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Tracks of a Rolling Stone

by Henry J. Coke · English · Gutenberg #497 · 612,387 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Tracks of a Rolling Stone

Author: Henry J. Coke


        
Release date: April 1, 1996 [eBook #497]
                Most recently updated: November 8, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/497

Credits: Transcribed from the 1905 Smith, Elder, & Co. edition by David Price. Second proofed by Margaret Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRACKS OF A ROLLING STONE ***


Transcribed from the 1905 Smith, Elder, & Co. edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org.  Second proofed by Margaret Price.

                 [Picture: Photograph of Henry John Coke]





                                  TRACKS
                                    OF
                             A ROLLING STONE


                                * * * * *

                                  BY THE
                         HONOURABLE HENRY J. COKE

                                AUTHOR OF
        ‘A RIDE OVER THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS’ ‘CREEDS OF THE DAY’ ETC.

                                * * * * *

                             WITH A PORTRAIT

                                * * * * *

                             _SECOND EDITION_

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                  SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
                                   1905

                          [All rights reserved]

                                * * * * *

                                    TO
                            MY DAUGHTER SYBIL

                                * * * * *




PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.


THE First Edition of this book was written, from beginning to end, in the
short space of five months, without the aid of diary or notes, beyond
those cited as such from a former work.

The Author, having no expectation that his reminiscences would be
received with the kind indulgence of which this Second Edition is the
proof, with diffidence ventured to tell so many tales connected with his
own unimportant life as he has done.  Emboldened by the reception his
‘Tracks’ have met with, he now adds a few stories which he trusts may
further amuse its readers.

_June_ 1905.




CHAPTER I


WE know more of the early days of the Pyramids or of ancient Babylon than
we do of our own.  The Stone age, the dragons of the prime, are not more
remote from us than is our earliest childhood.  It is not so long ago for
any of us; and yet, our memories of it are but veiled spectres wandering
in the mazes of some foregone existence.

Are we really trailing clouds of glory from afar?  Or are our
‘forgettings’ of the outer Eden only?  Or, setting poetry aside, are they
perhaps the quickening germs of all past heredity—an epitome of our race
and its descent?  At any rate _then_, if ever, our lives are such stuff
as dreams are made of.  There is no connected story of events, thoughts,
acts, or feelings.  We try in vain to re-collect; but the secrets of the
grave are not more inviolable,—for the beginnings, like the endings, of
life are lost in darkness.

It is very difficult to affix a date to any relic of that dim past.  We
may have a distinct remembrance of some pleasure, some pain, some fright,
some accident, but the vivid does not help us to chronicle with accuracy.
A year or two makes a vast difference in our ability.  We can remember
well enough when we donned the ‘_cauda virilis_,’ but not when we left
off petticoats.

The first remembrance to which I can correctly tack a date is the death
of George IV.  I was between three and four years old.  My recollection
of the fact is perfectly distinct—distinct by its association with other
facts, then far more weighty to me than the death of a king.

I was watching with rapture, for the first time, the spinning of a
peg-top by one of the grooms in the stable yard, when the coachman, who
had just driven my mother home, announced the historic news.  In a few
minutes four or five servants—maids and men—came running to the stables
to learn particulars, and the peg-top, to my sorrow, had to be abandoned
for gossip and flirtation.  We were a long way from street criers—indeed,
quite out of town.  My father’s house was in Kensington, a little further
west than the present museum.  It was completely surrounded by fields and
hedges.  I mention the fact merely to show to what age definite memory
can be authentically assigned.  Doubtless we have much earlier
remembrances, though we must reckon these by days, or by months at the
outside.  The relativity of the reckoning would seem to make Time indeed
a ‘Form of Thought.’

Two or three reminiscences of my childhood have stuck to me; some of them
on account of their comicality.  I was taken to a children’s ball at St.
James’s Palace.  In my mind’s eye I have but one distinct vision of it.
I cannot see the crowd—there was nothing to distinguish that from what I
have so often seen since; nor the court dresses, nor the soldiers even,
who always attract a child’s attention in the streets; but I see a raised
dais on which were two thrones.  William IV. sat on one, Queen Adelaide
on the other.  I cannot say whether we were marched past in turn, or how
I came there.  But I remember the look of the king in his naval uniform.
I remember his white kerseymere breeches, and pink silk stockings, and
buckled shoes.  He took me between his knees, and asked, ‘Well, what are
you going to be, my little man?’

‘A sailor,’ said I, with brazen simplicity.

‘Going to avenge the death of Nelson—eh?  Fond o’ sugar-plums?’

‘Ye-es,’ said I, taking a mental inventory of stars and anchor buttons.

Upon this, he fetched from the depths of his waistcoat pocket a capacious
gold box, and opened it with a tap, as though he were about to offer me a
pinch of snuff.  ‘There’s for you,’ said he.

I helped myself, unawed by the situation, and with my small fist
clutching the bonbons, was passed on to Queen Adelaide.  She gave me a
kiss, for form’s sake, I thought; and I scuttled back to my mother.

But here followed the shocking part of the _enfant terrible’s_ adventure.
Not quite sure of Her Majesty’s identity—I had never heard there was a
Queen—I naïvely asked my mother, in a very audible stage-whisper, ‘Who is
the old lady with—?’  My mother dragged me off the instant she had made
her curtsey.  She had a quick sense of humour; and, judging from her
laughter, when she told her story to another lady in the supper room, I
fancied I had said or done something very funny.  I was rather
disconcerted at being seriously admonished, and told I must never again
comment upon the breath of ladies who condescended to kiss, or to speak
to, me.

While we lived at Kensington, Lord Anglesey used often to pay my mother a
visit.  She had told me the story of the battle of Waterloo, in which my
Uncle George—6th Lord Albemarle—had taken part; and related how Lord
Anglesey had lost a leg there, and how one of his legs was made of cork.
Lord Anglesey was a great dandy.  The cut of the Paget hat was an
heirloom for the next generation or two, and the gallant Marquis’ boots
and tightly-strapped trousers were patterns of polish and precision.  The
limp was perceptible; but of which leg, was, in spite of careful
investigation, beyond my diagnosis.  His presence provoked my curiosity,
till one fine day it became too strong for resistance.  While he was
busily engaged in conversation with my mother, I, watching for the
chance, sidled up to his chair, and as soon as he looked away, rammed my
heel on to his toes.  They were his toes.  And considering the jump and
the oath which instantly responded to my test, I am persuaded they were
abnormally tender ones.  They might have been made of corns, certainly
not of cork.

Another discovery I made about this period was, for me at least, a
‘record’: it happened at Quidenham—my grandfather the 4th Lord
Albemarle’s place.

Some excursion was afoot, which needed an early breakfast.  When this was
half over, one married couple were missing.  My grandfather called me to
him (I was playing with another small boy in one of the window bays).
‘Go and tell Lady Maria, with my love,’ said he, ‘that we shall start in
half an hour.  Stop, stop a minute.  Be sure you knock at the door.’  I
obeyed orders—I knocked at the door, but failed to wait for an answer.  I
entered without it.  And what did I behold?  Lady Maria was still in bed;
and by the side of Lady M. was, very naturally, Lady M.’s husband, also
in bed and fast asleep.  At first I could hardly believe my senses.  It
was within the range of my experience that boys of my age occasionally
slept in the same bed.  But that a grown up man should sleep in the same
bed with his wife was quite beyond my notion of the fitness of things.  I
was so staggered, so long in taking in this astounding novelty, that I
could not at first deliver my grandfathers message.  The moment I had
done so, I rushed back to the breakfast room, and in a loud voice
proclaimed to the company what I had seen.  My tale produced all the
effect I had anticipated, but mainly in the shape of amusement.  One
wag—my uncle Henry Keppel—asked for details, gravely declaring he could
hardly credit my statement.  Every one, however, seemed convinced by the
circumstantial nature of my evidence when I positively asserted that
their heads were not even at opposite ends of the bed, but side by side
upon the same pillow.

A still greater soldier than Lord Anglesey used to come to Holkham every
year, a great favourite of my father’s; this was Lord Lynedoch.  My
earliest recollections of him owe their vividness to three accidents—in
the logical sense of the term: his silky milk-white locks, his Spanish
servant who wore earrings—and whom, by the way, I used to confound with
Courvoisier, often there at the same time with his master Lord William
Russell, for the murder of whom he was hanged, as all the world knows—and
his fox terrier Nettle, which, as a special favour, I was allowed to feed
with Abernethy biscuits.

He was at Longford, my present home, on a visit to my father in 1835,
when, one evening after dinner, the two old gentlemen—no one else being
present but myself—sitting in armchairs over the fire, finishing their
bottle of port, Lord Lynedoch told the wonderful story of his adventures
during the siege of Mantua by the French, in 1796.  For brevity’s sake,
it were better perhaps to give the outline in the words of Alison.  ‘It
was high time the Imperialists should advance to the relief of this
fortress, which was now reduced to the last extremity from want of
provisions.  At a council of war held in the end of December, it was
decided that it was indispensable that instant intelligence should be
sent to Alvinzi of their desperate situation.  An English officer,
attached to the garrison, volunteered to perform the perilous mission,
which he executed with equal courage and success.  He set out, disguised
as a peasant, from Mantua on December 29, at nightfall in the midst of a
deep fall of snow, eluded the vigilance of the French patrols, and, after
surmounting a thousand hardships and dangers, arrived at the headquarters
of Alvinzi, at Bassano, on January 4, the day after the conferences at
Vicenza were broken up.

‘Great destinies awaited this enterprising officer.  He was Colonel
Graham, afterwards victor at Barrosa, and the first British general who
planted the English standard on the soil of France.’

This bare skeleton of the event was endued ‘with sense and soul’ by the
narrator.  The ‘hardships and dangers’ thrilled one’s young nerves.
Their two salient features were ice perils, and the no less imminent one
of being captured and shot as a spy.  The crossing of the rivers stands
out prominently in my recollection.  All the bridges were of course
guarded, and he had two at least within the enemy’s lines to get
over—those of the Mincio and of the Adige.  Probably the lagunes
surrounding the invested fortress would be his worst difficulty.  The
Adige he described as beset with a two-fold risk—the avoidance of the
bridges, which courted suspicion, and the thin ice and only partially
frozen river, which had to be traversed in the dark.  The vigour, the
zest with which the wiry veteran ‘shoulder’d his crutch and show’d how
fields were won’ was not a thing to be forgotten.

Lord Lynedoch lived to a great age, and it was from his house at
Cardington, in Bedfordshire, that my brother Leicester married his first
wife, Miss Whitbread, in 1843.  That was the last time I saw him.

Perhaps the following is not out of place here, although it is connected
with more serious thoughts:

Though neither my father nor my mother were more pious than their
neighbours, we children were brought up religiously.  From infancy we
were taught to repeat night and morning the Lord’s Prayer, and invoke
blessings on our parents.  It was instilled into us by constant
repetition that God did not love naughty children—our naughtiness being
for the most part the original sin of disobedience, rooted in the love of
forbidden fruit in all its forms of allurement.  Moses himself could not
have believed more faithfully in the direct and immediate intervention of
an avenging God.  The pain in one’s stomach incident to unripe
gooseberries, no less than the consequent black dose, or the personal
chastisement of a responsible and apprehensive nurse, were but the just
visitations of an offended Deity.

Whether my religious proclivities were more pronounced than those of
other children I cannot say, but certainly, as a child, I was in the
habit of appealing to Omnipotence to gratify every ardent desire.

There were peacocks in the pleasure grounds at Holkham, and I had an
æsthetic love for their gorgeous plumes.  As I hunted under and amongst
the shrubs, I secretly prayed that my search might be rewarded.  Nor had
I a doubt, when successful, that my prayer had been granted by a
beneficent Providence.

Let no one smile at this infantine credulity, for is it not the basis of
that religious trust which helps so many of us to support the sorrows to
which our stoicism is unequal?  Who that might be tempted thoughtlessly
to laugh at the child does not sometimes sustain the hope of finding his
‘plumes’ by appeals akin to those of his childhood?  Which of us could
not quote a hundred instances of such a soothing delusion—if delusion it
be?  I speak not of saints, but of sinners: of the countless hosts who
aspire to this world’s happiness; of the dying who would live, of the
suffering who would die, of the poor who would be rich, of the aggrieved
who seek vengeance, of the ugly who would be beautiful, of the old who
would appear young, of the guilty who would not be found out, and of the
lover who would possess.  Ah! the lover.  Here possibility is a
negligible element.  Consequences are of no consequence.  Passion must be
served.  When could a miracle be more pertinent?

It is just fifty years ago now; it was during the Indian Mutiny.  A lady
friend of mine did me the honour to make me her confidant.  She paid the
same compliment to many—most of her friends; and the friends (as is their
wont) confided in one another.  Poor thing! her case was a sad one.
Whose case is not?  She was, by her own account, in the forty-second year
of her virginity; and it may be added, parenthetically, an honest
fourteen stone in weight.

She was in love with a hero of Lucknow.  It cannot be said that she knew
him only by his well-earned fame.  She had seen him, had even sat by him
at dinner.  He was young, he was handsome.  It was love at sight,
accentuated by much meditation—‘obsessions [peradventure] des images
génétiques.’  She told me (and her other confidants, of course) that she
prayed day and night that this distinguished officer, this handsome
officer, might return her passion.  And her letters to me (and to other
confidants) invariably ended with the entreaty that I (and her other,
&c.) would offer up a similar prayer on her behalf.  Alas! poor soul,
poor body!  I should say, the distinguished officer, together with the
invoked Providence, remained equally insensible to her supplications.
The lady rests in peace.  The soldier, though a veteran, still exults in
war.

But why do I cite this single instance?  Are there not millions of such
entreaties addressed to Heaven on this, and on every day?  What
difference is there, in spirit, between them and the child’s prayer for
his feather?  Is there anything great or small in the eye of Omniscience?
Or is it not our thinking only that makes it so?




CHAPTER II


SOON after I was seven years old, I went to what was then, and is still,
one of the most favoured of preparatory schools—Temple Grove—at East
Sheen, then kept by Dr. Pinkney.  I was taken thither from Holkham by a
great friend of my father’s, General Sir Ronald Ferguson, whose statue
now adorns one of the niches in the façade of Wellington College.  The
school contained about 120 boys; but I cannot name any one of the lot who
afterwards achieved distinction.  There were three Macaulays there,
nephews of the historian—Aulay, Kenneth, and Hector.  But I have lost
sight of all.

Temple Grove was a typical private school of that period.  The type is
familiar to everyone in its photograph as Dotheboys Hall.  The progress
of the last century in many directions is great indeed; but in few is it
greater than in the comfort and the cleanliness of our modern schools.
The luxury enjoyed by the present boy is a constant source of
astonishment to us grandfathers.  We were half starved, we were
exceedingly dirty, we were systematically bullied, and we were flogged
and caned as though the master’s pleasure was in inverse ratio to ours.
The inscription on the threshold should have been ‘Cave canem.’

We began our day as at Dotheboys Hall with two large spoonfuls of sulphur
and treacle.  After an hour’s lessons we breakfasted on one bowl of
milk—‘Skyblue’ we called it—and one hunch of buttered bread, unbuttered
at discretion.  Our dinner began with pudding—generally rice—to save the
butcher’s bill.  Then mutton—which was quite capable of taking care of
itself.  Our only other meal was a basin of ‘Skyblue’ and bread as
before.

As to cleanliness, I never had a bath, never bathed (at the school)
during the two years I was there.  On Saturday nights, before bed, our
feet were washed by the housemaids, in tubs round which half a dozen of
us sat at a time.  Woe to the last comers! for the water was never
changed.  How we survived the food, or rather the want of it, is a
marvel.  Fortunately for me, I used to discover, when I got into bed, a
thickly buttered crust under my pillow.  I believed, I never quite made
sure, (for the act was not admissible), that my good fairy was a
fiery-haired lassie (we called her ‘Carrots,’ though I had my doubts as
to this being her Christian name) who hailed from Norfolk.  I see her
now: her jolly, round, shining face, her extensive mouth, her ample
person.  I recall, with more pleasure than I then endured, the cordial
hugs she surreptitiously bestowed upon me when we met by accident in the
passages.  Kind, affectionate ‘Carrots’!  Thy heart was as bounteous as
thy bosom.  May the tenderness of both have met with their earthly
deserts; and mayest thou have shared to the full the pleasures thou wast
ever ready to impart!

There were no railways in those times.  It amuses me to see people
nowadays travelling by coach, for pleasure.  How many lives must have
been shortened by long winter journeys in those horrible coaches.  The
inside passengers were hardly better off than the outside.  The corpulent
and heavy occupied the scanty space allotted to the weak and
small—crushed them, slept on them, snored over them, and monopolised the
straw which was supposed to keep their feet warm.

A pachydermatous old lady would insist upon an open window.  A wheezy
consumptive invalid would insist on a closed one.  Everybody’s legs were
in their own, and in every other body’s, way.  So that when the distance
was great and time precious, people avoided coaching, and remained where
they were.

For this reason, if a short holiday was given—less than a week
say—Norfolk was too far off; and I was not permitted to spend it at
Holkham.  I generally went to Charles Fox’s at Addison Road, or to
Holland House.  Lord Holland was a great friend of my father’s; but, if
Creevey is to be trusted—which, as a rule, my recollection of him would
permit me to doubt, though perhaps not in this instance—Lord Holland did
not go to Holkham because of my father’s dislike to Lady Holland.

I speak here of my introduction to Holland House, for although Lady
Holland was then in the zenith of her ascendency, (it was she who was the
Cabinet Minister, not her too amiable husband,) although Holland House
was then the resort of all the potentates of Whig statecraft, and Whig
literature, and Whig wit, in the persons of Lord Grey, Brougham, Jeffrey,
Macaulay, Sydney Smith, and others, it was not till eight or ten years
later that I knew, when I met them there, who and what her Ladyship’s
brilliant satellites were.  I shall not return to Lady Holland, so I will
say a parting word of her forthwith.

The woman who corresponded with Buonaparte, and consoled the prisoner of
St. Helena with black currant jam, was no ordinary personage.  Most
people, I fancy, were afraid of her.  Her stature, her voice, her beard,
were obtrusive marks of her masculine attributes.  It is questionable
whether her amity or her enmity was most to be dreaded.  She liked those
best whom she could most easily tyrannise over.  Those in the other
category might possibly keep aloof.  For my part I feared her patronage.
I remember when I was about seventeen—a self-conscious hobbledehoy—Mr.
Ellice took me to one of her large receptions.  She received her guests
from a sort of elevated dais.  When I came up—very shy—to make my salute,
she asked me how old I was.  ‘Seventeen,’ was the answer.  ‘That means
next birthday,’ she grunted.  ‘Come and give me a kiss, my dear.’  I, a
man!—a man whose voice was (sometimes) as gruff as hers!—a man who was
beginning to shave for a moustache!  Oh! the indignity of it!

But it was not Lady Holland, or her court, that concerned me in my school
days, it was Holland Park, or the extensive grounds about Charles Fox’s
house (there were no other houses at Addison Road then), that I loved to
roam in.  It was the birds’-nesting; it was the golden carp I used to
fish for on the sly with a pin; the shying at the swans, the hunt for
cockchafers, the freedom of mischief generally, and the excellent
food—which I was so much in need of—that made the holiday delightful.

Some years later, when dining at Holland House, I happened to sit near
the hostess.  It was a large dinner party.  Lord Holland, in his
bath-chair (he nearly always had the gout), sat at the far end of the
table a long way off.  But my lady kept an eye on him, for she had caught
him drinking champagne.  She beckoned to the groom of the chambers, who
stood behind her; and in a gruff and angry voice shouted: ‘Go to my Lord.
Take away his wine, and tell him if he drinks any more you have my orders
to wheel him into the next room.’  If this was a joke it was certainly a
practical one.  And yet affection was behind it.  There’s a tender place
in every heart.

Like all despots, she was subject to fits of cowardice—especially, it was
said, with regard to a future state, which she professed to disbelieve
in.  Mr. Ellice told me that once, in some country house, while a fearful
storm was raging, and the claps of thunder made the windows rattle, Lady
Holland was so terrified that she changed dresses with her maid, and hid
herself in the cellar.  Whether the story be a calumny or not, it is at
least characteristic.

After all, it was mainly due to her that Holland House became the focus
of all that was brilliant in Europe.  In the memoirs of her father—Sydney
Smith—Mrs. Austin writes: ‘The world has rarely seen, and will rarely, if
ever, see again all that was to be found within the walls of Holland
House.  Genius and merit, in whatever rank of life, became a passport
there; and all that was choicest and rarest in Europe seemed attracted to
that spot as their natural soil.’

Did we learn much at Temple Grove?  Let others answer for themselves.
Acquaintance with the classics was the staple of a liberal education in
those times.  Temple Grove was the _atrium_ to Eton, and gerund-grinding
was its _raison d’être_.  Before I was nine years old I daresay I could
repeat—parrot, that is—several hundreds of lines of the Æneid.  This, and
some elementary arithmetic, geography, and drawing, which last I took to
kindly, were dearly paid for by many tears, and by temporarily impaired
health.  It was due to my pallid cheeks that I was removed.  It was due
to the following six months—summer months—of a happy life that my health
was completely restored.




CHAPTER III


MR. EDWARD ELLICE, who constantly figures in the memoirs of the last
century as ‘Bear Ellice’ (an outrageous misnomer, by the way), and who
later on married my mother, was the chief controller of my youthful
destiny.  His first wife was a sister of the Lord Grey of Reform Bill
fame, in whose Government he filled the office of War Minister.  In many
respects Mr. Ellice was a notable man.  He possessed shrewd intelligence,
much force of character, and an autocratic spirit—to which he owed his
sobriquet.  His kindness of heart, his powers of conversation, with
striking personality and ample wealth, combined to make him popular.  His
house in Arlington Street, and his shooting lodge at Glen Quoich, were
famous for the number of eminent men who were his frequent guests.

Mr. Ellice’s position as a minister, and his habitual residence in Paris,
had brought him in touch with the leading statesmen of France.  He was
intimately acquainted with Louis Philippe, with Talleyrand, with Guizot,
with Thiers, and most of the French men and French women whose names were
bruited in the early part of the nineteenth century.

When I was taken from Temple Grove, I was placed, by the advice and
arrangement of Mr. Ellice, under the charge of a French family, which had
fallen into decay—through the change of dynasty.  The Marquis de Coubrier
had been Master of the Horse to Charles X.  His widow—an old lady between
seventy and eighty—with three maiden daughters, all advanced in years,
lived upon the remnant of their estates in a small village called Larue,
close to Bourg-la-Reine, which, it may be remembered, was occupied by the
Prussians during the siege of Paris.  There was a château, the former
seat of the family; and, adjoining it, in the same grounds, a pretty and
commodious cottage.  The first was let as a country house to some wealthy
Parisians; the cottage was occupied by the Marquise and her three
daughters.

The personal appearances of each of these four elderly ladies, their
distinct idiosyncrasies, and their former high position as members of a
now moribund nobility, left a lasting impression on my memory.  One might
expect, perhaps, from such a prelude, to find in the old Marquise traces
of stately demeanour, or a regretted superiority.  Nothing of the kind.
She herself was a short, square-built woman, with large head and strong
features, framed in a mob cap, with a broad frill which flopped over her
tortoise-shell spectacles.  She wore a black bombazine gown, and list
slippers.  When in the garden, where she was always busy in the
summer-time, she put on wooden sabots over her slippers.

Despite this homely exterior, she herself was a ‘lady’ in every sense of
the word.  Her manner was dignified and courteous to everyone.  To her
daughters and to myself she was gentle and affectionate.  Her voice was
sympathetic, almost musical.  I never saw her temper ruffled.  I never
heard her allude to her antecedents.

The daughters were as unlike their mother as they were to one another.
Adèle, the eldest, was very stout, with a profusion of grey ringlets.
She spoke English fluently.  I gathered, from her mysterious nods and
tosses of the head, (to be sure, her head wagged a little of its own
accord, the ringlets too, like lambs’ tails,) that she had had an
_affaire de cœur_ with an Englishman, and that the perfidious islander
had removed from the Continent with her misplaced affections.  She was a
trifle bitter, I thought—for I applied her insinuations to myself—against
Englishmen generally.  But, though cynical in theory, she was perfectly
amiable in practice.  She superintended the ménage and spent the rest of
her life in making paper flowers.  I should hardly have known they were
flowers, never having seen their prototypes in nature.  She assured me,
however, that they were beautiful copies—undoubtedly she believed them to
be so.

Henriette, the youngest, had been the beauty of the family.  This I had
to take her own word for, since here again there was much room for
imagination and faith.  She was a confirmed invalid, and, poor thing!
showed every symptom of it.  She rarely left her room except for meals;
and although it was summer when I was there, she never moved without her
chauffrette.  She seemed to live for the sake of patent medicines and her
chauffrette; she was always swallowing the one, and feeding the other.

The middle daughter was Agläé.  Mademoiselle Agläé took charge—I may say,
possession—of me.  She was tall, gaunt, and bony, with a sharp aquiline
nose, pomegranate cheek-bones, and large saffron teeth ever much in
evidence.  Her speciality, as I soon discovered, was sentiment.  Like her
sisters, she had had her ‘affaires’ in the plural.  A Greek prince, so
far as I could make out, was the last of her adorers.  But I sometimes
got into scrapes by mixing up the Greek prince with a Polish count, and
then confounding either one or both with a Hungarian pianoforte player.

Without formulating my deductions, I came instinctively to the conclusion
that ‘En fait d’amour,’ as Figaro puts it, ‘trop n’est pas même assez.’
From Miss Agläé’s point of view a lover was a lover.  As to the
superiority of one over another, this was—nay, is—purely subjective.  ‘We
receive but what we give.’  And, from what Mademoiselle then told me, I
cannot but infer that she had given without stint.

Be that as it may, nothing could be more kind than her care of me.  She
tucked me up at night, and used to send for me in the morning before she
rose, to partake of her _café-au-lait_.  In return for her indulgences, I
would ‘make eyes’ such as I had seen Auguste, the young man-servant, cast
at Rose the cook.  I would present her with little scraps which I copied
in roundhand from a volume of French poems.  Once I drew, and coloured
with red ink, two hearts pierced with an arrow, a copious pool of red ink
beneath, emblematic of both the quality and quantity of my passion.  This
work of art produced so deep a sigh that I abstained thenceforth from
repeating such sanguinary endearments.

Not the least interesting part of the family was the servants.  I say
‘family,’ for a French family, unlike an English one, includes its
domestics; wherein our neighbours have the advantage over us.  In the
British establishment the household is but too often thought of and
treated as furniture.  I was as fond of Rose the cook and
maid-of-all-work as I was of anyone in the house.  She showed me how to
peel potatoes, break eggs, and make _pot-au-feu_.  She made me little
delicacies in pastry—swans with split almonds for wings, comic little
pigs with cloves in their eyes—for all of which my affection and my liver
duly acknowledged receipt in full.  She taught me more provincial
pronunciation and bad grammar than ever I could unlearn.  She was very
intelligent, and radiant with good humour.  One peculiarity especially
took my fancy—the yellow bandana in which she enveloped her head.  I was
always wondering whether she was born without hair—there was none to be
seen.  This puzzled me so that one day I consulted Auguste, who was my
chief companion.  He was quite indignant, and declared with warmth that
Mam’selle Rose had the most beautiful hair he had ever beheld.  He
flushed even with enthusiasm.  If it hadn’t been for his manner, I should
have asked him how he knew.  But somehow I felt the subject was a
delicate one.

How incessantly they worked, Auguste and Rose, and how cheerfully they
worked!  One could hear her singing, and him whistling, at it all day.
Yet they seemed to have abundant leisure to exchange a deal of pleasantry
and harmless banter.  Auguste was a Swiss, and a bigoted Protestant, and
never lost an opportunity of holding forth on the superiority of the
reformed religion.  If he thought the family were out of hearing, he
would grow very animated and declamatory.  But Rose, who also had hopes,
though perhaps faint, for my salvation, would suddenly rush into the room
with the carpet broom, and drive him out, with threats of Miss Agläé, and
the broomstick.

The gardener, Monsieur Benoît, was also a great favourite of mine, and I
of his, for I was never tired of listening to his wonderful adventures.
He had, so he informed me, been a soldier in the _Grande Armée_.  He
enthralled me with hair-raising accounts of his exploits: how, when
leading a storming party—he was always the leader—one dark and terrible
night, the vivid and incessant lightning betrayed them by the flashing of
their bayonets; and how in a few minutes they were mowed down by
_mitraille_.  He had led forlorn hopes, and performed deeds of astounding
prowess.  How many Life-guardsmen he had annihilated: ‘Ah! ben oui!’ he
was afraid to say.  He had been personally noticed by ‘Le p’tit caporal.’
There were many, whose deeds were not to compare with his, who had been
made princes and mareschals.  _Parbleu_! but his luck was bad.  ‘Pas
d’chance! pas d’chance!  Mo’sieu Henri.’  As Monsieur Benoît recorded his
feats, and witnessed my unbounded admiration, his voice would grow more
and more sepulchral, till it dropped to a hoarse and scarcely audible
whisper.

I was a little bewildered one day when, having breathlessly repeated some
of his heroic deeds to the Marquise, she with a quiet smile assured me
that ‘ce petit bon-homme,’ as she called him, had for a short time been a
drummer in the National Guard, but had never been a soldier.  This was a
blow to me; moreover, I was troubled by the composure of the Marquise.
Monsieur Benoît had actually been telling me what was not true.  Was it,
then, possible that grown-up people acquired the privilege of fibbing
with impunity?  I wondered whether this right would eventually become
mine!

At Bourg-la-Reine there is, or was, a large school.  Three days in the
week I had to join one of the classes there; on the other three one of
the ushers came up to Larue for a couple of hours of private tuition.  At
the school itself I did not learn very much, except that boys everywhere
are pretty similar, especially in the badness of their manners.  I also
learnt that shrugging the shoulders while exhibiting the palms of the
hands, and smiting oneself vehemently on the chest, are indispensable
elements of the French idiom.  The indiscriminate use of the word
‘parfaitement’ I also noticed to be essential when at a loss for either
language or ideas, and have made valuable use of it ever since.

Monsieur Vincent, my tutor, was a most good-natured and patient teacher.
I incline, however, to think that I taught him more English than he
taught me French.  He certainly worked hard at his lessons.  He read
English aloud to me, and made me correct his pronunciation.  The mental
agony this caused me makes me hot to think of still.  I had never heard
his kind of Franco-English before.  To my ignorance it was the most comic
language in the world.  There were some words which, in spite of my
endeavours, he persisted in pronouncing in his own way.  I have since got
quite used to the most of them, and their only effect is to remind me of
my own rash ventures in a foreign tongue.  There are one or two words
which recall the pain it gave me to control my emotions.  He would
produce his penknife, for instance; and, contemplating it with a
despondent air, would declare it to be the most difficult word in the
English language to pronounce.  ‘Ow you say ’im?’  ‘Penknife,’ I
explained.  He would bid me write it down; then having spelt it, he
would, with much effort, and a sound like sneezing—oh! the pain I
endured!—slowly repeat ‘Penkneef.’  I gave it up at last; and he was
gratified with his success.  As my explosion generally occurred about
five minutes afterwards, Monsieur Vincent failed to connect cause and
effect.  When we parted he gave me a neatly bound copy of La Bruyère as a
prize—for his own proficiency, I presume.  Many a pleasant half-hour have
I since spent with the witty classic.

Except the controversial harangues of the zealot Auguste, my religious
teaching was neglected on week days.  On Sundays, if fine, I was taken to
a Protestant church in Paris; not infrequently to the Embassy.  I did not
enjoy this at all.  I could have done very well without it.  I liked the
drive, which took about an hour each way.  Occasionally Agläé and I went
in the Bourg-la-Reine coucou.  But Mr. Ellice had arranged that a
carriage should be hired for me.  Probably he was not unmindful of the
convenience of the old ladies.  They were not.  The carriage was always
filled.  Even Mademoiselle Henriette managed to go sometimes—aided by a
little patent medicine, and when it was too hot for the chauffrette.  If
she was unable, a friend in the neighbourhood was offered a seat; and I
had to sit bodkin, or on Mademoiselle Agläé’s lap.  I hated the ‘friend’;
for, secretly, I felt the carriage was mine, though of course I never had
the bad taste to say so.

They went to Mass, and I was allowed to go with them, in addition to my
church, as a special favour.  I liked the music, the display of candles,
the smell of the incense, and the dresses of the priests; and wondered
whether when undressed—unrobed, that is—they were funny old gentlemen
like Monsieur le Curé at Larue, and took such a prodigious quantity of
snuff up their noses and under their finger-nails.  The ladies did a good
deal of shopping, and we finished off at the Flower Market by the
Madeleine, where I, through the agency of Mademoiselle Agläé, bought
plants for ‘Maman.’  This gave ‘Maman’ _un plaisir inouï_, and me too;
for the dear old lady always presented me with a stick of barley-sugar in
return.  As I never possessed a sou (Miss Agläé kept account of all my
expenses and disbursements) I was strongly in favour of buying plants for
‘Maman.’

I loved the garden.  It was such a beautiful garden; so beautifully kept
by Monsieur Benoît, and withered old Mère Michèle, who did the weeding
and helped Rose once a week in the laundry.  There were such pretty
trellises, covered with roses and clematis; such masses of bright flowers
and sweet mignonette; such tidy gravel walks and clipped box edges; such
floods of sunshine; so many butterflies and lizards basking in it; the
birds singing with excess of joy.  I used to fancy they sang in gratitude
to the dear old Marquise, who never forgot them in the winter snows.

What a quaint but charming picture she was amidst this quietude,—she who
had lived through the Reign of Terror: her mob cap, garden apron, and big
gloves; a trowel in one hand, a watering-pot in the other; potting and
unpotting; so busy, seemingly so happy.  She loved to have me with her,
and let me do the watering.  What a pleasure that was!  The scores of
little jets from the perforated rose, the gushing sound, the freshness
and the sparkle, the gratitude of the plants, to say nothing of one’s own
wet legs.  ‘Maman’ did not approve of my watering my own legs.  But if
the watering-pot was too big for me how could I help it?  By and by a
small one painted red within and green outside was discovered in
Bourg-la-Reine, and I was happy ever afterwards.

Much of my time was spent with the children and nurses of the family
which occupied the château.  The costume of the head nurse with her high
Normandy cap (would that I had a female pen for details) invariably
suggested to me that she would make any English showman’s fortune, if he
could only exhibit her stuffed.  At the cottage they called her ‘La
Grosse Normande.’  Not knowing her by any other name, I always so
addressed her.  She was not very quick-witted, but I think she a little
resented my familiarity, and retaliated by comparisons between her
compatriots and mine, always in a tone derogatory to the latter.  She
informed me as a matter of history, patent to all nurses, that the
English race were notoriously bow-legged; and that this was due to the
vicious practice of allowing children to use their legs before the
gristle had become bone.  Being of an inquiring turn of mind, I listened
with awe to this physiological revelation, and with chastened and
depressed spirits made a mental note of our national calamity.  Privately
I fancied that the mottled and spasmodic legs of Achille—whom she carried
in her arms—or at least so much of the infant Pelides’ legs as were not
enveloped in a napkin, gave every promise of refuting her generalisation.

One of my amusements was to set brick traps for small birds.  At Holkham
in the winter time, by baiting with a few grains of corn, I and my
brothers used, in this way, to capture robins, hedge-sparrows, and tits.
Not far from the château was a large osier bed, resorted to by flocks of
the common sparrow.  Here I set my traps.  But it being summer time, and
(as I complained when twitted with want of success) French birds being
too stupid to know what the traps were for, I never caught a feather.
Now this osier bed was a favourite game covert for the sportsmen of the
château; and what was my delight and astonishment when one morning I
found a dead hare with its head under the fallen brick of my trap.  How
triumphantly I dragged it home, and showed it to Rose and Auguste,—who
more than the rest had ‘mocked themselves’ of my traps, and then carried
it in my arms, all bloody as it was (I could not make out how both its
hind legs were broken) into the salon to show it to the old Marquise.
Mademoiselle Henriette, who was there, gave a little scream (for effect)
at sight of the blood.  Everybody was pleased.  But when I overheard
Rose’s _sotto voce_ to the Marquise: ‘Comme ils sont gentils!’ I
indignantly retorted that ‘it wasn’t kind of the hare at all: it was
entirely due to my skill in setting the traps.  They would catch anything
that put its head into them.  Just you try.’

How severe are the shocks of early disillusionment!  It was not until
long after the hare was skinned, roasted, served as _civet_ and as
_purée_ that I discovered the truth.  I was not at all grateful to the
gentlemen of the château whose dupe I had been; was even wrath with my
dear old ‘Maman’ for treating them with extra courtesy for their kindness
to her _petit chéri_.

That was a happy summer.  After it was ended, and it was time for me to
return to England and begin my education for the Navy I never again set
eyes on Larue, or that charming nest of old ladies who had done their
utmost to spoil me.  Many and many a time have I been to Paris, but
nothing could tempt me to visit Larue.  So it is with me.  Often have I
questioned the truth of the _nessun maggior dolore_ than the memory of
happy times in the midst of sorry ones.  The thought of happiness, it
would seem, should surely make us happier, and yet—not of happiness for
ever lost.  And are not the deepening shades of our declining sun
deepened by youth’s contrast?  Whatever our sweetest songs may tell us
of, we are the sadder for our sweetest memories.  The grass can never be
as green again to eyes grown watery.  The lambs that skipped when we did
were long since served as mutton.  And if

    Die Füsse tragen mich so muthig nicht empor
    Die hohen Stufen die ich kindisch übersprang,

why, I will take the fact for granted.  My youth is fled, my friends are
dead.  The daisies and the snows whiten by turns the grave of him or
her—the dearest I have loved.  Shall I make a pilgrimage to that
sepulchre?  Drop futile tears upon it?  Will they warm what is no more?
I for one have not the heart for that.  Happily life has something else
for us to do.  Happily ’tis best to do it.




CHAPTER IV


THE passage from the romantic to the realistic, from the chimerical to
the actual, from the child’s poetic interpretation of life to life’s
practical version of itself, is too gradual to be noticed while the
process is going on.  It is only in the retrospect we see the change.
There is still, for yet another stage, the same and even greater
receptivity,—delight in new experiences, in gratified curiosity, in
sensuous enjoyment, in the exercise of growing faculties.  But the belief
in the impossible and the bliss of ignorance are seen, when looking back,
to have assumed almost abruptly a cruder state of maturer dulness.
Between the public schoolboy and the child there is an essential
difference; and this in a boy’s case is largely due, I fancy, to the
diminished influence of woman, and the increased influence of men.

With me, certainly, the rough usage I was ere long to undergo materially
modified my view of things in general.  In 1838, when I was eleven years
old, my uncle, Henry Keppel, the future Admiral of the Fleet, but then a
dashing young commander, took me (as he mentions in his Autobiography) to
the Naval Academy at Gosport.  The very afternoon of my admittance—as an
illustration of the above remarks—I had three fights with three different
boys.  After that the ‘new boy’ was left to his own devices,—_qua_ ‘new
boy,’ that is; as an ordinary small boy, I had my share.  I have spoken
of the starvation at Dr. Pinkney’s; here it was the terrible bullying
that left its impress on me—literally its mark, for I still bear the scar
upon my hand.

Most boys, I presume, know the toy called a whirligig, made by stringing
a button on a loop of thread, the twisting and untwisting of which by
approaching and separating the hands causes the button to revolve.  Upon
this design, and by substituting a jagged disk of slate for the button,
the senior ‘Bull-dogs’ (we were all called ‘Burney’s bull-dogs’)
constructed a very simple instrument of torture.  One big boy spun the
whirligig, while another held the small boy’s palm till the sharp
slate-edge gashed it.  The wound was severe.  For many years a long white
cicatrice recorded the fact in my right hand.  The ordeal was, I fancy,
unique—a prerogative of the naval ‘bull-dogs.’  The other torture was, in
those days, not unknown to public schools.  It was to hold a boy’s back
and breech as near to a hot fire as his clothes would bear without
burning.  I have an indistinct recollection of a boy at one of our
largest public schools being thus exposed, and left tied to chairs while
his companions were at church.  When church was over the boy was
found—roasted.

By the advice of a chum I submitted to the scorching without a howl, and
thus obtained immunity, and admission to the roasting guild for the
future.  What, however, served me best, in all matters of this kind, was
that as soon as I was twelve years old my name was entered on the books
of the ‘Britannia,’ then flag-ship in Portsmouth Harbour, and though I
remained at the Academy, I always wore the uniform of a volunteer of the
first class, now called a naval cadet.  The uniform was respected, and
the wearer shared the benefit.

During the winter of 1839–40 I joined H.M.S. ‘Blonde,’ a 46-gun frigate
commanded by Captain Bouchier, afterwards Sir Thomas, whose portrait is
now in the National Portrait Gallery.  He had seen much service, and had
been flag-captain to Nelson’s Hardy.  In the middle of that winter we
sailed for China, where troubles had arisen anent the opium trade.

What would the cadet of the present day think of the treatment we small
boys had to put up with sixty or seventy years ago?  Promotion depended
almost entirely on interest.  The service was entered at twelve or
thirteen.  After two years at sea, if the boy passed his examination, he
mounted the white patch, and became a midshipman.  At the end of four
years more he had to pass a double examination,—one for seamanship before
a board of captains, and another for navigation at the Naval College.  He
then became a master’s mate, and had to serve for three years as such
before he was eligible for promotion to a lieutenancy.  Unless an officer
had family interest he often stuck there, and as often had to serve under
one more favoured, who was not born when he himself was getting stale.

Naturally enough these old hands were jealous of the fortunate
youngsters, and, unless exceptionally amiable, would show them little
mercy.

We left Portsmouth in December 1839.  It was bitter winter.  The day we
sailed, such was the severity of the gale and snowstorm, that we had to
put back and anchor at St. Helens in the Isle of Wight.  The next night
we were at sea.  It happened to be my middle watch.  I had to turn out of
my hammock at twelve to walk the deck till four in the morning.  Walk! I
could not stand.  Blinded with snow, drenched by the seas, frozen with
cold, home sick and sea sick beyond description, my opinion of the Royal
Navy—as a profession—was, in the course of these four hours, seriously
subverted.  Long before the watch ended.  I was reeling about more asleep
than awake; every now and then brought to my senses by breaking my shins
against the carronade slides; or, if I sat down upon one of them to rest,
by a playful whack with a rope’s end from one of the crusty old mates
aforesaid, who perhaps anticipated in my poor little personality the
arrogance of a possible commanding officer.  Oh! those cruel night
watches!  But the hard training must have been a useful tonic too.  One
got accustomed to it by degrees; and hence, indifferent to exposure, to
bad food, to kicks and cuffs, to calls of duty, to subordination, and to
all that constitutes discipline.

Luckily for me, the midshipman of my watch, Jack Johnson, was a trump,
and a smart officer to boot.  He was six years older than I, and, though
thoroughly good-natured, was formidable enough from his strength and
determination to have his will respected.  He became my patron and
protector.  Rightly, or wrongly I am afraid, he always took my part, made
excuses for me to the officer of our watch if I were caught napping under
the half-deck, or otherwise neglecting my duty.  Sometimes he would even
take the blame for this upon himself, and give me a ‘wigging’ in private,
which was my severest punishment.  He taught me the ropes, and explained
the elements of seamanship.  If it was very cold at night he would make
me wear his own comforter, and, in short, took care of me in every
possible way.  Poor Jack! I never had a better friend; and I loved him
then, God knows.  He was one of those whose advancement depended on
himself.  I doubt whether he would ever have been promoted but for an
accident which I shall speak of presently.

When we got into warm latitudes we were taught not only to knot and
splice, but to take in and set the mizzen royal.  There were four of us
boys, and in all weathers at last we were practised aloft until we were
as active and as smart as any of the ship’s lads, even in dirty weather
or in sudden squalls.

We had a capital naval instructor for lessons in navigation, and the
quartermaster of the watch taught us how to handle the wheel and con.

These quartermasters—there was one to each of the three watches—were
picked men who had been captains of tops or boatswains’ mates.  They were
much older than any of the crew.  Our three in the ‘Blonde’ had all seen
service in the French and Spanish wars.  One, a tall, handsome old
fellow, had been a smuggler; and many a fight with, or narrow escape
from, the coast-guard he had to tell of.  The other two had been badly
wounded.  Old Jimmy Bartlett of my watch had a hole in his chest half an
inch deep from a boarding pike.  He had also lost a finger, and a bullet
had passed through his cheek.  One of his fights was in the ‘Amethyst’
frigate when, under Sir Michael Seymour, she captured the ‘Niemen’ in
1809.  Often in the calm tropical nights, when the helm could take care
of itself almost, he would spin me a yarn about hot actions,
cutting-outs, press-gangings, and perils which he had gone through,
or—what was all one to me—had invented.

From England to China round the Cape was a long voyage before there was a
steamer in the Navy.  It is impossible to describe the charm of one’s
first acquaintance with tropical vegetation after the tedious monotony
unbroken by any event but an occasional flogging or a man overboard.  The
islands seemed afloat in an atmosphere of blue; their jungles rooting in
the water’s edge.  The strange birds in the daytime, the flocks of
parrots, the din of every kind of life, the flying foxes at night, the
fragrant and spicy odours, captivate the senses.  How delicious, too, the
fresh fruits brought off by the Malays in their scooped-out logs, one’s
first taste of bananas, juicy shaddocks, mangoes, and custard
apples—after months of salt junk, disgusting salt pork, and biscuit all
dust and weevils.  The water is so crystal-clear it seems as though one
could lay one’s hands on strange coloured fish and coral beds at any
depth.  This, indeed, was ‘kissing the lips of unexpected change.’  It
was a first kiss moreover.  The tropics now have ceased to remind me even
of this spell of novelty and wonder.




CHAPTER V


THE first time I ‘smelt powder’ was at Amoy.  The ‘Blonde’ carried out
Lord Palmerston’s letter to the Chinese Government.  Never was there a
more iniquitous war than England then provoked with China to force upon
her the opium trade with India in spite of the harm which the Chinese
authorities believed that opium did to their people.

Even Macaulay advocated this shameful imposition.  China had to submit,
and pay into the bargain four and a half millions sterling to prove
themselves in the wrong.  Part of this went as prize money.  My share of
it—the _douceur_ for a middy’s participation in the crime—was exactly
100_l._

To return to Amoy.  When off the mouth of the Canton river we had taken
on board an interpreter named Thom.  What our instructions were I know
not; I can only tell what happened.  Our entry into Amoy harbour caused
an immediate commotion on land.  As soon as we dropped anchor, about half
a mile from the shore, a number of troops, with eight or ten
field-pieces, took up their position on the beach, evidently resolved to
prevent our landing.  We hoisted a flag of truce, at the same time
cleared the decks for action, and dropped a kedge astern so as to moor
the ship broadside to the forts and invested shore.  The officer of my
watch, the late Sir Frederick Nicholson, together with the interpreter,
were ordered to land and communicate with the chief mandarin.  To carry
out this as inoffensively as possible, Nicholson took the jolly-boat,
manned by four lads only.  As it was my watch, I had charge of the boat.
A napkin or towel served for a flag of truce.  But long before we reached
the shore, several mandarins came down to the water’s edge waving their
swords and shouting angrily to warn us off.  Mr. Thom, who understood
what they said, was frightened out of his wits, assuring us we should all
be sawed in half if we attempted to land.  Sir Frederick was not the man
to disobey orders even on such a penalty; he, however, took the
precaution—a very wise one as it happened—to reverse the boat, and back
her in stern foremost.

No sooner did the keel grate on the shingle than a score of soldiers
rushed down to seize us.  Before they could do so we had shoved off.  The
shore was very steep.  In a moment we were in deep water, and our lads
pulling for dear life.  Then came a storm of bullets from matchlocks and
jingals and the bigger guns, fortunately just too high to hit us.  One
bullet only struck the back-board, but did no harm.  What, however,
seemed a greater danger was the fire from the ship.  Ere we were halfway
back broadside after broadside was fired over our heads into the poor
devils massed along the beach.  This was kept up until not a living
Chinaman was to be seen.

I may mention here a curious instance of cowardice.  One of our men, a
ship’s painter, soon after the firing began and was returned by the
fort’s guns, which in truth were quite harmless, jumped overboard and
drowned himself.  I have seen men’s courage tried under fire, and in many
other ways since; yet I have never known but one case similar to this,
when a friend of my own, a rich and prosperous man, shot himself to avoid
death!  So that there are men like ‘Monsieur Grenouille, qui se cachait
dans l’eau pour éviter la pluie.’  Often have I seen timid and nervous
men, who were thought to be cowards, get so excited in action that their
timidity has turned to rashness.  In truth ‘on est souvent ferme par
faiblesse, et audacieux par timidité.’

Partly for this reason, and partly because I look upon it as a remnant of
our predatory antecedents and of animal pugnacity, I have no extravagant
admiration for mere combativeness or physical courage.  Honoured and
rewarded as one of the noblest of manly attributes, it is one of the
commonest of qualities,—one which there is not a mammal, a bird, a fish,
or an insect even, that does not share with us.  Such is the esteem in
which it is held, such the ignominy which punishes the want of it, that
the most cautious and the most timid by nature will rather face the
uncertain risks of a fight than the certain infamy of imputed cowardice.

Is it likely that courage should be rare under such circumstances,
especially amongst professional fighters, who in England at least have
chosen their trade?  That there are poltroons, and plenty of them,
amongst our soldiers and sailors, I do not dispute.  But with the fear of
shame on one hand, the hope of reward on the other, the merest dastard
will fight like a wild beast, when his blood is up.  The extraordinary
merit of his conduct is not so obvious to the peaceful thinker.  I speak
not of such heroism as that of the Japanese,—their deeds will henceforth
be bracketed with those of Leonidas and his three hundred, who died for a
like cause.  With the Japanese, as it was with the Spartans, every man is
a patriot; nor is the proportionate force of their barbaric invaders
altogether dissimilar.

Is then the Victoria Cross an error?  To say so would be an outrage in
this age of militarism.  And what would all the Queens of Beauty think,
from Sir Wilfred Ivanhoe’s days to ours, if mighty warriors ceased to
poke each other in the ribs, and send one another’s souls untimely to the
‘viewless shades,’ for the sake of their ‘doux yeux?’  Ah! who knows how
many a mutilation, how many a life, has been the price of that requital?
Ye gentle creatures who swoon at the sight of blood, is it not the hero
who lets most of it that finds most favour in your eyes?  Possibly it may
be to the heroes of moral courage that some distant age will award its
choicest decorations.  As it is, the courage that seeks the rewards of
Fame seems to me about on a par with the virtue that invests in Heaven.

Though an anachronism as regards this stage of my career, I cannot resist
a little episode which pleasantly illustrates moral courage, or chivalry
at least, combined with physical bravery.

In December, 1899, I was a passenger on board a Norddeutscher Lloyd on my
way to Ceylon.  The steamer was crowded with Germans; there were
comparatively few English.  Things had been going very badly with us in
the Transvaal, and the telegrams both at Port Said and at Suez
supplemented the previous ill-news.  At the latter place we heard of the
catastrophe at Magersfontein, of poor Wauchope’s death, and of the
disaster to the Highland Light Infantry.  The moment it became known the
Germans threw their caps into the air, and yelled as if it were they who
had defeated us.

Amongst the steerage passengers was a Major—in the English army—returning
from leave to rejoin his regiment at Colombo.  If one might judge by his
choice of a second-class fare, and by his much worn apparel, he was what
one would call a professional soldier.  He was a tall, powerfully-built,
handsome man, with a weather-beaten determined face, and keen eye.  I was
so taken with his looks that I often went to the fore part of the ship on
the chance of getting a word with him.  But he was either shy or proud,
certainly reserved; and always addressed me as ‘Sir,’ which was not
encouraging.

That same evening, after dinner in the steerage cabin, a German got up
and, beginning with some offensive allusions to the British army,
proposed the health of General Cronje and the heroic Boers.  This was
received with deafening ‘Hochs.’  To cap the enthusiasm up jumped another
German, and proposed ‘unglück—bad luck to all Englanders and to their
Queen.’  This also was cordially toasted.  When the ceremony was ended
and silence restored, my reserved friend calmly rose, tapped the table
with the handle of his knife (another steerage passenger—an
Australian—told me what happened), took his watch from his pocket, and
slowly said: ‘It is just six minutes to eight.  If the person who
proposed the last toast has not made a satisfactory apology to me before
the hand of my watch points to the hour, I will thrash him till he does.
I am an officer in the English army, and always keep my word.’  A small
band of Australians was in the cabin.  One and all of them applauded this
laconic speech.  It was probably due in part to these that the offender
did not wait till the six minutes had expired.

Next day I congratulated my reserved friend.  He was reticent as usual.
All I could get out of him was, ‘I never allow a lady to be insulted in
my presence, sir.’  It was his Queen, not his cloth, that had roused the
virility in this quiet man.

Let us turn to another aspect of the deeds of war.  About daylight on the
morning following our bombardment, it being my morning watch, I was
ordered to take the surgeon and assistant surgeon ashore.  There were
many corpses, but no living or wounded to be seen.  One object only
dwells visually in my memory.

At least a quarter of a mile from the dead soldiers, a stray shell had
killed a grey-bearded old man and a young woman.  They were side by side.
The woman was still in her teens and pretty.  She lay upon her back.
Blood was oozing from her side.  A swarm of flies were buzzing in and out
of her open mouth.  Her little deformed feet, cased in the high-heeled
and embroidered tiny shoes, extended far beyond her petticoats.  It was
these feet that interested the men of science.  They are now, I believe,
in a jar of spirits at Haslar hospital.  At least, my friend the
assistant surgeon told me, as we returned to the ship, that that was
their ultimate destination.  The mutilated body, as I turned from it with
sickening horror, left a picture on my youthful mind not easily to be
effaced.

After this we joined the rest of the squadron: the ‘Melville’ (a
three-decker, Sir W. Parker’s flagship), the ‘Blenheim,’ the ‘Druid,’ the
‘Calliope,’ and several 18-gun brigs.  We took Hong Kong, Chusan, Ningpo,
Canton, and returned to take Amoy.  One or two incidents only in the
several engagements seem worth recording.

We have all of us supped full with horrors this last year or so, and I
have no thought of adding to the surfeit.  But sometimes common accidents
appear exceptional, if they befall ourselves, or those with whom we are
intimate.  If the sufferer has any special identity, we speculate on his
peculiar way of bearing his misfortune; and are thus led on to place
ourselves in his position, and imagine ourselves the sufferers.

Major Daniel, the senior marine officer of the ‘Blonde,’ was a reserved
and taciturn man.  He was quiet and gentlemanlike, always very neat in
his dress; rather severe, still kind to his men.  His aloofness was in no
wise due to lack of ideas, nor, I should say, to pride—unless, perhaps,
it were the pride which some men feel in suppressing all emotion by
habitual restraint of manner.  Whether his _sangfroid_ was
constitutional, or that nobler kind of courage which feels and masters
timidity and the sense of danger, none could tell.  Certain it is he was
as calm and self-possessed in action as in repose.  He was so courteous
one fancied he would almost have apologised to his foe before he
remorselessly ran him through.

On our second visit to Amoy, a year or more after the first, we met with
a warmer reception.  The place was much more strongly fortified, and the
ship was several-times hulled.  We were at very close quarters, as it is
necessary to pass under high ground as the harbour is entered.  Those who
had the option, excepting our gallant old captain, naturally kept under
shelter of the bulwarks and hammock nettings.  Not so Major Daniel.  He
stood in the open gangway watching the effect of the shells, as though he
were looking at a game of billiards.  While thus occupied a round shot
struck him full in the face, and simply left him headless.

Another accident, partly due to an ignorance of dynamics, happened at the
taking of Canton.  The whole of the naval brigade was commanded by Sir
Thomas Bouchier.  Our men were lying under the ridge of a hill protected
from the guns on the city walls.  Fully exposed to the fire, which was
pretty hot, ‘old Tommy’ as we called him, paced to and fro with
contemptuous indifference, stopping occasionally to spy the enemy with
his long ship’s telescope.  A number of bluejackets, in reserve, were
stationed about half a mile further off at the bottom of the protecting
hill.  They were completely screened from the fire by some buildings of
the suburbs abutting upon the slope.  Those in front were watching the
cannon-balls which had struck the crest and were rolling as it were by
mere force of gravitation down the hillside.  Some jokes were made about
football, when suddenly a smart and popular young officer—Fox, first
lieutenant of one of the brigs—jumped out at one of these spent balls,
which looked as though it might have been picked up by the hands, and
gave it a kick.  It took his foot off just above the ankle.  There was no
surgeon at hand, and he was bleeding to death before one could be found.
Sir Thomas had come down the hill, and seeing the wounded officer on the
ground with a group around him, said in passing, ‘Well, Fox, this is a
bad job, but it will make up the pair of epaulets, which is something.’

‘Yes sir,’ said the dying man feebly, ‘but without a pair of legs.’  Half
an hour later he was dead.

I have spoken lightly of courage, as if, by implication, I myself
possessed it.  Let me make a confession.  From my soul I pity the man who
is or has been such a miserable coward as I was in my infancy, and up to
this youthful period of my life.  No fear of bullets or bayonets could
ever equal mine.  It was the fear of ghosts.  As a child, I think that at
times when shut up for punishment, in a dark cellar for instance, I must
have nearly gone out of my mind with this appalling terror.

Once when we were lying just below Whampo, the captain took nearly every
officer and nearly the whole ship’s crew on a punitive expedition up the
Canton river.  They were away about a week.  I was left behind,
dangerously ill with fever and ague.  In his absence, Sir Thomas had had
me put into his cabin, where I lay quite alone day and night, seeing
hardly anyone save the surgeon and the captain’s steward, who was himself
a shadow, pretty nigh.  Never shall I forget my mental sufferings at
night.  In vain may one attempt to describe what one then goes through;
only the victims know what that is.  My ghost—the ghost of the Whampo
Reach—the ghost of those sultry and miasmal nights, had no shape, no
vaporous form; it was nothing but a presence, a vague amorphous dread.
It may have floated with the swollen and putrid corpses which hourly came
bobbing down the stream, but it never appeared; for there was nothing to
appear.  Still it might appear.  I expected every instant through the
night to see it in some inconceivable form.  I expected it to touch me.
It neither stalked upon the deck, nor hovered in the dark, nor moved, nor
rested anywhere.  And yet it was there about me,—where, I knew not.  On
every side I was threatened.  I feared it most behind the head of my cot,
because I could not see it if it were so.

This, it will be said, is the description of a nightmare.  Exactly so.
My agony of fright was a nightmare; but a nightmare when every sense was
strained with wakefulness, when all the powers of imagination were
concentrated to paralyse my shattered reason.

The experience here spoken of is so common in some form or other that we
may well pause to consider it.  What is the meaning of this fear of
ghosts?—how do we come by it?  It may be thought that its cradle is our
own, that we are purposely frightened in early childhood to keep us calm
and quiet.  But I do not believe that nurses’ stories would excite dread
of the unknown if the unknown were not already known.  The susceptibility
to this particular terror is there before the terror is created.  A
little reflection will convince us that we must look far deeper for the
solution of a mystery inseparable from another, which is of the last
importance to all of us.




CHAPTER VI


THE belief in phantoms, ghosts, or spirits, has frequently been discussed
in connection with speculations on the origin of religion.  According to
Mr. Spencer (‘Principles of Sociology’) ‘the first traceable conception
of a supernatural being is the conception of a ghost.’  Even Fetichism is
‘an extension of the ghost theory.’  The soul of the Fetich ‘in common
with supernatural agents at large, is originally the double of a dead
man.’  How do we get this notion—‘the double of a dead man?’  Through
dreams.  In the Old Testament we are told: ‘God came to’ Abimelech,
Laban, Solomon, and others ‘in a dream’; also that ‘the angel of the
Lord’ appeared to Joseph ‘in a dream.’  That is to say, these men dreamed
that God came to them.  So the savage, who dreams of his dead
acquaintance, believes he has been visited by the dead man’s spirit.
This belief in ghosts is confirmed, Mr. Spencer argues, by other
phenomena.  The savage who faints from the effect of a wound sustained in
fight looks just like the dead man beside him.  The spirit of the wounded
man returns after a long or short period of absence: why should the
spirit of the other not do likewise?  If reanimation follows comatose
states, why should it not follow death?  Insensibility is but an affair
of time.  All the modes of preserving the dead, in the remotest ages,
evince the belief in casual separation of body and soul, and of their
possible reunion.

Take another theory.  Comte tells us there is a primary tendency in man
‘to transfer the sense of his own nature, in the radical explanation of
all phenomena whatever.’  Writing in the same key, Schopenhauer calls man
‘a metaphysical animal.’  He is speaking of the need man feels of a
theory, in regard to the riddle of existence, which forces itself upon
his notice; ‘a need arising from the consciousness that behind the
physical in the world, there is a metaphysical something permanent as the
foundation of constant change.’  Though not here alluding to the ghost
theory, this bears indirectly on the conception, as I shall proceed to
show.

We need not entangle ourselves in the vexed question of innate ideas, nor
inquire whether the principle of casuality is, as Kant supposed, like
space and time, a form of intuition given _a priori_.  That every change
has a cause must necessarily (without being thus formulated) be one of
the initial beliefs of conscious beings far lower in the scale than man,
whether derived solely from experience or otherwise.  The reed that
shakes is obviously shaken by the wind.  But the riddle of the wind also
forces itself into notice; and man explains this by transferring to the
wind ‘the sense of his own nature.’  Thunderstorms, volcanic
disturbances, ocean waves, running streams, the motions of the heavenly
bodies, had to be accounted for as involving change.  And the natural—the
primitive—explanation was by reference to life, analogous, if not
similar, to our own.  Here then, it seems to me, we have the true origin
of the belief in ghosts.

Take an illustration which supports this view.  While sitting in my
garden the other day a puff of wind blew a lady’s parasol across the
lawn.  It rolled away close to a dog lying quietly in the sun.  The dog
looked at it for a moment, but seeing nothing to account for its
movements, barked nervously, put its tail between its legs, and ran away,
turning occasionally to watch and again bark, with every sign of fear.

This was animism.  The dog must have accounted for the eccentric
behaviour of the parasol by endowing it with an uncanny spirit.  The
horse that shies at inanimate objects by the roadside, and will sometimes
dash itself against a tree or a wall, is actuated by a similar
superstition.  Is there any essential difference between this belief of
the dog or horse and the belief of primitive man?  I maintain that an
intuitive animistic tendency (which Mr. Spencer repudiates), and not
dreams, lies at the root of all spiritualism.  Would Mr. Spencer have had
us believe that the dog’s fear of the rolling parasol was a logical
deduction from its canine dreams?  This would scarcely elucidate the
problem.  The dog and the horse share apparently Schopenhauer’s
metaphysical propensity with man.

The familiar aphorism of Statius: _Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor_,
points to the relation of animism first to the belief in ghosts, thence
to Polytheism, and ultimately to Monotheism.  I must apologise to those
of the transcendental school who, like Max Müller for instance
(Introduction to the ‘Science of Religion’), hold that we have ‘a
primitive intuition of God’; which, after all, the professor derives,
like many others, from the ‘yearning for something that neither sense nor
reason can supply’; and from the assumption that ‘there was in the heart
of man from the very first a feeling of incompleteness, of weakness, of
dependency, &c.’  All this, I take it, is due to the aspirations of a
much later creature than the ‘Pithecanthropus erectus,’ to whom we here
refer.

Probably spirits and ghosts were originally of an evil kind.  Sir John
Lubbock (‘The Origin of Civilisation’) says: ‘The baying of the dog to
the moon is as much an act of worship as some ceremonies which have been
so described by travellers.’  I think he would admit that fear is the
origin of the worship.  In his essay on ‘Superstition,’ Hume writes:
‘Weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are the true
sources of superstition.’  Also ‘in such a state of mind, infinite
unknown evils are dreaded from unknown agents.’

Man’s impotence to resist the forces of nature, and their terrible
ability to injure him, would inspire a sense of terror; which in turn
would give rise to the twofold notion of omnipotence and malignity.  The
savage of the present day lives in perpetual fear of evil spirits; and
the superstitious dread, which I and most others have suffered, is
inherited from our savage ancestry.  How much further back we must seek
it may be left to the sage philosophers of the future.




CHAPTER VII


THE next winter we lay for a couple of months off Chinhai, which we had
stormed, blockading the mouth of the Ningpo river.  Here, I regret to
think, I committed an act which has often haunted my conscience as a
crime; although I had frequently promised the captain of a gun a glass of
grog to let me have a shot, and was mightily pleased if death and
destruction rewarded my aim.

Off Chinhai, lorchers and fast sailing junks laden with merchandise would
try to run the blockade before daylight.  And it sometimes happened that
we youngsters had a long chase in a cutter to overhaul them.  This meant
getting back to a nine or ten o’clock breakfast at the end of the
morning’s watch; equivalent to five or six hours’ duty on an empty
stomach.

One cold morning I had a hard job to stop a small junk.  The men were
sweating at their oars like galley slaves, and muttering curses at the
apparent futility of their labour.  I had fired a couple of shots from a
‘brown Bess’—the musket of the day—through the fugitive’s sails; and
fearing punishment if I let her escape, I next aimed at the boat herself.
Down came the mainsail in a crack.  When I boarded our capture, I found I
had put a bullet through the thigh of the man at the tiller.  Boys are
not much troubled with scruples about bloodguiltiness, and not
unfrequently are very cruel, for cruelty as a rule (with exceptions)
mostly proceeds from thoughtlessness.  But when I realised what I had
done, and heard the wretched man groan, I was seized with remorse for
what, at a more hardened stage, I should have excused on the score of
duty.

It was during this blockade that the accident, which I have already
alluded to, befell my dear protector, Jack Johnson.

One night, during his and my middle watch, the forecastle sentries hailed
a large sampan, like a Thames barge, drifting down stream and threatening
to foul us.  Sir Frederick Nicholson, the officer of the watch, ordered
Johnson to take the cutter and tow her clear.

I begged leave to go with him.  Sir Frederick refused, for he at once
suspected mischief.  The sampan was reached and diverted just before she
swung athwart our bows.  But scarcely was this achieved, when an
explosion took place.  My friend was knocked over, and one or two of the
men fell back into the cutter.  This is what had happened: Johnson
finding no one in the sampan, cautiously raised one of the deck hatches
with a boat-hook before he left the cutter.  The mine (for such it
proved) was so arranged that examination of this kind drew a lighted
match on to the magazine, which instantly exploded.

Poor Jack! what was my horror when we got him on board!  Every trace of
his handsome features was gone.  He was alive, and that seemed to be all.
In a few minutes his head and face swelled so that all was a round black
charred ball.  One could hardly see where the eyes were, buried beneath
the powder-ingrained and incrusted flesh.

For weeks, at night, I used to sit on a chest near his hammock, listening
for his slightest movement, too happy if he called me for something I
could get him.  In time he recovered, and was invalided home, and I lost
my dear companion and protector.  A couple of years afterwards I had the
happiness to dine with him on board another ship in Portsmouth, no longer
in the midshipman’s berth, but in the wardroom.

Twice during this war, the ‘Blonde’ was caught in a typhoon.  The first
time was in waters now famous, but then unknown, the Gulf of Liau-tung,
in full sight of China’s great wall.  We were twenty-four hours battened
down, and under storm staysails.  The ‘Blenheim,’ with Captain Elliott
our plenipotentiary on board, was with us, and the one circumstance left
in my memory is the sight of a line-of-battle ship rolling and pitching
so that one caught sight of the whole of her keel from stem to stern as
if she had been a fishing smack.  We had been wintering in the Yellow
Sea, and at the time I speak of were on a foraging expedition round the
Liau-tung peninsula.  Those who have followed the events of the Japanese
war will have noticed on the map, not far north of Ta-lien-wan in the
Korean Bay, three groups of islands.  So little was the geography of
these parts then known, that they had no place on our charts.  On this
very occasion, one group was named after Captain Elliott, one was called
the Bouchier Islands, and the other the Blonde Islands.  The first
surveying of the two latter groups, and the placing of them upon the map,
was done by our naval instructor, and he always took me with him as his
assistant.

Our second typhoon was while we were at anchor in Hong Kong harbour.
Those who have knowledge only of the gales, however violent, of our
latitudes, have no conception of what wind-force can mount to.  To be the
toy of it is enough to fill the stoutest heart with awe.  The harbour was
full of transports, merchant ships, opium clippers, besides four or five
men-of-war, and a steamer belonging to the East India Company—the first
steamship I had ever seen.

The coming of a typhoon is well known to the natives at least twenty-four
hours beforehand, and every preparation is made for it.  Boats are
dragged far up the beach; buildings even are fortified for resistance.
Every ship had laid out its anchors, lowered its yards, and housed its
topmasts.  We had both bowers down, with cables paid out to extreme
length.  The danger was either in drifting on shore or, what was more
imminent, collision.  When once the tornado struck us there was nothing
more to be done; no men could have worked on deck.  The seas broke by
tons over all; boats beached as described were lifted from the ground,
and hurled, in some instances, over the houses.  The air was darkened by
the spray.

But terrible as was the raging of wind and water, far more awful was the
vain struggle for life of the human beings who succumbed to it.  In a
short time almost all the ships except the men-of-war, which were better
provided with anchors, began to drift from their moorings.  Then wreck
followed wreck.  I do not think the ‘Blonde’ moved; but from first to
last we were threatened with the additional weight and strain of a
drifting vessel.  Had we been so hampered our anchorage must have given
way.  As a single example of the force of a typhoon, the ‘Phlegethon’
with three anchors down, and engines working at full speed, was blown
past us out of the harbour.

One tragic incident I witnessed, which happened within a few fathoms of
the ‘Blonde.’  An opium clipper had drifted athwart the bow of a large
merchantman, which in turn was almost foul of us.  In less than five
minutes the clipper sank.  One man alone reappeared on the surface.  He
was so close, that from where I was holding on and crouching under the
lee of the mainmast I could see the expression of his face.  He was a
splendidly built man, and his strength and activity must have been
prodigious.  He clung to the cable of the merchantman, which he had
managed to clasp.  As the vessel reared between the seas he gained a few
feet before he was again submerged.  At last he reached the hawse-hole.
Had he hoped, in spite of his knowledge, to find it large enough to admit
his body?  He must have known the truth; and yet he struggled on.  Did he
hope that, when thus within arms’ length of men in safety, some pitying
hand would be stretched out to rescue him,—a rope’s end perhaps flung out
to haul him inboard?  Vain desperate hope!  He looked upwards: an
imploring look.  Would Heaven be more compassionate than man?  A mountain
of sea towered above his head; and when again the bow was visible, the
man was gone for ever.

Before taking leave of my seafaring days, I must say one word about
corporal punishment.  Sir Thomas Bouchier was a good sailor, a gallant
officer, and a kind-hearted man; but he was one of the old school.
Discipline was his watchword, and he endeavoured to maintain it by
severity.  I dare say that, on an average, there was a man flogged as
often as once a month during the first two years the ‘Blonde’ was in
commission.  A flogging on board a man-of-war with a ‘cat,’ the nine
tails of which were knotted, and the lashes of which were slowly
delivered, up to the four dozen, at the full swing of the arm, and at the
extremity of lash and handle, was very severe punishment.  Each knot
brought blood, and the shock of the blow knocked the breath out of a man
with an involuntary ‘Ugh!’ however stoically he bore the pain.

I have seen many a bad man flogged for unpardonable conduct, and many a
good man for a glass of grog too much.  My firm conviction is that the
bad man was very little the better; the good man very much the worse.
The good man felt the disgrace, and was branded for life.  His
self-esteem was permanently maimed, and he rarely held up his head or did
his best again.  Besides which,—and this is true of all punishment—any
sense of injustice destroys respect for the punisher.  Still I am no
sentimentalist; I have a contempt for, and even a dread of,
sentimentalism.  For boy housebreakers, and for ruffians who commit
criminal assaults, the rod or the lash is the only treatment.

A comic piece of insubordination on my part recurs to me in connection
with flogging.  About the year 1840 or 1841, a midshipman on the Pacific
station was flogged.  I think the ship was the ‘Peak.’  The event created
some sensation, and was brought before Parliament.  Two frigates were
sent out to furnish a quorum of post-captains to try the responsible
commander.  The verdict of the court-martial was a severe reprimand.
This was, of course, nuts to every midshipman in the service.

Shortly after it became known I got into a scrape for laughing at, and
disobeying the orders of, our first-lieutenant,—the head of the executive
on board a frigate.  As a matter of fact, the orders were ridiculous, for
the said officer was tipsy.  Nevertheless, I was reported, and had up
before the captain.  ‘Old Tommy’ was, or affected to be, very angry.  I
am afraid I was very ‘cheeky.’  Whereupon Sir Thomas did lose his temper,
and threatened to send for the boatswain to tie me up and give me a
dozen,—not on the back, but where the back leaves off.  Undismayed by the
threat, and mindful of the episode of the ‘Peak’ (?) I looked the old
gentleman in the face, and shrilly piped out, ‘It’s as much as your
commission is worth, sir.’  In spite of his previous wrath, he was so
taken aback by my impudence that he burst out laughing, and, to hide it,
kicked me out of the cabin.

After another severe attack of fever, and during a long convalescence, I
was laid up at Macao, where I enjoyed the hospitality of Messrs. Dent and
of Messrs. Jardine and Matheson.  Thence I was invalided home, and took
my passage to Bombay in one of the big East India tea-ships.  As I was
being carried up the side in the arms of one of the boatmen, I overheard
another exclaim: ‘Poor little beggar.  He’ll never see land again!’

The only other passenger was Colonel Frederick Cotton, of the Madras
Engineers, one of a distinguished family.  He, too, had been through the
China campaign, and had also broken down.  We touched at Manila, Batavia,
Singapore, and several other ports in the Malay Archipelago, to take in
cargo.  While that was going on, Cotton, the captain, and I made
excursions inland.  Altogether I had a most pleasant time of it till we
reached Bombay.

My health was now re-established; and after a couple of weeks at Bombay,
where I lived in a merchant’s house, Cotton took me to Poonah and
Ahmadnagar; in both of which places I stayed with his friends, and messed
with the regiments.  Here a copy of the ‘Times’ was put into my hands;
and I saw a notice of the death of my father.

After a fortnight’s quarantine at La Valetta, where two young
Englishmen—one an Oxford man—shared the same rooms in the fort with me,
we three returned to England; and (I suppose few living people can say
the same) travelled from Naples to Calais before there was a single
railway on the Continent.

At the end of two months’ leave in England I was appointed to the
‘Caledonia,’ flagship at Plymouth.  Sir Thomas Bouchier had written to
the Admiral, Sir Edward Codrington, of Navarino fame (whose daughter Sir
Thomas afterwards married), giving me ‘a character.’  Sir Edward sent for
me, and was most kind.  He told me I was to go to the Pacific in the
first ship that left for South America, which would probably be in a week
or two; and he gave me a letter to his friend, Admiral Thomas, who
commanded on that station.

About this time, and for a year or two later, the relations between
England and America were severely strained by what was called ‘the Oregon
question.’  The dispute was concerning the right of ownership of the
mouth of the Columbia river, and of Vancouver’s Island.  The President as
well as the American people took the matter up very warmly; and much
discretion was needed to avert the outbreak of hostilities.

In Sir Edward’s letter, which he read out and gave to me open, he
requested Admiral Thomas to put me into any ship ‘that was likely to see
service’; and quoted a word or two from my dear old captain Sir Thomas,
which would probably have given me a lift.

The prospect before me was brilliant.  What could be more delectable than
the chance of a war?  My fancy pictured all sorts of opportunities,
turned to the best account,—my seniors disposed of, and myself, with a
pair of epaulets, commanding the smartest brig in the service.

Alack-a-day! what a climb down from such high flights my life has been.
The ship in which I was to have sailed to the west was suddenly
countermanded to the east.  She was to leave for China the following
week, and I was already appointed to her, not even as a ‘super.’

My courage and my ambition were wrecked at a blow.  The notion of
returning for another three years to China, where all was now peaceful
and stale to me, the excitement of the war at an end, every port
reminding me of my old comrades, visions of renewed fevers and horrible
food,—were more than I could stand.

I instantly made up my mind to leave the Navy.  It was a wilful, and
perhaps a too hasty, impulse.  But I am impulsive by nature; and now that
my father was dead, I fancied myself to a certain extent my own master.
I knew moreover, by my father’s will, that I should not be dependent upon
a profession.  Knowledge of such a fact has been the ruin of many a
better man than I.  I have no virtuous superstitions in favour of
poverty—quite the reverse—but I am convinced that the rich man, who has
never had to earn his position or his living, is more to be pitied and
less respected than the poor man whose comforts certainly, if not his
bread, have depended on his own exertions.

My mother had a strong will of her own, and I could not guess what line
she might take.  I also apprehended the opposition of my guardians.  On
the whole, I opined a woman’s heart would be the most suitable for an
appeal _ad misericordiam_.  So I pulled out the agony stop, and worked
the pedals of despair with all the anguish at my command.

‘It was easy enough for her to _revel in luxury_ and consign me to a life
worse than a _convict’s_.  But how would _she_ like to live on _salt
junk_, to keep _night watches_, to have to cut up her blankets for
_ponchos_ (I knew she had never heard the word, and that it would tell
accordingly), to save her from being _frozen to death_?  How would _she_
like to be mast-headed when a ship was rolling gunwale under?  As to the
wishes of my guardians, were _their feelings_ to be considered before
mine?  I should like to see Lord Rosebery or Lord Spencer in my place!
They’d very soon wish they had a mother who &c. &c.’

When my letter was finished I got leave to go ashore to post it.  Feeling
utterly miserable, I had my hair cut; and, rendered perfectly reckless by
my appearance, I consented to have what was left of it tightly curled
with a pair of tongs.  I cannot say that I shared in any sensible degree
the pleasure which this operation seemed to give to the artist.  But when
I got back to the ship the sight of my adornment kept my messmates in an
uproar for the rest of the afternoon.

Whether the touching appeal to my mother produced tears, or of what kind,
matters little; it effectually determined my career.  Before my new ship
sailed for China, I was home again, and in full possession of my coveted
freedom as a civilian.




CHAPTER VIII


IT was settled that after a course of three years at a private tutor’s I
was to go to Cambridge.  The life I had led for the past three years was
not the best training for the fellow-pupil of lads of fifteen or sixteen
who had just left school.  They were much more ready to follow my lead
than I theirs, especially as mine was always in the pursuit of pleasure.

I was first sent to Mr. B.’s, about a couple of miles from Alnwick.
Before my time, Alnwick itself was considered out of bounds.  But as
nearly half the sin in this world consists in being found out, my
companions and I managed never to commit any in this direction.

We generally returned from the town with a bottle of some noxious
compound called ‘port’ in our pockets, which was served out in our
‘study’ at night, while I read aloud the instructive adventures of Mr.
Thomas Jones.  We were, of course, supposed to employ these late hours in
preparing our work for the morrow.  One boy only protested that, under
the combined seductions of the port and Miss Molly Seagrim, he could
never make his verses scan.

Another of our recreations was poaching.  From my earliest days I was
taught to shoot, myself and my brothers being each provided with his
little single-barrelled flint and steel ‘Joe Manton.’  At — we were
surrounded by grouse moors on one side, and by well-preserved coverts on
the other.  The grouse I used to shoot in the evening while they fed
amongst the corn stooks; for pheasants and hares, I used to get the other
pupils to walk through the woods, while I with a gun walked outside.
Scouts were posted to look out for keepers.

Did our tutor know?  Of course he knew.  But think of the saving in the
butcher’s bill!  Besides which, Mr. B. was otherwise preoccupied; he was
in love with Mrs. B.  I say ‘in love,’ for although I could not be sure
of it then, (having no direct experience of the _amantium iræ_,)
subsequent observation has persuaded me that their perpetual quarrels
could mean nothing else.  This was exceedingly favourable to the
independence of Mr. B.’s pupils.  But when asked by Mr. Ellice how I was
getting on, I was forced in candour to admit that I was in a fair way to
forget all I ever knew.

By the advice of Lord Spencer I was next placed under the tuition of one
of the minor canons of Ely.  The Bishop of Ely—Dr. Allen—had been Lord
Spencer’s tutor, hence his elevation to the see.  The Dean—Dr. Peacock,
of algebraic and Trinity College fame—was good enough to promise ‘to keep
an eye’ on me.  Lord Spencer himself took me to Ely; and there I remained
for two years.  They were two very important years of my life.  Having no
fellow pupil to beguile me, I was the more industrious.  But it was not
from the better acquaintance with ancient literature that I mainly
benefited,—it was from my initiation to modern thought.  I was a constant
guest at the Deanery; where I frequently met such men as Sedgwick, Airey
the Astronomer-Royal, Selwyn, Phelps the Master of Sydney, Canon
Heaviside the master of Haileybury, and many other friends of the Dean’s,
distinguished in science, literature, and art.  Here I heard discussed
opinions on these subjects by some of their leading representatives.
Naturally, as many of them were Churchmen, conversation often turned on
the bearing of modern science, of geology especially if Sedgwick were of
the party, upon Mosaic cosmogony, or Biblical exegesis generally.

The knowledge of these learned men, the lucidity with which they
expressed their views, and the earnestness with which they defended them,
captivated my attention, and opened to me a new world of surpassing
interest and gravity.

What startled me most was the spirit in which a man of Sedgwick’s
intellectual power protested against the possible encroachments of his
own branch of science upon the orthodox tenets of the Church.  Just about
this time an anonymous book appeared, which, though long since forgotten,
caused no slight disturbance amongst dogmatic theologians.  The tendency
of this book, ‘Vestiges of the Creation,’ was, or was then held to be,
antagonistic to the arguments from design.  Familiar as we now are with
the theory of evolution, such a work as the ‘Vestiges’ would no more stir
the _odium theologicum_ than Franklin’s kite.  Sedgwick, however,
attacked it with a vehemence and a rancour that would certainly have
roasted its author had the professor held the office of Grand Inquisitor.

Though incapable of forming any opinion as to the scientific merits of
such a book, or of Hugh Miller’s writings, which he also attacked upon
purely religious grounds, I was staggered by the fact that the Bible
could possibly be impeached, or that it was not profanity to defend it
even.  Was it not the ‘Word of God’?  And if so, how could any theories
of creation, any historical, any philological researches, shake its
eternal truth?

Day and night I pondered over this new revelation.  I bought the
books—the wicked books—which nobody ought to read.  The _Index
Expurgatorius_ became my guide for books to be digested.  I laid hands on
every heretical work I could hear of.  By chance I made the acquaintance
of a young man who, together with his family, were Unitarians.  I got,
and devoured, Channing’s works.  I found a splendid copy of Voltaire in
the Holkham library, and hunted through the endless volumes, till I came
to the ‘Dialogues Philosophiques.’  The world is too busy, fortunately,
to disturb its peace with such profane satire, such withering sarcasm as
flashes through an ‘entretien’ like that between ‘Frère Rigolet’ and
‘L’Empereur de la Chine.’  Every French man of letters knows it by heart;
but it would wound our English susceptibilities were I to cite it here.
Then, too, the impious paraphrase of the Athanasian Creed, with its
terrible climax, from the converting Jesuit: ‘Or vous voyez bien . . .
qu’un homme qui ne croit pas cette histoire doit être brûlé dans ce monde
ci, et dans l’autre.’  To which ‘L’Empereur’ replies: ‘Ça c’est clair
comme le jour.’

Could an ignorant youth, fevered with curiosity and the first goadings of
the questioning spirit, resist such logic, such scorn, such scathing wit,
as he met with here?

Then followed Rousseau; ‘Emile’ became my favourite.  Froude’s ‘Nemesis
of Faith’ I read, and many other books of a like tendency.  Passive
obedience, blind submission to authority, was never one of my virtues,
and once my faith was shattered, I knew not where to stop—what to doubt,
what to believe.  If the injunction to ‘prove all things’ was anything
more than an empty apophthegm, inquiry, in St. Paul’s eyes at any rate,
could not be sacrilege.

It was not happiness I sought,—not peace of mind at least; for assuredly
my thirst for knowledge, for truth, brought me anything but peace.  I
never was more restless, or, at times, more unhappy.  Shallow, indeed,
must be the soul that can lightly sever itself from beliefs which lie at
the roots of our moral, intellectual, and emotional being, sanctified too
by associations of our earliest love and reverence.  I used to wander
about the fields, and sit for hours in sequestered spots, longing for
some friend, some confidant to take counsel with.  I knew no such friend.
I did not dare to speak of my misgivings to others.  In spite of my
earnest desire for guidance, for more light, the strong grip of
childhood’s influences was impossible to shake off.  I could not rid my
conscience of the sin of doubt.

It is this difficulty, this primary dependence on others, which develops
into the child’s first religion, that perpetuates the infantile character
of human creeds; and, what is worse, generates the hideous bigotry which
justifies that sad reflection of Lucretius: ‘Tantum Religio potuit
suadere malorum!’




CHAPTER IX


TO turn again to narrative, and to far less serious thoughts.  The last
eighteen months before I went to Cambridge, I was placed, or rather
placed myself, under the tuition of Mr. Robert Collyer, rector of Warham,
a living close to Holkham in the gift of my brother Leicester.  Between
my Ely tutor and myself there was but little sympathy.  He was a man of
much refinement, but with not much indulgence for such aberrant
proclivities as mine.  Without my knowledge, he wrote to Mr. Ellice
lamenting my secret recusancy, and its moral dangers.  Mr. Ellice came
expressly from London, and stayed a night at Ely.  He dined with us in
the cloisters, and had a long private conversation with my tutor, and,
before he left, with me.  I indignantly resented the clandestine
representations of Mr. S., and, without a word to Mr. Ellice or to anyone
else, wrote next day to Mr. Collyer to beg him to take me in at Warham,
and make what he could of me, before I went to Cambridge.  It may here be
said that Mr. Collyer had been my father’s chaplain, and had lived at
Holkham for several years as family tutor to my brothers and myself, as
we in turn left the nursery.  Mr. Collyer, upon receipt of my letter,
referred the matter to Mr. Ellice; with his approval I was duly installed
at Warham.  Before describing my time there, I must tell of an incident
which came near to affecting me in a rather important way.

My mother lived at Longford in Derbyshire, an old place, now my home,
which had come into the Coke family in James I.’s reign, through the
marriage of a son of Chief Justice Coke’s with the heiress of the De
Langfords, an ancient family from that time extinct.  While staying there
during my summer holidays, my mother confided to me that she had had an
offer of marriage from Mr. Motteux, the owner of considerable estates in
Norfolk, including two houses—Beachamwell and Sandringham.  Mr.
Motteux—‘Johnny Motteux,’ as he was called—was, like Tristram Shandy’s
father, the son of a wealthy ‘Turkey merchant,’ which, until better
informed, I always took to mean a dealer in poultry.  ‘Johnny,’ like
another man of some notoriety, whom I well remember in my younger
days—Mr. Creevey—had access to many large houses such as Holkham; not,
like Creevey, for the sake of his scandalous tongue, but for the sake of
his wealth.  He had no (known) relatives; and big people, who had younger
sons to provide for, were quite willing that one of them should be his
heir.  Johnny Motteux was an epicure with the best of _chefs_.  His
capons came from Paris, his salmon from Christchurch, and his Strasburg
pies were made to order.  One of these he always brought with him as a
present to my mother, who used to say, ‘Mr. Motteux evidently thinks the
nearest way to my heart is down my throat.’

A couple of years after my father’s death, Motteux wrote to my mother
proposing marriage, and, to enhance his personal attractions, (in figure
and dress he was a duplicate of the immortal Pickwick,) stated that he
had made his will and had bequeathed Sandringham to me, adding that,
should he die without issue, I was to inherit the remainder of his
estates.

Rather to my surprise, my mother handed the letter to me with evident
signs of embarrassment and distress.  My first exclamation was: ‘How
jolly!  The shooting’s first rate, and the old boy is over seventy, if
he’s a day.’

My mother apparently did not see it in this light.  She clearly, to my
disappointments did not care for the shooting; and my exultation only
brought tears into her eyes.

‘Why, mother,’ I exclaimed, ‘what’s up?  Don’t you—don’t you care for
Johnny Motteux?’

She confessed that she did not.

‘Then why don’t you tell him so, and not bother about his beastly
letter?’

‘If I refuse him you will lose Sandringham.’

‘But he says here he has already left it to me.’

‘He will alter his will.’

‘Let him!’ cried I, flying out at such prospective meanness.  ‘Just you
tell him you don’t care a rap for him or for Sandringham either.’

In more lady-like terms she acted in accordance with my advice; and, it
may be added, not long afterwards married Mr. Ellice.

Mr. Motteux’s first love, or one of them, had been Lady Cowper, then Lady
Palmerston.  Lady Palmerston’s youngest son was Mr. Spencer Cowper.  Mr.
Motteux died a year or two after the above event.  He made a codicil to
his will, and left Sandringham and all his property to Mr. Spencer
Cowper.  Mr. Spencer Cowper was a young gentleman of costly habits.
Indeed, he bore the slightly modified name of ‘Expensive Cowper.’  As an
attaché at Paris he was famous for his patronage of dramatic art—or
artistes rather; the votaries of Terpsichore were especially indebted to
his liberality.  At the time of Mr. Motteux’s demise, he was attached to
the Embassy at St. Petersburg.  Mr. Motteux’s solicitors wrote
immediately to inform him of his accession to their late client’s wealth.
It being one of Mr. Cowper’s maxims never to read lawyers’ letters, (he
was in daily receipt of more than he could attend to,) he flung this one
unread into the fire; and only learnt his mistake through the
congratulations of his family.

The Prince Consort happened about this time to be in quest of a suitable
country seat for his present Majesty; and Sandringham, through the adroit
negotiations of Lord Palmerston, became the property of the Prince of
Wales.  The soul of the ‘Turkey merchant,’ we cannot doubt, will repose
in peace.

The worthy rector of Warham St. Mary’s was an oddity deserving of passing
notice.  Outwardly he was no Adonis.  His plain features and shock head
of foxy hair, his antiquated and neglected garb, his copious jabot—much
affected by the clergy of those days—were becoming investitures of the
inward man.  His temper was inflammatory, sometimes leading to excesses,
which I am sure he rued in mental sackcloth and ashes.  But visitors at
Holkham (unaware of the excellent motives and moral courage which
inspired his conduct) were not a little amazed at the austerity with
which he obeyed the dictates of his conscience.

For example, one Sunday evening after dinner, when the drawing-room was
filled with guests, who more or less preserved the decorum which
etiquette demands in the presence of royalty, (the Duke of Sussex was of
the party,) Charles Fox and Lady Anson, great-grandmother of the present
Lord Lichfield, happened to be playing at chess.  When the irascible
dominie beheld them he pushed his way through the bystanders, swept the
pieces from the board, and, with rigorous impartiality, denounced these
impious desecrators of the Sabbath eve.

As an example of his fidelity as a librarian, Mr. Panizzi used to relate
with much glee how, whenever he was at Holkham, Mr. Collyer dogged him
like a detective.  One day, not wishing to detain the reverend gentleman
while he himself spent the forenoon in the manuscript library, (where not
only the ancient manuscripts, but the most valuable of the printed books,
are kept under lock and key,) he considerately begged Mr. Collyer to
leave him to his researches.  The dominie replied ‘that he knew his duty,
and did not mean to neglect it.’  He did not lose sight of Mr. Panizzi.

The notion that he—the great custodian of the nation’s literary
treasures—would snip out and pocket the title-page of the folio edition
of Shakespeare, or of the Coverdale Bible, tickled Mr. Panizzi’s fancy
vastly.

In spite, however, of our rector’s fiery temperament, or perhaps in
consequence of it, he was remarkably susceptible to the charms of beauty.
We were constantly invited to dinner and garden parties in the
neighbourhood; nor was the good rector slow to return the compliment.  It
must be confessed that the pupil shared to the full the impressibility of
the tutor; and, as it happened, unknown to both, the two were in one case
rivals.

As the young lady afterwards occupied a very distinguished position in
Oxford society, it can only be said that she was celebrated for her many
attractions.  She was then sixteen, and the younger of her suitors but
two years older.  As far as age was concerned, nothing could be more
compatible.  Nor in the matter of mutual inclination was there any
disparity whatever.  What, then, was the pupil’s dismay when, after a
dinner party at the rectory, and the company had left, the tutor, in a
frantic state of excitement, seized the pupil by both hands, and
exclaimed: ‘She has accepted me!’

‘Accepted you?’ I asked.  ‘Who has accepted you?’

‘Who?  Why, Miss —, of course!  Who else do you suppose would accept me?’

‘No one,’ said I, with doleful sincerity.  ‘But did you propose to her?
Did she understand what you said to her?  Did she deliberately and
seriously say “Yes?”’

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and his disordered jabot and touzled hair echoed the
fatal word.

‘O Smintheus of the silver bow!’ I groaned.  ‘It is the woman’s part to
create delusions, and—destroy them!  To think of it! after all that has
passed between us these—these three weeks, next Monday!  “Once and for
ever.”  Did ever woman use such words before?  And I—believed them!’
‘Did you speak to the mother?’ I asked in a fit of desperation.

‘There was no time for that.  Mrs. — was in the carriage, and I didn’t
pop [the odious word!] till I was helping her on with her cloak.  The
cloak, you see, made it less awkward.  My offer was a sort of _obiter
dictum_—a by-the-way, as it were.’

‘To the carriage, yes.  But wasn’t she taken by surprise?’

‘Not a bit of it.  Bless you! they always know.  She pretended not to
understand, but that’s a way they have.’

‘And when you explained?’

‘There wasn’t time for more.  She laughed, and sprang into the carriage.’

‘And that was all?’

‘All! would you have had her spring into my arms?’

‘God forbid!  You will have to face the mother to-morrow,’ said I,
recovering rapidly from my despondency.

‘Face?  Well, I shall have to call upon Mrs. —, if that’s what you mean.
A mere matter of form.  I shall go over after lunch.  But it needn’t
interfere with your work.  You can go on with the “Anabasis” till I come
back.  And remember—_Neaniskos_ is not a proper name, ha! ha! ha!  The
quadratics will keep till the evening.’  He was merry over his prospects,
and I was not altogether otherwise.

But there was no Xenophon, no algebra, that day!  Dire was the distress
of my poor dominie when he found the mother as much bewildered as the
daughter was frightened, by the mistake.  ‘She,’ the daughter, ‘had never
for a moment imagined, &c., &c.’

My tutor was not long disheartened by such caprices—so he deemed them, as
Miss Jemima’s (she had a prettier name, you may be sure), and I did my
best (it cost me little now) to encourage his fondest hopes.  I proposed
that we should drink the health of the future mistress of Warham in tea,
which he cheerfully acceded to, all the more readily, that it gave him an
opportunity to vent one of his old college jokes.  ‘Yes, yes,’ said he,
with a laugh, ‘there’s nothing like tea.  _Te veniente die_, _te
decedente canebam_.’  Such sallies of innocent playfulness often smoothed
his path in life.  He took a genuine pleasure in his own jokes.  Some men
do.  One day I dropped a pot of marmalade on a new carpet, and should
certainly have been reprimanded for carelessness, had it not occurred to
him to exclaim: ‘_Jam satis terris_!’ and then laugh immoderately at his
wit.

That there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, was a
maxim he acted upon, if he never heard it. Within a month of the above
incident he proposed to another lady upon the sole grounds that, when
playing a game of chess, an exchange of pieces being contemplated, she
innocently, but incautiously, observed, ‘If you take me, I will take
you.’  He referred the matter next day to my ripe judgment.  As I had no
partiality for the lady in question, I strongly advised him to accept so
obvious a challenge, and go down on his knees to her at once.  I laid
stress on the knees, as the accepted form of declaration, both in novels
and on the stage.

In this case the beloved object, who was not embarrassed by excess of
amiability, promptly desired him, when he urged his suit, ‘not to make a
fool of himself.’

My tutor’s peculiarities, however, were not confined to his endeavours to
meet with a lady rectoress.  He sometimes surprised his hearers with the
originality of his abstruse theories.  One morning he called me into the
stable yard to join in consultation with his gardener as to the
advisability of killing a pig.  There were two, and it was not easy to
decide which was the fitter for the butcher.  The rector selected one, I
the other, and the gardener, who had nurtured both from their tenderest
age, pleaded that they should be allowed to ‘put on another score.’  The
point was warmly argued all round.

‘The black sow,’ said I (they were both sows, you must know)—‘The black
sow had a litter of ten last time, and the white one only six.  Ergo, if
history repeats itself, as I have heard you say, you should keep the
black, and sacrifice the white.’

‘But,’ objected the rector, ‘that was the white’s first litter, and the
black’s second.  Why shouldn’t the white do as well as the black next
time?’

‘And better, your reverence,’ chimed in the gardener.  ‘The number don’t
allays depend on the sow, do it?’

‘That is neither here nor there,’ returned the rector.

‘Well,’ said the gardener, who stood to his guns, ‘if your reverence is
right, as no doubt you will be, that’ll make just twenty little pigs for
the butcher, come Michaelmas.’

‘We can’t kill ’em before they are born,’ said the rector.

‘That’s true, your reverence.  But it comes to the same thing.’

‘Not to the pigs,’ retorted the rector.

‘To your reverence, I means.’

‘A pig at the butcher’s,’ I suggested, ‘is worth a dozen unborn.’

‘No one can deny it,’ said the rector, as he fingered the small change in
his breeches pocket; and pointing with the other hand to the broad back
of the black sow, exclaimed, ‘This is the one, _Duplex agitur per lumbos
spina_!  She’s got a back like an alderman’s chin.’

‘_Epicuri de grege porcus_,’ I assented, and the fate of the black sow
was sealed.

Next day an express came from Holkham, to say that Lady Leicester had
given birth to a daughter.  My tutor jumped out of his chair to hand me
the note.  ‘Did I not anticipate the event’? he cried.  ‘What a wonderful
world we live in!  Unconsciously I made room for the infant by
sacrificing the life of that pig.’  As I never heard him allude to the
doctrine of Pythagoras, as he had no leaning to Buddhism, and, as I am
sure he knew nothing of the correlation of forces, it must be admitted
that the conception was an original one.

Be this as it may, Mr. Collyer was an upright and conscientious man.  I
owe him much, and respect his memory.  He died at an advanced age, an
honorary canon, and—a bachelor.

Another portrait hangs amongst the many in my memory’s picture gallery.
It is that of his successor to the vicarage, the chaplaincy, and the
librarianship, at Holkham—Mr. Alexander Napier—at this time, and until
his death fifty years later, one of my closest and most cherished
friends.  Alexander Napier was the son of Macvey Napier, first editor of
the ‘Edinburgh Review.’  Thus, associated with many eminent men of
letters, he also did some good literary work of his own.  He edited Isaac
Barrow’s works for the University of Cambridge, also Boswell’s ‘Johnson,’
and gave various other proofs of his talents and his scholarship.  He was
the most delightful of companions; liberal-minded in the highest degree;
full of quaint humour and quick sympathy; an excellent parish
priest,—looking upon Christianity as a life and not a dogma; beloved by
all, for he had a kind thought and a kind word for every needy or sick
being in his parish.

With such qualities, the man always predominated over the priest.  Hence
his large-hearted charity and indulgence for the faults—nay, crimes—of
others.  Yet, if taken aback by an outrage, or an act of gross stupidity,
which even the perpetrator himself had to suffer for, he would
momentarily lose his patience, and rap out an objurgation that would
stagger the straiter-laced gentlemen of his own cloth, or an outsider who
knew less of him than—the recording angel.

A fellow undergraduate of Napier’s told me a characteristic anecdote of
his impetuosity.  Both were Trinity men, and had been keeping high jinks
at a supper party at Caius.  The friend suddenly pointed to the clock,
reminding Napier they had but five minutes to get into college before
Trinity gates were closed.  ‘D—n the clock!’ shouted Napier, and
snatching up the sugar basin (it was not _eau sucrée_ they were
drinking), incontinently flung it at the face of the offending timepiece.

This youthful vivacity did not desert him in later years.  An old college
friend—also a Scotchman—had become Bishop of Edinburgh.  Napier paid him
a visit (he described it to me himself).  They talked of books, they
talked of politics, they talked of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, of
Brougham, Horner, Wilson, Macaulay, Jeffrey, of Carlyle’s dealings with
Napier’s father—‘Nosey,’ as Carlyle calls him.  They chatted into the
small hours of the night, as boon companions, and as what Bacon calls
‘full’ men, are wont.  The claret, once so famous in the ‘land of cakes,’
had given place to toddy; its flow was in due measure to the flow of
soul.  But all that ends is short—the old friends had spent their last
evening together.  Yes, their last, perhaps.  It was bed-time, and quoth
Napier to his lordship, ‘I tell you what it is, Bishop, I am na fou’, but
I’ll be hanged if I haven’t got two left legs.’

‘I see something odd about them,’ says his lordship.  ‘We’d better go to
bed.’

Who the bishop was I do not know, but I’ll answer for it he was one of
the right sort.

In 1846 I became an undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge.  I do
not envy the man (though, of course, one ought) whose college days are
not the happiest to look back upon.  One should hope that however
profitably a young man spends his time at the University, it is but the
preparation for something better.  But happiness and utility are not
necessarily concomitant; and even when an undergraduate’s course is least
employed for its intended purpose (as, alas! mine was)—for happiness,
certainly not pure, but simple, give me life at a University.

Heaven forbid that any youth should be corrupted by my confession!  But
surely there are some pleasures pertaining to this unique epoch that are
harmless in themselves, and are certainly not to be met with at any
other.  These are the first years of comparative freedom, of manhood, of
responsibility.  The novelty, the freshness of every pleasure, the
unsatiated appetite for enjoyment, the animal vigour, the ignorance of
care, the heedlessness of, or rather, the implicit faith in, the morrow,
the absence of mistrust or suspicion, the frank surrender to generous
impulses, the readiness to accept appearances for realities—to believe in
every profession or exhibition of good will, to rush into the arms of
every friendship, to lay bare one’s tenderest secrets, to listen eagerly
to the revelations which make us all akin, to offer one’s time, one’s
energies, one’s purse, one’s heart, without a selfish afterthought—these,
I say, are the priceless pleasures, never to be repeated, of healthful
average youth.

What has after-success, honour, wealth, fame, or, power—burdened, as they
always are, with ambitions, blunders, jealousies, cares, regrets, and
failing health—to match with this enjoyment of the young, the bright, the
bygone, hour?  The wisdom of the worldly teacher—at least, the _carpe
diem_—was practised here before the injunction was ever thought of.  _Du
bist so schön_ was the unuttered invocation, while the _Verweile doch_
was deemed unneedful.

Little, I am ashamed to own, did I add either to my small classical or
mathematical attainments.  But I made friendships—lifelong friendships,
that I would not barter for the best of academical prizes.

Amongst my associates or acquaintances, two or three of whom have since
become known—were the last Lord Derby, Sir William Harcourt, the late
Lord Stanley of Alderley, Latimer Neville, late Master of Magdalen, Lord
Calthorpe, of racing fame, with whom I afterwards crossed the Rocky
Mountains, the last Lord Durham, my cousin, Sir Augustus Stephenson,
ex-solicitor to the Treasury, Julian Fane, whose lyrics were edited by
Lord Lytton, and my life-long friend Charles Barrington, private
secretary to Lord Palmerston and to Lord John Russell.

But the most intimate of them was George Cayley, son of the member for
the East Riding of Yorkshire.  Cayley was a young man of much promise.
In his second year he won the University prize poem with his ‘Balder,’
and soon after published some other poems, and a novel, which met with
merited oblivion.  But it was as a talker that he shone.  His quick
intelligence, his ready wit, his command of language, made his
conversation always lively, and sometimes brilliant.  For several years
after I left Cambridge I lived with him in his father’s house in Dean’s
Yard, and thus made the acquaintance of some celebrities whom his
fascinating and versatile talents attracted thither.  As I shall return
to this later on, I will merely mention here the names of such men as
Thackeray, Tennyson, Frederick Locker, Stirling of Keir, Tom Taylor the
dramatist, Millais, Leighton, and others of lesser note.  Cayley was a
member of, and regular attendant at, the Cosmopolitan Club; where he met
Dickens, Foster, Shirley Brooks, John Leech, Dicky Doyle, and the wits of
the day; many of whom occasionally formed part of our charming coterie in
the house I shared with his father.

Speaking of Tom Taylor reminds me of a good turn he once did me in my
college examination at Cambridge.  Whewell was then Master of Trinity.
One of the subjects I had to take up was either the ‘Amicitia’ or the
‘Senectute’ (I forget which).  Whewell, more formidable and alarming than
ever, opened the book at hazard, and set me on to construe.  I broke
down.  He turned over the page; again I stuck fast.  The truth is, I had
hardly looked at my lesson,—trusting to my recollection of parts of it to
carry me through, if lucky, with the whole.

‘What’s your name, sir?’ was the Master’s gruff inquiry.  He did not
catch it.  But Tom Taylor—also an examiner—sitting next to him, repeated
my reply, with the addition, ‘Just returned from China, where he served
as a midshipman in the late war.’  He then took the book out of Whewell’s
hands, and giving it to me closed, said good-naturedly: ‘Let us have
another try, Mr. Coke.’  The chance was not thrown away; I turned to a
part I knew, and rattled off as if my first examiner had been to blame,
not I.




CHAPTER X


BEFORE dropping the curtain on my college days I must relate a little
adventure which is amusing as an illustration of my reverend friend
Napier’s enthusiastic spontaneity.  My own share in the farce is a
subordinate matter.

During the Christmas party at Holkham I had ‘fallen in love,’ as the
phrase goes, with a young lady whose uncle (she had neither father nor
mother) had rented a place in the neighbourhood.  At the end of his visit
he invited me to shoot there the following week.  For what else had I
paid him assiduous attention, and listened like an angel to the
interminable history of his gout?  I went; and before I left, proposed
to, and was accepted by, the young lady.  I was still at Cambridge, not
of age, and had but moderate means.  As for the maiden, ‘my face is my
fortune’ she might have said.  The aunt, therefore, very properly
pooh-poohed the whole affair, and declined to entertain the possibility
of an engagement; the elderly gentleman got a bad attack of gout; and
every wire of communication being cut, not an obstacle was wanting to
render persistence the sweetest of miseries.

Napier was my confessor, and became as keen to circumvent the ‘old
she-dragon,’ so he called her, as I was.  Frequent and long were our
consultations, but they generally ended in suggestions and schemes so
preposterous, that the only result was an immoderate fit of laughter on
both sides.  At length it came to this (the proposition was not mine): we
were to hire a post chaise and drive to the inn at G—.  I was to write a
note to the young lady requesting her to meet me at some trysting place.
The note was to state that a clergyman would accompany me, who was ready
and willing to unite us there and then in holy matrimony; that I would
bring the licence in my pocket; that after the marriage we could confer
as to ways and means; and that—she could leave the _rest_ to me.

No enterprise was ever more merrily conceived, or more seriously
undertaken.  (Please to remember that my friend was not so very much
older than I; and, in other respects, was quite as juvenile.)

Whatever was to come of it, the drive was worth the venture.  The number
of possible and impossible contingencies provided for kept us occupied by
the hour.  Furnished with a well-filled luncheon basket, we regaled
ourselves and fortified our courage; while our hilarity increased as we
neared, or imagined that we neared, the climax.  Unanimously we repeated
Dr. Johnson’s exclamation in a post chaise: ‘Life has not many things
better than this.’

But where were we?  Our watches told us that we had been two hours
covering a distance of eleven miles.

‘Hi!  Hullo!  Stop!’ shouted Napier.  In those days post horses were
ridden, not driven; and about all we could see of the post boy was what
Mistress Tabitha Bramble saw of Humphrey Clinker.  ‘Where the dickens
have we got to now?’

‘Don’t know, I’m sure, sir,’ says the boy; ‘never was in these ’ere parts
afore.’

‘Why,’ shouts the vicar, after a survey of the landscape, ‘if I can see a
church by daylight, that’s Blakeney steeple; and we are only three miles
from where we started.’

Sure enough it was so.  There was nothing for it but to stop at the
nearest house, give the horses a rest and a feed, and make a fresh
start,—better informed as to our topography.

It was past four on that summer afternoon when we reached our
destination.  The plan of campaign was cut and dried.  I called for
writing materials, and indicted my epistle as agreed upon.

‘To whom are you telling her to address the answer?’ asked my accomplice.
‘We’re _incog._ you know.  It won’t do for either of us to be known.’

‘Certainly not,’ said I.  ‘What shall it be?  White? Black? Brown? or
Green?’

‘Try Browne with an E,’ said he.  ‘The E gives an aristocratic flavour.
We can’t afford to risk our respectability.’

The note sealed, I rang the bell for the landlord, desired him to send it
up to the hall and tell the messenger to wait for an answer.

As our host was leaving the room he turned round, with his hand on the
door, and said:

‘Beggin’ your pardon, Mr. Cook, would you and Mr. Napeer please to take
dinner here?  I’ve soom beatiful lamb chops, and you could have a
ducklin’ and some nice young peas to your second course.  The post-boy
says the ’osses is pretty nigh done up; but by the time—’

‘How did you know our names?’ asked my companion.

‘Law sir!  The post-boy, he told me.  But, beggin’ your pardon, Mr.
Napeer, my daughter, she lives in Holkham willage; and I’ve heard you
preach afore now.’

‘Let’s have the dinner by all means,’ said I.

‘If the Bishop sequesters my living,’ cried Napier, with solemnity, ‘I’ll
summon the landlord for defamation of character.  But time’s up.  You
must make for the boat-house, which is on the other side of the park.
I’ll go with you to the head of the lake.’

We had not gone far, when we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.
What did we see but an open carriage, with two ladies in it, not a
hundred yards behind us.

‘The aunt! by all that’s—!’

What—  I never heard; for, before the sentence was completed, the
speaker’s long legs were scampering out of sight in the direction of a
clump of trees, I following as hard as I could go.

As the carriage drove past, my Friar Lawrence was lying in a ditch, while
I was behind an oak.  We were near enough to discern the niece, and
consequently we feared to be recognised.  The situation was neither
dignified nor romantic.  My friend was sanguine, though big ardour was
slightly damped by the ditch water.  I doubted the expediency of trying
the boat-house, but he urged the risk of her disappointment, which made
the attempt imperative.

The padre returned to the inn to dry himself, and, in due course, I
rejoined him.  He met me with the answer to my note.  ‘The boat-house,’
it declared, ‘was out of the question.  But so, of course, was the
_possibility_ of _change_.  We must put our trust in _Providence_.  Time
could make _no_ difference in _our_ case, whatever it might do with
_others_.  _She_, at any rate, could wait for YEARS.’  Upon the whole the
result was comforting—especially as the ‘years’ dispensed with the
necessity of any immediate step more desperate than dinner.  This we
enjoyed like men who had earned it; and long before I deposited my dear
friar in his cell both of us were snoring in our respective corners of
the chaise.

A word or two will complete this romantic episode.  The next long
vacation I spent in London, bent, needless to say, on a happy issue to my
engagement.  How simple, in the retrospect, is the frustration of our
hopes!  I had not been a week in town, had only danced once with my
_fiancée_, when, one day, taking a tennis lesson from the great Barre, a
forced ball grazed the frame of my racket, and broke a blood vessel in my
eye.

For five weeks I was shut up in a dark room.  It was two more before I
again met my charmer.  She did not tell me, but her man did, that their
wedding day was fixed for the 10th of the following month; and he ‘hoped
they would have the pleasure of seeing me at the breakfast!’  [I made the
following note of the fact: N.B.—A woman’s tears may cost her nothing;
but her smiles may be expensive.]

I must, however, do the young lady the justice to state that, though her
future husband was no great things as a ‘man,’ as she afterwards
discovered, he was the heir to a peerage and great wealth.  Both he and
she, like most of my collaborators in this world, have long since passed
into the other.

The fashions of bygone days have always an interest for the living: the
greater perhaps the less remote.  We like to think of our ancestors of
two or three generations off—the heroes and heroines of Jane Austen, in
their pantaloons and high-waisted, short-skirted frocks, their pigtails
and powdered hair, their sandalled shoes, and Hessian boots.  Our near
connection with them entrances our self-esteem.  Their prim manners,
their affected bows and courtesies, the ‘dear Mr. So-and-So’ of the wife
to her husband, the ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ of the children to their parents,
make us wonder whether their flesh and blood were ever as warm as ours;
or whether they were a race of prigs and puppets?

My memory carries me back to the remnants of these lost externals—that
which is lost was nothing more; the men and women were every whit as
human as ourselves.  My half-sisters wore turbans with birds-of-paradise
in them.  My mother wore gigot sleeves; but objected to my father’s
pigtail, so cut it off.  But my father powdered his head, and kept to his
knee-breeches to the last; so did all elderly gentlemen, when I was a
boy.  For the matter of that, I saw an old fellow with a pigtail walking
in the Park as late as 1845.  He, no doubt, was an ultra-conservative.

Fashions change so imperceptibly that it is difficult for the historian
to assign their initiatory date.  Does the young dandy of to-day want to
know when white ties came into vogue?—he knows that his great-grandfather
wore a white neckcloth, and takes it for granted, may be, that his
grandfather did so too.  Not a bit of it.  The young Englander of the
Coningsby type—the Count d’Orsays of my youth, scorned the white tie
alike of their fathers and their sons.  At dinner-parties or at balls,
they adorned themselves in satin scarfs, with a jewelled pin or chained
pair of pins stuck in them.  I well remember the rebellion—the protest
against effeminacy—which the white tie called forth amongst some of us
upon its first invasion on evening dress.  The women were in favour of
it, and, of course, carried the day; but not without a struggle.  One
night at Holkham—we were a large party, I daresay at least fifty at
dinner—the men came down in black scarfs, the women in white ‘chokers.’
To make the contest complete, these all sat on one side of the table, and
we men on the other.  The battle was not renewed; both factions
surrendered.  But the women, as usual, got their way, and—their men.

For my part I could never endure the original white neckcloth.  It was
stiffly starched, and wound twice round the neck; so I abjured it for the
rest of my days; now and then I got the credit of being a coxcomb—not for
my pains, but for my comfort.  Once, when dining at the Viceregal Lodge
at Dublin, I was ‘pulled up’ by an aide-de-camp for my unbecoming attire;
but I stuck to my colours, and was none the worse.  Another time my
offence called forth a touch of good nature on the part of a great man,
which I hardly know how to speak of without writing me down an ass.  It
was at a crowded party at Cambridge House.  (Let me plead my youth; I was
but two-and-twenty.)  Stars and garters were scarcely a distinction.
White ties were then as imperative as shoes and stockings; I was there in
a black one.  My candid friends suggested withdrawal, my relations cut me
assiduously, strangers by my side whispered at me aloud, women turned
their shoulders to me; and my only prayer was that my accursed tie would
strangle me on the spot.  One pair of sharp eyes, however, noticed my
ignominy, and their owner was moved by compassion for my sufferings.  As
I was slinking away, Lord Palmerston, with a _bonhomie_ peculiarly his
own, came up to me; and with a shake of the hand and hearty manner, asked
after my brother Leicester, and when he was going to bring me into
Parliament?—ending with a smile: ‘Where are you off to in such a hurry?’
That is the sort of tact that makes a party leader.  I went to bed a
proud, instead of a humiliated, man; ready, if ever I had the chance, to
vote that black was white, should he but state it was so.

Beards and moustache came into fashion after the Crimean war.  It would
have been an outrage to wear them before that time.  When I came home
from my travels across the Rocky Mountains in 1851, I was still unshaven.
Meeting my younger brother—a fashionable guardsman—in St. James’s Street,
he exclaimed, with horror and disgust at my barbarity, ‘I suppose you
mean to cut off that thing!’

Smoking, as indulged in now, was quite out of the question half a century
ago.  A man would as soon have thought of making a call in his
dressing-gown as of strolling about the West End with a cigar in his
mouth.  The first whom I ever saw smoke a cigarette at a dining-table
after dinner was the King; some forty years ago, or more perhaps.  One of
the many social benefits we owe to his present Majesty.




CHAPTER XI.


DURING my blindness I was hospitably housed in Eaten Place by Mr.
Whitbread, the head of the renowned firm.  After my recovery I had the
good fortune to meet there Lady Morgan, the once famous authoress of the
‘Wild Irish Girl.’  She still bore traces of her former comeliness, and
had probably lost little of her sparkling vivacity.  She was known to
like the company of young people, as she said they made her feel young;
so, being the youngest of the party, I had the honour of sitting next her
at dinner.  When I recall her conversation and her pleasing manners, I
can well understand the homage paid both abroad and at home to the bright
genius of the Irish actor’s daughter.

We talked a good deal about Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb.  This arose out
of my saying I had been reading ‘Glenarvon,’ in which Lady Caroline gives
Byron’s letters to herself as Glenarvon’s letters to the heroine.  Lady
Morgan had been the confidante of Lady Caroline, had seen many of Byron’s
letters, and possessed many of her friend’s—full of details of the
extraordinary intercourse which had existed between the two.

Lady Morgan evidently did not believe (in spite of Lady Caroline’s mad
passion for the poet) that the liaison ever reached the ultimate stage
contemplated by her lover.  This opinion was strengthened by Lady
Caroline’s undoubted attachment to her husband—William Lamb, afterwards
Lord Melbourne—who seems to have submitted to his wife’s vagaries with
his habitual stoicism and good humour.

Both Byron and Lady Caroline had violent tempers, and were always
quarrelling.  This led to the final rupture, when, according to my
informant, the poet’s conduct was outrageous.  He sent her some insulting
lines, which Lady Morgan quoted.  The only one I remember is:

    Thou false to him, thou fiend to me!

Among other amusing anecdotes she told was one of Disraeli.  She had met
him (I forget where), soon after his first success as the youthful author
of ‘Vivian Grey.’  He was naturally made much of, but rather in the
Bohemian world than by such queens of society as Lady Holland or Lady
Jersey.  ‘And faith!’ she added, with the piquante accent which
excitement evoked, ‘he took the full shine out of his janius.  And how do
ye think he was dressed?  In a black velvet jacket and suit to match,
with a red sash round his waist, in which was stuck a dagger with a
richly jew’lled sheath and handle.’

The only analogous instance of self-confidence that I can call to mind
was Garibaldi’s costume at a huge reception at Stafford House.  The
_élite_ of society was there, in diamonds, ribbons, and stars, to meet
him.  Garibaldi’s uppermost and outermost garment was a red flannel
shirt, nothing more nor less.

The crowd jostled and swayed around him.  To get out of the way of it, I
retreated to the deserted picture gallery.  The only person there was one
who interested me more than the scarlet patriot, Bulwer-Lytton the First.
He was sauntering to and fro with his hands behind his back, looking
dingy in his black satin scarf, and dejected.  Was he envying the Italian
hero the obsequious reverence paid to his miner’s shirt?  (Nine tenths of
the men, and still more of the women there, knew nothing of the wearer,
or his cause, beyond that.)  Was he thinking of similar honours which had
been lavished upon himself when _his_ star was in the zenith?  Was he
muttering to himself the usual consolation of the ‘have-beens’—_vanitas
vanitatum_?  Or what new fiction, what old love, was flitting through
that versatile and fantastic brain?  Poor Bulwer!  He had written the
best novel, the best play, and had made the most eloquent parliamentary
oration of any man of his day.  But, like another celebrated statesman
who has lately passed away, he strutted his hour and will soon be
forgotten—‘Quand on broute sa gloire en herbe de son vivant, on ne la
récolte pas en épis après sa mort.’  The ‘Masses,’ so courted by the one,
however blatant, are not the arbiters of immortal fame.

To go back a few years before I met Lady Morgan: when my mother was
living at 18 Arlington Street, Sydney Smith used to be a constant visitor
there.  One day he called just as we were going to lunch.  He had been
very ill, and would not eat anything.  My mother suggested the wing of a
chicken.

‘My dear lady,’ said he, ‘it was only yesterday that my doctor positively
refused my request for the wing of a butterfly.’

Another time when he was making a call I came to the door before it was
opened.  When the footman answered the bell, ‘Is Lady Leicester at home?’
he asked.

‘No, sir,’ was the answer.

‘That’s a good job,’ he exclaimed, but with a heartiness that fairly took
Jeames’ breath away.

As Sydney’s face was perfectly impassive, I never felt quite sure whether
this was for the benefit of myself or of the astounded footman; or
whether it was the genuine expression of an absent mind.  He was a great
friend of my mother’s, and of Mr. Ellice’s, but his fits of abstraction
were notorious.

He himself records the fact.  ‘I knocked at a door in London, asked, “Is
Mrs. B— at home?”  “Yes, sir; pray what name shall I say?”  I looked at
the man’s face astonished.  What name? what name? aye, that is the
question.  What is my name?  I had no more idea who I was than if I had
never existed.  I did not know whether I was a dissenter or a layman.  I
felt as dull as Sternhold and Hopkins.  At last, to my great relief, it
flashed across me that I was Sydney Smith.’

In the summer of the year 1848 Napier and I stayed a couple of nights
with Captain Marryat at Langham, near Blakeney.  He used constantly to
come over to Holkham to watch our cricket matches.  His house was a
glorified cottage, very comfortable and prettily decorated.  The dining
and sitting-rooms were hung with the original water-colour
drawings—mostly by Stanfield, I think—which illustrated his minor works.
Trophies from all parts of the world garnished the walls.  The only
inmates beside us two were his son, a strange, but clever young man with
considerable artistic abilities, and his talented daughter, Miss
Florence, since so well known to novel readers.

Often as I had spoken to Marryat, I never could quite make him out.  Now
that I was his guest his habitual reserve disappeared, and despite his
failing health he was geniality itself.  Even this I did not fully
understand at first.  At the dinner-table his amusement seemed, I won’t
say to make a ‘butt’ of me—his banter was too good-natured for that—but
he treated me as Dr. Primrose treated his son after the
bushel-of-green-spectacles bargain.  He invented the most wonderful
stories, and told them with imperturbable sedateness.  Finding a
credulous listener in me, he drew all the more freely upon his invention.
When, however, he gravely asserted that Jonas was not the only man who
had spent three days and three nights in a whale’s belly, but that he
himself had caught a whale with a man inside it who had lived there for
more than a year on blubber, which, he declared, was better than turtle
soup, it was impossible to resist the fooling, and not forget that one
was the Moses of the extravaganza.

In the evening he proposed that his son and daughter and I should act a
charade.  Napier was the audience, and Marryat himself the orchestra—that
is, he played on his fiddle such tunes as a ship’s fiddler or piper plays
to the heaving of the anchor, or for hoisting in cargo.  Everyone was in
romping spirits, and notwithstanding the cheery Captain’s signs of
fatigue and worn looks, which he evidently strove to conceal, the evening
had all the freshness and spirit of an impromptu pleasure.

When I left, Marryat gave me his violin, with some sad words about his
not being likely to play upon it more.  Perhaps he knew better than we
how prophetically he was speaking.  Barely three weeks afterwards I
learnt that the humorous creator of ‘Midshipman Easy’ would never make us
laugh again.

In 1846 Lord John Russell succeeded Sir Robert Peel as premier.  At the
General Election, a brother of mine was the Liberal candidate for the
seat in East Norfolk.  He was returned; but was threatened with defeat
through an occurrence in which I was innocently involved.

The largest landowner in this division of the county, next to my brother
Leicester, was Lord Hastings—great-grandfather of the present lord.  On
the occasion I am referring to, he was a guest at Holkham, where a large
party was then assembled.  Leicester was particularly anxious to be civil
to his powerful neighbour; and desired the members of his family to show
him every attention.  The little lord was an exceedingly punctilious man:
as scrupulously dapper in manner as he was in dress.  Nothing could be
more courteous, more smiling, than his habitual demeanour; but his bite
was worse than his bark, and nobody knew which candidate his agents had
instructions to support in the coming contest.  It was quite on the cards
that the secret order would turn the scales.

One evening after dinner, when the ladies had left us, the men were drawn
together and settled down to their wine.  It was before the days of
cigarettes, and claret was plentifully imbibed.  I happened to be seated
next to Lord Hastings on his left; on the other side of him was Spencer
Lyttelton, uncle of our Colonial Secretary.  Spencer Lyttelton was a
notable character.  He had much of the talents and amiability of his
distinguished family; but he was eccentric, exceedingly comic, and
dangerously addicted to practical jokes.  One of these he now played upon
the spruce and vigilant little potentate whom it was our special aim to
win.

As the decanters circulated from right to left, Spencer filled himself a
bumper, and passed the bottles on.  Lord Hastings followed suit.  I,
unfortunately, was speaking to Lyttelton behind Lord Hastings’s back, and
as he turned and pushed the wine to me, the incorrigible joker, catching
sight of the handkerchief sticking out of my lord’s coat-tail, quick as
thought drew it open and emptied his full glass into the gaping pocket.
A few minutes later Lord Hastings, who took snuff, discovered what had
happened.  He held the dripping cloth up for inspection, and with perfect
urbanity deposited it on his dessert plate.

Leicester looked furious, but said nothing till we joined the ladies.  He
first spoke to Hastings, and then to me.  What passed between the two I
do not know.  To me, he said: ‘Hastings tells me it was you who poured
the claret into his pocket.  This will lose the election.  After
to-morrow, I shall want your room.’  Of course, the culprit confessed;
and my brother got the support we hoped for.  Thus it was that the
political interests of several thousands of electors depended on a glass
of wine.




CHAPTER XII


I HAD completed my second year at the University, when, in October 1848,
just as I was about to return to Cambridge after the long vacation, an
old friend—William Grey, the youngest of the ex-Prime-Minister’s
sons—called on me at my London lodgings.  He was attached to the Vienna
Embassy, where his uncle, Lord Ponsonby, was then ambassador.  Shortly
before this there had been serious insurrections both in Paris, Vienna,
and Berlin.

Many may still be living who remember how Louis Philippe fled to England;
how the infection spread over this country; how 25,000 Chartists met on
Kennington Common; how the upper and middle classes of London were
enrolled as special constables, with the future Emperor of the French
amongst them; how the promptitude of the Iron Duke saved London, at
least, from the fate of the French and Austrian capitals.

This, however, was not till the following spring.  Up to October, no
overt defiance of the Austrian Government had yet asserted itself; but
the imminence of an outbreak was the anxious thought of the hour.  The
hot heads of Germany, France, and England were more than meditating—they
were threatening, and preparing for, a European revolution.  Bloody
battles were to be fought; kings and emperors were to be dethroned and
decapitated; mobs were to take the place of parliaments; the leaders of
the ‘people’—_i.e._ the stump orators—were to rule the world; property
was to be divided and subdivided down to the shirt on a man’s—a rich
man’s—back; and every ‘po’r’ man was to have his own, and—somebody
else’s.  This was the divine law of Nature, according to the gospels of
Saint Jean Jacques and Mr. Feargus O’Connor.  We were all naked under our
clothes, which clearly proved our equality.  This was the simple, the
beautiful programme; once carried out, peace, fraternal and eternal
peace, would reign—till it ended, and the earthly Paradise would be an
accomplished fact.

I was an ultra-Radical—a younger-son Radical—in those days.  I was quite
ready to share with my elder brother; I had no prejudice in favour of my
superiors; I had often dreamed of becoming a leader of the ‘people’—a
stump orator, _i.e._—with the handsome emoluments of ministerial office.

William Grey came to say good-bye.  He was suddenly recalled in
consequence of the insurrection.  ‘It is a most critical state of
affairs,’ he said.  ‘A revolution may break out all over the Continent at
any moment.  There’s no saying where it may end.  We are on the eve of a
new epoch in the history of Europe.  I wouldn’t miss it on any account.’

‘Most interesting! most interesting!’ I exclaimed.  ‘How I wish I were
going with you!’

‘Come,’ said he, with engaging brevity.

‘How can I?  I’m just going back to Cambridge.’

‘You are of age, aren’t you?’

I nodded.

‘And your own master?  Come; you’ll never have such a chance again.’

‘When do you start?’

‘To-morrow morning early.’

‘But it is too late to get a passport.’

‘Not a bit of it.  I have to go to the Foreign Office for my despatches.
Dine with me to-night at my mother’s—nobody else—and I’ll bring your
passport in my pocket.’

‘So be it, then.  Billy Whistle [the irreverend nickname we
undergraduates gave the Master of Trinity] will rusticate me to a
certainty.  It can’t be helped.  The cause is sacred.  I’ll meet you at
Lady Grey’s to-night.’

We reached our destination at daylight on October 9.  We had already
heard, while changing carriages at Breslau station, that the revolution
had broken out at Vienna, that the rails were torn up, the Bahn-hof
burnt, the military defeated and driven from the town.  William Grey’s
official papers, aided by his fluent German, enabled us to pass the
barriers, and find our way into the city.  He went straight to the
Embassy, and sent me on to the ‘Erzherzog Carl’ in the Kärnthner Thor
Strasse, at that time the best hotel in Vienna.  It being still nearly
dark, candles were burning in every window by order of the insurgents.

The preceding day had been an eventful one.  The proletariats, headed by
the students, had sacked the arsenal, the troops having made but slight
resistance.  They then marched to the War Office and demanded the person
of the War Minister, Count Latour, who was most unpopular on account of
his known appeal to Jellachich, the Ban of Croatia, to assist, if
required, in putting down the disturbances.  Some sharp fighting here
took place.  The rioters defeated the small body of soldiers on the spot,
captured two guns, and took possession of the building.  The unfortunate
minister was found in one of the upper garrets of the palace.  The
ruffians dragged him from his place of concealment, and barbarously
murdered him.  They then flung his body from the window, and in a few
minutes it was hanging from a lamp-post above the heads of the infuriated
and yelling mob.

In 1848 the inner city of Vienna was enclosed within a broad and lofty
bastion, fosse, and glacis.  These were levelled in 1857.  As soon as the
troops were expelled, cannon were placed on the Bastei so as to command
the approaches from without.  The tunnelled gateways were built up, and
barricades erected across every principal thoroughfare.  Immediately
after these events Ferdinand I. abdicated in favour of the present
Emperor Francis Joseph, who retired with the Court to Schöbrunn.
Foreigners at once took flight, and the hotels were emptied.  The only
person left in the ‘Archduke Charles’ beside myself was Mr. Bowen,
afterwards Sir George, Governor of New Zealand, with whom I was glad to
fraternise.

These humble pages do not aspire to the dignity of History; but a few
words as to what took place are needful for the writer’s purposes.  The
garrison in Vienna had been comparatively small; and as the National
Guard had joined the students and proletariats, it was deemed advisable
by the Government to await the arrival of reinforcements under Prince
Windischgrätz, who, together with a strong body of Servians and Croats
under Jellachich, might overawe the insurgents; or, if not, recapture the
city without unnecessary bloodshed.  The rebels were buoyed up by hopes
of support from the Hungarians under Kossuth.  But in this they were
disappointed.  In less than three weeks from the day of the outbreak the
city was beleaguered.  Fighting began outside the town on the 24th.  On
the 25th the soldiers occupied the Wieden and Nussdorf suburbs.  Next day
the Gemeinderath (Municipal Council) sent a _Parlementär_ to treat with
Windischgrätz.  The terms were rejected, and the city was taken by storm
on October 30.

A few days before the bombardment, the Austrian commander gave the usual
notice to the Ambassadors to quit the town.  This they accordingly did.
Before leaving, Lord Ponsonby kindly sent his private secretary, Mr.
George Samuel, to warn me and invite me to join him at Schönbrunn.  I
politely elected to stay and take my chance.  After the attack on the
suburbs began I had reason to regret the decision.  The hotels were
entered by patrols, and all efficient waiters _kommandiere’d_ to work at
the barricades, or carry arms.  On the fourth day I settled to change
sides.  The constant banging of big guns, and rattle of musketry, with
the impossibility of getting either air or exercise without the risk of
being indefinitely deprived of both, was becoming less amusing than I had
counted on.  I was already provided with a _Passierschein_, which franked
me inside the town, and up to the insurgents’ outposts.  The difficulty
was how to cross the neutral ground and the two opposing lines.  Broad
daylight was the safest time for the purpose; the officious sentry is not
then so apt to shoot his friend.  With much stalking and dodging I made a
bolt; and, notwithstanding violent gesticulations and threats, got myself
safely seized and hurried before the nearest commanding officer.

He happened to be a general or a colonel.  He was a fierce looking, stout
old gentleman with a very red face, all the redder for his huge white
moustache and well-filled white uniform.  He began by fuming and
blustering as if about to order me to summary execution.  He spoke so
fast, it was not easy to follow him.  Probably my amateur German was as
puzzling to him.  The _Passierschein_, which I produced, was not in my
favour; unfortunately I had forgotten my Foreign Office passport.  What
further added to his suspicion was his inability to comprehend why I had
not availed myself of the notice, duly given to all foreigners, to leave
the city before active hostilities began.  How anyone, who had the
choice, could be fool enough to stay and be shelled or bayoneted, was
(from his point of view) no proof of respectability.  I assured him he
was mistaken if he thought I had a predilection for either of these
alternatives.

‘It was just because I desired to avoid both that I had sought, not
without risk, the protection I was so sure of finding at the hands of a
great and gallant soldier.’

‘Dummes Zeug! dummes Zeug!’ (stuff o’ nonsense), he puffed.  But a
peppery man’s good humour is often as near the surface as his bad.  I
detected a pleasant sparkle in his eye.

‘Pardon me, Excellenz,’ said I, ‘my presence here is the best proof of my
sincerity.’

‘That,’ said he sharply, ‘is what every rascal might plead when caught
with a rebel’s pass in his pocket.  Geleitsbriefe für Schurken sind
Steckbriefe für die Gerechtigkeit.’  (Safe-conduct passes for knaves are
writs of capias to honest men.)

I answered: ‘But an English gentleman is not a knave; and no one knows
the difference better than your Excellenz.’  The term ‘Schurken’ (knaves)
had stirred my fire; and though I made a deferential bow, I looked as
indignant as I felt.

‘Well, well,’ he said pacifically, ‘you may go about your business.  But
_sehen Sie_, young man, take my advice, don’t satisfy your curiosity at
the cost of a broken head.  Dazu gehören Kerle die eigens geschaffen
sind.’  As much as to say: ‘Leave halters to those who are born to be
hanged.’  Indeed, the old fellow looked as if he had enjoyed life too
well to appreciate parting with it gratuitously.

I had nothing with me save the clothes on my back.  When I should again
have access to the ‘Erzherzcg Carl’ was impossible to surmise.  The only
decent inn I knew of outside the walls was the ‘Golden Lámm,’ on the
suburb side of the Donau Canal, close to the Ferdinand bridge which faces
the Rothen Thurm Thor.  Here I entered, and found it occupied by a
company of Nassau _jägers_.  A barricade was thrown up across the street
leading to the bridge.  Behind it were two guns.  One end of the
barricade abutted on the ‘Golden Lámm.’  With the exception of the
soldiers, the inn seemed to be deserted; and I wanted both food and
lodging.  The upper floor was full of _jägers_.  The front windows
over-looked the Bastei.  These were now blocked with mattresses, to
protect the men from bullets.  The distance from the ramparts was not
more than 150 yards, and woe to the student or the fat grocer, in his
National Guard uniform, who showed his head above the walls.  While I was
in the attics a gun above the city gate fired at the battery below.  I
ran down a few minutes later to see the result.  One artilleryman had
been killed.  He was already laid under the gun-carriage, his head
covered with a cloak.

The storming took place a day or two afterwards.  One of the principal
points of resistance had been at the bottom of the Jägerzeile.  The
insurgents had a battery of several guns here; and the handsome houses at
the corners facing the Prater had been loop-holed and filled with
students.  I walked round the town after all was over, and was especially
impressed with the horrors I witnessed.  The beautiful houses, with their
gorgeous furniture, were a mass of smoking ruins.  Not a soul was to be
seen, not even a prowling thief.  I picked my way into one or two of them
without hindrance.  Here and there were a heap of bodies, some burnt to
cinders, some with their clothes still smouldering.  The smell of the
roasted flesh was a disgusting association for a long time to come.  But
the whole was sickening to look at, and still more so, if possible, to
reflect upon; for this was the price which so often has been, so often
will be, paid for the alluring dream of liberty, and for the pursuit of
that mischievous will-o’-the-wisp—jealous Equality.




CHAPTER XIII


VIENNA in the early part of the last century was looked upon as the
gayest capital in Europe.  Even the frightful convulsion it had passed
through only checked for a while its chronic pursuit of pleasure.  The
cynical philosopher might be tempted to contrast this not infrequent
accessory of paternal rule with the purity and contentment so fondly
expected from a democracy—or shall we say a demagoguey?  The cherished
hopes of the so-called patriots had been crushed; and many were the worse
for the struggle.  But the majority naturally subsided into their
customary vocations—beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, music, dancing, and
play-going.

The Vienna of 1848 was the Vienna described by Madame de Staël in 1810:
‘Dans ce pays, l’on traite les plaisirs comme les devoirs. . . . Vous
verrez des hommes et des femmes exécuter gravement, l’un vis-à-vis de
l’autre, les pas d’un menuet dont ils sont imposé l’amusement, . . .
comme s’il [the couple] dansait pour l’acquit de sa conscience.’

Every theatre and place of amusement was soon re-opened.  There was an
excellent opera; Strauss—the original—presided over weekly balls and
concerts.  For my part, being extremely fond of music, I worked
industriously at the violin, also at German.  My German master, Herr
Mauthner by name, was a little hump-backed Jew, who seemed to know every
man and woman (especially woman) worth knowing in Vienna.  Through him I
made the acquaintance of several families of the middle class,—amongst
them that of a veteran musician who had been Beethoven’s favourite
flute-player.  As my veneration for Beethoven was unbounded, I listened
with awe to every trifling incident relating to the great master.  I fear
the conviction left on my mind was that my idol, though transcendent
amongst musicians, was a bear amongst men.  Pride (according to his
ancient associate) was his strong point.  This he vindicated by excessive
rudeness to everyone whose social position was above his own.  Even those
that did him a good turn were suspected of patronising.  Condescension
was a prerogative confined to himself.  In this respect, to be sure,
there was nothing singular.

At the house of the old flutist we played family quartets,—he, the
father, taking the first violin part on his flute, I the second, the son
the ’cello, and his daughter the piano.  It was an atmosphere of music
that we all inhaled; and my happiness on these occasions would have been
unalloyed, had not the young lady—a damsel of six-and-forty—insisted on
poisoning me (out of compliment to my English tastes) with a bitter
decoction she was pleased to call tea.  This delicate attention, I must
say, proved an effectual souvenir till we met again—I dreaded it.

Now and then I dined at the Embassy.  One night I met there Prince Paul
Esterhazy, so distinguished by his diamonds when Austrian Ambassador at
the coronation of Queen Victoria.  He talked to me of the Holkham
sheep-shearing gatherings, at which from 200 to 300 guests sat down to
dinner every day, including crowned heads, and celebrities from both
sides of the Atlantic.  He had twice assisted at these in my father’s
time.  He also spoke of the shooting; and promised, if I would visit him
in Hungary, he would show me as good sport as had ever seen in Norfolk.
He invited Mr. Magenis—the Secretary of Legation—to accompany me.

The following week we two hired a _britzcka_, and posted to Eisenstadt.
The lordly grandeur of this last of the feudal princes manifested itself
soon after we crossed the Hungarian frontier.  The first sign of it was
the livery and badge worn by the postillions.  Posting houses, horses and
roads, were all the property of His Transparency.

Eisenstadt itself, though not his principal seat, is a large palace—three
sides of a triangle.  One wing is the residence, that opposite the
barrack, (he had his own troops,) and the connecting base part museum and
part concert-hall.  This last was sanctified by the spirit of Joseph
Haydn, for so many years Kapellmeister to the Esterhazy family.  The
conductor’s stand and his spinet remained intact.  Even the stools and
desks in the orchestra (so the Prince assured me) were ancient.  The very
dust was sacred.  Sitting alone in the dim space, one could fancy the
great little man still there, in his snuff-coloured coat and ruffles,
half buried (as on state occasions) in his ‘_allonge perücke_.’  A tap of
his magic wand starts into life his quaint old-fashioned band, and the
powder flies from their wigs.  Soft, distant, ghostly harmonies of the
Surprise Symphony float among the rafters; and now, as in a dream, we are
listening to—nay, beholding—the glorious process of Creation; till
suddenly the mighty chord is struck, and we are startled from our trance
by the burst of myriad voices echoing the command and its fulfilment,
‘Let there be light: and there was light.’

Only a family party was assembled in the house.  A Baron something, and a
Graf something—both relations,—and the son, afterwards Ambassador at St.
Petersburg during the Crimean War.  The latter was married to Lady Sarah
Villiers, who was also there.  It is amusing to think that the beautiful
daughter of the proud Lady Jersey should be looked upon by the Austrians
as somewhat of a _mésalliance_ for one of the chiefs of their nobility.
Certain it is that the young Princess was received by them, till they
knew her, with more condescension than enthusiasm.

An air of feudal magnificence pervaded the palace: spacious
reception-rooms hung with armour and trophies of the chase; numbers of
domestics in epauletted and belaced, but ill-fitting, liveries; the
prodigal supply and nationality of the comestibles—wild boar with
marmalade, venison and game of all sorts with excellent ‘Eingemachtes’
and ‘Mehlspeisen’ galore—a feast for a Gamache or a Gargantua.  But then,
all save three, remember, were Germans—and Germans!  Noteworthy was the
delicious Château Y’quem, of which the Prince declared he had a
monopoly—meaning the best, I presume.  After dinner the son, his
brother-in-law, and I, smoked our meerschaums and played pools of
_écarté_ in the young Prince’s room.  Magenis, who was much our senior,
had his rubber downstairs with the elders.

The life was pleasant enough, but there was one little medieval
peculiarity which almost made one look for retainers in goat-skins and
rushes on the floor,—there was not a bath (except the Princess’s) in the
palace!  It was with difficulty that my English servant foraged a tub
from the kitchen or the laundry.  As to other sanitary arrangements, they
were what they doubtless had been in the days of Almos and his son, the
mighty Arped.  In keeping with these venerable customs, I had a sentry at
the door of my apartments; to protect me, belike, from the ghosts of
predatory barons and marauders.

During the week we had two days’ shooting; one in the coverts, quite
equal to anything of the kind in England, the other at wild boar.  For
the latter, a tract of the Carpathian Mountains had been driven for some
days before into a wood of about a hundred acres.  At certain points
there were sheltered stands, raised four or five feet from the ground, so
that the sportsmen had a commanding view of the broad alley or clearing
in front of him, across which the stags or boar were driven by an army of
beaters.

I had my own double-barrelled rifle; but besides this, a man with a rack
on his back bearing three rifles of the prince’s, a loader, and a
_Förster_, with a hunting knife or short sword to despatch the wounded
quarry.  Out of the first rush of pigs that went by I knocked over two;
and, in my keenness, jumped out of the stand with the _Förster_ who ran
to finish them off.  I was immediately collared and brought back; and as
far as I could make out, was taken for a lunatic, or at least for a
‘duffer,’ for my rash attempt to approach unarmed a wounded tusker.  When
we all met at the end of the day, the bag of the five guns was forty-five
wild boars.  The biggest—and he was a monster—fell to the rifle of the
Prince, as was of course intended.

The old man took me home in his carriage.  It was a beautiful drive.
One’s idea of an English park—even such a park as Windsor’s—dwindled into
that of a pleasure ground, when compared with the boundless territory we
drove through.  To be sure, it was no more a park than is the New Forest;
but it had all the character of the best English scenery—miles of fine
turf, dotted with clumps of splendid trees, and gigantic oaks standing
alone in their majesty.  Now and then a herd of red deer were startled in
some sequestered glade; but no cattle, no sheep, no sign of domestic
care.  Struck with the charm of this primeval wilderness, I made some
remark about the richness of the pasture, and wondered there were no
sheep to be seen.  ‘There,’ said the old man, with a touch of pride, as
he pointed to the blue range of the Carpathians; ‘that is my farm.  I
will tell you.  All the celebrities of the day who were interested in
farming used to meet at Holkham for what was called the sheep-shearing.
I once told your father I had more shepherds on my farm than there were
sheep on his.’




CHAPTER XIV


IT WAS with a sorry heart that I bade farewell to my Vienna friends, my
musical comrades, the Legation hospitalities, and my faithful little
Israelite.  But the colt frisks over the pasture from sheer superfluity
of energy; and between one’s second and third decades instinctive
restlessness—spontaneous movement—is the law of one’s being.  ’Tis then
that ‘Hope builds as fast as knowledge can destroy.’  The enjoyment we
abandon is never so sweet as that we seek.  ‘Pleasure never is at home.’
Happiness means action for its own sake, change, incessant change.

I sought and found it in Bavaria, Bohemia, Russia, all over Germany, and
dropped anchor one day in Cracow; a week afterwards in Warsaw.  These
were out-of-the-way places then; there were no tourists in those days; I
did not meet a single compatriot either in the Polish or Russian town.

At Warsaw I had an adventure not unlike that which befell me at Vienna.
The whole of Europe, remember, was in a state of political ferment.
Poland was at least as ready to rise against its oppressor then as now;
and the police was proportionately strict and arbitrary.  An army corps
was encamped on the right bank of the Vistula, ready for expected
emergencies.  Under these circumstances, passports, as may be supposed,
were carefully inspected; except in those of British subjects, the person
of the bearer was described—his height, the colour of his hair (if he had
any), or any mark that distinguished him.

In my passport, after my name, was added ‘_et son domestique_.’  The
inspector who examined it at the frontier pointed to this, and, in
indifferent German, asked me where that individual was.  I replied that I
had sent him with my baggage to Dresden, to await my arrival there.  A
consultation thereupon took place with another official, in a language I
did not understand; and to my dismay I was informed that I was—in
custody.  The small portmanteau I had with me, together with my
despatch-box, was seized; the latter contained a quantity of letters and
my journal.  Money only was I permitted to retain.

Quite by the way, but adding greatly to my discomfort, was the fact that
since leaving Prague, where I had relinquished everything I could
dispense with, I had had much night travelling amongst native passengers,
who so valued cleanliness that they economised it with religious care.
By the time I reached Warsaw, I may say, without metonymy, that I was
itching (all over) for a bath and a change of linen.  My irritation,
indeed, was at its height.  But there was no appeal; and on my arrival I
was haled before the authorities.

Again, their head was a general officer, though not the least like my
portly friend at Vienna.  His business was to sit in judgment upon
delinquents such as I.  He was a spare, austere man, surrounded by a
sharp-looking aide-de-camp, several clerks in uniform, and two or three
men in mufti, whom I took to be detectives.  The inspector who arrested
me was present with my open despatch-box and journal.  The journal he
handed to the aide, who began at once to look it through while his chief
was disposing of another case.

To be suspected and dragged before this tribunal was, for the time being
(as I afterwards learnt) almost tantamount to condemnation.  As soon as
the General had sentenced my predecessor, I was accosted as a
self-convicted criminal.  Fortunately he spoke French like a Frenchman;
and, as it presently appeared, a few words of English.

‘What country do you belong to?’ he asked, as if the question was but a
matter of form, put for decency’s sake—a mere prelude to committal.

‘England, of course; you can see that by my passport.’  I was determined
to fence him with his own weapons.  Indeed, in those innocent days of my
youth, I enjoyed a genuine British contempt for foreigners—in the
lump—which, after all, is about as impartial a sentiment as its converse,
that one’s own country is always in the wrong.

‘Where did you get it?’ (with a face of stone).

_Prisoner_ (_naïvely_): ‘Where did I get it?  I do not follow you.’
(Don’t forget, please, that said prisoner’s apparel was unvaleted, his
hands unwashed, his linen unchanged, his hair unkempt, and his face
unshaven).

_General_ (stonily): ‘“Where did you get it?” was my question.’

_Prisoner_ (quietly): ‘From Lord Palmerston.’

_General_ (glancing at that Minister’s signature): ‘It says here, “et son
domestique”—you have no domestique.’

_Prisoner_ (calmly): ‘Pardon me, I have a domestic.’

_General_ (with severity), ‘Where is he?’

_Prisoner_: ‘At Dresden by this time, I hope.’

_General_ (receiving journal from aide-de-camp, who points to a certain
page): ‘You state here you were caught by the Austrians in a pretended
escape from the Viennese insurgents; and add, “They evidently took me for
a spy” [returning journal to aide].  What is your explanation of this?’

_Prisoner_ (shrugging shoulders disdainfully): ‘In the first place, the
word “pretended” is not in my journal.  In the second, although of course
it does not follow, if one takes another person for a man of sagacity or
a gentleman—it does not follow that he is either—still, when—’

_General_ (with signs of impatience): ‘I have here a _Passierschein_,
found amongst your papers and signed by the rebels.  They would not have
given you this, had you not been on friendly terms with them.  You will
be detained until I have further particulars.’

_Prisoner_ (angrily): ‘I will assist you, through Her Britannic Majesty’s
Consul, with whom I claim the right to communicate.  I beg to inform you
that I am neither a spy nor a socialist, but the son of an English peer’
(heaven help the relevancy!).  ‘An Englishman has yet to learn that Lord
Palmerston’s signature is to be set at naught and treated with
contumacy.’

The General beckoned to the inspector to put an end to the proceedings.
But the aide, who had been studying the journal, again placed it in his
chief’s hands.  A colloquy ensued, in which I overheard the name of Lord
Ponsonby.  The enemy seemed to waver, so I charged with a renewed request
to see the English Consul.  A pause; then some remarks in Russian from
the aide; then the _General_ (in suaver tones): ‘The English Consul, I
find, is absent on a month’s leave.  If what you state is true, you acted
unadvisedly in not having your passport altered and _revisé_ when you
parted with your servant.  How long do you wish to remain here?’

Said I, ‘Vous avez bien raison, Monsieur.  Je suis évidemment dans mon
tort.  Ma visite à Varsovie était une aberration.  As to my stay, je suis
déjà tout ce qu’il y a de plus ennuyé.  I have seen enough of Warsaw to
last for the rest of my days.’

Eventually my portmanteau and despatch-box were restored to me; and I
took up my quarters in the filthiest inn (there was no better, I believe)
that it was ever my misfortune to lodge at.  It was ancient, dark, dirty,
and dismal.  My sitting-room (I had a cupboard besides to sleep in) had
but one window, looking into a gloomy courtyard.  The furniture consisted
of two wooden chairs and a spavined horsehair sofa.  The ceiling was low
and lamp-blacked; the stained paper fell in strips from the sweating
walls; fortunately there was no carpet; but if anything could have added
to the occupier’s depression it was the sight of his own distorted
features in a shattered glass, which seemed to watch him like a detective
and take notes of his movements—a real Russian mirror.

But the resources of one-and-twenty are not easily daunted, even by the
presence of the _cimex lectularius_ or the _pulex irritans_.  I inquired
for a _laquais de place_,—some human being to consort with was the most
pressing of immediate wants.  As luck would have it, the very article was
in the dreary courtyard, lurking spider-like for the innocent traveller
just arrived.  Elective affinity brought us at once to friendly
intercourse.  He was of the Hebrew race, as the larger half of the Warsaw
population still are.  He was a typical Jew (all Jews are typical),
though all are not so thin as was Beninsky.  His eyes were sunk in
sockets deepened by the sharpness of his bird-of-prey beak; a single
corkscrew ringlet dropped tearfully down each cheek; and his one front
tooth seemed sometimes in his upper, sometimes in his lower jaw.  His
skull-cap and his gabardine might have been heirlooms from the Patriarch
Jacob; and his poor hands seemed made for clawing.  But there was a
humble and contrite spirit in his sad eyes.  The history of his race was
written in them; but it was modern history that one read in their
hopeless and appealing look.

His cringing manner and his soft voice (we conversed in German) touched
my heart.  I have always had a liking for the Jews.  Who shall reckon how
much some of us owe them!  They have always interested me as a peculiar
people—admitting sometimes, as in poor Beninsky’s case, of purifying, no
doubt; yet, if occasionally zealous (and who is not?) of interested
works—cent. per cent. works, often—yes, more often than we
Christians—zealous of good works, of open-handed, large-hearted
munificence, of charity in its democratic and noblest sense.  Shame upon
the nations which despise and persecute them for faults which they, the
persecutors, have begotten!  Shame on those who have extorted both their
money and their teeth!  I think if I were a Jew I should chuckle to see
my shekels furnish all the wars in which Christians cut one another’s
Christian weasands.

And who has not a tenderness for the ‘beautiful and well-favoured’
Rachels, and the ‘tender-eyed’ Leahs, and the tricksy little Zilpahs, and
the Rebekahs, from the wife of Isaac of Gerar to the daughter of Isaac of
York?  Who would not love to sit with Jessica where moonlight sleeps, and
watch the patines of bright gold reflected in her heavenly orbs?  I once
knew a Jessica, a Polish Jessica, who—but that was in Vienna, more than
half a century ago.

Beninsky’s orbs brightened visibly when I bade him break his fast at my
high tea.  I ordered everything they had in the house I think,—a cold
Pomeranian _Gänsebrust_, a garlicky _Wurst_, and _geräucherte Lachs_.  I
had a packet of my own Fortnum and Mason’s Souchong; and when the stove
gave out its glow, and the samovar its music, Beninsky’s gratitude and
his hunger passed the limits of restraint.  Late into the night we smoked
our meerschaums.

When I spoke of the Russians, he got up nervously to see the door was
shut, and whispered with bated breath.  What a relief it was to him to
meet a man to whom he could pour out his griefs, his double griefs, as
Pole and Israelite.  Before we parted I made him put the remains of the
sausage (!) and the goose-breast under his petticoats.  I bade him come
to me in the morning and show me all that was worth seeing in Warsaw.
When he left, with tears in his eyes, I was consoled to think that for
one night at any rate he and his _Gänsebrust_ and sausage would rest
peacefully in Abraham’s bosom.  What Abraham would say to the sausage I
did not ask; nor perhaps did my poor Beninsky.




CHAPTER XV


THE remainder of the year ’49 has left me nothing to tell.  For me, it
was the inane life of that draff of Society—the young man-about-town: the
tailor’s, the haberdasher’s, the bootmaker’s, and trinket-maker’s, young
man; the dancing and ‘hell’-frequenting young man; the young man of the
‘Cider Cellars’ and Piccadilly saloons; the valiant dove-slayer, the
park-lounger, the young lady’s young man—who puts his hat into mourning,
and turns up his trousers because—because the other young man does ditto,
ditto.

I had a share in the Guards’ omnibus box at Covent Garden, with the
privilege attached of going behind the scenes.  Ah! that was a real
pleasure.  To listen night after night to Grisi and Mario, Alboni and
Lablache, Viardot and Ronconi, Persiani and Tamburini,—and Jenny Lind
too, though she was at the other house.  And what an orchestra was
Costa’s—with Sainton leader, and Lindley and old Dragonetti, who together
but alone, accompanied the _recitative_ with their harmonious chords on
’cello and double-bass.  Is singing a lost art?  Or is that but a
_temporis acti_ question?  We who heard those now silent voices fancy
there are none to match them nowadays.  Certainly there are no dancers
like Taglioni, and Cerito, and Fanny Elsler, and Carlotta Grisi.

After the opera and the ball, one finished the night at Vauxhall or
Ranelagh; then as gay, and exactly the same, as they were when Miss Becky
Sharpe and fat Jos supped there only five-and-thirty years before.

Except at the Opera, and the Philharmonic, and Exeter Hall, one rarely
heard good music.  Monsieur Jullien, that prince of musical
mountebanks—the ‘Prince of Waterloo,’ as John Ella called him, was the
first to popularise classical music at his promenade concerts, by
tentatively introducing a single movement of a symphony here and there in
the programme of his quadrilles and waltzes and music-hall songs.

Mr. Ella, too, furthered the movement with his Musical Union and quartett
parties at Willis’s Rooms, where Sainton and Cooper led alternately, and
the incomparable Piatti and Hill made up the four.  Here Ernst, Sivori,
Vieuxtemps, and Bottesini, and Mesdames Schumann, Dulcken, Arabella
Goddard, and all the famous virtuosi played their solos.

Great was the stimulus thus given by Ella’s energy and enthusiasm.  As a
proof of what he had to contend with, and what he triumphed over, Hallé’s
‘Life’ may be quoted, where it says: ‘When Mr. Ella asked me [this was in
1848] what I wished to play, and heard that it was one of Beethoven’s
pianoforte sonatas, he exclaimed “Impossible!” and endeavoured to
demonstrate that they were not works to be played in public.’  What
seven-league boots the world has stridden in within the memory of living
men!

John Ella himself led the second violins in Costa’s band, and had begun
life (so I have been told) as a pastry-cook.  I knew both him and the
wonderful little Frenchman ‘at home.’  According to both, in their
different ways, Beethoven and Mozart would have been lost to fame but for
their heroic efforts to save them.

I used occasionally to play with Ella at the house of a lady who gave
musical parties.  He was always attuned to the highest pitch,—most
good-natured, but most excitable where music was to the fore.  We were
rehearsing a quintett, the pianoforte part of which was played by the
young lady of the house—a very pretty girl, and not a bad musician, but
nervous to the point of hysteria.  Ella himself was in a hypercritical
state; nothing would go smoothly; and the piano was always (according to
him) the peccant instrument.  Again and again he made us restart the
movement.  There were a good many friends of the family invited to this
last rehearsal, which made it worse for the poor girl, who was obviously
on the brink of a breakdown.  Presently Ella again jumped off his chair,
and shouted: ‘Not E flat!  There’s no E flat there; E natural!  E
natural!  I never in my life knew a young lady so prolific of flats as
you.’  There was a pause, then a giggle, then an explosion; and then the
poor girl, bursting into tears, rushed out of the room.

It was at Ella’s house that I first heard Joachim, then about sixteen, I
suppose.  He had not yet performed in London.  All the musical
celebrities were present to hear the youthful prodigy.  Two quartetts
were played, Ernst leading one and Joachim the other.  After it was over,
everyone was enraptured, but no one more so than Ernst, who
unhesitatingly predicted the fame which the great artist has so eminently
achieved.

One more amusing little story belongs to my experiences of these days.
Having two brothers and a brother-in-law in the Guards, I used to dine
often at the Tower, or the Bank, or St. James’s.  At the Bank of England
there is always at night an officer’s guard.  There is no mess, as the
officer is alone.  But the Bank provides dinner for two, in case the
officer should invite a friend.  On the occasion I speak of, my
brother-in-law, Sir Archibald Macdonald, was on duty.  The soup and fish
were excellent, but we were young and hungry, and the usual leg of mutton
was always a dish to be looked forward to.

When its cover was removed by the waiter we looked in vain; there was
plenty of gravy, but no mutton.  Our surprise was even greater than our
dismay, for the waiter swore ‘So ’elp his gawd’ that he saw the cook put
the leg on the dish, and that he himself put the cover on the leg.  ‘And
what did you do with it then?’ questioned my host.  ‘Nothing,
S’Archibald.  Brought it straight in ’ere.’  ‘Do you mean to tell me it
was never out of your hands between this and the kitchen?’  ‘Never, but
for the moment I put it down outside the door to change the plates.’
‘And was there nobody in the passage?’  ‘Not a soul, except the sentry.’
‘I see,’ said my host, who was a quick-witted man.  ‘Send the sergeant
here.’  The sergeant came.  The facts were related, and the order given
to parade the entire guard, sentry included, in the passage.

The sentry was interrogated first.  ‘No, he had not seen nobody in the
passage.’  ‘No one had touched the dish?’  ‘Nobody as ever he seed.’
Then came the orders: ‘Attention.  Ground arms.  Take off your
bear-skins.’  And the truth—_i.e._, the missing leg—was at once revealed;
the sentry had popped it into his shako.  For long after that day, when
the guard either for the Tower or Bank marched through the streets, the
little blackguard boys used to run beside it and cry, ‘Who stole the leg
o’ mutton?’




CHAPTER XVI


PROBABLY the most important historical event of the year ’49 was the
discovery of gold in California, or rather, the great Western Exodus in
pursuit of it.  A restless desire possessed me to see something of
America, especially of the Far West.  I had an hereditary love of sport,
and had read and heard wonderful tales of bison, and grisly bears, and
wapitis.  No books had so fascinated me, when a boy, as the
‘Deer-slayer,’ the ‘Pathfinder,’ and the beloved ‘Last of the Mohicans.’
Here then was a new field for adventure.  I would go to California, and
hunt my way across the continent.  Ruxton’s ‘Life in the Far West’
inspired a belief in self-reliance and independence only rivalled by
Robinson Crusoe.  If I could not find a companion, I would go alone.
Little did I dream of the fortune which was in store for me, or how
nearly I missed carrying out the scheme so wildly contemplated, or
indeed, any scheme at all.

The only friend I could meet with both willing and able to join me was
the last Lord Durham.  He could not undertake to go to California; but he
had been to New York during his father’s reign in Canada, and liked the
idea of revisiting the States.  He proposed that we should spend the
winter in the West Indies, and after some buffalo-shooting on the plains,
return to England in the autumn.

The notion of the West Indies gave rise to an off-shoot.  Both Durham and
I were members of the old Garrick, then but a small club in Covent
Garden.  Amongst our mutual friends was Andrew Arcedeckne—pronounced
Archdeacon—a character to whom attaches a peculiar literary interest, of
which anon.  Arcedeckne—Archy, as he was commonly called—was about a
couple of years older than we were.  He was the owner of Glevering Hall,
Suffolk, and nephew of Lord Huntingfield.  These particulars, as well as
those of his person, are note-worthy, as it will soon appear.

Archy—‘Merry Andrew,’ as I used to call him,—owned one of the finest
estates in Jamaica—Golden Grove.  When he heard of our intended trip, he
at once volunteered to go with us.  He had never seen Golden Grove, but
had often wished to visit it.  Thus it came to pass that we three secured
our cabins in one of the West India mailers, and left England in December
1849.

To return to our little Suffolk squire.  The description of his figure,
as before said, is all-important, though the world is familiar with it,
as drawn by the pencil of a master caricaturist.  Arcedeckne was about
five feet three inches, round as a cask, with a small singularly round
face and head, closely cropped hair, and large soft eyes,—in a word, so
like a seal, that he was as often called ‘Phoca’ as Archy.

Do you recognise the portrait?  Do you need the help of ‘Glevering Hall’
(how curious the suggestion!).  And would you not like to hear him talk?
Here is a specimen in his best manner.  Surely it must have been taken
down by a shorthand writer, or a phonograph:

_Mr. Harry Foker loquitur_: ‘He inquired for Rincer and the cold in his
nose, told Mrs. Rincer a riddle, asked Miss Rincer when she would be
prepared to marry him, and paid his compliments to Miss Brett, another
young lady in the bar, all in a minute of time, and with a liveliness and
facetiousness which set all these young ladies in a giggle.  “Have a
drop, Pen: it’s recommended by the faculty, &c.  Give the young one a
glass, R., and score it up to yours truly.”’

I fancy the great man who recorded these words was more afraid of Mr.
Harry _Phoca_ than of any other man in the Garrick Club—possibly for the
reason that honest Harry was not the least bit afraid of him.  The shy,
the proud, the sensitive satirist would steal quietly into the room,
avoiding notice as though he wished himself invisible.  Phoca would be
warming his back at the fire, and calling for a glass of ‘Foker’s own.’
Seeing the giant enter, he would advance a step or two, with a couple of
extended fingers, and exclaim, quite affably, ‘Ha! Mr. Thackry! litary
cove!  Glad to see you, sir.  How’s Major Dobbings?’ and likely enough
would turn to the waiter, and bid him, ‘Give this gent a glass of the
same, and score it up to yours truly!’  We have his biographer’s word for
it, that he would have winked at the Duke of Wellington, with just as
little scruple.

Yes, Andrew Arcedeckne was the original of Harry Foker; and, from the cut
of his clothes to his family connection, and to the comicality, the
simplicity, the sweetness of temper (though hardly doing justice to the
loveableness of the little man), the famous caricature fits him to a T.

The night before we left London we had a convivial dinner at the
Garrick—we three travellers, with Albert Smith, his brother, and John
Leech.  It was a merry party, to which all contributed good fellowship
and innocent jokes.  The latest arrival at the Zoo was the first
hippopotamus that had reached England,—a present from the Khedive.
Someone wondered how it had been caught.  I suggested a trout-fly; which
so tickled John Leech’s fancy that he promised to draw it for next week’s
‘Punch.’  Albert Smith went with us to Southampton to see us off.

On our way to Jamaica we stopped a night at Barbadoes to coal.  Here I
had the honour of making the acquaintance of the renowned Caroline
Lee!—Miss Car’line, as the negroes called her.  She was so pleased at the
assurance that her friend Mr. Peter Simple had spread her fame all the
world over, that she made us a bowl of the most delicious iced sangaree;
and speedily got up a ‘dignity ball’ for our entertainment.  She was
rather too much of an armful to dance with herself, but there was no lack
of dark beauties, (not a white woman or white man except ourselves in the
room.)  We danced pretty nearly from daylight to daylight.  The blending
of rigid propriety, of the severest ‘dignity,’ with the sudden guffaw and
outburst of wildest spirits and comic humour, is beyond description, and
is only to be met with amongst these ebullient children of the sun.

On our arrival at Golden Grove, there was a great turn-out of the natives
to welcome their young lord and ‘massa.’  Archy was touched and amused by
their frantic loyalty.  But their mode of exhibiting it was not so
entirely to his taste.  Not only the young, but the old women wanted to
hug him.  ‘Eigh!  Dat you, Massa?  Dat you, sar? Me no believe him.  Out
o’ de way, you trash!  Eigh! me too much pleased like devil.’  The one
constant and spontaneous ejaculation was, ‘Yah! Massa too muchy handsome!
Garamighty!  Buckra berry fat!’  The latter attribute was the source of
genuine admiration; but the object of it hardly appreciated its
recognition, and waved off his subjects with a mixture of impatience and
alarm.

We had scarcely been a week at Golden Grove, when my two companions and
Durham’s servant were down with yellow fever.  Being ‘salted,’ perhaps, I
escaped scot-free, so helped Archy’s valet and Mr. Forbes, his factor, to
nurse and to carry out professional orders.  As we were thirty miles from
Kingston the doctor could only come every other day.  The responsibility,
therefore, of attending three patients smitten with so deadly a disease
was no light matter.  The factor seemed to think discretion the better
part of valour, and that Jamaica rum was the best specific for keeping
his up.  All physicians were _Sangrados_ in those days, and when the
Kingston doctor decided upon bleeding, the hysterical state of the darky
girls (we had no men in the bungalow except Durham’s and Archy’s
servants) rendered them worse than useless.  It fell to me, therefore, to
hold the basin while Archy’s man was attending to his master.

Durham, who had nerves of steel, bore his lot with the grim stoicism
which marked his character.  But at one time the doctor considered his
state so serious that he thought his lordship’s family should be informed
of it.  Accordingly I wrote to the last Lord Grey, his uncle and
guardian, stating that there was little hope of his recovery.  Poor Phoca
was at once tragic and comic.  His medicine had to be administered every,
two hours.  Each time, he begged and prayed in lacrymose tones to be let
off.  It was doing him no good.  He might as well be allowed to die in
peace.  If we would only spare him the beastliness this once, on his
honour he would take it next time ‘like a man.’  We were inexorable, of
course, and treated him exactly as one treats a child.

At last the crisis was over.  Wonderful to relate, all three began to
recover.  During their convalescence, I amused myself by shooting
alligators in the mangrove swamps at Holland Bay, which was within half
an hour’s ride of the bungalow.  It was curious sport.  The great
saurians would lie motionless in the pools amidst the snake-like tangle
of mangrove roots.  They would float with just their eyes and noses out
of water, but so still that, without a glass, (which I had not,) it was
difficult to distinguish their heads from the countless roots and rotten
logs around them.  If one fired by mistake, the sport was spoiled for an
hour to come.

I used to sit watching patiently for one of them to show itself, or for
something to disturb the glassy surface of the dark waters.  Overhead the
foliage was so dense that the heat was not oppressive.  All Nature seemed
asleep.  The deathlike stillness was rarely broken by the faintest
sound,—though unseen life, amidst the heat and moisture, was teeming
everywhere; life feeding upon life.  For what purpose?  To what end?  Is
this a primary law of Nature?  Does cannibalism prevail in Mars?
Sometimes a mocking-bird would pipe its weird notes, deepening silence by
the contrast.  But besides pestilent mosquitos, the only living things in
sight were humming-birds of every hue, some no bigger than a butterfly,
fluttering over the blossoms of the orchids, or darting from flower to
flower like flashes of prismatic rays.

I killed several alligators; but one day, while stalking what seemed to
be an unusual monster, narrowly escaped an accident.  Under the
excitement, my eye was so intently fixed upon the object, that I rather
felt than saw my way.  Presently over I went, just managed to save my
rifle, and, to my amazement, found I had set my foot on a sleeping
reptile.  Fortunately the brute was as much astonished as I was, and
plunged with a splash into the adjacent pool.

A Cambridge friend, Mr. Walter Shirley, owned an estate at Trelawny, on
the other side of Jamaica; while the invalids were recovering, I paid him
a visit; and was initiated into the mysteries of cane-growing and
sugar-making.  As the great split between the Northern and Southern
States on the question of slavery was pending, the life, condition, and
treatment of the negro was of the greatest interest.  Mr. Shirley was a
gentleman of exceptional ability, and full of valuable information on
these subjects.  He passed me on to other plantations; and I made the
complete round of the island before returning to my comrades at Golden
Grove.  A few weeks afterwards I stayed with a Spanish gentleman, the
Marquis d’Iznaga, who owned six large sugar plantations in Cuba; and rode
with his son from Casilda to Cienfuegos, from which port I got a steamer
to the Havana.  The ride afforded abundant opportunities of comparing the
slave with the free negro.  But, as I have written on the subject
elsewhere, I will pass to matters more entertaining.




CHAPTER XVII


ON my arrival at the Havana I found that Durham, who was still an
invalid, had taken up his quarters at Mr. Crauford’s, the Consul-General.
Phoca, who was nearly well again, was at the hotel, the only one in the
town.  And who should I meet there but my old Cambridge ally, Fred, the
last Lord Calthorpe.  This event was a fruitful one,—it determined the
plans of both of us for a year or more to come.

Fred—as I shall henceforth call him—had just returned from a hunting
expedition in Texas, with another sportsman whom he had accidentally met
there.  This gentleman ultimately became of even more importance to me
than my old friend.  I purposely abstain from giving either his name or
his profession, for reasons which will become obvious enough by-and-by;
the outward man may be described.  He stood well over six feet in his
socks; his frame and limbs were those of a gladiator; he could crush a
horseshoe in one hand; he had a small head with a bull-neck, purely
Grecian features, thick curly hair with crisp beard and silky moustache.
He so closely resembled a marble Hercules that (as he must have a name)
we will call him Samson.

Before Fred stumbled upon him, he had spent a winter camping out in the
snows of Canada, bear and elk shooting.  He was six years or so older
than either of us—_i.e._ about eight-and-twenty.

As to Fred Calthorpe, it would be difficult to find a more ‘manly’ man.
He was unacquainted with fear.  Yet his courage, though sometimes
reckless, was by no means of the brute kind.  He did not run risks unless
he thought the gain would compensate them; and no one was more capable of
weighing consequences than he.  His temper was admirable, his spirits
excellent; and for any enterprise where danger and hardship were to be
encountered few men could have been better qualified.  By the end of a
week these two had agreed to accompany me across the Rocky Mountains.

Before leaving the Havana, I witnessed an event which, though disgusting
in itself, gives rise to serious reflections.  Every thoughtful reader is
conversant enough with them; if, therefore, he should find them out of
place or trite, apology is needless, as he will pass them by without the
asking.

The circumstance referred to is a public execution.  Mr. Sydney Smith,
the vice-consul, informed me that a criminal was to be garrotted on the
following morning; and asked me whether I cared to look over the prison
and see the man in his cell that afternoon.  We went together.  The poor
wretch bore the stamp of innate brutality.  His crime was the most
revolting that a human being is capable of—the violation and murder of a
mere child.  When we were first admitted he was sullen, merely glaring at
us; but, hearing the warder describe his crime, he became furiously
abusive, and worked himself into such a 

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