‘When Mary turned her wond’ring eyesOn rocks that seemed to prop the skies;On palace, park, and battled pile;On lake and river, sea and isle;O’er woods and meadows bathed in dew,To distant mountains wild and blue;She thought the isle that gave her birthThe sweetest, wildest land on earth.’
‘When Mary turned her wond’ring eyesOn rocks that seemed to prop the skies;On palace, park, and battled pile;On lake and river, sea and isle;O’er woods and meadows bathed in dew,To distant mountains wild and blue;She thought the isle that gave her birthThe sweetest, wildest land on earth.’
“On Sunday afternoon I went up Arthur’s Seat with Ally Gordon and the ladies-in-waiting—Lady Margaret Hely Hutchinson and Lady Mary Ashburnham. Most exquisite was the view over the sunlit slopes of Edinburgh in its purple haze. Besides this, I shall have many recollections of the delightful gardens of Holyrood in this still hot weather, the apple-trees bursting into bloom, the hoary chapel with its gothic arches and windows, the SalisburyCrags, deeply purple above, and fading into mist below.”
“May 29.—All has gone well and smoothly, and there is great interest in the Holyrood life—the moving diorama of people, with the varying lights and shades of character which they display, the old-world aspect of all that has to be done, with the pages in their crimson and white liveries, the chaplain and purse-bearer in their court dresses, and the mounted guard. It has all been made especially pleasant by being on such thoroughly friendly terms with the ladies-in-waiting and with one of the aides-de-camp, Ally Gordon: the extreme goodness of the other, who has been vehemently ‘converted,’ being a sort of barrier to intimacy.
“Old Miss Louisa Hope has been amongst the people who have come to Holyrood. She talked much of her friendship with Lord Brougham, with whom she corresponded constantly for many years. She had many religious conversations with him, and he often used to dwell with her, as in his public lectures, on the sublimity of that description of God, ‘eternal, immortal, invisible,’ which has been spoilt in the revised translation by changing the word ‘immortal’ into ‘incorruptible.’ After he had been betrayed into especially bad language in her presence, she wrote a strong remonstrance to him. He said nothing definite in answer, but thenceforth always addressed her as ‘Dearest Miss Hope.’ When she heard that he was not likely to live, Miss Hope wrote to him, saying that she trusted that, if he was able to write himself, he would give her some sign of his assuranceas to a future life; but that, if he were not able to write himself, he would not notice her request. Lord Brougham wrote, ‘I trust entirely in thegraciousnessof Him who died for me,’ and she was satisfied.
“Yesterday we drove out to Winton to Lady Ruthven. It was a lovely day, the sea deep blue, and the trees, especially the sycamores, in their richest foliage. We found the house just set in order after its devastation during the fire which consumed the dining-room three weeks ago, when everything was thrown out of the windows. Dear old Lady Ruthven herself sat all the time on a chair on the lawn watching the flames. She asked if every one was out of the castle, and being assured that it was so, said, ‘Is Peppy (her dog) safe?’—‘Yes, my lady.’—‘Is my blue vase safe?’—‘Yes, my lady.’—‘Then I am quite satisfied.’ And she bade every person on the property go to church the next day to return thanks for her preservation. She received me with the greatest affection, and bade me kiss her.[357]
“At the great dinner at Holyrood in the evening I took in a Mrs. Murray, who talked pleasantly about the old phase of Edinburgh society which she remembered. ‘There were three subjects—wine, law, and contradiction: wine is extinct now as a topic, but the other two, and especially the last, are as much to the fore as ever.’ She said that she had studied law herself, because it was the subject on which her husband was most interested, and she liked him to be able to discuss all his occupations with her.
“Another day I took in Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin, the marvellous amateur actress. She described her home life and the reading aloud to her boys. She read Landor, Alison, Scott. Only Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’ was a failure. They got through the first two cantos, then the youngest boy said, ‘Did the Childe never cheer up?’ and she was obliged to allow that he did not: so the book was closed.
“Yesterday I talked much with Mrs. Fraser—Professor Fraser’s wife. She described her visit to Hurstmonceaux—a week spent at the Rectory after her wedding tour, and going down twice to Lime, and my dear Mother sitting by the open window looking on the sunny lawn and flowers and the sparkling water.
“To-day, at St. Giles’s, Professor Flint preached a magnificent sermon on ‘I am the True Witness,’ describing how the doctrine which Christ preached was that of the kingdom; ‘that of the Church He left to others.’ His whole teaching was that inculcated by Diderot—‘Elargissez Dieu, montrez-lui à l’enfant, non dans le temple, mais partout et toujours.’”[358]
“May 30.—Our stay is nearly at an end, and I am very sorry.... It is impossible to live with the two charming old sisters (Lady Aberdeen and Lady Ashburnham), so one in every thought and act, without being impressed by their extreme simplicity and goodness; and Scottish ideas of clanship are more captivated by the fact of ‘His Grace’ being followed everywhere by his mother and aunt, and their goinghand in hand with him in every good work, than they could be by the most brilliant court. Yesterday the preaching and praying were tremendous. Now we are just off to a luncheon, then to visit the castle in state, then a soldiers’ home, a sculptor’s studio, an artist’s studio, a dinner of a hundred, and the Assembly again in state at 10P.M.I cannot say how kind every one is to me at Edinburgh.”
“London, July 10.—With Lady Paget to hear Spurgeon preach at his great Tabernacle near the Elephant and Castle. The vast congregation, the united sound of the thousands of voices in the hymn, the earnestness and zest of everything, were very striking: but far more so the strange, common, coarse preacher. The text was from Rev. xxii. 17, ‘Let him that heareth say Come.’ He described a sinner as like Leviathan, in whom there must be some weak spot betwixt its thousand scales, between which the dart of the exhorters could penetrate before death intervened and set the ‘wax-tablet’ of his character for ever. He spoke of the different ways of saying ‘Come,’ and acted them: that a ‘plain English, not half Dutch-Latin-Hebrew way of speaking,’ should be employed: that ‘prayer was as necessary as that a servant should tell her master who had called: that no servant was equal to answering for herself without referring to her master.’
“The rough similes just suited the congregation, and also the jokes, at which the people laughed aloud, but not irreverently. ‘A friend of mine was preaching in the street the other day, and one of those fellowspassed by who has felt the hand touched by a bishop’s lawn sleeve upon his blessed pate (not that I think there is any good in that; I do not know if you do), and asked him by what authority he was preaching, and my friend answered, ‘By the authority of Jesus Christ, who said, “Let him that heareth say Come.”’ ‘Popes were represented sometimes with a dove whispering the words which they should speak into their ears—they were represented with a dove; I hope it was not really a raven.’”
I was suddenly called away in the middle of the season by the alarming illness of my dearest old nurse, and for several weeks was at Holmhurst with her, in the mysterious solitude of the shadow of death, in which so many of my earlier years were passed, and then I had the intense thankfulness of seeing life return into the dear old face connected with so much that no one else remembers.
“Faire le bien, connaître le vrai, voilà ce qui distingue un homme d’un autre; le reste n’est rien. La durée de la vie est si courte, ses vraies besoins sont si étroits, que quand on s’en va, il importe si peu d’avoir été quelqu’un ou personne. Il ne faut à la fin qu’un mauvais morceau de toile et quatre planches de sapin.”—Diderot.“Happy are they to whom the solemn angel comes unannounced and quietly, and who are mercifully spared a long baptism of suffering.”—Whittier.
“Faire le bien, connaître le vrai, voilà ce qui distingue un homme d’un autre; le reste n’est rien. La durée de la vie est si courte, ses vraies besoins sont si étroits, que quand on s’en va, il importe si peu d’avoir été quelqu’un ou personne. Il ne faut à la fin qu’un mauvais morceau de toile et quatre planches de sapin.”—Diderot.
“Happy are they to whom the solemn angel comes unannounced and quietly, and who are mercifully spared a long baptism of suffering.”—Whittier.
“There is a melancholy in sunbright fieldsDeeper to me than gloom: I am ne’er so sadAs when I sit amid bright scenes alone.”—George Darley, “Sylvia.”
“There is a melancholy in sunbright fieldsDeeper to me than gloom: I am ne’er so sadAs when I sit amid bright scenes alone.”—George Darley, “Sylvia.”
ITwas on the 11th of July, after I had returned to London, that I was drawing in the cloisters of Westminster with Alethea Grenfell, when Miss Johnes (the charming correspondent of Bishop Thirlwall) passed by, and told me that Arthur Stanley was ill. I thought little of it at the time, as he was so often sick, and I had lately seen him looking better and happier than he had done since his sister Mary’s death. On Thursday 14th there was a great dinner-partyat the Deanery. Catherine Vaughan dined, and as, at the last moment, Arthur was not well enough to appear, she went in to sit with him after dinner, and finding him very dispirited and unwell, gave up her intention of going to Llandaff next day, and moved to the Deanery instead. That day erysipelas came on, and she was prevented seeing him till 3 A.M. on the morning of Monday the 18th, when the doctors called her, saying that an alarming change had come on. Canon Farrar was then summoned, and administered the Sacrament, but when he came to the blessing, Arthur motioned him to silence, and gave the words of the longer Benediction himself, with the same solemnity with which he spoke them at Augusta’s funeral. Then also Arthur spoke some farewell words—of grateful affection for the Queen, of trustful exhortation for his successor in the Deanery, of thankful appreciation of the fidelity of his housekeeper, Mrs. Waters, and the services of his butler and Charlotte the housemaid. Those who surrounded him then thought that he was sinking, but he rallied, and in the morning all the symptoms were favourable.
At 10A.M.on Monday, I broke through the cordon which surrounded the Deanery,and made my way up to Catherine, who was glad to have me with her. The large rooms were silent and hushed, though many persons, chiefly Bruces and Baillies, were moving in and out. It was the dead heat of July, not a leaf stirring. In the afternoon, Arthur was so much better that I went away, and even kept an engagement to dine out. But next morning came the shock of his death—Arthur—the “Cousin Arthur” of my childhood. He had become worse at 9.30P.M.The Archbishop read prayers in the room; they all knelt around; he never spoke more; and before midnight it was over.
Catherine and I both took leave of the Deanery for ever the next morning, but I went back to Westminster for the sad services of Sunday and Monday. The funeral sermons were much more affecting than the funeral itself;thatwas far less touching than Augusta’s, forhewas not there to be felt with and for; and yet the number and the unusual variety of true mourners made it a very remarkable sight.
To me it was a reopening of many beloved memories, and then a sealing them away for ever. On the day after his death his sister and Hugh Pearson, his dearest friend, wroteto me, asking me to undertake his biography, to which I gladly assented, feeling sure that I could do it well, and that no one could possibly know his life as well as myself. But Sir George Grove, one of his literary executors, did not permit my undertaking it.
The following weeks at Holmhurst were occupied on an article which I wrote upon Arthur inMacmillan[359](Sept. 1881), or rather in hunting up material for it amongst the few papers I myself possessed, as the literary executors allowed me access to nothing else. Yet, in doing it, I could feel that, though somewhat estranged from him in late years, there was no other who knewallhis life, its surroundings, motives, and interests as I did. I went afterwards to Catherine, but first paid a short visit in Suffolk to the ever-kind and pleasant Mrs. Paterson and her husband at their charming Rectory of Brome. I extract from my journal.
Journal.
“Brome Rectory, Sept. 15, 1881.—On Tuesday I came here ... into thickly wooded Suffolk, which thoroughly needs its shelter of trees from its exposure to the north-east winds, for they say there is not ahill between it and the Ural Mountains. I only just missed meeting two Mr. Tyrrells, who have been building a church, not uncalled for, they said, as an expiatory offering, for one of their ancestors murdered William Rufus, and another the Princes in the Tower. We saw Eye, with its fine church and pretty black and white grammar-school. The magnates of this neighbourhood are Sir Edward and Lady Caroline Kerrison, who possess two places, of which Brome Hall has delightful old gardens, while Oakley contains the trunk of the tree under which St. Edward was said to have been shot by the Danes, and in which, when it was cut down, an arrow-head was found imbedded. Sir E. Kerrison has just demolished a fine old wooden bridge, the successor of that under which the king concealed himself, and where he was discovered to a newly married couple by the light gleaming on his spurs. They betrayed him to the Danes, who shot him. Dying, he cursed all persons who should cross that fatal bridge over the Waveney on their way to or from a marriage, and on such occasions the country people will always go two miles round to avoid it. Close by is a spot where the discovery of flint weapons in a pre-historic stratum has compelled an entire re-arrangement of geology, as proving the existence of the world some millions of years before it was supposed to have been created.
“Yesterday I went to Norwich, and how many memories were awakened by the first sight of its beautiful spire! The river, the gateways, the ferry, the cathedral were the same: only the beautiful palace was turned into a common fifth-rate house. All whomet there have now passed away except Catherine Vaughan and Lea; but one seemed to see them all—the venerable white head of my uncle the Bishop in his stall; Sedgwick emerging from his house; Aunt Kitty in the broad garden-walk; my dearest Mother in the Abbey Room; Sarah Burgess[360]in her still existing little room down the steps; Arthur and Mary, Owen and Charlie—all gone!”
enlarge-imageNORWICH FROM MOUSEHOLD.NORWICH FROM MOUSEHOLD.[361]
“Sept. 25.—We went from Brome to see Roydon. Mr. G. E. Frere is squire there, an eccentric man of old family, who has planted the churchyard with flowers appropriate to each of the graves near them. One is covered with wormwood: it is that of two oldsisters in the parish, horribly ill-tempered, who both became bedridden, but each was provided with a stick that she might whack her companion as she lay in the bed near her. We met Mr. H., an ugly man, intensely. proud of his worthless pictures. Warren, the son of ‘Ten Thousand a Year,’ the clergyman who preached such a capital sermon on the single word ‘but,’ dined with him, and when Mr. H. pointed out what he calls a Murillo, said, ‘Really a Gorillo—a family portrait, I suppose!’ We also went to see Wingfield, an interesting old fortified manor of the De la Poles, and their magnificent tombs in the church. One of them married Chaucer’s grand-daughter and was murdered at Calais in the time of Henry VI.; another married the sister of Edward IV.
“On leaving Brome, I made a tourette into Norfolk—to dilapidated Walsingham, once the most celebrated shrine in England: to Lynn, with a custom-house worthy of Flanders: to Castle Rising, a Norman tower almost hidden in its green ballium: to Wymondham, with a splendid semi-ruined church, perpendicular outside, but Norman within: and to the glorious ruins of Castle Acre. The Coke of Elizabeth’s time bought so much land in Norfolk, that the Queen ordered him to be told that he must not buy any more, he would own too much for a subject. He petitioned, however, that he might just buy three acres more, which would complete his estate. The Queen said, ‘Yes, he might certainly do that;’ and he bought Castle Acre, West Acre, and South Acre, three huge properties, only the nucleus of which has descended to Lord Leicester.
“On the 20th I came to Llandaff.... We have been to see the ruins of a deserted manor-house which belonged to Sir George Aubrey. It was abandoned on account of a family tragedy. Sir George’s only son, a little boy, one day refused to eat his pudding. ‘You must,’ said the father. The child said he really could not, and implored with strange anguish to be excused, but the father insisted. Three hours after the child died in frightful agonies. That day the cook, by mistake, had put arsenic into the pudding instead of sugar.
“Yesterday Lord and Lady Romilly[362]fetched me to their pretty little house of Porthkerry, overhanging the Bristol Channel, and to-day we have driven through pouring rain to visit Fon Mon (pronounced Fun-Mun), a very curious old house of the thirteenth century.”
“Penrhos, Anglesea, Oct. 9.—From Llandaff I went to Tenby, an indescribably delightful place, with its varied coast, its wonderful caves, its rich festoons of clematis hanging over the cliffs, and its sapphire and chrysoprase seas. A girdle of old castles and abbeys surrounds the place, affording an endless variety of excursions. I saw something at Tenby of many members of the kindly respectable family of Allen, and the Dean of the same name welcomed me to St. Davids, which is truly marvellous in charm and interest—the cathedral, richly, exquisitely beautiful; the ruined palace and college; and the village, withits fine old cross, isolated in the solitude of a hollow in the vast swooping hills, sixteen miles from a railway, almost from any other inhabited place. It is said that if you take a sod from the churchyard and stand upon it on the shore of the neighbouring sea, you look across the mist of waters into all the glories of fairyland; and truly this seems almost the case without the assistance of the churchyard sod, all is so wondrously, uniquely, weirdly beautiful.
“On my way to this Stanley home of many memories, I went to visit the Williams’s of Parcian, in central Anglesea, where the very savageness of the country gives it an interest, and the desolate coves of its sea-shore, in one of which, with the beautiful name of Moelvra, theRoyal Charterwas lost.
“Mr. (William) Stanley[363]is very kind, and has a great deal of shrewd cleverness of its own sort; but a great deal has been written about the charms and moral advantages of the life of a country gentleman who never leaves his own place; nothing of its still more evident disadvantages. Surely no life has so strong a tendency to generate self-importance, exclusive possession, tenaciousness of authority, jealousy of interference, hatred of independence in others.”
“Kinmel, Oct. 14.—A kind invitation from Lord and Lady Penrhyn took me from Penrhos to Penrhyn Castle, which is a very stately building outside, though the huge stone corridors and richly decorated Norman rooms are very unsuited for home comfort. A regimentof young ladies, Miss Pennants—daughters, step-daughters, and step-grand-daughters of Lady Penrhyn[364]appeared at every meal. The lady of the castle herself is one of the most natural and unworldly women in the world; and Lord Penrhyn[365]was most agreeable with his personal reminiscences. He described the coronation of George IV., where he stood close to Queen Caroline as she entered the carriage to drive away, and he said the expression of her countenance was the most diabolical thing he ever looked upon. Lord Penrhyn rode after Lord Anglesea, the Waterloo hero, when he was followed by a hooting mob through St. James’s Park. Lord Anglesea backed his horse between the trees, set his teeth, and hissed back at the yelling people. Then he said, ‘If every man of you were a hundred men, and each of them had a hundred hands, and a bayonet in each hand, I should still do my—duty!’ Then the people cheered him.
“Lord and Lady Penrhyn took me to Pennisinant, Ogwen Bank, and the slate quarries. The two first cannot be much altered since my mother’s descriptions of them in her childhood, except by the growth of trees, and are very lovely, with mossy rocks breaking the cascatelle of the Ogwen, and old sycamores—now glorious in colour—on the grassy knolls, relieved against a wild background of purple mountains. At Ogwen Bank, the representation of our Lady Penrhyn’s pugs remains over the chimney-piece.
“The life at Penrhyn Castle was most easy and agreeable, with the freedom which only exists in very great houses, the plenty of time to oneself, and yet interesting society. The same may be said of Kinmel, which is like a great château in France.
“And here it has been a real pleasure to meet my sweet cousin Lizzie, Lady Loch,[366]and her charming husband, Sir Henry, Governor of the Isle of Man: she is really one of the best people I ever saw, as well as one of the pleasantest.”
“London, Nov. 1.—Dined with Lady Lyndhurst in Eaton Square. She talked of her early life. ‘I lived in Paris with my father, and I saw nobody. I never expected to marry; why should I? I had no fortune and no attractions. The first time I saw my Lord was when he came to Paris with his first wife. He came to see my father, and we went out driving with him. He and my father sat forward, and another young lady and I sat back, and most terribly afraid I was of him, and not a word did I speak—a shy, awkward girl sitting bolt upright.
“‘When my Lord was a widower, he came to Paris again. I was seven-and-twenty then, and was keeping my father’s house. Lord Lyndhurst came to breakfast with my father, and I gave them their coffee and whatever they wanted, and then sat there reading myGalignani, and not thinking a bit about them. Suddenly Lord Lyndhurst asked me if I knew of any very sunny apartment to let. “Oh, yes,” I said;“there is a friend of mine who wants to let just what you wish for, and, if you will wait a minute, I will run and get the keys, and can show it you.” So I got the keys, and he went with me, and the apartment was a capital one and suited him very well; and then, to my surprise, he asked me if I should be at home in the afternoon, and I thought, “What on earth can the old man want to come again for?”—and I answered him that I did not know. And, in fact, I forgot all about it, and went out driving to the Bois; and when I came in, the servant said Lord Lyndhurst had been. It gave me a sort of shock, and I went to my room, and said to myself, “What on earth can this mean?” But the next day before I was up—before I was up, if you please—I had a note from Lord Lyndhurst asking when I should be at home; and he came at that hour, and he came twice a day for three months, and it became quite awkward, every one talked of it—Paris is so small a world. However, at the end of that time he proposed. Afterwards I said, “Now do tell me what the dickens made you want to marry me—a woman without family, without fortune, and most decidedly without beauty?” and he said he did not know. After he had engaged me to marry him, he had to go back to England to his law-courts, and my father told me that I had better begin to get my things ready and buy my trousseau; but I said, “No, I should most certainly do nothing of the kind, for I did not believe for an instant that my Lord would ever come back again.”
“‘But he did come back, and we were married, and I had twenty-six years of the most perfect happinessever allotted to woman. My Lord had the most perfect temper in the world, and in all the years we were together, we never had even a difference of opinion. He never came in to breakfast, and he never took luncheon, so he never appeared in our rooms till dinner-time, but I trotted in and out of his library, and the oftener I went in, the better he was pleased.
“‘I had seen nothing of the world before I was married, but I saw plenty of it afterwards: indeed, a few years after, he was made Lord Chancellor, and that was the top of everything. The world was the one drawback to my happiness, for through almost the whole time of my married life I had to go out. My Lord’s eldest daughter was married three years after I married my Lord, and four years after, Soph, his second girl, was married; and then very soon there was my own girl to take out. Oh, how I hated it, but I never let my Lord know what I felt. We dined with him, and afterwards there was his whist, or people came to see him, and at ten o’clock he went to bed; then I went to my daily task of dressing to take the girls out, and sometimes I fairly cried as I was dressing.
“‘I was always up so late at night that I breakfasted in my own room, but there was always breakfast downstairs for the girls and Auntie—for my Lord’s elder sister, Miss Copley, always lived with us. Auntie was no trouble in the house, and I was very fond of her, for she perfectly adored my Lord. When I married, people wondered at my wishing to have my sister-in-law to live with me, but I said, “Bless you, have I not been brought up in France, where wholefamilies live together, and have to accommodate themselves to each other? and it would be hard indeed if I could not get on with poor old Auntie, when she is so fond of my Lord.”
“‘It was at the marriage of my daughter to Sir Charles Du Cane that my Lord said he had nothing left to live for, his work was done. He comforted me by telling me that he was so very old—and so he was,—and that if he lived he must become helpless, and so perhaps would be unhappy, and then perhaps even his mind might go. He said, “You will take care of Auntie?” and I said, “Of course I will,” and Auntie was always with me afterwards, and I loved her dearly, and she died in this very room at ninety-three. She was always well and cheerful, but one day she asked for her cup of tea as usual, and afterwards she—fell asleep,—she was so very old.
“‘My dear Lord was very old too when he died, but to me he was always like a young man, he was so bright and cheerful and so kind—always the pleasantest of companions. However, I could believe it was time that he should go, becausehetold me so.
“‘That is the story of my life, Mr. Hare, and now I am only waiting, hoping that some day,—perhaps some day not very far off,—I may see my dear Lord again.’”
“Athenæum Club, Dec. 13.—Sir G. Dasent, sitting at the next table at breakfast this morning, said, ‘I see you always sit in the historical corner.’—‘Do I? how?’—“Why, it is the place where Sam Wilberforcealways sat (behind the door leading to the kitchen), and so did Theodore Hook. It was from that corner that, when he had finished two bottles of port, he used to be heard calling out “Waiter, lemonade: bring morelemonade.” And they all knew what it meant: he hadn’t the face to ask for another bottle of port.’”
“Heckfield Place, Dec. 30.—I have had a pleasant visit here, meeting Sir Erskine May, a most winning and agreeable person. He revived for me the old story of Mrs. Blomfield, who forgot her Royal Academy ticket for the ‘private view,’ and, when they tried to prevent her coming in, said, ‘Oh, but you must let me pass: I am the Bishop of London’s lady.’—‘No, Ma’am, I could not let you in,’ said the doorkeeper, ‘if you were the Bishop of London’swife.’
“We went with Lord Eversley to see Bramshill, one of the places intended for Prince Henry, a most noble and beautiful old house.”
“Jan. 13, 1882.—With Ronald Gower and Hugh Pearson over the three great houses of London in the same morning. Grosvenor House is the pleasantest to live in, but Stafford House the most magnificent. When the Queen was being received there by the late Duchess, she said, with her happy power of expression, ‘I come, my dear, from my house to your palace.’
“Hugh Pearson talked of Archbishop Longley’s singular tact in saying the right thing. Some one asked him what tact was. He said, ‘It will bedifficult for me to describe what it is, but I will give you an instance of what it isnot. This morning I received a letter from a clergyman beginning—“In consideration of your Grace’s many infirmities and failing powers.” Now the beginning of that letter was not tact.’”
“Jan. 14.—To Lady Lyndhurst, whom I found in her room ill, and in great grief for the death of General Macdonald, her oldest friend, ‘who was the pleasantest, frankest, and handsomest of young men when I first came to England, and whom everybody has liked ever since. He was so well known, that when Mrs. Norton directed a letter to him “Jem at his Club,” the postman made no difficulties at all, but took it straight to him at White’s. There have been several pleasant notices of him in the papers since his death, but they have all committed the fatal blunder of calling him “Jim,” the thing of all others he would have disliked—he was always Jem with ane.’”
“Athenæum, Feb. 3.—Sir G. Dasent sat by me at breakfast. He described how he had almost bought the famous Vercelli MS. for £150, when ‘a stupid old canon interfered, and thought it ought not to be taken out of the place. It was taken to Italy from England by a Cardinal S. Andrea, who was tutor to Henry II., and who collected everything relating to St. Andrew, because of his name, and the MS. begins with the legend of St. Andrew. It ought some day to be restored to England by an interchange, England sending over some Italian MSS.;and now that it has been removed to the National Collection, this has been facilitated.’
“Sir G. Dasent talked of St. Olaf again. ‘He is what I call a good wearing saint, for he has lasted nine hundred years. It was just when St. Olaf was “coming up” that Earl Godwin and his sons were banished for a time. Two of them, Harold and Tosti, became Vikings, and in a great battle they vowed that, if they were victorious, they would give half their spoil to the shrine of St. Olaf, and a huge silver statue which they actually gave existed at Throndjem till 1500, and, if it existed still, would be one of the most important relics in archaeology. The old kings of Norway used to dig up the saint from time to time and to cut his nails. When Harold Hardrager was going to England, he declared he must see St. Olaf again—“I must see my brother,” he said: and he also cut the saint’s nails. But then he thought that from that time it would be better that no one should see his brother any more—it would not be for the good of the Church; so he took the keys of the shrine and threw them into the fiord; but at the same time he said that it would be a good thing for men who came after to know what a king was like, and he caused St. Olaf’s measure to be engraved upon the wall of the church at Throndjem—his measure of six feet.’”
“Feb. 21.—I sat at dinner by Mrs. Duncan Stewart, who talked with her usual power. ‘When I was young, I lived with my guardian and his wife at Havre de Grâce, and thence I married Mr. Duncan Stewart,who was a Baltic merchant, a prosperous and well-to-do man then, though he was ruined afterwards. We lived in Liverpool; but my husband loved hunting and fishing, and at certain times of the year he was “away after the grouse,” as every Scotchman is. I stayed with my children then, but I too had my time of the year for going away, and I always went to London, where I became very intimate with Lady Blessington and all that set—a very bad set, it must be allowed.
“‘One day when I was sitting alone in my house in Liverpool, and my husband was away with the grouse, a note of introduction was brought in for me from Mrs. Milner Gibson, whom I had known in London, with the cards of Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli. He was a young man then, all curly and smart, and his wife, though so much older than himself, was a very handsome, imperial-looking woman. I told them that I should be delighted to show them everything in Liverpool, as Mrs. Milner Gibson asked me.
“‘When I went to see them next day at the hotel, I asked Mrs. Disraeli how she had slept, and she said, “Not at all, for the noise was so great.” Then I said, “Why not move to my house, for my house is very quiet, and I am alone, and there is plenty of room?” And they came, and a most delightful ten days I had. We shut out Liverpool and its people, and we talked, and we became great friends, and when we parted it was with very affectionate regard on both sides; and afterwards they wrote to me every week, and when I went to London, my place was always laid at their table, and if I did not appear at their dinner, they always asked me why I had not come to them.
“‘After she died, we drifted apart, he and I, and though I saw him sometimes, it was never in the old intimate way. The last time I saw him though, we had a really good talk together. It was not till we were parting that I said to him, “I hope you are quite well,” and I shall never forget the hollow voice in which he said to me, “Nobodyis quite well.” After that I never saw him again, but I had a message from him through William Spottiswoode. “Tell Mrs. Stewart always to come to talk to me when she can: it always does me good to see her.”’
“Mrs. Duncan Stewart described Lady Beaconsfield as originally a factory-girl. Mr. Lewis first saw her going to her factory, beautiful, and with bare feet. He educated her and married her, died, and left her very rich, and then she married Disraeli. When askedwhyshe married her second husband, she would say, as if it was a feather in her cap, ‘My dear, he made love to me whilst my first husband was alive, and therefore I know that he really loved me.’
“It was at ‘Greenmeadow,’ a house four miles from Llandaff, that Disraeli served his apprenticeship as secretary to Mr. Lewis, living in the house with him and Mrs. Lewis in the position of a dependant. When the house overflowed with visitors from London, as was often the case, he was sent out to sleep at ‘The Holly Bush,’ a little public-house in the village. Both Greenmeadow and the Holly Bush exist still.”
On the 11th of March I again left England for Italy. I could not endure leaving Holmhurst and my dear old nurse, but itseemed necessary to go to finish collecting materials for my book on Southern Italy, as there were still so many places which I had not seen. At Rome I paid an interesting visit to the blind Duke of Sermoneta, still full of mental vigour, and of indignation at “la stupidézza del Vaticano e l’infámia del Quirinale.” Miss Garden had been to see him, and defended the policy of the Quirinal, saying Italy was a young country, would come round, &c. He retorted, “If you say that from politeness, as I think you do, you are wrong; but if you really think so, you must be an idiot.” This was my last visit to the kind old Duke, for he died in the following autumn.
enlarge-imageLAKE OF AVERNUS, NEAR NAPLES.LAKE OF AVERNUS, NEAR NAPLES.[367]
enlarge-imageCAPRI.CAPRI.[368]
At Naples, returning at night from the hotels in the lower town to those on the ridge of the hill, a gentleman engaged me in conversation and strolled along by my side. Suddenly, in the most desolate part of the road, he blew a whistle, and another man leapt out of the bushes, and both rushing upon me demanded “L’orológio e la bórsa.” I declared that I had neither watch nor purse. They insisted on my turning out all my pockets, which contained only three francs in paper and sixteen soldi in copper. Then they demanded my ring. I refused, and said it was no use for them to try to get it; it had not been off my finger for more than thirty years: it would not come off. They struggled to get it off, but could not. Then they whispered together. I said, “I see what you mean to do: you mean to cut off my finger and then drop me into the sea (which there—opposite the Boschetto—is deep water); but remember, I shall be missed and looked for.”—“No, we took good care to ascertain that first,” said my first acquaintance; “you said you had only been two days in Naples (and so I had): people who have been only two days in Naples are never missed.”—“But I do know Naples well—bisogna esaminarmi sopra Napoli,” I protested. “Dunque chi fu laPrincipessa Altamonti?”—“Fu figlia del Conte Cini di Roma, sorella della Duchessa Cirella.”—“E chi è il Principe S. Teodoro.”—“Fu Duca di S. Arpino, se maritava con una signora Inglese, Lady Burghersh, chi sta adesso Lady Walsingham.” After this they decided to let me go! But the strangest part of all was that the first brigand said, “After this scene you will not be able to walk home, and a carriage from theguardiacosts sixty centesimi; therefore thatsum I shall give you back,” and they counted twelve soldi from the sum they had taken. It is this fact which makes me speak of the men who attacked me at Naples as brigands, not as robbers.
I spent a few days delightfully in beautiful Capri, but most miserable were my after travels in the desolate wind-stricken plains or malaria-teeming swamps of wretched Calabria, of which I had formed a lofty estimate from Lear’s almost wholly imaginary drawings. Each place I had to visit seemed uglier and more poverty-stricken than the last, but perhaps came to a climax at Cotrone, where the windowless prison-van (being the only vehicle in the town) was sent to meet us, arriving by the night-train at the distant desolate station, and where the stairs of the hotel were crowded with beggars, who had nowhere else to sleep, lying in heaps, and swarming with vermin.
I see that I wrote to Miss Leycester—“Calabria was indescribably horrible, its poisonous swamps and arid plains too hideous for words: nothing whatever but dry bread to eat: the so-called inns the filthiest of hovels: the people ruffians: the remains of the Greek cities a few stones apiece.” I pushed on to Reggio and Scilla. But soon I became so ill that Ifled to Venice, where I was fit for nothing but to float in a gondola on the breast of ocean till I grew better.
Journal.
enlarge-imageSCILLA.SCILLA.[369]
“Venice, April 25, 1882.—It was by a happy accident that I found myself here on St. Mark’s Day. Madame von Usedom[370]called for me in her gondola, and we went together to S. Marco at 10A.M.Most glorious it looked, glints of sunlight falling here andthere on the golden walls and waving peacock-hued pavement, and violet shadows resting on all the inner recesses of arcades and cupolas, through which the grand mosaic forms of the saints were dimly visible. Crowds of people were present, yet in that vast space many thousands can move with ease. It is only a few days since the Patriarch, newly elected and a cardinal, entered Venice in triumph, followed by three hundred gondolas, standing at the prow of his barge, in his new scarlet robes, blessing the people. He is a young man, but is greatly beloved,[371]and every eye followed him as the grand procession swept chaunting round the church, and he was almost borne along by his huge golden robes, held up by the white-mitred attendant bishops of Chioggia and Torcello.
“I returned afterwards with the Usedoms to luncheon, and Madame von Usedom talked, as usual, of the great change which is sweeping over religious belief, but of how, in most thinking minds, the great essentials remained untouched. She had told Tholuck that she was troubled about her belief in the Trinity. He replied that in being so she confounded Religion with Theology: that the doctrine of the Trinity was a purely theological question, and not the least necessary to religion.
“In the afternoon the Comtesse de Lützow took me to see Besarel, a very remarkable self-taught genius, and a very good simple man and sculptor in wood and marble: and then we floated peacefully for hours through the labyrinthine streets of this wonderfulwater-city. In the evening, as I was sitting with the Lützows and Lady Augusta Cadogan at one of the tables in the piazza in front of Florian’s caffè, a table near was occupied by a party in which the conspicuous figures were a lady, not old, but with snow-white hair, and a very beautiful young woman, sippinggranitiand listening to the music: they were Queen Mary and Princess Mary of Hanover.
enlarge-imageFROM THE CAMPO DELLA CARITÀ.FROM THE CAMPO DELLA CARITÀ.[372]
“And all this late evening, as I am sitting upwriting, a monotonous song is wafted through the windows from the boats on the canal—
‘One sombre sweet Venetian slumbrous tune,’
‘One sombre sweet Venetian slumbrous tune,’
as J. A. Symonds calls it.”
I returned to England by way of Nüremberg, which seemed to me strangely smaller and less interesting than when I saw it as a boy, and was more thankful than ever before to find myself again, on the 10th of May, at Holmhurst, where my dear old Lea’s most sweet and beautiful old face welcomed me with a brighter smile than ever, and where I spent a happy month alone with her, going back into our “wealthy past,” and living again in memory many happy scenes in our long-ago.
At Venice a great sorrow had come to me—another blank in the narrowing circle of my beloved ones. It was the sort of sorrow from which “all at once one awakes and finds a whole wing of one’s palace has fallen,” as Emerson says. Dearest Hugh Pearson was dead. He was altogether the most perfectly good man I have ever known, and, strange to say, at the same time the most perfectly charming. He was, from his earliest youth, as free from self-consciousness as he was from selfishness, but rippled over with geniality, cordiality,warmth of interest, affection to all around him. He was really, not nominally, the father of his parish, and I believe there was scarcely one of his parishioners who was not fonder of him than of most of their own nearest relations. To the children of his village he was simply adorable, and his manner to them, his fun, his sympathy, his solicitude, the prettiest and most enchanting thing imaginable. “He was like James amongst the Apostles, who wrote nothing at all, and said nothing we know, and yet was one of the chosen three who were with the Master that day when His glory was revealed, and that night when His soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Trust came to him; he never sought it. He was at home in the human heart, but he never seemed to probe it.”[373]
I suppose dear Hugh Pearson was very ugly, but one loved him so much, one thought there was no face like his. Though he was so very much older than I was, there was no one with whom I was more intimate, and nothing I would not have confided to him. His goodness, his religion, were equally attractive and charming to all. One never felt with him as if God had been rather unfortunate in His goodintentions. His christian spirit christianised everything it came in contact with. His memory is a possession, and I may exclaim like the Duke of Ormonde, “I would not exchange my dead friend for any living friend in Christendom.” In the later years of his life, he had yielded to urgent request in accepting a canonry at Windsor, where I had delighted to visit him; but his heart was always in his country vicarage of Sonning on the Thames, and with his dear people there. He had refused the Queen’s persistent offer that he should succeed Arthur Stanley at Westminster, saying that he wished to die as he had lived—“a private person.”
The end came suddenly. On Easter Sunday (April 9) he told his people that it was his fortieth Easter Sunday amongst them, but he was taken ill whilst he was preaching, and two days after mortification came on. On Wednesday, the last evening of his life, when it was known that there was no hope of saving it, he desired that all his people—his true children—might be admitted to see him once more, and for three hours multitudes of his parishioners, men, women, and children, passed weeping through his room. He was able to speak separately to many of them, to give them allhis blessing, and with a message of peace—the last effort of his great loving heart—upon his lips, he passed into the perfect life.
enlarge-imageRev. Hugh Pearson. From a Photograph.Rev. Hugh Pearson.From a Photograph.
He has left the most undimmed memory it is possible for man to leave. To none of those who knew him is it possible that there can be even a breath upon the mirror of his perfectly beautiful and lovable life. To no one could the words of Dante be applied with greater truth:—