MEMOIRS OF LIFE
AND LITERATURE

Books by W. H. MALLOCK

Memoirs of Life and Literature
The Limits of Pure Democracy5th Edition
Religion as a Credible Doctrine
The Reconstruction of Belief

Novels

The Individualist3rd Edition
The Heart of Life3rd Edition
A Human Document9th Edition

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE

MEMOIRS OF
LIFE AND LITERATURE

BY
W. H. MALLOCK
AUTHOR OF
"RECONSTRUCTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF" ETC.

ILLUSTRATED

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXX

Memoirs of Life and Literature
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
Published September, 1920

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE[Frontispiece]
ROBERT BROWNINGFacing p.[30]
THOMAS CARLYLE"[64]
JOHN RUSKIN"[86]
OUIDA"[126]
CARDINAL MANNING"[134]
HERBERT SPENCER"[266]
THEODORE ROOSEVELT"[318]

MEMOIRS OF LIFE AND LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
FAMILY ANTECEDENTS

The Mallocks of Cockington—Some Old Devonshire Houses—A Child's Outlook on Life

"Memoirs" is a word which, as commonly used, includes books of very various kinds, ranging from St. Augustine's Confessions to the gossip of Lady Dorothy Nevill. Such books, however, have all one family likeness. They all of them represent life as seen by the writers from a personal point of view; and in this sense it is to the family of Memoirs that the present book belongs.

But the incidents or aspects of life which a book of memoirs describes represent something more than themselves. Whether the writer is conscious of the fact or no, they represent a circle of circumstances, general as well as private, to which his individual character reacts; and his reactions, as he records them, may in this way acquire a meaning and unity which have their origin in the age—in the general conditions and movements which his personal recollections cover—rather than in any qualities or adventures which happen to be exclusively his own. Thus if any writer attempts to do what I have done myself—namely, to examine or depict in books of widely different kinds such aspects and problems of life—social, philosophical, religious, and economic—as have in turn engrossed his special attention, he may venture to hope that a memoir of his own activities will be taken as representing an age, rather than a personal story, his personal story being little more than a variant of one which many readers will recognize as common to themselves and him.

Now for all reflecting persons whose childhood reaches back to the middle of the nineteenth century, the most remarkable feature of the period which constitutes the age for themselves cannot fail to be a sequence of remarkable and momentous changes—changes alike in the domains of science, religion, and society; and if any one of such persons should be asked, "Changes from what?" his answer will be, if he knows how to express himself, "Changes from the things presented to him by his first remembered experiences, and by him taken for granted," such as the teaching, religious or otherwise, received by him, and the general constitution of society as revealed to him by his own observation and the ways and conversation of his elders. These are the things which provide the child's life with its starting point, and these are determined by the facts of family tradition and parentage. It is, therefore, with a description of such family facts that the author of a memoir like the present ought properly to begin.

The Mallocks, who have for nearly three hundred years been settled at Cockington Court, near to what is now Torquay, descend from a William Malet, Mallek, or Mallacke, who was, about the year 1400, possessed of estates lying between Lyme and Axmouth. This individual, according to the genealogists of the Heralds' College, was a younger son of Sir Baldwyn Malet of Enmore, in the county of Dorset. His descendants, at all events, from this time onward became connected by marriage with such well-known West Country families as the Pynes, the Drakes, the Churchills, the Yonges of Colyton, the Willoughbys of Payhembury, the Trevelyans, the Tuckfields (subsequently Hippesleys), the Strodes of Newnham, the Aclands, the Champernownes, and the Bullers. Between the reigns of Henry VII and Elizabeth they provided successive Parliaments with members for Lyme and Poole. One of them, Roger, during the reign of the latter sovereign, found his way to Exeter, where, as a banker or "goldsmith," he laid the foundations of what was then a very great fortune, and built himself a large town house, of which one room is still intact, with the queen's arms and his own juxtaposed on the paneling. The fortune accumulated by him was, during the next two reigns, notably increased by a second Roger, his son, in partnership with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, military governor of Plymouth, who had somehow become possessed of immense territories in Maine, and was a prominent figure in the history of English trade with America.

The second Roger, about the year 1640, purchased the Cockington property from Sir Henry Cary, a Cavalier, who appears to have been a typical sufferer from his devotion to the royal cause. Roger Mallock was, indeed, so far Royalist himself that he entered a protest against the execution of Charles; but both he and his relatives also were evidently in sympathy otherwise with the Parliamentary party; for, during the Protectorate, Elizabeth Mallock, his cousin, married Lord Blayney, an Irishman, who was personally attached to Cromwell; while Rawlin Mallock, this second Roger's son (who had married Susannah, Sir Ferdinando Gorges's daughter), was Whig member for Totnes, twice Whig member for Ashburton, and was one of the small group of peers and country gentlemen who welcomed William of Orange when he disembarked at Brixham. Rawlin's heir was a boy—beautiful, as a picture of him in the guise of a little Cavalier shows—who died a minor in the year 1699, but who, during his brief life, as a contemporary chronicler mentions, had distinguished himself by an accomplishment extremely rare among the young country gentlemen of his own day—indeed, we may add of our own—that is to day, a precocious knowledge of Hebrew.

The young scholar was succeeded by a third Rawlin, his cousin, a personage of a very different type, who, in concert with his next-door neighbor, Mr. Cary of Torre Abbey, added to the pursuits of a Squire Western the enterprise of a smuggler in a big way of business. He was, moreover, a patron of the turf, having a large stud farm on Dartmoor, with results which would have been disastrous for himself if the wounds inflicted by the world had not been healed through his connection with the Established Church. He was fortunately the patron of no less than sixteen livings, or cures of souls, by the gradual sale of most of which he managed to meet, as a Christian should do, the claims of his lay creditors. Of the bottles of port with which he stocked the Cockington cellars two, bearing the date of 1745, still remain—or till lately remained—unopened. Through the successor of this typical Georgian the property passed to my grandfather, of whom my father was a younger son.

Like many other younger sons, my father, to use a pious phrase, suffered himself to be "put into the Church," where two of the livings still owned by his family awaited him. These, to his temporal advantage, he presently exchanged for another. His health, however, since I can remember him, never permitted him to exert himself in the performance of divine service. Indeed, his ecclesiastical interests were architectural rather than pastoral. He accordingly, after a brief acquaintance with his new parishioners, committed them to the spiritual care of a stalwart and well-born curate, and bought a picturesque retreat about ten or twelve miles away, embowered in ivy, and overlooking the river Exe, where he spent his time in enlarging the house and gardens, and in planting slopes and terraces, about a quarter of a mile in length, with what were then very rare trees. He was subsequently given for life the use of another house, Denbury Manor, of which I shall speak presently, which I myself much preferred, and with which my own early recollections are much more closely associated.

My mother was a daughter of the Ven. Archdeacon Froude, and sister of three distinguished brothers—Hurrell Froude, prominent as a leader of the Tractarian movement, Antony Froude the historian, and William Froude, who, though his name is less generally known, exercised, as will be shown presently, an influence on public affairs greater than that of many cabinet ministers. The Archdeacon of Totnes, their father, was a Churchman of a type now extinct as the dodo. Born in the early part of the reign of George III, and inheriting a considerable fortune, he was in his youth addicted to pursuits a proficiency in which is now regarded by no one as absolutely essential to a fitness for Holy Orders. He was famous for his horses, and also for his feats of horsemanship, one of these being the jumping of a five-barred gate without losing either of two guinea pieces which were placed at starting between his knees and the saddle. To the accomplishments of an equestrian he added those of a dilettante. He was an architect, a collector of pictures, a herald and archaeologist, and also (as Ruskin declared, to whom some of his drawings were exhibited) an artist whose genius was all but that of a master. Like other young men of fortune, he made what was then called the "grand tour of Europe," his sketchbooks showing that he traveled as far as Corfu, and subsequently, when he settled for life as the vicar of Dartington parish, he was regarded as one of the most enlightened country gentlemen of the district, active in improving the roads, which, till his time, were abominable, and in bringing poachers to punishment if not to repentance.

Within a short walk of the parsonage, over the brow of a wooded hill, is another house, which in the scenery of my childhood was an object no less familiar—Dartington Hall, the home of the Champernowne family, with which, by marriage and otherwise, my father's was very closely connected. Yet another house—it has been mentioned already as associated with my childhood also—is Denbury Manor, with its stucco chimneys and pinnacles, its distance from Dartington being something like eight miles. These four houses—Denbury Manor, Dartington Parsonage, Dartington Hall, and Cockington Court—all lying within a circle of some twelve miles in diameter, represent, together with their adjuncts, the material aspects of the life with which I was first familiar. Let me give a brief sketch of each, taking Denbury first.

Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging ingénue; but when I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty. She was, indeed, when she died very nearly a hundred, and her house and its surroundings now figure in my recollections as things of the eighteenth century which, preserved in all their freshness, had hardly been touched by the years which by that time had followed it. The house, which was of considerable antiquity, had been, for my great-grandmother's benefit, modernized or Elizabethanized under the influence of Horace Walpole and Wyat. It was backed by a rookery of old and enormous elms. It was approached on one side by a fine avenue of limes, and was otherwise surrounded by gardens with gray walls or secretive laurel hedges. Here was a water tank in the form of a Strawberry Hill chapel. Here was a greenhouse unaltered since the days of George II. Everywhere, though everything was antique, there were signs of punctilious care, and morning by morning a bevy of female villagers would be raking the gravel paths and turning them into weedless silver. The front door, heavy with nails, would be opened by an aged footman, his cheeks pink like an apple, and his white silk stockings and his livery always faultless. Within were old Turkey carpets, glossy, but not worn with use, heavy Chippendale chairs, great Delf jugs with the monogram of George II on them, a profusion of Oriental china, and endless bowls of potpourri. On the shelves of whatnots were books of long-forgotten eighteenth-century plays. In one of the sitting rooms was a magnificent portrait by Reynolds of Miss Froude's mother. It represented her playing on a guitar, and on a table beneath it reposed the guitar itself. Here and there lay one of the ivory hands with which powdered ladies once condescended to scratch themselves. There were shining inkstands whose drawers were still stocked with the wafers used for sealing letters in the days of Lydia Languish. In another room, called "the little parlor," and commonly used for breakfast, an old gentleman by Opie smiled from one of the walls, and saw one thing only which he might have seen there in his boyhood—a small piano by Broadwood, always fastidiously polished, as if it had just come from the shop, and bearing the date of 1780. Many houses abound in similar furnishings. The characteristic of Denbury was that it contained nothing else. These things were there, not as survivals of the past, but as parts of a past which for the inmates had never ceased to be the present. They were there as the natural appurtenances of a lady who, so far as I knew, had never been near a railway till a special train was run to convey mourners to her funeral.

Miss Froude matched her surroundings. During her later years she was never visible till midday, by which time she would, in an upstairs drawing room, be found occupying a cushionless chair at a large central table, with a glass of port at her right hand and a volume of sermons at her left. On either side of her stood a faithful attendant, one being a confidential maid, the other a Miss Drake—an old, mittened companion, hardly younger in appearance than herself—both of whom watched her with eyes of solicitous reverence, and seemed always ready to collapse into quasi-religious curtsies. Here she would receive such visitors as happened to be staying in the house, and subsequently reverential villagers, who appealed to her for aid or sympathy.

Dartington Parsonage was in one sense more modern than Denbury, having been for the most part constructed by the Archdeacon himself. Originally a diminutive dwelling—a relic of medieval times—he enlarged it to the dimensions of a substantial country house, surrounding a court, and connected with a medley of outbuildings—servants' offices, stables, barns, and coach houses, one of these last containing as a solitary recluse a high-hung yellow chariot, lined with yellow morocco, in which the Archdeacon had been wont to travel before the battle of Waterloo, and in which his grandchildren were never weary of swinging themselves. If the parsonage and its appurtenances can in any sense be called modern, they represented ideas and conditions which are far enough away now. There was nothing about them more modern than the early days of Miss Austen. The dining-room sideboard, with its long row of knife boxes, whose sloping lids when lifted showed a glimmering of silver handles, would have seemed familiar to Mr. Knightly, Mr. Woodhouse, and Sir Thomas Bertram. Opposite the dining room was a library, very carefully kept, the contents of which were a curious mixture. Besides great folio editions of the classics and the Christian Fathers, were collections of the ephemeral literature of the days of Charles II, notable among which were lampoons on Nell Gwyn and her royal lover—works which the Archdeacon certainly never bought, and which must have come to him through his mother from the Cavalier family of Copplestone. In the hall was a marble table bearing a bust of Demosthenes. In the drawing-room were watercolor drawings by artists such as Prout and Stansfield; a group of Dutch paintings, including a fine Van Ostade; sofas, on which Miss Austen might, have sat by the Prince Regent; and scrap-work screens on which faded portraits and landscapes were half eclipsed by quotations from Elegant Extracts. From the drawing-room windows, in my mother's earlier days, might often have been seen the figure of an old head gardener and factotum, George Diggins by name, bending over beds of geraniums, who was born in the reign of George II, who had passed his youth as a charcoal burner in woods not far from Ugbrooke, the seat of the Catholic Cliffords, and who often recounted how, on mysterious nights, "four horses and a coach, with the old Lord Clifford inside it, would come tumbling out of the woods into the road like so many packs of wool."

Dartington Hall—very well known to architects as the work of John Holland, Duke of Exeter, in the reign of Richard II—passed by exchange to the Champernownes in the reign of Henry VIII, and was originally an enormous structure, inclosing two quadrangles. A large part of it, as may be seen from old engravings, was falling into ruins in the days of George II, but its principal feature was intact till the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was one of the finest baronial halls in England, seventy feet by forty, with a roof resembling that of the great hall at Westminster. The roof, however, at that time showing signs of impending collapse, it was taken down by my grandfather in the year 1810, and only the bare walls and the pointed windows remain. The inhabited portion, however, is still of considerable extent, one of its frontages—two hundred and thirty feet in length—abutting so closely on a churchyard that the dead need hardly turn in their graves to peer in through the lower windows at faded wall-papers, bedroom doors, and endless yards of carpet. The interior, as I remember it, did not differ from that of many old country houses. There were one or two great rooms, a multitude of family portraits, and landscapes, marbles and coins brought from Italy by a traveled and dilettante ancestor. It was a great rendezvous for numerous Buller relations. It was, as was the parsonage also, a nest of old domestics, all born in the parish, and it included among its other inmates a ghost, who was called "the Countess," and who took from time to time alarming strolls along the passages.

It remains to add a word or two with regard to Cockington Court. At the time when my father was born in it, it was the heart of a neighborhood remotely and even primitively rural, and fifty years later, when I can first remember it, its immediate surroundings were unchanged. A few miles away the modern world had, indeed, begun to assert itself in the multiplying villas of Torquay, but on the Cockington property, which includes the district of Chelston, few dwellings existed which had not been there in the days of Charles II. Torquay, which at the beginning of the Napoleonic wars was nothing more than a cluster of fishermen's huts, owed its rise to the presence of the British fleet in Torbay, and the need of accommodation on shore for officers' wives and families. My grandfather built two houses, Livermead House and Livermead Cottage, in answer to this demand. Both were for personal friends, one of them being the first Lord St. Vincent, the other being Sir John Colbourne, afterward Lord Seaton. But though elaborate plans were subsequently put before him for turning the surrounding slopes into a pretentious and symmetrical watering place, the construction of no new residence was permitted by himself or his successor till somewhere about the year 1865, when a building lease was granted by the latter to one of his own connections.

Meanwhile, on adjacent properties, belonging to the Palks and Carys, Torquay had been developing into what became for a time the most famous and fashionable of the winter resorts of England, Cockington still remaining a quiet and undisturbed Arcadia.

But the real or nominal progress of five-and-forty years has brought about changes which my grandfather, blind to his own interests, resisted. To-day, as the train, having passed the station of Torre, proceeds toward that of Paignton, the traveler sees, looking inland at the Cockington and Chelston slopes, a throng of villas intermixed with the relics of ancient hedgerows. If, alighting at Torquay station, he mounts the hill above it by what in my childhood was a brambled and furtive lane, he will find on either side of him villas and villa gardens, till at length he is brought to a ridge overlooking a secluded valley. For some distance villas will still obscure his view, but presently these end. Below him he will see steep fields descending into a quiet hollow, the opposite slopes being covered or crowned with woods, and against them he will see smoke wreaths straying upward from undiscerned chimneys. A little farther on, the road, now wholly rural, dips downward, and Cockington village reveals itself, not substantially changed, with its thatch and its red mud walls, from what it had been more than two hundred years ago. Its most prominent feature is the blacksmith's forge, which, unaltered except for repairs, is of much greater antiquity. It is said that, as a contrast between the old world and the new, few scenes in England have been more often photographed than this. Passing the blacksmith's forge, and mounting under the shade of trees, the road leads to a lodge, the grounds of Cockington Court, and the church which very nearly touches it.

The house as it now stands—a familiar object to tourists—is merely a portion of what once was a larger structure. It was partly built by the Carys in the year of the Spanish Armada. Roger Mallock reconstructed it some seventy years later. It formed in his days, and up to those of my grandfather, one side of a square, entered between two towers, and was surrounded by a deer park of four or five hundred acres. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, however, agricultural land then rising in value, my grandfather, who threw away one fortune by refusing to have a town on his property, had been shrewd enough to get rid of his deer, and turned most of his parkland into farms. He also destroyed the forecourt of his house and a range of antique offices, considerably reducing at the same time the size of the main building by depriving it of its top story and substituting a dwarfish parapet for what had once been its eight gables. The interior suffered at his hands to an even greater extent. A hall with a minstrels' gallery was turned by him into several rooms as commonplace as it is possible to imagine. Indeed little of special interest survived him but some fine Italian ceilings, the most curious of which exists no longer, a paneled dining-room of the reign of William and Mary, a number of portraits dating from the days of James I onward, and a wall paper representing life-size savages under palm trees, which was part of the plunder of a French vessel during the time of the Napoleonic wars. To this meager list, however, up to my father's time might have been added another item of a more eloquent and more unusual kind—namely, a gilded coach, in which, according to village tradition, an old Madam Mallock (as she was called) used to be dragged by six horses along the execrable lanes of the neighborhood for her daily airing in the early part of the reign of George III. It is a great pity that, of all the appliances of life, carriages are those which are least frequently preserved. The reason doubtless is that they take up a good deal of room, and become absurdly old-fashioned long before they become interesting. The old coach of which I speak was bequeathed, with other heirlooms, to my father, who, I may say without filial impiety, proved altogether unworthy of it. He left it in a shed near a pond, into which it subsequently fell, its disjecta membra being presumably at the bottom still.

But whatever the house may have lost in the way of hereditary contents, the church contained, in my childhood, other symbols of the past—they have now likewise vanished—which spoke of "the family" rather than the mysteries of the Christian faith. The family shrouded its devotions, and sometimes its slumbers, in a pew which was furnished with a large fireplace, and eclipsed with its towering walls something like half the altar. All the panels of the western gallery were emblazoned with coats of arms and quarterings, and all the available wall space was dark with family hatchments. One afternoon, some five-and-forty years ago, a daughter of the house, who happened to be alone indoors, was alarmed by a summons to show herself and receive the Queen of Holland, who was then staying at Torquay, and who wished to inspect an old English house and its appurtenances. My cousin, who took her into the church, and who was somewhat confused by the presence of so august a visitor, explained the hatchments, with regard to which the queen questioned her, by saying that one was put up whenever a member of the Mallock family married.

As for myself, these solemn heraldic objects vaguely imbued me with a sense, of which I took long in divesting myself, that my own family was one of the most important and permanent institutions of the country. They were otherwise associated in my memory with a long succession of Christmases, when holly berries enlivened their frames and peeped over the walls of the pew where my elders drowsed, and my coevals were sustained during the sermon by visions of the plum pudding and crackers which would reward them in a near hereafter. I can still remember how, before these joys began, we would group ourselves in the dining-room windows, peering at distant woods, in which keepers still set man traps, or watching the village schoolchildren on their way from church homeward, making with their crimson cloaks a streak of color as they followed one another across slopes of snow.

The feelings excited by a landscape such as this bore a subtle resemblance to those produced in myself by the heraldries which thronged the church. From the windows, indeed, of all the houses of which I have just been speaking the prospect was morally, if not visually, the same. They all looked out, as though it were the unquestioned order of things, on wooded seclusions pricked by manorial chimneys or on lodges and gray park walls, while somewhere beyond these last lurked the thatch of contented cottages, at the doors of which, when a member of "the family" passed, women and children would curtsy and men touch their forelocks.

Here some persons may be tempted to interpose the remark that the aspect which things thus wore for ourselves was in one respect quite illusory. They may say that the idyllic contentment which we thus attributed to the cottagers was the very reverse of the truth, and that the thatch of their dwellings, however pleasing to the eye, really shrouded a misery to which history shows few parallels. Such an objection, even if correct, would, however, be here irrelevant; for I am dealing now not with things as they actually were, but merely with the impressions produced by them on childish minds, and more particularly on my own. Nevertheless, the objection in itself is of quite sufficient importance to call, even here, for some incidental attention; and how far, in this respect, our impressions were true or false will appear in the following chapter.

CHAPTER II
THE TWO NATIONS

The Rural Poor of Devonshire—The Old Landed Families—An Ecclesiastical Magnate

Our impressions of the cottagers, to which I have just alluded—and for us the cottagers represented the people of England generally—were not, it is true, derived from our own scientific investigations; they were derived from the conversation of our elders. But the knowledge which these elders possessed as to the ways, the temper, and the conditions of the rural poor was intimate, and was constantly illustrated by anecdotes, to which we as children were never weary of listening. The descriptions so often given of the misery of the agricultural laborers and the oppression of the ruling class from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the abolition of the Corn Laws may be correct as applied to certain parts of the kingdom; but, in the case of Devonshire at all events, they are, it would appear, very far from the truth. The period more particularly in question, including the decade known as "the hungry 'forties," is precisely the period with which these elders of ours were most closely acquainted; and, though we occasionally heard of disturbances called "bread riots" as having occurred in Exeter and Plymouth, no hint reached us of such outbreaks having ever taken place in the country, or of any distress or temper which was calculated to provoke protests of any sort or kind against the established order. On the contrary, between the rural poor and the old-fashioned landed aristocracy, lay and clerical alike, the relations were not only amicable, but very often confidential also.

This fact may be illustrated by the case of old Miss Froude, the "Lady Bountiful" of her immediate neighborhood, who was constantly appealed to by its inhabitants, not only for material aid, but for religious guidance as well, and appreciation of their religious experiences. Thus on one occasion an old woman was ushered into Miss Froude's presence who had evidently some fact of great importance to communicate. The fact turned out to be this: that she had spent the whole of the previous night in a trance, during which she had ascended to heaven, and been let in by "a angel." "Well," said Miss Froude, "and did they ask you your name?" "No, ma'am, not my name," was the answer; "they only asked me my parish." "And do you," Miss Froude continued, "remember what the angel's name was?" The old woman seemed doubtful. "Do you think," said Miss Froude, "it was Gabriel?" "Iss, fay (yes, i' faith)," said the old woman. "Sure enough 'twas Gaburl." "And did you," said Miss Froude, finally, "see anybody in heaven whom you knew?" The old woman hesitated, but caught herself up in time, and solemnly said, "I seed you, ma'am."

Had all Miss Froude's dependents been of an equally communicative disposition, there would indeed in the confessions of two of them have been matter of a less peaceful character. It had for some time been whispered among her indoor servants—this is before I can remember—that horses, after days of idleness so far as carriage work was concerned, would on certain mornings be found covered with sweat, and other signs of mysteriously hard usage. It was ultimately found out that an enterprising coachman and groom had been riding them periodically to Teignmouth, and playing a nocturnal part in the landing of smuggled cargoes, these being stowed in the cellars of a decaying villa, which for years had remained tenantless owing to persistent rumors that it was haunted by a regiment of exceedingly savage ghosts. The only other approach to anything like rural violence which reached our ears through the channel of oral tradition was an event which must have occurred about the year 1830, and was reported to the Archdeacon by George Diggins, his old factotum. This was the plunder of a vessel which had been wrecked the night before somewhere between Plymouth and Salcombe. The Archdeacon asked if no authorities had interfered. "I heard, sir," said George Diggins, "that a revenue officer did what he could to stop 'un, but they hadn't a sarved he very genteel." This statement meant that they had pushed him over the cliffs.

Otherwise the stories of rural life that reached me, though relating to times which have in popular oratory been associated with the rick-burnings and kindred outrages "by which the wronged peasant righted himself," were pictures of a general content, broken only by individual vicissitudes, which were accepted and bewailed as part of the common order of nature. Of such individual afflictions the larger part were medical. The women, even the most robust, would rarely confess to the enjoyment of anything so uninteresting as a condition of rude health. The usual reply made by them to the inquiries of any lady visitant was, "Thankee, ma'am, I be torrable" (tolerable); but, if conscious of any definite malady, their diagnosis of their own cases would, though simple, be more precise. One of them told my mother that for days she'd been terrible bad. "My inside," she said, "be always a-coming up, though I've swallowed a pint of shot by this time merely to keep my liver down."

In cottage households, though occasionally there might be some shortage of food, there were no indications of anything like general or chronic want. Indeed, if delicacies which the inmates had never seen before were brought them as a present from this or from that "great house," they would often eye them askance, and make a favor of taking them. That the ordinary diet of the Devonshire cottagers of those days contented them is shown by the dinner prepared for a man who worked at a limekiln by his wife, which she complacently exhibited to my mother as at once appetizing and nutritious. It was a species of dumpling with an onion, instead of an apple, in the middle of it, the place of the customary crust being taken by home-baked bread.

On the whole, however, the cottagers, no less than their richer neighbors, were preoccupied by interests other than those of mere domestic economy. Their gossip would accordingly take a wider range, as when one of them announced to an aunt of mine that a son and a daughter who had emigrated to the United States had "got stuck in the mud just outside America."

Often their discourses would relate to domestic discipline and theology. There was a certain Mrs. Pawley whose dwelling was widely celebrated as the scene of almost constant strife between herself and her husband, and who, on being asked by one of her lady patronesses if she could not do something to make matters run more smoothly, replied: "That's just what I tries to do, ma'am. I labor for peace, but when I speak to he thereof, he makes hisself ready for battle direckly."

Another good woman again had acquired an unenviable fame by some petty act of larceny which the magistrates had been bound to punish, and was explaining in tears on her doorstep to some lady's sympathetic ears that she had done the unfortunate deed merely because she was "temp'ed," on which a neighbor, who had no need for repentance, promptly appeared on the scene and said to her: "My dear crachur (creature), why be you temp'ed to do sich thing? I be never temp'ed to do nothing but what's good."

Passing one day through an orchard, Mr. Froude the historian encountered a man who was contemplating a heap of apples. The man looked up as though about to speak of the crop, but instead of doing so he gave vent to the following reflection: "Pretty job, sir," he said, "there was about a apple one time. Now the De-vine, He might have prevented that if He'd had a mind to. But com', sir, 'tis a mystery:"

Moral theology would sometimes take a more skeptical turn. A certain Mr. Edwardes—a most amusing man—used to describe a call which he paid one Sunday afternoon to a farmer near Buckfastleigh, whom he found reading his Bible. Mr. Edwardes congratulated him on the appropriate nature of his studies. The farmer pushed the book aside, and, pointing to the open pages, which were those containing the account of the fall of Jericho, said: "Do 'ee believe that, sir? Well—I don't." Mr. Edwardes, with becoming piety, observed that we were bound to believe whatever the Scriptures told us. "Well," the farmer continued, "when I was a boy they used to bake here in the town oven, and whenever the oven was heated, they sounded a sheep's horn. Some of the boys Sundays would get hold of that horn, just for the fun of the thing, and blaw it for all it was worth. If that there story was true, there wouldn't be a house in Buckfastleigh standing."

Independent, if not skeptical, thought was represented even by one of the members of Archdeacon Froude's own domestic establishment—a house carpenter, who was a kind of uncanonical prophet. He would see in the meadows visions of light and fire like Ezekiel's, and convert his commonest actions into means of edification. On one occasion, when he was constructing a bedroom cupboard, a daughter of the house remarked, as she paused to watch him, "Well, John, that cupboard is big enough." "It," said the prophet, reflectively, "is immense, but yet confined. I know of something which is immense, but not confined." On being asked what this was he answered, "The love of God."

Yet another story told by Mr. Antony Froude illustrates rural mentality in relation to contemporary politics. Mr. Froude was the tenant of a well-known house in Devonshire, and had come to be on very friendly terms with Mr. Emmot, his landlord's agent, a typical and true Devonian. One day Mr. Emmot came to him in a condition of some perplexity. He had been asked an important question, and was anxious to know if the answer he had given to it was satisfactory. It appeared that a cottager who had a bit of land of his own had been saying to him, "Look here, Mr. Emmot: can you tell us rightly what the difference be between a Conservative and a Radical?" "Well, Mr. Froude," said Mr. Emmot, "I didn't rightly knaw the philosophy of the thing, so I just said to 'un this: 'You knaw me; well, I be a Conservative. You knaw Jack Radford—biggest blackguard in the parish—well, he be a Radical. Now you knaw.'"

Chance reminiscences such as those which have just been quoted will be sufficient to indicate what, so far as a child could understand them, the conditions and ways of thinking of the rural population were, and how easy and unquestioning were the relations which then subsisted between it and the old landed families. These relations were easy, because the differences between the two classes were commonly assumed to be static, one supporting and one protecting the other, as though they resembled two geological strata. In slightly different language, society was presented to us in the form of two immemorial orders—the men, women, and children who touched their hats and curtsied, and the men, women, and children to whom these salutations were made.

I am not, however—let me say it again—attempting to write a chapter of English history, or to give a precise description of facts as they actually were so much as to depict the impressions which facts, such as they were, produced on children like myself through the medium of personal circumstances. At the same time, in the formation of these impressions we were far from being left to our own unaided intelligence. Our impressions, as just depicted, were sedulously confirmed and developed by carefully chosen governesses. One of these, young as she was, was a really remarkable woman, for whom English history had hatched itself into something like a philosophy. Her philosophy had two bases, one being the postulate of the divine right of kings, the other being her interpretation of the victory of the Normans over the Anglo-Saxons. Charles I she presented to our imaginations as a martyr; and, what was still more important, she seriously taught us that the population of modern England was still divided, so far as race is concerned, precisely as it was at the time of the completion of the Domesday Book; that the peers and the landed gentry were more or less pure-blooded Normans, and the mass of the people Saxons; that the principal pleasure of the latter was to eat to repletion; that their duty was to work for, that their privilege was to be patronized by, Norman overlords and distinguished Norman Churchmen; and finally, that of this Norman minority we ourselves were distinguished specimens. All this we swallowed, aided in doing so by books like Woodstock and Ivanhoe. But grotesque as such ideas seem now, they were not more grotesque than those shadowed forth in some of the novels of Lord Beaconsfield, and more particularly in Sybil, or The Two Nations. Had we indeed been set to compose an essay on the social conditions, as we ourselves understood them, "The Two Nations" would have been the title which we could most appropriately have selected for it.

When, however, forgetting our general principles, we gave our attention to the adult relations and connections who, through personal acquaintance or otherwise, constituted for us what is commonly called society, our respect for many of them as "Normans" was appreciably tempered by a sense of their dullness as men and women. They were nearly all of them members of old Devonshire families, beyond the circle of which their interests did not often wander. But certain of them in my own memory stand out from the rest as interesting types of conditions which by this time have passed away. Of these I may mention four—Emma and Antony Buller, son and daughter of Sir Antony Buller of Pound; Lord Blatchford, a Gladstonian Liberal, and the celebrated Henry Philpotts, the then Bishop of Exeter.

Antony Buller, who was my godfather, was vicar of a parish on the western borders of Dartmoor. In the fact that "remote from towns he ran his godly race" he resembled the vicar described in "The Deserted Village," but except for his godliness he resembled him in little else. A model of secluded piety, he was educated at Eton and Christchurch; unquestioning in his social as well as his Christian conservatism, and expressing in the refinement of his voice and the well-bred quasi-meekness of his bearing a sense of family connection, tempered by a scholarly recognition of the equality of human souls. Lord Blatchford, his not very distant neighbor, was in many ways an Antony Buller secularized. His piety, polished by the classics and Oxford chapels, was what was in those days called Liberal, rather than Tory. What in Antony Buller was a conservative Christian meekness was in Lord Blatchford a progressive Christian briskness; but his belief in popular progress was accompanied by a smile at its incidents, as though it were a kind of frisking to which the masses ought to be welcome so long as it did not assume too practical a character or endanger any of the palings within the limits of which it ought to be confined.

ROBERT BROWNING

Emma Buller, too, was typical, but in a totally different way. She was a type of that county life which railways have gradually modified, and by this time almost obliterated. She was a woman remarkable for her vivacity, wit, and humor. At county balls she was an institution. At country houses throughout Devonshire and Cornwall she was a familiar and welcome guest, and to half of her hosts and hostesses she was in one way or another related. Among her accomplishments was the singing of comic songs, in a beautifully clear but half-apologetic voice, so that while gaining in point they lost all trace of vulgarity, her eyes seeming to invite each listener on whom she fixed them to share with her some amusement which was only half legitimate. At the Duke of Bedford's house, near Tavistock, she exercised this magic one evening on Lord John Russell. The song which she sang to him was political. It began thus, each verse having the same recurring burden:

"Come, listen while I sing to you,
Lord John, that prince of sinisters,
Who once pulled down the House of Lords,
The Crown and all the ministers.
That is, he would have if he could,
But a little thing prevented him."

For many years she spent a large part of every winter with Lady (then Miss) Burdett-Coutts, who had in those days a large villa at Torquay, generally filled with visitors. Emma Buller's allusions to these, many of whom were notabilities, enlarged, as I listened to them in my childhood, my conception of the social world, and made it seem vaguely livelier and more fruitful in adventure than the hereditary circle with which alone I was so far familiar.

This result was accentuated by the stories told in my hearing of another personage well known to my family likewise, to which I listened with a yet keener appreciation. Bishop Philpotts—for it is of him I speak—holding till the day of his death a "golden stall" at Durham, the emoluments of which amounted to £5,000 a year, interested me rather as a lay magnate than as a clerical. Among the many villas then rising at Torquay the Bishop built one of the largest. This agreeable residence, in the designing of which he was helped by my father, and which overlooked extensive glades and lawns sloping down toward the sea, enabled him to enjoy a society more entertaining than that of his own cathedral close; and the anecdotes current in my family as to his ways and his mundane hospitalities were as familiar to me as those of any character in the novels of Miss Austen—a writer whose social discrimination delighted and appealed to me before I was ten years old.

The Bishop was renowned for his suave and courtly manners, his charming voice, and the subtle precision of its modulations; and the following stories of him are still fresh in my memory.

At one of his luncheon parties he was specially kind to a country clergyman's wife, who knew none of the company, and he took her out on a terrace in order to show her the view—a view of the sea shut in by the crags of a small cove. "Ah, my lord," gasped the lady, "it reminds one so much of Switzerland." "Precisely," said the Bishop, "except that there we have the mountains without the sea, and here we have the sea without the mountains."

He was somewhat less urbane to an ultra-fashionable lady, his neighbor, who had developed a habit, in his opinion objectionable, of exhibiting his views to her visitors by way of passing the morning. This lady, with a bevy of satellites, having appeared one day in his drawing room about the hour of noon, the Bishop, with the utmost graciousness, took them into a conservatory, showed them some of his plants and then, opening a door, invited them to go outside. As soon as they were in the outer air, he himself retreated, saying, as he closed the door, "We lunch at one."

On another occasion at a dinner party a shy young lady was present, whose mother, with maternal partiality, admitted that her daughter sang. After dinner the Bishop had candles placed on the piano, and begged the shrinking vocalist to give them an exhibition of her skill. The luckless victim protested that she could not sing at all, but presently, despite her objections, she was blushing on the fatal music stool, and was faltering out a desperate something which was at all events intended to be a song. "Thank you," said the Bishop, benignly, as soon as the performance was ended. "The next time you tell us you cannot sing we shall know how to believe you."

On yet another occasion two intrepid females, armed with guidebooks, and obviously determined to see whatever they could, had entered the Bishop's carriage drive, and were considering which way they would take, when their ears were caught by a sound like that of an opening window. They discovered, on looking about them, that the drive was commanded by a summerhouse, and, framed in an open window, was the visage of the Bishop himself. "Ladies," he said, blandly, "these grounds are private, as the gate through which you have just passed may in part have suggested to you. The turn to the left will bring you in due time to the stables. If you should go straight on you will presently reach the house. Should you inspect the house, may I mention to you that in one of the bedrooms is an invalid? You will perhaps pardon my servants if they do not show you that. Good morning."

But my boyish appreciation of the Bishop's mundane qualities was equaled by my faith in the sacrosanctity of his office. I never for a moment doubted that men like Henry of Exeter were channels through which the Christian priesthood received those miraculous powers by their exercise of which alone it was possible for the ordinary sinner to be rescued from eternal torment. Of the structural doctrines of theology which were then the shibboleths of English Churchmanship generally, I never entertained a doubt. That the universe was created in the inside of a week four thousand and four years before the birth of Christ, and that every word of the Bible was supernaturally dictated to the writer, were to me facts as certain as the fact that the ear this globular or that the date of the battle of Hastings was 1066. They belonged to the same order of things as the "two nations"; and the attempts of certain persons to discredit the former and to disturb the reciprocal relations of the latter represented for me a mood so blasphemous and absurd as not to be worthy of a serious man's attention.

And yet in certain ways by the time I was twelve years old I was something of a revolutionary myself. Like the majority of healthy boys, I had tastes for riding and shooting, and to such things as rooks and rabbits my rifle was as formidable as most boys could desire. But long before I was conscious of any passion for sport I found myself beset by another, which was very much more insistent—namely, a passion for literary composition—I cannot say a taste for writing, for I dictated verses to the nursery-maids before I could hold a pen. As soon as I was able to read I came across the works of Fielding, whose style I endeavored to imitate in a series of lengthy novels, deriving as I did so a precocious sense of manhood from the eighteenth-century oaths with which I garnished the conversation of my characters. My ambitions, however, as a writer of fiction were on the whole less constant than those which I entertained as a poet. By governesses and other instructors, Wordsworth and Tennyson were obtruded on me as models of beauty and edification. Wordsworth I thought ridiculous. Tennyson seemed to me unmanly and mawkish. The poets I found out for myself were Dryden and, more particularly, Pope; and when I was about fourteen I imagined myself destined to win back for Pope, as a model, the supremacy he had unfortunately lost, while the sentimentalities of Tennyson and his followers would disappear like the fripperies of faded and outworn fashions.

When my father and his family migrated from the banks of the Exe to Denbury these literary projects found fresh means of expanding themselves. Opposite the front door of the Manor House was a large and antique annexe, once occupied by a bailiff who managed the home farm. This my grandfather had intended to connect with the main building, by which means the Manor House would have been nearly doubled in size. His scheme was not carried out. The annexe, covered with increasing growths of ivy, remained locked up and isolated, and for many years stood empty. But on the Archdeacon's death, and the removal of his household from Dartington, a use was at last found for it. The upper rooms were converted into a temporary storehouse for his library—large rooms which now were lined with shelves, and in which fires were frequently lighted to keep the volumes dry. In a moment of happy inspiration I obtained permission to look after the fires myself. The key was placed in my possession. Day by day I entered. I locked myself in, and all the world was before me.

I had often before been irritated, and my curiosity had been continually piqued, by finding that certain books—most of them plays of the time of Charles II—would be taken away from me and secreted if I happened to have abstracted some such stray volume from a bookcase; but here I was my own master. My grandfather's library was, as I have said already, particularly rich in literature of this semiforbidden class, and rows of plays and poems by Congreve, Etheridge, Rochester, Dryden, and their contemporaries offered themselves to my study, as though by some furtive assignation. Among other wrecks of furniture with which the worm-eaten floors were encumbered was an old and battered rocking-horse, bestriding which I studied these secret volumes, and found in it an enchanted steed which would lift me into the air and convey me to magically distant kingdoms.

Inspired by these experiences, and fancying myself destined to accomplish a counter-revolution in the literary taste of England, I endeavored night by night to lay the foundations of my own poetic fame. My bedroom was pungent with the atmosphere of a pre-Tennysonian world. Its floor, uneven with age, was covered with a carpet whose patterns had faded into a dim monochrome, and its walls were dark with portraits of Copplestone forefathers in flowing wigs and satins. My bed was draped with immemorial curtains, colored like gold and bordered with black velvet. Close to the bed was a round mahogany table, furnished with pens and paper, and night by night, propped up by pillows, I endeavored to rival Dryden and Pope, by means of a quill wet with the dews of Parnassus—dews which, having sprinkled the bedclothes, would scandalize the housemaids the next morning by their unfortunate likeness to ink.

My father had originally meant to send me to Harrow, but, on the recommendation of one of the sons of the Bishop of Exeter, he first tried on me the effects of a school which had just been established for the purpose of combining the ordinary course of education with an inculcation of the extremest principles of the High Church Anglican party. I was, however, deficient in one of the main characteristics on which a boy's suitability to school life depends: I had an ingrained dislike, not indeed of physical exercise, but of games. Football to me seemed merely a tiresome madness, and cricket the same madness in a more elaborate form. Instead, therefore, of promoting me to Harrow, where two of his brothers had been educated, he took, after many delays, a step for which I sincerely thanked him—he transferred me, by way of preparation for Oxford, to the most congenial and delightful of all possible private tutors, at whose house I spent the happiest years of my life.

CHAPTER III
A PRIVATE TUTOR DE LUXE

Early Youth Under a Private Tutor—Poetry—Premonitions of Modern Liberalism

The tutor of whom I have spoken was the Rev. W. B. Philpot, a favorite pupil of Doctor Arnold's at Rugby, an intimate friend of Tennyson's, and himself a devotee of the Muses. His domed forehead was massive, his features were delicately chiseled, and his eyes were a clear gray. His back hair—the only hair he had got—showed a slight tendency to assume picturesque and flowing curves on the collars of his well-made coats; and, having heard from my father that I, too, was a poet, he declared himself eager to welcome me, not only as a disciple, but also as a valued friend. Mr. Philpot lived at Littlehampton, where he occupied a most capacious house. It was the principal house in a very old-fashioned terrace, which faced a sandy common, and enjoyed in those days an uninterrupted view of miles of beach and the racing waves of the sea. Mr. Philpot's disciples numbered from ten to twelve. They had, for the most part, been removed from Harrow or Eton, by reason of no worse fault than a signal inclination to indolence; and though, even under their preceptor's genial and scholarly auspices, none of them except myself showed much inclination for study, we formed together an agreeable and harmonious party, much of its amenity being due to the presence of Mrs. Philpot, his wife, whose brother, Professor Conington, was then the most illustrious representative of Latin learning at Oxford.

We enjoyed, under Mr. Philpot's care, the amplest domestic comforts, and we enjoyed, under our own care, almost unlimited credit at every shop in the town. We had carriages, the hire of which went down in Mr. Philpot's account, whenever we wanted them for expeditions; and we would often drive out in the warm after-dinner twilights to a tea garden three miles away, where we lingered among the scent of roses till the bell of some remote church tower sounded, through the dewy quiet, its nine notes to the stars. We had boats on the Arun, a stream on which our oars would take us sometimes beyond Amberly, and not bring us back till midnight. On other occasions we would, like Tennyson's hero, "nourish a youth sublime" in wandering on the nocturnal beach, and, pre-equipped with towels, would bathe in the liquid moonlight.

The Littlehampton season, so far as visitors were concerned, was summer, and from the middle of May onward various ladies of ornamental and interesting aspect would make their appearance on the pavement of Beach Terrace, or, seen on the balconies of houses which had just unclosed their shutters, would trouble and enliven the atmosphere with suggestions of vague adventures. Some of these we came to know, as Mr. Philpot and his wife had many mundane acquaintances. Others—and indeed most of them—remained tantalizing mysteries to the end. At all events they filled the air with the subtle pollen of a romance which a closer familiarity with them might very possibly have destroyed.

The effect on myself of such influences was presently betrayed by the fact that poetry, as understood by Pope, no longer satisfied me. I gradually submitted to the dominion of Keats, Browning, and Matthew Arnold. Even at Denbury, in my most conservative days, I had so far escaped from the atmosphere of Pope's Pastorals that I had described a beautiful valley in which I would often sequester myself as a place—

Where no man's voice, or any voice makes stir,
Save sometimes through the leafy loneliness
The long loose laugh of the wild woodpecker.

One of my fellow pupils, whose youth had an air of manhood, and who played with much expression on the cornet, confided to me, on returning from a summer holiday, his adventures on the Lake of Como, where, resting on his oars, he had agitated with his musical notes the pulses of a fair companion. "Now there," he said, "you have something which, if you tried, you might manage to make a verse about." I tried, and the result was this:

The stars are o'er our heads in hollow skies,
In hollow skies the stars beneath our boat,
Between the stars of two infinities
Midway upon a gleaming film we float.

My lips are on the sounding horn;
The sounding horn with music fills.
Faint echoes backward from the world are born,
Tongued by yon distant zone of slumbering hills.

The world spreads wide on every side,
But cold and dark it seems to me.
What care I on this charmèd tide
For aught save those far stars and thee?

I accomplished, however, such feats of imagination, not on my friend's behalf only, but on my own also. Readers of Martin Chuzzlewhit will remember how "Baily Junior," who was once bootboy at Mrs. Todger's boarding-house, imagined that Mrs. Gamp was in love with him, and that her life was blighted by the suspicion that such a passion was hopeless. I, in common with other imaginative boys, was frequently beatified by the magic of a not unlike illusion. My practical hopes for the future, so far as I troubled to form any, were to enter the diplomatic service as soon as I left Oxford, and it seemed to me that this or that distinguished and beautiful lady, old enough to be my mother, would meanwhile be blighted by some hopeless passion for myself, or else—what, in my opinion, was a still more exciting alternative—that I should, like another Byron, be blighted into renown through her treachery by a misplaced passion for her. As I paced the sands at Littlehampton, I pictured myself as having discovered her faithlessness on the eve of my own departure for the Embassy at Constantinople, and I addressed to her the following epistle, which I could not, with all my ingenuity, manage to protract beyond the two opening stanzas:

For you the ballroom's jaded glow—
The gems unworthy of your hair.
For me the milk-white domes that blow
Their bubbles to the orient air.

Your heart at dawn in curtained ease
Shall ache through dreams that are not rest.
But mine shall leap to meet the seas
That broke against Leander's breast.

Such dreams are not more absurd than those of the French Jacobins, who thought themselves Gracchus or Brutus; and they were accompanied when I was at Littlehampton by the growth of other preoccupations, which related to matters very different from the romance of individual adolescence. Mr. Philpot, in his own tastes, and also in his choice of pupils, was fastidious to a degree, which perhaps would be out of date to-day, and had actually been known to apologize, under his breath, for the fact that one of his flock—a singularly handsome youth and heir to an enormous fortune—came of a family which "was still distinctly in business." But he betrayed, at the same time, strong Radical leanings. Indeed, through him I first became aware that Radicalism meant more than some perverse absurdity of the ignorant. He completely bewildered and at the same time amused his pupils by taking in a paper called The Beehive, one of the earliest of the "Labor organs" of England; and from this mine of wisdom he would on occasion quote. To most of us the views expressed by him seemed no more than comic oddities, but they were to myself so far a definite irritant that I devised, though I never showed them to him, a series of pictures called "The Radical's Progress," in which the hero began as a potboy in a public house, and ended as an overdressed ruffian, waving a tall silk hat and throwing rotten eggs at Conservative voters from a cart. A taste of Mr. Philpot's equalitarian sentiments was given to us one day at luncheon, the occasion being his wife's commendation of a celebrated Sussex bootmaker who had just called for orders. "I like that man," she said. "He is always so civil and respectful." "Mary Jane! Mary Jane!" said Mr. Philpot, clearing his throat, and speaking from the other end of the table, "that respectfulness of yours is a quality to which I myself attach very little importance." In view of this speech we felt considerable satisfaction when, a few hours later, the day being the 5th of November, a disturbance was made by some boys at the front door, and Mr. Philpot, snatching up a tall hat, went out to appease the storm by the serene majesty of his presence. He was far from gratified when the immediate result of his intervention was to elicit the disrespectful cry of "Hit 'n on the bloody drum."

But, besides the novelty, as we thought it, of his vague democratic opinions, he exhibited what to me was at least equally novel—namely, a liberalism before unknown to me with regard to theological doctrine. He never obtruded this on us in any systematic way; but on not infrequent occasions he solemnly gave us to understand that dissenters enjoyed the means of salvation no less fully than Churchmen; that sacraments were mere symbols useful for edification according to varying circumstances; that sacerdotal orders were mere certificates of the fitness of individuals for the office of Christian ministers, and that everything in the nature of dogmatic authority was due to, and tainted with, the apostacy of Babylonian Rome. To myself all this was shocking in an extreme degree, and I began to ask myself the question, which might otherwise not have occurred to me, of whether the Church of Rome was not perhaps the one true religion, after all.

These movements of the spirit on my part led to the following incident. Among Mr. Philpot's pupils was a shy and very delicate boy, whose parents took a house at Littlehampton, and with whom he lived. His father was a fire-eating Irish baronet, who might have walked out of the pages of one of Lever's novels. His diet was as meager as that of an Indian fakir, though not otherwise resembling it. It consisted of rum and milk; and his favorite amusement was lying down on his bed and shooting with a pistol at the wick of a lighted candle. His wife—a lady of gentle and somewhat sad demeanor—one day took it into her head to join the Catholic Church; and Mr. Philpot hastened, as soon as he heard the news, to ask her, in the name of common sense and of conscience, what could have induced her to take a step so awful. Her answer, so he informed me afterward, was that I had told her that it was the best thing she could do. I had no recollection of having tendered to her any such momentous advice, and Mr. Philpot, who hardly could help smiling, acquitted me of playing intentionally the part of a disguised Jesuit. I must, however, have said something on behalf of the mystical Babylon, for not long afterward I was busy with a theological poem, prominent in which were the two following lines:

Oh, mother, or city of the sevenfold throne,
We sit beside the severing sea and mourn—

and by way of correcting such defects in my sentiments Mr. Philpot lent me a work by Archer Butler, a Christian Platonist, who would provide me, in his opinion, with a religious philosophy incomparably more rational than the Roman. This work had the result of directing me to certain old translations of Plotinus and other Neoplatonists of Alexandria; and my dominant idea for a time was that in Alexandrian mysticism Anglicans would discover a rock, firmly based, on which they would bring Rome to her knees, and conquer the whole world.

But such juvenile theologies, and the secret troubles connected with them, did not seriously interfere with the adventurous optimism of youth. They did but give a special flavor to the winds blown from the sea, to the suggestions of the sunsets on which the eyes of youth looked, and mixed themselves with the verses of Browning, Matthew Arnold, and Shelley. But a yet more successful rival to the speculations of Archer Butler and Plotinus was, in my own case, another and a new poet, who had at that time just made himself famous. This poet was Swinburne, who had recently given to the world his first Poems and Ballads. That volume, on the ground that it was an outrage on morals and decency, had been received, when originally published, with such a howl of execration that the publishers hastily withdrew it, and for some time it was unobtainable; but at length another firm found courage enough to undertake its reissue. To Mr. Philpot, who knew it merely by extracts, the mere mention of this volume seemed to be something in the nature of an indecency. But there is always an attraction in the forbidden. I dreamed of this volume, from which I had seen extracts likewise; and at last a chance came to me of securing an apple from the boughs of this replanted tree of knowledge.

Among our various dissipations were occasional excursions to Brighton, and on one of these I was accompanied by a fellow pupil whose family had a house there in one of the then fashionable squares. The family was absent, but the house was open, and my friend proposed that we should sleep there and make a night of it. We accordingly telegraphed to Mr. Philpot that we should be back next day by breakfast time, and arranged to dine early, and spend the evening at the play. As we walked to the theater we found the shops still open, and we paused to look for a moment at the windows of Treacher's Library. In a long row of volumes I saw one bound in green. Its gilt lettering glittered, and the gaslight revealed to me the reissued poems of Swinburne. I went in and bought it and entered the dress circle hugging this priceless treasure. The play, I believe, had something to do with racing, but I hardly looked at the stage. My eyes and attention were magnetized by the green object on my knee. I occasionally peeped at its pages; but the light, while the play was in progress, was too dim to render the print legible. Between the acts, however, I began to decipher stanzas such as the following, and notes new to the world invaded my ears like magic:

The sea gives her shells to the shingle,
The earth gives her streams to the sea,

or again:

As the waves of the ebb drawing seaward
When their hollows are full of the night.

When had words, I asked myself, ever made music such as this? I felt by the time I got back to my friend's door that:

I on honeydew had fed,
And drunk the milk of paradise.

This magic still remained with me when, my days at Littlehampton being ended, I went at length to Oxford. But meanwhile to my conditions at home a new element was added, by which the scope of my experiences was at once greatly enlarged.

I have mentioned already that, during the first sixty years of the growth of Torquay, the owners of Cockington had preserved their rural seclusion intact, having refused, during that long period, to permit the erection of more than two villas on their property. But somewhere about the year 1860 a solitary exception was made in favor of Mr. William Froude, my mother's eldest brother, to whom, by my paternal uncle, a lease was granted of a certain number of acres on the summit of what was then a wooded and absolutely rural hill. Here he erected a house of relatively considerable size, from which, as a distant spectacle, Torquay was visible beyond a tract of intervening treetops. It was nearing completion at the time when I was first under Mr. Philpot's care. My father, being a complete recluse, and my kindred, whether at Cockington Court or otherwise, confining their intimacies to hereditary friends and connections, I found few fresh excitements at their houses or his beyond such as I could spin for myself, like a spider, out of my own entrails. It was, therefore, for me a very agreeable circumstance that presently in Chelston Cross, while I was still under Mr. Philpot's care, I was provided with a second home during a large part of my holidays, and subsequently of my Oxford vacations, where the stir of the outer world was very much more in evidence.

Distinguished as a man of science, a mathematician, and a classical scholar, Mr. Froude possessed the most fascinating manners imaginable. His wife, the daughter of an old-world Devonshire notable who once owned the borough of Dartmouth, returning two members for it, he himself being always one, was a woman of remarkable intellect, of a singularly genial shrewdness, and of manners attractive to every one with whom she might come in contact. Indeed, no two persons could have been more happily qualified than Mr. and Mrs. William Froude, together with their daughter (subsequently Baroness A. von Hugel), to render their house a center of interesting and intellectual society, and their circle of friends was widened by two adventitious circumstances. Mrs. Froude, under the influence of Newman, who was her frequent and intimate correspondent, had entered the Catholic Church, her children following her example, and the freemasonry of a common faith resulted in closely connecting her and hers with various old Catholic families and many distinguished converts; while Mr. Froude, at the time to which I now refer, was becoming, through his indulgence in purely accidental taste, a figure in the world of national, and even of international, affairs.

His favorite recreation was yachting, and one of his possessions was a sailing yacht. He was thus, as a man of alert observation, led to pay special attention to the relation of a vessel's lines to its behavior under different conditions in respect of its stability and speed, and the project occurred to him of testing his rough conclusions by means of miniature models, these being placed in some small body of water and then submitted to systematic experiments. Accordingly, soon after he had settled himself at Chelston Cross, he proceeded to lease a field which adjoined his garden, and constructed in it a sort of covered canal, along which models of various designs were towed, the towing-machine recording the various results by diagrams. The discoveries which Mr. Froude thus made soon proved so remarkable that Edward, Duke of Somerset (then First Lord of the Admiralty), secured for him a government grant, in order that his operations might be extended, the whole of the earlier expenses having been borne by Mr. Froude himself. The enterprise soon attracted the attention of other governments also; Admiral Popoff, on behalf of the Tsar, having come all the way from Russia to visit Mr. Froude in connection with it. But the pilgrims to Chelston Cross were not naval experts only. Torquay was at that time nearing its social zenith, and the rumor that Mr. Froude was conducting a series of mysterious experiments which bade fair to revolutionize the naval architecture of the world stirred interest in many men of mark—statesmen and others who were far from being naval experts, and also of ladies, many of them with charming eyes whose attention alone was, in my opinion at all events, sufficient to throw a halo of success round any experiment which excited it.

All of these, masculine and feminine alike, were sensible of the charm of Mr. William Froude and his family; and for many years, even in London, it would have been difficult to find a house more frequented than Chelston Cross by a society of well-known and entertaining persons, not only English, but continental and American also. Thus, during the years of my tutelage at Littlehampton and Oxford, which comprised but occasional and brief visits to London, I acquired a considerable acquaintance, and what may be called some knowledge of the world, before I had entered the world as my own master and on my own account. Of the persons with whom I became, during that period, familiar some idea may be given by a mention of the names, or by brief sketches, of a few of them—those being selected who, whether as types or otherwise, may still have some meaning and interest for the social generation of to-day.

CHAPTER IV
WINTER SOCIETY AT TORQUAY

Early Acquaintance with Society—Byron's Grandson—Lord Houghton—A Dandy of the Old School—Carlyle—Lord Lytton, and Others—Memorable Ladies

Of the men—the noteworthy men—with whom I thus became acquainted before I had escaped from the torture of my last examination at Oxford, most had a taste for literature, while some had achieved renown in it. Of these, however, the first with whom I became intimate was one whose literary connections were vicarious rather than personal. My friendship with him originated in the fact that he was an old friend of the Froudes, and, as soon as Chelston Cross was completed, he would pay them protracted visits there. This was the then Lord Wentworth, who for me was a magical being because he was Byron's grandson. Another acquaintance who brought with him a subtle aroma of poetry was Wentworth's remarkable brother-in-law, Wilfrid Blunt, then the handsomest of our younger English diplomatists, a breeder of Arab horses, and also the author of love poems which deserve beyond all comparison more attention than they have yet received. Others again were Robert Browning, Ruskin, Carlyle, and Swinburne. These I met either at Oxford or in London, but to those whom I came to know through the William Froudes at Torquay may be added Aubrey de Vere, the Catholic poet of Ireland, Lord Houghton, Lord Lytton, the novelist, and the second Lord Lytton, his son, known to all lovers of poetry under the pseudonym of "Owen Meredith." As figures then prominent in the winter society of Torquay, I may mention also a courtly cleric, the Rev. Julian Young, a great diner out and giver of dinners to the great, a raconteur of the first order, a very complete re-embodiment of the spirit of Sidney Smith, and, further, an old Mr. Bevan, who, sixty years before, when he occupied a house in Stratton Street, had flourished as an Amphitryon and a dandy under the patronage of the Prince Regent.

Of the ladies of Torquay who, together with men like these, were prominent in my social landscape as I to-day recollect it, it is less easy to speak, partly because they were more numerous, and partly because many of them impressed me in more elusive ways. I may, however, mention a few of them who were well known as hostesses—the Dowager Lady Brownlow, Mrs. Vivian, Lady Erskine of Cambo, Lady Louisa Finch-Hatton, Miss Burdett-Coutts, and Susan, Lady Sherborne. All these ladies were the occupants of spacious houses the doors of which were guarded by skillfully powdered footmen, and which, winter after winter, were so many social centers. Lady Sherborne, indeed, was far more than a hostess: she was unrivaled as a singer of simple English songs—songs which her low voice filled with every trouble of which the human heart is capable; and as such she was, under a thin disguise, celebrated by the first Lord Lytton in one of his latest novels. To these ladies might be added innumerable others whose claims on my memory do not in all cases lend themselves to very exact statement. Most of them were English, and some of them, then in the bloom of youth and beauty, have between that time and this played their parts in the London world and ended them. But not a few were foreign—vivacious Northerners from New York, with the sublimated wealth of all Paris in their petticoats; Southerners whose eyes were still plaintive with memories of the Civil War; Austrians such as the von Hugels; Germans such as Countess Marie and Countess Helen Bismarck; and Russians whose figures and faces I remember much more accurately than their names.

It is idle, however, to say more of these, whose charms are with the last year's snows. And yet of these there were two of whom I may, for purposes of illustration, say something in detail. The two were sisters—we may call them Miss X and Miss Y—whose invalid father, a cadet of a well-known family, rarely left Torquay, where for some months of the year his daughters, otherwise emancipated from parental control, stayed with him. Both of these sisters were beautiful, and, so far as the resident ladies of Torquay were concerned, they received what is incomparably the sincerest form of homage that extraordinary beauty can elicit from ladies who do not possess it. Each of them was labeled as possessing that mysterious thing called "a history," or a shadow on her reputation of some sort, which my imagination, as soon as I heard of it (I was then about sixteen), turned into a halo iridescent with the colors of romance. For me, in Swinburne's words, they were "daughters of dreams and of stories" before I knew either by sight, or had any prospect of doing so. Dreams, except unpleasant ones, do not often fulfill themselves, but an exception to this rule was one day made in my favor.

As I was going home for my holidays from Littlehampton to Devonshire, my compartment at Eastleigh Junction was invaded by a feminine apparition, accompanied by a French poodle, which she placed on the cushion opposite to her. Her dress, though I divined its perfection, was quiet and plain enough; but the compartment, as soon as she entered it, seemed to be filled at once with the kind of fugitive flash which sunlit water sometimes casts on a ceiling. Acting, I suppose, on the principle of "Love me, love my dog," I had the temerity to express a commendation, entirely insincere, of hers; and this being received with a graciousness not perhaps unmixed with amusement, we were very soon in conversation. She talked of Nice, of Baden-Baden, and London; then she got to literature—I cannot remember how—and a moment later she was vouchsafing to me the intimate information that she was a poetess, and had contributed an anonymous poem to a certain lately published collection. Then, having caught my name on a printed label, she said, with a smile, "Is it possible that you are on your way to Torquay?" I answered that I should be there shortly, and, while elaborating this proposition, I managed to inspect the French poodle's collar, on which was engraved the name of the fair owner. In a flash the personality of this "daughter of dreams" was disclosed to me. This was Miss X, the most talked about of the two wonderful sisters. As I gathered that she herself would be soon at Torquay likewise, I tried, when she got out at some intermediate station, to express a hope that, if we met in the street, she would not have wholly forgotten me; but my modesty would not allow me to find adequate words. On the Parade, however, at Torquay, a fortnight later we did meet. She at once welcomed me with a laugh as though I were an old acquaintance, and my intimacy with her lasted so long, and to so much practical purpose, that it wrung from me at last a poem of which the concluding lines were these:

Pause not to count the cost;
Think not, or all is lost—
Fly thou with me.

But the "incident," in parliamentary language, was soon afterward "closed," partly because of her marriage to a very sensible husband, and partly because, having become acquainted with her sister, I began to look on the sister as the more romantic figure of the two.

The most successful rival, however, to the excitements of young romance is to be found by some natures in the more complex stimulations of society. In these the feminine element plays a conspicuous part; but a part no less conspicuous is that played by the masculine. Moreover, as the object of the social passion, unlike that of the romantic, is not identified with the vagaries of any one individual, society for those who court it is a corporation that never dies. It is for each individual what no one individual ever can be—namely, a challenge to faculties or acquirements which are coextensive with life. I will, therefore, turn from Miss X, and the lines in which I suggested an elopement with her as a project desirable for both of us, to some of the male celebrities whose names I have just mentioned, and describe how they impressed me when I first made their acquaintance.

Of the well-known visitors who wintered at Torquay none was more punctual in his appearance than Lord Houghton, who found an annual home there in the house of two maiden aunts. Through these long-established residents he had for years been familiar with my family, and from the first occasion on which I met him he exhibited a friendship almost paternal for myself. Lord Houghton was a man who, as Dryden said of Shadwell, would have been the wittiest writer in the world if his books had been equal to his conversation. Certainly nothing which he wrote, or which a biographer has written about him, gives any idea of the gifts—a very peculiar mixture—which made him a marked figure in any company which his ubiquitous presence animated. He knew everybody of note in the fashionable and semifashionable world, and many who belonged to neither, such as the Tichborne Claimant, and Calcraft, the common hangman; and his views of life, from whatever point he looked at it, were expressed with a weighty brilliance or a subcynical humor. One day when lunching at Chelston Cross he was asked by Mrs. William Froude if he was, or had ever been, a Mason. "No," said Lord Houghton, "no. I have throughout my life been the victim of every possible superstition. I am always wondering why I have never been taken in by that." He was once sitting at dinner by the celebrated Lady E—— of T——, who was indulging in a long lament over the social decadence of the rising male generation. "When I was a girl," she said, "all the young men in London were at my feet." "My dear lady," said Lord Houghton, "were all the young men of your generation chiropodists?" Mr. C. Milnes Gaskell of Thornes told me of a perplexing situation in which he had once found himself, and of how he sought counsel about it from Lord Houghton, his kinsman. Gaskell's difficulty was this. A friend for whom he was acting as trustee had, without imposing on him any legal obligations in the matter, begged him with his dying breath to carry out certain instructions. These seemed to Gaskell extremely unwise, and objectionable, "and yet," he said to Lord Houghton, "of course a peculiar sanctity attaches, itself to dying wishes. What would you do in such a situation as mine?" For a little while Lord Houghton reflected, and then answered, with an air of grave detachment, "I always tell my family totally to disregard everything I say during the last six months of my life."

Of his social philosophy otherwise he gave me in the days of my youth many pithy expositions, with hints as to what I should do when I entered the world myself. One of his pieces of advice was especially appropriate to Torquay. This was to make the acquaintance of old Mr. Bevan, a lifelong intimate of his own. Accordingly my introduction to this mysterious personage was accomplished.

Mr. Bevan lived in a large villa close to that which was occupied by Miss Burdett-Coutts. Its discreetly shuttered windows, like so many half-closed eyelids, gave, when viewed externally, the impression that it was asleep or tenantless; but to ring the front-door bell was to dissipate this impression immediately. The portals seemed to open by clockwork. Heavy curtains were withdrawn by servitors half seen in the twilight, and the visitors were committed to the care of an Austrian groom of the chambers, who, wearing the aspect of a king who had stepped out of the Almanach de Gotha, led the way over soundless carpets to a library. This was furnished with a number of deep armchairs; and I recollect how, on the first occasion of my entering it, each of these chairs was monopolized by a drowsy Persian cat. For a moment, the light being dim, these cats, so it seemed to me, were the sole living things present; but a second later I was aware that a recumbent figure was slowly lifting itself from a sofa. This was Mr. Bevan. His attire was a blue silk dressing-gown, a youthfully smart pair of black-and-white check trousers, varnished boots, and a necktie with a huge pearl pin in it, the pearl itself representing the forehead of a human skull. His hands were like ivory, his face was like a clear-cut cameo. With the aid of a gold-headed cane that had once belonged to Voltaire he gently evicted a cat, so that I might occupy the chair next to him, and said, in the language of Brummell's time, that he was "monstrous glad to see me." He pointed to objects of interest which adorned his walls and tables, such as old French fashion-plates of ladies in very scanty raiment; to musical clocks, of which several were presents from crowned heads; to sketches by d'Orsay, and to framed tickets for Almack's. "Whenever the dear lady next door," he said, with a glance at the seminudities of the French fashion-plates, and alluding to Miss Burdett-Coutts, "comes to have a dish of tea with me, I have to lock those things up. I fear," he said, presently, "I'm in a shocking bad odor with her now." Only last night, he explained, he had received from one of the French Rothschilds a magnificent pâté de foie gras; and, having himself no parties in prospect, he sent this gastronomical treasure to Miss Coutts, who was about to entertain, as he knew, a large company at luncheon. There was one thing, however, which he did not know—the luncheon was to be given to the members of a certain society which had for its object the protection of edible animals from any form of treatment by which they might be needlessly incommoded. What, then, were the feelings of the hostess when she suddenly discovered that a dish which, with Mr. Bevan's compliments, had been solemnly placed before her was the most atrocious of all the abominations which the company had assembled to denounce! "It was sent back to me," said Mr. Bevan, "as though it were the plague in person. It's a pity that you and I can't eat it together. I'd ask you to dinner if only I were sure of my new cook. My last cook was with me for twenty years. Shall I tell you what he wrote in a letter when he had left me to join the army during the Franco-German War? 'Alas! monsieur,' he said, 'I must now make sorties instead of entrées.'" The banquet, however, which Mr. Bevan had suggested—and it was followed by others—took place before many days were over. The guests numbered eight or nine. I cannot recollect who they were; but the cooking, the wines, and the decorations of the table would have satisfied Ouida herself. The china, covered with royal crowns, was a gift from Louis Philippe. The wines, of which the names and dates were murmured by the servants who dispensed them, seemed all to have come from the cellars of a Rothschild or an Austrian emperor, while every dish was a delicacy unique in its composition and flavor, the last of them being a sort of "trifle," which the artistry of a chef had converted into the form of a pope's tiara. Mr. Bevan, in short, was a model of the ultrafastidious man of the world as he figures in the novels of Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli. I mentioned this impression of him some time afterward to Lord Houghton, and he said: "There's a very good reason for it. When Bulwer Lytton and Disraeli entered the London world, Mr. Bevan was one of their earliest friends. He privately helped Disraeli in social and other ways. To him Bulwer Lytton owed his first personal knowledge of the then world of the dandies; and Mr. Bevan," said Lord Houghton, "was the actual model from which, by both these writers, their pictures of the typical man of the world were drawn."

THOMAS CARLYLE

My acquaintance with Mr. Bevan, however, and even that with Lord Houghton, were but minor experiences as compared with another meeting of a similar yet contrasted kind. At the time of which I speak there was one British author whose influence as a philosophic moralist eclipsed that of any of his contemporaries. This writer was Carlyle. His fame was then at its highest, and the moral consciousness of ultrapolite drawing rooms was being stirred to its well-dressed depths by his attack on "the dandies" in his book, Sartor Resartus, which many earnest and ornamental persons were accepting as a new revelation. I was myself sufficiently familiar with its pages, and, though some of them roused my antagonism, I could not deny their genius. One morning, during a brief visit to London, I received a note from Mr. Froude the historian, asking me to come to luncheon, and I duly arrived at his house, not knowing what awaited me. I presently learned that he was going to introduce me to Carlyle, and, as soon as luncheon was over, he walked me off to Chelsea. In a fitting state of awe I found myself at last in the great philosopher's presence. When we entered his drawing room he was stooping over a writing table in the window, and at first I saw nothing but his back, which was covered with a long, shapeless, and extravagantly dirty dressing gown. When he rose to meet us his manners were as rough as his integument. His welcome to myself was an inarticulate grunt, unmistakably Scotch in its intonation; and his first act was to move across the room to the fireplace and light a "churchwarden" pipe by sticking its head between the bars. As I watched him perform this rite, I noticed that close to the fender was a pair of very dirty slippers. To me these things and proceedings were so many separate shocks, the result of my reflections being this: If you represent fame, let me represent obscurity. But worse was still to come. It was presently proposed that we should all go out for a walk, and as soon as we were in the open air, the philosopher blew his nose in a pair of old woolen gloves. I here saw at once an illustration of the chapter in Sartor Resartus in which the author denounced what he christened "The Sect of the Dandies," as described and glorified by Bulwer Lytton in Pelham. Illustration could go no farther.

The very next famous man whom I met after this glimpse of Carlyle I met a little later at Torquay. The famous man was Lord Lytton himself. He was dining at Chelston Cross, and, owing to some lady's defection, I was actually his nearest neighbor. I saw in him everything which the spirit of Carlyle hated. I saw in him everything which was then in my opinion admirable. All the arts of appearance, conversation, and demeanor which in Carlyle were aggressively absent were in him exhibited in a manner perhaps even too apparent. I was indeed, despite my reverence for him, faintly conscious myself that his turquoise shirt stud, set with diamonds, was too large, and that his coat would have been in better taste had the cuffs not been of velvet. But it seemed to me that from his eyes, keen, authoritative, and melancholy, all the passions, all the intellect, and all the experiences of the world were peering. To have sat by him was an adventure; to have been noticed by him was not far from a sacrament.

Before very long, and likewise at Chelston Cross, I became acquainted with his son, "Owen Meredith," afterward Viceroy of India. Having heard that, like him, I was touched with the fever of the Muses, he at once showed me signs of an amity which ended only with his life. Treating me as though I were a man of the same age as himself, he would take my arm, when wandering in the Froudes' shrubberies, and describe to me the poems to the production of which his future years would be consecrated, or ask me to confide to him my corresponding ambitions in return. Like most poets, he was not without personal vanities; but never was a man more free from anything like jealousy of a rival. To praise others was a pleasure to him as natural as that of being praised himself.

To some of the celebrities associated with my youthful days I was introduced, as I have said already, not at Torquay, but at Oxford. There was one, however, whom, though essentially an Oxonian, I first met at Torquay. This was Jowett, the renowned Master of Balliol, to whose college I was destined to be subsequently either a disgrace or ornament. Jowett was frequently at Torquay, having a sister who lived there, and he was specially asked to luncheon at Chelston Cross to inspect me and see how I should pass muster as one of his own disciples. His blinking eyes, the fresh pink of his cheeks, his snow-white hair, and the birdlike treble of his voice, have been often enough described, and I will only say of them here that, when he took me for a walk in the garden, I subconsciously felt them—I cannot tell why—to be formidable. He inquired as to my tastes and interests with a species of curt benignity; but to my interest in poetry he exhibited a most disconcerting indifference, and I felt during the whole of our interview that I was walking with a mild east wind. In this he was a marked contrast to Ruskin, Robert Browning, and certain others—especially to "Owen Meredith"—men between whom and myself there was at once some half-conscious bond. There are no estrangements so elusive, and yet so insuperable, as those which arise from subtle discords in temperament. And yet in certain individual acts, to which I shall refer presently, Jowett treated me, when I was safely settled at Oxford, with much sympathetic good nature. But these and other Oxford experiences shall be reserved for another chapter.

CHAPTER V
EXPERIENCES AT OXFORD

Early Youth at Oxford—Acquaintance with Browning, Swinburne, and Ruskin—Dissipation of an Undergraduate—The Ferment of Intellectual Revolution—The New Republic

My experiences at Oxford I may divide into two groups—namely, those belonging to the social life of an undergraduate, and those consisting of the effects—philosophical, moral, or religious—produced in an undergraduate's mind by the influence of academic teaching.

As to my social experiences, my recollections are, on the whole, pleasurable, but they are somewhat remote from anything that can properly be called scholastic. They are associated with the charm of certain cloistered buildings—with Magdalen especially, and the shades of Addison's Walk; with country drives in dogcarts to places like Witney and Abingdon; with dinners there in the summer evenings, and with a sense of being happily outside the radius of caps and gowns; with supper parties during the race weeks to various agreeable ladies; and with a certain concert which, during one Commemoration, was given by myself and a friend to a numerous company, and for which the mayor was good enough to lend us the Town Hall.

From the incubus of mere collegiate discipline I was perhaps more free than nine undergraduates out of ten. At the time when I matriculated there were within the college precincts no quarters available; and I and a fellow freshman who was in the same position as myself managed to secure a suite of unusually commodious lodgings. That particular partnership lasted only for a term, but subsequently I and two other companions took the whole upper part of a large house between us. We were never what is called "in college"; we rarely dined in Hall, having, besides a good cook, a very good dining room of our own, where we gave little dinners, much to our own contentment. We had, moreover, a spare bedroom, in which on occasion we could put up a visitor. One visitor who stayed with us for some weeks was Wentworth. Little things remain in the mind when greater things are forgotten; and one little incident which I remember of Wentworth's visit was this. Those were days when, for some mysterious reason, men, when they smoked, were accustomed to wear smoking caps. Wentworth had one of Oriental design, which he would somehow attach to his head by means of a jeweled pin. One evening when he was adjusting it the light caught his features at some peculiar angle, and for a fugitive moment his face was an exact and living reproduction of one of the best-known portraits of Byron.

Another incident belonging to this same order of memories occurred during one of the race weeks. About half past ten one evening, accompanied by three companions, I was making my way along a rather ill-illuminated street. My three companions were feminine, and the dresses of two of them—triumphs of the latest fashion—were calculated to arrest attention as though they were so much undulating moonlight. Suddenly I was aware that a strange voice was addressing me. It was the voice of a proctor, who, attended by several "bulldogs," was asking me, with a sinister though furtive glance at the ladies, what I was doing, and why I was not in cap and gown. I could see in his eyes a sense of having very neatly caught me in a full career of sin. I explained to him that Mrs. L., wife of one of the greatest of the then university magnates, and her two charming daughters had just been so kind as to have had supper with me, and that I was seeing them back to All Souls'.

To return, however, to the first week or fortnight which saw me and my original housemate established as full-blown freshmen; I cannot for the life of me remember by what steps we entered on any course of formal instruction, but he and I were told with very surprising promptitude that we should, without loss of time, give a breakfast to the Balliol Eight. We did so, and never before had I seen on any one matutinal tablecloth provisions which weighed so much, or disappeared so rapidly.

Not many days later I found myself at another breakfast table of a very different character, in the capacity not of host, but guest. The host on this occasion was Jowett, who asked me to breakfast with him in order that I might meet Browning. Browning by some one or other—I think it was James Spedding—had been shown certain manuscript verses—precious verses of my own. He had sent me a message of a flattering kind with regard to them, and he now held out both his hands to me with an almost boisterous cordiality. His eyes sparkled with laughter, his beard was carefully trimmed, and an air of fashion was exhaled from his dazzling white waistcoat. He did not embarrass me by any mention of my own performances. He did not, so far as I remember, make any approach to the subject of literature at all, but reduced both Jowett and myself to something like complete silence by a constant flow of anecdotes and social allusions, which, though not deficient in point, had more in them of jocularity than wit. He was not, perhaps, my ideal of the author of "Men and Women," or the singer of "Lyric Love" as "a wonder and a wild desire"; but there the great man was, and when I quitted his presence and found myself once more in undergraduate circles I felt myself shining like Moses when he came down from the mount.

I was subsequently enveloped in a further reflected glory, due also to Jowett's kindness—a kindness which survived many outbursts of what I thought somewhat petulant disapproval. I received from him one day a curt invitation to dinner, and presented myself, wondering mildly to what this mark of favor could be due. But wonder turned to alarm when, on entering the Master's drawing-room, I discovered in the dim twilight no other figure than his own. His manner, however, though not effusive, was civil, and was certainly fraught with no menace of any coming judgment on my sins. We exchanged some ordinary observations on the weather and kindred topics. Then, looking over his shoulder, he uttered a half-audible word or two, which, being plainly not addressed to me, must have been addressed to somebody else. Presently, out of the shadows, a somebody else emerged. This was a person remarkable for the large size of his head, his longish hair, his insignificant stature, and his singularly sloping shoulders. I was introduced to him without catching his name. Dinner was announced forthwith. It was evident that, except for myself, this person was to be the sole guest. In the candlelight of the dinner table I realized that this person was Swinburne.

The dinner passed off pleasantly. Swinburne showed himself an intelligent, though by no means a brilliant, talker; and as soon as we had returned to the drawing room, where we drank a cup of coffee standing, Jowett, who had some engagement, abruptly left us to finish the evening by ourselves. On Swinburne the effect of the Master's disappearance was magical. His manner and aspect began to exhibit a change like that of the moon when a dim cloud drifts away from it. Of what we discussed at starting I have not the least remembrance, but before very long Swinburne was on the subject of poetry. His observations at first consisted of general criticisms. Then he began to indulge in quotations from various poems—none of them, I think, from his own; but, however this may have been, the music seemed to intoxicate him. The words began to thrill me with the spell of his own recitation of them. Here at last I realized the veritable genius who had made the English language a new instrument of passion. Here at last was the singer for whose songs my ears were shells which still murmured with such lines as I had first furtively read by the gaslight of the Brighton theater. My own appreciation as a listener more and more encouraged him. If he began a quotation sitting, he would start from his chair to finish it. Finally he abandoned the restraints of a chair altogether. He began, with gesticulating arms, to pace the room from one end to the other, reciting passage after passage, and appealing to me, who managed to keep pace with him, for applause. "The most beautiful lines that Tennyson ever wrote," he exclaimed, "were these, from 'Maud':

"And like silent lightning under the stars
She seemed to divide in a dream from a band of the blest.

"Yes," he went on, "and what did the dream-Maud tell her lover when she had got him? That the salvation of the world depended on the Crimean War and the prosecution of Lord Palmerston's policy." Finally he strayed into quotations from Sidney Dobell, a writer now hardly remembered, with one of which, describing a girl bathing, he made the Master's academic rafters ring:

"She, with her body bright sprinkles the waters white,
Which flee from her fair form, and flee in vain,
Dyed with the dear unutterable sight,
And circles out her beauties to the circling main."

He was almost shouting these words when another sound became audible—that of an opening door, followed by Jowett's voice, which said in high-pitched syllables, "You'd both of you better go to bed now."

My next meeting with Swinburne took place not many days later. He had managed meanwhile to make acquaintance with a few other undergraduates—all of them enthusiastic worshipers—one of whom arranged to entertain him at luncheon. As I could not, being otherwise engaged, be present at this feast myself, I was asked to join the party as soon as possible afterward. I arrived at a fortunate moment. Most of the guests were still sitting at a table covered with dessert dishes. Swinburne was much at his ease in an armchair near the fireplace, and was just beginning, as a number of smiling faces showed, to be not only interesting, but in some way entertaining also. He was, as I presently gathered, about to begin an account of a historical drama by himself, which existed in his memory only—a sort of parody of what Victor Hugo might have written had he dramatized English events at the opening of the reign of Queen Victoria. The first act, he said, showed England on the verge of a revolution, which was due to the frightful orgies of the Queen at "Buckingham's Palace." The Queen, with unblushing effrontery, had taken to herself a lover, in the person of Lord John Russell, who had for his rival "Sir Peel." Sir Peel was represented as pleading his own cause in a passionate scene, which wound up as follows: "Why do you love Lord John Russell, and why do you not love me? I know why you love Lord John Russell. He is young, he is beautiful, he is profligate. I cannot be young, I cannot be beautiful, but I will be profligate." Then followed the stage direction, "Exit for ze Haysmarket." In a later act it appeared that the Queen and Lord John Russell had between them given the world a daughter, who, having been left to her own devices, or, in other words, to the streets, reappears as "Miss Kitty," and is accorded some respectable rank. Under these conditions she becomes the object of much princely devotion; but the moral hypocrisy of England has branded her as a public scandal. With regard to her so-called depravities nobody entertains a doubt, but one princely admirer, of broader mind than the rest, declares that in spite of these she is really the embodiment of everything that is divine in woman. "She may," he says, "have done everything which might have made a Messalina blush, but whenever she looked at the sky she murmured 'God,' and whenever she looked at a flower she murmured 'mother.'"

The vivacity and mischievous humor with which Swinburne gave his account of this projected play exhibited a side of his character which I have never even seen mentioned, and the appreciation and surprise of his audience were obviously a great delight to him. He lay back in his chair, tossed off a glass of port, and presently his mood changed. Somehow or other he got to his own serious poems; and before we knew where we were he was pouring out an account of Poems and Ballads, and explaining their relation to the secrets of his own experiences. There were three poems, he said, which beyond all the rest were biographical: "The Triumph of Time," "Dolores," and "The Garden of Proserpine." "The Triumph of Time" was a monument to the sole real love of his life—a love which had been the tragic destruction of all his faith in woman. "Dolores" expressed the passion with which he had sought relief, in the madnesses of the fleshly Venus, from his ruined dreams of the heavenly. "The Garden of Proserpine" expressed his revolt against the flesh and its fevers, and his longing to find a refuge from them in a haven of undisturbed rest. His audience, who knew these three poems by heart, held their breaths as they listened to the poet's own voice, imparting its living tones to passages such as the following—

This is from "The Triumph of Time":

"I will say no word that a man may say,
Whose whole life's love goes down in a day;
For this could never have been, and never,
Though the gods and the years relent, shall be."

This is from "Dolores":

"Oh, garment not golden but gilded,
Oh, garden where all men may dwell,
Oh, tower not of ivory, but builded
By hands that reach heaven out of hell."

This is from "The Garden of Proserpine":

"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free;
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."

Then, like a man waking up from a dream, Swinburne turned to our host and said, nervously, "Can you give me another glass of port?" His glass was filled, he emptied it at a single draught, and then lay back in his chair like a child who had gone to sleep, the actual fact being, as his host soon recognized, that, in homely language, he was drunk.

Drink, indeed, was Swinburne's great enemy. He had, when I met him at Balliol, finished his own career there more than twelve years ago; but he had since then been a frequent guest of the Master's, who treated him, in respect of this weakness, with a watchful and paternal care. When I dined with him at the Master's Lodge there was nothing to tempt him but a little claret and water. The consequence was that afterward he was brilliant as the burning bush till he finally went in his sober senses to bed. He was not, I think, intemperate in the sense that he drank much. His misfortune was that a very little intoxicated him.

I associate my early days at Balliol with yet another memorable meeting. One of the most prominent and dignified of the then residents at Oxford was Sir Henry Acland, who, as a Devonshire man, knew many of my relations, and had also heard something about myself. He was a friend and entertainer of men of all sorts of eminence; and while I was still more or less a freshman he invited me to join at his house a very small company in the evening, the star of the occasion being a university lecturer on art, who was just entering on his office, and whose name was illustrious wherever the English language was spoken. He, too, knew something about me, having been shown some of my verses, and to meet him was one of my cherished dreams. Only half a dozen people were present, and from a well-known portrait of him by Millais I recognized his form at once. This was Ruskin. He had sent me, through Lord Houghton or somebody, a verbal message of poetic appreciation already. I was now meeting him in the flesh. The first thing in him which struck me was the irresistible fascination of his manner. It was a manner absolutely and almost plaintively simple, but that of no diplomat or courtier could be more polished in what was at once its weighty and its winning dignity. Such was his charm for the elect; but here again comes the question of temperament. Between Ruskin and Jowett there was a temperamental antipathy. An antipathy of this kind is a very different thing from any reasoned dislike, and of this general fact Ruskin and Jowett were types. I was myself another. Just as Jowett repelled so Ruskin attracted me. During my later days at Oxford I grew to know Ruskin intimately, and my sympathy with his genius never lost its loyalty, though for a long time certain of his ideas—that is to say, ideas relating to social politics—were to me barely intelligible, and though, when they became intelligible, I regarded them as perversely mischievous.

But beneath these social experiences, many of them sufficiently frivolous, and all of them superficial in so far as their interest related to individuals, Oxford provided me with others which went to the very roots of life. Of these deeper experiences the first was due to Jowett, though its results, so far as I was concerned, were neither intended, understood, nor even suspected by him.

The most sensational event which occurred during my first term at Balliol was the suicide of one of the undergraduates. He was a poor Scotch student of a deeply religious character, who had found, so his friends reported, that the faith of his childhood had been taken from him by Jowett's skeptical teachings, and who had ended by cutting his throat with a razor in Port Meadow. Jowett preached his funeral sermon—the only sermon which I ever, so far as my recollection serves me, heard preached in Balliol chapel by himself or by anybody else. Jowett, who on the occasion was obviously much moved, chose for his text the story of the woman taken in adultery, and of Christ's challenge to her judges, "Which of you will dare to assault with the first stone?" The course of his argument was curious. He began with examining the passage from the standpoint of verbal scholarship, the gist of his criticism being that its authenticity was at least doubtful. From this argument he diverged into one of wider scope, insisting on how much is doubtful in what the Gospels record as the sayings of our Lord generally, from which illuminating reflection he advanced to one wider still. It was as follows: Since we know so little of what Christ really said about God, how much less can we really know of the nature of God himself; of what he loves, condemns, or, in his infinite mercy, pardons?—the moral being that we ought to cast stones at nobody, and should in especial refrain from condemning our departed brother, who, for anything which we knew to the contrary, might be just as acceptable to God as any one of ourselves.

All my impressions of Jowett as a religious teacher were summed up in my impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very much more nebulous, or what many would describe as nil. A story used to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who confessed to him that his deepest trouble was his failure to find anything which accurate reason could accept as a proof of God's existence. Jowett did not utter a word till he and the young man parted. Then he said, "Mr. Smith, if you can't find a satisfactory proof of God's existence during the next three weeks, I shall have to send you down for a term." Had I been in the young man's place I should have retorted, "And pray, Mr. Jowett, what satisfactory proofs are you able to adduce yourself?"

But, in speaking of Jowett thus, I am not wholly, or even mainly, speaking of him as a single individual, I speak of him mainly as a type, exceptional indeed on account of his signal intellect, but otherwise representing a moral and mental attitude which was common not only to the teaching body of Balliol, but also to the age in general, in so far as its traditional temper had been influenced by scientific knowledge. Nearly all the Balliol dons—even those who never spoke of religion—seemed to start with the same foregone conclusion, that the dogmatic theology of the churches was as dead as the geocentric astronomy. They assumed this, just as Jowett did, on what purported to be scientific grounds, and yet when they sought, as he did, to put in the place of this some solemn system of quasi-scientific ethics, their attempts seemed to me to exhibit the same absurdity with which Jowett's constructive teaching had first made me familiar. Their denials of everything which to me had been previously sacred appalled me like the overture to some approaching tragedy. Their confident attempts at some new scheme of affirmations affected me like a solemn farce.

Some foretastes of the new gospel had, as I have said already, been vouchsafed to me at Littlehampton by Mr. Philpot. I now saw what logically the new gospel implied. The sense of impending catastrophe became more and more acute. I felt like a man on a ship, who, having started his voyage in an estuary, and imagining that a deck is by nature as stable as dry land, becomes gradually conscious of the sway of the outer sea, until, when he nears the bar, showers of spray fall on him, he perceives that the bows are plunging, and at last the percussion of waves makes the whole vessel shudder.

Such, then, were the effects on me of the religious liberalism of Oxford, and in this respect, as I now see, looking backward, my condition was temperamentally the same as it had been when I was still under the tuition of superorthodox governesses. In those days any questioning of the verbal inspiration of the Bible and the miraculous events recorded in it seemed to me, as it did later, to be at once absurd and blasphemous. There was, however, even then, something which to me seemed no less absurd than "the infidel's" attack on the dogmas of Christian orthodoxy—for I knew that "the infidel" existed—and this was the manner in which the Anglican clergy defended them. I was always, when a child, looking forward each week to the Sunday sermon, in the hope of finding some portions of it which I could either mimic or parody. I remember one sermon in particular, which the preacher devoted to a proof of God's existence. My own mental comment was, "If anything could make me such a fool as to doubt this self-evident truth, your arguments and the inflections of your voice would certainly make me do so." I heard another preacher indulge in a long half-hour of sarcasm at the expense of "the shallow infidel, who pointed to the sky and said, 'Where are the signs of His coming?'" In those days we were required by a governess to write out the morning's sermon as a pious discipline in the afternoon. This sermon I reproduced with a series of pictures in the margin, one of which represented the "shallow infidel" exploring the sky through a telescope, which he did his best to steady by holding it against the stem of a palm tree. And yet so literally true did all orthodox doctrines seem to me that I believed a member of my family to have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost by kissing a New Testament and swearing that one of the nursery maids had mispronounced some word—an imputation which she had indignantly denied.

This dual mood, as renewed in me by Oxford influences, differed from its earlier and childish form in the fact that my sense of the absurdities distinctive of modern religious thought acquired a wider range and went deeper than I had at first anticipated. The absurdities of which I was conscious as a child were those of the arguments by which the orthodox clergy endeavored to defend doctrines which were then for myself indubitable. At Oxford I became conscious of an absurdity to which as a child I had been a stranger—namely, the absurdity of the arguments by which men who repudiated orthodoxy altogether endeavored to establish in its place some purely natural substitute, such as the "enthusiasm of humanity," a passion for the welfare of posterity, or a godless deification of domestic puritanism for its own sake. In addition to this second absurdity a third gradually dawned on me. This was the absurdity, common to all parties alike, of supposing that, if the cardinal doctrines of religious orthodoxy were discredited—namely, that the human soul is immortal, that the human will is free, and that a God exists who is interested in the fortunes of each soul individually—these doctrines, in disappearing, would take away with them nothing but themselves alone; the actual fact being that they are known to mankind generally not so much in themselves as in their indirect effects on that plexus of moral, emotional, and intellectual values on which all our higher interests in the drama of life depend.

Thus, in whatever direction I turned, I felt that, if I listened to the reasoning of liberal Oxford, I was confronted with an absurdity of one kind or another. Of the only liberal answers attempted to the riddle of life, not one, it seemed to me, would bear a moment's serious criticism; and yet, unless the orthodox doctrines could be defended in such a way that in all their traditional strictness they could once more compel assent, life, in the higher sense of the word, would—such was my conviction—soon cease to be tolerable.

The only human being at that time who held and publicly expressed views similar to my own, so far as I knew, was Ruskin. Of the riddle which I found so importunate, he did not profess to have discovered any adequate solution of his own. On the contrary, he confessed himself a victim of a tragic and desolating doubt, but he did boldly proclaim that until some solution was found the men of the modern world were of all men the most miserable. Take, he said, the belief in immortality, which, according to some men, is a matter of mild indifference. It is really a belief which affects our whole conception of the human race. Consider, he said, the carnage of war, with its pile of unnumbered corpses. It must make some matter to us whether, according to our serious belief, each man has died like a dog, and left nothing in the way of a personal existence behind him, or "whether out of every Christian-named portion of that ruinous heap there has gone forth into the air and the dead-fallen smoke of battle some astonished condition of soul unwillingly released."

JOHN RUSKIN

Here, it seemed to me, was the true voice of reason and challenging passion combined—a voice which would not say "peace when there was no peace," and which I missed altogether in Jowett and the Oxford liberals generally. Jowett always regarded me as a mere dilettante and an idler, who was bound to disgrace Balliol by coming to grief in the schools, and he was, I think, mortified rather than pleased when I won, in my second year, the Newdigate prize for poetry.

But mine was certainly no mere idler's mood; and whatever Jowett may have thought of me when he heard of my giving parties to ladies, of my driving them out to picnics, or of my concocting prize poems, my mental life at Oxford was far from being a life of idleness. On the contrary, from my second year of residence onward I was constantly engaged in tentative sketches of a book in which I hoped some day to give a comprehensive picture of the moral and intellectual condition to which my Oxford experiences had by that time raised or reduced me. That book was The New Republic, with regard to which in this place a few words may be apposite.

The form of nearly every book is more or less fashioned on some model or models. My own models in the case of The New Republic were The Republic of Plato, the Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter, and the so-called novels of Peacock. All these books introduce us to circles of friends who discuss questions of philosophy, religion, art, or the problems of social life, each character representing some prevalent view, and their arguments being so arranged as to have, when taken together, some general and coherent meaning. Many of Peacock's characters are taken direct from life, and in this respect I made myself a disciple of Peacock. My characters in The New Republic were all portraits, though each was meant to be typical; but the originals of some—such as Lady Ambrose, the conventional woman of the world—were of no public celebrity, and to mention them here would be meaningless. The principal speakers, however, were drawn without any disguise from persons so eminent and influential that a definite fidelity of portraiture was in their case essential to my plan. Mr. Storks and Mr. Stockton, the prosaic and the sentimental materialists, were meant for Professors Huxley and Tyndall. Mr. Luke was Matthew Arnold. Mr. Rose was Pater. Mr. Saunders, so far as his atheism was concerned, was suggested by Professor Clifford. Mrs. Sinclair was the beautiful "Violet Fane"; and finally—more important than any others—Doctor Jenkinson was Jowett, and Mr. Herbert was Ruskin. All these people I set talking in polite antagonism to one another, their one underlying subject being the rational aim of life, and the manner in which a definite supernatural faith was essential, extraneous, or positively prejudicial to this.

To all the arguments advanced I endeavored to do strict justice, my own criticisms merely taking the form of pushing most of them to some consequence more extreme, but more strictly logical, than any which those who proclaimed them either realized or had the courage to avow. Thus when Doctor Jenkinson descanted in his sermon on the all-embracing character of Christianity, I made him go on to say that "true Christianity embraces all opinions—even any honest denial of itself." By this passage Browning told me that Jowett was specially exasperated, and Browning had urged on him that such a temper was quite unreasonable. I think myself, on the contrary, that Jowett had an excellent reason for it, this reason being that Jowett's position was false, and that my method of criticism had brought out its absurdity. Here indeed was the method employed by me throughout the whole book, except in the case of Ruskin, and there the method was inverted. Just as I sought to show that Jowett's principles, if carried far enough, ended in absurdity, so did I seek to show that Ruskin's principles, despite their superficial absurdities, ended, if carried far enough, in the nearest approach to truth which under modern conditions of thought and knowledge is possible. In my effort to give point to what were really my own underlying convictions, I wrote The New Republic six or seven times over, and in doing so it became clearer and clearer to me what my own convictions were. They ended in an application of the method of a reductio ad absurdum to everything; and this fact I finally indicated in the words of a Greek epigram which I placed as a motto on the title-page: "All is laughter, all is dust, all is nothingness, for all the things that are arise out of the unreasonable."

Such seemed to me the upshot of all the intellectual and moral teaching of Oxford, of the faintly hinted liberalism of Mr. Philpot's teachings which had preceded them, and of my own enlarging experiences of male and female society. That such a conclusion was satisfactory I did not for a moment feel, but here was the very reason which urged me on to elaborate it. The mood which expresses itself in a sense that life is merely ridiculous was, so my consciousness protested, nothing more and nothing better than a disease, and my hope was that I should get rid of it by expressing it once for all as pungently and as completely as I could, after which I would address myself to the project of finding a foundation for some positive philosophy of life which should indeed be fortified by reason, but against which reason should not prevail. When, however, The New Republic had been completed and given to the world, I felt that my sense of the absurdities of current liberal philosophy had not even yet exhausted itself; and I presently supplemented that work by another—The New Paul and Virginia, or Positivism on an Island, a short satirical story in the style of Voltaire's Candide. This is a story of an atheistic professor, such as Tyndall, who, together with a demimondaine, now the wife of a High Church colonial bishop, is wrecked on a desert island, and there endeavors to redeem her from the degrading superstitions of theism and to make her a partner with him in the sublime service of Humanity—of that "Grand Être," so he says to her, "which, so far as we are concerned, has come in the course of progress to consist of you and me." The New Paul and Virginia was followed some two years later by Is Life Worth Living? a formal philosophical treatise, in which the values of life and their connection with religious belief, the methods of fiction being abandoned, were submitted to scientific analysis. These three books represent the compound results produced by the liberalism of Oxford on a mind such as my own, which had been cradled in the conservatisms of the past. But meanwhile I had left Oxford behind me, and the death of my father and other family events which occurred about that time left me free to determine my own movements, the consequence being that thenceforward the months of what is called "the season" found me year by year in London from Easter till the approach of August. Of my early experiences of London, and of the kind of life I lived there, I will now give some brief account, not disdaining the humble aid of gossip.

CHAPTER VI
THE BASIS OF LONDON SOCIETY

Early Experiences of London Society—Society Thirty Years Ago Relatively Small—Arts and Accomplishments Which Can Flourish in Small Societies Only

Comparing London society as it was when I first knew it with what it has since become, I should say that its two most distinguishing features were its then comparative smallness and its practically unquestioned position. Its position was mainly founded on the hereditary possession of land, its nucleus being the heads of more or less ancient families whose rent rolls enabled them to occupy London houses and play an agreeable and ornamental part in the business of entertaining and being entertained for the few months called "the season." Certain qualifications in the way of family being given, mere personal charm and accomplishment would often secure for their possessors a high place in its ranks. Indeed, such qualifications were by no means always necessary, as was shown in still earlier days by the cases of Moore and Brummell; but, on the whole, the social conditions then prevalent in London coincided with what, in the country, I had known and accepted, when a child, as part of the order of Nature. Of society as represented by a definite upper class, the basis was still inheritance in the form of inherited land.

This was no mere accident. It was a fact definitely explicable in terms of statistical history. At the time of the battle of Waterloo, outside the landed class there did not exist in England five hundred people whose incomes exceeded £5,000 a year. The landed class was typically the rich class of the country. The condition of things since then has in this respect been reversed. During the sixty years succeeding the battle of Waterloo business incomes exceeding £5,000 a year had increased numerically in the proportion of one to eight, while since that time the increase has been still more rapid. On the other hand, not only has the number of the large agricultural landlords shown no increase whatever, but since the year 1880 or thereabouts their aggregate rental has suffered an actual decrease, having fallen in the approximate proportion of seventy to fifty-two. This shrinkage in the fortunes of the old landed families, except those who were owners of minerals or land near towns, and the multiplication of families newly enriched by business, were, when I first knew London, proceeding at a rate which had never been known before. It was, however, slow in comparison with what it has since become, and the old landed families, at the time to which I am now alluding, still retained much of their old prestige and power, as is shown by the fact that the leaders of both political parties were still mainly drawn from the limited class in question. It is shown with even greater clearness by facts more directly presenting themselves to the eye of the ordinary observer.

One of these is the aspect which thirty years ago was presented by Hyde Park during the season at certain hours of the day. Thirty years ago, for an hour or two before luncheon and dinner, its aspect was that of a garden party, for which, indeed, no invitations were necessary, but on which as a fact few persons intruded who would have been visibly out of place on the lawn of Marlborough House. To-day this ornamental assemblage has altogether disappeared, and its place has been gradually taken by a miscellaneous crowd without so much as a trace even of spurious fashion left in it. Thirty years ago Piccadilly in June was a vision of open carriages brilliant with flowerlike parasols, high-stepping horses, and coachmen, many of whom still wore wigs. To-day these features have been submerged by a flow of unending omnibuses which crowds fight to enter or from which they struggle to eject themselves. Fashionable hotels have succumbed to the same movement. Of such hotels thirty years ago the most notable were commonly described as "private"—a word which implied that no guests were received who were not known to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials. Claridge's, until it was rebuilt, was an establishment of this description. An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the mere chance latchkey of wealth, no more obtain access to such hotels as these than he could make himself to-day a member of some exclusive club by placing the amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall porter.

But society, as it was in this relatively recent past, did not differ from that of to-day merely in the fact of having been absolutely less numerous and of less multifarious origin. It differed in the effects which a mere restriction of numbers, coupled with inherited wealth and a general similarity of antecedents, has on the quality of social intercourse itself. In societies which are small, and yet at the same time wealthy enough to secure for their members as a whole a monopoly of varied experience, and invest them with a corporate power which cannot be similarly concentrated in any other cohesive class, these members are provided, like the believers in some esoteric religion, with subtle similarities of tastes, behavior, and judgment, together with daily opportunities of observing how far, and in what particulars, individuals belonging to their class conform or do not conform to them. These are constant provocations to refinements of mutual criticism which give life and conversation a zest not attainable otherwise. Finally a society which is small enough to possess such common standards, and whose position is so well established as to pervade it with a sense that no standards are superior to its own, tends to make manners perfectly simple and natural which could otherwise be approached only by conscious effort or affectation.

The result of such conditions, in so far as they prevailed in London when London life became first familiar to myself, was that society, in the narrower sense of the word, was taken in a spirit more serious than that which it excites to-day. To say nothing of ambitious hostesses who vied with one another in the entertainment of guests whose very names had a ring of importance when printed in the Morning Post, society was, even for men of conspicuous talent—such, for example, as Lord Houghton, Augustus Savile, and Hayward—a matter as serious as politics, or any war not of the first importance. To men like Christopher Sykes and Kenneth Howard it was very much more engrossing. Thus, at a luncheon party which I remember, a lady who had just reached London from Scotland asked, by way of conversation, "What is going on to-night?" Lord Houghton, who was one of the guests, answered, with all the gravity of a judge summing up the evidence at a murder trial: "The only event of to-night is the ball at Grosvenor House. There's nothing else worth mentioning." "The ball of to-night," I heard him say on a similar occasion, "will be Lady Harriet ——'s. That is sure to be good, for Lady Harriet knows nobody, so she can't ask the wrong people, and her list of invitations is in the hands of Augustus Savile." One of the cleverest hostesses of that time, Lady G——, denounced to a friend the impertinence of a "society paper" which had ventured to describe one of her entertainments as "political"; and she had actually been to the trouble of writing to inform the editor that her parties were fashionable gatherings and not political menageries. The then Lord Orford, a man of the highest literary culture, who professed to despise society, and very rarely entered it, said that his own idea of real happiness was "to go nowhere, and yet to be asked everywhere."

The seriousness with which society was taken, and the fear of its judgments entertained even by many of its most conspicuous members, was illustrated in a way now oddly belated by the celebrated "Lady A.," as she was called, who occasionally lent her house in Hertford Street for the month of August to her niece, Mrs. Marcus Hare. To this act of kindness she attached one strict condition—namely, that the blinds of the front windows should always be drawn down, lest anyone should suspect that she—Lady A. herself—was guilty of remaining in London when the fashionable season was over. A well-known social philosopher, Lady E——of T——, gave me in my early days an ultraserious lecture on the principles by which a young man should be guided when beginning to form acquaintances in a world like that of London. Her advice was almost identical with that which, in Bulwer Lytton's novel, Pelham, is administered to the hero by his mother. "You should be specially careful," said Lady E—— to me, "as to people with whom you dine. Some are remarkable for their chefs, some for the importance of their company. There are all sorts of differences which a young man has to learn. There are some evening parties," she said, "at which it will be enough for him to be merely seen; and, with very few exceptions"—this was her concluding counsel—"you should never be seen at a ball in a two-roomed house—a house, for example, like the houses in Eaton Place."

Another sort of social philosopher, in his own way equally typical, was Hamilton Aidé, who united to the life of society the cultivation of art, and was equally serious in his combined devotion to both. He was a musician, a poet, a singer of his own songs in a voice perfectly modulated. He was also as a painter in water colors one of the most distinguished amateurs of his time. His landscapes, indeed, and his sketches of old houses and gardens, Scotch castles, and the seclusions of Italian villas, were in themselves poems; and when he entertained the world—a world very carefully chosen—the attention of his guests was divided between his music and his great portfolios. His bachelor's quarters provided him with an appropriate background. His writing table was dominated by something resembling an altarpiece—namely, a large and ingenious rack, on which was arranged a battalion of invitations to balls and dinner parties; and his blotting book was flanked by two delicate volumes, one being a libro d'oro in the shape of a bulky visiting list, the other being a list of his engagements from day to day. He and his accomplishments were a finished work of art between them. But in a larger world his development would have been no more possible than the development of an orchid in the middle of a crowded street.

And the same is the case with regard to society generally. There are certain accomplishments which a small society tends to develop, and which a larger society does not. Among these the art of conversation is prominent, especially when it takes the form of wit, or becomes the vehicle of certain kinds of humor. I may further illustrate this general observation by mentioning a few individuals, of whom three at least are still well known by name, not to society only, but also to the world at large. These are Constance, Duchess of Westminster; Caroline, Duchess of Montrose, and the Duchess of Somerset, who, as Lady Seymour, was the heroine of the Eglinton Tournament. These ladies were all remarkable for the peculiar magic of their voices and for a peculiar sense of humor which their voices managed to indicate, and which gave its quality to their general views of life. They none of them laughed audibly, but the voice of each was a sort of laugh in solution, and this would produce a sense of laughter in others, even though in the words of the speaker herself there was no special felicity.

The Duchess of Montrose, by the mere tone in which she mentioned a name, would often convey a whole criticism of the person named; and though her topics and language were not infrequently of a kind which caused austere censors to reprehend, and even to avoid, her, yet if such censors found themselves by chance in her company, they would one and all be listening to her before five minutes was over.

The Duchess of Somerset's voice had the same spell of ambushed laughter in it, but she was a far greater mistress of the actual arts of language, if "art" be a word appropriate to the exercise of natural genius. I was asked by her daughter, Lady Guendolen Ramsden, to help her in compiling a volume of family memoirs, which would, so we hoped, have comprised a number of the Duchess's letters; but most of these had to be discarded as not suitable for publication, because of the numerous sketches contained in them of various friends or connections, which were drawn with a wit and precision worthy of Miss Austen herself in her least merciful moments. One specimen, however, may be given without compunction. She was describing a visit paid by her to a well-known country house, and mentioned that among the company were a prominent statesman and his wife, the former of whom was dear to caricaturists on account of his superabundant figure. "Sir —— and Lady —— are here," she wrote. "She is expecting; but he shows it most."

Here are examples of conversational or descriptive art which, in a large and mixed society, would, even if possible, be hardly so much as perceptible. I may take as two other examples Sophy, Lady Roden, and Lady Dorothy Nevill. Unlike Lady Dorothy, whose chronicled sayings have made her a public character, Lady Roden was known only to a small circle of intimates. She was a daughter of Byron's celebrated friend Mr. Hobhouse, subsequently Lord Broughton, and had received something of a really classical education under the semipaternal auspices of Thomas Love Peacock. Hence her conversation had a certain natural crispness which enabled her to indicate by touches, however light, any oddities of demeanor or conduct on the part of friends or acquaintances to persons whose standards were more or less like her own. There was a silly young woman who, after several years of matrimony, was ambitious of pushing her conquests beyond the matrimonial limits; and with this object in view did her best to be visible driving about with a succession of guiltlessly apathetic admirers. "Poor Mrs. P——," said Lady Roden. "She takes far more trouble in attempting to ruin her reputation than most women do to preserve it; but all her attempts are vain."

Lady Dorothy's charm in conversation was due to an adventurous whimsicality, perfectly natural, which was absent from Lady Roden's. She saw everything through a medium of unexpected analogies. She was one day asked in my hearing whether she had enjoyed herself at a Marlborough House garden party. "My dear," she said, "half of the people there I had never seen before in my life, and of those whom I had seen, I thought that half had been safe in Kensal Green." On another occasion, having been at a fancy ball—balls were a kind of entertainment which she very rarely frequented—and having been asked by a friend for an account of it, she replied: "By far away the most remarkable figure was ——. There she was—I don't know what she called herself—Diana in front, and George the Second behind."

But of the conversational art which flourishes in small societies only I could find the best examples, not among women, but among the men of what was then an expiring generation—men whose manners had been formed in a society smaller still. Alfred Montgomery was a wit of this classical type, and may be taken as representing others, all of whom, when I knew them, were verging on old age. These men, though free from any trace of pedantry, were never guilty of slang, unless slang was used intentionally for the purpose of humorous emphasis. Their conversation, if taken down verbatim, would have afforded perfect specimens of polished yet easy English. A lady of great wealth (who has long since been dead, but who shall nevertheless be nameless) had been for a time under some sort of social cloud, many influential people having virtuously refused to notice her. Toward the end of her life, however, the most august of all possible influences had raised her to a position of such fashionable brilliance that a great ball given by her had been the chief event of a season. Lady Roden asked Alfred Montgomery some question as to who had, and who had not, been there. "When a woman like Mrs. —— gives a ball of that kind, it is," he said, "an act of revenge quite as much as an act of hospitality. She takes far more pleasure in thinking of the people she has not asked than in thinking of those she has."

Certain other examples of conversational art occur to me which I associate with a form of entertainment now a thing of the past. Of London life as it had been long before I knew it, a notable feature, constantly referred to in memoirs, had been the breakfast party. It had before my time nearly, but had not quite, disappeared. It was so far kept alive by Lord Houghton, at all events, that a breakfast at his house in Bruton Street is one of my own early recollections. The repast began at ten and lasted for half the morning. There must have been about twenty guests. Two of them were "lions," whose hair was more remarkable than their speech. The rest were men of some sort of social eminence, who seemed to find the occasion not wholly congenial; and, in spite of the efforts of the host, conversation had a tendency to languish till a topic turned up which was then attracting public notice. This topic roused one of the guests—a seasoned man of the world—from a mood of apparent apathy into one of such humorous animation that soon the rest of the company were holding their breaths to listen to him. The topic in question was a volume of scandalous memoirs which had lately been published by Rosina, wife of the first Lord Lytton, for the purpose of attacking a husband from whom she had long been separated. The guest to whom I am now alluding caught the attention of everybody by confessing to an intimate acquaintance with the ways of this caustic lady, and proceeded to illustrate them by a series of amusing anecdotes of which I recollect the following:

Bulwer Lytton, as he then was, was candidate for one of the divisions of Hertfordshire, and speeches were being delivered from the hustings by supporters of local influence—among others by Lord Cowper. Lord Cowper was still speaking when something appeared at his elbow in the likeness of the candidate's wife. "Now, Billy Cowper," she said, "we've listened to you long enough. Sit down, and let me speak. You propose, gentlemen, to send my husband to Parliament. I am here to tell you that Parliament is not the proper place for him. His proper place," she said, pointing to the ground, "is below; and when you have sent him there, he will learn something of what he at present knows nothing. That something is Justice."

On another occasion, speaking in more moderate tones, she observed to a circle of acquaintances: "My husband is a man who has been born out of his due time. He ought to have been born nineteen hundred years ago. Had he been born then, he would have been Judas Iscariot. He would have betrayed his Master; he would have taken the thirty pieces of silver; but then he would not have hanged himself—far from it. He would have sat down and written the Epistle to the Ephesians."

On another occasion she told the following story of him. He was, so she said, in London, and she, having been left in the country, had written to propose joining him. He had at once replied begging her not to do so, but to leave him a little longer in the enjoyment of philosophic solitude. "When I heard that"—so she confided to a friend—"I set off for London instantly; and there I found him with Philosophic Solitude, in white muslin, on his knee."

"Perhaps," added the narrator, "even less agreeable to the delinquent would have been, had he heard it, her description of his physical appearance. Alluding to the fact that his head was undoubtedly too large for his body, she said, 'My husband has the head of a goat, and he has the body of a grasshopper.'"

But of all the men who, in the way of conversational wit or otherwise, figure in my memory as types of a now vanished generation, the most remarkable still remains to be noticed. This was the second Duke of Wellington. Even to those who knew him only by sight he was memorable, on account of his astonishing likeness to the portraits or statues of his father. He had not, or he had not chosen to cultivate, the talents which mainly lead to distinction in public life, but by the small circle of those who were intimate with him during his later days he was known for a humor, a polished wit, and a shrewdness which made him, of all possible companions, one of the most delightful. I knew him intimately myself as far as my age permitted. I often stayed with him at Strathfieldsaye, not only when he had parties, but also when, as sometimes happened, we were together for a week alone. On these latter occasions I had all the mornings to myself, and every afternoon I took with him long walks, during which he poured forth his social or other philosophies, or else told me stories of his father so pointed and numerous that, had I written them down, I might then have compiled a life of him which would form a very interesting supplement to those which exist already. I never, in the course of these walks, experienced a dull moment.

The only great entertainment at which I ever encountered him was a dinner party of his own given at Apseley House. During one of such visits which I paid him at Strathfieldsaye he told me that very soon he would have to give a party in London in honor of the King of the Belgians. The party was to be a large dinner, and he asked me to be one of the company. The time arrived. The King of the Belgians for some reason failed to come, but everything had been arranged in an appropriate manner for his reception. As a spectacle the table was noteworthy. It was covered with gold plate—a historic monument to the great hero of Waterloo—which consisted of figures of soldiers, horses, palm trees, camels, artillery, and other military objects symbolical of his various campaigns; and gold plate at intervals all round the table was supplemented by triumphal wreaths. The duke told me afterward that all these decorations were due to his own forgetfulness. He had for years been accustomed to celebrate the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo by a banquet to certain officers who had been present at it, and who still survived; but the number of these had already been so reduced that he had determined to discontinue the celebration. In fixing, however, a day for the dinner now in question, he had entirely forgotten that the date ultimately chosen was none other than the day of the great battle. His servants had concluded that, in honor of Belgian royalty, he was giving one more repetition of the Waterloo banquets of the past. Everything had been arranged accordingly; and I was thus present at a function which will never take place again.

But it was not at such functions that his real character displayed itself. This only came out in intercourse of a much more private kind, as would happen at Strathfieldsaye when he entertained parties of not more than ten people. When I was present on such occasions I was usually the youngest—by far the youngest—member of the company. Of the rest I may mention as examples Lady Dorothy Nevill, Alfred Montgomery, Sir Hastings Doyle, Lord Calthorpe, Sir St. George Foley, Lady Chesterfield, and Mr. Newtons, the courtly police magistrate, called by his friends "The Beak." And here—to repeat in substance the observation which I have made already—what always struck me was the far greater polish of manner that prevailed among these my elders than any which was cultivated among my own, the then rising, generation. In such an atmosphere the Duke's special gifts were at home. He never strained after effect. His words seemed to crystallize into wit or poignant humor before he had time to reflect on what he was going to say. But these qualities were perhaps seen at their best in tête-à-tête encounters or correspondence. At all events, it is from such occurrences that illustrations of them can be most readily drawn.

He had often spoken to me of his dislike of anything in the nature of jobbery, and this was once brought out in a very characteristic way by a passage at arms between himself and Lady St. Helier. Lady St. Helier had written to him to ask him if, as Lord Lieutenant of Middlesex, he would make one of her friends a magistrate. The duke promptly replied that her friend was an entire stranger to him, and that he never made appointments of that kind as a favor to some third party. There the matter rested for a week or two, at the end of which period she received the following note from him:

Dear Lady St. Helier.

You have treated me extremely ill. I have made inquiries about your friend, and I find he is part-proprietor of—here he named a certain place of amusement—which I learn is frequently used as a place for assignations of a very reprehensible kind.

Lady St. Helier's immediate reply was this:

My Dear Duke.

I have nothing more to say. You are acquainted with such matters so much better than I am.

Not long afterward he met her on somebody's doorstep, and she, who was taking her departure, greeted him with some slight frigidity. He merely looked at her with a momentary twinkle in his eye, and said, "I think you had me there." Some days later she received yet another letter from him, which consisted of these words:

Dear Lady St. Helier.

The deed is done. God forgive me.

A further encounter took place of something the same kind—the duke himself told me of this—from which he emerged the victor. He had, he said, received a letter from Lady Herbert of Lee, in which she begged him to contribute £100 toward the total required for the restoration of some Catholic church, and his answer had been as follows:

Dear Lady Herbert.

I shall be very happy to give you the sum you name, for a purpose so excellent as yours. At the same time I may say that I am myself about to restore the Protestant church at Strathfieldsaye, and I do not doubt that you will aid me by sending me a similar sum. Only, in that case, I think no money need pass between us.

In a kindred vein was his answer to another application, addressed to him, in formal terms, by a committee of the inhabitants of Tiverton. When the first duke was merely known as a soldier, the Tivertonians had begun to erect, on a neighboring hill near Wellington, a monumental column in his honor; but subsequently, when he came to show himself to the British public, not as a great general, but as an obstinate and intolerable Tory, the Radical Tivertonians refused to carry on the work farther. The column was left unfinished, as it stands at the present day; and the second duke, many years later, was petitioned, for the credit of the neighborhood, to finish it at his own cost. His answer to the petitioners was, so he told me, this:

Gentlemen.

It I were to finish that monument it would be a monument to nothing. As it stands, it is a monument to your own ingratitude.

Strathfieldsaye may have been in old days the scene of many political incidents. The latest was one at which I myself was present. The heroine of it was Miss Meresia Nevill, Lady Dorothy's daughter, who afterward achieved renown as a luminary of the Primrose League. She was then in her novitiate only, and the duke one morning whispered to her that he would give her a lesson in oratory. I was asked to be present at it, but otherwise it was to be strictly secret. Accordingly after breakfast she, I, and the duke met by appointment in the library. The doors were locked, and Miss Nevill, who had brought some memoranda with her scribbled on a half-sheet of letter paper, was told by the duke to take her stand on the hearth rug and give him a specimen of her powers by declaiming what she proposed to say, he himself being seated on a sofa watching her. "Now," he said, "begin." Bashfully consulting her notes, and speaking with apologetic rapidity, Miss Nevill began to murmur, "My lords, ladies and gentlemen." "No!" ejaculated the duke; "my dear young lady, no! Mouth it out like this: "My lords—ladies—and—gentlemen." Don't say it as if you were saying your prayers." In this humorous but most admirable advice there was no great verbal brilliance; but his tendency to verbal brilliance showed, on one occasion at all events, how capable it was of translating itself into the highest form of literary art. A favorite amusement of his was making translations from Horace. Among the passages which had specially provoked this enterprise was one the Latin of which is so terse and pungent that it has often been pronounced untranslatable. It is the passage in which Horace describes true happiness as that of the man who, looking back from to-morrow, is able to say, "I was really alive all yesterday." Dryden's pithy version of it is to the effect that the sole true happiness is that of the man:

Who, secure at eve, can say,
"To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day."

The duke's version was on a yet higher level than this, embodying in it a concentrated pungency and a curiosa felicitas which were quite in the vein of Horace, but contain a thought not present in the original. They were comprised in these few words:

Happy if only I enjoy
My rival's envy for a day.

It is true this specimen of the duke's wit in literature does not bear directly on the question of wit in social conversation; and yet it may lead the mind to questions which are very closely akin to it. The felicity of the duke's translation has a very close resemblance to the curiosa felicitas of Pope—for instance, in his "Characters of Women" and his celebrated satire on Addison. Nearly all Pope's satires are addressed, if not to a small society, yet at all events to a small public, and outside that limited body they would have neither vogue nor meaning.

CHAPTER VII
VIGNETTES OF LONDON LIFE

Byron's Grandson and Shelley's Son—The World of Balls—The "Great Houses," and Their New Rivals—The Latter Criticized by Some Ladies of the Old Noblesse—Types of More Serious Society—Lady Marian Alford and Others—Salons Exclusive and Inclusive—A Clash of Two Rival Poets—The Poet Laureate —Auberon Herbert and the Simple Life—Dean Stanley—Whyte Melville—"Ouida"—"Violet Fane"—Catholic Society—Lord Bute—Banquet to Cardinal Manning—Difficulties of the Memoir-writer—Lord Wemyss and Lady P—— —Indiscretions of Augustus Hare—Routine of a London Day—The Author's Life Out of London

The few portraits and anecdotes which I have just sketched or recorded are sufficient, let me say once more, to illustrate two general facts. They indicate the way in which society owes much of its finer polish to it. They emphasize the fact that, when I first knew it myself, it was very much smaller than it has since then become, and, though divided into sections even then, was very much more cohesive. Let me pass from this latter fact to some of my own experiences as connected with it.

For young men who are already equipped with influential friends or connections, a society which is relatively small and more or less cohesive is in some ways more easy of access than one which is more numerous, but in which, unless their means are ample enough to excite the competitive affection of mothers, they are more likely to be lost. In this respect I may look on myself as fortunate, for my circle of acquaintances very rapidly widened as soon as, having done with Oxford, I began to stay in London for more than a week at a time, and secured a habitation, more or less permanent, of my own. While I was first looking about for one which I thought would be suitable, Wentworth returned the hospitality which I had previously shown him at Oxford by putting me up for a fortnight at his house on the Chelsea Embankment, and during this visit an incident took place which, if merely judged by the names of the few persons concerned in it, might be thought picturesquely memorable.

Students of Robert Browning may recollect a short poem of his which begins with the following lines:

And did you once see Shelley plain?
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you answer him again?
How strange it seems and true!

My own answer would be, I did not see Shelley plain, but I did the next thing to it. Sir Percy and Lady Shelley—the poet's son and daughter-in-law—were Wentworth's near neighbors, though he never had met either of them. Lady Shelley had been an old friend of my mother's, and I took him one day to tea with her. To the wife of Shelley's son I introduced Byron's grandson. What event could seem more thrilling to any one whose sentiments were attuned to the music of Browning's verses? What really happened was this: Lady Shelley said to me some pleasant things about my mother; we all of us lamented the prevalence of the east wind, and then, having recommended her crumpets, she discussed with Wentworth the various large houses lately built in the neighborhood. At this juncture the drawing-room door opened and the son of the author of "Prometheus Unbound" entered. He was a fresh-looking country gentleman, whose passion was private theatricals. Close to his own house he had built a little private theater, and the conversation turned thenceforward on the question of whether a license would be necessary if the public were admitted by payment to witness the performance of a farce in the interest of some deserving charity.

By the time I left Wentworth's roof I had arranged to share with two Catholic friends a suite of rooms at a private hotel in Dover Street. Both belonged to well-known Catholic families, and had ready access to the world of Catholic gayety, especially in so far as this was represented by balls. One of them, through his skill as a dancer and his buoyant vivacity in conversation, was in much wider request. By the agency of Augustus Savile and others—of "social fairies" (as Lord Beaconsfield called them), such as the Duchess of Sutherland, whom I had known well at Torquay—cards for balls and parties, in quickly increasing numbers, found their way to myself likewise; while in other directions doors were opened also which led to a world of a more serious aspect and character.

Of balls I need say little except to observe that I went to a great many, and so far followed the advice of Lady E—— of T—— that I did not often find myself at a ball "in a two-roomed house." For this the principal reason was that, even from my childhood, I was wanting in any inclination to dance, and thus preferred many-roomed houses in which persons who were so disposed could sit out and converse, the very fact that a ball was in progress being hardly so much as perceptible. In this connection I may observe that, during my earlier days, the principal balls were still to a certain extent those which were given in houses famous for their traditions and their magnitude, such as Devonshire House, Bridgwater House, Stafford House, and so forth; but already things were in this respect changing. Newly established families, or families in the act of establishing themselves, had begun to outdo the "great houses" in their lavish expenditure on this kind of entertainment. The center of social gravity was in this respect being shifted. As an illustration of this fact I remember some curt observations made by two ladies who were in the act of bringing out their daughters. Both belonged to families of historical and high distinction, but their means were not equal to their dignity. One of them said, "If I want to take out my daughter, I have generally to go to the house of someone who is not a gentleman." Another said: "I don't care for London any longer. It seems that the only people who are giving balls to-day are people whose proper business would be to black my boots." Utterances of this kind, though of course greatly exaggerated, were straws which showed the direction in which the wind was blowing.

Let me turn from the world of balls to a milieu which is less frivolous, and take certain ladies as types of tendencies which then prevailed in it. It will be enough to mention four, whose houses represented society as, in some ways, at its best. I refer to Mrs. William Lowther, Lady Marian Alford, Louisa, Lady Ashburton (whom I thus group together because their isolated and commanding dwellings stood practically in the same row), and Lady Somers. All these were women of the highest cultivation. They were devoted to art. Mrs. Lowther was herself an artist. Mrs. Lowther and Lady Ashburton, though thorough women of the world with regard to their mundane company, were remarkable for a grave philanthropy which they sacrificed much to practice. Indeed at some of their entertainments it was not easy to tell where society ended and high thinking began. This could not be said of Lady Somers or of Lady Marian. Though in artistic and intellectual taste they equaled the three others, the guests whom they collected about them were essentially chosen with a view to the social charm which wit, manners, or beauty enabled them, as if by magic, to communicate to the passing moment. And here it may be observed conversely that in a world like that of London the art of society depends not on choice only, but also, and no less, on an equally careful rejection, and is for that reason beset by peculiar and varying difficulties. Of these difficulties Lady Marian herself once spoke to me. They had, she said, been lately brought home to her by certain of her friends who had been urging her to give a ball—a suggestion which, for the following reasons, she found herself unwilling to entertain. "It is impossible," she said, "to give a successful ball in London without being very ill-natured to a large number of people. Many of those who would think they had a right to be asked would—though on other occasions no doubt welcome enough—be as much out of place in a ballroom as a man would be in a boat race who could not handle an oar." But she was, so she added, going to make an attempt at reviving a kind of entertainment to which no such difficulties would attach themselves. During the months of the coming winter she proposed to send out cards to all her more intimate acquaintances; announcing that she would always be at home after dinner on a certain day each week, and begging them to give her their company whenever, and as often as, they pleased. A certain number of people—all of them agreeable and distinguished—responded to this appeal; but their number rarely exceeded fifteen or twenty, and Lady Marian was at length bound to admit that the competitive attractions developed by the enlargement of social life were such as to render a revival of the salon impossible, even among acquaintances so carefully chosen as her own.

I may, however, advert to another lady who in a certain sense succeeded where Lady Marian failed; but she succeeded by basing her salon on a noticeably different principle—namely, that of inclusion, whereas that of Lady Marian was selection. The passport to her drawing-rooms was fame—even fame of the most momentary kinds—and as fame is the meed of very various activities, not all her own charm was sufficient on some occasions to prevent her company from being a clash of illustrious rivals rather than a reunion of friends.

Of a clash of this kind I was once myself a witness, though nobody at the moment divined that there was a clash at all. The scene was not in London, but at the lady's house in the country, where a few guests were staying with her for the inside of a week. Two of these guests were poets; we may call them Sir E. and Sir L. The visit coincided with the time of Tennyson's last illness, the reports of which became daily more alarming. The two poets evinced much becoming anxiety, though this did not interfere with the zeal with which one day at luncheon they consumed a memorable plum tart. Next morning neither of them appeared at breakfast; and when both of them remained in their bedrooms for the larger part of the day I came to the prosaic conclusion that the plum tart had been too much for them. Next morning came the news of Tennyson's death. The two bards remained in their cells till noon, after which they both reappeared like men who had got rid of a burden. The true secret of their retirement revealed itself the morning after, when each of two great newspapers, with which they were severally connected, was found to contain long columns of elegy on the irreparable loss which the country had just suffered—compositions implying a suggestion on the part of each of the elegists that a poet existed who was not unfit to repair it. That same day after luncheon the two competitors departed. Our hostess and the other guests saw them off at the station, and as the train went on, the elegists were seen waving independent adieux, one from a first, the other from a third-class carriage. The successor to the late Laureate was Mr. Alfred Austin.

I knew Alfred Austin well; and a few words with regard to him may not be inappropriate here. Though his poetry has not commanded any very wide attention, he had more of true poetry in him than many people imagine. He had all the qualifications of a really great poet except a sustained faculty for writing really good poetry. He had a sound philosophic conception of what the scope and functions of great poetry are; and it would be possible to select from his works isolated passages of high and complete beauty. But, if judged by his poetry as a whole, he seems to have been so indolent or so deficient in the faculty of self-criticism that for the most part he suffered himself to be content with language which resembled an untuned piano, his performances on which were often calculated to affront the attention of his audience rather than to arrest and capture it. He once or twice asked me to make his works the subject of a critical and comprehensive essay. With some diffidence I consented, and accomplished this delicate task by picking out a number of his best and most carefully finished passages, which showed what he could do if he tried, and how far by pure carelessness he elsewhere fell short of the standard which he himself had set. For example, from his "Human Tragedy" I quoted the following lines, one of which refers to Rome as a place where "Papal statues arrogantly wave"; while in another, describing a headlong stream, he says with the utmost complacency that:

The cascade
Bounded adown the cataract.

I pointed out that no conceivable feat was so absolutely impossible for a statue as that of "waving," and that, a cataract and a cascade being practically the same thing, it was impossible that the former could manage to bound down the latter. My practical moral, as addressed to the Laureate, was, "Be just to yourself, and the public will be just to you," and the compliment implied in one part of this criticism did much to mitigate the unwelcome tenor of the other.

Many interesting people I used to meet at the house of Mr. Froude the historian. Among these were two relatives of Mr. Froude's second wife—namely, Henry Cowper, one of the most charming conversationalists of his time, Lady Florence Herbert, and, through her, her well-known husband, Auberon. Auberon Herbert was a most singular character. He represented a movement of thought which has since then taken other directions, and would probably now be associated with some form or other of socialism. In one sense he was certainly no socialist. On the contrary, he was an ardent champion of individual freedom, as opposed to the tyranny of the state. He even contended that all taxation should be voluntary, and actually started a journal, mainly written by himself, in support of this agreeable doctrine. He was, however, yet more pertinacious as an advocate of what is now called "the simple life." His wife shared, though she slightly perhaps tempered, his opinions; and when they first set up house together they insisted that all their household—the domestics included—should dine at the same table. After a week's experience, however, of this regime, the domestics all gave warning, and the establishment was reconstructed on a more conventional footing. This counter-revolution had been accomplished before I knew him, and my intimate acquaintance with him began at a great shooting party given at Highclere Castle by Lord Carnarvon, his brother. Neither I nor he were shooters, and while battues were in progress, and guns were sounding daily at no very great distance, he walked me about the park, declaring that modern castles which stood for nothing but the slaughter of half-tame birds were examples of a civilization completely gone astray. In order that I might see what, shorn of its earlier eccentricities, was his personal ideal of a reasonably ordered life, he asked me to stay with him for a week at his own home, Ashley Arnewood, in Hampshire, on the borders of New Forest. In due time I went. His dwelling among the woodlands was of very simple construction. It was a small farmhouse bisected by a flagged passage giving access to four rooms. On the right as one entered was a kitchen, on the left was an apartment which he dignified by the name of a museum, its sole contents being fragments of ancient British pottery which had been dug up in the neighborhood and were here carefully arranged on a large disused mangle. Beyond, and opposite to one another, were a dining room so limited in size that one end of the table abutted on a whitewashed wall, and a sitting room, luxuriously warm, which was furnished with several deep and remarkably comfortable chairs. The carpets consisted of rough coconut matting, and draughts in the bedrooms were excluded by rough red blankets, which did duty as curtains. The evening repast was almost obtrusively a tea rather than a dinner, though, in deference to my own presumably unconverted appetite, I, and I alone, was provided with some kind of meat. I could not help feeling at times that for my host and hostess alike this practice of "the simple life" represented a sacrifice to their principles rather than a complete enjoyment of them, for on several occasions before bedtime they both confessed to a sensation of acute hunger, and made an expedition to some mysterious region from which they returned with substantial parallelograms of bread.

Through the Antony Froudes I also made acquaintance with Lecky, whose nervous shyness in conversation was in curious contrast to his weighty style as a writer, and also with Dean Stanley and Whyte Melville the novelist. Between the two latter there might seem to be little connection, but I was asked to meet them at a little dinner of four, Whyte Melville being specially anxious to ask the Dean's advice. This was not, however, advice of any spiritual kind. Whyte Melville was thoroughly at home in the social world and the hunting field, and had made himself a great name as an accurate describer of both, but he was now ambitious of achieving renown in a new territory. He was planning a novel, Sarchedon, a story of the ancient East, and was anxious to learn from the Dean what historical authorities would best guide the Homer of Melton and Market Harborough in reconstructing the world of Bel and Baylon.

In speaking of novels I am led on to mention an authoress whose fame was concurrent with Whyte Melville's, and whose visions of modern society were not altogether unlike his own visions of Babylonia. This authoress was "Ouida." Ouida lived largely in a world of her own creation, peopled with foreign princesses, mysterious dukes—masters of untold millions, and of fabulous English guardsmen whose bedrooms in Knightsbridge Barracks were inlaid with silver and tortoise shell. And yet such was her genius that she invested this phantom world with a certain semblance of life, and very often with a certain poetry also. In some respects she was even more striking than her books. In her dress and in her manner of life she was an attempted exaggeration of her own female characters. For many years she occupied a large villa near Florence. During that time she visited London once. There it was that I met her. She depicted herself to herself as a personage of European influence, and imagined herself charged with a mission to secure the appointment of Lord Lytton as British Ambassador in Paris. With this purpose in view she called one day on Lady Salisbury, who, never having seen her before, was much amazed by her entrance, and was still more amazed when Ouida, in confidential tones, said, "I have come to tell you that the one man for Paris is Robert." Lady Salisbury's answer was not very encouraging. It consisted of the question, "And pray, if you please, who is Robert?" In a general way, however, she received considerable attention, and might have received more if it had not been for her reckless ignorance of the complexities of the London world. In whatever company she might be in, her first anxiety was to ingratiate herself with the most important members of it, but she was constantly making mistakes as to who the most important members were. Thus, as one of her entertainers—"Violet Fane"—told me, Ouida was sitting after dinner between Mrs. ——, the mistress of one of the greatest houses in London, and a vulgar little Irish peeress who was only present on sufferance. Ouida treated the former with the coldest and most condescending inattention, and devoted every smile in her possession to an intimate worship of the latter. When, however, she was in companies so carefully chosen that everybody present was worthy of her best attention, and so small that all were willing to give their best attention to her, she showed herself, so I was told, a most agreeable woman. Thus forewarned as to her ways, I found that such was the fact. I gave for her benefit a little luncheon party at the Bachelors' Club, the only guests whom I asked to meet her being Philip Stanhope and Countess Tolstoy (now Lord and Lady Weardale), Lord and Lady Blythswood, and Julia, Lady Jersey. Ouida arrived trimmed with the most exuberant furs, which, when they were removed, revealed a costume of primrose color—a costume so artfully cut that, the moment she sat down, all eyes were dazzled by the sparkling of her small protruded shoes. In a word, she quite looked the part, and, perceiving the impression she had made, was willing to be gracious to everybody. As we were going upstairs to the luncheon room, this effect was completed. Lady Jersey laid a caressing hand on her shoulder and said: "You must go first. The entertainment is in honor of you." Ouida was here at her best. No one could have been more agreeable and less affected than she.

Her latter years were overclouded by poverty. This was due to her almost mad extravagance—to her constant attempts, in short, to live up to the standards of her own heroines. Had she acted like a sensible woman, she might have realized a very fair fortune. She had many appreciative friends, who gave her considerable sums to relieve her at various times from the pressure of financial difficulties; but they realized in the end that to do this was like pouring water into a sieve. Somebody gave her £250 in London to enable her to pay her hotel bill; but before a week was over she had lavished more than a hundred in turning her sitting room at the Langham Hotel into a glade of the most expensive flowers. She died, in what was little better than a peasant's cottage, at Lucca. Among the ladies to whom she had been introduced in London was Winifred, Lady Howard of Glossop. A year or so later Ouida wrote me a letter from Florence, saying, "Your name has been just recalled to me by seeing in the Morning Post that you were dining the other night with Lady Howard of Glossop, one of my oldest friends." This is an example of the way in which her imagination enabled her to live in a fabric of misplaced facts, for the person through whom she became acquainted with Lady Howard was none other than myself. The next letter I had from her was to say that she was dedicating one of her later books—a volume of essays—to me. The letter did not reach me till after many delays, and I often regret the fact that before I was able, or remembered, to answer it she was dead.

Another authoress well known to me, of whom I have made mention already, was the beautiful "Violet Fane," who, under that pseudonym, published many volumes of poetry. Her actual name was Mrs. Singleton. She afterward became Lady Currie. I first knew her before my London days began, and I dedicated The New Republic to her. She was the center of a group of intimates, of whom those who survive must connect her with many of their happiest hours. No one could have combined in a way more winning than hers the discriminations of fashionable life with an inborn passion for poetry. She was perfect in features, slight as a sylph in figure, and her large dark eyes alternately gleamed with laughter and were grave as though she were listening for a voice from some vague beyond. Many of her phrases, when she was speaking of social matters, were like rapiers with the tip of which, as though by accident, she would just touch the foibles of her nearest and dearest friends, the result being a delicate puncture rather than the infliction of a wound.

She first became known as a poetess by a small volume of lyrics called From Dawn to Noon, in which, if, as some say, poetry be self-revelation, her success, according to certain of her censors, was somewhat too complete. The same criticism was provoked by her second volume, Denzil Place, a novel in blank verse interwoven with songs. Whatever her censors may have said about it, this, from first to last, was a work of real inspiration. Few who have read it will have forgotten the song beginning:

You gave to me on that dear night of parting
So much, so little; and yet everything,

or will have failed to recognize the musical ear of one who has given us the liquid melody of two such lines as these:

The tremulous convolvulus whose closing blue eye misses
The faint shadow on the dial that foretells the evening hour.

At all events, whatever her merits as a poetess, she was something like a living poem for a certain group of friends, of whom I happened to be one. This group comprised men such as Wilfrid Blunt, Lord Lytton, Philip Currie, Hamilton Aidé, Frederick Locker, Clair Vyner, Sir Baldwin Leighton, and others, all of whom had in them a natural appreciation of poetry, while some of them were poets themselves. With a more or less intimate, though loosely formed, group like this my memory associates many small gatherings, which generally took the form of dinners, either at "Violet Fane's" own house in Grosvenor Place, or at Hurlingham, or at the "Star and Garter," or at Vyner's house among its gardens and woods at Combe, where we would linger, forgetful of time, and feeling no inclination to join any larger company.

But of all the worlds which, within the world, were more or less self-cohesive and separate, that in which I felt myself most at home was the Catholic. At any entertainment given at a Catholic house the bulk of the guests—perhaps three-fourths of them—would be Catholics. These would be people so closely connected with one another by blood or by lifelong acquaintance as to constitute one large family. Well-born, well-bred, and distinguished by charming and singularly simple manners, they were content to be what they were, and the Darwinian competition for merely fashionable or intellectual brilliance, however prevalent elsewhere, was, with few exceptions, to them virtually unknown. Yet whenever anything in the way of formal pomp was necessary, they were fully equal to the occasion. The well-known dinners given by Mrs. Washington Hibbert, at which four-and-twenty guests would be seated round a huge circular table, would fill Hill Street with swaying family coaches, on whose hammercloths crests and coronets maintained an eighteenth-century magnitude which the modern world was abandoning, while on certain ecclesiastical occasions Catholic society could exhibit a stateliness even more conspicuous.

On one of these latter occasions I was, as well as I can remember, the only non-Catholic in the company. This was a great luncheon party given by the then Lord Bute in honor of Cardinal Manning. Lord Bute, who was in many ways the most learned of the then recent converts to Catholicism, was, as is well known, the original of Lothair in Lord Beaconsfield's famous novel. Lord Beaconsfield's portrait of him was disfigured, and indeed made ridiculous, by the gilding, or rather the tinsel, with which his essentially alien taste bedizened it; but, apart from such exaggerations, there were elements in it of unmistakable likeness, and the entertainment to which I am now referring was, apart from its peculiar sequel, like a page of Lothair translating itself into actual life.

The Butes were at that time living at Chiswick House, which they rented from the Duke of Devonshire. The house is a good example of that grandiose classicality which we associate with the eighteenth century, and the saloon in which the guests were assembled provided them with an appropriate background. They were something like thirty in number, and comprised some of the greatest of the then great Catholic ladies. Lord Beaconsfield himself could not have chosen them better. Indeed his Lady St. Jerome was actually there in person. When I entered there was a good deal of talking, and yet at the same time there was something like a hush. I divined, and divined correctly, that the Cardinal had not yet arrived. The minutes went slowly on; the appointed hour was past. At length a sound was heard which seemed to emanate from an anteroom, and presently a figure was solemnly gliding forward—a figure slight, emaciated, and habited in a long black cassock. This was relieved at the throat by one peeping patch of purple, and above the throat was a face the delicate sternness of which was like semitransparent ivory. The company parted, making way for the great Churchman, and then a scene enacted itself which cannot be better described than in the words written many years previously by the author of Lothair himself. "The ladies did their best to signalize what the Cardinal was and what he represented, by reverences which a posture-master might have envied and certainly could not have surpassed. They seemed to sink into the earth, and slowly and supernaturally to emerge."

When the banquet was over, and the guests were taking their departure, our host begged me to remain, so that he and I and the Cardinal might have a little conversation by ourselves. We were presently secreted in a small room or closet, and our little talk must have lasted till close upon six o'clock. I half thought for a moment that this might be a planned arrangement so that then and there I might be received into the Roman fold. Matters, however, took a very different course. Under the Cardinal's guidance the conversation almost immediately—how and why I cannot remember—turned to the subject of Spiritualism, and he soon was gravely informing us that, of all the signs of the times, none was more sinister than the multiplication of Spiritualist séances, which were, according to him, neither more nor less than revivals of black magic. He went on to assert, as a fact supported by ample evidence, that the devil at such meetings assumed a corporeal form—sometimes that of a man, sometimes that of a beautiful and seductive woman, the results being frequent births, in the prosaic world around us, of terrible hybrid creatures half diabolic in nature, though wholly human in form. On this delicate matter he descanted in such unvarnished language that the details of what he said cannot well be repeated here. Of the truth of his assertions he obviously entertained no doubt and such was his dry, almost harsh solemnity in making them that, as I listened, I could hardly believe my ears. Our host, though a model of strictly Catholic devoutness, was, so he told me with a smile when the Cardinal had taken his departure, affected very much as I was. The impression left on both of us was that, in the Cardinal's character, there must have been a vein of almost astounding credulity—a credulity which would account for the readiness with which, as a social reformer, he adopted on many occasions the wildest exaggerations of agitators.

CARDINAL MANNING

I was subsequently invited to call on him at the Archbishop's house in Westminster. During the interview which ensued he revealed intellectual qualities very different from those which had elicited a furtive smile even from a Catholic such as his host at Chiswick. We spent most of the morning in discussing the ultimate difficulties, philosophical, historical, and scientific, which preclude the modern mind from an assent to the philosophy of Catholicism. He displayed on this occasion, a broadness and a balance, if not a profundity of thought, in which many theologians who call themselves liberals are wanting. He spoke even of militant atheists, such as Huxley and Tyndall, without any sarcastic anger or signs of moral reprobation. He spoke of their opinions, not as sins which demanded chastisement, but simply as intellectual errors which must be cured by intellectual refutation, rather than by moral anathemas, and the personal relations subsisting between him and them were relations—so I have always understood—of mutual amity and respect.

Of another prominent Catholic, Wilfrid Ward, the same thing may be said. As a Catholic apologist he was a model of candor and suavity. He was, moreover, a most agreeable man of the world, among his accomplishments being that of an admirable mimic. He was, however, best known as an exponent of Catholic liberalism; and, since I am here concerned only with recollections of social life, to dwell on him longer would carry me too far astray.

Out of this last observation there naturally arises another, which relates to anecdotes or short sketches of individuals as a method of social history. For certain reasons the scope of this method is limited. In the first place, the persons whose doings or sayings are commemorated must be persons who, by their position or reputation, are more or less self-explanatory to the ear of the general reader. They will otherwise for the general reader have very little significance. They must also for the most part be dead, so that their susceptibilities may not be wounded by a too free allusion to their doings. Further, the anecdotes told of them must not be to their disadvantage in any way which would wound the susceptibilities of the living. These mortifying restrictions are, for all those who respect them, a deathblow to the most entertaining, perhaps the most instructive, part of what the memoir-writer has to tell. During the last ten years of his life the late Lord Wemyss amused himself by writing memoirs of his own distinguished activities, and on repeated occasions, when I stayed with him for a week in Scotland, he asked me to run my eye over a number of chapters with a view to seeing if any passages which might give offense had been left in them. A certain number of such had been already struck out by himself, but I very soon found that a considerable number remained. "God bless my soul!" he exclaimed when I pointed them out to him. "You are perfectly right. Let me have a blue pencil instantly." Lady P——, a witty woman of the widest European experience, attempted a similar task. She, too, asked me to look at what she had written, deploring the fact that all the most amusing parts had passed through the fire to the Moloch of an almost excessive caution. Here again I pointed out to the writer passages which had escaped the sacrifice, and which the living would certainly, even if not justifiably, resent—which they would, indeed, resent in exact proportion to their accuracy.

An example of the results which may be achieved by a memoir-writer who neglects this caution is provided by Augustus Hare. Hare was a man possessed of many accomplishments. Like Hamilton Aidé, he was a very remarkable artist. He was also a great teller of stories, and a master in the craft of improving whatever truth there might be in them. By birth and otherwise he was well and widely connected, and was a familiar figure in many of the best-known houses in England. He was an indefatigable writer of memoirs, and of all such writers he was incomparably the most intrepid. The possibility of offending others, even though they might be his hosts and hostesses, had no terrors for him. I was once staying at a country house in Sussex when a new book by him appeared, and had just been sent down from Mudie's. I had twice seen its back on a table, and meant to have looked at it in my bedroom before dressing for dinner; but whenever I tried to secure it for my own perusal it had disappeared. I heard someone casually say, "Everybody in the house is reading it." I could not but wonder why. I managed to secure it at last, and set myself to find out the reason. It did not take long to find. Hare, a year before, had been staying in that very house—a house famous for the material perfection of its equipments. "The servants here," so Hare wrote and printed, "are notoriously more pampered than those in any other house in England, and their insolence and arrogance is proportionate to the luxury in which they live." On another occasion he recorded a visit to Castle ——, the family name of the owners being C——. He summed up his gratitude to his entertainers in the following pithy sentence, "Except dear Lady ——, I never could stand the C——s." Another of his entries was as follows. Having migrated from the Stanhopes' at Chevening to a neighboring old house in Kent, he wrote, "What a comfort it is, after staying with people who are too clever, to find oneself with people who are all refreshingly stupid!" If it were not for the danger of lapsing into indiscretions like these—indiscretions of which Hare seemed altogether unconscious—interesting anecdotes might be here indefinitely multiplied.

Even so, however, such anecdotes, no matter who recorded them, would be simply so many jottings which owed their continuity to the fact that, like the stones of a necklace, they happened to be strung on the thread of a single writer's experiences, and in no two cases would this thread be altogether the same. My own experiences of the social life of London, as I knew it in my earlier days, will perhaps best be described in more general terms. In such terms, then, let me speak of it as, foreshortened by time, it now presents itself to my memory.

For me, in my earlier years, the routine of a London day was practically much as follows. A morning of note-writing—of accepting or refusing invitations—was succeeded by a stroll with some companion among the company—the gay and animated company—which before the hour of luncheon at that time thronged the park. Then, more often than not, came a luncheon at two o'clock, to which many of the guests had been bidden a moment ago as the result of some chance meeting. A garden party, such as those which took place at Sion House or at Osterly, would occupy now and again the rest of an afternoon; but the principal business of every twenty-four hours began with a long dinner at a quarter past eight, or sometimes a quarter to nine. For any young man who took part in the social movement, dinner would be followed by two or by more "At Homes." Then, when midnight was approaching, began the important balls, of which any such young man would show himself at an equal number, and dance, eat quails, or sit with a suitable companion under palm trees, as the case might be; while vigilant chaperons, oppressed by the weight of their tiaras, would ask one another, "Who is the young man who is dancing with my daughter?" Finally, if the night were fair, young men, and sometimes ladies, if their houses were close at hand, would stroll homeward through the otherwise deserted streets, while the East, gray already, was being slowly tinged with saffron.

If the life of those who play a part in a London season is to be judged by what they do with themselves during a London season itself, it might be reasonably asked (as it is asked by morose social critics) how any sensible people can find such a life tolerable. To this question there are several answers. One is that no society of a polished and brilliant kind is possible unless special talents and graces, wide experience, knowledge, and the power that depends on knowledge, enter into its composition and support it in a peculiar manner which does not prevail elsewhere. This fact, however, will be but partly intelligible unless we remember that it is based on, and implies, another—namely, that the society which is identified with the life of a London season represents for those who figure in it, not life as a whole, but merely one phase of a life of which the larger part is of very different kinds, and which elsewhere exhibits very different aspects.

This observation specially applies to the days when London society was in the main an annual assemblage of old-established landed families, whose principal homes were in the country, and whose consequence was derived from their rural, not from their urban, associations. Their houses in the country were constantly filled with visitors. Society, in a certain sense of the word, surrounded them even there. But it was a society differing in its habits, and even in its constitution, from that which formed itself in London, and of the total lives of most of the persons, composing it, London life represented not more than a quarter. For me, my own annual life as a Londoner rarely exceeded three months out of twelve. Except for these three months, my habits, as they formed themselves after my father's death, were for a long time these: Of the nine other months I spent about two in Devonshire, where by this time, through inheritance, a new home was open to me—Lauriston Hall, overlooking Torbay, whose waters were visible from the windows through a screen of balustrades and rhododendrons. I generally wintered abroad—for the most part on the Riviera—and the rest of my time was occupied in country visits at home, from the South of England and Ireland to the borders of Sutherland and Caithness.

During the months of the London season my immediate preoccupations, superficially at all events, were, no doubt, those of an idler; but even during such periods, as I presently shall have occasion to mention, serious thoughts beset me almost without cessation. Even experiences of human nature which were flashed on me at balls and dinners, through that species of mental polygamy of which society essentially consists, helped me to mature projects which I executed under conditions of greater calm elsewhere. In the following chapter I shall speak of country houses, describing the atmosphere and aspect of some of those which were best known to me, and which I found most favorable to the prosecution of such serious work as I have accomplished in the way of philosophy, of fiction, and of direct or of indirect politics.

CHAPTER VIII
SOCIETY IN COUNTRY HOUSES

A Few Country Houses of Various Types—Castles and Manor Houses from Cornwall to Sutherland

The pleasantest form of society in country houses—I speak here for myself—is not to be found on occasions such as that of a great shooting party or a party for a country ball, but rather in gatherings of a smaller and more intimate kind.

As an illustration of my own views in this respect, I may mention an incident which may appeal, perhaps, to the sympathies of others whose tastes or distastes are like my own. I was asked to stay in Shropshire with some friends whom I knew so intimately that they did not care how they treated me; and on this occasion they had treated me very ill. As I was approaching my destination by way of a little local line, I was surprised at seeing on the platform of one station after another an extraordinary amount of luggage, together with a number of footmen and unmistakable ladies' maids. What could be the meaning of this? At last the question occurred to me: Can it be possible that some county ball is impending, and that my dear friends mean to take me to it? My surmise was but too correct. "Why," I asked my hostess, "didn't you tell me? I would have come when this ball was over." "Yes," she said, "I know that. That's why I did not tell you. We sha'n't let you off, don't think it." I answered, in tones of resignation: "Well, what must be must be." There the matter dropped, till the night of the ball arrived, and the ladies went upstairs to make themselves ready for the festival. I went upstairs likewise, but my proceedings differed from theirs. I took off my coat, lay down on my bed, and covered myself completely in the folds of a great fur rug. Presently came a voice at the door—that of my hostess—saying, in tones of command: "Are you ready? Be quick! We must be going." "I can't come," I answered. "I'm in bed." My hostess saw that I had got the better of her. I heard her laugh the laugh of confessed defeat. As soon as the sound of her wheels told me she was off the premises, I put on my coat, went down to the library, read a novel by the fire, and when she and her friends returned I had a most charming supper with them at three o'clock in the morning.

The ideal society in country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the houses to which I am now alluding—some of them great, others relatively small, but most of them built by the forefathers of their present owners—have been houses which represented for me that old order of things with which I was familiar in my own earliest childhood. Family traditions and associations—elements rooted in the soil of a national and immemorial past—such were the factors by which the life of these houses was dominated. Their influence breathed from old portraits—many of them very bad—on the walls; from old carpets and furniture; from rows of forgotten books; from paths by secluded rivers; from labyrinths of bracken and from the movements of noiseless deer. In such houses, except on rare occasions, the company belonged essentially to the same world as their entertainers. They were a nation within a nation, from which the newly arrived magnates of mere London fashion would be absent, while persons obscure in London would be here in their natural element. Everybody here not only knew everybody else, but had known them, or had at least known all about them, always. In this respect society in such country houses generally bore, and still tends to bear, a strong resemblance to Catholic society in London.

But quite apart from these characteristics which depend on similar antecedents, society in a country house possesses advantages which in a London life are, from the nature of the case, impossible. At a fashionable evening party in London a lady, when she talks to a man, gives him generally the impression, as soon as she has exchanged a word with him, that the one wish of her life is to be talking to somebody else. London conversations, even at dinners, when neither party for an hour or so is able to desert the other, are in any case cut short, like chapters of a novel which are torn away from their context. Country-house conversations are like novels which, if laid down at one moment, can be taken up again the next. The atmosphere of London is one of constant excitement. The atmosphere of a country house is one of interest pervaded by repose. Each night there is a dinner party, but there is no going out to dinner, and there is no separation afterward. What is there comparable in London to the sense of secluded parks, or of Scotch or of Irish hillsides, where society is not absent, but is present only as concentrated in the persons of a few individuals, who at happy moments may be temporarily reduced to two, and where all become new beings in new and undisturbed surroundings?

Further, let me observe this—I have here an eye on my own case in particular—that, for an unmarried man with a literary purpose in life, the enjoyment of such society is heightened by the fact—the very important fact—that at any moment he may shut himself up in his bedroom as soon as the housemaids have done with it, and devote himself to his own avocations like a hermit in an African desert. Of such serious work as I have myself accomplished, I have accomplished a large part in hermitages of this description; and the fact that society was never very far away I have usually felt as a stimulus, and very rarely as a disturbance.

Friends have often suggested to me that even persons whose own acquaintance with country houses is extensive might be interested by a description of some that I have known myself. I have indeed known as many of such houses as most people; but no one person can know more than a limited number of them; and even of this limited number I, in a volume like the present, can mention only a few. I will take them in the order in which for geographical or architectural reasons they most readily recur to my own memory. I may begin with two which deserve to be coupled together on account of the positions which they occupy—namely, the extreme northeast of Great Britain in one case, and the extreme southwest in the other. I allude to Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland, and St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall.

The whole population of the great county of Sutherland is hardly so much as two-thirds of the population of Wimbledon, and, except for some minute portions, was, prior to certain recent sales, a single gigantic property. Dunrobin Castle, with a million silent acres of mountain and moor behind it, looks down from a cliff over the wastes of the North Sea, but is on the landward side sheltered by fine timber. At the foot of the cliff are the flower beds of an old-world garden. The nucleus of the house is ancient, but has now been incrusted by great modern additions, the Victorian regime expressing itself in windows of plate glass. But through the plate glass on one side is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside the dining room. So remote is this great house from any center of modern industry that the carts, dogcarts, and wagonettes used by the estate and the family were built and repaired by a staff of men on the premises. My first visit to Dunrobin was in the days of the Duchess Annie. The duke was away on his yacht, but during my visit he returned, and the duchess and I went to meet him at the station—a private station in the grounds. Those were the early days of agrarian agitation in the Highlands—an agitation which was vehemently applauded by the Radical press of London. One Radical correspondent reported in tones of triumph that the duke had been openly cursed by his tenants on his own private platform. The nonsensical nature of such statements is sufficiently illustrated by what happened on the occasion here in question. A number of tenants were gathered together on the platform for the purpose of receiving the duke, not with curses but with welcome; and as soon as he had descended from the train an old woman rushed from the throng and very nearly embraced him. "You dear old woman," he said, laying his hand on her shoulder, "you dear old woman, how glad I am to see you again!"

St. Michael's Mount, though less remote than Dunrobin from the modern world in some ways, is more visibly separated from it in another, being, except at times of low tide, an island. It crowns and incases the summit of a veritable island rock. The entrance to it is by a tower the bases of which seem to descend from above and meet the visitor halfway as he toils up a path apparently made for rabbits. Having mounted a hundred stairs, the adventurer is in a comfortable hall, above which are the dining room, once a monkish refectory, and an ancient church, now used as a private chapel. One door of this hall gives access to a large drawing-room, one of whose walls and whose fireplace have been carved out of the living rock. Another gives access to a billiard room, below which the Atlantic breaks at a depth of two hundred feet, and whose granite balconies are grazed by the breasts of ascending sea birds.

Both these houses, which would constantly suggest to me, when I stayed in them, the celebrated words of Keats:

Magic casements opening on the foam
Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

are, it is needless to say, exceptions rather than types. Of the others which I may appropriately mention, a few may be taken as belonging to an exceptional class also, on account of their unusual size; and these I may again divide into genuine and ancient castles, as distinct from modern imitations on the one hand, and what are properly palatial villas of the classical type on the other; the remainder being smaller, though often of great magnitude, and commonly known by such names as "halls," "parks," or "manors."

Of more or less genuine castles I have known a considerable number, many of them much smaller than houses less ambitiously named; but, with the possible exception of Alnwick, the interior of which is undisguisedly modern, there is one which, in point of magnitude and continuity of occupation, forms a class by itself. This castle is Raby, which has never been uninhabited since the days of Stephen, when the first smoke wreaths rose from its kitchen chimney. The house is a huge block, rising at intervals into towers, with a small court in the middle of it, across which carriages drive, having passed through a tunnel of arches, and deposit their occupants in a hall, from which stairs, at both ends of it, lead to the various living rooms, among these being an upper hall more than fifty yards in length. This whole block stands in a walled area, entered by a castellated gateway and encircled by a moat, a portion of which still holds water, and in which the towers reflect themselves. When I stayed there as a guest of the Duke and Duchess of Cleveland, an atmosphere of the past not only pervaded the castle, but seemed to extend itself for some miles into the neighborhood. When I and others who had arrived by the same train issued from the station doors, the carriages awaiting us in the twilight comprised old yellow chariots, with postilions, like that of my grandfather in which I had swung myself when a child. I said to Augustus Hare, who happened to be one of the party, "One would think that we all of us were going to Gretna Green." When we approached the castle, whose towers were blots in the November evening, I felt we were approaching a castle in a child's fairy tale. In point of magnitude, combined with ancient and absolutely continuous occupation, there is, so far as my own experience goes, no private dwelling in the kingdom which excels, or even equals, Raby. The duchess kept a great album in which each of her guests was asked to inscribe some record of his or of her visit, which record was to take the form of answers to certain printed questions, or of a sketch, or some original verses. I preferred to take refuge in the last, my own metrical record being this:

Some scoff at what was, and some shrink from what may be
Or is; but they all must be pleased with a place
Where even what was looks enchanting in Raby,
And where even what is is redeemed by Her Grace.

Apart from genuine castles of feudal type and origin, the greatest houses I have known, if regarded as architectural structures, are Blenheim, Trentham (the Brentham of Lord Beaconsfield's Lothair), and Cliveden. In this class I should, perhaps, include also Sir Robert Walpole's Houghton, where I have stayed as the guest of Cora, Lady Strafford, who occupied it for many years as a tenant, and with singular taste and knowledge so arranged the interior that every chair, sideboard, and table then in common use had been Sir Robert Walpole's own. I wrote my letters one morning in his study, at his own writing table, and using his own inkstand. The walls were lined with books, most of them presents from his contemporaries, and some of them extremely curious. I may mention one in particular. It related to the South Sea Bubble, and contained what was practically a list of the largest commercial fortunes existing then in England.

Other houses which in point of magnitude belong to the same group are Stowe, with its frontage of more than a thousand feet, Hamilton Palace, Wentworth Wodehouse, and Eaton. By those whose knowledge is greater than mine, the list, in any case small, might, no doubt, be extended. I speak here only of those at which I have myself stayed. But, in any case, no one, however wealthy, would think of building on a similar scale now. Their magnitude was useful only in days other than ours, when visitors stayed for a month or six weeks at a time, and brought with them their own carriages and the necessary grooms and coachmen. It is only on very rare occasions that such houses could be even half filled to-day; and they dwarf, rather than subserve, the only possible life that a reasonable man could live in them. Blenheim impresses a visitor as though it were built for giants. Alfred Montgomery, when staying for the first time at Eaton, could not, on coming downstairs, find his way to the breakfast room till he encountered a friend who guided him. "Good God!" he exclaimed as he entered the desired apartment, "I don't want to eat my breakfast in a cathedral." Mere magnitude, indeed, beyond a certain point is not a luxury, but an oppression. The greatest private dwelling ever erected in England is said to have been Audley End, when its original builder completed it. James I said of it, "It is a house fit only for a king"; and before it could be rendered habitable three-fourths of it had to be pulled down. Such was the verdict of experience on overbuilding in the past; and though many conditions have changed, a similar practical criticism is occasionally being pronounced to-day. Trentham is practically gone. Hamilton Palace, it is said, will soon exist no longer.

When, however, we turn to genuine castles, pseudo-castles, or houses which, large though many of them are, are small as compared with these, my memory provides me with examples of them which are scattered all over the kingdom, but of which, since they are types rather than grandiose exceptions, it will for the moment be enough to describe a few, others being reserved for mention in connection with particular circumstances.

Of castles other than the greatest, were I asked to name the most romantic which has been known to me as a visitor, and the most agreeable in the way of an ancestral dwelling, I should, I think, begin with Powis, as it stands with its rose-red walls, an exhalation of the Middle Ages, on a steep declivity among the mountainous woods of Wales—woods full of deer and bracken. Much of its painted paneling had never been, when I stayed there, touched or renovated since the time of the battle of Worcester. In a bedroom which had once been occupied by Charles I there was hardly a piece of furniture which was not coeval with himself. The dining room, as I remember it, had been frescoed by a Dutch artist in the reign of William and Mary.

In respect of mere romantic situation, the English house which I remember as coming nearest to Powis is Glenthorne, the seat of the Hallidays, which not so very long ago was thirty miles from a railway on one side, and seventeen on another. It fronts the Bristol Channel on the confines of Devon and Somerset. I have described it accurately in my novel The Heart of Life. In its general aspect it resembles my own early home, Denbury, but in some ways it is quite peculiar. In front of it is an Italian garden, below which are breaking waves, and behind it precipitous woods rise like a wall to an altitude of more than twelve hundred feet. The only approach to the house is by a carriage drive three miles long, which descends to it in zigzags from the upper world of Exmoor.

Hardly less romantic is Ugbrooke, the seat of the Cliffords, about twelve miles from Torquay, associated with the name of Dryden, who was a frequent guest there, and haunted by the Catholicism of a long series of generations. The chapel is approached through, and transmits its incense to, a library which hardly contains a book more recent than the days of the nonjurors, and I have often spent long mornings there examining the files of journals belonging to the epoch of Queen Anne, of the first two Georges, and of Pope. I have kindred recollections of Lulworth Castle in Dorsetshire, where the old religious regime so casts its spell over everything that I should hardly have been surprised if a keeper, encountered in the twilight park, had turned out to be carrying, not a gun, but a crossbow.

Of other houses connected with Catholic memories I may mention two in Yorkshire—Everingham Park and Houghton, then the respective homes of the late Lord Herries and his kinsman, Mr. Charles Langdale. Both were hereditary and absolutely unquestioning Catholics; and, strange to say, a large part of their tenantry were hereditary Catholics also. Each of these houses has a great chapel attached to it, and every Sunday processions of farmers' dogcarts would deposit their occupants at doors the decorations of which plainly showed that for these stalwart Englishmen the Protestant Reformation was no more than a dream.

But putting the question of Catholic atmosphere aside, and reverting once more to castles, I may begin with a mention of Chillingham, sheltered by the shadowy woods and surrounded by the moors of Northumberland.

As compared with Alnwick, Chillingham is a small structure. Apart from some offices added during the nineteenth century, it occupies an area measuring a hundred and twenty feet by a hundred. The outer walls are of enormous thickness, with a tower at each corner; and against these outer walls the rooms which constitute the dwelling, much less massive in their masonry, are built round a small court. They have hardly been altered since the days of Inigo Jones. When I stayed there with Sir Andrew Noble, who for many years was Lord Tankerville's tenant, the whole of the furniture seemed to have grown old with the house. The most modern contents of the bookshelves were the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose faded backs would grow young again in the flickering warmth of fires. Beneath the external windows were the box borders of a garden, and visible on distant slopes were the movements of wild cattle.

Another castle with which I was very familiar was Elvaston, near Derby, where year after year I stayed with the late Lord and Lady Harrington. Originally a red-brick manor house, it was castellated in the days of Wyatt; and though architects of to-day would smile at its artificial Gothic, it may now for this very reason be regarded as a historical monument. It is a monument of tastes and sentiments which have long since passed away. It represents not only a vanished taste in architecture, but sentiments also which are now even more remote. The Earl of Harrington, under whom the Gothic transfiguration was accomplished, seems to have regarded himself as a species of knight-errant. Round the fluted pillars by which the roof of the hall is supported—a hall which he christened "the Hall of the Fair Star"—were strapped imitation lances, and the windows were darkened by scrolls which all bore the same motto, "Loyal to Honor and to Beauty." This Lord Harrington had married a very beautiful wife, for whose pleasure he surrounded the house with a labyrinth of clipped yew hedges, the trees having been brought full grown from every part of England. Animated by a romantic jealousy, he never permitted this lady to stray beyond the park gates, and a little pavilion at the end of a yew avenue contains, or contained till lately, a curious something which is a vivid revelation of his mind. It consists of an image in plaster of Paris of his ladylove, together with one of himself kneeling at her feet and gazing at her, his hands being about to commit his adoration to the strings of a guitar. The Lord Harrington of my time, whose death is a still recent event, was associated with the huntsman's horn rather than with the strings of a troubador, and with the accouterments of the polo-field rather than with spears and lances. Lord Harrington, though his ruling passion was sport, was a man of wide information, expert as a mechanical engineer, and possessed alike in disposition and manner that rare kind of geniality which almost amounts to genius, and made all with whom he came in contact—even the Derbyshire miners—his friends.

The mention of Elvaston carries my thoughts to Cardiff. Cardiff Castle till late in the nineteenth century was mainly, though not wholly, ruinous, and some decades ago it was, at enormous expense, reconstructed by the late Lord Bute. All the lore of the architectural antiquarian was ransacked in order to consummate this feat. Indeed the wealth of detail accumulated and reproduced by him will be held by many people to have defeated its own ends. Ornaments, carvings, colorings, of which ancient castles may severally offer single or a few specimens, were here crowded together in such emphatic profusion as to fill the mind of the spectator with a sense of something novel rather than of anything antique. In a certain spectacular sense Cardiff Castle is large, but for practical purposes it is very much the reverse. I stayed there—and this was my first introduction to Wales—for the Eisteddfod, of which for that year Lord Bute was the president. The house party on the occasion comprised only eight persons, and there was, so I gathered, no room for more. Lord Bute was by temperament a man of extreme shyness, who naturally shrank from obtruding his own person in public, but on this occasion he rose to a full sense of his obligations. He prepared and delivered an address, most interesting and profoundly learned, on Welsh musical history. He and his house party were conveyed to the place of meeting in quasi-royal carriages, preceded and followed by outriders, and for a series of nights he provided the inhabitants of the town with balls, concerts, or entertainments of other kinds. No host could have been more gracious than he. On the last night of my visit there was a gathering practically private. The heroine of this was old Lady Llanover, who, though not a native of Wales, was an enthusiast for all things Welsh. She had brought with her in her train a bevy of her own female domestics, who wore steeple-crowned hats, and also an old butler dressed up like a bard. These were all arranged on a daïs, and sang national melodies; and when the performance was finished Lord Bute, with a charming smile, presented Lady Llanover with a ring. This bore on its large gem an engraving of a Welsh harp, below which was the motto in Welsh, "The language of the soul is in its strings."

Among my fellow guests at the Castle was a singularly interesting personage—Mr. George Clark of Talygarn. Mr. Clark, in alliance with Lord Wimborne, played a prominent part in the development of the Dowlais steel works, and he was at the same time one of the greatest genealogists and heraldic antiquarians of his day. I was intimate with him till his death, and have been intimate with his family ever since.

Apart from St. Michael's Mount, there are two old houses in Cornwall which year after year I visited for some part of December, proceeding thence to a third for a Christmas gathering in Worcestershire, and to a fourth—this was in Yorkshire—for the celebration of the New Year.

The Cornish houses of which I speak were Heligan, near Mevagissy, the home of the John Tremaynes, and Trevarthenick, near Truro, the home of Sir Louis and Lady Molesworth. Pale externally with the stucco of more than a hundred and fifty years ago, neither of these substantial houses has any resemblance to a castle; but the ample rooms and staircases, the dark mahogany doors and the far-planted woods of each represented in some subtle way the Cornish country gentlemen as they were in the days before rotten boroughs were abolished. Within a few miles' radius of Trevarthenick were two little agricultural townlets, hardly more than villages, which together were represented in those days by four members of Parliament. Old Lady Molesworth, Sir Louis's remarkable mother, who when she was ninety-five was as vigorous as most women of sixty, looked on any landowner as a parvenu who had not been a territorial magnate before the days of Henry VIII. When I think of these people and their surroundings I am reminded of an opinion I once expressed to an artist well known as a luminary of some new school of painting. When I met him at the house of a friend he told me that he had abandoned painting, and was applying his artistic principles to the manufacture of furniture. He kindly explained to me in somewhat technical language what the principles of the new art as applied to furniture were. I apologized for my inability to understand them, and confessed to him that my own taste in furniture was not so much artistic as political, and that the kind of chair, for example, which gave me most satisfaction was one that had been made and used before the first Reform bill.

The houses already referred to as successive scenes of Christmas and New Year visits were Hewel Grange, Lord Plymouth's, near Bromsgrove, and Byram, Sir John Ramsden's, about twenty miles from York.

Hewel Grange, which has taken the place of an old house, now abandoned, is itself entirely modern. Of all the considerable houses built in England during the last thirty years, it is, so far as I know, the most perfect as a specimen of architecture. Externally its style is that of the early seventeenth century, but its great hall is a monument of Italian taste subdued to English traditions and the ways of English life. New though the structure is, the red sandstone of its walls and gables has been already so colored by the weather that they look like the growth of centuries, and whatever is exotic in the interior carries the mind back to the times of John of Padua.

To pass from Hewel to Byram was to pass from one world to another, though both were saturated with traditions of old English life. Byram, standing as it does in a territory of absolutely flat deer park, gives, with its stuccoed walls and narrow, oblong windows, no hint of intended art. Parts of it are of considerable age, but it represents as a whole the dignified utilitarianism of the Yorkshire country gentleman as he was from a hundred to two hundred years ago. Sir John himself, familiar with political office, accomplished as a classical scholar, and endowed with one of the most charming of voices, was of all country gentlemen the most perfect whom it has ever been my lot to know. He was cradled in the traditions of Whiggism, and to me one of his most delightful attributes was inability to assimilate the spirit of modern Liberalism, whether in the sphere of politics or of social or religious thought.