n 3 1822^01 9283* ' 3 1822 01601 9283 Central University Library University of California, San Diego Note: This item is subject to recall after two weeks. Date Due JUI4 5 1993 MAY 1 Cl 39 (1/91) UCSD Lib. SOME EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ' ' Non aver tema, disse il mio Signore : Fatti sicur, die noi siamo a buon punto : Non stringer, ma rallarga ogni vigore. " Purgat&rio, Canto 9, v. 46-48. " ' I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.' " ' What is that ? ' said Will. . . . " ' That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower. ' " Middlemarch, Book iv. * rrww\t**i fati\ #\4 * SOME EMINENT WOMEN OF OUE TIMES SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES BY MRS. HENRY FAWCETT Pontoon MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1889 All rights rewrtwd PREFACE THE following short sketches of the lives of some of the eminent women of our times were written for The Mothers' Companion, and are now republished by the kind permis- sion of the proprietors and publishers, Messrs. Partridge. They were suggested by the fact that nearly all the best contributions of women to literature have been made during the last hundred years, and simultaneously with this remarkable development of literary activity among women, there has been an equally remarkable activity in spheres of work held to be peculiarly feminine. So far, therefore, from greater freedom and better education en- couraging women to neglect womanly work, it has caused them to apply themselves to it more systematically and more successfully. The names of Elizabeth Fry, Mary Carpenter, Sarah Martin, Agnes Jones, Florence Nightin- gale, and Sister Dora are a proof of this. I believe that we owe their achievements to the same impulse which in another kind of excellence has given us Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth Browning. The sketches were intended chiefly for working women and young people ; it was hoped it would be an encourage- ment to them to be reminded how much good work had been done in various ways by women. VI PREFACE An apology should, perhaps, be offered to the reader for the want of arrangement in the sequence of these sketches. As they appeared month by month, in 1887 and 1888, the incidents of the day sometimes suggested the subject. Thus the papers on Queen Victoria and on Queen Louisa of Prussia were suggested by the celebration of the Jubilee in June 1887, and by the universal grief felt for the death of Queen Louisa's son and grandson in 1888. As the incidents mentioned in some sketches are sometimes referred to in those that follow, it has been thought best not to alter the sequence in which they originally appeared. The authorities relied on are quoted in each paper. MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT. LONDON 1889. CONTENTS PAOB 1. ELIZABETH FRY . ... 1 2. MARY CARPENTER ...... 9 3. CAROLINE HERSCHEL . . . . .18 4. SARAH MARTIN .... 29 5. MARY SOMERVILLE . . . . . .35 6. QUEEN VICTORIA . .... .46 7. HARRIET MARTINEAU . . . . .57 8. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE . . . . .69 9. MARY LAMB . . .79 10. AGNES ELIZABETH JONES . . . . .91 11. CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE . . . .99 12. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING . . . .111 13. LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES IN AFGHANISTAN 117 14. ELIZABETH GILBERT ...... 128 15. JANE AUSTEN . . . . . .136 16. MARIA EDGEWORTH ...... 145 17. QUEEN LOUISA OF PRUSSIA . ... 163 18. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 176 viii CONTENTS PAOB 19. SISTER DORA. ... . 186 20. MRS. BARBATTLD .... .198 21. JOANNA BAILLIE ...... 205 22. HANNAH MORE . . . . . .211 23. THE AMERICAN ABOLITIONISTS PRUDENCE CRANDALL AND LUCRETIA MOTT . 223 ELIZABETH FRY " Humanity is erroneously considered among the commonplace virtues. If it deserved such a place there would be less urgent need than, alas ! there is for its daily exercise among us. In its pale shape of kindly sentiment and bland pity it is common enough, and is always the portion of the cultivated. But humanity armed, aggressive, and alert, never slumbering and never wearying, moving like an ancient hero over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues." JOHN MORLEY. THE present century is one that is distinguished by the active part women have taken in careers that were pre- viously closed to them. Some people would have us believe that if women write books, paint pictures, and understand science and ancient languages, they will cease to be true women, and cease to care for those womanly occupations and responsibilities that have always been entrusted to them. This is an essentially false and mis- taken notion. True cultivation of the understanding makes a sensible woman value at their real high worth all her womanly duties, and so far from making her neglect them, causes her to appreciate them more highly than she would otherwise have done. It has always been held at least, in Christian countries that the most womanly of women's duties are to be found in works of inney to those who are desolate and miserable. To be thirsty, hungry, naked, sick, or in prison, is to have a S> B 2 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES i claim for compassion and comfort upon womanly pity and tenderness. And we shall see, if we look back over recent years, that never have these womanly tasks been more zealously fulfilled than they have been in the century which has produced Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Josephine Butler, and Octavia Hill. Mrs. Fry was born before the beginning of this century in 1780 but the great public work with which her memory will always be connected was not begun till about 1813. She was born of the wealthy Quaker family, the Gurneys of Norwich. Her parents were not very strict members of the sect to which they belonged, for they allowed their children to learn music and dancing pursuits that were then considered very worldly even by many who did not belong to the Society of Friends. The gentle poet, William Cowper, speaks in one of his letters, written about the time of Elizabeth Fry's childhood, of love of music as a thing which tends " to weaken and destroy the spiritual discernment." Mr. and Mrs. Gurney, however, seem to have been very free from such prejudices, as well as from others which were much more universal, for their children not only learnt music and dancing, but also girls as well as boys Latin and mathematics. Mrs. Gurney seems to have discerned that she had an especial treasure in her little Elizabeth. She is spoken of in her mother's journal as "my dove-like Betsy." The authoress of the biography of Elizabeth Fry in the Eminent Women series, says : " Her faculty for independ- ent investigation, her unswerving loyalty to duty, and her fearless perseverance in works of benevolence, were all foreshadowed " in her childhood. She had as a young girl what appears to us now a very extraordinary dread of en- thusiasm in religion. One would think that if ever a woman needed enthusiasm for her life's work, Elizabeth Fry was that woman. But she confesses in her journal, written when she was seventeen years of age, "the greatest fear of religion" because it is generally allied with en- thusiasm. Perhaps the truth is that she had so deep a I ELIZABETH FRY 3 natural fount of enthusiasm in her heart that she dreaded the work that it would impel her to, when once it was allowed a free course. She had a very strong, innate repugnance to anything which drew public attention upon herself, and only the imperative sense of duty enabled her to overcome this feeling. In her heart she said what her Master had said before her : " Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me." When the sphere of public duty first revealed itself to her, she records in her diary what it cost her to enter upon it, and writes of it as " the humiliating path that has ap- peared to be opening before me." It must be noticed, however, that in her case, as always, the steep and difficult path of duty becomes easier to those who do not flinch from it. In a later passage of her diary, the public work which she had at first called a path of humiliation she speaks of as "this great mercy." In the little book to which reference has just been made, we read that the first great change in Elizabeth Gurney's life was caused by the deep impression made upon her by the sermons of William Savery. It is rather strange to find the girl who had such a terror of enthu- siasm, weeping passionately while William Savery was preaching. Her sister has described what took place. " Betsy astonished us all by the great feeling she showed. She wept most of the way home. . . . What she went through in her own mind I cannot say ; but the results were most powerful and most evident" (p. 11, Elizabeth Fry. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman). Her emotion was not of the kind that passes away and leaves no trace behind. The whole course of her life and tenor of her thoughts were changed. She became a strict Quakeress, not, how- ever, without some conflict with herself. There are pleasant little touches of human nature in the facts that she found it a trial to say " thee " and " thou," and to give up her scarlet riding habit. Soon after this, at the age of twenty, she became the wife of Mr. Joseph Fry, and re- moved to London, where she lived in St Mildred's Court, 4 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES i in the City. The family into which she married were Quakers, like her own, but of a much more severe and strict kind. Her marriage was, however, in every respect a fortunate one. Her husband sympathised deeply with her in all her efforts for the good of others, and encouraged her in her public work, although many in the Society of Friends did not scruple to protest that a married woman has no duties except to her husband and children. Her journal shows how anxiously she guarded herself against any temptation to neglect her home duties. She was a tender and devoted mother to her twelve children, and it was through her knowledge of the strength of a mother's love that she was able to reach the hearts of many of the poor prisoners whom she afterwards helped out of the wretchedness into which they had fallen. Her study of the problem, how to help the poor, began in this way. A beggar-woman with a child in her arms stopped her in the street. Mrs. Fry, seeing that the child had whooping-cough and was dangerously ill, offered to go with the woman to her home in order more effectually to assist her. To Mrs. Fry's surprise, the woman immediately tried to make off; it was evident what she wanted was a gift of money, not any help to the suffering child. Mrs. Fry followed her, and found that her rooms were filled with a crowd of farmed-out children in every stage of sick- ness and misery ; the more pitiable the appearance of one of these poor mites, the more useful an implement was it in the beggar's stock-in-trade. From this time onwards the condition of women and children in the lowest and most degraded of the criminal classes became the study of Mrs. Fry's life. She had the gift of speech on any subject which deeply moved her. From about 1809 she began to speak at the Friends' meeting-house. This power of speaking, as well as working, enabled her to draw about her an active band of co-workers. When she first began visiting the female prisoners in Newgate it is probable that she could not have supported all that she had to go through if it had not been for the sympathy and companionship of Anna i ELIZABETH FRY 5 lluxton and other Quaker ladies whom she had roused through her power of speech, just as she had herself been roused when a girl by the preaching of William Savory. The condition of the women and children in Newgate Prison, when Mrs. Fry first began visiting them in 1813, was more horrible than anything that can be easily imagined. Three hundred poor wretches were herded to- gether in two wards and two cells, with no furniture, no bedding of any kind, and no arrangements for decency or privacy. Cursing and swearing, foul language, and per- sonal filthiness, made the dens in which the women were confined equally offensive to ear, eye, nose, and sense of modesty. The punishment of death at that time existed for 300 different offences, and though there were many mitigations of the sentence in the case of those who had only committed minor breaches of the law, yet the fact that nearly all had by law incurred the penalty of death, gave an apparent justification for herding the prisoners in- discriminately together. It thus happened that many a poor girl who had committed a comparatively trivial offence, became absolutely ruined in body and mind through her contact in prison with the vilest and most degraded of women. No attempt whatever was made to reform or discipline the prisoners, or to teach them any trade whereby, on leaving the gaol, they might earn an honest livelihood. Add to this that there were no female warders nor female officers of any kind in the prison, and that the male warders were frequently men of depraved life, and it is not difficult to see that no element of de- gradation was wanting to make the female wards of New- gate what they were often called a hell on earth. When Elizabeth Fry and Anna Buxton first visited this Inferno, there was so little pretence at any kind of control over the prisoners, that the Governor of Newgate advised the ladies to leave their watches behind them at home. Mrs. Fry, with a wise instinct, felt that the best way of influencing the poor, wild, rough women was to show her care for their children. Many of the prisoners had their 6 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES I children with them in gaol, and there were very few even of the worst who could not be reached by care for their little ones. Even those who had no children were often not without the motherly instinct, and could be roused to some measure of self-restraint and decency for the sake of the children who were being corrupted by their example. So Mrs. Fry's first step towards reforming the women took the form of starting a school for the children in the prison. As usual in all good work of a novel kind, those who knew nothing about it were quite sure that Mrs. Fry would have been much more usefully employed if she had turned her energies in a different direction. People who have never stirred a finger to lighten the misery of mankind always know, so much better than the workers, what to do and how to do it. They would probably tell a fireman who is entering a burning house at the risk of his life, that he would be more usefully employed in studying the chemical action of fire, or in pondering over the indestructibility of matter. The popular feeling with regard to Mrs. Fry's work in Newgate was embodied by Thomas Hood in a ballad which is preserved in his collected works, and serves now to show how wrong a good and tender-hearted man may be in passing judgment on a work of the value of which he was entirely unqualified to form an opinion. The refrain of the poem is " Keep your school out of Newgate, Mrs. Fry " I like the pity in your full-brimined eye. I like your carriage and your silken gray, Your dove-like habits and your silent preaching, But I don't like your Newgatory teaching. No, I'll be your friend, and like a friend Point out your very worst defect. Nay, never Start at that word ! But I must ask you why You keep your school in Newgate, Mrs. Fry. Mrs. Fry's philanthropy was not of a kind to be checked by a ballad, and she went on perseveringly with her work ; the school was formed, and a prisoner, named Mary Connor, I ELI/AIJKTII 1-KV 7 ihc lir>t schoolmistress. A wonderful change gradually In', ainc apparent in the demeanour, language, and appear- ance of the women in prison. In 1817 an association was formed for carrying on the work Mrs. Fry had begun. I 1 was called " An Association for the Improvement of the IVmalo Prisoners in Newgate." Its first members were eleven Quakeresses and one clergyman's wife. Public attention was now alive to the importance of the work ; and in the following year a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed to inquire and report upon the condition of the London prisons. Mrs. Fry was examined before this committee. Her chief recommendations were that the prisoners should be employed in some industry, and be paid for their work, and that good conduct should be encouraged by rewards ; she was also most urgent that the women prisoners should be in the charge of women warders. Her work in the prison naturally led her to consider the condition and ultimate fate of women who were transported. Transportation was then carried out upon a large scale, and all the evils of the prison existed in an intensified form on board the transport ships. The horrors of the voyage were followed by a brutal and licentious distribution of the women on their arrival to colonists, soldiers, and convicts, who went on board and took their choice of the human cargo. Mrs. Fry's efforts resulted in a check being placed on these shameful bar- barities. The women were, owing to her exertions, sent out in charge of female warders, and they were provided with decent accommodation on their arrival Like Howard, Mrs. Fry did not confine her efforts to the poor and wretched of her own country. She visited foreign countries in order thoroughly to study various methods of prison work and discipline. On one occasion she found in Paris a congenial task in bringing the force of public opinion to bear on the treatment of children in the Foundling Hospital there. The poor babies were done up in swaddling clothes that were only unwrapped once in twelve hours. There was no healthy screaming in the 8 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES i wards, only a sound that a hearer compared to the faint and pitiful bleating of lambs. A lady who visited the hospital said she never made the round of the spotlessly clean white cots, without finding at least one dead baby ! Everything in the hospital was regulated by clockwork ; its outward appearance was clean and orderly in the extreme, but the babies died like flies ! The Archbishop of Paris was vastly annoyed with Mrs. Fry for pointing out this drawback to the perfect organisation of the institution ; but when once the light was let in, improvement followed. There were many other classes of neglected or unfortu- nate people whose circumstances were improved by Mrs. Fry's exertions. The lonely shepherds of Salisbury Plain were provided with a library after she had visited the deso- late region where they lived. She also organised a lending library for coastguard sm en and for domestic servants. There was no end to her active exertions for the good of others except that of her life. She died at Kamsgate in 1845, and was buried at Bark- ing. Her private life was not without deep sorrows and anxieties. She lost a passionately beloved child in 1815 ; in 1828 her husband was unfortunate in his business affairs. They suffered from a great diminution of fortune, and were obliged to remove to a smaller house and adopt a less expensive style of living. She did not pretend to any in- difference she was far from feeling under these trials ; but they were powerless to turn her from the duties which she had marked out for herself. The work which she had undertaken for the good of others probably became, in its turn, her own solace and support in the hour of trial and affliction. In helping others she had unconsciously built up a strong refuge for herself, thus giving a new illustration to the truth of the words : " He that findeth his life shall lose it : and he that loseth his life, for my sake, shall find it." II MARY CARPENTER " That it may please Thee ... to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives." MARY C.U;I'I:MKU was thirty-eight years old when Mrs. Fry died in 1845. We do not hear, in reading the lives of either, that the two women ever met, or that the elder directly stimulated the activity of the younger. Yet the one most surely prepared the way for the other ; their work was upon the same lines, and Miss Carpenter, the Unitarian, of Bristol, was the spiritual heir and successor of Mrs. Fry, the Quaker, of Norwich. There is, it is true, a contrast in the manner in which the two women approached their work in life. The aim of both was the rescue of what Mary Carpenter called " the perishing and dangerous classes." But while Mrs. Fry was led, through her efforts on behalf of convicts, to establish schools for them and their children, Mary Carpenter's first object was the school for neglected children, and through the knowledge gained there she was led to form schemes for the reformation of criminals and for a new system of prison discipline. Mrs. Fry worked through convicts to schools ; Mary Carpenter through schools to convicts. It will not therefore be imagined that there is any want of appreciation of Mrs. Fry when it is said that Mary Carpenter's labours were more effective, inasmuch as they 10 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES n were directed to the cause of the evil, rather than to its results. By establishing reformatory and industrial schools, and by obtaining, after long years of patient effort, the sanction and support of Parliament for them, she virtually did more than had up to that time ever been done in England, to stop the supply of criminals. Children who were on the brink of crime, and those who had actually fallen into criminal courses, were, through her efforts, snatched away from their evil surroundings, and helped to become respectable and industrious men and women. Before her time, magistrates and judges had no choice, when a child criminal stood convicted before them, but to sentence him to prison, whence he would probably come out hopelessly corrupted and condemned for life to the existence of a beast of prey. She says, in one of her letters, dated 1850: "A Bristol magistrate told me that for twenty years he had felt quite unhappy at going on committing these young culprits. And yet he had done nothing ! " The worse than uselessness of prisons for juvenile offenders was a fact that was burnt into Mary Carpenter's mind and heart by the experience of her life. She was absolutely incapable of recognising the evil and at the same time calmly acquiescing in it. Her magisterial friend is the type of the common run of humanity, who satisfy their consciences by saying, " Very grievous ! very wrong ! " and who do nothing to remove the grievance and the wrong ; she is the type of the knights - errant of humanity, who never see a wrong without assailing it, and endeavouring to remove the causes which produce it. Mary Carpenter was born at Exeter in 1807, the eldest of five children, several of whom have left their mark on the intellectual and moral history of this century. There was all through her life a great deal of the elder sister one may almost say, of the mother in Mary Carpenter. In an early letter her mother speaks of the wonderfully tranquillising influence of dolls on her little Mary. She never shrank from responsibility, and she had a special capacity for protecting love a capacity that stood her in ii MARY CARPENTER 11 good stead in reclaiming the little waifs and strays to whom she afterwards devoted herself. Her motherliness comes out in a hundred ways in the story of her life. Her end- less patience with the truant and naughty children was such as many a real mother might envy. She was especi- ally proud of the title of "the old mother" which the Indian women, whom she visited towards the close of her life, gave her. In writing to a friend, she once said : " There is a verse in the prophecies, ' I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,' and the motherly love of my heart has been given to many who have never known before a mother's love." She adopted a child in 1858 to be a daughter to her, and writes gleefully : " Just think of me with a little girl of my own I about five years old, ready- made to my hand, without the trouble of marrying a darling little thing, an orphan," etc. etc. Her friends spoke of her eager delight in buying the baby's outfit. It was her motherliness that made her so successful with the children in the reformatories- and industrial schools ; moreover, the children believed in her love for them. One little ragged urchin told a clergyman that Miss Carpenter was a lady who gave away all her money for naughty boys, and only kept enough to make herself clean and decent On one occasion she heard that two of her ex-pupils had " got into trouble," and were in prison at Winchester. She quickly found an opportunity of visiting them, and one of them exclaimed, directly he saw her, " Oh ! Miss Carpenter, I knew you would not desert us!" Another secret of her power, and also of her elasticity of spirit, was her sense of humour. It was like a silver thread running through her laborious life, saving her from dulness and despondency. In one of her reports, which has to record the return of a runaway, she said: "He came back resembling the prodigal in everything except his repentance ! " The motto which she especially made her own was Dum doceo disco While I teach, I learn. ' Her father had a 12 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES n school for boys in Bristol, and Mary and her sister were educated in it. They were among the best of their father's pupils, one of whom, the Eev. James Martineau, has left a record of the great impression Mary's learning made upon him. She was indeed very proficient in many branches of knowledge. Her education included Latin, Greek, mathe- matics, and natural history ; and the exactness which her father and the nature of her studies demanded of her, formed a most invaluable training for her after career. For many years the acquisition of knowledge, for its own sake, was the chief joy of her life ; but a time came when it ceased to satisfy her. She was rudely awakened from the delightful dreams of a student's life by a severe visita- tion of cholera at Bristol in 1832. From this period, and indeed from a special day that set apart as a fast-day in consequence of the cholera dates a solemn dedication of herself to the service of her fellow-creatures. She wrote in her journal 31st March 1832, what her resolution was, and concluded : " These things I have written to be a witness against me, if ever I should forget what ought to be the object of all my active exertions in life." These solemn self-dedications are seldom or never spoken of by those who make them. Eecords of them are found some- times in journals long after the hand that has written them is cold. But, either written or unwritten, they are prob- ably the rule rather than the exception on the part of those who devote themselves to the good of others. The world has recently learned that this was the case with Lord Shaftesbury. There is a time when the knight-errant consciously enrols himself a member of the noble band of warriors against wrong and oppression, and takes upon himself his baptismal vow manfully to fight against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue Christ's faithful soldier and servant to his life's end. It must be remembered that when Mary Carpenter first began to exert herself for the benefit of neglected children, there were no reformatory or industrial schools, except those which had been established by the voluntary efforts of it MARY CARPENTER 13 philanthropists like herself. Aided by a band of fellow- workers and wise advisers, chief of whom were Mr. Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, and his daughters ; Dr. Tuckerman, of the U.S.A. ; Mr. Russell Scott, of Bath ; Mr. Sheriff Watson, of Aberdeen ; and Lady Byron, Mary Carpenter set to work to establish a voluntary reformatory school at Kingswood, near Bristol. Her principle was that by surrounding children, who would otherwise be criminals, with all the influences of a whole- some home life, there was a better chance than by any other course, of reclaiming these children, and making them useful members of society. To herd children together in large, unhomelike institutions, was always, in Mary Carpenter's view, undesirable ; the effect on character is bad ; the more perfectly such places are managed, the more nearly do the children in them become part of a huge machine, and the less are their faculties, as responsible human beings, developed. Over and over again, in books, in addresses, and by the example of the institutions which she managed herself, Mary Carpenter reiterated the lesson that if a child is to be rescued and reformed, he must be placed in a family ; and that where it is necessary, for the good of society, to separate children on account of their own viciousness, or that of their parents, from their own homes, the institutions receiving them should be based on the family ideal so far as possible. With this end in view, the children at Kingswood were surrounded by as many home influences as possible. Miss Carpenter at one time thought of living there herself, but this scheme was given up, in deference to her mother's wishes. She was, however, a constant visitor, and a little room, which had once been John Wesley's study, was fitted up as a resting-place for her. On a pane of one of the windows of this room her predecessor had written the words, " God is here." She taught the children herself, and provided them with rabbits, fowls, and pigs, the care of which she felt would exercise a humanising influence upon them. The whole discipline of the place was directed by her ; one of her chief difficulties 14 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES n was to get a staff of assistants with sufficient faith in her methods to give them an honest trial. She did not believe in a physical force morality. " We must not attempt," she wrote, "to break the will, but to train it to govern itself wisely ; and it must be our great aim to call out the good, which exists even in the most degraded, and make it con- quer the bad." After a year's work at Kingswood in this spirit, she writes very hopefully of the improvement already visible in the sixteen boys and thirteen girls in her charge. The boys could be trusted to go into Bristol on messages, and even " thievish girls " could be sent out to shops with money, which they never thought of appropriating. But although the success of the institution was so gratifying, it had no legal sanction ; it had consequently no power to deal with runaways, and the great mass of juvenile delinquents were still sentenced to prisons, from which they emerged, like the man into whom seven devils entered, in a state far worse than their first. Mary Carpenter's work was not only to prove the success of her methods of dealing with young criminals, but, secondly, to convince the Government that the established system was a bad one, and thirdly, and most difficult of all, to get them to legislate on the subject. A long history of her efforts to obtain satisfactory legislation for children of the perish- ing and dangerous classes is given in her life, written by her nephew, Mr. J. Estlin Carpenter. It is enough here to say that in the House of Lords, Lord Shaftesbury, and in the House of Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr. Adderley (afterwards Lord Iddesleigh and Lord Norton), were her chief supporters. Mr. Lowe (now Lord Sherbrooke) was her chief opposer. Liberal as she was, born and bred, as well as by heart's conviction, she confessed with some feeling of shame, that the Tories "are best in this work." At last, in 1854, her efforts were crowned with success, and the Koyal Assent was given to the Youthful Offenders Bill, which authorised the establishment of reformatory schools, under the sanction of the Home Secretary. It is a striking proof of the change that has taken place ii MARY CARPENTER 15 in the sphere and social status of women, that Mary Carpenter, in the first half of her active life, suffered what can be called nothing less than anguish, from any effort which demanded from herself the least departure from absolute privacy. When she began her work of convincing the public and Parliament of the principles which ought to govern the education of juvenile criminals, her nephew writes that to have spoken at a conference in the presence of gentlemen, she would have felt, at that time (1851), as tantamount to unsexing herself. When she was called upon to give evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in 1852, her profound personal timidity made the occasion a painful ordeal to her, which she was only enabled to support by the consciousness of the needs of the children. Surely this excessive timidity arises from morbid self-consciousness, rather than from true womanly modesty. Mary Carpenter was enabled, by increasing absorption in her work, to throw it off, and for her work's sake she became able to speak in public with ease and self- possession. She frequently spoke and read papers at the Social Science Congresses, and at meetings of the British Association. A letter from her brother Philip describes one of these occasions, at the meeting in 1860 of the British Association at Oxford, when her subject was, "Educational Help from the Government Grant to the Destitute and Neglected Children of Great Britain." ' "July, 1860. " There was a great gathering of celebrities to hear her. It was in one of the ancient schools or lecture-halls, which was crowded, evidently not by the curious, but by those who really wanted to know what she had to say. She stood up and read in her usual clear voice and expressive enuncia- tion. ... It was, I suppose, the first time a woman's voice had read a lecture there before dignitaries of learning and the Church ; but as there was not the slightest affectation on the one hand, so on the other hand there was neither a scorn nor an etiquettish politeness ; 16 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES n but they all listened to her as they would have listened to Dr. Eae about Franklin, only with the additional feeling (expressed by the President, Mr. Nassau Senior) that it was a matter of heart and duty, as well as head." As years passed by, her work and responsibilities rapidly increased. It is astonishing to read of the number of institutions, from ragged schools upwards, of which she was practically the head and chief. Her thoroughly practical and business-like methods of work, as well as her obvious self-devotion and earnestness, ensured to her a large share of public confidence and esteem, and although she was a Unitarian, sectarian prejudices did not often thwart her usefulness. Two instances to the contrary must, however, be given. In 1856 the Somersetshire magistrates at the Quarter Sessions at Wells refused to sanction the Girls' Reformatory, established by Miss Carpenter at the Red Lodge, Bristol, on account of the religious opinions of its foundress. They appeared to have forgotten that " Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." A more deeply and truly religious spirit than Mary Carpenter's never existed ; but that is the last thing that sectarian rancour takes heed of. The other little bit of persecution she met with was regarded by herself and her friends as something between a compliment and a joke. In 1864 she wrote a book entitled Our Convicts. The work was re- ceived with commendation by jurists in France, Germany, and the United States, but the crowning honour of all was that the Pope placed her and her books on the "Index Expurgatorius." After this she felt that if she had lived in earlier times she might have aspired to the crown of martyrdom. The extraordinary energy and vitality of Mary Carpenter never declined. When she was over sixty years of age she made four successive visits to India, with the double object of arousing public opinion there about the education of women, and the condition of convicts, especially of female ii MARY CARPENTER 17 convicts. At the ago of sixty-six she visited America. She had long been deeply interested in the social and jwlitical condition of the United States, and had many warm personal friends there. Her first impulse to reformatory work had come from an American citizen, Dr. Tuckerman ; her sympathy and help had been abundantly bestowed upon the Abolitionist party, and she was of course deeply thank- ful when the Civil War in America ended as it did in the victory of the North, and in the complete abolition of negro slavery in the United States. Her mind remained vigorous and susceptible to new impressions and new enthusiasms to the last. Every movement for elevating the position of women had her encouragement She frequently showed her approval of the movement for women's suffrage by signing petitions in its favour, and was convinced that legislation affecting both sexes would never be what it ought to be until women as well as men had the power of voting for Members of Parliament. In 1877, within a month of her death, she signed the memorial to the Senate of the London University in favour of the admission of women to medical degrees. She passed away peacefully in her sleep, without pre- vious illness or decline of mental powers, in June 1877, leaving an honoured name, and a network of institutions for the reform of young criminals, and the prevention of crime, of which our country will for many years to come reap the benefit. Ill CAEOLINE HERSCHEL " As when by night the glass Of Galileo less assured observes Imagined lauds and regions in the moon." Paradise Lost. EVERY one knows the fame of Sir William Herschel, the first distinguished astronomer of that name, the builder and designer of the forty-foot telescope, and the discoverer of the planet, called after George III., Georgium Sidus. Hardly less well known is the name of his sister, Caroline Herschel, who was her brother's constant helper for fifty years. She was the discoverer of eight comets ; she received, for her distinguished services to science, the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, and the gold medal conferred annually by the King of Prussia for science ; she was also made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society and of the Royal Irish Academy, and received many other public marks of appreciation of the value of her astronomical labours. Few women have done as much as she for the promotion of science, and few have been more genuinely humble in their estimate of their own attainments. Nothing made her more angry than any praise which appeared, even in the slightest degree, to detract from the reputation of her brother ; over and over again she asserted that she was nothing more than a tool which he had taken the trouble to sharpen. One of her in < AKnUNK IIKKSi IIKL 19 favourite c.\i)rcssioii8 about herself was that she only "miinled the heavens" for her In-other. "I am nothing," she wrote ; " I have done nothing : all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only a tool which he shaped to his use a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as much." Scientific men and scientific societies did not endorse Caroline Herschel's extremely humble estimate of herself. In the address to the Astronomical Society by Mr. South, on presenting the medal to Miss Herschel in 1828, the highest praise was conferred upon her as her brother's fellow-worker, and as an original observer. " She it was," said Mr. South, "who reduced every observation, made every calculation ; she it was who arranged everything in systematic order ; and she it was who helped him (Sir W. Herschel) to obtain his imperishable name. But her claims to our gratitude do not end here : as an original observer >hr demands, and I am sure she has, our unfeigned thanks." He then narrates the series of her astronomical discoveries, and adds, referring to the brother and sister : " Indeed, in looking at the joint labours of these extraordinary person- ages, we scarcely know whether most to admire the intel- lectual power of the brother, or the unconquerable industry of his sister." The sharpest tool, or the best-trained puppy-dog in the world, could hardly have earned such praise as this. Without endorsing what Caroline said of herself in her generous wish to heighten the fame of her brother, it must, however, be conceded that in a remarkable degree she was what he made her. With an excellent, and indeed an exceptionally powerful, natural understanding, she was ready to apply it in any direction her brother chose. She was far from being a mere tool, but her mind resembled a fine musical instrument upon which her brother was able to play the lightest air or the grandest symphony, according as he pleased. At his "bidding she became, first, a prima donna, then an astronomer; if he had so wished it, she would probably with equal readiness and versatility have turned her attention to any other branch of science or art. 20 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES in Caroline Herschel was, indeed, a fine example of what devoted love can do to elevate the character and develop the natural capacity of the understanding. She was born in Hanover on the 16th March 1750, the youngest but one of six children. Her exceptionally long life of nearly ninety-eight years closed in January 1848. Her memory, therefore, included the earthquake of Lisbon, the whole French Revolution, the meteor-like rise and fall of Napoleon, and all the history of modern Europe to the eve of the socialistic outbreak of 1848. Her family life, before she left Germany, was of the narrowest possible kind. She had only one sister, seventeen years older than herself; and as Sophia Herschel married early, Caroline became the only girl in her family circle, and to the full was she kept to those exclusively feminine pursuits and occupations which the proprieties of Germany at that time enforced. Her mother appears to have been enthusiastically opposed to the education of girls. Her father wished to give her a good education, but the mother insisted that nothing of the kind should be attempted. How she learned to read and write we are not told in the biography written by her grand-niece, Mrs. J. Herschel. These accomplishments were by no means common among German women of the humbler middle class a hundred years ago. She did, how- ever, acquire them, in spite of her mother's decree that two or three months' training in the art of making household linen was all the education that Caroline required. Her father, who was a professional musician himself, wished to teach her music, but could only do so by stealth, or by taking advantage of half an hour now and then, when his wife was in an exceptionally good temper. In a letter, written when she was eighty-eight years old, Caroline recalls these furtive hours stolen from the serious occupa- tions of her life, which then consisted in sewing, " orna- mental needlework, knitting, plaiting hair, and stringing beads and bugles." "It was my lot," she writes, "to be the Cinderella of the family. ... I could never find time for improving myself in many things I knew, and which, MI CAROLINE IIERSCIIEL 21 after all, proved of no use to me afterwards, except what little I knew of music . . . which my father took a pleasure in teaching me N.B., when my motJier was not at home. Ann- n." Very early in her life her brother William became Caroline's idol and hero. He was twelve years older than herself, and distinguished himself among the group of brothers for tenderness and kindness to the little maiden. Her eldest brother, Jacob, was a fastidious gentleman, and Caroline's inability to satisfy his requirements for nicety at table ;and as a waitress, often earned her a whipping. 15iit her brother William's gentility was of a different order. She narrates one instance, which doubtless was a specimen of others, when " My dear brother William threw down his knife and fork and ran to welcome and crouched down to me, which made me forget all my grievances." Little did William or Caroline guess _that in the kind brother soothing the little sister's trouble, the future astronomer was " sharpening the tool " that was hereafter to be of such inestimable service to him. The connection of England and Hanover under one crown caused an intimate association between the two countries. William Herschel's first visit to England was as a member of the band of the regiment of which his father was bandmaster. On this first visit to England, William expended his little savings in buying Locke's " Essay on the Human Understanding." Jacob made an equally characteristic purchase of specimens of English tailoring art. These professional journeys to England led, in the course of time, to William Herschel establishing him- self as a music-master and professional musician at Bath. This, however, he very early regarded merely as a means to an end. He taught music to live, but he lived for his astronomical studies and for the inventions and improve- ments in telescopes which he afterwards introduced to the world. When Caroline was seventeen years old, her father died, leaving his family very ill provided for ; Caroline was more closely than ever confined to the tasks 22 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES in of a household drudge and to endeavouring to supply home- made luxuries for Jacob. This went on for five years, the mother and sister slaving night and day in order that Jacob might cut a figure in the world not humbling to the family pride. In 1772 William Herschel unexpectedly arrived from England, and his short visit ended in his sister Caro- line returning with him to Bath. She left, as she writes with some awe, even after an interval of many years, " with- out receiving the consent of my eldest brother to my going." There could not possibly be a greater contrast than that between Caroline's life in Hanover and her life in England. From being a maid-of-all-work in a not very interesting family, where there was a dull monotony in her daily routine of drudgery, she found she was to become a public singer, an astronomer's apprentice, and an assistant manu- facturer of scientific instruments ; she was not only her brother's housekeeper, but his helper and coadjutor in every act of his life. Nothing is more remarkable than the account of the life of William and Caroline Herschel at Bath. He frequently gave from thirty-five to forty music- lessons a week ; this, with his work as director of public concerts, kept the wolf from the door, and, needless to say, occupied his daylight hours with tolerable completeness. The nights were given to "minding the heavens," or to making instruments necessary for minding them much more efficiently than had hitherto been possible. Every room in the house was converted into a workshop. William Herschel literally worked on, night and day, without rest, his sister on several occasions keeping him alive by putting bits of food into his mouth while he was still working. Once when he was finishing a seven-foot mirror for his telescope, he never took his hands from it for sixteen hours. The great work of constructing the forty-foot telescope took place at Bath ; and at Bath also, while still practising the profession of a music-master, Herschel discovered the Georgium Sidus, and was acknow- ledged as the leading authority on astronomy in England. Up to the time of Herschel's improvements, six or eight in CAROLINE HERSCHKI. 23 inches used to be considered a largo size for the mirror of an astronomical telescope. His first great telescope had a twelve-foot mirror. There is a most exciting account in Mrs. HerschePs Life of Caroline Herschel, of the failure of the first casting of the mirror for the thirty-foot reflector. The molten metal leaked from the vessel containing it and fell on the stone floor, pieces of which flew about in all directions as high as the ceiling. The operators fortunately escaped without serious injury. "My poor brother fell, exhausted with heat and exertion, on a heap of brickbats." The disappointment must have been intense, but nothing ever baffled these indefatigable workers, and the second casting was a complete success. Five years after she had joined her brother at Bath, Caroline made her first appearance as a public singer. She was very successful, and her friends anticipated that her well-cultivated and beautiful voice would become a means of providing her with an ample income. She, however, had so fully identified herself with her brother's astronomical labours, that she only regarded her musical acquirements as a means of setting him free to devote himself more completely to the real object of his life. His fame as a maker of telescopes had by this time spread all over Europe, and many scientific societies, royal persons, and other celebrities, ordered telescopes of him. On these orders he was able to realise a large profit, but Caroline always grudged the time devoted to their execution. Her aim for her brother was not that he should become rich or even well-to-do, but that he should devote himself unre- servedly to advance the progress of astronomical science. She was ready to live on a crust, and to give herself up to the most pinching economies and even privations, for this end. She was the keeper of her brother's purse, and re- ceived his commands to spend therefrom anything that was necessary for herself ; her thrift and self-denial may be judged from the fact that the sum thus abstracted for her own personal wants seldom amounted to more than 7 or 8 a year. 24 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES in The next great change in the life of the brother and sister took place in 1782, when William Herschel left Bath and was appointed Astronomer-Royal by George the Third. His salary of only 200 a year involved a great loss of income, but this, in his eyes, was a small matter in com- parison with the advantage of having his time entirely free to give up to his favourite studies. They bade farewell to Bath, and settled first at Datchet, shortly after, however, removing to Slough. Caroline had dismal visions of bank- ruptcy, but William was in the highest spirits, and declared that they would live on eggs and bacon, " which would cost nothing to speak of, now that they were really in the country." Caroline was now installed as an assistant astronomer, and was given a telescope, which she calls a "seven-foot Newtonian Sweeper " ; and she was instructed, whenever she had an evening not in attendance on her brother, to " sweep for comets " ; but her principal business appears, at this time, to have been waiting on her brother, and writing down the results of his observations ; they worked quite as hard as they had done at Bath. They laboured at the manufacture of instruments all day, and at the observation of the heavens all night No severity of weather, if the sky was clear, ever kept them from their posts. The ink often froze with which Caroline was writing down the results of her brother's obser- vations. It has been well said that if it had not been for occasional cloudy nights, they must have died of overwork. The apparatus for erecting the great forty-foot telescope, and the iron and woodwork for its various motions, were all designed by William Herschel, and fixed under his im- mediate direction. His sister, in her Recollections, wrote : " I have seen him stretched many an hour in the burning sun across the top beam, whilst the iron-work for the various motions was being fixed." The penurious salary granted to William Herschel was supplemented by special grants for the removal and the erection of all this machinery; and in 1787 Caroline's services to her brother were publicly recognised by her receiving the appointment of assistant to in CAROLINE HERSC 1 1 I.I. 25 her brother at a salary of 50 a year. She was at all times grateful to members of the royal family for acts of kindness shown by them to her brother .and herself ; but it is evident that she felt that, so far as money was concerned, she had not much cause for gratitude to the royal bounty. She points out that at the time when Parliament was granting George III. the sum of 80,000 a year for encouraging science, 200 was considered a sufficient salary for the first astronomer of the day; and yet money could flow liberally enough in some directions, for 30,000 was at that time being spent on the altar-piece of St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Even Caroline's little salary of 50 a year was not regularly paid. It was a trial to her again to become a pensioner on her brother's purse, and it was not till nine quarters of her official salary remained unpaid, that she reluctantly applied to him for help. No wonder that in reading, after her brother's death, an account of his life and its achievements, she remarks, "The favours of monarchs ought to have been mentioned-, but once would /fur been enough." It was after her brother's marriage, in 1788, that the majority of Caroline's astronomical discoveries were made. She discovered her first comet in 1786, her eighth and last in 1797. She was recognised as a comrade by all the leading astronomers of Europe, and received many letters complimenting her on her discoveries. One from De la Lande addressed her as "Savante Miss," while another from the Rev. Dr. Maskelyno saluted her as " My worthy sister in astronomy." Royal and other distinguished visitors constantly visited the wonderful forty-foot tele- scope at Slough, and either William Herschel or his sister were required to be in attendance to explain its marvels. The Prince of Orange, on one occasion, called, and left an extraordinary message " to ask Mr. Herschel, or if he was not at home, Miss Herschel, if it was true that Mr. Her- schel had discovered a new star, whose light was not as that of the common stars, but with swallow-tails, as stars in embroidery." The only glimpse we get, through the 26 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES in peaceful labours of Caroline's long life, of the strife and turmoil of the French Revolution, is the note she makes of the visit, to her brother's observatory, of the Princesse de Lamballe. " About a fortnight after this," the diarist ob- serves, " her head was off." The absence of all comment upon the wonderful political events of the time is notice- able, and so also is Caroline's thinly-veiled contempt for any science less sublime than that to which she and her brother were devoted. Her youngest brother, Dietrich, was a student of the insect world. " He amuses himself with insects," she wrote to her nephew ; " it is well he does not see the word amuses, for whenever he catches a fly with a leg more than usual, he says it is as good as catching a comet." Her brother's marriage, though far from welcome at the time it took place, was a great blessing to her ; for it gave her a most tender and affectionate sister, and ulti- mately a nephew, the inheritor of his father's great gifts, and the being to whom, after William Herschel's death in 1822, Caroline transferred all the devoted and passionate attachment of which her nature was capable. The great mistake of her life was going back to Germany after Sir W. Herschel's death in 1822. She was then seventy-two years of age, and the previous fifty years of her life, containing all her most precious memories and associations, had been spent in England. In this country, also, were all those who were dearest to her. Yet, no sooner was her brother dead, than she felt life in England to be an impossibility. She little thought that she had still twenty-six years to live ; indeed she had long been under the impression that her end was near, but while her brother lived she kept this to herself, because she wished to be useful to him as long as she possibly could. She never really re-acclimatised herself to Germany. "Why did I leave happy England?" she often said. The one German institution she thoroughly enjoyed was the winter series of concerts and operas, which she constantly attended, and she mentions with pleasure, in her letters, that she was " always sure to be noticed by the Duke of Cambridge in CAROLINE HERSCIIKI, 27 as his countrywoman, and that is what I want; I will ! no Hanoverian." She laments the death of William IV., chiefly because, by causing a separation of the crowns of England and Hanover, it seemed to break a link between herself and the country of her adoption. She never revisited England, but she kept up a constant communication with it by letters to her sister-in-law, her nephew, and later to her niece, Sir John Herschel's wife. At that time the post between London and Hanover was an affair of fifteen days, and letters were carried by a monthly messenger, of whose services she seldom failed to avail herself. She took the keenest interest in her nephew's distinguished career. His letters to her are full of as- tronomy. In 1832 he made a voyage to the Cape to ob- serve the stars in the Southern Hemisphere. When Miss Herschel first heard of the intended voyage she refused to believe it. But when she was really convinced of it, the old impulse was as strong upon her as upon a war-horse who hears the trumpet. "Ja! if I was. thirty or forty years younger and could go too ! " she exclaimed. On 1st January 1840 the tube of the celebrated forty- foot telescope was closed with a sort of family celebration. A requiem, composed by Sir John Herschel for the occasion, was chanted, and he and Lady Herschel, with their seven children and some old servants, walked in procession round it, singing as they went. On hearing of this from Slough, Miss Herschel recalls that the famous telescope had also been inaugurated with music. " God save the King " had then been sung in it, the whole company from the dinner- table mounting into the tube, and taking any musical instru- ments they could get hold of, to form a band and orchestra. The most laborious of all her undertakings she ac- complished after her brother's death. It was "The Reduction and Arrangement in the form of a catalogue, in Zones, of all the Star Clusters and Nebulae, observed by Sir W. Herschel in his Sweeps." It was for this that the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society was voted to her in 1828. 28 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES in All through her life in Hanover she lived with the most careful economy, seldom or never consenting to draw upon Sir John Herschel for the annuity of 100 that had been left her by her brother. She said it was impossible for her to spend more than 50 a year without making herself ridiculous. The only luxuries she granted herself were her concert and opera tickets, and her English bed, which all sufferers from the inhuman German bedding must be thankful to hear she possessed. The self-forget- fulness and devotion to others which had characterised her in youth accompanied her to her grave. Every detail with regard to the disposition of her property and the arrange- ments for her funeral had been made by herself, with the view of giving as little trouble as possible to her nephew, and making the smallest encroachment upon his time. In her latest moments her only thought for herself was em- bodied in a request that a lock of her beloved brother's hair might be laid with her in her coffin. IV SARAH MARTIN THE DRESSMAKER AND PRISON VISITOR OF YARMOUTH "Two men I honour and no third. First the toilworn craftsman that with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's. ... A second man I honour, and still more highly : Him who is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable ; not -daily bread, but the bread of Life. . . . Unspeakably touching is it however when I find both dignities united ; and he that must toil outwardly for the lowest of man's wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest. Sublimer in this world know I nothing than the Peasant Saint, could such now anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to Nazareth itself ; thou wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring forth from the humblest depths of Earth, like a light shining in great darkness." Sartor Resartus, pp. 157, 158. EVERY one of us has probably been tempted at one time or another to say or think when asked to join in some good work, " If only I had more time or more money, I would take it up." It is good for us, therefore, to be reminded that neither leisure nor wealth are necessary to those whose hearts are fixed upon the earnest desire to leave this world a little better and a little happier than they found it. This lesson was wonderfully taught by Sarah Martin, a poor dressmaker, who was born at Caister, near Great Yarmouth, in 1791. In her own locality she did as great a work in solving the problems of prison discipline, and 30 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES iv how to improve the moral condition of prisoners, as Mrs. Fry was doing about the same time upon a larger scale in London. It is very extraordinary that this poor woman, who was almost entirely self-educated, and who was dependent on daily toil for daily bread, should have been able, through her own mother-wit and native goodness of heart, to see the evil and provide the same remedies for it as were in course of time provided throughout the land, as the result of study given to the subject, by statesmen, philosophers, and philanthropists. When Sarah Martin first began to visit the prison at Great Yarmouth, there was no sort of provision for the moral or educational improvement of the prisoners. There was no chaplain, there were no religious services, there was no school, and there was no employment of any kind, except what Satan finds for idle hands to do. The quiet, little, gentle- voiced dressmaker changed all this. She was first led to visit the prison in 1819, through the compassionate horror which filled her when she heard of the committal to prison of a woman for brutally ill- treating her child. Without any introduction or recom- mendation from influential persons, she knocked timidly at the gate of the prison, and asked leave to see this woman. She had not told a single human creature of her intention, not even her grandmother, with whom she lived. She was fearful lest she should be overcome by the counsels of worldly wisdom that she had better mind her own business, that the woman's wickedness was no concern of hers, and so forth. Her first application at the gaol was unsuccessful ; but she tried again, and the second time she was admitted without any question whatever. Once in the presence of the prisoner, the first inquiry by which she was met was a somewhat rough one as to the object of her visit. When the poor creature heard and felt all the deep compassion which had moved Sarah Martin to her side, she burst into tears, and with many expressions of contrition and gratitude besought her visitor to help her to be a better woman. iv SAKAII MARTIN 31 the ooks and diaries are lillrd with items of her own personal expenditure in setting up her poor clients with the small stock-in-trade or the tools necessary to start some simple business on their own account. After many years of patient and devoted work she was well known throughout the whole town and neigh- bourhood, and was no longer entirely dependent on her own slender earnings. Her grandmother died in 1826, and she then inherited a small income of about 12 a year. She removed into Yarmouth, and hired two rooms in a poor part of the town. Shortly after this she entirely gave up working as a dressmaker. She could not, of course, live on the little annuity she inherited from her grandmother; this was not much more than enough to pay for her rooms. But she did not fear for herself. Her personal wants were of the simplest description, and she said herself that she had no care : " God, who had called me into the vineyard, had said, 'Whatsoever is right, I will give you.' " It would, indeed, have been to the discredit of Yarmouth if such a woman had been suffered to be in want. Many gifts were sent to her, but she scrupulously devoted everything that reached her to the prisoners, unless the donor expressly stated that it was not for her charities but for herself. About 1840, after twenty-one years' work in the prison and workhouse of the town, the Corporation of Yarmouth urged her to accept a small salary from the borough funds. She at first refused, because it was painful to her that the prisoners should ever regard her in any other light than as their disinterested friend ; she feared that if she accepted the money of the Corporation she would be looked upon as merely one of the gaol functionaries, and that they would "rank her with the turnkeys and others who got their living by the duties which they discharged." It was urged upon her that this view was a mistaken one, and she was advised at least to accept a small salary as an experiment. She replied, " To try the experiment, which might injure the thing I live and breathe for, seems like D 34 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES iv applying a knife to your child's throat to know if it will cut. As for my circumstances, I have not a wish un- gratified, and am more than content." The following year, however, it was evident that her health was giving way, and another attempt was made, which ended in the Corporation voting her the small sum of 12 a year, not as a salary, but as a voluntary gift to one who had been of such inestimable service to the town. She did not live long after this. Her health gradually became feebler, but she continued her daily work at the gaol till 17th April 1843. After that date she never again left her rooms, and after a few months of intense suffering, she died on the 15th October. When the nurse who was with her told her the end was near, she clasped her hands together and exclaimed, " Thank God, thank God." They were her last words. She was buried at Caister; the tombstone which marks her grave bears an inscription dictated by herself, giving simply her name and the dates of her birth and death, with a reference to the chapter of Corinthians which forms part of the Church of England Service for the Burial of the Dead. Well, indeed, is it near that grave, and full of the thoughts inspired by that life, for us to feel that "Death is swallowed up in victory." The citizens of Yarmouth marked their gratitude and veneration for her by putting a stained-glass window to her memory in St. Nicholas's Church. Her name is reverently cherished in her native town. Dr. Stanley, who was Bishop of Norwich at the time of her death, gave expression to the general feeling when he said, " I would canonise Sarah Martin if I could 1 " MARY SOMERVILLE MARY SOMEUVILLE, the most remarkable scientific woman our country has produced, was born at Jedburgh in 1780. Her father was a naval officer, and in December 1 780 had just parted from his wife to go on foreign service for some years. She had accompanied her husband to London, and on returning home to Scotland was obliged to stay at the Manse of Jedburgh, the home of her brother-in-law and sister, Dr. and Mrs. Somerville. Here little Mary was born, in the house of her uncle and aunt, who afterwards became her father and mother-in-law, for her second husband was their son. In the interesting reminiscences she has left of her life, she records the curious fact that she was born in the home of her future husband, and was nursed by his mother. Mary was of good birth on both sides. Her father was Admiral Sir William Fairfax, of the well-known Yorkshire family of that name, which had furnished a General to the Parliamentary army in the civil wars of the reign of Charles I. This family was connected with that of the famous American patriot, George Washington. During the American War of Independence, Mary Somerville's father, then Lieutenant Fairfax, was on board his ship on an American station, when he received a letter from General Washington, claiming cousinship with him, and 36 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES v inviting the young man to pay him a visit. The invitation was not accepted, but Lieutenant Fairfax's daughter lived to regret that the letter which conveyed it had not been preserved. Admiral Fairfax was concerned with Admiral Duncan in the famous victory of Camperdown, and gave many proofs that he was in every way a gallant sailor and a brave man. Mary Somerville's mother was of an ancient Scottish family named Charters. The pride of descent was very strongly marked among her Scotch relatives. Lady Fairfax does not seem much to have sympathised with her remarkable child. Mary, however, inherited some excellent qualities from both parents. Lady Fairfax was, in some ways, as courageous as her husband ; notwithstand- ing a full allowance of Scotch superstitions and a special terror of storms and darkness, she had what her daughter called "presence of mind and the courage of necessity." On one occasion the house she was living in was in the greatest danger of being burned down. The flames of a neighbouring fire had spread till they reached the next house but one to that which she occupied. Casks of turpentine and oil in a neighbouring carriage manufactory were exploding with the heat. Lady Fairfax made all the needful preparations for saving her furniture, and had her family plate and papers securely packed. She assembled in the house a sufficient number of men to move the furniture out, if needs were. Then she quietly remarked, " Now let us breakfast ; it is time enough for us to move our things when the next house takes fire." The next house, after all, did not take fire, and, while her neighbours lost half their property by throwing it recklessly into the street, before the actual necessity for doing so had arisen, Lady Fairfax suffered no loss at all. The same kind of cool courage was often exhibited by Mary Somerville in later life. On one occasion she stayed with her family at Florence dur- ing a severe outbreak of cholera there, when almost every one who could do so had fled panic-stricken from the city. During the long absences of Sir William Fairfax on foreign service, Lady Fairfax and her children led a very MARY SOMERVILLE 87 life at the little seaside village of Burntisland, just opposite to Edinburgh, on the Firth of Forth. As a young child, Mary led a wild, outdoor life, with hardly any education, in the ordinary sense of the word, though there is no doubt that in collecting shells, fossils, and seaweeds, in watching and studying the habits and appearance of wild birds, and in gazing at the stars through her little bedroom window, the whole life of this wonderful child was really an education of the great powers of her mind. However, when her father returned from sea about 1789 he was shocked to find Mary "such a little savage"; and it was resolved that she must be sent to a boarding school. She remained there a year and learned nothing at all. Her lithesome, active, well-formed body was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk in front ; a metal rod, with a semicircle which went under the chin, was clasped to this busk, and in this instrument of torture she was set to learn columns of Johnson's dictionary by heart. This was the process which at that time went by the name of education in girls' schools. Fortunately she was not kept long at school. Mary had learned nothing, and her mother was angry that she had spent so much money in vain. She would have been content, she said, if Mary had only learnt to write well and keep accounts, which was all that a woman was expected to know. After this Mary soon commenced the process of self-education which only ended with her long life of ninety-two years. She not only learnt all she could about birds, beasts, fishes, plants, eggs and seaweeds, but she also found a Shakespeare which she read at every moment when she could do so undisturbed. A little later her mother moved into Edinburgh for the winter, and Mary had music lessons, and by degrees taught herself Latin. The studious bent of her mind had now thoroughly declared itself ; but till she was about fourteen she had never re- ceived a word of encouragement about her studiea At that age she had the good fortune to pay a visit to her uncle and aunt at Jedburgh, in whose house she had been born. Her uncle, Dr. Somerville, was the first person who 38 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES v ever encouraged and helped her in her studies. She ven- tured to confide in him that she had been trying to learn Latin by herself, but feared it was no use. He reassured her by telling her of the women in ancient times who had been classical scholars. He moreover read Virgil with her for two hours every morning in his study. A few years later than this she taught herself Greek enough to read Xenophon and Herodotus, and in time she became suffi- ciently proficient in the language to thoroughly appreciate its greatest literature. One of the most striking things about her was the many- sided character of her mind. Some people men as well as women who are scientific or mathematical seem to care for nothing but science or mathematics; but it may be truly said of her that " Everything was grist that came to her mill." There was hardly any branch of art or knowledge which she did not delight in. She studied painting under Mr. Nasmyth in Edinburgh, and he declared her to be the best pupil he had ever had. Almost to the day of her death she delighted in painting and drawing. She was also an excellent musician and botanist. The special study with which her name will always be associated was mathematics as applied to the study of the heavens, but she also wrote on physical geography and on microscopic science. It is sometimes thought that if women are learned they are nearly sure to neglect their domestic duties, or that, in the witty words of Sydney Smith, "if women are permitted to eat of the tree of knowledge, the rest of the family will soon be reduced to the same aerial and unsatis- factory diet." Mrs. Somerville was a living proof of the folly of this opinion. She was an excellent housewife and a particularly skilful needlewoman. She astonished those who thought a scientific woman could not understand any- thing of cookery, by her notable preparation of black currant jelly for her husband's throat on their wedding journey. On one occasion she supplied with marmalade, made by her own hands, one of the ships that were being fitted out for a Polar expedition. She was a most loving wife and tender v MARY SOMERVILLE 39 mother as well as a devoted and faithful friend. She gave up far more time than moat mothers do to the education of her children. Her love of animals, especially of birds, was very strongly developed. With all her devotion to science she was horrified at the barbarities of vivisection, and cordially supported those who have successfully exerted themselves to prevent it from spreading in England to the same hideous proportions which it has reached on the con- tinent of Europe. Many pages of one of her learned works were written with a little tame mountain sparrow sitting on her shoulder. On one occasion, having been introduced to the Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, she says he quite won her heart by exclaiming, in reference to the number of little birds that were eaten in Italy, " What ! robins ! Eat a robin ! I would as soon eat a child." Her first husband, Mr. Samuel Greig, only lived three years after their marriage in 1804. He appears to have been one of those men of inferior capacity, who dislike and dread intellectual power in women. He 'had a very low opinion of the intelligence of women, and had himself no interest in, nor knowledge of, any kind of science. When his wife was left a widow with two sons at the early age of twenty-seven, she returned to her father's house in Scotland, and worked steadily at mathematics. She pro- fited by the instructions of Professor Wallace, of the University of Edinburgh, and gained a silver medal from one of the mathematical societies of that day. Nearly all the members of her family were still loud in their con- demnation of what they chose to regard as her eccentric and foolish behaviour in devoting herself to science instead of society. There were, however, exceptions. Her Uncle and Aunt Somerville and their son William did not join in the chorus of disapprobation which her studies provoked. With them she found a real home of loving sympathy and encouragement. In 1812 she and her cousin William were married. His delight and pride in her during their long married life of nearly fifty years were unbounded. For the first time in her life she now had the daily 40 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES v companion ship of a thoroughly sympathetic spirit Much of what the world owes to her it owes indirectly to him, because he stimulated her powers, and delighted in anything that brought them out. He was in the medical department of the army, and scientific pursuits were thoroughly con- genial to him. He had a fine and well cultivated mind which he delighted in using to further his wife's pursuits. He searched libraries for the books she required, " copying and recopying her manuscripts to save her time." In the words of one of their daughters, " No trouble seemed too great which he bestowed upon her; it was a labour of love." When Mrs. Somerville became famous through her scientific writings, the other members of her family, who had formerly ridiculed and blamed her, became loud in her praise. She knew how to value such commendation in comparison with that which she had constantly received from her husband. She wrote about this, " The warmth with which my husband entered into my success deeply affected me ; for not one in ten thousand would have rejoiced at it as he did ; but he was of a generous nature, far above jealousy, and he continued through life to take the kindest interest in all I did." Mrs. Somerville's first work, The Mechanism of the Heavens, would probably never have been written but at the instance of Lord Brougham, whose efforts were warmly supported by those of Mr. Somerville. In March 1827 Lord Brougham, on behalf of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, wrote a letter begging Mrs. Somerville to write an account of Newton's Principia and of La Place's Mdcanique Celeste. In reference to the latter book he wrote, " In England there are now not twenty people who know this great work, except by name, and not a hundred who know it even by name. My firm belief is that Mrs. Somerville could add two cyphers to each of these figures." Mrs. Somerville was overwhelmed with astonishment at this request. She was most modest and diffident of her own powers, and honestly believed that her self-acquired knowledge was so greatly inferior to that of the men who had been educated at the universities, that v MARY SOMERVILLE 41 it would be the height of presumption for her to attempt to write on the subject. The persuasions of Lord Brougham and of her husband at last prevailed so far that she promised to make the attempt ; on the express condition, however, that her manuscript should be put into the fire unless it fulfilled the expectations of those who urged its production. "Thus suddenly," she writes, "the whole character and course of my future life was changed." One is tempted to believe that this first plunge into authorship was, to some extent, stimulated by a loss of nearly all their fortune which had a short time before befallen Mr. and Mrs. Somerville. Before authorship has become a habit, the whip of poverty is often needed to rouse a student to the exertion and labour it requires. The impediments to authorship in Mrs. Somerville's case were more than usually formidable. In the memoirs she has left of this part of her life, she speaks of the difficulty which she ex- perienced as the mother of a family and the head of a household in keeping any time free for ' her work. It was only after she had attended to social and family duties that she had time for writing, and even then she was subjected to many interruptions. The Somervilles were then living at Chelsea, and she felt at that distance from town, it would be ungracious to decline to receive those who had come out to call upon her. But she groans at the remembrance of the annoyance she sometimes felt when she was engaged in solving a difficult problem, by the entry of a well-meaning friend, who would calmly announce, " I have come to spend an hour or two with you." Her work, to which she gave the name of The Mechanism of the Heavens, progressed, however, in spite of interruptions, to such good purpose that in less than a year it was complete, and it immediately placed its author in the first rank among the scientific thinkers and writers of the day. She was elected an honorary member of the Astronomical Society, at the same time with Caroline Herschel, and honours and rewards of all kinds flowed in upon her. Her bust, by Chantrey, was placed in the great hall of the Royal 42 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES v Society, and she was elected an honorary member of the Eoyal Academy of Dublin, and of many other scientific societies. It was a little later than this, in 1835, that Sir Robert Peel, on behalf of the Government, conferred a civil list pension of 200 a year upon Mrs. Somerville ; the announcement of this came almost simultaneously with the news of the loss of the remainder of her own and her husband's private fortune, through the treachery of those who had been entrusted with it. The public recognition of her services to science came therefore at a very appro- priate time ; the pension was a few years later increased to 300 a year -by Lord John Russell. Throughout her life Mrs. Somerville was a staunch ad- vocate of all that tended to raise up and improve the lot of women. When quite a young girl she was stimulated to work hard by the feeling that it was in her power thus to serve the cause of her fellow-women. Writing of the period when she was only sixteen years old, she says : " I must say the idea of making money had never entered my head in any of my pursuits, but I was intensely ambitious to excel in something, for I felt in my own breast that women were capable of taking a higher place in creation than that assigned to them in my early days, which was very low." It is interesting to observe that her enthusiasm for what are sometimes called "women's rights" was as warm at the end of her life as it had been at its dawn. When she was eighty-nine, she was as keen as she had been at sixteen for all that lifts up the lot of women. She was a firm supporter of Mr. John Stuart Mill in the effort he made to extend to women the benefit and protection of Parliamentary representation. She recognised that many of the English laws are unjust to women, and clearly saw that there can be no security for their being made just and equal until the law-makers are chosen partly by women and partly by men. The first name to the petition in favour of women's suffrage which was presented to Parliament by Mr. J. S. Mill in 1868 was that of Mary Somerville. She also joined in the first petition to the v MARY SOMERVILI.K 48 Senate of the London University, praying that degrees might bo granted to women. At the time this petition was unsuccessful, but its prayer was granted within a very few years. One cannot but regret that Mrs. Somerville did not live to see this fulfilment of her wishes. She showed her sympathy with the movement for the higher education of women, by bequeathing her mathematical and scientific library to Girton College. It is one of the possessions of which the College is most justly proud. The books are enclosed in a very beautifully designed case, which also forms a sort of framework for a cast of Chantrey's bust of Mrs. Somerville. The fine and delicate lines of her beautiful face offer to the students of the College a worthy ideal of completely developed womanhood, in which intellect and emotion balance one another and make a perfect whole. Mrs. Somerville's other works, written after The Mechanism of the Heavens, were The Connection of the Physical Sciences, Physical Geography, and ' Molecular and Microscopic Science. The last book was commenced after she had completed her eightieth year. Her mental powers remained unimpaired to a remarkably late period, and she also had extraordinary physical vigour to the end of her life. She affords a striking instance of the fallacy of supposing that intellectual labour undermines the physical strength of women. Her last occupations, continued till the actual day of her death, were the revision and com- pletion of a treatise on The Theory of Differences, and the study of a book on Quaternions. Her only physical infirmity in extreme old age was deafness. She was able to go out and enjoy life up to the time of her death, which took place in 1872, at the great age of ninety-two years. She was a woman of deep and strong religious feeling. Her beautiful character shines through every word and action of her life. Her deep humility was very striking, as was also her tenderness for, and her sympathy with, the sufferings of all who were wretched and oppressed. One 44 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES v of the last entries in her journal refers again to her love of animals, and she says, "Among the numerous plans for the education of the young, let us hope that mercy may be taught as a part of religion." The reflections in these last pages of her diary give such a lovely picture of serene, noble, and dignified old age that they may well be quoted here. They show the warm heart of the generous woman, as well as the trained intellect of a reverent student of the laws of nature. "Though far advanced in years, I take as lively an interest as ever in passing events. I regret that I shall not live to know the result of the expedition to de- termine the currents of the ocean, the distance of the earth from the sun determined by the transits of Venus, and the source of the most renowned of rivers, the discovery of which will immortalise the name of Dr. Livingstone. But I regret most of all that I shall not see the suppression of the most atrocious system of slavery that ever disgraced humanity that made known to the world by Dr. Livingstone and by Mr. Stanley, and which Sir Bartle Frere has gone to suppress, by order of the British Govern- ment." A later entry still, and the last, gives another view of her happy, faithful spirit. The Admiral's daughter speaks in it : " The Blue Peter has been long flying at my foremast, and now that I am in my ninety-second year I must soon expect the signal for sailing. It is a solemn voyage, but it does not disturb my tranquillity. Deeply sensible of my utter unworthiness, and profoundly grateful for the innumerable blessings I have received, I trust in the infinite mercy of my Almighty Creator." She then expresses her gratitude for the loving care of her daughters, and her journal concludes with the words, " I am perfectly happy." She died and was buried at Naples. Her death took place in her sleep, on 29th November 1872. Her daughter writes, " Her pure spirit passed away so gently that those around her scarcely perceived when she left them. It was the beautiful and painless close of a noble and happy life." Wordsworth's words about old age were fully realised in her case MARY SOMKKV1LLE 45 Tliy thoughts and feelings shall not die, Nor leave thee when gray hairs are nigh, A melancholy slave ; Hut an old age, serene and bright, And lovely as a Lapland night, Shall lead thec to thy grave. VI QUEEN VICTORIA 1 A JUBILEE, or a fiftieth anniversary of the reign of a king or queen, is a very rare event in our history. Rather more than a thousand years have rolled away since the time when Egbert was the first king of all England. And in all these thousand years there have only been three jubilees before that now being celebrated, and these three have each been clouded by some national or personal mis- fortune casting a gloom over the rejoicings which would naturally have taken place on such an occasion. It is rather curious that each of the three kings of England who has reached a fiftieth year of sovereignty has been the third of his name to occupy the throne. Henry III., Edward III., and George III. are the only English sovereigns, before Victoria, who have reigned for as long as fifty years. In the case of Henry the Third, the fifty years of his reign are a record of bad government, rebellion, and civil war. Edward the Third's reign, which began so triumphantly, ended in disaster ; the king had fallen into a kind of dotage ; Edward the Black Prince had died before his father, and the kingdom was ruled by the incompetent and unscrupulous John of Gaunt ; the last years of this reign were characterised by military disasters, by harsh and unjust methods of taxation, and by subservience to the 1 Written for the Jubilee, June 1887. vi QUEKN VICTORIA 47 l>;i|acy. Those who thus sowed tin; wind were not long in reaping tlic whirlwind ; for these misfortunes were followed by the one hundred years' war with France, by the peasants' war under Wat Tyler, and by the persecution of heretics in England, when for the first time in our history a statute was passed forfeiting the lives of men and woim-n for their religious opinions. Passing on to the reign of George III., the jubilee of 1810 must have been a sad one, for the poor king had twice had attacks of madness, and one of exceptional severity began in the very year of the jubilee. Happily, on the present occasion the spell is broken. The Queen is not the third, but the first of her name, and although there are no doubt many causes for anxiety as regards the outlook in our political and social history, yet there are still greater causes for hopefulness and for confi- dence that the marvellous improvement in the social, moral, and material condition of the people which has marked the reign in the past will be continued in the future. It is not very easy at this distance of time to picture to one's self the passion of loyalty and devotion inspired by the young girl who became Queen of England in 1837. To realise what was felt for her, one must look at the character of the monarchs who had immediately preceded her. The immorality and faithlessness of George IV. are too well known to need emphasis. He was probably one of the most contemptible human beings who ever occupied a throne ; he was eaten up by vanity, self-indulgence, and grossness. With no pretence to conjugal fidelity himself, he attempted to visit with the severest punishment the supposed infidelity of the unhappy woman who had been condemned to be his wife. Kecklessly extravagant where his own glorification or pleasure was concerned, he could be penurious enough to a former boon companion who had fallen into want. There is hardly a feature in his character, either as a man or a sovereign, that could win genuine esteem or love. Mrs. Somerville was present at the gorgeous scene of his coronation, when something more 48 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vr than a quarter of a million of money was spent in decora- tions and ceremonial. She describes the tremendous effect produced upon every one by the knocking at the door which announced that Queen Caroline was claiming admittance. She says every heart stood still ; it was like the handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar's feast. Only by contrast with such a man as George IV. could William IV. be regarded with favour. Several prominent offices about the Court were occupied by the Fitz Clarences, his illegitimate children. His manners were described as " bluff " by those who wished to make the best of them ; " brutal " would have been a more accurate word. On one occasion a guest at one of his dinner parties asked for water, and the king, with an oath, exclaimed that no water should be drunk at his table. On another occasion, on his birthday, he took the opportunity, in the presence of the young Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, to make the most unmanly and ungenerous attack upon the latter, who was sitting by his side. Greville speaks of this outburst as an extraordinary and outrageous speech. The Princess burst into tears, and her mother rose and ordered her carriage for her immediate departure. It is no wonder that the Duchess of Kent was anxious, as far as possible, to keep her daughter from the influence of such a Court as this. Much of the Queen's conscientious- ness and punctual discharge of the political duties of her station may be attributed to her careful education by her mother and her uncle Leopold, the widower of Princess Charlotte, and afterwards King of the Belgians. It is not possible to tell from the published memorials what clouds overshadowed the Princess Victoria's childhood. She seems to have had a most loving mother, excellent health and abilities, and a judicious training in every way ; yet she says herself, in reference to the choice of the name of Leopold for her youngest son, " It is a name which is the dearest to me after Albert, one which recalls the almost only happy days of my sad childhood." It is evident, therefore, that her young life was not so vi QUEEN VICTORIA 49 happy and tranquil as it appeared to bo to outsiders. Per- haps her extreme and almost abnormal sense of responsibility was hardly compatible with the joyousness of childhood. There is a story that it was not till the Princess was eleven years old that her future destiny was revealed to her. Her governess then purposely put a genealogical table of the royal family into her history book. The child gazed earnestly at it, and by degrees she comprehended what it meant, namely, that she herself was next in succession to the ancient crown of England ; she put her hand into her governess's and said, " I will be good. I understand now why you wanted me to learn so much, even Latin. ... I understand all better now." And she repeated more than once, " I will be good." The anecdote shows an unusually keen sense of duty and of conscientiousness in so young a child, and there are other anecdotes which show the same characteristic. Who, therefore, can wonder at the un- bounded joy which filled all hearts in England when this young girl, pure, sweet, innocent, conscientious, and un- selfish, ascended the throne of George IV. and William IV. ? Her manners were frank, natural, simple, and dignified. The bright young presence of the girl Queen filled every one, high and low, throughout the nation with enthusiasm. The American author, Mr. N. P. Willis, republican as he was, spoke of her in one of his letters as "quite un- necessarily pretty and interesting for the heir of such a crown as that of England." Daniel O'Connell, then the leader of the movement for the repeal of the union between England and Ireland, was as great an enthusiast for her as any one in the three kingdoms. His stentorian voice led the cheering of the crowd outside of St. James's Palace who welcomed her at the ceremony of proclamation. He said, when some of the gossips of the day chattered of a scheme to depose " the all but infant Queen " in favour of the hated Duke of Cumberland, " If necessary I can get 500,000 brave Irishmen to defend the life, the honour, and the person of the beloved young lady by whom England's throne is now filled." 50 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vi The picture of the Queen's first council by Wilkie was shown in 1887 in the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy. It helps one very much to understand the sort of enthusiasm which she created. The sweet, girlish dignity and quiet simplicity with which she performed all the duties of her station filled every one with admiration. Surrounded by aged politicians, statesmen, and soldiers, she presides over them all with the grace and dignity associated with a complete absence of affectation and self -consciousness. Greville, the Clerk of the Council then, and for many years before and after, writes of this occasion : " Never was anything like the impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and admiration which is raised about her manner and behaviour, and certainly not without justice. It was something very extraordinary and far beyond what was looked for." Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, loved her as a daughter ; the Duke of Wellington had a similar feeling for her, which she returned with unstinted confidence and reliance. The first request made by the girl Queen to her mother, immediately after the proclamation, was that she might be left for two hours quite alone to think over her position and strengthen the resolutions that were to guide her future life. The childish words, " I will be good," probably gave the forecast of the tone of the young Queen's reflections. She must have felt the difficulties and peculiar temptations of her position very keenly, for when she was awakened from her sleep on the night of the 20th June 1837, to be told of William the Fourth's death, and that she was Queen of England, her first words to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who made the announcement, were, " I beg your Grace to pray for me." The Queen was very careful from the beginning of her reign thoroughly to understand all the business of the State, and never to put her signature to any document till she had mastered its contents. Lord Melbourne was heard to declare that this sort of thing was quite new in his ex- perience as Prime Minister, and he said jokingly that he would rather manage ten kings than one Queen. On one vi QUEEN VICTORIA 61 occasion he brought a document to her, and urged its importance on the ground of expediency. She looked up quietly, and said, " I have been taught to judge between what is right and what is wrong; but 'expediency' is a word I neither wish to hear nor to understand." Thirty years later one of the best men who ever sat in the House of Commons, John Stuart Mill, said, " There is an import- ant branch of expediency called justice." But this was probably not the kind of expediency that Lord Melbourne recommended, and the Queen condemned. In the Memoirs of Mrs. Jameson, by Mrs. Macpherson, there is a letter, dated December 1838, containing the following illustration of the way in which the Queen regarded the duties of her position. " Spring Rice told a friend of mine that he once carried her (the Queen) some papers to sign, and said something about managing so as to give Her Majesty less trouble. She looked up from her paper and said quietly, ' Pray never let me hear those words again ; never mention the word " trouble." Only tell me how the thing is to be done, to be done rightly, and I will do it if I can.'" Everything that is known of the Queen at that time shows a similar high conception of duty and right. She was resolved to be no mere pleasure- seeking, self-indulgent monarch, but one who strove earnestly to understand her duties, and was determined to throw her best strength into their fulfilment. It is this conscientious fulfilment of her political duties which gives the Queen such a very strong claim upon the gratitude of all her subjects. People do not always understand how hard and constant her work is, nor how deeply she feels her responsibilities. She is sometimes blamed for not leading society as she did in the earlier years of her reign, and it is no doubt true that her good influence in this way is much missed. Mrs. Oliphant has spoken of the way in which in those early years of her married life she was " in the foreground of the national life, affecting it always for good, and setting an example of purity and virtue. The theatres to which she went, 52 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vi and which both she and her husband enjoyed, were puri- fied by her presence ; evils which had been the growth of years disappearing before the face of the young Queen." That good influence at the head of society has been withdrawn by the Queen's withdrawal from fashionable life ; and there is another disadvantage arising from her seclusion, in the degree to which it prevents her from feeling the force and value of many of the most important social movements of our time. Except in opening Holloway College, and in the impetus which she has given to providing medical women for the women of India, she has never, for instance, shown any special sympathy with any of the various branches of the movement for improv- ing and lifting up the lives of women. Still, fully allow- ing all this, it is beyond doubt that her subjects, and especially her women subjects, have deep cause for grati- tude and affection to the Queen. She has set a high example of duty and faithfulness to the whole nation. The childish resolve, " I will be good," has never been lost sight of. With almost boundless opportunities for self- indulgence, and living in an atmosphere where she is necessarily almost entirely removed from the wholesome criticism of equals and friends, she has clung tenaciously to the ideal with which she started on her more than fifty years of sovereignty. Simplicity of daily life and daily hard work are the antidotes which she has constantly applied to counteract the unwholesome influences associated with royalty. Women have special cause for gratitude to her, because she has shown, as no other woman could, how ab- surd is the statement that political duties unsex a woman, and make her lose womanly tenderness and sympathy. The passionate worship which she bestowed upon her hus- band, the deep love she constantly shows for her children and grandchildren, and the eager sympathy which she ex- tends to every creature on whom the load of suffering or sorrow has fallen, prove that being the first political officer of the greatest empire in the world cannot harden her heart or dull her sympathy. A woman's , woman " for a' that." vi QUEEN VICTORIA 63 So much has lately been written about the supremo happiness of the Queen's married life, and so much has In 'en revealed of her inner family circle, that no more is 11 lrkiil how she looked. "Ten years younger than she did a fortnight ago," was the reply. The severity of the crisis was for the time averted, and the relief of mind it brought to the Queen could be plainly read in the change in her aspect. A wise and good clergyman, who was also a witty and powerful writer, the Rev. Sydney Smith, preached a sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral on the Queen's accession, in which he gave utterance to the hope that she would promote the spread of national education, and would " worship God by loving peace." " The young Queen," he said, " at that period of life which is commonly given up to frivolous amusement, sees at once the great principles by which she should be guided, and steps at once into the great duties of her station." He then spoke again of peace and of education as the two objects towards which a patriot Queen ought most earnestly to strive, and con- cluded : " And then this youthful monarch, profoundly but wisely religious, disdaining hypocrisy, and far above the childish follies of false piety, casts herself upon God, and seeks from the Gospel of His blessed Son a path for her steps and a comfort for her soul. Here is a picture which warms every English heart and could bring all this congregation upon their bended knees before Almighty God to pray it may be realised. What limits to the glory and happiness of our native land, if the Creator should in His mercy have placed in the heart of this Royal Woman the rudiments of wisdom and mercy ; and if giving them time to expand, and to bless our children's children with her goodness, He should grant to her a long sojourning on earth, and leave her to reign over us till she is well stricken in years ! What glory ! what happiness ! what joy ! what bounty of God ! " The preacher's anticipations of a long reign have been fulfilled, and the bright hopes of that seedtime of promise and resolution can now be compared with the harvest of achievement and fulfilment. There is always a great gap 56 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vi between such anticipations and the accomplished fact ; but it will be well for us all, high or low, if we are able, when we stand near the end of life and review the past, to feel that we have been equally steadfast to the high resolves of our youth, as the Queen has been to the words, " I will be good," which she uttered sixty years ago. VII HARRIET MARTINEAU HARRIET MARTINEAU is one of the most distinguished literary women this century has produced. She is among the few women who have succeeded in the craft of jour- nalism, and one of the still smaller number* who succeeded for a time in moulding and shaping the current Clitics of her day. There are many tlu'ngs in her career which make it a particularly instructive one. Her vivid remembrance of her own childhood gave her a very strong sympathy with the feelings and sufferings of children ; all mothers, especially the mothers of uncommonly intellectual children, ought to read, in the early part of Harriet Martineau's auto- biography, her record of her own childhood, and its peculiar sufferings. The Martineaus were descended from a French Huguenot surgeon, who left his native country in 1688, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes. He settled at Norwich, and became the progenitor of a long line of distinguished surgeons in that city. Harriet's father was a manufacturer; she was born on the 12th June 1802, the sixth of eight children. There is nothing in the outward circumstances of her youth to distinguish it from that of the substantial but simple comfort of any middle class family of that period, save that her education was above the average. The independence of judgment in religious matters that 58 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vn had made their ancestor a Huguenot, made the latter Marti- neaus Unitarians ; and it was to this fact that the excel- lence of the education of the family was in part due. For the Rev. Isaac Perry, the head of a large and flourishing boys' school in Norwich, became converted to the principles of Unitarianism, with the consequence of losing nearly all his pupils. The Unitarian community felt it their duty to rally round him, and support him to the utmost of their power. Hence those who, like the Martineaus, had children to educate sent them, girls as well as boys, to him. Harriet therefore had the inestimable advantage of beginning her career with a mind well equipped with stores of knowledge that were at that time usually considered quite outside the range of what was necessary for a woman. She speaks of herself as having, especially in her child- hood, " a beggarly nervous system "; and her description of her utterly unreasonable terrors, which she bore in silence, because of the want of insight and sympathy around her, ought to be a lesson to every parent. " Sometimes," she says, "I was panic -struck at the head of the stairs, and was sure I could never get down ; and I could never cross the yard into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind, because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head." " The extremest terror of all," she says, was occasioned by the dull thud of beating feather beds with a stick, a process in which the housewives of Norwich were wont to indulge on the breezy area below the Castle Hill. A magic-lantern, or the prismatic lights cast by glass lustres upon the wall, threw her into the same unaccountable terror-stricken state If she could have been coaxed into speaking of these panics, they might probably have ceased to assail her. But this she never dreamed of doing. There was too little tender- ness in her family life to overcome her natural timidity. Once when her terror at a magic-lantern so far overcame her as to find vent in a shriek of dismay, " a pretty lady, who sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide my vii HARRIET MARTINEAU 59 face in her bosom, ;me found, but by asking her for it. " In a few months, I believe there was hardly a line in Paradise Lost that I could not have instantly turned to. I sent myself to sleep by repeating it, and when my curtains were drawn back in the morning, descriptions of heavenly light rushed into my memory." Her keen appreciation of Milton's great poem was the compensation nature provided for 60 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vn the imaginative terrors which made her childhood such a sad one. Another misfortune was in store for her, which might have embittered the whole of her future existence. When she was about twelve years old it was recognised that her hearing was not good ; by sixteen her deafness had become very noticeable, and excessively painful to herself ; and before she was twenty she had become extremely deaf, so that she could hear little or nothing without the help of a trumpet. Few people can realise how much the loss of this all-important sense must have cost her. At the out- set of life, to be deprived of a faculty on which almost all free and pleasant social intercourse depends must be a bitter trial. One striking characteristic of Harriet Mar- tineau's mind was brought into relief by it. Throughout her life a misfortune never overtook her without calling out the strength necessary to bear it, not only with patience, but with cheerfulness. As soon as it was clear that her deafness was a trial that would last as long as her life, she made a resolution with regard to it. She determined never to inquire what was said, but to trust to her friends to re- peat to her what was important and worth hearing. This she rightly regarded as the only way of preventing her deafness becoming as irksome and trying to her compan- ions as it was to herself. It was not till she was nearly thirty that she began to use a trumpet, and she blamed herself seriously for the delay ; for she felt it to be the duty of the deaf to spare other people as much fatigue as possible, and also to preserve their own natural capacity for sound, and the habit of receiving it, as long as possible. Harriet's first attempt at authorship was undertaken at the age of nineteen ; she was tenderly devoted to her brother James, who was two years her junior. When he left home for college, the brightness of her life departed ; he told her she must not permit herself to be so miserable, and advised her to take refuge, each time he left her, in some new pursuit ; her first new pursuit was writing, and with a beating heart she posted her manuscript to the vii HARRIET MARTINEAU 61 Editor of the Monthly Repository, a Unitarian magazine of that day. She adopted the signature of " V. of Norwich " ; all authors will sympathise with what she felt when her manuscript was accepted, and she saw herself for the first time in print. She had not told any member of her family of her enterprise. Imagine therefore her delight when her eldest brother, whom she regarded with the utmost vener- ation, selected this article by V. of Norwich for special commendation, reading passages from it aloud, and calling upon Harriet to say whether she did not think it first-rate. After a brief attempt to keep her secret, she blurted out, " I never could baffle anybody. The truth is, that paper is mine." The kind brother read on in silence, and as she was going he laid his hand on her shoulder and said gravely (calling her " dear " for the first time), " Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings ; and do you devote yourself to this." " I went home," she adds, " in a sort of dream, so that the squares of the pavement seemed to float before my eyes. That evening made me an authoress." The trials of her life, however, shortly after this time began to thicken round her. Her beloved elder brother, whose advice had so greatly encouraged her, died of con- sumption. Her father's business declined rapidly in pros- perity ; it was a period of great commercial depression, and for a time absolute ruin seemed to stare the family in the face. The cares and the mental strain of this time brought the father to his grave; he died in 1826, when Harriet was twenty-four years of age, leaving his family in comparatively straitened circumstances. Shortly after this Harriet became engaged to be married ; but this, instead of bringing happiness, was a source of special trial ; for shortly after the engagement had been entered into, her lover became suddenly insane, and after months of severe illness, bodily and mental, he died. The next misfortune was the loss, in 1829, by the mother and daughters of the Martineau family, of nearly all they had in the world. The old manufactory, in which their money had been placed, 62 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vn failed. The way in which she treated this event is very characteristic. " I call it," she wrote, " a misfortune, be- cause in common parlance it would be so treated ; but I believe that my mother and all her other daughters would have joined heartily, if asked, in my conviction that it was one of the best things that ever happened to us. ... We never recovered more than the merest pittance. . . . The effect upon me of this new ' calamity,' as people called it, was like that of a blister upon a dull, weary pain or series of pains. / rather enjoyed it, even at the time; for there was scope for action, whereas in the long, dreary series of preceding trials, there was nothing possible but endurance. In a very short time my two sisters at home and I began to feel the blessings of a wholly new freedom. I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way; for we had lost our gentility. Many and many a time have we said that, but for the loss of that money, we might have lived on in the ordinary provincial method of ladies with small means, sewing and economising, and growing narrower every year; whereas by being thrown, while it was yet time, on our own re- sources, we have worked hard and usefully, won friends, reputation, and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad and at home, and, in short, have truly lived instead of vegetated" (Autobiography, pp. 141, 142). For a time, notwithstanding the kind brother's advice to Harriet, to leave sewing to other women and devote herself to literature, pressure was brought upon her to get her living by needlework instead of by her pen. She tried to follow both the advice of her friends and her own in- clinations. By day she pored over fine needlework, by night she studied and wrote till two or three o'clock in the morning. Instead of being crushed by the double strain, her spirit rose victorious over it. " It was truly life I lived during those days," she wrote, " of strong, intellectual, and moral effort." And again: "Yet I was very happy; the deep-felt sense of progress and expansion was delightful ; vii HARRIET MARTINEAU 83 and so was the exertion of all my faculties, and, not least, that of will to overcome any obstructions, and force my way to that power of public speech of which I believed myself more or less worthy." Her first marked literary success was the winning of each of three prizes which had been offered by the Unitarian body for essays presenting the arguments in favour of Unitarianism to the notice of Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans. She took every precaution to prevent the discovery that her three essays were by the same hand ; and great was the sensation caused by the discovery that this was indeed the case. The most important result to herself of this achievement was that it finally silenced those who wished her to believe that she was fit to do nothing more difficult in the world than bead-work and embroidery. It also set her up in funds to the extent of 45, and she immediately began to plan the work which brought her fame a series of tales illustrating the most important doctrines of political economy, such as the effect of machinery on wages, the relation of wages and population, free trade, protective duties, and so on. The difficulties she encountered, before she could induce any publisher to accept her series, were such as would have broken any spirit less heroic and determined than her own. " I knew the work wanted doing," she said, " and that I could do it " ; and this confidence prevented her from losing heart when one rebuff after another fell upon her. Almost every publisher to whom she applied repeated the cry that the public would attend to nothing at that time (1831) but the cholera and the Reform Bill. She says she became as sick of the Reform Bill as poor King William himself. At length, after a most exhausting and, to any one else, heart-breaking succession of disappointments, her series was accepted, but on terms that made her success in finding a publisher very little pleasure to her. The first stipulation was that 500 copies of the work must be subscribed for before publication, and the agreement was to cease if a thousand copies did not sell in the first 64 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vn fortnight. The dismal business of obtaining subscribers to an unknown work by an unknown author nearly broke her down. But in her darkest hour, alone in London, without money or friends, leaning over some dirty palings, really to recover from an attack of giddiness, but pre- tending to look at a cabbage bed, she said to herself, as she stood with closed eyes, " My book will do yet." The day of publication came at last, and Harriet, who had now rejoined her mother in Norwich, eagerly awaited the result. For about ten days she heard nothing, and she began to prepare herself to bear the disappointment of failure. Then at last a letter came, desiring her to make any corrections necessary for a second edition, as the publisher had hardly any copies left. He proposed, he said, to print an additional 2000. A postscript altered the number to 3000, a second postscript suggested 4000, and a third 5000 ! Her first feeling was that all her cares were now over. Whatever she had to say would now command a hearing, and her anxiety in future would be limited to making a good choice what to write about. Her series made a remarkable sensation ; she was over- whelmed with praise from all quarters. Every one who had a hobby wanted her to write a tale to illustrate its importance. Advantageous offers from publishers poured in upon her. Lord Brougham, who was then the leading spirit of the Diffusion of Knowledge Society, declared that the whole Society had been " driven out of the field by a little deaf woman at Norwich." It soon became evident, from the amount of political and literary work which was pressed upon her, that it was necessary for her to live in London. She accordingly took a small house in Fludyer Street, Westminster, in 1832, where she lived for seven years with her mother and aunt. No change could be greater than that from the provincial society in which she had been brought up, to that into which she was now welcomed. The best of London literary and political society was freely offered her. Cabinet ministers consulted her about their measures, and vii IIAKKIKT M \RTINEAU 65 she enjoyed the acquaintance or friendship of all the fore- most men and women of the clay. But her head was not turned, and she was not spoiled. Sydney Smith said he had watched her anxiously for one season, and he then declared her unspoilablo. The well-founded self-confidence that had made her say to herself, when almost any one else would have despaired, " My book will do yet," prevented lirr from being dazzled by flattery and social distinction. She knew perfectly well what she could do and what she could not do. It made her angry to hear herself spoken of as a woman of genius ; and in correcting a series of errors that had been made in an account given of her personal history in Men of the Time, she drily remarks, " Nobody has witnessed ' flashes of wit ' from me. The giving me credit for wit shows that the writer is wholly unacquainted with me." She was a woman of the utmost determination and endurance in carrying out anything she had made up her mind to be right. She once remarked that she had thought the worst that could befall her would bo to die of starvation on a doorstep, and added gleefully, " I think I could bear it." Her courage was put rather unexpectedly to the test in 1835, when she visited the United States. As every one is aware, negro slavery was lawful all over the United States until the civil war of 1862. But every one does not know that the heroic little band of men and women who first protested against the wickedness of slavery in America did so at the peril of their lives. The abolitionists, as they were called, were the objects, even in cities like Boston, usually considered the centres of culture and refinement, of most brutal outrage and cruelty. The abolitionists could not then even hold a meeting but at the peril of their lives. Miss Martineau found herself therefore in a society divided into two hostile factions one rich, strong, and numerous ; the other poor, small, and intensely hated. AY lieu she arrived she was disposed to be rather prejudiced against the abolitionists. She condemned slavery as a matter of course, but she thought those who had under- F 66 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vn taken the battle against it in America had been fanatical, sentimental, and misguided. This disposition of her mind was diligently fostered by the defenders of slavery, who represented the abolitionists to her as bloodthirsty ruffians who were trying to incite the slaves to the murder of their masters. It was not long before her clear intellect discerned the true bearings of the case. She soon acknowledged that, however distasteful to her might be the language used by the abolitionists, they were completely innocent of the charges made against them, and were, in fact, the blameless apostles of a most holy cause. From the time of forming this judgment, her course was clear. She boldly avowed abolitionist principles, and took an early opportunity of attending an anti- slavery meeting at which, in a short speech, she avowed her conviction that slavery was incon- sistent with the law of God, and incompatible with the course of His providence. It is unnecessary at this dis- tance of time to recount in detail the fury with which this declaration was regarded by the bulk of American society, and by almost the whole American press. Insult and contumely now met her at every turn, in quarters where she had before received nothing but adulation and flattery. But she was not of a nature to be induced by threats of personal violence to consent to that which her reason and conscience condemned. She remained then and always an ardent abolitionist, and when the great question of the existence of slavery in the United States was submitted to the arbitrament of war, she was one of the chief among the leaders of political opinion in England who kept our country as a nation free from the guilt and folly of supporting the secession of the Southern States from the American Union. The late Mr. W. E. Forster said at the time that it seemed to him as if Harriet Martineau alone were keeping this country straight in regard to America. After her return from America she resumed for a time her usual life of work and social activity in London. In a few years, however, her health broke down, and she MI 1 1. \KKIET MARTINKAU -.7 removed to Tynemouth, suffering, as was then thought, from an incurable disorder. For five years (1837-42) she lay on her couch a helpless, but by no means an idle, invalid. Some of her best books, including her delightful stories for children, Feats in the Fiord, The Crofton Boys, etc., were written during this period. She was under the care of a medical brother-in-law, who resided at Newcastle, and some of the most leading of London physicians visited her professionally. But her case was considered chronic, and she resigned herself to the belief that her health was gone for ever. After five years some one persuaded her to try the effects of mesmerism, and some members of her family and many of her former friends were very angry with her for getting well through its means. Her remarks on the subject are characteristic. "For my part," she writes, "if any friend of mine had been lying in a suffering and hope- less state for nearly six years, and if she had fancied she might get well by standing on her head instead of her heels, or reciting charms, or bestriding a broomstick, I should have helped her to try ; and thus was I aided by some of my family and by a further sympathy in others, but two or three of them were induced to regard my experiment and recovery as an unpardonable offence, and by them I never was pardoned." After her recovery she plunged again as heartily as ever into the enjoyment of travel and of work, and finally settled in a little home, which she built for herself, in the Lake country at Ambleside. Here she continued her literary activity, writing her History of the Peace, her version of Auguste Comte's philosophy, and at one time contribut- ing as many as six articles a week to the Daily News, But she was not content with merely literary labour; she exerted herself most effectually to set on foot, for the benefit of her poorer neighbours, all kinds of means for improving their social, moral, and intellectual position. She showed them, by example, how a farm of two acres could be made to pay. She started a building society, a mechanics' institute, and evening lectures for the people. She was almost worshipped 68 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vn by her servants and immediate dependents, and was a powerful influence for good on all around her. On all moral questions, and all questions affecting the position of women, she was a tower of strength upon the right side. She heartity sympathised with Mrs. Butler in the work with which her name is identified. " I am told," she said, " that this is discreditable work for women, especially for an old woman. But it has always been esteemed our special function as women to mount guard over society and social life the spring of national existence and to keep them pure ; and who so fit as an old woman 1 " In 1854 it was discovered that she had a heart com- plaint, which might have been fatal at any moment, but her life was prolonged for more than twenty years after this, closing at Ambleside on 27th June 1876. The words of her friend, Florence Nightingale, might have served as her epitaph "She served the Right, that is, God, all her life." VIII FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE AMONG the personal influences that have altered the every- day life of the present century, the future historian will probably allot a prominent place to that of Florence Nightingale. Before she took up the work of her life, the art of sick nursing in England can hardly have been said to exist. Almost every one had a well-founded horror of the hired nurse ; she was often ignorant, cruel, rapacious, and drunken ; and when she was not quite as bad as that, she was prejudiced, superstitious, and impervious to new ideas or knowledge. The worst type of the nurse of the pre-Nightingale era has been portrayed by Dickens in his " Sairey Gamp " with her bottle of gin or rum upon the " chimbley piece," handy for her to put it to her lips when she was "so dispoged." "SaireyGamp" is one of the blessings of the good old days which have now vanished for ever ; with her disappearance has also gradually disappeared the repugnance with which the professional nurse was at one time almost universally regarded ; and there is now hardly any one who has not had cause to bo thankful for the quick, gentle, and skilful assistance of the trained nurse whose existence we owe to the example and precepts of Florence Nightingale. Miss Nightingale has never favoured the curiosity of those who would wish to pry into the details of her private 70 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vm history. She has indeed been so retiring that there is some difficulty in getting accurate information about any- thing concerning her, with the exception of her public work. In a letter she has allowed to be published, she says, " Being naturally a very shy person, most of my life has been distasteful to me." It would be very ungrateful and unbecoming in those who have benefited by her self- forgetful labours to attempt in any way to thwart her desire for privacy as to her personal affairs. The attention of the readers of this sketch will therefore be directed to Miss Nightingale's public work, and what the world, and women in particular, have gained by the noble example she has set of how women's work should be done. From time immemorial it has been universally recognised that the care of the sick is women's work ; but somehow, partly from the low standard of women's education, partly from the false notion that all paid work was in a way degrading to a woman's gentility, it seemed to be imagined that women could do this work of caring for the sick without any special teaching or preparation for it ; and as all paid work was supposed to be unladylike, no woman undertook it unless she was driven to it by the dire stress of poverty, and had therefore neither the time nor means to acquire the training necessary to do it well. The lesson of Florence Nightingale's life is that painstaking study and preparation are just as necessary for women's work a# they are for men's work. No young man attempts responsible work as a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or even a gardener or mechanic, without spending long years in fitting himself for his work; but in old times women seemed to think they could do all their work, in governessing, nursing, or what not, by the light of nature, and without any special teaching and preparation whatever. There is still some temptation on the part of women to fall into this fatal error. A young woman, not long ago, who had studied medicine in India only two years, was placed at the head of a dispensary and hospital for native women. Who would have dreamt of taking a boy, after only two years' vin FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 71 study, for a post of similar responsibility and difficulty ? Of course failure and disappointment resulted, and it will probably be a long time before the native community in that part of India recover their confidence in lady doctors. Miss Nightingale spent nearly ten years in studying nursing before she considered herself qualified to under- take the sanitary direction of even a small hospital. She went from place to place, not confining her studies to her own country. She spent about a year at the hospital and nursing institution at Kaiserswerth on the Ehine in 1849. This had been founded by Pastor Fliedner, and was under the care of a Protestant Sisterhood who had perfected the art of sick nursing to a degree unknown at that time in any other part of Europe. From Kaiserswerth she visited institutions for similar purposes, in other parts of Germany, and in France and Italy. It is obvious she could not have devoted the time and money which all this preparation must have cost if she had not been a member of a wealthy family. The fact that she was so makes her example all the more valuable. She was the daughter and co-heiress of a wealthy country gentleman of Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and Embly Park in Hampshire. As a young girl she had the choice of all that wealth, luxury, and fashion could offer in the way of self-indulgence and ease, and she set them all on one side for the sake of learning how to benefit suffering humanity by making sick nursing an art in England. In the letter already quoted Miss Nightingale gives, in reply to a special appeal, advice to young women about their work : " 1. I would say also to all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify yourselves for it, as a man does for his work. Don't think you can undertake it otherwise. No one should attempt to teach the Greek language until he is master of the language ; and this he can only become by hard study. 2. If you are called to man's work, do not exact a woman's privileges the privilege of inaccuracy, of weakness, ye muddleheads. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by which alone you can make God's business 72 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vin succeed; for He has never said that He will give His success and His blessing to inefficiency, to sketchy and unfinished work" Here, without intending it, Miss Nightingale drew a picture of her own character and methods. Years of hard study prepared her for her work ; no inaccuracy, no weak- ness, no muddleheadedness was to be found in what she undertook ; everything was business-like, orderly, and thorough. Those who knew her in the hospital spoke of her as combining " the voice of velvet and the will of steel." She was not content with having a natural vocation for her work. It is said that when she was a young girl she was accustomed to dress the wounds of those who were hurt in the lead mines and quarries of her Derbyshire home, and that the saying was, " Our good young miss is better than nurse or doctor," If this is accurate, she did not err by burying her talent in the earth, and thinking that because she had a natural gift there was no need to cultivate it. She saw rather that because she had a natural gift it was her duty to increase it and make it of the utmost benefit to mankind. At the end of her ten years' training, she came to the nursing home and hospital for governesses in Harley Street, an excellent institution, which at that time had fallen into some disorder through mismanagement. She stayed here from August 1853 till October 1854, and in those fourteen months placed the domestic, financial, and sanitary affairs of the little hospital on a sound footing. Now, however, the work with which her name will always be associated, and for which she will always be loved and honoured, was about to commence. The Crimean war broke out early in 1854, and within a very few weeks of the commencement of actual fighting, every one at home was horrified and ashamed to hear of the frightful dis- organisation of the supplies, and of the utter breakdown of the commissariat and medical arrangements. The most hopeless hugger-mugger reigned triumphant. The tinned meats sent out from England were little better than poison ; ships arrived with stores of boots which proved all to be vin FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 73 for the left foot. (Muddleheads do not all belong to one sex.) The medical arrangements for the sick and wounded were on a par with the rest. Mr. Justin M'Carthy, in his History of Our Own Times, speaks of the hospitals for the sick and wounded at Scutari as being in an absolutely chaotic condition. "In some instances," he writes, "medical stores were left to decay at Varna, or were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay, which were needed for the wounded at Scutari. The medical officers were able and zealous men ; the stores were provided and paid for so far as our Government was concerned ; but the stores were not brought to the medical men. These had their hands all but idle, their eyes and souls tortured by the sight of sufferings which they were unable to relieve for want of the commonest appliances of the hospital" (vol. ii. p. 316). The result was that the most fright- ful mortality prevailed, not so much from the inevitable risks of battle, but from the insanitary conditions of the camp, the want of proper food, clothing, and fuel, and the wretched -hospital arrangements. Mr. Mackenzie, author of a History of the Nineteenth Century, gives the follow- ing facts and figures with regard to our total losses in the Crimea: "Out of a total loss of 20,656, only 2598 were slain in battle ; 18,058 died in hospital." "Several regiments became literally extinct. One had but seven men left fit for duty ; another had thirty. When the sick were put on board transports, to be conveyed to hospital, the mortality was shocking. In some ships one man in every four died in a voyage of seven days. In some of the hospitals recovery was the rare exception. At one time four-fifths of the poor fellows who underwent amputa- tion died of hospital gangrene. During the first seven months of the siege the men perished by disease at a rate which would have extinguished the entire force in little more than a year and a half" (p. 17f). When these facts became known in England, the mingled grief, shame, and anger of the whole nation were unbounded. It was then that Mr. Sidney Herbert, who was Minister of War, ap- 74 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vm pealed to Miss Nightingale to organise and take out with her a band of trained nurses. It is needless to say that she consented. She was armed with full authority to cut the swathes of red tape that had proved shrouds to so many of our soldiers. On the 21st of October 1854 Miss Nightingale, accompanied by forty-two other ladies, all trained nurses, set sail for the Crimea. They arrived at Constantinople on 4th November, the eve of Inkerman, which was fought on 5th November. Their first work, therefore, was to receive into the wards, which were already filled by 2300 men, the wounded from what proved the severest and fiercest engagement of the cam- paign. Miss Nightingale and her band of nurses proved fully equal to the charge they had undertaken. She, by a combination of inexorable firmness with unvarying gentle- ness, evolved order out of chaos. After her arrival, there were no more complaints of the inefficiency of the hospital arrangements for the army. The extraordinary way in which she spent herself and let herself be spent will never be forgotten. She has been known to stand for twenty hours at a stretch, in order to see the wounded provided with every means of easing their condition. Her attention was directed not only to nursing the sick and wounded, but to removing the causes which had made the camp and the hospitals so deadly to their inmates. The extent of the work of mere nursing may be estimated by the fact that a few months after her arrival ten thousand sick men were under her care, and the rows of beds in one hospital alone, the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, measured two miles and one-third in length, with an average distance between each bed of two feet six inches. Miss Nightingale's per- sonal influence and authority over the men were immensely and deservedly strong. They knew she had left the com- forts and refinements of a wealthy homo to be of service to them. Her slight delicate form, her steady nerve, her kindly conciliating manner, and her absolute self-devotion, awoke a passion of chivalrous feeling on the part of the men she tended. Sometimes a soldier would refuse to vin FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 75 submit to a painful but necessary operation until a few calm sentences of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the man would submit willingly to the ordeal he had to undergo. One soldier said, " Before she came here, there was such cursin' and swearing, and after that it was as holy as a church." Another said to Mr. Sidney Herbert, "She would speak to one and another, and nod and smile to many more ; but she could not do it to all, you know we lay there in hundreds but we could kiss her shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content." This incident, of the wounded soldier turning to kiss her shadow as it passed, has been woven into a beautiful poem by Longfellow. It is called " Santa Filomena." The fact that she had been born in, and had been named after, the city of Florence, may have suggested to the poet to turn her name into the language of the country of her birth. Miss Nightingale suffered from an attack of hospital fever in the spring of 1855, but as soon as possible she returned to her laborious post, and never quitted it till the war was over and the last of our soldiers was on his way home. When she returned to England she received such a welcome as probably has fallen to no other woman ; all distinctions of party and of rank were forgotten in the one wish to do her honour. She was presented by the Queen with a jewel in commemoration of her work in the Crimea, and a national testimonial was set on foot, to which a sum of 50,000 was subscribed. It is unnecessary to say that Miss Nightingale did not accept this testimonial for her own personal benefit. The sum was devoted to the per- manent endowment of schools for the training of nurses in St. Thomas's and King's College Hospitals. Since the Crimea no European war has taken place without calling forth the service of trained bands of skilled nurses. Within ten years of Florence Nightingale's labours in the East, the nations of Europe agreed at the Geneva Convention upon certain rules and regulations, with the object of ameliorating the condition of the sick and wounded 76 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vni ill war. By this convention all ambulances and military hospitals were neutralised, and their inmates and staff were henceforth to be regarded as non-combatants. The dis- tinguishing red cross of the Geneva Convention is now universally recognised as the one civilised element in the savagery of war. During a great part of the years that have passed since Miss Nightingale returned from the Crimea, she has suffered from extremely bad health; but few people, even of the most robust frame, have done better and more invaluable work. She has been the adviser of suc- cessive Governments on the sanitary condition of the army in India ; her experience in the Crimea convinced her that the death-rate in the army, even in time of peace, could be reduced by nearly one-half by proper sanitary arrangements. She contributed valuable state papers on the subject to the Government of the day, and her advice has had important effects, not only on the condition of the army, but also on the sanitary reform of many of the towns of India, and on the extension of irrigation in that country. Besides this department of useful public work, she has written many books on the subjects she has made particularly her own ; among them may be mentioned Notes on Hospitals and Notes on Nursing; the latter in particular is a book which no family ought to be without. It will surprise no one to hear that she is very zealous for all that can lift up and improve the lives of women, and give them a higher conception of their duties and responsibilities. She supports the extension of parlia- mentary representation to women, generally, however, putting in a word in what she writes on the subject, to remind people that representatives will never be better than the people they represent. Therefore the most im- portant thing for men, as well as for women, is to improve the education and morality of the elector, and then Parlia- ment will improve itself. Every honest effort for the good of men or women has her sympathy, and a large number vni FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 77 her generous support. May she long be spared to the country she has served so well, a living example of strength, courage, and self-forgetfulness A noblo typo of good Heroic womanhood. SANTA FILOMENA. HY II. W. LONGFELLOW. WHENE'ER a noble deed is wrought, Whene'er is spoken a noble thought, Our hearts, in glad surprise, To higher levels rise. The tidal wave of deeper souls Into our inmost being rolls, And lifts us unawares Out of all meaner cares. Honour to those whose words or deeds Thus help us in our daily needs, And by their overflow Raise us from what is low. Thus thought I, as by night I read Of the great army of the dead, The trenches cold and damp, The starved and frozen camp. The wounded from the battle plain In dreary hospitals of pain, The cheerless corridors, The cold and stony floors. Lo ! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss 78 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES vin Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls. As if a door in heaven should be Opened, and then closed suddenly, The vision came and went, The light shone and was spent. On England's annals, through the long Hereafter of her speech and song, That light its rays shall cast From portals of the past. A lady with a lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good Heroic womanhood. Nor even shall be wanting here The palm, the lily, and the spear, The symbols that of yore Saint Filomena bore. IX MARY LAMB THE name of Mary Lamb can never be mentioned without recalling that of her brother Charles, and the devoted, self-sacrificing love that existed between the two. It was one of Harriet Martineau's sayings, that of all relations that between brother and sister was apt to be the least satisfactory. There have been some notable examples to the contrary, and perhaps the most notable is that given by Charles and Mary Lamb. When a brother and sister are linked together by an unusually strong bond of affec- tion and admiration, it is generally the sister who, by inclination and natural selection, sacrifices all individual and personal objects for the sake of the brother. For instance, she frequently remains unmarried in order to be able to devote herself to his pursuits and further his interests. There is no more devotedly unselfish love than that of a sister and brother when it is at its best. The love of a wife for a husband, or a parent for a child, has something in it more of the element of self. In both these relationships, the husband and wife and the parent and child are so closely and indissolubly identified with one another that it is comparatively easy to merge the love between them into self-love. But between a brother and sister this is not the case. The bond that unites the two can be set aside by either of them at will. It is 80 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ix partly voluntary in its character, and, as previously remarked, in the give and take of this affection, it is, speaking generally, the brother who takes and the sister who gives. The contrary, however, was the case with Charles and Mary Lamb. Between these two, it was the brother who laid down his life for his sister, sacrificing for her sake, at the outset of his own career, his prospects of love and marriage, the ease and comfort of his life, and his opportunities of devotuig himself exclusively to his darling studies. The story of these two beautiful lives is worth more than even their contributions to English literature, and makes us love Lamb and his sister quite independently of the Essays of Elia, and the Tales from Shakespeare. Mary Lamb was born in 1764, eleven years before her brother Charles. Her childhood, till the birth of this precious brother, seems to have had little brightness in it. There was a tendency to insanity in the Lamb family, and this tendency was probably intensified in Mary's case by the harshness and want of sympathy with Avhich it was then the fashion to treat children. "Polly, what are those poor crazy, moy thered brains of yours thinking, always 1 " was a speech of her grandmother's that made a lasting impression on the sensitive child. The love of her parents, her mother especially, seems to have been centred on her brother John, older than herself by two years. " ' Dear little selfish, craving John,' he was in childhood, and dear big selfish John he remained in manhood" (Mrs. Gilchrist's Life of Mary Lamb, p. 4). The first creature upon whom the wealth of affection in Mary's nature could be freely bestowed was, therefore, the baby brother. She spoke in after years of the curative influence on her mind of the almost maternal affection which she lavished on the boy who was, to a great extent, committed to her care. Henceforward she was no longer lonely, but had gained a companion and object in life. Her education consisted mainly in having been " tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good ix MARY LAMB 81 old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and she browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage." This was the library of Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, to whom her father was clerk. In 1782, when Charles was seven and Mary eighteen, he became a scholar of the Blue Coat School, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Coleridge. The circumstances of the Lambs gradually narrowed. The father was superannuated, and his income was consequently reduced. The elder brother, John, held a good appoint- ment in the South Sea House, but he was much more intent on enjoying himself and surrounding himself with luxuries than upon providing for the wants of his family. For eleven years, from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, Mary supported herself by her needle. The father's mental faculties gradually gave way more and more. By the time Charles was fifteen he left school, and the care and maintenance of his family in a short time devolved mainly on him. He first obtained a clerk- ship in the same establishment where his brother was employed, and two years later he received a better paid appointment, with a salary of 70 a year, in the India House. Domestic troubles, however, thickened upon the family; the mother became a confirmed invalid, and in 1795 Charles was seized by an attack of the madness hereditary in the family. This affliction must have weighed terribly upon Mary, who thus saw her one prop and solace taken from her. She was left alone, with her father in his second childhood, her mother an exacting and imperious invalid, and an old Aunt Hetty, who was for ever poring over devotional books, without apparently the capacity of sharing any of the household burdens. No sooner was Charles restored to reason than a new trouble began. John met with a serious accident, and, though in his days of prosperity his family saw little or nothing of him, he now returned home to be nursed. This seems to have been the last straw that broke poor Mary down. In September 1796 the mania, with which she had been G 82 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ix often threatened, broke out ; she seized a knife from the table and stabbed her mother to the heart. The poor old father was almost unconscious of what had taken place ; Aunt Hetty fainted. It was Charles who seized the knife from his sister's grasp, but not before she had, in her frenzy, inflicted a slight wound on her father. The horror of the whole scene can be with difficulty pictured. Yet Charles, who had only lately been released from an asylum, had the power to cope with it, to maintain his calmness and courage, and above all to resolve that the terrible calamity which had overtaken them should not be allowed to enshroud the whole of his dear sister's life in the gloom of a madhouse. He wrote to his friend Coleridge five days after the tragedy, and his letter speaks nothing but tender fortitude. " God has preserved to me my senses," he writes. " I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and of my aunt. . . . With me ' the former things are passed away,' and I have something more to do than to feel." Severe self-mastery is perceived in every word of this letter. Lamb was evidently sensible that his own reason would totter if it were not controlled by a strong effort of will. In another letter written a week later to the same friend, the same spirit is shown ; he had already formed the determination not to allow his sister to remain in a madhouse ; he resolved to devote his life to her, and to give up all thought of other happiness for himself than what was consistent with his being her constant companion and guardian " Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know that my prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sister the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty's judgments on our house is restored to her senses, to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation ix MARY LAMB 83 and tho reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother's murder. I have seen her. I found her this morning calm and serene, far, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity; she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has happened. Indeed from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed, I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and religious principle to look forward to a time when, even she might recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm ; even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference a tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it. was a religious principle that most supported me 1 ... I felt I had something else to do than to regret. On that first evening, my aunt was lying insensible, to all appearance like one dying, my father with his poor forehead plastered over from a wound he had received from a daughter dearly loved by him, who loved him no less dearly, my mother, a dead and murdered corpse in the next room, yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to rest in things of sense, had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind unsatisfied with the ignorant present time; and this kept me up. I had the whole weight of the family thrown on me, for my brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties ; and I was now left alone." He then speaks of the kindness of various friends, and reckons up the resources of the family, resolving to spare 50 or 60 a year to keep Mary at a private asylum at Islington. " I know John will make 84 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ix speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital. ... If my father, and old maid-servant, and I, can't live, and live comfortably, on 130 or 120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires ; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not leave an unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly, but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way j and I know his language is already, ' Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to,' etc. ; and in that style of talking." Charles goes on to explain that his sister would form one of the family she had been placed with rather than a patient. "They, as the saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most thoroughly devoid of the quality of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly ; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found . . . uniformly great and amiable. God keep her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His dispensations to mankind." The whole of the rest of Lamb's life was a fulfilment of the loving resolutions which had sustained him in the terrible hour of his mother's death. His love for the beautiful Alice W n was relinquished as one of the " tender fond records " for ever blotted out by a sterner, more imperative claim of affection and duty. As soon as the old father died, Mary and Charles were reunited in one home, and her brother's guardianship was accepted by the authorities as a sufficient guarantee that any future return of her malady should not be accompanied by danger to the lives of others. He was faithful to his self- ix MARY LAMB 85 imposed task. He himself was never again attacked by the cruel malady, but his sister to the end of her life was subject to recurring periods of insanity, which latterly isolated her from her friends for months in every year. Through their joint care and caution no fatal results again attended these attacks of mania. There is something inexpressibly touching in the fact that on their holiday excursions together, Mary invariably, with her own hands, packed a strait -waistcoat for herself. She was able to foretell, by premonitory symptoms, when she was likely to be attacked ; and a friend of the Lambs has related how he had met them walking together, hand in hand, towards the asylum, both weeping bitterly. Lamb's strong feeling against allowing his sister to be placed in an hospital for lunatics is more than justified by the accounts given, in the Life of Lord Shaftesbury, of the frightfully barbarous treatment to which insane people were subjected in the early part of the present century. Their keepers always visited them whip in hand. They were sometimes spun round on rotatory chairs at a tremendous speed ; sometimes they were chained in wells, in which the water was made to rise till it reached their chins; sometimes they were left quite alone, chained to their beds, from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, unable to rise, and with nothing but bread and water within their reach. No wonder that Charles Lamb said he would burn by slow fires rather than let his sister be treated like this. The strong restorative of work done and duty fulfilled enabled Charles, within little more than a year of the dreadful calamity which had darkened his life, to make his first appearance as an author. These first poems were dedicated to "the author's best friend and sister." He wished to fence her round, as it were, by assurances of the high value he set on her, and of the depth of his love. "I wish," he wrote to Coleridge, "to accumulate perpetuat- ing tokens of my affection to poor Mary." When she was restored to his daily companionship, there was nothing 86 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ix ill her outward manner or appearance to indicate what a terrible cloud rested on her past life. Her manners were tranquil and composed. De Quincey speaks of her as that "Madonna-like lady." There was no appearance of settled melancholy in consequence of the fatal deed she had been led to commit, but that it left a wound which was hidden rather than healed is indicated by the words written long years after the event : " My dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart." On another occasion, a child Mary loved asked her why she never spoke of her mother. A cry of pain was the only response. Her dependence on her brother was an ever-visible presence in both their lives. Mrs. Cowden Clarke relates : " He once said, with his peculiar mode of' tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, 'You must die first, Mary.' She nodded, with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ' Yes, I must die first, Charles.' " The event was contrary to the wish and expectation thus expressed. Charles preceded Mary to the grave by thirteen years ; but during the greater part of that time her intellect was so clouded as to deprive her of the power of the acute suffering the loss of her brother would otherwise have caused. The literary fame of Mary Lamb rests chiefly on her Tales from Shakespeare, and a collection of beautiful little stories for children, called Mrs. Leicester's School. The Tales from Shakespeare were written, as so much good work has been, under the stress of poverty. Six of the great tragedies were undertaken by Charles, and fourteen other plays by Mary. The scheme was to render each play into a prose story fit for the comprehension and capacity of children ; and the work was done with inimitable felicity of diction, and critical insight into the situations and characters of the world of men and women who live in Shakespeare's dramas. There is a letter of Mary's describing herself and Charles at work: "Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet. You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one ix MARY LAMB 87 table (but not on one cushion sitting, like llormia and Helena in the Midsummer Nights Dream) ; or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has made something of it" (Mrs. Gilchrist's Life, p. 119). The Tales were written for William Godwin, whose first wife was Mary Wollstone- craft. His second wife helped him a great deal with his publishing business. She was a vulgar -minded woman, and a pet aversion of the Lambs, especially of Charles, who said, referring to her, "I will be buried with this inscription over me, 'Here lies C. L., the woman-hater' I mean, that hated one woman; for the rest, God bless 'em." The success of the Tales could not, how- ever, be marred by the unpopularity of the publisher and his wife. The book rapidly ran .through several editions, and even now a year seldom passes without the Tales from Shakespeare being presented to the public in some new form. A portrait of Mary Lamb has been drawn by the master hand of her brother. She is the Bridget of the Essays of Elia, as all lovers of the essays well know. The humour and delicate insight into character for which the writings of Charles Lamb are so distinguished, are also characteristic of Mary, though the humour in her case is less rollicking, and never breaks out in pure high spirits, as his often does. Some of the most charming of Mary's writings are her letters, which have been published in Mrs. Gilchrist's Life, especially those to a young friend, named Sarah Stoddart. This young lady had a most " business-like determina- tion to marry " ; and as she generally had more than one string to her bow, as the saying is, it is no wonder that she sometimes needed the help of an older and wiser woman than herself, to get her out of the difficulties in which she found herself. Much of Mary's own character comes out in the advice she gives her friend. She speaks 88 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ix in one place of her power of valuing people for what they are, without demanding or expecting perfection. It is a "knack I know I have, of looking into people's real character, and never expecting them to act out of it never expecting another to do as I would in the same case." How much practical wisdom there is in this, and what misunderstandings and heart-burnings would be saved if it were more common not to expect people to act out of their own characters ! There is a funny little bit in another letter to the effect that women should not be constantly admonishing men as to the right line of thought and conduct. " I make it a point of conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to be in. It always appears to me a vexatious kind of tyranny, that women have no business to exercise over men, which merely because, they Jiaving a better judgment, they have power to do. Let men alone, and at last we find they come round to the right way which we, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better, that we should let them often do wrong than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows." To begin quoting from the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb is such an enticing task that it would be easy to fill more pages than this little book contains. One more only shall be quoted from each. The most beautiful of Mary's letters is perhaps that which she wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, soon after the death by drowning of Words- worth's brother John. The beautiful poem by Words- worth, "The Happy Warrior," is supposed to have been written partly in reference to this brother, and partly in reference to Nelson, whose death took place the same year (1805). "I thank you," Mary wrote, " my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter ; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted it. ... I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now ix MARY LAMB 89 almost begun ; but I felt that it was improper, and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted, to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with, and through, your lost brother, and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you, I felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow ; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn't dare tell you so." How terrible that the mind and heart which could dictate such words as these were weighed down by the lifelong burden of insanity ! Before Miss Wordsworth's reply reached her, she was again attacked, and Charles wrote in her place : " I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand ; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about praising her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to my- self by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me ; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly, with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in thus up- braiding myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has clung to me for better, for worse j and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade." Great, noble spirits they both were, even in their weaknesses and imperfections, showing an example of 90 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES ix devoted unselfishness, tenderness, and generosity that many who "tithe mint and anise and cummin" might envy. Mary Lamb survived to old age, dying in May 1847, aged seventy-three. She was buried by her brother's side in the churchyard at Edmonton. AGNES ELIZABETH JONES " Count not that man's life short who has had time to do noble deeds." From CICERO. THERE is something very interesting in tracing, as we are sometimes able to do, the connection of one piece of good work with another. The energy, devotion, and success of one worker stimulates the enthusiasm of others ; this enthusiasm does not always show itself in carrying on or developing what has been already begun, but sometimes manifests itself in the more difficult task of breaking new ground ; and thus one good work becomes the parent of another. An example of what is here referred to is to be found in the work of Mrs. Fry. To her initiative may be traced not only the kindred labours of Mary Carpenter in reformatory and industrial schools, and the still more modern efforts for the better care of neglected children by the boarding- out system, and by such societies as the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, but to her also may indirectly be traced the success with which women have devoted themselves to the art of sick nursing, and from this again has spread or grown out the movement for extending to women a thorough medical education and training. Mrs. Fry's connection with the art of sick nursing came about in this way. In the first quarter of this century a 92 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES x young German named Fliedner was appointed pastor to the little weaving village of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. He endeared himself to his people by his devotion to them ; but the time came when he was forced to leave them. The whole village was involved in ruin because of the failure of the industry on which its inhabitants depended. The people not only could not support their pastor, but were themselves reduced to the greatest straits of actual want. He left them in order to seek in wealthier places, not maintenance for himself, but help for them. After travelling for some time in Germany, he came to England, and while here, still intent on making known the wants of Kaiserswerth, he met with Mrs. Fry, and was deeply interested in all she was doing for the benefit of prisoners. Not long after this he returned to Kaiserswerth, bearing with him the gifts he had collected to relieve the pressing wants of his people ; but his mind was now full of Mrs. Fry, and of what was being done in England by and for women. He and his wife resolved to begin similar work in Germany. They began with two young women just discharged from a neighbouring prison, whose relations refused to receive them or have anything further to do with them. Soon the number of discharged prisoners in- creased, and the pastor and his wife felt that they must have help ; a friend therefore came to join them in their work. In this way and from this small beginning grew in time a very large institution, comprising not only an organisation to enable discharged prisoners to get work and regain their character, but a home and school for orphans, a hospital for the sick, and an asylum for lunatics. The whole of the work of this institution, which occupied several houses and comprised more than 300 persons, was done by carefully -trained women, called deaconesses. Kaiserswerth was the parent of all the other deaconesses' institutions which now exist in almost every part of the world. The predominating spirit at Kaiserswerth, after that of religious self-devotion, to which a first place was given, was that the work of caring for the poor, the sick. x AGNES ELIZABETH JONES 98 and the afflicted can only be rightly undertaken after a long course of special preparation and training. It was a Protestant sisterhood ; those who entered were first called novices ; in time the novices became deaconesses, and the deaconesses were expected to bind themselves to remain in the institution five years. They were, however, bound by no vows, and could always leave if other duties seemed to require that they should do so. In this institution the art of sick nursing acquired a perfection at that time un- known in any other part of Europe. It was here, mainly, that Florence Nightingale received the training which enabled her to save the lives of so many of our soldiers in the Crimea, and to introduce into England a new era in the history of nursing. Hero too Agnes Elizabeth Jones was trained. Miss Nightingale's often-repeated lesson on the subject of the necessity of long and careful training was not lost upon Agnes Jones. When she left Kaiserswerth, she knew, as Miss Nightingale said, "more than most hospital matrons know when they undertake matronship." But she was not content with this. After working for a time with the London Bible Women's Mission, she applied to the training-school for nurses at St. Thomas's Hospital for another year's training. She entered the hospital as a " Nightingale probationer." She went through, while she was there, the whole training of a nurse. To quote Miss Nightingale again, referring to this period, " Her reports of cases were admirable as to nursing details. She was our best pupil ; she went through all the work of a soldier, and she thereby fitted herself for being the best general we ever had." Before referring to Agnes Jones's crowning work in re- organising the nursing staff of the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary, it will be well to recall the story of her life. There are few incidents in it, none at all of a sensational character ; but perhaps this makes the lesson to be learnt from it all the more plain and simple. She was born at Cambridge, of Irish parents, in 1832. Her father was a colonel in the 12th Regiment, and her 94 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES x descent was from the north Irish stock that has furnished so many great names to the roll-call of the worthies of our nation. She was a Protestant evangelical, of the type which northern Ireland produces. It is easy to label the religious sect to which she belonged as narrow and unattractive ; but however this may be, as exemplified in her personally, her religion was too intense a reality to be unattractive. It permeated her whole life, from the time when as a child of seven her dream was to become a missionary, to the hour when she died of typhus taken from a patient in the Liverpool Infirmary to whom she had given up her own room and bed. Another deep and permanent influence on her mind and character was her love for Ireland. Over and over again in her letters we come across expressions which show how close to her heart lay her country's good. The training at Kaiserswerth was intended to be utilised for the good of Ireland. " I have no desire," she wrote, " to become a deaconess ; that would not, I think, be the place I should be called upon to occupy. No, my own Ireland first. It was for Ireland's good that my first desire to be used as a blessed instrument in God's hand was breathed, . . . and in Ireland is it my heart's desire to labour. ..." In another letter she refers to the time when she "then and there" dedicated herself to do what she could for Ireland, in its workhouses, infirmaries, and hospitals. In another place she speaks of being retained in England for another year's training, and exclaims, " My last English sojourn, I hope, as Ireland is ever my bourn ! " And again, " My heart is ever in Ireland, where I hope ultimately to work." Her heart's desire was never gratified ; she laid down her life, at the age of thirty-five, in the Liverpool Workhouse, before she had had an opportunity of giving to her own dear land the benefit of all she had learned by the patient years of training at Kaiserswerth and in London. Ulster Protestant as she was to the backbone, and a member of the Church of England, she was a true patriot, and showed her patriotism by labouring with self-denying x AGNES ELIZABETH JONES 95 earnestness to fit herself to lift up to a higher level an important branch of the social life of her country. She was very much stimulated, as so many women were, by the heroism of the Nightingale band of nurses who left England for the Crimea in 1854. She listened with vehement inward dissent to those who cast contempt and blame on them, and, in her own words, " almost worshipped" their brave leader. She had paid a visit of a week to Kaiserswerth in 1853, but home duties, especially the care of a widowed sister, at that time and for some years prevented her from fulfilling her strong desire for a course of thorough training in the art of nursing. It was not till 1860 that she returned to Kaiserswerth for this purpose. Very soon after her year of preparation there, she received, through Miss Nightingale, an invitation from Mr. W. Rathbone to undertake the superintendence of the Liverpool Training School for Nurses of the Poor. She was overwhelmed by a genuine sense of her inadequacy to the task. She was a sincerely humble-minded woman, and not only craved more training in the mechanical difficulties of nursing, but doubted her own powers of organising, directing, and superintending. She hesitated, and while hesitating, joined Mrs. Ranyard in her London Biblewoman's Mission. Her work here was interrupted by a telegram summoning her to Rome to nurse a sick sister. As soon as the sister recovered, another invalid relative claimed her. By their bedsides she felt, to a certain extent, her own power, and the question often arose in her mind, " Could I govern and teach others ? " As soon as these private cares were over, she visited nursing institutions in Switzerland, France, and Germany, and before she returned to England she determined to go for another year's training to St. Thomas's Hospital, and then to offer herself for the difficult post at Liverpool. " I determined," she writes, "at least to try. ... If every one shrinks back because incompetent, who will ever do anything 1 ' Lord, here am I ; send me.' " She did not on leaving St. Thomas's immediately 96 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES x commence her work at Liverpool. She was for a short time superintendent of a small hospital in Bolsover Street, and later she filled a similar post at the Great Northern Hospital. It was not till the spring of 1865 that she took the place at Liverpool with which her name is chiefly connected. The old system in pauper infirmaries was to allow the patients to be " nursed " by old inmates of the workhouse. Among those to whom the care of the sick was confided were " worn-out old thieves, worn-out old drunkards," and worse. Mr. W. Rathbone, of Liverpool, strongly urged on the guardians of that place to do away with this wretched system, and to substitute in the place of these ignorant, and often vicious, women a staff of trained paid nurses. He generously undertook to defray the whole cost of the new scheme for three years, by which time he believed the' improvement effected would be so great that no one would for a moment dream of going back to the old plan. It was to the post of superintendent of the band of trained nurses that Agnes Jones was called in the spring of 1865. It was no light task for a young woman of thirty-three. She had under her about 50 nurses, 150 pauper " scourers," and from 1220 to 1350 patients. The winters of 1865 and 1866 will long be remembered as the terrible period of the cotton famine in Lancashire. The workhouse infirmary at Liverpool was not only full, but overflowing ; a number of patients often arrived when every bed was full. Then the gentle authority of Sister Agnes, as she was called, had to be exercised to induce the wild, rough patients to make way for one another. Sometimes she had to persuade them to let her put the beds together and place three or even four in two beds. The children had to be packed together, some at the head and some at the foot of the bed. She speaks of them as " nests of children," and mentions that forty under twelve were sent in in one day. This over-filling of the workhouse was of course no ordinary occurrence, and was due to the exceptional distress in Lancashire at that time. The number of deaths that x At INKS KLI/ABETII JONES 07 took place, for the same reason, was unusually large. Sister Agnes speaks in one of her letters of seven deaths having occurred between Sunday night and Tuesday morning. The dreadful melancholy of the place bore upon her Avith terrible weight. There was not only the depressing thought that most of the inmates were there in consequence of their own wickedness or folly, but added to this the patients were isolated from friends and relatives whose visits do so much to cheer an ordinary hospital. There were patients with delirium tremens wandering about the wards in their shirts ; there were little children, some not more than seven, steeped in every kind of vice and infamy. " I sometimes wonder," she wrote, in a moment of despair, " if there is a worse place on earth than Liverpool, and I am sure its workhouse is burdened Avith a large proportion of its vilest." Some of the best and most deeply-rooted instincts of human nature seemed to turn into cruelty and gall in this terrible place. One of the difficulties of the nurses was to prevent the mothers of the babies, who were still at the breast, from fighting and stealing one another's food. They had nothing to do but nurse their babies, and they would hardly do that. The noise, quarrelling, and dirt prevailing in their neighbourhood was a constant source of trouble and anxiety. Another trouble was the mixture among the patients of criminal cases, necessitating the presence of policemen constantly on the premises. The ex-pauper women, too, whom Sister Agnes was endeavouring to train as assistant nurses, were a great anxiety. One morning, after they had been paid their wages, five arrived at the hospital tipsy ; after some months of constant effort and constant disappointment, the attempt to train these women was given up. Besides the strain on nerves, temper, and spirit arising from all these causes, the physical work of Agnes Jones's post was no light matter. Her day began at 5.30 A.M. and ended after 11; added to this, if there was any case about which she was specially anxious, or any H 98 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES x nurse about whose competence she did not feel fully assured, she would be up two or three times in the night to satisfy herself that all was going well. Her nurses were devoted to her, and, as a rule, gave her no anxiety or discomfort which could be avoided. Her only distress on their account arose from a severe outbreak of fever and small-pox among them, which was a source of much painful anxiety to her. Miss Nightingale said of her that " she had a greater power of carrying her followers with her than any woman (or man) I ever knew." "Her influence with her nurses was unbounded. They would have died for her." All witnesses concur in speaking of her wonderful personal influence and the effect it produced. The in- firmary began to show the results of her presence within a month of her arrival. In the three years she spent there, she completely changed the whole place. At first the police, to whose presence reference has already been made, were astonished that it was safe for a number of young women to be about in the men's wards, for they well knew what a rough lot some of the patients were ; but " in less than three years she had reduced one of the most disorderly hospital populations in the world to some- thing like Christian discipline, such as the police themselves wondered at. She had led, so as to be of one mind and one heart with her, upwards of fifty nurses and probationers. . . . She had converted a vestry to the conviction of the economy as well as the humanity of nursing pauper sick by trained nurses. . . . She had converted the Poor Law Board to the same view, and she had disarmed all opposition, all sectarian zealotism; so that Eoman Catholic and Unitarian, High Church and Low Church, all literally rose up and called her blessed." The manner of her death has been already referred to. It was in unison with her unselfish, devoted life. She died on the 19th February 1868, and her body was committed to the earth of her beloved Ireland, at Fahan, on Lough Swilly, the home of her early years. XI CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE IN the quiet Yorkshire village of Haworth, on the bleak moorland hillside above. Keighley, were born two of the greatest imaginative writers of the presen^ century, Char- lotte and Emily Bronte. The wonderful gifts of the Bronte family, the grief and tragedy that overshadowed their lives, and their early deaths, will always cast about their story a peculiarly touching interest. Their father, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, was of Irish birth. He was born in the County Down, of a Protestant family one that had migrated from the south to the north of Ireland. His character was that which we are more accustomed to associate with Scotland than with Ireland. Resolute, stern, independent, and self-denying, he had the virtues of an old Covenanter rather than the facile graces which so often distinguish those of Celtic blood. His father was a farmer, but Patrick Bronte had no desire to live by agricultural industry. At sixteen years of age he separated himself from his family and opened a school. What amount of success he had in this undertaking does not appear, but it is evident that he had a distinct object in view, namely, to obtain money enough to complete his own education ; in this he was successful, for after nine years' labour in instructing others, he entered as a student in St. John's College, Cambridge, remained there four years, obtained 100 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xi the B.A. degree of the University, and was ordained* as a clergyman of the Church of England. He kept up no intercourse with his family, and showed no trace of his Irish blood, either in speech or character. He loved and married Miss Branwell, of Penzance, a lady of much sweet- ness and refinement. Their six children were destined, through the writings of two of them, to be known wherever the English language is spoken, all over the world. After holding livings in Essex and at Thornton, in Yorkshire, Mr. Bronte was appointed to the Rectory of Haworth, which is now so often visited on account of its association with the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Mrs. Bronte's six children were born in rapid succession, and her naturally delicate constitution was further tried by the constant labour and anxiety involved in providing, on very limited means, for the wants of the little brood. Mrs. Gaskell, in her Life of Charlotte Bronte, appears to imply that, more than is even usually the case, the weight of family cares and anxieties fell upon the mother rather than the father. " Mr. Bronte," she says, " was, of course, much engaged in his study, and besides, he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent appear- ance upon the scene as a drag both on his wife's strength and as an interruption to the comfort of the household." One feels disposed to comment on this by saying that children ought never to be born if either of their parents inclines to regard them "as an interruption to the comfort of the household." To give life and grudge it at the same time is not an attractive combination of qualities. Though not much helped by her husband, Mrs. Bronte was, how- ever, not alone in her domestic cares and duties ; the eldest of the "interruptions to the comfort of the household," Maria, was a child of wonderfully precocious intellect and heart. Her remarkable character was described in after years by her sister Charlotte as the Helen Burns of Jane Eyre. In her, her mother found a sympathising companion and a helper in her domestic cares. The time was rapidly approaching when the mother's place in the household xr CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTfc 101 would be vacant, and when many of its duties and re- sponsibilities would be discharged by Maria. The little Brontes were from their birth unlike other children. The room dedicated to their use was not, even in their babyhood, called their nursery ; it was their "study." Little Maria at seven years old would shut herself up in this study with the newspaper, and be able to converse with her father on all the public events of the day, and instruct the other children as to current politics, and upon the characters of the chief personages of the political world. Mrs. Bronte died in 1821. Maria was then eight; Elizabeth, seven ; Charlotte, five ; Patrick Branwell, four ; Emily, three ; and Anne, one. The little motherless brood were left alone for a year, when an elder sister of their mother came to live at the parsonage, but she does not seem to have had any real influence over them. She taught the girls to stitch and sew, and to become proficient in various domestic arts, but she had no sympathy or communion with them, and their real life was lived quite apart from hers. As soon almost as they could read and write at all, they began to compose plays and act them ; they had no society but each other's ; this, however, was all-sufficient for them. Their power of invention and imagination was very marked ; to the habit of composing stories in their own minds they gave the name of " making out" As soon as the labour of writing became less formidable than it always is to baby fingers, the stories thus " made out " were written down. In fifteen months, when Charlotte was about twelve to thirteen years of age, she wrote twenty -two volumes of manuscript, in the minutest hand, which can hardly be deciphered except with the aid of a magnifying-glass. The Duke of Wellington filled a large place in the minds of the Brontes, and in their romances. Something of what the hero was to them when they were children, Charlotte afterwards put into the mouth of Shirley, the heroine of her novel of that name. After the manner of imaginative children, she not 102 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xi only worshipped her hero from afar, but identified herself with him or with members of his family. The authorship of many of her childish romances and poems is ascribed, in her imagination, to the Marquis of Douro, or Lord Charles Wellesley ; and when these " goodly youths " are not introduced as authors they often become the chief person- ages of the story. The shadow of death that casts so deep a gloom over the story of the Bronte family, first fell on Maria and Elizabeth, the two elder children. The four girls Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily had been sent to a school, which was partly a charitable institution, at Cowan Bridge, in Westmoreland. The living at Haworth parsonage was the reverse of luxurious, but the food and the sanitary arrangements at Cowan Bridge were so bad that the health of the little Brontes was seriously injured by it. The food was repulsive from the want of cleanliness with which it was prepared and placed on the table. The children frequently refused food altogether, though sinking from the want of it, rather than drink the " bingy " milk, and eat unappetising scraps from a dirty larder, and puddings made with water taken from rain-tubs and impregnated with the smell of soot and dust. Besides the faulty domestic arrangements of the school, the discipline was harsh and tyrannical, and one teacher in particular was guilty of conduct towards Maria Bronte that can only be called brutal. Low fever broke out at the school, from which about forty of the pupils suffered, but the Brontes did not take the disease. It was evident that Maria was destined for another fate, that of consumption. She was removed from the school only a few days before her death, and Elizabeth followed her to the grave about six weeks later, in June 1825. Even after this Mr. Bronte's eyes were not opened to the danger his children were in by their treat- ment at Cowan Bridge, and Charlotte and Emily were still allowed to remain at the school. It soon, however, became evident that they would not be long in following Maria and Elizabeth unless they were removed ; and they returned xi CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE 103 homo before the rigours of another winter set in. All the physical and mental tortures she endured at Cowan Bridge, Charlotte afterwards described in the account she gives of "Lowood" inJane Eyre. It is not to be taken that the account of "Lowood" is as strictly an accurate description of Cowan Bridge as Charlotte Bronte would have given if she had been simply writing a history of the school. The facts are, perhaps, magnified by the lurid glow of passion and grief with which she recalled her sisters' sufferings. She was only between nine and ten when she left Cowan Bridge, and in the account she wrote of it twenty years later we see rather the impression that was left on her imagination than a strictly accurate history ; but there is no doubt that in her account of Maria Bronte's angelic patience, and the cruel persecution to which she was subjected by one of the teachers, the Lowood of Jane Eyre is a perfectly faithful transcript of what took place at Cowan Bridge. Mrs. Gaskell says, " Not a word of that part of Jane Eyre but is a literal repetition of scenes between the pupil and the teacher. Those who had been pupils at the same time knew who must have written the book from the force with which Helen Burns's sufferings are described." After the death of Maria and Elizabeth, the next great sorrow of the Bronte family arose from the career of the only son, Patrick Bramvell. He was a handsome boy of exceptional mental powers. He had in particular the gift of brilliant conversation, and there was hardly anything he attempted in the way of talking, writing, or drawing which he did not do well. In one of Charlotte's letters she says, " You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings ? I do, indeed. I have often thought so ; and I think, too, that the mode of bringing them up is strange ; they are not sufficiently guarded from temptation. Girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed, while boys are turned loose on the world, as if they of all beings in existence were the wisest and least liable to be led astray." Poor Bran well, with his brilliant social qualities, was not sufficiently guarded from temptation. 104 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xi The easiest outlet from the narrow walls of Haworth parsonage was to be found at the little inn of Haworth village. The habit of the place was, when any stranger arrived at the inn, for the host to send for the brilliant boy from the parsonage to amuse the guest. The result will easily be guessed. The guiding principle of Charlotte's character was her inexorable fidelity to duty ; her whole nature turned with irresistible force to what was right rather than to what was pleasant. With Branwell the reverse was the case. Conventional propriety of course strictly guarded Charlotte from the possible dangers of associating with casual strangers at the village inn, although her strong resolute character would not have run a tenth part of the risk of contamination as did that of the weak, pleasure-seeking BranwelL It is needless to dwell on the details of his gradual degradation ; the high ideals and hopes of his youth were given up ; his character became at once coarse and weak. He was entirely incapable of self- government and of retaining any kind of respectable employment. His intemperance and other vices made the daily life of his sisters at the parsonage a nightmare of horrors. For eight years the young man, whose boyhood his family had watched with so much hope and pride, was a source of shame and anguish to them, all the more keenly felt because it could not be openly avowed. Many who knew the family affirmed that so far as purely intellectual qualities were concerned Branwell was even more eminently distinguished than his sisters ; but mere intellect, without moral power to guide it, is as dangerous as a spirited horse without bit or bridle. Branwell was singularly deficient in that moral power in which his sisters were so strong, and his education did nothing to supply this natural deficiency. He died in 1848, at the age of thirty. Cowan Bridge was not the only experience Charlotte and Emily had of school life. They went for a time to another school at Eoe Head, where Charlotte was very happy, and in 1835 she returned to the same school as a teacher. In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to a school XI CHARLOTTE AND KM I LV I'.RONTK 105 in Brussels, where the former stayed two years, the latter only one. All that Charlotte saw and all the friends she made were afterwards portrayed in her stories. One of her most intimate friends became the Caroline Helstone of Shirley ; the originals of Rose and Jessie Yorke were also among her schoolfellows at Roe Head. There can be little doubt that M. Paul Emanuel of Villette was M. He"ger of the Brussels school. Every trivial circumstance of an unusually uneventful life became food for her imagination. The development of Emily's genius was different. Her love of the moors around Haworth was so intense that it was impossible for her to thrive when she was away from them. It became a fact recognised by all the family that Emily must not be taken away from home. The solitude of the wild, dark moors, and the communing with her own heart, together with the dark tragedy of Branwell's wasted life, were the sole sources of Emily's inspiration. Her poems have a wild, untameable quality in them, and her one romance, IFuthering Heights, places her in the first rank among the great imaginative writers of English fiction. There is something terrible in Emily's sternness of character, which she never vented pitilessly on any one but herself. She was deeply reserved, and hardly ever, even to her sisters, spoke of what she felt most intensely. A friend who furnished Mrs. Gaskell with some particulars for her biography, states that on one occasion she mentioned " that some one had asked me what religion I was of (with the view of getting me for a partisan), , and that I had said that was between God and me. Emily, who was lying on the hearth-rug, exclaimed, 'That's right.' This was all," adds the friend, "I ever heard Emily say on religious subjects." Emily's love for animals was intense ; she was especially devoted to a savage old bull -dog named Keeper, who owned no master but herself. The incident in Shirley of the heroine being bitten by a mad dog, .and straightway burning the wound herself with a red-hot Italian iron, was true of Emily. Her last illness was a time of terrible agony to Charlotte and Anne, not merely 106 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xi because they saw that she who, Charlotte said, was the thing that seemed nearest to her heart in the world was going to be taken from them, but because Emily's resistance to the inroads of illness was so terrible. She resolutely refused to see a doctor, and she would allow no nursing and no tender helpfulness of any kind. It was evident to her agonised sisters that she was dying, but she maintained her savage reserve, suffering in solitary silence rather than admit her pain and weakness. On the very day of her death she rose as usual, dressed herself, and attempted to carry on her usual employments, and all this with the catching, rattling breath and the glazing eye which told that the hand of Death was actually upon her. Charlotte wrote in this agonising hour, " Moments so dark as these I have never known. I pray for God's support to us all. Hitherto He has granted it." At noon on that day, when it was too late, Emily whispered in gasps, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now." A few days later Charlotte wrote, " We are very calm at present. Why should we be otherwise ? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over ; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by ; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need to tremble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them." The terrible anguish of those last days haunted the surviving sisters like a vision of doom. Nearly six months later Charlotte wrote again that nothing but hope in the life to come had kept her heart from breaking. "I cannot forget," she says, "Emily's death - day ; it be- comes a more fixed, a darker, a more frequently recurring idea in my mind than ever. It was very terrible. She was torn, conscious, panting, reluctant, though resolute, out of a happy life." Within a very short time the gentle youngest sister Anne also died, and Charlotte was left with her father, the last survivor of the family of six wonderful children who had come to Haworth twenty-nine years before. In earlier and happier days the habit of the sisters had been, when their aunt went to bed at nine o'clock, to put out xi < IIARLOTTE AND K.M1LV I5RONTE 107 the candles and pace up and down the room discussing the plots of their novels, and making plans and projects for th.'ir future life. Now Charlotte was left to pace the room alone, with all that had been dearest to her in the world under the church pavement at Haworth and in the old churchyard at Scarborough. But Charlotte was not one to give way to self-indulgent idleness, even in the hour of darkest despair. She was writing Shirley at the time of Anne's last illness. After the death of this beloved and only remaining sister, she resumed her task ; but those who knew what her private history at the time was, can trace in the pages of the novel what she had gone through. The first chapter she wrote after the death of Anne is called, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." The first venture in authorship of the sisters was a volume of poems, to which they each contributed. They imagined, probably with justice, that the world was at that time prejudiced against literary womea Therefore they were careful to conceal, even from their publishers, their real identity. The poems were published as the writings of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre was the first of Charlotte's stories which was published, but The Professor was the first that was written with a view to publication. The sisters each wrote a story Charlotte, The Professor ; Emily, Wuthering Heights; and Anne, Agnes Grey, and sent them to various publishers. Charlotte was the only one of the three sisters whose manuscript was returned on her hands. But she was not discouraged by the disappointment. Just at this time Mr. Bronte, who had been suffering from cataract, was persuaded by his daughters to go to Manchester for an operation. Charlotte accompanied him, and it was while she was waiting on him, in the long suspense after the operation had been performed, that she began Jane Eyre, the book that made her, and ultimately the name of Bronte, famous. Nothing is more striking in Charlotte's personal history than the way in which she reproduced the events and personages of her own circle into her novels. 108 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xi Probably the belief that she was writing anonymously encouraged her in this. Her father's threatened blindness and her own fear of a similar calamity are reflected, as it were, in the blindness of Eochester in Jane Eyre. The success of Jane Eyre was rapid and complete, and there was much dispute whether its author were a man or a woman. The Quarterly Review distinguished itself by the remark that if the author were a woman it was evident " she must be one who for some sufficient reason has long forfeited the society of her sex." Sensitive as Charlotte Bronte was, the coarseness of the insult could not wound her ; it could at the utmost be regarded as nothing worse than a trivial annoyance ; for when the words reached Charlotte, the grave had not long closed over Branwell's wasted life ; Emily was just dead, and it was evident that Anne was dying. The greatness of her grief and the anguish of her loneliness dwarfed to their proper pro- portions the petty insults that at another time would have caused her acute pain. On the whole she had nothing to complain of in the way her book was received ; she suffered no lack of generous appreciation from the real leaders of the literary world. Thackeray and G. H. Lewes, Miss Martineau, and Sidney Dobell were warm in their praise of her work. Charlotte's manner of making her literary fame known to her father was characteristic. The secret of their authorship had been very strictly kept by the sisters ; but when the success of Jane Eyre was assured, Emily and Anne urged Charlotte that their father ought to be allowed to share the pleasure of knowing that she was the writer of the book. Accordingly one afternoon Charlotte entered her father's study and said, "Papa, I've been writing a book." When Mr. Bronte found that the book was not only written, but printed and published, he exclaimed, " My dear, you've never thought of the expense it will be ! It will be almost sure to be a loss, for how can you get a book sold ? No one knows you or your name." " But, papa, I don't think it will be a loss ; no more will you, if you will just let me read you a review or two, xi CHARLOTTE AND KMILY BRONTI. 109 :nul tell you more about it." At tea that evening Mr. Bronte exclaimed to his other daughters, "Girls, do you know that Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely ? " The pacing up and down of the sisters in the firelight, discussing the plots of their novels, has been already mentioned. Mrs. Gaskell records that Charlotte told her that these discussions seldom had any effect in causing her to change the events in her stories, "so possessed was she with the feeling that she had described reality." This confirms what Mr. Swinburne has said of her strongest characteristic as an author, that she has the power of making the reader feel in every nerve that thus and not otherwise it must have been. It must not, however, be thought that the conversations with her sisters were therefore useless ; no doubt they were very stimulating to her imagination, and gave her creations more solid reality than they would otherwise have had. In 1854 Charlotte Bronte married Mr. Nicholls, an Irish gentleman, who had for eight years been her father's curate. She only lived nine months after her marriage. She was happy in her husband's love, and appreciated his devotion to his parish duties. But the loving admirers of Charlotte Bronte can never feel much enthusiasm for Mr. Nicholls. Mrs. Gaskell states that he was not attracted by her literary fame, but was rather repelled by it ; he appears to have used her up remorselessly, in their short married life, in the routine drudgery of parish work. She did not com- plain; on the contrary, she seemed more than contented to sacrifice everything for him and his work ; but she remarks in one of her letters, " I have less time for think- ing." Apparently she had none for writing. Surely the husband of a Charlotte Bronte, just as much as the wife of a Wordsworth or a Tennyson, ought to be attracted by literary fame. To be the life partner of one to whom the most precious of Nature's gifts is confided, and to be un- appreciative of it and even repelled by it, shows a littleness of nature and essential meanness of soul. A true wife or 110 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xi husband of one of these gifted heings should rather regard herself or himself as responsible to the world for making the conditions of the daily life of their distinguished partners favourable to the development of their genius. But pearls have before now been cast before swine, and one cannot but regret that Charlotte Bronte was married to a man who did not value her place in literature as he ought. XII ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING SYDNEY SMITH, writing in 1810 upon the extraordinary folly of closing to women all the ordinary means of literary education, remarked that one consequence of their exclusion was that no woman had contributed anything of lasting value to English, French, or Italian literature, and that scarcely a single woman had crept into the ranks even of the minor poets. While he was writing this, a little baby girl was beginning to prattle, who within a very short time was destined to win a place among the great poets of this century. The very great gifts of Elizabeth Barrett were discernible from her earliest childhood. Her father was Mr. Edward Moulton, of Burn Hall, Durham. The date and place of her birth are disputed. Mrs. Richmond Ritchie states in the National Dictionary of Biography that the future poetess was born at Burn Hall, Durham, in 1809 ; Mr. J. H. Ingram says in his Life of Mrs. Browning in the Eminent Women Series that she was born in London in 1809 ; while Mr. Browning has written to the papers to say that she was born at Carlton Hall, Durham, in 1806. Three birth- places and two birthdays are thus assigned to her. It is not, however, disputed that she was christened by the names of Elizabeth Barrett, and that her father afterwards exchanged the name of Moulton for that of Barrett on inheriting some property from a relative. At eight years old little Elizabeth 112 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xn could read Homer in the original Greek, and was often to be seen with the Iliad in one hand and a doll in the other ; this picture of her gives a beautiful type of her future character, its depth of loving womanliness, combined with the height of poetic inspiration and learning. She was certainly one of the women of whom her brother poet, Tennyson, sings, who "gain in mental breadth nor fail in childward care." She says herself of her childhood that "she dreamed more of Agamemnon than of Moses her black pony." At about eleven years old she wrote an epic poem in four books on The Battle of Marathon, which her father caused to be printed. Her home, during most of her childhood, was at Hope End, near Ledbury, in Herefordshire. Many pictures of her happy childhood among the beautiful hills and orchards of the West country are to be found in the poems, especially in " Hector in the Garden " and in her " Lost Bower." Much of her young life, too, is described in the earlier part of her greatest work, Aurora Leigh. We do not hear much about the mother of the poetess, but her grandmother, it is said, looked with much disfavour on the little lady's learning, and said she would " rather hear that Elizabeth's hemming were more carefully finished than of all this Greek." Her father, however, was a worthy guardian of the wonderful child that had been entrusted to him ; he fostered and encouraged her genius by all means in his power. He must have had a singular power of self-devotion and self- sacrifice ; and it is probable that much of his daughter's beautiful moral nature was inherited from him. When Elizabeth was about twenty, her mother lay in her last ill- ness, and simultaneously money troubles, brought on by no fault of his own, fell upon Mr. Barrett. He would allow no knowledge of this to disturb his wife during her illness ; and in order effectually to hide the truth from her, he made an arrangement with his creditors which very materially reduced his income for life, so that no reduction of his establishment should take place as long as his wife lived. Two other misfortunes had an important influence on xii KM/AIJKTH IIARKKTT IJKOWMM: 113 Elizabeth Barrett's youth. When she was about fifteen, she was trying to saddle her pony by herself in the paddock, when she was thrown to the ground, and her spine was in- jured in a manner that kept her lying on her back for four years. Scarcely had she recovered from this injury, \\1 it'ii another terrible calamity nearly overwhelmed her. She had been sent to Torquay for the benefit of her health, and had been there nearly a year, when her eldest brother came to visit her, in order to consult her about some trouble of his own. With two other young men, all good sailors, he took a little boat, intending to have a sail along the coast. Within a few minutes of starting, and almost under his sister's window, the boat went down, and young Barrett and his companions were drowned. The grief and horror caused by this terrible event nearly killed her. It was almost a year before she could be moved by slow stages of twenty miles a day to London. Those who knew her best at that time believe that she would have died if she had not been sustained by her love of literary pursuits, which afforded some relief to her mind from the constant dwelling on the tragedy of which she accused herself of being the cause. Miss Mitford says in her Literary Recol- lections : " The house she occupied at Torquay had been chosen as one of the most sheltered in the place. It stood at the bottom of the cliffs, almost close to the sea ; and she told me herself that during that whole winter the sound of the waves rang in her ears like the moans of one dying. Still she clung to literature and Greek ; in all probability she would have died without that wholesome diversion to her thoughts. Her medical attendant did not always understand this. To prevent the remonstrance of her friendly physician, Dr. Barry, she caused a small edition of Plato to be so bound as to resemble a novel. He did not know, skilful and kind though he were, that to her such books were not an arduous and painful study, but a con- solation and a delight." She, however, appeared to be con- demned to a life of perpetual invalidism. She now lived in London with her father, and was confined to one large I 114 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUK TIMES xn darkened room, and saw no one but her own family, and a few intimate friends, the chief of whom were Miss Mitford, Mrs. Jameson, and Mr. John Kenyon. The impression she produced on all who came into contact with her was that she was the most charming and delightful person they had ever met. Her sweetness, her purity, and the tender womanliness of her character, made her friends forget her learning and her genius. Miss Mitford says she often travelled five-and-forty miles expressly to see her, and re- turned the same evening without entering another house. The seclusion in which she lived was perhaps not unfavour- able to literary work. She lay on her couch, not only, as Miss Mitford says, reading every book worth reading in almost every language, but " giving herself heart and soul to that poetry of which she seemed born to be the priestess." In 1835 she published Prometheus and other Poems, which, in the opinion of the most competent judges, raised her at once to a high rank among English poets. In 1843 she wrote The Cry of the Children, to which Lord Shaftesbury owed so much in his efforts to protect factory children from being ground to death by overwork ; and later she wrote the noble " Song for the Ragged Schools of London," whose words go straight to every mother's heart. During her long period of illness her chief link with the outside world was her cousin, Mr. John Kenyon, to whom Aurora Leigh is dedicated. He knew all who were best worth knowing in the great world of London, and he occa- sionally introduced to her one and another of those whom he believed to be most capable of appreciating her and pleasing her. In this way, in 1846, he brought Mr. Robert Browning to see Miss Barrett. In the autumn of that same year the poet and poetess were married. What his love was for her and hers for him may be gathered in the lovely poem, "Caterina to Camoens," and in the forty-three Sonnets from the Portuguese, which Mrs. Browning wrote before her marriage. Almost directly after her marriage Mrs. Browning was ordered abroad for the benefit of her health, and the chief part of the remaining fifteen years of xii ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 115 her life was spent iu Italy. Sho identified herself com- pletely with those who were struggling for the unity and independence of Italy, and much of her poetry from this time onwards is coloured by her political convictions. In Florence, in 1849, her only child, Robert Browning the younger, was born. The deep joy of motherhood suffuses much of the noblest part of Aurora Leigh. One is tempted to believe that the lovely description of Marian Erie bending over her sleeping child, The yearling creature, warm and moist with life To the bottom of his dimples, could have been written by no one who had not felt a mother's love. In any case, it adds to one's pleasure in read- ing it to know that the poetess was drawing her inspiration from her own excessive happiness in the bliss of motherhood. Many have singled out Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese as her chief work. Mrs. Ritchie, in a very interesting article in the National Dictionary of Bio- graphy, says of them, " There is a quality in them which is beyond words : an echo from afar, which belongs to the highest human expression of feeling." Many other of the best judges have said they are among the greatest sonnets in the English language. But the work for which the world is most deeply in her debt is Aurora Leigh. It probes to the bottom, but with a hand guided by purity and justice, those social problems which lie at the root of what are known as women's questions. Her intense feeling that the honour of manhood can never be reached while the honour of womanhood is sullied ; her no less profound con- viction that people can never be raised to a higher level by mere material prosperity, make this book one of the most precious in our language. She herself speaks of it in the dedication as " The most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered." If she had written nothing else, she would stand out as one of the epoch-making poets of the present century. Mr. Browning has published some interesting informa- 116 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xn tion as to the manner in which he and his wife worked. They were very careful not to influence each other's compositions unduly. Their styles in writing are entirely unlike. They abstained from reading each other's poems while they were in process of composition. Mrs. Browning always kept a low writing-table, with inkstand and pen upon it, by her side. Mr. Browning wrote : " My wife used to write it (Aurora Leigh) and lay it down to hear our child spell, or when a visitor came in it was thrust under the cushions. At Paris, a year ago last March, she gave me the first six books to read, I never having seen a line before. She then wrote the rest and transcribed them in London, where I read them also. I wish, in one sense, that I had written and she had read it." No one but a poet could have expressed so perfectly the great pleasure the reading gave him. There is an anecdote that when the Brownings left Florence for London, in 1856, the box containing the MS. of Aurora Leigh was lost at Mar- seilles. It also contained the velvet suits and lace collars of the little boy ; and it is said that Mrs. Browning was far more distressed at losing the latter than the former. However, both were fortunately recovered, for the box con- taining them was found by Mrs. Browning's brother in one of the dark recesses of the Marseilles Custom House. As evidence of her position in the literary world, it may be mentioned that when Wordsworth died in 1850 the Athenceum strongly urged that Mrs. Browning ought to be made Poet Laureate. Her sympathy with Italy was so strong that it is be- lieved that the news of the death of Cavour, through whom in so large a measure the unity of Italy was achieved, hastened her own. She was very ill when the news reached her, and she died in Florence on 30th June 1861. The municipality of Florence placed a tablet upon her house expressing their gratitude and admiration for her, and saying that in her womanly heart she had reconciled the wisdom of the learned with the enthusiasm of the poet, and with her verses had made a golden ring uniting Italy with England. XIII LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES IN AFGHANISTAN THE first Napoleon is said to have remarked to Madame de Stael that women had nothing to da with politics; whereupon the lady rejoined that women ought at least to be sufficiently acquainted with political subjects to understand the reason why their heads were cut off. When we read the account of the great sufferings of the English ladies who were held as prisoners or hostages by Akbar Khan in Afghanistan in 1842, we are reminded of Madame de Stael's epigram, and think that they ought at least to have had the consolation of understanding the political meddling and muddling, which led to the pro- longed pain and danger to which they were subjected. Afghanistan is a wild mountainous country beyond the north-west frontier of the British Empire in India. Its people consist of savage, desperate, lawless tribes, con- stantly at war with one another ; indeed, they are hardly ever united unless they are attacked by some foreign foe. They are particularly jealous of any kind of foreign in- fluence or interference. Every man among them is bred to arms, even children being provided with dangerous knives; they are trained to great endurance, they are splendid horsemen, and are proficient in many kinds of manly sports and martial exercises ; but with these super- I 2 118 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xin ficially attractive qualities they possess others of a differ- ent stamp, for they are treacherous, utterly regardless of truth, revengeful, bloodthirsty, sensual, and avaricious. It will thus be seen that both their good and their bad qualities render them particularly dangerous as foes. The character of their country is very much like their own. It is a land of rocky mountain passes, and a great part of it is savage and sterile. It is separated from India by narrow rocky denies, the principal one of which, the Khyber pass, is twenty-eight miles long, and runs between lofty, almost perpendicular precipices ; the pass itself is so covered with rocks and boulders that progress along it, even under the most favourable circumstances, must necessarily be very slow. The rocky precipices which command the pass are so steep that they cannot be mounted ; but they are per- forated by many natural caves, which for centuries have been the strongholds of bands of robbers. It is easy to understand that an army endeavouring to go through this pass is at a terrible disadvantage, and is almost entirely at the mercy of the wild tribes of warriors and robbers who infest the heights. About 1838-39 there was more than usual of internal fighting between the savage tribes of Afghanistan. Some tribes wished for Dost Mahomed as their king, or Ameer, and others wished for Shaj Soojah. It was considered by those who directed the policy of the British Government in India, a favourable time for us to interfere. It appears to have been thought that we should make the ruler of Afghan- istan our friend, if he felt that he owed his throne to our espousal of his cause. It was, however, forgotten that, how- ever much the Afghans quarrelled among themselves, they would forget all past enmities and unite against a foreigner who tried to intervene between them ; and they would hate and despise any ruler who owed his nominal sovereignty to the help of foreign soldiers. Therefore, although the English succeeded, in the first instance, in driving away Dost Mahomed and making Shaj Soojah king, they soon found that this first success was the beginning of their diffi- xin LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES 119 culties. Sir George Lawrence has told the story in his in- teresting book called Forty-three Years of my Life in India, and another narrative of the same events may be found in Lady Sale's Journal. An Afghan horseman, with whom Sir George (then Major) Lawrence conversed, expressed the feelings of his countrymen and the difficulties of our position in a few words. " What could induce you," he said, " to squander crores of rupees x in coming to a poor rocky country like ours, without wood or water, and all in order to force upon us a kumbukbt (unlucky person) as a king, who, the moment you turn your backs, will be upset by Dost Mahomed, our own king ? " However, for a time the English army in Afghanistan did not realise the difficult and dangerous position in which they were placed. Dost Mahomed fled ; and not long after he surrendered himself to the English, and was sent, with his wives and children, as a prisoner of war to India. Everybody now thought all trouble and danger were over, and the married officers and men of the English garrison sent for their wives and children to join them at Cabul. Shaj Soojah was established there and received the con- gratulations of the English. Lawrence, however, observed that the Ameer's own subjects did not join in these con- gratulations, and moreover Shaj Soojah himself began to show signs of getting tired of his English friends. No special danger was, however, anticipated ; the English envoy, Sir W. MacNaghten, was about to leave Cabul, having been appointed to the Governorship of Bombay. Had he left, he would have taken Lawrence with him as his secretary. When the preparations for his departure were nearly complete, the clouds that had long been gathering at last burst in storm. The Ghilzye tribe rose in rebellion because they had been deprived of an annual subsidy of 3000, nominally paid them by Shaj Soojah, but really supplied by the British. This insurrection had the effect of a match applied to a train of gunpowder. 1 A crore of rupees is a million. At that time a rupee was worth 2s. ; therefore a crore of rupees would equal 100,000. 120 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xm The whole of Afghanistan was presently in arms; the safest and most easily defended routes for the return to India were cut off. The insurrection spread to Cabul itself ; the houses of the English residents were attacked and burned, the Treasury was sacked, and several officers and men were murdered in the streets. An attempt to send help to the English from Jellalabad was unsuccessful ; the Afghans were victorious, and held the small British force entirely in their power. Sir^George Lawrence and Lady Sale complain bitterly of the incapacity of those who were highest in command of the English military operations ; they urged that the right thing to have done would have been to take the whole British force into the Bala Hissar, the citadel of Cabul, and hold it against all comers till reinforcements arrived. The time of year was mid-winter, and winter in Afghanistan is intensely severe. To have held the fort would have entailed far less difficulty and danger than to attempt to retreat by the fearful Khyber pass, the heights of which were held by bands of savage mountaineers. This rash and fatal course was, however, attempted, with the result, now well known, that of the whole army, with the exception of those who were held by the Afghans as prisoners or hostages, only one man, and he severely wounded, reached Jellalabad alive. Those who have seen Lady Butler's picture, " The Last of an Army," will be able to realise something of what the disaster of the Khyber pass was. Akbar Khan, a son of Dost Mahomed and the leading spirit of the Afghan chiefs, had said that he would destroy the army with the exception of one man who should be left to tell the tale, and he kept his word. Before this fatal retreat was decided upon, attempts at negotiation with the Afghans were made ; Akbar, in par- ticular, had repeatedly demanded that, as a pledge of good faith, the wives and children of the English officers and men should be delivered over to him as hostages. While the English were still in Cabul, this suggestion was naturally rejected with horror. Some officers declared they would xin LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES 121 rather shoot their wives with their own hands than put them in the power of Akbar. Akbar had shown himself desperately cruel and treacherous. He twice invited the English envoy, Sir W. MacNaghten, outside the encamp- ment to consult with him and other chiefs as to the terms of capitulation. On the first occasion the envoy and his escort returned in safety, but the terms of the treaty agreed upon were, on the part of the Afghans, entirely set at naught. When the second conference was about to take place, the English were treacherously attacked and over- powered, and our envoy was murdered by Akbar with his own hands. It was not very likely therefore that the re- peated demand of this man to have the English women and children placed in his control would be listened to, and it was not, in fact, conceded until it became evident that to continue to accompany the ill-fated army in its retreat meant certain death. The retreat from Cabul began on the 6th January 1842; the , thermometer was ten degrees below zero far colder than the coldest weather of an ordinary English winter. The night was spent in the open ; part of the march had been through snow and slush, which wetted those on foot up to their knees. Lady Sale, who was riding, says her habit was like a sheet of ice. Many died of cold and exhaustion on the first night. The poor Sepoys, accustomed to the warmth of an Indian sun, were unable to handle their muskets, and when attacked by the murderous bands of Afghans that continually pursued the army, were cut down as helplessly as sheep. The suffer- ings of the women and children were terrible. One poor woman had lately been confined. She, as well as the others, was exposed to all the horrors of the Afghan winter, and to the chances of dying by the Afghan knife or bullet. Lady Sale, with her daughter Mrs. Sturt, showed a fine example of courage and endurance. Lawrence said she and all the ladies bore up so nobly and heroically against hunger, cold, and fatigue, as to call forth the admiration even of the Afghans themselves. It seems to have been 122 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xin known or rumoured that Akbar would make a special effort to get hold of the women, for Lady Sale and her daughter were advised to disguise themselves as much as possible, and to ride with the men, which they did, riding with Captain Hay's troopers. On the second day of the retreat they were heavily fired upon, Lady Sale was wounded, her daughter's horse was shot under her, and her son-in-law, Captain Sturt, was mortally injured. Let any one who likes to dwell on " the pomp and circumstance of glorious war " look on the reverse side of the picture. Captain Sturt had received a severe wound in the abdomen, from which it was from the first certain he could not re- cover. He was in great agony ; it was impossible to move him without increasing his sufferings, equally impossible that he should not be moved. He was placed in a kind of rough litter, the jolting of which was a terrible aggravation of his pain. At night he lay on a bank in the snow, suffer- ing from intolerable thirst ; the water for which he craved could only be supplied, a few spoonfuls at a time, because his wife and mother had no means of getting a larger quantity. Those who have known what it is, even in the midst of every home comfort, to stand by the death-bed of those they love, can best imagine what it was to Lady Sale and her daughter to see the anguish and death of their son and husband under such circumstances as these. The horrors of the retreat became worse and worse. All the baggage was lost, and the whole road was covered with men, women, and children lying down in the snow to die. Again Akbar renewed his demand for the women and children, and this time he urged it on grounds of humanity. It now appeared certain that the only chance of saving their lives was to accept Akbar's proposals. Nine ladies, twenty gentlemen, and fourteen children were accordingly made over to him as prisoners or hostages. It is true that he assured them that they were to consider themselves his honoured guests, and that on the whole he behaved well to them, but their sufferings while in his charge were very considerable. They believed themselves to be in constant xiu LADY SALE AND HKK FKLLOW-HOSTAGES 123 danger of death, or else that they would be sold as slaves and sent to Bokhara. All their arms and means of defence were taken from them, and they were but too well ac- quainted with the treacherous and cruel nature of the man whose prisoners they were. The most noticeable feature of Lady Sale's journal is its buoyant courage and cheerfulness. The forty-three persons of whom the hostages consisted were reinforced by the birth of three infants, one of which was Mrs. Start's, and consequently was Lady Sale's grandchild. They were eight and a half months in captivity. Their accommodation very often consisted of no more than two small rooms among the whole party. Lady Sale speaks of being lodged twenty-one in a room fourteen feet by ten feet ; another time thirty-four persons had to share a room only fifteen feet by twelve feet ; sixteen persons, of both sexes and all ages, shared one small room for a long time. Lady Sale and her daughter indeed, most of the captives had lost everything but the clothes they stood in. Yet, in the midst of all the discomfort and danger to which the party was exposed, there is seldom a word of complaint in Lady Sale's journal which she wrote at the time, and more often than not their hardships are turned into matter of laughter and merriment. The retreat from Cabul was begun, it will be remembered, on 6th January ; on the 9th the ladies and children, with twenty gentlemen, among whom was Major Lawrence, were made over to Akbar Khan ; not until 18th January were they established in permanent quarters in the fort of Buddeeabad. The journal for 19th January begins: "We luxuriated in dressing, although we had no clothes but those on our backs; but we enjoyed washing our faces very much, having had but one opportunity of doing so since we left Cabul. It was rather a painful process, as the cold and glare of the sun on the snow had three times peeled my face, from which the skin came off in strips." Major Lawrence describes the rooms assigned to the ladies as " miserable sheds full of fleas and bugs." But even these 124 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xm and worse trials to the temper were good-humour edly en- countered. "It was above ten days," Lady Sale wrote, " after our departure from Cabul before I had an oppor- tunity to change my clothes, or even to take them off and put them on again and wash myself; and fortunate were those who did not possess much live stock. It was not till our arrival here (near Cabul, almost at the end of their captivity) that we completely got rid of lice, which we de- nominated infantry ; the fleas, for which Afghanistan is famed, we called light cavalry." The food served out to the prisoners was the reverse of appetising : greasy skin and bones, boiled in the same pot with rice, and all served together, was a usual dish. Lady Sale describes a kind of bread made of unpollarded flour mixed with water, and dried by being set up on edge near a fire. " Eating these cakes of dough," she says, " is a capital recipe for heart- burn." The bad cooking they remedied by obtaining leave to cook for themselves. One of the chief alleviations of their lot consisted so far, at least, as the ladies were concerned in needlework ; they were supplied with calico, chintz, and other materials, and were most thankful, not only for the clothes which they were thus enabled to make, but also for the occupation the work afforded. The ladies also cheerfully bore their part in other kinds of work, and became laundresses, cooks, and housemaids, and, in one instance, carpenters and masons for the nonce. The choice of rooms being very limited, one was allotted to Lady Sale and her companions which had no windows, and consequently no means of getting air and light, except what came through the door. " We soon set to," writes Lady Sale, "and by dint of hard working with sticks and stones, in which I bore my part, assisted by Mr. Melville, until both of us got blistered hands, we knocked two small windows out of the wall, and thus ob- tained ' darkness visible.' " Lady Sale had permission to correspond with her husband, General Sir Robert Sale, who was conducting vigorous measures against the enemy at Jellalabad. Lady Sale was very proud of her husband, xui LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES 125 and mentions with evident delight the nickname of " Fight- ing Bob," which his soldiers had given him. Any recogni- tion of his deserts gave her keen satisfaction. She refers to the presentation of a sword to him as " the only thing that has given me pleasure," although at that time her praises were upon everybody's lips. She was so thoroughly a soldier's wife that she understood military tactics : before she left Cabul she speaks of taking up a post of observation on the roof of the house, " as usual," in order to watch the military movements that were going forward. She says she understood the plan of attack as well as she under- stood the hemming of a handkerchief ; therefore she dili- gently wrote an account of everything of importance to her husband. These letters were so important for the military and political news they contained that they were often forwarded to the Commander-in-chief, to Lord Auck- land, the Governor-general, and to the Court of Directors of the East India Company. The principal danger to which the prisoners were ex- posed, next to the ferocity and treachery of Akbar Khan's character, arose from the extraordinary frequency of earth- quakes in the region in which they were confined. Lady Sale is one of the very few human beings who has ever made such an entry in a journal as this : " 3d and 4th March. Earthquakes as usual." Under other dates such expressions as " Earthquakes in plenty " are frequent ; and hardly less significant is the entry, under the date of 19th April, "No earthquakes to-day." The earthquakes were of a most formidable character. Lady Sale had a narrow escape of destruction from one which took place in February. She was on the roof of the room she lived in, hanging out some clothes to dry, when the whole building began to rock; she felt the roof was giving way, and rushed down the stairs, just in time to save her life, as the building fell with an awful crash the instant she left it. Lawrence writes : " We all assembled in the centre of the court, as far from the crumbling walls as possible, . . . when suddenly the en- tire structure disappeared as through a trap-door, disclosing 126 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xin to us a yawning chasm. The stoutest hearts among us quailed at the appalling sight, for the world seemed coming to an end." Almost the only angry words that appear in Lady Sale's journal are caused by attempts of the officers to negotiate a ransom for themselves and the rest of the party, without consulting the ladies as to the terms to be agreed upon. Women's suffrage had not been much talked of in 1842, but Lady Sale appeared to hold that taxation and represent- ation ought to go hand in hand ; for she says, " A council of officers was held at the General's regarding this same ransom business, which they refer to Macgregor. I protest against being implicated in any proceedings in which I have no vote." In the end the Indian Government paid the sum that it was agreed to give to Saleh Mahomed for effecting the deliverance of the prisoners. Another source of irrita- tion to Lady Sale was the dread lest the military authorities should hesitate to proceed vigorously against the Afghans at the right moment because it might endanger the lives of the hostages. "Now is the time," she wrote on the 10th May, " to strike the blow, but I much dread dilly-dallying just because a handful of us are in Akbar's power. What are our lives compared with the honour of our country ? Not that I am at all inclined to have my throat cut ; on the contrary, I hope I shall live to see the British flag once more triumphant in Afghanistan." Allusion has already been made to Lady Sale's power of extracting grim fun out of the discomforts of the situa- tion. The Afghans are great thieves, and one of the minor troubles of the captives lay in the fact that their captors calmly appropriated articles sent to the prisoners. They took possession of a case in which Lady Sale had left some small bottles. "I hope," she writes, "the Afghans will try their contents as medicine, and find them efficacious : one bottle contained nitric acid, another a strong solution of lunar caustic." Twice she was incapacitated by severe attacks of fever, which had proved fatal to several of the party ; but her courage never deserted her ; and she shook xin LADY SALE AND IIKR FELLOW-HOSTAGES 127 off fever and all other ills when she heard her husband was near. Saleh Mahomed had already agreed, for a sum of money, to remove them from Akbar's power, and they had left the place in which they had been confined ; but Akbar would probably have recaptured them had not Sir R. Sale and Sir K. Shakespear with their brigades joined them just at the nick of time. Who can tell what the meeting must have been between the gallant husband and wife ? The narrative can best be given in Lady Sale's own words : " Had we not received assistance, our recapture was certain. ... It is impossible to express our feelings on Sale's approach. To my daughter and myself happiness, so long delayed as to be almost un- expected, was actually painful, and accompanied by a choking sensation which could not obtain the relief of tears. When we arrived where the infantry were posted, they cheered all the captives as they passed, them, and the men of the 1 3th " (her husband's regiment) " pressed for- ward to welcome us individually. Most of the men had a little word of hearty congratulation to offer each in his own style on the restoration of his colonel's wife and daughter ; and then my highly- wrought feelings found the desired relief; I could scarcely speak to thank the soldiers for their sympathy, whilst the long- withheld tears now found their course." XIV ELIZABETH GILBERT ELIZABETH GILBERT, daughter of the Bishop of Chichester, was one of the blind who help the blind. It is true, physically, that the blind cannot lead the blind ; but, perhaps, none are so well fitted as the blind, who are gifted with courage, sympathy, and hope, to show the way to careers of happy and active usefulness to those who are suffering from a similar calamity with themselves. The Bishop's little daughter, born at Oxford in 1826, was not blind from her birth. She is described in the first years of infancy as possessing dark flashing eyes, that, no doubt, were as eager to see and know as other baby eyes. Her sight was taken from her by an attack of scarlet fever when she was two years and eight months old. Her mother had lately been confined, and, conse- quently, was entirely isolated from the little invalid. The care of the child devolved upon her father, who nursed her most tenderly, and, by his ceaseless watchfulness and care, probably saved her life. But when the danger to life was passed, it was found that the poor little girl had lost her sight. Everything was done that could be done ; the most skilful oculists and physicians of the day were consulted, but could do nothing except confirm the fears of her parents that their little girl was blind for life. With this one great exception of blindness, Elizabeth xiv Ki,i/.\r.KTii <:IU;KI;T 129 (Jill)crt's childhood was peculiarly happy and fortunntf. Her parents wisely determined to educate her, as much as |HMl>lr, with their other children, and to avoid everything which could bring into prominence that she was not as the others were. There was a largo family of the Gilbert children, and Bessie, as she was always called, like the others, was required to dress herself and wait on herself in many little ways that bring out a child's independence and helpfulness. She used to sit always by her father's side at dessert, and pour him out a glass of wine, which she did very cleverly without spilling a drop. When asked how she could do this, she replied it was quite easy she judged by the weight when the glass was full. She learnt French, German, Italian, and music, with her sisters, and joined them in their games, both indoors and out. When she required special watching and care, they were given silently, without letting her find out that she was being singled out for protection. When she was old enough, the direction of the household and other domestic duties were entrusted to her in her parents' absence, in turn with her other sisters. Thus her ardour, relf-reliance, and courage were undamped, and she was prepared for the life's work to which she afterwards devoted herself the industrial training of the adult blind. In 1842 an event happened which doubtless had a good effect in developing Miss Gilbert's natural independence of character, which had been so carefully preserved by her parents training. Her godmother died and left her a considerable sum of money, of which she was to enjoy the income as soon as she came of age. It was, therefore, in her power to carry out the scheme which she formed in after years for the benefit of the blind, without being obliged to rely at the outset on others for pecuniary support She never could have done what she did if she had been obliged to ask her parents for the money the development of her plans necessarily required. They were most kindly and wisely generous to her, but it would have been impossible to one of her honourable and sensitive nature to spend K 130 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xiv freely and liberally as she did money which was not her own. The saddest and most desponding period of her life was that which came after she had ceased to be a child, and before she had taken up the life's work to which reference has just been made. She was one of a bevy of eight sisters ; and they naturally, as they passed from childhood to womanhood, entered more and more into a world which was closed to their blind sister. At that time, even more than now, marriage was the one career for which all young women were consciously or unconsciously preparing. It was hard for a young girl to live in a social circle in which marriage was looked upon as the one honourable goal of female ambition, and to feel at the same time that it was one from which she was herself debarred. Those who saw her at this time, say she would often sit silent and apart in the drawing-room of her father's house in Queen Anne Street, with the tears streaming down her face, and that she would spend hours together on her knees weeping. "To the righteous there ariseth a light in darkness." The light-bringers to the sad heart of Bessie Gilbert were manifold ; and as is usual in such cases, the light of her own life was found in working for the welfare of others. The most healing and cheering of words to those who are sick at heart are, " Come and work in My vineyard." Small things often help great ones ; and a clever mechanical invention by a Frenchman named Foucault, for enabling blind people to write, was not an unimportant link in the chain that drew Miss Gilbert out of her despondency. By means of this writing frame, she entered into correspondence with a young blind man, named William Hanks Levy, who had lately married the matron of the St. John's Wood School for the Blind. Levy entered with great zeal, enthusiasm, and originality into all the schemes Miss Gilbert began to form for the welfare of the blind. Her thoughts were further turned in the direction of working for the blind poor, by a book called Meliora, written by Lord Tngestre, the aim of which was to xiv KI.I/A15KTH CILBERT 181 show how the gulf between rich and poor could be bridged over. But most important of all, perhaps, of the influences that were making a new outlook for her life, was her friendship with Miss Bathurst, daughter of Sir James Bathurst. This lady was deeply interested in all efforts to raise up and improve the lot of women, and especially devoted herself to opening the means of higher education to them. She was one of those who hoped all things and believed all things, and, consequently, she rebelled against the impious notion that if a woman were not married there was no use or place for her in the world. It was her clear strong faith in women's work and in women's worth, that helped more than anything else to give dignity, purpose, and happiness to Bessie Gilbert's life. The life of the blind girl became ennobled by the purpose to work for the good of others, and to help both women and men who were afflicted similarly with herself to make the best use of their lives that circumstances permitted. ' Very little, comparatively, at that time had been done for the blind. The excellent college at Norwood did not exist. The poor blind very frequently became beggars, and the well-to-do blind, with few exceptions, were regarded as doomed to a life of uselessness ; in some instances, as in Miss Gilbert's own, kindly and intelligent men thought it neither wrong nor unnatural to express a hope that " the Almighty would take the child who was afflicted with blindness." What was specially needed at the time Miss Gilbert's attention was directed to the subject was the means of industrial training, to enable those who had lost their sight in manhood or womanhood to earn their own living. The proficiency of the blind in music is well known, but to attain a high degree of excellence in this requires a training from early childhood. To those who become blind in infancy a musical education affords the best chance of future independence ; but thousands become blind in later life, when they are too old to acquire professional skill as musicians ; and, besides these, there are those who are too completely without the taste for 132 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xiv music to render it possible for them to become either performers or teachers of it. It was especially for the poor adult blind that Miss Gilbert laboured. She studied earnestly to discover the various kinds of manual labour in which the blind stood at the least disadvantage in com- parison with sighted persons. Her efforts had a humble beginning, for the first shop she opened was in a cellar in Holborn, which she rented at Is. 6d. a week. She was ably seconded by Levy, and by a blind carpenter named Farrar ; the cellar was. used as a store for the mats, baskets, and brushes made by blind people in their own homes. A move was, however, soon made to a small house near Brunswick Square, but the work soon outgrew these premises also, and a house was taken, with a shop and workrooms, in what is now the Euston Road. Miss Gilbert exerted herself assiduously to promote the sale of the articles made by her clients. The goods were sold at the usual retail price, and their quality was in many respects superior to that of similar goods offered in ordinary shops ; in this way a regular circle of customers was in time obtained, who were willing to buy of the blind what the blind were able to produce. It must not be supposed, however, that this process, which sounds so easy and simple in words, was really easy and simple in practice. The blind men and women had to be taught their trades ; in the case of many of them, their health was below the average, and, in the case of a few, they were not quite clear that working had any advantages over begging, for a living. Miss Gilbert and her foreman, W. Levy, had industrial, physical, and moral difficulties to contend with that would have daunted any who were less firmly grounded in the belief in the permanent usefulness of what they had undertaken. Miss Gilbert found that many of the blind people she employed could not, with the best will in the world, earn enough to support them- selves. The deficiency was for years made up from her own private means. W. Levy had what appears a mis- taken enthusiasm for employing none but blind persons xiv KU/AMKTII (.IM'.ERT 133 in the various industries carried on in the workshop. There are some industrial processes for performing which blindness is an absolute bar, some in which it is a great disadvantage, others in which it is a slight disadvantage, and a few in which it is no disadvantage at all. The aim of those who wish to benefit the blind should be, in my judgment, to promote co-operation of labour between the Mind and the seeing, so that to the blind may be left those processes in which the loss of sight places them at the least disadvantage. The blind Milton composed Paradise Lost, and other noble poems, which will live as long as the English language lasts. He never could have done this if the mechanical labour of writing down his compositions had not been given over to those who had the use of their eyes. This is an extreme instance, but it may be taken as an example of the way in which the blind and the seeing should work together, each doing the best their natural faculties and limitations fit them for. Levy had an intense pride in having everything in Miss Gilbert's institution done only by the blind. So far did he carry this prejudice that it was only with difficulty that he was induced to have a seeing assistant for keeping the accounts. Previous to this, as was natural and inevitable, they were in the most hopeless confusion. Levy was, however, in many ways an invaluable leader and fellow- worker. His courage and energy were boundless. On one occasion he undertook successfully a journey to France in order to discover the place where some pretty baskets were made. He and his wife landed at Calais almost entirely ignorant of the French language, and knowing nothing except that certain baskets, for which there was then a good demand in England, were being manufactured in one of the eighty-nine departments of France. After many wanderings, both accidental and inevitable, he discovered the place. He was received with great kindness by the people who made the baskets, and, having learnt how to make them himself, he returned to England to communicate his knowledge to his and Miss Gilbert's 134 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xiv company of blind workpeople. A letter of Levy's to Miss Gilbert, describinga fire that had broken out close to the insti- tution, and had for some time placed it in great danger, is a wonderful instance of a blind man's energy and power of acting promptly and courageously in the face of danger. Little by little the work Miss Gilbert had begun grew and prospered. A regxilar society was formed, of which the Queen became the patron, and of which Miss Gilbert was the most active and devoted member. This association received the name of the Society for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind. Its present habitation is in Berners Street, London. Its founder, for several years before her death, was obliged, through ill-health, to with- draw from all active participation in its business ; but so well and firmly had she laid the foundations, that others were able to carry on what she had begun. The Society is one of the most useful in London for the poor adult blind, because it provides them with industrial training, according to their individual capacities, and secures them, as far as possible, a constant and regular market for the goods they are able to produce. The wages earned are in some cases supplemented by small grants, and pensions are, in several instances, given to those blind men and women who have survived their power of work. The result of Miss Gilbert's life has been to ameliorate very much the lot of the blind poor by substituting the means of self-supporting industry for the doles and alms which at one time were looked upon as the only means of showing kindness and pity to the blind. Miss Gilbert herself was keenly sensible of the value and life-giving power of work. Surrounded as she had been from childhood with every care and kindness which loving and generous parents could suggest, she yet found that when she began to work, the change was like a passing from death to life. The book from which all the facts and details in this sketch are taken l tells that soon after she began her work one of her 1 Elizabeth Gilbert and Her Work for the Blind. By Frances Martin. Macmillaii aud Co. xiv ELIZABETH GILBERT 135 friends " hoped she was not working herself to death." She replied, with a happy laugh, " Work myself to death 1 I am working myself to life." It is just this possibility of " working to life " that she has placed within the reach of so many blind men and women. Miss Gilbert's health was always very fragile. After 1872 she became by degrees a confirmed invalid, and after much suffering, borne with exquisite patience and cheer- fulness, she died early in the year 1885. XV JANE AUSTEN THERE is very little story to tell in the life of Jane Austen. She was one of the greatest writers of English fiction ; but her own life, like the life she describes with such extra- ordinary and minute accuracy in her tales, had no startling incidents, no catastrophes. The solid ground never shook beneath her feet ; neither she, nor the relations and neighbours with whom her tranquil life was passed, were ever swept away by the whirlwind of wild passions, nor overwhelmed by tragic destiny. The ordinary, everyday joys and sorrows that form a part of the lives of all of us, were hers ; but nothing befell her more sensational or wondrous than what falls to the lot of most of us. This even tenor of her own way she reproduces with marvellous skill in the pages of her novels. It has been well said that " every village could furnish matter for a novel to Miss Austen." The material which she used is within the reach of every one ; but she stands alone, hitherto quite unequalled, for the power of investing with charm and interest these incidents in the everyday life of everyday people which are the whole subject-matter of her six finished novels. A silly elopement on the part of one of the five Miss Bennets in Pride and Prejudice, and the fall which stuns Louisa Musgrove in Persuasion, when she insists on jumping off the cob at Lyme, are almost the xv JANE AUSTEN 137 jonly incidents in her books that can even be called unusual. Her novels remind us of pictures we sometimes see which contain no one object of supreme or extra- ordinary loveliness, but which charm by showing us the beauty and interest in that which lies around us on every side. There is a picture by Frederick Walker, called " A Rainy Day," which is a very good instance of this ; it is nothing but a village street just by a curve in the road ; the houses are such as may be seen in half the villages in England : a dog goes along looking as dejected as dogs always do in the rain, the light is reflected in the puddles of the wet road, one foot-passenger only has ventured out. There is nothing in the picture but what we may all of us have seen hundreds and thousands of times, and yet one could look and look at it for hours and never weary of the charm of quiet, truthful beauty it contains. This is one of the things which true artists, whether th.eir art is paint- ing pictures or writing books, can do for those who are not artists that is, help them to see and feel the beauty and interest of the ordinary surroundings of everyday life. Robert Browning makes a great Italian painter say We're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see ; And so they are better painted better to us, Whirh is the same thing. Art was given for that ; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out. Have you noticed, now, Your culliou's hanging face ? A bit of chalk, And trust me, but you should, though ! How much more If I drew higher things with the same truth ! That were to take the Prior's pulpit place, Interpret God to all of you. Jane Austen l was a clergyman's daughter, born in 1775 at the Vicarage of Steventon, about seven miles from 1 A very interesting memoir of Miss Austen has been written by her mallow, Mr. Austen Leigh. All who love her works should read it, ami thereby come to know and love the woman. 138 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xv Basingstoke, in Hampshire. Here she lived, for the first twenty-five years of her life, the quiet family life of most young ladies of similar circumstances; two of her brothers were in the Navy, one was a country gentleman, having inherited an estate from a cousin, another was a clergyman. The most dearly loved by Jane of all her family was her sister Cassandra, older than herself by three years. The sisters were so inseparable that when Cassandra went to school, Jane, though too young to profit much by the instruction given, was sent also, because it would have been cruel to separate the sisters ; her mother said, " If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off, Jane would insist on sharing her fate." The devotion between the sisters was lifelong. Their characters were not much alike ; Cassandra was colder, calmer, and more reserved than her sister, whose sweet temper and affectionate dis- position specially endeared her to all her family ; but Jane throughout her life relied upon Cassandra as one who was wiser and stronger than herself. The quiet family life at Steventon was diversified by one or two visits to Bath, then a very fashionable resort ; a short visit to Lyme is spoken of later on ; and in the early days in the vicarage the Austen children not infrequently amused themselves with private theatricals. Readers of Nartlianger Abbey, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park will find these mild amuse- ments woven into the web of the story; for, as Jane JAusten says herself, she was like a bird who uses the odd /bits of wool or moss in the hedgerows near to weave into the tiny fabric of its nest. The plays which the Austens acted were frequently written by themselves. This may probably have given to Jane her early impulse to author- ship. It is not improbable that it also smoothed the way of her career as a writer in another sense ; for at that time very great prejudice still existed in many people's minds against women who were writers. Lord Granville, speak- ing in December 1887, at the unveiling of the statue of the Queen at Holloway College, cited a great French writer who had laid it down as an axiom that a woman XV JANE AUST1.N 189 could commit no greater fault than to be learned ; the same writer had said of course partly in joke that it is enough knowledge for any woman if she is acquainted with the fact that Pekin is not in Europe, or that Alex- ander the Great was not the son-in-law of Louis the XIV. Referring to events within his own knowledge and memory, Lord Granville added, " One of the most eminent English statesmen of the century, a brilliant man of letters himself, after reading with admiration a beautiful piece of poetry written by his daughter, appealed to her affection for him to prevent her ever writing again, his fear was so great lest she should be thought a literary woman." If a similar prejudice were in any degree felt by the Austen family, it is not unlikely that it was gradually dissolved by the early habit of the children of writing plays for home acting. We read, indeed, that Jane did nearly all her writing in the general sitting-room of the family, and that she was careful to keep her occupation secret from all but her own immediate relations. For this purpose she wrote on small pieces of paper, which could easily be put away, or covered by a piece of blotting-paper or needlework. The little mahogany desk at which she wrote is still preserved in the family. She never put her name on a title-page, but there is no evidence that her family would have disapproved of her doing so. They seem to have delighted in all she did, and to have helped her by every means in their power. She was a great favourite with her brothers and sister, and with all the tribe of nephews and nieces that grew up about her. She had no trace of any assumption of superiority, and gave herself no airs of any kind. She had too much humour and sense of fun for there to be any danger of this in her case. She was thoroughly womanly in her habits, manners, and occupations. Like Miss Martineau, her early training preserved her from being a literary lady who could not sew. Her needlework was remarkably fine and dainty, and specimens of it are still preserved which show that her fingers had the same deftness and skill as 140 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xv the mind which created Emma Woodhouse and her father, Mrs. Norris and Elizabeth Bennet. She had taken to authorship as a duck takes to water, and had written some of her most remarkable books before she was twenty ; and she had done this so simply and naturally that she seems to have produced in her family the impression that writing first-rate novels was one of the easiest things in the world. We find, for instance, that she writes in 1814 many letters of advice to a novel -writing niece ; and she advises another little niece to cease writing till she is sixteen years old, the child being at that time only ten or twelve. In 1816 she addresses a very interesting letter to a nephew who is writing a novel, and has had the misfortune to lose two chapters and a half ! She makes kindly fun of the young gentleman, and suggests that if she finds his lost treasure she shall engraft his chapters into her own novel ; but she adds : "I do not think, however, that any theft of that sort would be really very useful to me. What should I do with your strong, manly, vigorous sketches, full of variety and glow ? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour ? " Early in 1801 the home at Steventon was broken up. Mr. Austen resigned his living in consequence of failing health, and the family removed to Bath. Mr. Austen died in 1805, and Mrs. Austen and her daughters lived for a time at Southampton. They had no really home- like home, however, between leaving Steventon in 1801 and settling at Chawton, in Hampshire, in 1809; and it is very characteristic of Jane Austen's home-loving nature that this homeless period was also a period of literary inactivity. She wrote Sense and Sensibility, NortJianger Abbey, and Pride and Prejudice before she left -Steventon, though none of them were published till after she came to live at Chawton. Here in her second home she wrote Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. In consequence of having three novels finished before one was printed, when XV .IANE AUSTKN 111 she uncc. Itc^aii to ]iiil>lisli, IKT works appraivil in rapid succession. ,sv//>r uml >V//.v////'//7// was the first to appeal 1 , in 1811, and the others followed quickly after one another, for her work was at once appreciated by the public, and the great leaders of the literary world, such as Sir Walter Scott, Southey, and Coleridge, welcomed her with cordial and generous praise. One curious little adventure should In- mentioned. In 1803, during her residence at Bath, she had sold the manuscript of Northanger Abbey to a Bath publisher for 10. This good man, on reconsideration, evidently thought he had made a bad bargain, and resolved to lose his ten pounds rather than risk a larger sum in printing and publishing the book. The manuscript there- fore lay on his shelves for many years quite forgotten. But the time came when Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park had placed their author in the first rank of English writers, and it occurred to Miss Austen and her family that it might be* well to rescue Nortfianger Abbey from its unappreciative possessor. One of her brothers called on the Bath publisher and negotiated with him the re-purchase of the manuscript, giving for it the same sum which had been paid to the author about ten years earlier. The publisher was delighted to get back his 10, which he had never expected to see again, and Jane Austen's brother was delighted to get back the manuscript. Both parties to the bargain were fully satisfied ; but the poor publisher's feelings would have been very different if he had known that the neglected Tiiumiscript, with which he had so joyfully parted, was by the author of the most successful novels of the day. There is a quiet vein of fun and humorous observation running through all Miss Austen's writings. It is as visible in her private letters to her friends as in her works intended for publication. The little turns of expression are not reproduced, but the humour of the one is very similar to that of the other. Thus, for instance, in one of her letters she describes a visit to a young lady at school in London. Jane Austen had left her a raw school- 142 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xv girl, and found her, on this visit, developed into a fashion- able young lady. " Her hair," writes Jane to Cassandra, " is done up with an elegance to do credit to any educa- tion." Who can read this without thinking of Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, and the inevitable contempt she inspired in her fashionable cousins because she did not know French and had but one sash 1 Eeference has already been made to the high apprecia- tion of Miss Austen's genius which has been expressed by the highest literary authorities in her own time and in ours. Sir Walter Scott wrote in his journal : " I have read again, and for the third time, Miss Austen's very finely- written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with. The big Bow- Wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the descriptive and the sentiment is denied to me." Lord Macaulay, the great historian, wrote in his diary : " Read Dickens's Hard Times, and another book of Pliny's Letters. Read North- anger Abbey, worth all Dickens and Pliny put together. Yet it was the work of a girl. She was certainly not more than twenty -six. Wonderful creature!" Guizot, the French historian, was a great novel reader, and he delighted in English novels, especially those written by women. Referring to the women writers of the beginning of this century, of whom Miss Austen was the chief, he said that their works " form a school which, in the excellence and profusion of its productions, resembles the cloud of dramatic authors of the great Athenian age." The late Mr. G. H. Lewes said he would rather have written Pride and Prejudice than any of the Waverley novels. George Eliot calls Jane Austen the greatest artist that has ever written, "using the term 'artist' to signify the most perfect master over the means to her end." It is perhaps only fair to state that some good judges do not entertain xv JANK AUSTEN 143 so high an opinion of her work. Madame de Stael pro- nounced against her, using the singularly inappropriate word " vulgar," in condemnation of her work. If there is a writer in the world free from vulgarity in its ordinary sense, it is Jane Austen ; it must be supposed that Madame de Stael used the word in its French sense, i.e. " commonplace " or " ordinary," such a meaning of the word as is retained in our English expression "the vulgar tongue." Charlotte Bronte felt in Miss Austen a defici- ency in poetic imagination, in the high tone of sentiment which elevates the prose of everyday life into poetry. She found her "shrewd and observant rather than sagacious and profound." Miss Austen's writings were so essentially different from the highly imaginative work of her sister author, that it is not surprising that the younger failed somewhat in appreciation of the elder writer. Jane Austen's failing health in 1816 caused much anxiety to her family. It is characteristic of her gentle thoughtfulness for all about her that she never could be induced to use the one sofa with which the family sitting- room was provided. Her mother, who was more than seventy years old, often used the sofa, and Jane would never occupy it, even in her mother's absence, preferring to contrive for herself a sort of couch formed with two or three chairs. A little niece, puzzled that " Aunt Jane " preferred this arrangement, drew from her the explanation that if she used the sofa in her mother's absence, Mrs. Austen would probably abstain from using it as much as was good for her. Her last book, Persuasion, was finished while she was suffering very much from what proved to be her dying illness. Weak health did not in any way diminish her industry, and she exacted from herself the utmost perfection that she felt she was capable of giving to her work. The last chapters of Persuasion were cancelled and re-written because her first conclusion of the story did not satisfy her. In May 1817 she and her sister removed to Winchester in order that Jane might have skilled medical advice. Here she died 911 18th July 144 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xv and was buried opposite Wykeham's Chantry, in the cathedral. Her sweetness of temper and her gentle gaiety never failed her throughout a long and trying illness. When the end was near, one of those with her asked if there was anything she wanted ; her reply was, " Nothing but death" XVI MARIA EDGEWORTH IT will be impossible, in the short limits of these pages, to give anything like a full account of the long life of Maria Edgeworth. She lived for nearly eighty-thr.ee years, from 1st January 1767 to 22d May 1849; and through her own and her father's friends she was brought into touch with nearly all the leading men and women connected with the stirring political and literary events of that period. What this implies will be best realised if we consider that her lifetime comprised the whole period of the French Revolution, the War of Independence in the United States, the long wars of England with Napoleon, the landing of the French in Ireland (her native country), the passing of the Act of Union between England and Ireland, Catholic Emancipation, the Abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions, the passing of the first Reform Bill, the Irish Famine of 1847, and the outbreak of revolutionary socialism on the Continent in 1848. These are some of the most burning of the political events of which she was a witness ; the literary and social history of the same period is hardly less remarkable. She lived in the centre of a world made brilliant by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Burns, Keats, Scott, and Jane Austen. She knew Mrs. Fry, Wilberforce, and Sydney Smith, as representing some of the most important of the social movements of her time : L 146 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvi among her friends in the scientific world were Ricardo, the political economist, Darwin, the naturalist, whose fame has been overshadowed by that of his grandson, the great Charles Darwin of our own times, Sir Humphry Davy, the Herschels, Mrs. Somerville, and James Mill. She knew Mrs. Siddons, and heard her recite in her own house the part of Queen Katherine in the play of Henry the Eighth. She was the intimate friend, and connection by marriage, of "Kitty Pakenham," the first Duchess of Wellington, wife of " the Great Duke." She lived to see the old stage coaches supplanted by our modern railways ; she was the interested eye-witness of the gradual introduction of the steam-engine into all departments of industry, a change which Sir Walter Scott said he looked on " half proud, half sad, half angry, and half pleased." She might well feel, as old age approached, that she had " warmed both hands at the fire of life." No life could have been fuller than hers of every sort of interest and activity. She said in a letter to a friend, written after a dangerous illness : " When I felt it was more than probable that I should not recover, with a pulse above 120, and at the entrance of my seventy- sixth year, I was not alarmed. I felt ready to rise tranquil from the banquet of life, where I had been a happy guest. I confidently relied on the goodness of my Creator " (Study of Maria Edgeworth, by Grace A. Oliver, p. 521). Maria Edgeworth's family was one of English origin, which had settled in Ireland in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Edgeworths intermarried into Irish, Welsh, and English families, but always maintained strong Irish sympathies. There were many remarkable men and women in the Edgeworth family before the birth of our heroine, but space forbids the mention of more than one, her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose name and fame are intimately associated with those of his daughter. Mr. Edgeworth was a most extraordinary man ; at one moment one admires him, at another one laughs at him, but one must always be astonished by him. " To put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes " would have been a congenial task XVI MAKIA EDOKWoliTII 147 -to him. lie made clocks, built bridges, raised spires, invented telegraphs, manufactured balloons, ink, and soap, constructed locks on his bedroom doors of such a complicated nature, that his guests were afraid to shut their doors lest they never should be able to open them again. When on a journey in France about 1770, he stayed at Lyons, and carried out a plan for diverting the Rhone from its course, thereby saving a large tract of country that had previously been inaccessible; for this service the city of Lyons rewarded him by a grant of land ; this property, however, was confiscated a few years later during the Revolution. He raised a corps of volunteer infantry in Ireland, to which Roman Catholics as well as Protestants were admitted, although at that time the sentiment of religious equality was regarded as akin to infidelity and disloyalty. He was born in England, and educated partly here and partly in Ireland ; like most of the Edgeworths, he came of a mixed race, his mother being a Welsh woman of considerable literary acquirements and faculties ; his first remarkable performance was a runaway marriage, which he contracted at the age of nineteen, with a Miss Elers, a lady of German origin, whom he appears rather to have disliked than otherwise. A runaway marriage with a girl whom he really loved would have been too commonplace a proceeding in those days for this eccentric young gentleman. Speaking of this lady, Mr. Edgeworth wrote : " My wife was prudent, domestic, and affectionate, but she was not of a cheerful temper. She lamented about trifles ; and the lamenting of a female, with whom we live, does not render home de- lightful." It is not recorded if Mrs. Edgeworth found the lamenting of the male with whom she lived any more delightful, nor indeed is it evident that her husband devoted much of his overflowing energy to lamentation. As he did not find his home delightful, he spent very little time in it, and was not long before he found pleasant society elsewhere. One can never think of Mr. Edgeworth apart from his 148 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvr extraordinary domestic history. He had four wives, one after another, in rapid succession, and twenty-two children. There were four children, of whom Maria was one, by the first marriage with the "lamenting female." The eldest of these, born when his father was under twenty, was brought up on the principles advocated by Rousseau, which may perhaps be summarised as never forcing a child to do any- thing that he does not wish to do. One experiment of this kind appears to have sufficed for the family ; the other twenty-one children, or such of them as survived infancy, were treated according to other theories. Indeed, it seems to have been part of Maria's education that she was to undertake, for a part of every day, some study or occupation that was uncongenial to her. Mr. Edgeworth's theories of education seem to have been almost as numerous as his family ; a story is told in the book already quoted, of the visit of a gentleman to Edgeworthstown House in Ireland ; on rejoining the ladies after dinner, the guest was imprudent enough to exclaim on the beauty of the golden hair of one of the younger girls. Mr. Edgeworth instantly took his daughter by the hand, walked across the room, opened a drawer, held her head over it, and with a large pair of scissors cut off all her hair close to her head. " As the golden ringlets fell into the drawer, this extraordinary father said, ' Charlotte, what do you say ? ' She answered, ' Thank you, father.' Turning to his guests, he remarked, ' I will not allow a daughter of mine to be vain.' " Among the friendships that had a powerful influence on Mr. Edgeworth's character must be mentioned that with Mr. Day, the author of a book which is still well known, Sandford and Merton. Mr. Day was an even more extra- ordinary man than Mr. Edgeworth. He entirely set at naught all the usual habits of society ; we are told that he " seldom combed his raven locks." He professed to think love had been the greatest curse to mankind, and announced in season and out of season his determination never to marry. It appears that the assistance of a great many ladies was needed to help him for a time to keep his xvi MAKIA EDCEWOKTH 149 word. Ho made offers of marriage to Margaret Edgeworth, his friend's sister, to Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd (who became later the second and third wives of Mr. Edgeworth) ; and failing to induce any of these ladies to accept him, he adopted two orphan girls from the Foundling with the object of educating one of them to such a pitch of perfection that she should be fit to be his wife. In order to foster the quality of " fortitude in females," he used to drop hot sealing-wax on their bare arms, and fire off pistols, charged with powder only, at their petticoats. One of the two little girls could never entirely overcome the tendency to make use of some vehement expression of pain or alarm under these circumstances. This Mr. Day considered a fatal disqualification for ever promoting her to be his wife. The other, to whom the romantic name of Sabrina Sydney had been given, was more promising, and at one time it seemed as if the perilous honour of being Mrs. Day would be hers. However, she was saved by her disobedience to his injunctions against wearing a particular kind of sleeve and handkerchief which were then in fashion. Upon this piece of self-will, we are told that " he at once and decidedly gave her up." Mr. Day's proposals to Honora and Elizabeth Sneyd, two beautiful sisters with whom he and Mr. Edgeworth were brought much in contact at Lichfield, have been already mentioned. Mr. Day pretended to despise beauty and to condemn love ; but Honora's beauty so far overcame his prejudices that he at least professed love for her. His offer of marriage, however, was more like an ultimatum of war than an expression of affection. He sent her a huge packet, in which he detailed all the conditions he should expect her to fulfil if she married him. One of these was entire seclusion from all society but his own. She replied that she "would not admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions : she did not feel that seclusion from society was indispensably necessary to preserve female virtue, or to secure domestic happiness. And she declined leaving her mode of life for any ' dark and untried system.' " 150 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvi Mr. Day was deeply wounded, but it was his vanity that suffered rather than his heart ; for in three weeks he made a similar overture to Honora's sister, Elizabeth. Now, however, the tables were turned. Whether the sisters conspired together to punish him is not known ; but Elizabeth imposed conditions on her lover before she would consent to receive his attentions ; she declared she could never marry a man who could neither fence, dance, nor ride, and had none of the accomplishments of a gentleman. These were the very qualities Mr. Day had chiefly exercised his philosophy' in deriding and denouncing. " How could he," cried Miss Elizabeth, with cruel logic, " with propriety abuse and ridicule talents in which he appeared deficient ? " Mr. Day therefore repaired to France with Mr. Edgeworth in order to acquire those polite accomplishments of which it had been the pride of his heart to know nothing. Poor Mr. Day ! How many a month I strove to suit These stubborn fingers to the lute ! To-day I venture all I know. She will not hear my music ? So ! Break the string ; fold music's wing : Suppose Pauline had bade me sing. When he came back from France, cruel Elizabeth laughed in his face, and said she had liked him best as he was before. Notwithstanding all these unsuccessful attempts, Mr. Day found a wife at length. She was a lady of large fortune, which, of course, he "despised" and appropriated. She conformed to all her husband's whims,- and honestly believed him to be the best and most distinguished of men. " That's what a man wants in a wife mostly," as Mrs. Poyser says ; "one who'd pretend she didn't know which end she stood uppermost till her husband told her." Mr. Day fell a victim at last to one of his numerous theories. He dis- approved of the professional method of breaking in colts, and undertook to train one upon an improved plan of his own. The animal plunged violently and threw him ; he had concussion of the brain, and died a few minutes after xvi MARIA KIH;K\V<>I;TII 151 liis fall. I'onr Mrs. Day was so inconsolable that she took to her bed, and died two years later. She must have IM-CM a woman of the type of Milton's Eve : " Herself, though fairest, unsupported flower." When her prop was gone, she drooped and died. During Mr. Edgeworth's residence at Lyons his first wile, Maria's mother, died, and in a few months he married the beautiful Honora Sneyd. The social circle at Lichfield, in which Honora had lived before her marriage, contained many distinguished persons, among them Dr. Darwin, and Miss Anna Seward, the poetess. Honora herself had been engaged, or partly engaged, to Major Andre, the unfortunate officer whose execution as a spy by the Americans, during the War of Independence, caused such deep indignation in England. Her marriage to Mr. Edgeworth in 1773, and her death in 1780, took place before the melancholy end of Major Andre's life. The association of Honora's name with that of Major Andre is mentioned here as an illustra- tion of the way in which the Edgeworth family were connected, in some form or another, with many of the most interesting events of the times in which they lived. Another such incident is to be found in the fact that the Abb6 Edgeworth, a relative who had become a Roman Catholic priest, and had lived many years in France, attended Louis XVI upon the scaffold, and received his last words. Of the charm and goodness of the beautiful Honora there can be no doubt. She won all hearts. Her little step- daughter, Maria, loved her dearly, and admired her as much as she loved her. She remembered, in after years, standing at her step-mother's dressing-table and looking up at her with a sudden thought, " How beautiful ! " The second Mrs. Edgeworth became, under her husband's tuition, a very good mechanic ; and together they wrote a little book for children, called Harry and Lucy. Very few books for children had at that time been written, so that they were very early in a field which has since found so many labourers. Mrs. Honora discerned Maria's remark- 152 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvi able qualities of mind. When the latter was only twelve years old her step -mother wrote to her expressing the pleasure she felt in being able to treat the young girl "as her equal in every respect but age." Mr. Edgeworth, too, fully appreciated and studiously cultivated Maria's gifts, and encouraged her in every way to treat him with open- ness and familiarity. This conduct was a very great contrast with the extreme stiffness and formality which then pre- vailed generally between parents and children. It was near this time, but a little later, that the well-known writer, William Godwin, was reproached by his mother with his too great formality in addressing her ; he had been accustomed to speak and write to her as " Madam," and she says in one of her letters to him that " Hon'd Mother " " would be full as agreeable." Therefore the terms of friendly familiarity and equality between Maria and her parents were the more remarkable. The happiness of Mr. Edgeworth's second marriage was unclouded, except by the symptoms of consumption in Honora, which warned them that an inevitable parting was at hand. She died in May 1780, when Maria was thirteen years old. By his dead wife's side, Mr. Edgeworth wrote to Maria impressing upon her all the hopes that he and her step-mother had formed for her future. Very soon after he wrote again and bade her write a short story on the subject of generosity; "It must be taken," he wrote, " from History or Romance, and must be sent the sennight after you receive this ; and I beg that you will take some pains about it." The story, when finished, was submitted to the judgment of Mr. William Sneyd, Honora's brother, who said of it, " An excellent story, and extremely well written ; but where is the generosity ? " a saying which afterwards became a house- hold word with the Edgeworths. When Honora was dying she had solemnly begged her husband and her sister Elizabeth to marry each other after her own death. Such marriages at that time were not illegal, and eight months after Honora's death her sister and Mr. Edgeworth were married in St. Andrew's Church, xvi MARIA EDQEWOBTB 153 Not long after this the first really important event of Maria's life took place, when she went with her father and the rest of his family to take up her residence in her Irish home. At the impressionable age of fifteen^ after having lived long enough in England to judge of the differences between the two countries, she was introduced to an intimate acquaintance with rural life in Ireland. Her father employed no agent for the management of his property, but invited and expected Maria to help him in all his business. In this way she acquired a thorough insight into the charm, the weakness and the strength, the humour and the melancholy of the Irish character. From 1782, when Mr. Edgeworth and his family returned to live at their Irish home, dates not only Maria Edgeworth's close observation of Irish character and customs, but also the very painstaking literary training which she began to receive from her father. Up to this time Maria had been much at school ; owing to the delicate health of her first step-mother, it was considered best that her educa- tion should be mainly carried on elsewhere than at home. Now, however, Mr. Edgeworth divided his time between the management of his estates and the education of his children, and to Maria's literary education in particular he devoted himself with singular zeal and assiduity. She was continually practised by him in systematic observing and writing ; she was instructed to prepare stories in outline. " None of your drapery," her father would say ; " I can imagine all that. Let me see the bare skeleton." At this stage her compositions would be altered, revised, and amended by him, and then returned to her for completion. There is no doubt whatever of the immense pains which Mr. Edgeworth bestowed upon Maria's literary training; and Maria herself felt that she owed everything to him. It may, however, very well be doubted whether his influence upon her was good from the literary point of view. He gave her method and system, and he cultivated her natural faculties for observation ; but there was something very mechanical and pedantic in his mind an affectation, 154 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvi a want of humour, and a want of spontaneity : she, when left to herself, was content with grouping the facts of life and nature as she saw them around her, without trying to be more instructive than they are. Castle Rackrent, which is the best of her Irish stories, was entirely her own, and bears no traces of her father's hand. This is the only one of her tales of which she did not draw out a preliminary sketch or framework for her father's criticism. She says herself of this story, " A curious fact, that where I least aimed at drawing characters I succeeded best. As far as I have heard, the characters in Castle Rachrent were, in their day, considered as better classes of Irish characters than any I ever drew ; they cost me no trouble, and were made by no receipt, or thought of philosophical classification ; there was literally not a correction, not an alteration, made in the first writing, no copy, and, as I recollect, no inter- lineation; it went to the press just as it was written. Other stories I have corrected with the greatest care, and remodelled and re-written." If she had given the world more work of this kind, and less of the kind produced under her father's methods, her name would to-day occupy a higher place than it does in the hierarchy of literature. Maria Edgeworth may be said to have invented the modern novel, which gives the traits, the speech, the manners, and the thoughts of a peasantry instead of moving only among the upper ten thousand. Sir Walter Scott, with his usual frankness and generosity, stated in his pre- face to the Waverley Novels that what really started him in his career as a novelist was the desire to do for Scotland and the Scottish peasantry what Miss Edgeworth had done for Ireland and the Irish peasantry. " I felt," he said, " that something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister kingdom in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and to tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles." Another of the leading XVI MAIM A KDCKWOKTII 105 writers of this century lias Mkaowfodged his indebtedness to Miss Kdg'worth. The great Russian novelist, Ivan TourgeniefF, told a friend that when he was quite young he was unacquainted with the English language, but he used to hear his elder brother reading out to his friends translations of Miss Edgeworth's Irish stories, and the hope rose in his mind that one day he would be able to do for Iviissia ami her people what Miss Edgeworth had done for Ireland. KVaders of the life of Maria Edgeworth find plenty of evidence of the extremely disturbed state of Ireland during the ten or twelve years which immediately preceded the passing of the Act of Union in 1800. Reports of midnight outrages by armed and disguised bands of assassins were frequent ; unpopular people were hooted and pelted by day, and sometimes murdered by night ; country houses were provided with shutters so contrived as to make it possible to open a cross-fire upon these murderous bands in case of necessity. The " Thrashers " and the " Whitetooths " were the names then assumed by those marauders who in later times have been known as Whiteboys and Moon- lighters. The state of Ireland, politically and socially, became so critical that many people began to feel that almost any change must be for the better. Added to all the other elements of confusion, there was, about 1798, the almost daily expectation of the French invasion. England and France were at war, and it was believed by our enemies that if they could once effect a landing in Ireland the people of that island were so ready for rebellion that the landing of the French would be in itself almost enough to place the whole country at their disposal. In this expectation they were, fortunately, very much deceived. A graphic description of the French invasion, and its utter failure to accomplish its purpose, has been given by Miss Edgeworth. Her family had, indeed, a very close acquaintance with the rebels and the invaders. The county in which Edgeworthstown was situated was in actual insurrection, and when the French landed at Killala, 156 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvi in county Mayo, they marched immediately upon Longford, which was in close proximity to Edgeworthstown. Mr. Edgeworth sent to the nearest garrison for military protection for his household. He also found the majority of the troop of infantry which he had organised faithful to him ; but it soon became evident, in spite of this and of the personal fidelity of his servants and tenants, that the house must be abandoned, and that the whole family must take refuge in the town of Longford. There is something rather amusing as well as touching in Maria's womanly regrets at leaving her new paint and paper to the mercy of the rebels and the French. " My father," she wrote, " has made our little rooms so nice for us ; they are all fresh painted and papered. rebels ! French ! spare them ! We have never injured you, and all we wish is to see every- body as happy as ourselves." After the family and house- hold had made good their departure from Edgeworthstown, Mr. Edgeworth remembered that he had left, on the table of his study, a list of the names of the men serving in his corps, on whose fidelity he could depend. If this list fell into the hands of the enemy, the men whose names were upon it would probably be selected for bitter and cruel vengeance. " It would serve," wrote Miss Edgeworth, " to point out their houses for pillage and their families for de- struction. My father turned his horse instantly, and galloped back. The time of his absence appeared immeasurably long, but he returned safely, after having destroyed the danger- ous paper." Even if Mr. Edgeworth did spoil Maria's romances, he must be forgiven for the sake of this act of unselfish gallantry. When the family arrived in safety at Longford, dangers began to arise from another source. It was discovered in the course of a few days that Edgeworth- stown House had been left by the rebels entirely uninjured. The corps of infantry which Mr. Edgeworth had brought with him into Longford consisted partly of Catholics. Mr. Edgeworth entertained and defended with vigour a plan for the defence of the town different from that favoured by other persons in authority. All these circumstances were xvi MARIA EDGEWORTII 157 put together with the speed of wild-fire, and created in the minds of the ultra-Protestants of Longford the conviction that Mr. Edgeworth was in secret league with the rebels ; this, they were convinced, was the reason why his house had been spared, why he had admitted Papists into any of the bonds of good fellowship ; and his plan for the defence of the gaol and the garrison was, they believed, only a trick for making them over into the enemy's hands. Two farthing candles, by the light of which Mr. Edgeworth had read the paper the previous evening, near the fortifications of the gaol, were speedily exaggerated into a statement that the gaol had been illuminated as a signal to the enemy. An armed mob assembled, fully determined to tear him to pieces. He escaped through the merest accident. Seeing him accompanied by English officers in uniform, his enemies thought he was being brought back a prisoner, and were for the moment satisfied. The incident is illustrative of the conflicting passions which, for so many years, have formed the great social and political difficulty in Ireland. The rebels and their French allies were defeated at the battle of Ballynamuck, and the quiet family life at Edge- worthstown was resumed. All through the turmoil of wars and rumours of wars, the even tenor of Maria's way was very little disturbed. " I am going on in the old way," she wrote, " writing stories. I cannot be a captain of dragoons, and sitting with my hands before me would not make any of us one degree safer." Maria and her father had published their joint book, Practical Education, in the very year (1798) of the exciting events just narrated. Elizabeth, the second step-mother, also had a hand in it ; to her notes, we are told, may be traced the chapter on " Obedience." In this chapter the original view is put forward that in order to form and firmly implant in little children the habit of obedience, their parents should be careful at first only to tell them to do what they like doing. The habit of unquestioning obedience thus formed will, it is thought, be sufficiently strong to bear the strain, when the time comes that the 158 EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES xvi child is told to do things which it would rather not do. There is a considerable element of good sense iu this method, as most people will agree who have tried it in the training and teaching of dogs. A much more doubt- ful theory put forward in the book is that children never should be in the society of servants. This appears to us, in these more democratic days, to savour very much of pride and conceit. It is quite true that parents cannot depute to a hired servant, however faithful, the responsi- bility of their own position. But to say that a child is on no account to speak to a servant, or to be spoken to by one, appears to us now as most unreasonable and mis- chievous. How valuable in bridging over the gulf that still separates class from class is the warm affection that often exists between children and their nurses ! Many a nurse has vied with a mother in warm and self-sacrificing devotion for her little charges ; and all this wholesome and healing affection would be lost if the plan advocated by the Edgeworths were carried out. It is satisfactory to hear that Mrs. Barbauld protested against this doctrine, and told Mr. Edgeworth that, besides the fact that it would foster pride and ingratitude, " one and twenty other good reasons could be alleged against it." It may be hoped that Mr. Edgeworth acknowledged himself vanquished before this formidable battery opened fire. One of the most delightful incidents of Miss Edge- worth's later life was her friendship with Sir Walter Scott. When the first of the Waverley Novels appeared, the secret of its authorship had been so carefully kept that every one was in the dark on the subject. The publishers had sent a copy to Miss Edgeworth and her father. As soon as Mr. Edgeworth had finished reading it, he exclaimed, "Aut Scotus, aut Diabolus," i.e. " either Scott or the Devil " ; and Maria put these words at the top of the letter which she wrote thanking the publishers for the book. Scott was already known to the world by his poems, and to this must be attributed the ready wit of the good guess made by the Edgeworths ; for up to this time neither father nor xvi MARIA EDOEWOBTH i.v.' li;nl hud the pleasure of meeting Scott In 1823, however, they did meet, and the acquaintance soon ripened into a lifelong friendship. Scott acted as guide to Miss K