when recalled to Newbridge to take charge of me; and though a dear, kind
old soul and an excellent nurse, she was naturally not much of a
playfellow for a little child, and it was very rarely indeed that I had
any young visitor in my nursery or was taken to see any of my small
neighbours. Thus I was from infancy much thrown on my own resources for
play and amusement; and from that time to this I have been rather a
solitary mortal, enjoying above all things lonely walks and studies; and
always finding my spirits rise in hours and days of isolation. I think I
may say I have _never_ felt depressed when living alone. As a child I
have been told I was a very merry little chick, with a round, fair face
and abundance of golden hair; a typical sort of Saxon child. I was
subject then and for many years after, to furious fits of anger, and on
such occasions I misbehaved myself exceedingly. “Nanno” was then wont
peremptorily to push me out into the long corridor and bolt the nursery
door in my face, saying in her vernacular, “Ah, then! you _bould
Puckhawn_ (audacious child of Puck)! I’ll get _shut_ of you!” I think I
feel now the hardness of that door against my little toes, as I kicked
at it in frenzy. Sometimes, when things were very bad indeed, Nanno
conducted me to the end of the corridor at the top of a very long
winding stone stair, near the bottom of which my father occasionally
passed on his way to the stables. “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! She’ll be good
immadiently, Sir, you needn’t come upstairs, Sir!” Then, _sotto voce_,
to me, “Don’t ye hear the Masther? Be quiet now, my darlint, or he’ll
come up the stairs!” Of course, “the Masther” seldom or never was really
within earshot on these occasions. Had he been so Nanno would have been
the last person seriously to invoke his dreaded interference in my
discipline. But the alarm usually sufficed to reduce me to submission. I
had plenty of toddling about out of doors and sitting in the sweet grass
making daisy and dandelion chains, and at home playing with the remnants
of my brother’s Noah’s Ark, and a magnificent old baby-house which stood
in one of the bedrooms, and was so large that I can dimly remember
climbing up and getting into the doll’s drawing-room.
My fifth birthday was the first milestone on Life’s road which I can
recall. I recollect being brought in the morning into my mother’s
darkened bedroom (she was already then a confirmed invalid), and how she
kissed and blessed me, and gave me childish presents, and also a
beautiful emerald ring which I still possess, and pearl bracelets which
she fastened on my little arms. No doubt she wished to make sure that
whenever she might die these trinkets should be known to be mine. She
and my father also gave me a Bible and Prayer Book, which I could read
quite well, and proudly took next Sunday to church for my first
attendance, when the solemn occasion was much disturbed by a little girl
in a pew below howling for envy of my white beaver bonnet, displayed in
the fore-front of the gallery which formed our family seat. “Why did
little Miss Robinson cry?” I was deeply inquisitive on the subject,
having then and always during my childhood regarded “best clothes” with
abhorrence.
Two years later my grandmother, having bestowed on me, at Bath, a
sky-blue silk pelisse, I managed nefariously to tumble down on purpose
into a gutter full of melted snow the first day it was put on, so as to
be permitted to resume my little cloth coat.
Now, aged five, I was emancipated from the nursery and allowed to dine
thenceforward at my parents’ late dinner, while my good nurse was
settled for the rest of her days in a pretty ivy-covered cottage with
large garden, at the end of the shrubbery. She lived there for several
years with an old woman for servant, who I can well remember, but who
must have been of great age, for she had been under-dairymaid to my
great great-grandfather, the Archbishop, and used to tell us stories of
“old times.” This “old Ally’s” great grandchildren were still living,
recently, in the family service in the same cottage which poor “Nanno”
occupied. Ally was the last wearer of the real old Irish scarlet cloak
in our part of the country; and I can remember admiring it greatly when
I used to run by her side and help her to carry her bundle of sticks.
Since those days, even the long blue frieze cloak which succeeded
universally to the scarlet—a most comfortable, decent, and withal
graceful peasant garment, very like the blue cotton one of the Arab
fellah-women—has itself nearly or totally disappeared in Fingal.
On the retirement of my nurse, the charge of my little person was
committed to my mother’s maid and housekeeper, Martha Jones. She came to
my mother a blooming girl of eighteen, and she died of old age and
sorrow when I left Newbridge at my father’s death half-a-century
afterwards. She was a fine, fair, broad-shouldered woman, with a certain
refinement above her class. Her father had been an officer in the army,
and she was educated (not very extensively) at some little school in
Dublin where her particular friend was Moore’s (the poet’s) sister. She
used to tell us how Moore as a lad was always contriving to get into the
school and romping with the girls. The legend has sufficient
verisimilitude to need no confirmation!
“Joney” was indulgence itself, and under her mild sway, and with my
mother for instructress in my little lessons of spelling and geography,
Mrs. Barbauld, Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor, I was as happy a little animal
as well might be. One day being allowed as usual to play on the grass
before the drawing-room windows I took it into my head that I should
dearly like to go and pay a visit to my nurse at her cottage at the end
of the shrubbery. “Joney” had taken me there more than once, but still
the mile-long shrubbery, some of it very dark with fir trees and great
laurels, complicated with crossing walks, and containing two or three
alarming shelter-huts and _tonnelles_ (which I long after regarded with
awe), was a tremendous pilgrimage to encounter alone. After some
hesitation I set off; ran as long as I could, and then with panting
chest and beating heart, went on, daring not to look to right or left,
till (after ages as it seemed to me) I reached the little window of my
nurse’s house in the ivy wall; and set up—loud enough no doubt—a call
for “Nanno!” The good soul could not believe her eyes when she found me
alone but, hugging me in her arms, brought me back as fast as she could
to my distracted mother who had, of course, discovered my evasion. Two
years later, when I was seven years old, I was naughty enough to run
away again, this time in the streets of Bath, in company with a hoop,
and the Town Crier was engaged to “cry” me, but I found my way home at
last alone. How curiously vividly silly little incidents like these
stand out in the misty memory of childhood, like objects suddenly
perceived close to us in a fog! I seem now, after sixty years, to see my
nurse’s little brown figure and white kerchief, as she rushed out and
caught her stray “darlint” in her arms; and also I see a dignified,
gouty gentleman leaning on his stick, parading the broad pavement of
Bath Crescent, up whose whole person my misguided and muddy hoop went
bounding in my second escapade. I ought to apologise perhaps to the
reader for narrating such trivial incidents, but they have left a charm
in my memory.
At seven I was provided with a nursery governess, and my dear mother’s
lessons came to an end. So gentle and sweet had they been that I have
loved ever since everything she taught me, and have a vivid recollection
of the old map book from whence she had herself learned Geography, and
of Mrs. Trimmer’s Histories, “_Sacred_” and “_Profane_”; not forgetting
the almost incredibly bad accompanying volumes of woodcuts with poor Eli
a complete smudge and Sesostris driving the nine kings (with their
crowns, of course) harnessed to his chariot. Who would have dreamed we
should now possess photos of the mummy of the real Sesostris (Rameses
II.), who seemed then quite as mythical a personage as Polyphemus? To
remember the hideous aberrations of Art which then illustrated books for
children, and compare them to the exquisite pictures in “_Little
Folks_,” is to realise one of the many changes the world has seen since
my childhood. Mrs. Trimmer’s books cost, I remember being told, _ten
shillings_ apiece! My governess Miss Kinnear’s lessons, though not very
severe (our old doctor, bless him for it! solemnly advised that I should
never be called on to study after twelve o’clock), were far from being
as attractive as those of my mother, and as soon as I learned to write,
I drew on the gravel walk this, as I conceived, deeply touching and
impressive sentence: “_Lessons! Thou tyrant of the mind!_” I could not
at all understand my mother’s hilarity over this inscription, which
proved so convincingly my need, at all events of those particular
lessons of which Lindley Murray was the author. I envied the peacock who
could sit all day in the sun, and who ate bowls-full of the
griddle-bread of which I was so fond; and never was expected to learn
anything? Poor bird, he came to a sad end. A dog terrified him one day
and he took a great flight and was observed to go into one of the tall
limes near the house but was never seen alive again. When the leaves
fell in the autumn the rain-washed feathers and skeleton of poor Pe-ho
were found wedged in a fork of the tree. He had met the fate of “Lost
Sir Massingberd.”
Some years later, my antipathy to lessons having not at all diminished,
I read a book which had just appeared, and of which all the elders of
the house were talking, Keith’s _Signs of the Times_. In this work, as I
remember, it was set forth that a “Vial” was shortly to be emptied into
or near the Euphrates, after which the end of the world was to follow
immediately. The writer accordingly warned his readers that they would
soon hear startling news from the Euphrates. From that time I
persistently inquired of anybody whom I saw reading the newspaper (a
small sheet which in the Thirties only came three times a week) or who
seemed well-informed about public affairs, “What news was there from the
Euphrates?” The singular question at last called forth the inquiry, “Why
I wanted to know?” and I was obliged to confess that I was hoping for
the emptying of the “Vial” which would put an end to my sums and
spelling lessons.
My seventh year was spent with my parents at Bath, where we had a house
for the winter in James’ Square, where brothers and cousins came for the
holidays, and in London, where I well remember going with my mother to
see the Diorama in the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, of St. Peter’s, and a
Swiss Cottage, and the statues of Tam o’ Shanter and his wife (which I
had implored her to be allowed to see, having imagined them to be living
ogres) and vainly entreating to be taken to see the Siamese Twins. This
last longing, however, was gratified just thirty years afterwards. We
travelled back to Ireland, posting all the way to Holyhead by the then
new high road through Wales and over the Menai Bridge. My chief
recollection of the long journey is humiliating. A box of Shrewsbury
cakes, exactly like those now sold in the town, was bought for me _in
situ_, and I was told to bring it over to Ireland to give to my little
cousin Charley. I was pleased to give the cakes to Charley, but then
Charley was at the moment far away, and the cakes were always at hand in
the carriage; and the road was tedious and the cakes delicious; and so
it came to pass somehow that I broke off first a little bit, and then
another day a larger bit, till cake after cake vanished, and with sorrow
and shame I was obliged to present the empty box to Charley on my
arrival. Greediness alas! has been a besetting sin of mine all my life.
This Charley was a dear little boy, and about this date was occasionally
my companion. His father, my uncle, was Captain William Cobbe, R.N., who
had fought under Nelson, and at the end of the war, married and took a
house near Newbridge, where he acted as my father’s agent. He was a
fine, brave fellow, and much beloved by every one. One day, long after
his sudden, untimely death, we heard from a coastguardsman who had been
a sailor in his ship, that he had probably caught the disease of which
he died in the performance of a gallant action, of which he had never
told any one, even his wife. A man had fallen overboard from his ship
one bitterly cold night in the northern seas near Copenhagen. My uncle,
on hearing what had happened, jumped from his warm berth and plunged
into the sea, where he succeeded in rescuing the sailor, but in doing so
caught a chill which eventually shortened his days. He had five
children, the eldest being Charley, some months younger than I. When my
uncle came over to see his brother and do business, Charley, as he grew
old enough to take the walk, was often allowed to come with him; and
great was my enjoyment of the unwonted pleasure of a young companion.
Considerably greater, I believe, than that of my mother and governess,
who justly dreaded the escapades which our fertile little brains rarely
failed to devise. We climbed over everything climbable by aid of the
arrangement that Charley always mounted on my strong shoulders and then
helped me up. One day my father said to us: “Children, there is a savage
bull come, you must take care not to go near him.” Charley and I looked
at each other and mutually understood. The next moment we were alone we
whispered, “We must get some hairs of his tail!” and away we scampered
till we found the new bull in a shed in the cow-yard. Valiantly we
seized the tail, and as the bull fortunately paid no attention to his
Lilliputian foes, we escaped in triumph with the hairs. Another time, a
lovely April evening, I remember we were told it was damp, and that we
must not go out of the house. We had discovered, however, a door leading
out upon the roof,—and we agreed that “_on_” the house could not
properly be considered “_out_” of the house; and very soon we were
clambering up the slates, and walking along the parapet at a height of
fifty or sixty feet from the ground. My mother, passing through one of
the halls, observed a group of servants looking up in evident alarm and
making signs to us to come down. As quickly as her feebleness permitted
she climbed to our door of exit, and called to us over the roofs.
Charley and I felt like Adam and Eve on the fatal evening after they had
eaten the apple! After dreadful moments of hesitation we came down and
received the solemn rebuke and condemnation we deserved. It was not a
very severe chastisement allotted to us, though we considered it such.
We were told that the game of Pope Joan, promised for the evening,
should not be played. That was the severest, if not the only punishment,
my mother ever inflicted on me.
On rainy days when Charley and I were driven to amuse ourselves in the
great empty rooms and corridors upstairs, we were wont to discuss
profound problems of theology. I remember one conclusion relating
thereto at which we unanimously arrived. Both of us bore the name of
“Power” as a second name, in honour of our grandmother Anne Trench’s
mother, Fanny Power of Coreen. On this circumstance we founded the
certainty that we should both go to Heaven, because we heard it said in
church, “The Heavens and _all the Powers_ therein.”
Alas poor “Little Charley” as everybody called him, after growing to be
a fine six-foot fellow, and a very popular officer, died sadly while
still young, at the Cape.
In those early days, let us say about my tenth year, and for long
afterwards, it was my father’s habit to fill his house with all the
offshoots of the family at Christmas, and with a good many of them for
the Midsummer holidays, when my two eldest brothers and the youngest
came home from Charterhouse and Oxford, and the third from Sandhurst.
These brothers of mine were kind, dear lads, always gentle and petting
to their little sister, who was a mere baby when they were schoolboys,
and of course never really a companion to them. I recollect they once
tried to teach me Cricket, and straightway knocked me over with a ball;
and then carried me, all four in tears and despair, to our mother
thinking they had broken my ribs. I was very fond of them, and thought a
great deal about their holidays, but naturally in early years saw very
little of them.
Beside my brothers, and generally coming to Newbridge at the same
holiday seasons, there was a regiment of young cousins, male and female.
My mother’s only brother, Adjutant General Conway, had five children,
all of whom were practically my father’s wards during the years of their
education at Haileybury and in a ladies’ boarding-school in London.
Then, beside my father’s youngest brother William’s family of five, of
whom I have already spoken, his next eldest brother, George, of the
Horse Artillery (Lieut. General Cobbe in his later years), had five
more, and finally the third brother, Thomas, went out to India in his
youth as aide-de-camp to his cousin, the Marquis of Hastings, held
several good appointments (at Moorshedabad and elsewhere), married and
had ten children, (all of whom passed into my father’s charge) and
finally died, poor fellow! on his voyage home from India, after thirty
years’ absence. Thus there were, in fact, including his own children,
thirty young people more or less my father’s wards, and all of them
looking to Newbridge as the place where holidays were naturally spent,
and to my father’s not very long purse as the resource for everybody in
emergencies. One of them, indeed, carried this view of the case rather
unfortunately far. A gentleman visiting us, happening to mention that he
had lately been to Malta, we naturally asked him if he had met a young
officer of our name quartered there? “Oh dear, yes! a delightful fellow!
All the ladies adore him. He gives charming picnics, and gets nosegays
for them all from Naples.” “I am afraid he can scarcely afford that sort
of thing,” someone timidly observed. “Oh, he says,” replied the visitor,
“that he has an old uncle somewhere who——Good Lord! I am afraid I have
put my foot in it,” abruptly concluded our friend, noticing the looks
exchanged round the circle.
My father’s brother Henry, my god-father, died early and unmarried. He
was Rector of Templeton, and was very intimate with his neighbours
there, the Edgeworths and Granards. The greater part of the library at
Newbridge, as it was in my time, had been collected by him, and included
an alarming proportion of divinity. The story of his life might serve
for such a novel as his friend, Miss Edgeworth, would have written and
entitled “_Procrastination_.” He was much attached for a long time to a
charming Miss Lindsay, who was quite willing to accept his hand, had he
offered it. My poor uncle, however, continued to flirt and dangle and to
postpone any definite declaration, till at last the girl’s mother—who, I
rather believe, was a Lady Charlotte Lindsay, well known in her
generation—told her that a conclusion must be put to this sort of thing.
She would invite Mr. Cobbe to their house for a fortnight, and during
that time every opportunity should be afforded him of making a proposal
in form, if he should be so minded. If, however, at the end of this
probation, he had said nothing, Miss Lindsay was to give him up, and he
was to be allowed no more chances of addressing her. The visit was paid,
and nothing could be more agreeable or devoted than my uncle; but he did
not propose to Miss Lindsay! The days passed, and as the end of the
allotted time drew near, the lady innocently arranged a few walks _en
tête-à-tête_, and talked in a manner which afforded him every
opportunity of saying the words which seemed always on the tip of his
tongue. At last the final day arrived. “My dear,” said Lady Charlotte
(if such was the mother’s name) to her daughter, “I shall go out with
the rest of the party for the whole day and leave you and Mr. Cobbe
together. When I return, it must be decided one way or the other.”
The hours flew in pleasant and confidential talk—still no proposal! Miss
Lindsay, who knew that the final minutes of grace were passing for her
unconscious lover, once more despairingly tried, being really attached
to him, to make him say something which she could report to her mother.
As he afterwards averred he was on the very brink of asking her to marry
him when he caught the sound of her mother’s carriage returning to the
door, and said to himself, “I’ll wait for another opportunity.”
The opportunity was never granted to him. Lady Charlotte gave him his
_congé_ very peremptorily next morning. My uncle was furious, and in
despair; but it was too late! Like other disappointed men he went off
rashly, and almost immediately engaged himself (with no delay this time)
to Miss Flora Long of Rood Ashton, Wiltshire, a lady of considerable
fortune and attractions and of excellent connections, but of such
exceedingly rigid piety of the Calvinistic type of the period, that I
believe my uncle was soon fairly afraid of his promised bride. At all
events his procrastinations began afresh. He remained at Templeton on
one excuse after another, till Miss Long wrote to ask; “Whether he
wished to keep their engagement?” My poor uncle was nearly driven now to
the wall, but his health was bad and might prove his apology for fresh
delays. Before replying to his Flora, he went to Dublin and consulted
Sir Philip Crampton. After detailing his ailments, he asked what he
ought to do, hoping (I am afraid) that the great surgeon would say, “O
you must keep quiet!” Instead of this verdict Crampton said, “Go and get
married by all means!” No further excuse was possible, and my poor uncle
wrote to say he was on his way to claim his bride. Ere he reached her,
however, while stopping at his mother’s house in Bath, he was found dead
in his bed on the morning on which he should have gone to Rood Ashton.
He must have expired suddenly while reading a good little book. All this
happened somewhere about 1823.
To return to our old life at Newbridge, about 1833 and for many years
afterwards, the assembling of my father’s brothers, and brothers’ wives
and children at Christmas was the great event of the year in my almost
solitary childhood. Often a party of twenty or more sat down every day
for three or four weeks together in the dining-room, and we younger ones
naturally spent the short days and long evenings in boyish and girlish
sports and play. Certain very noisy and romping games—Blindman’s buff,
Prisoner’s Bass, Giant, and Puss in the Corner and Hunt the Hare—as we
played them through the halls below stairs, and the long corridors and
rooms above, still appear to me as among the most delightful things in a
world which was then all delight. As we grew a little older and my dear,
clever brother Tom came home from Oxford and Germany, charades and plays
and masquerading and dancing came into fashion. In short ours was, for
the time, like other large country houses, full of happy young people,
with the high spirits common in those old days. The rest of the year,
except during the summer vacation, when brothers and cousins mustered
again, the place was singularly quiet, and my life strangely solitary
for a child. Very early I made a _concordat_ with each of my four
successive governesses, that when lessons were ended, precisely at
twelve, I was free to wander where I pleased about the park and woods,
to row the boat on the pond or ride my pony on the sands of the
sea-shore two miles from the house. I was not to be expected to have any
concern with my instructress outside the doors. The arrangement suited
them, of course, perfectly; and my childhood was thus mainly a lonely
one. I was so uniformly happy that I was (what I suppose few children
are) quite conscious of my own happiness. I remember often thinking
whether other children were all as happy as I, and sometimes, especially
on a spring morning of the 18th March,—my mother’s birthday, when I had
a holiday, and used to make coronets of primroses and violets for her,—I
can recall walking along the grass walks of that beautiful old garden
and feeling as if everything in the world was perfect, and my life
complete bliss for which I could never thank God enough.
When the weather was too bad to spend my leisure hours out of doors I
plunged into the library at haphazard, often making “discovery” of books
of which I had never been told, but which, thus found for myself, were
doubly precious. Never shall I forget thus falling by chance on _Kubla
Khan_ in its first pamphlet-shape. I also gloated over Southey’s _Curse
of Kehama_, and _The Cid_ and Scott’s earlier works. My mother did very
wisely, I think, to allow me thus to rove over the shelves at my own
will. By degrees a genuine appetite for reading awoke in me, and I
became a studious girl, as I shall presently describe. Beside the
library, however, I had a play-house of my own for wet days. There were,
at that time, two garrets only in the house (the bedrooms having all
lofty coved ceilings), and these two garrets, over the lobbies, were
altogether disused. I took possession of them, and kept the keys lest
anybody should pry into them, and truly they must have been a remarkable
sight! On the sloping roofs I pinned the eyes of my peacock’s feathers
in the relative positions of the stars of the chief constellations; one
of my hobbies being Astronomy. On another wall I fastened a rack full of
carpenter’s tools, which I could use pretty deftly on the bench beneath.
The principal wall was an armoury of old court-swords, and home-made
pikes, decorated with green and white flags (I was an Irish patriot at
that epoch), sundry javelins, bows and arrows, and a magnificently
painted shield with the family arms. On the floor of one room was a
collection of shells from the neighbouring shore, and lastly there was a
table with pens, ink and paper; implements wherewith I perpetrated,
_inter alia_, several poems of which I can just recall one. The _motif_
of the story was obviously borrowed from a stanza in Moore’s Irish
Melodies. Even now I do not think the verses very bad for 12 or 13 years
old.
THE FISHERMAN OF LOUGH NEAGH.