Another visitor whom I remember well at that and other times was the Rev. Henry Milman, the third son of Sir Francis Milman, who was, if I rightly recollect, physician to Queen Charlotte. I remember hearing him say (but this was long previously) that no man need think much about the gout, who had never had it till he was forty. His widow, Lady Milman, lived with her daughter many years at Pinner, near Harrow, and they were very old friends of my mother. She was a dear old lady with certain points of eccentricity about her. She used always to carry a volume of South’s sermons with her to church for perusal during the less satisfactory discourse of her more immediate pastor; and I am afraid was not sufficiently careful to conceal her preference. It must be over sixty years since, lunching one day at Pinner, I was much amused at her insisting that Abraham, the old one-eyed footman, who had lived in the family all his life, should kneel before the dining-room fire to warm her plate of pickled salmon! I remember walking with her shortly before her death in the kitchen garden at Pinner, when Saunders, the old butler, who had developed into a sort of upper gardener, was pruning the peach trees. “Oh! don’t cut that, Saunders,” said my lady; “I want to see those blossoms. And I shall never see them another year!” “Must come off, my lady,” said Saunders inexorably, as he sheared away the branch. “He never will let me have my way,” grumbled the little old lady, as she resumed her trot along the gravel walk under the peach wall. My lady, however, could assert herself sufficiently on some occasions. I happened to be at Pinner one day when Mrs. Archdeacon Hodgson, a neighbour, called somewhat earlier in the day than the recognised hour for morning visits. “Very glad to see you, my dear,” said my lady, rising to meet her astonished visitor, who was at least twice as big a woman as herself, I mean physically, “but you must not do this sort of thing again!”
Her third son, Henry Milman, who, having begun his career as the author of perhaps the best “Newdegate” ever written, was famous during the earlier part of it as a poet and dramatist, and during the latter portion of it (more durably) as an historian, was, with his very beautiful wife, one of our visitors at this period. He was at that time certainly a very brilliant man, but I did not like him as well as I did his elder brother, Sir William. I give only the impressions of an undergraduate, who was, I think, rather boyish for his age. But it seemed to me that the poet had a strain of worldliness in his character, and a certain flavour of cynicism (not incompatible, however, with serious views and earnest feeling on religious subjects), which were wholly absent from the elder brother, who wrote neither poems nor histories, but was to my then thinking a very perfect gentleman. “Nec vixit male qui natus moriensque fefellit.”
I find recorded in a diary of that time (November, 1832) some notes of a conversation with Henry Milman one evening when I, with my parents and sister, had been dining with Lady Milman at Pinner, which are perhaps worth reproducing here.
I asked him in the course of a long after-dinner conversation what he thought of Shuttleworth’s book on the Consistency of Revelation with Itself and with Human Reason, which formed the second volume of the series called the “Theological Library,” and which I had recently been reading. He said the work had a great many faults, one of the principal of which was its great difficulty. On this point I find, from other entries in my diary, that my undergraduate experience fully coincided with his more valuable judgment. The reasoning in a great many places was, he said, false; and in that part which treated of the Mosaic account of the creation of the world, the great question was entirely blinked. The abstract of moral duties appeared to him, he said, to be by far the most able part of the book. He considered Shuttleworth “a man of very limited reading.” And this perhaps he may have seemed to one of whom it used to be said jocosely in his own family that “Henry reads a book, not as other mortals do, line after line, but obliquely, from the left hand upper corner of a page to the right hand lower corner of the same!”
Milman, on the same occasion, spoke much of the decay of a love of learning in England generally, and particularly at Oxford. He said that no four men could be found there who were up to the European level of the day in any branch of learning—not even in theology. And speaking of England generally, he said that in no one public library in the country could the books requisite for a man, who wished to write a learned work on any subject whatever, be found. Germany was, and was, he thought, likely to remain, the great emporium of all learning.
As for the Church, he said that it would never be the profession that it had been—that it would not be his choice for a son of his; and that the law was the only profession for talent in these days. He observed that it was very remarkable that no change—no revolution—had ever passed over this country without adding power and wealth to that profession.
Here, also, I may record, if the reader will pardon the abruptness of a transition that hurries him from scholarly disquisition to antipodean regions of subject and social atmosphere, an expedition I and my brother Anthony made together, which recurs to my mind in connection with those days. But I think that it must have belonged to the Harrow Weald times before the return of my mother from America, because the extreme impecuniosity, which made the principal feature of it, would not have occurred subsequently. We saw—my brother and I—some advertisement of an extra-magnificent entertainment that was to take place at Vauxhall; something of so gorgeous promise in the way of illuminations and fireworks, and all for the specially reduced entrance fee of one shilling each person, that, chancing to possess just that amount, we determined to profit by so unique an occasion. Any means of conveyance other than legs, ignorant in those days of defeat, was not to be thought of. We had just the necessary two shillings, and no more. So we set off to walk the (at least) fourteen miles from Harrow Weald to Vauxhall, timing ourselves to arrive there about nine in the evening. Anthony danced all night. I took no part in that amusement, but contented myself with looking on and with the truly superb display of fireworks. Then at about 1 A.M. we set off and walked back our fourteen miles home again without having touched bite or sup! Did anybody else ever purchase the delight of an evening at Vauxhall at so high a price?
I did, however, much about the same time a harder day’s walk. I was returning from Oxford to Harrow Weald, and I determined to walk it, not, I think, on this occasion, deficiente crumenâ, but for pleasure, and to try my powers. The distance, I think, is, as near as may be, forty-seven miles. But I carried a very heavy knapsack—a far heavier one than any experienced campaigner would have advised. This was the longest day’s walk I ever achieved; and I arrived very tired and footsore. But the next morning I was perfectly well, and ready to have taken the road again. Upon this occasion I walked my first stage of twelve miles before breakfast; absolutely, that is to say, before breaking my fast. I think that not very many persons could do this, and I am sure that the few, who could do it, had much better not do so.
I have spoken of the immense change operated in the circumstances and surroundings of all of us by my mother’s return from America and the success of her first work, the Domestic Manners of the Americans. But, efficacious as this success was for producing so great a change, and sufficient as the continued success of her subsequent works was to rescue the whole of her family from the slough of ruin, in which my father’s farming operations, and to some extent, I suppose his injudicious commercial attempt at Cincinnati, had involved him, the results of this success were very far from availing to stem the tide of ruin as regarded his affairs. They were sufficient to relieve him from all expenses connected with the household or its individual members, but not to supply in addition to all these, the annual losses on the Harrow farm. Hence the break-up described by my brother Anthony in his Autobiography, and my father’s exodus from Harrow as there narrated.