AN INTENSE YOUTHFUL FRIENDSHIP.—If I had reaped no other benefit from Christ Hospital, the school would be ever dear to me from the recollection of the friendships I formed in it, and of the first heavenly taste it gave me of that most spiritual of the affections. I use the word "heavenly" advisedly; and I call friendship the most spiritual of the affections, because even one's kindred, in partaking of our flesh and blood, become, in a manner, mixed up with our entire being. Not that I would disparage any other form of affection, worshiping, as I do, all forms of it, love in particular, which, in its highest state, is friendship and something more. But if ever I tasted a disembodied transport on earth, it was in those friendships which I entertained at school, before I dreamt of any maturer feeling. I shall never forget the impression it first made on me. I loved my friend for his gentleness, his candor, his truth, his good repute, his freedom even from my own livelier manner, his calm and reasonable kindness. It was not any particular talent that attracted me to him or anything striking whatsoever. I should say in one word, it was his goodness. I doubt whether he ever had a conception of a tithe of the regard and respect I entertained for him; and I smile to think of the perplexity (though he never showed it) which he probably felt sometimes at my enthusiastic expressions; for I thought him a kind of angel. It is no exaggeration to say, that, take away the unspiritual part of it—the genius and the knowledge—and there is no height of conceit indulged in by the most romantic character in Shakspeare, which surpassed what I felt toward the merits I ascribed to him, and the delight which I took in his society. With the other boys I played antics, and rioted in fantastic jests; but in his society, or whenever I thought of him, I fell into a kind of Sabbath state of bliss; and I am sure I could have died for him.
ANECDOTE OF MATHEWS.—One morning, after stopping all night at this pleasant house, I was getting up to breakfast, when I heard the noise of a little boy having his face washed. Our host was a merry bachelor, and to the rosiness of a priest might, for aught I knew, have added the paternity; but I had never heard of it, and still less expected to find a child in his house. More obvious and obstreperous proofs, however, of the existence of a boy with a dirty face, could not have been met with. You heard the child crying and objecting; then the woman remonstrating; then the cries of the child snubbed and swallowed up in the hard towel; and at intervals out came his voice bubbling and deploring, and was again swallowed up. At breakfast, the child being pitied, I ventured to speak about it, and was laughing and sympathizing in perfect good faith, when Mathews came in, and I found that the little urchin was he.
SHELLEY'S GENEROSITY.—As an instance of Shelley's extraordinary generosity, a friend of his, a man of letters, enjoyed from him at that period a pension of a hundred a year, though he had but a thousand of his own; and he continued to enjoy it till fortune rendered it superfluous. But the princeliness of his disposition was seen most in his behavior to another friend, the writer of this memoir, who is proud to relate that, with money raised with an effort, Shelley once made him a present of fourteen hundred pounds, to extricate him from debt. I was not extricated, for I had not yet learned to be careful; but the shame of not being so, after such generosity, and the pain which my friend afterward underwent when I was in trouble and he was helpless, were the first causes of my thinking of money matters to any purpose. His last sixpence was ever at my service, had I chosen to share it. In a poetical epistle written some years after, and published in the volume of "Posthumous Poems," Shelley, in alluding to his friend's circumstances, which for the second time were then straitened, only made an affectionate lamentation that he himself was poor; never once hinting that he had himself drained his purse for his friend.
MRS. JORDAN.—Mrs. Jordan was inimitable in exemplifying the consequences of too much restraint in ill-educated country girls, in romps, in hoydens, and in wards on whom the mercenary have designs. She wore a bib and tucker, and pinafore, with a bouncing propriety, fit to make the boldest spectator alarmed at the idea of bringing such a household responsibility on his shoulders. To see her when thus attired, shed blubbering tears for some disappointment, and eat all the while a great thick slice of bread and butter, weeping, and moaning, and munching, and eyeing at very bite the part she meant to bite next, was a lesson against will and appetite worth a hundred sermons, and no one could produce such an impression in favor of amiableness as she did, when she acted in gentle, generous, and confiding character. The way in which she would take a friend by the cheek and kiss her, or make up a quarrel with a lover, or coax a guardian into good humor, or sing (without accompaniment) the song of, "Since then I'm doom'd," or "In the dead of the night," trusting, as she had a right to do, and as the house wished her to do, to the sole effect of her sweet, mellow, and loving voice—the reader will pardon me, but tears of pleasure and regret come into my eyes at the recollection, as if she personified whatsoever was happy at that period of life, and which has gone like herself. The very sound of the familiar word 'bud' from her lips (the abbreviation of husband,) as she packed it closer, as it were, in the utterance, and pouted it up with fondness in the man's face, taking him at the same time by the chin, was a whole concentrated world of the power of loving.
RESIDENCE AT CHELSEA.—REMOTENESS IN NEARNESS.—From the noise and dust of the New Road, my family removed to a corner in Chelsea where the air of the neighboring river was so refreshing, and the quiet of the "no-thoroughfare" so full of repose, that, although our fortunes were at their worst, and my health almost of a piece with them, I felt for some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in the silence. I got to like the very cries in the street for making me the more aware of it for the contrast. I fancied they were unlike the cries in other quarters of the suburbs, and that they retained something of the old quaintness and melodiousness which procured them the reputation of having been composed by Purcell and others. Nor is this unlikely, when it is considered how fond those masters were of sporting with their art, and setting the most trivial words to music in their glees and catches. The primitive cries of cowslips, primroses, and hot cross buns, seemed never to have quitted this sequestered region. They were like daisies in a bit of surviving field. There was an old seller of fish in particular, whose cry of "Shrimps as large as prawns," was such a regular, long-drawn, and truly pleasing melody, that in spite of his hoarse, and I am afraid, drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it when it came. It lasted for some years, then faded, and went out; I suppose, with the poor old weather-beaten fellow's existence. This sense of quiet and repose may have been increased by an early association of Chelsea with something out of the pale; nay, remote. It may seem strange to hear a man who has crossed the Alps talk of one suburb as being remote from another. But the sense of distance is not in space only; it is in difference and discontinuance. A little back-room in a street in London is further removed from the noise, than a front room in a country town. In childhood, the farthest local point which I reached anywhere, provided it was quiet, always seemed to me a sort of end of the world; and I remembered particularly feeling this, the only time when I had previously visited Chelsea, which was at that period of life.... I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it was. I am afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into Chelsea, and Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent. But to complete my sense of repose and distance, the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have always loved best, familiar to the eyes of my parents, and associated with childhood. It had seats in the windows, a small third room on the first floor, of which I made a sanctum, into which no perturbation was to enter, except to calm itself with religious and cheerful thoughts (a room thus appropriated in a house appears to me an excellent thing;) and there were a few lime-trees in front, which in their due season diffused a fragrance.