A merry party, of whom Mr. Gibson was usually one, used to meet frequently that winter at the hospitable table of Charlotte Cushman, the actress. She had, then, long retired from the stage, and had a handsome house in the via Gregoriana, in which also lived her friend Miss Stebbins and Miss Hosmer. Our dinners of American oysters and wild boar with agro-dolce-sauce, and déjeuners including an awful refection menacing sudden death, called “Woffles,” eaten with molasses (of which woffles I have seen five plates divided between four American ladies!) were extremely hilarious. There was a brightness, freedom and joyousness among these gifted Americans, which was quite delightful to me. Miss Cushman in particular I greatly admired and respected. She had, of course, like all actors, the acquired habit of giving vivid outward expression to every emotion, just as we quiet English ladies are taught from our cradles to repress such signs, and to cultivate a calm demeanour under all emergencies. But this vivacity rendered her all the more interesting. She often read to us Mrs. Browning’s or Lowell’s poetry in a very fine way indeed. Some years after this happy winter a certain celebrated London surgeon pronounced her to be dying of a terrible disease. She wished us farewell courageously, and went back to New England, as we all sadly thought to die there. The next thing we heard of Charlotte Cushman was, that she had returned to the stage and was acting Meg Merrilies to immense and delighted audiences! Next we heard that she had thus earned £5,000, and that she was building a house with her earnings. Finally we learned that the house was finished, and that she was living in it! She did so, and enjoyed it for some years before the end came from other causes than the one threatened by the great London surgeon.

One day when I had been lunching at her house, Miss Cushman asked whether I would drive with her in her brougham to call on a friend of Mrs. Somerville, who had particularly desired that she and I should meet,—a Welsh lady, Miss Lloyd, of Hengwrt? I was, of course, very willing indeed to meet a friend of Mrs. Somerville. We happily found Miss Lloyd, busy in her sculptor’s studio over a model of her Arab horse, and, on hearing that I was anxious to ride, she kindly offered to mount me if I would join her in her rides on the Campagna. Then began an acquaintance, which was further improved two years later when Miss Lloyd came to meet and help me when I was a cripple, at Aix-les-Bains; and from that time, now more than thirty years ago, she and I have lived together. Of a friendship like this, which has been to my later life what my mother’s affection was to my youth, I shall not be expected to say more.

On my way home through France to Bristol from one of my earlier journeys and before I became crippled, I had the pleasure of making for the first time the acquaintance of Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur. Miss Lloyd, who knew her very intimately and had worked in her studio, gave me an introduction to her and I reported my visit in a letter to Miss Lloyd in Rome.

“Mdlle Bonheur received me most cordially when I sent up your note. She was working in that most picturesque studio (at By, near Thoméry). I had fancied from her picture that she was so much taller and larger that I hardly supposed that it was she who greeted me, but her face is charming; such fine, clear eyes looking straight into one’s own, and frank bearing; an Englishwoman’s honesty with a Frenchwoman’s courtesy. She spoke of you with great warmth of regard; remembered everything you had said, and wanted to know all about your sculpture studies in Rome. I said it had encouraged me to intrude on her to hope I might persuade her to fulfil her promise of stopping with you next winter, and added how very much you wished it, and described the association she would have with you, sketching excursions, bovi, and Thalaba” (Miss Lloyd’s Arab horse). “She said over and over she would not go to Italy without going to see you; and that she hoped to go soon, possibly next winter.... Somehow, from talking of Italy we passed to talking of the North, which Mdlle. Bonheur thinks has a deeper poetry than the South, and then to Ireland, where she wishes to go next summer (I hope stopping at my brother’s en passant) and of which country she said such beautiful, dreamy things that even I grew poetic about our ‘Brumes,’—to which she quickly applied the epithet ‘grandiose,’—and our sea, looking, I said, like an angel’s eye with a tear in it. At this simile she was so pleased that we grew quite friends, and I can only hope she will not see that sea on a grey day and think me an impostor! Nothing I liked about her, so much, however, as her interest in Hattie Hosmer, and her delight in hearing about her Zenobia[[20]] (triumphans) in the Exhibition; at which report of mine she exclaimed: ‘That is the thing above all others I shall wish to see in London! You know I have seen Miss Hosmer, but I have never seen any of her works, and I do very much desire to do so’.... Her one-eyed friend sat by painting all the time. She is not enticing to look at, but I dare say, not bad. I said I always envied friends whom I caught working together and that I lived alone; to which she replied ‘Je vous plains alors!’ in a tone of conviction, showing that, in her case at all events, friendship was a very pleasant thing. Mdlle. Bonheur showed me three or four fine pictures she is painting, and some prints, but of course I was as stupid as usual in studios and only remarked (as a buffalo might have done,) that Roman bovi were more majestic and like Homeric Junos than those wiry little Scotch short-horns her soul delighteth to honour. But O! she has done a Dog, such a dog! Like Bush in outward dog, but the inner soul of him more profoundly, unutterably wise than tongue may tell! a Dog to be set up and worshipped as Anubis. Certainly Mdlle. Bonheur is a finer artist than Landseer in this, his own line. I wish she would leave the cattle and ‘go to the dogs.’”

My last journey but one to Italy was taken when I was lame; and, after my sojourn at Aix-les-Bains, I spent the autumn in Florence and the winter in Pisa; where I met Cav. d’ Azeglio as above recorded. Miss Lloyd rejoined me at Genoa in the spring to help me to return to England, as I was still (after four years!) miserably helpless. We returned over Mont Cenis which had no tunnel through it in those days; and, on the very summit, our carriage broke down. We were in a sad dilemma, for I was quite unable to walk a hundred yards; but a train of carts happily coming up and lending us ropes enough to hold our trap together for my use alone, Miss Lloyd ran down the mountain, and at last we found ourselves safe at the bottom.

After another very pleasant visit together to her friend Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur, and many promises on her part to come to us in England (which, alas! she never fulfilled) we made our way to London; and, within a few weeks, Miss Lloyd—one morning before breakfast,—found, and, in an incredibly short time, bought the dear little house in South Kensington which became our home with few interruptions for a quarter of a century; No. 26, Hereford Square. It was at that time almost at the end of London. All up the Gloucester Road between it and the Park were market-gardens; and behind it and alongside of it, where Rosary Gardens and Wetherby Place now stand, there were large fields of grass with abundance of fine old lime trees and elms, and one magnificent walnut tree which ought never to have been cut down. Behind us we had a large piece of ground, which we rented temporarily and called the “Boundless Prairie,” (!) where we gave afternoon tea to our friends under the limes, when they were in bloom. On a part of our garden Miss Lloyd erected a sculptor’s Studio. The House itself, though small, was very pretty and airy; every room in it lightsome and pleasant, and somehow capable of containing a good many people. We often had in it as many as 50 or 60 guests. In short, I had once more a home, and a most happy one; and my lonely wanderings were over.

CHAPTER
XV.
LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES.
LITERARY LIFE.

For some time before I took up my abode in London I had been writing busily for the press. When my active work at Bristol came to an end and I became for four years a cripple, I naturally turned to use my pen, and, finding from my happy experience of Workhouse Sketches in Macmillan’s Magazine that I could make money without much difficulty, I soon obtained almost as many openings as I could profit by to add to my income. I wrote a series of articles for Fraser’s Magazine, then edited by Mr. Froude, who had been my brother’s friend at Oxford, and who from that time I had the high privilege to count as mine also. These first papers were sketches of Rome, Cairo, Athens, Jerusalem, etc.; and they were eventually reprinted in a rather successful little volume called Cities of the Past, now long out of print. I also wrote many papers connected with women’s affairs and claims, in both Macmillan and Fraser; and these likewise were reprinted in a volume; Pursuits of Women. Beside writing these longer articles, I acted as “Own Correspondent” to the Daily News in Rome one year, and in Florence another, and sent a great many articles to the Spectator, Economist, Reader, &c. In short I turned out (as a painter would say) a great many Pot-Boilers. These, with my small patrimony, enabled me to bear the expense of travelling and of keeping a maid; a luxury which had become indispensable.

I also at this time edited, as I have mentioned, for Messrs. Trübner, the 12 vols. of Parker’s Works, with a Preface. The arrangement of the great mass of miscellaneous papers was very laborious and perplexing, but I think I marshalled the volumes fairly well. I did not perform as fully as I ought to have done my editorial duty of correcting for the press; indeed I did not understand that it fell to my share, or I must have declined to undertake the task. Mr. Trübner paid me £50 for this editing, which I had proposed to do gratuitously.

I had much at heart,—from the time I gave up my practical work among the poor folk at Bristol,—to write again on religious matters, and to help so far as might be possible for me to clear a way through the maze of new controversies which, in those days of Essays and Reviews, Colenso’s Pentateuch and Renan’s Vie de Jésus, were remarkably lively and wide-spread through all classes of society. With this hope, and while spending a summer in my crippled condition at Aix-les-Bains, and on the Diablerêts, I wrote to Harriet St. Leger:—