‘I do not believe that I was guilty of the rashness of throwing the javelin over the Cam. It was, I think, a passage of arms got up by the Eton men of the two Unions. My share, if any, was only as a member of the august committee of the green baize table. I can, however, remember the irruption of the three Cambridge orators. We Oxford men were precise, orderly, and morbidly afraid of excess in word or manner. The Cambridge oratory came in like a flood into a mill-pond. Both Monckton Milnes and Henry [Arthur] Hallam took us aback by the boldness and freedom of their manner. But I remember the effect of Sunderland’s declaration and action to this day. It had never been seen or heard before among us; we cowered like birds, and ran like sheep.... I acknowledge that we were utterly routed. Lord Houghton’s beautiful reviving of those old days has in it something fragrant and sweet, and brings back old faces and old friendships, very dear as life is drawing to its close.’
Mr Milnes had always wished that his son should become distinguished in that House of Commons where he had himself made so brilliant a début. With this object in view, he had urged him to cultivate speaking in public, and probably the only part of his Cambridge career which he viewed with complete satisfaction was his interest in, and success at, the Union Debating Society. But even in this they did not quite agree. Mr Milnes urged his son to take a decided line, and to lead the Union. But the only answer he could get was, ‘If there is one thing on which I have ever prided myself, it is on having no politics at all, and judging every measure by its individual merits. A leader there must be a violent politician and a party politician, or he must have a private party. I shall never be the one or have the other.’ Again, they were at variance on the burning question of the day, the Reform Bill. Mr Milnes, though a Conservative, was in favour of it; his son described it as ‘the curse and degradation of the nation.’ Further, while exhorting his son to prepare himself for public life, with a singleness of purpose that, if adhered to, would have excluded other and more congenial pursuits, Mr Milnes warned him that his circumstances would not allow him to enter parliament. No wonder, therefore, that the young man became perplexed and melancholy, and more than ever anxious to find a refuge for his aspirations in literature.
While these questions were pending between father and son, the pecuniary embarrassments to which we have already alluded entered upon an acute stage, and in 1829 the whole family left England for five years. If Mr Milnes ever submitted his own actions to the test of rigorous examination, he must have concluded that he had himself brought about the very result which he was most anxious to prevent; for it was this enforced residence on the Continent which, more than any other influence, shaped the character of his son. Mr Milnes evidently wished him to become a country gentleman like himself, and, if he must write, to be ‘a pamphleteer on guano and on grain.’ Instead of this, while he kept his loyalty to England with unbroken faith, he divested himself of English narrowness, and acquired that intimate knowledge of the other members of the European family, and, we may add, that catholicity of taste, for which he was so conspicuous. Probably no public man of the present century understood the Continent so well as Milnes. In many ways he was a typical Englishman; but he was also a citizen of the world.
The first resting-place of the family was Boulogne, and there Milnes made his first acquaintance with Frenchmen and their literature. The romantic school was beginning to engross public attention, and Victor Hugo—then, as afterwards, the ‘stormy voice of France’—became his favourite French poet. But, great as was the interest which Milnes felt in France, he was too eager for knowledge to be content with one language and one literature, and, rejecting his father’s suggestion that he should spend some time in Paris, he spent most of the summer and autumn of 1830 at Bonn, in order to learn German. We suspect that he must have taken this step at the suggestion of Thirlwall, for it was he who introduced him to Professor Brandis, and probably also to the veteran Niebuhr. Thence, his family having migrated to Milan, he crossed the Alps, and made his first acquaintance with Italy, which became, we might almost say, the country of his adoption. He felt a deep sympathy for the Italian people in their aspirations for liberty, and though, as was natural at his age, he enjoyed the society of the Austrian vice-regal Court, he longed to see the foreigner expelled from Italy. Other Italian cities were visited in due course, and, lastly, Rome. Where-ever he went, he managed, with a skill that was peculiarly his own, to know the most interesting people, and to be welcomed with equal warmth by persons of the most opposite opinions. It was no small feat to have known both Italians and Austrians at Milan; but at Rome, besides his English acquaintances, he formed lasting friendships with the Chevalier Bunsen and his family, and with Dr Wiseman, M. Rio, M. Montalembert, and other catholics of distinction. The Church of Rome must always have great attractions for a young man of deep feeling and with no settled principles of faith, and we gather that Milnes was at one time not indisposed to join it. His feelings in that time of unrest and perplexity are well indicated in the following lines, written at Rome in 1834:
‘To search for lore in spacious libraries,
And find it hid in tongues to you unknown;
To wait deaf-eared near swelling minstrelsies,
Watch every action, but not catch one tone;
Amid a thousand breathless votaries,
To feel yourself dry-hearted as a stone—