' < i" r fl Hill II MEN I HAVE KNOWN BY THE VERY REV. FREDERICK W. FARRAR, D.D. DEAN OF CANTERBURY NEW YORK: 46 EAST UTH STREET THOMAS Y. CROWELL & COMPANY BOSTON : 100 PURCHASE STREET COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY THOMAS Y. CKOWELL & COMPANY. C. J. PETERS & SON, TYPOGRAPHERS, BOSTON. THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA BARBARA CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE I. LORD TENNYSON i II. ROBERT BROWNING 42 III. MATTHEW ARNOLD 73 IV. PROFESSOR MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY . . 93 V. A GROUP OF SCIENTISTS Doctor Whewell 126 Professor J. Clerk Maxwell 136 Charles Darwin 140 Professor Tyndall 149 Professor Huxley 151 VI. A GROUP OF EMINENT AMERICANS Ralph Waldo Emerson 154 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 155 Oliver Wendell Holmes 156 James Russell Lowell 160 John Greenleaf Whittier 162 George W. Childs 167 Cyrus W. Field 170 Phillips Brooks 173 VII. A GROUP OF BISHOPS AND CARDINALS Archbishop Tail 179 Doctor Thomson, Archbishop of York . . . 183 Archbishop Magee 185 Archbishop Trench 185 Archbishop Benson 185 Cardinal Newman 192 iv CONTENTS. Cardinal Manning . . 192 Ur. 1'usey 195 Canon Liddon 197 Dean Church 199 VIII. A GUOUP OF BISHOPS AND DEANS Dean Welleslev 200 Dean Close 202 Dean Johnson 202 Dean Herbert 202 Dean Howson 203 Dr. Blakesley 204 Professor Blunt 205 Professor Mill 206 Dean Plumptre 207 Dr. Short 209 Bishop Cotton 213 Bishop Colenso 220 Bishop of Durham 227 Bishop Moberly 230 Bishop Wordsworth 233 IX. THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD 237 LORD LYTTON 245 THE EARL OF LYTTON 257 X. REMINISCENCES OF Charles Dickens 263 W. M. Thackeray 266 George Cruikshank 267 Anthony Trollope 267 George Du Maurier 267 Lord Macaulay 268 Thomas Carlyle 272 Charles Kingsley . . 278 Judge Hughes 281 Dr. Jowett 283 Dr. Thompson 287 MEN 1 HAVE KNOWN. I. LORD TENNYSON. I HAVE been requested to write some chapters on men of eminence whom I have known; but before I begin to do so I wish to make one or two preliminary remarks, in order to obviate any misconception. One is, that the desire to catch were it but a glimpse of those who have deeply influenced their generation is in no sense petty or ignoble. Without being an abject hero-worshipper, every man or woman of cultivated intelligence takes an interest in even seeing men of unquestioned greatness, the chief figures in the age in which they have lived. The famous and the supremely gifted are, after all, very few in number. 1 2 MEN I HAVE KNOWN. There are among us many inch-high distinc- tions and petty altitudes. Doubtless, to the eyes of beings loftier than human, our whole race, apart from its spiritual destinies, may wear the aspect of a low and level plain. They may think that to us who move upon its surface " every molehill is a mountain, and every thistle a forest tree." To us, however, it is given to measure men only in relation to their fellow-men ; and we see at once how very small is the number of those who rise even to fugitive eminence, much less to permanent suprem- acy, among their kind. Further than this, our passing estimates are often rectified as years go on, and men who filled a large space in the eyes of their contemporaries are often much dwarfed in the estimate of later generations. This is perhaps specially the case with statesmen, and others whose greatness is often mainly of an official character, dependent on status more than on genius. There are inns in England now called " The George and Can- non," which were originally named in honor LORD TENNYSON. 3 of the brilliant George Canning- when he was Prime Minister; but before a genera- tion was over, George Canning was so comparatively forgotten by the common mul- titude that the name "The George Can- ning " had to them become meaningless, and had to be changed into something of more popular significance. Voltaire Lived long, wrote much, laughed heartily, and died ; and the poet supposes that he will be Praised perhaps for ages yet to come. How immensely did he loom upon the imagination of his own ofeneration ! how C> comparatively small is the space which he occupies in ours! Still, we can only take the estimates which seem in our own days truest to ourselves ; and when we regard a man as very great we are all triad to come into contact with c> him, however casually. If we have been unable to see him with our eyes, it is a plesure to us to do so through the eyes of others. 4 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. Dr. Wright accidentally describes how he went to see Milton in his old age, poverty, neglect, and blindness. It may seem a trilling matter; but would we willingly give up the glimpses we thus gain of the poet who rode sublime Upon the seraph-wings of ecstasy, as he sat " in his small house up one pair of stairs, in an armchair, in his room hung with rusty green, in black clothes, pale but not cadaverous, and his hands gouty with chalk-stones " ? or as the painter Richardson saw him in 1671, "sitting in a gray coarse cloth at the door of his house, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air ; " or "in a green camblet coat, and no longer wearing his small silver-hilted sword, but led by the hand by the bookseller Milling- ton " ? When we think of the great Kant, do we utterly despise the glimpses of him in his daily walk and his simple meals, pre- served for us by his faithful servant ? And however much we may laugh at Boswell, who does not rejoice to have gained even LORD TENNYSON. 5 from his flunkeyism so vivid a picture of Dr. Johnson ? In order to get rid, in limine, of the notion that there is anything necessarily vul- gar or trivial in such a refined and modified Boswellism as may seem to be involved in slight Reminiscences, let me give one or two instances. When we read the intense lyric of Beranger, Lcs Souvenirs du Peuple, in which the old grandmother describes how o one night she saw the great Napoleon // ava.it petit chapeau, Avec redingote grise, who does not echo the passionate interpella- tion of her young audience // rons a partt, grand'mere, 11 vans a parle ! and Le pcuple encore le revere, Out, le revere; Parlez-nous de hit, grand' mire, Parlcz-nous de lui ! We may recall, too, how deep was the interest with which Robert Browning looked on a man who had talked with Shelley. MEN I HA VE KNO IV N. Ah, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you, And did you speak to him again ? How strange it seems and new ! I crossed a moor with a name of its own, And a certain use in the world, no doubt, Yet a handsbreadth of it shines alone 'Mid the blank miles round about. For there I picked up on the heather, And there I put inside my breast, A moulted feather, an eagle's feather ! Well, I forget the rest. Mr. Browning himself once told me how important and interesting he thought it that the young should have as it were landmarks in their lives, by at least seeing great men who belonged to an earlier generation. " Once," he said, " I was walking in the streets of Paris, with my son, who was then a little boy. We saw an old man approaching us in a long, loose, rather shabby coat, and with a stooping, shuffling attitude and gait. 'Touch that man as you pass him,' I whis- pered to my little son ; 'I will tell you why afterwards.' The child touched him as he LORD TENNYSON. 7 passed ; and I said to him, ' Now, my boy, you will always be able to remember in later years that you once saw and touched the great Beranger." Next I should like to say on the thresh- old, that no one would more absolutely dis- dain than myself the ignoble chatter of mere petty gossip, and, above all, of anything re- sembling that small malign detraction which seems to have a strong attraction for mean o minds. I shall speak in this paper of Lord Tennyson and he was intensely and rightly sensitive on this subject. He expressed again and again his disdainful shrinking from the vulgar touch of impudent intrusion. We remember his lines on receiving a cer- tain volume of Life and Letters, to which he prefixed the motto, "Cursed be he that moves my bones." Proclaim the faults he would not show ; Break lock and seal ; betray the trust ; Keep nothing sacred : 'tis but just The many-headed beast should know. Still more passionate was the sense of 8 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. loathing which he expressed against these "peering littlenesses" in his poem on The Dead Prophet She tumbled his helpless corpse about. " Small blemish upon the skin ! But I think we know what is fair without Is often as foul within." She gabbled as she groped in the dead, And all the people were pleased ; " See what a little heart," she said, '' And the liver is half-diseased ! " If there was one thing which Tennyson disliked more than another, it was the speak- ing of matters which belonged only to his privacy. He regarded it as a violation of confidence to make public use of opinions which he had only expressed in the care- less ease of private conversation. A writer of some distinction had on one occasion transgressed (as Lord Tennyson considered) the bounds of discretion. He had written an account of a day which he spent at the poet's house, and in this paper had quoted remarks which were in no way intended for the world. " It is the last day," said Lord LORD TENNYSON. 9 Tennyson, " that he shall ever have the opportunity of spending at my house." No such violation of confidence will ap- pear in anything which I shall write about any of those famous contemporaries who have now " gone to the more in number." I shall utter no syllable respecting them to which, ii they could come to us once more, they would in the smallest degree object, any more than they would to the exhibi- tion of their photographs. It will, I think, be admitted that the lite- rary lustre of the generation which may be regarded as just past was far more brilliant than that of the immediate present. The years in which Byron, Shelley, Keats, Sir Wal- ter Scott, Coleridge, \Vordsworth, Southey, Charles Lamb, Mrs. Hemans, Leigh Hunt, Tom Hood, and Tom Moore were writing - the years which witnessed the rising fame of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Maurice, Kingsley, Bishop Lightfoot, Dean Stanley, F. W. Robertson, Dickens, Thackeray, Lord Macaulay, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Houghton, Clough, Sir Arthur 10 MEN 1 HAVE KNOWN. Helps, Mr. Ruskin, Froude, Cardinal New- man, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and, among our brethren across the water, of Ban- croft, Parkman, Longfellow, Emerson, Lowell, \Yhittier, and O. VV. Holmes were very much richer in literary genius than the present day can pretend to be. We have not a scientific man who can be compared with Darwin ; not a novelist who distantly approaches George Eliot ; not an historian gifted with the eloquence and vividness of Macaulay ; not a poet who can be put on anything like the same level with Tenny- son or Browning. I count it among the most conspicuous blessings of my life that my lot has been cast in an age so rich in literary power ; and I value it among many choice privileges which have been accorded me, that among these men of genius there were not a few whom I have met, with whom I have conversed, whom I have per- sonally known, and with whom I have more or less corresponded. From nearly all of them I have received expressions, always of kindliness, sometimes of something more. LORD TENNYSON. LORD TENNYSON. 11 It was when I was a youth at Trinity College, Cambridge, that Tennyson's poems first began to master the attacks of critics, and securely to hold the admiration of the world. After the Poems by Two Brothers, a volume which is now so scarce as to be highly valued by bibliographers, his first col- lection of independent poems had contained some verses which the world will not will- ingly let die ; and many enriched with that consummate gift of insight, melody, and poetic expression which at last placed him in a position never to be disturbed. W. S. Landor has said that a poet rises first slowly and waveringly, then surely and steadily, till at last he is as a bird soaring into the sunlight, which he reflects from every wavering plume. We sometimes assume that men whose geatness is now universally acknowledged did not have to suffer as the vast majority of authors have had to suffer and many of them all their lives long --from the igno- rant contempt and detraction of critics. Any one who has the least knowledge of 12 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. literary history knows that those who have been exempt from insolent disparagement have been few in number. Homer had his Zoilus, and Virgil his Bavius and Maevius. It is quite curious to turn over the long-for- gotten and dusty volumes of reviews which once lorded it with arrogant insolence over the literary world, and to see how critics, now utterly insignificant and always shal- low, expended their ignorant incapacity and scorn upon men at whose feet the world has long sat to learn. The writers of such critiques, with a hectoring affectation of om- niscience, lookincr down on men transcend- o ently their betters from the whole altitude of their own inferiority. A flea may bite an emperor ; a fly may buzz with self-satisfied impudence round the forehead of a high priest. They are despicable, but they annoy. Few authors have had that serene confidence in their own heaven-bestowed gifts which enabled Wordsworth to regard his abusive critics with the calmest indifference ; or which made the fallen Guizot say, when hosts of his opponents thronged to the LORD TENNYSON. 13 steps of the tribune in order to denounce him, " Montez, Messieurs, montez toujours ; vous ne monterez jamais a la hauteur de mon dedain ! " Tennyson was no exception to the rule that poets, more often than not, have to fight their way to recognition. Once, when he was in the zenith of his fame, I was his guest at his delightful Freshwater home, and said that I imagined there were few poets who had secured an earlier or more enthusiastic recognition than he had done. He told me that I was quite mistaken ; that in his younger days he had even received anonymous letters about his poems with insulting addresses. Nevertheless, I think that his sensitiveness, and perhaps a con- sciousness of pre-eminent gifts analogous to that which Milton (for instance) pos- sessed, and so nobly expresses made him unconsciously exaggerate the number of those who did not at once, or fully, accept his claims. But, like Byron, he could turn on his critic with a passion and a power which made him a dangerous foe to attack. 1 1 MEN f HA VE KNO WN. When Christopher North, amid some eulo- gies, had mingled a little depreciation, Mr. Tennyson wrote the stinging lines on "Musty, fusty Christopher," 1 which, slight as they are, will be remembered long after Wilson's criticisms are forgotten. Again, when a famous writer, in a volume of poems now little read, had written with reference to Tennyson's pension, Though Peel with pudding plump the puling Muse, Tennyson's answer, signed " Alcibiades," ap- peared in Punch. It was pointed out to me, I remember, by the late Professor Fen- ton J. A. Hort when I was at college, and Tennyson never reprinted it, though a few verses of it very much softened, and omit- ting all the almost sanguinary satire are 1 You did late review my lays, Crusty Christopher; You did mingle blame and praise, Rusty Christopher. When I learnt from whom it came, I forgave you all the blame, Musty Christopher; I could not forgive the praise, Fusty Christopher. LORD TENNYSON. 15 to be found in one of his later volumes. The vengeance, as he himself admitted, was too severe for a line which was nothing more than hasty and ill-considered. I will not quote the verses, though they are very little known and are tremendously powerful ; but it is pleasant to record that, the very next week, the poet regretted the severity into which he had been hurried by his dis- pleasure, and wrote a noble Pali nodi a. This poem also appeared in Punch > under the name of " Alcibiades." It began, Ah God ! the petty fools of rhyme, Who shriek and sweat in pigmy wars Before the stony face of Time, And looked at by the silent stars : Who hate each other for a song, And do their little best to bite And pinch their brethren in the throng, And scratch the very dead for spite : When one small touch of Charity Would raise them nearer god-like state Than if the crowded Orb could cry Like those who cried Diana great : And I too talk, and lose the touch I talk of. Surely, after all, 16 MEN I HA VE KNO IV N. The noblest answer unto such Is perfect stillness when they brawl. I knew the eminent and kind-hearted author of the offending- line, and I knew Tennyson ; and it is pleasant to add that in later years, both privately and publicly, they spoke of each other with mutual kind- ness, and respect, and that the son of the aggressor became a warm friend of the poet, and received from him the honor of a dedi- cation. In mellower years Lord Tennyson's attitude towards criticism is expressed in the lines on A Spiteful Letter, Here, it is here, the close of the year, And with it a spiteful letter. My name in song has done him much wrong, For himself hath done much better. Rhymes and rhymes in the range of the times ! Are mine for the moment stronger ? Yet hate me not, but abide your lot, I last but a moment longer. Greater than I is that your cry ? And men will live to see it. Well if it be so so it is, you know; And if it be so, so be it ! Nor was it only the poet who knew how LORD TENNYSON. 17 to defend himself. I well remember the criticism in the Times I know not who wrote it on the In Memoriam. It was in the usual style of criticisms written de haul en bas in which the inferior partly snubs and partly condescends graciously to patronize his betters ; but it ended with an utterly despicable passage, in which the writer, incapable of understanding the spirit of a noble friendship, talked sneeringly of Arthur Hallam as the " Amaryllis of the Chancery Bar." I do not think that Lord Tennyson ever deigned to notice this stupid and malignant vulgarism. It was amply pun- ished in an admirable address to the work- ingmen of Brighton by F. W. Robertson. It was while I was at Cambridge that TJie Princess came out. A copy was given me ; and I so greatly delighted in it, that with- out having dreamed of consciously learning it, I could, without an effort, have repeated by far the greater part of it by heart. Once, when I was staying at the poet's beautiful home at Aldworth, I was leaning with him at evening on a low wall covered with roses 1 S MEN I HA VE KNO WN. and other flowers, which commanded a lovely view, first over the lower levels of the garden, then over a wide plain towards and beyond Leith Hill. I said that if I had not known that The Princess was written before he had built Aid worth, I should have thought that he had described the scene be- fore us in lines which I quoted, - And leaning there on those balusters, high Above the empurpled champaign, drank the gale That, blown about tin- foliage underneath, And sated with the innumerable rose, Beat balm upon our eyelids. He was pleased to hear me quote the lines ; and I then told him how much I owed to many passages of 77ic Princess, and among them to the lines on a happy wedded union, My bride, My wife, my life. O, we will walk this world, Yoked in all exercise of noble end. And so thro' those dark gates across the wild That no man knows. He made a remark which is interesting. He said, "Yes, I put some of my best poetic work into The Princess; and I LORD TENNYSON. 19 have often regretted that I did not connect O it with some stronger and more serious framework than what I called A Medley'' I was fortunate enough to obtain the Chancellor's o^old medal at Cambridge for a c> o> poem a very poor one, I fear on TJie Arctic Regions. It was in blank verse, and my competing; for the medal was almost exclusively clue to the accident that I had once been detained for more than two hours at a small railroad station in the country. The prize had not once been given for a poem in blank verse since the single occasion on which it had been won by Tennyson in 1829 for a poem on Tim- buctoo. There is a legend at Cambridge that one of the then examiners the History Professor, Professor Smyth had written on the outer leaf of this poem v.q., which he meant for "very queer;" but the other exam- iners took it for v.g., " very good," and as- signed the medal to it. The legend is, I should think, an entire myth ; and unques- tionably Tennyson's prize poem contains some far finer passages than any other 20 JlfEN I HA VE KNO WN. poem which has been so rewarded either at Cambridge or Oxford, though among the successful competitors have been such names as those of Heber, Macaulay, and Mackworth Praed. As so many years had elapsed since he had broken a fixed tradi- tion by a blank-verse poem, and since I had followed his example, I took the lib- erty, which I knew his kindness would forgive, of sending him my verses, and mentioning the circumstance. In those days the poet wrote his own letters, which he rarely did in later years, and I received the following reply : DEAR SIR, I have just received your prize poem, for which \ return you my best thanks. I believe it is true that mine was the first written in blank verse which obtained the Chancellor's medal. Nevertheless (and though you assure me that reading it gave you the deepest pleasure), I could wish that it had never been written. Believe me, dear sir, yours very truly, A. TENNYSON." I will quote one or two lines of the poem on Timbuctoo ; for in spite of the poet's dis- paragement it contains some splendid pas- sages, such as. ? / LORD TENNYSON. 21 My thoughts, which long had grovelled in the slime Of this dull world, like dusky worms which house Beneath unshaken waters, but at once Upon some earth-awakening day of spring Do pass from gloom to glory, and aloft Winnow the purple, bearing on both sides Double display of starlit wings, which burn Fan-like and fibred with intensest bloom ; E'en so my thoughts, erewhile so low, now felt Unutterable buoyancy and strength. And again, Thou with ravished sense Listenest the lordly music flowing from The illimitable years. I am the Spirit, The permeating life which courseth through All the intricate and labyrinthine veins Of the great vine of Fable, which, outspread With growth of shadowing leaf, and clusters rare, Reacheth to every corner under heaven Deep-rooted in the living soil of truth, So that men's hopes and fears take refuge in The fragrance of its complicated glooms And cool impleached twilights. Another circumstance introduced me to his notice. As a young man I wrote a book, now out of print, called The Origin of Language. It interested the poet ; and, among other reasons, because I had dwelt 22 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. much on the onomatopoetic force of words -the descriptiveness, so to speak, of their mere sounds. I had illustrated this by the echo of the sound to the sense, from the days of Homer's horses, 7roAA.a 8' avaira, Karavra, Trdpavra. TC So^/ita T' ij\0ov ; and Virgil's imitation of that line, Qnadrupedante pedum sonitu quatit tingula campum ; and Homer's cracking spear, Tpi\@a. Tf. Kal Ttrpa^Oa. SiaTpu^ev ; and Ennius', At tuba terribili sonitu taratantara dicit. I quoted many of Tennyson's own lines, such as, And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves ; and, The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells ; and, Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawns, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmur of innumerable bees ; LORD TENNYSON. 23 and, The brittle fleet Touched, clinked, and clashed, and vanished, and I woke, I heard the clash so clearly. Undoubtedly, these felicities of sound were a marked and carefully cultivated char- acteristic of the Laureate's verse, and he told me that he was greatly pleased with my way of dwelling on and illustrating it. It was partly, I think, his interest in this book which made him express, through a friend, his good wishes for my success when I was a candidate for the headmastership of Marlborough College. At that time his eld- est son, the present Lord Tennyson, was a pupil at the college, under the Laureate's old friend, the present Dean of Westminster. He was probably told by his son that I not infrequently illustrated my teaching by refer- ences to his poems, and he very kindly in- vited us to stay with him at Freshwater. 1 1 The night before I had spent at the delightful Palace of Art of the late Sir John Millais, whose son, the present baronet, had also been my pupil, and who was several times our guest at Marlborough. It was a pleasant reminiscence to me to pass from the house of one of our greatest painters to that of one of our great- est poets. 24 MEN f HA VK KNO WN. The hospitality of the poet and that of Lady (then Mrs.) Tennyson was perfect. At first he was always shy, but with those who won his confidence this very soon wore off. There was something delightfully sim- ple and straightforward in all he said, and the brusque frankness of his remarks and questions sometimes made one laugh. His appearance was that with which many pho- tographs have familiarized us. In his large, round, broad-brimmed cloth hat, and his ample cloak, and with his long beard, he used to compare his own appearance to that of a monk or a brigand. His conversation, in his brighter and lighter moods, was al- most boyish in its vivacity, and at more serious moments was full of wisdom and instructiveness. The first moods were often shown at social meals, and afterwards, when it was the custom for all the guests to ad- journ at once for dessert into another room, where the poet used sometimes to brew a bowl of punch with much delight. But late in the evening, when the ladies had retired, and he was smoking, often till late LORD TENNYSON. 25 at night in his study, he was ripe for con- versations, which were sometimes of absorb- ing interest, and touched not only On labor and the changing mart, And all the framework of the land, for he felt a lively concern in contemporary as in all other history, but also on some of the deepest topics of life, death, and what comes hereafter. Here it might be truly said that the great poet " rolled us out his mind." After this first visit he not infrequently asked us to be his guests, and every visit was full of happiness. I enjoyed very greatly the long walks with him over the " noble downs " and through the green fields and shady lanes of Freshwater, and over the wide moor and among the fine views at Aid- worth. I shall never forget how one even- ing we did not return from our walk till it was nearly dark, and our footsteps disturbed the many birds which sheltered themselves in undisturbed security in the densely flower- ing shrubs and trees which surrounded the 26 MEN J HA VE A'A r O \VN. poet's home. As the birds uttered their va- rious notes he stopped with delight and said, " There ! that is a blackbird ; and that a thrush ; and that a robin ; and that a blue- tit." He thus showed both the keenness of his hearing and his intimately familiar knowl- edge of " the voices of the birds." It was usually in the afternoon that he j would delight us, and any of the other miests who were at his house, by reading O> J 4*> to us some of his poems. I have heard him read Guinevere, and other of his Idylls. He read in a sort of recitative, somewhat monotonously at times, and always rhythmi- cally, but with such deep emotion that the effect was indescribable. I once asked him to read Boadicea, because of its singularly sonorous lilt ; and he did so, though he did not regard it as much more than an experi- ment in language and metre. Two of his readings are impressed on my memory with special vividness. One was The Revenge, which he read to a distin- guished company whom he met at dinner at our house at Westminster. Among those LORD TENNYSON. 27 present was my parishioner, the late Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, one of the best and truest men whom I ever knew, towards whom Mr. Tennyson seemed to be immedi- ately drawn. The effect of his reading of that noble piece was like that of a vivid picture, as his rich sonorous voice rose and fell with the changes of the impassioned story. The others were much longer readings. He read us the whole of Queen Mary before it was published. It has never been among the more popular of his works ; and I believe that on the stage, even with Sir Henry Irving to help, it was not a dramatic success. But as the poet interpreted it by his sympathetic reading, I had never before so deeply felt the tragedy of the life of that miserable queen, with her diseased body, her disap- pointed love, her blighted hopes, and the sour, gloomy, cruel, empoisoned fanaticism which she took for religion and the service O of her God. As he read, breadth on breadth of gloom seemed to be falling, fold after fold, upon the life of the unhappy woman, and his own voice was often broken 28 MEN I HA VR KNO WN. by emotion. I specially, however, remem- ber the ring of triumph with which, after the successful repression of Wyatt's rebel- lion, the queen is first made to say, My foes are at my feet AND I AM QUEEN! and with still more rapturous passion, My foes are at my feet AND PHILIP KING! I also specially remember his reading of the poem of Akhbars Dream. He told me much about Akhbar which was entirely new to me. For breadth and wisdom of thought this poem must always take a very high place. Lord Tennyson wrote one quatrain at my request, and I had the very great pleasure of suggesting to him the subject of one of his finest poems, St. Tclcmachus. The quatrain was in honor of Caxton. When I was rector of St. Margaret's, West- minster, the printers of London gave me a beautiful stained-glass window in memory of the first English printer, who lies buried in the church, and whose signature occurs LORD TENNYSON. 29 in its records as an auditor of its accounts. I wanted to place four lines under the win- dow, and asked the Laureate to write them for me, suggesting that he might make them turn on Caxton's motto, " Fiat Lux." I was with him when he wrote them, in his bedroom at the deanery of Westminster ; and witnessed, so to speak, their birth- throes until he became satisfied with them. He declared that they had cost him more trouble than many a substantive poem ! They are, Thy prayer was " Light more Light while Time shall last ! " Thou sawest a glory growing on the night, But not the shadows which that light would cast Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light. Quatrains were afterwards written for me and may be still read, engraved under the windows which I had erected in the church of the House of Commons in mem- ory of many great men by Lowell, Whit- tier, Robert Browning, Sir L. Morris, Sir E. Arnold, O. W. Holmes, Lord Lytton, and the Archbishop of Armagh. Many of them 30 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. were good and striking, but not one of them equals the quatrain of Tennyson. The poem of St. Telemachus originated thus. Lord Tennyson, one day when I was walking with him, asked me to sug- gest to him the subject of a poem. After thinking a moment, I suggested the story of St. Telemachus, leaping down into the amphitheatre, and by his self-devoted mar- tyrdom putting an end forever to the hid- eous butcheries of the ofladiatorial Barnes <"> o a scene which I have since described in my Gathering Clouds. To my surprise, he had never heard the story, and was much struck with it. He asked me to send him, when I returned, all the authori- ties on the subject. That was easily done, for it rests on the single authority of the Greek ecclesiastical historian Theodoret. I sent him the passage in the original Greek ; and he clothed it in the magnificent poem, which may be read in almost his latest volume, TJic Death of CEnonc ; and otlicr Poems. The last poem I ever heard him read LORD TENNYSON. 31 was Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. As he read it he Hung- singular pathos into the famous lines, Is it well that while we range with Science, glorify- ing in the Time, City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime ? There, among the glooming alleys, Progress halts on palsied feet, Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the street. But, as he read, he occasionally interpolated an explanatory remark, and was careful to impress upon us that the poem was dra- matic in character, and did not necessarily in all respects express his personal views. It is a matter of humble satisfaction to me that Lord Tennyson was greatly inter- ested both in my Life of CJirist and my sermons on Eternal Hope. The latter had a special attraction for him ; because they for- mulated a view which he had always held, and respecting which he had expressed his entire sympathy with my late friend and teacher, Professor Maurice, in the lines, 32 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. For being of that honest few, Who give the Fiend himself his due, Should eighty thousand College Councils Thunder anathemas, friend, at you ; Should all our Churchmen foam in spite At you, so careful of the right, Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome (Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight. But Lord Tennyson's views, though not dogmatic, inclined to still larger hopes than any which I had ventured to formulate. He considered that if a single soul were to be left in what are called " endless torments," that if the old, coarse, cruel conception, once unhappily universal, of hell as a hide- ous torture-chamber of eternal vivisection, were true even for one single soul, it would be a blot upon the universe of God, and the belief in it would be an impugn- ing of His Infinite Mercy. This he ex- presses in In Memoriam, Oh, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill, To pangs of nature, sins of will, Defects of doubt, and taints of blood. LORD^TENNYSON. 33 That nothing walks with aimless feet, That not one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete ; and again in the person of the poor victim in his Despair, When the light of a Sun that was coming would scat- ter the ghosts of the Past, And the cramping creeds that had maddened the peoples would vanish at last, And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend, For He spoke, and it seemed that He spoke, of a Hell without help, without end. Amid all his deep seriousness of mind the poet was always sensible to the humor- ous ; and he told me, with much amuse- ment, the ludicrous remark of a farmer, who, after hearing a red-hot sermon of never- o ending fire and brimstone, in the style of Jonathan Edwards or Father Furniss, con- soled his wife quite sincerely with the nai've remark, " Never mind, Sally ; that must be wrong : no constitooshun couldn't stand it ! " The impression left by one conversation 34 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. with him is still vivid in my memory. We were walking alone, up and down a long walk in the garden at Freshwater, and dis- coursing on a theme respecting which we were entirely at one ; namely, the very limited nature of our knowledge, and how easily we deceive ourselves into the notion that we know many things of which the reality is entirely hidden from us. " What we know is little, what we are ignorant of is immense." While we were thus talking he stooped clown, and plucked one of the garden flowers be- side the path. " How utterly ignorant we are of all the laws that underlie the life of even this single flower!" he said. This line of thought was exactly the same as that which he expressed in the striking poem, Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little Mower but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. " Rut yet," he said, " this one flower, LORD TENNYSON. 35 taken by itself, is quite sufficient to tell us all that it is most essential for us to know. It proves to us the love of God." I will mention only two more reminis- cences. When the Poet Laureate's brilliant son Lionel, whose early death in India caused him so much grief, was married in Westminster Abbey to Miss Locker Lamp- son (now Mrs. Augustine Birrell), the cere- mony was to have been performed by the poet's old friend, Dean Stanley. But, un- happily, when the clay came, to his own deep regret and that of every one else, the Dean was ill in bed, and was unable to be present. It therefore fell to my lot to marry them. The marriage service was chiefly read at the lectern, and the assemblage of O notabilities was one of the most remarkable which I have ever witnessed. All the great nobility, especially of the Liberal party, were present, including Mr. Gladstone and the Duke of Argyll, both of whom signed the marriage register. Of the " celebrities " in the world of Science, Literature, and Art, few were absent. Every glance one: took 36 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. showed the face of some one whom it was interesting to see. As the throng was very large, the Dean had arranged that places should be res'erved for the Poet Laureate, Mrs. Tennyson, and their son Hallam, who was with them, and that they should come in at the last moment by the little side-door in the north transept of the nave a door which is scarcely ever used, and which in the minute symbolism of Benedictine Churches is supposed by some to be made for the exit of the Evil Spirit, exorcised by the baptism of infants at the west "door; since the north is the region traditionally assigned to the Evil One. The door was to have been left unfastened for the entrance of Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson, but by some accident this had been overlooked. The bride and bride- groom, the best-man, the bridesmaids, were all standing ready ; the choir was densely thronged. I did not see the father, mother, and brother of the bridegroom ; but they might be easily overlooked in such a mul- titude, and I naturally assumed that they were present. The service began, and it LORD TENNYSON. 37 was only when I came to the sentence, " I pronounce that they be man and wile to- gether," that I noticed the Tennysons en- tering the choir. Finding the door locked o o by which they were to have been admitted, they were under great difficulties, since it is not easy for strangers to find their way about the Precincts. They came, I suppose, through the Deanery, round by Dean's Yard, and so by the Abbot's private entrance ; and I was particularly glad that they came in just in time to hear the blessings pro- nounced upon the wedded pair. Mrs. Ten- nyson was a great invalid ; and it was a touching sight to see her enter, supported by the Poet Laureate and her son, upon whose arms she leaned. After the ceremony, the chief guests went into the Jerusalem Chamber for the signing of the register. It was almost impossible to secure a passage for the distinguished per- sonages who were to sign as witnesses. After securing the signatures of Mr. Glad- stone and the Duke of Argyll, I had to find Mr. Tennyson, it was not till afterwards 38 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. that he received his title, and steer him to the book. He was short-sighted ; and the Jerusalem Chamber, always somewhat dark, was still more so from its densely crowded condition. As I held his arm and led him along, a lady held out her hand with a warm, " How are you, Mr. Tennyson ? I am glad that you got in just in time." " Oh, how do you do?" he answered. " I have not the least idea who you are ! " " I am Mrs. Lewes," she said, with a smile. It was his friend and neighbor, " George Eliot;" but (as he stopped to explain) he could hardly distinguish her features in the crowd and dim light of the ancient famous Chamber, and had not, at the moment, rec- ognized her voice. This was the only time that I had the pleasure of seeing " George Eliot." My last visit to Lord Tennyson was when he was old, infirm, and very near his end. My friend the late distinguished and brilliant Dr. Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachu- LORD TENNYSON. 39 setts, was in England ; and though he would c!> O not stay at my house as he moved about constantly, and preferred to be quite free I saw him almost daily. I was going to Aldworth to spend a day with Lord and Lady Tennyson ; and knowing that the poet knew the Bishop, and that it would be a great pleasure to them both to meet again, I asked leave to bring him with me. Lord Tennyson's carriage met us at the station, and after a lovely drive we reached the house. The poet looked very worn and very ill ; but we spent a delightful day with him, almost entirely in the open air, sitting and walking in the garden with him and his son Hallam, who devoted many years of his life to the care of his father, and to watch- ing over his health and happiness with most tender and assiduous devotion. We talked of many of the deepest subjects of human interest, and he read us some of those short poems which came out in his last volume. Just before we left, the Bishop asked him, with many apologies, if he would kindly sign his name in a volume of his poems, which 40 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. he had brought for that purpose. He did not generally like writing his autograph ; but he at once assented, and not without a lit- tle physical difficulty wrote his name on the title-page. After a very kindly farewell, he sent us back to the station in his carriage. As we drove out of the gates which lead o to the grounds, the Bishop turned to me, and I to him, with the very same words upon our lips, " We shall never see him again /" It was true. Lord Tennyson shortly after- wards ended the noble, simple life, during which, for nearly half a century, he had held the unquestioned rank of the greatest poet of his time, and in which he had so greatly " enriched the blood of the world" by " thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." This was also the last day which I spent with my dear and honored friend Phillips Brooks. How little I could have believed that a man so full of vigor, much younger than I, and so splendid a specimen of a man, would be called away so short a time after- wards ! LORD TENNYSON. 41 I was with Lord Tennyson the night be- fore he first took his seat in the House of Lords. I witnessed the grand and simple dignity with which he advanced to sign his name on the list of peers. Never was a man less elated with the pride which more vulgar natures might have displayed, even against their will. A noble name could add but little lustre to -a character so natural, so manly, and so noble, as that of this great teacher of his age. Hi*. M fa II. ROBERT BROWNING. PROFOUNDLY as I reverenced and loved Lord Tennyson, I had equal regard for the other great poet of our time, Mr. Robert Browning, and esteemed it no less an honor to have known him ; to have met him fre- quently ; to have welcomed him often as my own guest; and to have had many a de- lightful conversation with him. " Give me a great thought that I may live on it," said Herder. How many great thoughts on which we may live thoughts on the great- est and deepest of all subjects, and ex- pressed in the loveliest and most perfect language may we derive from the many volumes in which these two leading poets of our age gave us of their best ! How much poorer would be the mental equip- ment of many of us in this generation if 42 : i BROWNING AT 77 (1889). R OBER T BRO WNING. 43 these two gifted souls had not so often, for our advantage, - fed on thoughts which voluntarily move Harmonious musing. How great, again, was the gain which we derived from the beauty and simplicity of their lives ! How unlike they were to poets like Kit Marlowe and Greene, and others, who stood around The throne of Shakespeare, sturdy but unclean. How free were their lives from the sordid circumstances which stained the careers of men like George Withers and Edmund Waller; how free from the bitter jealous ac- rimonies of men like Pope; from the men- tal cloud which darkened the latter days of Cowper and of Southey ; from the " in- effectual angelhood " of Shelley, the laxities of Tom Moore, or the wild passions and premature misery of Byron ! Both of them might have derived happiness from the thought which comforted Wordsworth in the days when he was neglected and ridiculed, 44 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. -that they had never written a line which could call a blush on a pure cheek ; that their works would co-operate with every beneficent influence upon human nature ; that they had ever been on the side of freedom, nobleness, and love ; that they had added sunlight to daylight by making the happy happier. In simplicity and dignity, alike in years of struggle or at best of very modest competence and in years of abundance, if not of wealth ; alike in years of detraction and imperfect recognition, and in years of secure and settled fame, in which they held an acknowledged supremacy among the literary circles of their day, they showed the high example of men who knew that- Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead life to sovereign power; and that the self-possession of simple, right- eous, native manhood is the most beautiful of all human attainments. For my own part, if I were to enumerate the many blessings of my life, among them R OBER T BRO WNING. 45 would certainly be the fact that I had been permitted to hold familiar intercourse with two such poets as Alfred Lord Tennyson and Mr. Robert Browning. Once Lord Tennyson, knowing my rever- ence for Mr. Browning, on whose teaching I had been delivering a lecture, asked me humorously, " whether I did not consider him almost the only poet of the age?" It was very far from being the case. Their respective spheres and gifts were very distinct; each of them supplemented, in va- rious ways, the high teaching of the other. Nor was there a particle of rivalry between them. They were the best of friends ; and Lord Tennyson dedicated his Tiresias, and Other Poems, in the words, To my good Friend ROBERT BROWNING, ll'/inse genius and geniality Will best appreciate ivhat may be best, And make most allowance for 'what may be worst, This volume is Affectionately dedicated. I am in no sense pretending to offer the 46 MEN I HATE KXO WN. slightest sketch of any biography, but only to record such general reminiscences as can pain or annoy nobody, and may be of pass- ing interest to some. It was at one of the delightful literary din- ners which at one time used to be given annually on " All Fools' Day," by the late publisher, Mr. Macmillan, in his house at Balham that I first saw Mr. Browning. He was very fond of society and of dining out; so much so that Lord Tennyson, who was very much more of a recluse, used laughingly to say to him that he would die in an evening dress suit ! But the reason of o Browning's fondness for society was that he used to read in the minds of men as in a book. Human beings of every type were to him like manuscripts of infinite variety, and worth the most careful study. He could never be dull in human company. Mr. Macmillan's guests met at the railway station, and Mr. Browning was pointed out to me as he was hurrying in to take his ticket. Even then his hair was perfectly white. He was dressed, as always, with ROBERT BRO WNING. 47 faultless neatness ; and, though his figure was very short, his face was one of the most perfect symmetry, and, it might even be said, of beauty. When you looked at him you felt at once that you were in the pres- ence of no ordinary man. I still possess the interesting menu cards of some of those dinners, with the facsimile autographs of the guests at the back. One of the cards is here reproduced. I never again expect to take part in re- unions so delightful as were some of these parties ; and it would indeed be far from easy in these days to assemble a little gathering which could be enriched by such a minorlinsf J t3 O of genius and geniality as marked the char- acters of Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Dean Stanley. It may easily be under- stood that at such gatherings there was no lack of " heart-affluence in discursive talk ; " of " the feast of reason, and the flow of soul." Unlike Tennyson, Mr. Browning did not usually speak by choice in ordinary society on the deepest subjects of thought. I have, 48 MEN / HA VE KNO IV N. however, heard him do so, especially on one occasion at the Athenaeum where I very often met him just before his publication of La Saisiaz. He told me all the circum- stances which had led him to write that poem, and how deeply he had been im- pressed with the awful suddenness of the death of the lady friend which had led him to the train of thought there expressed. "I have there," he said, "given utterance to some of my deepest convictions about this life and the life to come." Mr. Browning was an admirable racon- teur ; and when one had heard him tell a story, whether it was serious or whether it was jocose, one never forgot it. Let me ofive an instance or two of both kinds. o He had been a considerable traveller, and we were talking about the peculiar sen- sations of seasickness. He was himself a good sailor, and did not suffer ; but he told me that once at the very beginning of a stormy passage across the Channel, a crowd of ladies and others were gathered around a distinguished foreign physician, who in la- X OBER T BRO WNING. 49 borious English was telling them how they might secure perfect immunity from this trouble. " To be quite free from the mal de mer" he said, just as the vessel was start- ing, " all that you have to do is to sit per- fectly still ; you must recline back in your chair on the deck ; you must close your eyes ; and then " Here a sudden rush of the speaker to the side of the vessel, and a violent access of the calamity from which he was promising cer- tain deliverance, cut short his harangue, and disturbed the confidence of his hearers in the promised panacea. Mr. Browning's sense of humor was quick. I once asked him about Tfie Steed which brouglit Good News from GJient, and whether the incident had any historic basis ; for I told him that a friend of mine had taken very considerable trouble to search various histories, and discover whether it was true or not. " No," he said ; " the whole poem was purely imaginary. I had had a long voyage in a sailing-vessel (I think it was from Mes- 50 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. sina to Naples), and, being rather tired of the monotony, thought of a good horse of mine, and how much I should enjoy a quick ride. As I could not ride in reality, I thought that I would enjoy a ride in ima- gination ; " and he then and there wrote that most popular of his lyrics. He told me that during the same voyage he had asked the skipper to awake him when they sighted the island of Capri, if they should happen to pass it very early in the morning, before he woke. " Why should you care to be awaked to see Capri ? " asked the skipper. In reply, Browning sketched to him some of the facts and legends of the long resi- dence of the Emperor Tiberius in the island, to which his auditor listened in silent as- tonishment. As they were passing Capri he came and awoke Mr. Browning, and, point- ing to the island, said laconically, to the poet's great amusement, " There's where that Great Mogul used to live!" I have heard him narrate two other sto- R OBER T BRO WNING. 51 ries, both of them Eastern legends about King Solomon, which impressed me much. One was as follows : I had been telling him the well-known Mohammedan myth, how Solomon, in his intense pride in the horses and chariots, which were a dubious and half-forbidden in- novation among the adjuncts of Jewish roy- alty, had once been surprised in the midst of his review by the voice of the muezzin (Eastern legends are always perfectly in- different about anachronisms) and the sum- mons to the evening prayer. Not knowing how to attend in time to this religious duty, Solomon magnificently consecrated all his forty thousand horses to Allah and his ser- vice. In reward for this sacrifice, Allah presented him with a magic carpet, which would at a wish transport to any distance the person who sat upon it. Once, as Solo- mon was consulting with his grand vizier, Azrael, the Angel of Death, passed by and gazed curiously at the vizier, who instantly, in alarm, entreated the king to lend him the magic carpet, and bade it transport him to 52 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. the centre of the desert of Arabia. No sooner had he gone than Azrael said to the king, " I looked at that man so closely, because, having been bidden to summon his soul from the centre of the Great Desert, I saw him, to my surprise, standing here with you." Mr. Browning agreed that the legend was a magnificent illustration of the two truths, that no man can ever escape his destiny, and that often he fulfils it the more cer- tainly by the very endeavor to escape it. " But," he added, " I have heard the legend in a far finer form. In this version v!5 the king and the vizier were standing to- gether on the topmost pinnacle of the tem- ple, to which they had ascended by a vast flight of steps. As they stood there talk- ing, they saw a man approaching them with his head bent ; but as he came to the foot of the steps he cast one glance upwards, and in that one glance both of them rec o ognized the awful lineaments of the Angel of Death. He began slowly to mount the steps ; and then the terrified vizier, borrow- R OBER T BR O WNING. 53 ing the magic carpet, desired to be trans- ferred to the loitiest summit of Caucasus. The angel ascended the steps and said to the king, ' I have come because I \vas bid- den to take the soul of your vizier from the top of El Brouz, and I saw him here.' - ' Angel,' said the king, bowing his head and pointing with his ringer, ' he awaits thee on the highest peak of Caucasus ! ' The other legend was that of the death of King Solomon, which the late Lord Lyt- ton heard from Mr. Browning, and clothed in magnificent verse in his Chronicles and o Characters. The kin?- had crone into the O c!> holy place to worship ; and while he stood there, in his jewelled crown, and in all the golden splendor of his royal robes, the fin- ger of Azrael suddenly touched him, and he died where he was Leaning upon the ebony staff Signed with the seal of the Pentegraph. The corpse stood motionless in all its per- ishing magnificence ; but the awe of the great king 54 MEN I HA I'E KNO WN. To whom were known, so Agar's offspring tell, The powerful vigil, and the starry spell, The midnight call Hell's awful legions dread, And sounds that break the slumbers of the dead kept all men, even the chief priests, from drawing near or touching him, while all the demons also were kept afar by the graven spell. Then forth from the temple wall crept a little brown mouse, too insig- nificant a creature to feel any reverence. It gnawed away the leather at the bottom of the staff, and lo, suddenly the gorgeous figure fell down flat upon its face, and slipped into ashes ; and out of the dust they picked a golden crown ! In his Mr. Sludge tJie Medium, Mr. Browning expressed his contemptuous dis- belief of what is called " spiritualism," and poured disdain upon the tricks of which professional " mediums" often availed them- selves. But one day, when I was talking to him on this subject, he admitted that there were many apparently curious mys- teries of thought-transmission for which he o could not readily account. He said that X OBER T BRO WNING. 55 once in Italy he met an Italian count who had the reputation of being able to read thoughts and to tell of occurrences by handling objects connected with them. The count knew that the poet was entirely sceptical as to his pro- fessed powers, and said to him, " Have you anything on your person to which any history is attached ? " Mr. Browning said, " No ; " but a moment after he remembered that he was wearing- o a pair of sleeve-links to which there was a history. Correcting himself, he said, - " Oh, yes; these sleeve-links are associated with a remarkable occurrence." Mr. Browning's grandfather had been a <7> O resident in the West Indies ; and his uncle had there been murdered by slaves, and these sleeve-links, which he had been wear- ing, had been taken from his corpse. The count laid them on the palm of his right hand, and, after looking intently first at them and then at Mr. Browning, exclaimed, " It is a very strange thing; but as I look at these sleeve-links I hear a voice crying in my ears, ' Murder ! murder ! ' 56 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. That the count could not have heard the story beforehand Browning was certain ; he thought it possible that he might have made a lucky guess, or have conjectured some- thing from the expression on his face. From what Eastern source Mr. Browning o had derived the legends of Solomon I omitted to ask ; but he was the most om- nivorous reader I ever met, far more so than Lord Tennyson, and he seemed (as indeed the range of his allusions show) to know something about everything. I be- lieve that when he was writing Sordello he exhausted every book in the British Museum which touched on the little-known story of the Italian poet. The accuracy with which he mastered even the most recondite allu- sions to his subjects before he fused them together in the crucible of his imagination was most remarkable. His memory, too, was very retentive. He once repeated to me a great part of the poem of poor George Smart on David, which he regarded as reaching a very high poetic level ; but he had read everything R OBERT BR O WNING. 57 from Busbequius to Beddoes for whom he told me he had a very high admiration, when I had quoted to him some lines from his dramas. This accuracy was extended to the minutest and most apparently insig- nificant details. In Florence it is possible to identify the very spot on which he was standing when he bought for a few pence the old paper copy of the trial of Count Guido, which suggested to him his longest, and in some respects most remarkable, poem, The Ring and the Book. The copy is still preserved by his son, who showed it to me, with other relics of his father, when I dined with him at his Venetian palace, in which I saw the truckle-bed and simply furnished upper room in which his great father had breathed his last. In later years Mr. Browning was particu- larly cordial to me, not only because he knew how deep was the debt of gratitude which I owed to him for all that I had learnt from his poems, but also because he was kind enough to believe that I had greatly promoted the sale of his writings in Amer- 58 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. ica. When, some ten years ago, I visited America, it had not been at all my original intention to make what is called " a lectur- ing tour," but only to deliver a theological course on a particular foundation to which I had been invited by the late Bishop of Pennsylvania. When, however, I yielded to the strong pressure which induced me to lecture in some of the great cities of the States, I chose " Browning's Poems " as the subject for one of my lectures. The poet's readers and admirers in America could not at that time have been very numerous ; for before I gave my lecture at Boston cer- tainly the most intellectual and literary city in the United States I was told that not half a dozen copies of his poems had been sold there during the year. The morning after my lecture, every copy which could be procured either in Boston or in the neigh- borhood was in immediate demand. Mr. Browning more than once expressed his ob- ligation to me for this service ; but I could not claim the smallest gratitude. I am sure o that he overestimated the effects of my lee- 6/JS, / . fi/fa / 4 J (/ o i and said, " Mr. Brown in cr I congratulate you on o ^> J your admirable little letter." "What letter?" he asked in surprise. " Your letter in the Pall Mall" R OBER T BRO WNING. 67 " I have sent no letter to the Paft Mall" he said. "Well, come and see it," I said, and took him up to the board on which the journal was hanging. He read it with a broad smile on his face, and said, " My correspon- dent must have sent it to the press, but I was quite unaware that he meant to do so." The " characteristic and trenchant " reply had been copied by the Pall Mall from the Birmingham Owl. It was as follows : 19 WARWICK CRESCENT, Feb. 10, 1887. DEAR SIR, I am quite sure you mean very kindly, but I have had too long an experience of the inability of the human goose to do other than cackle when benevolent, and hiss when malicious ; and no amount of goose criticism shall make me lift a heel at what waddles behind it. Believe me, dear sir, yours very sincerely, ROBERT BROWNING. I once asked him what he did in answer to the numerous requests which I felt sure he must receive for autographs. " Oh," he said, " I always send my auto- graph to those who write to me for it." "What do you do when, as is often the 68 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. case, the admirer does not even enclose a stamped envelope ? " "Oh," he replied, "I always send the autograph all the same ; but then I do not prepay the letter, because, if he thinks my autograph worth writing for, he will probably not think it dear at twopence! " When I placed the Jubilee Window of Queen Victoria's reign in St. Margaret's, Westminster, I asked Mr. Browning to write the quatrain under it for me. He did so; and these were the four highly characteris- tic lines, Fifty years' flight! wherein should he rejoice Who hailed their birth, who as they die decays? This : England echoes his attesting voice Wondrous and well : thanks, Ancient Thou of Days. The very quaintness of the lines, their characteristic oddness of collocation, as in "Ancient Thou of Days," -the fact that they were written in the poet's special style of what his critics called " Brown inofese, o made them more interesting to me than if they had been smooth and commonplace. They illustrate the cause which made peo- K OBER T BRO WNfNG. 69 pie call him unintelligible ; namely, that his sentences frequently did not " construe," but required some long subauditur to show their dependence. Thus, in these lines, the " This " stands so completely isolated and in- dependent that it must be taken for "This (is the reason wherein he should rejoice) ; " and the "Wondrous and well" means the highly compressed sentence, "The years have been fifty wondrous years, and have passed well for England." As it was, how- ever, the lines when published were received with general amusement, and elicited a silly and sanguinary parody in one of the London newspapers. I do not suppose that he ever saw this parody ; nor would he have been vexed about it if he had. Yet so far was he from beino- careless about the lines, that he o took the trouble of a long walk to St. Mar- garet's to see if they were correctly punc- tuated on the brass plate underneath the window. He found that the enoraver had o altered a comma, and requested me to have it at once corrected. And here let me add that this is the 70 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. more remarkable because Mr. Browning clearly did not understand the best princi- ples of punctuation as an aid to lucidity. A friend is said to have pointed out that a great deal of Sordcllo would be less dif- ficult of apprehension if it were differently punctuated throughout; and it has been said (but I cannot vouch for the fact) that the poet adopted his friend's punctuation of many passages, and so made the poem more easy to understand. His extraordi- nary method of ellipse and compression had become the habit of a life. When his Pauline came out, some critic had called it " wordy." Being resolute and earnest in all that he undertook, and thinking that there might be some element of truth in o the criticism, Mr. Browning set himself to correct the real or imaginary fault; and to this fact is due some at least of the pe- culiarities of his style. His last and most popular book, Aso- lando, he delighted in odd titles for his O books, and generally speaking was specially fond of everything quaint and unusual, ROBERT BROWNING. 71 came out when he was in Italy. He was lying on what proved, alas ! to be his death- bed, after a brief illness, when he was in- formed that already -- after a very short time his book had attained to a third edi- tion. This was a most uncommon circum- stance in the history of his writings. " How very gratifying!" he exclaimed, with a happy smile, on beincr informed of it. _> Shortly afterwards I received a telegram from his son from the Palazzo Rezzonico at Venice, saying that " Mr. Robert Brown- ing died this morning." It was sudden and wholly unexpected ; for in the lengthening of the allotted term of life which has become so common in this century, he could not have been called aged. He had always enjoyed excellent health. His eye was not dim, nor his natural strength abated ; and, o so far from showing any signs of intellec- tual senility or mental deterioration, this last volume contains some of his most vigorous and popular lyrics, especially that forcible one quite in his own peculiar style in which he speaks of himself as follows:- 72 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. Oh, to love so, be so loved, yet so mistaken 1 What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly ? Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel - Being who ? One who never turned his back but inarched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph, Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, Sleep to wake. What could I do, on receiving such a message, except to telegraph back to his son my expression of sincere sorrow and sympathy, and to add exactly what I felt : "The world is poorer for his loss"? tyrftto fy ' H, J' fyH-fC hf-f^C ^ MATTHEW ARNOLD. III. MATTHEW ARNOLD. THERE are many men of eminence whom it has been my good fortune to meet, who, quite apart from the genius which enabled them to enforce upon their generation the great lessons of science, of morality, or of religion, were men whom it would have been o delightful to know because of the charm and o geniality of their bearing. Genius has been defined as " the heart of childhood taken up and matured in the powers of manhood ; " and this childlike or boyish element has been a marked characteristic of some of our distinguished contemporaries. One saw it in Lord Tennyson, when his shyness with strangers wore off; its winning freshness was very noticeable in the ani- mated bearing of Dean Stanley during his happier hours ; and a boyish frankness and 73 74 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. spirit of fun added a constant charm to the gayety of Mr. Matthew Arnold, when he could throw off all reserve, and knew him- self to be amonir friends. If he were in *r> the midst of a society which he disliked he naturally did not care to unbend ; and then he might have been described, by those who knew nothing of him, as supercilious and unattractive. But among those who knew and loved him, and amono' whom he o could move with ease, all the " sweetness and light " which he regarded as the ideal of demeanor, came out ; and the success of any party of which he was a member was assured. There were times when his fun became almost boisterous ; and very often the quaint and unexpected turns of a wit which was enhanced bv his delightful per- j & i sonality would rouse a whole company to hearty mirth. I remember one day when a guest at a dinner-party asked whether Mr. X , a very refined and gentle Harrow master, was not a Conservative. "X - a Conservative!" he exclaimed, MA TTHE IV ARNOLD. 75 " X a Conservative ! Why, he would strangle the last king in the bowels of the last priest ! " To those who knew the very quiet -man- nered master there was something inde- scribably amusing in such a characterization. In a home where his presence was as a perpetual sunbeam, the fact that his affec- tions were ever " true to the kindred points of heaven and home" was a constant source of animation and happiness. The quaint and playful raillery with which he would address members of his family, telling them that they " had all his sweetness and none of his conceit," or " all his graces and none 5 of his airs," illustrated the abandon of his home affections, and all the more because he would awaken their extreme mirth by the gravity of countenance which he vainly endeavored to retain with which he as- sured them that, like the wife of the famous French duke, " they had embittered his ex- istence, and would precipitate his end." I never knew a man whose heart was more absorbed by home affections. His children 7G MEN I HA VE KNO IVN. were devoted to him, and they were not in the least afraid to repay him with banter similar to his own. One day, after ofazin, J f MA TTHE IV ARNOLD. 81 Arnold's letter in which he mentions the warm satisfaction felt by the Italian royal family for all that Harrow had clone for this young" prince, who was much attached to the Arnolds, and now occupies one of the most distinguished posts in the Italian navy. From the time that I became intimate with Mr. Matthew Arnold at Harrow, I con- stantly saw him, both at his house or my own, and at the Athenaeum Club, where he was one of the most popular and best- known members. When I was head master at Marlborough he paid us a visit with some of his family. Dean Stanley was our guest at the same time. Both of them spoke delightfully at Marlborougii at a great supper, and wrote most kindly about it afterwards in letters which are now in print among their memorials. I have a bundle of Mr. Arnold's letters, all of which over- flow with kindness ; but most of them are of too private and personal a character to print. Valuable as were Matthew Arnold's con- MEN I HA VE KNO WN. tributions to literature, high as his rank will always be among English poets, exquisite as was both his prose and verse, he, like Mr. Browning, was for many years so far unrecognized that his contributions to litera- ture added little or nothing to his income. When he was at Harrow he was surcharged on the income-tax, and appealed to the com- missioners, who were mostly local trades- men and others. He told them that in his tax-returns he had stated his income at ,1,000 a year, which was, I believe, the ut- most which he ever received from his post of inspector of schools, and asked why they had charged him the tax on a larger income. "Oh, but, Mr. Arnold, you are a writer," said the commissioners. " Gentlemen," he said, in his amusing tone, " you see before you that unfortunate being, an unpopular author! My books, so far, have not added to my income." It was not till later years that his writings materially increased his somewhat narrow resources. Like Mr. Browning, he had long MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 83 to wait, and his prose writings were more remunerative than his poems. Besides the permanent fame which Mr. Arnold has won as an exquisite poet, he rendered great services both to literature and education. Many must have felt that it was hardly creditable to England that one of her illustrious sons, in spite of his permanently valuable Reports on Foreign Educational Systems, received little or no official promotion of any kind no title, no distinction, no public literary recogni- tion from the government, though their re- wards were bestowed on far inferior men. When I was rector of St. Margaret's, West- o minster, he was inspector of my National Schools. It was always delightful to see and hear him as he examined the little chil- dren many of them among the poorest of the poor in grammar or arithmetic; or looked critically at the needle-work done by the little Annes and Mary Janes of the back streets. He manifested a true dignity by the uncomplaining faithfulness and regu- larity with which, for many long years, he 84 MEN I HA VE KNO IVN. discharged the comparatively humble rou- tine duties of an inspector, which must have often seemed very uncongenial, and from which he ought to have been ex- empted by promotion, or some form of national gratitude. He used sometimes to say, at gatherings where he was received with the loudest applause, " Gentlemen, you see before you a humble Inspector of Schools." But though he can hardly have failed to feel at times that he was in the position of a racehorse set to draw a market-cart, he continued to discharge the modest require- ments of his position with undiminished dignity and conscientious cheerfulness. His genuine kindness and consiclerateness, both to teacher and pupils, made him one of the most beloved of inspectors ; and when, at last, his term of service was ended, he re- ceived the expression of hearty and unani- mous gratitude from the whole body ol masters and mistresses with whom he had had to do. The buoyant freshness and viva- city of his earlier prose writings show how MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 85 little he allowed any natural disappointment to weigh upon his spirits ; and meanwhile he received, from every literary and high social circle in which he moved, the recog- nition which had not come to him in any large measure from his official superiors. Some of the views in his writings upon religious subjects were startling to orthodox Churchmen ; but in spite of this he re- mained on terms of cordial friendship with many of the bishops and leading clergy, as well as with the most eminent Noncon- formists. Whatever may have been their doctrinal divergences from his opinions, they saw that he wrote (with one unfortu- nate exception, in which, however, his ap- parent flippancy had not been intentional) in a serious, sincere, and deeply reverent spirit. There was much to learn even from his writings on sacred subjects, and to the last he remained a regular and reverent o attendant at church and at the Holy Com- munion. He called on us almost immediately after his return from his American tour, and made 80 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. us laugh heartily at his experiences. He was induced to ( visit the United States, partly by the great popularity of his writings in the Western world, and by the fact that he had many warm friends across the At- lantic ; but also because his income left but a very narrow margin for his necessary ex- penses, and it became a matter of impor- tance to him that he should raise a certain sum by lectures. I think that on the whole he enjoyed his American tour, but it re- quired his genial joyousness to endure some of the very free criticisms passed upon him by the American journalists. Beautiful as was the substance of his lectures, his de- livery, never telling, was but little suited to a nation in which every boy in the schools is trained for years in rhetorical deliver)" and the principles of elocution. I will mention some of his anecdotes. His first lecture was delivered at New York, and many had paid large fees for good places. But before he had spoken long he was met by cries of " Speak up, Mr. Arnold ! " " We cannot hear you, Mr. Arnold !" and many (as is not MA TTHE W ARNOLD. 87 uncommon in America) left the hall while he was speaking. " Next morning," he said, " a professor of elocution called on me, and remarked, ' This will never do, Mr. Arnold. People buy tickets to come and hear you, but you are very inaudible. Let me give you a lesson.' I gratefully accepted the kind offer, and we went to the hall before the delivery of the second lecture. The elocution professor gave me some excellent hints, and I was much better heard at subsequent lectures. At the hall I saw a sort of music-stand, which was just the right height for me ; and as the sight of one of my eyes is stronger than the other, I used to place it at my right, read a sentence, and then raise my head as I delivered it. But one morning afterwards there appeared in a Detroit paper a criticism in which was the remark, 'As for Mr. Arnold's manner, it reminds us of an elderly parrot pecking at a trellis ! ' These, and all similar criticisms, however frank, he took with absolutely imperturbable good-humor. He used to travel about the 88 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. United States to deliver his lectures, with Mrs. Arnold, his two daughters, and the agent, whom he elegantly called his " Im- presario'' They usually had free railway tickets presented to them ; and when the ticket-collector in the train was told this, he remarked, in a condescending tone, " Oh, the Arnold troupe, I suppose!" "Just as if we were a travelling circus ! " said Mr. Arnold, with a hearty laugh. Among other places, he visited Chicago. The next morning there was an article in one of the newspapers beginning, " We have seen him ; he is an elderly gentleman, who parts his hair in the middle, with su- percilious manners, and ill-fitting clothes!" Many might have been annoyed by such liberties. To Mr. Arnold they only caused extreme amusement, as he narrated them to his friends. He also told me, with much relish, the story of a trick played by a New York paper on a Chicago paper, which (it was said) sometimes copied, without acknowledg- ment, its foreign telegrams. The New York MATTHEW ARNOLD. 89 paper inserted a clever letter, purporting to have been written by Mr. Arnold, and com- menting not quite favorably on the city of Chicago. It began : "At Chicago my host was an artist in desiccated pork ! " The Chicago papers took the letter for genuine, and exploded into vehement vitu- peration, which was perhaps excusable, for they had received Mr. Arnold with the customary warmth and hospitality of our Transatlantic brethren. As soon as Mr. Ar- nold heard it, he telegraphed to Chicago to say that the letter was a forgery from be- ginning to end. It was then, however, too late to unsay the uncivil remarks which they had heaped on the unoffending head of their distinguished guest ; and when I visited Chi- cago the next year I found a certain sore- ness still remaining, which made him less o popular there than he was in many of the American cities. Almost the last, if not quite the last, public appearance of Mr. Arnold was made at my request. My friend and his friend, Mr. George \V. Chilcls of Philadelphia, had, 90 MEN I HA VE KNO \VN. with characteristic munificence, presented St. Margaret's, Westminster, with a splendid memorial window in honor of John Milton. Milton was more closely connected with St. Margaret's than any other church, as he re- sided near it for many years. His banns are recorded in its register, which also re- tain entries of the burial of his best-loved wife, Catherine Woodcock, " my late-es- poused saint, "--and of the infant daughter at whose birth she died. When this window was unveiled, I asked Mr. Arnold to come and read a paper on Milton in the vestry, in the presence of a small but distinguished gathering of literary men, among whom were Lord Lytton, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Lecky. As an inducement, I told him that, as I knew him to be, like myself, a de- voted admirer of Milton, he could not fail to write something valuable and interesting, > c!> and he miHit send it to some American O magazine. He consented, with his invari- o able kindness, and wrote the charming paper on Milton which has since been published. It \vas, I believe, the last thing he wrote. MATTHEW ARNOLD. 91 Not long after, I met him at the Athenaeum, and after asking me with assumed despair, "What on earth am I to do with that demon - ? " (mentioning one of the too numer- ous strangers who worried him, as they worry all public men, with their obtrusive- ness), he rubbed his hands in the highest spirits, and asked, "What do you think the American editor sent me for that little pa- per which I read for you at St. Margaret's ? They gave me no less than fifty pounds! " The next clay he went with Mrs. Arnold to meet his beloved daughter Mrs. Whit- ridcre, who had married an American gentle- r*> > man living in New York, and who was on her way home with her child, on her annual visit to England. On that very evening, I believe, he took the little jump over a hedge which, though at the moment it did not seem to have done him much harm, disturbed the weak action of his heart. The next morning - - to the grief of all who knew him and of all who love the purest and most refined forms of English litera- ture he was dead. 92 JlfEN I HA VE KNO WN. I attended his funeral in the sweet coun- try churchyard of Laleham, where he had desired to be buried with his beloved ones ; and I read at the service that noble chap- ter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, which stands, as it were, as a Magna Charta of man's hopes of immortality. I could not but think, as I went sadly home, that never again could I know so intimately a writer so brilliant and so distinguished, or a man more deeply loved by those who really rec- ognized the high and lovely characteristics of his great gifts and his unique personality. He was an admirable specimen ol a perfect English gentleman, a man of fine genius, of delightful bearing, of stainless integrity, and of a genuinely kind and loving heart. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. IV. PROFESSOR MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. I HAVE already said that I account it among the richest outward blessings of a life which has, by God's blessing, been a very happy one, that I have enjoyed the personal ac- quaintance in not a few cases the personal friendship of most of those great writers, artists, and men of science whose names will shine out like stars in the annals of the rei^n c> of our beloved Queen. Among these have been ecclesiastics of every school of thought in the churches of England and America, and some of the lead- ing members of other 'religious communions. Several of them like the Master of Balliol, Bishop Colenso, Bishop Phillips Brooks, Pro- fessor Maurice, and Dean Stanley were ecclesiastics whose views on many points dif- fered widely from those of their brethren. 93 94 MEN I HA VE KNOWN. It is a most happy thing- for the Church of England it is indeed one of the strongest elements of her influence and vitality that the clergy are not all like mere figures which follow a decimal point, and never rise to the dignity of a unit. They are not stereotyped into the nullity of a purely verbal and me- chanical orthodoxy. They are not all steeped in " the deep slumber of decided opinions." They do not all humbly accept whole series of artificial dogmas and observances of which many are the mere accretions of unauthor- ized tradition, which have crystallized round the nucleus of Catholic belief. The Church of England would soon, to use the words of Milton, " sicken into a muddy pool of con- formity and tradition," or, in the still more emphatic plain-spokenness of our Homily, fall into " the stinking puddles of men's tradi- tions," if theological acrimony had but power in proportion to its unscrupulous virulence. Most happily for the greatness and real influ- ence of our Church, there have always been mountains among the molehills, and forest trees amid the dense undergrowth of thistles. MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 95 Let us hope that, to the end of time, there may be enough men among our clergy to realize that truth is an ever- streamino" fountain, not a motionless lake o gleaming with the iridescence which con- ceals corruption men who believe that there is a continuous revelation to earnest souls, an ever-broadening light from heaven whereby " God shows all things in the slow history of their ripening." God grant us enough men to resist the seductions of promotion and popularity ; to flout an ef- feminate artificiality ; to refuse to answer the theological world according to its idols ; O & to scorn a slavish abnegation of the supreme rights of reason and conscience ; boldly to rebuke vice, and patiently to suffer for the truth's sake. Such men are the prophets of their age ; and it is their lot, as it is the lot of all the truest and greatest prophets, to have all manner of evil said against them falsely, as their Master had, by the "religious authorities" of the day - By fierce lies maddening the blind multitude. 90 MEN I HA VE KNO \VN. Such men in their measure were the two of whom I shall speak in this chapter FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, and ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY. Both of them stood, for the most part, alone among their clerical contemporaries. As Archbishop Tait was called, by way of a disparagement which was his highest honor, the " Archbishop of the Laity," so Professor Maurice and Dean Stanley found their best support and en- couragement in their sacred and noble work, far more among hosts of lay friends, who had benefited by and were grateful for their teaching, than amonir clerics, whose! news- o ' ^> papers rarely mentioned them without abuse or sneers. To a great extent it was their lot to sit Heedless of neglect and scorn. Till, their long task completed, they had risen And left us, never to return, and all Rushed in to peer and praise when all was vain. In the habitual falsification to which ec- clesiastical history seems specially liable, it may now be pretended that this was not the case ; for men soon begin to build the MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 97 tombs of the prophets whom their fathers slew. Nevertheless, it was so. Maurice was driven from his professorship at King's College, and was anathematized for years, so that no new "evangelical" paper could bid for popularity without the sauce piquantc of abuse of him in one of those "smart" articles in which all base minds delight. On Dean Stanley's deathbed I saw lying a bitterly contemptuous attack on his charm- ing and most useful Christian Institutions. I could only hope that he had not read it at all ; or, at any rate, not until the gall and wormwood of the anonymous reviewer be- came to him a matter of utter indifference, and the serpent hiss of ecclesiastical hatred as idle as the wind which blows over a crave. o> But one instance of party malice is worth gibbeting as a specimen of what the malig- nity of " religious " newspapers can achieve. The Dean had crone down to Bedford to O unveil the statue of John Bunyan, and had given one of his large, loving, and delightful addresses on the immortal Baptist tinker to whom we owe the Pilgrim' s Progress. The 98 MEN I HA VE KNO IVN. account of this event, given in a "leading" Ritualistic newspaper, was to the following effect : - " A statue has been erected to a Nonconformist writer at Bedford. Of course the person invited to un- veil it was the inevitable Dean of Westminster. All sorts of persons have statues erected to them in these days. There is a personage, undoubtedly powerful and influential, to whom we quite expect soon to hear that a statue has been erected. [Here followed an elabo- rate description of the Devi/J\ When the statue to this personage is finished, we are quite sure tliat the fittest per- son to unveil it will be the Dean of Westminster." Is this reptilian criticism, \vhich is exceed- ingly common, the sort of courtesy which will make the nation humbly accept the dic- tation of priests, or look up to them as ex- amples of " meekness and lowliness of heart " ? I first learnt to know, to honor, and to love F. D. Maurice, when, as a boy of six- teen, I went to King's College, London. He was then Professor of History and Literature, and lectured to us twice a week. We were supposed to take notes of his lectures, and were examined on the subjects of them at the end of the term. I never learnt short- FREDERICK D. MAURICE. MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 99 hand ; but the desire to profit by the lecture system, which was the main method of teach- ing" at King's College, made me so far a " tachygraph " that I could with ease take down everything that was essential in the lectures of Professor Brewer, Professor Mau- rice, and Dr. Jelf. Maurice's lectures were " caviare to the general." Many of the " stu- dents," as we were called, cared nothing for them, and were much more impressed by the lectures of his assistant, which were full of facts. But those of us who had any sense of reverence, or any insight into genius and character, felt that we were in the presence of a great and noble man, and were proud to be under his instruction. His lectures were meant to deal rather with the meaning and the philosophy of history than with those de- tails which he knew that we could derive from any ordinary handbook. Certainly, his lectures were a strong intellectual stimulus to those of us who were at all capable of rightly apprehending them. A witty youth wrote a parody on one of them, which began, " The fifteenth century 100 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. was preceded by the fourteenth, and was in turn succeeded by the sixteenth. This is a most deep, important, and memorable fact," etc. ; but even this fellow was one who had a real admiration for the teacher whom, though he was only one of a body of able men, we regarded as the most eminent o member of the teaching staff. This impres- sion was deepened in us by the Rev. E. H. Plumptre, afterwards Dean of Wells, with whom from those boyish clays I began a life- long friendship. He was then the chaplain of the college. He became Maurice's brother-in-law, and looked up to him, and taught us to look up to him, with the deep- est reverence. The classes were attended by some ninety or a hundred students, whom it was the custom of the place to regard and tr^at as " University men," though so many of us were but boys. Every one was addressed as " Mr. ; " and as we were all living at our respective homes, only those of us who formed friendships among ourselves knew anything about one another. A certain MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 101 number were of course the merest Philis- tines, who neither understood the lectures nor cared for them in the slio-htest decree ; > O and some, of yet coarser grain, had not the ordinary manners to respect the lec- turer or their fellow-students. These youths often behaved execrably. Maurice did not know most of them even by name, as he saw them only in the lecture- room ; and as none of the ordinary public school discipline existed, and any punish- ment short of expulsion was unknown, he had no means of controlling them. That o power of discipline which many seem to possess as a natural gift was not his ; and as we "students" were not a homogeneous body, living under one roof, but a conglom- eration of separate atoms without a particle of authority over one another, we could not coerce the boors into a better demeanor. At last, however, one " man " was in some way identified, and Dr. Jelf brought him into the lecture-room and made him apologize. Even this was not effectual. On one oc- casion things came to a climax. Some brain- 102 MEN I HA VE KNOWN. less youth had concealed himself under the platform on which the seats rose tier above tier; and, as the lecture proceeded, he em- phasized its periods, unseen, by tapping \vith a stick on the floor, giving very pronounced raps when there was any sentence peculiarly solemn and eloquent. This was too much for our equanimity. I never knew the " man's " name ; but I joined in a memorial of sympathy to Maurice, in which we ex- pressed our disgust at such ill-bred barba- rism, and offered our best services to put an end to it thereafter. From this time the disorder ceased. Maurice's literary lectures were even more stimulating and delightful than his histori- cal. He would sometimes make us read, each in turn, the main parts of a play of Shakespeare, criticising as he went along. He would sometimes give us a passage of some classic author to translate into verse, and then, without mentioning our names, would most kindly, yet incisively, criticise the merits and defects of our productions. Without being able to recall special views, MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 10.3 I remember the sort of literary impulse which he gave us ; and others must have profited by it even more than I, for in those classes, among others who were my friends and contemporaries, were Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mr. W. Stebbing, the late Mr. Henry Kingsley, Mr. Clement Swanston, Professor Bensley, Mr. Edward Dicey, and Sir Edwin Arnold. The lecture I best remember was one which Professor Maurice delivered at the spur of the moment, interrupting his ordi- nary course, on April 23, 1856, the day on which we heard in London the news of the death of the poet Wordsworth. I can recall how he spoke to us of the simplicity, the dignity, and whole-hearted devotion to his work of the poet's life, and quoted, as one of his most characteristic utterances, the lines on the rainbow, - My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky : So was it when my life began, So is it now I am a man, Or let me die ! 104 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. The Child is father of the Man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. Professor Maurice was then living in Guildford Street. It was not often that he could invite students to his house, nor was it an easy matter to arrange, since some of us lived far away ; but twice, at least, he asked me to dinner. Those were the days of the admirable little paper, The Christian Socialist, which died a very early death, though there have been few papers of so high a literary calibre, containing, as it did, contributions from J. M. Ludlow, F. J. Furnivall, Maurice, T. Hughes, and the brilliant addresses written by Kingsley un- der the name of " Parson Lot." I remem- ber the earnestness with which we talked of the Working Men's College, and many projects for social amelioration. At that time I was intensely interested in the learning and historic research of the four portly volumes of Elliott's Hor& Apoc- alyptica, of which, boy as I was, I had made a complete analysis. I asked Maurice MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. 105 what he thought of it ; and I remember the sort of cold shock I felt when he told me he regarded the entire system of interpreta- tion as utterly baseless. It was some years before further study brought home to me his conviction, that, though the Book of Revelation might, like those of all inspired writers, have " springing and germinal de- velopments," it was primarily " the thunder- ing reverberation of a mighty spirit struck by the plectrum " of the Neronian perse- cution. From the time I left King's College, Pro- fessor Maurice was always my kind friend. I met him sometimes at Mr. Macmillan's de- lightful reunions at Balham on " All Fools' Day." I met him also at the annual gath- ering of " The Apostles " in the Star and Garter at Richmond. I remember how he came in late at one of those dinners, and - being severely chaffed by Lord Houghton, Sir Fitzjames Stephen, and others for only having come just in time for the "white- bait " - said that " whitebait was his bete noir." 106 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. Lord De Tabley was chairman on that occasion ; and he proposed the health of Maurice, who was always a hero amongst us, saying how little it was to the credit of the dispensers of patronage that one who had rendered to the Church such services as Maurice had done, should never have received the smallest mark of public recog- nition. In his reply he passed over the remark with quiet dignity ; but in those days there would have been a tremendous outcry at his promotion. Once when I wrote a paper on the advantage of some knowledge of metaphysics for the clergy, the Evangelical editor struck out a passage in which I had spoken with gratitude of Maurice's Moral and Metaphysical Philos- ophy. When I was a master at Harrow, Professor Maurice was more than once my guest, and he was a most delightful one. He kindly became godfather to my second son, the Rev. Eric Maurice Farrar, who bears his name. I was seriously taken to task, and almost had a quarrel with certain excellent MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. 107 but narrow-minded persons, for inviting him to address the members of the Institute at Harrow ; but I stuck to my point, and we were rewarded by hearing- his beautiful lec- ture on "The Friendship of Books." He was touched by the genial warmth with which the Rev. B. H. Drury, now Senior Fellow of Caius College, spoke of him in proposing a vote of thanks. I continued more or less in kindly interchange of let- ters and rare conversations with him till his lamented death, on April i, 1872. Many of his pupils deeply sympathized with him, and sent an address of condolence to him, on his dismissal from the King's College Professor- ship, and received a very grateful reply. It was from his books that I learnt the germ of those convictions once, as I know to my cost, savagely and generally anathema- tized, now openly professed by multitudes of the clergy --to which I gave utterance in my sermons on " Eternal Hope." Matthew Arnold, in his tone of friendly banter, wrote of Maurice with high appre- ciation indeed, but still as having spent his 108 AfEN / HA VE KNOWN. life in " beating about the bush with deep emotion, but never starting the hare." Yet if it be the reverse of " ineffectual" to have written books which are still highly valued, and to have quickened to life many precious thoughts in the minds of many who have, in their turn, been among the teachers of their a^e, it falls to the lot of few to achieve o 7 so great a work as was done by one of the truest prophets of the nineteenth century, Frederick Denison Maurice. Were I to attempt to give all my reminis- cences of DEAN STANLEY, they would occupy much space ; for during some years as his colleague I was thrown into almost daily in- tercourse with him, and constantly walked with him in the afternoon to and from the Athenaeum. He took the kindest interest in my children, who were then little girls and boys, and he wrote to them some charmingly playful verses. I first met him, I know not how many years ago, at the house of his brother-in-law, Dean Vaughan ; and then frequently at some unusually simple and de- MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 109 lightful dinners, at which the contributors to the Dictionary of the Bible used to meet monthly under the presidency of Sir W. ' Smith. A little before that time Stanley's Sinai and Palestine had made a powerful impression ; and it is quite incessantly quoted in the Dictionary, as also is the first volume of the Lectiires on the History of tJie Jewish Church. By these books Stanley rendered a far more striking- service to the Church than has ever o been adequately recognized. By what Lord Beaconsfiekl so happily called his " pictur- esque sensibility," he made the characters of Scripture history move and speak, not as conventional lay figures, but as living men and women of like passions with ourselves ; and he thus gave a powerful stimulus to the interest felt by the young in the study of the Bible. It was the fashion of a certain school to sneer at these books and their little inac- curacies ; but the anonymous critics who revelled in these sneers might have thanked God if all that they had ever put together - minus its envy, hatred, and all uncharitable- 1 10 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. ness had achieved a hundredth part of the good work which was permitted to the man of whom they could scarcely speak without an anathema or a sneer. When I was elected head master of Marl- borough College, in December, 1870, I re- ceived the letter of which a fac-simile is here given. It is far more legible than most of those in the bundle which lies before me. I will ask the reader to look at the word " Deanery," which shows the fact that Stan- ley's written words were often only indicated by their first letter. Thus, when he wrote me a letter to Marlborough College, all that the post-office authorities could make out was that the letter was addressed to some place of which the name began with M and consisted of two words. With admirable sa- gacity, they sent the letter to Afcrthyr Tyd- vil. The letter, after long wanderings, was sent back to the Dean, who, writing to me again, enclosed the envelope with many notes of admiration after the " Marlborough Col- lege." The first proofs of his Sinai and Pales- / /, / MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. Ill tine informed the reader that from the monastery of Sinai was visible " tJic Jwrn of the burning beast ! " This was a fearfully apocalyptic nightmare of the printer's devil for " the horizon of the Burning Bush" The original proof-sheets also stated that, on turning the shoulder of Mount Olivet in the walk from Bethany, " there suddenly burst upon the spectator a magnificent view of- Jones ! " In this startling sentence " Jones" was a transmogrification of "ferns" the Dean's abbreviated way of writing " Jerusa- lem." When the Dean answered an invita- tion to dinner, his hostess has been known to write back and inquire whether his note was an acceptance or a refusal ; and when he most kindly replied to the question of some working-man, the recipient of his letter thanked him, but ventured to request that the tenor of the answer might be written out by some one else, "as he was not familiar with the handwriting of the aristoc- racy ! " While I was master of Marlborough, I in- vited him to give an address at our supper 1 12 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. to commemorate the opening of "The Brad- leian." He came, as did also Mr. Matthew Arnold and Sir George Grove ; and it need hardly be said that the occasion was in all respects delightful, and that the Dean's speech, as the case was always, was full of charm. When, after considerable hesitation, I ac- cepted the canonry at Westminster, he wrote with his usual kindness : "My DEAR FARRAR, I shall indeed be delighted to welcome so great an accession to our Abbey staff.'' During the time he was my Dean at the Abbey he was invariably kind and cordial, and it was a delight to take walks with him, o and to share his simple but refined hospi- tality. At the Deanery, and at his evening gatherings, one was sure to meet many in- teresting and distinguished guests. His interest in every passing event was keen. When Leo XIII. was elected Pope he sent me the missive shown in facsimile on the following page : - MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 1 13 He never really recovered his normal vigor and good spirits after the death of his beloved wife, Lady Augusta Stanley, though his happy visit to America did much to brighten and divert his thoughts. He had many stories to tell of the interviewers, and the \vay in which they recorded what he had (and had not!) said and done. In one city the paper said, " The Dean of Westminster ascended the pulpit robed in 1 1 4 MEN I HA VE KNO \VN. the insignia of the Diaconale " ! probably the writer meant of " the Decanate ; " and he took the ribbon of the Bath for an ec- clesiastical distinction. Only once were the reporters and interviewers thrown off the track, when, at one of the cities, he had taken rooms at the hotel, but was met by some gentleman in his carriage, who took him to the hospitality of his house. The pressmen did not even know where he was ; but this did not make the slightest difference, and on the Monday there were full accounts of his doings just as usual ! He was a tolerably regular attendant at Convocation. He used to go in, make a speech which cut across the grain of the susceptibilities of most of his hearers, and then march out with his head defiantly in the air, not waiting to hear the outburst which his speech often caused. Yet, personally, some of his strongest op- ponents loved him. On one occasion Arch- deacon Denison actually walked out in the middle of Stanley's speech, saying that he really could not stop to listen to such her- MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. 115 esies ; but shortly after, Stanley met him, and, taking him by the arm, said, " Come in to luncheon, my dear fellow," and in a few minutes they were talking and laugh- ing together most heartily. One of the severe critics whose incisive remarks he took most good-humoredly was his former Canterbury colleague, the late Archdeacon Harrison. On the occasion of the thankso-ivinor service on the Prince of O Wales's recovery from severe illness, Stanley had preached, and, with his usual penchant for historic analogies, had spoken of the interesting fact that on the last occasion of a similar character George III. had come to St. Paul's to thank God for his recovery. The Dean drew a parallel between " the aged king and the youthful prince." On coming out of the Cathedral, Archdeacon Harrison met him, and his only criticism of the ser- mon was, " Humph \ aged king, 46 : yoiitli- ful prince, 29. Humph ! " So far from being offended by this keen criticism, which was meant to speak volumes, the Dean laughed heartily as he told me this story against himself. 1 16 ME N T HA rr. KNO \VN. There is no denying that he was abso- lutely out of sympathy with the extreme and more ritualistic developments of what is called " the Oxford School." Disputes about copes, etc., he used to speak of as "quarrels about clergymen's clot lies." Every sympathy of his mind, every feeling of his heart, made him regard churchly exclu- siveness and the enforcement of unauthor- ised shibboleths with something as nearly approaching to anger as his genial temper- ament permitted. He looked on love, large - heartedness, and a spirituality unlettered by anything which he regarded as niggling or nugatory, as essential characteristics of the spirit of true Christianity. He regarded many liturgiological minutiae as being on a level with the Levitic ordinances which St. Paul and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews described as carnal, weak, and beggarly rudiments. Hence on mat- ters of opinion he was not in touch with many of the clergy, and there is no doubt that he rather enjoyed a certain sense of chivalry in the courageous isolation which he was forced to maintain. MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. 117 The late Archbishop Magee ventured to say that the clergy were like damp hay, which grows more hot and more likely to burst into flame when it is thickly packed. I was present at a crowded and excited meeting of the clergy, convened in the National Society's room at Westminster, so far as I can remember, to denounce one of Bishop Colenso's archdeacons, and inciden- tally the late Bishop of Worcester, who had said a kind word in his favor. Archbishop Tait was in the chair ; Archbishop Thom- son of York sat beside him ; and many bishops were present, with a large array of clergy. At one point Archbishop Tait in- dignantly interfered to suppress and forbid some very free comments on Bishop Phil- pott ; but Colenso was anathematized with- out stint. Then Stanley got up to speak. He pronounced a glowing eulogy on Bishop Colenso as the only bishop who, with in- tense, indefatigable toil, had mastered the Zulu language ; as the only bishop who had translated the Bible into the native Ian- 1 18 MEN I HA I'E KNO IVN. guage of his heathen people ; as the only bishop who had stayed in his humble colo- nial see for years together, never coming home except for business, and to right the wrongs of the oppressed, and in cases of absolute necessity. " Sneer at Bishop Colenso ! " he said de- fiantly, at the close of his speech : " Bishop Colenso's name will be remembered and honored when " with a sweep of his arm "when everyone of you is dead, buried, and utterly forgotten." After his delivery of that speech, in which he had liberated his mind, he was in unusually high spirits. He felt, not without sadness, that the day of his literary popularity was gone. His Christian Institutions, thanks to the un- just sneers heaped upon it in spite of its loving charm and wisdom, was very little noticed, and chiefly with contemptuous de preciation. " After a man has written a certain amount," he said to me, " the public seem to want no more of him ; and the davs MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 119 when my books ran through edition after edition is past and gone." But his death gave a fresh impulse to the sale of his books. He had long contemplated, with real in- terest, a little plan of preaching on the Beatitudes on Saturday afternoons in sum- mer, and of illustrating his sermons by the memories of those who were buried in the Abbey. As I was Canon in Residence at the time, I heard these sermons preached on 1 8th June, 1881, and on following Satur- days. He illustrated the Beatitudes of " the poor in spirit," and of ''those who mourn," by little sketches of Edward the Confessor and Jeremiah Horrocks, and by the pathetic tablet with his favorite inscription, to "Jane Lister, Dear Childe, who died October 7, 1688." He illustrated the Beatitude of the meek by Margaret of Richmond, mother of Henry VII., who said that if the princes of Europe would cease to war with each other, and would combine against the Turk, she would go as their washerwoman. The Beatitude o 120 MEN I HA VE KA T O WN. of those who hunger and thirst after right- eousness was enforced by stories of the emancipators of the slave, Granville Sharp, Zachary Macaulay, and Wilberforce ; the Be- atitude of the merciful, by Martin of Gal way (who carried through Parliament, amidst obloquy of every kind, the bill to suppress cruelty to animals), by Charles James Fox, and Charles Dickens. The Beatitude of the pure in heart evoked reminiscences of Milton, Addison, and Wordsworth, and of Newton (of whom his friends said that he had the whitest soul they had ever known). This last sermon was preached on July 9, 1 83 1. It was the last sermon he ever preached, and the tones of it still echo in my memory. In the middle of the service I was surprised to see the Dean go out. He came back in time to preach, and told me afterwards that he had suddenly felt ill. Next day he; took to his bed, and I visited him, little knowing how grave his illness was; towards the close of the fol- lowing week erysipelas set in. His friend, the late Bishop Fraser of Manchester, was MA URICE AND DEAN STANLE Y. 121 to preach at the Abbey on the evening of Sunday, July 17. As he could not be re- ceived at the Deanery, he came to my house, and, shocked at the news of the Dean's danger, shut himself up in my study, and added to his sermon a most touching and eloquent tribute to the Dean's beauty of character, moving many to tears as he asked for their prayers. That night I spent in the Dean's bedroom, in which also were Lady Frances Baillie, Dr. Harper, the late Precentor Flood Jones, and others. The Dean was then wholly unaware of his approaching end ; he talked of get- ting up and going about. Then I earnestly asked his friends present whether they would like to face death without even being warned that the solemn crisis was near. They were afraid of the shock which the announce- ment might cause to him. I told them that I had been present at many death- beds ; had often insisted that dying men or women should be warned of their peril ; and had never once known the slightest O shock follow a calm announcement. 122 MEN I HA VR KNO WN. Thereupon Dr. Harper gently told the Dean that he must not for a moment think of getting up ; that he was dangerously ill ; and that, besides, he was probably unaware how much his face was altered and disfig- ured. This was, indeed, so sadly true that no photograph of him could be taken, and his features were swollen out of recogni- tion. With the most innocent of gestures he raised his hand to his face, and remained silent for a few moments. Afterwards I proposed to administer to him the Holy Communion, and he assented. He then desired me to take down his latest mes- sages a very difficult task, for he could scarcely make any distinct articulation. At last, however, I made out these words the paper (a half- sheet of the Deanery note-paper, on which I wrote them with a blunt pencil) is now lying before me: " The end has come in the way I most desired that it should come, if I could have controlled it. Before and after preaching one of my sermons on the Beat- itudes, I had a most violent feeling of sickness, took to my bed, and said immediately I wished to die at Westminster. MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. 123 " Bless the Drummonds you, dearest Frances, and you, dearest Mary ; naturally, you know more about my thoughts and papers than any one else in the world." After this he wandered a little, but then rallied his forces to dictate his last message to the Queen and the nation. It was as follows, the only distinctly articulated words being : " A mark of respect to the Queen ; and I trust that last mark of conferring attention . . . the value of the Abbey . . . the glory of the Abbey . . . and what the duties of this office are supposed to be. In spite of every" [here I had long to wait before the dying Dean could eonvey to me the word he intended, which was] " incompetence, I have yet humbly trusted that I have sustained before the mind of the nation the extraordinary value of the Abbey as a religious, lib- eral, and national institution, and in spite of almost every . . ." Those were the last consecutive and intel- ligible words which Dean Stanley uttered, and they have never before been published. I mentioned the substance of them to Arch- bishop Tait, and he repeated them, but not quite accurately, in a speech in Convocation, from which they got into the papers. 124 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. The next day the Dean lay still, and either silent or incoherent, and no friend was al- lowed to be present, in order that he might, if possible, have a partial recovery. But on the Monday night I was again summoned to his bedside, where, besides Lady Frances Baillie, were Dean and Mrs. Vaughan, and for a time Archbishop Tait. I le spoke no word that night, but with long, labored, tremulous sighs gradually passed - To where beyond these voices there is peace. We read to him, and prayed with him. Among other things I put into Mrs. Vaugh- an's hands his favorite hymn, the noble hymn of Charles Wesley Come, O Thou Traveller unknown, Whom still I hear and cannot see, My company before is gone, And I am left alone with Thee ; Alone with Thee I mean to stay, And wrestle till the break of day. I doubt, however, whether he heard or was conscious of anything. He seemed to be speaking, but no words were intelligible. MAURICE AND DEAN STANLEY. 125 At last came the lonor fluttering breath, and o o the heart ceased to beat. We flung our- selves on our knees in turns, and prayed, our eyes bathed in tears, our voices broken by sobs. His was the purest, most childlike, most beautiful spirit I have ever known. He was a perfect illustration of- that definition of " Genius," already quoted, which describes it as " the heart of childhood taken up and matured in the powers of manhood." There has been rarely such a sight in England as that presented by his funeral. He was laid beside his beloved wife, Lady Augusta Stanley, who had been inex- pressibly dear to him. The Archbishop, Archdeacon Jennings, Dean Vaughan, and I took part in the funeral. Hundreds of the poor of Westminster were present, and many of the greatest writers, artists, and states- men. Almost all the royal princes stood round the little chapel which contains his grave, and there was scarcely one eye that was not wet with tears. V. A GROUP OF SCIENTISTS. DOCTOR WHEWELL ; PROFESSOR CLERK MAX- WELL J CHARLES DARWIN ; PROFESSOR TVN- DALL ; PROFESSOR HUXLEY. MY reminiscences of the great DR. WHEW- ELL, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and author, among other books, of the fa- mous History and of the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, are chiefly those of the days when I was an undergraduate, a scholar, and a young fellow of the great college over which he presided. In those days, whatever may be the case now, the master of a college stood at an awful distance from the undergraduates. Only a few favored youths, chiefly scholars, were invited to what were called " the stand- ups " - that is, to parties at the master's lodge, where no undergraduate was ever 126 il CHARLES DARWIN. DOCTOR WHEW ELL. 127 supposed to take the awful liberty of sitting down. It is, I cannot doubt, a sign of great- ness to be made the subject of contemporary myths ; for the clouds gather about moun- tain peaks. Not a few myths used to be narrated of our great master. As " myths " alone do I refer to them, not in the least vouching for their truth. One was, that c> when he was tutor he had invited a num- ber of his "men" to a "wine" -as the entertainments of those days used to be called. Noticing a vacant place, he said to his " gyp," " Why is not Mr. - - here ? " " He is dead, sir," was the reply. " I wish you would tell me when my pu- pils die ! " was the indignant answer. Now, I do not believe a word of this legend ; for though I did not know Dr. Whewell in the days when he was a tutor, yet, judging from his kindness to me when he was master, I am quite sure that he would keep more or less in touch with his pu- pils. Another favorite myth bore on the bon mot of some one, I think Sydney Smith, 128 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. - that " science was Dr. Whewell's forte, and omniscience his foible." He was sup- posed to know " something about every- thing, and everything about some things." On one occasion, two of the fellows, think- ing to get beyond his range, began to talk on the subject of Chinese metaphysics, which they had got up for the purpose. Whewell listened in silence for a time, and then ob- served, " Ah ! I see you have been reading a paper which I wrote for an Encyclopaedia of Science." After that, they laid no more plots to find limits to his universal knowledge ! I vividly recall the fine and stately pres- ence of the master, which (as another myth related) made a prize-fighter deplore that so splendid a physique, and such thews and sinews, should be thrown away on a mere clergyman ! I remember him especially in the college chapel. He was an unfeignedly religious man. One little peculiarity of his in the Communion service was always to omit the words ''and oblations" after "to DOCTOR W HE WELL. 129 receive these our alms." He understood the word "oblations" to mean simply the bread and wine as normally presented, or supposed to be presented, by the congre- gation. As we undergraduates had nothing to do with providing the Eucharistic ele- ments, he thought it meaningless to use the word. He preached to us only once a term ; for in those days every undergraduate was supposed to attend the University sermon, either at ten or at three, or both. The morning sermon was, as a rule, miserably attended ; and the afternoon but scantily, though we used to flock to hear the very small number of really eminent preachers who were, in those days, invited to address us. It is perhaps hardly surprising that the morning University sermon should have been abolished, for I haye sometimes seen barely half a dozen undergraduates present. Preachers were often duller even than their wont, because they unwisely used the Uni- versity pulpit to air their special " views," or mounted, for the nonce, on stilts to which 1 .30 MEN I HA VE KNO W TV. they were not accustomed. The clerk of St. Mary's (or one of the Esquire Bedells, I forget which) is reported to have made the remark, - " I have attended the University sermons morning and evening for forty years, and thank God I am still a Christian ! " There are now sermons every Sunday in all the college chapels, and doubtless they are more generally useful. It would hardly have been supposed that Dr. Whewell's sermons should frequently have had a marked poetic tinge. Such, however, was the case. As an undergrad- uate he had won the Chancellor's Medal for a poem on Boadicca, and several of his fugitive pieces of poetry are still preserved. I still remember his sermons. There was one especially, preached on Feb. 23, 1851, which we undergraduates asked him to print. He did so, and sent a copy to each of us, with the preface : - " Several of those who heard this ser- mon having expressed a desire to see it in print, I gladly offer it to them in that DOCTOR WHEWELL. 131 form, with my affectionate wishes for their welfare, and especially for their spiritual welfare." I still possess the copy which he sent me. The text was Isa. xxx. 15, " In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength" He spoke of the true sources of strength in sorrow, in doubt, in religious change, and amid social anxieties, pointing out that what we are to aim at is faith not "the quietness of inaction and the confidence of carelessness," but the clue use of the means of grace. " Consider," he said, " how great is the weight which these years of your life have to bear ; how much depends upon your forming here a manly and worthy view of the value of your own purity and sobriety of mind how much to yourselves, how much to your country, how much to your destiny, in time and in eternity. Seek to make your weeks roll round like the wheels of a chariot which is to carry you along the road of God's commands and purposes, which is bringing you continually nearer to 132 MEN I HA V'E KNO IV N. the gate of heaven. And so doing, may the Spirit of God descend upon you week by week, and day by day ! " It was in those days the idiotic and ill- mannered practice of the undergraduates to begin a loud and continuous whistle when- ever Dr. Whewell entered the Senate House. How this originated I do not o know. There were two legends about it : one was, that it intimated that the master vvould-have to whistle for a bishopric an honor for which I should imagine that he had not the remotest desire ; the other (equally absurd) was, that when some one had asked him how to pronounce his name he had said, " You must shape your mouth as if you were going to whistle ! " But he was the greatest man among us ; and I can remember my feeling of pained vex- ation to think how unworthy it was of Cam- bridge that this insulting inanity should be practised upon the master of our chief college, term after term, and year after year, even in the presence of distinguished strangers. At one time Dr. Whewell, owing to some DOCTOR WHEWELL. J33 line which he took in University questions, was very unpopular. He was hooted from the Senate House, and even an assault on him was apprehended. On one occasion the masters of arts and others formed a sort of escort and conducted him back to Trinity Lodofe. o But when his wife, Lady Affleck, died, a very touching incident occurred, showing the genuine goodness of heart which lay under the rough manners of the " men." Dr. Whewell had been tenderly devoted to his wife, and when he attended chapel after her death the Trinity men were touched by the fact that he had not shrunk from letting them see the spectacle of " an old man's anguish, and a strong man's tears." When next he entered the Senate House there was dead silence. For the first time for I know not how many years not a whistle was heard ; and then, a moment afterwards, as by spon- taneous impulse, the whole crowded mass of undergraduates in the gallery burst into a loud and long-continued cheer. It was not astonishing that such a proof of sympathy 134 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. should have moved the heart of the great master, or that the tears should have run down his cheeks. After that, I do not think that he was ever whistled at again. To me Dr. Whewell was always kind, and more than kind. When I was elected a scholar he addressed me in friendly terms. He read through with me the poem on The Arctic Regions which obtained for me the Chancellor's medal. In one line I had called the icebergs " unfabled Strophades." " Ah ! " he said, " an admirable expression ! " And he had a little talk with me as to whether I meant a particular word to be " irridescence " or "iridescence." In the examination for the Trinity Fellowships a paper was always set in Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics. I happened to have read all through the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for whom I felt in those days a boundless admiration, and whose works I had selected for one of my Trinity prizes. In my paper I had often referred to the views of Coleridge, and this pleased the master very much, for (though I did not DOCTOR W HEM' ELL. 135 know it) he too had a great sympathy and admiration for S. T. C. He told me, with a pleasant smile, that he had never before met with a fellowship candidate who had made the same use of Coleridge's views as I had done. When the question of University Reform was vehemently agitated with reference to the Royal Commission, I took the side of those who voted for, and ur^ed on, the o changes of system which have, since then, very considerably altered the whole of col- lege life and university education. Dr. Whewell was strongly, I had almost said passionately, "on the other side, and I had a long letter from him in consequence of a speech of mine at one of the meetings of the fellows of Trinity. He did not alter the opinions which I had been led to form, but it is needless to say that I wrote my answer to his arguments with the deepest respect and the most modest deference. I always felt warmly grateful for all that I owed to him, and am thankful to have come in contact with -so fine a personality. 136 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. A very great man of science PROFESSOR J. CI.EKK MAXWELL was my contemporary at college, and entered as a freshman with myself. He was elected a scholar in the same year as I was, and we were constantly thrown together during the time of our Uni- versity career. Many a long walk have I had with him, and spent with him many a bright and cheery evening, while "life moved like a fiery pillar before us, the dark side not yet turned." He was elected into the very small Society of " Apostles," to which have belonged such men as Archbishop Trench, Dean Alford, Thompson, Master of Trinity, Lord Houghton, Lord De Tabley, F. D. Maurice Sterling, Sir Henry Mayne, the late Sir A. Buller, Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen, Lord Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, F. J. Hort, and many eminent men now living, whom I will not name. Maxwell's speeches and pa- pers at the meetings of this little society which did not number more than five or six members were always most able and most characteristic. His interventions in the discussions, when PROFESSOR ;7 CLERK MAXWELL. 137 each of us had to speak in turn, were often hardly intelligible to any one who did not understand the general characteristics of his mind, which were very marked in his con- versation. If you said something to him, he would reply by a remark which seemed wide as the poles from what you had men- tioned. This often had the effect of di- verting the conversation from the subject in hand, because the remark appeared wholly irrelevant. When this was the case, he usually dropped the discussion altogether ; and, indeed', many of those who casually met him regarded him as incomprehensible for this reason. But if you gave him his bent, he would soon show you that his ob- servation, so far from beinor nihil ad rctn, C5 really bore very closely on the heart of the question at issue. To this he would gradu- ally approach, until the relevance of his first remark, which seemed so distant from the topic under consideration, became abun- dantly manifest. At one time, when I was an undergradu- ate, I became very despondent about my 138 MEN I HA VE KNO IV N. mathematics. In those days, the rule had only just been altered which insisted that a classical student should take honors in the mathematical tripos before he was even permitted to present himself in the classi- cal. I might have availed myself of this rule, but did not like to do so. Having been originally intended for Oxford, I had never taken much trouble with mathemat- ics, and had, moreover, been very badjy and carelessly trained in them. Hence I was nervous about the tripos ; and, seeing this, Maxwell, who was a ready verse-writer, felt a genuine sympathy with me in my dis- heartenment, and wrote me a little apologue called 7 he Lark and the Cabbage. In this he compared himself, with his mathemat- ical studies, to the cabbage ; and me, with my supposed poetic aspirations, to the lark, -the upshot being that I had better not attempt the mathematical tripos, but reserve myself for classics. I replied in a similar strain of nonsense, ending with It is a lark to be a lark, 'Tis green to be a cabbage. PROFESSOR J. CLERK MAXWELL. 139 Sometimes, however, he wrote more serious verses ; and when I left Cambridge he was one of the half-dozen friends who entered their thoughts for me in a little manuscript book. What he wrote was striking and o noble far more so, I should imagine, than has often been written by one undergradu- ate for another. It was as follows : " He that would enjoy life' and act with freedom must have the work of the clay continually before his eyes. Not yester- day's work, lest he fall into despair ; not to-morrow's, lest he become a visionary not that which ends with the day, which is a worldly work; nor yet that only which re- mains to eternity, for by it he cannot shape his actions. " Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of to-day a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he > has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises, because the present is given him for a pos- 140 MEN I HA I'E KNO WN. session. Thus ought man to be an imper- sonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite ; not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal truth enlighten it." With CHARLES DARWIN, one of the great- est, and certainly the most epoch-making man, of science in our age, I was chiefly acquainted by correspondence. My inti- macy with several of our greatest men of science elates from Feb. 8, 1867, in which year I delivered, by request, one of the lectures before the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. Being then a master at Harrow, I boldly chose for my subject, Some Defects in Our Public School Edu- cation. The system of spending many hours every week over Greek and Latin verse was, at that time, in lull vogue in all O CHARLES DAR WIN. 141 schools, and I vigorously attacked it. I had founded a little Scientific or Natural History Society among the boys at Harrow. It did excellent work, giving scope to boys who, like the late Professor F. Balfour, cared but little for the ordinary curriculum ; and my efforts to stimulate an interest in botany and other branches of study and observation left a permanent impress on the minds of several Harrovians. Struck with the good effect of interest in science on the intellectual devel- opment of many boys, I urged in my lec- ture that the very artificial drilling in Latin and Greek verse should be minimized, and entirely abandoned in the case of boys who had no sort of aptitude for it. I had known boys who, after years of training in it, only succeeded in producing at last some limping and abortive heptameter ! Sir Henry Holland was in the chair; Pro- fessor Tyndall, Mr. Spottiswoode, afterwards President of the Royal Society, and other scientific leaders were present. They hailed my lecture with the utmost warmth paid it the unusual honor of printing it, not in 142 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. epitome, but at full length, in the Transac- tions, and also begged me to publish it as a separate pamphlet. I was, of course, howled at as a hopeless Philistine by all who were stereotyped in the old classical system. That is a result which invariably follows the enunciation of new truths or plans for necessary reform. But the lecture produced a marked effect. At that time there was certainly not more than one well-known school which had a " Science Master ; " now there is scarcely a school of note which has not. Then the "Latin verse" system which for most boys was almost abysmally useless, or which, at the best, only produced very indirect results - was in all but universal practice ; now it is almost entirely abandoned. This is not the only battle in my life in which outbursts of ridicule and anathema have been wholly fruitless to hinder progress in a cause which I had ventured to plead at a time when it was new and entirely unpopular. I had one reward in the lifelong pleasure of enjoying some intercourse with men who CHARLES DAR WIN. 143 hailed my advocacy with the highest ap- proval. It was in consequence of this, and events which followed, that I first received the following very interesting letter from Mr. Darwin. He wrote: March 5, 1887. MY DEAR SIR, I am very much obliged to you for your kind present of your lecture. We have read it aloud with the greatest interest, and I agree to every word. 1 admire your candor and wonderful freedom from prejudice ; for I feel an inward conviction that if I had been a great classical scholar I should never have been able to have judged fairly on the subject. As it is, I am one of the root and branch men, and would leave classics to be learnt by those who have sufficient zeal and the high taste requisite for their ap- preciation. You have indeed done a great public ser- vice by speaking out so boldly. Scientific men might rail for ever, and it would only be said that they railed at what they did not understand. I was at school at Shrewsbury under a great scholar, Dr. Butler. I learnt absolutely nothing except by amusing myself by read- ing and experimenting in chemistry. Dr. Butler some- how found this out, and publicly sneered at me before the whole school for such gross waste of time. I re- member he called me a Poco eurante, which not under- standing I thought was a dreadful name. I wish you had shown in your lecture how science could practically be taught in a great school. I have often heard it objected that this could not be done, and 144 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. I never knew what to say in answer. I heartily hope that you may live to see your zeal and labor produce good fruit ; and with my best thanks, I remain, my dear sir, yours verv sincerely, CHARLES DARWIN. It will, I think, be agreed that this letter has something of an historic interest in the annals of English education. With regard to the difficulty stated by Mr. Darwin, one may now say solvitur ambulando ; for now there is no large school that does not offer its pupils the opportunity of acquiring some practical and experimental knowledge of science, whereas formerly chemistry itself used to be sweepingly described by boys under the one comprehensive designation of " Stinks." Darwin's nickname at school was " Gas." The mistake of Dr. Butler of Shrewsbury with regard to the greatest intel- lect which ever passed under his tuition was, of course, a vitium temporis non hominis. And I think I may add that Mr. Darwin's kind wish has been fulfilled, and that I have " lived to see the fruits of my labor." In 1871 Mr. Darwin very kindly sent me /hr Z ,c/C-c^r~ \7 -?- J o< zfor&-^r~> / T Vr**- ttf ^^- <*- CGi^ t& Jv&^&ufie& s**y^ *s Jt t */ ^y y / JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 161 Beneath yon birch, with silver bark, And boughs so pendulous and fair, The brook falls scattered down the rock, And all is mossy there. I have often talked with Mr. Lowell about literary subjects, but his conversations have not impressed themselves on my recollection. When the fine west window to Sir Walter Raleiofh, " the Father of the United States," *z_> was given to me by Americans to commem- orate the fact that the headless body of that brilliant explorer lies buried in St. Margaret's, Westminster, I chose Mr. Lowell (who was then the American Ambassador) as the fittest poet to write the memorial quatrain. I sent him at the same time the four lines which Lord Tennyson had written for me to be engraved under the window z> which the printers of London presented to me in memory of the first great English printer, who lies buried in the same church. I am able to give a facsimile of Mr. Lowell's letter and lines. Mr. Lowell was present at the sermon which I preached after the unveiling of the 1G2 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. window. I had occasion in the discourse to mention his name and quote his lines. He was sitting just under me in the Speaker's pew, and told me afterwards, when he lunched with us, that to hear himself spoken of as I had done made him as nervous as an M.P. might be supposed to be when he is " named " by the Speaker in the House of Commons ! With the Quaker poet, JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, I spent part of a delightful day, in his own house, with Dr. Phillips Brooks. I had a warm admiration for the venerable poet. He has, in his verses, given splendid expression to the convictions which I tried to set forth in Eternal Hope. He was one of the most modest and most saintly men I ever saw. The deepest, yet most tolerant, reli- gious feeling breathes through all his poems, from those of his early youth to those writ- ten in advanced age. I was further drawn to him by the noble passion with which, all his life long, he had thrown himself into every movement in the cause of humanity - s JOHN GREENLEAF WHTTTIER. 16-3 and mercy. Further, I found in his writings a far nearer approach to the true religion of Christ than I did in most books professedly religious. Of course Mr. Whittier was, in one sense, not a very great poet ; he did not stand in the front line. Some of his poems lack intensity and compression. But his best verses will undoubtedly live. What concen- trated force there is in his lines on the great orator, Daniel Webster, after the sort of volte-face through which he went on the sub- ject of slavery when he became a candidate for the Presidency : So fallen ! so lost ! the light withdrawn Which once he wore ! The glory from his gray hairs gone For evermore ! All else is gone ! from those great eyes The soul has fled : When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead ! Again, how marvellously touching are his lines in contemplation of death ! - 1 fU MEN 1 HA VE KNO WN. When on my day of life the night is falling, And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, I hear far voices out of darkness, calling My feet to paths unknown, I have but Thee, my Father ! let Thy Spirit Be with me then to comfort and uphold ; No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, Nor street of shining gold. Suffice it if, my good and ill unreckoned, And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace, I find myself by hands familiar beckoned Unto my fitting place : Some humble door, amid Thy many mansions, Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease, And flows for ever through Heaven's green expan- sions The river of Thy peace ! Mr. Whittier's home was as simple and unpretending as it could possibly be, yet all about it there was an indescribable air of re- finement. No one was at luncheon except Phillips Brooks and myself; and though the meal was as plain as possible, it was truly de- lightful. We were waited upon by the poet's JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 165 niece ; and I felt so uneasy at seeing her come in with the dishes and hand us the plates, that at last I said, " This is a reversal of the proper order of things ! What we ought to do is to wait on the young lady, not she on us." " Not at all ! " said Mr. Whittier. " You are the o-uests; there is nothing in the small- o o est degree derogatory in a young lady enjoy- ing the pleasure of waiting on you. This is our old simple New England custom." We had to be content! Immediately after the meal the young lady put on her riding- habit, and mounting her horse, which was led to the door, she went for a ride with the young gentleman to whom she was en- gaged. After lunch I asked Mr. Whittier to sign for me his photograph. This led to a con- versation about autographs. He said that the number of letters in the year which he received, asking for his autograph, was im- mense, and at last became embarrassing. This I can easily imagine ; for in America, at one time, there was such a rage for auto- 16G MEN I HA !'/: K.\O WN. graphs that I have often had birthday books, etc., left in a carriage which was merely standing at the door of a shop into which I had gone to buy something ! He asked Emerson how he treated requests for his autograph. Emerson said that he, at one time, always sent his autograph to any one who wrote to ask for it. Hut when the applications came to be counted by hun- dreds, he had ceased to do so. " But what do you do," asked Whittier, " when they enclose stamps ? " " Oh," said Emerson, " tlie stamps come in handy / " This, however, was a bolder impropriation than the conscience of the Quaker poet could permit, and whenever a stamped envelope came he enclosed his signature in it. I give the facsimile of a letter from Mr. Whittier to my friend, the famous philan- thropist, Mr. George W. Childs, together with the quatrain which he wrote for the Milton window in St. Margaret's. Of this window Mr. Childs was the donor, and I asked Mr. Whittier to write the inscription. , GEORGE W. CHILDS. 167 MR. GEORGE W. GUILDS was for many years the owner of the Public Ledger, one of the most honorable of the American papers. He never made any secret of the fact that he had risen from the very hum- blest and lowest position. I believe he once swept out the office as a penniless office-boy. By conduct and character he rose rapidly to wealth, influence, and uni- versal respect. I never knew a kindlier, more large-hearted, or more lovable man. I was his guest at Philadelphia, and I met him at dinner at Mr. Vanderbilt's, and in other houses. He gave me two memorable receptions. One was to the clergy, .black and white and of all denominations, in the neighborhood of Philadelphia, to the num- ber of seven hundred. Not a few of them were very poor, and the large and loving heart of Mr. Childs delighted in showing them an act of kindness. I was also the guest of the evening at an entertainment to which he had invited all the numerous representatives of the press in Philadelphia and the neighborhood. 16S MEN I HA VE KNO WN. I had the difficult task of addressing them almost on the spur of the moment ; and I spoke of the immense power which they wielded, and the awful temptations to abuse the safeguard of anonymity by using the poisoned dagger as well as the mask. I spoke of the intense and ruinous pain which a single careless paragraph in a newspaper might cause. Such a paragraph might have been written with no villanous intention, but merely in thoughtlessness to make " copy," and yet might be reverber- ated a millionfold, as if through a colossal telephone, microphone, and phonograph all in one. And I told the pressmen, in all humility, that if they abused the enormous power which they were thus enabled to wield, they might do more mischief than the madman, who, in Scriptural phrase, " scatters firebrands, arrows, and death." Mr. Childs was most deeply interested in what I said ordinary as it was. " From the first day that I owned the Public Ledger'' he said to me, " I made up my mind that nothing mean or dishonor- GEORGE WILLIAM CHILDS. GEORGE W. CHILDS. 169 able, no malignant gossip, no debasing reports, should stain its pages. To that I attribute its success ; and I would rather have given a thousand dollars than that you should not have said what you did to our journalists." He then made me accept a gold pocket- knife and a gold pencil-case, which I possess to this day. More than any man I ever knew, he found his highest, almost his ex- clusive, happiness in doing works of per- sonal kindness and public munificence. He was almost the only living man (Dean Stan- ley used to say) who, for more than half a century, had given a purely spontaneous gift to Westminster Abbey ; the gift was the beautiful window in honor of the poets George Herbert and Cowper. When I told Mr. Childs how closely Milton had been connected with St. Margaret's, Westminster, where his banns of marriage were published, and where his dearest wife (" my late- espoused saint") and infant daughter lie buried, he gladly consented to give a window to Milton's memory. When it was 170 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. executed, he sent at once the sum which it cost which was, I believe, more than 600. He, too, it was who erected the memorial fountain to Shakespeare at Strat- ford-on-Avon, and the memorial windows to Bishop Ken at Winchester, and to Keats. The name of one of the humblest and most unassuming of men will thus be permanently connected with some of the noblest and fairest names in English literature. And what was very remarkable was, that, so far from making much of his munificence, he re- garded himself as indebted to those who had called it forth. This very rare characteristic will be illustrated by the following paragraph at the end of one of his letters to me : - I cannot tell you the intense gratification the whole matter has given me personally, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you have done in the matter. I prize the MS., and will have it superbly bound. With cordial regard, GEO. W. CHILDS. 41 Another illustrious American whom I knew, and who was twice my host, was MR. CYRUS W. FIELD. 171 CYRUS W. FIELD, to whose indomitable energy and perseverance was so largely owing the laying of the Atlantic telegraph. It was he who in 1854 procured a charter for the submarine telegraph from the American continent to Newfoundland, which he meant to connect with the cable to Valencia in Ire- land. He devoted many years and a large part of his fortune to this effort, organized the " Atlantic Telegraph Company" in 1856, and accompanied the expedition sent out to lay the cable in 1857 and 1858. After two failures failures which would have been found fatally disheartening to most men - he succeeded ; and he began to operate with the Atlantic telegraph in August, 1866. I was his guest in New York, and he was mine more than once in England. He o was a genial, hearty, hopeful man, and a man, as it seemed to me, of very sincere and simple piety. Some writer has said that many a man would do one a kindness, yet would not on any account get up at seven in the mornincr to make himself of c3 use. I can only say that, when I arrived 172 MEN I HA VE KNOWN. by steamer at three in the morning at New York, the streets of the great city were empty and deserted, but Mr. Cyrus Field was there in person to meet me with his carriage ! I remember being struck with the simplicity with which his nephew, a fine handsome youth, lifted my heavy port- manteau, put it on his shoulder, and walked with it up the flight of steps to Mr. Field's house, and then to my room. I wondered whether there were many members of the families of millionaires who would have turned porter, without a moment's hesita- tion, and with such delightful simplicity! Mr. Cyrus Field loaded me with kindness, both in New York and at his splendid house on the Hudson ; and he asked many of the most distinguished Americans including one ex-President to meet me at dinner. I went with him to the Brooklyn Taber- nacle, and heard a sermon from Henry Ward Beecher which I still vividly remember, for its wit (in the higher sense), power, and large humanitarian philanthropy. After the service I went with Mr. Field to Mr. DEAN FAPRAR AND BISHOP BROOKS. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 173 Beecher's house to tea, and had some inter- esting conversation with him. It was at Mr. Field's house that the clergy of New York of all denominations presented me with a very kind and cordial address of welcome their spokesman being the eloquent and highly respected Rev. Dr. Storrs. One more great American I must mention my dear friend, BISHOP PHILLIPS BROOKS. He called and introduced himself to me in Dean's Yard at Westminster, about the time that he preached his sermon in the Abbey on "The candle of the Lord." I was very deeply struck with the sermon, and at my persuasion he published it with others in the admirable volume to which it gives the title. It was the first volume of sermons he ever published. After that he used to preach at St. Margaret's whenever he came to England. He was the fastest public speaker in America and England ; he ut- tered two hundred and thirteen words a min- ute in the pulpit, and was the despair of reporters. He not unfrequently repeated 174 MEN I HAVE KNOWN. his sermons in his own church (in which, like many English visitors, I preached for him). It was well that he could do so, for his discourses were unusually full of thought and power, and the only drawback to their magnificent effect was the lightning-like pace at which they were enunciated. I asked him if he could not correct this defect, which made it difficult for some of his hearers to follow him ; but he replied that it was not possible. As a youth he had suffered from some slight vocal difficulty, and it was only by very rapid speaking that lie could get over it. If space permitted, I might have much to tell of the delightful talks I had with him in his beautiful bachelor home at Boston, and of all his superabundant kind- ness ; but I will here pass them over. His popularity in America was wonderful. I travelled with him to Portland, where we both were guests in the house of the vener- able General Neal Dow ; to Salem, where I looked with deep interest on the relics of the old witch-hunting days ; and to other places. Whenever we came to a town where there PHILLIPS BROOKS. 175 was a university or a large school, I invari- ably had to go and give the youths an ad- dress ; and when I had finished, they always tumultuously called on Phillips Brooks to say something too. What he said was gen- erally quite simple, but delighted the " boys" by its large kindliness ; and his hearty greet- ings to them were always welcomed with enthusiasm. There were tremendous currents of op- posing feeling when he was elected Bishop of Massachusetts. His election was really carried by the overpowering enthusiasm of the laity, especially of his own devoted people, who thronged the immense and splendid Trinity Church, Boston. It is cer- tainly the finest church in America, and is a standing memorial of the genius of the American architect, Richardson, whom I visited with Phillips Brooks, and who died soon after. But the warm determination of his people that he should become a " Right Reverend " was not, I think, for his hap- piness. The distinction could add nothing to his immense influence, especially over 176 MEN I HA VE KNO \VN. the young, or to his genuine greatness. The virulence of the attacks made upon him pained him ; and the work which his new office entailed upon him was overwhelming, and destroyed the peaceful happy leisure which had been his delight. His admirably good-humored lines during the fury of the attacks which assailed him are worth re- cording. On seeing a caricature of himself in the columns of a certain journal, he wrote : And is this then the way he looks, This tiresome creature, Phillips Brooks ? No wonder, if 'tis thus he looks, The Church has doubts of Phillips I5rooks ! Well, if he knows himself, he'll try To give these doubtful looks the lie. He dares not promise, but will seek Even as a bishop to be meek ; To walk the way he shall be shown, To trust a strength that's not his own, To fill the years with honest work, To serve his day and not to shirk ; To quite forget what folks have said, To keep his heart and keep his head, Until men, laying him to rest, Shall say, " At least he did his best." Amen. PHILLIPS BROOKS. 177 I fear that it was the bishopric which really killed him. Being a bachelor, there was no one who could so closely look after him, and prevent him from being over- worked, and nurse him when he was poorly, as a wife would have done. Colossal frames like his he was six feet four, and pro- portionally broad look strong, but do not wear so well as those of average propor- tions. I think that his episcopal work tired him severely, and he died prematurely, to the irreparable loss of many friends in America and England, in consequence of a chill caught at one of the many evening meetings which he was constantly obliged to attend. I have had the happiness of experien- cing great kindness at the hands of many friends, both among the rich and the poor, the unknown and the famous. I never met with any who were more kind and generous than those whose friendship I formed or deepened, and whose warm-hearted hospi- tality I enjoyed, in the Western World. VII. A GROUP OF BISHOPS AND CARDINALS ARCHBISHOP TAIT, ARCHBISHOP THOMSON, ARCH- BISHOP BENSON, CARDINAL NEWMAN, CARDI- NAL MANNING, DR. PUSEV, CANON LIDDON. DEAN CHURCH. I HAVE had the advantage of knowing <*> o and in some cases of knowing intimately many of the leading ecclesiastics whose genius and piety have adorned the Victorian Era ; I will briefly touch upon a few of them in this chapter. Of many of them I could say much more than will here be written. Naturally, some of their letters to me were on personal matters, or contained confidential passages : it is hardly necessary to say that these will not be printed. In these slight reminiscences I shall reveal nothing private, and shall avoid every syllable which might give pain. 178 ARCHBISHOP TAIT. 179 From the time when I first came to Lon- don, ARCHBISHOP TAIT was conspicuously kind to me. I had met him several times as Bishop of London, and when I was Master of Maryborough College he and his family spent some days in the same hotel with us at Miirren, in Switzerland. I there saw a good deal of him ; we had some strolls together, and he was kindly inter- ested in a sermon which I preached there. When I came to London,- he was some- times our guest in Dean's Yard, and I have stayed with him at Addington Park, and driven and walked about with him. One afternoon the rain was pouring, and we all sat in the drawing-room reading aloud in turns Justin McCarthy's History of Our Own Times. It was delightful to hear the wise and often witty remarks which he some- times interpolated. His noble presence, invariable kindness, and genial wisdom made him a man of men. I can never be suffi- ciently grateful for acts of goodness which I cannot record, and for a generous appre- ciation which often supported me in troub- 1 80 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. lotis times. On more than one occasion sermons and speeches of mine had been misreported, but he always waited for the correct version. In one letter he says, " I have read the correct version of your Man- sion House speech with the greatest ad- miration ; " in another, " I thank you heartily for the part you took in the Lambeth Meet- ing. As to newspaper reports of your ser- mon, I pay no attention to them." There was absolutely nothing artificial or pompous about the true and simple dignity with which he wore his high honors. He greatly enjoyed a story, and was much amused at an anecdote I told, in a meet- ing of which he was chairman, about a Scot- tish divine, who, when an English visitor expressed surprise at the organ and painted windows in his Presbyterian Church, laid his hand on the visitor's arm, and said, with the broad Scottish pronunciation, - Per varies fasits, per tot discrimina return Tendinuts IN LATIUM. In his own speeches there were often little ARCHBISHOP TATT. 181 humorous remarks, such a:; " You know that, at my age, I cannot be in two places at once." He had a large and kindly tolerance for human stupidity, of which every public man sees so much in letters written by strangers. Handing back such letters to his chaplain, he used to say, " Tell him he is an ass but say so kindly'' I preached the first of the sermons on "Eternal Hope," in 1877. It was a very wet afternoon ; and as I walked to Westminster Abbey, I remember thinking, " There will be a very small congregation." That ser- mon, however, little as I dreamed of it, was destined to produce memorable effects. It was instantly reported, in most imper- fect forms ; it became the theme of uni- versal conversation in London ; and it quite literally went thrilling through the world ; for, during months afterwards, amid a per- fect chaos of abuse, anathema, and refuta- tion on all sides, I also received grateful o letters about it from the remotest regions of the British Empire, and from mission- aries working at lonely stations in the heart 1 82 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. of Africa and of Australia. That was due, not to any merits of the sermon itself, but to the fact that, speaking under the pres- sure of painful thoughts, and fresh from the deathbed of some who were near and dear to me, I had boldly uttered a belief and a hope which lay deep but unexpressed in millions of Christian minds. Archbishop Tait never added his voice to the hubbub of anathema by which I was immediately surrounded ; but, at first, his regard for me made him a little alarmed and anxious. He only wrote and recom- mended to me " some notes by Principal John Sharp, printed in the new volume of Mr. Erskine of Linlathen's letters, of a con- versation he had with Mr. Erskine on his peculiar views respecting the subject of your sermon." I was compelled to publish the series of five sermons, because they were becoming current in incorrect versions ; but they never elicited one syllable of rebuke from the archbishop, nor did they diminish in the smallest degree his friendly kind- ness. He afterwards asked me to publish DOCTOR THOMSON. 183 a sermon of mine in the Abbey by which, he told me, he had been deeply interested, on " Many Folds, One Flock," in which I had dwelt strongly upon the essential unity of true Christians amid their superficial divisions. The admirable life of the archbishop by the Bishop of Winchester gives such a true and beautiful picture of Archbishop Tait that posterity will know him as he was. Multi- tudes of visitors to Canterbury Cathedral still gaze with deep interest upon his beautiful effigy, and read the striking epitaph that " the one desire of his life was to make the Church of England the Church of the peo- ple." The title sometimes given him of "Archbishop of the Laity" was originally bestowed in a depreciatory sense : it is in reality his highest honor. He won the hearty esteem and confidence of the nation because he was a genuine man. I received no less kindness and encour- agement from his eminent colleague, DR. THOMSON, ARCHBISHOP OF YORK. There is scarcely one of his letters to me which is 184 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. not full of kind expressions. He came not unfrequently to service in my church, St. Margaret's, Westminster ; and he preached there, as did Archbishop Tait. Both the archbishops Dr. Tait and Dr. Thomson were my guests on the day that the House of Commons attended my church it is the church of the House in state, on the occasion of the jubilee of H. M. Queen Vic- toria. In the Athenaeum I have had more than one pleasant and interesting conversa- tion with the Archbishop of York. I spoke at the Church Congress in Hull at his ex- press invitation. He at once overruled an objection made by some clergymen on the grounds of my Eternal Hope, and said emphatically that nothing which I had writ- ten could be condemned as in any way " unorthodox." He wrote : '* I do most sincerely wish that you will come to the Congress, and your very kind letter shows me that there is still hope. Kindly respond as early as possi- ble ; and if you can, as you kindly hint, regard my in- vitation as a command, I shall be delighted, and shall never throw upon you any command more burden- some.'' DR. THOMSON, ARCHBISHOP OF YORK. MA GEE TRENCH BENSON. 185 I was also well acquainted for many years with his famous successor, ARCHBISHOP MAGEE ; but as I have spoken elsewhere of the circumstances which disturbed the friendly relations between us, as well as those which cordially renewed them, I will add nothing here respecting him. Of him, too, all men can judge from the very out- spoken letters of which his recent biography is mainly composed. I knew ARCHBISHOP TRENCH but slightly. I have met him, when he was Dean of West- minster, at the annual dinner of " the Apos- tles," and have talked with him on the subject of " The Origin of Language." He was fond of philology, and told me that he had read my book with much interest, and, in all the main points, agreed with it. I will not say much of ARCHBISHOP BEN- SON, with whom I enjoyed a friendship of many years ; for of him also I have spoken elsewhere. In many of the highest qualities 186 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. . in deep ecclesiastical learning, in graceful genius, in manly courage, in that radiant geniality which gave a charm to all which he said and did he was pre-eminently well fitted for his high office. When he visited Canterbury, which was ordinarily about three times in the year, he was always our guest. The old palace of the archbishops at Canter- bury was burnt down in Cranmer's days ; and the stately house, rebuilt by Archbishop War- ham, was destroyed by the Puritans. The archbishops, since the Reformation, have al- ways been received at the Deanery, though it is not impossible that henceforth they may have a house of their own in their " ancient and loyal " metropolitical city the first Christian English city of the first Christian English kingdom. Archbishop Benson loved Canterbury with an intense affection, and al- ways seemed to be in the highest spirits during his delightful visits. When he was present, there was an invariable flow of nat- ural, bright, and animated conversation. He amused us much one morning at breakfast. A room in the Deanery is known as " the ARCHBISHOP BENSON. ARCHBISHOP BENSON. 187 archbishop's room ; " and coming from it, he said in an emphatic way, - " I had a visitor last night, when you had all gone to bed." "A visitor? Not a burglar, I hope?" " No." "Nor one of our familiar ghosts?" o " No," said the archbishop ; " but he was winged, and he was brilliant." " It must have been an angel who came to see your Grace ? " " No ! though wincred. and brilliant, it o -> was deadly'' "Not a demon, I hope?" "No; you must guess." We all guessed in vain ; and he then told o us that it was a hornet, which alarmed him so much that he had to ring for his valet to catch it before he could go to sleep. This trivial incident illustrates his habit of playfulness. When the archbishop goes in state to the Cathedral, a little chorister in a violet cassock and cap always awaits him, to bear his train ; and some dozen bedesmen mostly of great age, all of whose nomi- 188 MEN I HA VE KNOWN. nations are signed by the Queen herself stand with their wands outside the Deanery door to escort us to the Cathedral. It was always a pleasure to see how the arch- bishop made friends at once alike with old and young. He used to pat the chorister on the head, ask him his name, make some cheerful and helpful remark to him ; and then turning to the old bedesmen, he would talk to them so amusingly that there would be a broad smile on all their faces, while at the same time he would always intermingle with his humor some good advice which they could not fail to remember. He greatly enjoyed his visits to Canterbury. After one of them he wrote : MY DEAR DEAN, To thank you and Mrs. Farrar for your kindness is impossible. I can only say that it has left me very grateful, but that I felt your enjoyment of it beside, throughout that busy time. All agree that we had a most delightful Sunday, and pray that God's gifts of grace may most amply rest on such worship and self-dedication as we witnessed. Ever affectionately yours, E. CANTUAR. ARCHBISHOP BENSON. 189 I was ill at the beginning of 1896, and he wrote, with deep sympathy, on Innocents' Day:- God give you strength and help if he gives you pain. This day of guileless suffering [Innocents' Day] is the recognition of the ages of the Church that the mystery of pain which some moderns feel as if they had discovered, is somehow ever and ever for his sake. FeVotro. You will offer yourself, I know, to his bleed- ing hand, and if my poor prayer can help you, it shall be with you. If I may mix with this another strain, it is only the old " whom he loveth he chasteneth," which has been the unspeakable stay of all who can receive it. Yours affectionately, E. CANTUAR. His interest in the minutest details of all that affected the Cathedral was wonderful. In the last few weeks of his life I had sev- eral letters from him about the design of two quite small triforiurn windows which I was filling with stained glass. He rejoiced in my removal of the font, which he said had " rebaptized the nave ; which for many years looked like a mere ambulatory, gar- nished with cenotaphs." He also greatly liked the suggestion for hanging the nave 1 1)0 MEN I HA VR KNO WN. with banners, and placing in it the pulpit designed by Mr. Boclley as a memorial to my learned predecessor, Dean Payne Smith. " You want the pulpit," he wrote, " that ' the water and the word ' may be evidently set forth. -1 rejoice to hear that you are taking up the idea of preaching in the nave. There is something specially fine in having a nave for great Christian oratory. It would even evoke it and there is a freedom and capacity there which tends as much to think- ing and conceiving as ever the choir to wor- ship and meditation." He loved to wander about the great Cathedral, in perfect solitude, using the private key which is given to every arch- bishop. He often went there when it was empty, late in the evening; and he asked me to place a humble little faldstool for him, that he might sit, and meditate, and pray alone, in " Becket's Crown." I did so, and he made use of it the next time he came. I received a letter from him, written from Ireland, on Oct. 2. On Oct. 1 1 he died. The letter is interesting as ARCHBISHOP BENSON. 191 showing how hard an archbishop has to work. I had asked him to preach on Whit- sunday, 1897, as tne actual thirteen hun- dredth anniversary of the baptism of King Ethelbert. Here is his reply : IRELAND, Oct. 2, 1896. MY DEAR DEAN, I would so joyfully do any- thing I could which you wished. But about preach- ing on Whitsunday, listen, 1. The Queen's sixth decade in June will give me work without end. 2. The Lambeth Conference comes in July, begin- ning at the end of June, and lasting till the end of July, with daily sessions, committees, house always full of bishops, every American bishop comes with his family, and stays three days. The work of it, and the preparation for it, which is absolutely immense and incessant, begins months before, and deepens daily till it is over, and leaves one rnju.9a.vri. Well, in ordinary years my only break is from the Thursday before Whitsunday till the Tuesday after. My ordination preparation for Trinity begins on Wednesday. Such were the toils from which that be- loved prelate was so suddenly, and under such blessed circumstances, called away. He died on Oct. 1 1 ; on Oct. 26 he would again have been our guest. 192 MEN I HA VE KNO IVN. From archbishops I pass to cardinals. I missed my one chance of personally know- ing CARDINAL NEWMAN. I spent part of a day at the Oratory, Birmingham, which was the cardinal's home, with an old friend and colleague who had become a Roman Catholic. This friend showed me over the school and all its arrangements, and got me to write my name in one of my books which was in the boys' library. I was to have seen the great cardinal, but he sent down a message that he did not feel well enough that day to see me. Like other Roman Catholics of eminence, he was by no means out of sympathy with the views ex- pressed in Eternal Hope. This may be seen from Mr. Oxenham's excellent volume on the subject, and from a letter from Cardinal Manning, which I shall quote immediately. I (jive a facsimile of Cardinal Newman's o reply to my gift of a copy of the book. I knew CARDINAL MANNING well for many years, and may say at once that I felt the .greatest regard and respect for him, be- / /* ' J ^t**. X; /Vir-v^>- '-/ ' (>- *^7 7oy-C- <7 '~*.0- t^-WA. ^-v t- n^ u. M^T^i^. M_ri^i!L C - ^V^' A > ^*^*~* - . **2 / I DEAN CHL'RCH. 199 And Charles Kingsley, when he was first made Canon of Westminster, and walked up the crowded aisle to preach one of those sermons which produced so deep an impression, said to a friend, with that slight stammer which lent additional piquancy to his remarks, " Whenever I walk up to the pulpit in the Abbey I wish myself d d dead ; and whenever I walk back I wish myself more d d d dead." I have several kind letters from Dr. Liddon before me. The one from which a paragraph is reproduced in facsimile gives his views about the future life. I knew DEAN CHURCH, and met him not unfrequently in the Athenaeum, at meetings of the Governing Body of Westminster School, and elsewhere. I reproduce one letter of his, because it shows his high ap- preciation of Dean Stanley, the news of whose death I had telegraphed to him, and asked him to be present at the funeral. VIII. A GROUP OF BISHOPS AND DEANS. DEANS WELLESLEY, HOWSON, JEKEMIE. PLUMP- TKE, AND OTHERS | BISHOP SHORT OF ST. ASAPH J BISHOP MOBERLY OF SALISBURY J BISHOP COLENSO OF NATAL J BISHOP LIGHT- FOOT OF DURHAM ; BISHOP WORDSWORTH OF LINCOLN. To the dignitaries and ecclesiastics men- tioned above I might add many \vhom I have known, but of whom I have not space to speak ; and even of these I can only speak very briefly. Let me begin with a few well-known deans. Whenever I had the honor of preaching before Her Majesty the Queen in the Private Chapel of Windsor, which has been on an average at least once a year for nearly thirty 200 DEAN WELLESLEY. DEAN WELLESLEY. 201 years, I was the guest of DEAN WELLESLEY at the Deanery in Windsor Castle, as subse- quently of his successors. Dean Wellesley was a man full of goodness, wisdom, and dignity an admirable specimen of what a great ecclesiastic should be. Although lie occupied so high a position, and enjoyed the warm esteem of his sovereign, who placed full confidence in his judgment, he was a man essentially kind and humble. His long period of otium cum dignitate in the easiest of deaneries never interfered with the steady self-culture which led him to the end of his life to continue those serious studies by which he was kept au courant with every phase and development of modern theology. In his younger days he had lived with his uncle, the great Duke of Wellington, of whom he had also seen o much when he was rector of Strathfield- saye. His manners recalled the stately courtesy which was perhaps more common in a past ofeneration than now it is. Of Dean Wei- o lesley all who were well acquainted with 202 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. him retain an affectionate remembrance ; and the Church of England owes a deeper debt of recognition than many are aware, to one whose sage counsels and wholesome influ- ence, most unobtrusively exerted, saved her from many perils, and ensured to her many benefits. I shall never forget the indefi- nable charm, refinement, and warmth of his hospitality, or the debt which I owe to him for many an act of gracious kindness. Among- other deans once known to me c> was the genial and witty DEAN CLOSE, an admirable evangelical preacher and speaker. I knew DEAN JOHNSON of Wells, an Oxford scholar of great distinction, who counted both the archbishops of his day (Tait and Thomson) among his pupils. At the house of DEAN HERBERT of Hereford I stayed almost every year, when I preached for him in Hereford Cathedral. He was a man deservedly beloved for the unassuming gentleness of his character, and his aristo- cratic courtliness recalled the perfect man- ners of a passing generation. DEAN HO WSON. 203 DEAN HOWSON, as the joint author of Conybeare and Howson's St. Paul, and as an old schoolmaster, was interested in the same subjects and pursuits as myself. I have heard some of his former pupils at Liverpool College speak of him with warm affection, and record how, even in the smallest matters, he assiduously strove to guide them aright. One of them now a clergyman said that, as a boy, he had once put out his foot for another boy to stumble over as he came out of the school gate. The boy was tripped up ; and while the offender was laughing- at his fall, Dr. O O Howson, who happened to pass, merely looked at him, and said, " Was that kind?" - nothing more. " Yet," said the clergy- man, "that lesson conveyed in but three words was so spoken that it has re- mained with me all my life." Dean Howson rendered memorable bene- fits to Chester Cathedral, which he restored by the aid of the large fund raised by his personal exertions. He died in 1885, after a long career of unostentatious but signal 204 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. services both as a teacher, an administrator, and a most useful writer. At Liverpool and Chester especially his name will long be cherished. The learned and able DR. BLAKESLEY, Dean of Lincoln, and editor of Herodotus, once famous for his letters in the Times with the signature " Historicus," was a man of large heart and open intellect, with whom I have stayed at Lincoln, and with whom I had many views in common. DEAN JEREMIE of Lincoln (d. 1872), for many years Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, was author, among other books, of the History of the Church in the Second and Tliird Centuries, For some kind reason, I know not what, he asked me to his rooms when I was only a poor unknown freshman ; and I still remember how, when the conversation happened to turn on Oliver Cromwell, he took down some old dictionary, and, with a hearty laugh, showed us a passage in which Oliver Cromwell was ranked with the Em- peror Phocas and Judas Iscariot, and was PROFESSOR BLUNT. 205 characterized as one of the three most wicked men whom the world had ever seen, and one of the three most certain of eternal damnation. The Dean was one of the very few elo- quent preachers to whom we undergraduates in those clays had any chance of listening. Whenever he occupied the University pulpit, the galleries were densely crowded. His sermons were perfect specimens of style. Every sentence was faultlessly turned, and dwelt on the ear like music. Nothing but " excessive fastidiousness and nervous sen- sitiveness to criticism " prevented Dean Jer- emie from accomplishing much more than he did ; but his indecision was perhaps due to the long life which he had lived as a scholar and a recluse. He printed but a few of his sermons. Thev were somewhat ./ academic in form, but certainly produced an effect, and lingered in the memory. There were other professors at Cambridge at that time whom I scarcely knew at all. One was PROFESSOR BLUNT, another preacher 206 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. who always had a large audience, because his sermons were enunciated with strong feeling. PROFESSOR HAROLD BROWNE, after- wards Bishop of Ely and Winchester, was always kind to me. He welcomed some of my papers in the preliminary examination with words of singularly high encourage- ment, and told me that he had kept them for years. I came across the learned PROFESSOR MILL only once. He had set a paper in the University scholarship examination, and his way always was to print four or five Latin and Greek passages for translation, and ask the candidates to assign them to their proper authors. This was generally an easy thing to do ; but one year he set a passage from the soldier-historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who died about A. n. 390, and had been an officer in the body-guard of the Emperor Julian. I should think that this was the first and the only instance in which the Latinity of the Syrian author has been used as a test of scholarship in a University competi- DEAN PLUMPTRE. DEAN PLUMPTRE. 207 tion. Dr. Mill told me that I was the only one of all the candidates who had assigned the passage to its rightful author; and as I was only a freshman at the time, he was a little surprised, and asked me how I came to be acquainted with such a writer, whom he personally admired, but who was wholly unknown to the classical curriculum of Cam- bridge. I answered that it was by mere accident. Ammianus Marcellinus is not un- frequently referred to in Elliott's Horte Apocalypticcz, and this had interested me in him, and made me acquainted with his style. DEAN PLUMPTRE of Wells was a lifelong friend to me, since the clays when I was a boy at King's College. He weekly looked over my papers in answer to questions on his lectures, and he gave me excellent advice and useful encouragement, together with the blessing of his unfailing regard and kindness. I was very diffident about myself; and I might almost say of Dean Plumptre, as Jeremy Bentham said of Lord Lansdowne, " He raised me from the bot- 1>08 MEN I HAVE KNOWN, \ tomless pit of humiliation ; lie first taught me that I could be something" - however small. But I received similar encourage- ment from the other King's College pro- fessors of that day Dr. Jelf, Archdeacon Browne, and Professors Maurice and Brewer. I have been Dr. Plumptre's guest in London, at Bickley, where he \vas for some years a rector, and in his Deanery at Wells. I do not think that the world has done justice to his manifold services and intellec- tual activity. His articles in Smith's Dic- tionary of the Bible are characterized not only by learning and research, but also by singular brightness and originality. His ser- mons, both those which were practical and those which were controversial, have perma- nent value, and show how largely he had imbibed the charitable spirit of his brother- in-law, Professor Maurice. He translated into verse and exceedingly well --the tragedies both of /Eschylus and Sophocles ; he wrote by far the best life of the saintly Bishop Ken ; he also published in two hand- some volumes a most valuable translation of DOCTOR SHORT. 209 all the works of Dante, with studies on his writings, and a singularly full and bright Commentary on Ecclesiastes. Besides all this, he was a poet; in his two volumes of poems, chiefly on scriptural subjects, there are some verses at least which ought to live, because they are written with great fresh- ness of thought and insight. Dr. Plumptre was not for a long time Dean of Wells, but during his tenure of the office he won the hearts of all, from the oldest canons down to the youngest choristers. I count his friendship among the conspicuous blessings, and his teachings among the formative in- fluences, of my life. The first bishop whom I ever knew was DR. SHORT, Bishop of Sodor and Man. He was the author of a Short History of the Church of England, which was long re- garded as a standard work of its kind. He subsequently became Bishop of St. Asaph, and did admirable work in that see, care- fully visiting every parish, and preserving records of its exact condition, which are, I 210 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. believe, still found useful by his Episcopal successors. I was then a boy of thirteen or fourteen, at King William's College, Isle of Man ; and as the boys in those days when steamers were few and travelling not so easy as now only went home for one long holiday in the summer, the bishop used kindly to invite some of us to spend a week with him at Bishopscourt at Easter. I remember that the first time I entered his study I saw on the chimneypiece a picture of my celebrated ancestor, the Marian martyr Farrar, Bishop of St. David's, who was burnt alive at Carmarthen in 1555. The bishop told me that he was thinking of writing a sketch of his predecessors in the ancient see of Sodor and Man, and that Bishop Farrar was one of them. I have since learned that this was a mistake. Bishop Farrar was one of Archbishop Cran- mer's chaplains, and was appointed Bishop of St. David's by Edward VI. There is not only no trace of his having set foot in the Isle of Man, but no trace of his having been appointed there. Perhaps the error arose DOCTOR SHORT. 211 from his sometimes signing himself R Men., which was an abbreviation for Meneviensis, or " of the see of St. David's." It was very delightful for us boys to be guests of the bishop at that charming coun- try palace, and to wander through the su- premely lovely mountain glen watered by a crystal streamlet, which formed part of its grounds to say nothing of the unwonted luxuries which the visits afforded us. It was also pleasant to accompany the bishop hand passibus cequis, as with his long thin gaitered legs he strode about the mountains and sea- shores in the neighborhood of his home. o There was, however, a drop of myrrh in the cup of our enjoyment. The bishop was a double first-class man, and an ardent enthu- siast in matters of education. He would amuse himself by examining us wretched schoolboys all day long at any rate, all the morning. At last Mrs. Short, a charm- ing lady, thinking that we looked "depressed and emaciated," interfered on our behalf, and robbed the bishop of the luxury of gauging our very shallow attainments. 212 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. Many incidents of those days linger in my mind. One evening the bishop made us all play the game, " What is my thought like ? " in which one had to show that one's guess resembled the thing really thought of. I guessed " a lamp," but he had thought of " a bishop." He wanted me to pay the forfeit for guessing wrong ; but I stoutly resisted, maintaining that every bishop was, or ought to be, a golden candlestick. An- other evening he watched us playing chess, on which as a boy I rather prided myself ; but he disdainfully remarked that I seemed to play it without any prearranged plan. We were once quietly but severely reprimanded by him. It was after dinner ; he was sitting asleep, or apparently asleep, in his arm-chair. The tempting dessert on the table was too much for some of the boys, and they helped themselves to fruits and "lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon " unobserved, as they thought. Their enjoyment of these dainties on the table was very brief. Suddenly there came a very quiet knock at the door, and the bishop, with his eyes still shut, instantly BISHOP COTTON. 213 said, " Come in ! " He did not reprove the young offenders, but alluded distantly, yet to susceptible consciences intelligibly to the incident in his extempore evening prayer, He never was so happy or so much in his element as when he was orally examin- ing a national school, and there were many stories of the answers he received. On one occasion he asked the children to compare an adjective, and a boy promptly answered, " Short, Shorter, Shortest." On another oc- casion he was questioning them about beset- ting sins, and rather imprudently asked them " what they supposed his besetting sin to be ? " " Drunkenness ! " was the prompt reply. Thereupon he told them that that was a mistake, but that his besetting sin was pride. Peace be with him ! He gave me, when I was a boy, many a happy hour. The next bishop whom I knew intimately was the late BISHOP COTTON of Calcutta, a post to which he was promoted from the head mastership of Marlborough College. He was a man of marked individuality, 214 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. who, without any splendid ability or wide learning, impressed himself deeply on the affection and memory of all who knew him by the beauty, firmness, and sincerity of his character. He was one of those men who seem to keep growing- in power and wisdom all through their lives. He figures in Tom Brown's Schooldays as " the young master" of Dr. Arnold's time, who befriends the shy and sensitive Arthur (a character intended in part to represent Dean Stanley). He was for fifteen years a master of Rugby, much beloved and honored by his colleagues, and gratefully appreciated by his elder pupils. There was a delightful quaintness about his ways. All his domestic pets had curious names, and his pig was dubbed "Vitellius" from his voracity! When Cotton went to Marlborough, the school, now so famous and popular, was passing through an acute crisis in its his- tory. Before the degree list was out at Cambridge, I received a letter from him - then a perfect stranger inviting me to take a mastership at the College, where BISHOP COTTON. 215 my friends Professor E. S. Beesley and Mr. E. A. Scott were already at work. I ac- cepted the post, and one of the first remarks which Mr. Cotton made to me was, " You know any day the school may disappear in blue smoke." The College was at that time overwhelmed with debt, owing to bad management, and at first each boy was actually costing more than the low annual sum he paid, though the boys were badly fed and roughly housed. With indomitable patience and resolution, and often " in the teeth of clenched antagonisms," Cotton al- tered this ; and though he was by no means a facile schoolmaster and could punish with severity, his quaint humor and his unquali- fied devotion to their interests, together with his admirable weekly sermons, soon gave him the highest influence among the boys. He gathered round him a devoted staff o of masters, who for the sake of the school were ready for any self-denial, and who treated the boys as so many younger brothers. In the old rough days there were 216 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. masters who, though they doubtless meant to be kind, kept up the inexorable severity with which, until this generation, boys had normally been trained for many years. In those days, though not even then at Marl- borough, it was not uncommon to see boys' backs scored with red and blue marks from strokes of the cane, or to see their hands sore or cut from what were called " pandies," inflicted by the same instrument of torture. Nous avons change tout cela. The " rebellion," which had most seriously shaken the very existence of the school, was hardly detumescent ; but Cotton's sov- ereign good sense soon swept away even the remembrance of it. I recollect that when I arrived as a young master, some forty- three years ago, the first thing I saw was a huge chalk inscription on the wall, "Bread, or Blood!" Cotton simply summoned the boys to- gether, told them that his best efforts were being given to improve the commissariat (which was not in his hands), and that, instead of scrawling up vulgar and stupid BISHOP COTTON. 217 inscriptions, they should confide in him. The masters conferred together, swept away the old bursar-and-steward arrangement, took the finances in their own hands, agreed not to draw one penny of their incomes till the end of the year (to save interest), and then to regard each pound as a share. They also offered to give up the whole of their incomes altogether, if funds were not forthcoming, or only to take any percentage of them that might be available. At the end of the year such had been the improvement in the manage- ment every hundred pounds was worth more than a hundred pounds, though the comfort of the boys had been largely and in every way improved. The whole body of masters then at once gave up the addi- tional quota which was fairly theirs. That year of crisis saved in all respects the for- tunes of the school, and turned all its sons into the most loyal of Marlburians. It is a great delight to me to have been a master during so interesting a year. I could tell many a story to the honor of 218 MEN I HAl'E KNOWN. Bishop Cotton. I will mention but one. He had a most incisive wit, which though never in the smallest degree unkindly, was yet very telling. Once he had let this wit play over an excellent boy in the sixth form, who was far from clever ; and the other boys had all laughed. After the lesson, the boy stayed behind, and said to the master, " Sir, I know that I am not clever ; I dare say that my work is intellectually poor ; but I honestly do my best, and I do not like to be made the subject of ridicule." The master, so far from being offended, frankly told the boy that he was sorry to have hurt his feelings ; and the remarkable > thing is, that never again was he known to have used his playful criticism in sucJi a way as to cause pain to the most sensitive of his pupils. This surely illustrates the beauty of his character. Very soon after I came, he appointed me as his assistant in the sixth form. Many of the boys in that sixth form have, since then, risen to positions of eminence. I re- member once seeing a boy chasing another, BISHOP COTTON. 219 who wore a scarlet cap, round the court, and shouting after him, " Keblipuris ! Ke- bTepuris ! " That is the Greek for the " red cap," and the boy had taken it from 77/6? Birds of Aristophanes, which we were then reading. The boy who was chasing the other is now the Right Reverend the Pri- mate of Australia ; the boy in the red cap is now the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Glasgow. It reminds one of Shenstone's lines Yet, nurs'd with skill, what dazzling fruits appear ! E'en now sagacious foresight points to show A little bench of heedless Bishops here, And there a Chancellor in embryo. Cotton did noble and invaluable work for India as Bishop of Calcutta, especially among the neglected Eurasians. His death, in the year 1860, was pathetically sudden. He had been consecrating a cemetery at Ktishtia, and had spoken of the fact that clear as were the associations of " God's Acre" to the living, yet to the dead who die in the Lord it mattered as little as to the martyrs whose 220 MEN I HA I'E A'AO WN. dust was scattered to the winds, if their bodies did not repose in consecrated ground. Cotton was very near-sighted, and he was also given to fits of abstraction. He had to walk back to his vessel on the river across a long unprotected plank. He lost his foot- ing ; his body was swept away by the rush- ing waters of the Ganges, and was seen no more. The next bishop whom I knew intimately was BISHOP COLENSO. I was grieved to see him universally treated as if he were a pariah. In his book on the Pentateuch he has referred to the fact that I had been asked to write the article on "DELUGE" for Smith's Dictionary of tJie Bible. I wrote it, but took the views about the non-universality of the Deluge which most inquirers now hold. The editor and publishers, alarmed at this deviation from stereotyped opinion, postponed the insertion of the article, and in Vol. I. inserted "DELUGE: see FLOOD." But even when they had got as far as " FLOOD," they had not made up their BISHOP COLENSO. 221 minds, and said, " FLOOD : see NOAH." My article was consequently sacrificed ; for " NOAH " had been already assigned to the present Bishop of Worcester. Yet, after all, Dr. Perowne (as he then was) came to much the same conclusion as myself; for he wrote " that even the language used with regard to the Flood itself strong as it undoubtedly is does not oblige us to suppose that the Deluge was universal." The Bishop of Natal had alluded to and commented on this fact, and wrote to me about it. Indignant at the utterly shame- ful treatment which he was receiving at all hands, and glad to show my humble sym- pathy with a noble-hearted man, conspicu- ous for the ardent and fearless sincerity of his love of truth, I wrote to ask him to stay with me at Harrow. He had himself in former days been a Harrow master, and he intensely enjoyed one or two quiet and happy Sundays with us. In those days, if a bishop happened to be present in Har- row School chapel, it was the custom to ask him to pronounce the benediction. 222 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. Bishop Colenso did so ; and will it IK; believed that numbers of letters came from parents objecting that their sons should be blessed by one whom, in their utter igno- rance of all the merits of the questions in- volved, they chose, with great injustice, to stigmatize as a heretic! The burden of this disagreeable correspondence fell, not on me, but on the head master ; and consequently, when the bishop wrote to offer himself for a Sunday, I had, with the deepest regret, to ask him to come on a week-day instead. The persecution he incurred which even went to the length of an impotent attempt to deprive him of his bishopric, and to re- duce him to the condition of a pauper by robbing him of his income was as in- credible as it was infamous. I well remem- ber his telling me that he found it by no means easy to get servants ; and that his laundress had actually declined to wash for him any more, because by doing so she lost customers ! I remember, too, that once when I had been preaching in a large West End church, BISHOP COLENSO, 223 the bishop invited me to his house, and I walked out of the church with him, he taking my arm. As his tall form was seen amid the throng" of worshippers, he was recognized as he left the church, and I heard audible and awestruck whispers, "He's iu diking with Bishop Colenso ! " He faced this tornado of abuse, and these hurricanes of universal anathema, with the calmest dignity. He never once lost his temper ; he never returned so much as one angry word to men who had heaped on him every species of abuse and contempt, and of whom many were incomparably his inferiors, not only in learning, but in every grace. A touch of humor helped him. He told me how, once, seeing an English bishop at Euston Station, the bishop, to his great surprise, advanced most cordially to meet him, and gave him a warm shake of the hand, which Colenso as warmly returned. But, alas ! the next moment the English prelate said, " The Bishop of Calcutta, I believe?" (or some other see). 224 MRN I HA VE KNO IVN. 44 No," replied Colenso, " the Bishop of Natal." The effect, he said, was electrical. The English bishop almost rebounded with an " Oh ! " and left him with a much-alarmed and distant bow, as if after shaking hands with him he needed a purifying bath. Three of the greatest English bishops Archbishop Tait, Bishop Philpott, and Bishop Thirlwall always held aloof from the com- bination of Colenso's persecutors. Yet at the very time that all the " religious " news- papers were raving at him, and the press teeming with long-forgotten answers to him, answers which were often entirely futile, and involved either the most complete igno- ratio elencki, or an untenable casuistry sea- soned with disdainful animadversion, at that very time he was receiving the hearty thanks and cordial appreciation of some of the most eminent scholars of Germany. Men of European fame like Professor Hupfeld of Halle and Professor Kuenen of Leyden openly expressed their admira- tion of him, and their obligations to him. BISHOP COLENSO. 225 French pastors like the Rev. Theophilus Bost wrote cordially about him ; and the President and other members of the Com- mittee of the Liberal Protestant Union of France sent him an address, in which " with outpoured hearts they thanked him, because, impelled by love of truth and true piety, he had commenced a work which, by ecclesi- astical officialism, was charged with impiety and sacrilege." Bishops and ecclesiastics denounced and excommunicated him ; and others wrote epigrams like There was a poor Bishop Colenso Who counted from one up to ten so That the writings Levitical He found were uncritical, And went out to tell the black men so! Yet the Bishop of Natal had written, with utter self-sacrifice, at the cost of all, for the sake of what he regarded as the truth. When questioned about the literal accuracy of parts of Scripture, which were perhaps never meant to be literally under- stood, - " My heart," he says, " answered in the 22 MEN I HAVE KNOWN. words of the prophet, Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord? I dared not do so." Future times will remember Bishop Co- lenso with honor and gratitude, when the names of nineteen-twentieths of his accusers have been buried in merciful oblivion. They will remember how, almost alone among colonial bishops, he not only devoted nearly the whole of his years to the duties of his see until his death, but also " with intense, indefatigable labor," mastered the Zulu lan- guage ; produced a Zulu grammar and dic- tionary ; translated into Zulu much of the Bible (correcting inconceivably frightful errors in some small previous attempts) ; and, in the cause of the oppressed, braving all hostile combinations, came home only to plead the wrongs of Langalibalde, and did his best to obtain justice for King Cetshwayo. I might add much more respecting him ; but I only trust that his countless enemies and impugners may have been enabled to meet their last hour with as much certainty BISHOP Ol < DURHAM. 227 of hearing the words, " Servant of Gocl, well done ! " as this bishop, with his boundless self-sacrifice, his incorruptible veracity, the charm of his simple Christian dignity, the blameless tenor of his innocence, and the sin- gular sweetness and serene magnanimity of a temper which ever returned good for evil, and blessing for unqualified abuse. The late most learned and altogether ad- mirable BISHOP OF DURHAM (Dr. Lightfoot), whose writings, and especially his Commen- taries on the Epistles of St. Paul, are an imperishable legacy for the Church, was my private tutor in my last year at Cambridge, and remained my kind friend and occasional correspondent from that time to his com- paratively early and deeply lamented death in 1890. Even as a boy, when he was at Birmingham School with two schoolfellows and chief friends so illustrious as his suc- cessor, Bishop Westcott, and the late Arch- bishop Benson of Canterbury, he was remarkable for his scholarly thoroughness and unswerving diligence. It is no small 228 MEN I HA VR KNOWN. glory to the late Bishop Prince Lee of Manchester, that he should have counted three such theologians among his sixth form boys. Dr. Lee chose for the one word on his tomb, o-a\7rret, " the trumpet shall sound." He was undoubtedly & remark- able and inspiring teacher ; and Archbishop Benson told me that, though he by no means made a point of looking over all the exercises which the boys sent up, yet when he would open a drawer full of them and choose one for criticism, he used to deal with it in a way so masterly as never to be forgotten. One day he saw the boy Lightfoot stand- ing on his desk, and called out in Greek, ^Kataba! Kataba! Kataba! Kataba!" " Get down ! " " Katabesomai? said the boy in his very quiet voice, completing the iambic line of Aristophanes ! Whatever Lightfoot undertook he com- pleted to the utmost of his power with in- defatigable thoroughness ; and to the last day of his life, even when illness had laid BISHOP LIGHTFOOT. BISHOP OF DURHAM. 229 its fatal mark upon him, he labored on for the good of his diocese, of his Church, and of the world. He remained by choice un- married, and at Auckland Castle found no small part of the refreshment and interest of his life in the society of the young men whom he generously trained for Holy Orders. When I was an undergraduate, I remem- ber the lesson we learned from seeing the <::> steady unvarying light of his lamp burn- ing night after night in his room till mid- night. He allowed himself no distraction except the afternoon "constitutional," and in summer the bathe in the Cam, to which I sometimes accompanied him. He became senior classic, although in Latin and Greek verse he never showed any brilliancy, and he was also a wrangler and a fellow of Trinity. He was grieved when, by some unaccountable accident, his friend Benson only came out eighth in the first class ; but, pointing to his name as senior chan- cellor's medallist, he said, " I think that will get him his fellowship," - as it did. 230 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. In the comparatively early death of this great bishop, the Church of England suf- fered an irreparable loss. Even in the dust of his writings there was gold, and his incidental papers and sermons are full of value. I once ventured to remark to the late Dean Church that Dr. Lightfoot, when he was a canon of St. Paul's, was to me a far more interesting preacher than even Canon Liddon; and the Dean, who was a consummate judge in such matters, and a frequent hearer of both preachers, took exactly the same view. The late BISHOP MOBERLY of Salisbury yearly came to our house at Marlborough to confirm some hundred or more carefully trained boys in the College Chapel. Hav- ing been himself a head master for many years at Winchester, he delighted in these annual visits to a great school, and told us that he reckoned his visit to Marlborough as one of the most enjoyable days in his episcopal year. At that time he was already old, and had to sit while he laid his hands BISHOP MOBERL Y. 231 on the boys' heads. His addresses varied but little from year to year, which is more or less inevitable, since bishops are obliged to administer confirmation perhaps a hundred or more times annually. But the addresses were so kindly, so sympathetic, so full of rich experience and wise advice, that they were always listened to with the most re- spectful attention. Bishop Moberly was a delightful talker. He was full of varied rem- iniscences of Oxford and Winchester days. At Oxford, when he was quite a young man, he was tutor at Balliol College, and Manning was among his pupils. Manning, as a youth, was full of eager ability and self- confidence. Bishop Moberly used to tell how once, in construing a difficult passage of Thucyclides, Manning had made a mistake which he, as tutor, immediately corrected. " Oh, sir," said the young Manning, " my rendering is, I assure you, quite tenable." He said it with such conviction that Mr. Moberly replied, " Well, I should have cer- tainly said that it was quite wrong ; but since you are so sure about it, I will look at it again." 232 MEN I HA VE KNO IV N. He did so, and found Manning's render- ing absolutely impossible. Meeting him in the quadrangle, he said, " Mr. Manning, how could you defend your translation of that passage in Tluicyd- ides ? It was quite wrong." "Oh, sir," said Manning, with a smile,, and entirely unabashed, "didn't you observe that I had not looked at it before ? " They continued to correspond with each other in later years. One day Dr. Moberly received from Manning the last charge which he published as archdeacon. Rumors were already ripe that Manning was about to join the Church of Rome, but the charge was an argument on the other side. L)r. Mo- berly wrote back, and said, " I was very glad, my dear Manning, to receive your charge, as it disproves the ru- mors about your leaving our communion." " Dear Dr. Moberly," was the reply, " in my charge I have stated the case of the Church of England. I only wish that it were tenable." Very shortly afterwards it was publicly an- BISHOP WORDSWORTH. 233 nounced that the Archdeacon of Chichester had joined the Church of Rome. In this chapter I will mention only one more prelate, the very learned and eminent BISHOP WORDSWORTH of Lincoln. I met him first at a dinner-party at Dean Blakesley's in Lincoln, and he thanked me very graciously for the sermon I had preached for Lincoln Hospital. I was one of his successors in the Archdeaconry of Westminster, which he h;-ld for a long series of years, and this led to some communications between us. Few men have achieved, as he did, a commentary on the whole of Scripture. It is in many respects a very learned and helpful work, though now in parts practically obsolete. This will remain as a permanent monument of his diligence and genius, and it was only one of many valuable works which years of leisure enabled him to elaborate. He was a very powerful, yet personally charitable, con- troversalist against the Church of Rome. On one occasion one of his old Harrow pu- pils he had for a time held the head mas- 234 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. tership of Harrow, a post for which he was ill-fitted, and in which he was far from suc- cessful entered Westminster Abbey while he was preaching, and asked the verger what was the subject of his sermon. " Oh, sir," said the verger, " it is the old story; he is giving it to the 1 Pope!" His sermons were usually very long, yet on one occasion, having only four Sundays in his month of residence, and wishing to preach five sermons of a course, he an- nounced to his congregation at the end of his fourth sermon that he now intended, then and there, to preach the fifth on the top of it ; and it is recorded that some of the con- gregation actually sat out both sermons ! One of my predecessors at St. Margaret's, the Syriac scholar, Canon Cureton, had a son at Westminster School, and whenever the canon preached too long a sermon, the boys used to thrash his son ! When Dean Trench was informed of this, he remarked with a deep sigh, " Oh, how I wish that Canon Wordsworth also had a son at the school ! " BISHOP WORDSWORTH. BISHOP WORDSWORTH. 235 There was something very original about Bishop Wordsworth's ways. On one occa- sion, standing at my door in Dean's Yard, I saw a curious figure approaching me, with a scarlet robe huddled up about his neck and face to protect him from the cold. It was Bishop Wordsworth in his Convoca- tion dress. "Affulsit screna lux" he said to me, "affulsit serena lux" This benefi- cient beam of light was, as he proceeded to explain, the settlement of some minute point in the Upper House of Convocation ! His conversation was often a sort of thinking aloud. Once in his private chapel, at family prayers, something in the lesson led him to allude to the Papal claims, and he kept all the servants and household an indefinite time, learnedly and with perfect oblivion of the circumstances disproving to them all grounds for the dogma of Papal infallibility. In his speeches he seemed at times to be no less oblivious of his audience. I heard him once at a Church Congress c"> meeting in Lincoln. He got hold of St. 23(5 MEN I HA VE A'JVO WN. Bernard's words, Deargcntcmus pcnnas " Let us besilver our wings." Talking on in an abstracted way, as if lie were think- ing aloud and had become unconscious of the throng of persons whom he was ad- dressing, he repeated the words again and again, and enforced the duty of making our wings like the wings of a dove, which is covered with silver wings, and her feathers like gold. EARL OF BEACONSFIE.LD. IX. THE EARL OF BEACONSFIELD, LORD LYTTON, AND THE EARL OF LYTTON. WHEN I was rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, the Prime Minister of the day, if he lived in his official residence in Down- ing Street, was always one of my parishion- ers. This was not due to any prerogative of that ancient historic church which nes- tles under the shadow of the great Abbey, and is as old as the Abbey itself, being meant for the population ; whereas the Abbey church was mainly for the monks. It was simply due to the circumstances that the parish attached to the church extends as far as Whitehall. But owing to this fact I have had interviews with most of the Pre- miers and Chancellors of the Exchequer who lived in their official houses during the nine- teen years that I was rector of the Church 237 238 MEN I HA I'E A'A T O WN. of the House of Commons ; as also with several of the First Lords of the Admiralty -such as that kindly and truly good man, Mr. W. H. Smith, whose guest I have been on various occasions. But the EARL OF BEACONSFIELD, both during the later years of his life, and since his death, has loomed so large upon the popular imagination that any anecdote about him will be received with interest. To me he was always conspicuously kind, though he was perfectly well aware that I belonged to the Liberal school of politics. It was he who, when I was Master of Marl- borough College, offered me the important and valuable Vicarage of Halifax, which, however, I was unable to accept. He next offered me the Canonry of Westminster, which is attached by Act of Parliament to the Rectory of St. Margaret's. I kept him long waiting for an answer; for at that time I had had no experience in parochial work, and in those days the parish was not only far more densely populous, but also un- speakably more wretched than it was sub- <* X2,jft_~^l A / EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. 239 sequently. Had I followed my own inclina- tion, I should have shrunk from so heavy a burden, and all the more because the church itself was then as repellently unattractive, with its church-wardens' Gothic and hideous galleries, as it subsequently became beautiful and interesting. But on consulting friends of some distinction in the Church, they ad- vised me to accept the offer, and I did so. Dean Wellesley told me afterwards that if I had asked his advice he would have recom- mended me to decline ; and that, in that case, it was certain a higher office would have speedily been placed at my disposal. I do not, however, in the least regret this, though I was assured on the highest author- ity that the only reason which deterred Lord Beaconsfield from placing further offers at my disposal was the outburst of denun- ciation which followed the publishing of my sermons on " Eternal Hope." This is no more a subject of regret to me than the other. The determination of our little des- tinies lies in hands far higher than our own, and I have every reason to thank God 240 MEN I HA VE KNO \VN. that, throughout my life, the lot has, by his mercy, fallen to me in pleasant places. When some kind friend said to Mr. Disraeli, as he then \vas, " Why, you have given preferment to a strong Radical" (a remark which certainly required modification) he only answered, with a laugh, that perhaps I should in time be brought round to his own views. He came on one occasion to hear me preach at the Abbey, having been taken there by Dean Stanley ; and he was good enough to express approval of what he heard. But my most characteristic reminis- cences of him are connected with a long interview which I had with him in Downing Street. I had taken some direct part, and had been deeply interested in, an exhibition by working-men of articles made by them- selves, which had (I think) been originally suggested by my friend the Rev. H. E. Fox, who was then vicar of Christ Church, West- minster. Several persons of high rank and great eminence had visited this exhibition, to which EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. 241 some two thousand working-men and their children had contributed. Among these vis- itors was H.R.H. the late Duke of Albany, who asked me to come and see him at Buckingham Palace, to drive with him in a broucrham to the exhibition, and to con- 3 duct him over it. I did so, and he was ex- tremely struck as I was myself, and as all the most observant visitors were by the beauty, the variety, and the ingenuity of the exhibits. This was all the more remarkable because it was a curious condition of the exhibition that every working-man should offer in competition for the prizes some ar- ticle of his own making which was not within the sphere of his immediate trade. I do not think that such exhibitions have been by any means common, and I am quite sure that they might be multiplied with advantage. Any one who saw what English working-men could do with ease in all sorts of lines would, I think, have come to the conclusion that, if the mechanical and inventive genius of our countrymen were carefully trained and en- couraged, we could not possibly have any- 242 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. thing- to fear from the competition of articles " made in Germany." The exhibition remained open for a month or two. The experts who decided the prizes had given their awards, and I now wished the temporary building to be closed and the prizes distributed. Lord Beacons- field was then Prime Minister, and I was very anxious that he should take the chair on the occasion, and should with his own hand give the prizes to the successful com- petitors. I had very little hope that he would accede to my request that he should do so, because I was aware how much, at that time, his hours were occupied by the heavy cares of public business ; and because, even when he was in Opposition, his public appearances, even at great political gather- ings, were not numerous. I pointed out to him, however, that there would be not only a general but even a political importance in his presiding at a function which had something of a national significance, and would cause the highest gratification to the two thousand working- EARL OF BEACONSFIELD. 243 men who had furnished their best treasures to the exhibition. He saw the force of these considerations, and asked me to pay him a visit in Downing Street. The Prime Minister usually sits in a pleasant inner room, looking out on St. James's Park, which is approached through a large reception room. I was re- ceived by Mr. Montagu Corrie, afterwards Lord Rowton, whom I remembered as an old Harrovian. He showed me into Lord Beaconsneld's room, and I soon saw from his remarks that what the Premier dreaded was the trouble of having to prepare a speech on an unfamiliar subject. Anticipat- ing this, I had drawn up a little paper, pointing out the value and importance of such exhibitions, and some of the special ways in which working-men might gain from the report of experts upon their productions. By way of instance I mentioned that some excellent musical instruments had been ex- hibited ; but two of them were, in spite of other merits, essentially faulty in principle. For instance, one man had sent an octagonal stringed instrument, a mistake which he 244 MEN J HA VE KNO WN. would never again commit when authorita- tively told that the geometrical shape of the instrument interfered with the purity of the tones. Another a blacksmith had made a still more serious mistake by sending in a violin made of metal, being obviously un- aware that the resonance of the metal would materially injure the vibrations of the strings. Notes of this kind were exactly what the Prime Minister wanted, and when he came to distribute the prizes I was amused with the effective use he made of them. For instance, he pointed out the mis- takes in construction of the instruments. " There is, for instance," he said, " my friend Mr. So-and-So, who is a blacksmith, / shall a/ways think of him as ' the har- monious blacksmith] whose violin is of metal. Now, this is a fundamental error ; for," etc. But the chief charm of the distribution of prizes at which the Speaker, Lord James, Mr. W. H. Smith, and other persons of dis- tinction were present was the happy way in which Lord Beaconsfield handed their LORD LYTTON. 245 prizes to the children who had been success- ful. He said the same words of simple congratulation to each little boy or girl, but as he spoke them he smiled on the chil- dren with genuine benignity, patted them on the head, or took them by the hand, and sent them away highly delighted. It will always be to me a pleasant recollection that as I left Lord Beaconsfield he rose, took me by the arm, walked with me across the great reception room, and as he handed me over to Mr. Corrie at the door, said very genially, "Dr. F'arrar, I have always felt a sincere regard for you." They were the last words I ever heard him speak. LORD LYTTON, the first who bore the title, was the father of the late Earl of Lytton, who was promoted to the Earldom when he ceased to be Viceroy of India. The first Lord Lytton was perhaps more universally known under the names of Sir Edward Bulwer, or Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, under which many of his most famous novels ap- peared. He was not only a man of genius, L'46 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. but also a man of wide reading and great attainments, who achieved success in many directions. Besides his chief work as a nov- elist, he wrote some poems, which, if they did not reach a high rank as poems, could yet hardly have been written by any one but a very able man. He wrote a history of Greece ; he was a frequent contributor to miscellaneous literature, and some of his isolated papers, though now little known, were full of charm and insight. He was also a statesman, and was made Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1858. As a dramatist he was so successful that his Lady of Lyons and his Richelieu still hold the : r place on the stage, and his comedy of Money was extremely popular. He be- gan his literary career by winning the chan- cellor's medal for a poem on " Sculpture," in 1825. One of the earliest of his novels to arouse attention was Eugene Aram, a subject which was, it is said, suggested to him by the fact that the wretched murderer had taught in the family of his grandfather. His fame was established by The Last Days ' * X s * >*^ , j; y , LORD LYTTON. 247 of Pompeii, and Rienzi, the Last of ike Trib- unes, in 1835. The custodian at Pompeii told me very recently that in the ruins of the old city no name was more frequently mentioned than that of Bulwer; and at Rome those who look with interest on the spot where Rienzi fell constantly refer to Lord Lytton's novel. I forget exactly how it was that he first wrote to me, but it came about in this way. He had long been engaged upon a transla- tion of the Odes and Epodes of Horace, which was very favorably received. It was published in 1872, and has passed through more than one edition. Some of his rhyme- less versions which attempted rather to catch the lilt and echo of the original than to reproduce the odes in the ancient metres, which I in vain tried to induce him to at- tempt in English are happy and graceful ; particularly a very charming rendering of the second Epode, " Bcatus ille qui procul ncgotiis ;" but the little introductory remarks to the poems are the most interesting ele- ment in the book. He dedicated the book to me in 1872 ; he died early in 1873. MEN I HA YE KNO \VN. Not out of vanity, nor as accepting Lord Lytton's far too generous praise, but only to show the kindness of his heart, I quote a part of his dedication, which ran as fol- lows : "To the Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D., Master of Marlborough College, in admira- tion of an intellect enriched by the variety of culture which gives renown to the Scholar, ennobled by the unity of purpose which blends the vocations of the Scholar with the mission of the Divine. . . . Indulgence is necessarily the greatest amongst those most indulgent as to man's weakness, if most ex- o actinor as to man's strength, THE SEEKERS o o AFTER GOD." As Lord Lytton was not in the closer technical sense a classical scholar, he wished his book to be revised, page after page, by some one who would, he thought, be able to correct any slight errors into which he might fall. He had asked Dr. B. H. Kennedy, the distinguished Master of Shrewsbury School, to perform this task for him ; but when Dr. Kennedy, who was then in advanced age, was unable to face the labor, he asked me LORD LYTTON. 249 to undertake it. I did so with the best care I could in the midst of a busy life. There were some actual mistakes, but not many. I subjected the translation, however, to a close scrutiny, and criticised the pages as Lord Lytton sent them to me, closely and fully, venturing to make not a few suggestions ; and I reviewed the book in the Quarterly Revieiv for October, 1869. One lesson the pleasant task brought home to my mind very vividly ; it was the immense labor which Lord Lytton brought to bear on all his works. Buffon says somewhere, "La Genie c'cst la patience'' I have, unfortunately, mislaid a mass of letters which I received from Lord Lvtton about j his renderings, and he would sometimes o ' write more than one letter about a sino-le o phrase. He rewarded me most amply for a purely friendly and voluntary task, first, by his too appreciative dedication ; next, by sending to Mrs. Farrar, with gracious kind- ness, a costly and beautiful dessert service in Berlin china; and thirdly, by always deal- ing with me as a friend for whom he had a 250 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. regard. I append the only letter of his on which I can lay my hands at this moment. I was several times his guest at Kneb- O worth. It was a truly delightful house at which to stay. The dining-hall with its panelling and gallery, its overhanging ban- ners, and its suits of armor that belonged to Lord Lytton's ancestors : was very beauti- ful, as were also the drawing-room and the long corridor, full of interesting books and objects of art. On a side table of the draw- ing-room, under a glass case, was a skull of remarkable formation evidently the skull of some man of marked genius which had been found at Pompeii, and which suggested to Lord Lytton the character of Arbaces, the Egyptian priest of the Temple of Isis. Some also of the pictures were interesting, and had histories attached to them. The host laid himself out to make our visits de- lightful. One generally met there some per- sons of literary note, such as his son, Robert Lytton (Owen Meredith), the Rev. Charles Young, John Forster, and others. We once paid him a visit from Saturday till Monday, LORD LYTTON. 251 accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Arnold and the Duke of Genoa, who was then in my pupil-room at Harrow. Break- fast was sometimes spread under the trees on the lawn, and luncheon would be had in a boat on the lake. It was pleasant to walk about the grounds at Knebworth ; they were full of monuments and inscriptions. One was a funeral memo- rial to his mother, from whom he inherited Knebworth. On it were inscribed lines of his own, ending with See how high in heaven The mounting column leaves the funeral urn. Another bore a very sad inscription to a favorite dog, to the purport that since it died there was no one so eao-er to welcome c> the return, or regret the absence, of its lonely master. One part of the grounds was known as " the Horace Garden." Horace was Lord Lytton's favorite author, and this secluded walk was surrounded with busts of Augus- tus, Maecenas, Horace himself, and many of 252 MEN I HAVE KNOWN. the friends mentioned in his Odes, with the relevant passages carved beneath. One afternoon Lord Lytton drove us a delightful excursion to Panshanger, where we saw, among other paintings, the famous Madonna of Raphael ; and to Brocket Hall, once the favorite residence of Lord Palm- erston. I drove back in one of the car- riages alone with my host. He was in one of his recurrent melancholy moods, and asked me " whether I thought that most marriages were happy?" I answered with- out the least hesitation that I believed they were. I knew from personal experience what matrimony might be, and while freely admitting, with the poet, that It locally contains or hell, or heaven, There is no third place in it, I added that, looking round on a very- large circle of friends and acquaintances, there was scarcely one among them whose marriage had not proved to be a source of the richest blessings. It is, of course, no secret that Lord Lytton's own marriage LORD LYTTON. 253 was not happy, and ended in long" years of separation. After hearing what I said, he answered, " I wish I could agree with you ; I fear that most marriages are unhappy." He was much interested in spiritualism, and told me one curious experience of his own. When he was first made a Minister by Lord Derby, he accepted the offer ; but the morning after his acceptance he re- ceived a letter from a total stranger, saying that, as a Conservative Ministry had come in, he doubtless expected an invitation to a place in the Cabinet, but that in this ex- pectation he was mistaken. The writer pro- fessed to know, in some occult way, that Sir Edward (as he then was) would not at that time become a member of the Ministry, but might become so at some later period. Lord Lytton put the letter aside, thinking, "In this case, at any rate, the astrologer or spiritualist is hopelessly wrong." Yet the statement of the letter proved to be true. He found in a few days that if he offered himself for re-election for the town of Hert- 254 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. ford, on accepting a post in the Cabinet, it was extremely doubtful whether he would be elected or not. He knew that a defeat under such circumstances would be a blow to the new administration, and he wrote to Lord Derby offering to forego for this rea- son the post which he had accepted. His generous suggestion was gratefully wel- comed, and it was not till afterwards that he became Secretary for the Colonies. If I remember rightly, it was owing, in part at least, to Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's suggestion, that Mr. Gladstone was sent on his famous commission to the Ionian Islands. At any rate, on this or some other occasion he had to travel down with Mr. Gladstone to Windsor. It happened that a Colonial mayor was also going to Windsor to be knighted, and got into the saloon carriage with the minister and Mr. Gladstone, ac- companied by his mace-bearer, or some sim- ilar official. This was quite contrary to eti- quette, and Mr. Gladstone told the mace- bearer very courteously that he ought to go down in another carriage. LORD LYTTON. 255 The man's only reply was, " Wherever the Mayor of goes, I shall go ! " Then Mr. Gladstone again explained to him the reason why it was really out of the question that he should occupy that car- riage ; but argument and expostulation were quite unavailing, and the man, with bovine impenetrability, intrenched himself in the one unvarying sentence, repeated at every pause, " Wherever the Mayor of goes, I shall go!" All eloquence was unavailing ; and at Windsor and everywhere else, wherever the mayor went, the inseparable mace -bearer determined to accompany him ! I had two disappointments in connection with Lord Lytton. He once sent us tickets to go and see his Sea- Captain, I think that was the title of the play, which was to be acted by Mr. and Mrs. Hermann Vezin. He had sent me a copy of the play, and I thought parts of it very fine. But when we got to the theatre door, we found it closed, with a notice on it to say that Mrs. Her- 256 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. mann Vezin was ill, and could not act that night. I am not sure that the play ever found its way upon the boards at all. Another time, Lord Lytton then Sir Edward was to have spoken on some great question in the House of Commons. He had a high reputation as an orator, and whenever he spoke the House was sure to be full. The sergeant-at-arms has a private gallery, and my kind friend, Lord Charles Russell, who then held the office, constantly lent Mrs. Farrar and me his gallery, thus enabling us to have the high intellectual pleasure of hearing a great debate. But the orator was ill that evening, and we lost the opportunity of hearing him. Even his slightest speeches had a certain grace in them. At a public, dinner he had to propose the toast of " The Ladies." His speech, put in a far more graceful form than I can reproduce, was to this effect : - " A great philosopher tells us that we should con- stantly lift our eyes to the heavens and contemplate the stars. I follow his advice, and in lifting my eyes to the heavens and looking at the stars, I propose the toast of ' The Ladies.' " THE EARL OF LYTTON. EARL LYTTON. 257 Lord Lytton was a man of keen political insight. He once showed me a book which had been given him by Louis Napoleon when the future emperor was an impecu- nious exile, as a young man, in London. Under the prince's autograph he had writ- ten a most remarkable prognostication of his future career, which had been curiously fulfilled almost to the letter. , One evening the gentlemen who were his guests were sitting up smoking to a late hour. The conversation turned on religious subjects. I was the only clergyman present, and many questions were put to me. I an- swered them frankly and fully, and found in Lord Lytton especially a very earnest and sympathetic listener. Attacks were often made upon him both in public and private ; but all that I saw of him made me regard him as kind, high-minded, and sincere ; un- prejudiced in his sympathies, and anxious to make those about him happy. I knew ROBERT, first EARL OF LYTTON, even more intimately than I knew his illustrious 258 MEN I HA VR KNO \VN. father ; and during the time that he was con- nected with the British Embassies at Paris and at Vienna, as well as during the time that he was Viceroy of India, and after his return, he wrote me long and affectionate letters. My clear son, Cyril Lytton Farrar, was his godson, and was named after him; and when this glad-hearted and gifted youth died at Peking, at the age of twenty-one, Lord Lytton contributed the lines placed under the memorial window in the vestry at St. Margaret's, of which a facsimile is here given. The Earl of Lytton disparaged his own poetic gifts, but he wrote much that is of high excellence. None but a poet could have written such lines as these in Tatui- Jiauscr, Ah, deeper dole, That so august a spirit, shrined so fair. Should, from the starry session of his peers, Decline to quench so keen a brilliancy In Hell's sick spume! ah me, the deeper dole! or than these in his two very remarkable volumes of Chronicles and Characters a 9 O 2? talked to his friend and biographer, Mr. John Forster ; and his books, more than in the case of many authors, revealed his inmost heart. His first important book, The Pick- wick Papers, was published in 1837, tne year in which Her Gracious Majesty began her reign. Everything which he then wrote was read with almost feverish eagerness ; per- haps his works are now read comparatively little. Each generation has its own taste, and tastes differ very widely in different epochs. Yet much that he wrote seems to me incom- parably more earnest and more wholesome than much which is now read and praised. He was, in his own way, a sincerely re- CHARLES DICKENS. 265 ligious man. It is certainly a blot on the humor of Pickwick that its pages " reek with brandy and water ; " but that was a vitium temporis, more than a vitium hom- inis, and, on the other hand, he could make the legitimate boast that he had never writ- ten a line which could call up a blush upon the purest cheek. It is immensely to the credit of the heart of the novelist, and will be a permanent addition to his fame, not only that he devoted fiction to the high end of exposing manifold social abuses, but even that, by the force of his genius, he contributed a material element to their cor- rection. If cheap private schools are no longer what once they sometimes were, it is due in part to Nicholas Nicklcby. Oliver Twist helped to bring about the improve- ment of workhouses, and Little Dorrit of debtors' jails, and Bleak House of the Court of Chancery, and David Copperficld of Doc- tors' Commons. Fiction could have had no loftier aim than such an amelioration of social conditions. 26G AfRN I HA VE KNO WN. I saw THACKERAY more frequently, have sat next to him at dinner, and met him in company with common friends. In ordi- nary society he probably left a much less genial impression than he did on the minds of his intimate associates. I was once stand- ing with the late Sir William Smith the editor of so many famous dictionaries at the door of the Athenaeum. A letter had appeared that morn ing in The Times, signed by Charles Dickens and Henry Rogers. " I have just been reading," he said, " a letter by the editor of our leading review and by the first novelist in the world ; and it is ex- pressed in the worst English ever written ! " Once he came down to Harrow, when I was a master there, and gave us his lecture on George III. Every word of it was read, and rather closely read, from his manuscript, and in a voice somewhat monotonous ; but I shall never forget the impression of tragic gloom left on my mind by his picture of the madness of George III.; and the lecture ap- peared to be listened to, even by the youngest Harrow boys, with breathless interest. WILLIAM M THACKERAY. CR U IK SHANK TR OLL OPE. 267 I dined with him afterwards at the house of Dr. Butler, and I remember that he spoke of many things ; but the only remark which I specially recall was one about himself. He said that he had recently sat at dinner next to an eminent tragedienne, now dead, and that she had overpowered him with ecstatic compliments ; a few days afterwards he had sat next to Jenny Lind and the great singer, with a frankness which delighted him, said that she had not read a line of one of his writings, and knew nothing about j o them. Of the two ladies he greatly pre- ferred Jenny Lind, and enjoyed her frank indifference much more than the fulsome adulation. Even so slight an acquaintance with a great writer seems to make one know more of the character of his genius. I once sat next to GEORGE CRUIKSIIAXK at dinner; and once vis-a-vis to ANTHONY TROLLOPE and GEORGE Du MAURIER then known only as a caricaturist. I still vividly recall the stately courtesy of Cruikshank, so much more sol- 2(58 MEN I HA VE KNOWN. emn at any rate on that and another oc- casion when I saw and heard him than one would have expected from most of his pictures ; and the almost riotous geniality with which Messrs. Trollope and Du Maurier enlivened us with their wit and brightness. Neither of them showed the least particle of stiffness towards a young, little-known, clerical stranger, but after mutual introduc- tions they frankly laid themselves out for pleasant conversation and social enjoyment. I conversed with LORD MACAULAY only once. I was at that time a young fellow of Trinity College, and was staying up at the college during one of the vacations. Macaulay's nephew and biographer, Sir George Trevelyan, whose recent with- drawal from Parliamentary life all would re- gret even more than they do but for the hope that it may set him free for the lite- rary work of which he has furnished such brilliant specimens, was then an under- graduate at Trinity. His uncle came up to see him, and stayed at the Bull Hotel. LORD MACAULAY. 269 Sir Georore whom I had known when he c!5 was the head of the school at Harrow, car- rying- everything- before him by his ability -was good enough to give me an invita- tion from the great historian to dine with him at the hotel. I need not say how proud I felt of the honor. The warmth and unaffected geniality with which Lord Macaulay welcomed us put us at once at our ease, and I still recall the unusually cordial way in which he shook his guests by the hand. The party was a small one. I do not remember the other guests, but besides Mr. Trevelyan, as he then was, Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Macaulay were present, and sat on the right and left side of their cousin. As I sat next to Mr. Macaulay, I had the full enjoyment of that power of conversation for which the historian was so famous. Sidney Smith once said that the punishments of the Inferno might be greatly improved upon. As a future punish- ment to some suave and gentle archbishop, for instance, -- 1 think it was Archbishop Howley, he would have him preached to 270 MEN I HA VE KNOWN. death by wild curates ; and as a punishment to Macaulay, he would put persons all round him who would pour into his ears a series of false facts and false dates which he should have no power to refute or to correct. The great man had not that punishment to en- dure that evening. Mr. Kenneth Macaulay was a barrister, an eloquent speaker, and a member for the city of Cambridge. As I am speaking of an evening more than forty years ago, I cannot recall the de- tails of the conversation, except that it was maintained the whole evening with unflag- ging vivacity. It is said by those who be- long to an older generation that the art of conversation has wholly declined, and has almost disappeared. I can well believe that it is so. In these days the newspapers bring to our breakfast-table, in endless columns of letterpress, not only the grave news of all the world, but even the most trivial in- cidents of daily life, even the all-but-imper- ceptible ripples upon what Mr. Lowell called " the stagnant goose- ponds of village gos- sip : " - how, for instance, Mr. Brown's son LORD MAC 'A UL AY. 271 has swallowed a hickory-nut, and how Mr. Smith's pony-chaise has stuck in a cart-rut ! As a rule, everybody knows as much about these things as anybody else, and frequently conversation soars no higher ; or, even if it does, our opinions are ready-made for us by our favorite newspapers, and we only have to echo them, and to borrow our wise judgment and brilliant reflections from the pages of our magazines. This was not so much the case before the days of telephones and submarine telegraphs, and 300,000 miles of iron roads. I do not think that any great man has left on my mind so vivid an impression of his gifts in conversation as Lord Macaulay. His memory was extraordinary. If you sur- prised him with the question, he would repeat for you the whole list of the archbishops of Canterbury, from St. Augustine to St. Edmund of Abingdon, and from him down to Archbishops Manners- Sutton, Howley, and Sumner. He could not, he said, repeat all the popes of Rome, as he got wrong among the numerous Piuses and Gregories. 272 MEN I HA VE KNO IVN. But he gave one instance of his powers that evening. Something had turned the con- versation upon executions, and especially the executions of women ; and, without an effort, on the spur of the moment, he seemed to recall the case of every woman of any fame who had been executed in the long course of English history. CARLYLE also I knew, though it was but slightly. When I was at Harrow I founded one of those Scientific and Natural History Societies among the boys which were then much less common than they have since become. I also strongly felt that to see and hear great men was, in itself, a sort of lib- eral education for young boys. I therefore invited several men of great eminence to come and give us lectures at Harrow ; and among those who came were such men of genius as Professor Tyndall, Professor Hux- ley, Mr. Ruskin, and Mr. A. Wallace. I was anxious that the boys should see and hear Carlyle, and I wrote to invite him to deliver a lecture, although I did not know him. I Thomas Carlyle. CARL YLE. 273 did not feel myself obtrusive in doing so, because almost any man, however eminent, enjoys the opportunity of talking to six hun- dred boys. Carlyle was interested in my re- quest, for he afterwards spoke about it to Professor Tyndall, who told me that when he informed the Sage of Chelsea of his in- tended lecture to the school, Carlyle an- swered in his deep voice, " Mind you don't tell them anything which is not true ! " I append a facsimile of his letter. Once, when I was at Westminster, Dean Stanley told me that he was going, by appointment, to see Carlyle, and asked me to accompany him. I was delighted to go. The dean's object was to take to him the birthday book of the late lamented Princess Alice of Hesse, who wished Carlyle to in- scribe his name in it. I, too, had something c> to take with me. Carlyle, in one of the most amusing chapters of his Frederick the Great, has described the intercourse of the king with Maupertius and Voltaire. Maupertius was a mathematician who had gone on an expedition to the arctic circle to measure 274 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. an arc of the meridian, and had, by the re- sult of his researches, definitely proved that the globe is an oblate spheroid, flattened at the poles. On his return to France he had had an engraving of himself published, in which he was represented in his arctic furs and fur cap, near the little hut amid the eternal snows in which he had taken his observations. He was represented with his right hand resting on the flatness of the north pole, and with his left triumphantly waving in the air. His achievement had been a considerable one, even if his manner of having it depicted had savored a little of French vanity. Frederick the Great made Maupertius the president of the new academy which he founded at Berlin ; and when Voltaire be- came a denizen of his court, the two men, being somewhat antipathetic in temperament, were a little inclined to be jealous of each other. Voltaire, putting into play his in- imitable wit, wrote a pamphlet in which he overwhelmed Maupertius with ridicule under the pseudonym of Dr. Akakia ; and in refer- *>< u -l cO CARL YLE. 275 ence to his portrait, dubbed him Le grand Aplatisseur, " the great Earth- flattener," as though he had not merely discovered, but actually caused, the squeezing down of the polar regions out of their proper sphericity ! Now, it so happened that in a shop of old engravings I had come across a copy of this portrait of Le grand Aplatisseur. I at once bought it, and had it framed. It is by no means common, and thinking that Carlyle would value it more than I did, I took it with me to make him a present of it. He did not possess it, but only a much inferior sketch of Maupertius, and he accepted it, not only graciously, but with real pleasure. I had proof afterwards that he really valued it ; for when he died I wrote and asked his executors whether, as it was but of small intrinsic value, they would return it to me as a memorial of Carlyle, if none of his family particularly wished for it. Of course I put the request very modestly, but they at once sent me back the picture, and I found that Carlyle had had it. taken out of the common wooden frame in which I had 27G MEN I HA VE KNO WN. placed it, and had had it framed in a worthier and more expensive style. 1 do not know whether he was in an exceptionally good-humor, and whether my present of Maupertius had specially made him feel gracious, but certainly that after- noon he showed none of the splenetic and dyspeptic rudeness of which he was so often guilty, and which made him blurt out so many disparaging, if sometimes shrewd, judgments even of contemporaries who were very far superior to himself in the moral heroism he so energetically preached, but which, in his life of continuous and too often self-absorbed wretchedness, he so con- spicuously failed to exemplify. For nothing is more saddening about Mr. Fronde's nu- merous volumes of the biography of Car- lyle, than the fact that while they abound in severe and scornful epigrams against mul- titudes of his most eminent and kindest ac- quaintances, there are but three personages, if so many, to whom he alludes with cordially generous approval. We must have stayed with him talking for CARL YLE. 277 at least an hour or more, and so far from showing any signs of being tired of us, he wanted us to stay longer. He did not, as it was pathetic to see, sign his name in the princess's book, because his hand shook so pitiably. He told the dean that he must leave the book there, and he would sign it at his leisure, and send it back. The conversation, suggested by this inci- dent, turned on German princesses, and we began to talk of Elizabeth of Hungary. Carlyle at first expressed himself almost con- temptuously about her, in much the same style as his published estimate of Ignatius Loyola, whom he somewhere characterizes as if he were among the poorest of God's creatures. The dean and I dwelt on the noble and tender elements in her character ; and, to my surprise, Carlyle, after a little time, quite came round to our view, and ad- mitted how much there was about her his- tory and legend which was touching and exemplary. To many who loved and hon- ored Carlyle the publication of his biography was a sacl and grievous disillusionment- 278 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. an act of almost profane iconoclasm. I re- member once being told by a friend that he happened to visit Carlyle just after a brilliant man of genius had left him, whom my friend had met on his way to Carlyle's door. " Ah," said the visitor, " I have just been visiting poor Carlyle. He is a mere wreck ! a mere wreck ! " " So you have just had Mr. with you," said my friend to Carlyle. " Yes," was the answer of the " mere wreck ;" " and he thinks God Almighty never made such another ! " I first met CHARLES KINGSLEY at the house of Archbishop Benson, who had then been recently appointed head-master of Welling- ton College. Wellington College is very near Kingsley's Rectory of Eversley, and Kingsley's eldest son was then a Welling- ton boy. For this reason, and from his natural deep interest in the rising genera- tion as " the trustees of posterity," Kingsley took the deepest interest in the her own filii -the boys at the college, which was then CHARLES KINGSLEY. CHARLES KINGSLEY. 279 beginning its career. He used to ride over to the college on his strong, serviceable horse, to accompany the boys in their paper-chases, and to encourage them in all manly sports. On this occasion he preached to the boys in the new and then undecorated school chapel. His sermon was extempore, and I can remem- ber how, as we came out of the chapel, his boy took him by the arm and said, " O father, what a jolly sermon ! " It was only "jolly" in schoolboy parlance as being interesting and arresting their at- tention, as otherwise it was a little sad in tone. I still remember it. He was instruct- ing the lads in their duties to one another, how they ought to respect one another, and to practise mutual forbearance. One of his illustrations was that they should not be to one another like a lot of hounds in a kennel, snarling and yelping and biting one another, and each determined to secure for itself the biggest bone. In the form of the sermon there was nothing literary ; it was a homely, practical address to boys by one who under- stood and sympathized with them. 280 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. He was at that time, as he often was, extremely depressed. His admirable biog- raphy leaves on us the true impression that, while he had occasional fits of exu- berant gayety, the prevalent tone of his mind was sad. He .felt bitterly that iso- lation in the church which he shared with his friend and teacher, F. D. Maurice. He shrank from those savage attacks which fell to his lot, as to the lot of all true men, and complained at one time that "the papers were all cursing him like a dog " because, with Carlyle and Ruskin, he thought that there was something to be said for Governor Eyre. At the time of which I speak he had recently finished his most brilliant novel, Hypatia, and was feeling the subsequent reaction. He said that the doctors told him he had exhausted the phosphorus- in his brain, and advised him to give ample time to sleep, and to eat plenty of fish. His latter years, when he was canon, first of Chester, then for a short time of Westminster, were among the hap- piest years of his life. He neither ex- THOMAS HUGHES. \ JUDGE HUGHES. 281 pected nor desired any further promotion. At both he did admirable work. He always loved to see young men about him, and to train them in strength and manliness. At Chester he formed a larije o Natural History Society, and his walks and talks with the members were found to be full of intellectual stimulus. At Westmin- ster he preached again many of the sermons which he had preached at Chester, and they produced a profound effect. It was curious to see him stand in the pulpit and gaze round him on the vast congregations with something of anxious curiosity. He felt the responsibility of those occasions, but he managed to create a sort of electric sympathy between his hearers and himself a sympathy caused by the depth of his sincerity and earnestness. I knew JUDGE HUGHES intimately for many years. My acquaintance with him began in a letter in which I had taken the liberty to write and point out a small mistake in natural history which he had made in Tom 282 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. Brown's School Days. In his long and interesting reply he acknowledged the mis- take, which was, I believe, corrected in later editions. I met him often, and he was once my guest for a fortnight at the .Lodge, Maryborough College. He had come down to give a lecture to the boys on his Ameri- can travels. The lecture was simple and homely enough, but it was full of fresh manly experience ; and this, together with the fact that he had written Tom Brown 's ScJiooJ Days, interested the Marlburians im- mensely. During that fortnight I had many a long and interesting walk and talk with him in the beautiful forest of Savernake, and over the Downs, and at Martinsell. Our conversation usually turned either upon questions of religion, which were always to him full of undying interest, or on the various social problems of the day. I had one more long walk with him at New Quay in Cornwall, over the lovely promontories, only a year before his death. Even at that late period of his life he seemed to have lost none of his old vigor and freshness. DR. JOWETT. 283 I once asked him to decide which of three boys should have the Essay Prize. I give a facsimile of his characteristic answer. DR. JOWETT of Balliol was always among my kindest friends. He was my guest at Marlborough, and I saw him yearly at West- minster, and stayed with him five or six times when I was Bampton Lecturer at Ox- ford, and on other Sundays when I had to preach at Oxford, or when he invited Mrs. Farrar and me to stay with him. He came down to preach to my boys at Marl- borough ; for it was always my wish to give them the opportunity of hearing in the college chapel some of the most eminent men and preachers of the day. The Sundays at Oxford were delightful. He generally had some distinguished guest, like Robert Browning or Matthew Arnold ; and at his dinner-table on Sunday one met men like Mr. Freeman, the historian, or Canon Liddon, or the Rev. E. Hatch, or some of the best-known Oxford residents. Meeting him thus often, I never saw any 284 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. trace of the silence, or reticence, or reluc- tance to talk, which is often alluded to in his biography. I found him. during many a stroll about Oxford, freely ready to dis- cuss any topic of interest, and to speak his mind upon it ; and there was a great charm about his gentleness and courtesy. I always regarded him as a sincerely and even deeply religious man, and that con- ception of him is amply justified by the de- tails of his published life, and especially by many passages in his beautiful letters. Mr. Leslie Stephen, in a recent paper, seems to condemn him, and to regard his example as harmful, because he thinks that he con- tinued to be a nominal member of the Church of England long after he had ceased to be a real one. I think that this view is mistaken. Dr. Jowett remained a professed advocate of the catholic faith and of the Church of England because it represented to him the best he knew and the highest to which he could attain. But his was essentially the philosophic mind. He did not believe that it is in hu- B. JOWETT. DR. JO WETT. 285 man power to see truth in definite, clear-cut outlines, or to formulate it with Aristotelian precision. Like Kant, he was overpowered with the grandeur of the starry heavens above and of the moral law within ; but he shrank from all attempt at expressing, still more at exhausting, the kind of truth which is of its essence incomprehensible, in the formal pigeon-holes of metaphysical dialec- tics. I once heard him preach a most inter- esting sermon on Miracles most interesting, though I could by no means agree with it all. He argued on the impossibility of see- ing God as it were through the chinks of the abnormal and the exceptional ; and he showed how very little we understand of the strange, perplexing, and often over- whelmingly saddening circumstances of na- ture and of life, instancing the heart-broken anguish of a mother at the death of some fair child, Soft silken primrose, fading timelessly. " Exactly like Jowett," said an indignant and well-known Oxford tutor to me, as we 286 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. walked out of St. Mary's "just nibbling at an argument ; just hinting a fault, and hesitating dislike." The criticism was at once just and unjust ; it was just, as indi- cating the form of the sermon, and its pos- sible tendency to suggest doubt which it did not solve ; but unjust in that it did not recognize the different ways of envisaging truth which are inseparable from the differ- ences of human temperament. " All that he knows, I see" said a mystic of a philosopher. "All that he sees I know" said the phi- losopher of the mystic. Hence Dr. Jowett cared little for the mi- nutiae of theological dogmatism or the verbal subtleties of scholastic shibboleths. He thought, I imagine, that they were apt to deceive men's minds with the arrogant sem- blance of knowledge without the reality; and he accepted them as being, at the best, but asymptotes to truth. But for this very reason he would not repudiate them. He could offer nothing definite as a substitute for them ; and held that they had a certain o ***->- ** *-* - S ILir^Jj 1^~~~ -P i * t-^tt-f, *--, v f^* ~Q J jL<<~- " 4>^." DR. THOMPSON. 287 value, if they were not overestimated, as though they expressed exhaustive or final verities. He would, I think, have had much sympathy with the remark of Angelique Ar- nauld, " I am of the church of all the saints ; and all the saints are of my church;" and he would have said with Abraham Lincoln, " When I find a church which writes promi- nently over its portals, ' Love God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor as thyself,' to that church will I belong." This was perhaps the reason why his ser- mons were, as a rule, moral, simple, practi- cal ; and,' in later years, when he preached annually at Westminster Abbey, he usually chose a biographical subject. The last name on my list is that of DR. THOMPSON, the famous master of Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a good and ripe scholar, and was the best Platonist at Cambridge, as Jowett was at Oxford. He wrote but little, and not much that will be permanent ; yet I cannot but think that grievous injustice is done to his memory 288 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. when he is regarded chiefly as the sayer of those sharp, witty, and often bitter epigrams which, as applied to their betters, small and malignant natures often find an eager pleas- ure in quoting. It is no less a man than Pascal who said, " Discur dc bons mots, mauvais caractere ; " and the man is not to be envied who can have the courage to o say with Ouintilian "Potius amicum qnam dictum pcrdidi" These often-quoted epi- Sframs the delight of the small minds, to o o which nothing is more agreeable than the power to repeat some clever depreciation of men who, to them at any rate, are " as captain is to subaltern " - had not even the merit of representing Dr. Thompson's real estimates. They were, in fact, mere splenetic outbursts born of momentary ill-temper and dyspepsia, like some of the brutalities of Carlyle. Some of Dr. Thompson's sayings were witty, as when he said of Ely, where as professor of Greek he held a canonry, " The place is so damp tJiat even my ser- mons wont keep dry there ;" and sometimes full of shrewdness, as when he said at a DR. THOMPSON. 289 college meeting where some of the young fellows were treating with very little respect the opinions of their seniors, " None of us is quite infallible, not even the youngest" But others, of which many float about Cambridge society, were mere petulancies of which he was himself ashamed ; as when he said of an amiable and excellent scholar. 1 The time that he spends on the neglect of his duties he wastes on the adornment of his person ; " and of an eminent professor, whose first lecture he attended, " I little thought that we should so soon have cause to regret his predecessor, Professor ; " a double-edged condemnation against two men, both of whom were in reality much more eminent than the author of the sar- casm. Dr. Thompson, to my knowledge, used such remarks of men respecting whom they were enthusiastically repeated by all the vulgar and malicious, but whom the master himself in reality honored and esteemed. Dr. Thompson was a singular and inter- esting man. I knew him well because I was many times his guest at Trinity Lodge. 200 MEN I HAVE KNOWN. He had a sort of Olympian manner, which did injustice to the real kindness of his heart. Once when a wit designated the various heads of colleges and professors by the names of various Greek deities, Thompson appeared as Adonis "A don is." But his manner did not express his real character. He had lived the life of a Cam- bridge don, and he told me that there was a period of his life in which he had been liable to fits of melancholy so overwhelming that he could only lie on the floor and groan ; but that this depression was always dispelled by hard work. Although Dr. Thompson, in one of his epigrams, was severe on me, he always expressed himself most kindly, and treated me as an honored guest. I only saw him taken aback once. I had entered the drawing-room of the Lodge just before the university sermon, which I had to preach, and which he had to attend as vice-chancellor His back was turned to me, and he thought that it was Mrs. Thomp- DR. THOMPSON. 291 son who had entered the room. "/ shall sleep frightfully" he said ; and turning round, saw me with a broad smile on my face, very much amused by his remark, not in the least hurt by it. He proceeded rather elaborately to ex- plain that he was not feeling- very well ; that the afternoon was a rather sleepy time ; that he had not slept well the night before ; and that the remark was not meant in the smallest degree as an unfavorable reflection on my sermons, etc., of which, indeed, both by word of mouth and in letters he spoke very kindly. I assured him, with a lau^h, that even o had he meant to speak slightingly I should not have been in the smallest degree of- fended, being far too well aware how many people think that sermons are, as Jowett expressed it, " a great trial to intellectual men," being, moreover, free from all illusion about the difficulties of sermons at the best, and, in particular, as to my own end- less deficiencies. But I think that the mas- ter could not quite get over the feeling 292 MEN I HA VE KNO WN. that, as schoolboys express it, he had " put his foot in it." To most sermons, however, he was as little partial as to his own. He was once expressing to me his astonish- ment at the unbroken flood of speech poured forth without a written note by a famous preacher who had been recently occupying the university pulpit. " Were you struck by his sermon ? " I asked. " Mir or magis" he replied, with a sort of Olympian uplift- ing of his eyebrows. He made my acquaint- ance when I was a young undergraduate, by asking me to one of his " wines," though I was not " on his side ; " i.e., not under his tutorship. This was very unusual ; and why he invited me I do not know, for I was a stranger to him. Some one asked him whether it was because I was one of " the Apostles" (as he himself had been). " No," he said, "it was a lucky hit that is all." From that time till his death I never re- ceived at his hand anything but kindness and consideration. THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara STACK COLLECTION THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW. 10nt-5,'6j(F44VSs4)170I> UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL UBRARY FACILITY A 001 081 500 9