“Lambeth,” I replied promptly. “It sounds ecclesiastical, doesn’t it?”
“It did until your name was connected with it,” said the Bishop with a merry laugh.
And I left him wondering whether that was the reason Providence had translated me to the Camberwell New Road.
As for myself, I never want my name to be connected with Lambeth; but in so far as it will ever be remembered at all, I pray that it may find its way into some niche in those cyclopædias and other mausoleums of the famous under the title “Manchester.”
And I am not alone in thinking that “Farewell Manchester” is a sad phrase to utter. For when Charles Edward left Manchester in 1745 after those pleasant weeks of revelry among the gentry of Lancashire and Cheshire, the legend is that he rode sadly over the Derbyshire hills chanting that mournful lament the music of which the old prebendary
of Hereford set down in later years and called “Felton’s Gavot” or “Farewell Manchester.” But I picture the Pretender cantering along and rallying his friends about the Lancashire lasses, whose hearts they had conquered and whose ribbons they wore in their bonnets, and I believe it was only in after years that the mournful ballad spread round the countryside and the ballad-mongers sang of the young prince whose “tear-drops bodingly from their prisons start.”
It would be absurd for modern visitors to Manchester, rushing away from the city in a luxurious dining car, plunging beneath the Disley Golf Links and emerging among the picturesque Derbyshire crags, to throw themselves into the romantic humour of the heroes of ’45 and mingle tear-drops with their soup. But alone with your thoughts, if you have lived in the midst of Manchester and her people and experienced their gracious hospitality to the stranger that is within their gates, you may find yourself crooning old Felton’s Gavot, and learn that the song vibrates in a minor key and that the tear-drops can only be kept back by control.
It is a hard thing to say “Farewell!” in the right key. Many, many kindly letters I received when I went away, and all were full of gracious messages; but the one I best remember as saying the just word of complimentary reproof was a valedictory letter from the Secretary of the Crematorium, in which he wrote, “our committee feel very grieved that you should be leaving us in this manner.” I
quote from memory, and of course the wording may not be exactly accurate. But the idea was beautifully and delicately expressed, and to the hidden indictment in the letter I plead guilty and throw myself upon the mercy of the Court.