During Rowland Hill's prime, and until the final breakdown of his health, our house was a favourite haunt of the more intimate of his many clever friends. Scientific, medical, legal, artistic, literary, and other prominent men met, exchanged views, indulged in deep talk, bandied repartee, and told good stories at breakfast and dinner parties; the economists mustering in force, and plainly testifying by their bearing and conversation that, whatever ignorant people may say of the science they never study, its professors are often the very reverse of dismal. If Dr Southwood Smith[12] and Mr (later Sir Edwin) Chadwick's talk at times ran gruesomely on details of “intramural interment,” the former, at least, had much quaint humour, and was deservedly popular; while Dr Neil Arnott, whose chief hobbies were fabled to be those sadly prosaic things, stoves, water-beds, and ventilation, but who was actually a distinguished physician, natural philosopher, author, and traveller, was even, when long past sixty, one of the gayest and youngest of our guests: a mimic, but never an ill-natured one, a spinner of amusing yarns, and frankly idolised by the juvenile members of the family whose minds he mercifully never attempted to improve.
Charles Wentworth Dilke,[13] founder of the Athenæum newspaper, a famous journalist and influential man of letters, at whose house one met every writer, to say nothing of other men and women, worth knowing, was another charming old man, to listen to whose talk was a liberal education. Did we walk with him on Hampstead Heath, where once he had a country house, he became an animated guide-book guiltless of a dull page, telling us of older times than our own, and of dead and gone worthies who had been guests at “Wentworth House.” On this much worn, initial-carven, wooden seat used often to sit Keats listening to the nightingales, and, maybe, thinking of Fanny Brawne. At another spot the weakly-framed poet had soundly thrashed a British rough who was beating his wife. Across yonder footpath used to come from Highgate “the archangel a little damaged,” as Charles Lamb called Coleridge. At that road corner, in a previous century, were wont to gather the visitors returning from the Well Walk “pump-room,” chalybeate spring, and promenade, till they were in sufficient force to be safe from highwaymen or footpads who frequented the then lonely road to London. In a yet earlier century certain gallant Spanish gentlemen attached to Philip and Mary's court, rescued some English ladies from molestation by English ruffians; and memorials of this episode live in the still traceable circle of trees whose predecessors were planted by the grateful ladies, and in the name of the once quaint old hostelry hard by, and of the road known as the Spaniards.
Another wanderer about Hampstead's hills and dales was the great Thackeray, who was often accompanied by some of the family of Mr Crowe, a former editor of the Daily News, and father to Eyre Crowe, R.A., and Sir Joseph Archer Crowe. These wanderings seem to have suggested a few of the names bestowed by Thackeray on the characters in his novels, such as “Jack Belsize” and “Lord Highgate,” while the title of “Marquess of Steyne” is reminiscent of another Thackerayan haunt—“Dr” Brighton. Hampstead still better knew Dickens, who is mentioned later in these pages. The two writers are often called rivals; yet novels and men were wholly unlike. Each was a peerless genius in his own line, and each adorned any company in which he moved. Yet, while Dickens was the life and soul of every circle, Thackeray—perhaps the only male novelist who could draw a woman absolutely true to life[14]—always struck us as rather silent and self-absorbed, like one who is studying the people around him with a view to their reproduction in as yet unwritten pages. His six feet of height and proportionate breadth, his wealth of grey hair, and the spectacles he was said never to be seen without, made of him a notable figure everywhere. Yet, however outwardly awe-inspiring, he was the kindliest of satirists, the truest of friends, and has been fitly described as “the man who had the heart of a woman.”[15] At the Athenæum Club he was often seen writing by the hour together in some quiet corner, evidently unconscious of his surroundings, at times enjoying a voiceless laugh, or again, perhaps when telling of Colonel Newcome's death, with “a moisture upon his cheek which was not dew.”
Another literary friend—we had many—was William Henry Wills, also mentioned later: a kind friend to struggling authors, who did not a little to start Miss Mulock on her career as authoress, and who made her known to us. He once told us a curious story about an old uncle with whom as a lad he used to stay in the days before the invasion of the west country by railways with their tendency to modernisation of out-of-the-way places. This ancient man lived in a large ancestral mansion, and literally “dined in hall” with his entire household. There was a sanded floor—formerly, no doubt, rush-strewn—and the family and their “retainers” sat down together at a very long table to the midday repast, the servants taking their place literally “below the salt,” which was represented by a large bowl filled with that necessary concomitant. In how many other country houses did this mediæval custom last into the first third of the nineteenth century?[16] Mrs Wills—only sister to the Chambers brothers, William and Robert, who, together with our other publisher friend, Charles Knight, did so much to cheapen the cost and in every way to raise the tone of literature—was, in addition to possessing great charm of manner, an admirable amateur actress, and an unrivalled singer of Scottish songs.
Hampstead, midway in the nineteenth century, was still a picturesque little town, possessed of several stately old houses—one known as Sir Harry Vane's—whose gardens were in some cases entered through tall, wide, iron gates of elaborate design which now would be accounted priceless. It was still the resort of artists, many of whom visited the pleasant house of Edwin Wilkins Field, conspicuous among the public-spirited men who rescued from the builder-fiend the Heath, and made of it a London “lung” and a joy for ever; himself a lawyer, the inspirer of the Limited Liability Act, and an accomplished amateur water-colour painter. His first wife was a niece of Rogers, the banker-poet, famous for his breakfast parties and table talk. At Mr Field's house we came first to know Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., the famous sea-scape painter, and his family, who were musical as well as artistic, and gave delightful parties. It was said that Stanfield was familiar with the build and rig of a ship down to its minutest detail, because he and his lifelong friend and fellow Royal Academician, David Roberts, ran away from school together to sea at a time when life on the ocean wave seemed to most boys the ideal existence. To the last, Stanfield looked like an old sea-dog, and was bluff, hearty and genial. Hampstead still remembers him with pride; and “Stanfield House,” wherein the first really good local Free Library was sheltered, is so called because for nearly twenty years it was his dwelling.
At the Fields' house, among other celebrities, artistic, literary and legal, we also met Turner; and it was to “Squire's Mount,” and at a crowded evening party there that a characteristic anecdote of this eccentric, gifted painter belongs. The taciturn, gloomy-looking guest had taken an early farewell of host and hostess, and disappeared, only to return some minutes later, wonderfully and fearfully apparelled, and silently commence a search about the drawing-room. Suddenly he seemed to recollect, approached a sofa on which sat three handsomely-attired ladies, whose indignant countenances were a sight for gods and men when the abruptly-mannered artist called on them to rise. He then half dived beneath the seat, drew forth a dreadfully shabby umbrella of the “Gamp” species, and, taking no more notice of the irate three than if they had been so many chairs, withdrew—this time for good. Turner had a hearty contempt for the Claude worship, and was resolved to expose its hollowness. He bequeathed to the nation two of his finest oil paintings on condition that they were placed in the Trafalgar Square Gallery beside two of Claude's which already hung there, and to this day act as foils. A custodian of the Gallery once told me that he was present when Turner visited the room in which were the two Claudes, took a foot-rule from his pocket and measured their frames, doubtless in order that his own should be of like dimensions.
Other artists whom we knew were Mulready, Cooke—as famous for his splendid collection of old Venetian glass as for his pictures—Creswick and Elmore; but much as Rowland Hill loved art, the men of science, such as Airy, the Astronomer Royal; Smyth, the “Astronomical Admiral”; Wheatstone, Lyell; Graham, the Master of the Mint; Sabine, the Herschels, and others were to him the most congenial company. After them were counted in his regard the medical men, philosophers and economists, such as Harley, Coulson, Fergusson, the Clarkes, Sir Henry Thompson—the last to die of his old friends—and Bentham, Robert Owen, James and John Stuart Mill—these last four being among the earliest great men he knew, and counting in some ways as his mentors.
Of his literary friends no two held a higher place in his esteem than Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau. Of the latter and of her able, untiring help in promoting the cause of Penny Postage, mention will appear later. The former, my father, and his brother Arthur, as young men, visited at her Irish home, making the pilgrimage thither which Scott and many other literary adorers had made or were destined to make, one of the most interesting being that of Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, of which she tells us in her editorial preface to a recent edition of “Castle Rackrent.” The two brothers had looked forward to meet a charming woman, but she exceeded their expectations, and the visit remained in the memory of both as a red-letter day.[17]
Among literary men, besides those already mentioned, or to be named later, were Leigh Hunt, De Quincey—who when under the influence of opium did the strangest things, being one day discovered by my father and a friend hiding in some East End slum under the wholly erroneous impression that “enemies” were seeking to molest him—Sir John Bowring, Dr Roget, author of “The Thesaurus,” and the Kinglakes. “Eothen,” as the writer of that once famous book of travels and of “The Invasion of the Crimea,” was habitually called by his friends, was a delightful talker; and his brother, the doctor, was equally gifted, if less fluent, while his sister was declared by Thackeray to be the cleverest woman he ever met.