“Your faithful servant,
“Stephen Coleridge.”
(Honorary Secretary and Treasurer to the fund.)
In a short space of time, I was told, a thousand pounds was collected; and it was kindly and thoughtfully expended in buying me an annuity of £100 a year. The amount of labour and trouble which all these arrangements must have cost Mr. Stephen Coleridge must have been very great indeed, and only most genuine kindness of heart and regard for me could have induced him to undertake them. I was very much startled when I heard of this gift and very unwilling to accept it, as in some degree taking away the pleasurable sense I had had of working all along gratuitously for the poor beasts, and of having sacrificed for some years nearly all my literary earnings to devote myself to their cause. My objections were over-ruled by friendly insistence, and Lord Shaftesbury presented the Testimonial to me in the following letter:—
“24, Grosvenor Square, W.,
“February 26th, 1885.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“The Committee of the Anti-vivisection Society, and other contributors, have assigned to me the agreeable duty of requesting you to do them the kindness and the honour, to accept the accompanying Testimonial.
“It expresses, I can assure you, their deep and real sense of the vast services you have rendered to the world, by the devotion of your time, your talents and indefatigable zeal, to the assertion of principles which, though primarily brought into action for the benefit and protection of the inferior orders of the Creation, are of paramount importance to the honour and security of the whole Human Race.
“We heartily pray that you may enjoy all health and happiness in your retirement, which, we trust, will be but temporary. We shall frequently ask the aid of your counsels and live in hope of your speedy return to active exertion, in the career in which you have laboured so vigorously, and which you so sincerely love.