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Collections and Recollections

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Title: Collections and Recollections

Author: George William Erskine Russell


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11665]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS ***

COLLECTIONS AND RECOLLECTIONS

George William Erskine Russell




THE MOST GENIAL OF COMPANIONS

JAMES PAYN

AT WHOSE SUGGESTION THESE PAPERS WERE WRITTEN AND TO WHOM THEY WERE
INSCRIBED

DIED MARCH 25, 1898

       *       *       *       *       *

    Is he gone to a land of no laughter--
      This man that made mirth for us all?
    Proves Death but a silence hereafter,
      Where the echoes of earth cannot fall?
    Once closed, have the lips no more duty?
      No more pleasure the exquisite ears?
    Has the heart done o'erflowing with beauty,
      As the eyes have with tears?

    Nay, if aught be sure, what can be surer
      Than that earth's good decays not with earth?
    And of all the heart's springs none are purer
      Than the springs of the fountains of mirth?
    He that sounds them has pierced the heart's hollows,
      The places where tears are and sleep;
    For the foam-flakes that dance in life's shallows
      Are wrung from life's deep.

J. RHOADES




PREFACE.

It has been suggested by Mr. Reginald Smith, to whose friendliness and
skill the fortunes of this book have been so greatly indebted, that a
rather fuller preface might be suitably prefixed to this Edition.

When the book first appeared, it was stated on the title-page to be
written "by One who has kept a Diary." My claim to that modest title
will scarcely be challenged by even the most carping critic who is
conversant with the facts. On August 13, 1865, being then twelve years
old, I began my Diary. Several attempts at diary-keeping I had already
made and abandoned. This more serious endeavour was due to the fact that
a young lady gave me a manuscript-book attractively bound in scarlet
leather; and such a gift inspired a resolution to live up to it. Shall I
be deemed to lift the veil of private life too roughly if I transcribe
some early entries? "23rd: Dear Kate came; very nice." "25th: Kate is
very delightful." "26th: Kate is a darling girl. _She kissed me_."

Before long, Love's young dream was dispersed by the realities of
Harrow; but the scarlet book continued to receive my daily confidences.
Soon--alas for puerile fickleness!--the name of "Kate" disappears, and
is replaced by rougher appellations, such as "Bob" and "Charlie;"
"Carrots" this, and "Chaw" that. To Harrow succeeds Oxford, and now
more recognizable names begin to appear--"Liddon" and "Holland," "Gore"
and "Milner", and "Lymington."

But through all these personal permutations the continuous Life of the
Diary remained unbroken, and so remains even to the present date. Not a
day is missing. When I have been laid low by any of the rather numerous
ills to which, if to little else, my flesh has been heir, I have always
been able to jot down such pregnant entries as "Temperature 102°;"
"Salicine;" "Boiled Chicken;" "Bath Chair." It is many a year since the
scarlet book was laid aside; but it has had a long line of successors;
and together they contain the record of what I have been, done, seen,
and heard during thirty-eight years of chequered existence. Entertaining
a strong and well-founded suspicion that Posterity would burn these
precious volumes unread, I was moved, some few years ago, to compress
into small compass the little that seemed worth remembering. At that
time my friend Mr. James Payn was already confined to the house by the
beginnings of what proved to be his last illness. His host of friends
did what they could to relieve the tedium of his suffering days; and the
only contribution which I could make was to tell him at my weekly visits
anything interesting or amusing which I collected from the reperusal of
my diary. Greatly to my surprise, he urged me to make these
"Collections" into a book, and to add to them whatever "Recollections"
they might suggest. Acting on this advice, I published during the year
1897 a series of weekly papers in the _Manchester Guardian_. They were
received more kindly than I had any right to expect; and early in 1898 I
reproduced them in the present volume--just too late to offer it, except
in memory, to dear James Payn.

The fortunes of the book, from that time till now, would not interest
the public, but are extremely interesting to me. The book brought me
many friends. One story, at any rate, elicited the gracious laughter of
Queen Victoria. A pauper who had known better days wrote to thank me
for enlivening the monotony of a workhouse infirmary. Literary clerks
plied me with questions about the sources of my quotations. A Scotch
doctor demurred to the prayer--"Water that spark"--on the ground that
the water would put the spark out. Elderly clergymen in country
parsonages revived the rollicking memories of their undergraduate days,
and sent me academic quips of the forties and fifties. From the most
various quarters I received suggestions, corrections, and enrichments
which have made each edition an improvement on the last. The public
notices were, on the whole, extremely kind, and some were
unintentionally amusing. Thus one editor, putting two and two together,
calculated that the writer could not be less than eighty years old;
while another, like Mrs. Prig, "didn't believe there was no sich a
person," and acutely divined that the book was a journalistic squib
directed against my amiable garrulity. The most pleasing notice was that
of Jean La Frette, some extracts from which I venture to append. It is
true that competent judges have questioned the accuracy of M. La
Frette's idiom, but his sentiments are unimpeachable. The necessary
corrective was not wanting, for a weekly journal of high culture
described my poor handiwork as "Snobbery and Snippets." There was a
boisterousness--almost a brutality--about the phrase which deterred me
from reading the review; but I am fain to admit that there was a certain
rude justice in the implied criticism.

G.W.E.R.

_Christmas, 1903_.




CONTENTS.

CHAPTER

I. LINKS WITH THE PAST

II. LORD RUSSELL

III. LORD SHAFTESBURY

IV. CARDINAL MANNING

V. LORD HOUGHTON

VI. RELIGION AND MORALITY

VII. SOCIAL EQUALIZATION

VIII. SOCIAL AMELIORATION

IX. THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE

X. POLITICS

XI. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY

XII. PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY (_contd_.)

XIII. CONVERSATION

XIV. CONVERSATION (_continued_)

XV. CONVERSATION (_continued_)

XVI. CONVERSATION (_continued_)

XVII. CLERGYMEN

XVIII. CLERGYMEN (_continued_)

XIX. REPARTEE

XX. TITLES

XXI. THE QUEEN'S ACCESSION

XXII. "PRINCEDOMS, VIRTUES, POWERS"

XXIII. LORD BEACONSFIELD

XXIV. FLATTERERS AND BORES

XXV. ADVERTISEMENTS

XXVI. PARODIES IN PROSE

XXVII. PARODIES IN VERSE

XXVIII. PARODIES IN VERSE (_continued_)

XXIX. VERBAL INFELICITIES

XXX. THE ART OF PUTTING THINGS

XXXI. CHILDREN

XXXII. LETTER-WRITING

XXXIII. OFFICIALDOM

XXXIV. AN OLD PHOTOGRAPH-BOOK

INDEX.




I.

LINKS WITH THE PAST.

Of the celebrated Mrs. Disraeli her husband is reported to have said,
"She is an excellent creature, but she never can remember which came
first, the Greeks or the Romans." In my walk through life I have
constantly found myself among excellent creatures of this sort. The
world is full of vague people, and in the average man, and still more in
the average woman, the chronological sense seems to be entirely wanting.
Thus, when I have occasionally stated in a mixed company that my first
distinct recollection was the burning of Covent Garden Theatre, I have
seen a general expression of surprised interest, and have been told, in
a tone meant to be kind and complimentary, that my hearers would hardly
have thought that my memory went back so far. The explanation has been
that these excellent creatures had some vague notions of _Rejected
Addresses_ floating in their minds, and confounded the burning of Covent
Garden Theatre in 1856 with that of Drury Lane Theatre in 1809. It was
pleasant to feel that one bore one's years so well as to make the error
possible.

But events, however striking, are only landmarks in memory. They are
isolated and detached, and begin and end in themselves. The real
interest of one's early life is in its Links with the Past, through the
old people whom one has known. Though I place my first distinct
recollection in 1856, I have memories more or less hazy of an earlier
date.

There was an old Lady Robert Seymour, who lived in Portland Place, and
died there in 1855, in her ninety-first year. Probably she is my most
direct link with the past, for she carried down to the time of the
Crimean War the habits and phraseology of Queen Charlotte's early Court.
"Goold" of course she said for gold, and "yaller" for yellow, and
"laylock" for lilac. She laid the stress on the second syllable of
"balcony." She called her maid her "'ooman;" instead of sleeping at a
place, she "lay" there, and when she consulted the doctor she spoke of
having "used the 'potticary."

There still lives, in full possession of all her faculties, a venerable
lady who can say that her husband was born at Boston when America was a
British dependency. This is the widow of Lord Chancellor Lyndhurst, who
was born in 1772, and helped to defeat Mr. Gladstone's Paper Bill in the
House of Lords on his eighty-eighth birthday. He died in 1862.[1]

A conspicuous figure in my early recollections is Sir Henry Holland,
M.D., father of the present Lord Knutsford. He was born in 1788, and
died in 1873. The stories of his superhuman vigour and activity would
fill a volume. In 1863 Bishop Wilberforce wrote to a friend abroad: "Sir
Henry Holland, who got back safe from all his American rambles, has been
taken by Palmerston through the river at Broadlands, and lies very
ill." However, he completely threw off the effects of this mischance,
and survived his aquaceous host for some eight years. I well remember
his telling me in 1868 that his first famous patient was the mysterious
"Pamela," who became the wife of the Irish patriot, Lord Edward
FitzGerald.

Every one who went about in London in the 'seventies will remember the
dyed locks and crimson velvet waistcoat of William, fifth Earl Bathurst,
who was born in 1791 and died in 1878. He told me that he was at a
private school at Sunbury-on-Thames with William and John Russell, the
latter of whom became the author of the Reform Bill and Prime Minister.
At this delightful seminary, the peers' sons, including my informant,
who was then the Hon. William Bathurst, had a bench to themselves.
William and John Russell were not peers' sons, as their father had not
then succeeded to the Dukedom of Bedford. In 1802 he succeeded, on the
sudden death of his elder brother, and became sixth Duke of Bedford; and
his sons, becoming _Lord_ William and _Lord_ John, were duly promoted to
the privileged bench. Nothing in _Pelham_ or _Vivian Grey_ quite equals
this.

When I went to Harrow, in 1868, there was an old woman, by name Polly
Arnold, still keeping a stationer's shop in the town, who had sold cribs
to Byron when he was a Harrow boy; and Byron's fag, a funny old
gentleman in a brown wig--called Baron Heath--was a standing dish on our
school Speech-Day.

Once at a London dinner I happened to say in the hearing of Mrs. Procter
(widow of "Barry Cornwall," and mother of the poetess) that I was going
next day to the Harrow Speeches. "Ah," said Mrs. Procter, "that used to
be a pleasant outing. The last time I went I drove down with Lord Byron
and Dr. Parr, who had been breakfasting with my father." Mrs. Procter
died in 1888.

Among the remarkable women of our time, if merely in respect of
longevity, must be reckoned Lady Louisa Stuart, sister and heir of the
last Earl of Traquair. She was a friend and correspondent of Sir Walter
Scott, who in describing "Tully Veolan" drew Traquair House with literal
exactness, even down to the rampant bears which still guard the locked
entrance-gates against all comers until the Royal Stuarts shall return
to claim their own. Lady Louisa Stuart lived to be ninety-nine, and died
in 1876.

Perhaps the most remarkable old lady whom I knew intimately was Caroline
Lowther, Duchess of Cleveland, who was born in 1792 and died in 1883.
She had been presented to Queen Charlotte when there were only forty
people at the Drawing-room, had danced with the Prince of Orange, and
had attended the "breakfasts" given by Albinia Countess of
Buckinghamshire (who died in 1816), at her villa just outside London.
The site of that villa is now Hobart Place, having taken its name from
that of the Buckinghamshire family. The trees of its orchard are still
discoverable in the back-gardens of Hobart Place and Wilton Street, and
I am looking out upon them as I write this page.

Stories of highwaymen are excellent Links with the Past, and here is
one. The fifth Earl of Berkeley, who died in 1810, had always declared
that any one might without disgrace be overcome by superior numbers, but
that he would never surrender to a single highwayman. As he was crossing
Hounslow Heath one night, on his way from Berkeley Castle to London, his
travelling carriage was stopped by a man on horseback, who put his head
in at the window and said, "I believe you are Lord Berkeley?" "I am." "I
believe you have always boasted that you would never surrender to a
single highwayman?" "I have." "Well," presenting a pistol, "I am a
single highwayman, and I say, 'Your money or your life.'" "You cowardly
dog," said Lord Berkeley, "do you think I can't see your confederate
skulking behind you?" The highwayman, who was really alone, looked
hurriedly round, and Lord Berkeley shot him through the head. I asked
Lady Caroline Maxse (1803-1886), who was born a Berkeley, if this story
was true. I can never forget my thrill when she replied, "Yes; and I am
proud to say that I am that man's daughter."

Sir Moses Montefiore was born in 1784, and died in 1885. It is a
disheartening fact for the teetotallers that he had drunk a bottle of
port wine every day since he grew up. He had dined with Lord Nelson on
board his ship, and vividly remembered the transcendent beauty of Lady
Hamilton. The last time Sir Moses appeared in public was, if I mistake
not, at a garden-party at Marlborough House. The party was given on a
Saturday. Sir Moses was restrained by religious scruples from using his
horses, and was of course too feeble to walk, so he was conveyed to the
party in a magnificent sedan-chair. That was the only occasion on which
I have seen such an article in use.

When I began to go out in London, a conspicuous figure in dinner-society
and on Protestant platforms was Captain Francis Maude, R.N. He was born
in 1798 and died in 1886. He used to say, "My grandfather was nine years
old when Charles II. died." And so, if pedigrees may be trusted, he was.
Charles II. died in 1685. Sir Robert Maude was born in 1676. His son,
the first Lord Hawarden, was born in 1727, and Captain Francis Maude was
this Lord Hawarden's youngest son. The year of his death (1880) saw also
that of a truly venerable woman, Mrs. Hodgson, mother of Kirkman and
Stewart Hodgson, the well-known partners in Barings' house. Her age was
not precisely known, but when a schoolgirl in Paris she had seen
Robespierre executed, and distinctly recollected the appearance of his
bandaged face. Her granddaughters, Mr. Stewart Hodgson's children, are
quite young women, and if they live to the age which, with such
ancestry, they are entitled to anticipate, they will carry down into the
middle of the twentieth century the account, derived from an
eye-witness, of the central event of the French Revolution.

One year later, in 1887, there died, at her house in St. James's Square,
Mrs. Anne Penelope Hoare, mother of the late Sir Henry Hoare, M.P. She
recollected being at a children's party when the lady of the house came
in and stopped the dancing because news had come that the King of France
had been put to death. Her range of conscious knowledge extended from
the execution of Louis XVI. to the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. So short a
thing is history.

Sir Walter Stirling, who was born in 1802 and died in 1888, was a little
old gentleman of ubiquitous activity, running about London with a yellow
wig, short trousers, and a cotton umbrella. I well remember his saying
to me, when Mr. Bradlaugh was committed to the Clock Tower, "I don't like
this. I am afraid it will mean mischief. I am old enough to remember
seeing Sir Francis Burdett taken to the Tower by the Sergeant-at-Arms
with a military force. I saw the riot then, and I am afraid I shall see
a riot again."

In the same year (1888) died Mrs. Thomson Hankey, wife of a former M.P.
for Peterborough. Her father, a Mr. Alexander, was born in 1729, and she
had inherited from him traditions of London as it appeared to a young
Scotsman in the year of the decapitation of the rebels after the rising
of 1745.

One of the most venerable and interesting figures in London, down to his
death in 1891, was George Thomas, sixth Earl of Albemarle. He was born
in 1799. He had played bat-trap-and-ball at St. Anne's Hill with Mr.
Fox, and, excepting his old comrade General Whichcote, who outlived him
by a few months, was the last survivor of Waterloo. A man whom I knew
longer and more intimately than any of those whom I have described was
the late Lord Charles James Fox Russell. He was born in 1807, and died
in 1894. His father's groom had led the uproar of London servants which
in the eighteenth century damned the play _High Life Below Stairs_. He
remembered a Highlander who had followed the army of Prince Charles
Edward in 1745, and had learned from another Highlander the Jacobite
soldiers' song--

    "I would I were at Manchester,
    A-sitting on the grass,
    And by my side a bottle of wine,
    And on my lap a lass."

He had officiated as a page at the coronation of George IV.; had
conversed with Sir Walter Scott about _The Bride of Lammermoor_ before
its authorship was disclosed; had served in the Blues under Ernest Duke
of Cumberland; and had lost his way in trying to find the newly
developed quarter of London called Belgrave Square.

Among living[2] links, I hope it is not ungallant to enumerate Lady
Georgiana Grey, only surviving child of

    "That Earl, who forced his compeers to be just,
    And wrought in brave old age what youth had planned;"

Lady Louisa Tighe, who as Lady Louisa Lennox buckled the Duke of
Wellington's sword when he set out from her mother's ball at Brussels
for the field of Waterloo; and Miss Eliza Smith of Brighton, the
vivacious and evergreen daughter of Horace Smith, who wrote the
_Rejected Addresses_. But these admirable and accomplished ladies hate
garrulity, and the mere mention of their names is a signal to bring
these disjointed reminiscences to a close.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Lady Lyndhurst died in 1901.

[2] "Living" alas! no longer. The last survivor of these ladies died
this year, 1903.




II.

LORD RUSSELL

These chapters are founded on Links with the Past. Let me now describe
in rather fuller detail three or four remarkable people with whom I had
more than a cursory acquaintance, and who allowed me for many years the
privilege of drawing without restriction on the rich stores of their
political and social recollections.

First among these in point of date, if of nothing else, I must place
John Earl Russell, the only person I have ever known who knew Napoleon
the Great. Lord Russell--or, to give him the name by which he was most
familiar to his countrymen, Lord John Russell--was born in 1792, and
when I first knew him he was already old; but it might have been said of
him with perfect truth that

    "Votiva patuit veluti descripta tabella
    Vita senis."

After he resigned the leadership of the Liberal party, at Christmas
1867, Lord Russell spent the greater part of his time at Pembroke Lodge,
a house in Richmond Park which takes its name from Elizabeth Countess of
Pembroke, long remembered as the object of King George the Third's
hopeless and pathetic love. As a token of his affection the King allowed
Lady Pembroke to build herself a "lodge" in the "vast wilderness" of
Richmond Park, amid surroundings which went far to realize Cowper's
idea of a "boundless contiguity of shade."

On her death, in 1831, Pembroke Lodge was assigned by William IV. to his
son-in-law, Lord Erroll, and in 1847 it was offered by the Queen to her
Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, who then had no home except his house
in Chesham Place. It was gratefully accepted, for indeed it had already
been coveted as an ideal residence for a busy politician who wanted
fresh air, and could not safely be far from the House of Commons. As
years went on Lord John spent more and more of his time in this
delicious retreat, and in his declining years it was practically his
only home.

A quarter of a century ago it was a curious and interesting privilege
for a young man to sit in the trellised dining-room of Pembroke Lodge,
or to pace its terrace-walk looking down upon the Thames, in intimate
converse with a statesman who had enjoyed the genial society of Charles
Fox, and had been the travelling companion of Lord Holland; had
corresponded with Tom Moore, debated with Francis Jeffrey, and dined
with Dr. Parr; had visited Melrose Abbey in the company of Sir Walter
Scott, and criticized the acting of Mrs. Siddons; conversed with
Napoleon in his seclusion at Elba, and ridden with the Duke of
Wellington along the lines of Torres Vedras.

The genius of John Leech, constantly exercised on the subject for twenty
years, has made all students of _Punch_ familiar with Lord John
Russell's outward aspect. We know from his boyish diary that on his
eleventh birthday he was "4 feet 2 inches high, and 3 stone 12 lb.
weight;" and though, as time went on, these extremely modest dimensions
were slightly exceeded, he was an unusually short man. His massive head
and broad shoulders gave him when he sate the appearance of greater
size, and when he rose to his feet the diminutive stature caused a
feeling of surprise. Sydney Smith declared that when Lord John first
contested Devonshire the burly electors were disappointed by the
exiguity of their candidate, but were satisfied when it was explained to
them that he had once been much larger, but was worn away by the
anxieties and struggles of the Reform Bill of 1832. Never was so robust
a spirit enshrined in so fragile a form. He inherited the miserable
legacy of congenital weakness. Even in those untender days he was
considered too delicate to remain at a Public School. It was thought
impossible for him to live through his first session of Parliament. When
he was fighting the Reform Bill through the House of Commons he had to
be fed with arrowroot by a benevolent lady who was moved to compassion
by his pitiful appearance. For years afterwards he was liable to
fainting-fits, had a wretched digestion, and was easily upset by hot
rooms, late hours, and bad air. These circumstances, combined with his
love of domestic life and his fondness for the country, led him to spend
every evening that he could spare in his seclusion at Pembroke Lodge,
and consequently cut him off, very much to his political disadvantage,
from constant and intimate associations with official colleagues and
parliamentary supporters.

There were other characteristics which enhanced this unfortunate
impression of aloofness. His voice had what used to be described in
satirical writings of the first half of the century as "an aristocratic
drawl," and his pronunciation was archaic. Like other high-bred people
of his time, he talked of "cowcumbers" and "laylocks," called a woman an
"'ooman," and was "much obleeged" where a degenerate age is content to
be obliged. The frigidity of his address and the seeming stiffness of
his manner, due really to an innate and incurable shyness, produced even
among people who ought to have known him well a totally erroneous notion
of his character and temperament. To Bulwer Lytton he seemed--

  "How formed to lead, if not to proud to please!
  His fame would fire you, but his manners freeze.
  Like or dislike, he does not care a jot;
  He wants your vote, but your affections not;
  Vet human hearts need sun as well as oats--
  So cold a climate plays the deuce with votes."

It must be admitted that in some of the small social arts which are so
valuable an equipment for a political leader Lord John was funnily
deficient. He had no memory for faces, and was painfully apt to ignore
his political followers when he met them beyond the walls of Parliament.
Once, staying in a Scotch country-house, he found himself thrown with
young Lord D----, now Earl of S----. He liked the young man's
conversation, and was pleased to find that he was a Whig. When the party
broke up, Lord John conquered his shyness sufficiently to say to his new
friend, "Well, Lord D----, I am very glad to have made your
acquaintance, and now you must come into the House of Commons and
support me there." "I have been doing that for the last ten years, Lord
John," was the reply of the gratified follower.

This inability to remember faces was allied in Lord John with a curious
artlessness of disposition which made it impossible for him to feign a
cordiality he did not feel. Once, at a concert at Buckingham Palace, he
was seen to get up suddenly, turn his back on the Duchess of Sutherland,
by whom he had been sitting, walk to the remotest part of the room, and
sit down by the Duchess of Inverness. When questioned afterwards as to
the cause of his unceremonious move, which had the look of a quarrel, he
said, "I could not have sate any longer by that great fire; I should
have fainted."

"Oh, that was a very good reason for moving; but I hope you told the
Duchess of Sutherland why you left her."

"Well--no; I don't think I did that. But I told the Duchess of Inverness
why I came and sate by her!"

Thus were opportunities of paying harmless compliments recklessly
thrown away.

It was once remarked by a competent critic that "there have been
Ministers who knew the springs of that public opinion which is delivered
ready digested to the nation every morning, and who have not scrupled to
work them for their own diurnal glorification, even although the recoil
might injure their colleagues. But Lord Russell has never bowed the knee
to the potentates of the Press; he has offered no sacrifice of
invitations to social editors; and social editors have accordingly
failed to discover the merits of a statesman who so little appreciated
them, until they have almost made the nation forget the services that
Lord Russell has so faithfully and courageously rendered."

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that the old Whig statesman lacked
those gifts or arts which make a man widely popular in a large society
of superficial acquaintances. On his deathbed he said with touching
pathos, "I have seemed cold to my friends, but it was not in my heart."
The friends needed no such assurance. He was the idol of those who were
most closely associated with him by the ties of blood or duty. Even to
people outside the innermost circle of intimacy there was something
peculiarly attractive in his singular mixture of gentleness and dignity.
He excelled as a host, doing the honours of his table with the
old-fashioned grace which he had learned at Woburn Abbey and at Holland
House when the century was young; and in the charm of his conversation
he was not easily equalled--never, in my experience, surpassed. He had
the happy knack of expressing a judgment which might be antagonistic to
the sentiments of those with whom he was dealing in language which,
while perfectly void of offence, was calmly decisive. His reply to Sir
Francis Burdett was pronounced by Mr. Gladstone to be the best repartee
ever made in Parliament. Sir Francis, an ex-Radical, attacking his
former associates with all the bitterness of a renegade, had said, "The
most offensive thing in the world is the cant of Patriotism." Lord John
replied, "I quite agree that the cant of Patriotism is a very offensive
thing; but the _recant_ of Patriotism is more offensive still." His
letter to the Dean of Hereford about the election of Bishop Hampden is a
classical instance of courteous controversy. Once a most Illustrious
Personage asked him if it was true that he taught that under certain
circumstances it was lawful for a subject to disobey the Sovereign.
"Well, speaking to a Sovereign of the House of Hanover, I can only
answer in the affirmative."

His copiousness of anecdote was inexhaustible. His stories always fitted
the point, and the droll gravity of his way of telling them added
greatly to their zest. Of his conversation with Napoleon at Elba I
recollect one curious question and answer. The Emperor took the little
Englishman by the ear and asked him what was thought in England of his
chances of returning to the throne of France. "I said, 'Sire, they think
you have no chance at all.'" The Emperor said that the English
Government had made a great mistake in sending the Duke of Wellington to
Paris--"On n'aime pas voir un homme par qui on a été battu;" and on War
he made this characteristic comment: "Eh bien, c'est un grand jeu--belle
occupation."

This interview took place when Lord John was making a tour with Lord and
Lady Holland, and much of his earlier life had been spent at Holland
House, in the heart of that brilliant society which Macaulay so
picturesquely described, and in which Luttrell and Samuel Rogers were
conspicuous figures. Their conversation supplied Lord John with an
anecdote which he used to bring out, with a twinkling eye and a
chuckling laugh, whenever he heard that any public reform was regarded
with misgiving by sensible men. Luttrell and Rogers were passing in a
wherry under old London Bridge when its destruction Was contemplated,
and Rogers said, "Some very sensible men think that, if these works are
carried into effect, the tide will flow so rapidly under the bridge that
dangerous consequences will follow." "My dear Rogers," answered
Luttrell, "if some very sensible men had been attended to, we should
still be eating acorns."

Of William and John Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell and Lord Eldon, Lord
Russell used to tell with infinite zest a story which he declared to be
highly characteristic of the methods by which they made their fortunes
and position. When they were young men at the Bar, having had a stroke
of professional luck, they determined to celebrate the occasion by
having a dinner at a tavern and going to the play. When it was time to
call for the reckoning, William Scott dropped a guinea. He and his
brother searched for it in vain, and came to the conclusion that it had
fallen between the boards of the uncarpeted floor.

"This is a bad job," said William; "we must give up the play."

"Stop a bit," said John; "I know a trick worth two of that," and called
the waitress.

"Betty," said he, "we've dropped two guineas. See if you can find them."
Betty went down on her hands and knees, and found the one guinea, which
had rolled under the fender.

"That's a very good girl, Betty," said John Scott, pocketing the coin;
"and when you find the other you can keep it for your trouble." And the
prudent brothers went with a light heart to the play, and so eventually
to the Bench and the Woolsack.

In spite of profound differences of political opinion, Lord Russell had
a high regard for the memory of the Duke of Wellington, and had been
much in his society in early life. Travelling in the Peninsula in 1812,
he visited Lord Wellington at his headquarters near Burgos. On the
morning after his arrival he rode out with his host and an aide-de-camp,
and surveyed the position of the French army. Lord Wellington, peering
through his glass, suddenly exclaimed, "By G----! they've changed their
position!" and said no more.

When they returned from their ride, the aide-de-camp said to Lord John,
"You had better get away as quick as you can. I am confident that Lord
Wellington means to make a move." Lord John took the hint, made his
excuses, and went on his way. That evening the British army was in full
retreat, and Lord Russell used to tell the story as illustrating the old
Duke's extreme reticence when there was a chance of a military secret
leaking out.

Lord Russell's father, the sixth Duke of Bedford, belonged to that
section of the Whigs who thought that, while a Whig ministry was
impossible, it was wiser to support the Duke of Wellington, whom they
believed to be a thoroughly honest man, than Canning, whom they regarded
as an unscrupulous adventurer. Accordingly the Duke of Wellington was a
frequent visitor at Woburn Abbey, and showed consistent friendliness to
Lord Russell and his many brothers, all of whom were full of anecdotes
illustrative of his grim humour and robust common sense. Let a few of
them be recorded.

The Government was contemplating the dispatch of an expedition to Burma,
with a view of taking Rangoon, and a question arose as to who would be
the fittest general to be sent in command of the expedition. The Cabinet
sent for the Duke of Wellington, and asked his advice. He instantly
replied, "Send Lord Combermere."

"But we have always understood that your Grace thought Lord Combermere a
fool."

"So he is a fool, and a d----d fool; but he can take Rangoon."

At the time of Queen Caroline's trial the mob of London sided with the
Queen, and the Duke's strong adhesion to the King made him extremely
unpopular. Riding up Grosvenor Place one day towards Apsley House, he
was beset by a gang of workmen who were mending the road. They formed a
cordon, shouldered their pickaxes, and swore they would not let the Duke
pass till he said "God save the Queen." "Well, gentlemen, since you will
have it so--'God save the Queen,' and may all your wives be like her!"

Mrs. Arbuthnot (wife of the Duke's private secretary, familiarly called
"Gosh") was fond of parading her intimacy with the Duke before
miscellaneous company. One day, in a large party, she said to him,--

"Duke, I know you won't mind my asking you, but is it true that you were
surprised at Waterloo?"

"By G----! not half as much surprised as I am now, mum."

When the Queen came to the throne her first public act was to go in
state to St. James's Palace to be proclaimed. She naturally wished to be
accompanied in her State coach only by the Duchess of Kent and one of
the Ladies of the Household; but Lord Albemarle, who was Master of the
Horse, insisted that he had a right to travel with her Majesty in the
coach, as he had done with William IV. The point was submitted to the
Duke of Wellington, as a kind of universal referee in matters of
precedence and usage. His judgment was delightfully unflattering to the
outraged magnate--"The Queen can make you go inside the coach or outside
the coach, or run behind like a tinker's dog."

And surely the whole literary profession, of which the present writer is
a feeble unit, must cherish a sentiment of grateful respect for the
memory of a man who, in refusing the dedication of a song, informed Mrs.
Norton that he had been obliged to make a rule of refusing dedications,
"because, in his situation as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, he
had been _much exposed to authors_."




III.

LORD SHAFTESBURY.

If the Christian Socialists ever frame a Kalendar of Worthies (after the
manner of Auguste Comte), it is to be hoped that they will mark among
the most sacred of their anniversaries the day--April 28, 1801--which
gave birth to Anthony Ashley, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. His life of
eighty-four years was consecrated, from boyhood till death, to the
social service of humanity; and, for my own part, I must always regard
the privilege of his friendship as among the highest honours of my life.
Let me try to recall some of the outward and inward characteristics of
this truly illustrious man.

Lord Shaftesbury was tall and spare--almost gaunt--in figure, but
powerfully framed, and capable of great exertion. His features were
handsome and strongly marked--an aquiline nose and very prominent chin.
His complexion was as pale as marble, and contrasted effectively with a
thick crop of jet-black hair which extreme old age scarcely tinged with
silver.

When he first entered Parliament a contemporary observer wrote: "It
would be difficult to imagine a more complete beau-ideal of aristocracy.
His whole countenance has the coldness as well as the grace of a
chiselled one, and expresses precision, prudence, and determination in
no common degree." The stateliness of bearing, the unbroken figure, the
high glance of stern though melancholy resolve, he retained to the end.
But the incessant labour and anxiety of sixty years made their mark, and
Sir John Millais's noble portrait, painted in 1877, shows a countenance
on which a lifelong contact with human suffering had written its tale in
legible characters.

Temperament is, I suppose, hereditary. Lord Shaftesbury's father, who
was for nearly forty years Chairman of Committees in the House of Lords,
was distinguished by a strong intellect, an imperious temper, and a
character singularly deficient in amiability. His mother (whose childish
beauty is familiar to all lovers of Sir Joshua's art as the little girl
frightened by the mask in the great "Marlborough Group") was the
daughter of the third Duke of Marlborough by that Duchess whom Queen
Charlotte pronounced to be the proudest woman in England. It is
reasonable to suppose that from such a parentage and such an ancestry
Lord Shaftesbury derived some of the most conspicuous features of his
character. From his father he inherited his keenness of intellect, his
habits of laborious industry, and his iron tenacity of purpose. From his
mother he may have acquired that strong sense of personal dignity--that
intuitive and perhaps unconscious feeling of what was due to his station
as well as to his individuality--which made his presence and address so
impressive and sometimes alarming.

Dignity was indeed the quality which immediately struck one on one's
first encounter with Lord Shaftesbury; and with dignity were associated
a marked imperiousness and an eager rapidity of thought, utterance, and
action. As one got to know him better, one began to realize his intense
tenderness towards all weakness and suffering; his overflowing affection
for those who stood nearest to him; his almost morbid sensitiveness; his
passionate indignation against cruelty or oppression. Now and then his
conversation was brightened by brief and sudden gleams of genuine
humour, but these gleams were rare. He had seen too much of human misery
to be habitually jocose, and his whole nature was underlain by a
groundwork of melancholy.

The marble of manhood retained the impression stamped upon the wax of
childhood. His early years had been profoundly unhappy. His parents were
stern disciplinarians of the antique type. His private school was a hell
on earth; and yet he used to say that he feared the master and the
bullies less than he feared his parents. One element of joy, and one
only, he recognized in looking back to those dark days, and that was the
devotion of an old nurse, who comforted him in his childish sorrows, and
taught him the rudiments of Christian faith. In all the struggles and
distresses of boyhood and manhood, he used the words of prayer which he
had learned from this good woman before he was seven years old; and of a
keepsake which she left him--the gold watch which he wore to the last
day of his life--he used to say, "That was given to me by the best
friend I ever had in the world."

At twelve years old Anthony Ashley went to Harrow, where he boarded with
the Head Master, Dr. Butler, father of the present Master of Trinity. I
have heard him say that the master in whose form he was, being a bad
sleeper, held "first school" at four o'clock on a winter's morning; and
that the boy for whom he fagged, being anxious to shine as a reciter,
and finding it difficult to secure an audience, compelled him and his
fellow-fag to listen night after night to his recitations, perched on a
high stool where a nap was impossible.

But in spite of these austerities, Anthony Ashley was happy at Harrow;
and the place should be sacred in the eyes of all philanthropists,
because it was there that, when he was fourteen years old, he
consciously and definitely gave his life to the service of his
fellow-men. He chanced to see a scene of drunken indecency and neglect
at the funeral of one of the villagers, and exclaimed in horror, "Good
heavens! Can this be permitted simply because the man was poor and
friendless?" What resulted is told by a tablet on the wall of the Old
School, which bears the following inscription:--

  _Love.     Serve_.

     NEAR THIS SPOT

  ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER

AFTERWARDS 7TH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, K.G.

  WHILE YET A BOY IN HARROW SCHOOL

  SAW WITH SHAME AND INDIGNATION

    THE PAUPER'S FUNERAL

WHICH HELPED TO AWAKEN HIS LIFELONG

DEVOTION TO THE SERVICE OF THE POOR

    AND THE OPPRESSED.

  _Blessed is he that considereth the poor_.

After leaving Harrow Lord Ashley (as he now was) spent two years at a
private tutor's, and in 1819 he went up to Christ Church. In 1822 he
took a First Class in Classics. The next four years were spent in study
and travel, and in 1826 he was returned to Parliament, by the influence
of his uncle the Duke of Marlborough, for the Borough of Woodstock. On
November 16 he recorded in his diary: "Took the oaths of Parliament with
great good will; a slight prayer for assistance in my thoughts and
deeds." Never was a politician's prayer more abundantly granted.

In 1830 Lord Ashley married a daughter of Lord Cowper, and this
marriage, independently of the radiant happiness which it brought, had
an important bearing on his political career; for Lady Ashley's uncle
was Lord Melbourne, and her mother became, by a second marriage, the
wife of Lord Palmerston. Of Lord Melbourne and his strong common sense
Lord Shaftesbury, in 1882, told me the following characteristic story.
When the Queen became engaged to Prince Albert, she wished him to be
made King Consort by Act of Parliament, and urged her wish upon the
Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. At first that sagacious man simply
evaded the point, but when her Majesty insisted on a categorical answer,
"I thought it my duty to be very plain with her. I said, 'For G----'s
sake, let's hear no more of it, ma'am; for if you once get the English
people into the way of making kings, you will get them into the way of
unmaking them.'"

By this time Lord Ashley was deeply immersed in those philanthropic
enterprises which he had deliberately chosen as the occupation of his
lifetime. Reform of the Lunacy Law and a humaner treatment of lunatics
were the earliest objects to which he devoted himself. To attain them
the more effectually he got himself made a member, and subsequently
chairman, of the Lunacy Commission, and threw himself into the work with
characteristic thoroughness. He used to pay "surprise visits" both by
day and night to public and private asylums, and discovered by those
means a system of regulated and sanctioned cruelty which, as he narrated
it in his old age, seemed almost too horrible for credence.

The abolition of slavery all over the world was a cause which very early
enlisted his sympathy, and he used to tell, with grim humour, how, when,
after he had become Lord Shaftesbury, he signed an Open Letter to
America in favour of emancipation, a Southern newspaper sarcastically
inquired, "Where was this Lord Shaftesbury when the noble-hearted Lord
Ashley was doing his single-handed work on behalf of the English slaves
in the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire?"

Sanitary reform and the promotion of the public health were objects at
which, in the middle part of his life, he worked hard, both as a
landowner and as the unpaid Chairman of the Board of Health. The crusade
against vivisection warmed his heart and woke his indignant eloquence
in his declining years. His Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey was
attended by representatives of nearly two hundred religious and
philanthropic institutions with which he had been connected, and which,
in one way or another, he had served. But, of course, it is with the
reform of the Factory Laws that his name is most inseparably associated.

In 1833 Lord Ashley took up the Ten Hours Bill, previously in the charge
of Mr. Sadler, who had now lost his seat. He carried his Bill through
the Second Reading, but it was opposed by Lord Althorp, who threw it
out, and carried a modified proposal in 1833. In 1844 the introduction
of a new Bill for the regulation of labour in factories brought Lord
Ashley back to his old battlefield. A desperate struggle was made to
amend the Bill into a Ten Hours Bill, but this failed, owing to Sir
Robert Peel's threat of resignation. In 1845 Lord Ashley refused the
Chief Secretaryship for Ireland in order to be able to devote himself
wholly to the Ten Hours Bill; and, as soon as Parliament rose, he went
on a tour through the manufacturing districts, speaking in public,
mediating between masters and men, and organizing the Ten Hours
movement.

In 1847 the Bill passed into law. On June 1 in that year Lord Ashley
wrote in his diary: "News that the Factory Bill has just passed the
Third Reading. I am humbled that my heart is not bursting with
thankfulness to Almighty God--that I can find breath and sense to
express my joy. What reward shall we give unto the Lord for all the
benefits He hath conferred upon us?--God in His mercy prosper the work,
and grant that these operatives may receive the cup of salvation and
call upon the name of the Lord!"

The perfervid vein of philanthropic zeal which is apparent in this
extract animated every part of Lord Shaftesbury's nature and every
action of his life. He had, if ever man had, "the Enthusiasm of
Humanity." His religion, on its interior side, was rapt, emotional, and
sometimes mystic; but at the same time it was, in its outward
manifestations, definite, tangible, and, beyond most men's, practical.
At the age of twenty-seven he wrote in his diary: "On my soul, I believe
that I desire the welfare of mankind." At eighty-four he exclaimed, in
view of his approaching end, "I cannot bear to leave the world with all
the misery in it." And this was no mere effusive declamation, but the
genuine utterance of a zeal which condescended to the most minute and
laborious forms of practical expression. "Poor dear children!" he
exclaimed to the superintendent of a ragged school, after hearing from
some of the children their tale of cold and hunger. "What can we do for
them?"

"My God shall supply all their need," replied the superintendent with
easy faith.

"Yes," said Lord Shaftesbury, "He will, but they must have some food
directly." He drove home, and instantly sent two churns of soup, enough
to feed four hundred. That winter ten thousand basins of soup, made in
Grosvenor Square, were distributed among the "dear little hearts" of
Whitechapel.

And as in small things, so in great. One principle consecrated his whole
life. His love of God constrained him to the service of men, and no
earthly object or consideration--however natural, innocent, or even
laudable--was allowed for a moment to interpose itself between him and
the supreme purpose for which he lived. He was by nature a man of keen
ambition, and yet he twice refused office in the Household, once the
Chief Secretaryship, and three times a seat in the Cabinet, because
acceptance would have hindered him in his social legislation and
philanthropic business. When we consider his singular qualifications for
public life--his physical gifts, his power of speech, his habits of
business, his intimate connections with the official caste--when we
remember that he did not succeed to his paternal property till he was
fifty years old, and then found it grossly neglected and burdened with
debt; and that his purse had been constantly drained by his
philanthropic enterprises--we are justified in saying that very few men
have ever sacrificed so much for a cause which brought neither honours,
nor riches, nor power, nor any visible reward, except the diminished
suffering and increased happiness of multitudes who were the least able
to help themselves.

Lord Shaftesbury's devotion to the cause of Labour led him to make the
Factory Acts a touchstone of character. To the end of his days his view
of public men was largely governed by the part which they had played in
that great controversy. "Gladstone voted against me," was a stern
sentence not seldom on his lips. "Bright was the most malignant opponent
the Factory Bill ever had." "Cobden, though bitterly hostile, was better
than Bright." Even men whom on general grounds he disliked and
despised--such as Lord Beaconsfield and Bishop Wilberforce--found a
saving clause in his judgment if he could truthfully say, "He helped me
with the chimney-sweeps," or, "He felt for the wretched operatives."

But even apart from questions of humane sentiment and the supreme
interests of social legislation, I always felt in my intercourse with
Lord Shaftesbury that it would have been impossible for him to act for
long together in subordination to, or even in concert with, any
political leader. Resolute, self-reliant, inflexible; hating compromise;
never turning aside by a hair's-breadth from the path of duty; incapable
of flattering high or low; dreading leaps in the dark, but dreading more
than anything else the sacrifice of principle to party--he was
essentially the type of politician who is the despair of the official
wire-puller.

Oddly enough, Lord Palmerston was the statesman with whom, despite all
ethical dissimilarity, he had the most sympathy, and this arose partly
from their near relationship and partly from Lord Palmerston's
easy-going habit of placing his ecclesiastical patronage in Lord
Shaftesbury's hands. It was this unseen but not unfelt power as a
confidential yet irresponsible adviser that Lord Shaftesbury really
enjoyed and, indeed, his political opinions were too individual to have
allowed of binding association with either political party. He was, in
the truest and best sense of the word, a Conservative. To call him a
Tory would be quite misleading. He was not averse from Roman Catholic
emancipation. He took no prominent part against the first Reform Bill.
His resistance to the admission of the Jews to Parliament was directed
rather against the method than the principle. Though not friendly to
Women's Suffrage, he said: "I shall feel myself bound to conform to the
national will, but I am not prepared to stimulate it."

But while no blind and unreasoning opponent of all change, he had a deep
and lively veneration for the past. Institutions, doctrines, ceremonies,
dignities, even social customs, which had descended from old time, had
for him a fascination and an awe. In his high sense of the privileges
and the duties of kingship, of aristocracy, of territorial possession,
of established religions, he recalled the doctrine of Burke; and he
resembled that illustrious man in his passionate love of principle, in
his proud hatred of shifts and compromises, in his contempt for the
whole race of mechanical politicians and their ignoble strife for place
and power.

When Lord Derby formed his Government in 1866, on the defeat of Lord
Russell's second Reform Bill, he endeavoured to obtain the sanction of
Lord Shaftesbury's name and authority by offering him a seat in his
Cabinet. This offer was promptly declined; had it been accepted, it
might have had an important bearing on the following event, which was
narrated to me by Lord Shaftesbury in 1882. One winter evening in 1867
he was sitting in his library in Grosvenor Square, when the servant told
him that there was a poor man waiting to see him. The man was shown in,
and proved to be a labourer from Clerkenwell, and one of the innumerable
recipients of the old Earl's charity. He said, "My Lord, you have been
very good to me, and I have come to tell you what I have heard." It
appeared that at the public-house which he frequented he had overheard
some Irishmen of desperate character plotting to blow up Clerkenwell
prison. He gave Lord Shaftesbury the information to be used as he
thought best, but made it a condition that his name should not be
divulged. If it were, his life would not be worth an hour's purchase.
Lord Shaftesbury pledged himself to secrecy, ordered his carriage, and
drove instantly to Whitehall. The authorities there refused, on grounds
of official practice, to entertain the information without the name and
address of the informant. These, of course, could not be given. The
warning was rejected, and the jail blown up. Had Lord Shaftesbury been a
Cabinet Minister, this triumph of officialism would probably not have
occurred.

What I have said of this favourite hero of mine in his public aspects
will have prepared the sympathetic reader for the presentment of the man
as he appeared in private life. For what he was abroad that he was at
home. He was not a man who showed two natures or lived two lives. He was
profoundly religious, eagerly benevolent, utterly impatient of whatever
stood between him and the laudable object of the moment, warmly attached
to those who shared his sympathies and helped his enterprises--_Fort
comme le diamant; plus tendre qu'une mère_. The imperiousness which I
described at the outset remained a leading characteristic to the last.
His opinions were strong, his judgment was emphatic, his language
unmeasured. He had been, all through his public life, surrounded by a
cohort of admiring and obedient coadjutors, and he was unused to, and
intolerant of, disagreement or opposition. It was a disconcerting
experience to speak on a platform where he was chairman, and, just as
one was warming to an impressive passage, to feel a vigorous pull at
one's coat-tail, and to hear a quick, imperative voice say, in no
muffled tone, "My dear fellow, are you never going to stop? We shall be
here all night."

But when due allowance was made for this natural habit of command, Lord
Shaftesbury was delightful company. Given to hospitality, he did the
honours with stately grace; and, on the rare occasions when he could be
induced to dine out, his presence was sure to make the party a success.
In early life he had been pestered by a delicate digestion, and had
accustomed himself to a regimen of rigid simplicity; but, though the
most abstemious of men, he knew and liked a good glass of wine, and in a
small party would bring out of the treasures of his memory things new
and old with a copiousness and a vivacity which fairly fascinated his
hearers. His conversation had a certain flavour of literature. His
classical scholarship was easy and graceful. He had the Latin poets at
his fingers' ends, spoke French fluently, knew Milton by heart, and was
a great admirer of Crabbe. His own style, both in speech and writing,
was copious, vigorous, and often really eloquent. It had the same
ornamental precision as his exquisite handwriting. When he was among
friends whom he thoroughly enjoyed, the sombre dignity of his
conversation was constantly enlivened by flashes of a genuine humour,
which relieved, by the force of vivid contrast, the habitual austerity
of his demeanour.

A kind of proud humility was constantly present in his speech and
bearing. Ostentation, display, lavish expenditure would have been
abhorrent alike to his taste and his principles. The stately figure
which bore itself so majestically in Courts and Parliaments naturally
unbent among the costermongers of Whitechapel and the labourers of
Dorsetshire. His personal appointments were simple to a degree; his own
expenditure was restricted within the narrowest limits. But he loved,
and was honestly proud of, his beautiful home--St. Giles's House, near
Cranbourne; and when he received his guests, gentle or simple, at "The
Saint," as he affectionately called it, the mixture of stateliness and
geniality in his bearing and address was an object-lesson in high
breeding. Once Lord Beaconsfield, who was staying with Lord Alington at
Crichel, was driven over to call on Lord Shaftesbury at St. Giles's.
When he rose to take his leave, he said, with characteristic
magniloquence, but not without an element of truth, "Good-bye, my dear
Lord. You have given me the privilege of seeing one of the most
impressive of all spectacles--a great English nobleman living in
patriarchal state in his own hereditary halls."




IV.

CARDINAL MANNING.

I have described a great philanthropist and a great statesman. My
present subject is a man who combined in singular harmony the qualities
of philanthropy and of statesmanship--Henry Edward, Cardinal Manning,
and titular Archbishop of Westminster.

My acquaintance with Cardinal Manning began in 1833. Early in the
Parliamentary session of that year he intimated, through a common
friend, a desire to make my acquaintance. He wished to get an
independent Member of Parliament, and especially, if possible, a Liberal
and a Churchman, to take up in the House of Commons the cause of
Denominational Education. His scheme was much the same as that now[3]
adopted by the Government--the concurrent endowment of all
denominational schools; which, as he remarked, would practically come to
mean those of the Anglicans, the Romans, and the Wesleyans. In
compliance with his request, I presented myself at that barrack-like
building off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, which was formerly the Guards'
Institute, and is now the Archbishop's House. Of course, I had long been
familiar with the Cardinal's shrunken form and finely-cut features, and
that extraordinary dignity of bearing which gave him, though in reality
below the middle height, the air and aspect of a tall man. But I only
knew him as a conspicuous and impressive figure in society, on public
platforms, and (where he specially loved to be) in the precincts of the
House of Commons. I had never exchanged a word with him, and it was with
a feeling of very special interest that I entered his presence.

We had little in common. I was still a young man, and the Cardinal was
already old. I was a staunch Anglican; he, the most devoted of
Papalists. I was strongly opposed both to his Ultramontane policy and to
those dexterous methods by which he was commonly supposed to promote it;
and, as far as the circumstances of my life had given me any insight
into the interior of Romanism, I sympathized with the great Oratorian of
Birmingham rather than with his brother-cardinal of Westminster. But
though I hope that my principles stood firm, all my prejudices melted
away in that fascinating presence. Though there was something like half
a century's difference in our ages, I felt at once and completely at
home with him.

What made our perfect ease of intercourse more remarkable was that, as
far as the Cardinal's immediate object was concerned, my visit was a
total failure. I had no sympathy with his scheme for the endowment of
denominational teaching, and, with all the will in the world to please
him, I could not even meet him half way. But this untoward circumstance
did not import the least difficulty or restraint into our conversation.
He gently glided from business into general topics; knew all about my
career, congratulated me on some recent success, remembered some of my
belongings, inquired about my school and college, was interested to find
that, like himself, I had been at Harrow and Oxford, and, after an
hour's pleasant chat, said, "Now you must stay and have some luncheon."
From that day to the end of his life I was a frequent visitor at his
house, and every year that I knew him I learned to regard and respect
him increasingly.

Looking back over these fourteen years, and reviewing my impressions of
his personality, I must put first the physical aspect of the man. He
seemed older than he was, and even more ascetic, for he looked as if,
like the cardinal in _Lothair_, he lived on biscuits and soda-water;
whereas he had a hearty appetite for his midday meal, and, in his own
words, "enjoyed his tea." Still, he carried the irreducible minimum of
flesh on his bones, and his hollow cheeks and shrunken jaws threw his
massive forehead into striking prominence. His line of features was
absolutely faultless in its statuesque regularity, but his face was
saved from the insipidity of too great perfection by the
imperious--rather ruthless--lines of his mouth and the penetrating
lustre of his deep-set eyes. His dress--a black cassock edged and
buttoned with crimson, with a crimson skullcap and biretta, and a
pectoral cross of gold--enhanced the picturesqueness of his aspect, and
as he entered the anteroom where one awaited his approach, the most
Protestant knee instinctively bent.

His dignity was astonishing. The position of a cardinal with a princely
rank recognized abroad but officially ignored in England was difficult
to carry off, but his exquisite tact enabled him to sustain it to
perfection. He never put himself forward; never asserted his rank; never
exposed himself to rebuffs; still, he always contrived to be the most
conspicuous figure in any company which he entered; and whether one
greeted him with the homage due to a prince of the Church or merely with
the respect which no one refuses to a courtly old gentleman, his manner
was equally easy, natural, and unembarrassed. The fact that the
Cardinal's name, after due consideration, was inserted in the Royal
Commission on the Housing of the Poor immediately after that of the
Prince of Wales and before Lord Salisbury's was the formal recognition
of a social precedence which adroitness and judgment had already made
his own.

To imagine that Cardinal Manning regarded station, or dignity, or even
power, as treasures to be valued in themselves would be ridiculously to
misconceive the man. He had two supreme and absorbing objects in
life--if, indeed, they may not be more properly spoken of as one--the
glory of God and the salvation of men. These were, in his intellect and
conscience, identified with the victory of the Roman Church. To these
all else was subordinated; by its relation to these all else was weighed
and calculated. His ecclesiastical dignity, and the secular recognition
of it, were valuable as means to high ends. They attracted public notice
to his person and mission; they secured him a wider hearing; they gave
him access to circles which, perhaps, would otherwise have been closed.
Hence, and for no other reason, they were valuable.

It has always to be borne in mind that Manning was essentially a man of
the world, though he was much more than that. Be it far from me to
disparage the ordinary type of Roman ecclesiastic, who is bred in a
seminary, and perhaps spends his lifetime in a religious community. That
peculiar training produces, often enough, a character of saintliness and
unworldly grace on which one can only "look," to use a phrase of Mr.
Gladstone's, "as men look up at the stars." But it was a very different
process that had made Cardinal Manning what he was. He had touched life
at many points. A wealthy home, four years at Harrow, Balliol in its
palmiest days, a good degree, a College Fellowship, political and
secular ambitions of no common kind, apprenticeship to the practical
work of a Government office, a marriage brightly but all too briefly
happy, the charge of a country parish, and an early initiation into the
duties of ecclesiastical rulership--all these experiences had made
Henry Manning, by the time of his momentous change, an accomplished man
of the world.

His subsequent career, though, of course, it superadded certain
characteristics of its own, never obliterated or even concealed the
marks left by those earlier phases, and the octogenarian Cardinal was a
beautifully-mannered, well-informed, sagacious old gentleman who, but
for his dress, might have passed for a Cabinet Minister, an eminent
judge, or a great county magnate.

His mental alertness was remarkable. He seemed to read everything that
came out, and to know all that was going on. He probed character with a
glance, and was particularly sharp on pretentiousness and
self-importance. A well-known publicist, who perhaps thinks of himself
rather more highly than he ought to think, once ventured to tell the
Cardinal that he knew nothing about the subject of a painful agitation
which pervaded London in the summer of 1885. "I have been hearing
confessions in London for thirty years, and I fancy more people have
confided their secrets to me than to you, Mr. ----," was the Cardinal's
reply.

Once, when his burning sympathy with suffering and his profound contempt
for Political Economy had led him, in his own words, to "poke fun at the
Dismal Science," the _Times_ lectured him in its most superior manner,
and said that the venerable prelate seemed to mistake cause and effect.
"That," said the Cardinal to me, "is the sort of criticism that an
undergraduate makes, and thinks himself very clever. But I am told that
in the present day the _Times_ is chiefly written by undergraduates."

I once asked him what he thought of a high dignitary of the English
Church, who had gone a certain way in a public movement, and then had
been frightened back by clamour. His reply was the single word
"_infirmus_," accompanied by that peculiar sniff which every one who
ever conversed with him must remember as adding so much to the piquancy
of his terse judgments. When he was asked his opinion of a famous
biography in which a son had disclosed, with too absolute frankness, his
father's innermost thoughts and feelings, the Cardinal replied, "I think
that ---- has committed the sin of Ham."

His sense of humour was peculiarly keen, and though it was habitually
kept under control, it was sometimes used to point a moral with
admirable effect.

"What are you going to do in life?" he asked a rather flippant
undergraduate at Oxford.

"Oh, I'm going to take Holy Orders," was the airy reply.

"Take care you get them, my son."

Though he was intolerant of bumptiousness, the Cardinal liked young men.
He often had some about him, and in speaking to them the friendliness of
his manner was touched with fatherliness in a truly attractive fashion.
And as with young men, so with children. Surely nothing could be
prettier than this answer to a little girl in New York who had addressed
some of her domestic experiences to "Cardinal Manning, England."

"My Dear Child,--You ask me whether I am glad to receive letters from
little children. I am always glad, for they write kindly and give me no
trouble. I wish all my letters were like theirs. Give my blessing to
your father, and tell him that our good Master will reward him a
hundredfold for all he has lost for the sake of his faith. Tell him that
when he comes over to England he must come to see me. And mind you bring
your violin, for I love music, but seldom have any time to hear it. The
next three or four years of your life are very precious. They are like
the ploughing-time and the sowing-time in the year. You are learning to
know God, the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, the presence and voice of
the Holy Ghost in the Church of Jesus Christ. Learn all these things
solidly, and you will love the Blessed Sacrament and our Blessed Mother
with all your heart. And now you will pray for me that I may make a good
end of a long life, which cannot be far off. And may God guide you and
guard you in innocence and in fidelity through this evil, evil world!
And may His blessing be on your home and all belonging to you! Believe
me always a true friend, Henry Edward, Card. Abp. of Westminster."

The Cardinal had, I should say, rather a contempt for women. He
exercised a great influence over them, but I question if he rated their
intellectual and moral qualities as highly as he ought, and their
"rights" he held in utter detestation. General society, though in his
later days he saw little of it except at the Athenaeum, he thoroughly
enjoyed. Like most old people, he was fond of talking about old days,
and as he had known hosts of important and interesting men, had a
tenacious memory, and spoke the most finished English, it was a pleasure
to listen to his reminiscences. He wrote as well as he talked. His
pointed and lucid style gave to his printed performances a semblance of
cogency which they did not really possess; and his letters--even his
shortest notes--were as exquisite in wording as in penmanship. As he
grew older, he became increasingly sensible of the charms of "Auld Lang
Syne," and he delighted to renew his acquaintance with the scenes and
associations of his youth.

On July 15, 1888, being the first day of the Eton and Harrow Match at
Lord's, a few old Harrovians of different generations met at a Harrow
dinner. The Cardinal, who had just turned eighty, was invited. He
declined to dine, on the ground that he never dined out, but he would on
no account forego the opportunity of meeting the members of his old
school, and he recalled with pride that he had played for two years in
the Harrow Eleven. He appeared as soon as dinner was over, gallantly
faced the cloud of cigar-smoke, was in his very best vein of anecdote
and reminiscence, and stayed till the party broke up.

The Cardinal's friendships were not, I believe, numerous, but his
affection for Mr. Gladstone is well known. It dated from Oxford. Through
Manning and Hope-Scott the influence of the Catholic revival reached the
young member for Newark, and they were the godfathers of his eldest son.
After their secession to Rome in 1851 this profound friendship fell into
abeyance. As far as Manning was concerned, it was renewed when, in 1868,
Mr. Gladstone took in hand to disestablish the Irish Church. It was
broken again by the controversy about _Vaticanism_, in 1875, and some
fifteen years later was happily revived by the good offices of a common
friend. "Gladstone is a very fine fellow," said the Cardinal to me in
1890. "He is not vindictive. You may fight him as hard as you like, and
when the fight is over you will find that it has left no rancour behind
it."

This affection for Mr. Gladstone was a personal matter, quite
independent of politics; but in political matters also they had much in
common. "You know," wrote the Cardinal to Mrs. Gladstone on her Golden
Wedding, "how nearly I have agreed in William's political career,
especially in his Irish policy of the last twenty years." He accepted
the principle of Home Rule, though he thought badly of the Bill of 1886,
and predicted its failure from the day when it was brought in. The
exclusion of the Irish members was in his eyes a fatal blot, as tending
rather to separation than to that Imperial federation which was his
political ideal. But the Cardinal always held his politics in
subordination to his religion, and at the General Election of 1885 his
vigorous intervention on behalf of denominational education which he
considered to be imperilled by the Radical policy, considerably
embarrassed the Liberal cause in those districts of London where there
is a Roman Catholic vote.

It is necessary to say a word about Cardinal Manning's method of
religious propagandism. He excelled in the art of driving a nail where
it would go. He never worried his acquaintance with controversy, never
introduced religious topics unseasonably, never cast his pearls before
unappreciative animals. But when he saw a chance, an opening, a
sympathetic tendency, or a weak spot, he fastened on it with unerring
instinct. His line was rather admonitory than persuasive. When he
thought that the person whom he was addressing had an inkling of the
truth, but was held back from avowing it by cowardice or indecision, he
would utter the most startling warnings about the danger of dallying
with grace.

"I promise you to become a Catholic when I am twenty-one," said a young
lady whom he was trying to convert.

"But can you promise to live so long?" was the searching rejoinder.

In Manning's belief, the Roman Church was the one oracle of truth and
the one ark of salvation; and his was the faith which would compass sea
and land, sacrifice all that it possessed, and give its body to be
burned, if it might by any means bring one more soul to safety. If he
could win a single human being to see the truth and act on it, he was
supremely happy. To make the Church of Rome attractive, to enlarge her
borders, to win recruits for her, was therefore his constant effort. He
had an ulterior eye to it in all his public works--his zealous
teetotalism, his advocacy of the claims of labour, his sympathy with the
demand for Home Rule; and the same principle which animated him in these
large schemes of philanthropy and public policy made itself felt in the
minutest details of daily life and personal dealing. Where he saw the
possibility of making a convert, or even of dissipating prejudice and
inclining a single Protestant more favourably towards Rome, he left no
stone unturned to secure this all-important end. Hence it came that he
was constantly, and not wholly without reason, depicted as a man whom in
religious matters it was impossible to trust; with whom the end
justified the means; and whose every act and word, where the interests
of his Church were involved, must be watched with the most jealous
suspicion.

All this was grossly overstated. Whatever else Cardinal Manning was, he
was an English gentleman of the old school, with a nice sense of honour
and propriety. But still, under a mass of calumny and exaggeration,
there lay this substratum of truth--that he who wills the end wills the
means; and that where the interests of a sacred cause are at stake, an
enthusiastic adherent will sometimes use methods to which, in
enterprises of less pith and moment, recourse could not properly be had.

Manning had what has been called "the ambition of distinctiveness." He
felt that he had a special mission which no other man could so
adequately fulfil, and this was to establish and popularize in England
his own robust faith in the cause of the Papacy as identical with the
cause of God. There never lived a stronger Papalist. He was more
Ultramontane than the Ultramontanes. Everything Roman was to him divine.
Italian architecture, Italian vestments, the Italian mode of pronouncing
ecclesiastical Latin were dear to him, because they visibly and audibly
implied the all-pervading presence and power of Rome. Rightly or
wrongly, he conceived that English Romanism, as it was when he joined
the Roman Church, was practically Gallicanism; that it minimized the
Papal supremacy, was disloyal to the Temporal Power, and was prone to
accommodate itself to its Protestant and secular environment. Against
this time-serving spirit he set his face like a flint. He believed that
he had been divinely appointed to Papalize England. The cause of the
Pope was the cause of God; Manning was the person who could best serve
the Pope's cause, and therefore all forces which opposed him were in
effect opposing the Divine Will. This seems to have been his simple and
sufficient creed, and certainly it had the merit of supplying a clear
rule of action. It made itself felt in his hostility to the Religious
Orders, and especially the Society of Jesus. Religious Orders are
extra-episcopal. The Jesuits are scarcely subject to the Pope himself.
Certainly neither the Orders nor the Society would, or could, be subject
to Manning. A power independent of, or hostile to, his authority was
inimical to religion, and must, as a religious duty, be checked, and, if
possible, destroyed. Exactly the same principle animated his dealings
with Cardinal Newman. Rightly or wrongly, Manning thought Newman a
half-hearted Papalist. He dreaded alike his way of putting things and
his practical policy. Newman's favourite scheme of establishing a Roman
Catholic college at Oxford, Manning regarded as fraught with peril to
the faith of the rising generation. The scheme must therefore be crushed
and its author snubbed.

I must in candour add that these differences of opinion between the two
Cardinals were mixed with and embittered by a sense of personal dislike.
When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very
unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof. I ventured to
ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches. He replied that he
had, and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very
unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety,
after a moment's pause he added, "But if you ask me if they are like
poor Newman, I am bound to say--_a photograph_."

It was, I suppose, matter of common knowledge that Manning's early and
conspicuous ascendency in the counsels of the Papacy rested mainly on
the intimacy of his personal relations with Pius IX. But it was news to
most of us that (if his biographer is right) he wished to succeed
Antonelli as Secretary of State in 1876, and to transfer the scene of
his activities from Westminster to Rome, and that he attributed the
Pope's disregard of his wishes to mental decrepitude. The point, if
true, is an important one, for his accession to the Secretaryship of
State, and permanent residence in Rome, could not have failed to affect
the development of events when, two years later, the Papal throne became
vacant by the death of Pius IX. But _Deo aliter visum_. It was ordained
that he should pass the evening of his days in England, and that he
should outlive his intimacy at the Vatican and his influence on the
general policy of the Church of Rome. With the accession of Leo XIII. a
new order began, and Newman's elevation to the sacred purple seemed to
affix the sanction of Infallibility to views and methods against which
Manning had waged a Thirty Years' War. Henceforward he felt himself a
stranger at the Vatican, and powerless beyond the limits of his own
jurisdiction.

Perhaps this restriction of exterior activities in the ecclesiastical
sphere drove the venerable Cardinal to find a vent for his untiring
energies in those various efforts of social reform in which, during the
last ten years of his life, he played so conspicuous a part. If this be
so, though Rome may have lost, England was unquestionably a gainer. It
was during those ten years that I was honoured by his friendship. The
storms, the struggles, the ambitions, the intrigues which had filled so
large a part of his middle life lay far behind. He was revered, useful,
and, I think, contented in his present life, and looked forward with
serene confidence to the final, and not distant, issue. Thrice happy is
the man who, in spite of increasing infirmity and the loss of much that
once made life enjoyable, thus

    "Finds comfort in himself and in his cause,
    And, while the mortal mist is gathering, draws
    His breath in confidence of Heaven's applause."

FOOTNOTES:

[3] 1903




V.

LORD HOUGHTON.

It is narrated of an ancient Fellow of All Souls' that, lamenting the
changes which had transformed his College from the nest of aristocratic
idlers into a society of accomplished scholars, he exclaimed: "Hang it
all, sir, we were _sui generis_." What the unreformed Fellows of All
Souls' were among the common run of Oxford dons, that, it may truly (and
with better syntax) be said, the late Lord Houghton was among his
fellow-citizens. Of all the men I have ever known he was, I think, the
most completely _sui generis_. His temperament and turn of mind were, as
far as I know, quite unlike anything that obtained among his
predecessors and contemporaries; nor do I see them reproduced among the
men who have come after him. His peculiarities were not external. His
appearance accorded with his position. He looked very much what one
would have expected in a country gentleman of large means and prosperous
circumstances. His early portraits show that he was very like all the
other young gentlemen of fashion whom D'Orsay drew, with their long
hair, high collars, and stupendous neckcloths. The admirably faithful
work of Mr. Lehmann will enable all posterity to know exactly how he
looked in his later years with his loose-fitting clothes, comfortable
figure, and air of genial gravity. Externally all was normal. His
peculiarities were those of mental habit, temperament, and taste. As far
as I know, he had not a drop of foreign blood in his veins, yet his
nature was essentially un-English.

A country gentleman who frankly preferred living in London, and a
Yorkshireman who detested sport, made a sufficiently strange phenomenon;
but in Lord Houghton the astonished world beheld as well a politician
who wrote poetry, a railway-director who lived in literature, a
_libre-penseur_ who championed the Tractarians, a sentimentalist who
talked like a cynic, and a philosopher who had elevated conviviality to
the dignity of an exact science. Here, indeed, was a "living
oxymoron"--a combination of inconsistent and incongruous qualities which
to the typical John Bull--Lord Palmerston's "Fat man with a white hat in
the twopenny omnibus"--was a sealed and hopeless mystery.

Something of this unlikeness to his fellow-Englishmen was due, no doubt,
to the fact that Lord Houghton, the only son of a gifted, eccentric, and
indulgent father, was brought up at home. The glorification of the
Public School has been ridiculously overdone. But it argues no blind
faith in that strange system of unnatural restraints and scarcely more
reasonable indulgences to share Gibbon's opinion that the training of a
Public School is the best adapted to the common run of Englishmen. "It
made us what we were, sir," said Major Bagstock to Mr. Dombey; "we were
iron, sir, and it forged us." The average English boy being what he is
by nature--"a soaring human boy," as Mr. Chadband called him--a Public
School simply makes him more so. It confirms alike his characteristic
faults and his peculiar virtues, and turns him out after five or six
years that altogether lovely and gracious product--the Average
Englishman. This may be readily conceded; but, after all, the
pleasantness of the world as a place of residence, and the growing good
of the human race, do not depend exclusively on the Average Englishman;
and something may be said for the system of training which has
produced, not only all famous foreigners (for they, of course, are a
negligible quantity), but such exceptional Englishmen as William Pitt
and Thomas Macaulay, and John Keble and Samuel Wilberforce, and Richard
Monckton Milnes.

From an opulent and cultivated home young Milnes passed to the most
famous college in the world, and found himself under the tuition of
Whewell and Thirlwall, and in the companionship of Alfred Tennyson and
Julius Hare, Charles Buller and John Sterling--a high-hearted
brotherhood who made their deep mark on the spiritual and intellectual
life of their own generation and of that which succeeded it.

After Cambridge came foreign travel, on a scale and plan quite outside
the beaten track of the conventional "grand tour" as our fathers knew
it. From the Continent Richard Milnes brought back a gaiety of spirit, a
frankness of bearing, a lightness of touch which were quite un-English,
and "a taste for French novels, French cookery, and French wines" with
which Miss Crawley would have sympathized. In 1837 he entered Parliament
as a "Liberal Conservative" for the Borough of Pontefract, over which
his father exercised considerable influence, and he immediately became a
conspicuous figure in the social life of London. A few years later his
position and character were drawn by the hand of a master in a passage
which will well bear yet one more reproduction:--

"Mr. Vavasour was a social favourite; a poet, and a real poet, and a
troubadour, as well as a Member of Parliament; travelled,
sweet-tempered, and good-hearted; amusing and clever. With catholic
sympathies and an eclectic turn of mind, Mr. Vavasour saw something good
in everybody and everything; which is certainly amiable, and perhaps
just, but disqualifies a man in some degree for the business of life,
which requires for its conduct a certain degree of prejudice. Mr.
Vavasour's breakfasts were renowned. Whatever your creed, class, or
country--one might almost add your character--you were a welcome guest
at his matutinal meal, provided you were celebrated. That qualification,
however, was rigidly enforced. A real philosopher, alike from his genial
disposition and from the influence of his rich and various information,
Vavasour moved amid the strife, sympathizing with every one; and
perhaps, after all, the philanthropy which was his boast was not
untinged by a dash of humour, of which rare and charming quality he
possessed no inconsiderable portion. Vavasour liked to know everybody
who was known, and to see everything which ought to be seen. His life
was a gyration of energetic curiosity; an insatiable whirl of social
celebrity. There was not a congregation of sages and philosophers in any
part of Europe which he did not attend as a brother. He was present at
the camp of Kalisch in his yeomanry uniform, and assisted at the
festivals of Barcelona in an Andalusian jacket. He was everywhere and at
everything: he had gone down in a diving-bell and gone up in a balloon.
As for his acquaintances, he was welcomed in every land; his universal
sympathies seemed omnipotent. Emperor and King, Jacobin and Carbonaro,
alike cherished him. He was the steward of Polish balls, and the
vindicator of Russian humanity; he dined with Louis Philippe, and gave
dinners to Louis Blanc."

Lord Beaconsfield's penetration in reading character and skill in
delineating it were never, I think, displayed to better advantage than
in the foregoing passage. Divested of its intentional and humorous
exaggerations, it is not a caricature, but a portrait. It exhibits with
singular fidelity the qualities which made Lord Houghton, to the end of
his long life, at once unique and lovable. We recognize the overflowing
sympathy, the keen interest in life, the vivid faculty of enjoyment, the
absolute freedom from national prejudice, the love of seeing and of
being seen.

During the Chartist riots of 1848 Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother:
"Tell Miss Martineau it is said here that Monckton Milnes refused to be
sworn in a special constable, that he might be free to assume the post
of President of the Republic at a moment's notice." And those who knew
Lord Houghton best suspect that he himself originated the joke at his
own expense. The assured ease of young Milnes's social manner, even
among complete strangers, so unlike the morbid self-repression and proud
humility of the typical Englishman, won for him the nickname of "The
Cool of the Evening." His wholly un-English tolerance and constant
effort to put himself in the place of others whom the world condemned,
procured for him from Carlyle (who genuinely loved him) the title of
"President of the Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation Company." Bishop
Wilberforce wrote, describing a dinner-party in 1847: "Carlyle was very
great. Monckton Milnes drew him out. Milnes began the young man's cant
of the present day--the barbarity and wickedness of capital punishment;
that, after all, we could not be sure others were wicked, etc. Carlyle
broke out on him with, 'None of your Heaven-and-Hell-Amalgamation
Companies for me. We _do_ know what is wickedness, _I_ know wicked men,
men whom I _would not live with_--men whom under some conceivable
circumstances I would kill or they should kill me. No, Milnes, there's
no truth or greatness in all that. It's just poor, miserable
littleness.'"

Lord Houghton's faculty of enjoyment was peculiarly keen. He warmed not
only both hands but indeed all his nature before the fire of life. "All
impulses of soul and sense" affected him with agreeable emotions; no
pleasure of body or spirit came amiss to him. And in nothing was he more
characteristically un-English than in the frank manifestation of his
enjoyment, bubbling over with an infectious jollity, and never, even
when touched by years and illness, taking his pleasures after that
melancholy manner of our nation to which it is a point of literary
honour not more directly to allude. Equally un-English was his frank
openness of speech and bearing. His address was pre-eminently what
old-fashioned people called "forthcoming." It was strikingly--even
amusingly--free from that frigid dignity and arrogant reserve for which
as a nation we are so justly famed. I never saw him kiss a guest on both
cheeks, but if I had I should not have felt the least surprised.

What would have surprised me would have been if the guest (whatever his
difference of age or station) had not felt immediately and completely at
home, or if Lord Houghton had not seemed and spoken as if they had known
one another from the days of short frocks and skipping-ropes. There
never lived so perfect a host. His sympathy was genius, and his
hospitality a fine art. He was peculiarly sensitive to the claims of
"Auld Lang Syne," and when a young man came up from Oxford or Cambridge
to begin life in London, he was certain to find that Lord Houghton had
travelled on the Continent with his father, or had danced with his
mother, or had made love to his aunt, and was eagerly on the look-out
for an opportunity of showing gracious and valuable kindness to the son
of his ancient friends.

When I first lived in London Lord Houghton was occupying a house in
Arlington Street made famous by the fact that Hogarth drew its interior
and decorations in his pictures of "Marriage a la Mode." And nowhere did
the social neophyte receive a warmer welcome, or find himself amid a
more eclectic and representative society. Queens of fashion,
professional beauties, authors and authoresses, ambassadors,
philosophers, discoverers, actors--every one who was famous or even
notorious; who had been anywhere or had done anything, from a
successful speech in Parliament to a hazardous leap at the
Aquarium--jostled one another on the wide staircase and in the gravely
ornate drawing-rooms. And amid the motley crowd the genial host was
omnipresent, with a warm greeting and a twinkling smile for each
successive guest--a good story, a happy quotation, the last morsel of
piquant gossip, the newest theory of ethics or of politics.

Lord Houghton's humour had a quality which was quite its own. Nothing
was sacred to it--neither age, nor sex, nor subject was spared; but it
was essentially good-natured. It was the property of a famous spear to
heal the wounds which itself had made; the shafts of Lord Houghton's fun
needed no healing virtue, for they made no wound. When that saintly
friend of temperance and all good causes, Mr. Cowper-Temple, was raised
to the peerage as Lord Mount Temple, Lord Houghton went about saying,
"You know that the precedent for Billy Cowper's title is in _Don
Juan?_--

    'And Lord Mount Coffee-house, the Irish peer,
     Who killed himself for love, with drink, last year.'"

When a very impecunious youth, who could barely afford to pay for his
cab fares, lost a pound to him at whist, Lord Houghton said, as he
pocketed the coin, "Ah, my dear boy, the _great_ Lord Hertford, whom
foolish people called the _wicked_ Lord Hertford--Thackeray's Steyne and
Dizzy's Monmouth--used to say, 'There is no pleasure in winning money
from a man who does not feel it.' How true that was!--" And when he saw
a young friend at a club supping on _pâté de foie gras_ and champagne,
he said encouragingly, "That's quite right. All the pleasant things in
life are unwholesome, or expensive, or wrong." And amid these rather
grim morsels of experimental philosophy he would interject certain
_obiter dicta_ which came straight from the unspoiled goodness of a
really kind heart. "All men are improved by prosperity," he used to
say. Envy, hatred, and malice had no place in his nature. It was a
positive enjoyment to him to see other people happy, and a friend's
success was as gratifying as his own. His life, though in most respects
singularly happy, had not been without its disappointments. At one time
he had nursed political ambitions, and his peculiar knowledge of foreign
affairs had seemed to indicate a special line of activity and success.
But things went differently. He always professed to regard his peerage
as "a Second Class in the School of Life," and himself as a political
failure. Yet no tinge of sourness, or jealousy, or cynical disbelief in
his more successful contemporaries ever marred the geniality of his
political conversation.

As years advanced he became not (as the manner of most men is) less
Liberal, but more so; keener in sympathy with all popular causes;
livelier in his indignation against monopoly and injustice. Thirty years
ago, in the struggle for the Reform Bill of 1866, his character and
position were happily hit off by Sir George Trevelyan in a description
of a walk down Piccadilly:--

  "There on warm midsummer Sundays Fryston's Bard is wont to wend,
   Whom the Ridings trust and honour, Freedom's staunch and jovial friend:
   Loved where shrewd hard-handed craftsmen cluster round the northern
      kilns--
   He whom men style Baron Houghton, but the Gods call Dicky Milnes."

And eighteen years later there was a whimsical pathos in the phrase in
which he announced his fatal illness to a friend: "Yes, I am going to
join the Majority--and you know I have always preferred Minorities."

It would be foreign to my purpose to criticize Lord Houghton as a poet.
My object in these chapters is merely to record the characteristic
traits of eminent men who have honoured me with their friendship, and
among those there is none for whose memory I cherish a warmer sentiment
of affectionate gratitude than for him whose likeness I have now tried
to sketch. His was the most precious of combinations--a genius and a
heart. An estimate of his literary gifts and performances lies
altogether outside my scope, but the political circumstances of the
present hour[4] impel me to conclude this paper with a quotation which,
even if it stood alone, would, I think, justify Lord Beaconsfield's
judgment quoted above--that "he was a poet, and a true poet." Here is
the lyrical cry which, writing in 1843, he puts into the mouth of
Greece:--

    "And if to his old Asian seat,
       From this usurped, unnatural throne,
     The Turk is driven, 'tis surely meet
       That we again should hold our own;
     Be but Byzantium's native sign
       Of Cross on Crescent[5] once unfurled,
     And Greece shall guard by right divine
       The portals of the Easter world."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] March 1897.

[5] The Turks adopted the sign of the Crescent from Byzantium after the
Conquest: the Cross above the Crescent is found on many ruins of the
Grecian city--among others, on the Genoese castle on the Bosphorus.




VI.

RELIGION AND MORALITY.

In these chapters I have been trying to recall some notable people
through whom I have been brought into contact with the social life of
the past. I now propose to give the impressions which they conveyed to
me of the moral, material, and political condition of England just at
the moment when the old order was yielding place to new, and modern
Society was emerging from the birth-throes of the French Revolution. All
testimony seems to me to point to the fact that towards the close of the
eighteenth century Religion was almost extinct in the highest and lowest
classes of English society. The poor were sunk in ignorance and
barbarism, and the aristocracy was honeycombed by profligacy. Morality,
discarded alike by high and low, took refuge in the great Middle Class,
then, as now, deeply influenced by Evangelical Dissent. A dissolute
Heir-Apparent presided over a social system in which not merely religion
but decency was habitually disregarded. At his wedding he was so drunk
that his attendant dukes "could scarcely support him from falling."[6]
The Princes of the Blood were notorious for a freedom of life and
manners which would be ludicrous if it were not shocking. Here I may
cite an unpublished diary[7] of Lord Robert Seymour (son of the first
Marquis of Hertford), who was born in 1748 and died in 1831. He was a
man of fashion and a Member of Parliament; and these are some of the
incidents which he notes in 1788:--

"The Prince of Wales declares there is not an honest Woman in London,
excepting Ly. Parker and Ly. Westmoreland, and those are so stupid he
can make nothing of them; they are scarcely fit to blow their own
Noses."

"At Mrs. Vaneck's assembly last week, the Prince of Wales, very much to
the honour of his polite and elegant Behaviour, measured the breadth of
Mrs. V. behind with his Handkerchief, and shew'd the measurement to most
of the Company."

"Another Trait of the P. of Wales's Respectful Conduct is that at an
assembly he beckoned to the poor old Dutchess of Bedford across a large
Room, and, when she had taken the trouble of crossing the Room, he very
abruptly told her he had nothing to say to her."

"The Prince of Wales very much affronted the D. of Orleans and his
natural Brother, L'Abbé de la Fai, at Newmarket, L'Abbé declaring it
possible to charm a Fish out of the Water, which being disputed
occasioned a Bett; and the Abbé stooped down over the water to tickle
the Fish with a little switch. Fearing, however, the Prince said play
him some Trick, he declared he hoped the Prince would not use him
unfairly by throwing him into the water. The Prince answer'd him that he
would not upon his Honor. The Abbé had no sooner began the operation by
leaning over a little Bridge when the Prince took hold of his Heels and
threw him into the Water, which was rather deep. The Abbé, much enraged,
the moment he got himself out run at the Prince with great violence, a
Horse-whip in his Hand, saying he thought very meanly of a Prince who
cou'd not keep his word. The Prince flew from him, and getting to the
Inn locked himself in one of the Rooms."

"Prince of Wales, Mrs. Fitzherbert, the Duke and Dutchess of
Cumberland, and Miss Pigott, Mrs. F.'s companion, went a Party to
Windsor during the absence of _The Family_ fm. Windsor; and going to see
a cold Bath, Miss P. expressed a great wish to bathe this hot weather.
The D. of C. very imprudently pushed her in, and the Dut. of C. having
the presence of mind to throw out the Rope saved her when in such a
disagreeable State from fear and surprise as to be near sinking. Mrs. F.
went into convulsion Fits, and the Dut. fainted away, and the scene
proved ridiculous in the extreme, as Report says the Duke called out to
Miss P. that he was instantly coming to her in the water, and continued
undressing himself. Poor Miss P.'s clothes entirely laid upon the Water,
and made her appear an awkward figure. They afterwards pushed in one of
the Prince's attendants."

So much for High Life at the close of the eighteenth century. It is more
difficult to realize that we are separated only by some sixty years from
a time when a Cabinet Minister and a brother of the Sovereign conducted
a business-like correspondence on the question whether the Minister had
or had not turned the Prince out of the house for insulting his wife.
The journals, newspapers, and memoirs of the time throw (especially for
those who can read between the lines) a startling light on that
hereditary principle which plays so important a part in our political
system. All the ancillary vices flourished with a rank luxuriance. Hard
drinking was the indispensable accomplishment of a fine gentleman, and
great estates were constantly changing owners at the gaming-table.

The fifth Duke of Bedford (who had the temerity to attack Burke's
pension, and thereby drew down upon himself the most splendid repartee
in literature) was a bosom-friend of Fox, and lived in a like-minded
society. One night at Newmarket he lost a colossal sum at hazard, and,
jumping up in a passion, he swore that the dice were loaded, put them
in his pocket, and went to bed. Next morning he examined the dice in the
presence of his boon companions, found that they were not loaded, and
had to apologize and pay. Some years afterwards one of the party was
lying on his death-bed, and he sent for the duke. "I have sent for you
to tell you that you were right. The dice _were_ loaded. We waited till
you were asleep, went to your bedroom, took them out of your waistcoat
pocket, replaced them with unloaded ones, and retired."

"But suppose I had woke and caught you doing it."

"Well, we were desperate men--_and we had pistols_."

Anecdotes of the same type might be multiplied endlessly, and would
serve to confirm the strong impression which all contemporary evidence
leaves upon the mind--that the closing years of the eighteenth century
witnessed the _nadir_ of English virtue. The national conscience was in
truth asleep, and it had a rude awakening. "I have heard persons of
great weight and authority," writes Mr. Gladstone, "such as Mr.
Grenville, and also, I think, Archbishop Howley, ascribe the beginnings
of a reviving seriousness in the upper classes of lay society to a
reaction against the horrors and impieties of the first French
Revolution in its later stages." And this reviving seriousness was by no
means confined to Nonconformist circles. In the eighteenth century the
religious activities of the time proceeded largely (though not
exclusively) from persons who, from one cause or another, were separated
from the Established Church. Much theological learning and controversial
skill, with the old traditions of Anglican divinity, had been drawn
aside from the highway of the Establishment into the secluded byways of
the Nonjurors. Whitefield and the Wesleys, and that grim but grand old
Mother in Israel, Selina Countess of Huntingdon, found their
evangelistic energies fatally cramped by episcopal authority, and, quite
against their natural inclinations, were forced to act through
independent organizations of their own making. But at the beginning of
the nineteenth century things took a different turn.

The distinguishing mark of the religious revival which issued from the
French Revolution was that it lived and moved and had its being within
the precincts of the Church of England. Of that Church, as it existed at
the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth,
the characteristic feature had been a quiet worldliness. The typical
clergyman, as drawn, for instance, in Crabbe's poems and Miss Austen's
novels, is a well-bred, respectable, and kindly person, playing an
agreeable part in the social life of his neighbourhood, and doing a
secular work of solid value, but equally removed from the sacerdotal
pretensions of the Caroline divines and from the awakening fervour of
the Evangelical preachers. The professors of a more spiritual or a more
aggressive religion were at once disliked and despised. Sydney Smith was
never tired of poking fun at the "sanctified village of Clapham" and its
"serious" inhabitants, at missionary effort and revivalist enthusiasm.
When Lady Louisa Lennox was engaged to a prominent Evangelical and
Liberal--Mr. Tighe of Woodstock--her mother, the Duchess of Richmond,
said, "Poor Louisa is going to make a shocking marriage--a man called
_Tiggy_, my dear, a Saint and a Radical." When Lord Melbourne had
accidently found himself the unwilling hearer of a rousing Evangelical
sermon about sin and its consequences, he exclaimed in much disgust as
he left the church, "Things have come to a pretty pass when religion is
allowed to invade the sphere of private life!"

Arthur Young tells us that a daughter of the first Lord Carrington said
to a visitor, "My papa used to have prayers in his family, but none
since he has been a Peer." A venerable Canon of Windsor, who was a
younger son of a great family, told me that his old nurse, when she was
putting him and his little brothers to bed, used to say, "If you're
very good little boys, and go to bed without giving trouble, you needn't
say your prayers to-night." When the late Lord Mount Temple was a youth,
he wished to take Holy Orders; and the project so horrified his parents
that, after holding a family council, they plunged him into fashionable
society in the hope of distracting his mind from religion, and
accomplished their end by making him join the Blues.

The quiet worldliness which characterized the English Church as a whole
was unpleasantly varied here and there by instances of grave and
monstrous scandal. The system of Pluralities left isolated parishes in a
condition of practical heathenism. Even bare morality was not always
observed. In solitary places clerical drunkenness was common. On
Saturday afternoon the parson would return from the nearest town
"market-merry." He consorted freely with the farmers, shared their
habits, and spoke their language. I have known a lady to whom a country
clergyman said, pointing to the darkened windows where a corpse lay
awaiting burial, "There's a stiff 'un in that house." I have known a
country gentleman in Shropshire who had seen his own vicar drop the
chalice at the Holy Communion because he was too drunk to hold it. I
know a corner of Bedfordshire where, within the recollection of persons
living thirty[8] years ago, three clerical neighbours used to meet for
dinner at one another's parsonages in turn. One winter afternoon a
corpse was brought for burial to the village church. The vicar of the
place came from his dinner so drunk that he could not read the service,
although his sister supported him with one hand and held the lantern
with the other. He retired beaten, and both his guests made the same
attempt with no better success. So the corpse was left in the church,
and the vicar buried it next day when he had recovered from his debauch.

While the prevailing tone of quiet worldliness was thus broken, here
and there, by horrid scandals, in other places it was conspicuously
relieved by splendid instances of piety and self-devotion, such as
George Eliot drew in the character of Edgar Tryan of Milby. But the
innovating clergy of the Evangelical persuasion had to force their way
through "the teeth of clenched antagonisms." The bishops, as a rule,
were opposed to enthusiasm, and the bishops of that day were, in virtue
of their wealth, their secular importance, and their professional
cohesiveness, a formidable force in the life of the Church.

In the "good old days" of Erastian Churchmanship, before the Catholic
revival had begun to breathe new life into ancient forms, a bishop was
enthroned by proxy! Sydney Smith, rebuking Archbishop Howley for his
undue readiness to surrender cathedral property to the Ecclesiastical
Commission, pointed out that his conduct was inconsistent with having
sworn at his enthronement that he would not alienate the possessions of
the Church of Canterbury. "The oath," he goes on, "may be less present
to the Archbishop's memory from the fact of his not having taken the
oath in person, but by the medium of a gentleman sent down by the coach
to take it for him--a practice which, though I believe it to have been
long established in the Church, surprised me, I confess, not a little. A
proxy to vote, if you please--a proxy to consent to arrangements of
estates, if wanted; but a proxy sent down in the Canterbury Fly to take
the Creator to witness that the Archbishop, detained in town by business
or pleasure, will never violate that foundation of piety over which he
presides--all this seems to me an act of the most extraordinary
indolence ever recorded in history." In this judgment the least
ritualistic of laymen will heartily concur. But from Archbishop Howley
to Archbishop Temple is a far cry, and the latest enthronement in
Canterbury Cathedral must have made clear to the most casual eye the
enormous transformation which sixty years have wrought alike in the
inner temper and the outward aspect of the Church of England.

Once Dr. Liddon, walking with me down the hall of Christ Church, pointed
to the portrait of an extremely bloated and sensual-looking prelate on
the wall, and said, with that peculiar kind of mincing precision which
added so much to the point of his sarcasms, "How singular, dear friend,
to reflect that _that person_ was chosen, in the providential order, to
connect Mr. Keble with the Apostles!" And certainly this connecting link
bore little resemblance to either end of the chain. The considerations
which governed the selection of a bishop in those good old days were
indeed not a little singular. Perhaps he was chosen because he was a
sprig of good family, like Archbishop Cornwallis, whose junketings at
Lambeth drew down upon him the ire of Lady Huntingdon and the threats of
George III., and whose sole qualification for the clerical office was
that when an undergraduate he had suffered from a stroke of palsy which
partially crippled him, but "did not, however, prevent him from holding
a hand at cards." Perhaps he had been, like Bishop Sumner, "bear-leader"
to a great man's son, and had won the gratitude of a powerful patron by
extricating young hopeful from a matrimonial scrape. Perhaps, like Marsh
or Van Mildert, he was a controversial pamphleteer who had tossed a
Calvinist or gored an Evangelical. Or perhaps he was, like Blomfield and
Monk, a "Greek Play Bishop," who had annotated Aeschylus or composed a
Sapphic Ode on a Royal marriage. "Young Crumpet is sent to school; takes
to his books; spends the best years of his life in making Latin verses;
knows that the _Crum_ in Crumpet is long and the _pet_ short; goes to
the University; gets a prize for an Essay on the Dispersion of the Jews;
takes Orders; becomes a bishop's chaplain; has a young nobleman for his
pupil; publishes a useless classic and a Serious Call to the
Unconverted; and then goes through the Elysian transitions of
Prebendary, Dean, Prelate, and the long train of purple, profit, and
power."

Few--and very few--are the adducible instances in which, in the reigns
of George III., George IV., and William IV., a bishop was appointed for
evangelistic zeal or pastoral efficiency.

But, on whatever principle chosen, the bishop, once duly consecrated and
enthroned, was a formidable person, and surrounded by a dignity scarcely
less than royal. "Nobody likes our bishop," says Parson Lingon in _Felix
Holt_. "He's all Greek and greediness, and too proud to dine with his
own father." People still living can remember the days when the
Archbishop of Canterbury was preceded by servants bearing flambeaux when
he walked across from Lambeth Chapel to what were called "Mrs. Howley's
Lodgings." When the Archbishop dined out he was treated with princely
honours, and no one left the party till His Grace had made his bow. Once
a week he dined in state in the great hall of Lambeth, presiding over a
company of self-invited guests--strange perversion of the old
archiepiscopal charity to travellers and the poor--while, as Sydney
Smith said, "the domestics of the prelacy stood, with swords and
bag-wigs, round pig and turkey and venison, to defend, as it were, the
orthodox gastronome from the fierce Unitarian, the fell Baptist, and all
the famished children of Dissent." When Sir John Coleridge, father of
the late Lord Chief Justice, was a young man at the Bar, he wished to
obtain a small legal post in the Archbishop's Prerogative Court. An
influential friend undertook to forward his application to the
Archbishop. "But remember," he said, "in writing your letter, that his
Grace can only be approached on gilt-edged paper." Archbishop Harcourt
never went from Bishopthorpe to York Minster except attended by his
chaplains, in a coach and six, while Lady Anne was made to follow in a
pair-horse carriage, to show her that her position was not the same
thing among women that her husband's was among men. At Durham, which was
worth £40,000 a year, the Bishop, as Prince Palatine, exercised a
secular jurisdiction, both civil and criminal, and the Commission at the
Assizes ran in the name of "Our Lord the Bishop." At Ely, Bishop Sparke
gave so many of his best livings to his family that it was locally said
that you could find your way across the Fens on a dark night by the
number of little Sparkes along the road. When this good prelate secured
a residential canonry for his eldest son, the event was so much a matter
of course that he did not deem it worthy of special notice; but when he
secured a second canonry for his second son, he was so filled with pious
gratitude that, as a thank-offering, he gave a ball at the Palace of Ely
to all the county of Cambridge. "And I think," said Bishop Woodford, in
telling me the story, "that the achievement and the way of celebrating
it were equally remarkable."

This grand tradition of mingled splendour and profit ran down, in due
degree, through all ranks of the hierarchy. The poorer bishoprics were
commonly held in conjunction with a rich deanery or prebend, and not
seldom with some important living; so that the most impecunious
successor of the Apostles could manage to have four horses to his
carriage and his daily bottle of Madeira. Not so splendid as a palace,
but quite as comfortable, was a first-class deanery. A "Golden Stall" at
Durham or St. Paul's made its occupant a rich man. And even the rectors
of the more opulent parishes contrived to "live," as the phrase went,
"very much like gentleman."

The old Prince Bishops are as extinct as the dodo. The Ecclesiastical
Commission has made an end of them. Bishop Sumner of Winchester, who
died in 1874, was the last of his race. But the dignified country
clergyman, who combined private means with a rich living, did his county
business in person, and performed his religious duties by deputy,
survived into very recent times. I have known a fine old specimen of
this class--a man who never entered his church on a week-day, nor wore a
white neckcloth except on Sunday; who was an active magistrate, a keen
sportsman, an acknowledged authority on horticulture and farming; and
who boasted that he had never written a sermon in his life, but could
alter one with any man in England--which, in truth, he did so
effectively that the author would never have recognized his own
handiwork. When the neighbouring parsons first tried to get up a
periodical "clerical meeting" for the study of theology, he responded
genially to the suggestion: "Oh yes; I think it sounds a capital thing,
and I suppose we shall finish up with a rubber and a bit of supper."

The reverence in which a rector of this type was held, and the
difference, not merely of degree but of kind, which was supposed to
separate him from the inferior order of curates, were amusingly
exemplified in the case of an old friend of mine. Returning to his
parish after his autumn holiday, and noticing a woman at her cottage
door with a baby in her arms, he asked, "Has that child been baptised?"
"Well, sir," replied the curtsying mother, "I shouldn't like to say as
much as that; but your young man came and _did what he could_."

Lost in these entrancing recollections of Anglicanism as it once was,
but will never be again, I have wandered far from my theme. I began by
saying that all one has read, all one has heard, all one has been able
to collect by study or by conversation, points to the close of the
eighteenth century as the low-water mark of English religion and
morality. The first thirty years of the nineteenth century witnessed a
great revival, due chiefly to the Evangelical movement, and not only,
as in the previous century, on lines outside the Establishment, but in
the very heart and core of the Church of England. That movement, though
little countenanced by ecclesiastical authority, changed the whole tone
of religious thought and life in England. It recalled men to serious
ideas of faith and duty; it curbed profligacy, it made decency
fashionable, it revived the external usages of piety, and it prepared
the way for that later movement which, issuing from Oxford in 1833, has
transfigured the Church of England.

"I do not mean to say," wrote Mr. Gladstone in 1879, "that the founders
of the Oxford School announced, or even that they knew, to how large an
extent they were to be pupils and continuators of the Evangelical work,
besides being something else.... Their distinctive speech was of Church
and priesthood, of Sacraments and services, as the vesture under the
varied folds of which the Form of the Divine Redeemer was to be
exhibited to the world in a way capable of, and suited for, transmission
by a collective body from generation to generation. It may well have
happened that, in straining to secure for their ideas what they thought
their due place, some at least may have forgotten or disparaged that
personal and experimental life of the human soul with God which profits
by all ordinances but is tied to none, dwelling ever, through all its
varying moods, in the inner courts of the sanctuary whereof the walls
are not built with hands. The only matter, however, with which I am now
concerned is to record the fact that the pith and life of the
Evangelical teaching, as it consists in the reintroduction of Christ our
Lord to be the woof and warp of preaching, was the great gift of the
movement to the teaching Church, and has now penetrated and possessed it
on a scale so general that it may be considered as pervading the whole
mass."

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Lord Holland's _Memoirs of the Whig Party_, ii. p. 123.

[7] The property of Colonel Davies-Evans of Highmead.

[8] Written in 1897.




VII.

SOCIAL EQUALIZATION.

It was a characteristic saying of Talleyrand that no one could conceive
how pleasant life was capable of being who had not belonged to the
French aristocracy before the Revolution. There were, no doubt, in the
case of that great man's congeners some legal and constitutional
prerogatives which rendered their condition supremely enviable; but so
far as splendour, stateliness, and exclusive privilege are elements of a
pleasant life, he might have extended his remark to England. Similar
conditions of social existence here and in France were similarly and
simultaneously transformed by the same tremendous upheaval which marked
the final disappearance of the feudal spirit and the birth of the modern
world.

The old order passed away, and the face of human society was made new.
The law-abiding and temperate genius of the Anglo-Saxon race saved
England from the excesses, the horrors, and the dramatic incidents which
marked this period of transition in France; but though more quietly
effected, the change in England was not less marked, less momentous, or
less permanent than on the Continent. I have spoken in a former chapter
of the religious revival which was the most striking result in England
of the Revolution in France. To-day I shall say a word about another
result, or group of results, which may be summarized as Social
Equalization.

The barriers between ranks and classes were to a large extent broken
down. The prescriptive privileges of aristocracy were reduced. The
ceremoniousness of social demeanour was diminished. Great men were
content with less elaboration and display in their retinues, equipages,
and mode of living. Dress lost its richness of ornament and its
distinctive characteristics. Young men of fashion no longer bedizened
themselves in velvet, brocade, and gold lace. Knights of the Garter no
longer displayed the Blue Ribbon in Parliament. Officers no longer went
into society with uniform and sword. Bishops laid aside their wigs;
dignified clergy discarded the cassock. Coloured coats, silk stockings,
lace ruffles, and hair-powder survived only in the footmen's liveries.
When the Reform Bill of 1832 received the Royal Assent, the Lord
Bathurst of the period, who had been a member of the Duke of
Wellington's Cabinet, solemnly cut off his pigtail, saying, "Ichabod,
for the glory is departed;" and to the first Reformed Parliament only
one pigtail was returned (it pertained to Mr. Sheppard, M.P. for
Frome)--an impressive symbol of social transformation.

The lines of demarcation between the peerage and the untitled classes
were partially obliterated. How clear and rigid those lines had been it
is difficult for us to conceive. In _Humphrey Clinker_ the nobleman
refuses to fight a duel with the squire on the ground of their social
inequality. Mr. Wilberforce declined a peerage because it would exclude
his sons from intimacy with private gentlemen, clergymen, and mercantile
families. I have stated in a previous chapter that Lord Bathurst, who
was born in 1791, told me that at his private school he and the other
sons of peers sate together on a privileged bench apart from the rest of
the boys. A typical aristocrat was the first Marquis of Abercorn. He
died in 1818, but he is still revered in Ulster under the name of "The
Owld Marquis." This admirable nobleman always went out shooting in his
Blue Ribbon, and required his housemaids to wear white kid gloves when
they made his bed. Before he married his first cousin, Miss Cecil
Hamilton, he induced the Crown to confer on her the titular rank of an
Earl's daughter, that he might not marry beneath his position; and when
he discovered that she contemplated eloping, he sent a message begging
her to take the family coach, as it ought never to be said that Lady
Abercorn left her husband's roof in a hack chaise. By such endearing
traits do the truly great live in the hearts of posterity.

In the earlier part of this century Dr. Arnold inveighed with
characteristic vigour against "the insolencies of our aristocracy, the
scandalous exemption of the peers from all ignominious punishments short
of death, and the insolent practice of allowing peers to vote in
criminal trials on their honour, while other men vote on their oath."
But generally the claims of rank and birth were admitted with a
childlike cheerfulness. The high function of government was the
birthright of the few. The people, according to episcopal showing, had
nothing to do with the laws but to obey them. The ingenious author of
_Russell's Modern Europe_ states in his preface to that immortal work
that his object in adopting the form of a Series of Letters from a
Nobleman to his Son is "to give more Weight to the Moral and Political
Maxims, and to entitle the author to offer, without seeming to dictate
to the World, such reflections on Life and Manners as are supposed more
immediately to belong to the higher orders in Society." Nor were the
privileges of rank held to pertain merely to temporal concerns. When
Selina Countess of Huntingdon asked the Duchess of Buckingham to
accompany her to a sermon of Whitefield's, the Duchess replied: "I thank
your ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers;
their doctrines are most repulsive, and strongly tinctured with
impertinence and disrespect towards their superiors, in perpetually
endeavouring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is
monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches
that crawl on the earth; and I cannot but wonder that your ladyship
should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good
breeding."

The exclusive and almost feudal character of the English peerage was
destroyed, finally and of set purpose, by Pitt when he declared that
every man who had an estate of ten thousand a year had a right to be a
peer. In Lord Beaconsfield's words, "He created a plebeian aristocracy
and blended it with the patrician oligarchy. He made peers of
second-rate squires and fat graziers. He caught them in the alleys of
Lombard Street, and clutched them from the counting-houses of Cornhill."
This democratization of the peerage was accompanied by great
modifications of pomp and stateliness in the daily life of the peers. In
the eighteenth century the Duke and Duchess of Atholl were always served
at their own table before their guests, in recognition of their royal
rank as Sovereigns of the Isle of Man; and the Duke and Duchess of
Argyll observed the same courteous usage for no better reason than
because they liked it. The "Household Book" of Alnwick Castle records
the amplitude and complexity of the domestic hierarchy which ministered
to the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland; and at Arundel and Belvoir,
and Trentham and Wentworth, the magnates of the peerage lived in a state
little less than regal. Seneschals and gentlemen-ushers,
ladies-in-waiting and pages-of-the-presence adorned noble as well as
royal households. The private chaplain of a great Whig duke, within the
recollection of people whom I have known, used to preface his sermon
with a prayer for the nobility, and "especially for the noble duke to
whom I am indebted for my scarf"--the badge of chaplaincy--accompanying
the words by a profound bow toward his Grace's pew. The last "running
footman" pertained to "Old Q."--the notorious Duke of Queensberry, who
died in 1810. Horace Walpole describes how, when a guest playing cards
at Woburn Abbey dropped a silver piece on the floor, and said, "Oh,
never mind; let the Groom of the Chambers have it," the Duchess replied,
"Let the carpet-sweeper have it; the Groom of the Chambers never takes
anything but gold."

These grotesque splendours of domestic living went out with the
eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson, who died in 1784, had already noted
their decline. There was a general approach towards external
equalization of ranks, and that approach was accompanied by a general
diffusion of material enjoyment. The luxury of the period was prodigal
rather than refined. There lies before me as I write a tavern bill for a
dinner for seven persons in the year 1751. I reproduce the items
verbally and literally, and certainly the bill of fare is worth studying
as a record of gastronomical exertion on a heroic scale:--

     Bread and Beer. Potage de Tortue. Calipash. Calipees. Un Paté de
     Jambon de Bayone. Potage Julien Verd. Two Turbots to remove the
     Soops. Haunch of Venison. Palaits de Mouton. Selle de Mouton.
     Salade. Saucisses au Ecrevisses. Boudin Blanc à le Reine. Petits
     Patés à l'Espaniol. Coteletts a la Cardinal. Selle d'Agneau glacé
     aux Cocombres. Saumon à la Chambord. Fillets de Saules Royales. Une
     bisque de Lait de Maquereaux. Un Lambert aux Innocents. Des Perdrix
     Sauce Vin de Champaign. Poulets à le Russiene. Ris de Veau en
     Arlequin. Quée d'Agneau à la Montaban. Dix Cailles. Un Lapreau. Un
     Phésant. Dix Ortolans. Une Tourte de Cerises. Artichaux à le
     Provensalle. Choufleurs au flour. Cretes de Cocq en Bonets. Amorte
     de Jesuits. Salade. Chicken. Ice Cream and Fruits. Fruit of various
     sorts, forced. Fruit from Market. Butter and Cheese. Clare.
     Champaign. Burgundy. Hock. White Wine. Madeira. Sack. Cape. Cyprus.
     Neuilly. Usquebaugh. Spa and Bristol Waters. Oranges and Lemons.
     Coffee and Tea. Lemonade.

The total charge for this dinner for seven amounted to £81, 11s. 6d.,
and a footnote informs the curious reader that there was also "a turtle
sent as a Present to the Company, and dressed in a very high _Gout_
after the West Indian Manner." Old cookery-books, such as the misquoted
work of Mrs. Glasse, Dr. Kitchener's _Cook's Oracle_, and the anonymous
but admirable _Culina_, all concur in their testimony to the enormous
amount of animal food which went to make an ordinary meal, and the
amazing variety of irreconcilable ingredients which were combined in a
single dish. Lord Beaconsfield, whose knowledge of this recondite branch
of English literature was curiously minute, thus describes--no doubt
from authentic sources--a family dinner at the end of the eighteenth
century:--

"The ample tureen of _potage royal_ had a boned duck swimming in its
centre. At the other end of the table scowled in death the grim
countenance of a huge roast pike, flanked on one side by a leg of mutton
_à la daube_, and on the other by the tempting delicacies of Bombarded
Veal. To these succeeded that masterpiece of the culinary art a grand
Battalia Pie, in which the bodies of chickens, pigeons, and rabbits were
embalmed in spices, cocks' combs, and savoury balls, and well bedewed
with one of those rich sauces of claret, anchovy, and sweet herbs in
which our grandfathers delighted, and which was technically termed a
Lear. A Florentine tourte or tansy, an old English custard, a more
refined blamango, and a riband jelly of many colours offered a pleasant
relief after these vaster inventions, and the repast closed with a dish
of oyster-loaves and a pomepetone of larks."

As the old order yielded place to the new, this enormous profusion of
rich food became by degrees less fashionable, though its terrible
traditions endured, through the days of Soyer and Francatelli, almost to
our own time. But gradually refinement began to supersede profusion.
Simultaneously all forms of luxury spread from the aristocracy to the
plutocracy; while the middle and lower classes attained a degree of
solid comfort which would a few years before have been impossible. Under
Pitt's administration wealth increased rapidly. Great fortunes were
amassed through the improvement of agricultural methods and the
application of machinery to manufacture. The Indian Nabobs, as they were
called, became a recognized and powerful element in society, and their
habits of "Asiatic luxury" are represented by Chatham, Burke, Voltaire,
and Home Tooke as producing a marked effect upon the social life of the
time. Lord Robert Seymour notes in his diary for 1788 that a fashionable
lady gave £100 a year to the cook who superintended her suppers; that at
a sale of bric-à-brac 230 guineas were paid for a mirror; and that, at a
ball given by the Knights of the Bath at the Pantheon, the decorations
cost upwards of £3000. The general consumption of French and Portuguese
wines in place of beer, which had till recently been the beverage even
of the affluent, was regarded by grave writers as a most alarming sign
of the times, and the cause of a great increase of drunkenness among the
upper classes. The habits and manners prevalent in London spread into
the country. As the distinction between the nobility, who, roughly
speaking, had been the frequenters of the capital, and the minor gentry,
who had lived almost entirely on their own estates, gradually
disappeared, the distinction between town and country life sensibly
diminished.

The enormous increase in the facilities for travelling and for the
interchange of information contributed to the same result; and grave men
lamented the growing fondness of the provincial ladies for the
card-table, the theatre, the assembly, the masquerade, and--singular
social juxtaposition--the Circulating Library. The process of social
assimilation, while it spread from town to country and from nobility to
gentry, reached down from the gentry to the merchants, and from the
merchants to the tradesmen. The merchant had his villa three or four
miles away from his place of business, and lived at Clapham or Dulwich
in a degree and kind of luxury which had a few years before been the
monopoly of the aristocracy. The tradesman no longer inhabited the rooms
over his shop, but a house in Bloomsbury or Soho. Where, fifty years
before, one fire in the kitchen served the whole family, and one dish of
meat appeared on the table, now a footman waited at the banquet of
imported luxuries, and small beer and punch had made way for Burgundy
and Madeira.

But the subject expands before us, and it is time to close. Now I
propose to inquire how far this Social Equalization was accompanied by
Social Amelioration.




VIII.

SOCIAL AMELIORATION.

At this point it is necessary to look back a little, and to clear our
minds of the delusion that an age of splendour is necessarily an age of
refinement. We have seen something of the regal state and prodigal
luxury which surrounded the English aristocracy in the middle of the
eighteenth century. Yet at no period of our national history--unless,
perhaps, during the orgies of the Restoration were aristocratic morals
at so low an ebb. Edmund Burke, in a passage which is as ethically
questionable as it is rhetorically beautiful, taught that vice loses
half its evil when it loses all its grossness. But in the English
society of his time grossness was as conspicuous as vice itself, and it
infected not only the region of morals, but also that of manners.

Sir Walter Scott has described how, in his youth, refined gentlewomen
read aloud to their families the most startling passages of the most
outrageous authors. I have been told by one who heard it from an
eye-witness that a great Whig duchess, who figures brilliantly in the
social and political memoirs of the eighteenth century, turning to the
footman who was waiting on her at dinner, exclaimed, "I wish to G---
that you wouldn't keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back
of my chair." Men and women of the highest fashion swore like troopers;
the Princes of the Blood, who carried down into the middle of the
nineteenth century the courtly habits of their youth, setting the
example. Mr. Gladstone told me the following anecdote, which he had from
the Lord Pembroke of the period, who was present at the scene.

In the early days of the first Reformed Parliament the Whig Government
were contemplating a reform of the law of Church Rates. Success was
certain in the House of Commons, but the Tory peers, headed by the Duke
of Cumberland, determined to defeat the Bill in the House of Lords. A
meeting of the party was held, when it appeared that, in the balanced
state of parties, the Tory peers could not effect their purpose unless
they could rally the bishops to their aid. The question was, What would
the Archbishop of Canterbury do? He was Dr. Howley, the mildest and most
apostolic of men, and the most averse from strife and contention. It was
impossible to be certain of his action, and the Duke of Cumberland
posted off to Lambeth to ascertain it. Returning in hot haste to the
caucus, he burst into the room, exclaiming, "It's all right, my lords;
the Archbishop says he will be d----d to hell if he doesn't throw the
Bill out." The Duke of Wellington's "Twopenny d----n" has become
proverbial; and Sydney Smith neatly rebuked a similar propensity in Lord
Melbourne by saying, "Let us assume everybody and everything to be d---
d, and come to the point." The Miss Berrys, who had been the
correspondents of Horace Walpole, and who carried down to the 'fifties
the most refined traditions of social life in the previous century,
habitually "d----d" the tea-kettle if it burned their fingers, and
called their male friends by their surnames--"Come, Milnes, will you
have a cup of tea?" "Now, Macaulay, we have had enough of that subject."

So much, then, for the refinement of the upper classes. Did the Social
Equalization of which we have spoken bring with it anything in the way
of Social Amelioration? A philosophical orator of my time at the Oxford
Union, now a valued member of the House of Lords, once said in a debate
on national intemperance that he had made a careful study of the
subject, and, with much show of scientific analysis, he thus announced
the result of his researches: "The causes of national intemperance are
three: first, the adulteration of liquor; second, the love of drink; and
third, the desire for more." Knowing my incapacity to rival this
masterpiece of exact thinking, I have not thought it necessary in these
chapters to enlarge on the national habit of excessive drinking in the
late years of the eighteenth century. The grossness and the universality
of the vice are too well known to need elaborating. All oral tradition,
all contemporary literature, all satiric art, tell the same horrid tale;
and the number of bottles which a single toper would consume at a
sitting not only, in Burke's phrase, "outraged economy," but "staggered
credibility." Even as late as 1831, Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards
Bishop, wrote thus in his diary:--"A good Audit Dinner: 23 people drank
11 bottles of wine, 28 quarts of beer, 2-1/2 of spirits, and 12 bowls of
punch; and would have drunk twice as much if not restrained. _None, we
hope, drunk!_" Mr. Gladstone told me that once, when he was a young man,
he was dining at a house where the principal guest was a Bishop. When
the decanters had made a sufficient number of circuits, the host said,
"Shall we have any more wine, my Lord?" "Thank you--not till we have
disposed of what is before us," was the bland episcopal reply.

But still, in the matter of drinking, the turn of the century witnessed
some social amelioration among the upper classes. There was a change, if
not in quantity, at least in quality. Where port and Madeira had been
the Staple drinks, corrected by libations of brandy, less potent
beverages became fashionable. The late Mr. Thomson Hankey, formerly
M.P. for Peterborough, told me that he remembered his father coming home
from the city one day and saying to his mother, "My dear, I have ordered
a dozen bottles of a new white wine. It is called sherry, and I am told
the Prince Regent drinks nothing else." The fifteenth Lord Derby told me
that the cellar-books at Knowsley and St. James's Square had been
carefully kept for a hundred years, and that--contrary to what every one
would have supposed--the number of bottles drunk in a year had not
diminished. The alteration was in the alcoholic strength of the wines
consumed. Burgundy, port, and Madeira had made way for light claret,
champagne, and hock. That, even under these changed conditions of
potency, the actual number of bottles consumed showed no diminution, was
accounted for by the fact that at balls and evening parties a great deal
more champagne was drunk than formerly, and that luncheon in a large
house had now become practically an earlier dinner.

The growth of these subsidiary meals was a curious feature of the
nineteenth century. We exclaim with horror at such preposterous bills of
fare as that which I quoted in my last chapter, but it should be
remembered, in justice to our fathers, that dinner was the only
substantial meal of the day. Holland House was always regarded as the
very temple of luxury, and Macaulay tells us that the viands at a
breakfast-party there were tea and coffee, eggs, rolls, and butter. The
fashion, which began in the nineteenth century, of going to the
Highlands for shooting, popularized in England certain northern habits
of feeding, and a morning meal at which game and cold meat appeared was
known in England as a "Scotch breakfast." Apparently it had made some
way by 1840, for the _Ingoldsby Legends_ published in that year thus
describe the morning meal of the ill-fated Sir Thomas:--

  "It seems he had taken A light breakfast--bacon,
  An egg, with a little broiled haddock; at most
  A round and a half of some hot buttered toast;
  With a slice of cold sirloin from yesterday's roast."

Luncheon, or "nuncheon" as some very ancient friends of mine always
called it, was the merest mouthful. Men went out shooting with a
sandwich in their pocket; the ladies who sat at home had some cold
chicken and wine and water brought into the drawing-room on a tray. Miss
Austen in her novels always dismisses the midday meal under the cursory
appellation of "cold meat." The celebrated Dr. Kitchener, the
sympathetic author of the _Cook's Oracle_, writing in 1825, says: "Your
luncheon may consist of a bit of roasted poultry, a basin of beef tea,
or eggs poached, or boiled in the shell; fish plainly dressed, or a
sandwich; stale bread; and half a pint of good homebrewed beer, or
toast-and-water, with about one-fourth or one-third part of its measure
of wine." And this prescription would no doubt have worn an aspect of
liberal concession to the demands of the patient's appetite. It is
difficult, by any effort of a morbid imagination, to realize a time when
there was no five-o'clock tea; and yet that most sacred of our national
institutions was only invented by the Duchess of Bedford who died in
1857, and whose name should surely be enrolled in the Positivist
Kalendar as a benefactress of the human race. No wonder that by seven
o'clock our fathers, and even our mothers, were ready to tackle a dinner
of solid properties; and even to supplement it with the amazing supper
(which Dr. Kitchener prescribes for "those who dine very late") of
"gruel, or a little bread and cheese, or pounded cheese, and a glass of
beer."

This is a long digression from the subject of excessive drinking, with
which, however, it is not remotely connected; and, both in respect of
drunkenness and of gluttony, the habits of English society in the years
which immediately succeeded the French Revolution showed a marked
amelioration. To a company of enthusiastic Wordsworthians who were
deploring their master's confession that he got drunk at Cambridge, I
heard Mr. Shorthouse, the accomplished author of _John Inglesant_,
soothingly remark that in all probability "Wordsworth's standard of
intoxication was miserably low."[9] Simultaneously with the restriction
of excess there was seen a corresponding increase in refinement of taste
and manners. Some of the more brutal forms of so-called sport, such as
bull-baiting and cock-fighting, became less fashionable. The more
civilized forms, such as fox-hunting and racing, increased in favour.
Aesthetic culture was more generally diffused. The stage was at the
height of its glory. Music was a favourite form of public recreation.
Great prices were given for works of art. The study of physical science,
or "natural philosophy" as it was called, became popular. Public
Libraries and local "book societies" sprang up, and there was a wide
demand for encyclopaedias and similar vehicles for the diffusion of
general knowledge. The love of natural beauty was beginning to move the
hearts of men, and it found expression at once in an entirely new school
of landscape painting, and in a more romantic and natural form of
poetry.

But against these marked instances of social amelioration must be set
some darker traits of national life. The public conscience had not yet
revolted against violence and brutality. The prize-ring, patronized by
Royalty, was at its zenith. Humanitarians and philanthropists were as
yet an obscure and ridiculed sect. The slave trade, though menaced, was
still undisturbed. Under a system scarcely distinguishable from slavery,
pauper children were bound over to the owners of factories and subjected
to the utmost rigour of enforced labour. The treatment of the insane
was darkened by incredible barbarities. As late as 1828 Lord Shaftesbury
found that the lunatics in Bedlam were chained to their straw beds, and
left from Saturday to Monday without attendance, and with only bread and
water within their reach, while the keepers were enjoying themselves.
Discipline in the services, in poorhouses, and in schools was of the
most brutal type. Our prisons were unreformed. Our penal code was
inconceivably sanguinary and savage. In 1770 there were one hundred and
sixty capital offences on the Statute-book, and by the beginning of the
nineteenth century the number had greatly increased. To steal five
shillings' worth of goods from a shop was punishable by death. A girl of
twenty-two was hanged for receiving a piece of woollen stuff from the
man who had stolen it.

In 1789 a woman was burnt at the stake for coining. People still living
have seen the skeletons of pirates and highwaymen hanging in chains. I
have heard that the children of the Bluecoat School at Hertford were
always taken to see the executions there; and as late as 1820 the dead
bodies of the Cato Street conspirators were decapitated in front of
Newgate, and the Westminster boys had a special holiday to enable them
to see the sight, which was thus described by an eye-witness, the late
Lord de Ros: "The executioner and his assistant cut down one of the
corpses from the gallows, and placed it in the coffin, but with the head
hanging over on the block. The man with the knife instantly severed the
head from the body, and the executioner, receiving it in his hands, held
it up, saying in a loud voice, 'This is the head of a traitor.' He then
dropped it into the coffin, which being removed, another was brought
forward, and they proceeded to cut down the next body and to go through
the same ghastly operation. It was observed that the mob, which was very
large, gazed in silence at the hanging of the conspirators, and showed
not the least sympathy; but when each head as cut off and held up, a
loud and deep groan of horror burst from all sides, which was not soon
forgotten by those who heard it."

Duelling was the recognized mode of settling all personal disputes, and
no attempt was made to enforce the law which, theoretically, treated the
killing of a man in a duel as wilful murder; but, on the other hand,
debt was punished with what often was imprisonment for life. A woman
died in the County Jail at Exeter after forty-five years' incarceration
for a debt of £19. Crime was rampant. Daring burglaries, accompanied by
every circumstance of violence, took place nightly. Highwaymen infested
the suburban roads, and not seldom plied their calling in the capital
itself. The iron post at the end of the narrow footway between the
gardens of Devonshire House and Lansdowne House is said by tradition to
have been placed there after a Knight of the Road had eluded the
officers of justice by galloping down the stone steps and along the
flagged path. Sir Hamilton Seymour (1797-1880) was in his father's
carriage when it was "stopped" by a highwayman in Upper Brook Street.
Young gentlemen of broken fortunes, and tradesmen whose business had
grown slack, swelled the ranks of these desperadoes. It was even said
that an Irish prelate--Dr. Twysden, Bishop of Raphoe--whose incurable
love of adventure had drawn him to "the road," received the penalty of
his uncanonical diversion in the shape of a bullet from a traveller whom
he had stopped on Hounslow Heath. The Lord Mayor was made to stand and
deliver on Turnham Green. Stars and "Georges" were snipped off
ambassadors and peers as they entered St. James's Palace.

It is superfluous to multiply illustrations. Enough has been said to
show that the circumscription of aristocratic privilege and the
diffusion of material luxury did not precipitate the millennium. Social
Equalization was not synonymous with Social Amelioration. Some
improvement, indeed, in the tone and habit of society occurred at the
turn of the century; but it was little more than a beginning. I proceed
to trace its development, and to indicate its source.

FOOTNOTES:

[9] I have since been told that this happy saying was borrowed from Sir
Francis Doyle.




IX.

THE EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE.

Mr. Lecky justly remarks that "it is difficult to measure the change
which must have passed over the public mind since the days when the
lunatics in Bedlam were constantly spoken of as one of the sights of
London; when the maintenance of the African slave-trade was a foremost
object of English commercial policy; when men and even women were
publicly whipped through the streets when skulls lined the top of Temple
Bar and rotting corpses hung on gibbets along the Edgware Road; when
persons exposed in the pillory not unfrequently died through the
ill-usage of the mob; and when the procession every six weeks of
condemned criminals to Tyburn was one of the great festivals of London."

Difficult, indeed, it is to measure so great a change, and it is not
wholly easy to ascertain with precision its various and concurrent
causes, and to attribute to each its proper potency. But we shall
certainly not be wrong if, among those causes, we assign a prominent
place to the Evangelical revival of religion. It would be a mistake to
claim for the Evangelical movement the whole credit of our social reform
and philanthropic work. Even in the darkest times of spiritual torpor
and general profligacy England could show a creditable amount of
practical benevolence. The public charities of London were large and
excellent. The first Foundling Hospital was established in 1739; the
first Magdalen Hospital in 1769. In 1795 it was estimated that the
annual expenditure on charity-schools, asylums, hospitals, and similar
institutions in London was £750,000.

Mr. Lecky, whose study of these social phenomena is exhaustive, imagines
that the habit of unostentatious charity, which seems indigenous to
England, was powerfully stimulated by the philosophy of Shaftesbury and
Voltaire, by Rousseau's sentiment and Fielding's fiction. This theory
may have something to say for itself, and indeed it is antecedently
plausible; but I can hardly believe that purely literary influences
counted for so very much in the sphere of practice. I doubt if any
considerable number of Englishmen were effectively swayed by that
humanitarian philosophy of France which in the actions of its maturity
so awfully belied the promise of its youth. We are, I think, on surer
ground when, admitting a national bias towards material benevolence, and
not denying some stimulus from literature and philosophy, we assign the
main credit of our social regeneration to the Evangelical revival.

The life of John Wesley, practically coterminous with the eighteenth
century, witnessed both the lowest point of our moral degradation and
also the earliest promise of our moral restoration. He cannot, indeed,
be reckoned the founder of the Evangelical school; that title belongs
rather to George Whitefield. But his influence, combined with that of
his brother Charles, acting on such men as Newton and Cecil and Venn and
Scott of Aston Sandford; on Selina Lady Huntingdon and Mrs. Hannah More;
on Howard and Clarkson and William Wilberforce; made a deep mark on the
Established Church, gave new and permanent life to English
Nonconformity, and sensibly affected the character and aspect of secular
society.

Wesley himself had received the governing impulse of his life from Law's
_Serious Call_ and _Christian Perfection_, and he had been a member of
one of those religious societies (or guilds, as they would now be
called) with which the piety of Bishop Beveridge and Dr. Horneck had
enriched the Church of England. These societies were, of course,
distinctly Anglican in origin and character, and were stamped with the
High Church theology. They constituted, so to say, a church within the
Church, and, though they raised the level of personal piety among their
members to a very high point, they did not widely affect the general
tone and character of national religion. The Evangelical leaders,
relying on less exclusively ecclesiastical methods, diffused their
influence over a much wider area, and, under the impulse of their
teaching, drunkenness, indecency, and profanity were sensibly abated.
The reaction from the rampant wickedness of the eighteenth century drove
men into strict and even puritanical courses.

Lord Robert Seymour wrote on the 20th of March, 1788: "Tho' Good Friday,
Mrs. Sawbridge has an assembly this evening; tells her invited Friends
they really are only to play for a Watch which she has had some time on
her Hands and wishes to dispose of."

"'Really, I declare 'pon my honor it's true' (said Ly. Bridget Talmash
to the Dutchess of Bolton) 'that a great many People now go to Chapel. I
saw a vaste number of Carriages at Portman Chapel last Sunday.' The Dut.
told her she always went to Chapel on Sunday, and in the country read
Prayers in the Hall to her Family."

But where the Evangelical influence reached, it brought a marked
abstention from such forms of recreation as dancing, card-playing, and
the drama. Sunday was observed with a Judaical rigour. A more frequent
attendance on public worship was accompanied by the revival of family
prayers and grace before meat. Manuals of private devotion were
multiplied. Religious literature of all kinds was published in great
quantity. A higher standard of morals was generally professed. Marriage
was gradually restored in public estimation to its proper place, not
merely as a civil bond or social festival, but as a chief solemnity of
the Christian religion.

There was no more significant sign of the times than this alteration. In
the eighteenth century some of the gravest of our social offences had
clustered round the institution of marriage, which was almost as much
dishonoured in the observance as in the breach. In the first half of
that century the irregular and clandestine weddings, celebrated without
banns or licence in the Fleet Prison, had been one of the crying
scandals of the middle and lower classes; and in the second half, the
nocturnal flittings to Gretna Green of young couples who could afford
such a Pilgrimage of Passion lowered the whole conception of marriage.
It was through the elopement of Miss Child--heiress of the opulent
banker at Temple Bar--from her father's house in Berkeley Square (now
Lord Rosebery's) that the ownership of the great banking business passed
eventually to the present Lord Jersey; and the annals of almost every
aristocratic family contain the record of similar escapades.

The Evangelical movement, not content with permeating England, sought to
expand itself all over the Empire. The Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had been
essentially Anglican institutions; and similar societies, but less
ecclesiastical in character, now sprang up in great numbers. The London
Missionary Society was founded in 1795, the Church Missionary Society in
1799, the Religious Tract Society in the same year, and the British and
Foreign Bible Society three years later. All these were distinctly
creations of the Evangelical movement, as were also the Societies for
the Reformation of Manners and for the Better Observance of the Lord's
Day. Religious education found in the Evangelical party its most active
friends. The Sunday School Society was founded in 1785. Two years later
it was educating two hundred thousand children. Its most earnest
champions were Rowland Hill and Mrs. Hannah More; but it is worthy of
note that this excellent lady, justly honoured as a pioneer of
elementary education, confined her curriculum to the Bible and the
Catechism, and "such coarse works as may fit the children for servants.
_I allow of no writing for the poor_."

To the Society of Friends--a body not historically or theologically
Evangelical--belongs the credit of having first awoke, and tried to
rouse others, to a sense of the horrors and iniquities involved in the
slave-trade; but the adhesion of William Wilberforce and his friends at
Clapham identified the movement for emancipation with the Evangelical
party. Never were the enthusiasm, the activity, the uncompromising
devotion to principle which marked the Evangelicals turned to better
account. Their very narrowness gave intensity and concentration to their
work, and their victory, though deferred, was complete. It has been
truly said that when the English nation had been thoroughly convinced
that slavery was a curse which must be got rid of at any cost, we
cheerfully paid down as the price of its abolition twenty millions in
cash, and threw the prosperity of our West Indian colonies into the
bargain. Yet we only spent on it one-tenth of what it cost us to lose
America, and one-fiftieth of what we spent in avenging the execution of
Louis XVI.

In spite of all these conspicuous and beneficent advances in the
direction of humanity, a great deal of severity, and what appears to us
brutality, remained embedded in our social system. I have spoken in
previous chapters of the methods of discipline enforced in the services,
in jails, in poorhouses, and in schools.[10] A very similar spirit
prevailed even in the home. Children were shut up in dark closets,
starved, and flogged. Lord Shaftesbury's father used to knock him down,
and recommended his tutor at Harrow to do the same. Archdeacon Denison
describes in his autobiography how he and his brothers were thrashed by
their tutor when they were youths of sixteen and had left Eton. _The
Fairchild Family_--that quaint picture of Evangelical life and
manners--depicts a religious father as punishing his quarrelsome
children by taking them to see a murderer hanging in chains, and as
chastising every peccadillo of infancy with a severity which makes one
long to flog Mr. Fairchild.

But still, in spite of all these checks and drawbacks and evil
survivals, the tide of humanitarianism flowed on, and gradually altered
the aspect of English life. The bloody Penal Code was mitigated. Prisons
and poorhouses were reformed. The discipline of school and of home was
tempered by the infusion of mercy and reason into the iron regimen of
terror. And this general diminution of brutality was not the only form
of social amelioration. It was accompanied by a gradual but perceptible
increase in decency, refinement, and material prosperity. Splendour
diminished, and luxury remained the monopoly of the rich; but
comfort--that peculiarly English treasure--was more generally diffused.
In that diffusion the Evangelicals had their full share. Thackeray's
admirable description of Mrs. Newcome's villa is drawn from the life:
"In Egypt itself there were not more savoury fleshpots than those at
Clapham. Her mansion was long the resort of the most favoured among the
religious world. The most eloquent expounders, the most gifted
missionaries, the most interesting converts from foreign islands were to
be found at her sumptuous table, spread with the produce of her
magnificent gardens ... a great, shining, mahogany table, covered with
grapes, pineapples, plum-cake, port wine, and Madeira, and surrounded
by stout men in black, with baggy white neckcloths, who took little
Tommy on their knees and questioned him as to his right understanding of
the place whither naughty boys were bound."

Again, in his paper on _Dinners_ the same great master of a fascinating
subject speaks the words of truth and soberness when he says: "I don't
know when I have been better entertained, as far as creature comforts
go, than by men of very Low Church principles; and one of the very best
repasts that ever I saw in my life was at Darlington, given by a
Quaker." This admirable tradition of material comfort allied with
Evangelical opinion extended into my own time. The characteristic
weakness of Mr. Stiggins has no place in my recollection; but Mr.
Chadband I have frequently met in Evangelical circles, both inside and
outside the Establishment. Debarred by the strictness of their
principles from such amusements as dancing, cards, and theatres, the
Evangelicals took their pleasure in eating and drinking. They abounded
in hospitality; and when they were not entertaining or being
entertained, occupied their evenings with systematic reading, which gave
their religious compositions a sound basis of general culture.
Austerity, gloom, and Pharisaism had no place among the better class of
Evangelicals. Wilberforce, pronounced by Madame de Staël to be the most
agreeable man in England, was of "a most gay and genial disposition;"
"lived in perpetual sunshine, and shed its radiance all around him."
Legh Richmond was "exceedingly good company." Robinson of Leicester was
"a capital conversationalist, very lively and bright." Alexander Knox
found that Mrs. Hannah More "far exceeded his expectations in pleasant
manners and interesting conversation."

The increasing taste for solid comfort and easy living which accompanied
the development of humanitarianism, and in which, as we have just seen,
the Evangelicals had their full share, was evidenced to the eye by the
changes in domestic architecture. There was less pretension in exteriors
and elevations, but more regard to convenience and propriety within. The
space was not all sacrificed to reception-rooms. Bedrooms were
multiplied and enlarged; and fireplaces were introduced into every room,
transforming the arctic "powdering-closet" into a habitable
dressing-room. The diminution of the Window-Tax made light and
ventilation possible. Personal cleanliness became fashionable, and the
means of attaining it were cultivated. The whole art or science of
domestic sanitation--rudimentary enough in its beginnings--belongs to
the nineteenth century. The system which went before it was too
primitively abominable to bear description. Sir Robert Rawlinson, the
sanitary expert, who was called in to inspect Windsor Castle after the
Prince Consort's death, reported that, within the Queen's reign,
"cesspools full of putrid refuse and drains of the worst description
existed beneath the basements.... Twenty of these cesspools were removed
from the upper ward, and twenty-eight from the middle and lower
wards.... Means of ventilation by windows in Windsor Castle were very
defective. Even in the royal apartments the upper portions of the
windows were fixed. Lower casements alone could be opened, so that by
far the largest amount of air-spaces in the rooms contained vitiated
air, comparatively stagnant." When this was the condition of royal
abodes, no wonder that the typhoid-germ, like Solomon's spider, "took
hold with her hands, and was in kings' palaces." And well might Sir
George Trevelyan, in his ardent youth, exclaim:--

  "We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men.
  For every glass of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten.
  They lived above the foulest drains, they breathed the closest air,
  They had their yearly twinge of gout, but little seemed to care.
  But, though they burned their coals at home, nor fetched their ice
     from Wenham,
  They played the man before Quebec and stormed the lines at Blenheim.
  When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork,
  No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork.
  But now that Jack gets beef and greens and next his skin wears flannel,
  The _Standard_ says we've not a ship in plight to hold the Channel."

So much for Social Amelioration.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] For a lively description of Andover School in the eighteenth
century, see the _Memoirs of "Orator Hunt_.'"




X.

POLITICS.

I now approach the political condition at the turn of the century, and
that was to a great extent the product of the French Revolution. Some
historians, indeed, when dealing with that inexhaustible theme, have
wrought cause and effect into a circular chain, and have reckoned among
the circumstances which prepared the way for the French Revolution the
fact that Voltaire in his youth spent three years in England, and
mastered the philosophy of Bacon, Newton, and Locke, the Deism of the
English Freethinkers, and the English theory of political liberty. That
these doctrines, recommended by Voltaire's mordant genius and matchless
style, and circulating in a community prepared by tyranny to receive
them, acted as a powerful solvent on the intellectual basis of French
society, is indeed likely enough. But to pursue the theme would carry us
too far back into the eighteenth century. In dealing with the
recollections of persons whom one's self has known we must dismiss from
view the causes of the French Revolution. Our business is with its
effect on political thought and action in England.

About half way through the nineteenth century it became the fashion to
make out that the effect of the Revolution on England had been
exaggerated. Satirists made fun of our traditional Gallophobia. In that
admirable skit on philosophical history, the introduction to the _Book
of Snobs_, Thackeray first illustrates his theme by a reference to the
French Revolution, and then adds (in sarcastic brackets)--"Which the
reader will be pleased to have introduced so early." Lord Beaconsfield,
quizzing John Wilson Croker in _Coningsby_, says: "He bored his audience
with too much history, especially the French Revolution, which he
fancied was his forte, so that the people at last, whenever he made any
allusion to the subject, were almost as much terrified as if they had
seen the guillotine." In spite of these gibes, historians have of late
years returned to the earlier and truer view, and have deliberately
reaffirmed the tremendous effect of the Revolution on English politics.
The philosophical Mr. Lecky says that it influenced English history in
the later years of the eighteenth century more powerfully than any other
event; that it gave a completely new direction to the statesmanship of
Pitt; that it instantaneously shattered, and rendered ineffectual for a
whole generation, one of the two great parties in the State; and that it
determined for a like period the character and complexion of our foreign
policy.

All contemporary Europe--all subsequent time--quivered with the shock
and sickened at the carnage; but I have gathered that it was not till
the capture of the Bastille that the events which were taking place in
France attracted any general or lively interest in England. The strifes
of rival politicians, the illness of George III., and the consequent
questions as to the Regency, engrossed the public mind, and what little
interest was felt in foreign affairs was directed much more to the
possible designs of Russia than to the actual condition of France. The
capture of the Bastille, however, was an event so startling and so
dramatic that it instantly arrested the public attention of England, and
the events which immediately followed in rapid and striking succession
raised interest into excitement, and excitement into passion. Men who
had been accustomed from their childhood to regard the Monarchy of
France as the type of a splendid, powerful, and enduring polity now saw
a National Army constituted in complete independence of the Crown; a
Representative Body assuming absolute power and denying the King's right
to dissolve; the summary abrogation of the whole feudal system, which a
year before had seemed endowed with perpetual vigour; an insurrection of
the peasantry against their territorial tyrants, accompanied by every
horror of pillage, arson, and bloodshed; the beautiful and stately Queen
flying, half naked, for her life, amid the slaughter of her sentinels
and courtiers; and the King himself virtually a prisoner in the very
Court which, up to that moment, had seemed the ark and sanctuary of
absolute government. All over England these events produced their
immediate and natural effect. Enemies of religious establishments took
courage from the downfall of ecclesiastical institutions. Enemies of
monarchy rejoiced in the formal and public degradation of a monarch.
Those who had long been conscientiously working for Parliamentary reform
saw with glee their principles expressed in the most uncompromising
terms in the French Declaration of Rights, and practically applied in
the constitution of the Sovereign Body of France.

These convinced and constitutional reformers found new and strange
allies. Serious advocates of Republican institutions, mere lovers of
change and excitement, secret sympathizers with lawlessness and
violence, sedentary theorists, reckless adventurers, and local
busybodies associated themselves in the endeavour to popularize the
French Revolution in England and to imbue the English mind with
congenial sentiments. The movement had leaders of greater mark. The Duke
of Norfolk and the Duke of Richmond, Lord Lansdowne and Lord Stanhope,
held language about the Sovereignty of the People such as filled the
reverent and orderly mind of Burke with indignant astonishment. In Dr.
Priestley the revolutionary party had an eminent man of science and a
polemical writer of rare power. Dr. Price was a rhetorician whom any
cause would have gladly enlisted as its champion. The Revolution
Society, founded to commemorate the capture of the Bastille,
corresponded with the leaders of the Revolution, and promised its
alliance in a revolutionary compact. And, to add a touch of comedy to
these more serious demonstrations, the young Duke of Bedford and other
leaders of fashion discarded hair-powder, and wore their hair cut short
in what was understood to be the Republican mode of Paris.

Amidst all this hurly-burly Pitt maintained a stately and cautious
reserve. Probably he foresaw his opportunity in the inevitable
disruption of his opponents; and if so, his foresight was soon realized
by events. On the capture of the Bastille, Fox exclaimed: "How much the
greatest event it is that ever happened in the world! and how much the
best!" At the same time Burke was writing to an intimate friend: "The
old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true
that this may be no more than a sudden explosion. If so, no indication
can be taken from it; but if it should be character rather than
accident, then that people are not fit for liberty, and must have a
strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them." This
contrast between the judgments of the 10 great Whigs was continuously
and rapidly heightened. Fox threw himself into the revolutionary cause
with all the ardour which he had displayed on behalf of American
independence. Burke opposed with characteristic vehemence the French
attempt to build up a theoretical Constitution on the ruins of
religion, history, and authority; and any fresh act of cruelty or
oppression which accompanied the process stirred in him that tremendous
indignation against violence and injustice of which Warren Hastings had
learned by stern experience the intensity and the volume. The
_Reflections on the French Revolution_ and the _Appeal from the New to
the Old Whigs_ expressed in the most splendid English which was ever
written the dire apprehensions that darkened their author's receptive
and impassioned mind. "A voice like the Apocalypse sounded over England,
and even echoed in all the Courts of Europe. Burke poured the vials of
his hoarded vengeance into the agitated heart of Christendom, and
stimulated the panic of a world by the wild pictures of his inspired
imagination."

Meanwhile the Whig party was rent in twain. The Duke of Portland, Lord
Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish, and Sir George
Elliot adhered to Burke. Fox as stoutly opposed him, and was reinforced
by Sheridan, Francis, Erskine, and Grey. The pathetic issue of the
dispute, in Burke's formal repudiation of Fox's friendship, has taken
its place among those historic Partings of Friends which have modified
the course of human society. As far as can now be judged, the bulk of
the country was with Burke, and the execution of Louis XVI. was followed
by an astonishing outbreak of popular feeling. The theatres were closed.
The whole population wore mourning. The streets rang with the cry "War
with France!" The very pulpits re-echoed the summons. Fox himself was
constrained to declare to the electors of Westminster that there was no
one outside France who did not consider this sad catastrophe "as a most
revolting act of cruelty and injustice."

But it was too late. The horror and indignation of England were not to
be allayed by soothing words of decorous sympathy from men who had
applauded the earlier stages of the tragedy, though they wept at its
culmination. The warlike spirit of the race was aroused, and it spoke in
the cry, "No peace with the regicides!" Pitt clearly discerned the
feeling of the country, and promptly gave effect to it. He dismissed
Chauvelin, who informally represented the Revolutionary Government in
London, and he demanded from Parliament an immediate augmentation of the
forces.

On the 20th of January, 1793, France declared war against England. The
great struggle had begun, and that declaration was a new starting-point
in the political history of England. English parties entered into new
combinations. English politics assumed a new complexion. Pitt's imperial
mind maintained its ascendency, but the drift of his policy was entirely
changed. All the schemes of Parliamentary, financial, and commercial
reform in which he had been immersed yielded place to the stern
expedients of a Minister fighting for his life against revolution abroad
and sedition at home. For though, as I said just now, popular sentiment
was stirred by the King's execution into vehement hostility to France,
still the progress of the war was attended by domestic consequences
which considerably modified this sentiment. Hostility gave way to
passive acquiescence, and acquiescence to active sympathy.

Among the causes which produced this change were the immense increase of
national burdens; the sudden agglomeration of a lawless population in
the manufacturing towns which the war called into being; the growing
difficulties in Ireland, where revolutionary theories found ready
learners; the absolute abandonment of all attempts at social and
political improvement; the dogged determination of those in authority to
remedy no grievance however patent, and to correct no abuse however
indefensible.

The wise and temperate reforms for which the times were ripe, and which
the civil genius of Pitt pre-eminently qualified him to effect, were not
only suspended but finally abandoned under the influence of an insane
reaction. The besotted resistance to all change stimulated the desire
for it. Physical distress co-operated with political discontent to
produce a state of popular disaffection such as the whole preceding
century had never seen. The severest measures of coercion and repression
only, and scarcely, restrained the populace from open and desperate
insurrection, and thirty years of this experience brought England to the
verge of a civil catastrophe.

Patriotism was lost in partisanship. Political faction ran to an
incredible excess. The whole community was divided into two hostile
camps. Broadly speaking, the cause of France was espoused, with
different degrees of fervour, by all lovers of civil and religious
freedom. To the Whigs the humiliation of Pitt was a more cherished
object than the defeat of Napoleon. Fox wrote to a friend: "The triumph
of the French Government over the English does, in fact, afford me a
degree of pleasure which it is very difficult to disguise;" and I have
gathered that this was the prevalent temper of Whiggery during the long
and desperate struggle with Republican and Imperial France. What Byron
called "The crowning carnage, Waterloo," brought no abatement of
political rancour. The question of France, indeed, was eliminated from
the contest, but its elimination enabled English Liberals to concentrate
their hostility on the Tory Government without incurring the reproach of
unpatriotic sympathy with the enemies of England.

In the great fight between Tory and Whig, Government and Opposition,
Authority and Freedom, there was no quarter. Neither age nor sex was
spared. No department of national life was untouched by the fury of the
contest. The Royal Family was divided. The Duke of Cumberland was one of
the most dogged and unscrupulous leaders of the Tory party; the Duke of
Sussex toasted the memory of Charles James Fox, and at a public dinner
joined in singing "The Trumpet of Liberty," of which the chorus ran--

    "Fall, tyrants, fall!
    These are the days of liberty;
    Fall, tyrants, fall!"

The Established Church was on the side of authority; the Dissenters
stood for freedom. "Our opponents," said Lord John Russell, in one of
his earliest speeches--"our opponents deafen us with their cry of
'Church and King.' Shall I tell you what they mean by it? They mean a
Church without the Gospel and a King above the law." An old Radical
electioneer, describing the activity of the country clergy on the Tory
side, said: "In every village we had the Black Recruiting-Sergeant
against us." Even within sacred walls the echoes of the fight were
heard. The State Holy-days--Gunpowder Treason, Charles the Martyr, the
Restoration and the Accession--gave suitable occasion for sermons of the
most polemical vehemence. Even the two Collects for the King at the
beginning of the Communion Service were regarded as respectively Tory
and Whig. The first, with its bold assertion of the Divine Right of
Sovereignty, was that which commended itself to every loyal clergyman on
his promotion; and unfavourable conclusions were drawn with regard to
the civil sentiments of the man who preferred the colourless
alternative. As in the Church, so in our educational system. Oxford,
with its Caroline and Jacobite traditions, was the Tory University;
Cambridge, the nursing mother of Whigs; Eton was supposed to cherish a
sentiment of romantic affection for the Stuarts; Harrow was profoundly
Hanoverian. Even the drama was involved in political antipathies, and
the most enthusiastic adherents of Kean and Kemble were found
respectively among the leaders of Whig and Tory Society.

The vigour, heartiness, and sincerity of this political hatred put to
shame the more tepid convictions of our degenerate days. The first Earl
of Leicester, better known as "Coke of Norfolk," told my father that
when he was a child his grandfather took him on his knee and said, "Now,
remember, Tom, as long as you live, never trust a Tory;" and he used to
say, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." A little girl of
Whig descent, accustomed from her cradle to hear language of this sort,
asked her mother, "Mamma, are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked
afterwards?" and her mother judiciously replied, "They are born wicked,
and grow worse." I well remember in my youth an eccentric maiden
lady--Miss Harriet Fanny Cuyler--who had spent a long and interesting
life in the innermost circles of aristocratic Whiggery; and she always
refused to enter a four-wheel cab until she had extorted from the driver
his personal assurance that he never had cases of infectious disease in
his cab, that he was not a Puseyite, and was a Whig.

I am bound to say that this vehement prejudice was not unnatural in a
generation that remembered, either personally or by immediate tradition,
the iron coercion which Pitt exercised in his later days, and which his
successors continued. The barbarous executions for high treason remain a
blot on the fair fame of the nineteenth century. Scarcely less horrible
were the trials for sedition, which sent an English clergyman to
transportation for life because he had signed a petition in favour of
Parliamentary reform.

    "The good old Code, like Argus, had a hundred watchful eyes,
    And each old English peasant had his good old English spies,
    To tempt his starving discontent with good old English lies,
    Then call the British yeomanry to stop his peevish cries."

At Woburn, a market town forty miles from London, under the very shadow
of a great Whig house, no political meeting could be held for fear of
Pitt's spies, who dropped down from London by the night coach and
returned to lay information against popular speakers; and when the
politicians of the place desired to express their sentiments, they had
to repair secretly to an adjacent village off the coach road, where they
were harangued under cover of night by the young sons of the Duke of
Bedford.

The ferocity, the venality, the profligate expenditure, the delirious
excitement of contested elections have made an indelible mark on our
political history. In 1780 King George III. personally canvassed the
Borough of Windsor against the Whig candidate, Admiral Keppel, and
propitiated a silk-mercer by calling at his shop and saying, "The Queen
wants a gown--wants a gown. No Keppel. No Keppel." It is pleasant to
reflect that the friends of freedom were not an inch behind the
upholders of tyranny in the vigour and adroitness of their
electioneering methods. The contest for the City of Westminster in 1788
is thus described in the manuscript diary of Lord Robert Seymour:--

"The Riotts of the Westr. Election are carried such lengths the Military
obliged to be called into the assistance of Ld. Hood's party. Several
Persons have been killed by Ld. J. Townsend's Butchers who cleave them
to the Ground with their Cleavers--Mr. Fox very narrowly escaped being
killed by a Bayonet wch. w'd certainly have been fatal had not a poor
Black saved him fm. the blow. Mr. Macnamara's Life is despaired of--&
several others have died in the difft. Hospitals. Next Thursday decides
the business.

"July 25.--Lord John Townsend likely to get the Election--what has
chiefly contributed to Ld. Hood's losing it is that Mr. Pulteney is his
Friend--Mr. P. can command 1,500 Votes--& as he is universally disliked
by his Tenants they are unanimous in voting against him--wch. for Ld. H.
proves a very unfortunate circumstance. The Duke of Bedford sent £10,000
towards the Expenses of the Opposition.

"It is thought that Lord Hood will not attempt a Scrutiny. One of Ld.
Hood's votes was discovered to be a carrot-scraper in St. James's Market
who sleeps in a little Kennel about the Size of a Hen Coup.

"Augt. 5th--The Election decided in favour of Ld. J.T., who was
chaired--and attend'd by a Procession of a mile in length. On his Head
was a crown of Laurel. C. Fox follow'd him in a Landau & 6 Horses
cover'd in Favors & Lawrels. The appearance this Procession made was
equal in splendor to the public Entry of an Ambassador."

A by-election was impending in Yorkshire, and Pitt, paying a social
visit to the famous Mrs. B.--one of the Whig Queens of the West
Riding--said, banteringly, "Well, the election is all right for us. Ten
thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorkshire to-night
by a sure hand." "The devil they do!" responded Mrs. B., and that night
the bearer of the precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the
Great North Road, and the ten thousand guineas were used to procure the
return of the Whig candidate. The electioneering methods, less
adventurous but not more scrupulous, of a rather later day have been
depicted in _Pickwick_, and _Coningsby_, and _My Novel_, and
_Middlemarch_, with all the suggestive fun of a painting by Hogarth.

And so, with startling incidents and culpable expedients and varying
fortunes, the great struggle for political freedom was conducted through
the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, and it has been my
interesting fortune to know some of the toughest of the combatants both
among the leaders and in the rank-and-file. And from all of them
alike--and not only from them, but from all who remembered the time--I
have gathered the impression that all through their earlier life the
hidden fires of revolution were smouldering under English society, and
that again and again an actual outbreak was only averted by some happy
stroke of fortune. At the Election of 1868 an old labourer in the
agricultural Borough of Woodstock told a Liberal canvasser from Oxford
that in his youth arms had been stored in his father's cottage so as to
be in readiness for the outbreak which was to take place if Lord Grey's
Reform Bill was finally defeated. A Whig nobleman, of great experience
and calm judgment, told me that if Princess Victoria had died before
William IV., and thereby Ernest Duke of Cumberland had succeeded to the
Throne, no earthly power could have averted a revolution. "I have no
hesitation in saying," I heard Mr. Gladstone say, "that if the repeal of
the Corn Laws had been defeated, or even retarded, we should have had a
revolution." Charles Kingsley and his fellow-workers for Social Reform
expected a revolution in April 1848.

But, after all, these testimonies belong to the region of conjecture.
Let me close this chapter by a narrative of fact, derived from the late
Lord de Ros, who was an eye-witness of the events which he narrated.
Arthur Thistlewood (whose execution for the "Cato Street Conspiracy" I
have described in a previous chapter) was a young Englishman who had
been in Paris in the time of Robespierre's ascendency, and had there
imbibed revolutionary sentiments. He served for a short time as an
officer in the English Army, and after quitting the service he made
himself notorious by trying to organize a political riot in London, for
which he was tried and acquitted. He subsequently collected round him a
secret society of disaffected citizens, and proceeded to arrange a plan
by which he hoped to paralyze Government and establish a Reign of Terror
in London.

One evening, in the winter of 1819-20, a full-dress ball was given by
the Spanish Ambassador in Portland Place, and was attended by the Prince
Regent, the Royal Dukes, the Duke of Wellington, the Ministers of State,
and the leaders of fashion and society. "About one o'clock, just before
supper, a sort of order was circulated among the junior officers to draw
towards the head of the stairs, though no one knew for what reason,
except that an unusual crowd had assembled in the street. The appearance
of Lavender and one or two well-known Bow Street officers in the
entrance-hall also gave rise to surmises of some impending riot. While
the officers were whispering to one another as to what was expected to
happen, a great noise was heard in the street, the crowd dispersed with
loud cries in all directions, and a squadron of the 2nd Life Guards
arrived with drawn swords at a gallop from their barracks (then situate
in King Street), and rapidly formed in front of the Ambassador's house.
Lavender and the Bow Street officers now withdrew; the officers who had
gathered about the stairhead were desired to return to the ballroom.

"The alarm, whatever it might have been, appeared to be over, and before
the company broke up the Life Guards had been withdrawn to their
barracks. Inside the Ambassador's house all had remained so quiet that
very few of the ladies present were aware till next day that anything
unusual had happened, but it became known after a short time that the
Duke of Wellington had received information of an intended attack upon
the house, which the precautions taken had probably prevented; and upon
the trial of Thistlewood and his gang (for the Cato Street Conspiracy)
it came out, among other evidence of the various wild schemes they had
formed, that Thistlewood had certainly entertained the project, at the
time of this ball, to attack the Spanish Ambassador's house, and destroy
the Regent and other Royal personages, as well as the Ministers, who
were sure to be, most of them, present on the occasion."

For details of the Cato Street Conspiracy the curious reader is referred
to the _Annual Register_ for 1820, and it is strange to reflect that
these explosions of revolutionary rage occurred well within the
recollection of people now[11] living, among whom I hope it is not
invidious to mention Mr. Charles Villiers,[12] Lady Mary Saurin,[13] and
Lady Glentworth.[14]

FOOTNOTES:

[11] 1897.

[12] The Right Hon. C.P. Villiers, M.P., 1802-98.

[13] (_nee_ Ryder), 1801-1900.

[14] Eve Maria, Viscountess Glentworth, 1803-19.




XI.

PARLIAMENTARY ORATORY.

Closely connected with the subject of Politics, of which we were
speaking in the last chapter, is that of Parliamentary Oratory, and for
a right estimate of oratory personal impressions (such as those on which
I have relied) are peculiarly valuable. They serve both to correct and
to confirm. It is impossible to form from the perusal of a printed
speech anything but the vaguest and often the most erroneous notion of
the effect which it produced upon its hearers. But from the testimony of
contemporaries one can often gain the clue to what is otherwise
unintelligible. One learns what were the special attributes of bearing,
voice, or gesture, the circumstances of delivery, or even the antecedent
conditions of character and reputation, which perhaps doomed some
magnificent peroration to ludicrous failure, or, on the contrary,
"ordained strength" out of stammering lips and disjointed sentences.
Testimony of this kind the circumstances of my life have given me in
great abundance. My chain of tradition links me to the days of the
giants.

Almost all the old people whose opinions and experience I have recorded
were connected, either personally or through their nearest relations,
with one or other of the Houses of Parliament. Not a few of them were
conspicuous actors on the stage of political life. Lord Robert Seymour,
from whose diary I have quoted, died in 1831, after a long life spent
in the House of Commons, which he entered in 1771, and of which for
twenty-three years he was a fellow-member with Edmund Burke. Let me
linger for a moment on that illustrious name.

In originality, erudition, and accomplishments Burke had no rival among
Parliamentary speakers. His prose is, as we read it now, the most
fascinating, the most musical, in the English language. It bears on
every page the divine lineaments of genius. Yet an orator requires
something more than mere force of words. He must feel, while he speaks,
the pulse of his audience, and instinctively regulate every sentence by
reference to their feelings. All contemporary evidence shows that in
this kind of oratorical tact Burke was eminently deficient. His
nickname, "The Dinner-bell of the House of Commons," speaks for his
effect on the mind of the average M.P. "In vain," said: Moore, "did
Burke's genius put forth its superb plumage, glittering all over with
the hundred eyes of fancy. The gait of the bird was heavy and awkward,
and its voice seemed rather to scare than attract."

Macaulay has done full justice to the extraordinary blaze of brilliancy
which on supreme occasions threw these minor defects into the shade.
Even now the old oak rafters of Westminster Hall seem to echo that
superlative peroration which taught Mrs. Siddons a higher flight of
tragedy than her own, and made the accused proconsul feel himself for
the moment the guiltiest of men. Mr. Gladstone declared that Burke was
directly responsible for the war with France, for "Pitt could not have
resisted him." For the more refined, the more cultivated, the more
speculative intellects he had--and has--an almost supernatural charm.
His style is without any exception the richest, the most picturesque,
the most inspired and inspiring in the language. In its glories and its
terrors it resembles the Apocalypse. Mr. Morley, in the most striking of
all his critical essays, has truly said that the natural ardour which
impelled Burke to clothe his judgments in glowing and exaggerated
phrases is one secret of his power over us, because it kindles in those
who are capable of that generous infection a respondent interest and
sympathy. "He has the sacred gift of inspiring men to care for high
things, and to make their lives at once rich and austere. Such a gift is
rare indeed. We feel no emotion of revolt when Mackintosh speaks of
Shakespeare and Burke in the same breath as being, both of them, above
mere talent. We do not dissent when Macaulay, after reading Burke's
works over again, exclaims: 'How admirable! The greatest man since
Milton!'"

No sane critic would dream of comparing the genius of Pitt with that of
Burke. Yet where Burke failed Pitt succeeded. Burke's speeches, indeed,
are a part of our national literature; Pitt was, in spite of grave and
undeniable faults, the greatest Minister that ever governed England.
Foremost among the gifts by which he acquired his supreme ascendency
must be placed his power of parliamentary speaking. He was not, as his
father was, an orator in that highest sense of oratory which implies
something of inspiration, of genius, of passionate and poetic rapture;
but he was a public speaker of extraordinary merit. He had while still a
youth what Coleridge aptly termed "a premature and unnatural dexterity
in the combination of words," and this developed into "a power of
pouring forth with endless facility perfectly modulated sentences of
perfectly chosen language, which as far surpassed the reach of a normal
intellect as the feats of an acrobat exceed the capacities of a normal
body." It was eloquence particularly well calculated to sway a popular
assembly which yet had none of the characteristics of a mob. A sonorous
voice; a figure and bearing which, though stiff and ungainly, were
singularly dignified; an inexhaustible copiousness of grandiloquent
phrase; a peculiar vein of sarcasm which froze like ice and cut like
steel--these were some of the characteristics of the oratory which from
1782 to 1806 at once awed and fascinated the House of Commons.

"I never want a word, but Mr. Pitt always has at command the right
word." This was the generous tribute of Pitt's most eminent rival,
Charles James Fox. Never were great opponents in public life more
exactly designed by Nature to be contrasts to one another. While every
tone of Pitt's voice and every muscle of his countenance expressed with
unmistakable distinctness the cold and stately composure of his
character, every particle of Fox's mental and physical formation bore
witness to his fiery and passionate enthusiasm. "What is that fat
gentleman in such a passion about?" was the artless query of the late
Lord Eversley, who, as Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre, so long presided over
the House of Commons, and who as a child had been taken to the gallery
to hear Mr. Fox. While Pitt was the embodied representative of Order,
his rival was the Apostle and Evangelist of Liberty. If the master
passion of Pitt's mind was enthusiasm for his country, Fox was swayed by
the still nobler enthusiasm of Humanity. His style of oratory was the
exact reflex of his mind. He was unequalled in passionate argument, in
impromptu reply, in ready and spontaneous declamation. His style was
unstudied to a fault. Though he was so intimately acquainted with the
great models of classical antiquity, his oratory owed little to the
contact, and nothing to the formal arts of rhetoric; everything to
inborn genius and the greatness of the cause which he espoused. It would
be difficult to point to a single public question of his time on which
his voice did not sound with rousing effect, and whenever that voice was
heard it was on behalf of freedom, humanity, and the sacred brotherhood
of nations.

I pass on to the orator of whose masterpiece Fox said that "eloquent
indeed it was; so much so that all he had ever heard, all he had ever
read, dwindled into nothing, and vanished like vapour before the sun."
In sparkling brilliancy and pointed wit, in all the livelier graces of
declamation and delivery, Sheridan surpassed all his contemporaries.
When he concluded his speech on the charge against Warren Hastings of
plundering the Begums of Oude, the peers and strangers joined with the
House in a tumult of applause, and could not be restrained from clapping
their hands in ecstasy. The House adjourned in order to recover its
self-possession. Pitt declared that this speech surpassed all the
eloquence of ancient and modern times, and possessed everything that
genius or art could furnish to agitate or control the human mind. And
yet, while Sheridan's supreme efforts met with this startling success,
his deficiencies in statesmanship and character prevented him from
commanding that position in the House and in the Government which his
oratorical gift, if not thus handicapped, must have secured for its
possessor.

As a speaker in his own sphere Lord Erskine was not inferior to the
greatest of his contemporaries. He excelled in fire, force, and passion.
Lord Brougham finely described "that noble figure every look of whose
countenance is expressive, every motion of whose form graceful; an eye
that sparkles and pierces and almost assures victory, while it 'speaks
audience ere the tongue.'" Yet, as is so often the case, the unequalled
advocate found himself in the House of Commons less conspicuously
successful than he had been at the Bar. The forensic manner of speech,
in which he was a head and shoulders higher than any of his legal
contemporaries, is, after all, distinct from parliamentary eloquence.

The same disqualification attached to the oratory of Lord Brougham,
whose speech at the bar of the House of Lords in defence of Queen
Caroline had made so deep an impression. His extraordinary fierceness
and even violence of nature pervaded his whole physical as well as
intellectual being. When he spoke he was on springs and quicksilver, and
poured forth sarcasm, invective, argument, and declamation in a
promiscuous and headlong flood. Yet all contemporary evidence shows that
his grandest efforts were dogged by the inevitable fate of the man who,
not content with excellence in one or two departments, aims at the
highest point in all. In reading his speeches, while one admires the
versatility, one is haunted by that fatal sense of superficiality which
gave rise to the saying that "if the Lord Chancellor only knew a little
law he would know something about everything."

Pitt died in 1806, but he lived long enough to hear the splendid
eloquence of Grattan, rich in imagination, metaphor, and epigram; and to
open the doors of the official hierarchy to George Canning. Trained by
Pitt, and in many gifts and graces his superior, Canning first displayed
his full greatness after the death of his illustrious master. For twenty
years he was the most accomplished debater in the House of Commons, and
yet he never succeeded in winning the full confidence of the nation,
nor, except in foreign affairs, in leaving his mark upon our national
policy. "The English are afraid of genius," and when genius is displayed
in the person of a social adventurer, however brilliant and delightful,
it is doubly alarming.

We can judge of Canning's speeches more exactly than of those of his
predecessors, for by the time that he had become famous the art of
parliamentary reporting had attained almost to its present perfection;
and there are none which more amply repay critical study. Second only to
Burke in the grandeur and richness of his imagery, he greatly excelled
him in readiness, in tact, and in those adventitious advantages which go
so far to make an orator. Mr. Gladstone remembered the "light and music"
of the eloquence with which he had fascinated Liverpool seventy years
before. Scarcely any one contributed so many beautiful thoughts and
happy phrases to the common stock of public speech. All contemporary
observers testify to the effect produced by the proud strength of his
declaration on foreign policy: "I called the New World into existence,
to redress the balance of the Old." And the language does not contain a
more magnificent or perfect image than that in which he likens a strong
nation at peace to a great man-of-war lying calm and motionless till the
moment for action comes, when "it puts forth all its beauty and its
bravely collects its scattered elements of strength, and awakens its
dormant thunder."

Lord John Russell entered the House of Commons in 1813, and left it in
1861. He used to say that in his early days there were a dozen men there
who could make a finer speech than any one now living; "but," he used to
add, "there were not another dozen who 

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