Children are said seldom to remember things which happen when they are three years old; but I have a distinct recollection of being at my mother's early home of Toft in Cheshire during this spring of 1837, and of the charm, of which children are so conscious, of the Mrs. Leycester ("Toft Grannie"—my mother's first cousin) who lived there. I also recollect the great dog at Alderley, and being whipped by "Uncle Ned" (Edward Stanley) at the gate of the Dutch garden for breaking off a branch of mezereon when I was told not to touch it. Indeed I am not sure whether these recollections are not of a year before, in which I distinctly remember a terrible storm at Lime, when Kate Stanley was with us, seeing a great acacia-tree torn up by the roots and hurled against the drawing-room window, smashing all before it, and the general panic and flight that ensued. Otherwise my earliest impressions of Hurstmonceaux are all of the primroses on the Lime bank—the sheets of golden stars everywhere, and the tufts of pure white primroses which grew in one particular spot, where the bank was broken away under an old apple-tree. Then of my intense delight in being taken in a punt to the three islets on the pond—Mimulus Island, Tiny and Wee; and of the excessive severity of Uncle Julius, who had the very sharpest possible way of speaking to children, even when he meant to be kind to them. Every evening, like clockwork, he appeared at six to dine with my mother, and walked home after coffee at eight. How many of their conversations, which I was supposed neither to hear or understand, have come back to me since like echoes: strange things for a child to remember—about the Fathers, and Tract XC., and a great deal about hymns and hymn-tunes—"Martyrdom," "Irish," "Abridge," &c.; for an organ was now put into the church, in place of the band, in which the violin never could keep time with the other instruments. Sir George Dasent has told me how he was at Hurstmonceaux then, staying with the Simpkinsons. Arthur Stanley was at the Rectory as a pupil, and he asked Arthur how he liked this new organ. "Well," he said, "it is not so bad as most organs, for it does not make so much sound." Uncle Julius preached about it, altering a text into "What went ye out for to hear."
A child who lives much with its elders is almost certain to find out what it is most intended to conceal from it. If possible it had better be confided in. I knew exactly what whispers referred to a certain dark passage in the history of the Rectory before Uncle Julius's time—"il y avait un crime"—and I never rested till I found it out. It was about this time that I remember Uncle Julius going into one of his violently demonstrative furies over what he considered the folly of "Montgomery's Poems," and his flinging the book to the other end of the room in his rage with it, and my wondering what would be done to me if I ever dared to be "as naughty as Uncle Jule."
From MY MOTHER'S JOURNAL.
"Lime, June 20, 1837.—Augustus was very ill in coming through London.... Seeing Punch one day from the window, he was greatly amused by it, and laughed heartily. Next day I told him I had seen Punch and Judy again. 'No, Mama, you can't have seen Judy, for she was killed yesterday.' On getting home he was much pleased, and remembered every place perfectly. Great is his delight over every new flower as it comes out, and his face was crimsoned over as he called to me to see 'little Cistus come out.' At night, in his prayers he said—'Bless daisies, bluebells,' &c.... I have found speaking of the power exercised by Jesus Christ in calming the wind a means of leading him to view Christ as God, which I felt the want of in telling him of Christ's childhood and human kindness,—showing how miraculous demonstration is adapted to childhood."
I have a vivid recollection of my long illness in Park Street, and of the miserable confinement in London. It was just at that time that my Uncle Edward Stanley was offered the Bishopric of Norwich. His family were all "in a terrible taking," as they used to call that sort of emotion, as to whether it should be accepted or not, and when the matter was settled they were almost worse—not my aunt, nothing ever agitated her, but the rest of them. Mary and Kate came, with floods of tears, to tell my mother they were to leave Alderley. My Uncle Penrhyn met Mary Stanley coming down our staircase, quite convulsed with weeping, and thought that I was dead.
When I was better, in the spring, we went to my Uncle Penrhyn's at East Sheen. One day I went into Mortlake with my nurse Mary Lea. In returning, a somewhat shabby carriage passed us, with one or two outriders, and an old gentleman inside. When we reached the house, Lea asked old Mills, the butler, who it was. "Only 'Silly Billy,'" he said. It was King William IV., who died in the following June. He had succeeded to the sobriquet which had been applied to his cousin and brother-in-law, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who died in 1834.
John Sterling had been living at Hurstmonceaux for several years as my uncle's curate, and was constantly at Lime or the Rectory. I vividly recollect how pleasant (and handsome) he was. My mother used to talk to him for hours together and he was very fond of her. With Mrs. Sterling lived her sister Annie Barton, whom I remember as a very sweet and winning person. During this summer, Frederick Maurice, a Cambridge pupil of my uncle's, came to visit him, and confessed his attachment to her. There were many obstacles to their marriage, of which I am ignorant; but my mother was always in favour of it, and did much to bring it about. I recollect Annie Barton as often sitting on a stool at my mother's feet.
On our way to Stoke in the preceding autumn, we had diverged to visit Frederick Maurice at his tiny curacy of Bubnell near Leamington. With him lived his sister Priscilla, for whom my mother formed a great friendship, which, beginning chiefly on religious grounds, was often a great trial to her, as Priscilla Maurice, with many fine qualities and great cleverness, was one of the most exacting persons I have ever known. I am conscious of course now of what fretted me unconsciously then, the entire difference of class, and consequent difference in the measurement of people and things, between the Maurices and those my mother had been accustomed to associate with, and of their injurious effect upon my mother herself, in inducing her to adopt their peculiar phraseology, especially with regard to religious things. They persuaded her to join in their tireless search after the motes in their brother's eyes, and urged a more intensified life of contemplative rather than active piety, which abstracted her more than ever from earthly interests, and really marred for a time her influence and usefulness. The Maurice sisters were the first of the many so-called "religious" people I have known, who did not seem to realise that Christianity is rather action than thought; not a system, but a life.
It must have been soon after this that Frederick Maurice moved to London, and our visits to London were henceforth for several years generally paid to his stuffy chaplain's house at Guy's, where, as I could not then appreciate my host, I was always intensely miserable, and, though a truly good man, Frederick Maurice was not, as I thought, an attractive one. What books have since called "the noble and pathetic monotone"[14] of his life, which was "like the burden of a Gregorian chaunt," describes him exactly, but was extremely depressing. He maundered over his own humility in a way which—even to a child—did not seem humble, and he was constantly lost mentally in the labyrinth of religious mysticisms which he was ever creating for himself. In all he said, as in all he wrote, there was a nebulous vagueness. "I sometimes fancy," "I almost incline to believe," "I seem to think," were the phrases most frequently on his lips. When he preached before the University of Cambridge to a church crowded with dons and undergraduates, they asked one another as they came out, "What was it all about?" He may have sown ideas, but, if they bore any fruits, other people reaped them.[15] Still his innate goodness brought him great devotion from his friends. Amongst those whom I recollect constantly seeing at Guy's, a man in whose society my mother found much pleasure, was John Alexander Scott, whom Mrs. Kemble describes as being mentally one of the most influential persons she had ever known.