Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
WHAT I REMEMBER
VOL. I.
[Illustration: THOMAS ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
_From a painting by Maria Taylor_
London: Richard Bentley & Son
_Printed in Paris_]
WHAT I REMEMBER
BY
THOMAS ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
[Illustration: colophon]
_IN TWO VOLUMES_
VOL. I
_SECOND EDITION_
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1887
RICHARD CLAY AND SONS,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.
OMNIBUS WICCAMICIS
T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
B. M. DE WINTON PROPE WINTON COLL.
OLIM ALUMNUS
GRATO ANIMO
D. D. D.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
EARLY DAYS IN LONDON 1
CHAPTER II.
EARLY DAYS IN LONDON 28
CHAPTER III.
AT HARROW 57
CHAPTER IV.
AT HARROW 81
CHAPTER V.
AT WINCHESTER 94
CHAPTER VI.
AT WINCHESTER 125
CHAPTER VII.
VISIT TO AMERICA 150
CHAPTER VIII.
VISIT TO AMERICA 168
CHAPTER IX.
AT OXFORD 190
CHAPTER X.
OLD DIARIES 221
CHAPTER XI.
OLD DIARIES 228
CHAPTER XII.
OLD DIARIES 243
CHAPTER XIII.
OLD DIARIES.--AT PARIS 261
CHAPTER XIV.
AT BRUGES.--AT HADLEY 290
CHAPTER XV.
GERMAN TOUR.--IN AUSTRIA 306
CHAPTER XVI.
IN AUSTRIA 328
CHAPTER XVII.
AT BIRMINGHAM 344
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 355
CHAPTER XIX.
MESMERIC EXPERIENCES 362
INDEX 397
WHAT I REMEMBER
CHAPTER I.
I have no intention of writing an autobiography. There has been nothing
in my life which could justify such a pretension. But I have lived a
long time. I remember an aged porter at the monastery of the “Sagro
Eremo,” above Camaldoli, who had taken brevet rank as a saint solely on
the score of his ninety years. His brethren called him and considered
him as Saint Simon simply because he had been porter at that gate for
more than sixty years. Now my credentials as a babbler of reminiscences
are of a similar nature to those of the old porter. I have been here so
many, many years. And then those years have comprised the best part of
the nineteenth century--a century during which change has been more
rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably
during any other century of which social history has to tell.
Of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that
social life in England--or rather let me say in Europe--is very
different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are
perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated
causes which have differentiated the Victorian era from all others. But
only the small records of an unimportant individual life, only the
memories which happen to linger in an old man’s brain, like bits of
drift-weed floating round and round in the eddies of a back-water, can
bring vividly before the young of the present generation those ways and
manners of acting and thinking and talking in the ordinary every-day
affairs of life which indicate the differences between themselves and
their grandfathers.
I was born in the year 1810 at No. 16, Keppel Street, Russell Square.
The region was at that time inhabited by the professional classes,
mainly lawyers. My father was a barrister of the Middle Temple to the
best of my recollection, but having chambers in the Old Square,
Lincoln’s Inn. A quarter of a century or so later, all the district in
question became rather deteriorated in social estimation, but has, I am
told, recently recovered itself in this respect under the careful and
judicious administration of the Duke of Bedford. The whole region
appeared to me, when I was recently in London, about the least changed
part of the London of my youthful days. As I walked up Store Street,
which runs in a line from Keppel Street to Tottenham Court Road, I spied
the name of “Pidding, Confectioner.” I immediately entered the shop and
made a purchase at the counter. “I did not in the least want this tart,”
said I to the girl who was serving in the shop. “Why did you take it,
then?” said she, with a little toss of her head. “Nobody asked you to
buy it.” “I bought it,” rejoined I, “because I used to buy pastry of Mr.
Pidding in this shop seventy years ago.” “Lor’, sir!” said the girl,
“did you really?” She probably considered me to be the Wandering Jew.
I remember well that my father used to point out to me houses in Russell
Square, Bedford Square, and Bloomsbury Square in which judges and other
notable legal luminaries used to live. But even in those days the
localities in question, especially the last named of them, were
beginning to be deserted by such personages, who were already moving
farther westward. The occasion of these walks with my father through the
squares I have named--to which Red Lion Square might have been
added--was one the painful nature of which has fixed it in my memory
indelibly.
“Infandam _memoria_ jubes renovare dolorem.”
For the object of these walks was the rendering an account of the
morning’s studies. I was about six years old, when under my father’s
auspices I was first introduced to the _Eton Latin Grammar_. He was a
Wykehamist, had been a fellow of New College, and had held a Vinerian
Fellowship. And his great ambition was, that his eldest son, myself,
should tread in his steps and pursue the same career. _Dîs aliter
visum!_--as regards at least the latter stages of that career. For I did
become, and am, a Wykehamist, as much as eight years at _Coll. B. M.
Winton prope Winton_ can make me.
Of which more anon.
For the present I see myself alone in the back drawing-room of No. 16,
Keppel Street, in which room the family breakfast took place--probably
to avoid the necessity of lighting another fire in the dining-room
below--at 7 A.M., on my knees before the sofa, with my head in my hands
and my eyes fixed on the _Eton Latin Grammar_ laid on the sofa cushion
before me. My parents had not yet come down to breakfast, nor had the
tea urn been brought up by the footman. _Nota bene._--My father was a
poor man, and his establishment altogether on a modest footing. But it
never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on
without a man-servant in livery. And though this liveried footman served
a family in which two tallow candles with their snuffer dish supplied
the whole illumination of the evening, had the livery been an _invented_
one instead of that proper to the family, the circumstance would have
been an absurdity exciting the ridicule of all the society in which my
parents lived. _Tempora mutantur!_ Certainly at the present day an
equally unpretending household would be burthened by no footman. But on
the morning which memory is recalling to me the footman was coming up
with the urn, and my parents were coming down to breakfast, probably
simultaneously; and the question of the hour was whether I could get
the due relationship of relative and antecedent into my little head
before the two events arrived.
And that, as I remember it, was the almost unvaried routine for more
than a year or two. I think, however, that the walks of which I was
speaking when this retrospect presented itself to me must have belonged
to a time a little, but not much later; for I had then advanced to the
making of Latin verses. We used to begin in those days by making
“nonsense verses.” And many of us ended in the same way! The next
step--_Gradus ad Parnassum_--consisted in turning into Latin verse
certain English materials provided for the purpose, and so cunningly
prepared as to fall easily and almost inevitably into the required form.
And these were the studies which, as I specially remember, were the
subject of rehearsal during those walks from Lincoln’s Inn to Keppel
Street.
My father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five
o’clock dinner--rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and
laborious man. Well! we, that is my next brother (not the one whose name
became subsequently well known in the world, but my brother Henry, who
died early) and myself, used to walk from Keppel Street to Lincoln’s
Inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. He was a fast
walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition
of our morning’s poetical achievements did not tend, as I well remember,
to facilitate the difficulty of “keeping our wind.”
But what has probably fixed all this in my mind during nearly three
quarters of a century was my father’s pat application of one of our
lines to the difficulties of those peripatetic poetizings. “_Muse and
sound of wheel do not well agree_,” read the cunningly prepared
original, which the _alumnus_ with wonderful sagacity was to turn into,
“_Non bene conveniunt Musa rotæque sonus_.” “That,” said my father, as
he turned sharp round the corner into the comparative quiet of
Featherstone Buildings, “is exactly why I turned out of Holborn!”
I do not know whether children of eight years old, or thereabouts, would
at the present day be allowed to range London so freely as we were. But
our great amusement and delight was to take long exploring walks in as
distant parts of the huge (though then comparatively small) city as
could be compassed within the time at our disposition. One especially
favourite excursion, I well remember, was to the White Horse Cellar in
Piccadilly to see the coaches start or arrive. I knew all their names,
and their supposed comparative speed. By this means, indeed, came my
first introduction to English geography. Formal lessons on such a
thoroughly “commercial academy” subject were not, of course, thought of
for an aspiring Wykehamist. But for the due enjoyment of the White Horse
Cellar spectacle it was necessary to know the whereabouts of the cities,
their distance from London, and the routes by which they were reached.
It thus came to pass that our geographical notions were of a curiously
partial description--tolerably copious and accurate as regards the south
and west of England, far less so as regards the north. For the north
country coaches did not start from Piccadilly. On the opposite side of
the way to the White Horse Cellar there was another coaching inn, the
White Bear, on which I remember we used to look with much contempt, from
the belief, whether in any degree well founded I know not, that the
coaches which stopped there on their way out of town, or arrived there,
were mainly slow coaches.
One does not traverse well nigh four score years without having
experienced longings for the unattainable on several occasions. But I
have no remembrance of any such eager, craving longing as the chronic
longing of those days to make one of the great-coated companies who were
departing to their various destinations by those “Telegraphs,”
“High-Flyers,” “Magnets,” and “Independents.” (The more suggestive names
of the “Wonder,” and its rival the “No Wonder!” once celebrated on the
north-western road, belonged to a later day.) Had I been offered a seat
on any of these vehicles my choice would have been dictated solely by
considerations of distance--Falmouth for choice, as the westward Ultima
Thule of coaching experience. With what rapture should I have climbed,
in my little round jacket as I was, and without a thought of any other
protection, to the roof of the Falmouth mail--_the_ mail for choice, the
Devonport “Quicksilver” being then in the womb of the future--and
started to fetch a forgotten letter (say) of the utmost importance, with
strict injunctions to bring it back by the returning coach! I don’t
think my imagination had yet soared to the supreme glories of the box
seat. That came later. To have been a booked passenger, that that horn
should have sounded _for me_, that I should have been included in the
guard’s final and cheery assurance, that at length all was
“right”--would have been ample enough for an ecstasy of happiness. What
an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What an infinite
succession of “teams!” What a delicious sense of belonging to some
select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we
should clatter at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the
morning, through the streets of quiet little country towns, ourselves
the only souls awake in all the place! What speculations as to the
immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman, when he “left you
here, sir!” in the small hours! What a delightful sense of the possible
dangers of the undertaking as testified by many eagerly read narratives
of the disasters of the road. Alas! I had no share in it all, save to
stand on the curbstone amid the crowd of Jew boys selling oranges and
cedar pencils sixpence a dozen, and hurrying passengers and guards and
porters, and look on them all with envious longing.
_Nota bene._ On such an occasion at the present day--if it be possible
to conceive such an anachronism--the Jew boys above referred to would
be probably Christian boys, and the object of their commerce, the
evening papers. But I have no recollection of any such element in the
scene at the White Horse Cellar some sixty-eight years since.
Occasionally when a holiday from lessons occurred--I am afraid most
probably in consequence of my father being confined to his bed with
headaches, which even at that early day, and increasingly, as years went
on, afflicted him--we, my brother Henry and I, obtained permission for a
longer ramble. I have no recollection that on these occasions either the
parks (unless perhaps sometimes St. James’s Park), or Kensington
Gardens, or Hampstead, or Highgate, or any of the places that might be
supposed to be attractive had any attractions for us. Our faces were
ever turned eastward. The city with its narrow mysterious lanes, and
still more mysterious wharves, its quaint secluded churches, its
Guildhall, and its Gog and Magog, the queer localities of the halls of
its Companies, and specially the abstruse mystery of that venerable
Palladium, the London stone, excited in those days an irresistible
influence on my imagination. But above all else the grand object of a
much-planned eastern pilgrimage was the Docks!--with the out-going ships
bearing, tied to their shrouds, boards indicating their destinations.
Here again was unsatisfied longing! But it was a longing more tempered
by awe and uncertainty. I am not sure that I would, if it had been
offered to me, have stepped on board an East Indiaman bound for Bombay
as eagerly as I would have climbed a coach starting for the Land’s End.
But it was a great triumph to have seen with our own eyes the _Agra_ (or
some other) _Castle_ majestically passing through the dock gates, while
passengers on deck, men and women, whose feet would absolutely touch
land no more till they stopped at far Bombay on the other side of the
world, spoke last farewells to friends standing on the dock walls or
even on the gates themselves.
But I can recall no less vividly certain expeditions of a kind which
appeared to our imaginations to be--and which perhaps really were in
some degree--fraught with a certain amount of peril. Stories had reached
us of sundry mysteriously wicked regions, where the bandit bands of the
great city consorted and lived outlaw lives under circumstances and
conditions that powerfully excited our young imaginations. Especially
accounts of a certain lane had reached us, where it was said all the
pocket handkerchiefs stolen by all the pickpockets in London were to be
seen exposed in a sort of unholy market. The name of this place was
Saffron Hill. Whether any such place still exists, I know not. It has
probably been swept away by the march of recent improvement. But it did
in those days veritably exist. And to this extraordinary spot--as remote
and strange to our fancy as the realms of Prester John--it was
determined after protracted consideration by my brother and myself, that
our next long ramble should be devoted. We had ascertained that the
dingy land of our researches lay somewhat to the westward of
Smithfield--which had already been the object of a most successful,
adventurous, and delightful expedition, not without pleasurable perils
of its own from excited bullocks, still more excited drovers and their
dogs--and by dint of considerable perseverance we reached it, and were
richly rewarded for our toil and enterprise. Report had spoken truly.
Saffron Hill was a world of pocket-handkerchiefs. From every window and
on lines stretched across the narrow street they fluttered in all the
colours of the rainbow, and of all sizes and qualities. The whole lane
was a long vista of pennon-like pocket-handkerchiefs! We should have
much liked to attempt to deal in this strange market, not so much for
the sake of possessing any of the articles, as with a view of obtaining
experience, and informing ourselves respecting the manners and customs
of the country. But we were protected from the possibly unpleasant
results of any such tentative by the total absence from our pockets of
any coin of the realm. We doubtless had pocket-handkerchiefs, and I have
no recollection of their having been stolen. Probably it was ascertained
by the inhabitants that they were not worth their notice.
But the subject reminds me of an experience of the pocket-picking world
which occurred to me some twenty years later. It was at Naples. People
generally in those days carried silk pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the
scraps of muslin which are affected nowadays. And five silk
pocket-handkerchiefs were abstracted from my pockets during my walks
abroad in as many days. I then took to wearing very common ones, and
lost no more! An American then at Naples, whose experiences of the
proclivities of that population had been similar to mine, was not so
fortunate in the result of the defensive measures he adopted. He sewed
strongly into the interior of his pocket a large fish-hook. The result
which he anticipated followed. The thief’s hand was caught, and the
American, turning sharply, seized him by the wrist and held him in a
grasp like a vice till he could hand him over to a gendarme. But within
a fortnight that American was stabbed to the heart one night as he was
going home from the theatre. The light-fingered fraternity, it would
seem, considered that such a practice was not within the laws of the
game; whereas my more moderate ruse did not offend their sense of
justice and fair play.
My brother and I reached home safely enough after our expedition to
thief-land; and were inexhaustible in our accounts of the wonders we had
witnessed. For it formed no part of our plan, and would not have been at
all in accordance with the general practice of our lives to conceal the
facts from our parents. Probably we had a sufficient suspicion of the
questionable nature of the expedition we contemplated to prevent us from
declaring it beforehand. But our education and habits would have
forbidden any dream of concealing it.
As far as my recollection serves me, our moral and religious education
led us to consider the whole duty of boy to be summed up in the two
precepts, “obey,” and “tell no lies.” I think there was a perfunctory
saying of some portion of the catechism on a Sunday morning. But I am
very sure that in our own minds, and apparently in those of all
concerned, the vastly superior importance of the Virgil lesson admitted
of no moment’s doubt. But it must not be imagined from this that my
parents were more irreligious people than their neighbours; still less
that they were not most affectionately and indeed supremely solicitous
for the well-being and education of their children. My father was the
son of a priest of the Church of England, and my mother the daughter of
another, the Rev. William Milton, Vicar of Heckfield, a New College
living not far from Reading. Their associates were mainly barristers or
clergy. My father was wholly and absolutely free from the prevailing
vice of the time, and I never remember to have seen him in any slightest
degree the worse for drink. And in the whole _manière d’être_ of the
house and home there was no note or symptom of any life save one of the
most correct respectability and propriety, fully up to the average of
the time. But my parents were by no means what was called in the
language of the time “evangelicals.” And in the social atmosphere of
those days, any more decided and marked amount of religious instruction
and teaching would have unmistakably indicated “evangelical tendencies.”
Moreover, though I cannot remember, and it is exceedingly improbable,
that any ideas were directly instilled into our minds on the subject, it
certainly is the fact that I grew into boyhood with the notion that
“evangelicalism” or “low churchism” was a note of vulgarity--a sort of
thing that might be expected to be met with in tradesmen’s back
parlours, and “academies,” where the youths who came from such places
were instructed in English grammar and arithmetic, but was not to be met
with, and was utterly out of place, among gentlemen and in gentlemanlike
places of education, where nothing of the kind was taught.
All this to mark the change of _tempora_ and _mores_, in these as in so
many other respects, since George the Third was king.
Among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood’s years in
Keppel Street, I can still recall to the mind’s eye the face and
features of “Farmer,” the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged
woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of
brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. Farmer, as I
remember her, inspired more awe than affection. She was an austere and
somewhat grim sort of body. And somehow or other the obscurely terrible
fact that she was an Anabaptist (!) had reached the world of the
nursery. I need hardly say that the accusation carried with it no sort
of idea whatever to our minds. I don’t think we had any knowledge that
the mystic term in question had reference to any forms or modifications
of religious belief. But we were well assured that it implied something
mysterious and terrible. And I am afraid that we gracelessly availed
ourselves of what we should have considered a misfortune, if we had at
all known what it meant, to express on occasions of revolt against
discipline, our scorn for an individual so disgraced by nature. I have
still in my ear the lilt of a wicked chorus the burthen of which ran:--
“Old Farmer is an Anabap_tist_!
When she is gone, she will not be missed!”
I remember in connection with poor Farmer and her heresies, an incident
which must have been ridiculous enough to the adult actors in it. Dr.
Nott, one of the prebendaries of Winchester, was an old and intimate
friend of my mother’s--had been such I believe, before her marriage. The
mention of this gentleman recalls to my mind--but this recollection
dates from a later day,--that it used to be said satirically, with what
truth I will not attempt to guess, that there was a large Chapter at
Winchester and _Nott_, one of them, a clergyman: the intention being to
insinuate that he was the only properly clerical character among them.
At all events, Dr. Nott was an exemplary dignitary of the Church, not
only in character, tastes, and pursuits, but in outward presentment
also. I remember well his spare figure, his pale and delicately cut
features, his black gaiters to the knee, and his elaborate white
neckcloth. He was a competent, and what would have been called in that
day an “elegant” Italian scholar. It was wholly under his supervision,
that a few years subsequently the extensive restoration and repair of
Winchester Cathedral was executed; a supervision which cost him, in
consequence of a fall from a ladder in the nave, a broken leg and
subsequent lameness for life. He had, if I mistake not, been one of the
tutors of the Princess Charlotte.
Well, upon one occasion of a visit of Dr. Nott’s in Keppel Street, we
children were summoned to the drawing-room for his inspection; and in
reply to a variety of questions as to progress, and goodness in the
nursery, etc., I, as the eldest, took courage to reply that if we were
not always as good and obedient in the nursery as might be desired, the
circumstance was to be attributed to the painful fact that our nurse was
an Anabaptist! Whether Dr. Nott was selected as the recipient of this
confidential communication because I had any vague idea that this
disgraceful circumstance had any special connection with his department
of human affairs, I cannot say. We were however told that the fact was
no wise incompatible with Farmer’s character as an excellent nurse and
good servant, and least of all could be considered as absolving us from
the duty of obedience. I remember that I wondered then,--and I wonder
still--what passed upon the subject between my mother and the Doctor
after our dismissal to the nursery.
Another intimate friend of my mother’s and frequent visitor in Keppel
Street was Lady Dyer, the wife, and subsequently widow of General Sir
Thomas Dyer. Sir Thomas resided on his estate of Ovington, near
Winchester; and I take it that my mother’s intimacy with Lady Dyer had
been brought about by the friendship existing between both ladies and
Miss Gabell, the eldest daughter of Dr. Gabell, the Head Master of
Winchester College. Lady Dyer, after several years of widowhood, married
the Baron de Zandt; and I remember, very many years subsequently to the
time that I am here writing of, visiting her with my mother at her
_schloss_, near Bamberg, where she lived in the huge house alone after
losing her second husband.
I fancy it was mainly due to her intimacy with my mother during those
years in Keppel Street that the house was frequented by several
Italians; exiles from their own country under stress of political
troubles. Especially I remember among these General Guglielmo Pepe,
subsequently the hero of the hopeless defence of Venice against the
Austrians. Of course I was too young to know or see much of him in the
Keppel Street days; but many years afterwards I had abundant
opportunities of knowing Pepe’s genuine nobility of character, high
honour, and ardent patriotism. He was a remarkably handsome man, but not
a brilliant or amusing companion. I remember that his sobriquet among
the three ladies mentioned together above was _Gateau de Plomb_! But
none the less was he highly and genuinely respected by them. He had a
kind of simple, dignified, placid manner of enunciating the most
astounding platitudes, and replying to the laughter they sometimes
produced by a calm, gentle smile, which showed how impossible it was for
his simple soul to imagine that his hearers were otherwise than
delighted with his wit and wisdom. How well I can remember the pleasure
his visits were wont to afford in the nursery by reason of the dried
Neapolitan figs and Mandarin oranges, which he used to receive from his
brother, General Fiorestano Pepe, and never failed to distribute among
his English friends. His brother, when Guglielmo threw in his lot with
the “patriots,” never forfeited his allegiance or quarrelled with the
King of Naples. Yet the two brothers continued on affectionately
fraternal terms to the last.
The quiet course of those Keppel Street years was, as I remember, once
or twice broken by the great event of a visit to Heckfield to my
maternal grandfather, the Rev. William Milton, a _ci-devant_ Fellow of
New College. He had at that time married a second wife, a Miss
Partington, his first wife, a Derbyshire Gresley, my maternal
grandmother, whom I had never seen, having died young. As my grandfather
Milton was the son of a Bristol saddler (who lived to the age of
ninety-nine), I suppose his marriage with a Gresley must have been
deemed a _mésalliance_ for the lady. But her death having occurred
before my time, I never heard anything of this.
The vicar of Heckfield held the adjoining chapelry of Mattingly, at
which place the morning service was performed on alternate Sundays. He
was an excellent parish priest after the fashion of his day;--that is
to say he was kindly to all, liberal to the poor to the utmost extent of
his means, and well beloved by his neighbours, high and low. He was a
charming old man, markedly gentlemanlike and suave in his manner; very
nice in his person; clever unquestionably in a queer, crotchety sort of
way; and thoroughly minded to do his duty according to his lights in
that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. But he would
have had no more idea of attempting anything of the nature of active
parochial work or reform, as understood at the present day, than he
would have had of scheming to pay the National Debt. Indeed, the latter
would have been the more likely to occupy his mind of the two, for he
was crotchety and full of schemes. Especially he was fond of mechanics,
and spent much money and much labour during many years on a favourite
scheme for obviating the danger arising from the liability of a stage
coach to be upset. He published more than one pamphlet on the subject,
illustrated--I can see the pages before me now--by designs of various
queer-looking models. There was a large coach-house attached to the
vicarage, and it was always full of the strangest collection of models
of coaches. I remember well that they all appeared to me hideous, and as
æsthetically inferior to my admired “Telegraphs” and “High-Flyers” as a
modern ironclad seems to the three-decker of his youth in the eyes of an
old sailor. But, as may be imagined. I never ventured to broach any
such heresy in my grandfather’s hearing! I should unquestionably have
done so had it been my father. But lesser acquaintanceship and the
venerable age of my grandfather checked my presumption.
There was--and doubtless is--a very pretty evergreen-embowered lawn at
the vicarage, and on this also there always used to be some model or
other intended to illustrate the principles of traction. One I
especially remember which was called (not, it may seem, very
grammatically) _rotis volventibus_. This machine consisted of two huge
wheels, some ten feet high, joined together by a number of cross-bars at
a distance of a foot or so from each other. It will be understood what a
delightful amusement it must have been to creep into the interior of
this structure, and cause it to roll over the smoothly shaven turf by
stepping treadmill fashion on the cross-bars one after the other. But
unfortunately in one part of the lawn there was a steep declivity, and
one day, when the idea of making _rotis volventibus_ descend this slope
became irresistible, there was a tremendous smashing of the evergreen
hedge, and a black-and-blue little body, whose escape without broken
bones was deemed truly prodigious.
“Never, Tom,” said my grandfather, “put in motion forces which you are
unable to control!”
The words remained implanted in my memory. But I do not suppose they
carried much instruction with them to my mind at the time.
I believe my grandfather spent more money on his mechanical fads than
was quite prudent, and took out patents which were about as remunerative
and useful as that which Charles the Second is said to have granted to a
sailor who stood on his head on the top of Salisbury steeple, securing
to him the monopoly of that practice!
I remember another eccentricity in which the vicar indulged. He said the
contact of a knife’s edge with earthenware, or porcelain, was extremely
disagreeable. He caused, therefore, a number of dinner plates to be made
with a little circular depression some two inches in diameter and about
as deep as a crown piece in the centre, and had some round pieces of
silver to fit into these receptacles, on which he cut his meat.
He was withal a very popular man, a good scholar, with decidedly
scholarly tastes, much of a mathematician, a genuine humourist, with a
sort of Horatian easy-going geniality about him, which was very charming
even to us boys.
My brother Henry was one year my junior; my brother Anthony, with whom
the world subsequently became acquainted, was five years younger than I.
Henry, therefore, was the companion of all the London rambles which have
been mentioned. I think we were tolerably good boys, truthful and
obedient to legitimate authority. I was, however, if nursery traditions
of a somewhat later day may be accepted as embodying real facts, rather
too much given to yielding obedience only on reason shown; to “argify,”
as certain authoritarians are wont to call it; and to make plenary
submission only when consciously defeated in argument.
We had little or nothing of the “amusements” nowadays so liberally
supplied to children. There was the pantomime at Christmas, intensely
enjoyed. And I remember well pondering on the insoluble question, _why_
my parents, who evidently, I thought, could if they chose it, go to the
theatre every night of their lives, should abstain from doing so.
I do not remember any discontented longings for more or other amusements
than we had. I was a thoroughly well constituted and healthy child, but
without the smallest pretention to good looks, either _in esse_ or _in
posse_; sturdily built, with flaxen head, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes;
broad of hand and foot; strong as a little pony--a veritable Saxon in
type. I seem to my recollections to have been somewhat bravely ready to
accept a life, in which the kicks might be more superabundant than the
halfpence, not without complacent mental reference to the moral and
physical breadth of shoulders, ready for whatever fate might lay on
them. The nature of my childish mind, as I remember, was to place its
ideas of heroism in capacity for uncomplaining endurance, rather than in
capability for mastering others.
All the usual childish complaints and maladies touched me very lightly.
I was as indifferent to weather, wet or dry, wind or shine, as a
Shetland pony. Feet wet through had to remain _in statu quo_ till they
were dry again. Assiduously taught by my mother, I read at a very early
age. Her plan for teaching the letters was as follows. She had a great
number of bone counters with the alphabet in capitals and small letters
on either side printed on them; then having invited a charming little
girl, the daughter of a neighbour--(Katie Gibbon, laid to rest this many
a year under the yew tree in the churchyard of the village of Stanton,
near Monmouth)--who was just my own age, she tossed the counters
broadcast over the floor, instituting prizes for him, or her, who should
in crawling races over the floor, soonest bring the letter demanded.
Reading thus began to be an amusement to me at an unusually early age. I
believe I gave early indications of possessing a certain quantum of
brain power; but had no reputation for cleverness. Indeed, had my
parents ever formed the opinion that any one of their children was in
any way markedly clever, they would have carefully concealed it from the
subject of it. I take it, I was far from being what is called a
prepossessing child. I had, I well remember, a reputation for an
uncompromising expression of opinion, which was not altogether
admirable. My mother used to tell in after years how, when once I had
been, at about four years old, attentively watching her dressing for
dinner, while standing on a chair by the side of her dressing table, I
broke silence when the work was completed to say very judicially, “Now
you have made yourself as fine as poso--(possible)--and you look worse
than you did when you began!”
I am tempted to insert here a letter to my father from Dr. Williams, my
old Winchester master, which (amusingly to me) illustrates what I have
here written of my nursery tendencies. It belongs to a later date, when
I was within half a year of leaving Winchester. I had not found it among
my papers when I wrote the passage to which it is now appended. But I
place it here in homage to the dictum that the child is father to the
man.
“I have the pleasure,” Dr. Williams writes, “to express my approbation
of your son’s conduct during the last half-year. His firmness in
maintaining what was right and putting down what was wrong was very
conspicuous in the early part of that time; not that I imagine it was
less afterwards, but occasion did not call it forth so much.”
What the occasion was I entirely forget; evidently he refers to some
exercise of my power as a Prefect.
“I have remarked to you before that he is _fond of having a reason_
assigned for every thing; but he must take care that this do not
degenerate into captiousness. His temper is generally good, but a little
too sensitive when he fancies a smile is raised at his expense.”
I feel no confidence that years have rendered me safe from the first
fault which my excellent master thus warned me against; but I am sure
they have cured me of the second.
I remember too, in connection with those Keppel Street days, to have
heard my mother speak of an incident which somewhat curiously
illustrates the ways and habits of a time already so far left behind us
by a whole world of social changes. It was nothing more than a simple
visit to the theatre to hear Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth. But this
exploit involved circumstances that rendered it memorable for other
reasons besides the intense gratification derived from the performance.
In the first place “the pit” was the destination to which my father and
mother were bound; not altogether, I take it, so much for the sake of
the lower price of admission (though my father was a sufficiently poor
and a sufficiently careful man to render this a consideration), as from
the idea that the pit offered the best vantage ground for a thoroughly
appreciative and critical judgment of the performance. For when we
children were taken to see a pantomime we went, as I remember, to the
boxes. But this visit to the pit involved the necessity of being at the
theatre at two in the afternoon, and then _standing_ in the crowd till,
if I rightly remember, six in the evening! Of course food had to be
carried. And each man there did his best to support and assist the lady
under his charge. But the ordeal must have been something tremendous,
and the amount of enthusiasm needed to induce a lady to face it
something scarcely to be understood at the present day. My mother used
to relate that sundry women were carried out from the crowd at the
theatre door fainting.
Before closing this Keppel Street chapter of my existence I may mention
one or two circumstances of the family life there which illustrate the
social habits of those days. The family dinner-hour was five. There were
no dinner napkins to be seen; they were perhaps less needed by
clean-shaven chins and lips. Two tallow candles, requiring to be snuffed
by snuffers lying in a little plated tray _ad hoc_ every now and then,
partially illumined the table, but scarcely at all the more distant
corners of the room. Nor were any more or better lights used during the
evening in the drawing-room. The only alternative would have been wax
lights at half-a-crown a pound--an extravagance not to be thought of.
Port and sherry were always placed on the shining mahogany table when
the cloth was withdrawn, and no other wine. Only on the occasion of
having friends to dinner, the port became a “magnum” of a vintage for
which my father’s cellar was famous, and possibly Madeira might be
added.
Perhaps it may be worth noting here as an incident illustrating change
of manners that I vividly remember my mother often singing to us
children in Keppel Street an old song about an “unfortunate Miss Bayly,”
who had been seduced by a “Captain bold of Halifax, who dwelt in country
quarters.” Now a purer or more innocent-minded woman than my mother did
not live, nor one less likely to have suffered aught that she imagined
to be unfitted _virginibus puerisque_ to reach the ears of her children.
Nor do I suppose that we had the faintest notion of the nature of the
evil inflicted on the unfortunate Miss Bayly by the Captain bold, nor
that we were in any degree scandalised by the subsequent incident of the
parish priest being bribed by “a one pound note” to accord Christian
burial to the corpse of a suicide, which he had previously refused to
bury. It may be feared that quite as many “unfortunates” share the fate
of Miss Bayly either in town or country quarters at the present day as
in the early days of the century. But I take it that the old world ditty
in question would not be selected for nursery use at the present day.
I could chatter on about those childish days in Keppel Street, and have
been, I am afraid, too garrulous already. What I have said, however, is
all illustrative of the social changes seventy years have wrought, and
may at the same time serve to show that I started on my octogenarian
career a sturdy, hardy little mortal, _non sine Dîs animosus infans_.