William Drew, who became a devoted Indian missionary, was another of my contemporaries, and, from sympathy with him, I caught a portion of his spirit; had I possessed the needful qualifications, I could have devoted myself to a similar enterprise.
Samuel Bergne, for many years an able and much-appreciated secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, was another of my fellow-students. With him I became extremely intimate, owing, in part, to an extraordinary family affair, which I have been requested to relate. My father, before he married, had living with him a sister, to whom he was strongly attached. After their separation, she went to reside in London, and dropped all correspondence with him; to the day of his death he could never ascertain what had become of her. Methods were adopted to find out her residence, but all in vain. More than thirty years had elapsed since she disappeared, when one day I met Bergne, who had been visiting his mother at Brompton. “Have not you a relative there?” he asked. “Not that I know of,” was my reply. Then he told me that an evening or two before, as he was sitting by the fire, it flashed upon him how he had heard that an old friend of his mother’s, before her marriage, bore the same name as mine; that she came from Norwich, and that her brother was a lawyer. I was taken aback by what my friend said, and then related what I had heard in childhood respecting my father’s long-lost sister. “Depend upon it,” he exclaimed, “I have found for you the lady your family have been seeking in vain.” I soon received a request to meet the stranger at Mrs. Bergne’s house, when something like a scene occurred, as the separated relatives stood face to face. Yet neither then nor afterwards did she shed any light upon the mystery. She had a husband who proved to be no less a mystery. We never could learn anything about his connections; but, at the time of my introduction to him he was engaged on The Morning Post. We afterwards learned from himself, as well as others, that he had been employed in this country as an agent of the Imperial French Court; certainly he had in his possession a key to the cipher-writing, used by the first Napoleon. He showed me relics of that extraordinary man, and had much to say of several notabilities at home and abroad. What of fact mingled with fiction in his strange disclosures I cannot say; but, after his death, I saw some of his papers, including an unintelligible correspondence between Mr. Canning and himself; also letters relating to private scandals of great people, only fit to be thrown into the fire. He lived in an imaginary world, and used to say that Napoleon Buonaparte was still living. To his influence, I suppose, the mystery which shrouded my aunt’s life after her marriage, might be ascribed.
The four years I spent at Highbury were marked by much political excitement. In 1828 the Corporation and Test Acts were repealed. The Catholic Relief Bill was carried in 1829. In 1830 William IV. succeeded his brother. The “three days of July” the same year occurred in Paris: the abdication of Charles X., and the accession of Louis Philippe, swiftly followed each other; and a fresh impetus was thus given to the cause of English liberalism. The Duke of Wellington’s protest against reform, the defeat of the Ministry on the Civil List, and the introduction of the Reform Bill the next year, produced an excitement which I do not think has been equalled since, though for passionate discussion in the homes of England, it has been surpassed by what occurred during the trial of Queen Caroline. Earl Grey, Lord Brougham, and Lord John Russell were popular idols, their names in everybody’s mouth, their portraits looking down from innumerable shop windows, their busts set up in house after house, their likenesses printed on handkerchiefs and stamped on pipes and jugs, and all sorts of ware. They were mobbed and hurrahed wherever they went, and their carriages were dragged by the populace through streams knee-deep.
At that period the old House of Commons was standing, and went by the name of St. Stephen’s Chapel. Within its walls the Reform battle was fought; and there still lingered round it memories of Pitt and Fox, Burke and Sheridan. I had a great curiosity to see this English forum, and when I obtained admission, with my tutor, Dr. Halley, who explained the building and what was going on, I seemed to be in an old Presbyterian meeting-house, with galleries on three sides, the Speaker’s chair, with its wooden canopy, resembling a pulpit, at the farther end. Members were “cribbed, cabined, and confined.” The forms of the House were interesting to me, and afforded a framework in which to insert images of men in the reign of George II. I had but to put Court dresses and cocked hats on the members, and forthwith the age of Walpole came back to view. A messenger from the Lords, the bowing of an officer as he approached the table, with its wigged clerks, and other matters of ceremony illustrated my readings of Parliament business in olden times.
One figure especially I now recall—that of Sir Charles Wetherall, a fierce opponent of reform. Up he rose, violently gesticulating, his shirt very visible between his black waistcoat and dark nether garment.
The coronation of William IV. and Queen Adelaide indicated a change in that august ceremonial, which showed how reform touched royal pageantry. Though an instance of a double coronation, it came short of the elaborate display when the previous monarch sat alone in Edward’s chair. I saw the procession going down to Westminster, along a narrow street at Charing Cross—old-fashioned shabby shops standing where now you catch sight of palatial hotels—old Northumberland House, with its gardens, occupying the space now become a broad avenue. The beefeaters, the trumpeters, and the footmen in attendance upon the gaudy state-coach, with its royal occupants, were very picturesque. And what a crush there was to avoid the mob streaming down from the Haymarket!
All sorts of reports were afloat, tending to make the new king popular. It was said, that immediately after his accession, he came to town in the dickey of his carriage, and invited, after an unceremonious manner, his old naval friends to come and dine with him. A story went the round with rare applause that, after the defeat of the Reform Bill, when he wanted to dissolve Parliament, he said if the royal carriages could not be got ready, he would go in a hackney coach. How far such tales were true I do not know; but a nobleman, present at one of His Majesty’s dinner-parties at the Brighton Pavilion, told me that, on that occasion, the king toasted some of his guests in sailor fashion, and remarked that his seafaring pursuits had scarcely fitted him for a throne. Then, pointing to the queen, he added that for any improvement in his ways he was indebted to that good lady. The story raised him in my estimation and that of many others.
I must now turn from politics and royalty to what was more in my own way.
The Rev. Daniel Wilson, afterwards Bishop of Calcutta, stood high amongst London Evangelicals as Vicar of Islington, and I sometimes heard him in his crowded church; but my great delight was to walk down to Camberwell to listen to Henry Melvill, then in the zenith of his popularity. His manner was peculiar—he had a curious shake of the head, and a strange inflection of voice at the end of a sentence, which kept up attention. As to style, he was artificial in the extreme; every paragraph seeming to be planned on the same model, ending with the words of his text as a well-turned climax. The preacher swept his auditors along with the force of a torrent from point to point. I heard him at Barnes, when he was advanced in life, deliver one of his old discourses, I should judge little, if at all, altered; but it lacked the fire of early days, and the congregation evinced little of the sympathy which seemed to quiver in London churches at the sound of his voice twenty or thirty years before.
Rowland Hill, though a very old man in 1830, continued to fill Surrey Chapel with a crowded audience. I listened to a sermon in which he recommended young people when they set up house-keeping to secure one piece of furniture especially—i.e., the looking-glass of a good conscience, so that husband and wife, keeping it clean, might see themselves in it, with joy and thankfulness; “for a good man is satisfied from himself,” and, he added, “so is a good woman.” John Angell James, of Birmingham, was one of the most popular preachers at that time, and he occasionally occupied Surrey Chapel pulpit; but William Jay, of Bath, was a more regular “supply,” and echoes of his sonorous voice I still catch as I read his pithy and impressive sermons. When he came to preach Rowland Hill’s funeral sermon I had left college, and he honoured me with an invitation to preach for him at Bath the Sunday following. In 1886, when I occupied the same pulpit in my old age, a lady told me that she remembered my being there more than fifty years before, when the people wondered at their pastor’s sending “such a boy to take his place.” A similar occurrence had happened when Jay first preached for Rowland Hill.