It is curious, certainly, how one has only to turn to the pages of a book which collects Reviews of past authors, like “Alibone’s Dictionary,” to find plentiful consolation. I chanced to open it on Thackeray, and found the Edinburgh Review, after abusing “Esmond” in the most contemptuous tones, saying patronisingly, “If Esmond had been confined within as short limits, it might have taken rank with the ‘Defence of Natural Society,’ but a parody three volumes long becomes tiresome.” The same Edinburgh Review advised Byron to abandon poetry and apply his talents to some better use; and declared Coleridge’s “Christabel” to be “a thing utterly destitute of value.” I think it is Montaigne who says, “Aucun chemin de fleurs ne conduit à la gloire.”

XXV
IN PLEASURE AND PAIN

“Why, of all the countless faces which I meet as I walk down the Strand, are the enormous majority failures—deflections from the type of beauty possible to them?”—Dean Church.

“Before the beginning of years there came to the making of man,
Time with a gift of tears, Grief with a glass that ran.”
—Swinburne.

“From the black depths, the ashes, and the dross
Of our waste lives, we reach out to the Cross,
And by its fulness measure all our loss.”
—Whittier.

IN the middle of October I went North for a short time.

Journal.

“Thoresby, Oct. 20, 1887.—A visit here has been charming—its inmates all so filled with kindness and goodness of every description, and Lady Manvers so very agreeable—‘une conversation si nourrie.” Nothing could exceed the dying splendour of the autumnal tints in the forest, of which we saw a great deal, as we sat out through the whole of each morning drawing amongst the tall golden bracken, over which the great antlers of a stag were now and then uplifted. My companions were Lady Mary Pierrepont, very pretty and charming, and Mrs. Trebeck, daughter and sister of a Bishop Wordsworth, who is here with her husband, Canon Trebeck of Southwell, a very singular and admirable muscular Christian. They have asked me to visit them. The first day of my visit I was delighted to meet Lord and Lady Montagu, unusually pleasant people, with a very nice daughter.”

“Southwell, Oct. 21.—Lord Manvers—kindest of hosts—sent me here, fourteen miles. It is a tiny town clustered around its—chiefly Norman—minster. The beautiful chapter-house has a wreathed door, before which Ruskin stood for an hour when he was here, motionless in rapt contemplation. On one of the old Norman pillars on the right of the nave are remains of a fresco of the Annunciation, evidently painted over an altar of the Virgin: on the other side are traces of a very early organ. In the graveyard is the tomb of Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke’s father. The Sub-dean and his wife are the centre around which the whole little place revolves with its society and charities. The Bishop, who lives in the country, seems rather to despise Southwell and to wish his cathedral had been at Nottingham.

“We went from Thoresby to Rufford,[469] a curious old low-lying house containing much fine tapestry, but where the old furniture is greatly made up. The house has an obstreperous ghost, that especially haunted the room which Augustus Lumley chose as his own, and frightened his pug-dog out of its wits; for beyond that room is a little chamber in which a girl was once shut up and starved to death; but since some bones have been found under one of the passages and received christian burial, the ghost has been laid. There is a portrait of a boy who was taken as a baby from gipsies and brought up in the house, but who disappeared after he grew up and never was heard of again: it was supposed that the impulse was too strong, and that he rejoined the tribe he came from.”