PERSONALIA 
 
 California 
 3gional
 
 u^* 1 *- 
 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGC
 
 PERSONALIA
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 BY 
 
 E. S. P. HAYNES 
 
 Author of ' ' Earl/ Victorias and other Papers, ' ' etc. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 SELWYN & BLOUNT 
 
 1918
 
 TO THE MEMORY OF 
 RUPERT AND ALFRED BROOKE
 
 PREFACE 
 
 I HAVE dedicated this rather retrospective little 
 vumme to Rupert and Alfred Brooke because the 
 loss of them is curiously typical of all that the 
 world has lost by the war. Neither of them could 
 have tolerated a Prussian Europe, or, I hasten 
 to add, a Prussianized England. Both would have 
 lived as loyally as they died for all that they held 
 dear. Yet at least one of their friends is not so 
 much inclined as the world at large to acquiesce 
 in their deaths as a means of edification. But for 
 the prostration of certain politicians, past and 
 present, before the Prussia they so ardently ad- 
 mired, Rupert and Alfred Brooke would have 
 enriched the best life and thought of England for 
 years to come. If a dozen politicians in Europe 
 had exerted half the energy of the late Mr. Stead 
 in bringing the war party of modern Germany 
 to their senses, the world would not now be such 
 a spectacle as to make many of us regret that 
 our planet cannot be mercifully annihilated.
 
 vi PREFACE 
 
 Surely no new world can be worth the appalling 
 sacrifice that we have seen of all that makes life 
 worth living. 
 
 All that the survivors can do is never to forget 
 the real aims of those who gave their lives to repair 
 the ghastly negligences and ignorances of European 
 diplomacy. Rupert Brooke, for example, was not 
 first and foremost what is hi these days called a 
 " war poet." He was no less enthusiastic than 
 F. H. Keeling in the cause of social justice. He 
 " would have disliked being remembered as a 
 mixture of Lord Tennyson and General Gordon," 
 if I may quote what one of his friends wrote not 
 long after he died. His outlook on life was never 
 turbid or histrionic as was so much of the Vic- 
 torian sentiment that almost transformed Tenny- 
 son and Gordon into the similitude of the Albert 
 Memorial, even if it stopped just short of the 
 figures in the Sieges Alice. The same considera- 
 tions apply to Alfred Brooke, whose memory, 
 being less public, is at least safe with his friends. 
 Nevertheless he, too, sacrificed a life of joy and 
 promise to the exigencies of a disaster which he 
 felt ought never to have been allowed to happen ; 
 and his friends may not unnaturally resent the 
 suggestion, dear to recruiting politicians and 
 other admirers of Scott's Wardour Street feudal- 
 ism, that to be prematurely assassinated by some 
 Teutonic ruffian is in itself so illustrious a destiny
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 as to extinguish all regrets for what might have 
 been. 
 
 Perhaps the only justification for publishing a 
 collection of old essays ranging over the last 
 fifteen years is the fear of interesting documents 
 like the Nicolas letters being any day obliterated 
 by some stray manifestation of the Kultur which 
 has given our army and navy so many " crowded 
 hours of glorious life " and proclaimed to the 
 sensual world that no Hohenzollern will tolerate 
 " an age without a name." If we are to welcome 
 Kultur as a school of heroism then let us promote 
 railway accidents, shipwreck, arson, and earth- 
 quakes. If not, let us discard all the common 
 cant about war. 
 
 Most of the following essays have appeared in 
 the Cornhill, New Witness, and English Review. 
 Three of them have not seen the light before. The 
 essay on Continental England was prophetic in 
 1915, when it was written, though it seems at 
 this date an inadequate summary of all the 
 measures that have been taken to assimilate 
 Great Britain to the Continent, especially as 
 regards bureaucracy and landscapes. I must 
 thank Mr. Ingpen for scholarly assistance and 
 footnotes. 
 
 St. John's Wood. December, 1917.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 EDWARD THOMAS ..... i 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK ... 19 
 - THREE MEN OF PEACE . . . -35 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS .... 46 
 A MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY " . .69 
 ALL SOULS' DAY ..... 87 
 THE TRAGEDY OF SURVIVAL ... 97 
 HISTORY AND MORALS .... 105 
 TEUTONS AND LATINS . . . .116 
 CONTINENTAL ENGLAND .... 123
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 IN December, 1898, Professor Morgan, a 
 friend and contemporary of mine at Balliol, 
 brought an interesting compatriot of his 
 to my rooms from Lincoln. Edward 
 Thomas was then, as always, tall and thin. 
 He had what another friend has described 
 as a " golden brown face " and deep blue 
 eyes which sometimes became suddenly 
 translucent and alert with interest. His 
 voice was a singularly melodious tenor. He 
 sang and read aloud very well. I have 
 never heard so delightful a rendering of 
 Jane Austen's novels or Gibbon's chapters 
 J I
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 on Christianity as he once gave me when I 
 was ill. His talk was incomparable. It 
 was full of such remarks as that which I cull 
 at random from his little volume " Rest and 
 Unrest " about a Welsh farmer : " He seemed 
 to regard the pig as a kind of brother who 
 sacrificed himself for the good of others 
 almost willingly out of consideration for the 
 expensive food which had fattened him ; 
 and until the day of the knife he was treated 
 as a brother seldom is." But he was as 
 reticent as he was responsive. He went 
 through life up to the time of entering the 
 Army with an ever-recurring fear that he 
 was not wanted, and was therefore all the 
 more cordial when he met anyone who made 
 it clear that his talk and his work were in 
 demand. 
 
 From our first meeting we were intimate 
 friends, though in later life often separated 
 by accidents of time and place. I may 
 perhaps be excused for dwelling more on 
 his personality than on his work, because
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 there are others far more competent than I 
 to deal with his books. In early life we both 
 dutifully reviewed each other's books in 
 various periodicals ; but we always frankly 
 expressed a decided preference for each 
 other's conversation. His books remain, 
 but he himself has gone ; and reading them 
 is, as Fitzjames Stephen once pointed out, 
 a poor consolation for the friends and 
 family of a deceased author. 
 
 Edward Thomas was born on March 3rd, 
 1878. He was the son of a civil servant now 
 well known in Positivist circles, and himself 
 a writer concerning the religion of Human- 
 ity. At St. Paul's School he belonged to a 
 special class for the study of history and 
 literature. Mr. Bentley and Mr. G. K. 
 Chesterton were both members of it. At 
 the age of seventeen he made the acquaint- 
 ance of his future father-in-law, James 
 Ashcroft Noble. Mr. Noble encouraged 
 him to give up the Civil Service and devote 
 himself entirely to literary work. He wrote 
 3 i*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 a number of articles on what is vaguely 
 called " Nature " for the Speaker, the Globe, 
 and other papers, which were finally pub- 
 lished under the title of " The Woodland 
 Life" in 1897. The book is full of 
 curious and delicate observation in a style 
 which has since been extensively imitated, 
 and the English is characteristically flaw- 
 less. 
 
 In these early years he was " living that 
 deep, beneficent, unconscious life which is 
 what, after all, we remember with most 
 satisfaction, and learn, often too late, to 
 label happiness when the pleasures have 
 all fallen away," as he writes in " Rest and 
 Unrest." This life he recovered to some 
 extent after joining the Army. At the 
 age of nineteen he obtained a scholarship 
 at Lincoln College, and read History under 
 the tuition of Mr. Owen Edwards, for whom 
 he had a deep regard and to whom he dedi- 
 cated his second book, " Horae Solitariae." 
 His life at Oxford was, on the whole, happy 
 4
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 and unruffled, and there perhaps for the 
 first time he became thoroughly interested 
 in his contemporaries. 
 
 He was always hyperaesthetic as regards 
 impressions, and the beauty of Oxford sank 
 deeply into him. I find a letter of his dated 
 July 25th, 1899, about an afternoon visit 
 to Eton, in which he writes of " the most 
 perfect memory scenes I ever knew, enclosed 
 in a silence broken only by the sound of 
 the wings of doves among all the peaks 
 and ridges of mellow red tile as we looked 
 out from the gallery of the Hall. ... I 
 expect there will be fragments of Eton in 
 all my landscapes for months." 
 
 " Horae Solitarise " is a collection of essays 
 that distils many of these impressions as 
 in the lovely passage about the Welsh hills 
 at night. There is also a great deal of quiet 
 humour and pleasant discourse on old books. 
 The book on Oxford (of which I possess 
 the MS.)* never got its proper appreciation. 
 
 * I have now presented it to Lincoln College library.
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 It is full of good things like the following 
 about the Magdalen choir : " When one 
 sang alone it was as it had been a dove 
 floating to the windows and away, away. 
 There were parts of the music so faint and 
 so exquisitely blended that the twenty voices 
 were but as the sound of a reverberating bell. 
 A voice of baser metal read the lesson with 
 a melancholy dignity which made the words 
 at once pleasing and unintelligible." My 
 copy is annotated with names. Here, for 
 instance, is a description of Belloc at the 
 Union : " A stiff, small, heroic figure 
 with a mouth that might sway armies, a 
 voice as sweet as Helicon, as irresistible and 
 continuous as Niagara " ; or again of Ray- 
 mond Asquith as one " who would rather 
 spend a life in deciding between the Greek 
 and Roman ideals than in ruling Parliament 
 and being ruled by society. He strode 
 like a Plantagenet. When he stood still 
 he was like a classical Hermes." 
 
 The book is full of miscellaneous reading 
 6
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 and learning, and contains various extracts 
 from Belloc's first volume of sonnets and 
 " Lambkin's Remains," works much trea- 
 sured by us both at a time when the rest 
 of the world read nothing of his but 
 " Danton " and " The Bad Child's Book of 
 Beasts." No other book of Thomas's con- 
 tains so happy a blend of humour, a sense of 
 beauty, and antiquarian learning as this on 
 Oxford. 
 
 While at Oxford he married Helen, 
 daughter of his old friend and literary spon- 
 sor, James Ashcroft Noble, and after taking 
 his degree he settled in a little house at 
 Earlsfield which he describes inimitably 
 in " Horae Solitariae." The next fifteen 
 years were marred by the struggle for 
 existence. His inveterate shyness and lack 
 of " push and go " were grave handicaps. 
 What he wanted was a literary director to 
 find out what he could do and induce others 
 to give him the work in question. He could 
 not make up his mind to lecturing of any 
 7
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 kind, and of other work he felt himself 
 incapable. He was extremely conscien- 
 tious, and in later life gave up a comfortable 
 temporary job for the Government because 
 he felt there was not enough for him to do 
 in it. Consequently he wrote a series of 
 books on different subjects, which often 
 fatigued him before he had achieved the 
 tale of one hundred thousand words deemed 
 essential in a trade which imagines that 
 the public demand for a book is regulated 
 more by quantity than quality. 
 
 The remuneration for this work was 
 sadly reduced after the ingenious discovery 
 by an enterprising firm of publishers that 
 the leisure of moderately educated spinsters 
 who liked to appear in print could be 
 exploited to produce any number of books 
 on a variety of topics. I do not suggest 
 that the res angusta domi embittered his life, 
 which he would always have desired to be 
 simple in a sense different from what the 
 "simple life" meant before 1914. But
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 the necessity of having to write to order 
 probably took some zest out of his writing, 
 even when he was engaged on such congenial 
 subjects as Jefferies, Borrow, or " Beautiful 
 Wales." 
 
 He never agreed with me ; but I always 
 considered his criticism the best part of his 
 literary work. He was perhaps the best critic 
 of contemporary poetry in his time. His 
 learning was as profound as his taste was un- 
 erring. As regards prose, his book on " Walter 
 Pater " is the best on the subject. One 
 sentence alone shows a wonderful sense of 
 what makes for style : " Only when a word 
 has become necessary to him can a man use 
 it safely ; if he try to impress words by force 
 on a sudden occasion, they will either perish 
 of his violence or betray him." The book 
 was a failure because the British public 
 does not want judicial criticism. To the 
 literary snob Pater was a fetish, and fetishes 
 are not meant to be the subject of intelligent 
 discussion. 
 
 9
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 Much the same drawback applied to 
 Thomas's deep and sympathetic interest 
 in human beings as such. He chose types 
 which do not excite general interest. Our 
 urban population likes to read of dukes and 
 Prime Ministers and millionaires, with a 
 female complement of duchesses and adven- 
 turesses. An intensive study of Welsh 
 farmers and rustic milkmaids and tramps 
 excites but little curiosity. And Thomas 
 perhaps felt that there was not so much 
 demand for his writing as it deserved, 
 without realizing that in this imperfect 
 world a man has often to begin by creating 
 a demand for himself. All this, however, 
 aggravated a natural melancholy of tem- 
 perament, which was not cured by various 
 abstinences either from meat or drink or 
 tobacco. His health suffered much as 
 Shelley's did when removed from the robust 
 influence of Peacock. 
 
 Yet this melancholy would instantane- 
 ously disappear in congenial company on 
 10
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 a holiday. There is one perfect memory 
 of walks over the Sussex downs on two 
 sunny days at the end of the year 1910, 
 which ended in a little festa with the Belloc 
 family and the singing of many of the songs 
 in which he delighted on the road to 
 London. The " Pocket-book of Poems and 
 Songs for the Open Air," which Thomas 
 compiled in 1907, is about the best antho- 
 logy of its kind. " I have gathered into it," 
 he writes, " much of the finest English 
 poetry, and that poetry at its best can hardly 
 avoid the open air. With this is some 
 humbler poetry which is related to the finest 
 as the grass is to the stars ; between the two 
 I have often found it hard to choose. I 
 have added about sixty of the sweetest 
 songs which it seemed that a wise man would 
 care to sing, or hear sung, in the fields, at 
 the inn, on the road at dawn or nightfall, 
 or at home." Looking at it again one finds 
 a poem of Walter de la Mare curiously 
 appropriate now, " Keep Innocency," and 
 ii
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 the last two lines of his favourite Cornish 
 epitaph : 
 
 " Long is his score who lingers out the day ; 
 Who goes the soonest has the least to pay." 
 
 After the war broke out he wrote an inter- 
 esting biography of the Duke of Marl- 
 borough. It shows less sign of fatigue than 
 some of his other books. He also brought 
 out an admirable little anthology from the 
 work of English writers entitled " This 
 England." He " wished to make a book as 
 full of English character and country as an 
 egg is full of meat," and certainly succeeded. 
 Readers of The English Review will re- 
 member him as a not infrequent contri- 
 butor : his beautiful essay called " July," 
 and his articles on street talk in the first 
 months of the war, and on Rupert Brooke, 
 on Swansea, etc., were full of keen and 
 judicial observation. 
 
 Of all those who have lost their lives in 
 12
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 this war he had the most vivid and sensitive 
 image in his brain of what he was fighting 
 for. As Mr. Seccombe has written : " It 
 was the life of one who knew and loved 
 England, its inhabitants and writers, old 
 and new, better than any man I ever came 
 across." His life in the Army cured his 
 neurasthenia. He could no longer feel at 
 any moment that he was not wanted. For 
 the first time he felt that certain prosaic 
 things had got to be done at regular hours. 
 He had no leisure for experiments in diet. 
 Although he gave a superficial impression 
 of passivity, I had always noticed that in an 
 emergency he acted promptly and wisely, 
 and this quality now came into function. 
 
 At this time, too, he began to write verse 
 under the name of Edward Eastaway, which 
 has been much praised by the critics. I do 
 not profess to understand the scansion of 
 modern verse, but the following poem can- 
 not fail to appeal to the most antiquated 
 reader : 
 
 13
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 The Bridge. 
 
 " 1 have come a long way to-day : 
 On a strange bridge alone, 
 Remembering friends, old friends, 
 I rest without smile or moan, 
 As they remember me without smile or moan. 
 
 " All are behind, the kind 
 And the unkind, too, no more 
 To-night than a dream. The stream 
 Runs softly yet drowns the Past, 
 The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and 
 the Past. 
 
 " No traveller has rest more blest 
 Than this moment brief between 
 Two lives, when the Night's first lights 
 And shades hide what has never been, 
 Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer than will be or 
 have been." 
 
 That is exactly the mood of a man who has 
 walked all day and gained the mental repose 
 that comes in the evening, and which came 
 to Edward Thomas in the last years of his 
 life ; and it may be remembered that he 
 never talked so well as when walking with his 
 14
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 elastic, long stride. One may think of his 
 talk as of the lute in Shelley's poem on 
 " The Woodman and the Nightingale " : 
 
 " Wakening the leaves and waves, ere it has past 
 To such brief unison as on the brain 
 One tone, which never can recur, has cast, 
 One accent never to return again." 
 
 The last lines of all have an even deeper 
 significance for us to-day than when they 
 were written in 1818 : 
 
 " The world is full of Woodmen who expel 
 Love's gentle Dryads from the haunts of life, 
 And vex the nightingales in every dell." 
 
 The hatred of the woodman against the 
 wood which sheltered the nightingale has 
 destroyed the youth of our world, to say 
 nothing of its beauties in nature and in art. 
 Edward Thomas died instantaneously in 
 the knowledge that all was well with the 
 cause for which he was fighting. The 
 15
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 following account of him was sent by his 
 commanding officer to his widow, and may 
 here be reproduced : 
 
 " I cannot express to you adequately in 
 words how deep our sympathy is for you and 
 your children in your great loss. These 
 things go too deep for mere words. We, 
 officers and men, all mourn our own loss. 
 Your husband was very greatly loved in this 
 Battery, and his going has been a personal 
 loss to each of us. He was rather older than 
 most of the officers, and we all looked up to 
 him as the kind of father of our happy 
 family. He was always the same, quietly 
 cheerful and ready to do any job that was 
 going with the same steadfast, unassuming 
 spirit. 
 
 " The day before his death we were rather 
 heavily shelled, and he had a very narrow 
 shave, but he went about his work quite 
 quietly and ordinarily, as if nothing was 
 happening,
 
 EDWARD THOMAS 
 
 " I wish I could convey to you the picture 
 of him, a picture we had all learnt to love 
 of the old clay pipe, gum boots, oilskin coat, 
 and steel helmet. 
 
 " With regard to his actual death you have 
 probably heard the details. It should be 
 of some comfort to you to know that he 
 died at a moment of victory from a direct 
 hit by a shell, which must have killed him 
 outright without giving him a chance to 
 realize anything, a gallant death for a very 
 true and gallant gentleman. We buried 
 him in a little military cemetery a few hun- 
 dred yards from the Battery ; the exact 
 spot will be notified you by the parson. 
 As we stood by his grave the sun came and 
 the guns round seemed to stop firing for a 
 short time. This typified to me what stood 
 out most in your husband's character, the 
 spirit of quiet, sunny, unassuming cheer- 
 fulness." 
 
 More need not be said. Edward Thomas 
 17 2
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 detested any suspicion of the histrionic. 
 His last wish was that his work should stand 
 or fall on its own merits without reference 
 to his military service, whether he returned 
 from it or not. His best epitaph was written 
 by George Herbert : 
 
 " Only a sweet and vertuous soul, 
 Like seasoned timber, never gives ; 
 But though the whole world turn to coal 
 Then chiefly lives." 
 
 .
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 GEORGE FREDERICK POLLOCK, formerly 
 senior Master of the King's Bench and 
 King's Remembrancer, was born on June 
 ist, 1821, and died on May zoth, 1915, just 
 before his ninety-fourth birthday. His 
 faculties, his interests, and his affections 
 remained as fresh as ever up to the last. 
 Apart from his unusual personal charm as 
 a human being, his range of reminiscences 
 was extraordinary, not only by reason of 
 his great age and retentive memory, but 
 also of his native and characteristic versa- 
 tility. I often urged him to collect them, 
 and indeed a publisher offered to send a 
 shorthand writer for as long as was necessary 
 to dictate a volume. But he said that 
 
 19 2*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 what he wanted was a " Boswell," and 
 even if such a prodigy had been found, 
 George Pollock would most probably have 
 been too tired or bored to go on for many 
 days continuously. 
 
 In more recent years I made notes of 
 most conversations that I had with him ; 
 but I fear that a full harvest could only 
 have been achieved by everyone following 
 my example, and even my own jottings were 
 sadly casual. 
 
 I remember being startled by his remark- 
 ing one day how delighted he was to see 
 G.R. on the mail-carts. It made him feel 
 " quite a boy again." He had not seen 
 any of the Georges, but had been astonished, 
 walking down Whitehall as a youth, to see 
 a genial gentleman suddenly look out of 
 his carriage window and put out his tongue. 
 This turned out to be His Majesty King 
 William IV., who wished to indicate to 
 some old naval friends on the pavement, 
 that his elevation to the throne had not 
 
 20
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 made him too proud. No wonder that my 
 eldest daughter, on being taken to see him, 
 promptly asked him for his- impressions of 
 the execution of Charles I., and was sadly 
 disappointed to find that her great-great- 
 uncle had not attended the ceremony. 
 
 George Pollock was no mere lawyer. He 
 was, as his father, the Chief Baron, used 
 proudly to announce to his friends, a first- 
 rate mechanic, and had made a complete 
 study and hobby of clocks and watches.* 
 The family watches were always chosen by 
 him and are still going as no other watches 
 go, though they were always a little erratic 
 at first. His accurate observation was never 
 at fault, as when he took up a silver teapot 
 at a wedding reception from among the 
 presents and remarked that it had a hole 
 in it. He told me that when he was leaving 
 Wimbledon he saw his old plumber and 
 
 * He chose the clock which now stands in the 
 smoking-room of the Athenaeum. 
 
 21
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 said, " I wish you could explain how it 
 was that I always had to get my pipes put 
 right once a year until ten years ago, when 
 you were too busy and I had to attend to 
 them myself, since when they have never 
 gone wrong." The plumber smiled signi- 
 ficantly and replied, " Well, sir, we must 
 live somehow." Members of the family 
 who had mishaps with bicycles, used to 
 find that the mere mention of the name of 
 Pollock evoked kindly welcome and some- 
 times even an offer to repair the machine 
 free of charge. This was no doubt partly 
 due to his own ungrudging benevolence. 
 In an age when we are all being exhorted 
 to economise it is refreshing to remember 
 that an official in the Law Courts not so 
 very long ago penetrated a large crowd on 
 a London pavement and discovered George 
 Pollock extended over a grating from which 
 he was trying with an umbrella to extract 
 a penny, which an urchin in tears pro- 
 fessed to have dropped down the abyss. 
 
 22
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 He was a well-known arbitrator in patent 
 cases. He had some knowledge of as- 
 tronomy, and counted Sir George Airey 
 and Sir Norman Lockyer among his friends, 
 not to mention other scientific men, such 
 as Faraday, Owen, and Hooker. 
 
 The John Murray of his day consulted 
 him as to publishing 500 copies of the 
 " Origin of Species." Murray was ex- 
 tremely sceptical as to the soundness of 
 the work, and thought 500 copies as large 
 a number as it was prudent to print. He 
 remarked that the Darwinian theory was 
 as absurd as though one should contemplate 
 a fruitful union between a poker and a 
 rabbit. George Pollock read the book, 
 and remarked that the contents were pro- 
 bably beyond the comprehension of any 
 scientific man then living. But he advised 
 publishing 1,000 copies because "Mr. 
 Darwin had so brilliantly surmounted the 
 formidable obstacles which he was honest 
 enough to put in his own path." This is 
 23
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 an interesting example of the way in which 
 a man of good general ability, accustomed 
 as a lawyer is to apply broad principles of 
 reason to different kinds of subject-matter, 
 may arrive at sounder conclusions than a 
 specialist. 
 
 Talks with him were always a liberal 
 education, because they gave first-hand 
 impressions of an excellent observer in 
 regard to many characters whose bio- 
 graphies are often written by persons who 
 have not even seen the subject of the 
 biography. It was thus thrilling for me, 
 who had always admired the career of Mrs. 
 Norton and read a recent account of her 
 life, to hear that at a time when the differ- 
 ences between Mr. and Mrs. George Norton 
 were most acute, the Chief Baron put his 
 house at the disposal of both, so that Mrs. 
 Norton should see her children there. 
 She was accustomed to meet them in a 
 room at one end of which George Pollock 
 (on at least one occasion) sat and read the 
 24
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 " Encyclopaedia Britannica," while she 
 played with them at the other end. 
 Usually his sister Mary was there. The 
 heroines of history are not always wholly 
 approved by their contemporaries. An old 
 man, long since dead, told me that the 
 advent of Florence Nightingale was not at 
 first popular with the soldiers in the 
 Crimea, because they felt embarrassed by 
 the idea of female nursing. Similarly, 
 Mrs. Norton was thought by some to be 
 " playing to the gallery," and in the opinion 
 of Baron Martin, " talked to too many 
 men " on one occasion when crossing the 
 Atlantic. But George Pollock nevertheless 
 sympathized, as his father did, with her 
 position as regards her children. 
 
 His talk, as might be expected, shed 
 light on social usages of the past. One 
 night the Duchess of Somerset was driving 
 near Wimbledon and her carriage fell into 
 a ditch. George Pollock was passing and 
 assisted her and the coachman to get the 
 25
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 vehicle out of the ditch, and collect various 
 toys and pieces of china back into the 
 carriage. The next morning the Duchess, 
 " in a refined manner," sent a military 
 friend to convey her acknowledgments but 
 did not come herself, since, for aught she 
 knew, her benefactor might have had 
 a " vulgar wife who would return the 
 call." 
 
 He mentioned that ba'ths first came into 
 fashion in the 'fifties, and caused much 
 annoyance to a certain old colonel since 
 they encumbered the officers' luggage. 
 " These young men," he complained, 
 " keep washing themselves till there is not 
 a bit of natural smell about them." The 
 only unpardonable smell was of course 
 tobacco. Even onions were preferable. 
 Though the late King Edward introduced 
 smoking as far as he could, even when his 
 hosts drove him into the stable-room, 
 George Pollock, despite his respect for the 
 Church, felt it his duty, even in 1883, to 
 26
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 remonstrate with a curate who smoked a 
 cigar at a garden party. 
 
 His attitude to the divorce question 
 interested me. He mentioned that all the 
 lawyers of the time strongly supported the 
 Act of 1857 in spite of ecclesiastical opposi- 
 tion. But he felt himself " incompetent 
 to form an opinion " on the question, 
 which curiously illustrated the survival of 
 the old Catholic tradition that marriage 
 should be an institution entirely subject 
 to ecclesiastical control and jurisdiction. 
 
 He naturally told many stories of his 
 father and the law. One of his earliest 
 memories was of mischievously abstracting 
 Scarlett's spectacles from the back of his 
 coat just as he was about to read an im- 
 portant letter to the jury. This was in 
 1833, when he was a boy of twelve. He 
 mentioned how his brother judges would 
 give way to Maule for fear of his ability 
 and sharp tongue till on one occasion 
 Maule, after delivering judgment and then 
 27
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 hearing all the other judgments, suddenly 
 remarked : " After mature consideration, 
 I differ from my learned brothers. I 'have 
 come to the conclusion that my judgment 
 was wrong, and the first misgivings that 
 occurred to me about it were due to the 
 fact that my brothers agreed with it." 
 
 As a boy of eighteen he had attended 
 the famous trial of John Frost and others 
 whom his father ably defended on a charge 
 of high treason at Monmouth. He used 
 to relate with great gusto the objection to 
 the proceedings taken on the ground that 
 the list of witnesses had not been handed 
 to the prisoners with the copy of the indict- 
 ment as prescribed by the Act of Queen 
 Anne. It was in that trial that a woman 
 was closely cross-examined about the move- 
 ments of her husband, who had returned 
 home very late and come straight up to 
 bed. " As he was getting into bed," she 
 
 said, " his words were " But here she 
 
 was sharply interrupted by Counsel : 
 28
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 " You must not tell us what he said, because 
 that is not evidence ; you can only tell us 
 what he did." 
 
 His grandfather, David Pollock, had come 
 to London from Berwick, and started a 
 saddler and military contractor's business 
 at Charing Cross. David's father was a 
 bookseller at Berwick-on-Tweed, and his 
 grandfather (George Pollock thought) was 
 a cobbler at Perth in the seventeenth 
 century. David died in 1815, and was 
 embarrassed by the fact that Parliament 
 did not allow enough money to cover the 
 liabilities of the Duke of York, not to 
 mention those of the Duke of Kent. He 
 was sometimes in attendance on Royalty 
 itself, when he had to present himself in 
 Court dress. But David died solvent in 
 1815, and his business was carried on for 
 two years afterwards by his widow and his 
 son William. William died early at the 
 age of thirty-five. Another son, David, 
 who became before his death Lord Chief 
 29
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 Justice of Bombay, was sixty-seven at the 
 time of his death. He has been described 
 as a singularly lovable man. Of the other 
 sons, George, my great-uncle's godfather, 
 was ultimately a Field-Marshal, and 
 Frederick the Chief Baron of the Ex- 
 chequer. It was quite usual for one of the 
 sons to sleep under the counter if the house 
 was more full than usual, and more than one 
 slept there on the occasion of David's 
 funeral. The other son, John, was an 
 adventurous solicitor. He was renowned 
 for his prowess at racquets and generally 
 as an athlete. In the same day he once 
 walked from London to Windsor, won a 
 foot race, and walked back again. He had 
 his vicissitudes and once found a valuable 
 friend in Mr. Heathorn, the father of Mrs. 
 Huxley, who told me of it when she became 
 my grandmother-in-law. 
 
 But the hero of George Pollock's stories 
 was usually his father, the Chief Baron, 
 whose judgments bulk so large in the 
 30
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 Common Law of England. Unlike his 
 brother John, he thought taking exercise 
 a bore, unless it took the form of dancing 
 or of leaping over tables and chairs, as a 
 friend of mine who is still alive, saw him 
 doing at an hotel in Norwich after receiving 
 a pair of white gloves when he was about 
 seventy-five years old. He drove up from 
 Hatton every day in his family coach, 
 though his sedentary habits never prevented 
 his doing justice to his excellent brown 
 sherry, a few bottles of which I once had 
 the privilege of possessing in my own 
 cellar. In later years he drove to and 
 from Waterloo station, and the railway 
 company arranged an afternoon train for 
 his convenience. Though he kept very 
 open house at Hatton, he had a frugal 
 mind in less essential matters. Thus, on 
 consulting Sir Harris Nicolas in regard 
 to tracing the family coat of arms, he was 
 told that it would cost ^100 in London, 
 but subsequently discovered that the same
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 operation could be performed in Edin- 
 burgh for ^20, which gave him great satis- 
 faction. There is a romantic legend that 
 the Pollocks were ruined by the Hanoverians 
 in the Rebellion of 1715, and that the 
 Pollock boar is to be found on a prison 
 wall in Carlisle Castle, presumably carved 
 by a Pollock in captivity. But the Chief 
 Baron cared little for these things, and 
 derived pleasure from recording that his 
 father was a saddler, and that he owed 
 much to his mother's co-operation in the 
 family business and belief in himself when 
 a boy. His career at Trinity College, 
 Cambridge, was mainly due to her unsparing 
 efforts. A Fellow of the College also made 
 a very timely loan, which was duly repaid. 
 
 He had a very human sympathy with 
 prisoners. I have a volume of his notes 
 of evidence, and in one of the murder trials 
 he lays great stress to the jury on the fact 
 that there was no Court of Criminal Appeal. 
 There is a story of a certain burglar having 
 32
 
 MASTER GEORGE POLLOCK 
 
 been induced by the prison chaplain to 
 atone for his crime by pleading guilty 
 before the Chief Baron. But after an 
 interval in the Court the burglar returned 
 to the chaplain acquitted. " When I saw 
 that good, kind man sitting in Court," he 
 explained, " I knew I should be acquitted, 
 and really could not bring myself to plead 
 guilty." 
 
 I have put together as much as I can have 
 recorded of George Pollock's reminiscences. 
 Probably there is better material at the 
 disposal of others ; but perhaps this attempt 
 to collect what I heard may stimulate a 
 better qualified relation or friend to write 
 something worthier of him. Such a col- 
 lection would to some extent mitigate 
 the loss of his winning personality. For a 
 man to be missed as he now is after dying 
 on the verge of his ninety-fourth birthday, 
 shows how little old age can extinguish a 
 rare and singularly loving spirit. Up to 
 the last he answered every letter by return 
 33 3
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 of post, and his letters were as affectionate 
 as on the other hand they were businesslike, 
 when the occasion demanded. We shall 
 not see his like again. Even his type is 
 gone. The combination of kindliness, 
 geniality, and pawky humour that dis- 
 tinguished him is not to be found in our 
 day. 
 
 " Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus 
 Tarn cari capitis ? " 
 
 34
 
 NOT long ago I dreamed that I was before 
 a Tribunal which was to decide my 
 liability for military service. In my dream 
 I was nearly fifty years old ; and it had 
 been internationally agreed that in the 
 interests of the human race, all men between 
 forty and sixty should be called up before 
 the younger men. The Tribunal, com- 
 posed of impartial persons between twenty 
 and forty, was on the whole very polite 
 and judicial, except in certain cases of 
 fire-eating editors and newspaper pro- 
 prietors, who were not found as indispens- 
 able to the State in their professional 
 capacities as they imagined. I do not 
 35 3*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 think that I ever grasped who were our 
 enemies in the dream-war ; but with the 
 curious forgetfulness of a dreamer, I saw, 
 sitting on the Tribunal, three friends of 
 mine, namely : Rupert Brooke, his younger 
 brother, Alfred, and Frederic Hillersdon 
 Keeling. They had all developed along the 
 lines I had expected. Rupert was Pro- 
 fessor of English Literature at Cambridge, 
 Alfred a pillar of City finance, and Ben 
 Keeling (as his friends called him) head 
 of a Sociological Research Department. 
 
 I woke up before my own case came on, 
 and wondered why these three particular 
 friends should have been associated in my 
 dream. I think it was because they were 
 all so temperamentally opposed to ideals 
 connected with war or any other form of 
 cruelty. In their Cambridge days, when I 
 first knew them, they would have fought 
 conscription to the last ditch. To Rupert 
 Brooke and Keeling Germany was a less 
 foreign country than France. Yet they all 
 36
 
 THREE MEN OF PEACE 
 
 went straight into the Army in August 
 1914 with more alacrity than some of 
 those who disdain pacific ideals. So 
 typical were they of many others who 
 have died or encountered even worse 
 disasters (such as blindness and loss of 
 reason) in the war, that personal impressions 
 of them may perhaps be of general interest. 
 
 Rupert Brooke always appeared singularly 
 unruffled by any events, political or other- 
 wise, in his almost Shelleyan existence at 
 Grantchester. I see him tugging my little 
 boat up the sunny shallows of the Cam, 
 in a flannel shirt and shorts, to a place just 
 above Byron's Pool where we bathed with 
 his friends. His talk was simple, detached, 
 and ironical. I remarked to him one day 
 how distressed any poet of the late nineties 
 would have been by a pane of yellow glass 
 in a door that opened on to the Vicarage 
 lawn ; and he said how much he enjoyed 
 the charming illusion of sunshine it gave 
 him on a wet day. In the summer days 
 37
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 of July 1914, when he was just back from 
 his travels, he seemed more personally 
 interested in the world ; but his most 
 salient characteristic before the war was 
 always a marked gentleness of character. 
 I could not imagine him involved in any 
 quarrel ; and his indignation after seeing 
 the agonized evacuation of Antwerp was 
 only a logical development of his own 
 ideals. Though always in pursuit of 
 realities, he had never before been face 
 to face with cruelty on a large scale. He 
 himself describes the almost tidal conflict 
 in his own mind and all the queer muddle 
 of English and German memories when 
 the war broke out, in one of his best essays, 
 which has already acquired an historical 
 value. 
 
 Alfred Brooke, who was killed while 
 asleep in a dug-out by a high explosive on 
 the I4th June, 1915, was, perhaps, even 
 more to his friends than his brother ; for 
 he was by temperament more intimate 
 38
 
 THREE MEN OF PEACE 
 
 and less elusive. But I knew him better 
 than Rupert, and may be wrong as to this. 
 La Bruyere has remarked that there are 
 some whose glory it is to write, and others 
 whose glory it is not to write. It was 
 Alfred's glory to talk in his own mellow, 
 humorous, inimitable manner, and to make 
 others talk also. He was, I must imagine, 
 the most charming host, guest, and travel- 
 ling-companion of his generation. He was 
 the ideal embodiment of all that is con- 
 veyed by the old motto : " Sodalitas, 
 Convivium" He was myriad-minded in 
 his interests ; but modern finance appealed 
 to his imagination, and he threw in his lot 
 with it till the war made havoc of finance 
 and financiers. He then promptly devoted 
 himself to a life, which, apart from the 
 purpose of trying to end the offensive 
 chaos, was for him singularly tedious and 
 boring. Volumes of Gibbon and piles of 
 the New Statesman and the New Witness 
 followed him up to his last dug-out. To 
 39
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 the very end his courage was no less 
 conspicuous than his frank disgust with 
 the brutalities of war and the horrors of 
 walking through trenches over masses of 
 German dead. He was firmly convinced 
 that if the Kaiser and his General Staff 
 had ever had to fight in trenches themselves, 
 the " mailed fist " would never have 
 materialized. He was a Liberal stalwart 
 who would have fought conscription in 
 England tooth and nail ; though under 
 any intelligent system of conscription either 
 he or his brother would probably have 
 been employed in a less hazardous depart- 
 ment of the War Machine. He has, at 
 least, escaped seeing the destruction of 
 the amiable, if unsophisticated, Liberalism 
 that he so ardently supported. But for 
 those who loved him he leaves a drab 
 world. 
 
 Of quite a different type was Sergeant 
 F. H. Keeling. The Brookes were of 
 King's ; Keeling was of Trinity. Keeling 
 40
 
 THREE MEN OF PEACE 
 
 was an impetuous and vociferous reformer 
 of the Fabian School. In his chambers at 
 Lincoln's Inn blue-books littered his 
 capacious table, and even his floor and his 
 bed. The social progressiveness of the 
 whole modern world blew like a gale 
 through these otherwise " dusty purlieus of 
 the law." 
 
 For anyone who, like myself, associated 
 Fabian ideals with a certain humanity of 
 regimentation and an abstract unreality in 
 logically and practically developing notions 
 which were plausible only on paper, to know 
 Keeling was a valuable education. He 
 loved human beings almost en masse, and 
 his affection knew no distinction or limita- 
 tion. His friends were of all ranks and 
 ages. His elderly bedmaker at Cambridge, 
 his artisan cronies, his Civil Service col- 
 leagues, and nearly all the men and women 
 he came across, were all alike charmed by 
 his disinterested enthusiasm for reforms of 
 all kinds. He would give endless time and
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 trouble to putting right some case of 
 individual distress or hardship ; he was 
 never content, as most reformers are, to 
 note the case for future use in propaganda. 
 His head was as open as his heart ; he was 
 never satisfied with his own notions of 
 things. " Give us this day our daily idea, 
 and forgive us what we thought yesterday," 
 might have been his prayer had he been 
 in the habit of praying, which he was not. 
 Pomposity and the cold dignity of the 
 aspiring prophet were not in his com- 
 position. The vocabulary with which 
 before the war he championed the ideals 
 of Nonconformity, Puritanism, and Pro- 
 hibition, would have speedily cleared any 
 conventicle or assembly-room of Non- 
 conformists, Puritans, or Prohibitionists. 
 The war, indeed, so far changed his ideas, 
 that in one of his last letters he wrote to 
 me that " if there were a Valhalla, he would 
 sample the best brews" for my benefit, 
 in anticipation of my advent. In another 
 42
 
 THREE MEN OF PEACE 
 
 letter, from a hospital at the front, he 
 mentioned that even an unreformed world 
 could seem very sweet on a fine day. 
 
 Others have written of his military life, 
 which he keenly enjoyed. True to his 
 convictions of human equality, he enlisted 
 as a private and refused all offers of a com- 
 mission, though he could not avoid being 
 made a sergeant. He threw all his mar- 
 vellous energy and enthusiasm into the 
 war, and will (I imagine) never be forgotten 
 either by officers or men. Like Rupert 
 and Alfred Brooke, Raymond Asquith, and 
 so many others, he went to his death as 
 though the undying words of Aeschylus 
 called him : 
 
 e TrarpiB', eXevffepovre Se 
 IIai8a9, yvvaiKa*;, 0&v re TrarpoKDV eSi], 
 7)Ka? re TT pojovcov' vvv vrrep irdvTwv dycav. 
 
 To some survivors, perhaps, the honour 
 and glory of death in action is some con- 
 solation. For me, and probably many 
 43
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 others, the whole tragedy is unrelieved by 
 the thought that the shoddy vain-glory of 
 two diseased Emperors and the folly or 
 criminality of their subjects should have 
 bled Europe of her best lives. The sense 
 of loss to England in the death of all these 
 young men must surely obliterate all the 
 old romantic nonsense about war for 
 several decades at least. But the criminal 
 vanity of a dynasty like the Hohenzollerns, 
 and all the poisonous brood of ideas deve- 
 loped to minister to that vanity, will not 
 be easily exterminated. It may soon rise 
 again from its ashes if we allow ourselves 
 to relapse into a mood of sentimental 
 acquiescence in accomplished facts, and 
 console ourselves too easily with reflections 
 on the honour and glory of the dead. 
 " Who dies if England lives ? " like most 
 rhetorical questions invites no answer. 
 But one may well ask what sort of England 
 would survive if wars on the present scale 
 occurred in each decade. Certainly not 
 44
 
 THREE MEN OF PEACE 
 
 the England that produced Chaucer's 
 Knight : 
 
 " And though that he was worthy, he was wise, 
 And of his port as meke as is a mayde. 
 He never yet no vilanie ne sayde 
 In alle his lif unto no manere wight ; 
 He was a veray parfit gentil knight." 
 
 45
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS AND HIS 
 AUTOGRAPHS 
 
 THE uncertainty of human life and the 
 wholesale destruction of property in war 
 make many a possessor of interesting records 
 anxious to publish them while they still 
 exist. For many years I have been in 
 possession of interesting documents which 
 belonged to my great-grandfather, Sir 
 Harris Nicolas, such as autograph letters 
 from Nelson, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and 
 others from his friends, such as Barham and 
 Babbage, of which a selection is here given. 
 I have been asked at different times to 
 write a short memoir of Sir Harris, but have 
 always postponed doing so for want of 
 sufficient leisure. There is, however, an 
 46
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 excellent sketch of his career in the " Dic- 
 tionary of National Biography ; " and the 
 longer story of it would only constitute a 
 heavy indictment against his contemporaries 
 for their indifference to research and exact 
 learning, which seems superfluous now that 
 the war has so seriously exposed the national 
 apathy in the region of science. 
 
 Sir Harris was one of those brilliant 
 amateurs who have built up the intellectual 
 prestige of this country, but who have rarely 
 been able to accomplish their work properly 
 unless, like Darwin and others, they have 
 also been well-to-do. Carlyle mentions 
 meeting him in March, 1832,33 follows: 
 
 " Yesternight I saw Sir Nicholas Harris 
 Nicolas, Knight of the Guelphic Order, 
 Antiquarian, and what not ; a good-natured, 
 rattling, small rather than thick-headed 
 mortal ; he said (coming home with me 
 through Chancery Lane) : ' I believe I 
 have ruined (or done more to ruin) more 
 47
 
 booksellers than any man living ; no book 
 of mine ever paid its expenses.' ' 
 
 Hood refers to him in his poem, " Miss 
 Kilmansegg " as an expert in pedigrees, 
 and rhymes his name to " ridiculous." 
 Carlyle again refers to him in " Latter 
 Day Pamphlets " as the modern substitute 
 for Homer when condemning the dullness 
 of his own times. 
 
 Sir Harris was born on the loth March, 
 1799, and entered the Royal Navy, of 
 which he was to be the historian, on the 
 27th October, 1808. As a midshipman 
 he saw much active service, and narrowly 
 escaped death capturing French frigates 
 off the coast of Calabria. He became a 
 Lieutenant on the 2Oth September, 1815, 
 and in the following year was put on half 
 pay owing to peace. He returned to his 
 native town, Looe, in Cornwall, and in- 
 herited some land there on attaining his 
 majority, This property had been mis-
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 managed during his minority ; and when it 
 was sold, some years later, the purchase 
 money only cleared off incumbrances. 
 
 On the 28th March 1822 he married 
 Lady Nicolas, and in a few years they came 
 to London. In 1824 he was elected a 
 Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and 
 on the 6th May 1825 was called to the 
 Bar. He had already started writing in 
 1823 with " Notitia Historica," and 
 followed it up with volumes on the peerage 
 and old wills. He is, of course, principally 
 known to the general reader as the editor 
 of Nelson's dispatches ; but the range and 
 versatility of his other writings, which need 
 not be here enumerated, is astonishing. 
 
 In the France or Germany of his own 
 day his talents would have been used to 
 proper advantage. Unfortunately he was 
 handicapped at every turn. His family 
 increased as rapidly as the number of his 
 unremunerative treatises, so that except 
 for a very short period of peerage practice 
 49 4
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 he was in constant embarrassment till his 
 final exile in Boulogne, where he died, 
 broken by misfortune, on the 3rd August, 
 1848. The records on which he worked 
 were under the control of officials wko were 
 expected to collect their own remuneration 
 by imposing fees at their discretion on 
 those who wanted to see them ; and if 
 ever useful service was done to the cause 
 of sound learning, it was the Nicolas 
 evidence before the Records Commission 
 in 1836. His troubles were aggravated by 
 being made a Knight in 1831 ; for in those 
 days it was necessary to " keep up " that 
 rank in proper style ; and though the 
 Court frequently used his services, he 
 received no emoluments of any kind. He 
 became G.C.M.G. in 1840; but even this 
 brought him no kind of appointment. 
 
 In spite of his energy and industry, 
 which kept him at work for whole days 
 without interruption, his health was per- 
 manently damaged by the rough con- 
 50
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 ditions of his early life in the Navy. He 
 was by temperament both irritable and 
 candid ; and, like many sailors, was no 
 respecter of persons. His pamphlets about 
 Palgrave and Panizzi show how little in*- 
 clined he was to consider his own interests 
 when he set out to remedy a private or 
 public grievance. 
 
 Perhaps no more need be said about 
 the public services and private character of 
 a courageous pioneer in legal and historical 
 research, nor should I have considered it 
 necessary to say as much but for a recent 
 criticism of Sir Harris by a contemporary 
 historian as being " aggressive and pas- 
 sionate." The ample facilities enjoyed by 
 that historian in his work, as compared with 
 the miserable difficulties of my ancestor's 
 career, might surely have tempered such 
 language about him. 
 
 As regards the autographs, I do not 
 know how those not written to Sir Harris 
 were acquired, except that Mrs. Nelson 
 5i 4*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 Ward (Nelson's daughter, Horatia) gave 
 him many naval letters. There are, for 
 instance, two very interesting letters to 
 Lady Hamilton (one annotated by her) ; 
 but these are included in the dispatches. 
 There are, however, two unpublished 
 letters from Byron and Shelley. Shelley 
 writes on the 2oth June, 1822, from Lerici 
 to Leigh Hunt at Leghorn, as follows : 
 
 *: 
 
 Enquire when you arrive for any in- 
 formation you may want of Mr. Dunn, 
 the English shopkeeper. Your arrival gives 
 me spirits enough to laugh at almost any- 
 thing. I know not how to impute my 
 want of them to either love or veal- 
 cutlets.* I hope to enjoy much of the 
 
 * He seems to have begun to write " pork," 
 but crossed it out and wrote " veal-cutlets," 
 perhaps for Hunt's benefit. He certainly did not 
 hanker after meat, although on the testimony of 
 Peacock he thrived during the river-trip of August 
 1815 on a diet of " mutton chops, well-pep- 
 pered." 
 
 52
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 one and devour many of the other in your 
 presence. I hope to forget what I might 
 have been in my content with what I am. 
 I embrace you all affectionately. 
 Yours ever, 
 
 P. B. S. 
 
 This must have been one of the last 
 letters he ever wrote. 
 
 Byron was at Genoa at the date of 
 his letter, which is apparently unpublished. 
 It was addressed to Leigh Hunt : 
 
 Nov. 23rd, 1822. 
 DEAR H., 
 
 Murray wrote to me some time 
 ago that Mr. Taaffe's comment* had 
 arrived in the river, but whether we are 
 " to search its bottom or survey its shore " 
 
 * " Count " Taaffe, the " butt " of the Pisa 
 circle, had printed a " Dante Commentary," at 
 Pisa, which John Murray had undertaken to pub- 
 lish, at Byron's recommendation. 
 53
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 for the literary ballast is known only to 
 Prester John himself, who hath been intent 
 as an oracle ever since upon the subject. 
 This is all that I can say on that topic. 
 I had done with ray part in getting it so 
 far forwards to the market. I have heard 
 no news of the Liberal* except that Lord 
 
 says in a note that he heareth by 
 
 letter that " it has made a great stir " in 
 London but as there be several variations 
 of " stir " in that metropolis I do not 
 augur very favourably. Also your brother 
 would have written once before. Had you 
 not better write to H. Smith that we will 
 take in the M.P.R. as they continue sending 
 it to us ? How and where is the sub- 
 scribblation to be paid ? I am out of 
 sorts for they are (illegible) out the hall 
 for this ball to-morrow which is a great 
 
 * Leigh Hunt's quarterly publication which 
 he had come out to Italy to edit, at Byron's invi- 
 tation. The first number is dated October I5th 
 1822.) 
 
 54
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 vex but as promised the Neighbour- 
 hood's deputation word must be kept. 
 I hope that Mrs. H. is better. 
 
 Yours ever, 
 
 N. B. 
 
 Addressed to 
 
 Leigh Hunt, Esq., 
 
 Albano. 
 
 There is an undated letter from Words- 
 worth : 
 
 Friday. 
 
 My DEAR MRS. POWELL, 
 
 Here I am, 41, Upper Grosvenor 
 Street, but so much tossed about in this 
 vast city that I scarcely know where and 
 when to appoint a meeting. To-morrow I 
 go to Windsor. Sunday I am engaged, 
 and so on. Could you call (one) day 
 here between five and six and wait if I 
 should not be in ? 
 
 Ever faithfully yours, 
 
 WM. WORDSWORTH. 
 
 55
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 The year of the following letter from Sir 
 Walter Scott is not recorded ; but the 
 letter runs thus : 
 
 Abbotsford, 
 
 1st January. 
 MY DEAR SIR, 
 
 I have read with the greatest 
 interest and attention the negotiations of 
 Bishop Beckington which you favour me 
 with a copy of. They possess high interest 
 as historical documents regarding an age 
 of which we know so little as the early 
 part of Henry VI. (illegible). It is in 
 such minute details rather than in the 
 generalities of ordinary history that we 
 discover those minute traces by which the 
 peculiar habits of our ancestors may be 
 traced and recognized. I have not heard 
 what it is that prevents you from your 
 promised attention to Greene his works 
 and literary squabbles, but I regret much 
 that the book is not in your hands as it is 
 56
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 material to English literature and very 
 well worthy of such illustrations as you 
 would bestow. On my return to Edin- 
 burgh I hope to send you a copy of a 
 trifling work which I have printed for the 
 Roxburghe Club, of which I hope your 
 favourable acceptance. 
 
 I am, sir, with renewed thanks, 
 
 Your very much obliged servant, 
 WALTER SCOTT. 
 
 A letter from Lockhart shows that Sir 
 Harris knew how to get his works reviewed 
 in the Quarterly ; but is not of interest 
 otherwise. There are letters from the 
 Duke of Wellington, Lyndhurst, Brougham, 
 and others which are not noteworthy for 
 their contents ; but the Duke's letter is 
 characteristic : 
 
 London, 
 
 Feb. zoth, 1841. 
 
 The Duke of Wellington presents his 
 57
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 compliments to Sir Harris Nicolas. He was 
 Knight of the Bath in 1804. He has no 
 recollection of anything else. 
 
 The last attempted literary enterprise of 
 Sir Harris was to edit the letters of Sir 
 Hudson Lowe. Here is a letter from Sir 
 Hudson : 
 
 MY DEAR SIR HARRIS, 
 
 I feel much obliged by your kind 
 invitation to pay a visit at Rose Cottage, 
 and should be much gratified to go over the 
 classic ground of Windsor with you 
 more unique and proud in its associations 
 than all the other Royal and Imperial 
 residences in Europe joined together except 
 always that where the Holy Father still 
 holds his Court ; but I fear it will not be 
 in my power to do it. To-morrow I go 
 down to Suffolk to bring my daughter up 
 to Town if the kind friend with whom 
 58
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 she is staying will allow me to do so, and I 
 must confess I shall have some scruple in 
 bringing her away from a very pleasant 
 country residence to be imposing my 
 weariness upon her, during this sultry 
 weather, in Town, but we are not always 
 masters of our own actions, which appears 
 to me the strongest argument which can 
 be offered against the utility of that doctrine 
 for which, as you will see by the inclosed 
 (sent without his knowledge), my son still 
 continues so strenuous an advocate. It 
 matters not, in fact, what our disposition 
 or natural inclinations may be if cir- 
 cumstances will force us to act otherwise. 
 I am happy at all events to be able to 
 congratulate Lady Nicolas and your 
 daughters as well as yourself in being able 
 to follow yours in what must prove so 
 agreeable a variety to you, and with most 
 sincere thanks for your many acts of real 
 kindness and with my best regards to Lady 
 Nicolas and the Misses Nicolas, in which 
 59
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 I venture to anticipate my daughters. 
 Most heartily yours, I remain always, 
 My dear Sir Harris, 
 
 Your most obliged and faithful, 
 
 H. LOWE. 
 22nd Septr. 1843. 
 
 Two of Sir Harris's most intimate friends 
 were Babbage, the mathematician, and 
 Barham, the author of the " Ingoldsby 
 Legends." 
 
 The following letters of Babbage and 
 Barham are characteristic : 
 
 MY DEAR LADY NICOLAS, 
 
 I do not know whether your 
 daughter yet goes out, as the phrase is, 
 but perhaps you may not be unwilling to 
 make an exception to a philosopher's party, 
 especially as it is possible I may have no 
 reunions of my friends next season. As 
 Sir Harris is, of course, a great stickler for 
 'precedent, pray assure him I can give him 
 several similar cases in which my parties 
 60
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 have profited by the presence of young 
 ladies of great wit and beauty whose 
 fathers had the discernment to see the fit 
 cases to be made the exceptions. I hope, 
 therefore, to have the pleasure of seeing 
 Miss Nicolas on Saturday next, and that 
 you will always consider her included in 
 my cards. 
 
 I am, dear Lady Nicolas, 
 Ever truly yours, 
 
 CHARLES BABBAGE. 
 I4th Febr. 1840. 
 
 MY DEAR SIR HARRIS, 
 
 Garter's engagement with me is 
 on Friday, i6th, the day bejore the one on 
 which you ask me to partake of your hospi- 
 tality. Now if you will do me the favour 
 to join our party on that day at seven, I 
 shall be most happy to avail myself of your 
 kind invitation for the following day. 
 
 Pray make my best respects to Lady 
 Nicolas and the young ladies, to whom I 
 61
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 pledge myself for a ghost story on demand 
 (they will know what I mean). 
 And believe me ever, 
 
 Most faithfully yours, 
 
 R. H. BARHAM. 
 Amen Grove (corner the post-office 
 
 people call it), 
 June 8th, 1843. 
 
 The following, characteristic of Leigh 
 Hunt, who was long-winded even when 
 he refused an invitation, was probably 
 written to Margaret Gillies, who painted 
 a portrait of Leigh Hunt now in the 
 National Portrait Gallery. In a letter to 
 Dr. S. Smith, Leigh Hunt says : " Ask 
 the dear Gillieses, nevertheless, to love me a 
 little bit still, and do you so much " . . . . 
 
 Chelsea, 
 
 January 8th. 
 
 How monstrous, my dear Margaret, that 
 I cannot come to you on either of these 
 days ! For if you have all been so desirous, 
 62
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 like good friends, to see me, I assure you the 
 wish has been heartily matched by my own. 
 But I have so much work to do this week 
 and next, that I am afraid to break in upon 
 it with pleasures, which temperate as they 
 are, divert me from my task more than you 
 can imagine. Give my love to Dr. Smith* 
 and ask him to be kind enough to repeat 
 his invitation for some day the week after 
 next, and most gladly will I break out of 
 my studious chrysalis and be (in every 
 respect, alas ! and yet what is the good of 
 saying " alas ? ") a strange kind of winter 
 butterfly. And I will then make you laugh 
 with an account of a fit of illness I have had, 
 during which I was ashamed to send for Dr. 
 S. (for it was a Christmas illness), but was 
 
 * Dr. Thomas Southwood Smith (1788-1861), 
 Leigh Hunt's medical attendant and friend, is 
 described in the " Dictionary of National Bio- 
 graphy " as " Sanitary Reformer." It was to 
 Smith that Bentham left his body by will for 
 dissection, 1832. 
 
 63
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 resolved, so far, to shew myself his not 
 unworthy patient by most heroically ab- 
 staining from taking a single spoonful of 
 brandy, which everybody swore would put 
 an end to it. So I gloriously proclaimed 
 my devotion to his orders, and had the plea- 
 sure of hearing his name alternately de- 
 nounced and admired for producing martyr- 
 dom so inveterate. Would to heaven I 
 could boast on the active side of the devo- 
 tion, as well as the passive, but you know 
 what Shelley said of the good heroine 
 I should have made ; though indeed to 
 complete that character the active part 
 must and shall come. Always 
 
 Your affectionate friend, 
 
 L. H. 
 
 The following letter from Procter (better 
 known as Barry Cornwall) to Robert 
 Browning is of great literary interest, for 
 Browning cannot have had many admirers 
 in 1841 : 
 
 64
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 Thursday night, 
 
 5, Grove End Place, 
 St. John's Wood, 
 
 2ist Sep. 1841. 
 MY DEAR BROWNING, 
 
 There is some cause (some good 
 cause) why I do not see you now and then, 
 come and tell me what it is. I have asked 
 Macready, Blanchard, and Forster to dine 
 with me on Tuesday next at a quarter before 
 seven will you come also ? Say yes ; in 
 order that you may tell me why you (an 
 idle man in common phrase) never come and 
 seek me as I would seek you were I a 
 master of my time, and you not. 
 
 I am a bachelor (Felix ter et what is 
 the rest ?) I require the congratulations 
 of my friends. My wife is in Italy well 
 and happy and about to return. She will 
 be glad to know that you are well also. 
 
 Some time ago some months, indeed 
 I began a letter to you, in verse, commenc- 
 ing with : 
 
 65 5
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 " Browning, my boy, when will you come and 
 
 taste 
 
 Our calm suburban air ? We are not graced 
 Often with poets in our humble," etc. 
 
 but I could not get on. 
 
 There are a dozen lines or so accomplished, 
 but the rest is air. A bump on the pave- 
 ment last winter has dissipated my ideas. 
 Some of these days I will give you (in ex- 
 change) my copy of the Sordello, in 
 which you will see that I have carefully 
 read the book (times over, indeed). I 
 have said half a dozen times that although 
 it is decidedly drama yet that it manifests 
 more power (above all, there is the great 
 Iris bow of promise) than the Paracelsus. 
 Do not be offended with your critics, but 
 make them serve you to step higher ; as I 
 am sure you will ; were I younger and had 
 more leisure I should like to run an honour- 
 able tilt with you (dramatically) and see 
 which of us could do the best. Do not 
 despise me as a rival because of Mirandola, 
 66
 
 SIR HARRIS NICOLAS 
 
 for I utterly despise that and can do better 
 things. 
 
 Be assured of this, that however authors 
 may meet with temporary applause, there 
 is no one to be afraid of at the present day. 
 I am quite sure of this. 
 
 A man has only to gird up his loins and 
 fight boldly and sincerely. Let me hear 
 from you. 
 
 Yours very sincerely, 
 
 B. W. PROCTER. 
 
 There are other letters from John Lin- 
 gard, Agnes Strickland, the historian of 
 the Queens of England, Thackeray, John 
 Bright, and Chief Baron Pollock ; but they 
 have little interest except for the hand- 
 writing and purely personal considerations. 
 
 The tattered autograph album revives 
 for me memories of sitting over it as a little 
 boy with a fragile, but very sympathetic 
 and entertaining, old lady who talked much 
 of her father. She remembered the pale 
 67 5*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 features of Hallam ; but said that 
 Macaulay was too much of a Radical to visit 
 the Nicolas household. She spoke of the 
 old chateau Amremont at Boulogne which 
 her father hired because of its Napoleonic 
 associations and in spite of its sanitary 
 dangers. She remembered the trees of 
 Liberty in the streets which marked the 
 year 1848. Just before her death she sent 
 me the album, which was her most trea- 
 sured possession, and I think she would have 
 desired some at least of its contents to be 
 printed for those who are at all interested 
 in the " old, unhappy, far-off things " of 
 this world. 
 
 68
 
 A MEMOIR OF OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 THIS charming little book, which I was 
 fortunate enough to get the other day, is a 
 delightful tribute to one of our forgotten 
 worthies, to wit, George Mogridge, who was 
 born on the ijth February 1787 and died 
 on the 2nd November 1854, and is written 
 in his own incomparable style. 
 
 Many of us must have been familiar in 
 youth with the voluminous works, without 
 knowing the identity, of the author, whose 
 writings, to quote the memoir, " have been 
 perused in the drawing-room with pleasure 
 and profit, while they have conveyed instruc- 
 tion to the cottager, the mechanic, the sailor, 
 the soldier, and the poor man's child . . . 
 and obtained a circulation wherever the 
 69
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 English language is spoken." In writing for 
 the Religious Tract Society he adopted the 
 various but suitable names of " Grandfather 
 Gregory," " Uncle Adam," " Grandmamma 
 Gilbert," and " Aunt Upton." 
 
 " It is believed," writes his anonymous 
 biographer, " that the writings of Mr. 
 Mogridge are free from all that would 
 injure the mind or debase the affections." 
 This we may well accept when we hear 
 of " Old Humphrey " sitting among his 
 books, with " a large card before him, 
 on which were written in a bold style 
 the three words c ALLURE INSTRUCT 
 -IMPRESS,' to remind him of his 
 work, and the way in which it was to 
 be done." That he eschewed the in- 
 sidious temptations of " trying to act the 
 buffoon " and " leaving volumes of wit and 
 humour behind him " was a source of real 
 consolation to at least one of his friends on 
 the occasion of his demise. Old Hum- 
 phrey has himself written that " it would 
 70
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 be no bad method to find out the lawfulness 
 or unlawfulness of our pleasures, and the 
 spiritual or worldly state of our affections, 
 were we to ask ourselves this question in the 
 midst of every enjoyment, ' Can we put up 
 a hearty hallelujah at the end of it ? ' 
 Such a standard is indeed an infallible safe- 
 guard against buffoonery. 
 
 Nevertheless the channel of his work was 
 determined by a series of providential inci- 
 dents which his biographer frankly portrays 
 in the best Mogridgian manner. One of 
 his early and more profane works was en- 
 titled " The Churchyard Lyrist " (perhaps 
 subsequently extended into " The Church- 
 yard Prattler "). " It is hoped," we read, 
 " that it answered the purpose of the pub- 
 lishers better than it did that of the author. 
 The price agreed on for the copyright was 
 .50 ; but as it was to be received in 
 copies, and as Mr. Mogridge gave three- 
 fourths of the books away, his pocket was 
 thereby very little replenished."
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 How familiar this tragedy will seem to 
 some of us ! Young writers who have not 
 yet achieved Old Humphrey's popularity 
 will sympathize even more deeply with him 
 in his later disappointments. " A pub- 
 lisher, to whom he had offered a small 
 manuscript for 10, placed it flat on 
 his counter, and measuring it with his 
 hand, said, with a consequential air, that 
 he had bought manuscripts double the 
 height for five." Mr. Mogridge, how- 
 ever, appears to have been buoyed up by 
 the memory of Milton obtaining only 
 five pounds for " Paradise Lost," and even 
 went so far as to send " sparkling contri- 
 butions " to " add lustre " to a new maga- 
 zine called the Comet. The Comet, after 
 printing only one such contribution, un- 
 fortunately fell to earth again. The office 
 of the magazine was shut up on the day 
 when the second number of the work was 
 to appear. " These misadventures " (we 
 are told) " gave a serious turn to Mr. 
 72
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 Mogridge's thoughts, and brought him into 
 association with enterprises of a more 
 decidedly religious character than he at first 
 contemplated. He felt the necessity of 
 applying in quarters where greater reliance 
 could be placed," and proceeded to forward 
 one tract per week to a respectable book- 
 seller called Houlston for publication. 
 
 In a verse tract entitled " Thomas 
 Brown : or a Dialogue on Sunday Morn- 
 ing," Mr. Mogridge gloriously triumphed 
 in distracting the popular taste from that 
 less innocent verse which a printer, after 
 vainly trying to elevate his customers, had 
 been forced by economic necessity to supply. 
 Old Humphrey's verse owed its inspiration 
 to a " rough sketch in a kind of poetical 
 prose " delivered to him by a " worthy 
 relative." The " rustic throng ' were 
 caught at once by the " artless history of 
 the sabbath-breaker." The verses were 
 recited aloud and " with breathless atten- 
 tion they " (i.e., the rustic throng) " drank 
 73
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 in with greedy ears the words of the reciter 
 until ' Thomas Brown ' was represented 
 as attending the village church. The 
 description that followed won every heart. 
 . . . ' Thomas Brown ' used to be fami- 
 liarly chanted in the streets of London. 
 . . . One man was so constantly engaged in 
 reciting the tract that he seemed to have 
 no other occupation." 
 
 This was the beginning of Mr. Mogridge's 
 really striking success, though he modestly 
 told the Religious Tract Society that " he 
 feared the buoyancy and flow of his thoughts 
 were unsuited to the force and sobriety 
 required in religious tracts." His works 
 included " The Sabbath-breaker Re- 
 claimed : or Thomas Brown," " The In- 
 fidel Blacksmith," " John Tomkins, the 
 Dram-drinker," " Footprints of Popery," 
 " The Woolly Bear," " Gaffer Greenwood's 
 Pleasant Tales," " Juvenile Culprits," " Old 
 Humphrey's Walks in London," " Old 
 Humphrey's Country Strolls," " Learning 
 74
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY > 
 
 to Think," " Learning to Feel," " Learning 
 to Converse," and many other little volumes 
 concerning all of which his biographer very 
 properly writes : " He ever took a sunny 
 and hopeful view of things as they rose 
 before him ; yet however gay, he was never 
 volatile nor lost sight of the responsibility 
 of authorship or his character as a Chris- 
 tian." 
 
 The popularity of these works is un- 
 doubtedly significant to the student of 
 English history. Old Humphrey's great 
 sayings are not without their influence on 
 our thought and action. Take, for example, 
 " Habitual cheerfulness is no unfit attendant 
 on healthy piety," or " The morality of a 
 painting reaches the judgment only by 
 passing through the lengthy avenues of 
 reason and reflection, while its immorality 
 influences the passions instantaneously 
 through the eye." Such obiter dicta reveal 
 isolated currents of opinion that still find 
 voice in some great periodicals of to-day, 
 75
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 and in this connection we may well be glad 
 to know that the editor of " Ackerman's 
 Poetical Magazine " was profuse in his 
 acknowledgments for Old Humphrey's 
 " disinterested aid." This, however, was in 
 the days of his literary adolescence the 
 days when Mr. Mogridge, overcome by the 
 beauties of natural scenery, would fall " on 
 his knees with a fervour of feeling that was 
 painful to him, and prayed that God in his 
 goodness would either subdue his emotions, 
 or give him the greater ability to sustain the 
 enjoyment of them." 
 
 The two cardinal defects in his work 
 are his habit of answering his own rhetorical 
 questions and his exuberant delight in 
 family vaults, the latter of which he yearned 
 to adorn with drapery. Of the first I may 
 take these specimens : 
 
 " And did the magic of romantic lays 
 Seduce the leisure of my earlier days ? 
 Did fancy spread her varied charms around, 
 And lead me wandering o'er enchanted ground ? 
 76
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 " Oh yes, and oft these transitory toys 
 Have flung a sunbeam on my passing joys. 
 And has the midnight taper wasted been 
 In pondering legend hoar, and fairy scene ? 
 Have idle fictions o'er my fancy stole, 
 And superstition's tales beguiled my soul ? " 
 
 " They have," etc., etc. 
 
 As to the vaults, we are sorry to find 
 Mr. Mogridge writing about an impending 
 funeral to a bereaved daughter, " I shall go, 
 not aweeping, so far as sorrow is concerned, 
 but, as a rejoicing pilgrim, to Norwood 
 Cemetery," and again, " The vault is an 
 excellent one ; and many of the girls who 
 attend the church will sit exactly over the 
 dust of their late instructor."* In fact, 
 the reader is perhaps less surprised than 
 Old Humphrey to learn the effect of his 
 ministrations to a father who had recently 
 
 * " The dust " is quite an unusual expression. 
 We usually read of " the mouldering tenant of 
 the tomb." 
 
 77
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 lost his son : " When we paid him a visit 
 of condolence, a bear robbed of her whelps 
 could hardly have been more irascible." 
 
 William Wordsworth, however, was less 
 sensitive : 
 
 " When in the neighbourhood of Rydal 
 Mount, Mr. Mogridge could not repress 
 a desire to see the man whose talented 
 writings had afforded him hours of enjoy- 
 ment. Not with a feeling of idle and 
 intrusive curiosity, but with a sense of 
 deep respect and honour, he wrote rapidly 
 a brief note, in which he inclosed his card, 
 and forwarded it to Mr. Wordsworth. 
 
 " ' And I, too (among the thousand 
 and one strangers passing through this 
 land of mountains and meres, who would 
 enjoy the same privilege) would fain see 
 Wordsworth. My letters of introduction 
 are a graven brow, a sprinkling of the grey 
 on my head, a respectful and affectionate 
 admiration of the author of the ' Ex- 
 78
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 cursion,' and a pledge that I will not rob 
 him of more than five minutes of his 
 valuable time. 
 
 " ' The Builder of the mountains, 
 
 The Maker of the meres, 
 Go with thee, gifted man, and spread 
 The sunbeams round thy honour'd head, 
 
 Through this low vale of tears.' 
 
 " On reaching Rydal Mount, he heard 
 the painful intelligence that Mr. Words- 
 worth had lost his only daughter a month 
 previously. It appeared, for a moment, 
 wrong to trespass on the grief of an afflicted 
 parent, but the very loss increased the 
 desire of Mr. Mogridge to see him.* He 
 accordingly delivered his note to a servant ; 
 and in a few moments the poet-laureate 
 came forward and took the visitor by the 
 hand in a most cordial manner. There 
 
 * We hope that Mr. Mogridge made no sugges- 
 tions for improving the family vault, but he pro- 
 bably meant to do so. 
 
 79
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 was a welcome in his words and looks ; and 
 in a short time, they were walking together 
 round the beautiful grounds of the Mount, 
 beholding the striking objects of the glowing 
 scene. 
 
 " The simple and courteous demeanour 
 of Mr. Wordsworth soon made the visitor 
 feel quite at ease. They walked together 
 through the retired walks and mossy alcoves 
 of this lovely retreat, while grave and 
 serious observations and more cheerful 
 remarks alternately diversified their con- 
 versation. When an allusion was made 
 to the promised five minutes, the laureate 
 refused to hear of it. Scarcely less than 
 an hour had passed before Mr. Mogridge 
 took his departure, impressed with the 
 hospitable and benignant spirit of the 
 gifted occupant of Rydal Mount." 
 
 Old Humphrey himself did not escape 
 the penalty of literary celebrity. His 
 identity was frequently suspected during 
 80
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY " 
 
 his tours. His feelings were indeed hurt 
 when he was suspected of preaching, and 
 his retort on one occasion was : " I do not 
 Breach, but I am read by thousands : 
 good-bye." 
 
 A hairdresser at Hastings once remarked 
 to Mr. Mogridge during his toilet : " I 
 have lately been reading a very interesting 
 book. I can't read prosy works, but this 
 one was quite to my taste ; it is an excellent 
 one. It is called * Old Humphrey's 
 Addresses.' ' He then went on to ex- 
 patiate on the merits of " The Toppers," 
 and other well-known pieces in the volume. 
 . . . Mr. Mogridge quietly enjoyed his 
 friend's recital. " It was just the kind of 
 incident to bring out the natural amiability 
 of his heart. A copy of the work was 
 obtained in the town, and at the next 
 interview Mr. Mogridge placed it in his 
 hands, having previously recorded in his 
 own trembling penmanship that it was 
 
 " a gift from the author to Mr. ." 
 
 81 6
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 The disconcerted and delighted hairdresser, 
 on receiving the neat-looking volume, could 
 scarcely believe that he had been un- 
 wittingly extolling the book to its author's 
 face his own customer, too ! and that 
 the author's own hands had presented to 
 him the valued work, to be kept as a 
 memorial of a pious interest in his welfare." 
 Was this hairdresser, we wonder, as simple 
 as he appeared ? 
 
 Once, too, when passing through a 
 crowded London street, a popular orator, 
 seeing Mr. Mogridge, suddenly broke out 
 
 in a loud voice, looking at the startled 
 
 '' 
 
 author : 
 
 " Where have you been wandering about, Thomas 
 
 Brown, 
 In your jacket so out of repair ? " 
 
 These were the first words of the famous 
 composition, " Thomas Brown." 
 
 " Mr. Mogridge (we are told) was not 
 an inattentive observer of public affairs, 
 82
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 though his politics took but little of a party 
 character. On one subject, however, he 
 was most decided that of opposition to 
 all the political as well as religious encroach- 
 ments of Romanism. A letter to a friend 
 at the time when the insidious inroads of' 
 Popery had aroused the attention of all 
 sound-hearted Protestants, afforded an occa- 
 sion for a statement of his views of the true 
 nature of that antichristian system."^ 
 
 Nevertheless, his horror of Popery did 
 not prevent his visiting France, where he 
 met with an adventure of a desperate 
 nature. As he says, " The object of my 
 French excursion was to see and know as 
 much of France and French customs as my 
 limited opportunities would afford ; there 
 was a strong temptation to witness, but 
 none to partake of, the thoughtless follies 
 around me. I am, however, not attempt- 
 ing to justify myself, for I was wrong, but 
 
 * That statement is here suppressed in the 
 interests of religious toleration. 
 
 83 6*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 simply narrating a fact." The adventure is 
 too long to relate, but as Old Humphrey 
 " could only express himself in French with 
 great difficulty, and found it out of the 
 question to do so when excited," he had 
 ultimately to submit to paying nineteen 
 francs for a meal which appears to have 
 been mainly composed of brandy. I cannot 
 improve on the censorious comment of his 
 biographer. " Old Humphrey, in this narra- 
 tive, writes as one self-condemned. He 
 seems, however, to have been taught a 
 lesson of discretion by his adventure with 
 the French chasseur, which he was anxious 
 to impress on other tourists, that they 
 might not be beguiled into similar im- 
 prudent familiarity with roadside com- 
 panions and strangers." 
 
 The reader of the memoir is often anxious 
 to visualize Mr. Mogridge, and perhaps 
 the most moving picture of Old Humphrey 
 is provided by himself in one of his 
 
 addresses : 
 
 84
 
 MEMOIR OF " OLD HUMPHREY ' 
 
 " If you meet an ancient man with a 
 kind-hearted countenance, who, as he 
 passes a throng of playful boys, softly 
 speaks, ' Bless you all, my little merry 
 hearts ; may you be as free from sin as 
 you are from sorrow ; ' or ejaculates, as a 
 pale-faced woman, habited in black, with 
 a crape bonnet on her head, moves on with 
 a dejected air, * May thy Maker be thy 
 Husband, and thy mourning be turned 
 into joy ; ' or who comforts a little orphan 
 boy, patting him on the head, and speaking 
 to him of a heavenly Father, and quoting 
 to him, ' When my father and my mother 
 forsake me, then the Lord will take me 
 up : ' follow him up closely, for it is ten 
 to one but he will turn out to be Old 
 Humphrey." 
 
 I hope that the atmosphere of Mr. 
 Mogridge and his works will appeal to 
 others as it has appealed to me. In the 
 days of thoughtless youth, I fear that I, 
 like many others, only thought of Old 
 85
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 Humphrey as a bore of several hundred 
 horse-power. I have grown, however, to 
 admire his vitality, his exuberance, the 
 undoubted polish of his style, and the 
 undiluted vigour of his opinions. England 
 owes much to the sturdy honesty and zeal 
 for propagating the truth that distinguish 
 Old Humphrey's writings, and we might 
 all be the better for emulating his familiarity 
 with the Bible. As an old friend of mine, 
 who was almost one of Old Humphrey's 
 generation, once wrote to me of his con- 
 temporaries : " They thought more clearly, 
 if not more profoundly, than we do to-day." 
 The great Mogridge family has done much 
 for us all ; and, parted as we are from them 
 by the great revolutions in thought that 
 have occurred since 1854, we may some- 
 times find ourselves envying them " their 
 early Heaven, their happy views." 
 
 86
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY 
 
 THE custom in most European countries 
 of bringing flowers to the graves on All 
 Souls' Day, and in modern Spain and 
 Russia and Greece of bringing food and 
 wine, is, of course, directly interwoven 
 with the ancestor worship of savage tribes. 
 This worship, as Tylor wrote, " keeps up 
 the social relations of the living world." 
 A particularly poignant example of it was 
 related by Mr. Stephen Graham in the 
 Daily Mail not long ago. He describes 
 seeing a widow in East Russia bringing 
 food to her husband's grave within a year 
 87
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 of his death, and then throwing herself 
 on the earth and sobbing out all that had 
 happened to her and the children during 
 the year, with all the children's inquiries 
 after him and messages for him. Similarly, 
 it is common to read of a bereaved person 
 committing suicide on the grave of the 
 beloved. A certain old lady of Exeter 
 who was left a widow in 1845, during all 
 the thirty years of her remaining life never 
 left the house except to take a carriage to 
 church on Sunday. In this way she pre- 
 sumably concentrated her thoughts on her 
 husband and avoided contracting new ties 
 and interests that might (as she thought) 
 make his memory less vivid to her. 
 
 All this implies our passionate loyalty 
 to the dead and our spontaneous revolt 
 against the automatic readjustment that 
 occurs throughout nature of loss, whether 
 it be of a limb or a friend, so vividly 
 described in Arnold's lines, not about death 
 but about absence : 
 
 88
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY 
 
 " But each day brings its petty dust 
 Our soon-choked souls to fill, 
 And we forget because we must 
 And not because we will." 
 
 Yet, from a strictly rational point of 
 view, the old lady's proceedings were no 
 less absurd than the device of the man in 
 Mr. Kipling's story who lived on a trapeze 
 in order to avoid being aged by the rotation 
 of the earth ! Its logical conclusion is 
 either partial or total suicide. 
 
 Whatever one may or may not believe 
 as to personal immortality or survival, I 
 scarcely think that the belief is relevant to 
 the problem of the duties of the living to 
 the dead, that is to say, whether they 
 should concentrate their thoughts on the 
 dead or consciously welcome distraction 
 from the subject. Nothing can alter the 
 fact that, if we meet the dead again after 
 many years, we cannot possibly restore 
 our relations with them to the exact con- 
 dition in which they stood at the date of 
 89
 
 a given death. For example, a man may 
 take up a colonial appointment for some 
 years, and, on returning to his wife, will 
 probably find that he and she have to 
 " begin all over again," that is to say, to 
 learn again all the mutual adjustment of 
 habits entailed by married life. Even 
 spiritualists are careful to explain that the 
 spirit of a dead person becomes more 
 remote from this world and less communi- 
 cative as time goes on. 
 
 I maintain, therefore, that for the vast 
 majority of persons the dead cease to be 
 anything but memories when the first 
 period of bereavement is over ; and the pain 
 of bereavement is nothing but the gradual 
 admission of the fact that the dead person 
 has, from our point of view, ceased to live, 
 and is, in sober fact, dead. 
 
 A man who has lost his leg may constantly 
 
 feel pains in his big toe, and the analogous 
 
 pains of bereavement take their time to 
 
 wear out. The man's memories of walks 
 
 90
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY 
 
 or other amusements when he had the leg 
 may become all the more vivid because 
 they are now gone for ever. So also 
 memories of the dead may become more 
 vivid. The point is that he loses the 
 illusion of pains in the big toe just as we 
 lose the illusion of the dead being still alive. 
 We can, perhaps, find the answer as to 
 what our duty is to the dead by reflecting 
 on what we should like to happen after 
 our own deaths. We should all, no doubt, 
 like to be remembered, but not in a painful 
 way. The one great terror of death for 
 the wise man is the fear of the distress 
 and anguish that it would cause his family 
 and friends ; he would like always to be 
 a happy memory, and not a source of vain 
 regrets. If a man really cares about his 
 wife, and faces death as a fact, he would 
 surely be ashamed of any posthumous 
 jealousy of her being happily remarried. 
 It is becoming more and more customary 
 for people to leave directions for the
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 reduction or abolition of mourning customs, 
 which in their origin are certainly due to 
 fear of a malign ghost. No breach or 
 observance of such customs can really affect 
 the genuine elements of grief or sense of 
 loss. On the other hand, preoccupation 
 with the dead is to some extent the off- 
 spring of subconscious fear. The sensation, 
 often felt soon after a death, that the dead 
 person is watching what we do, may 
 nowadays be tempered with affection, but 
 the real root of it is fear of a spirit which, 
 dislodged from its comfortable surround- 
 ings on earth, is only too ready to wreak its 
 vengeance on those who have escaped such 
 a misfortune. As a matter of fact, I can 
 conceive no worse fate for the living than 
 to feel that they are incessantly watched by 
 the dead, or for the dead than incessantly 
 to watch the living without being able to 
 communicate with the living. 
 
 It is, of course, far from desirable to do 
 any violence to natural feelings. To divert 
 92
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY 
 
 such feelings by unnatural absorption in 
 work or travel, or distractions of any sort, 
 is no real cure ; it is at best but a palliative. 
 Sooner or later the fact of a particular death 
 must be realized and faced. One is often 
 repelled, of course, by those who maintain 
 that all the beauty and poignancy of life 
 is due to its perishability ; yet one cannot 
 but admit the truth of Cory's lines from 
 " Mimnermus in Church " : 
 
 " You promise heavens free from strife, 
 Pure truth, and perfect change of will ; 
 
 But sweet, sweet is this human life, 
 So sweet, I fain would breathe it still ; 
 
 Your chilly stars I can forego, 
 
 This warm, kind world is all I know." 
 
 Again the readjustment that we feel 
 disloyal in death as in love, is described by 
 Mr. Belloc in his " Path to Rome " in a 
 way that removes the feeling of disloyalty : 
 
 " All you that have loved passionately 
 and have torn your hearts asunder in dis- 
 illusions, do not imagine that things broken 
 93
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 cannot be mended by the good angels. 
 There is a kind of splice, called the ' long 
 splice,' which makes a cut rope seem what 
 it was before ; it is even stronger than 
 before, and can pass through a block. There 
 will descend upon you a blessed hour when 
 you will be convinced as by a miracle, and 
 you will suddenly understand the redinte- 
 gratio amoris. But this hour," Mr. Belloc 
 characteristically adds, " you will not receive 
 in the rain on the Emilian way." 
 
 We cannot keep up the illusion of perma- 
 nence in life, although that illusion is, per- 
 haps, the principal charm of being young. 
 We have got to face the fact that this world 
 is an unending process of flux and change, 
 and further, that even our own selves are 
 incessantly dying and being born again from 
 day to day, if we are to live in any sense 
 worthy of the word " life." We see how 
 very old people die just because they fail 
 to respond to the flux and change ; the 
 process, whether mental or physical, is the 
 94
 
 ALL SOULS' DAY 
 
 same ; indeed, we sometimes notice how 
 middle-aged persons who are unduly sub- 
 servient to very old parents lose elasticity 
 before their time. Individuality is itself 
 no more than a capacity to assimilate through 
 human intercourse and observation and 
 affections all that enables it to survive ; and 
 all that we have assimilated from the dead 
 will for ever remain a part of us. Memories 
 of the dead will always form our standards 
 and give us a certain bias of selection. 
 
 Wars such as we are enduring now only 
 illustrate the same truths on a large scale 
 and in the grand style. Nothing can be so 
 melancholy as to read name after name of 
 our fallen officers, with the almost invariable 
 words " only son " or " only child " of the 
 bereaved parents. Whole families seem to 
 be wiped out every day in a process of whole- 
 sale massacre which some of us had hoped 
 would never again afflict European civiliza- 
 tion. We are exasperated by the criminal 
 stupidity of Europe in allowing militarism, 
 95
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 as known in modern Prussia, ever to reach 
 the full development of its powers. We 
 fear that, even after all this present sacrifice, 
 this will probably not be the last European 
 war. But we can no more escape facing the 
 cataclysm than men whose homes have 
 vanished in an earthquake can avoid making 
 new homes. To allow ourselves to be 
 paralysed by such a calamity is to betray 
 the cause for which men are every day cheer- 
 fully giving their lives. We need not 
 reproach ourselves with being callous if, as 
 the war goes on, we find ourselves becoming 
 more familiar with the idea of death on a 
 scale hitherto unknown. 
 
 The worst wrong we can commit is to 
 allow ourselves to be so obsessed by the idea 
 of death as to lose the idea of life ; this may 
 well become a stronger temptation to those 
 who are not actually fighting than to those 
 who are. It will be at some such moment 
 of suicidal weakness that we shall be asked 
 to " spare Prussia humiliation." 
 
 96
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF SURVIVAL 
 
 IT is safe to say that before the war death 
 was regarded as the principal tragedy of life, 
 rather to the exclusion of pain and disease. 
 The autobiography of Herbert Spencer 
 represents a continuous effort to live as 
 long as possible, and this is specially con- 
 spicuous in his closing pages. This ideal is 
 even more uncompromisingly expressed in 
 the works of Metchnikoff. MetchnikorFs 
 ideal is essentially that of the quiet life, free 
 from accident and disturbance. This ideal of 
 the individual life to some extent infected our 
 idea of the community, and to some it seemed 
 that, just as, according to Metchnikoff, 
 the human body in old age was ultimately 
 destroyed by phagocytes, so the com- 
 97 7
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 munity in its old age might ultimately be 
 destroyed by bureaucrats. There was cer- 
 tainly a feeling that it was rather disreput- 
 able to die young ; for early death was 
 largely associated either with ill health or 
 with the results of a too adventurous dis- 
 position. 
 
 It was, therefore, all the more startling 
 when, in spite of having grown up in this 
 climate of opinion, the young men of our 
 time many of whom seemed little inter- 
 ested in public movements suddenly faced 
 the situation and cheerfully risked their 
 lives for the cause of their country. Many 
 of them were notoriously opposed to mili- 
 tarism in any form, and only went to the 
 front, partly from a vague feeling of self- 
 preserving solidarity and partly through 
 revolt against the treatment of Belgium by 
 the Germans. Many of them, again, had 
 no conviction of personal immortality. 
 They vindicated the philosophy of Omar 
 Khayyam against the philosophy of St. Paul, 
 98
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF SURVIVAL 
 
 when he wrote that to eat, drink, and be 
 merry showed nothing but a feeling of 
 desperation at the thought that there was 
 no resurrection. It did not occur to some 
 believers that to eat, drink, and be merry is 
 not the same thing as gluttony, drunken- 
 ness, and buffoonery. 
 
 Pomponazzi, in preaching the doctrine 
 that virtue is its own reward, especially 
 mentions the case of the brutes, among 
 which there exists in the parent an infallible 
 instinct to die while preserving the life of 
 its offspring, and therefore the species, in 
 spite of having no belief in a future state. 
 The whole problem has been very well 
 stated by an American writer, now dead, in 
 a book entitled " L'Ame Pai'enne." 
 
 " Au fond, ils ne s'en emeuvent pas. Us 
 n'ont pas plus peur que les feuilles des arbres 
 jaunissant dans les brouillards de 1'automne. 
 Un instinct imperissable les avertit que s'ils 
 sont la feuille qui va tomber, ils sont aussi 
 99 7*
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 1'arbre sur lequel elle repoussera, et la terre 
 qui les porte Pun et 1'autre. . . . 
 
 " Nos sensations ne meurent pas, car 
 elles ne sont pas en nous ; c'est nous qui 
 sommes en elles. Nous sommes les colonnes 
 de poussiere qui s'elevent et tournoyent 
 au carrefour des vents, et peu nous importe 
 ou la colonne s'abat, car les grains de sable 
 sont incorruptibles et deja le vent a repris 
 
 sa course." 
 
 The war, however, has changed for the 
 moment the whole atmosphere. The 
 tragedy is now not so much to die as to 
 survive. There are those who survive their 
 children, grandchildren, friends, and hus- 
 bands, and there are those who survive the 
 war in a state of permanent mutilation or 
 disablement. In Paris there was recently 
 an entertainment given at the " Trocadero " 
 to 20,000 blind soldiers, and it is in itself 
 a tragic fact that 14,000 of these men were 
 married to women who had come forward 
 100
 
 to marry them by reason of their calamity. 
 
 The third aspect of the new tragedy is the 
 question whether the survivors will not see 
 a world vastly inferior to that from which 
 the most vital and energetic men have been 
 taken ? The question now before us is 
 whether we shall allow the world that will 
 exist after the war to be worse than the 
 world as it was before the war ? 
 
 Probably we shall not throw overboard 
 our ideas about the desirability of prolong- 
 ing human life, for this is, after all, nothing 
 more than an effort to reduce the element 
 of waste in human life. On the other hand, 
 more stress will undoubtedly be laid on the 
 desirability of abolishing human pain and 
 misery, and making life, such as it is, better 
 worth living. From this point of view there 
 will probably be an altered standard of 
 values. It is difficult to suppose that the 
 men who come back from the front will 
 think as rigidly as most English people do, 
 or did, of what passes under the name of 
 101
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 " euthanasia." They have seen the torture 
 that is caused by certain wounds when no 
 morphia is at hand. There was a particular 
 case of a man who passed eight hours in the 
 tortured convulsions of tetanus in the 
 trenches. During all that time he implored 
 those round him to shoot him and put an 
 end to his misery, and most of them would 
 certainly have done so but for being re- 
 strained by a pious officer who refused to 
 allow this man any release from torture 
 except on the assurance of a doctor, who could 
 not be found, that the man could not 
 possibly recover. It is difficult for an 
 optimist to believe that such ideas as those 
 in which the officer was educated will 
 permanently survive this war. 
 
 Generally speaking, the new feeling that 
 life is short and uncertain, which brings us 
 so much nearer to the outlook of our 
 ancestors than anything else could do, will 
 probably prove a stimulant. If life is short 
 and uncertain then there is all the more 
 102
 
 THE TRAGEDY OF SURVIVAL 
 
 reason to compress all we can into it. This 
 quickened impulse of improving the world, 
 as we find it, within the compass of the 
 individual life, will certainly accelerate the 
 intolerance of taboos which, although only 
 half accepted by the community, enormously 
 interfere with human progress and happi- 
 ness. It is, for instance, difficult to suppose 
 that after this war the problems of marriage 
 and divorce, and of certain diseases which 
 have not been adequately dealt with for 
 fear of pious prejudices, will not be tackled 
 in quite a different spirit by the surviving 
 generation. 
 
 It is, perhaps, also not too optimistic to 
 suppose that a tremendous collective effort 
 will be made to minimize the chances of 
 future wars. In so far as this war has been 
 caused by the mere existence of a despotic 
 monarchy, the mere existence of despotic 
 monarchy is, or ought to be, jeopardized. 
 In so far as this war has been caused by 
 militarist propaganda in Germany, the 
 103
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 propagandists must in future be treated as 
 enemies of the human race. Those who 
 preach universal tolerance have always 
 rightly maintained that truth is great and 
 will prevail ; but the process by which it is 
 made to prevail may be unduly expensive, 
 and if ever force can be justly invoked it is 
 to suppress the doctrines of Bernhardi. 
 
 104
 
 HISTORY AND MORALS 
 
 IN an old number of the Independent Review 
 Mr. John Pollock recorded the fact that the 
 late Lord Acton described Bismarck as " a 
 great man and a great scoundrel," and Lord 
 Nelson as " an infamous man." These 
 remarks were made in private conversation ; 
 but in his inaugural lecture on the Study 
 of History, delivered to historical students 
 at Cambridge in 1895, Lord Acton wrote : 
 " I exhort you never to debase the moral 
 currency or to lower the standard of recti- 
 tude, but to try others by the final maxim 
 that governs your own lives, and to suffer 
 no man and no cause to escape the undying 
 105
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 penalty which history has the power to 
 inflict on wrong." 
 
 In this same lecture Lord Acton also 
 quoted from Burke words that might have 
 been his own. These are the words : " My 
 principles enable me to form my judgment 
 upon men and actions, just as they do in 
 common life ; and are not formed out of 
 events or characters, either present or past. 
 History is a preceptor of prudence, not 
 principles. The principles of true politics 
 are those of morality enlarged ; and I 
 neither do now, nor ever will admit any 
 other." This is edifying enough ; Burke 
 and Lord Acton were entitled to express 
 their principles either in the pulpit, the 
 House of Commons, or the arm-chair, but 
 it would seem to follow from the above 
 citations that in Lord Acton's opinion such 
 principles should be preached by the his- 
 torian to his readers. We do not expect 
 political economists, art-critics, mathe- 
 maticians, physicists, or publicists to com- 
 106
 
 HISTORY AND MORALS 
 
 municate to us their moral principles. 
 Carlyle, Ruskin, and other Victorian writers 
 did so ad nauseam ; but the more perma- 
 nent part of their work is surely that which 
 is least mixed up with the moralities. Is it 
 too much to ask of the historian that he 
 should understand and explain human affairs 
 with as little commentary as possible ? 
 Lord Acton himself did not invariably 
 practise what he preached. Nothing could 
 be more admirably fair and scientific than 
 his introduction to Mr. Burd's edition of 
 Machiavelli's " II Principe." Mr. Pollock 
 himself did not think it his duty to moralize 
 much in his book on the Popish Plot. But 
 the enunciation of the theory is dangerous 
 in countries like England and the United 
 States, where the public are plagued enough 
 already by the introduction of ethical 
 irrelevancies into every department of 
 thought. 
 
 Most of us remember the history books 
 of our childhood, in which monarchs and 
 107
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 presidents were almost invariably classified 
 as good or bad. Virtuous indignation may 
 help to support the great fabric of social 
 respectability ; but it is hardly necessary 
 to pitchfork it into the region of scholar- 
 ship. The historian is, no doubt, incapable 
 of strict neutrality in his judgments. The 
 personal equation is too strong and the flesh 
 is weak. He may well be allowed an ex- 
 plosive epithet or two in describing the 
 proceedings of a Nero or a Torquemada ; 
 but it is quite another matter for him to 
 suspend or modify his narrative or exposi- 
 tion in order to pronounce a series of 
 ethical judgments. Such judgments are 
 purely irrelevant to the matter he has in 
 hand ; and, even if they are not, the reader 
 is not less likely to botch telegrams or com- 
 mit adultery because the historian tells 
 him that it is wrong to do so. The business 
 of the historian is to obtain his facts and to 
 explain how they are related in the chain of 
 cause and effect. 
 
 108
 
 HISTORY AND MORALS 
 
 In the words of two great historians, 
 M. Langlois and M. Seignobos : " Les 
 gouts personnels ou le patriotisme peuvent 
 creer des preferences pour des personnages 
 sympathiques ou des evenements locaux ; 
 mais le seul principe de choix qui puisse 
 etre commun a tous les historiens c'est 
 le role joue dans 1'evolution des choses 
 humaines." 
 
 The psychology of human beings is part, 
 and perhaps the most complex part, of the 
 historian's material. But we want to know 
 why Titus Oates perjured himself, not to 
 what extent his perjury should be condemned 
 by good men. It may, no doubt, be relevant 
 to dwell upon the dark side of his earlier 
 record, since his acts to some extent affect 
 the credibility of his statements ; but it 
 seems difficult to see why the historian should 
 go further. 
 
 The question is important in another way. 
 Supposing an historian were to adopt Lord 
 Acton's conception of his metier, and were 
 109
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 deliberately to work himself up into a be- 
 comingly austere frame of mind, is he more 
 or less likely to possess a correct insight into 
 human motives ? If we are perplexed in 
 our estimate of another person, and the 
 character of that person vitally affects our 
 own affairs, whom do we commonly consult ? 
 Should we not prefer the judgment of a 
 " man of the world " to that of a philoso- 
 pher, a divine, or an itinerant preacher ? 
 A doctor, or lawyer, acting in his professional 
 capacity, makes it his first object to under- 
 stand the persons he has to deal with, how- 
 ever strongly he may be inclined on his 
 purely human side to approve or disapprove 
 their respective virtues and vices. Why 
 should not the historian aim at following 
 this example ? 
 
 If we consider the qualities of really great 
 historical work, we find that at its best it 
 is an explanation of human affairs and not 
 the condemnation of human weaknesses. 
 Most readers will prefer Carlyle's admirable 
 no
 
 HISTORY AND MORALS 
 
 description of Prussia in the time of 
 Frederick the Great to his dithyrambic 
 denunciations of the French Revolution. 
 In the one case he explains and in the 
 other he rants. 
 
 The supreme English historian is Edward 
 Gibbon ; surely we must appreciate his 
 admirable disinclination to moralize. His 
 irony is often an indirect commentary, yet it is 
 also a model of historical narrative. He has 
 the true detachment of the philosophic 
 spectator, not the frenzied vision of Exeter 
 Hall. He has, no doubt, a distinct bias 
 that is inevitable but his business is the 
 relation of events in their natural chain of 
 cause and effect, not the distortion of them 
 to point a moral. The historian is not 
 required to call things by wrong names. 
 The late Sir Leslie Stephen, in discussing 
 the English Restoration plays, remarked 
 that some of them appeared to be written 
 " by blackguards for blackguards." We 
 may differ as to the expression used ; but the 
 Hi
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 remark is made to explain the interaction of 
 society and literature, not to enforce the 
 proposition that immoral plays are deserving 
 of censure. 
 
 We learn more of Bismarck if we try to 
 understand his point of view than if we dwell 
 on his want of scruple. It is more important 
 to realize the heroic qualities of Lord Nelson 
 than to reflect how much more respectable 
 he would have been if he had lived happily 
 with his wife. 
 
 Lord Acton's theory is, in reality, part 
 and parcel of the theology which has 
 found it necessary to create an " Index 
 Expurgatorius." It betrays the cloven 
 hoof of the theologian. The Catholic 
 theologian knows that men are naturally 
 sinful, and that their essential concern 
 in this world is not the acquisition of 
 profane knowledge, but of eternal happi- 
 ness. If they are to read history at all, 
 they must be told what is right and what is 
 wrong, lest they should be perverted by 
 112
 
 HISTORY AND MORALS 
 
 evil examples. That is not a theory which 
 is in itself likely to gain much hold on a 
 Protestant country ; but the common 
 tendency to virtuous indignation is quite 
 strong enough without being reinforced 
 by such notions of history as this. 
 
 I remember once seeing in the Spectator 
 a review of a serious book on the recent 
 history of the American drama by a well- 
 known American writer. The reviewer dis- 
 claimed all interest in the subject, but 
 added that one thing chiefly struck him : 
 
 " Mr. demands no moral judgments, 
 
 either from the audience, the playwright, 
 or the actors. This may be true ; but 
 if it is, religion is false." We surely 
 cannot wish history to be written in this 
 vein. 
 
 In his first inaugural lecture Lord Acton 
 wrote that tout comprendre c'est tout par donner 
 was a dangerous maxim for the historian 
 to act upon, because it might tempt him to 
 excuse the crimes of historical characters. 
 113 8
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 The historian is not, however, concerned 
 to condemn or to excuse. Even if he were, 
 it is much easier to fall into the snare of 
 denunciation than of palliation. 
 
 There are many types of virtuous indig- 
 nation. The young are intolerant through 
 undeveloped sympathies and ignorance of 
 the world. Idle mobs at criminal trials 
 " compound for sins that they've inclined 
 to " by vociferously " damning those they 
 have no mind to." The squire contem- 
 plates the poacher in as righteous a 
 mood as the magistrate sentences some un- 
 fortunate for having attempted to commit 
 suicide. 
 
 Such emotions do not, however, conduce 
 to enlightenment, and when, as in the case 
 of German historians, they assume a patriotic 
 form they are highly dangerous. It needs 
 but a superficial acquaintance with the 
 German, and particularly the Prussian, his- 
 torians of the nineteenth century to observe 
 the appalling consequences of an intellectual 
 114
 
 . HISTORY AND MORALS 
 
 prostitution which could only end in propa- 
 gating the gospel of Kultur. It is only too 
 characteristic of Lord Acton's generation 
 that he should have coupled the names of 
 Nelson and Bismarck ! 
 
 115 8*
 
 TEUTONS AND LATINS 
 
 THERE are pestilent people still about who 
 bisect Europe into Teutons and Latins, 
 entirely omitting the Iberians, Scandina- 
 vians, Celts, and other races. Ever since 
 the arrival of the Prince Consort in England 
 and the fungoid multiplication of a certain 
 group of historians in Oxford, we have been 
 told that the Teutons had all the virtues, 
 and the Latins all the vices, of Europe, 
 just as since the war the Harmsworth hacks 
 have done nothing but insist on the " mysti- 
 cism " of the modern Frenchman and the 
 " artistic instincts " of the modern Italian.* 
 
 * The modern Frenchman is anything but "mystical," 
 i nd the modern Italian is eminently scientific. 
 
 116
 
 TEUTONS AND LATINS 
 
 As a matter of fact, the English are, like 
 most successful races, mongrels. England 
 started with a Celtic foundation, on the top 
 of which came Frisian tribes. The country 
 was twice civilized once by the Romans 
 and again by the Normans and we have 
 had a good sprinkling of Danish, Flemish, 
 and French elements. Even had we been 
 purely Teutonic to start with, our insular 
 position, our " Celtic fringe," and our world- 
 wide connections would have saved us from 
 the extravagances of the pure Teuton, if 
 such a thing exists. 
 
 Again, we must allow for the fact that 
 modern Germany has centred round Berlin 
 instead of round Vienna, as medieval Ger- 
 many at her best did, and the hideous 
 breed of Prussian is due to a very unhappy 
 mixture of Slav and some other tribes 
 on the Baltic coast. It is the result of 
 promiscuous rape and slaughter carried 
 on for several centuries by the Teutonic 
 knights. 
 
 117
 
 So far as England is concerned the mere 
 citation of such a line as : 
 
 " The multitudinous seas incarnadine " 
 
 indicates a very happy marriage of Latin 
 and Saxon. We have in our language con- 
 trived to preserve just that sense of form 
 which does distinguish the Latin from the 
 Teuton. Mommsen wrote that all Latin 
 literature was rhetoric ; but the Latin lan- 
 guage is at least clear, forcible, and beau- 
 tiful, which is more than can be said for 
 Mommsen's own language. And if the 
 Latin writers are frequently rhetorical they 
 avoid with native success the bombastic 
 and question-begging cacophony which has 
 afflicted students of German literature for 
 the last forty years. 
 
 It is true that during that same period we 
 
 have had to put up with a marked Teutonic 
 
 influence on our literature and manners. 
 
 The writings of Coleridge, Carlyle, Meredith, 
 
 118
 
 and the later works of Vernon Lee are all 
 painful examples of the vogue that German 
 models produced on the minds of an earlier 
 generation, which suddenly thought it 
 smart to learn German and to imitate the 
 German contortion of language. In man- 
 ners we have the " strong, silent man," 
 who has fortunately declined since the early 
 nineties. His origins can clearly be traced 
 to the insufferable formality of Coburg 
 customs which replaced the delightful 
 accessibility -of the English Court during 
 the reigns of the later Georges and 
 William IV. Our country was, indeed, 
 fortunate to experience the reaction of 
 Edward VII to the older and saner ideals 
 of the English gentleman with a taste for 
 France. He was at least free from the 
 anxiety that tortured his mother when 
 she feared that Bulwer Lytton might step 
 on to the rug reserved for none but royal 
 feet after dinner. 
 
 There is a considerable danger of all this 
 119
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 Teutonophil nonsense becoming more 
 virulent than ever after the war. We shall 
 be told that the Teuton is not merely our 
 cousin, but our brother, and was only led 
 astray by the wicked Hohenzollern, though, 
 in fact, the Kaiser has always been detested 
 whenever he was identified with a policy of 
 peace. And we shall also be told that the 
 Latin is hard-hearted, unchaste, atheistic, 
 and volatile. We shall be invited to admire 
 the duty and discipline and sentimental 
 outpourings of the Teuton. Europe will 
 be flooded with pseudo-Swiss waiters and 
 prostitutes, who will no doubt acquire 
 British nationality and a vote whenever 
 they can. There may be even more 
 copious contributions of Teutonic money 
 to the party funds. 
 
 It is, therefore, all the more necessary to 
 remind ourselves that the English are 
 English and not Teutons, that we are to-day 
 the trustees of civilization as the Romans 
 were before us, and that the disintegration 
 120
 
 TEUTONS AND LATINS 
 
 of Europe by the descendants of those who 
 broke up the Roman Empire must entail 
 the return of ages far darker than those 
 which are commonly called " dark." 
 
 In conclusion, there is one point which 
 is supposed to unite us with Germany, 
 and that is the Protestant religion. " Grand 
 old Martin Luther " and Frederick the 
 Great have been held up as our Protestant 
 heroes. In this respect I think the Germans 
 damaged Europe very badly. The Catholic 
 Church took over part of the civilization 
 of the Roman Empire. Europe had a 
 certain international spirit before the Re- 
 formation which it has lost ever since. On 
 such questions as international diplomacy 
 or private domestic institutions like mar- 
 riage there was a certain tradition common 
 to Europe. I, at least, follow Goethe in 
 thinking that Europe would have been a 
 much better place if the party of Erasmus 
 had overcome the Lutherans. We should 
 have been spared the Jesuits on the one hand 
 121
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 and the Calvinists on the other. We 
 might have achieved in the seventeenth 
 century a certain humanism of which we 
 barely see traces in the twentieth. Here 
 again (as it seems to me) the Germans for 
 the second time put the clock back several 
 centuries. But so long as our vain adula- 
 tion of Protestant ideas continues we shall 
 be told to admire Martin Luther and his 
 friends, whose influence produced nothing 
 better than the Thirty Years War in Ger- 
 many, an Erastian Church in England, the 
 abomination and desolation of Calvinism 
 elsewhere, and the growth of a Catholicism 
 which seems to me inferior to what came 
 before it. 
 
 The human and intellectual issues of the 
 present war are equally grave and the best 
 chances of modern Europe are still in the 
 melting-pot. 
 
 122
 
 CONTINENTAL ENGLAND 
 
 WE must be prepared to find England 
 quite Continental after the war. What a 
 joy it was before 1914 to see the white 
 cliffs of our mystical island, and to know 
 that on reaching them one would handle 
 gold coins, strike large and efficient matches, 
 encounter amiable and incurious Custom 
 House officials, see the dingy public houses, 
 read church or chapel newspapers, and 
 forget that we had anything but a navy 
 to defend our shores. But now the future 
 traveller will have his luggage as thoroughly 
 ransacked here as he ever did in France or 
 Italy ; he will find the same sort of con- 
 tinental cafe as he left behind, though 
 123
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 perhaps with strictly indoor accommoda- 
 tion ; he will read definitely anti-clerical 
 newspapers, and see signs of a standing 
 army wherever he goes. We shall have 
 assimilated continental ideals and models 
 perhaps even in our marriage laws. We 
 shall enjoy simple pleasures, not waste our 
 food, have our journals printed on the 
 sort of paper we used to find on the Con- 
 tinent, anxiously regard the sputtering 
 match, and keep up a standing army in 
 order to stave off the possible attacks of 
 our European debtors. If, in fact, we 
 cross the channel from France, it will 
 probably be by a tunnel, and we shall find 
 appetizing things to eat instead of the so- 
 called tea and the ancient buns which used 
 to welcome us home. 
 
 Let us hope we shall like it. Some of 
 us may then hanker for pre-war England, 
 with all her ramshackle associations of 
 liberty, disorganization, granite confec- 
 tionery, dirty taverns, free trade, and 
 124
 
 CONTINENTAL ENGLAND 
 
 sentimental insularity. I suppose we ought 
 not to complain. We shall lead a simpler 
 life, and waste less in goods and money. 
 We shall be more aware of facts, and not 
 bury our faces in the sand of illusions. 
 Our politicians will be to us no more than 
 a French Deputy is to a Frenchman. Our 
 Christmas will be denuded of the Christ- 
 mas tree which the Prince Consort imported 
 from Coburg. Our plum puddings will be 
 less substantial. Our beer will be brewed 
 under some sort of bureaucratic control. 
 Our religion, or whatever remains of it, 
 will be strictly undenominational ; and 
 the mystical latitudes of the Broad Church 
 will vanish in our clearer vision of 
 reality. 
 
 " The old order changeth ; " but then it 
 has always changed very slowly in England. 
 Now we are to have a " quick change." 
 All our young men have been either bureau- 
 crats or soldiers. They will be less tolerant 
 of amiable incompetence. They will have
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 more of what was vilely christened " push 
 and go." They will be inclined to do away 
 with contemplative indolence. They will 
 not put up with individual eccentricities. 
 There may be much worse tendencies. 
 The use of the " nark " both in khaki and 
 in mufti may become normal to our police 
 as it never was before. Already our rail- 
 way officials treat travellers like cattle. 
 Passengers are locked into their particular 
 sections of a corridor train, and herded 
 into large, dark rooms without being 
 allowed to approach their train till it 
 arrives quite in the continental style 
 and many of the ticket collectors adopt 
 manners which are military in Germany 
 but not in England. 
 
 Perhaps we shall be better off ; but we 
 shall lose a good deal. There has always 
 been a certain mystical geniality in English 
 life perhaps better expressed by Dickens 
 than by any other English writer. There 
 has always been a pleasant eccentricity 
 126
 
 CONTINENTAL ENGLAND 
 
 among us of the sort that we find in the 
 autobiographies of John Stuart Mill and 
 Herbert Spencer as well as in the " Pick- 
 wick Papers." There has been a devil- 
 may-care happy-go-luckiness which one 
 can remember enjoying in old boatmen and 
 innkeepers and farmers. 
 
 Instead of all this, we shall have alert- 
 ness and efficiency and caution. The 
 national character will change perhaps 
 radically and we shall become more in- 
 telligent and less amiable. If we do, it 
 will not be our fault. We came into the 
 war to avenge the oppressed and vindicate 
 international law. The great neutral world 
 was tardy and grudging in appreciation 
 and sympathy. If we treat that world 
 less generously than before by reason of 
 poverty and hardship, it will have no right 
 to complain. But whatever changes may 
 come, let us hope that Lord Nelson's words 
 will never lose their force : " Hitherto 
 there has been nothing greater known on 
 127
 
 PERSONALIA 
 
 the Continent than the faith, the un- 
 tarnished honour, the generous public sym- 
 pathies, the high diplomatic influence, the 
 commerce, the power, the valour of the 
 British Nation." 
 
 THE END 
 
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