of quinine. Chemists have often been amazed at the prescription. But in due time the trouble quite disappeared, and I now, laus Deo! very rarely ever have a touch of it. As many persons suffer terribly from this disorder, which is an aching in the back of the head and neck accompanied by “sick headache,” I give the ingredients of the cure; the proper quantity must be determined by the physician. [373]
We dined once with Mr. Washburne, who during dinner showed his extreme goodness of heart in a very characteristic manner. Some foolish American had during the émeute—in which I was to have been a leader, had I so willed—got himself into trouble, not by fighting, but through mere prying Yankee “curiosity” and mingling with the crowd. Such people really deserve to be shot more than any others, for they get in the way and spoil good fighting. He was deservedly arrested, and sent for his Minister, who, learning it, at once arose, drove to the prefecture, and delivered his inquisitive compatriot. On another occasion we were the guests of J. Meredith Read, then our Minister to Athens, where we met Prevost Paradol. But at this time there suddenly came over me a distaste for operas, theatres, dinners, society—in short, of crowds, gaslight, and gaiety in any form, from which I have never since quite recovered. I had for years been fearfully overdoing it all in America, and now I was in the reaction, and longed for rest. I was in that state when one could truly say that life would be tolerable but for its amusements. It is usual for most people to insist in such cases that what the sufferer needs is “excitement” and “distraction of the mind,” change of scene or gaiety, when in reality the patient should be most carefully trained to repose, which is not always easily done, for so very little attention has been
paid to this great truth, that even medical science as yet can do very little towards calming nervous disorders. In most cases the trouble lies in the presence, or unthinking heedless influence, of other people; and, secondly, in the absence of interesting minor occupations or arts, such as keep the mind busy, yet not over-excited or too deeply absorbed. An important element in such cases is to interest deeply the patient in himself as a vicious subject to be subdued by his own exertions. No one who has never had the gout severely can form any conception of the terribly arrogant irritability which accompanies it. I say arrogant, because it is independent of any voluntary action of the mind. I have often felt it raging in me, and laughed at it, as if it were a chained wild beast, and conversed with perfect serenity. Unfortunately, even our dearest friends, generally women, cannot, to save their very lives and souls, refrain from having frequent piquant scenes with such tempting subjects; while, on the other hand, the subjects are often led by mere vanity into exhibiting themselves as something peculiar. Altogether, I believe that where there is no deeply seated hereditary or congenital defect, or no displacement or injury from violence or disease, there is always a cure to be hoped for, or at least possible; but this cure depends in many cases so very much upon the wisdom and patience of friends and physicians, that it is only remarkable that we find so many recoveries as we do. Where the patient and friends are all really persons of superior intelligence, almost miraculous cures may be effected. But unfortunately, if it be not born in us, it requires a great deal of genius to acquire properly the real dolce far niente.
From Paris we went to Spa in the Ardennes. In this very beautiful place, in a picturesque land of legends, I felt calmer and more relieved. I think it was there that for the first time I got an inkling that my name was becoming known in Europe. There was a beautiful young English lady whom I occasionally met in an artist’s studio, who one day asked me with some interest whom the Leland could be
of whom one heard sometimes—“he writes books, I think.” I told her that I had a brother who had written two or three clever works, and she agreed with me that he must be the man; still she inclined to think that the name was not Henry, but Charles.
Mr. Nicolas Trübner, whom I had not seen since 1856, came with his wife and daughter to Spa, and this was the beginning of a great intimacy which lasted to his death. Which meeting reminds me of something amusing. I had written the first third of “Breitmann as a Politician,” which J. “Camden” Hotten had republished, promising the public to give them the rest before long. This I prevented by copyrighting the two remaining thirds in England! Being very angry at this, Hotten accused me in print of having written this conclusion expressly to disappoint and injure him! In fact, he really seemed to think that Mr. Trübner and I were only a pair of foreign rogues, bound together to wrong Mr. J. C. Hotten out of his higher rights in “Breitmann.” I wrote a pamphlet in which I said this and some other things very plainly. Mr. Trübner showed this to his lawyer, who was of the opinion that it could not be published because it bore on libel, though there was nothing in it worse than what I have here said. However, Mr. Trübner had it privately printed, and took great joy, solace, and comfort for a very long time in reading it to his friends after dinner, or on other occasions, and as he had many, it got pretty well about London. I may here very truly remark that Mr. Hotten, in the public controversy which he had with Mr. Trübner on the subject of my “Ballads,” displayed an effrontery absolutely without parallel in modern times, apropos of which Punch remarked—
“The name of Curll will never be forgotten,
And neither will be thine, John Camden Hotten.”
From Spa we went to Brussels, where I remember to have seen many times at work in the gallery the famous artist
without arms who painted with his toes. What was quite a remarkable was the excellence of his copies from Rembrandt. Nature succeeded in his case in “heaping voonders oopen voonders,” as Tom Hood says in his “Rhine.” I became well acquainted with Tom Hood the younger in after years, and to this day I contribute something every year to Tom Hood’s Annual. At Brussels we stayed at a charming old hotel which had galleries one above the other round the courtyard, exactly like those of the White Hart Inn immortalised in “Pickwick.” There was in Philadelphia a perfect specimen of such an inn, which has of late years been rebuilt as the Bingham House. While in Spa I studied Walloon.
From Brussels to Ghent, which I found much modernised from what it had been in 1847, when it was still exactly as in the Middle Age, but fearfully decayed, and, like Ferrara, literary with grass-grown streets. Und noch weiter—to Ostend, where for three weeks I took lessons in Flemish or Dutch from a young professor, reading “Vondel” and “Bilderdijk,” who, if not in the world of letters known, deserves to be. I had no dictionary all this time, and the teacher marvelled that I always knew the meaning of the words, which will not seem marvellous to any one who understands German and has studied Anglo-Saxon and read “Middle or Early English.” Then back to Spa to meet Mr. and Mrs. Trübner and her father Octave Delepierre, who was a great scholar in rariora, curiosa, and old French, and facile princeps the greatest expert in Macaronic poetry who ever wrote. May I here venture to mention that he always declared that my later poem of “Breitmann and the Pope” was the best Macaronic poem which he had ever read? His reason for this was that it was the most reckless and heedless or extravagant combination of Latin and modern languages known to him. I had, however, been much indebted to Mr. Oscar Browning for revising it. And so the truth, which long in darkness lay, now comes full clearly to the light of day.