i left paris a day or two before my father, mother, and sisters, though bound for the same destination—bruges. my object in doing so appears to have been to get a sight of some of the towns of french flanders by the way. but i was not many days after them in reaching the chateau d’hondt, outside the porte st. pierre at bruges; and there i remained, with the exception of sundry visits to ostend, and two or three rambles among the flemish cities, till the 3rd of october.
one used to go from bruges to ostend in those days by “torreborre’s” barge, which was towed by a couple of horses. there was a lumbering but very roomy diligence drawn by three horses abreast. but the barge, though yet slower than the diligence, was the pleasanter mode of making the journey. the cost of it, i well remember, was one franc ten centimes, which included (in going by the morning barge, which started, if i remember rightly, at six a.m.), as much bread and butter and really excellent café au lait as the traveller chose to consume{291}—and i chose in those days to consume a considerable quantity. what the journey cost without any breakfast, i forget, if i ever knew. i fancy no such contingency as any passenger declining his bread and butter and coffee was contemplated, and that the charge was always the same whether you took breakfast or not. it was not an unpleasant manner of travelling, though specially adapted for the inmates of the castle of indolence. the cabin was roomy and comfortably furnished, and infinitely superior to the accommodation of any of the dutch trekschuyts of the present day. one took one’s book with one. and a cigar on the well-seated cabin roof was in excellent keeping with the lazy smoothness of the movement, and the flat sleepy monotony of the banks.
and these visits to ostend were very pleasant. consul fauche’s hospitable door was always open to me, and there was usually sure to be something pleasant going on within it—very generally excellent music. i have already spoken of mrs. fauche’s charming voice. any pleasant english, who might be passing through, or spending the bathing season at ostend, were sure to be found at the consul’s—especially if they brought voices or any musical dispositions with them. but mary fauche herself was in those days a sufficient attraction to make the whitest stone evening of all that when no other visitor was found there. noctes c?n?que de?m!
but those pleasant ostend days were before the summer ended overshadowed by a tragedy, which i{292} will not omit to record, because the story of it carries a valuable warning with it.
we had made acquaintance at paris with a mrs. mackintosh and her daughter, very charming scotch people. mrs. mackintosh was a widow, and margaret was her only child. she was an extremely handsome girl, nineteen years of age, and as magnificent a specimen of young womanhood as can be conceived. “more than common tall,” she showed in her whole person the development of a juno, enhanced by the vigour, elasticity and blooming health of a diana. she and her mother came to ostend for the bathing season. margaret was a great swimmer; and her delight was to pass nearly the whole of those hot july days in the water. twice, or even thrice every day she would return to her favourite element. and soon she began to complain of lassitude, and to lose her appetite and the splendour of her complexion. oh! it was the heat, which really only the constant stimulus of her bath and swim could render tolerable. she was warned that excess in bathing, especially in salt water, may sometimes be as dangerous as any other excess, but the young naiad, who had never in her life needed to pay heed to any medical word or warning, would not believe, or would not heed. and before the september was over we followed poor margaret mackintosh to the little ostend cemetery, killed by over bathing as decidedly as if she had held her head under water!
this sad tragedy brought to a gloomy end a{293} season which had been, if not a very profitable, a very amusing one. there was a ci-devant don quixote sort of a looking man, a count melfort, whose young and buxom wife boasted some strain of i forget what noble english blood, and who used to give the consul good dinners such as he particularly affected, which his wife was neither asked nor cared to share, though the ladies as well as the gentlemen were excellent good friends. there was a wealthy colonel dickson who also used to give dinners, at one of which, having been present, i remember the host fussing in and out of the room during the quarter of an hour before dinner, till at last he rushed into the drawing-room with his coat sleeves drawn up to his elbows, horror and despair in his mien, as he cried, “great heaven! the cook has cut the fins off the turbot!” if any who partook of that mutilated fish survive to this present year of grace (which, i fear, is hardly likely to be the case) i am sure they will recall the scene which ensued on the dreadful announcement. there was the very pretty and abnormally silly little banker’s wife, who supplied my old friend, captain smithett, with billets doux and fun, and who used to adapt verses sent her by a still sillier youthful adorer of her own to the purpose of expressing her own devotion to quite other swains.
it was a queer and not very edifying society, exceedingly strange, and somewhat bewildering to a lad fresh from oxford who was making his first acquaintance with continental ways and manners.{294} all the married couples seemed to be continually dancing the figure of chassée croisez, and i, who had no wife of my own, and was not yet old enough to know better, thought it extremely amusing.
when october came, and i had not heard anything from birmingham of the appointment to a mastership in the school there, for which i had been all this time waiting, i thought it was time to look up my birmingham friends and see how matters stood there. at birmingham i found that the governors of king edward’s school were still shilly-shallying; but i heard enough to convince me that no new master would be appointed till the very fine new building which now ornaments the town, but was then in course of construction, should be completed.
having become convinced of this, in which it eventually turned out that i was right, it only remained to me to return to bruges, with the assurance from dr. jeune and several of the governors that i and nobody else should have the mastership when the appointment should be made. i returned to bruges, passing one day with the dear grants at harrow, and an evening with my brother anthony in london by the way, and reached the chateau d’hondt on the 15th of october, to find my father very much worse than i had left him. he was in bed, and was attended by the dr. herbout of whom i have before spoken. but he was too evidently drawing towards his end; and{295} after much suffering breathed his last in the afternoon of the 23rd of october, 1835. on the 25th i followed his body to his grave, close to that of my brother henry, in the cemetery outside the catherine gate of the town.
the duty was a very specially sad one. when i followed my mother to the grave at florence many years afterwards my thoughts were far from being as painfully sad, though she was, i fear, the better loved parent of the two. she died in a ripe old age after a singularly happy, though not untroubled, life, during many years of which it was permissible to me to believe that i had had no small share in ministering to her happiness. it was otherwise in the case of my father. he was, and had been, i take it, for many years a very unhappy man. all had gone wrong with him; misfortunes fell on him, one on the back of the other. yet i do not think that these misfortunes were the real and efficient causes of his unhappiness. i do not see what concatenation of circumstances could have made him happy. he was in many respects a singular man. ill-health and physical suffering, of course, are great causes of an unhappy life; but all suffering invalids are not unhappy. my father’s mind was, i think, to a singular degree under the dominion of his body. the terrible irritability of his temper, which sometimes in his latter years reached a pitch that made one fear his reason was, or would become, unhinged, was undoubtedly due to the shattering of his nervous system, caused by the habitual use{296} of calomel. but it is difficult for one who has never had a similar experience to conceive the degree in which this irritability made the misery of all who were called upon habitually to come into contact with it. i do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that for many years no person came into my father’s presence who did not forthwith desire to escape from it. of course, this desire was not yielded to by those of his own household, but they were none the less conscious of it. happiness, mirth, contentment, pleasant conversation, seemed to fly before him as if a malevolent spirit emanated from him. and all the time no human being was more innocent of all malevolence towards his fellow creatures; and he was a man who would fain have been loved, and who knew that he was not loved, but knew neither how to manifest his desire for affection nor how to conciliate it.
i am the more convinced that bodily ailment was the causa causans of most, if not of all, of this unhappy idiosyncrasy, that i have before me abundant evidence that as a young man he was beloved and esteemed by his cotemporaries and associates. i have many letters from college friends, fellows of new college, his cotemporaries, several of them thanking him for kindnesses of a more or less important kind, and all written in a spirit of high regard and esteem.
what so grievously changed him? i do not believe that he was soured by pecuniary misfortune,{297} though he had more than enough. his first great misfortune—the marriage of his old widower uncle, whose heir he was to have been—was, i have the means of knowing, borne by him well, bravely and with dignity. i believe that he was destroyed mind and body by calomel, habitually used during long years.
throughout life he was a laborious and industrious man. i have seen few things of the kind with more of pathos in it than his persevering attempt to render his labour of some value by compiling a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms. he had quite sufficient learning and sufficient industry to have produced an useful book upon the subject if he had only had the possibility of consulting the, of course, almost innumerable necessary authorities. the book was published in quarto by subscription, and two or three parts of it had been delivered to the subscribers when death delivered him from his thankless labour and his subscribers from further demands on their purses. i do not suppose that any human being purchased the book because they wished to possess it. and truly, as i have said, it was a pathetic thing to see him in his room at chateau d’hondt, ill, suffering, striving with the absolutely miserable, ridiculously insufficient means he had been able with much difficulty to collect, to carry on his work. he was dying—he must, i think, have known that he was; he had not got beyond d in his dictionary; all the alphabet was before him, but he would not give up; he would{298} labour to the last. my mother was labouring hard, and her labour was earning all that supplied very abundantly the needs of the whole family. and i cannot help thinking that a painful but not ignoble feeling urged my poor father to live at least equally laborious days, even though his labour was profitless.
poor father! my thoughts as i followed him to the grave were that i had not done all that i might have done to alleviate the burthen of unhappiness that was laid upon him. yet looking back on it all from the vantage-ground of my own old age (some fifteen years greater than that which he attained) i do not see or think that any conduct of mine would have made matters better for him.
my father’s death naturally made an important change in my mother’s plans for the future. the chateau d’hondt was given up, adieus were said, not without many au revoirs, to many kind friends at bruges, and more especially at ostend, and we left belgium for england. after some time spent in house-hunting, my mother hired a pleasant house with a good garden on the common at hadley, near barnet, and there i remained with her, still awaiting my birmingham preferment, all that winter and the following spring. the earlier part of the time was saddened by the rapid decline and death of my younger sister, emily. we knew before leaving bruges that there was but a slender hope of saving her from the same malady which had been fatal to my brother henry. but the medical men hoped{299} or professed to hope, that much might be expected from her return to her native air. but the mark of the cruel disease was upon her, and very rapidly after our establishment at hadley she sank and painlessly breathed her last.
poor little emily! she was a very bright espiègle child, full of fun and high spirits. there is a picture of her exactly as i remember her. she is represented with flowing flaxen curls and wide china-blue eyes, sitting with a brown holland pinafore on before a writing-desk and blowing a prismatically-coloured soap-bubble. the writing copy on the desk lying above the half-covered and neglected page of copy-book bears the legend “study with determined zeal!”
her youngest child had ever been to my mother as the apple of her eye, and her loss was for the passing day a crushing blow. but, as usual with her, her mind refused to remain crushed, any more than the grass is permanently crushed by the storm wind that blows over it. she had the innate faculty and tendency to throw sorrow off when the cause of it had passed. she owed herself to the living, and refused to allow unavailing regret for those who had been taken from her to incapacitate her for paying that debt to the utmost.
and once again, as was usual with her, her new home became a centre of social enjoyment and attraction for all, especially the young, who were admitted to it. i do not remember that with the exception of the family of the rector, mr. thackeray,{300} we had many acquaintances at hadley. i remember a bit of fun, long current among us, which was furnished by the reception my mother met with when returning the call of the wife of a wealthy distiller resident in the neighbourhood. the lady was of abnormal bulk, and when my mother entered the room in which she was sitting, she said, “excuse me, ma’am, if i keep my chair, i never raise. but i am glad to see you—glad to see anybody,” with much emphasis on the last word. i wish every caller was received with as truthful an expression of sentiments.
our society consisted mainly of friends staying in the house, or of flying visitors from london. as usual, too, my mother soon gathered around her a knot of nice girls, who made the house bright. for herself she seemed always ready to take part in all the fun and amusement that was going; and was the first to plan dances, and charades, and picnics, and theatricals on a small and unpretending scale. but five o’clock of every morning saw her at her desk; and the production of the series of novels, which was not brought to a conclusion till it had reached the hundred and fifteenth volume, though it was not begun till she was past fifty, never ceased.
the christmas was, i remember, a very merry one. we were seeing a good deal of a young fellow-clerk of my brother’s in the secretary’s office at the post office, who was then beginning to fall in love with my sister cecilia, whom he married not long afterwards. he was then at the beginning of{301} a long official life, from which he retired some years ago as sir john tilley, k.c.b. among others of our little circle, i especially remember joseph henry green, the celebrated surgeon, coleridge’s literary executor, who first became known to us through his brother-in-law, mr. hammond, who was in practice at hadley. green was an immensely tall man, with a face of no beauty, but as brightly alive with humour as any i ever saw. he was a delightful companion in a walk; and i remember to the present hour much of the curious and out-of-the-way information i picked up from him, mainly on subjects more or less connected with his profession—for he, as well as i, utterly scouted the stupid sink-the-shop rule of conversation. i remember especially his saying of coleridge, à propos of a passage in his biography which speaks of the singular habit (noticed by his amanuensis) that he had of occupying his mind with the coming passage, which he was about to dictate, while uttering that with which the writer was busy, that he (green) had frequently observed the same peculiarity in his conversation.
some few of our guests came to us from beyond the channel, among them, charming mrs. fauche, with her lovely voice and equally lovely face, whose ostend hospitalities my mother was glad to have an opportunity of returning.
among these visitors from the other side of the channel, i remember one elderly lady of the roman catholic faith, and a strict observer of its precepts, who was pleased to express a very strong{302} approbation of a certain oyster soup, which made its appearance one day at my mother’s table. she was charmed at the idea of being able to eat such soup for a maigre dinner, and begged that the receipt might be written out for her. “oyster soup! just the thing for a friday!” so the mode of preparing the desired dainty was duly written out for her. but her face was a study for a physiognomist when she read the first line of it, to the effect that she was to “take of prime beef” so much. oyster soup, indeed!
it was a pleasant time—so pleasant that i am afraid that i did not regret perhaps so much as i ought to have done the continued delay of the birmingham appointment for which i was all this time waiting. but pleasant as it was, its pleasantness was not sufficient wholly to restrain me from indulging in that propensity for rambling which has been with me the ruling passion of a long life-time.
it was in the spring following that merry christmas that i found time for a little tour of about three weeks in normandy. the reader need not fear that i am going to tell him anything of all i did and all i saw, though every detail of it seemed to me at the time worthy of minute record. but it has all been written and printed some scores of times since those days—by myself once among the rest—and may now be dismissed with a “see guide-books passim.” the expenses of my travel accurately recorded i have also before me. there indeed i might furnish some facts which{303} would be new and surprising to tourists of the present day, but they would only serve to make him discontented with his generation.
there is one anecdote, however, connected with this little journey, which i must relate. i was returning from southern normandy and reached caen without a penny in my pocket. my funds, carefully husbanded as they had been, had sufficed to carry me so far and no further. there were no such things as telegrams or railways in those days; and i had nothing for it but to go to an hotel and there remain till my application to hadley for funds could be answered—an affair of some ten or twelve days as things then were. while i was waiting and kicking my heels about the old norman city, from which i had already extracted all the interest it could afford me, i lounged into the shop of a bookseller, m. mancel. i revisited him on a subsequent occasion, and find the record of this second visit in the first of two volumes which i wrote, and entitled a summer in brittany. there i find that m. mancel is “the publisher of numerous works on the history and antiquities of normandy.... m. mancel has also an extensive collection of old books on norman history; but the rarest and most curious articles are congregated into a most bibliomaniacal looking cabinet, and are not for sale.”
well, this was the gentleman into whose very tempting shop i strayed with empty pockets. he was extremely civil, showed me many interesting things, and finding that i was not altogether an{304} ignoramus as regarded his specialty, observed ever and anon “that is a book which you ought to have!” “that is a work which you will find very useful!” till at last i said “very true! there are two or three books here that i should like to have; but i have no money!” he instantly begged me to take any book or books i should like to buy, and pay for them when i got to london. “but,” rejoined i, “i don’t know when i shall get to london, for i have no money at all. i reached caen with my purse empty, and am stranded here!” m. mancel thereupon eagerly begged me to let him be my banker for my immediate needs, as well as for the price of any volumes i chose to purchase. and though he had never seen my face or heard my name before, he absolutely did furnish me with money to reach home, and gave me credit for some two or three pounds’ worth of books, it being arranged that i should on reaching london pay the amount to m. dulau in soho square.
a few years ago on passing through caen i went to the old book shop; but m. mancel had long since gone to join the majority, and his place knew him no more. his successor, however, on my explaining to him the motive of my visit, remarked with a truly french bow, “my predecessor seems to have been a good physiognomist, monsieur!”
i returned to hadley to find my mother eagerly occupied with the scheme of a journey to vienna, and a book as the result of it. she had had, after the publication of her book on paris and the{305} parisians, some idea of undertaking an italian tour, but that was now abandoned in favour of a german journey, whether on the suggestion of her publisher, or from any other cause of preference, i do not know. of course i entered into such a scheme heart and soul. my only fear now was that news of my appointment to a mastership at birmingham might arrive in time to destroy my hopes of accompanying my mother. but no such tidings came; on the contrary, there seemed every reason to suppose that no new master would be appointed till after the following christmas holidays. my mother was as anxious as i was that i should be free to act as her courier, for in truth she could hardly dispense with some such assistance; and i alone remained who could give it to her. my sister cecilia was to accompany my mother. she wished also to take with her m. hervieu, the artist who illustrated her former books; and i obtained her permission to ask an oxford friend to make one of the party. we were thus a party of five, without counting my mother’s maid, an old and trusted servant, the taking of whom, however, she subsequently considered so great a mistake that she never fell into it on any other occasion.
my delight at the prospect of such a journey was intense. i surrounded myself forthwith with an amazing supply of maps and guide-books, and was busy from morning to night with the thoroughly congenial task of studying and preparing our proposed route.
