The younger branch was represented more to one’s taste by the Rev. William Wallinger and his brother Arnold, a sergeant-at-law. John was too busily engaged on Calvin’s affairs to visit Seaford at this time, but William was in a manner settled there with his pupil, the young Lord Pelham. Other members of the family came there to make up a seaside season; among them the wife and daughters of William Roberts, who was Teller of the Exchequer, an office held by his father before him, both renowned epicures, who held to the axiom that a good cook was three hundred and sixty-five blessings a year. Mrs. Roberts was a sister of the Rev. John, and brought with her a string of seven daughters, all less beautiful than their mother. Then the family of Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary, added to the list of visitors, he being an old friend of all.
Mrs. Nussey was a very lovely woman. She was the daughter of Mr. Walker, her husband’s predecessor at court; in fact, the Walkers and Nusseys, in turn or together, had been apothecaries to the royal family time out of mind, and it was said that the late Mr. Walker was the only man who knew how to reach the vein in George the Fourth’s fat arm.
Nussey, whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and that the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable.
Nussey was a man deservedly esteemed; he had that gracious manner which comes often from enjoying the confidence of the great.
I must say a few words more about William Wallinger. Any attempt to describe his countenance would be made utterly in vain; it is in this that the artist may assert his superiority to the writer. No one ever saw him without surprise to find himself in company with so much grace and manly beauty. He was too gentlemanly for a king, too quietly self-possessed for a noble, too impressive in manner for any other human being but himself. He inherited a good fortune; he might have had the pick of the country in preferment had he so chosen, but he refused profitable livings, among others that of Stanmer, a village in Lord Chichester’s park, preferring modest pulpits and independence. He was much thought of by the people at Hastings for a period. There Lord Chichester had a chapel built for him; but he often changed his residence and varied his duties. He was attached to Tunbridge Wells, where his sister, Mrs. Jederé Fisher, resided at her seat called Great Culverden. She was the widow of Mr. Jederé Fisher, of Ealing Park, Middlesex, a charming residence, sold later on to Sir William Lawrence, the eminent surgeon, now cut up into streets and villas.
Her son is a well-known Kentish magnate.
XVIII.
As a rudiment of that vaulting ambition and its consequences which grew up in me by degrees, and has, I lament to say, remained with me, though now grown prudent and steady, the better aims of which I have striven to fulfil, I may mention here, in taking leave of my boyhood, that there was a bath at Islington called Peerless Pool, to which in summer the boys of the school were sent to bathe. It was a large mass of water, oblong in shape, with a wide promenade. There we would spend a whole afternoon, sent there by the authorities when the half-holiday was at hand. There, to excite the wonder and applause of the other boys, I punished myself by taking the longest run to the water’s edge that was obtainable within the enclosure, and leaping somersault fashion into the air to a great height, and reaching the water in a seated posture. In doing this I entailed on myself a punishment equal to being flogged. Being somewhat sheepish at the age of fifteen, I did not stand very high in the estimation of my uncle, General Gordon, while staying with him at Woolwich, when one day he took me down to the Thames to bathe. There was a platform, probably for the soldiers to jump from into the water; this afforded me a long run, and I resolved on performing my feat. My uncle was perfectly amazed at it, and often alluded to it with surprise in later years.