The success of the book was great.
The Gatherings have taken wonderfully. All the critics praise without exception. So I have sacked £210 by two months’ work, and not damaged my literary reputation.
Lockhart congratulated him warmly on the achievement. “You may,” he says (January 5th, 1847), “live fifty years without turning out any more delightful thing” than the Gatherings. Tho’ I had read the Handbook pretty well, I found the full zest of novelty in these Essays, and such, I think, is the nearly universal feeling. Fergusson was at Lord Clarendon’s in Herts at Christmas. Lord Clarendon said that he had had a Spanish party a few days before—all highly pleased. One said it would take, to get together the knowledge of this book, four of the most accomplished of Spaniards. ‘Ah!’ said another, ‘but where could you get one that could put it all together in a form so readable?’ I forget their names; but they were men of mark.”
From 1846 onwards Mrs. Ford’s health became a cause of ever-increasing anxiety. Changes of climate were tried without permanent benefit. For months together Ford was separated from his library. He still wrote articles for the Quarterly Review, but he attempted no larger work. Addington had apparently urged him to write a life of the Duke of Alva. His answer shows that he felt that a different standard of historical writing was forming, and that he had neither the youth nor the freedom from other duties to satisfy the new canons of criticism.
As for Alva (he writes, December 14th, 1848), I imagine that iron Duke will form a prominent figure in Prescott’s Philip II., on which he is hard at work. To write a new and real history, State-paper offices, archives, and family documents must be consulted all over the world. Neither eyes nor domestic businesses permit a sufficient lucid interval. It is something for a man who has idled away the best part of life to have put forth two red tomes, and be acknowledged as competent. Claudite jam rivos pueri, sat prata biberunt.
Mrs. Ford died January 23rd, 1849. Six months later his mother, Lady Ford, died at the age of eighty-two (July 13th, 1849). Business crowded upon him, so that he describes himself as “hung, drawn, and quartered by attorneys.” Solitary, depressed in spirits, worried by executorships and trusteeships, he wrote nothing, and went nowhere. But gradually his life resumed its usual course, though he made London, not Heavitree, his home. His pen was once more busy. The marriage of his two elder daughters interested and excited him.
“Great events” (he writes to Addington from 123, Park Street, December 1850) “have taken place here. My humble dwelling has become a perfect temple of Hymen. Cupid scatters orange blossoms plenis manibus. Both my girls are going to be married. Georgy,[51]—you know,—to Mowbray, son of our old friend, Henry Northcote; Minnie[52] to Edmund Tyrwhitt, next brother to Sir Henry, and cousin
R.R.Reinagle R.A.S. Pinx Emery Walker Ph Sc.