FRIVOLA 

 
 (^LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 FRIVOL A.
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 1. ARCADY : FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE. 
 
 Fourth Edition ; Cloth, 35. 6d. 
 
 2. THE COMING OF THE FRIARS, AND 
 
 OTHER MEDLEVAL SKETCHES. Fifth 
 Edition ; Cloth, 33. 6d. 
 
 3. RANDOM ROAMING, AND OTHER 
 
 PAPERS. Second Edition ; Cloth, 35. 6d. 
 
 4. STUDIES BY A RECLUSE. Second 
 
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 5. TRIALS OF A COUNTRY PARSON. 
 
 Third Edition ; Cloth, 35. 6d. 
 
 6. SIMON RYAN, THE PETERITE. Paper, 
 
 is. ; Cloth, 2s. 
 
 LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.
 
 FRIVOLA 
 
 ] AUGUSTUS JESSOPP, D.D. 
 
 Rector of Seaming, 
 Hon. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. 
 
 Hon. Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. 
 Hon. Canon in the Cathedral of Norwich. 
 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 MDCCCXCVI
 
 [All rights reserved.']
 
 And she talked on we talked truly ! upon 
 
 all things substance shadow 
 Of the sheep that browsed the grasses of the 
 
 reapers in the corn 
 Of the little children from the schools, seen 
 
 winding through the meadow 
 Of the poor rich world beyond them, still kept 
 
 poorer by its scorn ! 
 
 MRS. BROWNING.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 AN ANTIQUARY'S GHOST STORY 7 
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL 16 
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY ... 28 
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON 83 
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MARVELLOUS ... Ill 
 
 CLOCKS AND WATCHES 122 
 
 THE PHENOMENA OF DOUBLES 131 
 
 DREAMS ... ... ... ... ... 140 
 
 A NIGHT OF WAKING 149 
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH 158 
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME 183
 
 LEnvoi. 
 
 THIS volume owes its appearance to the pressure 
 put upon me by my readers, who have asked me 
 to republish, and so make more accessible to 
 them, some of the Fugitive Pieces which it 
 contains. 
 
 The first paper appeared as a letter to The 
 Athenaeum of January 10, 1880, when the 
 facts were very fresh in my memory ; but I did 
 not give it the title which the astute and saga- 
 cious editor of that journal invented. I am 
 not an antiquary, and lack all those qualities 
 which an antiquary ought to be gifted with, 
 and I never pretended that I had seen a Ghost, 
 nor do I quite know what a Ghost is. How- 
 ever, the letter produced an immense sensation 
 at the time ; and inasmuch as I have again 
 and again been compelled to relate the facts
 
 iv L' EN VOL 
 
 by word of mouth which I had already com- 
 mitted to paper, possibly more faithfully and 
 certainly more simply than I find it possible to 
 do under personal cross-examination, I have 
 thought it better to re-issue the narrative, which 
 all may read at leisure, and so save myself 
 from having to repeat the old story. 
 
 Queen Mary's Fool appeared in The 
 Athenaeum also. 
 
 The Ups and Downs of an Old Nunnery 
 came out in Good Words. / think it a very 
 pathetic and suggestive story, but my friends 
 tell me I am a very bad critic of my own 
 writings, and I can only retort that this is 
 hardly possible, for I must know more about 
 them than anyone else, and I protest vehe- 
 mently that young men and maidens to say 
 nothing of their seniors will be the better for 
 reading this story of the Nunnery. The only 
 weak point in it and it is a very weak point 
 in this age, when fiction reigns supreme in 
 literature is that it is all true, from beginning 
 to end. Alas ! what a pass we have come to,
 
 L EN VOL v 
 
 when an author has to apologise to the public 
 for telling the plain truth and no more ! 
 
 The remaining papers in the volume, with 
 the exception of the last, have all appeared 
 in The Illustrated London News, and as far 
 as I know, everything in them too is plain un- 
 varnished fact for which I could give chapter 
 and verse if they were wanted. Even the aw- 
 ful doings of the dragon of Sudbury, in the 
 fifth paper, are no inventions of mine; and if 
 they are not true, who am I that I should 
 set myself to prove the negative f I have given 
 my authorities, and isn't that enough 1 
 
 * * * * 
 
 The editor of The Seaming Review, from 
 whose scathing treatment I have in the course 
 of my career suffered severely, will not pass 
 without grave censure the last few lines. She 
 tells me that our dear old Biddy was sly 
 enough and clever enough to invent as well as 
 to relate, and that in the good old soul's 
 reminiscences appeals must have been made 
 to the credulity of one at least of her hearers.
 
 vi L' ENVOI. 
 
 Biddy is dead, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum 
 is a recognised canon of criticism. So far as 
 her story is capable of being tested I have 
 tested it. The local colouring, at any rate, 
 was not Biddy's. Have I not been to Breccles 
 Hall, and surveyed the ground f 
 
 The last paper, "Books that have helped me," 
 was contributed to The Forum. / shall always 
 feel grateful to the editor of The Forum, for sug- 
 gesting this subject to me. It set me thinking 
 along what lines my mind had travelled and 
 grown in my earlier manhood; and that kind 
 of introspection is a very useful process for us 
 all to go through at some stages of our 
 development. 
 
 Would it be quite too cruel a question 
 to ask of some men and women " What 
 books have marred you f "
 
 AN ANTIQUARY'S GHOST STORY. 
 
 Do I sleep f do I dream f 
 Do I wander and doubt ? 
 Are Hi ings what they seem f 
 Or is visions about ? 
 
 LITTLE more than two months [grown now, 
 as I print for the second time, into sixteen 
 years] have passed since my own personal 
 experience of mental phenomena was 
 strikingly enlarged by the occurrence with 
 which the following narrative deals. Yet 
 already I find that round the original story 
 there has gathered a surprising accumulation 
 of the mythical element, and that I myself 
 am in danger of becoming a hero of romance 
 in more senses than one. As I object to be 
 looked upon as a kind of medium to whom
 
 8 FRIVOLA. 
 
 supernatural visitations are vouchsafed, and, 
 on the other hand, do not wish to be set 
 down as a crazy dreamer whose disorgan- 
 ised nervous system renders him abnormally 
 liable to fantastic delusions, I have yielded to 
 the earnest request of some who have begged 
 me to make public the following paper. I 
 am told that there are those who busy them- 
 selves in collecting similar stories, and if it 
 be so, it is better they should hear the facts 
 from me than after they have passed through 
 other channels. The narrative was written, at 
 the request of a friend, not many days after 
 the event, when all the circumstances were 
 fresh in my recollection. 
 
 On the loth of October, 1879, I drove 
 over from Norwich to Mannington Hall to 
 spend the night at Lord Orford's. Though 
 I was in perfect health and high spirits, it is 
 fair to state that, for some weeks previously, 
 I had had a great deal to think about, some 
 little anxiety, and some considerable mental
 
 AV ANTIQUARY'S GHOST STORY. 9 
 
 strain of one kind or another. I was not, 
 however, conscious of anything approaching 
 weariness, irritability, or " fag." I arrived at 
 4 p.m., and was engaged in pleasant and 
 animated conversation till it was time to 
 dress for dinner. We dined at seven ; our 
 party numbered six persons. Of these, four 
 at least had been great travellers. I myself 
 was rather a listener ; the talk was general 
 and discursive, and amused and interested 
 me greatly. Not for a single moment did it 
 turn upon the supernatural ; it was chiefly 
 concerned with questions of art and the ex- 
 periences of men who had seen a great deal 
 of the world, and could describe intelligently 
 what they had seen and comment upon it 
 suggestively. I have very rarely been at a 
 more pleasant party. After dinner we played 
 a rubber. We " left off as we began," and 
 as two of the guests had some distance to 
 drive we broke up at half-past ten. 
 
 The main object of my going over to Man- 
 nington was to examine and take notes upon
 
 to FRIVOLA. 
 
 some very rare books in Lord Orf ord's library, 
 which I had been anxiously wishing to get 
 a sight of for some years, but had never 
 been fortunate enough to meet with up to 
 this time. I asked leave to sit up for some 
 hours and make transcripts. His lordship 
 at first wished me to let his valet remain in 
 attendance to see all lights put out, but as 
 this would have embarrassed me and com- 
 pelled me to go to bed earlier than I wished, 
 and as it seemed likely that I should be 
 occupied till two or three in the morning, it 
 was agreed that I should be left to my own 
 devices and the servants should be allowed 
 to retire. By eleven o'clock I was the only 
 person downstairs, and I was very soon 
 busily at work and absorbed in my occu- 
 pation. 
 
 The room in which I was writing is a 
 large one, with a huge fireplace and a grand 
 old chimney ; and it is needless to say that 
 it is furnished with every comfort and luxury. 
 The library opens into this room, and I had
 
 AN ANTIQUARY'S GHOST STORY. n 
 
 to pass out from where I was sitting into 
 this library and get upon a chair to reach 
 the volumes I wanted to examine. There 
 were six small volumes in all. I took them 
 down and placed them at my right hand in 
 a little pile, and set to work sometimes 
 reading, sometimes writing. As I finished 
 with a book I placed it in front of me. 
 There were four silver candlesticks upon the 
 table, the candles all burning, and, as I am 
 a chilly person, I sat myself at one corner of 
 the table with the fire at my left, and at 
 intervals, as I had finished with a book, I 
 rose, knocked the fire together, and stood up 
 to warm my feet. I continued in this way 
 at my task till nearly one o'clock. I had got 
 on better than I expected, and I had only 
 one more book to occupy me. I rose, 
 wound up my watch, and opened a bottle of 
 seltzer water, and I remember thinking to 
 myself that I should get to bed by two after 
 all. I set to work on the last little book. I 
 had been engaged upon it about half an
 
 12 FRIVOLA. 
 
 hour, and was just beginning to think that 
 my work was drawing to a close, when, as I 
 was actually writing, I saw a large white 
 hand within a foot of my elbow. Turning 
 my head, there sat a figure of a somewhat 
 large man, with his back to the fire, bending 
 slightly over the table, and apparently ex- 
 amining the pile of books that I had been at 
 work upon. The man's face was turned away 
 from me, but I saw his closely cut reddish- 
 brown hair, his ear and shaved cheek, the 
 eyebrow, the corner of the right eye, the 
 side of the forehead, and the large high 
 cheek-bone. He was dressed in what I 
 can only describe as a kind of ecclesias- 
 tical habit of thick corded silk or some 
 such material, close up to the throat, and 
 a narrow rim or edging, of about an inch 
 broad, of satin or velvet serving as a 
 stand-up collar, and fitting close to the 
 chin. The right hand, which had first at- 
 tracted my attention, was clasping, without 
 any great pressure, the left hand ; both hands
 
 AN ANTIQUARY'S GHOST STORY. 13 
 
 were in perfect repose, and the large blue 
 veins of the right hand were conspicuous. I 
 remember thinking that the hand was like 
 the hand of Velasquez's magnificent " Dead 
 Knight " in the National Gallery. I looked 
 at my visitor for some seconds, and was per- 
 fectly sure that he was not a reality. A 
 thousand thoughts came crowding upon me, 
 but not the least feeling of alarm, or even 
 uneasiness ; curiosity and a strong interest 
 were uppermost. For an instant I felt eager 
 to make a sketch of my friend, and I looked 
 at a tray on my right for a pencil ; then I 
 thought, " Upstairs I have a sketch-book 
 shall I fetch it ? " There he sat, and I was 
 fascinated ; afraid, not of his staying, but lest 
 he should go. Stopping in my writing, I 
 lifted my left hand from the paper, stretched 
 it out to the pile of books, and moved the 
 top one. I cannot explain why I did this 
 my arm passed in front of the figure, and it 
 vanished. I was simply disappointed and 
 nothing more. I went on with my writing
 
 14 FRIVOLA. 
 
 as if nothing had happened, perhaps for 
 another five minutes, and I had actually got 
 to the last few words of what I had deter- 
 mined to extract when the figure appeared 
 again, exactly in the same place and attitude 
 as before. I saw the hands close to my own ; 
 I turned my head again, to examine him 
 more closely, and I was framing a sentence 
 to address to him, when I discovered that I 
 did not dare to speak. I was afraid of the 
 sound of my own voice. There he sat, and 
 there sat I. I turned my head again to my 
 work, and finished writing the two or three 
 words I still had to write. The paper and 
 my notes are at this moment before me, and 
 exhibit not the slightest tremor or nervous- 
 ness. I could point out the words I was 
 writing when the phantom came and when 
 he disappeared. Having finished my task, I 
 shut the book and threw it on the table ; it 
 made a slight noise as it fell the figure 
 vanished. 
 
 Throwing myself back in my chair, I sat
 
 AN ANTIQUARY'S GHOST STORY. 15 
 
 for some seconds looking at the fire with a 
 curious mixture of feeling, and I remember 
 wondering whether my friend would come 
 again, and if he did whether he would hide 
 the fire from me. Then first there stole 
 upon me a dread and a suspicion that I was 
 beginning to lose my nerve. I remember 
 yawning ; then I rose, lit my bedroom 
 candle, took my books into the inner library, 
 mounted the chair as before, and replaced 
 five of the volumes ; the sixth I brought 
 back and laid upon the table where I had 
 been writing when the phantom did me the 
 honour to appear to me. By this time I 
 had lost all sense of uneasiness. I blew out 
 the four candles and marched off to bed, 
 where I slept the sleep of the just or the 
 guilty I know not which but I slept very 
 soundly. 
 
 This is a simple and unvarnished narrative 
 of facts. ,Explanation, theory, or inference 
 I leave to others.
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 
 
 I had rather have a fool to make me merry than 
 experience to make me sad. As You LIKE IT. 
 
 IT is a fact to be deplored in the march of 
 progress that we are waxing less gay and 
 more grim from generation to generation. 
 There are many causes which contribute to 
 bring this about, such as the general desire 
 on the part of everybody to' behave himself 
 like everybody else the repressive force 
 exercised by the police whose business it is 
 to stop merry people from making a noise 
 and laughing too loud, and to punish 
 severely anything in the shape of a practi- 
 cal joke ; the dreary uniformity in male 
 dress ; the dismal tyranny of sombre colours 
 in our attire ; the ghastly prevalence of ex-
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 17 
 
 aminations which have an incalculable effect 
 in depressing the spirits of young and old, 
 and the deplorable delusion that it is the 
 duty of everybody to work and the duty of 
 nobody to play. These and other influences 
 which might be dwelt on all work in the direc- 
 tion of making us in these later ages of the 
 world's history more respectable but a great 
 deal less hilarious than our grandsires were. 
 But perhaps the printing press has as much 
 to answer for as anything else. Of course I 
 do not forget Punch, but I am inclined to 
 lay a great deal of blame at the door of that 
 incomparable serial. The truth is, we all 
 now take in Punch, and we all have our 
 laugh on Wednesday and relapse into 
 seriousness till the next Wednesday ; the 
 mischief being that everybody has the 
 benefit of the same joke, and everybody has 
 his share in the drolleries of the same jester. 
 Time was when the favoured few had real, 
 live, paid Fools to make them laugh when 
 they were sad, and to keep their spirits up
 
 i8 FRIVOLA. 
 
 when they were low. There was no need 
 to read jokes, or to read about them, when 
 they were four-and-twenty hours old ; there 
 were no literary Fools, but the Fool was, we 
 may say, a member of a profession, and his 
 training made him up to any emergency 
 that might arise. Men called him a fool 
 because he made himself ridiculous ; but as 
 often as not (as you may see in Shakespeare) 
 he proved the wisest man in a company, 
 speaking out what none but he dared utter, 
 and yet keeping his head cool and not likely to 
 lose it on the block. There are thousands of 
 good stories of Fools and their sayings aye, 
 and of their doings too which shall not be 
 repeated here ; but it is not known to all 
 that instances of female Fools are by no 
 means rare. Female gladiators Juvenal tells 
 us of ; for when civilisation grows rank the 
 women always must needs vie with men 
 in their follies and vices sometimes, too, 
 in their virtues and accomplishments ; but 
 the earliest mention of a female Fool I do
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 19 
 
 not mean a foolish female as far as I know, 
 occurs in one of Seneca's letters, who tells 
 us that she played to his wife ; that her name 
 was Harpaste ; that she had long been what 
 he calls " an hereditary nuisance in the 
 house " ; and yet that he himself was very 
 partial to this kind of monster. You may 
 read what little more Seneca says about the 
 poor woman in the tenth Epistle of the fifth 
 book, and you will see how the moralist, as 
 his fashion was, went on to improve the 
 occasion like some Puritan divine or some 
 Scotch meenistcr. 
 
 I know not if many instances could be 
 found of a female Fool being kept in any 
 English household, but I do know that 
 Queen Mary kept such an one even to 
 her dying day. In that curious book, pub- 
 lished more than fifty years ago by Sir 
 Francis Madden, entitled " The Privy Purse 
 Expenses of the Princess Mary," there are 
 so many notices of payments made on 
 account of " Jane the Fool " that we can
 
 20 FRIVOL A. 
 
 hardly open the volume and turn over half 
 a dozen pages without coming upon them. 
 There are charges entered for her dress, "for 
 a coffer for her," for "the keeper of her 
 horse," and very frequent payments " to the 
 Barbor for shaving Jany's hed " (the fee for 
 which was apparently 4d. in 1543, and raised 
 after this to 8d.). These Privy Purse ex- 
 penses begin in December, 1537, and extend 
 to December, 1544; that is, they have to do 
 with the time when " the Lady Mary," after 
 her submission to her father and reconcilia- 
 tion with him, was allowed to set up a 
 separate establishment, and they continue 
 almost down to the time when she was 
 named in the Third Act of Succession as 
 " the Kinges Highnes daughter." During 
 all these eight years Jane the Fool was 
 her constant attendant, and was a great 
 favourite with the Princess. In July, 
 1544, the poor woman had a serious 
 illness; and again, two years after Mary 
 had become queen, we find a note of a
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 21 
 
 payment ".to a woman dwelling at Burye, 
 for healing Jane the Foole her eye," Even 
 Henry the Eighth himself had a lurking 
 regard for her : I suspect she was too 
 shrewd to try any jokes upon the grim king. 
 Sir Francis Madden tells us that, " in all 
 probability, this very person is intended to 
 be represented in the interesting painting by 
 Holbein of Henry the Eighth and his family, 
 which formerly ornamented the meeting- 
 room of the Society of Antiquaries at 
 Somerset House, and which is now at 
 Windsor " ; and he gives us a reference to 
 an order of the king in 1540, whereby Sir 
 Anthony Denny is required to deliver certain 
 quantities of silks and stuffs, among other 
 people, to " Jane the Fool." 
 
 Unhappily the original of Queen Mary's 
 will has disappeared, and in that copy of it 
 which still exists in Harl. MS. 6949, and 
 which Sir F. Madden prints as he finds it, 
 there is a tantalising omission which will 
 now probably never be supplied, though we
 
 22 FRIVOL A. 
 
 are told, " Then follow in the will several 
 particular legacies to her women and other 
 servants about her, which in all amount to 
 .3,400." Whether any particular legacy 
 was left to " Jane the Fool " it is idle now to 
 conjecture. Even the woman's name was 
 lost, and few could have expected that it 
 would ever be discovered. During the 
 course of some researches into Norfolk 
 history, however, I happen to have stumbled 
 upon some scraps of information about 
 "Jane the Fool" which may be of interest 
 to some of my readers. 
 
 Among the closest and the dearest of the 
 Princess Mary's friends and attendants were 
 Henry Jerningham and his wife, who was 
 her lady in waiting, and who attended upon 
 her at her coronation. The queen took an 
 early opportunity of knighting Mr. Jerning- 
 ham, appointed him Vice-Chamberlain in 
 1556, and Master of the Horse in 1557, 
 and, further, made him some very exten- 
 sive grants of land, a portion of which,
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 23 
 
 especially the Manor of Cossey in Norfolk, 
 is still in the possession of Sir Henry Jer- 
 ningham's lineal descendant, Lord Stafford. 
 At Queen Elizabeth's accession all hope 
 of further preferment was gone for Sir 
 Henry Jerningham, being, as he was, a 
 firm and conscientious Catholic, and 
 strongly opposed to the tenets of the 
 Reformation. Accordingly he retired from 
 Court, and came down to Norfolk, where he 
 employed himself in building Cossey Hall, 
 which still stands, and has never ceased to 
 be occupied from that day to this by the 
 Jerninghams, who have had the good taste 
 to leave the old house intact, though a 
 glorious mansion has been added on to the 
 original and less ambitious pile. 
 
 Sir Henry Jerningham died in 1573, 
 having made his will on the I5th of August 
 of the previous year. In it occurs the 
 following bequest : " Item, I give and 
 bequeath to old Jone Cooper my old gown ; 
 And also I will that my wife for term of her
 
 24 FRIVOLA. 
 
 life, and after her decease my heirs, shall 
 pay yearly to the said Jone Cooper, as my 
 bequest and legacy, the sum of xxvis. viijd., 
 by even portions at the Feast of St. Michael 
 the Archangel and on our Lady Day in 
 Lent, every year, for term of the life of the 
 said Jone Cooper, with meat and drink and 
 Lodging within my house : And if it shall 
 fortune that my wife during her life, or any 
 heir after her decease, shall by any occasion 
 remove or put out the said Jone Cooper from 
 my house, Then I will and bequeath to her 
 out of my Manor of Cossey, to be paid 
 yearly by even portions, . . . the sum of 
 Four Pounds by year, . . . for her main- 
 tenance and finding for term of her 
 life." 
 
 Frances Lady Jerningham survived her 
 husband more than ten years. Cossey 
 was settled upon her ladyship for life, and 
 her eldest son resided at Wingfield Castle, 
 on the borders of Suffolk, which three cen- 
 turies ago must have been a far more
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 25 
 
 magnificent abode than Cossey. But Lady 
 Jerningham (her son was not knighted) kept 
 her state at Cossey, and lived there as a 
 representative personage, not without sus- 
 picion of harbouring priests and having 
 mass said in her house, spite of the penal 
 laws. Her will, too, is before me, and by 
 one of its clauses she directs as follows : 
 "Also I do give unto Joane Fool four 
 pounds in money, or twenty shillings a 
 year as long as she liveth, which shall be 
 thought best for her at the discretion of my 
 executor, over and besydes the Four pounds 
 yearly which was given her by my late hus- 
 band ; and I give unto her one feather-bed 
 bolster and covering, and all these premises 
 (sic) not otherwise except my son shall 
 refuse to keep and maintain her during her 
 life in his house, the which I do rather wish 
 for him to keep her, for that she hath been a 
 long servant (sic), than to put her away out 
 of his house." 
 
 So that " Jane the Foole " is Sir Henry's
 
 26 FRIVOL A. 
 
 "Jone Cooper," and Lady Jerningham's 
 "Joane Foole." 
 
 In August, 1578, Queen Elizabeth paid a 
 visit to Norwich ; and on Tuesday, the i9th, 
 Her Majesty set out from the Bishop's Palace 
 to "hunt" at Cossey Park hunt in the dog- 
 days ! At St. Bennet's Gates she was stopped 
 by a " Pageant," which is duly described 
 in Nichols' "Progresses" (vol. ii. p. 151). 
 What the " hunting " could have been it is 
 difficult to imagine. I have my own sus- 
 picion in the matter, but I forbear from 
 stating it now. It has been said, and is 
 generally believed, that Sir Henry Jerning- 
 ham entertained Her Majesty. This is 
 certainly false, nor do I believe that his 
 son was present on the occasion. No 
 mention of any entertainment is to be 
 found ; and there was no time for the 
 " hunting " after the " pleasant show " and 
 the Latin speech of the minister of the 
 Dutch Church. But it is quite conceivable, 
 and to me it seems probable, that one
 
 QUEEN MARY'S FOOL. 27 
 
 object of the Queen in visiting Cossey at 
 all was to see old "Jone Foole," whom she 
 must well have remembered thirty or forty 
 years before at her father's court, with her 
 shorn head and her motley dress, and her 
 jokes and drollery. Whether she did see 
 her, talk over old scenes, and leave some 
 remembrance behind her, I suppose we 
 shall never know. All that, and a great 
 deal more, has gone down into silence. It 
 is pleasant to be able to prove that " Joane 
 Foole " was not turned out of Cossey in her 
 old age ; pleasant to find that the poor 
 woman continued to be kept to the end as a 
 retainer in the household in which she had 
 lived so long ; for in the parish register of 
 Cossey I find under the year 1585 the 
 following entry : " Sepulta fuit Johana Cow- 
 per, 14 die Aprilis."
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD 
 NUNNERY. 
 
 '' My lady Prioresse, by your leve, 
 So that I wist I shuld you not agreve, 
 I wolde demcn, that ye tcllen slwld 
 A tale next, if so were that ye wold. 
 Now wol ye vouchesauf, my lady dere ?" 
 " Gladly," quoth she, "and saide as ye slnil here." 
 CANTERBURY TALES. 
 
 I. 
 
 No wise man will ever begin to read any 
 history worth reading without having a 
 map before him. I give notice that I am 
 going to try my hand at a short history 
 more or less veracious ; therefore it will be 
 necessary for my readers to open the map 
 of Norfolk, and to follow me with the eye 
 as I take a brief survey of the ground. 
 
 8
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 29 
 
 From Hunstanton, at the north-west cor- 
 ner of the county, to Downham Market, 
 lying almost due south, there runs, for a 
 distance of twenty-five miles as the crow 
 flies, a line of low sand-hills, as we may 
 call them, which mark the ancient coast- 
 line of Norfolk on this side, on which a 
 number of villages grew up slowly many 
 ages ago, when the river Ouse flowed 
 much nearer to the aforesaid villages than 
 it does now. 
 
 About half-way between Hunstanton and 
 Downham lies the once flourishing town of 
 Lynn, and if you look you will see that the 
 river Ouse is all in all to Lynn, or, at any 
 rate, that it was so in the old days. The 
 Ouse was the western boundary beyond 
 which it was not worth while for the Nor- 
 folk men in the early times to fix their 
 habitations ; for all to the westward of the 
 river stretched an enormous morass, say 
 fifteen miles from north to south, and eight 
 or ten from east to west. Its boundary
 
 30 FRIVOLA. 
 
 on the east was the Ouse, on the west the 
 Nen. It is even now a dreary region, a 
 land of marshes and big drains and swamps. 
 The water is naught, for all its horrible 
 abundance, but the land is very rich in 
 pasture such as cattle thrive on. There is 
 one portion of this fenland which rises a 
 few feet above the general level of the 
 surrounding marshes, and which in Roman 
 times to go no farther back must have 
 presented the appearance of an island, 
 pretty much as the Isle of Dogs did in 
 times not so very far removed from our 
 own ; and gradually there grew up here, 
 too, some villages which are now remark- 
 able for their very magnificent churches, 
 each with some interesting feature of its 
 own. The Roman occupiers of the land 
 may be said to have made this district what 
 it is, by raising a stupendous rampart to 
 keep out the sea, which had a trick of 
 inundating the country hereabouts, and this 
 immense sea-wall remains to this day.
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 31 
 
 Nevertheless the Great Ouse was periodi- 
 cally overflowing large breadths of the 
 marshland on this side and on that, and 
 the struggle between the stubborn industry 
 and energy of man, and the sullen river 
 crawling along and floundering and sprawl- 
 ing over the meadows and drowning the 
 herds, never ceased. There were always 
 wide tracts of muddy waste and loneliness 
 which had their tales to tell of broken 
 hearts and disappointment and sorrow, if 
 only there were anybody who cared to 
 listen to the dull and dreary stories. And 
 all this went on for hundreds of years. 
 
 Then there came a time when England 
 was cursed with the curse of long wars, and 
 when the law of the stronger prevailed, and 
 when might carried it over right when, 
 indeed, there was no right and the weak 
 had to go to the wall, and poor men and 
 women despaired of any redress for their 
 sufferings and of any security for their lives, 
 and any hope anywhere of peace or happi-
 
 32 FRIVOLA. 
 
 ness in this world. And they said to them- 
 selves and to one another, " Let's give it 
 up, this vain and cruel contest with the 
 pitiless ones. Let's go and hide ourselves 
 in the deserts and in the swamps, where 
 no one will come and hunt for us, and 
 where we will eat our own bread if we 
 can grow any, and catch our own fish, and 
 milk our own kine. If we enter into the 
 city we shall die then, and if we sit still 
 we die also. Now, therefore, come let us 
 hide ourselves among the tall reeds shaken 
 by the winds, where the wild-fowl make 
 their nests and leave their eggs. Peradven- 
 ture the fierce and strong will not miss nor 
 find us. If they kill us we shall but die." 
 
 So they slunk away and hid their heads 
 by twos and threes, and they gathered 
 strength for the future from the hope that 
 where wicked men were not, there only 
 God was to be found ; and they kept one 
 another's hearts up by resolving to lift up 
 those hearts to the unseen Father, and
 
 t7PS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 33 
 
 to seek Him day and night in prayer and 
 praise, if haply they might bring Him 
 nearer to themselves who was their only 
 help in those very troublous times. 
 
 Thus it came to pass that once upon a 
 time and that means in the times before 
 the Norman conqueror came to make him- 
 self master of England a certain damsel, 
 whose heart had been strangely stirred, 
 looked about for some lonely place where 
 she might " serve God," as the phrase was, 
 without disturbance from any earthly ene- 
 mies, and she found for herself a spot which 
 in the after time was called Crabhouse, and 
 then was all wild and desolate, and where 
 for a great distance round there were no 
 dwellings of men. Under her guidance 
 there gathered sundry other damsels, and 
 they built for themselves a little chapel to 
 the honour of God and the Virgin Mary 
 and St. John the Evangelist, in the which 
 for many a day they kept up the worship 
 of the Heavenly Father.
 
 34 FRIVOLA. 
 
 So runs the story. It is all written in 
 old French, which my Parisian friends 
 would find a little hard to read, but it 
 must be all true, for it is so very old. 
 Were the damsels all lovely and graceful 
 and lady-like and well-to-do ? I should 
 say decidedly not. I suspect they were 
 poor spinsters of a very uncertain age ; they 
 probably could only just read or write ; 
 they had no friends, and they must have 
 been very ill-clad, very cold, very rheu- 
 matic, and every other day they must have 
 had the ague. 
 
 The place where these poor women 
 settled and tried to hide themselves was 
 just at the edge of that sloppy island that 
 I have mentioned before. It was on the 
 left bank of the Ouse, and it got to be 
 called Wiggenhall St. Mary in the after 
 time. 
 
 Was their chapel a very gorgeous edifice, 
 with star-y-pointing pinnacles, and stained- 
 glass windows, and all sorts of beautiful
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 35 
 
 things to delight the eyes and bring joy 
 to the damsels ? Very decidedly not, 
 again. It was at best a wretched little 
 shanty, built of drift-wood that had been 
 carried down the Ouse, and it was covered 
 with a mean roof thatched with the reeds 
 that the poor damsels had to cut with 
 their own hands from the river bank, and 
 furnished with a log or two to sit on, and 
 a mud floor, and, perhaps, some ugly little 
 image of the Virgin and her Babe ; and 
 the wind and rain came in through the 
 tiny apertures that served for windows, in 
 which there was never a pane of glass, but 
 only provided with rough shutters which 
 were set up against the storms ; and then 
 the walls were made of logs, and between 
 the logs there was more mud which the 
 damsels had puddled with their own 
 poor hands. 
 
 But the damsels held on to their little 
 habitations, >and a priest came from time 
 to time, ministered in their chapel, and
 
 36 FRIVOLA. 
 
 gave them words of comfort and counsel ; 
 and they worked hard and prayed hard, 
 and little by little the look of their settle- 
 ment began to improve, and there went up 
 a good report of them and people came 
 to look at them, and came not empty- 
 handed, and what had been a mere wilder- 
 ness of sedge and ooze became almost a 
 pleasant place to visit, and the damsels 
 had made it into the semblance of a quiet 
 home. 
 
 So the years went on. But in A.D. 1086 
 the great Conqueror sent forth his orders 
 by which the whole realm of England was 
 divided among certain commissioners, who 
 were bidden to make a great survey of 
 every cultivated acre, and to put it all 
 down in their return to the great king. 
 And there came, as I think, an evil day 
 for the poor damsels. For the king's 
 officers found them out, and they asked 
 them, sternly, " Who are ye ? And whose 
 land is this that ye are keeping your cows
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 37 
 
 on, and growing hemp and oats and osiers 
 on, and building your houses on, not to 
 speak of that chapel of yours ? Who does 
 it all belong to ? " And the damsels shrank 
 before the great bearded men, and they 
 answered, tremblingly, "This land is ours. 
 It was but a poor swamp a while ago, and 
 we have made it what it is. Who should 
 it belong to but to us ? " 
 
 But the bearded men laughed scornfully 
 at the damsels, and they said, " Ye are 
 squatters, and nothing else ! The land can- 
 not be yours. Ye stole it from somebody. 
 Speak up ; who did ye steal it from ? " 
 So the damsels were very frightened, and 
 they pitched upon somebody who was a 
 recognised landowner hereabouts, but who 
 he was nobody can now tell. He may 
 have been anybody, but he gave them a 
 certificate or charter, testifying that they 
 held the land of him, and that charter 
 was their title-deed. The story goes that 
 they kept that charter, and handed it down
 
 38 FRIVOLA. 
 
 in safe custody to those that came 
 after. 
 
 How long the damsels kept up their 
 method of life in the swamp, which 
 gradually began to assume less and less 
 the appearance of desolation and loneli- 
 ness till the little settlement had become 
 a patch of reclaimed land, there is no evi- 
 dence to show. I daresay other damsels, 
 the rejected, the undowered, and, now and 
 then, a lonely and childless widow with 
 some few goods and chattels of her own, 
 joined them. The poor women, doubtless, 
 went about doing some little good in their 
 own simple and unambitious way ; some- 
 times took care of other women's babies 
 when their mothers had to go out fishing 
 for eels and picking up oysters and mussels 
 for a livelihood ; sometimes they adopted 
 some wretched little orphan ; sometimes 
 tried their hands at nursing the sick, or 
 at teaching young girls who wanted teach- 
 ing sorely ; and sometimes they laid out
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 39 
 
 the dead and helped to bury the corpse 
 in the muddy grave ; doing it all in a 
 quiet, business-like way, making no fuss 
 and getting no honour and glory from it 
 all except only that sort of recognition 
 which takes the shape of a wring of the 
 hand from a great horny fist, and now 
 and then a sob which needed no words 
 to make it eloquent, and now and then a 
 whisper from quivering, bloodless lips, say- 
 ing, " Kiss me, sister. Kiss me, poor sinner 
 only once before I die ! " And one by 
 one the poor damsels passed away, too ; 
 emaciated by years of ague and racked in 
 every joint by the chronic rheumatism, 
 and glad to end it all because yonder there 
 was the great hope of better things. But 
 there were others who took their places, 
 and went on doing as they did, and living 
 just as humbly. 
 
 But one day there came tidings that the 
 waters of the great deep were rolling in. 
 Did the huge waves come tumbling over
 
 40 FRIVOL A. 
 
 the Roman bank ? or the clouds of heaven 
 pour down their burden of rain so heavily 
 that the lazy Ouse could not carry off the 
 rainfall ? or had some portentous tides 
 risen up and driven the river back, say- 
 ing, angrily, as it were, " We want no more 
 of you " ? I know not. Only this is told 
 us, that one day there was a great flood, 
 and in a few hours it had swept away all 
 the labours of years, and they that were 
 left of the poor damsels found themselves 
 houseless and homeless the place knew 
 them no more. There is some reason to 
 fear that almost all of the good sisters 
 were simply drowned, for we only hear of 
 a single survivor, and her name was Sister 
 Joanna ; and because she had no place to 
 hide her head in now, she made herself a 
 little cabin in the churchyard of Wiggen- 
 hall Magdalene, which was about a couple 
 of miles from the old Crabhouse settle- 
 ment, and there I suppose she ended her 
 days. They called her an anchorite, be-
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 41 
 
 cause she lived all alone with none to 
 minister to her wants, and she was 
 venerated by the people thereabout as a 
 holy woman and one better than them- 
 selves : and there, I suppose, she died, and 
 there lie her bones, unless some crazy 
 body-snatcher has dug them up since then, 
 as the body-snatchers are prone to do. 
 
 But though the flood may have drowned 
 almost all the damsels, and certainly did 
 overwhelm their dwellings and their chapel, 
 and all the work of their hands, yet even 
 great floods subside at last. And so it 
 came to pass that after a while the re- 
 claimed land of course very much the 
 worse for the deluge rose again as the 
 river subsided ; and once more the ques- 
 tion came up, Who did the land belong 
 to, now that the good women were all 
 dead ? This time the question was easily 
 settled, for it escheated that is, reverted to 
 the Lord of the Manor of Wiggenhall St. 
 Mary en engleys Moder Cristes, as the dear
 
 42 FRIVOLA. 
 
 old chronicle explains it and the name 
 of this good man was Allan Fitz Richard 
 of Wiggenhall. 
 
 At this point there conies in another 
 side-light. I daresay some may have al- 
 ready said to themselves before they have 
 read thus far, "Who performed the ser- 
 vices for the damsels in their chapel, and 
 gave them the sacrament, and prayed with 
 them when they were dying, and buried 
 them when they were dead ? " Well, it so 
 happens that we know something about 
 this good man. His name was Aylmer 
 Cook, and when the flood came he es- 
 caped it, and he survived it apparently for 
 some years, and he was known in the 
 neighbourhood as Aylmer Kok, le cha- 
 peleyn de Crabhus. In those days the 
 clergy might marry if they pleased, and 
 in Norfolk almost all the clergy were 
 married men, and the good chaplain was 
 married too, and he was not only a hus- 
 band but a father, for he had a son named
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 43 
 
 Allan, and his wife's name was Agnes. 
 Now, mistress Agnes was a lady by birth, 
 for she was none other than the sister of 
 Allan Fitz Richard whom I mentioned 
 before. And it looks very much as if 
 brother and sister had a strong love either 
 for each, for Agnes called her son after 
 her brother's name, and her brother gave 
 her a not inconsiderable dower. For when 
 the little estate which had been flooded 
 when the damsels had been drowned re- 
 verted to Allan Fitz Richard, he would 
 have none of it, but he gave it over to his 
 sister and her husband, and it became 
 their possession to deal with as they would. 
 The worthy chaplain and his wife now did 
 their best with the lands that had come 
 to them, and having scruples (such as 
 were very strong indeed in those days) 
 about appropriating to their own use what 
 had once been set apart for the service of 
 God in any special way, they made the 
 land over, after the fashion of those days,
 
 44 FRIVOLA. 
 
 for the support of certain religious houses 
 to form part of their endowments ; but in 
 some way or other, which it is difficult to 
 explain, they reserved a portion of the 
 estate for the continual maintenance of the 
 original establishment at Crabhouse, if it 
 should ever be revived. 
 
 It seems, too, that the little society was 
 kept up. It seems that there still remained 
 some remains of the old buildings, such as 
 they were, and I guess that now and then 
 some attempts were made to revive the old 
 common life, and the old devotion, and 
 the old habits of usefulness and self-denial 
 which had been the glory and the beauty 
 of the little society at its first starting. 
 But evidently there was no leading spirit 
 now, and no head no rapt devotee with 
 her spasms of awful penitence and throbs 
 of an absorbing love, and yet with a clear 
 brain that looked difficulties in the face 
 and saw how they were to be overcome; 
 one, too, who had the gift of governing
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 45 
 
 those most difficult of creatures to govern 
 firmly, to wit good women with a call. 
 Failing such a head the body languished, 
 although the old establishment of the 
 damsels got to be called a Nunnery 
 which was a grand name, though it meant 
 much less then than it got to mean a 
 century or two later. For the organi- 
 sation of these houses for devout women, 
 who wished to live in the society of 
 their own sex, and to help one another 
 in attempting to lead a higher life than 
 they had strength of will and patience to 
 live while in commerce with the world 
 that organisation had become much more 
 elaborate and much more precise in Eng- 
 land than it had been in the days when 
 the damsels first went away into the wilder- 
 ness ; and such little communities began 
 to assert themselves and to get just a little 
 airified, much in the same way that many 
 a trumpery school for little boys in a back 
 street calls itself a college. So now we
 
 46 FRIVOLA. 
 
 begin to hear of these little humble estab- 
 lishments (whose beginnings are lost to us 
 in the mists of the distant past) spoken of 
 in language which the poor old damsels in 
 the swamps had hardly thought of using. 
 For, gradually, the life of the cloister had 
 got to be a great deal more attractive than 
 it had been, and a nunnery was no bad 
 place for the widow or the rejected to 
 make her home in ; and a nun had be- 
 come a personage, too, with the possi- 
 bilities of a career before her, and many 
 an old and ruined cloister rose up, as it 
 were, from the dead a phoenix that sprang 
 from its own smouldering ashes, much more 
 splendid than it had ever been before. 
 
 However, it was a long, long time before 
 this little Crabhouse Nunnery rose to any 
 importance or notoriety. Its original estate 
 was a very insignificant little piece of pro- 
 perty ; the establishment just kept going, 
 and that was all, and there is reason to 
 believe that for some hundreds actually
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 47 
 
 hundreds of years it was little better than 
 a refuge for poor women in their old age, 
 who lived a life in community, and had 
 some little difficulty in getting bed and 
 board and such clothing as was needful 
 for them, and doing very little but pray in 
 the little chapel for themselves and their 
 friends and benefactors. 
 
 Not much excitement in this kind of 
 thing, my masters ! No ! Not at all for 
 you and me ; but there are many employ- 
 ments which you and I should find horribly 
 dull, and yet which have their charm for 
 those who have, in a manner, been brought 
 up to it. I should not, myself, like to be 
 a waiter in an eating-house, or a needle- 
 woman, even though I were full of orders 
 perpetually. Yet I have no doubt there 
 are members of those professions who feel 
 a pride and pleasure the one in putting 
 an extra polish on the cruets, the other in 
 clicking at the sewing-machine and fixing 
 on the buttons with faultless precision.
 
 II. 
 
 1 SAID it was a long time before the 
 Nunnery of Crabhouse rose to any import- 
 ance. I might have said it was a long time 
 before it emerged from obscurity. It never 
 became a great and showy one. It never 
 could have been an attractive place. Kings 
 were never its nursing fathers nor queens 
 its nursing mothers. It grew slowly from 
 generation to generation because the good 
 women who lived there were really good 
 women, and bore a good name and kept 
 it, and lived to do good to other people, 
 and the neighbours were grateful to the 
 sisters and their prioresses. So, as time 
 went on, little patches of land here an 
 acre, there a rood or two, sometimes a
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 49 
 
 breadth of turbary, whence they might dig 
 turf for fuel, and sometimes a little meadow 
 in which their cows were pastured ^and 
 now and then a little house and its garden 
 came into the hands of the nuns, and very 
 slowly they began to thrive. We have 
 actually a very minute register of their 
 possessions, and in almost all cases we know 
 the names of those from whom their lands 
 and tenements were acquired. 
 
 It will surprise some of my readers to 
 learn that, for a couple of centuries after 
 the Conquest, there was hardly an acre 
 came into their possession that they did not 
 pay something for. It must be remembered 
 that when the house once began to be well 
 accounted of in the district round, there 
 would be sure to be many gentlewomen 
 who, for one reason or another, would be 
 very glad to be admitted into the sisterhood 
 and make their home among them. If 
 some sad widow, or some single lady with 
 no desire to marry and a great desire to live
 
 So FRIVOL A. 
 
 a useful life, asked for admission, it is not 
 to be supposed that she would be received 
 without inquiry, and one of the first ques- 
 tions would have to be, " Can you con- 
 tribute anything to the cost of your bed 
 and board ? " As a rule, it went without 
 saying that a candidate for a vacancy would 
 be required to give some equivalent for the 
 conveniences which she was desirous to 
 secure for herself. At first she would be 
 admitted on probation, but in any case the 
 house must be secured from loss. 
 
 Hence, when a certain Henry de Wiggen- 
 hall found himself with a daughter on his 
 hands who desired to live the life of religion 
 among the nuns, he came to the prioress 
 and made an offer. He made over four 
 acres of land and the third part of " la terre 
 turbarie sur Cuttedole," and the land was 
 conveyed to the convent "et le covent 
 recurent Julianne la fille avant dit Robert 
 et la feseyent dame de la Meson et trouverait 
 ce qui lui appendit ; " which, being inter-
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 51 
 
 preted, means, they found her in bed and 
 board and such things as a sister of the 
 house was entitled to. Again, a little later, 
 a gentleman hard by, named Roger Brunger, 
 got admission for his daughter, and made 
 over a house and two and a half acres of 
 land in Tilney, "et la couvente recurent 
 Johanne la fille avant dit Roger et la fesey- 
 ent dame de la Mesun." And in the same 
 way, Philippa, the daughter of Master 
 William de Dunton, who had never had a 
 husband and never wanted to wed, bought 
 a little estate which lay very conveniently 
 near the lands of the nunnery, and with it 
 some other appurtenances, and "devint 
 sceur de la Mesun," and in the after time 
 this little estate went by the name of 
 Phelyppescroft ; and I take it, it was rather 
 a considerable addition to the endowment 
 of the house where Philippa found a home 
 for her lifetime. This was in the year 1267 
 or 8, that is, in the fifty-second year of King 
 Henry III.
 
 52 FR1VOLA. 
 
 But about twenty years later "a great 
 stroke of luck," as some folks call it, fell to 
 the prioress and the sisters. There was a 
 very great man, who lived not many miles 
 off, at Rainham, and his name was Sir John 
 de Ingoldesthorpe. He belonged to one 
 of the most wealthy and influential families 
 in Norfolk, and his brother [or cousin ?] 
 was Bishop of Rochester ; and he had a 
 daughter whose name was Beatrice. She, 
 too, believed herself to have a vocation, or, 
 perhaps, she had been educated at Crab- 
 house, and had conceived a strong desire 
 to live as the good nuns lived and to be as 
 they were. And Sir John and the Lady 
 Ela, his wife, would not thwart the girl, 
 and let her have her way. Such a young 
 lady could not be allowed to come among 
 her friends empty-handed, and accordingly 
 Sir John made over to the convent quite 
 a considerable little estate lands and tene- 
 ments and quit-rents, which are all set 
 down in the register ; and on the day of
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 53 
 
 Sister Beatrice's admission there was a feast 
 in the nunnery, and Beatrice had a brand- 
 new nun's habit given her, not by the con- 
 vent but by her father ; " et Sire Johan 
 avant dite donna pour son habite et pur 
 sa feste cent souz." Sous means solidos, i.e., 
 shillings, and it is not far from the truth 
 to say that in the thirteenth century five 
 pounds sterling would go as far as a hundred 
 pounds will go now, when money is so 
 abundant that the rich don't know what 
 to do with it. So you see that Sir John did 
 his part in the transaction in a free and 
 open-handed way, and from the day that 
 Beatrice became a nun at Crabhouse the 
 affairs of the little community began to 
 prosper, and the house began to get a high 
 reputation. For human nature is always 
 human nature, and when lonely widows 
 and forlorn spinsters and young ladies of 
 artistic and poetic temperament are looking 
 about for a home, they prefer mixing with 
 good society, and do not like to associate
 
 54 FRIVOL A. 
 
 with vulgar people who are " not nice 1 " 
 And thus it came to pass that with the 
 opening of the fourteenth century Crab- 
 house evidently became quite a select and 
 high-class and fashionable place of retire- 
 ment, and ladies of some fortune were 
 ambitious of being elected to the high and 
 important position of prioress of the house, 
 and they all brought something with them, 
 and they all had the desire to advance the 
 honour and glory of their own foundation, 
 and to keep up its discipline, and economise 
 its resources, with a view to making it a 
 splendid place some day, if only it could 
 be managed. 
 
 During the fourteenth century the nuns 
 were steadily adding to their property. 
 They must have been living very frugally 
 and very strictly, for they were always buy- 
 ing up little bits of land that were lying 
 round them, and every now and then 
 making a shocking bad bargain. Thus 
 when Agnes de Methwold was prioress
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 55 
 
 (A.D. 1315-1344) there was a certain Aleyn 
 Brid who had a few patches of land lying 
 conveniently near the nunnery, and he 
 made an offer of it to the convent. But 
 Aleyn was a shrewd man, and I guess 
 he came to the prioress and pretended he 
 was getting too old to cultivate that land, 
 and he would be glad to be rid of it, and if 
 only the prioress and her nuns would allow 
 him and his wife maintenance for their joint 
 and separate lives from the house, and firing, 
 and a sum of money down, the nuns might 
 have his lands and welcome. The bargain 
 was struck and the lands made over ; but 
 alack ! alack ! it seems as if Aleyn Brid 
 and his wife had not the least intention of 
 dying for many a long day, and like many 
 annuitants before and since they went on 
 obstinately living and getting their mainten- 
 ance ; and the land turned out to be barren 
 and useless, insomuch that the chronicler 
 of the house, writing years afterwards, could 
 not restrain her righteous indignation, but
 
 56 FRIVOL A. 
 
 breaks out into the remark, " When you 
 come to look at it, gentles, land so dear 
 and worth so little never was bought ! " si 
 cher terre de cy petit value unkes ne fut achate. 
 
 The managing of the convent's property, 
 dotted about as it was in half a dozen neigh- 
 bouring parishes, required some vigilance 
 and business capacity. But the Crabhouse 
 sisters seem to have always had a rather 
 peculiar way of getting their work done. 
 Instead of employing some needy factor 
 who had an eye to his own interest first, 
 and then after an interval some regard 
 for the interest of his employers, they appear 
 to have always employed one of their 
 chaplains to be their agent, and it is sur- 
 prising to see what enthusiastic and long- 
 headed men some of these chaplains were. 
 
 I have already spoken of Aylmer, the 
 chaplain, who evidently was a man of some 
 property hereabouts, and though he gave 
 back a great part of the lands which had 
 belonged to the drowned nunnery in the
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 57 
 
 days of its distress, yet it seems that he kept 
 back a great deal, which he handed on to 
 his wife and children. In process of time 
 this property, which comprehended a dwell- 
 ing-house and other appurtenances, came 
 into the hands of Henry Fitz Roger, a 
 thriving Wiggenhall man, and he went on 
 adding field to field till towards the end of 
 the reign of King Edward I. he had got 
 together more than a hundred acres lying 
 round about the nunnery, and taking time 
 by the forelock and not waiting till death 
 should come upon him unawares and baffle 
 all his plans, he made over all this estate, 
 and gave it to the nuns as a separate estate, 
 the income of which was to go for the 
 support of a chaplain, who should perform 
 the services in the convent church for ever, 
 and not forget to offer up his prayers for the 
 soul of the founder. 
 
 Now I daresay you may think that this 
 endowment made the chaplain independent 
 of the prioress, and that it was likely to
 
 58 FRIVOLA. 
 
 make him "put on parts," as we say in 
 Norfolk. Nothing of the kind ! I cannot 
 stop to explain how it was exactly the con- 
 trary. But a chaplain was a stipendiary 
 who might be much more easily dismissed 
 than a beneficed clergyman can or ever 
 could be, while on the other hand when the 
 post fell vacant the prioress had rather a 
 valuable piece of preferment in her hands, 
 and not only was it obviously for the good 
 of the house to get the best man she could 
 find, but she was in a position to make such 
 conditions as would lay some rather onerous 
 duties upon the newly appointed function- 
 ary. The result was that, from time to 
 time, a succession of head chaplains (for in 
 such an establishment there were always 
 necessarily two or three at least of these 
 clergy employed in conducting the services 
 in the church, which went on night and 
 day) are to be met with at Crabhouse who 
 were evidently men of considerable business 
 ability, and who, moreover, were as evidently
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY, 59 
 
 animated by a strong esprit de corps. More 
 than one of them added considerably to 
 the possessions of the house, and bought 
 land with his savings, and gave that land to 
 enrich the nunnery. 
 
 Nothing succeeds like success, and by 
 the time that Prioress Maud who, I 
 would have you note, was a Talbot, and 
 so a lady of birth resigned her office 
 on St. Simon and St. Jude's day, 28th 
 October, 1420, the nunnery had very 
 many friends, far and near, who were 
 all ready and willing and anxious to 
 make a great effort, so that Crabhouse 
 might begin to be reckoned as one of the 
 grand places of the county, and raise up its 
 head among the more splendid foundations 
 of East Anglia. The nuns made choice of 
 Joan de Wiggenhall as their new prioress, 
 and she was installed accordingly, with all 
 due pomp and ceremony, on St. Catherine's 
 day following, that is on the 25th November. 
 I take it that Prioress Joan was an heiress,
 
 60 FRIVOL A. 
 
 and, in fact, the last representative of the 
 elder line of her family, and the nuns knew 
 perfectly well what they were about when 
 they chose a lady of birth and wealth, and 
 highly connected to boot, to rule over them. 
 They certainly were not disappointed in 
 any expectations they may have formed. 
 The new prioress set to w r ork in earnest to 
 make the nunnery into quite a new and 
 imposing place, and her friends and kinsfolk 
 rallied round her nobly. 
 
 The first thing Dame Joan did was to 
 pull down a great barn "which was at the 
 gate," and I suppose much dilapidated ; and 
 she built it up anew, and in the doing of 
 this she got substantial aid from Sir John 
 Ingoldesthorpe, whose ancestor had allowed 
 his daughter to take the veil at Crabhouse a 
 century or so before. Then she set to work 
 to carry out some much-needed repairs and 
 improvements in the conventual buildings. 
 Then she got a kinsman of hers presented 
 to the adjoining parish of Wiggenhall St.
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 61 
 
 Peter's, and this she did in order that she 
 might work a reform in that poor neglected 
 place. 
 
 For in King John's time the patron of 
 that benefice had, with the connivance of 
 the bishop of the diocese, alienated all the 
 tithes of the place and made them over 
 to a newly founded Gilbertine Priory at 
 Shouldham (ten miles off as the crow flies), 
 and left the wretched vicar to depend upon 
 the voluntary offerings of his people for a 
 maintenance. As usual the Gitbertines had 
 taken all they could get and had done 
 nothing in return ; and now, after a couple 
 of centuries of neglect, the chancel of the 
 church was a roofless ruin and a scandal 
 to all beholders. Dame Joan made a strong 
 appeal to the Prior of Shouldham, and being 
 what she was, a great lady with a great 
 following, she did not plead in vain. The 
 chancel of Shouldham was rebuilt, Dame 
 Joan paying one-third of the cost ; and to 
 make things safe for the future she bound
 
 62 FRIVOL A. 
 
 the parish by indenture never to sell the 
 lead from the roof and never to remove it 
 except for repairs as long as time should 
 last. Then she began in earnest upon her 
 own church the church of Crabhouse 
 Nunnery. In the year 1423, " in the fourth 
 year of the same Joan, prioress, for mischief 
 that was on the church which might not be 
 repaired, but if it were new made, with the 
 counsel of her friends, did it take down, 
 trusting to the help of our Lord and to the 
 great charity of good Christian men . . . 
 and she wrought thereupon three year and 
 more continually, and made it." 
 
 A very grand church it was, too, inside 
 and out, and many thousand pounds as we 
 reckon it now, did she spend, and there was 
 quite a craze in the neighbourhood among 
 the rich folk who gathered round her. 
 There was William Harold, "that lieth in 
 the chapel of our lady," who " paid for the 
 leading of the church " ; and there was 
 Richard Steynon, citizen of Norwich, who
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 63 
 
 gave freely of his substance in hard cash 
 and left a great deal more, "which was 
 withholden from us by untrue men his seka- 
 tours " ; and there was John Lawson and 
 Stephen Yorke and many another whose 
 donations were large and liberal, though I 
 do not put down the amounts, because, if 
 I did, my readers would be inclined [from 
 pure ignorance, Sir or Madam, pure ignor- 
 ance !] to undervalue them and count them 
 nothing so great after all. 
 
 But all this time by far the greatest con- 
 tributor was a cousin of Dame Joan, whose 
 name was Edmund Perys. He was rector 
 of Watlington, a village just a mile from 
 Crabhouse, but on the other side of the 
 Ouse. He too was a rich man and a good 
 one, and he caught the enthusiasm of Dame 
 Joan, and he threw himself heart and soul 
 into the work she had begun. He was so 
 modest and retiring a man, and was so 
 entirely of those who 
 
 " Do good by stealth and blush to find it fame/'
 
 64 FRIVOL A. 
 
 that the simple chronicler shrinks from 
 naming him more than once, and after that 
 alludes to him in the most delicate way as if 
 he had expressly desired to avoid publicity. 
 She the chronicler speaks of him as " the 
 person beforesaid," and sometimes she is 
 even more obscure in her mention of him 
 and his good deeds. But that his contribu- 
 tions were upon a very large scale is plain. 
 He found the stalls for the choir and the 
 reredos, which cost him a huge sum ; and 
 he presented two Service Books for the 
 church, called Antiphonaries, which were so 
 splendidly illuminated and so gorgeously 
 bound that they cost a sum at least equal 
 to 200 of our money ; and above all, he 
 found the stained-glass windows, but on 
 them he would not allow his name to be 
 inscribed. 
 
 "In the end of the work in the beginning 
 of the seventh year of the occupation of 
 the same Joan Prioress, the foresaid person 
 passed to God on the Wednesday next
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 65 
 
 after the Conception of Our Lady," with 
 many a prayer from the good nuns " that 
 our Lord mote comfort his soul withouten 
 End." In his will he ordered that he 
 should be buried within the precincts of the 
 nunnery, and I daresay one of these days the 
 body-snatchers aforesaid will dig hereabouts 
 and discover his tomb and desecrate it as is 
 their wont. In the meantime better let the 
 gentle cattle browse upon his grave. 
 
 It was in the year 1427 when " this good 
 man bef oresaid " died and was buried. He 
 was hardly gone when "our Lord, that is 
 full gracious to all his servants that have 
 need and that trust in him, sent them 
 another good friend them to help and 
 comfort." He was a very considerable 
 personage in his day, "and cosyn to the 
 same Prioress," and his name was " Master 
 John Wiggenhall, Doctor of Canon [Law]." 
 He held several pieces of valuable prefer- 
 ment, and he was Vicar-General of the 
 Bishop of Norwich, and many other things 
 5
 
 66 FRIVOLA. 
 
 besides. By his help Dame Joan may be 
 said to have completed her work of making 
 the Nunnery of Crabhouse into perhaps the 
 most splendid of the smaller monasteries in 
 East Anglia. She rebuilt the cloisters, the 
 dorter, the tower of the church, and a great 
 deal else that is duly and fully specified ; 
 and all this time she was doing deeds of 
 liberal charity of which the chronicler takes 
 little or no note. But what follows has 
 an eloquence of its own. For, " in the xix 
 year of the same Prioress, fell a great dearth 
 of corn ; wherefore she must needs have left 
 work without relieving and help of some 
 good creatures. So by the stirring of our 
 Lord, Master John Wiggenhall, beforesaid, 
 sent us of his charity an 100 coombs malt 
 and an 100 coombs barley, and besides this 
 procured us 20 marks." 
 
 I have not told nearly all that might be 
 told of Master John Wiggenhall, for my 
 business is not with him but with the 
 nunnery that he befriended so handsomely.
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 67 
 
 As for his kinswoman, Dame Joan, she died 
 in 1451, and was succeeded by another lady 
 of gentle lineage, Dame Margaret Daubeny ; 
 and she again by Dame Audrey Wulmer. 
 And under these prioresses things appear to 
 have prospered well; and the nunnery had 
 always generous friends. But at last, just 
 as the sixteenth century began, the nuns 
 chose as their prioress one Elizabeth 
 Bredon, and under her the discipline and 
 all the old prestige passed away. What 
 happened then and how it came about I do 
 not care to tell, for it is not pleasant to 
 speak of sad things which do not satisfy, 
 for they are vain.
 
 III. 
 
 MY readers might think I had treated 
 them unfairly if I did not take them to the 
 end of my story ; and, moreover, one of the 
 Philistines might take up the thread of my 
 narrative and tie ugly knots in it, and end it 
 off with cruel frays and tags and a crumpled 
 kind of selvage, such as people are wont to 
 leave who cobble at other folks' unfinished 
 work. So I suppose I must go on with my 
 story even to the bitter end alas ! it is a 
 bitter end. 
 
 Crabhouse Nunnery was in its glory in 
 the days of the Prioress Joan. But I am 
 really inclined to think that the beautiful 
 house had become only too attractive by the 
 time that her successor, Margaret Daubeney, 
 
 68
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 69 
 
 died, about the year 1470. Up to that time 
 the Prioresses had been ladies of the best 
 blood in East Anglia for more than a 
 century and a half, and, as such, they would 
 be sure to attract other members of the 
 county families to take the veil under them, 
 whose entrance fees would add to the 
 resources of the establishment, and whose 
 kith and kin would befriend it. Crabhouse 
 Nunnery had a character to lose and a 
 tradition to keep up and a name which all 
 the countryside respected. But, as the 
 fifteenth century was drawing to a close, 
 young people began to think less of retiring 
 from the world and hiding themselves in a 
 cloister, than of yore. 
 
 In Norfolk there was a great deal of the 
 leaven of Lollardism at work among the 
 people, a great deal of inquiry and religious 
 discussion, and a great many more questions 
 and speculations stirring them than there 
 had been hitherto. The country, more 
 especially throughout East Anglia, was in a
 
 70 FR1VOLA. 
 
 very unsettled state. There was much 
 violence and disorder and insecurity among 
 some classes. The Universities were exer- 
 cising a very profound influence upon 
 others. Columbus had crossed the Atlantic 
 and discovered a new world. In 1476 
 Caxton had set up his first printing-press at 
 Westminster, and that, too, was the begin- 
 ning of quite new things. Old things were 
 passing away and the old order decaying. 
 Just at this time there was a break in the 
 traditions of the nunnery, and for some 
 reason which has been left unexplained, the 
 nuns elected as their prioress, about the year 
 1490, a lady who, as they say in Norfolk, 
 had " come out of the shires," and her name 
 was Elizabeth Breden. We know nothing 
 of her except her name, and that name may 
 stand for anything from Bruton to Breydon, 
 for the wise men of the East please them- 
 selves about spelling the names of outsiders, 
 and never spell them quite correctly if they 
 can help it.
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 71 
 
 The new Prioress was evidently not 
 "strong enough for the place." Norfolk 
 people are horribly clannish and exclusive, 
 and any head of a Norfolk religious house, 
 in the fifteenth century, who was not Nor- 
 folk born would be sure to have a very bad 
 time of it. Prioress Elizabeth certainly had 
 a bad time of it. It is fair enough to con- 
 jecture that the poor lady had some good 
 qualities, some attractiveness, and, probably, 
 some wealthy kinsfolk ; for all these things 
 would be taken into consideration, and, other 
 things being equal, it was right enough and 
 natural enough that they should weigh with 
 the nuns in making their choice of a new 
 Prioress. But a large establishment, with 
 conflicting interests among the members, 
 with a crowd of old servants and depen- 
 dents indulging in gossip and tittle-tattle, 
 with a dozen ladies of all ages querulous, 
 self-willed, and yet requiring to be made 
 submissive and tractable with the routine 
 of business claims employing fully the time
 
 72 FRIVOL A. 
 
 of the ruler all these things call for 
 administrative ability, wisdom, decision, 
 and self-control, which are not to be found 
 every day in combination in the same 
 person. 
 
 The lady Elizabeth Breden was not the 
 woman to keep things straight. She fretted, 
 she fussed, she whimpered, she scolded, she 
 shut herself up in her chamber, she went to 
 church and prayed hard, but it would not 
 do not even that. It ended by the disci- 
 pline of the house falling to pieces, and with 
 the decay of discipline all sorts of serious 
 laxity and soreness and wrangling and, at 
 last, shame, came upon the once happy and 
 prosperous convent. 
 
 You must understand that all the abbeys 
 and priories, and all the monks and nuns in 
 them, were subject to be visited by the 
 bishop of the diocese in which they were 
 situated at least once in every six years. 
 This visitation was a very serious business 
 so serious and so much to be feared that the
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 73 
 
 larger and more important monasteries were 
 continually attempting to become exempt 
 from the episcopal visitation and to be free 
 from all control and dictation of the 
 bishops ; for the episcopal visitation was a 
 scrutiny of the most searching kind. The 
 bishop could not often carry it out in 
 person, for a mediaeval bishop was a very 
 busy man, and the usual plan was for the 
 bishop to be represented by his official, who 
 came with a staff of chaplains and clerks 
 and servants, and settled himself down in 
 the monastery sometimes for a week at a 
 time. All the accounts of the house were 
 laid before him and duly audited. The 
 church and monastic buildings were care- 
 fully examined by his surveyor. A minute 
 inventory of the furniture, ornaments, plate, 
 vestments, service-books, sacred vessels, and 
 the like, was submitted to his inspection and 
 compared with an earlier list which had 
 been passed at the previous visitation. A 
 report was placed before him of the con-
 
 74 FRIVOL A. 
 
 dition of the farm buildings, and the live 
 and dead stock of the house, and all these 
 documents were signed by the head of the 
 house and the office-holders, or obedien- 
 tiaries, as they were called, and the vouchers 
 were taken away and deposited in the 
 episcopal archives. 
 
 Then came the personal examination of 
 the members of the community. All were 
 assembled in the chapter-house, and each 
 was interrogated separately (beginning with 
 the head of the house) as to any complaints 
 that he or she had to make, any breaches of 
 discipline, any irregularity in the conduct of 
 the religious services, any injustice done or 
 insubordination shown ; above all, as to any 
 grave offence against morals, or suspicious 
 rumours that might be afloat affecting the 
 character of any member of the body, and 
 which could not be concealed without 
 incurring the guilt of conniving at a crime 
 against the whole society. The answers and 
 informations given at these visitations were
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 75 
 
 all taken down by the sworn notary, and the 
 formal report was kept in the bishop's 
 registry. Hundreds of these comperta, as 
 they were technically called, still exist in 
 out-of-the-way nooks and corners, though 
 very few have as yet been printed. When 
 they are published they will give us incom- 
 parably the most minute and trustworthy 
 picture of the inner life of the monasteries 
 which can be found, and will show us that 
 life at its worst, though, of course, not at its 
 best. 
 
 A collection of these comperta for a large 
 number of religious houses in the diocese of 
 Norwich, was published by the Camden 
 Society in 1888. Five visitations are there 
 given, the earliest for the year 1492, the 
 latest for 1532. That is, they cover the last 
 forty years of the period during which the 
 monasteries were subject to episcopal super- 
 vision and control. Beyond all doubt the 
 religious houses in England during those 
 years were in a condition of decay, morally,
 
 76 FRIVOLA. 
 
 religiously, intellectually, and financially, as 
 compared with their condition one or two 
 centuries before. How was it at Crabhouse ? 
 
 JjS * * * * 
 
 On Monday, the loth day of June, 1514, 
 the Rev. Thomas Hare, Doctor of Laws and 
 Commissary of the Bishop of Norwich, 
 entered upon his visitation of Crabhouse 
 Nunnery and begun his examination. The 
 Lady Elizabeth Breden, as Prioress, was 
 first questioned. She evidently began by 
 trying to shield her nuns and telling no tales. 
 " The services were conducted as they ought 
 to be ; the rules of the religious life were 
 observed ; the accounts were well kept ; the 
 buildings were in sufficient repair ; the debts 
 were few and small. But, if the truth were 
 to be told, there was one nun, Mary Stut- 
 field by name, of a good Suffolk family, with 
 whom nothing was to be done she was 
 incorrigibly disobedient to her Prioress ! " 
 Others were examined. Bit by bit the sad 
 truth came out. The nuns began to recrimi-
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 77 
 
 nate on one another. The Prioress was 
 obviously wanting in tact, good sense, and 
 firmness. There were quarrels and bicker- 
 ings ; the juniors were habitually saucy to 
 the seniors. The religious services were, 
 indeed, regularly conducted by the chap- 
 lains, but the nuns were not looked after 
 and were allowed to do as they pleased. 
 One of them, Agnes Smith must I tell the 
 dreadful tale ? had brought scandal and 
 disgrace upon the house ; she had gone 
 astray. Even the Prioress, two of the nuns 
 declared, had been lying when she said that 
 the accounts were duly kept ; the truth was 
 she had kept none, so they declared. 
 
 The visitation came to an end. Certain 
 temporary injunctions were laid upon the 
 Prioress. The Visitor went his way to pre- 
 sent his report to the bishop. What fol- 
 lowed we are not told, and I suppose we 
 shall never know. I feel pretty sure that 
 Dame Elizabeth Breden was compelled to 
 resign her post, for at the next visitation, in
 
 78 FRIVOLA. 
 
 1520, her name does not appear, and 
 Margery [not Mary, who was probably her 
 sister] Stutfield, who had been sub-prioress 
 on the previous occasion, had succeeded her 
 as prioress. Then all things were going on 
 well. 
 
 Dame Margery Stutfield was the last 
 Prioress that ruled over Crabhouse. She 
 must have held office for more than twenty 
 years. From anything that appears to the 
 contrary, she managed her house discreetly 
 and honestly. But there was " a blot on the 
 scutcheon," and the character of the nun- 
 nery had been lost. 
 
 The stigma in any case would have proved 
 ruinous. There are some sins which society 
 cannot afford to forgive and which no 
 school or house for virtuous and devout 
 women can safely endure. They bring their 
 own punishment with them. Thus when 
 the spoliation came and the plunderers were 
 let loose upon the spoil, Crabhouse Nun- 
 nery was found to be a poor deserted place.
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 79 
 
 Mothers could no longer send their 
 daughters there devout and earnest ladies 
 who were seeking a home to retire to in 
 their age, avoided the place. When the 
 Commissioners drew up the report, which 
 they handed in to Henry VIII., in 1536, 
 they found only four nuns in the house 
 though they add that the buildings were " in 
 requisite reparaciones," and of the poor 
 ladies themselves they declare that "their 
 name ys goode." Twenty years had passed 
 since the unhappy scandal, but from that 
 day the nunnery had gone down. Under 
 any circumstances it could hardly have 
 recovered from its shame. 
 
 A year or so before this report of the 
 Commissioners was drawn up the Prioress 
 of Crabhouse and her three or four sisters 
 had seen that the days of their house must 
 needs be few, and that it would not be long 
 before they would be turned out of their 
 pleasant home. Long before the blow fell 
 upon the monasteries wise men and shrewd
 
 8o FRIVOL A. 
 
 women must have foreseen, and did foresee 
 very clearly, that they were going to be 
 turned adrift and robbed of their all ; and 
 they that could do so prepared for the worst, 
 and set themselves to save something from 
 the wreck that was coming. The earliest 
 invasion by the brutal ruffians who were 
 sent out to pillage the smaller monasteries 
 began in October, 1535. Already Dame 
 Margery Stutfield and her nuns had managed 
 to get rid of much of the convent's property. 
 They had sold lands and movables before 
 the Commissioners arrived, and though 
 these gentlemen stopped some sales they did 
 not get the plunder they expected to find at 
 Crabhouse, and were very angry at their dis- 
 appointment. Whereupon they revenged 
 themselves a few months later by inventing 
 hideous slanders against the poor ladies 
 slanders which the Commissioners, whose 
 report has been already quoted, quietly but 
 decisively contradicted when the truth was 
 inquired into. But it seems that the Prioress
 
 UPS AND DOWNS OF AN OLD NUNNERY. 81 
 
 of Crabhouse and her nuns managed very 
 cleverly for themselves ; they stript their 
 house of all the valuables sold the cattle 
 and farming stock, and then simply ran away 
 and deserted the place without waiting to be 
 driven out as others were. 
 
 When the bailiffs came to seize and 
 sell all the movables there were no 
 buyers ! It must have been a grim joke 
 to the poor people in the neighbourhood, 
 who for generations had been living upon 
 the nunnery and were now friendless and 
 beggared, to see the king's officers marching 
 into the forsaken and desolate cloister, and 
 finding little but the bare walls. However, 
 they had come to hold a sale by auction, 
 and a sale there was accordingly. Some 
 church plate was delivered over to the 
 receiver for the King which was valued at 
 .5 153. and a yeoman in the neighbour- 
 hood named Henry Webbe made a bid for 
 all the live and dead stock and furniture that 
 could be found. It was all knocked down 
 6
 
 82 FRIVOLA. 
 
 to. him in a single lot, and he paid for "all 
 the goods/' the magnificent sum of nine 
 pounds sterling. It was one of the few 
 instances of the spoilers being outwitted by 
 their victims in those bad times. 
 
 And this was the end of Crabhouse Nun- 
 nery. Not one stone remains upon another 
 now of the beautiful church and costly 
 buildings that rose up to heaven there some 
 four hundred years ago. It has all passed 
 away like the fabric of a vision. People who 
 have lived on the site of the old conventual 
 buildings all their lives can hardly point to 
 the spot where the old nunnery stood, and 
 know not that they are walking over the 
 graves of the buried dead.
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 
 
 Had I but plenty of money, money enough and to spare, 
 The house for me, no doubt, were a house in the city 
 
 square ; 
 Ah, such a life, such a life as one leads at the window 
 
 there. 
 
 Houses in four straight lines, not a single front awry ! 
 You ivatch who crosses and gossips, who saunters, who 
 
 hurries by ; 
 Green blinds, as a matter of course, to draw when the 
 
 sun gets high ; 
 And the shops with fanciful signs which are painted 
 
 properly. 
 
 BROWNING. 
 
 I. 
 
 EVERYBODY knows the look of the innocent 
 rustic mooning about the streets and ex- 
 hibitions of London in the month of May ; 
 his weak and weary eyes, his generally limp 
 and dazed appearance, his slow and per- 
 plexed movements, his frequent appeals to
 
 84 FRIVOL A. 
 
 the policeman, his benevolent expression of 
 countenance, his oddly cut coat, his queer 
 way of putting his feet to the ground, his 
 exhaustion when he has reached four o'clock 
 in the afternoon, his disappearance from the 
 scene when the Row begins to empty, and 
 the presumption that he retires to rest at 
 nine to sleep off the fatigue of his long day, 
 his reappearance early next morning at the 
 Royal Academy, or the Water Colours, and 
 all the rest of it. He is a pitiable object 
 generally to the Londoner, who, however, 
 treats him tenderly as an amusing, innocent 
 creature, never likely to be noxious, and 
 likely to repay civility by purring in a gurg- 
 ling, gratified way of his own. It amuses 
 us to receive this sort of patronage, which 
 all classes in London bestow, and we never 
 think of resenting it. We so entirely ac- 
 quiesce in our position as belonging to the 
 lower orders qua country bumpkins that 
 we are actually grateful for any recognition 
 vouchsafed to us. As a rule, I come up to
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 85 
 
 London for about a week at a time, in May 
 or June, and by the time the week is over I 
 find I have had enough. This year I have 
 been tempted to stay three whole weeks ; 
 and my prolonged absence from the wilder- 
 ness has made me meditative. I find my- 
 self looking at the world of London and 
 Londoners with the eyes of a philosopher, 
 and I am beginning to question myself as to 
 what I have seen and what impressions 
 have been made upon my mind that 
 foolish thing I call my mind, which I sup- 
 pose we all have, or think we have. 
 
 The first observation that strikes me with 
 a kind of awe when I am in London is that 
 in the great city everything is changing at 
 a pace which absolutely bewilders us rustics. 
 The streets change ; the old landmarks 
 change ; the people change ; the very 
 climate is changing ; and nobody is at all 
 put out by it, and nobody seems to care. 
 I remember the shock that I felt it seems 
 only the other day when I first discovered
 
 86 FRIVOL A. 
 
 that there was no longer any Temple Bar. 
 But the removal of that fabric was a trifle to 
 all that has gone on since. With us in the 
 wilderness nothing changes. I trudge along 
 many a road in this parish which I firmly 
 believe and I have reason for the belief 
 was a well-known trackway two thousand 
 years ago at the least. There in the 
 Hedgerows stand the old pollards that 
 must have known what " lopping and 
 topping " was centuries before people burnt 
 coal here in the east. There are the old 
 landmarks, and the old " drifts " leading 
 to the old queer-shaped fields, and the 
 old slums at the edge of the common, 
 where the squatters settled in the days of 
 King Stephen or King John. There, too, 
 are the old churches restored or unrestored 
 standing where they have stood for many 
 a long century, substantially the same, so 
 patient if I may say so so dumb, and yet 
 so eloquent. But in London I am always 
 losing my way ; looking out for the old
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 87 
 
 landmarks and finding them gone. The 
 very stones on the pavement seem to be 
 alive, restless, anxious to move on, looking 
 out for something new. As for the old 
 churches and the old schools, such as St. 
 Paul's and Christ's Hospital, they are always 
 on the march, and I am told it is the march 
 of progress. I dare say it is. How should 
 I know whether it is or is not ? 
 
 There is another fact which strikes me as 
 I prowl about London, and that is that 
 nobody I meet seems to be without money. 
 We in the wilderness have no money, that's 
 the naked fact ! Discount it as you may, 
 you cannot whittle down that startling state- 
 ment to anything less than this : that we in 
 the country have no money to carry out 
 improvements, great or small. We go on 
 in the old way because we are all living 
 horribly near the wind, and we can't help 
 ourselves. The idea of paying half a crown 
 for a cab in the country to take us home a 
 mile or two when our knees are trembling
 
 88 FRIVOL A. 
 
 under us, never occurs to any but a most 
 lavishly extravagant spendthrift. We are 
 always practising small economies : we 
 carry on our correspondence by the help of 
 postcards ; we never forget that a shilling 
 represents twelve pence ; we have a best 
 coat and a second-best coat, and we 
 cautiously look out at the front door before 
 we start on our expeditions, deliberating 
 whether it will be prudent to wear that 
 new hat that is still shiny. It was almost 
 frightful to see the reckless way in which a 
 lad of sixteen or seventeen, who was sitting 
 next me in a Knightsbridge omnibus the 
 other day, put his hand in his pocket for the 
 penny which was demanded, and brought 
 out a whole handful of cash, and only a 
 single copper coin in the whole hoard. 
 Where did he get it from ? Had he come 
 by it honestly ? After that, I watched 
 other people, and again and again I wit- 
 nessed the same phenomenon. Little girls 
 carry purses, and they have all got some-
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 89 
 
 thing in them ; and they ask for change in 
 the most nonchalant way, as if they had all 
 been born, not only with a silver spoon 
 in their mouths, but spangled over with 
 diamonds and rubies, when they came into 
 the world. 
 
 The natural consequences of all this 
 amazing diffusion of wealth is that the 
 quality of everything one sees or buys in 
 London is immeasurably superior to that 
 which we ever meet with in the country. 
 Ever since I can remember anything, I 
 have had a passion for horses. It makes 
 me feel quite bad to watch the car- 
 riages in the streets and the parks. Take 
 the first pair that meets you almost at any 
 hour of the day, and you. may safely say that 
 those horses are a better pair than you will 
 see in the wilderness once in three years. 
 You simply can't buy such horses here in 
 the wilds. You would actually have to 
 send to London for them, if you even really 
 determined to pay the price. And the same
 
 90 I VOL A. 
 
 is true of everything. It may happen that 
 you take a pride in your tiny conservatory, 
 and have a local reputation very cheaply 
 earned, it must be allowed for "making 
 things grow." You go out to dinner, say in 
 Kensington or Bloomsbury, and, lo ! there 
 upon the table you are greeted with a dis- 
 play of flowers, incomparably more beautiful 
 and more perfectly grown than you can 
 ever hope to raise, while the mere mass of 
 them is greater than your gardener could 
 produce in a twelvemonth. You have had 
 a new coat made expressly for that London 
 trip, and your wife has had two gowns I 
 mean dresses : nobody wears gowns now 
 except aldermen and the trouble those 
 garments have occasioned you in securing a 
 fit has made you sensibly older. Before 
 you have been many days en Evidence, you 
 are conscious that your rusticity has been 
 only too apparent, and the "cut" and the 
 " style " and the something or other about 
 you have betrayed the country tailor or the
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 91 
 
 village modiste. We can't get quality. We 
 can't get first-rate work in anything. We 
 can't get our houses painted in London 
 style. We can't get our very boots blacked 
 with the London polish, nor (when we have 
 any hair left) can we even get our hair cut 
 scientifically or, indeed, decently, by rustic 
 fingers and rustic scissors. But this is not 
 all not nearly all. I am more impressed 
 by the improvement in the manners and 
 appearance of the middle classes in London 
 than by their mere prosperity. I notice it 
 among men, women, and children. There 
 has been a wonderful lift upward along the 
 whole line. May I explain what I mean ?
 
 II. 
 
 THOUGH I did not say so in express terms, 
 I think the readers of these papers will 
 understand that I am writing as one of the 
 middle class. We use that expression 
 "middle class" very frequently, and yet 
 few of us, if pushed for a definition of our 
 meaning, would be prepared with an answer. 
 I hold that the middle class is composed of 
 all those who are not on visiting terms with 
 the Houses of Parliament, and whose in- 
 come counts by hundreds, not thousands, a 
 year. The nobility and the Parliamentary 
 families have many poor relations and con- 
 nections, who, after a fashion, " hang on to 
 their order by their eyelids," but they are 
 on the border-land, having the entree to
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 93 
 
 some of the great houses, but little more ; 
 and, on the other hand, when professional 
 men and traders count their income by 
 thousands they are by way of being admitted 
 sooner or later to take their place among 
 the upper ten. We of the middle class, 
 however, are merely the respectable people, 
 who do not pretend to live on terms of 
 equality with the great folk. We do not 
 grudge them the position they hold ; we 
 have no envious feeling towards them. 
 When admitted to their society, we have the 
 good taste to like the region in which they 
 move, and we do not find ourselves out of 
 our element ; yet their ways are not our 
 ways, and their world is not ours. On the 
 other hand, we of the middle class have only 
 kindly and generous feelings for the labourer 
 and the artisan. If they can rise step by 
 step in the social scale, we are not they who 
 would hinder them. As long as they are 
 the friends of order and are amassing that 
 which gives stability to the commonwealth,
 
 94 FRIVOL A. 
 
 so long are they our friends : we and they 
 have common interests, and that which is 
 for their advantage is for ours also. Below 
 them lies the proletariat and the residuum, 
 and at the movements of this lower stratum 
 some look with no little uneasiness and ap- 
 prehension. Of this stratum I may at once 
 confess that I know little or nothing. I 
 have never laboured among the masses of 
 the great towns ; therefore I do not presume 
 to speak of them. I leave them to the 
 specialists, who of late have taken them 
 under their very equivocal protection, and 
 who are laying down the law about them in 
 a very dogmatic way. 
 
 The courtesy of the bourgeoisie in London 
 strikes a countryman just fresh from the 
 provinces as something which is apt almost 
 to arouse his suspicion. I have more than 
 once heard country folk remark upon it, as 
 if they could not understand why a man 
 who sold them a pair of gloves, or could 
 not find some trumpery article in stock,
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 95 
 
 should take so much trouble and be "so 
 kind about it. The gentleman didn't know 
 me, and he was as polite as if I had come in 
 a carriage ! " Now, I do not mean to say 
 that our country shopkeepers are anything 
 except very obliging, and ready at all times 
 to show the utmost attention to their 
 customers. So far from this, they are 
 altogether unsparing of themselves, even to 
 the humblest of their clients. But in the 
 small circle of our country buyers and 
 sellers we all know one another ; and just 
 because we do know one another's concerns 
 there is a certain free and easy familiarity of 
 tone in our dealings which the Londoner 
 has quite banished. In the large shops 
 establishments I ought to say of the 
 Metropolis the assistants are all ladies and 
 gentlemen. With us in the wilds they are 
 all young persons. In a large shop in a 
 certain town in Cornwall, the other day, I 
 was much amused by the entrance of a very 
 pleasantly dressed good lady, with whom
 
 96 FRIVOLA. 
 
 two of the assistants shook hands cordially 
 before the inevitable question was put 
 "And what can I serve you with, Mrs. 
 Trevince ? " Then commenced a cheery 
 conversation, a merry consultation, a joke 
 or two, a laugh, and all the rest of it. I, 
 meanwhile, was engaged in trying on a cap 
 which I was not at all anxious to carry off 
 too hastily. I, too, engaged in conversation 
 on things in general. Before I had left that 
 shop, I had ingratiated myself with the 
 keeper thereof and his family as a distin- 
 guished foreigner whose biography might 
 be worth discovering. Next time they'd try 
 again ! In London there is none of this 
 undress familiarity. Those stately queens 
 and princesses who try on your wife's 
 mantle for her, they awe us rustics by their 
 dignity and bearing ; they are so gracious, 
 so beautiful yes ! they really are astonish- 
 ingly beautiful ! so perfectly self-possessed, 
 and they never lose their tempers. It is 
 amazing to notice the self-control of these
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 97 
 
 young women under provocations and 
 irritations which would drive ordinary young 
 women raving mad. The whole order of 
 assistants in the London shops is a dis- 
 tinctly higher order than their representa- 
 tives in the country. They have learnt the 
 precious art of being habitually courteous. 
 They have risen above mere familiarity of 
 tone and manner, not to speak of rudeness, 
 snappishness, and impertinence. 
 
 The same is observable, too, in the 
 manners of every omnibus conductor, or 
 cabman, or chance man in the streets of 
 whom you ask your way. It is not that 
 you meet with civility meaning by that a 
 tacit recognition on the part of the other 
 that you are a gentleman it is much more 
 true that the other surprises you by showing 
 that he himself has unconsciously become a 
 gentleman. It is more than twenty years 
 since I have had any dispute with a cabman 
 in London, though I ride in cabs as often as 
 most men when I am in the great city, and 
 7
 
 98 FRIVOLA. 
 
 you may be sure I don't foolishly overpay 
 my fare if I know what it ought to be. But 
 I remember the day when " cabby " was a 
 very different creature from the well-spoken 
 man he is now ; and the " jarvey " of my 
 childhood was not overdrawn in the early 
 pages of " Pickwick." As to the London 
 police officers, one has to remember the 
 manners or want of manners of the same 
 class in Germany and France to realise how 
 great an advance we have made in England 
 in graciousness over our Continental neigh- 
 bours. In the country we have none of 
 this courtesy ; indeed, we have lost not only 
 that servility which was a bad sign, and 
 which it was well should go but in its 
 place we have little or nothing that stands 
 for that politeness which indicates true in- 
 dependence. The contrast between town 
 and country is very marked, and it may be 
 summed up briefly by saying that the towns- 
 man has been rising to self-respect ; the 
 countryman has only got as mr as self-
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 99 
 
 assertion, and he shows no sign of getting 
 any farther. 
 
 It is significant, however, to notice, what 
 must have struck many others besides my- 
 self, that this advance in courtesy is much 
 more marked among the young men than 
 among the young women. The girls in 
 some employments are inclined to be saucy, 
 free and easy, and airified. Domestic 
 servants in London, I observe, are begin- 
 ning to drop the " Sir " or " Ma'am " which 
 used to be general among us. Girls in the 
 post offices and the telegraph offices are 
 much less pleasant people to deal with than 
 the lads ; and I am told that young women 
 who have only lately risen to the conscious- 
 ness of having won their "rights" are ex- 
 hibiting somewhat too much of the self- 
 assertion and too little of the self-respect. 
 I have seen signs of this more than once ; 
 but I should be glad to find, on further 
 inquiry, that my impression was a wrong 
 one. Meanwhile, my admiration for the
 
 ioo FRIVOLA. 
 
 London boy is unbounded. I am old 
 enough to remember when Mr. MacGregor 
 first started the Shoeblack Brigade, arid the 
 ridicule that came from certain quarters 
 upon that brave experiment. Then it was 
 said by not a few that only failure was to be 
 expected from a Quixotic attempt to make 
 the young ragamuffins in London give an 
 account of their daily earnings. Now we 
 are almost all convinced that you may do 
 anything with and make anything out of the 
 London boy.
 
 III. 
 
 THE most repulsive subject that English 
 people discuss is the subject of education. 
 There is nothing to compare with it for the 
 amount of nonsense which they talk about 
 it ; none that seems to bring out such in- 
 consequential theories ; none that tempts 
 men to dogmatise so idiotically. The very 
 smallest part of a human being's education 
 is that which is carried on at school, and 
 yet, from " my lords " downwards, we Eng- 
 lish folk seem to have no other notion than 
 that the moment a lad passes out from the 
 school for the last time his education is 
 complete. It is much nearer the truth to 
 say that not till then does the real education 
 of life begin. The opportunities, the facili- 
 ties, the means and appliances for building
 
 102 FRIVOL A. 
 
 up the average London boy into a manly, 
 rational creature are truly wonderful. There 
 was a time, not so long ago, when the street- 
 boy was a standing nuisance because he had 
 nothing to do. Look at him now ! Stand- 
 ing at the door of a certain hotel not a 
 thousand miles from the Strand, I have seen 
 a string of four or five telegraph boys file 
 past me more than once or twice coming 
 from I know not whence and going I know 
 not whither scrupulously neat and clean in 
 their dress, upright as darts, steady as old 
 horses, lithe and quick as antelopes, and, 
 withal, joyous as kittens at play. I have 
 seen them hurrying by, talking as fast as 
 their tongues could move, never a sign or 
 sound that was boisterous or unmannerly. 
 Watch the little shoeblacks with their 
 brushes and their blacking. See the con- 
 centration of thought, the fixity of purpose 
 which they display, the determination to get 
 the highest possible polish on that damp 
 boot, the critical look at your trousers as
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 103 
 
 they turn them up, the satisfaction they feel 
 in the completeness of their last effort, and 
 then the briskness of their movements as 
 they spring upon the next customer ! You 
 may come upon a little gathering of them 
 sometimes in the dull time of the day, 
 sprawling, and discussing the last murder. 
 Next moment they are all alert and wide- 
 awake, all offering themselves ; never dis- 
 puting if you select one of them, whichever 
 it may be. I am sorry to notice that they 
 have given up whistling, to a great extent. 
 Life has begun for them, and whistling 
 seems to be considered inconsistent with 
 serious employment. Happily, however, 
 they have not given up singing, and the 
 style of music and song is a huge improve- 
 ment upon the melodies and the subject- 
 matter of the lyrics we used to hear when 
 I was a lad. One evening in the merry 
 month of May I found myself at a sta- 
 tion of the Underground Railway when 
 my train was not due for twenty minutes.
 
 io 4 FRIVOL A. 
 
 There were two boys at the bookstall ; 
 they were in the best possible spirits ; one 
 began to sing a song, the other at once 
 broke in with singing as true and distinct 
 a second as any choir-master could desire to 
 listen to ; and the next moment, from the 
 other side of the line, a third boy, whose 
 voice was not yet broken, growled out an 
 attempt at a bass. He broke down hope- 
 lessly, and the laughter of all the three boys 
 at the failure was so fresh and gay and 
 hearty that I wished I could be a boy again, 
 or that I had had such a chance as these 
 youngsters had in their day. I do not think 
 it is possible to over-estimate the prodigious 
 improvement that has been effected upon 
 Young London by the now general employ- 
 ment of young boys in the various occupa- 
 tions which, a generation back, it was as- 
 sumed could only be safely entrusted to 
 adults. When the present librarian of the 
 Bodleian entered upon his office, one of the 
 earliest of his reforms was largely to increase
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 105 
 
 the staff of assistants by introducing boys 
 into the library. I believe the experiment 
 has proved a complete success, and I doubt 
 not it will be followed elsewhere by and by. 
 You may talk as you please about night- 
 schools and lectures and classes. What are 
 these mechanical contrivances for turning 
 boys into bookworms and prigs in com- 
 parison with the discipline of the streets, 
 carried on every hour of the day, under a 
 sense of responsibility and with the con- 
 sciousness of belonging to the great living 
 machinery of society yes ! and the convic- 
 tion that you are helping to keep it going ? 
 
 One of the most memorable evenings that 
 I ever spent was at a boys' club at Toynbee 
 Hall. We had turned out from the gym- 
 nasium, where the lads were performing all 
 sorts of dreadful and alarming gyrations, 
 and we were by special favour admitted to 
 this meeting. If I am not mistaken, the 
 chairman was a lad of twenty, just on the 
 verge of becoming superannuated. I have
 
 io6 FRIVOLA. 
 
 never seen any man in my life conduct the 
 business with more dignity, courtesy, or 
 good sense. One boy, who was in his shirt 
 sleeves, was inclined to rebel against autho- 
 rity. The quiet way in which that young 
 chairman put him down, and the cordial 
 support which the chair received, was mar- 
 vellous. As for us, who were but lookers- 
 on, and admitted only on sufferance, we 
 were as completely ignored as if we had 
 been men in the moon. Think of the silent 
 but profound and far-reaching influence 
 which a discipline and training like this 
 must needs be exercising upon those to 
 whom it extends directly and indirectly ! 
 Think, too, of the magnificent work that 
 has been going on at the Polytechnic under 
 such an heroic and enlightened philanthro- 
 pist as Mr. Quinton Hogg ! Think of all 
 the boys' clubs and young men's institutions 
 which they tell me are to be found in all 
 parts of London, affording rational amuse- 
 ment and recreation for mere lads the
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 107 
 
 cricket, the juvenile bands, the choirs and 
 you will not doubt that these things must be 
 working a change in the whole bearing of 
 young Londoners which you, who have 
 been living in it all along, are hardly, if at 
 all, conscious of, but which proves to us, the 
 occasional visitors, that a great social revo- 
 lution has been carried out without our 
 knowing how a revolution whereby the 
 rising generation of Londoners has been 
 lifted up to a moral and intellectual level 
 which their grandfathers, half a century ago, 
 conceived to be impossible of attainment by 
 their progeny in their own lifetime. 
 
 If my old friend X were now alive, he 
 would be some years past seventy. He was 
 a man who had made his own way in the 
 world, after a fashion, and he was rather 
 fond of talking to me of his early struggles. 
 He was one of, I think, seven sons of a law 
 stationer in the purlieus of the Inns of 
 Court, and at fifteen he was thrown upon 
 his own resources. A warehouseman in
 
 io8 FRIVOL A. 
 
 the City took him as a supernumerary in his 
 business more as an act of charity than 
 with any hope of finding him of much use. 
 He had a salary of ^30 a year, and he lived 
 upon it, without a shilling from his parents. 
 His mother engaged a garret for him in 
 Clifford's Inn, for which he paid .4 a year ; 
 and she started him with bed and bedding 
 and the barest necessaries in the way of 
 furniture. An old woman came in once a 
 day to " tidy up." He told me that for the 
 first year he never had a fire in his room. 
 He got to know where the biggest cup of 
 coffee and the biggest roll could be got for 
 a penny, and where the cheapest beef ct la 
 mode was to be found for his make-shift 
 dinner. He left the warehouse at seven or 
 eight o'clock in the evening; then he walked 
 the streets, and sometimes took refuge in a 
 small coffee-house as near the fire as he 
 could get, and regaled himself with a supper 
 of more coffee, and now and then with the 
 luxury of a muffin. He never could have
 
 A COUNTRY COUSIN IN LONDON. 109 
 
 been a strong boy, and I believe his consti- 
 tution was permanently weakened by his 
 early privations. At the end of his first 
 year his salary was raised to ^40, and he 
 bought his first greatcoat. " I can tell you 
 that was a day when I put that greatcoat 
 on ! " he said, as he looked back upon that 
 great event in his history. But during three 
 or four years of this lonely and desolate life 
 he assured me that he had absolutely no 
 amusement of any kind, except such as he 
 sought and found at the theatres. Poor as 
 he was, and frugal and self-denying, he 
 discovered that recreation of some sort he 
 must have, and accordingly he went to the 
 vast expense of providing himself with three 
 season tickets of admission to the gallery of 
 the Adelphi and two other playhouses I 
 forget which. He paid a guinea for each 
 ticket. All this was going on not much 
 more than fifty years ago. Contrast the life 
 of a poor lad like this with that which boys 
 of the same age lead in London now ! It is
 
 no FRIVOLA. 
 
 a contrast between a daily round of half- 
 starved misery anxious, monotonous, and 
 desolate and a life of gaiety, excitement, 
 congenial society, and elevating influences 
 on the right hand and on the left, which 
 cannot but be fruitful in grand results for 
 the boys of to-day who will be the men of 
 to-morrow.
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MAR- 
 VELLOUS. 
 
 Bui there's a tree, of many one, 
 A single field which I have look'd upon, 
 Both of them speak of something that is gone ; 
 The pansy at my feet 
 Doth the same tale repeat ; 
 Whither is fled the visionary gleam f 
 Where is it now, the glory and the dream f 
 
 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 MR. CADAVEROUS has left me a legacy. The 
 good man is dead, but he has left me his 
 note-books. This morning I opened one of 
 them, and found it full of ghost stories. 
 There was a note, written in Greek and 
 Latin, on the last page, which, being inter- 
 preted, says : " Of all that comes before this 
 page I believe not one single word." I was 
 angered as I read, for why should any man 
 
 gollect a mass of narratives which he looks 
 in
 
 H2 FRIVOLA. 
 
 upon not as mere fiction but as mere lies ? 
 This arid scepticism makes me hate my 
 generation. What would Sir Thomas 
 Brown have said to it if he had been so 
 unlucky as to live in our time ? I turned 
 for relief to a veracious chronicler of the 
 fourteenth century, who has painfully got 
 together all he could find about the reign of 
 King Richard II., and who has, in point of 
 fact, left us about the best resume of the 
 years between 1393 and 1404 which any 
 contemporary writer has handed down to 
 us, and straightway I found myself breath- 
 ing a purer air. 1 A fig for men and women 
 who brag of what they do not believe ! As 
 Bishop Blougram says, " What can I gain 
 on the denying side ? " If a man can't see, 
 we pity him because he's blind. If he can't 
 hear, we commiserate with him because 
 he's deaf. If he can't tell tea from coffee 
 not to speak of port from sherry we take 
 
 1 "Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti, 
 Regum Angliae in Job. de Trokelow's Chronica," &c. 
 Edited by S. H. Riley. Rolls Series, 1866,
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MARVELLOUS. 113 
 
 good care to waste no good liquor upon 
 him. But if he can't believe because he 
 cannot imagine anything that he cannot 
 handle, what shall we say of him but that 
 he is an intellectual cripple ? I had a boy 
 in my house once who was born with only 
 one arm. He used to say he should not 
 like to be "one of those fellows with a 
 second arm lolloping about at his side." He 
 could not understand what a man could do 
 with two arms. If a man has only one arm, 
 by all means let him make the best of it. 
 But bragging of it well ! he'd better let 
 that alone. Give me the man who can 
 believe anything. There's some hope that 
 he will end with a balance of ascertained 
 certainty to his credit when he is beginning 
 to crave less for proof than conviction and 
 assurance. 
 
 Accordingly I love my old chronicler. 
 
 He lived in days when people were not 
 
 perpetually asking, " But is it true ? " " Of 
 
 course it's true. Do you suppose I should 
 
 8
 
 H4 FRIVOLA. 
 
 tell it you if it weren't ? It would not be 
 worth my while. Invent ? We chroniclers 
 never invent ; we tell our tale and leave it. 
 The age of invention will come some day. 
 What a stupid, dull, matter-of-fact age it will 
 be ! " My chronicler embellishes nothing 
 he tells a simple, unvarnished tale. Rather 
 he has a host of marvellous tales, none the 
 less matters of fact. 
 
 In those eleven years which my chronicler 
 deals with he gives us no less than fifteen 
 marvellous stories of strange experiences 
 which claimed to be set down in his 
 veracious history. Would you like some 
 specimens ? Then take them as they come ! 
 
 In the year 1397, savs ne > about the season 
 of Lent, in a village near the town of Bed- 
 ford, every evening as the sun went down, a 
 ghostly female took to wandering about. 
 She frequented the house of a certain 
 widow, and she announced herself to be 
 the widow's daughter. She declared that 
 the widow was sure to be damned. She
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MARVELLOUS. 115 
 
 had buried her baby offspring in the garden 
 behind the house, and it was all the mother's 
 fault that the babe was born dead. So said 
 the ghost. An animated dialogue took place 
 between the mother and the phantom. Said 
 the mother : " I shall not be damned, for I 
 confessed my sin to a priest, and he gave me 
 absolution." Said the ghost : " Mother, 
 thou liest ! and damned thou shalt be for 
 thy sin ! " Undismayed the mother made 
 answer : " Nay ! thou art a lying spirit, that 
 wouldst fain drive me to despair. Avaunt ! " 
 The chronicler assures us that this wrang- 
 ling went on between the living and the 
 dead very often " fit saepius contentio inter 
 eos " and inasmuch as the mother stood 
 firm, the ghost changed its tactics. The 
 widow had a son, and he was a priest ; but 
 he was a worldly priest, and extravagantly 
 fond of hunting. The phantom made an 
 attack upon this priest, whose name (says 
 my chronicler) was John Hervy. The 
 spirit gave the parson no rest day and
 
 n6 FRIVOLA. 
 
 night coming to him ; told him he read his 
 matins vilely, and as for his saying of the 
 Mass, it was just shocking bad (pessime). 
 John Hervy didn't care a straw, and, in fact, 
 the ghost and the whole family got, at last, to 
 be on such astonishingly intimate terms that 
 the very servants used to put the ghost to 
 proof, and made her say after them the 
 Lord's Prayer and the Ave Maria, and even 
 the very Creed and the first verse of the 
 Gospel of St. John. All which the afore- 
 said ghost repeated without hesitation or 
 stumbling. But there was one prayer 
 which began with the words " O Jesus 
 of Nazareth." It was an English prayer, 
 by good luck, and then it looked as if 
 the ghost could not manage that. It 
 stammered and bungled and could not 
 pronounce English ; that was plain. But 
 in process of time the spirit got over even 
 that difficulty, and managed, it seems, to 
 repeat anything that was put to it. For the 
 thing went on, says my chronicler, for three
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MARVELLOUS. 117 
 
 years ; and then the ghost grew malicious 
 and mischievous : it took to rattling the 
 pots and pans and doing other naughty 
 things. Finally the ghost began to upset 
 the great jugs of beer when they were full, 
 and there was no knowing what might come 
 next. . . . So. . . . Alack ! there is no end 
 to the story. My author does not pursue 
 the subject, but in the most tantalising way 
 leaves us to imagine the rest. 
 
 Two years after this there came a horrible 
 portent, which disturbed men's minds ex- 
 ceedingly. It came to pass that in this year 
 1399, of a sudden all over England the 
 laurels shrivelled up, and then, to the 
 wonder of mankind, after they had all lost 
 their leaves they grew green and fresh again 
 not everywhere, we are told that was not 
 to be expected but in many places they 
 recovered ; that, at any rate, was cheering. 
 People were awestruck, of course. What 
 could it mean ? Verily it meant this. Had 
 not the king of late brought many of the
 
 n8 FRIVOLA. 
 
 nobility to shame thrown them into prison, 
 banished them what not ? They would be 
 restored by and by never fear ! Never 
 fear ! The laurels would come back and be 
 green again ! I suspect that the withering 
 of the laurels was in the winter time, for my 
 chronicler says that in the spring even 
 during the season of Lent a certain holy 
 hermit, William Norham by name, presented 
 himself before the Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, solemnly declaring that he had a 
 message "from Him it was not safe to 
 disobey," which he had to deliver to the 
 king and his great ones. Strange to say, 
 the archbishop brought him to the king. 
 " If," said King Richard, " you are on such 
 intimate terms with God Almighty, go and 
 walk barefoot on yonder water, and then we 
 shall know whether you're a true mes- 
 senger ! " The hermit was equal to the 
 occasion. " I profess to do no miracles. I 
 leave that to my betters. Nevertheless, I 
 warn thee, O King, that thou scorn not my
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MARVELLOUS. 119 
 
 message, or woe to thee and thine ! " So 
 spake the hermit ; but the king threw him 
 into gaol, and there he lay for four long 
 years, during which time all the evils that 
 he had prophesied came to pass. But when 
 they let him out, and Henry IV. was on the 
 throne, the wretched man tried the same 
 little game a second time. This time he did 
 not fare so well, for King Henry laid his 
 hands upon him at York and hanged him 
 for a rogue ; though, says my authority, he 
 was beyond doubt a holy man, for his hair 
 shirt had actually eaten into his flesh, and 
 he had never worn shoes upon his feet for 
 many years, except when he said his Mass ; 
 and he had made a pilgrimage to Rome too, 
 and flesh meat had never entered his mouth 
 for years and years, and yet they hanged 
 him for a traitor. Oh ! the pity of it ! 
 
 You must not expect that I should tell 
 you all my chronicler's stories. No ! I 
 must leave out the story of the devil of 
 Danbury ; and I cannot stop to explain
 
 120 FRIVOLA. 
 
 how that awful prophecy came true which 
 frightened the king so much as well it 
 might 
 
 " Scarce two years on 
 Will last the pomp of John ! " 
 
 Nor may I tell about the hobgoblins that 
 kept up an infernal battle in the neighbour- 
 hood of Biggleswade. Indeed, I can only 
 give you a taste of the many good things 
 that are ready to hand, but I positively must 
 add a word about the dragon of Sudbury. 
 There can be no sort of doubt about that 
 dragon. He appeared in the year 1405, and 
 he took possession of a portion of Sir 
 Richard de Waldegrave's property, and that 
 same property (Bures) belongs to his de- 
 scendants to this day, so it must be true. 
 The people turned out in force against that 
 dragon yea, all the servants of Sir Richard. 
 But the darts that were hurled against him 
 rebounded, says my chronicler, as if they 
 had been hurled at a hard rock, and the 
 arrows that hit the spine of his back (spinam
 
 THE DYING OUT OF THE MARVELLOUS. 121 
 
 dorsi) went flying away from it in awful 
 fashion, and they gave it up for a while. 
 At last the whole country turned out to slay 
 that dragon ; but when the dragon saw that 
 he was going to be attacked in earnest, 
 being a wary dragon, he betook himself to a 
 swamp or lake thereabout I daresay it's 
 there now and he went and hid himself in 
 the reeds, and he never more was seen. 
 What a dreary, monotonous, uneventful age 
 we live in ! We have sneered the ghosts 
 and dragons away. We feed our children 
 upon grammar and the multiplication table. 
 Yet there are wonders still if we had but 
 eves to see them.
 
 CLOCKS AND WATCHES. 
 
 . . . like a German dock, 
 Still a-tepairhig ; ever out of frame ; 
 And never going aright, being a watch, 
 But being watch' d that it may still go right. 
 
 LOVE'S LABOUR LOST. 
 
 AN excellent worthy, some years ago, pre- 
 sented to the parish of which I have the 
 honour to be rector a secondhand clock, 
 which has been ticking intermittently ever 
 since in the church tower. It was a 
 generous gift, and the people are proud of 
 the ancient timepiece. We are not of 
 those who look a gift-horse in the mouth, 
 and it is not every parish that has a clock 
 which strikes the hours and has some pre- 
 tension to keep the time when it is duly 
 watched and wound up and treated with
 
 CLOCKS AND WATCHES. 123 
 
 loyal deference. We do not expect too 
 much of our clock. It is a thing to boast 
 of, even though it be not exactly a thing of 
 beauty ; it has its own way of going and its 
 own way of stopping too, and is entirely to 
 be depended on for one thing and that is 
 for not being too rigidly uniform in its 
 habits. In fact, our clock is a wayward 
 clock ; it prides itself on not being as other 
 clocks are. Fifty times a day do fond eyes 
 gaze at it, and the passers-by on the road to 
 the nearest market town may often be heard 
 exclaiming with a glad surprise, "Why ! 
 that clock's a-going to-day," and then they 
 pull out their watches and compare notes. 
 
 When our benefactor gave us that clock 
 another excellent worthy presented us with 
 a sundial, and fixed it up with carefully 
 calculated precision upon the south porch. 
 It is an admirable dial, exact, unpretentious, 
 silent as the grave, faultless, and absolutely 
 to be trusted ; yet such is the perversity of 
 human nature I never saw a human being
 
 124 FRIVOLA. 
 
 turn his eyes to that sundial except he was 
 one that I had taken the pains to show it to 
 and bid him look at it. Nobody cares for it, 
 nobody respects it, nobody consults it, 
 nobody believes it to be of the slightest use 
 or admires it as an ornament. Why is this ? 
 
 There is something in the nature of all of 
 us which makes perfection appear insipid. 
 It is irritating to find in anything no margin 
 of error. In proportion as we eliminate the 
 " personal equation," in that proportion we 
 are face to face with mere mechanism. 
 Never to make mistakes is the characteristic 
 of the low man. You may find a million 
 knaves who in the course of their lives were 
 never known to be wrong in adding up 
 miles of figures. They are worth so many 
 pounds a year to any haberdasher in the 
 New Cut. 
 
 That is all they are fit for. "Seven 
 pieces of tape at five farthings a piece ; three 
 ha'p'orth of pins from a twopenny box ; half 
 a card of hooks and eyes at threepence a
 
 CLOCKS AND WATCHES. 125 
 
 card, with five hooks and seven eyes short ; 
 a pair of braces a trifle soiled at tenpence for 
 three pairs, and two-and-a-half per cent, dis- 
 count off the total for ready money. How 
 much ? " The man will tell you in a twink- 
 ling, he's as true as my sundial ! Do you 
 love him ? Not you ! You'd as soon lose 
 your heart to a pair of pincers. But you do 
 get very fond of your watch, especially if it 
 varies. You take it out much more often to 
 find how wrong it is than to find out the 
 time of day. When it stops without rhyme 
 or reason you shake it, and it probably 
 thinks better of it and languidly consents to 
 go for a little while longer ; next day it 
 starts off at a full gallop, and you find it 
 has gained five minutes in twelve hours. 
 That's a watch of some character, that is ! 
 But suppose all watches went like chrono- 
 meters, who would carry one ? The mono- 
 tony of all men's watches saying exactly 
 the same thing at every moment of the day 
 or night would be sickening. I knew a
 
 126 FRIVOL A. 
 
 man once who had a large collection of 
 watches. They dated from fabulous ages, 
 they came from distant lands, they included 
 that famous " repeater " which the boatswain 
 in " Peter Simple " was so proud of. One 
 had been dented by a bullet at Waterloo ; 
 another had been cut out of a shark which 
 had swallowed it in a sailor's breeches- 
 pocket ; and a lot of seven had been bought 
 as a bargain of a mysterious villain who was 
 suspected of having abstracted them from a 
 pawnbroker's window. I asked my friend 
 one day how many he had. " Sixty-two in 
 all ! " was the reply. " I wound them all up 
 yesterday, and so I happen to know ! " 
 " Wound them up ? do you mean to say 
 they all go ? " His contemptuous astonish- 
 ment was chilling. "Why, my good man, 
 what do you suppose they were made for ? " 
 To say the truth, I had never looked at the 
 matter in that light. It appeared, however, 
 in pursuing my inquiries, that some of these 
 articles did not go, for the sufficient reason
 
 CLOCKS AND WATCHES. 127 
 
 that their mainsprings were broken ; but the 
 rest did actually begin to tick when the key 
 was removed, and continued ticking audibly 
 for very various periods. He took careful 
 notes and showed them to me. The 
 " shark " kept on for nearly an hour, some 
 persisted only for five or six minutes, some 
 for half a day ; but the prize of patient con- 
 tinuance was won by a plump little veteran, 
 with a tortoiseshell case and a pretty little 
 portrait of Charles I. inside it, certainly more 
 than two hundred years old. This old relic 
 actually went on for twenty-two hours. 
 Surprised into unwonted activity after a 
 sleep of centuries, it could not have enough 
 of the joy of being awake again. For 
 myself, I never in my life had a watch I 
 could depend upon, but I only half regret 
 the fact. I seldom miss a train, for I can 
 always calculate what o'clock it is by making 
 due allowances. Of course my watch plays 
 tricks ; so do my dogs, but it does not hurt 
 me and it amuses them. I bear no malice
 
 128 FRIVOLA. 
 
 to the one or the other they are, each in 
 his own sphere, interesting organisms. That 
 I do not occasionally, in my weak and 
 foolish moments, covet a better article to 
 compare with my neighbour's sumptuous 
 productions, is more than I can say, for 
 pride will tempt us all at times, and no man 
 likes to be jeered at for his "turnip." But 
 there are clocks and watches that I would 
 rather have as my own than the best that 
 Dent ever dreamt of, though they should be 
 jewelled in a hundred holes such as that 
 clock that the late Principal of Brasenose 
 College showed me lovingly some twenty 
 years ago. It was made to go on for a 
 hundred years without winding. When I 
 saw it, it was solemnly swinging its long 
 pendulum and keeping admirable time, as it 
 had done, if I mistake not, for some ten or 
 twelve years already. I hope it is still going 
 on bearing witness to the shortness of 
 human life and the length of clock life. 
 Was it this clock, or was it another, that
 
 CLOCKS AND WATCHES. 129 
 
 kept note of all the changes of the calendar, 
 and, when a leap year occurred, duly 
 chronicled February 29 ? But of all the 
 watches that ever were, the most precious 
 to me, if it could be recovered from the 
 ruthless hands of the destroyers, would be 
 Doctor Donne's watch, which he left by will 
 to his " very worthy friend and kind 
 brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Grymes," de- 
 scribing it as " that striking clock which I 
 ordinarily wear." To think of holding that 
 in one's hand ! It rested once near the great 
 dean's heart it answered to the pulses that 
 were beating there. When he died it grew 
 cold. What a life that watch must have 
 led ! What a joy to the little children when 
 he drew it forth and made it strike the 
 hours. Perhaps Shakespeare saw it, heard it, 
 handled it ; for was not Donne a " great lover 
 of plays," as Ben Jonson testified of him ? 
 But who cares for Donne now ? Alas ! 
 hero-worship is sorely on the decline. We 
 adore the moderns and their new devices, 
 9
 
 130 FRIVOLA. 
 
 and we bargain that our engine-turned play- 
 things shall be up to the last fashion ; and 
 now our maidens must wear their watches 
 on their wrists, and defy the tennis balls. 
 And the moral of it all what is the moral ? 
 " Madam," said Coleridge to the serious lady 
 who inquired for the moral in " The Ancient 
 Mariner " " Madam, I never knew it had a 
 moral."
 
 THE PHENOMENA OF DOUBLES. 
 
 HISTORY is rich in examples of the same 
 discovery having been made simultaneously 
 by two or more great thinkers working in 
 ignorance of each other's researches. 
 Whether the modern theory of Natural 
 Selection was first struck out by Mr. Wallace 
 or Mr. Darwin is still, I am told, a matter of 
 doubt among the learned ; but there can be 
 no doubt that Le Verrier in France and 
 Professor Adams at Cambridge were both 
 engaged in calculating the orbit of the 
 planet Neptune for years before the world 
 had any suspicion of its existence, neither 
 
 of them knowing that any one else was 
 131
 
 I 3 2 FRIVOLA. 
 
 engaged upon the same problem. I wonder 
 why nobody has ever written a book 
 perhaps somebody has on the romance of 
 scientific discovery, and given us a chapter 
 upon this most curious I am almost tempted 
 to say this mysterious subject. 
 
 I have often thought that among the 
 curiosities of literature there is something 
 akin to this simultaneity in scientific dis- 
 covery observable in the simultaneous ap- 
 pearance of two great men bearing the same 
 name, who made their mark in their gene- 
 ration while engaged in the same sphere of 
 labour. I confess to a certain degree of 
 irritation, while reading Professor Stokes's 
 book on " Ireland and the Celtic Church " 
 some weeks ago, to find that most learned 
 and acute scholar making out a painfully 
 distinct story of the life of St. Patrick. I 
 was perfectly happy as long as I could 
 solace myself with the belief that there were 
 two Patricks in Ireland during the fifth 
 century two, and only two. And as for
 
 THE PHENOMENA OF DOUBLES. 133 
 
 Dr. Petrie's theory of there having been 
 seven, it was easy to reject that as a mon- 
 strous hypothesis ; but to be put off with one 
 is to be robbed of an illustrious pair of 
 saints whose co-existence as long as it 
 could be accepted would lend material 
 support to a beautiful theory. It seems, 
 however, that I need not surrender my 
 belief, for the Professor thinks it necessary 
 to admit that there may have been easily 
 three St. Patricks at work in Ireland during 
 the fifth and sixth centuries. If there may 
 have been three, I hold that there must have 
 been two. 
 
 It is quite certain that there were two 
 Saints Columba or Columban alive at the 
 same time in the sixth century. They were 
 not akin to one another, though both were 
 Irishmen. Both were "Seekers after God," 
 both were ardent missionaries, both were 
 the originators of a new form of the religious 
 life the one may be said to have been the 
 founder of Scottish monachism, which had a
 
 134 FRIVOLA. 
 
 character of its own ; the other was the 
 founder of the new Burgundian monachism, 
 which continued to flourish for the best part 
 of a century among the fastnesses of the 
 Vosges till the more popular and less strin- 
 gent rule of St. Benedict superseded the 
 Columban regime. It is hardly probable 
 that the two saints should not have met and 
 conferred with one another, but each had a 
 line of his own and each followed his own 
 course independently. 
 
 I have not kept pace with the new re- 
 searches that have been made into the life 
 and labours of John Wycliffe during the last 
 few years ; but, again, it is certain that there 
 were two John Wy cliff es at Oxford at the 
 same time ; and as it appears that we have 
 to account for a fellowship at Merton and 
 another at Balliol, a rectory at Fylingham in 
 Lincolnshire and another at Lutterworth, 
 and the headship of Balliol and Canterbury 
 Colleges, all which were held by one or 
 more John Wycliffe in the course of a dozen
 
 THE PHENOMENA OF DOUBLES. 135 
 
 or fifteen years, some of us would find it 
 hard to believe that there were less than 
 two contemporary bearers of the name at 
 Oxford, men of mark in the University, and 
 working either in association or in rivalry. 
 
 Pass over another century or two, and we 
 come upon two great scholars at Cambridge, 
 both bearing the name John Boys. They 
 were both distinguished academics, both 
 fellows of colleges at the same time ; the 
 elder was one of the translators of the Bible, 
 while the other was distinguishing himself 
 as a prominent divine and a preacher at 
 Paul's Cross and elsewhere ; and within five 
 years one was made Prebendary of Ely, and 
 the other Dean of Canterbury. As a matter 
 of course, the two have been confused by 
 incautious historians, and are not unlikely 
 to be confounded with one another again. 
 But the most curious instance that occurs 
 to me of the simultaneous activity of two 
 men bearing the same name in the world 
 of literature is that afforded by what some-
 
 136 FRIVOLA. 
 
 body has called the "Battle of the Keys," 
 in the sixteenth century. When Queen 
 Elizabeth paid her famous visit to Cam- 
 bridge in 1564, the Public Orator of the 
 time regaled her Majesty with the usual 
 oration, in which he maintained that Cam- 
 bridge was a seat of learning which could 
 boast of a greater antiquity than any other 
 University in the land. The Oxford men 
 were offended and indignant. When the 
 arrogant claims of the Cantabs was reported 
 to one Thomas Caius Master of University 
 College, Oxford he then and there sat 
 down and wrote a dissertation maintaining 
 the contrary position to wit, that the Uni- 
 versity of Oxford was a far more ancient 
 institution than her sister on the Granta. 
 But Cambridge, too, could boast of a cham- 
 pion bearing the name of Caius though his 
 name was John and the other's name was 
 Thomas. John Caius set himself to confute 
 Thomas Caius, and to it they went, hammer 
 and tongs. Each had his supporters and
 
 THE PHENOMENA OF DOUBLES. 137 
 
 partisans, and there was a great deal of 
 strong language and a great deal of strong 
 feeling, and the followers of one Caius called 
 the followers of the other Caius all the hard 
 names they could find, and there was, you 
 may be sure, no love lost between them. 
 But the curious point of the story is that 
 there should be two men in the world who 
 bore the name of Key at all, and who, 
 bearing it, as they both did, should simul- 
 taneously take it into their heads to adopt 
 the same Latinised form, which has nothing 
 to do with the meaning of the English word. 
 They were strictly contemporaries ; they were 
 probably born and certainly died within a 
 year of one another. They were not allied 
 by blood : one was a Yorkshire, the- other a 
 Norfolk man. They were both suspected of 
 being ill-affected towards the doctrines of 
 the Reformation ; they were both masters 
 of colleges in their respective Universities ; 
 the one was buried at Oxford in May, 1572, 
 the other at Cambridge in July, 1573. There
 
 138 FRIVOLA. 
 
 is no reason to believe that these two men 
 ever met or ever held intercourse with one 
 another for an hour. 
 
 Now, if we had been dealing with mem- 
 bers of the only too prolific stock of the 
 Browns or the Smiths or the Robinsons, 
 it might have been easy to adduce number- 
 less instances of famous or notorious couples 
 alive at the same time in the history of each 
 of those families. The other day I counted 
 in Gore's Directory more than six hundred 
 bearers of the name of John Jones who were 
 actual householders at Liverpool in 1885. 
 We have only to bear in mind that Jones 
 and Evans are but the two different forms 
 of the same name, and corruptions of what 
 we now call John and the Greeks called 
 Johannes, to find ourselves with a practically 
 inexhaustible fund of material, from which 
 we may construct any theories we please to 
 adopt with regard to the illustrious house of 
 Jones. Have we not Johns and Jones, and 
 Iwans and Evans, and innumerable other
 
 THE PHENOMENA OF DOUBLES. 139 
 
 variants at our command ? A practised 
 sophist might do what he pleased with such 
 a bank to draw from. But Boys and Wick- 
 liffe and Caius are at least unusual names, 
 and yet here are these double stars, as we 
 may call them, suddenly appearing in the 
 firmament, revolving round each other with 
 grotesque pirouetting, each casting upon the 
 other a measure of illumination or obscura- 
 tion according as we change our points of 
 view. 
 
 Is not this a subject that deserves serious 
 examination, my brothers ? Let us look 
 into it. Let us found a society for collect- 
 ing and recording illustrative facts. The 
 study of -the occult sciences is reviving. 
 Here we have a chapter, it may be, of a 
 solemn and pregnant opus magnum which 
 only waits to be written. In the revelations 
 of the future the phenomena of doubles 
 cannot but find a place of prominence.
 
 DREAMS. 
 
 Night is the time for dreams, 
 
 The gay romance of life. 
 When truth that is and truth that seems 
 
 Blend m fantastic strife. 
 Ah! visions less beguiling far 
 Than waking dreams by daylight are. 
 
 THEY tell me that in the libraries at Nineveh 
 and elsewhere among the ruined cities of 
 Mesopotamia there is an enormous literature 
 of dream-books. Everybody was a dreamer 
 among those Babylonians and Assyrians. 
 Men laid themselves down to sleep with the 
 full intention of making a night of it. They 
 gave themselves up to the luxury of seeing 
 sights and hearing sounds which in their 
 waking hours they could not apprehend : 
 
 the body reposed, the soul went on its 
 140
 
 DREAMS. 141 
 
 travels to the spiritual world. The Chaldean 
 sage was an interpreter of dreams ; he was 
 that or nothing. Gentle and simple dream 
 profusely, and gentle and simple went to 
 the interpreter to be told what their dreams 
 meant and what they portended. Interpre- 
 tation of the nightly visions began with 
 empiricism as every science does. It deve- 
 loped into one of the recognised sciences. 
 It had its axioms, its postulates, its laws, its 
 method, and doubtless it had a calculus of 
 its own. So rich, I am told, is the literature 
 of this science that one of these days we 
 may expect that it will be revived. Beware 
 how you trust to the Gospel of Education to 
 rid you of credulity ! Athens swarmed with 
 dreamers, who brought their dreams to the 
 professors of the art of explaining them. The 
 Oneirocritica of Artemidorus has come down 
 to us, and has been learnedly edited more 
 than once ; the author was a physician, and 
 his work, in five books, gives us the result of 
 many years of study and research in an age
 
 i 4 2 FRIVOLA. 
 
 which was by no means barren of culture. 
 Moreover, Artemidorus was not only a 
 learned man and a great traveller, but he 
 was a religious man too, according to his 
 lights, and he solemnly declares that he 
 had a divine mission to write his book on 
 the interpretation of dreams. But he was 
 of yesterday as compared with those Chal- 
 dean masters who stabbed their cuneiform 
 lore into the Mesopotamian clay and then 
 sent it to the baker to make into those 
 imperishable tablets. Mr. Cadaverous, who 
 was rather audacious in his views of history, 
 though always reverent, as a man of his 
 temperament could not help being, used to 
 give it as his opinion that when Abraham 
 went forth from Ur of the Chaldees he 
 carried with him some of the mystic lore 
 which he could not but have learnt in the 
 home of his father, Terah ; and he was wont 
 to say that the patriarchs were all dreamers, 
 their " unconscious cerebration " having 
 been stimulated by long cultivation of the
 
 DREAMS. 143 
 
 hypnotic faculty through many generations. 
 He used to instance the case of Joseph as 
 proving that the art of dream-interpretation 
 had not been lost in the patriarchal age, 
 though, he added, it was not until the return 
 to Babylon that we read of any great atten- 
 tion having been bestowed upon the anti- 
 quated science. Of course I am not respon- 
 sible for any opinions expressed by Mr. 
 Cadaverous. 
 
 Fifty years ago my father had a groom 
 who was much exercised in his mind on 
 the subject of dreams. He was not a very 
 estimable fellow, and I am afraid he did not 
 teach me much good. He had a small 
 collection of dream-books. Where he got 
 them from I know not, but many a time and 
 oft have I sneaked into the harness-room to 
 pore over those books, and with the omnivo- 
 rosity (what a beautiful word !) of youth I 
 eagerly devoured them. Alas ! I remember 
 little more than the look of them now, but 
 my flesh used very much to creep at one
 
 144 FRIVOLA. 
 
 dream which was set down with a horrible 
 vividness. It was the dream of an unhappy 
 visionary who, as he slept, beheld two enor- 
 mous cats with fiery eyes glaring at a wreath 
 of curling smoke that kept rising from the 
 earth and was for ever changing its form. 
 Suddenly the cloud-like appearance assumed 
 a human shape, and then one cat sprang 
 upon the other cat, and mangling and 
 slaughter supervened, and lo ! the smoke 
 was red smoke like unto flame. The book 
 went on to say that this dream was dreamt 
 by Jack somebody or other for three con- 
 secutive nights before he murdered Tom 
 somebody else, whom he found with his 
 sweetheart Polly. It was in vain that the 
 slaughtered pair were buried in the same 
 hole, for Jack had dreamt that the cloud of 
 smoke had issued from the bowels of the 
 earth, and that meant that murder will out ; 
 and so it came to pass, and Jack was hanged. 
 " Smoke rising from the ground means in- 
 fallible detection," said the dream-book, " as
 
 DREAMS. 145 
 
 is evident from the instances given above." 
 Therefore I inferred that when you dream 
 of curling smoke you should avoid following 
 in the steps of Cain ! 
 
 I am given to understand that dreaming 
 is going out among townsfolk. I suppose 
 that this is to be accounted for from the fact 
 that the townsman's daily life is too full of 
 incident of a certain sort too crowded, too 
 argumentative, too noisy, to allow of much 
 dreaming. There is no room for any play 
 of the fancy in the conditions of town life. 
 I believe that among our country folk 
 dreaming is coming in again. I have heard 
 a great deal about people's dreams during 
 the last few years. Country people are not 
 living at the same tension as the dwellers in 
 the streets are. They have a great deal of 
 time on their hands ; they are not unused to 
 loneliness ; they sleep for much longer hours, 
 they hardly know the taste of gin ; they are 
 giving up drinking beer ; they quench their 
 thirst with tea, sometimes hot, sometimes 
 10
 
 146 FRIVOLA. 
 
 cold, and they have leisure for dreaming. 
 The most common dreams of the rustics in 
 East Anglia are what I must call religious 
 dreams. More than once I have been 
 solemnly assured that the dreamer " has 
 seen the Lord." It would be easy to raise 
 a laugh by detailing the grotesqueness of the 
 vision. It is usually a woman who dreams 
 this dream, and I am bound to say that .the 
 result of such dreams is not edifying. I 
 cannot say that I ever knew any man, 
 woman, or child the better for dreaming 
 anything. I have known several who were 
 distinctly the worse for it. A year or two 
 ago we had a menagerie established near 
 us for a couple of days. The week after it 
 went away half a dozen people in the next 
 parish dreamt of raging wild beasts. The 
 hyenas were the worst. One young fellow 
 is reported to have said he was glad he had 
 been to the show, for "he gnaw'd the look 
 of the devil now as he'd never gnaw'd him 
 afore." On inquiry it turned out that he
 
 DREAMS. 147 
 
 had been dreaming of the devil, who ap- 
 peared in the form of a raging hyena, only 
 that he had horns. The wretched youth 
 had a hideous night of it. " That war more 
 nor a dream, that war ! " he protested, 
 solemnly. " He came that near to me that 
 I couldn't stir ; and he says says he, in a 
 sort of a whisper like ' I'm arter you ! ' 
 says he ; and I shrook out then ; and I woke 
 up, and I'd had enough of him that turn, 
 and I don't want to dream that no more ! " 
 Unluckily for this dreamer, however, it is 
 by no means certain that this vision of his 
 will not come back to him. Recurring 
 dreams are far from uncommon. I knew a 
 man who had a dream which haunted him 
 for years. He was always able to fly in his 
 dreams, and the pleasure he derived from 
 his nocturnal soarings into the empyrean 
 was exquisite. About once a month he 
 dreamt that dream, but he never dreamt it 
 in harvest time. Then the men are always 
 working in company, and the work is really
 
 148 PRIVOLA. 
 
 hard work and exhausting. They sleep too 
 soundly then to find any time for dreaming. 
 This man went on at his flying dream for 
 many years, till he was past seventy. He 
 had a long and painful illness, but he slept 
 without dreaming. One night, however, the 
 dream returned, and in the morning he said 
 to his old wife, " Betsy ! I had a flight last 
 night. To-night I shall have that dream 
 again but I sha'n't come down no more 
 this time ! " Next morning the poor woman 
 woke up, only to find that her husband was 
 lying by her side quite cold.
 
 A NIGHT OF WAKING. 
 
 At all times will you have my power alike f 
 Sleeping or waking must I still prevail. 
 
 i KING HEXRY VI. 
 
 SLEEP, gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, has 
 been very gracious to me all through my 
 life. A sleepless night I have not known 
 for nearly thirty years ; yet somehow it 
 came to pass one night that I laid awake for 
 hours. It was so novel an experience to 
 me that I became quite interested in my 
 symptoms, and the longer they lasted the 
 more I found myself wishing that I could 
 record what went on during those four or 
 five hours. 
 
 I had had an exhausting day. Some 
 clergymen go through their Sunday duties 
 
 with little or no effort. I am so unhappily 
 
 149
 
 150 FRIVOLA. 
 
 constituted that I never can " take it easy," 
 as the phrase is. I speak and read with 
 more emphasis than wisdom ; I preach 
 more loudly than I need ; I have of late 
 years given up delivering written sermons, 
 and such as I do deliver cost me much 
 thought and pains. The result is that on 
 Sunday evening, after some three hours of 
 continuous reading, singing, declaiming, and 
 some eight hours of mental tension not 
 unmixed with anxiety, disappointment, and 
 sometimes heaviness of heart, I am almost 
 always half prostrate by fatigue a useless 
 log, in fact, and fit for nothing. But 
 " Nature's soft nurse " comes and tends me, 
 and twelve hours of slumber is not rare with 
 me between Sunday afternoon and Monday 
 morning. 
 
 But that night I laid my head upon my 
 pillow disgracefully early, and I was "off" 
 before one could utter a dissyllable. In an 
 hour or so I awoke with a start. Mendels- 
 sohn's outburst of angelic assurance came to
 
 A NIGHT OF WAKING. 151 
 
 me, as it were from all the clouds of heaven, 
 and the rapture of the great chorus " Be not 
 afraid ! Be not afraid ! " startled me like a 
 revelation in the darkness. I sat up in bed 
 and listened, but the silence was awful. It 
 seemed to me that the ticking of the clock 
 had ceased. I waited, and the old clock 
 began again. Now you must please to 
 understand that three or four days before 
 this I had heard that same chorus rendered 
 with wonderful precision and effect, and it 
 had stirred me with a profound sense of 
 wonder and joy all the more intense because 
 it was so familiar. But what made the 
 clock stop and then go on again ? Oh, you 
 wise ones ! Of course you will account for 
 it. I know all about your theories, and if 
 you ask me how long it stopped I can only 
 say it was for a space of time somewhat 
 between five minutes and eight hours. But 
 nothing shall persuade me it was for less 
 than five minutes. I tell you I sat up and 
 listened for it, and the thing wouldn't go on !
 
 152 FRIVOLA. 
 
 Then I laid me down again and closed my 
 eyes, for they were very weary, and they 
 ached and throbbed. But sleep had gone 
 from me. I was horribly wakeful. I became 
 conscious that I had no will. I was like 
 the man in Horace, who was possessed 
 with a delusion that he was sitting in a 
 theatre, and scene after scene was shifted, 
 and the dancers danced, and the players 
 played, and the drama went on in its regular 
 course, and that poor man redoubled his 
 applause. So it was with me ; but I took 
 all the parts, and the dialogue came from 
 me, it did not come to me. It was a 
 glorious and elaborate tragedy. There was 
 a poor desolate maiden, who was most 
 cruelly wronged ; and I hated myself when 
 a tall burly Jew flouted her, stabbed her, and 
 hid the dagger in her lover's scabbard, and 
 then went on to play the part of virtue's 
 champion, and was triumphant after all. I 
 hated myself for conniving at the crime, but 
 I lay there passive, wide awake and passive.
 
 A NIGHT OF WAKING. 153 
 
 I felt my arm was getting very cold, but I 
 had not the power to move it under the 
 bedclothes. When I did shift my posture 
 imagination seemed to have passed from me, 
 and memory was roused to preternatural 
 activity. It began by my seeing my grand- 
 father springing out of his yellow chariot ; 
 and I wondered why he wore that queer 
 little pigtail, and who tied it up for him. 
 People long dead came by the score, mixing 
 with living men and women, talking, laugh- 
 ing, quarrelling. People I had never thought 
 about for years, nor cared for at any time. 
 Gradually they resolved themselves into a 
 sort of debating club, everybody having his 
 views, and everybody expressing himself with 
 a precision and fluency which vexed me 
 with a painful envy. They talked and 
 argued for hours and hours, and the clock 
 went on ticking, and I w r as nowhere. At 
 last, out of the chaotic hubbub some order 
 and method arose, and my dead friend 
 V , with his low voice, declared quietly
 
 154 FRIVOLA. 
 
 that the days were coming when men would 
 no longer condemn suicide as a moral 
 offence, but sometimes condone it, some- 
 times applaud it. The Lady Theodora, 
 with her glorious eyes, flashed at the speaker 
 imperiously. I had no suspicion till then 
 that she was wondrously learned. She 
 knew Plato's " Crito " by heart it seemed, 
 and she quoted Socrates word for word a 
 whole page of it. I could not have done it 
 to save my soul. She glanced at Dr. 
 Donne's paradoxical work, the " Biatha- 
 natos," reasoned closely, criticised as she 
 went on ; wondered how Donne could be 
 so silly as to say that bees sometimes kill 
 themselves. Argument, quotation, illustra- 
 tion, followed on, always sweetly, persua- 
 sively, sometimes impetuously ; and they 
 crowded round her, and I lost their distinc- 
 tive individuality they were a mere crowd. 
 Memory was becoming blurred, the 
 dialectic faculty was taking up the game. 
 We came to no conclusion. There was a
 
 A NIGHT OF WAKING. 155 
 
 tangle of discussion. For an hour or so we 
 talked of fascination, possession, and tha* 
 which we call mesmerism. Another dead 
 friend broke in gaily. I did not see his 
 face ; but he was present, and he called to 
 me laughingly, " I possessed you once you 
 know I did ! I wondered myself at my 
 ascendancy was it physical, or intellectual, 
 or the other thing, eh ? Clearly it was not 
 moral." I am sure the Lady Theodora 
 smiled. I turned wearily, stared into the 
 blackness. The clock went on as before. 
 Sleep would not come. But was this 
 wakefulness ? 
 
 " Can't you sleep ? " said the living voice 
 of one by my side. I fenced with 
 the anxious question, then I got up and 
 looked at the stars. There was a mist 
 covering the face of the earth, but not a 
 sound, not the stir of a leaf. The moon 
 had set. I was very, very weary. I laid me 
 down again. I began to worry myself with 
 regrets, with plans, with new schemes. An
 
 156 FRIVOLA. 
 
 unaccountably fantastic wish presented itself. 
 "As soon as I finish the half-dozen tasks I 
 have in hand," I said, " I'll translate the 
 ' Misopogon of Julian the Apostate !'" That 
 set me thinking of one of old Biddy's odd 
 sayings : " Working men ha' got no call to 
 have beards ! They'd be a deal better with- 
 out 'em. Esau was the first as we read on 
 that wore a beard, and much good it did 
 him 1 " I was back again among my own 
 people now, and memory, with some simple 
 homely reminders, came to me with mes- 
 sages of refreshment. Hark ! there was the 
 sound of some travelling van that came on 
 and on and passed along the road and went 
 off into the distance till there was stillness 
 again. "Suppose it was the phantom 
 coach !" I thought to myself, and then 
 there came back to me stories of that phan- 
 tom coach, and I recalled them one by one 
 till a flash of self-reproach startled me as I 
 reflected that I had kept all these to myself 
 from year to year, and that one or two of
 
 A NIGHT OF WAKING. 157 
 
 these stories would die with me if I did not 
 write them down. I had almost utterly for- 
 gotten Biddy's weird story of Jarge Mace 
 (they pronounce George Jarge in Arcady) of 
 Attleborough, and how the coach came to 
 fetch him, "down there by Breccles Hall 
 somewheres." It all came back upon me 
 last night with extraordinary vividness. 
 How had it come to pass that I had never 
 told it to the world ? 
 
 Then I thought I would write about it the 
 very next day, and I began to plan it out and 
 to give myself to the future to the morrow 
 not to the hour, nor to yesterday and the 
 times gone by. And so as I lay thinking 
 consciously at last, strange to say, the clock 
 stopped again, and there came another 
 sound : a human hand it was the hand of 
 the Marchioness was knocking at the door. 
 I had been asleep for some hours after my 
 spell of wakefulness, and it was time to rise 
 and be about my work ; for we all have our 
 work even we poor useless country parsons.
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 
 I. 
 
 Come on, then ; horse and chariot let us have, 
 And to our sport. 
 
 TITUS ANDRONICUS. 
 
 IF you have never heard of the Phantom 
 Coach that travels about the old roads and 
 old trackways of the county of Norfolk, it is 
 your own fault ; it is not mine. For I have 
 written of that coach in a book that will do 
 you good to read and do me good if you buy 
 it. I wrote about that coach mockingly once ; 
 I tremble to write of it as if it were a delusion 
 now. Have I not spoken with those on whom 
 it called, at whose doors it stopped, who saw 
 the flash of its lamps, who heard the roll of 
 its wheels, who have shuddered with a sicken- 
 158
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 159 
 
 mg horror lest it had come for them, and 
 only breathed again when it had vanished 
 and passed on ? 
 
 Who knows not "King Solomon's Mines" 
 and " She " ? I had almost written " Her " ! 
 The gifted writer of those fascinating books 
 had a father, and he was my neighbour and 
 friend. A more robust and genial man I 
 never knew. Let his gifted son forgive me 
 if I take leave to repeat what he told me 
 more than once. I think it was Christmas- 
 time, or about the turning of the year. There 
 was a joyous company in the house ; they 
 were waiting for one of those vigorous and 
 manly sons of the large-hearted squire, who 
 that night was expected home. Suddenly 
 first one and then another cried : " There he 
 is ! " Sure enough, the sound of wheels was 
 heard coming up the drive ; the carriage 
 stopped as usual at the inner gate ; then it 
 came slowly up to the door, and some of the 
 party ran to greet the new arrival. There 
 was nothing to be seen. Though all the
 
 160 FRIVOLA. 
 
 household had heard the sound of the 
 wheels, and all were ready with words of 
 welcome on their lips, yet there was nothing ! 
 It was a windless night, and it was absolutely 
 impossible for any real vehicle to have come 
 and gone ; yet as absolutely certain to the 
 minds of those who were present on that 
 occasion that a carriage had come up to that 
 front door and had vanished whether into 
 the bowels of the earth or into the infinite 
 ether, none of them would have dared to 
 say. But nothing happened nothing. 
 
 Longham Hall is a very different place 
 from Bradenham Hall. Bradenham is the 
 house of " a fine old English gentleman, one 
 of the olden time." Longham is a better sort 
 of farmhouse, with as little romance or senti- 
 ment about it as about any house in Bedford 
 Row. It was newly built about forty years 
 or so ago. The road had been newly made, 
 and the fresh gravel had been laid down not 
 many weeks, when H., the tenant of the farm, 
 went to bed as usual, and all the family were
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 161 
 
 sound asleep. He was awakened by the 
 very unusual sound of carriage wheels upon 
 the gravel ; the carriage came on and on, 
 exactly as in the other case, and stopped at 
 the front door. He sprang out of bed, threw 
 up the window, and saw the flare of carriage- 
 lamps under his very eyes. He called out, 
 asking who was there. There was nothing 
 to answer ; nothing to be seen ! The prac- 
 tised ear of the old yeoman could not be 
 mistaken when he said, " No fewer than two 
 horses at least could have drawn those four 
 wheels over the new gravel." He evidently 
 believed that it must have been a coach and 
 four. Yet when the morning came, it was 
 clear that the outer gate had not been opened ; 
 not a wheel had passed over the gravel. 
 Friend H. told me all this, and was prepared 
 with a theory to explain it all, but inasmuch 
 as his theory was by far the most incredible 
 and incomprehensible part of the whole story, 
 I found no difficulty in forgetting it, and if I 
 remembered it I would not repeat it. There 
 ii
 
 162 FRIVOLA. 
 
 are some things "that don't bear repeating" ! 
 I have heard a great many ghost stones in 
 my time, but I never heard one of them so 
 silly as the very best attempt to show how it 
 was that so-and-so was seen and heard. The 
 credulity of incredulity beats the credulity of 
 superstition hollow ! Nothing happened 
 nothing. 
 
 Now comes old Biddy's story. Breccles 
 Hall is one of the most beautiful and interest- 
 ing Elizabethan houses in the county of 
 Norfolk. It was dismantled and turned into 
 a farmhouse about sixty years ago, and the 
 heraldic shields in stained glass that were at 
 that time in the windows were removed to 
 the mansion of the purchaser of the estate, 
 together with other memorials of former 
 owners and occupants. Breccles Hall has 
 a history. It was a place of resort and hiding 
 for the Seminary priests who were hunted 
 and proscribed and barbarously slaughtered 
 in Queen Elizabeth's days. It was a place at 
 which Mass was said every now and then,
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 163 
 
 when the doors were shut and a few trembling 
 but devout worshippers ventured to gather 
 together at the secret invitation of Mistress 
 Eleanor Woodhouse, who lived at Breccles, 
 and whose husband had to pay heavily for 
 his wife's stubborn clinging to the old ritual. 
 Then it was a place where Lady Baldock 
 lived and where she died, and when she 
 died she would have herself buried in an 
 erect position in the church hard by. It was 
 a house which for three hundred years no 
 owner seems to have been able to hand down 
 to a grandson of his own name. It is a 
 house in which tradition says that once upon 
 a time there came some cowled monks and 
 settled there ; and certainly, among the 
 pictures that once hung upon its walls, there 
 was a picture of two nuns that stood out of 
 the canvas, and would have walked out of it 
 but that one held the other by the hand, and 
 so they were a check either upon each. 
 Lastly, it was a house in which two of its 
 owners are said to have committed suicide.
 
 164 FRIVOLA. 
 
 One certainly did ; I have my doubts about 
 the second. 
 
 Put all these things together, and if Breccles 
 Hall is not a haunted house, and has not 
 been a haunted house for three hundred 
 years, all I can say is that it ought to have 
 been. I have my own suspicions and they 
 are strong ones that it was dismantled at 
 last, because it was held to be haunted. 
 Think of the accumulation of facilities for 
 ghostliness here. A lady buried upright ; her 
 head not six inches from the pavement of 
 the chancel. Wandering Mass priests, scut- 
 tling behind the arras and hiding in the roof. 
 White monks and black nuns. Mangled 
 suicides, and childless old gentlemen mum- 
 bling in their desolate orbity ; and the owls 
 hooting, and the woods moaning, and the 
 rats making night horrible with their madden- 
 ing squeakings at wholly unaccountable 
 times. What 1 That house not haunted ? 
 Impossible ! 
 
 Be it as it may. The Phantom Coach
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 165 
 
 called there some ninety years ago called 
 and fetched away Jarge Mace. And who 
 was Jarge, and how much of him was 
 fetched ?
 
 II. 
 
 " I'VE been to Breccles, Biddy ! I suppose 
 you never heard of Breccles." 
 
 " Not heerd o' Breccles ? Dash it ! The 
 first sixpence I ever had o' my own I got at 
 Breccles !" said the old woman. Then she 
 proceeded to tell me how it was. Biddy 
 was a " little 'un," and she had an aunt who 
 was dairymaid at Breccles Hall and Squire 
 Taylor " give my aunt leave to have me stop 
 wi' her, and I slept with aunt, that was when 
 Mrs. Taylor was alive [she died in 1807], 
 and Miss Penelope was there, too ; she was 
 Squire Taylor's sister, and Mr. Philip, him 
 as shot hisself, and Miss Maria, she took and 
 
 gave me a kiss, she did. But it was Miss 
 166
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 167 
 
 Penelope as gave me the sixpence. She 
 was what folks called a mighty stately old 
 lady. But she gave me sixpence. That's 
 where the coach stopped and fetched Jarge 
 Mace ! " 
 
 " What coach, Biddy ? " 
 
 " Why, the coach as goes about at night- 
 time ! " 
 
 I gathered that about this time Squire 
 Taylor was out at elbows. Perhaps the son 
 had taken to evil habits. Perhaps the good 
 man was over-housed, perhaps the times 
 were bad indeed, they were bad times for 
 the landlords at the beginning of the 
 century. Be it as it may, Squire Taylor had 
 been cutting down the timber. " Miles and 
 miles o' woods," said Biddy, which you 
 must accept aim grano. Bad times have a 
 tendency to bring out all the badness in 
 half-starved men. There was a wide stretch 
 of open country, heather commons not yet 
 all enclosed and waste lands to the west of 
 Breccles, where there were large flocks of
 
 168 FRIVOLA. 
 
 sheep and rabbits ; and to the east there 
 were still some squires' houses, and 
 pheasants and hares in the spinneys ; and 
 it was whispered that there was a regular 
 band of smugglers, who were organised 
 to carry Hollands across the open from 
 somewhere to somewhere, and who, some- 
 how, had confederates who did something 
 while the peasantry kept their eyes open 
 or shut according as it suited their pur- 
 pose. 
 
 One night it was at the beginning of the 
 century, and a little before Christmas-time 
 a band of fellows from Shropham and Rock- 
 land agreed to meet in a plantation " some- 
 wheres behind Breccles Hall," and one of 
 the men was a certain George Mace, who 
 was a very black sheep at the little town of 
 Watton, or near it. The probability is that 
 Mace was the leader, and that the fellows 
 were bent on " drawing the covers " round 
 Merton, where the second Lord Walsingham 
 kept up some state when he was in residence.
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 169 
 
 " Mace ! Mace ! Why, there was a great 
 prize-fighter named Mace, Biddy. Any 
 relation of his ? " 
 
 " Begging your pardon, sir ! Boxer Mace 
 was Jem Mace, and he came from Bilney or 
 thereby. I've often had a chat with Jem 
 Mace before he took to boxing. But there's 
 a lot of Maces round about Bilney. Jarge 
 Mace he came from Watton, and he was 
 christened Jarge because he was born the 
 day the king was crowned, and I never 
 heard tell as he had nothing to do with 
 Boxer Mace ! " 
 
 Then came many speculations about the 
 illustrious house of Mace and the most 
 illustrious Jem who, I was informed, took 
 a public-house in Norwich, where he ended 
 his days in the odour of beer and tobacco 
 till we came back at last to Jarge, and how 
 he was a mysterious sort of a man, who was 
 never without money in his pocket, though 
 nobody knew where it came from ; how he 
 never did a stroke of work ; how he was sus-
 
 1 70 FRIVOLA. 
 
 pected of having been implicated in two or 
 three serious robberies, and had never been 
 even apprehended ; how folks said he kind 
 o' set on other rogues, and gave information, 
 and was a sort of a spy who had methods of 
 his own which he followed in a sly Satanic 
 way ; how he was a woman-hater, and a 
 man who could drink all night in the ale- 
 house and never open his mouth ; how his 
 only ostensible means of livelihood was 
 skittles, which he played for miles round ; 
 and how he had played a keeper for his 
 velveteen jacket and won it and wore it for 
 years, "and never wore no other, so I've 
 heerd my aunt say. But aunt never saw 
 him, 'cause the coach came and fetched 
 Jarge years before my aunt was dairymaid at 
 Breccles. But she was that afraid of Jarge 
 and of the coach coming to the Hall that 
 she couldn't sleep o' nights watching for it. 
 And it was all as ever Miss Penelope could 
 do to make her stay two years, though Miss 
 Maria kept laughing at her all the time.
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 171 
 
 And at last she couldn't bear it, and she 
 went and got married." 
 
 Whether the fact that Squire Taylor's son, 
 daughter, and sister were all unwedded, 
 though they were at least mature when 
 Biddy's aunt was dairymaid, had awakened 
 a dread in that virtuous female's mind lest 
 she, too, as an inmate of the Hall, would be 
 infallibly doomed to celibacy if she remained 
 there ; or whether she was haunted with the 
 dread that where the coach stopped, there 
 could be no marrying or giving in marriage, 
 I cannot take upon me to determine ; but 
 Biddy's aunt " went and got married," and 
 for the rest of her life she would frequently 
 recur to the coming of the coach, and every 
 particular and detail of her narrative she 
 protested with solemn oaths and assevera- 
 tions was true as Gospel, and Biddy believed 
 her as in duty bound. 
 
 This little band of poachers or thieves 
 it is hard to say which met at the trysting- 
 place in the plantation. They received their
 
 172 FRIVOLA. 
 
 instructions from Mace, who, it was agreed, 
 was to watch the house for a certain time, 
 then join them " somewhere by Thompson 
 way, I've heerd my aunt say." There again 
 Mace was to be the look-out man ; finally 
 they were to get back to Breccles Hall and 
 settle up before the moon went down. After 
 that, each was to get home at his own risk 
 as best he could. Everything went smoothly, 
 everything had been skilfully arranged. As 
 to the plunder, whatever it was, aunt 
 couldn't say anything about it. The moon 
 was getting low. The rogues crept back to 
 a shed behind the Hall and waited. Mace 
 was not there. They listened, and heard 
 nothing. One peeped out, and then another ; 
 and time wore on and the moon got lower. 
 Hark ! Rumbling along over the villainous 
 roads that scarcely deserved the name, a 
 carriage was evidently making its way to the 
 front door. The four fellows saw the coach- 
 lamps flashing through the stained-glass 
 windows of the old mansion the very coats
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 173 
 
 of arms were painted on the hoar-frost at their 
 feet. At the front door the coach stopped ; 
 they heard the carriage door open, the steps 
 let down the door was shut again with a 
 slam. The next moment there was utter 
 darkness, the moon had set, and the stillness 
 was as the stillness of the grave. In the 
 house it was evident that no one had heard 
 anything no one was awake, no one stirred. 
 The coach had vanished. 
 
 Then those four men went their ways ; 
 they would stay no longer. Next morning 
 Jarge Mace was found lying dead at the 
 front door of Breccles Hall. Not a mark 
 upon his body ; not a stain upon his gar- 
 ments ; his eyes staring glassily, stiff and 
 cold. 
 
 And yet arrogant sceptics have the hardi- 
 hood to disbelieve in the Phantom Coach, 
 and will maintain that it never did set down 
 anybody, or pick up and fetch anybody, 
 not even Jarge Mace.
 
 III. 
 
 WHEN I wrote on the subject of the Phantom 
 Coach in November last, I never thought 
 that I should have occasion to recur to it 
 again. But it so happens that among the 
 letters which came to me as a natural conse- 
 quence of my rashness in dealing with so 
 mysterious a phenomenon there are at least 
 two which it seems to me that my readers 
 ought to be made acquainted with, be they 
 sceptics of the most pronounced type who 
 are prepared to disbelieve anything and 
 everything, or be they the so-called spiritual- 
 ists whose credulity has no limit. For 
 
 myself, I am one of those unhappy eclectics 
 
 174
 
 7 HE PHANTOM COACH. 175 
 
 whom the Philistines abhor because I do 
 believe something, and the visionaries 
 denounce as a mocker because I stand by 
 the laws of nature, and cannot conceive that 
 twice two can ever be equal to five. We are 
 an unfortunate band, we eclectics. During 
 the last year or two I have found myself 
 stigmatised as a dangerous Radical, a bigoted 
 Tory, and a crypto Papist, only, as far as I 
 can see, because I am not a dangerous, 
 bigoted, or crypto anything. If I were only 
 a poet I could understand why I should have 
 this hard measure, for it was of a poet that 
 it was said 
 
 He's a traitor, blasphemer, and what rayther worse is, 
 He puts all his Atheism into dre'ful bad verses ! 
 
 But being a mere man of prose, why should 
 mine enemies box the compass, as it were, 
 and paste me all over with tickets like an 
 old portmanteau that has been upon its 
 travels ? 
 
 You, my superior people, do not believe 
 in the Phantom Coach. Good ! I am not
 
 176 FR1VOLA. 
 
 going to argue with you. You spiritualistic 
 people you look askance at me because I 
 do not believe as much as I ought about the 
 said coach ? Good again ! I'm not going 
 to argue with you either. I never knew a 
 man of fifty who was argued into anything ; 
 and most of you, I am informed, are over 
 fifty and so am I. 
 
 Nevertheless, here are two letters which 
 are lying before me as I write. You are 
 welcome to the extracts from those letters, 
 which I am permitted to make public. It is 
 no fault of mine that I am compelled to 
 withhold the names of persons and places, 
 which have been communicated to me in 
 confidence. 
 
 The first letter is dated November 7, 1893. 
 It was written by a lady of good birth, 
 education, and position, and this is what she 
 says : 
 
 " We live in an old-fashioned mansion in 
 
 , and on September 9, seventeen years 
 
 ago, my sisters and I were sitting quietly in
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 177 
 
 the dining-room after supper, and three 
 small dogs were lying before the fire. The 
 night was very still, but suddenly the stillness 
 was broken by the sound of wheels on the 
 drive, coming towards the house. The dogs 
 began barking, and my sisters exclaimed 
 ' There is a carriage coming up the avenue 1 ' 
 I may mention that for some days we had 
 been expecting a brother from the north of 
 England. Someone looked at the timepiece, 
 and said, ' It will be Henry ; he must have 
 come with the last train ! ' My sisters went 
 to the door to welcome him, and I went and 
 looked out at the window. Shading my 
 eyes from the light in the room, and peering 
 through the Venetian blinds, I distinctly 
 saw a horse (harnessed) standing halfway 
 past the porch at the door. It was a brown 
 horse, and the ears were lying a little back. 
 I said aloud, ' It is Henry ! There's a trap 
 at the door,' and then I followed my sisters. 
 Imagine my feelings, on going to the door, 
 to see nothing, and my sisters gazing around 
 12
 
 178 FRIVOLA. 
 
 in blank amazement. We returned to the 
 dining-room feeling rather queer and eerie. 
 After a bit a thought occurred to me to ask 
 the servants if they had heard anything. On 
 going to the kitchen, I said, ' Did you hear 
 anything ? ' ' Yes,' they said ; ' we heard a 
 carriage come up the avenue.' Further 
 inquiry elicited the fact that they had heard 
 it coming some distance away and then stop 
 at the house, and they had remarked among 
 themselves that it was a long time in going 
 away. 
 
 " As many members of our family were from 
 home, I made a note of the date and hour ; 
 but nothing happened, and ever since all our 
 friends know the story as the ' Phantom 
 Carriage.' ... I ought to mention that 
 looking out of the dining-room window, as I 
 did, although a carriage is at the door, it is 
 only the horse that can be seen." 
 
 I have very little comment to make upon 
 this simple narrative ; it speaks for itself. 
 But I wonder why those three little dogs did
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH, 179 
 
 not run to the door and go for that horse. 
 But then dogs do so dearly love a Turkey rug 
 spread before the fire, and it may be that they 
 had heard enough to make them reluctant to 
 carry the matter any further. That was really 
 a very profound remark of the philosopher 
 who confessed that he had never yet got inside 
 a dogs head. 
 
 Seventeen years ago is an unco' long time. 
 It's several thousands of days ago, and tens 
 of thousands of hours ago, and of course 
 of course what happened all that time ago 
 can't be quite as true as what happened the 
 day before yesterday. " Julius Caesar ? Who's 
 Julius Caesar ? " said a grumpy old parishioner 
 of mine to a persistent proselytiser. " For 
 all I know, or you know, he may have been 
 aboard of the Ark. I ain't agoing to be took 
 all that way back ! " Just so ; I am painfully 
 aware that the historic imagination requires 
 to be cultivated laboriously before it can go 
 " all that way back." After seventeen years 
 we may begin to doubt any evidence. To
 
 i8o FRIVOLA. 
 
 begin with, none of those dogs can be alive 
 now, and if they were they'd be so deaf that 
 it would be useless to cross-examine them ! 
 
 It is therefore advisable that we should have 
 better evidence than that of seventeen years 
 ago. Wherefore let my readers ponder the 
 following letter, dated November 30, 1893, 
 and dated from a house in the county of 
 Norfolk, the peculiar land of the Phantom 
 Coach, as I till recently had believed. Also, 
 let it be remembered that the article on the 
 said coach was published on the 4th of that 
 month. The writer of the letter is a bene- 
 ficed clergyman and well known in the land 
 of the East, whence in old times the wise 
 men came, but where now they stay because 
 they are so wise. Thus writes this wise 
 man : 
 
 " On Nov. 13 I was dining with the Volun- 
 teers, and on my left . . . was a doctor who 
 lives just at the top of my lane. He said to 
 me, f Were you dining at X on Saturday?' 
 I replied, ' No ! but why do you ask ? '
 
 THE PHANTOM COACH. 181 
 
 ' Oh ! ' he replied, ' because I was on the X 
 road on Saturday, and I saw going before 
 me into Y a carriage with lamps lit, and I 
 thought it must be yours, because it turned 
 down your lane and in at your gate ; and 
 when I went in my wife said to me, " I sup- 
 pose the W.'s were dining out ? I have just 
 heard their carriage drive in." ' l Well,' I 
 replied, ' we certainly were not dining out on 
 Saturday, and at the hour at which you saw 
 the carriage I was in bed and asleep, and I 
 certainly heard nothing.' That, Sir, is the 
 story, and I do not attempt to explain it. No 
 one living in that lane has a carriage-and- 
 pair except ourselves. . . . There is no train 
 at so late an hour." 
 
 As far as I am at present informed, this is 
 the last appearance of the Phantom Coach 
 in its native county. On this story I have 
 even less to say by way of comment than on 
 the previous one. A suggestion has been 
 offered which will be fully approved of by 
 the Philistines and make them very happy,
 
 1 82 FRIVOLA, 
 
 but will correspondingly distress their more 
 physical fellow-creatures, always provided 
 that it suffices for its purpose of accounting 
 for the facts. And whenever you are com- 
 pelled to admit facts that are hateful to you, 
 you may always get rid of them by account- 
 ing for them. The suggestion is this : A band 
 of Philistines " india-rubber idiots on the 
 spree" are supposed to have hired a 
 carriage-and-pair from somewhere, and to 
 have driven down from nowhere in particu- 
 lar till they came to X. Then they drove to 
 that particular lane in the dead of night, and 
 secretly drew back to where they came from. 
 Also it is supposed that they were induced to 
 take this nocturnal drive, with lamps lit and 
 a coachman on the box, in consequence of 
 the profound effect produced upon them by 
 a certain article in The Illustrated London 
 News, on November 4, 1893. Very odd, isn't 
 it?
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 
 
 When 
 
 We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge 
 Soul-forward, headlong into a book's profound, 
 Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth 
 'TVs then we get the right good from a book. 
 
 AURORA LEIGH. 
 
 WE read of the late Colonel Newcome that 
 when he took up his abode in that famous 
 mansion, 120, Fitzroy Square, he had a 
 vague hope that he might renew his youth, 
 and live on quite familiar terms with the 
 generation below him. Accordingly he had 
 occasional gatherings, to which he invited 
 his juniors, Mr. Pendennis, Mr. Warrington, 
 and such as they, who were born when the 
 worthy colonel had already arrived at middle 
 life, and were to him but as striplings. Poor 
 Colonel Newcome found that he was not at 
 his ease. Between him and his guests there 
 183
 
 184 FR1VOLA. 
 
 was a chasm : they could not, somehow, 
 shake hands across it, and he grew sad. It 
 slowly dawned upon him that the old and 
 the young cannot hope to enjoy perfect 
 sympathy. Love, veneration, esteem, may 
 exist on the one side or the other, but there 
 is a point at which entire communion is 
 necessarily interrupted ; the man of sixty 
 and the man of thirty can never have the 
 same point of view. 
 
 Now, I have passed my sixtieth year ; how 
 much I have passed it I decline to say. I 
 have a painful suspicion that the young 
 fellows in the twenties or the thirties hardly 
 understand what this admission implies. I 
 was not brought up as you were, my re- 
 spected friends. I did not even eat and 
 drink the same things that you did when 
 you were boys, still less was I taught as you 
 were. To begin with, we were supposed to 
 know Latin by instinct fifty years ago in 
 England. There was, indeed, a translation 
 of the Latin rules at the end of the Latin
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 185 
 
 grammar, but there was none at the end of 
 the Greek grammar ; for, by the time a boy 
 began Greek, he was presumed to have no 
 need of anything in the shape of a " crib." 
 
 The only dictionaries w r e had was a thing 
 called "Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary," which 
 might have been better ; and another thing 
 called " Schrevelius' Greek Lexicon," which 
 could hardly have been worse. Schrevelius 
 was a Dutchman, who published his meagre 
 volume in the eighteenth century, and, until 
 some fifty years ago, it was absolutely the 
 only help which English schoolboys had to 
 enable them to acquire any knowledge of 
 Greek. But Schrevelius had not a word of 
 English in it : we learnt our Greek fifty 
 years ago through the mediation of Latin, 
 and when we " looked up " a word in the 
 lexicon we got the Latin equivalent, and 
 that alone. It is literally true that I do not 
 remember the time when I did not know 
 Latin ; and one of my earliest recollections 
 is that of having got a prize in my ninth year
 
 1 86 FRIVOL A. 
 
 for repeating from memory nearly seven 
 hundred lines of Ovid better than a dozen 
 other urchins who competed for the same 
 prize, and whom I distanced, to the joy of 
 my proud parents. This was well 1 it was 
 more than fifty years ago. 
 
 As far as I can remember, schoolboys in 
 those days never had any English reading- 
 books except " The Boy's Own Book " and 
 "Robinson Crusoe." Sir Walter Scott was 
 alive, or, at any rate, he had not been dead 
 long, but the Waverley Novels were a great 
 deal too dear to allow of a boy reading them 
 except in the holidays. The first of them 
 that I remember devouring were "The 
 Black Dwarf" and "The Talisman." But 
 there was one English book which we all 
 were expected to "get up" before we were 
 " called to construe," and that book was the 
 first volume which exercised a really power- 
 ful and permanent influence upon me in my 
 early boyhood : that too was a dictionary, to 
 wit, " Lempriere's Classical Dictionary."
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 187 
 
 There is no such thing as a classical dic- 
 tionary now. It has given place to the 
 " Dictionary of Greek and Roman Bio- 
 graphy," forsooth, and that means about the 
 very dullest and dreariest collection of 
 articles on biography and mythology which 
 the severest learned pundits can be induced 
 to compile for the cultivation of the critical 
 faculty, at the expense of everything else, in 
 the minds of boys and girls. But " Lem- 
 priere's Dictionary " was about as different 
 from your modern dictionary of classical 
 biography and mythology (and as superior, 
 from the literary standpoint) as a plum 
 pudding is superior to a dog biscuit. Dr. 
 Lempriere was a merry old scholar who had 
 been brought up upon Ovid and Virgil and 
 Homer and Herodotus, and upon very little 
 else. He believed all the stories in Greek 
 and Roman literature as a respectable and 
 conscientious old Tory should believe them. 
 All your new-fangled scepticism and your 
 rubbishy science of mythology these were
 
 i88 FRIVOLA. 
 
 as unknown to him as the history of the 
 Hittites. " Romulus and Remus, sir not 
 believe in them ? Why ! you'll try and 
 persuade me that Balaam's ass never talked 
 next ! Pyramus and Thisbe only myths ! 
 Why ! a man must be a born idiot to gabble 
 such stuff ! " 
 
 The longest article in " Lempriere " was 
 one on Hercules. A murrain on the inno- 
 vators who could not be content with that 
 old name, but have changed it to Heracles ! 
 We had none of your Zeus and Here and 
 Ares and the rest of them mere counter- 
 feits ; but good old Jupiter and Juno and 
 Mars and Venus, rollicking about as gods 
 should ; such as they were painted, mus- 
 cular, rotund, burly, and shameless ; not 
 namby-pamby, finicking things of beauty, 
 that were all grace and smoothness. In our 
 " Lempriere " the gods never glided, they 
 bounced, as Rubens painted them ; and we 
 made no mistakes about them, or it went 
 hard with us. Hercules was in those days
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 189 
 
 to me a model of what a real hero ought to 
 be. Lempriere's article on Alexander the 
 Great, too, had a great hold upon me, and 
 was a prime favourite. But Hercules ! he 
 was a man, and Alexander was but a very 
 feeble imitator of the other. The labours of 
 Hercules were all set down in detail ; all the 
 twelve religiously numbered. 
 
 " Lempriere's Classical Dictionary " had a 
 great deal to do in the making of me in 
 those boyish days. My imagination was 
 trained, stimulated, appealed to. I was not 
 turned into a prig and a sceptic too early. 
 I had a world of heroes and demigods about 
 me night and day. I admired greatly ; I 
 had my horrors, my dreams, my super- 
 stitions ; I was swathed about with a grand 
 and ennobling credulity. I believed in a 
 past where virtue and bravery and adven- 
 ture and self-sacrifice were no rarities. His- 
 tory was made to appear to us as a veracious 
 record of the prowess of the strong and the 
 valiant. We had not yet arrived at assuming
 
 190 FRIVOL A. 
 
 that to believe anything outside the range of 
 our narrow experience is a superstition. 
 And thus I am sure that " Lempriere's 
 Dictionary" was one of the most potent, 
 as it certainly was one of the earliest, factors 
 which contributed to the formation of my 
 mind at that period when our minds are in 
 their most plastic state, and when the mould- 
 ing of them goes on so strangely and so 
 rapidly that it is not always easy for us to 
 recollect when they acquired their shaping, 
 or how the pressure of the guiding hand was 
 applied here or there. 
 
 Meanwhile, at school and in holiday-time, 
 I devoured whatever came in my way that 
 was printed, it did not matter much what. 
 We rarely spent more than nine or ten 
 weeks of the year under our parents' roofs 
 in those days, and a boy who, during his 
 holidays, read anything more than he could 
 help, was looked upon by the fellows, when 
 the holidays were over, as a bit of a sneak 
 a " smug " we used to call him. At home,
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 191 
 
 however, I used to read a great deal. One 
 vacation I was greatly attracted by Harriet 
 Martineau's " Illustrations of Political Eco- 
 nomy." They were to me wonderfully 
 interesting stories, and gave me my first 
 suspicion that a man or woman might 
 actually be a reformer, even a Radical, and 
 yet be virtuous and capable of salvation. 
 But my interest in economics and politics 
 lasted very little over one summer vacation, 
 for one day, behold ! a schoolfellow brought 
 back in his box a copy of " Marmion," and, 
 more wonderful still, somebody put into my 
 box a copy of " Monk " Lewis's " Tales of 
 Wonder." The world has forgotten Lewis, 
 but I am not likely to forget him, and very 
 much less likely to forget " Alonzo the brave 
 and the fair Imogene." " Marmion " I must 
 soon have known by heart, but I am not 
 sure that the " Tales of Wonder " were not 
 even more to me than " Marmion " ; and to 
 this day I hesitate to pronounce which I 
 consider most thrilling, the death of Mar-
 
 192 FRIVOLA, 
 
 mion, or the weird adventures of the heroic 
 King Jamie, that pearl of knightly courtesy, 
 
 " When in there came a grisly ghost 
 Loud stamping on the floor ! " 
 
 The years that followed this period were 
 remarkable for my first becoming acquainted 
 with Chaucer and Spenser. I could only 
 get extracts of the former, and found him 
 just a trifle hard, but the " Faerie Queene" 
 I read through from end to end, as I 
 certainly did the " Paradise Lost " and the 
 " Paradise Regained." Milton was the first 
 English poet I was made to read ; for my 
 father took me in hand during the holidays 
 and insisted on my learning a certain num- 
 ber of lines by heart and saying them to 
 him. I am bound to explain that these 
 holiday tasks were a penance imposed upon 
 me for the sin of having " Tom Jones " 
 under my pillow. I forget how my sin 
 was found out. It was, however, no severe 
 punishment, and I got to love Milton greatly
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 193 
 
 and learned much more than I was ordered 
 to learn. 
 
 It was just after I left school, and before I 
 went up to the University, that the first great 
 crisis in my intellectual life occurred. I was 
 introduced to the writings of Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge. I do not, of course, refer to the 
 poetical works, but to that entirely unique 
 collection of theologico-philosophical dog- 
 matism, of profoundly suggestive hints and 
 speculations, of hybrid mysticism, of subtile 
 and pregnant criticism, of dreams and light- 
 ning flashes of genius to be found in the 
 prose writings of the Highgate sage. To 
 me, as to many another young man at that 
 time (1844), the "Aids to Reflection" came 
 as a new revelation. I cannot stop to ex- 
 plain how it was so, but the book took such 
 hold of me that for years I rarely passed a 
 week without reading out of it. It followed 
 almost as a matter of course that at this period 
 I should surrender myself to the influence of 
 Southey and Wordsworth. I think it was in 
 '3
 
 194 FRIVOLA. 
 
 the Christmas vacation of 1844-5 that I made 
 a vow never to leave the house riding or 
 walking till I had learnt one of the Ecclesi- 
 astical Sonnets by heart, and I remember 
 many of them to this day. Southey's larger 
 poems, " Thalaba," " The Curse of Kehama," 
 and especially " Roderick," seemed to me 
 then the great epics of the age. I am not 
 at all certain that I gave them too high a 
 place in my admiration, and as I write I 
 cannot remember any English epic that I 
 have been able to read through since I read 
 "Roderick," not even "Festus" or "Orion." 
 At this period, too, I was given over to 
 Carlyle's " Heroes " and his " French Revo- 
 lution," and to Shelley and Charles Lamb. 
 My father had known Lamb personally, and 
 was on intimate terms with Talfourd, Shel- 
 ley's counsel, and from my boyhood I had 
 heard a great deal of both one and the 
 other ; but it was not until about 1844 or 
 1845 that they became the gods of my 
 idolatry. Shelley, however, was not for
 
 BOOKS THA T HA VE HELPED ME. 195 
 
 long my idol. I suspect it was more from 
 some forgotten perversity, or perhaps some- 
 body of whom I entertained a low opinion 
 preached Shelley to me, that I took it into 
 my head to rail against Shelley. There 
 came a time when I humbled myself and 
 blushed for very shame that I should ever 
 have even pretended to speak of that glorious 
 poet with less than passionate enthusiasm. 
 But Lamb : who can only admire Lamb ? 
 He is and will for ever be more than a mere 
 author to those that know him. He is a 
 presence, a presiding genius ; he goes in and 
 out with you, haunts you in the kindest, 
 gentlest way. 
 
 It was in 1845 that I first saw Tennyson's 
 poems. How I could have lived without 
 knowing them till then I cannot understand. 
 I shall never forget hearing the " Morte 
 d' Arthur " read to me by a friend for the 
 first time. 
 
 It was while I was under the domination 
 of Coleridge that the time came when I was
 
 196 FRIVOLA. 
 
 compelled to turn my mind to theological 
 reading ; and it was while I was thinking 
 seriously of preparing myself to take holy 
 orders in the Church of England that my 
 tutor (with whom I had gone through a 
 great many Greek plays, a great many Greek 
 orations, and a great deal else in Greek and 
 Latin literature which it is not worth while 
 to particularise) said to me once, "Before 
 you begin cramming divinity, do read one 
 more term with me, and we'll go through 
 the 'Gorgias' of Plato." Plato was by no 
 means an unknown author to me, but the 
 Gorgias was quite unknown. The reading 
 of that dialogue, under the guidance of a 
 man of real genius, thoughtfulness, and 
 earnestness, was another (I am not sure that 
 it was not the greatest) crisis of my intellec- 
 tual life. I don't see how any young man of 
 any enthusiasm could possibly read the last 
 twenty pages of the Gorgias for the first time 
 without feeling that somehow somehow 
 he had caught a glimpse of a new world.
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 197 
 
 At this time, too, I was a great reader of 
 Jeremy Taylor, especially of the " Holy 
 Living," and I made the acquaintance of 
 St. Augustine's " Confessions," which has 
 been one of my pocket-books ever since. 
 The last of the great writers who, at this 
 period, contributed to make a man of me 
 was Dr. Donne. Those who wish to know 
 who Dr. Donne was must read his biography 
 in the " Lives " of Isaac Walton ; and when 
 they do read it, let them be duly grateful to 
 whosoever may have first introduced them 
 to the most exquisite biography in the 
 English language. Be it understood, I do 
 not expect many people will take to Dr. 
 Donne's writings ; I can only tell them that 
 I owe a great deal to them myself, though 
 how I owe it and what I owe I have not 
 space here to explain. 
 
 It will be seen from the above only too 
 brief sketch of my boyish studies that my 
 mental culture did not proceed quite in the 
 common groove that others of my genera-
 
 I 9 8 FRIVOLA. 
 
 tion travelled along. There were reasons 
 for this which the world will hardly care to 
 know ; let them pass. But my mind was, I 
 believe, one of unusually slow development, 
 as my body was : and when I have carried 
 my readers thus far, I must needs add that 
 I have brought them only to the threshold 
 of my life, to the time of my early manhood, 
 when the world was all before me all the 
 doubts and perplexities, all the horror of 
 feeling the ground under my feet going from 
 me, all the wonder and amazement which 
 startled me as my horizon widened ; or 
 when, in utter loneliness of spirit, the 
 daylight was blotted out for an hour, no 
 sun was in the heavens, and yet, as I waited, 
 lo ! from the blackness there shone out 
 God's stars. I believe that if it had not 
 been for Coleridge and Tennyson and 
 Donne I should have had no eyes to see 
 those stars. I should have cried, "They 
 are no stars at all, only Jack o' lanterns ; 
 believe them not, my brethren ! "
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 199 
 
 The time came when I began my minis- 
 terial life in a little English village. If I 
 had not been a student during those years, 
 and had not taken a genuine delight in my 
 clerical work, I think I must have solaced 
 myself with drink and "gone to the bad." 
 It was a tiny little place with about a hun- 
 dred and fifty people in it ; the country was 
 hideous ; " the water was naught and the 
 ground barren " ; the roads were straight as 
 a line and level as a billiard-table ; there was 
 not a hill within five miles of us, and if we 
 wanted to see a stream that a boy could not 
 jump over, we had to go another five miles 
 to look at it. Neighbours outside the parish 
 we had none, and we were as poor as rats. 
 I say " we," for a real princess had stooped 
 so low as to marry me, and we two knew no 
 more of the world than a schoolboy and 
 schoolgirl, to whom life, however, was all 
 couleur de rose. We were twenty-four years 
 old, and at this mature age I projected a 
 great edition of the works of Doctor Donne,
 
 200 FRIVOL A. 
 
 the princess helping me. In course of this 
 labour I was driven to make my first ac- 
 quaintance with mediaeval literature. I had, 
 even in my undergraduate days, made the 
 acquaintance of Dr. Maitland's " Essays on 
 the Dark Ages," which had given me my 
 first taste for mediaevalism. It is another of 
 the great books to which I owe so much, 
 and I think that if I have acquired any small 
 skill in writing English, I owe the accom- 
 plishment more to the influence of Dr. 
 Maitland's style than to that of any other 
 writer alive or dead. Reading it now, with 
 wider knowledge and a wider horizon, I still 
 regard this delightful volume as one of the 
 most precious books in my library, and one 
 of the most original and suggestive books 
 that a young man can read. It is quite 
 sui generis. I am not going to criticise it 
 or give anything like an analysis of its 
 contents, but I never knew any one to 
 whom I have recommended it who has not 
 expressed himself enthusiastically grateful
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 201 
 
 for the knowledge of it ; or who did not 
 regard it as one of his most precious 
 possessions. 
 
 I had always been a great reader of his- 
 tory. I daresay I read a great deal too 
 much ; but history in those days was not 
 nearly so severe a study as it has become 
 since then, and if we loaded our memories 
 with huge masses of facts only a fraction of 
 which we could by any possibility remember, 
 that was better than in our nonage over- 
 taxing our brains by putting them to the 
 mastering of theories which we could not 
 understand. I read though every page of 
 Hume and Smollett's History of England 
 before I was fifteen, and I kept the pile of 
 pencil notes on the volumes scrawled in a 
 boyish hand, which I could not make up my 
 mind to destroy till I was nearly fifty years 
 old. I read through Hallam's History of 
 the Middle Ages religiously when it was 
 really quite beyond me, because I used to 
 meet Hallam now and then at dinner when
 
 202 FRIVOLA. 
 
 I was a lad. I forget when I first heard of 
 Prescott, but I devoured his works as most 
 young fellows devour a new novel ; but now 
 my Donne labours drove me pari passu into 
 two lines of historical study ; first, into the his- 
 tory of the seventeenth century ; and secondly, 
 into medievalism ; and I dare say, if I had 
 kept to that kind of thing for some years, 
 exclusively, it might have ended in my 
 turning out a blear-eyed Dryasdust. 
 
 One day some being from a higher sphere 
 brought us a new book, Ruskin's " Modern 
 Painters," the first two volumes. That was 
 another epoch in my life. We used to drive 
 about the dull roads to the nearest market 
 town in a little pony gig in those days ; we 
 always had a book with us. As surely as 
 the pony gig came to the door, so surely did 
 a volume of Ruskin accompany us on our 
 travels, the princess reading all the while ; 
 and if any one could have heard our excla- 
 mations of delight and our discussions and 
 questionings in those long drives, I think he
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 203 
 
 would have thought that we were as queer a 
 pair of young folks as he had seen for many 
 a day. We were fairly mad upon Ruskin, 
 and we were all the better for it ! 
 
 If young Americans and young English- 
 men do not read Ruskin's " Modern Painters" 
 now, they ought to read it ; and if they can- 
 not read all the volumes, let them at least 
 read that most precious and incomparable 
 second volume, which constitutes the third 
 part of the work, and deals with the imagi- 
 native and theoretic faculties. What I owe 
 to John Ruskin's writings I shall never be 
 able to set down in black and white. The 
 only harm that I think they ever did me 
 was that, coming upon me, as they did for 
 the first time, when I was deep in my 
 mediaeval researches, they occasioned me an 
 impatient distaste for any book written in a 
 slip-slop style ; and, whereas I formerly never 
 cared much how an author told his story 
 provided he had a story to tell, I found 
 myself suddenly growing over-fastidious as
 
 204 FRIVOL A. 
 
 to the manner of a writer, and I became 
 more and more exacting as to the form, and 
 less curious as to the matter, of a book than 
 I had been. 
 
 There are three books which I must needs 
 name before I quite take leave of my readers, 
 because they have, each in its own peculiar 
 way, had a wholly incalculable influence 
 upon my mind, and left upon me an im- 
 pression so deep and lasting that I should 
 find it impossible to exaggerate the effect 
 produced. One of these books was Mr. 
 Browning's " Paracelsus " ; another, John 
 Stuart Mill's book on " Liberty " ; and the 
 third, Mr. Lowell's "Biglow Papers." If I 
 had the space at my disposal, I could easily 
 show that the incongruity which may appear 
 on the surface in bracketing these three 
 books together is not really so great as it 
 may seem at first sight. This only I know, 
 that, during the last twenty years of my life, 
 very few books in any language have forced 
 themselves so much upon my memory, and
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HELPED ME. 205 
 
 been so much quoted by me, and so much 
 "leaned upon," as the "Biglow Papers." 
 Americans tell me that the book has almost 
 " gone out." It may be so ; but if it be so, 
 I am at a loss to think what literary master- 
 piece in America can ever hope for imperish- 
 able fame. 
 
 During those same last twenty years I 
 have myself been taking to make books. 
 When a man arrives at that stage he has 
 in great measure to live upon his resources, 
 those blessed accumulations which past study 
 have laid up for him. He gets to use books 
 rather than read them as we do when we 
 are young. He has, whether he will or 
 not, to become critical, discriminating, and 
 eclectic. I hate to think or to say that he 
 ever need stop growing, but something like 
 that comes to pass. Let us say he becomes 
 broader, more deliberate. He wants less 
 intellectual food, and let me hope it he 
 gets less dependent on it.
 
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