"And then how blest the noon-day rest,
Reclin'd on a grassy bank,
With hungry cheer and the brave old beer,
Better than Odin drank;
And the secret balm of the spirit at calm,
And poetry, hope, and health,—
Ay, have I not found in that rare ground
A mine of more than wealth?"
Another long-time friend also of the antiquarian sort was Walter Hawkins, with whom I was intimate for many years. His private collection of coins and curiosities was even larger and costlier than Nightingale's, and was given by his administratrix to the United Service Museum, where I believe the bulk of it (perhaps morally mine) still remains in cases not yet unpacked. He died suddenly, to my great financial loss; for he was very fond of me, offering himself sponsor and giving his name to a son of mine; and as a rich old bachelor he used, to make humorously half promises of benefits to come. In fact, he had called in his lawyer to take instructions for a new will, and partly at least had erased or destroyed the old one of a twelve years agone, when, one raw and wintry morning, he insisted upon seeing a lady from and to her carriage without his hat (punctilio being his forte and his fault), caught cold, took to his bed, and was dead in four days! Accordingly a relative with whom he had not been on the best of terms for years, administered to his half will, and succeeded to his possessions. Such is life and its futile expectations.
Walter Hawkins had many peculiarities: one was this. At great cost he was long building for himself a tomb at Kensal Green, which he would not let me see till it was finished: he then triumphantly exhibited to my astonished eyes a domed marble temple with four bronze angels blowing trumpets east, west, north, and south,—and waited for my approval, which honestly I could not give. I heard nothing more of this small mausoleum, for he was a taciturn man: but when, some year or two after, I went to his funeral and looked in vain for the temple-tomb, I found it had vanished, and in its stead was a plain marble slab with his simple name and birthday on it, and a blank left for the date of his death. Manifestly he had repented of the vaingloriousness of those herald angels and their dome; and practically took the hint of my dispraise in the adoption of that humbler tombstone.
Here is another characteristic trait: some navvy had found an old rusty anchor near the Thames Tunnel, one of Brunel's ruinous follies,—now, as we all know, finished and utilised by a railway. This anchor, a small one, probably lost by some "jolly young waterman," Mr. Hawkins maintained was Roman; and he had made for it a superb crimson case lined with satin, which hung on his drawing-room wall at Hammersmith as a decoration. He was also proud of possessing the paw of the Arctic bear which had attacked Captain Parry, but from which he escaped, as also did the bear, for no one is said to have shot the beast: however, there was the paw in proof: and there were divers other uncommon properties.
One of the most curious matters about my friend was this: the anagram of his name in full (and he always wrote Esquire and not Esq.) exactly describes him, with his peculiarity of greeting one with "Oh, I'm so glad to see you!" and with his usual signature "W. H.," which also he put on a medal for good conduct to youths, and gave my son one of those "W. H. medals." Now the words "Oh, Walter Hawkins, Esquire," makes anagrammatically, "W. H., who likes rare antiques!" exactly his idiosyncrasy as a man and a collector.
We all know how strangely "The Right Honourable William Ewart Gladstone, M.P.," spells, "I am the Whig M.P. who'll be a traitor to England's rule:"—may it not prove to be prophetic. And still more strange is the fact that the words "William Ewart Gladstone" spell "Erin, we will go mad at last!" which seems only too likely. Another curious anagram is this,—in a far different vein: "Christmas comes but once a year," makes "So by Christ came a rescue to man." There's no end to these petty word miracles.
But to revert to our theme and to conclude it. As a West India merchant, Mr. Hawkins one day sent me down to Albury a hogshead of sugar and some sacks of rice, to be given (or, as he preferred it, sold at half price for honour's sake and not to pauperise) to my poorer neighbours for a Christmas gift. Well, to please him, I tried to sell, and only raised the rancour of the shopkeepers, who declared I was competing with them as a grocer: then I gave, with the same experience that soup charity had before taught me, to wit, that poor quarrelled with poorer, and both with me, for more or less given. So I was glad when it all came to an end. It is very difficult, as many a Lady Bountiful knows, to be charitable on a wide scale: e.g. once, in my country life, I tried to recommend brown bread and oatmeal; and got nothing by it but ill-will, as if wishing to starve the poor by denial of wheat-flour.
Most of us have been checked in such silly efforts to do good through forgetfulness of the fact that usually the poorest are the proudest. Even the luxurious débris of London Club kitchens must be flung into swill-barrels for pigs, because starving men and women will not demean themselves to ask for it at the buttery-hatch. Moreover, that such are often extravagant too, everybody has found out—here's an instance: In my legal days, I now and then of course relieved poor folk, and sometimes passed through Seven Dials: casually, I looked in upon an old couple to whom I had occasionally given a trifle, believing them to be near starvation; and I found them roasting a brace of partridges—or was it quails? for they were waistcoated with bacon,—and I had the charity to hope they had not stolen them! Anyhow, I never called there again. And, while I am in Seven Dials, let me record another useful small experience. There was a lapidary handy, who had at times cut my beach-found choanites for me. One day I found him making scarabæi out of bits of agate and lapis lazuli. "Who gave you an order for these," said I. "Well, sir, I don't rightly know his name; but he was a furriner." "Was the name Signor——?" "That's it, sir." Then I set off straight to Sotheby's where I knew the Signor's Egyptian antiquities were soon to be sold, and duly forewarned the auctioneer of these forgeries. I need not detail how at the sale he put buyers on their guard, exposing the fraud, and condemning the peccant scarabæi to extinction. I wonder how many Grecian bronzes and copper Buddhas have been cast in Birmingham!
Yet another old friend for many years, so far literary in that he was a sculptor, is to be recorded in Joseph Durham: it was he who, more than thirty years ago, modelled in life and made in marble after death my beautiful three-year old daughter, little Alice, epitaphed in my poems. Of Durham's nobleness of character I can here give a charming trait. I used to go about once a week—sometimes less often—to Alfred Place to see how Durham was getting on with the statue (a sleeping infant), and one day, to my astonishment, I perceived that instead of any progress having been made in the work, it had, miraculously to me, retrograded; not half so near completion as it was last week. As I was wondering and perhaps not well pleased, Durham said, "I had hoped you would not call, till I had made it look as it did last week,—and then you needn't have known it." "Known what, friend?" "Well, only this; I came to a stain in the marble, and as I resolved you should have everything of the best,—I took another block, and have worked at it night and day, in hopes you wouldn't find me out. There's the other figure, under that cloth." Now, considering that the new block involved a cost of some twenty pounds,—and that the old one might have been artificially doctored, and that anyhow the risk and loss were equitably as much, mine as his,—and further that the young sculptor had little more than daily bread, if that,—I do say all this proves Durham to have been the noble fellow I found him to be for years. He is long gone, like so many other friends, to that Brighter World. His life-story in this was a touching one, as he told it to me; and I think known to very few besides myself. In youth he loved and was beloved; but friends and circumstances hindered; so she married some one else who, to Durham's constant horror and indignation, treated his wife brutally: till, one happy day, he died in some fit, probably from his own excesses. And then—here comes the sad climax—when Durham, having achieved fortune and fame, offered himself to his old love, the now rich widow, she deliberately turned away with a refusal, and broke his heart! Was it any wonder that his grief sometimes sought the solace of voluntary forgetfulness, or that certain false friends of his I wot of have in their teetotal Pharisaism made the evil most of an occasional infirmity, and have blackened even with printer's ink the memory of one of God's and Nature's true noblemen! Besides my little daughter in marble (so charmingly asleep that, in the Royal Academy, we heard one lady whisper to another, Hush, don't talk so loud, you'll wake her!)—besides that, his chef-d'œuvre, as I always think, he modelled the bust of her father, now in the Crystal Palace Gallery,—but would not accept any payment for it! So like Durham,—who in many secret ways was ever generous and trying to do good: he was always self-forgetful and only too modest. Apropos, I remember that when Lord Granville asked the sculptor of Prince Albert's statue at South Kensington "Whether the Queen, who was so well pleased, could do anything for him"—suggestive, no doubt, of a knighthood—the dear unselfish Durham replied, "Thank you, my Lord,—if her Majesty's pleased, I'm satisfied." So that chance for a title was thrown heedlessly away,—but we always called him "Sir Joe" ever after: specially among the "Noviomagians," a band of antiquaries who used to dine together jovially at many pretended and picturesque sites of the undiscoverable Noviomagus, and among them I have met and numbered as my friends Chief Baron Pollok, George Godwin, Francis Bennoch, Thomas Wright, Thornbury and Fairholt and other noted names, some of them still among the living.