“No, I don’t think I am tidy,” von Rottenburg once exclaimed. “I had to be tidy for so many years that I fear I am a little lax nowadays, although I can always find the papers I want myself, and generally know where I have put everything. During those years with Bismarck I had to be so careful, so exact and methodical. One of his little hobbies was that when he was staying in an hotel, or anywhere away from home, he, or I, would carefully search the waste-paper baskets to see no scrap of paper that could in any way be made into political capital was left therein.
“Bismarck was most particular about this. He destroyed everything that might, he thought, make mischief, or would do harm of any kind.”
Did von Rottenburg destroy his wondrous diaries which I saw a few weeks before he died? Of them I may have more to say in the future.
Another of my very earliest recollections is of Madame Antoinette Sterling. She came from America to sing in England, and often stayed at the residence of my grandfather, James Muspratt, of Seaforth Hall, near Liverpool. In this house in earlier years James Sheridan Knowles wrote some of his plays, and in it also Baron Justus von Liebig—who invented his famous soup to save my mother’s life—Charlotte Cushman (the American tragedienne), Charles Dickens, and Samuel Lover had been frequent and ever-welcome guests.
At the time that Antoinette Sterling arrived in this country sundry cousins, who were all quite little children, sat, open-mouthed and entranced, before the fire in that beautifully panelled, well-filled library at Seaforth Hall, while she squatted on the floor amongst us and sang, “There was an old Nigger and his name was Uncle Ned,” or “Baby Bye, here’s a fly.” How we loved it! Again and again we wildly demanded another song, clapping our hands, and again and again that good, kind soul sang to her juvenile admirers—maybe her first English audience.
Seaforth Hall was built by my grandfather about 1830, at which time four miles of beach divided him from Liverpool. The docks of that city are eleven miles long to-day, and the Gladstone Dock is now in the field in which we children used to ride and play. It was named “Gladstone Dock” because that great statesman was born at a house near by. The next dock will probably be on the site of my grandfather’s dining-room, and may berth the largest ship in the world, that monster now being built by Lord Aberconway (John Brown and Co.).
During his early years my father went a great deal into Society, being presumably considered a clever, rising young physician who had seen a good deal of the world, and was an excellent linguist: so by the time he moved to the house now numbered “25, Harley Street,” in 1860—a step followed later by his marriage with Emma, daughter of the above-named James Muspratt—he was well established in the social world.
I often heard him speak of the delightful gatherings he attended and so much enjoyed in those early days before I had opened my eyes on this wonderful world, when women like Charlotte Cushman, Catherine Hayes, Helen Faucit, Mrs. Charles Kean, Mrs. Kemble, and Mrs. Sterling added grace and charm to the company: when the scientific giants were Faraday, Tyndall, Sir David Brewster, Graham, Sir Henry Holland, and William Fergusson: and in the literary world he was brought into contact with Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Samuel Lover, Theodore Hook, and Mark Lemon.
The people at whose houses he visited became his constant guests; so later his children grew up in a delightful atmosphere, in a home of culture, where art, science, and literature were amply represented.
Meetings like these, even in earliest childhood, with bright souls, persons of culture, intellect, polished manners, and brilliant gifts, all leave strong impressions on a plastic youthful mind, and the memory is undoubtedly an influence through life.