Any one who has enjoyed the help of an acute mind in life must
have concluded that the human creature was not designed to be very
intellectual. It has great faculties, but these can do little more than
provide munificently for its wants. It solves with facility all the
problems of luxury and amusement, but can for the most part no further
go. Nevertheless, there are a few of an intellectual caste, living apart
from the vulgar and ostentatious; these force their thoughts on unwilling
recipients, and in what they produce give intimations of a higher race
than that of man being still possible, though scarcely to be expected to
spring from the few, since the grovellers have so immense a majority.
The clergy of Brighton were adapted more to the wants of the
congregations than to those of religion. One likes the clergy. They
have a good education up to the age of one or two and twenty, and their
profession is gentlemanly. If they renewed their knowledge of science
from time to time, they would not interpolate nature with dogma, the
effect of which is more damaging than they can conceive. To the eye
clarified by impartial thought, it is like a pimple on the face of a
pretty girl; but it will run its little course.
While at Brighton I first knew Count Pepoli, the head of an illustrious
Bolognese family. He was the author of some pleasant works, and wrote
the opera of “I Puritani” for his friend Bellini, the composer who
furnished the music. He was banished from his country, and had his
estates put under forfeiture by Pius IX., whose utmost science could
do no better than proclaim the dogma of an immaculate conception, and
announce himself infallible, as occupying upon earth the rotten throne
of an Almighty. Yet this gentleman, by the aid of his superstitious
adherents, was able to expel the best families from Bologna, for not
wishing to retain him in his place of civil chief—put into that place by
those supernatural chemists, the cardinals, who, by mumbling cabalistic
words over a drink of wine, could turn it into blood, and, by showing the
whites of their eyes, could metamorphose a mouthful of dry bread into the
flesh of Christ. They mean well, they administer to existing wants; but
the drinking and the eating of these would be cannibalism of the worst
description, and this they have not the imagination to perceive.
Pepoli reached England a poor man, though the owner of many palaces and
lands. He supported himself by becoming, almost at once, Professor of
the Italian Language, Literature, and Antiquities at the University of
London, in Gower Street; and he retained this post for some twenty years.
When the pope was shown the shortest cut out of Rome, Pepoli rushed
back to Bologna, and got hold of his magnificent palaces once more, and
recovered his lordly position.
Some twenty years after this, when I last visited Italy, on my way to
Rome I stopped at Bologna, and inquired of my landlord, Pellagrini, the
way to the Palazzo Pepoli, which I accordingly sought and found. It was a
massive, ancient structure, and on inquiring of the janitor if the count
was at home, was informed that his kinswoman, the Countess Maria Pepoli,
lived there; and I was directed to his residence, which was a large
building occupying one side of an open _Place_, and which seemed only to
need a sentinel to complete its pretensions to being a royal palace.
Unfortunately for me, the count was at his country seat.
This nobleman, while in London, married a Scotch lady. My old friend, Mr.
Plattnaur, kept up a constant correspondence with the count, informing
him of all that happened to his English friends. Plattnaur was very
intimate with Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The lady once asked when he would
join them at dinner. He replied, “If you please, to-morrow.” “Yes,” she
answered, “do come to-morrow: it will be the first day of the chicken.”
I have not spoken of Sir Matthew Tierney, a physician of Irish
extraction, a good-looking plausible man, always equal to the occasion,
whatever might fall in his way. He had the look of a baronet when once
you knew he was one—a title that he won easily, by a stroke of worldly
wisdom. When George No. 4 was a Brighton man, reposing under that Chinese
umbrella, the Pavilion, he was surrounded by physicians, one of whom,
Dr. Bankhead, I was intimately acquainted with in Italy during 1831 and
1832. Bankhead was a powerful-looking Scotchman, with a large red face
and hair to match, living abroad for reasons, and practising among the
English residents at Florence, by whom he was much liked and courted, and
as little respected as many of them were respected by themselves. But all
liked his anecdotes of life high and low, more especially so did the men
after dinner, when the ladies had left the table.
He told me that he used to meet the king’s physicians every morning
before visiting the royal patient, and that he and the others invariably
passed away an hour in inventing scandalous stories about the
aristocracy, calculated to give amusement and pleasure to their patient.
He had been Lord Londonderry’s physician; with him he had lived in town
and country, and so had become acquainted with the noblest in the land,
and with all their foibles.
Bankhead knew the history of Tierney’s rise to the summit, which had a
very humble beginning. The king, always self-indulgent, was of course
always ill. At that time his favourite groom, who was suffering under
circumstances similar to those of his master, and could get no attention
from the medical men of the palace, consulted Tierney. That astute
physician saw his chance, and giving the groom as much care as he would
have bestowed on royalty itself, effected a cure, which, commending
itself to the king, led to Tierney being summoned, and to his advice
being followed with marked advantage.
Sir Matthew kept up a handsome house at Brighton, on the Grand Parade,
where he resided in the season, living in London during the fashionable
months. He was a favourite, and a man of very pleasant manners.
As to manners, they make the man more than doth the tailor, though he
be a Stultz or a Poole. Sir Matthew had the manner of a man of mark,
which consisted in his looking as if he had an answer ready to any
question before it was asked. When he came into the committee-room of
the hospital, it was as if he had entered to do all the business of the
meeting, and to put everything right, taking it as granted that confusion
was in the ascendant.
It was so with Sir David Scott. His quiet, pleasant face was a signal for
all to look at him, and to feel that what he had to say would be more
refreshing than anything they could utter themselves.
Horace Smith’s face was of that free, smileless expression, which clearly
asked, “Do you want to laugh? for, if so, I’ll make you do so without
further notice.”
As to Wagner’s face, it was one not easily defined. The expression was
pleasing without being quite agreeable. It bore the candid threat of
entering on some business transaction, useful in itself, but declining
in interest the nearer it approached the amount of subscriptions still
necessary to carry out as it deserved his beneficent scheme. Wagner in
one thing only was unscrupulous and devoid of mercy—it was in ordering
money out of one pocket into another for the general good, as if parting
with it was the chief object in life, and to assist another in doing so
was benevolence itself, such as few were capable of feeling towards a
fellow-man.
How successful he was in taking every one into partnership with him in
such matters!