CHAPTER XI.

BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. DLXVIII. FEBRUARY 1863. VOL. XCIII.

CONTENTS.

PROGRESS IN CHINA.—PART II., 133

CAXTONIANA.—PART XIII., 149

NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (_Continued_).

HENRI LACORDAIRE, 169

LADY MORGAN’S MEMOIRS, 188

A SKETCH FROM BABYLON.—CONCLUSION, 205

OUR NEW DOCTOR, 223

POLITICS AT HOME AND ABROAD, 245

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET

AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

_To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed._

SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. DLXVIII. FEBRUARY 1863. VOL. XCIII.

PROGRESS IN CHINA.

PART II.

THE TAEPINGS AND THEIR REMEDY.

It would have required many cycles of Cathay to bring to the councils of

the Court of Pekin the enlightenment we have alluded to in our last

Number, if the populations over which it ruled had not threatened to

outstrip the Government in the adoption of European ideas. Petty

sedition, which had always been acknowledged in China as the expression

of the will of the people, suddenly assumed an alarming form, and

threatened to subvert not only the present dynasty, but, what was of far

greater importance, a much venerated constitution, the result of the

collective wisdom and experience of twenty-five centuries.

The two Kwang provinces, Kwang-tung and Kwang-si, were the first

affected by the leaven of European example, and were so the more readily

because our violent acts, irrespective of any question of justification,

were congenial to the predatory tastes of the inhabitants of that

portion of China. That region, which contains from twenty-six to

twenty-eight millions of Chinese, has always been the last to submit to

the rule of a new dynasty, and the first to revolt. Six centuries ago,

the Mongol conquerors of China had no easy task in mastering these

southerners; and Arab historians, never very nice in their estimate of

the value of human life, write in strong terms of the terrible means by

which the subjection of Kwang-tung was accomplished. “The blood of the

people flowing in sounding torrents,” was a strong metaphor applied to

the Mongol conquest; yet, four centuries afterwards, the Manchous had to

repeat the same frightful lesson before they could say that they ruled

over the cities and plains of Kwang-si. Even then, large bodies of the

disaffected fled to the mountains on the north, and to the sea on the

south, and, as banditti or pirates, have never been entirely reconciled

to any form of government. In the lawless seafaring population of

Kwang-tung, our armed smugglers found willing allies against a weak

executive, and the leaven of our example at length brought about a

rebellion, which, under the name of Taepingism, has been the most

appalling scourge that ever fell upon a nation. We will endeavour to

trace its origin, analyse the character of its reputed leaders, and,

from the testimony of impartial witnesses, show what Taepingdom has done

during the fourteen years it has had existence.

The elements of revolution were, as we have said, always ready to hand

in Southern China; and even before the establishment of our sovereignty

at Hong-Kong, there were thousands of lawless Cantonese ready to work

any wickedness, whether as land or sea pirates, it mattered little, and

they were merely kept in anything like subjection by excessive severity

on the part of the mandarins and the executive of China. We stepped in,

destroyed the prestige of Imperial fleets and armies; and our smugglers,

in armed merchantmen called opium-clippers, brought into utter contempt

the police of the Empire, and showed the natives of all classes how to

evade the payment of all dues or taxes. Smuggling and piracy were

divided by too narrow a distinction for the appreciation of the

Cantonese, and their defiance of the Government was actively supported

by the opium-clippers. The visitors to our settlement of Hong-Kong might

have seen fleets of heavily-armed native vessels, loading with salt,

opium, and other goods, all of which were to be run in the teeth of

mandarins, war-junks, or forts. Fast boats, each manned with a hundred

men, flaunted their flags, and beat their gongs. They became quite as

ready to fight the European as their own rulers. When these ruffians had

no other work in hand, they cut off their own lawful traders, or the

little coasters under European flags. Gradually increasing in numbers

and audacity, they attacked outlying Chinese towns; and when their own

Government offered a sufficiently high pecuniary reward, they were

equally ready to assist Governor-General Yeh to exterminate us.

We do not care to pass any opinion upon the iniquity or otherwise of the

opium trade. It may have been a political and commercial necessity; but

we should be false to history if we failed to trace much of the evil

under which China is now suffering to that melancholy source. Owing to

the enormous profits made upon the drug as a contraband article, the

native traders formed themselves into powerful guilds, with

ramifications at Hong-Kong, Macao, and Canton, which actually guaranteed

the success of smuggling ventures—a smuggling assurance company, so to

speak, against the lawful tax-gatherers of China; and the writer has

heard the officers and crew of more than one English opium-clipper boast

of having protected these ruffians, and beaten off the Government boats.

This defiance of the native authorities extended itself to the interior.

Bands of armed men were led by opium-brokers through the provinces,

fighting their way with smuggled goods. To this fact we have the

testimony of the Roman Catholic missionaries; and indeed Monsieur

Chauveau, the head of the Catholic mission in Yunnan, insists—and we

believe him—that the Taeping rebellion was inaugurated by a large band

of six hundred opium-smugglers forcing their way from Yunnan to Canton,

and compelling some influential personages in Kwang-si to assist them.

After the smugglers had retired, the authorities naturally called the

gentry to account. The mob took part with their neighbours; a secret

society gave its aid; sedition spread, and, like a ball of snow,

gathered weight as it rolled through a turbulent province. Hither

hastened, as official reports state, the soldiery and braves that had

been disbanded after the first war with us; hither went the disaffected

of all classes, the ruined opium-smokers and _roués_ of Canton; in

short, the rowdies of a population equal to that of the French empire in

extent soon collected at the base of the Kwang-si mountain-ranges, and

devastated the best part of that province. In the year 1850, these

troubles assumed the distinct phase of rebellion. After shirking the

difficulty for as long a time as possible, the ‘Pekin Gazette’ began to

publish reports of the state of Kwang-si. It told how vast districts had

been swept over by banditti, how the entire eastern circuit of the

province “had been atrociously dealt with by bands, who carried banners

inscribed with the information, ‘We are dealing justice on behalf of

Heaven.’” These justice-dispensing robbers “fired the villages wherever

they came, violated the women, murdered the well-disposed, and took care

to carry off all guns, horses, and arms.”

Directly the ‘Pekin Gazette’ officially recognised the rebellion, the

European residents, instead of sympathising with the Government and the

well-disposed Chinese, at once testified their interest in the movement,

and openly avowed a hope that by the swords of these rebels China would

be reformed and converted. Each one had his reason for adopting what at

first sight seemed so unfair a course. The European official was sick of

mandarin arrogance; the missionary was wearied with the slowness of his

progress in dealing with the stolid self-sufficiency of the Chinese

character, and in trying to establish breaches in the obstinacy of his

belief in Confucius and Mencius; the trader longed for extended commerce

or larger profits; and our smugglers were at war, as well as the

Kwang-si rebels or Canton pirates, with all law and order.

The Taepings were speciously represented as men battling for religious

and political freedom; and a Swedish missionary, Mr Hamberg, claimed for

our reputed converts the credit of having organised and guided the

rebellion. Himself deceived by the cunning of the Asiatic, he put forth

a strange fable, called the ‘Revelations of Hung-siu-tsien,’ and was

thus mainly instrumental in enlisting on behalf of an organised system

of land-piracy the religious sympathy of this country. Hordes of armed

robbers, ravaging the interior of a distant country, because they said

they believed in Heaven, were forthwith pronounced Christians, engaged

in war upon heathenism. And, forgetting the first principle of our

faith, that it is not to be propagated by the sword, we shut our ears

and hearts against the wail of perishing multitudes, and dreamed that

the light of the Gospel had dawned on Cathay. Years have elapsed since

our credulity was thus imposed on, and from the experience gathered we

are now able, we think, to tear the veil from the monstrous imposition.

The rebellion in Kwang-si first obtained political importance when it

secured the adhesion of a few literary expectants for office, who had

been rejected at the competitive examinations in Canton. By those

examinations, every man in China may hope to reach the highest posts in

the empire. The necessities of the Court of Pekin during the reign of

the last three inefficient monarchs had compelled it to dispose of

certain appointments by purchase. Every disappointed candidate at the

provincial examinations traced his failure to this abuse, and a

formidable body of ambitious, half-educated enemies to the State was

thus formed. This was exactly the class needed by the hard-fighting

brigands of Kwang-si and pirates of Kwang-tung to bind them together

under a common banner, and they were not long in finding their way to a

theatre where they might play at being kings, ministers, and generals to

their hearts’ content.

For one of these disappointed candidates for office, named

Hung-siu-tsien, and for a society of reputed converts at Hong-Kong,

known as the Christian Union, Mr Hamberg claims the credit of the

Taeping movement. They are perfectly welcome to the honour; but we, in

the first place, impeach the testimony of the Chinaman who persuaded Mr

Hamberg that the leader of the Taepings was a Christian convert; and, in

the next place, we declare that the members of the “Christian Union”

were as arrant knaves as ever imposed upon the good-nature of a

confiding clergyman.

The Christian Union at Hong-Kong was instituted for the purpose of

training Chinese in Protestant Christianity, and sending them as

missionaries into the interior of the country. Mr Gutzlaff had the

charge of this Union, and seems to have been utterly deceived by them;

for we are assured by one who was immediately brought up amongst them as

an Englishman studying the Chinese language, that they were dissolute

characters, pretending to be converts for the sake of a livelihood.

There was no duplicity they did not practise, and no lie they did not

invent. Our informant one day entered the study of one of these

missionaries, as he was poring over a long and well-written Chinese

letter. His face was lit up with joy and interest, and he exclaimed,

“Ah, when you are able to compose like that!” The young English student

took up the letter, and found it to be from a convert named Wang-pin,

giving an account of a mission upon which he had been despatched into

the interior. It described his adventures and difficulties, his hopes

and anxieties; how some officials had maltreated him; how he had

escaped: it recounted labours amongst his brethren, and, lastly, the

conversion of two women and a youth, and the joy with which he had

welcomed by baptism such and such persons into the fold. The imposition

was perfect; but, unfortunately, the writer had allowed himself to be

seen very recently in Hong-Kong. Search was made for him. Aided by a

policeman, the task of discovering Wang-pin was not difficult. He was

dragged out of a brothel, where, no doubt, he had penned his interesting

report.

Such profligacy was the rule rather than the exception amongst the

Christian Union. At a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society,

Mr Lay related another instance of moral turpitude. It appears that the

Union was supposed to consist of men from various provinces of China,

and a number of Bibles adapted for circulation in their respective

districts were regularly issued to these natives, when they were

despatched upon their tours of duty. As there was reason to suppose that

these Bibles were often returned to the office, and had to be paid for

as new ones supplied from the Chinese publisher at Hong-Kong, a number

of them were secretly marked with the names of the converts who were

supposed to distribute them gratis in remote parts of the empire. Before

many days, every one of these marked Bibles returned to the hands of Mr

Hamberg, and it was then discovered that they had been sold to the

Chinese publisher, who had again presented them as new Bibles. Of course

this system of pillage was put a stop to, but we leave the reader to

guess how many more frauds were daily perpetrated by such a set of

scamps upon innocent-minded missionaries. We might fill a volume with

further details of the tricks of the Christian Union, but we forbear.

Amongst these reputed converts to Christianity was one who can at any

rate claim the credit of having so thoroughly deceived us, that even so

recent a writer as Commander Lindesay Brine, of the Royal Navy, did not

succeed in discovering the wolf under the skin of the oily Hung-jin. Mr

Hamberg first met Hung-jin (or, as he now styles himself, Kan-wang) in

1852, at a time when the minds of our residents in China were much

excited. Mr Hamberg was full of curiosity, Hung-jin all ready to gratify

it. Hung-jin quite delighted the missionary “with the interest he

displayed in Christianity, and his acquaintance with its precepts.” The

rogue, be it known, had actually studied Christianity _for two entire

months_, some years previously, under Mr Roberts, an American missionary

in Canton. As a near connection of two out of three of the most

prominent leaders in Kwang-si, Hung-jin could give information about

them; and, still more to delight Mr Hamberg, he invented a fable he knew

would be very palatable to the outer barbarian, and promote the fortune

of himself and family. Hung-jin, having converted us to Taepingism, was

much treasured by our religious societies in China, and every care and

expense were lavished upon him to render him a fit instrument for

keeping up the connection between us and the leaders of the Taeping

movement. He and his brother, we know, were in the employ of two

missionaries in Hong-Kong about the year 1853. Hung-jin was above the

average of his countrymen in ability; and, under the care of the Rev. Mr

Chalmers for three years, made considerable progress in secular studies.

In 1854 he was baptised, and repeated unsuccessful attempts were then

and subsequently made to send him back to his friends in Kwang-si and

Central China. Our missionaries were almost hysterical over their

treasure; they declared he had quite established himself in the

confidence and esteem of the Shanghai missions; that he exhibited “much

talent, evinced much sweetness of disposition, and, above all, had given

undoubted proofs of the sincerity of his attachment to the Christian

faith.” Early in 1859 he contrived at last to rejoin his relative in

Nankin: a relative whom he had left years before as a mere conspirator

in Kwang-si, he now found self-installed as an incarnation of the Deity

in a yamun of Nankin. The discontented and unsuccessful candidate for

literary honours of Canton was now the King of Heaven, the Tien-wang of

Nankin. Hung-jin was welcomed as he deserved, for he had well served the

King of Heaven by throwing dust in the eyes of the much-feared

foreigner; and Hung-jin, the Christian impostor, stepped into royal

robes as the “Kan-wang,” “Shield King,” or, in other words, the prop and

stay of Taepingism; and, having shown such ability in bamboozling the

foreigner, his especial province appears to have been to feed us with

hopes of a general conversion and extension of trade, but to take care

that we did not test their sincerity. Feeling that it was not yet time

to throw off the cloak of piety which had hitherto served him so well,

Commander Brine tells us that the Kan-wang wrote to the Rev. Mr Edkins,

deploring his unfitness for the high post to which his distinguished

relative had appointed him; expressing his own anxiety “to promote the

diffusion of true religion;” adding, that he was more than ever

impressed with the superhuman wisdom of the Tien-wang, or King of

Heaven! Just after he had thus given utterance to these expressions of

diffidence and zeal, our late pupil, now an assistant-king in Nankin,

started on an expedition into Ngan-hwuy province, to spread the

knowledge of Perfect Peace. A traveller who happened to be on the river

Yang-tsze at that time, tells us that it was easy to trace the path of

the mission by “the smoking and flaming villages.” Every impostor must,

however, eventually be exposed, and so it was with the Kan-wang; for the

missionaries, taking him and his relative at their word, thrust

themselves into Nankin. Mr Roberts, the quondam instructor in divinity

of the Taeping rulers, had preceded the Kan-wang, and the latter found

Mr Roberts clad in regal robes, and holding some sort of office. About

this time also (1860), the Rev. Mr Holmes visited Nankin; he came away

shocked at what he had seen and heard. We shall avail ourselves

presently of his testimony as to the character of the Taeping rebellion;

but for the present we shall confine ourselves to the career of

Hung-jin, or Kan-wang. In the ‘North China Herald’ of October 19, 1861,

under the signature “Rusticus Expectans,” we next hear of the scamp. The

anonymous writer turns out, by the evidence of Captain T. W. Blakiston,

to be Mr Forrest, an interpreter in the British consular

establishment.[1] Mr Forrest draws a vivid picture of the homes of the

different Taeping-wangs. He tells us of his Excellency Le, who was

building a gorgeous yamun, “upon which upwards of a thousand workmen

were engaged—some building, some carving stone and wood, and not a few

standing with a bundle of rattans in their hands ready to inflict blows

on any one shirking his work. A great portion of the building is already

completed, and the whole will be a good specimen of a Chinese yamun of

the old style, with its network of beams at the gables, its large wooden

columns, and fantastic carvings. Asking what the workmen were paid, Le

laughingly replied,—‘You English pay for work; we Taepings know better.

Is not ours a truly great Empire?’”

In front of the Kan-wang’s palace were two orchestras, painted over with

dragons, diablerie, Chinese characters, and the beatitudes from St

Matthew! The Kan-wang is, it seems, a hearty fat individual, forty years

of age, and very intelligent. He can shake hands like an Englishman, and

say, “How do you do?” Mr Chalmers’s care in his education was evinced by

his knowledge of geography especially, and the number of books of

reference by which he was surrounded.

“His sanctum is quite a museum in its way; a fine cheerful room facing

a garden of flowers, with a large bed of Soochow manufacture for its

principal article of furniture. The bed is covered with jade

ornaments, and hung with rich yellow curtains. Tables line the sides

of this chamber, and they are loaded with the strangest conglomeration

of articles: a telescope on a moving pedestal, a gun-box, three Colt’s

revolvers useless from rust, a box of percussion-caps, ditto of

vestas, Windsor soap, a Woolwich manual of fortification, and a Holy

Bible; any amount of Chinese books, five clocks, broken barometers,

ink-stones, and dirty rags, fans mounted in silver, jade-stone

drinking-cups, gold and silver platters, chopsticks, English port-wine

bottles, and Coward’s mixed pickles. About the apartment were

suspended an English naval sword, some dragoon-caps, a couple of

Japanese knives, two French plates, an engraving of the Holy Well in

Flintshire, and lying on the bed was a mass of silver ingots tied up

in a cloth.”

Amidst this collection of loot, the Kan-wang could give a neat dinner

and plenty of wine, for which he had an especial dispensation. Our

informant then adds that Kan-wang is “a good fellow, and merely

accommodates his Christianity to his tastes and habits”—an opinion in

which we agree, only substituting the words arch-knave for good fellow.

Hear, for instance, what Mr Roberts says of him, in January 1862:—

“From having been the religious teacher of Hung-siu-tsuen in 1847, and

hoping that good—religious, commercial, and political—would result to

the nation from his elevation, I have hitherto been a friend to his

revolutionary movement, sustaining it by word and deed, as far as a

missionary consistently could without vitiating his higher character

as an ambassador of Christ. But after living among them fifteen

months, and closely observing their proceedings—political, commercial,

and religious—I have turned over entirely a new leaf, and am now as

much opposed to them—for good reasons, I think—as I ever was in favour

of them. Not that I have aught personally against Hung-siu-tsuen; he

has been exceedingly kind to me. But I believe him to be a crazy man,

entirely unfit to rule without any organised government; nor is he,

with his coolie kings, capable of organising a government, of equal

benefit to the people, of even the old Imperial Government. He is

violent in his temper, and lets his wrath fall heavily upon his

people, making a man or woman ‘an offender for a word,’ and ordering

such instantly to be murdered without ‘judge or jury.’ He is opposed

to commerce, having had more than a dozen of his own people murdered

since I have been here, for no other crime than trading in the city,

and has promptly repelled every foreign effort to establish lawful

commerce here among them, whether inside of the city or out. His

religious toleration and multiplicity of chapels turn out to be a

farce—of no avail in the spread of Christianity—worse than useless. It

only amounts to a machinery for the promotion and spread of his own

political religion, making himself equal with Jesus Christ, who, with

God the Father, himself, and his own son, constitute one Lord over

all!! Nor is any missionary who will not believe in his divine

appointment to this high equality, and promulgate his political

religion accordingly, safe among these rebels, in life, servants, or

property. He told me soon after I arrived, that if I did not believe

in him I would perish, like the Jews did for not believing in the

Saviour. But little did I then think that I should ever come so near

it, by the sword of one of his own miscreants, in his own capital, as

I did the other day.

“Kan-wang, moved by his coolie elder brother (literally a coolie at

Hong-Kong) and the devil, without the fear of God before his eyes,

did, on Monday the 13th instant, come into the house in which I was

living, then and there most wilfully, maliciously, and with malice

aforethought, murder one of my servants with a large sword in his own

hand in my presence, without a moment’s warning or any just cause. And

after having slain my poor harmless, helpless boy, he jumped on his

head most fiend-like, and stamped it with his foot; notwithstanding I

besought him most entreatingly from the commencement of his murderous

attack to spare my poor boy’s life.

“And not only so, but he insulted me myself in every possible way he

could think of, to provoke me to do or say something which would give

him an apology, as I then thought and think yet, to kill me, as well

as my dear boy, whom I loved like a son. He stormed at me, seized the

bench on which I sat with the violence of a madman, threw the dregs of

a cup of tea in my face, seized hold of me personally and shook me

violently, struck me on my right cheek with his open hand; then,

according to the instruction of my King for whom I am ambassador, I

turned the other, and he struck me quite a sounder blow on my left

cheek with his right hand, making my ear ring again; and then,

perceiving that he could not provoke me to offend him in word or deed,

he seemed to get more outrageous, and stormed at me like a dog, to be

gone out of his presence. ‘If they do these things in the green tree,

what will they do in the dry?’—to a favourite of Tien-wang’s—who can

trust himself among them, either as a missionary or a merchant? I then

despaired of missionary success among them, or any good coming out of

the movement—religious, commercial, or political—and determined to

leave them, which I did on Monday, January 20, 1862.”

We may add, that subsequent to the departure of Mr Roberts, the Taeping

leaders signified that they had no farther need of missionaries at

Nankin.

Let us now trace the career of the head of Taepingism, Hung-siu-tsuen,

from the ‘Pekin Gazette’ and other documents.

In the year 1837, a man twenty-three years of age, whose family resided

near Canton, went up for his literary examination—a competitive

examination for office under his Government. He was plucked—it was not

the first time. Perfectly satisfied with his own merits, he had assumed

the title Siu-tsuen, or “Elegantly perfect,” in addition to the family

name of Hung. As Siu-tsuen we shall speak of him. Between 1837 and 1843,

Siu-tsuen was again repeatedly unsuccessful at the examinations;

disappointment brought on brain fever, and for some years he was a

dangerous lunatic. Recovering from this attack, he accidentally obtained

possession of a number of tracts on Christianity by a native convert

called Leang-Afah. They were in style and translation enough to puzzle a

stronger brain than Siu-tsuen’s. Naturally excitable, he was now seized

with a religious mania, and fancied he had personal interviews with the

Trinity. He had witnessed the proceedings of Western nations against the

Government of his country; and our combination of civilisation,

religion, and war no doubt struck him as the right means for gratifying

his spleen and his ambition. From a crack-brained enthusiast, Siu-tsuen

sobered down into a conspirator against his sovereign and the order of

the State. From 1843 to 1846, he was, we are told, busy inoculating a

small circle of his immediate friends with his views. His disciples

believed that he was in direct communication with the Deity, and he

appears at first to have merely contented himself with the character of

a second Moses. He formed a society which he called the “Congregation of

the Worshippers of God” (or “Shangti”). Hung-jin, or Kan-wang, and

another relative of Siu-tsuen’s, named Fung, likewise joined it. As the

society increased, Siu-tsuen bound the members by oaths “to live or die

with him, and to exert all their efforts to assist him;” and in return

he promised to ascertain from heaven for the members “wherein lay their

respective interests and profits,”[2] an essentially Chinese way of

looking at Christianity. They soon worshipped Siu-tsuen as an

incarnation of Shangti, or God. Both he and his relative Fung had

ecstatic fits. The latter performed miracles; and like other

arch-impostors, they passed unconsciously from deluding others into

deceiving themselves. The disordered condition of Southern China

favoured the propagation of any doctrines, however wild and bizarre; and

the mountains and secluded valleys of Kwang-si afforded the necessary

hiding-places for a sect whose first article of faith was disobedience

to the Emperor. In either 1846 or 1847 Mr Roberts, residing in Canton,

was so interested in the doings of Siu-tsuen that he invited him to stay

at his house, and promised a kind welcome on the part of his brethren.

Siu-tsuen, accompanied by his relative Hung-jin, accordingly went to Mr

Roberts, and stayed two entire months studying Protestantism. Their

conduct was exemplary, but Mr Roberts did not feel justified in

baptising the worthies before they left, which is just as well, for, in

“the 3d month of 1848,” Siu-tsuen announced to his flock that “our

Heavenly Father had come down into the world,” and on “the 9th month he

was followed by the Saviour, who wrought innumerable miracles!”

About this time the plot of sending Hung-jin to the Europeans, and

intrusting him with the office of misleading us as to the real character

of the intended insurrection, must have been decided upon, for we now

find him in communication with Mr Hamberg. What occurred between 1850

and 1853, when Hung-jin rejoined his relative at Nankin, we will

condense in a few words. Siu-tsuen and Fung, aided by another

disappointed candidate for office named Tai-tsuen, or Tien-teh, raised

the standard of revolution, and declared openly their intention of

subverting the present dynasty. Siu-tsuen styled himself the King of

Perfect Peace, or “Tae-ping-wang,” and nominated the other two as

subordinate kings. They sacked several cities in Kwang-si, but finding

the province getting too hot to hold them, they decamped with the loss

of Tien-teh, their best leader, and crossed into Honan province, so as

to strike the great water-communication which circulates through Central

China. The Taeping leader, then captured, made a full confession, which,

tested by the experience of to-day, is a most truthful account; and

though vaunting the courage of his brother rebels, he distinctly says

that, after all, Siu-tsuen was a mere profligate and winebibber,

rejoicing in no less than thirty-six mistresses.

In June 1852, we find that the Taepings, ten thousand strong, had

reached a large river flowing through Honan into the Yang-tsze. The

water-communication once reached, they had but to embark, and the

current would waft them to Nankin, and as far north as Tien-tsin.

By Christmas 1852 they had reached the commercial heart of the Empire in

the great emporiums which lie about the confluence of the rivers Han and

Yang-tsze. Two centuries of peaceful industry, of buying and selling,

giving and taking in marriage, without one thought of a sudden and

bloody awakening from a dream of luxury, were here ready for the

strong-handed. The writer met a man who witnessed the destruction of the

three great cities of Wuchang, Hankow, and Han-yang, the slaughter of

the ill-starred inhabitants, and the conflagration of the vast fleets of

junks and trading-boats there assembled. For eight days and nights the

place was, he said, wrapt in flames—a perfect hell upon earth. The

horrors of this scene were sufficient to frighten all the inhabitants of

the lower valley of the Yang-tsze into subjection, but it did not save

them from pillage and rapine. The officials were everywhere slaughtered

when they dared to remain at their posts, and the Manchou garrisons,

with their children and women, perished to a soul. Wherever the current

of the river would float these Taepings, they conquered, unopposed.

Nankin in its turn fell into their hands with frightful slaughter, and

Chin-Keang, at the entrance of the Grand Canal, shared the same fate.

Still aided by the water-communication, they aimed a blow at Pekin, and

actually advanced to the head of the canal. Directly, however, the

water-communication failed them, their progress was arrested, and they

sustained a defeat that deterred them from a second attempt on the

capital. There can be no greater fallacy than the notion that the

stability of the dynasty has been really jeopardised, or that the raid

of the Taepings towards Pekin was the result of organisation or military

skill, instead of being entirely due, as we have said, to the immense

water facilities at their command, from the very mountains of Kwang-si

to the Tung-ting Lake, and from the lake to the Yang-tsze, and from it

to Tien-tsin by the Grand Canal.

Siu-tsuen, _alias_ Tien-wang, or King of Heaven, now sat (in 1853) in

Nankin, and Taepingism was thoroughly established as an evil which it

would require years to extirpate; and what was worse, damage had been

done to the extension of Protestant Christianity in the minds of the

better classes in China, from the artful manner in which Siu-tsuen had

succeeded in dragging us in as his allies against the Government and

peaceable classes of China.

That he and his emissaries did not confine themselves to converting

sanguine and anxious missionaries, is well attested in the Blue-Book of

1853. There we find one of our consular body officially reporting:—

“All I have heard tends to strengthen my previously expressed

conviction that the insurrectionary movement is a national one of the

Chinese against the continued rule, or rather misrule, of the

Manchous; and that the power of the latter is already _irrevocably

subverted in the southern half of the Empire_. The interference of

foreigners in their behalf would now only have the effect of

prolonging hostilities and anarchy for an indefinite period; while, if

they abstain from interference, it is highly probable that the valley

of the Yang-tsze, with the southern provinces, _will speedily come

under the rule of a purely Chinese dynasty as one internally strong

State_, governed according to the old national principles of

administration.”

Ten years have elapsed since that prophecy. The Manchou has had during

that period two wars with Great Britain and France, and rebellions in

every one of the eighteen provinces of China. Yet Pekin rules while

Nankin plunders. The dynasty was not quite so sick as Mr Meadows

supposed.

Following the weak example of the United States representatives in 1853,

our authorities actually put themselves into official communication with

the Taeping kings. The insolence of their communications was as gross as

their mendacity.

Take the following extract for example, written by two subordinate

rulers, Lo and Woo, who perhaps had formerly been of the Christian

Union:—

“Well do we remember how, in conjunction with Bremer, Elliot, and

Wanking, in the province of Canton, we together erected a church, and

together worshipped Jesus, our Celestial Elder Brother; all these

circumstances are as fresh as if they had happened but yesterday. We

are grieved to hear that Bremer has met with a misfortune, and we can

never forget the nobleness of his character. As to Elliot and Wanking,

we hope they have enjoyed health since we last met—we feel an

irrepressible anxiety to meet our old friends.”

So much for the dodge of Christianity, for the whole idea of building a

church with Sir Charles Elliot and “Wanking” was evidently coined with

the aid of one Mang, the teacher of Mr Meadows, and who, like all these

teachers, was handing his master over as a sheep to be shorn by his

countrymen. Then in another place a sop is held for the commercial

interest:—

“Our Royal Master has received the command of Heaven to show kindness

to foreigners, and harmonise them with the Chinese” [Mr Roberts’s

testimony, dated ten years afterwards, to wit], “not restricting

commercial intercourse, or levying transit duties upon merchandise.”

We may have done right, after all, in allowing these Taepings time to

show by their acts how little they intended to fulfil their promises. In

ten years they have utterly wrecked the richest portion of China. All

the wonders of Chinese art and industry are levelled with the dust and

destroyed. The Porcelain Pagoda—the Iron Tower—the Ming Cemetery of

Nankin—the beautiful temples and valuable libraries of Golden Island,

exist no longer. A district once teeming with hamlets and farms, rich in

silks and teas, and all the products of the Flowery Land, is now a

wilderness; and the Englishman who looked upon the wondrous scene of

Asiatic civilisation and industry, as spread before him in the valley of

the Yang-tsze in the year 1842, would never recognise it again in the

famine-stricken desolation of to-day. Lest we should allow our

indignation at such unchecked barbarism to carry us away, we will quote

from two recent visitors, the one a soldier, the other a clergyman.

Colonel Wolseley, in 1862, says: “Having had some little experience of

the imbecility of the Imperial Government, I went to Nankin strongly

prejudiced against it, and only too anxious to recognise any good which

we might discover in its rival.... The Imperial Government, with all its

weakness, is as far removed above that established at Nankin, as the

true religion of our Saviour is above that set up by the impostor

Tien-wang.” He confirms the fact that no man of worth or station in

China has joined the movement; and after describing all the ruin, crime,

and nastiness of the interior of the Taeping stronghold, he urges his

countrymen to assist the better classes of Chinese in sweeping away the

abomination, because it is the barrier to true progress in China.

Mr Holmes, whose zeal for the spiritual welfare of the Chinese

subsequently led to his being slain by some rebels in Shan-tung, bears

the following testimony to the hopelessness of anything good from

Taepingism. After visiting Nankin in the end of 1861, he says:—

“I went to Nankin predisposed to receive a favourable impression;

indeed, the favourable impressions of a previous visit to Suchau led

me to undertake this journey. I came away with my views very

materially changed. I had hoped that their doctrines, though crude and

erroneous, might notwithstanding embrace some of the elements of

Christianity. I found, to my sorrow, nothing of Christianity but its

names, falsely applied—applied to a system of revolting idolatry.

Whatever there may be in their books, and whatever they may have

believed in times past, I could not escape the conclusion that such is

the system which they now promulgate, and by which the character of

their people is being moulded. Their idea of God is distorted until it

is inferior, if possible, to that entertained by other Chinese

idolaters. Their willingness—if indeed they are willing to receive

Christian missionaries among them—is doubtless founded upon a

misapprehension of their true character. They suppose that the

missionary will prove an instrument which they can bend to suit their

own purposes. Exceptions might, perhaps, be made in favour of

individuals: it is of those who hold the reins of power that I speak.

“The city of Nankin is in a ruinous condition. It would be no

exaggeration to say that half the houses have been destroyed. The

country around is not half cultivated. Provisions are very scarce and

expensive. Their trade is very limited. We observed instances in which

workmen were compelled to labour without compensation. All indicates a

policy that has little regard to the welfare of the people, or to any

interests other than those immediately connected with war, and with

the indulgence of their rulers.

“The present state of their political affairs would indicate that

Hung-siu-tsuen’s career must close before the present dynasty can be

supplanted. His horrible doctrines, which have served to break down

every distinction between right and wrong in the minds of his

soldiers, and send them forth to perform every enormity without

remorse, have secured him the lasting hatred of the masses of the

people. The scenes of internal discord which so nearly proved their

destruction a few years since, would doubtless be enacted again, and

upon a large scale, when, with their enemies vanquished, they came to

a final division of the spoils.”

And if any farther testimony were necessary, we might, in the pages of

the last Blue-Book for 1862, cull evidence enough to convince the most

sceptical that the people, as well as the Government, are hostile to the

robbers who pretend to be inaugurating a new rule.

This Taeping movement has never had at any time a national character. It

has not been joined by any influential class. The Taepings have never

organised any sort of government, and they have never held any ground

but that on which their camps stood. Had they shown any disposition to

gain the suffrages of the Chinese people, already dissatisfied with

their mandarins, their chances of subverting the dynasty would have been

great. They have not done so, and the consequence is, that the popular

feeling is strongly against them. Hear, for instance, what thirty-two of

the representative elders of the districts between Soochow and the

Yang-tsze river say in a petition to our Minister, and then decide on

which side our humanity should be enlisted:—

“Living to the east of the river, we have the misfortune to be visited

by the murderously ferocious rebels, who have burnt our dwellings,

carried off our people, dishonoured our wives and daughters, robbed

us, and murdered innumerable of us, till the land is covered with

corpses, and the roads run with tears and blood. We ourselves have

suffered so in our persons, and our families overwhelmed with

bitterness, refugees from our homes, that there is no name for our

misery; our lives can scarcely be called our own. It seems that not

one of us will escape. In desperation, therefore, we piteously implore

the Minister, that in his great goodness, surpassing all things, he

will pity us, and speedily rescue us, and will despatch his energetic

soldiers to sweep the abomination out of the land, that our death may

be turned to life, our gratitude be unimaginable; and unless his

goodness does rescue us, there will be no escape for us, and the

people and property on the east of the river will be destroyed, and

the land left a desert, without hope of recovery. We implore him,

therefore, the more earnestly, that millions of the poor people are

lying, leaning on each other, in this deep snow, in misery

unspeakable, waiting for his will.”

Could any words be more expressive? And it is not only the Imperialists

who suffer, but there are tens of thousands who have joined the Taeping

ranks from compulsion and to save their lives. These poor creatures are,

if possible, more to be pitied than any other class. They stand between

two fires,—the sword of the Taeping and the Imperial executioner. On

their behalf we ought as soon as possible to place the Imperial

Government in such a position that an amnesty could be safely granted,

or arrangements made for allowing these compromised people to emigrate

to Borneo, the Straits settlements, to Burmah, and elsewhere. The

compromised might embark with their wives and families, and in less

populated regions found colonies as creditable to their mother country

as they would be profitable to European civilisation and commerce. This

would be a triumphant solution of the Taeping difficulty; and we feel

justified in hoping that the Court of Pekin may be persuaded to temper

justice with mercy, inasmuch as one of its highest officers has recently

recognised the evils of over-population, and legalised emigration from

the provinces under his jurisdiction.

Our collision with the Taepings has been denounced as if it had been

sought by the British authorities in China. But this is by no means the

case. In 1858, when Lord Elgin ascended the Yang-tsze, the escorting

squadron was deliberately attacked, although the smallest vessel was

sent considerably in advance with a flag of truce flying, and a person

was expressly sent in her to afford every explanation of our

Ambassador’s motive in desiring to pass Nankin.

Both then and subsequently the Taeping chiefs were told that we

entertained no hostile feeling towards them, and that so long as they

respected British property we should be strictly neutral. In spite of

these warnings and the promises of their leaders, the Taepings, not

satisfied with the sack of the great cities in the districts around

Shanghai and Ningpo, actually attacked our settlements. Necessity has

compelled us to act upon the defensive. We had to drive them from the

neighbourhood; and in order to prevent their starving out the vast

numbers of Chinese who had taken shelter in Shanghai, we had to mark

certain limits within which we would not suffer their presence. Such is

the history of our “war” against the Taepings. Troops have been sent for

from India, and Shanghai and Ningpo are virtually under the protection

of the British and French forces. As a temporary measure this may

answer, but it is beset with inconveniences and risks if prolonged.

Temporary protection, as our Indian experience abundantly teaches us,

leads to permanent occupation, and ultimate absorption of territory. The

foot of a vigorous European nation, once placed firmly on the soil of an

Eastern state, cannot be withdrawn.

Yet the present state of China leaves us no alternative. There are other

important considerations upon which our space forbids us entering, but

there is one we will allude to in passing—the evils inflicted upon the

country by the influx of adventurers now swarming thither, who are

amenable to no law, with no fortunes or characters to lose, but

abundance of appetite to acquire. The misdeeds of these miscreants are a

great obstacle to friendly intercourse with the Chinese people; and to

watch and keep them within bounds, the operation of a high and powerful

police is absolutely necessary. Our trade and property must be protected

by some Power, or be sacrificed. How that protection shall be afforded

is the problem to be solved.

This country is decidedly opposed to direct intervention, while the

assumption of a protectorate over China by any other Power would be

directly opposed to our interests.

It might be well, if it were possible, to leave the Chinese to work out

their own regeneration; but unfortunately our commercial interests and

revenue are so interwoven with the wellbeing of China, that we cannot

afford to wait the time that might elapse before the restoration of

order.

In respect to ourselves, were we disposed to look on and abide the

issue, other Powers whose interests differ, and whose risks are by no

means as great, would not refrain with such a temptation before them. We

have already a glut of territory in Asia; it is quite natural that other

European powers should crave an India likewise. In respect to China

herself, she is fully alive to the necessity of calling in European

vigour and intelligence, and has made up her mind to procure it; a step

the natural consequence of contact with Europeans, and over which we

have no control.

If the Governments of Europe were to agree to withhold the service of

their troops, this would not prevent the employment of private

individuals from Europe or America, and we have seen only recently how

easy it is to evade the jurisdiction of the foreign consul by the simple

process of hailing for a Chinaman, or from any State not represented on

the spot. The Chinese Government can command foreign aid if so disposed,

but irresponsible enlistment of foreigners is on all grounds

objectionable and dangerous. It has been tried, and the results have

been what might have been anticipated—waste, peculation, and danger to

the State. What indeed is the experience of those European Powers who

have at different times independently raised foreign legions?

The Taoutai of Shanghai long since tried the experiment upon his own

responsibility of forming a European-Chinese fleet, and utterly failed,

after spending millions of dollars. He bought up in 1853 a number of

vessels, manned and officered them with all the dregs of our

settlements; without proper status or discipline they were sent up to

fight Taepings at Nankin, and of course ran away. Other mandarins hired

lorchas under European flags to protect trade on the coast; these

likewise turned upon their employers, and, instead of fighting pirates,

frightened their employers. The last item of news from China is, that

the crews of some hired lorchas had passed over in a body to the

pirates, and that one of Ward’s regiments had mutinied after his death,

and looted the yamun of a high official.

In our opinion, there is, in view of the interests of all European

Powers, but one mode of giving aid to the Chinese Government—to wit,

encouraging officers of character and respectability, subjects of those

Powers, to enter the service of the Chinese Government.

We have with China an enormous and profitable trade; we want it

guaranteed and developed. This duty properly devolves upon China, but

she is as yet unable to discharge it. It is by the aid of men who

possess both character and status, the guarantee of good behaviour, that

she will acquire strength and knowledge to fulfil her obligations, and

through their influence be induced to adopt the results of European

science and skill—the steamship, railways, and electric telegraph—thus

insuring progress profitable to herself and the world at large. This

end, we take it, should be our object in giving help to China. She

should not be strengthened out of hand, but by a slow process with a

small force, whose action should be spread over a period sufficient to

enable us to open the country, throughout its length and breadth, to

Christianity and commerce.

Views in consonance with the foregoing remarks appear to have found

favour at Pekin, but owing, doubtless, to the different views

entertained by the Ministers of England, France, Russia, and America,

the Regency has been dragged first in one direction and then in the

other. Russia is evidently ready for direct intervention. In 1860 she

persuaded the Emperor of China to barter square miles of territory for

old rifles, and we hear that the Czar’s ships are ready to retake

Nankin. The capture of that city is just now worth a province to the

Court of Pekin. The French and ourselves have been flirting with the

question, watching and checkmating each other, rather than promoting the

real interests of China. Not, perhaps, because Sir Frederick Bruce has

not been aware of what was really essential, but because he was

apprehensive, probably, of compromising our Ministry in any direct line

of policy. The result has been that small bodies of Imperialists have

been drilled by English and French officers upon totally different

systems, in spots scattered all over the sea frontier of China. Every

one of these half-trained braves will be as dangerous as a Taeping,

unless he be under efficient discipline and thorough control. No regular

organisation has been attempted, and we cannot but fear that such

trifling with a very serious question will lead to great evils.

As an instance, permission has just been given to all our military

officers, of any stamp, to accept commissions in China. The officer of

repute is thus placed on a footing with discharged seamen and marines

now holding the rank of Colonels and Majors in the Chinese army, while

the Chinese Government is unfairly left to discriminate between the good

and the worthless. A surer method of bringing discredit upon ourselves,

and involving us eventually in direct intervention, could scarcely be

devised.

Surrounded with difficulties, Prince Kung appears to have rightly turned

his first attention to the organisation of a maritime police, and given

a willing ear to the counsels of the Acting Inspector-General, Mr Hart,

supported by our able Minister. Instructions have been issued for a

certain sum to be set aside from the customs revenue, and the chief of

that department has been authorised to take such steps as would

accomplish the desired object. These instructions are interesting, and

evince a real desire to master the subject; whilst the admission that a

departure from ancient custom is necessary, is highly significative of

the dawn of progress in China. Prince Kung writes from Pekin in February

last as follows:—

“The Foreign Office repeat the instructions they have already given

the Inspector-General, to give effect to the arrangement for the

purchase of foreign steamers with the utmost despatch. The orders to

the various customhouses to get ready their quota were issued some

time back; and these orders have been repeated, coupled with a caution

against delay, as it is the Emperor’s particular wish that not a day

should be lost. The Board understand that there are several classes of

foreign steamers—the mail steamer, the merchant steamer, and the war

steamer; that the first is very small, the second the reverse of

handy, and that neither are available like the third for warlike

purposes. They are further informed that the mail and merchant

steamers are paddle-wheel steamers, while the war steamers are ‘secret

wheel’ (screw) vessels. This is a point of great importance, to which

they would draw the special attention of the Inspector-General. The

money being now ready for transmission, there is no reason why there

should be any, the slightest, delay.”

The despatch gives instructions upon other points, and concludes with

again urging the Inspector-General to lose no time, closing with the

words, “Hasten! hasten!!”

The Inspector-General, obliged by ill-health to return to England, was

the better able to work out the desires of the Emperor’s Council, and

put himself in communication with Her Majesty’s Government, with a view

to obtain their necessary sanction before he could legally purchase a

vessel or employ a British subject. He was, above all, desirous to

insure the thorough respectability and good character of the European

force destined to guide as well as aid the Chinese—at the same time, to

take care that the help should be granted in a way to insure real

progress at Pekin, and thus guard against a return to the old policy of

exclusion as soon as the officials were relieved from the fears and

difficulties of their present position—and to effect this in such a

manner as should not supersede, but merely supplement, the action of the

Chinese themselves. This maxim should ever be borne in mind in our

dealings with China. To supersede the native authority, besides

humiliating him, brings about no beneficial result.

Her Majesty’s Government met the proposals of the Inspector-General on

behalf of the Emperor of China in an enlightened spirit, guarding

themselves, however, carefully against any risk of being charged with

intervention. Mr Lay offered the post of Commander-in-Chief of the

European-Chinese naval force to Captain Sherard Osborn, C. B., which

office, under the sanction of Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for

Foreign Affairs and the Board of Admiralty, he gladly accepted. The

necessary authority from Her Majesty in Council was issued, authorising

the Inspector-General Horatio Lay and Captain Sherard Osborn to purchase

such vessels and enter such British subjects as might be necessary,

without an infringement of the Foreign Enlistment Act. With the

permission of the Admiralty, Captain Osborn selected the following

officers:—Captain Hugh Burgoyne, V.C., as second in command; Commander

C. S. Forbes; Lieutenants Arthur Salwey, Noel Osborn, F. C. Vincent, H.

M. Ommanney, Allen Young, and G. Morice; Mr Henry Collins in charge of

the Paymaster’s and Storekeeper’s Departments; and Doctors John Elliot,

F. Piercey, Fegan, and others, of the hospital arrangements. Officers of

the highest stamp have been likewise selected from the mercantile

marine, and no seamen or marines have been entered except such as could

show years of good conduct.

It is, moreover, Mr Lay’s intention to enlist presently in this force

the subjects of the other Treaty Powers, so as to render it a _European_

Chinese force, in accordance with the principle successfully carried out

in the customs administration.

As the funds arrived from China the vessels and stores were purchased.

The Admiralty afforded the same facilities from our arsenals as would

have been conceded to any other friendly Power. From the superabundant

ships in our navy the Emperor of China was allowed to purchase the

Mohawk, Africa, and Jasper, and they were re-named respectively the

Pekin, China, and Amoy. There being no others available, and the private

yards having been swept by the Federals of such vessels as could carry

guns or serve for warlike purposes, it became necessary, in spite of the

delay it would entail, to enter into contracts for the construction of

three other vessels, which will be launched in March. The six

vessels—three of them despatch-vessels fit to cope with the stormy seas

of the Chinese seaboard, and the other three for river service—form as

small a force as it is safe to begin with. It is intended that they

shall carry about 40 guns, and be manned by 400 European officers and

seamen, of the very best character. During the interval occupied in the

building of some of the vessels and equipment of the others, there has

been abundant occupation in arranging the details necessary for a sound

organisation. A code of laws for the good order and comfort of all,

based upon the customs of a European navy, has been compiled, so that

Prince Kung’s seal may render it the future naval law of China. The

scale of pay, rations, prize-money, and pensions for wounds, has been

carefully considered, to meet the requirements of the special service. A

signal-book has been adapted for intercommunication; and, strange as it

may sound, even an ensign—green ground intersected by two yellow

diagonal bands, and bearing the Imperial crest—had to be improvised,

inasmuch as in China every armed native vessel flies her own colours

according to the whim of her master,—an irregularity to which it is very

necessary a stop should be put.

No one will deny that the task about to be undertaken is an arduous one;

yet, after having carefully weighed all its difficulties, we cannot help

feeling sanguine of a successful issue. A good maritime police is the

secret of government in China. If the water-ways of China are in a state

of security and order, peace will re-establish itself everywhere. The

rivers, the seas, and lakes and canals, within the area of the Empire,

cut it up into such sections that rebellion will be destroyed in detail,

or rather starve, directly a strong executive is placed upon the

Emperor’s waters. The Taepings and other banditti spread over the area

they have devastated, by availing themselves of the extensive

water-communication. The Government of Pekin, if it is wise, will pursue

the same course in its measures of repression. The steam gunboat and the

electric telegraph, by their very appearance in the disturbed districts,

will re-assure those who have almost ceased to believe in any

government, and frighten away the evildoers; whilst the fall of Nankin

will break the neck of a scourge which is on its last legs. The fleets

of piratical junks which now infest the coasts of China, and whose

depredations are known only to the natives, will, we hope, disappear

before the vigorous operations of a steam flotilla under the Imperial

flag. These “vikings” of the East occupy every creek between Canton and

the borders of Cochin-China; they have quite cut up the native trade of

the whole seaboard, and occasionally pirate even European traders. It is

mainly owing to these gentry that we have been unable as yet to

establish relations and open a customhouse at Kiung-Chow in the island

of Hainan, a point which we hope one day to see the centre of an

enormous trade. Lastly, we see every reason to expect most important

results from the information the officers of the European-Chinese

flotilla will be able to gather of the interior of the Chinese Empire,

and of the commercial advantages likely to flow therefrom. As employés,

though merely temporarily so, of the Emperor, they will have access to

every part of that vast county, and excite no fears or jealousy; their

opportunities will be immense, and we have reason to believe that they

will bear well in mind the duty they owe to their fellow-men of

gathering and storing well every crumb of information, geographical and

otherwise. What they may effect for the benefit of our commerce, we may

estimate from the fruits that have already followed in the wake of their

brethren of the navy of England who first penetrated to Shanghai in

1842, and to Hankow in 1858. There are cities as rich as the former,

rivers as large as the Yang-tsze, and lakes equal to those of Canada, to

be re-discovered. Those almost unknown provinces of the interior are not

wastes profitable only to the geographical enthusiast, but countries

equal to states of Europe, thickly dotted with cities, and densely

populated, with a people second only to ourselves in commercial energy

and respect for law and order. England for years has spent wealth,

energy, and precious lives in opening China to Western influence and

civilisation. To-day, her success is certain. The Government and people

of China both ask us to aid them in their hour of trouble, and in return

they will assuredly grant us that access and commercial freedom for

which we have so long laboured and so often fought. The portals of

ignorance and heathenism are opening. Shall we, who are in the vanguard

of nations, hesitate? No—assuredly not! Our motto must ever be

“Forward;” and will not all enlightened Christendom join us in wishing

“God speed” to those about to put forth in this fresh enterprise to the

land of Cathay?

CAXTONIANA:

A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS.

By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’

PART XIII.

NO. XIX.—MOTIVE POWER (_continued_).

The next morning the sun shone into my windows so brightly that I rose

at an earlier hour than I had been accustomed to do for months, and

strolled into the gardens, interesting myself in considering the

painter’s charge against dressed ground and Tracey’s ingenious reply to

it. The mowers were at work upon the lawns. Perhaps among rural sounds

there is none which pleases me more than that of the whetting of the

scythe—I suppose less from any music in itself, than from associations

of midsummer, and hay-fields, and Milton’s ‘Allegro,’ in which the low

still sound is admitted among the joyous melodies of Morn. As the

gardens opened upon me, with their variety of alleys and by-walks, I

became yet more impressed than I had been on the day before, with the

art which had planned and perfected them, and the poetry of taste with

which the images of the sculptor were so placed, that at every turn they

recalled some pleasing but vague reminiscence of what one had seen in a

picture, or in travel; or brought more vividly before the mind some

charming verse in the poets, whose busts greeted the eye from time to

time in bowery nook or hospitable alcove, where the murmur of a

waterfall, or the view of a distant landscape opened from out the

groves, invited pause and allured to contemplation.

At last, an arched trellis overhung with vine leaves led me out into

that part of the park which fronted the library, and to which the

Painter had given his preference over the grounds I had just quitted.

There, the wildness of the scenery came on me with the suddenness of a

surprise. The table-land, on which the house stood on the other side of

the building, here abruptly sloped down into a valley through which a

stream wound in many a maze, sometimes amidst jagged rocklike crags,

sometimes through low grassy banks, round which the deer were grouping.

The view was very extensive, but not unbrokenly so; here and there thick

copses, in the irregular outline of natural groves, shut out the valley,

but still left towering in the background the wavy hill-tops, softly

clear in the blue morning sky. Hitherto I had sided with Tracey; now I

thought the Painter right. In the garden, certainly, man’s mind forms a

visible link with Nature, but in those scenes of Nature not trimmed and

decorated to the book-lore of man, Thought takes a less finite scope,

and perhaps from its very vagueness is less inclined to find monotony

and sameness in the wide expanse over which it wanders to lose itself in

reverie.

Descending the hillside, I reached the stream, and came suddenly upon

Henry Thornhill, who, screened behind a gnarled old pollard-tree, was

dipping his line into a hollow where the waves seemed to calm

themselves, and pause before they rushed, in cascade, down a flight of

crags, and thence brawled loudly onward.

As I know by experience how little an angler likes to be disturbed, I

contented myself with a nod and a smile to the young man, and went my

own way in silence; but about an hour afterwards, as I was winding back

towards the house, I heard his voice behind me. I turned; he showed me,

with some pride, his basket already filled with trout; and after I had

sufficiently admired and congratulated, we walked slowly up the slope

together. The evening before, Captain Thornhill had prepossessed me less

than the other members of the party. He had spoken very little, and

appeared to me to have that air of supreme indifference to all persons

and things around him, which makes so many young gentlemen like—so many

young gentlemen. But this morning he was frank and communicative.

“You have known Sir Percival very long, I think?” said he.

“Very long. I knew him before I had left Cambridge. In my rambles during

a summer vacation, chance brought us together; and though he was then

one of the most brilliant oracles of the world of fashion, and I an

unknown collegian, somehow or other we became intimate.”

“I suppose you find him greatly altered?”

“Do you mean in person or in mind?”

“Well, in both.”

“In person less altered than I could have supposed; his figure just the

same—as erect, as light, and seemingly as vigorous. In mind I cannot yet

judge, but there is still the same sweetness, and the same cheerfulness;

the same mixture of good-tempered irony and of that peculiar vein of

sentiment which is formed by the combination of poetical feeling and

philosophical contemplation.”

“He is a very fine fellow,” returned Henry Thornhill, with some warmth;

“but don’t you think it is a pity he should be so eccentric?”

“In what?”

“In what? Why, in that which must strike everybody; shirking his

station, shutting himself up here, planning gardens which nobody sees,

and filling his head with learning for which nobody is the wiser.”

“His own friends see the gardens and enjoy them; his own friends may, I

suppose, hear him talk, and become the wiser for his learning.”

“His own friends—yes! a dozen or two individuals; most of them

undistinguished as—as I am,” added the young man, with visible

bitterness. “And, with his talents and fortune, and political influence,

he might be, or at least might have been, anything; don’t you think so?”

“Anything is a bold expression; but if you mean that he might, if he so

pleased, have acquired a very considerable reputation, and obtained a

very large share of the rewards which ambitious men covet, I have no

doubt that he could have done so, and very little doubt that he could do

so still.”

“I wish you could stir him up to think it. I am vexed to see him so

shelved in this out-of-the-way place. He has even given up ever going to

Tracey Court now; and as for his castle in Ireland, he would as soon

think of going to Kamtschatka.”

“I hope, at all events, his estates, whether in the north or in Ireland,

are not ill-managed.”

“No, I must say that no estates can be better managed; and so they ought

to be, for he devotes enormous sums to their improvement, as well as to

all public objects in their district.”

“It seems, then, that if he shirks some of the pomps of wealth, he does

not shirk its duties?”

“Certainly not, unless it be the duty which a great proprietor owes to

himself.”

“What is that duty?”

The young man looked puzzled; at last he said—

“To make the most of his station.”

“Perhaps Sir Percival thinks it is better to make the most of his mind,

and fancies he can do that better in the way of life which pleases him,

than in that which would displease; but he is lucky in stewards if his

estates thrive so well without the watch of the master’s eye.”

“Yes, but his stewards are gentlemen—one, at Tracey Court, is a Mr

Aston, an old schoolfellow of Sir Percival, who was brought up to expect

a fine property at the death of an uncle; but the uncle unluckily

married at the age of fifty, and had a large family. Sir Percival heard

he was in distress, and gave him this appointment; it just suits him.

The Irish steward, Mr Gerrard, is also a capital fellow, who travelled

in the East with Sir Percival. Being half Irish himself, Gerrard

understands how to make the best of the population; and being half

Scotch, he understands how to make the best of the property. I have no

doubt that the estates are better managed in Sir Percival’s absence than

if he resided on them, for you know how good-natured he is. A bad tenant

has only to get at his heart with a tale of distress, in order to renew

his lease for whipping the land on his own terms.”

“So then,” said I, “we have come at last to this conclusion, that your

wise relation, knowing his own character, in its merits and its

failings, has done well in delegating to others, in whose probity and

intellect he has a just confidence, the management of those affairs

which he could not administer himself with equal benefit to all the

persons interested. Is not that the way in which all states are

governed? The wisdom of a king in absolute governments, or of a minister

in free ones, is in the selection of the right persons for the right

places; thus working out a wise system through the instrumentalities of

those who best understand its details.”

“Yes; but, talking of ministers, Sir Percival makes nothing of his

political influence; he shuns all politics. Can you believe it?—he

scarcely ever looks into the leading article of a newspaper!”

“To a man who has been long out of the way of party politics, there is

not the interest in leading articles which you and I take.”

“I rather think that Sir Percival does not like to be reminded of

politics, for fear he might be induced to take an interest in them.”

“Ah, indeed! Why do you think so?”

“Because, three years ago, Lady Gertrude was very anxious that he should

claim the old barony of Ravenscroft, which has been in abeyance for

centuries, but to which the heralds and lawyers assured him there could

be no doubt of his proving his right. Lady Gertrude was so intent upon

this that at one time I thought she would have prevailed. He looked into

the case, invited the lawyers here, satisfied himself that the proof was

clear, and then suddenly forbade all steps to be taken. Lady Gertrude

told me that he said to her, ‘For my family this honour is nought, since

the title, if revived, would again die with me; but for myself it is a

temptation to change, to destroy the mode of life in which I am

happiest, and in which, on the whole, I believe I am morally the least

imperfect. If I once took my seat in the Lords, a responsible

legislator, how do I know that I should not want to speak, to act, to

vie with others, and become ambitious if successful—and fretful if

not?’”

“So he declined. Well, after all, a life most in harmony with a man’s

character is that in which he is probably not only the happiest, but the

best man. Ambition is but noble in proportion as it makes men useful.

But, from your own account, Tracey’s private life is useful already,

though its uses are not obtrusive. And for public life, three parts of

the accomplishments, and perhaps of the virtues, which make his private

life beautiful, would not be needed.”

I uttered these defensive suggestions on behalf of my host somewhat in

rebuke of the young relation whose criticisms had called them forth,

though in my own mind I felt a sort of melancholy regret that Percival’s

choice of life should be in walks so cool and sequestered, and the tenor

of his way so noiseless: And did not his own fear to be tempted into

more active exertions of intellect, if once brought under the influence

of emulative competition, indicate that he himself also felt a regret,

on looking back to the past, that he had acquired habits of mind to

which the thought of distinction had become a sensation of pain?

When our party assembled at breakfast, Tracey said to me, “I had no idea

you were so early a riser, or I would have given up my ride to share

your rambles.”

“Are you too, then, an early riser?”

“Yes, especially in summer. I have ridden twelve miles with Bourke to

show him the remains of an old Roman tower which he has promised to

preserve a few ages longer—in a picture.”

Here the entrance of the letter-bag suspended conversation. The most

eager for its opening was young Thornhill; and his countenance became at

once overcast when he found there was no letter for him; as mine, no

doubt, became overcast when I found a large packet of letters forwarded

to me. I had left town long before the post closed; and two or three

hours suffice to bring plenty of troublesome correspondents upon a busy

Londoner. My housekeeper had forwarded them all. I think Lady Gertrude

was the only other one of our party for whom the postman sped the soft

intercourse from soul to soul. When I looked up from my letters, Henry

Thornhill had already glanced rapidly over the panorama of the world,

displayed in the ‘Times’ newspaper, and, handing it to the Librarian,

said disdainfully, “No news.”

“No news!” exclaimed Caleb Danvers, after his own first peep—“no news!

Why, Dr ——’s great library is to be sold by auction on the 14th of next

month!”

“That _is_ interesting news,” said Tracey. “Write at once for the

catalogue.”

“Any further criticism on the Exhibition of the Royal Academy?” asked

the Painter, timidly.

“Two columns,” answered Mr Danvers, laconically.

“Oh,” said the Painter, “that is interesting too.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr Danvers,” said Lady Gertrude, “but will you

glance at the foreign intelligence? Look to Germany;—anything about the

Court of ——?”

“The Court of ——? yes, our minister there is convalescent, and going to

Carlsbad next week.”

“That’s what I wanted to know,” said Lady Gertrude. “My letter is from

his dear sister, who is very anxious about him. Going to Carlsbad—I am

glad to hear it.”

Meanwhile Clara, who had possessed herself of the supplementary sheet,

cried out, joyously—“O dear Henry, only think—Ellen has got a baby. How

pleased they will be at the Grange! A son and heir at last!”

“Tut,” growled Henry, breaking an egg-shell.

“So,” said Tracey, “you see the ‘Times’ has news for every one except my

friend here, who read in London yesterday what we in the country read

to-day; and Captain Thornhill, who finds nothing that threatens to break

the peace of the world to the promotion of himself and the decimation of

his regiment.”

Henry laughed, but not without constraint, and muttered something about

civilians being unable to understand the interest a soldier takes in his

profession.

After breakfast, Tracey said to me, “Doubtless you have your letters to

answer, and will be glad to have your forenoon to yourself. About two

o’clock we propose adjourning to a certain lake, which is well shaded

from the sun. I have a rude summer pavilion on the banks; there we can

dine, and shun the Dogstar. Clara, who happily does not know that I am

thinking of Tyndaris, will bring her lute, Aunt Gertrude her work,

Bourke his sketch-book; and the lake is large enough for a sailing

excursion, if Henry will kindly exchange, for the day, military repose

for nautical activity.”

All seemed pleased with the proposal except Henry, who merely shrugged

his shoulders, and the party dispersed for the morning.

My letters were soon despatched, and my instincts or habits (which are,

practically speaking, much the same thing) drew me into the library.

Certainly it was a very noble collection of books, and exceedingly well

arranged. Opening volume after volume, I found that most of those

containing works of imperishable name were interleaved; and the

side-pages thus formed were inscribed with critical notes and comments

in my host’s handwriting.

I was greatly struck with the variety and minuteness of the knowledge in

many departments, whether of art, scholarship, or philosophy, which

these annotations displayed, and the exquisite critical discrimination

and taste by which the knowledge was vivified and adorned. While thus

gratifying my admiring curiosity, I was accosted by the Librarian, who

had entered the room unobserved by me.

“Ay,” said he, glancing over my shoulder at the volume in my

hand—“Shakespeare; I see you have chanced there upon one of Sir

Percival’s most interesting speculations. He seeks first to prove how

much more largely than is generally supposed Shakespeare borrowed, in

detail, from others; and next, to show how much more patently than is

generally supposed Shakespeare reveals to us his own personal nature,

his religious and political beliefs, his favourite sentiments and

cherished opinions. In fact, it is one of Sir Percival’s theories, that

though the Drama is, of all compositions, that in which the author can

least obtrude on us his personality, yet that of all dramatists

Shakespeare the most frequently presents to us his own. Our subtle host

seeks to do this by marking all the passages of assertion or reflection

in Shakespeare’s plays which are not peculiarly appropriate to the

speaker, nor called for by the situation—often, indeed, purely

episodical to the action; and where in such passages the same or similar

ideas are repeated, he argues that Shakespeare himself is speaking, and

not the person in the dialogue. I observe in the page you have opened,

that Sir Percival is treating of the metaphysical turn of mind so

remarkably developed in Shakespeare, and showing how much that turn of

mind was the character of the exact time in which he lived. You see how

appositely he quotes from Sir John Davies, Shakespeare’s

contemporary—who, though employed in active professional pursuits, a

lawyer—nay, even an Attorney-General and a Serjeant; a member of

Parliament, nay, even a Speaker, and in an Irish House of

Commons—prepared himself for those practical paths of life by the

composition of a poem the most purely and profoundly metaphysical which

England, or indeed modern Europe, has ever produced: at this day it

furnishes the foundation of all our immaterial schools of metaphysics.

You will see, if you look on, how clearly Sir Percival shows that

Shakespeare had intently studied that poem, and imbued his own mind, not

so much with its doctrines, as with its manner of thought.”

“Tracey was always fond of metaphysics, and of applying his critical

acuteness to the illustration of poets. I am pleased to see he has, in

the tastes of his youth, so pleasing a resource in his seclusion.”

“But it is not only in metaphysics or poetry that he occupies his mind;

you might be still more forcibly struck with his information and his

powers of reasoning if you opened any of the historians he has

interleaved—Clarendon, for instance, or our earlier Chronicles. I cannot

but think he would have been a remarkable writer, if he had ever

acquired the concentration of purpose, for which, perhaps, the idea of

publishing what one writes is indispensably necessary.”

“Has he never had the ambition to be an author?”

“Never since I have known him; and he never could conceive it now. You

look as if you thought that a pity.”

“Well, is it not a pity?”

“Sir,” quoth the Librarian, taking snuff, “that is not a fair question

to put to me, who have passed my life in reading books, and cherishing a

humane compassion for those who are compelled to write them. But permit

me to ask whether a very clever man, himself a voluminous writer, has

not composed a popular work called the ‘Calamities of Authors’?—did you

ever know any writer who has composed a work on the ‘Felicities of

Authors’? Do you think, from your own experience, that you could write

such a work yourself?”

“Rhetorically, yes; conscientiously, no. But let us hope that the

calamities of authors lead to the felicities of readers.”

Thus talking we arrived at the Librarian’s own private sanctuary, a

small study at the end of the library, looking on the wilder part of the

park. Pointing to doors on the opposite side of a corridor, he said,

“Those lead to Sir Percival’s private apartments—they are placed in the

Belvidere Tower, the highest room of which he devotes to his scientific

pursuits; and those pursuits occupy him at this moment, for he expects a

visit very shortly from a celebrated Swedish philosopher, with whom he

has opened a correspondence.”

I left the Librarian to his books, and took my way into the

drawing-room. There I found only Clara Thornhill, seated by the window,

and with a mournful shade on her countenance, which habitually was

cheerful and sunny. I attributed the shade to the guilty Henry, and my

conjecture proved right; for after some small-talk on various matters, I

found myself suddenly admitted into her innocent confidence. Henry was

unhappy! Unreasonable man! A time had been when Henry had declared that

the supremest happiness of earth would be to call Clara his! Such

happiness then seemed out of his reach; Clara’s parents were ambitious,

and Henry had no fortune but “his honour and his sword.” Percival

Tracey, _Deus ex machinâ_, had stepped in—propitiated Clara’s parents by

handsome settlements. Henry’s happiness was apparently secured. Percival

had bestowed on him an independent income, had sought to domicile him in

his own neighbourhood by the offer of a charming cottage which Tracey

had built by the sea-side as an occasional winter residence for himself;

had proposed to find him occupation as a magistrate—nay, as a commanding

officer of gallant volunteers—in vain—

“He was all for deeds of arms;

Honour called him to the field.”

The trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep.

Henry had been moving heaven and earth to get removed into a regiment

which was ordered abroad, not exactly for what we call a war, but for

one of those smaller sacrifices of human life which are always going on

somewhere or other in distant corners of our empire, and make less

figure in our annals than they do in our estimates. Such trivial

enterprises might at least prepare his genius and expedite his

promotion.

“Mox in reluctantes dracones,” &c.

Percival, who was in secret league with Clara against this restlessness

for renown which it is to be fervently hoped the good sense of Europe

will refuse to gratify, had done his best, by a pleasant irony and

banter, to ridicule Henry out of his martial discontent. In vain—Henry

only resented his kinsman’s disapproval of his honourable ambition, and

hence his regret that Sir Percival did not “make the most of his

station.” Surely, did he do so, a word from a man of such political

importance in point of territory would have due effect on the War

Office. Henry thought himself entitled not only to a chance of fighting,

but to the dignity of Major. All this, by little and little, though in

her own artless words, and in wifelike admiration of Henry’s military

genius as well as ardour, I extracted from Clara, who (all women being

more or less, though often unconsciously, artful in the confidences with

which they voluntarily honour our sex) had her own reason for frankness;

she had seen Sir Percival since breakfast, and he had sought to convince

her that it would be wise to let Henry have his own way. The cunning

creature wished me to reason with Tracey, and set before him all the

dangers to limb and life to which even a skirmish with barbarians might

expose a life so invaluable as her Henry’s. “I could see him depart

without a tear, if it were to defend his country,” said she, with

spirit. “But to think of all the hardships he must undergo in a savage

land, and fighting for nothing I can comprehend, against a people I

never heard of—_that_ is hard! it is so reckless in him—and, poor dear,

his health _is_ delicate, though you would not think it!”

I promised all that a discreet diplomatist under such untoward

circumstances could venture to promise; and on the Painter entering the

room, poor Clara went up-stairs, trying her womanly best to smile away

her tears.

Left alone with the artist, he drew my attention to some pictures on the

wall which had been painted by Sir Percival, commended their gusto and

brilliancy of execution, and then said, “If our host had begun life on

fifty pounds a year, he would have been a great painter.”

“Does it require poverty in order to paint well?”

“It requires, I suppose, a motive to do anything exceedingly well; and

what motive could Sir Percival Tracey have to be a professed painter?”

“I think you have hit on the truth in his painting, and perhaps in his

other accomplishments: all he wants is the concentration of motive.”

“Is it not that want which makes three-fourths of the difference between

the famous man and the obscure man?” asked the Painter.

“Perhaps not three-fourths; but if it make one-fourth, it would go a

long way to account for the difference. One good of a positive

profession is, that it supplies a definite motive for any movement which

the intellect gives itself the trouble to take. He who enters a

profession naturally acquires the desire to get on in it, and perhaps in

the profession of art more ardently than in any other, because a man

does not take to art from sheer necessity, and without any inclination

for it, but _with_ a strong inclination, to which necessity gives the

patient forces of labour. I presume that I am right in this conjecture.”

“Yes,” said the Painter, ingenuously. “So far back as I can remember, I

had an inclination, nay a passion, for painting; still I might not have

gone through the requisite drudgery and apprenticeship; might not have

studied the naked figure when I wished to get at once to some gorgeous

draperies, or fagged at perspective when I wanted to deck out a sunset,

if I had not had three sisters and a widowed mother to think of.”

“I comprehend; but now that you have mastered the fundamental

difficulties of your art, and accustomed yourself to hope for fame in

the fuller and freer developments of that art, do you think that you

would gladly accept the wealth of Sir Percival Tracey, on the condition

that you were never to paint for the public, and to renounce every idea

of artistic distinction? or, if you did accept that offer for the sake

of your sisters and mother, would it be with reluctance and the pang of

self-sacrifice?”

“I don’t think I could accept such an offer on such conditions even for

them. I am now, sir, utterly unknown—at best one of those promising

pupils, of whom there are hundreds; but still I think there is a

something in me as painter, as artist, which would break my heart if,

some day or other, it did not force itself out.”

“Then you would not lose your motive for becoming a great painter, even

did you succeed to the wealth and station which you say deprive Sir

Percival of a motive, supposing that, in accepting such gifts of

fortune, you were _not_ required to sacrifice the inclination you take

from nature?”

“No, I should not lose the motive. Better famine in a garret than

obscurity in a palace!”

Our conversation was here broken off by the entrance of Lady Gertrude.

“It is just time for our expedition,” said she. “I think it is about to

strike two, and Percival is always punctual.”

“I am quite ready,” said I.

“And I shall be so in five minutes,” cried the Painter; “I must run

up-stairs for my sketch-book.”

“Oh, I see what is keeping my nephew,” said Lady Gertrude, looking out

of the window; and as I joined her she drew my attention to two figures

walking slowly in the garden; in one I recognised Tracey, the other was

unknown to me.

“He must have come by the early train,” said Lady Gertrude, musingly. “I

wonder whether he means to stay and go with us to the lake.”

“You mean the gentleman in black?” said I; “I think not, whoever he may

be, for, see, he is just shaking hands with Tracey like a man who is

about to take leave. By his dress he seems a clergyman.”

“Yes, don’t betray me—Percival’s London almoner. My nephew has employed

him for seven years, and it is only within the last year that I

discovered by accident what the employment is. He comes here when he

likes—seldom stays over a day! One of those good men who are bored if

they are not always about their work; and indeed he bores Percival by

constantly talking of sorrow and suffering, which Percival is always

wishing to relieve, but never wishes to hear discussed. You don’t know

to what a degree my nephew carries his foible!”

“What foible?”

“That of desiring everybody to be and to look happy. A year ago, his

valet, who had lived with him since he came of age, died. I found him

another valet, with the highest character—the best servant possible—not

a fault to find with him; but he had a very melancholy expression of

countenance. This fretted Percival; he complained to me. ‘Dolman is

unhappy or discontented,’ he said. ‘Find out what it is; remedy it.’ I

spoke to the poor man; he declared himself most satisfied, most

fortunate in obtaining such a place. Still he continued to look

mournful. Percival could not stand it. One day he thrust a bank-note

into the man’s hand, and said, ‘Go, friend, and before sunset look

miserable elsewhere.’”

I was laughing at this characteristic anecdote, when Percival entered

the room with his usual beaming aspect and elastic step. “Ready?” said

he; “that’s well: will you ride with me?” (this addressed to myself). “I

have a capital sure-footed pony for you.”

“I thought of giving your friend a seat in my pony-chaise,” said Lady

Gertrude.

Percival glanced at his aunt quickly, and replied, “So be it.” I

should have preferred riding with Tracey; but before he set off he

whispered in my ear, “It makes the dear woman happy to monopolise a

new-comer—otherwise——” He stopped short, and I resigned myself to the

pony-chaise.

“Pray,” said Lady Gertrude, when we were fairly but slowly in movement

along a shady road in the park,—“pray, don’t you think it is very much

to be regretted that Percival should be single—should never have

married?”

“I don’t know. He seems to me very happy as he is.”

“Yes, happy, no doubt. I believe he would make himself happy in a

dungeon; and——” Lady Gertrude rather spitefully whipped the ponies.

“Perhaps,” said I, as soon as I had recovered the first sensation of

alarm, with which I am always seized when by the side of ladies who

drive ponies and whip them—“perhaps,” said I—“take care of that

ditch—perhaps Percival has never seen the woman with whom it would be

felicity to share a dungeon?”

“When you knew him first, while he was yet young, did you think him a

man not likely to fall very violently in love?”

“Well, ‘fall’ and ‘violently’ are two words that I should never have

associated with his actions at any time of life. But I should have said

that he was a man not likely to form a very passionate attachment to any

woman who did not satisfy his refinement of taste, which is exquisitely

truthful when applied to poems and statues, but a little too classically

perfect for just appreciation of flesh and blood, at least in that sex

which is so charming that every defect in it is a shock on the _beau

ideal_.”

“Nevertheless,” said Lady Gertrude, after acknowledging, with a gracious

smile, the somewhat old-fashioned gallantry conveyed in my

observations—“nevertheless, Percival has loved deeply and fervently,

and, what may seem to you strange, has been crossed in his affections.”

“Strange! Alas! in love nothing is strange. No one is _loved_ for his

merits any more than for his fortune or rank; but men, and women too,

are _married_ for their merits, and still more for their rank and their

fortune. I can imagine, therefore, though with difficulty, a girl wooed

by Percival Tracey not returning his love, but I cannot conceive her

refusing his hand. How was it?”

“You see how I am confiding in you. But you are almost the only friend

of his youth whom Percival has invited as his guest; and your evident

appreciation of his worth at once opens my heart to you. In the course

of that lengthened absence from England—on the eve of which you took

leave of him nearly thirty years ago—Percival formed a close friendship

with a fellow-traveller in the East: Percival considers that to the

courage, presence of mind, and devotion of this gentleman, a few years

younger than himself, he owed his life in some encounter with robbers.

Mr Gerrard (that is this friend’s name) was poor and without a

profession. When Percival was about to return to Europe, he tried in

vain to persuade Mr Gerrard to accompany him—meaning, though he did not

say so, to exert such interest with Ministers as he possessed, to obtain

for Gerrard some honourable opening in the public service. The young man

refused, and declared his intention of settling permanently at Cairo.

Percival, in the course of his remonstrances, discovered that the cause

of this self-exile was a hopeless attachment, which had destroyed all

other objects of ambition in Gerrard’s life, and soured him with the

world itself. He did not, however, mention the name of the lady, nor the

reasons which had deprived his affection of hope. Well, Percival left

him at Cairo, and travelled back into Europe. At a German spa he became

acquainted with an Irish peer who had run out his fortune, been

compelled to sell his estates, and was living upon a small annuity

allowed to him either by his creditors or his relations; a man very

clever, very accomplished, not of very high principle, and sanguine of

bettering his own position, and regaining the luxuries to which he had

been accustomed, through some brilliant marriage, which the beauty of

his only daughter might enable her to make. Beauty to a very rare degree

she possessed—nor beauty alone; her mind was unusually cultivated, and

her manners singularly fascinating. You guess already?”

“Yes. Percival saw here one with whom he did not _fall_ in love, but for

whom he _rose into love_. He found his ideal.”

“Exactly so. I need not say that the father gave him all encouragement.

Percival was on the point of proposing, when he received a letter from

Mr Gerrard (to whom he had written, some weeks before, communicating the

acquaintance he had made, and the admiration he had conceived); and the

letter, written under great excitement, revealed the object of Gerrard’s

hopeless attachment. Of Irish family himself, he had known this young

lady from her childhood—and from her childhood loved her. He had been

permitted to hope by Lord ——, who was at that time in a desperate

struggle to conceal or stave off his ruin, and who did not scruple to

borrow from his daughter’s suitor all that he could extract from him.

Thus, when the final crash came, Lord ——’s ruin involved nearly the

whole of Gerrard’s patrimony; and, of course, Lord —— declared that a

marriage was impossible between two young persons who had nothing to

live upon. It was thus that Edmund Gerrard had become an exile.

“This intelligence at once reversed the position of the rivals. From

that moment Percival devoted himself to bless the life of the man who

had saved his own. How he effected this object I scarcely know; but Lord

—— gave his consent to Gerrard’s suit, and lived six years longer with

much pomp and luxury in Paris. Gerrard settled with his wife in

Percival’s Irish castle, and administers Percival’s Irish estates, at a

salary which ranks him with the neighbouring gentry. But Percival never

visits that property—I do not think he would trust himself to see the

only woman he ever loved as the wife of another, though she is no longer

young, and is the mother of children, whose future fortunes he has,

doubtless, assured.”

“What you tell me,” said I, with emotion, “is so consistent with

Tracey’s character that it gives me no surprise. That which does

surprise me is, not the consent of the ruined father, but the consent of

the accomplished daughter. Did Percival convince himself that she

preferred his rival?”

“That is a question I can scarcely answer. My own belief is, that her

first fancy had been caught by Gerrard, and that she had given him cause

to believe that that first fancy was enduring love; but that, if her

intimate acquaintance with Percival had continued longer, and had

arrived at a stage at which his heart had been confessed to her, and her

own heart frankly wooed, the first fancy would not have proved enduring

love. But the acquaintance did not reach to that stage; and I have

always understood that her marriage has been a very happy one.”

“In that happiness Tracey is consoled?”

“Yes, now, no doubt. But I will tell you this, that as soon as all

obstacles to the marriage were removed, and Gerrard on his way from the

East, Percival left Germany and reached Lausanne, to be seized with a

brain fever, which threatened his life, and from the effects of which it

was long before he recovered. But answer me candidly one question, Do

you think it is too late in life for him to marry yet?”

Poor Lady Gertrude asked this question in so pleading a tone of voice,

that I found it very difficult to answer with the candour which was

insisted on as the condition of my reply. At length I said, bravely—

“My dear Lady Gertrude, if a man hard upon sixty chooses to marry, it

becomes all his true friends to make the best of it, and say that he has

done a wise thing. But if asked beforehand whether it be not too late in

life for such an experiment, a true friend must answer, ‘Yes.’”

“Yet there have been very happy marriages with great disparity of

years,” said Lady Gertrude, musingly, “and Percival is very young for

his age.”

“Excellent after-reflections, if he do marry. But is he not very happy

as he is? I know not why, but you all seem to conspire against his being

happy in his own way. One of you wants him to turn politician, another

to turn Benedict. For my part, the older I grow, the more convinced I am

of the truth of one maxim—whether for public life or for private—‘Leave

well alone.’”

By this time we had arrived into the heart of a forest that realised

one’s dreams of Ardennes; a young man would have looked round for a

Rosalind, a moralising sage for a Jacques. Many a green vista was cut

through the mass of summer foliage, and in full view before us stretched

a large wild lake; its sides, here and there, clothed with dipping trees

or clustered brushwood. On the opposite margin, to which, in a neck of

the lake, a rustic bridge gave access, there was a long and picturesque

building, in the style of those quaint constructions of white plaster

and black oak beams and rafters, which are still seen in Cheshire, but

with ruder reliefs of logwood pilasters and balconies; a charming,

old-fashioned garden stretched before it, rich in the genuine English

flowers of the Elizabethan day; and scattered round, on inviting spots,

were lively-coloured tents and awnings. The heron rose alarmed from the

reeds as we drew near the water; but the swans, as if greeting the

arrival of familiar friends, sailed slowly towards us. Tracey had

already arrived at the cottage, and we saw him dismounting at the door,

and talking to an old couple who came out to meet and welcome him.

“I believe,” said Lady Gertrude, “that Percival’s secret reason for

building that cottage was to place in it these two old servants from

Tracey Court. They had known him there when he was a boy, and are so

attached to him that they implored him to let them serve him wherever he

resided. But they were too old and too opinionated to suit our moderate

establishment, which does not admit of supernumeraries, so he suddenly

found out that it would be very pleasant to have a forest lodge for the

heats of summer, built that house, and placed them in it. The old woman,

who was housekeeper at Tracey Court, is, however, as I hope you will

acknowledge, a very good cook on these holiday occasions; and her

husband, who was butler there, is so proud and so happy to wait on us,

that——. But no doubt you understand how young it makes us old folks

feel, to see those who remember us in our youth, and to whom we are

still young.”

Our party now assembled in front of the forest lodge, and the grooms

took back the ponies, with orders to return before nightfall. Tracey

carried me over the lodge, while Henry Thornhill and the Painter busied

themselves with a small sailing vessel which rode at anchor in a tiny

bay.

This rustic habitation was one for which two lovers might have sighed.

Its furniture very simple, but picturesquely arranged, with some of

those genuine relics of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps rather that of

James I., which are now rarely found, though their Dutch imitations are

in every curiosity-shop. As in the house we had left there was

everywhere impressive the sentiment of the classic taste, so here all

expressed the sentiment of that day in our own history which we

associate with the poets, who are _our_ most beloved classics. It was

difficult, when one looked round, to suppose that the house could have

been built and furnished by a living contemporary; it seemed a place in

which Milton might have lodged when he wrote the ‘Lycidas,’ or Izaak

Walton and Cotton have sought shelter in the troubled days of the Civil

War, with a sigh of poetic regret as they looked around, for the yet

earlier age when Sidney escaped from courts to meditate the romance of

‘Arcadia.’

“I have long thought,” said Tracey, “that if we studied the secrets of

our English climate a little more carefully than most of us do, we could

find, within a very small range, varieties of climate which might allow

us to dispense with many a long journey. For instance, do you not

observe how much cooler and fresher the atmosphere is here than in the

villa yonder, though it is but five miles distant? Here, not only the

sun is broken by the forest-trees, but the ground is much more elevated

than it is yonder. We get the bracing air of the northern hills, to

which I have opened the woods, and here, in the hot relaxing days of

summer, I often come for days or weeks together. The lodge is not large

enough to admit more than two, or at most three other visitors, and

therefore it is only very intimate friends whom I can invite. But I

always look forward to a fortnight or so here, as a time to be marked

with the whitest chalk, and begin to talk of it as soon as the earliest

nightingale is heard. Again, on the other extremity of my property, by

the sea-side, I have made my winter residence, my Tarentum, my Naples,

my Nice. There the aspect is due south—cliffs, ranged in semicircle,

form an artificial screen from the winds and frosts. The cottage I have

built there is a sun-trap. At Christmas I breakfast in a bower of

geraniums, and walk by hedgerows of fuchsia and myrtle. All this is part

of my philosophical plan, on settling down for life—viz., to collect all

the enjoyments this life can give me into the smallest possible compass.

Before you go, you must see my winter retreat. I should like to prove to

you how many climates, with a little heed, an Englishman may find within

a limit of twenty miles. I had thought of giving Bellevue (my sea-side

cottage) to the Thornhills, and delighted in the thought of becoming

their guest in the winter, for aunt. Gertrude does not fancy the place

as I do, and wherever I go cannot live quite alone, nor quite without

that humanising effect of drawing-room scenery, which the play-writers

call ‘petticoat interest.’ But when a man allows himself to be selfish,

he deserves to be punished. Henry Thornhill disdains Bellevue and

comfort, and insists on misery and bivouacs.”

“Ah, my dear Tracey,” said I, mindful of my promise to Clara, “Henry

Thornhill is much too fine a young fellow to be wasted upon ignoble

slaughter, and still more ignoble agues and marsh fevers. I hope you do

not intend to gratify his preposterous desire to plant laurels at the

other end of the world, and on soil in which it may be reasonably

doubted whether any laurels will grow——”

Tracey’s brow became clouded. He threw himself on a seat niched into the

recess of a lattice window, looked out at first abstractedly, and then,

as the cloud left his brow, observantly.

“See, my dear friend,” said he—“see, how listlessly, for a mere holiday

pleasure, that brave lad is running up the sails. Do you think that he

would be thus indifferent if he were clearing decks for a fight, if

responsibility, and honour, and duty, and fame were his motive powers?

No. If he stayed at home inactive, he would be miserable the more Clara

and I tried to make him happy in our holiday way. That which a man

feels, however unphilosophically (according to other men’s philosophy),

to be an essential to the object for which he deems it noble to

exist—that the man must do, or at least attempt; if we prevent him, we

mar the very clockwork of his existence, for we break its mainspring.

Henry must have his own way. And I say that for Clara’s sake; for if he

has not, he will seek excitement in something else, and become a bad man

and a very bad husband.”

“Hem!” said I; “of course you know him best; but I own I do not see in

him a genius equal to his restlessness or his ambition; and I think his

wife very superior to himself in intellect. If, besides giving him your

sea-side villa, you gave him a farm, surely he might become famous for

his mangold-wurzel; and it is easier for all men, including even Henry

Thornhill, to grow capital wurzel than it is to beat Hannibal or

Wellington.”

“Pish!” said Tracey, smiling, “you ought to know mankind too well to

think seriously what you say in sarcasm. Pray, where and what would

England be if every sharp young fellow in the army did not set a

Hannibal or a Wellington before his eyes; or if every young politician

did not haunt his visions with a Pitt, a Fox, or a Burke? What Henry

Thornhill may become, Heaven only knows; but if you could have met

Arthur Wellesley before he went to India, do you think you would have

guessed that he would become the hero of England? Can any of us detect

beforehand the qualities of a man of action?—Of a man of letters, yes,

to a certain degree, at least. We can often, though not always, foresee

whether a man may become a great writer; but a great man of action—no!!

Henry has no literature, no literary occupation, nor even amusement.

Probably Hannibal had none, and Wellington very little. _Bref_—he thinks

his destiny is action, and military action. Every man should have a fair

chance of fulfilling what he conceives to be his destiny. Suppose Henry

Thornhill fail; what then? He comes back, reconciled to what fate will

still tender him—reconciled to my sea-side villa—to his charming

wife—reconciled to life as it _is_ for him. But now he is coveting a

life which _may_ be. A man only does that which fate intends him to do,

in proportion as he obeys the motive which gives him his power in life.

Henry Thornhill’s motive is military ambition. It is no use arguing the

point—what man thinks, he is.”

I bowed my head. I felt that Tracey was right, and sighed aloud, “Poor

little Clara!”

“Poor little Clara!” said Tracey, sighing also, “must, like other poor

dear little loving women, take her chance. If her Henry succeed, how

proud she will be to congratulate him! if he fail, how proud she will be

to console him!”

“Ah, Tracey!” said I, rising, “in all you have said I recognise your

acute discernment and your depth of reasoning. But when you not only

concede to, but approve, the motive power which renders this young man

restless, pray forgive so old a friend for wondering why you yourself

have never found some motive power which might, long ere this, have

rendered you renowned.”

“Hush!” said Tracey, with his winning, matchless smile—“hush, look out

on yon woods and waters. Has not the life which Nature bestows on any

man who devoutly loves her a serener happiness than can be found in the

enjoyments that estrange us from her charms? How few understand the

distinction between life artificial and life artistic! Artificial

existence is a reverence for the talk of men; artistic existence is in

the supreme indifference to the talk of men. You and I, in different

ways, seek to complete our being on earth, not artificially, but

artistically. Neither of us can be insincere mouthpieces of talk in

which we have no faith. You cannot write in a book—you cannot say in a

speech—that which you know to be a falsehood. But the artificial folks

are the very echoes of falsehood; the noise they make is in repeating

its last sounds. An artist must be true to nature, even though he add to

nature something from his soul of man which nature cannot give in her

representations of truth. Is it not so?”

“Certainly,” said I, with warmth. “I could neither write nor speak what

I did not believe to be, in the main, truthful. A man may or may not,

according to the quality of his mind, give to nature that which clearly

never can be in nature—viz., the soul or the intellect of man. But soul

or intellect he must give to nature—that is, to everything which

external objects present to his senses as truthful—or he is in art a

charlatan, and in action a knave. But then truth, as Humanity knows it,

is not what the schoolmen call it, One and Indivisible; it is like

light, and splits not only into elementary colours, but into numberless

tints. Truth with Raffaelle is not the same as truth with Titian; truth

with Shakespeare is not the same as truth with Milton; truth with St

Xavier is not the same as truth with Luther; truth with Pitt is not the

same as truth with Fox. Each man takes from life his favourite truth, as

each man takes from light his favourite colour.”

“Bravo!” cried Tracey, clapping his hands.

“Why bravo?” said I, testily. “Can the definition I hazard be construed

into a defence of what I presume to be your view of the individual

allegiance which each man owes to truth as he conceives it? No; for each

man is bound to support and illustrate, with all his power, truth as

truth seems to him, Raffaelle as Raffaelle, Titian as Titian,

Shakespeare as Shakespeare, Milton as Milton, Pitt as Pitt, Fox as Fox.

And the man who says, ‘I see truth in my own way, and I do not care to

serve her cause;’ who, when Nature herself, ever moving, ever active,

exhorts him to bestir himself for the truth he surveys, and to animate

that truth with his own life and deed, shrugs his shoulder, and cries

‘_Cui bono?_’—that man, my dear Tracey, may talk very finely about

despising renown, but in reality he shuffles off duty. Pardon me; I am

thinking of you. I would take your part against others; but as friend to

friend, and to your own face, I condemn you.”

To this discourteous speech Tracey was about to reply, when Lady

Gertrude and Clara Thornhill entered the room to tell us that the boat

was ready, and that we had less than two hours for aquatic adventure, as

we were to dine at five.

“I am not sorry to have a little time to think over my answer to those

reproaches which are compliments on the lips of friends,” said Tracey to

me, resting his arm on my shoulder; and in a few minutes more we were

gliding over the lake, with a gentle breeze from the hills, just lively

enough to fill the sail. Clara, bewitchingest of those womanliest women

who unfairly enthral and subdue us, while we not only know that their

whole hearts are given to another, but love and respect them the more

for it,—Clara nestled herself by my side. And I had not even the

satisfaction of thinking that that infamous Henry was jealous. He did

indeed once or twice pause from his nautical duties to vouchsafe us a

scowl; but it was sufficiently evident that the monster was only angry

because he knew that Clara loved him so well, that she was seeking to

enlist me on her side against his abominable ambition of learning the

art of homicide.

“Well,” whispered Clara to me—“well, you have spoken to Sir Percival!”

“Alas, yes! and in vain. He thinks that for your sake Henry must fulfil

that dream of heroism, which perhaps first won your heart to him. Women

very naturally love heroes; but then they must pay the tax for that

noble attachment. Henry must become the glory of his country, and the

major of a regiment in active service. My dear child—I mean, my dear Mrs

Thornhill—don’t cry; be a hero’s wife! Tracey has convinced me that

Henry is right; and my firm belief is that the chief motive which makes

Henry covet laurels is to lay them at your feet.”

“The darling!” murmured Clara.

“You see your parents very naturally wished you to make a better worldly

marriage. That difficulty was smoothed over, not by the merits of Henry,

but the money of Sir Percival Tracey. Could you respect your husband if

he were not secretly chafed at that thought? He desires to lift himself

up to you even in your parents’ eyes, not by a miserable pecuniary

settlement effected through a kinsman, but by his own deeds. Oppose

that, and you humiliate him. Never humiliate a husband. Yield to it, and

you win his heart and his gratitude for ever. Man must never be put into

an inferior position to his helpmate. Is not that true? Thank you, my

child—(come, the word is out)—for that pressure of my hand. You

understand us men. Let Henry leave you, sure that his name will be

mentioned with praise in his commanding officer’s report after some

gallant action, looking forward to the day when, in command himself,

Parliament shall vote him its thanks, and his sovereign award him her

honours; and your Henry, as you cling in pride to his breast, shall

whisper in words only heard by you—‘Wife mine, your parents are not

ashamed of me now! All this is your work! all results from the yearning

desire to show that the man whom you had singled out from the world was

not unworthy of your love!’”

“But Henry does not say those pretty things,” sighed Clara, half

smiling, half weeping.

“Say them? In words, of course not. What man, and especially what

Englishman, does say pretty things? It is only authors, who are the

interpreters of hearts, that say what lovers and heroes feel. But a look

says to the beloved one more than authors can put into words. Henry’s

look will tell you what you, his own, his wife, have been to him in the

bivouac, in the battle; and you will love and reverence him the more

because he does not say the pretty things into which I mince and

sentimentalise the calm Englishman’s grand, silent, heartfelt

combination of love with duty and with honour. My dear Clara, I speak to

you as I would to my own daughter. Let your young soldier go. You and I

indeed—the woman and the civilian—may talk as we will of distinctions

between the defence of the island and the preservation of the empire.

But a soldier is with his country’s flag wherever it is placed—whether

in the wilds of Caffraria or on the cliffs of Dover. Clara, am I not

right? Yes! you again press my hand. After all, there is not a noble

beat in the heart of man which does not vibrate more nobly still in the

heart of the wife who loves him!”

Just at this time our little anchor dropped on a fairy island. There was

as much bustle on board as if we had discovered a new Columbia. We

landed for a few minutes to enjoy a glorious view of the lake, to which

this island was the centre, and explore a curious cave, which, according

to tradition, had been the dwelling of some unsocial anchorite in Gothic

days. The rocky walls of this cell were now inscribed with the names or

initials of summer holiday visitors from provincial towns.

“See,” said the Painter, “how instinctive to man is the desire to leave

some memorial of himself wherever he has been.”

“Do you acknowledge then,” said Tracey, “that the instinct which roused

Joseph Higgins to carve on the rock, for the benefit of distant ages,

the fact, that in the year 1837 he visited this spot in company with

‘Martha Brown,’ is but a family branch of the same instinct which makes

genius desire to write its name on the ‘flammantia mœnia mundi?’”

“Perhaps,” replied the Painter, “the instinct is the same; but if it be

so, that truth would not debase and vulgarise the yearning of genius—it

would rather elevate and poetise the desire of Joseph Higgins.”

“Well answered,” said I. “Has any one present a knife that he will not

mind blunting? if so, I should like to carve my name under that of

Joseph Higgins. It is something to leave a trace of one’s whereabout

twenty years hence, even in the rock of this lonely cave.”

Henry produced the knife, and I carved my name under that of Joseph

Higgins, with the date, and these words—“A Summer Holiday.” “I have not

had many holidays,” said I, “since I left school; let me preserve one

from oblivion.” I passed the knife to Tracey.

“Nay,” said he, laughing, “I have no motive strong enough to induce me

to take the trouble. I have no special holiday to record—my life is all

holiday.”

We re-entered our vessel, and drifted along the lake—the Painter jotting

down hints of scenery in his sketch-book, and Percival reading to us

aloud from a volume of Robert Browning’s Poems which he had brought with

him. He was a great admirer of that poet, and was bent upon making Clara

share his own enthusiasm. Certainly he read well, and the poems he

selected seemed in harmony with the scene; for there is in Robert

Browning a certain freshness and freedom of music, and a certain

suggestiveness of quiet thought reflected from natural images, which fit

him to be read out of doors, in English landscapes, on summer days.

When we returned from our cruise, we found our rural banquet awaiting

us. We were served under an awning suspended from the trunks of two

mighty elms, whose branches overhung the water. Lady Gertrude had not

exaggerated the culinary skill of the _ci-devant_ housekeeper. What with

the fish from the lake, various sorts, dressed in different ways,

probably from receipts as old as the monastic days in which fresh-water

fishes received the honours due to them—what with some excellent

poultry, which, kept in that wild place, seemed to have acquired a finer

flavour than farmyard coops bestow—and what with fruits, not rendered

malefic by walls of pastry—the repast would have satisfied more refined

epicures than we were. Cool, light, sparkling wines, innocent as those

which Horace promised to Tyndaris, circled freely. All of us became

mirthful, even Clara—all of us except Henry, who still looked as if he

were wasting time; and the Painter, who became somewhat too seriously

obtrusive of his art, and could with difficulty be kept from merging the

whole conversation into criticisms on the landscape effects of

Gainsborough contrasted with those of Claude.

After dinner we quietly settled ourselves to our several amusements—Lady

Gertrude to some notable piece of female work. Clara, after playing us a

few airs on her lute, possessed herself of Tracey’s volume of Browning,

and pretended to read. The Painter flung himself on the grass, and

contemplated with an artist’s eye the curves in the bank, and the

lengthening shadows that crept over the still waters. Henry, ever

restless, wandered away with a rod in his hand towards a distant

gravelly creek, in which the old man at the lodge assured us he had seen

perch of three pounds weight.

The Librarian alone remained seated at the table, finishing very slowly

his bottle of claret, and apparently preparing himself for a peaceful

slumber.

Tracey and I strolled along the margin of the lake, the swans following

us as we walked: they were old friends of his.

“So,” said Tracey at last, “you think that my course of life has not

been a wise one.”

“If all men lived like you, it might be very well for a paradise, but

very bad for the world we dwell in.”

“Possibly; but it would be very bad for the world we dwell in if the

restless spirits were not in some degree kept in check by the calm ones.

What a miserable, unsafe, revolutionary state of society would be that

in which all the members were men of combative ambition and fidgety

genius; all haranguing, fighting, scribbling; all striving, each against

the other! We sober fellows are the ballast in the state vessel: without

us, it would upset in the first squall! We have our uses, my friend,

little as you seem disposed to own it.”

“My dear Tracey, the question is not whether a ship should carry

ballast, but whether you are of the proper material for ballast. And

when I wonder why a man of great intellect and knowledge should not make

his intellect and knowledge more largely useful, it is a poor answer to

tell me that he is as useful as—a bag of stones.”

“A motive power is as necessary to impel a man, whatever his intellect

or knowledge, towards ambitious action, as it is to lift a stone from

the hold of a vessel into the arch of a palace. No motive power from

without urges me into action, and the property inherent in me is to keep

still.”

“Well, it is true, yours is so exceptional a lot that it affords no

ground for practical speculation on human life. Take a patrician of

£60,000 a year, who only spends £6000: give him tastes so cultivated

that he has in himself all resources; diet him on philosophy till he

says, with the Greek sage, ‘Man is made to contemplate, and to gaze on

the stars,’ and it seems an infantine credulity to expect that this

elegant Looker-on will condescend to take part with the actors on the

world’s stage. Yet without the actors, the world would be only a

drop-scene for the Lookers-on. Yours, I repeat, is an exceptional case.

And those who admire your mind, must regret that it has been robbed of

fame by your fortune.”

“Flatterer,” said Tracey, with his imperturbable good-temper, “I am

ashamed of myself to know that you have not hit on the truth. If I had

been born to £200 a year, and single as I am now—that is, free to choose

my own mode of life—I should have been, I was about to say as idle as I

am, but idle is not the word; I should have been as busy in completing

my own mind, and as reluctant to force that mind into the squabbles of

that mob which you call the world: in fact, I am but a type—somewhat

exaggerated by accidental circumstances, which make me more prominent

than others to your friendly if critical eye—of a very common and a very

numerous class in a civilisation so cultivated as that of our age.

Wherever you look, you will find men whom the world has never heard of,

yet who in intellect or knowledge could match themselves against those

whose names are in all the newspapers. Allow me to ask, Do you not know,

in the House of Commons, men who never open their lips, but for whose

mere intellect, in judgment, penetration, genuine statesmanship, you

have more respect than you have for that of the leading orators? Allow

me to ask again, Should you say the profoundest minds and the most

comprehensive scholars are to be found among the most popular authors of

your time; or among men who have never published a line, and never will?

Answer me frankly.”

“I will answer you frankly. I should say that, in political judgment and

knowledge, there are many men in the back benches of Parliament, who are

the most admirable critics of the leading statesmen. I should say that,

in many educated, fastidious gentlemen, there are men who, in exquisite

taste and extensive knowledge, are the most admirable critics of the

popular authors. But still there is an immense difference in human value

between even a first-rate critic who does not publish his criticisms,

and even a second or third-rate statesman or author who does contribute

his quota of thought to the intellectual riches of the world.”

“Granted; but the distinction between man and man, in relation to the

public, is not mere intellect, nor mere knowledge; it is in something

else. What is it?”

“Dr Arnold, the schoolmaster, said, that as between boy and boy the

distinction was energy, perhaps it is so with men.”

“Energy! yes: but what puts the energy into movement? what makes one man

dash into fame by a harum-scarum book full of blunders and blemishes, or

a random fiery speech, of which any sound thinker would be heartily

ashamed; and what keeps back the man who could write a much better book

and make a much better speech?”

“Perhaps,” said I, ironically, “that extreme of elegant vanity, an

over-fastidious taste; perhaps that extreme of philosophical

do-nothingness, which always contemplates and never acts.”

“Possibly you are right,” answered Tracey, shaming my irony by his

urbane candour. “But why has the man this extreme of elegant vanity or

philosophical do-nothingness? Is it not, perhaps, after all, a physical

defect? the lymphatic temperament instead of the nervous-bilious?”

“You are not lymphatic,” said I, with interest; for my hobby

is—metaphysical pathology, or pathological metaphysics—“You,” said I,

“are not lymphatic; you are dark-haired, lean, and sinewy; why the deuce

should you not be energetic! it must be that infamous £60,000 which has

paralysed all your motive power.”

“Friend,” answered Tracey, “are there not some some men in the House of

Lords with more than £60,000 a year, and who could scarcely be more

energetic if they lived on 4d. a day and worked for it?”

“There have been, and are, such instances in the Peerage, doubtless;

but, as a general rule, the wealthiest peers are seldom the most active.

Still, I am willing to give your implied argument the full benefit of

the illustration you cite. Wherever legislative functions are attached

to hereditary aristocracy, that aristocracy, as long as the State to

which they belong is free, will never fail of mental vigour—of ambition

for reputation and honours achieved in the public service. It was so

with the senators of Rome as long as the Roman Republic lasted; it will

be so with the members of the House of Lords as long as the English

Constitution exists. And in such an order of men there will always be a

degree of motive power sufficiently counteracting the indolence and

epicurism which great wealth in itself engenders, to place a very large

numerical proportion of the body among the most active and aspiring

spirits of the time. But your misfortune, my dear Tracey, has been this

(and hence I call your case exceptional)—that, immeasurably above the

average of our peers, both in illustration of descent and in territorial

possessions, still you have had none of the duties, none of the motive

power, which actuate hereditary legislators. You have had their

wealth—you have had their temptations to idleness; you have not had

their responsible duties—you have not had their motives for energy and

toil. That is why I call your case exceptional.”

“Still,” answered Tracey, “I say that I am but a very commonplace type

of educated men who belong neither to the House of Lords nor the House

of Commons, and who, in this country, despise ambition, yet in some

mysterious latent way serve to influence opinion. Motive power—motive

power! how is it formed? why is it so capricious? why sometimes

strongest in the rich and weakest in the poor? why does knowledge

sometimes impart, and sometimes destroy it? On these questions I do not

think that your reasonings will satisfy me. I am sure that mine would

not satisfy you. Let us call in a third party and hear what he has to

say on the matter. Ride with me to-morrow to the house of a gifted

friend of mine, who was all for public life once, and is all for private

life now. I will tell you who and what he is. In early life my friend

carried off the most envied honours of a university. Almost immediately

on taking his degree, he obtained his fellowship. Thus he became an

independent man. The career most suited to his prospects was that of the

Church. To this he had a conscientious objection; not that he objected

to the doctrines of our Church, nor that he felt in himself any

consciousness of sinful propensities at variance with the profession;

but simply because he did not feel that strong impulse towards the

holiest of earthly vocations, without which a very clever man may be a

very indifferent parson: and his ambition led him towards political

distinction. His reputation for talents, and for talents adapted to

public life, was so high, that he received an offer to be brought into

Parliament at the first general election, from a man of great station,

with whose son he had been intimate at college, and who possessed a

predominant influence in a certain borough. The offer was accepted. But

before it could be carried out, a critical change occurred in my

friend’s life and in his temper of mind. A distant relation, whom he had

never even seen, died, and left him a small estate in this county: on

taking possession of the property, he naturally made acquaintance with

the rector of the parish, and formed a sudden and passionate attachment

for one of the rector’s daughters, resigned the fellowship he no longer

needed, married the young lady, and found himself so happy with his

young partner and in his new home, that before the general election took

place, the idea of the parliamentary life, which he had before coveted,

became intolerable to him. He excused himself to the borough and its

patron, and has ever since lived as quietly in his rural village, as if

he had never known the joys of academical triumph, nor nursed the hope

of political renown. Let us then go and see him to-morrow (it is a very

pretty ride across the country), and you will be compelled to

acknowledge that his £600 or £700 a year of wood and sheepwalk, with

peace and love at his fireside, have sufficed to stifle ambition in one

whose youth had been intensely ambitious. So you see it does not need

£60,000 a year to make a man cling to private life, and shrink from all

that, in shackling him with the fetters and agitating him with the

passion of public life, would lessen his personal freedom and mar his

intellectual serenity.”

“I shall be glad to see your friend. What is his name?”

“Hastings Gray.”

“What! the Hastings Gray who, seventeen or eighteen years ago, made so

remarkable a speech at some public meeting (I own I forget where it

was), and wrote the political pamphlet which caused so great a

sensation!”

“The same man.”

“I remember that he was said to have distinguished himself highly at the

university, and that he was much talked of in London, for a few weeks,

as a man likely to come into Parliament, and even to make a figure in

it. Since then, never having heard more of him, I supposed he was dead.

I am glad to learn that he only sleepeth.”

Here we heard behind us the muffled fall of hoofs on the sward; our

party was in movement homeward, Lady Gertrude leading the van in her

pony chaise. I had to retake my place by her side; Clara and the

Librarian followed in a similar vehicle, driven by Henry Thornhill, who

had caught none of the great perches; I suspect he had not tried for

them. Percival and the Painter rode. The twilight deepened, and soon

melted into a starry night, as we went through the shadowy forest-land.

Lady Gertrude talked incessantly and agreeably, but I was a very dull

companion, and, being in a musing humour, would much rather have been

alone. At length we saw the moon shining on the white walls of the

villa. “I fear we have tired you with our childish party of pleasure,”

said Lady Gertrude, with a malicious fling at my silence.

“Perhaps I am tired,” I replied, ingenuously. “Pleasures are fatiguing,

especially when one is not accustomed to them.”

“Satirist!” said Lady Gertrude. “You come from the brilliant excitement

of London, and what may be pleasure to us must be _ennui_ to you.”

“Nay, Lady Gertrude, let me tell you what a very clever and learned man,

a Minister of State, said the other day at one of those great public

ceremonial receptions which are the customary holidays of a Minister of

State. ‘Life,’ said he, pensively, ‘would be tolerably agreeable if it

were not for its amusements.’ He spoke of those ‘brilliant excitements,’

as you call them, which form the amusements of capitals. He would not

have spoken so of the delight which Man can extract from a holiday with

Nature. But tell me, you who have played so considerable a part in the

world of fashion, do you prefer the drawing-rooms of London to the

log-house by the lake?”

“Why,” said Lady Gertrude, honestly, and with a half-sigh; “I own I

should be glad if Percival would consent to spend six months in the

year, or even three, in London. However, what he likes I like.

Providence has made us women of very pliable materials.”

“Has it?” said I; “that information is new to me—one lives to learn.”

And here, as the pony stopped at the porch, I descended to offer my arm

to the amiable charioteer.

Nothing worth recording took place the rest of the evening. Henry and

the Painter played at billiards, Lady Gertrude and the Librarian at

backgammon. Clara went into the billiard-room, seating herself there

with her work: by some fond instinct of her loving nature she felt as if

she ought not to waste the minutes yet vouchsafed to her—she was still

with him who was all in all to her!

I took down ‘The Faithful Shepherdess,’ wishing to refresh my memory of

passages which the scenes we had visited that day vaguely recalled to my

mind. Looking over my shoulder, Percival guided me to the lines I was

hunting after. This led to comparisons between ‘The Faithful

Shepherdess’ and the ‘Comus,’ and thence to that startling contrast in

the way of viewing, and in the mode of describing, rural nature, between

the earlier English poets and those whom Dryden formed upon Gallic

models, and so on into the pleasant clueless labyrinth of metaphysical

criticism on the art of poetic genius. When we had parted for the night,

and I regained my own room, I opened my window and looked forth on the

moonlit gardens. A few minutes later, a shadow, moving slow, passed over

the silvered ground, and, descending the terrace stairs, vanished among

the breathless shrubs and slumbering flowers. I recognised the man who

loved to make night his companion.

(_To be continued._)

HENRI LACORDAIRE.[3]

There are few of the leaders or servants of the public who interest the

general mind so profoundly as the great preachers, whose fame reaches

the humblest as well as the most exalted, and within the reach of whose

influence, more or less, an entire generation passes. Not to reckon the

secondary class of preachers, whose biography is as inevitable as their

decease, and whose lives are studied as a matter of religious duty by

vast sections of the population who lie in a kind of underground out of

the reach of ordinary literature, it is enough to instance such a life

as that of Chalmers, to prove how wide a hold upon the public interest

is taken by a man with whom, for once in their lives, most people of his

generation have come in momentary contact in the slight but often

momentous relation of hearers to a speaker. Only a very limited number

can or do hear a great speaker in any other kind, compared with those

who think it indispensable to hear the notable preacher of their day;

and multitudes who have the most visionary conception of their rulers

and statesmen, and all other public notabilities, have a certain

personal knowledge of the orator whose sphere is the pulpit, which makes

them as eager to hear his life as if their own history were somehow

involved in it. The life which we have now to unfold to our readers is,

however, one with which in this country we are unfamiliar. It is a

religious existence of a fashion unknown to us. A strange atmosphere

breathes out of its acts and sentiments; its strength and its feebleness

are alike novel to our experience; but under all these puzzling

distinctions, the life itself is very remarkable—interwoven with the

entire history of its country and period—and opens to us so strange yet

so instructive a glimpse of a Christianity not less fervent, pure, and

true, than anything in our Protestant records, but couched in terms so

different from ours, and wearing an aspect so unlike, that the mingled

resemblance and dissimilarity add a charm to its own merits. The life of

Henri Lacordaire, priest, preacher, and monk, told by his eloquent

countryman and loving friend, M. de Montalembert, is for us not only a

religious biography, but a novel study of character and life. The

picture is fascinating but strange. Stranger than the eremites in the

ancient wilderness, or those early followers of Benedict and Francis,

with whom the same hand has lately made us familiar, is the apparition

of the monk of the nineteenth century as he appears in these pages. For

it is no picturesque lay figure which rises in the white Dominican tunic

before our unaccustomed eyes, but a modern Frenchman, acute, brilliant,

unimpassioned—full of sound sense and inexorable logic—a politician, a

liberal, a man of his day, no less than a great preacher and a pious

Catholic. The story of his life is without private events, for he was a

priest, and debarred from any private life save that which makes a

passion of friendship and finds an outlet there; but his career is that

of a man strong in personal identity, who acts and thinks for himself,

and throws his entire being into his occupation, whatever that may be.

M. de Montalembert, always eloquent, is perhaps too rhetorical and

declamatory for biography, at least in narrating a life which to a great

extent he shared, and the vicissitudes of which, as he records them,

naturally rouse his enthusiasm, his indignation, and grief, and tempt

him into many digressions. The volume which he has dedicated to the

memory of his friend is more of an _eloge_ than a biography, and the

lines of the picture are vague in consequence, and want the distinctness

of portrait-painting; nevertheless the figure rounds out of its dim

background into unquestionable individuality, and the English reader who

has not already heard of the great French preacher will herein meet with

another man well worthy the remembrance of the world.

Henri Lacordaire was born in the beginning of the present century,

almost a contemporary of our own great preacher Edward Irving, in whose

life one remarkable point of resemblance shows only the full force of

the contrast between the French priest and the Scotch pastor. He was of

moderate origin, undistinguished either in his birth or training,

without any brilliant prognostics to mark the beginning of his career.

It is thus that his biographer sums up the simple story of his early

days:—

“Nothing could be more simple or ordinary than the life of this young

priest. Those who seek romances or stormy passages in the lives of

historical personages, or at least in their youth, must find them

elsewhere. No adventure, no stroke of fate or of passion, troubled the

course of his early years. The son of a village doctor, educated by a

pious mother, he had, like almost all the young men of the time, lost

his faith at college, and did not regain it either in the school of

law or at the bar, where he ranked for two years among the advocates.

In appearance nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He

was a Deist, like all the youth of the time; he was, above all,

liberal, like all France, but without excess. He shared the

convictions and the generous delusions which we all breathed in the

air which had been purified by the downfall of imperial despotism, but

he desired only a liberty strong and legitimate; and without having

yet been enlightened by the lights of faith, he already foresaw the

supreme danger of modern society, for at twenty he wrote ‘Impiety

leads to depravity,’ ‘Corrupt morals produce corrupt laws,’ and

‘Licence carries the nations on to slavery.’ He himself remained

always virtuous and regular in his morals, without any other passion

than for glory. Even before he became a Christian he respected

himself.”

Life, however, soon quickened into warmer bloom, in the heart of this

virtuous young heathen. Providence had other occupation for him than the

practice of the French bar, and the excitement of those politics which

present such a fantastic succession of revolution and stagnation,

violence and apathy. He woke up out of his classic convictions into

Christian life, and with characteristic promptitude, as soon as he

believed, devoted himself to the service of religion. “Neither man nor

book was the instrument of his conversion,” says his biographer. “A

sudden and secret touch of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of

irreligion. In one day he became a Christian, and the next, being a

Christian, determined to become a priest.” This prompt and clear spirit,

swiftly logical, unimpassioned, and master of itself, pervaded his

entire life. It was not argument or exhortation that convinced him. He

perceived in his rapid young soul—aware as he was of forces in himself

which must have work to occupy them, and of unspeakable want in the

world around him—“the nothingness of irreligion”—a notable and

significant discovery. That elegant, classic, unproductive blank of

Pagan virtue—could anything ever come of it, even in its highest

development? Swiftly the alternative presented itself to the young

Frenchman. Out of this “nothingness” he did not come by halves. From the

first freedom of his young manhood and accomplished education, he went

back again steadily to the rules and studies of a new training. After

three years at the seminary of St Sulpice he became a priest, at a time

when priests had little honour and no popularity in France. The young

advocate, glowing with all the inspirations of undeveloped eloquence—a

man destined to play so notable a part in his generation, and no doubt

aware in his heart of the genius which nobody else as yet

suspected—fell, in the flush of his youth, into obscure priestly

offices, such as doubtless demonstrated to him a “something” in the

Christian faith enough to exercise and employ all the helpful energies

of man. He became the almoner of a convent, then of a college, following

the common order of the youthful priesthood. Except the fact that he had

thus suddenly, by prompt exercise of will, joined himself to that

unpopular class, nothing as yet appeared to distinguish him from his

brethren. “The only thing singular in him was his liberalism,” says M.

de Montalembert. “By a phenomenon then unheard of, this convert, this

seminarist, this almoner of nuns, was steadfast in remaining a liberal,

as in the days when he was only a student and advocate.” This was, to

bystanders, the one remarkable feature in him—he was a priest, and yet

he was a liberal—to wit, a radical, a democrat, all but a republican.

From his convent he wrote like any other enthusiastic young man, in the

days when men found a gospel in political privileges, of “the

imprescriptible rights of the human race.” His dream was to place these

imprescriptible rights under the protection of the Church—to ally the

old religion with the new freedom. “Christianity is not a law of

slavery,” he wrote, in youthful boldness, from his “little convent of

the Visitandines,” when Paris surged with the subterranean heavings of

the Revolution of July. “She has not forgot that her children were free

when all the world groaned under the iron of so many horrible Cæsars;

and that they created, underground, a society of men who spoke of

humanity under the palace of Nero.” “In his youth and his solitude,” he

who had forsaken the bar and its triumphs, the world and its ways, for

the humble offices of the priesthood, arrived at this conclusion which

nobody else had dreamed of. It is a conclusion which, since then, has

been tried on a sufficiently large scale and found impracticable, but it

is not the less an idea which must have been full of charms and of

inspiration to the young priest, whom a higher call than that of

political right or wrong had drawn within the bosom of an institution

supposed, and with justice, to be the foe of liberty.

Across this calm and soft perspective—from which the young priest,

palpitating with all the impulses of youth and genius, looked forth with

hopes that seem Utopian, and warm ideal conceptions of good and glory

yet to be attained—a light more brilliant suddenly streams. This path of

life, as yet so humble, enveloped in profound personal obscurity,

unknown to man, is suddenly crossed by a dazzling meteoric radiance, and

thrown into strong illumination before the world. It is the Abbé de

Lamennais, strange Quixote of French religious history, who suddenly

appears upon the scene, without introduction or description, with a

suddenness somewhat confusing to an English reader, who is less

instructed in the notable facts and persons of Gallican ecclesiastical

history in recent years, than the audience which M. de Montalembert

especially addresses. The point of junction between the distinguished

ecclesiastic of La Chenaie and the young almoner of the Visitandines, is

this same belief common to both, that the Church, so far from being the

enemy, ought to be the chief supporter of political freedom. M. de

Lamennais, “then the most celebrated and the most venerated of French

priests,” had started from the opposite ground of high ultramontane

Papalism, but, by dint of the lofty view taken by a lofty and visionary

though wilful and uncertain mind, of that unique spiritual despotism,

had come to the conclusion—a conclusion falsified by all experience, but

not inconceivable in theory—that the Holy Father of Christendom ought to

be the guardian of all men’s liberties. It was 1830, a year of

Revolution,—another violent crisis had come in the fortunes of France.

The freedom, the boldness, the bewilderment of such a sudden change of

affairs, excited and stirred up all questions and spirits. This new

theory of the small but enthusiastic religious band, which aimed at

nothing less than re-conquering for the Church the love and heart of the

country, came into the field with many others. It is at this point that

M. de Montalembert, who for some little time has been preluding tenderly

in strains of love and lamentation, suddenly dashes into his story, and

introduces us, with an affectionate abruptness, into this agitated

society, to the beginning of his friendship with Lacordaire, and to the

person and character of his friend.

“It was in November 1830 that I saw him for the first time in the

cabinet of the Abbé de Lamennais,” he writes, “four months after a

revolution which seemed for a moment to confound in a common ruin the

throne and the altar, and one month after the beginning of the journal

‘L’Avenir.’ The motto of this journal was—_Dieu et la liberté!_ It was

intended by its founders to regenerate Catholic opinion in France, and

to seal its union with the progress of liberalism. I hastened to take

part in this work, with the ardour of my twenty years, from Ireland,

where I had just seen O’Connell at the head of a people whose

invincible fidelity to the Catholic faith had worn out three centuries

of persecution, and whose religious emancipation had just been won by

the free press and freedom of speech. A very small number of laymen

shared the convictions of M. de Lamennais, with a still more limited

number of priests. Among the latter, the Abbé Lacordaire, whom as yet

no one knew, was named to me. Not only was he not of those who had

made themselves a name by reproducing the doctrines of the celebrated

author of ‘L’Essai sur l’Indifference,’ but he could not even be

called his pupil.... There needed nothing less than the Revolution of

July and ‘L’Avenir’ to engage in a common work two natures so

profoundly distinct. I saw them both for the first time: dazzled and

swayed by the one, I felt myself more sweetly and more naturally drawn

towards the other. If I could but paint him such as he appeared then,

in all the radiance and the charm of youth! He was twenty-eight. He

was dressed as a layman, the state of Paris not then permitting

priests to wear their proper costume. His graceful figure, his fine

and regular features, his sculpturesque forehead, the commanding

carriage of his head, his dark and sparkling eye, an indescribable

something of pride and elegance, as well as of modesty, in all his

person—all this was but the cover of a soul which seemed ready to pour

itself forth, not only in the free encounters of public speaking, but

in the overflowing of affectionate intercourse. The flash of his eye

disclosed gleams at once warlike and tender; it sought not only

enemies to combat and to overthrow, but hearts to fascinate and

conquer. His voice, already so nervous and energetic, frequently

assumed accents of an infinite sweetness. Born to fight and to love,

he already bore the seal of the double royalty of the soul and talent.

He appeared to me charming and terrible, as a type of the enthusiasm

for good—virtue armed for the support of truth. I saw in him one of

the elect, predestined to all that youth adores and desires the

most—genius and glory. Yet he, still more attracted by the gentle joys

of Christian friendship than the distant echoes of fame, made us

understand that the greatest struggles moved us only by half—that they

still left us power to dream, above all, of the life of the heart—that

the days began and ended according as a loved remembrance had risen or

had been silent in the soul. It was he who spoke to me thus; and he

added immediately, ‘Alas! we ought to love only the infinite, and this

is the reason why that which we love is so complete in our soul.’ The

morning after this first meeting he took me to hear his mass, which he

said in the chapel of a little convent of the Visitandines in the

_Pays Latin_, and already we loved each other as men love in the pure

and generous impulses of youth and under the fire of the enemy. He

condescended to rejoice over that meeting which he had desired, and

upon which he congratulated himself in terms which expressed his

classic and democratic thought. He wrote, some time before, ‘My soul,

like Iphigenia, awaits its brother at the foot of the altar.’

Afterwards, speaking of his new friend to an older one, he said, ‘I

love him like a plebeian.’”

Such was the fervent young man with whom, in the year of the

Revolution, in the warmth of their youth, the young Montalembert

formed an everlasting friendship. They lived henceforward in a union

close as that of the classic models of amity, and effusive as is

natural to young Frenchmen. The two had hard enough work in hand in

those brilliant, agitated, youthful days, over which M. de

Montalembert lingers with a natural fondness. In the reign of utter

prose which had begun, this Young France stood all glowing and

poetic—believing in a new beginning as youth always believes—hoping

everything grand, exalted, and generous from the new era and its own

toils. They had their journal, choice vehicle of assault upon the

world and all its wrongs; and from that little battery thundered, day

by day, at all the injustice and oppression which came under their

quick observation, taking summary vengeance upon the offenders. To-day

it was a petty official, “_lui, ce sous-préfet!_” whom the young Abbé

tossed in the air on the point of that dazzling spear of youthful

scorn and beautiful indignation—to-morrow it was the new Government

itself which felt the diamond point of their virgin weapons. Young

ardour, daring hardihood, wild rushes at conclusions, grand assumption

and display of wisdom, mixed with a thorough enjoyment and relish in

the dangerous sport, shine through the tale. The young men were in the

flush of youth and conscious power, exercising a censorship which

somehow comes natural to youth, and which, in its brilliant

impertinence and freshness of life, earns its own excuse almost from

its victims. Lamennais, though not young, was of that character of

genius—generous, susceptible, and wilful—which commends itself to the

young, and leads without controlling them. He who, in the wild

retirement of La Chenaie amid the Breton woods, made for himself a

little family of the youths whom he had devoted himself to train for

the service of the Church, and attached them to him with a kind of

passion, seems to have exercised no subduing influence over the young

men whom he associated with himself in the work of ‘L’Avenir.’ They

tilted frankly at the world with an inexhaustible delight in their

work. “Neither the old clergy nor the new Government were disposed to

receive this new doctrine,” says M. de Montalembert, with unconscious

humour, in explanation of this work; “but the violence and mistakes of

the latter might be counted upon to enlighten, little by little, and

bring back the former. It was necessary, then, at once to point out

the arbitrary acts of certain functionaries against religion, and to

teach Catholics to draw, from liberal institutions and ideas, arms

which the fall of a dynasty could no more break in their hands. This

was the double task to which the young Henri Lacordaire devoted his

untried, and till then unknown, talent.”

Into this enterprise the young Abbé rushed with all his joyous youthful

forces. Violent Radicalism and lofty High-Churchism, both the one and

the other of a more fiery character than are known in our tamer

atmosphere, here took hands together and defied the world. The young

champion went to the wildest extremities in his vivid and rash

eloquence. The French priest even, in the inspirations of his genius,

antedated the equally fiery priests of Scotland, and loftily suggested

to his brethren of the clergy—while discoursing to them of the sacrilege

committed by a sous-préfet, who had forced an entrance into a country

church for the corpse of a man who had been refused the rites of

burial—an expedient which has only been adopted on the northern side of

the Tweed. “You will make him grow pale” (to wit, the sous-préfet),

cries the young orator, “if, taking your dishonoured God, with staff in

hand and hat on head, you bear Him into some hut made with fir planks,

swearing not to expose Him a second time to the insults of the

State-temples.” “These words,” says Montalembert, “indicate the extreme,

unjust, and dangerous conclusion from which ‘L’Avenir’ drew not back. It

said to the clergy that they should be prepared to renounce the _budget

du culte_, sole remnant of their ancient and legitimate patrimony, sole

guarantee of their material existence, to give up even the churches of

which the State assumed to be owner, to enter into full possession of

the invincible powers and inexhaustible resources of modern liberty.”

Nor did these bold assaults end in mere words. “A series of contests,”

continues the biographer, “the details of which would encumber this

narrative, but which were all designed to promote the emancipation of

the priests and the Catholic citizens, took him more than once to the

court of the _police correctionelle_, sometimes as the accused,

sometimes as client, sometimes even as advocate; for until he was

interdicted by a decision of the Council of Discipline, he still

retained the right to plead in that capacity; and I remember the

surprise of a president of the Chamber, in discovering one day at the

bar, in the robe of an advocate, the priest whose name already began to

be famous.”

Into these encounters the young man entered with a certain relish and

delight which sometimes amazed his friend. “I know not what attraction

drew him to those combats,” says M. de Montalembert; “one would have

said that he was trying the temper of his arms, and endeavouring to

render his blows more sure.” “I am convinced,” he wrote, in issuing from

one of his skirmishes, “that the Roman senate would not have frightened

me.” And not only did he find enjoyment in the fight for itself, but

occasional triumphs rewarded the young orator—triumphs of his frank and

open youth over the big popular spectator that loved not the name of

priest. One day, in answering an _avocat du roi_ who had ventured to say

that the priests were the ministers of a foreign power, Lacordaire

cried, “We are the ministers of one who is nowhere a stranger—of God.”

Upon which the audience, “composed of that people of July so hostile to

the clergy,” applauded, exclaiming, “My priest, my curé, what do you

call yourself? you are a brave man!” He was not less frank nor less

successful when he appeared as the defendant in a Government prosecution

along with Lamennais, on account of some of the plain-speaking of the

‘Avenir’ touching an appointment of bishops. In his speech before this

tribunal, Lacordaire defended himself, in his capacity of priest, with a

touching simplicity and dignity. “I rise,” he says, “with a recollection

that will not leave me. When the priest in former days rose amid the

people, something which excited a profound love rose at the same time

with him. Now, accused as I am, I know that my name of priest is mute

for my defence, and I am resigned to it. The people deprived the priest

of that ancient love which they bore him, when the priest deprived

himself of an august part of his character—when the man of God ceased to

be the man of freedom.... I never knew freedom better,” he continues,

with a burst of professional enthusiasm, “than the day when I received,

with the sacred unction, the right of speaking of God. The universe

opened before me, and I learned that there was in man something

inalienable, divine, eternally free—speech! The message of the priest

was confided to me, and I was told to bear it to the ends of the world

without any one having the right to seal my lips a single day of my

life. I went out of the temple with these grand doctrines, and I met

upon the threshold, law and bondage!” After this brilliant address, M.

de Montalembert comes in with a tender touch of description—a little

sketch which in a word or two makes us of the party, and reveals the

entire scene in all its agitation and triumph.

“The two accused were acquitted. The verdict was not given till

midnight. A numerous crowd surrounded and applauded the victors of the

day. When they had dispersed we returned alone, in the darkness, along

the quays. Upon the threshold of his door I saluted in him the orator,

of the future. He was neither intoxicated nor overwhelmed by his

triumph. I saw that for him the little vanities of success were less

than nothing; but I saw him eager to spread the contagion of

self-devotion and of courage, and delighted by the evidences of mutual

faith and disinterested tenderness, which in young and Christian

hearts burn with a purer and dearer light than all the victories.”

Generous and tender dreams! but who could refuse to believe that the

young companion, more intoxicated with his triumph than himself, who

wandered along those dark banks of Seine in the cool midnight, in the

silence, so grateful after that day’s toil, by his side, affectionate

and rejoicing, gave a dearer and more flattering homage to the young

orator than all the applauding crowds? This single sentence is one of

the most perfectly distinct touches of human personality and affection

in the book.

These pious young revolutionaries, “young and Christian hearts,”

continued for some time longer to get themselves into all kinds of

trouble. From freedom of speech they proceeded to contend for freedom of

teaching—constituted themselves into an _agency for the defence of

religious liberty_—and set up, at their own hand, a free school, taught

by three of themselves, in Paris. A curious scene followed. The three

young teachers, of whom Lacordaire was one and Montalembert another,

began their volunteer labours with twenty children to each. Next morning

an officer of the university appeared to stop this irregular assembly.

He addressed himself first to the children. “In the name of the law, I

summon you to depart,” cried this functionary to the assembled urchins.

“In the name of your parents, whose authority I have, I command you to

remain,” immediately answered Lacordaire. The small citizens, doubtless

charmed to be able to rebel so soon against law and government,

immediately gave their shrill suffrage in his favour. “We shall remain,”

cried the little rebels, with one voice. The result, of course, was,

that scholars and teachers had equally to succumb to the power of the

law, and that once more there ensued a trial, and brilliant appearance

of the eloquent Abbé, which this time was before the Chamber of Peers,

the most illustrious assemblage in France, one of the culprits, M. de

Montalembert himself, being a member of that august body. We have no

room to quote this speech; but the prosecution, like the former, seems

to have ended in nothing.

“I will be pardoned for lingering upon the events of that year, so

memorable for us,” says Montalembert, with touching grace. “There is no

one, however obscure and useless may have been his life, who, at the

decline of his days, does not feel himself drawn by an irresistible

current towards the moment when the first fires of enthusiasm were

lighted in his soul and on his lips—no one who does not breathe with a

sort of intoxication the perfume of these recollections, and who is not

tempted to boast beyond measure their charm and their brightness,—days

at once happy and sad,” he says—“days devoured by labour and by

enthusiasm—days such as occur but once in a life.”

The apology is beautiful, but it is unnecessary. Few will read the

history of those young days and friends, differing so totally from

ourselves, yet so entirely in accord, without feeling their hearts warm

to the historian, whose own youth rises so fair before him as he writes,

and of whom the world is fully advised that his maturer days have well

borne out the promise of that youth.

We, too, are tempted to linger, but must not, space and time preventing.

‘L’Avenir’ came at last to a sudden check, as was inevitable. After it

had affronted the clergy, the bishops, and the Government, united its

own little band of retainers in such bonds as unite men “under the fire

of the enemy,” and fought its way for thirteen months through all manner

of prosecutions and oppositions, the daring little journal came to a

close in a manner as remarkable and Quixotic as had been its career. “In

announcing the suspension,” says M. de Montalembert, “we announced at

the same time the departure of the three principal editors for Rome, in

order to submit to the Pope the questions in controversy between us and

our adversaries, promising beforehand an absolute submission to the

Pontifical decision.” Strange mission of the three—two of whom only had

youth to excuse them in this mad embassage—to persuade wise Rome to

embroil herself, and compromise her infallibility, in the decision of

questions so complicated, for the satisfaction of the editors of

‘L’Avenir!’ The two young men went lightly upon their mission, not

without natural excitement in the prospect of visiting the sacred city;

but matters were different with Lamennais, whose genius and lofty

intention seem to have been shipwrecked by that spirit of unmaturing

youthfulness, always sanguine of its own triumph, expecting everything

to yield to its will, absolute and petulant, and incapable of

contradiction, which is as undignified as it is unnatural in a man of

mature age. The confidence which led Lacordaire and Montalembert to

state their difficulties to his Holiness, and beg his decision upon

them, was sufficiently romantic and high-flown. “But how explain or

excuse it,” says our author, “in a distinguished priest, already mature

in age, as was the Abbé de Lamennais, who was then more than fifty, and

who had already lived at Rome, where the Pope had received him with the

greatest distinction?” The pilgrims were received with paternal kindness

and unresponsive civility. They got no reply, as was natural.

Lacordaire, always prompt and clear-sighted, with a native vein of good

sense and practical wisdom running through all the fiery impulses of his

genius, was the first to perceive how great a mistake they had made. He

remained more than two months in Rome endeavouring to reconcile

Lamennais to the failure of their mission, and, for his own part,

refreshing his soul in that wonderful shrine of all memories and

thoughts. “I can see him still,” says his affectionate biographer,

“wandering for long days among the ruins and the monuments, pausing, as

overpowered, to admire, with that exquisite feeling of true beauty which

never forsook him, all that Rome presents of the profound and the

antique—fascinated, above all, by the tranquil and incomparable charm of

her horizons; then returning to the common hearth to preach reserve,

resignation, submission—in a word, reason—to M. de Lamennais.” At last

the young priest announced to his fretful and rebellious senior his

intention of returning to France, to await there in silence, but without

remaining idle, the verdict of authority. “Silence,” said he, “is, after

speech, the second power in the world.” They parted so; and although

they again met after an interval, the erratic and devious career of

Lamennais had no further influence worth noting upon the clear,

straightforward course of his young associate. ‘L’Avenir’ and such

brilliant follies were over. Life, serious and grave, now awaited the

young priest and orator, whose time for trying the temper of his weapons

and the steadiness of his strokes was past.

After this agitating and fruitless journey, Lacordaire returned to

Paris, where he lived in seclusion, in duty, and silence, for three

years. Immediately after his return the cholera broke out, and he gave

himself up with grave enthusiasm to the necessities of the time,

attaching himself to one of the temporary hospitals. “The prejudices

against the clergy were still in full force,” says M. de Montalembert;

“the authorities refused the help of the Archbishop of Paris, and

priests could not show themselves in the streets _en soutane_.” But the

attendance of Lacordaire and a few of his more zealous brethren was

tolerated. “Each day I make a little harvest for eternity,” he writes.

“Most of the patients do not confess, and the priest is here only a

deputy of the Church, coming timidly to seek, if there may happen to be

some soul which belongs to the flock. Here and there one or two

confess—others are dying without ear and without voice. I put my hand

upon their forehead, and, trusting in divine mercy, I say the words of

absolution. It is seldom that I go away without a feeling of

satisfaction in having come.” But amid these unappreciated labours, and

in the loneliness, deeper than actual solitude, of a great town, the

young priest amused his lonely heart with dreams of the tranquil country

and a secluded life. He thought of becoming a rural curé, and in

imagination chose Franche Comté, the country of his friend. “I would

bury myself in the depths of the country,” he writes again, with an

effusion of visionary yet profound sadness. “I would live only for a

little flock, and find all my Joy in God and in the fields. It should be

manifest that I am a simple man and without ambition. Adieu, great

works! adieu, fame and great name! I have known their vanity, and I

desire nothing more than to live obscure and good. Some day when

Montalembert shall have grown grey in the midst of ingratitude and

celebrity, he will come to see upon my forehead the remains of our

common youth. We shall weep together at the hearth of the

_presbyterié_—he will do me justice before we die. I shall bless his

children.... For me, a poor Catholic priest, I shall neither have

children growing up under my eyes to survive me, nor domestic hearth,

nor Church brilliant with knowledge and sanctity. Born in degenerate

times, I shall pass from the earth among things unworthy of the memory

of man. I shall endeavour to be good, simple, pious,—hoping

disinterestedly in the future, since I shall not see it—working for

those who perhaps will see it—and not accusing Providence, which might

weigh down with heavier evils a life which deserves so little.”

Such were the sad thoughts of the young man thus stopped short in the

beginning of his career. He was not, however, permitted to leave Paris;

he returned to his little convent of the Visitandines, where he lived,

strengthening himself “in prayer and labour, in charity, in solitude—in

a life grave, simple, unknown, truly hidden in God;” but where that

sadness and wistful uneasiness which so often tries to persuade itself

into contentment, by dwelling upon the advantages of solitude, betrays

itself in his utterances. “How happy are they,” he writes, “who are born

and die under one roof without ever having quitted it.” Then he

congratulates himself on his retirement. “I have always needed solitude,

if only to say how much I loved it.... My days all resemble each other.

I work regularly in the morning and afternoon. I see no one, save some

country ecclesiastics, who come to see me now and then. I feel with joy

the solitude which encircles me—it is my element, my life. Nothing can

be done but with solitude—it is my great axiom.... A man makes himself

from within and not from without!” “Nevertheless,” adds the biographer,

“a certain instinct of the future which awaited him combined with this

passionate inclination for solitude, and disclosed itself now and then

in his soul like a gleam in the night. To speak and to write, to live

solitary and in study, this is my whole desire,” he wrote. “However, the

future will justify me, and still more the judgment of God. A man has

always his hour; he must wait for it, and do nothing contrary to

Providence.”

All this was the natural language of a young and exuberant life, whose

hour had not yet come, and which was fully occupied in the endeavour to

content and satisfy itself in its compulsory calm. During this interval

he preached his first sermon, which, after all the brilliant orations

which he had made at the bar and before the public courts, was a

failure. “He is a man of talent, but he will never be a preacher,” said

his disappointed friends; and he acknowledged and tried to reconcile

himself to the fact. “But I may one day be called to a work which

requires youth, and which will be devoted solely to youth,” says the

preacher, with a sigh of disappointment, yet hope. But soon the skies

opened, and the work for which he longed presented itself at last.

It was as lecturer to the pupils of the College Stanislas, “the most

humble in Paris,” that he recommenced in 1834 his public work. After his

second lecture the chapel could not contain the crowd of hearers who

joined his young auditory. At once, without any interval, he seems to

have vindicated his own gifts and flashed into immediate popularity. But

the shadow of ‘L’Avenir’ and all its combats was still upon him. After

two winters occupied thus, the Archbishop, who was his friend, and had

sanctioned his lectures, changed his mind, and forbade him to continue

them. Lacordaire obeyed without a murmur. “Obedience is hard,” he wrote,

“but I have learned by experience that it is sooner or later rewarded,

and that God above knows what is best for us; light comes to him who

submits, as to a man who opens his eyes.”

Shortly, however, his reward came. The heart of the Archbishop melted;

at the repeated petition of a deputation of law students, headed by the

celebrated Ozanam, he called the preacher of the College Stanislas to

the pulpit of Notre Dame, to a lectureship which had been established a

year before for the students of the metropolis. Here Lacordaire rose at

once to the height of fame as a preacher. His genius had been maturing

in the silence and disappointment of the past. Now there were no longer

two opinions on the subject. The venerable walls of Notre Dame had never

seen such an audience, says M. de Montalembert; and the highest

applause, the applause of his gratified diocesan, crowned the triumph.

The Archbishop, “who was present at all the sermons, and who for the

first time since the violences of which he had been the victim after the

Revolution of July, found himself in the presence of the crowd, was

transported by a success which avenged him so nobly by associating him

with the popularity of this new-born glory. One day, rising from his

archiepiscopal throne before that immense audience, he bestowed on his

young disciple the title of _the new prophet_.”

Around this new prophet a circle of young and fervent souls occupied the

closest place. The Society of St Vincent de Paul, newly formed, and in

all the ardour of its first love, whom the preacher apostrophised as

“that chivalry of youth, purity, and brotherhood,” formed the nucleus of

the congregation; and, looking back upon the image of his friend

triumphant amid such a surrounding, it is not wonderful that M. de

Montalembert breaks sharply off with a cry of indignation over the

downfall of that admirable Society, “the most beautiful work of the

nineteenth century,” as he exclaims, with natural fervour, “the most

pure and spontaneous fruit of Christian democracy.” “Imagine Lacordaire

in his strength, and with the liberty of the press, before such an act!”

says his biographer, recalling the days of ‘L’Avenir;’ “imagine the

justice which he would have done with that pen which of old had

stigmatised much smaller culprits by burning invectives, the echo of

which still vibrated in the pulpit of Notre Dame: _Lui, ce

sous-préfet!_”

When he had thus reached the height of popularity, and attained the

sphere of labour for which he had longed, Lacordaire stopped short in a

manner which cannot fail to amaze the English reader. Here terminated

the first chapter in the life of the great preacher. In the midst of his

triumphant success, and of this work so congenial to his mind and

satisfactory to his highest ambition, he came of his own will to a

sudden pause in his career. “By one of those marvellous intuitions, of

which he had more than any one else the secret, he recognised,” says M.

de Montalembert, “that self-examination, labour, silence, and solitude

were still necessary to him.” He paused at the height of his triumph. “I

leave in the hands of my bishop this pulpit of Notre Dame, founded by

him and by you, by the pastor and by the people. This double suffrage

has shone for a moment on my head; suffer me to remove it, and to find

myself again alone for a time with my weakness and my God.” With these

words he concluded his second Lent in 1836. “After he had left the

pulpit, he declined, notwithstanding the repeated entreaties of the

Archbishop, to re-enter it, and departed for Rome.”

No outward circumstances accounted for this sudden pause. It was an

internal need to which he responded by such a simple and actual

withdrawal from life as seems unprovided for, even in the conceptions of

Protestant piety. The spirit of Lacordaire, says one of his closest

companions, his maternal friend, Madam Swetchine, required only the

power of “subduing and containing itself in obscurity,” to become

sublime; a great and general necessity of all others the least easily

attainable. To accomplish such a victory over ourselves, we, in our

heretical pride of reason and self-command, have no external aids. What

we can do towards this greatest of conquests we must do under the cover

of ordinary circumstances and labour, and few and happy are the men who

do not find this perennial conflict recur in their disengaged moments

all through their lives. But the Catholic Church has ordained a system

of helps and stimulants in the great work of ruling their own spirit,

which is harder to most men than taking cities. When the young Father

Lacordaire felt the reins gliding out of his hands, in whatever way that

occurred—for we have no information on the subject—the expedient of

flight suggested itself to him, as it would have been very unlikely to

do to an Englishman in similar circumstances. The Catholic priest

thought it no shame to acknowledge to himself that his spirit stood in

need of discipline. All the saints and holy men of his Church had at

some period of their lives fled from the attractions of the world, and

used sharp methods of subduing the flesh, which they did not hesitate to

acknowledge was too strong for them. Lacordaire, too, withdrew to get

the mastery of his own spirit. This was his object in going to Rome. He

was in the height of manhood, thirty-four years old—the very noon of

life. He was no superstitious or visionary priest, but a man already

versed in the ways of the world, who had acquitted himself with

intuitive good sense in more than one difficult crisis. He had passed

through scepticism, through criticism, to that dutiful and steadfast

faith which knew both how to reason and how to obey. He was not

disappointed or unfortunate, but, on the contrary, glowing with success

and triumph of the kind most gratifying to such a man. He was not even

of an archæological type of mind, nor romantically prejudiced in favour

of the antique institutions of Christendom; he was a liberal, a man of

his day, an educated modern mind—able, surely, if ever priest or

Catholic was, to form his opinion freely. He had arrested himself by his

own will in a career abundantly flattering to all his tastes and

vanities, and now stood thoughtful in the mid-current of his life to

determine how he should best perfect and utilise that existence still in

its highest force and power. Wandering about Rome, among its monuments

and relics, praying to God, as he himself says, in its basilicas, he

pondered this great question. Nowhere could have been found a fitter

scene. Amid the ruins of many a grand ambition, over the traces engraven

in the earth by many a haughty and undisciplined spirit, the thoughtful

priest wandered, meditating the highest uses of his own life. His

thoughts came to a conclusion which, to our eyes, seems the most

inconceivable and astonishing ever made by man. He decided upon becoming

a monk. Aware by many a mortifying experience that the very name of

priest was still suspected and disliked in his own country, where all

his power and influence lay, this man, so sensible, so moderate, so

dutiful, whose genius had not made him eccentric, and whose sympathies

were all with his own age, decided that the best thing he could do for

France and the glory of God was to clothe his own vigorous life and

personality in the obsolete dress of the cloister. It was not the

cloistered indolence of an Italian convent to which he looked forward.

In the strength of his life and genius he felt no need of that repose,

which would but have chafed him. Eager for work, conscious of his own

powers, devoted to his own country, and seeking to qualify himself for

renewed and advancing labour, this was the decision to which Lacordaire

came; a decision altogether inexplicable and amazing, which we are

unable to account for at this distance, much less to explain.

Nor was this resolution adopted by any capricious impulse, or in any

flash of imaginative ardour. It was a conclusion obtained not without

pain and resistance of the flesh. “I persuaded myself then,” he

explains, in one of his latest productions, quoted by M. de

Montalembert, “while wandering about Rome, and praying God in its

basilicas, that the greatest service which could be rendered to

Christendom in the times in which we live, was to do something for the

restoration of the religious orders. But this persuasion, though it was

for me the very light of the Gospel, left me undecided and trembling,

when I came to consider how unfit I was for such a great work. My faith,

thank God, was profound. I loved Jesus Christ and His Church above

everything created. I had loved glory before I loved God, but nothing

else. Besides, in descending into myself, I found nothing there which

seemed to me to answer to the idea of a founder or even restorer of an

order. When I contemplated these Colossi of Christian strength and piety

my soul fell under me, like a horseman under his horse—I was struck to

the ground discouraged and wounded. The mere idea of sacrificing my

liberty to a rule and to superiors overwhelmed me. The son of an age

which scarcely knew how to obey, independence had been my couch and my

guide. How could I transform myself suddenly into a docile heart, and

henceforward trust only in submission for the light of my conduct?” The

question was hard to answer. Of all men the young editor of ‘L’Avenir’

might have seemed the least likely to attain such a height of virtue;

but from this difficulty he escapes, after much further self-argument,

by the following conclusion:—

“I encouraged myself by these thoughts, and it occurred to me that all

my previous life, and even my faults, had prepared for me a certain

access to the heart of my country and my time. I asked myself if I

should not be guilty if I neglected these openings by a timidity which

was good for nothing but repose, and if the greatness even of the

sacrifice was not a reason for attempting it?... Urged by the

situation, and solicited by a grace stronger than myself, I at last

made up my mind; but the sacrifice was terrible. It had not cost me

nothing to leave the world for the priesthood, but it cost me

everything to add to the priesthood the burden of monastic life.

However, in the second case as in the first, as soon as I had

consented to it I knew neither weakness nor repentance, and went

forward courageously to meet the trials which awaited me.”

It is not difficult to recognise in this second great decision of his

life the same prompt and steadfast spirit which, having convinced the

young advocate of the nothingness of irreligion, bore him at once,

without pause or lingering, into the service of that faith in which

there _was_ something, a power owned by all human hearts. It is the same

principle which again moves him. Common means and modes of working this

power have been sadly unsuccessful of recent years. What is this grand,

unused, obsolete instrument, the traces of which are marked all over

that Roman soil among the vines and the ruins? Who can tell if perhaps

_that_, restored to efficient working, and new-tempered and polished,

might accomplish, as of old, those prodigies of labour and service, for

which the usual tools seem no longer practicable? As soon as he settles

in his mind the undoubted duty of trying this forgotten weapon, and

restoring it to the armoury of the Church, no further pause is

necessary. In the height of his fame and strength, the great preacher

returns upon the new preparations and training necessary for his new

life. He disappears into “the depths of an Italian cloister” for his

novitiate, assured that he is thus doing his highest duty to God and his

country. “I believe that this act is the _dénouement_ of my life—the

result of all that God has done before—the secret of His graces, of my

trials and experiences,” he writes. “I am like a man who has gained some

credit, and who can apply it to some useful and generous work. Without

the past I could do nothing; by continuing only the past, it would be a

life of which the effect was not proportioned to the grace which God has

given me.” This was the strange result of his retirement and pondering.

In Notre Dame, amid the throng of impressed and admiring hearers, the

preacher felt that he was not doing enough, nor making sufficient use of

God’s gifts. A noble discontent had seized him—he had to make better

usury yet, and greater, of his talent. To see him, after all his

questioning, disappear into that Italian cloister, is to us the

strangest anticlimax—the most wonderful apparent contradiction; but it

was the calm conclusion of his mind—a mind ripe and well able to judge,

unimpassioned and sensible. We do not attempt to offer any explanation

of the act, nor do we profess ourselves competent to understand the

convictions that led to it; but strange as it is, here is the fact, let

us draw what conclusions we will. According to Lacordaire’s deliberate

and thoughtful decision, he could serve God best as a monk, and a monk

accordingly he became.

Five years afterwards he reappeared in the pulpit of Notre Dame, “with

his shaven head and his white tunic.” He preached with his usual

eloquence upon _La Vocation de la Nation Française_, and spoke only in

passing of his own monastic vocation. He made but one appearance,

contenting himself apparently with “inaugurating in France,” as M. de

Montalembert says, “the monastic frock, which she had not seen for fifty

years.” He disappeared from Paris after this for two years more,

dividing his time between the Italian cloister and the southern

provinces of France, until in 1843 a new war began to rage in the French

world, on that old question of liberty of teaching, for which the young

‘L’Avenir,’ years ago, had fought so stoutly, and for which its editors

had made their appearance at the bar of the Chamber of Peers. Under the

influence of this strife, and just as the Government awoke to alarm, and

began to regard with apprehension the appearance of the Dominican frock

in the pulpit and in the streets, the new Archbishop invited Lacordaire

to resume his lectureship in Notre Dame. The Frère Prêcheur took his

place again in the metropolitan pulpit: it was at once a defiance of the

alarmed Government, and a re-proclamation of those principles of

religious liberty on which the preacher had long ago taken his stand.

For this question “de la liberté d’enseignement” involved also the

question of liberty of association, the power of forming communities—a

power nominally accorded to the French nation by its charter, but which

had never been actually granted to it. The Church, wise as a serpent,

seized upon this public right. She, too, had bethought herself of the

long disused and valuable instrument of monasticism. Without monks no

thorough hold could be got upon popular educational institutions; but

without the power of forming corporations and organising bodies of men,

the invasion of a new race of monks was impossible. On the other hand,

alarmed statesmen and the public in general foresaw, with this power in

the hands of the Church, an immediate inroad of the dreaded Jesuit and

his brethren, to lay insidious hold upon the education of the people.

“While the bishops and Catholic publicists,” says M. de Montalembert,

“claimed the liberty promised by the charter with all its consequences,

the numerous orators and writers of the University party defended its

monopoly, and made use especially against the Jesuits of that

unpopularity which the heirs of the perverse doctrines and cruel

persecutions of the eighteenth century could everywhere re-awaken

against the religious orders. _We owe them nothing but expulsion!_ this

cry of a deputy too famous for his interruptions, seemed to the world of

so-called liberals the best response to the claims raised for religious

associations in the name of liberty and equality.” The Church mustered

her forces gallantly, and went into the conflict with might and main.

With cunning boldness she placed two of the feared and suspected monks

in the pulpit of Notre Dame—Lacordaire, in his white Dominican robe, and

the Jesuit De Ravignan—to fire between them the new-born enthusiasm of

French Catholics, and show what voices were these which the timidity of

the State and the prejudices of the vulgar would banish from France.

Into that pulpit politics did not enter—but an instrument more

efficacious was there. “Lacordaire did not himself enter into the

controversy,” says M. de Montalembert, “and not the least allusion to it

is to be found in all his discourses.... But the universal popularity of

his preaching, the immense audiences which everywhere collected around

the pulpit in which he appeared, were arguments much more eloquent than

discussions of politics or public law. It sufficed him to establish his

victory by preaching in Paris and throughout France, and by assuming the

right of living in a community, and attiring himself as he pleased,

which no one dared to contest with him, in the different places where he

lived with his brethren.” Such was the unquestionably potent line of

argument set up by the Gallican Church. Here was the greatest preacher

of the age, a man pure and pious, incapable of self-aggrandisement, full

of ardour for God’s service, known to have hazarded his life in hospital

and public pestilence, a champion of popular liberty, altogether of

spotless reputation and well-deserved fame; was the order to which such

a man belonged, by free will and choice, to be feared and banished? were

such as he to be interrupted in their great work because they preferred

to wear a certain garb and conform to certain rules? No, in the name of

liberty! A more effective plea could scarcely be imagined. Lacordaire’s

colleague, the Père de Ravignan, claimed for himself, as M. de

Montalembert tells us, “as a citizen, and in the name of the charter,

and of the liberty of conscience guaranteed to all, the right of being

and of calling himself a Jesuit.” But the Frère Prêcheur does not seem

to have done even so much as this. Never abandoning the idea for which

others were now fighting as he had once fought, he devoted himself to

his duties in the midst of the strife—made his monkish frock splendid

with the eloquence of a voice worthy the old renown of the French

pulpit—made it familiar to all eyes as he travelled through the country

collecting crowds of eager hearers everywhere; finally, with quiet

resolution, established here and there, in different quarters, houses of

his order, assuming for himself, in the strength of his character and

fame, the very right for which his colleagues were struggling, and

giving calm intimation, as he did so, that he would defend this right,

if attacked, before the tribunals of his country. Nobody ventured to

attack Lacordaire. The white Dominican went all over France, leaving

behind him here and there a little nucleus of monks. Public opinion

melted before the great preacher. If men’s minds did not change, at

least their opposition was hushed and put down by the unquestionable

eminence of the man. “Henceforward,” he himself says, “in all the

pulpits, and upon all the roads of France, the monastic robe has

recovered the right of citizenship which it lost in 1790.” He restored

the credit of the monks, and gained a certain degree of toleration for

the Jesuits themselves, and thus won what is in the eyes of M. de

Montalembert “the great victory which shall immortalise his name.”

This struggle, which Lacordaire himself calls “the most perilous and the

most decisive of all his campaigns,” was brought to a conclusion by the

renewed political agitations of 1848. In that strange hubbub and

overthrow of existing affairs, the tide of public commotion, by way of

demonstrating the hold he had obtained on the public mind, drew the monk

from his retirement to plunge him into the newly-formed Assembly of

France. His appearance there did not, in the excitement of the time,

shock the sensibilities of any; his election even “charmed and reassured

all religious men;” and the preacher himself was sufficiently sanguine

to believe that the mild Lamartine sway was to maintain the constitution

of France, and that great charter for which he had fought so long, and

to introduce a new era in the history of the nation. He obeyed the voice

of the people, like other great Elects, and took his seat always in his

Dominican frock in the revolutionary parliament—and he assisted in

founding another paper, ‘L’Ere Nouvelle,’ which was neither so

long-lived nor so brilliant as ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth. But the natural

good sense of the man shortly interposed. His parliamentary career

lasted but ten days, and erelong he retired also from the newspaper, and

withdrew to one of his new convents to recover himself and throw off the

excitement of this renewed essay at politics. Then having shaken himself

free of this interruption, he went back to his beloved pulpit, where he

preached and laboured as before for three years. But in April 1851, when

concluding his lectures, he took an unlooked-for and unintended

farewell—some subtle shadow of coming events, which, however, he denies

to be a presentiment, having moved him to special tenderness and

pathos—of the pulpit in which, more or less, he had laboured for twenty

years. “Oh, walls of Notre Dame! sacred arches which have borne my words

to so many intelligences deprived of God! altars which have blessed me!

I will never separate from you!” he cries, his heart moving within him

as he recalls his past life, and all that has happened there, since,

young and in the dawn of his fame, he made his first appearance in the

metropolitan church. But he never again entered the pulpit thus endeared

by the labours of a life; once more only he preached in Paris, and once

again, in 1854, delivered, at the request of the Archbishop, six

discourses in Toulouse. His career as a preacher had come to an abrupt

and unexpected conclusion: for in the mean time that virtuous republic,

which Lamartine and his brethren had begun so mildly, had fallen into

desperate troubles, and the sharp and sudden stroke of the _coup d’état_

had shocked society in France into a new mood. Freedom of speech,

eloquence itself, went suddenly out of fashion. Silence was best when

there was so little to say that could be anyhow consolatory to the

people or satisfactory to the ruler. With a delicate but indignant

reticence, M. de Montalembert indicates thus the reason of his friend’s

sudden withdrawal from the pulpit:—

“I do not think that any formal interdiction emanating even from the

temporal authorities had ever been pronounced against him; but there

was a general sentiment that this bold and free language which he had

used for twenty years, under all changes, without meeting any

obstacle, without recognising any curb but that of orthodoxy, was now

out of date. Evil days had come for the struggles and the triumphs of

eloquence. It was universally repudiated, and made responsible for all

the misfortunes of the country, for all the dangers of society, by a

triumphant revenge of those who had never been able to make any man

listen to them. The prince of sacred eloquence had thus to be silent.

He said afterwards, ‘I left the pulpit in a spontaneous fear of my

liberty before an age which was no longer free. I perceive,’ he added,

‘that in my thoughts, in my language, in my past, in what remains to

me of future, I also was a kind of freedom, and that my hour had come

to disappear like the others.’”

He preached no more. He was not yet fifty—still in the full vigour of

his powers—but the day of discussion, of agitation, of eloquence was

over, and Lacordaire, with instinctive wisdom, seems to have perceived

the expediency of submission. It is a strange conclusion to a singular

career. After the chivalrous pugnacity of his earlier years; after his

steady struggle all his life through, by every possible means to link

together democracy and Catholicism, the old unmoving Church and the new

ever-varying world; after ‘L’Avenir’ of his youth, with its daring hopes

and efforts—the brilliant youthful future which he and his colleagues

were to work out of revolution and anarchy—and ‘L’Ere Nouvelle’ of his

later years, which had less of the future, less of hope, yet was still a

new beginning;—it is a strange sight to see the champion suddenly drop

his arms and stand silent, arrested for ever before this new, strange,

silent figure of absolutism which has suddenly erected itself against

the agitated firmament. When this unlooked-for apparition rises between

him and the skies, the great preacher has nothing more to say. All is

over in a moment. “I have never feared but one thing—the absolute

triumph of an individual,” said his friend, Madame Swetchine. And when,

at last, after a world of controversy and discussion, that dreaded event

arrived, the public life of the great orator came to an almost

instantaneous conclusion. He retired not by compulsion, but by some

internal sense of necessity. “He had no violence, no persecution to

complain of,” says his biographer, “and I only render homage to truth by

declaring that I have never seen in him the least trace of bitterness or

of animosity against the new power. This power inspired him only with

the sentiment of neutrality, dignified and a little disdainful, which

existed in his nature in respect to all powers.” But whatever his

sentiment might be, the fact is certain. Before all other developments

of power the orator had held up bravely the banner of the Church, and

kept his place. Before this new potency he gave way and yielded. It is

one of the strangest acts of homage ever done to an unquestionable

strength—“Le prince de la parole sacrée dût donc se taire.” He gave up

that right over which he had rejoiced in the fervent days of his youth

as “something inalienable, divine, eternally free”—the right of speaking

of God. He made neither resistance nor public protest. The shadow of the

new Empire fell over him in sudden chill and silence, and the words died

upon his fervid lips. He who had spoken so freely, laboured so hard,

spent himself so liberally for the service of his Church and country,

was in himself, as he expresses it, “a kind of liberty”—a personified

freedom; and, as with other freedoms, the day was over for him. He saw

by intuition that resistance was useless. The silent despot overawed, as

by a species of fascination, the eloquent priest, who, in his heart, was

“a little disdainful” of all kinds of powers. This new kind of power,

personal, self-concentrated, standing alone in an inexorable mute

mystery over the destinies of France, silenced the preacher as if by

force of instinct. His voice died out of the country, which had fallen

into a sudden paralysis, half of fear, half of admiration, before this

basilisk Emperor. The spell was upon Lacordaire as upon France. He never

opened his lips again in public after that one series of provincial

lectures, which were themselves broken off and left imperfect, because

one of them contained “some outbursts of truth, of grief, and of

boldness, which were no longer in season. He had to renounce public

speaking definitively,” says M. de Montalembert, with significant

reserve; and here, according with the beginning of the imperial power,

ended his public life.

He withdrew after this to Soraye, an ancient abbey, first of the

Benedictines, then of the Dominicans, to which order he himself

belonged, and where there now flourished a large public school. He

devoted himself to the regeneration and perfection of this institution,

to “the teaching of youth, which had always been the supreme vocation of

his life.” Here he consoled the sadness and disappointment of his heart,

wounded as it was by the sudden overthrow of all the work of his life,

and by the sad and rapid change of affairs which had taken place in

France, among the children whom he loved. But though he made no public

complaint, and manfully devoted himself to the favourite occupation

which Providence had still left to him, the lamentable downfall of all

his hopes went to the heart of the liberal monk. His country, his age,

“which scarcely knew how to obey,” had become all at once eager “not

only to accept but to implore a master.” His Church and religious party,

“clergy and Catholics, who had so long applauded the masculine

independence of his eloquence, had fallen all at once a prey to a

delusion without excuse, and to a prostration without example in all the

history of the Church. Names which had been honoured to appear beside

his own in the memorable manifestoes by which Christian liberty had

invoked the sole shelter of public freedom, appeared all at once affixed

to harangues and mandiments which borrowed the forms of Byzantine

adulation to salute the mad dream of an orthodox absolutism.” “Till the

last day of his life,” adds M. de Montalembert, “the grief and

indignation with which the sight of this great moral catastrophe

inspired him was not weakened. But his affliction, his magnanimous

wrath, breathed forth in his letters. This treasure remains to us, thank

God! it will be preserved for posterity; and when the time shall come

when all may be said, it will appear as the most brilliant and most

necessary of protests against those who have so miserably divided,

disarmed, and discredited Catholicism in France.”

We have no space to quote, as the biographer does, those melancholy and

indignant letters. Whilst thus breathing forth to his friends the

disappointment which consumed his soul, Lacordaire lived on in his

southern seminary, far from the busy world which had deceived him, a

life of usefulness and silence. It was a “retreat laborious and

animated” in which he now found himself; and, with a true Christian

philosophy, the great orator bent all his faculties to his work. “One of

the consolations of my present life,” he writes, with touching sadness,

“is to live only with God and children: the latter have their faults,

but they have still betrayed nothing and dishonoured nothing.” He made

Soraye “the most flourishing and popular scholastic establishment in the

south;” he formed a tender paternal friendship with many young souls,

over whom he had immense influence. With the same eloquence which he had

displayed in Notre Dame he preached to his pupils in their provincial

chapel. In short, he accepted his position like a true man; and, hiding

his mortification, his profound disappointment, his injured heart in his

own breast, devoted himself to the important but obscure position in

which he was to end his life. Here another great event happened to him

in his seclusion. It was from Soraye he came, in his Dominican frock, to

receive from the French Academy “the noblest recompense which can, in

our days, crown a glorious and independent life.” He sat one day only in

that illustrious assembly, where he appeared, as he himself said, as

“the symbol of freedom accepted and fortified by religion.” This last

honour was the last public event which occurred in his life. He went

back laureated for his dying, and ended his life in Soraye, after a

painful illness—so far as we are able to make out, for M. de

Montalembert is indistinct in the matter of dates—in the winter of 1861.

“It is the first time that my body has resisted my will,” he said, with

a half-playful melancholy, in the midst of his sufferings; and died

exclaiming, “My God, open to me, open to me!” with a sublime simplicity.

God opened to him, and his agitations were over. Whether on the other

side of that wonderful gateway he might discover that his monkish frock

was less worth fighting for than it appeared, who can inquire? He lived

a life full of worthy labour and service, and doubtless found his

reward.

Our space does not permit us to follow M. de Montalembert, in his

quotations from the letters and sermons of his friend, though there are

in these letters many snatches of brilliant and tender eloquence on

which we are much tempted to linger. It is not, however, in his

productions that Lacordaire is most remarkable; it is in his character

and career. “The principal thing is _to have a life_,” he himself said,

when deprecating the over-production of modern literature; and no man

has more exemplified the saying. He had a life, this man of conflict and

strife, of self-denial and silence, of independence and duty—a life too

human to make any formal anatomical consistency over-visible in its

flesh-and-blood details—broadly contradictory, yet always in a harmony

with itself more true than consistency. With his heart full of the

agitations and the hopes of his time, he lived in his cloister in the

practice of self-mortifications and punishments as severe as those with

which any antique son of Dominic had subdued the flesh. “When all the

events of this generous life shall be known, the orator will disappear

before the monk,” says his sympathetic and admiring biographer, “and the

_prestige_ of that eloquence which has moved, enlightened, and converted

so many souls, will seem a less marvel than the formidable austerity of

his life, the severity with which he chastised his flesh, and his

passionate love for Jesus Christ.” This is the side of his character and

existence least comprehensible to the English spectator. How he, so

unimpassioned, so temperate, so sensible—he who had only loved glory,

and nothing else, before he loved God—should have needed “excessive

macerations” to subdue that flesh which, so far as appears, was far from

exercising any despotic sway over the spirit, is a curious question, and

one which perhaps never can be answered to the satisfaction of our

practical understandings; but the interest, the individuality, and

sincere nobleness of his life seem unquestionable. From his little

convent he passes to the bar and public tribunal, where even the

unwilling crowd applauds; to the pulpit, where admiring multitudes

surround him; yet returns to his Visitandines and his almonry, obedient

and silent, when the hour of his triumph is over. From the height of

popular fame and success, driven by that noble intuition in his heart

that he is not sufficiently using the talent God has given him, he

withdraws to take up the monk’s frock, most despised of habits, not to

hide a mortified life or wounded heart, as a sentimental bystander might

suppose, but for the sake of the labour and use of which he believes it

still capable. Deeply contradictory as such a proceeding is of all our

convictions and theories, it is far from our thoughts to blame

Lacordaire for this singular vestment in which he enwrapped all his

later life. It may be that to the eyes of this languid and over-refining

age, the forcible type and symbol which antedate all arguments is, after

all, the thing most wanted; and that the apparition of the monk,

self-denuded of all possessions, even of his own will, for the glory of

God and the service of his neighbour, may startle the confused

intelligence into a belief of that work and its importance, which no

philosophy could give. Such at least seems to have been the conviction

of Lacordaire. Like his great contemporary Irving, the French preacher

felt the inefficacy of common means for the work on which his heart was

set. To both the world came open-mouthed, wondering and admiring; but

neither in the London modern church, nor under the noble arches of Notre

Dame, was the report of the prophet believed as he felt in his heart it

ought to be. This uneasiness in the passionate heart of our great

countryman gave rise, by some subtle magnetic influence, to a wild dream

of miraculous aid and voices from heaven; and in the self-controlled and

unimpassioned soul of the French priest it wrought an issue almost as

strange—the restoration, to some extent, of monasticism in his country,

and the dedication of his own life to that disused and discredited

vocation. No two men could be more unlike, but here both met in a

strange concord and agreement. Something had to be done beyond the

ordinary routine of evangelism to seize upon the dull ear and sluggish

heart of the time. Supernaturalism, or monasticism, or any other

martyrdom—what matter, so it did but startle that slumbering generation

to some thought of its evil ways? Let us build the sepulchres of those

prophets whom our fathers, by their apathy and indifference, drove into

such a noble desperation. We too, doubtless, will do our share of the

same work. Yet it is a kind of penitence of humanity for its

ever-recurring mistakes and misconceptions, which prompts one generation

to decorate the tombs into which the sins of a former generation have

urged and driven the not perfect yet noble dead.

LADY MORGAN’S MEMOIRS.[4]

In a small house furnished in the tawdry-brilliant style, in a small

street adjoining Lowndes Square, there dwelt, between the years 1828 and

1859, a small woman, who, though very old, persisted in believing

herself to be young, and dressed and spoke and acted as if she were the

observed of all observers. She was not handsome; she never could have

been, for there were defects both in face and form at variance with

beauty; but she was bright, or rather brisk, in the expression of her

countenance, and her air was jaunty, though neither graceful nor

elegant. The career of this little woman had been a remarkably busy,

and, on the whole, a successful one. She was a voluminous writer, and

had made a good deal of money out of her publishers. By a process which

is perhaps better understood on the other side of St George’s Channel

than here, she succeeded in making her way into what is called

“society,” and she never loosened her hold, having once made it fast,

upon man or woman, whom, for any reason of rank, worth, or talent, she

considered it worth while to cultivate. It is curious to observe

likewise the skill with which she makes it appear that the balance of

advantage in the matter of acquaintance was always on the side of her

friends, especially when they happened to be gentlemen; for she laboured

under the happy delusion of believing that she was not only the

cleverest, but the most beautiful woman of the age, and that no man,

young or old, married or single, ever approached except to fall in love

with her.

Time, however, overtook her, as he overtakes other people, and beat her

in the race. Latterly she went out little in search of society, either

because invitations came sparsely in, or that the fatigue was too great

for her, or that she grudged the fly-hire. But she had weekly receptions

in her own little drawing-room, and moved heaven and earth, and a

variety of penny-post men, to get them attended. A few old Whigs,

including the Marquess of Lansdowne and good-natured Lord Carlisle, when

he happened to be in town, looked in occasionally at her soirées. Now

and then a Tory man of genius—Sir E. B. Lytton, for example—would make

his appearance; and it has even been whispered, though we doubt the

truth of the story, that a learned divine, sometimes two, might

occasionally be seen in the throng. But the bulk of her guests consisted

of fashionables of a second or third order, with a few small

celebrities, literary, musical, and artistic. The little woman was very

great on these occasions. She dispensed her weak tea and weaker

conversation with equal fluency; she flattered and received flattery to

any conceivable amount. Every man his own trumpeter, and every woman

too, was with her an article of religious belief; and she did what

religious professors are suspected of not always doing—she carried her

faith into practice. A judicious application of rouge to the cheeks, the

frocks and furbelows of a girl, a mincing gait, and a perpetual smile,

set her forth to the best advantage. At eighty-three years of age she

was still a butterfly; and if she could not flit, she floundered from

flower to flower.

One day it became known, through a paragraph in the ‘Morning Post,’ that

Lady Morgan was dead. London was not thrown into a state of

consternation by the announcement, neither did any of its leading

habitués array themselves in mourning: on the contrary, we are afraid

that, having read the brief sketch which accompanied the notification,

and commented upon it, most people forgot within five minutes or less

that such a person as Lady Morgan had ever existed. But this was a

consummation which, though common enough where others were concerned,

her ladyship had made up her mind should not occur in her case. Having

engrossed, as she believed, a large share of public attention while

living, she determined that she should not cease to be talked about when

dead. Accordingly, she conceived the brilliant idea of immortalising

herself in a posthumous work, and occupied herself, early and late, in

preparing the materials. She availed herself of the assistance of

kindhearted Miss Jewsbury in this work, and appointed by will that Mr

Hepworth Dixon should be the guardian of her literary reputation. We

never heard whether in her lifetime she made Mr Dixon aware of the

honour which was intended for him: we think it probable that she did

not; because Mr Dixon is reputed to be a man of sense; and it strikes us

that, knowing his woman, he would have got out of the scrape had the

chance of doing so been afforded him. But it is one thing to object to a

proposed arrangement before it is completed, and quite another to refuse

carrying into effect the last wish of a relative or dear friend. The

struggle was doubtless severe; but sentiment prevailed with Mr Dixon

over the remonstrances of good taste and good feeling. He took home the

box which contained the precious documents; and now, at an interval of

three years from the old lady’s death, the results are before us.

But Mr Dixon, though a pious executor, is not the less a wise man. He

seems to have read her ladyship’s papers through, and arrived at a just

appreciation of their merits. They would not bear handling in any shape;

they must come before the public exactly as they came before him, or he

at least could have nothing to say to them. Here is his preface:—

“Lady Morgan bequeathed her papers and journals to me, with a view to

their publication. The collection was large, as she had preserved

nearly every line written to her from the letters of princes and

statesmen, the compliments of poets, of exiles, and heroes, down to

the petitions of weavers, chimney-sweeps, and servant-girls—even the

invitations sent her to dinner, and the address cards left at her

door. Many of these trifles of the day have no value now; a hundred

years hence, if kept together, they may serve to illustrate with

singular brightness and detail the domestic life of a woman of society

in the reign of Victoria. My duty in the matter of their publication

was clear enough. Lady Morgan had not only proposed to write her own

memoirs, but had made a considerable progress in her task. A good part

of a volume had been prepared under her own eyes for the press. Much

of the correspondence to be used had been marked, and the copious

diaries, in which she had noted the events of her life and the course

of her thoughts, supplied nearly all the additions which could be

desired. Under these circumstances, it appeared to me that Lady Morgan

could be judiciously left to tell her own story in her own way.”

If Mr Dixon had followed any other course, he would have done great

injustice both to himself and to Lady Morgan. Her ladyship’s story, as

told by herself, is indeed a literary curiosity: had it been told by

him, or by anybody else, we doubt whether it would have found a dozen

readers. It is probable, for example, that Mr Dixon would have

endeavoured to settle the dates of events as they occurred. Possibly,

too, he might have narrated these events exactly as they befell: we are

pretty sure that he would have done his best to draw a faithful

portraiture of his heroine—coloured, perhaps, with the tints which

biographers are apt to shed over the objects of their laudation, but not

absolutely blazing. Lady Morgan knew a great deal better than this. She

starts with the frank avowal, “that she never means to be trammelled by

attending to dates.... What has a woman to do with dates?—cold, false,

erroneous, chronological dates! New style, old style, procession of the

equinox; ill-timed calculation of comets long since due at their

stations, yet never come.” Don’t let the reader suppose that this is a

mere empty flourish of trumpets. Lady Morgan was never more earnest in

her life than when she wrote these sentences. It formed part of her plan

to be considered as enjoying a perpetual youth, and she took the

readiest, and, as she believed, the surest means of effecting that

purpose. In like manner, Lady Morgan had resolved that from beginning to

end, her career, as the world was to follow it, should be a romance. She

throws an air of mystery, therefore, not only over the date of her

birth, but over all the incidents of place and condition into which she

fell; till circumstances, as wonderful as they are fortunate, combined

to plant her in the foremost ranks of literature and fashion. This gives

her an immense advantage over autobiographers in general. She is free to

say what she pleases, and to say it as she pleases; and if the public be

perverse enough to discredit her statements wholly or in part, what is

that to her? The public will read her book and talk about it, and the

subject of it; and her manes, if she have any manes, will for a while be

gladdened.

There are two ways of telling the story of Lady Morgan’s infancy and

girlhood. The first, or poetical, which is her own, describes her as

descended from an old Irish family—as the daughter of a man of brilliant

genius and the highest sense of honour—as coming into the world at a

moment when this great and good man’s affairs happened, unfortunately,

to be in confusion; and as thus forced, without any fault of his or her

own, to make a too early acquaintance with poverty and its attendant

evils. The other, or prosaic, which has no foundation to rest upon

except vulgar fact, says that Sydney Owenson was the daughter of a

strolling player, who could never clearly distinguish between _meum_ and

_tuum_—who was always rollicking, light-hearted, and merry—who spent

every farthing which he earned faster than it came in, was often in

prison, and perpetually in debt. The poetic, or Lady Morgan’s reading,

further shows that the Owensons or M‘Owens came from one of the great

houses of Connaught, which at some remote period, date unknown, had lost

or forfeited their enormous estates; that her grandfather, a handsome

young yeoman, ran away with her grandmother, and that, though very poor,

they lived, upon the whole, comfortably and respectably together. The

other, or prosaic version, seems to say that it was Miss Owenson’s

grandmother who ran away with her grandfather; that she fell in love

with his _illigant_ Hibernian proportions on the occasion of a great

curling-match, and never let him alone till he had made her his wife. It

is not, however, so easy, as we advance in this interesting history, to

follow the line which separates the ideal from the real; but this much

at least is certain, that before the end of a year the _ci-devant_ Miss

Crofton became the mother of Robert M‘Owen, and that Robert M‘Owen

became in due course of time the father of Sydney Lady Morgan.

There is nothing to show very clearly under what circumstances the

patronymic M‘Owen made way for the more euphonious Owenson. We are

inclined to believe that the change must have occurred at the time when

young M‘Owen became a dependant upon the Blakes, and hereby hangs a

tale. Mrs M‘Owen, it appears, was a sweet singer, and played skilfully

on the Irish harp. She possessed likewise a large share of that

inventive faculty which descended to her granddaughter, for she managed

to get up such a story, and to tell it so effectively, as to induce a

rich neighbour to become the patron of her son. A Mr Blake, a man of

enormous wealth, had purchased the property on which M‘Owen’s cabin

stood. He called one day on the inmates, and was struck, of course, with

the ladylike manners of one of them, who soon made him aware of the

gentility of her own descent, and got up a pedigree still more startling

for her husband and son. Mr Blake was assured, with great solemnity and

perfect effect, that at some period indefinitely remote a Blake had

diddled a M‘Owen out of his estate. The millionaire’s sympathies were

awakened, either by the tale, or by the manner of telling it; and as he

had previously been struck by the boy’s exquisite voice (for young

M‘Owen sang like a thrush, and formed one of the choir in the morning at

the chapel, and in the afternoon at the church), Mr Blake forthwith

proposed to take him into his family and do for him. It was too good an

offer to be refused. Young M‘Owen, henceforth to be spoken of as

Owenson, left the cabin for the hall, and received just such an

education as a horribly selfish bachelor with some fine tastes

considered would suffice to render the boy useful to himself, and

amusing to other people.

We hear nothing after this of Grandfather M‘Owen, and not much of

Grandmother. They probably continued to live, the rest of their days,

the cat-and-dog life which usually falls to the lot of persons

circumstanced as they were; but the son goes with his patron to Dublin,

where for the first time he is present at a play. By-and-by, after

exchanging his frieze for broadcloth, he removes to London. There wits

and beauties flock about him. He is very clever—he sings divinely.

Oliver Goldsmith is his first cousin, five times removed, and Madame

Weichsel takes a fancy to him. This is too much, and the lad’s head gets

turned. Mr Blake has occasion to visit Ireland, or says that he has, and

goes away, after charging young Owenson to keep at home and look after

his property. In particular, he charges the lad not to go to the theatre

in his absence, or to any other place of public amusement; but no sooner

is the patron’s back turned, than the protégé hurries off to Vauxhall,

and is easily persuaded to take part in the duet of ‘Fair Aurora’ with

his friend Madame Weichsel, who has an engagement there. He little knows

what eyes are upon him all the while. Mr Blake has not gone to Ireland;

he has come to Vauxhall to be amused, and after listening to the duet,

and probably applauding it, he goes straight back to his house in

Russell Street. We are not prepared to say what might have happened had

young Owenson returned home to sleep. But he did nothing of the sort; he

was out on a spree for three days and three nights, and found, when the

fun was over, that his trunk stood ready roped in the hall, and that a

letter from Mr Blake, containing a bank post-bill for £300, requested

him to go about his business.

On the whole, we are inclined to believe that this is a not incorrect

statement of the case. Some allowances must of course be made for

over-colouring. Probably Owenson was not quite the accomplished

gentleman whom his daughter represents him to have been, nor Mr Blake

the sybarite and the brute she describes. At all events, we think he did

perfectly right in getting rid of a scapegrace whom he could not trust

out of his own sight. Such, however, were not young Owenson’s views of

the matter. He indignantly re-enclosed the bank-note to Mr Blake (we

have some doubts about that fact), and marched off, proud and penniless,

to Oliver Goldsmith. The upshot was that he took to the stage, and sang

and acted with moderate success. He accepted an engagement in

Shrewsbury, and there persuaded the mayor’s daughter to marry him

privately. It was a decided _mésalliance_ on both sides, for the good

blood of old Ireland got contaminated by intermixture with that of a

provincial magnate; while the magnate took so little to the honour

conferred upon him, that he refused to make any settlement on the young

couple, or even to see them.

Miss Hill, now Mrs Owenson, was a follower of Lady Huntingdon, and hated

the stage. She prevailed upon her husband, great as he was in such

characters as Sir Lucius O’Trigger and Major O’Flaherty, to abandon it,

and he confined himself to singing at oratorios. This continued for a

while, very much to the singer’s discontent; but by-and-by Richard

Daley, Esq. of Castle Daley (let us not withhold the title), persuaded

the facile Owenson to violate his pledge, and to connect himself with

the Theatre-Royal, Crow Street, Dublin, of which he of Castle Daley was

the patentee. There followed upon this a removal to Drumcondra, where

the deputy-manager—for such was Mr Owenson’s rank—took a “pretty villa,”

and Mrs Owenson bore as she best might her banishment to the land of

Papists and potatoes. And here, in passing, we would venture to point

out, that when Lady Morgan speaks of “pretty villas,” “elegant

cottages,” “lovely villages,” and suchlike, she does not always intend

that we should believe her _au pied de la lettre_. The “pretty villa” in

the “lovely village” was, we suspect, in the present instance, a

tumbledown, half-ruinous house on the outskirts of a dirty lane, much

frequented by long-legged swine and half-naked children. And we arrive

at this conclusion from recollecting a little incident in her ladyship’s

after-history, which may be worth recording. She went out of town, on

one occasion, to write, as she said, “in quiet,” a book on which she was

engaged. Her correspondence with her fashionable friends was not,

however, intermitted; and in a letter to Lady Charleville, not given in

this collection, she describes herself as “sitting beside a glass door,

which opens upon a velvet lawn, and commands a lovely view over one of

the fairest landscapes that ever delighted the eye of a painter.” Lady

Charleville, happening not long after to be near the place of

“Glorvina’s” retreat, had the curiosity to go and see the spot which had

been thus delineated, and found it to be a small and rather dirty room

in a cottage, with a single window looking out upon a cabbage-garden,

beyond which, at about ten yards’ distance, uprose a stiff quickset

hedge, impervious to the vision!

We must pass lightly over what remains to be told of the family history

of the Owensons. It is rather confusedly narrated, and seems to imply

that the circumstances of the household were generally straitened, and

that they either shifted their habitat very frequently, or were often in

two places at the same time. We have just ascertained, for example, that

on the arrival of Mrs Owenson in Ireland, “my father took a pretty villa

for her at Drumcondra.” Yet the authority for this fact relates: “I was

born on Christmas Day, in that land where all holy days are religiously

celebrated, as testimonials to faith, and are excuses for festivity in

ancient ould Dublin.” And here again there is a blank, which we are left

to fill up as we please. On the Christmas Day of what year might this

memorable event occur? Taking collateral circumstances into account, it

might not unfairly be assumed that some Christmas Day about the middle

of the last century witnessed the remarkable occurrence. But the

inference, we suspect, would be erroneous. Having taken a good deal of

pains to settle the matter, we are glad that it is in our power to save

Lady Morgan from the reproach of having lived many years beyond eighty.

She was born in 1776. “Bells tolled, carols were intoned—the streets

resounded with joyous sounds; an uproarious party sat about the board of

as fine a type of the Irish gentleman as Ireland ever set forth, when

another birth” (another than what?) “was announced by a joyous gossip to

the happy father, who instantly disappeared.” We cannot too much commend

the taste, not to say the piety, of this whole sentence. No wonder that

the guests, waiting, “not with empty glasses,” till the happy father’s

return, should have considered the event a “reason fair to fill their

glass again,” or that they were with difficulty dispersed on the

assurance “that they should all meet again that day month, to be present

at the christening of the young heathen.”

The christening of the “young heathen” took place in due time. The

ceremony is well described, and the style eminently characteristic, for

it is light, airy, graceful, and considerably profane. Then comes a

pause, extending, as it would appear, over some years—and after that a

graphic account of the lumbering of a post-coach, “on the evening of a

dreary winter’s day, up the ill-paved hill of an old street in the

oldest part of Dublin, called Fish Shambles Street.” Where the coach

came from we are not told, but it conveyed Mrs Owenson and her two

daughters (for by this time Olivia likewise had been born, and both she

and Sydney were able to take their share in conversation) to the new

home which Mr Owenson had prepared for them. And here comes another

mystery. The house is evidently a ruin—but why a ruin, and how, if ever,

repaired, we never learn. It is enough for us to know that Mr Owenson,

in breach of his engagement with Mr Daley of Castle Daley, had taken the

National Theatre Music Hall, and that it was opened with the

representation of three pieces,—“‘The Carmelite,’ ‘The Brave Irishman,’

and ‘The Poor Soldier.’ A medley of Irish airs made up the overture,

which ended with the Volunteers’ March, and my father wrote and spoke

the prologue in his own character of an Irish Volunteer.” Now, if we

recollect aright, the Irish Volunteers were in their glory about 1782,

and as we learn that Miss Sydney, when the “post-coach” set down its

burden, had held an interesting conversation with her mother about

Handel, it appears to us that on this eventful night she could not have

been less than six years old at the least.

Mr Owenson’s theatrical adventure was not a fortunate one. The

Government went against him, by granting to Mr Daley a patent for the

exclusive performance of the regular drama; and the Dublin gentry,

though they took plenty of boxes at the Music Hall, objected or forgot

to pay for them. Neither was he more successful in trade. His cousins,

the Ffrenches, an old family, of course, exiled on account of their

religion, or for some other cause, made him their agent for the sale of

wines which they grew at Bordeaux; and though he certainly managed to

get rid of large quantities, he was never able to remit to them

negotiable bills for the same. He went, in short, to the dogs, his

course thither being a good deal accelerated by the death of his amiable

but gloomy and Calvinistic wife. And now began in earnest the education

of the two Misses Owenson. They were placed under a French _emigrée_, a

Mme. Terson, who kept school first at Portarlington, and afterwards at

Clontarf, and learned from her imperfectly a good deal, living at the

same time with “many girls of rank, and some of distinguished talent.”

How Mme. Terson got paid we are left to conjecture. Probably she never

got paid at all; but being a benevolent person, and a sort of sister of

mercy, she allowed the player’s daughters to remain with her for four

years, and then handed them over to a Mrs Anderson in order to be

finished. Mrs Anderson, however, was a different sort of person from

Mme. Terson. Her pupils “were the daughters of wealthy mediocrities;

their manners were coarse and familiar;” and Mrs Anderson herself had a

vulgar desire to receive _quid pro quo_. The young ladies could not,

under such circumstances, remain long with her. Yet “the school in Earl

Street had its advantages too, for it brought us constantly in contact

with our dear father, who walked out with us every Sunday on the Mall in

Sackville Street, where the fashionables of Dublin most did congregate,

who seldom passed us without the observation, ‘There goes Owenson and

his two dear little girls.’”

Having thus early established for herself an interest in the esteem and

admiration of “the fashionables,” it is not to be wondered at that

Sydney Owenson’s after-career should have been brilliant. She went with

her father to Kilkenny, where he built “a beautiful little theatre,” and

mortgaged it, before it was roofed in, “to a wealthy and fashionable

attorney.” The usual results followed—Mr Welch, the wealthy and

fashionable attorney, “foreclosed his mortgage suddenly” (we have heard

that he never could get a farthing of interest), “and bills to an

enormous amount were presented.” They were accepted as a notice to quit.

Mr Owenson carried his daughters back to Dublin, where he placed them in

lodgings under the care of their faithful maid Molly, and then bolted.

The truth seems to be, that everybody came down upon him. The players

were clamorous for their salaries; the workpeople insisted upon having

their accounts settled; the attorney claimed the amount of his mortgage;

and the Ffrenches required that some portion at least of the value of

the wine which Mr Owenson had undertaken to sell for them should be

accounted for. What could the poor manager do under such circumstances?

He hid himself till a commission of bankruptcy could be taken out, and

then, like many a wiser if not better man, walked at large again, as if

nothing particular had happened.

From this date, about 1794, Mr Owenson ceases to be the prominent figure

in the family tableau. His daughter Sydney assumes her proper place.

Though barely eighteen, she has already had lovers without end at her

feet. The first is a poor scholar called Dermody (a thorough scamp, by

the by, who abused everybody’s patience, and died at last of _delirium

tremens_ in the purlieus of Westminster), to whom her father had been

kind. It is by no means certain that he ever seriously proposed, but he

wrote many letters full of nonsense, most of which are printed in this

collection. Then came the officers of the garrison of Kilkenny, two of

whom at least fairly died because beautiful Sydney was cruel.

“Captain White Benson and Captain Earl” (says Miss Jewsbury, writing

from Lady Morgan’s memoranda) “were two young officers quartered in

Kilkenny during the period when Mr Owenson had his daughters with him,

while his theatre was being built. She refers to the young men in one

of her Dublin letters to her father, telling him that they had

called....

“Molly was a very dragon of discretion, and the two girls might have

had a worse guardian. Lady Clark often told of the Kilkenny days, when

she, an unformed lump of a girl, whose greatest delight was to go

rambling about the fields, armed with a big stick and followed by a

dog, once returned from her rambles covered with mud, and her frock

torn from scrambling over hedges and ditches, her hair all blown over

her face (she had the loveliest long golden hair that ever was seen),

and found her sister Sydney and these two young officers sitting in

the parlour, talking high sentiment, and all three shedding tears.

Molly came in at the same moment to lay the cloth for dinner, and

thinking they had stayed quite long enough, said, in her most

unceremonious manner, ‘Come, be off wid yez! an’ the master will be

coming in to his dinner, and what will he say to find you here

fandangoing with Miss Sydney?’ Sydney, who the moment before had been

enjoying her sorrows, burst out laughing at this sally, and, shaking

her black curly head, danced away like a fairy.”

What an exquisite piece of word-painting! What a charming scene! Who can

wonder that the results should have been so serious? Of Captain Earl, to

be sure, we hear nothing more, but Captain Benson wrote two letters at

least to his lady-love, both of which, dated in 1798, are given _in

extenso_. Miss Jewsbury’s remarks concerning them are edifying:—

“These two letters,” she says, “are much worn and torn, as though from

frequent reading and handling. On the back of the latest of them is

written, ‘This elegant-minded and highly-gifted young man drowned

himself near York a few months after I received this letter.’”

Tender as her heart was, Miss Owenson had something else to do than to

indulge its weaknesses. She determined, as soon as she became acquainted

with the real state of her father’s affairs, to earn her own livelihood;

and however ridiculous her vanity may be, however gross her many

breaches of truth and common propriety, we are bound to acknowledge, and

we do it with hearty goodwill, that she went gallantly through with that

purpose. Her first impulse was to turn authoress; her next and wiser, to

go out as a governess or companion, if any lady, young or old, would

have her. She was now about twenty-one, but looked considerably younger.

There was difficulty, therefore, in finding a place for her, though her

old music-master, M. Fontaine, did his best to make her merits known,

and the Countess O’Haggerty, an _emigrée_ and a distinguished harpist,

took her up. Accident, however, introduced her at one of Fontaine’s

parties to Mrs Lefanu, a sister of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who

behaved to her then and ever afterwards with marked kindness. The result

was, that a Mrs Featherstone sought her out, and, after a little

preliminary negotiation, it was settled that she should proceed on a

visit to Bracklin, near Castletown, in the county of Westmeath, and, if

approved and approving, that she should undertake the education of two

young ladies, the daughters of her new friend. If we are to believe Lady

Morgan, she seems to have won the hearts and clouded the judgments of

all whom she approached.

Her account of her journey to Bracklin, and of the manner of her

reception there, is of course too good to be quite true, but it is very

characteristic. She was to travel by the night-mail, but, being invited

to a _petit bal d’adieu_ at M. Fontaine’s, she was startled in the

middle of a country-dance by hearing the guard’s horn sounding at the

end of the street. “Then all that could be done was for Molly to throw a

warm cloak over me, with my own bonnet, and my little bundle of things,

so that I might dress when I got to Kinigad. One of the young gentlemen

snatched up my portmanteau, and so we all flew along the flags, which

were frosted over, and got to the mail just as the guard lost patience

and was mounting. So I was poked in and the door banged to, and ‘my

carriage’ drove off like lightning down College Green, along the quays,

and then into some gloomy street I did not remember.”

A smart young officer is taken up at one of the barrack-gates, but being

told by the guard that there was an old lady inside, he declines to

enter, and jumps up beside the coachman. Imagine his chagrin on

discovering, when the coach stops at Kinigad, how grossly he had been

deceived. “What!” he exclaims, as Miss Owenson is about to step out;

“‘let such a foot as that sink in the snow?—never!’ ... and he actually

carried me in his arms into the kitchen, and placed me in an old

arm-chair before a roaring turf-fire.” Of course he did, and of course

he was overawed and subdued when he heard that Mr Featherstone’s

carriage and horses were waiting to carry the young lady to Bracklin.

But what must the astonishment of the quiet country family have been

when the future governess of their children walked in, “pinched, cold,

confused, and miserable, in a balldress and pink silk shoes and

stockings, without an article wherewith to change, her luggage having

gone forward with the mail?” All, however, comes right in the end. The

old gentleman looks grave, the young ladies laugh; mamma puts the

stranger in charge of her future pupils, who dress her up in suits of

their own. There is a capital dinner—she sings ‘_Emunch ach Nuic_’ (‘Ned

of the Hills’), and ‘Barbara Allen’ (we presume, at the dinner-table),

and after tea the whole entertainment is wound up with a dance, in which

Miss Owenson comes off with flying colours. Why could not the old lady

stop there?

“Public for public,” she continues, in her imbecility. “It may be

worth while here to contrast my last jig in public with this my first

out of the schoolroom. During the Viceroyalty of the Duke and Duchess

of Northumberland, by whose attentions I was much distinguished, as

indeed were all my family, it happened that Lord George Hill came on a

little embassy from Her Excellency to beg that I would dance an Irish

jig with him, as she had heard of my performance with Lady Glengall in

a preceding reign. He said if I would consent I should choose either

the Castle or the Viceregal Lodge for the exhibition, and that his

brother, Lord Downshire, would write to Hillsboro’ for his own piper,

who was then reckoned the best in Ireland. As it was to be a private

and not a court exhibition, my husband permitted me to accept the

challenge from the two best jig-dancers in the country, Lord George

himself and Sir Philip Crampton. I had the triumph of flooring my two

rivals. Lord George soon gave in, and the Surgeon-General felt a

twinge of gout, he said, which obliged him to retire from the lists.”

The ball is now at Miss Owenson’s foot, and she keeps it going. Her life

at Bracklin is a sort of heaven upon earth. Everybody takes to her. Mr

Featherstone himself, though reserved at the outset, becomes one of her

thousand lovers, and carries her with him into all the society which the

county can afford. So it is when the family goes to Dublin for the

season. How the education of the Misses Featherstone got on at all, we

don’t pretend to understand, for the teacher seems to have plunged into

the very vortex of fashionable life. Among other acquaintances which she

formed were Sir John Stevenson and Tom Moore, the latter of whom she did

her best to captivate, with, as it would appear, only indifferent

success. But if she failed to bring the poet to her feet, she caught

from him the furor of authorship. She had already completed her first

novel, and needed only a publisher to bring it out. Her account of the

manner in which that want was supplied is too rich not to be given in

detail:—

“The Featherstone family were shortly to leave town, and I resolved on

the desperate step of publishing my novel, though I did not know the

difference between a bookseller and a publisher; and I intended to

take my chance of finding one in the streets of Dublin. I had observed

that the Domenich Street cook, a relic of the Dowager Steele regime,

was in the habit of hanging up her bonnet and cloak in the back hall.

I slipped down quietly one morning early, put on the cloak and bonnet,

and with the MS. tidily put up under my arm, passed through the open

hall-door, at which a milkman was standing, and started on my first

literary adventure. I wandered down into Britain Street, past the

noble edifices of the Lying-in Hospital and the Rotunda, quickened my

steps down the aristocratic pavement of Sackville Street, then

occupied by the principal nobility of Ireland. When I got to the

bottom, with Carlisle Bridge and the whole world of commerce ‘all

before me where to choose,’ I was puzzled; but as chance directed, I

turned to the right into Henry Street, proceeding along, frightened

and uncertain. To the left rose the Church of St. Peter, where I had

gone to be confirmed; opposite to it were Stella’s lodgings, where she

and Mrs Dingley held their _bureau d’esprit_. At the other end of the

carrefoure, and on a line with the church, and on the same side with

it, my eyes were dazzled by an inscription over a door,—‘T. Smith,

printer and bookseller.’ As I ascended the steps a dirty-faced boy was

sweeping the shop, and, either purposely or accidentally, swept all

the dust into my face. He then flung down the brush, and, springing

over the counter, leaned his elbows on the counter, and his chubby

face on his hands, and said, ‘What do you please to want, Miss?’ I was

stunned, but after a moment’s hesitation replied, the gentleman of the

house. ‘Which of them—young or ould?’ Before I could make any

selection, a glass door at the back of the shop opened, and a flashy

young yeoman in full uniform, his musket on his shoulder, and

whistling the ‘Irish Volunteers,’ marched straight up to me. The

impudent boy, winking his eye, said, ‘Here’s a young Miss wants to see

yez, Master James.’ Master James marched up to me, chucked me under

the chin, ‘and filled me from the top to the toe choke-full of direst

cruelty.’ I could have murdered them both. All that was dignified in

girlhood and authorship beat at my heart, when a voice from the

parlour behind the shop came to my rescue by exclaiming, ‘What are you

doing there, Jim—why ain’t you off, sir, for the Phœnix?—and the

lawyers’ corps marched an hour ago.’ The next moment, a good-looking,

middle-aged man, but in a great passion, with his face half shaved,

and a razor and shaving-cloth in his hand, came forth and said, ‘Off

wid ye now, sir, like a sky-rocket.’ Jim accordingly shouldered his

musket ‘like a sky-rocket,’ and Scrub, leaping over the counter,

seized his broom and began to sweep diligently to make up for lost

time. The old gentleman gave me a good-humoured glance, and saying,

‘Sit down, honey, and I’ll be with you in a jiffy,’ returned in a few

minutes with the other half of his face shaved, and, wiping his hands

with a towel, took his place behind the counter, saying, ‘Now, honey,

what can I do for you?’ This was altogether so unlike my ideas of the

Tonsons, the Dodsleys, and the great Miss Burney, that I was equally

inclined to laugh and cry; so the old gentleman repeated his question,

‘Well, what do you want, my dear?’ I hesitated, and at last said, ‘I

want to sell a book, please.’ ‘To sell a book, dear,—an ould one, for

I sell new ones myself? And what is the name of it, and what’s it

about?’ I was now occupied in taking off the rose-coloured ribbon with

which I had tied up my MS. ‘What!’ he said; ‘it is a MS., is it!’ ‘The

same, sir,’ I said: ‘St Clair.’ ‘Well, now, my dear, I’ve nothing to

do with Church books, neither sermons nor tracts, do you see. I take

it for granted it is a Papist book by the title.’ ‘No, sir, it is one

of sentiment, after the manner of Werter.’ He passed his hand over his

face, which left the humorous smile on his face unconcealed. ‘Well, my

dear, I never heard of Werter, and am not a publisher of novels at

all.’ At this announcement, hot, hurried, flurried, and mortified, I

began to tie up my MS. In spite of myself the tears came into my eyes,

and poor good-natured Mr Smith said, ‘Don’t cry, my dear; there’s

money bid for you yet. But you’re very young to turn author; and

what’s your name, dear?’ ‘Owenson, sir,’ I said. ‘Owenson!’ he

repeated; ‘are you anything to Mr Owenson of the Theatre-Royal?’ ‘Yes,

sir; I am his daughter.’ ‘His daughter—you amaze me!’”

And so on, and so on; for such, in fact, is the point up to which the

whole twaddle is leading. The illustrious Owenson of the Theatre-Royal

has friends and admirers everywhere. His name is a talisman which opens

all doors, and softens all hearts. Mr Smith introduces Miss Owenson to

Mr Brown, Mr Brown allows her to leave her MS. behind, and, without a

word of agreement, spoken or written, on either side, he brings it out

to his own great satisfaction. Miss Owenson thus becomes famous before

she is aware of it.

Though very happy at Bracklin, Miss Owenson is not sorry to leave it.

She returns to the bosom of her own family, and thus speaketh:—

“We” (that is to say, her sister Olivia and herself) “are seated at

our little work-table, beside a cheerful turf-fire and a pair of

lights. Livy is amusing herself at work, and I have been reading out a

work of Schiller’s to her; whilst Molly is washing up the tea-things

in the background, and Peter is laying the cloth for his master’s

supper. That dear master! In a few minutes we shall hear his rap at

the door, and his whistle under the window; and then we shall circle

round the fire, and chat and laugh over the circumstances of the day.

These are the scenes in which my heart expands, and which I love to

sketch on the spot. Ah! I must soon leave them.”

To be sure she must; the simple truth being this, that she quarrelled

with both father and sister, and had an insuperable objection to all

their domestic arrangements. “In spite of her romantic love for her

father,” observes Miss Jewsbury, “and her sincere attachment to her

sister, the beautiful illusion of living a domestic life with them soon

wore off. Accustomed as she had been so long to the plentiful comfort

and regularity of Mrs Featherstone’s well-ordered household, she felt

the difference between that and the scrambling poverty and discomfort of

life in an Irish lodging.” So she levanted, and is next heard of in the

family of Mr and Mrs Crawford, at Fort-William, in the north of Ireland.

Her letters from that place are all in the old style. One of them

indeed, addressed to her sister, begins by confessing that while

surrounded “by that happy circle to which her heart was accustomed to

expand,” “her spirits sank beneath the least appearance of discord, and

she was too conscious that she was not so fortunate as to please every

member of her own dear family.” The case is quite different at

Fort-William. “Here I am almost an object of idolatry among the

servants, and am caressed by all ranks of people.” She not only goes

wherever the family are invited, but receives separate invitations for

herself. To be sure, Mrs Crawford now and then runs rusty, and the

self-love of the little governess receives a wound. “We had a very

pressing invitation sent us for a ball at Clough-Jordan, given by a club

there. Mine was, as usual, separate, but Mrs Crawford would not go. It

is the third she has refused. Is it not provoking? Be content with your

situation; you are young, you are beautiful, you are admired, and

foolish women do not torment you!” Provoking! it was intolerable.

Happily, however, crosses of this kind were rare—at all events, we don’t

find many allusions to them in Miss Owenson’s correspondence with her

old friend Mrs Featherstone.

“The other day we had upwards of forty people to dinner, among others

Lord Dunally, Lord and Lady Clanbrock, Hon. Mrs Dillon, the Vaughans

of Golden Grove, &c. We sang and played a good deal, and the night

finished most pleasantly with my Irish jig, in which I put down my men

completely. This has produced an ode to a jig, which I will send, when

I can get a frank, to your papa, for I know it will please him....

Well, the other night we were at an immense row at Lady Clanbrock’s,

to whom I owe so many obligations for her marked attention to me since

my residence here, that I am at a loss how to mention them. It was

quite a musical party, and—give me joy—on the decision of Lord

Norbury, who was of the party, I bore away the palm from all their

Italian music by the old Irish airs of ‘Ned of the Hill’ and

‘Cooleen,’ to which I had adapted words, and I was interrupted three

times by plaudits in the ‘Soldier tired.’”

Having thus got into the good graces of a few lords and ladies, it is

scarcely to be wondered at that Miss Owenson should become disgusted

with Mrs Crawford and her pruderies. “As I found that these good people”

(the Crawfords) “were determined on going for life to Castle Tumbledown”

(Fort-William), “and as I never had any strong propensity for the

society of crows who have established a very flourishing colony in the

battlements, I gave in my resignation last week.” It was time that she

should, for her mind was so completely divided between authorship and

gaiety, that it could scarcely be expected to stoop to the trivialities

of teaching. ‘St Clair,’ brought out, as we have stated,

surreptitiously, had made some stir. Miss Jewsbury says it was

translated into German; but we doubt whether it was much read at home

beyond the circle of the authoress’s acquaintances. The complimentary

notes which it drew from her friends, however, induced her to begin

another, which was to be completed in six volumes, and to which she gave

the name of the ‘Novice of St Domenich.’ Part of the ‘Novice’ she seems

to have written in her father’s lodgings at Enniskillen, whither, after

her breach with Mrs Crawford, she appears to have retired; part in the

house of a family called Crossley, to whom she paid a visit. There were

several sons in that family, one of whom, as a matter of course, fell in

love with her. His letters—for he wrote many—are all carefully

preserved; and on the back of the envelope in which they were wrapped up

Miss Jewsbury found the following inscription:—“Francis Crossley, aged

eighteen, chose to fall in love with me, Sydney Owenson, aged eighteen.

He was then intended for a merchant, but the ‘Novice of St Domenich,’

which he copied out, as regularly as it was written, in six huge

volumes, and its author, turned his head. He fled from his

country-house, went to India, and became a great man.” With exceeding

naïveté Miss Jewsbury observes on this—“Lady Morgan, when she endorsed

these papers, had of course forgotten her own age. It is so sweet to be

eighteen.” Forgotten her own age! We should think that she had, just as

she forgot everything which did not minister to her vanity or jump with

the humour of the moment. But Lady Morgan could remember as well as

forget, when it suited her purpose. “Among her memoranda of 1822 and

1824,” says Miss Jewsbury, “are two or three entries on the subject of

Captain Crossley, which may be given in this place:” “Francis Crossley,

my fast friend of the other sex, met me at my sister’s house at dinner

after an absence of eighteen years. It was a singular interview. What

was most singular in it is, that he remains unchanged. He insists upon

it that, _in person_, so am I.” “August 24th: Received this day a letter

from Captain Crossley, acquainting me with his intention of marrying. I

have written him an answer _à mourir de rire_, and so ends our romance

of so many years!” “August 26th: Captain and Mrs Crossley dined this day

here, and I never saw such a _triste_-looking couple. My poor Francis

silent and sad.” How could he be otherwise, poor man! under the

circumstances—with the new and old love both before him, and cut off, by

his own rash act, from choosing between?

We take leave from this date of Miss Owenson the governess, that we may

follow the fortunes of Miss Owenson the authoress. Her pen is never

idle. She writes, with equal facility and speed, songs, which are set to

music or arranged by her father, odes, and novels. She has learned,

likewise, how to attend to her own interests in disposing of her

copyrights. The Dublin publisher seems to have rendered her no account,

so she opens a correspondence with Sir Richard Phillips of London. The

story which she tells, and her manner of telling it, take with the

bibliopole, and she packs up the ‘Novice,’ and sets off alone,

personally to negotiate with him. With all her foibles (for, indeed,

Lady Morgan’s worst faults scarcely deserve to be described by a harsher

title), there was something about her which made friends wherever she

went. Mr Quintin Dick, for example, a chance fellow-passenger in the

coach from Holyhead, never lost his interest in her to the day of his

death. Phillips could not resist her insinuating manners. He bought her

MS. (she does not say what he gave for it); and, though married and of

middle age, made love to her in his own way. Gruff, stern, old Mrs

Inchbald, alone of the Londoners to whom she recommended herself,

repulsed her. But the repulse made no lasting impression. She returned

to Ireland gratified and hopeful, and extended day by day her

reputation, and the circle, already not limited, of her correspondence

and acquaintances.

Lady Morgan’s novels have long since passed into the oblivion which is

their rightful portion. They are all cast in the same mould. Whether we

look into ‘St Clair,’ ‘The Novice,’ ‘The Wild Irish Girl,’ ‘The O’Briens

and the O’Flahartys,’ or any other of the multitudinous brood which made

their appearance at intervals from 1801 to 1826, each resembles the

other as closely as pea resembles pea. We have in all of them the same

characters, almost the same incidents, certainly the same opinions, and

the same style of conversation throughout. Miss Owenson herself is the

universal heroine; Mr Owenson figures in most of them, sometimes as a

prince, otherwise as a nobleman. The officers with whom she associated

in Kilkenny—the friends who sheltered her in her hour of need—her

lovers, real or imaginary—her lord and lady acquaintances—an interesting

priest, and a griping parson,—all come upon the stage. The love-passages

are warm, the learning is ludicrous; the delineation of national manners

and national modes of thinking one-sided; and the style lively and

incorrect, or else turgid and pompous. They attained to a degree of

popularity for which it seems difficult in this age to account. The

truth, however, is, that Miss Owenson caught the top of the wave. By

writing up Liberalism just as it began to struggle into fashion, she

became to the Whigs, as a novelist, pretty much what Moore was as a

poet; and she reaped her reward. For the Tories, as is their wont, while

they abused her principles, followed the lead set them by their rivals,

and spoke of the authoress as a woman of genius, whom it would be

generous to praise and entertaining to cultivate. Hence both parties

were as ready to receive her advances as she was willing to make them.

Moreover, when she attained to the height of her popularity, at the date

of the publication of ‘The Wild Irish Girl,’ public taste was wretched

in the extreme. The Waverley Novels had not yet begun to purify the

atmosphere which the Minerva Press had long darkened, and Miss Edgeworth

and Miss Austin stood wellnigh alone among lady-novelists. Now, Miss

Owenson, though neither an Edgeworth nor an Austin, was far superior to

your ‘Anna Marias’ and ‘Girls of the Mountain.’ She had a good deal of

intuitive perception into the realities of woman’s nature, though not,

perhaps, into the best parts of it; and hence, in spite of frequent

outrages to good manners, and sometimes to decency, she commanded

attention.

“I read ‘Ida,’” writes Lady Charleville, “before it was all issued

from the press, a volume being sent me as soon as sewed; and I read it

with the same conviction of the existence of excellent talent, great

descriptive powers; and in this work I find particular ingenuity in

the novel attempt to interest us for a woman who loved two. And for

each of the lovers the episode was happily contrived on this plan, and

executed with great taste and spirit. I could have wished the

situations had been less critical in point of delicacy, as the English

gentleman has incurred great blame on all sides for having suffered

her to escape; and the poor Turk too. The politics of Athens are

ingenious; but, alas! one poor Emmet, hanging so recently in our

streets, does not suffer us to enjoy our miseries in any fiction for

some years to come. I have not read the ‘Monthly Review,’ where it is

criticised. I choose to be pleased with what you write now, though I

do heartily reprobate your putting off the period of polishing and

purifying your language, for pique to those censors, who, after all,

may be the best of friends, if they point out a path so attainable to

fame. Assuredly, to those to whom God has given fancy, and a touch of

the ethereal spark, it is doubly a duty to write pure language, under

the penalty of else rendering the best gift of Heaven valueless. Where

little is to be done, it is inexcusable to neglect that; and assuredly

you promised me that ‘Ida’ should be more correct than your former

publications, even, as you imagined, at the expense of fancy. Now, we

found as much imagination as ever, and not more of the square and

compass than hitherto.”

If it was thus that ladies of taste and delicacy, however awkwardly they

might express themselves, thought and wrote of Miss Owenson’s manner of

handling the tender passion, and if ladies of taste and delicacy could

dispense their criticisms with so gentle a hand, it is little to be

wondered at if the mass of subscribers to circulating libraries devoured

such books as ‘Ida,’ and pronounced them divine.

Miss Owenson was now the fashion, and Lord and Lady Abercorn invited her

to pay them a visit at Baronscourt. They had read ‘The Novice of St

Domenich’ and ‘The Wild Irish Girl,’ and, being bored with each other’s

society, yet equally taking a fancy to the authoress, they urged her to

come and live with them, and amuse them over their dull fireside. Miss

Jewsbury, writing, we presume, from her friend’s notes, thus describes

the pair:—

“He” (the Marquess) “was extremely handsome, noble, and courtly in his

manner; witty, sarcastic, a _roué_ as regarded his principles towards

women, a Tory in politics, fastidious, luxurious, refined in his

habits, fascinating in his address, _blasé_ upon pleasure and

prosperity, yet capable of being amused by wit, and interested by a

new voice and face. Altogether, he was as dangerous a man for a

brilliant young woman to be brought near, as could easily be found.

Miss Owenson had, however, the virtue for herself which she bestowed

upon her heroines. Her own sentiments and romances found their outlet

and exercise in her novels; and she had, for all practical purposes,

the strong hard common sense which called things by their right names,

and never gave bewildering epithets to matters of plain right and

wrong. She had no exaggerated generosity, nor sentiments of delicacy

about other people’s feelings. The Marchioness of Abercorn was as

genuine a fine lady as the Marquess was a fine gentleman. In after

years Lady Morgan drew her portrait in ‘O’Donnel’ as Lady Llamberis.

She was good-natured and inconsequent; she took up people warmly, and

dropped them easily; she was incapable of permanent attachment, except

to those belonging to herself.”

With this amiable couple Miss Owenson lived rather more than two years.

She does not appear to have been altogether pleased with her position,

and no wonder. Lady Abercorn was the Marquess’s third wife, who

“Lived with him on terms of excessive politeness, and poor Miss

Owenson was expected to bear their tempers and attentions, to sit in

the cross-fire of their humours, and to find good spirits and

sprightly conversation when they were dull. Add to this, that heavy

pressure of anxiety about family matters, which was laid upon her

before her nerves and sinews were braced to meet it, and before she

had any worldly knowledge, produced a feeling of exhaustion. In the

material prosperity of her life at Baronscourt the tension relaxed,

and the fatigue of past exertion asserted itself. Her own ambition had

never allowed her to rest—she had been wonderfully successful; but at

Baronscourt and Stanmore Priory all she had attained looked dwarfed

and small when measured by the hereditary power and consequence of the

family in which she was for the time an inmate. She did not become

discontented, but she was disenchanted for the time with all that

belonged to herself, and saw her own position on its true comparative

scale. Sydney Owenson, from earliest childhood, had depended on

herself alone for counsel and support. There is no sign that she ever

felt those moments of religious aspiration, when a human being,

sensible of its own weakness and ignorance, cries for help to Him who

made us. There are no ejaculations of prayer or of thanksgiving; she

proudly took up her own burden, and bore it as well as she could;

finding her own way, and shaping her own life, according to her own

idea of what ought to form her being’s end and aim. She was a

courageous indomitable spirit; but the constant dependence on herself,

the steady concentration of purpose with which she followed out her

own career without letting herself be turned aside, gave a hardness to

her nature, which, though it did not destroy her kindness and honesty

of heart, petrified the tender grace which makes the charm of

goodness.”

Lord and Lady Abercorn were very fond of Miss Owenson in their own way.

They had formed a plan for her happiness, which, in spite of the

opposition in the outset of the two parties most interested, they

ultimately succeeded in carrying into effect. Lord Abercorn had for his

family physician Dr Morgan, a dull, priggish, and most conceited

individual, between whom and the authoress of ‘The Wild Irish Girl’ he

and the Marchioness determined to make a match. How the affair went on

from its dawn to its consummation; how Miss Owenson compelled the

reluctant doctor to fall in love with her in spite of himself; how,

frightened at the results of the frolic, she would have drawn back at

last, had not the lord and lady proved too clever for her,—Lady Morgan,

with her usual taste, has described in detail. All the doctor’s letters,

with some of her own, are printed in this collection; the latter of

which, by the by, rather contradict the text of the narrative. According

to her ladyship’s version, placed on record after the event, things ran

thus:—There had been a great deal of love-making on his side, with

something very like it on hers; but in the end—

“Any romance she had felt about Sir Charles was frightened out of her

for the time being; and she said she would have given anything to be

able to run away again. Neither was much delay accorded to her. On a

cold morning in January she was sitting in the library by the fire in

her morning wrapper, when Lady Abercorn opened the door and said,

‘Glorvina, come up-stairs directly and be married; there must be no

more trifling.’ Her ladyship took Miss Owenson’s arm and led her

up-stairs into her dressing-room, where a table was arranged for the

ceremony; the family chaplain standing in full canonicals with his

book open, and Sir Charles ready to receive her. There was no escape

left—the ceremony proceeded, and the Wild Irish Girl was married past

redemption.”

All this took place, it will be observed, in January 1812, possibly upon

the third day of the month. On the 29th of the previous December, Miss

Owenson, being in Dublin on some mysterious millinery business, wrote

thus to the Doctor—“Oh, Morgan! give me all your love, tenderness,

comfort, and support, for in five short days I am yours for ever.” Thus,

whether by accident or through design, Miss Owenson, at the age of

thirty-six, gave her hand to a man six or seven years her junior, on

whom the noble Marquess had persuaded the Lord-Lieutenant to confer the

honour of knighthood, for no other ostensible purpose than that he might

have the satisfaction of filling his glass after dinner, and drinking to

the health of Sir Charles and Lady Morgan.

Little more remains to be told of the personal history of our

heroine—not much of her future efforts as an authoress and a politician.

Sir Charles and Lady Morgan soon discovered that the stately restraint

of Baronscourt and the Priory were too much for a newly-married couple.

They parted from the Abercorns, therefore, apparently on decent terms,

and took possession of a house of their own in Kildare Street. Sir

Charles then endeavoured to get into practice as a physician, but

failed. Nobody called him in, so the gifted couple devoted themselves

conjointly and severally to literature. We say conjointly and severally,

because the lady, with her usual prudence, had stipulated in the

marriage-contract that her earnings should belong exclusively to

herself; while the gentleman, who was a widower, settled his private

patrimony on a daughter whom his first wife had brought him. Lady Morgan

had by far the best of this bargain. Her novel of ‘O’Donnel,’ which

Colburn brought out in 1813, she sold for £500; and as the book went

through not fewer than three editions, we are of opinion that, looking

at the matter in a mercantile point of view, she was not paid too much

for it.

This was clearly Lady Morgan’s opinion likewise, and she determined that

Mr Colburn should not for the future purchase her favours so cheaply. As

to her husband, he had utterly failed. He put forth a volume, which he

called ‘Outlines of the Physiology of Life,’ and his publisher never

sold copies enough to cover the cost of the paper. No wonder. It was a

dull, impudent, most unphilosophical piece of materialism, which

disgusted even the believers in that wretched creed by the boldness with

which it asserted as facts points which they had never ventured to treat

except as open to speculative discussion. But the failure of Sir Charles

in nowise daunted his wife. The battle of Waterloo having restored peace

to Europe, and re-established, as was assumed, the throne of the

Bourbons in France, Sir Charles and Lady Morgan went forth to spy the

land; and after remaining, chiefly in Paris, about six weeks, came back

and entered into negotiation with Mr Colburn for the publication of a

volume of their travels. A very diplomatic correspondence ensued.

Colburn offered £750 for the copyright, and spoke of the great things

which he was in a condition to do, for what he called his books and his

authors, through the instrumentality of his ‘New Monthly Magazine and

Literary Gazette.’ Her ladyship stood out stiffly for £1000, and she

carried her point. “To conclude at once,” wrote Colburn, “though at a

really great risk, I will consent to undertake to pay the £1000, and,

_on my honour_, if it succeed better than expected, I will consider

myself accordingly your debtor, besides making up to you the other £50

on ‘O’Donnel,’ that you may no longer regret the third edition.”

Nobody reads Lady Morgan’s ‘France’ now any more than he reads

‘O’Donnel.’ It is full of the most ridiculous blunders, and abounds in

misstatements which could have hardly been accidental at the time. Yet

it sold well. The ‘Quarterly’ fell upon it mercilessly, doubtless

promoting the sale by the virulence of its criticisms. This attack Lady

Morgan ingeniously met by assuring her friends that Croker was one of

her rejected lovers, and that he had taken this opportunity of avenging

himself for the sufferings he had undergone! On the other hand, all who

delighted in scandal were charmed with the book, and Mme. Paterson

Buonaparte wrote from Paris to assure the authoress that her manner of

detailing it was quite as agreeable to French people as to English.

“Public expectation is as high as possible,” she says, “and if you had

kept it a little longer, they would have purchased it” (the book) “at

your own price. How happy you must be at filling the world with your

name as you do! Madame de Staël and Madame de Genlis are forgotten;

and if the love of fame be of any weight with you, your excursion to

Paris was attended with brilliant success. I assure you—and you know I

am sincere—that you are more spoken of than any other person at the

present day. Mr Moore seldom sees me; I did not take with him at all.

He called to show me the article of your letter which mentions the

report of the Duke of Wellington’s loves. I am not the Mrs —— the

great man gives as a successor to Grassini. You would be surprised if

you knew how great a fool she is, at the power she exercises over the

Duke; but I believe that he has no taste _pour les femmes d’esprit_,

which is, however, no reason for going into extremes, as in this

case.”

The prince of puffers was Henry Colburn. He spent a fortune in

advertising his own books, and succeeded, till the trick was found out,

in cramming many a trashy production down the throat of a gullible

public. It is certain, also, that he believed in his own power, and made

a boast of it. He was so well pleased with the success of ‘France,’

that, besides purchasing ‘Florence Macarthy,’ with some dead weight,

from Sir Charles for £1200, he suggested that the Morgans should visit

Italy, and promised £2000 for the copyright of the book of travels to be

written. The terms were accepted, and in due time appeared ‘Italy,’ by

Lady Morgan. “Her ladyship’s criticisms on the public buildings and

pictures,” observes Miss Jewsbury, “may be open to question, but the

spirit of the book (being ultra-liberal) is noble, and its fascination

undeniable.” Agreeing with the former clause of this sentence, we may

let the latter pass unnoticed; for the bubble of Lady Morgan’s

reputation was on the eve of bursting. She and Mr Colburn fell out. She

never could believe but that the monarch of Marlborough Street was

growing rich at her expense; so, having visited France a second time,

and written a second book about it, she determined to bring him to

reason. While the work was yet in progress, she wrote to Colburn, who

did not immediately answer the letter. She wrote again, but no reply

came; whereupon she opened a correspondence about terms with Messrs

Saunders and Otley. Colburn no sooner heard of this, than he

remonstrated against it in no very becoming terms. “I can now only say,”

he wrote to Sir Charles, “that if Lady Morgan does not break off the

negotiation, which is simply done on the plea of misunderstanding, it

will be no less detrimental to her literary than to her pecuniary

interest. As to myself, it is a very different feeling, and not merely

pecuniary interest, that makes me urge this matter; as I can prove, if

necessary, I have lost considerably by the last two or three works.”

Could bibliopolic insolence go beyond this? He lost by her ladyship’s

works! He threaten to injure her literary reputation! Let him do his

worst. A bargain was concluded with Messrs Saunders and Otley, and under

their auspices ‘France Revisited’ came out. The day after its appearance

men read with astonishment in all the newspapers an advertisement headed

in large letters, “Lady Morgan at half-price.” The base-born miscreant

had the audacity to declare “That in consequence of the great losses

which he had sustained by Lady Morgan’s former works, Mr Colburn had

declined this present book on France, and that all the copies of her

ladyship’s works might be had at half-price.” The cruel announcement had

the desired effect. Messrs Saunders and Otley found themselves losers by

a good deal more than the thousand pounds which they had given for the

copyright, and Lady Morgan’s popularity as a writer collapsed.

We must not devote more of our space to the poor dead old lady. She had

pretty well feathered her nest by this time, and though she could not

sell her books as she had heretofore done, she did what was far better.

She got the Government to settle upon her a pension of £300 a year, the

very highest reward which Imperial generosity ever bestows in this rich

country on literary eminence. This enabled her to keep house in William

Street, and to maintain such social intercourse with the gay world as we

have elsewhere indicated. She had always been a ready correspondent, and

she continued the practice of letter-writing to the last. Generally

speaking, that portion of her correspondence which has found its way

into these volumes is harmless enough. It contains little else, when her

ladyship writes, than descriptions of the fine people whom she meets,

and the pleasant things which they say to her. When fine ladies and

gentlemen address her, it is always in a strain of exaggerated flattery.

But poor Lady Caroline Lamb might, we think, have been permitted to lie

still in her grave. Not that her letters to Lady Morgan tell anything

which we did not know already; for Lady Caroline never made a secret of

her weaknesses, and was evidently incapable of understanding that other

people might call them by a harsher name. But for the sake of Lady

Morgan herself, and the reputation of good-heartedness, which was really

not undeserved in her case, it is a pity that she should be made the

means of recalling to the world’s recollection so pitiable a story. We

suspect, however, that Miss Jewsbury and Mr Dixon had no choice in the

matter. They must print all or nothing; and so, having spared very few

of the old lady’s male friends, they could find no good reason for being

more tender towards her friends of the other sex. In the name, however,

of the women of society living under the reign of Victoria, we must

protest against these volumes being accepted, either now or a hundred

years hence, as illustrative of the sort of domestic life to which they

are accustomed.

A SKETCH FROM BABYLON.

CONCLUSION.—CHAPTER X.

Madame Mélanie was a milliner much affected in aristocratic and

financial circles.

Finance sympathises with Hungary, Poland, and oppressed nationalities,

and Mélanie appertained to this section of mortality. Moreover, she made

dresses beautifully, and the employment of her gratified the double

sentiments of charity and vanity.

Mélanie was the daughter of a French maid-servant, in the service of a

Hungarian lady. Brought up in her maternal profession—for her sire was

not known—she lived under the roof of her Hungarian mistress till what

she was pleased to call the “Hongarian Strockle.” Of this event she

narrated striking scenes. Assuming to herself the name of her mistress,

whom she had betrayed, she told how Haynau had threatened her with

chastisement, and how, barefooted, she had reached a place of safety.

More than once she had been invited to publish her adventures, but she

was far too wise. Her ancient nobility obtained for her much greater

consideration as a seamstress, and a better livelihood than Kossuth

himself could procure; and in the humility of her station she was more

free from detection than in a more elevated sphere.

She had begun poorly enough—working away gradually, and accumulating

capital by labour and saving, by gifts from her patronesses, and also by

occasionally abstracting small pieces of jewellery and money from the

aristocratic dressing-rooms to which, in her capacity as a distressed

noblewoman, she obtained freer access than others of her equals. True,

she soon gave up the latter pursuit. Not only was it dangerous, but

increasing business, by removing her from want, enabled her to resist

temptation. Still she derived considerable emolument from what Italian

servants term “_incerti_.” She did not object, for a consideration, to

usurp the office of the Postmaster-General, nor did she refuse the

shelter of her roof when business or charity required an interview

between opulent monades of opposite sexes. On the whole, Madame Mélanie

is a deserving creature. The sums she spends in alms astound the more

credulous of her customers. She has sent more than one packet of linen

to the lying-in hospital of the parish, and the initial “M., through a

friend,” for Garibaldi’s muskets, has been traced to the same benefic

source. She will not marry again, for she never can forget the Count of

her early days, when they lived and loved in Hungary; but a French

courier, about three years younger than herself, dwells in her house

under the designation of adopted son, keeps her accounts, and transacts

business with her solicitor.

Such was the person let loose in her respectable household by that

careful mother, Lady Coxe. ’Ungary has done much for many disreputable

foreigners. The respectability of a few has floated the depravity of the

many.

On the credit of a lying assumption, Madame Mélanie had access to the

homes and toilet-tables of England which would be denied to any

respectable Englishwoman of the same class, however deserving.

“Good morning, Mélanie,” said Lady Coxe, as she lay back in her _chaise

longue_.

“Good morning, miladi—always so _charmante_ and _gracieuse_.”

“Git along, Mélanie,” replied miladi, playfully: when away from her

daughters she laid aside that staidness of demeanour maintained before

them towards her inferiors.

“Mélanie, we are going to Lady Ilminster’s _dejooner_.”

“Miladi go everywhere fashionable.”

“Oh yes, Mélanie, and I don’t know ’ow ever I shall be able to bear up

against it. I feel so exhausted.”

“Oh, miladi does not care herself.”

“What can I do, Mélanie?—I feel so weak!”

“Miladi look very pale.”

“I think I must send for Dr Leadbitter.”

“If miladi would take a little drop of port-wine once or twice in the

day.”

“You really think so, Mélanie?”

“Yes truly, miladi.”

“Just like a good creature open that cupboard. I always keep a bottle

there in case Sir Jehoshaphat should drop in; you will find a glass.

Per’aps there are two. Bring them, Mélanie, and take a glass yourself.”

The seamstress did as she was bid, and, placing the decanter and glasses

respectfully on the table and in the manner of a skilled practician, she

sat herself down in the same deferential attitude near her employer.

Lady Coxe took a bumper; then she took another, and declared herself

better.

Madame Mélanie’s first glass was not half emptied.

“Well, Mélanie, what would you advise about my dress for this party? You

know it is to be very shwosi.”

“Miladi shall be the best dressed and the youngest-looking miladi in the

house.”

“Git along, Mélanie,” retorted miladi, stealthily filling herself

another bumper.

A flush pervaded the cheek of the matron. Perhaps it was of pride.

“Miladi, I recommend moire antique—magenta, with quilled ribbons—chapeau

of blonde with magenta trimmings—parasol to match.”

“Your taste is so good, Mélanie.”

“Magenta so well become miladi. Bootiful complexion—she young as Miss

Constance.”

“Oh, you flattering thing! but what will you give my daughters—the Miss

Coxes.”

“Oh, I talk to them myself. They not be Miss Coxe long, I think. Miss

Florence make a very nice bride, and Miss Constance bootiful Comtesse.”

“Git along; but what do you mean? Fill your glass.” Lady Coxe as a

fugleman showed the way.

“They tell me such a ’andsome man want to marry her—noble and rich.”

“English or furrin, Mélanie?”

“Not English.”

“You know ’im to be rich?”

“Oh yes, I know him rich. Miladi know poor woman like me obliged to make

affair with all sort of people. One of my customers, Mademoiselle

Dulaugier of Opera Comique. I send all her bill to Comte Rabelais, and

he pay, what you call, on the nail.”

“Very satisfactory,” responded Lady Coxe. “Let me ’ope Constance may be

the means of leading ’im to better things.”

“Indeed, let us hope so,” said Mélanie, and this time she held her glass

to her lips for some seconds, though the liquid within was not much

diminished.

“Nothing is settled, believe me, Mélanie. But then the world is talking

of it.”

“Of nothing else. Who occupy London so much as your family, miladi? The

Duchesse of Wiltshire, when I go to her, say to me, ‘Mélanie, tell me

all about that bootiful Miladi Coques and her bootiful family. None so

bootiful as the mother.’”

At this moment the door admitted Florence and Constance.

Mélanie rose in admiration.

“What bootiful colour! What roses in cheeks.”

The girls acknowledged her salute, and the rose left the cheek of

Constance.

Mélanie whispered Lady Coxe, “I will make for Mademoiselle Constance

bootiful dress like used to wear La Dulaugier—the Comte’s own choice.”

“Mélanie is come to take orders for Lady Ilminster’s dejooner.”

“I shall have a very simple dress,” said Florence.

“And so shall I,” chimed in Constance, in a voice low and tremulous.

“Impossible!” broke in the seamstress—“impossible!”

“Nonsense!” said Lady Coxe.

“You will ruin Constance, Mélanie,” retorted Florence.

“Mademoiselle Constance will marry a rich man, and think nothing of the

trifles she spends now,” responded Mélanie, somewhat tartly.

“You know what to make,” said Lady Coxe, in a voice that admitted of no

reply.

With an obsequious courtesy Mélanie left the room, and Constance,

retiring to her own chamber, threw herself on her bed and wept bitterly.

CHAPTER XI.

It was dusk when Mélanie left the house—that dangerous summer dusk, when

that is seen which you wish concealed, but when you can with difficulty

perceive what you wish to discover.

Mélanie wended her way towards Grosvenor Street, where she resided. As

she reached the corner of the Square, however, she stopped at the corner

of Charles Street, under a gas-lamp.

She did not wait many minutes when a Clarence stopped at the crossing.

A man jumped out. It was Count Rabelais.

Holding open the door of the carriage, he admitted the dressmaker, who

took her seat next a woman already inside. Jumping in again with a bow,

the Count gave an order to the coachman, who dashed off under the

gas-lamp.

Augustus Bromley, who was passing at the moment, saw the whole

transaction, as well as the face of the third occupant. It was that of

Madame Carron. For the first time an idea entered his mind, how much

like the face of the Count was to that of the actress.

Hurrying homeward to write a line of excuse to a friend with whom he was

engaged to dine, he seated himself not many minutes later in a stall of

the St James’s Theatre.

The first play, a short one, was over, and in the next Madame Carron was

to appear. Her part that night involved one or two songs, and a piano

was wheeled into the orchestra.

Bromley, who was sitting at one end, could see Madame Carron in the

wings with Angelo Magens, a pianist and composer of some celebrity. They

were together engaged earnestly over a sheet of music paper, beating

time and giving or demanding explanation.

At length Bromley perceived that the play was about to begin, from

Madame Carron plucking at her skirts, and from Mr Magens’s appearance in

the orchestra. The musician turned round, and, at a signal from Bromley,

came to the neighbourhood of his stall, and leaned over to speak to him.

“How d’ye do, Angelo?” asked Bromley. “Ages since I’ve seen you. How are

Mrs Angelo and Adelaide?”

“Quite well, thank you, Mr Bromley. How well you’re looking!”

“Rather hard at work, that’s all.”

“I can understand that, in your important avocations.”

“By the way, Angelo, do you know the Carron well?”

“Well, Mr Bromley, she’s been very kind to a poor man like me.”

“Do you think we’ve time to go round and have a glass of sherry?”

“Not now; at the end of the next act;” and the bell rang for the curtain

to rise. As it rose, Bromley perceived behind Madame Carron the figure

of Rabelais.

The act was soon over, and Magens came for his glass of sherry. Bromley

led him to the public-house adjoining, and the liquor was poured out.

As they both sipped it, Bromley again began, “How well she did that last

scene!”

“Admirably; she is a wonderful woman!”

“Indeed she is, Magens. By the way, where is Monsieur Carron?”

“Oh! he is dead, I believe.”

“Then is that story true about her?”

“If you have heard anything against her reputation, I can undertake to

declare it false.”

Little Magens, when under the united influence of sentiment and sherry,

could be very fiery.

He was a grateful homuncule.

“Of _course_ not,” rejoined his interrogator. “I mean that other story.”

“Are you trying to pump me, Mr Bromley?”

“It would take a cleverer man than me to do that, Angelo—another

glass—there’s lots of time. We’ve only been five minutes, and the

_entr’acte_ at a French play is never less than a quarter of an hour.

(Glasses filled.) You were saying—”

“Well, the only story I have ever heard is about her family. They say,

with I do not know what foundation, that she is of a good family, and is

devoting all her profits to the support of it. She certainly does not

live in the style of a person earning the immense salaries she

receives.”

“Rabelais, I suppose, knows all about it.”

Magens shook his head, swallowed the remainder of his glass, and

silently led the way back to the theatre.

“By the way, do you know anything of Madame Mélanie, the seamstress? She

is much employed by actresses, I believe? A young lady was asking me,

whether she made Mademoiselle Dulaugier’s ballet-dresses.”

“I know her very little myself. Mrs Magens knows her.”

“Well, Magens, good evening. Can you come and dine with me to-morrow at

the Garrick?”

“To-morrow, I am engaged here all the evening, and I suppose your hours

are fashionable.”

“Well, another day.”

When he resumed his stall, Bromley perceived that a box near the stage

was newly filled.

He looked up, and there was Lady Coxe and her three daughters.

Near Constance sat the Count. Her eye caught his, and she blushed

deeply.

Bromley went revolving in his mind many things. At length he made up his

mind, and sauntered into the box.

The Count greeted him with unusual civility. Lady Coxe invited him to a

chair next her.

“Mr Bromley,” she whispered, “do me a favour. The Congte is most anxious

to go to Lady Ilminster’s. Can you, do you think—can you manage this?”

“Impossible, my dear Lady Coxe. I have already exceeded my powers.”

A wink, supposed to be imperceptible, announced to the Count the result

of the negotiation. A dead silence ensued. When Bromley left the box, no

effort was made to detain him.