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THE DAYS BEFORE YESTERDAY
by
Lord Frederick Hamilton
FOREWORD
The Public has given so kindly a reception to The Varnished Pomps of
Yesterday (a reception which took its author wholly by surprise), that
I have extracted some further reminiscences from the lumber-room of
recollections. Those who expect startling revelations, or stale whiffs
of forgotten scandals in these pages, will, I fear, be disappointed,
for the book contains neither. It is merely a record of everyday
events, covering different ground to those recounted in the former
book, which may, or may not, prove of interest. I must tender my
apologies for the insistent recurrence of the first person singular; in
a book of this description this is difficult to avoid.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Early days--The passage of many terrors--Crocodiles, grizzlies and
hunchbacks--An adventurous journey and its reward--The famous spring in
South Audley Street--Climbing chimney-sweeps--The story of Mrs.
Montagu's son--The sweeps' carnival--Disraeli--Lord John Russell--A
child's ideas about the Whigs--The Earl of Aberdeen--"Old Brown
Bread"--Sir Edwin Landseer, a great family friend--A live lion at a
tea-party--Landseer as an artist--Some of his vagaries--His frescoes at
Ardverikie--His latter days--A devoted friend--His last Academy picture
CHAPTER II
The "swells" of the "sixties"--Old Lord Claud Hamilton--My first
presentation to Queen Victoria--Scandalous behaviour of a
brother--Queen Victoria's letters--Her character and strong common
sense--My mother's recollections of George III. and George IV.--Carlton
House, and the Brighton Pavilion--Queen Alexandra--The Fairchild
Family--Dr. Cumming and his church--A clerical Jazz--First visit to
Paris--General de Flahault's account of Napoleon's campaign of
1812--Another curious link with the past--"Something
French"--Attraction of Paris--Cinderella's glass slipper--A glimpse of
Napoleon III.--The Rue de Rivoli--The Riviera in 1865--A novel
Tricolour flag--Jenny Lind--The championship of the Mediterranean--My
father's boat and crew--The race--The Abercorn wins the championship
CHAPTER III
A new departure--A Dublin hotel in the "sixties"--The Irish mail
service--The wonderful old paddle mail-boats--The convivial waiters of
the Munster--The Viceregal Lodge--Indians and pirates--The imagination
of youth--A modest personal ambition--Death-warrants; imaginary and
real--The Fenian outbreak of 1866-7--The Abergele railway accident--A
Dublin Drawing-Room--Strictly private ceremonials--Some of the
amenities of the Chapel Royal--An unbidden spectator of the State
dinners--Irish wit--Judge Keogh--Father Healy--Happy Dublin knack of
nomenclature--An unexpected honour and its cause--Incidents of the
Fenian rising--Dr. Hatchell--A novel prescription--Visit of King
Edward--Gorgeous ceremonial, but a chilly drive--An anecdote of Queen
Alexandra
CHAPTER IV
Chittenden's--A wonderful teacher--My personal experiences as a
schoolmaster--My "boys in blue"--My unfortunate garments--A "brave
Belge"--The model boy, and his name--A Spartan regime--"The Three
Sundays"--Novel religious observances--Harrow--"John Smith of
Harrow"--"Tommy"--Steele--"Tosher"--An ingenious punishment--John
Farmer--His methods--The birth of a famous song--Harrow school
songs--"Ducker"--The "Curse of Versatility"--Advancing old age--The
race between three brothers--A family failing--My father's race at
sixty-four--My own--A most acrimonious dispute at Rome--Harrow after
fifty years
CHAPTER V
Mme. Ducros--A Southern French country town--"Tartarin de
Tarascon"--His prototypes at Nyons--M. Sisteron the roysterer--The
Southern French--An octogenarian pasteur--French
industry--"Bone-shakers"--A wonderful
"Cordon-bleu"--"Slop-basin"--French legal procedure--The
bons-vivants--The merry French judges--La gaiete francaise--Delightful
excursions--Some sleepy old towns--Oronge and Avignon--M. Thiers'
ingenious cousin--Possibilities--French political situation in
1874--The Comte de Chambord--Some French characteristics--High
intellectual level--Three days in a Trappist Monastery--Details of life
there--The Arian heresy--Silkworm culture--Tendencies of French to
complicate details--Some examples--Cicadas in London.
CHAPTER VI
Brunswick--Its beauty--High level of culture--The Brunswick
Theatre--Its excellence--Gas vs. Electricity--Primitive theatre
toilets--Operatic stars in private life--Some operas unknown in
London--Dramatic incidents in them--Levasseur's parody of
"Robert"--Some curious details about operas--Two fiery old
pan-Germans--Influence of the teaching profession on modern
Germany--The "French and English Clubs"--A meeting of the "English
Club" Some reflections about English reluctance to learn foreign
tongues--Mental attitude of non-Prussians in 1875--Concerning various
beers--A German sportsman--The silent, quinine-loving youth--The Harz
Mountains--A "Kettle-drive" for hares--Dialects of German--The odious
"Kaffee-Klatch"--Universal gossip--Hamburg's overpowering
hospitality--Hamburg's attitude towards Britain--The city itself--Trip
to British Heligoland--The island--Some peculiarities--Migrating
birds--Sir Fitzhardinge Maxse--Lady Maxse--The Heligoland
Theatre--Winter in Heligoland
CHAPTER VII
Some London beauties of the "seventies"--Great ladies--The Victorian
girl--Votaries of the Gaiety Theatre Two witty ladies--Two clever girls
and mock-Shakespeare--The family who talked Johnsonian
English--Old-fashioned tricks of pronunciation--Practical jokes--Lord
Charles Beresford and the old Club-member--The shoeless
legislator--Travellers' palms--The tree that spouted wine--Ceylon's
spicy breezes--Some reflections--Decline of public interest in
Parliament--Parliamentary giants--Gladstone, John Bright, and
Chamberlain--Gladstone's last speech--His resignation--W.H. Smith--The
Assistant Whips--Sir William Hart-Dyke--Weary hours at Westminster--A
Pseudo-Ingoldsbean Lay
CHAPTER VIII
The Foreign Office--The new Private Secretary--A Cabinet
key--Concerning theatricals--Some surnames which have passed into
everyday use--Theatricals at Petrograd--A mock-opera--The family from
Runcorn--An embarrassing predicament--Administering the oath--Secret
Service--Popular errors--Legitimate employment of information--The
Phoenix Park murders--I sanction an arrest--The innocent victim--The
execution of the murderers of Alexander II.--The jarring military
band--Black Magic--Sir Charles Wyke--Some of his experiences--The
seance at the Pantheon--Sir Charles' experiments on myself--The
Alchemists--The Elixir of Life, and the Philosopher's Stone--Lucid
directions for their manufacture--Glamis Castle and its
inhabitants--The tuneful Lyon family--Mr. Gladstone at Glamis--He sings
in the glees--The castle and its treasures--Recollections of Glamis
CHAPTER IX
Canada--The beginnings of the C.P.R.--Attitude of British Columbia--The
C.P.R. completed--Quebec--A swim at Niagara--Other mighty
waterfalls--Ottawa and Rideau Hall--Effects of dry climate--Personal
electricity--Every man his own dynamo--Attraction of Ottawa--The
"roaring game"--Skating--An ice-palace--A ball on skates--Difficulties
of translating the Bible into Eskimo--The building of the snow hut--The
snow hut in use--Sir John Macdonald--Some personal traits--The Canadian
Parliament buildings--Monsieur l'Orateur--A quaint oration--The "Pages'
Parliament"--An all-night sitting--The "Arctic Cremorne"--A curious
Lisbon custom--The Balkan "souvenir-hunters"--Personal inspection of
Canadian convents--Some incidents--The unwelcome novice--The Montreal
Carnival--The Ice-castle--The Skating Carnival--A stupendous toboggan
slide--The pioneer of "ski" in Canada--The old-fashioned raquettes--A
Canadian Spring--Wonders of the Dominion
CHAPTER X
Calcutta--Hooghly pilots--Government House--A Durbar--The sulky
Rajah--The customary formalities--An ingenious interpreter--The sailing
clippers in the Hooghly--Calcutta Cathedral--A succulent banquet--The
mistaken Minister--The "Gordons"--Barrackpore--A Swiss Family Robinson
aerial house--The child and the elephants--The merry midshipmen--Some
of their escapades--A huge haul of fishes--Queen Victoria and
Hindustani--The Hills--The Manipur outbreak--A riding tour--A wise old
Anglo-Indian--Incidents--The fidelity of native servants--A novel
printing-press--Lucknow--The loss of an illusion
CHAPTER XI
Matters left untold--The results of improved communications--My
father's journey to Naples--Modern stereotyped uniformity--Changes in
customs--The faithful family retainer--Some details--Samuel Pepys'
stupendous banquets--Persistence of idea--Ceremonial
incense--Patriarchal family life--The barn dances--My father's
habits--My mother--A son's tribute--Autumn days--Conclusion
THE DAYS BEFORE YESTERDAY
CHAPTER I
Early days--The passage of many terrors--Crocodiles, grizzlies and
hunchbacks--An adventurous journey and its reward--The famous spring in
South Audley Street--Climbing chimney-sweeps--The story of Mrs.
Montagu's son--The sweeps' carnival--Disraeli--Lord John Russell--A
child's ideas about the Whigs--The Earl of Aberdeen--"Old Brown
Bread"--Sir Edwin Landseer, a great family friend--A live lion at a
tea-party--Landseer as an artist--Some of his vagaries--His frescoes at
Ardverikie--His latter days--A devoted friend--His last Academy picture.
I was born the thirteenth child of a family of fourteen, on the
thirteenth day of the month, and I have for many years resided at No.
13 in a certain street in Westminster. In spite of the popular
prejudice attached to this numeral, I am not conscious of having
derived any particular ill-fortune from my accidental association with
it.
Owing to my sequence in the family procession, I found myself on my
entry into the world already equipped with seven sisters and four
surviving brothers. I was also in the unusual position of being born an
uncle, finding myself furnished with four ready-made nephews--the
present Lord Durham, his two brothers, Mr. Frederick Lambton and
Admiral-of-the-Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, and the late Lord Lichfield.
Looking down the long vista of sixty years with eyes that have already
lost their keen vision, the most vivid impression that remains of my
early childhood is the nightly ordeal of the journey down "The Passage
of Many Terrors" in our Irish home. It had been decreed that, as I had
reached the mature age of six, I was quite old enough to come
downstairs in the evening by myself without the escort of a maid, but
no one seemed to realise what this entailed on the small boy
immediately concerned. The house had evidently been built by some
malevolent architect with the sole object of terrifying little boys.
Never, surely, had such a prodigious length of twisting, winding
passages and such a superfluity of staircases been crammed into one
building, and as in the early "sixties" electric light had not been
thought of, and there was no gas in the house, these endless passages
were only sparingly lit with dim colza-oil lamps. From his nursery the
little boy had to make his way alone through a passage and up some
steps. These were brightly lit, and concealed no terrors. The staircase
that had to be negotiated was also reassuringly bright, but at its base
came the "Terrible Passage." It was interminably long, and only lit by
an oil lamp at its far end. Almost at once a long corridor running at
right angles to the main one, and plunged in total darkness, had to be
crossed. This was an awful place, for under a marble slab in its dim
recesses a stuffed crocodile reposed. Of course in the daytime the
crocodile PRETENDED to be very dead, but every one knew that as soon as
it grew dark, the crocodile came to life again, and padded noiselessly
about the passage on its scaly paws seeking for its prey, with its
great cruel jaws snapping, its fierce teeth gleaming, and its horny
tail lashing savagely from side to side. It was also a matter of common
knowledge that the favourite article of diet of crocodiles was a little
boy with bare legs in a white suit. Even should one be fortunate enough
to escape the crocodile's jaws, there were countless other terrors
awaiting the traveller down this awe-inspiring passage. A little
farther on there was a dark lobby, with cupboards surrounding it. Any
one examining these cupboards by daylight would have found that they
contained innocuous cricket-bats and stumps, croquet-mallets and balls,
and sets of bowls. But as soon as the shades of night fell, these
harmless sporting accessories were changed by some mysterious and
malign agency into grizzly bears, and grizzly bears are notoriously the
fiercest of their species. It was advisable to walk very quickly, but
quietly, past the lair of the grizzlies, for they would have gobbled up
a little boy in one second. Immediately after the bears' den came the
culminating terror of all--the haunt of the wicked little hunchbacks.
These malignant little beings inhabited an arched and recessed
cross-passage. It was their horrible habit to creep noiselessly behind
their victims, tip...tip...tip-toeing silently but swiftly behind their
prey, and then ... with a sudden spring they threw themselves on to
little boys' backs, and getting their arms round their necks, they
remorselessly throttled the life out of them. In the early "sixties"
there was a perfect epidemic of so-called "garrotting" in London.
Harmless citizens proceeding peaceably homeward through unfrequented
streets or down suburban roads at night were suddenly seized from
behind by nefarious hands, and found arms pressed under their chins
against their windpipe, with a second hand drawing their heads back
until they collapsed insensible, and could be despoiled leisurely of
any valuables they might happen to have about them. Those familiar with
John Leech's Punch Albums will recollect how many of his drawings
turned on this outbreak of garrotting. The little boy had heard his
elders talking about this garrotting, and had somehow mixed it up with
a story about hunchbacks and the fascinating local tales about "the wee
people," but the terror was a very real one for all that. The
hunchbacks baffled, there only remained a dark archway to pass, but
this archway led to the "Robbers' Passage." A peculiarly bloodthirsty
gang of malefactors had their fastnesses along this passage, but the
dread of being in the immediate neighbourhood of such a band of
desperadoes was considerably modified by the increasing light, as the
solitary oil-lamp of the passage was approached. Under the comforting
beams of this lamp the little boy would pause until his heart began to
thump less wildly after his deadly perils, and he would turn the handle
of the door and walk into the great hall as demurely as though he had
merely traversed an ordinary everyday passage in broad daylight. It was
very reassuring to see the big hall blazing with light, with the logs
roaring on the open hearth, and grown-ups writing, reading, and talking
unconcernedly, as though unconscious of the awful dangers lurking
within a few yards of them. In that friendly atmosphere, what with toys
and picture-books, the fearful experiences of the "Passage of Many
Terrors" soon faded away, and the return journey upstairs would be free
from alarms, for Catherine, the nursery-maid, would come to fetch the
little boy when his bedtime arrived.
Catherine was fat, freckled, and French. She was also of a very stolid
disposition. She stumped unconcernedly along the "Passage of Terrors,"
and any reference to its hidden dangers of robbers, hunchbacks, bears,
and crocodiles only provoked the remark, "Quel tas de betises!" In
order to reassure the little boy, Catherine took him to view the
stuffed crocodile reposing inertly under its marble slab. Of course,
before a grown-up the crocodile would pretend to be dead and stuffed,
but ... the little boy knew better. It occurred gleefully to him, too,
that the plump French damsel might prove more satisfactory as a repast
to a hungry saurian than a skinny little boy with thin legs. In the
cheerful nursery, with its fragrant peat fire (we called it "turf"),
the terrors of the evening were quickly forgotten, only to be renewed
with tenfold activity next evening, as the moment for making the
dreaded journey again approached.
The little boy had had the Pilgrim's Progress read to him on Sundays.
He envied "Christian," who not only usually enjoyed the benefit of some
reassuring companion, such as "Mr. Interpreter," or "Mr. Greatheart,"
to help him on his road, but had also been expressly told, "Keep in the
midst of the path, and no harm shall come to thee." This was distinctly
comforting, and Christian enjoyed another conspicuous advantage. All
the lions he encountered in the course of his journey were chained up,
and could not reach him provided he adhered to the Narrow Way. The
little boy thought seriously of tying a rolled-up tablecloth to his
back to represent Christian's pack; in his white suit, he might perhaps
then pass for a pilgrim, and the strip of carpet down the centre of the
passage would make an admirable Narrow Way, but it all depended on
whether the crocodile, bears, and hunchbacks knew, and would observe
the rules of the game. It was most improbable that the crocodile had
ever had the Pilgrim's Progress read to him in his youth, and he might
not understand that the carpet representing the Narrow Way was
inviolable territory. Again, the bears might make their spring before
they realised that, strictly speaking, they ought to consider
themselves chained up. The ferocious little hunchbacks were clearly
past praying for; nothing would give them a sense of the most
elementary decency. On the whole, the safest plan seemed to be, on
reaching the foot of the stairs, to keep an eye on the distant lamp and
to run to it as fast as short legs and small feet could carry one. Once
safe under its friendly beams, panting breath could be recovered, and
the necessary stolid look assumed before entering the hall.
There was another voyage, rich in its promise of ultimate rewards, but
so perilous that it would only be undertaken under escort. That was to
the housekeeper's room through a maze of basement passages. On the road
two fiercely-gleaming roaring pits of fire had to be encountered.
Grown-ups said this was the furnace that heated the house, but the
little boy had his own ideas on the subject. Every Sunday his nurse
used to read to him out of a little devotional book, much in vogue in
the "sixties," called The Peep of Day, a book with the most terrifying
pictures. One Sunday evening, so it is said, the little boy's mother
came into the nursery to find him listening in rapt attention to what
his nurse was reading him.
"Emery is reading to me out of a good book," explained the small boy
quite superfluously.
"And do you like it, dear?"
"Very much indeed."
"What is Emery reading to you about? Is it about Heaven?"
"No, it's about 'ell," gleefully responded the little boy, who had not
yet found all his "h's."
Those glowing furnace-bars; those roaring flames ... there could be no
doubt whatever about it. A hymn spoke of "Gates of Hell" ... of course
they just called it the heating furnace to avoid frightening him. The
little boy became acutely conscious of his misdeeds. He had taken ...
no, stolen an apple from the nursery pantry and had eaten it. Against
all orders he had played with the taps in the sink. The burden of his
iniquities pressed heavily on him; remembering the encouraging warnings
Mrs. Fairchild, of The Fairchild Family, gave her offspring as to their
certain ultimate destiny when they happened to break any domestic rule,
he simply dared not pass those fiery apertures alone. With his hand in
that of his friend Joseph, the footman, it was quite another matter.
Out of gratitude, he addressed Joseph as "Mr. Greatheart," but Joseph,
probably unfamiliar with the Pilgrim's Progress, replied that his name
was Smith.
The interminable labyrinth of passages threaded, the warm, comfortable
housekeeper's room, with its red curtains, oak presses and a delicious
smell of spice pervading it, was a real haven of rest. To this very
day, nearly sixty years afterwards, it still looks just the same, and
keeps its old fragrant spicy odour. Common politeness dictated a brief
period of conversation, until Mrs. Pithers, the housekeeper, should
take up her wicker key-basket and select a key (the second press on the
left). From that inexhaustible treasure-house dates and figs would
appear, also dried apricots and those little discs of crystallised
apple-paste which, impaled upon straws, and coloured green, red and
yellow, were in those days manufactured for the special delectation of
greedy little boys. What a happy woman Mrs. Pithers must have been with
such a prodigal wealth of delicious products always at her command! It
was comforting, too, to converse with Mrs. Pithers, for though this
intrepid woman was alarmed neither by bears, hunchbacks nor crocodiles,
she was terribly frightened by what she termed "cows," and regulated
her daily walks so as to avoid any portion of the park where cattle
were grazing. Here the little boy experienced a delightful sense of
masculine superiority. He was not the least afraid of cattle, or of
other things in daylight and the open air; of course at night in dark
passages infested with bears and little hunchbacks ... Well, it was
obviously different. And yet that woman who was afraid of "cows" could
walk without a tremor, or a little shiver down the spine, past the very
"Gates of Hell," where they roared and blazed in the dark passage.
Our English home had brightly-lit passages, and was consequently
practically free from bears and robbers. Still, we all preferred the
Ulster home in spite of its obvious perils. Here were a chain of lakes,
wide, silvery expanses of gleaming water reflecting the woods and
hills. Here were great tracts of woodlands where countless little burns
chattered and tinkled in their rocky beds as they hurried down to the
lakes, laughing as they tumbled in miniature cascades over rocky ledges
into swirling pools, in their mad haste to reach the placid waters
below. Here were purple heather-clad hills, with their bigger brethren
rising mistily blue in the distance, and great wine-coloured tracts of
bog (we called them "flows") interspersed with glistening bands of
water, where the turf had been cut which hung over the village in a
thin haze of fragrant blue smoke.
The woods in the English place were beautifully kept, but they were
uninteresting, for there were no rocks or great stones in them. An
English brook was a dull, prosaic, lifeless stream, rolling its
clay-stained waters stolidly along, with never a dimple of laughter on
its surface, or a joyous little gurgle of surprise at finding that it
was suddenly called upon to take a headlong leap of ten feet. The
English brooks were so silent, too, compared to our noisy Ulster burns,
whose short lives were one clamorous turmoil of protest against the
many obstacles with which nature had barred their progress to the sea;
here swirling over a miniature crag, there babbling noisily among a
labyrinth of stones. They ultimately became merged in a foaming,
roaring salmon river, expanding into amber-coloured pools, or breaking
into white rapids; a river which retained to the last its lordly
independence and reached the sea still free, refusing to be harnessed
or confined by man. Our English brook, after its uneventful childhood,
made its stolid matter-of-fact way into an equally dull little river
which crawled inertly along to its destiny somewhere down by the docks.
I know so many people whose whole lives are like that of that
particular English brook.
We lived then in London at Chesterfield House, South Audley Street,
which covered three times the amount of ground it does at present, for
at the back it had a very large garden, on which Chesterfield Gardens
are now built. In addition to this it had two wings at right angles to
it, one now occupied by Lord Leconfield's house, the other by Nos. 1
and 2, South Audley Street. The left-hand wing was used as our stables
and contained a well which enjoyed an immense local reputation in
Mayfair. Never was such drinking-water! My father allowed any one in
the neighbourhood to fetch their drinking-water from our well, and one
of my earliest recollections is watching the long daily procession of
men-servants in the curious yellow-jean jackets of the "sixties," each
with two large cans in his hands, fetching the day's supply of our
matchless water. No inhabitants of Curzon Street, Great Stanhope
Street, or South Audley Street would dream of touching any water but
that from the famous Chesterfield House spring. In 1867 there was a
serious outbreak of Asiatic cholera in London, and my father determined
to have the water of the celebrated spring analysed. There were loud
protests at this:--what, analyse the finest drinking-water in England!
My father, however, persisted, and the result of the analysis was that
our incomparable drinking-water was found to contain thirty per cent.
of organic matter. The analyst reported that fifteen per cent. of the
water must be pure sewage. My father had the spring sealed and bricked
up at once, but it is a marvel that we had not poisoned every single
inhabitant of the Mayfair district years before.
In the early "sixties" the barbarous practice of sending wretched
little "climbing boys" up chimneys to sweep them still prevailed. In
common with most other children of that day, I was perfectly terrified
when the chimney-sweep arrived with his attendant coal-black imps, for
the usual threat of foolish nurses to their charges when they proved
refractory was, "If you are not good I shall give you to the sweep, and
then you will have to climb up the chimney." When the dust-sheets laid
on the floors announced the advent of the sweeps, I used, if possible,
to hide until they had left the house. I cannot understand how public
opinion tolerated for so long the abominable cruelty of forcing little
boys to clamber up flues. These unhappy brats were made to creep into
the chimneys from the grates, and then to wriggle their way up by
digging their toes into the interstices of the bricks, and by working
their elbows and knees alternately; stifled in the pitch-darkness of
the narrow flue by foul air, suffocated by the showers of soot that
fell on them, perhaps losing their way in the black maze of chimneys,
and liable at any moment, should they lose their footing, to come
crashing down twenty feet, either to be killed outright in the dark or
to lie with a broken limb until they were extricated--should, indeed,
it be possible to rescue them at all. These unfortunate children, too,
were certain to get abrasions on their bare feet and on their elbows
and knees from the rough edges of the bricks. The soot working into
these abrasions gave them a peculiar form of sore. Think of the
terrible brutality to which a nervous child must have been subjected
before he could be induced to undertake so hateful a journey for the
first time. Should the boy hesitate to ascend, many of the
master-sweeps had no compunction in giving him what was termed a
"tickler"--that is, in lighting some straw in the grate below him. The
poor little urchin had perforce to scramble up his chimney then, to
avoid being roasted alive.
All honour to the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, the philanthropist, who
as Lord Ashley never rested in the House of Commons until he got a
measure placed on the Statute Book making the employment of
climbing-boys illegal.
It will be remembered that little Tom, the hero of Charles Kingsley's
delightful Water-Babies, was a climbing-sweep. In spite of all my care,
I occasionally met some of these little fellows in the passages,
inky-black with soot from the soles of their bare feet to the crowns of
their heads, except for the whites of their eyes. They could not have
been above eight or nine years old. I looked on them as awful warnings,
for of course they would not have occupied their present position had
they not been little boys who had habitually disobeyed the orders of
their nurses.
Even the wretched little climbing-boys had their gala-day on the 1st of
May, when they had a holiday and a feast under the terms of Mrs.
Montagu's will.
The story of Mrs. Montagu is well known. The large house standing in a
garden at the corner of Portman Square and Gloucester Place, now owned
by Lord Portman, was built for Mrs. Montagu by James Wyatt at the end
of the eighteenth century, and the adjoining Montagu Street and Montagu
Square derive their names from her. Somehow Mrs. Montagu's only son got
kidnapped, and all attempts to recover the child failed. Time went on,
and he was regarded as dead. On a certain 1st of May the sweeps arrived
to clean Mrs. Montagu's chimneys, and a climbing-boy was sent up to his
horrible task. Like Tom in the Water-Babies, he lost his way in the
network of flues and emerged in a different room to the one he had
started from. Something in the aspect of the room struck a
half-familiar, half-forgotten chord in his brain. He turned the handle
of the door of the next room and found a lady seated there. Then he
remembered. Filthy and soot-stained as he was, the little sweep flung
himself into the arms of the beautiful lady with a cry of "Mother!"
Mrs. Montagu had found her lost son.
In gratitude for the recovery of her son, Mrs. Montagu entertained
every climbing-boy in London at dinner on the anniversary of her son's
return, and arranged that they should all have a holiday on that day.
At her death she left a legacy to continue the treat.
Such, at least, is the story as I have always heard it.
At the Sweeps' Carnival, there was always a grown-up man figuring as
"Jack-in-the-green." Encased in an immense frame of wicker-work covered
with laurels and artificial flowers, from the midst of which his face
and arms protruded with a comical effect, "Jack-in-the-green" capered
slowly about in the midst of the street, surrounded by some twenty
little climbing-boys, who danced joyously round him with black faces,
their soot-stained clothes decorated with tags of bright ribbon, and
making a deafening clamour with their dustpans and brushes as they sang
some popular ditty. They then collected money from the passers-by,
making usually quite a good haul. There were dozens of these
"Jacks-in-the-green" to be seen then on Mayday in the London streets,
each one with his attendant band of little black familiars. I summoned
up enough courage once to ask a small inky-black urchin whether he had
disobeyed his nurse very often in order to be condemned to sweep
chimneys. He gaped at me uncomprehendingly, with a grin; but being a
cheerful little soul, assured me that, on the whole, he rather enjoyed
climbing up chimneys.
It was my father and mother's custom in London to receive any of their
friends at luncheon without a formal invitation, and a constant
procession of people availed themselves of this privilege. At six years
of age I was promoted to lunch in the dining-room with my parents, and
I always kept my ears open. I had then one brother in the House of
Commons, and we being a politically inclined family, most of the
notabilities of the Tory party put in occasional appearances at
Chesterfield House at luncheon-time. There was Mr. Disraeli, for whom
my father had an immense admiration, although he had not yet occupied
the post of Prime Minister. Mr. Disraeli's curiously impassive face,
with its entire absence of colouring, rather frightened me. It looked
like a mask. He had, too, a most singular voice, with a very impressive
style of utterance. After 1868, by which time my three elder brothers
were all in the House of Commons, and Disraeli himself was Prime
Minister, he was a more frequent visitor at our house.
In 1865 my uncle, Lord John Russell, my mother's brother, was Prime
Minister. My uncle, who had been born as far back as 1792, was a very
tiny man, who always wore one of the old-fashioned, high black-satin
stocks right up to his chin. I liked him, for he was always full of fun
and small jokes, but in that rigorously Tory household he was looked on
with scant favour. It was his second term of office as Prime Minister,
for he had been First Lord of the Treasury from 1846 to 1852; he had
also sat in the House of Commons for forty-seven years. My father was
rather inclined to ridicule his brother-in-law's small stature, and
absolutely detested his political opinions, declaring that he united
all the ineradicable faults of the Whigs in his diminutive person.
Listening, as a child will do, to the conversation of his elders, I
derived the most grotesquely false ideas as to the Whigs and their
traditional policy. I gathered that, with their tongues in their
cheeks, they advocated measures in which they did not themselves
believe, should they think that by so doing they would be able to
enhance their popularity and maintain themselves in office: that, in
order to extricate themselves from some present difficulty, they were
always prepared to mortgage the future recklessly, quite regardless of
the ultimate consequences: that whilst professing the most liberal
principles, they were absurdly exclusive in their private lives, not
consorting with all and sundry as we poor Tories did: that convictions
mattered less than office: that in fact nothing much mattered, provided
that the government of the country remained permanently in the hands of
a little oligarchy of Whig families, and that every office of profit
under the Crown was, as a matter of course, allotted to some member of
those favoured families. In proof of the latter statement, I learnt
that the first act of my uncle Lord John, as Prime Minister, had been
to appoint one of his brothers Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of
Commons, and to offer to another of his brothers, the Rev. Lord
Wriothesley Russell, the vacant Bishopric of Oxford. Much to the credit
of my clergyman-uncle, he declined the Bishopric, saying that he had
neither the eloquence nor the administrative ability necessary for so
high an office in the Church, and that he preferred to remain a plain
country parson in his little parish, of which, at the time of his
death, he had been Rector for fifty-six years. All of which only goes
to show what absurdly erroneous ideas a child, anxious to learn, may
pick up from listening to the conversation of his elders, even when one
of those elders happened to be Mr. Disraeli himself.
Another ex-Prime Minister who was often at our house was the fourth
Earl of Aberdeen, who had held office many times, and had been Prime
Minister during the Crimean War. He must have been a very old man then,
for he was born in 1784. I have no very distinct recollection of him.
Oddly enough, Lord Aberdeen was both my great-uncle and my
step-grandfather, for his first wife had been my grandfather's sister,
and after her death, he married my grandfather's widow, his two wives
thus being sisters-in-law. Judging by their portraits by Lawrence,
which hung round our dining-room, my great-grandfather, old Lord
Abercorn's sons and daughters must have been of singular and quite
unusual personal beauty. Not one of the five attained the age of
twenty-nine, all of them succumbing early to consumption. Lord Aberdeen
had a most unfortunate skin and complexion, and in addition he was
deeply pitted with small-pox. As a result his face looked exactly like
a slice of brown bread, and "Old Brown Bread" he was always called by
my elder brothers and sisters, who had but little love for him, for he
disliked young people, and always made the most disagreeable remarks he
could think of to them. I remember once being taken to see him at
Argyll House, Regent Street, on the site of which the "Palladium" now
stands. I recollect perfectly the ugly, gloomy house, and its uglier
and gloomier garden, but I have no remembrance of "Old Brown Bread"
himself, or of what he said to me, which, considering his notorious
dislike to children, is perhaps quite as well.
Of a very different type was another constant and always welcome
visitor to our house, Sir Edwin Landseer, the painter. He was one of my
father and mother's oldest friends, and had been an equally close
friend of my grandparents, the Duke and Duchess of Bedford. He had
painted three portraits of my father, and five of my mother. Two of the
latter had been engraved, and, under the titles of "Cottage Industry"
and "The Mask," had a very large sale in mid-Victorian days. His large
picture of my two eldest sisters, which hung over our dining-room
chimney-piece, had also been engraved, and was a great favourite, under
the title of "The Abercorn Children." Landseer was a most delightful
person, and the best company that can be imagined. My father and mother
were quite devoted to him, and both of them always addressed him as
"Lanny." My mother going to call on him at his St. John's Wood house,
found "Lanny" in the garden, working from a ladder on a gigantic mass
of clay. Turning the corner, she was somewhat alarmed at finding a
full-grown lion stretched out on the lawn. Landseer had been
commissioned by the Government to model the four lions for the base of
Nelson's pillar in Trafalgar Square. He had made some studies in the
Zoological Gardens, but as he always preferred working from the live
model, he arranged that an elderly and peculiarly docile lion should be
brought to his house from the Zoo in a furniture van attended by two
keepers. Should any one wish to know what that particular lion looked
like, they have only to glance at the base of the Nelson pillar. On
paying an afternoon call, it is so unusual to find a live lion included
amongst the guests, that my mother's perturbation at finding herself in
such close proximity to a huge loose carnivore is, perhaps, pardonable.
Landseer is, of course, no longer in fashion as a painter. I quite own
that at times his colour is unpleasing, owing to the bluish tint
overlaying it; but surely no one will question his draughtsmanship? And
has there ever been a finer animal-painter? Perhaps he was really a
black-and-white man. My family possess some three hundred drawings of
his: some in pen and ink, some in wash, some in pencil. I personally
prefer his very delicate pencil work, over which he sometimes threw a
light wash of colour. No one, seeing some of his pen and ink work, can
deny that he was a master of line. A dozen scratches, and the whole
picture is there! There is a charming little Landseer portrait of my
mother with my eldest sister, in Room III of the Tate Gallery. Landseer
preferred painting on panel, and he never would allow his pictures to
be varnished. His wishes have been obeyed in that respect; none of the
Landseers my family possess have ever been varnished.
He was certainly an unconventional guest in a country house. My father
had rented a deer-forest on a long lease from Cluny Macpherson, and had
built a large house there, on Loch Laggan. As that was before the days
of railways, the interior of the house at Ardverikie was necessarily
very plain, and the rooms were merely whitewashed. Landseer complained
that the glare of the whitewash in the dining-room hurt his eyes, and
without saying a word to any one, he one day produced his colours,
mounted a pair of steps, and proceeded to rough-in a design in charcoal
on the white walls. He worked away until he had completely covered the
walls with frescoes in colour. The originals of some of his best-known
engravings, "The Sanctuary," "The Challenge," "The Monarch of the
Glen," made their first appearance on the walls of the dining-room at
Ardverikie. The house was unfortunately destroyed by fire some years
later, and Landseer's frescoes perished with it.
At another time, my father leased for two years a large house in the
Midlands. The dining-hall of this house was hung with hideously wooden
full-length portraits of the family owning it. Landseer declared that
these monstrous pictures took away his appetite, so without any
permission he one day mounted a ladder, put in high-lights with white
chalk over the oils, made the dull eyes sparkle, and gave some
semblance of life to these forlorn effigies. Pleased with his success,
he then brightened up the flesh tints with red chalk, and put some
drawing into the faces. To complete his work, he rubbed blacks into the
backgrounds with charcoal. The result was so excellent that we let it
remain. At the conclusion of my father's tenancy, the family to whom
the place belonged were perfectly furious at the disrespect with which
their cherished portraits had been treated, for it was a traditional
article of faith with them that they were priceless works of art.
Towards the end of his life Landseer became hopelessly insane and,
during his periods of violence a dangerous homicidal maniac. Such an
affection, however, had my father and mother for the friend of their
younger days, that they still had him to stay with us in Kent for long
periods. He had necessarily to bring a large retinue with him: his own
trained mental attendant; Dr. Tuke, a very celebrated alienist in his
day; and, above all, Mrs. Pritchard. The case of Mrs. Pritchard is such
an instance of devoted friendship as to be worth recording. She was an
elderly widow of small means, Landseer's neighbour in St. John's Wood;
a little dried-up, shrivelled old woman. The two became firm allies,
and when Landseer's reason became hopelessly deranged, Mrs. Pritchard
devoted her whole life to looking after her afflicted friend. In spite
of her scanty means, she refused to accept any salary, and Landseer was
like wax in her hands. In his most violent moods when the keeper and
Dr. Tuke both failed to quiet him, Mrs. Pritchard had only to hold up
her finger and he became calm at once. Either his clouded reason or
some remnant of his old sense of fun led him to talk of Mrs. Pritchard
as his "pocket Venus." To people staying with us (who, I think, were a
little alarmed at finding themselves in the company of a lunatic,
however closely watched he might be), he would say, "In two minutes you
will see the loveliest of her sex. A little dainty creature, perfect in
feature, perfect in shape, who might have stepped bodily out of the
frame of a Greuze. A perfect dream of loveliness." They were
considerably astonished when a little wizened woman, with a face like a
withered apple, entered the room. He was fond, too, of descanting on
Mrs. Pritchard's wonderfully virtuous temperament, notwithstanding her
amazing charms. Visitors probably reflected that, given her appearance,
the path of duty must have been rendered very easy to her.
Landseer painted his last Academy picture, "The Baptismal Font," whilst
staying with us. It is a perfectly meaningless composition,
representing a number of sheep huddled round a font, for whatever
allegorical significance he originally meant to give it eluded the poor
clouded brain. As he always painted from the live model, he sent down
to the Home Farm for two sheep, which he wanted driven upstairs into
his bedroom, to the furious indignation of the housekeeper, who
declared, with a certain amount of reason, that it was impossible to
keep a house well if live sheep were to be allowed in the best
bedrooms. So Landseer, his easel and colours and his sheep were all
transferred to the garden.
On another occasion there was some talk about a savage bull. Landseer,
muttering, "Bulls! bulls! bulls!" snatched up an album of my sister's,
and finding a blank page in it, made an exquisite little drawing of a
charging bull. The disordered brain repeating "Bulls! bulls! bulls!" he
then drew a bulldog, a pair of bullfinches surrounded by bulrushes, and
a hooked bull trout fighting furiously for freedom. That page has been
cut out and framed for fifty years.