As an instance of his thoughtfulness, I may mention that having one day just received a ticket for the Private View of the Academy, he offered it to me and I accepted it gladly, observing that since the recent death of Boxall I feared we should not have one given to us, and that my friend would be pleased to use it. “O, I am so glad!” said Lord Shaftesbury; and from that day every year till he died he never once failed to send her, addressed by himself, his tickets for each of the two annual exhibitions. When one thinks of how men who do not do in a year as much as he did in a week, would have scoffed at the idea of taking such trouble, one may estimate the good nature which prompted this over-worked man to remember such a trifle, unfailingly.
The most touching interview I ever had with him, was one of the last, in his study in Grosvenor Square, not long before his death. Our conversation had fallen on the woes and wrongs of seduced girls and ruined women; and he told me many facts which he had learned by personal investigation and visits to dreadful haunts in London. He described all he saw and heard with a compassion for the victims and yet a horror of vice and impurity, which somehow made me think of Christ and the Woman taken in adultery. After a few moments’ silence, during which we were both rather overcome, he said, “When I feel age creeping on me, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong to say it, but I cannot bear to leave the world with all the misery in it.” No words can describe how this simple expression revealed to me the man, in his inmost spirit. He had long passed the stage of moral effort which does good as a duty, and had ascended to that wherein even the enjoyment of Heaven itself, (which of course, his creed taught him to expect immediately after death) had less attractions for him than the labour of mitigating the sorrows of earth.
I possess 280 letters and notes from Lord Shaftesbury written to me during the ten years which elapsed from 1875, when I first saw him, till his last illness in 1885. Many of them are merely brief notes, giving me information or advice about my work as Hon. Sec. of the Victoria Street Society, of which he was President. But many are long and interesting letters. The editor of his excellent Biography probably did not know I possessed these letters, nor did I know he was preparing Lord Shaftesbury’s Life or I should have placed them at his disposal. I can only here quote a few as characteristic, or otherwise specially interesting to me.
“Castle Wemyss, Wemyss Bay, N.B.,
“September 3rd, 1878.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Your letter is very cheering. We were right to make the experiment. We were right to test the man and the law: Cross, and his administration of it. Both have failed us, and we are bound in duty, I think, to leap over all limitations, and go in for the total abolition of this vile and cruel form of Idolatry; for idolatry it is, and, like all idolatry, brutal, degrading, and deceptive....
“May God prosper us! These ill-used and tortured animals are as much His Creatures as we are, and to say the truth, I had, in some instances, rather be the animal tortured than the man who tortured it. I should believe myself to have higher hopes, and a happier future.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”