At length we turned off towards the north, and by-and-by were entering a huge building of gray stone, with tall pillars in front of it, which my father told me was the British Museum. What a place for a boy! Endless halls of statues; enormous saloons filled with glass-cases of shells; cases of innumerable birds; acres of butterflies and other insects; strange objects which I did not understand—magic globes of shining crystal, enormous masses of iron which were said to have fallen from the sky; vases and jewels; and finally, at the farther end of a corridor, a small door, softly opening, disclosed a circular room of stupendous proportions, domed above, the curving walls filled with myriads of books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks, and in the midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his web; but it was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat or walked to and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the world. It was my first vision of a great library.
Another time we went—all of us, I think—to the Tower of London. I vibrated with joy at the spectacle of the array of figures in armor, and picked out, a score of times, the suit I would most gladly choose to put on. Here were St. George, King Arthur, Sir Scudamour, Sir Lancelot—all but their living faces and their knightly deeds! Then I found myself immured in dungeons with walls twenty feet thick, darksome and low-browed, with tiny windows, and some of them bearing on their stones strange inscriptions, cut there by captives who were nevermore to issue thence, save to the block. Here the great Raleigh had been confined; here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the noble Sir Henry Vane, who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New England. Everywhere stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters in their brilliant fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then passed the portals of the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam of the Koh-i-noor—if it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and not a glass model foisted on my innocence.
Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the bowels of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we passed through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us two endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a man, with people walking in them, and disappearing in their interminable perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them, and after we had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the river Thames was flowing over our heads, with its ships on its surface, and its fishes, and its bottom of mud and gravel—under all these this illuminated corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing and walking therein. Would we ever again behold the upper world and the sky? The atmosphere was not pleasant, and I was glad to find myself climbing up another flight of stairs and emerging on the other side of the river, which we had crossed on foot, dry-shod.
Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I remember that a woman who seemed taller than common, dressed in a dark silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose features were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation unlike other voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name which I had heard often, and which had a glamour for my boyish imagination—Jenny Lind. There also rises before me the dark, courteous visage and urbane figure of Monckton Milnes; but there was something more and better than mere courtesy and urbanity about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified by the discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles term, I think, "Facetiae"—of which Milnes had a collection unmatched among private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast, which he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable—in England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the afternoon. Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw nothing, but heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father seemed to have little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of the despotic attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was far more intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who disregarded her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure compassion, I believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which the poor woman had placed herself, tried with all her might to read the book and believe the theory; she would take up the mass of manuscript night after night, and wade through it with that truly saintlike self-abnegation which characterized her, occasionally, too, reading out a passage which struck her. The result was that she could not bring herself to disbelieve in Shakespeare, but she conceived a higher admiration than ever of Bacon; and that, too, was characteristic of her.
We made several incursions into the surrounding country. One was to Newstead, where, from the talkative landlady of the hotel, we heard endless stories about Byron and his wife; this was before Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe published her well-intended but preposterous volume about the poet. Then we visited Oxford, and were shown about by the mayor of the town, and by Mr. S. C. Hall, and were at one moment bathed in the light emanating from Lady Waldegrave, of which interview my father, in his private note-book, speaks thus: "Lady Waldegrave appeared; whereupon Mr. Speirs (the mayor) instantly was transfigured and transformed—like the English snob he is, worthy man—and looked humbler than he does in the presence of his Maker, and so respectful and so blest that it was pleasant to behold him. Nevertheless, she is but a brummagem kind of countess, after all, being the daughter of Braham, the famous singer, and married first to an illegitimate son of an Earl Waldegrave—not to the legitimate son and possessor of the title (who was her first love)—and after the death of these two to the present old Mr. Harcourt. She is still in her summer, even if it be waning, a lady of fresh complexion and light hair, a Jewish nose (to which her descent entitles her), a kind and generous expression of face, but an officer-like figure and bearing. There seems to be a peculiarity of manner, a lack of simplicity, a self-consciousness, which I suspect would not have been seen in a lady born to the rank which she has attained. But, anyhow, she was kind to all of us, and complimentary to me, and she showed us some curious things which had formerly made part of Horace Walpole's collection at Twickenham—a missal, for instance, splendidly bound and beset with jewels, but of such value as no setting could increase, for it was exquisitely illuminated by the own hand of Raphael himself! I held the precious volume in my grasp, though I fancy (and so does my wife) that the countess scarcely thought it safe out of her own hands. In truth, I suppose any virtuoso would steal it if he could; and Lady Waldegrave has reason to look to the safe-keeping of her treasures, as she exemplified by telling us a story while exhibiting a little silver case. This once contained a portion of the heart of Louis XII. (how the devil it was got I know not), and she was showing it one day to Strickland, Dean of Westminster, when, to her horror and astonishment, she saw him open the case and swallow the royal heart! Ate ever man such a morsel before! It was a symptom of insanity in the dean, and I believe he is since dead, insane." It was after this interview with the countess that we visited Old Boston, and when my parents told old Mr. Porter about the missal his jolly eyes took on a far-away expression, as if he saw himself in the delightful act of purloining it, "in obedience to a higher law than that which he broke."
The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those years, and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had already begun to read. The publication of this work had made him famous, though he had written two or three volumes before that, and was at this very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow was never a hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One day, however, Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing to turn on Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates, and that the latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular influence over other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of them to run away from the school and lead a life of freedom and adventure on the roads and lanes of England. To this part of Mr. Martineau's tale I lent an eager and sympathetic ear; but the narrator was lowered in my estimation by the confession that he himself had not been a member of Borrow's party. He went on to say that the fugitives had been pursued and captured and brought back to bondage; and upon Borrow's admitting that he had been the instigator of the adventure, he was sentenced to be flogged, and that it was on the back of this very Martineau that he had been "horsed" to undergo the punishment! Imagine the great, wild, mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic and precise cleric that was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts could bring most men.
One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch—though I cannot fix the exact date—was to an old English country-seat, built in the time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting lost, and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and passages through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that when one of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would come out. Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great, black lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end of a corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in addition to its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and there were bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we proposed to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been closed one hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened since then, and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some reason, had become very objectionable or dangerous to other persons concerned. The windows of the room, they added, had been walled up at the same time; so there this unhappy creature slowly starved to death in pitch darkness. There, doubtless, within a few feet of where we stood, lay her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she wore in life. Sometimes, too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound, like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like frivolous chatter beside it.
About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the Continent, and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in Southport which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to meet with the crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding spirits, and he told my father an anecdote of our friend Grace Greenwood, which is recorded in one of the private note-books. "Grace, Bennoch says," he writes, "was invited to a private reading of Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she thought it behooved her to manifest her good taste and depth of feeling by going into hysterics and finally fainting away upon the floor. Hereupon Charles Kemble looked up from his book and addressed himself to her sternly and severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you disturb the company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'"
This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be imparted to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and, after a few flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch says he had this story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes it; and I think it not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a morbid exaggeration of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed into this awful fix. I wonder how she survived it!
At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved, gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little models of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a sail-boat for myself. My father seems to have thought that some practical acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me no harm—by adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture—so he arranged with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for instruction. Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in the mysteries of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel, and finally presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches long and nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my labors, but conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them himself; the model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a bluff-bowed, broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French fishing-boats which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and Havre. The outside form being done, I entered upon the delightful and exciting work of hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding, more than once, piercing through from the hold into the outer world. But the little ship became more buoyant every day, and finally stood ready for her deck. This I prepared by planing down a bit of plank to the proper thickness—or thinness—and carefully fitted it into its place, with companionways fore and aft, covered with hatches made to slide in grooves. Next, with chisel, spoke-shave, and sand-paper, I prepared the mast and fitted a top-mast to it, and secured it in its place with shrouds and stays of fine, waxed fishing-line. The boom and gaff were then put in place, and Fanny Wrigley (who had aforetime made my pasteboard armor and helmet) now made me a main-sail, top-sail, and jib out of the most delicate linen, beautifully hemmed, and a tiny American flag to hoist to the peak. It only remained to paint her; I was provided with three delectable cans of oil-paint, and I gave her a bright-green under-body, a black upper-body, and white port-holes with a narrow red line running underneath them. Thus decorated, and with her sails set, she was a splendid object, and the boys with bought models were depressed with envy, especially when I called their attention to the stars and stripes. This boat-building mania of mine had originated while we were at Mrs. Blodgett's, where the captain of one of the clippers gave me a beautiful model of his own ship, fully rigged, and perfect in every detail; only it would not sail, being solid. Concerning his clipper, by-the-way, I once overheard a bit of dialogue in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room between my captain and another. "Do you mean to say," demanded the latter, "that you passed the Lightning?" To which my captain replied, in measured and impressive tones, "I-passed-the-Lightning!" The Lightning, it may be remarked, was at that time considered the queen of the Atlantic passage; she had made the trip between Boston and Liverpool in ten days. But my captain had once shown her his heels, nevertheless. I wanted to christen my sloop The Sea Eagle, but my father laughed so much at this name that I gave it up; he suggested The Chub, The Mud-Pout, and other ignoble titles, which I indignantly rejected, and what her name finally was I have forgotten. She afforded me immense happiness.