I left Paris a day or two before my father, mother, and sisters, though
bound for the same destination--Bruges. My object in doing so appears to
have been to get a sight of some of the towns of French Flanders by the
way. But I was not many days after them in reaching the Château d’Hondt,
outside the Porte St. Pierre at Bruges; and there I remained, with the
exception of sundry visits to Ostend, and two or three rambles among the
Flemish cities, till the 3rd of October.
One used to go from Bruges to Ostend in those days by “Torreborre’s”
barge, which was towed by a couple of horses. There was a lumbering but
very roomy diligence drawn by three horses abreast. But the barge,
though yet slower than the diligence, was the pleasanter mode of making
the journey. The cost of it, I well remember, was one franc ten
centimes, which included (in going by the morning barge, which started,
if I remember rightly, at six A.M.), as much bread and butter and really
excellent _café au lait_ as the traveller chose to consume--and I chose
in those days to consume a considerable quantity. What the journey cost
without any breakfast, I forget, if I ever knew. I fancy no such
contingency as any passenger declining his bread and butter and coffee
was contemplated, and that the charge was always the same whether you
took breakfast or not. It was not an unpleasant manner of travelling,
though specially adapted for the inmates of the Castle of Indolence. The
cabin was roomy and comfortably furnished, and infinitely superior to
the accommodation of any of the Dutch _trekschuyts_ of the present day.
One took one’s book with one. And a cigar on the well-seated cabin roof
was in excellent keeping with the lazy smoothness of the movement, and
the flat sleepy monotony of the banks.
And these visits to Ostend were very pleasant. Consul Fauche’s
hospitable door was always open to me, and there was usually sure to be
something pleasant going on within it--very generally excellent music. I
have already spoken of Mrs. Fauche’s charming voice. Any pleasant
English, who might be passing through, or spending the bathing season at
Ostend, were sure to be found at the Consul’s--especially if they
brought voices or any musical dispositions with them. But Mary Fauche
herself was in those days a sufficient attraction to make the whitest
stone evening of all that when no other visitor was found there. _Noctes
cœnæque Deûm!_
But those pleasant Ostend days were before the summer ended overshadowed
by a tragedy, which I will not omit to record, because the story of it
carries a valuable warning with it.
We had made acquaintance at Paris with a Mrs. Mackintosh and her
daughter, very charming Scotch people. Mrs. Mackintosh was a widow, and
Margaret was her only child. She was an extremely handsome girl,
nineteen years of age, and as magnificent a specimen of young womanhood
as can be conceived. “More than common tall,” she showed in her whole
person the development of a Juno, enhanced by the vigour, elasticity and
blooming health of a Diana. She and her mother came to Ostend for the
bathing season. Margaret was a great swimmer; and her delight was to
pass nearly the whole of those hot July days in the water. Twice, or
even thrice every day she would return to her favourite element. And
soon she began to complain of lassitude, and to lose her appetite and
the splendour of her complexion. Oh! it was the heat, which really only
the constant stimulus of her bath and swim could render tolerable. She
was warned that excess in bathing, especially in salt water, may
sometimes be as dangerous as any other excess, but the young naiad, who
had never in her life needed to pay heed to any medical word or warning,
would not believe, or would not heed. And before the September was over
we followed poor Margaret Mackintosh to the little Ostend cemetery,
killed by over bathing as decidedly as if she had held her head under
water!
This sad tragedy brought to a gloomy end a season which had been, if
not a very profitable, a very amusing one. There was a _ci-devant_ Don
Quixote sort of a looking man, a Count Melfort, whose young and buxom
wife boasted some strain of I forget what noble English blood, and who
used to give the Consul good dinners such as he particularly affected,
which his wife was neither asked nor cared to share, though the ladies
as well as the gentlemen were excellent good friends. There was a
wealthy Colonel Dickson who also used to give dinners, at one of which,
having been present, I remember the host fussing in and out of the room
during the quarter of an hour before dinner, till at last he rushed into
the drawing-room with his coat sleeves drawn up to his elbows, horror
and despair in his mien, as he cried, “Great heaven! the cook has cut
the fins off the turbot!” If any who partook of that mutilated fish
survive to this present year of grace (which, I fear, is hardly likely
to be the case) I am sure they will recall the scene which ensued on the
dreadful announcement. There was the very pretty and abnormally silly
little banker’s wife, who supplied my old friend, Captain Smithett, with
_billets doux_ and fun, and who used to adapt verses sent her by a still
sillier youthful adorer of her own to the purpose of expressing her own
devotion to quite other swains.
It was a queer and not very edifying society, exceedingly strange, and
somewhat bewildering to a lad fresh from Oxford who was making his first
acquaintance with Continental ways and manners. All the married couples
seemed to be continually dancing the figure of _chassée croisez_, and I,
who had no wife of my own, and was not yet old enough to know better,
thought it extremely amusing.
When October came, and I had not heard anything from Birmingham of the
appointment to a mastership in the school there, for which I had been
all this time waiting, I thought it was time to look up my Birmingham
friends and see how matters stood there. At Birmingham I found that the
governors of King Edward’s School were still shilly-shallying; but I
heard enough to convince me that no new master would be appointed till
the very fine new building which now ornaments the town, but was then in
course of construction, should be completed.
Having become convinced of this, in which it eventually turned out that
I was right, it only remained to me to return to Bruges, with the
assurance from Dr. Jeune and several of the governors that I and nobody
else should have the mastership when the appointment should be made. I
returned to Bruges, passing one day with the dear Grants at Harrow, and
an evening with my brother Anthony in London by the way, and reached the
Château d’Hondt on the 15th of October, to find my father very much
worse than I had left him. He was in bed, and was attended by the Dr.
Herbout of whom I have before spoken. But he was too evidently drawing
towards his end; and after much suffering breathed his last in the
afternoon of the 23rd of October, 1835. On the 25th I followed his body
to his grave, close to that of my brother Henry, in the cemetery outside
the Catherine Gate of the town.
The duty was a very specially sad one. When I followed my mother to the
grave at Florence many years afterwards my thoughts were far from being
as painfully sad, though she was, I fear, the better loved parent of the
two. She died in a ripe old age after a singularly happy, though not
untroubled, life, during many years of which it was permissible to me to
believe that I had had no small share in ministering to her happiness.
It was otherwise in the case of my father. He was, and had been, I take
it, for many years a very unhappy man. All had gone wrong with him;
misfortunes fell on him, one on the back of the other. Yet I do not
think that these misfortunes were the real and efficient causes of his
unhappiness. I do not see what concatenation of circumstances could have
made him happy. He was in many respects a singular man. Ill-health and
physical suffering, of course, are great causes of an unhappy life; but
all suffering invalids are not unhappy. My father’s mind was, I think,
to a singular degree under the dominion of his body. The terrible
irritability of his temper, which sometimes in his latter years reached
a pitch that made one fear his reason was, or would become, unhinged,
was undoubtedly due to the shattering of his nervous system, caused by
the habitual use of calomel. But it is difficult for one who has never
had a similar experience to conceive the degree in which this
irritability made the misery of all who were called upon habitually to
come into contact with it. I do not think that it would be an
exaggeration to say that for many years no person came into my father’s
presence who did not forthwith desire to escape from it. Of course, this
desire was not yielded to by those of his own household, but they were
none the less conscious of it. Happiness, mirth, contentment, pleasant
conversation, seemed to fly before him as if a malevolent spirit
emanated from him. And all the time no human being was more innocent of
all malevolence towards his fellow creatures; and he was a man who would
fain have been loved, and who knew that he was not loved, but knew
neither how to manifest his desire for affection nor how to conciliate
it.
I am the more convinced that bodily ailment was the _causa causans_ of
most, if not of all, of this unhappy idiosyncrasy, that I have before me
abundant evidence that as a young man he was beloved and esteemed by his
cotemporaries and associates. I have many letters from college friends,
fellows of New College, his cotemporaries, several of them thanking him
for kindnesses of a more or less important kind, and all written in a
spirit of high regard and esteem.
What so grievously changed him? I do not believe that he was soured by
pecuniary misfortune, though he had more than enough. His first great
misfortune--the marriage of his old widower uncle, whose heir he was to
have been--was, I have the means of knowing, borne by him well, bravely
and with dignity. I believe that he was destroyed mind and body by
calomel, habitually used during long years.
Throughout life he was a laborious and industrious man. I have seen few
things of the kind with more of pathos in it than his persevering
attempt to render his labour of some value by compiling a dictionary of
ecclesiastical terms. He had quite sufficient learning and sufficient
industry to have produced an useful book upon the subject if he had only
had the possibility of consulting the, of course, almost innumerable
necessary authorities. The book was published in quarto by subscription,
and two or three parts of it had been delivered to the subscribers when
death delivered him from his thankless labour and his subscribers from
further demands on their purses. I do not suppose that any human being
purchased the book because they wished to possess it. And truly, as I
have said, it was a pathetic thing to see him in his room at Château
d’Hondt, ill, suffering, striving with the absolutely miserable,
ridiculously insufficient means he had been able with much difficulty to
collect, to carry on his work. He was dying--he must, I think, have
known that he was; he had not got beyond D in his dictionary; all the
alphabet was before him, but he would not give up; he would labour to
the last. My mother was labouring hard, and her labour was earning all
that supplied very abundantly the needs of the whole family. And I
cannot help thinking that a painful but not ignoble feeling urged my
poor father to live at least equally laborious days, even though his
labour was profitless.
Poor father! My thoughts as I followed him to the grave were that I had
not done all that I might have done to alleviate the burthen of
unhappiness that was laid upon him. Yet looking back on it all from the
vantage-ground of my own old age (some fifteen years greater than that
which he attained) I do not see or think that any conduct of mine would
have made matters better for him.
My father’s death naturally made an important change in my mother’s
plans for the future. The Château d’Hondt was given up, adieus were
said, not without many _au revoirs_, to many kind friends at Bruges, and
more especially at Ostend, and we left Belgium for England. After some
time spent in house-hunting, my mother hired a pleasant house with a
good garden on the common at Hadley, near Barnet, and there I remained
with her, still awaiting my Birmingham preferment, all that winter and
the following spring. The earlier part of the time was saddened by the
rapid decline and death of my younger sister, Emily. We knew before
leaving Bruges that there was but a slender hope of saving her from the
same malady which had been fatal to my brother Henry. But the medical
men hoped or professed to hope, that much might be expected from her
return to her native air. But the mark of the cruel disease was upon
her, and very rapidly after our establishment at Hadley she sank and
painlessly breathed her last.
Poor little Emily! She was a very bright _espiègle_ child, full of fun
and high spirits. There is a picture of her exactly as I remember her.
She is represented with flowing flaxen curls and wide china-blue eyes,
sitting with a brown holland pinafore on before a writing-desk and
blowing a prismatically-coloured soap-bubble. The writing copy on the
desk lying above the half-covered and neglected page of copy-book bears
the legend “Study with determined zeal!”
Her youngest child had ever been to my mother as the apple of her eye,
and her loss was for the passing day a crushing blow. But, as usual with
her, her mind refused to remain crushed, any more than the grass is
permanently crushed by the storm wind that blows over it. She had the
innate faculty and tendency to throw sorrow off when the cause of it had
passed. She owed herself to the living, and refused to allow unavailing
regret for those who had been taken from her to incapacitate her for
paying that debt to the utmost.
And once again, as was usual with her, her new home became a centre of
social enjoyment and attraction for all, especially the young, who were
admitted to it. I do not remember that with the exception of the family
of the rector, Mr. Thackeray, we had many acquaintances at Hadley. I
remember a bit of fun, long current among us, which was furnished by the
reception my mother met with when returning the call of the wife of a
wealthy distiller resident in the neighbourhood. The lady was of
abnormal bulk, and when my mother entered the room in which she was
sitting, she said, “Excuse me, ma’am, if I keep my chair, I never
_raise_. But I am glad to see you--glad to see anybody,” with much
emphasis on the last word. I wish every caller was received with as
truthful an expression of sentiments.
Our society consisted mainly of friends staying in the house, or of
flying visitors from London. As usual, too, my mother soon gathered
around her a knot of nice girls, who made the house bright. For herself
she seemed always ready to take part in all the fun and amusement that
was going; and was the first to plan dances, and charades, and picnics,
and theatricals on a small and unpretending scale. But five o’clock of
every morning saw her at her desk; and the production of the series of
novels, which was not brought to a conclusion till it had reached the
hundred and fifteenth volume, though it was not begun till she was past
fifty, never ceased.
The Christmas was, I remember, a very merry one. We were seeing a good
deal of a young fellow-clerk of my brother’s in the secretary’s office
at the Post Office, who was then beginning to fall in love with my
sister Cecilia, whom he married not long afterwards. He was then at the
beginning of a long official life, from which he retired some years ago
as Sir John Tilley, K.C.B. Among others of our little circle, I
especially remember Joseph Henry Green, the celebrated surgeon,
Coleridge’s literary executor, who first became known to us through his
brother-in-law, Mr. Hammond, who was in practice at Hadley. Green was an
immensely tall man, with a face of no beauty, but as brightly alive with
humour as any I ever saw. He was a delightful companion in a walk; and I
remember to the present hour much of the curious and out-of-the-way
information I picked up from him, mainly on subjects more or less
connected with his profession--for he, as well as I, utterly scouted the
stupid sink-the-shop rule of conversation. I remember especially his
saying of Coleridge, _à propos_ of a passage in his biography which
speaks of the singular habit (noticed by his amanuensis) that he had of
occupying his mind with the coming passage, which he was about to
dictate, while uttering that with which the writer was busy, that he
(Green) had frequently observed the same peculiarity in his
conversation.
Some few of our guests came to us from beyond the Channel, among them,
charming Mrs. Fauche, with her lovely voice and equally lovely face,
whose Ostend hospitalities my mother was glad to have an opportunity of
returning.
Among these visitors from the other side of the Channel, I remember one
elderly lady of the Roman Catholic faith, and a strict observer of its
precepts, who was pleased to express a very strong approbation of a
certain oyster soup, which made its appearance one day at my mother’s
table. She was charmed at the idea of being able to eat such soup for a
_maigre_ dinner, and begged that the receipt might be written out for
her. “Oyster soup! Just the thing for a Friday!” So the mode of
preparing the desired dainty was duly written out for her. But her face
was a study for a physiognomist when she read the first line of it, to
the effect that she was to “Take of _prime beef_” so much. Oyster soup,
indeed!
It was a pleasant time--so pleasant that I am afraid that I did not
regret perhaps so much as I ought to have done the continued delay of
the Birmingham appointment for which I was all this time waiting. But
pleasant as it was, its pleasantness was not sufficient wholly to
restrain me from indulging in that propensity for rambling which has
been with me the ruling passion of a long life-time.
It was in the spring following that merry Christmas that I found time
for a little tour of about three weeks in Normandy. The reader need not
fear that I am going to tell him anything of all I did and all I saw,
though every detail of it seemed to me at the time worthy of minute
record. But it has all been written and printed some scores of times
since those days--by myself once among the rest--and may now be
dismissed with a “See guide-books _passim_.” The expenses of my travel
accurately recorded I have also before me. There indeed I might furnish
some facts which would be new and surprising to tourists of the present
day, but they would only serve to make him discontented with his
generation.
There is one anecdote, however, connected with this little journey,
which I must relate. I was returning from southern Normandy and reached
Caen without a penny in my pocket. My funds, carefully husbanded as they
had been, had sufficed to carry me so far and no further. There were no
such things as telegrams or railways in those days; and I had nothing
for it but to go to an hotel and there remain till my application to
Hadley for funds could be answered--an affair of some ten or twelve days
as things then were. While I was waiting and kicking my heels about the
old Norman city, from which I had already extracted all the interest it
could afford me, I lounged into the shop of a bookseller, M. Mancel. I
revisited him on a subsequent occasion, and find the record of this
second visit in the first of two volumes which I wrote, and entitled _A
Summer in Brittany_. There I find that M. Mancel is “the publisher of
numerous works on the history and antiquities of Normandy.... M. Mancel
has also an extensive collection of old books on Norman history; but the
rarest and most curious articles are congregated into a most
bibliomaniacal looking cabinet, and are _not_ for sale.”
Well, this was the gentleman into whose very tempting shop I strayed
with empty pockets. He was extremely civil, showed me many interesting
things, and finding that I was not altogether an ignoramus as regarded
his specialty, observed ever and anon “That is a book which you ought to
have!” “That is a work which you will find very useful!” till at last I
said “Very true! There are two or three books here that I should like to
have; but I have no money!” He instantly begged me to take any book or
books I should like to buy, and pay for them when I got to London.
“But,” rejoined I, “I don’t know when I shall get to London, for I have
no money at all. I reached Caen with my purse empty, and am stranded
here!” M. Mancel thereupon eagerly begged me to let him be my banker for
my immediate needs, as well as for the price of any volumes I chose to
purchase. And though he had never seen my face or heard my name before,
he absolutely did furnish me with money to reach home, and gave me
credit for some two or three pounds’ worth of books, it being arranged
that I should on reaching London pay the amount to M. Dulau in Soho
Square.
A few years ago on passing through Caen I went to the old book shop; but
M. Mancel had long since gone to join the majority, and his place knew
him no more. His successor, however, on my explaining to him the motive
of my visit, remarked with a truly French bow, “My predecessor seems to
have been a good physiognomist, monsieur!”
I returned to Hadley to find my mother eagerly occupied with the scheme
of a journey to Vienna, and a book as the result of it. She had had,
after the publication of her book on _Paris and the Parisians_, some
idea of undertaking an Italian tour, but that was now abandoned in
favour of a German journey, whether on the suggestion of her publisher,
or from any other cause of preference, I do not know. Of course I
entered into such a scheme heart and soul. My only fear now was that
news of my appointment to a mastership at Birmingham might arrive in
time to destroy my hopes of accompanying my mother. But no such tidings
came; on the contrary, there seemed every reason to suppose that no new
master would be appointed till after the following Christmas holidays.
My mother was as anxious as I was that I should be free to act as her
courier, for in truth she could hardly dispense with some such
assistance; and I alone remained who could give it to her. My sister
Cecilia was to accompany my mother. She wished also to take with her M.
Hervieu, the artist who illustrated her former books; and I obtained her
permission to ask an Oxford friend to make one of the party. We were
thus a party of five, without counting my mother’s maid, an old and
trusted servant, the taking of whom, however, she subsequently
considered so great a mistake that she never fell into it on any other
occasion.
My delight at the prospect of such a journey was intense. I surrounded
myself forthwith with an amazing supply of maps and guide-books, and was
busy from morning to night with the thoroughly congenial task of
studying and preparing our proposed route.