( ^^^SJ^-v^ | i ^ I t i -,: ^^-^ TOWNS VILLAGES AND SCHOOLS VOL. I. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 2 vols. crown 8vo. price 18$. . REMINISCENCES CHIEFLY OF ORIEL COLLEGE AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. By the RBT. THOMAS MOZLEY, M.A. formerly Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. ' We have rarely taken up two more fascinating volumes." ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE. ' No modern delineator of man- ners lias sketched humours and eccentricities in high or low more brightly and humanely than Mr. MOZLBY.' The TIMES. 'Full of point, incident, apt characterisation, and humour. One of the great attractions of these volumes is the complete absence of any party bitterness.' BRITISH QUARTERLY BKVIEW. ' Not even the famous Apologia wilt compare with these two volumes of reminiscences in re- spect of minute fulness, close personal observation, and charac- teristic touches.' ACADEMY. ' One of the most amusing and interesting works we have ever read, even in the province of auto- biography.' LITBRARY CHURCHMAN. 'Mr. MOZLEY briefly sketches two lives, Cardinal NEWMAN'S and his own ; and round them he groups nearly all the prominent men in the Oxford of his day. The two volumes are full of interest.' DAILY NEWS. ' Mr. MOZLEY'S reminiscences will not only be found of great value by future writers, but are so skil- fully put together with so much vivacity, variety, knowledge of human nature, and fine sense of humour that they will be widely read.' NONCONFORMIST. London: LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. REMI NISCENCES CHIEFLY OF TOWNS, VILLAGES AND SCHOOLS BY THE REV. T. MOZLEY, M.A. FORMERLY FELLOW OF ORIEL SUCCESSIVELY PERPETUAL CURATE OF MORETON PINCKNEY, NORTHANTS RECTOR OF CHOLDERTON, WILTS ; RECTOR OF PLYMTREE, DEVON AND RURAL DEAN OF PLVMTREE AND OF OTTERY AUTHOR OF ' REMINISCENCES OF ORIEL COLLEGE AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT ' IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I. SCO.VD EDITION LONDON LONGMANS. GREEN, AND CO. 1885 Al rights reserved LONDON : PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SO.VARK AND PARLIAMENT STREET PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. I COULD HAVE WISHED for a little more time to revise these volumes, to correct slips of memory or of the pen, and to profit by the comments of reviewers. But I do not really think there is much to be done in this way, even with the largest allowance of time. The printers have taken such good care of me, that I can only find a few trifling errors, for all of which I may say that I am solely responsible. But I gladly avail myself of the opportunity to introduce in this place a letter from an old Carthusian con- temporary, eight years my junior, reconciling my account of the Bell System at that school with that quoted by the present head-master from the evidence given by the late Dean of Peterborough : Gulval Vicarage, Penzance : February 16, 1885. Dear Sir, Pardon my troubling you with this letter, but I have just been reading your Reminiscences of Charterhouse with much interest. 2065276 vi PREFACE TO I went there as a child, not eight years old, in 1822, and re- mained there till 1832 ten long dreary years leaving when Russell did. In regard to Russell's system of Praepositi, I think the different statements of yourself and Drs. Saunders and Haig Brown may thus be reconciled. In my earliest years it was as you describe, promotion being given in the upper forms to successful teaching in the lower school. But soon after 1825, parents, I believe, in many instances objected to their sons teaching instead of being taught ; and many of the cleverest boys, moreover, were bad teachers. Hence, the head boy in the class then became Prsepositus. During the latter part of my time the number of boys so decreased that the forms were amalgamated, and in nearly every case each had its own master. I went much too young, and learnt nothing till I got under Russell ; but, with one or two exceptions, the teaching power was below par after your time there were two very able men, Churton and Boone. I was in Penny's house. Uobson and the two Venables, my seniors there, were talented fellows. Thackeray also was there ; but, singularly enough, never gave any early indication of his after celebrity. The abolition of/aggingby Russell brought about a far worse and cruel system of bullying, of which I, as once the youngest of nearly five hundred boys, have a keen recollection. The incident you mention in which young Howard lost his life was the ' calling out,' the peculiarity of which savagery was that an- nually all the lower school had the right to call on any unpopular upper boy to run the gauntlet between the two rows of under boys, from Cloisters' doors to a point near the Chapel ; the latter were armed with implements of all kinds, from sticks to stones in stockings. Howard in the melte fell down the steps leading to Chapman's. You are right in saying that spite of its surroundings Char- terhouse was wonderfully free from all epidemics. In my ten years measles was the only malady that I remember, and that only on one occasion. One reason for this I arrived at some years since, when passing over the Green I noticed the excava- tions then going on for Merchant Taylors' Buildings, the sub- soil being some eighteen or twenty feet of clear bright golden THE SECOND EDITION. vii gravel. Again apologising for this infliction on your time and patience, Believe me, Dear Sir, Yours faithfully, W. W. WlNGFIELD. The Rev. T. Mozley. As the plan of earning promotion in the upper part of the school by giving instruction in the lower was certainly a remarkable experiment, and appears to have begun and ended with my own stay at the school, I may as well quote the corroborative evidence of the Charterhouse Blue-book for Easter 1824 the only one I happen to possess. At that date Joseph Jones and J. L. Irwin, both of the Second Form, were teaching the Fourth. John Murray and Samuel Coates, both of the Second Form, were teaching the Fifth. W. H. Rooper and Mosley Smith, both of the second division of the Second, were teaching the Sixth. G. Wallace and R. N. Bennett, both of the second division of the Second, were teaching the Seventh. Passing over the teachers of four other Forms, I find F. A. Marriott and C. Marjoribanks, both of the Third Form, teaching respectively two little squads of five boys and of four, called the Twelfth Form. As to the rough Good Friday game, and the inci- dent of poor Howard's death, my memory refuses to qualify itself, though I admit that Mr. Wingfield's account has a strong point of verisimilitude in the resemblance to the favourite Midland game of Pri- soners' Base. viii PREFACE TO In Vol. II. p. 338, I have mentioned a pretty pic- ture, a great favourite in its day, containing a portrait of Mrs. Walter Blunt, wife of Pickford's curate-in- charge at Cholderton. The Bishop of Colchester kindly writes : This picture is now in my possession, and I can supply a slight correction, and a little additional information. The pic- ture is by Harlow, and the title is not ' Congratulation,' but ' The Proposal,' one of the young ladies being supposed to have received an offer of marriage by letter. One of the others with Mrs. Blunt (then Miss Pearce) is her sister, who became Lady Dymoke, and only died last year. The third is my mother, Mrs. Blomfield, then Miss Cox, cousin to the other ladies. The circumstance about the cast in the right eye is exactly what my mother always told us. During all the latter half of last year I was under great and increasing apprehension that I should not live to see the publication of these volumes, and should therefore have no opportunity of either cor- rection or defence. I had a variety of threatening symptoms of which I am quite unable to give a scientific account. The feeling made me the more anxious to deliver myself to the full and say out what I had to say, and it eventually led to an earlier publication than I had intended, for my first idea had been to keep all the manuscripts in hand till the New Year, and I now found that I was exceeding my limits. One result has been that I have given a fuller and more documentary treatment to some matters not likely to interest all readers equally. I have ever thought my father's rescue of one of the THE SECOND EDITION. ix chief parish churches of Derby from private usurpa- tion one of the noblest deeds in all my Church and public experience. But I cannot expect all fine gentle- men, ladies, and litterateurs of the present period to share my filial enthusiasm on the point. For their sake, had time allowed, I should have attempted a more sketchy and picturesque treatment. This would have involved the use of generalities. But a recent ex- perience left it not improbable that some one, with at least the authority of years, might suddenly spring up and denounce the whole story as a fiction. In view of such a contingency I deemed it best to give as much fact and document as my space would allow, enough indeed to defend itself and to stand as a monument of my father, should I be no longer here to defend it. As to my reviewers, I thank them all very heartily. Some of them begin, very naturally, with drawing heavy groans at the length, the bulk, the incongruous- ness, the inconsecutiveness of the farrago they have to despatch, and digest, perhaps at a sitting ; but they have almost invariably become pleasanter, not to say affectionate, as they find the labour coming to an end. Nobody can feel more than I do for those who have to extract the essence of two bulky volumes in a few hours. A word more. I am told that I ought not to have introduced such topics as those treated in the con- cluding chapters, in a work of so miscellaneous a character. My answer is, that I have no other opportunity. I can only appear in my own proper x PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. form, and I have done my best to present that form in these volumes. Should I be spared for a year or two more I hope and trust one day to make a more suitable presentment of myself, and of the subject I have most at heart. 7 LANSDOWNE TERRACE, CHELTENHAM : March 1885. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. CHAPTER PAGB I. INTRODUCTION. TO MY REVIEWERS .... I II. TO MY REVIEWERS ....... 8 III. CONFLICTING RECOLLECTIONS X 6 iv. DR. PUSEY'S SERMON ON 'SIN AFTER BAPTISM' . . 21 V. TWO CHERUBS (TAIT AND GLADSTONE) ... 23 VI. ARCHBISHOP TAIT AT POWDERHAM CASTLE . . . 27 VII. RITUALISM. (A WALK AND TALK WITH TAIT) . . 33 VIII. THE LATE PRIMATE'S LAST WORDS . . . . 38 IX. A PARSON FROM THE CRADLE (SELF) .... 43 X. PARSONS AND PARSONS 50 XI. FROM CONISBOROUGH TO DONCASTER .... 54 XII. FROM DONCASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH . . . . 59 ii CONTENTS. CHAPTER PACK XIII. THE ' COUNTRY SPECTATOR ' . . . . .67 XIV. GAINSBOROUGH. UPS AND DOWNS . . . . 74 XV. GAINSBOROUGH. VARIETIES 80 XVI. THE TOWN GOURMAND 88 XVII. THE RACE OF LIFE IN TOWNS .... 94 XVIII. THE BEGINNING OF A TRADE. (BY A RELATIVE) . IO2 XIX. GAINSBOROUGH. THE CLERGY .... IO6 XX. GAINSBOROUGH. FAITH AND POLITICS . . . II 3 XXI. THE LIBRARY (AS A MEANS OF PRIVATE EDUCATION) Il8 XXII. CATHEDRALS AND CHAPTERS 124 XXIII. A SUN-LIT SPOT . . . . . . ,130 XXIV. BRIDLINGTON QUAY AND FLAMBOROUGH . . , 138 XXV. COUNTY KERRY. (AN ANCESTOR THENCE) . .144 XXVI. MY PARENTS 150 XXVII. NATALE SOLUM 158 XXVIII. TWO MISHAPS (ONE THE BIRTH OF MY BROTHER JAMES A ROMANCE) . . . , , .165 XXIX. ANGELS EVER BRIGHT AND FAIR 172 XXX. OUR WALKS AND WANDERINGS . . . .175 XXXI. 'THE MILL ON THE FLOSS ' (AT GAINSBOROUGH) . 182 XXXII. A MIGRATION (TO DERBY) ..... 185 XXXIII. SOME EMPLOYES , 196 XXXIV. OUR BEGINNING AT DERBY 203 XXXV. CHANGE IN THE TOWN AND IN THE COUNTRY . 212 CONTENTS. xiii CHAPTER PAGE xxxvi. A DUKE'S TENANT . . . . . 215 XXXVII. MY UNCLE ROBERT ....... 221 XXXVIII. THE WARDWICK (AT DERBY) 227 XXXIX. OUR SURROUNDINGS 2$2 XL. WILLIAM JEFFERY LOCKETT. (THE PRESENT LACE- MAKING MACHINE) 237 XLI. REV. EDWARD HIGGINSON 243 XLII. SOME SCHOOLFELLOWS 252 XLIII. AN ACCIDENT 26l XLIV. ACCIDENTS . . 265 XLV. THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS AND THE MECHANICAL . 275 XLVI. THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS OF THE PERIOD . . . 283 XLVII. A PRIVATE TUTOR 289 XLVIII. PEOPLE I HAVE SEEN, AND STILL SEE . . . 295 XLIX. RECREATIONS AND AMUSEMENTS 303 L. DR. SAMPSON (AN EARLY CLERICAL FRIEND OF THE FAMILY) ........ 309 LI. DR. SAMPSON 319 LII. DR. SAMPSON . . . 330 LIII. FROM DERBY TO LONDON. MY FIRST JOURNEY. . 340 LIV. MY SUBSEQUENT JOURNEYS 348 LV. LONDON IN 1 820 354 I.VI. LONDON IN l82O 361 LVII. MY DEBUT AT CHARTERHOUSE 373 :iv CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE LVIII. CHARTERHOUSE ON THE BELL SYSTEM . . . 380 LIX. THE DISCIPLINE OF CHARTERHOUSE . . . . 388 LX. CARTHUSIAN INCIDENTS 393 LXI. HOW' WE AMUSED OURSELVES 4OO LXII. THE CARTHUSIAN REGIME 407 LXIII. SOME CONTEMPORARIES IN THE SCHOOL . . . 417 LXIV. SOME CONTEMPORARIES IN LLOYD'S HOUSE . . 426 LXV. DAY-BOYS AND GOWN-BOYS 436 LXVI. FILEY (IN YORKSHIRE) 444 LXVII. CHARTERHOUSE TO ORIEL 453 CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. TO MY REVIEWERS. IN the first place I thank you all very heartily. You have given me some useful information and a good deal of wholesome correction. You make me regret that I did not present myself to the world in my own name at twenty-five instead of seventy-five. It has always been my nature to learn by sad experience that is, by chastisement, of one sort or another for I am but a lump of clay, with as many sides as I have fallen upon, and as many impressions as I have suffered collisions. But I must acquit myself of a burden. My dear friends, I am ashamed of you. You had a chance such as never fell to a reviewer before, and not one of you discovered it. The head and front of my offending in the matter of spelling was the addition of the final e to the name of the famous Provost of Oriel. Certainly I ought not to have added it. Sixty-three years ago he kindly put my name down for admission to his college, and sixty years ago he wrote to Dr. Russell, directing him to VOL. I. B 2 INTRODUCTION. send me up at once for matriculation. But, for one reason or another, his name has not occupied a very prominent place in the world now for many years. So my vagrant memory drifted lazily to the name of the Devonshire hamlet, and to the story of the famous stone said to give the name to the hamlet and to the family. Copleston himself used to explain that this was a coping-stone, or a stone surmounting a gable. But it was hard to see how so ordinary a feature could be the distinction of a place or of a family. Prince, writing two centuries ago, described the stone as a dolmen, twelve feet clear of the ground, standing at the meeting of four parishes, where it probably had stood long before the parishes were constituted. I had also ringing in my ear a familiar Devonshire rhyme Crocker, Cruwys, and Coplestone When the Conqueror came were found at home. Now, as the rhyme does not stand on the consonants, it can only stand on the sound of the vowel, which implies a terminal e. In fact that has now long been the spelling of tne place, though I have to admit that Prince going back many centuries does always spell the name Copleston. But to think of you all yes, all of you, some dozen doughty knights of the pen not having found and flung at my head the following passage in the Memoir of the Bishop, by W. J. Copleston, published by Parker, 1851. It occurs in a letter from one of Copleston's quondam pupils to the writer of the memoir : EDWARD COPLESTON. 3 You will smile, I think, at the fo lowing characteristic trait of a relative whose turn of mind you knew so well. A note was delivered to your uncle while we were ' enucleating ' (as an excellent friend and olim soctus, T , used to style it) a tough part of the ' Agamemnon.' Having opened and perused the note, Mr. Copleston tossed it indignantly to me, pointing to the direction ' Now look there as if that man, who ought to know better, and has called here half a dozen times, could not recollect that my name is Copleston, as you may see it over my door, and that I was baptized Edward, which he must know also, or might have found out.' H. He indulges you, I see, sir, with two superfluous letters. C. Yes the Rev. Mr. Copples'.one ! Now, I cannot recom- mend a better habit to a young man, like yourself, entering the world in good society, than to ascertain the exact prefix, spelling, and pronunciation of every man's name with whom you have intercourse such, I mean, as he and his family choose habitually to adopt. Depend upon it that people in general infer a sort of oXiywpt'a from such lapses ; as if you took such little interest in their identity, as to forget the minor characteristics of it. This I quote, indirectly, from a review of the memoir in the 'Christian Remembrancer' of January, 1852, to which my brother Arthur, who wrote the review, has called my attention. But once upon my mis-spellings I must go on. What a storm there was about my writing Oakley for Oakeley ! All the nine villages of the name are spelt Oakley, and the suburban square is Oakley, and no doubt the e is an interpolation. Still I ought to have known the right spelling, even after forty years. It is true that I have myself suffered much persecution in the wanton mis-spelling of my own name half a dozen different ways. The very last letter I had from Ward, for five years my fellow-worker in the ' British 4 INTRODUCTION. Critic,' and very frequent correspondent, lies before me, spelling my name ' Mozely.' Did I quarrel with him? No. I knew he was too ideal ever to be real. My case could not easily be so bad as that of a departed friend, whose right name was Lewellin, but who kept in a portfolio more than a hundred various spellings of his name actually received through the post. But I think my mis-spelling of the well-known and much loved Master of University raised the greatest storm of indignant remonstrance. What, not to know how to spell Plumptre ! The very insuf- ficient answer is that I had been living twelve years at Plymtree, and had no acquaintance with the living representatives of the Master at Oxford. Then I have offended a whole college, and a college that thinks something of itself, by allowing myself to be misled by the rules of pronunciation, and giving it only two /'s in the course of three syllables. I took inadvertently the old spelling. In Hume I find it John Baliol. In Ecton's ' Thesaurus ' I find it Baliol College. The rule certainly is that when a is pro- nounced as in ' whale ' there must be only one /, and when as in the first syllable of ' alligator,' with two /'s. My saddest case of mis-spelling, for such it is, I do indeed deeply grieve, and can only plead ' extenu- ating circumstances.' Of course I ought to have known how to designate Newman's friend, Bowden, and the pope he wrote a life of; especially when I was undertaking to enlighten the public on these points. I had the names, in various connections, ly- ing before me. Had I felt a doubt, five minutes might have settled the question. The true man was John JOHN W. BOWDEN. 5 W. Bowden, and he published a Life of Gregory VII. I described him as Henry Boden, and his subject as Gregory the Great. There could hardly be worse blunders at least in the eyes of those who happen to be well acquainted with all the personages concerned. 1 should think that no one of all Newman's friends was so dear to him as John W. Bowden. Well, what have I to say for myself? I never saw John W. Bowden but once in my life. I never saw his brother, the true Henry Bowden, even once. I am not sure that I ever saw the outside of John W. Bowden's book, and am pretty sure that I never read a page, or a line of it. The only time I saw him was in a mile's walk from Rose Bank to Oxford, in Newman's company. I could not but be struck by the man, and remember him well. He was a very fine figure, graceful rather than stately, very hand- some, with a very expressive countenance, a melo- dious voice, and a fluent utterance. It could be no surprise that any one could become tenderly attached to him. But this beautiful vision I saw and heard once, and never again. Of course I ought to have known and remem- bered what John W. Bowden did in his brief career. I now find that, besides his share in 'St. Bartholomew's Eve ' and the ' Life of Hildebrand,' he wrote four of the 'Tracts for the Times,' beginning with the fifth, on the Constitution and History of the Church. I have just now run through them. To those who have yet to form an idea of a writer, who, as ti\o. fidus Achates of the Cardinal, must be an object of interest, I may say that the tracts recall the man. They are very easy, 6 INTRODUCTION. graceful, business-like pieces of workmanship ; but, though they might possibly secure some young Evan- gelical already on the move, I cannot think they would bring over any dissenters. Such people object to the doctrine, the discipline, and the secular associa- tions of the Church, and J. W. Bowden leaves these matters just where they were. He affects to start from the mission of the Apostles, but really builds on the foundation of Constantine. However, I recom- mend the four tracts, which read very musically, if music could win souls. John W. Bowden married into the family of a great Northern baronet, and was absorbed into it. An aristocratic connection is much admired and much coveted, but it often ends in personal annihila- tion. Inconsistency, too, even apparent inconsistency, is a destructive process. There certainly was some- thing incongruous in the admirer of Hildebrand, who was for putting his hook in the nose of every prince, power, and potentate in the world, settling into the appendage of a Northumbrian baronet's household. I have further to confess that a time came when the name had a painful association, which did not allow me to dwell on it. When I went to reside in town in 1848 I forget whether J. W. Bowden was still living I think not my wife, upon some en- couragement, ventured to call on Mrs. Bowden, whom she had met several times at Oxford, and who was then residing either at or next door to Sir John Swinburne. She was then invited to repeat her call at lunch-time. She made several attempts without being admitted. My own impression at the time was that TRICKS OF MEMORY, 7 nobody was likely to be admitted, unless stepping from a brougham, with a footman in livery. I could well have afforded this in those days, and perhaps ought to have done so, but I was spending all my receipts on Cholderton Church, and on another object equally romantic. However, the acquaintance dropped, and so it appears did Bowden's Christian name from my memory. In later years another solution has presented itself. My wife never failed to express her opinions candidly and plainly, and, judging by the result, I think it likely Mrs. Bowden did the same, in the opposite direction. On looking over some old memoranda I see that J. W. Bowden wrote an article on the ' Anglican Church in the Mediterranean ' for the July number of the ' British Critic ' in 1841. I was then editor, but I have lent and lost my own copy of that number forty years, and I never again saw another copy till the other day. These are tricks of memory of which I have had sad experience in my own case, and some too in the case of others. I find that a doubt once established never departs. There are words, not a few, which I can never spell without reconsideration. This is a small matter. But I find it the same in regard to the various aspects of things, the judgments I have deliberately formed upon persons and affairs, and the recollections in which I have summed up passages of my life. Does the mind revolve upon an axis ? Does it ebb and flow? Does it alternately swallow and disgorge like the Maelstrom? The mind requires rest and refreshment ; does it also require repair and 8 TO MY REVIEWERS. restoration ? What is the cure ? To be right and wrong alternate minutes is not a safe condition. I do hope that when I next have to speak of John W. Bowden, I shall not be on the Henry Boden tack, and that I shall not be found dreaming of him that sent Augustine to Canterbury. No mistake of mine made such a stir as my supposed alliance between the Denisons and the house of Rutland. One of my reviewers thought it an intentional slight on both houses. The fact is I had written Portland, and it was actually printed Portland. I had had a momentary doubt, which a second thought dispelled. But when, in a hurried revision, I saw Portland in the proof, I said to myself, ' Oh, that's impossible. The Denisons can't have married into those Dutch people.' The truth is, correctors of the press ought to have as few ideas as possible. CHAPTER II. TO MY REVIEWERS. OF course I knew that Medley was Bishop of Frederic- ton, and Field of Newfoundland. But when I cast my eye across the Atlantic in search of Medley, Frederic- ton modestly sidled into the background, leaving Newfoundland in the front. I am really thankful for the blunder, for it has brought me two pleasant letters from Fredericton. But all Devonshire was speedily T. FINCH HOBDAY BRIDGE. 9 upon me, for Medley was long there, and proud are they of him. Of Field I heard frequently at one time, and I will take the opportunity to associate with him a rather remarkable personage, who deserved not to be forgotten. T. Finch Hobday Bridge was my contemporary at Charterhouse a neat, compact, sprightly figure, with a resolute expression, and a pair of bright, black eyes. Russell had great hopes of him. His figure stood out well from the rank. His readiness and industry promised any career. But his name was down for Worcester College. On the other hand, a gown-boy, whose name I need not give, for besides being very dull he was exceedingly grotesque, was shortly going to Christ Church. Russell bribed him, or rather his friends, with an ' exhibition ' to exchange with Bridge, who was soon my opposite neighbour at Oxford, in one of the attics of Peckwater Quad. Poor Bridge became too much of a favourite : he was too much in society ; he found his work too easy, and his course too clear. His looks soon showed deterioration. He recovered himself in time to take a ' double second ' he could have taken a ' double first.' He went to Newfoundland, and Field made him his archdeacon. I heard that he did most of the work there. Field's path was beset with difficulties, and Bridge would undertake anything, and do it. The Bishop called him hi> ' Iron Bridge,' and the expres- sion recalled the very look of his schoolboy days. I met him once at a Founder's Day. He was then the most perfect figure of an ecclesiastic I had seen in this country. Even in France or in Italy he would have io TO MY REVIEWERS. commanded admiration. He had to work harder and harder at his post. Fever came, and he did not shrink from his duty. He took the fever and died, leaving a family with very small means. A year or two after, a lady, who wanted a girl to educate with her only daughter, asked me to call in the course of an afternoon. She told me I should find four girls from the Clergy Orphan School Is that the right title of it ? sent for her to choose from. She had already seen them, and had made up her mind to choose one of two. The moment I entered the drawing-room it was as if my old school- fellow was before me, so close the resemblance in figure, expression, and eyes. It was a complete sur- prise, for the lady had not mentioned names, and I had only heard incidentally some time before this that Bridge had left a family of what consisting, or where, I knew not. Another girl was prettier, but there could be no doubt Edith Bridge was the stronger and finer metal. She did her part, a trying one, well. She was valued and loved. I think she is now in a sisterhood. With regard to some of my errors and omissions, to a certain neutrality where decision might have been expected, and confusedness where order and accuracy were most desirable, I have to remind my readers that I only promised ' Reminiscences.' I was, in fact, the first to sound the note of alarm. I offered the cue, and my critics readily availed themselves of it. After a form of my own, which I do not venture to commend to general imitation, I am an honest man. My wife and old servants could testify to their merriment when PROVING ALL THINGS. 11 a possible purchaser came to examine a mare I wished to part with, and after he had felt all the legs and pronounced them sound, I called his attention to a suspicious appearance in one of them. This is exactly what I have done in this instance. But I did not think it necessary to call the reader's attention to the periods when, upon my own showing I could only speak upon the information of others, and with a second-hand authority. I stated particularly, with names, dates, personal relations, and specified opportunities, the claims I had to write and to be read. Very excusably I did not call the reader's attention to the negative aspects of this statement. Those aspects were plain enough. When I first be- came acquainted with the Newmans there was a swarm of little books of the Evangelical school flying and settling all about them. I did warn the reader that I had no acquaintance with the family before 1826, though I might not invite him to suspect the accuracy of my impression. That impression has been sharply attacked, I know not when and where. The echoes only have reached me. It is a point in which others have a right to the last word, and I am content to leave it with them. But I have to clear myself of levity. I did riot make my statement at random, or without much consideration. I have the greatest regard and affection for the memory of the lady whose name I have, perhaps unwarrantably, brought forward. For nearly three whole years before her death the ' Tracts for the Times ' were coming out, and were the subject of general conversation, She and her elder daughter, 12 TO MY REVIEWERS. who was her double as much as a daughter can be of a mother, had very strong objections to those tracts, and they both expressed their objections very freely. They liked neither the matter nor the tone of the tracts. They were most explicit on the subject to numerous callers, including some of Newman's par- ticular friends, indeed some of the writers. Long before the appearance of the tracts, they had seemed quite in accord with Golightly, a frequent caller, whose conversation always ran upon religious topics, and who was then, what he remained always, a decided, not to say extreme, Evangelical, showing more sympathy for Puritans than for High Church- men. Though I respected their sincerity and frankness, I thought it a pity these ladies volunteered their criticism under the circumstances. I often said to myself, ' Why plant themselves so near Oxford, indeed nearer and nearer, to come into possible collision with the son ? When, upon my marriage, I went to my Wiltshire rectory, I took a large supply of the tracts with me. I very soon had to keep them out of sight, and it was very rarely, indeed accidentally, that I looked into them. They kept coming, but as fast as they came I stowed them away. I did not venture to distribute them. Had I done so, my neighbours would have discussed them with my wife, and it would immediately have come out that we were not quite at accord on some questions then at the front of the religious controversy. AH this is a matter of notoriety. Fifteen years ago, when I was at Rome, writing letters about the ARM1N1ANS. 13 proceedings of the Council, I read in a Roman Catholic newspaper published in London that such was the peculiar malignity of my disposition that I had been on the point of going over to Rome to spite one wife, and was now attacking Rome to spite another. What then was the root of this antipathy, this antagonism, holding its ground for two generations ? Putting things together as well as I could, I did not write that the mother was a Calvinist, but I explained and refined to the utmost of my poor ability and very slight theological information. I fear I gave myself too much trouble about it, and got bewildered accordingly. I said that the lady in question was ' a modified Calvinist.' It was an unfortunate expres- sion, betraying uncertainty both as to the subject and as to the predicate. To say the truth, I don't know what Calvinism is, and never yet met with any one who could give a satisfactory definition of it. The people who admire Calvin are always anxious to ex- plain that they are not themselves Calvinists. The lady I am speaking of was not a Laudian ; I have seen her described as an Arminian but nobody, not even Arminius himself, could say quite what that meant. The Dutch divine has acquired a celebrity far beyond his wishes, but he began with a protest against the excesses of human presumption in Divine matters, and, driven on by controversy and persecution, he shewed rather the negative than the positive side of his theological system, if he had anything to call a system. I had no intention of describing the lady as singular, or ' sectarian,' or of a definite school. Nor could I say simply that hers i 4 TO MY REVIEWERS. was ' the religion of a lady,' as people talk of ' the religion of a gentleman.' From a diary in 1831 I find the ladies were read- ing Tillotson ; but the very same entry mentions Baxter, so not much is to be inferred from that. I believe the real question is, what were the prevalent religious views in the city of London in the first years of this century ? Yet there is still another account of the matter, which is probably in most cases the true one. The sweet religion of nature prevails between parents and children. The relation itself, and its various emergencies, suggest a sound faith and a salutary discipline sufficient for the occa- sion. Fathers and mothers must be divinities till they have forfeited the character, or till the believing eyes of children are unhappily opened and they are driven out of their little paradise. I have given a confused account of the starting of the ' Tracts for the Times,' and of the ' Hadleigh Conference.' The truth is I was at the time very closely engaged in my duties and undertakings at my Northamptonshire parish, seldom leaving home for a day ; and the tracts, as also the story of the ' Confer- ence,' and succeeding conferences, came to me after date. I often saw it stated, or implied, that Newman had been at the Conference, but I found it difficult to conceive it, or to reconcile it with his own distinct course. As my readers now probably know, he was not one of the very small party assembled at Had- leigh. They were Rose, Mr. William Palmer, of Worcester College, Froude, and Perceval. The first of these had sufficient goodness and genius to meet new SIX WILLIAM PALMER. 15 and great emergencies, had it pleased God to spare him. Upon Froude I am forbidden to speculate. Ostendent terris hunc tantum fata, neque ultra Esse sinent. But to any one who reads Sir W. Palmer's story of the Oxford Movement in the ' Contemporary Review,' or the ' Catechism of Church Principles ' which it was Mr. Perceval's one idea to force on the Church of England, it will be quite clear that the former was prepared to employ all the physical force of England to sweep Ireland clean of Popery, and the latter equally prepared, in like fashion, to purge England of Dissent. Their only notion of a movement was a proclamation of war, and I must do them both the justice to believe that they had the courage of their opinions. Unless my memory is very much indeed at fault, I feel sure that one of Sir W. Palmer's statements is calculated to give a very wrong impression. He says : The publication of my ' O 'igines Liturgica? ' had the gratify- ing result of introducing me to the acquaintance, amongst others, of Newman, who was then reputed to be one of the most rising men in Oxford, and also to the acquaintance of Froude, whose reputation as a scholar and a man of genius stood very high. Both were Fellows and Tutors of Oriel College. Sir W. Palmer adds that the acquaintance had no time to ripen, as just when it was likely to increase Newman and Froude went to the Mediterranean. The word ' publication ' here surely includes the preparation, the search, and collection of materials, as 1 6 CONFLICTING RECOLLECTIONS. well as the actual composition, extending over four years. I repeat, unless I have been dreaming, I met Palmer frequently at Oriel, in Newman's company, in 1829, 1830, 1831 ; and upon these occasions there was always some talk upon the work he was engaged in. Nor are Sir W. Palmer's own expressions con- sistent with the date of actual publication. Newman might have been called a 'rising man ' in 1829, and he was still Tutor as too was Froude but any one familiar with the character and position of Newman and Froude in 1832, would smile at Sir W. Palmer's description of them as applied to that date. CHAPTER III. CONFLICTING RECOLLECTIONS. AFTER having myself made so great a mistake as to imagine Sir W. Palmer, whom I had never known by that title, to be no longer in the flesh in 1882, I am hardly in a position to criticise his accuracy. I feel, however, bound to anticipate the possible and indeed reasonable suggestion that his dates, orders of se- quence, and measures of significance in his ' Narrative of Events,' 1883, are occasionally at variance with mine. The variance is sometimes great, and to me unaccountable ; but certainly not owing to faulty memory on my part, or careless writing. Not a few of Sir William's statements are quite SUSPENSION OF THE ' BRITISH CRITIC: 17 at variance with my recollections, and incredible to my conceptions. Among other startling assertions, he claims to have brought about the suspension of the ' British Critic,' and so delivered the Church of England from a plague. Had he added that it was he who built Cholderton Church, I could not have been more surprised. Perhaps Sir W. Palmer's statement might be interpreted to mean that, upon my resigna- tion of the editorship, he was consulted by Rivington, who had published for him two important works, and that his advice was to discontinue the periodical. He does not, however, say this straight, so what he does say is only half a revelation, that is, a mystery. His reticence has suggested to me the possibil.ty of Rivington having offered him the editorship, and of his having declined it, which certainly would have been his wisest course. Since writing the above I have seen, in the proof, a letter of my brother James of the date, while pass- ing through the press. He states that, in December 1843, Palmer had just asked him to contribute to the ' British Critic,' of which he was now to be editor. The subjects suggested were not such as my brother James, or the English world, were likely to care much about. They would take some time, and could not be expected by New Year's Day. I am not in a position to say why Palmer made the offer, or why my brother declined it, though I should have been surprised if he had accepted. As I cannot explain the fact I will not comment on it ; I only substitute it for the very wide statement that it was Sir W. Palmer who extinguished the ' British Critic.' VOL. I. C 1 8 CONFLICTING RECOLLECTIONS. If any one had a taste for the employment he could make a curious and instructive collection of the mistakes made by considerable writers, whose names would suffer no disparagement by a few trifling deduc- tions. According to their bent, or to the exigencies of their work, historians either run into details, or dress up pictures of events or of men, or generalise ; and in any case they easily slip off the lines of pro- portion, congruity, and truth. Few people, indeed, except those who have to criticise and to be criticised, can have any notion of the immense number of errors as to names, dates, and other particulars, current in literature, and passing wholly unquestioned. They do not often signify much : the argument or the narrative runs the same. When the writer himself does not think it worth while to cast his eyes on the printed page before him, he generally takes a true estimate of the accuracy required. I have stated, for example, that by walking up our own street at Derby in 1817 I might have seen three men beheaded for high treason. Several histories say there were only two, and one of the minor Quarter- lies of 1883 puts the trial and execution at York. What matters it now ? I venture to give a more serious instance of inaccuracy from one of the most painstaking and conscientious writers of our times, the late Dean of Westminster. In his most interesting ' Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey,' second edition, page 243, we read : In St. Edmund's Chapel lies Nicholas Monk, the honest clergyman, who undertook the journey to Scotland to broadi SLIPS OF HISTORIANS. 19 the first design of the Restoration to his brother the General, for whom he had always had ' a brotherly affection,' but who was sent back, with 'such infinite reproaches, and many oaths, that the poor man was glad when he was gone, and never had the courage after to undertake the like employment.' His services, however, were not forgotten, and he was raised to the See of Hereford, and, dying immediately afterwards, was buried in the Abbey. No doubt the General did use some very rough language upon finding that his brother had disclosed his errand to his own Episcopalian chaplain, Dr. Price. He went so far as to say that he was bound to hang anybody that went into his camp and talked of a restoration. But Nicholas Monk, with his daughter, remained two months at Dalkeith Palace on the most affectionate terms with the General, who then dismissed them with ' a very particular kindness.' But the General did more : he gave Nicholas two very critical and difficult missions, and Nicholas under- took and discharged both with great promptitude, and with most important results. Immediately on his arrival at London he went to Sir John Granville, and told him the General could have nothing to say to any communication from Charles ; but at the same time stated that there had been matters between himself and the General, upon which he and others had been sworn to secrecy. From Sir John Granville, Nicholas Monk went straightway to Commissary Clarges, the General's re- presentative in town, and communicated to him the as- surance, which he was to transmit to Speaker Lenthall, that the General would support Parliament against the military faction. In a veiy few hours this message 20 CONFLICTING RECOLLECTIONS. set in motion the train of events leading by necessary consequence to the Restoration. Parliament instantly, and most rashly, as it seemed, declared its independ- ence, and so defied the army, against which it had no protection at hand but some ill-officered guards. Lambert, with equal rashness, surrounded the guards, and turned back the members as they were coming to the House. This was all General Monk wanted, and, as soon as he could make the requisite preparation, he crossed the Tweed, and, without the shedding of a drop of blood, restored the Crown. The late Dean's account of the matter is from Clarendon, and, as the historian wrote it very soon after the Restoration, it might be supposed reliable. But the truth was Clarendon hated Monk and all his belongings. He had tried hard to make Monk his tool, on the speculation of the tool running all the risks of failure, and being thrown away in the case of success. Monk had seen through and through him his back and his lont at once, so to speak and the result was Clarendon himself was thrown overboard. He was in exile when he wrote the few and hasty words quoted by Dean Stanley. I cannot but suspect that if it had been a philosopher, a statesman, or a man of letters, instead of a simple country parson, the Dean would have given a little more time and thought to the Rector of Plymtree, whose dust is now commingled with that of the Plantagenets in Westminster Abbey. PREACHED AND NOT PUBLISHED, 21 CHAPTER IV. PUSEY'S SERMON ON SIN AFTER BAPTISM. IN my remarks upon this famous sermon, chap, xciv., I say, ' I have not read the sermon, nor have I read the explanatory " Tract for the Times " on the subject. I have only my recollections.' In the next page I relate at some length the incident of Samuel Wilber- force coming up suddenly, about a fortnight after the sermon, to ask for an explanation, presenting himself , for that purpose, not to Pusey, but to Newman, and after another fortnight making a public and very energetic protest against Pusey's sermon, and the teaching supposed to be associated with it. About two months after the publication of the ' Reminis- cences ' I was surprised and, I may add, gratified by receiving the following : South Hermitage, Ascot Priory, Bracknell. MY DEAR MOZLEY, In your ' Reminiscences,' &c., there is a chapter on a sermon of mine on Heb. vi. 4, 5, 6. You say, ' I have not read the sermon, nor have I read the explanatory " Tract for the Times " in explanation of it.' Was it then printed ? I have not the faintest memory of it, nor of any ' Tract for the Times,' nor of S. W. making a public and very energetic protest against it. Can you tell me anything about any of the three which might recall them to me ? For you have criticised the sermon, pointing out what you think was defective, and I have no means of explaining myself. With every good wish, Yours very faithfully, Aug. 2, 1882. E. B. PUSEY. 22 PUSEY ON SIN AFTER BAPTISM. The Tracts on Baptism were a thing per se. They were written to save a Hebrew pupil from leaving the Church because it taught the doctrine of baptismal regeneration. I asked him to wait until I could put together the Scriptural evidence for it. In the course of it I wrote on Heb. vi. 4, et seq. The letter reached me a day or two after my arrival at Llandudno. I replied that here I was in Wales for my wife's health, my first visit to the principality, and away from my books, meaning chiefly my copy of the tracts. I could only beg for time, promising to reply at length immediately on my return home. I did this with a sad misgiving that I had little right to be sure we should either of us be living a month thence. I received the following very kind reply : MY DEAR MOZLEY, I am sorry to hear of your wife's illness. Do not trouble yourself about my sermon. I am satisfied that it was never printed. Probably I never heard that it was talked about. 1 have nothing to complain of in your statement. Indeed, I do not see the difference between your statement and what you say was mine. The defect of the sermon as you have reported of it would have been its omis- sions. I can hardly think that I said nothing to comfort those who were so stricken. Perhaps I shall find the sermon. I only wanted it for my own information. At a later period, I was blamed in the opposite direction for accepting and press- ing S. Gregory's commentary on ' The first shall be last, and the last first,' as involving that some who have gone much out of the way would, through their subsequent repentance and use of the grace of God, be higher than some who had been all along in it. But it matters little what one thought those many years ago, unless it becomes necessary to explain what one holds now. One can only hope that God stirred up some hearts then (as He, by your account, did yours), and that one's imperfections did not mar the work. Would that we were not so wide apart. I do not think that LAST WORDS. 23 you can understand that great stirring of mind ; but the question is not about the past, but the present and the Hereafter. With every good wish, Yours very faithfully, Aug. 7, 1882. E. B. PUSEY. On my return home I immediately wrote to Pusey in reply to his three first questions. On referring to the tracts containing Scriptural views on Holy Baptism, and particularly to the preface, I found it to be as Pusey stated. At the time referred to he was writing these tracts, and having to preach before the University he spoke on the matter that his heart was full of. Samuel Wilberforce's sudden appearance at Oxford soon after the delivery of the sermon, and his, visit to Newman's rooms and my own, as, too, his public protest soon after, must rsst on my recollections. There is nothing either for or against them in the published ' Life." CHAPTER V. TWO CHERUBS. WITH regard to two of the most remarkable of my contemporaries I have enjoyed a singular good fortune, indeed, as I feel it, a providential protection. Those two are Mr. Gladstone and Archbishop Tait. It has been my fate, or my folly, to differ from them both considerably I think always more or less. I have always been at heart too much of a Tory for the one, and too High Church for the other. They have both 24 . TWO CHERUBS. gone heartily with the country, but I have been only the humble servant of my country and a reformer rather against the grain. ' Broad Church ' has been to me all my life simply an abomination that is, Broad Church as enunciated by its foremost advocates. This led me to a strange complication of feelings with regard to the late Dean Stanley. While I was always fascinated by his style I could not help read- ing, generally twice over, every scrap of his I saw in the papers I recoiled utterly from what I believed to be his doctrine. As for Mr. Gladstone, I for many years have seldom thought of him and his measures without being re- minded of the terrible lines in which Horace describes one of the attendants of that fickle goddess whom he believed to be the arbiter of civil strife : Te semper anteit serva necessitas, Clavos trabales et cuneos manu Gestans ahena ; nee severus Uncus abest liquidumque plumbum. Often have I felt that I would rather grow cabbages like Cincinnatus, than be the public executioner of usurpations, monopolies, and other abuses. But after indulging in the sentiment I have swelled the triumph of justice, peace, and public good. I have gene- rally been so unfortunate in the use of my electoral privileges that I have come to think them hardly worth the fuss made about them ; but the most un- fortunate use I ever made of them so I felt at the time was when I went up to Oxford to vote for Mr. Gladstone, and he was actually elected. It was some excuse for this ridiculous inconsist- GLADSTONE AND TAIT. 25 ency that I scarcely ever looked into Mr. Gladstone's weekly organ -of course he hadn't a weekly organ in any other sense than he had a tail to his coat without seeing some very offensive and utterly untrue allusion to myself. No philosophy, no known species of Christianity, can prevent a little, just a little annoy- ance under such circumstances. But now, what is the singular good fortune or providential protection I began with ? Simply this : I never in all my life once saw Mr. Gladstone from the evening I met him in Hurdis Lushington's room, three or four days after his arrival from Eton, till he was so good as to ask me to breakfast in June 1882, and kindly suggest a correction or two in my book. On the former occasion he had all the purple bloom and freshness of boyhood, and the glow of generous emotion. Since that day I have seen portraits and caricatures of him a thousand times, but the original idea has never failed to return to the memory. My life's experience of Archbishop Tait has been much the same. I met him, several years my junior, in Oriel Common Room, and perhaps once or twice in the streets of Oxford about the same time. He was then a good-natured, chubby-faced, unmistakably Scotch lad, perhaps canny beyond his years. I never saw him again till very recently, at a meeting in the rooms of the National Society for the foundation of a college in memory of Bishop Selwyn. As the leader of the ' Four Tutors,' and on other occasions, he could not but give pain to Newman's friends and adherents. Nor could he fail to incur the charge of partiality when in after years, and invested with 26 TWO CHERUBS. official authority, he seemed not to shew the like alacrity in reproving excesses in an opposite direction. Nevertheless, he never lost to me his youthful form, and as I have thought of these two men I have often been reminded of the two beautiful angelic, or rather cherubic, faces looking upwards from the fore- ground of Raphael's Madonna di San Sisto. It is needless to say that the development into the existing statesman, as formed by half a century of incessant political warfare, is simply ludicrous, and I could not say that I find in this case the child to be father of the man. But it was so in the case of the late Primate. He was the fair, ingenuous boy to the last as far as looks are concerned, and those looks could not fail to speak the truth. To me the two recollections have been the source of as much plea- sure as some childhood memories of a more senti- mental character. It has often occurred to me how much schoolboys owe, in after life, to the sweet and vivacious company of ever-youthful faces still crowding their memories, surrounding them wherever they move, and flitting across their sight night and day. Still, I always felt something owing to myself and to my Oxford friends in the part which the former Tutor of Balliol had taken ; and this sense, after much deliberation, I expressed in what may seem a very puny form. Some years ago I recognised on my chancel-screen at Plymtree the rough portraiture of Henry VII., Prince Arthur, and Cardinal Morton. These I got o reproduced, with an account of Morton, chiefly from 'MY DUTY AND RESPECT: 27 Hook's ' Lives of the Archbishops,' but with the addition of some interesting matter from other sources. I could not omit, had I even wished it, send- ing a copy to Morton's living successor in the primacy, but I took care to accompany it with nothing more than ' my duty and respect' It was most kindly acknowledged. CHAPTER VI. ARCHBISHOP TAIT AT POWDERHAM CASTLE, FOUR years ago the late Primate, having recently lost his son and his wife, and, it may be added, his health and his strength, was taking a holiday in the west of England. To my surprise, and not less pleasure, I received an invitation from the Earl of Devon to meet him at Powderham Castle. It was almost exclusively a family party, Mr. Sadler, Vicar of Honiton, being the only exception besides myself. The Primate, attended by his daughter, now his only secretary, was a touching spectacle. Lady Anne Wood did the honours of the well-known historic pile which occu- pies so high a place in Devon story and Devon affections. It was Friday, if I remember right, and I was asked to remain over the Sunday. As I had a clerical friend staying with me and taking most of my duty, I could easily accept the invitation. The Primate and his devoted secretary had work all the day, and showed little. 28 ARCHBISHOP TAIT AT POWDERHAM CASTLE. One evening Lady Anne planted me on a sofa near the Primate, who at once began on Oxford acquaint- ances and Oxford doings. Of everybody and every- thing he spoke with a bright and tender kindness. His gentle and admiring allusions to Ward made me feel a little ashamed of the budget of grievances my soul still harbours with that gentleman. He talked most pleasantly of the Newmans, and reminded me of an incident I had long forgotten. While the Cardinal that now is was standing at the north side of the Altar at the old Margaret Street Chapel, a black cat suddenly descending, nobody knew whence, lighted on his shoulder and bounded off, nobody could see whither. Three or four years difference of age make much difference in mental recollections, and I was flattered to find the Primate had a distinct recollection of me in Oriel Common Room. He thanked me much for my book on Cardinal Morton. I had sent Lord Devon a copy also, and he very kindly had it laid on the drawing-room table. It had made the Primate acquainted with the very remarkable and utterly forgotten fact that his prede- cessor Morton had done the honours of Rome to the French King Charles VIII. and his army, on their return from the so-called conquest of Naples, when the Pope (Borgia) and all his own cardinals found it expedient to be out of the way at Orvieto. Morton had been present, with thirteen other cardinals, at the state reception of the king by the Pope, on the former's first passage through Rome, and had wit- nessed the succession of expedients by which each struggled to assert his pre-eminence. CANTERBURY AT ROME. 29 In regard to another matter, it was on his second visit that Charles VIII. laid the first stone of the Trinita di Monte, the first church in Rome with that dedica- tion, on the site of the temporary church used by his soldiers on their previous month's sojourn at Rome. The Primate kindly invited me to call at Lambeth the ensuing February, when he would take me over the Palace and show me what Morton had done there. I accepted the invitation, but when February came there was not a day I could have spared for so happy a pilgrimage. I was rural dean. I had to visit twenty churches, some near twenty miles off, and very inaccessible. I had to prepare candidates for Con- firmation. I had to accompany the Bishop in his little tour of the rural deanery. So I had to break my engagement. Calling at Lambeth later in the year, I found the Primate had left special directions that I was to be shown everything and receive all possible assistance. Having had to write to Golightly a few days before my visit to Powderham, I thought to amuse him by mentioning it. He wrote to me, enclosing a note ad- dressed to the Primate, with a particular injunction to deliver it with my own hand. This I did, though not quite liking the job. The note would not contain dynamite, but there are degrees of explosiveness. The Primate opened the note, glanced at its contents, and, with a pleasant smile, put it in his pocket. Going the round of our contemporaries, he took for granted I must have been well acquainted with his brother-in-law Spooner, whose influence had told so much on Mrs. Tait. I certainly remembered him 30 ARCHBISHOP TAIT AT POIVDERHAM CASTLE. very well as a mild and amiable member of our Oriel circle ; but he was several years my junior, and when I saw anything of him he was rather the recipient than the medium of impressions, and not even re- ceiving impressions in a demonstrative manner. It must have been in after years that he acquired force of character and of manner to impress his sister, indeed his brother-in-law too, as he appears to have done. But everybody who compares his early con- temporaries with their life careers will have been struck by the frequent discrepancy between the promise and the fulfilment, most apparent when really there had been no promise at all. I cannot for the life of me recall what led to my next move. It could not be any question as to my place in the Class List ; nor was it any allusion to my inconsistencies. I blurted out that most of the time I was at school, all the time I was at college, and for many years after, I had been under a very strange, if not absolutely evil, possession, a philosophy begotten in me, somehow or other, by my frequent conversation with an early instructor, the father of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The Primate was astonished and amused. Open- ing his eyes and his mouth, he awaited further revela- tions. I cannot have said a word on the matter for forty years, and how I came now to select the Primate of all England for my father confessor I can't conceive. I had to go on, and as I attempted to make things intelligible he asked me some per- tinent questions. Had I published anything on the subject ? How had it affected my writings generally ? In what respect did the process I had aimed at differ PHILOSOPHY AND LEGEND. 31 from the natural growth of all minds that is, all that do grow ? Of course he observed on the utter antagonism of such a method as that I tried to describe with the principles of the Oxford school. Though I wished to explain myself further, it was a happy deliverance when Lady Anne came up, pro- posed to introduce me to some one else in the room, took me off, and planted some one else tete-d-tete with the Archbishop. My monopoly of his presence had been long enough in all conscience, for I now remember I had favoured him with one of the derivations which experi- ence has taught me to inflict sparingly on old acquaint- ances. He alluded to my pictured chancel screen. What other figures were there ? These I enumerated. One I dwelt upon, either wholly forgetting what the Archbishop would have to say to it, or upon some latent suggestion. This was St. Sidwell. As painted on my chancel screen she carries a scythe over her shoulder, and her own head in her hands, a glory taking its place. The legend, I believe, is that upon some trial of her faith she fled across the corn-fields, and was pursued by the reapers, one of whom cut her head off with a sweep of his scythe. I derived the legend from its root, which I supposed to be the river Sid in my rural deanery. It is so called, I said, from its sinking or settling down into the shingle and sand before it reaches the sea. The Sid would have a source, which would be called Sidwell, as in the case of Clyst Wellham, corrupted into Clystwilliam in my own village. The locality of Sidwell would give a name to a family. This would be latinised into Sativola, the name of the saint. But Sativola if 32 ARCHBISHOP TAIT AT PO WDERHAM CASTLE. it means anything, means flying over a harvest-field. The martyrdom described would be a natural con- clusion, and my picture would be the orthodox repre- sentation. I added that no doubt the picture, which is not uncommon, had probably suggested the old story of the Irishman carrying a scythe over his shoulder, and, upon seeing a salmon in the water, striking it with the but-end of his implement, when, as the story goes, he cut off his own head and his neighbour's right ear. This I have seen in a caricature representing the head falling before him. As soon as I came to the name Sidwell the Arch- bishop said, ' Oh, come, let me hear about that name, for you know I am much interested in it.' As to my story he maintained a polite reserve. I see the Sit- wells of Rheinshaw derive the name from one Sca- wald, or Scadwald. There is not much to be made of old spelling. The English Liddells and the Irish Lidwills are of the same original stock, but the former derive the name from Lyddale. It must have been on the afternoon of Saturday that all went out together to the point where the pleasure-grounds resolved themselves into woods, and where one saw less of the castle and more of the country. The Primate had been well packed up in a Bath-chair, Lady Anne taking care of him. He invited me to accompany them round the woods. I suppose most people would say they would rather die than not accept such an invitation. That was exactly the choice I had to make ; so I felt ; and I concluded not to die immediately. It was cold. A DISAPPOINTMENT. 33 The air of the woods was dank. The pace had been a creeping one. The stoppages had been frequent. I felt a deadly chill coming up my arms. Three or four months before this I had had a serious warning, and had had to call in the doctor, the first time for half a century. It had, I believed, been the result of a chill. With extreme mortification, I declined, stating the reason ; and Lord Devon kindly took me at a brisk pace a wide reach round the domain, which may be described as an extensive spur of the Great Haldon, commanding the valley of the Exe. Among other remarkable specimens he showed me what I had not believed to be possible in this climate. It was a eucalyptus, that had attained the size of a full-grown forest-tree, with two feet diameter of solid wood. It was not the variety which runs into long pendent branches ; the leaves were small and few, affording little hope of further growth. It had never borne any of the blossoms whose beautiful and elaborate goblet-and-lid-shaped envelope gives the name to the tree. CHAPTER VII. RITUALISM. AT Powderham Castle there was morning and even- ing service in the chapel. This was part of the old building, whether originally a chapel I know not, but VOL. I. D 34 RITUALISM. now of a thoroughly ecclesiastical character. The chancel screen was temporary I think. In the order of the day, posted about the house, I saw that there was early Communion on Sunday. There had been some negotiation with the Bishop of the Diocese on the subject ; for though the community of a castle may be regarded as a parish, still there were parochial claims to be considered. Half-past seven had been selected as a time which would not come in compe- tition with any parish service. I think I was waked by the chapel bell, but I was in the chapel, though approached through a labyrinth of passages, before the bell went down. The congregation was assembled. The day before this I had turned to the right and taken a seat amongst the members of the household. I was now directed into the part enclosed by the screen, and I took my seat in a stall on the north side. In a minute, the Archbishop, in his overcoat, came in and took his seat opposite. In a minute more a door opened south of the Altar, and there came in the priest, and a very youth- ful attendant, both in embroidered vestments. Either there were frequent bowings and genuflections, cross- ings, an actual elevation of the Host, and a good deal more, or my imagination has overmastered me and supplied it all. The celebrant communicated in both kinds ; then administered in -both kinds to the acolyte, as I venture to call him. Then the Archbishop, crossing over, came and knelt at the rail towards my end of it. 1 took my place at his side. We received in both kinds and withdrew. Then THE CHASUBLE 35 came the family, the household, and the rest of the congregation, including about twenty young women of an industrial home I forget the exact name in the park, under Lady Anne's management. Alto- gether there must have been about fifty communi- cants. Everybody in and about the castle, I was told, communicated, except a stable-boy who had not yet been confirmed. We all went to the usual morning service at the village of Powderham. The church was full. Lord Devon read the lessons, and it was a pleasure to hear them so read. After service the Archbishop remained to look at the numerous Courtney monu- ments and the painted windows. I did also. On our leaving the church together, he turned round and asked, ' Did you ever see a chasuble worn at Com- munion before ? ' I had to make the disgraceful confession that I did not know what a chasuble was, and that I had supposed the vestment to be a cope. ' Oh no,' he replied, 'a cope encloses the whole body, leaving just room for the two hands, joined palm to palm, to come out in front,' and then he suited the action to the word. The chasuble is a close-fitting vestment, leaving the arms free, and designed appar- ently to save the ampler formation of the surplice from embarrassing the celebrant. Convenient as it is, and rather ungraceful, it is made the most of by a full-sized cross embroidered on the back. I cannot help asking my readers what creature wears a chasuble. Some will answer at once. Some would not for a hundred years. Look into any brook- flowing over gravel, and you may see a little bit of D 2 36 RITUALISM. straw, or wood, rolling over the pebbles, and coming to a short rest now and then. Fix your eyes on it, and you will see tiny legs before and behind. This is the caddis-worm, that envelops itself with a jacket of straw, or. of sand glued together, to protect its very frail structure from the points and edges upon which its lot is cast. The root of caddis and chasuble is the same. Anglers know the creature well, for it is a favourite bait ; but few of them can ever have invested it with ritualistic associations. ' I suppose,' said the Archbishop, ' all this would make a disturbance if done in a parish church.' I will not say that he added, ' People will do what they please in their own houses,' because it is what I have often said myself. The truth is, an English- man's house is his temple as well as his castle, and he reigns in it like the King of Salem, receiving homage from patriarchs and hierarchies. By the bye, has nobody with a good range of society favoured the public with a description of the many services and rituals he has had the happiness to join in ? Such a work might be commended to the attention of the gentleman who has published so many vivid pictures of the various orthodoxies and heterodoxies, and what not, to be found in the pulpits of the metropolis. ' But what opinion had the Archbishop himself of this ceremonial ? ' I seem to hear some of my readers asking. I cannot remember that he expressed either approval or disapproval. But this might be because 1 was myself in that mood. At dinner that day I found myself sitting next WHITHER THOU WOULDEST NOT. 37 the celebrant. ' I thought we should have the Arch- bishop's blessing this morning,' I said quite inno- cently. ' That is only when he takes a part in the service,' he replied. ' Otherwise his presence is not recognised.' I observed that I had been at services unconscious of the presence of a bishop, and only made aware of it by his giving the parting benedic- tion. ' They do that,' he said ; ' but it's quite wrong.' A rigid High Church friend of mine in the diocese goes beyond even the Powderham use. He has several times turned me bodily out of his chancel because I had not a surplice on, and I think him quite capable of turning out an archbishop too. The Archbishop was taken to visit the House of Mercy at Bovey Tracy, an institution conducted on High Church principles. I believe I was asked to join the party, but I could not have stood a drive of twenty miles or more in an open carriage in cold weather. Hard as I know myself to be, I should indeed have been hard not to be moved by the spectacle now for days before me. Here was a man who had attained the highest elevation possible to an English subject, only to feel the more acutely the most cruel blows of common affliction. A whole troop of little ones, his eldest son, his wife, and now the best part of his own powers and his confidence in them, had been taken away ; and, while charged with a high office and a mighty work, he had to feel that his part in it must be economised down to the strength of a child. The Canterbury succession contributes its full share to the lessons which chide ambition ; but for that 38 THE LATE PRIMATES LAST WORDS. protracted death to the world, which to those who bear it meekly is a living martyrdom, no example could beat this. I could not help being reminded of his Grace's great competitor in life's race alas, poor Yorick ! the late Bishop of Winchester. When Tait declined York, S. Wilberforce observed that no Scotchman was ever known to take the road to Scot- land. It would now be an interesting theme to com- pare their respective fortunes. S. Wilberforce was suddenly laid low, but was thereby spared a long agony, a tedious decay, and a memory charged with old and new, and still newer, sorrows. He left sons to sustain his honours, and to fight for his memory with all the pugnacity of the parent. Once again did I see the Archbishop, and that was in his own grounds, at a garden reception at Lambeth, calm, collected, and reserving his strength. I cannot remember whether it was then, or at our part- ing at Powderham Castle, that he alluded playfully to my day-dream of a new philosophy. CHAPTER VIII. THE LATE PRIMATE'S LAST WORDS. AFTER this account of my very recent and very interesting personal acquaintance with the Archbishop, I need scarcely describe indeed, I could hardly de- scribe how I felt his exceedingly kind notice of my book in ' Macmillan's Magazine.' He had bestowed EVANGELICALS. 39 on it almost the last of his strength. I have myself always found writing rather hard work, and I feared that even the fourteen columns he had given me might have contributed too much to the drain on his ebbing powers. The editor prefixed a note, which was unhappily rather out of date by the time most readers, including myself, could see it : ' The following article was written very shortly before the beginning of the serious illness from which the Archbishop is now happily recovering.' In the first week of October it was already known that the Archbishop's recovery would be slow, and was still doubtful. It was known too that he must spare himself and be spared. For some days I debated within myself whether I should write to his Grace, acknowledging his great kindness, and accepting, as I had every wish to do, and now solemnly do, his gentle rebuke for the asperity or rather exaggeration of my tone on the Evangelical party as I had known it sixty years ago. In my book I have spoken with affec- tion, or respect, of many Evangelical clergymen, numbering some of them among my dearest friends ; but I confess to an expression here and there of the sort that is apt to disfigure reminiscences and make them sour reading. But if I had written to the Archbishop at all I should certainly have felt myself obliged to respond to one particular passage, which I, and I suppose most people, regarded as the very point of the article. It had evidently been written carefully, and in full view of some chapters in my book which I had myself felt to require apology. I could not infer that the Archbishop agreed with me ; 40 THE LATE PRIMATE'S LAST WORDS. but, taking me at the worst, it was plain that he was prepared to claim toleration for me. The passage in ' Macmillan ' to which I refer is as follows : But meanwhile, throughout the length and breadth of England, what is the view of Christianity which is welcomed by the great mass of intelligent, religious men ? It is often said that Arnold is the father of the scepticism which unfortu- nately prevails so largely in much of our periodical literature, and those whom it leads. No statement can be more utterly untrue. Men point to the much loved character of Arthur Clough, and the way in which his faith seemed shaken from its foundations ; but his case was most peculiar exposed to the overwhelming influence of two contending torrents, one leading him to Rome, the other to the fathomless abyss of an unknown scepticism. It is not fair to argue from isolated and extraordinary examples. I repeat my opinion, that the life and letters of Dr. Arnold, and the last two volumes of his sermons, set forth that view of a comprehensive, loving, yet zealous Christian teaching, which approves itself to the conscience, and seeks to be embodied in the lives, cf the vast majority of intelli- gent persons throughout the kingdom. There is no talk here of high, or low, or broad. I believe that the best men of the time have a dislike of all ' schools of theology.' They desire a religion which shall save them and their neighbours in life and in death, without tying them up to unnatural phrases, or locking up their feet whether they will or no in the stocks of some antiquated system of discipline. Christ and God ever present, the Holy Spirit blowing where He listeth, the regu- larly ordained and familiar ordinances of the Church, are far more to them than any technical definitions or strict orders of the schools (p. 422). The whole article, and this paragraph in particular, became immediately the subject of excited and not quite respectful comment. It was described as 'super- ficial,' as indicating mental decay, and as something like a scandal, proceeding as it did from the pen of an Anglican Primate. Had I then ventured to make any ARNOLD. 41 acknowledgment, public or private, I had to consider well what I should say. This was a matter beset with difficulties, among which my own prejudices were not the least. I could not easily, or rightly, detach the consummation here desired from Arnold's teaching, and I know little or nothing of his later sermons and their final development. From the date of his unfor- tunate article on the ' Oxford Malignants ' to his death, I had been in Salisbury Plain, seeing no new publications except those sent to me. I shared the universal shock of the news of his sudden death. There reached me various reports of his softening of character, and his tenderness towards Newman. These reports, as it appears, multiplied the fact in my apprehension, for I am told that on his coming up to read his Lectures he met Newman only once, and could have but a short talk with him. Anyhow, I find myself incapable of discussing Arnold's opinions or wishes, and I must be content to leave them out of account. The matter seemed to lie between the Archbishop and myself, and I felt I could not address him without seeming to ask for some sifting of words and compari- son of ideas, either binding him to what he had said, or suggesting qualifications. I must not be in a hurry. Who would extract further admissions, or seek con- troversy, with a man on a sick bed ? At all events he would wait there for me. Soon one heard of the fatal relapse, and, after a long hanging between life and death, all was over. The words remain, and it would argue strange insensibility, and a still worse indifference, to a great 42 THE LATE PRIMATE'S LAST WORDS. question not to follow up what certainly reads like an invitation. I could not, at least I did not, avail my- self of the Primate's invitation to walk by his side round the Powderham domain, or his very express invitation to go with him the round of his own palace. But I can plead no infirmities, no engage- ments now, and I will do what I can to make up for my former defaults. But before I enter upon this very serious under- taking, I must take a hint from the poor lady in the ' Arabian Nights.' As I am about to offer myself for execution, I will obtain at least a long respite. It will not be in this chapter, or in the next, or for many a chapter, or even in this volume, that I shall distinctly offer myself as a messenger of peace from the late Archbishop's deathbed. I am entitled nay, I am bound to say what I am. I find myself described as a ' journalist,' above all things ; as out of my place in Orders or in the Church of England ; as more than half an Arian ; as bizarre, confused, half Popish, half rational ; as not knowing, or very much caring, what I am ; and as leaving others in a perplexity more painful to them than to myself. It would be tedious to enumerate all the pretty compliments of this sort that have been paid me. As these writers are anonymous, I do not know whether they are clergymen or not, but they seem to think of me exactly what I think of them viz. that they are but amateur theologians, with no body or basis of theology, and making up for the want of it by sharp criticisms. A large portion of our Christian people substitute SOMETHING MORE THAN A WRITER. 43 denunciation for religion. Possibly, however, some of these might be honest in their opinion that I knew and cared more about other matters than theology, or any spiritual question. With a little inquiry, these honest folks might have ascertained that I have had the charge of rural parishes altogether twenty-eight years ; and with a little more inquiry they might have learnt that I have resided as regularly and stuck to my duties as closely as any of my predecessors or succes- sors, and that I had always evidently taken pains in my preaching and teaching, as to what I should say in the pulpit, the cottage, and the school. CHAPTER IX. A PARSON FROM THE CRADLE. I CANNOT remember the time when I was not to be a parson, but what marked me for it is more than I can say. I was always unready. I never could answer a question sharply put. At the end of every term at Oriel I had to appear before the Provost and Tutors, and to be examined in the work of the term. I had all my books with me. The instant I put them down on the table the Provost invariably asked, 1 What have you been doing this term, Mr. Mozley ? ' and then, with the books before me, I could never answer a word. I was never either fluent, or distinct. I was never completely intelligible, or, indeed, always audible. 44 A PARSON FROM THE CRADLE. I was very liable to momentary forgets, transposi- tions and misplacings of words. When our chapel was being enlarged at Charterhouse we had our Sunday services in the Under School, and once or twice Russell called on me to read the Lessons. I still see the looks and hear the tones elicited by my reading, with all the energy I could muster, ' Your tires shall be upon your feet, and your shoes upon your heads.' I had never much presence or variety of accom- plishment. I remember Thackeray, after enlarging on the high qualities and multifarious acquirements of John Oxenford, turning round to me, and, whether to soften or to enforce the implied com- parison, adding, ' Oh, you're a bishop, but Oxenford's a man ! ' But this was not meant to be a compli- mentary recognition of my clerical character. As a simple fact, till I went to Charterhouse I was weak, puny, and, I am afraid, fractious, and rather mischievous ; as well as shy, absent, and slow. Oftener than my brothers I received from my father the gentle rebuke, ' You've as many megrims as a dancing bear.' When I began to see London people they wondered at the length of time it took to get an answer from me. A conversation with me was like a game of chess -by the post. I was clearly unfit for business. My serious thoughts ran in the clerical direction, and I have related elsewhere how eagerly I took the cue offered me in the incident of the ' Country Spec- tator.' It was not that I thought of Orders as the road to promotion. My brother James always showed CLERICAL DREAMS. 45 a just appreciation of dignities. I never did. They involved too much responsibility, trouble, and self- restraint. We both of us wished to be preachers : yet our dreams were different. He very early wished to be in the pulpit what he came to be in his publica- tions rather than in the pulpit, a great propounder of grand arguments and new truths. With him official as well as personal authority was to be something in the scale. He was to be introduced enough to pre- sent himself well to his hearers and to discard mere tricks of eloquence. At thirteen I brought James up to Oxford to stand at Corpus, and both then and on subsequent occasions had him under my care in lodgings. What incessant questions did he ask about every variety of academical vestment, every bell he heard, and every trifling ceremony ! Always too much wrapped in myself I felt torn inside out, but I answered him, doing my duty much like the iniquce mentis aselhis. Then what was my own clerical dream, if I did not dream of palaces and deaneries, or even of Uni- versity pulpits ? My dream, so far like my brother's, embraced passive and active elements, the former the groundwork of the latter. I was to be of the true seed of Aaron, and to grow up easily and quietly as an olive in the House of the Lord. Reverence was what I chiefly asked for ; but it was a very absorbing and comfortable idea, something one could always fall back upon. But reverence is a very passive idea. You can reverence with very little effort or demon- stration, and be reverenced with no stronger claims than that you are simply posing for it. Long after I 46 A PARSON FROM THE CRADLE. had ceased to be young, a Scotch lady, who had the invaluable gift of speaking her mind freely without giving offence, said, ' Mr. Mozley, you always look as if you expected to be worshipped.' It was too near the truth. I had always felt I had a right to be lis- tened to. But a dream, if it condescends to human affairs, must have some active element, and this in my case was a wish to be eloquent, not in a showy and declamatory fashion, but by appeals to those who already thought and felt as I did. At my Derby school we had to learn by heart bits of forensic or parliamentary eloquence ; but these I did not care for, and never learnt them well. Most prob- ably I did not understand them. With this very trifling exception, there was nothing in my education to develop any power of speech. The fact tha-t all the living eloquence was then on the side of revolu- tionists and dissenters enemies of Church and State was against it in our little circle. Orthodoxy and loyalty must be studied, written, and dry. I used to attend the Assizes regularly, and I heard very good speaking, but it gave me no wish to be a barrister. Indeed, I could never hope to be as humor- ous as Vaughan, as logical and dogged as Clarke, or as silver-tongued as Denman. From 1815 to 1832 there was not a single Derby clergyman who could be called eloquent, though no doubt they said much that I had better have listened well to. But during this period, and long before, there were many preachers, not of the Church of England, very eloquent in their respective ways, and wherever they came they drew crowds of eager SOME GREAT PREACHERS. 47 listeners. Domestic servants generally went where they pleased, and took the children where they pleased. I remember being taken to hear a great dissenting preacher at Gainsborough. At Derby I heard Robert Hall, and some Wesleyan stars. In town I heard Rowland Hill, Edward Irving, and other well-known preachers. Everybody returning home from a fort- night in town was asked what preachers he had heard, and what he thought of them. Extempore preaching was very rare in those days, and was thought almost miraculous. It was just be- ginning to find a place in education. In some religious families the little children were taught to preach, or at least to write short sermons. William Cayley, in my house at Charterhouse, used to boast that he preached at home every Sunday. He did not want for courage or for tongue. But to none of the examples I have named could I ascribe my ineffectual aspiration after eloquence. Robert Hall was fluent, easy, and agreeable ; but he was monotonous, he seldom rose to eloquence, he made no hits, and he had a snuffle which could not but annoy strangers. Rowland Hill, when I heard him, was long past his best days, and I remember him with reverence and a certain liking rather than anything to call admiration. Edward Irving was a prodigy, but not in my lines. His sentences were so long and so involved that no organ but his own could have taken a hearer into them or out of them. It was such a work of intonation and accentuation. I heard him preach for more than two hours my father thought it had been only one hour and I was sorry when he 48 A PARSON FROM THE CRADLE. stopped ; but he inspired no rivalry. The Wesleyan preachers I heard were earnest and vigorous, but jarred a little on one's taste. In proportion as all these preachers were classical, or what we should call educated, they introduced little Scripture. In proportion as they quoted texts they failed in style. But when style, that is, good taste, is once given up there ensues descent to a lower and still lower depth. For really powerful preaching all depends on that earnestness of tone and manner which implies and conveys absolute conviction. But this requires very little education nay, it finds in education its greatest difficulty. The most ignorant and unin- formed man can deal with a few simple truths better than the scholar who has been elaborating them into form all his life, and he can apply a score or two familiar texts better than the well-read critic or polemic. Had the plan of my life been an intention and a design, deliberately formed in a manner I was con- scious of, and for tangible reasons, I might have pursued it better and more consistently. As it was I allowed other fancies to come in the way, without much caring how far they were compatible with what I simply believed to be my destiny ; just as the old Pagan divinities exercised much free will and licence under cover of certain irresistible Fates. Any time from eight years old to fifteen I should have been delighted to run away from school or home, and find myself at sea anywhere between the Equator and the Poles, fighting Frenchmen or whales, no matter which. But as it would be wrong, and was also THE AMPHIBIOUS INSTINCT. 49 impossible, I could only dream, and my clerical destination was a fact. The sight of water in any quantity always took me out of myself, and seemed to change my very nature. A broad river reach, a good big pond, or a swimming-bath was enough. Is this inherited, or an accident of early formation ? Are we chickens, or ducklings, or sea-gulls from the egg? I stood one bright summer's day on Filey Brigg with my father, watching the clear blue waves rising far above our heads and falling in white foam at our feet, and felt an almost irresistible desire to plunge into the rising and falling wall of waters. My father remon- strated. I thought I knew better, but, happily, obeyed. Some years after, late in an evening, I was actually on the point of going into a pretty considerable surf in Alum Bay, in the Isle of Wight. Some men chanced to come up, and one of them said, ' Sir, if you go into that water you will never come out again.' Scarcely believing the warning, I felt it my duty to act upon it. Taking headers into the pool under the floodgates below Sandford Lasher was one of the most delightful of my Oxford enjoyments. It is an excellent imita- tion of danger, with just enough of the reality, for lives have been lost there, besides some placed in great jeopardy. I have seen the like instinct frequently cropping up under apparently adverse conditions. A bright farmer's daughter exclaimed one day, ' I do so love the water ! ' As two of her brothers were at sea, and the sea itself was not more than a dozen miles off, I VOL. I. E 50 PARSONS AND PARSONS. thought she might have had a taste, or at least a sight, of the sea. On my asking the question it appeared she had never seen a larger piece of water than her father's cattle-pond. CHAPTER X. PARSONS AND PARSONS. VERY early an old Gainsborough friend of our family, whom I and my brother John visited after our migra- tion to Derby, said my father had made a great mistake in marking out John for the man of business, and me for the parson. I rather think my brother thought so too. He was too dutiful even to complain, though his innermost heart's wish was to go to college. But when his elder brother broke loose from the business, John had to be put in his place. For myself I never doubted or criticised my clerical destination. There are those who think such destinations in- jurious. They would rather a man graduated in some other vocation, and in that way mixed upon more equal terms with the world : well in it, and rising through it, before claiming to be wiser or better than it. My own experience, but I must confess also my own predilections, are much in favour of the priest, or the Levite, or at least the Nazarite, from his birth. It is something to fall back upon, and that cannot be easily shaken off. My own retrospect suggests that there is much ARCHIBALD FOX. 51 more to be said for another objection to the common run of clerical careers. That objection is, that you set a man to preach to others for the salvation of their souls, who never felt the least anxiety as to the salvation of his own. He is to cry danger who never felt it ; he is to invite to a banquet who never hun- gered, to wells of life who never knew thirst Speak- ing for myself, I cannot remember ever to have felt a misgiving as to my own salvation. I was, so I felt, on the right road. I might diverge into flowery paths on the right hand or the left, but the road was still in sight, and easily regained. I might rest, and be too thankful, but a little extra exertion would soon make up for lost time. There was always the sense that I was saved. I remember having an hour's discussion with Archibald Fox, a pupil of Chalmers, in which he argued that every Christian course must be preceded by a terrible trial, a struggle between life and death, the agonies of one dying to the world before hi? spiritual rising again in Christ. I maintained that such moods were exceptional ; I think I even believed them to be morbid. True growth in grace I believed to be regular, like the growth of a healthy plant or a vigorous human frame. As for healthy plants and vigorous frames, perhaps the less .1 now say about them the better ; but I now cannot help seeing that few men, if any, have had much power, or even desire, to win souls who have not themselves gone through the dark and dismal passage which poor Archibald described, and from which I fear he never himself completely emerged. E 2 52 PARSONS AND PARSONS. My ideas of eloquence began, and ended, with the eloquence of the Bible. Of course, such a model must end as it began, unless I could believe myself inspired like Malachi Macbriars. The sublime poetry of the Old Testament, and the words of our Lord, defy imitation. There is nothing equal or second to them and woe to the rash imitator ! When the preacher mounted the pulpit to address listeners fresh from these sublime utterances, they could not but feel a vast interval. But in this very interval was there not space for something better than the pulpit eloquence of the period ? Meanwhile, for many years, there was no pressure upon me. I had not to preach ; I might still indulge in a dream without putting it to proof. At length I had to prove it. I took orders, and had to preach. I soon found that I could not hope to be eloquent. I had grown into a priest, but not into an orator. My pleasant ideas of spontaneous growth and happy development had been a bad foundation for the acquirement of a gift which eminently demands application and exercise. An old friend of mine, at once shrewd and kind, once told me that he would answer for my emptying any church, give me time for it. Happily I had been long before him in the discovery. I had a good deal to make up for, and by every means in my power I had to compensate for the want of the one special gift which, it may be said, dispenses with all other means of attraction, or usefulness. I could teach, for I had learnt that at Charterhouse. I cculd show, what indeed I felt, a neighbourly and WHAT I COULD DO, WHAT 1 COULD NOT. 53 even pastoral interest in those that Heaven had entrusted to my care. From childhood I had felt with passion, indeed with weakness, the sufferings, the indignities, of poor working-people. The senti- ment found more scope in the country than in the town, where labour marshalls itself into armies and assumes an arrogant bearing. For the first four years that I was in orders I had my fellowship as well as my living, and was a bachelor a rich man indeed, so far as means could make me. I could easily and honestly be liberal with my money, and this sort of charity both the giver and the receiver feel to cover many sins. All these subsidiary and adventitious aids I employed to make myself as acceptable and useful as my defects of enunciation and expression would allow. I could not envy gifts which I could not attain. I had no right to complain that Heaven had given me some of its gifts, the rest to others. I feel very sure that I would rather have stood in my shoes, and in threadbare garments, or even in a labourer's smock frock, with nothing on earth T could call my own, able to constrain the ears and hearts of a rustic crowd to the message of mercy and grace, than be the possessor of all that Fortune could bestow in her fondest and most capricious mood. Such was the spirit, and such the measure of myself, and with that I began a clerical career not continuous indeed, yet never completely interrupted now extending over half a century. Have I a right to speak on matters deeply af- fecting the position and efficiency of the Church of 54 FROM CONISBOROUGH TO DONCASTER. England ? It has been denied. I have been told that I am not really of her, and that I am more of the world than of the Church. As far as regards the claim of the world to regard me as her son, I often think of the saying of a nobleman to Lord Anson, the circumnavigator, ' My lord, you have been round the world, but never in it' If I am in anything it is the Church of England, not the world : that is, I am in and of the Church of England, but not as far as it is the Church of the world. CHAPTER XL FROM CONISBOROUGH TO DONCASTER. WHO am I ? How came I here, before you, my reader ? How was I formed ? How did I form myself ? How far was I formed by birth, circum- stances, and what people call accidents ? These are questions which everybody may well ask himself from time to time, for they affect his responsibility they should instil caution, they should move gratitude. In the interest of truth it is wise to inquire, from time to time, how one has been led up to it, how far possibly led away from it. Few of us know how much we owe to parentage, to our country, and to the religious community we were born in. But these are not everything. That were as much as to say that there is no truth at all, and no promise of a Power leading to all truth. Moreover, readers and THE FOUNDER OF OUR FAMILY. 55 hearers have a voice in this matter. It is always assumed, with good reason, that anybody who cares to read what a man has to say on important subjects may wish to know something about him. First for my ancestry. Now, my dear grandson, my good nephews and nieces, and great-nephews and nieces, do not excite yourselves. I seem to hear you exclaim, ' Pray give us somebody to be proud of ; or hold your tongue.' I will do the best I can for you. I cannot give you a Norman knight, or a Scandi- navian pirate. I cannot give you a rebel, or a Church robber, or a regicide. Our name is Saxon, and describes the wide, spongy, irregular lane, or 'green,' forming the approach to a village, much cut by wheel-track, and potched, or trod into ' pockets,' by cattle. There are, or were, many such ; so of course there are many of our name, spelt in one way or another. But our name represents only one line of ancestry. I must have had about a hundred ancestors living two hundred years ago, all contri- buting to the blood that flows in these veins ; but I will take the particular ancestor that I happen to know something about. He lived at Conis- borough, in Yorkshire. In the reign of Edward III., one William Mosley was Constable of Conisborough Castle. Why do I mention him ? I seem to see my nephews and nieces reassuring themselves. Wnat reason have I to think that we are descended from him ? None whatever that I know, beyond the name. There is no external evidence, or internal either. I am sure that I should not myself ever have made a Constable of a Castle. 56 FROM CONISBOROVGH TO DONC ASTER. I doubt whether I should have kept the enemy out, but I am certain I should not have kept the garrison itself in order, or duly economised the provisions. In my best days I should never have been fit for a place in the constabulary of our times. I should neither have been terrible to pickpockets, nor wel- come to the area. A good many years ago I was walking down St. James's Street one afternoon, when I saw Denison and Woodgate walking up arm in arm. ' These fellows have been lunching,' I said to myself. The instant of our encounter Denison exclaimed, for me to hear, ' Here comes Mozley. Doesn't he look like a police- man?' As far as I can see myself, I think I might be imagined a 'detective.' In Berkshire a policeman, stationed I believe on my special account, took much needless care of me for several years. At last, for an indiscretion that is, for knocking a disorderly ruffian down and not duly reporting it, thus giving the ruffian the whip-hand of officers and magistrates he was degraded. There- upon he hastily resigned. So the authorities sent him down to find out the pilferers and purloiners at the Portsmouth dockyards. In a very short time his body was found in the dock. I might myself have achieved that brief career, with its little halo of sentimental regards. But I must return to Conisborough. Some time before the Glorious Revolution there was born there my great-great-grandfather. He was a weaver whether master or man, I know not. He was prob- ably both, for in those days the men worked their A WEAVER* S SON. 57 own looms. He had fourteen children, whose educa- tion had to be neglected. It was not, however, for- gotten. ' If you want education you must get it yourselves,' was the stern decree. My great-grand- father Henry saw only one escape from the misery and ignorance about him. He had already been taking lessons in the school of nature, seeing what animals did at the last pinch, and learning a little of their craft. Playing one day on the mound of the famous ' Keep,' he saw a tired fox creep up and disappear in a hole in a wall. The huntsmen soon came. ' Have you seen the fox ? ' one of them asked sharply. ' I don't know where he is,' was the evasive reply, which time did not allow them to question. My ancestor accordingly, at a very early age, hired himself to a farmer to follow the plough one day and go to school the other. He had to keep himself, and he lived on oatcake and oatmeal por- ridge. He must have made great progress, for at a very early age he went to an attorney's office at Doncaster in some humble capacity, and no doubt did much engrossing, for he became an exquisite penman. He was also a good accountant, and he must have been a great reader. My own handwriting not that which now meets the compositor's eye, but such as it was in its golden age, and before I wasted the precious patrimony in scribbling is no doubt direct, through three descents, from the weaver's son and from Conisborough school. My father's hand was always as good as copperplate. Every line of it might have been engraved as a copy 58 FROM CONISBOPOUGH TO DONCASTER. at the head of a page in an exercise-book. I may say that my father never wrote a single letter of our rather slippery alphabet out of shape. But it was the hand of a schoolmaster, or of a banker's clerk, whereas the weaver's son wrote the hand of a scholar of the good old school. My father was his grandfather's pet and favourite, as I became his ; and was most like his grandfather as I was most like him. Adoption, in the old Roman sense, has very little place in English law or usage. Families are generally large enough to dispense with the necessity, while ba- chelors are generally too independent to fetter them- selves with quasi- parental obligations. But adoption within the family that is, the acceptance of a child as inheriting the largest share of the parent's nature is common enough, and frequently inevitable. Notwithstanding the chance of encountering un- desirable relatives, my father always hailed back to Conisborough, as the nest of the family. In 1842, three years before his death, he took me to Gainsborough, spending a night at Conisborough on the way. I afterwards found that my mother had wished to accompany him, but he preferred me. This was to be a pilgrimage, not a progress. After exam- ining the Castle, we walked into the village. Immedi- ately upon our entering it, a pretty girl of thirteen or so left a group in advance of us, walked up to my father, and, with a slight curtesy, presented him with a bouquet. Without waiting for any kind of reply, she turned on her heels and rejoined her companions. I was sentimental or superstitious enough to feel it must signify something that I did not know of. LIVE AND LEARN. 59 Our quarters at the village inn were straitened, and we occupied the same bedroom. In the morning I put on my coat and waistcoat together, as I always did. My father was astonished. He had never seen it done before, and it did not seem to have occurred to him that it was possible. Yet my father was a very ingenious man. I remember him frequently throwing a lighted paper into his boots before drawing them on, in the belief that a certain amount of suction would follow the cooling of the heated air. The belief itself would be a substantial element in the process. My father wore spectacles from the age of fifteen. Going out birds'- nesting with his schoolfellows, he found that any of them would see a nest before he did. This led to the discovery that his eyesight was at fault, and that both for near and for distant objects. For nearly as long as I can remember he wore spectacles of four different foci. The two eyes required different foci, and each glass was subdivided into an upper focus for walking, and a lower focus for reading. He had often to ex- plain this, for to the uninitiated it looked as if the glasses were broken. CHAPTER XII. FROM DONCASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH. FROM Doncaster, the weaver's son went to Gains- borough. To modern ideas, at least to such as prevail in the south of England, this must seem a downward 60 FROM DONCASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH. step, but I am not quite sure that even in these days any one in that region, having to make his way in the world, would so regard it. Gainsborough was then rapidly rising as an inland port for London and Baltic shipping on the one hand, and for canals, or ' navigations ' as they were called, on the other. Lincoln was no longer a port. This may seem very superfluous information to some of my readers, so I must explain. The Romans, though able now and then to make a great effort and scour the seas, generally relied on their military system, their hold of the strong points, their frontier fortifications and garrisons, and their lines of communication. They preferred to be at a little distance from the open sea. They made, or possibly only improved, a canal from Lincoln to Torksey, eight miles off, on the Trent, protecting the junction with a strong castle. When the Danes came on the scene, they were menacing, invading, and for long periods occupying the land from the sea, of which they had command ; and for this purpose they preferred Gainsborough to Lincoln. From Gainsborough they commanded all Lindsey that is, the northern half of Lincolnshire and could provision their fleets and sally forth to land, in a few days, on any part of the eastern or south-eastern coast. As soon as the Normans had established their supremacy over both Saxon and Dane, they seem to have reverted to the Roman plan of occupation. In 1 1 21, Henry I. cleared out the canal from Lincoln to Torksey, and rebuilt the castle at the junction. The result was that eighty years after, in the reign of THE ROMAN, AND THE DANISH PORT. 61 John, Lincoln was the fourth port in the kingdom, its trade being only exceeded, and that not consider- ably, by London, Boston, and Southampton. The canal, however, required continual scouring, and must have fallen into bad condition in the Wars of the Roses. A Bishop of Lincoln then cleared and deepened the channel half the way from the Trent to Lincoln, when the work was stopped by his death, and by the Reformation, which disabled bishops from attempting great works, and set nobody in their place to do them. Taylor, the Water Poet, has left us a humorous account of a voyage made in the Forcedike Flood, as it was inappropriately called, in the reign of Charles I. It took him nine hours to do the eight miles, so much was the passage obstructed by shallows, mud, and weeds, and it was often as much as his nine men could do to draw the boat like so many horses. My great-grandfather seems to have had a good many irons in the fire, trying first one employment, then another, all apparently with success. He kept a school long enough to have scholars that did him credit and were grateful. He was an accountant and as such was frequently consulted by tradesmen in difficulties, and invited to arbitrate in disputes. He made many wills dealing with considerable pro- perties. The duplicate of the will he made for his own father is a model of penmanship and of just expression. For some time he was a grocer. For a longer time he had a windmill for the crushing of linseed. The mill I remember, but the sails had now given place to steam. The particular 62 FROM DONCASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH. process I remember to have witnessed was the forma- tion of oil-cakes by the descent of heavy weights upon horsehair bags rilled with linseed, already crushed, I suppose. There were plenty of windmills, even to my days, great and small. On high ground, a little out of Gainsborough, was a subscription windmill, as lofty as a good church tower, with a gallery round, and an automatic steering apparatus to bring the six enormous sails always to face the wind. In the outskirts of Hull there must have been twenty such mills, presenting a most formidable aspect. In the immediate neighbourhood of Nottingham there were scores of windmills, more on the scale of Don Quixote's imaginary army of giants, against which he tilted with such disastrous consequences. In 1832, I found at Moreton Pinckney a windmill which had stood in the parish two hundred years before, and had been moved twenty miles into Warwickshire, to return home again, where I found it. But windmills are now almost gone, and water-mills are following fast. The only ' Mill on the Floss ' that I can remember was an oil-mill, that is, one for crushing linseed, on the Nottinghamshire side of the Trent, one of the three oil-mills in or about the town. I have always sup- posed it worked by steam. As I write this I hear the measured and musical cadence of the three weights raised and dropped in succession on the bags of linseed. Finally, my great-grandfather started bookselling, to which his son John added printing. Now more than a century ago the latter sent for a printing-press MERSES PROF UNDO, PULCRIOR EVE NIT. 63 from Edinburgh. It went down in a gale at sea, but its place was supplied by a better, for the printing- press was then rapidly improving. Spalding, Stam- ford, and Leeds were literary centres early last century, but I doubt whether there was a printing-press in the northern part of Lincolnshire, the Isle of Lindsey, as it used to be called, or in the adjacent parts of Notting- hamshire when my grandfather was printing in 1778. It must have been the first important work of his press that now lies before me bearing that date. It is ' The Christian's Universal Companion, containing the whole Prayer Book, with Notes, a Week's Prepar- ation, a Companion to the Altar, a Manual of Private Devotion, and Tate and Brady's Version.' It is really a good book, only just suggestive of a design to evade the monopoly of the Universities and of the King's Printer. My grandfather was a favourite in the Gains- borough world, but died young of gout. His father, the founder of our family, survived to 1788, leaving what in those days was a very handsome fortune to be divided between four or five grandchildren. The father and son subscribed each a hundred pounds to the building of the bridge over the Trent and the turnpike-road to Retford, not completed till three years after the death of the survivor. I do not know whether I ought to thank my great- grandfather for changing the spelling of my name from Mosley to Mozley. The family tradition is that he had good reasons for distinguishing himself from some of the Conisborough weaver's numerous progeny. Thanks to my own father and brothers, the new spelling now holds its own and wants no changing. 64 FROM DO NC ASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH. Thus, at a very critical time, a business with a large opening devolved upon my father, then a lad of fifteen. He had brothers, but their tastes clashed. It was a case for undivided management, and my father, if not quite autocratic, was always disposed to be single-handed. One brother went into the army, another into the mercantile navy first the East Indian, then the West Indian. I have no knowledge of the retail part of the business, if there ever was a retail part. There was none within my recollection. This I state as a simple fact, for I have always had much respect for shop- keepers, holding them to have the advantage of ' mer- chants ' as they love to be called manufacturers, and warehousemen, in some important respects. The snopkeeper converses with a greater variety of classes and characters. He is bound to be polite ; to be all things to all men, women, and children ; to come into immediate contact with people's wants and fancies, and to be continually practising the little arts of rhetoric which are not to be despised. I can never forget that the first European convert to the gospel, of whom we have any particulars, was a shopkeeper, a stallkeeper perhaps, the representa- tive of one of the many firms of clothiers and dyers at Thyatira. In the thick of a great competition, and among gold-diggers and travellers of all nations, she was pursuing her trade with the usual clever instincts and kindly feelings of the shopkeeping class, and now she had something better to tell of and to offer, at least on one day of the week. The more exalted class ensconces itself in counting- MERCHANTS AND SHOPKEEPERS. 65 houses and warehouses ; it sits surrounded by ledgers and mercantile directories ; it communicates with none but its own class, its own clerks, and its own work- people. The practice of lying freely ascribed to shopkeepers need not be fatal to self-respect, or ab- solutely to truth, for the people at the bazaars in the East lie enough, and remain gentlemen, and even men of honour. Wholesale people lie wholesale. Bona- parte would have been nearer the truth if he had called us a nation of merchants and manufacturers instead of a nation of shopkeepers. I have frequently had occasion to notice that mer- chants are bad advisers in political questions. They are very greedy and exacting. They want everything to run just their own way. They quarrel with every- thing and everybody that does not quite suit their cards. They would be ready to provoke a war with all the world to obtain a monopoly of custom. At Gainsborough, which was an insignificant market-town, but a very considerable inland port, the social ascendency of the wholesale class was complete. A population of five or six thousand people in an agri- cultural neighbourhood could not create a local trade that might vie with the opportunities of a wholesale or carrying trade. The owners of wharves, ware- houses, ships, and shares in commercial enterprises became rich some at least. They speculated in the market of the world. They made ' corners ' in tallow, oil, linseed, flax, hemp, hides, timber, pitch, and metals. As soon as they had made a few thousands they enlarged and decorated their houses, getting new furniture from town or from the Continent. They VOL. I. F 66 FROM DONC ASTER TO GAINSBOROUGH. made fresh starts in politics and religion, generally with a view to mark their social superiority. They proclaimed their success in great entertainments, sometimes given once for all. I well remember such a 'house-warming' on Mor- ton Terrace, after the fortunate issue of a speculation in tallow. All the gentility of the town was there, generally examining with evil eyes the new furniture and upholstery. At the close of the evening a lady running along a passage in quest of her cloak came on a tallow candle, and exclaimed, for all to hear, ' What ! mutton, in all this finery ! ' Lincolnshire men share with Scotchmen a reputation for being rather slow to take in a joke. It was not till quite the other day that it suddenly flashed on me this was a cut at the host's successful hit in tallow. But ostentation is often a matter of business, and extravagance a speculation. My father was one of the Commissioners of Income Tax. After a long run of prosperity a merchant made a very bad failure. For many years he had returned for assessment profits to the amount of several thousands. On examination of his books it was found that he had never made any profits at all. T. FANS HA W MIDDLETON. 67 CHAPTER XIII. THE 'COUNTRY SPECTATOR.' IN the year 1792, before my father had completed his nineteenth year, there came to Gainsborough Mr. T. Fanshaw Middleton, the future Vicar of St. Pan- eras, and the first Bishop of Calcutta. At Christ's Hospital he had been for several years the school- fellow and friend of S. T. Coleridge and Charles Lamb, the former of whom had followed him to Cambridge, and had been there his most loved and cherished companion. Shortly after coming to Gains- borough he commenced, through my father, the weekly publication of the ' Country Spectator ' I suppose the first periodical the town had produced. The wit is of the period, and the style is of the century. We must remember that even Charles Lamb did not im- mediately ripen into the style we all identify with him. From childhood the book always had a great fascina- tion for me, insomuch that I am hardly in a condition to criticise, especially as I should have to admit that here and there the taste is questionable. The papers are always interesting, and also instructive, if we choose so to apply them. I might expect to find more about my native town, and also more about the stirring events of the period, for the Revolution was then raging across the Channel ; but the book is really F 2 68 THE 'COUNTRY SPECTATOR: an outpouring of old thoughts. I content myself with quoting a single paper, which may be considered a fair specimen. NUMBER V. TUESDAY, 6 November, 1792. Audire est operce pretium, procedere recte Qui rem Romanam Latiumque augescere vultis. ENNIUS. Thou, that in NEWS-ROOM holdest fierce debate On Britain's glory or its fallen state, ' To thee I call : ' with willing ear attend, And hear the counsels of your COUNTRY friend : Small is my fee ; for who would e'er delay TWO-PENCE for wisdom or for wit to pay ? The passion for News and the love of dabbling in Politics, which distinguish our nation above all others, are not confined to the Capital alone, but have found their way to the remotest parts of the kingdom. In confirmation of this remark, we may observe that in almost every market-town a room is set apart for the use of those, who wish to be acquainted with the events of the day. Hither Country Politicians and rural statesmen hasten on the arrival of the Post from London, and according to their different tenets vilify or extol the Constitution. The News-Room is a place of so general resort, and is productive of so many advantages, not only to those who frequent it, but to the body of the people in the Country, that it well deserves the notice and commendation of the Country Spectator. I shall, therefore, devote to-day's specu- lation to a display of the great utility of News-Rooms, and shall subjoin a few rules, which may be of use to the company, who assemble there. Since, however, it is scarcely possible that I should write on such a subject without betraying my own Political sentiments, and since I do not wish to make proselytes of my Readers by taking them off their guard, I think proper to admonish them, that I myself am a stanch friend to Demo- cracy. It is not necessary that I should give my particular Reasons for having espoused the cause of the people, since nine THE NEWS-ROOM. 69 Authors out of ten have done the same, and since it seems perfectly natural that they all should do so. If a declaimer can by his eloquence persuade the people that they are oppressed by their governors, and can incite them to take the power into their own hands, he may surely hope to be rewarded for having meliorated their condition : and tho' there is some danger that his zeal for their happiness may be misconstrued into turbu- lence and sedition, and that the mob, blind to their own interest, may turn with fury on their Teachers, yet what can they do to us Authors ? They cannot give vent to their resent- ment by laying waste our land; and as to our houses^ we live in lodgings. In estimating the benefits, which every Town derives from its News-Room, we must consider how far it contributes, by reducing the price of News, to make the inhabitants better acquainted with the Papers. It is not possible to form any accurate calculations on this head, as it must depend on many extraneous circumstances, which no calculator can take into the account. We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general rule, that of the subscribers to every Room, not above one in ten would take in a Paper to himself. I shall, therefore, in my enumeration of the advantages arising from these admirable institutions, consider them as solely producing an effect, to which they contribute in so great a degree. The News-Room, then, is a source of useful information to all who visit it. The Papers, it is well known, are among the most instructive and elegant compositions of the present day. They seldom, indeed, display much extent of learning or depth of thought ; these they very prudently leave to the compilers of those huge musty volumes, which load the shelves of libraries ; but they teach us (what are of infinitely greater importance) life and manners, and acquaint us with the most interesting events of the age in which we live. By means of them we know on what day in last week his Majesty went a hunting, or the Princesses took the air in the Park ; we learn at what hour of the morning the Prince walks on the Steyne, and at what races the Duke of York was the only gentleman on the turf. This and the like interesting intelligence is gene- rally made known thro' all the towns in our latitude, within eighty or a hundred hours after the events actually took place. 70 THE 'COUNTRY SPECTATOR? But the Papers are never so extensively useful, as in the discussion of political subjects. The freedom of speech, which they employ on these occasions, assists greatly in enlarging our ideas and divesting our minds of the silly prejudices, which we all, more or less, inherit from our forefathers. Some of them, indeed, affect to speak with reverence of the Ministry and our glorious Constitution ; but all the reputable and inde- pendent Prints nobly display the corruptions, which disgrace our Church and State ; and that we may not be bigotted to our Religion or Religious establishments, their writers very laud- ably and ingeniously compose jokes on our Bishops and Clergy. Jn a word, they teach us to despise the slavish restraints, which all governments impose, and convince us that our Rulers deserve abuse by the patience, with which they bear it. These notions properly diffused enlighten the understandings of the Country people, and cannot fail to kindle in their bosoms the fire of patriotism ; for which reason a News-Room is in a Country-Town what the sun is in the system of the universe ; it dispenses light and heat to the surrounding bodies. It is, therefore, one of the fortresses, which protect our liberties : without it we should few of us know how our Representatives are acting in Parliament, nor should we be able to gain any genuine political information, unless from the Rights of Man, and one or two other good Books, which are sold cheap, tho' not tinder vahie, for the benefit of the poor. The News-Room is, moreover, an excellent school for young students in the art of oratory. I lately visited ene of these places, in a certain town of my district, where a Politician was holding forth with exultation on the Duke of BrunswicKs inglorious retreat. I could not help forming a comparison betwixt the scene then before me and that in a London Coffee- house ; which is certainly less convenient for haranguing than the Country News-Room. In the former, before an Orator has spoken ten minutes, he is interrupted by a waiter with a message from some impertinent coxcomb in the opposite box, who deposes that he came thither for the purpose of reading and not of hearing. If the speaker has any modesty, he is compelled to be silent ; if he has none, he is compelled to depart. I have known one of these clamorous Politicians fairly ousted by an advertisement inserted in his favourite Paper, declaring that A SCHOOL OF ORATORY. 71 : The ugly gentleman in the striped coat, who sits in one of the corner boxes of the Chapter Coffee-house, and harangues his neighbours every morning from half-past eleven to one o'clock, is a general nuisance : resolved, that he be turned out.' But in the Country, where people are better bred, this uncivil behaviour is never practised ; and no man will interrupt his learned friend in the middle of a speech, for the sake of read- ing the news. I would, therefore, advise all Gentlemen who are in training for Coachmaker 1 s Hall, for Debating Lellars, or for any other places of political discussion in Town, where young speakers are liable to be abashed by interruptions from the audience, to begin their career in some snug News-Room in the North : and thus, when the advantages of such an educa- tion become generally known, they may boast of their early practice, as the Country barber signifies by a board over his door, that he has studied in London. I must recollect, however, that I am probably writing to many, who will never move out of the circle of Country Politics. I shall, therefore, conclude this week's Essay by advising them, and, indeed, all who are of the fraternity how- ever dispersed, to fix their political opinions ; that whenever they are called upon, they may be able to make the same honest declaration, which I voluntarily made in the beginning of this Paper. But since it is not always easy for men to know precisely what opinions they hold, and since a conformity to some Creed is the usual method of discovering the prin- ciples and belief of those who believe any thing at all, and even of those who ' believe nothing, I shall subjoin two Po- litical Creeds, one for the use of each of the great sects, into which the French and, of course, the English are at this day divided. They, who do libenter et ex animo subscribe to either of these sets of articles, may be assured that they are orthodox in the tenets of their respective sects. There may, indeed, be found several persons of nice consciences, who will not con- form to a single article in either of these forms of belief; but such fellows I consider as heretics, who are determined to think for themselves ; and, therefore, it is needless that I should offer them any rules, by which they may model their opinions. 1 Vid. CONNOISSEUR, No. 9. 72 THE 'COUNTRY SPECTATOR} THE ARISTOCRAT'S CfcEEfc, I. I believe that virtue and talents are attached to dignity of birth ; which is the reason that all Kings are great and good men. II. I believe in the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, who reflected on the French Revolution. III. I believe that nothing can legally be done in Church or State without a precedent ; which is the better for being found in the annals of the nth Century. IV. I believe that the vulgar in all countries are a low set of people, fit only to submit to their betters ; that they are every where treated with too much lenity ; and that they ought not to imagine that they are of any importance. V. Lastly, I believe that whatever is, is right ; and, therefore, that nothing in our present form of government can be wrong. THE DEMOCRAT'S CREED will be somewhat longer than the former, which arises from my better acquaintance with the principles of my own party, than with those of any other. I. I believe that all genius and virtue resides among the people, who are disdainfully called the Mob. II. I believe in Thos. Paine and in every syllable of. the Rights of Man ; in the Editor of the Morning Post ; and in a certain impartial publication, which ought to be more generally read, called the Jockey Club. III. I believe that all men are naturally equal, not in talents or integrity, which are, and ever will be, real distinctions ; but in the absence of all distinctions whatever. IV. I believe that a popular government is the least excep- tionable form of government, but that all government should be made unpopular. V. I believe that the present age is more virtuous and en- lightened than any preceding one, as may be proved from the spirit of reform, which all Europe is introducing into Church and State. VI. I believe that my ancestors had no right to transmit a form of government to me, for which reason / will not TWO POLITICAL CREEDS. 73 be aiding and abetting in transmitting any form of govern- ment to my posterity. VII. I believe that all men have their Rights, except the King, and that he has no rigJit at all to have any. VIII. Lastly^ I believe that whatever is, is wrong ; and, there- fore, that opposition to the present system, whatever it is, is right. , From another paper I will add a sonnet written in imitation of 'some charming lines,' as the editor calls them, in Cowley's ' Dedicatory Elegy,' which I beg also to quote : O mihi jucundum Grantee super omnia nomen ! penitus toto corde receptus amor / Ah ! mihi si vestra reddat bona gaudia sedis Detque Deus docta posse quiete Jrui ! Qualis eram, cum me tranqtiilld mente sedentem Vidisti in ripd, Came serene, tud : Mulcentem audisti juvenili flumina cantu ; 1 lie quidem immerito, sed tibi gratus erat. Tune liquidis tacitisque simul mea vita diebus, Et similis vestrce Candida flu xit aqua; At nunc c./V RIOTS. 157 cessant din that I was glad to get out. One fellow, a Bow Street runner, was in the pit. Being recognised, he was turned out. Soon after he appeared again in the pit, and seemed determined to maintain his position. But a dozen or score fellows flew on him like so many tigers. They were all down together Good heavens, such a scene ! I fully expected three or four would have been killed. Nearly all have ' O. P.' in front of their hats. Many had silver letters, which looked very pretty. The various devices the pit have to keep the noise alive are wonderful. When the curtain rises they turn their backs to the stage, making the most dreadful noises. Then two or three pronounce 'O. P.,' stamping their feet violently down during the pronuncia- tion of the letters. This was instantly caught by the whole house. You can have no idea of the effect. Then they cram themselves as close to the sides of the pit as possible, and make a road up the middle. The active fellows then race it up and down, treading of course on the seats. Even leapfrog was attempted. The play was ' Romeo and Juliet,' with ' The Poor Soldier.' All was pantomime. I declare solemnly I did not hear one word of the performance, and although a very large band of music was playing in the farce, and between play and farce, it was only at intervals you could discover it, and then only for a single moment. When any of the Kembles appear on the stage, the scene is at its climax, for then, as my paper formerly observed, it is enough to tear Hell's Concave. The audience look anywhere but on the stage, and if the players speak at all, it is a proof of their folly, for they cannot hear themselves. Nov. 1 6. I understand that in the row at Covent Garden last night, one of the ' O. P.'s ' was knocked down and kicked when down by one of the fighting Jews, and that he is now dying in consequence. I 5 8 NAT ALE SOLUM. CHAPTER XXVII. NATALE SOLUM. FROM an early date Gainsborough was a position of strategic importance. It was the highest point of the river, accessible to small sea-going vessels at all states of the tide, and at high tides to larger vessels. In my time the Smiths built ships of seven or eight hundred tons burden there. Next to the Thames, the Trent was formerly the best station for a fleet on the east coast. It could there be easily defended, and could always drop down with the ebb in a few hours, and, with a favourable wind, be at sea in a long day. Gainsborough was, and indeed still is, the most inland point in the east of England that can be reached by vessels of three hundred tons burden. On the other hand, it was the lowest point of the river that could be reckoned on for a safe crossing under ordinary conditions. Just above the old town the Trent contracts to a width of 1 10 yards. The approaches are on dry ground, only submerged by the most extraordinary floods. Below Gainsborough there were several ancient ferries in particular, one still bearing the name of Ferry Kinnard, being no doubt the spot where Edward the Confessor passed with an army upon rafts it must be supposed. That ferry, however, could only be reached over wide marshy tracks on both sides of the river, and, conse- GENES BURH. 159 quently, after a period of dry weather. The Romans had a bridge of some sort two or three miles above Gainsborough, and there are even traces of an old work. But, as I have stated above, the Roman port was Lincoln, communicating with the Trent by a canal at Torksey, where the junction was fortified to prevent surprise by piratical fleets. Gainsborough first appears in history as built from the ruins of Torksey. Alfred was married here, in the old palace then occupying the site of the still existing ' Old Hall.' It was here that Sweyn, some generations after, effected his first landing on English soil, and soon made his first settlement. His son Canute was born here, and was much more of a Gainsborough man than I can claim to be, for here he passed his youth, and here, upon the death of his father, he was proclaimed King of England by the captains of his navy. It is an old and probable tradition of the place that here he rebuked his courtiers by commanding the onward-rushing ' eagre ' to stand still. It is frequently said that Gainsborough is a cor- ruption of Danesborough ; but the Anglo-Saxon spell- ing was ' Genes burh,' and Alfred's wife was daughter of the Ealdorman of the Gainas, who can hardly be supposed identical with Danes. Gainsborough, I must add, was the most northern town outside the Trent,' while Derby and Nottingham were the most southern towns of the north of England. In the Civil War the ordinances of Parliament would take effect a week earlier at Gainsborough than at the two other towns. 160 NAT ALE SOLUM. The later history of the town is written in its domestic and its ecclesiastical architecture. The body of the church, by Gibbs, is a noble piece of building, however incongruous, and notwithstanding Mr. Britton's fierce denunciations. There was a story about the church bells and about the organ, both of which I believed to be without rivals out of London. The crimson velvet and gold fringe adorning the pulpit and reading-desk, I used to be told, were from the spoil taken after the battle of Dettingen. Gains- borough must have been an important place when Henry VIII. held his court here in the Old Hall on the I3th, I4th, and I5th of August, 1541, on his way to receive the submissions and peace-offerings of the Yorkshire malcontents. Though his progress was slow, and he diverged right and left to hawk or to hunt or to enjoy hospitalities, he left Doncaster alto- gether out of his route. The Old Hall appears in the charges against Katherine Howard, and that may possibly be the foundation of the ghost story one used to hear. It was occupied by gentry till the middle of last century, for the fourth Earl of Abing- ton, so I read, was born there. A substantial mansion near the bridge was said to have been built out of a great rising in wheat About the time I came into the world there was born in that house one who became an M.P., and a rather noisy Protectionist. Much to my amusement, he used to be quoted as an immense authority by several of the newspapers. I cannot recall ever to have seen the future champion of vested rights and sliding scales, for I was not old enough to accompany my brother THE HUNDRED OF BASSETLAW. 161 John to a juvenile party given at his father's house in honour of the son and heir. Lower down the river, that is, higher up the town, were two enormous bow-windows. They came of a successful operation in timber. Whale-oil and tallow were, I think, the most speculative articles, but hemp and flax also had great and sudden rises in our time. Half-way 'down town,' a house projected itself over a small colonnade, assuming that importance which pillars always have to the rude as well as the classic mind. The encroachment must have been in the days when there were no umbrellas, no pave- ments, no parapets nothing, indeed, to save pas- sengers from either eaves-droppings or sludge. No piece of architecture, ancient or modern, holds its ground in my memory more than the 'Pillared House,' as it used to be called. Across the river lay a region which I always regarded with a romantic interest. Man, rather than nature, had made it what it was, for there was not much to be seen in it from Gainsborough, and one could travel many a mile through it without dis- covering what one might call a landscape. But it had comfortable towns and villages, and thriving homesteads ; immense fields of wheat, or turnips, as might be ; mansions great and small, tall church towers, and, above all, the Dukeries. This was to us the first stage into England, and the world. Its wealth, its quietness, its gentility, and its nobility, pre- sented a striking contrast to the north of Lincolnshire, which I think we used to regard as what is called VOL. I. M 1 62 NAT ALE SOLUM. a ' God-forsaken ' region ; and a still stronger contrast to the industrious, speculative, half foreign, Isle of Axholme. This favoured region, this man-made paradise, westward of us, on which we put our foot on crossing the bridge, is the Parliamentary borough of East Retford, or the hundred of Bassetlaw. Few locali- ties in this century have been favoured with so many hard names. It is an anomaly, a monstrosity, a diluted rotten borough, a hybrid between country and town, a mere frog that has swollen itself in rivalry to the ox. In a word, it is a defiance of all principle. This, however, is the truest and exactest description that could be given of our whole electoral system. It was in one of the first years of the century that my father bought the house in which I and my brother James were born. He often mentioned the simple and cheap process of transfer. The house was held by copyhold under the manor of Gains- borough. He went with the vendor to an office, where the purchaser's name was substituted for the vendor's in a book, and a shilling given to the clerk, when they walked away. All my childhood was darkened by stories of the Press-gang. The king's ships hovered about the coasts, off the most frequented ports, boarded mer- chant-ships returning sometimes from long voyages, and carried off young fellows as they were on the point of revisiting their homes, often never to be heard of again. That was the fate of several of my own relatives by my mother's side, and it has often led me to ask what England will do in the event of THE PRESS-GANG. 163 a great naval war, for I cannot suppose the system of pressing will be tolerated. One of the numbers of the ' Country Spectator ' is the touching narrative of a thriving fisherman inter- cepted by a frigate on his return from a cruise, and then, after a service which promised promotion and prize-money, cut in two by a cannon-ball in one of Rodney's actions. His three sons were taken up by the Marine Society, which made two of them sailors. But there was no provision for the widow, and she soon died in a workhouse. Our servants had many stories of the press-gang, some very pitiable. By strange caprices of memory I associate them with particular spots of my native town, and never think of them without a shudder. However, the navy got hold of apprentices as well, though I believe they were legally exempt. Almost everybody about me was a volunteeer, and, I have little doubt, ready for action, and likely to do good service. It was, however, rather as trophies and relics, than for any chance of active service, that several of my father's work-people brought with them to Derby long boarding-pikes, some of which I remember being told had been actually used in the West Indies. Gainsborough was the most foreign-looking town I have known in England. The red fluted tiles, the yellow ochre doorsteps, the green outside shutters, the frequent appearance of the jawbones of whales uti- lised for garden gateposts, and, above all, the masts and spars suddenly appearing high over corn-fields, took one quite out of everyday England. M 2 1 64 NATALE SOLUM. I cannot, however, be blind to the fact that it requires any one to have been born and bred in the town to feel a positive enthusiasm for it I met some years ago on the railway the daughter of a clergyman whose living lay near the town. She had had a troubled time, and was now earning her own bread by making picturesque water-colour drawings of seats, parks, and pleasure-grounds. It chanced to come out that I was a native of Gainsborough, when she exclaimed with unexpected animation, ' I pity you.' I replied that I did not feel I had any claim to her pity. From time to time I have heard of people who had received every possible kindness from the town taking the earliest opportunity to get out of it, though they could give no reason for their apparent ingratitude. Many of the names there in my time were German, or Dutch, or from the Isle of Axholme, so often mentioned in these pages. This was a fertile plain, surrounded and protected by morasses, till an adventurous Dutch engineer obtained Charles I.'s consent to drain and reclaim them, which he did most successfully. Mr. Rudsdell, one of my own godfathers, was of foreign extraction, and one of the four trustees of the Presbyterian (Unitarian) Meeting- House. He and his wife dined with us on Christmas Day, 1814, and I stood by when my father communi- cated to him, first of his townsmen, his intention to move to Derby. The poor gentleman could hardly believe it. We often heard of him and his folks. His pleasant, good-looking daughter paid us a visit at Derby, and married in due time the young minister 'A2THP A' 'Q2 'AEEAAMIIEN. 165 of her Gainsborough congregation. His eldest son was knighted for services rendered to the Foreign Office in the Mediterranean. The father was still living at a great age in 1842, when my father took me a round of the old places. Mr. Rudsdell had moved to the pretty residential village of Morton, a mile down the Trent. We went there. Immediately after passing a bend of the road and coming in sight of the village street, we saw afar off a brilliant object in the sunshine. My father at once recognised it. The Rudsdells had brought from their continental home an immense brass door-knocker, which they attached to their Gainsborough door, and which even there attracted attention. The old gentle- man was in a genteel cottage now, but the knocker was there. It was a wasted visit, and we came away disappointed. He could not be persuaded that my father was not my grandfather, who had been more nearly his own contemporary. CHAPTER XXVIII. TWO MISHAPS. MY eldest brother used frequently to aver that he distinctly remembered the arrival of a large Cheshire cheese in a wheelbarrow the day of his birth. I cannot pretend to vie with him in my recollections, but I used to hear as a fact that after long suffering my mother had a tooth extracted the day before my 1 66 TWO MISHAPS. birth. I was so diminutive, and weakly, that upon our being initiated by Miss Holt in the severities of the Spartan system, I was told it was fortunate I had not been born in those days, as I should have been at once condemned as physically incapable of useful citizenship. Bad as this beginning was, I helped to make it worse. In 1 8 10, within the Jubilee year, the wall sepa- rating our garden from the Garfits' was in the mason's hands. He had left his ladder standing and gone off to his afternoon meal. My brother John, just five, mounted the ladder to save some ripe currants on a tree nailed to the wall. I followed suit on the ground below, stooping as I remember, and being then three and three quarters. My brother chanced to loosen a brick the only wicked thing he did in his life and it fell cornerwise into the crown of my skull, which had happily not quite lost its cartilaginous consist- ency. The result was a deep indentation, which remains to this day. I was not stunned or much hurt. I remember walking to a back kitchen to have my head washed at the pump. My parents, however, were much frightened. I had erysipelas, I believe also ophthalmia, and I was taken to Cleathorpes. Among other incidents of my journey I remember our stopping at Brocklesby to see the new Yarborough mausoleum, when, at my desire, I was lifted up to see whatever was to be seen in the lower windows. I was not apparently the worse for the accident, for next year, and for two years, I went daily ' down town ' to a school for young ladies my brother John going to the male department. The accident made MY FIRST ESCAPADE. 167 me liable to flushes, and less able to bear sunshine than other children. I may, too, possibly owe to it some susceptibilities and mental activities of an ab- normal kind. This is not my oldest recollection. I think I was only two when I escaped out of the house, with a penny in my hand, and made for Winks's fancy- goods shop, it might be a couple of hundred yards off, where I bought a very small wax doll, made, after the fashion of those days, like the Egyptian and old Hellenic deities, with no division of the lower ex- tremities. I brought him home in triumph, I believe with the idea of having him dressed like a sailor. There had already been a hue and cry for me indeed a chase, I believe. I cannot have been much older when my maid took me with a message to Mr. Yule's, I think, a solicitor at the farther end of Castead or Cascott Lane. She left me alone in the office among books and papers. I mounted on a stool and pored over some printed matter, wondering if I should ever be able to know the meaning of those long words, and already having a dreary presentiment of life's long moil and toil. I now venture to appeal to the imagination of my readers, I will not say their credulity, for I frankly tell them they may believe or not as they please. What I am about to relate certainly has much corro- boration in facts. Quite independently, the theory has suggested itself to a kind and sensible sister. In consequence of my former batch of Reminis- cences, I have found myself the object of compari- 1 68 TWO MISHAPS. sons, which I interpret to mean that there is some- thing to be accounted for. I have been given to understand that my brother James was vastly my superior in all important respects. His character, his style, his orthodoxy, his learning, his sociableness, &c., have been described by writers who never de- scribed them before, possibly because, till they saw my book, they had never seen the darker shades that would constitute a proper foil. They will now see that I have every reason to accept their discriminating judgment upon the two brothers, and that it is I, rather than any outside critics, who have most right to extol my brother's bright and felicitous personality. September 15, 1813, was my seventh birthday, and I might be excused for being a little elated, and more than usually off my guard. But my mother was ill, and could not bear a noise. So we were taken out of our usual nursery, and transferred to a front room at the top of the house, with a bird's-eye view of the market-place. The scene was new to me. I perched on a window-sill, and gazed intently on the groups standing or moving below, and the various operations in progress. It was the world, and I was absorbed in it. The market-place, I may say, is a very handsome one, and will bear comparison with many in larger and wealthier towns. It was one of my points in common with Delane. He read for some time with his uncle at a parsonage near Gainsborough, and had pleasant and respectful recollections of the market- place, indeed of the whole town. Towards the evening of this fatal September 1 5 SOLUTION OF A MYSTERY. 169 word came upstairs that another brother had arrived. This was James Jacob in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, why not in English also it is hard to say. If there be any occasion when there are mysterious transactions about us, or when we may be ourselves but not quite ourselves, it is at our entrance and departure from this visible world. Mind, good reader, I am positively challenged to account for some very extraordinary differences of character which demand explanation. I must offer the best solution I can for an otherwise inexplicable enigma. It is that when James came into the world, he, or his good genius, as that may be, had at once to look for the form in which to present himself on the stage of humanity. Now, it is well known that every seven years we finally acquit ourselves of one form and enter into another. I, therefore, was just at this moment creeping out of my old slough, and, in my own careless and slovenly fashion, insinuating myself into the new one provided for me. True to my unlucky name, I might be doubting between the new and the old. In that mystic world James appeared on the scene. He saw the as yet dull and joyless investiture prepared for him, and by its side the brighter and more advanced stage of human existence. With that keen appreciation of the better thing, and that prompt decision which always marked him, he seized my intended promotion, and left me to wriggle back as well as I could into my old faded and worn-out integument. So, instead of being seven years behind me, he was at once seven years in advance. I, on the contrary, was left an unformed, i;o TWO MISHAPS. ambiguous creature, always vacillating between my progressive and my retrogressive tendencies. On July 1 8, 1815, my brother James was one year ten months old, and I, as I have said, exactly seven years older. We went to church on the baptism of a new-born sister. James was ' taken to church ' with her, having been long before ' privately ' baptised. During the ceremony, he paid the closest attention to the clergyman, and I to him. I did not even observe that he was not himself baptised. How can I remem- ber all this ? some will ask. I have not the least recollection of it, but I cannot doubt it, for here it lies before me in my own handwriting of the very day after. My father was preparing for our reception at Derby, and I was writing letters to him by way of exercise. Here are the words : 'On the i8th of this month ' I find on looking over these letters that I always gave the day of the month ' James and Rosa were christened. James imitated almost every motion of the clergyman during the ceremony. Miss Holt is godmother to both of them.' The lady was our governess, and a deep sense of the very great obligation we were all under to her for her thoroughly conscientious teaching compels me to include her name in this record. James early insisted on apprehending whatever he saw and learning what it meant, and I believe I may say that I was myself exceptionally patient in standing the continuous fire of his interrogations. What a time indeed I had with him when I brought him up to Oxford at the age of thirteen, and had him with me several weeks ! A year or two after the above first experience of LINCOLNSHIRE A FRIEND IN NEED. 171 a public ceremony, James was taken to All Saints' Church at Derby, and, by choice, stood on the seat to command the field of action. Mr. Hope suddenly ap- peared, in his surplice, in the reading-desk it was the three-decker of the period. ' What's that ? ' called out James, so audibly that he had to be sternly hushed. My brother James could not of course remember anything of his native town, and he always seemed to think it hard that he was considered to be a Lincoln- shire man. This distaste for his county was a little aggravated by his rough treatment at Grantham school. His county, however, stood him in some stead at Oxford. Out of forty Fellows at Magdalene seven had to be from Lincolnshire, and when there happened to be no demy so qualified, the fellowship became open to the university. Through this open- ing my brother got his university position, and his long and happy home at Old Shoreham. For many years my memory was always harking back to Gainsborough. Whenever my mind was at liberty, or I chose to let it go rambling, it was not to Derby but to Gainsborough. No sensations have I ever felt so deeply and so delightfully as those of that place. The pretty faces and sweet voices of my childhood survive unchanged. The smell of the tar and of the burnt chips that greeted us at the ship- yards is to me the sweetest of odours. How trans- ported I was when I found that the sprig of lilac I had cut off and planted had actually taken root and become a tree. Hundreds of trees have I planted since, but the flood of joy has never risen to the high- water mark of that hour. The large white convol- 172 ANGELS EVER BRIGHT AND FAIR. vulus that festooned the hedges on the way to Morton still surpass all flowers in true grace and freshness. But where and when was it that I first learnt the worship of flame, and gazed for hours, I may say, on the miracle of combustion ? Was it an innate idea derived from an incident in my Irish ancestry which I have already told ? CHAPTER XXIX. ANGELS EVER BRIGHT AND FAIR. THE next thing to an infinite prospect or retrospect is a very old personal recollection. My own faculties of perception were formed by circumstances, whatever they may have been by nature. For two precious years, from five years old to seven, I went ' down town ' to the same school as my next elder brother, John ; but he to the boys' school on the ground-floor, I to the girls' school above. I was the only male in that pretty little herd, /3ovs sv a