"My Lord, I need not say how deeply I feel the kindness that prompted the proceeding which has led to this meeting. If anything could increase the intensity of that feeling, it would be the words in which you have given expression to your sentiments in this matter, and to those of the rest of the subscribers to this recognition.
"The labourers in the work of sanitary reform have been many; and it is by the united efforts of some of the most enlightened, disinterested, and learned men that shed lustre on this century, that this great work has been placed in its present position.
"That such names as those which grace this Tablet[[25]] should have united to express their sense of the value of any part which I may have taken in this work, will ever be to me a source, I do not say of happiness only, but of that rare and pure happiness which results not alone from the inward consciousness of devotion to duty through encouragement and discouragement, through evil and through good report, but also from the knowledge that such judges of the matter justify that consciousness, and in my own individual case have so placed their judgment on record, that it may be present to me to the latest day of my life and to my children and my children's children.
"I will only add that the honourable names on this Record give me this further delight, that they are to me a pledge that Sanitary Improvement will go on. They thus bear their testimony to their sense of its importance, and they, from their position and character, can ensure its progress. The first labourers in this work may not be permitted to complete it,—they seldom are in any great work; but, whoever may have the satisfaction of completing it, that work—whatever obstacles may retard, whatever short-sighted and short-lived interests may oppose it, however it may seem for a while not to advance—that work will be done; and the time will come when not only the professional man and the educator, but the legislator, the statesman, the general, the minister of religion—in a word, every one to whom is entrusted the care, the guidance, and the control of numbers, will feel ashamed to be ignorant, and indeed will be accounted unfit for his office if he be ignorant, of the laws of human health and life."
Yes! That his work had lived and would live, this was what he cared for. This it was that kept him uniformly brave and bright, and made him say to me one evening in tones of grateful joy—we were sitting on the wide balcony watching the moon rise over the fir-tree tops, his hand in mine as of old,—
"I have indeed succeeded! I have lived to see seven millions of the public money expended on this great cause. If any one had told me, when I began, that this would be, I should have considered it absolutely incredible."
CHAPTER X.
THE SUNSET OF LIFE—ITALY, 1861.
My grandfather had travelled abroad but little during his strenuous life. He had, it is true, been to Paris in 1850, accompanied by Mr Charles Macaulay, Dr John Sutherland, and Mr (afterwards Sir Henry) Rawlinson, on business connected with the General Board of Health scheme for extra-mural sepulture, but, except on that occasion, he had not left England.
So that when in 1857 he was asked to join a party of three proceeding to Milan for the purpose of examining the irrigation works of that city, he gladly undertook the journey, which was to lead them viâ Marseilles and along the Cornice Road, then traversed by carriage only. The beauty of Italy thus came before him with full freshness at the age of seventy, and he returned strengthened and invigorated.