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MEMOIRS OF EIGHTY YEARS.

BY
GORDON HAKE,
PHYSICIAN.

“Could we elude the fiat,—all must die,—

Men would become their own posterity.”

LONDON:
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON,
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen.
1892.

(All rights reserved.)

CONTENTS.

ERRATA.

Transcriber’s Note: the errata have been corrected.

Memoirs of Eighty Years.

I.

Several literary men of eminence have from time to time suggested to me that I ought to write my memoirs, but I have long held the opinion that such works have scarcely a legitimate interest for one’s contemporaries. Now, however, that I have exceeded, by fourteen years, the age of man, I begin to regard the opinion of others, and to look upon myself as a sort of incipient posterity, and am disposed to make the experiment of placing some portion of my life on record.

Most people who attain to birth, parentage, and education, find the latter the most doubtful of the three, even the first being somewhat uncertain. For myself, there is a tradition in my family that I was born by candle-light on the 10th of March, 1809: it was at midnight, and in the town of Leeds.

To keep those in order who believe too much, Nature has issued a series of minds that believe too little, and I am one of these; I could prove to the satisfaction of any free metaphysician that I have never existed at all, and that I am a mere optical illusion, like the rest of my fellow-men.

As to my parentage, I believe in that implicitly. But who else would be so credulous, if it were to his interest to prove the reverse?

As to my education, it has been as scanty as that of the best of us; it would be too great a joke to suppose that eighty years is a sufficient time for the acquisition of any knowledge worth naming. Herschel, for example, discovered the planet Uranus; that educated him, though it had been in the place where he found it for countless millions of years.

The educated are those who appreciate things at their true value; culture does not merely signify knowledge, but its acquisition in the utmost detail.

My father was said to have a musical genius, and rumour handed down that my mother fell in love with him on that account. She was the most emotional woman that I ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I can understand her marrying at the age of thirty-three a youth of nineteen, which she did; but I cannot understand my father at his age marrying her.

I had a sister; she was the firstborn, and a brother who came after me.

My father died at the age of twenty-six; he got his feet wet in the snow, took a chill, and went regularly through all the stages of inflammation.

I was three years and three months old when my father died; I remember him, also his house, both inside and out, and the square where it stood, at Sidmouth. But I have only one vision of these things; it is always the same, that of the father, the house, and the square.

II.

It is as well to know how one’s family dovetails into the community of such a mosaic work as the British, so I will set down what information I have on the subject. I presume that a band of Hakes quitted Prussian Saxony in the olden time for a less sandy soil, and that some of them settled on the old red sandstone of Devon. The name of Hache gave itself to a town in the region of Broadcliss, and received a notice in Doomsday-book. The family no doubt occupied the soil thereabout for centuries, the name being noticeable in the Broadcliss Register in the time of Queen Anne. The name, too, is rife in Saxony; at Stassfurt there is a Hake’s Bridge; besides this there are numerous workmen of the name, engaged in the salt factories, not to mention a general and count who commanded the army against the Danes in the Schleswig-Holstein affair. In England, too, this family name has belonged to all classes, from a viscount in the time of Edward I., an M.P. for Windsor and a poet, in the reign of Henry VIII., down to some, who, being in trade, my mother used to call “the scum of the earth.”

My great-grandfather is reputed to have had land and a mansion called Bluehayes, hard by Broadcliss; and tradition says it got merged into the family of Acland by a successful mortgage on their part. My family lived on the soil for many centuries without being distinguished in any branch of science, literature, or art.

My mother’s family have had a different career: her father was a soldier, and the son of one; they were Gordons of the Huntly stock, and came directly from the Park branch of that house, but how little meaning is there in a name! Truth to tell the only male descendants of the first Gordon are the Aberdeen family. In the reign of one David, King of Scotland, a Norman prince of name forgotten, settled on a territory called Gordon, north of the Tweed. The elder branch failed after three or four generations; an only daughter succeeding to the territory, married a Seton, of Seton, who took the name of Gordon, so that this branch, the most successful one, having become barons, earls, marquisses, and finally dukes, are a younger branch of the Setons; baronets of Touch, still existing, while the Aberdeens, the second branch of Gordon, are the true descendants.

The centuries that have elapsed must have wholly eradicated the blood of Gordon in this family that still bears the name, and had the marquisate from early Scottish kings, whose daughter one of them married: Arabella.

There is something very dry in family history, because no one cares for other people’s relations. What I note down is to show that I belong to all classes. I have a cousin who is a baronet named Key; another who is an earl named Ranfurly; and, as I was told, one of my family was a butcher named Bedford. In fact, while not a true Briton, which I am glad of, I have a full share to my name of the Saxon blood. As regards my mother’s family, they were comparatively obscure in the middle of this century, and are so still, except in the instance of one individual who has a statue in Trafalgar Square, set up by the Conservative Government in perpetual disapproval of the neglect which the hero of Khartoum experienced at the hands of the Gladstone-Granville administration. But for that he would have been, like Cromwell, without a statue. Of him I shall give my opinion in the proper place; and as his name is public property, I shall trace some of the families from which, in common with him, I have derived my origin.

I may say, then, that our grandfather, Captain William Augustus Gordon, was an officer somewhat distinguished in the service. He was at the taking of Moro Castle, Havanna, Louisburg, and Quebec. At the siege of Quebec he was on the staff of General Wolf, and saw him die happy. He retired early from the army, in which he made many powerful friends—married a lady of many high qualities and great personal beauty, named Clarke, whose family belonged to Hexham, in Northumberland, the sister of the Rev. Slaughter Clarke, incumbent of that place, at whose house he first met her while stationed in the town on military duty. He had a family by her of four daughters and three sons, of which my mother was the firstborn.

III.

I had a sister; she came two or three years before me, and died at the age of four or five and twenty, of typhoid fever. She was attended, but in vain, by men of skill—Dr. J. A. Wilson, physician to St. George’s, and Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary.

Then I have a brother, who came last—two years after me—my oldest friend.

We both had good abilities, as time has since shown, but being let to run wild, we had no serious use for them, so we devoted them to mischief. It seems a settled purpose in nature for children to destroy whatever things they can lay their hands on, by way of testing the strength of materials, and to privately annoy all who come within their reach, not out of wickedness, but for fun. I and my brother fully entered into these views, and did all in our power to assist them; the consequence was, we were a good deal disliked. Another failing that we indulged in was a love of the village boys’ society, and this caused us to be looked down on by gentlemen’s sons. The street boys we found the best company, and they were amenable to our orders, which could not be said of the genteel class.

All this is defensible in children who are allowed to follow their own devices, and is a sign of health, for good little boys and girls are never very well. There is no intellectual endowment of such value as a sense of the ridiculous; it argues the existence of imagination, to which it is a supplement and corrective.

Can any one say he has more than one friend who makes him part of himself? I have one—my brother. I used to say once, “If you want friends, you must breed them;” but experience tells us that this method has only an average success. Acquired friends must be engrafted in youth, or before, while growth is going on. Friendships made later are only impressions; they are not an integral part of us; and, though they may flourish, are liable to be overturned. Stately as they may become, like the elm, they have no tap-root.

I said, the other day at dinner, before one of my brother’s sons, but playfully, “I and my brother are fonder of each other than we are of our own children; but we have known each other longer than we have known them.”

A child to be healthy should not be too clever; he should only have receptive power and humour. How grown-up children even differ in this respect!

IV.

Soon after I was seven I went away to school. My mother had inherited a small income in bank-stock, and was able to go where she liked, which she did freely. It was now Exmouth, now Teignmouth, Dawlish, Budleigh Salterton, Tiverton, and other places, but she never found peace of mind in any. She was throughout a long life in search of the Ideal which she never found, and she handed the passion with the same result down to me. She had a married sister, named Wallinger, at Gainsborough; so she took us there. This sister, a year younger than herself, played the great lady throughout as long a life as my mother’s: her husband, Captain Wallinger, was the son of the Wallinger of Hare Hall in Essex, a county family; he had been in the Dragoon Guards, and at a venture might be called the finest and handsomest man of his time.

I remember the house where we lived at Gainsborough, and that of the Wallingers, so well, that I could describe both to the satisfaction of an artist, together with the surroundings, and the roads leading to them, not forgetting a white wooden bridge that spanned the Trent, and which we crossed in due time in a post-chaise into Yorkshire, where we visited relations, the Rimingtons of Hillsborough, near Sheffield, the beautiful grounds of which are now, perhaps, cut up for buildings by a knife-grinding population. A descendant of this family is Rimington Wilson of Bromhead, a famed grouse manor; another is Lord Ranfurly. I remember even sitting on the left side of the carriage, and looking out of the window at the water as we crossed the Trent.

One does not read faces from an early age, but I have a good recollection of certain features; for instance, I can recall our “cousin” Rimington’s powdered head. But after I was seven, I never forgot a face, and often knew schoolfellows again, despite the changes time had worked, whom I had not met for half a century.

It is not the features one recollects, but the demeanour and general expression. One does not, as a rule, observe the features of others. A man who had seen me every day for a year, said, “Well, I always imagined your eyes were blue, but I now observe that they are hazel.”

In his novel of “Coningsby” Disraeli has introduced the character of Sir Joseph Wallinger, the same Christian name as my uncle’s. There being no other family of that name, I have often felt curious to learn what circumstance led him to its selection. He may have been a visitor at Hare Hall in his younger days. I shall have occasion to revert frequently to the Wallingers.

We made a long visit to the Rimingtons; I retain the recollection of it as one of much enjoyment. I remember the housekeeper promising me a penny if I would sit still for an hour, which I did, and lost my money five minutes after while rolling it about the floor; a suggestive episode. I remember Mr. Rimington giving me sixpence, which I no sooner got than I dropped it into a water-tank beyond recovery, as many have done since who have shares in submarine telegraph companies.

This wealthy family, which must still dwell in the memory of many Sheffielders, had only one son, whose three children may still live, with the exception of Lady Ranfurly; the eldest is Rimington of Bromhead Hall, with the suffix of Wilson.

Bromhead Hall manor must have the best grouse shooting in Yorkshire, except that of Studley Royal. My grandmother’s sister, Mrs. Wilson, was our cousin Rimington’s mother, and was a very stately lady. She lived at Upper Tooting, where I once spent my holidays with her when I was at school in London. One day, after a drive with her, she said, “Remember, you have had a ride in your aunt Wilson’s carriage;” and these are the only words of hers that I have borne in memory.

My grandmother, Mrs. Gordon, had two brothers besides the one already named—William and Henry Clarke, of the City of London. William was one of the Mercers’ Company, and is buried in their ground at Mercers’ Hall. He lived at 72, Gracechurch Street, with his brother, who carried on a business in the stationery trade, and made money. His elder brother was rich, leaving over a hundred thousand pounds, but was never in trade. These brothers died unmarried, and their wealth reached the next generation, the elder attaining the age of ninety-five.

V.

That uncle of mine, William Clarke, whom I never saw but in the back room on the first floor of 72, Gracechurch Street, had a proud temper. His father went into business in King Street, Guildhall, and was cut by the father before him for so doing, which father was a general, and paymaster to Queen Anne’s forces, with a residence in Kew Palace. My mother’s immediate uncle was introduced into his father’s business, that of a whalebone merchant, but quitted it suddenly on being asked by a customer to abate a price; his reply being, “Do you think it was stolen?” He played a part in life which still influences posterity, and will do so more and more, if only through one act of his life, that of giving a presentation to the first Sir Frederick Pollock for St. Paul’s School. Proud as he was, he had a good heart, though a churl; he was careful even to meanness; he was charitable towards those who needed it most, preferring the poor to such of his own kith and kin as were not well off. Indeed he left thousands to charitable institutions, and very little to any of his relations except one, the only nephew who preserved his name, though his intentions were ultimately frustrated by the death of his heir, and that, at a period of his life when he was no longer competent to design a will. But he did a great thing in sending the young Pollock to St. Paul’s School, whence the boy proceeded to Cambridge, and became one of the hundred senior wranglers of his own century. The genius of the Pollock family was ripe for breaking out; the brother of the future Chief Baron, Sir George Pollock, became a distinguished general, and, I think, died a field-marshal, a rank borne for a long time by the Duke of Wellington alone, who could tolerate no rival. Sir Frederick Pollock was facile princeps in his profession, and from him have sprung lawyers of mark for three generations, not the least promising of these, as report goes, the present or third baronet, son of a good, great, and noble-minded sire, lately lost to the world; and it must not be forgotten that the name is great in medicine, that profession which is more enlightening than all the others put together, involving, as it does, an adequate knowledge of every science. It is not to be forgotten, either, that one of the most cultivated men of the day, a true poet and the possessor of a unique literary talent in fantastic caricature, is to be found in Walter Herries Pollock, a younger brother of the present baronet.

Either William Clarke or his brother Henry, who were both governors of Christ’s Hospital, supplied me with my early education by nominating me to that remarkable school. They might have put me also to St. Paul’s, though I might not, certainly, have done them the credit they must have enjoyed from giving a presentation to the young Pollock. What the elder did for my mother was always with a high hand; if he sent her money it was with covert insult, nevertheless circumstances compelled her to be grateful and to say as much in return, and she certainly had the best of it in so doing. I must acquit all who act in like manner of wanting spirit, in accepting needful favours done with an ill grace. None of us feel resentful towards Nature for giving us our carrots, our turnips, our potatoes, covered with dirt!

I was given in charge of a clergyman from Exeter to London, the Rev. Mr. Back, who took his own son to the school at the same time. I remember absolutely nothing of my journey, over 173 miles, except that on the road the coach met a drove of cows, and that I said to myself, “This will be something to tell my mother.” This occurrence has stuck to my memory ineradicably, like a daub of paint. But I remember the date without ever having refreshed it: the 20th of June, 1816.

In those days the journey occupied twenty-four hours; as I started in the morning I must have reached town in the morning, and being destined for Hertford, where the younger boys of my tender age were sent, I must have been conveyed there the same day, but I recollect nothing that happened till in bed at No. 1 ward, under Nurse Merenith.

But the almost regal school and oblong gravelled ground, with buildings in front and on each side, faced with trees, and enclosed in lofty iron railings, I see still; as I saw on being turned loose the next day.

When at home in the enjoyment of freedom, I was riotous; when at school, in the hands of strangers, I was meek. I feared my writing and cyphering master, Mr. Whittle. The usher, who took a dislike to me, never missed an opportunity of striking me a blow. Less I feared my classical master, Dr. Franklin, a tall man of noble deportment, with a florid complexion, and a face that never relaxed during school hours, but was full of play the moment school was over. I recollect well my astonishment at seeing the boys following him in crowds as he marched to his house in his doctor’s gown, while they tugged at his robes, seized on his hands, and made free with him as if he were their father; he enjoying these liberties not less than the boys themselves.

I was at once put into Greek and Latin grammar, with delectuses; and then into Æsop. But while on those amusing fables I sickened of measles; from this I had scarcely convalesced when I was down with scarlet fever. This burnt itself out of my blood, but left me prostrate, and, as I learned, I was sent home to my mother to die; all of which seemed to me very natural.

VI.

Let me here remark, as a physician, that, had not my constitution been faultless, the scarlet fever would have seized on my kidneys or my heart, and have maimed me for life, allowing me, perhaps, twenty years in which to complete my survey of the world. But I passed unscathed through the ordeal, a sort of inoculation that renders one death-proof so long as it is not worth while to die. How did I get home through that long journey? In doing so I anticipated a two days’ instalment of my now near-approaching oblivion.

My recovery was rapid, and, now that I had a brother as my familiar, I was ready to set him a bad example, and to perpetrate whatever mischief our united talents could invent. Our most obvious opportunity was, after we had watched our neighbour at Heavitree sweeping his gravel walks, to throw rubbish on them over the fence, that he might have the labour in which he delighted, over again. We would then retire unseen, and, as we thought, into the security of non-detection, too young to know the value of circumstantial evidence. But the nonsense of children is little worth repeating, except to babes, and I cannot emulate those wonderful geniuses who can even turn metaphysics into fairy tales. I cannot resist giving an account of the finest ride I ever had in my life.

It was at Heavitree, where, near the churchyard and parsonage, there was a large meadow, which I and my brother often crossed on our rambles. One day we encountered a large sow there. I coaxed my way up to it, and leapt on to its back, when it started off at a tremendous gallop, needing neither whip nor spur. My seat kept safe, and I was carried round the meadow at a fabulous pace, no doubt amid gruntings the most terrific. This ride seemed to realize in me a state of existence surpassing all common pleasure; it was a taste of glory.

My leave of funereal absence, which was so soon converted into a holiday, was prolonged without difficulty on the certificate of Mr. Harris, a leading surgeon of Exeter, who was good nature itself; but he must have seen that I was malingering. I must have remained at home nearly a year. By this time I was intelligent enough to understand my mother and her history, and my brother was not behind me in that respect. She instilled into our minds a contempt for the Hake family, some of whom were in trade; but this was most unjust, for their moral tone was high, and they were a credit to the middle class. Their position in life had changed since the generation previous; but family pride had remained to them, and that is sometimes the parent of honour—if not its father, its mother at least. On the other hand, she was never tired of her own family distinction; her father and two of her brothers, the third being still a boy, had in her eyes the attributes of nobility. But all this was in the warmth of her own imagination and love; for no one else thought so. They were respectable and respected—that was all. Those who are really great are not aware of it, for it never occupies their thoughts.

The time came for me to be returned to my owners, the masters of the school—a change that gave me neither pleasure nor pain. I cannot recall the time when I did not feel myself the subject of destiny against which I had no instinct of resistance. So amenable was I to the mastery of circumstances, that all things happened as a matter of course, and I knew no protest. When my illnesses began, I was the subject of diarrhœal disorder, and I was brutally treated. I was put into a room with a tub of cold water to cleanse my miserable self, when the boys, hearing of my wretched plight, broke in upon me with a broom, and did the work of scrubbing me. My feeling was that I must bear it; my consolation was that it would not last. Soon afterwards I was taken to the sick ward and treated with humanity.

VII.

My governor, as was called the one who gave a boy his presentation, made an attempt to have me kept in London, but I was still thought too young, and I reached Hertford again, where I remained for perhaps another year; but after the August holidays, I was established in the Newgate Street school.

The Wallingers had settled at Seaford, in a house on the Crouch, to which a good garden was attached, and in this my uncle plied the spade and grew vegetables. It was a gentlemanly residence, standing high and overlooking the sea.

At Seaford I spent my first holidays, and made a large acquaintance there. It was the property of the Earl of Chichester and Mr. Ellis, and it returned two members to the House of Commons at the dictation of its owners. Mr. Canning once had the honour of representing, I cannot say the borough, but the gentlemen to whom it belonged. During his proprietorship Mr. Ellis was created Lord Seaford; he afterwards succeeded to the family title of Howard de Walden.

A row of houses led from the beach up to the Crouch on the left side; opposite to this was an open field. One of these houses Mr. Ellis kept as his occasional residence. It was entirely in the French style, had a long walled garden, and was very picturesque. The man cook of this gentleman sometimes visited Seaford, and took up his abode in the family house, bringing with him his hounds and horses.

A cousin of mine, Henry Shore, who was also in the school, passed the August holidays at Seaford with our relations. His mother was the youngest of the four Miss Gordons. She married into a very considerable family, the Shores of Maresbrook Park, near Sheffield, an elder branch, of which the younger was Shore of Tapton, who took the name, afterwards, of Nightingale. He had two daughters, Florence and Penelope. The first of these, as is well known, remained single; the second married Sir Harry Verney.

It may be of interest to mention that these ladies took their names from the country of their birth, the one being born at Florence, the other at Athens.

This was my first opportunity of learning my aunt’s character, which was a very singular one. It was necessary to her that she should be the first person in her circle, wherever that lay. At Seaford she found no difficulty. It was then an obscure town with a few good families in it, among them the clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Carnegie and his wife; Mr. Verral, the surgeon, a man of great talent and skill, with his wife and children; and Captain Evans, the agent of the borough owners, whose business it was to see that the taxes were paid up, or to pay them himself, ready for an election, and never to press for rent. Then there were gentlemen farmers in the neighbourhood, a peculiar class—men of capital and education, devoted chiefly to the breeding of sheep. Every one has heard of Southdown mutton; in those days it was in plenty. Ellman of Glynde and Lord Chichester were great among its producers, and it was never killed till it was six years old. No venison equalled it in flavour, and, regrettable to say, it is now unknown in the market; if it still exists in perfection, it may be at Stanmer Park and at Glynde.

The greatest of our aunt’s accomplishments was keeping house—of all else she was ignorant in the extreme; but, by the aid of a small dictionary, she kept the spelling of her letters pretty correct, and by tact she concealed her ignorance of all human knowledge. She expected to be looked up to by her neighbours, and she required this homage of her relations, one and all. I and my cousin had to meet a heavy tax to retain her favour. She would spoil our morning by sending us on errands to her tradesmen, not in one round, but to one at a time, with a written order, which held us on the trudge up to the time of luncheon. She made us her pensionnaires, and she had the firm belief that she honoured and delighted us in thus keeping us employed. Her remaining sister, Mrs. Gwynne, lived at Denton, a village on the Newhaven side of the downs, three miles off. The Rev. William Gwynne, the husband of this lady, was the rector of the parish.

Mrs. Wallinger was very fond of this sister, who was a cautious and sentimental flatterer, and witty beyond all common measure. She was never at a loss for anecdotes of the most amusing kind. Her husband was a stout, showy man, a good talker and a lover of wine, which did not suffice him without a long double nightcap of brandy, gin, or rum. He and Captain Wallinger adapted themselves admirably to each other, and the two families met at each other’s table often.

There was a houseful of children at Denton Rectory, ending in five sons and two daughters, brought up without a view to education, both boys and girls. Notwithstanding this, one of the five sons became an Australian judge, and another entered the Church, though at first an M.D. Mr. Gwynne had a passion for shooting; he cared more for his dogs than for his own cubs. He was, however, a kind man, with a manner that made him appear interested in every one he met with.

VIII.

As I have got so near to the remarkable family of Gwynnes, I must say a few more words about them.

Mr. Gwynne was one of six brothers and two sisters. One brother was a very artful lawyer of imposing demeanour, and was highly respected by all who did not know him.

Another brother, whose position in life—the head of the Legacy Office—was so good that all men spoke well of him, married a not good-looking Jewess. A third brother was also in the law, but the time came when he forewent his licence, perhaps owing to some irregularities in his practice; but he was the most true-hearted of the lot, and had one of the sweetest of daughters. He had a practice still, but it was attended with certain disabilities. Two brothers remained; both attained rank in the East India Company’s service. They were, like the rest, very fine men, and, being soldiers, they were of unimpeachable honour.

Then there were two sisters, who, as is always the case in slack families, were a credit to society. These two ladies were both well settled in life.

My uncle was the most unfortunate of the family; too much for the day was the good thereof, so he allowed his affairs to drift in whatever direction they liked, and that was towards bankruptcy, of course.

He was indulgent towards his family, though perhaps a little ironical towards his wife, who would repeat all that passed concerning him with the greatest glee. After a quarrel, in which he said ill-natured things, she would say, “If that is your opinion of me, Gwynne, why did you marry me?” “My dear Henrietta,” he would reply, “it was for your present beauty and your future expectations.” And she would tell this story with fits of laughter.

These, my uncle and aunt, were frequent guests at Glynde, the residence of a Lord and Lady Hampden, who took much pleasure in Mrs. Gwynne’s society on account of her great wit.

One evening, after dinner, Lady Hampden spoke warmly in favour of one of the farmers, dwelling on his truthfulness and honesty.

“My dear Lady Hampden,” said Mrs. Gwynne, “you do not know that man; I can assure you that, with the exception of my dear husband, he is the greatest liar in the county.”

My uncle, Captain Wallinger, would sometimes drive me over to Denton, and we generally reached the parsonage in time to see a general rush of the boys from the house and premises. They were so dirty, so ill-clad and unkempt, they did not dare to face their uncle. Mr. Gwynne was seldom at home; his time was fully employed in keeping appointments with dog-fanciers, horse-dealers, gunsmiths, and the like. He allowed the parish to take care of itself, or to be cared for by the farmers or his wife; and as he preached extempore, he had no sermons to prepare. He was very fluent, which he accounted for by saying that he looked at the congregation as he would do on a field of cabbage-stalks. I have no doubt that, when preaching to others, he was sincere, and that he preached to himself at the same time. But he was not one of those self-martyrs who annoy themselves through life with religious dogmas. Still, he was not a mere agnostic in canonicals, but true to his belief, though he did not avail himself personally of this advantage.

There was not a tree in the village, except a willow that wept over a mud pond on the roadside by the church, as some sanctified parties do over the worthless dead; yet Denton could be compared to nothing but the backwoods of a colony, so rugged an aspect did the Gwynne boys give to the place. They were the talk of the neighbourhood for miles around. They could, nevertheless, satirize and very cleverly mock those who looked down on their doings. One or two of them, once on a visit at the Wallingers’, followed their aunt, by invitation, up to the drawing-room. She knew them of old, and while they ascended the stairs she turned round suddenly, when she met the sight she expected—one was making hideous faces at her, the other was squaring his fists at her back.

“Dear me! You seem amused,” was her only reproof; but she secretly enjoyed it, for everything was grateful to her that stamped others as her inferiors.

IX.

I was now to enter on a new life. My home was to be a monastic one, which three hundred years before had been the residence of mitred abbots. A king had expelled these from their Gothic dominion; another and a better king had given it to his children, among whom in these latter days were Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and Charles Lamb. And now I was to be there, to tread in their steps, to pace the same ancient cloisters, to catch the same earnest mood in pacing them.

The place was more like a university than a school. Four classical masters to teach us the languages of Athens and Rome; two writing-masters, who themselves wrote like copper-plate, and made us do likewise, besides teaching us figures.

Then we had playgrounds by the acre. One looking on Little Britain through lofty palisades, on which same ground were the residences of the masters and of certain dignitaries, among them that of the treasurer, always a City magnate, and to us inscrutably great. The counting-house was in the grounds, as well as the head and junior master’s houses, together with the office and house of the steward. With all these buildings, the playground was not crowded; and apart, in the large open space on the north side, stood the grammar school.

Now that the institution is to be removed, the character of the boys will change, and all its traditions end. The cloisters and garden within their quadrangle, with the monkish dormitories and other old places, have hitherto shaped the minds of the boys, and this influence will cease, and the feeling will vanish that the school owed its foundation to a king. It was in this feeling that the pride of the boys lay; it indulged them in the belief that they were superior to all other boys. They thought of their royal founder almost as if they were descended from him, and honoured their very dress from its similarity to that which the youthful sovereign himself wore.

In my time the cloisters were Gothic, as originally built; half a century ago they were reconstructed into Saxon or some other contemptible pattern, which has perpetuated the architect’s ignorance, insensibility, and bad taste up to the present. But it signifies little; all will be swept away and covered with shops, where the name of Homer will nevermore be heard. But Parliament, in sympathy with open spaces, may grant the necessary million. Not they!

But nothing was intended to last for ever, if we except—what?

The genius of the place affected me very soon, I felt myself growing into monkhood. I preferred the sombre cloister to the playground, and for that reason I often had to be alone there, not in steady thought, but under involuntary emotions which ran through me like an underground current. Then, the suggestiveness of some of the inscriptions on the walls, thus, “Here lies a benefactor, let no one move his bones.” This I used to regard as a very pathetic appeal, as if the bones were very comfortable where they were yet in constant dread of being disturbed. Had nothing been said they might have been safer from the antiquarian.

But I should mention that the first ordeal I was put through was to fight. Every boy knew whom he could fight; this was required of him for the benefit of his public. A boy named Yardley was selected to test my pugnacious powers. We were of a height, both tall, and of about the same age. We were taken into a private yard. Of fighting I knew nothing; but I had a quick eye and was quick of limb. More than this I had dramatic imagination, and to this it was that I owed my victory. I pictured to myself a tiger springing at his prey, and with this example I leapt at my antagonist from some distance, and my fists covered his face and eyes almost before he knew that I was upon him. He had not a moment’s chance, he floundered each time that I was upon him.

This encounter was never forgotten by the boys, and I was never asked to fight again.

X.

Theodore Watts, as he told me twenty years ago, holds the opinion that Shakespeare wrote private poetry in a separate book while composing his dramas, and that he gave such portions of it as he could make fit, to certain of his characters. He thought, if I remember aright, that the soliloquy and the dagger-scene were morsels of this sort. It certainly must strike one that “the law’s delay” and “the insolence of office” were not prominent grievances in Hamlet’s career.

When I was about eleven years old I became owner of Rowe’s “Shakespeare,” which has in it a wonderful little life of the bard. He quotes the marvellous passage beginning with—

“She never told her love,”

and, as far as memory serves me, it was to declare that poetry of such exquisite beauty was not to be found in any other writer, ancient or modern. I have since often thought that nothing in the context fairly led up to an idea of such magnitude, and that the passage was one of Shakespeare’s interpolations. Be this as it may, it had an elevating effect on me which has lasted me for life; it gave me a sense of perfect excellence. It may appear ridiculous to say that it not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but that it depressed me, in turn, with the feeling that I could never equal it, however long I might live!

No other writer at that time affected me similarly, except Virgil, when I came to that passage which depicts the breaking of the waves on the prow of the vessel and the receding of the cities and lands (terræque urbesque recedunt). After we reached our beds at night the boys were wont to “coze” in literary cliques round some favourite tale-teller, who would relate marvellous stories of knights and ladies, with much about genii, fairies, and witches. Though I never heard anything to that effect, I have always thought that Coleridge must have lent himself to such delights for the pleasure of others, and that “Christabel” was unconsciously an outcome of these romantic entertainments.

Many of the boys were great readers of forbidden story, and smuggled books into the school, the penalty of which, on being found out, was a flogging. The books in question were romances of enchanted castles; of beautiful young women, the prisoners of tyrants; of subterraneous passages and solitary cells. I would give much to possess a circulating library of that day. Such a one I found at Seaford, and devoured whenever my holidays came round. The novel, as reintroduced by Plumer Ward, and imitated greedily by Bulwer and Disraeli, was then unknown.

“Tremaine,” like all new conceptions which are accordant with the average mentality of great Britons, became epidemic, and floated over the reading world as a new sensation. It was succeeded by “De Vere,” while Walter Scott was winding up the business of romance. The success of these works started a fresh “novel” epoch, now, too, worn out, only lingering till such successors as Walter Besant and Louis Stevenson are ready to sweep them from view. This is so true that it is almost a disgrace to write a novel.

It must not, however, be forgotten that Dickens fired a bomb into library shelves, and that Thackeray gave us his own character in novelistic shape.

All great things appear in epochs, which hitherto have had a limited duration. Witness the rise and fall of sculpture in Greece, of epic and drama there; of painting in Italy, beginning with Titian and Raphael as late as the sixteenth century; of music in Germany and Italy, now on the point of extinction. Poetry, too, has had its day from Shakespeare to Coleridge, and is now dead. The present is the epoch of invention, and that will die out.

Music has never been of the highest quality in a free country. The northern nations, England, America, the great Colonies, produce no musical genius; Italy and Germany have ceased to do so since they came into the enjoyment of freedom.

Science itself, now rampant, is but of an epoch. But, amid all this, religion is enduring.

Some will say, We now have the Press; that will maintain and resuscitate all that is good or beautiful! Not so; it is but of an epoch, and is already blasé. It does not lead; it only “follows the leader,” as in a game played by a child.

Nothing that has been and has died out, will be revived. The skeleton, an osseous Apollo, will remain, and that is all.

These dry bones cannot live, O son of man!

XI.

The masters of the school in my time were a certain set of reverends named Rice, Lynam, and the Trollopes. I was more or less under all, none of whom were in sympathy with boys. Rice was called “cuddy,” a word in our vocabulary signifying “severe.” He beat the boys with a fury worthy of a bastard son of the Eumenides.

To see that man of the fist, rod, and cane spending his force on a little boy, now leaving the autograph of his four fingers, in red and white, on the infant’s cheek, sending him reeling half-way up the room, while the robes he wore were flung fluttering into the air, was a sight worthy of the demons, and would have made for them a matinée.

Lynam was a quiet man. He heard the boys their lessons, but never explained them. Under him I had the Greek and Latin grammars so well by heart, that, give me a week to look them over, I could repeat them now! We had to say them, year after year, but there was no teaching. When he got rid of a class he was at once at his own work, and that probably was “The Lives of the Roman Emperors,” published after his decease.

Trollope was of the neuter gender. He must have been paralyzed at some period of his life, for his articulation was jumbled; he rolled one word into another before it took sound, and he dragged a leg after him as a Scotchman would a haddock. But his father, the doctor, carried the divinity, in which he had graduated, about his person. His shovel hat, his robes, all bespoke that heavenly dandy, a dignitary of the Church Catholic and Apostolic. He looked worthy the order of the black silk pinafore.

In those days, and long after, an English clergyman dressed like a gentleman; he now wears a black livery, and he looks like a bishop’s footman, in mourning, with his master, for some dead archbishop.

The school was truly classical and nothing else, except for the teaching of “spongy” Reynolds and “hacky” Clark—the writing and arithmetic masters—the affix of this first being due to a nose which was amorphous and appeared to belong to the class Porifera, or sponges, while that of the second was due to a guttural crackling sound of the man’s voice.

To do Reynolds justice, he was not impatient, and he was painstaking with his pupils. To facilitate his arithmetical instruction he wrote two lines of verse which were naïve—they ran thus:—

“Profit and loss accounts are plain;

We debit loss and credit gain.”

But his supreme merit was that of substituting geographical for moral texts in our copy-books. One I remember, for small text, was, “Batavia in Java, capital of the Dutch settlements.”

Reynolds was somebody. He married his daughter to Thomas Hood, and his son was, I believe, the Reynolds of Sunday newspaper fame.

With this exception the school was purely classical; nothing whatever was taught but Greek and Latin. History, geography, English, and its grammar, were unheard of. We had to teach ourselves to read and spell, and none will dispute that the prayers before scanty meat were beautifully given by the Grecians, those head boys who proceeded to the University. Grammar we learnt only from the Greek and Latin, but it was sufficient; composition we derived from the same source, whence, perhaps, our habit of inversion, so offensive nowadays to poetic dribblers, who doat on Wordsworthy prose.

The steward of the school, who was ruler, a sort of president of the growing-up republic, named Higgins, was an oldish man, grey-pated, with a youthful slim figure, fair skin, and a straight disciplinarian mouth. He presided at meal-time, seated at a desk on the large daïs at the upper end of the hall, like a modern Pontius Pilate. There he was, to receive criminals led to judgment by the monitors, and to flog them without mercy. He was greatly feared and, of course, greatly hated. He reminded one of a snake in his movements, which were rapid and flexible. No complaint was made to him of the boys, by beadles or monitors, but what was believed by him; he required no proof.

It was a sort of Russian system; every official, every monitor, was a spy, and the steward was the willing knout, a creature emotional as a reptile, servile as a dog, and as a cat cruel.

Nevertheless, there was one extenuating circumstance—he had a pretty daughter, with whom a friend and school-fellow of mine was in love.

I have remarked on the strictly classical character of the school; but, after all, if one learns only one good thing well, one wishes to know others, and can teach one’s self. Then, classics have another advantage: Horace alone can make a gentleman. But what is more remarkable than all the other omissions in the school is, that the boys were never, individually, taught a word of religion. When it is remembered what a powerful influence the wealth of the clergy exercises, one must pause in wonder over the fact of religious teaching being a thing unknown. Religious machinery was everywhere visible. There was a grand organ in the gallery at one end of the dining-hall, over the doorway; there was an organist, Mr. Glen, to accompany the hymn or psalm during the daily services before meat, consisting of a bit of Bible and a thanksgiving, the Grecians being pro-chaplains. There was a form of prayer read by any boy in the wards who was handy at bed-time, and a chapter selected at his option; but no teaching of the Scriptures or of the Church dogmas, if we may except the services at Christ Church on Sundays. There may have been such an appointment as chaplain to Christ’s Hospital; if so it was strictly honorary, and kept a profound secret.

By the way, there was some religious improvement to be derived personally through the committing of a misdemeanour, the punishment for which was the getting a chapter in the Bible by heart. I profited by this myself in a curious manner, for, being a very sensitive boy, I made a bad reader, so, when called upon to perform the evening service, I always read the chapter which I knew by heart, and that so impressively and faultlessly, that I came off with much éclat.

I can still repeat that chapter, but no other.

XII.

Perhaps ten thousand boys have passed through the school since I bade farewell to its cloisters, but I am unable to say whether the system of non-religious teaching has been changed. Our reverend classical masters manifested no religious tastes; it may be due to their not having imbibed any when they were pupils like ourselves in the school. I do recollect Mr. Lynam, of whom I was a pupil for several years, correcting my pronunciation of Jōb, which I called Jŏb. If we were reading something from Scripture before him, I have wholly forgotten it; the occasion must have been so rare.

What the effect of religious ignorance may have been on so many before and after me, it is difficult to surmise. I have no recollection of any boy, in after-life, becoming a bishop or a millionaire. Nature was open to them; she is constantly carrying on revelations, and all must begin with these before entertaining Divine ones. The greater our acquaintance is with natural teaching, the better we are able to judge of religious. A well-educated scientific man would decide a religious question in five minutes which would take five hundred years for all the doctors of divinity to get to the bottom of. A large knowledge of Nature is requisite even to find a meaning for any inspired passage, and it is doubtful if any divine ever had training enough to understand fully any one important passage of Holy Writ. Those men who are recognized as having undergone inspiration were never able to state lucidly what they heard, but recorded it in such shape as must for ever puzzle the brains of the priesthood. If such men as the Herschels had been made the vehicles of a revelation, it would have been expressed to the world in such tangible language as shuts out all dispute.

The advantages of knowledge derived from observations made within the sacred precincts of Nature is that there is always a revelation going on, made by a silent, invisible power that we can question without offence. But the custodes of the holy archives greatly disapprove of such proceeding. The Catholic forbids the perusal of Scripture; the Protestant the perusal of Nature; and that reverend gorilla, the agnostic, inculcates the wisdom of studying all things and learning nothing. Surely he is the missing link!

I admire the clergy as gentlemen and men of education, but the fault is that they proceed from the university to the Church, and drop science and literature out of their daily life, returning to ignorance at the same pace as they quitted it as children. The cultivated class find it impossible to converse with them on any profitable grounds.

XIII.

My mother’s youngest brother was an officer of artillery, and, as adjutant, was always stationed at Woolwich. He had married the daughter of a Mr. Samuel Enderby, an oil-merchant, and a man of great wealth, living on Croom’s Hill, Greenwich, when first I knew his family, and afterwards moving to a mansion on Blackheath.

When a day’s holiday occurred, I and my cousin walked down to my uncle’s house, taking that of the Enderbys on our way. We were paid our travelling expenses both ways, though we never rode, but kept the money in our pockets, together with the heavy tips that we got at both houses.

My uncle did not attain the rank of captain, even, till middle age. Promotion in the artillery, going by rotation, was slow, and so long remained, owing to the Duke of Wellington’s narrow ideas, and brevet at last had to be substituted for real rank.

My uncle, however, died a lieutenant-general, with a good-service pension, followed by the command of a brigade.

My son, Alfred Egmont Hake, has given a true and pleasing account of my uncle, Henry William Gordon, and his family relations, derived from information supplied by me for his “Story of Chinese Gordon,” who was one of my uncle’s younger sons.

I had a strong love for this uncle, and he reciprocated the feeling; nay, more, he always overlooked my faults, which were not a few in the eyes of those relatives who were incompetent to judge me, and expected me to play the commonplace game in life for which, unfortunately, I was wholly unqualified.

Charles Gordon’s education was military only. His rapidity of perception and combination, so conspicuous in his command of an army, were left otherwise barren; he was, therefore, unable to grasp the great truths that surround our actual being, sacrificing their beauty and enjoyment to a meaningless superstition. He had even humour of the most delicate kind, without which no man of genius is ever born, for it is the crowning faculty of man’s intellect.

As possessing a judgment myself which reaches no conclusion before passing through an unprejudiced analysis of all things great and small concerning it, I have never been able to conceive a soldier’s duties accordant with a Christian’s, or to realize such an idea as that of a man leading one army of paid assassins against another, with a love of Christ, or of his Maker, or of mankind in his heart. The fact that men offer their own lives only shows how earnest they are in the profession of shedding blood. Those of the Mahometan class might infuse religion into slaughter; but not one of the disciples or evangelists could have done it, except one.

“Rich must a hero be in superstition

Who deems ’twas God who gave him his commission.”

Throughout his childhood and youth, Charles Gordon associated with soldiers. His family were of the military class; he imbibed the love of their profession. He had an acute mind, with faculties which, if trained, would have served for a philosopher; but he had not the originality that leads a man to educate himself, and to cast all falsehood out of his nature. A slight knowledge of physiology would have sufficed to root out most of his theological ideas; but that slight knowledge, even, he did not possess; and what he most wished might be, he believed. His name is great, but his reputation will rest finally on his military genius and his many virtues.

But to return to my subject. A day’s holiday at Woolwich was a pleasant pastime. It sometimes included a visit to Greenwich Hospital, sometimes a review, and more than once a sight of Richardson’s Theatre at Greenwich Fair-time, when all that is tragical in the world was enacted with all the rant that tradition had handed down from stage to stage.

XIV.

I passed my last remaining holidays with my mother at Exeter, the old dean and chapter town of the west. Exeter continues in my mind to be a mediæval city, its inhabitants a people of the middle ages. To enjoy the height of respectability it was necessary to have a visiting connection with the bishop of the diocese, and this secured the unenviable acquaintance of the dean, the Mr. Dean, the divinest of doctors, and the whole chapter, which, judging from its antecedents, owed its importance to and was in itself a mere Chapter of Accidents. To think how men, ignorant of all things save privilege and dogma, can testimonialize their fellow-citizens by means of a nodding smile! To be admitted into the close to eat mutton and red-currant jelly with the canons of the cathedral was a fortune of social rank, sufficiently ample to confer honour on the dozens who knew them. How strange is all this to minds of any magnitude! A string of minor infallibles, each the owner of dearly beloved brethren whom he condescends to despise, ruling over the pauper intellects and imaginations of a city!

Yet all these idolaters are great economists; instead of earning their own respectability, they seek to get it dirt-cheap by having it conferred upon them.

I found my mother in better circumstances; her younger uncle had died, and as he could not take his hoard away with him, he left it to be divided among his near relations, but the only one, the Rev. Robert Clarke, who bore his name, came best off; and he deserved it, not only for his own sake, but because he was already better off than most of those who profited under the will! This cousin was the kindest, the most clerically gentlemanlike of the cloth he favoured. The name of Clarke is on record at Hexham as that of liberal Church patrons.

But mediæval cities and people of the middle ages, still playing out the ancestral game, have their theatres. To that of Exeter I went to see Yates perform the part of Falstaff. I was deeply bitten by the fun, and the next day performed much of the character myself before my mother, and kept her in a continual roar of laughter.

The eminent surgeon, Mr. Shelden, was, in times preceding, a practitioner in the place; as such he was a friend of the Gordons. He left a relict, whom my mother often took me to see—a charming lady, who knew how to make herself delightful to a child. Mr. Shelden was Professor of Anatomy at the College of Surgeons in London. In the museum of the college there is a mummy which he made, and which he called “Madame Mahogany.” It excited much curiosity at one time. On visiting the museum, I readily found it on the left of the entrance door. There is a portrait of this eminent man in the Devon and Exeter Hospital, painted by the artist from memory after Shelden’s death, and it was said to be an excellent likeness by those who remembered him.

It may interest some to know that my grandfather resided for many years at Bowhill House in St. Thomas’s. The place was purchased over his head, and made the county lunatic asylum, which purpose I believe it serves to this day.

With this place were associated some of my mother’s happiest as well as most miserable recollections. The names of those who were known to her family are still rife in the old red sandstone country, and have been distinguished in the new generation. I must mention that of Mr. Northmore, of Cleve, who was a generous-minded reformer in days when to be a radical was worse than to lead a life of blasphemy. He was the first scientific man who succeeded in condensing a gas. The one he operated on was chlorine; his results were published in Nicholson’s Journal in the year 1809. So little interest attached to great discoveries in those days that his researches were forgotten, and Faraday long afterwards succeeded in the same work. He had never heard the name of Northmore, and published his own results as the first obtained in that direction. This I learned from Mr. Northmore himself, when I was grown up. That philosopher did not even claim his discovery when the scientific world was ringing with Faraday’s praise.

Among other friends of her youth my mother long remembered with affection her school-fellow, Ann Gifford, the daughter of a grocer in Exeter. The name was afterwards known through the brother becoming master of the rolls and obtaining a peerage as counsel for great George our king, during the prosecution of the queen.

In those days counsel were at their boldest, when Denman, who had to examine the Duke of York, could say to him in open court, “Stand forth, thou slanderer!”

I have heard say that one of the most amusing transfigurations ever produced, without a miracle, was that of Mr. Wareman Gifford, from a grocer behind the counter to the brother of a lord.

XV.

At school was laid the foundation of two lifelong friendships; one with Henry Edmondes, who afterwards was a barrister, and became deputy clerk of the peace for Middlesex during Sergeant Adams’s chairmanship—another with Hugh Worthington Statham, who proceeded to medicine, finally occupying the mastership of the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries. Edmondes was of short stature, with an intellect the better of which I have never known. He had all the humour of Charles Dickens, and, had he lived, might have proved a closer rival than Thackeray to that inimitable writer. He had advantages that Dickens never acquired; he was a scholar, well read in English, French, and Italian, as well as in classics, and was free from that silly sentimentalism which at times placed Dickens below par.

Statham, like myself, is still alive: never losing sight of the literæ humaniores, he threw his excellent abilities into the healing art, and touched the first place in his branch of the profession. Next to my brother, he is my oldest friend. Our first meeting must have been seventy years ago.[1]

I have not yet alluded to the King’s Ward, a sort of aristocratic section of the school, in which the boys were trained for the navy. Candidates were received into it at their own option. They formed a society apart, not associating with the other boys; consequently their deeds were traditional, relating to how in times past they had been in revolt, defying their masters, escaping from the school, and, after being retaken, how they were locked up in the prison cell and tamed on bread and water.

Their studies were under a mathematical master, apart from the other boys. They were distinguished by a metal badge with some emblem upon it, which was worn by them on the left shoulder.

They were always considered a very “gallous” set, which, in the school vocabulary, signified “daring.”

I preferred my solitary walks in the cloisters to joining in the games, and this secluded habit sometimes raised a faction against me, and I had only the choice left me of yielding or of being mobbed. There was a game in which some hundreds held on to each other by the tails of their coats, while the leader determined the direction they should take by going himself the way which pleased him. I was always a candidate for the leadership, and my plan was to drag the long chain of boys through segments of circles to left and back to right; the effect of this was, by a swift and sudden turn, to throw half the boys off their legs to the ground, the hinder ones coming in for the fall as the impetus given by the foremost reached them.

It appears remarkable, at first thought, that with so many hundreds one should learn the name of every boy; but it is nothing compared with what is achieved by study. Some forty years ago I had a conversation with Professor Henslow, of Cambridge, on the subject of getting names by heart. At that time there were sixty thousand plants classified. He said that a botanist would by degrees fix all these names on his memory without any effort.

A memorable group among us was that of three brothers named Leighton, a family of such beauty as can only be rarely seen. Two of them were Grecians. The eldest, James Leighton, was tall, with dark hair and complexion, and of a graceful figure. He proceeded to the university early in my time, so I saw little of him, but that little has lasted my memory for seventy years. David Leighton came next; he was of a fair complexion, with large grey eyes, with nose and lips exquisitely curved, and a countenance expressive of talent and good nature.

The Grecians might reach their twentieth year at the school, and, as men, had the advantage of their dress being made of fine cloth; it was otherwise the same as that of the boys, except that they had broad red girdles, stamped like those of the monitors. In such dress the Grecians had a truly noble appearance; one might think of them as high officials at the court of Edward the Sixth.

The youngest of the group was Frederick Leighton, my junior, and my particular friend. He had dark and refined features, with curling hair.

I met David Leighton again at Baden Baden in 1832, among the fashionable crowds from all nations. He was chaplain to the English residents of the place. I have heard nothing more of this fine family from that time to this.

I asked him what he had done at Cambridge. His answer was, that he had disgusted his whole family.

Another contemporary, one who made some figure in professional life, was Lawson Cape. As a boy he was the greediest of readers. His father brought him historical works week after week, and he devoured their contents as fast as they reached him. He was short, fair-haired, freckled, quick at reading, quick at learning, quick at looking about him. It was difficult to follow his movements, so excited were they on all occasions. I met him again at Florence, during the carnival. I saw him abroad once more at Baden Baden, after which he settled in London as an accoucheur, when I came across him for the last time.

He was related to Sir Charles Locock, and through his influence acquired an obstetric practice in town.

[1] He died at the beginning of 1892, after entering his eighty-fourth year. He was two months my senior. I have later on made a distinction between early friends and later ones, dwelling on the fact that what happens to us before we have attained our full growth is nourished as a part of us, and so becomes ingrained in our natures.

XVI.

Dr. Basham, physician to the Westminster Hospital, was another of us. I lost sight of him between the years 1824 and 1860, when I met him in the laboratory, and knew him again at a glance.

Sir Henry Cole, whom I had not seen for five and thirty years, another boy, came across me at one of Lady Ripon’s receptions; I recognized him too, though he was disguised in the broad red ribbon and star of the Bath.

These two men reached notoriety, each in his calling, Basham as a physician, Cole as an official in the office of Records. But they and their like were of the vanishing class, their names are disappearing; they filled only a little space in their own generation, which they accompany to oblivion.

My school days are a memory that I have never refreshed by visiting those ancient halls and cloisters; once only since I left them have I passed through from Newgate Street to Little Britain. I found all there was doubly dead. It was dead in its own past, and dead in mine. I saw a moral blank in which love was absent, absent as it had ever been between the pupil and his masters. During my holidays at Seaford, I experienced thirty days at a time of love and kindness; the recollection of this drew me to it again. I was seldom at Brighton without going over there with my brother and his wife, or with his children and mine, to look once more at the house on the Crouch, and to walk over that beautiful south down that ascends from the beach and the sea to Cuckmere.

When we no longer knew one living creature there, we still found pleasure in asking the oldest inhabitants if they remembered Captain and Mrs. Wallinger.

When I quitted school and gave up the mediæval costume, I was put into fine clothes, and spent a fortnight at Woolwich, taken about from sight to sight by my uncle, dining often at the artillery mess, taking a spare bed at the quarters of Colonel Wylde, and waited on by his man, when I learned, and have since often found, that a soldier makes the best valet in the world. Whatever familiarity you may show him, he never becomes familiar with you; he is always respectful. No one knew this better than my famed cousin, Charles Gordon. He, when at home, would talk to the soldier-footman of certain members of his mother’s family, who were expected as guests, and, calling them good-naturedly by opprobrious names, would ask if they were in the house; but the servant, however hard driven by the persistency of his young master, would to the last pretend not to understand to whom he made allusion.

I did not like that visit to Woolwich: my uncle was very severe, though only at the moment, on the faults of young people, though a kinder heart could not well be. The evenings were formal; we sat round a table, every one in some manner occupied. Unused to fine furniture I kicked the leg of the table. The uncle showed anger on his expressive face, while he asked, “Can’t you reconnoitre?” I was given an elegant copy of “Gil Bias” to read; unused to such editions, unused to reading in the presence of fine people, I damped my finger at my lips. “Give me the book,” shouted the good uncle; “I’ll show you how to turn over the leaves!” In this he performed the feat as any other gentleman would do, and handed the book back.

This and similar incidents so troubled me that I contemplated taking flight; but my patience under trial prevailed, and I bided the time for a visit to Seaford, which soon came about.

This was in 1824, when Charles Gordon was not yet a denizen of our world.

Colonel Wylde, my host at the barracks when the family house on the common was full, played a part which relieved him from the humdrum of military life. He spoke Spanish fluently, and, at a time when such a man was much wanted by the Government, he was employed on a mission to Spain; and afterwards, when Prince Albert became one of our royal family, he was appointed as his equerry, and became a great favourite at court. He was my uncle’s closest friend; but on the command of a brigade falling vacant, Wylde, then general, was given the appointment, though one below my uncle in seniority, on whom by custom it should have devolved, and this one incident cooled the warm friendship of a long life.

Owing to his urbanity, his knowledge of life, and his pleasant face, Wylde became a great favourite with the royal family, the queen, the princes and princesses, all of whom loaded him with presents. Prince Albert pressed on him a baronetcy, which, from a mistake in the bestowal of his early affections, he could not accept. It was an arbitrary act of the Duke of Cambridge to break through the rules of the service and give him a brigade which was due to another, to a friend; perhaps he should have refused, but doubtless the pressure on all sides was heavy, not to mention that Wylde had a family which would have been large if divided between two.

What made this brigade business more aggravating was, that the duke had contracted an intimacy with my uncle and his family, and was really his friend.

XVII.

Leaving Woolwich, I went on a long visit to my relations, the Wallingers, with whom I had passed so many happy holidays while at school.

Seaford occupies a line on the southern coast most charming to the eye, but its beauty has been its ruin. A picturesque expanse of back water extends from its magnificent cliff to Newhaven, and the time came when its decaying vegetation generated typhoid fever, which destroyed the reputation of the place, while it decimated the inhabitants.

Another calamity followed: a high spring tide, not so many years ago, washed away the houses in front of the sea, and overflowed the streets. Repairs have been made, new structures raised, private houses, hotels, and a convalescent hospital; but it is no longer the Seaford it was of old, in its rotten-borough days.

I was once more there with my kind aunt, and an uncle whose brow smiled while it frowned. There were two branches of Wallinger; my uncle was a cadet of the elder branch, then represented by the Rev. John Wallinger, the disinherited heir of Hare Hall, who went from the law to the Church for the love of Calvin.

The younger branch was represented more to one’s taste by the Rev. William Wallinger and his brother Arnold, a sergeant-at-law. John was too busily engaged on Calvin’s affairs to visit Seaford at this time, but William was in a manner settled there with his pupil, the young Lord Pelham. Other members of the family came there to make up a seaside season; among them the wife and daughters of William Roberts, who was Teller of the Exchequer, an office held by his father before him, both renowned epicures, who held to the axiom that a good cook was three hundred and sixty-five blessings a year. Mrs. Roberts was a sister of the Rev. John, and brought with her a string of seven daughters, all less beautiful than their mother. Then the family of Mr. Nussey, the king’s apothecary, added to the list of visitors, he being an old friend of all.

Mrs. Nussey was a very lovely woman. She was the daughter of Mr. Walker, her husband’s predecessor at court; in fact, the Walkers and Nusseys, in turn or together, had been apothecaries to the royal family time out of mind, and it was said that the late Mr. Walker was the only man who knew how to reach the vein in George the Fourth’s fat arm.

Nussey, whom I knew very intimately later in life, told me that the king confided to him all his secrets, and that the knowledge, if written down, would set all England in a blaze. He was with the royal patient to the last, the king never letting go of his hand for twenty-four hours, which gave him an agony of cramp all but insupportable.

Nussey was a man deservedly esteemed; he had that gracious manner which comes often from enjoying the confidence of the great.

I must say a few words more about William Wallinger. Any attempt to describe his countenance would be made utterly in vain; it is in this that the artist may assert his superiority to the writer. No one ever saw him without surprise to find himself in company with so much grace and manly beauty. He was too gentlemanly for a king, too quietly self-possessed for a noble, too impressive in manner for any other human being but himself. He inherited a good fortune; he might have had the pick of the country in preferment had he so chosen, but he refused profitable livings, among others that of Stanmer, a village in Lord Chichester’s park, preferring modest pulpits and independence. He was much thought of by the people at Hastings for a period. There Lord Chichester had a chapel built for him; but he often changed his residence and varied his duties. He was attached to Tunbridge Wells, where his sister, Mrs. Jederé Fisher, resided at her seat called Great Culverden. She was the widow of Mr. Jederé Fisher, of Ealing Park, Middlesex, a charming residence, sold later on to Sir William Lawrence, the eminent surgeon, now cut up into streets and villas.

Her son is a well-known Kentish magnate.

XVIII.

As a rudiment of that vaulting ambition and its consequences which grew up in me by degrees, and has, I lament to say, remained with me, though now grown prudent and steady, the better aims of which I have striven to fulfil, I may mention here, in taking leave of my boyhood, that there was a bath at Islington called Peerless Pool, to which in summer the boys of the school were sent to bathe. It was a large mass of water, oblong in shape, with a wide promenade. There we would spend a whole afternoon, sent there by the authorities when the half-holiday was at hand. There, to excite the wonder and applause of the other boys, I punished myself by taking the longest run to the water’s edge that was obtainable within the enclosure, and leaping somersault fashion into the air to a great height, and reaching the water in a seated posture. In doing this I entailed on myself a punishment equal to being flogged. Being somewhat sheepish at the age of fifteen, I did not stand very high in the estimation of my uncle, General Gordon, while staying with him at Woolwich, when one day he took me down to the Thames to bathe. There was a platform, probably for the soldiers to jump from into the water; this afforded me a long run, and I resolved on performing my feat. My uncle was perfectly amazed at it, and often alluded to it with surprise in later years.

After this display of my pluck, he was much in favour of my going into the army.

By this time my mother was gravitating southwards with my sister and brother, that she might be near her sisters; she accordingly took a house at Lewes, where there was a good grammar school suitable for my brother.

The process of intellectual growth in all probability differs in individuals; what it was in me I am able to state. It is my opinion that with the same organism as I now have, with which I can grasp and master any subject, not much matter what it is, I should have made but a poor show of intellect but for certain elements of a moral nature. The first of these is a sense of one’s own nothingness without knowledge; the second is a desire for even more knowledge than most persons possess.

All this is emotional, but it supplies an impulse to intellectual motor power, which, when traced out, proves to be of a very simple kind, consisting of impressions derived from without being reiterated within, and inspected over and over again. Take several brains of the same capacity: one man has not the impulse of ambition or desire. Say to him—

“All the world’s a stage.” His ear takes the words to his brain, and they are lodged there; he can repeat them from memory of sound. Say to another—

“All the world’s a stage.” He will be impressed, first by words, on receiving them, and will repeat them mentally, and in doing so will see that he is reiterating a pre-existing mental impression; one which at some time he had derived through the eye; he will see a stage with men and women on it—the players. He will see these making “their exits and their entrances,” and by reiterated observation of old impressions, which run parallel, he will observe men and women actively employed in the world. By a like process of observing old impressions mentally, he will not only witness the phenomena of human life, but will undergo the appropriate emotion even before the phenomena are realized, the emotion leading up to the idea.

Now all this requires previous knowledge, without which no extended train of thought can be effectively carried out; whence it is that those who are ambitious and have a desire for knowledge, will acquire it at every expense, both of time and labour, and will so become accustomed to keeping their native intellect in play.

XIX.

I had taken leave of boyhood and entered on the period of youth—a time when neither children nor men were found to be suitable companions. The three epochs in our lives are pretty equally divided: that of childhood, owing to the feebler action of the forces, appears to pass away very slowly, and ending at our fifteenth or sixteenth year seems interminable; longer than the time it takes to advance from forty to seventy years of age, and quite as long as to go onwards from fifteen to forty years.

Of course there is an earlier and a later youth, and it is to the first that the preceding remark chiefly applies, the period when ignorance is not strange.

At this early time we do not recognize nature otherwise than as being ourselves, or in any way apart from us; it is later that the line of demarkation draws itself between the inner and outer world; and it is then that time seems to move.

I suppose it was owing to a species of honesty, but I found, very tryingly, at this time, that my self-assurance and my knowledge were in strict proportion; I was not, in fact, presumptuous; but of great modesty.

I must put to my credit a habit of not allowing a moment of ignorance to pass by without rectifying it by questioning either books or persons, and I often learnt more from others than from books. To this day I never come across a man possessed of special experience without questioning him as if I were engaged in a research. Not long ago, a gentleman who had been twenty years in the Fiji Islands, said of me that I had extracted more information from him respecting the people and country in an hour’s conversation, than had been elicited from him by all his friends put together, during the year he had spent in London as commissioner from the islands during the Colonial Exhibition.

I trace the increase of this habit upon me to the practice of minute diagnosis which belongs to the physician. By its means, at all events, I accumulated corners of knowledge, which few appeared to possess besides myself.

In a country town there is often a man or two of eminent attainments who is buried alive. It was so at Lewes, a feeble, antiquated presentiment of civilization in itself; but it contained Gideon Mantell, the great geologist, who, searching Tilgate Forest, became the discoverer of the Iguanodon, which is now visible in the South Kensington Museum.

In those days all county towns were alike in essentials, and Lewes was not a bad typical example. With a small population it returned two members to Parliament, both baronets, both wearing pigtails, both having parks within a drive. There was Sir John Shelley of Maresfield Park, and Sir George Shiffner of Combe Place. Great men were greater in those days than they are now, or will ever be again. Sir John looked a great man. Sir George looked only an important one.

Sir John was tall, slim, upright, with the look of a diagnostic, in whose presence a horse resolved itself into its elements. The whip in his hand told the man. When either of these worthies appeared in the quiet streets—and quiet they were, except on market days—the shop-keepers were seen standing at their doors as if they were their own customers. The apparition of Sir John or Sir George was like that of Hermes, when, formerly, the god visited Athens.

Like everything else that is worn out, Lewes was discontented with its lot. Not many miles south was Seaford, a rotten borough, and, in the distance, Old Sarum, and this was more than the less prosperous inhabitants of Lewes could endure. They must have reform, and it came.

Like many individuals, they did not know when they were well off.

After having two baronets at their command, both with pigtails, they are no longer a parliamentary borough; even their ancient grammar school is turned into a commercial Academy, no longer a Plato at its head.

What need is there of eternal retribution when men are everlastingly punishing themselves?

XX.

Like most other county towns Lewes had many mansions. These in olden times were the winter residences of nobles and squires, and, at their death, of their relicts, for the women always survived the men. It was considered in those days that the taste of port wine struck the highest note on the palatal gamut, and that gout, though painful, was a distinction. The best lives seldom exceeded sixty-nine. The vesical and gall compartments at that age, generally, had completed their mineralogical collection, and death was not pleasant.

Many of these mansions had the charms of not having been decorated or repaired for a hundred years, whence they looked much the same as when inhabited by the dowagers of bygone generations. So sensible were some of the later occupants of this, that they preserved them in their pristine state, and sat in them in old armchairs till they imagined themselves to be ancestors; and in an instance or two donned the pigtail to complete the illusion. So honourable was this emblem, that no tradesman, however mean his calling, could wear it without being spoken of as the old gentleman, and he doubtless felt himself to be such, though he might be serving a customer with a jar of spermaceti oil.

As aforesaid, Gideon Mantell was an inhabitant of Lewes, struggling for fame by his researches within the chalk strata, and for a livelihood by his practice as a surgeon and apothecary, in which he had a fair amount of success, no doubt due to his great abilities, but in the estimation of many to the flash of his surroundings. His gig and groom were models as they waited at his door. His coat of arms embraced your vision as it shone in the fan-light and whispered of greatness within. He was tall, graciously graceful, and flexible, a naturalist, realizing his own lordship of the creation.

Mantell had a brother in his business, a man, short and deformed, of a quiet, obliging manner. His name was Joshua. He had a son who also made himself heard in later times from the wilds of New Zealand, as a successful scientific explorer.

Some years later the good Earl of Egremont, lord of Petworth Castle, great in his generosity, presented Mantell with a large sum of money to start him in a spacious mansion at Brighton, where he might set up his fine museum, and pursue his profession in a wider field. Removing to this from Lewes he still pursued his science, but the sort of ground he needed was preoccupied, and, disposing of his collection to the trustees of the British Museum, he migrated finally to a suburb of London, I think it was to Clapham.

Had Government allowed such a man as Mantell a thousand a year for the purposes of science, he would have brought the geology of his day to perfection! How creditably they might have amended the sacrifice by withholding the £70,000 from the British Gallery for the purchase of a sham Raphael, and a preposterous Rembrandt, which the pencils of those artists never touched—an invalid housemaid on a throne as Virgin, and a Charles the King on a cart-horse! Raphael painted only beauty, Rembrandt only grace. But the English are the meanest judges of art in Europe. An Italian picture-dealer would have set them right in a few minutes.

What have the trustees done with those fabulous Correggios, which once made such a figure and were shelved to the entrance passage, when the National Gallery was still in Mr. Angerstein’s mansion in Pall Mall?

“Per arte e l’inganno,

Si vive mezzo l’anno;

Per inganno e l’arte

Si vive l’altro parte.”

There were other worthies in this town of Lewes: Mr. Horsfield, author of the “History and Antiquities of Lewes;” Mr. Lower, a stationer, who wrote on Sussex worthies; and the master of the Grammar School, Dr. Proctor, whose voice crackled emphasis and accent. He was one of the rolling stones that gather no moss; Lewes failed him and he took a mansion towards Kemp town; he was tempted from his school there to Jersey, and became Principal of its College, but this did not fit him for any length of time. My brother, who was his pupil, met him now and then in after days in the streets of London; he was then always on his way to see the bishop.

XXI.

All this time I was a student of medical science under a truly eminent man, Thomas Hodson, the highest authority in his profession within the bounds of Sussex. His career and station gave him every claim to be classed with the worthies of his age. He was the friend and fellow-student of Astley Cooper, and the other aristocrats of surgical art. All acknowledged him as their equals, though his skill and abilities were in a measure hidden from the admiration of the world. He was numbered among the leading lithotomists, having extracted the stone by means of the greatest operation in surgery, somewhere about a hundred times, with unvarying success.

It was in reflecting on the skill of such men that I always regarded surgery as a science far above all that physic can attain to.

Thomas Hodson is a name not to be forgotten. He loved his art passionately, and he would discourse on it with all the fervour it deserved. It is an art; but look at its foundation! The human frame is a transparency to the surgeon’s eyes. He is never in the dark, but sees his way clearly, with a perfect knowledge of what has to be done from first to last. It is otherwise with physic: the physician can fulfil certain indications, with certain remedies; these very few in number. For the rest, how these operate, what work they perform in modifying function he can never fully foresee. Nor will science ever reach such a pitch as to enable him to trace the changes which occur in the system, under the influence of a single dose.

He can swim, but he is mostly out of his depth, and that too often in troubled waters.

On the other hand, physicians generally used to receive a better education than surgeons; such of them as respect their position, make themselves acquainted with every branch of knowledge, whether in literature, science, or art; in social life all doubtful questions, when all others are at a loss, are referred to them; and it is fully expected of them that they will have a ready reply.

Hodson was one of the most amiable men I ever knew, and his manners were sweet and elegant to such a degree as to make it deserving of mention that on being thwarted he became the most passionate of men. The world, then, seemed hardly large enough to hold him. Such a trifle as the loss of a letter, or of a book, would set him off. Smiling, pale with anger, he would exclaim, “Will you look about for me?” Then, rapping on the table with his bent forefinger, forcibly enough to crack the mahogany, he would shout, “I have looked high, I have looked low; I have looked uphill, I have looked downhill, and I have looked on level ground. Help me for my sake; if you won’t do so for my sake, help me for God’s sake; and if you won’t help me for God’s sake, do so for Jesus Christ’s sake; for they say he was a good ⸺!”

Hodson was a man of middle stature, fair, although old; bald, with a finely shaped head, and silvery hair; with classic features, and a most intelligent expression. His manner was courteous and, in its particular fashion, graceful. It is no wonder that such a man, gifted as he was, should have been the delight of the neighbouring gentry, and of the greater men of the town. When summoned to Glynde or Firle, the residences of Lords Hampden and Gage, he was always a desired guest at the table of those nobles; and no more genial and amusing one was anywhere to be found.

Glynde, the inheritance of the late Speaker, Lord Hampden by creation, sad to say at this hour dead, a descendant of the great patriot, is the most charming house, perhaps, of any in the south. A large Elizabethan mansion, a pleasant park, downs covered with the choicest breed of sheep in the known world, was even made more celebrated by the tenant farmer John Ellman, than by the lords of the soil.

In those times there was such a thing as south-down mutton!

John Ellman, of Glynde, was a man known to the whole agricultural world. To those who never saw him, he was known by his full-length portrait, as was Coke of Norfolk, and other celebrities of his day, to be seen in the window of a corner shop, between St. James’s Street and Pall Mall, kept by a gentleman who had the aspect of George the Fourth, and was supposed to be a son of the monarch; giving one a good idea of what the king would have been, had he been born a commoner.

XXII.

Ellman, of Glynde, was a knee-breeches man, with top-boots, tall, coated for horseback, and with a characteristic farmer’s hat, not scanty of brim. As such I remember him; but when alone, or even speaking to another, there seemed something wanting to him, and this was a—Cattle Show.

I recollect his daughter—an extremely pretty girl, sixty-five years ago. I used to wonder how such a delicacy could come of so purely masculine a breed of men.

The south-down sheep is no doubt fully kept on at Glynde; the late Earl of Chichester, too, is said to have kept up the breed, but it is to be feared that it is less profitable than the fat, or wool-growing sorts, which yield the worst mutton to the market, and the best wool; matured for the butcher within a year.

“Sic transit gloria brebis.”

Mr. Hodson took me with him to the funeral of the then last Lord Hampden, who only enjoyed his estate for twelve months. I entered the vault; the crimson velvet and gilt nails were as fresh on the coffin of the previous lord as on the one now placed by its side. All the other red velvet coffins had gone brown.

A gentleman, it was Mr. Cumberland, of the mint, who was related to Lord Hampden, and used to stay with him at the old family seat in Buckinghamshire, told me that there was always a table in the family pew on Sunday morning, with wine glasses on it, and a bottle of port wine, with which the friends regaled themselves during the weary service at church, which, as a duty, they attended, so setting a good example to the village folk.