Mr. Alexander was the father of the young Alexander who was my school-fellow at Doncaster, and I am hardly exaggerating his affection for me when I say that he had a paternal feeling towards myself. He put his library entirely at my disposal, and gave me a room in his house at Heath Field, near Halifax, whenever I felt inclined to avail myself of it, and had liberty to go there.
His library had cost him several thousand pounds, and was rich in archaeological books. Mrs. Alexander was a charming lady, always exquisitely gentle in her way, and gifted with a quiet firmness which enabled her to match very effectually the somewhat irascible disposition of my friend, who had the irritability as well as the kindness of heart which, I have since observed, are often found together in Frenchmen. With all his goodness he was by no means an indulgent judge; he could not endure the slightest failure or forgetfulness in good manners, and most of his young relations were afraid of him. I only offended him once, and that but slightly. He was walking in his own garden with my uncle, when I had to do something that required the use of both hands, and I was encumbered with a book. I dared not lay the book on the ground, as I should have done if it had been my own, so I asked my uncle to hold it. I could see an expression on Mr. Alexander's face which said clearly enough that I had taken a liberty in requesting this little service from a senior, and it only occurred to me as an afterthought that I might have put my hat on the ground and laid the book on the hat. This little incident shows one side of my dear friend's nature, but it was not at all a bad thing for me to be occasionally under the influence of one who was at the same time kind and severe. In early life he had been a dandy, and a local poet had called him,—
"Elegant Extracts, the Halifax fop."
[Footnote: "Elegant Extracts" was the title of a book of miscellaneous reading which had an extensive sale in those days. The couplet related to a public ball,—
"Elegant Extracts, the Halifax fop,
With note-book in hand, took coach for the hop."
Mr. Alexander sometimes alluded in a pleasant way to his early foppishness, and told some amusing anecdotes, one of which I remember. He and a young friend having adopted some startling new fashion before anybody else in Halifax, were going to church very proud of themselves, when they heard a girl laughing at them, on which her companion rebuked her, saying, "You shouldn't laugh; you might be struck so!" She thought the dandies were two misshapen idiots.]
In his maturity all that remained of early dandyism was an intolerance of every kind of slovenliness. He rigorously exacted order in his library; I might use any of his books, but must put them all back in their places. Perhaps my present strong love of order may be due in a great measure to Mr. Alexander's teaching and example. Amongst the friends of my youth there are very few whom I look back to with such grateful affection.
Like most boys who have become authors, I made attempts in literary composition independently of those which were directly encouraged by my master. In this way I wrote a number of articles that were accepted by the "Historic Times," a London illustrated journal of those days which was started under the patronage of the Church of England, but had not a great success. My first articles were on the Universities, of which I knew nothing except by hearsay, and on "Civilization, Ancient and Modern," which was rather a vast subject for a boy whose reading had been so limited. However, the editor of the "Historic Times" had not the least suspicion of my age, so I favored him with a long series of articles on Rome in 1849, forming altogether as complete a history of the city for that year as could have been written by one who had never seen it, who did not know Italian, and who had not access to any other sources of information than those which are accessible to everybody in the newspapers.
Under these circumstances, it may seem absurd to have undertaken such a task, but the reader may be reminded that learned historians undertake to tell us what happened long ago from much less ample material. I got no money for these articles (there were twelve of them), and no publisher would reprint them because there was no personal observation in them which publishers always expect in a narrative of contemporary events. The work had, however, been a good exercise for me in the digesting and setting in literary order of a mass of confused material.
My passion for heraldry and hawking led to the production of a little book on heraldry which was an imitation of Sir John Sebright's "Observations on Hawking," a treatise that seemed to me simple, and clearly arranged.