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MEMOIRS OF SIR WEMYSS REID 1842-1885

[Illustration: Wemyss Reid]

MEMOIRS OF SIR WEMYSS REID 1842-1885

EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY STUART J. REID

TO
Lady Reid,
THE DEVOTED WIFE OF
MY BROTHER,
THESE PAGES ARE INSCRIBED.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION.

The sense of personal loss occasioned by my brother's death is still so keen and vivid that if I am to write at all about him—and my duty in that respect is clear—it must be out of the fulness of my heart. My earliest recollections of him begin when I was a child and he was a bright, self-reliant lad in the home at Newcastle, the characteristics of which are with artless realism described in the opening pages of this book. It is the simple truth to say that we grew up in an atmosphere of love and duty. Our father was a man of studious habit, passing rich in the possession of a library of dry works on theology which his children never read, and among which they searched in vain for the fairy books and stories, or even the poetry, dear to the youthful heart. He was a faithful, rather than a gifted preacher, and I have always thought that his power—it was real and far-reaching—lay in his modest, unselfish life, and in that unfailing sympathy which kept him on a perpetual round of visits to the sick and sorrowful, year in, year out. He had a quiet sense of humour, and was never so happy as when he could steal a day off from the insistent claims of pastoral work for a ramble in the country with his boys.

Always a public-spirited man, and keenly interested in political affairs, he talked to us freely about the events of the time, and made us feel that the little affairs of our own home and immediate environment could never be seen in their true perspective until they were set against the larger life of the town, and, in a sense, of the nation. When any great event occurred he used to tell us all about it; when any great man died, if we did not know the significance of his life and the loss it meant to the country, it was not his fault. He was a quiet, rather reserved man, terribly in earnest, we thought, and with a touch of sternness about him which vanished in later life. He mellowed with the passing years, and long before old age crept quietly upon him the prevailing note of his character was charity. He had been in early life associated to some extent with the Press, and later had written one or two books, so that ink was in my brother's blood.

Our mother was almost his opposite in character. She was quick, almost imperious in temper, vivacious and witty of speech, full of sense and sensibility, in revolt—I see it now—against the narrow conditions of her lot, and yet bravely determined to do her best, not merely for her husband and children, but for the rather austere little community in which she was always a central figure. There was a charm about her to which all sorts and sizes of people surrendered at discretion, and she loved books more modern and more mundane than the dingy volumes on my father's shelves. She had received, what was more rare then than now, a liberal education, and, besides modern languages, had at least a moderate acquaintance with the classics. She held herself gallantly in the dim, half-educated society of her husband's chapel, but reserved her friendships—sometimes with a touch of wilfulness—for those who represented whatever there was of sweetness and light in the wider society of the town. In one respect she was absolutely in harmony with my father, and that was in her sympathy with the poor and in quiet, unparaded determination to hold out a helping hand to all that sought it. She had imagination, and she sent it on errands of good-will. I think my brother inherited from her his alertness of mind and not a little of his quickness of apprehension.

I can remember him coming back from Bruce's school all aglow with his prizes, and I can recall, as if it were but yesterday, his audacious speeches, and the new books with which, as soon as he earned a shilling, he began to leaven the dull old library, much to the delectation of the other children. I can recall a rough cartoon in one of the local journals which was greeted with huge merriment in the family circle, because it represented Tom as "Ye Press of Newcastle"—a mere boy in a short jacket perched on a stool, scribbling for dear life at the foot of a platform on which some local orator was denouncing the tyranny of the existing Government. He must then have been about seventeen, certainly not more, and he was even at that time somewhat of a youthful prodigy. Then he developed a passion for the collection of autographs, and used to write the most alluring letters to celebrities, and astound my modest father by the replies—they were invariably written as to a man of mature life and public importance—which he had elicited from eminent people in politics and the world of letters. He, a mere youth, invited a well-known Arctic explorer to Newcastle to lecture on his perils in the frozen North, and my father bought him his first hat to go to the railway station to meet the gallant sailor, who brought his pathetic relics of Franklin to our house, where he stayed as guest. The great man's chagrin when he found that a lad scarcely out of short jackets had invited him to Newcastle vanished in the genial firelight, and in the subsequent reception of the good townsfolk. Then my brother conceived the ambitious scheme of the West End Literary Institute, and by dint of energetic and persistent begging carried the project out, and with a high hand.

Suddenly, when he was still a young reporter, a great calamity befell the locality. The Hartley Colliery catastrophe plunged all Tyneside in gloom. He was the youngest reporter on the local Press, but his account of the long-drawn agony of that terrible time, when two hundred brave fellows lost their lives, was the most graphic. It brought him local renown. It was published as a shilling pamphlet, after it had done duty in the Newcastle Journal, and to his credit he gave, though as poor as a church mouse, the whole of the proceeds—a sum of £40, I think—to the Relief Fund. It was a characteristic act which was not belied by the subsequent generosity of his life. All too soon—for he brought as a young reporter a breezy, new atmosphere into the family circle—he went to Preston, on the principle of promotion by merit. Then Leeds claimed him, and next he settled in London, in the short-lived happiness of his early married life, returning to Yorkshire—this time as chief of the paper he had served so well. During his career as editor of the Leeds Mercury I saw comparatively little of him. We were both busy, though in different ways; but we kept up, then and always, a brisk correspondence, and his letters, all of them brimful of public interest and family affection, are before me now. The world is a different place to me now, but "memory is a fountain of perpetual youth" and nothing can rob me of its sweetness.

There is scarcely an incident recorded in these pages which he did not tell me at the time in familiar talk. There is much, also, that he has not set down here, all of it honourable to himself, which I could recount about those early days in Newcastle, and to a certain extent also in Leeds, where I was again and again his guest; but, as he has chosen to be silent, it is not for me to speak. Oddly enough, I never in my life heard him deliver a political speech, nor do I think he excelled in that direction. But he was admirable as a lecturer on literary subjects, and I have seen him again and again hold a large audience spellbound when his subject was Charlotte or Emily Brontë, Mrs. Carlyle, the Inner Working of an English Newspaper, the Character of General Gordon, or some other theme which appealed to him. He spoke rapidly and clearly, and between the years 1882 and 1886 gave his services without stint in this direction to the people of Leeds, Bradford, and other of the Yorkshire towns. The manuscripts of these lectures are before me as I write; they are all in his own hand, and they must have taken from an hour to an hour and a half in delivery. Yet one of the most important of them—it runs to between sixty and seventy closely written manuscript pages, and bears no marks of haste—was, as a note in his own hand at the outset shows, begun one day and finished the next—a proof, if any were needed, of his rapidity in work. He made many enthusiastic friends amongst the shrewd working people of the North by these deliverances.

The last twenty years of my brother's life are outside the present narrative. Two of them were spent in Leeds in ever-widening newspaper work, and the remaining eighteen in London, under circumstances he has himself described in another volume, which, for political reasons, is for the present withheld. It will appear eventually, and personally I feel no doubt whatever that it will take its place, quite apart from its self-revelation, as one of the most important and authentic records, in the political sense, of the later decades of Queen Victoria's reign. My brother's knowledge of the secret history of the Liberal party in the memorable days when Mr. Gladstone was fighting his historic battle for Home Rule, and during the subsequent Premiership of Lord Rosebery, was exceptional. He was the trusted friend of both statesmen, and probably no other journalist was so absolutely in the confidence of the leaders of the Liberal party—a circumstance which was due quite as much to his character as to his capacity. It is not my intention to anticipate the story, as he himself tells it, either of the "Hawarden Kite" or the Home Rule split, much less to disclose his opinions—they are emphatic and deliberate—of the men who made mischief at that crisis. I leave also untouched the plain, unvarnished account he gives, on unimpeachable authority, of a subsequent and not less discreditable phase in the annals of the Liberal party. There are reasons, obvious to everyone who gives the matter a moment's thought, that render it inadvisable in the interests of the political cause with which my brother all his life was identified, and for which he suffered more than is commonly known, to yield to the very natural temptation to throw reticence to the winds.

To one point only will I permit myself to make brief but significant allusion, for I cannot allow this book to go forth to the world with the knowledge that the publication of the companion volume is—through force of circumstances—for the present postponed, without at least a passing reference to what in the authoritative biography of Mr. Gladstone is called the "barren controversy" which arose in 1892, as to whether the present Duke of Devonshire, in 1880, tried to form a Government. That controversy was assuredly "barren" to my brother in everything but the testimony of a good conscience. He was assailed by almost the whole Press of the country for the part which he played in it, and not least mercilessly by journalists of his own party. As he said to me himself at the time, "If I had been Mr. Parnell, fresh from the revelations of the Divorce Court, I could not have been treated with greater contumely." If there was one thing on the possession of which he prided himself in life more than another, it was loyalty, and seldom was political loyalty subjected to a more cruel strain. He held his peace with all the materials for his own vindication in his hand, rather than embarrass Mr. Gladstone at a great political crisis.

The letters on which he based his statements are in existence. I wished to print them, without note or comment of mine, in an Appendix to the present volume, but permission has been withheld. They cannot remain for ever in ambush, and when they are published, with my brother's full and magnanimous comments, it will be apparent to all the world how greatly he was misjudged. It is enough for the present to say that Mr. Gladstone himself admitted in a note under his own hand that the interpretation which my brother put upon the facts submitted to him absolutely and entirely justified the course which he took in that controversy. Mr. Gladstone, as Mr. Morley somewhat drily states in his biography, "reckoned on a proper stoicism in the victims of public necessity," and I suppose my brother was regarded as thin-skinned, but a man may be forgiven a measure of sensitiveness when his honour is impeached.

He always used to speak with gratitude of the action of Lord Russell of Killowen at that period. He heard the gossip of the clubs, and was not content, like the majority of men, either to believe it or to dismiss the matter with a shrug of the shoulders. He sought my brother out at his own house, heard the whole story from his own lips—through an informal but stringent process of cross-examination—drew his own conclusions, and did more than anyone else to turn the tide of misrepresentation. Lord Russell never rested until Wemyss Reid was elected an honorary member of the Eighty Club, a distinction shared by only two or three persons, and one which did not a little to bring about, in the Liberal party at least, a quick reversal of public opinion. The chivalrous action of Lord Russell was all the more creditable as the two men at the time were only slightly acquainted. Other honours came to my brother within the next two years. The University of St. Andrews in 1893 conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., and in the following year he was knighted "for services to Letters and Politics."

It is a pleasure to hark back to the literary interests which grew around the later years of my brother in London. He went thither in 1887 to take control of the business of Messrs. Cassell & Company—a position of wide influence and hard work which he retained to the last day of his life. He used to tell me that he detested the City and the irksomeness of keeping office hours, but he stuck manfully to his post, and his presence at the desk there lent a lustre even to the traditions of a great publishing house. I betray no confidences when I say that at first he found his new duties somewhat uncongenial. He had won his spurs as a journalist, he was fond of the cut and thrust of party politics, he missed the rush of public life, and he felt that perhaps he had been ill-advised in quitting the editorial saddle. But this feeling of depression quickly wore off when he set himself, with characteristic energy, to master the details of his new work, though to the last he often cast longing glances backwards to the years in which he inspired the policy of a great daily newspaper. Before he left Leeds—and here I may say that he did not leave without substantial proof of the esteem in which he was held—he accepted two literary commissions, either of which would have satisfied most men and absorbed all their energies for a term of years.

One was the preparation of an authoritative biography of Mr. Forster, the other a similar work—less political and more literary—on the first Lord Houghton. He was, of course, in a position to speak from close personal knowledge of both men, and in each case all their private letters and papers were placed at his discretion. He found relief from the prosaic details of a business career in these congenial tasks, if such a term is applicable to what in reality were labours of love. Both were big books, and the marvel is how, with all that he had in hand at the time, he contrived to write them. But the passion for work was the zest of his life, and it was never turned to more admirable account than in these labours. "The Life of the Right Hon. W. E. Forster" was published in 1888, and "The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Lord Houghton" in 1890, and both met with a reception which it is hardly within my province to describe. It is enough to say that they widened his reputation, added materially to his influence, and, best of all, brought him many new and powerful friends.

Almost before he had finished writing the second of these books, at the instance of Mr. Bryce (with whom his relations were always most close and cordial) and other well-known men in the Liberal party, he, in conjunction with Sir John Brunner, founded the Speaker, a weekly journal which was started on similar lines to the Spectator, but devoted to the advocacy of the Home Rule cause, and broadly of the policy of Mr. Gladstone. The first number was published on January 4th, 1890, and from that time until October, 1899, he alone was responsible for its editorial control. He gathered around him a brilliant staff of contributors; he used laughingly to say that he was over-weighted by them, and, if I may venture a criticism, he gave them too free a hand. Contemporary politics were discussed amongst others by Mr. Morley, Mr. Bryce, Mr. J. A. Spender, and Mr. Herbert Paul. Literary criticism, economic questions, and other phases of public affairs, were handled by Sir Alfred Lyall, Mr. Birrell, Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. James Payn, Mr. Henry James, Mr. J.M. Barrie, Mr. Quiller-Couch, Mr. Sidney Webb, Mr. L. F. Austin, Mr. A. B. Walkley, and a score of young writers; whilst men like the late Lord Acton and Principal Fairbairn, and occasionally Mr. Gladstone himself, lent further distinction to its pages. No one worked harder in those days for the Speaker than my brother's ever loyal assistant in its direction, Mr. Barry O'Brien, whose intimate knowledge of the trend in Irish politics was invaluable. I shall not anticipate by any comments of my own the vivid and always genial pen-and-ink pictures which are given of the chief members of the Speaker staff in that part of the Memoirs which yet remains unprinted.

I prefer to fall back in this connection on a little bit of reminiscence, printed in one of the daily papers on the morrow of my brother's death. It was written by Mr. L. F. Austin, who alas! has so quickly followed him to the grave. "Some months ago, feeling himself under sentence of death, Sir Wemyss Reid applied his leisure to the task of completing his Memoirs. 'Here is a chapter that may interest you,' he said to me one day, producing a roll of manuscript. It did interest me very much, and when it comes to be published it will be read with no little emotion by the men who formed the regular staff of the Speaker under Sir Wemyss Reid's editorship. He deals with us all in turn in a spirit of the kindliest remembrance and simple goodwill; and as I read those pages, I felt they were his farewell to some of the men who have good reason to think of him as the staunchest of friends." I was in very close association with my brother during the whole of the ten years in which he retained control of the Speaker, and took my full share of the work. They were for him years of strenuous and unremitting toil, but he used to say that there were few greater rewards for a man of his temperament than to be in the thick of the political movement, and to be in the front rank of the fighters. He adopted as his motto in life "Onwards"—the watchword of his old school at Newcastle, emblazoned on the back of the prizes which he took in far-off days; and from first to last he lived up to it. Brusque he sometimes was, decisive always; perhaps he was too easily ruffled in little affairs, but he was magnanimous to the point of self-sacrifice in great. After quitting, under circumstances entirely honourable to himself, the editorial chair of the Speaker, my brother, who for years previously had been an occasional contributor to the pages of the Nineteenth Century, contributed regularly to that review a political survey of the month. Some of his best work was put into these articles, and the last of them was written under great physical stress, and appeared almost simultaneously with the announcement of his death. It was the last task to which he put his hand, and the wish of his life was granted: he died in harness.

It is not too much to say that neither his interest nor his influence in political affairs suffered the least abatement in the six closing years of his life, which bridged the distance between his relinquishment of the Speaker and the hour when he finally laid down his pen. The withheld portion of this Autobiography makes that abundantly clear, for, as in a mirror, it reflects the secret history of the Liberal party. His relations with Lord Rosebery, both during and after that statesman's brilliant but difficult Administration, were singularly intimate and cordial—a circumstance which invests with peculiar interest the final chapters which he wrote. They throw a dry light on the political intrigues which occurred after Mr. Gladstone's retirement; they reveal the difficulties—both open and unsuspected—which beset his successor. Lord Rosebery has written me a letter, and I have his permission to quote from it:—"I can only dwell on the sterling notes of courage and friendship. As to the first, he had taken part in many controversies, which it is now unnecessary to revive, and borne himself gallantly in them. But before his life ended he was to display a rarer quality. In September, 1903, he wrote to me that he could only count on a few weeks longer of life—that he was condemned by all doctors…. He partially recovered from that attack, though from that day he was doomed to speedy death. I saw him in February for the last time, not long before the end. He told me, as he always did, that he did not feel amiss, but that his doctors all unanimously condemned him to a short shrift; that his friend Sir Frederick Treves was putting him under a new treatment, from which he hoped to derive some benefit; but that, whatever happened, he should go on writing as if nothing were wrong until the end came. That did not long tarry. In the evening of Thursday, February 23rd, he was taken ill, and before ten o'clock on Sunday morning he was dead. During the seventeen months which elapsed from the time of the doom pronounced by his physicians until its fulfilment, Wemyss Reid so demeaned himself that none could have penetrated his secret. He was as gay and high in spirit, as strenuous in work, as thoughtful for others, as ever; so that those who knew the fatal truth could not bring themselves to believe it. He was at work for the Nineteenth Century the day before he was taken with his final attack. But he himself, cheerful and smiling, never lost the certainty that death hung over him by a thread.

"So much for his courage; and now for the other note that I would touch—his friendship. His ideal of friendship was singularly lofty and generous. He was the devoted and chivalrous champion of those he loved; he took up their cause as his own, and much more than his own; he was the friend of their friends and the enemy of their enemies. No man ever set a higher value on this high connection, which, after all, whether brought about by kinship, or sympathy, or association, or gratitude, or stress, is under Heaven the surest solace of our poor humanity; and so it coloured and guided the life of Wemyss Reid. His chief works were all monuments to that faith; it inspired him in tasks which he knew would be irksome and which could scarcely be successful, or which, at least, could ill satisfy his own standard. This is a severe test for a man of letters, but he met it without fail…. All this seems lame and tame enough when I read it over. But it was true and vivid when Wemyss Reid was living, and giving to his friends the high example of a brave and unselfish life. Among them, his memory will be a precious fact, and an inheritance long after any obituary notice is forgotten. It will live as long as they live; he would scarcely have cared to be remembered by others." Lord Rosebery's kindness to my brother—it was constant, delicate, and unwavering—can never be forgotten by any of his relatives. He was the first visitor to the house of mourning on Sunday, February 26th; he came in haste, with the hope that he might still be in time to see my brother alive.

Here, perhaps, is the place to mention some other of his friends: I mean, of course, those with whom he was most intimate in his closing years. It may be I have forgotten some; if so, I need scarcely add that it is without intention. But I do not like to end without at least recalling his close relations with Lord Burghclere, Mr. Bryce, Sir Henry Fowler, Mr. Edmund Robertson, Sir Henry Roscoe, Sir Norman Lockyer, Sir Frederick Treves, Sir John Brunner, Principal Fairbairn, Dr. Guinness Rogers, the Rev. R. H. Hadden, Mr. W. H. Macnamara, Mr. Douglas Walker, Mr. J. C. Parkinson, Mr. G. A. Barkley, Mr. Charles Mathews, Mr. J. A. Duncan, Mr. Edwin Bale, Mr. Barry O'Brien, Mr. Herbert Paul, Mr. J. A. Spender, and last, but certainly not least, Mr. Malcolm Morris, who was with him at the end. James Payn, William Black, Sir John Robinson represent the losses of the last few years of his life; all of them were men with whom—literature and politics apart—he had much in common.

It is impossible to cite the Press comments on the morrow of my brother's death, but room at least must be found for one of them—the generous tribute of his friend Mr. J. A. Spender in the Westminster Gazette:—

"I well remember how bravely and serenely he bore his death-sentence and how modestly he communicated it to his friends, as if an apology were needed for speaking of anything so personal. And then he picked himself up and started again, determined that his work should go forward and his interests lose none of their edge, though his days were short. He was the last man in the world to think of such a thing; and yet to many of us he seemed the perfect example of how a man should bear himself in such a strait. I have heard young men speak of him as old-fashioned, and, judged by some modern standards, his virtues were indeed those of the antique world. He loved his profession for its own sake, believed in its influence and dignity, hated sensationalism—whether in politics or in newspapers—would rather that any rival should gain any advantage over him than that he should divulge a secret or betray the confidence of a friend. And so he came to be the confidant and adviser of many eminent men who were attached to him for his sterling qualities of head and heart, for his knowledge, his integrity, his admirable common-sense. Of all his qualities none was more attractive than the staunchness of his friendship. To those whom he really liked, old or young, eminent or obscure, Wemyss Reid was always the same, a champion who would brook no slight, and whose help was readiest when times were worst. A literary man, he was quite without literary jealousy, and never so happy as when giving a hand-up to a new writer or a young journalist. All of us who knew him are in his debt—neque ego desinam debere."

I will permit myself to make one other quotation, and only one. In September, 1903, we lost our only sister. We three brothers had been at her funeral in Scotland; it was the last time we were all together. I lunched a day or two later with him at the Reform Club, and though, like myself, he was naturally depressed, he spoke cheerfully, and there was nothing to hint that he was more than tired. Three days later, September 19th, he wrote me a long letter, which began with the words, "Heaven knows, I do not want to add to your anxieties at the present moment, but I think I ought to tell you what has happened to me." He then went on to say that his friend Mr. Malcolm Morris had met him at the Club on the same day that I was there, and, startled by his appearance, had asked him a number of questions. Mr. Morris had been abroad and had not seen him for some time, but he insisted on an immediate visit to a specialist, and this was arranged for the following Saturday, the day on which he wrote the letter from which I am citing. He was told at that interview that his condition was most serious, even critical—in fact, that he had not long to live. So he wrote, "I have clearly to put my house in order, and to wait as calmly as possible for what may happen. The thing has come upon me very suddenly in the end, but I have had forebodings for some time past. You remember what I said to you on my way to Kilmarnock last week? I want nobody to worry about me personally. If my work is to come to an end soon, it will at least have been a full day's work. I know I can count on your brotherly love and sympathy."

Lady Reid and his children were at the moment from home. I went to him at once; he was sitting alone in his house, and he received me with a smile. He talked calmly and without a shadow of fear, and with no hint of repining. He had gathered from the specialist that he had only a few weeks at the most to live, and he told me that as he rode away in a hansom from the house where he had received what he called his sentence of death, he looked at the people in the street like a man in a dream, and with a curious feeling of detachment from the affairs of the world. But he rallied, and went about his work as usual, was as keenly interested as ever in the politics of the hour, and gave to those who knew how much he suffered an example of submission and fortitude which is not common.

Naturally I saw much of him in his closing days, and in talk with me he nearly always turned to the old sacred memories which we had in common. When I was a mere youth and he at the beginning of his career as a journalist, I remember his telling me never to forget that blood was thicker than water. His letters to me during thirty years, and many practical deeds as well, if I were to publish the one or to state the other, would prove how constantly he himself bore that in mind. Others can speak of his gift as a raconteur, his superb power of work, his moral courage, his quick capacity in the handling of public questions; all this I know, and I know besides, better perhaps than anyone else who is likely to speak, his intense family affection, his real though unparaded loyalty to conviction, and the magic of a kindliness which was never so apparent as when the way was rough and the heart was sore.

All the letters which arrived after his death—and they came in battalions—were quick with the sense of personal loss. They came from all sorts of people—from school-fellows in the distant Newcastle days, and obscure folk who had their own story to tell of his kindness, to statesmen of Cabinet rank, and men whose names are famous in almost every walk of life. Personally, I think I was most touched by the remark of a poor waiter, "a lame dog" whom, it seems, he had helped over a difficult stile in life, and who declared that he was "one in a thousand." Assuredly, as far as courage and sympathy are concerned, those simple words were true.

STUART J. REID.

Blackwell Cliff, East Grinstead. October 12th, 1905.

AUTHOR'S PREFACE

One who tries to tell the story of his life and of his personal experiences, public and private, undertakes a task of rare difficulty. Now that I have completed the work that I set myself to perform some years ago, I recognise more fully than I did at the outset the greatness of this difficulty, and I am only too conscious that, at the best, I have succeeded but partially in overcoming it. The egotism which is inseparable from a narrative written, as this necessarily is, in the first person, is perhaps the most obvious of all the defects which it must present to the reader. Quite frankly I may say that, on reading these pages, I am filled with something like confusion by the extent to which I have been forced to bring my own personality, my own sayings and doings, even into those chapters which deal with public affairs. I can only plead in extenuation of my offence that I do not see how it could have been avoided in that which is neither more nor less than an Autobiography. I may add that I have tried always to speak the truth, and have never consciously magnified my own part in the transactions upon which I have touched.

The closing chapters of the story have been written under what seemed to be the shadow of approaching death. Indeed, at one time I had no hope that I could live to complete my task. No man who writes thus, on the verge of another world, would willingly swerve by so much as a hair's-breadth from what he believes to be the truth. But human nature and human limitations remain the same from the beginning to the end of life, and I am fully conscious of the fact that the soundness of my judgments upon affairs and my fellow-men is not less open to impeachment to-day than when I was moving in the main current of human activity. If in anything that I have written I have wronged any of my fellow-creatures it has been absolutely without intention on my part, and I can only hope that they will vindicate themselves, after the publication of these pages, as quickly and completely as possible.

I have had no exciting story to tell, and no personal triumphs to chronicle. My simple desire has been to write of the persons and events of my own time in the light in which they appeared to my own eyes, and by doing so to give possibly some information regarding them which may be new to many of my readers. I have been always much more of a spectator than of an actor in the arena; but it has been my lot to be very near, for many years, to those who were actively engaged in that "high chess game whereof the pawns are men"; and we have authority for the belief that the onlooker sees more than the actual player of the drama he describes.

I must add that nowhere, except in a few cases in which I make special mention of the fact, have I trusted to mere hearsay evidence. I have confined myself to that which I know to be the truth, either from my personal observation or from documents of unimpeachable authority. My opinions may be of very little value, but my facts are, I believe, incontrovertible.

WEMYSS REID.

26, Bramham Gardens, South Kensington, January 1st, 1905.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. EARLY DAYS. Birth and Parentage—Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 'Forties—A Visit to St. Andrews—The Scottish Sabbath—First Acquaintance with a Printing Office—Tyneside in the Mid-Century—In Peril of Housebreakers—At Dr. Collingwood Bruce's School—A Plague of Flies—Cholera—Fire.

CHAPTER II. PROBATION. Aspirations After a Journalistic Life—A Clerk's Stool in the W.B. Lead Office—Literary Ambitions—An Accepted Contribution—The Northern Daily Express and its Editor—Founding a Literary Institute—Letters from Charles Kingsley and Archbishop Longley—Joseph Cowen and his Revolutionary Friends—Orsini—Thackeray's Lectures and Dickens's Readings.

CHAPTER III. MY LIFE-WORK BEGUN. On the Staff of the Newcastle Journal—In a Dilemma—Lord John Russell and Mr. Gladstone at Newcastle-upon-Tyne—Mr. Gladstone's Triumphal Progress—A Memorable Colliery Disaster: A Pit-Sinker's Heroism—Adventure at a Dickens Reading.

CHAPTER IV. FROM REPORTER TO EDITOR. First Visit to London—The Capital in 1862—Acquaintance with Sothern—Bursting of the Bradfield Reservoir—Attendance at Public Executions and at Floggings—Assuming the Editorship of the Preston Guardian—Political and Literary Influences—Great Speeches by Gladstone and Bright—Bright's Contempt for Palmerston—Robertson Gladstone Defends his Brother—Death of Abraham Lincoln—Meeting with his Granddaughter.

CHAPTER V. WORK ON THE LEEDS MERCURY My New Duties—Betrothal—The Writing of Leading Articles—The Founder of the Leeds Mercury—Edward Baines the Second—Thomas Blackburn Baines—Patriotic Nonconformists—Another Colliery Disaster: A Story of Heroism—An Abortive Fenian Raid at Chester—Reminiscences of the Prince of Wales's Visits to Yorkshire—Mr. Bright and the Reform Demonstrations of 1866—The Closing Speech at St. James's Hall—The Tribune of the People Vindicates the Queen.

CHAPTER VI. LIFE IN LONDON. Appointed London Correspondent of the Leeds Mercury—My Marriage—Securing Admission to the Reporters' Gallery—Relations between Reporters and Members—Inadequate Accommodation for the Press—Reminiscences of the Clerkenwell Explosion—The Last Public Execution—The Arundel Club—James Macdonell—Robert Donald—James Payn—Mrs. Riddell and the St. James's Magazine—My First Novel—How Sala Cut Short an Anecdote—Disraeli as Leader of the House in 1868—A Personal Encounter with him at Aylesbury—Mr. Gladstone's First Ministry—Bright and Forster—W.E. Baxter—Irish Church Disestablishment Debate in the House of Lords—Mr. Mudford—Bereavement.

CHAPTER VII. EDITOR OF THE LEEDS MERCURY. Forming Good Resolutions—Provincial Journalism in the 'Seventies— Recollections of the Franco-German War—The Loss of the Captain and its Consequences to me—Settling Down at Leeds—Acquaintance with Monckton Milnes—Visits to Fryston—Lord Houghton's Chivalry—His Talk—His Skill in Judging Men—Stories about George Venables—Lord Houghton's Regard for Religious Observances.

CHAPTER VIII. MY FIRST CONTINENTAL TOUR. A Generous Scot—Paris after the Commune—An Uncomfortable Journey Home—Illness of the Prince of Wales—Revived Popularity of the Throne—Death and Funeral of Napoleon III.—Burial of the Prince Imperial—Forster's Educational Policy—Bruce's Licensing Bill—My Second Marriage.

CHAPTER IX. A NEW ERA IN PROVINCIAL JOURNALISM. Bringing the Leeds Mercury into Line with the London Dailies—Friendship with William Black—The Dissolution of 1874—The Election at Leeds—Mr. Chamberlain's Candidature for Sheffield—Mr. Gladstone's Resignation—Election of his Successor—Birth of the Caucus—The System Described—Its Adoption at Leeds—Its Effect upon the Fortunes of the Liberal Party—The Bulgarian Atrocities Agitation.

CHAPTER X. CONTRIBUTIONS TO BRONTË LITERATURE. Visit to Haworth—Feeling Against the Brontës in Yorkshire—Miss Nussey and her Discontent with Mrs. Gaskell's "Life"—Publication of "Charlotte Brontë: a Monograph"—Mr. Swinburne's Appreciation—An Abortive Visit to the Poet—Lecture on Emily Brontë and "Wuthering Heights"—Miss Nussey's Visit to Haworth after Charlotte's Marriage.

CHAPTER XI. VISITS TO THE CONTINENT. Politics in Paris in 1877—An Oration by Gambetta—the Balloting—The Republic Saved—Gambetta's Funeral—A Member of the Reform Club—The Century Club—A Draught of Turpentine and Soda—The "Press Gang" at the Reform—James Payn and William Black—George Augustus Sala and Sir John Robinson—Disraeli's Triumph in 1878—A European Tour.

CHAPTER XII. A CHAPTER OF MISFORTUNES. Death of my Sister's Husband and of my Brother James—An Accident on Marston Moor—Sir George Wombwell's Story of the Charge of the Light Brigade—His Adventure on the Ouse—Editing a Daily Newspaper from a Sick Bed—Reflections on Death—Death of my Mother—Serious Illness of my Only Daughter.

CHAPTER XIII. THE GENERAL ELECTION OF 1880. Mr. Gladstone's Position in 1879—His Decision to Contest Midlothian—How he came to be Adopted by the Leeds Liberals—The Conversation Club—A Visit from John Morley—The Dissolution of 1880—Lecture on Mr. Gladstone—His Triumphant Return for Leeds—His Election for Midlothian—Mr. Herbert Gladstone Adopted as his Successor at Leeds—Mr. Gladstone's Visit to Leeds in 1881—A Fiasco Narrowly Avoided—A Wonderful Mass Meeting—Mr. Gladstone's Collapse and Recovery—My Introduction to Him—An Excursion to Tunis—"The Land of the Bey"—Mr. A.M. Broadley's Prophecies—Howard Payne's Grave—A Series of Coincidences.

CHAPTER XIV. CONCERNING W.E. FORSTER AND OTHERS. The Beginning of Mr. Stead's Journalistic Career—His Methods—Birth of the New Journalism—Madame Novikoff and Mr. Stead—Mr. Stead's Attacks upon Joseph Cowen—How he dealt with a Remonstrance—W. E. Forster—Mr. Chamberlain's Antagonism—The Leeds Mercury's Defence of Forster—How he was Jockeyed out of the Cabinet—Forster's Resignation—News of the Phoenix Park Murders—Forster's Reflections—Mr. Gladstone's Pity for Social Outcasts—Mr. Chamberlain's Brothers Blackballed at the Reform—Failure of an Attempt to Crush the Leeds Mercury—Forster's Gratitude.

CHAPTER XV. THE FIRST LIBERAL IMPERIALIST. Forster a Pioneer of Liberal Imperialism—His Political Courage—His Unfortunate Manner—His Home Life—Intrigues in the Cabinet—The Plots against Forster's Life—Reaction in his Favour—Forster and Lord Hartington—The Former's Grief for Gordon—Forster and Lord Rosebery—Mr. Stead and the Pall Mall Gazette—His Responsibility for the Gordon Imbroglio.

CHAPTER XVI. NOVELS AND NOVELISTS. "The Lumley Entail"—"Gladys Fane"—My Experience in Novel-Writing—About Sad Endings—Imaginary Characters and Characters Drawn from Life—Visits from William Black and Bret Harte—Black as an After-Dinner Speaker—How Bret Harte saw Haworth Parsonage, and was Roughly Entreated by a Yorkshire Admirer—A Candid Opinion on the Brontë Monograph.

CHAPTER XVII. TO THE DEFEAT OF THE GOVERNMENT (1885). More Antagonism towards Forster—A Household Suffrage Demonstration at Leeds—A Meeting at the Carlton Club and a Coincidence—Forster and "the most Powerful Man in England"—Single-Member Constituencies and the Cumulative Vote—Dynamite Outrages—Police Protection for Statesmen—I Receive Threatening Letters and Get a Fright—Death of Lord Houghton—Lord Derby and how he was Misunderstood—An Unconventional Dinner at Lord Houghton's—A Visit to Tangier—In Peril of the Sea—Gibraltar "a Magnificent Imposture"—Captain W. and the M.P.—To the North Cape—Cheering a Funeral Party—News of Mr. Gladstone's Overthrow—Home Again.

MEMOIRS OF SIR WEMYSS REID.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

EARLY DAYS.

Birth and Parentage—Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 'Forties—A Visit to St.
Andrews—The Scottish Sabbath—First Acquaintance with a Printing
Office—Tyneside in the Mid-Century—In Peril of Housebreakers—At Dr.
Collingwood Bruce's School—A Plague of Flies—Cholera—Fire.

It was in the old town, now the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne that I first saw the light—March 29, 1842. My father, the Rev. Alexander Reid, was trained first at the University of St. Andrews, under Dr. Chalmers, and afterwards at Highbury College, London, under Dr. Pye-Smith, for the Congregational ministry. On leaving College he settled in 1830 at Newcastle, and there remained for half a century a faithful and honoured preacher, retiring in 1880 amid the esteem of the whole community on Tyneside. He died in 1887 under the roof of my younger brother Stuart, at Wilmslow, Cheshire, a year which was memorable to me in other than a sorrowful sense, since it was then that I settled in London. It was said of my father at the time of his death, in one of the Newcastle papers, that for a man to be in difficulty or sorrow was a passport to his help and sympathy. My mother was the daughter of Thomas Wemyss, of Darlington, a well known Biblical scholar and critic, a kinsman of the poet Campbell, and a direct descendant of the Stewarts of Ascog, Bute, a family which traced its descent in unbroken succession—with the bar sinister at the start—from Robert II. of Scotland.

Of the six children who grew up in the austerely simple but happy surroundings of my father's home, the eldest, Mary, was the daughter of my father by a previous marriage; she married the Rev. William Bathgate, D.D., of Kilmarnock, and died as recently as 1903, to my great sorrow. My elder brother James, with whom I was most closely associated in boyhood and youth, was always more or less of an invalid, and died at Leeds in 1880—the year in which our mother also passed away. I came next in the family, and my younger brothers are Alexander, now manager of the Dublin and Wexford Railway, and Stuart, who, like myself, has followed journalism and literature. It only remains for me to mention the youngest member of the family, John Paul, a bright and affectionate little fellow of thirteen, whose loss in 1868 threw a shadow over the home which only the passage of long years softened.

Newcastle, in those days, was scarcely a third of its present size, and the river Tyne, which is now a mere ditch, hemmed in on either side by great manufactories, shipbuilding yards, and wharves, from its mouth to a point above Newcastle, was then a fair and noble river, which watered green meadows and swept past scenes of rural beauty. The house in which I was born stood in Elswick Row, and in the year of my birth—1842—that terrace of modest houses formed the boundary-line of the town on the west. Beyond it was nothing but fields and open country. There was no High Level Bridge in those days, spanning the river and forming a link in the great iron highway between the English and Scotch capitals; nor had so much as the first stone of the famous Elswick Ordnance and Engineering Works been laid. The future Lord Armstrong, whom I met at dinner not long ago, looking hardly older than when I first saw him, was then a solicitor, whose office stood in Westgate Street, and whose dreams could scarcely have foreshadowed his ultimate destiny. Richard Granger was just completing that great reconstruction of the centre of the town which gave Newcastle so noble and unprovincial an appearance; but the fine streets he had constructed—finer than any others to be found in England at that period—were still untenanted, and it was melancholy in walking along Clayton Street to see nine houses out of ten mere empty shells without doors or windows.

My earliest recollections start out of the void with great distinctness on one particular day. It was my third birthday, and I can still recall vividly the two boys—myself and my brother James—who were playing together in the garden in front of the pleasant house we then occupied in Summerhill Terrace, when I was called into the drawing-room to receive my birthday gifts.

It is not, however, with the memories of a child that I wish to entertain my readers, except in so far as they may have some intrinsic interest of their own. Dimly I can recall the year of storm and stress on the Continent, when thrones were toppling and the tide of revolution threatened a general catastrophe; vaguely, too, I remember the firing of the guns from the old castle, which announced the death of Queen Adelaide in 1849; but it was not until 1850 that my real life may be said to have begun. In the spring of that year I went on a long visit to my paternal grandfather at St. Andrews, where his family had been settled for many generations. In the station of Berwick-upon-Tweed the luggage of passengers was examined in order to see that whiskey was not being smuggled across the Border, and I was filled with childish wonder as I watched the process.

St. Andrews, as it was in 1850, bore little resemblance to the well-known pleasure resort of to-day. So far as I can remember, there was not a modern building in the city, and as a picture of an old-world Scottish town it was without a flaw. No club-house faced the sea, nor were there the fashionable residences which adorn the modern St. Andrews. The grass grew and the oats ripened where now stretch the long terraces devoted to summer lodgings for the visitors. North Street and South Street were the two city thoroughfares, if thoroughfares they could be called, seeing that even in them the green weeds grew freely. Antiquity and repose characterised the place as a whole, though in the winter months the stir of young life filled the little city, troops of red-cloaked students passing to and fro between the grey, weather-beaten halls of the University and their lodgings. At the end of South Street stood the ruins of the cathedral with the fine tower, in which the beams of some great vessel of the Spanish Armada, wrecked on the neighbouring Bell Rock, were carefully preserved, and the graceful arches of the sacred building, for the destruction of which John Knox was responsible. Many generations of my forefathers slept side by side in one particular portion of the cathedral grounds, and here my grandfather used to bring me to play among the tombs and to spell out the names of kinsmen who had died a century or more before my own earthly pilgrimage began. The whole place, with its noble ruins of castle and cathedral, its grey and empty streets, its venerable halls, its green links and fine coast-line, made a profound impression upon my imagination as a child. To this day I can recall not only the scene itself, but the sounds, the colours, the briny odours, the very atmosphere of the place.

Golf was then, as now, the one great amusement of the citizens, though there was this difference between the past and the present. In those days the game was almost unknown to the rest of the world, and to all intents and purposes St. Andrews had a monopoly of it. [Footnote: Blackheath, of course, had then, as now, its ancient golf club.] We all talked golf, even if we did not all play it. The shop-boys rose betimes of a summer's morning to enjoy a round on the links before breakfast, and learned professors and staid ministers gave their afternoons to the same absorbing pursuit. Child though I was, even I had my clubs, and played in my own fashion at the game.

My grandfather, who had retired from his business as a manufacturer of flax some years before, had a number of poor relations and dependents whom he frequently visited, taking me with him as a companion. Many of these were weavers, and in those days the weaver carried on his craft at home. I can see distinctly the little stone cottages in the narrow wynds off South Street, which I was wont to visit; I can recall the whirr and rattle of the loom "ben the house," and picture to myself the grave elderly man who on my entrance would rise from the rickety machine in front of which he was seated, and, after refreshing himself with a pinch of snuff, adjust his horn-rimmed spectacles and stare, with a seriousness which to me was somewhat disquieting, at the little English boy who had found his way into his presence. Kind they were without exception, these simple homely folk; but their gravity was hardly to be measured. Stern Calvinists to a man and a woman, the world was clearly to them no playground, no place for the frivolous pursuit of pleasure; and even the innocent sports of a child seemed to jar on their sense of the fitness of things.

It was on Sunday, however, that the full severity of the Scotch Puritanism of that day made itself felt in my inmost soul. Oh, the dreary monotony of those Sabbaths at St. Andrews! The long, long service and yet longer sermon in the forenoon, the funereal procession of the congregation to their homes, the hasty meal, consisting chiefly of tea and cold, hard-boiled eggs, which took the place of dinner, and the return within a few minutes to the kirk, where the vitiated atmosphere left by the morning congregation had not yet passed away. Even when the second service had come to a close, the solemnities of the day were not ended, for the Sunday School met in the late afternoon, and remained in session for a couple of hours. But it was not the public services, terrible though these were, that formed the most depressing feature of Sunday in St. Andrews; it was the rigid discipline which pervaded her home-life. My grandfather, I believe, was looked upon as being somewhat lax in his religious views, and he was undoubtedly more liberal—perhaps one might say more advanced—than many of his neighbours. Yet even he had to render homage to the universal law. So when Sunday came round the blinds were closely drawn, lest the rays of the sun should dissipate the gloom befitting the solemn day, whilst no voice in the household was raised above a sepulchral whisper. Lucky for me was it that I was sent to bed early, and that thus the horrors of the Sabbath were in my case abbreviated. The older members of the family sat in a silent semicircle round the smouldering fire, each holding, and some possibly reading, a book, the suitableness of which for use at such a time was beyond question. The Bible, the metrical version of the Psalms, and one or two volumes of discourses by divines of undoubted orthodoxy, formed the only literature recognised on these occasions. For myself, I had brought with me from home a copy of the delightful, though now forgotten, book called "Evenings at Home." and my Sabbatical sufferings were intensified by the sight of this volume on a high bookshelf, where it remained beyond my reach from Saturday night till Monday morning.

My life among these grave, elderly men and women would probably have been a sad one but for one fact. Adjoining my grandfather's residence was a small printing office, which he had established some years before for the benefit of a widowed daughter-in-law. A door opened from the house into the printing office, and through it I would steal whenever I got the chance. It was not only that the journeyman printer (there were journeymen in those days) was the kindest of men, whose memory I cherish with affection to this hour, and who never failed to welcome me with a smile and a pleasant word when I invaded his domain. The place had a charm of its own for me, mysterious, inexplicable, but absolutely enthralling. The cases of type, the presses, the ink-rollers, the damp proof-sheets—chiefly of bills announcing public meetings or the "roup" of some bankrupt farmer's stock—filled me with wonder and delight. Child as I was, I saw in these humble implements of the petty tradesman the means by which one mind can place itself in contact with many.

It is not to be supposed that I had even the dimmest perception of anything beyond the most obvious features of the printer's business, but the seed was sown then which was to fructify throughout my whole remaining life, and from the day when I first felt the fascination of that humble printer's workshop, I never ceased to regard myself as in a special degree a child of the printing-press. How delightful were the hours which I and David, the journeyman aforesaid, spent together when business was slack—and it was often slack! Then it was that together we would compose the most wonderful announcements of the great enterprises to which I was to commit myself in after life. Now it was the prospectus of a "genteel academy" of which I was to be the principal, and again it was the announcement of the opening of a vast emporium for the sale of goods of every description under my direction, that we thus composed and printed. These advertisements were invariably printed on gilt-edged paper in the bluest of ink, and, when I subsequently returned home, excited prodigious envy in my elder brother, who had never been privileged to "see himself in print."

My stay at St. Andrews ended at last in a somewhat melancholy fashion. As the place seemed to agree with me, it was settled that I should remain for a year at least; and in order that the time might not be wasted I was sent to school, the school being the well-known Madras College. Here both boys and girls were taught together. Of the present state of that famous institution I know nothing, nor do I wish to utter a word of disparagement of those who were responsible for its management fifty years ago; but to me, a timid boy who, in spite of his Northumbrian burr, was turned to ridicule as a Cockney by the Fifeshire lads and lasses, it wore the aspect of a veritable place of torment. That classic instrument of discipline, the tawse, was in use at every hour of the day, girls as well as boys receiving barbarous punishment under the eyes of their class-mates. Perhaps the cruelty was not so great as it seemed to me, but at all events it was enough, so far as I was concerned. My dread of the terrible lash grew into a brooding horror, which poisoned my days and destroyed my nights; and before I had been a month at the school I was seized with an attack upon the brain which nearly proved fatal.

Let me mention here, by way of testifying to the orthodoxy of the religious training given to my young soul, that on the first night on which I became delirious I was pursued by a phantom, plainly visible to my overwrought imagination, which wore the exact guise of the Evil One. Horns, hoofs, tail, and trident, were all clearly seen, and I sprang wildly from side to side of my bed trying to evade the fiend's attempt to capture me, until at last I took refuge, trembling and almost fainting, in my grandfather's arms. My youth and my good constitution carried me safely through an illness of no ordinary severity, and one day, as I lay in bed in the first stage of convalescence, I had the joy of hearing my mother's voice, and of knowing that she was with me once more. A few days later I returned with her to Newcastle, and thus ended the attempt to make a Scotsman of me.

My visit to the North, however, had the effect of stimulating my intelligence, and giving me a real interest in things around me. Travel had, in short, done its usual work of instructing and vivifying the mind. Henceforward I had a standard of comparison to apply to home scenes and experiences which I had not previously possessed. One favourite resort of ours at home was a grove of trees situate midway between the outskirts of the town and the village of Benwell. To us children, and to certain other young folk who were our playmates, it was known as Diana's Grove, though whether the name came from some fancy of our own or some bygone tradition, I was never able to ascertain. On the maps of those days it bore quite another designation. It was a delightful spot, and when, accompanied by our nursemaid, my brothers and I set off to spend a long summer morning there, we seemed to have reached the height of bliss. The grove was separated from Elswick Lane by sloping fields, where wheat and barley grew luxuriantly, and the narrow path by which we ran, shouting with joy, through these fields to our haven among the trees led past a little fountain at which we always stopped to drink. The grove itself was a small wood of oak and fir trees, covering a piece of rising ground from which the most delightful views of the beautiful Tyne Valley and the country lying south of the river were to be obtained. How often as a child, when tired with my boyish games, I have sat with my brother beneath one of the trees of the grove, and looked with eyes of wonder on the scene before me! The noble river seemed to flow almost at our feet, and the only signs of life upon its surface were the great keels passing slowly up and down. Beyond it were the green meadows of Dunstan, whilst, rising behind them, was the fine amphitheatre crowned by the pretty village of Wickham and the woods of Ravensworth and Gibside. Young as I was, I could quote poetry; and I remember how, as I looked upon this scene, there invariably occurred to me the lines—

"Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green;
So to the Jews old Canaan stood
While Jordan rolled between."

Away yonder, across the brimming river, was the Canaan of my imagination—the mysterious, unknown land into which my little feet were so eager to wander, reckless of what might happen there. Why do I dwell upon this simple scene? I do so because, alas, it is now a scene of the past. Where my young comrades and I made merry fifty years ago in the shade of the oak trees, or beside the well in the meadow, there is now a vast cemetery, and some of those who played with me there now sleep peacefully almost in the shadow of the Diana's Grove we loved so well. And the prospect from the grove—where is it now? Along the north bank of the Tyne, at that very spot, stretch the immense works of Lord Armstrong, whilst the houses of his workmen, in thickly-planted streets, cover the fair meadows of my youth, and the dense cloud of smoke for ever rising from forge and furnace blots out the prospect of the southern shore.

Hardly less melancholy is the change which has overtaken the favourite seaside resorts of my childhood. Tynemouth was the earliest watering-place of which I knew anything. In those days the pleasant village, not yet defiled by the soot of Shields, consisted of three streets, called respectively Front Street, Middle Street, and Back Street. There was no great pier casting its mighty arm into the sea across the mouth of the river, and the favourite resort of visitors, the place where we children played and bathed, and our elders lounged and read or flirted, according to their tastes, was the quaint little haven now given up to the pier works. How high the breakers were that rolled into that haven as I stood, a wondering child, and watched them from the shore! I have tossed on many seas since then, and have stood on many a storm-swept headland; but nowhere have I seen waves so high—so irresistible in their majesty, as those waves at Tynemouth seemed to my innocent eyes to be.

Far greater than the change at Tynemouth is that which has taken place at Whitley, another of our favourite summer resorts, on the delightful Northumbrian coast. What Whitley is now I do not know; but when I last saw it, more than a dozen years ago, it had become a rambling, ugly, ill-built town, chiefly given over to lodging-house keepers, though redeemed by its fine stretch of hard sand. Very different was the Whitley with which I first made acquaintance in 1849. There was no lodging-house in the place; nothing but a sequestered village, which could not boast of church or chapel, and which had only one small shop. My parents used to hire a charming little cottage belonging to the village blacksmith. Its front opened upon the village street, and behind was a garden, full of the simple cottage flowers which are so strangely unfamiliar to those doomed to dwell in towns. A summer-house, clothed in honeysuckle, was one of the features of the garden, and the delicious scent seemed to me in those happy days, when I first reached the cottage on one of our summer holidays, to be as it were the fragrance of heaven itself. Nobody else seemed to visit Whitley in those first years of our sojourn there; so that we had the noble stretch of sands and the long line of cliffs almost to ourselves during the long summer's day, and my father, lying on the yielding turf above the sands, could study his sermon for the coming Sunday at peace, unmolested and almost unseen by any man. There must still, I suppose, be spots somewhere on the long coastline of this island where one might find combined the peace, the seclusion, and the beauty of that bit of Northumberland as I knew it fifty years ago; and yet, whatever my understanding may say, my heart tells me that I shall never again see anything like the Whitley of my youth. [Footnote: Since these pages were penned, the memory of the blacksmith's cottage at Whitley has been vividly brought back to me under rather singular circumstances. In the spring of 1895 I was dining in Downing Street with Lord Rosebery, then Prime Minister. Next to me at dinner was seated Sir James Joicey, the millionaire colliery owner and Member of Parliament. Sir James is, like myself, a Northumbrian, and our conversation naturally turned upon our native county. I spoke of the blacksmith's cottage, and the bower of honeysuckle at Whitley, with the enthusiasm which old memories evoked. To my surprise, there was an answering gleam of pleasure and tenderness on my friend's face. "You lived in the blacksmith's cottage?" said he. "Why, so did we when I was a boy!" We found, on comparing dates, that the Joiceys had followed my own parents as tenants of the tiny house when the latter gave it up. To both of us it seemed a far cry from the honest blacksmith's modest cottage to Mr. Pitt's dining-room in Downing Street.]

It was in the autumn of 1850 that a rather curious adventure befell me, which might well have cut short my career, and prevented these pages from ever seeing the light. We were about to remove from Summerhill Terrace to a house not far distant which had just been bought by my father, and, as it happened, one dull afternoon I was left alone at home, my mother and the servants being all engaged at the new house. I was left with strict injunctions to "put the chain on the front door," and to bolt the kitchen door, which was on a lower level than the other. The first order I obeyed, but the second, under the temptation of an entrancing story in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine which absorbed my thoughts, I entirely forgot. I was devouring this story, as only children do devour stories, when I heard the front door opened. I was sitting in the parlour, at the back of the house, so that I could not see anyone enter the garden. Running to the door, under the belief that my mother had returned, I found myself confronted by two men. They were—or pretended to be—pedlars; and one of them carried a case filled with sham jewellery. Their great desire seemed to be to get me to unchain the door. I was simple enough to tell them that I was alone in the house, but my simplicity did not carry me so far as a compliance with their urgent request. After arguing with me for several minutes, and even endeavouring to bribe me with a trumpery jewel, the men withdrew, muttering. I watched them for a moment, and took note of the keen, earnest gaze they bent upon the house before leaving the garden. But the voice of the charmer in Tait was calling too loudly to allow me to dwell upon anything else, and I was quickly back again in the parlour and deep in mystery.

It might have been twenty minutes later that there fell upon my startled ear a sound which under the circumstances was distinctly sinister—that of a man's foot on the sanded floor of the kitchen passage below. A timid child at all times, there is no need to say that when I crept to the head of the stairs, and, after listening there breathlessly for a few seconds, ascertained beyond doubt that more than one man was moving about in the rooms below me, I was filled with almost a paralysing sense of terror. Here at last the "robbers" of whom I and my brother had so often talked in frightened whispers in our beds, were come in good earnest. What was to be done? And then there flashed upon me, like an inspiration, the recollection of a plan which we had talked over together when discussing the best means of driving the robbers from our house, should they ever enter it. We had both agreed, then, that if we could but induce any ordinary thief to believe that a certain big relative of ours, whose colossal proportions we had often admired, was on the premises, there would be no need to do anything else to make the intruder flee affrighted. My mind was made up. Creeping softly back into the parlour, I seized the tongs. These I hurled suddenly down the kitchen stairs, and when the terrible din thus raised had died out, I cried in my childish treble, "Uncle John! Uncle John! Come downstairs! There are thieves in the house!" There was a cry of rage or alarm from the kitchen, a hurried scuffling of feet on the floor, and then through a window I saw my two friends the pedlars flying through the yard, and pausing not to look behind. I ought, of course, to have forthwith gone downstairs and done my duty by that back door, which I had so shamefully neglected earlier in the day; but I am ashamed to say that my momentary access of courage had entirely died away by this time, and that for no imaginable sum of money would I have dared to descend those stairs, and pass through the dark passage leading to the back door. The thieves were in due time captured and transported for another offence; but my parents refused to prosecute them in order that I might escape the ordeal of a public examination. They were desperate ruffians, and the police declared their belief that if they had known I was alone in the house they would have murdered me.

I now come to my schooldays in the distant years 1852-4. My father, as I have already said, was a minister of religion for fifty years at Newcastle. He was one of the gentlest and noblest of men, one whom I have never ceased to revere as the very pattern and exemplar of a Christian gentleman. But those who follow such a calling cannot expect to gain riches as their reward, and my father was a poor man. Despite his poverty, he was resolved that his sons should have the best education that he could procure for them. That meant that they must be sent to the best school in the town—Percy Street Academy. So when my elder brother in 1848 was of school age, he took him to Mr., not then Dr., Bruce, to enter him as a pupil. I have no doubt that he went with some trepidation, knowing full well that the school fees would be a heavy tax upon his small income. I was sitting with my mother in the drawing-room of Summerhill Terrace when my father returned, and I saw that there was an unwonted brightness on his gentle face. He told my mother how Mr. Bruce, after examining my brother, had pronounced him to be fully qualified to enter the school; and then my father asked about the fees. The answer he received was, "My dear Mr. Reid, I never take a fee from a minister of religion." And so it came to pass that not only my brother James but myself and my two younger brothers were educated at Percy Street without any fee being paid on our behalf. No one will wonder that I cherish Dr. Bruce's memory with unstinted gratitude and reverence.

Schooldays, despite the popular theory, are, as a matter of fact, generally as uninteresting to the schoolboy as their story is to the public, and I shall not detain the reader with much about this period of my life. Dr. Collingwood Bruce, the father, by the way, of Mr. Justice Bruce, was then and long afterwards the most famous school master in the North of England, and under him I received that small fraction of my education which a man usually obtains during pupilage. Percy Street Academy, Newcastle, has long since disappeared, after having counted no inconsiderable proportion of the best-known residents among its pupils. It occupied a series of rambling buildings with an imposing house at the end of the row, in which lived "The Doctor," the assistant masters, and the boarders. But though the school is gone, my old schoolmaster died but recently, enjoying to the last the respect of his fellow citizens and the repose of a happy old age. He is known to fame as the author of the leading work on the Roman Wall, and as an antiquary of high repute. I have a grateful recollection of many of his acts during my school career; and, looking back, there are none I now esteem more highly than the attempts he constantly made to interest his pupils in the general affairs of the world outside the school-gates.

How well, for example, do I remember the school being summoned one morning in November, 1854, to the large writing room! Here the Doctor was standing at his desk awaiting us, armed with a copy of the Times. It had just arrived, and it contained W. H. Russell's brilliant account of the battle of Inkermann. In a few well-chosen words, the Doctor—who was an excellent public speaker—explained that he had called us from our tasks in order that we might listen to the story of a great deed done for England of which every Englishman ought to be proud; and then he read the whole story of the battle as it is told in Russell's graphic narrative, whilst we boys cheered each deed of English valour and groaned at the Russians as lustily as though we had been ourselves spectators of the fight. It was a wise act on the part of Dr. Bruce, and many others besides myself must have been grateful to him for having thus made us participators in the emotion which in those stirring times thrilled the nation.

It was before the Crimean War, however, that we in Newcastle passed through an experience the like of which I shall hardly encounter again. Newcastle was then notorious for its bad sanitation. A great part of the town consisted of houses of extreme antiquity, crowded together in narrow alleys in the neighbourhood of the river. These alleys, I may note in passing, were known as "chares"—a designation which used habitually to puzzle the Judges of Assize when they had to inquire into the circumstances of one of the not infrequent riots which in those days chequered the harmony of life on the banks of the Tyne. It was towards the end of July, 1853, that the rumour spread, reaching even a schoolboy like myself, that the cholera was approaching. A few weeks later it was with us in all its grim reality. Its actual appearance in the town was preceded by an extraordinary phenomenon which may, or may not, have been connected with the epidemic. One hot morning in August, when I left home for school, I was struck by the curious appearance of the atmosphere. No sooner had I stepped out of doors than I found that the strange dimness which pervaded everything was due to swarms of minute flies, which literally darkened the skies and settled in innumerable hosts upon every object animate and inanimate. It was impossible to breathe without inhaling these loathsome insects whenever the mouth was opened, and in order to protect ourselves my brother and I fastened our pocket handkerchiefs over our faces and walked to school in this fashion. We found that most other persons had adopted the same device. The plague lasted in Egyptian intensity for the whole of that day. The next day it had to a certain extent subsided, and on the third the dead flies might have been seen literally in heaps, each one of which must have contained countless thousands, in the corners of halls and passages. Everybody connected this most disagreeable phenomenon with the approach of the pestilence, and, whether they did so rightly or wrongly, the cholera only too certainly followed upon its heels.

Its first appearance raised feelings of terror in many hearts. I confess for myself that when I heard that three persons had died of cholera in the town on the previous day I fell into a small panic; but it was then that my mother, always a deeply religious woman, seeing how things were going with us, called her children together, and in the happiest manner succeeded in converting our dread of an unknown and mysterious evil into a perfect and childlike trust in the protection of a Heavenly Father. What she said I cannot now recall; I only know that from that moment, whilst many of our companions in school and at play went about with pallid faces and unstrung nerves, all our fears seemed as if by magic to have vanished. But the reality of the plague was terrible indeed, and the month of September, 1853, is never likely to be forgotten by anyone who then lived at Newcastle. It was not merely that the mortality was enormous, the deaths on some days being above a hundred, but that the circumstances attending the plague were of a gruesome and harrowing character. Not a few of the scenes in the streets recalled the story of the Great Plague of London. We had the same incidents of the dead lying unburied because there were none left to carry them to the grave. We had the piles of coffins waiting for interment in the churchyard. We had sad stories of men seen wheeling the corpse of wife or child in a barrow to the place of burial. In the evenings workmen carried burning disinfectants through the streets, the blue flames and sickening stench of which heightened the horrors of our situation. And perhaps most awful of all was the suddenness with which the disease slew. One evening in that terrible month my brothers and I were playing in the garden of our next-door neighbour with his children; by-and-by he himself came out to smoke his evening pipe, and as usual he had a kindly word for each one of us. We left him, when we went to bed, sauntering in the placid eventide among the flowers he was wont carefully to tend. When I got downstairs next morning a rough country servant, who was then in our employment, bluntly told me that "that laddie B——" (naming our neighbour) had died of the cholera during the night.

It is easy to conceive the effect which an incident like this necessarily had upon the mind of a child; and there were many such incidents. I verily believe that if we had not been clad by our mother's care and wisdom in that armour of trusting faith, we should have suffered irremediable injury. As it was, it became apparent that we must be removed from the plague-stricken town. But whither could we go? No visitor from Newcastle or any other riverside town could find admittance into any of the lodging-houses on the coast. Happily a port of refuge was open to us in the little blacksmith's cottage at Whitley, and thither, to our great relief, we were transported about the time when the virulence of the epidemic began to abate. My father had himself suffered from an attack of the disease, probably incurred whilst visiting, with quiet but unstinted devotion, the sick, and I also had had a very slight touch of it. The fine air of Whitley and the sunny hours spent on the lonely sands did wonders for us all; and when we returned home it was to find Newcastle restored to its ordinary life, with only the empty places in many households to remind us of the ordeal through which the town had passed.

I have spoken of the resemblance between this outbreak of cholera and the Great Plague of London. Curiously enough, the likeness between the experiences of the northern town in the nineteenth century and the capital in the seventeenth was to be made yet closer. It was just a year after the epidemic had passed away that we were visited by another calamity, infinitely less appalling, and yet at the time of its occurrence far more startling. Sound asleep in the middle of a dark October night, I began to dream, and, naturally enough at the time, my dreams were of the war which had then begun. A Russian fleet escaping from the Baltic had sailed up the Tyne and was bombarding Newcastle. So ran my vision, and its effect was heightened by the firing of the guns I heard in my sleep.

Suddenly my dream and everything else vanished from my mind, driven out by a shock the like of which I had never experienced before. I was sitting up in bed, trembling violently, and wondering what awful thing it was that had broken in upon my slumbers. It was a sound—but such a sound! Nothing approaching to it had ever fallen on my ears before; and even when wide awake I still heard its echoes vibrating around me. My brother James, strange to say, had slept peacefully through the roar of an explosion the noise of which was heard at Sunderland, fourteen miles away. In response to my cries he awoke, and at my urgent request went to the window, which I was myself at the moment too much unnerved to approach. Directly he drew aside the curtain the room was filled with a glare that rendered every object as plainly visible as in broad daylight. We believed that a large building used as a tannery immediately behind our house must be on fire, but the building stood, and we saw that the glare which lighted up the whole heavens was far away. It was shortly after three o'clock on the morning of October 6th, 1854. Presently our natural agitation was increased by a violent knocking on the front door of the house at that untimely hour. It was the old man who "kept" my father's chapel at Tuthill Stairs, and he brought with him a doleful story. Evidently hysterical from the shock he had received, he told my father, amid his sobs, that half of Newcastle and Gateshead had been blown down by a frightful explosion in one of the Gateshead bonded warehouses; that the dead and dying were lying about in hundreds, and that, to crown everything, Tuthill Stairs Chapel had been destroyed.

It was indeed a tale of woe; and though my father promptly discounted it, it was impossible to doubt, with the evidence of that flaming sky before our eyes, that something very terrible had happened. Whether old Dixon expected my father to act as an amateur fireman, or whether he hoped for services of a more spiritual kind, I do not know; but he resolutely refused to return to the scene of the disaster unless my father accompanied him. So by-and-by my brother and I found ourselves accompanying my father and the chapel-keeper on their way to the fire.

A strange spectacle it was which was presented to us. Thousands of persons were hurrying down towards the river side; and upon their faces shone the reflection of the glowing sky. By-and-by, as we came within range of the effects of the explosion, we found broken windows and shattered doorways on every side. It was not, however, until we reached the High Level Bridge, and from the giddy height of the roadway looked down upon the river and the two towns, that we realised the full extent of the disaster which had happened so suddenly. To our right, as we stood on the bridge, raged a fire of immense extent. The flames were roaring upwards from one of the great bonded warehouses of Gateshead, and threatening at every moment to attack the old parish church, which stood like a rock strangely illumined in the glare; to our left, in the crowded streets and alleys of the lower part of Newcastle, I counted no fewer than seven fires burning fiercely in different places, whilst on the river there were three ships in flames. It was wonderful to look up and see burning sparks and fragments hurtling through air, resembling nothing so much (I thought at the time) as a snowstorm every flake of which was a point of fire; it was wonderful, too, to see the shipping in the river, the broad stream itself, and the long lines of houses on either side glowing in the dancing flames. We could hear the rush of the fire heavenwards; we could see the mere handfuls of men—soldiers, police, and what not—who were vainly striving to cope with the terrible enemy they had so suddenly been called upon to face; and even as we looked we saw fresh fires break out, and above the roar of the mighty furnace on the Gateshead side—with the glowing crater which marked the site of the great explosion—could hear at intervals the cries of the workers. Looking back, I think that was upon the whole the most sublimely impressive sight I ever beheld. The two burning towns; the river between them glittering as though its waters had been turned to gold; the dense silent crowds around me—these made up a picture the memory of which can never fade.

Though old Dixon's "hundreds of dead and dying" was the wildest of exaggerations, there had been a most lamentable loss of life as a consequence of the explosion. What had happened was this: about midnight a fire had broken out in a vinegar manufactory in the densely-crowded district of Gateshead lying between the parish church and the river. This fire, baffling the efforts of the fire brigade, spread quickly, until it reached some large bonded warehouses adjoining the vinegar manufactory. By this time it had acquired such proportions that it had been found necessary to summon the military from the Newcastle Barracks to assist in the effort to extinguish it, whilst vast crowds of people assembled, not only in the neighbourhood of the fire itself, but on the bridges and Newcastle quay, from which an excellent view was to be obtained. The fire at last reached a warehouse owned by a gentleman named Bertram, and here it assumed a new character. The exact contents of the warehouse remain undiscovered to this day. At the time it was freely asserted that Mr. Bertram had, in direct breach of the law, warehoused a large quantity of gunpowder; but scientific witnesses who were subsequently examined showed that it was possible that certain chemicals stored in the warehouse, when suddenly combined, as by the falling of the floors, would be quite as explosive as gunpowder itself.

Be this as it may, after one or two slight explosions—those which in my dream were transformed into the cannonade of a Russian force—the whole warehouse with all its contents was suddenly blown into the air by the force of an explosion seldom equalled in its terrible violence. That explosion not only carried the burning materials across the river to Newcastle, where they quickly produced another conflagration as serious in its character as that which was raging in Gateshead, but inflicted terrible injury both to life and property. The persons in the neighbourhood of the burning building, including soldiers, firemen, police, and Mr. Bertram, the owner of the warehouse, were instantly killed; and in many cases not a trace of their remains could afterwards be found. On the bridges and on Newcastle quay the great crowds of onlookers were thrown to the ground by the shock, and several were killed outright; whilst, far and wide, buildings were partially unroofed, windows broken, and a great and populous district reduced to the state in which one might have expected to see it after a bombardment. The exact number of those killed was never ascertained, but I believe that between thirty and forty persons lost their lives.

As I came away with my father and brother from the scene of the fire, my young nerves received the shock which invariably follows the first sight of death. In the Sandhill—the scene of Lord Eldon's elopement with the beautiful Bessie Surtees—a man was lying on the pavement who had been killed by the force of the explosion. As I passed, they were lifting the body into a cart, and the sight of the head, hanging helplessly like that of a dead bird, was one I never forgot. All that day the fires burned fiercely, and it was not until the third day that they were really subdued. Indeed, on the Gateshead side the ruined warehouses smoked and smouldered for more than a week. In all, the value of the property destroyed was something like a million sterling.

Never shall I forget my morning at school on the day on which the fire first broke out. Boylike, it was the wonder rather than the horror of the thing which was uppermost in my mind, and I and my schoolfellows, before the morning bell sounded, eagerly related to each other all that we had seen; those who, like myself, had been early on the ground having much to tell to eager listeners. It was only when we had trooped excitedly into our class-rooms, and found ourselves face to face with our masters, that we began to realise the actual solemnity of a catastrophe the like of which had never before befallen an English provincial town. In the Latin room, where I was due at the opening of the school, I was unfeignedly surprised to see Mr. Garven, our old classical tutor, sitting in tears at his desk, and I can still hear the broken whispers in which he attempted to speak to us of the terrible event.

It came home, I ought to say, very closely to "Bruce's school." More than one of those killed had been pupils, and the son of Mr. Bertram, upon whom already an excited public opinion was seeking to fasten the responsibility for the explosion, was one of our schoolfellows, and had but the day before joined us in our lessons. Suddenly as, in a half-hearted way, we began our usual tasks, Dr. Bruce entered, pale and agitated. "Boys," he said, "a dreadful thing has happened to our good old town. God knows how far the mischief may extend, and what ruin may be wrought; but we know already that more than one old pupil here have lost their lives, and that some of you boys have lost those near and dear to you. There can be no school to-day. It would not be decent——" And then the Doctor's voice fairly gave way, and we found ourselves dismissed to an unexpected—and, for once, an undesired—holiday. These things sink deep into the youthful imagination, and the memory of them can never be lost. As I look back upon the years I spent at school, that dark October morning stands out with a prominence that causes every other day of my school life to sink into insignificance.

CHAPTER II.

PROBATION.

Aspirations After a Journalistic Life—A Clerk's Stool in the W.B. Lead
Office—Literary Ambitions—An Accepted Contribution—The Northern
Daily Express and its Editor—Founding a Literary Institute—Letters
from Charles Kingsley and Archbishop Longley—Joseph Cowen and his
Revolutionary Friends—Orsini—Thackeray's Lectures and Dickens's
Readings.

One day, in the summer of 1856, I was walking along Princes Street, Edinburgh, looking with wonder and delight upon the beautiful panorama that was spread before my eyes. I was little for my age, and the gentleman who was my companion, and who was pointing out to me the many famous buildings and monuments that form the glory of the modern Athens, was leading me by the hand.

Probably he thought me still younger than I was, and treated me as a mere child. I had come to Edinburgh on a brief holiday, and was staying at the house of one of my father's friends. By-and-by, having duly fulfilled his duty as showman, my companion, in a kindly, patronising way, sought to draw me out. "And what do you mean to be, my boy, when you grow up?" he asked. My answer was instantaneous and assured. "I mean to be a newspaper editor, sir." My friend flung my hand from him and burst into a roar of laughter, which surprised me even more than it did the passers-by. "A newspaper editor!" he cried, still convulsed by what appeared to me a most unseemly, if not offensive, merriment. "Good heavens! And what in the world has put such a thing as that into the child's head?" My wounded dignity came to my aid. Was I not fourteen? and had I not already left school and begun to earn my own living? "I made up my mind a long time ago," I said in the accents of injured innocence. "When I am a man I mean to be that, and nothing else." I had a sad time of it for the rest of the day, for this worthy gentleman appreciated what he regarded as the joke so keenly that whenever he met a friend he stopped him, and said, "Let me introduce to you a live editor—that is to be some day." He enjoyed the situation more than I did.

But it was quite true. Young as I was, I had made up my mind, and was resolved that nothing should move me from my purpose. Perhaps the printer's ink of the dear old composing room at St. Andrews had inoculated me, and made me proof against the usual temptations by which a boy, dreaming of his future path in life, is beset. Or perhaps it was because printer's ink is in the blood of the family. Whatever may have been the cause, journalism was my first precocious love, and my last; and, looking back across the years of heavy work which now separate me from that June morning at Edinburgh, I see no reason to repent my early choice or the loss of every other chance of success in life.

Yet, at the outset, there were a hundred obstacles barring my way to the door through which I longed to pass. I was already, as I have said, at work. Knowing full well the narrowness of my father's means, I had cheerfully taken a situation as a clerk, and kindly Fortune had smiled upon me in the appointment I secured. Most boys of my time on leaving school went, as it was phrased in those days, "on the quay side" at Newcastle; that is to say, they entered the office of one of the great merchants by whose hands the prosperous trade of the Tyne was carried on. Here their lives were full from morning to night with the business which in such a hive of industry seemed to know no slackening. No doubt, a position in a shipping or colliery office at Newcastle in those days was one to which many advantages were attached. Not a few schoolfellows of my own, starting with no greater advantages than I possessed, have become men of large fortune, have acquired landed estates, have sat in Parliament, have founded county families. But it was not towards these ends that my youthful ambition urged me; and, happily for me, the office to which I went one January morning in the 'fifties, in the humble capacity of junior clerk, had nothing in common with the bustling, worrying places of business on the quay side, where the race for wealth seemed to absorb the thoughts of all, from highest to lowest.

Through the influence of a friend, and chiefly in virtue of my father's name, I secured a place in what was then known as the W.B. Lead Office. There was at that time a certain quality of lead distinguished by these letters which carried off the palm in the lead markets of the world; indeed, its price was constantly from one to two pounds a ton higher than that of any other lead procurable. This lead was obtained from the great mines in Weardale and Allandale, then and for many generations owned by the Beaumont family. Mr. Wentworth Blackett Beaumont was at that time the head of the family. There was no eager bustle, due to the keenness of business competition, in the quiet rooms of the W.B. Lead Office in Northumberland Street, when I entered it as a boy. The whole of the produce of the mines was sold to half a dozen great London firms, and the sales were made in such large quantities that a score of transactions sufficed for a year's work. How great those transactions were may be gathered from the fact that I sometimes had to make out a single invoice in which the sole item stated represented a sum of £40,000.

Very soon I found that my chief duty as junior clerk in this eminently sedate and respectable establishment was to read the Times to my immediate superior. This gentleman I must always remember with a lively sense of gratitude. His name was Fothergill, and, like myself, he had little taste for mere business avocations. He was a student, a lover of literature, a collector of books, and a writer of verse. Fortunate was it for me to meet with such a companion at that stage in my life—the stage when one is most susceptible to outside influences. For five years we sat opposite to each other in the same quiet room, and never once did I hear fall from his lips an unworthy idea or suggestion. He suffered from serious weakness of the eyes, and it was for this reason that so much of my spare time (and it was nearly all spare time there) was devoted to reading aloud to him. He had only a clerk's income, small enough in all conscience, but he never wanted money to spend on a book or a magazine. I remember his delight when the first number of the Saturday Review, to which he had subscribed on its appearance, was placed in his hands. From that time forward my daily readings of the leaders in the Times were varied by weekly readings of the brilliant sarcasm and invective which then distinguished the new review that had entered the field of journalism with so bold a mien, and was holding its own so fearlessly against all comers. With such a friend, always ready to give me of his best—alas, at the time, in my youthful ignorance of men, I failed altogether to appreciate my good fortune in meeting a companion like this—my mind rapidly expanded, and before I was half way through my teens I was learning to put boyish things behind me. Although Fothergill did not encourage my precocious affection for the press, wisely holding that a literary life was one reserved only for the few, and, like matrimony, not to be "taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly," he did not, as so many men in his place might have done, stamp ruthlessly upon my aspirations or subject them to that cruel sarcasm which is so killing to the ambitions of the young. This, it is true, was done by another person in the same office—the manager; but, fortunately, that gentleman was altogether so obnoxious to me for many reasons that his special dislike of my literary bent, and the sneers with which he greeted my early appearances in print, did not affect my purpose in the slightest degree.

I could say much of those five years of my life spent in the W.B. Lead Office, but I must not weary my readers with that which would be at best a humdrum tale. My education went on apace. In the evenings I took lessons at home, and during the day, when I was not otherwise engaged, I had always a book or a pen in my hand. How high one's aspirations soar in that season when everything seems possible to the unfledged soul! The glory of Milton itself seemed hardly beyond attainment, and I nursed the illusion that within me lay the potentiality of a new Scott, or Dickens, or Thackeray. Happy, foolish dreams, from cherishing which no man has ever been the worse! A hundred times I essayed to produce something worthy of being printed. But the stories, the essays, and—save the mark!—the poems I attempted had a knack of remaining unfinished, or, when finished, were so obviously bad, even to my untrained judgment, that they were promptly destroyed. When at last I did taste the fearful joys of a first appearance in print, it was on a very humble stage. A great controversy was raging in Newcastle in 1857 over the appointment of the then vicar to another living in the town; an appointment that was obnoxious not only because it was a clear case of pluralism, but because the vicar himself belonged to the then unpopular High Church party. I read the articles in the papers, and the letters in which my indignant fellow-townsmen gave expression to their views, with keen interest, and at last I was myself prompted to join in the fray. Having carefully composed a letter to the editor of the Northern Daily Express, which I signed "A Bedesman," I furtively dropped it into the letter-box at the newspaper office, and tremblingly awaited the result.

I had not long to wait. The next morning, as I was on my way to the office, I chanced upon a contents bill of the Express, and there, with dazzled eyes, the testimony of which I could hardly believe, I read the announcement that the paper of the day contained a letter by "A Bedesman." And here I must make a humiliating confession. The price of the paper was a penny, and at that particular moment I discovered that I had not a penny in the world. My weekly pocket-money was sixpence, and it generally went at one of the old bookstalls in the market before the week was far advanced. But I could not face the day before me with the dreadful uncertainty weighing upon my soul as to whether another person might not have adopted the same signature as myself, and whether, consequently, I might not be labouring under a fond delusion. I turned and fled home (fortunately I always started for work in good time), and asked my mother to lend me the penny I needed. In a broken whisper I confided to her the fact that I believed there was really a letter of mine in that morning's Express. I got my penny, and in a few minutes I was feasting my eyes upon that sight—dearer than any other the world can show to the young literary aspirant—my first printed composition. I had then just entered my fifteenth year.

Not one writer in a thousand has stopped at a first book, and not one newspaper contributor in a million has stopped at a first letter to the editor. Like much better people, I had made the discovery that whilst my opinions regarding the Genius of Shakespeare, the Art of Fiction, and the Character of Cromwell were not wanted by anybody, there were some questions cropping up, as it were, at my own door, about which I might, if I liked, give an opinion that some persons at all events would think worth printing. In short, I was enabled to see that though I could not fly, I might at least walk. How eagerly I turned to profit the discovery I had thus made need not be told here. For the moment my ambitious designs were laid on one side. I no longer dreamed of an Epic that should rival "Paradise Lost" or a novel that might outshine "Vanity Fair"; but I prepared to discuss the local questions of the hour, the site of a post office, the opening of a hospital, the grievance of some small public official, with the zest which I had only felt hitherto when dealing with the great literary and social problems, to the discussion of which my untrained intelligence could contribute nothing of value. What I wrote on such topics as those I have named I cannot pretend to remember; but there must have been some little promise in my contributions to the Express, for one memorable day, when I got home from work, my father told me that he had received a visit from Mr. Marshall, the chief proprietor of that paper, and that this visit closely concerned me. Mr. Marshall had inquired as to my age and occupation, and having suggested that my leaning towards journalism ought not to be repressed, had offered to have me taught shorthand by the reporter of the Express. Finally he had left with my father half a sovereign, which he desired me to accept in payment of my various contributions to the paper. So, whilst I was still a mere boy, not having as yet entered on my sixteenth year, I found myself enrolled among the more or less irregular camp-followers of journalism.

It was indeed a rapturous moment when I heard this news. If I had been allowed, I would forthwith have thrown up my place at the W.B. Lead office and taken service—even the humblest—on the Press. But on this point my father was firm. I must stick to my proper work for the present, though there could be no harm in my devoting my evenings to such study and practice as might fit me for journalism hereafter. Not that he or my mother desired to see me become a journalist. The Press—at all events in provincial towns—in those days was the reverse of respectable in the eyes of the world; and truly there was some reason for the low esteem in which it was held. The ordinary reporter on a country paper was generally illiterate, was too often intemperate, and was invariably ill-paid. Again and again did my mother seek to check my eager yearning for a life on the Press with the repetition of dismal stories dinned into her ears by sympathising friends, who deplored the fact that her son should dream of leaving so secure and respectable a position as a clerkship in the W.B. Lead Office for the poor rewards and dubious respectability of a newspaper career.

There was an old friend of my father's—Innes by name—who took it upon himself to remonstrate with me. After exhorting me fervently for some time, he sought to illustrate the dangers of the course on which I was anxious to embark by a personal experience. "Thomas," he said solemnly (and oh, how I hated to be called Thomas!), "I knew a laddie called Forster. His father was a most respectable, decent man, that kept a butcher's shop at the top o' the Side—a first-rate business; and this laddie—his name was John—got just such notions into his head as ye have; he was always reading and writing, and nothing would suit him but to go to college instead of sticking to the shop. And at last he went away to London, and his poor father died, and the business went all to pieces, and I've never heard tell of that laddie from the day he went to London until now. He's died of starvation, most likely, by this time."

"Why, Mr. Innes," I cried, "do you really mean to say that you have never heard of Mr. Forster's books—his Life of Oliver Goldsmith and 'The Arrest of the Five Members'? He's one of our great writers now, and if I could only reach a position like his—" But this prospect was so dazzling that it fairly took my breath away, and I lapsed into silence, delighted to find that my old friend's "awful example" should have been a man in whose footsteps I most ardently desired to tread.

As I have mentioned the opposition which my parents offered to my design to become a journalist, it is only right that I should say that if it had not been for the atmosphere in which I lived at home, the accomplishment of that design would never have become possible. Ours was a home of narrow and stinted means, but of wide and generous sympathies. We children learned from the example of our dear father and mother to look beyond ourselves and our own small interests upon the battle of life as it was being fought in the world at large. If our table was of the plainest, there were always books and newspapers in the house, and they were not there for show. My mother had a genuine taste for literature, and a judgment which, if not infallible, was at least sound. Many a time would we discuss together the books we were reading. They were not, as a rule, hot from the Press; but why should they have been, in the case of a boy with all the literary treasures of the world still untasted? My father leaned, as was natural, to the more serious side of literature; but he had a keen interest in public affairs, and he brought to their study a sagacious and well-informed mind. Whilst the spirit in which both he and my mother viewed life and the problems which it daily presented to them was that of a pure and lofty Puritanism, it was broadened and softened, more particularly in the case of my father, by the gentleness and liberality of their own characters. So it was in an atmosphere of culture and liberal thought that I lived my life in those days both at home and at the W.B. Lead Office.

The Northern Daily Express was a penny newspaper which laid claim to be the first provincial daily published at that price. The claim has, I believe, been disputed by Mr. Justin McCarthy, who claims the honour for a Liverpool journal with which he was himself at one time connected. But whether first or second, it is certain that the Express was very early in the field. It had been started at Darlington in 1855 by a gentleman named Watson. A year later it was transferred to Newcastle, and it was in the Express office that I first became acquainted with actual newspaper work. A very curious place was that office when I first knew it. It consisted simply of two rooms and two cellars in a house in West Clayton Street. One of the rooms was devoted to the compositors who set the little sheet; the other was by day the counting-house and the place where the papers were sold and advertisements received, whilst at night it became the editorial office—the editor, sub-editor, and reporters all working together here at the desks occupied by the clerks during the day. I ought, perhaps, to explain that the staff was not quite so large as my description of it might lead people to suppose. The sub-editor, for instance, doubled his part and acted as reporter also. Still, it was a tight fit in that little room in West Clayton Street when I went there of an evening to write some paragraph or letter for the next morning's paper. In the cellars was the machine on which the Express was printed, and the stock of paper.

In one respect, the Express was better equipped than is many a pretentious journal of to-day. Its editor—Manson by name—was a man of remarkable ability, and his carefully-prepared leading articles were certainly second to none in the newspaper press of his day. This is a strong saying, but my reader will not think it unjustified when he hears that Manson's services had been eagerly sought for by more than one London newspaper, including the Times. He was a man of real genius, but, unfortunately, not without the defects of his qualities. In my young eyes he was a marvel, and almost an idol. To sit beside him, as I sometimes did, whilst he forged the thunderbolts which produced so great an effect upon the opinion of the town, was to me a joy almost too great for words. I would sit and watch the untiring hand moving across the slips of blue paper with a mind filled with the awe and reverence with which a pupil of Michael Angelo might have watched the master at work. I had at last got my foot on the first rung of the ladder, and my soul was filled with absolute content. True, my days were given to the W.B. Lead Office; but seldom did an evening come round without finding me, on one pretext or another, in the house in West Clayton Street. Indeed, I had now become almost a recognised member of the staff, and my little contributions in the shape of paragraphs, letters, and the inevitable verses appeared almost daily.

I had been trying to teach myself shorthand, and had made some progress with Pitman's system of phonography; but now, thanks to the kindness of Mr. Marshall, I secured the services of a first-rate teacher, and soon made rapid progress in that difficult art. My teacher was Mr. Lowes, an admirable shorthand writer, who wrote a system of his own. To Mr. Lowes, phonography appeared to be the chief evil afflicting mankind. What little things divide the world! In my teacher's opinion it was divided into phonographers and stenographers, and never did the schoolmen of old show more bitterness in maintaining their own shibboleths than did Lowes in asserting the superiority of his system to that of Mr. Pitman—an opinion which I need scarcely say was not shared by the world.

Lowes was a good fellow, and a most kind and patient teacher. Under his guidance I soon acquired a certain amount of facility in ordinary press-work. Contributions to Chambers's Journal, the Leisure Hour, and one or two minor religious magazines, gave me as the years passed an opportunity of addressing a wider audience than the readers of the Express, and though I had as many misfortunes and disappointments as most young writers, I stuck steadily to my task, and bit by bit strengthened my position in the world of journalism.

There were other fields of activity, besides the press, that I assiduously cultivated. For example, in the plenitude of my wisdom, at the age of seventeen I founded an institution in the west end of Newcastle, not far from my father's church. I called it the "West End Literary Institute," and truly it was designed upon a most ambitious scale. When I recall the way in which I begged money from all and sundry among my friends for the purpose of starting the institute, and the manner in which I pestered distinguished authors for presentation copies of their books, in order to furnish the shelves of the library, I am driven to the painful conclusion that I must have been a terrible person in the days of my youth, and something of a prig to boot. Apropos of the begging for books as free gifts from authors, I had one or two amusing experiences. Among those whom I importuned in this impertinent way were Charles Kingsley, and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Longley. Kingsley replied to my request in a manner that was as sensible as it was severe, bluntly telling me that he was a poor man who wrote books in order to get money, and who could not afford to give them away. I have written books myself since then, and have had many an application as unreasonable as that which I addressed to the author of "Alton Locke." This fact, perhaps, explains my entire approval of the snubbing which that distinguished man administered to me.

Very different, however, was the response of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a courteous and dignified epistle, expressing his pleasure at being able to comply with my request, and fifteen handsome octavo volumes of sermons were forthwith forwarded to me from Hatchard's. I had other similar experiences, and the result was that when my library was thrown open to the public the amount of theology which it contained far outweighed every other department of literature. However, people came to my reading-room, and I was fortunately able to provide them with other entertainment besides the reading of old sermons. I started a course of lectures and readings. I blush to say that I distinguished myself one evening by reading the play of Macbeth to an unhappy audience of bored victims. Heaven forgive me! I carried on my West End Institute for some years, started a flourishing penny bank in connection with it, and formed numerous acquaintances among the more intelligent artisans of the district; but at last the building was wanted for an extension of the Sunday schools connected with my father's congregation, and the little performance came to an end. I trust it had not made me an incurable prig, but I fear that it did not do anybody very much good; though, perhaps, it kept some out of mischief.

No account of Newcastle at this period (1850-60) would be complete without some reference to one of its most notable inhabitants, Mr. Joseph Cowen, commonly known at that time to his fellow-townsmen as "Joe." Mr. Cowen's subsequent career in Parliament, brief though it was, gained for him a reputation for eloquence hardly inferior to that enjoyed by the most illustrious of his contemporaries. But in those early days of my youth it was not his eloquence but his advanced opinions about which his fellow-townsmen thought most. He openly professed to be a Republican, in theory at all events, and all his sympathies were engaged on the side of the oppressed nationalities of Europe. A man of culture, of commanding abilities, and of considerable wealth, he lived by choice in the plainest fashion, delighting to be known as one of the people. He dressed at all times in the kind of suit which a Northumbrian pitman wears when not actually at work. Years afterwards, when he had just thrilled all England by a great speech in the House of Commons on the subject of Russian oppression, I chanced to meet him one day in Pall Mall, and, stopping to talk to him, was amused to see the glances of curiosity which were cast at the strangely attired man who had found his way to that fashionable thoroughfare.

Nor was it only in his dress that he affected a likeness to the working-men of Tyneside. In his speech he exaggerated the burr of the Newcastle tongue. Most of us were anxious to get rid of that undesirable distinction. Mr. Cowen clung to it as one of the most precious of his possessions. He had to pay for this piece of affectation in later life, when he became a figure in the House of Commons. His first notable speech in that assembly was on the Royal Titles Bill of Mr. Disraeli. It was a very brilliant performance, greatly admired by those who were able to appreciate it. But, unfortunately, it was not understood by everybody. The day after it was delivered, Mr. Disraeli was questioned at a dinner-party by a lady, who asked him what he thought of the new orator whose presence had been revealed to the House. "I'm sorry I can't answer your question," said the Prime Minister. "It is true that a gentleman, whom I had never seen before, got up on the Opposition side and made a speech which seemed to excite great enthusiasm in a certain part of the House; but, unfortunately, he spoke in a language I had never heard, and I haven't the slightest idea in the world what he said."

But in the days of which I am now writing Mr. Cowen was still a long way from the House of Commons. His fame, however, was even then of no common kind. He was known throughout Europe as a man willing to befriend, not merely with speech and pen, but with purse, every victim of political oppression. By the despotic Governments of the Continent he was held in feverish hatred, and at one time his modest house at Blaydon Burn was regularly watched by French, Russian, and Austrian spies; nor was it without good reason that the tyrants of Europe saw in him their natural enemy. Under his roof many of the most eminent refugees from the countries I have named and from Italy found a welcome shelter, and in one room in that house was a small printing press on which thousands of revolutionary proclamations in all the languages of Europe had been printed. Mazzini, Garibaldi, Kossuth, Felice Orsini, and scores of other notable revolutionaries whose names I forget, were his friends and guests, and through his influence a large party of us in Newcastle were led to take almost as warm an interest in political affairs on the Continent as in the movements of parties at home. Again and again in those days, when France was crushed under the heel of the Second Empire, when Poland was vainly writhing in her cruel bonds, when Hungary was filled with the spirit of rebellion, and when the people of Italy were taking their first steps by the intricate paths of conspiracy and insurrection towards unity and freedom, Joe Cowen would find some excuse for summoning a public meeting in the old Lecture Room, Nelson Street, in order that we might listen to some patriot exile as he told the story of his country's wrongs, or give expression to our own detestation of the despotism which at that time weighed upon Europe, from the banks of the Seine to those of the Volga.

No impressionable youth could fail to be affected by such an influence as this, and if in those days I shrank from Mr. Cowen's views on home politics as being too advanced, I was one of the most enthusiastic of his adherents in his self-appointed mission against the tyrannies of the Continent. How well do I remember some of the faces and figures of Mr. Cowen's friends and guests! I can still see Kossuth with his grey hair and wrinkled brow, and Mazzini with his melancholy eyes and handsome face; I can still hear the tones of Louis Blanc as he stands on the platform of the lecture room and talks to us in excellent English of the epoch of the Great Revolution. But the one man whose face and figure dwell most vividly in my recollection is Orsini, the great Italian who, after a lifetime spent in the attempt to deliver Tuscany and Lombardy from the yoke of the tyrant, died under the guillotine in Paris, and by his death secured for Italy her long-sought freedom. Orsini came to Newcastle shortly after his escape from an Austrian dungeon at Mantua, and addressed a great meeting in the Lecture Room. He spoke English fairly well; but it was the appearance of the man, and the knowledge of all that he had suffered in the struggle for Italian freedom, that appealed to one more eloquently than his words. Never had I seen any man whose appearance equalled that of this Italian martyr who died as an assassin. His features were almost faultless, whilst his jet-black hair set off the lustrous pallor of his complexion with extraordinary effectiveness. Attired in fashionable evening dress, his hands encased in white kid gloves, and a smile, gentle rather than pathetic, lighting up his beautiful face, he looked the last man in the world whom one would naturally associate with desperate deeds. Yet, not many weeks after I had grasped his hand, he had brought about the terrible attempt upon the life of the Emperor Napoleon, when the latter was driving through the Rue Lepelletier, Paris, by which many innocent persons perished, and was himself lying in prison under sentence of death. Mr. Cowen once told me that it was he who provided the funds for carrying out Orsini's plot against Louis Napoleon's life, but he did so in absolute ignorance of the fact that this was the purpose to which the money was to be appropriated. He understood that it was wanted for the equipment of another insurrectionary expedition against the Austrians in Italy, and he willingly subscribed the amount asked for.

As for Orsini, he met his death like a hero; but it is well known that before dying he succeeded, as a leading member of the Carbonari, in extracting from the French Emperor, who had himself belonged to that society, a promise that he would free Italy from Austrian oppression. By giving that promise, Louis Napoleon was delivered from the fear of violent death at the hands of the Carbonari, whilst his fulfilment of it in the war of 1859 gave Italy her first great step towards unity and freedom. Even the romantic page of history has never recorded a more notable transaction than that which thus took place in a condemned cell between an assassin lying under sentence of death and a reigning Emperor; nor would it be possible to denounce regicide so absolutely as most of us do if there were many instances in which it had proved so successful as it did in the case of Orsini.

I have dwelt at undue length on an episode which my readers probably think altogether outside the scope of this narrative, but it does not lie quite so far apart from it as they may imagine. It was my association as a boy with Mr. Cowen's enthusiastic assertion of the rights of oppressed nationalities, and the stirring of my spirit which necessarily resulted from contact, however slight, with men like Kossuth and Orsini, that first made me a real Liberal in politics.

As I have mentioned the Lecture Room—a dismal, stuffy, ill-lighted little theatre—I may refer to two meetings unconnected with foreign politics which I remember in it. One was in 1857, when the Dissenters of Newcastle had revolted against the domination of the Whig clique, and at the general election had set up a candidate of their own. They had great difficulty in finding one, for they required a man who would pay his own expenses (in those days a very serious item), and the chance of success was by no means brilliant. At last, however, they secured a rich retired Bombay merchant, and he came down to Newcastle forthwith to address his first meeting. The Lecture Room was crowded with enthusiastic Nonconformists, and these were the words with which the unhappy candidate began his speech: "Gentlemen, four-and-twenty hours ago, if anybody had asked me where Newcastle-on-Tyne was, I could not have told them." This, to an audience full of the local pride which possessed the soul of every genuine Newcastle man! I need hardly say that, having ascertained where Newcastle was, Mr. C. speedily departed from it, amid a storm of indignation, never again to be seen in its streets.

More vivid still is my recollection of the Lecture Room on the occasion when Thackeray delivered his lectures on the Four Georges to an audience more select than numerous. I was at the age when, as the author of "Vanity Fair" himself has said, "to behold Brown, the author of the last romance, in the flesh, is a joy and a delight." Anybody who had written a book seemed to me to be a hero; what was it then to see and to hear the literary idol of my youth? Thackeray, with his tall figure, his silvery hair, his upturned face, expressive and striking, though by no means beautiful, seemed to me as I sat on my bench and listened to him to be nothing less than one of the gods. He was an admirable lecturer; his voice was musical and clear, his pronunciation singularly distinct and accurate, and the little touches of sarcasm and humour which he conveyed to his audience by a tone or an inflection, quite inimitable. I heard, as I sat listening to his lecture on George the Third—by far the best of the series—someone near me yawn, and my soul was filled with horror at what I thought nothing less than an act of sacrilege. I never saw the great novelist except on the occasion of his visit to Newcastle, but to the end of my days it will be a delight thus to have beheld him in the flesh. Dickens I heard read several times, though never in the Lecture Room; yet I cannot say that any of his readings made upon me the impression produced by Thackeray's lectures. The actor and the arts of the popular entertainer were too plainly visible in all that he did, and I received something like a shock when, having written an enthusiastic but juvenile panegyric upon him on the occasion of one of his visits to Newcastle, I learned that he had sent his secretary to buy a dozen copies of the paper to send to his friends. That so great a man should have thought a mere newspaper effusion worth noticing seemed to me altogether incredible. The reader may smile at the confession, but I own I never thought quite so much of Dickens, as a man, after this incident. This only shows how high was the pedestal upon which I had placed him, and how slight was my knowledge of human nature.

CHAPTER III.

MY LIFE-WORK BEGUN.

On the Staff of the Newcastle Journal—In a Dilemma—Lord John
Russell and Mr. Gladstone at Newcastle-upon-Tyne—Mr. Gladstone's
Triumphal Progress—A Memorable Colliery Disaster—A Pit-Sinker's
Heroism—Adventure at a Dickens Reading.

At last my term of probation came to an end. My friend and teacher, Mr. Lowes, after a temporary absence from Newcastle, had returned to it to undertake the editorship of the Newcastle Journal, a weekly Tory newspaper which was about to appear in a daily edition. We had kept up our friendship, and to my intense delight he offered me the post of chief reporter on the daily paper. This was in the spring of 1861. My father had come, reluctantly enough, to the conclusion that I must be allowed to go my own way, and accordingly, on July 1st in that year, I entered on my career as a professional journalist. On the previous day I had said good-bye to the W.B. Lead Office, and to Mr. Fothergill, whose kindly interest in my fortunes had never wavered, and whose own literary tastes and sympathies led him at last to look with something like approval on the step I was taking. Never was a young subaltern prouder of his first commission than was I of an appointment which gave me a recognised standing, however humble, on the English Press.

Nor was I without substantial reason for my delight at the change in my lot. My work at the W.B. Lead Office had been light enough in all conscience; but the drudgery of official routine, the strict keeping of office hours, and the monotony which made one day the counterpart of any other, were no more to my liking than they are to the liking of anyone who is young and high-spirited. All this was now at an end. No special hours had to be kept, and no two days were the same. Instead of the four walls of my office, I now had the whole of the northern counties as my sphere of work. To this hour I remember the delight with which on my second morning at the Journal office I set off, in company with the reporters of the Chronicle and the Express, to report the Quarter Sessions at Hexham. A poor task no doubt it was, but it involved a journey up the beautiful Tyne valley, and a glimpse of the old abbey town; it meant, in short, the change from a life of drudgery to one of adventure, and that morning I felt that I had recovered my lost youth.

But enough of my own feelings. The readiness with which I adapted myself to my new surroundings, the zest with which I entered into the friendships of my new comrades, certainly indicated that I had something, at all events, of the Bohemian in my nature. Of the public events of that year, 1861, there is comparatively little to be said. I remember, indeed, that I happened to be acting for the first time as sub-editor in the temporary absence of my friend, Mr. Lowes, when I received a telegram announcing that the first shot had been fired in the American War. Some two or three months later Newcastle was favoured with a visit from Lord John Russell, who had recently accepted an earldom. He was entertained at a great banquet in the Town Hall, whereat all the Whig notabilities of the North of England assembled to do him honour. Now, in my days, provincial reporters were an unsophisticated race. To a young journalist, living in Newcastle, the journalism of London seemed so remote and unattainable that it might as well have been in another planet. The sight of a reporter for one of the London dailies was awe-inspiring, and the notion of being called upon to work in the company of so august a being almost took one's breath away.

It fell out that at the Russell banquet it was arranged that his speech should be reported in short "turns" by the whole body of reporters present. This is an arrangement now, I believe, in universal use, the object being to get the report out quickly. But in 1861 it was almost unknown on the provincial press, and this was my first experience of it. Perhaps I was unnerved by the presence of a couple of Times reporters, or perhaps my knowledge of shorthand was not then all that it should have been. Be this as it may, I have to confess with regret that in reporting my turn of the great statesman's speech I made one woeful blunder. Lord Russell said (I quote from memory) that we saw now in the New World that which had so often been seen in the Old—a struggle on the one side for empire and on the other for independence. Now in the system of shorthand which I had learned, the word "independence" is represented by an arbitrary symbol, consisting of two dots, one above the other, like a colon. When I came to write out my turn, I found to my horror that the signification of this particular symbol had escaped my memory. There it was, staring me in the face from my note-book, but what it meant for my very life I could not at the moment tell. And the telegraph messengers were pestering me for my copy, and, worst of all, the reporters from London seemed to my guilty conscience to be eyeing me askance, and wondering what the delay meant. In a desperate moment I made a guess, not at the meaning of my symbol, but at some word which might take its place, and possibly pass unnoticed; so I represented Lord Russell as having said that we saw in the New World, what we had often seen in the old, a struggle on the one side for empire, and on the other for power. If it did not make absolute nonsense of the speaker's words, it certainly robbed them of all their point and meaning, and yet history is based upon blunders like this. And years afterwards I saw in a certain volume this mutilated sentence printed as Lord Russell's judgment upon the causes of the great rebellion. Never did anybody feel more ashamed of himself than I did at that time, and never again was I caught in a similar dilemma.

Newcastle was very fond in those days of entertaining the distinguished stranger. Lord Russell's visit in 1861 had been such a success that twelve months later the Liberals of the town resolved to invite Mr. Gladstone to be their guest. Mr. Gladstone was at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was not very long since he had ceased to be a Conservative; but already he had incurred the suspicions of a section of the Liberal Party, and the old Whigs of Northumberland would have nothing to do with his visit to the Tyne. But Mr. Gladstone did not need the sympathy or countenance of the Brahmins of Liberalism. He came, he was seen, and he conquered. Rarely have I seen anything to compare with the enthusiasm which fired the people of Tyneside during the two days he spent amongst them in October, 1862. I have said elsewhere that this visit was one of the turning-points in Mr. Gladstone's life. He himself practically acknowledged this to me in after-days. It was the first occasion in his career on which he had been brought into close contact with a great industrial community. It was the first time that he was treated as the popular idol by an overwhelming multitude of his fellow men. On the first day of his visit he was entertained at a banquet in the Town Hall, and it was in his speech after dinner that he made one of the notable mistakes of his great career. The Civil War in America, to which Lord Russell had alluded twelve months before, was still raging. I need hardly say that the sympathies of the upper classes were enthusiastically with the South. The names of the public men of eminence who favoured the North might have been counted upon one's fingers. Mr. Gladstone believed in the cause of the Confederates, and in this speech at Newcastle he declared that Jefferson Davis had created not merely an army and a navy, but a nation. The speech caused a great sensation. Naturally enough, it aroused bitter indignation on the other side of the Atlantic, whilst the sympathisers with the North in this country felt deeply aggrieved by it. In subsequent years Mr. Gladstone publicly made amends to the great Republic for his error of judgment, but it was a long time before he was allowed to forget it.

I had no misadventure in reporting this memorable speech. It was the first occasion on which I had ever heard Mr. Gladstone speak, and it is even fresher in my recollection than my last sight of him shortly before his death. I can recall his tall, upright figure, the handsome, open countenance, as mobile as an actor's, the flashing eye that in moments of passion lit up so wonderfully, the crop of waving brown-black hair. I have seldom seen a finer-looking man. I hear once again the beautiful voice, so sonorous, so varied in tone, so emphatic in accent. To the boy of twenty a first sight of this great historic figure was a revelation. He seemed different from everybody else, almost a being from another world. I suppose that my admiration of Mr. Gladstone, which some have considered idolatrous, is to be dated from that hour. Thirty years afterwards I still regarded him as my political leader, and as the chief of men.

On the second day of his visit to Newcastle, Mr. Gladstone, as the guest of the River Tyne Commissioners, steamed down the Tyne from Newcastle to its mouth. His progress was like that of a conqueror returning from the wars. The firing of cannon, the waving of flags, the cheering of thousands, acclaimed his passage down the coaly stream. An immense train of steamers and barges, all gaily decorated, followed in his wake. At different points of the journey his steamer was brought to a standstill, in order that addresses of welcome might be presented to him by different public bodies. He made speeches without end in reply. I think I reported eight of them myself. It was evident that he was deeply impressed by this demonstration, and I have always held that it was on that fateful day in October, 1862, that he discovered that his unpopularity with the upper classes was more than counterbalanced by his hold upon the affections of the people. As we were returning to Newcastle in the evening, I happened to be standing near Mrs. Gladstone, and she entered into conversation with me. It was the first time that I had ever seen her. "I think this has been the happiest day of my life," she said to me, with that exuberant enthusiasm in the cause of her illustrious husband which was one of the sweetest and noblest traits of her character. Exactly twenty years later, on October 8th, 1882, I sat beside Mrs. Gladstone at dinner at Leeds, where the Prime Minister had just been making a series of memorable speeches, and had received a welcome which even surpassed that at Newcastle in 1862. I recalled our meeting on the steamboat twenty years before, and her face kindled with an expression of delight. "Ah," she said, "I shall never forget that day! It was the first time, you know, that he was received as he deserved to be."

My reporting experiences at Newcastle were as varied as those of most journalists. One day I would be listening to a bishop's charge; the next, in some beautiful spot in the valley of the North Tyne, I would be professing to criticise shorthorns at a cattle show, and on the third day it might be my misfortune to have to be present at an execution. Colliery accidents, boat races (for which the Tyne has long been famous), performances at the theatre—all these came within the scope of my duty. It was admirable training, and has turned out many a good journalist. Always to be on the alert, so that no important item of news should be missed by my paper; always to be ready to reel off a column of readable "copy" on any subject whatever; always to be prepared for any duty that might turn up—these were among the necessary qualifications for my post. Then, as the Journal was short-handed, it sometimes fell to my lot to undertake tasks which usually lie outside the reporter's sphere. Sometimes I had to take a turn at sub-editing, and sometimes I had even to write a leader. My first attempt at leader-writing for the Journal was on a momentous occasion—the death of the Prince Consort. This was an event which for a time lightened my duties considerably. All public festivities were suspended; meetings of every kind were put off, and for a space of some weeks the country was spared the infliction of reading reports of speeches.

It was just about a month after the death of the Prince Consort that the most notable incident connected with my career as a reporter at Newcastle occurred. This was the terrible disaster at the Hartley New Pit, a colliery some fifteen miles from Newcastle, near the bleak Northumberland coast. The accident was of a peculiar character, and it excited an extraordinary amount of public interest. Up to that time it had been lawful to work coal mines with a single shaft, so that there was only one possible mode of egress for the men at work in the pit. Hartley was one of these single shaft collieries, and on the morning of Thursday, January 17th, 1862, more than two hundred men and boys were suddenly made prisoners in the workings by the blocking of this shaft. The beam of a pumping engine erected directly over the mouth of the pit broke, and one half of the beam—a piece of metal weighing some fifteen tons—fell down the shaft. It tore down the sides in its descent, and finally lodged at a point above the seam in which the men were working, with an immense mass of débris from the shaft walls piled above it.

The suspense of the relatives of the buried men and boys was terrible, and the whole civilised world seemed to share their emotion. After the accident had occurred, signals had been exchanged between the buried men and those at the surface, but none could tell how long the former might be able to sustain life in the vitiated atmosphere of the mine, when ventilation was no longer possible. I reached Hartley a few hours after the breaking of the beam, and in the hand-to-hand encounter with death at that forlorn and desolate spot I first became acquainted at close quarters with the tragic realities of life. For a full week in that bitter January weather I may be said to have lived on the pit platform. From ten in the morning till long after midnight I remained there, writing hourly despatches for my paper; then I drove to Newcastle, a cold, dark journey of a couple of hours, and scribbled my latest bulletin at the Journal office. This done, I lay down on a pile of newspapers in the rat-haunted office, and snatched a few hours' sleep before returning to the post of duty. But some nights it was impossible to leave the mouth of the pit even for a moment, for none could tell when the captives might be reached; so I sat with the doctors, the mining engineers, and one or two colleagues before the fire which gave us a partial warmth, though it did not shield us from the pitiless winds and the drifting sleet and snow, which often effaced my "copy" more quickly than I wrote it. It was a time of hardship and endurance, not soon to be forgotten; but it was also a time which tested to the full the capacities, both mental and physical, of the journalist, and I at least derived nothing but benefit from that rough experience.

For a full week the work of re-opening the shaft went on by night and day, and there were wives and parents who during all that week hardly left the neighbourhood of the pit for a single hour. The task of re-opening the shaft was one of extreme peril. The men had to be lowered to their work at the end of a rope in which a loop had been made, which was secured round their bodies. The two chief dangers they had to face were the continual falling in of the sides of the shaft and the presence of noxious gases. They never flinched, however, and I witnessed on that dreary pit platform at Hartley that which I have always considered the bravest deed I ever saw. I and a handful of watchers were dozing round the open fire in the early hours of a bitter winter morning, just one week after the accident had happened, when we were suddenly aroused by an urgent signal from the shaft, evidently coming from the men working far below. We thought that the imprisoned miners had been reached, and eagerly we waited till the first messenger was brought to the surface. Alas! when he was raised to the mouth of the shaft we saw that he was one of the sinkers, and was unconscious—apparently, indeed, dead. Whilst the doctor in attendance was seeking to restore him, other men were brought up, nearly all in the same condition, until the whole of the sinkers who had been engaged in their perilous task of mercy were laid in a row, pallid and unconscious, at our feet. The truth was at once apparent. The obstacle which had so long blocked the shaft had at last been removed, but a deadly gas—carbon dioxide—had at once ascended from the long-sealed workings, and we knew that the men we had been trying to save must be beyond the reach of help.

One of the sinkers who lay insensible on the platform was the son of the master-sinker, Coulson by name. I saw Coulson, when he realised what had happened, stoop down and kiss the unconscious lips of his son, and then, without a word or a sign of hesitation, he calmly took his place in the loop, and ordered the attendants to lower him into the pit. None dared say him nay, for there was still a last faint possibility that some one among the imprisoned miners might yet be alive. But it seemed to us on the pit-heap that the brave old man was going to certain death, and we never expected to see him alive again when he vanished from our sight. He did come back alive, however, and brought with him the terrible story of what he had seen. All the two hundred imprisoned colliers were dead. They were found sitting in long rows in the workings adjoining the shaft. Most had their heads buried in their hands, but here and there friends sat with intertwined arms, whilst fathers whose boys were working with them in the pit were in every case found with their lads clasped in their arms. They had all died very peacefully, and certainly not more than forty-eight hours after the closing of the shaft. One of the over-men had kept a diary of events. It told how some had succumbed to the fatal atmosphere before others, and how, in the depths of the mine, a prayer-meeting had been held, and "Brother Tibbs" had "exhorted" his fellow-sufferers. There was something noble in this peaceful ending of a life of toil and danger. It affected the whole country profoundly. It drew from the Queen, who herself had been but a few weeks a widow, a letter of sympathy which touched the heart of the nation. A subscription was raised for the widows and orphans on so liberal a scale that all their wants were more than provided for. I had myself the pleasure of starting a subscription for Coulson and his heroic fellow-workers in the shaft, which realised a handsome sum; and I was present in the Town Hall at Newcastle when they were decorated with the medals they deserved so well.

Incidentally, this great disaster affected my own career. My accounts, written at the pit mouth from day to day, had been widely quoted and read throughout the country, and it was desired that I should reprint them. They were accordingly republished for the benefit of the fund raised for the sinkers, and had a large sale. As my name appeared on the reprint, it gave me a certain passing renown in journalistic circles, and materially aided me in my future professional life.

Charles Dickens, as I have already mentioned, came to Newcastle to read from his works during my reportership on the Journal. I was, of course, an enthusiastic admirer of his, though, as I have said, Thackeray was my chief hero as a novelist. I have already spoken of the boyish eulogium which I wrote upon Dickens in anticipation of his visit.

The evening of his first reading was marked by an incident which nearly cut short my career. The hall where he was to read was full to the door when I arrived. With three ladies—who, like myself, had come too late—I was in danger of being excluded. A form was, however, brought in, and placed directly beneath the platform, so close to it that we had to incline our heads at an uncomfortable angle in order to see the reader's face. Suddenly, before the reading had proceeded very far, the heavy proscenium, which Dickens always carried about with him for the purpose of his readings, fell with a crash over me and the three ladies on the form. We were so near that the top of the proscenium happily fell beyond us, and we escaped with a severe fright. Years afterwards I was amused to read, in one of the published letters of Dickens to his sister-in-law, an account of this accident, in which the novelist told how his gasman had said afterwards: "The master stood it like a brick." But it was not upon the master, but upon me and the three ladies that that terrible proscenium suddenly descended.

CHAPTER IV.

FROM REPORTER TO EDITOR.

First Visit to London—The Capital in 1862—Acquaintance with
Sothern—Bursting of the Bradfield Reservoir—Attendance at Public
Executions and at Floggings—Assuming the Editorship of the Preston
Guardian—Political and Literary Influences—Great Speeches by
Gladstone and Bright—Bright's Contempt for Palmerston—Robertson
Gladstone Defends his Brother—Death of Abraham Lincoln—Meeting with his
Granddaughter.

My first visit to London was on the occasion of the opening of the International Exhibition of 1862. The abominable system of Parliamentary trains, which made it necessary that the third-class passenger should rise in the middle of the night if he had to make a journey of any length, was then in force. I had, therefore, to start at five o'clock in the morning in order that I might reach London in the evening. I can still recall some of the emotions of that journey. London was to me the city of all cities—the one great goal of the journalist's ambition. I took short views of life even then, but my secret hope, ever present to my mind, was that I might some day attain a post in connection with the London Press. As the crawling train came into the southern counties—farther south than I had ever been in my life before—I remember counting the milestones on the road, and suffering all the emotions of the youth in "Locksley Hall" as he draws nearer to the world's central point.

My first impression, when I found myself in the cab that was to carry me to the Brompton Road, where lodgings had been engaged for me, was one of bewilderment at the length of the streets. I had studied a plan of London, and thought from it that I could, in case of need, find my way easily on foot from King's Cross to Brompton. Now I discovered, to my dismay, that streets which had seemed no longer than those with which I was familiar at Newcastle stretched to a length that was apparently interminable; whilst instead of one unbroken thoroughfare I was rattled in my cab through squares and streets innumerable, the names of none of which had I been able to read upon my plan. My next impression was one of delight at the fidelity with which little bits of street scenery had been portrayed by John Leech in Punch. In Newcastle we knew nothing of the kitchen area and the portico. I was filled with joy when, in passing through the Bloomsbury squares, I recognised, as I thought, the very houses, porticoes, and areas that Leech had made the background for his magnificent flunkeys and neat parlour-maids.

The streets of London were a good deal dingier and dirtier in 1862 than they are to-day, and they were certainly vastly noisier. The wooden pavement was unknown, and the roar of traffic in crowded thoroughfares was positively deafening. The window-boxes filled with the flowers that are now so common and so pretty a feature of the London summer were rare, as also were the coloured awnings and outside blinds now almost universal in the better-class of thoroughfares. Hyde Park was untidy and neglected, flower-beds being practically unknown. The fine open space at Hyde Park Corner did not exist, and Piccadilly Circus was a circus really, and one of very narrow extent. But though far from possessing the magnificence of which it can now boast, London forty years ago had certain advantages over the city of to-day. There were no enormous piles of flats shutting out air and light from the streets, where both are so much needed. Few of the houses were more than four storeys in height, and the irregular architecture which then prevailed in Piccadilly—that most delightful of all the streets of the world—added to its attractiveness. But I must not be led into a digression upon London, a city so great and wonderful that a volume might easily be filled with the story of the associations it holds in my memory.

On the day after my arrival in town I was present at the State Opening of the Great Exhibition of 1862, the second—and apparently the last—of the international exhibitions held in London. Its interest was sensibly diminished by the fact that, in consequence of the death of the Prince Consort, neither the Queen nor any member of her family was present. The Duke of Cambridge, then in the prime of his manhood, took the leading part in the ceremony, and he had as his supporters Prince Frederick of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor Frederick, and the Prince of Hesse. We were not so clever in those days at arranging spectacles as we have since become, and, shortly before the hour fixed for the opening ceremony, a good deal of confusion still reigned upon the daïs set apart for the official notabilities. I was amused to see Lord Granville, who was, if I remember aright, chairman of the Royal Commissioners, broom in hand, vigorously sweeping the carpet in front of the State chairs only a few moments before he had to rush off to receive the Duke of Cambridge. My most vivid recollection of the opening ceremony is the singing of Tennyson's fine ode, composed for the occasion. I can still recall the cadence of the first lines as they fell upon my ears.

A visit to the House of Commons, where I remember hearing speeches from Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and where I gazed with longing eyes upon the occupants of the reporters' gallery, fills up my memories of this first sight of London. I might, indeed, have included in them some reference to Sothern, the actor, who was then at the height of his glory in the famous part of Lord Dundreary. But it was at Newcastle, not in London, that I actually made Sothern's acquaintance. No actor ever made a single character so famous as this part of Dundreary was made by Sothern. When he came to Newcastle on his first provincial tour I met him, and spent some pleasant evenings with him after the play. He was a man of refined speech and good social gifts. His besetting weakness, as I learned even then, was that addiction to practical jokes which, on more than one occasion in his subsequent career, involved him in unpleasant situations. One of his favourite tricks was to select some portly and self-important gentleman whom he saw passing along Piccadilly or Oxford Street, and, rushing up to him, to claim him as his dearly loved but long-lost uncle. The more strenuously the victim denied the relationship, the more eloquently pathetic and indignant became Sothern. A crowd always collected quickly, and more than once the police were summoned to relieve the putative uncle from the presence of his unwelcome nephew.

Sothern told me that he was driven nearly mad during the long run of Lord Dundreary—or, rather, Our American Cousin, as the play was named—at the Haymarket. He found it almost impossible to repeat his own jokes before a house in which he invariably recognised many familiar faces. He was constantly driven to vary his "gag," in order to amuse these veterans of the theatre, and it was in a large measure to escape from them that he made his provincial tour. In one of his conversations on the stage with the fair Georgina, who was endeavouring to entrap him into marriage, he used sometimes, at the moment when the lady thought that he was about to propose, to put a question of a very different kind: "Can you wag your left ear?" I asked him one day what had made him invent so ridiculous a question as this. "Because I can wag my left ear," was his prompt response, and straightway I saw the organ in question flapping about like a sail in a breeze. The Theatre Royal at Newcastle in those days was under the management of Mr. E. D. Davis, a well-known figure in the provincial theatrical world. It was before the days of touring companies, and Mr. Davis was supported by an excellent body of artists, including his brother and his son Alfred, as well as his niece Emily Cross. I went to the theatre in the dignified capacity of dramatic critic; but neither then, nor at any subsequent period of my life, did I fall a victim to that passion for the drama to which so many Pressmen succumb. Indeed, I have a lively recollection of incurring the well-merited reproof of pretty Miss Cross for having engaged in one of the stage boxes in a hot political discussion with another Newcastle journalist, Mr. Joseph Cowen to wit. Yet it was at Newcastle that I had my first and last association with dramatic authorship. One of the Davises had written a play which he had called Wild Flowers. He asked me to read the manuscript, and when I had done so I suggested that it should be entitled The Marriage Contract, an emendation which the author duly accepted.

My term of service on the Newcastle Press came to an end sooner than I had anticipated. The chief feature of my reporting experiences in 1863 was the meeting of the British Association in my native town. There was keen rivalry between the Journal and the Chronicle—Mr. Cowen's newspaper—with regard to the reporting of all local matters. Unfortunately for me, the Chronicle was a wealthy paper, and the Journal a very poor one. I had, therefore, to wage an unequal war with my richer rival. A British Association meeting throws a heavy strain upon the newspapers of the town in which it takes place. Half-a-dozen sections meet every day, and all must be reported; whilst there are, in addition, evening meetings and social functions, the story of which must be told from day to day. Sir William Armstrong, then just coming into fame as a maker of guns, though long known to Newcastle as a great mechanical engineer and the inventor of the hydraulic crane, was the president of the meeting. This added to the pride which the people of Newcastle felt in the fact that their town had been chosen for the scene of so distinguished a gathering. In those days local patriotism ran very high in the old town. We were intensely provincial, and our favourite belief was that Newcastle stood unrivalled among the cities of the earth. When any distinguished stranger came amongst us—as, for example, Mr. Gladstone, on the occasion to which I have already referred—we washed our face, and put on our best clothes in order to impress the visitor. We had something of the perfervid nature of the Scot in our characters, and rose to extraordinary heights of enthusiasm on very indifferent pretexts. It followed that when we had so distinguished a body as the British Association to receive as our guests, and when we had furnished in one of our own citizens the president of the meeting, we almost went out of our minds in our exultant delight. I do not know if Newcastle is still capable of these transports of enthusiasm. I rather think that the local patriotism which distinguished so many of our cities fifty years ago is now, in these days of incessant intercommunication, merged in the larger patriotism of the nation. Be this as it may, I must explain that my dissertation on the manner in which Newcastle received the British Association in 1863 is merely intended to account for the fact that, as a result of that meeting, I suffered from a serious illness, brought on by anxiety and overwork. I found that reporting, when you had to compete with a formidable rival possessing a staff three times as large as your own, was laborious, as well as exciting; and having a desire to attempt literary work upon a higher level, I gave up my position as a reporter, and adopted instead the vocation of a leader-writer.

My last bit of work as a reporter for the Newcastle Journal was in describing the accident which happened at Bradfield, near Sheffield, in the spring of 1864. The dam of the great reservoir from which Sheffield drew its water supply burst, and a torrent of water, many feet in depth, and nearly a quarter of a mile in width, suddenly rushed down a narrow valley, and flooded the lower part of Sheffield. The tragic occurrence was subsequently described by Charles Reade in his novel, "Put Yourself in His Place." Reade was not an eye-witness of the scene that was presented after the flood had spent its force, but I can bear testimony to the fact that he described it accurately. Certainly it was a wonderful and terrible sight that was presented when I visited the place a few hours after the bursting of the dam. The streets of Sheffield were ploughed up to the depth of many feet; lamp-posts were twisted like wire, and many houses either stood tottering with one of their sides clean swept away, or lay a mere heap of ruins. Hundreds of lives were lost. A great battle could not have dealt death more freely than did this flood. Most of the victims were drowned in their beds, and it was a terrible sight to see the long rows of corpses, clad in night-dresses, that were laid out in the public building that had been hastily turned into a mortuary. I think, indeed, the horror of that spectacle surpassed even that of the scene at Hartley New Pit, when the victims of the accident there were disinterred.

The newspaper reporter has still, in the discharge of his duty, to see many strange and painful things, but he is now spared some of the most trying sights to which he was exposed in my reporting days. Among these, none was so painful and so revolting as a public execution. I attended several executions during my connection with the Newcastle Press, and I was a witness in 1868 of the last public execution in England—that of Barrett, the Fenian, of whom I shall have more to say by-and-by. I am thankful to know that the necessity of attendance at these dreadful scenes is no longer imposed upon the journalist, and I feel a profound pity for those officials who are compelled by an imperative duty to be present at the private strangling of their fellow-creatures. It is true, however, that use hardens the heart and deadens the nerves. I remember how, on the first occasion of witnessing an execution, as I stood trembling at the foot of the scaffold on which the victim was about to appear, I noticed an old reporter, for whom I entertained a great personal respect, pacing up and down beside me, reading the New Testament. In the passion of horror and pity that filled my young heart, I concluded that my friend was seeking spiritual comfort in view of the event in which we were about to take part as spectators and recorders. I said something to him about the horror of the act we were shortly to witness. He looked up with a placid smile from his reading, and said gently—for he was essentially a gentle man—"Yes, very sad, very sad; but let us be thankful it isn't raining." And then he calmly returned to his daily reading of the Word. If even gentle hearts can thus grow callous, what must be the "moral effect" of an execution upon those who are already brutalised?

Another unpleasant sight which reporters are now spared is the flogging of garrotters. When the Act authorising this punishment was passed, provision was made that the representatives of the Press should be present when it was inflicted. More than once I have had to witness these floggings in the course of my ordinary duty. I confess that they did not affect me as they seemed to affect most of my colleagues. An execution, with the violent thrusting of a human soul into the unknown, moved me deeply; but the physical punishment of a ruffian who had himself inflicted atrocious suffering upon some innocent person seemed to be such well-deserved retribution that even the coward's shrieks for mercy made no impression upon my nerves; and yet I have seen reporters who could laugh and joke at an execution faint at the flogging of a garrotter. So differently are human beings constituted!

At the end of June, 1864, I left my native town, and went to Preston to undertake editorial duties in connection with the Preston Guardian—the leading Liberal paper in North Lancashire. It was a custom amongst journalists in those days always to give a farewell entertainment to a brother of the Press when he quitted a town where he had been engaged for any length of time. I was entertained at the usual complimentary dinner, and was made the recipient of a very handsome testimonial. I felt most unfeignedly that I had not deserved it, yet the possession of the gold watch and collection of standard books subscribed for out of the scanty earnings of my colleagues was a real comfort to me when, with a sad heart, I left the sacred shelter of my home and quitted the town in which the whole of my life up to that moment had been spent. I reached Preston one summer evening as homesick as any lad could have been. I did not know the name of a single person in the town except that of the proprietor of the Guardian, Mr. Toulmin. I did not even know the name of an hotel at which to stay for the night. A porter at the railway station told me the name of the chief inn, and thither I repaired with my belongings.

An amusing experience befell me here, which, as it relates to a state of things that is now obsolete, I may recount. On the day after my arrival, having introduced myself at the Guardian office, and taken formal possession of my new post, I returned to my hotel in time for the daily dinner which the waitress had informed me was served at one o'clock. The coffee-room, when I entered it, was filled by commercial travellers, all hovering with hungry looks around the table that had been laid for dinner. They seemed relieved when I, as shy a youth as could anywhere be found, entered the room, and instantly seated themselves at the table. I looked round for some corner in which I might hide myself from what seemed to me to be their almost ferocious gaze, and was filled with alarm when I found that the only seat left vacant was that at the head of the table. Instinctively I shrank from so conspicuous a place, and as I moved away the hungry company seemed to glare at me more fiercely than ever. A waitress approached me, and saying, "You are president of the day, sir," motioned me to the vacant seat at the head of the board. I do not think I was ever more miserable or more frightened in my life than when, under her imperious direction, I took my seat and met the gaze of a dozen hungry men: on the sideboard stood the soup tureens, the waiting-maids beside them, but not a cover was lifted or a motion made, and dead silence filled the room. I sat in blushing bewilderment, waiting for the dinner to be served. Suddenly, from the other end of the table, a harsh voice issued from the lips of a burly, red-faced man. "Mr. President, if you are a Christian, you'll perhaps be good enough to say grace, and let us get to our dinner, which we want very badly." I managed to stammer forth the formula of my childhood, and thought the worst was over. Not a bit of it. No sooner had the soup been audibly consumed than the hated voice from the foot of the table again assailed me. "Mr. President, I really don't know what you mean by neglecting your duties in this way, but let me tell you that this is not a company of teetotallers." "Ask them what wine they would like," whispered the waitress behind me, who saw my plight, and who evidently pitied it, for she added, "Don't let that nasty man at the other end of the table bully you." But I was incapable of maintaining the deception in which I had been innocently involved, and, taking my courage in both hands, I frankly told the company that I was not a commercial traveller, had never in my life dined at a commercial table, and, as I knew nothing of the usages of such a place, would beg the gentleman at the other end of the table to take upon himself the duties of president. There was a burst of laughter from the majority of the diners, and good-humour was instantly restored. My vis-à-vis, who was addressed as "Mr. Vice," was, indeed, somewhat grumpy; but I had won the goodwill of the others, and was allowed to look on, a silent spectator, whilst the many mystic rites and usages which distinguished the "commercial table" of that epoch were duly celebrated. Strange to say, that was not only my first but my last experience of the kind, and now I imagine that the old customs of the road—the wine-drinking, the speech-making, the toasts, and the graces before and after meat—are all things of the past.

My editorial career at Preston began with a somewhat painful and even dramatic episode. I had returned to the office, after my dinner with the commercial travellers, in order to attend to my duties for the day. The Guardian was published twice a week—on Wednesday and Saturday. This was Tuesday afternoon. The proprietor had informed me that he was already provided with a leading article for Wednesday's publication, and my duties were therefore confined to the sub-editing of the news and the writing of a few editorial paragraphs. Suddenly Mr. Toulmin entered my room, and, without uttering a word, placed a telegram on the desk before me. It consisted of these words, still imprinted on my memory: "Washington Wilkes died suddenly last night while addressing a public meeting." I knew Mr. Wilkes by name as a Radical journalist of considerable ability, who wrote regularly for the Morning Star. Accordingly I expressed my regret on hearing of his death. "Yes," said Mr. Toulmin, bluntly; "that's all very well, but now you'll have to write the leader for to-morrow, for Wilkes was to have written it." Under these startling circumstances I penned my first leading article for the Preston Guardian. Though I thus stepped into the shoes of a dead man, I fear that I can hardly have filled them; but this was, on the whole, not to be wondered at.

Mr. Toulmin, my new employer, was a man of marked character. Long before my business connection with him ceased, I learned to regard him with genuine respect and liking, and these feelings I entertained for him to the day of his death. But his somewhat rough exterior was not altogether prepossessing, and when I came to him first as a raw lad, shy, sensitive, and intolerant of manners that were foreign to my own, I must frankly confess that I felt repelled by him. Besides, I quickly discovered that I should have to fight my own battles if I wished to preserve my professional rights and dignity. I had been engaged as editor and sub-editor of the Guardian, and as it was my first editorship, it need hardly be said that I valued my position highly. Mr. Toulmin, I subsequently found, had a reputation for getting all he could out of the members of his staff without much regard to the customs of journalism. Thus, I had scarcely finished the article which would have been written by Washington Wilkes but for his sudden death, when Mr. Toulmin, coming into my room, expressed his warm satisfaction at the quickness with which I had turned out my work; then, with an almost paternal smile upon his face, he laid before me some pages of manuscript, and in an insinuating voice said: "Would you mind keeping your eye upon this whilst I run over this proof?" In an instant I grasped his meaning. I had been engaged as editor, and he proposed to fill up my spare time by employing me as a proof-reader. For a moment I was almost apoplectic with indignation at what I regarded as an outrage upon my dignity. To this day I am thankful that I controlled my temper, but I am not less thankful that I had the courage—and it required some courage—to say to him, with a smile as insinuating as his own: "I should have been delighted, but unfortunately I have an engagement out of doors." And thereupon I left the room, triumphant.

Never again did Mr. Toulmin invite me to assist him in reading a proof, and long afterwards he made frank admission to me of the fact that this incident proved that I was "not going to be put upon." Very soon I found that he was not only a kind-hearted but a very able man. He had begun life, at the age of six, in a cotton factory. The statement to-day is hardly credible, but such is the fact. In those cruel times, when no Lord Ashley had as yet arisen to open the door of the workman's prison-house and set the children free, this poor child had been shut up from six in the morning till six at night in the fetid atmosphere of a cotton-mill. God knows what the economic value of such a weakling's labour may have been! One would think that a South Carolina planter would have been wiser than to work his "stock" at such an age. Be this as it may, my friend had passed through this terrible apprenticeship to toil—always hungry, always tired; and had not only survived it, but emerged from it a man. When I knew him he could talk calmly of the horrors of his childhood, but there was an undercurrent of bitterness in his reference to those times which one could understand and respect. He was an ardent and convinced Liberal, and I think that I owe more to his teaching for the character of my own political views than I owe to anybody else.

When I went to Lancashire in 1864 the terrible effects of the cotton famine were everywhere to be seen. History has done justice to the noble fortitude with which the operatives of Lancashire "clemmed" (starved) in silence during that awful time. Never shall I forget the pale, pinched faces of the men and women as they walked to and from their daily labour. The worst of the struggle was over, but hundreds of great mills were still closed, and those which were open only ran half-time. The working classes in Lancashire, as in most places, were on the side of the North in the American Civil War, and not even the sufferings which that war caused them, made them abate their opposition to the slave-holding South. But in Lancashire, as elsewhere, the upper classes—with the exception of the few who followed the noble leadership of John Bright—were enthusiasts on the side of the South, and, if they had dared, would have urged English intervention on behalf of the Confederate States. There was thus a strong and marked difference of opinion between the upper and the lower classes in Lancashire, as elsewhere. The great question in domestic politics was that of Parliamentary reform. Advanced Liberals believed that if only the franchise was enlarged, and the working-man admitted within the pale, Liberal principles and ideas would henceforward triumph permanently in our national politics, and they were, consequently, eager to bring about this great constitutional change. Tories also believed that this would be the effect of the enlargement of the franchise, and they naturally opposed it vehemently. Neither party foresaw that the elements common to human nature everywhere would influence the course of politics just as fully after the working men had been admitted within the pale of the Constitution as before, and that we should find even amongst the lower orders the same differences between Liberals and Conservatives as prevailed in the middle class.

The sober Whiggish turn of mind which I had inherited from my father influenced me greatly in those days. Like the rest of the world, I believed that to admit the working classes to the franchise would be to give democracy a free rein, and to bring about changes, both social and political, of an extreme kind. Many of the changes then suggested did not seem to me to be wise. For this reason I could not enter as heartily as I might otherwise have done into the demand for Parliamentary reform. To go slowly, I thought, would be to go safely. From this Laodicean frame of mind I was rescued by Mr. Toulmin. It was not only that he could speak of the dark days at the beginning of the century, and of the inequality and injustice which then prevailed under Tory rule in England; he was able also to point out the contrast between the unselfish and heroic conduct of the Lancashire operatives with regard to the American Civil War, and that of their superiors, in whose hands the political destinies of the country rested. He was in the habit of enforcing his broad and sensible arguments on the subject of Parliamentary reform by means of a quaint little diagram, which he was continually presenting to those with whom he engaged in argument. "Look at this," he would say, pointing to an inverted pyramid, "that is the British constitution as it is at present. Does it not strike you as being rather top-heavy, and not unlikely to topple over in a storm? Now look at this," and he placed the pyramid on its proper base. "That is what I want to see, and you'll agree with me it's a great deal safer than the other way." I thought of Tennyson's words: "Broad-based upon her people's will," and felt that there was more in the rude little diagram than in many subtle and learned arguments.

It was not only from my intercourse with Mr. Toulmin that I derived mental profit in those days. I was always a rapid worker, and I speedily found that two days and a half in each week sufficed to enable me to discharge my duties at the Guardian office. The ample leisure which I thus enjoyed I devoted to reading, and in my lonely lodgings I spent hours each day in study. As I look back upon that time I feel again stealing over me like a vivifying flood the influence of Carlyle, under the spell of whose teaching and inspiration I then practically came for the first time. The companions of my solitude in those days were at least not ignoble ones. Carlyle, Browning—not yet the victim of the Browning Society—Thackeray, and most of our great historians, were always by my side, and my mind gradually expanded as it absorbed their words and thoughts. In one respect Preston has always seemed to me to be unique among English towns. The centre of the town, if I may commit a bull, lay at a point on its circumference. The Town Hall, the parish church, the leading business thoroughfare, the railway station, and the Guardian office were all close to the river Ribble, separated from it only by the beautiful Avenham Park, where the residences of the local aristocracy were to be found. All the industrial part of the town, and the houses of the operatives, lay farther away from the river. Across the river there was nothing but open country. My modest lodgings in Regent Street were at the same time within three minutes' walk of the Guardian office and of the old wooden bridge that crossed the Ribble. Thus I could escape almost directly from the town into the open country, and many were the hours I spent in delightful solitary rambles through the lanes and fields of rural Lancashire. It is a good thing for a young man to have time for solitary thinking, and no one who is worth his salt can enjoy the kind of solitude which fell to my lot at Preston without gaining by it. If I went there a boy, I left the place, after my eighteen months of editorship, a man.

Of my newspaper experiences at Preston there is not much to record. Two notable speeches that I heard and reported—although I would not read proofs I was quite willing to oblige Mr. Toulmin by keeping up my practice as a shorthand writer—recur to me. One was a speech made in 1865 by Mr. Gladstone at Manchester. The chief memory it has left with me is of the touching and stately eloquence with which he told his audience that he felt that his own life's work was drawing to a close. Of the men with whom he had entered upon public life, he declared the majority had passed away, and that fact reminded him that he could not reasonably expect that his own time could be much further prolonged. No one who heard him could have imagined that thirty years of public service still lay before the speaker. The other speech was still more notable, for it introduced me for the first time to the greatest of all the orators of the nineteenth century, John Bright. Mr. Bright's speech, which was delivered at Blackburn, promised to be of peculiar interest, inasmuch as he made it only a few days after the death of Lord Palmerston, in October, 1865. Everybody was curious to know what the great Liberal would say of the man whose policy he had so often opposed, and with whom he had so often crossed swords on the floor of Parliament. I went to Blackburn as curious as anybody else. Bright made a long speech, and from beginning to end he never mentioned the name of Palmerston. Years afterwards, in a spirit, I fear, slightly tinged with malice, I would sometimes supply that notable omission by naming Palmerston to Mr. Bright. The effect was always the same, and always electrical. "Palmerston!" he would cry. "The man who involved us in the crime of the Crimean War!" And then he would break off with an angry toss of his leonine head; but the accents of immeasurable scorn filled the hiatus in his speech.

In after years I became what I still remain—an enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Bright's oratory. I hope to say something on a later page on this subject. Here I need only note the fact that his first speech disappointed me. Indeed, men were usually disappointed when they heard him for the first time. They went expecting to hear an orator full of sound and fury. They were amazed by the reserve—one might almost say the repose—of his style. Of gesture he made absolutely no use. He never let his magnificent voice rise above a certain pitch; he never poured out his words in a tumultuous torrent; he was always deliberate and measured in his utterances, and it was only as you grew accustomed to him that you noted those wonderful inflections of the voice which expressed so clearly the emotions of the orator.

In 1865 the country was much agitated on the question of the cattle plague. It was a question that particularly affected Cheshire and the rural parts of Lancashire. The action taken by the Government, of which Mr. Gladstone was a prominent member, was strongly opposed by the representatives of the agricultural interest. A county meeting was held at Preston to consider the subject and to denounce the Ministry. If I remember aright, the Earl of Derby, the famous "Rupert of debate," was in the chair, and he was surrounded by half the magnates of Lancashire. It was a notable and imposing gathering. One titled speaker after another got up and abused Ministers, and it was notable that Mr. Gladstone fell in for the hottest measure of abuse. When some resolution was about to be put a man seated in the body of the hall got up and asked if he might say a few words. He was a tall, thick-set person, and his dress was so plain that most of us took him for a farmer, if not a farm-labourer. The meeting, which was enjoying the eloquence of earls and aristocrats of every degree, turned with anger upon the unknown intruder, and shouted "Name, name!" with all its might. "My name is Gladstone," said the stranger, in a clear and powerful voice. Everybody burst into a roar of laughter. It seemed so curious that immediately after listening to unmeasured vituperation of the Gladstone, this humble person who had obtruded himself unexpectedly upon the scene should happen to be of the same name. But before the laughter had subsided Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, who was on the platform, shouted out the explanation of the mystery. "Mr. Robertson Gladstone, of Liverpool." It was the brother of the much-hated Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had gone to the meeting to defend his illustrious relative; and defend him he did, with so much force and eloquence that he not only made some of the noble speakers look rather foolish, but convinced one, at least, who heard him that if he had adopted a Parliamentary career, he too might have been one of the great figures of the House of Commons.

As I look back upon my editorial experiences during the year and a half that I spent at Preston, the salient questions which stand out in my recollection are the war between Denmark and the Austro-Prussian allies, in which this country was so nearly involved, and the concluding struggles in the American Civil War, which may be said to have had their culmination in the tragical assassination of Lincoln. It may seem a strange thing to say, and yet I believe that Lincoln's cruel death did more to hasten the return of peace and goodwill, not only in the United States, but all over the world, after the close of the war, than anything else could have done. It is certain that it produced a remarkable effect in England. The "classes" in England were, as I have said, almost unanimously opposed to the North, and there was no single person engaged in the great struggle whom they more persistently misunderstood and misrepresented than Abraham Lincoln. Even now I feel a sense of shame as I recall the abuse which was showered upon that great man at the time when he was leading his country through the most terrible crisis in her history. But his death, coming as it did in the moment of victory, and also at the moment when he had shown that he knew how to be moderate and magnanimous in victory, opened the eyes of the world, and showed him, even to those Englishmen who had hated him, in his true colours—one of the wisest and noblest men of our time.

This revelation of the blunder which "the classes" had committed in their estimate of Lincoln had an even greater effect in softening the asperities which the war left behind it than had the exposure of the egregious miscalculations of English statesmen as to the comparative military strength of North and South. One must not blame Englishmen too severely, however, for their lack of appreciation of Lincoln. It is doubtful if even now he is appreciated at his true worth by Americans themselves. Some years ago I had the privilege of taking in to dinner a charming young lady who was Lincoln's direct descendant. I said to her, "You can hardly understand how pleased I am to have met you. There is scarcely any man whose name is familiar to me whom I honour as I honour the memory of your grandfather." The young lady opened her eyes in innocent amazement, and confessed subsequently that she had been very much surprised by my little speech. "At home they never say anything about grandpapa." Lowell, however, has said something about him which will live for ever in the elegiac poetry of the world.

My stay at Preston came to an end in January, 1866. I had become engaged whilst staying there, and, feeling stronger in health, was anxious to obtain a more active position than the editorship of a newspaper published only twice a week. My wishes were realised when I received an offer from the proprietors of the Leeds Mercury of a position on that journal, which had long been one of the most important of provincial newspapers. I accepted the offer, and left Preston at the beginning of 1866 with feelings of nothing but goodwill and respect for my old chief, Mr. Toulmin.

CHAPTER V.

WORK ON THE LEEDS MERCURY.

My New Duties—Betrothal—The Writing of Leading Articles—The Founder of the Leeds Mercury—Edward Baines the Second—Thomas Blackburn Baines—Patriotic Nonconformists—Another Colliery Explosion: A Story of Heroism—An Abortive Fenian Raid at Chester—Reminiscences of the Prince of Wales's Visits to Yorkshire—Mr. Bright and the Reform Demonstrations of 1866—The Closing Speech at St. James's Hall—The Tribune of the People Vindicates the Queen.

I did not know, when I arrived in Leeds one wintry day in the beginning of 1866, how long my connection with that town was to last, and how closely I was to become associated with its public life. Beyond one or two members of the Mercury staff, I knew nobody in Leeds, so that once more I found myself amongst strangers. But whereas at Preston I had remained a stranger and a wayfarer during the whole period of my sojourn in the place, I had not been long in Leeds before I began to feel that I had found a second home. This was, no doubt, due in part to the fact that old friends of mine were already employed on the Mercury staff, through whom I speedily made a number of acquaintances among the townspeople. But I think that the sense of being at home which I acquired so soon was chiefly due to the character of the inhabitants of Leeds. Whatever may be the case now, at that time the Leeds people were typical representatives of the best characteristics of Yorkshire. They were frank, outspoken, warm-hearted, and hospitable. They were not, indeed, so refined in speech as they might have been, and to the stranger their blunt utterances were at times rather disconcerting. They criticised one's work freely, and never hesitated to say when they did not like it. They had strong prejudices and prepossessions, to both of which they gave free expression. But if they never hesitated to criticise, they were just as ready, when they were pleased, to utter words of praise and encouragement; and it was not long before I had the gratification of finding that my humble efforts on the Leeds Mercury had made for me many friends whom I did not know in the flesh.

Next to the delight of a first appearance in print, there is nothing that brings so much joy to the heart of a young writer as the discovery that something which he has written has won the sympathy and secured for him the friendly approval of some unknown reader. It is in this that there lies, after all, the highest reward of the journalist. No honours, no money, no fame can ever satisfy him as does the knowledge that by means of his pen he is influencing the thoughts, and winning the affections, of some at least of that vast unknown public whom it is his duty to address. A sheet of paper is but a flimsy thing, yet, as a rule, when used by the journalist it cuts off the electric current of sympathy which passes between speaker and auditor when they are visible to each other. The discovery that it may sometimes be a conductor, instead of an obstruction, to the current warms the heart of a young writer in a wonderful fashion, and is the best stimulus that he can have in the pursuit of his profession. To my dying day I shall think of Leeds with pleasure and gratitude, in remembrance of the fact that it was there that I first enjoyed this delightful experience.

My duties on the Leeds Mercury were, in the first instance, both varied and modest. I had to superintend the work of the reporting staff, taking part myself, when necessary, in the reporting of large meetings and important speeches. I had to do all the descriptive work of the journal, and in those days more importance was attached to the work of the descriptive writer than appears to be the case at present. Russell, of the Times, the illustrious "pen of the war," furnished the model for descriptive journalism in the 'sixties. There was none of that slap-dash statement of bare facts, embellished by the more or less impertinent personal impressions and opinions of the reporter, to which we have become accustomed in recent times. It was expected that a descriptive article should be in the nature of an essay, and that it should actually describe, more or less vividly, the scene with which it dealt. If anyone cares to search the files of our leading newspapers between 1860 and 1870, he will come upon some pieces of descriptive writing of astonishing literary merit.

In addition to acting as descriptive writer, I had, when required, to contribute leading articles to the Mercury. At first I did this at rare intervals. It was an innovation for anyone connected with the reporting staff to contribute to the leading columns, and I remember the alarm and indignation of the older members of the staff when they learned that work of this character was to be entrusted to me. But I had practised leader-writing at Preston; I liked it (though my preference was for descriptive writing), and it was not long before I found that I had got into the regular leader-writer's stride. I was barely four-and-twenty, and I had, therefore, a consuming sense of the value of my lucubrations and the importance of my opinions. It is emphatically true, as Sir William Harcourt once wrote to me, that "Youth is the age of Wegotism." When I wielded that magnificent editorial "we," and was able to back up my own crude ideas with all the authority of a great daily newspaper, I felt that I, too, was somebody in the world of affairs, and that though I might live in modest lodgings and possess but narrow means, I was not without a distinct place and influence of my own in the great commonwealth. Such are the illusions of the youthful leader-writer— foolish, perhaps, but not ignoble.

Some of my early leaders pleased the proprietors of the paper, one of whom was also the editor. It was arranged that I was to contribute regularly the chief article for Monday's paper. Now, as I have said, I had become engaged, and my cousin, Miss Kate Thornton, to whom I was betrothed, lived at Stockport, at a distance of more than two hours from Leeds. I had been in the habit of visiting Stockport almost every Saturday, returning to my duties on Monday morning. This leader-writing for Monday's paper threatened to interfere with this arrangement. Fortunately for me, the proprietors of the Mercury—of whom I shall have more to say presently—had a great reverence for Sunday. The Leeds Mercury, indeed, had not become a daily paper until long after this change in its character was expected by the public, simply because an ordinary daily newspaper entailed a certain amount of Sunday work upon those engaged in producing it. It was not until the proprietors had satisfied themselves that it would be possible to produce a Monday morning's newspaper, and at the same time to keep the office closed from midnight on Saturday till midnight on Sunday, that they resolved to publish daily. The arrangement was costly; it was vastly inconvenient to everybody concerned. I am afraid that it did not conduce to the keeping of the Sabbath, seeing that the compositors, who were not allowed to enter the office until midnight of that day, were tempted to spend an hour or two in some public-house before commencing their belated work. But with all its drawbacks, the plan had at least the advantage of keeping the office doors shut for the whole of the twenty-four sacred hours, and thus the appearance of evil, if not the evil itself, was avoided. As a consequence of this system, the greater part of Monday's paper had to be set on Saturday, and the leader, in particular, was always furnished to the printers on that day. So far, therefore, there was nothing to prevent my writing the Monday's leader, and still paying my usual weekly visit to Stockport. All that was necessary was that the editor should give me my subject early enough on Saturday morning.

This, however, was what I could not induce him to do. He was supposed to be at the office shortly after eleven o'clock, and my train for Stockport did not leave until half-past one. If the editor had been punctual, and if he had given me my subject at once, I should have had ample time in which to write my leader. But unfortunately he was not punctual, and too often when he came he was occupied with other business, whilst I hung about miserably counting the minutes until I was summoned to his presence. Then, when at last I had received my subject, or had got leave to write upon some topic suggested by myself, I hurried to the sub-editor's room, and, sitting at a corner of a table upon which I laid my watch, dashed off my precious article at the top of my speed. When I began my practice as a leader-writer I took from an hour and a half to two hours to write my fifteen hundred words; but, under the pressure of that terrible half-past one o'clock train, I gradually improved my pace, until at last, if I took more than an hour in the production of an article, I felt dissatisfied. Mere speed in writing is a very small accomplishment. It is not necessarily a virtue, and it may even be a vice; but it is undoubtedly an accomplishment that I possess. In later days my regular time for turning out an article of the length I have named was from forty to fifty minutes. I could write my leaders with people talking around me, and felt no difficulty in joining in the conversation. I am told that many journalists regard it as incredible that an article of fifteen hundred words could be written in from forty to fifty minutes. All I can say is that it is a fact, and I attribute this speed in writing to the pressure of that half-past one o'clock train on Saturdays in the good old days of my first residence in Leeds.

The story of the Leeds Mercury is an honourable one in the annals of English journalism. It was first established, if I remember aright, in the year 1718. In the editor's room at Leeds a file of the paper is preserved, dating from the year 1727. This file is complete for more than 170 years, with one melancholy exception. In the volume for 1745 the numbers of the paper published during the second Jacobite Rising are omitted. But in spite of this omission, these volumes, extending over so long a period, are of immense value and interest. In its earliest days the Mercury, though published in a provincial town, sought to reproduce in its columns not so much the news of the locality as the humour of the Metropolis; and the very first leading article in the earliest volume preserved at Leeds bears the quaint title, "To the Ladies who affect showing their stockings."

Comparatively early in the Georgian era the Mercury became distinguished for the excellence of its news, both local and general. It was not, of course, a large newspaper in those days, but the four pages of which it consisted were full of meat. There was no descriptive reporting; but what could be more expressive than the announcement of a marriage in such terms as these:—"On Tuesday se'n-night, Squire Brown of Bumpkin Hall was married to Miss Matilda Midas of Halifax, a handsome young lady with ten thousand pounds to her dowry"? We are much more florid nowadays, but by no means so precise. The leader-writer did not spread himself abroad a hundred years ago. Indeed, soon after the Leeds Mercury gave up discussing the amiable weakness that it attributed to ladies with well-turned ankles, it ceased for a time to discuss anything at all. It was only in the beginning of the nineteenth century that it resumed its leading articles. But what leading articles they were! Fine writing and redundancy of style were both discarded, and when the news of Waterloo arrived, the editor's comment upon the great epoch-making victory was expressed in a dozen lines. One sighs at the thought of the miles of "long primer" that would be expended if we had the opportunity of commenting upon such a theme to-day. Yet the twelve-line article in the Leeds Mercury of June, 1815, really said everything that was to the point on the subject with which it dealt.

It was in the year 1800 that the Mercury took that new stand in its history which was to place it in the front rank among English provincial journals. Three or four years earlier a young journeyman printer, named Edward Baines, had tramped across the moors which form the dividing line between Lancashire and Yorkshire, and after walking the whole distance from Preston to Leeds, had found employment in the small printing office in which the Leeds Mercury was produced. Edward Baines, the first, was undoubtedly a man of great ability and remarkable character. Very soon after he began his humble work as a compositor in Leeds he attracted the attention not only of his employer, but of some of the gentry of the town. He was seen to be a person of uncommon intelligence, strict integrity, and distinct political sagacity. The Leeds Mercury, at the close of the eighteenth century, was still a mere news-sheet, professing no opinions of its own, and consequently making no attempt to mould the opinions of its readers. The Whig party in the West Riding felt that they needed an organ of their own to support their cause in that great district. Accordingly, they subscribed funds sufficient to acquire the Mercury and to provide capital for carrying it on, and they placed the paper in the hands of Edward Baines, the young printer who, but a few years previously, had made his first appearance in Yorkshire.

The trust they reposed in Mr. Baines was more than justified. Under his direction the Mercury became in a few years the leading journal in the north of England. The money that had been advanced to him for its purchase he speedily repaid, and by the time that Wellington was dealing his death-blow at French Imperialism, Edward Baines had made himself a power, not only in Leeds but in Yorkshire. I remember being told by very old men that when the news of Waterloo reached him a chair was taken out of his office in Briggate to the street, where an eager crowd had gathered. Mounting upon this chair, Mr. Baines read the despatch announcing the great victory to his enthusiastic fellow townsmen. An earnest Liberal, he fought by the side of the Liberal leaders both with his pen and his tongue during the long struggle for Parliamentary Reform, and he was in due time rewarded by being elected to represent Leeds in the House of Commons. His may fairly be described as an ideal career. He gained friends, influence, wealth, in the town he had entered as a penniless workman. But, better than all, he witnessed the triumph of nearly all the great political and social movements to which he had lent his powerful aid. Having represented his fellow-townsmen in three successive Parliaments, he was honoured at his death, at a ripe age, in 1848, with a public funeral, which people in Leeds still recall as a unique demonstration of gratitude and esteem. In Yorkshire, where his career was better known than elsewhere, the name given to him by the generation that followed him was that of "the English Benjamin Franklin."

It was Mr. Baines's good fortune to leave behind him in his sons men who were worthy to succeed him. His eldest son, Matthew Talbot Baines, went to the Bar. After his father's death he entered Parliament, where he had a distinguished career, becoming eventually a Cabinet Minister under Lord Palmerston. He died at a comparatively early age, and it was well known to the initiated that, if he had not died thus young, it was the intention of the Government to propose him for the Speakership. The second son of the man who really founded the fortunes of the Leeds Mercury was, like his father, called Edward. He, too, attained distinction in the public service. From his youth he was his father's chief assistant in the editorship of the Mercury, and by his enterprise, sagacity, and fine abilities as a journalist he greatly extended the influence and reputation of the paper. As a boy he was present at the so-called Battle of Peterloo—the riot which took place at Manchester in 1819, when a political meeting was being held on the site of the present Free Trade Hall. Young Edward attended the meeting as a reporter for the Mercury. He observed everything that happened, and it was his evidence, given subsequently at Lancaster Assizes, that saved many innocent persons, who had been hunted down by the cruel authorities of the day, from the punishment of transportation.

Edward Baines the second edited the Mercury down to 1859, when, on the death of his brother, he was chosen by his fellow-townsmen to succeed him as their representative in Parliament. He had there a most honourable career. He was, like his father, a Nonconformist, and he was also a strict teetotaller. When he entered the House of Commons there was only one other teetotaller in that body. A generous and cultured man, filled with enthusiasm for the public good, he succeeded during his Parliamentary career in winning the respect of the House, not only for himself personally, but for those Nonconformist and teetotal principles which Society, at that time, held in such low esteem. Strangely enough, this life-long advocate of temperance reform lost his seat in the General Election of 1874 through an outburst of teetotal fanaticism on the part of the advocates of the Permissive Bill. As he refused to vote for that measure, they ran an intemperate temperance advocate named Lees against him, and by doing so gave the seat to a local brewer. On his eightieth birthday, in 1880, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in recognition of his life-long devotion to the public service.

I am not, however, telling the story of the Baineses. I have not even referred to it at such length merely because I feel it to be an honourable and instructive chapter in English local history, but because it throws light upon the peculiar position and authority enjoyed by the Leeds Mercury when I first became connected with it in 1866. At that time, the son of the second Edward Baines, Thomas Blackburn Baines, was editor of the paper, but his father took as active a part in its political direction as was consistent with the performance of his duties in Parliament. While Tom Baines edited the paper, the management was in the hands of his uncle, Frederick Baines, a man for whom I retain to this day something of the affection and respect of a son for a father. The paper, it will be seen, was thus the exclusive possession of the Baines family. It represented the views to which they had clung so tenaciously from the first. It was the great organ of Nonconformity in the English Press, and it was at the same time the advocate of a pronounced, though not an extreme, Liberalism. Its influence in the politics of Yorkshire was great, but no small part of that influence was due to the fact that the character of its conductors was known to the world, and that they were everywhere recognised as high-minded men, to whom journalism was something more than a trade. It was, indeed, a fortunate accident that brought me, whilst still in my youth, into intimate association with so high-minded a family.

They had their peculiarities. I have spoken already of their strict regard for the Sabbath. In other matters also they clung to many of the notions of the Puritans of an older generation. They never allowed the Mercury to publish betting news, or to pander to the national passion for gambling sport in any manner whatever. It would have been a good thing for the Englishman of to-day if, in this respect, their action, instead of being the exception, had been the rule among newspaper proprietors. The love of sport and of betting which has had so bad an effect upon the national character during the last thirty years would have been greatly curbed if other newspaper proprietors had been as mindful of their responsibilities as were the Baineses. As it was, they met with no reward for the heavy sacrifice they made in refusing to cater for the tastes of the sport-loving populace.

Another peculiarity which marked the Mercury in those days, though founded upon equally admirable motives, was not so happy in its character as this exclusion of betting news. Edward Baines the second regarded the theatre from the old Nonconformist point of view. He looked upon it, as so many did, as being an agent for the demoralisation of the young, and he refused to allow any notice of it to appear in the columns of his paper. This naturally excited the anger and ridicule of a large section of the public, who were not insensible to the change that was gradually taking place on the British stage. But no arguments and no ridicule could move the sturdy old Nonconformist. I remember once pleading with him for some relaxation of this rule. He heard all I had to say with courteous attention, but when I had exhausted my stock of arguments he delivered himself as follows: "My dear Mr. Reid, I feel sure that you are quite sincere and conscientious in the views you hold, but you do not know the theatre as I do. I speak from personal experience when I say that both in itself and in its surroundings it is immoral and demoralising." I stared aghast at this utterance. I knew that I went to theatres occasionally, but until then I had believed that Edward Baines had never crossed the threshold of a playhouse. He saw my look of surprise, and continued, "Yes, I am sorry to say that between the years 1819 and 1822 I attended the theatre frequently in London, and I can never forget the shocking immorality I witnessed both on the stage and among the audience." Dear, simple, high-principled, and most scrupulous soul! It was impossible to make way against his sixty-year-old memories.

But I must not omit to mention one characteristic of the proprietors of the Mercury which had a marked influence upon their manner of conducting that paper. This was their intense love of country. Both Edward Baines and his brother Frederick, though they never called themselves patriots, were among the most patriotic men I have ever known. They were Nonconformists and Liberals, and consequently, in the belief of their ignorant political opponents, they ought also to be Little Englanders of the huckster class. Instead of being Little Englanders, they were all through their lives the advocates of a sane but ardent Imperialism. They loved their country, and they believed in it—believed in it not only as the foremost nation of the earth, but as a great instrument for good among the peoples of the world. It followed that, whilst the Mercury advocated advanced Liberal opinions on most domestic questions, it was always in foreign affairs the supporter of an enlightened and reasonable Imperialism, and on any question affecting international policy it resolutely refused to take the mere partisan point of view. I have dwelt at this length upon some of the characteristics of the Leeds Mercury and its proprietors when I first became acquainted with them because they had a great and abiding influence upon my own character and opinions. At Preston I had learned to sympathise with the democracy, and to believe ardently in the cause of political reform. At Leeds I came in contact with a wider and loftier standard of Liberalism, and, whilst retaining my faith in the principles of my party on domestic questions, I added to it a conviction, not less profound, of the duty of advancing the interests of the British Empire throughout the world by every means in my power. In later years, when I was myself the editor of the Leeds Mercury, some of my excellent friends in London—and notably Mr. Stead—were wont to deplore my tendency in favour of Imperialism in foreign affairs, and to attribute it to the influence upon me of the Pall Mall clubs. As a matter of fact, I was led in this direction by the influence of these two estimable Yorkshire Nonconformists.

My first stay in Leeds in the somewhat anomalous position I have described lasted for little more than eighteen months. During that period I found plenty of work to do as a descriptive writer and reporter, and was brought into contact with some notable and interesting persons. Some months after I had become connected with the Mercury, I renewed my acquaintance with the tragical vicissitudes of colliery life. An explosion occurred at the Oaks Pit, near Barnsley, which led to the sacrifice of three hundred lives. Such a loss of life, exceeding that on many an historic battlefield, was in itself terrible, but the circumstances attending the accident at the Oaks Pit added to the grimness of the tragedy. When I reached the colliery a few hours after the explosion occurred I found that some two hundred of the men who had been working in it were known to have been killed, but that many more were believed to be still alive in the distant workings, and that a large rescue party had gone below to recover them. Having sent my last despatch to Leeds, I went to an inn at Barnsley to snatch a few hours of sleep before resuming work at daybreak. In the morning, as I was hastening back to the colliery to learn what progress had been made during the night, I suddenly saw a dense volume of black smoke shoot out of the mouth of the pit, and, rising high in the air, spread in a fan-shaped cloud of enormous size. Immediately afterwards the dull reverberation of an underground explosion fell upon my ear. A rough collier was walking beside me, and when he heard that ominous sound he turned white, and staggered against the wall which lined the road. "God have mercy on us!" he cried, "she's fired again." It was an awful moment. Both I and the pitman knew that, in addition to any survivors of the first explosion, there were twenty or thirty brave men risking their lives in a work of mercy when this new catastrophe took place.

We ran to the pit at our utmost speed, and when we reached the bank we found ourselves in the midst of a distressing scene. The engineers and workmen who had been engaged at the mouth of the pit were completely unnerved by this unexpected disaster, and were weeping like children. The second explosion had driven the "cage" completely out of the shaft, and it hung in a wrecked condition in the gallows-like scaffolding which surmounted the pit. There was thus no means of descending the shaft, even if anyone had been courageous enough to do so. This renewed explosion was, I ought to say, almost unprecedented in the long story of colliery accidents. In a few minutes the wives and friends of the search party below came thronging around us with agonised inquiries as to the safety of those whom they loved. For a time all was confusion and despair; but very quickly the voice of authority was heard, and the pit platform was cleared of all except the small party that remained on duty and myself. It was, as a matter of fact, a place of danger, for, as a second explosion had occurred, it was quite possible that it might be followed by a third. In spite of this risk, it was resolved to communicate, if possible, with the bottom of the shaft.

By order of the engineer in charge, we all lay down at full length on the platform, and one of our number was pushed forward until his head and shoulders protruded over the black chasm of the pit, from which a thin column of smoke was still rising. He was armed with a hammer, and with this he struck one of the metal guiders of the ruined cage, giving the pitman's "jowl" or signal, "three times three, and one over." Lying breathless, we listened, hoping for some response. But there was only the silence of death. Thrice the brave man repeated the signal, but no answering sound came from the depths of the pit, and sadly we came to the conclusion that all had perished. The signal man was dragged back from his post of peril, and we were consulting eagerly as to the next step to be taken, when a third explosion suddenly took place, shaking the platform on which we stood, and covering us with fragments of burning wood. Several of us were slightly hurt, but no one sustained any serious injury. The painful fact that was forced upon us, however, by this new explosion was that nothing could for the present be done to ascertain the fate of the gallant fellows who had apparently been lost in their attempt to rescue their comrades. It was clear that the pit was making gas, and that a fire was burning somewhere in the workings, which in due time might—and, as a matter of fact, did—cause fresh explosions. In these circumstances nothing could be done except to pour water into the pit in the hope of extinguishing the fire. Sorrowfully the band of workers abandoned the pit-heap, leaving only a couple of young mining engineers to keep watch above the scene of death.

In the middle of the following night—repeated explosions having taken place during the day—a remarkable incident occurred. One of the engineers left in charge—named, if I remember aright, Jeffcock—was suddenly startled by hearing a sound proceeding, apparently, from the depths of the pit. He went to the edge of the shaft, and then heard unmistakably, far below him, the "jowl" for which we had listened in vain on the previous morning. It proved that there was someone living in the pit, and Mr. Jeffcock instantly determined to save him if he could. The shaft was a very deep one. The cage which was the ordinary means of descent had, as I have already explained, been destroyed, whilst the pit-sides had been torn by the successive explosions, so that they were in a highly dangerous state. But undaunted by these difficulties and dangers, Jeffcock carried out his heroic task. Summoning assistance, he caused himself to be lowered at the end of a rope to the bottom of the shaft. Heaven only knows what were the terrors and dangers of that descent. He faced them all unflinchingly. At the bottom of the pit he discovered not any member of the search party, for they had all succumbed, but one of the men employed in the colliery, who, by some extraordinary chance, had escaped with his life not only from the original explosion, but from all those which followed it. With immense labour and risk he brought this man, the sole survivor of more than three hundred, to the pit's mouth, and the next night the thoughtless fellow for whom a brave man had risked so much, and whose own escape from death had been almost miraculous, was carousing in a public-house in Barnsley, and pocketing the coppers which hundreds of curious persons paid for the privilege of seeing him.

One evening, in the summer of 1866, when I was on duty in the Mercury office, I received a telegram which Mr. Baines had despatched from the House of Commons half an hour before. It stated that the Home Secretary had just received information that Chester Castle had been attacked by five hundred Fenians from Manchester, and that troops were being despatched from London to meet them. I saw that a train which left Leeds late in the evening would land me at Chester an hour or so after midnight, and I at once made up my mind to take it. When I reached Chester all was quiet at the station, and there were no signs of a Fenian rising. I asked the chief official on duty if he knew anything about the affair. All he could tell me was that during the early hours of the evening the waiting rooms, and even the platform itself, had been filled with crowds of "working men in their Sunday clothes," who had seemed to be waiting for somebody or something. There were many hundreds of them, and their unexplained presence had greatly puzzled the railway officials. Some time before I arrived they had disappeared.

I went out into the streets of the old city. The darkness of the summer night still brooded over me, but there was light enough to see that at every street corner and every open space a crowd was gathered. They were curious crowds. In every case the men were clustered in a circle, their faces all turned towards the centre. They seemed to be listening intently to someone who, in the middle of each little group, was speaking in low but earnest tones. I made my way to one of the small crowds, and, joining it, tried to hear what it was that the speaker in the middle was saying; but instantly a strange thing happened. The crowd fell apart, melted away into the gloom, and I suddenly found myself standing alone. Thrice did I thus attempt to learn what was passing in these mysterious groups, and every time the result was the same. I accosted individuals in the streets, and questioned them as to the meaning of the curious scene, so unusual in the dead of night in a quiet cathedral city. No man answered me, except in some unintelligible syllable. I was not molested, nobody was uncivil, but from no one could I get a word of explanation. Gradually, as morning began to break, the throng became thinner. It was dispersed like the mist by the sunshine.

By four o'clock Chester was apparently deserted by its strange visitors. I went to the castle, and found that all was quiet there. I went to the police office, and here I was told that the men were undoubtedly Fenians, but that they had been guilty of no violence, and had given no excuse to the police to interfere with them. They had apparently come to Chester from every quarter, Liverpool, Manchester, and Stafford having each contributed a contingent. But few had come by rail, most having entered the city on foot. What it all signified the police declared they could not understand, though they had no doubt that it had meant mischief. At five o'clock I returned to the station, and saw two special trains arrive within a few minutes of each other. These brought down a full battalion of the Guards from London. It was a fine sight to see the regiment marching with fixed bayonets from the station to the Castle. When the last man had disappeared within the Castle gates, we knew that, whatever plot had been hatched, it had miscarried.

The next day I gave in the Leeds Mercury a full account of what I had seen at Chester, and stoutly upheld the theory that a Fenian raid, which had somehow or other miscarried, had been intended. But, on the same morning, almost every other newspaper in the United Kingdom published an account of the affair that had been supplied by a Liverpool news agency. In this account the whole matter was turned into ridicule, and the authorities were said to have been hoaxed, or carried away by their own excited imaginations. But I had seen those strange, mysterious groups, planted so thickly in the streets of Chester under the silent night, and I could not accept the explanation of the Liverpool reporter. Still, for the moment his story was that which was generally believed, and I had to submit to the suspicion of having allowed myself to be befooled. Not until more than twelve months later was the truth revealed. It came out in the course of the trial of certain Fenian prisoners that there really had been a plot to seize, not Chester Castle, but the arms it contained. The conspirators knew that the guard in the Castle was very weak. They hoped to get into the place by stratagem, and to seize the contents of the armoury. Then they meant to capture a train, and, having destroyed the telegraph wires, to carry their booty to Holyhead, where they expected to find a steamer which would land them in Ireland. It was about as mad a plan as was ever devised—as mad as John Brown's seizure of the arsenal at Springfield. But desperate men attempt daring deeds. Fortunately for the peace of the realm, the plot against Chester was revealed to the Government in time, and when the little army of Fenians knew that they had been betrayed, they silently dispersed without striking a blow. It was, I confess, a satisfaction to me when the informer—Corydon, if I remember the name aright—confirmed the truth of my interpretation of that strange scene at Chester; and I had the additional satisfaction of feeling that I was one of the few living men who had, with his own eyes, actually seen a hostile army assembled on English soil.

A reporter's life brings him into contact both with tragedy and comedy. I have an amusing recollection of a visit paid by Edward VII., when Prince of Wales, to Upper Teesdale during my stay in Leeds, for the purpose of shooting on the Duke of Cleveland's moors. I travelled in the special train which took the Prince and his party to the little station of Lartington, then the terminus of the line which now connects the east and west coasts. No royal personage had visited that beautiful valley before. It was Sunday, and the whole population seemed to have turned out to see the train, in which the heir to the throne travelled, fly past them. Everywhere it was greeted with the waving of hats and handkerchiefs; but I saw one old man, apparently an agricultural labourer, who was not content with uncovering his head when the train went by. Reverently he sank down upon his knees, and remained in that position until long after we had sped past him. From Lartington the Prince and his party were to drive to the inn at High Force, a dozen or fourteen miles away. I, and a companion, representing a Sheffield newspaper, were to take up our quarters for the night at the little village of Middleton-in-Teesdale, halfway to High Force. A country omnibus had been provided for the Prince and his friends, and in this they drove off. We had to walk, as no vehicle was to be got.

When we had tramped a mile or more on our way, we met two men who were walking quickly towards Lartington. One of them, who from his appearance might have been a village schoolmaster, accosted us politely. "Can you tell me if his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales has arrived at Lartington station yet?" "Yes," I replied, "he got there more than half an hour ago." "Then where is he?" said my interlocutor in an injured tone of voice. "He surely cannot be stopping there?" I told him that this was not the case, and that he had already preceded us along that very road. "Impossible!" retorted the schoolmaster. "I've been on this road ever since the morning, and I can assure you that his Royal Highness has not passed this way." "Did you not see a small omnibus pass," I asked, "with some luggage on the roof?" The schoolmaster's companion, who was younger, admitted that he had done so. "Well, then," I continued, "you must have seen a gentleman in a brown felt hat sitting beside the driver, and smoking a cigar. That was the Prince of Wales." "Don't attempt to make a fool of me, you impertinent jackanapes!" roared my schoolmaster friend in a mighty rage, and, setting off again at full speed, he proceeded on his way towards Lartington, in search of the kingly vision he expected to discover.

There was another occasion, during those early Yorkshire days, when I had a little experience connected with the Prince. He and the Princess were about to be received as the guests of a great—a very great—dignitary. It was the first occasion on which this really eminent man had entertained their Royal Highnesses, and he had specially furnished certain rooms in his stately abode for their use. He gave a polite intimation that he would be glad to see one representative of the Press of the United Kingdom, in order that he might show him these apartments, with a view to their being properly described in print. My colleagues of the Yorkshire Press unanimously selected me to represent them on this great occasion, and were good enough to warn me that they would expect at least a column of descriptive matter detailing the glories of the upholstery provided for the Royal apartments.

To my surprise, when I got to the house I was at once brought face to face with the Great Man himself. He was mighty affable, and most desperately anxious that I should do justice to his newly bought furniture. I shall never forget my tour of the bedrooms and boudoirs to which I was expected to do justice. The Great Man pounded the beds to prove their elasticity. He turned down the bedclothes to convince me of the fineness of the linen. He lifted up chairs in order that I might satisfy myself of the solidity of their construction, and he expatiated upon the beauties of curtains, window-hangings, and carpets in periods as sonorous as any with which he had thrilled the House of Lords. I frankly confess that I was astounded, and not a little shocked. I could see that the Great Man was disappointed at my somewhat stolid reception of a florid eloquence of which George Robins, the auctioneer, might have been proud. I do not think, however, he was half so much disappointed as my colleagues were when I returned to them and dictated a dozen lines of severe catalogue as the only "description" I was capable of giving of the furniture of two commonplace bedrooms. I never met the Great Man in after life without seeing him, in my mind's eye, flourishing a chair upside down, or lovingly patting with his mighty hand an embroidered coverlet.

Upon the whole, the most important of the events in which I took part as reporter and descriptive writer during this period at Leeds was the series of Reform demonstrations in which Mr. Bright played the leading part in the autumn of 1866. I remember no public meetings in the course of my life that equalled them in enthusiasm. The Russell administration had been defeated in the previous session on the question of Parliamentary Reform, the defeat having been brought about by the action of the Adullamites, so-called, under the leadership of Lord Grosvenor and Mr. Lowe. John Bright, to use a phrase that has since become historic, "took off his coat" at the end of that session, and went to the country with the avowed determination of raising such a movement in favour of Parliamentary Reform that even the Tory Government, which was now in office under the Premiership of Lord Derby, would be compelled to yield to it. His plan of campaign was as simple as are most great plans. He arranged to address meetings in the chief cities of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Each meeting was to be preceded by a Reform demonstration held on some open piece of ground in or near the city where the meeting was to be held. These demonstrations took place at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Dublin, and London. I was present at all of them.

Never were such open-air gatherings held in England before. On more than one occasion the attendance exceeded a hundred thousand. The gatherings were without exception orderly and enthusiastic. All the smaller towns and villages near the scene of meeting sent deputations. There were great processions through the streets, headed by bands and political banners. At the place of meeting many different platforms were erected, and resolutions calling upon the Government to introduce a measure of Parliamentary Reform were put simultaneously from all the platforms. Nothing could have been more impressive as a demonstration of national feeling than these wonderful gatherings, so vast, so resolute in their bearing, and yet so orderly. They made even Ministers feel that the time had passed for trifling with the question of Reform. The Government were compelled to yield, and, as everybody knows, the session of 1867 witnessed the passing of the Household Suffrage Act. But by far the most important factor in each of these successive gatherings was the evening meeting that followed the open-air demonstration. At this Mr. Bright was always the chief speaker. I do not think he ever made better speeches than those which he delivered during this autumn of 1866. I have recorded the first occasion on which I heard Bright speak, and have said that his oratory was not so impressive on a first hearing as people might suppose. For my own part, I found that the spell of his magic grew stronger every time that it was renewed, and before I had listened to the last of this wonderful series of orations I had become what I remained to the end—the most enthusiastic of his admirers.

The opening speech of the series was delivered at Birmingham, and it contained one passage that, after all these years, is still stamped upon my memory. It was a brilliant vindication of Mr. Gladstone, as the apostle of Parliamentary Reform, from the sharp attacks made upon him by the Adullamites. Even then the intrigues against Mr. Gladstone's leadership of the Liberal party—intrigues which did not cease until the day of his final retirement nearly thirty years later—had begun. Bright treated them with characteristic contempt. He inveighed with all his force against the men who were going about declaring that Mr. Gladstone was unfit to be the leader of the party, and, with that accent of withering scorn which was one of his most formidable weapons as an orator, he cried, "If they have another leader who can take Mr. Gladstone's place, why do they not let us see him? Where have they been hiding him until now?" That single sentence fell like a hammer upon the heads of the intriguers of the Cave. In face of it they could not continue their absurd attempt to rob Mr. Gladstone of his appointed place.

The most florid and poetical of Bright's Reform speeches was that which he delivered at Glasgow. It consisted, for the most part, of a noble appeal to ministers of religion, and to all interested in the social welfare of the people, to try what a Reformed Parliament could do to remove the burdens laid upon the shoulders of common humanity. "The classes have failed, let us try the nation." The speech closed with a fine peroration in which the speaker, after referring to the effect already produced by the public movement in favour of Reform, declared that he could see "as it were upon the hill-tops of Time, the glimmerings of the dawn of a new and a better day for the country and the people that he loved so well." It was with this peroration still ringing in my ears that I hurried from the meeting to the telegraph office. I was palpitating with excitement under the influence of Bright's magic eloquence. Judge of my astonishment when I heard two worthy citizens of Glasgow who had just left the hall comment upon the speech in these words. First Citizen: "A varra disappointing speech!" Second Citizen: "Ou aye! He just canna speak at all." This extraordinary incident at least bears out what I said as to the disappointing character of Bright's eloquence upon people who listened to it for the first time. A man needed to grow into an appreciation of it. There was, by the way, an amusing incident in connection with the reporting of this Glasgow speech. Bright, as I have said, had referred to the influence of the great popular demonstrations in favour of Reform, and had spoken of them as "those vast gatherings, sublime in their numbers and in their resolution." Some unhappy reporter, by a very slight slip, made him speak of the meetings as sublime in their numbers and their resolutions—a very different matter.

His last Reform speech in 1866 was delivered in London, in St. James's Hall. It was preceded on the previous day by the usual procession through the streets and an open-air demonstration at Lillie Bridge. The poor Londoners were very much alarmed at the prospect of the gathering. The editors of the morning papers opened their respective Balaam boxes and gave the asses a holiday, to borrow a phrase of Christopher North. Innumerable letters were published, declaring that the mob of reformers, led by the wild man from Birmingham, would probably sack the town; and fervent entreaties were addressed to the Government to line the streets with troops for the protection of peaceful and law-abiding householders. The Government, which had received its lesson in Hyde Park in the preceding summer, did nothing of the sort; but I believe that a good many houses and even shops in the West End were actually closed and barricaded by their perturbed and nervous proprietors. There was one notable and significant exception to this rule. Miss—now the Baroness—Burdett-Coutts not only did not close her house in Piccadilly, but assembled a party of friends at it, and, seated in the midst of them in the great bay-window overlooking Piccadilly, saluted in friendly fashion the great army of the unenfranchised as they passed along the road. She was cheered vociferously, and must have felt a thrill of satisfaction at the thought that she was recognised as the worthy representative of that stout old Radical reformer, Sir Francis Burdett. I took up my position to see the procession pass in Pall Mall, opposite the Reform Club. I had never before seen that famous building. It struck me at the time as having a cold and gloomy exterior, yet I gazed upon it with reverence as the home of the most distinguished of the men who espoused the cause of liberty. I little thought, on that dull winter day, how many years I was destined to spend within its walls, or how large a part I was to take in its affairs.

Of course, all the fears of the alarmists were falsified. The only untoward incidents were the raids of the pickpockets upon the crowds. I myself was one of their victims, in a somewhat curious fashion. I was riding with another reporter in a cab at the tail of the procession. The crowd, as we approached Lillie Bridge, was very dense, pressing upon us on all sides. Suddenly a hand was put in at the open window of the cab, and, before I had the presence of mind to grasp the situation, the pin I wore had been removed from my scarf, literally under my very eyes. It was one of the neatest and most impudent robberies I ever saw.

Bright's speech at St. James's Hall was a very fine one. It contained a memorable passage in which he described men dwelling in fancied security on the slopes of a slumbering volcano. He demanded if those who warned them of the peril to which they were exposed were to be accused of being the cause of that peril. It was a brilliant and telling retort upon those who charged him with having stirred up a seditious movement for his own personal ends. But his best speech at St. James's Hall was a brief and unpremeditated utterance at the close of the meeting. Mr. Ayrton, the well-known member for the Tower Hamlets, an advanced Radical, and a man who subsequently made himself notorious as a Minister of the Crown by his aggressive and unconciliatory utterances, was one of the speakers who followed Bright. He referred to the demonstration in front of Miss Burdett-Coutts's house on the previous day, and made some remarks comparing her with the Queen, who was just then in Scotland, by no means to the advantage of the latter. Bright's loyalty, which was strong and real, was outraged by Ayrton's language. In burning words, evidently born of genuine emotion, he repudiated and rebuked the want of respect shown to her Majesty, and declared that any woman, be she the wife of a working man or the queen of a mighty realm, who was capable of showing an intense devotion to the memory of her lost husband was worthy of the respect and reverence of every honest heart. Years afterwards, I have reason to know, that utterance was borne in mind in high quarters. It laid the foundation of the high personal regard and friendship which her Majesty extended to the old tribune of the people when he became a Minister of the Crown.

CHAPTER VI.

LIFE IN LONDON.

Appointed London Correspondent of the Leeds Mercury—My
Marriage—Securing Admission to the Reporters' Gallery—Relations between
Reporters and Members—Inadequate Accommodation for the
Press—Reminiscences of the Clerkenwell Explosion—The Last Public
Execution—The Arundel Club—James Macdonell—Robert Donald—James
Payn—Mrs. Riddell and the St. James's Magazine—My First
Novel—How Sala Cut Short an Anecdote—Disraeli as Leader of the House in
1868—A Personal Encounter with him at Aylesbury—Mr. Gladstone's First
Ministry—Bright and Forster—W. E. Baxter—Irish Church Disestablishment
Debate in the House of Lords—Mr. Mudford—Bereavement.

In 1867 a change unexpectedly took place in my position. The London representative of the Leeds Mercury, my old friend Mr. Charles Russell, now editor of the Glasgow Herald, retired from his post, and I was appointed to succeed him. In addition to the duties which had been discharged by Mr. Russell, it was arranged that I was to act as London correspondent of the Mercury and to continue to be an occasional contributor of leaders. On September 5th in this year I was married at Cheadle Congregational Church, Cheshire, to my cousin, to whom I had long been engaged, and I at once went to London to spend my honeymoon in the delightful occupation of house-hunting. The London suburbs wore a different aspect in 1867 from that which they now present. In the far west of London, at all events, the reign of the semi-detached villa, with its private garden, was still maintained. There were no lofty "mansions" comprising endless suites for the accommodation of persons of limited means, and the system of a common garden for the residents in a particular street or square was practically unknown outside the central district of the metropolis. Notting Hill, Kensington, Shepherd's Bush, and Hammersmith offered to the man of moderate means the choice among an infinite number of pleasant little villas, each boasting its own garden and lawn secluded from the public eye. My choice fell upon a house of this description in Addison Road North, and there I spent two happy years, the garden, with its fine old tree casting a welcome shade over the lawn, making me forget the fact that I was, at last, an actual dweller in the world's greatest city.

Almost my first business in London was to secure admission to the Reporters' Gallery in the House of Commons. There was an autumn session in that year, 1867, and I was anxious to get access to the Gallery when it began. In order to obtain the coveted Gallery ticket I proffered my gratuitous services as an occasional reporter to the Morning Star. My offer was accepted, and after an interview with Mr. Justin McCarthy, who was then editor of the Star, I was introduced to Mr. Edwards, the chief of the reporting staff, as a new member of that body. Edwards, who was one of the veterans of the Gallery, was a character in his way. He was an Irishman possessed of a delicious brogue, a devout Roman Catholic, intensely proud of the fact that he had a son in the priesthood. His mind was stored with reminiscences of the Gallery in the days when the status of a Parliamentary reporter was hardly recognised even in the House of Commons itself. Like so many of the Gallery men of this time, his world seemed to be limited to the little society of which he was a conspicuous member. Nothing appeared to interest him that lay outside the immediate duties of a Parliamentary reporter. His sole reading seemed to be the reports of debates, his sole pleasure listening to Parliamentary speeches. Many amusing stories were told of him by his colleagues. Not long before I made his acquaintance, Mr. Bright, in one of the debates on the Liberal Reform Bill, had made his famous reference to the Cave of Adullam which caused the anti-reformers in the Liberal party to be nicknamed "Adullamites." Mr. Bright was interested in the Morning Star, and that newspaper's report of this passage in his speech was obviously confused and defective. The day after it was printed the manager of the Star summoned Edwards to his presence in order to complain of this fact. "Do you think our fellows understood the allusion to the Cave of Adullam?" he inquired of Edwards. "Of course they did," replied the latter, hotly. "They're an ignorant lot, I know, but there isn't one of them so ignorant as not to have read the Arabian Nights!"

Edwards was very kind to me. He seemed to feel a profound respect for a man who undertook to do any work for nothing, and he did his utmost to make my somewhat anomalous position personally agreeable. One bit of good advice he gave me. That was that I should not let anyone know that I received no salary. The truth is that in those days the Parliamentary reporters were a very clannish set—almost, indeed, a close corporation. To my youthful eyes, most of them appeared to be men who had attained an almost incredible age. They could talk of the days in the old House of Commons when no Reporters' Gallery existed, and the unfortunate shorthand writers had to take their notes on their knees, at the back of the Strangers' Gallery. In the House of Lords they had to stand in a kind of gangway, and I have heard a venerable man tell how a certain distinguished peeress, who had to pass along this gangway when she went to hear the debates, used deliberately to brush against the reporters as she did so, and knock the note-books out of their hands. It was, I suppose, her Grace's manner of displaying her peculiar affection for the Press. The reporters looked with suspicion upon any newcomer, and for a time after I entered the Gallery I was viewed with unconcealed dislike by most of my new colleagues.

A somewhat untoward incident that happened on the first night on which I took my seat as one of the Star staff added to this feeling. Worthy Edward Baines, sitting on the Opposition benches below me, no sooner recognised me in the Gallery than he felt it to be his duty to come up and have a chat with me. Accordingly he made his way to one of the side galleries adjoining the reporters' seats, and conversed with me for several minutes, pointing out the leading members and officials of the House and making himself generally agreeable, as was his wont. I little knew what offence I was unconsciously giving to my colleagues. In those days a gulf that was regarded as impassable divided the members of the Press from the members of the House. Occasionally the white-haired, or rather white-wigged, Mr. Ross, the head of the Times Parliamentary corps, might be seen holding a mysterious colloquy in some gloomy corner behind the Gallery with some politician; but the overwhelming majority of the reporters had never exchanged a word with a Member of Parliament in their lives, and, to do them justice, they evidently had no desire to do so. The caste of reporters neither had, nor wished to have, any relations with the Brahmins of the green benches below them, and I found subsequently that if by any chance a reporter were detected in conversation with even the most obscure Member of Parliament he thought it necessary to give some explanation of his conduct to his Gallery friends afterwards. It may be imagined, then, with what feelings the veterans of the Gallery saw a newcomer, on his very first appearance in the Gallery, talking on friendly and confidential terms with a well-known Member of the House. Some of the old hands positively snorted at me in their indignation, and one of the few friends I had in the Gallery earnestly warned me that the recurrence of such an incident would prove fatal to my career as a Parliamentary reporter. Who would have imagined then that the relations of journalists and Members would ever assume their present intimate character?

The accommodation for reporters outside the Gallery was very different then from what it is now. There were two wretched little cabins, ill-lit and ill-ventilated, immediately behind the Gallery, which were used for "writing out." But one of these was occupied exclusively by the Times staff, and the other was so small that it could not accommodate a quarter of the number of reporters. One of the committee rooms on the upper corridor—No. 18, if I remember aright—was given up after a certain hour in the afternoon to the reporters, and here most of the work of "writing out" was done. As for other accommodation for the Press, it consisted only of a cellar-like apartment in the yard below, where men used to resort to smoke, and of the ante-room to the Gallery, where the majestic Mr. Wright presided.

Mr. Wright was one of the characters of the Gallery. Like most of the officials of the House in those days, he was a protégé of the Sergeant-at-Arms, Lord Charles Russell. Rumour declared that he had originally been a boat-builder on the Thames, and had secured the favour of Lord Charles by his services in teaching his sons to row. He certainly looked more like a boat-builder, or the captain of a barge, than the keeper of the vestibule to the Reporters' Gallery. He was permitted to purvey refreshments of a modest kind to the reporters. He always had a bottle of whisky on tap, a loaf or two of stale bread, and a most nauseous-looking ham. I never, during my career in the Gallery, tasted that ham. The tradition was that every night, when Mr. Wright, at the close of his duties, retired to his modest abode in Lambeth, he took with him the ham, wrapped in a large red bandana which he had been flourishing, and using, during the evening, and for greater security placed it under his bed during the night. I do not vouch for the truth of this story, universally believed by the Gallery men of my day.

I simply repeat that I never in the course of my life tasted one of Mr. Wright's hams. The sole refreshment I ever consumed in his filthy den consisted of eggs and tea. The tea I drank with unfeigned reluctance, but the eggs, however stale, inspired me with a confidence I felt in none of the other viands provided by the ex-boat-builder. The reporters nowadays have a dining-room of their own, as well as reading-room, smoking-room, and tea-room. The status of the Press is changed indeed.

One of Mr. Wright's characteristics was his love of talking Johnsonese. I can see him in my mind's eye now, as I emerged from the Gallery after a heavy "turn," reclining on the wooden bench which was his favourite place of rest. His head half covered with the famous red bandana; his boots off, and a pair of dirty worsted stockings exposed to view, he twiddled his thumbs, and through half-closed eyes cast a disparaging glance at the young member of the Gallery who had not yet patronised either his whisky or his ham; then, with a grunt, he would wake up and begin to speak. "I hope, sir, that you are intellectual enough to appreciate the grandeur of the debate to which you have just been privileged to listen. Sir, it fills me with an amazement that is simply inexpressible to listen to those two men, Gladstone and Disraeli, when they are a-conducting themselves as they 'ave been this evening. What I want to know, sir, is, where do they get it from? You and me could never do such a thing—no, not a moment. In my opinion they are more than mortal." But enough of Mr. Wright, who is dead now, though he lived to see the twentieth century born, and to mourn over the changed times which no longer made the hungry reporter dependent upon his famous ham.

The first night of that autumn session of 1867 was a memorable one. Mr. Disraeli sat on the Treasury Bench as leader of the House. Opposite to him sat Mr. Gladstone, now the recognised leader of the Liberal party. Mrs. Disraeli had been seriously ill; was, in fact, still ill when Parliament met. Mr. Gladstone, who never overlooked the courtesies of debate, in opening his attack upon the Government after the speech had been duly moved and seconded, made touching reference to the personal anxieties of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Mr. Disraeli was visibly moved. He suddenly covered his face with his hands, and one could see that his eyes were filled with tears. Nearly thirty years later there was a similar scene in the House, in which Mr. Gladstone was again the moving cause. This was when, referring to a speech by Mr. Austen Chamberlain, he spoke of it in terms that made Mr. Chamberlain himself flush with emotion, and caused the tears to gather in the eyes of that hardened political fighter. Strange are the links which bind the generations together!

It was in the late autumn of 1867 that one of the most remarkable of the outrages committed by the Fenians in London took place. This was the explosion at the Clerkenwell House of Detention. The object of the crime was the rescue of two Fenians who were confined in the prison. The authorities at Scotland Yard had got wind of the plot, and sought to put the governor of the prison, and the magistrates who controlled it, on their guard. The latter declared themselves quite able to look after their prisoners, and declined the proffered assistance of the police. Instead of keeping guard, as they should have done, round the walls of the House of Detention, they contented themselves with keeping the prisoners—whose names, if my memory does not fail, were Burke and Casey—in their cells at the hour when they usually took their daily exercise in the yard. A wheelbarrow, laden with powerful explosives, was deliberately wheeled up to the prison wall, outside the exercise ground, at the time when Burke and Casey were supposed to be walking there. An orange was thrown over into the yard, this being the signal that had been agreed upon with the captives, and the fuse attached to the barrel of explosives was lighted. Then the conspirators quietly retired, nobody molesting them. A terrific explosion followed.

I had just left the reading-room of the British Museum that afternoon, and was crossing the quadrangle, when I heard a sound which my experience of the Oaks Pit enabled me at once to recognise as that of an explosion. I thought that some kitchen boiler in an adjoining house must have burst; but nothing was to be seen, and I went my way, merely making a note, with the reporter's instinct, of the exact moment at which the explosion took place. The next morning the London papers were full of the details of the great crime. Several persons, including some children, had been killed outright, and many more had been injured. A breach had been made in the prison wall, but the Fenian prisoners, of course, had not escaped, owing to the precautions taken by the authorities. The whole country was roused to a violent state of indignation by this crime, which followed close upon a similar attempt to rescue other Fenian prisoners who were being carried in a prison van through the streets of Manchester. The Manchester crime resulted in the death of a police sergeant named Brett, and for that murder three men—Allen, Larkin, and Gould, who are still famous in Irish history as "the Manchester martyrs"—were hanged.

On the day following the Clerkenwell explosion I attended the inquest upon some of the victims, and, curiously enough, I was the only person who could inform the coroner of the exact hour at which the outrage was committed. The police were soon in hot pursuit of the culprits. Five men were arrested, and after a tedious investigation at Bow Street were committed for trial at the Old Bailey. If I remember aright, they were Irishmen hailing from Glasgow. I made my first acquaintance with Bow Street Police Court at the examination of these men. It was the old police court—a dismal, stuffy, ill-ventilated room—where justice had been administered for several generations. I have a lively recollection of the fact that whilst I was reporting the proceedings I suddenly fainted, for the first time in my life; and I still remember gratefully the kindness of the police, who removed me from the court room into the fresh air, and tended me with the utmost care until I had recovered. This sympathy with illness is one of the best characteristics of our London police.

The trial at the Old Bailey resulted in the acquittal of all the prisoners except one, a man named Barrett. He was convicted, and sentenced to death. Great interest in his case was felt in Glasgow, and I was asked by one of the Glasgow newspapers to telegraph to it a full account of the execution. It was in one respect to be a remarkable occasion, for an Act had just received the assent of Parliament putting an end to public executions, and Barrett's was to be the last event of the kind. I and an old newspaper friend named Donald, who was also commissioned to describe the scene, agreed to stay up all night in order that we might witness the gruesome preliminaries of a hanging at the Old Bailey. We were on duty in the Reporters' Gallery up to a late hour of the night, and I remember that Mr. Bright, rising from his seat below the gangway, made an appeal to the Home Secretary to spare the condemned man's life. It was very unusual for such an appeal to be made in that fashion, and it was still more unusual to make it within a few hours of the time fixed for the execution. The Home Secretary was, of course, unable to comply with Mr. Bright's prayer, but this scene in the House of Commons was undoubtedly a solemn one, more solemn and impressive than the tragedy to which it was the prelude. Donald and I, when the House at last rose, sauntered slowly through the streets, taking note of that night side of London, which was novel to both of us. In the early hours of the morning we found ourselves at Covent Garden, where we watched the unloading of the vegetable carts and the unpacking of the great hampers filled with sweet spring flowers. Before six o'clock we had reached the Old Bailey, where already a large crowd was gathering.

Rumours of an attempted rescue, even on the scaffold, had been freely circulated. Calcraft, the executioner, had received a number of threatening letters, which had frightened him greatly. The police, knowing what the Fenians had already attempted in the way of rescuing their friends, were very much on the alert, and more than a hundred officers, in private clothes and armed with revolvers, had been placed outside the barriers amongst the crowd. At six o'clock the great gates leading to the yard of the Old Bailey courthouse were thrown open, and with a heavy, rumbling sound the grim old scaffold which had figured in so many scenes of horror was for the last time drawn forth from its resting-place and wheeled to its position in front of the small, iron-barred door, which, as late as 1900, was still seen in the middle of the blank wall of Newgate Prison. The noise of the workmen's hammers as they made the scaffold fast was almost drowned by the roar of the quickly gathering crowd. All the scoundreldom of London seemed to have assembled for the occasion. It was the last Old Bailey execution crowd. The windows of the public-house opposite the scaffold had been thrown open, and at every window men and women were crowded together, eagerly waiting for the grim approaching spectacle. It was not an edifying sight, this execution crowd.

There was one strange incident connected with it that has never been put on record. Shortly after the scaffold had been placed in position I saw four men, whose faces were familiar to me, trying to force their way through the crowd, and I was greatly startled when I recognised them as the four men who had been tried at the same time as Barrett, but who had been acquitted by the jury. Not knowing what sinister purpose they might have in view, I felt it my duty at once to warn the chief inspector of police of their presence. He was greatly disturbed, and quickly pushed his way through the crowd towards the place I had indicated to him. I followed close at his heels until we reached the front of the scaffold. As we did so he quickly put his hand upon my shoulder to stop me, and at the same time uncovered his head. It was a strange sight that we saw in the middle of that obscene and blasphemous mob. The four men, who had so narrowly escaped the fate of Barrett, were kneeling, bare-headed, on the stones of the Old Bailey in front of the scaffold on which their friend was about to die, praying silently but earnestly. For several minutes they continued to kneel and pray, and then, suddenly rising, they hurriedly left the crowd and disappeared. "Did you ever see anything like that?" said the inspector to me; and I do not know which of us was the more moved by this strange incident.

Of the execution itself I have only one thing to say: that is, that Barrett died in a very different fashion from any other murderer whom I had seen hanged. He faced death, in fact, like a hero, with undaunted mien, and a smile upon his pallid lips. I observed that his trousers were all frayed and worn at the knees, and remarked upon the fact to one of the warders who was standing beside me. "Yes," he replied, "he has been on his knees, praying, ever since he was sentenced." I came away from the spot rejoicing in the thought that I should never again be called upon to witness that abominable thing a public execution.

It was in 1868 that I gained my first experience of London club-life. This was when I became a member of the Arundel Club. The club is still, I believe, in existence, and has a home somewhere in the Adelphi. In 1868 it occupied a house at the bottom of a street, running from the Strand to the river, which was swept away when the Hotel Cecil was built. This house had once been the residence of John Black, the well-known editor of the Morning Chronicle, a journalist who used to boast that his readers would follow him wherever he liked to lead them. The members of the club were, for the most part, journalists, actors, and artists. It was a delight to me to find admittance to the society I had hitherto regarded with wistful eyes from afar. I could feel at last that I had got a foothold, however humble, in the literary life of London. The man who introduced me to the club was my old friend James Macdonell. We had become intimate at Newcastle, in the days when he was editing the Northern Daily Express. His brilliant writing had attracted the attention of the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph, and they had brought him to London to act as assistant editor of that paper.

Macdonell was a typical journalist, of very fine character. He was an enthusiast, more than commonly perfervid, even for a Scot. Whatever he believed, he believed with all his heart and soul. He was always in earnest, and always striving to give effect to his opinions. His leaders were really polished essays, of remarkable point and brilliancy. His conversation was as striking and epigrammatic as his writing. He was inspired by generous impulses, and his soul was clean. One of his colleagues on the Telegraph declared that Macdonell evidently believed that his chief business in life was to frame syllogisms and apply them. He had a good deal of the temperament of the French man of letters, and to the enthusiasm of the Gaul he added a fine taste for style. In those early days in London he was full of the possibilities that lay before the penny Press, and predicted that the day was not far distant when the Daily Telegraph would supersede the Times as the chief organ of English opinion. He greatly admired the shrewdness of the proprietors of the paper, who, having no knowledge of literary quality themselves, had yet an unerring instinct for what was good in journalism. He delighted in one story which I have heard him relate more than once. He had been telling Alexander Russel, of the Scotsman, of the shrewd manner in which Mr. Levy, the principal owner of the Telegraph, had been criticising an article of which he did not quite approve. The writer had pleaded that the reasoning of the article was perfectly sound. "We don't want sound reason; we want sound writing," was Mr. Levy's response. When Macdonell repeated this to Russel, the great Edinburgh editor slapped his thigh, and cried, with an oath, "The Lord knew what He was about when He chose that people for His own!"

It was not to be Macdonell's fate to convert the Telegraph into a second Times. On the contrary, after a few years in Fleet Street, he himself went to Printing House Square, where he became, in the closing days of Delane's editorship of the Times, the principal political leader writer. He made a great mark in that capacity, and drew the Times a good deal further in the direction of advanced Liberalism than it has ever been drawn before or since. He was a strong hater of Mr. Disraeli's Imperial policy, and for a time the leading journal lent no countenance to that line of action. But the curb was put upon the enthusiastic leader writer, with his strong humanitarian views, and he had to see the paper with which he was identified taking a course of which he could not approve. To a man who threw his whole heart into his work, nothing could be more galling than this. Poor Macdonell fairly wore himself out with his ceaseless expenditure of nervous and intellectual force, and he died suddenly and prematurely in 1878. His death was, I think, the greatest blow to English journalism that it has received in my time. In 1868, however, Macdonell was still in the heyday of his physical and mental powers. We used to meet at the Arundel Club in the society that I have described. Sala, Tom Robertson, Swinburne, and others hardly less eminent, formed the company; and to these Macdonell, when he was moved to talk—as he frequently was—would pour out the epigrams in which he delighted. I can recall some of them that were very brilliant, but they are too personal to be repeated here.

Another friend of those days never attained to anything like fame. He died, as he had lived, a simple working journalist, and he is now remembered only by a handful of personal friends. Yet even now, more than twenty years after his death, I feel that Robert Donald was in many ways one of the most gifted men I have ever known. He had come from Edinburgh to fill a place in the Reporters' Gallery, and he added to his work as reporter that of London correspondent of the Glasgow Herald. With the rest of his intimate friends, I had an almost unbounded admiration for his gifts, and an unqualified belief in his future. We knew from constant and intimate intercourse the wealth of intellect and of feeling that he possessed, and we were convinced that when he revealed these riches to the world he would impress others as much as he had impressed us.

He had been engaged for years in writing a novel—a novel that, we were convinced, would be a notable addition to the great treasury of English literature. He was very reticent on the subject of this magnum opus, but at last he consented to submit the manuscript to me and to another friend with whom he was equally intimate, Mr. Charles Russell. I can recall the thrill of expectancy and delight with which I first turned to the voluminous pages of Donald's book. I can remember how I read on far into the night, revelling in the freshness and vigour of the style, in the brilliancy of the dialogue which abounded throughout the story, and in the insight into character and the grasp of human motives that were everywhere revealed. After I had read a hundred pages I was convinced that all our anticipations as to Donald's future fell short of the mark. But I read on and on, and slowly, yet certainly, a deadly sense of disappointment crept into my heart. It was not that there was any falling-off in the quality of the work. Every page was as fresh and as strong as those which preceded it. But when I had read a thousand pages—large pages, closely written—and had come to the end of that part of the work that he had finished, I made the appalling discovery that the story he had to tell had not advanced a single step beyond the point he had reached in the first chapter. Apparently it would require thousands of pages more to complete the tale, and the work was already as long as "Middlemarch" itself.

Donald had the faculty of writing admirably—far better, I still think, than any but the greatest of his contemporaries; but he lacked the chief essential of a novelist, the power of making his story march. Russell, when he read the manuscript, compared it to an immense torso, heroic in its proportions, splendid in its workmanship, but nothing more than a fragment after all. "And yet what a quarry it is!" he said to me when we were discussing it. "If only some inferior writer were allowed to dig into it, and transfer its gold and marble to his own pages!" My poor friend's personal story was a real tragedy. He accepted the advice we gave him, and, laying aside the huge unfinished manuscript, began to write what he meant to be a short and simple story. He submitted the opening chapters to the editor of the Glasgow Weekly Herald. That gentleman was delighted with it, and at once accepted the novel for publication in his journal. The first few weekly instalments were read with the keenest pleasure by everybody, and the hope ran high that we had found a new writer who was destined to take his place in the first rank of English authorship. But by-and-by the readers of the Herald made the discovery that had been made by myself when I read Donald's unfinished manuscript. Each chapter of the tale was brilliant in itself, but no single chapter advanced the movement of the story by a hair's breadth.

For weeks and months the novel ran its course, until the murmurs of discontent on the part of the readers swelled into a positive roar. Mr. Stoddart, the editor, who was a warm friend of Donald's, again and again implored him to expedite the development of the plot, and again and again he undertook to do so. But it was beyond his power to fulfil his promise. Then, one day, a terrible thing happened. I was lunching with Donald in a club in St. James's Street, one of the proprietors of the Herald (now dead) being also his guest. This gentleman suddenly turned to Donald, and speaking not with intentional brutality, but simply in the frankness of unrestrained good-fellowship, asked him "when that d——d long-winded story of his was going to stop?" adding that it must be got out of the way in a week or two, as they wanted to begin the publication of another. I saw how my poor friend turned pale at the cruel thrust. He faltered out a promise that he would finish the tale at once, but I felt that his heart was broken. He went home and bravely did his best to keep his promise, but he only found once more that the task was beyond his strength; and the unfortunate editor was reluctantly compelled to call in an outsider to put an end in a summary fashion to a story which had escaped completely from the grasp of its author. Donald never recovered from the blow. His own ambition was crushed and mortified, and the ardent hopes of his friends were all destroyed. He did not long survive this tragical experience. And yet what a man he was! And what capacities he possessed, capacities which would have enabled him to delight the world, if only he had not lacked the poor faculty of the storyteller!

These were two of my great friends during my first residence in London, and they were friends of whom any man might have been proud. Others I held scarcely less dear, but they are still, happily, living, and I must refrain from dwelling upon them. I had not been long settled in London before I found work of different kinds accumulating on my hands. I wrote London letters every week for the Madras Times, under the editorship of an old friend, James Sutherland, and I contributed to various provincial papers. But that which chiefly attracted me was literary work for the magazines, and it was in connection with this work that I first became acquainted with one of the dearest and most honoured of the friends of my life, James Payn. I had been for some years an occasional contributor to Chambers's Journal, and had received more than one encouraging note written in a hand that it was difficult to decipher, and simply signed, "Editor, C.J." At last it occurred to me that a series of descriptive articles relating to the places and scenes with which I had become familiar as a Parliamentary reporter might be accepted by the editor. With much trepidation—for I was still a neophyte in London literary life—I addressed a personal note to Mr. Payn, asking for an interview. I got a cordial reply, inviting me to call upon him at the office of Messrs. Chambers in Paternoster Row. Though I entered his presence with fear and trembling, in two minutes I was at my ease, and talking freely to the kindest and most generous man that ever wielded the editorial pen. Neither of us then knew how dear we were to become to each other, and how close and affectionate was to be our intercourse during more than twenty years.

To Payn I was, of course, merely a very humble contributor to the journal he edited; but I was received in a most friendly and cordial fashion, and found, much to my delight and not a little to my astonishment, that the brilliant man of letters before me was eager to recognise the bond which a common calling created between us. There was no air of patronage in his treatment of my modest proposals. He did what he could to make me feel that we stood on an equality. This was Payn all over. Throughout his life he was one of those men of letters who, whilst never sinking into the boon companionship of Bohemia, show their respect for the calling they have adopted by treating all the other members of that calling with an unaffected respect and cordiality. Such men are the salt of our order. Payn's generosity to young and unknown writers has been attested by many men who in later life attained eminence, to whom he gave the first helping hand in their long struggle against fate. When, in later days, I read these tributes to the splendid and unselfish service which Payn had rendered to English literature, I always recalled him as I saw him in the dingy office in Paternoster Row on that day in 1868, when he first gave me the right hand of fellowship. I shall have much to say of him hereafter. At this point I need only record the fact that I became a frequent contributor to Chambers's Journal, writing for it a series of articles, descriptive of the work of the journalist, that were afterwards republished in a volume called "Briefs and Papers." In this little book I collaborated with my old friend and schoolfellow, Mr. W. H. Cooke, who was the author of the chapters describing the experiences of a young barrister.

By-and-by, as I extended my connection with magazine work, I was brought into contact with Mrs. Riddell, the gifted writer of that admirable novel "George Geith," and of other stories of equal merit. Mrs. Riddell was the editor and proprietor of the St. James's Magazine, and I became a regular contributor to its pages. Here I was brought into intimate association with a phase of literary life which belongs rather to the past than to the present. Mrs. Riddell had achieved sudden fame by her brilliant stories. In these days such fame would have meant for her a handsome income and a recognised position in society. But forty years ago fame as a writer was not necessarily rewarded in this way. My first interview with Mrs. Riddell, who was a lady of delightful manners and charming appearance, took place literally in a cellar beneath a shop in Cheapside. The shop was her husband's, and here certain patent stoves, of which he was the inventor and manufacturer, were exposed for sale. I had been greatly surprised when Mrs. Riddell, wishing to speak to me about certain contributions to the St. James's Magazine, had asked me to call, not at the office in Essex Street, but at this shop in Cheapside. I was still more surprised on finding this gifted woman, in whose brilliant pages I had found so much to delight me, acting as her husband's clerk, and engaged in making out invoices in the cellar beneath the shop.

I am afraid that, in spite of her husband's occupation, I cannot give Mrs. Riddell a testimonial as a business woman. She was, as I have said, delightful as a writer, and charming as a woman, but her editorship of the St. James's Magazine did not suggest that she had the aptitude necessary to success in business. She was very kind to me, and gave me the opportunity of writing on any subject, and at almost any length, in the pages she controlled. More than once I have had three long articles in one number of the magazine; but I was always harassed by the fact that the magazine was never "out" on the proper day, and that the editor was always in a hurry for the copy I had to supply. My chief contributions to the St. James's were a series of sketches of statesmen, subsequently republished in a volume, entitled "Cabinet Portraits," another series of sketches of London preachers, and a novel called "The Lumley Entail."

This novel was my first venture in fiction, and one curious incident, at least, was connected with it. I had submitted to Mrs. Riddell nothing more than the first two or three chapters, and a synopsis of the plot, when I offered it to her. With a courage that was undoubtedly rash, she accepted the story forthwith, and decided to begin its publication at once. I was very busy with my newspaper work at the time, and in consequence could only write my monthly instalment in bare time for its inclusion in the coming number of the magazine. One awful day, when the St. James's for the current month was already overdue, I received a telegram from the publisher bidding me send in my instalment immediately, as they were waiting for it in order to go to press. I rushed to the office in a state of consternation, and explained to the man that I had duly sent in my manuscript more than a week before. "I know that," he said quite coolly; "I got it myself, and gave it to Mrs. Riddell; but unfortunately she has lost it, so you will have to write it over again." Here was a pretty dilemma for a budding novelist! I did not take "The Lumley Entail" so seriously as I should have done, and I had a very vague recollection of the contents of the lost instalment; but there was no help for it. I had to sit down there and then in the office in Essex Street, and write another instalment of equal length. It was altogether different from that which it was meant to replace, and I have no doubt that it changed materially the fortunes of the more or less human beings who figured in my tale. Such, however, was the fate of a young contributor in the hands of an unbusinesslike editor.

But, as I have said, Mrs. Riddell, apart from her imperfect observance of editorial customs, was a delightful woman. She and her husband lived in a rambling old house in the Green Lanes, Tottenham. Here she entertained many of the notable men of letters of her time, and here I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of not a few of them. The establishment was a somewhat primitive one. The workshop in which Mr. Riddell carried on the manufacture of his patent stoves was at the back of the house, and a rather large central hall, dividing the dining-room and the drawing-room, was used as a kind of show-room in which choice specimens of Mr. Riddell's wares were displayed. The special feature of these patent stoves was that they were ornamental as well as useful. They were made to look like anything but what they were. One stove appeared in the guise of a table, richly ornamented in cast-iron; another was a vase; a third a structure like an altar, and so forth. But whatever their appearance might be, they all were stoves. One winter's night, when there was an inch of snow on the ground, I went out to the Green Lanes to attend one of Mrs. Riddell's literary parties. It was bitterly cold, and one of the stoves in the hall had been lighted for the comfort of the guests. We were a merry company, including, if I remember aright, George Augustus Sala, and some other well-known journalists. In the course of the evening Mrs. Riddell asked a well-known barrister, who at that time dabbled a little in literature, and who has since risen to fame and to a knighthood, to favour us with a song. He was an innocent young man in those days, and tried to excuse himself. "Now, Mr. C——," said Mrs. Riddell, "I know you have brought some music with you, so you must get it and do as I wish." The young man admitted that he had brought music, and blushingly retired to the hall in quest of it. Suddenly, those of us who were standing near the door heard a groan of anguish, and, looking out, we saw Mr. C—— holding in one hand the charred remains of a roll of music, and in the other the remnants of what had once been an excellent overcoat. He had laid his coat, when he arrived, on what was apparently a hall table. Unluckily for him, it happened to be the patent stove that had been lighted that evening to cheer and warm us when we escaped from the storm outside. I draw a veil over the subsequent proceedings.

I believe it was on this very evening that I heard Sala utter one of those jocosely brutal sentences for which he was celebrated. The literary men who frequented Mrs. Riddell's house were not, I am sorry to say, so respectful to her husband as they might have been. They made it very clear, in fact, that it was the novelist and not the inventor of stoves whom they came to see, and they were impatient when the latter attempted to intrude his views upon them. A party of us were gathered in the dining-room, smoking and otherwise refreshing ourselves. We had been listening to story after story from some of the best talkers in the Bohemia of those days, and again and again the attempts of Mr. Riddell to contribute to our entertainment by some long-winded narration had been vigorously and successfully repulsed. At last the unhappy host found an opening, and had got so far as "What you were saying reminds me of an interesting anecdote I once heard," when Sala, striking his fist upon the table, thundered a stentorian "Stop, sir!" Mr. Riddell looked at him, half frightened, half indignant. "If the story you propose to tell us," continued Sala, "is an improper one, I wish to tell you that we have heard it already; and if it is not improper, we don't want to hear it at all." Yes, clearly one had wandered into Bohemia in those days.

My work in the Gallery of the House of Commons was of great interest. I watched Disraeli during his first brief premiership in 1868, when he had to hold the reins of authority in a House in which his party was really in a minority, and when he had nightly to confront the fierce attacks of Mr. Gladstone, who was rallying his own followers, both in the House and in the country, for their successful onslaught upon the Government. It was a unique and most valuable experience to watch these two great men in their gladiatorial combats across the table of the House: Gladstone wielding the mighty broadsword of his powerful eloquence, and seeming as if at every moment he would annihilate his antagonist; Disraeli, with marvellous skill and exquisite adroitness, bringing the rapier of his wit to bear upon his opponent, and again and again pinking him with some stinging epigram or smart retort that set all the Tory benches roaring with delight. It made one's young blood grow warmer to watch the struggle from the impartial height of the Reporters' Gallery.

I was in the House on that memorable occasion when Disraeli made a speech which astounded his followers so much that they were only able to account for it by the hypothesis that he had taken too much to drink. This is a harsh way of stating the case, but there is no doubt a measure of truth in it. Disraeli was not a self-indulgent man, but in those days his devotion to his duties in the House was so great that he would sometimes sit all the evening listening to a debate without taking any food, and in his dinnerless condition the stimulant he took before making his speech in reply occasionally got into his head. Certainly, in the memorable speech on the Irish Church question, to which I allude, he was betrayed into excesses for which some justification was necessary. I remember seeing him, at the close of that speech, draw his handkerchief from his pocket and wave it round his head, before he sank back exhausted on the Treasury bench; and I can still see the pale and angry face of Mr. Gladstone as he sprang to his feet to reply, and hear the stern tones in which he referred to "the excitement—the too obvious excitement—of the right honourable gentleman."

Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff has recently furnished the world with many volumes of personal reminiscences. He does not include among those reminiscences any reference to a scene which I witnessed in the House of Commons during Disraeli's first brief premiership, although Sir Mountstuart was himself the hero of the occasion. It was one Wednesday afternoon. There was an empty House and a dull debate, but Disraeli was in his place on the Treasury Bench, so that anything might happen. It pleased the Mr. Grant Duff of those days to deliver himself of a philippic, at once voluminous and violent, against the Prime Minister. He quoted the opinions of foreign critics to the disadvantage of Mr. Disraeli; he emphasised them by fine flights of his own imagination; and he illustrated his speech with a wealth of gesticulation and a variety of intonation that convulsed his scanty audience with laughter. People wondered mildly what punishment was in store for the audacious man who was thus breaking one of the unwritten canons of the House, for in those days it was regarded as bad form on the part of a man not himself in the front rank to attack one in the position of Mr. Disraeli. As the speech proceeded, the Prime Minister sat in his favourite attitude, his arms folded, his head slightly bent forward, and his vacant eyes fixed upon the points of his boots. He might have been carved in stone for any trace of emotion that he displayed. We in the Gallery anticipated that this air of absolute indifference was to be the punishment of his rash assailant. But to our surprise, when Grant Duff sat down, Disraeli instantly sprang to his feet. As he did so, he raised his single glass to his eye, and looked fixedly across the House to the spot where the member for Elgin was slowly composing himself after his mighty effort. For some seconds Disraeli, with an air of cold, cynical aloofness, continued to gaze at the unfortunate man. Then, with a favourite action, he suddenly dropped the glass from his eye, and, waving his hand with an airy gesture of contempt, said, "I shall not detain the House, sir, by referring to the—the exhibition we have just witnessed; but I merely wish to say in reply to an honourable member below the gangway," and so on. This was, I think, the most cruel speech I ever heard Disraeli make, and for the moment it seemed to have a crushing effect upon its subject.

In those days Disraeli was not the Tory idol he subsequently became. I well remember, on the historic evening when Mr. Gathorne Hardy moved the adjournment of the House because of the absence of Mr. Disraeli at Windsor, and the news instantly spread that Lord Derby had resigned and Mr. Disraeli had become Prime Minister in his place, that there was a hubbub—not merely of excitement, but of disapproval—in the Lobby. Tory members of the old school were furious at having "that Jew," as they contemptuously styled him, set over them. I walked from the House that evening with Sir Edward Baines and Mr.—afterwards Sir Charles—Forster. They were both full of the dislike felt on the Tory side for the change in the leadership of their party. It is strange to note how quickly the views of a party change with regard to its leaders. I remember the time when the idea that Mr. Gladstone would ever be Prime Minister was treated with ridicule by not a few of those who sat beside him in Parliament. I have myself heard Mr. Disraeli assailed in scornful and sarcastic terms by Lord Salisbury, and have listened to his sneering retort. Even after Disraeli became Prime Minister in 1868 it is notorious that the Duke of Buccleuch refused to entertain him as his guest when he visited Scotland to rally the party before the General Election of that year. It was on the occasion of this visit that he gave such offence to the graver section of the Tories by the speech in which, explaining the genesis of the Household Suffrage Act, he used the words, "I educated my party." A few years later the whole party was proud of having been educated by him; but when he made this speech his words were regarded as an insolent display of vanity on the part of an upstart who had elbowed his way to the front at the expense of better men.

My only personal encounter with the great Tory leader was connected with this same speech at Edinburgh. I went to Aylesbury, during the course of the 1868 election, in order to report a speech of his. He spoke in the Corn Exchange, which was crowded to excess. The accommodation for the reporters was quite unequal to their demands, and I had to stand among the crowd and take my notes as best I could. A good-natured farmer in front of me invited me to use his back as a desk, against which I placed my note-book. Disraeli had not proceeded very far with his speech before I found that my friend was not by any means in agreement with the illustrious speaker. Again and again he interrupted him with exclamations and questions. For a long time Disraeli took no notice of these interruptions, but at last one stung him into action. The orator had paused for a moment, and my farmer friend, seizing his chance, bawled out in a stentorian voice, "What about educating your party?" The Prime Minister instantly turned round, raised his glass to his eye, and with an angry and contemptuous glare, transfixed—me! The farmer's courage had given way when he found that his shot had told, and, to my unutterable disgust, he dropped upon his knees, and left me to face the music. Disraeli looked at me for a perceptible space of time, and then, dropping his glass, said, in those chilling tones of which he was a master, "I shall certainly not try to educate you, sir." Everybody stared at me; everybody groaned at me; and it was only the consciousness of my own innocence that kept me from dropping on my knees beside the treacherous author of my humiliation.

In that election of 1868 I recorded my first parliamentary vote. Living at 24, Addison Road North, I was an elector of Chelsea, and I duly supported at the polling booth the joint candidature of Sir Charles Dilke and Sir Henry Hoare. This was the last General Election before the passing of the Ballot Bill. Representatives of the different candidates sat on either side of the poll clerk, and duly thanked each elector as he recorded his vote for the man whom they represented.

I wrote an article in the St. James's Magazine describing the opening day of the session of the new Household Suffrage Parliament. It was called "The Birthday of an Era," and, looking back, I think I was fully entitled to make use of that somewhat high-sounding phrase. It was the beginning of the Gladstonian epoch in English history, and, for good or for evil (in my own opinion mainly for good), it was destined to make a deep impression on the institutions and fortunes of the nation. When Mr. Gladstone entered upon his first term of office as Prime Minister, he was certainly surrounded by a wonderful band of colleagues. They included Lord Granville, Lord Hartington, Lord Kimberley, Mr. Lowe, Mr. Bright, Mr. Cardwell, Mr. Childers, Mr. Bruce, and Mr. Forster. In my time no stronger ministry than this has had power in England. The men I admired most after Mr. Gladstone were Mr. Bright and Mr. Forster. I had not yet made the personal acquaintance of Forster, and did not dream of the close ties by which we were eventually to be united; but I was drawn to him from the very first by an instinctive feeling of liking and esteem. His blunt speech, his careless dress, his unpolished but genuine manners, all seemed to me to mark him out as that rare creature a thoroughly honest politician; and whilst I sat in the Reporters' Gallery, there was no one after Mr. Gladstone whose speeches delighted me more than did those of Forster.

Before the Ministry had been long in office I was brought into contact with one of its members, Mr. W.E. Baxter, the Secretary to the Admiralty. Mr. Baxter was a great reformer and a financial purist. When he went to the Admiralty he found extravagance and confusion, not to speak of corruption, pervading all the departments connected with the provision of matériel for the Fleet. He set to work at once, with the vigour of the new broom, to cleanse the Augean stable. Naturally he excited the bitter hostility of those whose personal interests were affected by his action, and these, being in many cases persons of influence, were able to inspire attacks upon his policy in the leading organs of the daily press in London. I, in my small way, as London correspondent of the Leeds Mercury, had defended him against some of these attacks. Baxter noticed my defence, and sought me out in order to thank me for it. He did more than this. He proposed that I should hear from him from time to time how he was advancing in his work of reorganisation and reform, and should make the facts known to the public through the columns of the Mercury. This was great promotion for me. In those days the provincial press had no direct connection with Ministers or the leaders of parties; and the "London correspondent" was not in a position to supply his readers with news at first hand, or with any news, indeed, that was at once original and authentic. Through Mr. Baxter I suddenly found myself placed in a position that enabled me to provide the Leeds Mercury with political and administrative news that was not only of the highest importance, but that had not appeared anywhere else. For Mr. Baxter was better than his word. When I went, as I did several times a week, to see him at the Admiralty, he not only told me all that was going on in his own department, but all that could be published with regard to the proceedings of the Government as a whole. I think I am correct in saying that I was at that time the only correspondent of a provincial newspaper who was favoured in this way, and my letter to the Mercury began to be read and quoted in many different quarters. Certainly my position was made both easier and more important by this friendship with Mr. Baxter.

During the whole of 1869 I attended the debates in Parliament, and watched with eager sympathy the progress of the Government in the heavy task that it had set itself. The passing of the Bill for disestablishing the Irish Church was the chief business of that memorable session. The speaking on both sides was at the highest level. In the House of Commons, Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright, Lowe, and Gathorne Hardy distinguished themselves above all others. But the palm for oratory, as has so often been the case, was borne off by the House of Lords. That House presented a brilliant spectacle during the debates on the second reading of the Bill which the majority of the peers detested so heartily. The speaking against the measure was far more effective than that in its favour. Indeed, at this distance of time I can only recall one speech by a supporter of the Bill which impressed itself so strongly upon me as to remain fresh in my memory after the lapse of more than thirty years. That was the speech of Dr. Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, who was courageous enough to stand against his brethren, and to prefer the claims of justice to those of the Establishment in which he was a leading figure. On the other hand, two at least of the speeches delivered against the Bill are still vividly present to my mind. The first was the speech of Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, an extraordinary display of florid and flowing eloquence. It moved the House so greatly that when he sat down the Tory peers rose, almost in a body, and rushing across the floor, offered him their personal congratulations and handshakes in recognition of his success. Such a scene, common enough in foreign Chambers, was almost without precedent in our cold and stately House of Lords. The other memorable speech was that of Lord Derby, "the Rupert of debate." Though I had no sympathy with his views, I could not but admire the almost passionate fervour with which he pleaded for the Irish Church, and the indignation with which he denounced those who were bent upon despoiling it. I remember his quoting with dramatic effect the curse uttered by Meg Merrilees upon Ellan-gowan—a curse which he intended, of course, to apply to Mr. Gladstone. It was the last speech that Lord Derby ever made. When the announcement of the final surrender of the Peers, after the Bill had passed through Committee, was made by Lord Cairns, I saw Lord Derby rise from his seat and, with a face inflamed with indignation, hobble swiftly out of the Chamber. He never entered it again.

This incident belongs to the tragedy of politics; but the debates on the Irish Church Bill in the House of Lords were not without their touches of comedy. One of these was supplied by Lord Westbury, the ex-Liberal Lord Chancellor. He made a very amusing, a very bitter, and an almost wholly inaudible speech against the Bill. The older peers, with their hands behind their ears, clustered round him to catch his witticisms, some even kneeling on the floor in order to be near enough to hear him. They chuckled and laughed consumedly, but we unfortunate reporters in the Gallery had but the faintest idea of what it was they were laughing at. One sentence I did indeed catch, and still remember. It was to the effect that if the Irish Church were disestablished there would be no provision for the celebration of holy matrimony in Ireland in accordance with Protestant rites. "Was it possible," Lord Westbury asked, with simulated indignation, "that the authors of this iniquitous measure really meant to drive all the unmarried Protestants of Ireland into mortal sin?" The old peers around him enjoyed this effort of the imagination mightily.

The other comic incident I remember was of a different kind. The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr. Trench, on behalf of his fellow-prelates, made a long speech against the Bill. Dr. Trench was a man of very high character and fine talent, but he was not at home in the House of Lords, or, indeed, in a political speech. When he advanced to the table of the House, he caused a slight titter by producing an unmistakable black sermon case, and spreading it open before him. By-and-by, as he proceeded with his sonorous but somewhat melancholy discourse, everybody perceived that he was preaching a sermon. The intonation of his voice, the phraseology, the measured sweep of the hands, all smacked of the pulpit. The whole House listened eagerly, and watched intently for the accident that was certain to happen. At last it came. "I beseech you, my brethren," said the Archbishop, in a moment of apostolic absence of mind, and the whole House exploded in a roar of long-suppressed laughter, which made it impossible to learn the nature of the Primate's appeal.

For any man of intelligence the position of a parliamentary reporter is one of great interest and full of great possibilities. In my days in the Gallery there was, as I have already stated, little communication between the Gallery and the House proper. The art of exploiting the Press had not yet become familiar to the politicians, and a great gulf seemed to be fixed between the reporters and the members. Since then, that gulf has almost disappeared, and not a few men have stepped down from the Reporters' Gallery to the floor of the House. But our very aloofness from the inner side of parliamentary life, with its personal interests and its incessant intrigues, strengthened our position as independent critics and observers. We looked on as at a play in which we ourselves had no part, and those who possessed the instinct for politics which is the gift of the born journalist were able to see more and learn more from our independent standpoint than many of the actual actors saw and learned. Some of the most capable of our political writers and critics were trained in the Gallery. One of my most intimate friends in those days was Mr. Mudford, who subsequently became known to fame as the editor of the Standard, and who built up that journal's great reputation. Of Mudford's capacity as an editor it is hardly necessary to speak here, but I may note in passing that even in his early days in the Gallery he displayed the marked characteristics which distinguished him when he was at once the ablest and the least known of London editors. His independence of character was even then combined with a strong indisposition to make many acquaintances, or to cut any figure in public. It was my privilege to be counted thus early in his career among his friends, and I am glad to say that it is a privilege which I still enjoy.

My stay in London was brought to an end in the early part of 1870, amid circumstances that changed the whole tenor of my life, and for a time left me a crippled and wounded man. I have said nothing in these pages of my private life or my domestic happiness. My marriage had proved to be, in all respects save one, everything that the heart of man could desire. The one drawback was my wife's delicate health; but she had shown such marvellous recuperative powers at times when the doctors had spoken in the gravest manner of her case, and she possessed so unfailing a flow of natural good spirits, that it was impossible for one who, perhaps, saw only that which he desired to see, to believe that her case was hopeless. Yet hopeless it really was during the whole of the two short years of her married life. Her death—it took place on the 4th of February—was a blow that seemed to shatter my own life to its very foundations. I cannot dwell upon it, unless it be to say that at that time of unspeakable sorrow I first learned the value of human sympathy, and made the discovery that there are, happily, in this world not a few men and women who seem to have the gift of being able, not indeed to remove, but to share and to lighten the burdens of their fellow-creatures. It is only those who have gone through such an ordeal as this of mine who can fully understand all that human sympathy may be in that hour of darkest woe when a man, still standing on the threshold of life, finds himself alone in a world which to him has suddenly become an empty desert.

One incident, and one only, of those days I will venture to recall. I was walking along the Strand in the blackest hours of my misery, when I saw an old man approaching me whose depth of mourning showed that he had sustained the same bereavement as myself. There was probably a difference of fifty years in our ages, but we were alike in the sacred kinship of sorrow. As he drew near me I saw his eyes fixed upon mine with a long look of tenderness and sympathy that went to my very heart, and comforted me subtly. I envied him his age, which seemed to bring him so much nearer to the end. I do not think he envied me my youth. It was but for a moment that we were thus drawn to each other in the crowded street—"ships that passed in the night," in the darkest night, indeed; but that moment I have never forgotten.

CHAPTER VII.

EDITOR OF THE LEEDS MERCURY.

Forming Good Resolutions—Provincial Journalism in the 'Seventies—
Recollections of the Franco-German War—The Loss of the Captain
and its Consequences to me—Settling Down at Leeds—Acquaintance with
Monckton Milnes—Visits to Fryston—Lord Houghton's Chivalry—His
Talk—His Skill in Judging Men—Stories about George Venables—Lord
Houghton's Regard for Religious Observances.

In April, 1870, there came to me most unexpectedly the offer of the editorship of the Leeds Mercury. It came, as readers of the preceding pages know, at a time when my whole life was unsettled by the bereavement which had made me a lonely, restless man. It was, I need hardly say, an offer of a very tempting character. After little more than two years of the life of a journalist in London, the prospect was held out to me of a recognised position on the Press as chief of one of the principal provincial dailies. The position meant increased remuneration, freedom from the anxieties of miscellaneous work, and the possession of influence of no ordinary kind. All my friends and relatives urged upon me the madness of refusing such an offer, especially since it had come to me unsought and at an unusually early age. Yet for a time I was more inclined to refuse than to accept the proposal. I loved London, and the freedom of its literary life, and I knew by experience how sharp was the contrast between the social life of the capital and that of a provincial town like Leeds. Besides, London drew my sympathies more strongly than ever as the scene of those short years of married happiness which had now come to an end. So, for a time, I wavered as to the acceptance of the new position offered to me, and it was only under the sharp pressure of friends and relatives that I at last wrote to my old friend, Mr. Frederick Baines, and accepted the editorship of the Mercury.

No one not a member of the Baines family had edited the journal since it became the property of the first Edward Baines, so that it was a new departure in more respects than one that the proprietors were making in placing the editorship in my hands. The cause of the vacancy which I undertook to fill was a rather curious one. Mr. Tom Baines, who had been editor since his father, Edward Baines, entered Parliament, had become an adherent of the religious body known as Plymouth Brethren. A man of culture, of fine ability, and of high character, he had deliberately associated himself with a sect which regarded the affairs of the world as being outside the scope of a Christian's duties. He found it impossible to combine attention to the many questions of politics and public business that must engage the thoughts of a newspaper editor, with the Bible readings and sermons upon spiritual truth to which he specially desired to devote himself. It was a sore trouble to his excellent father when Mr. Tom Baines decided that the life of a journalist and that of a Plymouth Brother were not consistent; but, with that noble respect for all conscientious convictions which distinguished Edward Baines both in public and in private, he bowed to his son's decision, and regretfully acquiesced in his retirement from a post that he had filled with eminent distinction.

So it came about that on May 15th, 1870, I found myself in the train on my road to Leeds to take charge of the duties of the important post to which I had been called. I do not think that I had any conception at that time of the real importance of that post, or of the heavy responsibilities attaching to it. I was barely eight-and-twenty, and hitherto the bent of my inclination had been towards literature rather than political journalism. The ideal life, I thought, was that of a successful writer of fiction. Though a sincere and convinced Liberal, I had always possessed an unfortunate capacity for seeing the defects and blunders of my own party, and I had a strong distaste for the doctrine which finds expression in the phrase, "My party, right or wrong." Besides, I was then, as I still am, strongly attracted towards different personalities. There were men on the Conservative side of the House of Commons whom I regarded with deep respect and esteem. There were others, sitting on the Liberal benches, whom I held in something like contempt. Upon the whole, therefore, I did not feel so much attracted by the responsible editorship of a great political journal as might have been expected, and it was with considerable trepidation, and many doubts as to my own capacity, that I made that fateful journey to Leeds. I remember distinctly the current of my thoughts as the train flew northwards. The death of my wife had sobered me, and all youthful levity seemed to have been buried in her grave. I spent the four hours of the railway journey in making good resolutions as to my conduct in my new position.

The resolution which impressed itself most forcibly upon my mind was a determination not to make any enemies. I could honestly say that I had made none so far in the course of my life. If my circle of acquaintances was but a narrow one, it consisted wholly of persons who were truly my friends. In my innocence I believed that in the public position I was about to take this pleasant condition of things might be continued. I would be fair, just, and courteous to everybody, I resolved; and thus I should pass through life as one of those fortunate men who enjoy everyone's goodwill. I can smile now as I recall the speedy shattering of that illusion which awaited me at Leeds; but I well remember the almost tragical sense of surprise and disappointment which I felt when I first found that in honestly doing what I conceived to be my duty, in a public matter with which I had to deal, I had most unexpectedly made a personal enemy. Speaking now with long years of experience behind me, I may be allowed to bear my testimony to the fact that it is impossible for a public man in this country to deal honestly with the many controversial questions that politicians have to handle without finding that, in the course of his life, he must of necessity make some enemies. Human nature being what it is, it seems impossible for a man to take a clear and independent line on great questions without at times giving offence to others, who may be just as honest and conscientious as himself. It would, of course, be ridiculous to say that the test of a man's worth as a politician, whether in Parliament or the editorial chair, is the number of his enemies; but I am convinced that a public man who has absolutely no enemies must be a person who has deliberately shirked his duties and stifled his conscience.

My first step on entering on my duties as editor of the Mercury was to make a complete change in the editor's hours. My predecessor had been in the habit of writing his leader in the middle of the day, and it was very seldom that he was to be seen in the office after four o'clock in the afternoon. In common with all, or nearly all, the editors of the provincial dailies of his time, he never attempted to write upon late news. It was the fashion then for the provincial editor to wait until he had ascertained the opinions of the London daily papers upon current questions before he ventured to express his own. It was a delightful system so far as the ease and comfort of the provincial editor were concerned. To be able to finish the labours of the day in the early hours of the afternoon was an ideal state of things from the personal point of view. Fortunately I did not yield to the temptation to continue the old, easygoing régime. My experience in London had made me acquainted with the interiors of the offices of more than one of the daily newspapers, and I was no longer oppressed with a provincial reverence for London editors as beings who dwelt apart. I saw no reason why I should not express my own views upon the questions with which I had to deal, instead of waiting to pen a mere reflection of the views of other persons. So, almost from the first day of my editorship, I went to the office late, and wrote upon some subject that was absolutely fresh. Barely three weeks had passed before I was able to make a distinct impression upon the readers of the Mercury as a result of this changed system.

It was on the night of June 9th, 1870. I had finished my leader for the next morning's paper, and was just preparing to leave the office, when a telegram was brought to me with the sad announcement of the death of Charles Dickens. My old leader was instantly thrown aside, and, sitting down, I wrote out of a full heart of the irreparable loss which English literature and the Englishmen of that generation had suffered. No matter what the faults of the article might be, it made a great impression upon the readers of the Mercury next morning, for the death of Dickens was one of those events that touch the heart of the nation, and everybody was anxious to read any comments upon it. The impression made by my article was deepened by the fact that no other provincial paper had commented upon the absorbing topic. From that moment I seemed to have gained the ear of my readers, and Leeds, which, not unnaturally, had taken coldly to me in the first instance, began to open its heart and extend its sympathies to the new and unknown editor. All this sounds like sheer egotism; but as to the fact that, with my editorship of the Mercury, the practice of writing upon the latest topics in the provincial daily press first became general, there can be no dispute, and as it is a fact of interest in the history of the Press, I have dwelt upon it at this length.

Very soon the attention of newspaper readers all over the world was absorbed by one engrossing topic—the great war between France and Germany. The experiences of an editor during those exciting days were not uninteresting. There have been no such days since in my recollection. In the first instance, when the clouds were gathering with startling suddenness, few persons in this country believed that war was possible. It was incredible, they held, that two civilised nations should fight over such a question as the candidature for the Spanish throne. All the orthodox authorities were furiously angry with those journals that pointed out the real dangers of the situation, and the difficulty of arresting two great nations like France and Prussia when they had once begun to approach each other with the language of menace. One day Mr. Frederick Baines brought into my room one of the most influential citizens of Leeds. His purpose in calling was to protest against the alarmist tone of the articles in the Mercury, and nothing could have been better than the imposing air of authority with which he informed me that he knew for a fact that neither the members of the English Government nor any other well-informed persons looked upon a war as being even remotely possible. I felt very uncomfortable, and somewhat overweighted by the air of my visitor. I could see, too, that Mr. Frederick Baines, though thoroughly loyal to me, was also impressed by his friend's statement. But in spite of the high authority on which this gentleman spoke, just three days later war was declared.

Never in my time has the world looked on at a drama at once so stupendous and so enthralling in its excitement as that of the Franco-German War. We have had wars since then which have affected this country more nearly, and have, of course, stirred deeper emotions in our breasts, than this war between France and Germany; but as a dramatic spectacle on which, thank God, we Englishmen could look as spectators merely, this great struggle was unsurpassed and unapproached. The march of events was so swift, the surprises were so great and numerous, the field of operations was so near and so familiar, and the political upheaval so terrible and so complete, that we onlookers were kept in a state of perpetual, almost breathless, suspense whilst the struggle lasted.

Of course, the newspapers were full of the war from the moment of its breaking out. The arrangements for special correspondents and news from the front were more complete than they had ever been before, and as the astounding drama swiftly advanced from the trivial overture at Saarbruck to the overwhelming catastrophe at Sedan, the civilised world had eyes and ears for nothing else. Barely seven weeks elapsed between the declaration of war and the surrender of the Emperor and the fall of his empire. During those seven weeks, public opinion in this country seemed to be equally divided between the two belligerents; but after the collapse of the Imperial army and the fall of the empire, the balance swung round in favour of France. That wholesome human sentiment which leads most men to take sides with the weak against the strong acted upon us, and drew our sympathies to unhappy France. The French have never given us credit for this fact, but have continually reproached us for not having espoused their side in a quarrel with which we had absolutely no concern. On the other hand, the Germans have never openly resented our sympathy with France in her day of immeasurable misfortune. I do not think, however, that they have forgotten it.

It was after Sedan, when it became evident that Paris was about to be invested by the victorious troops, that the war entered upon a new phase. At first nobody believed in a possible siege of Paris, any more than people now believe in a possible siege of London. I remember one of the sub-editors of the Leeds Mercury, who happened to take the Prussian side in the quarrel, bursting into my room one day in a furious passion to denounce the conduct of those wretched Frenchmen, who were positively cutting down the woods outside the city barriers in order to prevent their affording shelter to the enemy. My friend had once visited Paris, and had been struck by the beauty of these woods. Apparently he thought that, even for their own salvation, the French had no right to disfigure scenes of beauty that had delighted the eyes of sentimental tourists.

The newspapers, when it became evident that the siege of Paris was, after all, destined to take place, had to adopt measures to secure correspondents who were prepared to endure the hardships of that siege in order to furnish information to the British public. The most famous of these correspondents was Mr. Labouchere, who furnished the Daily News with the most entertaining journal of a siege ever written by a besieged resident. On behalf of the Leeds Mercury I engaged the services of another well-known journalist to act as our representative during the siege. This gentleman very naturally required a considerable sum of money in advance for his maintenance during the investment. He had written one or two admirable letters in anticipation of the siege, and I cheerfully sent him the amount for which he asked. He received it just before the Prussian lines closed round Paris, and I do not remember that I ever heard from him again. The letters which it is to be presumed he wrote to the Leeds Mercury never reached that journal.

When the investment began, and Paris was cut off from the outer world, we onlookers with the strip of sea between had certain visible signs of the reality of the siege offered to us in our very midst. The front page of the Times furnished one of these signs. Day after day, for weeks at a stretch, the whole of that page was occupied by messages from the French outside Paris to their friends and relatives within the walls. At first English readers were puzzled by this phenomenon. The investment of the city was very strict, and it was difficult to understand how the newspaper could be smuggled inside the barriers; but presently the truth was made known. This page of the Times was part of the machinery of the famous pigeon post which connected the outside world with Paris during its long beleaguerment. The page was photographed on a microscopic scale. The film on which the photograph was printed was carried into Paris by a pigeon, a magic-lantern was used to enlarge the photograph, and the messages it contained were copied by Post Office officials, and forwarded to their different destinations. Such a postal service was, I imagine, unique. It was certainly most ingenious.

Another sign of the siege of Paris was presented during those bright autumn days by the appearance of Piccadilly, especially on a Sunday afternoon. I generally spent Sunday in London, and during that autumn, when walking on a Sunday in Piccadilly, I noticed more than once that the majority of the well-dressed persons promenading on the northern side of the street were Frenchmen—most of them wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honour. They were chiefly Imperialists, for whom there was no place in France under the new régime, and they had flocked to London literally in thousands, so that the great West End thoroughfare resounded at times with the French tongue.

One feature of that autumn was the unwonted magnificence of the displays of the aurora borealis. I never saw such fine auroras before or since. Night after night the sky was lighted up by the brilliantly coloured shafts of quivering flame. It is hardly surprising that the vulgar should have associated the phenomenon with the wonderful tragedy which was being enacted so near to our shores. The most ignorant, however, did not regard it as an omen. They honestly believed that they saw in the heavens the reflection of the glare from burning Paris.

I did not settle down to my editorial work in Leeds easily. Everything drew me back to London, and I told the proprietors of the Mercury that I did not mean to retain my post after the war came to an end. But at this point a fresh piece of good fortune came to me, though it arose out of a deplorable calamity. The Captain, the experimental vessel built by Captain Cowper Coles on designs that many high naval authorities had declared to be dangerously unsound, capsized in the Bay of Biscay, and sank with nearly every soul on board, including her designer, Captain Coles himself. There had been a great newspaper discussion about the Captain, and the Times had taken a vigorous part in it against the Admiralty authorities and in favour of Captain Coles. On the morning on which the news of the disaster was announced, the Times in its leading article maintained that the catastrophe was in no sense due to the instability of the ship, and urged that another Captain should be forthwith built. The Leeds Mercury, on the other hand, took what I regarded as the commonsense view, and insisted that for the future the opinions of the trained experts of the Admiralty should be preferred to those of irresponsible enthusiasts, even though they happened to be, like Captain Cowper Coles, men of genius.

Mr. Edward Baines, like most old journalists, had a profound respect for the wisdom of the Times, and he was very much disturbed when he found that the Leeds Mercury took a directly opposite view of the disaster to that of "the leading journal." He expressed to me, in his usual friendly and courteous manner, his regret that I had expressed myself so strongly, and evidently felt that what the Times said must be true. But on the following day the Times, after an interval for reflection, completely changed its position, admitted that the design of the Captain must have been at fault, recalled the fact that the catastrophe had been foreseen by the highest authorities, and protested against the building of any more ships of the same character. There was nothing surprising in this change of front, for the first views of the paper had been obviously inconsistent with the facts and with commonsense. But Mr. Baines was immensely impressed by the fact that the Leeds Mercury had grasped the essential truth before the Times. He greatly exaggerated the merit of his editor in the matter, came to the conclusion that I had become indispensable to the paper, and would not rest until I had entered into a new and binding agreement with him to continue my editorship on conditions that were greatly to my own advantage.

Thus this grave disaster to an English ship led to my final relinquishment of the idea of returning to London as a literary free lance, and to my settling in Leeds as permanent editor of the Mercury. Gradually my life in the town of my adoption became more agreeable to me. I made friends who were kind to me with the characteristic kindness of Yorkshire. I began to feel the power, as well as the responsibility, of my position; and I learned before long that, even in connection with the local affairs of a great community, a man can render services to his fellow citizens quite as important as any that he can render on the larger platform of public life.

It was at the close of 1870 that I first made the personal acquaintance of a man to whom I was afterwards to be deeply and permanently indebted. This was Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton. There was no better known figure in London society in those days than Lord Houghton. But he was much more than a figure in society. Delightful as host, raconteur, poet, and man of letters, he was more admirable still as the generous and willing servant of those who needed help. He had his foibles, his likes and his dislikes; but he was not one of those philanthropists who wait to be asked for their help. Where he was attracted towards anyone he was eager to aid, not only without solicitation, but at times even against the will of the beneficiary himself. I have known many kind men, many true friends, in the course of my life; I have known none whose kindness was more unstinted, more constant, or more generous than that of Lord Houghton. He had come to Leeds in December, 1870, to attend some public meeting, and he was entertained as his guest by Mr. Baines, whose son, as I have already explained, was my predecessor in the editorship of the Mercury.

At the dinner-table at Mr. Baines's house, Lord Houghton was as vivacious and as full of good talk as usual. The conversation happened to turn upon slips of the tongue. Houghton said that the most amusing he remembered was that of the lady who, meeting a friend in the street, exclaimed, "Have you heard of the dreadful thing that has happened to my poor brother John? He has become a Yarmouth Bloater." The good lady meant, of course, to say "Plymouth Brother." To Houghton's surprise, his story was received in embarrassed silence, and someone, as he told me afterwards, trod heavily upon his foot. Monckton Milnes was not a man to be easily disconcerted, and he speedily restored the party to a proper mood of geniality; but after dinner he took someone aside, and asked the meaning of the cold reception of his joke. He received the explanation which the reader will anticipate. It was because Mr. Tom Baines had become a Plymouth Brother that he had been compelled to retire from the editorship of the Mercury, to the great distress of his father. My name as his successor in that position was unknown until then to Lord Houghton, but he had no sooner heard it than he invited me to visit him at Fryston.

When I first entered the hospitable door of Fryston, I suffered from a distinct feeling of trepidation. It was new to me to meet men of Lord Houghton's social rank and fame on terms of friendly intimacy, and I confess that I was miserably shy when I made my first appearance among the company assembled in that pleasant morning room, where, long years before, Thomas Carlyle had been first introduced to the amenities of English country-house life. Carlyle has told the world, in a letter written to his wife, how much he was confounded by what seemed to him to be the splendours of a society that he had hitherto viewed only from the outside. His description of his bedroom—it was much larger and grander in the letter than any bedroom that really existed at Fryston—of the servants in livery, the menu of the dinner-table, and of the valet who made unlawful and undesired investigation of the contents of his pockets when he intruded himself upon him in the morning, all bespoke the absolute novice. I do not think, however, that he was a greater novice in 1842 than I was in 1870. A very brief experience enables any person of ordinary intelligence to grasp the essential details of country-house life; but many persons—including Carlyle and myself—would have been spared a certain spell of nervous discomfort if there had existed some simple written code explaining those usages and customs in which country-house life differs from the ordinary life of the English middle-classes. But kindness puts an end to all difficulties of the shy guest, and certainly there never was a kinder hostess than Lady Houghton.

From 1870 down to 1885 I had the good fortune to be a frequent visitor at Fryston. Lord Houghton's kindness to me at our first meeting only increased as time passed; and writing of him now, long after he has passed away, I must relieve my heart by saying that I owe more to him and to his unceasing efforts, not merely to draw me out, but to push me forward, than to any other friend I have ever made. There was a whimsical side to his character which, naturally enough, attracted more attention than was given to his more sober qualities. The eccentricities of his youth, embalmed by Sydney Smith and the other humorists of the 'thirties and 'forties, had disappeared when I made his acquaintance; but to the last he was absolutely careless as to public opinion, except on such points as those on which he himself shared that opinion. The truest thing that was ever said of him was said by William Edward Forster at the Cosmopolitan Club one night, when Houghton was leaving it. Someone said, referring to Houghton, "He's a good man to trust when you're in trouble, for he'll stand by you." "He'll do more than that," responded Forster; "he'll stand by a man not only in trouble but in disgrace, and I know nobody else who will." This was where the finer trait in Houghton's independence of character came in. He was always ready to espouse the cause of a man upon whom the world was frowning, but happily this quality is not uncommon among our nobler natures. That which was most uncommon in Houghton's character was his willingness to befriend a man even when he knew that the disgrace into which he had fallen was not undeserved. He could be severe—as severe as anybody I have ever known—upon vice and meanness; but if the sinner needed help he pitied him at once, and was ready to aid him to the best of his power.

His talk in his own house was delightful. It was altogether different from the talk that men heard when they met him at London dinner-tables. Strangely enough, it was at the breakfast-table that he talked best. Most Englishmen are not roused to conversational brilliancy until the day is far spent; but Houghton was at his best at breakfast and immediately afterwards. And how good that best was! He was a walking encyclopaedia, although no man was ever less of "a book in breeches." Whenever I wished to clear up some obscure point in history or politics, in literature or in the personal life of our times, I went to him, and seldom was it that I failed to get the light I wanted. As a judge of character he had no equal among the men I have known, and in the years that have flown since his death I have had the happiness of seeing his forecast of the future of not a few men strikingly realised. The first time I ever heard the name of Lord Rosebery was from his lips, in 1874 or 1875. I had seen the name in print, of course, but to me it was a name, and nothing more. "You don't know Lord Rosebery?" said he one day. "Then mark him well. He is the ablest young man in England, and, I believe, will be Prime Minister before he dies."

On another occasion he shocked me for the moment by a deliverance about Mr. Gladstone. It was in 1880, when the great statesman, having won the most brilliant triumph of his life, and finally defeated his great rival, Lord Beaconsfield, was struck down by serious illness a few weeks after he had regained power. "I am so sorry to see that Gladstone is getting better," Houghton said to me as we sat in the library at Fryston. I could hardly believe my own ears, and expressed my surprise at hearing such a sentiment from the lips of one of Mr. Gladstone's greatest admirers. "Don't you see," responded Houghton, "that if he dies now he will be one of the greatest figures in English history? He has just won the greatest triumph a statesman ever enjoyed. It is impossible that he can remain at this dazzling height. Now is the time for him to die." Those who only knew Lord Houghton as a genial cynic would have been surprised if they had known that in his opinion the greatest Englishman of his own time was Lord Shaftesbury, and the greatest Englishwoman Florence Nightingale. Those who were acquainted with his poetry would not have felt this surprise. There is much in his verse, neglected though it now be, which deserves a high place in our national literature. But in his later days—or, rather, throughout his life—the world refused to see his more serious side, and treated him as the humorist and the wit, the cynic, and the kind-hearted but eccentric peer who made it his mission in life to try to fuse the two worlds of society and intellect.

He certainly had wonderful success in bringing together men who stood at opposite poles both of position and opinion. In the days when Mr. John Morley was only known as a promising writer of the most terrible heterodoxy, he dined with Houghton, and was placed next the Archbishop of Canterbury. "Who is that clever-looking young man sitting next the Archbishop?" asked Lord Selborne, who was also at the table. When he was told that it was Mr. Morley, the editor of the Fortnightly Review and the author of the famous "little g," he threw up his hands in absolute consternation. But Houghton had a rare discrimination in bringing men together. He never brought people who disliked each other into juxtaposition, as some notorious hostesses of our own time are fond of doing. What he did was to gather round his table men of talent and worth who would have had little chance of meeting but for his kindly and hospitable intervention, and many a lifelong friendship has thus been begun beneath his roof.

One of the earliest lessons a man learnt on being admitted to Houghton's cosmopolitan society was the great need of care in the selection of topics in addressing a stranger. Most persons one met at Fryston had either done something or were somebodies, and occasionally their fame was not of the kind that commends itself to everybody. It was necessary, therefore, to walk delicately, like Agag, in opening a conversation with a stranger. A terrible experience of my own will illustrate this fact. As boy and man I had adored Thackeray, and made him the hero of my literary dreams. There was one incident in his early life about which I was quite unreasonably curious. I wanted to know which of his schoolfellows it was who broke his nose and disfigured him for life, and I had made up my mind that if ever I met a man who had been at school with him I would question him on this point. During one of my earlier visits to Fryston I found that George Venables, the well-known Parliamentary counsel and Saturday Reviewer, was staying there. Venables was one of the most distinguished men of his day. His ripe judgment commanded universal confidence, whilst the somewhat austere manner which veiled a warm heart inspired chance acquaintances with a certain feeling of awe. During dinner I heard Venables talking about his early days at the Charterhouse, and felt at once that my long-sought chance had come. Accordingly, when I was walking with him in the Fryston woods on the following morning, I plucked up my courage, and asked him if he had been at the Charterhouse with Thackeray. "Certainly I was," replied the eminent publicist; "we entered on the same day, and were great friends all the time we were at school." "Then," said I, rushing blindly upon my fate, "you can tell me what I have long wanted to know. Who was it that broke Thackeray's nose?"

It was winter, and we were walking in Indian file through the woods. As I put this question to Venables, he suddenly stopped, and, turning round, glared at me in a manner that instantly revealed the terrible truth to my alarmed intelligence. He continued to glare for several seconds, and then, apparently perceiving nothing but innocent confusion, not unmixed with alarm, on my face, his own features became relaxed into a more amiable expression. "Did anybody tell you," he said slowly, and with solemn emphasis, "to ask me that question?" I could truthfully say that nobody had done so. My answer seemed to mollify Venables at once. "Then, if nobody put you up to asking me that question, I don't mind answering it. It was I who broke Thackeray's nose. We were only little boys at the time, and quarrelled over something, and had the usual fight. It wasn't my fault that he was disfigured for life; it was all the fault of some wretched doctor. Nowadays a boy's nose can be mended so that nobody can see that it has ever been broken. Let me tell you," he continued, "that Thackeray never showed me any ill-will for the harm I had done him, and I do not believe he felt any." Nor, I must add, did Venables show any ill-will to me for the gaucherie which had caused me to rake up this painful episode in his career.

Venables himself had been the victim of another mistake, which he resented more strongly than he did my indiscretion. He told the story to me and to Mrs. Procter one day in the drawing-room at Fryston, with keen indignation. A certain noble lord had approached him at an evening party with an air of extraordinary deference. Venables knew the peer very slightly, and was surprised by the salaams with which he was greeted. His surprise changed to fury when he discovered that his lordship had mistaken him for a notorious millionaire of somewhat dubious reputation who had just blossomed into a baronetcy. "Think of it!" he said with lofty scorn. "The fellow came cringing to me as if I were a prince of the blood, merely because he thought I was that odious adventurer, and had money in my pocket." Mrs. Procter sprang from her seat, and, hobbling across the room with extended forefinger, cried to Venables, in tones of dramatic intensity, "Does that noble lord still live?"

It was from Venables that I heard a delightful story about our host which, years afterwards, I repeated in writing Lord Houghton's life. It was the story of Carlyle's remark when Tennyson's friends were trying to procure a pension for him from Sir Robert Peel. "Richard Milnes," said Carlyle, taking his pipe out of his mouth, "when are ye gaun to get that pension for Alfred Tennyson?" Milnes tried to explain to Carlyle that there were difficulties in the way, and that possibly his constituents, who knew nothing about Tennyson, might accuse him of being concerned in a job if he were to succeed in getting the desired pension for the poet. "Richard Milnes," replied the sage, "on the Day of Judgment, when the Lord asks ye why ye didna get that pension for Alfred Tennyson, it'll no do to lay the blame on your constituents. It's you that'll be damned." I always had a half impression that, for some reason or other, Lord Houghton did not like to hear that story told in his presence. All the world knows, of course, that he did get the pension for the poet, and thus escaped the penalty anticipated by the philosopher.

But if Lord Houghton was sensitive on some points, he was frank and courageous in acknowledging his own youthful follies and the punishment which they brought upon him. I shall never forget his taking me to a particular corner in that vast library at Fryston—which, like some vegetable parasite, seemed to have spread itself over every inch of available wall-space in the house—and taking down from the shelves a volume of the "Life of Sydney Smith." His object in doing so was to show me the original manuscript of the pungent and witty letter in which Sydney Smith rebuked him sharply for having written a somewhat peppery note to ask the Canon if it was true that he had dubbed him "the cool of the evening." "What a young fool I was!" said Lord Houghton, when he had read the letter to me. "And how good it was of Sydney Smith to set me down in that fashion!"

Everybody knows that Lord Houghton was the most tolerant of men in all matters of faith and opinion; but he did not allow mere carelessness or idleness to serve as an excuse for the disregard of religious observances. My usual time for visiting Fryston was on Saturday, when I was free from the charge of my paper for four-and-twenty hours. My kind friend always insisted on Sunday morning that instead of going to church I should spend the morning in strolling in the park, either alone or in his delightful company. This, he would say, was necessary in the interests of my health. I spent more Sundays at Fryston than I can count, but I never entered the little church hard by the park gates until the sad day when I went there to attend his funeral. One Sunday evening, when there was a rather large party at the Hall—including John Morley—we were summoned by the old butler—himself a character not unworthy of commemoration—to prayers in the morning room. Lord Houghton was good enough to intimate to Morley and myself that we should not be expected to attend, and we accordingly remained in the drawing-room in conversation. A certain young Yorkshire baronet, who was also of the party, influenced by our bad example, stayed behind with us. In a couple of minutes, however, the butler reappeared, and going up to the baronet, said, "Sir Henry, his lordship is waiting for you before he begins prayers." The liberty accorded to the philosophic writer and the editor was not permitted to the country gentleman. I think I ought to add, in justice to Mr. Morley at least, that he and I accompanied the unwilling young man to the scene of the family devotions.

I must stay my hand, however, in these rambling recollections of my kind and brilliant friend and benefactor. No doubt I shall have more to say about him before my task is finished; but for the present I must take up again the thread of my narrative.

CHAPTER VIII.

MY FIRST CONTINENTAL TOUR.

A Generous Scot—Paris after the Commune—An Uncomfortable Journey
Home—Illness of the Prince of Wales—Revived Popularity of the
Throne—Death and Funeral of Napoleon III.—Burial of the Prince
Imperial—Forster's Educational Policy—Bruce's Incensing Bill—My Second
Marriage.

With the opening of 1871 came the armistice before Paris, quickly followed by the conclusion of peace. Then took place the ghastly upheaval of the Commune, and the eyes of the world were once more riveted upon the great city which has been the theatre of so many tragedies. It shocked everybody to think that the heavy sufferings through which unhappy France had passed, instead of uniting all classes of the people together in the bonds of a common sorrow, had only intensified the conflicts of parties and social grades. But in due time the Communist rising itself was suppressed, and peace at last fell to the lot of distracted France.

In September of this year, 1871, I went abroad for the first time in my life. Passing through Belgium and by the Rhine to Switzerland, I visited the Italian lakes before returning to England by way of Paris. There is no need to dwell upon the incidents of a commonplace tour like this, though one can never forget the delightful sense of exhilaration produced by a first experience of the living grandeur of the Alps. Switzerland was not so completely hackneyed in those days as it is now, and to me, of course, as a newcomer, it did not seem to be hackneyed at all. I was too young, I think, fully to realise the indescribable charm of Italy, a charm which is felt more strongly by most of us with each successive visit to that land of dreams and beauty. At Milan I was the victim of a not unusual incident in travel. I found myself stranded at the old Hôtel de la Ville for want of money. I had arranged for a remittance to reach me there; but in those days there were no tunnels through the Alps, and Italy was, in consequence, still a long way from England. My remittance, therefore, took longer to reach me than I had anticipated. The result was that I spent certain miserable days in a state of almost complete impecuniosity. I shall never forget the weary hours during which I tramped the streets, and the endless visits to the post office in search of the letter which I awaited so anxiously.

But whilst in this unpleasant position, I was fortunate enough to meet with an instance of genuine kindliness that really raised my opinion of my fellow-creatures. An old Scotsman used to sit beside me at the table d'hôte at the Hôtel de la Ville. He was a man of intelligence, and I found his conversation very pleasant. With the pride and sensitiveness of youth, I was, of course, resolute in my determination to conceal from him my unpleasant fix; but one night at dinner he startled me by asking when I was going to leave Milan. I feebly evaded the question by saying that I must first of all see all the sights of the place. "Hoots, man!" he retorted, "ye've seen all the sights, and ye're jist wasting your time and losing your holiday stopping here. I ken weel what it is ye're waiting for. Ye're short of money—that's it, isn't it?" I murmured something to the effect that I was expecting remittances which would, no doubt, reach me almost immediately. "Weel, I'm not going to let a young fellow like you lose your holiday," said my friend, in a very positive manner, "and ye'll just have to make me your banker for what ye want, and get away out of this hole as soon as ye can, for there are better sights to be seen than Milan." I could only prevent his forcing money upon me on the spot by promising that if my remittance did not come next day I would avail myself of his generous offer. Happily, the next day relief came, and I was no longer in pawn at Milan. But blessings on the head of that worthy old Scot, who must long ago have gone over to the majority! At least he nobly redeemed the character of his countrymen from the libel which makes the name of a Scotsman synonymous with meanness.

Paris in September, 1871, presented a strange sight to the eyes of a visitor. The shadow of the double ordeal of the siege and the Communist rising still lay heavily upon it. In the streets traces of the conflict between the Versaillists and the Communards were everywhere visible. Lamp-posts twisted by the shell fire, plate-glass windows perforated by bullets, columns chipped and shattered, and the pavement ripped up for the erection of barricades, were the common sights of the streets; whilst the blackened ruins of the Tuileries, and the other public buildings destroyed by the rebels, remained to attest the desperate character of the civil war that had been waged in the capital. The inhabitants had not yet recovered from the privations of the siege and the horrors of the Commune. There were few who smiled, and there were many who could not speak of the past without tears. That which was specially noticeable was the fact that all the fury of the Parisians seemed to be turned against the Communards. Many of them, speaking of the Prussians, referred warmly to the contrast between their conduct and that of their own lawless fellow-citizens.

Outside Paris the traces of the siege were everywhere visible, and driving along the country roads near St. Cloud—where the people were still living in tents and wooden sheds, almost every house having been destroyed—one came constantly upon little groups of graves of German soldiers who had been buried where they fell, each grave marked by its wooden cross with its simple inscription. These monuments spoke eloquently of the tragic character of the struggle. At Versailles, where the National Assembly was sitting, the great bulk of the Communist prisoners were confined in the orangery in front of the palace. Loaded cannon commanded this improvised prison, where many hundreds of men and women were herded promiscuously. Standing on the terrace above the orangery, I leant over the balustrade in order to look on the prisoners beneath. I had to withdraw hastily, for from the miserable crowd there came up an unbearable stench, such as might emanate from a cage of wild animals. Now and then one saw Communists being escorted by soldiers to meet the swift vengeance of the court-martial which was sitting to try them. These unhappy prisoners, who had little chance of escaping the penalty of death, bore themselves with firmness, and manifestly believed that they were sufferers in a holy cause. Not even the sight of the destruction they had wrought in Paris could wholly stifle one's feelings of sympathy with them in their wretched plight.