(or in being pursued, which comes to the same thing); were spent by me, free from all such distractions, in study and in the performance of happy and healthful filial and housewifely duties. Destiny, too, was kind to me, likewise, by relieving me from care respecting the other great object of human anxiety,—to wit, Money. The prophet’s prayer, “Give me neither poverty nor riches” was granted to me, and I have probably needed to spend altogether fewer thoughts on £ s. d. than could happen to anyone who has either to solve the problems “How to keep the Wolf from the door” and “How to make both ends meet?” or “How, justly and conscientiously, to expend a large income?” Wealth has only come to me in my old age, and now it is easy to know how to spend it. Thus it has happened that in early womanhood and middle life I enjoyed a degree of real leisure of mind possessed by few; and to it, I think, must be chiefly attributed anything which in my doings may have worn the semblance of exceptional ability. I had good, sound working brains to start with, and much fewer hindrances than the majority of women in improving and employing them. Voilà tout.
I began by saying that I was well-born in the true sense of the words, being the child of parents morally good and physically sound. I reckon it also to have been an advantage,—though immeasurably a minor one,—to have been well-born, likewise, in the conventional sense. My ancestors, it is true, were rather like those of Sir Leicester Dedlock, “chiefly remarkable for never having done anything remarkable for so many generations.”[[3]] But they were honourable specimens of county squires; and never, during the four centuries through which I have traced them, do they seem to have been guilty of any action of which I need to be ashamed.
My mother’s father was Captain Thomas Conway, of Morden Park, representative of a branch of that family. Her only brother was Adjutant General Conway, whose name Lord Roberts has kindly informed me is still, after fifty years, an “honoured word in Madras.” My father’s progenitors were, from the fifteenth century, for many generations owners of Swarraton, now Lord Ashburton’s beautiful “Grange” in Hampshire; the scene of poor Mrs. Carlyle’s mortifications. While at Swarraton the heads of the family married, in their later generations, the daughters of Welborne of Allington; of Sir John Owen; of Sir Richard Norton of Rotherfield (whose wife was the daughter of Bishop Bilson, one of the translators of the Bible); and of James Chaloner, Governor of the Isle of Man, one of the Judges of Charles I. The wife of this last remarkable man was Ursula Fairfax, niece of Lord Fairfax.[[4]]
On one occasion only do the Cobbes of Swarraton seem to have transcended the “Dedlock” programme. Richard Cobbe was Knight of the Shire for Hants in Cromwell’s short Parliament of 1656, with Richard Cromwell for a colleague. What he did therein History saith not! The grandson of this Richard Cobbe, a younger son named Charles, went to Ireland in 1717 as Chaplain to the Duke of Bolton with whom he was connected through the Norton’s; and a few years later he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin,—a post which he held with great honour until his death in 1765. On every occasion when penal laws against Catholics were proposed in the Irish House of Lords Archbishop Cobbe contended vigorously against them, dividing the House again and again on the Bills; and his numerous letters and papers in the Irish State-Paper office (as Mr. Froude has assured me after inspection) bear high testimony to his liberality and integrity in that age of corruption. Two traditions concerning him have a certain degree of general interest. One, that John Wesley called upon him at his country house,—my old home, Newbridge;—and that the interview was perfectly friendly; Wesley approving himself and his work to the Archbishop’s mind. The other is; that when Handel came to Dublin, bringing with him the MS. of the Messiah, of which he could not succeed in obtaining the production in London, Archbishop Cobbe, then Bishop of Kildare, took lively interest in the work, and under his patronage, as well as that of several Irishmen of rank, the great Oratorio was produced in Dublin.
Good Archbishop Cobbe had not neglected the affairs of his own household. He bought considerable estates in Louth, Carlow, and Co. Dublin, and on the latter, about twelve miles north of Dublin and two miles from the pretty rocky coast of Portrane, he built his country house of Newbridge, which has ever since been the home of our family. As half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope the reader will look at the pictures of it which must be inserted in this book and think of it as it was in my youth, bright and smiling and yet dignified; bosomed among its old trees and with the green, wide-spreading park opened out before the noble granite perron of the hall door. There is another country house on the adjoining estate, Turvey, the property of Lord Trimleston, and I have often amused myself by comparing the two. Turvey is really a wicked-looking house, with half-moon windows which suggest leering eyes, and partition walls so thick that secret passages run through them; and bedrooms with tapestry and ruelles and hidden doors in the wainscot. There were there, also, when I was young, certain very objectionable pictures, beside several portraits of the “beauties” of Charles II.’s court, (to the last degree decolletées) who had been, no doubt, friends of the first master of the house, their contemporary. In the garden was a grotto with a deep cold bath in it, which, in the climate of Ireland, suggested suicide rather than ablution. Altogether the place had the same suggestiveness of “deeds of darkness” which I remember feeling profoundly when I went over Holyrood with Dr. John Brown; and it was quite natural to attach to Turvey one of the worst of the traditional Irish curses. This curse was pronounced by the Abbess of the neighbouring convent (long in ruins) of Grace-Dieu when Lord Kingsland, then lord of Turvey, had by some nefarious means induced the English Government of the day to make over the lands of the convent to himself. On announcing this intelligence in his own hall to the assembled nuns, the poor ladies took refuge very naturally in malediction, went down simultaneously on their knees, and repeated after their Abbess a denunciation of Heaven’s vengeance on the traitor. “There should never want an idiot or a lawsuit in the family; and the rightful heir should never see the smoke of the chimney.” Needless to add, lawsuits and idiots have been plentiful ever since, and, after several generations of absentees, Turvey stands in a treeless desert, and has descended in the world from lordly to humble owners.
How different was Newbridge! Built not by a dissolute courtier of Charles II., but by the sensible Whig, and eminently Protestant Archbishop, it has as open and honest a countenance as its neighbour has the reverse. The solid walls, about three feet and a-half thick in most parts, keep out the cold, but neither darken the large, lofty rooms, nor afford space for devious and secret passages. The house stands broadly-built and strong, not high or frowning; its Portland-stone colour warm against the green of Irish woods and grass. Within doors every room is airy and lightsome, and more than one is beautiful. There is a fine staircase out of the second hall, the walls of which are covered with old family pictures which the Archbishop had obtained from his elder brother, Col. Richard Chaloner Cobbe, who had somehow lost Swarraton, and whose line ended in an heiress, wife of the 11th Earl of Huntingdon. A long corridor downstairs was, I have heard, formerly hung from end to end with arms intended for defence in case of attack. When the Rebellion of 1798 took place the weapons were hidden in a hole into which I have peered, under the floor of a room off the great drawing-room, but what became of them afterwards I do not know. My father possessed only a few pairs of handsome pistols, two or three blunderbusses, sundry guns of various kinds, and his own regimental sword which he had used at Assaye. All these hung in his study. The drawing-room with its noble proportions and its fifty-three pictures by Vandyke, Ruysdael, Guercino, Vanderveldt and other old masters, was the glory of the house. In it the happiest hours of my life were passed.
Of this house and of the various estates bought and leased by the Archbishop his only surviving son, Thomas Cobbe, my great-grandfather, came into possession in the year 1765. Irreverently known to his posterity as “Old Tommy” this gentleman after the fashion of his contemporaries muddled away in keeping open house a good deal of the property, and eventually sold one estate and (what was worse) his father’s fine library. Per contra he made the remarkable collection of pictures of which I have spoken as adorning the walls of Newbridge. Pilkington, the author of the Dictionary of Painters, was incumbent of the little Vicarage of Donabate, and naturally somewhat in the relation of chaplain to the squire of Newbridge, who had the good sense to send him to Holland and Italy to buy the above-mentioned pictures, many of which are described in the Dictionary. Some time previously, when Pilkington had come out as an Art-critic, the Archbishop had remonstrated with him on his unclerical pursuit; but the poor man disarmed episcopal censure by replying, “Your Grace, I have preached for a dozen years to an old woman who can’t hear, and to a young woman who won’t hear; and now I think I may attend to other things!”
Thomas Cobbe’s wife’s name has been often before the public in connection with the story, told by Crabbe, Walter Scott and many others, of the lady who wore a black ribbon on her wrist to conceal the marks of a ghost’s fingers. The real ghost-seer in question, Lady Beresford, was confounded by many with her granddaughter Lady Eliza Beresford, or, as she was commonly called after her marriage, Lady Betty Cobbe. How the confusion came about I do not know, but Lady Betty, who was a spirited woman much renowned in the palmy days of Bath, was very indignant when asked any questions on the subject. Once she received a letter from one of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies-in-Waiting begging her to tell the Queen the true story. Lady Betty in reply “presented her compliments but was sure the Queen of England would not pry into the private affairs of her subjects, and had no intention of gratifying the impertinent curiosity of a Lady-in-Waiting!” Considerable labour was expended some years ago by the late Primate (Marcus Beresford) of Ireland, another descendant of the ghost-seer in identifying the real personages and dates of this curious tradition. The story which came to me directly through my great-aunt, Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady Betty’s favourite daughter, was, that the ghost was John Le Poer, Second Earl of Tyrone; and the ghost-seer was his cousin, Nichola Hamilton, daughter of Lord Glerawly, wife of Sir Tristram Beresford. The cousins had promised each other to appear,—whichever of them first departed this life,—to the survivor. Lady Beresford, who did not know that Lord Tyrone was dead, awoke one night and found him sitting by her bedside. He gave her (so goes the story) a short, but, under the circumstances, no doubt impressive lesson, in the elements of orthodox theology; and then to satisfy her of the reality of his presence, which she persisted in doubting, he twisted the curtains of her bed through a ring in the ceiling, placed his hand on a wardrobe and left on it the ominous mark of five burning fingers (the late Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor of Ardgillan Castle told me he had seen this wardrobe!) and finally touched her wrist, which shrunk incontinently and never recovered its natural hue. Before he vanished the Ghost told Lady Beresford that her son should marry his brother’s daughter and heiress; and that she herself should die at the birth of a child after a second marriage, in her forty-second year. All these prophecies, of course, came to pass. From the marriage of Sir Marcus Beresford with the ghost’s niece, Catharine, Baroness Le Poer of Curraghmore, has descended the whole clan of Irish Beresfords. He was created Earl of Tyrone; his eldest son was the first Marquis of Waterford; another son was Archbishop of Tuam, created Lord Decies; and his fifth daughter was the Lady Betty Cobbe, my great-grandmother, concerning whom I have told this old story. In these days of Psychological Research I could not take on myself to omit it, though my own private impression is, that Lady Beresford accidentally gave her wrist a severe blow against her bedstead while she was asleep; and that, by a law of dreaming which I have endeavoured to trace in my essay on the subject, her mind instantly created the myth of Lord Tyrone’s apparition. Allowing for a fair amount of subsequent agglomeration of incidents and wonders in the tradition, this hypothesis, I think quite meets the exigencies of the case; and in obedience to the law of Parsimony, we need not run to a preternatural explanation of the Black Ribbon on the Wrist, no doubt the actual nucleus of the tale.
I do not disbelieve in ghosts; but unfortunately I have never been able comfortably to believe in any particular ghost-story. The overwhelming argument against the veracity of the majority of such narrations is, that they contradict the great truth beautifully set forth by Southey—
“They sin who tell us Love can die!—