CONTENTS.

PAGE
Memoir of Arthur Hugh Clough[1]
Letters from 1829 to 1836. Rugby[57]
Letters from 1836 to 1849. Oxford[75]
Letters from 1849 to 1852. London[141]
Letters from 1852 to 1853. America[187]
Letters from 1853 to 1861. London[216]
A Consideration of Objections Against the Retrenchment Association at Oxford during the Irish Famine in 1847[283]
Lecture on the Poetry of Wordsworth[305]
On the Formation of Classical English: An Extract from a Lecture on Dryden[325]
Lecture on the Development of English Literature from Chaucer to Wordsworth[333]
Review of some Poems by Alexander Smith and Matthew Arnold[355]
Letters of Parepidemus[381]
A Passage upon Oxford Studies: Extracted from a Review of the Oxford University Commissioners’ Report, 1852[399]
Extracts from a Review of a Work entitled ‘Considerations on some Recent Social Theories’[405]
Notes on the Religious Tradition[415]

MEMOIR
OF
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Arthur Hugh Clough was born at Liverpool, January 1, 1819. He was the second son of James Butler Clough. His father belonged to an old Welsh family, who trace themselves back to Sir Richard Clough, known as agent at Antwerp to Sir Thomas Gresham. His mother’s name was Anne Perfect. She was the daughter of John Perfect, a banker at Pontefract in Yorkshire, of a respectable family long established in that place.

Sir Richard Clough, we are told, was related on his mother’s side to John Calvin. In his own county of Denbigh he was evidently a man of considerable position. He built two houses, Plâs Clough and Bachegraig, about the year 1527. He married first a Dutch lady, by whom he had a son, Richard, who carried on the name, and to whom he bequeathed Plâs Clough. He married, secondly, Katharine Tudor, heiress of Berain, and descendant of Marchweithian, lord of the Welsh tribe of Is-aled. She was a relation and ward of Queen Elizabeth, being great-granddaughter of Henry VII.; and the Queen’s consent is mentioned as having been required for her marriage. Sir Richard Clough was her second husband; and the story is told that he, as well as Morris Wynn of Gwydir, accompanied her to her first husband’s funeral, and that Morris Wynn when leading her out of church requested the favour of her hand in marriage, to which she answered that she had already promised it as she went in to Sir Richard Clough; but added that should there be any other occasion she would remember him. After the death of Sir Richard, accordingly, she did marry him, and afterwards married, fourthly, Edward Thelwall, of Plas-y-Ward. She is said however, to have preferred Sir R. Clough to her other husbands; and a curious picture of her exists, a companion to a somewhat remarkable one of Richard Clough, holding a locket containing his ashes in one hand, and resting the other on his scull.

By this lady, Sir R. Clough had only two daughters, one of whom married a Wynn, and was the ancestress of the family of Lord Newborough, which still possesses Maynau Abbey, given to her by Sir R. Clough. The second daughter, Katherine, married Roger Salusbury, and received from Sir Richard the house and property of Bachegraig, which afterwards came into the possession of Mrs. Thrale, her lineal descendant.

His son Richard inherited Plâs Clough, where his descendants continued to reside. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the family was represented by a Hugh Clough, who had thirteen children, one of whom, called also Hugh, was Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and is buried there: he was a friend of Cowper the poet, and is said to have been something of a poet himself. Hugh died unmarried; but three sons and one daughter of the first Hugh married, and left large families. One son, Roger, thirteenth child of Hugh Clough, married Ann Jemima Butler, a lady possessed of considerable estates in Sussex, to which she was co-heiress with her sister, who married Roger Clough’s elder brother Richard. He did not, however, leave much to his children, for he was of a liberal and profuse turn, and he had ten children, of whom James Butler Clough was the third. This son was the first of his family to leave the neighbourhood of their old house in Wales. He removed to Liverpool, where he settled and went into business as a cotton merchant, and where his four children were born. When Arthur was about four years old, his father migrated to Charleston, in the United States, where he passed several years, and this was the home of Arthur’s childhood till he went to school. We give here a few recollections furnished by his sister, the next to him in age in the family, which bring before us the scenes in which his childhood was passed, and the influences which even then began to tell strongly upon him.

‘The first distinct remembrance,’ she says, ‘that I have of my brother is of his going with me in a carriage to the vessel which was to take us to America. This must have been in the winter of 1822-23, when he was not quite four years old. My next recollection is of our home at Charleston, a large, ugly red brick house near the sea. The lower storey was my father’s office, and it was close by a wharf where from our windows we could see the vessels lying by and amuse ourselves with watching their movements.

‘In the summer of this year (1823) we went to the North, and stayed some time in a boarding-house at New York, and afterwards with some friends who lived on the banks of the Hudson, and had a large and pleasant garden. It was here, I have heard, that Arthur learned to read. In the autumn we returned to Charleston, having made the passage there and back by sea.

‘The two following summers (1824 and 1825) we again visited the North; both times we went to New York, and the first year on to Albany and Lebanon Springs, and the second time as far as Newport. After our return to Charleston in the autumn my father was obliged to go to England, and he took with him my eldest brother Charles, who was old enough to go to school. Arthur and I and my youngest brother George remained in the red brick house at Charleston with my mother and a faithful old nurse. My father was absent eleven months. Then Arthur became my mother’s constant companion. Though then only just seven, he was already considered as the genius of our family. He was a beautiful boy, with soft silky, almost black hair, and shining dark eyes, and a small delicate mouth, which our old nurse was so afraid of spoiling, when he was a baby, that she insisted on getting a tiny spoon for his special use.