my book, briefly, as somewhat gloomy—it had not become the fashion then to expose the sores of City life—sneeringly observed that it would be interesting if I would state what were the portions of the Gospels given away by Mr. John Morley, evidently ignorant that there could be any John Morley besides the one he knew. I do not for a moment suppose that the reviewer had any personal pique towards myself. His blunder was simply one of ignorance. In another case it seemed to me that the reviewer of a critical journal which had no circulation had simply made his review a ground of attack against a weekly paper of far greater circulation and authority than his own. I had published a little sketch of travel in Canada. The review of it was long and wearisome. I could not understand it till I read in the closing sentence that there was no reason why the book should have been reprinted from the obscure journal in which it originally appeared—that obscure journal at the time being, as it is to this day, one of the most successful of all our weeklies. In his case the motif of the ill-natured criticism was very obvious.
In some cases one can only impute a review of an unfavourable character to what the Americans call “pure cussedness.” For instance, I had written a book called “British Senators,” of which The Pall Mall Gazette had spoken in the highest terms. It fell into the hands of the
Saturday reviewer when The Saturday Review was in its palmy days, always piquant and never dull. It was a fine opportunity for the reviewer, and he wielded his tomahawk with all the vigour of the Red Indian. I was an unknown man with no friends. It was a grand opportunity, though he was kind enough to admit that I was a literary gent of the Sala and Edmund Yates type (it was the time when George Augustus Sala was at the bottom—the Saturday took to praising him when he had won his position), a favourable specimen if I remember aright. So far so good, but the aim of the superfine reviewer was of course to make “the literary gent” look like a fool. As an illustration of the way in which we all contract our ideas from living in a little world of our own, I said that I had heard the late Mr. Joseph Sturge, of Birmingham, say at a peace meeting at Edinburgh that there were more tears shed on the occasion of the death of Mr. Bradshaw of the Railway Guide than when the Duke of Wellington died. The Saturday reviewer exultingly wrote “Here is a blunder of Ritchie’s; what Mr. Sturge said, and what Ritchie should have said, was that there were more tears shed when Mr. Braidwood of the Fire Brigade died, than when the Duke of Wellington died.” No doubt many a reader of the Saturday chuckled over the blunder of “the literary gent” thus held up to derision. But unfortunately for
the Saturday reviewer, Mr. Sturge died before Mr. Braidwood, and thus it was impossible that he could have referred to the tears shed on the occasion of the death of the latter. The laugh really ought to have been the other way. But the mischief was done, “the literary gent” snubbed, and that was all the Saturday superfine reviewer cared about.
CHAPTER IX.
Cardiff and the Welsh.
In 1849 I lived at Cardiff. I had come there to edit The Principality, a paper started, I believe, by Mr. David Evans, a good sort of man, who had made a little money, which, I fear, he lost in his paper speculation. His aim was to make the paper the mouthpiece for Welsh Nonconformity. I must own, as I saw how Cardiff was growing to be a big place, my aim was to make the paper a good local organ. But the Cardiff of that time was too Conservative and Churchified for such a paper to pay, and as Mr. John Cassell offered me a berth on his paper, The Standard of Freedom, my connection with Cardiff came to an end. I confess I left it with regret, as I had some warm friends in the town, and there was a charming little blue-eyed maid—I wonder if she is alive now—the daughter of an alderman and ex-mayor, with whom I had fallen desperately in love for a time.
At that time Cardiff had a population of some 14,000. Lord Bute had built his docks, not by any means as extensive as they are now, and it was beginning to do an extensive trade in coal
brought down by the Taff Vale Railway. There was no rail to Cardiff then. To get to it from London I had to take the rail to Bristol, spend the night there, and go to Cardiff by the steamer which plied daily, according to the state of the tide, between that port and Bristol, at that time the commercial capital of the South Wales district. The mails from London came by a four-horse coach, which plied between Gloucester and Cardiff. I felt rather miserable when I landed at the docks and looked at the sad expanse of ground behind me and the Bristol Channel. A long street led up to the town, with shabby houses on one side and a large expanse of marshy land on the other. I had heard so much of the romance of Wales that when I realised where I really was my heart quite sank within me. At the end of St. Mary Street was a very primitive old town hall, where I gave a lecture on “The Progress of the Nation,” the only time I ever gave a lecture in my life. The chairman was Mr. Vachell, father of the late Dr. Vachell, an old resident in Cardiff, a man of considerable eminence in the town—as he was supposed to be very wealthy—and in the Cardiff of that day wealth was regarded as the only claim to respect; he, at the end of my lecture, expressed an opinion favourable to my talents, but at the same time intimating that he had no sympathy with much I had uttered. Especially he
differed from me in the estimate I had given of the “Rights of Man,” by Tom Paine. Once more I had an opportunity of lifting up my voice in the Old Town Hall. It was on the subject of Teetotalism. My opponent was a worthy, sturdy teetotaler known as Mr. Cory, whose sons still flourish as the great coal merchants of our day. Cardiff was a town of publicans and sinners, and I am sorry to say I secured an easy triumph; and Mr. Cory created great laughter as he said, in the course of his oration, that if he were shut up in a cask he would cry out through the bunghole, “Teetotalism for ever!” He kept a place at the lower end of the town to supply ships’ stores, and was in every way, as I afterwards found by the friendship that existed between us, a sterling character.
Just opposite the Town Hall, on the other side of the way, was the Castle, then in a very neglected condition, with a large enclosure which was open to the public as a promenade. The street between them contained the best shops in the town. It extended a little way to Crockherbtown on one side and to the Cardiff Arms Hotel on the other, and then you were in the country. Beyond the Cardiff Arms was a pleasant walk leading to Llandaff Cathedral, then almost in a state of decay; and to Penarth a charming hill, overlooking the Bristol Channel, on the other, with a little old-fashioned