Memoirs of Eighty Years

by Thomas Gordon Hake

That beneficent duchess and her worthy successor, Miss Burdett-Coutts, were constant visitors at Brighton during the autumn.

I had many inducements to be at Brighton. I was acquainted with all the medical profession there; Dr. Price and the skilful Mr. Taylor, Mr. Lawrence, Mr. Furner, were my particular friends, and I knew the principal residents of the place.

I undertook the work of the dispensary, to which I was physician for five years, and I joined the Committee of the Sussex County Hospital, which was the pet establishment of such men as Lords Egremont and Chichester and Munster, of the Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Lawrence Peel, all of whom would spend a pleasant gossiping hour in the committee-room from time to time; none of whom forgot the wants of the institution.

While I was chairman of the committee it fell to me to read out a letter from Mr. Lawrence Peel, announcing his gift of, I think, two thousand pounds, as a mark of gratitude for Lady Jane Peel’s recovery from illness.

When I see a portrait of Lord Hartington, the massive countenance brings the Duke of Devonshire back into my mind. I need no portraiture, but the name to bring the Earl of Munster back to memory. These great men were as much at home with us all as they were with each other, enjoying the chat and the laugh without mannerism or hauteur.

It is through manners that all our intercourse is carried on, and one would suppose that they strictly represented the person. It is not so to any great extent; fashion influences them, and they become modified by imitation, so that they cease to be anything very different from current coin; like it, having the different qualities of silvery, coppery, or golden; the same person expressing himself in all three to different sorts of men—a guinea’s worth to the physician, a shilling’s worth to the beggar.

In my early days the tumid young men, rigged out in newest apparel, would go up and down Bond Street at a snail’s pace, doing no better than advertising their tailors. Like handsomely bound volumes, the contents inane, they were just as contemptible as the “sandwichers” who now take their place, bound in boards. None of these tumefied gentlemen ever walked in a hurry, confessedly because they would not have it supposed that they had anything to do. But they had; they smoked cigars in the open air, holding them in two fingers out of five, the other three spread out like a fan, the hand encased in lavender-tinted gloves guiltless of a crease. They smoked weeds which were lighter in weight than the silver they cost; they smoked them in Bond Street, they smoked them in the park; but as any lady of their acquaintance approached, they ostentatiously flung them into the road before raising the host—that is to say, the hat—a couple of inches nearer heaven.

I remember well the time when no gentleman was supposed to smoke; the habit was fit only for the vulgarian. By degree the young officer, the young squire, and the delicate-minded parvenu was seduced into the allurements of tobacco.