We will next give an exact narrative of what actually took place. Professor Williams, who had held the Arabic chair since 1854, died in the Long Vacation of 1870, and on October 1 the Vice-Chancellor announced the vacancy, and fixed the day of election for Friday, October 21. The only candidates who presented themselves in the ordinary way were Palmer and the Rev. Stanley Leathes, M.A., of Jesus College, a gentleman who had obtained the Tyrwhitt Hebrew Scholarship in 1853. It was thought that his merits were little known, and that he would not prove a formidable opponent; and Palmer, as Mr Besant rightly states, looked upon the Professorship as as good as won. However, on the day before, or the day but one before, the election, the President of Queens’ College left a card on each of the electors, to say that Dr Wright would be voted for. One of these cards was given to Palmer, we do not know by whom. He showed it to a friend, who asked, ‘What does it mean?’ ‘It means that it is all up with me,’ was Palmer’s reply; and events proved that he was right in his forebodings. When the electors met, the Masters of Trinity Hall and Emmanuel were not present, and the Master of Gonville and Caius declined to vote. The remaining fourteen voted in the following way:—for Dr Wright, eight; for Mr Palmer, five; for Mr Leathes, one. Dr Wright, therefore, was declared to be elected.
It will be seen from what is here stated—and the accuracy of our facts is, we know, beyond question—that it was not the Heads of Houses in their collective capacity who rejected Palmer, but less than half of them. Again, we submit that there is no evidence that those who voted against him were actuated by either of the prejudices which Mr Besant imputes to them. A high place in a tripos is no longer regarded at Cambridge as indispensable, unless the candidate be trying for a post the duties of which are in direct relation to the tripos in which he has sought distinction. Four years afterwards, the resident members of the Senate chose as Woodwardian Professor of Geology a gentleman who had taken an ordinary degree, in opposition to one who had been placed thirteenth in the first class of the mathematical tripos, on the ground that they believed him to be a better geologist than his opponent. It will be said they were not the Heads of Colleges; but we would remark that, even in the election we are discussing, the case against them breaks down on this point; for the successful candidate was not even a member of the University, and surely an indifferent degree is better than no degree at all. As to the second prejudice against Palmer, we simply dismiss it with contempt. We never heard of a Cambridge elector who was influenced by hearsay evidence; and, as a matter of fact, Palmer was supported by the Master of his own College, who must have known more about his habits than all the other Heads put together. If we consider the result arrived at by the light of subsequent events, it is natural for those who, like his biographer and ourselves, are strongly prepossessed in Palmer’s favour, to regret that he was unsuccessful; and we are delighted to find Mr Besant asserting, as he does, that University distinctions ought to be given, ceteris paribus, to University men. But if we try to put ourselves in the position of the electors, and survey the two candidates as they surveyed them, there is, we feel bound to assert, ample justification for the selection they made, having regard to the particular post to be filled at that time. They had, in fact, to choose between a tried and an untried man. Dr Wright was known to have received a regular education in Oriental languages in Germany and in Holland, and to be thought highly of by the most competent judges in those countries. He had given proof of sound scholarship in various publications, and it was considered by several scholars in the University that the studies to which he had given special attention, viz.—Syriac, Samaritan, Ethiopic, and the Semitic group of languages generally—would be specially useful there. He had held a Professorship in Trinity College, Dublin, where he had been distinguished as a teacher; he was personally known in Cambridge, not merely to Dr Phillips, but to the University at large, at whose hands he had received the honorary degree of Doctor of Law in 1868. Moreover, he was already an honorary Fellow of Queens’ College, and therefore it was not strange that a Society which had already gone so far should signify to him their intention of proceeding a step further, in the event of his consenting to come and reside at Cambridge as a Professor. He was accordingly elected Fellow January 5, 1871[[97]].
Palmer, on the other hand, had submitted to the electors testimonials which testified to his wonderful knowledge of Hindustani, Persian, and Arabic as spoken languages; he was known to have given special attention to the languages of India; he had catalogued the Oriental MSS. in the Libraries of the University, of King’s College, and of Trinity College; he had translated Moore’s Paradise and the Peri into Arabic verse; and he had published a short treatise on the Sufistic and Unitarian Theosophy of the Persians. But here the direct evidence of his acquirements ceased; and it is at this point that the date of the election becomes material. None of his more important works had as yet appeared. The official Report of his journeys in the East was not published until January 1871; and the preface to his Desert of the Exodus is
dated June of the same year[[98]]. The Heads, therefore, could not know that he ‘had relied on his knowledge of the language for safety in a dangerous expedition.’
After a disappointment so severe as the loss of the much-coveted professorship, it might have been expected that Palmer’s connexion with Cambridge would soon have been severed; that he would have sought and obtained a lucrative appointment elsewhere. On the contrary, it was written in the book of fate, as one of his favourite Orientals would have said, that he should not only remain at Cambridge, but remain there in connexion with Oriental studies. Cambridge has two chairs of Arabic: a Professorship founded by Sir Thomas Adams in 1632; and a Readership, founded by King George I. in 1724, at the instance of Lancelot Blackburn, Bishop of Exeter and Lord Almoner. It is endowed with an income of £50 a year, paid out of the Almonry bounty, but reduced by fees to £40. 10s. If, however, the income be small the duties are none—or, rather, none are attached to the office as such; and moreover the Reader is technically regarded as a Professor, and has a Professor’s privilege of retaining a College Fellowship for life as a married man. The previous holder of the office, the Rev. Theodore Preston, Fellow of Trinity College, had regarded it as a sinecure, and moreover had generally been non-resident. On his resignation in 1871, the Lord Almoner for the time being, the Hon. and Rev. Gerald Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, gave the office to Palmer. At last, therefore, he seemed to have obtained his reward—congenial occupation in a place which had been the first to find him out and help him, where he had many devoted friends, and where he was now enabled to establish himself as a married man; for on the very day after he received his appointment he married a lady to whom he had been engaged for some years.
Palmer took a very different view of his duties as Reader in Arabic from what his predecessor had done. He delivered his inaugural lecture on Monday, 4 March, 1872, choosing for his subject ‘The National Religion of Persia; an Outline Sketch of Comparative Theology[[99]],’ and during the Easter and Michaelmas terms he lectured on six days in each week, devoting three days to Persian and three to Arabic. To these subjects there was subsequently added a course in Hindustani. In consequence of this large amount of voluntary work the Council of the Senate recommended (February 24, 1873)[[100]] ‘that a sum of £250 per annum should be paid to the present Lord Almoner’s Reader out of the University Chest,’ and that he should be authorized to receive a fee of £2. 2s. in each term for each course of lectures from every student attending them, provided he declared in writing his readiness to acquiesce in certain regulations, of which the first was: ‘That it shall be his ordinary duty to reside within the precincts of the University for eighteen weeks during term time in every academical year, and to give three courses of lectures—viz. one course in Arabic, one in Persian, and one in Hindustani.’ The Senate accepted this proposal March 6, 1873, and Palmer signed the new regulations five days afterwards. In recording this transaction Mr Besant remarks: ‘It must be acknowledged that the University got full value for their money.’ We reply to this sneer that the University asked no more from Palmer than it asked from every other professor whose salary was augmented. The clause imposing residence had been accepted in the same form by all the other professors; and one course of lectures in each term is surely the very least that a teaching body can require from one of its staff. It must also be remembered that the Lord Almoner’s Readership is an office to which the University does not appoint, which therefore it cannot control, and which, until Palmer held it, had been practically useless. He, however, being disposed to reside, and to discharge his self-imposed duties vigorously, the University came forward with an offer which was meant to be generous, in recognition of his personal merits; for the whole arrangement, it will be observed, had reference to the present Reader only—that is, to himself. The precise amount offered, £250, was evidently selected with the intention of placing the Lord Almoner’s Reader on the same footing as a professor, for the salaries of nearly all the professorial body had been already raised to £300; and, if a comparison between the Reader and the Professor of Arabic be inevitable, it may be remarked that while the University offered £250 to the former, they offered only £230 to the latter. The intention, we repeat, was generous, and we protest with some indignation against Palmer’s bitter words: ‘The very worst use a man can make of himself is to stay up at Cambridge and work for the University.’ The truth is that University life did not suit him, and though he tried hard for ten years to believe that it did, the attempt ended in failure, and it is much to be regretted that it was ever made.
We must pass rapidly over the next ten years. They were years of incessant labour, labour which must have been often most painful and irksome, for it had to be undertaken in the midst of heavy sorrow, ill-health, pecuniary difficulties—everything, in short, which damps a man’s energies and takes the heart out of his work. His married life began brightly enough: he had an assured income of nearly £600 a year, which he could increase at pleasure, and we know did increase, by literary work. In 1871 he entered at the Middle Temple, probably with the intention of practising at the Indian bar at some future time; but after he had given up all thoughts of India he joined the Eastern Circuit, and attended assizes and quarter sessions regularly. He had a fair amount of business, and is said to have made a good advocate, though he could have had little knowledge of law, and, in fact, regarded his legal work as a relaxation from severer studies. These he pursued without intermission. Besides his lectures, which he gave regularly, he produced work after work with amazing rapidity. In 1871, in addition to the Desert of the Exodus, he published a History of Jerusalem, written in collaboration with his friend Mr Besant; in 1873 he undertook to write an Arabic Grammar, which appeared in the following year; in 1874 he wrote Outlines of Scripture Geography, and a History of the Jewish Nation, for the Christian Knowledge Society, and began a Persian Dictionary, of which the first part was published in 1876; in 1876—77 he edited the works of the Arabian poet Beda ed din Zoheir for the Syndics of the University Press, the text appearing in 1876 and the translation in 1877; and during the next few years he was at work upon a Life of Haroun Alraschid, a new translation of the Koran, and a revision of Henry Martyn’s translation of the New Testament into Persian. Besides this vast amount of solid work it would be easy to show that he produced nearly as great a quantity of that other literature which, when we consider the labour which it entails upon him who writes it, it is surely a misnomer to call ‘light.’ Professor Nicholls, of Oxford, gives an account, in a most interesting appendix to Mr Besant’s book, of the quantity of Persian, Arabic, and Hindustani which Palmer was continually writing. In the last-mentioned language there were a poem on the marriage of the Duke of Edinburgh, and a wonderful account of the visit of the Shah to England, which occupied thirty-six columns of the Akhbar, a space equivalent to about twenty columns of the Times; and, although Palmer admitted that ‘the writing of such things is a laborious and artificial task to me, as I am not as familiar with the Urdú of everyday life as I am with the Persian,’ he still went on writing them. How familiar he was with Arabic and Persian is shown by the curious fact that whenever he was under strong emotion he would plunge abruptly into one or other language, sometimes writing a whole letter in it, sometimes only a sentence or two, or a few verses. Besides these Oriental ‘trifles’ as he would probably have called them, we find continual contributions to English periodical literature, and three volumes of poetry: English Gipsy Songs in Romany (1875); the Song of the Reed, and other Pieces (1876); and Lyrical Songs, &c. by John Ludwig Runeberg (1878). In the first of these he collaborated with Mr Leland, whom we mentioned before, and Miss Janet Tuckey; and in the last with Mr Magnusson; but the second is entirely his own. We regret that we cannot find room for a specimen of these graceful verses. Those who have leisure to look into the Song of the Reed, or the translation of Zoheir, will find themselves introduced to a new literature by one who, if not a poet, was unquestionably, as Mr Besant says, a versifier of a high order, and in the very front rank of translators.
We have said that most of this work—were it grave or gay, it mattered not—had to be got through in the midst of serious anxieties. Mrs Palmer’s health began to fail before they had been married long, and it soon became evident that her lungs were affected. It was necessary that she should leave Cambridge. In the spring of 1876, Wales was tried, with results which were so reassuring that it was decided to complete her cure (as it was then believed) by a winter in Paris. There, however, she got worse instead of better, and early in the following year her husband began to realize that she would die. In the autumn of 1877, they returned home to try Wales once more, and then, as a last resource, Bournemouth. There, in the summer of 1878, Mrs Palmer died. The expenses of so long an illness, added to journeyings to and fro, and the cost of keeping up two establishments (for he was obliged to continue his Cambridge lectures all the while), crippled his resources, and produced embarrassments from which he never became wholly free. His own health, too, never strong, gave way under his fatigues and worries, and he became only not quite so ill as his wife. Yet he never complained; never said a word about his troubles to any of his friends. Those who were most with him at this dreary time have recorded that he always met them with a smiling face, and went about his work as calmly as if he had been well and happy.
It was fortunate for him that he had a singularly joyous nature, which could never be saddened for long together. He was always surrounded by a pleasant atmosphere of cheerfulness, which not only did good to those about him, but had a salutary effect upon himself, enabling him to maintain his elasticity and vigour, even in the face of sorrow and ill-health. Most things have their comic side, if only men are not blind to it; and he could see the humorous aspect of the most melancholy or the most perilous situation. To the last he was full of life and fun. Though he no longer, as of old, wrote burlesques, he could draw clever caricatures of his friends and acquaintances; tell stories which convulsed his hearers with laughter; and sing comic songs—especially a certain Arab ditty, in which he turned himself into an Arab minstrel with really wonderful power of impersonation. Again, whatever he came across—especially in great cities like London or Paris—was full of interest for him. Without being a philanthropist, or, indeed, having a spark of humanitarian sentiment in his nature, he took a pleasure in investigating his fellow-creatures, talking to men and finding out all about them. He was endowed in the highest degree with the gift of sympathy; and this, while it made him the most loveable of friends, made him also a singularly acute investigator, and gave him a power of influencing others which was truly wonderful. He possessed, too, great manual dexterity, and took a pleasure in finding out how all those things were done which depend for their success upon sleight of hand; and in all such he became a proficient himself. He was a first-rate conjuror, and besides doing the tricks, ordinary and extraordinary, of professed conjurors, he took much satisfaction in reproducing the most startling phenomena of spiritualism, which he regarded as a debased form of conjuring—‘a swindle of the most palpable and clumsy kind.’ It was in such pursuits that he found the recreation which other men find in hard exercise. Of this he took very little. Even in his younger days he did not care for games, and his one attempt at cricket was nearly fatal to the wicket-keeper, whom he managed to hit on the head with his bat; but he was an expert gymnast, and loved boating and fishing in the Fens, to which he used to retire from time to time with one of his friends. It may be doubted whether he cared about the sport and the fresh air so much as the absolute repose; the old-world character of that curious corner of England; the total absence of convention. There he could dress as he pleased; and he took full advantage of his liberty. It is recorded that once, as he was coming home to College, he happened to meet the Master, Dr Bateson, who, casting his eye over the water-boots and flannels, stained with mud and weather, in which the learned Professor had encased himself, remarked, ‘This is Eastern costume, I suppose.’ ‘No, Master; Eastern Counties costume,’ was the reply.
It is pleasant to be able to record that the happiness which had been so long delayed came at last. In about a year after his wife’s death he married again. His choice was fortunate, and for the last three years of his life he was able to enjoy that greatest of all luxuries—a thoroughly happy home. He stood sorely in need of such consolation, for in other directions he had plenty to distress and worry him. His pecuniary difficulties pressed upon him as hardly as ever, and his relations with the University began to be somewhat strained. He had had the mortification of seeing Professor Wright’s salary raised to £500 a year, with no hint of any corresponding proposition being made for him[[101]]; and when the Commissioners promulgated their scheme his office was not included in it, a suggestion for raising his salary which had been made by the Board of Oriental Studies being wholly disregarded by them. Moreover, the undertaking to deliver three courses of lectures in each year turned out to be infinitely more laborious than he had expected. Candidates for the Indian Civil Service increased in number; and the pupils of any given term were pretty sure to want to go on with their work in the next, when he was teaching a different language, so that he was compelled in practice to give, not one, but two, or even three, courses in each term. Moreover, the elementary nature of much of this instruction—the ‘teaching boys the Persian alphabet,’ as he called it—became every year more and more irksome. We are not surprised that he got disgusted with the University; but at the same time we cannot agree with Mr Besant that the University was wholly to blame. They were in no wise responsible for the conduct of the Commissioners; in fact, all that could be done to make them take a different view was done. Had Palmer resided continuously in the University, and pressed his own claims, things might have been very different. But this he had been unable to do, for reasons which, as we have seen, were beyond his own control, and for which, therefore, he is not to be blamed; but the fact cannot be denied that for some years he had been practically non-resident. There was also another cause which has to be taken into consideration—his own disposition. The life of a University is a peculiar life, which does not suit everybody, and certainly did not suit him. He felt ‘cabined, cribbed, confined,’ in it; and he said afterwards that ‘he never really began to live till he was emancipated from academic trammels.’ Our wonder is, not that he left Cambridge when he did, but that he remained so long connected with it. The final break took place in 1881, when he voluntarily rescinded the engagement which he had made to lecture, and, retaining the Readership and the Fellowship at S. John’s College—neither of which he could afford to resign—took up his abode in London, where he obtained a place on the staff of the Standard newspaper. He readily adapted himself to this new life, and soon became a successful writer. One of the assistant-editors at that time, Mr Robert Wilson, has recorded that