i have no intention of writing an autobiography. there has been nothing in my life which could justify such a pretension. but i have lived a long time. i remember an aged porter at the monastery of the “sagro eremo,” above camaldoli, who had taken brevet rank as a saint solely on the score of his ninety years. his brethren called him and considered him as saint simon simply because he had been porter at that gate for more than sixty years. now my credentials as a babbler of reminiscences are of a similar nature to those of the old porter. i have been here so many, many years. and then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century—a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell.
of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that social life in england—or{2} rather let me say in europe—is very different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated causes which have differentiated the victorian era from all others. but only the small records of an unimportant individual life, only the memories which happen to linger in an old man’s brain, like bits of drift-weed floating round and round in the eddies of a back-water, can bring vividly before the young of the present generation those ways and manners of acting and thinking and talking in the ordinary every-day affairs of life which indicate the differences between themselves and their grandfathers.
i was born in the year 1810 at no. 16, keppel street, russell square. the region was at that time inhabited by the professional classes, mainly lawyers. my father was a barrister of the middle temple to the best of my recollection, but having chambers in the old square, lincoln’s inn. a quarter of a century or so later, all the district in question became rather deteriorated in social estimation, but has, i am told, recently recovered itself in this respect under the careful and judicious administration of the duke of bedford. the whole region appeared to me, when i was recently in london, about the least changed part of the london of my youthful days. as i walked up store street, which runs in a line from keppel street to tottenham court road, i spied the name of “pidding, confectioner.” i immediately entered the shop and{3} made a purchase at the counter. “i did not in the least want this tart,” said i to the girl who was serving in the shop. “why did you take it, then?” said she, with a little toss of her head. “nobody asked you to buy it.” “i bought it,” rejoined i, “because i used to buy pastry of mr. pidding in this shop seventy years ago.” “lor’, sir!” said the girl, “did you really?” she probably considered me to be the wandering jew.
i remember well that my father used to point out to me houses in russell square, bedford square, and bloomsbury square in which judges and other notable legal luminaries used to live. but even in those days the localities in question, especially the last named of them, were beginning to be deserted by such personages, who were already moving farther westward. the occasion of these walks with my father through the squares i have named—to which red lion square might have been added—was one the painful nature of which has fixed it in my memory indelibly.
“infandam memoria jubes renovare dolorem.”
for the object of these walks was the rendering an account of the morning’s studies. i was about six years old, when under my father’s auspices i was first introduced to the eton latin grammar. he was a wykehamist, had been a fellow of new college, and had held a vinerian fellowship. and his great ambition was, that his eldest son, myself, should tread in his steps and pursue the same{4} career. d?s aliter visum!—as regards at least the latter stages of that career. for i did become, and am, a wykehamist, as much as eight years at coll. b. m. winton prope winton can make me.
of which more anon.
for the present i see myself alone in the back drawing-room of no. 16, keppel street, in which room the family breakfast took place—probably to avoid the necessity of lighting another fire in the dining-room below—at 7 a.m., on my knees before the sofa, with my head in my hands and my eyes fixed on the eton latin grammar laid on the sofa cushion before me. my parents had not yet come down to breakfast, nor had the tea urn been brought up by the footman. nota bene.—my father was a poor man, and his establishment altogether on a modest footing. but it never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on without a man-servant in livery. and though this liveried footman served a family in which two tallow candles with their snuffer dish supplied the whole illumination of the evening, had the livery been an invented one instead of that proper to the family, the circumstance would have been an absurdity exciting the ridicule of all the society in which my parents lived. tempora mutantur! certainly at the present day an equally unpretending household would be burthened by no footman. but on the morning which memory is recalling to me the footman was coming up with the urn, and my parents were coming down to breakfast, probably simultaneously; and the{5} question of the hour was whether i could get the due relationship of relative and antecedent into my little head before the two events arrived.
and that, as i remember it, was the almost unvaried routine for more than a year or two. i think, however, that the walks of which i was speaking when this retrospect presented itself to me must have belonged to a time a little, but not much later; for i had then advanced to the making of latin verses. we used to begin in those days by making “nonsense verses.” and many of us ended in the same way! the next step—gradus ad parnassum—consisted in turning into latin verse certain english materials provided for the purpose, and so cunningly prepared as to fall easily and almost inevitably into the required form. and these were the studies which, as i specially remember, were the subject of rehearsal during those walks from lincoln’s inn to keppel street.
my father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five o’clock dinner—rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and laborious man. well! we, that is my next brother (not the one whose name became subsequently well known in the world, but my brother henry, who died early) and myself, used to walk from keppel street to lincoln’s inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. he was a fast walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition of our morning’s poetical achievements did not tend, as i well remember, to facilitate the difficulty of “keeping our wind.{6}”
but what has probably fixed all this in my mind during nearly three quarters of a century was my father’s pat application of one of our lines to the difficulties of those peripatetic poetizings. “muse and sound of wheel do not well agree,” read the cunningly prepared original, which the alumnus with wonderful sagacity was to turn into, “non bene conveniunt musa rot?que sonus.” “that,” said my father, as he turned sharp round the corner into the comparative quiet of featherstone buildings, “is exactly why i turned out of holborn!”
i do not know whether children of eight years old, or thereabouts, would at the present day be allowed to range london so freely as we were. but our great amusement and delight was to take long exploring walks in as distant parts of the huge (though then comparatively small) city as could be compassed within the time at our disposition. one especially favourite excursion, i well remember, was to the white horse cellar in piccadilly to see the coaches start or arrive. i knew all their names, and their supposed comparative speed. by this means, indeed, came my first introduction to english geography. formal lessons on such a thoroughly “commercial academy” subject were not, of course, thought of for an aspiring wykehamist. but for the due enjoyment of the white horse cellar spectacle it was necessary to know the whereabouts of the cities, their distance from london, and the routes by which they were reached. it thus came to pass that our geographical notions were of a{7} curiously partial description—tolerably copious and accurate as regards the south and west of england, far less so as regards the north. for the north country coaches did not start from piccadilly. on the opposite side of the way to the white horse cellar there was another coaching inn, the white bear, on which i remember we used to look with much contempt, from the belief, whether in any degree well founded i know not, that the coaches which stopped there on their way out of town, or arrived there, were mainly slow coaches.
one does not traverse well nigh four score years without having experienced longings for the unattainable on several occasions. but i have no remembrance of any such eager, craving longing as the chronic longing of those days to make one of the great-coated companies who were departing to their various destinations by those “telegraphs,” “high-flyers,” “magnets,” and “independents.” (the more suggestive names of the “wonder,” and its rival the “no wonder!” once celebrated on the north-western road, belonged to a later day.) had i been offered a seat on any of these vehicles my choice would have been dictated solely by considerations of distance—falmouth for choice, as the westward ultima thule of coaching experience. with what rapture should i have climbed, in my little round jacket as i was, and without a thought of any other protection, to the roof of the falmouth mail—the mail for choice, the devonport “quicksilver” being then in the womb of the future—and{8} started to fetch a forgotten letter (say) of the utmost importance, with strict injunctions to bring it back by the returning coach! i don’t think my imagination had yet soared to the supreme glories of the box seat. that came later. to have been a booked passenger, that that horn should have sounded for me, that i should have been included in the guard’s final and cheery assurance, that at length all was “right”—would have been ample enough for an ecstasy of happiness. what an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! what an infinite succession of “teams!” what a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we should clatter at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the morning, through the streets of quiet little country towns, ourselves the only souls awake in all the place! what speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman, when he “left you here, sir!” in the small hours! what a delightful sense of the possible dangers of the undertaking as testified by many eagerly read narratives of the disasters of the road. alas! i had no share in it all, save to stand on the curbstone amid the crowd of jew boys selling oranges and cedar pencils sixpence a dozen, and hurrying passengers and guards and porters, and look on them all with envious longing.
nota bene. on such an occasion at the present day—if it be possible to conceive such an anachronism—the jew boys above referred to would be{9} probably christian boys, and the object of their commerce, the evening papers. but i have no recollection of any such element in the scene at the white horse cellar some sixty-eight years since.
occasionally when a holiday from lessons occurred—i am afraid most probably in consequence of my father being confined to his bed with headaches, which even at that early day, and increasingly, as years went on, afflicted him—we, my brother henry and i, obtained permission for a longer ramble. i have no recollection that on these occasions either the parks (unless perhaps sometimes st. james’s park), or kensington gardens, or hampstead, or highgate, or any of the places that might be supposed to be attractive had any attractions for us. our faces were ever turned eastward. the city with its narrow mysterious lanes, and still more mysterious wharves, its quaint secluded churches, its guildhall, and its gog and magog, the queer localities of the halls of its companies, and specially the abstruse mystery of that venerable palladium, the london stone, excited in those days an irresistible influence on my imagination. but above all else the grand object of a much-planned eastern pilgrimage was the docks!—with the out-going ships bearing, tied to their shrouds, boards indicating their destinations. here again was unsatisfied longing! but it was a longing more tempered by awe and uncertainty. i am not sure that i would, if it had been offered to me, have stepped on board an east indiaman bound for bombay as eagerly as i{10} would have climbed a coach starting for the land’s end. but it was a great triumph to have seen with our own eyes the agra (or some other) castle majestically passing through the dock gates, while passengers on deck, men and women, whose feet would absolutely touch land no more till they stopped at far bombay on the other side of the world, spoke last farewells to friends standing on the dock walls or even on the gates themselves.
but i can recall no less vividly certain expeditions of a kind which appeared to our imaginations to be—and which perhaps really were in some degree—fraught with a certain amount of peril. stories had reached us of sundry mysteriously wicked regions, where the bandit bands of the great city consorted and lived outlaw lives under circumstances and conditions that powerfully excited our young imaginations. especially accounts of a certain lane had reached us, where it was said all the pocket handkerchiefs stolen by all the pickpockets in london were to be seen exposed in a sort of unholy market. the name of this place was saffron hill. whether any such place still exists, i know not. it has probably been swept away by the march of recent improvement. but it did in those days veritably exist. and to this extraordinary spot—as remote and strange to our fancy as the realms of prester john—it was determined after protracted consideration by my brother and myself, that our next long ramble should be devoted. we had ascertained that the dingy land of our researches lay somewhat to the{11} westward of smithfield—which had already been the object of a most successful, adventurous, and delightful expedition, not without pleasurable perils of its own from excited bullocks, still more excited drovers and their dogs—and by dint of considerable perseverance we reached it, and were richly rewarded for our toil and enterprise. report had spoken truly. saffron hill was a world of pocket-handkerchiefs. from every window and on lines stretched across the narrow street they fluttered in all the colours of the rainbow, and of all sizes and qualities. the whole lane was a long vista of pennon-like pocket-handkerchiefs! we should have much liked to attempt to deal in this strange market, not so much for the sake of possessing any of the articles, as with a view of obtaining experience, and informing ourselves respecting the manners and customs of the country. but we were protected from the possibly unpleasant results of any such tentative by the total absence from our pockets of any coin of the realm. we doubtless had pocket-handkerchiefs, and i have no recollection of their having been stolen. probably it was ascertained by the inhabitants that they were not worth their notice.
but the subject reminds me of an experience of the pocket-picking world which occurred to me some twenty years later. it was at naples. people generally in those days carried silk pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the scraps of muslin which are affected nowadays. and five silk pocket-handkerchiefs were abstracted from my pockets{12} during my walks abroad in as many days. i then took to wearing very common ones, and lost no more! an american then at naples, whose experiences of the proclivities of that population had been similar to mine, was not so fortunate in the result of the defensive measures he adopted. he sewed strongly into the interior of his pocket a large fish-hook. the result which he anticipated followed. the thief’s hand was caught, and the american, turning sharply, seized him by the wrist and held him in a grasp like a vice till he could hand him over to a gendarme. but within a fortnight that american was stabbed to the heart one night as he was going home from the theatre. the light-fingered fraternity, it would seem, considered that such a practice was not within the laws of the game; whereas my more moderate ruse did not offend their sense of justice and fair play.
my brother and i reached home safely enough after our expedition to thief-land; and were inexhaustible in our accounts of the wonders we had witnessed. for it formed no part of our plan, and would not have been at all in accordance with the general practice of our lives to conceal the facts from our parents. probably we had a sufficient suspicion of the questionable nature of the expedition we contemplated to prevent us from declaring it beforehand. but our education and habits would have forbidden any dream of concealing it.
as far as my recollection serves me, our moral{13} and religious education led us to consider the whole duty of boy to be summed up in the two precepts, “obey,” and “tell no lies.” i think there was a perfunctory saying of some portion of the catechism on a sunday morning. but i am very sure that in our own minds, and apparently in those of all concerned, the vastly superior importance of the virgil lesson admitted of no moment’s doubt. but it must not be imagined from this that my parents were more irreligious people than their neighbours; still less that they were not most affectionately and indeed supremely solicitous for the well-being and education of their children. my father was the son of a priest of the church of england, and my mother the daughter of another, the rev. william milton, vicar of heckfield, a new college living not far from reading. their associates were mainly barristers or clergy. my father was wholly and absolutely free from the prevailing vice of the time, and i never remember to have seen him in any slightest degree the worse for drink. and in the whole manière d’être of the house and home there was no note or symptom of any life save one of the most correct respectability and propriety, fully up to the average of the time. but my parents were by no means what was called in the language of the time “evangelicals.” and in the social atmosphere of those days, any more decided and marked amount of religious instruction and teaching would have unmistakably indicated “evangelical tendencies.” moreover, though i cannot remember, and it is{14} exceedingly improbable, that any ideas were directly instilled into our minds on the subject, it certainly is the fact that i grew into boyhood with the notion that “evangelicalism” or “low churchism” was a note of vulgarity—a sort of thing that might be expected to be met with in tradesmen’s back parlours, and “academies,” where the youths who came from such places were instructed in english grammar and arithmetic, but was not to be met with, and was utterly out of place, among gentlemen and in gentlemanlike places of education, where nothing of the kind was taught.
all this to mark the change of tempora and mores, in these as in so many other respects, since george the third was king.
among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood’s years in keppel street, i can still recall to the mind’s eye the face and features of “farmer,” the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. farmer, as i remember her, inspired more awe than affection. she was an austere and somewhat grim sort of body. and somehow or other the obscurely terrible fact that she was an anabaptist (!) had reached the world of the nursery. i need hardly say that the accusation carried with it no sort of idea whatever to our minds. i don’t think we had any knowledge that the mystic term in question had reference to any forms or modifications of religious belief. but we were well{15} assured that it implied something mysterious and terrible. and i am afraid that we gracelessly availed ourselves of what we should have considered a misfortune, if we had at all known what it meant, to express on occasions of revolt against discipline, our scorn for an individual so disgraced by nature. i have still in my ear the lilt of a wicked chorus the burthen of which ran:—
“old farmer is an anabaptist!
when she is gone, she will not be missed!”
i remember in connection with poor farmer and her heresies, an incident which must have been ridiculous enough to the adult actors in it. dr. nott, one of the prebendaries of winchester, was an old and intimate friend of my mother’s—had been such i believe, before her marriage. the mention of this gentleman recalls to my mind—but this recollection dates from a later day,—that it used to be said satirically, with what truth i will not attempt to guess, that there was a large chapter at winchester and nott, one of them, a clergyman: the intention being to insinuate that he was the only properly clerical character among them. at all events, dr. nott was an exemplary dignitary of the church, not only in character, tastes, and pursuits, but in outward presentment also. i remember well his spare figure, his pale and delicately cut features, his black gaiters to the knee, and his elaborate white neckcloth. he was a competent, and what would have been called in that day an “elegant” italian scholar. it was{16} wholly under his supervision, that a few years subsequently the extensive restoration and repair of winchester cathedral was executed; a supervision which cost him, in consequence of a fall from a ladder in the nave, a broken leg and subsequent lameness for life. he had, if i mistake not, been one of the tutors of the princess charlotte.
well, upon one occasion of a visit of dr. nott’s in keppel street, we children were summoned to the drawing-room for his inspection; and in reply to a variety of questions as to progress, and goodness in the nursery, etc., i, as the eldest, took courage to reply that if we were not always as good and obedient in the nursery as might be desired, the circumstance was to be attributed to the painful fact that our nurse was an anabaptist! whether dr. nott was selected as the recipient of this confidential communication because i had any vague idea that this disgraceful circumstance had any special connection with his department of human affairs, i cannot say. we were however told that the fact was no wise incompatible with farmer’s character as an excellent nurse and good servant, and least of all could be considered as absolving us from the duty of obedience. i remember that i wondered then,—and i wonder still—what passed upon the subject between my mother and the doctor after our dismissal to the nursery.
another intimate friend of my mother’s and frequent visitor in keppel street was lady dyer, the wife, and subsequently widow of general sir{17} thomas dyer. sir thomas resided on his estate of ovington, near winchester; and i take it that my mother’s intimacy with lady dyer had been brought about by the friendship existing between both ladies and miss gabell, the eldest daughter of dr. gabell, the head master of winchester college. lady dyer, after several years of widowhood, married the baron de zandt; and i remember, very many years subsequently to the time that i am here writing of, visiting her with my mother at her schloss, near bamberg, where she lived in the huge house alone after losing her second husband.
i fancy it was mainly due to her intimacy with my mother during those years in keppel street that the house was frequented by several italians; exiles from their own country under stress of political troubles. especially i remember among these general guglielmo pepe, subsequently the hero of the hopeless defence of venice against the austrians. of course i was too young to know or see much of him in the keppel street days; but many years afterwards i had abundant opportunities of knowing pepe’s genuine nobility of character, high honour, and ardent patriotism. he was a remarkably handsome man, but not a brilliant or amusing companion. i remember that his sobriquet among the three ladies mentioned together above was gateau de plomb! but none the less was he highly and genuinely respected by them. he had a kind of simple, dignified, placid manner of enunciating the most astounding platitudes, and replying to the{18} laughter they sometimes produced by a calm, gentle smile, which showed how impossible it was for his simple soul to imagine that his hearers were otherwise than delighted with his wit and wisdom. how well i can remember the pleasure his visits were wont to afford in the nursery by reason of the dried neapolitan figs and mandarin oranges, which he used to receive from his brother, general fiorestano pepe, and never failed to distribute among his english friends. his brother, when guglielmo threw in his lot with the “patriots,” never forfeited his allegiance or quarrelled with the king of naples. yet the two brothers continued on affectionately fraternal terms to the last.
the quiet course of those keppel street years was, as i remember, once or twice broken by the great event of a visit to heckfield to my maternal grandfather, the rev. william milton, a ci-devant fellow of new college. he had at that time married a second wife, a miss partington, his first wife, a derbyshire gresley, my maternal grandmother, whom i had never seen, having died young. as my grandfather milton was the son of a bristol saddler (who lived to the age of ninety-nine), i suppose his marriage with a gresley must have been deemed a mésalliance for the lady. but her death having occurred before my time, i never heard anything of this.
the vicar of heckfield held the adjoining chapelry of mattingly, at which place the morning service was performed on alternate sundays. he was an ex{19}cellent parish priest after the fashion of his day;—that is to say he was kindly to all, liberal to the poor to the utmost extent of his means, and well beloved by his neighbours, high and low. he was a charming old man, markedly gentlemanlike and suave in his manner; very nice in his person; clever unquestionably in a queer, crotchety sort of way; and thoroughly minded to do his duty according to his lights in that state of life to which it had pleased god to call him. but he would have had no more idea of attempting anything of the nature of active parochial work or reform, as understood at the present day, than he would have had of scheming to pay the national debt. indeed, the latter would have been the more likely to occupy his mind of the two, for he was crotchety and full of schemes. especially he was fond of mechanics, and spent much money and much labour during many years on a favourite scheme for obviating the danger arising from the liability of a stage coach to be upset. he published more than one pamphlet on the subject, illustrated—i can see the pages before me now—by designs of various queer-looking models. there was a large coach-house attached to the vicarage, and it was always full of the strangest collection of models of coaches. i remember well that they all appeared to me hideous, and as ?sthetically inferior to my admired “telegraphs” and “high-flyers” as a modern ironclad seems to the three-decker of his youth in the eyes of an old sailor. but, as may be imagined. i never ventured{20} to broach any such heresy in my grandfather’s hearing! i should unquestionably have done so had it been my father. but lesser acquaintanceship and the venerable age of my grandfather checked my presumption.
there was—and doubtless is—a very pretty evergreen-embowered lawn at the vicarage, and on this also there always used to be some model or other intended to illustrate the principles of traction. one i especially remember which was called (not, it may seem, very grammatically) rotis volventibus. this machine consisted of two huge wheels, some ten feet high, joined together by a number of cross-bars at a distance of a foot or so from each other. it will be understood what a delightful amusement it must have been to creep into the interior of this structure, and cause it to roll over the smoothly shaven turf by stepping treadmill fashion on the cross-bars one after the other. but unfortunately in one part of the lawn there was a steep declivity, and one day, when the idea of making rotis volventibus descend this slope became irresistible, there was a tremendous smashing of the evergreen hedge, and a black-and-blue little body, whose escape without broken bones was deemed truly prodigious.
“never, tom,” said my grandfather, “put in motion forces which you are unable to control!”
the words remained implanted in my memory. but i do not suppose they carried much instruction with them to my mind at the time.
i believe my grandfather spent more money on{21} his mechanical fads than was quite prudent, and took out patents which were about as remunerative and useful as that which charles the second is said to have granted to a sailor who stood on his head on the top of salisbury steeple, securing to him the monopoly of that practice!
i remember another eccentricity in which the vicar indulged. he said the contact of a knife’s edge with earthenware, or porcelain, was extremely disagreeable. he caused, therefore, a number of dinner plates to be made with a little circular depression some two inches in diameter and about as deep as a crown piece in the centre, and had some round pieces of silver to fit into these receptacles, on which he cut his meat.
he was withal a very popular man, a good scholar, with decidedly scholarly tastes, much of a mathematician, a genuine humourist, with a sort of horatian easy-going geniality about him, which was very charming even to us boys.
my brother henry was one year my junior; my brother anthony, with whom the world subsequently became acquainted, was five years younger than i. henry, therefore, was the companion of all the london rambles which have been mentioned. i think we were tolerably good boys, truthful and obedient to legitimate authority. i was, however, if nursery traditions of a somewhat later day may be accepted as embodying real facts, rather too much given to yielding obedience only on reason shown; to “argify,” as certain authoritarians are wont to call{22} it; and to make plenary submission only when consciously defeated in argument.
we had little or nothing of the “amusements” nowadays so liberally supplied to children. there was the pantomime at christmas, intensely enjoyed. and i remember well pondering on the insoluble question, why my parents, who evidently, i thought, could if they chose it, go to the theatre every night of their lives, should abstain from doing so.
i do not remember any discontented longings for more or other amusements than we had. i was a thoroughly well constituted and healthy child, but without the smallest pretention to good looks, either in esse or in posse; sturdily built, with flaxen head, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes; broad of hand and foot; strong as a little pony—a veritable saxon in type. i seem to my recollections to have been somewhat bravely ready to accept a life, in which the kicks might be more superabundant than the halfpence, not without complacent mental reference to the moral and physical breadth of shoulders, ready for whatever fate might lay on them. the nature of my childish mind, as i remember, was to place its ideas of heroism in capacity for uncomplaining endurance, rather than in capability for mastering others.
all the usual childish complaints and maladies touched me very lightly. i was as indifferent to weather, wet or dry, wind or shine, as a shetland pony. feet wet through had to remain in statu quo till they were dry again. assiduously taught{23} by my mother, i read at a very early age. her plan for teaching the letters was as follows. she had a great number of bone counters with the alphabet in capitals and small letters on either side printed on them; then having invited a charming little girl, the daughter of a neighbour—(katie gibbon, laid to rest this many a year under the yew tree in the churchyard of the village of stanton, near monmouth)—who was just my own age, she tossed the counters broadcast over the floor, instituting prizes for him, or her, who should in crawling races over the floor, soonest bring the letter demanded. reading thus began to be an amusement to me at an unusually early age. i believe i gave early indications of possessing a certain quantum of brain power; but had no reputation for cleverness. indeed, had my parents ever formed the opinion that any one of their children was in any way markedly clever, they would have carefully concealed it from the subject of it. i take it, i was far from being what is called a prepossessing child. i had, i well remember, a reputation for an uncompromising expression of opinion, which was not altogether admirable. my mother used to tell in after years how, when once i had been, at about four years old, attentively watching her dressing for dinner, while standing on a chair by the side of her dressing table, i broke silence when the work was completed to say very judicially, “now you have made yourself as fine as poso—(possible)—and you look worse than you did when you began!{24}”
i am tempted to insert here a letter to my father from dr. williams, my old winchester master, which (amusingly to me) illustrates what i have here written of my nursery tendencies. it belongs to a later date, when i was within half a year of leaving winchester. i had not found it among my papers when i wrote the passage to which it is now appended. but i place it here in homage to the dictum that the child is father to the man.
“i have the pleasure,” dr. williams writes, “to express my approbation of your son’s conduct during the last half-year. his firmness in maintaining what was right and putting down what was wrong was very conspicuous in the early part of that time; not that i imagine it was less afterwards, but occasion did not call it forth so much.”
what the occasion was i entirely forget; evidently he refers to some exercise of my power as a prefect.
“i have remarked to you before that he is fond of having a reason assigned for every thing; but he must take care that this do not degenerate into captiousness. his temper is generally good, but a little too sensitive when he fancies a smile is raised at his expense.”
i feel no confidence that years have rendered me safe from the first fault which my excellent master thus warned me against; but i am sure they have cured me of the second.
i remember too, in connection with those keppel street days, to have heard my mother speak of an{25} incident which somewhat curiously illustrates the ways and habits of a time already so far left behind us by a whole world of social changes. it was nothing more than a simple visit to the theatre to hear mrs. siddons in lady macbeth. but this exploit involved circumstances that rendered it memorable for other reasons besides the intense gratification derived from the performance. in the first place “the pit” was the destination to which my father and mother were bound; not altogether, i take it, so much for the sake of the lower price of admission (though my father was a sufficiently poor and a sufficiently careful man to render this a consideration), as from the idea that the pit offered the best vantage ground for a thoroughly appreciative and critical judgment of the performance. for when we children were taken to see a pantomime we went, as i remember, to the boxes. but this visit to the pit involved the necessity of being at the theatre at two in the afternoon, and then standing in the crowd till, if i rightly remember, six in the evening! of course food had to be carried. and each man there did his best to support and assist the lady under his charge. but the ordeal must have been something tremendous, and the amount of enthusiasm needed to induce a lady to face it something scarcely to be understood at the present day. my mother used to relate that sundry women were carried out from the crowd at the theatre door fainting.
before closing this keppel street chapter of my{26} existence i may mention one or two circumstances of the family life there which illustrate the social habits of those days. the family dinner-hour was five. there were no dinner napkins to be seen; they were perhaps less needed by clean-shaven chins and lips. two tallow candles, requiring to be snuffed by snuffers lying in a little plated tray ad hoc every now and then, partially illumined the table, but scarcely at all the more distant corners of the room. nor were any more or better lights used during the evening in the drawing-room. the only alternative would have been wax lights at half-a-crown a pound—an extravagance not to be thought of. port and sherry were always placed on the shining mahogany table when the cloth was withdrawn, and no other wine. only on the occasion of having friends to dinner, the port became a “magnum” of a vintage for which my father’s cellar was famous, and possibly madeira might be added.
perhaps it may be worth noting here as an incident illustrating change of manners that i vividly remember my mother often singing to us children in keppel street an old song about an “unfortunate miss bayly,” who had been seduced by a “captain bold of halifax, who dwelt in country quarters.” now a purer or more innocent-minded woman than my mother did not live, nor one less likely to have suffered aught that she imagined to be unfitted virginibus puerisque to reach the ears of her children. nor do i suppose that we had the faintest notion of the nature of the evil inflicted on the unfortunate{27} miss bayly by the captain bold, nor that we were in any degree scandalised by the subsequent incident of the parish priest being bribed by “a one pound note” to accord christian burial to the corpse of a suicide, which he had previously refused to bury. it may be feared that quite as many “unfortunates” share the fate of miss bayly either in town or country quarters at the present day as in the early days of the century. but i take it that the old world ditty in question would not be selected for nursery use at the present day.
i could chatter on about those childish days in keppel street, and have been, i am afraid, too garrulous already. what i have said, however, is all illustrative of the social changes seventy years have wrought, and may at the same time serve to show that i started on my octogenarian career a sturdy, hardy little mortal, non sine d?s animosus infans.
