We made soon after a visit to the Rev. Dean and Mrs. Carrington, in Bocking, Essex. They had a fair daughter, Eva, then quite a girl, who has since become well known as a writer, and is now the Countess Cesaresco Martinengro—an Italian name, and not Romany-Gypsy, as its terminations would seem to indicate. There is in the village of Bocking, at a corner, a curious and very large grotesque figure of oak, which was evidently in the time of Elizabeth a pilaster in some house-front. My friend Edwards, who was wont to roam all over England in a mule-waggon etching and sketching, when in Bocking was informed by a rustic that this figure was the image of Harkilés (Hercules), a heathen god formerly worshipped in the old Catholic convent upon the hill, in the old times!
From London we went in August, 1870, to Brighton, staying
at first at the Albion Hotel. There, under the influence of fresh sea-air, long walks and drives in all the country round, I began to feel better, yet it was not for many weeks that I fairly recovered. A chemist named Phillips, who supplied me with bromide of potass, suggested to me, to his own loss, that I took a great deal too much. I left it off altogether, substituting pale ale. Finding this far better, I asked Mr. Phillips if he could not prepare for me lupulin, or the anodyne of hops. He laughed, and said, “Do you find the result required in ale?” I answered, “Yes.” “And do you like ale?” “Yes.” “Then,” he answered, “why don’t you drink ale?” And I did, but before I took it up my very vitality seemed to be well-nigh exhausted with the bromide.
Samuel Laing, M.P., the chairman of the Brighton Railway, had at that time a house in Brighton, with several sons and daughters, the latter of whom have all been very remarkable for beauty and accomplishments. In this home there was a hospitality so profuse, so kind, so brilliant and refined, that I cannot really remember to have ever seen it equalled, and as we fully participated in it at all times in every form, I should feel that I had omitted the deepest claim to my gratitude if I did not here acknowledge it. Mr. Laing was or is of a stock which deeply appealed to my sympathies, for he is the son of the famous translator of the Heimskringla, a great collection of Norse sagas, which I had read, and in which he himself somewhat aided. Of late years, since he has retired from more active financial business, Mr. Laing has not merely turned his attention to literature; he has deservedly distinguished himself by translating, as I may say, into the clearest and most condensed or succinct and lucid English ever written, so as to be understood by the humblest mind, the doctrines of Darwin, Huxley, and the other leading scientific minds of the day. Heine in his time received a great deal of credit for having thus acted as the flux and furnace by which the ore of German philosophy was
smelted into pure gold for general circulation; but I, who have translated all that Heine wrote on this subject, declare that he was at such work as far inferior to Samuel Laing as a mere verbal description of a beautiful face is inferior to a first-class portrait. This family enters so largely into my reminiscences and experiences, that a chapter would hardly suffice to express all that I can recall of their hospitality for years, of the dinners, hunts, balls, excursions, and the many distinguished people whom I have met under their roof. It is worth noting of Mr. Laing’s daughters, that Mary, now Mrs. Kennard, is at the head of the sporting-novel writers; that the beautiful Cecilia, now Mrs. MacRae, was pronounced by G. H. Lewes, who was no mean judge, to be the first amateur pianiste in England; while the charming “Floy,” or Mrs. Kennedy, is a very able painter. With their two very pretty sisters, they formed in 1870 as brilliant, beautiful, and accomplished a quintette as England could have produced.
One day Mr. Laing organised an excursion with a special train to Arundel Castle. By myself at other times I found my way to Lewes and other places rich in legendary lore. Of this latter I recall something worth telling. Harold, the conquered Saxon king, had a son, and the conqueror William had a daughter, Gundrada. The former became a Viking pirate, and in his old age a monk, and was buried in a church, now a Presbyterian chapel. There his epitaph may be read in fine bold lettering, still distinct. That man is dear to me.
Gundrada married, died, and was buried in a church with a fine Norman tombstone over her remains. The church was levelled with the ground, but the slab was preserved here and there about Lewes as a relic. When the railway was built, about 1849, there was discovered, where the church had been, the bones of Gundrada and her husband in leaden coffins distinctly inscribed with their names. A very beautiful Norman chapel was then built to receive the
coffins, and over them is placed the original memorial in black marble. There is also in Lewes an archæological museum appropriately bestowed in an old Gothic tower. All of which things did greatly solace me. As did also the Norman or Gothic churches of Shoreham, Newport, the old manor of Rottingdean, and the marvellous Devil’s Dyke, which was probably a Roman fort, and from which it is said that fifty towns or villages may be seen “far in the blue.”
One day I went with my wife and two ladies to visit the latter. The living curiosity of the place was a famous old gypsy woman named Gentilla Cooper, a pure blood or real Kalorat Romany. I had already in America studied Pott’s “Thesaurus of Gypsy Dialects,” and picked up many phrases of the tongue from the works of Borrow, Simson, and others. The old dame tackled us at once. As soon as I could, I whispered in her ear an improvised rhyme:—
“The bashno and kāni,
The rye and the rāni,
Hav’d akai ’pré o boro lon pāni.”