Take those ten names only, and you say, as a lady once said to me, “Any one of them would make the fortune of a reception.” But Mr. Bowker’s next ten do not pale in comparison:—
F.W. Robinson, George Macdonald, George Meredith, W.E. Norris, Mrs. Ritchie (Anne Thackeray), Mrs. Oliphant, Amelia Blandford Edwards, Mrs. Elizabeth Lynn Linton, Miss Yonge, and Mrs. Macquoid. Observe, these twenty are only some of the novelists.
Among other men and women of letters, there are Tennyson, Browning, Hughes, Bailey, both Morrises, Domett, Taylor, Mallock, Kinglake, our dear old Martin Tupper, Stephen, Walter H. Pater, Addington Symonds, Swinburne, Buchanan, the Rossettis, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith, Matthew Arnold, Austin Dobson, Alfred Austin, Coventry Patmore, Gerald Massey, Max Müller, Spencer, Tyndall and Huxley, Lubbock, and the two Cardinals, Manning and Newman. Other clergyman are Farrar, Haweis, and Spurgeon. Besides these, among men who have done more than write books, there are, in Mr. Bowker’s lists, Froude, McCarthy, and Lecky to represent history, and Dr. Smith, king of dictionaries. Smiles, the self-help man, Colvin, and Hamilton are others.
THOMAS HUGHES
I think I may say that Lowell knew personally all the more distinguished of the persons in these very interesting groups before he left London. He formed some very tender friendships among them, and in the collection of his letters none are more affectionate, none are more entertaining, than are those to his English friends. Besides those named in the lists above there are ladies,—Mrs. Stephen, the Misses Lawrence, Mrs. Clifford; and Gordon, Du Maurier, Lord Dufferin, are mentioned as people with whom he was in pleasant relations. Lady Lyttelton was a most intimate friend of Mr. and Mrs. Lowell.
Among other intimate friends, Judge Hughes and Mrs. Hughes. Dr. Hughes, as every one knows, had been a guest at Elmwood, and Mr. Lowell during his residence as our minister in England, and in his visits there afterwards, would have thought a summer wasted indeed if he had not received the welcome of these dear friends.
With the election of Mr. Cleveland in the autumn of 1884 Lowell knew that his stay in England would come to a close. For ten or fifteen years, indeed, he had been in public antagonism to Mr. Blaine, and he would never have served under him as President in the English legation. More than this, however, Mrs. Lowell died in the spring of 1885, unexpectedly, of course, for death is always unexpected. “We had taken it for granted together that she would outlive me, and that would have been best.” How many a man and woman have had to say something like that!
She had been an invalid, with critical ups and downs. But her unfailing sympathy for him and his work had never yielded, and those who remember him in the closest intimacies of London life always speak of her with tenderness. She was almost always shut up at home, and he was everywhere, among people of all sorts and conditions. But the very difference of their lives when they were parted seemed to make their companionship more tender when they were at home.
Of his departure from England, his cousin, Mr. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, says, with truth:—