“I remain, dear Sir,
“Yours truly,
“Mary Carlyle Aitken.”
Mr. Carlyle supported our Anti-vivisection Society from the outset, for which I was very grateful to him; but having promised to join our first important deputation to the Home Office, to urge the Government to bring in a Bill in accordance with the recommendations of the Royal Commission, he failed at the last moment to put in an appearance, having learned that Cardinal Manning was to be also present. I was told that he said he would not appear in public with the Cardinal, who was, he thought, “the chief emissary of Beelzebub in England!” When this was repeated to me, my remark was:—“Infidels is riz! Time was, when Cardinals would not appear in public with infidels!”
Nothing has surprised me more in reading the memoirs and letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle than the small interest either of them seems to have felt in the great subjects which formed the life-work of their many illustrious visitors. While humbler folk who touched the same circles were vehemently attracted, or else repelled, by the political, philosophical and theological theories and labours of such men as Mazzini, Mill, Colenso, Jowett, Martineau and Darwin, and every conversation and almost every letter contained new facts, or animated discussions regarding them, the Carlyles received visits from these great men continually, with (it would seem) little or no interest in their aims or views one way or the other, in approval or disapproval; and wrote and talked much more seriously about the delinquencies of their own maidservants, and the great and never-to-be-sufficiently-appealed-against cock and hen nuisance.
I had known Cardinal Manning in Rome about 1861 or 1863 when he was “Monsignor Manning,” and went a little into English society, resplendent in a beautiful violet robe. He was very busy in those days making converts among English young ladies, and one with whom we were acquainted, the daughter of a celebrated authoress, fell into his net. He had, at all times, a gentle way of ridiculing English doings and prejudices which was no doubt telling. One of the stories he told me was of an Italian sacristan asking him “what was the Red Prayer Book which all the English tourists carried about and read so devoutly in the churches?” (of course Murray’s Hand-books).[[25]]
A few years afterwards when he had returned to England as Archbishop of Westminster, I met him pretty frequently at Miss Stanley’s house in Grosvenor Crescent. He there attacked me cheerfully one evening: “Miss Cobbe I have found out something against you. I have discovered that Voltaire was part-owner of a Slave-ship!”
“I beg you to believe,” said I, “that I have no responsibility whatever respecting Voltaire! But I would ask your Grace, whether it be not true that Las Casas, the saintly Dominican, founded Negro Slavery in America?” A Church of England friend coming up and laughing, I discharged a second barrel: “And was not the Protestant Saint, Newton of Olney,—much worse than all,—the Captain of a Slave-ship?”[[26]]
One evening at this pleasant house I was standing on the rug in one of the rooms talking to Mr. Matthew Arnold and two or three other acquaintances of the same set. The Archbishop, on entering shook hands with each of us, and we were all talking in the usual easy, sub-humorous, London way when a tall military-looking man, a Major G., came in, and seeing Manning, walked straight up to him, went down on one knee and kissed his ring! A bomb falling amongst us would scarcely have been more startling; and Manning, Englishman as he was to the backbone under his fine Roman feathers, was obviously disconcerted, though dignified as ever.
In a letter to a friend dated Feb. 19th, 1867, I find I said: