Memoirs of Eighty Years

by Thomas Gordon Hake

This recalls Mr. Stillman to my mind, almost the only one of Rossetti’s set whom in this sense I can refer to with unmixed pleasure—Stillman, an American gentleman of high culture, and his faultless lady, a Greek by birth! He is now the Times correspondent in Rome. I have met him and lost sight of him often, and when I meet him after an interval of years, he is always the same kind, attentive friend, though we have no interests in common beyond each other.

It having been made known at Boston that I had certain scientific tendencies, I was invited to deliver a lecture there. It was not the season for such a purpose, but the influence of the Lawrences sufficed to get an audience together of about fifteen hundred. I gave a choice of some subjects, as “The Correlation of Forces, Physical and Vital,” “The Cyclical Phenomena of the Universe,” and “Sleep, Dreams, Somnambulism, Sleep-talking, and the Mesmeric State.” The last subject was selected, and the lecture was received with great politeness by an attentive audience.

I had intercourse with several leading medical gentlemen at Boston, and was treated by them with much hospitality. They have a method of maintaining hospitals peculiarly their own, much of the money being subscribed out of their own pockets—all for the good of their science.

Dr. Warren was at that time the most noted physician in Boston. He gave me some brochures of his writing, one alluding to the reflex actions of the great sympathetic nerve. I found it very suggestive. He had taken the trouble to collect all that had been written on the sea-serpent, and to sift the statements of travellers by sea, with a resulting belief in its individuality.

It was at New York that I made the valued and intimate acquaintance of Mr. Bancroft, the historian, and his lady, a truly noble pair. Mr. Bancroft was a man of universal knowledge. This he showed conspicuously in a lecture, the title of which I have forgotten, but not the contents. Its purpose was to show the rapid and far-reaching advance that science had made up to that day.

I met again at New York that gifted artist, Mr. Lawrence, whom I had known in England. He preceded Richmond, and was his equal in drawing likenesses in chalks—works which are much prized—among them those of Thackeray, Tennyson, and other celebrities.

I visited Quebec, and at Lord Elgin’s, the governor-general’s, had the pleasure of meeting the present Lord Albemarle, then a youth. At the same party I became acquainted with Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, who, later, becoming a writer, I may as well depict the impression he made on me. He was a little man, his manner very gentle and sympathetic, with such amiability of countenance as to leave little room for intellectual expression, though no doubt his abilities fell little short of his good intentions.

I must mention the kindness shown me at New York by the eminent house of Middleton and Co., whose friendship in financial matters I have availed myself of to this day. The family belong to the West Indian islands and are British.

I pass over my explorations in the south and west; they were the same as other people’s, now well known to book-life; but I do not forget that I once walked across the Mississippi, a mile wide, on the ice, from Wisconsin into Minnesota. There is another thing ever to be remembered: while at Philadelphia I was treated with a dish of terrapine, a small sort of turtle, surpassing the gigantic species in flavour to such a degree as to wholly eclipse its merits. Why is it not imported? The very taste of it would raise the feeblest palate from the dead!

It is nearly forty years since I saw the United States: I have had plenty of time to think over what I thought of them then. The enthusiastic admirers of America are men who, being a little eminent before going, receive an ovation on their arrival. These men adore the worthy republicans, write about them, mention their names in print in the order in which they bestowed their attentions on them. If these men who, being a little eminent, went to ever-glorious France and received an ovation, which they don’t, their enthusiasm would alike tingle at the roots of their hair.