Tennyson and his friends

by Unknown

JAMES SPEDDING

By W. Aldis Wright, Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

“Spedding was the Pope among us young men—the wisest man I know.”—Tennyson: a Memoir, by his Son, p. 32.

James Spedding, of whom FitzGerald wrote, “He was the wisest man I have known,” was born June 20, 1808, at Mirehouse, Keswick, and was the third son of John Spedding. He was educated at the Grammar School, Bury St. Edmunds, where his father, leaving his Cumberland home, went to live for the purpose of putting his sons under the care of Dr. Malkin. Among his school-fellows were W. B. Donne, J. M. Kemble (the Anglo-Saxon scholar), the three brothers FitzGerald, and his own brother Edward, who with himself was at the head of the school when they left. From Bury he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he was contemporary with Frederick, Charles, and Alfred Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), and W. H. Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity), and was very early admitted into the fellowship of the Apostles. On Commemoration Day, 1830, he was called upon to deliver an oration in the College Chapel, the subject being “An Apology for the Moral and Literary Character of the Nineteenth Century,” which was afterwards printed. Another of his early productions was a speech against Political Unions, written for a debating society in the University of Cambridge, which, although anonymous, attracted the notice of the author of Philip van Artevelde, afterwards his colleague in the Colonial Office, who quoted some passages from it in the notes to his poem, with the remark: “It is a singular trait of the times that a speech containing so much of sagacity and mature reflection as is to be found in this exercitation, should have been delivered in an academical debating club, and should have passed away in a pamphlet, which, as far as I am aware, attracted no notice. Time and place consenting, a brilliant Parliamentary reputation might be built upon a tithe of the merit.” In 1831 he won the Members’ Prize with a Latin essay on “Utrum boni plus an mali hominibus et civitatibus attulerit dicendi copia,” and in 1832 he was again a candidate, and wrote to Thompson on the 4th of May about it:

Tennant and I both got in our Essays, both in a very imperfect state, and both the last minute but one.... I find that Alford also wrote. So the Apostles have three chances. What Alford’s may be I do not know. But Tennant’s and mine are neither of them worth much: Tennant’s from dryness, mine from impertinence: for of all the impertinent things I ever wrote (and this is a bold word) my “Dissertatio Latina” was the most impertinent. It was in the form of a letter from Son Marcus to Father Cicero; cutting up the Offices in the most reverential way possible. The merit of it is, that if no prize is given at all I may fairly put it down to the novelty of the experiment and the nature of the Judges, whom to my horror I found out the day after to be the Heads of Colleges! Marry, God forbid! I rather calculated on Graham’s[103] being one of the chief voters, who is fond of fun in general, and of my Latin in particular. However, it is no matter. I spent an amusing fortnight and improved my composition: and my mind is easy anyhow, which you will not easily believe.

On June 21 he writes again:

You will be glad to know that scoffing and utilizing march (like humanity according to the St. Simonians), and that Cicero the son has justified his parentage by getting the first prize for Latin composition. You will be sorry to hear that not Alford nor Tennant, but Hildyard Pet. hath obtained the second. Whether their labour has been lost I know not, but mine has been fairly paid, being at the rate of a guinea a day, and therefore 365 guineas a year, a very tolerable income, and I shall increase my establishment accordingly.... I wish you would decide, with your character, to come to Cambridge in the vacation and not stay by that dismal sea. There will be George Farish, and Edm. Lushington, and God knows whether Tennant, and do but add yourself to myself, and ourselves to the aforesaid: and lo you a select company as ever smoked under the shadow of a horse chesnut. If you do not come, you will simply be behind the world of the wise (which you know is as much like a goad as like a nail fastened by the master of an assembly) in the understanding of things spoken. For we talk out of the “Palace of Art” and the “Legend of Fair Women.” The great Alfred is here, i.e. in Southampton Row, smoking all the day, and we went from this house [14 Queen Square, Westminster] on a pilgrimage to see him; to wit, Two Heaths, my brother and myself, and, meeting Allen on the way, we took him along with us, and when we arrived at the place appointed we found A. T. and A. H. H. and J. M. K. So we made a goodly company, and did as we do at Cambridge, and, but that you were not among us, we should have been happy.

Again, on the 18th of July:

A new volume by A. T. is in preparation and will, I suppose, be out in Autumn. In the meantime I have no copy of the “Palace of Art,” but shall be happy to repeat it to you when you come,—no copy of the “Legend of Fair Women,” but can repeat about a dozen stanzas which are of the finest,—no copy of the conclusion of “Œnone” but one in pencil which no one but myself can read. The two concluding stanzas of “The Miller’s Daughter,” I can give you in this letter.... A broad smiling letter from John Heath commissions me this morning to engage Mrs. Perry’s lodgings for Dunbar, whereat I rejoice: also informs me that he himself keeps a Parroquet, and that Douglas has become a great Berkeleian, and would leave his body, like Jeremy Bentham’s, to be dissected, if he thought he had one.

His brother Edward, who had been for some time in delicate health, died on the 24th of August 1832, and a few days later Spedding writes to Thompson:

If you have seen Tennant you will be prepared to hear that my brother Edward died early on Friday morning, after above a month of severe suffering, leaving a ghastly vacancy in my prospects, not to be filled up. However, what is past—the profit and the pleasure which I have gathered out of long and pleasant years of brotherly society—this at least is safe, and is so much to be thankful for. Why should I be the sorrier because I have so long been graced with a source of comfort and of pride, which, if I had never known, I should now be as cheerful as when I last wrote to you? You knew him but little, but you knew him enough to form some notion of how much I have to regret—or, in other words, how much I have had to bless God for. He made a good and a Christian end, and it is ascertained by a post-mortem inspection that he could not possibly have had health for any length of time together. His disease was the formation of internal abscesses, in consequence of a failure of some of the membranes, and quite beyond the reach of surgery, so that, had one been at liberty to decide by a wish whether he should live or die, it would have been an act of unpardonable selfishness to wish him a moment more of captivity. This too is something to take off the bitterness of regret, which, however, in any way has no business to be bitter. But whether it is that I value high human friendship more highly than I ought to do, or whatever be the cause, a strange fatality seems to hang over the objects of my more especial esteem, and I would have you, Thompson, beware in time. But I shall lose my character with you if I do not take care. I hope you will communicate the news to Tennant and Farish, and to all our common friends, for explanations face to face are formidable things.

It was the death of this brother that gave occasion to the verses “To J. S.” which Tennyson published in the volume then in course of preparation.

In October 1832, after unsuccessfully sitting for a Fellowship, he decided upon another trial. Writing from Mirehouse to Thompson, he says:

I find it impossible to read here, the valleys look so independent of circumstances. There stand the mountains, there lie the valleys, and there is that brook which thou hast made to take its pastime therein, a jolly old beck that has lately taken to worshipping its maker; for it overflowed and went into the church, turning us Christians out, or rather preventing us from going in—a better thing, inasmuch as prevention is better than cure.

He was again unsuccessful, and Whiston was elected before him.

In the spring of this year (1833) he had written to Thompson: “Hallam announces himself this morning as not otherwise than unwell.” He had long been delicate, and his early and sudden death at Vienna on the 15th of September came as a shock but not a surprise to his friends. There was a suggestion that his memory should be perpetuated by an inscription in the College Chapel, but it came to nothing. Spedding wrote to Thompson on November 18:

Phillips has been consulting me and others as to the propriety and possibility of getting a tablet to Arthur Hallam’s memory erected in Trinity Chapel. Everybody approves cordially to whom he has communicated the proposal, and he now wishes it to be known among Hallam’s friends that such a plan is in contemplation, but privately and quietly. He will then get Christopher Wordsworth to get the Master’s permission, and then it will be time to think about the rest. It is just possible that there may be some College etiquette or other in the way, and it would be a pity in that case that the intention should have been talked about publicly. Will you communicate this to friends in Cambridge who may communicate with friends out of Cambridge, and so there will be little difficulty in letting every one know who is interested in the matter? Kemble can tell Trench, etc.; Merivale, Alford, etc. Who will write to Monteith, or send me his address? I will write to Donne myself. I think you must know every friend of Hallam’s whom I know. I have communicated with no one yet, except those in town. You will be able to do what is fitting better than I can tell you.

The scheme came to nothing, for what reason we do not know; possibly “college etiquette,” as Spedding anticipated, might stand in the way, for Hallam was neither Fellow nor Scholar of the College.

In the spring of 1834 Spedding was still at Mirehouse, and gives Thompson an account of a day and night he spent with Hartley Coleridge:

The said Hartley is indeed a spirit of no common rate—his mind is brimful of rare and precious fancies, which leap out of him as fresh as a fountain in the sunshine. His biographical engagement with Bingley is for the present suspended, by his own fault, as he says. I suppose he could not stand it any longer. But the three first numbers are completed, and bound up in a goodly fat volume of 720 closely printed pages. It contains twelve or fifteen lives, and more good things of all sorts and sizes than any other book of 720 pages. It is published by Bingley in Leeds and Whitaker in London, called Biographia Borealis, costs sixteen shillings, and the notes alone are worth the money. Wherefore, I pray you not only to get it yourself, but likewise to make everybody else get it. No apostolic bookcase should be without it. It should become a household book; therefore, let no one think of borrowing it, but whosoever is wise and good let him buy or steal it. If any man should ask what are the politics of the work (a question which no Apostle, who is indeed an Apostle, ever thought of asking but in the way of mere curiosity), then say thou, the same politics which were held in common by Plato, Demosthenes, Shakespeare, Bacon, Burke, and God Almighty, and let him make what he can of the information.

Wordsworth’s eyes are better, but not well, nor ever likely to be. Reading inflames them and so does composing. I believe it was a series of Highland Sonnets that brought on the last attack, so much worse than any he had had before. He read me several that I had not seen nor heard before, many of them admirably good; also a long, romantic wizard and fairy poem, in the time of Merlin and King Arthur, very pretty, but not of the first order. But I should not have expected anything so good from him, which was so much out of his beat. He has not advanced much in his knowledge of Alfred; but he is very modest in his refusal to praise attributing his want of admiration to a deficiency in himself, whether from the stiffness of old age, which cannot accommodate itself to a new style of beauty, or that the compass of his sympathies has been narrowed by flowing too long and strongly in one direction. (N.B. He is not answerable for the English that I am writing.) But he doubts not that Alfred’s style has its own beauty, though he wants the faculty to enter fully into it, alleging as a parallel case the choruses in “Samson Agonistes” the measure of which he has never been able to enjoy, which comes to perhaps as high a compliment as a negative compliment can be. He spoke so wisely and graciously that I had half a mind to try him with a poem or two, but that would have been more perhaps than he meant. And indeed it is always so pleasant to hear a distinguished man unaffectedly disclaiming the office of censor, that I never think it fair to take him at his word. I have given a copy of Alfred’s second volume to Hartley Coleridge, who, I trust, will make more of it. He had only seen it for a few minutes, and was greatly behind the age, though he admitted that A. T. was undoubtedly a man of genius; and was going to say something about the Quarterly in a Review of The Doctor, which he was, or is, writing for Blackwood. I also sent him yesterday a copy of Charles Tennyson, accompanied with one of my most gentlemanly letters.

Spedding was now nearly six-and-twenty, and had no settled plan of life before him. “For myself,” he says, “I am unsettled in all my prospects and plans. I am, in fact, doing nothing, but I flatter myself I am pausing on the brink to take a good look at the different ways of life which are open to me before I take the fatal plunge.”

At the end of 1834 he invited Thompson, who was then at York, to visit him at Mirehouse.

Excuses shall not be admitted, at least not such as yours. Is there not a stage-coach which fears God, and do you for that reason refuse to employ it? You ought rather to encourage it. What is a little bile or rheumatism, compared with the advancement of Truth, and the conservation of the Faith that is on the earth? Moreover, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a coach leaves Kendal at 8 o’clock in the morning, and arrives in Keswick about one, having traversed in the short space of five hours many miles of the finest scenery in the country, containing both other things and five lakes, and the dwelling-places of Wordsworth, Hartley Coleridge, and Hamilton[104] (more commonly known as Cyril Thornton). As for your time lost last term, that I know, from my experience of your character, to be a fiction of modesty: and as for your hopes of making up for it at home, that I know, from my experience of my own character, to be humbug. Besides, you write as one balancing his own desires according to a principle of enlightened self-interest. You forget that it is not for your own pleasure, but for my profit, that I ask you to come. Am I not sliding daily from bad to worse? Am I not losing the race I do not run? Am I not learning to look on all knowledge as vanity, all labour as sorrow? for not the knowledge for which men labour is profitable, but the labour only, and yet who can labour for that which profiteth not? Have I not already parted with the hope, and am I not now parting with the wish, to advance? Am I performing any duty? Am I making any money? Am I not falling away from the Apostolic mind, notwithstanding? Am I not taking pleasure in the shooting of snipes? Am I not in danger of having a bad German pronunciation for evermore? Roll these things in your mind, and then roll yourself into the coach. I will meet you at Ambleside, if you like.

I had read the review of Wordsworth several times over: and thought the criticism (except. excipiend.) good, and the moral philosophy superb. The passage about the moon looking round her, etc., I of course felt to be a blunder, though I was less surprised than sorry to see it. It seems to me to chime in too well with what I marked as the defect of his preface to P. v. A.,[105] so that I fear it is not a negligent criticism, as one might have hoped: but an opinion well weighed and carefully adopted. I wonder what he would say to Ebenezer Elliott, with his flowers and mountains, for a taste?

Welcome then again
Love-listening Primrose! tho’ not parted long
We meet like lovers after years of pain.
Oh thou bringst blissful childhood back to me,
Thou still art loveliest in the lowest place,
Still as of old Day glows with love for thee,
And reads our heavenly Father in thy face.
Surely thy thoughts are humble and devout,
Flower of the pensive gold! for why should heaven
Deny to thee his noblest boon of thought,
If to Earth’s demigods ’tis vainly given?
Answer me, Sunless Sister, Thou hast speech
Though silent Fragrance is thy eloquence,
Beauty thy language, and thy smile might teach
Ungrateful man to pardon providence.

He would call it a very bold figure of speech: figure of speech, quotha! However, Philip is a noble fellow, and the apology for this piece of criticism is so wise and so good that one can hardly regret that an apology was needed. I have sent for the citation of Will. Shakespeare, though rather with the desire than the expectation of great delight. I read a few extracts in the Atlas, with which I was not at all struck, or, if at all, not favourably; but that does not go for much, as I did not know who it was by, or anything about it, and the extracts were most probably ill-chosen. But to tell you the truth I never took much to Landor. To be sure I never read much of him, but I have often had the book in my hand. Perhaps I might have liked him better if the speakers had been named Philander and Strephon, and Philalethes and the like, instead of Bacon, and Hooker, and Raleigh, and so following. I shall have every chance this time: for besides the prejudice derived from your praise, I am by no means easy in feeling no great respect for a writer of whom P. v. A. speaks so very highly. There is something in Philip’s intellect which commands more than my usual reverence. More genial minds I have met with, but for strength, and integrity, and discretion of understanding, I do not know his equal. He puts me in mind of F. Malkin. We must have him change his mind, though, about the moon and the streams. I read the review of Coleridge in the Quarterly the other day. The parts which are not Coleridge’s own might have been better, but they are well enough.

The spring of 1835 was memorable at Mirehouse for a visit of Tennyson and FitzGerald. That this made a vivid impression on FitzGerald is evident from a letter which he wrote after Spedding’s death to his niece, when there was some idea of gathering together his miscellaneous essays:

“I rejoice,” he says, “to hear of a Collection, or Reprint, of his stray works.... I used to say he wrote ‘Virgilian Prose.’ One only of his I did not care for; but that, I doubt not, was because of the subject, not of the treatment: his own printed Report of a Speech he made in what was called the ‘Quinquaginta Club’ Debating Society (not the Union) at Cambridge about the year 1831. This speech his Father got him to recall and recompose in Print; wishing always that his Son should turn his faculties to such public Topics rather than to the Poets, of whom he had seen enough in Cumberland not to have much regard for: Shelley for one, at one time stalking about the mountains with Pistols, and other such Vagaries. I do not think he was much an admirer of Wordsworth (I don’t know about Southey), and I well remember that when I was at Merehouse (as Miss Bristowe would have us call it), with A. Tennyson in 1835, Mr. Spedding grudged his Son’s giving up much time and thought to consultations about Morte d’Arthur’s, Lords of Burleigh, etc., which were then in MS. He more than once questioned me, who was sometimes present at the meetings, ‘Well, Mr. F., and what is it? Mr. Tennyson reads, and Jem criticizes:—is that it?’ etc. This, while I might be playing Chess with dear Mrs. Spedding, in May, while the Daffodils were dancing outside the Hall door.”

“At the end of May,” he writes to Mrs. Kemble, “we went to lodge for a week at Windermere—where Wordsworth’s new volume of Yarrow Revisited reached us. W. was then at his home, but Tennyson would not go to visit him: and of course I did not: nor even saw him.”

In the summer of 1835 Thompson spent the Long Vacation at the Lakes, and Spedding was engaged in securing lodgings for him and his pupils, while Tennyson was still at Mirehouse.

“I am going,” he writes, “with Alfred, I believe, to Buttermere, and so have not time to tell you how much I am rejoiced that your destiny should have dragged you hither—nor to discuss the London Review—nor to tell you about Fitz and Alfred Tennyson, and Hartley Coleridge, and W. W., etc., only that Alfred is very gruff and unmanageable, and the weather very cold. He desires to be remembered. Fitz is gone.”

A few days later he says:

Alfred left us about a week since, homeward bound, but meaning to touch at Brookfield’s on his way. The weather has been much finer since he went; certainly, while he was here, our northern sun did not display himself to advantage. Nevertheless, I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have supposed who did not know his almost personal dislike of the Present, whatever it may be. Hartley Coleridge is mightily taken with him; and, after the fourth bottom of gin, deliberately thanked Heaven (under me, I believe, or me under Heaven, I forget which) for having brought them acquainted. Said Hartley was busy with an article on “Macbeth,” to appear (the vegetable spirits permitting) in the next Blackwood. He confessed to a creed touching Destiny which was new to me: denying Free Will (if I understood him right) in toto; but at the same time maintaining that man is solely and entirely answerable for whatever evil he does: not merely that he is to suffer for it, which I could understand, but that he is answerable for it which I do not. Now this, I think, is not fair. I could not get Alfred to Rydal Mount, he would and would not—sulky one, although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him; and would have been more so had the state of his household permitted, which I am sorry to say is full of sickness.... By a letter from D. D. H[eath] received to-day I infer that Subscription no Bondage is out; which I shall accordingly send for. I am sorry it is not to be understood in the sense of “Killing no Murder,” which seems to me, till I be further enlightened, the only sort of construction which will make sense of it. D. D. H. looketh on this pamphlet as the final cause of the system of subscription at Oxford, and, now that the effect hath been accomplished doth heartily wish that custom may be discontinued. Euge, D. D. H.! For myself, since Alfred went, my time has been chiefly employed (that is, all my time which was not occupied in exercising the puppies) upon three several books: to wit, Ralph Esher, a sort of novel by Leigh Hunt, containing a most graceful and lively portraiture of Charles II.’s times, a good deal of rot about Truth and Love, and a good deal of metaphysics, hard to understand in parts, but in parts (to me, at least) very deep and touching. Item, Isaac Comnenus, a Play (Murray, 1827): by Henry Taylor, as Southey who lent me the book informs me; a work much in the tone and [style of] P. v. A., and though far behind in design and execution by [no means] an unworthy precursor. It has some passages as fine as anything in Philip. Item, thirdly and lastly, Basil Montagu’s Life of Bacon, a work of much labour both on the writer’s part and the reader’s, but well meant, and if not itself a good one containing all the materials necessary for a good one, which is saying a great deal. I have not read all the notes. In fact I believe they are all contained in the text. I should think that on a moderate computation, half the two volumes is a reprint of the other half, for if there are a few pages which are printed twice over, there are many half and quarter pages which are repeated four or five times. I should half like to review it.

If he had acted on his own suggestion we might not have had Macaulay’s Essay, and certainly should not have had the Evenings with a Reviewer. This is the first intimation of his interest in what was to be the work of his life. It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Henry (afterwards Sir Henry) Taylor, the author of Philip van Artevelde, which influenced his occupation for the next six years.

“At this time,” says Sir Henry in his Autobiography, “I obtained another relief, and in obtaining it obtained a friend for life. James Spedding was the younger son of a Cumberland squire who had been a friend of my father’s in former, though I think they had not met in latter days. In the notes to Van Artevelde I had quoted a passage from an admirable speech of his spoken in a debating club at Cambridge when he was an undergraduate. This led to my making his acquaintance; and when some very laborious business of detail had to be executed, I obtained authority to offer him the employment with the remuneration of £150 a year. He was in a difficulty at the time as to the choice of a profession, and feeling that life without business and occupation of some kind was dangerous, was glad to accept this employment as one which might answer the purpose well enough, if he proved suited to it, and if not might be relinquished without difficulty and exchanged for some other. I wrote to Mr. Southey, 24th January 1836:

“‘Spedding has been and will be invaluable, and they owe me much for him. He is regarded on all hands, not only as a man of first-rate capacity, but as having quite a genius for business. I, for my part, have never seen anything like him in business on this side Stephen.... When I contemplate the easy labours of Stephen and one or two others I am disposed to think that there are giants in these days.’

“For six years Spedding worked away with universal approbation, and all this time he would have been willing to accept a post of précis writer with £300 a year, or any other such recognised position, and attach himself permanently to the office. But none such was placed at his disposal ... and he took the opportunity of the Whig government going out in 1841 to give up his employment. He then applied himself to edit the works and vindicate the fame of Lord Bacon. In 1847, on Sir James Stephen’s retirement, the office of Under Secretary of State with £2000 a year was offered to him by Lord Grey, before it was offered to me, and he could not be induced to accept it. He could not be brought to believe, what no one else doubted, that he was equal to the duties.

“Be this as it may, the fact that the man being well known and close at hand for six years, who could have been had for £300 a year in 1841, should have been let slip, though he was thought worth £2000 a year in 1847, if not a rare, is a clear example of the little heed given by the Government of this country to the choice and use of instruments.”

The exact date of Spedding’s beginning work at the Colonial Office is not known, but it must have been between the middle of June 1835 and the end of August,[106] for by that time he found that Downing Street was “no place for the indulgence of the individual genius.” In a letter to Thompson he writes:

I did take the liberty of insinuating a scoff at a Spanish Governor in one of my Despatches, but H. T. said it was clever and would not do. Said H. T. rises day by day in my esteem. He is not the least stiff or awful, but very gentle and majestic. He has a great deal of P. v. A. in him. But we do not talk much except on matters of business, which, however, rises in his hands to the dignity of statesmanship. I have not yet ascertained the contingencies on which my stay here depends, but I should think it probable that I may in the end have the offer of a permanent appointment in the office. If I have, I mean to take it, purely from a sense of duty; that I may have a nominal employment to satisfy impertinent enquiries withal, and perhaps also (as I dream in my more romantic moments) that I may have a real employment to discipline my own soul withal. The prospect of its leading to wealth or dignity is so small under present circumstances as not to be worth taking into account, yet not exactly so neither, for any prospect of any thing to come, however faint and distant, dignifies an employment with a relationship to the future and the indefinite.

I meant to have gone to Kitlands to-day, but the coach was full. Recollect that you are not a man of many cares new taken up, and therefore may find time to shower your wiser meditations upon a sheet of paper, which addressed to me under cover to “R. W. Hay, Esq., Under Secretary of State, Colonial Office, Downing Street,” will not be lost upon one who sometimes did but observe and wonder, but has now to enquire and dispatch.

Thompson had been with a reading party at Keswick during the summer, but had proved a bad correspondent.

“I have heard,” Spedding writes in November, “occasionally from Mirehouse dim intimations of your supposed existence; and latterly I have seen Martineau, to whom I have carefully pointed out the weak points in your character, which he had not observed. I have reason to believe that I am rising rapidly in public estimation, and I have only to pray that I may not become too sufficient for my place. My sense of Duty has already been appealed to in the most flattering manner, to draw me to the undertaking of nobler business, which, being capable of, I have no right (it is said) to decline. My capacity, it would seem, is beyond doubt; and, as it has been evinced without any effort or observation of mine, perhaps the best way after all will be to let it have its own way and trouble my soul no more about it. Turn it adrift in the world, leave it to find its own market and provide its own goods, and if my soul (which would be a stranger in such pilgrimage) should return in after years to enquire after it, who knows how great she may find it grown? P. v. A. is away for his holidays. If you can suggest a good subject for a dramatic romance out of English or Scotch history between the Conquest and the time of Elizabeth, you shall thereby do him a good turn, and perhaps get praised in a note. Helps has just been here asking for information about Cambridge in general, more particularly about you and Blakesley. I could only tell him what I knew of you, which you must confess is not much to your credit. Sterling has established himself and his family in Bayswater, and gives tea parties to the wiser minds. I am going thither to-night. Garden (I understand from himself, writing from Carstairs) is to curatise in Cornwall. D. D. H. thinks there is humour in an equity draft.... My own career is as far from being marked out as ever. There is no present prospect of a vacancy here, and I cannot get any body to advise me to accept it if there were.”

In the following year Thompson was appointed to the Head Mastership of the recently founded Leicester and Leicestershire Collegiate School, and at the opening ceremony on August 9, 1836, he delivered an address, of which Spedding says:

I have read your speech, not with the distant and respectful admiration, the wonder broken off, which I am apt to call faith, but with the deliberate admiration of a man who understands and strongly assents. I see your audience had sense enough to utter loud cheers, but I want to know whether they had sense enough to see that such a speech ought not to be let pass away in a newspaper, but to be provided with some permanent, portable, and self-subsisting existence. If the proceedings of the day are to be published in a pamphlet, I should like to invest money in a few copies. If not, I shall think about printing your part of them in a legible shape on my own account.... G. Farish is going to Madeira, with Sterling, I believe. James F. speaks hopefully of the latter, but is more alarmed about his brother.

In a letter to Allen we get a glimpse of Tennyson:

Alfred Tennyson has reappeared, and is going to-day or to-morrow to Florence, or to Killarney, or to Madeira, or to some place where some ship is going—he does not know where. He has been on a visit to a madhouse for the last fortnight (not as a patient), and has been delighted with the mad people, whom he reports the most agreeable and the most reasonable persons he has met with. The keeper is Dr. Allen (any relation of yours?), with whom he had been greatly taken!

Again writing to Thompson in October 1840 he says:

I have been studying Alfred Tennyson’s MSS., and I send you a copy of a poem which I think he once repeated to you and me, and which we neither of us much entered into. Reading it again the other day, I was surprised with the power and beauty of it, and I now think it wants nothing but a better name, or, I should rather say, a historical foundation. I would have it put into the mouth of some noted man (among the many such that must have been) involved in a marriage which he does not like, in violation of a pre-existing attachment. The imagining of such situations for the mere purpose of entering into the feelings which belong to them has something unwholesome in it, to my fancy; but the situation being given (whether in fact or fiction), there is no harm in turning it into poetry.

In 1840 Lord Lyndhurst was a candidate for the office of High Steward of the University of Cambridge in opposition to Lord Lyttelton. Spedding voted for the latter.

“I went down to Cambridge,” he writes to Thompson, “to support Lord Lyttelton in his late distinguished defeat, of which you have, of course, heard all particulars with apostolic embellishments and illustrations both from other apostolic souls and from Merivale. I have been happy in being able in these trying circumstances to preserve my natural tranquillity. My view of the nature of the contest is this: The University would select Lord Lyndhurst as the sort of man whom a University should delight to honour. A dissentient minority say not content. The majority reply to the dissentients, ‘Why divide? You see you cannot win.’ The minority rejoins, ‘Never mind; divide we will, win or not win. If Lord Lyndhurst is to be selected for such an honour as this, it shall be deliberately and not by accident. The objections shall be formally brought forward and formally overruled.’ The bringing of the question to the poll I consider as an appeal to the constituency to consider what they were about; and, in spite of the result, I am glad it has been brought to this issue. For the credit of the University it was fit it should be known that there were 500 dissentients, and for the instruction of mankind it was fit it should be known that there was a majority of two masters of arts to one who thought Lord Lyndhurst the proper man to receive the honours and dignities of the University. Had I been an enemy I should have voted in the majority; but being a dutiful, though not perhaps a very respectful son, I was glad of an opportunity of making the 586 into 587.”

The friends of Lord Lyndhurst made every effort to secure his election, and we learn from his Life by Sir Theodore Martin that he was only induced to be a candidate on condition that his return would be certain. The majority was 480.

Thompson, who had returned to Cambridge, was at this time in feeble health, and, as it was not known where a letter would find him, FitzGerald wrote under cover to Spedding, who was still at the Colonial Office. The letter does not appear to have been preserved, but it suggested to Spedding some criticism of the theatres and actors of the time which is not without interest at the present day.

“Fitz,” he writes on November 25, 1840, “has forwarded this to me that I may direct it properly, and as it is not sealed I have made free with the contents. The meaning of the writing on the wall had hitherto escaped me, I confess, but the effect of my head in the Pit has often occurred to me as something unseemly, like Scriptures out of Church; inasmuch as when I am by myself I always choose a place where I can wear my hat. I have sometimes thought of getting a wig to wear in such places of vain resort. But to say the truth, a bad play will often afford more rational entertainment for two or three hours than an average dinner party, provided a man goes to it with an understanding that such a thing can be neither better nor worse than a shadow, and with an imagination to amend it. It is strange enough, for your best modern plays and your modern acting of the best plays (except in a very few instances) are so wretched that one should think they could only bore and disgust one—meagre, vapid, false and vulgar in the highest degree. One only wonders that so many human heads and hearts can consent to sit it out, and be amused and refreshed by it. I believe it is this very problem which gives the theory an interest to me, for certainly the spectators are to me an integral part of the spectacle (do I use ‘integral’ right? I could never properly understand the calculus), and the most entertaining part of the action is the action of the play upon the audience. You not only see the mirror held up to Nature, but you see Nature looking at her image in it, which presents her in still another aspect. Of the nature of the multitude, their ways of thinking and feeling certainly, and partly too of their ways of acting, much may be learned in the pit of a theatre. From the effect of Bulwer’s plays upon the play-going public one might have inferred the effect of his novels upon the reading public, almost as surely as you might have inferred the effect of his plays from observing the style of acting which is most popular. But besides my pleasure in contemplating the nature of the fool multitude, I am curious about the laws of art, and I observe, in that as in other things, that specimens of the want of the thing are as instructive as the specimen of the thing itself. I never understood Shakespeare’s idea of Julius Caesar till I once saw George Bennett enact him; and I think I gained more light as to the meaning of many parts of Falstaff in the Merry Wives from the grossest and, I think, worst piece of acting I ever saw (by Bartley) than I have gained as to Benedick from C. Kemble, or Hamlet from Macready. Altogether, I find that the clumsy, tawdry, motley pageant, with its little good and much bad, its touches of nature here and there, and its scene after scene of vulgarity, insipidity, cant, and monstrous unnaturalness, has the effect of provoking my understanding and imagination into agreeable exercise.”

The time had come when, after six years of service, Spedding resolved to shake himself free from the uncongenial business of the Colonial Office, and devote himself to what was to be the work of his life. On the 19th of August 1841 he writes from Wycliffe Rectory to Thompson who was then in Germany:

You told me to write on speculation and not put off too long, but I suppose I am not the less qualified to perform the former part of your injunction for having neglected to perform the latter. But I suppose the worst consequence will be that my letter will not reach you, by which you will save something in postage and lose nothing in any other way. The fact is that your letter reached me during the last hours of my official life, when between the duty of clearing my table, and preparing for another and a better life (packing up, to wit), I had no time to write anything that was to go as far as Dresden. From the business of Downing St. I relapsed suddenly to the not less absorbing recreations of the 12th August and the moors; and since we left the grouse in quiet I have been on constant duty in looking at rocks and rivers and whatever there is to be looked at in a country not barren of natural attractions and the scene of one of Walter Scott’s poems. To-day I have been I do not know how many miles to see a handsome modern house and fine estate on the banks of the Tees, and to enjoy the most formidable of all mortal entertainments, a lunch of about 16 persons at a house you were never in before; all low voices and only one of the family known to you by name. However the beef was good, and silence is richer than speech. I am now returned, my skin is full of tea and bread and butter, and the room is full of young women talking about ghosts and singing Irish melodies. I have borrowed this sheet of thin paper that you may have the less to pay, and I have set off in this minute hand that I may have the more room to utter whatsoever shall be given to me to utter in this house: what that may be I shall not stay to conjecture, but proceed at once to the proof.

I need not describe to you the appearance of London or the manners of the inhabitants in the galleries and institutions with which it abounds, as you have had opportunities of learning better by the use of your own eyes and ears as much about these as you wish to know. Something I might say about the manners and morals of Downing Street which would be new to you, that section of London society having been rarely penetrated by travellers, and if penetrated still more rarely escaped from without the loss of that peculiar faculty by virtue of which man tells truth. But this also I shall at present spare you. Downing Street already lies behind me, and I think it is St. Paul who tells us that we should fix our eyes on what is before, and what, I wonder, is before me? I see a fair array of years abounding in capabilities and in leisure to cultivate them, and if I could follow that precept of St. Paul’s faithfully, and abstain from looking backwards at an equally fair array of opportunities unimproved and leisure run to waste, I should think the prospect a splendid one.... For these six years past I have been working for other men’s purposes, and cultivating my life for their use. Now I set up for myself; and the question is this, of all things which most need to be done what am I best able to do?... But I had forgotten that all this will be a mystery to you who do not know what I have done to myself since I saw you. You must know this that as soon as it was clear which way the elections were going, I wrote to Stephen to say that I meant to leave the C.O., not because the change of parties need make any difference to me, but because my position had already yielded all the good I could expect from it, and a change of administration formed a natural period which it would not be desirable to let pass, the gain of the salary being, in fact, to a person who could live without it, no adequate compensation for the loss of time to a person who could use it in other ways, etc. etc. Stephen thought me quite right, and recommends me to persevere in my present intention of making literature my business: so far at least as to make a fair experiment of it: not doubting that, for a man who has enough to live upon, and who has resolution enough to employ five or six hours every day in reading or writing with some definite practical object, there is no kind of life so eligible: and there is plenty of work to do. So on the 10th of August 1841 (which day I will trouble you, in the memoir of my life which you will prefix to your edition of the fragments of my great work which you will find among my papers at my untimely death, to make for ever memorable) I took my leave of the Colonial Office and recovered possession of my time and my hours at the moderate cost of £150 per annum, and here I am with the responsibility: a German, I suppose, would spell it with a capital R. And now what have you to say? One thing I really think is promising. I set out with a definite project, not too big or too remote: and if I had not involved myself in a desire to make something of these Baconian letters, which I could not so well do without more leisure and liberty to hunt down my game, I should not have trusted myself to my own guidance with quite so free a conscience. I have already made an entrance into the Lambeth Library and satisfied myself that former editors are not to be trusted; and that a great deal may probably be done by a man who unites two important requisites which have not yet met in any of them, industry and brains. Would you believe, for instance, that there is more than one letter from Francis Bacon to his Mother, and vice versa, which have never been included in any collection of his letters? And that there are many letters between Antony Bacon and his mother relating to the prospects and goings on of the two brothers between the ages of twenty and thirty-five which no biographer of Francis appears to have studied, probably none has ever seen? Mr. Maitland showed me a MS. commonplace book containing a good many anecdotes about Bacon and the people of that time (most of them published I believe in the Apophthegms, etc.) interspersed with memoranda of all kinds, of which he says he can find no account. I suspect it to be Dr. Rawley’s private memorandum book; a point which may easily be verified: and if so it will no doubt contain many things which being laid alongside of many other things will throw light upon various obscurities. That such a MS. should be known to exist in the Lambeth Library, and that, after some half-dozen editors have been over the ground in pursuit of Baconiana, it should remain there without anything being known about it, is it not a proof that in fact the ground has yet to be explored? And if so who can say but that among the volumes upon volumes of letters relating to these times which are still preserved in print or in MS., matter may not be found out of which to construct an edition of Bacon’s letters that will read as easily and as clearly as a novel. I am sure if it were done properly, it would be one of the most valuable historical and probably the most valuable biographical works that has been produced about these times. For there is hardly any contemporary political question of interest which is not indirectly or directly touched upon at one time or another, and which would not therefore require elucidation.

The subject is pursued in the next letter written from Mirehouse ten days later to Thompson, who was still abroad.

I am quite sure that much remains to be done with regard to those Baconian letters which I told you of, and I am sure too that without leisure and liberty I at least could not fairly set about it. I have been among the MSS. in the Lambeth Library and found that, though there are probably not many letters of Bacon’s which have not been published, there is a wilderness of papers closely connected with them which has never been properly explored. It is a field in which nobody has been at work that had both industry and brains. For the present, therefore, I look forward to this as my main business, in which if I prosper, I shall know what to do when (Peel having lost that no confidence in his opponents in which consists all the confidence he has to rest upon himself) Lord John shall come in again and fortune shall be again in a condition to be wooed; if I prosper not, I shall still know what to do; though it will be different. But I am filling a second letter with myself.

I am afraid you are not likely to see any people of the right sort, such as you describe, at Munich; though I duly advertised them of your street and lodging. Pollock has been circuiting as simple barrister, and will shortly have to circuit again as Barrister revising. In the between he comes here, and indeed I expect him this evening.... Douglas Heath had meant to join John, who has been tumbling up and down the Alps under the guidance of some Geologist; an unsafe guide, I should fancy, for what death so sweet to a Geologist as to knock out his brains against a stone; or to be embedded in some liquid, liquefying, or indurescent substance (such as snow or mud or lava) in which a million of years hence some other Geologist may find him embedded and so satisfy himself that a man was once there? He seems to have had some fine rides on the backs of avalanches down fissures. But Douglas was kept in London by business partly, and partly by the illness of his mother and the uncertain health of his father, and does not expect to get out of England this year. I hope he will contrive to get hither in about a month. I am afraid there is no chance of your finding a chink of time between your return to England and your October term business in which you might pay us another visit. Your first object ought to be to put yourself into the most convenient place for being thoroughly cured, which implies the neighbourhood of a thoroughly good Doctor: a luxury which we cannot offer you here. But I hope that, now the year is mine all round to dispose of as I think best, we shall be able some day to make our several times suit and our several lines meet at Mirehouse, and run on together for a while. You are very much approved of by everybody here.

Early in the year 1842, Spedding accompanied the first Lord Ashburton to the United States as Secretary to a commission, the object of which was to determine a boundary question which was successfully settled by the treaty of Washington. He writes to Thompson from Gosport on February 9, 1842:

Having heard that you think I might have written to you upon the occasion by my breaking out in this new light, and partly concurring in that sentiment, and finding myself as much at leisure for the rest of the evening as if the destinies of no country, much less the destinies of two, depended upon me, I sit down to shake mental hands with you, and to wish you prosperity during my eclipse and setting behind the Atlantic.

I will not trouble you with explanations concerning my inducement for taking so considerable a step as this. You will easily understand that I had to listen to more inward voices than one, and to wait the result of much confused inward debate before I decided to take it. Fortunately there was no question as to the comparative worth of the said two voices, nor any doubt as to the side on which they respectively appeared. It was the Fiend, i.e. the baser nature, the human instinct, that said, “Budge not.” The better voice said, “Go, why not?” The decision was soon taken, and being taken, the thing itself seemed much easier than it looked at first. It is now above three weeks since I have looked at it only as a thing that is to be, and I almost feel as if it would be strange if it were otherwise. What the effect of it may be on my character and fortunes I do not trouble myself to prophesy. It will at least make me think many things easy which seemed unapproachably difficult a month ago. It will teach me to keep accounts. And it will give me some insight into the nature of a state-conscience, a state-reason, a state-understanding, and a state-character. Many things besides. It may very likely ruin my reputation, but I am not sure that that would be an evil. I should be much happier, I think, without any reputation, not to add that if it were gone, I should be thrown upon my resources, which might after all turn out to be a better thing. But let these things pass. One thing is quite clear, that I could not spend the next six months in any way by which I should gain so much either in knowledge or in power. My immortal work must, of course, be suspended, but what is six months in an immortality? By the way, touching my Falstaff Platonizing, I agree with you, as reported by Merivale, that the insertion of such a joke would be unbecoming in a Museum Academicum, the more’s the pity, for with the joke itself I was a good deal pleased. But then, on the other hand, you will not let me prefix a serious introduction, explaining the thing which it is meant to illustrate. I can only suggest that you should yourself write an introduction refuting the said theory, if you really believe that the thing is worth putting in at all. But let this also pass, for I see the bottom of my paper (by the way I suppose I must not say such a thing in the U.S.), and the chambermaid would fain be dismissed to her bed. At present you may truly say that I am going ahead, for I alone of the suite have arrived, and my master, by being unpunctual, has lost a day of fair wind.

At this time FitzGerald wrote to Laurence, the artist:

You have, of course, read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for Beachy Head. There is a Shakespeare cliff, and a Spedding cliff. Good old fellow! I hope he’ll come back safe and sound, forehead and all. Not swords, nor cannon, nor all the bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude; no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied, that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead; we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things; you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the Lake of Geneva. We have great laughing over this.

Tennyson’s 1842 volume came out while Spedding was at Washington, and FitzGerald, writing to Pollock, regretted that it contained some pieces which he thought better omitted.

I agree with you quite about the skipping-rope, etc. But the bald men of the Embassy would tell you otherwise. I should not wonder if the whole theory of the Embassy, perhaps the discovery of America itself, was involved in that very Poem. Lord Bacon’s honesty may, I am sure, be found there.

“The Yankees,” Donne writes to Bernard Barton, “seem to think baldness a rarity appertaining to the old country, for their papers could not sufficiently express their wonder, when Ld. Ashburton went over about the Boundary question, at the lack of hair among his attachés. Spedding’s crown imperial of a cranium struck them like a view of Teneriffe or Atlas.”

“Nothing has been heard of Spedding,” says FitzGerald, “but we all conclude, from the nature of the case, that he has not been scalped.”

The mission ended happily in the treaty of Washington, and Spedding returned to his friends, in spite of the forebodings of FitzGerald, who says:

A man on the coach the other day told me that all was being settled very easily in America, but stage-coach politicians are not always to be trusted.

By the end of the year (1842), Spedding was again at Mirehouse.

“I am at present,” he writes to Thompson, “absorbed in teaching the young idea of a water spaniel how to shoot. He promises to be an accomplished dog. He can already catch a wounded hare and bring it, rescue a snipe out of a rapid stream, hunt (though in vain) for a water-hen among the roots of an alder-bush, and wait with intense breathless anxiety to hear the sound of a duck’s wing in the gloaming. In time I hope to teach him to do as I bid him. We are all well here. How is all at Cambridge? What shall you do at Christmas? If I am still here, can you come so far north? You shall see the dog.”

But although these country delights had their attractions for him, he had for some years established himself in London, where his rooms at 60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields were the meeting-place of Tennyson, Thackeray, FitzGerald, and any of his friends who happened to be in London at the time.

“Spedding is just now furnishing chambers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields,” FitzGerald writes in 1836, “so that we may look on him as a fixture in London. He and I went to dine with Tennant at Blackheath last Thursday: there we met Edgeworth, who has got a large house at Eltham, and is lying in wait for pupils. I am afraid he will not find many. We passed a very delightful evening.”

His return from America after four months at Washington, led to his being selected by the editor of the Edinburgh Review to write an article on Dickens’s American Notes, which gave the novelist strange and unreasonable offence. Spedding had originally written, “He is understood to have gone out as a kind of missionary in the cause of international copyright,” and this had been changed by the editor to “He went out, if we are rightly informed, as a kind of missionary,” etc. To this Dickens writes in a towering passion, “I deny it wholly. He is wrongly informed, and reports without enquiry, a piece of information which I could only characterise by using one of the shortest and strongest words in the language.” And yet his letters show that, whether the subject of international copyright were the real object of his visit or not, his speeches on it are referred to with a kind of satisfaction as if they were of the utmost importance. Apparently he was dissatisfied with the impartial way in which Spedding distributed his praise and blame, praising only where praise was due and blaming where it was not, and not attributing too much value to the hasty results of a four months’ experience of the country.

But for several years Spedding had been a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, and the articles which he selected for republication are full of that calm wisdom which distinguished all that he wrote. In 1836 he reviewed his friend Henry Taylor’s Statesman; in 1838 he wrote on “Negro Apprenticeship”; in 1839 on the “Suspension of the Jamaica Constitution”; in 1840 on the “Wakefield Theory of Colonization”; in 1841 on the “Civilization of Africa and the Niger Expedition,” in which his friend John Allen lost a brother; and in 1842 on “South Australia in 1841,” a sequel to the article on the “Wakefield Theory of Colonization.” And now for the next thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the task of what FitzGerald called washing his blackamoor, “a Tragedy pathetic as Antigone or Iphigenia.” His own special work was the arrangement of Bacon’s letters and minor writings, which had hitherto been very carelessly edited, and for this purpose he spent his days among the originals in the Lambeth Library and the British Museum. “Spedding devotes his days to Lord Bacon in the British Museum,” writes FitzGerald in 1844; and again in 1846, “I saw very little of Spedding in London, for he was out all day at State paper offices and Museums.”

But he was not so absorbed in his special pursuits as not to take interest in public affairs, and the Maynooth Grant in 1845 and the opposition which it excited caused him to take part in an address to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in its favour.

“You will see in the Morning Herald of to-day,” he writes to Thompson, “that the great event has already taken place, and though the world continues to move as it did, there does appear to be a change of weather.

“We had only 300 names. But that was quite enough, considering all things, especially the respectability of the people, and the imperfection of the agitation, to make the address well worth presenting. Having gone so far, to hold back altogether would have been to confess that the attempt was a mere failure, which nobody can say it was. To hold it back past the time specified in the circulars and originally designed, for the chance of obtaining more signatures, would have been useless: people would have only said that though we boasted of the shortness of the time in which the signatures were collected, yet in fact we waited as long as there was any chance of gathering any more. And in point of fact they had begun to come in very slowly by Monday morning. At best, it could not have been improved into an effectual canvass, and as it is, it shows very well. Let any one put the two lists side by side, and then say, if the weight of opinion in Cambridge inclines one way, which way is it? I was doubtful of the expediency of stirring it at first, but I am now very glad that it has been done. I wish the Herald had printed the names. But it was an unlucky day, there being a great debate in both Houses.

“Hare declined presenting; upon which H. Lushington, Venables, Micklethwaite, and myself (who had, in fact, been the chief actors), distributed ourselves into two cabs: and drove slap up to the Chancellor of Exchequer’s. Harry Lushington was the chief speaker, and did it very well and gracefully. Goulburn was, of course, gracious, but I should hardly have inferred that he was glad. However, he said he was; glad that this had been done, and glad that no more had been done; and (upon the whole) easy about the matter. The fever (he said) appeared to be gradually subsiding, and indeed the opposition was less formidable than might be supposed. ‘From what the gentleman said who presented the address on the other side, he gathered that it was for the most part a conscientious opposition, not arising from any political animosity.’ Certainly Punch cannot be said to beat Nature.”

Nothing, however, diverted him from his great object. FitzGerald writes to Frederick Tennyson:

Spedding, you know, does not change: he is now the same that he was fourteen years old when I first knew him at school, more than twenty years ago; wise, calm, bald, combining the best qualities of Youth and Age.

But his calmness was not proof against the enthusiasm created by the advent of Jenny Lind in 1847. Again FitzGerald writes:

All the world has been, as I suppose you have read, crazy about Jenny Lind.... Spedding’s cool blood was moved to hire stalls several times at an advanced rate.... I have never yet heard the famous Jenny Lind, whom all the world raves about. Spedding is especially mad about her, I understand: and, after that, is it not best for weaker vessels to keep out of her way? Night after night is that bald head seen in one particular position in the Opera house, in a stall; the miserable man has forgot Bacon and philosophy, and goes after strange women.

His health, however, had been giving some cause for anxiety at this time to his old friend, who writes to Carlyle:

Thank you for your account of Spedding: I had written however to himself, and from himself ascertained that he was out of the worst. But Spedding’s life is a very ticklish one.

Hitherto Spedding had been working in his own way at Bacon’s life and letters without any idea of contributing to a complete edition of his works, but rather with the object of defending him against what he believed to be the injustice done him by Macaulay in his famous Essay. But in 1847 Mr. Leslie Ellis had been preparing an edition of Bacon’s philosophical works which was offered for publication to Messrs. Longman, and Spedding acted as intermediary.

“Better, I think,” he writes to Thompson, “to be with the publishers than against them so long as one keeps the reins. Therefore I have written to Longman, reporting Ellis’s proposition, and recommending them to treat immediately with him upon those terms; for that if they get the philosophical works alone so edited, their edition will command the market, even if they do nothing but reprint the rest as they are. Whereas, if any other publisher should engage Ellis’s services for that portion, their trade edition would be worthless for ever. All which I believe to be true, and I hope will be conclusive. When that point is fixed there will be time enough to consider what else may be done. If they refuse the opportunity, I think I shall decline further connexion with the enterprise. My own project, as I never counted upon anything but expense from it, will not be much affected either way.”

The result, as is well known, was a complete edition of Bacon’s works, in which Mr. Leslie Ellis undertook the philosophical, Mr. Douglas Heath the legal and professional, and Spedding the literary and miscellaneous, to which he afterwards added the life and letters. In the meantime he wrote, but never published, for his own satisfaction and that he might gather the opinions of his friends, Evenings with a Reviewer, the reviewer being Macaulay and the review his Essay on Bacon. In sending a copy to Dr. Whewell he says:

It may seem absurd in a man to print a book, and yet to wish not only to keep it private, but also to prevent it from circulating privately. But after considering the matter carefully, with reference to what I may call the interest of the subject—I mean to the chance of making a successful and durable impression upon the popular opinion—I am satisfied that it would not be judicious to present the question to the public first in this form. It would probably provoke controversy. The result of the controversy would depend upon reviewers. Reviewers, until they have heard the evidence as well as the argument, are not in a condition to judge; yet unless the evidence be made easily accessible and bound up with the argument, they cannot be expected either to seek it out or to suspend their opinions, but will simply proceed to judgment without hearing it. In such a case, considering the strength of popular prepossessions and the tendency of the first blow at them to raise a dust of popular objections, the verdict would in the first instance go against me; and though I might appeal with a better chance to the second thoughts and the next generation, yet the appeal would be conducted at great disadvantage, because I should then stand in the position of an advocate with a personal interest in the cause. As it is, I hope in my division of Bacon’s works to set forth all the evidence clearly and impartially, so that everybody who has the book will have the means of judging for himself, and if I can get that credit for justice and impartiality which I mean to deserve, I do not much doubt the issue. But the first reception of the work, upon which in these times so much depends, will itself depend very much upon my coming before the public with a clear and unsuspected character: and this, if I should previously acquire the reputation (justly or not) of an advocate engaged to make good his own cause, I could not expect.

FitzGerald, writing to Donne at the end of 1848, says of Evenings with a Reviewer:

I saw many of my friends in London, Carlyle and Tennyson among them; but most and best of all, Spedding. I have stolen his noble book away from him; noble, in spite (I believe, but am not sure) of some adikology in the second volume: some special pleadings for his idol: amica Veritas, sed magis, etc.

And Donne in reply:

I, too, have Spedding’s “glorious book,” which I prefer to any modern reading. Reading one of his “Evenings” is next to spending an evening with the author.

Thompson, whose health had completely broken down in 1849, was undergoing the water-cure at Great Malvern, and early in 1850 Spedding writes to him:

They tell me that a letter will find you at Great Malvern. Indeed, I had reason to think so before, for I had heard of you twice since you went thither; once from Spring Rice and once from Blakesley.... I have been stationary here since August, seeing nobody and hearing nothing, so you must not expect any news.... You want to know, perhaps, what I am about myself. I am at this moment sitting in an easy-chair with the ink on a table beside me, and the papers on a blotting-board on my knee. On the little table beside me is first a leaden jar, bought long since to keep tobacco in, now holding snipe-shot. Next to it a pocket Virgil lying on its belly. On my left a ledge made for a lamp, on which are three different translations of Bacon’s Sapientia Veterum, and some loose pieces of paper destined in due time to be enriched with a fourth translation, of which I need say no more. Next to my little table stands a large round table, now quite uninhabitable by reason of the litter of books that has taken possession of it, as, for instance, another Virgil with English translation and notes, open, upon its back; a Dryden’s translation shut, and standing upright on its edge. A letter-clip holding a packet in brown-paper cover, inscribed “De sapientia veterum: translation.” A volume of Bacon standing shut on its edge. A Cruden’s Concordance; and near it, lying on its side and shut, Alford’s Greek Testament (an excellent book of immense industry, and very neat execution; good in all ways so far as I have looked, and so far as I can judge of what I see in such a matter; it seems as if one might find in it everything one can want to know about the four gospels, that an editor can tell one). Another volume of Bacon open, on its back; beneath it a folio Aristotle (!) also open, and beneath that again a huge old folio Demosthenes and Æschines (but this was brought down from the garret two days ago, and has not yet been put away). Many other things of the same kind; which, however, I cannot describe particularly without getting up, which I do not feel disposed to do. But I must not forget a striped box which belongs to my portmanteau, but serves here as a receptacle for loose papers, and stands on the table. Another table in the corner sustaining two vols. of Facciolati evidently out for use, reposing on a huge Hogarth which lies there because no bookcase is big enough to hold it, and itself reposes upon all the Naval Victories, flanked by a ball of string, an unopened packet of Bernard Barton’s remains, a Speed’s History of England, a ream of scribbling paper, and an Ainsworth. Under my chair lies my own dog Tip, who once went with you and me to the top of Ullock. Opposite stands a long narrow box containing bows, and hung about with quivers, belts, and other archery equipments. The chimney-piece is littered with disabled arrows. It is now half-past 3 P.M., I have a slight headache, due (I really believe) to a sour orange. The lake was yesterday frozen over with ice as smooth and transparent as glass. I had no skates, and to-day it is going either to thaw or to snow. I intended to buy a pair of skates last midsummer, but forgot. I have a great mind to go and buy a pair now. I leave you to gather the condition of my mind from the condition of my room. I am in truth doing very little. These family establishments are not favourable for work. I do not know how it is; the day seems as long, and one seems to have it all to oneself, but there are no hours in it. What becomes of half of them I cannot guess. Time leaks in a gentleman’s house.

My father has had a bad cold this winter, which hung about him longer than usual, and made him both look and feel ill. But he has thrown it quite off and seems now to be as well [as] usual, which is very well. His sight grows worse as of course it must do; but as fast as it leaves him he learns to make less do, so that he does not appear to be much distressed by the gradual privation. His old bitch is dead, and his old mare retires upon a pension, a paddock, a horse-pond, and a house, all to herself, with a daily feed of corn. He is now very well mounted on a fast walking pony, borrowed from a neighbour, and has a boy to walk with him and two puppies. He looks after his farming affairs as usual, and does not at all believe that land can be ruined by plenty. In truth we hear little in these latitudes of the agricultural distress of which we see so much in the newspapers.

I have not heard from Ellis since he left England, and I do not know exactly where he is. He talked of staying some time at Avignon. But I am so doubtful whether a letter would find him there that I do not care to write upon the chance. Our publishers seem to be quite easy in mind, and made no enquiries as to the rate of progress. If Ellis can be ready within two years, I shall have to stir myself in order to be ready with my contribution. But I expect a good year’s respite. I have finished the Henry VII., however, which is my principal labour; and I like very well what I have done.

But all his plans were disarranged by Mr. Ellis’s illness. In the latter part of 1849, while travelling on the Riviera, Ellis had a severe attack of rheumatic fever, from which he never recovered, and which entirely disabled him for the work he had undertaken and in which he had made some progress. Spedding, therefore, had to take his place and edit as best he could Bacon’s Philosophical Works. He has explained very fully in the Preface to them the method he adopted, and the careful manner in which he kept Mr. Ellis’s work distinct. “Early in 1853,” he says, “I took the work in hand.” In the meanwhile he was to be found at his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and there FitzGerald visited him in April 1850.

“Spedding is my sheet-anchor,” he says, “the truly wise and fine fellow: I am going to his rooms this very evening, and there I believe Thackeray, Venables, etc. are to be. I hope not a large assembly, for I get shyer and shyer even of those I know.”

“I was in London only for ten days this spring,” FitzGerald writes to Frederick Tennyson, “and those ten days not in the thick of the season.... The most pleasurable remembrance I had of my stay in town was the last day I spent there; having a long ramble in the streets with Spedding, looking at books and pictures; then a walk with him and Carlyle across the Park to Chelsea, where we dropped that Latter-Day Prophet at his house; then, getting upon a steamer, smoked down to Westminster; dined at a chop-house by the Bridge, and then went to Astley’s; old Spedding being quite as wise about the horsemanship as about Bacon and Shakespeare. We parted at midnight in Covent Garden, and this whole pleasant day has left a taste on my palate like one of Plato’s lighter, easier, and more picturesque dialogues.”

In August he went into Suffolk to stay with FitzGerald and the Cowells at their home in Bramford, near Ipswich. FitzGerald again writes to Frederick Tennyson:

I have not seen any one you know since I last wrote; nor heard from any one: except dear old Spedding, who really came down and spent two days with us, me and that Scholar and his Wife in their Village, in their delightful little house, in their pleasant fields by the River side. Old Spedding was delicious there; always leaving a mark, I say, in all places one has been at with him, a sort of Platonic perfume. For has he not all the beauty of the Platonic Socrates, with some personal beauty to boot? He explained to us one day about the laws of reflection in water; and I said then one never could look at the willow whose branches furnished the text without thinking of him. How beastly this reads! As if he gave us a lecture! But you know the man, how quietly it all came out; only because I petulantly denied his plain assertion. For I really often cross him only to draw him out; and vain as I may be, he is one of those that I am well content to make shine at my own expense.

In August 1851 he writes again to Frederick Tennyson:

Almost the only man I hear from is dear old Spedding, who has lost his Father, and is now, I suppose, a rich man. This makes no apparent change in his way of life; he has only hired an additional Attic in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so as to be able to bed a friend upon occasion. I may have to fill it ere long.

And a few months later:

Spedding is immutably wise, good, and delightful; not as immutably well in Body, I think, though he does not complain.

The great work went slowly on, but nothing as yet was published. Spedding had just taken over Ellis’s portion and was devoting himself to this. We get a glimpse of him again in FitzGerald’s letters:

I saw old Spedding in London; only doubly calm after the death of a Niece he dearly loved, and whose death-bed at Hastings he had just been waiting upon.

It was 1857 before the first three volumes appeared, followed by three others in 1858, and by the final volume in 1859. Ellis did not live to see the completion of the work, for he died in May of that year.

FitzGerald, writing in 1857 to Cowell, who was now in Calcutta, from Portland Terrace, where he lived during his early married life, says:

Spedding has been once here in near three months. His Bacon keeps coming out: his part, the Letters, etc., of Bacon, is not come yet; so it remains to be seen what he will do then, but I can’t help thinking he has let the Pot boil too long.

It was 1861, however, before the first volume of the Life and Letters appeared, and Spedding found that he had already been forestalled by Hepworth Dixon in The Story of Lord Bacon’s Life. In a note to the earliest letter printed, probably the earliest specimen remaining of Bacon’s handwriting, he says, with quiet contempt:

The copies of some of these letters lately published by Mr. Hepworth Dixon ... differ, I observe, very much from mine; most of them in the words and sense, more or less, and some in the name of the person writing, or the person written to, or both. But as mine are more intelligible, and were made with care and at leisure, and when my eyes were better than they are now, I do not suspect any material error in them, and have not thought it worth while to apply for leave to compare them again with the originals.

“I am very glad,” FitzGerald writes to Thompson, “to hear old Spedding is really getting his share of Bacon into Print: I doubt if it will be half as good as the “Evenings,” where Spedding was in the Passion which is wanted to fill his Sail for any longer Voyage.”

Some three years later, he says:

Spedding’s Bacon seems to hang fire; they say he is disheartened at the little Interest, and less Conviction, that his two first volumes carried; Thompson told me they had convinced him the other way; and that Ellis had long given up Bacon’s Defence before he died.

And so it continued to the end. When the sixth volume appeared in 1872 FitzGerald wrote:

And here is Spedding’s vol. vi. which leaves me much where it found me about Bacon: but though I scarce care for him, I can read old Spedding’s pleading for him for ever; that is old Spedding’s simple statement of the case, as he sees it. The Ralegh business is quite delightful, better than Old Kensington.

Carlyle alone of all the critics was unstinted, though rather patronizing, in his praise. Writing to FitzGerald, he says:

Like yourself I have gone through Spedding, seven long long volumes, not skipping except when I had got the sense with me, and generally reading all of Bacon’s own that was there: I confess to you I found it a most creditable and even surprising Book, offering the most perfect and complete image both of Bacon and of Spedding, and distinguished as the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy-work I have ever met with in this generation. Bacon is washed down to the natural skin; and truly he is not, nor ever was, unlovely to me; a man of no culpability to speak of; of an opulent and even magnificent intellect, but all in the magnificent prose vein. Nothing or almost nothing of the “melodies eternal” to be traced in him. There is a grim strength in Spedding, quietly, very quietly invincible, which I did not quite know of till this Book; and in all ways I could congratulate this indefatigably patient, placidly invincible and victorious Spedding.

But for the last eight years he had given up his rooms in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and gone to live with his nieces at 80 Westbourne Terrace, where he remained till his death. Thompson, in succession to Dr. Whewell, had been appointed Master of Trinity, and in writing to congratulate him Spedding says:

I was not unprepared for your news, having just returned from Kitlands, where the Pollocks were, and the rumour was under discussion and generally thought to be well-founded, and the thing if true very much rejoiced over. I have great pleasure in adding my own congratulations, as well to yourself as to Trinity. It was all that was wanted to make one of the last acts of Lord Russell a complete success. I should be very glad to think that I had as much to do with it as you suppose: but I was only one of many, and not by any means the most influential, and as the thing is done, no matter how it was brought about.

I am myself preparing for a shift of position, though the adventure is of a milder kind. My nephew (J. J. S.) is going to be married within a month or so: and it has been settled that he is to live at Greta Bank, and that the rest of the party now living there are to take a house in London: where I am invited to join them, with due securities for liberties and privileges. Though the exertion incident to dislodgment from quarters overgrown with so many superfetations of confusion and disorder, is formidable to contemplate, the proposed arrangement is so obviously convenient and desirable, that I am going to encounter it. And though the place is not yet settled, it seems probable that before the end of the year I shall be transferred or transferring myself and my goods to the western part of London, and preparing to remodel my manners and customs (in some respects) according to the usages of civilized society. Though I shall live among women, they will be women of my own house, and therefore not worshippers, which is a great advantage, and though there may be some danger for an obedient uncle in being where he can always be caught, I hope to be able to preserve as much independence as is good for a man.

I have four proof sheets to settle, and have just been interrupted by an engraver with a proof [of] the D. of Buccleugh’s miniature of Bacon, which will be the best portrait that has yet been done of him in black and white.

This was the miniature which was reproduced at the beginning of the third volume of the Life and Letters, and which Spedding regarded as the original of Van Somer’s portrait.

The following letter to Tennyson, written in 1870, is necessary to the full understanding of Tennyson’s reply (see Memoir by his Son)[107]:

My dear Alfred—I do not know where you are, and I want to know for three reasons: 1st, that I may thank you for your book; 2nd, that I may send you mine; 3rd, that I may let you know, if you do not know it already, that there has been a box here these many weeks, which is meant for you and comes from FitzGerald.

A copy of your new volume[108] came early from the publisher, yet not so early but that it found me already half way through. I was happy to observe that neither years nor domestic happiness have had any demoralizing effect upon you as yet. Your touch is as delicate and vigorous and your invention as rich as ever: and I am still in hope that your greatest poem of all has not yet been written. Some years ago, when you were in want of a subject, I recommended Job. The argument of Job, to be treated as you treat the legends of Arthur, as freely and with as much light of modern thought as you find fit. As we know it now, it is only half intelligible, and must be full of blunders and passages misunderstood. Probably also the peculiar character of the oriental style would at any rate stand in the way and prevent it from producing its proper effect upon the modern and western mind. Yet we can see through all the confusion what a great argument it is, and I think it was never more wanted than now. If you would take it in hand, and tell it in verse in your own way, without any scruples about improving on Scripture, I believe it would be the greatest poem in the language. The controversy is as much alive to-day in London as it could ever have been in the place where and the time when it was composed, of which, as the author, I am altogether ignorant. And the voice out of the whirlwind may speak without fear of anachronisms.

My own book,[109] though there is only one volume this time, is much bigger than yours. It is wrapped up ready to go by the book-post, and only wants to know to which of your many mansions it is to be directed.

Fitz’s box, which is about as large as a tailor’s box for a single suit, contains a drawing of Thackeray’s, an illustration of the “Lord of Burghley,” a pretty sketch of the landskip-painter and the village maiden. He sent it here under the vain delusion that whenever you happened to come to London I should be sure to know. And I presume he sent word to you of what he had done, for he did not ask me to communicate the fact. I was only to write to him in case the box did not arrive, and as the box did arrive I did not write. If you will let me know what you wish to be done with it, I will do with it accordingly.

There is a line in your last volume which I can’t read: the last line but one of the “flower in the crannied wall.”

In the course of the same year he edited the Conference of Pleasure, written by Bacon for some masque or festive occasion, and printed from a MS. belonging to the Duke of Northumberland which had been slightly injured by fire. FitzGerald, in a letter to me, says of it:

Spedding’s Introduction to his grilled Bacon, I call it really a beautiful little Idyll, the mechanical Job done so perfectly and so elegantly.

But while he was engaged in the great labour of his life he found time to write beautiful pieces of criticism on Shakespeare to which FitzGerald would willingly have had him devote his whole attention. “I never heard him read a page,” he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, “but he threw some new light upon it.” In the Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1850 he contributed a paper on “Who wrote Shakespeare’s Henry VIII.?” which he discussed with characteristic thoroughness. His conclusion was that it was the work of two authors, one of whom was Fletcher, and this was confirmed by the investigations of another enquirer, who independently arrived at substantially the same result. The division of the Acts in Much Ado, Twelfth Night, Richard II., and King Lear formed the subject of other discussions, and these he considered his most valuable contribution to the restoration of Shakespeare. A criticism of Miss Kate Terry’s acting in Viola gave him the opportunity of pointing out the corruptions by which the fine comedy, Twelfth Night, has been degraded into farce.

“Spedding says,” FitzGerald writes in 1875 to Fanny Kemble, “that Irving’s Hamlet is simply—hideous—a strong expression for Spedding to use. But—(lest I should think his condemnation was only the Old Man’s fault of depreciating all that is new) he extols Miss Ellen Terry’s Portia as simply a perfect Performance: remembering (he says) all the while how fine was Fanny Kemble’s.”

Again to the same correspondent early in 1880 he says:

By far the chief incident in my life for the last month has been the reading of dear old Spedding’s Paper on the Merchant of Venice, there, at any rate, is one Question settled, and in such a beautiful way as only he commands. I could not help writing a few lines to tell him what I thought, but even very sincere praise is not the way to conciliate him. About Christmas I wrote him, relying on it that I should be most likely to secure an answer if I expressed dissent from some other work of his, and my expectation was justified by one of the fullest answers he had written to me for many a day and year.

The paper referred to was “The Story of the Merchant of Venice” in the Cornhill Magazine for March 1880. In sending a copy to Frederick Tennyson he says:

I now post you a paper by old Spedding—a very beautiful one, I think; settling one point, however unimportant, and in a graceful, as well as logical, way such as he is Master of.

A case has been got up—whether by Irving, the Stage Representative of Shylock, or by his Admirers—to prove the Jew to be a very amiable and ill-used man: insomuch that one is to come away from the theatre loving him and hating all the rest. He dresses himself up to look like the Saviour, Mrs. Kemble says. So old Jem disposes of that, besides unravelling Shakespeare’s mechanism of the Novel he draws from, in a manner (as Jem says) more distinct to us than in his treatment of any other of his Plays “not professedly historical.” And this latter point is, of course, far more interesting than the question of Irving and Co.,—which is a simple attempt, both of Actor and Writer, to strike out an original idea in the teeth of common-sense and Tradition.

And now came the end, unexpected and the result of an accident, which he maintained was entirely his own fault. In writing to tell me of the fatal result, one of his dearest friends said:

I grieve to tell you that all is over with our dear old friend.... He intended to cross before two carriages—crossed before one—found there was not time to pass before the other, and instead of pausing stepped back under the hansom which he had not seen, and which had not time to alter its course. He spent more strength in exculpating the poor driver than on any personal matter during his illness as soon as he regained memory of the circumstances.

“Mowbray Donne,” says FitzGerald, when all was over, “wrote me that Laurence had been there four or five days ago, when Spedding said, that had the Cab done but a little more, it would have been a good Quietus. Socrates to the last.”

And in another letter:

Tennyson called at the Hospital, but was not allowed to see him, though Hallam did, I think. Some one calling afterwards, Spedding took the doctor’s arm, and asked, “Was it Mr. Tennyson?” Doctors and nurses all devoted to the patient man.

To Fanny Kemble he writes:

It was very, very good and kind of you to write to me about Spedding. Yes: Aldis Wright had apprised me of the matter just after it happened—he happening to be in London at the time; and but two days after the accident heard that Spedding was quite calm, and even cheerful; only anxious that Wright himself should not be kept waiting for some communication which S. had promised him! Whether to live, or to die, he will be Socrates still.

Directly that I heard from Wright I wrote to Mowbray Donne to send me just a Post Card—daily, if he or his wife could, with but one or two words on it—“Better,” “Less well,” or whatever it might be. This morning I hear that all is going on even better than could be expected, according to Miss Spedding. But I suppose the Crisis, which you tell me of, is not yet come; and I have always a terror of that French Adage—“Monsieur se porte mal—Monsieur se porte mieux—Monsieur est—” Ah, you know, or you guess, the rest.

My dear old Spedding, though I have not seen him these twenty years and more—and probably should never see him again—but he lives—his old Self—in my heart of hearts; and all I hear of him does but embellish the recollection of him—if it could be embellished—for he is but the same that he was from a Boy—all that is best in Heart and Head—a man that would be incredible had one not known him.

Again he writes of him to Professor Norton:

He was the wisest man I have known; a great sense of Humour, a Socrates in Life and in Death, which he faced with all Serenity so long as Consciousness lasted. I suppose something of him will reach America, I mean, of his Death; run over by a Cab and dying in St. George’s Hospital to which he was taken, and from which he could not be removed home alive.

“I did not know,” he says in another letter, “that I should feel Spedding’s Loss as I do, after an interval of more than twenty years [since] meeting him. But I knew that I could always get the Word I wanted of him by Letter, and also that from time to time I should meet with some of his wise and delightful Papers in some Quarter or other. He talked of Shakespeare, I am told, when his Mind wandered. I wake almost every morning feeling as if I had lost something, as one does in a Dream; and truly enough, I have lost him. ‘Matthew is in his Grave, etc.’”

In apologizing to Fanny Kemble for not writing to her as usual, he says:

I have let the Full Moon pass because you had written to me so lately, and so kindly, about our lost Spedding, that I could not call on you too soon again. Of him I will say nothing except that his Death has made me recall very many passages in his Life in which I was partly concerned. In particular, staying at his Cumberland Home along with Tennyson in the May of 1835.... His Father and Mother were both alive—he a wise man, who mounted his Cob after Breakfast, and was at his Farm till Dinner at two—then away again till Tea: after which he sat reading by a shaded lamp: saying very little, but always courteous and quite content with any company his Son might bring to the house, so long as they let him go his way: which indeed he would have gone whether they let him or no. But he had seen enough of Poets not to like them or their Trade: Shelley for a time living among the Lakes: Coleridge at Southey’s (whom perhaps he had a respect for—Southey, I mean); and Wordsworth, whom I do not think he valued. He was rather jealous of “Jem,” who might have done available service in the world, he thought, giving himself up to such Dreamers; and sitting up with Tennyson conning over the “Morte d’Arthur,” “Lord of Burleigh,” and other things which helped to make up the two Volumes of 1842. So I always associate that Arthur Idyll with Basanthwaite Lake, under Skiddaw. Mrs. Spedding was a sensible, motherly Lady, with whom I used to play Chess of a Night. And there was an old Friend of hers, Miss Bristowe, who always reminded me of Miss La Creevy, if you know of such a Person in Nickleby.

We will conclude with what his old friend, Sir Henry Taylor, wrote of him after his death:

As he will not read what I write I may allow myself to say something more. He was always master of himself and of his emotions; but underlying a somewhat melancholy composure and aspect there were depths of tenderness known only to those who knew his whole nature and his inward life, and it is well for those by whom he is mourned if they can find what he has described in a letter to be his great consolation in all his experiences of the death of those he loved (experiences which had begun early and had not been few), “that the past is sacred and sanctified; nothing can happen hereafter to disturb or obliterate it; nor need the recollection have any bitterness if a man does not, out of a false and morbid sentiment, make it so for himself.”

And he adds:

To me there are no companions more welcome, cordial, consolatory or cheerful than my dead friends.

---

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM

Arthur Hallam reading “Walter Scott” aloud on board the “Leeds,”
bound from Bordeaux to Dublin, Sept. 9, 1830.

After Tennyson’s and Hallam’s memorable journey to the Pyrenees in aid of the revolutionary movement
against King Ferdinand of Spain, vividly described by Carlyle in his Life of John Sterling.

Alfred Tennyson (in profile), John Harden and Mrs. Harden (on the left), and the Miss Hardens.