At Manchester I find myself to have been much scandalised at a scene which I witnessed in the Collegiate Church there. There were seventeen couples to be married, and they were all married at once, the only part of the service individually performed being the “I take thee,” &c. &c. I perfectly well remember at this distance of time the bustling about of the clerk among them to insure that every male should be coupled to the right female. “After this wholesale coupling had been completed,” says my diary, “the daily service was begun, and was performed in a more indecent and slovenly way than I ever before witnessed, which is saying a great deal! While the Psalms were being sung the priest, as having nothing to do, walked out, and returned just in time to read the Lessons.” Such were the manners and habits of 1832.
A few weeks later I find an entry to the effect that, “while my father was reading Grandison to us in the evening I got M. Hervieu (the artist who did the illustrations for my mother’s Domestic Manners of the Americans and other books, and who chanced to be passing the evening with us en famille) to draw me a caricature illustrating the following passage of Beattie’s Minstrel:—
“And yet young Edwin was no vulgar boy;
Deep thought would often fix his youthful eye.
Dainties he heeded not, nor gaud, nor toy,
Save one short pipe!”
I possess this remarkable work of art to the present day!
At another page I stumble on the record of a conversation with the sexton of Leatherhead, whom, in one of my rambles, I found digging a grave in the churchyard there. Three shillings, I learned, was the price of a grave of the ordinary depth of five feet. Those, however, who could afford the luxury of lying deeper paid a shilling a foot more.
One more note from the diaries of those days I will venture to give, because it may be taken as a paraleipomenon to that Autobiography of my brother, which the world was kindly pleased to take some interest in:—
“Went to town yesterday [from Harrow], and among other commissions bought a couple of single-sticks with strong basket handles. Anthony much approves of them, and this morning we had a bout with them. One of the sticks bought yesterday soon broke, and we supplied its place by a tremendous blackthorn. Neither of us left the arena without a fair share of rather severe wales; but Anthony is far my superior in quickness and adroitness, and perhaps in bearing pain too. I fear he is likely to remain so in the first two, but in the third I am determined he shall not.”
Thus says the yellow fifty-seven-year-old page!
And I have literally thousands of such pages; voluminous records—among other matters—of walking excursions in the home counties, in Devon, in Wales, in Gloucestershire, and the banks of the Severn and Wye, not a page of which fails to bear its testimony to the curiously changed circumstances under which a pedestrian would now undertake such wanderings. I find among other jottings—deemed memorabilia at the time—that I carried a knapsack weighing twenty-eight pounds over the top of Plinlimmon, because I considered seven and sixpence demanded by the guide for accompanying me, excessive.
But ohe! jam satis. I will inflict no more upon the patient reader—the impatient will have skipped much of what I have already given him.