My Life as an Author
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Title: My Life as an Author
Author: Martin Farquhar Tupper
Release date: January 20, 2006 [eBook #17558]
Language: English
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Produced by Stacy Brown Thellend, Robert Connal and the
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[Illustration: Martin F. Tupper. _Elliott & Fry, Photographers._]
Martin Tupper's Autobiography
MY LIFE
AS AN AUTHOR
BY
MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
D.C.L. F.R.S.
_Viri, vivo, vivam._
LONDON:
SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON
CROWN BUILDINGS, 188 FLEET STREET, E.C.
1886
[_All rights reserved_]
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Page
Preliminary--Sonnet--Public Life, not Private--Benjamin
Franklin--Samples from Books--Self-judgment 1-6
CHAPTER II.
Infancy and Schooldays--Parentage--Germany and Guernsey,
America and Canada--Winsor's Patent Gaslights--King George
III.'s Blessing--My Father's Dream--Second
Sight--Heredity--First School at Brentford--Next at Brook
Green--Third Charterhouse--Dr. Russell--Parson
Schoolmasters--Coins and Hoops--Andrew
Irvine--Cockshies--Harpies at the Feast--Dr.
Stocker--Holt's--M'Neile--Harold Browne 7-25
CHAPTER III.
Young Authorship in Verse and Prose--Melite--Rough
Rhymes--Carthage--Umbrella Sapphics--Height of Honesty--Holkar
Hall--Melrose Abbey--Heidelberg--Pterodactyles--The
Buckstone--Scotch Journal--Vitrified Forts--Ireland--Kingston
Caverns--Cornish Letter and Sketches--Penzance--The
Logan--Land's End--St. Michael's Mount--Rapid Travel 26-51
CHAPTER IV.
College Days--Voice from the Cloister--Gladstone--Aristotle
Class--Giants in those Days--Studentship--A
Reading-Man--College Larks--D.C.L.--Dr. Bliss 52-61
CHAPTER V.
Failure as to Orders--Stammering--Blewbury Vicarage--Lincoln's
Inn--Lewin's Critique--Brodie's Cacography--Inkpen's
Entomology--Duke of Wellington--Walters'--Letter as to
India--Barrister and Benedict--A Hoax--Theodore Hook--Old Lady
Cork 62-71
CHAPTER VI.
Stammering--Man's Privilege of Speech--Chess
Playing--Anecdotes--Angling--Fishing Sonnets 72-78
CHAPTER VII.
Oxford Prize Poems--Verses in the Schools--Parodies--Rhyme
and Rhythm--Scriptural Science--Classic Parallels 79-85
CHAPTER VIII.
Sundry Providences--The Small Semisuicide--A Concussion--Horse
Accidents--Perils by Land and Sea--Lydstep Cavern 86-89
CHAPTER IX.
Yet more Escapes--White Cross Guild--Evils and
Temptations--Potipheras--Heresies--Creeds 90-94
CHAPTER X.
Fads and Fancies--Vegetarian--Teetotalism--The
Anglo-Saxon--Opera Colonnade--Moderation--America
Revisited--Poem on Temperance and Total
Abstinence--Gough--Dr. Hodgkin--A Martyr--Clerical Letter
on Pharisaism 95-104
CHAPTER XI.
Sacra Poesis--Geraldine--Critiques--John and Tom
Hughes--Donnington Priory--Little Providences 105-110
CHAPTER XII.
Origin of "Proverbial Philosophy"--M'Neile and Stebbing--N.P.
Willis--Harrison Ainsworth--Hatchard's--Moxon's--Cassell's--A
Prophecy--My Father's Letter and Gift--Sixty
Times--Politeuphuia--Parallels--Mr. Orton's Volume--American
Laudations, and English--As to _per contra_--Copyright
Question--Wedding Gifts--An Elizabethan Author--Seldom
Seen, and Few Adventures 111-133
CHAPTER XIII.
A Modern Pyramid--The Vision--A Fearful
Flight--Imagination--The Crystal Cubes and Mud
Bricks--Sonnets and Sonneteering--Mackay and Shakespeare's 134-144
CHAPTER XIV.
An Author's Mind--Prefatory Ramble--Addled Eggs--The Mental
Cathedral--Probabilities--Job's Trials 145-152
CHAPTER XV.
The Crock of Gold--Dramatised in Boston and London--Origin
of the Story--The Twins--Heart: drawn from Living
Models--Critiques from Ollier and St. John 153-158
CHAPTER XVI.
Æsop Smith--Mudie's--Rabelaisian Hints--The Early
Gallop--Alfred, or Albert Order--Fables 159-162
CHAPTER XVII.
Stephan Langton--King Alfred's Poems--The Silent Pool--Hard
Reading for the History--The Book still in Print--Curious
Metrical Translation of Anglo-Saxon Poetry--The Jubilee at
Wantage and at Liverpool 163-169
CHAPTER XVIII.
Shakespeare Commemoration--Lord Carlisle--Lord Houghton,
Leigh Court--Stratford Church--The Baptismal Font--An
American Autograph Hunter--Sonnet 170-172
CHAPTER XIX.
Translations and Pamphlets--Homer, _lib._ A.--Tennyson's
Vivien--Classical Versions--Hymn for All Nations--Protestant
Ballads--Fifteen Pamphlets 173-179
CHAPTER XX.
Paterfamilias's Diary--Courier Pierre--Devil's
Bridge--Major Hely--Guernsey--The Haro that saved Castle
Cornet--Night-Sail in the Race of Alderney--Durham's
Statue of Prince Albert--Isle of Man--King Orry--Walter
Montgomery--Bishop Powys 180-189
CHAPTER XXI.
Never Give Up, at Dr. Kirkland's--Harvest Hymns--Gordon
Ballads--The Good Earl--John Brown--My Brother--Memory--Evil
not Endless 190-199
CHAPTER XXII.
Protestant Ballads--"So help me, God!"--Nun's Appeal, &c. 200-203
CHAPTER XXIII.
Plays--Alfred--Raleigh--Washington--Twelve Scenes--Family
Records 204-207
CHAPTER XXIV.
Antiquariana--Lockhart and my Coin Article in
the _Quarterly_--Farley Finds--Mummy Wheat and Faraday 208-212
CHAPTER XXV.
Honours--_Times'_ Letter--A Peerage and Baronetcy--Prussian
Medal and Chevalier Bunsen's Letter--Authorship a Rank by
Itself--Many Inventions and Literary Discoveries, as Punch,
Humpty Dumpty, 666, &c. 213-220
CHAPTER XXVI.
Courtly: Prophetic Sonnet on our Empress--Many Royal
Poems--Modern Court Suit _v._ Queen Anne's--A Greeting
to Prince Albert Victor 221-228
CHAPTER XXVII.
F.R.S.--Lord Melbourne's Carelessness--Spectrum
Analysis--Spiritualism--Vivisection--Painted
Windows--Parabolic Teaching 229-233
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Personation--Bignor--The Greyhound--Alibis--A Rescue
on Snowdon--Fraudulent Collections--Forged
Authorials--Boston Unitarianism--Pictures Falsely Signed 234-237
CHAPTER XXIX.
Hospitalities--Farnham Castle--Orchids and Pines--Bishop
Sumner--Garibaldi at Gladstone's--Parham and
Curzon--Ghosts--Purple Parchments--Uncut
Elzevirs--Shenstone's Leasowes--"Little
Testy"--Sonnet--Isle of Wight--Sojourns--City
Feasts--Ostentatious Hospitality 238-244
CHAPTER XXX.
Social and Rural--No Scandals--Hawthorne's Visit--Alexander
Smith's--Jerdan's Haycock--Otto Goldschmidt and
Macdougall--Dark Visitors--Liberian Gold
Medal--Noviomagians--Lucky Angling--Albury Waltz--Rustic
Stupidity--Redmen--The Drinking Fountain--Our House a
Hive of Bees--Foxhunt in Drawing-room--The Donkey
Burglar--Anthony Devis--Irvingism 245-256
CHAPTER XXXI.
American Ballads: "Ho, Brother! I'm a Britisher"--The
Quasi-Inspiration--"Thirty Noble Nations," and
Thirty-three--Many Others--Ground-baiting the Transatlantic 257-259
CHAPTER XXXII.
First American Visit--Too Temperate for 1851; not Temperate
enough for 1876--Grand Dinner at Baltimore, and Great
Speech--The Astor Dinner--"Amice Davis"--Mayor Kingsland and
the Mile-long Procession--Willis, at Golden Square--The
Fillmore Dinner at the White House--Jenny Lind's
Concert--Gordon Bennet--Squier--Barnum 260-270
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Second American Visit--Extreme
Gold--Talmage--Bryant--Cooper--"Immortality" at the
Tabernacle--Lotus Club--Lord Rosebery--Dr. Levis--Mr.
Pettit's Portrait--The Listers at Hamilton--Toronto--Sir
Charles Tupper--Elgin--Dufferin--Mackay and Sleighing--Dawson
and Eozoa--Vaughan-Tuppers--The Grand John Hopkins'
Banquet--Charleston Tuppers--My Palinode to the South--Visit
to Williams Middleton--Parting Stanzas--Ruined
Mansion--Valete 271-280
CHAPTER XXXIV.
English and Scotch Readings, very rapid, from Isle of Wight
to Peterhead--My Entrepreneur D.: his Experiences: I Failed
with Him, but Succeeded Alone--Specimen of Readings--Local
Critiques--Many Friends Unrecorded--Miscellaneous Poems--Mr.
Gall's Primeval Man--Arbroath--Mill the Atheist--Mr.
Boyd's Piety--Hamilton Mausoleum--Wild Cattle--Burns's
Country--James Baird the Millionaire and the Hodman 281-288
CHAPTER XXXV.
Electrics--Sir Culling Eardley at Erith--Atlantic
Telegraph--The First Message--Meddlesome Revisers--Antique
Telegraphy--Addison and Strada--Professor Morse--A
Telegram-Sonnet 289-295
CHAPTER XXXVI.
The Rifle, a Patriotic Prophecy in 1845--Early
Pamphlet--Defence not Defiance--Albury Club--Blackheath
Review--Lord Lovelace--Alarums--Drummond's Scare--A
Lucky Shot 296-303
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Autographs and Advertisements--Worth Eighteenpence each--A
Hundred at Once--Photographs--Oil Paintings--Locks of
Hair--Interviewers--Puffs and Anti-puffs 304-311
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Kindness to Animals--Louis Napoleon and
Alfort--Vivisection--Pontrilas Court--The Omnibus
Hack--Divers Ballads 312-315
CHAPTER XXXIX.
Orkney and Shetland--Our Voyage--Wick Herring Fair--Balfour
at Shapinshay--Kirkwall--Aytoun--Gulf Stream--Snuff-Boxes
and Corals--Fair Isle Hosiery--Stennis--Scalloway--Lerwick
Literature--Artificial Flora--Thurso Castle--Robert
Dick--Cape Wrath--Stornoway--Callanish--Pipers--The brooch
of Lorne, &c. 316-321
CHAPTER XL.
Literary Friends--Mrs. Somerville, Miss Granville, Mrs.
Jameson, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Ouida, Miss Braddon, Mrs.
Carter Hall, Mrs. Grote, Lady Wilde, Miss Mackay, Rogers,
Carlyle, Haweis, Tennyson, Browning, Mortimer Collins,
Dickens and Son, Owen, Austen, Pengelley, Bowerbank, S.
Mackenzie, M. Arnold, S. Brooks, Albert Smith, Mark Lemon,
Tenniel, Cooper, P.B. Cole, E. Yates, Frank Smedley, J.G. Wood,
Cuthbert Collingwood, Mr. and Mrs. Zerffi, Birch, Miss Hooper,
Miss Barlee, G. MacDonald, Ronald Gower, Fred. Burnaby,
Charles Marvin--A Diner-Out--A Mormon Guest--Apostles--Frank's
Ranche--Twelve Anecdotes--Thackeray and Leech,
Longfellow, C. Kingsley, Ainsworth, Lord Elgin 322-350
CHAPTER XLI.
Some Older Friendships--Nightingale, and Farley Heath--Walter
Hawkins--His Tomb--Anchor--Anagrams--Christmas Largesse--Sham
Antiques--Joseph Durham--Alice's Statue--"Sir
Joe" and the Noviomagians--Prince Albert at St. Peter's
Port--Baroness Barnekow--Swedish Proverbial--King Oscar's
Poems--Geo. Metivier--French Proverbial--John Sullivan--Canon
Jenkins--Barnes, De Chatelain, De Pontigny--Correspondents,
&c. 351-362
CHAPTER XLII.
Political--A Dark Horse--No Party-Man--Gladstone--Ambidextrous
Stanzas--Liberal and Tory--The One-Vote System--Fancy
Franchises--The Voter's Motto--Fair Trade _v._ Free
Trade--Radically Conservative--Strikes, &c. 363-372
CHAPTER XLIII.
A Cure for Ireland--Racial Difficulties--The Unsunned
Corner--Æsop Smith's Prescription--An Irish Balmoral in
1858--My Anti Celtic Ballads--Adventures 373-379
CHAPTER XLIV.
Some Spiritist Experiences--Not a Spiritualist, but an Honest
Recorder of Facts--Alexis--Howell--Vernon's Mesmerised
Child--Mrs. Cora Tappan--Chauncey Townsend's
Book--Spirit-Drawings--Planchette--Showers of Flowers, and
Sugar-Plums, and Pearls--Mr. Home--Prayer before
_Séance_--The Table in the Air--Live Coals in My Hand--The
Vitalised Accordion--The Colonel's Ghost--Iamblicus--Query
Electrical Influence--Our Mysterious Key--Miss
Hudson--Thought-Reading 380-399
CHAPTER XLV.
Fickle Fortune--Losses and Failures--Testimonial--"L'espoir
est ma force"--My _Levée_ in 1851--The Missed Codicil--Life
and Death 400-403
CHAPTER XLVI.
Henry De Beauvoir, killed in Africa--Archdeacon Kitton--Our
Old Chancery Suit: A Lost Fortune--Belgravian Five Fields,
another Missed Chance--Earl Grosvenor 404-407
CHAPTER XLVII.
Flying: my Lecture at the Royal Aquarium with Fred. Burnaby
as Chairman--Henry Middleton's Invention--De Lisle Hay's
"Conquest of the Air"--Ezekiel's Angels--Ovid, and
Tennyson--Claude Hamilton--Extracts 408-412
CHAPTER XLVIII.
Luther--The Peroration as to his Life and
Exploits--Anniversary Stanzas, in many Languages--Bullinger's
Music--Wycliffe Ballad--Wondrous Parallel 413-416
CHAPTER XLIX.
Final--Whatever is, is Right--Sick-bed
Repentance--Intuitions--What We Shall Be--Protest Against
Atheism--The Infinities--A Childlike Hymn--Eternal
Hope--Mercy for Ever--The Assurance of Ovid 417-431
MY LIFE AS AN AUTHOR.
CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
I have often been asked to prepare an autobiography, but my objections
to the task have ever been many and various. To one urgent appeal I sent
this sonnet of refusal, which explains itself:--
"You bid me write the story of my life,
And draw what secrets in my memory dwell
From the dried fountains of her failing well,
With commonplaces mixt of peace and strife,
And such small facts, with good or evil rife,
As happen to us all: I have no tale
Of thrilling force or enterprise to tell,--
Nothing the blood to fire, the cheek to pale:
My life is in my books: the record there,
A truthful photograph, is all I choose
To give the world of self; nor will excuse
Mine own or others' failures: glad to spare
From blame of mine, or praise, both friends and foes,
Leaving unwritten what God only knows."
In fact I always rejected the proposal (warned by recent volumes of
pestilential reminiscences) and would none of it; not only from its
apparent vainglory as to the inevitable extenuation of one's own faults
and failures in life, and the equally certain amplification of
self-registered virtues and successes,--but even still more from the
mischief it might occasion from a petty record of commonplace troubles
and trials, due to the "changes and chances of this mortal life," to the
casual mention or omission of friends or foes, to the influence of
circumstances and surroundings, and to other revelations--whether
pleasant or the reverse--of matters merely personal, and therefore more
of a private than a public character.
Indeed, so disquieted was I at the possible prospect of any one getting
hold of a mass of manuscript in old days diligently compiled by myself
from year to year in several small diaries, that I have long ago
ruthlessly made a holocaust of the heap of such written self-memories,
fearing their posthumous publication; and in this connection let me now
add my express protest against the printing hereafter of any of my
innumerable private letters to friends, or other MSS., unless they are
strictly and merely of a literary nature.
Biography, where honest and true, is no doubt one of the most
fascinating and instructive phases of literature; but it requires a
higher Intelligence than any (however intimate) friend of a man to do it
fairly and fully; so many matters of character and circumstance must
ever be to him unknown, and therefore will be by him unrecorded. And
even as to autobiography, who, short of the Omniscient Himself, can take
into just account the potency of outward surroundings, and still more of
inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good
or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very
much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern
teachers? We are each of us morally and bodily the psychical and
physical composite of a thousand generations. Albeit every individual
possesses as his birthright a freewill to turn either to the right or to
the left, and is liable to a due responsibility for his words and
actions, still the Just Judge alone can and must make allowance for the
innate inclinings of heredity and the outward influences of
circumstance, and He only can hold the balance between the guilt and
innocence, the merit or demerit, of His creature.
So far as my own will goes, I leave my inner spiritual biography to the
Recording Angel, choosing only to give some recollections and memories
of my outer literary life. For spiritual self-analysis in matters of
religion and affection I desire to be as silent as I can be; but in such
a book as this absolute taciturnity on such subjects is practically
impossible.
For the matter, then, of autobiography, I decline its higher and its
deeper aspects; as also I wish not to obtrude on the public eye mere
domesticities and privacies of life. But mainly lest others less
acquainted with the petty incidents of my career should hereafter take
up the task, I accede with all frankness and humility to what seems to
me like a present call to duty, having little time to spare at
seventy-six, so near the end of my tether,--and protesting, as I well
may, against the charge of selfish egotism in a book necessarily spotted
on every page with the insignificant letter I; and while, of course on
human-nature principles, willing enough to exhibit myself at the best,
promising also not to hide the second best, or worse than that, where I
can perceive it.
That shrewd old philosopher, Benjamin Franklin, thus excuses his own
self-imposed task of "autobiography," and I cannot do better than quote
and adopt his wise and just remarks:--
"In thus employing myself, I shall yield to the inclination so natural
to old men, of talking of themselves and their own actions, and I shall
indulge it without being tiresome to those who, from respect to my age,
might conceive themselves obliged to listen to me, since they will
always be free to read me or not. And (I may as well confess it, as the
denial would be believed by nobody) I shall, perhaps, not a little
gratify my own vanity. Indeed, I never heard or saw the introductory
words, 'Without vanity I may say,' &c., but some vain thing immediately
followed. Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they may
have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with
it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the
possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action; and
therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man
were to thank God for his _vanity_ among the other comforts of life.
"And now I speak of thanking God, I desire, with all humility, to
acknowledge that I attribute the happiness of my past life to His divine
providence, which led me to the means I used, and gave the success. My
belief of this induces me to _hope_, though I must not _presume_, that
the same goodness will still be exercised towards me in continuing that
happiness or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience
as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to
Him only in whose power it is to bless us, even in our afflictions."
Thus speaketh the honest wisdom of Benjamin Franklin.
* * * * *
I do not see that a better plan can be chosen for carrying out the title
of this book than the one I have adopted, namely, tracing from the
earliest years to old age the author's literary lifework, illustrated by
accounts of, and specimens from, his various books and writings,
especially those which are absolutely out of print, or, haply have never
been published. No doubt, in such excerpts, exhibited at their best, the
critical accusations of unfairness, self-seeking, and so forth, will be
made, and may be met by the true consideration that something of this
sort is inevitable in autobiography. However, for the matter of vanity,
all I know of myself is the fact that praise, if consciously undeserved,
only depresses me instead of elating; that a noted characteristic of
mine through life has been to hide away in the rear rather than rush to
the front, unless, indeed, forced forward by duty, when I can be bold
enough, if need be; and that one defect in me all know to be a dislike
to any assumption of dignity--surely a feeling the opposite to
self-conceit; whilst, if I am not true, simple, and sincere, I am worse
than I hope I am, and all my friends are deceived in their kind judgment
of me.
But let this book speak for itself; I trust it is honest, charitable,
and rationally religious. If I have (and I show it through all my
writings) a shrinking from priestcraft of every denomination, that
feeling I take to be due to some ancient heredity ingrained, or, more
truly, inburnt into my nature from sundry pre-Lutheran confessors and
martyrs of old, from whom I claim to be descended, and by whose spirit I
am imbued. Not but that I profess myself broad, and wide, and liberal
enough for all manner of allowances to others, and so far as any narrow
prejudices may be imagined of my idiosyncrasy, I must allow myself to be
changeable and uncertain--though hitherto having steered through life a
fairly straight course--and that sometimes I can even doubt as to my
politics, whether they should be defined Whig or Tory; as to my
religion, whether it is most truly chargeable by the epithet high or
low; as to my likings, whether I best prefer solitude or society; as to
literature, whether gaieties or gravities please me most. In fact, I
recognise good in everything, though sometimes hidden by evil, right (by
intention, at least) in sundry doctrines and opinions otherwise to my
judgment wrong, and I am willing to believe the kindliest of my
opponents who appear to be honest and earnest. This is a very fair creed
for a citizen of the world, whose motto is Terence's famous avowal,
"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."
CHAPTER II.
INFANCY AND SCHOOLDAYS.
In a short and simple way, then, and without any desire ostentatiously
to "chronicle small beer," as Iago sneers it, I suppose it proper to
state very briefly when and where I was born, with a word as to my
parentage. July 17, 1810, was my birthday, and No. 20 Devonshire Place,
Marylebone, my birthplace, at that time the last house of London
northward. My father, Martin Tupper, a name ever honoured by me, was an
eminent medical man, who twice refused a baronetcy (first from Lord
Liverpool, and secondly, as offered by the Duke of Wellington); my
mother, Ellin Devis Marris, being daughter of Robert Marris, a good
landscape artist, of an old Lincolnshire family, and made the heiress,
as adopted child, of her aunt, Mrs. Ellin Devis, of Devonshire Place and
Albury.
My father's family have sojourned 336 years in Guernsey, having migrated
thither from Thuringia, _viâ_ Hesse Cassel, owing to religious
persecution in the evil days of Charles V., our remote ancestors being
styled Von Topheres (chieftains, or head-lords) of Treffurth (as is
recorded in the heraldic MSS. of the British Museum), that being the
origin of our name.
Of my mother's family (in old time Maris, as "of the sea," with mermaids
for heraldry), I have the commissions of one who was an Ironside
cavalry officer, signed by Cromwell and Fairfax; and several of her
relatives (besides her father) were distinguished artists. In
particular, her uncle (my wife's father), Arthur William Devis, the
well-known historical painter, and her great-uncle, Anthony Devis, who
filled Albury House with his landscapes.
Some of our old German stock crossed the Atlantic in Puritan times, and
many of the name have attained wealth and position both in Canada and
the United States; notably Sir Charles Tupper northwards, and sundry
rich merchants in New York, Virginia, and the Carolines southwardly.
Of my infancy let me record that I "enjoyed" very delicate health,
chiefly due, as I now judge, to the constant cuppings and bleedings
whereby "the faculty" of those days combated teething fits, and (perhaps
with Malthusian proclivities) killed off young children. I remember,
too, that the broad meadows, since developed into Regent's Park and
Primrose Hill, then "truly rural," and even up to Chalk Farm, then
notorious for duels, were my nursery ramblings in search of cowslips and
new milk. Also, that once at least in those infantile days, my father
took me to see Winsor's Patent Gaslights at Carlton House, and how he
prognosticated the domestic failure of so perilous an explosive, more
than one blowing-up having carelessly occurred.
* * * * *
Another infantile recollection is memorable, as thus. My father's annual
holiday happened one year to be at Bognor, where a patron patient of
his, Lord Arran, rented a pleasant villa, and he had for a visitor at
the time no less a personage than George the Third: it must have been
during some lucid interval, perhaps after the Great Thanksgiving at St.
Paul's. My father took his little boy with him to call upon the Earl,
not thinking to see the King; but when we came in there was his
kind-hearted Majesty, who patted my curls and gave me his blessing! How
far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected my after career
believers in the divine rights and spiritual powers of a king may
speculate as they please. At all events I got a good man's blessing.
I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a
dream. My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy's Hospital,
from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the wounded
after the battle of Copenhagen. He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey
for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of those days, when, on the
night before embarking, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he
crossed the churchyard and fell into an open grave. Telling this to his
parents at "The Pollet," they would not let him go, with a sort of
superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the smack was seized on its
voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were
consigned--for twelve years--to a French prison! I have heard my father
tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr. Watts' awkward line,
"On little things what great depend." I might say more about warnings in
dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences. For
instance, my "Dream of Ambition" in Proverbial Philosophy was a real
one. And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition
alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth in Things False," which has
several times occurred to myself, as this, for example: Years ago, in
Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing
through a town--I think it was Crediton--and I had the strange feeling
that I had seen all this before: now, we changed horses just on this
side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth
of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see
right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had
foreseen,--a market-place with the usual incidents. Now, if reasonably
asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I
reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soul
may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real and
ideal. But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a judgment
upon the famous Horatian philosophy of "more things in heaven and
earth," &c.
* * * * *
On Mr. Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to
myself. Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse
or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape
painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on
stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family. As to
my father's surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain,
wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs,
labelled by my father "in my late dear father's handwriting," but
whether or not original, I cannot tell. As a Guernseyman, he might well
be as much French as English. They seem to me clever and worthy of
Beranger, though long before him: possibly they are my grandsire's. A
very fair judge of French poetry, and himself a good Norman poet, Mr.
John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells me that the songs are
excellent, and that he remembers them to have been popularly sung when
he was a boy.
About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals
so with men, "fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;" this so far as bodies
are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable
instances prove, where children do not take after their parents. If,
however, I may mention my own small experience of this matter, literary
talent, or at all events authorship, _is_ hereditary, especially in
these days of that general epidemic, the "cacoethes scribendi."
* * * * *
I wrote this paper following originally for an American publication; and
as I cannot improve upon it, and it has never been printed in England, I
produce it here in its integrity.
A true and genuine record of what English schools of the highest class
were more than sixty-five years ago cannot fail to have much to interest
the present generation on both sides of the Atlantic; if only because we
may now indulge in the self-complacency of being everyway wiser, better,
and happier than our recent forebears. And in setting myself to write
these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at times
necessarily naming names (for the too frequent use of dashes and
asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisimilitude of plain
truth-telling), I desire to say nothing against or for either the dead
or the living beyond their just deserts, and I protest against any
charge of unreasonable want of charity as to my whilom "schools and
schoolmasters." It is true that sometimes I loved them not, neither can
I in general respect their memory; but the causes of such a feeling on
my part shall be made manifest anon, and I am sure that modern parents
and guardians will rejoice that much of my childhood's hard experience
has not been altogether that of their own boys.
I was sent to school much too soon, at the early age of seven, having
previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in
"little Latin and less Greek" of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a
wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an
epitaph on himself the following effusion:
"Beneath this stone a Swallow lies,
No one laughs and no one cries;
Where he is gone or how he fares
No one knows and no one cares."
At this time of day I suspect this epigram not to be quite original, but
it served to give me for the nonce a high opinion of the pundit who read
with me Cornelius Nepos and Cæsar and some portions of that hopeless
grammar, the Eton Greek, in the midst of his hard-breathing consumption
of perpetual sandwiches and beer.
The first school chosen for me (though expensive, there could not have
been a worse one) was a large mixed establishment for boys of all ages,
from infancy to early manhood, belonging to one Rev. Dr. Morris of
Egglesfield House, Brentford Butts, which I now judge to have been
conducted solely with a view to the proprietor's pocket, without
reference to the morals, happiness, or education of the pupils committed
to his care. All I care to remember of this false priest (and there were
many such of old, whatever may be the case now) are his cruel
punishments, which passed for discipline, his careful cringing to
parents, and his careless indifference towards their children, and in
brief his total unfitness for the twin duties of pastor and teacher. A
large private school of mixed ages and classes is perilously liable to
infection from licentious youths left to themselves and their evil
propensities, and I can feelingly recollect how miserable for nearly a
year was that poor little helpless innocent of seven under the
unrestricted tyranny of one Cooke (in after years a life convict for
crime) who did all he could to pollute the infant mind of the little fag
delivered over to his cruelty. Cowper's Tirocinium well expresses the
situation:--
"Would you your son should be a sot or dunce,
Lascivious, headstrong, or all these at once,
Train him in public with a mob of boys,
Childish in mischief only and in noise,
Else of a mannish growth and, five in ten,
For infidelity and lewdness, men."
My next school was more of a success; for Eagle House, Brookgreen, where
I was from eight to eleven, had for its owner and headmaster a most
worthy and excellent layman, Joseph Railton. Mr. Railton was gentle,
though gigantic, fairly learned, just and kindly. His school produced,
amongst others eminent, the famous naval author Kingston, well known
from cabin-boy to admiral; there was also Lord Paulet, some others of
noble birth, and the two Middletons, nick-named Yankees, whom years
after I visited at their ruined mansion in South Carolina after the
Confederate War. Through the personal good influence of honest "Old
Joe," and his middle-aged housekeeper, Mrs. Jones, our whole
well-ordered company of perhaps a hundred boys lived and learned, worked
and played purely, and happily together: so great a social benefactor
may a good school chieftain be.
I have little to regret in my Brook Green recollections; the annual fair
was memorable with Richardson's show and Gingel's conjuring, and the
walks for mild cricketing at Shepherd's Bush, and the occasional Sundays
at home; and how pleasant to a schoolboy was the generous visitor who
tipped him, a good action never forgotten; and the garden with its
flowering tulip-tree, and the syringas and rose-trees jewelled with the
much-prized emerald May-bugs; for the whole garden was liberally thrown
open to us beyond the gravelled playground; all being now given over to
monks and nuns. Then I recollect how a rarely-dark annular eclipse of
the sun convulsed the whole school, bringing smoked glass to a high
premium; and there was a notable boy's library of amusing travels and
stories, all eagerly devoured; and old Phulax the house-dog, and good
Mr. Whitmore an usher, who gave a certain small boy a diamond
prayer-book, greatly prized then, though long since lost, and suitably
inscribed for him "_Parvum parva decent_;" and the speech days, wherein
the same small boy always signalised himself, to the general
astonishment, for he was usually a stammerer, owing much to the early
worries of Brentford; all these are agreeable reminiscences.
My next school at eleven was Charterhouse, or as my schoolfellow
Thackeray was wont to style it, Slaughterhouse, no doubt from the cruel
tyranny of another educational D.D., the Rev. Dr. Russell. For this man
and the school he so despotically drilled into passive servility and
pedantic scholarship, I have less than no reverence, for he worked so
upon an over-sensitive nature to force a boy beyond his powers, as to
fix for many years the infirmity of stammering, which was my affliction
until past middle life. As for tuition, it must all have grown of itself
by dint of private hard grinding with dictionaries and grammars, for the
exercises, themes, and other lessons were notoriously difficult, and
those before me would be inextricable puzzles now; however, we had to do
them, and we did them, unhelped by any teacher but our own industry. As
for the masters in school, two more ignorant old parsons than Chapman
and "Bob Watki" could not readily be found; and though the four others,
Lloyd, Dickens, Irvine, and Penny were somewhat more intelligent, still
all six in the lower school were occasionally summoned to a "concio," if
the interpretation of any ordinary passage in Homer or Virgil or Horace
was haply in dispute between a monitor and his class. In the upper
school the single really excellent teacher and good clergyman, Edward
Churton, had but one fault, a meek subserviency to the tyrannic Russell,
who domineered over all to our universal terror; and I remember kindly
Mr. Churton once affected to tears at the cruelty of his chief. What
should we think nowadays of an irate schoolmaster smashing a child's
head between two books in his shoulder-of-mutton hands till the nose
bled, as I once saw? Or, in these milder times when your burglar or
garotter is visited with a brief whipping, what shall we judge of the
wisdom or equity of some slight fault of idleness or ignorance being
visited with the Reverend Doctor's terrible sentence, "Allen, three
rods, eighteen, and most severely"?
Let me comment on this line, one of a sharp satire by a boy named
Barnes, long since an Indian Judge and I suppose translated Elsewhere.
Allen was head-gown-boy, and so chief executioner, the three rods being
some five-feet bunches of birch armed with buds as sharp as thorns,
renewed after six strokes for fresh excoriation! sometimes the
exhibition was in medio, a public terror to evil-doers, or doers of
nothing, but usually in a sort of side chapel to the lower school where
the whipping-block stood. Who could tolerate such things now? and who
can wonder that I, as a lad, proclaimed that I would rather die than be
flogged, for I had resolved in that event to commit justifiable homicide
on my flogger? I do not mean Allen, who became Head of Dulwich College,
and with whom I have since dined, annually as donor of a picture there,
but Russell, concerning whom I vowed that if ever he was made a Bishop
(happily he wasn't) I would desert the Church of England; as yet I have
not, albeit it has lately become so papalised as to be little worth an
honest Protestant's adherence.
As to the exclusively classic education in my young days, to the
resolute neglect of all other languages and sciences, I for myself have
from youth upwards always protested against it as mainly waste of time
and of very little service in the battle of life. For proof of this,
before I was eighteen, I wrote that essay on Education to be seen in my
first series of Proverbial Philosophy, which long years after the
celebrated Dr. Binney of the Weigh-house in Thames Street issued with my
leave as a tractate useful to the present generation. And while there
was so much fuss made as to the criminality of a false quantity in
Greek, or a deficient acquaintance with those awkward verbs in "Mi," or
above all a false concord (every one of which derelictions in duty
involved severe punishment), let us remember that all this time
Holywell Street was suffered to infect Charterhouse with its poison (I
speak of long ago, before Lord Campbell's wholesome Act), and that our
clerical tutors and governors professionally recognised no sort of sins
or shortcomings but those committed in class! They practically ignored
everything out of school, much as a captain knows nothing of his company
off duty. It was the idle system of boys set to govern boys, that the
masters might have no damage. I think the system was called Lancastrian.
One very noticeable trait in the parson-schoolmasters of those old days
(and perhaps it still survives) was the subserviency to rank and wealth
towards any pupils likely to give them livings, whereof more anon; at
present, an appropriate instance occurs to me. I was in my thirteenth
year monitor of the playground, when one Dillon, a scion of a titled
family, hunted and killed a stray dog there, and much to their credit
for humanity a number of other boys hunted and pelted _him_ into a dry
ditch or vallum, dug for the leaping-pole under a Captain Clias who
taught us athletics. I was technically responsible for this open insult
offered to Hibernian nobility, however well disposed to look another way
and let lynch-law take its course. Accordingly, the Doctor had me up for
punishment, and he inflicted an almost impossible imposition, Book
Epsilon of the Iliad (the longest of all) to be translated word for
word, English and Greek, and to be given to him in MS. within a month
(it would have been work for a year), that or expulsion. Had Mr. Dillon
been a plebeian, no notice would have been taken of the matter, but he
was an honourable, so Russell must avenge his righteous punishment.
However, the result of this outrageous set-task was curious and worthy
of this its first and only record. All the seventy boys in Irvine's
house and others elsewhere, volunteered to do the whole imposition for
me, and within a week hundreds of pages closely written with Greek and
Latin, were sewn together, making a large quarto pamphlet, which was
duly handed by me to the wondering Doctor; who had, however, too much
shrewdness to care to inquire closely as to this popular outburst of a
general indignation, so he said nothing more about it.
For other playground reminiscences: I saw, even in those tame times for
cricket when overhand bowling was illegal, and the fierce artillery of a
Spofforth impossible, a poor lad killed in the field, one Honourable
Henry Howard; he was taken to the pump for recovery, as from a swoon,
but the ball had struck him behind the ear, stone-dead. Again as to that
pump; it was sometimes maliciously used for sousing unfortunate
day-boys, who were allowed two minutes law out of school to enable them
to escape pursuit after lessons, most unjustly, and injuriously, seeing
that old Sutton founded his Charterhouse mainly for day-boys (John Leech
was one in my time) and for pensioners ("old Cods") whereof Colonel
Newcome of Thackeray fame, was another; but both of these charity
classes were utterly despised and ignored by the reverend brigands who
kept all the loaves and fishes for themselves.
One remarkable playground experience was the fact that it helped to
develop in me antiquarian inclinations, and my own discovered
hunting-ground for Roman numismatics in the south of England, long
afterwards expanded in "Farley Heath" near Albury. At Charterhouse
there was a great slope or semi-mound which had in old times been
utilised as a wholesale grave for the victims of plague and other
epidemics. It strikes me now as most perilous, but we boys used to dig
and scratch among bones and other _débris_ for on occasional coin or
lead token, whereof I found several; it is only a wonder that we did not
unearth pestilence, but mould is fortunately very antiseptic. Another
playground peculiarity was that after the hoop season, usually driven in
duplicate or triplicate, the hoops were "stored" or "shied" into the
branching elms, from which they were again brought down by hockey-sticks
flung at them; a great boon to the smaller boys who thus gratuitously
became possessed of valuable properties. And for all else, there were
fights behind the school, in those pugilistic days scientifically
conducted with seconds and bottleholders, and some "claret" drawn, and
other like fashionable brutalities; also in its season came football,
but not quite so fiercely fought as it is now; and there was Mr.
Rackwitz, the man of sweets and pastries at the corner; and another sort
of rackets in the tennis court; and for another sort of court there was
then extant a bit of ruinous Gothic in old Rutland Court, a ghostly
entrance from Charterhouse Square, some thought haunted, and long since
cleared away.
And now crossing the Square we come to No. 41, the Queen Anne fashioned
mansion where Mr. Andrew Irvine (another Reverend Master, who like all
the rest, except Churton, almost never "did duty," and when he did
manifestly could neither read, preach, not pray) had a houseful of
pupils, whereof the writer was one. That long room is full of ancient
memories of past and gone Carthusians, though it is now humiliated into
a local charity school. I remember some humorous scenes there, chiefly
owing to the master's notorious niggardliness. Andrew had some Gruyere
cheese, easily accessible to the boyish plunderers of his larder. Now we
had complained that our slabs of butter laid between the cut sides of
the rolls often were salt and strong, so one "Punsonby" (afterwards an
earl) managed to put a piece of highly-flavoured Gruyere into a roll,
and publicly at breakfast produced it before Mr. Irvine as a proof of
the bad butter provided by the unfortunate housekeeper. He was overborne
against his own convictions, by the heroic impudence of chief big boys
whom he dared not offend, and actually pretended indignation, promising
better butter in future!
For another small scholastic recollection: Andrew's Indian brother had
brought over a lot of curiosities from the East, including a rhinoceros
skin, and bows and arrows, idols, and the like, all of which were
carelessly stored away in a cellar near the larder aforesaid. Of course
the boys made a raid upon such _spolia opima_, and divers portions of
that thick hide were exhibited as Indian rubber: but Andrew never knew
that many other things vanished, and that for example Knighton used to
walk home on Saturdays with preternaturally stiff arms, an arrow
(possibly poisoned) being hid in each sleeve! some creeses also were
appropriated by others. I wonder if any Carthusian of my time survives
as the possessor of such loot.
Let me record, too, that in those evil days (for I am not one who can
think this age as "pejor avis") boys used to go, on their Monday
mornings' return from the weekly holiday, out of their way to see the
wretches hanging at Newgate; that the scenes of cruelty to animals in
Smithfield were terrible; that books of the vilest character were
circulated in the long-room; and that both morality and religion were
ignored by the seven clergymen who reaped fortunes by neglecting five
hundred boys. If more memories are wanted of those times, here are two;
the planned famine on one occasion, when--under monitorial
inspiration--all the juniors clamoured for "more, more," seeing they had
slabbed on the underside of the tables masses of bread and butter
supposed to have been eaten-out; and on another, that lobsters,
surreptitiously obtained from out-of-bounds by the big boys were sworn
in the _débris_ of their smaller claws to be pieces of sealing-wax! and
nothing else: at least a reckless young aristocrat declared that they
were so,--and the mean-spirited Andrew, fearful of giving offence in
such high quarters, pretended to believe him.
Yet another trifle; for I find that such trivials are attractive to
homeflock readers, by whose taste I feel the more public pulse, even as
Rousseau did with his housekeeper. We, that is Knighton and Ellis and I,
used to return on Sunday night in my father's carriage by the back way
of Clerkenwell to Charterhouse in order to avoid the crowds of cattle;
and I well remember that sometimes we would utilise apples and nuts from
the dessert as missiles from our carriage window as we sped along. Alas!
on one occasion Knighton was skilful enough to smash a chemist's blue
bottle with an apple,--and on another I am aware that an oil lamp in
Carthusian Street succumbed to my only too-true cockshy: "Et hoc
meminisse _dolendum_."
Another incident was amusing in its way. Poor Mr. Irvine (who was going
to be married) mended up a very much smashed greenhouse to greet his
bride thereby with floral joy. Unluckily, the boys preferred broken
panes to whole ones, so nothing was easier than by flinging brickbats
and even mugs over the laundry wall to revel in the sweet sound of
smashed glass; moreover this would go to evidence the popular animosity
against a wretched bridegroom. Then, when he reappeared after some
temporary absence before the wedding, it was after this ridiculous
fashion. There was a wooden staircase screened off one side of the
long-room down which he would occasionally creep to listen at the door
at bottom to the tattle of the boys about him. He was heard creaking
downstairs, and some active young fellow by a round-about byway managed
to steal down behind and suddenly pushed him by the burst open door,
spread-eagle fashion, into the laughing long-room! The poor victim
pretended it was an accident, "Ye see, Mr. Yates, I was coming down the
stair, and me foot slipped." It seems that the luckless Andrew was
coming, so he averred, expressly to expostulate with the boys, to throw
himself on their generosity for a subscription towards his ruined
greenhouse, and to ask Messrs. "Punsonby," Yates, & Co. to promote it.
This they promised to do, and did after an original fashion. Several
pounds worth of pence and half-pence were distributed through the house,
so that when Andrew with his traitorous aides went round to collect
monies, it miraculously happened to be all coppers, unrelieved by a
single sparkle of silver or gold. On which, in a red rage (and he often
was in the like) he flung the whole bowlful into the long-room fire,
from the ashes whereof for days after the small boys gladly collected
hot half-pence. We must recollect that the canny Scot was a mean
over-reaching man, so perhaps he was well paid out. Soon after the
wedding, the bridegroom held high festival, and gave a grand dinner to
all the masters. Our big boys were equal to the occasion, and as the
hired waiters from the Falcon brought out the viands (all was a delusive
peace as they went in) our harpies flew upon the spoil, and each meat,
fish and fowl was cleared off the great dishes held between the helpless
hands of the astonished servitors! It was really too bad, but if a man
is so manifestly unpopular no doubt he deserves it. Rugbeians would not
have so served Arnold. Nearly all my schoolmates are dead, and I cannot
call on Charles Roe or Frank Ellis to corroborate my small anecdotes,
but I could till lately on Sir William Knighton and one or two more. In
a crowd of five hundred scholars (Russell's average number, afterwards
much diminished, until Godalming brought up the tale), there must be
many still extant and of eminence whom I would name if I did but know
them. Certainly, yes, Trevelyan was my next neighbour in the "emeriti,"
and there was Hebert, the one distinguished in the State, the other in
the Church; also Cole, and his noble chief of Enniskillen, whom I have
visited at Florence Court; and Walford, our great genealogist, with many
more; among the more recent dead, let me mention my good friend
Archibald Mathison, lately an Indian Judge, and Robert Curzon, and
Arthur Helps, the historian of Mexico. Thackeray I knew then but very
slightly, as he was a lower schoolboy, and John Leech not at all,
because he was a day boy, seeing that the upper school was made to keep
foolishly aloof from all such; however, in after years I made good
acquaintance with both of those true geniuses, and had Leech down to
Albury, and to illustrate my tales, whilst I have several times
compared judgments with Thackeray as to Doctor Birch and his young
friends and other scholia.
For the matter of my practical education at Charterhouse, I like others
went through the usual course, though without much distinction. I never
gained a prize, albeit I tried for some, by certain tame didactic poems
on the Tower, Carthage, and Jerusalem, and as I couldn't as a stammerer
speak in school, high places were out of my reach. Like others, however,
I learned by heart all Horace's odes and epodes, the Ajax and the
Antigone of Sophocles, and other like efforts of memory, almost useless
in after life, except for capping quotations, and thereby being thought
a pedant by the display of schoolboy erudition. How often have I wished
that the years wasted over Latin verses and Greek plays had been
utilised among French and German, astronomy, geology, chemistry and the
like; but all such useful educationals were quite ignored by the
clerical boobies who then professed to teach young gentlemen all that
they needed to know. Sixty years ago I perceived what we all see now
(teste Lord Sherborne) that a most imperfect classical education, such
as was then provided for us, was the least useful introduction to the
real business of life, except that it was fashionable, and gave a man
some false prestige in the circle of society. At about sixteen I left
Charterhouse for a private tutor, Dr. Stocker, then head of Elizabeth
College, Guernsey, seeing my father wished to do him a service for
kindly private reasons; I was not at the College, but a pupil in his own
house: however, as this other Rev. D.D. proved a failure, I was passed
on to a Rev. Mr. Twopeny of Long Wittenham, near Dorchester, staying
with him about a year with like little profit; when I changed to Mr.
Holt's at Albury, a most worthy friend and neighbour, with whom I read
diligently until my matriculation at Oxford, when I was about nineteen.
With Holt, my intimate comrade was Harold Browne, the present Bishop of
Winchester, and he will remember that it was our rather mischievous
object to get beyond Mr. Holt in our prepared Aristotle and Plato, as we
knew he had hard work to keep even in the race with his advanced pupils
by dint of midnight oil. With this good tutor and the excellent
ministrations of Hugh M'Neile, the famous rector of Albury, my _status
pupillaris_ comes technically to an end, Oxford being practically
independence; albeit I am sure that education can cease only with human
life, even if it be not carried further, onward and upward, through the
cycles of eternity.
As I did not care to stop the continuity of this gossiping record
(perhaps too light and too frank, but it is best unaltered) I must now
hark back for a few years, to fill in whatever small details of early
life and primitive literature happened to me, between school and
college. Truly, much of this amounts to recording trivialities; but
boyhood, not to say life also, is made up of trifles; and there is
always interest to a reader in personal anecdotes and experiences, the
more if they are lively rather than severe. Let this excuse that lengthy
account of "My Schooldays."
CHAPTER III.
YOUNG AUTHORSHIP IN VERSE AND PROSE.
Of my earliest MS., written soon after my seventh birthday, I have no
copy, and only a very confused memory: but I remember that my good
mother treasured for years and showed to many friends something in the
nature of an elegy which a broken-hearted little brother wrote on the
death of an infant sister from his first school: this is only mentioned
in case any one of my older readers may possibly supply such a lost MS.
in a child's roundhand. At school, chiefly as a young Carthusian, I
frequently broke out into verse, where prose translation was more
properly required: seeing that it pleased my indolence to be poetical
where I was not sure of literal accuracy, and (I may add) it rejoiced me
to induce a certain undermaster to suspect and sometimes to accuse this
small poetaster of having "cribbed" his metrical version from some
unknown collection of poems: however, he had always to be satisfied with
my assurance as to authenticity, for he was sure to be baffled in his
inquiries elsewhere.
One such instance is extant as thus,--for I kept a copy, as the
assembled Charterhouse masters seemed to think it too good to be
original for a small boy of twelve to thirteen. Here then, as a specimen
of one of my early bits of literature, is a genuine and unaltered poem
(for any modern improvements would not be honest) in the shape of a
translated Greek epigram from the Anthologia:--
"Not Juno's eye of fire divine
Can vie my Melite, with thine
So heavenly pure and bright;
Nor can Minerva's hand excel
That pretty hand I know so well,
So small and lily-white.
"Not Venus can such charms disclose
As those sweet lips of blushing rose
And ivory bosom show;
Not Thetis' nimble foot can tread
More lightly o'er her coral bed
Than thy soft foot of snow.
"What happiness thy face bestows
When smiling on a lover's woes!
Thrice happy then is he
Who hears thy soul-subduing song,--
O more than blest, to whom belong
The charms of Melite!"
I was head of the lower school then, and I remember the father of Bernal
Osborne patting my curly locks and scolding his whiskered son for
letting a small boy be above him.
Much about this time, and until I left Charterhouse at sixteen, there
proceeded from my pen numerous other mild rhymed pieces and sundry
unsuccessful prize poems; _e.g._, three on Carthage, the second Temple
of Jerusalem, and the Tower of London, whereof I have schoolboy copies
not worth notice; besides divers metrical translations of Horace,
Æschylus, Virgil; and a few songs and album verses for young lady
friends, one being set by a Mr. Sala (perhaps G.A.S. had a musical
relative) with an impromptu or two, whereof the following "On a shell
sounding like the sea" is a fair specimen for a boy:--
"I remember the voice of the flood
Hoarse breaking upon the rough shore,
As a linnet remembers the wood
And his warblings so joyous before."
Of course, this class of my juvenile lyrics was holiday work, and barely
worth a record, except to save a fly in amber, like this.
* * * * *
Whilst I was at Charterhouse, occurred my first Continental journey,
when my excellent father took his small party all through France in his
private travelling carriage, bought at Calais for the trip (it was long
before railways were invented), and I jotted down in verse our daily
adventures in the rumble. The whole journal, entitled "Rough Rhymes," in
divers metres, grave and gay, was published by the "Literary Chronicle"
in 1826, and the editor thereof, Mr. Jerdan, says, after some
compliments, "the author is in his sixteenth year,"--which fixes the
date. Possibly, a brief specimen or two of this may please: take the
livelier first,--on French cookery: if trivial, the lines are genuine: I
must not doctor anything up even by a word.
"Now Muse, you must versify your very best,
To sing how they ransack the East and the West,
To tell how they plunder the North and the South
For food for the stomach and zest for the mouth!
Such savoury stews, and such odorous dishes,
Such soups, and (at Calais) such capital fishes!
With sauces so strange they disguise the lean meat
That you seldom, or never, know what you're to eat;
Such fricandeaux, fricassees epicurean,
Such vins-ordinaires, and such banquets Circean,--
And the nice little nothings which very soon vanish
Before you are able your plate to replenish,--
Such exquisite eatables! and for your drink
Not porter or ale, but--what do you think?
'Tis Burgundy, Bourdeaux, real red rosy wine,
Which you quaff at a draught, neat nectar, divine!
Thus they pamper the taste with everything good
And of an old shoe can make savoury food,
But the worst of it is that when you have done
You are nearly as famish'd as when you begun!"
For a more serious morsel, take the closing lines on Rouen:--
"Yes, proud Cathedral, ages pass'd away
While generations lived their little day,--
France has been deluged with her patriots' blood
By traitors to their country and their God,--
The face of Europe has been changed, but thou
Hast stood sublime in changelessness till now,
Exulting in thy glories of carved stone,
A living monument of ages gone!--
Yet--time hath touch'd thee too; thy prime is o'er,--
A few short years, and thou must be no more;
Ev'n thou must bend beneath the common fate,
But in thy very ruins wilt be great!"
More than enough of this brief memory of "Sixty Years Since," which has
no other extant record, and is only given as a sample of the rest,
equally juvenile. Three years however before, this, my earliest piece
printed, I find among my papers a very faded copy of my first MS. in
verse, being part of an attempted prize poem at Charterhouse on
Carthage, written at the age of thirteen in 1823; for auld langsyne's
sake I rescue its conclusion thus curtly from oblivion,--though no doubt
archæologically faulty:--
"Where sculptured temples once appeared to sight,
Now dismal ruins meet the moon's pale light,--
Where regal pomp once shone with gorgeous ray,
And kings successive held their transient sway;--
Where once the priest his sacred victims led
And on the altars their warm lifeblood shed,--
Where swollen rivers once had amply flowed
And splendid galleys down the stream had rowed,
A dreary wilderness now meets the view,
And nought but Memory can trace the clue!"
The poor little schoolboy's muse was perhaps quite of the pedestrian
order: but so also, the critics said, had been stern old Dr. Johnson's
in his "London."
Mere school-exercises (whereof I have some antique copybooks before me),
cannot be held to count for much as early literature; though I know not
why some of my Greek Iambic translations of the Psalms and Shakespeare,
as also sundry very respectable versions of English poems into Latin
Sapphics and Alcaics still among my archives, should not have been
shrined--as they were offered at the time--in Dr. Haig Brown's
Carthusian Anthology. However somehow these have escaped printer's
ink,--the only true _elixir vitæ_--and we must therefore suppose them
not quite worthy to be bracketed with the classical versification of
Buchanan or even of Mr. John Milton,--albeit actually superior to sundry
of the aforesaid Anthologia Carthusiana; so of these we will say
nothing.
Of other sorts of schoolboy literaria whereof from time to time I was
guilty let me save here (by way of change) one or two of my trivial
humoristics: here is one, not seen in print till now; "Sapphics to my
Umbrella,--written on a very rainy day," in 1827. N.B. If Canning in his
Eton days immortalised sapphically a knifegrinder, why shouldn't a young
Carthusian similarly celebrate his gingham?
"Valued companion of my expeditions,
Wanderings, and my street perambulations,
What can be more deserving of my praises
Than my umbrella?
"Under thine ample covering rejoicing,
(All the 'canaille' tumultuously running)
While the rain streams and patters from the housetops,
Slow and majestic,
"I trudge along unwetted, though an ocean
Pours from the clouds, as if some Abernethy
Had given all the nubilary regions
Purges cathartic!
"Others run on in piteous condition,
Black desperation painted in their faces,
While the full flood descends in very pailfuls
Streaming upon them.
"Yea, 'tis as if some cunning necromancer
Had drawn a circle magically round me,
Till like the wretched victim of Kehama,
(Southey's abortion)
"Nothing like liquor ever could approach me!
But it is thou, disinterested comrade,
Bearest the rainy weather uncomplaining,
Oh, my umbrella!
"How many hats, and 'upper Bens,' and new coats,
How many wretched duckings hast thou saved me
Well--I have done--but must be still indebted
To my umbrella!"
Another such trifle may be permissible, as thus: also about an umbrella,
a stolen one. On the occasion of my loss I wrote this to rebuke the
thief, "The height of honesty:"--
"Three friends once, in the course of conversation,
Touch'd upon honesty: 'No virtue better,'
Says Dick, quite lost in sweet self-admiration,
'I'm sure I'm honest;--ay--beyond the letter:
You know the field I rent; beneath the ground
My plough stuck in the middle of a furrow
And there a pot of golden coins I found!
My landlord has it, without fail, to-morrow.'
Thus modestly his good intents he told:
'But stay,' says Bob,' we soon shall see who's best,
A _stranger_ left with me uncounted gold!
But I'll not touch it; which is honestest?'
'Your honest acts I've heard,' says Jack, 'but I
Have done much better, would that all folks learn'd it,
Mine is the highest pitch of honesty--
I borrow'd an umbrella and--_return'd it!!_'".
_N.B._--I remember that Dr. Buckland, whose geological lectures I
attended, had the words "Stolen from Dr. Buckland" engraved on the ivory
handle of _his_ umbrella: he never lost it again.
In the way of prose, not printed (though much later on I have since
published "Paterfamilias's Diary of Everybody's Tour") I have kept
journals of holiday travel _passim_, whereof I now make a brief mention.
Six juvenile bits of authorship are before me, ranging through the
summers of 1828 to 1835 inclusive; each neatly written in its note-book
on the spot and at the time (therefore fresh and true) decorated with
untutored sketches, and all full of interest ab least to myself in old
memories, faded interests, and departed friends. As very rare survivals
of the past (for who cares to keep as I have done his schoolboy journals
of half a century ago?) I will give at haphazard from each in its order
of time a short quotation by way of sample,--a brick to represent the
house. My first, A.D. 1828, records how my good father took his
sons through the factories of Birmingham and the potteries of
Staffordshire, down an iron mine and a salt mine, &c. &c., thus teaching
us all we could learn energetically and intelligently; it details also
how we were hospitably entertained for a week in each place by the
magnate hosts of Holkar Hall and Inveraray Castle; and how we did all
touristic devoirs by lake, mountain, ruin, and palace: in fact, a short
volume in MS., whereof quite at random here is a specimen page. "Melrose
looks at a distance very little ruinous, but more like a perfect
cathedral. While the horses were being changed we walked to see this
Abbey, a splendid ruin, with two very light and beautiful oriel windows
to the east and south, besides many smaller ones; the architecture being
florid Gothic. The tracery round the capitals of pillars is in wonderful
preservation, looking as fresh and sharp as on the first day of their
creation; instead of the Grecian acanthus _Scotch kail_ being a
favourite ornament. Some of the images still remain in their niches. In
the east aisle is the grave of the famous wizard, Michael Scott, and at
the foot of the tombstone a grim-looking figure,--query himself? In the
ruined cloisters the tracery is of the most delicate description,
foliage of trees and vegetables being carved on them. This Abbey was
founded by David the First, but repaired by James the Fourth, which
accounts for his altered crown appearing in stone on the walls," &c. &c.
The Scotch kail is curious, as indicative of national preference: and
is the wizard still on guard? Recollect that in those days there were no
guide-books,--so every observant traveller had to record for himself
what he saw.
The next, in 1829, was a second visit to the Continent, my first having
been in 1826, with those quotations from "Rough Rhymes" which have
already met your view. In this we took the usual tour of those days,
_viâ_ Brussels and the Rhine to Switzerland, and I might quote plenty
thereof if space and time allowed. Here shall follow a casual page from
the 1829 MS. Journal, now before me.
"Heidelberg has a university of seven hundred students, who wear no
particular academicals, but are generally seen with a little red or blue
cap topping a luxuriant head of hair, a long coat, and moustaches which
usually perform the function of a chimney to pipe or cigar. All along
our to-day's route extended immense fields of tobacco, turnips, and
vegetals of every description. Most of the women seem to be troubled
with goitres, and we observed that all who have them wear rows of
garnets strung tight on the part affected, whether with the idea of
hiding the deformity, or of rendering the beauty of the swelling more
conspicuous, or of charming it away, I cannot tell. The roads in these
parts are much avenued with walnut trees: Fels, our courier, told me
that of all trees they are most subject to be struck by lightning, and
that under them is always a current of air. I insert his information, as
he is both a sensible man, and has had great opportunities of
observing," &c. &c. Here is a gap of three years.
In 1832, my journal about Dorsetshire and the Isle of Wight is chiefly
geological: as this extract shows, it was mainly a search after fossil
spoils at Charmouth:--"Would you like to see a creature with the head of
a lizard, wings of a bat, and tail of a serpent? Such things have been,
as these bones testify; they are called Pterodactyls, and are as big as
ravens. Thus, you see, a dragon is no chimera, but attested by a science
founded on observation, Geology. As their bones (known by their
hollowness) often occur in the coprolites or fossil dung of Plesiosauri,
mighty monsters of the deep like gigantic swans, it is thought they were
their special prey, for which the long and flexible neck of the
Plesiosaurus is an _à priori_ argument," &c. &c.
The 1833 journal is Welsh; and, _inter alia_, I therein drew and I now
record that recently destroyed and more recently restored Druidical
movement, the Buckstone: "A solid mass of rock, not of living adamant
but of dead pudding-stone, seemingly 'by subtle magic poised' on the
brow of a steep and high hill, wooded with oaks: the top of this mass of
rock is an area of fifty-four feet, its base being four, and the height
twelve. It was once a logan stone, but now has no rocking properties;
though most perilously poised on the side of a slope, and certainly, if
in part a work of nature, it must have been helped by art, seeing the
mere action of the atmosphere never could have so exactly chiselled away
all but the centre of gravity. The secret of the Druids, in this
instance at least, was in leaving a large mass behind, which as a lever
counteracted the preponderance of the rock." I drew on the spot two
exact views of it, taken to scale,--whereof this is one,--now of some
curious value, since its intentional destruction last year by a snobbish
party of mischievous idiots. (However, I see by the papers that, at a
cost of £500, it has been replaced.) Let this touch suffice as to my
then growing predilection for Druidism, since expanded by me into
several essays find pamphlets, touching on that strange topic, the
numerous rude stone monuments from Arabia to Mona.
[Illustration]
The 1834 journal regards Scotland,--a country I have since visited
several times, including the Orkneys and Shetlands, and the voyage round
from Thurso _viâ_ Cape Wrath to the Hebrides; whereof, perhaps, more
anon. For a specimen page of this let me give what follows; the locality
is near Inverness and the Caledonian Canal: "We now bent our steps
toward Craig Phadrick, two miles north. This is the site of one of the
celebrated vitrified forts, concerning the creation of which there has
been so much learned discussion. And verily there is room, for there is
mystery: I will detail what we saw. On the summit of a steep hill of
conglomerate rock we could trace very clearly a double oblong enclosure
of eighty yards by twenty, with entrances east and west, a space of five
yards being between the two oblongs. The mounds were outwardly of turf,
but under a thin skin of this was a thick continuous wall of molten
stone, granite, gneiss, and sandstone, bubbling together in a hotchpot!
The existence of these forts (occurring frequently on the heights and of
various shapes) is attempted to be explained by divers theories. One man
tells us they were beacons; but, first, what an enormous one is here,
one hundred and twenty-four feet by sixty of blazing wood, timber being
scarce too! next, they sometimes occur in low situations from which a
flame could scarcely be seen; thirdly, common wood fire will not melt
granite. Another pundit says they are volcanic. O wondrous volcano to
spout oblong concentric areas of stone walls! Perhaps the best
explanation is that the Celts cemented these hilltops of strongholds by
means of coarse glass, a sort of red-hot mortar, using sea-sand and
seaweed as a flux. This is Professor Whewell's idea, and with him we had
some interesting conversation on that and other subjects." Of this
Scotch tour, full of interest, thus very curtly. Turn we now to Ireland
in 1835. My record of just fifty years ago is much what it might be now,
starvation, beggary, and human wretchedness of all sorts in the midst of
a rich land, through indolence relapsed into a jungle of thorns and
briars, quaking bogs, and sterile mountains; whisky, and the idle
uncertain potato, combining with ignorance and priestcraft, to
demoralise the excitable unreasoning race of modern Celts. Let us turn
from the sad scenes of which my said diary is full, to my day at the
spar caverns of Kingston. "At the bottom of a stone quarry, we clad
ourselves in sack garments that mud wouldn't spoil, and with lit candles
descended into the abyss, hands, knees, and elbows being of as much
service as our feet. Now, I am not going to map my way after the manner
of guide-books, nor to nickname the gorgeous architecture of nature
according to the caprice of a rude peasant on the spot or the fancy of a
passing stranger. I might fill a page with accounts of Turks' tents,
beehives, judges' wigs, harps, handkerchiefs, and flitches of bacon, but
I rather choose to speak of these subterranean palaces with none of such
vulgar similarities. No one ever saw such magnificence in stalactites;
from the black fissured roofs of antres vast and low-browed caves they
are hanging, of all conceivable shapes and sizes and descriptions. Now a
tall-fluted column, now a fringed canopy, now like a large white sheet
flung over a beetling rock in the elegant folds and easy drapery of a
curtain, everywhere are pure white stalactites like icicles straining to
meet the sturdier mounds of stalagmite below; whilst in the smaller
caves slender tubes extend from top to bottom like congealed rain. One
cavern is quite curtained round with dazzling and wavy tapestry; another
has gigantic masses of the white spar pouring from its crannied roof
like boiled Brobdingnag macaroni; others like heaps of snowy linen lying
about or hanging from the ceiling. The extent of the caves is quite
unknown: eleven acres (I was told) have been surveyed and mapped, while
there are six avenues still unexplored, and you may already wander for
twenty-four hours through the discovered provinces of the gnome king."
This is not to be compared with Kentucky, perhaps not quite with
Derbyshire; but it seemed to me marvellous at the time. Let this much
suffice as hinted reference to those early journals, which, if the world
were not already more full of books than of their readers, would be as
well worth printing in their integrity as many others of their bound and
lettered brethren.
In connection with these journals, I have been specially requested to
add to the above this record following (dated forty-four years ago) as a
specimen of my letter-writing in old days: it has pen-and-ink sketches,
here inserted by way of rough and ready illustration. The whole letter
is printed in its integrity as desired, and tells its own archæological
tale, though rather voluminously; but in the prehistoric era before
Rowland Hill arose, to give us cheap stamps for short notes, it was an
economy to make a letter as long as possible to pay for its exorbitant
postage: for example, my letters to and from Oxford used to cost
eightpence--or double if in an envelope, then absurdly surcharged.
_My Cornish Expedition._
[Illustration: [The Arms of Cornwall]
8th and 9th of January 1840.
"FOR ONE AND ALL"]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
My Dear Mother, and all good Domiciliars,--
I suppose it to be the intention of our worshipful and right
bankrupt Government that everybody write to everybody true, full,
and particular accounts of all things which he, she, or it, may
have done, be doing, or be about to do; and seeing I may have
something to say which will interest you all, I fulfil the
gossiping intentions of the Collective Wisdom, and give you an
omnibus epistle. Now, I recommend a good map, a quiet mind, and as
Charley says, Atten_tion_.--The bright, clear, frosty morning of
the 8th found me at Devonport, and nine o'clock beheld the same
egregious individual, well-benjamined, patronising with his bodily
presence the roof of the Falmouth coach. A steam ferry-bridge took
us across the Hamoaze, which, with its stationed hulks, scattered
shipping, and town and country banks, made, as it always makes, a
beautiful landscape. At Torpoint we first encountered venerable
Cornwall; and a pretty drive of sixteen miles, well wooded, and
watered by several intrusions of the unsatisfied sea, brought coach
and contents to Liskeard, a clean, granite, country town, with
palatial inn, and (in common with the whole of Devonshire and
Cornwall) a large many gabled church, covered with carved cathedral
windows, and shadowed by ancient elms. Not being able to accomplish
everything, I heard of, but saw not, divers antiquities in the
distant neighbourhood of St. Clare, such as a circle of stones, an
old church and well, and the natural curiosity called the
cheese-ring, being a mass of layered granite capriciously
decomposed: these "unseen ones" (what a mysterious name for a
three-volumed Bentleyism!) I do not regret, for I know how to
appreciate those wonders, the only enchantment whereof is,
distance. So suffered I conveyance to Lostwithiel, a town lying in
a hollow under the pictorial auspices of Restormel Castle, whose
ivied ruins up the valley are fine and Raglandish: while the rest
were bolting a coach dinner, I betook me to ye church, and was
charmed with a curious antique font, and the tower, an octagon
gothic lantern with extinguisher atop, like this: as far as memory
serves me. Onward again, through St. Blazey, and a mining district,
not ill-wooded, nor unpicturesque, to the fair town of St. Austle,
which the piety of Cornish ancestors has furnished with another
splendid specimen of ecclesiastical architecture, the upper half of
the chief tower, a square one, being fretted on every stone with
florid carving, and grotesque devices: but what shall I say of
Probus tower, which from top to bottom is covered with delicate
tracery cut in granite? it rises above the miserable surrounding
village, a satire upon neighbouring degeneracy in things religious:
you must often have seen drawings of Probus at the Watercolour
Exhibition, as it is a regular artists' lion. At about half-past
six we got into Truro, a clean wide flourishing town with London
shops, a commemorative column, a fine spired church, bridges over
narrow streams, and, like most other West of England towns, well
payed and gas-lighted. From this, I had intended to go to Falmouth,
but a diligent brain-sucking of coach comrades induced me to jump
at once into a branch conveyance to Penzance, so passing sleepy
Redruth, Camborne, and St. Erth in the dark, I found myself safely
housed at the Union Inn, Penzance, at half-past eleven. Talking of
unions, the country is studded here as everywhere with them; fine
buildings put to the pernicious use of imprisoning for life those
whose only crime is poverty, and destined to be metamorphosed ere
long (so I prophesy) into lunatic asylums for desperate
ministerialists, prisons for the Chartists, veterinary colleges for
cattle with the rot, and as one good end, hospitals for the poor.
Near Redruth, I took notice in the moonlight of Carn-bréh, the
remains of a British beacon or hill-fort, much of the antiquarian
interest of which has been destroyed by a neighbouring squire
having added to it _modern_ ruins, to make it an object from his
hall! the whole hill, like much of the country, is sprinkled with
granite blocks higgledi-piggledy, and it is a grand dispute among
the pundits, whether or not the Archdruid Nature has been playing
at marbles in these parts; I wished to satisfy myself about it, but
couldn't stop, and so there's no use in grummering about regrets.
I've seen enough, to be able to judge _à priori_, that father
Noah's flood piled the hill with blocks, which have served one Dr.
Borlase and others as occasions for earning the character of
blockheads. One thing is man's doing, without _much_ dispute, and
that is, an obelisk in honour of old Lord De Dunstanville, which is
a conspicuous toothpick on the hilltop: no doubt, as in this case,
nature brought the stones there, and man did his part in arranging
them; poor Dr. B. would have you believe that every natural rock
had been lifted here bodily for architectural purposes, and as
bodily made a most elaborate and labyrinthine ruin afterwards. At
Penzance, a broiled fish supper, and to bed by midnight, having
ordered a twilight gig, wherein by 7 on the ninth I was traversing
the beautiful bay. Penzance is a fine town in a splendid situation;
the bay, bounded by the Lizard and its opposite bold
brother-headland, inclosing St. Michael's Mount, and having a
fertile and villa-studded background; the town full of good
handsome shops (one like the Egyptian Hall), a large cathedralish
church, and with a very special market-place, of light granite, in
the form of a plain Grecian temple, surmounted at the middle by an
imposing dome. As I had duly culled information from the natives, I
lost no time in breakfasting, but drove off, bun in hand, to
explore the country of the Druids. Now, if the matters I succeeded
in visiting were in isolated and plain situations, they might have
been less disappointing; but where the face of the whole soil is
covered naturally with jutting rocks, and timeworn boulders of
granite, one doesn't feel much astonishment to see some one stone
set on end a little more obviously than the rest, or to find out by
dint of perseverance a little arrangement, which may or may not be
accidental: added to this, the cottages, and walls, and field
enclosures are built of such immense blocks cleared off the surface
of the fields, that one's mind is prepared for far more than the
Druids ever did: many a Stonehengeified doorway, many a Titanic
pigstye, many a "Pelion-on-Ossa" questionable-sentry box, puts one
out of conceit with our puny ancestors. I went first to the
Dâns-mene, a famous stone-circle; and felt not a little vexed to
find that I, little i, am feet taller than any of the uprights
there, not 25 in number, and no bigger than field gateposts. It is
evidently the consecrated portion of a battlefield, for there are
several single stones dotted about the neighbourhood, to mark where
heroes fell; like those at Inveraray, but smaller. The habit all
through Cornwall of setting up a stone in every field, for cattle
to scratch themselves withal, seems to be a sly satire against
other rubbing-stones for A.S. Ses. A few dreary miles further
brought me to the "voonder of voonders," the Logan-Rock, which on
the map is near Boskenna. The cliff and coast scenery is superb;
immense masses of granite of all shapes and sizes tumbled about in
all directions; what wonder that in such a heap of giant pebbles
_one_ should be found ricketty? or more, what wonder that the very
decomposing nature of coarse granite should have caused the
atmosphere to eat away, gradually, all but the actual centre of
gravity? both at the Logan, and Land's End, and Mount St. Michael,
I am sure I have seen a hundred rocks wasted very nearly to the
moving point, and I could mention specifically six, which in 20
years will rock, or in half an hour of chiselling would. In part
proof of what I say, the Land-End people, jealous of Logan
customers, have just found out a great rock in their parts, which
two men can make to move; I recommended a long-handled chisel, and
have little doubt that my hint will be acted on; by next season,
the Cornish antiquaries will be puzzling their musty brains over
marks of "druidical" tools; essays will appear, to demonstrate that
the chippings were accomplished by the consecrated golden sickle;
the rock will be proved to have been quarried at Normandy, and
ferried over; facsimiles of the cuts will be lithographed; and the
Innkeeper of the "First and Last house in England" will gratefully
present a piece of plate (a Druid "spanning" [consider Ezekiel's
"putting the branch to the nose" as a sign of contempt]!) to the
author of "Hints for a Chisel," "Proverbial Phil.," &c. &c. &c.
But--_revenous à nos moutons_: to _the_ Logan: until it was
scrupulously pointed out, by so tangible a manner as my boy-guide
getting _on_ it, I could scarcely distinguish it from the fine
hurlyburly of rocks around. That it moves there is no question; but
when I tell you that it is now obliged to be artificially kept from
falling, by a chain fixing it behind, and a beam to rest on before,
I think you will agree with me in muttering "the humbug!" Artists
have so diligently falsified the view, _ad captandum_, that you
will have some difficulty in recognising so old a friend as the
Logan: it is commonly drawn as if isolated, _thus_, and would so,
no doubt, be very astonishing; but, when my memory puts it as
above, stapled, and _obliged_ to remain for Cockneys to log it,
surrounded by a much more imposing brotherhood, my wonder only is
that it keeps its lion character, and that, considering the easy
explication of its natural cause or accident, it should ever have
been conceived to be man's doing; perhaps the Druids availed
themselves of so lucky a chance for miracle-mongering, but as to
having contrived it, you might as well say that they built the
cliffs. It strikes me, moreover, that Cornwall could never have
been the headquarters of Druidism, inasmuch as the soil is too
scanty for oaks: there isn't a tree of any size, much less an oak
tree in all West Cornwall: they must have cut samphire from the
rocks, instead of misletoe from oaks, and the old gentlemen must
have been pretty tolerable climbers, victim and all, to have got
near enough to touch the Logan: to be sure it was a frosty day, and
iron-shod shoes on icy granite are not over coalescible, but I did
not dare scramble to it, as a tumble would have insured a
particularly uncomfortable death; and although the interesting
"Leaper from the Logan, or Martin Martyr" would have had his name
enshrined in young lady sonnets, and azure albums, such immortality
had little charms for me. I contented myself with being able to
swear that I have seen 90 tons of stone moved by a child of ten
years old. Near it is another, called the logging lady, a block,
upright like its neighbours, about 12 feet high, and which the boy
told me could only be made to log by two men with poles; in fact,
one end is worn with levers: well, I told him to try and move it;
no use, says he; try, said I; he did try, and couldn't; well, I
took a sight of where I thought he could do it, and set him to
push; forthwith, my lady tottered, and I told the boy, if he would
only keep to himself where he pushed it would be a banknote to him.
I mention this to illustrate what I verily believe, to wit, that,
if a man only took the breakneck trouble to clamber and try, he
would discover several rocking-stones; but the fact is, this would
diminish the wonder, and Cockneys wouldn't come to see what is
easily explained: your Druids, with imaginary dynamics, invest
nature's freaks with mysterious interest. But away to Tol Peden
Penwith, where there is another curiosity; in the smooth green
middle of a narrow promontory, surrounded and terminated by the
boldest rock-scenery, strangely drops down for a perpendicular
hundred feet, a circular chasm, not ill named the Funnel, and which
not even a stolid Borlase can pretend was dug by the Druids: at the
bottom there is communication with the sea by means of a cavern,
and in stormy weather the rush up this gigantic earth's
chimney-must be something terrible: will this convey a rough idea?
the scenery all round is really magnificent, and the looking down
this black smooth stone-pit is quite fearful; it slopes away so
deceitfully, and looks like a huge lion-ant's nest. Few people see
this, because you can only get at it by a walk of a mile, but I
think it quite as worth seeing as the logan-rock. My next object
was the Land's End, where, as elsewhere, I did signalise myself by
_not_ scribbling my autograph on a rock, or carving M.F.T. on the
sod: the rocky coast is of the same grand character; granite bits,
as big as houses, floundering over each other like whales at play;
the cliffs, cavernous, castellated, mossgrown, and weatherbeaten;
it looks _like_ a Land's end, a regular break up of the world's
then useless ribs: an outlier of rocks in the sea, surmounted by a
lighthouse: looks _like_ the end of the struggle between conquering
man, and sturdy desolation. One place, where I tremble to think I
have been, struck me as quite awful: helped by an iron-handed
sailor, who comforts you in the dizzy scramble with "Never fear,
sir, you shan't fall, unless I fall too," you fearfully pick your
way to the extreme end, where it goes slick down, and lying
prostrate on the slippery granite (which looks disjointed
everywhere, and as if it would fall with you, bodily) with head
strained over you see under you a dreadful cavern, open nearly to
where you are, up which roars the white and angry sea. O brother
David, and foot-tingling Sire, never can you take that look; and
never would I again. Only think of tipping over! ugh.--Into the gig
again, beside my shrewd Sam Weller driver, and away. Here and there
about this part of Cornwall are studded rude stone crosses,
probably of the time of St. Colomba, as they are similar to those
at Iona: about two or three feet high, and very rude. In one place,
I noticed what seemed to be a headless female figure, perhaps the
Virgin, and as large as life: my Jehu said he had heard that it
once had a head. We soon came to a small square inclosure, said to
be a most ancient cemetery; I scrambled over the wall, and found
among the briars and weeds one solitary tomb of a venerable and
Runic aspect, but I soon found out that it recorded the name of
somebody who departed Ye LYFE somewhere in 1577; nothing so
extremely ancient. A rough rock-besprinkled hill now attracted me,
as I heard it was called another Carn-bréh, and was surmounted by
some mound, or ruin: so out of the gig, and up in no time. Clearly
it had been an ancient beacon place, as atop are the remains of a
small square-built terrace inclosing some upright stones placed
irregularly,--a sort of huge fireplace. One of the neighbouring
rocks presented on its surface a fine specimen of what are called
rock basins; but unluckily for the antiquary, this excavation is on
the side of the stone, not on the summit; so that it could not
possibly hold water, and is clearly caused by some particular moss
eating away the stone.--By three o'clock returned to Penzance, had
dinner (it was breakfast too), bought a mineral memorial, and in
the gig again, over the sands to the outlandishly named Mara Zion,
or Market Jew, words probably of similar import. Opposite to this
little place, and joined to it by a neck of rocks passable at
low-water, stands that picturesque gem, Mount St. Michael. You know
the sort of thing; an abrupt, pyramid of craggy rock, crowned with
an edifice, half stronghold and half cathedral. It is a home of the
St. Aubyn family, and is well kept up in the ancient style, but in
rather a small way: a portcullised entrance, old armour hanging in
the guard-room, a beautiful dining-hall with carved oak roof, and
panels, and chairs; a chapel to match, with stained windows; an
elegant Gothic drawing-room, white and gold; and everything, down
to black-leather drinking jugs, in character with the feudal
stronghold. I mounted the corkscrew tower, and got to the broken
stone lantern they call St. Michael's chair; an uncomfortable job,
but rewarded by a splendid panorama, gilt by the setting sun: in
the chapel too, I descended into a miserable dungeon communicating
with a monk's stall, where doubtless some self-immured penitent had
wasted life away, only coming to the light for matins, and only
relieved from solitary imprisonment by midnight mass. This has been
discovered but very lately in repairing the chapel: it was walled
up, and contained a skeleton. As a matter of course, this old
castle contains a little hidden room, where that ubiquitous
vagabond, the royal Charles, laid his hunted head: the poor
persecuted debauchee sponged upon all his friends like Bellyserious
Buggins. Back again, by water this time, to little Mara Zion, but
ever and anon looking with admiration on that beautiful mount; the
western rocks are really magnificent, as big as the largest
hay-stacks, and tumbled about as loosely as an emptied sugar-basin;
some hanging by a corner, and others resting on a casual fragment;
I am sure of one logan-stone, if a little impertinent bit of rock
were only moved away; and I walked under and between more Titanic
architecture than Stonehenge can show: the Druids, for my part,
shall have their due, but not where they don't deserve it. At nine,
after a substantial fried-fish tea, I mounted the night coach to
Falmouth,--outside, as there was no room in, and so, through
respectable Helstone, remarkable for a florid Gothic arch erected
to some modern worthy of the town, to decent Penryn, and then by
midnight, to the narrowest of all towns, Falmouth. I longed to get
back to my darlings, and resolved to see them by next morning, so
booked an outside (no room inside, as before) for an immediate
start. Now, you can readily imagine that I was by no means hot, and
though the night of Thursday last was rather mild, still it was
midwinter: accordingly I conceived and executed a marvellous
calorificating plan, which even the mail-coachman had never heard
of. Haying comforted my interiors with hot grog of the stiffest, I
called for another shillingsworth of brandy, and deliberately
emptied it, to the astonished edification of beholders, into my
boots! literal fact, and it kept my feet comfortable all night
long. And so, wrapped all in double clothing, sped I my rapid way,
varying what I had before seen by passing through desolate Bodmin,
and its neighbourhood of rock, moor, and sand: hot coffee at
Liskeard, morning broke soon after, then the glorious sun over the
sea. Hamoaze, the ferry, and Devonport at 1/2 past 8. Much as I
longed to get home, I went forthwith into a hot bath at 102, to
boil out all chills, and thence went spick and span to my happy
rest, having within 48 hours seen the best part of Cornwall and its
wonders, and rode or walked 250 miles. And so, brother David,
commend me for a traveller. HERE ends my Cornish
expedition. Does it recall to thee, O sire, thine own of old time,
undertaken (if I remember rightly) with Dr. Kidd?--Mails then did
not travel like the Quicksilver, averaging 12 miles an hour, and
few people go 40 miles before breakfast. Now, I feel able to get
nearer my Albury destination, and in a week or so, shall hope to be
residing at Dorchester, near the Blandford of paternal
recollections. Did you, dear mother, get a letter from me directed
to Albury? I hope so, for it sets all clear: and if not, I'll set
the nation against cheap postage. I don't feel the least confidence
now in the Post Office, forasmuch as they have no interest in a
letter after it is paid, and many will be mislaid from haste and
multiplicity. Please to say if it came safely to hand, as I judge
it important. If you, dear mother, got my last, I have nothing more
to say, and if not, I'll blow up the Post Office: unpopularity
would send all the letters by carriers: but whether or not, I can't
write any more, so with a due proportion of regards rightly
broadcast around, accept the remainder from--Your affectionate son,
M.F.T.
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CHAPTER IV.
COLLEGE DAYS.
In 1829 I was entered as a commoner at Christ Church, Oxford, and went
through the usual course of lectures with fair success. As a family we
have all favoured Oxford rather than Cambridge: my father and two
cousins, Elisha and Carré, were at Exeter College, to take the benefit
of its Sarnian Exhibitions; my brother Daniel was at Brasenose, and my
brother William gained a scholarship of Trinity. When at Christ Church I
wore the same academical gown which my father had,--and have it still; a
curious antiquity in the dress line, now some fourscore years old, and
perfect for wear and appearance,--such as would have rejoiced the Sartor
Resartus of Carlyle. At college I did not do much in the literary line,
unless it is worth mention that translations from the Greek or Latin
poets were always rendered by me in verse not prose, and that I
published anonymously "A Voice from the Cloister," being an earnest
appeal to my fellow-collegians against the youthful excesses so common
in those days.
From this pamphlet I give an extract, as it is scarce; it began with
blank verse and ended with rhyme, all being for the period courageously
moral and religious. The end is as thus:--
"Enough, sad Muse, enough thy downward flight
Has cleft with wearied wing the shades of night:
Be drest in smiles, forget the gloomy past,
And, cygnet-like, sing sweeter at the last,
Strike on the chords of joy a happier strain
And be thyself, thy cheerful self, again.
Hail, goodly company of generous youth,
Hail, nobler sons of Temperance and Truth!
I see attendant Ariels circling there,
Light-hearted Innocence, and Prudence fair,
Sweet Chastity, young Hope, and Reason bright,
And modest Love, in heaven's own hues bedight,
Staid Diligence, and Health, and holy Grace,
And gentle Happiness with smiling face,--
All, all are there; and Sorrow speeds away,
And Melancholy flees the sons of day;
Dull Care is gladden'd with reflected light,
And wounded Sin flies sickening at the sight.
"My friends, whose innate worth the wise man's praise
And the fool's censure equally betrays,
Accept the humble blessing of my Muse,
Nor your assistance to her aim refuse,
She asks not flattery, but let her claim
A kind perusal, and a secret name."
I scarcely like to mention it, as a literary accident, but being a
curious and unique anecdote it shall be stated. I had the honour at
Christ Church of being prizetaker of Dr. Burton's theological essay,
"The Reconciliation of Matthew and John," when Gladstone who had also
contested it, stood second; and when Dr. Burton had me before him to
give me the £25 worth of books, he requested me to allow Mr. Gladstone
to have £5 worth of them, as he was so good a second. Certainly such an
easy concession was one of my earliest literary triumphs.
My first acquaintance with Gladstone, whom I have known from those
college days now for more than five and fifty years, was a memorable
event, and may thus be worthy of mention. It was at that time not a
common thing for undergraduates to go to the communion at Christchurch
Cathedral--that holy celebration being supposed to be for the particular
benefit of Dean and Canons, and Masters of Arts. So when two
undergraduates went out of the chancel together after communion, which
they had both attended, it is small wonder that they addressed each
other genially, in defiance of Oxford etiquette, nor that a friendship
so well begun has continued to this hour. Not that I have always
approved of my friend's politics; multitudes of letters through many
years have passed between us, wherein if I have sometimes ventured to
praise or to blame, I have always been answered both gratefully and
modestly: but I have ever tried to hold the balance equally too,
according to my lights, and if at one time (on occasion of the great
Oxford election, 1864) I published a somewhat famous copy of verses,
ending with
"Orator, statesman, scholar, wit, and sage,
The Crichton,--more, the Gladstone of the age,"
my faithfulness must in after years confess to a well-known palinode
(one of my "Three Hundred Sonnets") commencing
"Beware of mere delusive eloquence,"
and a still more caustic lyric, beginning with
"Glozing tongue whom none can trust,"
and so forth, as a caution against a great man's special gift, so
proverbially dangerous. Some of our most honest Ministers, _e.g._,
Althorpe and Wellington, have been very bad speakers: some of our most
eloquent orators have proved very bad Ministers.
And in this place I may introduce some account, long ago in print, of
the famous Aristotle class under the tutorship of Mr. Biscoe at Christ
Church, wherein (among far nobler and better scholars) your present
confessor took the lowest seat.
Fifty years ago Biscoe's Aristotle class at Christ Church was comprised
almost wholly of men who have since become celebrated, some in a
remarkable degree; and, as we believe that so many names, afterwards
attaining to great distinction, have rarely been associated at one
lecture-board, either at Oxford or elsewhere, it may be allowed to one
who counts himself the least and lowest of the company to pen this brief
note of those old Aristotelians.
Let the central figure be _Gladstone_--ever from youth up the beloved
and admired of many personal intimates (although some may be politically
his opponents). Always the foremost man, warm-hearted, earnest,
hard-working, and religious, he had a following even in his teens; and
it is noticeable that a choice lot of young and keen intelligences of
Eton and Christ Church formed themselves into a small social sort of
club, styled, in compliment to their founder's initials, the "W.E.G."
Next to Gladstone Lord _Lincoln_ used to sit, his first parliamentary
patron at Newark, and through life to death his friend. We all know how
admirably in many offices of State the late Duke of Newcastle served his
country, and what a good and wise Mentor he was to a grateful Telemachus
in America.
_Canning_ may be mentioned thirdly; then a good-looking youth with
classic features and a florid cheek, since gone to "the land of the
departed" after having healed up the wounds of India as her
Governor-General. Next to the writer, one on each side, sat two more
Governors-General _in futuro_, though then both younger sons and
commoners, and now both also gone to their reward elsewhere; these were
_Bruce_, afterwards Lord Elgin, and _Ramsay_, Lord Dalhousie; the one
famous from Canada to China, the other noted for his triumphs in the
Punjaub. When at Toronto in 1851, the writer was welcomed to the
splendid hospitality of Lord Elgin, and the very lecture-room here
depicted was mentioned as "a rare gathering of notables." Lord
_Abercorn_ was of the class, a future viceroy; Lord _Douglas_, lately
Duke of Hamilton, handsome as an Apollo, and who married a Princess of
Baden; and if Lord _Waterford_ was infrequent in his attendance, at
least he was eligible, and should not be omitted as a various sort of
eccentric celebrity. Then _Phillimore_ was there, now our Dean of the
Arches; _Scott_ and _Liddell_, both heads of houses, and even then
conspiring together for their great Dictionary. _Curzon_ too (lately
Lord De la Zouch) was at the table, meditating Armenian and Levantine
travels, and longing in spirit for those Byzantine MSS. preserved at
Parham, where the writer has delighted to inspect them; how nearly
Tischendorf was anticipated in his fortunate find of that earliest
Scripture, no one knows better than Lord Zouch, who must have been close
upon that great and important discovery! _Doyle_, now Professor of
Poetry, _Hill_, of Mathematics, _Vaughan_, of History--all were of this
wonderful class; as also the Earl of _Selkirk_, celebrated as a
mathematician; Bishops _Hamilton_, _Denison_, and _Wordsworth_; and
_Cornewall Lewis_, late Chancellor of the Exchequer; and _Kynaston_,
Head Master of St. Paul's; and a member of Parliament or two, as, for
example, _Leader_, once popular for Westminster.
Now, other names of almost equal eminence may have been here
accidentally omitted, but the writer will not guess at more than he
actually recollects. Sometimes--for the lecture was a famous
one--members of other colleges came in; _Sidney Herbert_, of Oriel, in
particular, is remembered; and if _Robert Lowe_, of University, was only
occasionally seen, it must have been because he seldom went abroad till
twilight.
Altogether "there were giants in those days;" and, without controversy,
a casual class, containing more than a score of such; illustrious names
as are here registered, must be memorable. The lecture-room was next to
Christ Church Hall, where that delicate shaft supports its exquisite
traceried roof; the book was "Aristotle's Rhetoric," illustrated by each
reader with quotations, a record whereof is still _penes me_, and the
lecturer, now no longer living, was that able and accomplished classic,
the Reverend _Robert Biscoe_.
My college days are full of recollections of men, since become famous in
literature, art, science, or position: of these the principal are
already recorded as having been members of the Aristotle class. Let me
add here, that I lived for three weeks of my first term in the gaily
adorned rooms in Peckwater of the wild Lord Waterford; and afterwards in
Lord Ossulston's, both being then absent from college; that Frank
Buckland and his bear occupied (long after I had left) my own chambers
in Fells' Buildings; that I was a class-mate and friend of the luckless
Lord Conyers Osborne, then a comely and ruddy youth with curly hair and
gentle manners, and that I remember how all Oxford was horrified at his
shocking death--he having been back-broken over an arm-chair by the
good-natured but only too athletic Earl of Hillsborough in a wine-party
frolic; that Knighton, early an enthusiast for art, used to draw his own
left hand in divers attitudes with his right every day for weeks; and
that some not quite unknown cotemporary used to personate me at times
for his own benefit. As he has been long dead, I may now state that he
was believed to be Lord Douglas of Hamilton. Here is the true story. One
day the Dean requested my presence, and thus addressed me: "I have long
overlooked it, Mr. Tupper, but this must never occur again: indeed I
have only waited till now, because I knew of your general good conduct."
"What have I done, Mr. Dean: be pleased to tell me."
"Why, sir, the porter states that this is the fifth time you have not
come into college until past twelve o'clock."
"I beg your pardon, Mr. Dean; there is some mistake: for I have never
once been later than ten."
"Then, Mr. Tupper, somebody must have given your name in the dark: and I
request that you will do your best to discover who did this, and report
it to me."
As I failed to do it, after some days, again the Dean sent for me; and
finding after question made that I pretty well guessed the delinquent
but declined to expose him, the Dean kindly added--"This does you
credit, sir," and I left. A few days passed, and I was brought up again
with "I think you are intended for the Church, Mr. Tupper." As well as I
could manage it, I stammered out that it was impossible, as I could not
speak. Then he said he was sorry for that, as he meant to nominate me
for a studentship. This, however, never came to pass, and so the matter
dropped; until Dean Gaisford succeeded Dean Smith, and Joseph lost his
Pharaoh.
At college I lived the quiet life of a reading-man; though I varied
continually the desk and the book with the "constitutional" up
Headington Hill, or the gallop with Mr. Murrell's harriers, or the quick
scull to Iffley, or the more perilous sailing in a boat (no wonder that
Isis claims her annual victims), or the gig to Blenheim or
Newton-Courtnay,--or that only once alarming experience of a tandem when
the leader turned round and looked at me in its nostalgic longing to
return home,--or the geological ramble with Dr. Buckland's class,--or
the botanic searchings for wild rarities with some naturalist pundit
whose name I have forgotten; and so forth. In matters theological, I was
strongly opposed to the Tractarians, especially denouncing Newman and
Pusey for their dishonest "non-naturalness" and Number Ninety: and I
favoured with my approval (_valeat quantum_) Dr. Hampden. I attended Dr.
Kidd's anatomical lectures, and dabbled with some chemical
experiments--which when Knighton and I repeated at his father's house, 9
Hanover Square, the baronet in future blew us up to the astonishment of
the baronet _in præsenti_, his famous father. Also, I was a diligent
student in the Algebraic class of Dr. Short, afterwards the good Bishop
of St. Asaph; and I have before me now a _memoria technica_ of mine in
rhyme giving the nine chief rules of trigonometry, but not easily
producible here as full of "sines and cosines, arcs, chords, tangents,
and radii," though helpful to memory, and humorous at the time, ending
with
"At least I have proved that nothing is worse
Than Trigonometrical Problems in verse:"
there are also similarly to be recorded my mathematical _séances_ with
that worthy and clever Professor, A.P. Saunders, afterwards headmaster
of Charterhouse; and my Hebrew lectures with the mild-spoken Dr. Pusey,
afterwards so notorious; and I know not whatever else is memorable,
unless one condescended to what goes without saying about Hall and
Chapel, and Examinations: however, some frivolous larks in the Waterford
days, wherewith I need not say the present scribe had nothing to do, may
amuse. Here are three I remember; 1. An edict had gone out from the
authorities against hunting in pink,--and next morning the Dean's and
the Canons' doors in quad were found to have been miraculously painted
red in the night. 2. There was a grand party of Dons at the Deanery, and
as they hung their togas in the hall (for they couldn't conveniently
dine in them) there was filched from each proctorial sleeve that
marvellous little triangular survival of a stole which nobody can
explain, and all these collectively were nailed on the Dean's outer door
in a star. 3. A certain garden of small yews and box trees was found one
morning to have been transplanted bodily into Peckwater Quadrangle, as a
matter of mystery and defiance. And there were other like exploits; as
the immersion of that leaden Mercury into its own pond; and town and
gown rows, wherein I remember to have seen the herculean Lord
Hillsborough on one side of High Street, and Peard (afterwards
Garibaldi's Englishman) on the other, clear away the crowd of roughs
with their fists, scattering them like duplicates of the hero of
Corioli.
Of course I duly took my degrees of B.A. and M.A.,--and long after of
D.C.L., when the Cathedral chimes rang for me, as they always do for a
grand compounding Doctor.
A mentionable _curio_ of authorship on that occasion is this: whatever
may be the rule now, in those days the degree of D.C.L. involved a
three-hours' imprisonment in the pulpit of the Bodleian Chapel, for the
candidate to answer therefrom in Latin any theological objectors who
might show themselves for that purpose; as, however, the chapel was
always locked by Dr. Bliss, the registrar, there was never a possibility
to make objection. So my three hours of enforced idleness obliged me to
use pencil and paper, which I happened to have in my pocket,--and I then
and there produced my poem on "The Dead"--to be found at p. 26 of my
Miscellaneous Poems, still extant at Gall & Inglis's--a long one of
eighteen stanzas, much liked by Gladstone amongst others. I didn't
intend it certainly, but, as the poem ends with the word "bliss," it was
ridiculously thought that I had specially alluded to the registrar!
CHAPTER V.
ORDERS: AND LINCOLN'S INN.
Soon after leaving Oxford, and when some attempts to help my speech
seemed to be partially successful, my father wished me to take orders,
which also from religious motives was my own desire (for M'Neile at
Albury, and Bulteel at Oxford, had been instruments of good to me, the
first since I was 15, the other as a young collegian) and as Earl
Rivers, whom my father had financially assisted promised me a living,
and a curacy was easy where the mere licence was enough by way of
salary, I soon found myself standing for introductory approval before
Bishop Burgess at his hotel in Waterloo Place, a candidate for orders by
Examination. The good Bishop being a Hebrew scholar was glad enough to
hear that I (with however slight a smattering) had studied that
primitive tongue under Pusey and Pauli,--and I began to hope before his
awful presence. But, when he told me to read, and soon perceived my only
half-cured infirmity, he faithfully enough assured me with sorrow that I
could not be ordained unless I had my speech. So that first and sole
interview came to an untimely end: for soon after, not meaning to give
up the struggle at once, I resolved, before my next Episcopal visit, to
go down to Blewbury, the vicarage of my friend Mr. Evanson, who had
agreed to license me to his curacy, in order that by reading the lessons
in church I might practically test my competency. Of course, I prepared
myself specially by diligence, and care, and prayer, to stand this new
ordeal. But I failed to please even the indulgent vicar, though he got
his curate for nothing, and though his fair daughter amiably welcomed
the not ungainly Coelebs; and as for the severe old clerk,--he naïvely
blurted out, "Tell'ee what, sir, it won't do: you looks well,--but what
means them stops?" Alas! they meant the rebellion of tongue and lips
against every difficult letter, a _t_, or a _p_, or a far too current
_s_. And so I came to the wise conclusion that I was not to be a parson.
And perhaps it's as well I'm not; for my natural combativeness would
never have tolerated my bishop or my rector, or even the parish
churchwarden, specially in these days of Ritualism and Romanism. I was
thus thrown back upon myself: and I now see gratefully and humbly how I
was being schooled and forced into a mental era of silent
thoughtfulness, in after years the seed of several volumes as well as
innumerable ballads and poems which have flown as fly-leaves over the
world.
After this clerical failure, my good father urged me to turn to the law,
thinking that as a chamber counsel my intellectual attainments (and I
had worked hard for many years) might yet be available to society and to
myself, though on the "silent system:" but alas! verbal explanations are
as necessary in a room as at the bar; I soon perceived that all could
not be done on paper, and as I thoroughly hated law I speedily turned to
other sorts of literature, in especial the fixing of my own rhymed or
rhythmed thoughts in black and white.
There is a small chamber in the turret of No. 19 Lincoln's Inn Old
Square, on the second floor of rooms then belonging to my late friend
Thomas Lewin (afterwards a Master in Chancery, and well known not only
for his Law books, but also for his Life of St. Paul) where I used to
dream and think and jot down Proverbial morsels on odd bits of paper
which gradually grew to be a book. Lewin once, I remember, picked up
from the wastepaper basket these lines which he admired much, and asked
me where they came from:
"For that a true philosophy commandeth an innocent life,
And the unguilty spirit is lighter than a linnet's heart."
They occur in my Essay on Ridicule, first series, so I had to confess as
found out.
When my book appeared Lewin offered to review it for me in the _Literary
Gazette_, then edited by his friend Mr. Landon, L.E.L.'s brother. An
unusual rush of business just then coming in to him, and the editor
pressing for copy, Lewin begged me to write the Article myself, to which
I most reluctantly assented; resolving however to be quite impartial.
The result was that when I handed the critique to my busy friend, he
quickly said after a hurried glance, "Why, this won't do at all; you
have cut yourself up cruelly, instead of praising, as you ought to have
done. I must do it myself, I suppose. Here, copy out this Opinion for
me, if you can read it: it's Mr. Brodie's, and I can't." With that he
threw my MS. into the wastepaper basket, and I did his work for him,
whilst he commended me with due vigour, and sent his clerk off with a
too kind verdict in hot haste to the expectant editor.
The mention of Brodie reminds me that I spent a year copying old deeds
in his murky chamber, 49 Lincoln's Inn Fields, where nobody could read
his handwriting except his clerk (appropriately yclept Inkpen), and
when _he_ couldn't it was handed back to Mr. Brodie for exposition,
wherein if he himself failed, as was sometimes the case, he had to write
a new Opinion. Inkpen was a character, as a self-taught entomologist,
breeding in me then the rabies of collecting moths and beetles, as a
couple of boxes full of such can still prove. He lived at Chelsea, near
the Botanical Gardens there; and attributed his wonderful finds of
strange insects in his own pocket-handkerchief garden to stray
caterpillars and flies, &c., that came his way from among the packets of
foreign plants. He used also to catch small fowl on passengers' coats
and blank walls, as he passed on his daily walks to his office and back,
having pill-boxes in his pocket, and pins inside his hat to secure the
spoil. In the course of years he had amassed butterflies and beetles to
so valuable an extent, that when he was compelled by adverse fortune to
sell his cabinets by auction at Stevens's, he netted £1200 for his
collection: this he told me in later years himself; immediately after
the sale, he commenced collecting anew,--and having been made curator of
Lincoln's Inn Fields (through Mr. Brodie's interest), he soon found an
infinity of new insects,--derived perhaps from the Surgeon's Hall
Museum, or straying to the nine acres of that Garden,--is it not the
area of Cephren's Pyramid?--as a refuge for them out of smoky London.
The good man always brought a new flower to look at every morning while
at desk work; it lived in an old inkbottle of water, till one happy day
I bethought me charitably of giving him a pretty China vase,--that good
man, I say, is now long since gone to a world of light and
beauty--whence, I am sure, flowers and butterflies cannot be excluded.
About the same time this memorable matter may receive a notice. One day
at Brodie's chambers we heard a riotous noise in Lincoln's Inn Fields,
and running out, I found that the Duke of Wellington, for some political
offence, was being mobbed,--and that too on the 18th of June! He was
calmly walking his horse, surrounded by roaring roughs,--a groom being
behind him at some distance, but otherwise alone. Disgusted at the
scene, I jumped on the steps of Surgeon's Hall, and shouted
out--Waterloo, Waterloo! That one word turned the tide of execrations
into cheers, and the Iron Duke passed me silently with a military
salute: as the mob were thus easily converted ("mob" being, as we
conveyancers say, a short form for "mobilé", changeable) and escorted
our national hero to his home in safety, I really think the little
incident worth recording. We are just now in the throes of such a
mobocracy,--and know how much one firm policeman can avail to calm a
riot. While speaking of the Duke and Apsley House, let me add here
another word of some interest. My uncle, Arthur W. Devis, had painted
life-sized portraits of Blucher and Gneisenau, which his widow had given
to me: and as the Duke had always been my father's friend, I asked his
Grace if he would accept them from me; this he declined, but said, "get
Colnaghi to value them and I'll buy them"--as accordingly I did, and the
pictures are still I presume either at Apsley House or Strathfieldsaye.
My small memories of the Great Duke are summed up in these four
monosyllables, plain, blunt, firm, kind.
After Brodie's, my liberal father would give for me another hundred
pounds, this time to his cousin Mr. Walters of No. 12 in the Square, to
make me more learned as a conveyancer: but it was all of no use: "He
penned a stanza when he should engross:" however, I ate my terms and was
duly called to the Bar. At Walters' my most eminent colleague, amongst
others, was Roundel Palmer, now Lord Selborne, who, some time after,
when we both had chambers in the Inn, wanted me (but I repudiated the
idea) to be proposed as a candidate member for Oxford University, just
before Gladstone was induced to stand; I daresay he will remember it. As
to M.P.ship I may have had other chances, but I never cared for a
position of endless care and toil by night and day, to say nothing of my
impediment of speech, and as to the magic letters I rather despised
them: this being one reason. Not very many years ago my brother Charles
was offered Nottingham if he would pay £3000 for the honour,--and so I
failed to appreciate any such distinction. I think too that votes were
at one time purchasable even at Guildford, my county town: but that was
of course at a less upright and immaculate time of day than this.
At Walters' were also three of my cotemporaries,--De Morgan, who had the
business after decease of our principal, and whose brother is or was the
famous psychological philosopher; Domville, since Sir Charles, I
believe; and Gunn, a West Indian, of whom the jest was to inquire of
Walters, a very nervous man, if he liked us to have a gun in chambers:
all these, and there were more, were clever men and worthy, but as the
tide of life flows on I have lost sight of them.
* * * * *
I have just found an old letter of my own, dated December 28, 1839,
which (with my own permission asked and granted) I will give as to a
matter quite forgotten by me, viz., that Lady Spencer promised my
father to get me an Indian Writership,--as also that previously I had
once hopes of the Registrarship from Lord John Russell, afterwards given
to Mr. Lyster. The letter proves how much my no-speech hindered both my
good father's efforts and my own;--and explains itself. In those days it
cost 9d. between Albury and London.
My Dearest Father,--I can fully, though not perhaps so
fully as you can, enter into your great anxieties about your five
great boys, and actuated by this sympathy I sit down to say a word
more about India.--I do hope you have not yet given Lady Spencer a
decisive answer, as the horizon seems a little to clear of its
indigenous hurricanes. Since my last letter to you I have, I can
truly say, made every effort to speak like a man, but, alas I too
unsuccessfully: my tongue seems only able to say veto to the
Church, and that speaking is a necessary qualification "needs no
demonstration." Aunt Fanny has strongly recommended me to think
more seriously about it, and Mr. M'Neile has also given me his
valuable opinion on the subject, that at least I must inquire what
I am more fitted for, and not lightly put aside those opportunities
which Providence places in my way. However, I would by no means be
hurried in my choice either way: I must inquire what is the office
of a writer; whether oratorical powers be not requisite, &c., for
as yet I have a very vague and indefinite idea of what I reject or
choose. I really do find my impediment most truly a grievous
impediment to what appears more desirable; but I would wish to
consider this, as every other constitutional infirmity or
affliction, as but an instrument in the hands of God to subserve
some wise purpose. Let this letter therefore, if you please, serve
as a preventive, if not too late, to your final decision about it,
and put me, my dear father, in possession of more of the peculiar
features, in a writer's employment if you can, I hope to be with
you on Friday.
Till then, and ever believe me, my dear father, your affectionate
son,
M.F. Tupper.
Albury, _December 28th, Wednesday._
The day after I took my degree as a barrister, I married my cousin after
a nine years' engagement; my father having resolved I should not marry
without a profession. I did my best at this vocation of the law much
against the grain, and actually achieved, with Lewin's help, a
voluminous will, and a marriage settlement, with some accessory deeds,
procured for me by my mother's friend Mr. Hunt, through one Dangerfield,
a solicitor. I have often felt anxious to know how far my conveyancing
held water; but the thought of Lewin's skill has comforted me--and
besides I have never heard a word about it now for half a century. My
fee for all was fifty guineas--pretty well for a first and last exploit
in the way of law and its rewards.
As I am just leaving my father's house for Park Village, and thereafter
Albury, here I will insert two little memories of past days when I lived
with my parents at No. 5. Here is one. Theodore Hook's famous Berners
Street hoax had lately made such exploits very catching among
schoolboys--and in my Charterhouse days it was repeated by "Punsonby &
Co." at my father's town-house. On a certain Saturday when I had my
weekly holiday at home, I marvelled to find the street crowded with
vans, coal-carts, trucks, a mourning coach, fishmongers, butchers, and
confectioners with trays, and a number of servants wanting places. All
these were crowding round No. 5, as ordered or advertised for by Mr.
Tupper: of course soon explained away, and rejected, to a general
indignation at the hoaxers. Now, as I had my suspicions, I sat unseen at
the front drawing-room window, and watched: and as more than once I had
noticed P. and his friends pass down the street on the opposite side, I
taxed them with their exploit on the Monday; and I rather think it cost
them not a trifling sum to satisfy that crowd of disappointed tradesmen.
Happily such practical joking is now long since (or ought to be) a
social outrage of the past; Hook's being first had the grace of original
humour,--but imitations are dull repetition, not to be excused. I only
once met Theodore Hook, and that was in his decadence; he looked puffy
and only semi-sober; but I recollect with how much deference and
expectation the "livener-up" was eagerly surrounded, and how sillily the
dupes laughed at every word he uttered, whether humorous or not.
* * * * *
For another last memory of No. 5, in the dining-room whereof Lord
Sandwich, who had once lived there, is said to have invented
"sandwiches," I will record this.
In those days of long ago, how well I remember our next-door neighbour,
old Lady Cork, "The Dowager-Countess of Cork and Orrery," as her
door-plate proclaimed, some of whose peculiarities I may mention without
offence, as they were notorious and (the physicians judged) innocent
and venial. Whenever she found herself alone (and she kept profuse
hospitality three or four days a week, with her vast illuminated
conservatory full of artificial flowers and grapes and oranges tied on
everything), when those famous routs were silent, and dance music no
longer kept us awake at night, the little old lady would send in a
message, asking "neighbour Tupper to give her a dinner
to-day"--sometimes even coming unannounced. She usually appeared all in
white, even to her shoes and bonnet, which latter she would keep on the
whole evening; the only colour about her being rouged cheeks, sometimes
decorated with a piece of white paper cut into the shape of a heart, and
stuck on "to charm away the tic." Well, her ladyship was always full of
society anecdotes; and I only wish that her diary may soon be published,
as probably a more spicy record of past celebrities than even Pepys's in
old times, or Greville's in our own; but she is said to have left
instructions to her executors not to publish till every one mentioned by
her was dead: so we must wait till that tontine is over. But the
specialty of the aged countess, who died at past ninety but never owned
to more than sixty, was a propensity to annex small properties; always
it happened that next morning after a visit either her butler or her
lady's-maid would bring to us a spoon or a fork or a piece of
_bric-à-brac_ which she had carried off with her in seeming
unconsciousness; and as she never inquired for them afterwards, possibly
it was so. Let doctors decide. _Requiescat._ The forthcoming memoirs of
that once famous and lovely Miss Monckton will be interesting indeed, if
not over-edited.
CHAPTER VI.
STAMMERING AND CHESS.
One of the apparent calamities of my life (overruled, as I have long
since seen, for good) was the before-mentioned affliction of a very bad
impediment of speech, which blighted my youth and manhood from fifteen
to thirty-five, obliging me to social humiliations of many kinds, to
silence in class and on examination occasions (hence my written poetries
in lieu of spoken prose), and in early manhood preventing me from taking
orders, and thereafter from speaking in the law courts. But I was
hopelessly and practically a dumb man, except under special excitations,
when I could burst into eloquent speech which surprised third persons
more than myself; for when quite alone I could spout like Demosthenes;
it was only nervous fear that paralysed my tongue. Accordingly, my good
father placed me from time to time with well-meaning and well-paid
pretenders to make a perfect cure of my affliction, and I did many
things and suffered much from such false physicians. I am sure no one
can truly say what I can, viz., that in a purposely monotonous note and
syllable by syllable, with a crutch under my chin, and a sort of gag on
the rebellious tongue, I have read all through in a loud voice Milton's
whole Paradise Lost and Regained, and the most of Cowper's poems! That
was the sort of tongue-drill and nerve-quieting recommended and enforced
for many hours a day, through weary months, by a certain Mr. C., while
Dr. P., his successor to the well-named "patient," gave, first,
emulcents, and then styptics, and was fortunately prevented in time by
my father from some surgical experiments on the muscles of lip and
tongue. However, nobody could cure me, until I cured myself; rather, let
me gratefully and humbly confess, until God answered constant prayer,
and granted stronger bodily health, and gave me good success in my
literary life, and made me to feel I was equal in speech, as now, to the
most fluent of my fellows. So let any stammerer (and there are many
such) take comfort from my cure, and pray against the trouble as I did,
and courageously stand up against the multitude to claim before heaven
and earth man's proudest prerogative--the privilege of speech. In my
Proverbial Essay "Of Speaking" will be found two contrasted pictures
drawn from my own experiences: one of the stifled stammerer, the other
of the unbridled orator: which you can turn to as you will. As, however,
some of my old groanings after utterance are not equally accessible, I
will here give a few lines of mine from the "Stammerer's Complaint,"
printed in the medical book of one of my Galens:--
"... And is it not in truth
A poisoned sting in every social joy,
A thorn that rankles in the writhing flesh,
A drop of gall in each domestic sweet,
An irritating petty misery,--
That I can never look on one I love
And speak the fulness of my burning thoughts?
That I can never with unmingled joy
Meet a long-loved and long-expected friend
Because I feel, but cannot vent my feelings,--
Because I know I ought, but must not, speak,--
Because I mark his quick impatient eye
Striving in kindness to anticipate
The word of welcome strangled in its birth?
Is it not sorrow, while I truly love
Sweet social converse, to be forced to shun
The happy circle, from a nervous sense--
An agonising poignant consciousness--
That I must stand aloof, nor mingle with
The wise and good in rational argument,
The young in brilliant quickness of reply,
Friendship's ingenuous interchange of mind,
Affection's open-hearted sympathies?
But feel myself an isolated being,
A very wilderness of widowed thought!"
All this is only sad stern truth; nothing morbid here: let any poor
stammerer testify to my faithfulness. Amongst others afflicted like
myself was Charles Kingsley, whom I knew well at a time when I had
overcome my calamity; whereas he carried his to the grave with him;
though he had frequent gleams of a forced and courageous eloquence,
preaching energetically in a somewhat artificial voice,--in private he
stammered much, as once I used to do, no doubt to his mortification,
though humbly acquiescing in God's will.
* * * * *
Chess is a chief intellectual resource to the stammerer; for therein he
can conquer in argument without the toil of speech, and prove himself
practically more eloquent than the men full of talk whom he so much
envies. Accordingly, in days gone by (for of late years I have given it
up, as too toilsome a recreation) I played often at that royal game. In
these times it is no game at all,--but a wearisome if seductive
science; just as cricket is an artillery combat now, and football a most
perilous conflict, and boating breaks the athlete's heart, and billiards
can only be played by a bar-spot professional, and tranquil whist itself
has developed into a semi-fraudulent system of open rules and secret
signs; even so the honest common-sense old game of chess has come to be
so encumbered with published openings and gambits and other parasitic
growths upon the wholesome house-plant, that I for one have renounced
it, as a pursuit for which life is too short and serious (give me a
farce or a story instead), and one moreover in which any fool well up to
crammed book games may crow over the wisest of men in an easy, because
stereotyped, checkmate. However, in this connection, I recollect a small
experience which proves that positive ignorance of famous openings may
sometimes be an advantage; just as the skilled fencer will be baffled by
a brave boor rushing in against rules, and by close encounter
unconventionally pinning him straight off. When a youth, just before
matriculation, I was a guest at Culham of the good rector there, a
chess-player to his own thinking indomitable, for none of the neighbours
could checkmate him: so he thought to make quick work of a silent but
thoughtful boy-stammerer,--by tempting him at an early period of the
game to take, seemingly for nothing but advantage, a certain knight (his
usual dodge, it appeared) which would have ensured an ultimate defeat.
However, I declined the generous offer, which began to nettle my
opponent; but when afterwards I refused to answer divers moves by the
card (as he protested I ought), and finally reduced him to a positive
checkmate, he flew into such an unclerical rage that I would not play
again; his "revenge" might be too terrible. For another trivial chess
anecdote: a very worthy old friend of mine, a rector too, was fond of
his game, and of winning it: and I remember one evening that his ancient
servitor, bringing in the chessboard, whispered to me, "Please don't
beat him again, sir,--he didn't sleep a wink last night;" accordingly,
after a respectably protracted struggle, some strange oversights were
made, and my reverend host came off conqueror: so he was enabled to
sleep happily. I remember too playing with pegged pieces in a box-board
at so strange a place as outside the Oxford coach; and I think my
amiable adversary then was one Wynell Mayow, who has since grown into a
great Church dignitary. If he lives, my compliments to him.
One of the best private chess-players I used often to encounter,--but
almost never to beat, is my old life-friend, Evelyn of Wotton, now the
first M.P. for his own ancestral Deptford. It was to me a triumph only
to puzzle his shrewdness, "to make him think," as I used to say,--and if
ever through his carelessness I managed a stale, or a draw,--very seldom
a mate,--that was glory indeed. If he sees this, his memory will
countersign it.
Let so much suffice, as perhaps a not inappropriate word about the
Literary Life's frequent mental recreation, especially, where the player
is, like Moses, "not a man of words."
One day, by the by, this text in the original, "lo ish devarim anochi"
(Exod. iv. 10), came to my lot in Pusey's Hebrew class, to my special
confusion: but every tutor was very considerate and favoured the one who
couldn't speak, and Mr. Biscoe in particular used to say when my turn
came to read or to answer,--"Never mind, Mr. Tupper, I'm sure you know
it,--please to go on, Mr. So-and-So." This habitual confidence in my
proficiency had the effect of forcing my consciousness to deserve it;
and it usually happened that I really did know, silently, like
Macaulay's cunning augur, "who knew but might not tell."
Speaking of recreation, Izaak Walton's joy as a contemplative man has
been mine from youth; as witness these three fishing sonnets, just found
in the faded ink of three or four decades ago, which may give a gleam of
country sunshine on a page or two, and would have rejoiced my
piscatorial friends Kingsley and Leech in old days, and will not be
unacceptable to Attwood Matthews, Cholmondeley Pennell, and the Marstons
with their friend Mr. Senior in these. I have had various luck as an
angler from Stennis Lake to the Usk, from Enniskillen to Killarney, from
Isis to Wotton,--and so it would be a pity if I omitted such an
authorial characteristic; especially as my stammering obliged me to
"study to be quiet."
I.
"Look, like a village Queen of May, the stream
Dances her best before the holiday sun,
And still, with musical laugh, goes tripping on
Over these golden sands, which brighter gleam
To watch her pale-green kirtle flashing fleet
Above them, and her tinkling silver feet
That ripple melodies: quick,--yon circling rise
In the calm refluence of this gay cascade
Marked an old trout, who shuns the sunny skies,
And, nightly prowler, loves the hazel shade:
Well thrown!--you hold him bravely,--off he speeds,
Now up, now down,--now madly darts about,--
Mind, mind your line among those flowering reeds,--
How the rod bends,--and hail, thou noble trout!"
II.
"O, thou hast robbed the Nereids, gentle brother,
Of some swift fairy messenger; behold,--
His dappled livery prankt with red and gold
Shows him their favourite page: just such another
Sad Galatæa to her Acis sent
To teach the new-born fountain how to flow,
And track with loving haste the way she went
Down the rough rocks, and through the flowery plain,
Ev'n to her home where coral branches grow,
And where the sea-nymph clasps her love again:
We the while, terrible as Polypheme,
Brandish the lissom rod, and featly try
Once more to throw the tempting treacherous fly
And win a brace of trophies from the stream."
III.
"Come then, coy Zephyr, waft my feathered bait
Over this rippling shallow's tiny wave
To yonder pool, whose calmer eddies lave
Some Triton's ambush, where he lies in wait
To catch my skipping fly; there drop it lightly:
A rise, by Glaucus!--but he missed the hook,--
Another--safe! the monarch of the brook,
With broadside like a salmon's, gleaming brightly:
Off let him race, and waste his prowess there;
The dread of Damocles, a single hair,
Will tax my skill to take this fine old trout;
So,--lead him gently; quick, the net, the net!
Now gladly lift the glittering beauty out,
Hued like a dolphin, sweet as violet."
CHAPTER VII.
PRIZE POEMS, ETC.
In the course of my Oxford career I tried for two Newdigate Prize poems,
"The Suttees" and the "African Desert," won respectively by Claughton,
now Bishop of St. Albans, and Rickards, whose honours of course I ought
to know, but don't. A good-looking and well-speaking friend of mine,
E.H. Abney, now a Canon, was so certain that the said prizes in those
two successive years were to fall to me, that he learnt my poems by
heart in order to recite them as my speech-substitute in the Sheldonian
Theatre at Commemoration, and he used frequently to look in upon me to
be coached in his recital. It was rumoured that I came second on both
occasions,--one of them certainly had a 2 marked on it when returned to
me, but I know not who placed it there. However, my pieces were
afterwards printed; both separately, and among my "Ballads and Poems,"
by Hall and Virtue, and are now before me. As an impartial and veteran
judge of such _literaria_, I am bold to say they are far better than I
thought, and might fairly have won Newdigate prizes, even as friend
Abney & Co. were sure they would.
At the close of my University career came, of course, the Great Go,
which I had to do as I did the Little Go, all on paper; for I could not
answer _vivâ voce_. And this rule then, whatever may be the case now,
prevented me from going in for honours, though I had read for a first,
and hoped at least to get a second. Neither of these, nor even a third
class, was technically possible, if I could not stand a two days' ordeal
of _vivâ voce_ examination, part of the whole week then exacted.
However, I did all at my best on paper, specially the translations from
classic poets in verse: whereof I'll find a specimen anon. The issue of
all was that I was offered an honorary fourth class,--which I refused,
as not willing to appear at the bottom of the list of all,
alphabetically,--and so my tutor, Mr. Biscoe, not wishing to lose the
honour for our college, managed to get it transferred to another of his
pupils, Mr. Thistlethwaite, whose father wrote to thank me for this
unexpected though not unmerited luck falling to his son.
One short presentable piece of verse-making in the schools is as below
from Virgil: there were also three odes of Horace, a chorus from
Æschylus, and more from other Greek and Latin poets.
"Sicilian Muses, sing we loftier strains!
The humble tamarisk and woodland plains
Delight not all; if woods and groves we try,
Be the groves worthy of a consul's eye.
Told by the Sibyl's song, the 'latter time'
Is come, and dispensations roll sublime
In new and glorious order; spring again
With Virgo comes, and Saturn's golden reign.
A heavenly band from heaven's bright realm descends,
All evil ceases, and all discord ends.
Do thou with favouring eye, Lucina chaste,
Regard the wondrous babe,--his coming haste,--
For under him the iron age shall cease,
And the vast world rejoice in golden peace," &c. &c.
I select this bit, famous for being one of the places in Virgil which
goes to prove that the Sibylline books (to which the Augustan poets had
easy access) quoted Isaiah's prophecies of Christ and the Millennium. It
will be considered that my public versifying was quite extempore, as in
fact is common with me. For other college memories in the literary line,
I may just mention certain brochures or parodies, initialed or
anonymous, whereto I must now plead guilty for the first time;
reflecting, amongst other topics, on Montgomery's Oxford, St. Mary's
theology, Mr. Rickard's "African Desert," and Garbet's pronounced and
rather absurd aestheticism as an examiner. Here are morsels of each in
order:--
"Who praises Oxford?--some small buzzing thing,
Some starveling songster on a tiny wing,--
(_N.B._ They call the insect Bob, I know,
I heard a printer's devil call it so)--
So fondly tells his admiration vast
No one can call the chastened strains bombast,
Though epitheted substantives immense
Claim for each lofty sound the _caret_ sense," &c. &c.
Next, a bit from my Low Church onslaught on St. Mary's in the Hampden
case, being part of "The Oxford Controversy":--
"Though vanquished oft, in falsehood undismayed,
Like heretics in flaming vest arrayed
Each angry Don lifts high his injured head,
Or 'stands between the living and the dead.'
Still from St. Mary's pulpit echoes wide
Primó, beware of truth, whate'er betide;
Deinde, from deep Charybdis while you steer
Lest damned Socinus charm you with his sneer,
Watch above all, so not _Saint_ Thomas spake,
Lest upon Calvin, Scylla's rook, you break," &c. &c.
These forgotten trivials, wherein the allusions do not now show clear,
are, I know, barely excusable even thus curtly: but I choose to save a
touch or two from annihilation. Here is another little bit; this time
from a somewhat vicious parody on my rival Rickard's prize poem: it is
fairest to produce at length first his serious conclusion to the normal
fifty-liner, and then my less reverent imitation of it. Here, then, is
the end of Rickard's poem:--
"Bright was the doom which snatched her favourite son,
Nor came too soon to him whose task was done.
Long burned his restless spirit to explore
That stream which eye had never tracked before,
Whose course, 'tis said, in Western springs begun
Flows on eternal to the rising sun!
Though thousand perils seemed to bar his way,
And all save him shrunk backward in dismay,
Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
To reach that stream, though doomed to perish there!
That prayer was heard; by Niger's mystic flood
One rapturous day the speechless dreamer stood,
Fixt on that stream his glistening eyes he kept,--
The sun went down,--the wayworn wanderer slept!"
So much for the prize-taker; the prize-loser vented his spleen as
thus:--
"Bright was the doom that diddled Mungo Park,
Yet very palpably obscure and dark.
Long burned his throat, for want of coming nigh
That stream he long'd and pray'd for wistfully,
Whose course, 'tis said, that no one can tell where
It flows eternal; guessing isn't fair.
Though miles a thousand had he tramp'd along,
And all, save him, were sure that path was wrong,
Still hope prophetic poured the ardent prayer
He'd find that stream,--if it was anywhere!
That prayer was heard, of course, though no one knows
Where this said Niger never flowed, or flows;
All that is known is, that a dreamer stood
In speechless transport by a mystic flood,
And after fixing on't his glistening eyes,
The sun goes down, and so the dreamer dies!"
For the fourth promised specimen, the best excuse is that Garbet really
did utter the words quoted,--and the answer he received about love is
exact, and became famous:--
"'Didst e'er read Dante!'--Never. 'Cruel man!
Take, take him, Williams,--I--I never can.'"
_N.B._--Williams was the other examiner. Garbet went on with a further
question nevertheless,--as he was affectedly fond of Italian:--
"'Dost know the language love delights in most?
If thou dost not, thy character is lost.'
'Yes, sir!'--the youth retorts with just surprise,
'Love's language is the language of the eyes!'"
In those days, as perhaps also in these, like Pope, "I spake in
numbers," verse being almost--well, not quite--easier than prose. In
fact, some of my critics have heretofore to my disparagement stumbled on
the printed truth that he is little better than an improvisatore in
rhyme. And this word "rhyme" reminds me now of a very curious question I
raised some years after my Oxford days in more than one magazine
article, as to when rhyme was invented, and by whom: the conclusion
being that intoning monks found out how easily the cases of Latin nouns
and tenses of verbs, &c., jingled with each other, and that troubadours
and trouveres carried thus the seeds of song all over Europe in about
the ninth century, until which time rhythm was the only recognised form
of versification, rhyme having strangely escaped discovery for more than
four thousand years. Is it not a marvel (and another marvel that no one
noticed it before) that not one of the old poets, Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
and I think Sanscrit, Arabic, and Celtic too, ever (except by manifest
accident, now intentionally ignored) stumbled upon the good idea of
terminating their metres with rhyme? Where is there any ode of Horace,
or Anacreon,--where any psalm of David; any epigram of Martial, any
heroic verse of Virgil, or philosophic argument of
Lucretius,--decorated, enlivened, and brightened by the now only too
frequent ornament of rhyme?
* * * * *
I have just found among my old archived papers, faded by nearly six
decades of antiquity, a treatise which I wrote at nineteen, styled by me
"A Vindication of the Wisdom of Scripture in Matters of Natural
Science." This has never seen the light, even in extracts; and probably
never can attain to the dignity of print, seeing it is written against
all compositor law on both sides up and down of a quarto paper book.
Therein are treated, from both the scriptural and the scientific points
of view, many subjects, of which these are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in
chief Joshua's sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in
Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, "He spreadeth out the
north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing," the
blood's innate vitality--"which is the life thereof," the earth's
centre, or orbit, and inclination, astronomy, spirits, the rainbow, the
final conflagration of our atmosphere to purify the globe, and many
other matters terrestrial and celestial. Some day a patient scribe may
be found to decipher this decayed manuscript and set out orderly its
miscellaneous contents. I began it at eighteen, and finished it when at
Oxford.
There is also now before me another faded copybook of my early Christ
Church days containing ninety-one striking parallel passages between
Horace and Holy Writ; some being very remarkable, as Hor. _Sat._ i. 8,
and Isaiah xliv. 13, &c., about "making a god of a tree whereof he
burneth part:" also such well-known lines as "Quid sit futurum eras,
fuge quærere," and "Quis scit an adjiciant hodiernæ crastina summæ
Tempora Di superi?"--compared with "Take no thought for the morrow" and
"Boast not thyself of to-morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may
bring forth." With many more; in fact I collected nearly a hundred out
of Horace, besides a few from others of the classics.
CHAPTER VIII.
SUNDRY PROVIDENCES.
Carlyle somewhere gives utterance to a truism, which the present scribe
at least can most gratefully countersign, that "it takes a great deal of
providence to bring a man to threescore years and ten." Not only are we
in peril every time we take breath, both from the action of our own
uncertain hearts and from the living germs of poison floating in the
air, but from all sorts of outer accidents (so-called, whereas they all
are "well ordered and sure") wherewith our little life is compassed
from, cradle to grave; in truth, trifles seem to rule us: "the turning
this way or that, the casual stopping or hastening hath saved life or
destroyed it, hath built up or flung down fortunes." Every inch and
every instant, we are guided and guarded, whether we notice it or not:
"the very hairs of our heads are all numbered." Here shall follow some
personal experiences in proof. Nearly seventy years ago I knew a small
schoolboy of seven who accidentally slit his own throat while cutting a
slate-frame against his chest with a sharp knife; there was a knot in
the wood, the knife slipped up, a pinafore was instantaneously covered
with blood--(though the little semisuicide was unconscious of any
pain)--thereafter his neck was quickly strapped with diaculum
plaister,--and to this day a slight scar may be found on the left side
of a silvery beard! Was not this a providential escape? Again--a lively
little urchin in his holiday recklessness ran his head pell-mell blindly
against a certain cannon post in Swallow Passage, leading from Princes
Street, Hanover Square, to Oxford Street, and was so damaged as to have
been carried home insensible to Burlington Street: a little more, the
doctors said, and it would have been a case of concussion of the brain.
The post is still there "to witness if I lie," as Macaulay's Roman
ballad has it,--and here grown to twice its height, thank heaven! am I.
Then again, some ten years after, a youth is seen careering on a
chestnut horse in Parliament Street, when a runaway butcher's cart
cannoned against his shying steed, the wheel ripping up a saddle-flap,
just as the rider had instantaneously shifted his right leg close to the
horse's neck! But for that providence, death or a crushed knee was
imminent.
Yet again, after some twenty years more: "Æsop Smith" was one dark
evening creeping up a hill after a hard ride on his grey mare Brenda,
when he was aware of two rough men on the tramp before him, one of whom
needlessly crossed over so that they commanded both sides, and soon
seemed to be approximating; which when Æsop fortunately noticed, with a
quick spur into Brenda he flashed by the rascals as they tried to snatch
at his bridle and almost knocked them over right and left whilst he
galloped up the hill followed by their curses: was not this an escape
worth being thankful for?
Once more: the same equestrian has had two perilous dog-cart accidents,
noticeable, for these causes; viz.--broken ribs, and a crushed right
hand, have proved to him experimentally how little pain is felt at the
moment of a wound; which will explain the unconscious heroism of common
soldiers in battle; very little but weakness through loss of blood is
ever felt until wounds stiffen: further, a blow on the head not only
dazes in the present and stupefies further on, but also completely takes
away all memory of a past "bad quarter of an hour." At least I
remembered nothing of how my worst misadventure happened; and only know
that I crawled home half stunned by moonlight for three miles, holding
both sides together with my hands to enable me to breathe: no
wonder,--all my elasticity was gone with broken ribs. Though these two
accidents cost me, one three months, and the other much longer of a
(partly bedridden) helplessness, were they not good providences to make
one grateful? I write my mental thanksgiving with the same healed broken
hand.
So much of perils by land, by way of sample: here are three or four by
sea, to match them. Do I not remember how a rash voyager was nearly
swept off the _Asia's_ slippery deck in a storm, when a sudden lurch
flung him to cling to the side rail of a then unnetted bulwark, swinging
him back again by another lurch right over the yawning waves--like an
acrobat? Had I let go, no one would have known of that mystery of the
sea,--where and when a certain celebrity then expected in America, had
disappeared! Captain Judkin after that always had his bulwarks netted;
so that was a good result of my escape: I was the only passenger on
deck, a favoured one,--the captain being on his bridge, two men at the
wheel in their covered house, the stormy wind all round in a cyclone,
and the raging sea beneath,--and so all unseen I had been swept
away,--but for good providence.
Once again; do I not shudderingly recollect how nearly the little
Guernsey steamer was run over by an American man-of-war in the Channel,
because a tipsy captain would "cross the bows of that d---- d
Yankee:"--the huge black prow positively hung over us,--and it was a
miracle that we were not sunk bodily in the mighty waters. What more?
Well, I will here insert an escaped danger that tells its own tale in a
sonnet written at the time, the place being Tenby and the sea-anemone
caverns there, accessible only at lowest neap tide.
"An hour of peril in the Lydstep caves:
Down the steep gorge, grotesquely boulder-piled
And tempest-worn, as ocean hurrying wild
Up it in thunder breaks and vainly raves,--
My haste hath sped me to the rippled sand
Where, arching deep, o'erhang on either hand
These halls of Amphitrité, echoing clear
The ceaseless mournful music of the waves:
Ten thousand beauteous forms of life are here;
And long I linger, wandering in and out
Among the seaflowers, tapestried about
All over those wet walls.--A shout of fear!
The tide, the tide!--I turned and ran for life,
And battled stoutly through that billowy strife!"
Perhaps this is enough of such hairbreadth 'scapes both by land and
water: though I might (in America especially) mention many more. Then
there are all manner of the ordinary maladies of humanity, which I
pretermit. Carlyle was quite right; it _does_ require "a good deal of
providence" to come to old age.
CHAPTER IX.
YET MORE ESCAPES.
But there are many other sorts of peril in human life to which I may
briefly advert, as we all have had some experiences of the same. Who
does not know of his special financial temptation, some sanguine and
unscrupulous speculator urging him from rock to rock across the rapids
of ruin, till he is engulfed as by Niagara? Or of the manifestly
disinterested and generous capitalist, who gives to some young legatee a
junior partner's free arm-chair, only that he may utilise his money and
keep the house solvent for yet a year or two, utterly unheeding that ere
long the grateful beneficiaire must be dragged down with his chief to
poverty? Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will,
stealing our rights by evil influence? Or of the seemingly luckless
accident killing off our intending benefactor just before that promised
codicil? Or of the ruinous investment? Or of the bankrupt Life
Assurance? Or of the unhappy fact of your autograph, "a mere matter of
form," on the back of some dishonoured bill of one's defaulting friend?
Yet all these are providences too,--lessons of life, and parts of our
schools and schoolmasters.
And there are many like social evils besides. Let me delicately touch
one of them. I desire as an Ancient, now nearing the close of my
career, at least in this the caterpillar and soon to be chrysalis
condition of my being, to give my testimony seriously and practically to
the fact (disputed by too many from their own worse experience) that it
is quite possible to live from youth to age in many scenes and under
many circumstantial difficulties, preserving still through them all the
innocent purity of childhood. True, the crown of greater knowledge is
added to the Man; but although it be a knowledge both of evil and of
good, theoretically,--it need not practically be a guilty knowledge. If
one of any age, from the youngest to the oldest, has not the power of
self-control perpetually in exercise, and the good mental help of prayer
habitually at hand to be relied on, he is in danger, and may fall into
sin or even crime, at any hour, unless the Highest Power intervene. But,
if the senses are trained to resist the first inclinations to
unchastity, by the eye that will not look and the ear that will not
listen, then the doors of the mind are kept closed against the enemy,
and even "hot youth" is safe.
We live in a co-operative cycle of society; and amongst other
co-operations are all manner of guilds to encourage, by example,
companionship and the like, divers great virtues, and some less
important fads and fancies of the day: let me not be thought to
disparage any gatherings for prayer, or temperance, or purity; though
individual strong men may not need such congregated help as the weaker
brethren yearn for. Many a veteran now, changed to good morals from a
looser life in the past, may well hope to serve both God and man by
preaching purity to the young men around, by vowing them to a white
ribbon guild, and giving them the decoration of an ivory cross. But he
is apt to forget what young blood is, his own having cooled down apace;
anon he will find that Nature is not so easily driven back--_usque
recurrit_--and he will soon have to acknowledge that if the higher and
deeper influences of personal religion, earnest prayer, honest
watchfulness, and sincere--though it be but incipient--love of God and
desire to imitate Christ, are not chief motives towards the purification
of human passion, this brotherhood of a guild may tend to little except
self-righteousness, and it will be well if hypocrisy and secret sin does
not accompany that open boastfulness of a White Cross Order. After all
said and done, a man--or woman--or precocious child--must simply take
the rules of Christ and Paul, and Solomon, as his guide and guard, by
"Resisting," "Fleeing," "Cutting off--metaphorically--the right hand,
and putting out the right eye;" so letting "discretion preserve him and
understanding keep him;" but there is nothing like flight; it is easy
and speedy, and more a courage than a cowardice. Take a simple instance.
Some forty years ago, an author, well-known in both hemispheres, then
living in London, received by post a pink and scented note from "an
American Lady, a great admirer of his books, &c. &c.: would he favour
her by a call" at such an hotel, in such a square? Much flattered he
went, and was very gushingly received; but when the lady, probably not
an American (though comely enough to be one), after a profusion of
compliments went on to complain of a husband having deserted her, and to
throw herself not without tears on the kindness of her favourite author,
that individual thought it would be prudent to depart, and so promptly
remembering another engagement he took up his hat and--fled. He had
afterwards reason to be thankful for this escape, as for others. _I,
fac simile_; as no doubt you have done, and you will do, for there are
many Potipheras; ay, and there exist some Josephs too.
Other forms of evil in the way of heterodoxy and heresy have assailed
your confessor, as is the common case with most other people, whether
authors or not. The rashest Atheism or more cowardly Agnosticism are
rampant monsters, but have only affected my own spirit into forcing me
to think out and to publish my Essay on Probabilities, whereof I shall
speak further when my books come under review. But beyond these open
foes to one's faith, who has not met with zealous enthusiasts who urge
upon his acceptance under penalty of the worst for all eternity if
refused, any amount of strange isms,--Plymouth, Southcote, Swedenborg,
Irving, Mormon,--and of the other 272 sects which affect (perhaps more
truly infect) religion in this free land? I have had many of these
attacking me by word or letter on the excuse of my books. Who, if he
once weakly gives way to their urgent advice to "search and see for
himself," will not soon be addled and muddled by all sorts of
sophistical and controversial botherations, if even he is not tempted to
accept--for lucre if not godliness--the office of bishop, or apostle, or
prophet, or anything else too freely offered by zealots to new converts,
if of notoriety enough to exalt or enrich a sect; such sect in every
case proclaiming itself the one only true Church, all other sects being
nothing but impostors? We have all encountered such spiritual
perils,--and happy may we feel that with whatever faults and failings,
there is an orthodox and established form of religion amongst us in the
land. For my own part, I go freely to any house of prayer, national or
nonconformist, where the Gospel is preached and the preacher is capable:
all I want is a good man for the good word and work--and if he has the
true Spirit in him, I care next to nothing for his orders: though to
many less independent minds human authorisation may be a necessity. From
cradle hymns to the more serious prayings of senility, my own religion
in two words is crystallised as "Abba, Father;" my only priest being my
Divine Brother; and my Friend and Guide through this life and beyond it
the Holy Spirit, who unites all the family of God. May I die, as I have
lived, in this simple faith of childhood.
My "Probabilities" has, amongst others apposite, this sentence about the
origin of evil, and the usefulness of temptation: "To our understanding,
at least, there was no possible method of illustrating the amiabilities
of Goodness and the contrivances of Wisdom but by the infused permission
of some physical and moral evils; mercy, benevolence, design would in a
universe of Best have nothing to do; that universe itself would grow
stagnant, as incapable of progress; and the principal record of God's
excellences, the book of redemption, would have been unwritten. Is not
then the existence of evil justified in reason's calculation? and was
not such existence an antecedent probability?"
CHAPTER X.
FADS AND FANCIES.
In a recent page I have alluded to sundry "fads and fancies of the day,"
some of greater and others of lesser import, and I have been mixed up in
two or three of them. For example;--as an undergraduate at Oxford I
starved myself in the matter of sugar, by way of somehow discouraging
the slave-trade; I don't know that either Cæsar or Pompey was any the
better for my small self-sacrifice; but as a trifling fact, I may
mention that I then followed some of the more straitlaced fashions of
Clapham. Also, when in lodgings after my degree, I resolved to leave off
meat, bought an immense Cheshire cheese, and, after two months of
part-consumption thereof, reduced my native strength to such utter
weakness as quite to endanger health. So I had to relapse into the old
carnality of mutton chops, like other folk: such extreme virtue doesn't
pay.
Of course abstinence from all stimulant has had its hold on me
heretofore, as it has upon many others,--but, after a persistent six
months of only water, my nerve power was so exhausted (I was working
hard at the time as editor of "The Anglo-Saxon," a long extinct
magazine) that my wise doctor enjoined wine and whisky--of course in
moderation; and so my fluttering heart soon recovered, and I have been
well ever since.
Now about temperance, let me say thus much. Of course, I must approve
the modern very philanthropic movement, but only in its rational aspect
of moderation. In my youth, the pendulum swung towards excess, now its
reaction being exactly opposite; both extremes to my mind are wrong. And
here let me state (_valeat quantum_) that I never exceeded in liquor but
once in my life: that once serving afterwards as a valuable life lesson
all through the wine-parties of Christ Church, the abounding
hospitalities of America, both North and South, through two long
visits--and the genialities of our own Great Britain during my several
Reading Tours. If it had not been for that three days' frightful
headache when I was a youth (in that sense a good providence), I could
not have escaped so many generous hosts and seductive beverages. That
one departure from sobriety happened thus. My uncle, Colonel Selwyn,
just returned from his nine years' command at Graham's Town, South
Africa, gave a grand dinner at the Opera Colonnade to his friends and
relatives, resolved (according to the fashion of the time) to fill them
all to the full with generous Bacchus by obligatory toasts, he himself
pretending to prefer his own bottle of brown sherry,--in fact, dishonest
toast and water; but that sort of practical joke was also a fashion of
the day. The result, of course, was what he desired; everybody but
himself had too much, whilst his mean sobriety, cruel uncle! enjoyed the
calm superiority of temperance over tipsiness. However, the lesson to me
(though never intended as such) was most timely,--just as I was entering
life to be forewarned by having been for only that once overtaken. I
have ever since been thankful for it as a mercy; and few have been so
favoured; how many can truly say, only that once? But I pass on, having
a great deal more to write about temperance. On my first visit to
America in 1851, all that mighty people indulged freely in strong drinks
of the strangest names and most delicious flavours: on my second in
1876,--just a quarter of a century after,--there was almost nothing to
be got but iced water. Accordingly when I was at Charleston I took up my
parable,--and spoke through a local paper as follows: I fear the extract
is somewhat lengthy, but as an exhaustive argument (and the piece,
moreover, being unprinted in any of my books), I choose to give it here
in full, to be skipped if the reader pleases. It is introduced thus by
an editor:--
"In these days of extreme abstinence from wine and spirits, it is
refreshing to see what the strong common-sense of an eminent moral
philosopher has to say about temperance. We make, then, a longish
extract, well-nigh exhaustive of the subject, which occurs in a
lecture, entitled 'America Revisited--1851 and 1877,' from the pen
of Martin Tupper, explaining itself. The author introduces his
poetic essay thus:--'Since my former visit to the States
twenty-five years ago, few changes are more remarkable than that in
the drinking habits of the people; formerly it was all for
spirituous liquors, and now it is "Water, water everywhere, and
every drop to drink!" The bars are well-nigh deserted, and the
entrance-halls of most houses are ostentatiously furnished with
plated beakers and goblets ensuring an icy welcome: in fact, not to
be tedious, intemperance has changed front, and excess in water has
taken the place of excess in wine.'" To an Englishman's judgment
the true "part of Hamlet" in a feast is the more generous fluid,
and the greatest luxuries are simply Barmecidal without some
wholesome stimulant to wash them down; accordingly, my too
outspoken honesty protested thus in print against this form of
folly in extremes, and either pleased or offended, as friends or
foes might choose to take it.
"Temperance? Yes! true Temperance, yes!
Moderation in all things, the word is express;
'Nothing too much'--Greek, 'Meden Agan;'
So spake Cleobúlus, the Seventh Wise Man;
And the grand 'golden mean' was shrewd Horace's law,
And Solomon's self laid it down for a saw
That 'good overmuch' is a possible fault,
As meat over-salted is worse for the salt;
And Chilo, the Stagyrite, Peter, and Paul,
Enjoin moderation in all things to all;
The law to make better this trial-scene, earth,
And draw out its strongest of wisdom and worth,
By sagely suppressing each evil excess--
In feasting, of course, but in fasting no less--
In drinking--by all means let no one get drunk--
In eating, let none be a gluttonous monk,
But everyone feed as becometh a saint,
With grateful indulging and wholesome restraint,
Not pampering self, as an epicure might,
Nor famishing self, the ascetic's delight.
"But man ever has been, and will be, it seems,
Given up to intemperance, prone to extremes;
The wish of his heart (it has always been such)
Is, give me by all means of all things too much!
In pleasures and honours, in meats, and in drinks,
He craves for the most that his coveting thinks;
To wallow in sensual Lucullus's sty,
Or stand like the starving Stylités on high,
To be free from all churches and worship alone,
Or chain'd to the feet of a priest on a throne,
To be rich as a Rothschild, and dozens beside,
Or poor as St. Francis (in all things but pride),
With appetite starved as a Faquir's, poor wretch!
Or appetite fattened to luxury's stretch;
Denouncing good meats, on lentils he fares,
Denouncing good wine, by water he swears--
In all things excessive his folly withstands
The wise moderation that Scripture commands.
"This vice of excess is no foible of mine,
Though liking and needing a glass of good wine,
To help the digestion, to quicken the heart,
And loosen the tongue for its eloquent part,
But never once yielding one jot to excess,
Nor weakly consenting the least to transgress.
For let no intolerant bigot pretend
My Temperance Muse would excuse or defend,
As Martial or tipsy Anacreon might,
An orgy of Bacchus, the drunkard's delight:
No! rational use is the sermon I'm preaching,
Eschewing abuse as the text of my teaching.
"Old Pindar says slyly, that 'Water is best;'
When pure as Bandusia, this may be confest.
But water so often is troubled with fleas
And queer little monsters the microscope sees;
Is sometimes so muddy, and sometimes so mixt
With poisons and gases, both fixt and unfixt,
And seems so connected with juvenile pills--
A thought which the mind with unpleasantness fills--
That really one asks, is it safe to imbibe
So freely the live animalcula tribe,
Unkilled and uncooked with a little wine sauce
Poured in, or of whisky or brandy a toss--
And gulp a cold draught of the colic, instead
Of something to warm both the heart and the head?
"That Jotham-first-fable, the bramble and vine,
Piles up to a climax the praise of good wine;
For in Judges we read--look it up, as you can--
'It cheereth the heart, both of God and of man;'
And everywhere lightness, and brightness, and health,
Gild the true temperance texts with their wealth,
Giving strong drink to the ready to perish,
And heavy-heartedness joying to cherish.
"What is wanted--and let some Good Templar invent it,
Damaging drunkenness, nigh to prevent it,
Is a drink that is nice, warm, pleasant, and pale,
Delicious as 'cakes,' and seductive as 'ale,'
Like 'ginger that's hot in the mouth' and won't hurt you,
As old Falstaff winks it, in spite of your virtue;
A temperate stimulant cup, to displace
Pipes, hasheesh, and opium, and all that bad race;
Cheap as pure water and free as fresh air--
Oh, where shall we find such a beverage--where?
"No wine for the pure or the wise--so some teach--
Abstinence utter for all and for each,
Total denial of every right use,
Because some bad fools the good creature abuse!
As well might one vow not to warm at a fire,
Nor give the least rein to a lawful desire,
Because some have recklessly burnt down their houses,
Because the rogue cheats, or the reveller carouses!
I see not the logic, the rational logic,
Conclusive to me, coherent and cogic,
That since some poor sot in his folly exceeds,
I must starve out my likings, and stint out my needs.
"Am I _that_ brother's keeper? He is not an Abel,
Is strange to my roof, and no guest at my table:
I know not his mates, we are not near each other,
He swills in the pothouse, that dissolute brother!--
But there's your example?--The drunkards can't see it,
And if they are told of it, scorn it and flee it;
Example?--Your children!--No doubt it is right
To be to them always a law and a light;
But moderate temperance is the vise way
To form them, and hinder their going astray;
Whereas utter abstinence proves itself vain,
And drunkards flare up because good men abstain.
"The law of reaction is stringent and strong,
A youth _in extremis_ is sure to go wrong,
For the pendulum swings with a multiplied force
When sloped from its even legitimate course.
I have known--who has not?--that a profligate son
Has been through his fanatic father undone;
Restrained till the night of free licence arrives,
And then he breaks out to the wreck of two lives!
"A fierce water-fever just now is red-hot;
Drink water, or perish, thou slave and thou sot!
Drink water alone, and drink more, and drink much--
But, liquors or wines? Not a taste, not a touch!
Yet, is not this fever a fervour of thrift?
It is wine you denounce, but its cost is your drift;
The times are so hard and the wines are so bad
(For good at low prices are not to be had),
That forthwith society shrewdly shouts high
For water alone, the whole abstinence cry!
And, somehow supposed suggestive of heaven,
The cup of cold water is generously given,
But a glass of good wine is an obsolete thing,
And will be till trade is once more in full swing!
I hint not hypocrisy; many are true,
They preach what they practise, they say--and they do,
And used from their boyhood to only cold water,
Enjoin nothing better on wife, son, and daughter;
But surely with some it is merely for thrift,
That they out off the wine, and with water make shift,
Although they profess the self-sacrifice made
As dread of intemperance makes them afraid.
And so, like a helmsman too quick with his tiller,
Eschewing Charybdis they steer upon Scylla,
To perish of utter intemperance--Yes!
The victims of water consumed to excess.
"To conclude: The first miracle, wonder Divine,
Wasn't wine changed to water, but water to wine,
That wine of the Kingdom, the water of life
Transmuted, with every new excellence rife,
The wine to make glad both body and soul,
To cheer up the sad, and make the sick whole.
And when the Redeemer was seen among men,
He drank with the sinners and publicans then,
Exemplar of Temperance, yea, to the sot,
In use of good wine, but abusing it not!
We dare not pretend to do better than He;
But follow the Master, as servants made free
To touch, taste, and handle, to use, not abuse,
All good to receive, but all ill to refuse!
It is thus the true Christian with temperance lives,
Giving God thanks for the wine that He gives."
I once heard Mr. Gough, the temperance lecturer: it was at the Brooklyn
Concert Hall in 1877. A handsome and eloquent man, his life is well
known, and that his domestic experiences have made him the good apostle
he is. I remember how well he turned off the argument against himself as
to the miracle of the marriage-feast in Cana of Galilee: "Yes,
certainly, drink as much wine made of water as you can." It was a witty
quip, but is no reply to that miracle of hospitality. _Apropos_,--I do
not know whether or not the following anecdote can be fathered on Mr.
Gough, but it is too good to be lost, especially as it bears upon the
fate of a poor old friend of mine in past days who was fatally a victim
to total abstinence. The story goes that a teetotal lecturer, in order
to give his audience ocular proof of the poisonous character of alcohol,
first magnifies the horrible denizens of stagnant water by his
microscope, and then triumphantly kills them all by a drop or two of
brandy! As if this did not prove the wholesomeness of _eau de vie_ in
such cases. If, for example, my poor friend above, the eminent Dr.
Hodgkin of Bedford Square, had followed his companion's example, the
still more eminent Moses Montefiore, by mixing water far too full of
life with the brandy that killed them for him, he would not have died
miserably in Palestine, eaten of worms as Herod was! Another such
instance I may here mention. When I visited the cemetery of Savannah,
Florida, in company with an American cousin, I noticed it graven on the
marble slab of a relation of ours, a Confederate officer, to the effect
that "he died faithful to his temperance principles, refusing to the
last the alcohol wherewith the doctor wanted to have saved his life!"
Such obstinate teetotalism, I said at the time, is criminally suicidal.
Whereat my lady cousin was horrified, for she regarded her brother as a
martyr.
I cannot help quoting here part of a letter just received from an
excellent young clergyman, who had been reading my "Temperance," quite,
to the point. After some compliments he says, "I need scarcely say I
entirely agree with the scope and arguments of this vigorous poem.
Nothing is more clear, and increasingly so, to my own perception than
the terrible tendency of modern human nature to run into extremes"
(quoting some lines). "Your reference to 'thrift' is especially true. I
have often smiled at the pious fervour with which the heads of large
families with small incomes have embraced teetotalism! I have long
thought that the motto '_in vino veritas_' contains in it far more of
'_veritas_' than is dreamt of in most people's philosophy, and that the
age of rampant total abstinence is the age of special falseness. Of
course, the evils of drunkenness can scarcely be exaggerated,--and yet
they can be and are so when they are spoken of as equal to the evils of
dishonesty: the former is indeed brutal, but the latter is devilish, and
far more effectually destroys the souls of men than the former.
Nevertheless in our poor money-grubbing land, the creeping paralysis of
tricks of trade, &c., is thought little of; and the shopman who has just
sold a third-rate article for a first-class price goes home with
respectable self-complacency and glances with holy horror at the man who
reels past him in the street.
"I desire to say this with reverence and caution. For we all need the
restraining influences of the blessed Spirit of God, as well as the
atonement and example of His dear Son. But when we see the present
tendency to anathematise open profligacy, and to ignore the hidden
Pharisaism (the very opposite to our Lord's own course), and the subtle
lying of the day, it seems as if those who ponder sadly over it ought to
speak out."
Doubtless, there are many more fads and fancies, many other sorts of
perils and trials that might be spoken of as an author's or any other
man's experiences: but I will pass on.
CHAPTER XI.
"SACRA POESIS" AND "GERALDINE."
With the exception of "Rough Rhymes," my first Continental Journal as
aforesaid, and a song or two, and a few juvenile poems, my first
appearance in print, the creator of a real bound volume (though of the
smallest size) was as author of a booklet called "Sacra Poesis;"
consisting of seventy-five little poems illustrative of engravings or
drawings of sacred subjects, and intended to accompany a sort of pious
album which I wished to give to my then future wife. Most of it was
composed in my teens, though it found no technical "compositor" of a
printing sort until I was twenty-two (in 1832), when Nisbet published
the pretty little 24mo, with a picture by myself of Hope's Anchor on the
title. The booklet is now very rare, and a hundred years hence may be a
treasure to some bibliomaniac. Of its contents, speaking critically of
what I wrote between fifty and sixty years ago, some, of the pieces have
not been equalled by me since, and are still to be found among my
Miscellaneous Poems: but, many are feeble and faulty. Some of the
reviews before me received the new poetaster with kindly appreciation;
some with sneers and due disparagement,--much as Byron's "Hours of
Idleness" had been treated not very many years before: though another
cause for hatred and contempt may have operated in my case, namely
this: Ever since youth and now to my old age I have been exposed to the
"_odium theologicum_," the strife always raging between Protestant and
Papist, Low Church and High, Waldo and Dominic, Ulster and Connaught:
hence to this hour the frequent rancour against me and my writings
excited by sundry hostile partisans.
* * * * *
My next volume was "Geraldine and other Poems," published by Joseph
Rickerby in 1838. The origin thereof was this,--as I now extract it from
my earliest literary notebook:--
"In August 1838 I was at Dover, and from a library read for the first
time Coleridge's Christabel;" it was the original edition, before the
author's afterward improvements. "Being much taken with the poem, the
thought struck me to continue it to a probable issue, especially as I
wanted a leading subject for a new volume of miscellaneous verse. The
notion was barren till I got to Heine Bay a fortnight after, and then I
put pen to paper and finished the tale. It occupied me about eight days,
an innocent fact which divers dull Zoili have been much offended withal,
seeing that Coleridge had thought proper to bring out his two Parts at a
sixteen years' interval; a matter doubtless attributable either to
accident or indolence,--for to imagine that he was diligently polishing
his verses the whole time (as some blockheads will have it) would indeed
be a verification of the _parturiunt montes_ theory. The fact is, these
things are done at a heat, as every poet knows. Pegasus is a racer, not
a cart-horse; Euterpe trips it like the hare, while dogged criticism is
the tortoise, &c." The book had a fair success, both here and in
America, and has been many times reprinted. Critiques of course were
various, for and against; the shuttlecock of fame requires conflicting
battledores: but, as I now again quote from that early notebook, "It is
amusing to notice, and instructive also to any young author who may
chance to see this, how thoroughly opposite many of the reviews are,
some extolling what others vilify; it just tends to keep a sensible man
of his own opinion, unmoved by such seemingly unreasonable praise or
censure. When Coleridge first published Christabel (intrinsically a most
melodious and sweet performance) it was positively hooted by the
critics; see in particular the _Edinburgh Review_. Coleridge left behind
him a very much improved and enlarged version of the poem, which I did
not see till years after I had written the sequel to it: my Geraldine
was composed for an addition to Christabel, as originally issued."
Another note of mine, in reply to a critic of _The Atlas_, runs
thus:--"Nobody who has not tried it can imagine the difficulties of
intellectual imitation: it is to think with another's mind, to speak
with another's tongue: I acknowledge freely that I never was satisfied
with Geraldine as a mere continuation of a story, but as an independent
poem, I will yet be the champion of my child, and think with _The
Eclectic_ that I have succeeded as well as possible: as honest Pickwick
says, 'And let my enemies make the most of it.' At this time of day it
is not worth my while by any modern replies to attempt to quench such
long extinct volcanoes as 'The Conservative' and 'The Torch,' nor to
reproduce sundry glorifications of the new poet and his verses from many
other notices, long or short, duly pasted down for future generations in
my Archive-book. As to critical verdicts in this case, black and white
are not more contradictory: _e.g._, let _Blackwood_ be contrasted with
the _Monthly Review_, or the _Church of England Quarterly_ with the
_Weekly True Sun_, &c. &c."
It is a pity (at least the author of sold-out volumes may be forgiven
for the sentiment) that most of my books are not to be bought: they are
not in the market and are only purchasable at old-literature stores,
such as Reeves' or Bickers': some day, I hope to find a publisher
spirited enough to risk money in a ten-volumed "Edition of my Prose and
Poetry complete," &c.; but in the past and present, the subscription
system per Mudie and Smith, buying up whole editions at cost price
whereby to satiate the reading public, starves at once both author and
publisher, and makes impossible these expensive crown octavo editions,
"which no gentleman's library ought to be without." Some of the beat
smaller pieces in my "Geraldine and other Poems" will be found in Gall &
Inglis's Miscellaneous Tupper before mentioned: but my two Oxford Prize
Poems, The African Desert and The Suttees, are printed only in the
Geraldine volume.
Anecdotes innumerable I could tell, if any cared to hear them, connected
with each of my books, as friends or foes have commented upon me and
mine in either hemisphere. In this place I cannot help recording one, as
it led to fortunate results. In 1839 I was travelling outside the Oxford
coach to Alma Mater, and a gentleman, arrayed as for an archery party
with bow and quiver, climbed up at Windsor for a seat beside me. He
seemed very joyous and excited, and broke out to me with this stanza,--
"How fair and fresh is morn!
The dewbeads dropping bright
Each humble flower adorn,
With coronets bedight,
And jewel the rough thorn
With tiny globes of light,--
How beautiful is morn!
Her scattered gems how bright!"
There,--isn't that charming? he said,--little aware of whom he asked the
amiable query. But when I went on with the second verse, he opened his
eyes wider and wider as I added:
"There is a quiet gladness
On the waking earth,
Like the face of sadness
Lit with chastened mirth;
There is a mine of treasure
In those hours of health,
Filling up the measure
Of creation's wealth!"
Of course, discovery of the author was unavoidable: so we collided and
coalesced, and I rejoiced to find in this "Angel unaware" no less a
celebrity than John Hughes of Donnington Priory, father of the still
greater celebrity (then a youth) Tom Hughes of Rugby and "Tom Brown's
Schooldays." Some time after I spent several pleasant days at his fine
old place in Berks, and made happy acquaintance with the brightest old
lady I ever met, his mother, who had known Burns and Byron and Scott; as
also with his pleasant good wife and her clever sons, one of whom, in
the ripeness of time, married a then charming little girl, the
heiress-ward of my host, and since well appreciated in society as a
_grande dame_; wife also to one famous for a Rugby in both hemispheres,
for rifledom, the White Horse of Wilts, and now full-fledged county
judgeship. These excellent friendships survive many long years and will
be transplanted elsewhere hereafter. All this grew from a casual
encounter outside a coach: but such is life; what we call accidents are
all providences, and we are guided inch by inch and minute by minute.
Tom Hughes succeeded as a county judge in Yorkshire my old schoolfellow,
St. John Yates, mentioned on a recent page in connection with Andrew
Irvine's turkeycock irascibility.
"Watch little providences: if indeed
Or less there be, or greater, in the sight
Of Him who governs all by day and night,
And sees the forest hidden in the seed:
Of all that happens take thou reverent heed,
For seen in true Religion's happier light
(Though not unknown of Reason's placid creed)
All things are ordered; all by orbits move,
Having precursors, satellites, and signs,
Whereby the mind not doubtfully divines
What is the will of Him who rules above,
And takes for guidance those paternal hints
That all is well, that thou art led by Love,
And in thy travel trackest old footprints."
CHAPTER XII.
PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.
And this may well be a fitting place wherein to record the origin,
progress, and after long years the full completion of what is manifestly
my chief authorial work in life, "Proverbial Philosophy." To ensure
accuracy, and not leave all the details to oftentimes unfaithful memory,
I will give a few extracts from "a brief account" of the book, set down
in 1838, at the beginning of Volume I. of "My Literary Heirloom," now
grown to many volumes, containing newspaper cuttings, anecdotes, and
letters and scraps of all sorts relating to my numerous works.
"In the year 1828, when under Mr. Holt's roof at Albury (anno ætatis meæ
18), I bethought myself, for the special use and behoof of my cousin
Isabella, who seven years after became my wife, that I would transcribe
my notions on the holy estate of matrimony; a letter was too light, and
a formal essay too heavy, and I didn't care to versify my thoughts, so I
resolved to convey them in the manner of Solomon's Proverbs or the
'Wisdom' of Jesus the Son of Sirach: and I did so,--successively, in the
Articles first on Marriage, then Love, then Friendship, and fourthly on
Education: several other pieces growing afterwards. Whilst at Albury, my
cousin showed some of these to our rector, Hugh M'Neile, who warmly
praised them, and recommended their publication; but, regarding them as
private and personal, I would not hear of it, and in fact it was nine
years before they saw print; thus literally, though I meant it not then,
exemplifying the Horatian advice, 'nonumque premantur in annum.'
However, one day in August 1838, Mr. Stebbing, whose chapel, in the
Hampstead Road I used to attend when living at Gothic Cottage, Regent's
Park, in my first years of marriage, visiting me and urging me to write
something for the _Athenæum_, which he was then editing, I was induced
to show him these earliest essays; but I declined to _give_ them to him,
whereat he was angered; perhaps the rather in that I objected to
piecemeal publication, possibly also casting some reproach (as the
fashion of the day then was) upon magazine and journalistic literature
generally. That I made an enemy of him was evidenced by a spiteful
little notice in the _Athenæum_ of April 21st (three months after my
first series was published) stating that it was 'a book not likely to
please beyond the circle of a few minds as eccentric as the author's.'
The same false friend excluded me altogether from any notice in the
_Examiner_ wherein he had some literary influence." To this day these
reviews have been my foes, which I regret.
"Still, Mr. Stebbing did me substantial good; he praised the idea as
'new, because a resuscitation of what was very old,'--and as of my own
origination in these latter days, and as a good vehicle for thoughts on
many matters: and he promised his valuable assistance to a young
author's fame,--performing as above. So, after a last interview with him
at his house, wherein I conclusively refused him, I wrote my Preface at
once, jotting down (as I recollect at the street corner post opposite
Hampstead Road Chapel) on the back of an old letter my opening
paragraph,--
"'Thoughts that have tarried in my mind, and peopled its inner
chambers,' &c., &c.
"In ten weeks from that day I had my first series ready,--supposing it
then all I should ever write;--the same assurance of a final end having
been my delusion at the close of each of my four series. My first
publisher was Rickerby of Abchurch Lane, who produced a beautifully
printed small folio volume with ornamental initials, and now very
scarce: it came to a second edition, but brought me no money,--and the
third edition failing to sell, it was in great part sent to America;
where N.P. Willis finding a copy, fancied the book that of some
forgotten author of the Elizabethan era, and quoted it week after week
in a periodical of his, _The Home Journal_, as such: years afterwards,
when he met me in London, he was scared to find that one whom he had
thought dead three hundred years was still alive and juvenile and ruddy.
"It might be thought indelicate in me to quote at length the many
pleasant greetings of the press to my first odd volumes; suffice it to
say, that the kind critics were with few exceptions unanimous in
commendation; and some great names, as Heraud, Leigh Hunt, and St. John
particularly favoured me,--the latter prophesying a tenth edition: but I
must still condescend to pick out at the end of this paper a few of the
plums of praise wherewith my early publication was indulged, if only to
please the numerous admirers of my chief 'lifework.' One comfort is that
no one of my reviewers all my life through has ever been bought or
rewarded. As to the less fulsome style of criticism, I was supposed by
the _Spectator_ to have 'written in hexameters,'--as if David or Solomon
had ever imitated Homer or some more ancient predecessor of his; and the
_Sun_ fancied that I had 'culled from Erasmus, Bacon, Franklin, and
Saavedra,' whereas I was totally ignorant of their wisdoms: Saavedra I
have since learned is Cervantes. The _Sunday Times_ finds 'Proverbial
Philosophy' 'very like Dodsley's "Economy of Human Life,"' but I may say
I never saw that neat little book of maxims till my brother Dan gave it
to me fourteen years after my Philosophy was public property; I am also
by this critic supposed to have 'imitated the Gulistan or Bostan of
Saadi,'--whereof I need not profess my total ignorance: however, the
writer kindly says of me, 'if he fail to make himself heard, the fault
will be rather in the public than in him.' The _Metropolitan_ propounds
that 'a book like this would make a man's fortune in the East, but we
are afraid that philosophy in proverbs has no great
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