x& m. 
 
 LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHB' 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029808775 
 
f'H- 
 
OLD AND ODD 
 MEMORIES 
 
 BY 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE 
 
 Upo<r6r]Kas yap 5r/ fioi 6 \6yos e£ apxfjs edifaro. 
 
 Herodotus. 
 
 'My story from the first has favoured digressions.' 
 
 SECOND IMPRESSION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 EDWAED AENOLD 
 1908 
 
 AH rights reserved 
 
PREFACE 
 
 These Memories are virtually new, though they 
 embody some matter which has already appeared in 
 various forms. To the Proprietors, Editors, and 
 Publishers by whose kindness my old literary pro- 
 perties are restored to me, to make what use of them 
 I like, I return my hearty thanks. 
 
 As far back as 1884, I spoke of my ' weak health 
 and weaker eyesight '. Since then, the deterioration 
 of my sight has disabled me from reading. It is 
 hoped that, if misprints or other errors are found in 
 these pages, the reader will ascribe them to this cause. 
 Let me add that, in combating the effects direct and 
 indirect of these drawbacks, I have had valuable help 
 from my old friend and schoolfellow Mr. Francis Storr. 
 
 L. A. T. 
 
 Athenaewm Club. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 FAGS 
 
 Tales of my Forefathers 1 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 My Father and his Clerics 34 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 My Father in his Home 45 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 My Old-world Kinsfolk and Friends ... 69 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 Jottings about Harrow (1850-6) .... 98 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Jottings about Oxford (1856-60) .... 147 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Jottings about After-life 199 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 My Father's Anecdotes 271 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 Random Recollections of Famous Men . . . 289 
 
 INDEX 331 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Portrait of the Author .... Frontispiece 
 
 Helmingham Hall, Suffolk . . . To face p. 2 
 
 John, Lord Tollemache and his Great- 
 
 Grandson Denis „ p. 34 
 
 Georgina Tollemache, afterwards Lady 
 
 Mount Temple „ p. 78 
 
 Peckforton Castle and Beeston Castle „ p. 286 
 
OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 TALES OF MY FOREFATHERS 
 ' O poco nostra nobilta di sangue ! 
 
 Ben se' tu manto che tosto raccorce, 
 Si che, se non s'appon di die in die, 
 Lo tempo va dintorno con le force.' — Dante. 
 
 'We fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by 
 associating ourselves to the authors of our existence.' — Gibbon. 
 
 On the manor house at Bentley, near Ipswich, is 
 said to have been inscribed the couplet : 
 
 'Before the Normans into England came, 
 Bentley was my seat and Tollemache was my name.' 
 
 As a matter of fact, the first mention of the 
 Tollemaches or Tahnaches occurs in the reign of 
 Henry I, who is believed to have brought my for- 
 bears and other followers from the neighbourhood of 
 Avranches. It appears that in a document dated 
 1120 my ancestor is mentioned in connexion with 
 a certain Thomas de St. Jean-le-Thomas near Mont 
 St. Michel. In 1130 the names of the two men are 
 found in conjunction in England. The derivation of 
 'Tollemache' is uncertain. The old etymology from 
 'Toll-mack' (toll the bell) was rejected by Freeman; 
 but he owned himself unable to suggest a substitute. 
 A high living authority writes to me : 
 
 'On consulting Godefroy's great work on Old French, I 
 have found that your name clearly originated in a sobriquet. 
 
 B 
 
2 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 For " Talemache ", which represents its original form as 
 nearly as possible, is an Old French word corresponding to 
 " besace ", " sac " in modern French. There was also a word 
 " Talemaxhier ", corresponding to " souiller ", " salir " ; but the 
 former derivation is clearly the right one. Even our Henry II 
 was called " Curtmantel " from the cape he wore ; and so 
 your progenitor may have been conspicuous for some ap- 
 pendage, or simply (like Judas !) have carried the bag.' 1 
 
 As the antiquities and curiosities of our family 
 history are less interesting to my readers than to me, 
 I will touch on them very briefly. One of my ances- 
 tors bore a part in the popular rising in the eastern 
 counties which occurred in connexion with the rebellion 
 of "Wat Tyler ; and a great-great-&c.-aunt of mine 
 appears to have been Maid of Honour to the wife of 
 Henry IV. At that time Peter was a favourite name 
 in our family ; but, towards the end of the Wars of 
 the Eoses, it was displaced by Lionel or Lyonel, 
 which has since been passed on as a sort of family 
 badge from generation to generation, like Aubrey 
 among the de Veres and Anthony among the Ashleys, 
 till, of late years, it has become inconveniently and 
 confusingly common among us. About the same time 
 there occurred another change of far greater moment. 
 Helmingham Hall came to the Tollemaches by 
 marriage; it was at once made their home, while 
 thenceforward the interest taken in Bentley was little 
 more than a sentiment. Yet, from a sentimental 
 point of view, the woods of Bentley are still regarded 
 as the antique gem of the family property. But why 
 do I speak only of the woods of Bentley? The cause 
 of the limitation is this. A spendthrift ancestor, 
 
 1 Since writing the above, I have heard that other authorities 
 say that my name occurs in Domesday Book as Toedmag. 
 
TALES OF MY FOREFATHERS 3 
 
 after impairing his fortune by gambling, sought to 
 recoup himself by a big bet, in which he staked all 
 that part of the Bentley property over which the 
 plough could go. He lost; and the unploughable 
 woods, which still belong to the family, are the sole 
 territorial relic handed down from its early days. 
 
 It must, however, be acknowledged that the victory 
 won over Bentley by Helmingham was well deserved. 
 It was to Helmingham that I alluded when I once 
 wrote of ' an ancestral home which has been known 
 from childhood, which stirs every feeling of pride and 
 affection, while yet it reposes in majestic dullness, and 
 has the vault where those who have been loved he 
 buried '. Indeed, to those whose home it has been, 
 Helmingham seems a place quite apart. The flavour 
 of ' otium cum antiqua dignitate ' makes itself felt 
 throughout. The park, ' spared and blessed by time,' 
 has always presented itself to my imagination as in 
 a pre-eminent degree a survival of Tudor stateliness, 
 and almost, to use a topsy-turvy metaphor, as an 
 Elizabethan patch stuck on Victorian England. The 
 house is surrounded by a moat well supplied with 
 water ; and thus, when the two drawbridges are raised, 
 it is literally on an island. 
 
 In a letter to John Allen (August 28, 1838) Edward 
 FitzGerald writes : 
 
 ' I wish you had been with me and Browne at an old seat of 
 Lord Dysart's, Helmingham in Suffolk, the other day. There 
 is a portrait there of the present Lady Dysart in the prime of 
 her beauty, by Sir Joshua. She is now 95. . . .It is much more 
 English and aristocratic to my mind than Boughton or 
 Woburn Abbey.' 
 
 The garden, too, has a moat of its own which, how- 
 ever, does not quite surround it. Can this horseshoe 
 
 B 2 
 
4 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 moat have been designed for protection : or can the 
 garden have ever needed such protection ? No doubt, 
 in Catholic times, ponds were required to supply the 
 family with fish on fast days. But there are plenty of 
 bona fide fishponds in the park, which had no need of 
 being supplemented by a garden moat. Should not 
 this moat that is not a moat (as an old Greek might 
 have phrased it) be considered as an elaborate orna- 
 ment counterfeiting utility ? And what view should 
 be taken of counterfeits of that sort and on that scale ? 
 I own that such disproportionate and purposeless 
 decorations make me think of the ring of the planet 
 Saturn ; for, however beautiful they are in themselves, 
 they are symptoms of a low or rudimentary develop- 
 ment. But, after all, this is the only make-believe of 
 the kind into which, so far as I can remember, my 
 forefathers were betrayed ; and even this make-believe, 
 as Horace would have said, has been hallowed by the 
 Goddess of Death. Such a time-honoured blemish is 
 transfigured into a charm. 1 
 
 But it may be objected that what is here said of the 
 garden moat might to some extent be applied to the 
 moat round the house. The present house is early 
 Tudor in its style, and indeed it appears to have been 
 
 1 1 have left my strictures on the origin of the garden-moat at 
 Helmingham in their original form, though I have since learnt 
 that experts are doubtful as to the cause of the anomaly. One 
 theory is that the two moats are much older than any of the 
 buildings which now exist, or of which traces have been found ; 
 that what is now the garden moat was originally meant for the 
 defence of stables and other out-buildings ; and that it was 
 specially designed for the protection of these against inroads of 
 the Norsemen. In support of this theory it is remarked that twin 
 moats, so to call them, of the Helmingham type are found to exist 
 elsewhere in the Eastern counties, and I believe' that no such twin 
 moats have been discovered in any other part of England. 
 
TALES OF MY FOBEFATHEES 5 
 
 built not long before the estate came to our family. 
 Would the moat have been of much use at that date ? 
 My reply to this is, that my father, who made some 
 necessary restorations, came upon the remains of an 
 earlier house on the site of the present house. He 
 also remarked, in proof of the antiquity of the garden 
 moat, that a very old tree grows on its steep bank. 
 He was fond of pointing out the yet older trees which 
 are to be found in the avenue, and in various parts of 
 the park ; a few of them, he was inclined to think, 
 had approached, if not reached, their millennium. Be 
 this as it may, it says a good deal for the Helmingham 
 oaks that they are famous even in Suffolk, a county 
 famed for its old timber. Of a secular oak near Bury 
 St. Edmunds I will give the legend as I heard it from 
 my father. St. Edmund was tracked by means of 
 wolves, bound to this oak and shot with arrows, and 
 by way of insult some wolves' bones were buried with 
 his bones. It is a fact that not long ago, wolves' bones 
 were discovered near the spot ; and the decaying oak, 
 having been afterwards blown down, was examined, 
 and the barb of an arrow was found near its centre. 
 
 In Helmingham Park there are red as well as fallow 
 deer. The stags, in particular, are appropriate in the 
 old place. During the rutting season their belling 
 seems to take one out of the tame safeness of latter-day 
 Europe, and to transport one bodily into Tudor or 
 mediaeval insecurity. I remember once feeling this 
 strongly in my boyhood, when the menacing tones of 
 a stag issued from the avenue between me and the 
 house. A somewhat milder form of that pleasant 
 illusion, the illusion of conjuring with time and of 
 travelling up and down through the centuries, was 
 brought home to me a few years ago at Lucerne, when 
 
6 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 the moon was shining peacefully on the water and, in 
 strong contrast, across an arm of the lake were heard 
 the discordant sounds of wild beasts in a menagerie ; it 
 was as if the wolves and bears were roaming at their 
 own sweet will, as they roamed in the days of William 
 Tell or of Anne of Geierstein. 
 
 It might be thought that the house, being sur- 
 rounded by a moat, would be damp. But, on the 
 contrary it is proved to be dry by the fact that the 
 old books and manuscripts in the library are well 
 preserved. Some of these are of great value. Caxton's 
 book entitled The Game and Playe of the Chesse was — 
 on what authority I know not — labelled by my father 
 as the first book printed in England. But the gem of 
 the library is King Alfred's translation into Anglo- 
 Saxon, with important additions, of the Historiae 
 adversus paganos, by Orosius. This unique manuscript 
 was discovered and edited by Dr. Bosworth, who was 
 Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in the fifties. 
 He spoke enthusiastically on the subject in my 
 presence. Indeed, as reported by my father, he 
 maintained that the translation, including the addi- 
 tions, was entirely the work of King Alfred, and that 
 the handwriting is probably that of one of the king's 
 secretaries, and may in part be that of the king himself. 
 How far this account finds acceptance with more 
 recent scholars I cannot say. 
 
 Augustus Hare has given a quaint old-world picture 
 of the social economy of a Shropshire parish : 
 
 ' The curates always came to luncheon at the rectory on 
 Sundays. They were always compelled to come in igno- 
 miniously at the back door, lest they should dirty the 
 entrance : only Mr. Egerton was allowed to come in at the 
 front door, because he was a " gentleman born " .' 
 
TALES OF MY FOKEFATHEES 7 
 
 This comical state of things bears a sort of analogy to 
 what occurred at Helmingham in my father's boyhood, 
 and even in my own. I well remember when the 
 country doctor used to come in at the back door, and 
 sometimes (there being no steward's room) to take 
 refreshment in the housekeeper's room. Nor, a 
 decade or two earlier, did the Eector fare much better. 
 My father told me that, when his uncle, Lord Dysart, 
 was in authority, the Eector, Mr. Bellman, was on 
 Sundays, indeed, allowed to dine with the family, but 
 was received with ostentatious patronage. On week- 
 days the physician of souls sank to the level of the 
 apothecary: the housekeeper's room was thought 
 good enough for him. Mr. Bellman lived on into 
 what may be called our Evangelical era, his successor 
 having been the Eev. J. C. Eyle, afterwards Bishop of 
 Liverpool. I can just remember the aged Eector in 
 his wonted resort, the housekeeper's room ; and 
 indeed I fear that I must have imbibed a drop or two 
 of anti-clerical virus, for I am accused of having 
 thrown the good old man's hat into the moat, nor do 
 I seem to have been punished as severely as, child 
 though I was, I deserved to be. 
 
 The vicinity of the moat was certainly tempting. 
 In my not unspoilt childhood, a bedroom was found to 
 be locked and the keyhole was empty. After a fruit- 
 less search for the key, some one asked me if I had 
 seen it. At first I affected not to hear ; but presently, 
 thinking that the good game of hide and seek had 
 lasted long enough, I called out : ' I've drownded it ! ' 
 Another story of my childhood is characteristic. I am 
 assured that, after a funeral, my parents and other 
 bereaved kinsfolk sent for me, and that, not finding 
 the party vivacious enough for my taste, I sought to 
 
8 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 enliven it by a reference to what was then nay favourite 
 food, ' Let us talk about mushrooms ! ' 
 
 What I have related as to our treatment of 
 Mr. Bellman is, no doubt, very shocking; but it is 
 only fair to remember that, at that time, old Catholic 
 families were equally careful that their sons of Levi 
 should not socially take too much upon themselves. 
 Indeed, a well-informed Catholic priest has told me 
 that, on the occasion of the marriage in England of 
 one of the Orleans princes, when the Catholic Bishop 
 had performed the ceremony, and when, no doubt, the 
 episcopal ring had been dutifully kissed by the bride 
 and bridegroom, his lordship was left to partake of the 
 wedding breakfast in the steward's room. Let us 
 hope that this was an oversight. 
 
 At the confines of the Helmingham park stands the 
 fine old square-towered church, after the pattern 
 common in Suffolk. On the outside wall is the 
 quaintly alliterative, not to say punning, inscription : 
 
 ' Scandit ad aethera virgo puerpera, virgula lease.' 
 
 It is fortunate that my father had quite forgotten his 
 Latin. Otherwise, though there is nothing in this 
 rugged hexameter which he, as a strong Protestant, 
 could have gainsaid, it has a Mariolatrous flavour 
 which he would in no wise have relished. On his 
 Cheshire estate there lingered a far more curious relic 
 of Catholicism, of which also he was ignorant. In 
 the part of the county where he lived, the children 
 have (or had) a way of squalling on the second of 
 November. Neither they nor their parents can give 
 any explanation of the unmusical noise ; all they can 
 say of it is that it is called ' souling '. It is, therefore, 
 clearly a survival from the observance of All Souls' 
 
TALES OF MY FOREFATHERS 9 
 
 Day. If my father had known of this survival, we 
 may be sure that such priscae vestigia fraudis, such 
 a trail of the Babylonish serpent, would have been 
 speedily and pitilessly effaced. Very different is the 
 view of the philosopher or antiquary. It is at once 
 pathetic and comic to think that from generation to 
 generation this tradition of squalling should annually 
 take effect at the appointed season, although the 
 squallers have no notion what their squalls mean ; and 
 that it should have been kept secret from a succession 
 of Protestant landlords, although the squallers had no 
 notion that there was any secret to keep. 
 
 Reverting to the Helmingham church, I own that, to 
 me at least, its chief interest lies, not in its square 
 tower, nor yet in the monkish hexameter on the 
 walls, but in the family memorials within. The most 
 quaintly whimsical of these memorials are roughly 
 painted kneeling effigies of four of my ancestors, 
 effigies by gazing on which, some of us were fain, 
 during a long sermon, to seek refuge either from the 
 prosings of a dullard or from the Pandemonian fore- 
 shado wings of a Boanerges. The joint lives of those 
 ancestors seem to have stretched from late Plantagenet 
 well on into Tudor times. It appears that they retain 
 in Elysium a cheering sense of their ante mortem 
 honours and equipments ; for they are represented as 
 literally wearing their swords and metaphorically 
 blowing their trumpets. The inscriptions are in such 
 doggerel as : 
 
 'Baptised Lyonel Tojlemache my Nanie 
 Since Norman conquest of unsoyled Fame,' 
 
 This specimen shows that the defunct had virtues 
 less defective than his biographer's syntax ! Another 
 
10 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 of my ancestors was 'free of his purse and port'. 
 A third self-trumpeter was ' With Norfolk's great duke 
 in no little trust.' 
 
 None, however, of these inscriptions is so quaint 
 as the following, also found in East Anglia, which 
 I give as it was given to me. Some generations back, 
 a Sir John Trollope restored his family church, and 
 flattered himself that such an ecclesiastical labourer 
 was worthy of his heavenly hire. There is a super- 
 stition that the post mortem prospects of persons buried 
 under a chancel are better than those of ordinary 
 mortals. Accordingly this son of Zebedee, this claimant 
 of posthumous precedence, had a statue of himself 
 erected in the very centre of the chancel, with one 
 hand pointing towards heaven and the other towards 
 a hole before his feet ; and over the anticipatory grave 
 he inscribed this stanza, whose third line is redolent of 
 that sort of beatific confidence which Bishop Eyle 
 would have called ' assurance ' : 
 
 'I, Sir John Trollope, 
 Made these stones roll up; 
 When Heaven shall take my soul up, 
 My body shall fill this hole up.' 
 
 In The Baronial Halls of England it is said that : 
 
 'The Tollemaches — although classing amongst the most 
 ancient families of the realm, and for centuries preserving 
 an unbroken link — appear never to have been very emulous 
 of distinction. The name scarcely appears upon the Roll of 
 Fame: neither in the Senate nor at the Bar have they 
 achieved for it high repute ; nor does it occupy a conspicuous 
 place in the annals of war of any period — from the Conquest 
 down to the existing age.' 
 
 The uncomplimentary critic, however, has the 
 fairness to record one exception to the sweeping 
 
TALES OF MY FOEEFATHEES 11 
 
 allegation of Tollemachian mediocrity. The exception 
 is, of course, the General Tollemache, or Talmash, of the 
 reign of William III. And it must be owned that, 
 taking note of this exception and leaving the last and 
 present generations out of sight, a comparer of small 
 things with big things might be tempted to extend to 
 our family the reproach cast by Macaulay on the 
 Eepublic of Venice, namely, that it prospered for 
 centuries without bequeathing to mankind 'the 
 memory of one great name or one generous action'. 
 But, in truth, such wholesale invectives are to be 
 taken with a grain of salt ; for, when they proceed 
 from serious writers, those writers are nearly always 
 pedants who expect too much from human nature. 
 Had not Macaulay himself a touch of this noblest 
 form of pedantry? And was it not partly on that 
 account, or at least on account of his inclination to 
 regard men generally as either sheep or goats, and 
 hardly ever as alpacas, that Matthew Arnold dubbed 
 him a Philistine ? But, without pursuing this far- 
 reaching digression, I will merely suggest (as a pedant 
 of another kind might phrase it) that the river of Lethe 
 does not issue in that of Cocytus : oblivion is not a 
 special subject for lamentation or reproach (Nee vixit 
 male qui vivens moriensque fefellit) : ' A life unnoticed is 
 not lived amiss.' 
 
 Nor is this all that may be said on behalf of my 
 bucolic ancestors. Some of them were Justices of the 
 Peace, and even High Sheriffs, at a time when those 
 offices had far greater importance and responsibility 
 than they now have. And thus it is that the 
 posthumous boasters in Helmingham Church, so to 
 call them, whom one is apt to deride as vainglorious 
 weatherers of a storm in a teacup, should rather be 
 
12 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 represented as sinews of the body politic, which, 
 though weak individually, did their little something 
 towards bringing about that rare capacity for safe 
 and orderly progress which marked the England of 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 It is hard for me to decide how much should be 
 written about that distinguished kinsman of mine 
 whose fame has the melancholy and invidious advan- 
 tage of being 
 
 'Fair as a star when only one 
 Is shining in the sky;' 
 
 for I cannot guess how far my readers are conversant 
 with Macaulay's account of General Tollemache's 
 tragic fate. Let me then, as briefly as possible, inform 
 or remind them of the leading facts. Tollemache tried 
 to execute a scheme of long standing for attacking 
 Brest ; but the plan had been betrayed to Louis XIV ; 
 Brest was securely fortified and garrisoned ; the 
 expedition was repulsed ; and Tollemache, writes 
 Macaulay, being mortally wounded, 'exclaimed with 
 his last breath that he had been lured into a snare by 
 treachery. The real criminal was not named ; nor, 
 till the archives of the House of Stuart were explored, 
 was it known to the world that Talmash had perished 
 by the basest of all the hundred villanies of Marl- 
 borough.' But what can have been the motives of 
 this treason ? The historian's reply is that Tollemache 
 was second to Marlborough, not only in command, but 
 also in professional skill ; and Marlborough, being in 
 disgrace at Court, wished to force his own services on 
 William by getting rid of the only rival who could 
 possibly have taken his place. Moreover, William 
 was unpopular, and the Stuarts might be restored. 
 
TALES OF MY FOKEFATHEKS 13 
 
 Marlborough wished to regain the favour of the exiled 
 family, and, by betraying William, to make up for 
 having deserted James. The atrocity of such motives 
 ascribed to such a man is calculated to arouse suspicion ; 
 but I am bound to add that the Due d'Aumale, when 
 visiting Helmingham, asked my father to show him 
 the inside of the church : and, seeing that my father 
 looked surprised, he explained that he wanted to see 
 the monument of the General, and added that, having 
 himself consulted the archives in Paris, he could vouch 
 for the truth of Macaulay's narrative. 1 
 
 What, then, is the reply of Marlborough's apolo- 
 gists ? They at once admit the substantial facts ; but 
 they plead extenuating circumstances. The design 
 on Brest, they say, had already been betrayed by 
 Godolphin. Marlborough, being apprised of this 
 treachery, knew that his own betrayal of the design 
 
 1 That ' anecdotage is nothing if not desultory ' is an old thesis 
 of mine. And, in particular, to blame discursiveness in a memoir 
 would be worthy of the Scotchman who said of a dictionary : ' It 
 is full o' learning and wad be an unco' guid book if it hadna so 
 muckle toorning and tacking about.' So the above mention of the 
 Due d'Aumale tempts me to record a saying about him which 
 was told me by my father-in-law, the first Lord Egerton of 
 Tatton. When that most learned of princes and his son (who 
 died young) were staying at Tatton, the latter gave his host an 
 ingenuous account of the difference between his own tastes and 
 those of his father : ' Mon pere, milord, aime la chasse, et il aime 
 beaucoup les livres ; moi, j'aime la chasse, mais les livres je ne 
 les aime pas.' This frank schoolbuoyancy of the young Cond6 
 strikes me as not bad for a prince ! Here is another Egerton 
 d'Aumale story. My mother-in-law used to say that the Duchess 
 d'Aumale — having invited her, as the French now phrase it, five 
 o'docker avec elle — took up the teapot, gave it a good shake, and 
 asked quite seriously, ' Is not this how you do make the tea in 
 England?' 
 
14 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 would inform Louis of nothing which Louis did not 
 know before. Nor did he apprehend that the twofold 
 betrayal would do much practical harm to the English ; 
 for he never supposed that Tollemache would be so 
 rash as to assault Brest without first making all 
 possible inquiries. Let me add that, after reading 
 Macaulay's narrative, I find it hard to doubt that he 
 has unwittingly been led to extenuate Tollemache's 
 rashness by his evident abhorrence of Marlborough. 
 
 This, then, is the plea set up by Marlborough's 
 advocates, not certainly a satisfactory plea ; but, such 
 as it is, let him by all means have the benefit of it. 
 A modern Plutarch, by the way, might draw an 
 instructive parallel between Marlborough and Themi- 
 stocles. The facing-both-ways policy of Themistocles 
 in telling Xerxes that the Peloponnesian captains 
 meditated an escape from Salamis is, in some 
 particulars, like the policy of Marlborough in telling 
 Louis that, the English meditated an attack on Brest. 
 The fact was, that neither of these great commanders 
 could foresee whether his countrymen or their ene- 
 mies would prevail. Each of them showed a perverted 
 ingenuity in propping his own fortunes at the cost 
 of patriotism and honour. Likewise, as Greece 
 triumphed over Persia, and England over Louis and 
 James, the two disloyal generals were alike in this, 
 that they tarnished their reputation to little or no 
 purpose. In both cases, honesty might have been the 
 best policy. 
 
 On the whole, my sense of the wrongs of my far- 
 off great-uncle does not deter me from thinking, with 
 Froude, that Macaulay has been too severe a censor 
 on Marlborough. He does not make allowance either 
 for the great commander's temptations or for the low 
 
TALES OF MY FOKEFATHEKS 15 
 
 ethical standard which prevailed in his day. At all 
 events, the victor of Blenheim should be regarded 
 with indulgence by the descendants of those whom 
 he so signally served. Perhaps I cannot better 
 illustrate my own estimate of this villainous hero or 
 heroic villain than by using a homely metaphor, and 
 likening him to an apple which is just a little ' gone '. 
 Being smooth and polished on the surface, he was 
 somewhat rotten at the core ; but there was in him 
 much, very much, that was good and wholesome not- 
 withstanding. Nor, indeed, can I doubt that my 
 exaggerative and jocularly censorious friend, the late 
 S. H. Reynolds of Brasenose, would have said of him, 
 as he said of Bacon, and might with greater justice 
 have said of Napoleon : ' He was a scoundrel, but 
 a scoundrel of whom human nature ought to be 
 proud ! ' 
 
 Whatever may be said in praise of the talents and 
 the public virtue of General Tollemache, he was not 
 exemplary in at least one domestic relation. He was, 
 after a peculiar fashion, an undutiful son. A note in 
 Bishop Burnet's History informs us ' It was commonly 
 thought that he [Tollemache] was Oliver Cromwell's 
 son, and that he had a very particular sort of vanity 
 in desiring that it should be so understood '. Even if 
 a strong case could be made out for the Cromwellian 
 paternity, the complacent bastard would be fairly 
 open to the reproach unjustly brought against Falcon- 
 bridge : 
 
 ' Out on thee, rude man ! thou dost shame thy mother, 
 And wound her honour with this diffidence.' 
 
 But, in fact, is such an aspersion on the private 
 character of our Puritan Protector warranted by 
 
16 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 evidence antecedently probable ? Personally, I could 
 as soon believe that, as my father assured me, ensilage 
 is known to have been practised in Egypt in the days 
 of the Patriarch Joseph ; that Julius Caesar, when in 
 Gaul, immersed himself in the same mud baths, nay, 
 in the very same particles of mud, which are now so 
 importunately extolled by the uncleanly convalescents 
 of Dax ; or that, as some kinswomen of mine declare, 
 a Verdant Green of a young curate, when dining with 
 their uncle, inquired of his host quite innocently: 
 ' Has your lordship ever suffered from delirium 
 tremens ? ' 1 He must have taken it for a form of 
 influenza. 
 
 Yet, after all, the General had no need to bring in 
 Cromwell as a deus (or diabolus) ex machina, in order to 
 account for his superiority to his Tollemache ancestors; 
 for he may have inherited the intelligence of his 
 mother, who was undoubtedly a woman of great parts. 
 So remarkable was she, that she claims more than 
 a passing notice. Her father, William Murray, 
 Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I, became 
 the first Earl of Dysart, whose title she brought into 
 our family. This last circumstance is recorded by 
 Burnet in a passage which is worth quoting for two 
 reasons. First, it alludes to the gossip about her and 
 Cromwell without assigning to it any undue impor- 
 tance. Secondly, it is a good specimen of the com- 
 
 1 1 will add a trivial but authentic incident which the mention 
 of that 'ungenteel' malady suggests. In Cranfordshire, alias 
 Cheshire, a poor woman said of her little girl whose mind was 
 wandering during a feverish attack, 'I think she has delirious 
 trimmings.' A Malapropian patient lately said to her doctor, 
 ' You see, sir, what it is. I've got a compilation of diseases. 
 When the high strikes meets the dumb beagles [lumbago] then 
 you gets the vipers' dance. 
 
TALES OF MY FOKEFATHEKS 17 
 
 bination of suaviter in modo with fortissime in re which 
 was fashionable at that time. To speak more exactly, 
 it well illustrates the preamble of compliment, analo- 
 gous to the ceremonious bow of a duellist, with which 
 it was then thought proper to approach a bad lady of 
 quality before morally running her through the body. 
 Even so the Gaekwar of Baroda, when trying to poison 
 General Phayre, inserted diamond dust as well as 
 arsenic in the beverage that was presented to him. 
 Would not the arsenic of itself have sufficed to do 
 the work? The reason for combining it with the 
 costly adjunct seems to have been, not merely that 
 diamonds are less wholesomely and agreeably placed 
 inside than outside the human body, but also that it 
 was thought that the queen's representative ought to 
 be dispatched in a manner suitable to his rank. 
 
 After making an uncomplimentary reference to the 
 first Lord Dysart, who, it appears, was ' pretty open ' 
 when sober and reserved wlien tipsy, Burnet goes on 
 to say : 
 
 ' His eldest daughter, to whom his honour, such as it was, 
 descended, married Sir Lionel Tollemaehe, of Suffolk, a man 
 of noble family. After her father's death, she took the title 
 of Countess of Dysart. She was a woman of great beauty, 
 but of far greater parts. She had a wonderful quickness of 
 apprehension, and an amazing vivacity in conversation. She 
 had studied not only divinity and history, but mathematics 
 and philosophy. She was violent in everything she set about, 
 a violent friend, but a much more violent enemy. She had a 
 restless ambition, lived at a vast expense, and was ravenously 
 covetous; and would have stuck at nothing by which she 
 might compass her ends. She had blemishes of another kind, 
 which she seemed to despise, and to take little care of the 
 decencies of her sex. She had been early in a correspondence 
 with Lord Lauderdale, that had given occasion to censure. 
 
 c 
 
18 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 When he was a prisoner after Worcester fight, she had made 
 him believe he was in great danger of his life, and that she 
 saved it by her intrigues with Cromwell, which was not a little 
 taken notice of. Cromwell was certainly fond of her, and she 
 took care to entertain him in it, till he, finding what was said 
 upon it, broke it off. . . . All applications were made to her : 
 she took upon her to determine everything. She sold all 
 places, and was wanting in no methods that could bring her 
 money, which she lavished out in a most profuse vanity. As 
 the conceit took her, she made him (Lauderdale) fall out with 
 all his friends, one after another, including a certain Sir 
 Robert Murray, whose unswerving fidelity both to Lauderdale 
 and herself she requited with the most heartless treachery.' 
 
 After reading this scathing indictment, one's first 
 impulse is to exclaim Intolerabilius nihil est quam femina 
 dives ('A wealthy woman is the worst of plagues'). 
 But presently follows the inclination to wonder or 
 smile at the moral vagary which prompts a man to 
 exonerate his own ancestress by laying the responsi- 
 bility of her misdeeds on the alleged feminine 
 incapacity to bear the trials of wealth, and, in a word, 
 on feminine weakness in general. One had said in 
 one's haste that the typical woman (das Ewig- Weibliche) 
 needs the admonition : 
 
 'Let her know her place; 
 She is the second, not the first;' 
 
 and that the disordering of Adam's ribs was at once 
 a symbol and a cause of the disordering of the world. 
 There would, no doubt, be great exaggeration in such 
 an uncompromising verdict; but, for all that, the 
 biblical allusion in the last sentence draws me on to 
 make a not irrelevant reflection. The late Duke of 
 Westminster once said in conversation that he was 
 especially attracted by the Epistle of St. James. Yet 
 that any millionaire ever really believed in the plenary 
 
TALES OF MY FOREFATHERS 19 
 
 inspiration of the injunction, ' Go to, ye rich men, 
 weep and howl,' seems to me about as likely as that 
 any woman ever really believed in that of the sweep- 
 ing generalization of Ecclesiastes, ' One man among 
 a thousand have I found ; but a woman among all 
 those have I not found.' 
 
 With the earldom of Dysart, Ham House came into 
 our family ; and, when Lady Dysart married Lauder- 
 dale, it acquired a great importance, which, however, 
 as time went on, it gradually lost. Long ago I 
 described Ham House as 
 
 'that enchanted palace of desolation where the bounty of 
 Lauderdale and others has amassed treasures of all sorts, which 
 now lie buried and forgotten, like the " unvalued jewels " which, 
 in Clarence's dream, lay at the bottom of the sea. . . . Macaulay 
 ascribes " the more than Italian luxury of Ham, with its busts, 
 fountains, and aviaries," to Lauderdale, who held Ham House 
 in right of his wife. The room is still shown where the Cabal 
 Ministry used to meet. It was to Ham that James II was 
 first told to retire on the arrival of William. One is tempted 
 to say " Fuit Ilium et ingens Gloria," when one recalls Evelyn's 
 and Walpole's accounts of this " hall of my father that 's gone 
 to decay ".' 
 
 On reading these sentences over after the lapse of 
 years, I feel that, when I wrote them, I hardly did 
 justice to the interest which Ham then possessed as 
 a buried city of the past, safe from the innovator and 
 restorer, and subject to no ravages but those of time. 
 The melancholy charm which belonged to it differed 
 rather in degree than in kind from that which affected 
 Byron when he exclaimed, ' The Bucentaur lies rotting 
 unrestored,' or which prompted Shelley to apostrophize 
 degenerate Italy as a shrine 
 
 'Where desolation clothed with loveliness 
 
 Worships the thing thou wert'. 
 
 c2 
 
20 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Of late the old place has been furbished up with great 
 skill and success. It therefore seems ungracious to 
 remark that such restorations are at best necessary- 
 evils. 
 
 Of the rooms in Ham House the one that struck me 
 most, as showing the difference between past and 
 present, contained two stiff and big armchairs, in 
 which, according to tradition, the Duke and Duchess 
 of Lauderdale sat face to face, and seem to have con- 
 templated one another with a leisurely stare. Did 
 they like the process ? There is a story that a Scotch 
 minister, wishing to impress on his congregation the 
 self-sufficing grandeur of the Deity, exclaimed that 
 throughout the pre- Adamite eternity ' He was alone, 
 alone, alone, without even a throne to sit upon '. The 
 Lauderdales with their armchairs were not so badly 
 off as that. But their solitude a deux reminds me that 
 Paley, when told of a married couple who had never 
 quarrelled, said in his north country accent,' Varry dool ; ' 
 and are we not made to feel that there was method in 
 the folly of the schoolboy who said in an examination, 
 ' The Greeks started the custom of each man having 
 only one wife, and they called it monotony ' ? ' 
 Another reflection is aroused by the stately inactivity 
 of the Duke and Duchess. If there is often or always 
 
 1 This suggestive blunder — Adyos i/^rSijs eo<.Ku>s aX-qOivio — recalls to 
 me a definition of matrimony given by an Irish Catholic girl at 
 a Confirmation class : ' Matrimony is a state of torment into 
 which souls enter to prepare them for another and a better world. 
 These words of wisdom having been reported by the catechizing 
 priest to another priest, the latter exclaimed, ' Of course you 
 turned the stupid girl down to the bottom of the class ? ' ' Well, 
 no,' replied the catechist, with humorous indulgence; 'perhaps 
 she was not so far wrong, after all. What on earth do you and 
 I know about the matter ? ' 
 
TALES OF MY FOEEFATHEES 21 
 
 mischief for idle hands to do, there are also untoward 
 and importunate thoughts for idle heads to think. 
 Must not, then, the august malefactors, when (or if) 
 they sat gazing listlessly at each other, have been 
 haunted by the memory of their manifold misdoings ? 
 They ought to have been, in all conscience ; but, alas ! 
 the assembling of sinners stifles the sense of sin. And 
 if in this way callousness is epidemic and, as it were, 
 gregarious, it is to be feared that these Arcades ambo — 
 which Byron translated ' blackguards both ' — may 
 have quieted their consciences by reflecting that each 
 was kept in countenance by the other. 
 
 The Duchess was the daughter of the first Earl of 
 Dysart. But why was the earldom conferred on him? 
 The answer is that he was the whipping-boy of 
 Charles I. And how came there to be so odd an 
 invention as a whipping-boy — one who might almost 
 literally have taken for his motto Quidquid delirat 
 princeps, ego vapulo tantum (' For all the prince's mad 
 pranks I must smart')? The origin of this quaint 
 survival of primitive culture invites notice. A pitiless 
 logic was applied by our forefathers to the belief in the 
 efficacy of vicarious punishment, as it has been applied 
 in our own time by so accomplished a writer as 
 Mr. Shorthouse. The former application led to the 
 farcical institution of the whipping-boy, the latter to 
 the repulsive extravagance of ' Blanche, Lady Falaise '. 
 To my father, on the other hand, that Philistinian and 
 illogical instinct called 'common sense' was a safeguard 
 against any such vagary. Being curious to learn how 
 so stern an Evangelical would regard the notion of 
 a moral lightning conductor which, as it could not 
 destroy, diverted the retributive force, I spoke to him 
 about the ancestral whipping-boy. I found that, 
 
22 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 though he was generally well up in the family- 
 antiquities, this detail had quite passed from his 
 memory. He evidently knew nothing about the 
 quondam whipping-boy in The Fortunes of Nigel. 
 Indeed, so novel and so distasteful was the conception 
 to him that he seemed to suspect either that I had 
 been hoaxed or that the whole was the coinage of my 
 common-sense-less brain. Was ever any one, he asked 
 (in effect), such a fool as to think that a bad boy could 
 be the better for the punishment of a good boy? To 
 my mind the wonder rather is that, if the principle of 
 the Protestant sale of Indulgences was thus recognized, 
 so convenient a theory was not given a general 
 application. Why was it that, not kings only, but all 
 possessors of spare cash, did not purchase impunity 
 for their own children by hiring children of the poor 
 as victims of the transferable vapulations ? I suppose 
 that, in fact, our ancestors only half believed in the 
 efficacy of the human scapegoat. 
 
 Lady Louisa Stuart, daughter of Lord Bute, the 
 Prime Minister, has given an interesting account of 
 the good Duke of Argyll, who plays so important 
 a part in The Heart of Midlothian. The Duke's mother 
 was a Tollemache ; and thus Lady Louisa has been led 
 to make mention of two of our family characteristics. 
 First, she says that one of Argyll's daughters ' had too 
 much of the Tollemache blood to be afraid of any- 
 body'. Secondly, she reports a quaint saying of the 
 duke's brother, Lord Islay : ' I wanted to discuss such 
 an affair with my brother, but all went wrong. I saw 
 the Tollemache blood beginning to rise, so I e'en quitted 
 the field.' Here, then, are two alleged characteristics 
 of our race, fearlessness and impetuosity. We have 
 seen that, at any rate, the first of these two race-marks 
 
TALES OF MY FOKEFATHEKS 23 
 
 was conspicuous in General Tollemache. Just as, 
 according to a famous writer, a mob's notion of 
 ' evolution ' is to spell it with an initial ' r ', even so 
 a hero's notion of ' luck ' is to spell it with an initial 
 ' p '. But the pluck of General Tollemache was set on 
 too high a pedestal ; Audentes fortuna iuvat was too 
 literally and exclusively his maxim. Next, as to the 
 second of those race-marks — the tendency of the 
 Tollemache blood to tempestuous uprisings. Alas, 
 how many generations have gone by since the birth 
 of the champion of Jeanie Deans ! With each of 
 those generations the Tollemache blood has received 
 an alien admixture ; and, after even one or two of 
 such matrimonial dilutions, it might have been 
 expected to grow calm. But, in fact, has our family 
 shown any signs of becoming, as Burns would have 
 said, ' tideless-blooded ' ? Well, the sequel will show. 
 At present it will suffice to remind my readers of the 
 complacent assertion of Sir Anthony Absolute, that 
 his kinsfolk ' were always impatient ' ; by which was 
 meant that every Absolute, past, present or to come, 
 had a prescriptive right to be impatient : Heredite 
 oblige. Will this convenient plea for impatience and 
 imperiousness be conceded by the court of Khada- 
 manthus to the ghost of each member of a family 
 which has been prolific of counterparts of Sir 
 Anthony ? 
 
 Besides the Lady Dysart who married Lauderdale, 
 there was a noteworthy one of later date, to whom 
 I shall refer in the sequel. But with this exception, 
 as I 'personally conduct' my reader down the 
 main stream of our family history, I find no figure to 
 arrest his attention between General Tollemache and 
 Admiral Tollemache, my grandfather. But there is, 
 
24 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 so to speak, a tributary stream which deserves to be 
 pointed out. In the last century, a Lord Dysart 
 married a daughter of Carteret ; and I am prouder of 
 being the great-great-great-grandson of that scholarly 
 and eloquent statesman than of my kinship with the 
 brave and able, but reckless, General Tollemache, who, 
 if he was not actually felix opportunitate mortis, at any 
 rate derived, like another Samson, more renown from 
 the tragic occasion of his death than from all the 
 exploits of his life put together. After making 
 mention of my descent from Carteret, I am tempted 
 to quote from Matthew Arnold an account of an 
 episode at the close of the life of that brilliant and 
 versatile politician: 
 
 ' Robert Wood, whose Essay on the Genius of Homer is 
 mentioned by Goethe as one of the books which fell into his 
 hands when his powers were first developing themselves, and 
 strongly interested him, relates ... a striking story. He says 
 that in 1762, at the end of the Seven Years' War, being then 
 Under-Secretary of State, he was directed to wait upon the 
 President of the Council, Lord Granville (Carteret), a few days 
 before he died, with the preliminary articles of the Treaty of 
 Paris. " I found him," he continues, " so languid, that I pro- 
 posed postponing my business for another time ; but he insisted 
 that I should stay, saying it could not prolong his life to 
 neglect his duty ; and repeating the following passage out of 
 Sarpedon's speech, he dwelled with particular emphasis on the 
 third line, which recalled to his mind the distinguishing part 
 he had taken in public affairs : 
 
 a> isi-nov, el p.ev yap ■noXep.ov irtpl rovbe (pvyovTf 
 alei 8tj /xeAAoi/xeu dyijpco r' adavdrco re 
 e<Tcre<rd , ovre ksv ovtos evl irpaiTOKTi p:a-^oCp.r]V, 
 ovre Ke ere areWoiiiL /i<£)(rji> ey Kvbiavupav' 
 vvv 8' — €/x7T?7s yap Krjpes ((pearacnv Oavdrow 
 pxpiai, as ovk eori (pvyeiv fiporbv ovb' vna\v£ai, — 
 lofieu .... 
 
TALES OF MY FOEEFATHERS 25 
 
 ' " His lordship repeated the last word several times with 
 a calm and determinate resignation ; and after a serious pause 
 of some minutes, he desired to hear the Treaty read, to which 
 he listened with great attention, and recovered spirits enough 
 to declare the approbation of a dying statesman (I use his 
 own words) on the most glorious war, and most honourable 
 peace, this nation ever saw." ' 
 
 I quote this story (partly) because, as Arnold observes, 
 it exhibits the English aristocracy at its very height 
 of culture, lofty spirit, and greatness, towards the 
 middle of the last century. 
 
 Pope translates the passage from Homer thus : 
 
 'Could all our care elude the gloomy grave, 
 Which claims no less the fearful than the brave, 
 For lust of fame I should not vainly dare 
 In fighting fields, nor urge thy soul to war: 
 But since, alas! ignoble age must come, 
 Disease, and death's inexorable doom; 
 The life which others pay let us bestow, 
 And give to fame what we to Nature owe.' 
 
 My chief interest in my grandfather, the Admiral, 
 arises from the fact that he helps me to understand 
 my father. Like my father, he was a man of great 
 muscular strength, and had the qualities which 
 commonly go with such strength. During the Peace 
 of Amiens he was at Calais, playing the pocketless 
 game which the French call billiards. As he was 
 making a stroke, a French bully nudged his arm. 
 A repetition of the offence having shown it to be no 
 accident, he threw the Frenchman out of the window ; 
 and then, warned by the landlord, ran for his life. 
 The impetuous temper thus shown, my father inherited 
 from him, as will be hereafter proved by a few in- 
 stances and as might be proved by many more. II 
 chassoit da ^ace. I am anticipating ; but it is important 
 
26 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 to mention here that my father became his own 
 master when very young. He is well known to have 
 been a model landlord ; and, as such, he lived much 
 on his estate. This was, of course, an excellent thing ; 
 but it had the drawback of accustoming him to be 
 surrounded by his dependents, and to be, as the 
 phrase is, cock of the walk. My grandfather, also, as 
 captain and as admiral, had a long spell of being cock 
 of the walk. Goethe has said, of course with some 
 exaggeration, that every old man is a King Lear. 
 With no greater exaggeration he might have added 
 that every middle-aged man who has had his own way 
 since his youth is a rudimentary Lear. Such a one, 
 especially if born of a masterful stock, is almost sure 
 to have his share of the qualities which reach their 
 climax in military monarchs whose Potsdamnable 
 telegrams or manifestoes have, at divers times, been 
 cast forth on the world. 
 
 The Admiral's character may be further illustrated 
 by a comical anecdote. While at sea, he was 
 naturally out of the way of hearing about ecclesiastical 
 preferments. On returning home after a long cruise, 
 he met an old clerical friend in a London street, and 
 accosted him with nautical roughness and in a loud 
 voice : ' Is that you, Lloyd ? Why, what on earth 
 have you got against your stomach ? ' ' Hush ! ' was 
 the amused reply. ' It is my apron. I'm a bishop.' 
 The author of this apology for vestments was doubtless 
 Peel's intimate friend, Lloyd, bishop of Oxford. 
 
 I hasten to add that my grandfather was, like my 
 father, a fine old-world relic. Perhaps the French 
 language, so rich in social and ethical subtleties, is 
 the best adapted for a brief statement of the admiral's 
 merits : G'etait an brave homme, un homme brave, un galant 
 
TALES OF MY FOEEFATHEES 27 
 
 homme, et un homme galant. In particular, during the 
 war against Napoleon, he showed remarkable courage 
 and skill in an adventure near Toulon. I have been 
 taken to task for never having described this adven- 
 ture. But would my readers care for it ? The brave 
 acts recorded in history are like the stars visible on 
 a clear night : each of them is brilliant in itself, but 
 there are so many of them, and at a distance they look 
 so like one another, that all but a very few of them 
 seem to be of small account. So that, after all, we 
 may feel an odd sort of sympathy with the parson 
 who, wishing to prove Monotheism from the unity 
 discernible in Nature, clinched the argument by ex- 
 claiming : ' There is one sun, one moon, and one 
 multitude of stars ' ! 
 
 As Hume says of the father of Edward IV, so let 
 me say of the Admiral : ' He performed actions which 
 acquired him honour, but merit not the attention of 
 posterity.' In short, such has been the abundance 
 of courageous actions and such is the surfeit of their 
 eulogies that, proud though I personally am of my 
 grandfather's prowess, I suspect that my readers will 
 be content to take the particulars of that prowess on 
 trust. 
 
 My two grandmothers were sisters, daughters of 
 a clever and eccentric Lady Aldborough, who is now 
 wellnigh forgotten. She was, indeed, fond of her 
 children ; but, when her daughter, Lady Emily, was 
 a girl, she showed her fondness for her in an odd and 
 what may be termed a matriarchal fashion. As her 
 two elder daughters had been carried off by marriage, 
 she feared lest this youngest one might follow suit. 
 To guard against such a mishap, she resolved to make 
 her less attractive to the male sex; and, with that 
 
28 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 view — so runs the tradition — she cropped her hair 
 and eyebrows. The shorn damsel, however, did not 
 waste her time in sulking or fuming, after the manner 
 of the incensed lady who disdained to be comforted 
 under a less wholesale bereavement : 
 
 'Sooner let air, earth, sea, to chaos fall, 
 Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all!' 
 
 But, being of a practical turn, she went to the barber's 
 and bought a wig, and a wig, as I myself can testify, 
 she wore to the close of her long life. 
 
 A tradition of the Edgeworth family ascribes a 
 similar exercise of authority to the father of Maria. 
 Suspecting that a younger and comelier daughter of 
 his was growing vain of her long hair, he first caught 
 the offending ringlets in a drawer and then cut them 
 off. The victim might have exclaimed, like Jephthah's 
 daughter on a graver occasion : 
 
 'It comforts me in this one thought to dwell, 
 That I subdued me to my father's will.' 
 
 At all events, it appears that she submitted to the 
 discipline with a meekness which would have moved 
 the envy of my imperious and, so to say, Neo-Eoman 
 ancestors. It is well known and should be well noted 
 that her father, despot though (or because) he was, 
 found such favour with the female sex that he was 
 four times married. Perhaps his four wives cherished 
 the old-fashioned, but now, alas, obsolete or obsolescent, 
 belief that the proper guide of womankind is man. 
 
 That no unkind reader may charge me with oriental 
 views on masculine superiority, I will subjoin, in 
 ridicule of those views, an anecdote which reached 
 me on good authority. A tall and handsome lady 
 rowed two puny Eastern grandees, I think Siamese 
 
TALES OF MY FOEEFATHEES 29 
 
 princes, on the river at Oxford. When the trip was 
 over, they bowed low, and the elder of them said to 
 her : ' We thank you, madam. You are so good that 
 perhaps in heaven you may become a man,' — such 
 a man presumably as he himself was. In that case, 
 would not a post mortem Conservatism come over her 
 and make her want to be restored, like the sex- 
 alternating Caeneus of Virgil, to her former condition ? 
 It is time, however, to return to the chastised and 
 shorn, but irrepressible, Lady Emily. Of my near 
 relationship to her and of the many tokens of affection 
 which I received from her in my boyhood I will only 
 say that they shut my mouth as to some of her amiable 
 weaknesses. But I cannot forbear mentioning that 
 she was too much of what I have sometimes satirically 
 called a D. P. (daughter of the Plantagenets), too 
 pre-French-Eevolutionary in her ideas, for the nine- 
 teenth century. An example will show what I mean. 
 But, before giving it, it is fair to explain that the 
 incident referred to occurred when the dear old lady 
 was hard upon eighty, and when her faculties had 
 certainly declined. She was urging a young kinsman 
 of large expectations to get married : ' did he not 
 know any nice girl?' 'I know a great many,' was 
 the reply ; ' but how can I tell whether any of them 
 will have me?' 'Nonsense,' exclaimed Lady Emily. 
 ' Nothing can be simpler. Let them all stand in a row, 
 and then make your selection.' This quasi-feudal advice 
 carries the imagination back to Tudor times and 
 indeed recalls a suggestion of Henry VIII, which is 
 thus described by Hume : 
 
 'He (Henry) proposed to Francis, that they should have 
 a conference at Calais on pretence of business ; and that this 
 monarch should bring along with him the two princesses of 
 
80 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Guise, together with the finest ladies of quality in France, 
 that he might make a choice among them. But the gallant 
 spirit of Francis was shocked with the proposal : he was im- 
 pressed with too much regard, he said, for the fair sex, to 
 carry ladies of the first quality like horses to a market, there 
 to be chosen or rejected by the humour of the purchaser.' 
 
 After the ^Restoration, Lady Aldborough saw much 
 of the family of the Duke of Orleans, better known as 
 Louis Philippe. In this relation my father told me 
 of an incident which may serve to throw light on 
 the course of my early training. My mother, when 
 staying as a girl of seventeen with Lady Aldborough 
 in Paris, positively refused to accept an invitation to 
 dine with the Duchess of Orleans on Sunday. This 
 was, so far as I am aware, the first premonitory sign 
 of the Evangelical wave which was to overspread our 
 family, and of the spirit of devotion to which it owed 
 its force. Without dwelling at length on this purely 
 personal matter, I will say, once for all, that my 
 mother died when I was eight years old, and that my 
 recollections of her are faint. But from the eon- 
 current testimony of her acquaintances I have abundant 
 proof that to have known her was a Christian education. 
 Indeed, it must have required a double portion of 
 religious zeal to enable her, not only to resist the 
 attraction of principalities and powers at a distance, 
 but to bid defiance to the formidable Lady Aldborough 
 at close quarters. 
 
 The friendship of Louis Philippe with the countess 
 was continued after he became king. Indeed, she 
 appears to have bantered His Majesty without reserve. 
 An instance of her uncourtly familiarity is reported 
 by the late Lord Stanhope in his Conversations with 
 tlie Duke of Wellington : 
 
TALES OF MY FOEEFATHEKS 31 
 
 ' (1842, Oct. 10th) : I repeated to the Duke a new mot of 
 Lady Aldborough. I heard it from the Dowager Lady 
 Sandwich, who is now on a two days' visit to us. She 
 (that is, Lady Aldborough) went to Court at the Tuileries 
 soon after the last attempt to shoot Louis Philippe, and when 
 there was also a rumour of his dropsy, which had just been 
 contradicted on authority : she thus addressed him : " Sire, 
 je vousfilicite; je vols que vous avez 6tS d I'Spreuve dufeu 
 et de I'eau ! " — giving him with these words a vigorous 
 punch in the stomach to indicate where the peril of water 
 had been feared! This, though not exactly in the style of 
 Louis Quatorze, was from its novelty highly acceptable to 
 his present representative, who has been talking of it ever 
 since.' 
 
 The King, in thus tolerating his friend's lack of 
 ceremony, showed geniality and good temper ; but, 
 for all that, her jest belongs, if not to the large class 
 of ' things one would rather have left unsaid ', at least 
 to the far larger class of things one's friends would 
 rather one had left unsaid. 
 
 The opening words of the Duke's rejoinder indicate 
 that such was also his opinion : 
 
 ' He replied that she was an extraordinary old woman. 
 His aide-de-camp in France had more than once ventured 
 on an April fool's prank — a poisson d'avrU — with her. Of 
 this he gave several instances. Her exact age is a problem. 
 Once, some years ago, the Duchess-Countess of Sutherland 
 was told of Babbage's machine to calculate, as was declared, 
 even the most impossible things. " Then," she said, " I wish 
 he would calculate two things for me : first Lady Aldborough's 
 age, and secondly, whether by any chance the Tories will ever 
 come back to power." ' 
 
 We need not wonder that the friends of this 
 eccentric old lady felt curious respecting her age ; 
 for, in truth, she took great pains to conceal it. A 
 popular writer has said that there are three things 
 
32 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 about which many men, otherwise honest, are not to 
 be trusted : horses, violins, and umbrellas. It might 
 assuredly be added that many women, otherwise 
 truthful, lie when they tell the tale of their years. 
 And sometimes this seed of mendacity yields a harvest 
 of trouble. I once knew the widow of a naval chaplain 
 who, having understated her age in her marriage 
 register, was punished for this girlish weakness by 
 being unable, after her husband's death, to obtain her 
 full pension. Lady Aldborough had no temptation to 
 commit this particular form of folly. But her mode 
 of counterfeiting youth, being deliberate, was even 
 more extravagant and might have brought her into 
 difficulties. She began travelling on the Continent 
 before the French Eevolution ; and we have seen that 
 she visited Louis Philippe after he had become king. 
 It was, of course, necessary in those days that her 
 passport should declare how old she was. On her 
 original passport she stated that she was twenty-five ; 
 and she positively refused, throughout her long career 
 of travelling, to modify this statement. Accordingly, 
 when at about seventy she presented her passport to 
 a French official, we cannot wonder that he looked 
 suspiciously at her, and exclaimed : ' Mais, Madame, 
 il me semble que vous avez plus de vingt-cinq ans.' 
 ' Monsieur, vous etes le premier Francais qui ait jamais 
 doute de ce qu'une dame lui a dit au sujet de son age.' 
 ' Pardon, Madame, mille fois. Je me suis trompe 
 tout-a-fait.' And, with a low bow, the contrite sceptic 
 opened the door ; and the old-young lady of quality, 
 more fortunate than the Horatian Lyce, was taken at 
 her own valuation, and suffered to carry off her pro- 
 tracted youthfulness in triumph. Assuredly it might 
 be said of her that ' elle n'avait pas perdu l'ancienne 
 
TALES OF MY FOREFATHERS 33 
 
 habitude d'etre jeune '. This last mot has been happily 
 compared by Augustus Hare to a saying of Lady 
 Gifford. A little girl asked her, ' Do tell me, are you 
 old or young ? I never can make out ' ; and she said, 
 ' My dear, I have been a very long time young.' Did 
 not a Presbyterian minister once, when preaching 
 about the Prodigal Son, dilate on the watchful love of 
 the father, who had doubtless been fattening the calf 
 during all the years since the truant had left his 
 home ? (Discursive as usual, I am reminded that the 
 condition of such an elderly calf would be but feebly 
 represented by Sir G. Trevelyan's ' Veal tottering on 
 the verge of beef ! ') 
 
 D 
 
CHAPTEK II 
 
 MY FATHER AND HIS CLERICS 
 
 ®avaTOS Se toi avT<$ 
 dy8\^pos /xd\a toios iXeva-erai, os ke (tc Tre<pvrj 
 yrjpai xnro Xtwapto apTj/jievov, afJL<pi Be Aao4 
 oA/?ioi ecraovrai. — IToMEE. 
 
 ' And thou shalt fall in a serene old age, 
 Painless and ripe, with nothing left to do, 
 While a blest people at thy gates engage 
 Thy [fostering] care.' — Woesley's Translation. 
 
 It is not my purpose to say much about my father, 
 either as a politician or as a landlord. He regarded 
 the Reform Bill of 1832 as, at best, a necessary evil. 
 He even thought that, if Peel had disfranchised every 
 corrupt borough and transferred the members to large 
 constituencies, such as Manchester, the extension of 
 the franchise might have been delayed, if not averted. 
 He was one of those fifty or sixty members who, at 
 the very last division, opposed the repeal of the Corn 
 Laws. He continued a Protectionist to the end ; and 
 on this, as on other matters, he had the courage of his 
 opinions. Indeed, in allusion to an old cartoon in 
 Punch, he used jocularly to call himself one of the 
 fifty cannon-balls which nothing could melt. He 
 held that Free Trade would have speedily ruined 
 British agriculture, if it had not been for the discovery 
 of gold ; and he was fond of quoting a high commercial 
 authority as having said that this discovery ' had given 
 the greatest stimulus to trade that the world had ever 
 
Joh\, Lord Tollemache, and his great-grandson Denis. 
 
MY FATHEE AND HIS CLEEICS 35 
 
 known '. He talked the matter over with that charming 
 and accomplished old man, the late Mr. George 
 Norman, whose opinion carried great weight in 
 matters of political economy and finance, and whose 
 name is familiar to the readers of The Life of George 
 Grote. Mr. Norman indirectly confirmed my father 
 in his opinion by telling him that the discovery of 
 gold had raised prices as much as ten per cent. ; but 
 I am bound to add that Mr. Norman told me that, in 
 his opinion, the rise of prices had done more harm 
 than good. From all this it will be inferred that my 
 father would have condemned what may be called the 
 golden rule of political economists : Take care of the 
 consumer, and the producer will take care of himself. 
 
 One thing has always struck me about his regulations 
 in regard to allotments and to the general manage- 
 ment of his estates. When I was living under his 
 roof, half a century ago, those somewhat arbitrary 
 rules were thought by many landowners to be as 
 eccentric as (to compare small things with great) the 
 British Constitution was thought on the Continent 
 before the last century. On the other hand, this same 
 system has suddenly gained such a wide popularity 
 as almost to suggest a comparison with the present 
 popularity of our Constitution among publicists all 
 over the world. What was the cause of this surprising 
 change? The proximate cause seems to have been 
 a speech delivered by Mr. Chamberlain, then a Liberal 
 of the first water, a speech which declared my father 
 to be one of the very best of English landlords, and 
 which straightway transformed the old-fashioned Pro- 
 tectionist into a Radical hero. In fact, my father has 
 a better claim than Mr. Jesse Collings to the historic 
 phrase of ' Three acres and a cow ', for it was a visit to 
 
 d2 
 
36 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 the Peckforton estate in 1884 that inspired Mr. Impey's 
 leaflet with that title. 
 
 Other and wider causes doubtless helped on the 
 change, causes connected with the decline of the 
 laisses-faire school of political economy. Mr. Norman, 
 himself a strong adherent of that school, told me that 
 an inquiry had been set on foot as to the comparative 
 rate of wages on different Suffolk estates ; and he 
 believed that the labourers on my father's estate were 
 little, if at all, better off than the labourers on other 
 estates ; the rate of wages had found its level, and the 
 labourers on my father's estate received as much less 
 from the farmers as they received more from the 
 landlord. Doubtless there was some overstatement 
 in this. At any rate, my father, then a very old 
 man, knew nothing of the untoward investigation. 
 But I refer to it as showing the instinctive repulsion 
 with which some political economists of the old 
 school would have regarded the masterful beneficence 
 even of a model landlord. Or, to speak more precisely, 
 a disciple of that school would pronounce Lord Tolle- 
 mache's paternal landlordism, as, indeed, he would 
 pronounce Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Act, to be a 
 needful anomaly perhaps, but certainly an anomaly, 
 and to involve the assumption that political economy 
 is a less exact science than it was once thought to be. 
 
 Far wider and more radical was the divergence of 
 opinion between my father and one of his neighbours, 
 that very remarkable man, Mr. Charles Austin. 1 It 
 
 1 I have dealt at some length in Safe Studies (the chapter 
 reprinted from Tfie Fortnightly Bevieiv, March, 1875) on my 
 intellectual obligation to him. He was, according to Sir G. 
 Trevelyan, the only man who exercised ' a dominating influence ' 
 over Macaulay. 
 
MY FATHER AND HIS CLEEICS 37 
 
 was partly under his guidance that I broke loose from 
 my hereditary politics, and became a stanch Whig 
 and an upholder of what is now called Individualism. 
 My father, whose view of the patria potestas might 
 have found favour with Brutus or Camillus, was wont 
 to rate me soundly for my 'harum-scarum' notions. 
 But the Liberal party has since changed its front, and 
 Individualism is giving place to State Socialism. At 
 the same time, it has been my good or bad fortune 
 to continue in the main loyal to the principles of 
 Kicardo : 
 
 'though fallen on evil days, 
 On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues.' 
 
 The odd result of all this was that my father, at the 
 end of his active and useful life, seemed to be in some 
 respects less out of sympathy with modern Liberalism 
 than I was. 
 
 Some of the older generation will remember that 
 my father drove almost, if not quite, the last curricle 
 in London — one of those not very safe, but comfortable 
 and picturesque, carriages which seemed to take one 
 bodily into the England of Miss Austen. The mention 
 of these old-world conveyances recalls a quaint remark 
 made to me at the Paris Exhibition of 1889 by a 
 Erench garcon, who wore an antique dress, and showed 
 me, in the so-called Hue de la Bastille, a full-sized 
 model of a restaurant of the eighteenth century : ' II 
 n'y a rien de change, sauf le personnel ! ' 
 
 In early youth my father was extraordinarily active. 
 So much so, indeed, that, in a race of a hundred 
 yards, he twice beat the champion runner of England. 
 In relating this, however, he was careful to explain 
 that he was several years younger than the champion, 
 
38 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 who had passed his prime. In later life his chief 
 amusement was driving four-in-hand ; and, on at least 
 one occasion, he drove his four chestnut horses when 
 he was over eighty. When I congratulated him on this 
 achievement, he gave the characteristic explanation, 
 ' I had a young fool of a coachman who didn't know 
 how to drive ; so I had to teach him. I found it hard 
 work to get on the box ; but, when I was once hoisted 
 up, it was all right.' Alas ! how often the thought of 
 my dear old father — a muscular Puritan, if ever there 
 was one — has tempted me to exclaim : ' Pater mi, 
 pater mi, currus Israel et auriga eius ! ' 
 
 The following adventure of his youth will astonish 
 those who are conversant only with the Evangelicalism 
 of his declining years. Once, when he was travelling 
 with a friend, his dressing-case was stolen. The 
 friend had seen a suspicious-looking stranger standing 
 by ; and from his description the authorities of Scot- 
 land Yard identified the man with a noted thief ; but 
 there was no legal proof, and the affair was dropped. 
 At the next Derby, my father, pointing out a horse to 
 the same friend, said that, if he were to bet, he would 
 back that horse. A stranger, overhearing him, offered 
 him odds of twenty-five to one against it in five-pound 
 notes. My father took the bet, and was much sur- 
 prised when his friend whispered in his ear that the 
 stranger was no other than the thief. The horse won, 
 and the miscreant had to disgorge more than the value 
 of what he had stolen. 
 
 One or two characteristic anecdotes may here be 
 added. After landing on the south coast of England, 
 Lord Tollemache put his wife and children in a cab, 
 and himself walked to the station. Stopping suddenly 
 before a barber's shop, he said to the shopman : ' I 
 
MY FATHER AND HIS CLERICS 39 
 
 like the look of that wig in the window. How long 
 would it take to shave my head ? ' 'A quarter of an 
 hour, sir.' 'I can give you twenty minutes, and 
 I shall then have five minutes to catch the train.' 
 When he joined my step-mother and her children, he 
 had the wig on. This story I had from my father's 
 own lips. The other came to me less directly, but 
 I have no reason to doubt it. My grandmother, Lady 
 Elizabeth Tollemache, had a house in London ; and 
 another Lady Elizabeth lived in the next house, which 
 was exactly like it. My father, calling accidentally at 
 the wrong door, asked the servant, ' Is Lady Elizabeth 
 at home ? ' ' Her ladyship receives nobody, sir ; she 
 is ill in bed.' ' Stuff and nonsense, she is my mother.' 
 And, rushing past the astonished footman, he ran 
 upstairs to what he supposed to be his mother's bed- 
 room. 
 
 My father, before appointing an incumbent to one 
 of his numerous livings, made the noble resolution 
 that, as he expressed it, he would select, not merely 
 a good man, but the very best he could find ; and, if 
 a hell firebrand was sometimes chosen, we may at 
 least applaud the singlemindedness which prompted 
 the choice. 
 
 It happened on a Sunday afternoon that he attended 
 the church of one of his nominees — the opposite end 
 of the social scale being represented by an infirm 
 peasant whom I will call John Martin. The eloquent 
 preacher impressed on his hearers that, to speak 
 broadly, there will be no reserved seats in heaven : 
 ' All of you, my brethren, from you, Lord Tollemache, 
 down to you, John Martin, will stand side by side 
 before the judgement-seat of God.' The patron, 
 I understand, was asleep. If he had been awake, 
 
40 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 would he have quite relished being thus reminded of 
 the posthumous equality which he of course admitted in 
 theory ? I remember an odd story of a pious marquise 
 who attended to the spiritual wants of her servant, 
 Jean, who died young. When the old lady went to 
 heaven, she deigned to inquire whether ' mon valet de 
 chambre, ce bon Jean' was also among the elect. 
 ' Comment, vous ne savez pas ? Monseigneur Jean, il 
 est Archangel' was the reply vouchsafed to her. 
 When she was told, moreover, that she must needs 
 bow herself to the ground if she met so great a per- 
 sonage, it repented her that she had taken such thought 
 for the religion of her household ! 
 
 Of my father's Evangelical nominees to livings the 
 most original was a quondam doctor whom — he still 
 retained his medical prefix — I will call by the 
 pseudonym of Dr. Jones. Being ' righteous over- 
 much ', though not ' overwise ', he vexed his spirit 
 with subtle imaginings about the Trinity and the 
 Apocalypse. Once, or more than once, he startled 
 my father's guests by exclaiming at dinner, ' Louis 
 Napoleon is the Beast.' With a like asperity, regarded 
 by him as a sacred duty, he once said to me : ' I detest 
 the Chancellor of Oxford, the Bishop of Oxford, and 
 the Member for Oxford' (Lord Derby, Wilberforce, 
 Gladstone). 
 
 So, too, he declared, with patriotic pride, that the 
 Sacred Number has taken concrete form in our three 
 estates of the realm. And, for a like reason, he 
 boasted that ' the soil of Britain is holy ' ; three 
 nationalities, England, Wales, and Scotland, were 
 all to his liking ; while, alas ! Ireland, poor Catholic 
 Ireland, was nought but our human nature— utterly 
 corrupt and abominable! Such indeed was his 
 
MY FATHEK AND HIS CLEKICS 41 
 
 sancta simplicitas that, without a thought of ir- 
 reverence, he (living within view of the Welsh 
 mountains) likened Wales to 'the Son in the bosom 
 of the Father'. 
 
 What a great man said of words in general may 
 more plausibly be applied to dogmas: they are the 
 counters of wise men, and the money of fools. I have 
 elsewhere described Matthew Arnold as ' a Hebrew 
 prophet in white kid gloves '. Yet never did I so feel 
 in the presence of a Samuel or an Elijah, born out of 
 date, as when I was penetrated by the eye and voice 
 of Dr. Jones. But now what concerns us about him is 
 that the occasion of his death was marked by a tragic 
 wonder which eclipsed all the eccentric and aggressive 
 dogmatism of his life. He was so fortunate as to be 
 twice married ; and he showed his affection for his 
 first wife in a manner trying to his second. 1 When 
 the anniversary of the former's death recurred, he 
 sent away the latter for a few days, that he might, in 
 solitary musings, enjoy the luxury of his grief. But 
 the victim of these periodic exiles had a worse trial in 
 store for her. The disconsolate husband naturally 
 wished his mortal remains to be laid by those of his 
 first wife. When the time came, the needful prepara- 
 tions were entrusted to a deaf but doughty grave- 
 digger, who heard not, or heeded not, when his spade 
 struck upon something hard, but continued to dig 
 energetically. To be brief, the too horrible result 
 was that the severed head of the first Mrs. Jones 
 bounded on to the grass, and is said to have been 
 visible from the parsonage window and to have 
 been seen by her successor. The tragi-comedy is 
 a burlesque of the weird pathos shadowed forth 
 
 1 See note at end of this chapter. 
 
42 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 in the line which stirred the unwilling admiration 
 of St. Augustine : 
 
 'Infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae.' 
 ('The very image of my wretched spouse.') 
 
 It should be explained that this eccentric divine 
 was recommended to my father, by an Evangelical star 
 of the first magnitude. After the appointment had 
 been made, the charitable and true-hearted patron 
 excused the vagaries of his nominee, whom he 
 described as ' spiritually minded '. But he resolved 
 never again to give a living to an applicant of whom 
 he himself knew nothing. 
 
 I have given a few traits of my father's character, 
 and I must not ' further seek his merits to disclose '. 
 
 The most delicate task for a son, next to speaking 
 of his father's defects, is to speak of his father's virtues. 
 To sum up my general impression I cannot do better 
 than quote from The Lady of the Lake : 
 
 ' His ready speech flowed fair and free, 
 In phrase of gentlest courtesy ; 
 Yet seemed that tone and gesture bland 
 Less used to sue than to command.' 
 
 What is lacking in this portraiture may be partly 
 supplied by an anecdote. An original picture — I 
 think the only one — of the Lord Falkland used to 
 belong to our family. The Lord Falkland of the day 
 begged my father, as an old friend, to let him buy this 
 memorial of his ancestor ; and my father — wishing, as 
 he expressed it, to do as he would be done by — con- 
 sented to the proposal, and replaced the original 
 picture by a copy. This may be taken as a typical 
 instance of the kindness, nay, the exceeding great 
 kindness, which was often shown by him. I cannot, 
 
MY FATHER AND HIS CLERICS 43 
 
 however, if I would, conceal the fact that he had the 
 defects of his qualities ; if he had been less masterful, 
 his work might have been less masterly. In fact, he 
 might be roughly described as three parts Sir Roger 
 de Coverley and one part Cardinal Richelieu. 
 ' Roughly,' I say, for assuredly he had virtues of 
 a kind which neither of these had. One great virtue 
 he derived from his Evangelicalism, He was liberal 
 alike of sympathy and of money to orthodox dis- 
 senters ; and it may have been in consequence of 
 this sympathy, or rather of its religious basis, that, 
 though himself an aristocrat to the backbone, he was 
 remarkably tolerant of the class of persons whose real 
 worth is veiled by social shortcomings, and whose 
 aspirations are less defective than their aspirates. 
 When reading of those rare bienfaisants seigneurs of 
 the ancien regime, I am instinctively reminded of 
 him. Is it unbecoming for a son to add concerning 
 his father that the setting, so to say, was worthy of 
 the gem, and that there was in him — absolutely when 
 in his prime, relatively when in extreme old age — 
 a dignity of presence and of bearing, Gratior et pulchro 
 veniens in corpore virtus? — 'Worth by the charm of 
 loveliness enhanced.' To this rare combination of 
 qualities it is due that, though for many years he 
 and I had scarce a taste or a thought in common, 
 and though he was neither politician nor orator, 
 nor philosopher, nor scholar, I believe him to have 
 been the grandest specimen of a country gentleman 
 that our generation has seen or is likely to see. 
 
 NOTE TO PAGE 41. 
 
 I have seen in the south of France an eccentrically built house, 
 whose no less eccentric designer is said to have put conjugal 
 
44 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 devotion to a sharper test even than that devised by Dr. Jones. 
 It is reported that, after losing his much loved wife, he caused 
 her to be embalmed, attired in her accustomed dress, and seated in 
 her accustomed chair at table. At last, finding this mute com- 
 panionship unsatisfying, he sought and obtained the hand of a 
 girl of low degree, who was presumably attracted by his wealth. 
 But he stipulated that the ghastly relic of the deceased should 
 make a third at their meals (Mortua quinetiam iungebat corpora 
 vivis), ' And eke he linked the living to the dead.' The unlucky 
 bride bore the infliction for a few weeks, and then absconded. 
 
 Here may be inserted a less tragic incident connected with 
 a second marriage. A pathetic epitaph (attributed to Shenstone) 
 is inscribed on the monument to the wife of Sir G. Shuekburgh : 
 'Heu! quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui meminisse' 
 (' Alas ! how much less to me is the converse with others than 
 the memory of thee '). The same monument records the death of 
 Shuckburgh's second wife, whom he married within three years. 
 
 I have somewhere heard an authentic account of an epitaph by 
 a disconsolate widower to this effect : ' I cannot bear to live 
 without her.' The widower married again and added to the 
 epitaph the significant word ' alone '. 
 
 Here is a variant of the same theme. A widower inscribed on his 
 wife's tombstone, ' The light of my life has gone out,' and excused 
 himself to her successor by adding, ' but I have struck a second 
 match.' 
 
 The anecdote of the Frenchman who made a dinner-companion 
 of his dead wife was recalled to me when reading of the saintly 
 messmates whom Greville thus describes : 
 
 ' The most extraordinary thing (at Baden-Baden) is the chapel 
 which the old Margravine (Sybilla) built in the garden in the 
 days of her penitence, to which she used to retire during Lent, 
 lying on a mat, lacerating herself with a scourge, wearing iron 
 spikes under her clothes, and dining with three wooden figures 
 (of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and St. John), who continue to sit at 
 the table, though they have no longer any meat served up to them 
 as they used to have.' 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 
 
 ' He that claims, either for himself or for another, the honours 
 of perfection, will surely injure the reputation he designs to 
 assist. ' — Johnson. 
 
 'Friends, as Professor Jowett said, always think it necessary 
 (except Boswell, that great genius) to tell lies about their deceased 
 friends; they leave out all their faults lest the public should 
 exaggerate them. But we want to know their faults — that is 
 probably the most interesting part of them.' — Max Mullee. 
 
 I was born on May 28, 1838. It appears that, very 
 shortly after my birth, my eyesight was found to be 
 extremely defective. One result of this lifelong 
 infirmity should here be mentioned. In my Recollec- 
 tions of Mark Pattison it is suggested that a tendency 
 to take life too seriously is generally discernible in 
 those who, like him, have a retentive memory, a strong 
 logical faculty, and weak nerves. In my own case this 
 evil was aggravated by my near-sightedness, which, 
 cutting me off from many sources of interest and 
 recreation, threw me upon myself, and made me 
 abnormally introspective. Hence it was that the 
 terrific creed of Calvinism, in which my father said 
 that he found a constant and overflowing wellspring 
 of happiness, brought to me unrest and vexation. 
 Naturally enough, the line which, as time went on, 
 I began to take on these subjects filled him with 
 surprise as well as with indignation. Scarcely less 
 surprised and indignant would he have been if he had 
 
46 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 heard of the dogmatic thunderbolt of Archbishop 
 Whately : ' The God of the Calvinists is the devil with 
 " God" written on his forehead.' 
 
 At this point I must needs speak of my father more 
 definitely as a spiritual pastor and master. And if 
 in doing so I bring out the Richelieu rather than the 
 Coverley side of his character, well, I must call to 
 mind the famous warning addressed by Cromwell to 
 Lely the painter : ' Paint me as I am. If you leave 
 out the scars and wrinkles I will not pay you a shilling.' 
 Amicus Pater, magis arnica Veritas. 
 
 This strong and upright man was, in very truth, the 
 presiding spirit, the Jupiter, as it were, of my early 
 years. Nor must I forget that he was the Iupiter 
 Optimus of my childhood, even though he is now 
 chiefly present to my mind as the Iupiter Maximus or 
 Tonans of my hobbledehoyhood, when, though still 
 dependent on him, I was of an age, and therefore 
 bound, to hold opinions of my own. One significant 
 peculiarity may be worth recording. He had a way, 
 after I came of age, and occasionally after I married, of 
 speaking of me to the servants as ' Master Lionel '. 
 Nor was this a mere harmless eccentricity. It was 
 associated with the fact that he expected me to treat 
 him, after I had grown up, with the same absolute 
 submission which James I doubtless required from 
 'Baby Charles'. 
 
 I have tried in vain to find a facsimile of my father 
 in fiction. The two fictitious characters which seem 
 most to resemble him occur in the novels of Mr. Norris, 
 that epicurean successor of Thackeray, who, not having 
 Thackeray's bitterness, has but little of his tonic 
 quality, and who, partly on this account, is far less 
 popular than he deserves to be. One of these char- 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 47 
 
 acters is Sir Brian Segrave in Major and Minor. Of 
 Sir Brian's autocratic impulsiveness my father had 
 a full share. But he was far superior to him in moral 
 earnestness. He had a closer resemblance to the 
 austere father in Mr. Ghaine's Sons. But from such 
 a typical Calvinist as Mr. Chaine he was sharply 
 distinguished. He was, in fact, an Evangelical only 
 at second hand. The most uxorious of men, he caught 
 some of my mother's Evangelical devotion ; and 
 during the forty-four years which elapsed between 
 her death and his own, he kept the husk of Evan- 
 gelicalism, though with less and less of the kernel. 
 Mr. Chaine emphatically lived ' As ever in his great 
 Taskmaster's eye ' ; my father, on the other hand, 
 though absorbed in his moral task, bestowed only 
 a fitful and, as it were, conventional thought on the 
 great Taskmaster. Eeligion became little more than 
 the mould in which his philanthropy was cast. Not, 
 of course, that he was aware of this. On the contrary, 
 he ascribed a sort of talismanic efficacy to the mere 
 letter of the Scripture. Between morning prayers 
 and breakfast there was an inconvenient interval of 
 half an hour. In my childhood this interval was filled 
 up with our Scripture reading, which consisted of two 
 or three chapters read verse about by us all, without 
 note or comment ; if there were a few spare minutes, 
 an extra chapter was hurried through at express speed 
 by the paterfamilias. 
 
 The Bible thus read left but a faint impression, and 
 the only text I can remember his quoting to me was 
 the congenial words : ' Children, obey your parents.' 
 He had besides a poor verbal memory. Thus he told 
 me that he had read some of the Greek and Latin 
 classics at school. But, when I came on the scene, he 
 
48 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 had utterly forgotten both his Greek and his Latin. 
 So, again, it is remarkable that a man of his vigorous 
 and not uncultivated mind should have been quite 
 ignorant of French. If he wanted to cut short an 
 unseasonable conversation before the servants, he had 
 a way of saying ' Doucement '. But to the best of my 
 recollection, he hardly ever used any other French 
 word in my presence ; though, by the way, I am 
 informed that, spending the last winter of his life in 
 France, he learnt to dismiss beggars with a decisive 
 ' Allez-vous-en ' ! On the other hand, I could not, by 
 any effort of fancy, conceive him adopting the Spanish 
 formula for getting rid of a beggar : ' Go away, my 
 brother, and God be with you.' 
 
 Being the son of a sailor, he had a liking for 
 Marryat's novels, and encouraged me to read them. 
 But the work of fiction which I knew best was The 
 Pilgrim's Progress. After an interval of some sixty 
 years, I can remember being offended by a tautological 
 passage, where Christiana says of herself: 'I am a 
 widow and my husband is dead.' Doubtless, however, 
 the tautology is meant to emphasize the pathos ; as 
 when, in King John, Constance describes herself as 
 ' a widow, husbandless.' 
 
 Charles Austin used to ascribe to the influence of 
 Macaulay the tide of opinion which had set in, during 
 the latter half of his own life, in favour of Bunyan ; 
 and he expected that tide soon to be on the ebb. I am 
 glad, however, that my own partiality for the great 
 allegory is sanctioned by the authority of so many 
 distinguished men, Kuskin among others. There is 
 also a pet aversion of mine which Kuskin shared. ' My 
 aunt,' he writes, ' gave me cold mutton for Sunday's 
 dinner, which — as I preferred it hot — greatly dimin- 
 
MY FATHEK IN HIS HOME 49 
 
 ished the influence of The Pilgrim's Progress.' Cold 
 dinners on Sunday ! Yes, they are hateful ; I loathe 
 them not so much for their culinary shortcomings, as 
 for their kill-joy associations. Even my saintly aunt, 
 afterwards known as Lady Mount Temple, used to say 
 as a girl that, when she married, she would certainly 
 give them up. For myself, they made me as little 
 look forward to a heaven where ' Sabbaths never end ', 
 as to one ' where congregations ne'er break up \ Of 
 course my father ascribed our cold sabbatical fare to 
 his desire to give rest to the servants. But this was 
 not his only motive. Without suspecting it, he was 
 in favour of a periodical recurrence of a Protestant 
 fast-day. He wished there to be at least one day in 
 the week when the elect gave up what other men 
 enjoyed. Keligion is nothing if not ascetic ; and 
 a quaint proof of the more or less ascetic character 
 of our Sabbath-worship was this, that, although my 
 father often had large parties staying with him on 
 Sunday, yet his guests were on that day not only 
 deprived of hot meat, but also given chablis instead of 
 champagne. This sabbatical substitution of chablis 
 for champagne recalls the story — I think a true one — 
 told of the late Canon Bull, of Christ Church, who, 
 half a century ago, was famous throughout Oxford for 
 his excellent dinners. One of these dinners was given 
 to a party of Oxonians in Lent. Neither salmon nor 
 roast beef was lacking, but at the outset the host 
 apologetically exclaimed : ' At this holy season we 
 have no side dishes.' It ought to be added that, 
 though we always had cold meals on Easter Day, we 
 had excellent hot joints on Good Friday, for, as my 
 father once said to me, 'I don't look upon Good 
 Friday as quite like Sunday.' 
 
50 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 It was natural that, being thus nurtured in Evan- 
 gelicalism, some of us fell into the sort of mistakes to 
 which beardless Bibliolaters are prone. Indeed, the 
 Prayer Book as well as the Bible had pitfalls for us. 
 My elder brother was embarassed by the petition, 
 'Make speed to save us.' A worn-out old labourer, 
 named Speed, was then living near our home in 
 Cheshire. My brother wondered how succour could 
 be in store for us from so unexpected a quarter ; but 
 he rejoiced that, when the awful day came, the decrepit 
 deliverer would be within reach. So, again, my father 
 had an endearing way of addressing my mother as 
 ' my life '. Accordingly the liturgical phrase ' our 
 eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom ' suggested 
 to my childish ear a complimentary periphrasis for the 
 queen. 
 
 When I heard in my boyhood that a book had been 
 published, entitled A Tale of Two Cities, I was so 
 simple as to imagine that it must record the tragic 
 fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. Likewise the admonition 
 of Joseph to his brethren, 'See that ye fall not out 
 by the way,' was the occasion of my making an odd 
 blunder ; for I could not imagine that those semi- 
 inspired writers, the compilers of the Authorized 
 Version, would use so colloquial an expression for 
 quarrelling. So I concluded that the worthy patriarch 
 was merely counselling the travellers to see that the 
 timber of their waggons was sound and to beware of 
 ruts and joltings. 
 
 A friend tells me that, when very young, she 
 imagined Judas Iscariot to have been so called from the 
 carroty hair with which he is represented in pictures. 
 My first step in etymology was yet stranger, and 
 indeed would be inexplicable but for the fact that, in 
 
MY FATHEK IN HIS HOME 51 
 
 my childhood, owing to my bad sight, the Bible was 
 very generally read aloud to me. I was possessed with 
 the delusion that my friends meant to read, not 
 'Judas Iscariot', but ' Judas's chariot'. How I got 
 over the difficulty about the chariot speaking, I do not 
 know. Perhaps I vaguely surmised that the loquacity 
 of a chariot was scarcely more extraordinary than the 
 loquacity of an ass. In a sacred literature which is 
 full of marvels, what should be thought incredible? 
 Ce n'est que la premiere voix miraculeuse qui coute. 
 
 One of the entertaining books which found its way 
 into our schoolroom was St. John's Wild Sports in the 
 Highlands. It was the author's name that chiefly 
 attracted me ; for I remember with what eagerness 
 I took up the volume, and how my wondering 
 sympathy was stirred by the healthy outdoor relaxa- 
 tions of the versatile Evangelist. But I was much 
 disappointed when a kinsman of my own age — why 
 may I not say a ' kinsboy ' ? — suggested that perhaps 
 the sportsman was not the Evangelist after all, but 
 merely a holy man who had been canonized ! In like 
 manner Canon Isaac Taylor once told me that, while 
 some valuable books which he had put into his Church 
 Library were neglected, there was an extraordinary 
 run upon a third-rate book of Evangelical theology 
 bearing the name of Adam's Private Thoughts on 
 Meligion. On inquiry, he found that his simple- 
 minded parishioners imagined that the volume of their 
 choice embodied the meditations which, amid the 
 strange trees and stranger serpent of Eden, divine or 
 angelic tuition had called forth from the father of 
 mankind. Bishop Walsham How related that he 
 received a letter from a man, who, having been told 
 to study Daniel on the Book of Common Prayer, 
 
 e2 
 
52 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 had read the Book of Daniel all through and found no 
 mention of the Prayer Book. That very amusing 
 book of Bishop Walsham How's, Lighter "Moments, 
 contains another story which I am tempted to compare 
 with the foregoing. Dr. Goulburn, dilating in a sermon 
 on the intermixture of good and evil in the world, 
 sententiously exclaimed : ' Eemember that there was 
 a Ham in the Ark ; ' and then improved matters by 
 adding : 'I mean a human Ham.' Had the good Dean 
 a tendency to be something of a pulpit-Malaprop ? 
 A friend of mine assures me that he heard a sermon of 
 Goulburn's in which he eloquently declared that even 
 the most sumptuous banquet would at last become 
 wearisome, and then added : ' Heaven is a feast from 
 which there is no rising up.' It is reported that, 
 when he was preaching to the boys at Bugby, he threw 
 out a suggestion which must have been true in a double 
 sense : ' What is your conversation, my brethren, from 
 day to day? Is it not chaff, chaff, chaff?' 
 
 The earliest instance that I can remember of a 
 religious discord arising between my father and my- 
 self is of interest as showing that, even when there 
 is a strong affection on both sides, it is harder for a 
 camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a 
 father with a despotic and uninquiring mind to 
 understand a son with an inquiring mind. My 
 experience is curiously similar to that so graphically 
 related by Mr. Edmund Gosse in his Father and Son. 
 When I was eight years old, we spent a few weeks at 
 Felixstowe ; and, as my mother had lately died, I was 
 the special object of my father's care. Nothing could 
 exceed his devotion to me. One symptom of that 
 devotion was that he and I had daily ' Scripture 
 readings ' alone. It was his wish that I should freely 
 
MY FATHEE IN HIS HOME 53 
 
 question him about any difficulty that occurred to me. 
 Once, as if to give the fullest scope to such questioning, 
 he read aloud the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
 Galatians. Presently he came to the text : ' But 
 though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other 
 gospel unto you than that which we have preached 
 unto you, let him be accursed.' "With the simplicity 
 of a child, I asked if St. Paul was not 'wrong' in 
 speaking thus of an angel from heaven. Of course 
 I could not then have formulated the argument, that 
 in the quasi-ecclesiastical suit of Angel versus Apostle, 
 the angel ought to carry the day ; for the credentials 
 of an angel coming down from heaven would be more 
 direct and better attested than those of the apostle, 
 and, in a word, his appearance would be a greater 
 miracle than any which the apostle could work. But 
 probably some infantine counterpart of this argument 
 flitted before my mind, just as a vision of the anti- 
 Pauline denizen of the skies, of the unorthodox bird 
 of paradise with a human head, may have flitted 
 before my imagination. But neither the rudimentary 
 argument nor the angelic vision had a softening 
 influence on my father. He rated me soundly, sent 
 me for the rest of the day to, at best, the suburbs 
 of Coventry, and altogether treated me with a severity 
 which seemed to me all the more grievous from its 
 contrast with the forbearance to which my delicate 
 childhood had grown accustomed. Doubtless a healthy 
 child would not have minded the scolding, but I have 
 suffered all my life from over-sensitiveness and those 
 religious terrors from which Lucretius sought to rid 
 his readers. ' He 's a good man but a stern man ' 
 was said of my excellent father by the Scotch wife 
 of one of his tenants. 
 
54 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 Twice in my life I have, after an odd fashion, felt 
 as one about to die ; once, when in my youth I drove 
 by the Avernian Lake ; and again, when I made my 
 Will for the first time. It was this sensitiveness 
 which caused me to speak as I did above of the creed 
 of Calvinism as ' terrific '. In fact, I can echo the 
 sentiments expressed, not long ago, by the author 
 of the very clever Pages from a Private Diary : 
 
 'People who write in the papers are not old enough to 
 remember the hideous Clapham School religion, from which 
 muscular Christianity helped to deliver us. Its outward 
 form and symbol was black kid gloves and its passwords 
 were many, perhaps the most odious being the word 
 "engage". When a clergyman called, it was quite cus- 
 tomary for him to say " Shall we engage ? " and then and 
 there you were expected to let him hale you into the presence 
 of your Maker.' 
 
 In case any reader may think my view exaggerated, 
 I must remind him that the Calvinism of to-day differs 
 from the Calvinism of my youth almost as much as 
 the Conservatism of to-day differs from the Conserva- 
 tism of my youth. A familiar sign of this difference 
 is the partial removal of the ban which in strict circles 
 used to be set on such entertainments as balls and 
 theatres. But another sort of illustration will serve 
 my turn better. In my Harrow days I heard many 
 long sermons from Mr. Cunningham, the time-honoured 
 Evangelical vicar ; but the only sermonic phrase of his 
 which has stuck in my memory is this : ' If heaven is 
 eternal, hell is eternal.' In striking contrast with 
 this was the remark made to me recently by an 
 Evangelical of the first water, to the effect that the 
 word ' death ' is sometimes employed in the Gospels 
 where ' hell ' might have been expected. The texts 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 55 
 
 in favour of the future punishment of the wicked 
 (including, of course, unbelievers and misbelievers) 
 were, in my friend's opinion, too clear and too 
 numerous to be explained away ; but he went on 
 to intimate that their posthumous lot may be no 
 worse than a sort of purgatory ending in annihilation. 
 This, after all, was something, especially as charity, 
 having driven orthodoxy out of one of her strongholds, 
 is sure to carry the victory further by strengthening 
 the foundations of ' eternal hope '. Whence we may 
 conclude that orthodoxy, even Calvinistic orthodoxy, 
 is on the way to concede what may be termed the 
 evanescence of Pandemonium and the euthanasia of 
 the devil. 
 
 Now, however, when the hell-spectre has been laid, 
 Calvinism, being little dreaded, is also little regarded ; 
 it can have little more than an antiquarian interest 
 for my readers, and, therefore, I will touch on it as 
 briefly as possible. Personally, I have no recollection 
 of the use of the word ' engage ' in the sense mentioned 
 in the foregoing extract from the Private Diary. ' Con- 
 version ' and ' Assurance ' are the two passwords which 
 come to my mind most readily. ' No field preacher,' 
 says Macaulay, ' surely ever carried his irreverent 
 familiarity so far as to bid the Supreme Being stop 
 and think on the importance of the interests which 
 are under his care.' The great critic would have 
 spoken less confidently if he had heard, as I did, a 
 locum tenens at Helmingham exhort his congregation 
 to remind the Deity of the promises by which He had 
 bound Himself: 'Entangle God in His own words.' 
 A more direct refutation of Macaulay's thesis reached 
 me lately from America. A friend who was present 
 at the opening of a Congregationalist Chapel in a city 
 
56 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 of the West reports that he heard the senior deacon 
 begin his dedicatory prayer: 'O Lord, it has been 
 proved to Thee by statistics how grievously in- 
 adequate has been the religious accommodation of 
 this city.' 
 
 In my boyhood my father told me that he would 
 like me to go to the Bar; and he added, by way 
 of encouragement, that he knew a leading counsel 
 who was 'an advanced Christian'. Afterwards I 
 innocently adopted this phrase in conversation with 
 my friend and tutor, the Rev. W. E. Jelf, the editor 
 of Aristotle's Ethics. The learned High Churchman 
 surprised me by his disgust at what he thought an 
 offensive Evangelical shibboleth. But, after all, may 
 not the word ' advanced ' be described as a jack-of-all- 
 trades in the theological and political workshop? 
 Some Ritualists use it as a friendly epithet to indi- 
 cate what my father would have stigmatized as veiled 
 Popery ; while, on the other hand, the late Sir 
 Benjamin Brodie, thinking himself rather a fish out 
 of water in the Tory Oxford of his time, used to call 
 himself to his friends an ' AL.', which, being inter- 
 preted, meant ' Advanced Liberal '. 
 
 It is, of course, not meant that my father had a 
 monopoly of narrowness. On the contrary, he was 
 more liberal than many of his co-religionists. Some 
 of these had a way of besprinkling their conversation 
 with trifles steeped in theology, or at any rate with 
 what may be called Grundyloquent platitudes. My 
 father's good genius, which may have been connected 
 with shady logic, kept him from such extremes. He 
 had neither the inclination nor the leisure to philoso- 
 phize. Much of his time was taken up with his 
 duties as a landlord and, during some forty years, 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 57 
 
 as a member of one or other House of Parliament. 
 But he managed to pick up a wholesome and con- 
 venient smattering of science, biography, and travel, 
 such as enabled him, in Bacon's phrase, ' to find talk 
 and discourse,' if not ' to weigh and consider '. His way 
 of reading and, for that matter, also of talking, may be 
 illustrated by a quaint anecdote which he told against 
 himself. Being so unlucky as to arrive at a London 
 dinner party only just when the couples were filing 
 downstairs, he joined a solitary gentleman who was 
 bringing up the rear, and at once blurted out, 'It's 
 all Sir David Brewster's fault that I wasn't in time.' 
 Then, seeing that his companion looked surprised, 
 he went on to explain: 'I was so engrossed in his 
 More Worlds than One that I forgot to look at my 
 watch.' Sir David, for the stranger was no other 
 than he, modestly bowed, and expressed his satis- 
 faction that, as Othello would have said, the head 
 and front of his offending had this extent, no 
 more. 
 
 It will be remembered that Sir David, in the volume 
 aforesaid, insists on the application of the argument 
 from final causes to the entire universe, inorganic as 
 well as organic ; and, no doubt, it was this theological 
 tendency that made the book so attractive to my father. 
 He regarded Evolutionists as under a ban. It was 
 in the sixties that a guest of his, Lady Goody Blue 
 Stocking, reminded me in his presence that I had 
 promised to lend her The Origin of Species. ' If I were 
 Lady Goody,' he said, 'I should first borrow it, and 
 then burn it. It seems to me so unscriptural.' 
 
 It will be inferred that he could not tolerate Biblical 
 criticism. I remember his coming across a mock letter 
 in Punch, purporting to have been written from Bishop 
 
58 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 Colenso to Archbishop Longley. It ended somewhat 
 as follows : 
 
 'To call myself a heathen dark, 
 Because I've doubts about Noah's Ark, 
 And think it right to tell all men so, 
 Is not the course for Yours, Colenso.' 
 
 The odd thing was that, on reading this skit, my 
 father was surprised as well as indignant. He of 
 course regarded it as an avowal of unbelief ; and he 
 seems to have been made aware for the first time 
 to what manner of opinions the episcopal convert was 
 led by the proselytizing Zulu. 
 
 In justice to my father it should be pointed out 
 that the time was exceptional when he uttered those 
 anathemas. The champions of the 'New Keforma- 
 tion', as it has been styled, had bewildered him by 
 openly unfurling their banner ; and, indeed, they 
 were not yet strong enough to claim belligerent rights. 
 The ultimate concession of those rights was due to 
 various causes. It was especially due to the Veni, 
 vidi, vici of the Newton of biology, to his triumph 
 at once so sudden and so signal as to justify me in 
 thus paraphrasing Pope : 
 
 'Our Nature and her laws lay hid in night; • 
 God said, "Let Darwin be," and all was light.' 
 
 Great allowance for the pre-Darwinian intolerance 
 should therefore be made by us who live in an age 
 when few educated men are so antediluvian as to 
 believe in the Deluge, and when hardly any are left 
 who regard Darwin himself as a nineteenth-century 
 Anti-Christ. Even Bishop Creighton, as related in 
 his Life, dissuaded his fiancee from reading The Origin 
 of Species, as unprofitable, if no worse. 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 59 
 
 Another of my father's stories about himself may- 
 find a place here. The scene was a railway carriage, 
 in which he was travelling with his charming old 
 friend Colonel Wilson Patten, afterwards Lord Win- 
 marleigh ; and the date was probably in the fifties. 
 The incident and his way of relating it were so 
 characteristic that it must be repeated, as nearly as 
 possible, in his own words: 'I was telling "Wilson 
 Patten how strongly I disapproved of his having 
 voted in favour of Maynooth. He tried to stop me ; 
 but, as it was very important, I insisted all the more. 
 I said, " I can't understand, Wilson Patten, how a 
 Protestant like you can vote in favour of giving public 
 money to support Popish error." At last he touched 
 me and pointed to a corner of the carriage, where 
 a gentleman was reading a newspaper. I looked, and 
 saw it was Dr. Wiseman — the man who wants to be 
 called " Cardinal " in a Protestant country. I recog- 
 nized him at once, for I had seen him under the 
 gallery of the House of Commons listening to debates, 
 and he knew me by sight also. I, of course, apolo- 
 gized for having spoken as I did in his presence. He 
 made a low bow (he had all the plausible manner of a 
 Roman ecclesiastic), and he began talking about the 
 churches in the neighbourhood — this church had been 
 well restored, he did not like the style of that one. 
 At last I said to him, " Dr. Wiseman, you seem to 
 know a great deal about our churches ; I suppose you 
 expect them all to become Roman Catholic some 
 day?" "Indeed," he answered, "I think there are 
 many things more impossible than that " ! ' 
 
 To the maxim ' Tout comprendre, c'est tout par- 
 donner' I would add the corollary which, as 'tout 
 comprendre' is impossible, should be appended: 
 
60 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 ' Savoir que tout comprendre serait tout pardonner, 
 c'est deja beaucoup pardonner.' In other words, I 
 would suggest that, in order to forgive my father's 
 anti-Catholic animosity, we must understand when 
 and by whom his opinions were formed. They took 
 their final shape when the Oxford movement was 
 producing a strong Protestant reaction, and when, in 
 very truth, the Scarlet Woman was a red rag to John 
 Bull. Likewise his lot fell in a neighbourhood almost 
 literally made up of agricultural peasants and of 
 Evangelical parsons. It must, however, be owned 
 that the Cimmerian darkness was in part shed abroad 
 by himself. The clergyman who spoke to Charles 
 Austin of 'the Eoman Catholic religion, if indeed 
 it is to be called a religion', was my father's guest, 
 and probably his nominee. With somewhat less 
 extravagance, an Evangelical from Suffolk told me 
 that the foundations of Popery could easily be sub- 
 verted by ' hard facts '. Alas, what are many seemingly 
 hard facts worth? They sometimes make me think 
 of sticks of sealing-wax. If they are contemplated 
 with the requisite coolness, they are solid and straight ; 
 but once let any undue heat — the heat of passion or 
 of controversy — be applied to them, and they can .be 
 twisted into forms the most fantastic and grotesque. 
 
 Of my father's clerical friends, my favourite was 
 old Mr. Armistead, of Sandbach. He, too, had his 
 original side. Himself a moderate High Churchman, 
 he was asked by a Cheshire neighbour of more 
 extreme views to preach a sermon at the opening of 
 a private chapel. He consented; but, as the service 
 was going on, he was shocked by some ritualistic 
 practices which seemed to him redolent of Eome. So 
 strong was his disapproval and so tender his con- 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 61 
 
 science, that he then and there made signs to his host, 
 and informed him that he felt bound to preach either 
 no sermon at all or a condemnatory one. Of course 
 the former alternative was accepted by the squire. 
 But my father, when he told the story, seemed to 
 think it an open question whether Mr. Armistead 
 would not have done better to have mounted the 
 pulpit, and to have withstood his erring friend to the 
 face as openly as Paul withstood Peter. Being thus 
 moderate, and being also an old friend, this upright 
 and downright parson could say things to my father 
 which would have been tolerated from no one else. 
 In the courtyard of the neo-feudal castle built by 
 my father on one of the Peckforton hills there is a 
 chapel which was licensed by the bishop, but was not 
 consecrated or endowed (an endowment would have 
 given too free a hand to the chaplain). My father 
 himself told me that Mr. Armistead once said to him, 
 ' If I had been the bishop, I should have insisted on 
 the chapel being consecrated, or I would have had 
 nothing to do with it.' ' If the bishop had taken that 
 line,' was the reply, 'what do you suppose I should 
 have done? I should at once have appointed a dis- 
 senting chaplain.' Knowing that my father often 
 subscribed to Wesleyan charities, I asked him whether, 
 in the case proposed, the chaplain would have been 
 taken from that sect. He answered that he should 
 probably have given the preference to Lady Hunting- 
 don's followers, whom, of all dissenting bodies, he 
 believed to come nearest to the Church of England. 
 
 It will be gathered that my father had no love for 
 the Anglo-Catholics. Their avowed sympathy for the 
 real Catholics was particularly irritating to him. This 
 may be illustrated by the following anecdote, which 
 
62 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 he told about himself without ever dreaming that it 
 might be taken as against himself : ' A young curate was 
 showing the Helmingham pictures to a party of ladies. 
 I happened to be passing through the room when he 
 brought them to the portrait of Mary Tudor ; and I 
 heard him say, "This is Holy Queen Mary." The 
 foolish women were looking admiringly at him, and 
 seemed to be quite talked over. I said, " I suppose 
 you mean Bloody Mary," and I passed on without 
 giving him time to answer.' 1 
 
 ' Cadogan Place,' says Dickens, ' is the connecting 
 link between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave 
 Square and the barbarism of Chelsea. . . . Not that 
 the people of Cadogan Place claim to be on precisely 
 the same footing as the high folks of Belgrave Square 
 and Grosvenor Place, but that they stand, with 
 reference to them, rather in the light of those ille- 
 gitimate children of the great, who are content to 
 boast of their connexions, although their connexions 
 disavow them.' To speak thus of the highly respect- 
 able Cadogan Place folks is, of course, shocking. But 
 I quote the passage as illustrative of my father's view 
 of the Anglo-Catholics, a view in which he for once 
 found himself in agreement both with his Catholic 
 and with his philosophical enemies ; for in the con- 
 sentient opinion of such adverse critics, there is a 
 spiritual bar sinister on the escutcheon of the Eitua- 
 lists, who meekly crave recognition from the obdurate 
 
 1 A lady of my acquaintance was staying in a Devonshire inn. 
 In the sitting-room was an oil painting to which the landlord 
 called her attention as a genuine portrait of Queen Mary. ' Which 
 Queen Mary?' the lady inquired. The host hesitated and 
 whispered, 'Bloody Queen Mary,' adding, apologetically, 'it's 
 a title she assumed when she came to the throne.' 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 63 
 
 and scornful Catholics, while on the other hand the 
 ' barbarism ' of Dissenters is their bugbear. In fact, 
 my father looked on the Anglo-Catholics with dis- 
 trust, as Catholic wolves clad in Protestant sheepskins. 
 
 Of course Lord Tollemache had Catholic friends, 
 to whom he was bound by a tie of esteem. But these 
 contraband friendships, so to call them, were not 
 generally very close, and I now and then seemed to 
 detect in them a bitter flavour — amari aliquid — which 
 might suggest the unsavoury comparison of the 
 drunken helot. The Papists, he thought, were the 
 honest Catholics, and might be held up as a whole- 
 some warning to the Anglo-Catholics. But, in view 
 of particular cases, he was better than his principles. 
 I once told him of the self-sacrificing devotion shown 
 by the founder of the Jesuits. He was evidently 
 surprised, and replied with some excitement, as if 
 conscience-stricken at his own hardihood : ' Is that 
 really so ? I tell you what. I shouldn't be surprised 
 if Ignatius Loyola was a saved soul ! ' I have just 
 said that my father was sometimes better than his 
 principles. He was, in a like sense, better than some 
 of his co-Evangelicals. Sydney Smith said of Horner 
 that he had the Ten Commandments written on his 
 face, and, adapting the metaphor, I might say of some 
 of my father's chief friends that on their hearts were 
 inscribed, in capital letters, the damnatory clauses of 
 the Athanasian Creed. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, when he honoured me with a call as 
 a Balliol undergraduate, spoke of my father as a man 
 of ' great practical ability '. And no doubt he had 
 a fair proportion of that 'common sense' which he 
 extolled so frequently. But to that too elastic term 
 he gave three different meanings ; it stood for capacity, 
 
U OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 first, of transacting business ; secondly, of discerning 
 character ; and thirdly, of forming a sound judgement 
 on all topics, human and divine. Knowing that he 
 had a good deal of the quality in the first of these 
 acceptations, he unwittingly laid claim to it in the 
 second, and even in the third. And thus it may be 
 said that, more ambitious even than Bacon, he took 
 all wisdom for his province, and that, in his own 
 opinion, the riddle of the world was his oyster, which 
 he with common sense would open. An earnest 
 philanthropist, who is also a despot by temperament 
 and by habit, nearly always thinks with Savonarola 
 that his own cause is the cause of God ; and those 
 who thwart him seem to him guilty of a nondescript 
 compound of lese-majeste and lese-divinite. Froude 
 went the length of saying that, in religion, toleration 
 means indifference ; and, though such a paradox may 
 need qualification, we may safely contend that, if 
 ambition is the last, intolerance is the chief, infirmity 
 of noble minds. Did not the saintly Keble, after 
 declaring his own strict views on inspiration to one of 
 the Coleridges, add that ' most of the men that have 
 difficulties on this subject are too wicked to be 
 reasoned with'? And did not Dr. Arnold, when 
 asked by Ward whether it was not in the interest of 
 truth that such a philosopher as the elder Mill should 
 have a fair hearing, make the trenchant answer, ' I'd 
 give James Mill as much opportunity for advocating 
 his opinions as is consistent with a voyage to Botany 
 Bay'? 
 
 My father has already been described as in 
 a manner compounded of Coverley and Eichelieu. 
 The despotic element in him which is implied in this 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 65 
 
 comparison has also been touched on, but has not yet 
 been sufficiently illustrated. So prominent, however, 
 was that feature of his character that no literary 
 portrait would be tolerably complete without it. 
 A trivial incident will suffice. 
 
 In or about my thirtieth year, when I was spending 
 the winter with my father at Peckforton, I had to go 
 up to London for a few days to eat dinners at Lincoln's 
 Inn. During my absence I received a letter advising 
 me to return with a new wideawake, as my father, 
 seeing my old and shabby one in the entrance hall, 
 had thrown it into the fire, to the great amusement 
 of the children of the family. Well, being still a 
 bachelor, and in a state of quasi-dependence, I had 
 to submit. But two or three years later, before 
 returning to Peckforton as a married man, it seemed 
 to me due to my wife that I should guard against 
 a second bonfire. So I provided myself with brand- 
 new gloves and a brand-new wideawake. For some 
 time things went smoothly. But one Sunday morning 
 — perhaps after an extra long Calvinistic sermon — 
 my father was out of sorts, and spoke to me after 
 this manner : ' I remember that some years ago 
 you left such a disreputable wideawake in the hall 
 that I had to burn it. I saw some dirty old gloves 
 on the hall-table the other day ; I don't know that 
 they were yours ; but I give you fair notice that, 
 if I find any dirty gloves of yours there, I shall burn 
 them.' 
 
 Forewarned was forearmed ; so I took care not to 
 leave my hat or gloves, new and clean though they 
 were, for a single instant on the hall-table. Per- 
 sonally, I was now safe ; and, in point of fact, the 
 little drama of the bonfire was suspended until within 
 
66 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 a few hours of the breaking-up of the party. On that 
 last morning my wife was sitting with the ladies in 
 the drawing-room after breakfast, when my father 
 entered and said that he had seen some pairs of dirty 
 gloves on the hall-table, and that, as he disapproved of 
 such untidiness, he had thrown them into the fire. 
 There was a meet that morning, the season being mid- 
 winter ; and the perturbed ladies wondered which of 
 their respective husbands or fathers would have to 
 ride bare-handed with the hounds. 
 
 My story would give a wrong impression of my 
 father if I did not add that so general was the respect 
 felt for him, and such was the unwillingness to forgo 
 the hospitality of Peckforton, that, whatever his guests 
 may have thought of the holocaust, no word of remon- 
 strance, to the best of my knowledge, was addressed to 
 him by any of them. Let me as a pendant relate 
 another anecdote which is quite as characteristic of 
 him as the preceding one, and far pleasanter — an 
 anecdote which represents him as a latter-day Coverley, 
 and not as a latter-day Kichelieu or Louis XIV. 
 
 My father was one day driving down Piccadilly in 
 a hansom, when he saw a lady on the pavement 
 apparently bowing to him. He did not recognize her; 
 and, when it was too late, he charged himself with 
 rudeness for not having acknowledged her greeting. 
 Instantly he stopped the cab, ran after the lady, and 
 began to apologize. ' I do not know you, sir,' was her 
 abrupt rejoinder. He returned to his cab crestfallen ; 
 but it suddenly flashed upon him that the lady must 
 have thought that he wanted to scrape up an acquaint- 
 ance with her. Up went the umbrella again, and 
 again he pursued the lady. When he had caught her 
 up, he began : ' I am afraid, madam ' Being now 
 
MY FATHER IN HIS HOME 67 
 
 really angry, she interrupted him with the words, 
 ' Pass on, sir, at once.' 
 
 In this exhibition of courtesy run riot, my father 
 unwittingly enacted the wayward and eccentric side of 
 Coverley's character. On the occasion to be now 
 mentioned, he showed his inborn delicacy and tact, 
 and reproduced Sir Roger at his very best. 
 
 On one occasion, when staying at his Cheshire 
 home, he drove to a fine church in the neighbourhood, 
 perhaps to see some alterations which had been made. 
 While he was in the church with the clergyman the 
 organ was being played. Probably the organist was 
 practising for a future service. Presently the organ 
 stopped and the organist came down, and was intro- 
 duced to my father. No doubt my father was under 
 the impression that the playing of the organ was in 
 connexion with his visit, and also a little misconceived 
 the position of an organist ; for, when they parted, 
 he gave the organist five shillings. ' Here, boy,' said 
 the organist, roughly, beckoning to the lad who had 
 been blowing the bellows and was standing at a little 
 distance ; ' this must be intended for you.' My father 
 continued for a few minutes his conversation with the 
 clergyman ; and then, turning to the organist, said, 
 ' I suppose you have a very good organ. Is it quite 
 as you like ? ' ' Well,' said the organist, ' we are pro- 
 posing to add one or two stops.' ' I hope, then, you 
 will allow me to make a small contribution towards 
 the expense.' Lord Tollemache handed him a 
 sovereign without showing the least sign of the 
 constraint which he was certainly putting upon 
 himself. 
 
 What Shakespeare says of Cawdor and Mark 
 Pattison of Charles I may, with a slight change, be 
 
 f2 
 
68 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 applied to my father. Nothing in his life became 
 him better than the leaving it. His death was 
 caused by a cold which he caught, at the age 
 of eighty-five, through driving a long distance on 
 a wintry day in order to give advice and help to 
 one of his tenants. 
 
 On the whole, the famous eulogy which Hamlet 
 bestowed on his father I will in all sincerity ascribe to 
 mine : 
 
 'He was a man, take him for all in all, 
 I shall not look upon his like again.' 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS 
 ' On ne brise pas avec le passe sans y laisser le meilleur de soi.' 
 
 — ScHEREB. 
 
 ' Les Conservateurs sont le sel de la terre.' — Renan. 
 
 Arthur Stanley was charged by an able critic with 
 
 ' making a fire-screen of his friends ' ; by which was 
 
 meant that, wishing to screen his own unpopular 
 
 opinions, he exposed to public wrath the not less 
 
 unpopular opinions of his allies. In like manner, as 
 
 I now pass on to the social shibboleths of my avowedly 
 
 Conservative father, I will shelter him under the 
 
 authority of a remarkable lady who called herself 
 
 anything but a Conservative. Macaulay tells us that, 
 
 in speaking to Lady Holland, he expressed a wish 
 
 that ' it had been possible to form a few commercial 
 
 constituencies, if the word constituency were admissible '. 
 
 ' I am glad you put that in,' said her ladyship. ' I was 
 
 just going to give it you. It is an odious word. Then 
 
 there is talented and influential and gentlemanly (I never 
 
 could break Sheridan of gentlemanly, though he allowed 
 
 it to be wrong).' Canon Ainger told me that he 
 
 objected to the participles ' cultured ' and ' talented ', 
 
 both of them being sham participles derived, not from 
 
 verbs, but from substantives. Some of Lady Holland's 
 
 objections now seem hypercritical. But it must be 
 
 remembered that slang words are the parvenus of 
 
 language. Much that was once slang is now stamped as 
 
70 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 classical English, just as what were once new families 
 are now, as The Times said in a somewhat different 
 sense of the first Lord Eaglan, ' visibly stamped with 
 nobility.' Such terms as budget, solidarity, or as boudoir, 
 dejeuner a la fourchette, chevalier d'industrie, and esprit 
 d'escalier must have been regarded as slang by the first 
 purists who heard them. 
 
 With Lady Holland's objection to 'gentlemanly' 
 my father agreed thoroughly. I think it was Sydney 
 Smith who said that a false quantity in Latin was the 
 masculine of a lady's faux pas. My father would have 
 thought a false quantity in Latin verse a venial offence 
 when compared with saying gentlemanly instead of gentle- 
 manlike, or, let me add, when compared with talking 
 about the Marquis of X. or the Earl of Y. instead of 
 saying Lord X. or Lord Y. I once shocked him by 
 referring to a ' leader ' in The Times instead of saying 
 ' a leading article '. But he was kept in countenance 
 by Charles Austin, who gently, but seriously, took my 
 wife to task for abridging the name of The Saturday 
 Beview into The Saturday. I have somewhere heard 
 or read that Sir John Coleridge was the last survivor 
 of those who wore frills on their shirt-fronts ; but my 
 father retained that badge of old-world stateliness 
 somewhat after the time of Sir John's death. My 
 wife remembers as a child seeing her great-uncle, 
 Sir Tatton Sykes, appear in church with a frilled shirt, 
 cutaway coat, and top-boots. The effect was enhanced 
 by his coming in this riding costume into a square 
 family pew, where the fire was occasionally poked 
 between the service and the sermon. 
 
 I am quoting my father and other kinsfolk as old- 
 worldometers, if I may use a Sydney-Smithism. Nearly 
 up to the end of his life he had a horror of after- 
 
MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FEIENDS 71 
 
 noon tea. When I was a boy it used to be de rigueur 
 to hold the knife and fork in the hand while the plate 
 was being sent round for a second help of meat. In 
 conclusion, let me raise rather than answer a question 
 as to the exact meaning of words. My father had 
 a way of applying the epithet 'worthy' to a man 
 whom he ought to like, but did not. 1 In a nearly 
 allied sense, the word 'good-natured' was and is 
 employed ; it connotes the harmless insipidity which, 
 oddly enough, Shakespeare, speaking through the 
 mouth of Lady Blanche, seemed to regard as the sole 
 merit of the future Saint Louis : 
 
 'Nothing do I see in you 
 (Though churlish thoughts themselves should be your judge), 
 That I can find should merit any hate.' 
 
 My strong impression is that the word ' amiable ' used 
 similarly to bear a good sense. Yet I have an equally 
 strong impression that nearly all young or middle- 
 aged ladies would resent the application of the word 
 to themselves. 
 
 While I am on the subject of good breeding I will 
 interpose a word about what Bacon calls 'the con- 
 veying of effectual and imprinting passages amongst 
 compliments, which is of singular use if a man can 
 hit upon it '. The following advice was once given me 
 by the Bev. W. E. Jelf: — 'The art of pleasing,' he 
 said, ' is quite simple. You have only to ask questions 
 to draw people out, as if you were asking for in- 
 formation.' This shrewd counsel, which would have 
 
 1 The use of the epithet ' worthy ' for the purpose of damning 
 •with faint praise is well exemplified by Sydney Smith : ' Lady 
 ... is a very sensible and a very worthy person ; I must do her 
 the justice to say that, when my jokes are explained to her, and 
 she has leisure to reflect on them, she laughs very heartily ! ' 
 
72 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 commended itself to Bacon, is only one aspect of a 
 wider maxim which might be expressed in language 
 combining Bacon and Shakespeare, ' Assume an interest 
 if you have it not.' Such counsel may at first sight 
 be thought to savour of simulation ; but, in fact, it 
 merely formulates what all good listeners and nearly 
 all good talkers consciously or unconsciously put in 
 practice. To which should be added that Jelf himself 
 was the most straightforward of men. 
 
 What has here been said of my father as a stickler 
 for aristocratic shibboleths may seem to conflict with, 
 what was before said of his toleration for persons 
 socially deficient, nay, even for such as may be called 
 lack-aspirates. But in his own family or the circle 
 of his intimates he would have endured no social 
 aberrations. Among the lack-aspirates whose social 
 shortcomings were condoned, the chief were two or 
 three distinguished scientific friends. He was also 
 indulgent to such shortcomings in a few lesser folks, 
 who had done good and useful work, and who, more- 
 over, would have been described by a French aristocrat 
 as lien-pensants, and by Disraeli as on the side of the 
 angels. But he was quick to see motes in the eyes 
 of Radicals, as well as of Eationalists. Benan has 
 made the sound and far-reaching observation that 
 public opinion is sometimes merciful to those who 
 brave it in only one way, but seldom or never to those 
 who brave it in more. Lord Tollemache's sympathies 
 and antipathies might have served to verify this 
 remark. Dryden wished to inflict a double punish- 
 ment on Whig poetasters, 
 
 ' For writing treason and for writing dull ; ' 
 
 and, in much the same way, a double portion of my 
 
MY OLD-WOELD KINSFOLK AND FEIENDS 73 
 
 father's wrath would have fallen on those twofold 
 miscreants, who at once abused the queen's authority 
 and the queen's English. 
 
 My father's view of the perils of democracy may be 
 worth illustrating. A friend suggested to him that 
 young trees should be planted in the avenue at 
 Helmingham, to take the place of the old ones as 
 they died off ; and I asked him whether he meant to 
 follow the advice. ' I think not,' he replied ; ' the 
 young trees by the side of the very old ones would be an 
 eyesore for many years ; and very likely, before they 
 had time to grow up, property would he made My of.' 
 I further inquired whether he at all expected a whole- 
 sale confiscation. 'Certainly not,' was the answer. 
 ' The Eadicals are far too wide awake to frighten 
 people in that way. All they have to do is to lay 
 taxation more and more on wealth ; and, depend 
 upon it, they'll do this.' Whence he evidently con- 
 cluded that ' La democratic, c'est le vol ', and that 
 Eadical is rascal writ large. 
 
 But in politics, as in theology, my father was better 
 than his principles. He differed from his Tory friends 
 in his view of the Great Eebellion. To some of them 
 the dispute between Charles and the Eoundheads 
 seemed to be what may be called a Cain-and-Abel 
 quarrel — a quarrel, that is, in which all the right was 
 on the losing and all the wrong on the winning side. 
 On the other hand, my father, while regretting the 
 execution of the king, which he condemned as both 
 a crime and a folly, used to say that, if Charles had 
 been only deposed, he would to this day be regarded 
 as a tyrant. No doubt his modified sympathy with 
 the Puritans was connected with his liking for their 
 theology. It is, by the way, odd that, though my 
 
74 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 ancestors were nearly all Cavaliers and Tories, yet an old 
 picture of Cromwell occupies a prominent place in the 
 library at Helmingham. Can this picture be a relic of 
 the friendship between the Protector and Lady Dysart ? 
 One of my father's ' brilliant flashes ' of Liberalism 
 was his esteem for Mr. Bright, who lunched with 
 him in St. James's Square. I once heard an old Tory 
 friend speak sarcastically of John Tollemache and 
 John Bright having been seen walking together in 
 the West End. In the present day, of course, such 
 sarcasm seems simply ridiculous. Assuredly 10 St. 
 James's Square, my father's London home, a house 
 which had belonged to three Prime Ministers, Lord 
 Chatham, Mr. Perceval, and Lord Derby, was never, 
 after the death of the last of them, so much honoured 
 as when entered by Mr. Bright, except when, at a 
 later date, it became the home of another Prime 
 Minister, Mr. Gladstone, as his son's guest. But it must 
 be owned that Mr. Bright, in the earlier portion of 
 his career, assailed the aristocracy so bitterly that it 
 was hardly possible for its members to do him justice. 
 An odd indication of their dislike of him was shown 
 by our octogenarian friend, Mr. John Forbes, of Ham, 
 who told me some time in the fifties, that he had 
 been staying with Lord Aberdeen, and went on to 
 say, ' There was such a queer party there ; there was 
 Lord X. and the Duke of Y. ; and who should be there 
 also but the Quaker, Johnny Bright ? ' Mr. Forbes 
 would have stood aghast if he could have foreseen 
 that Mr. Bright in his old age would be fortunate 
 enough, as Mr. Gladstone once said in conversation, 
 to win the favour of his old enemies, and, as another 
 Liberal, the late Lord Davey, once phrased it, would 
 live to be ' petted by duchesses '. 
 
MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FEIENDS 75 
 
 But it was with the (politically) unconverted John 
 Bright that my father had dealings. What can have 
 been the tie which drew the two men together ? No 
 doubt my father had a genuine esteem for Mr. Bright. 
 As he used to express it, ' Bright is an honest man,' 
 but this, at first sight, was not saying much. One 
 would hardly contract a friendship with an unsympa- 
 thetic stranger merely because he is not a pickpocket. 
 But by ' honest ' my father meant to imply that the 
 great Eadical was consistent ; and further, that moderate 
 Liberals, and especially aristocratic Liberals, were not 
 consistent. In his judgement, as the Anglo-Catholics 
 were to the Roman Catholics, so were the Whigs to 
 such Liberals as Bright. He certainly regarded 
 Bright as a turbulent orator ; but I suspect that, for 
 that very reason, he wished to hold him up to public 
 view as a sort of reductio ad anarchiam of Whig 
 principles, and as an admonitory beacon to wavering 
 Tories. 
 
 Aristotle says that the best of all harmonies is the 
 harmony of opposites ; and Goethe has somewhat 
 broadly contended that the propensity of men to dance 
 with girls is a sign that like is not so much drawn to 
 like as unlike to unlike. Doubtless this attraction of 
 contrast did something towards breaking down the 
 barrier between the Tory and the Radical. But other 
 causes were more potent. According to my father's 
 standard, Bright was orthodox in religion. He was, 
 also, widely and deservedly celebrated. This may 
 have unwittingly cast a spell on such a political foe as 
 my father ; for, in the opinion of even a political foe, 
 celebrity covereth a multitude of sins. It may be 
 objected that, if Bright was a political sinner, his 
 abilities were an aggravation of his guilt. Was it 
 
76 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 consistent in my father to vent his wrath on the lesser 
 heretics, and then to be friendly with the heresiarch? 
 Perhaps this was inconsistent ; but, if so, the incon- 
 sistency did him honour. He subordinated theory to 
 practice, even as, on a far grander scale, Queen 
 Victoria habitually during her long reign paid attention, 
 not to royal prerogatives, but to the modest and 
 judicious exercise of her strictly limited authority. 
 When looking back on the last sixty years of the 
 nineteenth century, I am tempted to grudge to the 
 race of bees what may be called their anti-Salic law. 
 Would that we, too, could always be subject to queens, 
 so that the sentiment of chivalry might eke out what 
 remains of the sentiment of loyalty ! x 
 
 My father, I have said, regarded the uncompromising 
 John Bright as a wholesome warning to the com- 
 promising tribe of Whigs. He was, perhaps, confirmed 
 in this opinion by observing the antipathy with which 
 many Whigs looked on their too-stalwart ally. Lord 
 Palmerston, in a famous debate, so far forgot himself 
 as to speak of the quasi-Puritanical orator as the 
 ' honourable and reverend gentleman ' ; and his dislike 
 was shared by his stepson, Mr. Cowper-Temple (after- 
 wards Lord Mount Temple), who married my father's 
 youngest sister. My uncle is justly described by 
 Mr. George Eussell as ' that saintly friend of temper- 
 ance and all good causes'. He therefore surprised 
 
 1 1 found myself writing these sentences in January, 1901 ; and, 
 digressive though they are, I let them stand. They were the 
 natural, though slight and inadequate, expression of my feelings 
 about the late Queen's character and career at the time when 
 that rare combination of womanly cheerfulness and tact in social 
 matters with masterful passivity in politics — ywaiKos avSpoftovkov 
 Ktap — a woman wise and resolute as a man, was taken from us. 
 
MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS 77 
 
 me not a little by speaking to me of his co-Liberals, 
 Cobden and Bright, with an asperity which seemed 
 quite alien to his nature, and which, indeed, I never 
 heard him exhibit with reference to any one else. As 
 his name is now wellnigh forgotten except in connexion 
 with the clause in the Education Bill of 1870, I will 
 inform or remind my readers that it was he who, as 
 First Commissioner of Public Works, adorned the 
 parks with flower-beds, and in a manner turned them 
 into gardens. He has a yet greater, though less con- 
 spicuous, title to our gratitude as the staunch friend of 
 the then unpopular F. D. Maurice, whom it was his 
 privilege to appoint to St. Peter's Church, in Vere 
 Street. Indeed, he played the part of Maecenas to 
 mid-century Broad Churchmen, such BroadChurchmen, 
 I mean, as Tom Hughes, who would have repudiated 
 the Broad-Churchism of Jowett, and whom I heard 
 describe Matthew Arnold as no better than a ' sham 
 Christian '. 
 
 'As the husband is, the wife is/ says Tennyson; 
 and the maxim, however questionable in regard to not 
 a few married couples, was strictly true of my uncle 
 and aunt. Charles Austin once said of his old ac- 
 quaintance, Lord John Russell, that though he was the 
 greatest of all the Russells, living or dead, he was not 
 and never could be popular; for he was lacking in 
 the milk of human kindness. Such a charge could 
 certainly not have been brought against either of the 
 Cowper-Temples. Each of them was full, not only 
 of the milk of human kindness, but of the lactea 
 ubertas, the cream of irrepressible philanthropy. I have 
 already coupled Ruskin's name with my aunt's, on the 
 ground that both of them hated cold dinners on 
 Sunday. But between the two anti-sabbatarians there 
 
78 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 was a far more interesting and sentimental tie. Euskin 
 relates in Praeterita that his father, having long 
 found him an unwilling attendant at the great cere- 
 monies in Kome, suddenly observed with delight that 
 a change had come over him : 
 
 'The fact was that at services of this kind there was 
 always a chance of seeing at intervals, above the bowed 
 heads of the Italian crowd, for an instant or two before 
 she also stooped, or sometimes eminent in her grace above 
 a stunted group of them — a fair English girl, who was not 
 only the admitted queen of beauty in the English circle 
 of that winter in Rome, but was so in the kind of beauty 
 which I had only hitherto dreamed of as possible, but never 
 yet seen living ; statuesque severity with womanly sweetness 
 joined. I don't think I ever succeeded in getting nearer than 
 within fifty yards of her ; but she was the light and solace 
 of all the Roman winter to me, in the mere chance glimpses 
 of her far away and the hope of them. Meantime my father 
 . . . enjoyed everything that Rome had to show ; the musical 
 festas, especially, whenever his cross-grained boy consented, 
 for Miss Tollemache's secret sake, to go with him.' 
 
 My aunt was indeed lovely, both in the English and 
 in the American sense of the word : ' a fair English 
 girl ' and a scMne Seek. Sydney Smith described her 
 as the Evangelical Beauty; and, near half a century 
 ago, the head of a great college at Cambridge, who 
 was then my uncle's private secretary, spoke to me 
 of my aunt as representing to him his ideal of 
 womanhood. 
 
 As an honest critic I am bound to show the silver 
 side of the shield. Goethe has remarked metaphorically 
 that the habitual use of either the microscope or the 
 telescope impedes the normal use of the eye. Thus 
 my aunt could hardly fail to pay the penalty of 
 attending to far-off sorrows and of spreading her 
 
Geokgina Tollemache, afterwards Lady Mount Temple. 
 
MY OLD-WOELD KINSFOLK AND FKIENDS 79 
 
 sympathy over a wide area. An example will make 
 my meaning clear. Towards the close of her life, 
 being visited by an excellent wife and at another time 
 by a devoted mother, she asked the wife if she was 
 fond of her husband, and the mother if she was fond 
 of her daughters. Neither of the guests took offence ; 
 for they reckoned her extraordinary questions among 
 the manifold defects incident to old age and disease. 
 But, in fact, the rudiment of those defects might have 
 been discerned in her much earlier. Her sympathy was 
 too often on the stretch for spontaneous and healthful 
 activity. It would be most unfair to say that her 
 charity ended at home ; for, indeed, when she heard 
 the sorrows of her private friends, her sympathetic 
 spirit was abundantly willing. But her flesh was 
 weak, and her nerves were exhausted. She tried to 
 conceal the exhaustion, but failed ; and the too 
 frequent result was a fatigued artificiality of manner, 
 not easily distinguished from affectation. But, in truth, 
 this only means that the divine ichor which flowed 
 in her veins was hardly suited to a daughter of Eve. 
 She was too saintly to be quite human. 
 
 I have referred to the difficulty of finding in fiction 
 a character resembling my father. In finding a 
 character resembling my aunt there is no difficulty 
 whatever. The saintly Cecilia de Noel, in the novel 
 of that name by the author of Mademoiselle Ixe, might 
 have been, if she was not, drawn from the life. Cecilia 
 was told that, if she went into a certain room at night, 
 she must expect to see a ghost. She went into the 
 room and saw the ghost, which had a rather diabolical 
 appearance. But it looked miserable ; so, wishing to 
 comfort it, she embraced it. My aunt was quite 
 capable, in a like case, of administering the consolatory 
 
80 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 hug. She would certainly have been convinced that 
 she had seen the ghost, so convinced that she would, 
 if required, have gone to the stake rather than deny 
 the apparition. In fact, the arch-fiend of Spiritualism 
 had laid hold on her ; and the lesser fiends which pre- 
 side over crystal-reading and palmistry, Anglo-Israel, 
 and the Great Pyramid, were not far off. But why 
 dwell on her excessive credulity ? Though her fancies 
 now and then seemed extravagant and her insistence on 
 them troublesome, I felt, after talkingwith her, that, like 
 the water of Bethesda, I had been troubled by an Angel. 
 My father never did full justice to my uncle and 
 aunt, whom he regarded as ' romantic ' and as ' sadly 
 wanting in common sense '. One comment of his on 
 my uncle is too characteristic to be omitted. ' I can't 
 make him out,' he said. ' He talks in such a beauti- 
 ful way about religion, and yet — would you believe it ? 
 — he goes into the same lobby with the infidels of the 
 House of Commons to vote for opening the British 
 Museum and the Picture Galleries on Sunday.' Should 
 such a criticism be called mid-century or mediaeval ? 
 
 Charles Austin, who had no liking for Carry le, either 
 personally or as a writer, admitted that he sometimes 
 said very good things. One of his witty sayings was 
 reported by my friend Augustus Hare: 'A clergyman, 
 after lamenting in Carlyle's presence the manifold sins 
 of the present age, exclaimed, "What would happen 
 if Christ were now to appear on earth ? " " Happen ! " 
 replied the sage, "why, Dicky Milnes would invite 
 Him to dine, and ask Pontius Pilate to meet Him.'" 
 On another occasion Carlyle spoke of Milnes as ' the 
 President of the Heaven-and-Hell- Amalgamation Com- 
 pany ', Such a nickname could not have been given 
 
MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS 81 
 
 to Cowper-Temple, at least not in this sense. But he 
 might be said to have competed with Arthur Stanley 
 for the Presidency of the Hell-Abolition Company. 
 Arthur Stanley is well known to have posed as the 
 patron of heretics and as the showman of all sorts 
 of queer lions and lionesses. At his parties might be 
 seen a few scions of nobility jostling up against such 
 espriis forts as Mrs. Grote ; there might also be a stray 
 Prince of the Roman Church ; and along with these, 
 any Evangelicals who dared to brave the spiritual 
 infection. Dr. Vaughan had that hardihood ; but 
 he did not quite like the process ; for he is reported 
 to have said that one of Stanley's receptions was made 
 up of ' lordlings and atheists '. He might more truly 
 have said that such an assembly was a happy family 
 of Bluestockings, Redstockings, and Radstockings. 
 
 My uncle had now and then a similar omnium 
 gatherum at Broadlands. But generally he had the 
 prudence to keep the hostile factions apart. I re- 
 member that long ago he and my aunt were discussing 
 what guests should be asked to meet the old Lord 
 Shaftesbury one week, and what others should meet 
 Mr. John Morley the next week. 
 
 My father, though not overfond of his brother-in- 
 law, pronounced him to be the model of a high-bred 
 gentleman ; and he well deserved that praise. It 
 might have been said of him, as Chesterfield said of 
 Marlborough, that he could decline a request with 
 more grace than most men would have shown in 
 granting it. He was most agreeable in conversation. 
 He had the knack of repeating pleasantly and unostenta- 
 tiously curious details about the many distinguished 
 men whom he had known, details resembling those 
 which Johnson turned to account in his Lives of the 
 
82 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Poets, and such as, if not orally given, are apt to be 
 lost. Sometimes his discourse held such details in 
 solution, so that they could not at the time be dis- 
 cerned. I reminded him that my father had voted 
 with the Liberals on various questions, such as 
 Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister, the right of 
 Divorce, and the policy of Sir John Bowring in China. 
 He pleasantly replied, 'Yes. Your father supports 
 us when we are in the right ; but we prefer having 
 some one who will support us when we are in the 
 wrong.' I afterwards discovered that this was an 
 echo, conscious or unconscious, of a mot of his uncle 
 Lord Melbourne, who, according to Hayward, on being 
 pressed, to do something for a journalist, on the ground 
 that he always supported his lordship when in the 
 right, retorted, 'That's just when I don't want his 
 help. Give me a fellow who will stick by me when 
 I am in the wrong.' 
 
 Much, perhaps too much, has been said in various 
 quarters about the resemblance between Lord Palmer- 
 ston and Cowper-Temple. One point the two men 
 certainly had in common. Mr. White Cooper told 
 me that, late one afternoon, he was sent for to Cam- 
 bridge House to operate on one of Lord Palmerston's 
 eyes. It was necessary to have a light ; and the 
 oculist, after warning his patient that the operation 
 would be painful, suggested that a servant should be 
 summoned to hold the candle. ' No,' replied Lord 
 Palmerston, ' I prefer holding it myself.' And he 
 held the candle steadily right through the operation. 
 Cowper-Temple was blessed with a like indifference 
 to pain. He modestly told me that he took no credit 
 to himself for this power of endurance ; if he bore 
 pain better than most men, the reason was that he 
 
MY OLD-WOELD KINSFOLK AND FEIENDS 83 
 
 felt it less. There is an old story, varying in some 
 particulars, which some of my readers may have heard. 
 The version of it given to me, I think by Charles 
 Austin, was that, at a dinner party at Cambridge 
 House, two of the guests were the American Minister 
 and my uncle, who were strangers to each other. 
 Lady Palmerston said to the former quite naturally, 
 L Let me introduce my son to your Excellency.' The 
 Minister, not knowing of her former marriage, looked 
 first at the step-son and then at the step-father, and 
 exclaimed, ' By God, what a wonderful likeness ! ' 
 Perhaps it was owing to my defective eyesight that, 
 personally, I could never see the likeness between the 
 two men. My uncle had a great admiration for his 
 step-father ; and his admiration may account for his 
 having caught from him some odd tricks of manner, 
 amongst others, according to my father, that of strok- 
 ing his hat when he was making a speech. 
 
 If I failed to see the likeness I could not fail to 
 note the striking differences, mental and moral, be- 
 tween the step-father and the step-son. Lord Palmer- 
 ston, it is true, had one strange fad : he believed in 
 the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare's plays. But 
 this fad, due perhaps to a great man's immunity from 
 the wholesome restraints of criticism and contradiction, 
 was especially conspicuous through not being of a 
 piece with his usual sobriety of judgement. Cowper- 
 Temple, on the other hand, bristled all over with 
 crotchets. I have heard him speak of ghostly mani- 
 festations as if their reality were as indisputable as 
 that of the Norman Conquest or of the decease of 
 Queen Anne. Just as Oedipus was ' at the mercy 
 of any one who spoke terrors to him', so Cowper- 
 
 Temple was at the mercy of any one who spoke 
 
 g2 
 
84 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 marvels. Was it through his wife's influence that he 
 became thus credulous? He was certainly a doting 
 husband; and, though never hen-pecked, he may have 
 been hen-led. But he was by nature inclined to credu- 
 lity. It may be said that in him, as in my aunt, the 
 heart was disproportioned to the brain. But such 
 a disproportion is a graver defect in a man, whose 
 business it is to reason, than in a woman, whose 
 business it is to feel. My uncle was both a very 
 charming man and a saint ; nearly all very charming 
 men and nearly all saints have something of the 
 woman in their composition ; and woman is born to 
 superstition as the sparks fly upward. Can the in- 
 quiry be carried further? What will-o'-the-wisp has 
 beguiled so many refined and religious persons into 
 the quagmire of Spiritualism ? The late Archdeacon 
 Cheetham told me that, when talking over the alleged 
 wonders of Spiritualism with Bishop Westcott, he 
 was beginning to ascribe them to mere dupery and 
 imposture, when the Bishop cut him short : ' If you 
 carry those arguments a little further, you'll be giving 
 up the miracles of the Bible.' Widely as my uncle 
 differed from my father on many points, he agreed 
 with him in regarding the symbols of religion as a 
 solid foundation on which logical deductions would 
 stand firm. Neither of these excellent men for a 
 moment suspected that superstition, like the stereo- 
 scope, has the semblance of adding a third dimension, 
 and of giving solidity to likenesses and shadows. 
 
 My father hardly ever dealt in epigrammatic say- 
 ings. The only such saying of his that I can re- 
 member has reference to his friend and neighbour, 
 the Lord Cholmondeley of my youth, who was an odd 
 compound of Evangelical and courtier, and from whose 
 
MY OLD-WOELD KINSFOLK AND FEIENDS 85 
 
 house, by the way, I saw the procession at the Duke 
 of Wellington's funeral. ' If all Englishmen,' said my 
 father, ' were like Lord Cholmondeley, they would be 
 religious and delightful men, but the French would soon 
 come and take London.' I own that, as a patriot, 
 I should be equally disquieted if all Englishmen were 
 facsimiles of Cowper-Temple. Since writing this 
 account of my uncle, I have heard that it was he who 
 introduced Mr. Frederick Myers and Mr. Edmund 
 Gurney to each other, and that it was in his house 
 that the idea of founding the Psychical Research 
 Society had its origin. 
 
 If a text were wanted for a sermon on my uncle, 
 a text significant alike of his goodness and of his 
 credulity, perhaps the most appropriate would be 
 ' Charity believeth all things.' But the application of 
 such a text as a last word would seem ungracious. 
 Rather let me end my comment by transferring to 
 him the praise bestowed by Macaulay on Ken : ' His 
 intellect was indeed darkened by many superstitions 
 and prejudices ; but his moral character, when im- 
 partially reviewed, . . . seems to approach as near as 
 human infirmity permits to the ideal perfection of 
 Christian virtue.' 
 
 The wife of the Lord Cholmondeley aforesaid had 
 been a Somerset and was well up in the ways of 
 Courts. She told me of a curious point of etiquette. 
 When a gentleman gives his arm to a lady, which 
 arm should it be? Lady Cholmondeley replied that, 
 when walking into dinner, he should give his right 
 arm, as the right is the post of honour. But, if the 
 two are walking together out of doors, he should give 
 his left arm, that his right hand may be free to hold 
 a stick for her defence. 
 
86 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 A sister of Lady Cholmondeley was the second 
 wife of my uncle by marriage, Mr. Finch of Burley- 
 on-the-Hill, a house made famous by Macaulay's 
 description of it in his History, but lately, alas! 
 burnt. Mr. Finch was the kindest of men, and at 
 the same time an ardent Evangelical, so thoroughly 
 unspotted by the world as to be hardly enough in 
 touch with the world. Lord Cholmondeley told 
 him that he meant to be buried at Houghton in 
 Norfolk; for he wished to lie near his distinguished 
 kinsfolk of old time, Eobert and Horace Walpole. 
 Mr. Finch listened with evident uneasiness, and pre- 
 sently muttered, 'For myself, I should prefer rising 
 at the Day of Judgement in better company.' Lord 
 Cholmondeley's wish for fashionable fellowship under- 
 ground may recall the aeronautic optimism of another 
 aristocrat. Mr. Hare records that in the Duke of 
 Hamilton's park 'is a large domed edifice something 
 like the tomb of Theodoric at Eavenna. It was erected 
 by the last Duke for himself, his son, grandson, and 
 his nine predecessors. "What a grand sight it will 
 be," he said, " when twelve Dukes of Hamilton rise 
 together here at the Eesurrection ! " ' 
 
 From sepulchral sociability I pass on to sepulchral 
 comfort. John Addington Symonds wrote to me 
 saying that he ' blessed ' me for an anecdote related in 
 Stones of Stumbling : ' An aged kinswoman of mine 
 expressed dread of being buried in a deep family 
 vault ; whereupon a privileged butler broke in with 
 the remark, " Indeed, ma'am, you needn't be the least 
 afraid ; I was down there myself the other day, and 
 it's quite dry and comfortable."' It may here be 
 added that the kinswoman in question was my wife's 
 grandmother, who was in part the original of the 
 
MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS 87 
 
 redoubtable Lady Cumnor in Wives and Daughters. 
 Every reader will remember the consolation which, 
 when the valour of Bob Acres was oozing out at 
 the palms of his hands, was offered by Sir Lucius 
 O'Trigger: 'I'm told there is very snug lying in the 
 Abbey.' Not long ago, a lady expressed surprise 
 to the keeper of the cemetery at Biarritz that so 
 many English are buried there. 'Que voulez-vous, 
 Mademoiselle ? ' he replied. ' Vous voyez le cimetiere 
 est expose au grand soleil et a l'air ; et l'air et le 
 grand soleil ce sont ce que les Anglais cherchent 
 avant tout. Voila pourquoi ils desirent etre enterres 
 ici.' An excellent Bishop had a story of an asthmatic 
 lady who objected to being buried in the vault which 
 contained the remains of her husband, but insisted 
 that the place should be reserved for her sister. 
 When the Bishop said, 'Surely that is meant for 
 yourself,' she answered, 'No, I never could breathe 
 in a vault. I must have fresh air. She shall have it, 
 and I'll be buried in the open ground if you please.' 
 
 Where can I have come across the following story ? 
 ' A miser did not openly declare during his lifetime to 
 which of his two nephews he would leave his fortune. 
 When the Will came to be read, it appeared that the 
 younger had been preferred. He was naturally plied 
 with questions to the same purport as that of Bang 
 John to Robert Falconbridge : " Is that the elder, and 
 art thou the heir ? " He thereupon explained that his 
 uncle had said to him, "It may be a mere fancy of 
 mine ; but I don't quite like the idea of finding myself 
 penniless in the other world. I will leave you my 
 fortune if you will pledge your honour to put £10,000 
 into my coffin." On hearing the explanation, the 
 elder brother asked, "And were you such a fool as 
 
88 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 to consent?" "Yes," was the reply, "and I've been as 
 good as my word. I wrote a cheque for £10,000 to 
 my uncle, made payable to order ; and it 's put in the 
 coffin." ' This may recall an entry in Eogers's Table 
 Talk : ' When Lord Erskine heard that somebody had 
 died worth £200,000, he observed, "Well, that's a 
 very pretty sum to begin the next world with." ' This 
 reminds me of the remark of the late Lord Young on 
 the unsaintly millionaire who had left a quarter of 
 a million to the Kirk : ' It is the biggest fire insurance 
 I ever heard of.' 
 
 Laurence Oliphant declared London society to be 
 made up of two classes, the worldly-holies and the 
 wholly-worldlies. A third class ought to have been 
 added consisting of the wholly-holies, among whom 
 I should include my two uncles, Mr. Cowper-Temple 
 and Mr. Finch. Which of these three classes is the 
 most interesting to the psychologist? Undoubtedly 
 the worldly-holies ; for the compromises which they 
 practise on a large scale help us to discern the com- 
 promises practised by others on a small scale ; for 
 instance, by their efforts to reconcile Belgravian ethics 
 with the Sermon on the Mount. Their exegetical 
 freaks are sometimes as eccentric, though hardly ever 
 as ingenious, as the argument placed on record by the 
 late Warden of Merton (George Brodrick) in his 
 account of the debate in Convocation, which turned 
 on the morality of vivisection : 
 
 'A comical episode in the proceedings was the half -delivered 
 speech of a gentleman who, rising late, failed to get a hearing, 
 but was understood to be arguing in favour of vivisection on 
 the ground that it had been sanctioned by our Lord Himself, 
 when He caused the herd of swine to run down a steep place 
 into the sea, it being a well-known fact that pigs cut their 
 
MY OLD-WOELD KINSFOLK AND FKIENDS 89 
 
 own throats in swimming and would thus vivisect themselves 
 in the midst of the waves.' 1 
 
 I can contribute one or two examples of highly 
 respectable other-worldliness (both-worldsliness would be 
 a better word if it were not unpronounceable). An 
 excellent friend of mine withdrew her daughter from 
 a High School on the ground that 'Divinity' and 
 'Deportment' were neglected. A mistress, reporting 
 the transaction, improved the story by saying that the 
 ground of objection was ' a deficiency in Divinity and 
 Dancing '. My next instance I give on the authority 
 of the first Lord Egerton. A rich widow, before 
 accepting an impecunious suitor of good family, stipu- 
 lated that there should be 'powdered footmen and 
 family prayers'. This case of worldly-holiness has an 
 obvious affinity with the following example of full- 
 blown wJiolly-worldliness. My father had a tenant 
 farmer whose family had been on the estate for 
 generations ; of which, as Pepys would have said, he 
 was 'mighty proud'. One of his younger sons was 
 accepted by the daughter — the only child — of a rich 
 
 1 The mention of vivisection reminds me that, long ago, in play- 
 ful conversation, the lamented Professor Clifford simulated wrath 
 at the slackness of the Anti-vivisectionists. So successful was he 
 in maintaining the gravity of his look and manner that an unin- 
 formed hearer might have thought him serious, until he ended by 
 complaining that, during a long series of years, the poor little 
 gold-beaters had been deprived of their skins without one word 
 of remonstrance ! Before the Commission on Vivisection which 
 is now sitting (June, 1908) a medical witness related an experiment 
 that he had performed upon himself. An anti-vivisectionist 
 member of the Commission who had missed the beginning of the 
 evidence began the cross-questioning. 'This must have been a 
 very painful operation ? ' 'Oh no, the pain was very slight.' 
 ' But the poor victim must have suffered terribly.' ' I was the 
 victim.' 
 
90 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 carpenter whom I will, like Sir Walter Scott, call 
 Shavings. Fears were entertained that the haughty 
 old farmer would object to the alliance. But, to the 
 surprise of all, he at once gave his consent. Un- 
 fortunately a less pleasant surprise was in store for 
 Mr. Shavings. When he called to ask what fortune 
 the bucolic grandee proposed to leave to his son, he 
 received the laconic answer, 'Not a sixpence. I find 
 the blood, and you find the money.' The marriage 
 took place notwithstanding. 
 
 Shavings was the hero of another odd incident. 
 I have already referred to the Eev. J. C. Eyle, after- 
 wards Bishop of Liverpool, who was Eector of Hel- 
 mingham for nearly twenty years. His sermons were 
 sometimes what might be praised as original or 
 blamed as eccentric. I heard him preach on the 
 downward course of an impenitent sinner. He de- 
 scribed how the wretched man first thinks it too soon 
 to repent, and afterwards thinks it too late; 'and then 
 he dies and Mr. Shavings is sent for to make his 
 coffin,' &c. I was told that Shavings grew very red 
 when his name was mentioned. It is said that, when 
 Helmingham Hall was (as they say of watering-places) 
 out of season, the Kector sometimes gave very re- 
 markable sermons. A neighbouring clergyman in- 
 formed me that, going to the church one Sunday in 
 winter, he heard Mr. Eyle exclaim from the pulpit : 
 4 You say Cheer, boys, cheer, and There 's a good time 
 coming, boys ; but I tell you, There 's a bad time coming, 
 boys.' 
 
 In Safe Studies it is related that Charles Austin 
 attended a lecture, in which an Oxford First-Classman 
 defended verbal inspiration by the dangerous argument 
 that, without it, a revelation would be useless or 
 
♦ 
 MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS 91 
 
 impossible. Being subsequently asked by Mr. Austin 
 how he accounted for the existence of various readings 
 in the Bible, the lecturer explained that his language 
 had reference only to the Divine Word as originally 
 inspired. ' A111 the arguments,' said Mr. Austin, 
 'which you employed to prove that a revelation 
 would be useless unless the very words were super- 
 naturally given, tend likewise to prove that it would 
 be useless unless the very words were supernaturally 
 preserved.' As Bishop Eyle is no longer alive, I may 
 mention that he was the ' First-Classman ' who thus 
 perilously argued that inspiration is nothing if not 
 verbal. 
 
 But, though his theology belonged to the dark ages, 
 both as a parish priest and as a neighbour Dr. Byle 
 was admirable. His sermons, though they may have 
 been narrow and sometimes too colloquial, showed him 
 to be what he was — a very able as well as a deeply re- 
 ligious man. Let me add that it was by his advice that 
 my father, though standing in mortal dread both of 
 the High Church and of the Broad Church tendencies 
 of Oxford, was persuaded to send me to Balliol. 
 
 I wonder whether his tracts are now as popular as 
 they used to be. My father told me that, when he 
 went to the United States towards the end of the 
 forties, he was struck by seeing Ryle's tracts for sale 
 in Broadway, New York. A quarter of a century 
 later, I had a somewhat similar experience. Staying 
 at St. Moritz, I went one day to lunch at Samaden, 
 which was (and probably is) one of the Evangelical 
 centres in the Engadine. Looking over the books in 
 the Bernina Hotel, I came upon a volume of Byle's 
 tracts. Its frontispiece represented a side of the 
 interior of Helmingham Church with the mural 
 
92 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 monuments of my ancestors ; and, I thought of the 
 Virgil that I construed at Harrow : 
 
 ' This part was named from Ilium, that from Troy ; ' 
 and of the Clough that I read at Oxford : 
 ' And the Antipodes too have a Bothie of Tober-na-vuolich.' 
 
 Macaulay, in his account of George Grenville's 
 homilies to George III, tells us that, when the 
 uncourtly politician ' had harangued two hours, he 
 looked at his watch, as he had been in the habit of 
 looking at the clock opposite the Speaker's chair, 
 apologized for the length of his discourse, and then 
 went on for an hour more '. Macaulay's story reminds 
 me of a sermon that I heard as a boy one hot Sunday 
 afternoon, from an old family friend named Taylor. 
 After preaching three-quarters of an hour, he suddenly 
 exclaimed : ' And now I will conclude ; but no, I will 
 not conclude,' and he went on for a quarter of an hour 
 more. I once heard this kind, but not very wise, old 
 man preach a sermon at Helmingham. He took for 
 his text a passage from the Apocalypse (iii. 16) 
 containing a phrase which many clergymen, out of 
 regard for the feelings of their flocks, change into 
 ' I will cast thee out of my mouth ' . But Mr. Taylor 
 was not thus considerate, and he gave his reason. 
 ' I once knew,' he said, ' a very refined but worldly 
 young lady, who heard this text read in church. She 
 could not believe that such a word as " spue " occurred 
 in the Bible, and thought it must have been invented 
 by the clergyman. But, when she returned home, 
 she looked into her own Bible, and found the word 
 there ; she bought another Bible, and found it there 
 also. This had such an effect upon her that she began 
 to search the Scriptures diligently — and was converted.' 
 
MY OLD-WOKLD KINSFOLK AND FKIENDS 93 
 
 Whence might be drawn the moral : Woe unto Bowd- 
 lerizing parsons, if not unto Bowdlerizers in general ! 
 
 I have said that two of my uncles by marriage were 
 wholly-Jiolies. A third, the wholly-holiest of all, was 
 Admiral F. Vernon Harcourt. The Admiral had a 
 brother who was also an admiral, and who kept race- 
 horses. My uncle, on the other hand, thought that 
 Epsom was traversed by the broad road which leadeth 
 to a place, in the phrase of The Ingoldsby Legends, 
 ' where you certainly would not take cold.' Imagine, 
 then, his surprise when, on May 29, 1856, an ac- 
 quaintance, not knowing that there was another 
 Admiral Harcourt, stopped him in the street and 
 heartily congratulated him on having won the Derby. 
 Another unwitting actor in this comedy of errors was 
 the Editor of The Record, in which journal the Admiral 
 was sharply chidden for his backsliding ! But the 
 oddest scene in this farce of real life took the form of 
 a begging letter. It began with an expression of deep 
 regret that the backsliding saint should have been 
 guilty of horse-racing, but expressed a hope that he 
 would show his penitence by a liberal donation to his 
 correspondent's pet charity. The petitioner can hardly 
 have pondered the query of the King in Hamlet — 
 ' May one be pardoned and retain the offence ? ' 
 
 A Suffolk squire who was regarded by our family 
 as very good but not as either lively or wise, shall be 
 called John Broad. An old schoolfellow of mine, now 
 distinguished both in politics and in literature, told 
 me in the fifties that, when taking a ride with 
 Mr. Charles Buxton, he observed that John Broad 
 was the name given to Mr. Buxton's horse. On asking 
 the reason, my friend received for answer, ' The brute 
 is so stupid that I had to call him after a stupid 
 
94 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 neighbour of ours.' Not long after, the two friends 
 were again riding together, and this time the horse 
 had a different name. ' The horse has turned clever,' 
 explained Buxton, ' so I couldn't call him John Broad 
 any longer.' This tribute to the animal's growth in 
 intelligence brings to my memory the story of the 
 Irishman who, having some kittens for sale, offered 
 them to the priest as Catholic kittens. Finding the 
 priest uncompliant, he went some days later to the 
 Anglican clergyman, to whom he described the kittens 
 as Protestant. ' Why, Pat, your priest tells me that 
 you said they were Catholic kittens.' ' Faith, your 
 riverence, they were blind then, but now their eyes are 
 opened.' The allegorically christened horse reminds 
 me of another story, told by Bishop Walsham How : 
 ' Dr. B., of Oswestry, has three horses, which he has 
 named " High Church", "Low Church", and " Broad 
 Church". The reason he gives is that the first is 
 always on his knees, the second never, and, as for the 
 third, you never know what he will do next.' Here 
 is another quaint contrast between the High and Low 
 Church. A clerical dinner having been ordered at 
 a hotel, the landlord inquired as to the theological 
 views of the guests ; for, he said, ' the Low Church 
 eats and the High Church drinks.' A late Precentor 
 of Westminster Abbey had a story that a privileged 
 old widow, whose husband had had something to do 
 with the Abbey, was holding forth about the Eevisers 
 of the Translation of the Bible. ' I likes,' she said, 
 ' the New Testament better than the Old ; for the 
 New Testament only eats sandwiches, while the Old 
 Testament eats joints.' The explanation doubtless was, 
 that the Hebrew scholars, who dealt with the Old 
 Testament, had to be more 'up-to-date' critics, and 
 
MY OLD-WOELD KINSFOLK AND FKIENDS 95 
 
 therefore, as a rule, younger and more voracious, than 
 the Greek scholars, who dealt with the New Testament. 
 To the same Precentorial source I am indebted for 
 another odd incident. In a year distinguished by 
 a Pan-Anglican Synod, when Great Britain was be- 
 sprinkled with bishops from Greater Britain, a stately 
 attendant of one of our great Cathedrals was asked by 
 a lady whether that year Canon Liddon would preach 
 his usual course of sermons in one of the summer 
 months. ' No, madam,' answered the big man, ' we're 
 using up the Colonials.' Who or what can this august 
 personage have been ? He was, to speak colloquially, 
 a cut above the Malaprop who said of himself : ' When 
 first I came here, I was the parish clerk ; then the 
 vicar took to calling me the sextant ; then there come 
 the new vicar as called me the virgin ; and now this 
 one he calls me the sacrilege.' 
 
 A story is told, for which I will not vouch, though 
 I believe it has some foundation in fact, that, when 
 a late Archbishop of Canterbury was entertaining at 
 Lambeth the Colonial Bishops who had come over for 
 the Pan-Anglican Conference, it was suggested to the 
 Primate, as the Bishops were retiring to bed, that 
 some of them might be smokers. His Grace at once 
 gave orders to have the housekeeper's room prepared, 
 and asked his Domestic Chaplain to inform the guests 
 that there was a room at their disposal to smoke in. 
 The Chaplain, so runs the tale, knocked at twelve 
 doors and discovered twelve Bishops, each on his 
 knees — and each smoking up the chimney ! 
 
 The anecdote of the allegorically named horses 
 brings to my mind the following reminiscence of 
 
 Sydney Smith : ' Once, when talking to Lord ■ on 
 
 the subject of Bible names, I could not remember the 
 
96 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 name of one of Job's daughters. "Kezia," said he, 
 immediately. Surprised, I congratulated him upon 
 being so well read in Bible-lore. " Oh," he said, " my 
 three greyhounds are named after Job's daughters." ' 
 The mention of Job's daughters recalls a witty epigram 
 by Dr. Whewell. For my non-classical readers I may 
 explain that it was the fashion for lovers at Eome in 
 toasting a mistress to drink as many glasses as her 
 name had letters. 
 
 'Sex Jemima scyphis, et quinque Kezia bibatur; 
 Ebrius est si quis te, Kerenbappuch, amat.' 
 
 ('Five healths Kezia, six Jemima boasts; 
 None but a drunkard Kerenhappuch toasts.') 
 
 My next anecdote, however unpleasant, is at 
 least instructive. Some years ago, a gentleman, whose 
 deceased father had been Master of the Hounds, 
 observed that one of the dogs was called Herod, and 
 expressed surprise. 'You remember, sir,' explained 
 the huntsman, ' that your father was a very choleric 
 gentleman. One day the hounds chopped a fox. He 
 swore at them, and ordered that they should not be 
 fed that day. Next day they chopped another ; and 
 again he said that they were to be given no food. The 
 third day they were so savage that it wasn't safe to go 
 near them ; but I managed to open the door of the 
 kennel from above with my crop. As they rushed 
 out, we saw that there were some poor little children 
 playing in the village ; and, before we could stop the 
 hounds, they were among the children. We drove 
 them off as fast as we could ; but we found that one 
 of the hounds had a child's hand in its mouth. We 
 called him Herod; and the name has gone on to 
 one of its puppies.' Horrorstruck, the gentleman 
 
MY OLD-WORLD KINSFOLK AND FRIENDS 97 
 
 asked whether there had not been a great row about 
 so gross a scandal. 'Lor' bless you, sir,' was the 
 reply ; ' no, it was before the time of those damned 
 Radicals and newspapers.' This shocking incident 
 may at any rate comfort us by showing that, in some 
 respects, we are better off, if not better, than our 
 fathers. 
 
 Dogs have been, after an odd fashion, not only 
 receivers but transmitters of their names. Thus, 
 after noting one or two Transatlantic towns as having 
 a mongrel etymology, Canon Isaac Taylor goes on to 
 say : ' Floss, Tiny, and the other townships which 
 a late Canadian Governor named after his wife's 
 lap-dogs, are at all events distinctive names, though 
 perhaps showing a slight want of respect to the 
 inhabitants.' 
 
 And now, as I look back on this winding bout of 
 linked stories long drawn out, a fear seizes me lest my 
 critics should denounce some of them as ' chestnuts '. 
 I can only plead that to the general reader the majority 
 of this will be new, and hope that those which are 
 old may pass as stuffing for my turkey. In the words 
 of Shakespeare's Menenius : 
 
 'I shall tell you 
 A pretty tale ; it may be you have heard it ; 
 But, since it serves my purpose, I will venture 
 To stale it a little more.' 
 
 H 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 JOTTINGS ABOUT HAEROW (1850-6) 
 
 ' Yet the time may come, as the years go by, 
 When your eyes will fill 
 At the thought of the Hill 
 And the wild regret of the last Good-bye.' 
 
 Harrow Songs. 
 
 Why ' Jottings ' ? Because I wish it to be under- 
 stood that I am, as far as possible, avoiding the ground 
 already occupied by the great book on Harrow, and 
 by the small volumes on the same subject. But, in 
 spite of this good resolution, I will begin with a 
 reference to the interesting volume by Mr. Fisher 
 Williams, who remarks that ' there is an Act of Par- 
 liament which seems to imply that Eton, Winchester, 
 Charterhouse, Eugby, Harrow, and Shrewsbury are 
 Public Schools, but no sane person would suggest 
 that these names exhaust the list'. Of course Mr. 
 Williams is right as to the present and general use 
 of the term ' Public School '. But there was, in my 
 Harrow days, an esoteric use of the term according 
 to which the foregoing list would have erred on the 
 side, not of narrowness, but of comprehension. It 
 used to be said that Marlborough, having challenged 
 Eton to a cricket match, received the discourteous 
 answer: 'Harrow and Winchester we know, and 
 Eugby we have heard of; but who are ye?' The 
 story sounds apocryphal; but I have heard it more 
 than once. When I was at Oxford, it was told me 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAEEOW (1850-6) 99 
 
 by an old Eugbeian who was naturally indignant that 
 his own great school had been ranked only as a 
 proxime accessit to Public-Schooldom, and who showed 
 by his indignation that he considered the story to 
 be true. Whether true or invented its currency half 
 a century ago proves that, at that time, there was 
 believed to exist a disdainful oligarchy of three or 
 four Public Schools under the presidency of Eton. 
 
 But how was it that Harrow, not having a royal nor 
 even, like Winchester, an episcopal foundation, gained 
 a place in this oligarchy ? How came even the most 
 benighted Tories to grant her this precedence over 
 Eugby ? I long ago heard a Eugbeian, afterwards an 
 Oxford professor, give an answer which, so far as it 
 went, was decisive. 'The simple fact is,' he said, 
 'that Harrow has been far more than Eugby under 
 aristocratic patronage.' But this was only to throw 
 the difficulty further back. It is well known that in 
 early Hanoverian times, Eton being Jacobite, Harrow 
 became the Whig Public School. But why was she 
 selected for this distinction? It is obvious to reply 
 that she probably owed it to her healthy situation and 
 to her nearness to London. If Brighton is now some- 
 times called ' hondon-super-mare ', Harrow (Millia quae 
 magna distat ab urbe decern, only ten milestones from 
 Town) has a far better claim to be called ' London- 
 super-collem '. But, after all, Harrow School has always 
 had this advantage of situation ; and yet it was long 
 before it began to tell on her fortunes. Indeed, the 
 odd thing is that, being the great Whig school under 
 the first two Georges, and therefore presumably 
 favoured by the Court, she produced no famous orator 
 or statesman before Sheridan. How then was it that, 
 towards the end of the eighteenth century, she, like 
 
 h2 
 
100 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 her great son Byron at a later date, woke up, as it 
 were, and found herself famous ? I venture to throw 
 out a suggestion. Can it have been by a mere co- 
 incidence that Harrow School obtained its prestige 
 during the interval between the time when the road 
 from London to Harrow first became comparatively 
 safe from highwaymen and the time when other 
 healthy schools, or sites for schools, were made ac- 
 cessible by steam ? 
 
 I have elsewhere recorded that Mr. Gladstone said 
 to me that, if our Public School system were removed, 
 ' it would be like knocking a front tooth out of our 
 English social life.' But how have these schools 
 acquired this peculiar distinction? Perhaps the sim- 
 plest answer to such a question would be that, just 
 as the English aristocracy has been called une pepiniere 
 politique, even so an English public school is a nursery 
 of good manners. I am using ' good manners ' as 
 equivalent to the French ' mceurs ', or at any rate as 
 including what Sainte-Beuve commends as ' un 
 compose de bonnes habitudes, d'honnetes precedes, 
 reposant d'ordinaire sur un fonds plus ou moins 
 genereux, sur une nature plus ou moins bien ne'e'. 
 But, as ' breeding ' in a democratic age is out of 
 fashion, I will rather insist on the service done by 
 Public Schools as cultivators of what may be termed 
 the social sense. This social sense, so far as it can 
 be distinguished from the moral sense, bears to it 
 something of the relation which the minute hand of 
 a watch bears to the hour hand: it is more active than 
 its fellow, and has more often to be consulted ; for, 
 though it points to lesser matters, yet these are the 
 very matters which are apt to be overlooked. If there 
 is any ground for Matthew Arnold's estimate of con- 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 101 
 
 duct as comprising three-fourths of life, manners, 
 being a good third of conduct, may fairly be reckoned 
 as a good fourth of life. But leaving these curiosities 
 (as Bacon expresses it) I will record a serious ob- 
 servation of J. S. Mill. After extolling to me the 
 merits of the famous G. H. Lewes, Mill significantly 
 added that pioneers of thought are too often negligent 
 of good manners. His insistence on this point startled 
 me, as he would have been the last man to hold that 
 ' manners maketh man ', or even — what is far nearer 
 the truth — that manners maketh woman. He pro- 
 bably would have taken much the same line about 
 courtesy that he took about the poetry of Wordsworth. 
 The Liberals, he said, must sooner or later win the 
 day; but, when their victory is achieved, there will 
 be a special need for a poetry of Nature as a corrective 
 and safeguard. He doubtless thought that there will 
 then be also a special need for the polish of good 
 manners. 
 
 Jowett once remarked to me on the difference 
 between the types of men that come respectively 
 from the great Public Schools. He did not explain 
 in what the difference consists ; but an illustration 
 may help us to see his meaning. Lord Cardwell gave 
 it as his own experience that, of all men, Etonians 
 were the pleasantest to deal with. When he spoke 
 thus, he was perhaps thinking that, as a class, they 
 are conspicuous for good manners. And, certainly, 
 when I went to Oxford, the best of them seemed to 
 me to be thus conspicuous. Not to give living in- 
 stances, I wish to bear witness to the social charm 
 of Edward Herbert, who was murdered at Marathon. 1 
 
 1 It seems brutal to indulge in sentiment about such a tragedy; 
 but I often wonder whether it was possible for a scholar to be 
 
102 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 In touching on this question, I feel as though truth 
 were in one balance and the School I love in the 
 other, and that 'both being dear to me, it is righteous 
 to prefer truth '. In the one scale may be put such 
 Harrow worthies (I omit the living) as Bodney, Parr, 
 Sir William Jones, Bruce (the traveller), Sheridan, 
 Byron, Theodore Hook, Perceval, Peel, Goderich, 
 Palmerston, Shaftesbury, Cottenham, Aberdeen, the 
 second Lord Lytton, Anthony Trollope, the brothers 
 Merivale, Manning, Blayds (Calverley), J. A. Sy- 
 monds ; to which list, in fear of being convicted of 
 flagrant omissions, I append a highly elastic ' et 
 ceteros'. A glance at the opposite scale of Eton 
 worthies fairly takes one's breath away. It is be- 
 wildering and dazzling as the muster-roll of unborn 
 heroes revealed to Aeneas in the shades, or a nearer 
 parallel would be the imagines which were borne in 
 long procession before a Pabius or a Valerius. Not 
 of course that Eton has obtained this position by 
 anything special in her mode of teaching. She owes 
 quite as much to her fortune as her fortune owes to 
 her. She may be called the school of the uppermost, 
 as Harrow is the school of the upper class ; and the 
 success of her statesmen is mostly due to their having 
 a social start in the political race. Yet the undoubted 
 
 doomed to death on that spot, without letting his thoughts travel 
 back through the centuries to the victory of Miltiades, the 
 victory which may vie with the defeat at Thermopylae for the 
 honour of being called the baptism in blood of the cause of 
 Liberty. It would be too much to say of poor Herbert, 
 Credibile est ipsum sic voluisse mori. But he recalls to me the 
 still more appropriate fate of Ottfried Miiller, who, after having 
 written disparagingly about the Hellenic sun-god, died at Athens 
 from the effects of a sunstroke which he received on the site of 
 the temple at Delphi.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAREOW (1850-6) 103 
 
 fact remains that the biography of Etonians is, even 
 in proportion to their numbers, a larger factor in 
 English history than the biography of Harrovians. 
 
 Having thus stated the case for Eton, I turn to the 
 congenial task of holding a brief for Harrow — the 
 Harrow, it must be remembered, of half a century 
 ago. My highly original, if not eccentric, friend, 
 the late Professor Nicholl of Glasgow, used to com- 
 plain that Public Schools rub off men's corners. He 
 might have added that the smoothing process, the 
 effacing of individuality, is carried further at Eton 
 than at Harrow. Not that the process is so wholly 
 harmful as he thought. Indeed, it may be regarded 
 as a main cause of Lord Cardwell's preference for 
 Etonians as being the easiest men to get on with. 
 The typical Etonian has a remarkable power of self- 
 adaptation. He is more like the Mr. Pliable, while 
 the Harrovian is more like the Mr. Obstinate of The 
 Pilgrim's Progress. The Etonian may be described as 
 a John Bull without horns, while the Harrovian is 
 a John Bull of a breed of shorthorns. If the art of 
 being agreeable in society may be roughly described 
 as a compound of two qualities, naturalness and the 
 wish to please, the former of these qualities grows 
 best at Harrow, the latter at Eton. An old Harro- 
 vian, referring to a former schoolfellow, who was a 
 great favourite in London society, spoke of him as 
 ' nice, nice, very nice, too nice '. My Etonian friend, 
 W. H. Gladstone, on hearing that comment, naively 
 remarked, with special reference no doubt to the 
 Harrovian criticized, that he did not understand how 
 any one could be 'too nice'. This trifling anecdote 
 may serve to illustrate my own impression that what 
 may be called a French or diplomatic type of manners 
 
104 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 is less likely to find favour at Harrow than at Eton. 
 The note of the Eton manner is the quality which 
 is either' commended as courtesy or disparaged as 
 courtliness. In pronouncing judgement on this Etonian 
 manner, Harrovians are apt to think that courtliness 
 is the solvent of individuality, and that too much 
 manner unmaketh man. 
 
 The note of the Harrow manner is a refined blunt- 
 ness ; and, if I personally prefer the bluntness, this 
 only means that I am a Harrovian. 
 
 The tie which draws old Harrovians together seems 
 to me exceptionally close. If two strangers meet on 
 the Continent and each finds the other to have been at 
 Harrow, a rudimentary friendship is nearly sure to 
 spring up. The strength of the mutual attraction is 
 partly due to the fact that Harrow has but half the 
 numbers of Eton. But there is probably another cause 
 of our esprit d'ecole. I have spoken of Harrovians as 
 generally belonging to the upper as distinguished from 
 the uppermost class. Voltaire says that the popula- 
 tion of England is like her ale : at the top there is 
 nothing but froth ; at the bottom there is nothing but 
 dregs ; but between these extremes all is excellent. It 
 would be easy to cavil at this conceit, and in particular 
 to object that ale without froth would be flat and 
 insipid. But, accepting the simile, I would maintain 
 that the Harrow brew is excellent ale with but little 
 of the froth. The school is (or was) to a great extent 
 recruited from the families of country gentlemen and 
 well-bred parsons. It has not many ' tufts ' ; and 
 happily it has few or no tuft-hunters. All this is to 
 the good ; but, like most good things, it has its draw- 
 backs. When I run through the list of my old school- 
 fellows, I am surprised that more of them have not 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKROW (1850-6) 105 
 
 distinguished themselves. This may be partly due to 
 the fact that, in the case of so many of them, the peti- 
 tion of Agur has been too literally fulfilled. They have 
 ' neither poverty nor riches ', and they are therefore 
 alike insensible to the stimulus of want and to that of 
 ambition. Small certainties, says Johnson, are the 
 bane of talent. But they are the best safeguard against 
 that crooked wisdom — against those unsocial qualities 
 which Bacon praises with faint blame, or with no 
 blame, in his Essays on ' Cunning ' and on ' Fortune '. 
 The result is that Harrovians are not generally original ; 
 but they are good fellows, and above all good com- 
 rades. If I say of them that they are as a body 
 
 ' ingenio, virtute, loco, re, 
 Primorum extremi, mediocribus usque priores/ 
 
 (' In wit and merit, honour and estate, 
 First of the many, last among the great.') 
 
 I am not claiming for them higher praise than 
 Horace gave himself. The old Public School saw has 
 many variants, but the version I remember began 
 ' Winchester scholars, Eton swells ', and ended with 
 ' Harrow gentlemen '. 
 
 One consideration may serve to explain the dearth 
 of originality among us. At school we were sheltered 
 against every whiff of Neology. Let me give an 
 example. I left Harrow barely three years before the 
 publication of The Origin of Species ; yet, during all 
 the six years that I spent there, no doubt was ever 
 whispered to me as to the accuracy of Archbishop 
 Ussher's chronology. In my case, this experiment of a 
 ' cloistered and fugitive virtue ' was not a success. Too 
 sudden and violent was the change from Vaughan to 
 Jowett. At Balliol blow after blow fell on my untem- 
 
106 OLD AND ODD MEMORD3S 
 
 pered theology in such rapid succession that, at last, I 
 might in a literal sense have exclaimed : ' Heu pietas, 
 heu prisca fides ! ' (' Alas for piety and early faith ! ') 
 
 My own impressions of Harrow teaching are con- 
 firmed by Dean Lake's experience as to the difference 
 between the alvmni of the three great public schools. 
 ' The ablest Rugbeians,' he said to me (in effect), ' bring 
 to Balliol a rather precocious familiarity with the 
 problems of life. Their solutions of these problems 
 may be crude, but seem to be given at first hand. One 
 of our Scholars, who came from Rugby, expressed 
 himself in his English Essay with an epigrammatic 
 smartness which seemed to me to be, in so young a 
 man, not quite natural or healthy. Etonians, on the 
 other hand, know nothing of such matters, but wish to 
 be taught. Harrovians also know nothing of such 
 matters ; but they do not wish to be taught ; they look 
 on metaphysics as a mere will-o'-the-wisp.' 
 
 In politics Dr. Vaughan took an independent line. 
 He was a stanch Liberal at a time when few clergy- 
 men were Liberals, and when either Conservatism or 
 mild Whiggism was the creed of the upper classes. I 
 have somewhere come upon the statement, apparently 
 made with authority, that an ex-head master, being 
 asked what was the chief characteristic of Harrow, 
 answered : ' Oh ! there cannot be any doubt of that. 
 Harrow is, and always was, the Liberal Public School.' 
 Can this have been ' always ' the case ? Harrow may 
 have been less Conservative than Eton ; but has she 
 not often, if not generally, been less Liberal than 
 Rugby? Some years after I had left Harrow, the 
 late Mr. Hope-Edwardes, who had been Captain of the 
 School, told me he had been looking over the minutes 
 of our Debating Society, and found that some of us, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKEOW (1850-6) 107 
 
 seemingly including himself, had defended very start- 
 ling propositions. He gave as an instance : ' That the 
 substitution of arbitration for war is impossible, and 
 that, even if it were possible, it would be undesirable.' 
 If such a debate (of which I have a dim recollection) 
 really took place, and if the motion was carried, the 
 4 beardless Catos ', as Hope-Edwardes once called us, 
 must have been suffering from an epidemic of para- 
 doxical Toryism. Some of the cleverest boys, like 
 Trevelyan, remained true to the Whig traditions which 
 the school had inherited from the eighteenth century ; 
 but I doubt whether any of us were Liberal in the 
 modern sense. Some of us were great admirers of 
 Macaulay ; but hardly any, if any, were disciples of 
 Carlyle. Lake used to say it was Carlyle who first 
 taught him and his friends that some good had come 
 out of the French Eevolution. Now, I suspect that in 
 my Harrow days most parents, like Tennyson, regarded 
 that Eevolution as ' the red fool-fury of the Seine ', 
 and would not have been best pleased that their sons 
 should remain at a school where they might learn to 
 be apologists of Danton. On my once mentioning 
 Carlyle's name to my father, his only remark was that 
 he believed him to be a 'horrible infidel'. It is 
 possible that he may have been confounding him with 
 a freethinker named Carlisle. 
 
 Harrow, as I have here described it, was not likely 
 to find favour with such an apostle of culture as Mark 
 Pattison. He evidently regarded our schooling as fit 
 only to be a preparation for a University of Gath. 
 But he certainly carried his scepticism too far when 
 he asked me disdainfully if I had learnt anything at 
 all at Harrow. My answer to his query involved a 
 personal explanation which I must sooner or later 
 
108 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 inflict upon my readers. I told him that, by reason of 
 my defective eyesight, I was not a fair specimen or 
 judge of Harrow teaching. No spectacles suited to my 
 extreme hypermetropia had been devised till after I 
 had taken my degree. The consequence was that, in 
 my boyhood, I sometimes had an experience similar 
 to what has been recorded of Lowe : in writing I had 
 to stoop so much that my nose was blackened by the 
 ink. To look out words in a lexicon must have taken 
 me at least three times as long as it took other boys. 
 The disabling effect of this infirmity was so obvious 
 that I was sub rosa indulged in the use of cribs. But 
 cribs, especially when the Greek poets are concerned, 
 are a poor substitute for a lexicon. Hence I was 
 heavily handicapped at Harrow; and it might have 
 been thought that I should have been equally so at 
 Oxford. But at Oxford the case was different, because 
 the Latin and Greek books which I had to read up 
 for the final schools were in prose, and the difficulty 
 of translating them was hardly ever such as a good 
 crib failed to overcome. 1 
 There were one or two other ways in which my 
 
 1 As a memoir-writer is privileged to be egotistical (especially 
 in footnotes), I will here state that my spectacles, being strong 
 magnifiers, make my eyes look preternaturally big, and that the 
 effect was made more startling by the first pair, which were not 
 oval, but round. Goethe says that no man who wishes to please 
 a lady should appear before her in spectacles. An odd experience 
 of my own confirms this opinion. A precocious Italian cousin of 
 mine, who was then what in German is called a Backfisch, when she 
 first saw me decked with the unsightly aid to my eyesight, stared 
 for a moment and then, holding her hands before her eyes, called 
 out ' Do take off those goggles, Lionel. You look so like Satan ! ' 
 Certainly girls are like gooseberries : they begin by being verdant 
 and refreshing ; then follows a tart and unwholesome interval 
 until ripeness and sweetness are their portion. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAEKOW (1850-6) 109 
 
 near-sightedness and general delicacy affected my 
 position at Harrow. I was unable to take part in 
 games ; and, indeed, I could not see well enough to 
 enjoy looking on at a cricket match. Likewise, I was 
 never placed in a big house ; for it was rightly thought 
 that in such a house I should have been unable, as a 
 small boy, to hold my own against bullies, and, when 
 I became a monitor, to keep a watchful eye on delin- 
 quents. Even in a small house my monitor-craft was 
 sadly at fault, as a comic incident will show. The 
 only three tunes I can recognize are God save the King, 
 Bousseau's Dream, and VilliJcins and his Dinah. Why 
 are these dissimilar melodies thus unequally yoked 
 together? Because my fags, knowing that I hated 
 music, had a way of singing the doggerels about 
 Villikins and the ' cup of cold pison ' in the passage 
 outside my room ; and, thanks to their unkindly 
 efforts, this vulgar and now forgotten tune acquired 
 a right of way into my unmusical ear. 
 
 But I return to the essential part of Pattison's 
 inquiry. What is the worth of the literary wares 
 which a ' swot ' (they call him a ' sap ' at Eton and 
 a ' mug ' at Winchester) bore with him from Harrow ? 
 The worth of those wares was undoubtedly great ; but 
 they were lacking in variety. Dr. Vaughan was an 
 incomparable teacher within his own range, but that 
 range, I repeat, was limited. Of modern history and 
 literature we hardly knew anything ; and, to the dis- 
 gust of Westcott, who was one of the masters, we 
 were not stimulated to learn more. It is true that 
 some fragments of modern history were learnt from 
 such books as the Life of Clive and Guizot's History of 
 the Great Rebellion, which were set as holiday tasks. 
 But no comprehensive view of history was presented 
 
110 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 to us while I was at Harrow. Shortly before I went 
 there, the subject of a holiday task was a part of 
 Russell's Modem Europe. This new departure would 
 have been forgotten but for a happy incident which 
 preserves it like the fly in amber. The story is thus 
 related by one of Vaughan's pupils : 
 
 ' The holiday task, from Russell, was set to the Sixth Form : 
 Blayds [Calverley], who was in that Form, had not looked 
 into the Modem Europe at all, but, as we were waiting for 
 Vaughan, he snatched up another fellow's book and glanced 
 at a chance page or two. When he was put on by Vaughan, 
 the first question or two wholly stumped him till, by a lucky 
 chance, Vaughan asked : " What were the amusements of the 
 Ostrogoths in those days?" To which Blayds, with the 
 proper intonation, rolled out : " They hunted the boar on the 
 voluptuous parterre, the trim garden and expensive pleasure 
 ground, where effeminacy was wont to saunter and indolence 
 to loll." Incredible as it may seem, he had given Russell's 
 exact words. The Form was convulsed and even Vaughan 
 could not forbear a smile.' 
 
 So, again, English literature was out of our beat, 
 perhaps for the simple reason that it was out of 
 Vaughan's own beat. Lake once told me that 
 Vaughan, besides knowing nothing whatever of the 
 Fathers, was not well up in English literature. This 
 latter fact, if fact it was, is easily accounted for by 
 the manifold and incongruous objects of attention — 
 sermons, floggings, and parental ' visitations ' — which 
 make such cruel inroads into a head master's leisure. 
 Nevertheless, on hearing Lake's criticism, I expressed 
 surprise, alleging that, when I asked Vaughan to re- 
 commend me a speech for Speech-day, he quoted on 
 the spot, and with perfect fluency, a long extract from 
 Erskine's defence of Stockdale. Lake laughed : ' Does 
 not the passage contain something about a Red Indian 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 111 
 
 and a tomahawk ? ' I assented. ' I remember it well. 
 That was the speech which Vaughan recited at Rugby, 
 and it is the only piece of English prose that he 
 knows.' 1 Even the classical teaching of Dr. Vaughan 
 ran only in a very few grooves. An old pupil of his 
 has calculated that, during the fifteen years of his 
 head mastership, he must have gone through Sophocles 
 six times. The critic goes on to point out the narrow- 
 ness, with respect to time, of the limits of the historical 
 area to which our tuition was restricted : 
 
 ' I knew something about the blockade of Pylos and the 
 operations of Demosthenes the general; but I had never 
 heard of the battle of Navarino, and Demosthenes the orator 
 was to me little more than a cyclopaedia of Greek syntax.' 
 
 To this I may add that when, during my residence at 
 Oxford, I read Mill's high praise of Marcus Aurelius, 
 I felt myself on entirely new ground. I did not know 
 the date, and I doubt if I had even heard the name of 
 that ' imperial saint of heathendom ', as Freeman has 
 called him ; and, moreover, on my talking the subject 
 over with one or two of my ablest schoolfellows, I had 
 the ignoble satisfaction of learning that they were 
 quite as much in the dark as myself. Ignorare meum 
 nihil est, si nesciat alter : 
 
 ' If others are as blind as you, why blush 
 At ignorance ? It matters not a rush.' 
 
 Perhaps this human weakness of mine, combined with 
 my loyalty to Dr. Vaughan and my ingrained Conser- 
 vatism, make me feel even now less resentment at the 
 limitation of what we learnt at Harrow than some of 
 my schoolfellows feeL To speak more seriously, I 
 
 1 As Vaughan praised this passage highly, and as it is far less 
 well known than it deserves to be, I will print it in a note at 
 the end of this chapter, i > _ -" 
 
112 OLD AND ODD MEMOEDZS 
 
 doubt whether the school classics even of a Squire 
 Western or a Parson Adams are quite thrown away. 
 An ingenious person has said that those classics, like 
 tadpoles' tails, are dropped in mature life. It would 
 be more correct, both scientifically and otherwise, in 
 comparing them to tadpoles' tails, to do so on the 
 ground that in mature life they seem to be dropped, 
 but are really absorbed. The principle of Multum, 
 non multa may have been carried by Vaughan to an 
 extreme point. But this extreme would have been 
 preferred by the greatest of ancient sages to the oppo- 
 site one for two reasons : first, because it is nearer to 
 the golden mean ; and, secondly, because it is less 
 agreeable, and therefore more disciplinary. To combine 
 the multum, or rather the profundum, with the multa is 
 not easy, and it is questionable whether the present 
 multiplicity of subjects is an improvement on the old 
 Harrow Trivium of Latin, Greek, and a tincture of 
 Mathematics. And now, having offered a friendly 
 and, I hope, not undutiful comment on Vaughan's 
 teaching, I am yet impelled to wind up with the not 
 very novel query : Why on earth were we doomed 
 to spend so much time in writing Greek and Latin 
 verses ? 
 
 But Vaughan was admirable in his own line, not 
 only as a teacher, but as a moral trainer. In both 
 respects he is well known to have been a follower 
 of Dr. Arnold; so much so, indeed, that one is 
 tempted to parody the Virgilian metaphor, and to 
 say that he carried Rugby bodily to Harrow. Not, 
 of course, that Vaughan was a facsimile of Arnold. 
 My father used to say that Vaughan was ' much 
 superior to Arnold, having far more common sense ' ; 
 which was another way of saying that Arnold was 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAREOW (1850-6) 113 
 
 vastly more original than Vaughan. But this deficiency 
 of Vaughan's may have helped him as a schoolmaster. 
 Indeed, I have quoted my father's praise of him as 
 serving to show that, if he had encouraged free 
 inquiry, he would have given a rude shock to the 
 susceptibilities of parents, and perhaps to the fortunes 
 of the school. But this caution of his was not the 
 mere outcome of policy ; it was part of his character. 
 He told me that, though he had sometimes been 
 brought into sympathetic contact with the religious 
 difficulties of his friends, he himself had never to any 
 serious extent suffered from such difficulties. On the 
 whole, we may conclude that Arnold was far more of 
 a Broad Churchman, according to the standard of his 
 time, than Vaughan was according to the standard of 
 twenty years later. But, though Vaughan may in a 
 manner be described as merely Arnold writ small, he 
 emulated his great master in impressing on his pupils, 
 both by precept and example, a conviction of the 
 tremendous seriousness of life and what George Eliot 
 called the self-scourging sense of duty. Neither 
 Arnold nor Vaughan was what is called a Puritan, 
 but their method may, for want of a better word, 
 be called quasi-puritanical. Mill has somewhere 
 ascribed to the English that incapacity of personal 
 enjoyment which, he says, is characteristic of a nation 
 over which Puritanism has passed. This incapacity 
 ought surely to be reckoned as a heavy discount on 
 the debt which we undoubtedly owe to the Puritans. 
 Undoubted, also, is the debt which we owe to Arnold's 
 quasi-puritanical method. Is that debt also to be 
 charged with a like discount? Well, writing about 
 schools, one feels like a schoolboy; and thus, when 
 seeking to estimate this quasi-puritanical discipline, 
 
 i 
 
114 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 one is reminded of what in the old school doggerel 
 the graminivorous Nebuchadnezzar said of his un- 
 princely diet : 
 
 ' It may be wholesome, but it is not good.' 
 
 Certainly this insistence on the awful solemnity of 
 life was characteristic of Dr. Vaughan. Thus, in a 
 sermon referring to the Crimean War, he said (as 
 nearly as I can remember) that the time will come 
 ' when the destiny of mightiest empires will be lighter 
 in our esteem than the salvation of a single soul'. 
 Cardinal Newman once delivered himself of a similar 
 judgement expressed yet more strongly. 1 And there 
 is no doubt that a conclusion of this sort may be 
 drawn from the premisses which Vaughan and New- 
 man held in common. It is equally certain that such 
 teaching would not be likely to produce a type of 
 character which would have found favour with Horace 
 or Montaigne or Goethe. After reading Eomilly's 
 Memoirs, Macaulay writes : ' A fine fellow ; but too 
 stoical for my taste. I love a little of the epicurean 
 element in virtue.' Like Moliere, he desired une vertu 
 traitable. And, after all, might not the best sort of 
 Puritanism be defined as Stoicism in excelsis, as 
 Stoicism plus Keligion ? It should be added that 
 the stoical or puritanical seed is likely to bear more 
 fruit when sown in the minds of the young. In this 
 relation Walter Bagehot laid his finger on the right 
 point when he said of the lessons taught by Arnold : 
 
 ' The common English mind is too coarse, sluggish, and 
 worldly to take such lessons too much to heart. It is 
 improved by them in many ways, and is not harmed by them 
 
 1 Quoted in my Talks with Mr. Gladstone, p. 139. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 115 
 
 at all. But there are a few minds which are very likely to 
 think too much of such things. A susceptible, serious 
 intellectual boy may be injured by the incessant inculcation 
 of the awfulness of life, and the magnitude of great problems. 
 It is not desirable to take this world too much au sSrieux ; 
 most persons will not ; and the one in a thousand who will, 
 should not.' 
 
 By the monitorial system this aspect of the Arnold- 
 Vaughan discipline was put in the strongest light. 
 In a prize poem on ' Harrow ', Hope-Edwardes 
 satirized our school debates — which, by the way, 
 were held in the monitors' library — as serio-comic 
 exhibitions : 
 
 ' Where youth assumes upon its mimic stage 
 The dignity without the sense of age.' 
 
 So far, at least, as the dignity of age is concerned, 
 a like charge might be brought against the monitorial 
 conclaves, of which the same library was the scene. 
 The monitors formed a sort of bureaucracy under 
 Vaughan. Mill says that a bureaucracy is apt to 
 degenerate into a ' pedantocracy '. Is there not a fear 
 that a bureaucracy of boys will become a prigocracy ? 
 Each monitor was provided with an amalgam of the 
 Miltonic and the Nelsonic rule of conduct, and seemed 
 to be saying : ' Harrow expects me to do my duty, as 
 ever in my great Taskmaster's eye.' What could be 
 more saintly or heroic ? And yet one could wish 
 that the moral strut had been now and then relaxed 
 by the help of such maxims as Chamfort's ' No day is 
 so utterly lost as that on which one has not laughed ', 
 or as Horace's ' Dulce est desipere in loco ' (' E'en 
 folly in due place is sweet'). I doubt, by the way, 
 if Horace was a favourite with Vaughan. 
 
 In speaking thus, I must not be thought to make 
 
 i 2 
 
116 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 light of my obligation to the quasi-puritanical method. 
 In one respect, especially, we all owe much to 
 Vaughan's discipline. His pupils were trained to be 
 self-reliant. He once spoke to me contemptuously 
 of certain educational wiseacres who had assumed 
 as axiomatic that boys are not fit to be trusted. He 
 himself, on the other hand, made a point of trusting 
 them as far as possible. 
 
 The suave dignity of his manner may be set off by 
 a contrast. Of the assistant masters one of the most 
 remarkable shall be called the Rev. X. Y. At Cam- 
 bridge he had taken a low wranglership, and this was 
 his only academic distinction. The extraordinary 
 thing about him was his power of enforcing discipline. 
 Lacking nearly all the intellectual gifts of Westcott, 
 he had the one faculty essential to a schoolmaster in 
 which Westcott was deficient. In his classroom you 
 could hear a pin drop. Only now and then, like 
 thunder in a clear sky, a name would be heard, and 
 some victim, often innocent, would be summoned 
 
 before him ' Sergeant, I saw you smile.' — ' No, sir, 
 
 I didn't.' — 'You were smiling, Sergeant.' — ' Indeed, 
 sir, I wasn't.' — ' I shall send you up to Dr. Vaughan 
 [to be flogged] for impertinence and prevarication.' 
 This is no invention, but happened to E. W. Sergeant 
 exactly as I have related it when he was head of the 
 school in 1854. Of course he was not flogged — the 
 persons of monitors are sacrosanct — but, when less 
 exalted personages were sent up by Y., Vaughan, 
 according to tradition hardly credible of so wise and 
 upright a man, would generally take a middle course. 
 ' I am very sorry to find that your conduct has given 
 grave offence to Mr. Y. ; perhaps [with a smile] you are 
 not quite such a reprobate as he imagines you, and for 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKROW (1850-6) 117 
 
 this time I will merely set you five hundred lines to 
 write out.' 
 
 There was something inscrutable and almost un- 
 canny about Y., something of the damonisch that 
 Goethe discovered in Napoleon. He moved in a 
 mysterious way both among boys and among masters. 
 No wonder that myths grew freely about him and that 
 some were accepted as history. One of them is so 
 characteristic as to be worth relating : 
 
 Mr. Y. ' I am sorry, Dr. Vaughan, to have to report 
 to you two of your monitors for drinking.' Br. V. 
 ' This is a very serious charge. When and where did 
 it happen ? ' Mr. Y. ' This afternoon in a public-house 
 at Pinner.' Br. V. 'Did you catch them flagrante 
 delicto?' Mr. Y. 'No, Dr. Vaughan, I was in my 
 study.' Br. V. ' But surely, you cannot possibly have 
 seen from your study to Pinner.' Mr. Y. 'I have a 
 strong telescope, Dr. Vaughan.' Br. V. 'But how 
 can you tell that it was not water they were drinking ?' 
 Mr. Y. ' It was gin and water. I noticed a sediment 
 of sugar at the bottom of their glasses.' 
 
 Mr. Y. passed for a confirmed bachelor. The only 
 master with whom he consorted was likewise a 
 bachelor, whose two spinster sisters kept house for 
 him. Mr. Y. was supposed to be courting one of the 
 sisters ; and, whenever his class had a particularly 
 bad time of it, the traditional explanation was that 
 he had again been refused by one or other of the 
 ladies. 
 
 The denouement which followed might have found a 
 place among the Contes Brolatiques. Many years after- 
 wards a gentleman in deep mourning requested an 
 interview with the then Head Master. He had come 
 to announce the death of Mr. Y., his near relation. 
 
118 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 The Head Master was deeply moved, and expressed 
 his heart-felt sympathy. 'And I hope,' added the 
 visitor, 'that something will be done for the poor 
 children. I fear he left his large family very ill 
 provided for.' To the general amazement it turned 
 out that Mr. Y., some score of years before, had con- 
 tracted a secret mesalliance, and had domiciled his 
 wife at Margate. If it cannot be said of him that 
 moriens fefellit, at any rate he carried out the Greek 
 precept, Xd6e Piaxras. In short, his life was an 
 enigma. 
 
 In childhood I was tormented by forebodings of 
 what I was to expect as a schoolboy. They were due 
 to the accounts given me by my elder brother, who 
 had been at a famous school in Hertfordshire. That 
 school was vulgarly known as ' the little House of 
 Lords ', and might be supposed to rank as a private 
 school at its best. Unluckily, the schoolmaster seems 
 to have thought that severity could draw talent out of 
 dunces, and that his rod, like Aaron's, would bring 
 forth flowers. The words of the French master were 
 a fit accompaniment to the deeds of his chief. When 
 enraged with my informant, he used to cry out : ' You 
 are one stagnant pool of corruption. You are one 
 standing dunghill. If you are impudent, I will kick 
 you out like one dogue.' The nightmare, or daymare, 
 caused by these tales, which did not lose in my 
 brother's telling, haunted me till I went to Harrow. 
 Imagine my relief when, on the morning after my 
 arrival, I stood before Dr. Vaughan. His benign face 
 and gentle voice fairly took me aback. Could this 
 angel in man's clothing be capable of the constant 
 firmness and occasional severity which I had heard 
 ascribed to him ? My surprise, as I afterwards learnt, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 119 
 
 was shared by my companions. The story ran that, 
 on this occasion, young Buddinggreen, misled by the 
 youthful appearance of the Head Master, had not an 
 inkling of being in that august presence ; and that, 
 finding himself placed in the Third Form, he angrily 
 called out : ' Do you put me at the bottom of the 
 school? I thought I was to be examined by 
 Vaughan ! ' 
 
 In truth, there was no art to find the construction of 
 Vaughan's mind either in his face or in his voice. There 
 was an element of inscrutability in him. His mother- 
 in-law, Mrs. Stanley, told my father that she herself 
 did not quite understand why he first accepted and then 
 declined Lord Palmerston's offer of a bishopric. After 
 he had left Harrow, Archdeacon Cheetham met him 
 out walking, but, observing that he was gazing intently 
 on the ground, forbore to interrupt him and passed 
 on. Presently Vaughan called him back, and explained 
 with a smile : ' They used to say at Harrow that I could 
 look on the ground and see fifty yards before me and 
 fifty yards behind me all the time.' He was not only 
 conscious, but in a manner proud of what may be termed 
 his social opacity. He found it convenient to see through 
 others without being seen through himself. One of 
 his staff reported him as saying : ' I find it to be an 
 advantage that, the more angry I am with a boy, the 
 calmer I am in appearance.' Closely allied to this 
 inscrutability of his was the rather inelastic softness 
 of voice and suavity of expression, which was unruffled 
 even during the application of the birch. When the 
 monitors dined with him, they naturally felt shy 
 about fixing the moment of departure. Vaughan 
 would catch the eye of the senior boy and look sig- 
 nificantly at his watch. When the hint was taken, 
 
120 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 he squeezed the boy's hand and exclaimed in depre- 
 catory accents : ' Must you go ? ' Such diplomacy not 
 even a Quaker would blame, but I cannot help feeling 
 that he sometimes carried it to a point that Polonius 
 would have called 'indirection' and Mark Pattison 
 ' economy of truth '. 
 
 I was reminded of Dr. Vaughan when I came upon 
 the following passage in The Last of the Barons : 
 
 ' In our common intercourse with life, we must have 
 observed that, where external gentleness of bearing is accom- 
 panied by a repute for iron will, determined resolution, and 
 a serious, profound, and all-inquiring intellect, it carries with 
 it a majesty wholly distinct from that charm which is exer- 
 cised by one whose mildness of nature corresponds with the 
 outward humility ; and, if it does not convey the notion of 
 falseness, bears the appearance of that perfect self-possession, 
 that calm repose of power, which intimidates those it 
 influences far more than the imperious port and the loud 
 voice.' 
 
 In saying that this passage made me think of Dr. 
 Vaughan, I am of course not implying that his gentle 
 look and ' voice of velvet ' (recalling the voix veloutee 
 ascribed by Dumas to Aramis) conveyed to those who 
 at all knew him ' the notion of falseness '. But I think 
 that the secretive quality, which helped him as a 
 schoolmaster, may have been a drawback to him as 
 a man, and especially as a friend. At all events, he 
 was not often to old Harrovians what Arnold was to 
 old Eugbeians, a sort of lifelong Gamaliel. Harrow 
 men were not, as a rule, permanently drawn to him by 
 the force of pupillary attraction. This does not apply 
 to his theological pupils at Doncaster and Llandaff, 
 who were familiarly known as his ' doves ', attracted 
 even more by the master's meekness than by his 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 121 
 
 wisdom. But some even of the clergy would have 
 wished Vaughan to be less enigmatic. Even Arch- 
 bishop Thomson, whom I had expected to find his 
 warm admirer, told me with regret that he could not 
 quite make him out. Among laymen this feeling was 
 stronger. And here perhaps we have one reason why, 
 after thinking over my old Harrow friends in relation 
 to Vaughan, and then over my old Balliol friends in 
 relation to Jowett, I am struck by the thought that 
 Jowett retained to the last a far more important and 
 devoted lay-following than Vaughan ever had. 
 
 The impression produced by Vaughan's suavity on 
 a man of the world was brought home to me by some 
 remarks of my uncle Mr. Finch, whose theology was 
 almost identical with Vaughan's. He had been at 
 Harrow under Dr. George Butler, and he sent his son 
 there under Vaughan. He talked to me of the school 
 at the two epochs, and pointed out the contrast between 
 the two head masters in their manner of dealing with 
 boys. The genial downrightness of Butler was more 
 to his liking than the impenetrable meekness of 
 Vaughan. He told me an anecdote in illustration of 
 the Harrow of his youth. A lower boy had prevailed 
 on one of the Sixth Form to furnish him with a set 
 of elegiacs. The verses were good enough; but the 
 treacherous friend concluded them with the tell-tale 
 couplet : 
 
 ' Hos ego versiculos scripsi, sed non ego feci ; 
 Da mihi, praeceptor, verbera multa, precor.' 
 
 'Are these verses yours?' asked the head master. 
 ' Yes, sir.' ' Why, you blockhead, do you know what 
 you are asking me to do ? ' (I have italicized the most 
 un-Vaughanlike part of the sentence.) How different 
 
122 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 would have been the line taken by Vaughan with refer- 
 ence to a similar culprit. He would have rebuked the 
 boy for aggravating the guilt of appropriating what was 
 not his own by the guilt of telling a falsehood ; and to 
 the homily would have been appended, with an ominous 
 suavity of voice, the euphemistic preamble of a flogging : 
 'Will you go down and wait for me in the Fourth 
 Form room ? ' It was said that he sometimes mollified 
 the injunction with a ' Please ' ; but of this I am not 
 sure. It was rumoured in my school days that, as 
 his chastening hand was drawing screams from a 
 small boy, he exhorted him in mellifluous tones : 
 ' Tomkins junior, bear your punishment like a man. 
 Again and again descended the birch, and again and 
 again followed the roar. One who was in the school 
 when first Vaughan became head master was told 
 that at that time the urbanity of chastisement was 
 carried yet further: 'After a severe administration 
 of the birch, Vaughan was reported to have addressed 
 the birchee in the blandest tones: "Thank you, my 
 dear boy, I won't trouble you any more to-day." ' 1 
 
 A similar incident is reported to me from Eton 
 under the reign of Keate, George Butler's contem- 
 porary. Lord Castletown told Mr. Hare that, when 
 at Eton under Keate, he was set as a holiday task 
 to write seventy Latin verses on St. Paul's speech 
 at Athens. His guardian, Lord Holland, had no 
 scruple in doing the verses for him. He had actually 
 written sixty-six of the lines when some business 
 called him away. The remaining lines had to be 
 supplied by Castletown, who afterwards gave this 
 account : 
 
 1 School and Sea, by ' Martello Tower '. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 123 
 
 ' It was a most grand set of verses. And, when I gave them 
 up to Keate, he would read them aloud before the whole 
 school. In the middle he said, " Who wrote these, sir ? " 
 " I, sir." " You lie, sir," said Keate. At last he came to the 
 last four lines. " You wrote these, sir," he said. I heard no 
 more of it, but I never got back my copy of verses.' 
 
 Here again I have italicized the most un-Vaughanlike 
 phrase of the old schoolmaster. 
 
 Spedding, in his Apology for Bacon, observes that 
 there are in each age certain acts which, though 
 theoretically condemned, are practically tolerated. 
 To this nondescript class belong the ' privileged lies ' 
 of my school-days. At that time the principle of con- 
 doning a he told by a boy to a master, in order 
 to avoid incriminating himself, was not utterly 
 exploded. It was Vaughan who at Harrow raised 
 the moral standard in this respect. He also raised 
 it by abolishing what were there called ' mills ', that 
 is to say, fights, which, like the famous one at Rugby 
 described in Tom Brown, had taken place with the 
 connivance of the masters on a plot of grass between 
 the school buildings and the racquet courts, still 
 known as the ' milling ground '. By these two 
 innovations — the proscription of ' privileged lies ' and 
 of 'mills' — as well as by sundry Other reforms, 
 Vaughan rendered a great service to the school. But 
 as a rigid reformer he was in a manner disqualified for 
 showing such indulgence to boys' peccadilloes as was 
 shown by Dr. George Butler, or still more for taking 
 them as a matter of course after the manner of Keate. 
 In other words, he governed the school in the spirit 
 of a modern pioneer; and this is why, as a school- 
 master, he was such a rigid Stoic or Puritan. It is 
 the misfortune of nearly all the moral pioneers and 
 
124 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 rigid Stoics that expressions like nil admirari, comedie 
 humaine, or redeeming vice, are abhorrent to them, and 
 that they thus become limited in the sphere of their 
 sympathy. They are lacking in the kind of humour 
 which Bagehot has called ' pleasant cynicism ' ; and, 
 in short, they expect too much from human nature. 
 
 The praise of Vaughan is in all the churches, but 
 Harrovians in particular will associate his memory in 
 countless ways with 
 
 ' . . . that best portion of a good man's life, 
 His little nameless unremembered acts 
 Of kindness and of love,' 
 
 including especially bountiful help to needy scholars. 
 His success at Harrow is written in fair characters, 
 seen and read of all men, but much more might be 
 said of the new life that he breathed into the school. 
 
 I once heard a distinguished clergyman ask a former 
 Captain of the School whether he was a Vaughan-lover 
 or a Vaughan-hater, as nearly all Harrow men belonged 
 to one or other of these categories. Personally, I prefer 
 calling myself a Vaughan-admirer. After what, I fear, 
 the Vaughan-lovers will stigmatize as an impertinence, 
 I will resume the safer and more congenial vein of 
 anecdotage. These supplementary anecdotes may 
 serve to illustrate or qualify opinions already ex- 
 pressed. The first came to me direct from the late 
 Charles Eoundell, who was Captain of the School at 
 the time of Vaughan's appointment. It had been the 
 custom for the Sixth Form to send fags to bring them 
 hot meat from the town for their Sunday breakfast. 
 Vaughan, not knowing of this custom, was surprised 
 one Sunday morning to meet a small boy laden with 
 provisions. ' Is that your breakfast, Johnson ? ' ' No, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 125 
 
 sir.' 'To whom are you taking it?' Johnson (as 
 I call him) doubted whether the old head boy or the 
 new lamb-like head master was the more to be feared ; 
 and, after a moment's hesitation, he refused to answer. 
 A term or two later, Vaughan would not have stood 
 this ; but, not yet feeling himself firm in his saddle, 
 and perhaps liking the boy's courage, he passed the 
 matter over. Roundell, when the fag told him what 
 had occurred, was horrified, the more so as Vaughan 
 had already begun to preach sermons which were, 
 to say the least, much to the point. A few hours 
 later, when Vaughan mounted the pulpit, Roundell 
 looked up with mingled curiosity and fear. On his 
 expectant ear this text fell like a thunderbolt : 
 ' Behold, I have chosen you twelve, and one of you 
 is a devil.' Blayds, who was just behind him, 
 whispered, ' That 's you ' ; and my friend had a 
 momentary dread of being made the Judas of the 
 discourse. But it soon appeared that the appropriate 
 text had been chosen by accident ; nothing whatever 
 was said about the hot-breakfasting monitor or the 
 too reticent fag. But in my school-days the story had 
 grown ; the rumour ran that Vaughan had chosen this 
 appalling text for a sermon against one of the monitors. 
 It will doubtless be inferred from this exaggeration 
 that Harrow must have been a very myth-making 
 place. Perhaps it was ; but in this instance there 
 was some excuse, for Vaughan had a way of preaching 
 such personal sermons as to make almost any exaggera- 
 tion about them sound plausible. One such sermon, 
 which I myself heard, lingers in my memory. To all 
 appearance, it was distinctly pointed at an unnamed 
 boy, who had gone to Harrow strongly imbued with 
 the principles and sentiments of a pious home. The 
 
126 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 next term he retained his good resolutions, ' but with 
 the unhappy addition of self-confidence ' ; and the 
 result was that this same boy, who had but lately 
 been shocked by even the slightest deviation from 
 Christian charity, had himself become a persecutor 
 and a bully. Some of Vaughan's friends tried to 
 make out that he could not have possibly been 
 preaching at a real boy ; but the general impression 
 was that his words would bear no other construction. 
 An old Rugbeian, who was present, agreed in this 
 opinion. He told me that he had heard strong 
 sermons from Arnold, but never anything like that. 
 
 It has already been remarked that Vaughan's caution 
 was not the mere outcome of policy, but was natural 
 to him. The same may be said of his suavity. This 
 latter quality was discernible in him even when he 
 was at Eugby, as is shown by an anecdote told by one 
 of his schoolfellows. Dr. Arnold had issued an order 
 forbidding the boys to angle. But the order was 
 hard to enforce, and was sometimes disobeyed. One 
 juvenile transgressor, while intent on his float, suddenly 
 observed with dismay that Vaughan, then a praepostor, 
 had come close to him. But he felt reassured on 
 being asked by the intruder if he had had good sport. 
 His fears, however, were reawakened when he saw 
 the praepostor's eyes ranging over the adjacent bushes 
 as if in search of something. At last Vaughan fixed 
 his gaze on a willow with long and supple branches, 
 and, pointing to one of them, said in dulcet accents : 
 ' Will you please cut that stick and give it me ? ' The 
 culprit tremblingly complied ; and then followed a 
 drastic object-lesson on the sin of disobedience, which 
 somehow recalls to me an unwonted outburst in 
 which I well remember to have heard Vaughan 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKEOW (1850-6) 127 
 
 indulge, when he was too angry to be suave, in the 
 speech-room at Harrow : ' If this [insubordination] 
 cannot be coerced, I am unfit for the place which 
 I now occupy. But it can be coerced, and it shall.' 
 In my Harrow days Vaughan used to advise the 
 monitors to consult him in difficult cases, not as 
 a master, but as a friend. He thus drew a sharp 
 line between what might be termed his private self 
 and his official self. From what has been said it may 
 be inferred that he drew a similar line when he was 
 praepostor at Rugby. His official self chastised the 
 insubordinate schoolboy, but his private self felt 
 genuine sympathy for the irrepressible sportsman. 
 Possibly, also, Vaughan thought that Dr. Arnold in 
 his prohibition of angling had committed an error 
 of judgement. He once spoke to me with regret of 
 a letter in which Arnold objected to field sports, not 
 on humanitarian grounds, but merely on the ground 
 that such sports are a waste of time. Neither Vaughan 
 nor the present writer could conceive why this objec- 
 tion should be more applicable to field sports than 
 to any other form of outdoor recreation. Vaughan's 
 sympathy with the angler may be illustrated by that 
 expressed in the Comedy of Errors by the Duke of 
 Ephesus for the shipwrecked Aegeon of Syracuse, 
 whom, while sentencing him to death on account 
 of his nationality, he yet graciously exhorts to com- 
 plete the narrative of his woes : 
 
 ' Nay; forward, old man, do not break off so ; 
 For we may pity, though not pardon thee.' 
 
 Anyhow, as I have again referred to Vaughan's 
 masterful suavity, I must again insist that it was 
 only manner-deep. (His manner was conventional, 
 
128 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 but not circumventional.) Anything like flattery would 
 have stirred his aversion or ridicule. He would have 
 sighed or smiled at the servility of his far-back 
 predecessor Dr. Bolton, head master of Harrow 
 towards the close of the seventeenth century, who, 
 in a sermon written during the reign of Charles II, 
 alluded to ' our present sovereign, between whom and 
 Joseph there seems to be a resemblance'. Will my 
 readers charge the author of this preposterous com- 
 parison with a plentiful lack of humour? Such a 
 charge is of course true, unless the reverend gentleman 
 was actuated by worldly wisdom. May there not 
 have been means of so steering the course of the 
 published sermon as to make it pass within eyeshot 
 of the king? And may not Charles have relished 
 the patriarchal comparison, not certainly as expressing 
 what he himself thought, but as tending to make the 
 outer public fancy that he was less unlike Joseph 
 than was commonly surmised ? The obsequious 
 pedagogue, if he acted for this end, was what Bacon 
 would have called 'an impudent flatterer', who 
 followed the knavish rule : ' Look wherein a man 
 is conscious to himself that he is most defective, and 
 is most out of countenance in himself, that will the 
 flatterer entitle him to perforce, spreta conscientia.' 
 I note in passing that the foregoing cannot have been 
 the only occasion when the Merry Monarch was 
 regaled by a funny sermon, at least if it is true that 
 a certain would-be bishop, named Mountain, preached 
 before him from the text : ' If ye shall say unto this 
 mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the 
 sea; it shall be done.' Is it not said that, a century 
 later, a wily candidate for preferment chose a no less 
 felicitous text for a sermon before Lord North : ' Pro- 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKROW (1850-6) 129 
 
 motion cometh neither from the east, nor from the 
 west : nor yet from the south ' ? O.y j" % j 
 
 The story of Vaughan and the peccant angler recalls 
 to me a similar incident vouched for by a friend 
 of mine, though the ending was different. As a boy 
 he was once caught fishing on Sunday by his rector, 
 a sporting parson of the old school, who, while hating 
 all Puritans, was himself an easy-going stickler for the 
 Decalogue. Not being a Rugby praepostor, the parson 
 forbore to enforce his exhortation by blows, but ad- 
 ministered an extempore sermon to the delinquent, 
 and, as the phrase goes, gave it him hot. ' I have no 
 patience with you,' he began severely. ' You can fish 
 on all the six weekdays, and have no shadow of excuse 
 
 for your sin in breaking the Fourth Com But, 
 
 damn it, Frank, look alive, you've got a bite ! ' 
 
 One more story of a schoolboy angler. I had it at 
 first hand from the schoolmaster. The master said 
 that he had not forbidden the boys to fish ; but he 
 discouraged the pastime on the ground that, to use 
 a phrase of Maclaren, the old gymnasiarch at Oxford, 
 'it did not sufficiently bring the voluntary muscles 
 into play.' Happening to come across a pupil angling, 
 he said, ' Do you know, Greenwit, that Dr. Johnson 
 defines a fishing-rod as a long stick with a worm at 
 one end and a fool at the other ' ? x The boy seemed 
 puzzled for an instant, and then asked quite simply, 
 ' Please, sir, when you cane a boy, which of you is 
 the worm ? ' It should be explained that Greenwit 
 was a simple-minded boy who would not be guilty 
 of an intentional impertinence. His master, knowing 
 
 1 It appears that this famous definition is not by Johnson, 
 though commonly ascribed to him. Some have attributed it to 
 South ; but its real author is unknown. 
 
 K 
 
130 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 this, was wise enough not to take offence at the palp- 
 able hit. 
 
 The last anecdote suggests a wide subject on which 
 I can only touch. My old friend, H. D. Traill, was 
 fond of writing and talking about humour. Being 
 told of a humorist who made a point of avoiding ' dull 
 dogs ', he remarked that any one who indulged in this 
 aversion shut himself out from the great hunting- 
 ground of humour. It would be truer to say that the 
 .quarry of humorists consists, not of stupid people, 
 but of foolish people, and especially of those foolish 
 people who have, like Hamlet, ' method ' in their 
 folly, and who manage to combine something of the 
 experience of mature life with the pleasant incoherency 
 of childhood. Most of us have had experience of 
 tactfully foolish persons who amuse us with occasional 
 Malapropisms and Dundrearyisms, and who withal 
 are so observant or so wholesomely snubbable as just 
 to stop short of being bores. 1 T. E. Brown, the Manx 
 poet, in a sermon that he preached in Clifton chapel 
 against bullying, bade his hearers remember that God 
 created fools both for their delectation and profit, and 
 admonished them not to abuse the gift. ' Treat your 
 fool gently, as Isaak Walton did his frog ; use him 
 as if you loved him.' 
 
 To return to Harrow, there is a capping story of 
 
 1 The occasional amusingness of persons who are, so to say, 
 consecutively deficient may be illustrated by an example, which 
 is perhaps just good enough to be footnote-worthy. A lady, who 
 once taught at a girls' school, tells me that one of her pupils, who 
 was not quite * all there ', imagined that cedar pencils grew ready 
 made on trees. But the ' softy's ' oddest mistake was in reply to 
 the question, ' What do you know of the Pyrenees and Mount 
 Atlas ? ' ' The Atlas Mountains run all round Africa, closely 
 followed by the Pyrenees.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 131 
 
 the tables turned on a master by a pupil. One of the 
 masters (later than my day) had a special objection to 
 blunders that did not stand on all fours, and for 
 which, therefore, there was no excuse. When Scott 
 was Master of Balliol, he said to the undergraduates 
 in that emphatic voice — emphatic even in the enun- 
 ciation of commonplaces — which was so familiar to 
 us : ' Remember that a translation may make sense, 
 and yet not he right ; but that, if it makes nonsense, 
 it must he wrong' Well, it was with mistranslations" 
 of this latter kind that the Harrow master had no 
 patience ; and he used to show his irritation by 
 saying to the self-convicting blunderer, 'You are 
 talking nonsense, and you know you are.' One day 
 he was giving a lesson in the Greek Testament, when 
 a boy, X, in construing a text, fell into hopeless con- 
 fusion. Seeing that another boy was looking in- 
 attentive, the master said to him, ' Y, will you point 
 out X's mistake to him ? ' Y had no notion what 
 X had said, and sought to escape from the difficulty 
 by answering, ' He talked nonsense, and he knew he 
 did.' The rash experiment succeeded. The master 
 was wise enough to ignore the conscious or un- 
 conscious impertinence, and broke himself of the 
 mannerism. 
 
 Mr. George Russell, in his Collections and Recol- 
 lections, says that Dr. Vaughan was a man who 
 
 ' concealed under the blandest of manners a remorseless 
 sarcasm and a mordant wit, and who never returned from the 
 comparative publicity of the Athenaeum to the domestic 
 shades of the Temple without leaving behind him some 
 pungent sentence which travelled from mouth to mouth and 
 spared neither age nor sex nor friendship nor affinity.' 
 
 This trenchant criticism is surely overcharged, but 
 
 k2 
 
132 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 it would not have been thus definitely formulated 
 without some evidence to substantiate it. Indeed, 
 I know from other sources that Dr. Vaughan 
 indulged somewhat freely in satirical remarks, so 
 pointed as to leave a barb and cause pain, which none 
 would have regretted more than the satirist himself. 
 The epigram about ' lordlings and atheists ' may be 
 apocryphal, but two others of Dr. Vaughan's witty 
 sallies, which are so indefinite in their application that 
 they may, I trust, be recorded with safety, have been 
 told me on good authority. In reference to a late 
 able dignitary of the Church, who had the reputa- 
 tion of being something of a tuft-hunter, Vaughan 
 observed : ' I cannot quite make him out ; he seems 
 to be on kissing terms with so many duchesses.' In 
 reference to an excellent and eloquent divine who 
 would have adorned the stage no less than the pulpit, 
 he said, 'He is the best after-dinner preacher that I 
 know.' It is right to add that to me, who was not one 
 of his intimates, he spoke of this clergyman far more 
 pleasantly : ' I consult him whenever I am in want of 
 a quotation, and he is sure to give me a good one.' 
 
 Two stories of his ready wit and his genial humour 
 reach me from the artist to whom he sat for his 
 portrait, which was exhibited in the Academy. The 
 painter was questioning him about the antecedents of 
 his rector. ' He wears a hood or band which looks as 
 if he had taken a university degree, but there is no 
 record of one against his name in Crockford. Can this 
 be an omission ? ' Vaughan : ' No ; I fear we must 
 call it a false-hood, or shall we say contra-band ? ' The 
 two were discussing their common friend Ainger, and 
 Vaughan observed, ' He is terribly harum-scarum, 
 absent-minded, and scatter-brained, but such a dear, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 133 
 
 delightful fellow that one cannot be angry with him. 
 He was staying with me at the deanery, and kept me 
 up talking till the small hours. When I gave him 
 his candle to show him to bed, he went on talking and 
 dropping the wax all over the stair-carpet, and when I 
 said, " My dear Ainger, do look what you are about," 
 he only laughed and quoted Watts, " How neat she 
 spreads her wax ! " ' 
 
 Winchester is well known to have a school-slang of 
 its own. We had nothing of the sort at Harrow ; but 
 a few words were peculiar to the school. One of these 
 was ' chaw '. This word, the short for ' chaw-bacon ', 
 was merely descriptive when applied to a social inferior, 
 but disdainful when applied to a schoolfellow. So 
 far it recalls the common use of the word 'cad'. 
 But ' cad ', when applied to a social equal, imputes 
 dishonourable conduct, while ' chaw ', when so applied, 
 merely imputes lack of breeding. When I went to 
 Oxford, I found that this ugly word no longer formed 
 a part of the current vocabulary ; but its place was 
 supplied by the no less ugly word ' bloke ', said to 
 be imported from Eton. But ' bloke ' was not quite 
 synonymous with ' chaw ' ; for it was seldom or never 
 employed as descriptive of a social inferior ; and, 
 when employed about an undergraduate, it did not 
 necessarily imply that he was underbred or illbred. 
 Madame de Sevigne declared that one of the uncome- 
 liest of her friends ' abused the privilege of being 
 ugly ' ; and, in like manner, to call a man a bloke 
 was to charge him with an exorbitant indulgence in 
 the licence to be slow. But, instead of wearying 
 my readers with a philological discussion, I will tell 
 an anecdote which it recalls. Half a dozen under- 
 graduates resolved to give a bloke-breakfast. Each 
 
134 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 was to invite the greatest bloke that he knew. None 
 of them was to be told beforehand whom the others 
 had asked ; and, when the breakfast was over, a prize 
 was to be given to the one who had exhibited the 
 most characteristic specimen. "When the day for the 
 breakfast came, twelve places were duly laid. Each 
 of the six hosts felt a curiosity about the five blokes 
 that were unknown to him similar to that which a 
 naturalist feels before examining a strange animal or 
 plant. But the curiosity was not destined to be grati- 
 fied. To the general surprise, only one recipient of 
 the unflattering invitation put in an appearance. At 
 first much surprise was occasioned by the five empty 
 chairs. But afterwards each graceless entertainer — 
 each ' hostile host ' — discovered that the solitary guest 
 had been unanimously pronounced to be facile princeps 
 in his own line, and to embody the quintessence of 
 blokedom ! 
 
 Mark Pattison told me that, with all his experience 
 of examinations, he had never come across one of 
 those amusingly absurd answers which are so often 
 reported ; and he evidently thought that nearly all 
 such 'howlers' are inventions. So I am glad to be 
 able to record an odd blunder which was mentioned 
 to me by a Harrow master shortly after he had looked 
 over the examination paper which contained it. 
 Question : ' Where did the patriarch Joseph die, and 
 what do we read about his remains?' Answer: 
 1 Joseph died and was buried in Egypt, and was then 
 taken to Canaan. We read that afterwards he went 
 boldly to Pilate and begged the body of Jesus.' It 
 should be explained that the boy who had this vague 
 notion, both of dates and of post-mortem possibilities, 
 was near the bottom of the school. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 135 
 
 The anachronism of this blunder reminds me of 
 a story told me by a lady whose father was a vicar in 
 the Oxford diocese under Bishop Mackarness. The 
 Bishop, who was dining at the vicarage, was taken to 
 get ready in his host's dressing-room, where my in- 
 formant's little brother was supposed to be asleep. 
 The child, however, whose mind had been agitated 
 by the prospect of the episcopal visit, was lying 
 awake ; and, on hearing the august footsteps enter 
 the room, jumped up in his cot, stared at the great 
 man, and called out, ' Are you one of God's holy 
 apostles ? ' Here may be inserted another youthful 
 mistake, which resembles the last only in being at 
 once singular and authentic. An examinee, being 
 asked what was meant by the Salic Law, answered, 
 1 The Salic Law provides that no one whose mother 
 was a woman may ascend the throne.' This Mala- 
 propist must have been cousin-german to the small 
 boy whom, when he was kept indoors by a cold, his 
 mother offered to amuse by playing at ball with him. 
 ' You can never catch,' grumbled the urchin. ' That 's 
 the worst of having a woman for one's mother.' 
 
 Keference has already been made to John Addington 
 Symonds, who was about a year junior to me. We 
 were together both at Harrow and at Oxford, and we 
 were always on very friendly terms. It is related in 
 his Life that he and I met at what must have been a 
 very interesting breakfast given by Professor Coning- 
 ton. We were both members of a society which was 
 variously designated as the Essay Society, the Mutual 
 Improvement Society, (less modestly) the Wise and 
 Good, and (with special reference to two or three of 
 its members) the Jolly Pantheists — a society of which 
 Conington, himself anything but a Pantheist, was the 
 
186 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 founder and patron. Symonds and I spent many 
 months as valetudinarian exiles, he at Davos and I 
 at St. Moritz. We tried to arrange a meeting ; but 
 the fates, in the shape of doctor's orders, interposed. 
 At last they interposed once for all in a sadder way. 
 When the news of his fatal illness at Eome reached 
 me, it recalled to me Shelley's lines on Keats : 
 
 ' To that high Capitol, where kingly Death 
 Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, 
 He came ; and bought, with price of purest breath, 
 A grave among the eternal.' 
 
 In my school-days occurred what may be called the 
 earthquake conspiracy, which I will go on to describe, 
 as I have seen the details given inaccurately in print. 
 The victim of that conspiracy was the English teacher 
 of French and German, whom (paullum mutato nomine) 
 I will call the Eev. C. Swan. Swan was an accom- 
 plished scholar and a thoroughly kind man ; but he 
 was passionate and grotesquely incompetent to govern 
 boys. His greatest difficulty was with the Sixth 
 Form. As the Sixth Form boys differed widely from 
 each other in their proficiency in modern languages, 
 they were, in respect of those languages, divided into 
 three classes. These classes went into Swan's class- 
 room at consecutive hours ; and it will be convenient 
 to distinguish them according to the order of their 
 lessons as the first, second, and third classes. One 
 day, when the boys in the first class had been rebuked 
 by Swan for making a noise, they thought of a device 
 for continuing the uproar without giving him the 
 opportunity of fixing on a special culprit. All at the 
 same instant made a movement with their feet, too 
 slight to be detected by Swan, but collectively suffi- 
 cient to cause a tremor of the old floor. When the 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKKOW (1850-6) 137 
 
 master began to scold right and left, a boy called 
 out, ' We're doing nothing, sir ; it 's an earthquake ! ' 
 Swan was puzzled and embarrassed. His embarrass- 
 ment was not lessened when, at the end of the hour, 
 the second class appeared ; for the outgoing boys had 
 whispered to the incomers that an earthquake was the 
 order of the day, and the hoax must be kept up. Nor 
 was this all. During the hour occupied by the second 
 class, the first class had time to communicate with the 
 third class ; and between them they gave greater 
 plausibility to the fiction by adding details. When 
 the second hour was over, the third class rushed up 
 to the master's bench, exclaiming with one voice, 
 ' Mr. Swan, of course you have felt the earthquake ; ' 
 and they went on to give particulars. At last poor 
 Swan suffered himself, like Merlin, to be ' over talked 
 and over worn ' ; and, like Merlin, he sealed his fate 
 by so yielding. ' Yes, yes,' he replied quite seriously 
 to his questioners ; ' I felt three sensible shocks come 
 up through the leg of the table.' An actor in this 
 mischievous farce afterwards told me that one of 
 the boys remarked that there was ' a lurid appearance 
 in the sky', and hinted that the world might be 
 coming to an end, with the further suggestion that, 
 as they would all want time to prepare themselves, 
 the lesson might with advantage be cut short. But, 
 as my chief authority for the story remembers nothing 
 of this audacious forestalment of the dies irae, I imagine 
 that the eschatological plea for a half-holiday — a plea 
 which, if reported to Vaughan, would not have been 
 to his liking — was uttered sotto voce. After this, 
 Swan's authority collapsed. His persecutors treated 
 him as something between a wild beast and a lunatic. 
 When his temper was rising, they stared at him and 
 
138 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 said aloud to each other, ' Take care, he 's getting 
 dangerous.' Things had come to such a pass that he 
 received courteous notice to quit, and he had not the 
 wisdom to take his dismissal in silence. It is right to 
 add that, though I had once incurred his wrath at 
 Harrow, yet, when we afterwards met at Oxford, I 
 found him quite friendly and hospitable. 
 
 Every one will remember the apologue of the 
 Brahmin and the three rogues, so aptly used by 
 Macaulay in his essay on Robert Montgomery's poems. 
 But a closer parallel is furnished by an incident which 
 Arago has related in his Memoirs : 
 
 ' When a master has lost consideration, without which 
 it is impossible for him to do well, the pupils allow them- 
 selves to insult him to an incredible extent. Of this I will 
 cite a single example. A pupil, M. Leboullenger, met one 
 evening in company M. Hassenfratz [a master], and had 
 a discussion with him. When he re-entered the school in the 
 morning, he mentioned this circumstance to us. " Be on your 
 guard," said one of our comrades to him ; " you will be cross- 
 questioned this evening. Be cautious, for the Master has 
 certainly prepared some great difficulties so as to raise 
 a laugh at your expense." Our anticipations were not 
 mistaken. Scarcely had the pupils arrived in the amphi- 
 theatre when M. Hassenfratz called to M. Leboullenger, who 
 came to the table. "M. Leboullenger," said the Master to 
 him, " you have seen the moon ? " " No, sir." " What, sir ! 
 you say that you have never seen the moon V "I can only 
 repeat my answer — no, sir." Beside himself with anger, and 
 seeing his prey escape him by means of this unexpected 
 answer, M. Hassenfratz addressed himself to the inspector 
 who was on duty that day to keep order, and said to him, 
 "Sir, there is M. Leboullenger who pretends never to have 
 seen the moon ! " " What would you wish me to do ? " stoically 
 replied M. Le Brun. Kepulsed on this side, the Master turned 
 once more towards M. Leboullenger, who remained calm and 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAKKOW (1850-6) 139 
 
 serious in the midst of the unspeakable amusement of the 
 whole amphitheatre. " What ! " cried the Master, " you persist 
 in maintaining that you have never seen the moon ? " " Sir," 
 returned the pupil, " I should deceive you if I told you that I 
 had not heard it spoken of ; but I have never seen it." " Sir, 
 return to your place ! " After this scene, M. Hassenfratz was 
 a master only in name, his teaching could no longer be of 
 any use.' 
 
 Swan's incapacity for managing boys was, to 
 some extent, shown by that most cultivated and 
 sympathetic of all the assistant masters, who was 
 afterwards so much revered as Bishop Westcott of 
 Durham. When the tidings of the Bishop's death 
 reached me, I was reminded of all his goodness to me 
 during my school-days. He used to revise the com- 
 positions of some of the monitors ; and it was he who 
 generally took the Sixth Form when Vaughan was 
 absent or unwell. Being myself in the Sixth between 
 1854 and 1856, I had the privilege of seeing much of 
 him ; and I am sure that all of us, boys though we 
 were, who came under his tuition, were sensible of 
 his high moral distinction, while his learning seemed 
 to us portentous. Yet somehow in school we stood 
 in far less awe of him than of his chief. This, no 
 doubt, was partly due to the fact that he, like Swan, 
 was in a subordinate position — a position which, in 
 comparison with that of the Sixth Form, was saddled 
 with a queer disability. The monitors had, and the 
 rest of the Sixth Form expected in due time to 
 acquire, the power of inflicting corporal punishment 
 on the lower boys, while the assistant masters had 
 not that power, and never would acquire it. But in 
 this and similar respects Westcott was no worse off 
 than his colleagues. Yet one or two of them sue- 
 
140 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 ceeded better with the Sixth Form than he did. In 
 spite of all his goodness and his eminence as a 
 scholar, he lacked the art of ruling boys. This 
 deficiency may have been due partly to his absorption 
 in study, but partly also to his angelic meekness and 
 simplicity. He had neither the iron hand nor the 
 velvet glove of Dr. Vaughan. 
 
 As a master, Westcott might have profited by the 
 lessons of worldly wisdom contained in some of Bacon's 
 Essays. Not, indeed, that he had neglected to study 
 the Baconian philosophy. With youthful naivete, I 
 once asked him how he liked the Novum Organum. 
 ' It 's a great book,' he answered eagerly ; ' a noble 
 book. Read it carefully by all means, and see that 
 you understand all its theories ; but don't believe tliem. 
 In his inquiry into the nature of heat, Bacon carries 
 out his own principles thoroughly ; he makes every turn 
 at exactly the right point ; and yet his conclusions are 
 wrong ! ' Westcott doubtless wished to warn me 
 against Bacon's notion that he was opening out a 
 straight and easy path which was to lead to scientific 
 truth, and which, if duly followed, was to place wise 
 men and fools pretty much on a par. 
 
 When my father was hesitating whether to send 
 me to Oxford or to Cambridge, I talked the matter 
 over with Westcott. He said decidedly that the best 
 thing for a man was to go to Trinity, Cambridge ; 
 if he did not go there, he could hardly do better than 
 go to Balliol. In this conversation he seemed to me 
 to do scant justice to poor Oxford ; but, according to 
 a friend,, he had a sort of university scale, which 
 ranked her still lower. He used to say that there 
 are three universities : (1) Trinity, (2) the rest of 
 Cambridge, and (8) Oxford. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 141 
 
 His admiration for his own college extended to its 
 master, Dr. Whewell. I asked him about Whewell's 
 famous book, The Plurality of Worlds. Westcott 
 answered that this was one of the great books of 
 the century. On the other hand, he spoke slightingly 
 of Sir David Brewster's reply to it. That reply, he 
 said, was destitute of scientific reasoning ; it had only 
 one plausible argument — an argument founded on the 
 polarization of light in the planet Jupiter ; and even 
 this was not substantiated by facts. Can he have 
 been unconsciously adapting what Johnson said of 
 a dull, tiresome man : ' That fellow seems to me to 
 possess but one idea, and that is a wrong one ' ? On 
 another occasion, Westcott referred with yet greater 
 scorn to a Harrow prize essay, which was bombastic 
 in tone : ' Its style is six times as bad as that of 
 Sir Archibald Alison.' 
 
 After these samples of what may be termed West- 
 cott's vigorous blaming, it is time to give a sample 
 or two of his vigorous praising. Hope-Edwardes, who 
 has been already mentioned, had a genius for Latin 
 versification. Did not Westcott think him unrivalled 
 in this line ? ' Not quite,' he answered. ' He has 
 one superior, but only one. Blayds's prize poem 
 on the Parthenon seems to me the finest piece 
 of Latin verse that has been written in recent 
 times.' Professor Conington, to whom I repeated 
 this remark, thought the praise of the poem too 
 high. 
 
 Westcott spoke to me with admiration of a speech 
 delivered by Canning at Plymouth in 1823. The 
 orator, combating the notion that England during 
 peace was losing her capacity for war, compares the 
 country to one of the great ships lying tranquilly in 
 
142 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 the harbour. He reflects with exultation how soon 
 such a ship, 
 
 ' upon any call of patriotism, or of necessity, would assume 
 the likeness of an animated thing, instinct with life and 
 motion — how soon it would ruffle, as it were, its swelling 
 plumage — how quickly it would put forth all its beauty and 
 its bravery, collect its scattered elements of strength, and 
 awaken its dormant thunder.' 
 
 He quoted part of this passage and called attention to 
 the effectiveness of its (more or less) trochaic ending. 
 
 He had no great liking for Macaulay, whose anti- 
 thetical style seemed to him to be, at best, a sort of 
 counsel of imperfection. Such a style, he said, bears 
 much the same relation to prose that rhyme bears to 
 verse : it is a help towards the attainment of success 
 of the second order ; but to supreme excellence it is 
 a hindrance. 
 
 Some readers will remember the outcry raised in 
 orthodox circles by that rudimentary Darwin, the 
 author of The Vestiges of Creation. Another Darwinian 
 before Darwin was Professor Baden Powell, whose 
 works struck such horror into my father that I was 
 rebuked for bringing them into his house. Being still 
 in my pupillage, I consulted Westcott as to whether 
 I should study Baden Powell's works. He strongly 
 advised me to read the Professor's chapters in defence 
 of the Transmutation of Species, and evidently looked 
 with favour on what, as Darwin's great work had not 
 yet been published, may be called their forecast of 
 evolution. 
 
 A further illustration of his liberalism in this 
 direction may be given. An old Harrovian friend, 
 who has taken up modern views, assures me that it 
 was Westcott who first started him, not indeed on the 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HARROW (1850-6) 143 
 
 broad road, but on the Broad Church road. How that 
 odd chance arose he thus describes in a letter : 
 
 ' Did I ever tell you that my home faith received its first 
 shock from Westcott? I had suggested, in elegiacs, that 
 shells found sv/mmis montibus proved Beucalionis aquas ; and 
 he asked me whether I really believed that ! ' 
 
 It may be thought strange that my able friend was so 
 much affected by Westcott's views on the Deluge, 
 which are now generally accepted ; but the fact was 
 that to many of us the Evangelical tenets seemed so 
 to combine in a consistent whole that a doubt as to 
 one of them would naturally extend itself to others. 
 We should have agreed with Fitzjames Stephen in 
 thinking that to give up the miracles of the Old 
 Testament, and then to hope to retain those of the 
 New, was like applying a lighted match to a barrel 
 of gunpowder and expecting only half the gunpowder 
 to explode. 
 
 It is all the more remarkable that Westcott showed 
 this sympathy with modern theories, as his own views 
 on inspiration were the strictest possible. Of those 
 views two examples may be given. I heard him 
 ask a boy at Harrow how he accounted for St. Paul's 
 employment of some unusual word. The boy had the 
 hardihood to answer, 'He thought it sounded well.' 
 'You have high authority on your side,' said West- 
 cott, naming an eminent divine, 'but I cannot 
 believe that St. Paul ever used a word which was 
 not the fittest for his argument.' The other example 
 to which I refer occurred much later. In my Memoir 
 of Jowett I quote the following criticism, without 
 mentioning the name of the critic : 
 
 ' I was always grieved by the indefiniteness of his 
 
144 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 [Jowett's] scholarship. He seemed to think that words and 
 phrases had no particular meaning, while I was taught, and 
 with all my heart believe, that " there is a mystery in every 
 syllable " of St. Paul (say) or St. John.' %, rv„ c-c-. . P- ^ 
 
 I may now state that the author of this criticism was 
 Bishop Westcott. At an earlier date he spoke to me 
 with admiration of Jowett's character. But (if I may 
 slightly alter a familiar phrase) there was no sympathy 
 lost between the two men. In my Oxford days I 
 cross-questioned Jowett as to his opinion about West- 
 cott. ' Mr. Westcott,' he chirped, ' is very able and 
 very learned, but not, I should say, very sensible or 
 very philosophical.' This may be thought damning 
 with the faintest of faint praise. But it must be 
 remembered that the two theologians differed, inter 
 alia, on one fundamental point. Jowett is said to 
 have called (and certainly thought) Butler's Analogy 
 ' a tissue of false analogies '. On the other hand, 
 Westcott told me that he himself owed the greatest 
 possible debt to that work ; he even thought that in 
 his youth, but for Butler's influence, ' he might have 
 gone into one of the sister Churches.' 
 
 Dr. Hort told me that, when Dr. Lightfoot was 
 appointed to the See of Durham, Westcott exclaimed, 
 ' We now have a Bishop who will never be afraid 
 to say what he thinks, and who will do his duty 
 without flinching.' Might it not be added, that in 
 this respect Westcott himself was Bishop Lightfoot's 
 worthy successor ? 
 
 Once, in discussing with me Gladstone's character, 
 Bishop Westcott expressed himself thus : ' Mr. Glad- 
 stone's literary judgements have always appeared to 
 me to be singularly traditional. His character was 
 immeasurably greater than anything that he either 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT HAEEOW (1850-6) 145 
 
 did or said. . . I was far more interested by the 
 manner in which he held and expressed his opinions 
 than by the opinions themselves.' In like manner, 
 some of Westcott's friends and admirers will think 
 that he himself was greater and better than his 
 writings. And there are those who, while differing 
 from him widely on speculative matters, can yet 
 regard him as the fairest flower of scholarly orthodoxy 
 and of Christian charity that England has seen, at 
 any rate since the death of Dean Church. Sint animae 
 nostrae cum illo. 
 
 Extract from Erskine's Defence of Stockdale. 
 
 ' Our Empire in the East would, long since, have been lost to 
 Great Britain, if civil skill and military prowess had not united 
 their efforts to support an authority, which Heaven never gave, 
 by means which it never can sanction. I know what reluctant 
 nations submitting to our authority feel, and how such feelings 
 can alone be suppressed. I have heard them in my youth from 
 a naked savage, in the indignant character of a Prince surrounded 
 by his subjects, addressing the Governor of a British colony, 
 holding a bundle of sticks in his hand as the notes of his 
 unlettered eloquence. "Who is it," said the jealous ruler over 
 the desert, encroached upon by the restless foot of English 
 adventure, " who is it that causes the river to rise in the high 
 mountains, and to empty itself into the ocean ? Who is it that 
 causes to blow the loud winds of winter, and that calms them 
 again in the summer ? Who is it that rears up the shade of those 
 lofty forests, and blasts them with the quick lightning at His 
 pleasure? The same Being who gave to you a country on the 
 other side of the waters, and gave ours to us ; and by this 
 title we will defend it," said the warrior, throwing down his 
 tomahawk upon the ground, and raising the war-sound of his 
 nation.' 
 
 L 
 
146 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Alas that Erskine's wit and wisdom have been so short-lived ! 
 His eloquent utterances are as clean forgotten as his quaint 
 epigram : 
 
 ' The French have taste in all they do, 
 
 Which we are quite without ; 
 For Nature, that to them gave gout, 
 To us gave only gout.' 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 
 
 ' Stantes erant pedes nostri in atriis tuis, Oxonia . . . Eogate 
 quae ad pacem sunt Oxoniae, et abundantia diligentibus te.' — 
 Psalm cxxii. 2, 6 (adapted). 
 
 Professor Wall's lectures on Logic will be well 
 remembered by my contemporaries at Balliol, and by 
 many who were there long before me or long after me. 
 He was not popular; and between him and Jowett 
 there was, seemingly, no love lost. The cause may 
 have been that there was little in common between 
 the broad mind of the Master and the mind of Wall, 
 which was as sharp and as narrow as a knife. But, 
 after all, this narrow sharpness was needed by the 
 undergraduates as a corrective to the mysticism of 
 Jowett, who is reported to have expressed a wish 
 ' that a desolating scepticism could be thrown over the 
 Logic Schools '. An able pupil of Wall's said of him 
 that, though he did not keep pace with the age, he was 
 useful even in his errors ; for has not Bacon maintained 
 that error is not so great an impediment to truth as 
 obscurity? The mention of Bacon's name brings to 
 my mind a felicitous criticism that Wall once made on 
 an utterance of his. Being anything but a worshipper 
 of the ancient philosophers, Bacon committed himself 
 to the paradox that the weightier writings of antiquity 
 have perished, while the lighter of them have been 
 borne down to us on the river of time. This opinion, 
 Wall justly remarked, is wrong ; and he added that the 
 
 l2 
 
148 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 error is based on Bacon's manner of wording the meta- 
 phor—on his use of question-begging epithets. The 
 same metaphor would have pointed to a diametrically 
 opposite conclusion if the writings of antiquity which 
 have floated down safely on the river of time, instead 
 of being condemned as light, had been praised as 
 buoyant. Here is a longer and more elaborate specimen 
 of Wall's mode of exposition : 
 
 ' Pope has the couplet, £ •'>' - : ■ , >'- n C W S 1 ' 3 
 
 " For wit and judgement often are at strife, 
 Tho' meant each other's aid, like man and wife.'' 
 
 It is sometimes said that the reason why they are thus at 
 strife is because the witty man can see resemblances but not 
 differences, and the man of sound judgement can see differences 
 but not resemblances. But this is wrong. The man who has 
 an eye for a certain class of resemblances has also an eye for 
 the corresponding class of differences; and vice versa. The 
 real opposition is between the man who can discern sensuous 
 resemblances and differences on the one hand, and the man 
 who can discern fundamental resemblances and differences on 
 the other hand. A. B. says of somebody that his nose is like 
 a door-knocker. You look at the nose and you see that it is 
 like a door-knocker. The man who observes this sensuous 
 resemblance will also be quick to observe sensuous differences ; 
 and we call him a witty man. On the other hand, C. D. can 
 detect fundamental differences between things. He will also 
 be able to detect fundamental resemblances between them; 
 and we call him a man of judgement. But it is unlikely 
 either that A. B. will have the judgement of C. D. or that C. D. 
 will have the wit of A. B.' 
 
 This sample of Wall's style illustrates his admirable 
 clearness. Doubtless that clearness may have been 
 connected with his dislike of guarding his main propo- 
 sitions by means of saving qualifications. But, as in 
 the above example, are not such qualifications needed ? 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 149 
 
 Instance upon instance could be cited to show that wit 
 is, at any rate, not always ' at strife ' either with sound 
 judgement or with mental power. Aristophanes, 
 Lucian, Voltaire, Chesterfield, Swift, Sheridan, 
 Canning, Sydney Smith, Whately, Mansel are obvious 
 cases in point. Might it not be more plausibly urged 
 that wit and humour are solvents of enthusiasm ? 
 Such, at any rate, I conceive to be the truth underlying 
 the following extravagant admission, nay, self-accusa- 
 tion of Sydney Smith : ' I wish, after all I have said 
 about wit and humour, I could satisfy myself of their 
 good effects upon the character and disposition, but I 
 am convinced the probable tendency of both is to 
 corrupt the understanding and the heart.' 
 
 The mention of Archbishop Whately may serve as 
 an introduction to an anecdote told of him by Wall. 
 A candidate for Orders, calling on the Archbishop by 
 appointment, found him lying on a sofa, and was 
 startled by the announcement, ' I am a Jew. Convert 
 me.' After thoroughly defeating his young antagonist, 
 the mitred champion of heterodoxy dismissed him 
 with the words, 'Come again to-morrow, and you 
 will find me a Mahometan.' Wall spoke of the 
 puzzles with which Whately used to regale his friends. 
 One of these was : Q. ' What is the vocative of Cat ? ' 
 A. ' Puss.' Wall maintained that the riddle was also 
 sound grammar. According to him the true vocative 
 of 'le roi' was 'sire'. The following anecdote rests 
 on the authority, not of Wall, but of a personal 
 friend of the Whatelys, who informed me that the 
 Archbishop was fond of telling it against his wife, 
 while she, for her part, did not relish it. Mrs. Whately, 
 after making a purchase at a ready-money shop in 
 Dublin, found that she had not her purse with her, 
 
150 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 and begged to be allowed to pay when next she passed ; 
 but the shopman was obdurate. Drawing herself up, 
 she said, ' Do you know who I am ? I am the Arch- 
 bishop's lady.' ' Madam, if you were his wedded wife it 
 would make no difference.' Some years ago, a Spanish 
 or Portuguese lady went to a Lord Mayor's dinner in 
 company with a kinswoman of mine. Seeing an 
 English lady treated with marked deference, she asked 
 who she was. My friend replied, ' O'est la femme de 
 l'archeveque de Cantorbery.' 'La femme d'un arch- 
 eveque ! Comme c'est drole. II faut que je la regarde 
 bien ; ' and she set herself to stare as intently as if 
 the poor archbishopess had been a vagrant from the 
 planet Mars. 
 
 Of the second Sir Benjamin Brodie — not the great 
 surgeon, but the Professor of Chemistry — I saw a 
 great deal at Oxford. In regard to his general point 
 of view, it is enough to say that, hearing a friend 
 complain of the recurrence of one of Jowett's fits of 
 orthodoxy, he drily remarked, ' It is hard for a dog to 
 run with thirty-nine stones tied to his neck.' He 
 would have agreed with Renan in thinking that, while 
 a Catholic priest is like a bird in a cage, a Protestant 
 clergyman is like a bird with a wing clipped ; he 
 seems free, and so in fact he is until he essays to fly. 
 
 But my present concern is with a conversation 
 about Professor Sylvester which took place at Brodie's 
 table. We were told by our host that, in a primitive 
 and, as a modern Lamb might say, unrsteam-tainted part 
 of the country (probably in Wales), Sylvester had 
 been travelling on the box of a stage-coach. As the 
 coach halted at one of the inns, two odd-looking old 
 ladies were seen talking to each other. Presently one 
 of them, who was accosted by her friend as 'Mrs. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 151 
 
 Gamp ', walked away. The friend waited to see the 
 start ; and, as the coach went off, Sylvester, not being 
 shy, shouted to her from the box, ' Good-bye, Mrs. 
 Harris.' The coachman stared. ' I thought, sir, that 
 you were a stranger in these parts. How on earth did 
 you know that that lady's name is Mrs. Harris ? ' The 
 old lady was in fact a Mrs. Harris. 
 
 When Brodie had ended, we proceeded, more 
 Oxoniensi, to discuss the strange adventure. Scepticism 
 was then rife among University Liberals, and one of 
 the party had the hardihood to suggest that the whole 
 story might be a myth. But Brodie quashed this 
 objection by saying that he had the anecdote from 
 a trustworthy witness — I think Henry Smith — who 
 had it from Sylvester himself. Two other solutions, 
 and only two, were brought forward. Was it at all 
 likely that by what may be called a fortuitous 
 concourse of intellectual atoms the two surnames were 
 associated in fact as well as in fiction, and that, in 
 very truth, Sylvester had hit the mark with a random 
 shot ? Or had Dickens stumbled upon the old ladies, 
 and then taken their names in vain ? To this latter 
 hypothesis there would seem to be a grave objection. 
 That the great novelist, if he had encountered any 
 such quaint and Cranfordian specimens of womanhood, 
 would have made literary capital out of their pecu- 
 liarities is more than probable ; but it is hardly 
 credible that, knowing that his book might make its 
 way into odd corners, he would have run the risk of 
 giving needless offence by proclaiming the actual 
 names to the world. It is true that he took great 
 pains to draw from real life suitable names for his 
 characters. Indeed, a lawyer has left on record that 
 he himself saw in a solicitor's office a deed containing 
 
152 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 the names of Pickwick, Winkle, and Tupman ; and he is 
 convinced that Dickens, who was for a time employed 
 in an attorney's office, borrowed the names from this 
 deed. Well, assuming his opinion to be right, one 
 would like to know whether the three worthies were 
 still alive when their fictitious namesakes were made 
 to play a comic, nay, a grotesque part in the famous 
 romance. Eeverting after the lapse of about half a 
 century to the puzzle which was thus played with by 
 Brodie and his guests, I would suggest an explanation 
 which is perhaps less improbable than either of those 
 above mentioned. It does not seem to me at all clear 
 that the real Mrs. Gamp's friend was a Mrs. Harris, or 
 that the coachman had ever heard of her before. He 
 may merely have echoed the name given by his 
 neighbour. Not suspecting the capacity for gratuitous 
 and frolicsome impertinence which sometimes lurks 
 under an exterior of academic gravity, he must 
 naturally have supposed that the traveller who 
 addressed the lady by name really knew her name, 
 and must as naturally have wondered how and where 
 the acquaintance between them had arisen, and why 
 it was that the greeting was so long deferred, so 
 laconic, and so entirely on one side. If this was the 
 real explanation, it may serve to throw light on the 
 development, not merely of one mongrel myth — of 
 a myth, I mean, born partly of truth — but of the whole 
 class of such myths. 
 
 Mansel, afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, was the best- 
 known Oxford wit in my undergraduate days. I have 
 already referred to him as a conspicuous instance of 
 the union of wit with analytical power. When The 
 Times some years ago ascribed the christening (or 
 shall I say the antichristening ?) of the Essayists and 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 153 
 
 Keviewers as Septem contra Christum to the great ortho- 
 dox wit of the day, it was understood that the writer 
 alluded to Mansel. Some of my readers may have 
 heard before his ready reply to the lady who showed 
 him a donkey with its head caught in a hurdle : 
 ' It 's a case of asphyxia (ass-fixia).' Here is a less well- 
 known mot of his. When he was crossing to Ostend 
 on a stormy day, a friend told him that land was in 
 sight. He replied piteously: 'Quodcunque ostendis 
 mihi sic, incredulus odi.' 
 
 When it was first suggested that each candidate for 
 the degree of D.D. instead of maintaining a thesis in 
 the Divinity Schools should write two dissertations, 
 Mansel vented his Conservative wrath in an epigram : 
 
 ' The degree of D.D. 
 
 You propose to convey 
 To an A. double S. 
 
 For a double S.A.' [Essay]. 
 
 A late kinsman of his told me of two of his good 
 sayings which were new to me. During the mania 
 for what was then called electro-biology, he took 
 a disc and gazed hard at it without result. ' 1 cannot/ 
 he exclaimed, ' agree with the Latin grammar in 
 saying didici a disco, for I have learned nothing from 
 the disc.' All his sympathies were on the side of the 
 black cloth ; and once, when he thought that the 
 clergy were being made scapegoats by the reformers, 
 he was naturally indignant. But his anger was 
 tempered by wit. ' The Badicals,' he said, ' are giving 
 effect to the injunction — Due nigras pecudes; ea prima 
 piacula sunto ' (First to the sacrificial altar bring black 
 sheep). Mansel, it is clear, did not relish this form of 
 clerical precedence over laymen. But, in good sooth, 
 
154 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 might not such precedence be plausibly defended? 
 For myself, I have sometimes thought that Quintus 
 Curtius would have shown gumption as well as 
 modesty if he had assumed that a few time-honoured 
 flamens would be a costlier and more acceptable 
 sacrifice than a raw soldier, and that therefore the 
 first plunge into the abyss ought to be taken, willingly 
 or unwillingly, by a bevy of sacerdotal grandees. The 
 only noteworthy remark of Mansel's that I myself 
 heard was made when the question of secret voting at 
 elections was in agitation. He had the whimsical 
 notion that the ballot might be rendered inoperative 
 by a trick. It would be easy, he said, for a landlord 
 to send his agents to call on his tenants, at least on 
 those whose politics were doubtful. In the course of 
 conversation the agents would offer to bet against the 
 candidate whom the landlord wished to bring in. If 
 the tenants took the bet, they would scarcely vote in 
 such a way as to lessen their chance of winning. If 
 they refused to take it, well, so much the worse for 
 them. 
 
 Henry Smith used sometimes to be called the 
 greatest man in Oxford, not excepting Jowett. He 
 was certainly the most all-round great man ; for, 
 besides being great as a scholar and philosopher, he 
 was supremely great as a mathematician. Jowett, in 
 his obituary sermon, describes him as ' one of the 
 greatest mathematical geniuses of this century ' ; and 
 in another part of the same sermon he goes the length 
 of calling him ' one of the most distinguished men 
 of this century'. Perhaps, indeed, his devotion to 
 mathematics was not without its drawback. It used 
 to be said of Sylvester, Henry Smith, and Cayley that 
 what Sylvester wrote was intelligible only to himself, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 155 
 
 Henry Smith, and Cayley ; what Henry Smith wrote 
 was intelligible only to himself and Cayley ; but what 
 Cayley wrote was intelligible only to himself. This 
 speculative isolation tends to make mathematicians 
 dull talkers ; and Henry Smith was singularly dis- 
 tinguished as a very brilliant talker. From the 
 abstract nature of the subject he professed Henry 
 Smith was almost unknown to the outer world, but 
 his comparative obscurity may be partly due to his 
 commonplace name. The surname Smith has need to 
 be introduced by some such Christian name as Sydney, 
 Adam, Horace, or Goldwin. 
 
 On my once remarking to Henry Smith that Jowett 
 sometimes talked like a Conservative, he startled me 
 by calling him one of the most Radical of his friends. 
 He added that he was referring to the Master's 
 ecclesiastical views ; Jowett seemed to him to be 
 prepared to expand the Church so as to make it in- 
 clude any one ; 1 and he gave me to understand that his 
 own ideals were less comprehensive. On the other 
 hand, when I spoke of Henry Smith's anti-Radicalism 
 to Jowett, the Master replied with something of 
 a chuckle, 'Well, he's a Liberal in religion.' From 
 these and many other indications it was easy to infer 
 that Henry Smith had strong Conservative instincts. 
 Like nearly all academic Liberals, but earlier in life 
 than most of them, he was impressed by the vanity 
 of political wishes and aspirations. Hope long deferred 
 
 1 Jowett was doubtless expressing his own ecclesiastical views 
 when, in his obituary sermon on Arthur Stanley, he said of him, 
 ' His sympathies, notwithstanding his liberal opinions, were 
 rather with the old order of things than with the new. He 
 would have liked to see the Church and the Universities freed 
 from restriction, but still rooted in the past.' 
 
156 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 maketh the heart callous ; and, tired with looking 
 forward to the Earthly Paradise, 
 
 ' whose margin fades 
 For ever and for ever when I move/ 
 
 he became thoroughly disillusioned. At all events, it 
 was instructive to contrast his confidence in regard to 
 science with his diffidence — a diffidence often veiled 
 with a genial irony — in other matters. Indeed, if 
 ' Faith ' be taken to mean belief in the ideals of 
 reformers, and ' Love ' to mean zeal for the attainment 
 of those ideals, Henry Smith, when himself para- 
 doxically inclined, might have echoed the paradox of 
 Clough : 
 
 ' Not, as the Scripture says, is, I think, the fact. Ere our 
 
 death-day, 
 Faith, I think, does pass, and Love ; but Knowledge abideth. 
 Let us seek Knowledge ; — the rest may come and go as it 
 
 happens.' 
 
 For assuredly the remedial force in which he trusted 
 was the vis medicatrix scientiae. 1 This being his mental 
 attitude, there is no wonder that such an uncom- 
 promising Little-Englander as Freeman regarded him 
 as an idealist run to seed, and that, when the war 
 between Russia and Turkey broke out, Freeman was 
 for assigning him a seat in the Turkish Parliament as 
 member for Laodicea ! 
 
 In my youth one of the ablest of the Fellows of 
 Balliol impressed on me that philosophical scepticism 
 
 1 In a somewhat similar spirit Sydney Smith, setting forth the 
 slow progress of education, contrasts it with the rapid progress of 
 science and the mechanical arts : ' If men had made no more 
 progress in the common arts of life than they have in education, 
 we should at this moment be dividing our food with our fingers 
 and drinking out of the palms of our hands.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 157 
 
 often produces a somewhat rickety Conservatism. It 
 may have been on this wise that his friend Henry 
 Smith inclined to the belief that le mieux est I'ennemi 
 du Men. 
 
 Henry Smith was noted for his witty sayings, his 
 amusing anecdotes, and his happily applied quotations. 
 The wittiest of his sallies was not very good-natured. 
 He said of an able but not too diffident scientist, who 
 then edited Nature, that he did not sufficiently dis- 
 tinguish between the Editor [of Nature] and the 
 Author of Nature. When censuring the too common 
 practice of airing novel and misunderstandable opinions 
 in the presence of young ladies, he gave utterance 
 to an ornithological paradox : ' We must remember 
 that little ducks are sometimes also little geese.' 
 An undergraduate, puzzled by something mathe- 
 matical which he ought to have understood, apologized 
 to Henry Smith for troubling him about it on Sunday 
 morning. Smith drily replied that he had no scruple 
 in helping him; 'for it is written that "if thine ox 
 or thine ass fall into a pit ", he may be helped out on 
 the Sabbath day.' Henry Smith, in reference doubt- 
 less to the popular outcry against Jowett and Darwin, 
 was fond of quoting Koger Bacon's complaint when 
 he was imprisoned through the ' incredible folly ' 
 of those with whom he had to deal : Circa id tempus 
 in carcere cohibitus sum propter incredibilem stultitiam 
 eorum quibuscum agere habui. He cited a quaint 
 remark made by the mathematical Gauss in illustra- 
 tion of the common experience of men who enjoy 
 the work of research, but hate the labour of publish- 
 ing the results obtained : Generare iucundum est, par- 
 turire molestum. 
 
 Here is one of Smith's anecdotes. A young girl 
 
158 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 was had up before the magistrate by a farmer for 
 killing one of his ducks with a stone. The case 
 against her was clear; but it was thought worth 
 while to call witnesses to prove that she had been 
 in the habit of using bad language. In solemn accents 
 the magistrate addressed her: 'Little girl, you have 
 heard the evidence against you, and you see how one 
 thing leads to another. You began by cursing and 
 swearing and blaspheming your Maker, and you have 
 ended by throwing a stone at a duck.'" The bathos 
 may remind us of the rebuke addressed by Keate 
 to the Eton choristers for their unpunctuality : ' Your 
 conduct is an insult to the Almighty and keeps the 
 canons waiting.' 
 
 At the time of the election for the Sanscrit professor- 
 ship in 1860, when Max Miiller the scholar was beaten 
 by Monier Williams the saint, Smith was strong on 
 the side of Max Miiller. He told me that a portly 
 divine, after giving his vote for Monier Williams, 
 called out, 'I hate those damned intellectuals.' This 
 may be capped with Mr. Tuckwell's anecdote of 
 Lancelot Lee, who, when bothered by an under- 
 graduate about a puzzling equation, waited till the 
 importunate student had shut the door, and then 
 exclaimed, ' I hate your damned clever fellows.' By 
 the way, Sir Henry Jenkyns, the parliamentary 
 draughtsman, who was thrown into contact with 
 all sorts and conditions of politicians, told me that 
 an old Tory M.P. had said to him : ' There are no 
 Conservatives now. The only two parties are — 
 Liberals and damned Liberals.' 
 
 Smith told me of an opponent of Max Miiller who, 
 when the latter was thought likely to be successful, 
 comforted himself with the reflection, ' I am generally 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOKD (1856-60) 159 
 
 in a minority in this world, and I hope to be in a 
 minority in the next.' Let me compare or contrast 
 this faith in minorities with Lord Houghton's mode 
 of announcing his own fatal illness to a friend : ' Yes, 
 I am going to join the majority — and you know 
 I have always preferred minorities.' 
 
 After reporting to me the above epigram of the 
 Oxford Tory, Henry Smith observed that this epigram 
 could be turned round in a variety of ways, and that 
 each way it suggested something curious. Emboldened 
 by this confident assertion of his, I repeated the 
 epigram to my father in the hope that he, too, would 
 see the humour of it. But, alas ! the plea for minorities, 
 with all that it involved, only drew from him a 
 comment of a matter-of-fact sort. ' The remark,' he 
 said, 'does not seem to me singular at all. Every 
 good man hopes to go to heaven ; and we of course 
 know that those who go there will be a minority.' 
 And to heaven there was, according to his creed, 
 a hideous and clearly defined alternative. But his 
 practice was far better than his principles. Would 
 he, for example, have incurred the responsibility of 
 bringing a large family into the world if, in regard 
 to the majority of human beings, his practical creed had 
 not been rather mors ianua vitae than mors porta gehennae? 
 
 Considering Henry Smith's reputation as a wit, 
 I am sorry not to have succeeded better in illustrating 
 it. But perhaps my difficulty can be explained. 
 ' Miss Edgeworth,' said Sydney Smith, ' does not say 
 witty things ; but such a perfume of wit runs through 
 her conversation as makes it very brilliant.' And, 
 in like manner, Charles Bowen observed in regard 
 to Henry Smith : ' The brightest conversation is often 
 the most evanescent, and the finesse of wit, like a 
 
160 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 musical laugh, disappears with the occasion, and 
 cannot be reproduced on paper or in print.' 
 
 Of Charles Bowen himself, better known as Lord 
 Bowen, I could write a good deal, having sat with 
 him at the Scholars' table at Balliol, having discussed 
 wide questions with him when he coached me in the 
 Ethics, and having met him in after life in various 
 places, including Rome. But his biography has been 
 excellently written by my old schoolfellow, Sir Henry 
 Cunningham ; and his fame, both as a lawyer and 
 as a scholar, is established. I will confine myself 
 to his lesser and less-known qualities. ' Those who 
 knew him intimately,' writes Mr. George Eussell, 
 'would say that he was the best talker in London.' 
 Praise like this could not be earned without the 
 possession of great wit ; and it is with his wit that 
 my concern now lies. Here are a few of his ' common 
 or garden ' Ions mots. When scholars were discussing 
 whether a telegraphic message should be called a 
 ' telegram ' or a ' telegrapheme ', Bowen was the 
 reputed author of the suggestion that the unsaintly 
 expletive ' damn ' might be made more tolerable by 
 being expanded into ' dapheme '. 
 
 Bowen followed the example of Jowett in thoroughly 
 distrusting metaphysics. Thus, Jowett dissuaded a 
 pupil from reading T. H. Green's Prolegomena ; and 
 Bowen defined a metaphysician as ' a blind man 
 groping in a dark room for a black cat which is not 
 there'. Was it not Berkeley who said that meta- 
 physicians first kick up the dust and then complain 
 that they cannot see? Jowett once told me that 
 Voltaire defined metaphysics as ' Beaucoup de grands 
 mots qu'on ne peut pas expliquer, pour ce qu'on ne 
 les comprend pas '. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 161 
 
 A friend writes to me : ' Bowen and I rowed in 
 the same "torpid". I remember his saying, "The 
 galley-slaves were better off than we are. Two or 
 three of them were chained to one oar." ' He doubt- 
 less spoke in that velvety voice in which, some years 
 later, after returning from a climb up an Alpine 
 aiguille with a party of young ladies, he said to a 
 friend : ' I have solved the riddle of the schoolmen ; 
 for I have seen how many angels can balance themselves 
 on the point of a needle.' Being requested by a lady 
 to find a name for a society which she and some 
 lively and, so to say, reasonably frivolous friends 
 talked of starting in opposition to the too serious 
 society which glories in the appellation of the Souls, 
 Bowen paused for a moment and then replied in his 
 semi- Jowettian chirp : ' I think you might call your- 
 selves Parasols.' 
 
 I speak of his chirp as only semi- Jowettian ; for 
 it had a character of its own. In fact, he had at 
 Balliol, and retained to the last, more or less of that 
 set and, as it were, stereotyped graciousness which 
 outsiders, according to their several standpoints, have 
 variously denominated the Rugby manner, the Balliol 
 manner, or the Oxford manner. It was even said 
 of him that, when addressing a jury, he spoke to 
 them as if he were asking them to dance with him. 
 This mannerism was no doubt a drawback to the 
 display of his great qualities; but it gave effect to 
 his sallies of wit, and by so doing stamped them on 
 the public memory. Let me here reproduce some 
 of those flashes that lit up the solemnity of Bowen 
 the judge. If one-fourth of my readers remember, 
 three-fourths of them will have forgotten, that when 
 the judges proposed to insert in an address to the 
 
 M 
 
162 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 late Queen the modest phrase, ' Conscious as we are 
 of our own shortcomings,' Bowen suggested the 
 emendation, 'Conscious as we are of each other's 
 shortcomings!' Once, when through some accident 
 he was suddenly called upon to preside at the 
 Admiralty Court, he gracefully apologized for his 
 want of experience in that department, but promised 
 to do his best, adding with a smile : 
 
 ' And may there be no moaning of the Bar 
 When I put out to sea.' x 
 
 Was it on the same occasion that, having to break 
 new judicial ground, he playfully reminded a friend 
 of the placard posted up in a Californian music-hall — 
 ' Don't shoot at the musician. He is doing his best ' ? 
 In my Harrow days one of the ablest of the assistant 
 masters, the Eev. S. A. Pears (afterwards Head 
 Master of Eepton), told me that he had been reading 
 a report of a speech in which Mr. Gladstone moved 
 the laughter of the House of Commons by unwarily 
 exclaiming : ' A man can only die once — I may be mis- 
 taken ' ! Such a rhetorical solecism on the part of 
 Mr. Gladstone taxes our powers of belief, even if it 
 be granted that, in the early fifties, he was not quite 
 the master of his craft that he afterwards became. 
 But Pears was habitually accurate, and his account 
 
 1 Wit being equal in two epigrams or adapted quotations, the 
 kindlier must carry the day ; and therefore this pleasantry of 
 Bowen's should be ranked far higher than that of the humorist 
 who, on hearing of the assassination of Alexander II, grimly 
 exclaimed, ' Urit me Glycerae nitor ' (nitro-glycerine burns me). 
 Need I explain that the real meaning of Horace's line is ' The 
 beauty of Grlycera sets me on fire ' ? I once ventured (though 
 I hardly dare to repeat it even in a note) a defence of Sir Evelyn 
 Baring's (Lord Cromer) policy in Egypt by saying 'Egyptian 
 restiveness must be checked by a Baring rein.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 163 
 
 has seemed to me more credible since I received a 
 letter in which a somewhat similar ' thing one would 
 have wished to express differently' is reported of 
 Lord Bowen. My correspondent, himself an ear- 
 witness, writes as follows : 
 
 ' Were you in the Hall, at some gathering of old members of 
 Balliol, when Bowen began his speech with, " I well remember 
 the first day of my life " — at which the irreverent company 
 laughed ? When the laughter had subsided, Bowen in the 
 same voice repeated the same words. Again the company 
 laughed. Bowen a third time repeated the same words, 
 looking grave and annoyed. So no one laughed, and he 
 finished the sentence : " I well remember the first day of my 
 life on which I received a letter from a great man." ' 
 
 This aposiopesis brings to my memory a sentence 
 in a sermon which Mark Pattison doubtfully ascribed, 
 I think, to Whitefield: '"J can do all things" (No, 
 Paul, you can't, I defy you) — " through Christ which 
 strengthened me " (Yes, Paul, you're all right now).' 
 
 Some years ago a working man of the best type, 
 having been laid up in a London hospital with an 
 illness which needed incessant care, was at last nursed 
 into convalescence. Gratitude to the kind lady who 
 had tended him beamed on his honest face, as he 
 wished her farewell with untutored cordiality : ' Good- 
 bye, Miss Nurse, and thank you heartily. If there 
 ever was a fallen angel on earth, it's you.' An old 
 Balliol friend, to whom I told this anecdote, capped 
 it with a quaint narrative of Charles Bowen which he 
 had at first hand. Bowen, when at Oxford, went to 
 a tobacconist's shop to order a peculiar kind of tobacco. 
 As the woman in the shop did not understand the 
 order, he explained that her husband would under- 
 stand it perfectly. 'My husband, sir, is above.' 
 
 m2 
 
164 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 Bowen: 'Surely you can call him down.' 'No, sir, 
 he is in heaven.' 
 
 Mention has already been made of the Rev. W. E. Jelf, 
 with whom I read during three consecutive summers 
 at his house in North Wales. As Censor of Christ 
 Church, he had been very unpopular ; as Proctor, he 
 had, in modern phrase, been phenomenally so. But 
 to me personally he was always kind and pleasant, 
 except on the last day that I spent under his roof, 
 when, through the indiscretion of a fellow-pupil, he 
 unfortunately learnt that I disbelieved in the univer- 
 sality of the Deluge. I may tell again a story which 
 gains in point when I add, as now I can, the name 
 of my informant. Many years ago, a scholarly wag, 
 noted for his good wine, invited to dinner the Head 
 and tutors of a famous College. The wine gave general 
 satisfaction until a new kind was brought round, 
 which all were expected to drink, but which no one 
 seemed to appreciate. ' You liked all my wines 
 separately,' said the host, ' but I have now mixed 
 them together, and you dislike the compound. Just 
 so, individually, you are my best friends ; but, when 
 you act collectively, you are the most detestable set 
 of men I know.' 1 
 
 When Jelf told me this story in the fifties, I some- 
 how imagined that the guests of the facetious enter- 
 tainer were the Dean and Canons of Christ Church. 
 But, on my asking him many years later whether this 
 was so, he answered in the negative, but laughingly 
 refused to name the College to whose governing body 
 
 1 Compare the comment on the Germans addressed by the 
 English heroine of Cynthia's Way to a German friend : ' You're 
 very nice individually, but collectively, when you begin to talk 
 about us, you're wild asses braying in the wilderness.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 165 
 
 the equivocal compliment had been paid. From his 
 manner of refusing, I strongly suspect that the Principal 
 who, with his subordinates, had been thus blessed 
 individually and cursed collectively, was no other than 
 my informant's brother, the courteous and amiable 
 Dr. Jelf of King's College, who is now, alas ! chiefly 
 remembered as the champion of hell-fire and the 
 persecutor of Maurice. 
 
 Dr. Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale about Boswell : 
 ' He wants to see Wales ; but, except the woods of 
 Bach-y-Graig, what is there in Wales?' Could even 
 Johnson have written thus if he had seen the ten 
 miles between Dolgelly and Barmouth ? It was about 
 the middle of the Mawddach valley that Jelf resided. 
 He spoke enthusiastically of the neighbourhood where 
 he had spent many happy years, and had been 
 especially fortunate in his friends. The most original 
 of those friends had been an old Sir Kobert Vaughan, 
 who died before I came on the scene. Sir Kobert 
 carried his hatred of modernity so far that he refused 
 to enter a railway train, even when going to London. 
 His special aversion was Peel, whose name he pro- 
 nounced ' Pail '. Jelf described Sir Eobert as a fine 
 gentleman of the old school ; but, like many such 
 gentlemen, he had a despotic side. A sample of his 
 squirearchical absolutism was mentioned to me by my 
 tutor. His dinner was at five o'clock ; and, as the 
 clock struck, he and his family entered the room ; 
 and it was a high crime if his guests were not equally 
 punctual, even though some of them came from a 
 distance. When they arrived late, he received them 
 with his wonted courtesy ; but then, with much bow- 
 ing and scraping and, as Lord Burleigh said when 
 ordering the infliction of torture, 'as charitably as 
 
166 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 such a thing can be,' he conducted them to the side 
 table, where they had to remain during the whole of 
 their long meal. Nay, the autocrat of the dinner table 
 had a yet further device. Outside his lodge, which 
 was three-quarters of a mile from the house, there 
 was a sham clock which stood always at five minutes 
 to five; so that his uninitiated visitors, fearing the 
 doom of the side table, galloped through the park at 
 break-neck speed. 
 
 Here is another of Jelf 's stories. Once at a West 
 End party, on the arrival of aristocratic visitors, the 
 servant preluded the announcement of their titles 
 with such conventional flourishes as ' the Most Noble ' 
 or ' the Eight Honourable '. He was taken to task 
 for wasting time on these prefixes and told to give 
 the titles plain and simple. Presently, on the appear- 
 ance of a new batch of guests, the too docile domestic 
 called out, ' The simple Lady Waterpark and the two 
 plain Miss Cavendishes' (the lapse of at least sixty 
 years dispenses me from reticence about their names). 
 This anecdote was capped by Jelf with one drawn 
 from his own experience. When some visitors crossed 
 the Mawddach to call on him, his raw servant 
 announced them as ' Them people as lives on t'other 
 side of the water '. This gaucherie may be matched 
 by one which at least so far resembles it that, in both 
 instances, the narrative is authentic and the scene 
 of it in Wales. A drawing-room full of visitors was 
 once startled by the announcement of a Welsh maid, 
 'Mr. Hughes has called, ma'am, and he says he has 
 no head and has sold his tongue.' It appeared on 
 inquiry that Hughes was the butcher and that the 
 head was a calf's head. 1 
 
 1 Quoted from The Spectator. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 167 
 
 A Bishop of Sodor and Man was once announced 
 by a deaf or stupid servant as ' a Bishop sort of man '. 
 Another or the same Bishop of that oddly named 
 diocese, being on the Continent, was described in the 
 Visitors' List as ' L'eveque de Syphon et d'homme '. 
 
 Mr. G. W. E. Kussell writes: 'At Ely, Bishop 
 Sparke gave so many of his best livings to his family 
 that it was locally said that you could find your way 
 across the fens on a dark night by the number of 
 little Sparkes along the road.' Jelf assured me that 
 a similar nepotism was practised by a Bishop Law 
 (I think of Bath and Wells), insomuch that his 
 successor found four of the best livings in the diocese 
 occupied by 'three Laws and one Law-in-law', and 
 applied the quotation, Ubi plurimae leges, ibi pessima 
 respublica ('Where the laws are most numerous, the 
 commonwealth is worst '). 
 
 A famous sentence in a sermon preached by Dean 
 Gaisford at Christ Church has been transmitted in 
 various forms. Jelf, who heard the sermon, reported 
 to me the sentence as follows : ' The benefits derived 
 from classical education are two : first, they often lead 
 to worldly advantages ; and, secondly, they cause us 
 to look with contempt on persons less intellectually 
 gifted than ourselves.' According to a version of this 
 story reported to me by Canon Ainger, the preacher 
 headed the list of the advantages of classical education 
 with an advantage little in keeping with the other 
 two, namely, that ' it enables us to read the precepts 
 of our Lord in the original language '. 
 
 Jelf had an extreme dread and dislike of 'needy 
 men of ability', whom he regarded as impatient of 
 social barriers and as therefore inclined to Socialism. 
 In fact, he would have attributed to many of them the 
 
168 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 anarchical quality which Bismarck afterwards de- 
 scribed as Gatilinarische Intelligent. Would he or 
 Bismarck or even my father have looked with un- 
 mixed sorrow on a Dathan-and-Abiram earthquake — 
 a discriminating earthquake, I mean, which, while 
 sparing the supporters, swallowed up all the opponents 
 of constituted anthority? That such a wholesale 
 consummation was devoutly to be wished would, 
 I imagine, have been affirmed without scruple by 
 a Tory of the type of Sir Robert Vaughan. 
 
 It has been elsewhere mentioned that, on my asking 
 Jowett whether the retentiveness of Arthur Stanley's 
 memory was not unsurpassed, he replied, ' No, 
 Conington has a better memory, but Stanley has a 
 more useful one.' To my recollections of Stanley I 
 will add a slight reminiscence brought to my memory 
 by an incident in his life which I had not heard of till 
 after his death. The incident — a characteristic one — 
 is that, when he was making a tour in Italy, he heard 
 a report that the old royal family of France was likely 
 to be restored in the person of the Comte de Chambord ; 
 and he hurried off to Paris in the hope of witnessing 
 the coronation. 
 
 Here certainly we have an extreme instance of what 
 Scherer called ' ces agitations sans but qui constituent 
 la comedie humaine'. The point of course is that 
 Stanley did not want to see the Bourbons restored, but 
 that, if they were to be restored, he wished to see the 
 restoration. In his case the historiographer was 
 stronger than the politician, but assuredly an ardent 
 Liberal like John S. Mill would have been incapable of 
 deriving artistic satisfaction from the undoing of the 
 work of the French Revolution. How, on the other 
 hand, would such a cynical Liberal as Pattison have 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 169 
 
 acted in a like emergency ? He would doubtless have 
 laughed sardonically at human affairs, and this world 
 humour would have found vent in such expressions as 
 Le fond de la Providence, c'est Vironie, or as Aristophanes 
 has it, ATvos (3ao~i\evei top AC ZgeXrjXaKm, a pun which 
 may be paraphrased, ' The deuce reigns, having 
 turned out Zeus.' But Stanley's moral attitude, while 
 wholly unlike Mill's, was also unlike Pattison's. He 
 did not chuckle ; he craved food for his imagination. 
 As he took a picturesque view of history, so he took 
 what may be termed a literaturesque view of shows and 
 scenes. He wished to see all sorts of things, including 
 even a bullfight, that he might be able to describe 
 them. Might he not have been said, in certain states 
 of mind, if I may so apply the words of a living critic, 
 'considerer le monde comme un deroulement de 
 tableaux vivants ' ? 
 
 This long-winded disquisition must be excused 
 because it serves to illustrate a reminiscence of Stanley 
 which I hasten to give. One afternoon, in the sixties, 
 I met him at a garden party at Holland House, where 
 he was quite in his element. He was showing the 
 bust of Napoleon to a circle of ladies, and was trans- 
 lating in fervent accents the motto from the Odyssey 
 inscribed beneath it : — 
 
 ov y&p Tsui r48vr]K€v ewt yBovi bios Obvcro-evs, 
 dAA.' en ttov fcods KaTepvuerai. evpei ttovtv, 
 vtJ<t<j> ev afx<pipvTri, xaAewot be fuv &vbpes e\ov(Tiv 
 aypioi, 01 Ttov k&vov epvuavoaxr aeKOvra. 
 
 Macaulay has paraphrased these lines in English 
 verse ; and, though his rendering of them is hardly 
 worthy either of them or of himself, his con- 
 nexion with Holland House must give his version the 
 preference : 
 
170 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 ' For not, be sure, within the grave 
 Is hid that prince, the wise, the brave ; 
 But in an islet's narrow bound, 
 With the great Ocean roaring round, 
 The captive of a foeman base, 
 He pines to view his native place.' 
 
 But how came Stanley to translate the lines with 
 so much gusto ? Was it merely because he felt, as we 
 all feel, that the great Emperor deserved a full 
 measure of the praise bestowed by Macaulay on 
 Warren Hastings, namely, that ' hatred itself could 
 deny him no title to glory except virtue ' ? At any 
 rate, beyond what is involved in this admiration of 
 the colossal, he had no Napoleonic leanings. On the 
 other hand, Lord Holland, who inscribed the motto, 
 had, like his kinsman Charles Fox, such leanings in 
 an extreme form. He was one of those Whigs who, 
 when the fallen despot had broken faith by escaping 
 from Elba, was mad enough to object to his being put 
 into safe custody at St. Helena. It must, however, be 
 owned that, from the point of view of this intractable 
 and unforewarnable politician, this burnt child who 
 was for running straight into the fire, the motto from 
 Homer was absolutely perfect. 
 
 The Napoleonic sympathies of Lord Holland suggest 
 a serious consideration. Our Radical friends are fond 
 of declaring that from time out of mind there has 
 been, as it were, a standing lawsuit between Con- 
 servatives and Liberals, a lawsuit in which, while 
 point after point has been hotly disputed by the 
 Conservatives, the contention of the Liberals has been 
 uniformly ratified by posterity. Well, it is whole- 
 some to reflect that, when pronouncing in 1815 on 
 the fate of 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 171 
 
 ' The desolator desolate, 
 The victor overthrown,' * 
 
 the Conservatives were substantially in the right, 
 whilst Lord Holland and some of his ablest friends 
 advocated a policy which might have been hardly less 
 suicidal than that of their far-off Liberal predecessors, 
 who, when and after deposing Richard Cromwell, cast 
 away their weapon of defence and fell helplessly into 
 the power of their implacable enemies. Not indeed 
 that all the frequenters of Holland House were as 
 infatuated as their host. Charles Austin, who was 
 one of those frequenters, took a wholly opposite view. 
 He assured me that he should not at all have minded 
 if, instead of being exiled to St. Helena, Napoleon had 
 been tried by court martial and shot ; although he 
 regretted that, as it was decided to spare the great 
 captive's life, so uncourtly a governor — or gaoler — as 
 Sir Hudson Lowe was set over him. Why in truth 
 was Bonaparte spared, when Ney and Labedoyere 
 were put to death ? I sometimes think that, from an 
 artistic point of view, the difficulty of dealing with the 
 prostrate giant was like that of giving a worthy ending 
 to a good romance. 
 
 I remember in my Oxford days hearing a sermon 
 by Stanley which at once delighted and startled me. 
 One sentence in it has stuck in my memory : ' The 
 great peculiarity of Christianity, which proves Chris- 
 tianity to be true and all other religions to be false, 
 is not that it has so many miracles, but that it has 
 so few.' This amazing paradox makes short work of 
 the Paley-Butler mode of reasoning ; and indeed, by 
 cutting away the external props of Christianity, it 
 
 1 Byron. 
 
172 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 throws her, as it were, on her internal evidence ; so 
 that the human conscience is made the ultimate 
 criterion of divine truth. 
 
 Of Professor Conington I have already spoken ; and 
 I have elsewhere rebutted a charge brought against 
 him by Pattison. 1 He never reckoned me among his 
 special friends ; but he had many such friends whose 
 affection for him he warmly returned. This was 
 indicated by his favourite motto : 0tAo? fy <pi\oio-L (' he 
 was a friend to his friends '). 
 
 I heard him long ago speak of the letters of 
 ' Historicus ', which, when they came out, were com- 
 pared to those of Junius. ' Historicus ' is now known 
 to have been Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Harcourt. 
 Conington quoted from the letters a passage addressed 
 to Lord Derby, the Prime Minister, which seemed to 
 him very striking : ' History, my Lord, condemns 
 Mary of Scotland, not because she murdered Darnley, 
 but because she married Bothwell,' meaning that Lord 
 Derby was culpable, not because he ratted from the 
 Whigs, but because he took office with the Tories. 
 
 A kinsman of the late Lord Aberdare tells me that, 
 with the exception perhaps of that accomplished 
 nobleman, Conington was the most widely informed 
 man whom he ever knew. But he admits that the 
 Professor was not ' a sayer of good things ' ; as indeed 
 might be inferred from the meagre supply of his 
 sayings which, cast about as I would, was all I could 
 draw into my net. Conington spoke of himself as 
 taking a Macaulay-bath in the morning, meaning that, 
 when engaged on literary work, it was his daily 
 practice to read to himself, generally aloud, a passage 
 from Macaulay, whom he clearly regarded as his model ; 
 1 Stones of Stumbling, p. 186, note. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 173 
 
 even as a far more accomplished and fascinating 
 writer of prose, W. R. Greg, modelled his style on 
 that of Burke. I once remarked to Jowett that, in 
 spite of the fidelity of Conington's translation of the 
 Aeneid into verse, I preferred Dryden's translation : 
 Dryden, though he has not the tenderness of Virgil, 
 has much of his stateliness ; and stateliness is utterly 
 wanting in Conington's version. ' It is the fault of 
 his jingling metre,' chirped Jowett when I discussed 
 the matter with him. As I doubt whether Conington's 
 translation is now much read, I should explain that it 
 is in the ballad metre of Scott. Fortunate it is that 
 no charge of metrical incongruity can be brought 
 against his charming translation of Horace into 
 English verse. 
 
 I have remarked that he was not a sayer of good 
 things. Perhaps this defect was associated with his 
 virtues. In his youth he held modern views ; but he 
 was afterwards ' converted ' ; and, though he was 
 always tolerant of theological differences, his moral 
 gait was that of a scholarly Puritan. Well, it may be 
 safely affirmed, not indeed that perfect charity casteth 
 out mirth, but that saintly joviality is apt to be either 
 forced or insipid. If St. Paul during his stay at 
 Athens had been a guest at a symposium of wits, 
 I doubt whether his talk would have seemed to them 
 brilliant. And, for a like reason, Conington's sallies 
 were of a kind at which the hearer ' somewhat grimly 
 smiled '. Let me close this notice of the Professor 
 with a characteristically innocent story of his, which 
 may show what I mean. A man, walking along a 
 road during a shower, was splashed by some ducks, 
 and anathematized them by exclaiming, 'Oh, you 
 little beggars, this will make the green peas grow ! ' 
 
174 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 In relating this anecdote, the Professor may have 
 been reminded of the Greek epigram in which the 
 Vine curses its enemy, the Goat : 
 
 k^i; p.e cfrdyris em pi(av o/j.cos «fri KapTio(popr](Tii> 
 otnrov tin<TTtei(Tai croL, rpdye, 8vop.£v(p. 
 
 ' Down to the root though thou nibble me, goat, yet my 
 branches shall yield thee 
 Wine to besprinkle thee when thou at the altar dost bleed.' 
 
 The topsy-turvy anathema on the ducks is like the snub 
 given by Charles Lamb to the agricultural bore who 
 asked him whether there was likely to be a good crop 
 of turnips : ' I suppose it depends on the number of 
 boiled legs of mutton.' Mr. Russell gives a somewhat 
 analogous instance of logic turned upside down : 
 
 ' Mr. Tom Appleton, famous for many witty sayings 
 (among them the well-known "Good Americans, when they 
 die, go to Paris "), heard some grave city fathers debating 
 what could be done to mitigate the cruel east wind at an 
 exposed corner of a certain street in Boston. He suggested 
 that they should tether a shorn lamb there.' 
 
 A somewhat different case is brought to my memory, 
 a case in which quite seriously the cart was set before 
 the horse, or rather, by an infirmity of vision, the cart 
 was mistaken for the horse. A pious old woman at 
 Biarritz said to my wife after a thunderstorm : ' Le bon 
 Dieu nous envoie l'eclair afin que nous puissions nous 
 garder du tonnerre.' 
 
 Conington said that the word ' squarson ', which is 
 commonly attributed to Bishop (Samuel) Wilberforce, 
 was really invented by Bartlett of Trinity. It appears, 
 however, that Bartlett himself ascribed this port- 
 manteau-word, as Lewis Carroll would have called it, 
 to Sydney Smith. It must have been in familiar use 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXPOED (1856-60) 175 
 
 when Bishop Blomfield said to Wilberforce : ' I have 
 often seen a squarson, but you are the first squishop 
 I have seen.' 
 
 Bartlett at any„ rate wrote the well-known skit on 
 the expulsion of the drunk and disorderly under- 
 graduate : 
 
 ' Why was his time, now waxing short, 
 Cut prematurely shorter ? 
 Because at first he floored the port 
 And then he floored the porter.' 
 
 As I was writing, or to speak by the card, dictating 
 the last few paragraphs, I heard the sad news of 
 Archbishop Temple's death. My acquaintance with 
 him was slight and my conversations with him few, 
 and chiefly on general topics, but I can tell one or two 
 anecdotes relating to his career at Oxford. To make 
 these clear to non-Oxonian readers, a word must first 
 be said about Dr. Jenkyns, the Master of Balliol, 
 under whom he worked, first as undergraduate and 
 then as tutor. Jenkyns, intellectually considered, 
 was an enigma. Long ago a cultivated friend, who 
 had known him privately, spoke of him to me as 
 ' a man of mean understanding * ; yet it is hard to 
 reconcile this estimate with a sense of the great 
 services rendered by him to Balliol. Mr. Goldwin 
 Smith, in his delightful book on Oxford and her 
 Colleges, has observed that, early in the last century, 
 Oriel and Balliol ' attained a start in the regeneration 
 of Oxford which Balliol, being very fortunate in its 
 Heads, has since in a remarkable manner maintained ' ; 
 and there can be no doubt that, when thus praising 
 the Masters of Balliol, he was thinking of Jenkyns as 
 well as of Scott and of Jowett. Perhaps I picture 
 Jenkyns as a sort of inverted Charles II. Whilst his 
 
176 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 general policy was wise, nearly all his recorded 
 sayings are foolish. Dr. Jenkyns ceased to be Master 
 before I went to Balliol ; but the first of the two 
 following anecdotes reached me on good authority, and 
 the second is, I imagine, at least founded on fact. 
 Both of them are characteristic of Jenkyns, and 
 indirectly perhaps of that unconstrained Oxford life 
 
 hvenvraviTov es r-qv bCanav !£ovo-tas 
 
 whose extinction I heard Dean Mihnan at Jowett's 
 table refer to with regret. Besides the open scholar- 
 ships at Balliol, there are close scholarships confined 
 to Blundell's School, Tiverton, a school known by 
 reputation to readers of Lorna Boone. As a College 
 reformer Dr. Jenkyns looked with a jealous eye on 
 those Blundell scholarships, and was not over-gracious 
 to the Blundell scholars. Temple, who was of course 
 one of the very ablest men in the College, was a 
 Blundell scholar ; and even he came in for a share of 
 the Master's ill humour. When at last the news came 
 that he had gained a Double First, the Master sent for 
 him with the intention, it was surmised, of apologizing 
 for past discourtesies. But, if Temple expected such 
 an apology, he reckoned without his host. ' Mr. 
 Temple,' said the pedant, 'I hear that you have 
 obtained a Double First Class. I hope you now see 
 what an advantage you have had in being allowed to 
 associate on equal terms with the open scholars of 
 this College.' Alas that I cannot reproduce in writing 
 the somewhat inane nasal accent which is as uniformly 
 associated with the reported sayings of Jenkyns, as is 
 the twittering falsetto with the sayings of Jowett. 
 I note in passing that Jenkyns's antipathy to the 
 Blundell scholars found vent on another occasion in 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 177 
 
 a very similar form of rudeness. According to the 
 late Lord Coleridge, he once said to them : ' You are 
 very fortunate. You came here very inferior men ; 
 and you have associated with very superior men. 
 Some of you profit by this ; and some don't.' It should 
 be explained that the Blundell scholars dined with 
 the other scholars at a table separate from the 
 commoners. 
 
 My next anecdote belongs to the time when Temple 
 had become one of the dons. For the Matriculation 
 examination Dr. Jenkyns, being himself an indifferent 
 scholar, had the sense to call in the aid of the tutors. 
 On one such occasion, however, having no prompter 
 at hand, he had to do the work himself. He read 
 through a candidate's Latin prose, and, seeing nothing 
 wrong in it, beamed on its author, and said to him 
 (adopting his usual mode of address) : ' Young man, 
 this is a very creditable performance.' Luckily or un- 
 luckily, soon after the exultant student had withdrawn, 
 Temple made his appearance, ran his eye over the 
 exercise and, detecting in it sundry 'howlers', as- 
 sured Jenkyns that it could not possibly pass. The 
 Master rose to the occasion. Conscious that he had 
 somehow been made a fool of, he easily persuaded 
 himself that the writer of the bad exercise had been 
 morally as well as intellectually in fault. So he sent 
 for the hapless youth, and rebuked him in evident 
 good faith : ' Young man, I find you have grossly 
 deceived me.' And he sternly pointed to the door. 
 
 It is well known that, theological differences not- 
 withstanding, the Archbishop retained to the last his 
 veneration for Jowett. After reading the Preface to 
 the last edition of my Memoir of Jowett, in which 
 Jowett's Platonism is spoken of as a wholesome 
 
 N 
 
178 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 antidote to the prevailing and growing Aristotelianism 
 of our time, he expressed himself thus : ' It is a pity- 
 that Jowett did not write more. The influence of 
 a man's talk dies too soon. But I do not believe that 
 Aristotle will prevail, as you do. The growth of the 
 Aristotelian spirit will soon call out a corresponding 
 growth of the Platonic' Fancy an Archbishop in my 
 younger days wishing that Jowett had written more ! 
 
 One anecdote more about Jenkyns. A friend who 
 was under him at Balliol tells me that there were 
 rooks in what was then the Fellows' garden, and that 
 once, at oddly short intervals, several of them were 
 seen lying dead on the ground. ' There is an 
 epidemic among the crows,' snorted the Master, who 
 was naively unsuspicious of air-guns. 
 
 Let me add an anecdote about Temple which 
 presents two contrasting sides of his character, one 
 of them a pleasanter side than has been commonly 
 shown in such anecdotes. When he was Bishop of 
 Exeter, he was dining with a vicar in the diocese. 
 1 I heard, my lord,' said his host across the table, 
 
 ' from a mutual friend ' ' A common friend, if 
 
 you please,' exclaimed the Bishop. The vicar was so 
 incensed by this interruption that he resolved never 
 again, of his own free will, to have Temple in his house. 
 But, when the next confirmation took place, the Bishop 
 had to be asked. Soon after his arrival, he found 
 himself alone in the drawing-room with the vicar's 
 little daughter, who was barely three years old. 
 Presently, when the mother came in, the child was 
 prattling away to the formidable guest. Fearing that 
 the little girl was troublesome, the mother tried to 
 stop her. ' Pray let her go on,' said Temple ; ' children 
 talk a language which only mothers and angels can 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 179 
 
 understand.' Thenceforward he was a special favourite 
 at the vicarage. 
 
 Let me here make a palinode. In my Recollections 
 of Pattison I quoted as characteristic of the man some 
 of his most cynical utterances. I was not at the time 
 aware that, when I made his acquaintance in 1882, 
 he was already a doomed man — dying, by inches, of 
 cancer on the liver. If any of my readers can be sure 
 that he himself, languishing under such a disease, would 
 not become cynical and bitter, let him cast the first 
 stone at Mark Pattison. I have sometimes thought 
 that the Eector might have supplemented the old 
 Humanum est ermre with Humanum est joeccare et pati — 
 supplemented it with the ' Stoic-Epicurean acceptance ' 
 of sin and sorrow as necessary parts of the order of 
 things. Seeing him chiefly in the excitement of con- 
 versation, I did not at the time realize how persistently 
 Humanum est pati struck the keynote of his declining 
 years. 
 
 ' Forth into life you bid us go, 
 
 And into guilt you let us fall, 
 Then leave us to endure the woe 
 
 It brings unfailingly to all.' 
 
 The late Canon Pinder told me a characteristic mot 
 of the Eector's. Walking up Headington Hill, Patti- 
 son met some undergraduates in pink on their way 
 back from hunting. ' There,' he exclaimed, ' go the 
 fellows who understand life ! ' This throws light on a 
 dark saying ascribed to him : ' The highest life is the 
 art to live,' and may be compared with the confession 
 of Eenan : ' Tout en etant fort applique, je me demande 
 sans cesse si ce ne sont pas les gens frivoles qui ont 
 raison.' Perhaps these two wise men would have 
 agreed in thinking that the typical philosopher or 
 
 n2 
 
180 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 scholar never is, but always to be, happy: Victuros 
 agimus semper, nee vivimus unquam. 
 
 From the anecdote told me by Pinder about Pattison 
 I pass on to two anecdotes of his about Jowett, who 
 is, after all, the central figure of my Oxford group. 
 Pinder was once co-examiner with Jowett in the 
 classical schools. One of the examinees on that 
 occasion was a youth who was destined for Holy 
 Orders, but who had already been, at least once, 
 plucked for his degree. This time he had done some- 
 what better ; and the question was whether he could 
 be suffered to scrape through. Pinder, being merci- 
 fully inclined, was for giving the good, but stupid, 
 young man the benefit of the doubt. Jowett, how- 
 ever, was less easily satisfied. He spent a good hour 
 in alternately sitting with the examination papers 
 before him, and pacing up and down the room ; but, 
 sitting or walking, he was alike unable to make up 
 his mind. To bring him round, his more indulgent 
 (or impatient) colleague drew his attention to one or 
 two passages, which showed that the candidate had 
 done his little best to get up his subjects. At last 
 Jowett yielded, drily exclaiming, ' Well, I think I can 
 sign his testamur ; but I hope I shall never hear him 
 preach ! ' 
 
 Of the other and more impressive incident, my 
 informant was not himself a witness ; but he says 
 that it reached him on good authority. A young lady 
 who could, and sometimes did, take liberties with 
 Jowett, had the effrontery to say to him : ' I want 
 to know, Master, what you think of God.' 'I am 
 more concerned to know what God thinks of me,' 
 was the felicitous reply. This courteous extinguisher, 
 so to term it, had been reported to me before ; but it 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-80) 181 
 
 hardly seemed to me credible that any girl would have 
 ventured on such unwomanly freedom in addressing 
 the resourceful, and at times formidable, Master. I 
 therefore forbore in my Memoir to give currency to 
 what I suspected of being a forgery; but assuredly 
 the draft on our credulity should be honoured and 
 accepted now that it has been endorsed by two inde- 
 pendent witnesses. 
 
 Taine says that no better illustration of the differ- 
 ence between the English and the French standard 
 of judgement can be found than is furnished by the 
 English admiration for Johnson. I am somehow 
 reminded of this by the difficulty which Cambridge 
 men feel in understanding the force of the pupillary 
 attraction which drew so many Oxonians to Jowett, 
 and which makes his influence so abiding. The weed, 
 as some would call it, of tutor-worship does not flourish 
 on the banks of the Cam ; and, explain the fact as we 
 may, we have here one of the slight but significant 
 traits which distinguish the sister universities from 
 each other : 
 
 ' Ulis f acies non una duabus, 
 Nee diversa tamen, qualem decet esse sororum.' 
 
 (' Unlike and yet alike in face, 
 They might be sisters of one race.') 
 
 They may be compared to two of the Gallapagos 
 Islands — islands which, as Darwin tells us, being 
 divided by a narrow but deep channel, differ from 
 one another slightly in respect of the animals that 
 inhabit them. In fact, the difference between the 
 Oxford and the Cambridge type is shown in various 
 wavs — some of them trivial and in a manner comic. 
 Thus, I heard T. H. Green say that Oxford must 
 
182 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 be more religious than Cambridge, since at Oxford 
 we speak of ' St. John's College ', whereas, when the 
 corresponding college is mentioned at Cambridge, the 
 saintly prefix is commonly omitted. 
 
 So, again, I have been told that accomplished ladies 
 are called ' intellectual ' at Oxford, while at Cambridge 
 they fall to the rank of being ' appreciative '. It is 
 fair to mention that I heard this from the wife of 
 an Oxford don. Perhaps, being thus an Oxonian-in- 
 law, she may have an Oxford bias. 
 
 The proverbial meeting of extremes always sur- 
 prises us when it occurs. Thus, we are startled to 
 learn that at Cambridge the uncomely word ' beastly ' 
 has acquired much the same meaning, or want of 
 meaning, into which the grand old word ' awful ' has 
 been degraded at Oxford (and, alas ! at not a few 
 places besides). Of the lusus linguae, so to call it, 
 at Cambridge an illustration has come to me on good 
 authority. A debating society of lady students 
 launched on the wide question : Is conventionality 
 a good or a bad thing ? As the discussion proceeded, 
 all reverence for tradition seemed to be trembling 
 in the balance, until an oratress clinched the matter 
 by declaring that her brother had told her to stick 
 to the conventions on pain of making herself ' beastly 
 peculiar '. 
 
 I pass from these trifles to Matthew Arnold's 
 dictum, that while Cambridge is the university of 
 great men, Oxford is the university of great systems. 
 He was, of course, referring to theological movements 
 such as Tractarianism and Broad Churchism. Every 
 such movement needs organization, and has the effect 
 of marshalling disciples under leaders. Jowett was 
 the recognized chief of the Broad Church movement 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 183 
 
 at Oxford, just as Newman and Pusey had been the 
 chiefs of the High Church movement. His ascend- 
 ancy was in a measure theological, but with this 
 aspect of Jowettolatry I am not here concerned. 
 
 As in the case of Dr. Johnson, Jowett's social 
 peculiarities, which of themselves would certainly not 
 have made him popular, may yet, when known to be 
 associated with his admirable qualities, have caused 
 those qualities to be more observed by all who knew 
 him. His angularities stuck in our memory and 
 imagination. In my Memoir of him I have noted 
 the curious fact that, in his youth and middle life, 
 he was not only a silent man, but sometimes an 
 imposer of silence on others ; and yet in his old age 
 he made much of the art of conversation. Some facts 
 which have since reached me have heightened my 
 sense of this strange contrast. 
 
 An odd anecdote about Jowett which came to me 
 on very passable authority illustrates his power of 
 silence. The late Miss E., whom I met at dinner 
 with him in the seventies, enjoyed at that time, as 
 she well deserved, his warm friendship. Unluckily 
 a report sprang up that she was about to become 
 mistress of what ought, in Cambridge phrase, to be 
 called Balliol 'Lodge'. This connubial forecast soon 
 reached the ears of Jowett, and not merely annoyed, 
 but incensed him. He fancied that the angelic 
 Miss E. had been slack in silencing the rumour, and 
 he broke off his intercourse with her. One day he 
 only just caught the train to London. He hurried 
 into a first-class carriage without noticing that it had 
 a solitary occupant, who was no other than Miss E. 
 Taking a seat in the opposite corner, he at once buried 
 himself in his newspaper. The strain of the rebuking 
 
184 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 silence soon became too much for his fellow traveller. 
 'Mr. Jowett,' she said earnestly, 'I really must ex- 
 plain.' ' In these cases,' interrupted the Master, 
 ' there are only two remedies, silence and time.' And 
 he rigorously applied the former of these remedies 
 during the rest of the journey. 
 
 My next illustration of Jowett's taciturnity is more 
 conclusively attested. When he became Master, he 
 used to ask the freshmen to breakfast in batches. My 
 informant, shortly after coming into residence, was 
 included in the first batch. When the guests arrived, 
 the Master was not in a talkative mood. At last the 
 social atmosphere became so oppressive that one of 
 the freshmen, with the ineptitude of shyness, hazarded 
 the remark, ' The fish is very nice.' This foolish 
 utterance can hardly have been meant for the com- 
 pany at large ; but unluckily Jowett heard it. After 
 an interval of silence, he turned full on the blunder- 
 ing novice and solemnly asked, ' What was that obser- 
 vation of yours about the fish?' The next day the 
 second batch of freshmen, duly forewarned, too rigor- 
 ously followed the Trappist rule. When taking leave 
 the Master, himself screened by his position from a 
 retort, naively said to them, ' Gentlemen, you ought 
 to cultivate the art of conversation.' In fairness to 
 Jowett, it should be borne in mind that other excel- 
 lent teachers of clever pupils have failed to draw out 
 commonplace ones. Some famous Heads of houses 
 have been even more incompetent than he was to 
 talk down to the level of mediocrity. Mark Pattison's 
 student-breakfasts were not generally pleasant to his 
 guests ; and at Trinity, Cambridge, the great Dr. 
 Whewell was the incarnation of masterful unsoci- 
 ability. A Trinity friend told me in the fifties that 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFORD (1856-60) 185 
 
 Whewell's evening parties went by the name of ' per- 
 pendiculars', because the undergraduates were expected 
 to remain standing all the time, though he himself sat 
 down whenever he chose. It is also related that, 
 being shortsighted, he inspected each man in turn at 
 unpleasantly close quarters ; and it was a high crime 
 for any one to speak until he was spoken to. On one 
 occasion, under the trying scrutiny, an unwary fresh- 
 man remarked that the weather was fine. ' Sir,' 
 replied the pedant, 'are you not aware that, if you 
 have any communication to make to the Master of 
 your College, you should make it through your tutor ? ' 
 A lady, whose daughter was going to one of the 
 women's colleges, was asked by Jowett what the girl's 
 studies were to be. On hearing the full curriculum, 
 he replied curtly, 'The important thing is that she 
 should learn to talk well.' I am told that he once 
 gave offence by saying publicly before an assembly of 
 ladies, ' The great object of the higher education of 
 women is that they should learn to converse well.' 
 A Cambridge friend tells me that in his youth he 
 called upon Jowett. After the first greetings, the 
 Master maintained such an obstinate silence that the 
 wearied guest summoned up courage to ask, ' Does 
 not Wycherley say that the silence of a wise man 
 is more prejudicial than the speech of a fool ? ' Jowett 
 took the remonstrance in good part, and deplored his 
 own want of readiness in conversation. Another 
 illustrative incident may be mentioned, which has 
 more picturesque details. A lady friend assures me 
 that she was spending an evening at the Deanery of 
 "Westminster, when, shortly before the party broke up, 
 she saw Jowett at the further end of the supper-room. 
 Close to her, an offended wife was giving, in an audible 
 
186 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 voice, a premature curtain-lecture to her husband, 
 who, though he was a friend of Jowett's, had not 
 introduced him to her. The victim bore the hen- 
 pecking with masculine meekness; but he suddenly 
 called out, 'See, he is alone now. Come and be 
 introduced.' Up jumped the lady, and the coveted 
 introduction took place. But, alas ! the effort of con- 
 verting the storm depicted on her countenance into 
 an angelic calm left her no energy to think of any- 
 thing worthy to be poured into the great man's ears. 
 So she was speechless. Jowett lent no help ; but, 
 after the two had stood at gaze for some minutes, 
 he broke the silence by inquiring, ' Will you not 
 take some claret-cup ? ' And, without waiting for an 
 answer, he walked away. 
 
 Such social shortcomings as these were by no means 
 calculated to make him widely popular. But, at the 
 same time, his reserve may have helped to draw him 
 nearer to his friends. In their view, his bluntness 
 was associated with his utter guilelessness ; and per- 
 haps, too, his inaccessibility to the many raised the 
 value of his intimacy with the few. 
 
 This is only a surmise, and I feel on much surer 
 ground when I touch on the direct and serious causes 
 of Jowett's influence. His personal interest in his 
 pupils was such that he was able to recall, long years 
 after, what had happened to them at college. Their 
 welfare he made his own. He triumphed in their 
 successes, and he was afflicted in their failures. Some 
 examples may serve to show how strong and how 
 endearing his sympathy was. A brilliant and witty 
 pupil of his, who through some accident had missed 
 his First Class, tells me that, after his disappointment, 
 Jowett insisted on his spending the Christmas vacation 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOKD (1856-60) 187 
 
 at Oxford, to try for a University prize. When the 
 prize had been gained, Jowett congratulated him by 
 saying, ' Now you have made up for your Second 
 Class.' I well remember the affectionate voice and 
 manner with which Jowett comforted a delicate pupil, 
 whose bad health and worse eyesight had prevented 
 him from going in for honours in Moderations. ' A 
 man of your abilities must succeed in life ; but you 
 must not be disappointed if circumstances make you 
 fail in any particular instance.' To the same pupil, 
 when he had read a college essay, Jowett said, after 
 commending one or two points, 'Your style is awk- 
 ward.' But he afterwards added in a quite paternal 
 tone, ' I want to make you write really well.' I feel, 
 however, that such sayings as these must appear tame 
 and disappointing to those who did not know Jowett ; 
 for his kindness, after all, owed no small part of its 
 effect to that beaming smile and cherubic chirp of his, 
 to that comitate condita gravitas, in a word, to that 
 personal charm which his friends loved, but which 
 they vainly attempt to make quite intelligible to 
 others. 
 
 In truth, Jowett was a student-fancier ; he came to 
 divine by a sort of intuition the points of each indi- 
 vidual student, just as a skilful bird-fancier can tell 
 the points of his birds. In particular he had at com- 
 mand something of the pecca fortiter spirit, or, as he 
 himself might have said, of ' roguery ' to serve as a 
 moral tonic for pupils who took life too seriously, or 
 at any rate too logically. To a friend thus afflicted he 
 is reported to have given the sweeping admonition, 
 ' Never indulge a scruple.' 
 
 A pupil, walking with Jowett through some private 
 grounds in the spring, called his attention to the 
 
188 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 young rabbits frisking about, and moralized on their 
 hard lot — 
 
 ' Unconscious of their doom 
 The little victims play.' 
 
 Jowett was not so soft-hearted. 'You shouldn't 
 indulge that sort of sentiment,' he said, 'it'll make 
 you morbid.' And, after all, was he not right ? Taine 
 has remarked that any one who is keenly sensitive 
 to the wholesale cruelties and iniquities of life can 
 hardly continue to be philanthropic, and cannot pos- 
 sibly be happy. Would not such an one's ' tears for 
 ever flow'? Mirandum est unde ille oculis suffecerit 
 humor ('What fountain could supply such floods of 
 tears? ') 
 
 In a less serious mood, on seeing the body of a rook 
 which had been tried, sentenced, and executed by its 
 peers, he pathetically exclaimed, ' That crow was a 
 heretic ! ' This instance of Jowett's peculiar humour 
 makes one feel how each man's speculations on the 
 moral vagaries of Nature take their colour from his 
 personal experience and prepossessions. Jowett, as 
 he himself told me, was repelled by the very thought 
 of euthanasia. Otherwise, the fate of the euthanatized 
 rook might have led him to moralize, like Jaques, on 
 the difference between corvine and human ethics in 
 regard to the best mode of dealing with sickness, in 
 the anti-evolutionary philanthropy which keeps alive 
 those Benhadads of Nature whom she ' appointed to 
 utter destruction '. 
 
 The delicate pupil whom I have already referred to, 
 hesitating to conform to an anomalous practice to 
 which all the world conforms, laid the grounds of 
 his objection before Jowett. The Master heard him 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 189 
 
 out, and then, after his wonted pause, exclaimed, 
 ' Yes ; that sounds logical. But you know it is wrong.' 
 This is a good instance of his summary way of cutting 
 logical knots with the sword of common sense, and bears 
 out the remark made by Sir Leslie Stephen with refer- 
 ence to him : ' What was a defect in a philosopher 
 might be an excellence in a teacher.' All who knew 
 the Master will feel the truth of that observation ; for, 
 in fact, his peculiar distinction was like Banquo's : 
 Thou shalt get kings, though thou be none.' Jowett 
 was the intellectual father of some men of great philo- 
 sophical power ; but a philosopher, in the sense of a 
 scientific thinker, he himself was not. 
 
 This unformulated wisdom, this philosophy minus 
 logic, is reflected in Jowett's theological works. 
 While still a young man, he laboured to discover 
 the hidden springs in which certain time-honoured 
 beliefs have their origin. The results of that labour 
 are seen in his Essays on the Pauline Epistles. We 
 cannot, he concluded (in effect), hold the Pauline 
 theology in the precise sense in which St. Paul him- 
 self held it ; for the mould in which that theology 
 is cast bears traces of bygone superstitions. To speak 
 more generally, Jowett was the first to open the eyes 
 of his countrymen to the extent to which the theology 
 of a pre-scientific age is refracted and distorted by 
 what he called its modes of thought. It may be con- 
 fidently affirmed that those limiting and impeding 
 modes of thought appeared to him to bear much the 
 same relation to undeveloped thought that, according 
 to Maine, legal fictions bear to undeveloped law ; they 
 might haply (after the manner of Coleridge) be nick- 
 named thought in circumbendibus ; in truth, they are a 
 disease of thought. Jowett, or at any rate some of 
 
190 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 his disciples, regarded that disease as a sort of intel- 
 lectual measles, a malady which a nation nearly 
 always goes through in its infancy, and which in its 
 maturity it is all the better for having gone through 
 and got over. He would doubtless have agreed with 
 Eenan in thinking that it is a sign of the inferiority 
 of China that she in her youth escaped that helpful 
 malady ; she was too prosaically healthy ; she never 
 dreamed her dream. At all events, there can be 
 no doubt that it was by the unclerical and almost 
 unprecedented freedom with which Jowett discussed 
 aspects of the beatific vision that he first came into 
 notice. It is true that, somewhat later, another great 
 Oxonian went even further on the Neo-Christian lines. 
 Matthew Arnold started on the same track with Jowett 
 when he counselled his readers to study the natural 
 history of religion, and in doing so to avail themselves 
 of the comparative method ; but, unlike Jowett, he 
 followed that track to its logical conclusion. In short, 
 he was more of a philosopher than his friend. But 
 the advantage was not all on his side. Many persons, 
 and especially many parents, would take things from 
 the Master which they would not have taken from 
 Matthew Arnold. This, then, is one of the numerous 
 instances in which Jowett, as a teacher, had his reward 
 for practically assuming that logic is a good servant 
 but a bad master. 
 
 I have elsewhere ranked him among the Whigs of 
 religion. In this and in other departments he was an 
 unwilling, and therefore a cautious, reformer. In fact, 
 he was a sort of captive balloon, tethered by Con- 
 servative instincts, and thus secured against perilous 
 flights. Hence he came to be regarded as an oracle 
 by those pupils who wished indeed to rise above the 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOKD (1856-60) 191 
 
 common level (spernere Jiumum fugiente penna), but to 
 keep that level well in sight. His teaching led me to 
 agree with the opinion once expressed to me by the 
 late Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, that ' moderate, 
 attainable ideals are the only ones worth striving for '. 
 Many Oxford Liberals held this view, though they 
 would perhaps not have acknowledged it so frankly 
 as did their distinguished Cambridge contemporary. 
 For it is with justice that the typical Oxonian has 
 been declared by Paul Bourget to be ' profondement 
 et intimement conservateur, meme quand il se dit et 
 se croit liberal '. 
 
 It will now be understood how it was that so many 
 Conservative Liberals fell under the sway of ' little 
 Benjamin, their ruler'. In their judgement, any 
 opinion, to speak roughly, which had received the 
 Jowett stamp was warranted safe. When an under- 
 graduate, having to read an essay to Jowett, feared 
 that some sentiment which it contained might be 
 thought revolutionary or otherwise unguarded, he was 
 at once reassured if the great malleus stultorum came 
 out with his significant ' Yes ', pronounced half dubi- 
 tatively and half as if assent had been wrung from 
 him. If Jowett let himself transgress this mono- 
 syllabic limit, his halting assent to the venturesome 
 proposition would probably be enveloped in the sort of 
 picturesque haze which is, as haze in general seems to 
 be, dear to the artistic temperament. His pupils also 
 learnt that, if now and then he favoured a dangerous 
 principle, his bugle was likely soon to vary its note 
 and sound a retreat. They thus found, or fancied, 
 that they had his sanction for playing with edged 
 tools ; and it is probable that they did not altogether 
 dislike the pastime. He seemed, like a modern 
 
192 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 Ecclesiastes, to preach that there is a time to be 
 consistent and a time to refrain from consistency. 
 At all events, Kenan's apophthegm in his Etude on 
 Ecclesiastes, ' On ne philosophe jamais plus librement 
 que quand on sait que la philosophic ne tire pas a 
 consequence,' might pass for a free rendering of 
 Jowett's oft-repeated admonition 'not to fall under 
 the dominion of logic '. 
 
 I have heard from an old Balliol friend that, 
 happening to see "Ward's Nature and Grace on Jowett's 
 table, he asked what he thought of it. ' Dark with 
 excess of logic,' was the characteristic answer. As 
 a disciple of Jowett, I am tempted to think that, 
 if there is a grain of truth in Swift's definition of 
 'happiness' as 'the perpetual possession of being 
 well deceived ', there would be at least a grain of 
 it in a definition of ' wisdom ' as ' the art of being 
 wholesomely inconsequent'. But a philosopher who 
 thus deliberately plays fast and loose with logic should 
 bear in mind that he is, at best, approaching truth 
 by the most circuitous of paths ; like the rest of the 
 world, Vult decipi. In fact, the mental attitude which 
 Jowett drilled into his pupils may be illustrated by 
 what I have always thought a very striking and 
 weighty admission on the part of Fitzjames Stephen. 
 In The Nineteenth Century, after expatiating on Pro- 
 fessor Mivart's attempt to put critical wine into 
 Catholic bottles, that most philosophical and cour- 
 ageous of our (then) judges went on to say : 
 
 'It would, in my opinion, be much better and simpler to 
 say at once, " I do not argue, I merely affirm, I do beg the 
 question of religion. I find certain moral and what I call 
 spiritual advantages in it, and I say no more." This kind of 
 faith no one could reasonably attack, either in Mr. Mivart or 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOKD (1856-60) 193 
 
 in any one else, whether a Catholic priest or a Baptist minister, 
 I at all events would never do so.' 
 
 In fact, he was willing, like the Pontiff in Cicero's 
 famous Dialogue, to accept the national religion, nulla 
 ratione reddita. And, to put the matter broadly, those 
 Oxford Liberals who practically took this line were 
 naturally, if unwittingly, drawn towards Jowett by 
 the wish to have their consciences at ease ; he ab- 
 solved them from the ' virtuous sin ' of conformity ; 
 or shall we rather say that by his example, if not 
 by his direct teaching, he granted them a dispensation 
 to go on conforming? It must be owned that the 
 premises adopted or assumed by those apologists of 
 compromise might be pressed to something very like 
 the Ovidian conclusion : Eocpedit esse Deos et, ut expedit, 
 esse putemus (' Believe in gods ; 'tis safer to believe '). 
 
 Let me give an example or two indicative of 
 Jowett's claim to be regarded as the pope of some 
 neo-Christians — I mean, of some of those Whigs of 
 religion who, at a time when the old order is changing, 
 are earnestly desirous to reform and spiritualize, instead 
 of revolutionizing, the orthodox theology : to abolish 
 Satan, but to keep Christ. More than forty years ago, 
 I asked the then Lady Brodie whether she, as the wife 
 of a leader of scientific thought, did not feel in great 
 difficulty as to what orthodox doctrines should be 
 taught to her children. Her answer was, in effect, 
 'I try to teach them nothing of which Mr. Jowett 
 would disapprove.' 
 
 As a pendant to this I will cite an Apologia pro fide 
 sua which Charles Bowen offered in his youth. On 
 my once hinting to him that some of his principles 
 might lead to complete scepticism, he replied, 'If 
 that is the logical conclusion, I decline to draw it; 
 
 o 
 
194 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 and, if I am inconsistent, I am not more so than 
 Jowett ! ' Other analogous instances might be given ; 
 but what has been said will suffice to show how 
 thoroughly Jowett's friends put their trust in him. 
 Truly and heartily may the survivors of them apply 
 to him a text forming part of the Latin grace which I 
 have so often repeated in the Balliol Hall : In memoria 
 aeterna erit iustus. 
 
 After speaking thus of Jowett's influence, it is time 
 to sum up my view of its nature and limitations ; and, 
 for that purpose, it may be as well to compare it with 
 Vaughan's influence on the one hand, and with Patti- 
 son's on the other. The text for such a comparison 
 may be furnished by a Persian proverb : ' He who 
 knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a 
 fool ; shun him. He who knows not, and knows that 
 he knows not, is a child ; teach him. He who knows, 
 and knows not that he knows, is asleep ; wake him. 
 He who knows, and knows that he knows, is a sage ; 
 follow him.' Dr. Vaughan had to deal with boy 
 representatives of all these classes, and he could not 
 specialize for any of them. Not a few of his pupils were 
 drawn from the class which stands first on the list ; 
 they had no notion of the depths of their ignorance, 
 and never would have such notion to their lives' end. 
 From the task of training these intellectual ne'er- 
 do-wells {oLKoXaa-Toi) Jowett was saved by the strict 
 entrance examination at Balliol ; but he had to train 
 many second-rate-able pupils — pupils, I mean, who 
 were more or less painfully conscious of their own 
 deficiencies, but who had not the force to overcome 
 them (dKpareh). Pattison's case was different. He 
 limited his care to the fourth and perhaps the third 
 classes of the Persian proverb — to full-blown or full- 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOKD (1856-60) 195 
 
 blowing sages who might easily be fostered into bloom. 
 We are all familiar with that missish and Lydia 
 Languish-ing, but convenient, phrase, a finishing gover- 
 ness. Pattison was an incomparable finishing tutor of 
 philosophers. In perfecting these pupils he followed 
 his natural bent. With little or no effort on his part, 
 his potent personality acted freely on them, and he 
 disclosed to them the sceptical leaning of his own 
 mind. Jowett, on the other hand, was both assiduous 
 and cautious in training his disciples, and sought to 
 adapt himself to their several needs. Of Jowett it 
 might be said, Admissus circumpraecordia ludit (' He won 
 unfelt an entrance to the heart ') ; of Pattison, Er war 
 der Geist der stets verneint. Not, indeed, that the Eector 
 obtruded his negations on minds unprepared for them. 
 With the outer world he followed Amiel's maxim : 
 S'adapter aux illusions courantes. He of course carried 
 out this rule with reservation. He was one of those 
 Whigs of religion aforesaid who, when a religious 
 reform has to be made, feel the necessity of making 
 it in due time. But, with this qualification, he was 
 for leaving the national religion intact. He held that 
 most men, and all women, have need of a beatific 
 vision, nay, of a beatific illusion ; and that, when 
 illusion is bliss, 'tis folly to be disillusionized and sin 
 to disillusionize others, r i *m - b ttjL fcfok tnrfl -e ul - 
 Jowett also acted on this principle ; but he generally 
 did so unawares. A dogma in favour of accommo- 
 dation was in ' the antechamber of his consciousness ' ; 
 and it now and then forced its way into the presence- 
 chamber. There was something feminine in his gentle 
 and refined nature, and he was blessed with a woman's 
 power of self-deception ; insomuch that, hating to 
 profess opinions which he did not hold, he could 
 
 o2 
 
196 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 generally hold opinions which he wanted to profess. 
 The result was that his theology was in a state of flux. 
 Take, for example, his view of the doctrine of immor- 
 tality. He assured me, in the fifties, that he had 
 never felt any serious doubt as to that doctrine ; and, 
 towards the close of his life, he told a friend that his 
 faith had grown firmer with advancing years. But he 
 sometimes struck a different note. I will not lay 
 stress on the fact that Kenan, after a conversation 
 with him, could not detect any difference between 
 Jowett's creed and his own ; for, in talking a foreign 
 language, the Master may have failed to express the 
 more delicate shades of his meaning. But the judge- 
 ment of the French critic is confirmed by Jowett's 
 bewildering suggestion that 'the personality of God, 
 like the immortality of man, may pass into an idea'. 1 
 In view of these contradictions, it is hardly too much 
 to say that, according to his mood, the heaven of his 
 hopes ranges through nearly the whole interval that 
 divides the happy fairyland of Mrs. Oliphant's Little 
 Pilgrim from the glorified nothingness of George Eliot's 
 ' choir invisible '. 
 
 This latter view seems to have been held by 
 Matthew Arnold towards the close of his life. Yet, 
 shortly before his death, he described himself to me 
 as a Liberal Anglican ; and to the last he conformed 
 to the Anglican ritual. 2 So that this conforming and, 
 
 I Life, vol. ii. p. 311. 
 
 II He is well known to have been an Inspector of Dissenting 
 Schools ; and, not being over-friendly to Dissenters as a class, he 
 was asked how he got on with the masters. His reply was, as it 
 were, spouted with that rhetorical humour which half concealed 
 the soul within : ' I am just the man for the post. I am 
 splendidly impartial, for I have an equal contempt for all their 
 miserable superstitions.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT OXFOED (1856-60) 197 
 
 so to say, patriotic religion of his may be denned as 
 the worship of the ideal symbolised as the supernatural, 
 and his heaven as a state of blessedness symbolised as a 
 place of enjoyment. Might not these definitions have 
 been applied to religion and to heaven as Jowett con- 
 ceived them when he wrote the mysterious sentence 
 cited above ? 
 
 In very truth, his faith was a sort of telescope. It 
 could be extended or curtailed as occasion required ; 
 but, however often its form and range were thus 
 altered, it appeared to be, at any given moment, firm 
 enough for all practical purposes. Is the lack of intel- 
 lectual seriousness which thus characterized Jowett 
 a matter for censure ? To such a question I answer, 
 Yes and No. If Jowett the philosopher ought to be 
 charged with the sin of inconsistency, the virtue of 
 inconsistency ought to be placed to the credit of 
 Jowett the instructor. To him may, in a special 
 manner, be applied what Montalembert once said to 
 an English friend about the English in general : ' C'est 
 votre manque de logique qui vous sauve.' I have 
 already touched on this paradox ; but some final 
 words of explanation are needed. My greatest Balliol 
 friend, the late Sir Henry Jenkyns, himself the most 
 upright of men, once quoted to me with approval 
 Jowett's injunction not to believe too much in logic, 
 and added, with a touch of humour, that no man 
 ought quite to believe in himself. Might it not be 
 said with sufficient truth for an epigram that perfect 
 simplicity is the virtue of a simpleton? Doubtless Bowen 
 was only half in earnest when he pleaded as an excuse 
 for playing fast and loose with logic that he was kept 
 in countenance by Jowett; but in taking this line 
 the Master's famous pupil showed that he wished, as 
 
198 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Carlyle would have said, ' to agree in everything but 
 opinion' with the religious world. Jowett himself 
 retained this quasi-sympathy, this concordia discors, 
 with the religious world to the last ; and his retention 
 of it helped him in his endeavour to guide his pupils 
 in the path, not of wisdom only, but of righteousness. 
 To guide them thus was the object of his life ; and 
 did he not to a great extent attain that object ? At 
 any rate, some of his pupils will never forget their 
 obligation to his wholesomely illogical method. One 
 of them, in particular, owes it to that method that, 
 after passing through the Slough of Despond and the 
 valley of the shadow of euthanasia, he learnt to re- 
 member Zion. To speak more precisely, Jowett, 
 seconded by Matthew Arnold, taught him to be a 
 neo-Christian indeed, but emphatically a heart-Chris- 
 tian (un chretien de cosur). And thus, the disciple may 
 say of his revered Master, in the words of the Son 
 of Sirach : In the beloved city he gave me rest, and in 
 Jerusalem was my power. 
 
CHAPTEE VII 
 
 JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 
 
 ' Ampliat aetatis spatium sibi vir bonus ; hoc est 
 Vivere bis vita posse priore frui.' — Martial. 
 
 ('A happy retrospect prolongs life's span ; 
 Two lives are granted to the good old man.') 
 
 ' I now perceive why old men repeat their stories in company. 
 . . . When they originate nothing, they can profit their juniors 
 by recollections of the past.' — Crabbe Eobinson. 
 
 Mobley's Life of Gladstone revived a popularity 
 which appeared to be on the wane. Some years ago, 
 an eminent diplomatist expressed to me his surprise 
 that, though Disraeli was, to put it mildly, not more 
 distinguished and high-principled than Gladstone, yet 
 his memory was still fresh and green, whilst that of 
 Gladstone seemed to have withered. Many persons, 
 admitting the reality of this phenomenon, attributed 
 it to the revival of militarism and Imperialism conse- 
 quent on the Boer War. Other circumstances prob- 
 ably helped to bring about the indifference — or worse 
 — with which the Liberal chief was regarded by the 
 upper classes ; but, at any rate, the publication of his 
 biography has been the cause or occasion of a renewed 
 interest in the great statesman. I should be tempting 
 Providence if I did not seize the opportunity to lay, 
 like a Hebrew mourner, my few stones (in genuine 
 veneration) on his tomb. To vary the metaphor by 
 a phrase of Mr. Gladstone's, I purpose by some dis- 
 cursive observations to 'fill up the chinks of my 
 knowledge '. 
 
200 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 A friendly critic in the Guardian (Oct. 21, 1903) 
 hinted at a wish that in my account of Gladstone 
 I had entered more into personal details. The follow- 
 ing were the only such details that I could give in 
 reply :— 
 
 ' One stormy day he walked from his hotel at Biarritz 
 to visit me in the room where I am now writing ; and I was 
 amazed to see that he had come without an umbrella. On my 
 venturing to remonstrate, he laughingly explained that, if 
 the high wind had happened to turn his umbrella inside out, 
 a picture of him in that forlorn plight would have found its 
 way into half the comic papers ! I could not help thinking 
 how little we know of the small worries of great men. How 
 widely applicable was Horace's remark, " Saepius ventis agita- 
 tur ingevs Pinus " (" The tallest pines most feel the blast "), 
 and how doubly applicable were the words here italicized to 
 Mr. Gladstone as I then saw him. 
 
 ' My other and very different anecdote may serve to illus- 
 trate Mr. Gladstone's extreme good nature. My wife and 
 I invited a Liberal barrister to dinner to meet his political 
 chief ; but he was prevented from coming by a broken leg. 
 He was, I think, at that time not personally known to 
 Mr. Gladstone ; but, although his room was near the top of 
 our hotel, which then had no lift, the grand octogenarian 
 walked up flight after flight of stairs and talked for some 
 time by his bedside. It was in the course of this conversa- 
 tion that the great man uttered the hard saying that at 
 no distant time, not only will Home Kule in Ireland have 
 been carried, but people will have a difficulty in under- 
 standing the state of mind which postponed the carrying of 
 it so long. 
 
 'As you wish to learn something about Mr. Gladstone's 
 amusements, it may be worth while mentioning that when 
 I left him one evening, he told me that he was going to 
 play backgammon, and recommended the game to me as 
 a wholesome relaxation.' 
 
 Jowett doubted whether Gladstone could be properly 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 201 
 
 called a man of genius, inasmuch as none, or hardly 
 any, of his phrases have become current. I have 
 elsewhere pointed out that several of the great orator's 
 phrases are still remembered, such phrases, in par- 
 ticular, as ' within the range of practical politics ' and 
 as 'turning out the Turks, bag and baggage'. But 
 his most felicitous metaphor has been preserved in 
 an unexpected quarter. Mr. Traill, himself a fin de 
 siecle Conservative, had no love for the Radical leader, 
 as is clearly shown in two of those brilliant Dialogues 
 of the Bead which he has published under the name of 
 The New Lucian. One of those Dialogues in Elysium 
 is between Horsman and Edmund Burke. Horsman, 
 who is clearly Traill's trans-Stygian representative, is 
 trying to explain to Burke the cause of Gladstone's 
 influence. 'Simplicity, terseness, homely vigour,' 
 he says, ' are absolutely antipodean to his style.' He 
 ascribes much to the orator's countenance, and, above 
 all, to the richness and exquisite modulation of his 
 voice. But what here concerns me is that he can 
 find only one good metaphor in all Mr. Gladstone's 
 speeches. His account of it is as follows : — 
 
 'He [Gladstone] was speaking of the Christian races in 
 Turkey, and he said of them: "They were like a shelving 
 beach, which restrained the ocean. That beach, it is true, 
 is beaten by the waves; it is laid desolate; it produces 
 nothing; it becomes perhaps nothing but a mass of shingle, 
 of rock, of almost useless seaweed ; but it is a fence behind 
 which a cultivated earth can spread and escape the incoming 
 tide ; and such was the resistance of Bulgarians, of Servians 
 and of Greeks. It was that resistance which left Europe 
 to claim the enjoyment of her own religion and to develop 
 her own institutions and her laws." . . . This had that highest 
 merit of oratorical metaphor, that is, image and argument 
 in one.' 
 
202 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 Let it be understood that I cite the above metaphor, 
 not as the single, but as a singularly good specimen of 
 Mr. Gladstone's power of happy illustration. 
 
 It may not be too much of a digression to quote 
 a passage which throws light on the uncomplimentary 
 side of Mr. Gladstone's metaphor — on the comparison, 
 I mean, between the intellectual barrenness of the 
 Christian subjects of the Porte, and the barrenness 
 of the seashore. The following extract is from King- 
 lake's highly characteristic account of his experience 
 of Servia and Bulgaria more than sixty years ago : 
 
 ' There are few countries less infested by " lions " than 
 the provinces on this part of your route ; you are not called 
 upon to drop a tear over the tomb of the once brilliant 
 anybody, or to pay your tribute of respect to anything dead 
 or alive ; there are no Servian or Bulgarian litterateurs with 
 whom it would be positively disgraceful not to form an 
 acquaintance; you have no staring, no praising to get 
 through. The only public building of any interest that lies 
 on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good 
 specimen of Oriental architecture ; it is of a pyramidal shape, 
 and is made up of thirty thousand skulls contributed by the 
 rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this 
 century. I am not at all sure of my date, but I fancy it 
 was in the year 1806 that the first skull was laid. I am 
 ashamed to say that, in the early morning, we unknowingly 
 went by the neighbourhood of this triumph of art, and so 
 basely got off from admiring the " simple grandeur of the 
 architect's conceptions " and " the exquisite beauty of the 
 fretwork ".' 
 
 My readers are familiar with the conceit that 
 ' Words that were fire are ashes on the page ', and 
 with Charles Fox's stronger assertion that a speech 
 which reads well must be ' a damned bad speech '. 
 Yet, after all, the speeches of Demosthenes and of 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 203 
 
 Cicero were effective when spoken and are still read 
 with delight. To Gladstone's eloquence, on the other 
 hand, may be applied what was said by Tacitus about 
 the eloquence of Haterius and by Macaulay about that 
 of Pitt : Canorum illud et profluens cum ipso simul 
 exstinctum est (' His copious and melodious eloquence 
 perished with him '). The writings of Mr. Gladstone, 
 like his speeches, are not much read ; and I often 
 wonder why he failed as a writer. I once heard 
 Canon Ainger admit that sometimes in the pulpit 
 he himself trusted to the intonation of his voice to 
 make his meaning clear, and that thus the habit of 
 preaching was a snare to him as a writer. Perhaps 
 Mr. Gladstone fell into a like snare. His overwhelm- 
 ing success as an orator may have blinded him. to the 
 difference between spoken and written English. If 
 his tongue was the pen of a ready writer, his pen was 
 sometimes the tongue of a too-ready speaker. He 
 may also have suffered as a writer from that 'dim 
 magnificence' of language which Macaulay ascribes 
 to him, and represents as in some cases ' very much 
 worse than absolute nonsense'. It is, by the way, 
 in this same essay on Gladstone that Macaulay notes 
 the contrast 'between the effect of written words 
 which are perused and re-perused in the stillness of 
 the closet, and the effect of spoken words which, set 
 off by the graces of utterance and gesture, vibrate for 
 a single moment on the ear '. Without pursuing the 
 inquiry further, we may assume that, great scholar 
 though Gladstone was, his rank as a writer is oddly 
 below his rank as a speaker, so much that he may 
 be described as omnium consensu capax optime scribendi, 
 nisi scripsisset. In illustration of the vast difference 
 between Gladstone's rank as an orator and as a writer, 
 
204 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 it may be enough to contrast the general disregard 
 of his writings with the loud echo which resounded 
 through the country when he blew the war trumpet 
 in his electioneering struggles. During the Midlothian 
 campaign, in particular, he was in very truth a 
 Misenus — 
 
 ' Quo non praestantior alter 
 Aere ciere viros Martemque accendere cantu.' 
 
 (' Of trumpeters unmatched 
 To kindle by his blast the warrior's fire.') 
 
 Jowett exhorted one or more of his pupils to follow 
 what he called 'Devil's advice' by cherishing ambi- 
 tion ; and even so stern a moralist as Mill regarded 
 that last infirmity of noble minds as conducive, if 
 not essential, to great artistic or literary success. But 
 Lord Morley tells -us that Gladstone disclaimed ambi- 
 tion. Might not the literary success of his speeches 
 have been greater if he had had more ambition? 
 A certain form of ambition as an orator he must 
 have had ; but even as an orator his ambition had 
 the rare merit of being untainted with envy. Of his 
 freedom from that fault, which Scherer somewhere 
 declares to be 'quasi-universal', an example may be 
 given. I was once so thoughtless as to tell him that, 
 in the opinion of Leslie Stephen, Burke and Bright 
 were the only two English orators whose speeches 
 would continue to be read. In fact, these two con- 
 stituted a highly select First Class from which his 
 own name was conspicuously omitted. But, far from 
 resenting the omission, he said that he was interested 
 to hear the critic's opinion, and would certainly report 
 it to his friends. It was assuredly much to his honour 
 that he thus rejoiced at the rather invidious praise 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 205 
 
 bestowed on Bright, who had been, not merely his 
 contemporary, but his political subordinate, and who 
 in the matter of Home Eule must have seemed to 
 him a deserter. 
 
 During the first year of my undergraduate life 
 Mr. Gladstone did me the great honour of calling 
 on me at Balliol. I well remember with what awe he 
 then inspired me ; and I have learnt only by report 
 that he knew how to be seasonably frivolous (desipere 
 in loco). From his manner in old age I should never 
 have inferred this. He was, indeed, most kind 
 in gratifying my taste for his charming political 
 gossip ; but he seemed to me to take life so seriously 
 that he could not, like his friend Robert Lowe, be 
 broadly witty, and humour was not one of his strong 
 points. In fact, my experience of him confirms the 
 general impression left on me by one of his friends 
 who, as is mentioned elsewhere, said to me : ' He will 
 talk about a piece of old china as if he was standing 
 before the judgement seat of God.' 
 
 ' Mirabeau,' says Macaulay, ' was fond of giving odd 
 compound nicknames. Thus, M. de Lafayette was 
 Grandison-Cromwell ; the King of Prussia was Alaric- 
 Cotin 1 ; d'Espremenil was Crispin-Cataline. We think 
 that Mirabeau himself might be described, after his 
 own fashion, as a Wilkes-Chatham.' Perhaps I may 
 help to give a rational basis to the general estimate 
 of Mr. Gladstone by raising the question as to how 
 
 1 The Abbe Cotin, like Frederick the Great, was a pedantic and 
 pretentious versifier; he is said to have been the original of 
 Trissotin in Les Fenvmes Savantes. Obviously the point of the 
 satire is that Frederick's bad verses are put side by side with his 
 military genius. 
 
206 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 Mirabeau, had he been now alive, would have nick- 
 named him. With the utmost diffidence I will state 
 my own answer to this question. In 1885, when 
 referring to a conversation with Mark Pattison, 
 I described Mr. Gladstone as ' the modern Pericles — 
 scholar, orator, reformer'. Assuredly I might have 
 added that each of the two statesmen was not only 
 a reformer, but the chief reforming politician of his 
 time and country ; and that therewithal each of them 
 was an aristocrat by birth and tradition, and to some 
 extent, probably, by sentiment. But here the analogy 
 between them ends. Unlike Gladstone, Pericles was 
 a general. Moreover, it is probable that Pericles 
 was less of a born orator than Gladstone, or at any 
 rate that the oratorical faculty — that good servant, 
 but bad master — exercised less dominion over him. 
 But it is hard to judge on this point ; for it is possible 
 that those spirit-stirring words of his, words some of 
 which ever since my Harrow and Balliol days have 
 haunted my memory, were manipulated by Thucydides. 
 Nor is this the only point on which our knowledge 
 concerning the Greek statesman is provokingly limited. 
 Jowett once told me that, in his opinion, the relation 
 of Pericles to the Athenian democracy may have 
 resembled that of Louis Napoleon to the democratic 
 empire of the French. This, I own, seems to me 
 unlikely. But Jowett was probably thinking of the 
 passage of Thucydides in which the administration of 
 Pericles is described as ' nominally a democracy, but 
 in reality the supremacy of the first citizen ' — a phrase, 
 by the way, which might well be applied to Mr. Glad- 
 stone. Of course, in thus comparing the two states- 
 men I am not affirming them to be equal. Probably 
 no admirer of Mr. Gladstone would go that length ; 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 207 
 
 and certainly none would assign to him anything like 
 the place in English history which Pericles occupied 
 in Athenian history. Anyhow, the superiority of 
 Pericles furnishes no objection to a comparison of 
 this sort. 
 
 But the chief and most obvious difference between 
 Pericles and Gladstone has been hitherto omitted. 
 Pericles was the disciple of the free-thinking Anaxa- 
 goras, whereas Mr. Gladstone was a convinced and 
 devoted member of his National Church. The advan- 
 tages which, even as a politician, this saint of politics 
 owed to his religion were truly immense; but were 
 they wholly without drawbacks ? Sir George Cornwall 
 Lewis is reported to have described him as ' too 
 religious for a statesman', and, without giving coun- 
 tenance to this paradox, we may yet grant that the 
 enthusiastic idealism, which he owed partly to his 
 religion and partly to his oratorical temperament, 
 sometimes involved him in difficulties. Alas, what 
 else could be expected? We all learnt at college 
 that, according to Plato, when one of the prisoners 
 was temporarily released from the famous cave, and 
 was suffered to catch a glimpse of the glorious world 
 of substances as distinguished from shadows, he found 
 it hard on his return to act like and with his fellow 
 prisoners ; in short, that the idealist is apt to lose, 
 along with many of the defects, some of the sense 
 of measure of men of the world. At any rate, men 
 of the world are at a loss to understand him ; for, 
 in truth, the aspect of mind produced by the long 
 and close contemplation of the ideal is wont, like the 
 light on the face of Moses, to have a dazzling and 
 bewildering effect upon bystanders. Thus it is that 
 the average man is embarrassed by the political gait 
 
208 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 of prophets and world-betterers ; he cannot keep pace 
 with them, and wonders whither they will go next. 
 The unsafeness of such enthusiasts has been insisted 
 on by Fitzjames Stephen, whose dislike of them was 
 aggravated by his Indian experience, and who, when 
 he gave expression to that dislike, seems to have been 
 especially thinking of Mr. Gladstone and of that 
 ' saint of rationalism ', as Mr. Gladstone called him, 
 John Mill. And doubtless many others, whose views 
 are less extreme, merely perhaps because their minds 
 are less logical, virtually think that prophetic zeal, 
 like an active volcano, is a sublime and even fascinating 
 spectacle when viewed from a safe distance ! 
 
 This slight and somewhat allusive sketch of what 
 may be regarded as Mr. Gladstone's shortcomings 
 may suffice for the present purpose. His metal was 
 so free from alloy that, for some rough purposes, its 
 very purity made it less serviceable, I will not say 
 than baser, but than harder metal. After this digres- 
 sion, I will ask how is the comparison between 
 Pericles and Gladstone to be qualified? In short, 
 how is he to be nicknamed a la Mirabeau ? If I were 
 writing for Greek scholars only, I should, so to say, 
 decompose his character into elements represented 
 by the formula Pericles-Nicias. But, addressing 
 general readers, and, moreover, having regard to 
 the whimsical incongruity which such nicknames 
 seem to demand, I am tempted to label him Pericles- 
 Newman. 
 
 And what double nickname can be given to 
 Disraeli? I sometimes think that he might be 
 dubbed Gambetta-Alcibiades. But between these 
 composite photographs, as Mr. Galton might call 
 them, of Gladstone and Disraeli there is a difference. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 209 
 
 The representation of Gladstone is a portrait ; that 
 of Dizzy, though the best that occurs to me, is a 
 caricature. 
 
 Henry Greville, writing as late as 1856, mentions 
 a rumour ' that the Conservatives are coquetting with 
 Gladstone, and that a large section of the party is 
 willing to accept him as their leader vice Disraeli ' ; 
 and more recently the paradox has been broached 
 that Gladstone ought to have been a Tory and Disraeli 
 a Eadical. The odd thing is that Fox and Pitt were 
 also said to have in a manner changed places. Thus 
 Charles Greville in his famous Memoir (March 8, 
 1829) writes : ' He [Lord Harrowby] talked a great 
 deal of Fox and Pitt, and said that the natural dis- 
 position of the former was to arbitrary power and that 
 of the latter to be a reformer, so that circumstances 
 drove each into the course the other was intended for 
 by Nature.' The ever-recurring chapter of 'What 
 might have been ' ought to be studied with caution : 
 for hardly any conclusion that can be drawn from it 
 should rank higher than a plausible conjecture. But 
 it is worth noting that, according to such a conjecture, 
 twice in the same country and in less than a century 
 destiny has driven the Conservative and Liberal chiefs 
 into a path opposed to the natural bent of each, and 
 has thus in a signal manner, if I may so phrase it, 
 round-holed a square peg, and square-holed a round 
 one. Voluit Fortuna iocari. 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, like other reformers and moralists, 
 was sometimes without honour near his own home. 
 A gentleman once told me that, when going on a visit 
 
 p 
 
210 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 to Hawarden, a fellow guest had the curiosity to cross- 
 question the flyman as to what was thought of Gladstone 
 in the neighbourhood. The reply was startling : ' We 
 don't think him up to much; he don't preserve 
 pheasants and knows nothing about horses. If you 
 want to see a real man, you should go to the Dook at 
 Eaton ; he 's something like ! ' 
 
 Before parting company with Mr. Gladstone, I will 
 report an observation of his which was told me by an 
 ear-witness. He now and then used disparaging lan- 
 guage, which certainly came oddly from him, about 
 the old Hebrews. On the occasion in question, he 
 maintained that they had produced no great general. 
 The friend to whom the remark was addressed asked 
 whether Joshua had not shown military genius. ' Not 
 to be compared with Buller,' was the startling reply. 
 It is pleasant for obvious reasons to report the compli- 
 ment paid by so high an authority to our English 
 general. But I cannot understand what possible 
 comparison there can be between a warrior who, 
 according to the only record, could count on super- 
 natural aid and a warrior who never dreamt of such 
 aid. Fancy if Sir Eedvers had been able by the sound 
 of a trumpet to cause Pretoria to fall flat, the sun and 
 moon to stand still, and the Tugela to be dried up ! 
 With what joyful astonishment would the English 
 have welcomed such an exploit, and how it would 
 have frightened the Boers ! 
 
 I made the acquaintance of Professor (afterwards 
 Sir Eichard) Owen early in the sixties, when staying 
 with friends at Eoehampton. His mitis sapientia, 
 moulded and informed by wide culture and by travel, 
 needs not to be dwelt on at length. Suffice it to give 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 211 
 
 from my personal recollection an instance of his 
 familiarity — a familiarity especially fascinating in a 
 man of science — with the borderland between science 
 and literature. Ray, the father of natural history 
 in England, writing in 1692, said : ' He that uses 
 many words for explaining any subject, doth, like the 
 cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own 
 ink.' This passage Owen cited from memory, and he 
 added that the author of the comparison was not 
 always so happy in his scientific metaphors. 
 
 It may be noted in passing that the part of the 
 cuttlefish was deliberately played by the teacher of 
 rhetoric mentioned by Quintilian, whose advice to his 
 pupils was ' Darken ' (<tk6ti<toi>), that is, ' Be obscure, 
 that men may say, That must he deep, as even I could 
 not understand it!' To the same effect was the 
 whimsical or ironical rejoinder made by Pattison to 
 a lady who had been advocating the utmost simplicity 
 in writing : ' You are quite wrong. If you merely 
 study simplicity, people will like your writings but 
 will forget them. Let your style be showy and 
 wordy, and you will have some chance of being 
 remembered ! ' Matthew Arnold, when asked why 
 he had not written his theological works in a simpler 
 style and one less liable to give offence, answered 
 that, if he had so written them, no one would have 
 read them. Bacon says that a slight ostentation is 
 'like unto varnish, that makes the ceilings not only 
 shine but last '. 
 
 The chapter of accidents contains queer sections, 
 and the occasional verisimilitude of fiction is matched 
 by the occasional falsi-similitude of truth. To show 
 that something of real paradox lies hid in this seeming 
 platitude, I will give an authentic version of what has 
 
 p 2 
 
212 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 been called Owen's ghost-story. He himself related it 
 to me some forty years ago, and I have come upon 
 other versions of it. Some of those that have appeared 
 in the newspapers are so inaccurate and pointless that 
 I make no apology for telling the story once more. 
 The version here given was furnished me by a very 
 distinguished scientific friend who heard it from Owen 
 more than once, and thus obtained an account which, 
 whilst in the main it coincides with my own recollec- 
 tions, is far more complete and circumstantial. It is 
 as follows : — 
 
 'When a young man, Owen was surgeon to the jail at 
 Lancaster, which stands on the top of a steep hill. The road 
 through the town that led to it roseln long paved steps, with 
 low houses on either side. He had become an ardent student 
 of Lawrence, whose works had for the first time shown to 
 him the relations of comparative anatomy ; and, among other 
 things, made it clear that the negro and European were 
 structurally alike, brain and all. 
 
 ' There was a negro in the jail dying of consumption ; and 
 Owen eagerly craved to obtain possession of his head, after 
 his death, for leisurely dissection. At last the man died. 
 Owen told the porter in charge that he would come in the 
 evening to make the autopsy, and the coffin was not to be 
 closed yet ; and in the evening he came, wrapped in a long 
 cloak, and with a bag under his arm such as lawyers carry 
 briefs in. His heart palpitated at the thought of what he 
 was going to do; for there was a great outcry against 
 resurrection-men and others of that sort. He went into the 
 jail and up to the mortuary, and then and there cut off 
 the negro's head as he lay in his coffin, and put it into his 
 bag ; then he placed the lid on the coffin and screwed it down 
 with the implements left in readiness. Then he descended 
 the stairs and, passing out, told the porter at the gate that 
 he had examined the negro, and the coffin was all ready for 
 burial. The man said " All right ", and Owen went out, with 
 the bag containing the head under his large cloak. The frost 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 213 
 
 was severe, and the paving-stones were slippery. It was about 
 nine at night ; the streets were deserted, and the lights of the 
 houses were mostly in the upper rooms, showing that the 
 people were going to bed. In front of him was a long stretch 
 of straight road down the steep hill, then it curved out of 
 sight ; but just at the curve a single door stood open and the 
 fire and candle-light shone ruddily and cheerfully through. 
 At this moment Owen slipped and fell head-foremost towards 
 the descent. He wildly grasped the bag as he fell, but some- 
 how grasped it below the head instead of above it. The 
 consequence was that out went the head. As Owen lay 
 sprawling, and before he could get to his feet again, the 
 head was in full roll down the hill, going faster and faster, 
 and bumping down each successive step with increasing 
 speed. Owen rushed wildly after it, but was many yards 
 behind. On went the head and bounded right through an 
 open door. It was a matter of life and death to Owen's 
 career to escape detection in the sacrilege he had committed : 
 so he rushed into the house after it with ghastly face and his 
 long cloak streaming in the wind. He had just time to notice 
 a family gathering who were yelling with terror ; and there 
 was the head on the floor! He plunged and seized it and 
 then rushed out as swiftly as he had rushed in, and got home 
 as fast as he could, finding to his infinite relief that he was 
 not followed. He dissected the head at leisure, but dared not 
 go out of doors, and had not sufficient control of his voice 
 to ask what people said. At length it came out that the 
 house belonged to a woman whose husband had been engaged 
 in the slave traffic, and was believed to be dead. The version 
 she gave was that her own husband's head had rushed into 
 the house for protection, but that the devil, rushing in after, 
 had seized it and borne it away to hell.' 
 
 To this graphic account I will make one slight 
 addition. Owen told me that the woman confirmed 
 her statement by saying, l If you doubt me, sir, look at 
 the stain of blood on the floor.' Observe that the ex- 
 planation of the woman's myth is strictly rationalistic 
 
214 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 in the German sense of the word : her account was 
 based on a real event misunderstood and misrepre- 
 sented. Grote and others have contended that myths 
 are often mere fictions, and that, when they contain 
 a substratum of fact, the substratum is generally irre- 
 coverable. Probably this is so ; but at any rate the 
 foregoing instance is an exception, and such an ex- 
 ception as would have rejoiced the hearts of a 
 rationalist like Euhemerus, or Paulus, or the com- 
 mentator who resolved the story of Jonah into a ship- 
 wreck of the prophet on an island whose inn bore the 
 sign of the Whale. 
 
 A friend of my father's who paid him long and 
 frequent visits at Peckforton was Colonel Gooch. In 
 early youth he had been mentioned in the Gazette for 
 his gallantry at Hougoumont. Indeed, according to 
 my father, he was ' the youngest man ever mentioned 
 in dispatches', and, long after his death, I discovered 
 that he had been immortalized — or perhaps it would 
 be safer to say post-mortalized — by being referred to 
 in Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World. When 
 I knew him, he was a good-natured but touchy old 
 gentleman, and such interest as still attached to him 
 belonged wholly to his past. He was short of stature, 
 and sensitive on the point. Another and far more 
 interesting annual guest of my father was Mr. John 
 Forbes, who had been at the close of Warren Hastings's 
 trial, who had spoken to a ferryman who as a boy had 
 helped to ferry Pope over the Thames, who had been 
 Lord Wellesley's private secretary, who had entered 
 Madrid with Wellington, and who, though almost for- 
 gotten in our generation, was more or less acquainted 
 with nearly all the leading men of the preceding one. 
 Though he was nearly twenty years older than Gooch r 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEE-LIFE 215 
 
 he was well preserved and handsome, and he looked 
 down on the little Colonel both literally and meta- 
 phorically, and also generally managed to talk him 
 down. The two rivals certainly did not love one 
 another ; and, though regard for my father kept them 
 from openly quarrelling, they had occasional bouts of 
 sparring. Forbes told Gooch that he was ' a little 
 canary bird '. As the little man did not sing, I cannot 
 guess why he was likened to a canary rather than to 
 any other small bird (unless, indeed, he was yellow 
 through hepatic troubles). Anyhow, he had his 
 revenge. Once, on reaching Peckforton, he unex- 
 pectedly saw the doorway darkened by the stately 
 form of his persecutor, and called out, ' Why, Forbes, 
 are you here ? I heard you were dead.' And his 
 manner showed that the too persistent vitality of his 
 old acquaintance was to him — well — not a source of 
 unmixed satisfaction. 
 
 The Positivists have a 'sacrament' admonishing 
 superannuated veterans to retire, after the manner of 
 Laertes, from active life. An anecdote told by 
 Mr. Forbes serves to show that even the Iron Duke, 
 towards the close of his life, had need of such an 
 admonition. At that melancholy period, the great 
 man was asked by a lady whether it was true that the 
 Spaniards put musk-rats into scent-bottles? 'Quite 
 true,' he answered. ' And are the musk-rats,' she 
 inquired, ' as big as common rats ? ' ' Certainly,' he 
 replied ; and, as she looked incredulous, he appealed 
 to an aide-de-camp, who promptly assented. 'And,' 
 continued the lady, 'are Spanish scent-bottles the 
 same size as ours ? ' ' Just the same size,' said 
 Wellington ; and again the wily subordinate echoed 
 the opinion of his chief. But, when the Duke was 
 
216 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 well out of hearing, the time-server gave vent to his 
 real thought by exclaiming, ' We are always being 
 ordered at the Horse Guards to put rats into scent- 
 bottles ' ; or, to adapt a more familiar metaphor, they 
 were told to ride a camel through a needle's eye ! 
 This narrative, when I heard it, sounded to me 
 apocryphal; but I find that it is confirmed in the 
 autobiography of Lord Albemarle, that genial and 
 accomplished patriarch, who lived to be one of the 
 last, if not the very last, of the survivors of the 
 Waterloo dinner. 
 
 My anecdote of the Duke in the character of Baron 
 Munchausen recalls a story told by Samuel Kogers : 
 A traveller once said that in a particular country the 
 bees were as large as sheep. He was asked, ' How 
 big then are the hives ? ' ' Oh,' he replied, ' the usual 
 size.' 
 
 Mr. Forbes said that a Lord Forbes, a kinsman of 
 his own, saw something, I know not at what date, of 
 an eccentric King of Naples. When dining with His 
 Majesty, he was puzzled by the sight of what our 
 friend described as ' a colossal glass of water ' on 
 a separate table by the side of the royal chair. Nor 
 was his perplexity removed till the end of dinner, 
 when the floor, where the dinner table stood, was let 
 down by machinery. (Can such a trap-door table have 
 resembled the tables volantes which, according to 
 Carlyle, found favour in France shortly before the 
 Eevolution ?) When the table had been lowered, the 
 Englishman, looking down into its temporary grave, 
 saw the cook standing expectant, until the King, after 
 brandishing the ' colossal glass ', playfully drenched 
 him with its contents. All the courtiers laughed, and 
 Lord Forbes afterwards owned that he himself had 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 217 
 
 laughed too. But, when next he dined with the King, 
 the same glass and the same cook reappeared, and the 
 same sorry farce was re-enacted. Again the courtiers 
 laughed ; but the Englishman could not conceal his 
 disgust. 
 
 A favourite quotation of Mr. Forbes's was : 
 
 ' Forgiveness to the injured does belong ; 
 But they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong;' 
 
 and he invariably added, ' I don't know whether these 
 lines are by Pope or Addison.' As a matter of fact, 
 they occur in Dryden's Conquest of Granada. The 
 blunder is hardly worth correcting, but I quote the 
 lines because they are to me an echo of auld lang syne, 
 and I always associate them with my dear old friend. 
 Their implied experience of the seamy side of human 
 intercourse make them especially suited to be an old 
 man's motto. Macaulay couples them with Odisse 
 quern laeseris, of which they are in fact a lengthened 
 paraphrase. Of course, both the Latin motto and the 
 English paraphrase are one-sided ; but in the latter, 
 because of its greater defmiteness, the one-sidedness is 
 more evident. In fact, this English couplet is like 
 a coin whose sharp edges have been smoothed down 
 by use ; so that here familiarity breeds indulgence. 
 I once raised an outcry among friends by perpetrating 
 a variation on the same theme : 
 
 ' From boons we grant, affection draws its savour ; 
 Our hearts are cold when we receive a favour.' x 
 
 1 Since writing the above, I have lighted on a passage in which 
 the view here indicated is expressed by Macaulay without 
 epigrammatic exaggeration, and with only so much cynicism as 
 belongs to naked truth. ' The way in which the two favourites 
 
218 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 L 
 
 A pendant to Odisse quern laeseris would be Amare 
 quern iuveris; this sounds quite harmless, but is more 
 cynical than it sounds. My favourite pastime of 
 permutations and variations suggests to me a variant 
 on Rochefoucauld's famous maxim, ' Hypocrisy is the 
 homage paid by vice to virtue ' — ' Equivocation is the 
 homage paid by falsehood to truth.' I have elsewhere 
 maintained that 'Valour is the better part of dis- 
 cretion ' is an inverted proverb which appears to me 
 to have fully as much truth as its original. The point 
 has been illustrated by the saying of Van Amburgh, 
 who, when asked what he should do if he met a lion 
 in the desert, replied, ' If I wished for sudden death, 
 I should turn and run away.' 
 
 Though Mr. Forbes was emphatically a ladies' man 
 (he was especially given to the old-world fashion of 
 hand-kissing), yet he sometimes abused the female sex. 
 But his censure of that sex was akin to flattery. It 
 might be said of him, as Eenan said of the author of 
 Ecclesiastes, that he would never have abused women 
 as he did, if he had not been very fond of them. He 
 showed this by the mock-solemnity with which he 
 used to quote in their presence three stanzas on 
 Woman, the last and most vigorous of which I will 
 here transcribe, partly in the hope that some reader 
 can tell me who wrote them : 
 
 (Essex and Buckingham) acted towards Bacon was highly charac- 
 teristic, and may serve to illustrate the old and true saying, 
 that a man is generally more inclined to feel kindly towards one 
 on whom he has conferred favours than towards one from whom 
 he has received them.' That amusing comedy, Le Voyage de 
 Monsieur Perrichon, in which this perverse side of human nature 
 is happily illustrated, contains the remark : ' Les hommes ne 
 s'attachent point a nous en raison des services que nous leur 
 rendons, mais en raison de ceux qu'ils nous rendent.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 219 
 
 ' Lovely trifler, dear delusion, 
 
 Conquering weakness, wished-for pain, 
 Man's best solace and confusion, 
 Of all vanities most vain!' 
 
 Will it be said that it was discourteous of him to 
 repeat these shocking lines ? Well, he was more than 
 kept in countenance by my father's favourite brother, 
 himself the most courteous of men, who long ago 
 startled my youthful ears by quoting a most un- 
 chivalrous Latin couplet : 
 
 'Ursa quid peius? Tigris. Quid tigride? Serpens. 
 Aspide quid? Mulier. Quid muliere? Nihil.' 
 
 The false quantity in the second line shows that 
 the epigram is post-classical, but for the date and 
 authorship I have searched in vain. I was, however, 
 lucky enough to discover a variant : 
 
 ' Quid pluma levius ? Pulvis. Quid pulvere ? Ventus. 
 Quid vento ? Mulier. Quid muliere ? Nihil.' 
 
 This occurs in Francis Davison's Poetical Bhapsody 
 (1602), translated by Walter Davison, the poet's 
 brother : 
 
 'Dust is lighter than a feather, 
 And the wind more light than either; 
 But a woman's fickle mind 
 More than feather, dust, or wind.' 
 
 There is moreover a variant of this variant, which 
 improves both the quantity and the quality of the 
 epigram : 
 
 'Quid vento? Meretrix. Quid meretrice? Nihil' 
 
 The end of these twin-couplets may recall that of a 
 conceit by Quarles : 
 
220 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 'My soul, what's lighter than a feather? Wind. 
 Than wind ? The fire. And what than fire ? The mind. 
 What 's lighter than the mind ? A thought. Than thought ? 
 This bubble world. What than this bubble? Nought.' 
 
 The mention of Quarles recalls another circumstance 
 mentioned by Forbes. He said that within his 
 memory the bodies of Henry VHI and Charles I, 
 which lay side by side, were disinterred in presence 
 of the Prince Kegent, and that for a moment the 
 features of Charles were discernible, but that, as soon 
 as they were exposed, they crumbled away. The 
 incident was the occasion of some satirical verses, 
 which I can quote, I think exactly, as I heard them 
 from Forbes half a century ago : 
 
 'Scarce worth an epitaph from Tate or Quarles, 
 See heartless Henry lies by headless Charles. 
 Between them stands another sceptred thing, 
 It lives, it moves, in all but name — a king. 
 Charles to his people, Henry to his wife, 
 In him the double tyrant starts to life. 
 Justice and Death have mixed their dust in vain; 
 The royal vampires join to breathe again. 
 What now do tombs avail, since these disgorge 
 The blood and dirt of both to mould a George?' 
 
 Forbes spoke of these lines as being by ' Lord Byron 
 or somebody', and I have since learnt that they 
 are really by Byron. Two variants of them have 
 already been published. These versions and Forbes's 
 version are nearly identical in the last four couplets. 
 But the three versions of the first couplet differ utterly. 
 One version of that couplet is : 
 
 'Famed for contemptuous breach of sacred ties, 
 By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies.' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTERLIFE 221 
 
 The other version is : 
 
 'Famed for their civil and domestic quarrels, 
 See heartless Henry lies by headless Charles.' 
 
 It will be seen that Forbes's version is far better than 
 the one of the other two which it most resembles. 
 He was an older contemporary of Byron's and may 
 very well have heard the lines shortly after they were 
 written ; he himself was incapable of writing the first 
 line of his version ; and I see no reason for doubting 
 that this latest and best variant of that line was 
 Byron's own. 
 
 It may be worth mentioning that Greville reports 
 the fact of the disinterment of the two kings : 
 
 'Sir Henry Halford gave me an account of his discovery 
 of the head of Charles I in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, 
 to which he was directed by Wood's account in the Athenae 
 Oxonienses. He says that they also found the coffin of 
 Henry VIII, but that the air had penetrated and the body 
 had been reduced to a skeleton. By the side was Jane 
 Seymour's coffin untouched, and he has no doubt her body 
 is perfect. By degrees we may visit the whole line of Tudors 
 and Plantagenets and see if those famous old creatures were 
 like their effigies. He says Charles's head was exactly as 
 Vandyke had painted him.' 
 
 This was written in 1831 ; and it is curious that 
 Greville, who was in the centre of London gossip, 
 heard then for the first time of the disinterment which 
 must have taken place at least eleven years earlier, 
 and that he makes no mention either of the Prince 
 Eegent or of the satire. 
 
 Byron's satire, both in its violence and in one of its 
 rhymes, recalls a characteristic stanza in the poet's 
 diatribe entitled The Irish Avatar : 
 
222 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 'Spread — spread, for Vitellius, the royal repast, 
 
 Till the gluttonous despot be stufFd to the gorge, 
 And the roar of his drunkards proclaim him at last 
 The Fourth of the fools and oppressors called George. 
 
 Charles Austin used to declaim this stanza with gusto ; 
 and he added that, allowance being made for the 
 difference of time and ethical standard, George IV 
 was as bad as the worst of the Eoman Emperors. At 
 the present day such anathemas are scarcely in- 
 telligible. Whatever may have been the King's vices, 
 we cannot afford to feel such rancorous hatred for 
 any one so far off. It is, therefore, a relief to turn to 
 what Mr. Goldwin Smith — himself anything but a 
 king-fancier — has to say in his favour: 'He visited 
 Ireland ; he fell in love with a very excellent as well 
 as very charming woman in the person of Mrs. Fitz- 
 herbert, and, if he had been allowed, would have made 
 her his wife; 1 and he liked Jane Austen's novels.' 
 Might it not be added that he was the friend and 
 admirer of Walter Scott? 
 
 The late Colonel Taylor, formerly Conservative Whip, 
 told me that he (or a friend of his), meeting a brother 
 officer after a long absence, was concerned to see that 
 he had lost an arm. How, he asked, had the accident 
 occurred ? ' The odd thing is,' answered the veteran, 
 ' that my arm was cut off by a dead man. As I was 
 riding in Morocco, I met an Arab on a mountain-pass 
 where there was only just room for our two horses. 
 He raised his scimitar and I had just time to cock 
 my pistol and shoot him ; but, as he fell, the scimitar 
 caught my arm and lopped it off.' 
 
 An anecdote was told me in the sixties of a very 
 able and agreeable Englishman who was uniformly 
 
 1 It is now known that he actually married Mrs. Fitzherbert. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 223 
 
 courteous to his Armenian wife, though she was 
 ungracious to him and altogether a shrew. How 
 came he to choose such a wife? It appeared on 
 inquiry that in his youth he was attached to the 
 British Legation at Athens, and that he fell in love 
 with the charming daughter of an Armenian merchant. 
 Her father, however, objected ; and the only expedient 
 seemed to be for her to be put into a cask and shipped 
 across the Aegean Sea. She had a very plain and 
 cantankerous sister who continually snubbed her, but 
 who on this occasion played a sisterly part. She 
 procured a cask, looked to the breathing holes and 
 needful provisions, and then brought the bride-elect 
 to what Dumas would have called her tonibeau vivant. 
 The poor girl shuddered and turned away. ' Why 
 don't you get in ? ' asked her sister reproachfully. 
 'I suppose I must — but no, I really can't,' was the 
 faltering reply. ' Then, if you wont, I will,' said the 
 audacious interloper ; and into the barrel she stepped. 
 The portable prison, alas ! reached Athens safely ; and, 
 on opening the cask, the ardent lover saw what he 
 saw. He, however, was too generous to ship off the 
 enamoured vixen, and thus expose her to her father's 
 fury. He therefore resigned himself to the lot, so 
 to say, of a transferable bridegroom, and married the 
 ugly girl. But what can his feelings have been? 
 Perhaps they may be sufficiently indicated by adapting 
 a Cloughian hexameter : 
 
 'Rachel he dreamt of at night; in the morn found Leah 
 in the barrel.' 
 
 The following incident was reported to me by the 
 late Eev. S. H. Beynolds of Brasenose, who had it 
 direct from another distinguished Oxford don, whose 
 
224 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 little daughter was the heroine — perhaps a heroine in a 
 double sense. The child once went in great distress 
 to her mother, saying that she had committed a sin 
 which could never be forgiven, and which was too bad 
 to be told. By dint of a little coaxing, she was 
 induced to make a full confession, which was on this 
 wise : ' I felt so sorry for poor Satan, and wanted to 
 give him a little comfort. So I got a glass of cold 
 water, and poured it down a little hole in the kitchen 
 floor.' The courage which the child showed by her 
 truly religious wish to let, as it were, her rain descend 
 on the Evil One, recalls to me the stanza : 
 
 'And not a drop that from our cups we throw 
 For earth to drink of, but may steal below 
 
 To quench the fire of anguish in some eye 
 There hidden — far beneath, and long ago.' 
 
 The following ingenious legend as to the creation 
 
 of Eve was told me by C , an Oxford don, now 
 
 deceased. When the Garden of Eden was created, 
 it was surrounded by a high wall to guard it from the 
 devils who were outside. Within it were placed 
 couples of all kinds of beasts and birds ; but Adam 
 was the only human being. As time went on, the 
 couples increased and multiplied, so that they were 
 straitened for space in the garden. The inmates 
 were therefore suffered to go beyond the walls each 
 day ; but they had to return before nightfall. When 
 the gate was open, an angel with a flaming sword 
 kept watch. One day a peacock went forth and, 
 spreading his tail for a space, looked round; but, 
 seeing nothing so beautiful as himself, he speedily 
 turned back. Thence came an opportunity for one 
 of the fiends. We learn from Paradise Lost that 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 225 
 
 devils can contract themselves indefinitely at will. 
 Availing himself of this useful faculty, the demon 
 found a hiding-place beneath the bird's descending tail. 
 He thus entered the garden unseen] by the angel, and, 
 disengaging himself from the peacock, traversed the 
 enclosure with evil intent. Presently he saw Adam 
 asleep on the ground. Not being one of the worst 
 devils, he did the sleeper no harm, but merely tried 
 to make a facsimile of that majestic form. His success 
 was such that he produced a living copy, not indeed 
 equal to the original, but still of transcendent beauty. 
 Meantime the hoodwinked guardian scented mischief. 
 Taking a bird's- (I mean an angel's-) eye view of the 
 whole garden, he saw the patriarch still sleeping, and 
 the demon and his creature standing and beholding 
 him. Thereupon the flaming sword was drawn, and 
 straightway the heads of both the spectators rolled 
 on the grass. Then, alas! the angel was filled with 
 remorse. As he gazed on the exquisite countenance 
 of the newly-formed and innocent creature, he resolved 
 to restore the 'thing of beauty' to life. But, in his 
 extreme haste, he clapped the head of the paragon on 
 the shoulders of the fiend. It grew there ; and by 
 that odd process of engrafting was formed the first 
 woman. 
 
 As I was not told from what source this tale of 
 pre-scientific hybridization was derived, I asked Mark 
 Pattison whether it could by any possibility have been 
 
 the narrator's own invention. ' C ■,' was his decided 
 
 answer, 'never invented anything so good as that.' 
 Can any reader tell me if the legend was, so to say, 
 a genuine antique ? 
 
 It was at Biarritz that the legend of the possessed 
 peacock was told me ; and it may be partly on this 
 
226 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 account that I have come to associate that legend 
 with the conceit current in Basqueland : ' L'homme 
 est de l'etoupe ; la femme est du feu ; le diable passe 
 et souffle.' Well, the Basque mot is, at any rate, more 
 gallant than their proverb : ' Give a dog a bone, and 
 a woman a he.' 
 
 Goethe, in one of his letters, quotes an enigmatical 
 saying of the ancient Greeks : ' The sea wants figs.' 
 To that saying a quaint story is attached. A Sicilian 
 Greek, having put to sea with a cargo of figs, was 
 caught in a storm. The cargo was lost ; and, though 
 he himself escaped, he was reduced to poverty. After 
 his return, as he was lounging on a calm day by the 
 seashore, a friend advised him to try his fortune once 
 more on shipboard. But he had already had too 
 much of the sea, and had resolved never again to trust 
 to what Aeschylus calls that ' stepmother of ships '. 
 ' To-day,' he said, ' she is alluring with her smiles ; but, 
 in truth, she is both treacherous and greedy : she 
 wants figs ! ' 
 
 In our own time, as in that of the shipwrecked 
 fig-merchant, the storms on the coast of Sicily are 
 objects of peculiar dread. A traveller, who has seen 
 much of the Sicilians, tells me that they hold St. Peter 
 to be responsible for those storms, and that therefore 
 they, perhaps unwittingly, regard him with some- 
 thing of disfavour. Being thus minded, they concoct 
 legends at his expense, of which the following may 
 serve as a sample. His wife's mother, they say, 
 having done much evil on earth, was doomed to the 
 lowest depths of Pandemonium. The apostle was 
 troubled on her account, the more so as her condition 
 exposed him to much raillery on the part of beatified 
 new-comers. At last their banter became so irksome 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 227 
 
 that he besought the Supreme Judge for a remission 
 of her sentence. Such an act of clemency was without 
 precedent ; but a point was stretched for the mother- 
 in-law of the prince of the apostles. It was, there- 
 fore, decreed that the records of her life should be 
 overhauled to see whether a single virtuous act was 
 set down to her credit. The inquiry showed that she — 
 more fortunate than Mr. Kipling's Tomlinson — had 
 done one such act. When eating an onion, she had 
 given part of the peel to be sucked by a hungry 
 beggar. On the strength of this signal act of 
 generosity, it was ordained that the identical onion- 
 peel should be created anew, and that an angel, 
 flying down to the nether regions, should give her 
 one end of it, and should drag her up by means of 
 that slender pulley. At first the angling process 
 seemed likely to succeed; the aged sinner began to 
 rise from the abyss. But, while she was still within 
 reach of the bottomless pit, others of its inmates 
 remembered that they, in their time, had given such 
 succour to the needy as was hardly less munificent 
 even that the bestowal of the onion-peel ! They 
 therefore claimed a share in her good fortune, and, 
 catching hold of her feet, began to rise with her. To 
 these hangers-on, literally so called, others attached 
 themselves : 
 
 'And thick and fast they rose at last, 
 And more and more and more.' 
 
 Presently the ascending chain became so long that 
 for a moment it seemed likely that the hopes of 
 Universalists would be fulfilled, and that hell would 
 wear the aspect of an extinct volcano. But this was 
 not to be. The crafty old woman, whether incom- 
 
 Q2 
 
228 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 moded by the ever-increasing weight of the hangers-on, 
 or fearing that her own glory would be lessened by 
 being shared with so many, began to kick lustily. 
 So energetic was she that she soon disburdened her- 
 self of the living parachute, and was left for an instant 
 alone with the angel. But her selfishness was not 
 to remain unpunished. Her frantic efforts broke the 
 onion-peel. She fell back into the lake of anguish ; 
 and the last state of the apostle's kinswoman was 
 worse than the first. 
 
 In the course of my rambles I twice visited Ferney, 
 and paid homage to the Manes of Voltaire. I felt 
 that I was meeting an old friend when I saw the 
 church which the philosopher built, and on which 
 'Deo erexit Voltaire' is ostentatiously inscribed. 
 Charles Austin had told me of the inscription, and 
 had commented on the anomaly of a church being 
 built by such a man. Though he himself carried 
 conformity as far as any one, he sometimes expressed 
 a half-jocular disapproval of conformity in others. 
 And thus it was that he tacked on a couplet slightly 
 altered from Cowper to a famous couplet of Pope, and 
 exclaimed : 
 
 'Who builds a church to God, and not to fame, 
 Will never mark the marble with his name; 
 Like him who, to the curse of ages born, 
 Built God a church, and laughed His word to scorn.' 
 
 On another occasion he spoke more characteristically 
 by saying, with a dry laugh, ' I can forgive Voltaire's 
 conformity, but not his bad Latin.' If he referred 
 to the inscription he was surely hypercritical, and 
 Dumas showed a happier wit when he wrote : 
 
 'La premiere chose que Ton apercoit (a Ferney) avant 
 d'entrer au chateau, c'est une petite chapelle dont l'inscrip- 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 229 
 
 tion est un chef-d'oeuvre; elle ne se compose cependant que 
 de trois mots latins. Deo erexit Voltaire. Elle avait pour 
 but de prouver au monde entier, fort inquiet des de'mele's de 
 la creature et du Crdateur, que Voltaire et Dieu s'e'taient 
 enfin re'concilie's ; le monde apprit cette nouvelle avec satisfac- 
 tion, mais il soupconna toujours Voltaire d'avoir fait les 
 premieres avances.' 
 
 It is well known that the philosopher's heart is 
 preserved in the chateau, and that it bears the inscrip- 
 tion Mon cceur est id, mais mon esprit est partout. As 
 I viewed this strange relic of the 'Patriarch of the 
 Holy Philosophical Church', I murmured to myself 
 the lines addressed by Antony to the body of 
 Caesar : 
 
 'Thou art the ruins of the noblest man 
 That ever lived in the tide of times.' 
 
 The word ' noblest ' does not, indeed, fit the vain 
 and undisciplined Frenchman, though he has as good 
 a claim to it as the slayer of Vercingetorix and the 
 subverter of the Koman Republic. But in my youth 
 I had been attracted towards Voltaire. At Harrow 
 I was a worshipper of Macaulay and a sentence of 
 the Essay on Banke had early stuck in my memory : 
 'When an innocent man was broken on the wheel 
 at Toulouse ; when a youth, guilty only of an indis- 
 cretion, was beheaded at Abbeville ; when a brave 
 officer, borne down by public injustice, was dragged, 
 with a gag in his mouth, to die on the Place de la 
 Greve ; a voice instantly went forth from the banks 
 of Lake Leman, which made itself heard from Moscow 
 to Cadiz, and which sentenced the unjust judges to 
 the contempt and detestation of all Europe.' Even 
 in my Evangelical boyhood, I had a liking for the 
 philanthropic infidel; and regarded him as the 
 
230 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 Christian Prudentius regarded the apostate Julian: 
 Perfidus itte Deo, sed non et perfidus orbi. Assuredly 
 Voltaire, with all his vanities and his graver failings, 
 was one of the greatest and most humane as well as 
 wittiest men that our poor little planet has produced. 
 The preservation of the heart of Voltaire brings to 
 my memory the eccentric fate of that of Louis XIV. 
 The posthumous wanderings of this latter heart will 
 be familiar to some readers ; but the odd thing is that 
 they are not known more widely ; and so let me 
 renew my plea, that, in very truth, what are ' chest- 
 nuts ' to the few may be ' nuts ' to the many. The 
 facts were communicated to me by the late General 
 Addison. He asked me if I knew the present where- 
 abouts of the heart of the Grand Monarque ; and, on 
 my answering in the negative, he startled me by 
 saying that it now lies in Westminster Abbey. 
 According to his account, the tomb of Louis XIV 
 was rifled during the French Revolution, and his 
 heart was offered for sale. It was eventually bought 
 by Mr. Harcourt, the then owner of Nuneham. Dean 
 Buckland paid a visit to Mr. Harcourt, and the singular 
 relic was shown to him. Being then on the extreme 
 verge of imbecility, the quondam geologist said that, 
 when about to examine a curious stone, he first put 
 it into his mouth ; and — mirabile dictu ! — he put the 
 shrunken heart into his mouth and inadvertently 
 swallowed it. His death must have followed soon after 
 his involuntary cannibalism ; for the royal heart was 
 still inside his body when he was taken to his last 
 resting-place in the Abbey. General Addison added 
 that this extraordinary story was vouched for by one 
 of the owners of Nuneham — I rather think by the 
 Eev. William Harcourt, the father of Sir William. It 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 231 
 
 should be stated that the late Mr. Edward Harcourt, 
 elder brother of Sir William, gave a kinsman of mine 
 a narrative of the affair substantially agreeing with 
 the first part of that given me by the general. His 
 authentic version confirms the foregoing version up 
 to the point of the aged Dean's highly indigestible 
 mouthful, but says nothing about the tragic sequel 
 of that unwonted diet. 
 
 In confirmation of this extraordinary narrative, it 
 may be worth mentioning that the Dean and his more 
 celebrated son used to apply what may be called the 
 gustatory — why may I not say the disgustatory ? — test 
 to stones in an almost incredible fashion. The same 
 kinsman whom I have just cited as a witness, and 
 who is himself a F.R.S. of long standing, writes to 
 me: 
 
 'It was related that in a cathedral (say Canterbury) the 
 verger was wont to show visitors the stain on a marble 
 tomb, still plainly visible, where the blood of a saint (say 
 Thomas a Becket) had been spilt. When Dean Buckland was 
 taken to this spot, instead of being content with looking and 
 listening, he bent over and applied his tongue to the darkened 
 surface, and exclaimed, as he raised himself, "Bat's dung ; 
 decidedly!" One of the hearers at once capped the story. 
 "Another remarkable thing," he said, " is that Frank Buckland, 
 the naturalist, inherited the same faculty. Once upon a time, 
 he was walking in London with a friend when a thick fog 
 came on. They lost their way and wandered for some time, 
 till, when they came to a halt, they had no notion in what 
 part of London they were. In these straits Frank Buckland 
 knelt down and put his tongue to the pavement ; and, as he 
 rose, he exclaimed, ' Bayswater, decidedly ! "'" 
 
 Here is a mot addressed to the afore-mentioned 
 Eev. W. Harcourt by the astronomer Leverrier. Know- 
 ing Mr. Harcourt to be well versed in science, the 
 
282 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 French savant gave him a meteoric stone, quaintly- 
 observing, ' Voila, monsieur, une planete de poche ! ' 
 The ' pocket planet ' reminds me of the scornful pity 
 with which, in Voltaire's romance, the huge travellers 
 from Sirius and Saturn to the Earth regarded poor 
 little men as ' atomes intelligents . . . dans ce miserable 
 etat si voisin de l'aneantissement ', and also of Dryden's 
 reference to heathen deities as 'puny godlings of 
 inferior race '. 
 
 My next anecdote has for its heroine the widow of 
 a distinguished officer ; and it appeals to me, as both 
 she and her husband were known to me in my youth. 
 Towards the close of her life, Lady C. used often to 
 play at cards with a party of friends, including an old 
 German baron and his young wife. Having been kept 
 away from the party by illness, she wrote to the Baron 
 telling him that she had formerly been indifferent to 
 religion, but that, during her seclusion, she was con- 
 verted. The clever, if somewhat eccentric, lady ended 
 her letter on this wise : ' I feel that my life cannot 
 last much longer, and you, too, my dear Baron, are 
 no longer young. Our earthly pleasures must soon 
 be given up ; but it comforts me to think that you and 
 I will have a good time together in the other world 
 before the Baroness comes to join us there.' 
 
 Her mundane and epicurean view of Paradise 
 reminds me of an episode in the life of Benjamin 
 Franklin. The great American, when a widower and 
 well stricken in years, tried to win for himself a sort 
 of Abishag-wife, in the person of Helvetius's widow. 
 Finding the lady unresponsive, he wrote her a letter, of 
 which the following may serve as an abridgement : 
 
 ' Mortified at the barbarous resolution pronounced by you 
 so positively yesterday evening, that you would remain single 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTERLIFE 233 
 
 the rest of your life, as a compliment due to the memory of 
 your husband, I retired to my chamber. Throwing myself 
 upon my bed, I dreamt that I was dead, and was transported 
 to the Elysian Fields. I was asked whether I wished to see 
 any persons in particular, to which I replied, that I wished to 
 see the philosophers. " There are two who live here at hand 
 in this garden ; they are good neighbours, and very friendly 
 towards one another.'' "Who are they?" "Socrates and 
 Helvetius." "I esteem them both highly; but let me see 
 Helvetius first, because I understand a little French, but 
 not a word of Greek." I was conducted to him and he 
 received me with great courtesy. "I have taken to myself 
 another wife," he said, "who has a great fund of wit and 
 good sense; and her whole study is to please me. She is 
 at this moment gone to fetch the best nectar and ambrosia 
 to regale me ; stay here awhile and you will see her." As 
 he finished speaking, the new Madame Helvetius entered 
 with the nectar and I recognized her immediately as my 
 former friend, Mrs. Franklin! I reclaimed her, but she 
 answered me coldly : " I was a good wife to you for forty- 
 nine years and four months, nearly half a century ; let that 
 content you. I have formed a new connexion here, which 
 will last to eternity." 
 
 ' Indignant at this refusal of my Eurydice, I immediately 
 resolved to quit those ungrateful shades, and return to this 
 good world again, to behold the sun and you ! Here I am ; 
 let us avenge ourselves.' 
 
 I have referred to the friendly relation which, 
 political differences notwithstanding, subsisted between 
 Mr. Bright and my father. For this and other reasons, 
 I am anxious to relate a circumstance which throws 
 a pleasant light on the domestic affections of that not 
 too conciliatory orator. A friend of his once told me 
 that he saw him gazing intently at some caged birds 
 in front of a shop in a London street ; and he asked 
 him what on earth he saw there which so attracted 
 
234 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 him. Bright answered that, when one or more of 
 his children were absent, he wrote to them as often 
 as possible ; and he was then looking out for 
 something which might find a place in his next 
 letter. 
 
 Occasionally instances occur, not exactly of haphazard 
 voting in Parliament, but at any rate of voting not accord- 
 ing to knowledge. A late not over-scrupulous M.P., 
 who had no love for the Evangelicals, told me that, just 
 before an ecclesiastical division, a noted Evangelical 
 asked him eagerly which way Newdigate had voted. 
 My informant, provoked at this lack of independence, 
 went the length of hoaxing him as to the line taken 
 by Newdigate and his fellow Evangelicals. Some 
 thirty years ago, a Low Church M.P. who knew little 
 or nothing about ecclesiastical politics said to me : 
 ' Whenever a church question comes before the House, 
 I observe into which lobby Beresford Hope goes, and 
 I walk straight into the opposite one ! ' 
 
 One of the most singular of my links with the past 
 is Lady Molesworth (the mother of the politician), 
 whom I met at Brighton in 1869, and who was then 
 hard upon ninety. She told me that she had gone 
 into a shop adjoining the Pavilion, and had astonished 
 the shopman by saying : ' This used to be part of the 
 Pavilion. The last time I was here was seventy years 
 ago, when I came to a ball given by the Prince 
 Begent.' The garrulous old lady's experience reminds 
 me of an odd incident connected with the same place. 
 My wife's grandmother, Lady Ely, who was lady- 
 in-waiting to Queen Adelaide, was in attendance at 
 Brighton when a Court ball was given at the Pavilion. 
 As the accommodation was indifferent, she asked some 
 of her friends to leave their cloaks in her bedroom. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 235 
 
 When, at the end of the ball, the ladies returned to 
 claim their possessions, they were startled by a loud 
 snore coming from behind the curtains of the four- 
 poster. The fact was that the aged and infirm Lord 
 Ely, never dreaming that his privacy would be invaded, 
 had gone to rest betimes. 
 
 A quasi-historic interest may attach to some doggerel 
 lines, which Mr. Forbes confidently declared to have 
 been written in Paris by the Duchess of Wellington, 
 when the English were so much hated by the French 
 after the end of the great war : 
 
 ' The French petits-maitres, who the spectacle throng, 
 Say of Wellington's dress Qu'il fait Vilain ton ; 
 But at Waterloo Wellington made the French stare, 
 When their army he dressed a la mode d'Angleterre.' 
 
 Need I explain that 'Vilainton' was the French 
 nickname for Wellington ? 
 
 Wellington and my great-grandmother, Lady Aid- 
 borough, were bound by a close tie of friendship. 
 Her daughter told me with natural pride that, in 
 acknowledgement of his regard for her mother, the 
 Duke, when presented to her, kissed her hand. But 
 Lady Aldborough, though intimate with our great 
 general, was still more so with our great admiral. 
 The latter friendship she owed chiefly to her being 
 the niece of the husband of Lady Hamilton. In a 
 letter to The Spectator, the last survivor of Lady Aid- 
 borough's grandsons writes that 
 
 ' She had often seen her celebrated Aunt Emma dance the 
 famous shawl dance for the benefit of our naval hero. My 
 grandmother lived a great deal in Paris. She told me she 
 went there on one occasion for six weeks, and stayed sixteen 
 years. She was certainly there during part of the Hundred 
 Days.' 
 
286 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 In confirmation of this last statement, I may mention 
 that my father told me that in 1815 she witnessed the 
 service at the Sainte Ohapelle, on one Sunday attended 
 by Louis XVIII, and on the next by Napoleon. As 
 she could not possibly foresee that the ghost of the 
 Empire was to haunt Europe for only a hundred days, 
 one wonders that so shrewd a calculator exposed her- 
 self to the chance of becoming a detenue. But her 
 prudence soon revived. The Emperor, indeed, sent 
 one of his generals, who was personally known to 
 her, to assure her of the safety of the English in 
 France. But she wisely distrusted such assurance, 
 and took refuge betimes in Switzerland, where she 
 remained till all fear of the tyranny was overpast. 
 It must be remembered that some competent ob 
 servers considered, even after Waterloo, that the 
 Napoleonic game was not up. Thus, the able and 
 upright General Marbot regretted that the defeated 
 Emperor abdicated when he did. But surely he 
 had no choice. Might he not have exclaimed with 
 Anchises : 
 
 'Satis una superque 
 Vidimus excidia et captae superavimus urbi ' ? 
 
 Dryden's free rendering of this passage may be 
 adapted thus : 
 
 'Tis sure enough, if not too much, for one 
 Twice to have seen his country overthrown.' 
 
 That prince of anecdotists and of gossips in high 
 places, Abraham Hayward, has classed Lady Aid- 
 borough with Sydney Smith and Luttrell as one of the 
 chief wits of her time. This being so, one regrets 
 that so few of her good sayings have been preserved. 
 One of her sallies was a late offshoot of such an act 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 237 
 
 of high-bred inconsiderateness and insolence as might 
 have been expected from Lady Kew or from the 
 Lady Catherine of Pride and Prejudice. The story 
 shall be told in her grandson's words : 
 
 = Lady Aldborough was living in Dublin in a rather high 
 social position, when a young man was appointed aide-de-camp 
 to the Lord Lieutenant, and was soon introduced to her. This 
 young man was Arthur Wellesley. Wishing to show him 
 some civility, Lady Aldborough offered him a seat in her 
 carriage on the occasion of a fete some miles out of Dublin. 
 She found him a silent, dull, young man, putting nothing 
 in the pool, as she expressed it, and she decided to give him 
 the slip coming back. Wellesley waited in vain to be picked 
 up till all the carriages were gone, and the only means of 
 getting back to Dublin was to take a seat in the van of the 
 band. Many years afterwards she reminded the great Duke 
 of this occurrence, saying : " I little thought, when I left you 
 to find your way back with the fiddlers, that you were going 
 to play first fiddle yourself." ' 
 
 My reference to Lady Aldborough's high-bred 
 insolence illustrates the fact that, when a person 
 who has risen from the ranks is unkind and un- 
 mannerly, we are often told that the offender is 
 ill-bred, and that no lady or gentleman would have 
 acted in such a way. On the other hand, when the 
 delinquent belongs to a good family, the censure is 
 softened, and certainly no such word as ' ill-bred ' or 
 1 underbred ' will be used. It may be added that, if he 
 or she is not well born only, but rich and hospitable, 
 the blame will be spoken sotto voce or written in 
 invisible ink. 
 
 It is pathetic to contrast Lady Aldborough in the 
 heyday of her brilliant, but somewhat arrogant, prime 
 with the Lady Aldborough as she appeared in her 
 extreme old age. 'Dined with Lady Aldborough,' 
 
238 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 writes Greville, July 9, 1843, 'and with Mrs. Murchison, 
 wife of the geologist, at an hotel table d'hote (at Baden- 
 Baden), where Lady A.'s screaming and strange 
 gestures alarmed me for the effect they would pro- 
 duce on the company, and lest she should come out 
 with some of those extraordinary things which she 
 does not scruple to say to almost everybody she talks 
 to. She is eighty-seven years old, still vigorous, 
 and has all her wits about her, only her memory is 
 gone, for she tells a story, and, forgetting she has told 
 it, begins it again almost directly after.' An odd entry 
 occurs in the Memoir thirteen years earlier: 'Lady 
 Aldborough came in in the evening, and flew up 
 to him (Marmont) with "Ah, mon cher Marechal, 
 embrassez-moi " ; and so, after escaping the cannon's 
 mouth at Paris, he was obliged to face Lady 
 Aldborough's mouth here.' 
 
 To these links with the past may here be appended 
 a somewhat whimsical link between my great- 
 grandmother's dotage and my own boyhood. Lady 
 Aldborough — surely in her decrepitude — paid £40 
 for a handsome but taciturn green parrot, which 
 came into my possession when I was eight years 
 old. Jacko had been left to my grandmother; but 
 he was, to use my father's phrase, such a ' savage 
 brute' with most people, and his love at first sight 
 for me was so marked, that he was soon made over to 
 me. If any one petted me, he was jealous ; if any one 
 pretended to beat me, he was furious. 
 
 Max Miiller has contended that the line between 
 human reason and animal instinct is not so hard and 
 fast as is sometimes supposed ; a bird, before cracking 
 a nut, will sometimes judge by its weight whether it 
 has a kernel or not : is not this an act of comparison ? 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 239 
 
 Jacko performed such an act after a fashion of his 
 own. He had a way of taking my finger in his claw 
 and playfully biting it ; but he first experimented on 
 his own leg. As, however, the untutored Baconian 
 did not allow for the fact that his leg was protected 
 with feathers while my finger was not, his friendly 
 peck was sometimes harder than I liked. Was not 
 his hasty generalization a rudimentary form of the 
 inductio per enumerationem simplicem ? 
 
 In early boyhood I was sent, in forma invalidi, as 
 a day scholar to a boarding-school at Brighton. Jacko 
 used to be placed in the bow window of our lodging ; 
 and from his joyful uproar my friends could at once 
 tell when he espied me on my way home. When 
 I went to Harrow, the sense of bereavement, seconded 
 by old age, soon did its work ; and, before my first 
 term was over, the loyal bird had sickened and died. 
 Hamerton, after hinting at the possibility that all 
 human reverence may gradually disappear from the 
 earth, comforted himself with the reflection that, 
 even in that case, the torch of reverence will still 
 be kept alight; for the reverence of dogs for their 
 masters is indestructible. From Martial's lap-dog 
 to Ovid's parrot the step is short. And thus, 
 when I think of my dear Jacko, I am reminded 
 of the graceful epitaph which that friend of my 
 youth, Sir Francis Doyle, wrote on a favourite 
 dog: 
 
 'Not hopeless round this calm sepulchral spot 
 
 A wreath, presaging life, we twine; 
 If God be love, what sleeps below was not 
 
 Without a spark divine.' 
 
 Before quitting this subject, I will tell of a mis- 
 conception which should warn us — well — not to cast 
 
240 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 our metaphors before philistines. When collecting 
 my old-world memories, I asked an acquaintance 
 who was well stricken in years if he could give me 
 any links with the past. He looked bewildered, and 
 then answered quite seriously : ' I don't understand 
 you. What are links with the past ? Golf links, I sup- 
 pose you mean.' This is almost as good as Miss Ferrier's 
 story of the Bath bluestocking who asked her country 
 visitor if she had seen Crabbe's Tales. ' Crabs' 
 tails ! ' was the puzzled reply : ' I didn't remember 
 that they had tails.' 
 
 The rustic lady must have been as much puzzled 
 as was a doctor in an Alpine hotel who, finding that 
 coffee kept one of his patients awake, was advised by 
 an English lady to let the invalid try cocoa. The 
 doctor knew hardly any English, and it was unluckily 
 in English that the suggestion was made. ' I under- 
 stand you not,' he replied, utterly bewildered. ' Cocko ! 
 Cuckoo ! He is in the forest ! ' I was staying in the 
 hotel at the time and had the story direct from the 
 lady. 
 
 A friend assures me that, when Sir Bartle Frere 
 called on her mother in India, the native servant, 
 sorely perplexed by his name, announced him as- 
 'Bottled Beer Sahib'. 
 
 Mr. Thorold Eogers, whose economic works are 
 now forgotten, but whose satires still live in the 
 memory of Oxford men, was fond of telling the story 
 how, on a visit to the States, he was disgusted, as he 
 steamed up the St. Lawrence, at seeing the magnificent 
 cliffs deformed by an advertisement cut in gigantic 
 letters : ' Take Cockle's antibilious pills.' On his 
 return a month later his annoyance was tempered 
 by amusement ; for beneath was inscribed in equally 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEE-LIFE 241 
 
 bold characters, ' and Prepare to meet thy God.' The 
 second poster, so he was informed, was bona fide, the 
 work of some religious society, and not the witty 
 counterblast of a rival firm of quack medicine-vendors. 
 Some wag must have added the ' and '. 
 
 The familiar Anglo-Latin pun on a member of the 
 Jex-Blake family (not the Dean of Bath and Wells) 
 is too unjust to be here repeated. But an impromptu 
 of a guest of the Dean's may be given without offence. 
 He had been driven to the station with a pair of 
 spanking greys, and, after alighting, is said to have 
 exclaimed : ' If the plural of lex is leges, it follows 
 that the plural of Jex is gee-gees.' 
 
 Looking in an old diary of mine, I find that 
 January 25, 1870, has the laconic entry : ' Marry. 
 To Norwood ' ; in which unromantic place I spent 
 my mid-wintery honeymoon — felicitatis eximiae non 
 auspicatum exordium. But with the commonplaces 
 (or uncommonplaces) of my domestic bliss I will 
 not weary my readers. One fact in relation to my 
 marriage may here suffice. A day or two after that 
 happy event, my wife and I were reading together 
 Tennyson's Golden Supper and we came upon the 
 
 words : 
 
 'Lionel and the girl 
 Were wedded.' 
 
 The trifle seems to me worth recording as a sample 
 of odd coincidences, such as occur from time to time 
 and furnish one of those foundations of sand whereon 
 spiritualists and telepathists erect their fairy palaces. 
 A yet stranger coincidence was mentioned to me by 
 a late distinguished lawyer. His twin daughters went 
 in together for an examination, in which the question 
 
 R 
 
242 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 was asked: 'What do you understand by Catholic 
 Emancipation?' Quite independently, and without 
 having, so far as they remembered, previously talked 
 over the matter, they both, in almost identical words, 
 wrote down the ingeniously wrong answer : ' Catholic 
 Emancipation means the abolition of slavery, which 
 has been rightly called Catholic as it took place at 
 the same time all over the world.' 
 
 A reminiscence of my wife's girlhood may here not 
 be irrelevant. One day, as she was Avalking in the 
 garden of St. James's Square, she was startled to see 
 two small boys fighting. As she approached, she 
 recognized one of them as a Catholic Peer, and the 
 other as the son of a Protestant Peer. On her 
 asking them what on earth they were quarrelling 
 about, the Protestant champion answered : ' That boy 
 says there's purgatory, and I say there isn't.' Was 
 it under the influence of an inherited instinct or of 
 a family tradition that the puny disputants — both 
 of them descendants of the Crusaders — thus appealed 
 to the God of battles, and had recourse to the ordeal 
 of fisticuffs ? 
 
 Since my marriage, I have spent a large part of 
 each year out of England in valetudinarian banish- 
 ment. Between 1878 and the time when I am now 
 writing (1905), the scenes of my voluntary or involun- 
 tary exile have been in or near Switzerland in the 
 summer and autumn and at Biarritz in the winter. 
 When on the Continent, I have always lived in hotels ; 
 and thus I have been brought into long and close 
 contact with what I call ex-Anglian life — the life of 
 the English abroad. In one of Coppee's short stories, 
 the heroine, being asked her nationality, gave the 
 quaint reply : ' Je ne suis ni de Londres, ni de Paris, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 243 
 
 ni de Vienne, ni de Saint-Petersbourg . . . Je suis de 
 table d'hote.' Writing on this subject nearly twenty 
 years ago, I said: 'The land of the table d'hote is 
 a land whereon the sun never sets ; and everywhere 
 it has its own customs and by-laws. In this pleasant, 
 if not very edifying, country of cosmopolites and 
 butterflies, the conventional note, so to say, is pitched 
 a full octave lower than in any other civilized society. 
 Confidences are poured forth — experto crede — by mere 
 strangers, although (or because) they never expect to 
 see one again ; and friendship grows and is lost 
 with the rapidity of a serpent's skin, or rather of 
 Jonah's gourd.' 
 
 I am tempted to add a few words on this ubiquitous 
 no-man's-land, partly because I have naturally seen 
 much more of it since writing those words, and partly 
 because table d'hdte life, as I then understood it, is 
 changing its character, if not dying out. The change 
 has been unexpected, and its causes are perplexing. 
 While English life at home has been growing less 
 conventional, English life abroad has grown more 
 intolerant and exclusive. At any rate, only thus 
 can I explain the fact that, in foreign towns fre- 
 quented by the English, the sociable long table of 
 the table d'hote, that table so dear to forlorn and 
 solitary old maids, is being very generally displaced 
 by a number of conventional small tables. Observe, 
 I am not surprised that parents should be afraid lest 
 their young daughters in hotels should make acquaint- 
 ance with vulgar people. What surprises me is that, 
 during the last twenty or thirty years, this fear has been 
 on the increase. How is this anomaly to be explained ? 
 The only explanation that occurs to me is that, owing 
 to the improved means of locomotion, the ranks of 
 
 r2 
 
244 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 the ' travelling English ' are nowadays recruited from 
 a lower class than in the seventies or eighties ; an 
 insupportable or, in modern phrase, 'impossible' 
 intruder is oftener encountered ; and the result is 
 that the increased toleration of the most refined 
 class of tourists is more than counteracted by the 
 increased vulgarity of an occasional member of the 
 least refined class. Be this as it may, it is at least 
 certain that hotel society, agreeable as it often is, 
 can never be warranted select; for hotels are clubs 
 without black balls. At ' a game of " Definitions " 
 played long years ago at Pontresina, a lady, who 
 had to define the words meeting and parting, joined 
 the two words together, and defined meeting-and- 
 parting as hotel-life'. Indeed, being in a manner 
 unstable all round, hotel-life is the paradise of loafers 
 and lotus-eaters. And yet this nondescript paradise 
 is attractive to some who are anything but lotus- 
 eaters. Will it be said that the attraction must be 
 such as Goethe had in view when he maintained that 
 likes are not drawn to likes, but unlikes to unlikes ? 
 Well, I will touch briefly on the causes of that 
 harmony of opposites further on. Meantime, I must 
 freely admit that there are occasions when this 
 paradise, such as it is, is less marked by the presence 
 of the tree of knowledge than by that of the serpent — 
 occasions, I mean, when the prevailing interests are 
 divided between golf and gossip, and when, alas ! the 
 patron saints are St. Ananias and St. Sapphira. Once, 
 when staying at a foreign watering-place, I took part 
 in a game in which each player had to devise an 
 ingenious mode of representing some well-known 
 tragedy or comedy. The prize was given to a lady 
 who pinned to her dress a slip of paper on which the 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 245 
 
 name of the watering-place was written. The play 
 which was thus too appropriately designated was Hie 
 School for Scandal The joke would have had no point 
 if it had not, by general consent, been founded on fact. 
 It is assuredly not meant that table-d'hote-land is 
 always suffering from the scandalmongering ailment. 
 But other infirmities are to be found there. In ' show ' 
 watering-places there is much idleness and extrava- 
 gance in dress. Not that the extravagance is really 
 equal to that of London or Paris. But, owing partly 
 to the suspension of ordinary occupations, partly to the 
 absence of a well-directed and organized public opinion, 
 and partly, perhaps, to the mixture of classes and 
 nationalities, the extravagance, and especially the idle- 
 ness, are brought into strong relief. It is in such 
 a booth of Vanity Fair that the Mrs. Beffold of Ships 
 that Pass in the Night is fitly placed to show off her 
 finery. By her side in the novel stands the contrasting 
 figure of Bernadine, who is a representative, though 
 an idealized one, of another class of table d'hoters. 
 I refer to the class of invalids, many of whom are 
 rather unfairly called malades imaginaires. Does a malade 
 imaginaire, pure and simple, really exist? Surely no 
 one, without something wrong in his nervous system, 
 would be thus hypochondriacal ; so that what is called 
 une maladie imaginaire is, generally at least, une maladie 
 reelle, eocageree par V imagination. This reality gives the 
 doctors something tangible to deal with, if that is any 
 consolation to the patient. According to Mr. Goldwin 
 Smith, the famous Dr. Kadcliffe, of Oxford, ' is said to 
 have punished the giver of a niggardly fee by a pre- 
 diction of death, which was fulfilled by the terrors of 
 the patient.' Well, even of itself and without the aid 
 of medical vindictiveness, the nervous disorder to 
 
246 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 which I refer is often productive of morbid forebodings 
 and hardly less morbid introspection ; so that we may 
 say of it, as Horace and Ovid said of dropsy, that it 
 tempts its victims to do the very thing that is worst 
 for them (Crescit indulgens sibi), it grows by self-indul- 
 gence. Doubtless the professional invalid, so to call 
 him, is entitled to far more respect and sympathy 
 than the votary of vanity. He might urge with truth 
 that a man's happiness consisteth less in how much he 
 possesseth than in how well he digesteth. But, though 
 the valetudinarian is more estimable than the vanitarian, 
 he is not a whit less tiresome. It is far from pleasant 
 to be brought to close quarters with a self-tormentor 
 of whom it may be said that, after a novel fashion, his 
 god is his belly, and that he is in very truth a pepto- 
 maniac. In other words, a philosophical hater of 
 boredom might think that between the cult of wealth 
 and that of health, between vanitas vanitatum and 
 sanitas sanitatum, there is little to choose. 
 
 Anyhow, after following me thus far, the reader 
 will hardly wish to be brought into longer and closer 
 contact with the counterparts, male or female, of 
 Mrs. Keffold — with the social Pharisees, I mean, who 
 are conventional when they ought to be unconventional 
 and are unconventional when they ought to be con- 
 ventional. So, bidding adieu or au diable to, let us 
 say, those gnat-straining camel-swallowers, I will pass 
 on to a very different class of tourists, from whom 
 a wholesome lesson is to be learnt. The lesson is well 
 expressed both in a Latin and in a German motto : 
 
 'Qui vult optatam cursu contingere metam 
 Multa tulit fecitque puer ; ' 
 ('The youth who would the goal attain 
 Must toil and moil with might and main.') 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 247 
 
 and 
 
 'Was Hanschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmer mehr.' 
 The truth of these texts for a lay ■ sermon has been 
 pathetically brought home to me by my experience of 
 tables d'hote. Among the table d'hoters are to be found 
 6\jniiadeis, late-in-life scholars, men who, after spending 
 their best years in business, have a praiseworthy wish 
 to cultivate their minds in old age. They will often 
 glibly and intelligently air their newly-acquired learn- 
 ing, but suddenly they will be guilty of some ana- 
 chronism or other blunder so gross as to show that their 
 knowledge is founded, not on rock, but on sand. Such 
 men, in Max Muller's phrase, aspire to be architects 
 when they ought to be masons ; or, in Bunyan's phrase, 
 they seek to enter the Celestial City without having 
 passed through the wicket-gate. Their mental condition 
 may be illustrated by the case of an elderly American, 
 who, however, did not stumble into an historical pit- 
 fall, but naively avowed his ignorance. His daughter 
 had twice been married to Frenchmen, her second 
 husband being a distinguished politician ; but, though 
 he himself had lived much in France, he had learnt 
 no more of the language than the emigres, after the 
 great war with Napoleon, had learnt of English. 
 Many years ago, when wintering at Biarritz, he 
 picked up a translation of Lamartine's account of 
 the Keign of Terror. The odd thing was that the 
 disasters of that sad time had been unknown to him ; 
 and, as he read of the cruel activity of the guillotine, 
 he worked himself into a sort of passion. At last 
 he called out, more than half in earnest, ' If I had 
 known that such things had been done in France, 
 I should never have let my daughter marry two 
 Frenchmen ! ' 
 
248 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 Such being the shortcomings of table-d'h6te-land, 
 it may be asked why men and women of culture 
 are content to live in it. The obvious answer is that 
 those of them who thus expatriate themselves are 
 nearly always either invalids or their ' caretakers '. 
 What was said by an irreverent person when com- 
 paring heaven and hell may be applied to a comparison 
 between a foreign health-resort and England : the 
 former is preferable in point of climate, the latter 
 in point of society. And to invalids of the class here 
 specified a good climate is of the utmost importance. 
 But this is not all. A delicate man who lives with 
 the busy inhabitants of a town is apt to feel, to use an 
 Aesopian metaphor, like a grasshopper in colloquy 
 with ants. A human grasshopper of this type cannot 
 help being a grasshopper. But the human ants cannot 
 understand that. To speak more precisely, a man 
 in the prime of life who is disabled by nervous weak- 
 ness for hard work will be charged with being what 
 Shakespeare called ' crafty-sick ', or at best with being 
 hypochondriacal, by his stalwart neighbours who bear 
 the burden and heat of the day ; and, finding himself 
 either patronized or cold-shouldered by those Pharisees 
 of industry, the idler by necessity takes refuge with 
 the idlers by choice. Here, again, the quaint old 
 American may serve as a witness. After spending 
 some years in Europe, he felt a natural wish to end 
 his days with the surviving friends of his youth. So 
 he returned to Chicago ; but he found that, in a society 
 where dollar-hunting was the order of the day, where 
 all young men were busy, and where old men talked 
 business and thought business, an easy life was impos- 
 sible for him. The contagion of work began to tell on 
 his health and spirits ; and he recrossed the Atlantic 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 249 
 
 in search of that leisure which now, in the New World 
 especially, seems to be at a discount, but which Horace 
 valued above gold and jewels (non gemmis . . . venale 
 neque auro). The general principle which my old friend 
 thus exemplified is well stated by Johnson. ' Boswell : 
 " We grow weary when idle." Johnson: "That is, sir, 
 because, others being busy, we want company ; but, 
 if we were all idle, there would be no growing weary ; 
 we should all entertain one another".' 
 
 Will it be objected that I have not yet adequately 
 explained the attractions of hotel life for any studious 
 person, even if he be physically disabled for hard 
 work ? By far the greatest of those attractions is to 
 be found in the many delightful friendships which he 
 may hope to gain there — friendships which would not 
 as easily take root in the conventional soil of England. 
 If I have not hitherto said anything of the supreme 
 advantage of ex-Anglian life, the reason is that it is 
 felt, but can hardly be described. A good illustration 
 of this advantage will be given presently. So I will 
 remark that, in some foreign hotels, human nature is 
 oftener than elsewhere to be seen in the rough, and 
 that, in those psychical laboratories, there is a good 
 chance of attaining what Goethe declares to be the 
 true aim of culture, ' to know the world and not to 
 despise it ' (die Welt zu kennen und sie nicht verachten). 
 A few stray anecdotes will make my meaning clearer. 
 They are so chosen and arranged as to throw light 
 on the relation in which tourists stand both to those 
 among whom they sojourn and to each other ; and, 
 to follow this arrangement, the reader should regard 
 them as divided into two classes, which I am tempted 
 to call the pleasantly exotic and the quaintly table- 
 d'hotic. Beginning with this latter class, which is 
 
250 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 mainly comic, I will gradually pass on to the other 
 anecdotes, which are semi-serious and, it is hoped, 
 suggestive. 
 
 Keference has already been made to the games of 
 ' definitions ' which used to be played at Pontresina. 
 In one such game an umbrella was defined as 'a 
 shelter for one and a shower-bath for two'. The 
 sandwiches in the Engadine being often made by 
 putting a slice of meat between the halves of a split 
 roll, a sandwich was described as 'a crusty couple 
 divided by a tongue '. A discourteous wag gave just 
 offence by defining woman as ' a creature that was 
 made after man and has been after him ever 
 since '. 
 
 At the Bernina hospice, where I used often to stay, 
 a south country squire said that his sporting vicar, 
 when dining with him, was called away to a peasant's 
 deathbed ; after a short absence he returned, and thus 
 related his experience : ' I asked the poor man if he 
 had anything on his mind ; and, as his answer was 
 vague, I put a leading question, "Did you ever kill 
 a fox ?" "No, parson," he said, emphatically; "never." 
 So I told him he was a good man, and I felt sure he 
 would go to heaven.' 
 
 A kinswoman of my wife, who had left the school- 
 room long before girls were expected to learn German, 
 was staying in a hotel near the river at Coblentz when 
 she was horrified to hear the cry of ' Dampfschiff' . 
 She instantly rang for the waiter and asked whether 
 the cry meant that there were damp sheets in the 
 bedrooms. Did she imagine that the German land- 
 lord was thus publicly proclaiming his own neglect 
 of sanitary precautions, and, moreover, that he was 
 conveying the information in English? Or perhaps 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEE-LIFE 251 
 
 she thought that she had made her way unawares 
 into either a hydropathic institution or a madhouse. 
 Anyhow, the confusion of sounds which so perplexed 
 her brings to my memory the use of an orally am- 
 biguous word by a not very wise nobleman who, 
 being then Privy Seal, was sent on a mission to 
 Talleyrand, and thus pompously announced himself: 
 ' Je suis le Sceau [sot] Prive du Eoi ; pas le Grand 
 Sceau [sot]. II y a un Sceau [sot] encore plus grand 
 que moi.' 'Est-il possible?' was the witty French- 
 man's response. 
 
 My kinswoman's error may also recall that of an 
 eminent man who was less proficient in modern 
 languages than in classics, and who ordered in a Swiss 
 hotel Kindfleisch by mistake for Eindfleisch. It is said 
 that in the Channel Islands, during the absence or 
 illness of the incumbent of a parish, an English 
 clergyman, who was by way of being a good French 
 scholar, undertook to preach a French sermon. With 
 great earnestness he exhorted his hearers to drink of 
 the water of life freely : ' Chaque matin et chaque soir 
 prenez eau-de-vie. Quand vous avez soif, buvez eau- 
 de-vie librement.' Conflicting reports have reached 
 me as to the whereabouts of this Malapropian ad- 
 venture ; but my impression is that the story is, at 
 least, founded on fact. In Lincolnshire, tomatoes, 
 when fully ripe, are said to ' bleed '. A Lincolnshire 
 lady once told her cook that, as they were beginning 
 to ' bleed ', they should be used at once. The cook, 
 being from a different county, was at first dumb- 
 founded by the expression, but presently exclaimed : 
 ' I suppose, ma'am, that is what the clergyman meant 
 when he said last Sunday " the blood of tomatoes is 
 the seed of the Church " ! ' 
 
252 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 A cousin tells me that once, in a foreign hotel, she 
 met an English paterfamilias who, being urged by 
 his son to take some ice, gruffly, but too audibly, 
 answered, ' The temperature of the stomach ought not 
 to be below 98°.' In contrast to this valetudinarian 
 may be mentioned a middle-class matron whom my 
 wife saw at a table d'hote at Nice, and who, misliking 
 the foreign cookery, called out : ' They never give us 
 anything tasty here. Why can't we have pickled 
 pork ? ' 
 
 More than thirty years ago, St. Moritz was visited 
 by a former schoolfellow of mine, who was then 
 Viceroy of Ireland. Great was the excitement which 
 sprang out of that event. A ball being given at the 
 hotel, a lady, who danced with the great man, told me 
 that a Danish gentleman said to her with a solemn 
 air : ' Do you know that you had the honour of being 
 the Viceroy's partner ? ' Being somewhat nervous 
 and flighty, the aforesaid Dane was tiresomely in- 
 quisitive as to the position which this queller of the 
 Irish enjoyed : were not his revenues immense ? At 
 last the popular imagination became so heated that 
 a vapour issued from it in the form of a myth. 
 Rumour appears to have confounded the Viceroy with 
 the Khedive ; and he himself laughingly told me that 
 this portentous delusion had reached his ears. A year 
 or two passed by, and my old schoolfellow returned 
 to St. Moritz. But the ministry had changed, and 
 he was now shorn of his viceregal honours. The 
 Danish wiseacre also returned ; and I found myself 
 speculating whether he and such as he did not 
 feel about this human shuttlecock of fortune as 
 Burke felt about Marie Antoinette, and whether 
 they were able ' to contemplate without emotion that 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 253 
 
 elevation and that fall ' ! Did they not fear that 
 the deposed quasi-Khedive, submitting as best he 
 might to the decree of Allah, was flying from the 
 wrath of his sovereign, and in hourly expectation of 
 the bowstring? 
 
 Here may follow two of my wife's early remi- 
 niscences. She was dining long ago at a table d'hote 
 in Paris, and was doing full justice to some excellent 
 dates. A French gentleman, who wished both to do 
 her a good turn and to air his English, said to her : 
 ' I have seen much of the Arabs, mademoiselle. They 
 say that, if you eat too many dates, you will come out 
 all over buttons.' 
 
 My wife, when a girl, was taken by her mother 
 with her elder sisters to Vevey. The family there 
 struck up an acquaintance with a Moldavian prince, 
 with whom they went on excursions. The gossip 
 afterwards ran in Cheshire that he asked my (future) 
 mother-in-law to marry him, and that she answered, 
 ' Helas, j'ai un cher mari en Angleterre.' The ' Helas ', 
 if not the rest of the non-possumus, is certainly a fiction. 
 But it appears that he asked her if any of her daughters 
 would be available. Learning, however, that such a 
 random and indiscriminating proposal was not to the 
 taste of English girls, he considered which of the 
 daughters would be the most eligible for the princess- 
 dom, and at last decided to limit his attentions to the 
 youngest. But, as she was taking the grape-cure and 
 as she did not seem strong, he thought it safe, as a 
 prelude to his courtship, to put her through a sort 
 of medical catechism. Accordingly, after an expe- 
 dition, he contrived to sit opposite her in an omnibus ; 
 and, on that not too private occasion, he made the 
 highly pertinent (or impertinent) inquiry : ' Mademoi- 
 
254 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 selle a l'air un peu delicat. Est-ce la poitrine ou 
 l'estomac ? ' And, as if to draw the attention of the 
 onlookers, he pointed to the corresponding parts of 
 his own body. 
 
 From the purely comic and table-d'hotic anecdotes, 
 I pass to such as may cast a sidelight on the subtle 
 difference between Englishmen and foreigners. A 
 glimpse of that difference may be gathered from a 
 quaint incident which bears a distant family likeness 
 to Mr. Pickwick's adventure in the White Horse Hotel 
 at Ipswich, and also to the last scene in the Senti- 
 mental Journey. Towards the middle of the seventies, 
 a certain Lady X. arrived one evening at Pontresina 
 in the height of the season, without having secured 
 rooms for herself and her maid. The place was so 
 full that the only accommodation to be had was a 
 room with three beds. Lady X. and her attendant 
 at once took possession of this room, and made ready 
 for the night. But, looking around, they suddenly 
 caught sight of a pair of trousers. The lady rang and 
 peremptorily asked if she and her maid were sure of 
 having the room to themselves. ' Mais non, madame, 
 pas tout a fait,' was the reply ; ' le troisieme lit est 
 occupe depuis quelques jours par un monsieur ; mats 
 il est tres tranquille.' Tranquil he might be, and a 
 right to a third part of the room was certainly his. 
 Yet, with feminine disregard to the distinction be- 
 tween meum and tuum, the interlopers put the trousers 
 outside the door and turned the key. But, as they 
 were settling down to their first sleep, they heard 
 a loud knocking at the door, followed by an assurance 
 from the monsieur tres tranquille that he had left 
 a few things in the drawers which he could not 
 possibly do without. Not over-graciously the maid 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTBE-LIFE 255 
 
 got up and unlocked the door. As soon as she 
 had called out 'Entrez', the monsieur tres galcmt, as 
 he might well be called, came in and took posses- 
 sion of his chattels ; and then, bowing low to the 
 recumbent interlopers, he left the room to seek a 
 resting-place for himself, if, peradventure, he could 
 find one. 
 
 In 1871 my wife and I, staying at the hospice 
 on the Bernina Pass, were waited on by an intelligent 
 maid named Sabina, who seemed to have Italian blood 
 in her veins. She was born, as might have been 
 judged from her appearance, for better things, and 
 had occasion, in Horace's phrase, to ' lament the 
 unkindness of her household gods '. She told us that 
 the Catholic church at St. Moritz had been built in 
 part by ' ma tante, Madame la Comtesse de Frances 
 Galli ' (or some such name) ; and we learned on inquiry 
 that she was only so far exaggerating that the lady 
 was not strictly her aunt, but her first cousin once 
 removed, or, as we should say in Cheshire, her 
 Welsh aunt. The mixture of classes in Switzerland 
 is certainly abnormal, even when judged by the re- 
 publican standard. A woman who kept a small shop 
 on the Alps told me that her father, then a very old 
 man, had during many years administered the finances 
 of the country (in fact he was a Swiss Mr. Gladstone). 
 I am the less inclined to doubt her assertion, as a 
 friend once assured me that there were three brothers 
 in Switzerland who were respectively a member of 
 the Government, a doctor of divinity, and an hotel 
 waiter. 
 
 Sabina told us that she bad two suitors, one of 
 whom lived at Milan, the other at Monte Video. 
 It will be seen that the two places, like Macedon 
 
256 OLD AND ODD MEMORD3S 
 
 and Monmouth, have little in common besides the 
 initial M (intervalla vides humane commoda) ! All 
 Sabina's leanings were towards Italy ; and she quoted 
 with sympathy the Italian saying : ' German is the 
 language of horses, English of birds, French of diplo- 
 macy, but Italian of love.' Is not the first of these 
 comparisons ascribed to Charles V? For the other 
 three Sabina is my sole authority. 
 
 When visiting Switzerland in 1876, I asked the 
 landlady of an Alpine hotel if she could give a better 
 account of her sister, who had been a great invalid. 
 ' No,' was the reply ; ' I fear she can never get better. 
 Her illness is not infectious ; and so it cannot be passed 
 on to any one else.' This quaint delusion may serve 
 to illustrate the opinion expressed by Goethe to the 
 effect that human nature is a book which, to him who 
 has the skill to read it, is full of instruction at every 
 page. For the delusion is a survival of a belief which 
 was prevalent in the early stages of culture. It was 
 then held that, in regard to health, and, indeed, things 
 in general, one man's gain is another man's loss. A 
 trace of that sentiment is to be found in Horace's not 
 over-kind prayer to Apollo and Diana, which, for the 
 benefit of the non-classical reader, I will give in 
 Lytton's translation : 
 
 'May the God in his mercy 
 Save from war and from pest and from famine, 
 Our people, and Caesar our prince, 
 And direct them on Persia and Britain.' 
 
 A like spirit is shown by Bacon in his Essay of 
 Fortune : ' The most frequent of external causes of 
 fortune is that the folly of one man is the fortune 
 of another ; for no man prospers so suddenly as by 
 others' errors. Serpens, nisi serpentem comederit, non fit 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 257 
 
 draco.' Bacon himself held this inhuman theory of 
 good and ill fortune with some modifications ; but, 
 according to its extreme form, we stand to each other 
 in a relation somewhat similar to that of two buckets 
 in a well, or of two men on a seesaw — one man has 
 to go down that another may rise. Even the scientific 
 Lucretius extends such a notion to the case of all 
 living creatures. ' Nature,' he says, ' allows nothing 
 to be born, unless helped by the death of something 
 else.' But a more definite illustration of the theory 
 that one man's health is another man's sickness has 
 been furnished by Kinglake : 
 
 ' I did not hear whilst I was at Cairo that any prayer for 
 a remission of the plague had been offered up in the mosques. 
 I believe that, however frightful the ravages of the disease 
 may be, the Mahometans refrain from approaching Heaven 
 with their complaints until the plague has endured for a long 
 space, and then at last they pray God — not that the plague 
 may cease, but that it may go to another city.' 
 
 But can nothing be done towards explaining this 
 notion that physical ills cannot be absolutely cured, 
 but only transferred — the notion, in fact, of the 
 conservation of disease which, baseless though it is, 
 might pass for a crude and fantastic foreshadowing 
 of the doctrine of the conservation of energy ? Two 
 points may be noted. First, the phenomena of in- 
 fection and contagion must have been bewildering 
 and misleading to primitive observers. They must 
 have been especially misleading in cases when the 
 liability to infection is greatest on the eve of the 
 patient's recovery. Also, precautions against infection 
 not being then understood, the convalescent would 
 sometimes be allowed to go about too soon and to 
 receive the congratulations of his friends. If any 
 
 s 
 
258 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 of these caught the malady, would it not be inferred 
 that the burden of it had, so to speak, been taken 
 off his shoulders and transferred to theirs ? Secondly, 
 in the ages before science, it was commonly held that 
 diseases were punitive, and that punishment by proxy 
 was efficacious ; whence it might be concluded that 
 the wrath of gods or demons might be diverted from 
 one victim if, but only if, another victim were pro- 
 vided. This, after all, is merely a variant of what 
 was said in the first chapter in regard to the institu- 
 tion of whipping-boys. 
 
 A young lady — no matter whether American, 
 English, or continental — who was an excellent Greek 
 scholar, determined, when her pupilage was over, to 
 give her erudition a local colouring by taking a trip 
 to Greece. Her former tutor followed in her wake ; 
 and the consequence — quali digna tabelld — was a speedy 
 betrothal in Arcadia amid the ruins, according to 
 report, of a Pagan temple (if it was not a temple of 
 Aphrodite, it should have been). 
 
 At the time of this truly sentimental journey, 
 but quite independently, Greece was visited by 
 two well-to-do clergymen. The comment on their 
 prosperous air and its spiritual advantages which was 
 published in a Greek newspaper shall here be inserted 
 in the quaint form in which it was reported to me : 
 ' Two English papas [priests] are travelling among us ; 
 but how unlike they are to our papas. Their coats 
 are made of the best cloth ; they travel in first-class 
 railway carriages ; and they go to the most expensive 
 hotels. No wonder the English are religious ! ' This 
 naive canonization of Mammon recalls by way of 
 contrast the visit paid by a clergyman's daughter to 
 an old woman in her father's parish. A curate had 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 259 
 
 just been appointed, and the old gossip talked much 
 of his virtues ; she esteemed and admired him, though 
 apparently he had not the social attractions which 
 gilded the eloquence of the opulent parsons afore- 
 mentioned. ' He ain't much to look at and his clothes 
 ain't much neither,' she said, ' but his innerds is lovely.' 
 Matthew Arnold was told by Cardinal Antonelli 
 that he had seen Italian workmen in the picture 
 galleries, and that their downright criticisms on the 
 pictures E questo bello and E questo brutto were 
 commonly just. From this and other indications 
 it may be inferred that among the Latin races the 
 peasants are more imaginative and endowed with 
 a greater sense for beauty than in Teutonic countries 
 or, at any rate, in England. I remember, many years 
 ago, being with my father on one of the Peekforton 
 hills in Cheshire, when the view around us was 
 magnificent. Beneath lay far and wide a level sea 
 of mist, and above that sea the only islands visible 
 were the ruined castle of Beeston near us and the 
 Welsh heights in the distance. Coming upon some 
 workmen, one of whom my father regarded as the 
 most capable man on his estate, he called their 
 attention to the beautiful effect. But he found that 
 the mist was to them a damp mist and nothing more 
 — the beauty did not appeal to them a bit. In 
 contrast with this I will mention that, when my wife 
 was driving in the neighbourhood of Biarritz with her 
 camera, the coachman turned and said to her : ' C'est 
 bien dommage que Madame ne puisse pas photo- 
 graphier le bruit de l'eau courante.' To which I will 
 append the query : Will any one now living see the 
 time when it will be possible so to phonograph the 
 sound of running water as to do it justice ? Be this 
 
 s2 
 
260 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 as it may, the sentiment of the coachman was Words- 
 worthian, as will be seen by comparing it with what 
 Wordsworth himself said of Lucy : 
 
 'The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 In many a secret place 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 And beauty born of "murmuring sound 
 Shall pass into her face.' 
 
 A much-travelled painter told me that once, when he 
 had a studio at Chicago, a gentleman with five ladies 
 asked to see his pictures. The visitors were admitted ; 
 but, as no names had been given, the host asked the 
 gentleman to present him in due form to himself and 
 to the rest of his party. ' I am young Young,' replied 
 the stranger ; and then, pointing to the two ladies who 
 were nearest to him, he added: "This is Mrs. Young, 
 and this is Mrs. Young ' ; and exactly the same form 
 of words was repeated as the three other ladies were 
 introduced. He went on to explain that Brigham 
 Young was his father, and that the ladies were his 
 five wives ! 
 
 The reader will now perceive what attractions the 
 characteristic differences between Englishmen and 
 foreigners would have for a present-day Miss Austen 
 or Mrs. Gaskell, and that such attractions would be 
 more or less felt even by those mute inglorious 
 observers, those romanciers manques, who have a keen 
 eye for social incongruities, but have not the skill to 
 portray them. It is at foreign hotels in France and 
 Switzerland that my wife and I have met many of 
 our pieasantest and most cultivated friends. Switzer- 
 land has a character of its own. It has been called 
 the Kurhaus as well as the playground of Europe; 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 261 
 
 and the Engadine, in particular, is the sanatorium 
 of overworked brains and the paradise of holiday- 
 making students. Of this I had an illustration on 
 the first day that I ever spent in that happy valley ; 
 for I then made the acquaintance of Miss Swanwick. 
 As she was travelling with her elder sister, she was 
 of course known in the hotel as Miss Anna Swanwick. 
 But she is the Miss Swanwick of literature; and 
 Miss Swanwick she shall be called in the brief notice 
 of her with which this chapter will conclude. 
 
 It was in 1870 that my wife and I first made 
 Miss Swanwick's acquaintance, when we spent most 
 of the summer under the same roof. I afterwards 
 met her often under divers conditions, and in the 
 company of a great variety of friends — ranging from 
 Canon Plumptre to Francis Newman. All that I saw of 
 her confirmed my original impression. In Coleridge's 
 Table-Talk it is said that 'there are three classes 
 into which all the women past seventy that ever 
 I knew were to be divided : (1) that dear old soul ; 
 (2) that old woman; (3) that old witch'. The first 
 of these categories is a sort of niche in which I have 
 always mentally placed the image of Miss Swanwick. 
 Yet the somewhat patronizing appellation of a ' dear 
 old soul' is hardly good enough for her. Indeed, 
 I cannot better describe her than as the most charming 
 old lady I ever met. 
 
 But praise is apt to lose credit if it is indiscriminate ; 
 and I am therefore emboldened to add a word of 
 qualification. Miss Swanwick is chiefly known as 
 the translator of some Greek and German plays. Of 
 her translations some competent judges think very 
 highly. The late Mrs. Francis Galton (nee Butler) 
 mentioned to me one of her distinguished brothers 
 
262 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 as subscribing to that favourable opinion. It is, there- 
 fore, with great diffidence, that I confess that Miss 
 Swanwick's translation of Aeschylus, and especially 
 of the Agamemnon, fell short of my expectation. One 
 illustration of the grounds of my disappointment has 
 stuck in my memory. My readers will remember 
 the grandly abrupt transition of Cassandra from 
 prophetic mists to appalhng clearness: 
 
 'Ayajxeixvovos ere <£jjju.' k'no^ea-Qai y.6pov. 
 
 Miss Swanwick renders this fine line by ' On Aga- 
 memnon's death, I say, thou'lt look'. Surely, such 
 a translation, with its unemphatic ending, is little 
 better than a parody. 1 Nor, to speak more generally, 
 did Miss Swanwick, either as a talker or as a writer, 
 ever impress me as being a born philosopher. Perhaps, 
 indeed, if she had given such an impression, she would 
 have lost some of her womanly charm. Be this as it 
 may, her conversation was fascinating, especially when 
 she dealt in reminiscences. Of those reminiscences 
 I will give a few specimens. 
 
 Her memory stretched back to the time of the first 
 Reform Bill. She was then residing at Liverpool, 
 whither the tidings of the great event came in the 
 middle of the night. ' So great was the excitement,' 
 she said, 'that our friends threw gravel against our 
 windows to wake us up, that we might hear the good 
 news as soon as possible.' 
 
 She told me that she was once reading The Merchant 
 
 1 A great Cambridge scholar has asked me to suggest an alter- 
 native rendering of this line. Prudence would counsel my 
 declining the task. But, being thus challenged, I will submit 
 that such a translation as ' Thine eyes shall gaze on Agamemnon's 
 doom ' would not be more inadequate than Miss Swanwick's. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 263 
 
 of Venice in a gondola. To her surprise, the boatman 
 suddenly exclaimed : ' A Daniel come to judgement.' 
 Being cross-questioned, he replied : ' I know Shake- 
 speare well. Portia was a very clever woman ; but 
 I guess there are more Portias in the world than 
 Beatrices.' At first, Miss Swanwick thought he was 
 an educated man, gone down in the world. But he 
 undeceived her, by adding : ' I once read a very 
 clever book — you may not have read it, but I thought 
 it very clever — I mean The Vicar of Wakefield.' No 
 wonder Miss Swanwick was startled by his remark 
 about Portia and Beatrice ! The stress which he thus 
 laid on a certain kind of merit proves him to have 
 been a man of reflection. This will be felt if I illustrate 
 his remark by quoting Macaulay's comparison between 
 Lord Jeffrey and Sydney Smith : ' In ability I should 
 say that Jeffrey was higher, but Sydney rarer. 
 I would rather have been Jeffrey ; but there will be 
 several Jeffreys before there is a Sydney.' The 
 gondolier's enthusiasm for The Vicar of Wakefield 
 recalls an odd experience of another boatman. An 
 Englishman once observed that one of the crew on 
 a steamer on the Lake of Lucerne spoke idiomatic 
 and racy English, and asked him how he had picked 
 it up. The Switzer replied that he had learnt it by 
 studying Verdant Green, which an English party had 
 left on board ! 
 
 The mention of Sydney Smith reminds me of an 
 anecdote related about him by Miss Swanwick. She 
 told me that he had two nieces staying with him, 
 who begged him to give a ball. 'No,' he replied, 
 shaking his powdered head : ' you may get plenty 
 of powder from the old canon, but no ball.' To me 
 certainly this story had the charm of novelty; but 
 
264: OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 I am surprised that it is not better known. Sydney- 
 Smith is the residuary legatee to whom are assigned 
 such of our national bons mots as are without a claimant. 
 Is it possible that in this case he has unwittingly 
 been enriched at the expense of some other canon 
 whose fame as a wit was not strong enough to hold 
 its own ? * 
 
 Being on very cordial terms with Francis Newman, 
 Miss Swanwick was surprised and shocked by the 
 tone of the book he wrote after the death of his 
 brother. He had spoken to her in very friendly 
 terms of the Cardinal, and had shown her an affec- 
 tionate letter which he had received from him on his 
 birthday. It appears that Francis told John Henry 
 that, in spite of theological differences, there was 
 really great spiritual sympathy between them ; and 
 received for reply that there could be no such 
 sympathy whatever. The younger brother felt this 
 bitterly ; and Miss Swanwick was inclined to regard 
 it as one cause of his asperity. 
 
 I remarked to her that Arthur Stanley — I think 
 in his American Addresses — expressed the paradoxical 
 opinion that some of Francis Newman's writings 
 would probably outlive those of his brother. She 
 replied that the Dean had expressed the same opinion 
 to her in conversation. He once talked to me about 
 the Cardinal not very sympathetically. But can he 
 seriously have thought that any writing of Francis 
 Newman will be remembered so long as ' Lead, kindly 
 Light'? People will differ as to the comparative 
 soundness of the views of the two brothers; but 
 
 I I have left this passage standing, though I have since learned 
 that the witty parson was Canon Goodall, of Windsor, who was 
 Provost of Eton at the beginning of the nineteenth century. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 265 
 
 almost all agree that in point of style the elder 
 brother was infinitely superior ; and style is the anti- 
 septic of literature. 'Le livre, c'est le style' would 
 be true enough for an epigram. 
 
 I have elsewhere stated that Mr. Gladstone told me 
 of a good saying of Tennyson's, that ' Carlyle is a poet 
 to whom Nature has denied the faculty of verse ' ; and 
 that I replied, ' This reminds me of what Tennyson 
 said to a friend of mine about Walt Whitman : "The 
 first requisite of a singer is that he should sing. 
 Walt Whitman has not this first requisite ; let him 
 speak in prose."' I am now at liberty to mention 
 that the friend to whom I referred was Miss Swanwick. 
 Another utterance of the late poet-laureate was 
 reported by her at first hand. Some one spoke of 
 the exercise of the poetic faculty as a continual and 
 unalloyed delight; whereupon Tennyson muttered, 
 in a deep voice, which, as imitated by her, was very 
 like a grunt : ' I have not found it so.' He had 
 doubtless experienced 'the exalted portion of the 
 pain' of poetic inspiration, which was yet more 
 vividly present to the mind of Shelley, who, after 
 enumerating some of the blessings vouchsafed to 
 less gifted persons, mournfully adds : 
 
 ' Smiling they live and call life pleasure : 
 To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.' 
 
 Miss Swanwick was also well acquainted with 
 Browning. She told him that, of his heroes, Luria 
 was the one whom she liked best; and he replied 
 that he also was of that opinion. Miss Swanwick 
 was startled and annoyed when, in 1873, Francis 
 Newman and the present writer put in a plea for 
 euthanasia. How, then, from the point of view of 
 
266 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 ethics, or even of enlightened selfishness, could she 
 excuse the sentimental kakothanasia, the rather slow 
 self-poisoning, of Luria? Would she not have been 
 the first to condemn the deliberate plan of suicide 
 by lot, with the benevolent sequel of suicide by proxy, 
 in Miss Cholmondeley's brilliant but bewildering novel 
 of Bed Pottage ? 
 
 Miss Swanwick told me that, to judge by her own 
 experience, Englishwomen are hardly ever remarkable 
 for wit. To this allegation — an allegation which in 
 a member of our socially down-trodden sex would be 
 thought most unchivalrous — the only exceptions she 
 could recall were Miss Cobbe 1 and the late Mrs. Willis, 
 sister of Eobert Chambers. 
 
 An intelligent Englishman and Miss Swanwick met 
 on the Continent, and, after the very slight acquain- 
 tance which suffices to draw such ex-Anglians into 
 a rudimentary friendship, he begged leave to present 
 her with the outcome of the labours of his life. She 
 was at her wits' end to guess what was coming. The 
 gift, however, proved to be quite portable, and in no 
 way beyond acceptance from a comparative stranger. 
 It was neither more nor less than an oddly drawn 
 map of the world, a map in which the light and shade 
 were distributed so as to mark the abundance, rarity, 
 or total absence, not of Christianity, nor yet of coal- 
 fields, but of snails. Miss Swanwick was thoroughly 
 taken aback. Her contemplation of the multum laboris 
 in parvo involved in the gasteropodic atlas filled her 
 with dismay at the shortness of the mental tether 
 
 1 A witty saying of Miss Cobbe comes to my memory. She said 
 that she was once in an Italian church when Exspectans exspectavi 
 was being chanted. She dryly remarked that Expectorcms 
 expectoravi would have been at least equally appropriate. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTER-LIFE 267 
 
 with which the snail-absorbed specialist had bound 
 himself. But might he not have urged on his own 
 behalf that an extreme subdivision of intellectual 
 labour is a need of our complex civilization, and that 
 they also serve who only specialize ? 
 
 Let me here insert a story about Miss Swanwick 
 which at least is ben trovata, and which, relating as 
 it does to one of her pleasant symposia, brings to my 
 memory the various occasions when I myself partook 
 of her hospitality. It is said that after an interview 
 with her Mr. Gladstone, knowing her literary claims 
 and perhaps struck by her somewhat homely attire, 
 thought of placing her name on the Civil List ; but it 
 seemed to him safer, before speaking to her on the 
 subject, to find out all he could about her income. 
 Pending the inquiry he was somewhat startled by 
 receiving a letter from her inviting him and Mrs. 
 Gladstone to dinner. The invitation was accepted ; but 
 the careful financier began to feel doubts whether he 
 would be justified in offering a pension to a lady who 
 could afford to give such an entertainment. At last 
 he decided that his judgement on her case should be 
 regulated by the quality of the dinner, and in particular 
 that her poverty should be subjected to a sort of wine 
 test. Would she, or would she not, provide cham- 
 pagne ? Unluckily (so runs the tale) she had resolved 
 to do full honour to her distinguished guest ; and, as 
 she saw him sipping his champagne, little did she 
 dream that her hospitality would cost her a grant 
 from the public purse. Was ever wine bought so 
 dear ! (I need hardly add that the pension if offered 
 would assuredly have been declined). 
 
 In my paper on the Upper Engadine it is related 
 that 'two sisters were wandering in the woods near 
 
268 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Campfer, when they came upon a piece of beautiful 
 foliage. "How Cox would like this ! " said one of them, 
 who was a skilful artist. " And why not hens ? " asked 
 her puzzled companion.' It may now be mentioned 
 that the 'skilful artist' to whom the unexpected 
 question was addressed was Miss Swanwick, and that 
 the questioner is long since deceased. I had this 
 story at first hand. 
 
 A general impression has now, I trust, been given 
 of Miss Swanwick's peculiar fascination. The quality 
 of that fascination may be further explained by saying 
 that she combined a full measure of the special virtue 
 of her sex with a fair measure of the special virtue of 
 ours ; for to a truly feminine tenderness she added 
 what might be ungallantly called a super-feminine 
 sense of justice. 
 
 Perhaps what struck me most was that her 
 womanly charm was unimpaired either by the meta- 
 physical training of her youth or by her propensity in 
 later years to make speeches in support of ' Woman's 
 Eights'. This womanliness of hers may have been 
 one cause of the fact that she was, as it were, an 
 optimist by faith. Any one who doubted that all 
 things work together for good would have appeared to 
 her to impugn the Divine love or, in Eenan's phrase, 
 ' blasphemer l'Eternel '. She frankly admitted that 
 this belief in good as the final goal, not only of ills in 
 general, but of each particular ill, is hard to reconcile 
 with the facts of life, and especially with the suffering 
 of the lower animals. But the belief certainly helped 
 her to make the best of things, and, in very deed, to 
 bring to the support of the equanimity under hard- 
 ships which Horace recommended, a foundation and 
 an assurance which Horace had not. Hence arose 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT AFTEK-LIFE 269 
 
 that habitual cheerfulness to which she owed much 
 of her charm, as may be shown by two instances. 
 When the elder Miss Swanwick, whom she loved 
 tenderly, began to suffer from failing eyesight, she 
 said to my wife and me : ' My dear sister can no 
 longer see to read ; but the beautiful book of Nature is 
 open to her, and I am thankful that she can still 
 enjoy it.' We were yet more touched by the manner 
 in which, when she was more than eighty, she told 
 my wife that she had to give up her favourite 
 occupation : ' The doctor will not let me write any 
 more ; but I shall have the more time to love my 
 friends.' 
 
 A kinswoman of Mr. Gladstone, who met Parnell 
 shortly before what his enemies regard as his down- 
 fall, told me that he struck her as being a political 
 saint or apostle ; he looked frightfully ill ; and he had 
 the air of being kept alive only by the hope of 
 redressing the wrongs of Ireland. Between Parnell 
 and Miss Swanwick there was not much resemblance ; 
 but this account of him indirectly recalls the im- 
 pression left on me by her shortly before her death. 
 The current of her frail life had the appearance of 
 being supplied by her mental and moral energy. Her 
 voice, to the very last, retained its sympathetic 
 quality; and at times the brightness of her eye was 
 such that she seemed galvanized back into youth. 
 The effect of all this was heightened by the contrast 
 of her small stature. She was easily moved to 
 enthusiasm ; and, when so moved, she had a natural 
 and childlike way of stretching out both her little 
 arms. In that posture she was almost literally, 
 though unconsciously, enacting the Virgilian line 
 which has been metaphorically applied by Matthew 
 
270 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 Arnold to _ Marcus Aurelius ; for one was fain to 
 regard her as straining towards the ideal : 
 
 ' Tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore.' 
 
 Indeed, I am convinced that no cloud, I will not say 
 of pessimism, but even of scepticism, darkened her 
 spiritual horizon. And thus it was that, after she 
 had for the last time expounded to me her confident 
 universalism, a form of belief which, after all, is only 
 optimism writ large, I could scarce help, as we parted, 
 exclaiming aloud : Vale, gratia plena, beata tu in 
 mulieribus. 
 
CHAPTEK VIII 
 
 MY FATHER'S ANECDOTES 
 
 ' By nature honest, by experience wise, 
 Healthy by temperance and by exercise ; 
 His life, tho' long, to sickness past unknown, 
 His death was instant, and without a groan. 
 O grant me thus to live, and thus to die ! ' 
 
 Pope (on his father). 
 
 ' Much had he seen and known ; cities of men 
 And manners, climates, councils, governments, 
 Himself not least, but honoured of them all.' 
 
 Tennyson (adapted). 
 
 Befoke relating a few of my father's anecdotes, 
 I must premise two things : first, that I merely report 
 the anecdotes, and do not vouch for their accuracy ; 
 and, secondly, that they lose much by not being told 
 in his inimitable voice and manner. 
 
 He was an intimate friend of Lord Charles 
 Wellesley, who told him some curious facts about the 
 Iron Duke. The first two that I shall record tempt 
 one to supplement the old saying about a hero and his 
 valet de chambre, with the addition that a hero is not 
 always seen at his best beneath the scrutiny even of 
 his favourite son. 
 
 The ship of an admiral, who was the Duke's near 
 connexion, was wrecked. He was placed in command 
 of a second ship which was also lost, and he himself 
 was drowned. Lord Charles communicated the 
 
272 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 disaster to his father, who merely exclaimed, with 
 Spartan coldness and brevity, ' That 's the second ship 
 he has lost.' The twin anecdote, so to call it, had 
 reference to Lord Charles himself. Being ordered 
 with his regiment abroad, he felt much concern at 
 bidding farewell to his aged father, whom he might 
 never see again. On his making the announcement, 
 the Duke, who had been reading, damped the son's 
 emotion by saying shortly, 'Good-bye, Charlie, good- 
 bye ! ' and, taking a last look before leaving the room, 
 the son was mortified to see that the father appeared 
 to be as intent on his reading as ever. 
 
 Compare with these anecdotes the following extract 
 from Greville's Memoirs : 
 
 ' The Duke [of Wellington] is a very hard man ; he takes 
 no notice of any of his family ; he never sees his mother, has 
 only visited her two or three times in the last few years ; and 
 has not now been to see Lady Anne [his niece] though she 
 has been in such affliction for the death of her only son, and 
 he passes the door every time he goes to Strathfieldsaye.' 
 
 Is this indifference, after all, so very strange? 
 Sydney Smith has somewhere lamented that the 
 greatest public benefactors are seldom conspicuous 
 for what are called the minor virtues ; why, then, 
 should we wonder that the man whom Goethe himself 
 has ranked with Aristides as a supreme example 
 of integrity and public worth — that this great 
 national hero, while ever vigilant against public 
 calamity, was scarce sensitive enough to domestic 
 losses, or to the fear of them ? He would not have 
 been the Iron Duke if he had been made of quick- 
 silver. In confirmation of the general view here 
 indicated, Macaulay may be quoted : ' It is not given 
 
MY FATHER'S ANECDOTES 273 
 
 to the human intellect to expand itself widely in all 
 directions at once, and to be at the same time gigantic 
 and well-proportioned.' Wo viel Licht ist, ist starker 
 Schatten. 
 
 It may be added that a very different and very 
 minor form of insensibility was ascribed by Lord 
 Charles to his father. During the Peninsular War 
 the Duke had eggs for his breakfast, eating them 
 habitually whether they were fresh or stale. Com- 
 paring this account with an entry in Lord Stanhope's 
 Conversations with the Duke of Wellington, we get some 
 idea of the Duke's daily bill of fare during the war : 
 
 ' General Alava told me that, when he travelled with the 
 Duke, and asked him at what o'clock he would start, he 
 usually said, " At daylight " ; and to the question of what they 
 should find for dinner, the usual answer was " Cold meat ". 
 " J'en ai pris en horreur," added Alava, "les deux mots, cold 
 meat et daylight." ' 
 
 Lord Charles was often troubled by importunate 
 acquaintances, who begged for some of his father's 
 hair. On such occasions, he said to an old servant 
 whose hair was like the Duke's, ' Sit down, John, 
 I must cut off another lock ! ' This story recalls one 
 told of a simple-minded old Etonian who was with me 
 at Oxford. The boy once, when returning to Eton, 
 after the summer holidays, boasted that he had shot 
 some yellow-hammers. His schoolfellows gravely 
 assured him that those birds were under Wellington's 
 protection, and that, if he did not straightway 
 apologize, he would be imprisoned or worse. He was 
 actually induced to write a penitent letter to his 
 Grace, and received a curt answer, telling him that 
 
 T 
 
274 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Field-Marshal the Duke of Wellington could not make 
 out what he meant. But he had his reward ; for one 
 of the masters, hearing of the hoax, gave him five 
 shillings for the letter in the hope of getting 
 Wellington's autograph. It was, however, afterwards 
 discovered that the letter was almost certainly written 
 by a secretary, who could exactly counterfeit the 
 Duke's handwriting. 
 
 Before taking leave of our great general, I cannot 
 forbear recording a noteworthy saying of his, which 
 I heard on direct authority. The Lord Stradbroke 
 of my youth, if I remember rightly, served under 
 Wellington in Spain, and afterwards fought at Quatre 
 Bras, but was somehow disabled from being at 
 Waterloo ; he was, moreover, almost the only Tory 
 landlord whose abilities I ever heard Charles Austin 
 praise. When he was staying with my father, the 
 conversation turned on the extraordinary passage in 
 which Victor Hugo attributes Napoleon's fall to the 
 Divine jealousy (il genait Dieu), and in which, so far 
 as he ascribed to human, or rather to British, agency 
 any share in the giant's overthrow, he would have us 
 believe that the credit was due to the British army 
 alone, and not to Napoleon's rival — would have us 
 believe this et quantum Gallia mendax Audet in historid 
 (all the brazen lies of French historians). ' I heard 
 the Duke say,' remarked Lord Stradbroke, ' that, if he 
 had had his old Peninsular army at Waterloo, it 
 would have been an affair of four hours.' This is 
 remarkable as being the utterance of one who was 
 never given to boasting. 
 
 From Lord Stradbroke's statement it might be 
 inferred that Wellington regarded his last and greatest 
 victory as an easy one. That he did not so regard it, 
 
MY FATHEE'S ANECDOTES 275 
 
 however, is proved by the following extract from the 
 Creevy papers : 
 
 ' " It has been a damned nice thing," said the Duke [about 
 Waterloo], without the least approach to anything like 
 triumph ; " the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. 
 By God ! I don't think it would have done if I had not been 
 there." ' 
 
 One of my grandfather's greatest friends was 
 Admiral Holloway, who, when the Orient caught fire 
 at the battle of the Nile, ordered his seamen to fire on 
 the flames, and thus, by preventing their extinction, 
 to ensure the destruction of the French vessel. After 
 the victory, the other admirals of their abundance 
 gave rich presents to their commander. But Holloway, 
 being poor, offered a humbler gift. His ' widow's mite ' 
 took the extraordinary form of a coffin made out of the 
 disiecta membra of the Orient Nelson declared that he 
 valued this coffin more than any of the other gifts, 
 and ordered that, when he died, he should be buried 
 in it. Alas ! this ominous gift, this veritable Swpov dSa>pov, 
 was prophetic. 
 
 After the battle of Waterloo, my father, being then 
 in his tenth year, saw Napoleon standing on the deck 
 of the Bellerophon ; and I have heard him say with 
 what pleasure he afterwards recalled the generosity 
 of the British sailors, who, in spite of all their past 
 hatred, paid homage to fallen greatness with the 
 hearty cry of ' Vive l'Empereur ! " From my grand- 
 father, Admiral Tollemache, my father derived a love 
 of naval matters, which lasted till the end of his life. 
 A year before he died, he went over the arsenal and 
 dockyard of Toulon. A lieutenant in the French navy 
 was deputed to show him over the works ; and my 
 father's brother, who was present, writes that the 
 
 t2 
 
276 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 Frenchman gave the following explanation of the 
 failure of his countrymen at sea during the Bevolu- 
 tionary war : 
 
 'They had no good officers at that time. The French 
 navy, unlike the army, was thoroughly loyal ; and, after the 
 execution of the king, the best officers emigrated in great 
 numbers, and those who remained were guillotined. Thus the 
 French navy was deprived of all its able commanders ; and 
 the Government had to replace them with inferior, or at least 
 inexperienced, men.' 
 
 Shortly after my father entered Parliament, there 
 was a great disturbance in Ireland. The Duke of 
 Wellington was reported to have said significantly 
 that the army was ready. One or more Irish members 
 answered the appeal by saying in the House of Com- 
 mons that the people of Ireland were ready too. Amid 
 the general excitement, a young member of timorous 
 aspect rose to make his maiden speech. In a meek 
 voice the novice began : ' Mr. Speaker, I have listened 
 attentively to this debate, and have come to the con- 
 clusion that Irishmen are no more fit to govern them- 
 selves than blacks ! ' The bashful orator was the first 
 Mr. Walter of The Times. A late writer for The Times 
 told me that this Mr. Walter (or his son), when driving 
 in Ireland, had the curiosity to ask his carman how he 
 would deal with Irish disturbances. ' Faith, sir,' was 
 the reply, ' if we could get Cromwell out of hell, he 
 would be the man to keep the Irish in order.' 
 
 Between the years 1858 and 1866, my father used 
 often to take me as his son into one of the seats under 
 the gallery of the House of Commons. Naturally, 
 however, the better the debate, the harder it was for 
 me to get in. Perhaps this is the reason why the 
 speeches have left so little impression on my memory. 
 
MY FATHEK'S ANECDOTES 277 
 
 The quaintest thing that I remember hearing was 
 a comparison made by Bernal Osborne between Pius IX 
 and the strongly anti-Papal Lord Palmerston : ' Both 
 began as reformers. Both withdrew their reforms. 
 Non possumus became the motto of the one, as of the 
 other. And now what is the result ? The one is 
 defended by French bayonets, and the other by Con- 
 servative votes! 
 
 At my special request I was taken to hear my old 
 friend Mr. (afterwards Lord) Goschen second the 
 address on the Queen's Speech. I afterwards told 
 Hayward how much Goschen's speech had impressed 
 me. Hayward was also impressed, but characteristically 
 added : ' The thing that most struck me in connexion 
 with it was the remark made by Lord Hotham, that 
 he had never before known a young member make so 
 long a speech without once apologizing for trespassing 
 on the patience of the House. One always likes to 
 have a foolometer.' It was, I think, Sydney Smith who 
 coined this unpleasant but serviceable hybrid. 
 
 One of my father's Liberal friends was Mr. Charles 
 Villiers, M.P., whose conversation was, at any rate 
 towards the end of his life, marked by a mordant 
 humour, or, let me rather say, by what Walter Bagehot 
 would have called ' a pleasant cynicism ' — a quality 
 which many excellent persons (especially ladies) fail 
 to understand, but which is often at once a disguise 
 and a partial remedy for excessive sensibility. An 
 electioneering experience which he told my father 
 loses half its point without the cockney accent which 
 he mimicked to perfection. Mr. Villiers had been 
 asking a Badical elector to support him. ' Yes ; I'll 
 support you. But, Willars, we must have a diwision 
 of property ! ' ' Certainly,' replied the diplomatic 
 
278 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 candidate, 'I should be quite in favour of such a 
 measure. But I am afraid that, if property is divided, 
 there will not be enough for you and me and the rest 
 of us.' After a momentary embarrassment, the cheer- 
 ful and resourceful Socialist hit on a remedy : ' Why, 
 then, Willars, we must diwide again ! ' 
 
 Another of my father's friends was the old Field- 
 Marshal, Lord Combermere, who told him that he 
 would have been placed by Wellington in command 
 of the cavalry at Waterloo, if the post had not already 
 been promised by the Prince Eegent to Lord Anglesey. 
 To this statement it has been objected that, so far was 
 Lord Combermere from being favourably regarded by 
 the Duke, it was mainly through the latter's opposition 
 that he was not made an earl instead of a viscount. 
 If this allegation is correct, the line taken by Welling- 
 ton was certainly curious ; but some light may be 
 thrown on it by the following quaint extract from 
 Collections and Recollections : €. U . ,V' i, :'<! /vl /? 
 
 « . "p 
 
 ' The Government was contemplating the dispatch of an / > 
 expedition to Burmah, with a view to taking Rangoon, and 
 a question arose as to who would be the fittest general to be 
 sent in command of the expedition. The Cabinet sent for the 
 Duke of Wellington, and asked his advice. He instantly 
 replied, " Send Lord Combermere." " But we have always 
 understood that your Grace thought Lord Combermere 
 a fool." " So he is a fool, and a damned fool ; but he can 
 take Rangoon." ' 
 
 Why, it may be asked, did not Wellington recom- 
 mend some general who was as brave and loyal as 
 Lord Combermere, but who was not ' a damned fool ' ? 
 One cause of the anomalous choice probably was that, 
 in the Duke's opinion, Combermere had the merits as 
 well as the defects of a routinist. He was, as I myself 
 
MY FATHER'S ANECDOTES 279 
 
 should have inferred from what I saw of him in his 
 old age, lacking in originality ; but, for that very reason, 
 he could be better trusted than (for example) his 
 brilliant contemporary, Picton, to carry on war accord- 
 ing to strict rule and to obey orders implicitly. 
 Fitzjames Stephen, who had seen more than enough 
 of would-be world-menders among the natives of India, 
 liked doing business with routinists of the better sort 
 rather than with enthusiasts of any sort. Perhaps he 
 had a weakness even for those thorough conven- 
 tionalists, those ' slight, unmeritable ' men who, like 
 the Shakespearian Lepidus, feed 
 
 ' On objects, arts, and imitations.' 
 
 At any rate, his partiality for honest and intelligent 
 routinists was due to the fact that he could depend on 
 them and knew where he was with them. So could 
 Wellington depend on Combermere. ^ 
 
 My father used to tell a story that in his early youth 
 — more than seventy years ago — he was dining with 
 a Lady Pocock and her daughter at Twickenham, 
 I think in what was called afterwards Orleans House. 
 During the dinner he spoke contemptuously of the 
 belief in second-sight, but was checked by a sign from 
 Miss Pocock. When they were alone, she explained 
 that some time before, she and her mother were 
 sitting together in the drawing-room, which was on 
 the ground floor, with a window looking into the 
 garden at the back of the house. Suddenly she saw 
 a stranger staring at them through the window, and, 
 on her uttering an exclamation of surprise, her mother 
 looked up and recognized in the intruder her own 
 brother, whom she had believed to be in Africa, 
 and whom his niece had never seen. Lady Pocock 
 
280 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 rushed to the window to greet him, wondering, no 
 doubt, why he had come upon them thus unawares, 
 and why, vagrant-like, he had taken the house in the 
 rear, instead of going straight to the front door. But, 
 before she had reached the window, he had vanished ; 
 nor could he be found anywhere in the garden. Like- 
 wise the gardener, who was working in front of the 
 house, assured her that he himself had been there all 
 the time, and that no visitor could possibly have either 
 come or gone without his seeing him. The daughter 
 made a memorandum of the day ; and they afterwards 
 learnt that on that day her uncle had died in Africa. 
 The mother had felt the shock so keenly that the 
 subject was never alluded to in her presence. It may 
 serve to guarantee the fidelity of Lord Tollemache's 
 report of the strange narrative if I mention that, 
 being a stanch Protestant, he retained to the last his 
 repugnance to the belief in second-sight, which he 
 seemed to regard as covertly opening a breach to the 
 hostile array of non-biblical miracles, from that of 
 St. Januarius downwards. This story of second-sight 
 seems to me worth recording, as, unlike so many of 
 such stories, it does not rest on the ipse (or ipsa) dixit 
 of a single witness. I wish, however, that the mother, 
 the daughter, and the gardener could all have been put 
 into the witness-box and cross-examined. It would 
 then have appeared, among other things, whether the 
 exact hour as well as the day of the mysterious event 
 had been noted down, and whether, if so, due allow- 
 ance had been made for the difference between 
 English and African time. 
 
 The scene of one of my father's anecdotes was laid 
 in a southern seaport town, where long ago a general 
 and an admiral were neighbours. The General's house 
 
MY FATHEK'S ANECDOTES 281 
 
 was fronted by a grass-plot, on which he claimed the 
 right to pasture a cow. One day his wife complained 
 that the supply of milk was falling short. The 
 sentinel accounted for the deficiency by saying that 
 the grass had lately been much trodden down by the 
 public. Thereupon the martial despot gave orders 
 that no animal, human or other, except the cow, should 
 be allowed on the grass-plot ; and added — men were 
 not particular in those days — that, if this rule was 
 infringed, the sentinel should be flogged. Soon after- 
 wards the Admiral's wife, having a pressing engage- 
 ment, took a short cut over the grass in disregard of 
 the sentinel's repeated order to stand back. ' Common 
 soldier,' said the offended lady, ' don't you know who 
 I am ? ' ' All I know is that you're not the General's cow.' 
 The following story would seem incredible if my 
 father had not heard it from an eye-witness. When 
 Colonel Lennox (afterwards Duke of Eichmond) called 
 out and nearly shot the Duke of York, the indignation 
 of the royal family and of their friends was extreme. 
 After a time, however, the Prince Eegent forgave the 
 audacious duellist, and quite unexpectedly asked him 
 to dinner. A large party was awaiting the arrival of 
 their royal host when, to their amazement, Colonel 
 Lennox was announced. Being received with silence 
 and cold looks, he resolved, after a quaint fashion, to 
 mark his sense of the courtiers' disapproval. So he 
 laid down two chairs side by side on the floor, and 
 leapt over them. Being a man of singular activity, he 
 repeated this little comedy, after laying a third chair 
 over the first, and again after laying a fourth on the 
 second, and again after laying a fifth on the summit. 
 In this last jump, however, his foot caught the top- 
 most chair, and the pile was scattered over the floor. 
 
282 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 At this moment the Prince entered the room, and in 
 astonishment asked the unseasonable athlete what on 
 earth he was about. ' Beally, sir,' replied the un- 
 abashed Colonel, 'it is most unfortunate. No one 
 spoke a word, and I had to amuse myself. But 
 I sincerely hope that none of your Eoyal Highness's 
 chairs is broken.' The Prince laughed, and the matter 
 blew over. 'No one but a thorough gentleman,' said 
 my father, who used to pronounce the word with 
 a peculiar emphasis, and to employ it in a somewhat 
 narrowly exclusive sense, ' could have carried the 
 affair off as Colonel Lennox did.' 
 
 My father told a story that at Queen Caroline's 
 trial a Tory nobleman 1 was stopped by the mob, who 
 insisted that, before entering Westminster Hall, he 
 should say ' Queen for ever'. After exacting a promise 
 that they would grant him a free passage if he com- 
 plied, he waved his hat and called out, ' Queen for 
 ever, and may all your wives be like her ! ' 2 This 
 novel Ave Begina amused the crowd, and they let him 
 pass. My father added that Brougham used to say 
 that part of his defence of Queen Caroline had been 
 carefully prepared, while other parts were extempore. 
 A friend of the orator, referring to a striking passage 
 in the speech, observed that this at least must have 
 been composed on the spur of the moment. 'That 
 
 1 The nobleman, I have since learnt, was none other than the 
 great Duke. 
 
 2 Herodotus (VI. 69) tells that a Spartan king questioned his 
 mother about the scandal that his real father was not a king, but 
 an ass-keeper. The lady's answer was somewhat analogous to the 
 exclamation of the Tory nobleman. On the authors of the slander 
 she pronounced the anathema : « 8e 6vo<t>op/35>v toio-i ravra Xiyovtri 
 TiKTOiev ai yuvatKes 7rai8as. 
 
MY FATHEK'S ANECDOTES 283 
 
 only shows,' said Brougham, ' how well I fitted it in. 
 I copied out that passage thirteen times ! ' 
 
 Anecdotage, I repeat, is nothing if not desultory ; so 
 I will here save from oblivion a good thing which, 
 according to Charles Austin, Brougham said when the 
 clergy — at the instigation, the Whigs declared, of 
 Lord Lonsdale — came up in a body, and turned the 
 scale against Brougham at an election. With more 
 wit than reverence, the defeated orator exclaimed : 
 ' The Lord gave the word : great was the company of 
 the preachers.' 
 
 Though my father had little sympathy with 
 Brougham, he believed him to be a man of genuine 
 convictions, while he held, in a modified form, the 
 opinion of Miss Martineau and Walter Bagehot, that 
 Brougham's great rival, Copley, was always the 
 advocate, and was without strong convictions. In 
 confirmation of this view, Charles Austin related a 
 fact illustrative of the bitter indignation which pre- 
 vailed among the Whigs when Copley, like another 
 Strafford, suddenly ' ratted ' and turned Tory. So 
 extreme was this resentment that Denman told his 
 servant that, if his old friend called, he was not to be 
 admitted. In spite of the servant, the future Lord 
 Lyndhurst made his way to the door of Denman's 
 chamber, and shouted from outside, ' Let me at least 
 beg that, if you are asked about my change of opinions, 
 you will say that it was honest.' ' If I am asked about 
 your change of opinions,' was the reply from within, 
 ' I will say that you say that it was honest.' 
 
 It may not be amiss to subjoin one of my father's 
 anecdotes about Ham House, which (as already 
 mentioned) is the seat of the elder branch of our 
 family, and is familiar by name to the readers of 
 
284 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Evelyn and Walpole. Sixty years ago this 'most 
 mournfully fascinating of places ' J belonged to Louisa, 
 Countess of Dysart in her own right, who, like some 
 other of our kinsfolk, might have taken Sit pro ratione 
 voluntas as a motto. One day this original old lady 
 sent an express to the first surgeon in London, begging 
 him to come to her at once. He reached Ham in the 
 middle of the night ; and, on asking what accident 
 had befallen her ladyship, was told that her lap-dog 
 had broken its leg ! 
 
 It seems to me only the other day when my father 
 used to pack some fourteen persons (including his 
 young children and grandchildren) into a huge four-in- 
 hand carriage, nicknamed ' The Village ', and to drive 
 us to Richmond ; and from Eichmond we rowed up 
 the river to Ham. In one of these patriarchal trips it 
 was casually mentioned that Ham House had been 
 the home of Lauderdale ; on hearing this, an eminent 
 orator, who was of the party, repeated the following 
 satire on the Duke, the authorship of which I have 
 failed to trace : 
 
 ' He was not a Jew, for he ate of the swine ; 
 He was not a Turk, for he drank of the wine ; 
 But let this inscription be writ on his grave : 
 He was not a Christian — he never forgave I ' 
 
 I quote these lines, not merely because they are at 
 once vigorous and unfamiliar, but also because they 
 indicate one of the besetting sins laid to the charge 
 of our landlords as a class. The charge is not wholly 
 without foundation. And yet, in spite of all that has 
 been done amiss and left undone, one is wont to echo 
 
 1 A romantic incident which occurred at Ham House in the 
 presence of Sir Charles Wheatstone and Mr. Babbage is related in 
 Safe Studies, p. 157. 
 
MY FATHEE'S ANECDOTES 285 
 
 the piteous lament, patria, divom domus Ilium, if 
 one lingers for a moment on the hateful foreboding 
 that the country gentlemen and their stately tra- 
 ditions, and their church as a National Church, and 
 all the dying embers of feudalism, nay, that the old 
 England of Shakespeare and of Scott, will soon be 
 as extinct as the dodo. An antidote, or perhaps a 
 counter-irritant, to these useless regrets may be found 
 in a strange old-world story, which my father related 
 as true. At my old home in Suffolk there is an 
 avenue of giant trees which can have changed but 
 little during the last three centuries, and which seem 
 to look down with lofty compassion as generation 
 after generation of their puny owners passes from 
 the scene. Beneath the shade of these ' monumental 
 oaks', as Milton would have called them, Queen 
 Elizabeth made her way in 1561, and crossed the 
 Helmingham drawbridge, on a visit to Sir Lionel 
 ToUemache, with the view of standing godmother to 
 his child. The infant died ; but, fearing to disappoint 
 Elizabeth, the parents had the dead body duly 
 christened ! The lute given by the Queen to the 
 child's mother is still an heirloom in the family ; and 
 the drawbridge is still raised every night, as it is said 
 to have been for centuries. U n'y a rien de change, 
 sauf le personnel. 1 
 
 1 The narrative of the royal sponsorship and the post mortem 
 christening of the child was unquestioned in my youth ; and 
 I regarded it as unquestionable when I wrote the foregoing 
 paragraph. Eecently, however, that unblessed sorceress, Modern 
 Criticism, has set her withering hand upon it, as upon so much 
 that is quaint and venerable. The Queen's visit is now said to 
 have been paid, not to Helmingham, but to Hedingham, a seat of 
 the Earl of Leicester. But, as my kind friend Mr. G-rote is, alas ! 
 no longer alive to charge me with the sin of lese-verite, I leave the 
 
286 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 It is, however, fitting that this farewell homage to 
 the memory of my father should close with a reference, 
 not to Helmingham, but to that other home of my 
 boyhood which is, in a special sense, associated with 
 his name. Inhabitants of Cheshire are familiar with 
 the sight of the two castles on hill-tops, the old and 
 the new castle which confront one another as if in 
 anger, and which somehow recall to me the Cloughian 
 hexameter : 
 
 ' Utter, O some one, the word that shall reconcile ancient and 
 modern ! ' 
 
 The modern castle, as perfect in its way as such an 
 anachronism can be, was built by my father on one 
 of the Peckforton hills. It stands about a mile and 
 a half from two points which together are said to 
 command, on a clear day, a view of twelve or thirteen 
 counties. On a neighbouring hill is seen the grand 
 historic ruin of Beeston, rivalling the new castle in 
 beauty, and far surpassing it in interest. 
 
 It is, by the way, worth mentioning that in the 
 forties, while the modern castle was still unfinished, 
 my father went to America and returned thence to 
 Liverpool. On the last morning of his homeward 
 voyage, as he went on deck, being then in the Mersey, 
 the first object that caught his eye was the rising wall 
 on the Peckforton hill. Was he not at that moment 
 the very personification of the fortunati quorum iam 
 moenia surgunt ? 
 
 anecdote as it originally stood. In doing so, I shelter myself 
 under the authority of Goethe, who remarks on such grand old 
 tales as those of Horatius and of Scaevola : ' If the Romans were 
 great enough to invent these stories, we ought to be great enough 
 to believe them.' Adapting another of Goethe's sayings, I will 
 add — 'Wen Schonheit betrtlgt ist wohl betrogen.' 
 
a 
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 x 
 
 in 
 6 
 
 a 
 y. 
 
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 a 
 P* 
 
MY FATHER'S ANECDOTES 287 
 
 I have spoken above of the house at Peckforton, as 
 built by my father; for, though Salvin was the 
 architect, yet the neo-feudal conception and several 
 of the characteristic details were, in great part, my 
 father's own. Indeed, a high authority told him, 
 perhaps not quite seriously, that no professional 
 architect would have ventured on anything so quaintly 
 original. A singular hue of antiquity is given to this 
 ' John-of-Gaunt Castle ' by the fact that, in the hall, 
 the dining-room, and some of the passages, the walls 
 of red sandstone are left bare ; and it should be added 
 that on those rocky walls the traces of primaeval 
 waves are plainly visible. No flower-beds soften the 
 ruggedness of the mock-fortress ; but the wild ground, 
 with its wealth of bilberries and broom, stretches to 
 its very base. 
 
 The two small gardens are situated — not very con- 
 veniently — at the foot of the hill. One of these has 
 a claim on our notice ; for within it there rises — 
 literally, as Virgil would have said, 'in the shade of 
 an over-spreading beech ' — a picturesque spring which 
 goes by the name of Horsley Bath. The so-called 
 'bath' supplied the house with excellent water. 
 Indeed, a Cheshire doctor once told my father that 
 he and some medical friends, after careful analysis, 
 found the water of that spring to be the purest in 
 England, not excepting the water of Malvern. Of 
 course this judgement is not to be taken for gospel. 
 Nor, indeed, should I rely implicitly on the in- 
 scription over the spring, which bears date, I think, 
 some time in the seventeenth century : 
 
 ' Obstructum reserat, durum terit, humida siccat, 
 Debile fortificat, si tamen arte bibis.' 
 
 As a boy, I was puzzled to make out how water 
 
288 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 could 'dry up what is moist'. But the Eev. W. E. 
 Jelf explained to me that humida must here mean 
 ' humours ' ; and, indeed, it is plain that the inscription 
 altogether refers to bodily ailments. The non-classical 
 or semi-classical reader should be told that the two 
 first clauses represent the wonder-working spring as, 
 so to speak, Carlsbad and Contrexeville rolled up 
 into one. 
 
 Writing about this home of my youth, I cannot 
 help mentioning that, as the venerable Bishop 
 Durnford assured me, Bishop Heber, when first he 
 caught a distant view of the Himalayas, was reminded 
 of the Peckforton hills. A strange comparison cer- 
 tainly ! But it will be remembered that an odd like- 
 ness between a small thing and a very big thing is 
 the more striking by reason of the incongruity. To 
 which it should be added that Heber, when he thought 
 of the comparison, saw the great Indian range, as 
 Tennyson might have said, foreshortened in the tract 
 of space ; and also that, being himself a Cheshire man, 
 he may have been biased on the side of his native 
 county, remembering, as it were, or fondly imagining, 
 parvam Troiam simulataque magnis Pergama. 
 
CHAPTEE IX 
 
 RANDOM RECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 
 
 ' A great thing is a great book, but a greater thing than all is 
 the talk of a great man.' — Disraeli. 
 
 'Every public-spirited man who knows a Johnson would be 
 a Boswell, if he could. Unluckily, however, Boswells are much 
 rarer than Johnsons.' — Times. 
 
 I once asked Huxley whether the difference between 
 the natural intelligence of an Englishman or a German 
 and that of a savage is not small indeed when com- 
 pared with the difference between the natural intelli- 
 gence of the savage and that of a chimpanzee or gorilla. 
 He quite agreed with me ; but he seemed to think that 
 many savages would be unable to bear the strain of 
 European culture. He, however, made the remark that 
 the training of many savages is more quickening to the 
 intelligence than the training of an ordinary London 
 clerk ; and he went on to enumerate some of the 
 small things which a savage has to be constantly 
 observing. I reminded him of the minute indications 
 (such as that of short steps betokening old age) by 
 which, in Voltaire's romance, Zadig contrived to de- 
 scribe a malefactor whom he had not seen. He 
 replied that this instance exactly illustrated his point. 
 
 He maintained a purely agnostic attitude in regard 
 to the great riddles of life. 'Any Sunday-school 
 teacher,' he said, 'is by the way of knowing more 
 about these things than I know.' I found that in 
 reference to the most practically important of the 
 great riddles, Tyndall, when pressed by logic, was 
 more inclined to definite negation than Huxley was. 
 
 u 
 
290 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 Another distinguished man of whom I saw some- 
 thing was the late judge, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen. 
 I was introduced to him at The Saturday Eeview dinner 
 in 1863, and claimed acquaintance with him nearly 
 twenty years later at Biarritz. On this latter occasion 
 he seemed much amused that, looking, as he did, like 
 a thorough John Bull, he had yet been asked by a shy 
 young Englishman at the table d'hote, ' Pouvez-vous 
 parler anglais, monsieur?' 'I ought to be able to 
 talk it,' he answered, in his deep voice, 'for I have 
 talked it more than fifty years ! ' 
 
 It was by his advice that I published a volume of 
 essays originally printed for private circulation. We 
 discussed together several passages, and one or two 
 of his comments may be worth recording. 
 
 In reference to an incident related to me by 
 Mr. John Forbes, who told circumstantially and re- 
 peatedly an extraordinary story, namely, that he 
 himself heard Warren Hastings, towards the close 
 of his trial, in answer to some accusation, call out, 
 ' It is false ! ' whereupon Burke exclaimed aloud, 
 ' What does that Jack-in-the-box say ? ' I had ex- 
 pressed my scepticism. Sir James, on the other hand, 
 thought it probable that Mr. Forbes's statement was 
 correct. He was of age at the end of Hastings's 
 trial, and it seemed to Sir James unlikely that he 
 could have invented so singular an occurrence. And 
 Sir James added that, considering how brutal (I think 
 that was his word) Burke was in his manner to 
 Hastings, the incident did not seem to him ante- 
 cedently incredible. Coming from so experienced 
 a sifter of evidence, this opinion of Sir James cannot 
 fail to carry weight. 
 
 In the same volume I tell how, according to 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 291 
 
 Charles Austin, Bentham used to mark theological 
 works with the syllable ' Jug ', as short for ' Jugger- 
 naut'. Stephen capped this anecdote by saying that 
 the great jurist, whenever he heard of an unusually 
 horrible accident, used to exclaim : ' How like Prowy 
 [Providence] ! ' I see that the latter interjectional and 
 not over-reverent abbreviation is cited by the cultivated 
 villain in Mrs. Humphry Ward's Marcella. 
 
 In my juvenile defence of euthanasia I mentioned 
 the case of a kindly old Indian officer of past eighty, 
 whom I asked whether he would like to live his life 
 over again. ' Live it over again ! ' he answered, with 
 an enthusiasm of which I had thought him incapable. 
 ' I would live it five times over again. There is not 
 a single day that I regret.' Referring to this incident 
 in 1884, Fitzjames Stephen said, ' I cannot make the 
 same boast as the Indian officer, for I am only in my 
 fifty-sixth year. But, up to the present time, I have 
 not spent a single day which I would not live over 
 again.' Alas ! would he have been able to say this 
 eight or nine years later ? 
 
 I reminded Stephen of an article in which he quoted 
 somebody as saying (in effect) : ' I think I know what 
 becomes of the sheep and of the goats ; but what about 
 the alpacas ? ' He illustrated the sentiment by telling 
 me that somebody had maintained that the difference 
 between the last person in heaven and the first person 
 in hell would be no greater than the difference between 
 the ' wooden spoon ' and the captain of the poll — in 
 other words, between the last of the honour men and 
 the first of the pass men. In both these instances 
 may not the anonymous somebody whom he cited 
 have been merely a masked ego? 
 
 When legal member of the Supreme Council in 
 
 u 2 
 
292 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 India, Stephen was amused to find that some small 
 idols which he had ordered at Benares reached him 
 at Calcutta with the label ' Gods with care '. ' Quippe 
 salus divom summa est mortalibus cura,' would be 
 the comment of a modern Lucretius. 
 
 I stayed at Alderley many years ago, and saw 
 something of Lady Stanley (nee Dillon); but I can 
 recall no characteristic remark of hers which I should 
 feel at liberty to quote. One good saying of hers, 
 however, I can give on good authority. An eminent 
 divine tells me that he sat near her at the opening 
 of Holloway College. He observed that she looked 
 uneasy as her eyes wandered over the pictures of the 
 founders of religions and other spiritual heroes which, 
 as I understand, decorate the walls of the chapel. 
 At last she exclaimed, with the directness of one 
 accustomed to think aloud : ' I see no picture of 
 Confucius. Surely he had a finger in the pie ! ' 
 
 Of Herbert Spencer I saw but little. As he spoke 
 to me in friendly terms of my article on ' Historical 
 Prediction ', I asked him how far he regarded such 
 prediction as possible. ' A forester,' he replied in 
 effect, ' when he plants an acorn, cannot guess where 
 each twig and leaf of the full-grown oak will find 
 a place ; but he can form a general impression as to 
 what the tree, under favourable conditions, will be 
 like. And in much the same way a wise man will 
 deal in the widest generalities when seeking to forecast 
 the future of civilization.' 
 
 The story of Herbert Spencer as a billiard-player 
 has been represented by the ladies with whom he 
 boarded as one of the mock pearls of biography. I 
 will, however, give it as I have heard it told circum- 
 stantially by a friend of his, who ought to know. For 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 293 
 
 a month each year, while house-cleaning is going on, 
 members of the United Service Club are received as 
 guests by the Athenaeum, which faces it. Spencer 
 was an enthusiastic billiard-player, and bilhards was, 
 I believe, the only game in which the philosopher 
 indulged. He joined the Savile Club because the 
 game, forbidden at the Athenaeum on Sunday, was 
 there permitted. One afternoon at the Athenaeum 
 he found himself alone in the billiard-room with a 
 member of the United Service, and challenged the 
 ' Old Cripple ' (to use the familiar sobriquet) to a friendly 
 game. His antagonist happened to be an expert, and 
 went out in a couple of breaks, the score standing 
 at a hundred to one (his own initial miss). As he 
 laid down his cue, Herbert Spencer, showing the same 
 unphilosophic weakness that Horace attributes to the 
 Stoic with a cold in his head, exclaimed : ' Sir, billiards 
 is a useful relaxation, but such proficiency in the art 
 as you have displayed is evidence of a misspent youth.' 
 Is it possible that, when the aged philosopher denied 
 having said this, his memory may have played him 
 false ? Anyhow, the untimely rebuke has a Spencerian 
 ring, and, on the strength of it, I am tempted to point 
 a contrast between Spencer and Johnson. Boswell 
 had been to see a man riding on three horses. 
 
 Johnson. ' Such a man, Sir, should be encouraged ; for his 
 performances show the extent of the human powers in one 
 instance, and thus tend to raise our opinion of the faculties of 
 man. He shows what may be attained by persevering appli- 
 cation ; so that every man may hope that, by giving as much 
 application, although perhaps he may never ride three horses 
 at a time, or dance upon a wire, yet he may be equally expert 
 in whatever profession he has chosen to pursue.' 
 
 To what length might not such an apology for toil— 
 
294 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 some trifles be carried? But perhaps Johnson had 
 in his mind the thought that life is woven of divers 
 threads, and that its richness is measured by its 
 variety. 
 
 I asked Spencer how he accounted for the couvade, 
 that extraordinary and, not long ago, widely prevalent 
 custom by which a mother, immediately after her 
 confinement, set about her work, while the father 
 went to bed with the infant. Spencer explained it 
 by saying that, according to the couvaders, an evil 
 spirit was lying in wait for the child, and, supposing 
 it to be with its mother, never thought of looking for 
 it elsewhere. Is it not strange that, if this was really 
 their belief, they can have supposed him to be hood- 
 winked, time after time, by this very simple and 
 uniform stratagem? Certainly they did not credit 
 the devil with the wisdom of the serpent. 
 
 I gathered from an essay by Spalding that, if one 
 human being could be made in every molecule the 
 exact counterpart of another, his recollections would 
 be identical with those of his original. This paradox 
 seemed to be incredible, and I asked Spencer whether 
 it did not also seem so to him. He amazed me by 
 replying to the following effect : ' I agree with 
 Spalding ; but I assume that the one man is the 
 exact duplicate of the other, not organically only, but 
 functionally.' 
 
 Professor Clifford thought it possible that there may 
 be regions of space where mathematical principles do 
 not hold. Spencer regarded this as the ne plus ultra 
 of scepticism. Clifford, he said to me, practically 
 assumed the universality of physical laws; and 
 Spencer added that this was harder to prove than 
 the universality of mathematical principles. 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 295 
 
 A friend asked him in my presence whether he did 
 not consider the principles which underlie Evolution 
 to exclude the belief in a supernatural act of Creation. 
 ' If you believe in Creation,' he answered (in effect), 
 ' you are in for all the rest.' 
 
 As he disbelieved in the supernatural origin of the 
 material universe, he consistently rejected the super- 
 natural origin of life. His views on the latter subject 
 seemed to me identical with those of Professor Tyndall, 
 who, however, expressed them to me more clearly. 
 Tyndall told me that he had no doubt that, if the 
 condition of things which immediately preceded the 
 origin of life could anywhere be reproduced, the 
 evolution of life would follow. All he maintained 
 was that the experiments which had been designed 
 to bring about spontaneous generation had failed. 
 
 Herbert Spencer once told me, when he was an old 
 man, that he was sometimes glad that he had almost 
 reached the end of his existence, and that he left 
 no posterity. I think that a phrase to a like effect 
 occurs somewhere in his writings. But, at any rate, 
 as I once heard Tyndall remark, such pessimism is 
 at variance with the main drift of Spencer's ethical 
 philosophy. If there is more pain than pleasure in 
 life, were not Hyder Ali and Napoleon, who put so 
 many human sufferers out of existence, deserving of 
 praise as beneficent heroes ? 
 
 From this melancholy aspect of our great philosopher 
 it is a relief to turn to a comic anecdote regarding him. 
 Towards the close of his life he frequented a boarding- 
 house ; and, chancing to meet a lady who had often 
 dined within earshot of him, I asked her if she could 
 remember any wise sayings of his. After pondering 
 for some time, she answered, ' I can remember one of 
 
296 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 his remarks. He said that ' ' making good melted butter 
 is a lost art in England ".' This is like the story that 
 Coleridge tells of the sage and the gooseberries. It 
 also brings to my mind a passage in Eotlien : 
 
 'Whilst I was at Damascus, I had my quarters at the 
 Franciscan convent there; and very soon after my arrival 
 I asked one of the monks to let me know something of the 
 spots that deserved to be seen. I made my inquiry in refer- 
 ence to the associations with which the city had been hallowed 
 by the sojourn and adventures of St. Paul. " There is nothing 
 in all Damascus," said the good man, "half so well worth 
 seeing as our cellars ; " and forthwith he invited me to go, see, 
 and admire the long range of liquid treasure that he and his 
 brethren had laid up for themselves on earth.' 
 
 A more suggestive parallel is to be found in Heine's 
 account of his interview with Goethe : 
 
 ' When I visited him in Weimar, and stood face to face with 
 him, I looked involuntarily around in search of the eagle with 
 the thunderbolts in his beak. I was on the very point of 
 addressing him in Greek ; but, as soon as I observed that he 
 understood German, I related to him, in my own mother- 
 tongue, that the plums upon the road between Jena and 
 Weimar tasted very nice. So many long wintry nights had 
 I thought it over, how many deep and sublime things I would 
 say to Goethe when I saw him : and when, at length, I did 
 see him, I said to him that Saxon plums tasted very nice ! ' 
 
 The late Sir George Bowen received direct from 
 Bishop Selwyn a gruesome anecdote which I had 
 heard before, but had always believed to be a ' Joe 
 Miller'. A Maori chief notified to the Bishop that 
 he was convinced of the truth of Christianity, and 
 wished to be received into the Church of England. 
 But Selwyn had learnt that the Maori was a polygamist; 
 and, being less tolerant in these matters than Colenso 
 is said to have been, he insisted that, before the appli- 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 297 
 
 cant could be baptized, he must get rid of all his 
 wives but one. The Maori went away heavy and 
 displeased ; but, not long after, he called on the 
 Bishop and assured him that the difficulty had been 
 got over. ' I fear,' said the Bishop, sympathetically, 
 'that the separation between you and your wives 
 must have been very painful. Where are they?' 
 ' Here,' replied the convert, complacently patting his 
 stomach. 
 
 Canon Isaac Taylor gave me some interesting par- 
 ticulars about the origin of the letters of the alphabet. 
 He seemed to think that the most curious example 
 is furnished by the letter M, which in its original 
 form was an owl, the two angles at the top of the M 
 representing the owl's ears and the angle in the 
 middle representing its beak. It may be noted in 
 passing that, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, alphabetical 
 writing was not yet perfected ; so much so that in 
 them the symbolical owl was capable of standing 
 either for the letter M, for such a syllable as em, or 
 seemingly also for a real owl. 
 
 It was by the Canon's advice that some phrases 
 occurring in my volumes were submitted to Dr. Murray, 
 with the result that the following words of my coinage 
 have found a place in his great Dictionary : Crematory ; 
 euthanasiast ; finifugal (recoiling from the thought, not 
 merely of death, but of minor catastrophes which may 
 be suggestive of death) ; foolometry ; geomorphic (applied 
 to a conception of heaven analogous to an anthropo- 
 morphic conception of God) ; malistic (less strong than 
 pessimistic). The word after-glow was certainly not 
 invented by me ; but, strange to say, it is not known, 
 according to the Dictionary, to have occurred in any 
 publication prior to the appearance of an article of 
 
298 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 mine in The Fortnightly Beview for February, 1873. 
 The fact is curious as tending to show how little our 
 ancestors can have cared for the grandeur and the 
 charm of Alpine scenery. 
 
 One of my oldest friends was the late S. H. Reynolds, 
 formerly Fellow of Brasenose and editor of Bacon's 
 Essays and Selden's Table Talk for the Clarendon 
 Press. His odd saying that Bacon was 'a scoundrel 
 of whom human nature ought to be proud ' has already 
 been quoted in this volume. Two other specimens of 
 his grim and fantastic humour may here be added. 
 He had no belief at all in the political capacity of 
 women, and but little in their sense of truth. And 
 he used to illustrate this unchivalrous sentiment of 
 his by means of an apologue, with respect to which 
 he disclaimed originality, but which he, at any rate, 
 made his own by the characteristic stamp which he 
 set upon it. His primary object was to show what 
 was expected of a model wife : 
 
 ' A certain man had a wooden leg, and told his wife that he 
 did not wish the fact to be known. But reports about the 
 wooden leg got abroad; which the wife, whenever they 
 reached her, indignantly denied. Thus far she had only done 
 what any wife would do. But she proved herself to be a good 
 wife by the circumstance that, although she unscrewed the 
 wooden leg every night and screwed it on every morning, yet, 
 when she denied that it existed, she firmly believed that she 
 was telling the truth ! ' 
 
 Behold how good and wholesome a thing is the sweet 
 unreasonableness of woman ! 
 
 Perhaps the most generally popular of the sports 
 of Reynolds's imagination is one which Lucian would 
 have ironically entitled 'A True History'. The 
 narrative bears record that there lately dwelt in one 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 299 
 
 of the colleges of Oxbridge a certain tutor who was 
 also a priest. He was one who minded his own 
 business ; insomuch that he could not have been 
 reproached with what Montaigne calls 'the wrong 
 and unnatural course of abandoning a pleasant and 
 healthful life to serve others'. It was his daily 
 practice to breakfast on two eggs. One morning, 
 at daybreak, the Angel Gabriel appeared unto him 
 in bodily shape, and certified that, if he would forgo 
 one of his eggs that morning, he himself indeed 
 would profit not at all, but unspeakable blessings 
 would be vouchsafed to his fellow men. Smothering 
 his wrath at the presumption of his unbidden guest, 
 the latter-day saint inquired : ' Do I understand that, 
 if I consent to make this sacrifice, I myself shall 
 obtain no benefit of any sort?' Whereto the angel 
 made answer : ' None save that exceeding great 
 blessing, the testimony of a good conscience.' This 
 was too much for mortal man. So, turning his back 
 on the exorbitant petitioner, the reverend gentleman 
 cried hastily to his servant : ' John, bring up my two 
 eggs.' 
 
 It may here be added that a kinswoman of 
 Keynolds, having found some asphodel near Biarritz, 
 and being attracted by its classical associations, asked 
 a peasant what it was called in French. ' Je ne sais 
 pas,' was the scornful reply ; ' c'est quelque chose qu'on 
 donne a manger aux cochons.' 
 
 Lord Houghton and Mr. Freeman. — The names of 
 these two eminent men suggest points of contrast 
 rather than of comparison. The contrast was well 
 shown, though somewhat to the advantage of the 
 historian, when it was my good fortune to meet them 
 together at a London breakfast party in 1875. On 
 
300 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 that occasion Lord Houghton, wishing presumably to 
 throw down the gauntlet, propounded the audacious 
 paradox that lay scholars ought not to study the Greek 
 Testament ; ' the Greek,' he said, ' is so abominable ! ' 
 Freeman replied with unwonted moderation. Anxious, 
 doubtless, to avoid having a contest on the brink of 
 a precipice, he forbore to give the obvious theological 
 rejoinder to the imprudent challenge. He preferred 
 taking the comparatively safe, and to him familiar, 
 ground that students of Greek literature should be 
 made to follow it through all its successive stages. 
 In this friendly passage of arms, both the combatants 
 acted more or less characteristically. It was like 
 Freeman to ignore the fact that ordinary students, 
 having but a hmited time to devote to Greek literature, 
 must in the main concentrate their attention on that 
 literature when at its best ; and it was like Lord 
 Houghton to pose as a Humanist, pure and simple. 
 By taking this line he seemed of set purpose to be 
 making himself out less serious than he was. It was 
 perhaps owing to this tendency to self-caricature that 
 he often failed to get credit for his many sterling 
 qualities. It is said that Lady Palmerston, being 
 asked why Monckton Milnes had never mounted 
 higher on the political ladder, muttered something 
 to the effect that he was not thought ' serious '. Was 
 this a true bill against the future Lord Houghton? 
 Was he then or at any time wholly lacking in serious- 
 ness ? In my youth I met him at Cambridge House, 
 and sometimes wondered how many of the celebrities 
 and aspirants who thronged to overflowing Lady 
 Palmerston's drawing-rooms and staircase on those 
 well-remembered Saturday evenings took anything 
 like so serious and rational a view of the problems 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 301 
 
 of life as was taken by that ' bird of paradox ', who 
 was often charged with want of seriousness. Not, of 
 course, that Lord Houghton, or any one else, could 
 solve the insoluble riddle. But he, perhaps, saw better 
 than most men why and how far it is insoluble ; and 
 at any rate he could reject certain popular solutions 
 of it as utterly inadmissible and fantastic. In other 
 words, he was an exception to what Goethe meant by 
 his sweeping generalization that ' every Englishman is 
 without intelligence '. 
 
 But assuredly Milnes had the defects of his qualities. 
 If he could deftly thread his way through a mass of 
 metaphysical subtleties wherein the average English- 
 man is, as it were, a John Bull in a china shop, he 
 was thereby impeded from going straight to a practical 
 end. His native hue of resolution was sicklied, as 
 well as silvered, o'er with the pale cast of analysis. 
 Like the Halifax of the Bestoration, he saw practical 
 questions from too many sides. In fact, he had not 
 what Bacon regarded as a condition of worldly success : 
 he was not ' something of the fool '. Yet, for that very 
 reason, he was charged with unwisdom, even by the 
 most useful and admirable of all those persons — com- 
 prising the great majority of mankind — whom Bacon 
 and Carlyle would have called fools and Heine would 
 have called philistines. The sketches of him drawn 
 by such worthies were at times anything but flattering. 
 For example : my father, while still a member of the 
 Lower House, was once admonishing me not to try my 
 hand at poetry. He concluded with crushing emphasis : 
 ' The only poets that I know are the greatest fools in 
 the House of Commons ; ' and there can be no doubt 
 he was especially thinking of Milnes. In a word, 
 nearly all humourless men of action disliked Milnes's 
 
302 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 seeming levity ; and probably between him and them 
 no love was lost. Oderunt Mlarem tristes, tristemque 
 iocosi ('Wits hate the witless, witless hate the wits'). 
 Yet he himself could be a man of action on an 
 emergency. Charles Austin told me that he never 
 admired Milnes so much as once when he went with 
 him and others for a picnic ; the coachman was seized 
 with a fit, and the so-called unpractical dreamer, first 
 or alone of the party, became an extempore doctor 
 and took all the measures which the case required. 
 Austin's testimony was all the more valuable because, 
 regarding Milnes as having been rightly nicknamed 
 ' the Cool of the Evening ' by Sydney Smith, he failed 
 to appreciate the manifold charms of that genial and 
 delightful friend. 
 
 An anecdote or two will serve to show the appro- 
 priateness of the nickname. Milnes was once spending 
 New Year's Eve in the house of some kinsfolk of mine, 
 but not of his own. When the clock struck twelve, 
 he promptly got up, and, importing into England the 
 French and Italian custom, he kissed his astonished 
 hostess before all the party. On the occasion of 
 another- visit to the same house he joined a game 
 of ' magic music ', and was himself sent out. It was 
 determined to give him a characteristic task. In 
 playful allusion to his habit of lolling on a sofa when 
 paying a morning call, two sofa cushions were placed 
 on the ground, and he was expected to lie down on 
 them. He soon found out what he had to do. Might 
 it not have been said of him throughout his life, as of 
 Scott in his earlier years, that he was, in very truth : 
 
 ' a grandam's child 
 Who, half a plague and half a jest, 
 Was still endured, beloved, caress'd'? 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 303 
 
 A trifling incident may serve to show how he came 
 to be charged with a sort of dilettante frivolity. In 
 my sallet days I advocated euthanasia, and once tried 
 to convert Lord Houghton to that simple yet drastic 
 ' cure for incurables '. ' No, no,' he answered, in a 
 careless tone : ' you can't trust the doctors ; ' and then 
 he added, with greater interest, 'Have you heard what 
 they've been doing in Japan ? " He went on to say 
 that a measure had been brought forward in the 
 Japanese Assembly for the abolition of hara-kiri ; 
 and that this measure had been either carried or lost 
 (I forget which) by a small majority. There was 
 something, not so much in what he then said, as in 
 the tone in which he said it, which left the impression 
 that he regarded hara-kiri and euthanasia as two 
 entertaining episodes in the universal comedy. At the 
 time I was nettled by his seeming levity ; but I now 
 see that he was showing his wonted tact in thus play- 
 fully handling a scheme which, if not Utopian, at 
 any rate lies far beyond the moral horizon of the 
 present century ? 
 
 It may not be amiss to add (or rather repeat) another 
 illustrative example. A singular rebuke was addressed 
 to me many years ago by Lord Houghton, when, in 
 a fit of youthful impetuosity, I hinted that the Liberals 
 ought to disestablish the Church. ' Don't suggest 
 anything so dreadful,' said he. ' The philosophers 
 would never be able to do it ; it could only be done 
 through an outburst of Protestant fanaticism, which 
 would be a calamity indeed ! ' 1 
 
 1 This unecclesiastieal Apologia pro Ecclesia recalls Charles 
 Buller's trenchant paradox : ' Destroy the Church of England ! 
 You must be mad ! It is the only thing between us and real 
 religion.' 
 
304 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 Among the many admirable merits of Freeman, 
 tact certainly had no place. He was often instant out 
 of season. A curious example of this inopportuneness 
 of his occurred when I had the honour of making his 
 acquaintance. It was in my undergraduate days (in 
 1858, or thereabouts) that I met him at the house of 
 the late Mr. Parker, the Oxford publisher — the late 
 W. H. Gladstone being also an undergraduate guest. 
 Oddly enough, I had never heard of Freeman before, 
 and I was fairly taken aback by this uncouth specimen 
 of an Oxford don, who was molesting his orthodox host 
 by detailing the discrepancies between the Elohistic 
 and the Jehovistic cosmogonies in Genesis. Presently 
 he called out : ' Parker, give me a Bible. See how the 
 compiler has put the contradictory narratives side by 
 side, without even attempting to reconcile them. And 
 will you tell me that this clumsy piece of patchwork 
 came from the same Moses who wrote those grand 
 passages in Deuteronomy which come into my head 
 whenever I think of Louis Napoleon ? " And he went 
 on to spout, in his strident voice, interrupted now and 
 again by a loud, exultant laugh, a series of verses 
 which in no wise savoured of blessing — such verses as 
 Cursed slialt thou be when thou contest in, and cursed shalt 
 thou be when thou goest out. Cursed shalt thou be in the 
 city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field. The Lord shall 
 cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies. Thou shalt 
 become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all 
 nations. Thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, 
 and the earth that is under thee shall be iron. The two 
 undergraduates who heard Freeman thus declaiming 
 were at their wits' end to keep their countenance. 
 But they were certainly startled, and W. H. Gladstone, 
 I fear, was much scandalized. The British public, it 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 305 
 
 should be remembered, had not yet been educated up 
 to the acceptance, or even to the toleration, of biblical 
 criticism. 
 
 Nearly thirty years later, I had direct evidence that 
 Professor Freeman, notwithstanding his ecclesiastical 
 leanings, continued loyal to the higher criticism down 
 to the close of his life. I ventured to call his attention 
 to the article which Professor Mivart wrote in The 
 Nineteenth Century in 1887, and in which, good Catholic 
 though he was at that time, he granted to the critical 
 spirit plenary jurisdiction over at least part of the Old 
 Testament. Freeman's answer was on this wise : 
 ' I have often thought that a Eoman Catholic can, as 
 I believe others do besides Mivart, afford to deal more 
 freely with the Old Testament than a Protestant can. 
 He is not in the same way bound to the worship of 
 a book, just as he is not bound to the worship of 
 a day; he has something behind both. Still the 
 avowals are startling.' Matthew Arnold was of the 
 same opinion. ' Mivart,' he said to me, more sm, ' is 
 stupendous.' 
 
 It is with reluctance that I advert to a side of the 
 historian's character which recalls Horace's description 
 of Achilles : 
 
 ' Irascible, inexorable, keen.' 
 
 That he was sometimes merciless in his chastisement 
 of persons who, even unwittingly, infringed the laws 
 of historical criticism, is well known. But it is less 
 often noted that he was capricious in his administra- 
 tion of the stripes. We have seen that he was no 
 bibliolater. But he was always indulgent to biblio- 
 latry. The result was that, in his dealings with sacred 
 and profane literatures respectively, he was guilty of 
 
306 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 an inconsequence strange in an historical critic, and 
 especially strange in one who was wont to be a stickler 
 for logical consistency. Venial errors in non-biblical 
 criticism were in the wallet before his face, whilst 
 grave errors in biblical criticism were in the wallet 
 behind his back. He bade men strain at William 
 Tell's apple ; but he let them swallow Jonah and his 
 whale ! 
 
 Matthew Arnold has referred to Freeman as the 
 critic who kept ' such jealous watch over the honour 
 of our Saxon ancestors ', and elsewhere as one ' who 
 was so fond of the German element in our nation, 
 and, indeed, everywhere ; who ground his teeth if one 
 said Charlemagne, instead of Charles the Great, and, in 
 short, saw all things in Teutonism, as Malebranche 
 saw all things in God '. 
 
 Eenan has said of Josephus, ' II a le defaut le plus 
 oppose a la saine maniere d'ecrire l'histoire, une per- 
 sonality extreme,' and there would be an antecedent 
 probability that such an historian as Freeman, with his 
 overweening and crushing personality, would incur 
 a like censure. I must leave it for my readers to 
 decide whether Freeman did, or did not, deserve such 
 a censure. 
 
 Instead of pronouncing judgement on the historian, 
 I will relate an incident in his life with which his 
 truly volcanic ebullitions of wrath may have had some 
 connexion. It was only a short time before his death 
 that the Committee of the Athenaeum elected him. 
 Some years earlier, I had suggested in an influential 
 quarter that so distinguished a writer ought to be 
 admitted under Eule 2. But I received for answer 
 that, if ever within the precincts of the Athenaeum 
 Library Freeman chanced to hear a word spoken in 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 307 
 
 extenuation of the Bulgarian atrocities, that sanctuary 
 of the Muses would be converted into a bear-garden. 
 It might, peradventure, have been added that the 
 members of a refined and peaceful society could hardly 
 suffer themselves to be affrighted by a stalwart and 
 bellicose intruder, who had ruthlessly assaulted some 
 of them with his pen, and who, if opportunity served, 
 might be tempted to assault them with his tongue. 
 Even a bookworm may be trodden on once too often ; 
 and even a literary club must set limits to the un- 
 clubbability of its members ! 
 
 The following anecdote, which purports to be 
 authentic, may throw some light on the peculiarity of 
 Freeman here indicated. He had given a dogmatic 
 and combative address on the early inhabitants of 
 Britain to a learned society. At the subsequent 
 dinner, a member who was called upon to propose his 
 health is reported to have paid him the wittily am- 
 biguous compliment : ' Our best thanks are due to 
 Professor Freeman for having so well illustrated the 
 manners of our rude forefathers ! ' 
 
 My limits forbid me to consider how Professor 
 Freeman and Lord Houghton, regarded as representa- 
 tive men, symbolized the jarring elements of which 
 intellectual society is made up, and by whose inevitable 
 and indispensable Concordia discors it is maintained. 
 Suffice it to say that the application to them of the 
 Aristophanie antithesis, ' The one I think a clever 
 man, but the other I love,' will seem to be a form of 
 damning with faint praise, until it is remembered that 
 it was on Aeschylus and Euripides that the faint 
 praise was originally bestowed. 
 
 The Rev. C. L. Hodgson (Lewis Carroll). — The obituary 
 notices of the man of genius who is best known as the 
 
 x2 
 
308 OLD AND ODD MEMOKIES 
 
 literary father of the Alices have agreed in calling 
 attention to one great peculiarity which marked him. 
 His mind had a twofold activity. He might be 
 described — roughly — as made up of Euclid and La 
 Fontaine fused together. To speak more precisely : 
 as a mathematician, he did his work well; as 
 a fabulist, admirably. The intellectual athlete who 
 kept his balance on the rugged and bewildering 
 heights of Conic Sections and Determinants could 
 freely disport himself in a waking-dreamland, a land 
 whose phantasmagoria 
 
 ' Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax 
 And cabbages and kings ' 
 
 was interspersed with such 'fearful wild-fowl' as pedes- 
 trian oysters and plaintive mock-turtles. But the 
 point to note is that his intellect, vigorous and 
 versatile on these oddly remote and dissimilar levels, 
 was unwieldy on intermediate levels. He could soar 
 and dive far better than he could walk. This may 
 partly account for his unreadiness in conversation. 
 Not, indeed, that he was unable at times to talk 
 brilliantly. With his ready command of homely and 
 witty illustrations, he could hardly fail to achieve this. 
 Indeed, I have obtained distinct testimony on the 
 point from one of his intimate friends, who writes : 
 
 ' Of his brilliancy there can be no manner of doubt ; but it 
 was at the same time very difficult to define or focus. You 
 ask me for some of his brilliant flashes ; I am quite unable to 
 give you any. All he said, all his oddities and clever things, 
 arose out of the conversation — conversation quite of an 
 ordinary everyday sort ; to explain it at all you would want 
 shorthand notes of everything that was said, and even then 
 you would not follow it, unless you knew the people who 
 
RECOLLECTIONS OP FAMOUS MEN 309 
 
 were talking, the peculiarities of this man, and the deafness 
 of that, and so on. It was Alice, all kinds of queer turns 
 given to things. You never knew where he would take you 
 next; and all the while there seemed to be an odd logical 
 sequence, almost impelling your assent to most unexpected 
 conclusions. He had a great fund of stories; these again 
 were never told independently, they were fished up from his 
 stores by some line dropped down in ordinary talk. He 
 always said he never invented them (and my own impression 
 is that he did not), but that they had been read somewhere or 
 told him by some one. He never told stories against people; 
 was never bitter or cruel, never attempted to " score off " 
 others.' 
 
 It may be instructive to contrast my correspondent's 
 view of Dodgson's conversational powers with the view 
 taken by another of his friends, a man of science. The 
 latter tells me that, to his thinking, Dodgson was not a 
 brilliant talker ; he was too peculiar and paradoxical ; 
 and the topics on which he loved to dwell were such 
 as would bore many persons ; while, on the other hand, 
 when he himself was not interested, he occasionally 
 stopped the flow of a serious discussion by the intrusion 
 of a disconcerting epigram. This glaring discrepancy 
 of opinion may in part be explained as follows : The 
 correspondent from whom I have quoted is orthodox, 
 whereas my scientific friend inclines towards modern 
 views. Now, I suspect that Dodgson's pleasantry, 
 however seemingly extravagant, had a method in it ; 
 and that, even if none of his paradoxes had, like those 
 of Mansel, a more or less clearly defined theological 
 purpose, at any rate his wit would play with the 
 greatest ease and effect among orthodox and sympa- 
 thetic listeners. Nor is it likely that among such 
 listeners his sallies would be rated at less than their 
 full value. As a general rule, orthodoxy, combined 
 
310 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 with brilliancy, is like glycerine combined with vaccine 
 —it enables a little of it to go a very long way ! 
 
 From a comparison of these discordant accounts it 
 may be inferred that Dodgson was not a steady, or 
 what may be termed a safe talker. He could not be 
 relied on to bear his part in the give-and-take of serious 
 conversation — to keep the shuttlecock flying at neither 
 more nor less than the convenient height. Indeed, the 
 greatest praise which his most partial friends could 
 claim for him as a talker would be that which 
 Wellington bestowed on Talleyrand, namely, that he 
 was generally dull, but now and then said things which 
 his hearers would never forget. Thus, then, we may 
 conclude that he had no eye for the middle distance of 
 the intellectual landscape. The lower generalizations 
 of philosophy and the higher generalizations of daily 
 experience, which together form the common ground 
 where men of parts and men without parts can freely 
 meet and converse — these axiomata media of discourse 
 were almost a sealed, were (let us say) an uncut, book 
 to our mathematical romancist. 
 
 He was, indeed, addicted to mathematical and some- 
 times to ethical paradoxes. The following specimen 
 was propounded by him in my presence : ' Suppose 
 that I toss up a coin on the condition that, if I throw 
 heads once, I am to receive a Id. ; if twice in succession, 
 an additional dole of 2d. ; if thrice, a further addition 
 of 4:d., and so on, doubling for each successful toss : 
 what is the value of my prospects? The amazing 
 reply is that it amounts to infinity ; for, as the profit 
 attached to each successful toss increases in exact pro- 
 portion as the chance of success diminishes, the value 
 of each toss will be identical, being in fact a halfpenny ; 
 so that the value of an infinite number of tosses is an 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 311 
 
 infinite number of half-pence. Yet, in fact, would 
 any one give me sixpence for my prospect ? This,' 
 concluded Dodgson, ' shows how far our conduct is from 
 being determined by logic' The solution of this 
 astounding paradox is of course that, in order to bring 
 out his result, we must suppose a somewhat monotonous 
 eternity to be consumed in the tossing process. 
 
 He told me of a simple, too simple, rule by which, 
 he thought, one could be almost sure of making some- 
 thing at a horse-race. He had on various occasions 
 noted down the fractions which represented the sup- 
 posed chances of the competing horses, and had 
 observed that the sum of these chances amounted to 
 more than unity. Hence he inferred that, even in the 
 case of such hard-headed men as the backers, the wish 
 is often father to the thought ; so that they are apt to 
 overrate the chances of their favourites. His plan, 
 therefore, was to bet against all the horses, keeping 
 his own stake the same in each case. He did not 
 pretend to know much about horse-racing, and I 
 probably know even less ; but I understand that it 
 would be impossible to adjust the hedging with suffi- 
 cient exactitude — in fact, to get bets of the right 
 amount taken by the backers. 
 
 Two other ' dodges ' of his may be mentioned here. 
 He said that, if a dull writer sent you a copy of his 
 books, you should at once write and thank him, and 
 should add, with Delphic ambiguity, that you will lose 
 no time in perusing them ! Being a strict moralist, he 
 must assuredly have meant so palpable an equivocation 
 to be regarded as a mere jeu d'esprit. He was doubt- 
 less more serious in asserting that whenever a mother 
 held up an uncomely infant for his inspection, he met 
 her wistful gaze with the exclamation, 'That is a 
 
312 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 baby ! ' Might not Falconbridge have condoned such 
 an evasion in an extreme case as being, at worst, ' a 
 virtuous sin'? To be frank would be a mortal 
 offence ; and to avert a mother's wrath, one might be 
 tempted to invoke a principle of limited application, 
 ' Salus amicitiae suprema lex.' Better this than to set up 
 the more widely applicable and therefore more abusable 
 plea, ' Be minimis non curat moralitas.' 
 
 Dodgson had an ingenious memoria technica to im- 
 press and illustrate harmonic progression. According 
 to him, it is (or was) the rule at Christ Church that, if 
 an undergraduate is absent for a night during term 
 time without leave, he is for the first offence sent down 
 for a term ; if he commits the offence a second time, 
 he is sent down for two terms ; if a third time, Christ 
 Church knows him no more. This last calamity 
 Dodgson designated as 'infinite'. Here, then, the 
 three degrees of punishment may be reckoned as 1, 2, 
 infinity. These three figures represent three terms in 
 an ascending series of harmonic progression, being the 
 reciprocals of 1, f, 0, which are three terms in a 
 descending arithmetical progression. 
 
 After the foregoing manifestations of the riddling 
 spirit which possessed this 7toiki\g>86s Oxonian Sphinx, 
 we are not surprised to learn that, though he generally 
 delighted children, he has been known to bore them 
 with arithmetical puzzles. Also, his favourites some- 
 times complained that his interest in them passed 
 away with their childhood. He related to me a quaint 
 incident, which is said to be highly characteristic of 
 him. He mentioned that he took no great interest in 
 little boys, and that once on receiving a letter from a 
 child with an hermaphrodite name, Sydney or Evelyn, 
 he supposed the writer to be a boy, and answered 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 313 
 
 somewhat curtly. Learning afterwards that his small 
 correspondent was a girl, he made his peace by writing 
 to her with great cordiality and with a mock-serious 
 playfulness. His letter concluded with the postscript : 
 ' If you see Nobody come into the room, please give 
 him a kiss from me.' Was he prompted thus to 
 personify Nobody by the recollection of a famous 
 scene in the Odyssey'! At all events, being sorely 
 perplexed as to the manner of bestowing a ghostly 
 embrace on visible and incarnate nothingness, the 
 poor child acknowledged her embarrassment in a 
 charmingly naive letter which he read aloud to me. 
 
 He spoke of the difficulties which he had to en- 
 counter before his Alice could make her appearance on 
 the stage. Especially he dwelt on the corrections which 
 were needed in The Walrus and the Carpenter. His 
 intention had been that this farcical interlude should 
 be represented in its original form. But he discovered 
 that the tranquil massacre of the oysters was a 
 catastrophe too tame for dramatic effect. Thereupon 
 he conceived the happy thought of making the ghosts 
 of the victims jump on the sleeping forms of their 
 assassins and give them bad dreams. With pardon- 
 able — or rather with amiable — vanity he informed me 
 that the spirit shown by the defunct oysters in 
 inflicting this (somewhat mild) retaliation drew loud 
 applause from the spectators. 
 
 Owing to the immense popularity of this fable 
 without a moral, or with a queer moral (for, in very 
 truth, the loquacious and companionable oysters are 
 more like children bewitched into the shape of oysters), 
 I am tempted to repeat a minute criticism upon it. 
 Keferring to the form in which it was originally 
 written, I asked its author about its concluding stanza, 
 
314 OLD AND ODD MEMOEIES 
 
 and especially about the line, ' Shall we be trotting 
 home again?' The humorous fatuity of this line, 
 addressed, as it is, to the eaten oysters, would assuredly 
 tally far better with the unctuous and gratuitous 
 wheedling of the Walrus than with the commonplace 
 bluntness of the Carpenter ; why, then, is it put into 
 the Carpenter's mouth ? Dodgson frankly owned that 
 the objection had never occurred to him. He said 
 something about the number of syllables in the first 
 line of the stanza, but he presently remarked that this 
 line might be written, ' O Oysters dear, the Walrus 
 said.' On the whole, he left on my mind the 
 impression that, if he had woven anew the quaintly 
 and brilliantly variegated threads of the threefold 
 wonder-tale of Alice (Tergeminam Aliciam, tria virginis 
 ora creavit), ' a triune Alice, one fair maid in three,' 
 this trifling blemish in its best-remembered, oftenest- 
 quoted episode would have been removed. 
 
 My sketch of Lewis Carroll would be incomplete if 
 I made no mention of his solicitude to avoid every 
 form of pleasantry which could possibly give offence. 
 Everybody remembers the triumphant conclusion of 
 Alice in the Lodking-Glass. After not a few singular 
 adventures, the heroine crosses a fateful stream; 
 whereupon a crown is set on her head ; and, entering 
 a stately mansion, she is welcomed with the rejoicings 
 of her friends, rejoicings which are in no wise lessened 
 by the infliction of a sudden and severe, if not 
 capricious, punishment on a member of the opposite 
 party. All this, ever since my first perusal of the 
 book, has reminded me of the closing scene of that 
 favourite of my boyhood, The Pilgrim's Progress. 
 I mentioned this association of ideas to Dodgson ; and 
 I let him discern my curiosity to know whether the 
 
EECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 315 
 
 coincidence was undesigned. He took the matter more 
 seriously than I had expected. With evident annoy- 
 ance, he assured me that the thought of imitating 
 Bunyan had never occurred to him ; such trespassing 
 on sacred ground would have seemed to him highly 
 irreverent ; and, sooner than be guilty of that irrever- 
 ence, he would have re-written this portion of the 
 book. At the same time, he acknowledged that he 
 had nearly been betrayed into an oversight which he 
 would have regretted exceedingly. Mill was once 
 provoked into saying that a certain wise man was 
 remarkable, not only for seeing what ordinary men 
 could not see, but also for not seeing what they 
 could see. It was with a somewhat similar sense of 
 anomaly and incongruity that I learnt that, without 
 the least suspicion of profanity, such an accomplished 
 man as Dodgson had, in the first draft of Alice in 
 Wonderland, made the passion-flower do duty for 
 a flower in a passion. Fortunately he showed the 
 manuscript to a lady friend, who informed or reminded 
 him of the sacred - source from which that flower 
 derives its name. The correction was at once made ; 
 and the passion-flower yielded its place to the tiger- 
 lily. 
 
 Another circumstance may show how Dodgson 
 hated anything that at all savoured of profanity. An 
 authoress said in his presence that she brought up 
 her children on 'faith, soap, and charity.' Not 
 content with showing by his manner that he was 
 shocked, he afterwards wrote to the lady a letter of 
 reproof. 
 
 Canon Ainger, when calling on me, took up my 
 copy of Tischendorfs New Testament. In that 
 
316 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 volume, as is well known, the ' various readings' are 
 in each instance placed at the bottom of the page, 
 being separated from the text by a horizontal line. 
 ' The notes,' said Ainger, ' are partitioned off (par 
 Tischendorf).' This pun on a surname recalls his witty 
 couplet in praise of Taine's work on English litera- 
 ture : — 
 
 ' While English critics their dull wits were straining, 
 Lo, enter Taine, and all was entertaining.' 
 
 Mr. Lecky. — The following incident was told me 
 by Lecky in somewhat whimsical illustration of his 
 belief that, if religion were to die out of all other 
 European nations, it would still survive in Holland : 
 A Dutch peasant was in sore straits about the 
 impossibility of making his hens observe Sunday. He 
 came to his pastor with a present of eggs. He 
 regretted, he said, that he could not prevent his hens 
 from laying these on the Sabbath ; but he made what 
 amends he could by giving them to God's minister 
 that they might be handed over to the poor and 
 infirm. 
 
 Lecky commended to my notice a rare Memoir 
 written by an Englishman who had visited Voltaire 
 at Ferney. During his visit, his host told him that 
 a stranger had called asking for some favour, that he 
 himself was busy, but that he would be much obliged 
 if the guest would interview the applicant and see 
 whether he was to be trusted. The Englishman 
 undertook the office. On his return, he expressed 
 his conviction of the man's trustworthiness ; for he 
 stammered, and no stammerer could be an impostor. 
 'Nonsense!' exclaimed Voltaire. 'Did not Moses 
 stammer ? ' 
 
[RECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 317 
 
 Mr. Lecky playfully told me that he felt a sort of 
 interest in Charles II as the greatest miracle-worker 
 in the world ; for, according to the Court physician, 
 he cured some 90,000 persons of the king's evil. 
 In a like spirit he added that no evidence can be 
 drawn from this odd miracle in support of either of 
 the rival Churches ; for credulous sufferers were 
 touched by Catholic or Protestant kings with equal 
 success. 
 
 The late Lord Aberdare had a story that, on the 
 question being asked, 'What is the difference between 
 a Writer for the Signet and an attorney ? ' some one 
 astutely answered, ' The same sort of difference as 
 that between a crocodile and an alligator.' 
 
 Was it not, by the way, Joseph Hume who brought 
 some insulting charge against Lord Palmerston, which 
 the latter, in reply, declared to rest solely on Hume's 
 own allegation ? ' My allegation ! ' retorted the irre- 
 pressible Radical. 'I can tell the noble lord that in 
 this House there is no greater allegator than himself ! ' 
 
 Another of Lord Aberdare's stories referred to 
 a case, tried before Lord Campbell, which arose out 
 of a collision between a brougham and an omnibus. 
 One of the advocates pronounced the word ' brougham ' 
 as a dissyllable, being evidently unaware that the name 
 of the carriage, like the surname of Lord Brougham, 
 is abbreviated into a monosyllable. After several 
 repetitions, the judge became irritable, and exclaimed, 
 'Brother H, if you would say "broom" you would 
 save a syllable and the time of the court.' The counsel 
 took the hint, but bided his time for a retort. Presently 
 the judge began to sum up, and had occasion to 
 speak of the ' omnibus '. ' My lord,' interrupted the 
 audacious advocate, ' if your lordship would only say 
 
318 OLD AND ODD MEMORIES 
 
 " bus ", you would save two syllables and the time of 
 the court.' The author of this sally was on very 
 friendly terms with the judge, or he would hardly 
 have dared to take such a liberty. 
 
 Lord Aberdare used to tell an anecdote of a Welsh 
 clergyman who did not get on very well with his 
 parishioners, and was made chaplain of a gaol. When 
 preaching his farewell sermon to his parish, he chose 
 the unfortunate text, ' I go to prepare a place for you.' 
 This may remind one of the story that an Evangelical 
 divine, having been with difficulty persuaded by his 
 son, a priest of the most approved Eitualistic type, 
 to preach in the latter's church, selected — I suppose 
 by accident — the too appropriate text, ' Lord, have 
 mercy on my son : for he is lunatick.' 
 
 Shortly before my father died, I spoke to Lord 
 Aberdare of the strangeness of the order of the world, 
 in which my father was broken down with age, while 
 the oak trees in the avenue of his park probably 
 looked much the same as they did when Queen Eliza- 
 beth, according to tradition, drove under them to pay 
 a visit to the Sir Lionel Tollemache of that day. 
 Lord Aberdare, in reply, quoted from memory a 
 passage from Dryden's Palamon and Arcite : 
 
 ' The monarch oak, the patriarch of the trees, 
 Shoots rising up, and spreads by^slow degrees ; 
 Three centuries he grows, and three he stays, 
 Supreme in state, and in three more decays.' 
 
 After repeating these lines, which — partly perhaps 
 through the application of the masculine pronoun to 
 the oak — seemed peculiarly and pathetically suggestive 
 of human growth, maturity, and decrepitude, he went 
 on to say with emphasis : ' Such a life as that would 
 indeed be worth having ! ' 
 
KECOLLECTIONS OF FAMOUS MEN 319 
 
 Lockhart, himself a sort of half-Boswell to Scott, 
 spoke contemptuously of the real Boswell and of 
 what may be termed the Boswellian class. Mr. Lecky, 
 too, the last time that I had the pleasure of seeing 
 him, showed no sympathy for those recorders of 
 conversations and moral embalmers of the dead. 
 Indeed, I only half-convinced him that Johnson ought 
 to thank his biographer, if he chanced to meet him 
 in the Elysian Fields. The views which I then 
 expressed had been forestalled by Sydney Smith when 
 he wrote to Miss Berry : ' Ah ! if Providence would 
 but give us more Boswells.' 1 
 
 The ruling passion is strong in death. Let me end 
 as I began, with a classical tag — 
 
 ' Lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti, 
 Tempus abire tibi est.' 
 
 By a strange coincidence these familiar lines of 
 Horace were construed by the late William Bogers 
 of Bishopsgate (another Balliol worthy) in his last 
 lesson at Eton, and I will add my last paraphrase : 
 
 ' Enough of play — Odd Memories, old and new, — 
 'Tis time to draw the curtain ; Friends, adieu ! ' 
 
 1 It is with great hesitation that, in this volume and elsewhere, 
 I so often cite Sydney Smith, whose wise and witty sayings have 
 already suffered much from being overquoted and overpraised. 
 Wit is like the wall of Jericho : at the approach of the trumpeter 
 it falls flat* 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aberdare, Lord, 172, 317, 318 
 
 Aberdeen, Earl of, and John Bright, 74 
 
 Aberdeen, Earl of (the present), old 
 Harrovian, 102 
 
 Addison, General, 230 
 
 Adelaide, Queen, 231 
 
 Aeschylus, translations of, 262 & note, 307 
 
 Ainger, Canon, 69, 132-3, 167, 203,315-16 
 
 Alava, General, and Wellington, 273 
 
 Albemarle, Earl of, 216 
 
 Aldborough, Countess of, 27, 31-2, 235-8, 
 famous friends of, 30-1, 235 
 
 Alice in Wonderland, and Through the 
 Looking-GUm, 313-15 
 
 Alison Sir A., style of, Westcott on, 141 
 
 Alligators, jests on, 317 
 
 Allotments, 35 
 
 Alphabet, Taylor on, 297 
 
 Ambition, Jowett, Mill, and Gladstone 
 on, 204 
 
 American, stories of an, 247-9 
 
 Amiel on illusions, 195 
 
 Announcements by servants, 166-7 
 
 Argyll, Duke of, ' Tollemache blood' of, 
 22 
 
 Aristophanes on Aeschylus and Eu- 
 ripides, 307 
 
 Aristotle, 56, 75 
 
 Arm-giving, etiquette of, 85 
 
 Armenian wife, story of an, 223 
 
 Armistead, Rev. — , 60 
 
 Arnold, Dr., 64, compared with Vaughan, 
 112, 113 et seq. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 41, cited, 25, 100, 182, 
 190, 196, 211, 306 
 
 Asphodel, and pigs, 299 
 
 Athenaeum Club, and Freeman, 306-7 
 
 A urn ale, Due d', on fate of General Tolle- 
 mache, 13 ; son, and wife, stories of, 
 13 note 
 
 Austin, Charles, 36 & note, 70, 77, 90, 171, 
 222, 228, 274, 283, 291, 302 
 
 Baden, Margravine of, 44 
 
 Bagehot, Walter, 114, 277, 283 
 
 Balliol College, manner of, 161 ; Master 
 
 of, 175 
 Bartlett, 174, 175 . 
 Basque sayings on Women, 226 
 Bathos, in perorations, 158 
 Beeston Castle, 259, 286 
 Bellerophon, the, and Napoleon I, 275 
 Bellman, Rev. — , 7 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 291 
 Bentley, Tollemache family seat, 1-3 
 Berry, Miss, 319 
 
 Best, Lady Emily, nee Stratford, 27 
 
 Biarritz, 87 
 
 Bible criticism, 91, 304-6 ; misreadings, 
 
 50-2 ; names for animals, 96 
 Revision Committee, story of, 94 
 Billiards, Herbert Spencer on, 292 
 Bishops, in difficulties, 95 ; nepotism of 
 
 some, 167 ; stories of, 135, 167 
 Bismarck, Prince, 168 
 Blake, Jex-, pun on name, 241 
 Blayds (Calverley), old Harrovian, 102, 
 
 110 
 'Blokes,' at Oxford, 133-4 
 Blundell scholars, 176-7 
 Boswells, views on, 319 
 Bosworth, Dr., 6 
 Bowen, Charles (Lord Bowen), 159, 160, 
 
 161, 163, 193, 197, 296 
 Brewster, Sir D., 141, and More Worlds 
 
 than One, 57 
 Brest, death of General Tollemache at, 
 
 12 
 Bright, Rt. Hon. John, 74 et seq., 204-5, 
 
 233 
 Broad Churchmen, 77, 113, 143, 182 
 Broadlands, parties at, 81 
 Brodie, Lady, and Jowett, 193 
 Brodie, Sir Benjamin, 56 
 Brodie, Sir Benjamin (the 2nd), 150-2 
 Brodrick, Hon. G., 88 
 ' Brougham ' and ' bus ', 317-8 
 Brougham, Lord, 282, 283 
 Brown, T. E., on fools, 130 
 Browning, Robert, 265 
 Bruce, the traveller, old Harrovian, 102 
 Buckland, Dean, and Louis XTV's heart, 
 
 230-1 
 Buckland, Frank, odd faculty of, 231 
 Bull, Canon, 49 
 Buller, Charles, 303 note 
 Buller, General Sir Redvers, 210 
 Butler, Dr. George, head master of Har- 
 row, 121, 123 
 Butler's Analogy, 144 
 Burke, Edmund, and Hastings, 290 
 Buxton, C, 93 
 Byron, Lord, old Harrovian, 100, 102 ; 
 
 lines by, 220, 221. 
 
 Cabal, the, and Ham House, 19 
 
 1 Cad,' true meaning, 133 
 
 Cairo, Plague at, 257 
 
 Calverley, G. S., prize poem by, praised 
 
 by Westcott, 141 
 Calvinism, catchwords of, 55 ; terrors 
 
 of, 45, 54 et seq. 
 
322 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Cambridge men, and Jowett, 181 
 Cambridge slang, 182 
 Campbell, Lord, 317-18 
 Canning's Plymouth speech, 141-2 
 Cardwell, Lord, on Etonians, 101, 103 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 80, 107 ; Tennyson on, 
 
 265 
 Caroline of Brunswick, Queen, trial of, 
 
 282 
 ' Carroll, Lewis,' see Dodgson, Bev. C. L. 
 Carteret, see Granville 
 Castletown, Lord, 122-3 
 t Cat,' vocative of, 149 
 Catholic Emancipation, 242 
 Caxton's book on Chess, 6 
 Cayley's abstruse works, 155 
 Charles I, 73 ; disinterment of, 220-1 ; 
 
 whipping-boy of, 21 
 Charles II, 128 ; as miracle-worker, 317 
 Chatham, Earl of, town house of, 74 
 Cheshire workmen's lack of taste, 259 
 China, 190 
 
 Cholmondeley, Marquis of, 85, 86 
 Christianity and miracles, Stanley on, 
 
 171 
 Church, Dean, tribute to, 145 
 Civil List, the, and Miss Swanwick, 267 
 Classics, compared to tadpoles' tails, 
 
 112 
 education in, Gaisford on, 167 y* 
 
 Clergymen and doctors, social status of, 
 
 early nineteenth century, 6, 7, 8 
 English, Greek view of, 258 
 married, stories of, 150 
 and thought, Benan on, 150 
 Clifford, Prof., 89, mathematical views 
 
 of, 294 
 Climate v. society, 248 
 Clough, Arthur, on knowledge, 156 
 Cobbe, Miss Frances Power, wit of, 266 
 
 & note 
 Coincidences, stories of, 211-2 
 Coleridge, Lord (late), on Jenkyns and 
 
 the Blundell scholars, 177 
 Coleridge, Sir John, 70 
 Colin, Abbe, 205 note 
 Colonial Bishops, in difficulties, 95 
 Combermere, Field-Marshal Viscount, 
 
 on Waterloo, Wellington's view of 
 
 him, 278-9 
 Comparison, exercised by birds, 238-9 
 Conduct, Matthew Arnold on, 100-1 
 Confucius, 292 
 
 Conington, Professor, 135, 141, 172, 174 
 Conscience, good, as reward, 299 
 Conservatives and Gladstone, 209 
 Conversation, of Dodgson, 308 ; of 
 
 Jowett, 183 et seq. 
 Conversion, a peculiar, 92 
 Cooper, White, 82 
 Copley, J. S. (LordLyndhurst), opinions 
 
 on, 283 
 Cottenham, Earl of, old Harrovian, 102 
 Couvade, the, Spencer on, 294 
 Cox, David, 268 
 Crabbe's Tales, 240 
 Creation belief, Spencer on, 295 
 
 Cromwell, Oliver, and General Tolle- 
 mache, 15, Lady Dysart's intrigues 
 with, 18 ; an Irish appreciation of, 
 276 ; portrait of, at Helmingham, 74 
 
 Culture, Goethe on, 249 
 
 Cumnor, Lady, in Wives and Daughters, 
 original of, 87 
 
 Cynthia's Way, quoted, 164 note 
 
 Damascus ' lions ', 296 
 
 ' Dampfschiff,' story of, 250-1 
 
 Davey, Lord, on John Bright, 74 
 
 'Definitions,' game of, 244, 250 
 
 Deluge, the, Westcott on, 143 
 
 Democracy, Lord Tollemache on, 73 
 
 Denman, Lord, 283 
 
 Derby, Earl of, 'Historicus' on, 172; 
 
 town house of, 74 
 Devil, a, and the creation of Eve, 224-5 
 Devil, the, story of, 224 
 Dickens, Charles, nomenclature of, 151-2 
 Disestablishment, 303 & note 
 Disraeli, 199, 208-9 
 Dodgson, Bev. C. L. (Lewis Carroll), 174, 
 
 307, 308, 310, 311, books by, 313-15 ; 
 
 child-friends of, 313 
 Dogs, doings and names of, 96-7 ; towns 
 
 named after, 97 
 Doncaster and Llandaff, Vaughan's 
 
 ' doves ' at, 120 
 Dryden's poems cited, 217, 318 
 ' Dull dogs,' unconscious humour of, 129, 
 
 130 & note 
 Dumas, on Voltaire's bad Latin, 228-9 
 Dysart, Countess of, mother of General 
 
 Tollemache, 16, intrigues of, with 
 
 Cromwell, 18, marriages, 17, 19, life 
 
 at Ham House, 19, 20-1. 
 Dysart, Louisa, Countess of, and the 
 
 surgeon, 284 
 Dysart, Earl of, the first, 7, 16, 17 
 Dysart, Earldom of, alleged origin of, 
 
 21 ; how brought into Tollemache 
 
 family, 16, 19 
 
 Eating, stories of, 252-3 
 Edgeworth, Maria, as talker, 159 
 Edge worth, Mr., a despot, 28 
 Edwardes, Hope-, 106-7, 115, 141 
 Egerton of Tatton, Lady, and the Mol- 
 davian prince, 253 
 Elizabeth, Queen, alleged visit of, to 
 
 Helmingham, 285 & note, 318 
 Elliott, George, belief of, 196 
 Ely, Marchioness of, 234 
 Ely, Marquis of, 234 
 Engadine, the, 261 
 
 English books, known to working-class 
 foreigners, 262-3 
 Literature, neglect of at Harrow, 110 
 Public School, uses of, 100 
 English, the, abroad, past and present, 
 243-4 
 differences in, from foreigners, 247 
 
 et seq., 260 
 Goethe's generalization on, 301 
 lack of logic, Montalembert on, 197 
 
INDEX 
 
 323 
 
 English women, witty, 266 
 
 Erskine, Lord, 88, 146, Defence of Stock- 
 dale by, cited, 145 
 
 Essay Society, Oxford, names for, 135 
 
 Espremenil, J', Mirabeau's nickname 
 for, 205 
 
 Eton boy and Iron Duke's autograph, 
 273-4 
 
 Eton College, compared with Harrow, 
 98 et seq. ; head of all Public 
 Schools, 98, 99 ; a Jacobite school, 
 99; manner characteristic of, 101, 
 103-4 ; under Keate, 122-3 ; wor- 
 thies of, 102 
 
 Euhemerus, 214 
 
 Euthanasia, 188, 265, 291, 303 
 
 Evangelicalism, 30, 143 ; catchwords 
 and symbols of, 54, 55 
 
 Eve, creation of, legend of, 224-5 
 
 Evelyn, John, and Ham House, 19, 284 
 
 Evolution and Darwinism,57, 58, 142, 295 
 
 Ex-Anglian life, 242 et seq. 
 
 Falkland, Viscount, picture of, 42 
 
 Father and Son, author's parallel ex- 
 perience, 52-3 
 
 Ferney, 316, visits to, 228 
 
 Motion of author's youth, 48 
 
 Finch, Mr., 86, 88, 121 
 
 Fishing, schoolboy, 126-9 
 
 Fitzherbert, Mrs., 222 
 
 Foolometer, coiner of word, 277 
 
 Fools, T. E. Brown on, 130 
 
 Forbes, John, of Ham, reminiscences of, 
 214 etseq. 
 
 Forgiven and forgiver, sayings on, 
 217-18 
 
 Fortune, relative, various views, 256-8 
 
 Franklin, Benjamin, and the widow, 
 232-3 
 
 Frederick the Great, Mirabeau's nick- 
 name for, 205 & note. 
 
 Free Trade, and discovery of gold, 34-5 
 
 Freeman, Professor, 304 et seq., 156, 305, 
 compared with Lord Houghton, 
 299 et seq. 
 
 French navy of the Revolution, 270 
 
 French Eevolution, 107, 247, 270 
 
 Frere, Sir H. Bartle E., 210 
 
 Froude, J. A., on toleration, 64 
 
 Gaisford, Dean, on classical education, 
 
 167 
 Galapagos Islands, a parallel to, 181 
 Galton, Mrs. Francis, 261 
 General's cow, the, story of, 281 
 George IV, 220 ; and Colonel Lennox, 
 
 281-2 ; and the Pavilion, 234 ; satire 
 
 on, by Byron, 221-2, kinder views, 
 
 222 
 German, English, French, and Italian 
 
 sayings, 256 
 Ghosts, Owen's story on, 212-14 ; some 
 
 believers in, 79, 83-4 
 Gifford, Lady, 33 
 Gladstone, Bt. Hon. W. E., 74, 265; 
 
 anecdotes of, 200 ; charaoter and 
 
 opinions of, Westcott on, 144-5; 
 eloquence of, 203 ; freedom from 
 envy, instance of, 204 ; genius of, 
 Jowett on, 200-1 ; a Hawarden view 
 of, 209-10 ; lacking in humour, 205 ; 
 metaphors of, 201 ; and Miss 
 Swanwick, story of, 267 ; as 
 ' modern Pericles ', 206-8 ; phrases 
 of, still remembered, 201 ; rhetorical 
 Solecism by, 162 ; theological views 
 of, 207 ; visit from, to author at 
 Oxford, 205 ; as writer, 144-5, 203 ; 
 on English Public School System, 
 100 ; on the first Lord Tollemache, 
 63 ; on Home Bule, 200 ; on Joshua, 
 and General Buller, 210 
 Gladstone, W. H, 103, 304 
 Goderich, Lord, old Harrovian, 102 
 Goethe, cited, 24, 26, 75, 226, 244, 249, 
 256, 301, on Wellington, 272 ; Heine's 
 visit to, 291 
 Gooch, Colonel, 214-15 
 Good breeding, 69 et seq. 
 1 Good manners,' 100-1 
 Goodall, Canon, 264 note 
 Goschen, Viscount (the late), 277 
 Goulburn, Dean, sermons of, 52 
 Granville, Earl of (1762), dying words 
 
 of, 24-5 
 Greek, the, of the New Testament, 
 
 Houghton on, 300 
 Greek scholars' courtship, 258 
 Green, T. H., Prolegomena by, 160 ; story 
 
 of, 181-2 
 Greg, W. E., literary model of, 173 
 Grenville, George, harangues of, 92 
 Greville, Charles, 209, 221, 228 
 Greville, Henry, on Conservative coquet- 
 
 tings with Gladstone, 209 
 Grote, Mrs., 81 
 Gurney, Edmund, 85 
 
 H-less folk, and Lord Tollemache, 43, 
 
 73 
 Halford, Sir Henry, and the finding of 
 
 Charles I's head, 221 
 Ham House, historical associations of, 
 
 19, 283-4 
 Hamilton, Duke of, tomb of, 85 
 Hamilton, Lady (Emma), 235 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 235 
 Harcourt, Admiral F. Vernon, 93 
 Harcourt, Edward, 231 
 Harcourt family, of Nuneham, and 
 
 Louis XIVs heart, 230-1 
 Harcourt, Sir William (' Historicus '), 
 
 172, 230, 231 
 Hare, Augustus, 6, 80, 86 
 Hara-kiri, and euthanasia, Houghton 
 
 on, 303 
 ' Harris, Mrs.,' story about, 151 
 Harrow School, catchwords at, 133 ; 
 
 jottings about, 98 et seq. ; manners 
 
 and characteristics of, 103-4,105,123; 
 
 monitors, 115, 127 ; moral training 
 
 at, under Vaughan, 112 ; political 
 
 colour of, 99, 106-7 ; source of 
 
324 
 
 INDEX 
 
 scholars at, 102, 104-5 ; teaching at 
 
 in the '50's, 105 et seq. ; Vaughan- 
 
 lovers and the reverse at, and after, 
 
 120, 124 ; worthies of, 100, 102 
 Harrowby, Earl of, on Fox and Pitt, 
 
 209 
 Hastings, Warren, and Burke, 290 
 Hayward, Abraham, on Lady Aid- 
 borough's wit, 236 
 Hearts of famous men, 229, 230-1 
 Heber, Bishop, 288 
 Heine, Heinrich, on his interview with 
 
 Goethe, 296 > 
 
 Helmingham Church, 8, Tollemaehe^ 
 
 monuments in, 9 
 Helmingham Hall, 2 ; alleged visit to, 
 
 of Queen Elizabeth, 285 & note, 318; 
 
 library treasures, 6 ; twin moats of, 
 
 3-5,7 
 Helmingham Park, deer in, 5 ; oaks of; 
 
 5,318 
 Helvetius, Mme., and Benjamin 
 
 Franklin, 232-3 
 Henry Till on choice of wives, 29 ; 
 
 disinterment of, 220-1 
 Herbert, Edward, charm and fate of, 
 
 101-2 & note. 
 Herod, the foxhound, 96 
 High Church movement, leaders of, 183 
 High and Low Church, stories of, 94 
 ' Higher criticism,' the, 304-6 
 Historical prediction, Spencer on, 292 
 ' Historicus,' see Harcourt, Sir W. V. 
 History, little taught at Harrow, 109- 
 
 10 
 Holland, Lecky on, 316 
 Holland House, Napoleon's bust at, 
 
 169-70 
 Holland, Lady, words disliked by, 69 
 Holland, Lord, Napoleonic sympathies 
 
 of, 170-1 
 Holloway, Admiral, gift from, to Nelson, 
 
 275 
 Holloway College, 293 
 Home Bule, Gladstone on, 200 
 Hook, Theodore, old Harrovian, 102 
 Hope, Mr. Beresford, 234 
 Hope-Edwardes, see Edwardes, Hope- 
 Horace, cited, 256, 319 
 Horse-racing, Lewis Carroll's 'system' 
 
 for, 311 
 Horse-stories, 93-4 
 
 Horsley Bath, Peckforton Castle, 287-8 
 Hort, Dr., 144 
 Hotham, Lord, on Goschen's maiden 
 
 speech, 277 
 Houghton, Lord (Monckton Milnes), 
 
 302 ; Carlyle's saying on and name 
 
 for, 80; contrasted with Freeman, 
 
 299 et seq. ; on his approaching 
 
 death, 159 
 Houghton, Norfolk, Walpoles buried at, 
 
 86 
 How, Bishop Walsham, stories by, 51, 94 
 ' Howlers,' 134-5 
 Hughes, ' Tom,' Broad Church views of, 
 
 77 
 
 Hugo, Victor, on Napoleon's fall, 274 
 Human nature as Book, Goethe on, 256 
 Hume, Joseph, and Palmerston, 317 
 Hundred Days, the, 235-6 
 Huntingdon, Countess of, sect founded 
 
 by, 61 
 Huxley, Prof., recollections of, 289 
 Hyder Ali, as benefactor?, 295 
 
 Idleness, Johnson on, 249 
 
 Ignorance, 111, 194 
 
 Immortality, Jowett's views on, 196 
 
 Infection, delusion as to, 256-8 
 
 Insolence ' high-bred ', 237 
 
 Inspiration, verbal, 90-1 
 
 Irish carman on Irish disturbances, 276 
 
 Jeffrey, Lord, and Sydney Smith, 
 
 Macaulay on, 263 
 Jelf, Dr., of King's College, 164 
 Jelf, Eev. W. E., 56, 164 et seq., 288 ; on 
 
 art of pleasing, 71 
 Jenkyns, Dr., Master of Balliol, 175, 
 
 176-7 
 Jenkyns, Sir Henry, 158, 197 
 Jex- Blake, see Blake, Jex- 
 Job's daughters, 96 
 Jonah, rationalized version of, 214 
 Jones, Sir William, old Harrovian, 102 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, contrast between, 
 
 and Spenser, 293 ; definition by, of 
 
 fishing-rod, 129 & note ; French view 
 
 of, 181 ; on Idleness, 249 ; on ' What 
 
 is there in Wales?' 165 
 Joseph, the patriarch, a ' howler ' on, 
 
 134 
 Josephus, Kenan on, 306 
 Joshua and Buller, Gladstone on, 210 
 Jowett, Prof. B., Master of Balliol, cited, 
 
 101, 144, 155 & note, 168, 173, 206 ; 
 
 reminiscences of, 121, 153 et seq. ; 
 
 pvpillary attraction of, 181, 183, 
 
 186-7; theological attitude and 
 
 works, 182, 189 et seq., 192 ; vocal 
 
 mannerisms, 176, 187 
 Jowett, Memoir of, by the author, 177-8 
 Judgement Day, some anticipations, 86 
 
 Kakotranabia, 266 
 
 Keate, Dr., head master of Eton, 122-3 
 Keble, Kev. John, intolerance of, 64 
 Kinglake, A., cited, 202, 257, 296 
 King's Evil, cured by Charles II, 317 
 Knowledge, 156, 194, 211 
 
 Lafayette, Marquis de, Mirabeau's nick- 
 name for, 205 
 
 Lake, Dean, 106, 110 
 
 Latin races, artistic appreciation of, 259 
 verses, stories of, 121-3 
 
 Lauderdale, Duke of, and Lady Dysart, 
 17, 18, their marriage and home, 
 19, 20 ; satirical lines on, 284 
 
 Law, Bishop, nepotism of, 167 
 
 Lead, Kindly Light, by Cardinal Newman, 
 264 
 
 Lecky, Mr., 316-17, on Boswells, 319 
 
INDEX 
 
 325 
 
 Lee, Lancelot, 158 
 Leisure, stories anent, 248-9 
 Lennox, Colonel, 281-2 
 Leverrier and the ' pocket-planet ', 231-2 
 Lewes, G. H., Mill on, 101 
 Liberals, inconsistency of, 75 
 Life, enjoyment of, 291 
 origin of, Tyndall and Spencer on, 
 
 295 
 Pattison and Benan on, 179 
 riddle of, attitude to, of Houghton, 
 
 301, of Tyndall, and of Huxley, 289 
 Lightfoot, Bishop, 144 
 Likes and unlikes, Goethe on, 75, 244 
 Linguistic confusions, 251 et seq 
 Little Pilgrim, The, by Mrs. Oliphant, 
 
 196 
 Lloyd, Bishop of Oxford, 26 
 Lockhart, on Boswellianism, 319 
 Logic upside down, stories of, 173-5 
 London Society, Oliphant on, 88 
 Louis XIV, fate of his heart, 230 
 Louis Philippe, and Lady Aldborough, 
 
 30-1 
 Low, Sir Hudson, 171 
 Lowe, Bobert (Viscount Sherbrooke), wit 
 
 of, 205 
 Loyola, Ignatius, 63 
 Lucretius on relative Fortune, 257 
 ' Lucy,' by Wordsworth, 260 
 Luria, Browning's least-liked character, 
 
 265 
 Luttrell, Mr., wit of, 236 
 Lying, stories about, 116-17 <£■ note, 123 
 Lytton, 2nd Earl, old Harrovian, 107 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, literary style of, 
 Conington on, 172, Westcott on, 
 142 ; on favours and forgiveness, 
 217-18 note ; on General Tollemache, 
 12 ; on Gladstone, 203 ; on Jeffery 
 and Sydney Smith, 263; on Mira- 
 beau's nicknames, 205 ; on virtues, 
 114 ; on Voltaire, 229 
 Mackarness, Bishop, 135 
 Malades imaginaires, 245-6 
 Malebranche, 306 
 
 Manning, Cardinal, old Harrovian, 102 
 Hansel, Dean, as wit, 149, 152-4 
 Maori chief, and his wives, 296-7 
 Marathon, murder of Edward Herbert 
 
 at, 181-2 & note 
 Marbot, General, and Napoleon's abdi- 
 cation, 236 
 Marcella, by Mrs. H. Ward, 291 
 Marlborough, Duke of, and General 
 
 Tollemache, 12 
 Marmont, Marshal, and Lady Ald- 
 borough, 238 
 Martineau, Miss Harriet, 283 
 Mary Tudor, sobriquet of, 62 & note 
 Masters, and boys, stories anent, 136 
 
 et seq. 
 Matrimony, blunders on, 20 & note 
 Maurice, Bev. F. D., 77 
 Medical malapropisms, 16 note 
 
 Melbourne, Earl of, on journalistic sup- 
 port, 82 
 
 Merchant of Venice, story anent, 263 
 
 Merivale, the brothers, old Harrovians, 
 102 
 
 Metaphors spread before Philistines, 
 instances, 240 
 used by Gladstone, 201 
 
 Metaphysics, 160 
 
 Mill, J. S., 168, on good manners, 101 ; 
 on limited vision of the wise, 315 
 
 ' Mills,' abolished by Vaughan, 123 
 
 Milman, Dean, 176 
 
 Milnes, Monckton, see Houghton, Lord 
 
 Minorities, epigrams on, 159 
 
 Mirabeau's nicknames for the great, 205 
 
 Miracles (see also King's Evil), Stanley 
 on, 171 
 
 Miser's cheque, the, 87 
 
 Mivart, Prof., views of, on Biblical criti- 
 cism, Freeman and M. Arnold on, 
 305, Fitzjames Stephen on, 192-3 
 
 Molesworth, Lady, 234 
 
 Montalembert, on English lack of logic, 
 197 
 
 Morley, Viscount, 81, Life of Gladstone 
 by, 199 
 
 Moses, Voltaire on, 316 
 
 Mount Temple, Lady (nie Tollemache), 
 49, beauty and characteristics of, 
 77-80, literary parallel to, 79 
 
 Mount Temple, Lord, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 
 85, 88 ; likeness of, to Palmerston, 82 
 
 Muller, Ottfried, fate of, 102 note 
 
 Muller, Prof. Max, 158, on unsound 
 learning, 247 
 
 Murray, Dr., words corned by author 
 sanctioned by, 297 
 
 Murray, Sir Bobert, 18 
 
 Murchison, Mrs., 238 
 
 Myers, Frederick, 85 
 
 Naples, King of, dinners of, 216 
 Napoleon I as benefactor ? 295 ; bust of, 
 
 Holland House, Stanley and, 169 ; 
 
 fall of, 171, 236, cause of, Hugo on, 
 
 274 ; seen by Lord Tollemache, 275 
 Napoleon III, Freeman on, 304, Jowett 
 
 on, 206 
 Nature and Grace, by Ward, Jowett on, 
 
 192 
 Nelson, Admiral Viscount, Holloway's 
 
 gift to, 275 ; and Lady Hamilton, 
 
 235 
 Nepotism, episcopal, 167 
 New Lucian, The, by H. D. Traill, on 
 
 Gladstone, 201 
 Newdigate, Mr., 234 
 Newman, Francis, 261, and his brother, 
 
 264 ; advocate of euthanasia, 265 
 Newman, John Henry (Cardinal), High 
 
 Church leader, 114, 183; relations 
 
 of, with his brother, 264, relative 
 
 literary status of, ib. 
 NichoU, Prof., on Public Schools, 103 
 Norman, George, economist, 35, 36 
 
326 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Oak, the, Dryden on, 318 
 Oaks at Helmingham, 5, 318 
 Oldworldometers, 70 
 01iphant,Laurence,on London Society ,88 
 Opposites, harmony of, 75, 244 
 Orient, V, ship, coffin made from, for 
 
 Nelson, 275 
 Orosius' Geography, at Helmingham, 6 
 Osborne, Bernal, 277 
 Other-worldliness, 89 
 Owen, Sir Eichard, 211 ; ghost story 
 
 told by, 212-4 
 Oxford, ' blokes ' at, 133-4 ; jottings on, 
 
 147 est seq. 
 Oxford and her Colleges, by Goldwin 
 
 Smith, 175 
 Oxford and Cambridge types, 181-3 
 Oxford and Cambridge Universities, in 
 
 Westcott's estimation, 140 
 
 Palmerston, Viscount, 76, 82, 83, 277, 
 317 ; old Harrovian, 102 
 
 Pahnerston, Viscountess, on Monckton 
 Milnes, 300 
 
 Paradise, 232-3 
 
 Parish clerk, as Malaprop, 95 
 
 Parker, J., publisher, 304 
 
 Parnell, Mr., 269 
 
 Parr, old Harrovian, 102 
 
 Patten, Colonel Wilson (Lord Winmar- 
 leigh), 59 
 
 Pattison, Eev. Mark, Sector of Lincoln 
 College, 163, 168-9, 184, 225; an 
 amende, 179 ; cited, 107, 134, 179, 211 ; 
 influence of, 194-5 
 
 Paulus, 214 
 
 Pavilion, the, at Brighton, 234 
 
 Pears, Eev. A. S., 162 
 
 Peckforton, Castle, 286, architect, 287, 
 chapel, 61, gardens and spring, 
 287-8,?guests at, 214 
 
 Peckforton Hills, 259, 288 
 
 Peel, Sir Eobert, old Harrovian, 102 
 
 Peptomaniacs, 246 
 
 Perceval, the Prime Minister, old Harro- 
 vian, 102 ; town house of, 74 
 
 Pericles and Gladstone compared, 206-8 
 
 Persian proverb, on Knowledge and 
 Ignorance, 194 
 
 Pews, family, 70 
 
 Phayre, General, and the Gaekwar, 17 
 
 Phrases, quaint, stories of, 163-4 
 
 Pickwick at Ipswich, a parallel, 254-5 
 
 Picton and Combermere, compared, 279 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress, Tlie, 48, 49 ; a parallel, 
 314-17 
 
 Pinder, Canon, on Jowett, 180, on Patti- 
 son, 179 
 
 Pius IX, Pope, compared to Pahnerston 
 by Osborne, 277 
 
 Plague, Mahomedan view of, 257 
 
 Pleasing, art of, Jelf on, 71 
 
 Plumptre, Canon, 261 
 
 Plurality of Worlds, by Whewell, 141 
 
 Pocock, Lady, second-sight of, 279-80 
 
 Poets, Lord Tollemache on, 301 
 unmusical, Tennyson on, 265 
 
 Pontresina, adventure at, 254-5 
 
 Portia, boatman's criticism on, 263 
 
 Powell, Prof. Baden, 142 
 
 Pre-Darwinians, 142 
 
 Prigocracy, 115 
 
 Prince Eegent, see George IV 
 
 ' Privy Seal,' French rendering of, 251 
 
 Prolegomena, by Green, 160 
 
 Property, division of, 277-8 
 
 Psychical Eesearch Society, founders, 83 
 
 Public Schools, past and present use of 
 term, 98 
 system of, Gladstone's view of, 100 
 the three great, differences between 
 alumni of, Lake on, 106 
 
 Pulpit stories, 52, 167, 318 
 
 Pupils, ' scoring ' off masters, 129, 131 
 
 Purgatory, and fisticuffs, 242 
 
 Puritanism denned, 114 ; legacies of, 113 
 
 Pusey, Dr., 183 
 
 Quarles, Jacob, verse by, 220 
 Queens, rule by, 76 
 Quintilian, on Style, 211 
 Quintus Curtius, 154 
 
 Eadcliffe, Dr., 245 
 
 Eangoon, taking of, 278 
 
 Eay and others, on darkening knowledge 
 
 with words, 211 
 Recollections of Pattison, by the author, 
 
 179 
 Record, The, 93 
 
 Red Pottage, by Mary Cholmondeley, 266 
 Eeform Bill, the first, 262 
 ' Eeign of Terror,' A merican on, 247 
 Eeligious views, modification of since 
 
 the '60s, 54 
 Eenan, Ernest, cited, 150, 179, 192, 196, 
 
 306 
 Eeynolds, Eev. S. H., 223-4, 298-9 
 Eodney, Admiral, old Harrovian, 102 
 Eogers, Samuel, ' tall ' story by, 216 
 Eogers, Thorold, on American advertise- 
 ments, 240 
 Eogers, Eev. W., 319 
 Eoutinists, value of, 279 
 Eugby School (see also Arnold, Dr.), 113 
 
 et seq. ; Goulburn's sermon at, 52 
 Euskin on Lady Mount Temple, 78; 
 
 tastes of, shared by author, 48 
 Eussell, G. W. E., 131, 167 
 Eussell, Lord John, 77 
 Bussell's Modern Europe, 110 
 Eyle, Eev. J. C. (Bishop of Liverpool), 
 
 7, 90, 91 
 
 St. Edmund's Oak, 5 
 
 St. John's College, and 'John's', 182 
 
 St. James Sq., No. 10, 74 
 
 St. Peter, and Sicilian storms, 226-8 
 
 Sabbatarianism, 30, 48-9, 316 
 
 Sabina, of the Bernina Hospice, 255 
 
 Salic Law, 135 
 
 Salvin, 287 
 
 Satan, an innocent sympathizer, 224 
 
 Savage intellects, Huxley on, 289 
 
INDEX 
 
 W l-i 
 
 Scliool for Scandal, The, joke on, 215 
 
 Soott, E., Master of Balliol, on trans- 
 lations, 131 
 
 Seott, Sir Walter, George IV. 's admira- 
 tion for, 222 
 
 ' Sea wants figs,' story of, 226 
 
 Second-sight, 279-80 
 
 Selwyn, Bishop, and Maori ohief, 296 
 
 Sentimental Journey by Sterne, parallel 
 to, 254 
 
 Sepulchral amenities, 86 
 
 Sermons, 92, 128, by Gaisford, 167, Goul- 
 burn, 52, Eyle, 90, Stanley, 171, and 
 Vaughan, 125-6 ; some odd texts 
 for, 318 
 
 Servia and Bulgaria, in Kinglake's day, 
 202 
 
 Seymour, Jane, coffin of, 221 
 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of (the good), 18, old 
 Harrovian, 102 
 
 Sheep, the goats, and Alpacas, Stephen 
 on, 291 
 
 Sheridan, Thomas, dramatist, old Har- 
 rovian, 102 
 
 Ships that pass in the Night, by Beatrice 
 Harraden, cited, 245 
 
 Shuckburgh, Sir G., wife's epitaph, 44 
 
 Sicilian coast, storms on, 226-8 
 
 Slang, 69, 70, 182 
 
 Smith, as surname, 155 
 
 Smith, Prof. Goldwin, on Balliol and 
 Oriel, and their Masters, 175 ; on 
 effect of imagination, 245 ; on 
 George IV, 222 
 
 Smith, Henry, 154-7 
 
 Smith, Canon Sydney, compared to 
 Jeffrey, by Macaulay, 263 ; wit of, 
 236 ; words, coined by, and ascribed 
 to, 'foolometer,' 277, 'squarson,' 
 174; cited, 63, 70, 71 note, 95, 149, 
 156 note, 263, 302 
 
 Snails, map of, 266 
 
 Social sense, the, 100-1 
 shibboleths of noted people, 69-71 
 status of clergy and doctors early 
 19th century, 6, 7, 8 
 
 Solomon and women, Eenan on, 218 
 
 ' Souling ' in Cheshire, 8 
 
 Spalding on identity in recollection, 294 
 
 Sparkes, Bishop of Ely, nepotist, 167 
 
 Speeches of great men, 202, of Glad- 
 stone, 203 
 
 Spencer, Herbert, 292 et seq. 
 
 Spiritualism, Westcott on, 84 
 
 Spontaneous generation, Tyndall on, 
 295 
 
 ' Squarson,' and ' Squishop ', 174-5 
 
 Stanley, Dean of Westminster, anec- 
 dotes and views of, 69, 81, 155, 168 
 etseq., 171, 264 
 
 Stanley, Lady, of Alderley, 292 
 
 Stanley, Mrs., 119. 
 
 Stephen, Sir J. Eitzjames, 192, 279, 290 
 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, cited, 189, 204 
 
 Stradbroke, late Earl of, on Wellington, 
 and Waterloo, 274 
 
 Stratford, Lady Emily, 27-9 
 
 A oil,,- 
 
 327 
 
 Stuart, Lady Louisa, on Tollemache 
 
 characteristics, 22 
 Style, literary, 141, 172, 211, 265 
 Swanwick, Miss Anna, 261 et seq. 
 Switzerland, mixture of classes in, 255 ; 
 
 special character of, 260 ^ 
 
 Sykes, Sir Tatton, 70 J i-O c 
 
 Sylvester, Prof., 150-1 ; 154 
 Symonds, J. A,, 86, 135-6 ; oldHarrovian, 
 
 102 
 
 Taisle-veote, land of, 242 et seq. 
 
 Table-Talk, by Coleridge, 261 
 
 Taine, on Johnson, 181 
 
 Talmash, General, see Tollemache 
 
 Taylor, Canon Isaac, 51, on the alphabet, 
 297 ; on towns named after dogs, 97 
 
 Taylor, Colonel, on arm cut off by dead 
 man, 222 
 
 Taylor, Eev , 92 
 
 Temple, Archbishop, at Oxford, stories 
 of, 175 et seq. 
 
 Tennyson, Lord, 241 ; on poets and 
 poetry, 265 
 
 Thomson, Archbishop, on Dr. Vaughan, 
 121 
 
 Toleration, lapses from, 64 
 
 Tollemache, Admiral, 23, 25-7, 275 
 
 Tollemache family, ancestry, 1 ; ety- 
 mology of name, 1, 2 & note ; 
 favourite names in, 2 ; monuments 
 in Helmingham Church, 9 ; Suffolk 
 family seats, see Bentley, & Hel- 
 mingham 
 
 Tollemache, General, 11 ; fate of, 12, 23. 
 24 ; odd vanity of, 15 ; remarkable 
 mother of, 16 
 
 Tollemache, Hon. Lionel A. (author), 
 advocacy of euthanasia by, 265 ; 
 eyesight of, effect of, on tempera- 
 ment, 45, 53, 54, and on education, 
 108 & note, 109 ; marriage of, odd 
 coincidence, 241 ; political views of, 
 37 ; religious training of, 45 et seq. ; 
 religious views of, as influenced by 
 Jowett, 198 ; unmusicalness of, 109 ; 
 words coined by, sanctioned by 
 Dr. Murray, 297 ; youthful memories 
 of, 5, 7, 8 
 
 Tollemache, Hon. Mrs. Lionel, 242, 253 
 
 Tollemache, Lady Elizabeth, 27, 39 
 
 Tollemache, Lord (the first), 37, 43 ; anec- 
 dotes told by, 271 et seq, ; anecdotes 
 told of, 38 et seq. , 275 ; characteristics, 
 11, 22-3, 25-6, 34-8, 42-3, 56, 
 57, 65-7, 70 ; epigram by, 85-6 ; as 
 father and religious teacher, 46 
 et seq. ; fictitional parallels to, 46-7 ; 
 parliamentary life of, 57 ; political 
 views and friendships of, 34-7, 70, 
 73, 74, 76 ; social shibboleths of, 69 ; 
 views of, theological and other, 39, 
 42, 45, 57, 60, 63, 107, 301 ; old age 
 and death of, 68, 318 
 
 Tollemache, Mrs. (ne'e Best), religious 
 views of, 30, 47 
 
328 
 
 l-L 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Tollemache, Sir Lionel, and his wife, 17 ; 
 
 visit to (alleged) of Queen Elizabeth, 
 
 285 & note, 318 
 Tomatoes v. martyrs, 251-2 
 Tourist ignorance, 247 
 Traill, H. D., 130, 201 
 Trollope, Anthony, old Harrovian, 102 
 Trollope, Sir John, monument of, 10 
 Tyndall, Prof., 289, 295 
 
 Vaughan, Dr. C. J., characteristics and 
 stories of, 110 et seq., 118, 120, 124, 
 125-6, 131-3; as head master at 
 Harrow, 105, 106, 109, 116 et seq. ; 
 on Stanley's parties, 81 
 
 "Vaughan, Sir Robert, social domestic 
 despotism of, 165-6 
 
 Verdant Green, English learnt from, 263 
 
 Vestiges of Creation, 142 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, gondolier's apprecia- 
 tion of, 263 
 
 Viceroy, a, story of, 252 
 
 Victoria, Queen, tribute to, 76 & note 
 
 Villiers, Charles, story by, 277 
 
 Vivisection, 88 note, odd defence of, 88 
 
 Voltaire, 316, at Eerney, church built 
 by, 228, heart preserved at, 229 ; 
 Zadig by, 289 
 
 Voting in Parliament, 234 
 
 Walks, Jelfs stories of, 165-6 
 
 Wall, Prof., reminiscences of, 147 etseq. 
 
 Walpole, Horace, and Ham House, 19, 
 
 284 ; tomb of, 86 
 Walpole, Sir Robert, tomb of, 86 
 Walrus and the Carpenter, The, 313-14 
 Walter, Mr., maiden speech by, 276 
 'Water of life,' in French sermon, 251 
 Waterpark, Lady, and her daughters, 166 
 Waterloo, battle of, 236; Wellington 
 
 on, 275 
 Wellesley, Lord Charles, stories told by, 
 
 of his father, 271 et seq. 
 Wellington, Duchess of, doggerel by, 235 
 Wellington, Duke of, stories of, by his 
 
 son, 271 etseq., others, 215-16, 237, 
 
 witty lines on, 235 ; on the battle of 
 Waterloo, 275 
 Westcott, Bishop, 84, 139-45 
 Westminster Abbey, and the heart of 
 
 Louis XIV, 230 
 Westminster, Duke of (the late), 210 
 Whateley, Archbishop, 149-50 
 WheweU, Dr., Master of Trinity, 96, 141, 
 
 184, 185 
 Whipping-boys, 21 
 Whitefield, story of, 163 
 Whitman, Walt, Tennyson on, 265 
 Wholly-holies, 93 
 Wives, stories of, 41 & note, 43-4, 253-4, 
 
 296, 298 
 Wives and Daughters, by Mrs. Gaskell, 
 
 original of ' Lady Cumnor ' in, 86 
 Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, 174, as 
 
 'Squishop,' 175 
 Williams, Eisher, book by, on Harrow, 
 
 98 
 Williams, Prof. Monier, 158 
 Willis, Mrs., 266 
 Wiseman, Cardinal, and Lord Tolle- 
 
 mache, 59 
 Wit, the 'perfume of, 159; and sound 
 
 judgement, 148, 149 
 Women, age of, 31-3 
 attitude to of John Eorbes, 218 
 Basque proverb on, 222 
 definition of, 250 
 disparaging verses on, 219 
 old, three classes of, 261 
 wealthy, drawbacks to, 18 
 witty, stories of, 236-7 & note 
 Words, coined by author, sanctioned by 
 Murray, 297 
 disliked by noted people, 69-70 
 peculiar to Harrow, Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, 182, and Public Schools, 109 
 Worldly-holies, in society, 88 
 Writers to the Signet, 317 
 
 York, H.R.H. the Duke of, duel of with 
 
 Colonel Lennox, 281 
 Young, Lord, on ' fire insurance ', 88 
 Young, Brigham, son of, 268 
 
 THE END 
 
 Oxford : Horace Hart, Printer to the University 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 TALKS WITH 
 MR. GLADSTONE. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 With his latest Photograph. i2mo., 235 pages, buckram. Price 6s. 
 Fourth Edition, containing Dedication to Mrs. Drew, and Appendix. 
 
 'The best [records of Mr. Gladstone's Table Talk] we have is 
 Mr. Tollemache's journal of their conversations in successive years 
 at Biarritz.' — Times. 
 
 ' Sir Edward Hamilton's excellent monograph in a small degree, 
 and Mr. Tollemache's " Talks with Mr. Gladstone " in a very much 
 greater degree, remove themselves from the rank of common 
 eulogies.' — Morning Post. 
 
 ' Even in the matter of talking, if Gladstone is to look for immor- 
 tality, the votes sacer to whom he must go is far less Mr. Morley than 
 Mr. Lionel Tollemache, who cannot have spent as many minutes in 
 his company as Mr. Morley spent hours. But in " Talks with 
 Mr._ Gladstone" one sees and hears the talker; here [in Mr. Morley's 
 "Life"] we read him, and it is quite another thing.' — Guardian, 
 October 21, 1903. 
 
 ' The " Book of the Day " is unquestionably the Hon. Lionel 
 Tollemache's " Talks with Mr. Gladstone." . . . How well Mr. 
 Tollemache can write many of us know already, and it would seem 
 from these fascinating random jottings that he can talk as well as 
 he can write.' — St. James's Gazette. 
 
 ' That Mr. Tollemache is an accomplished writer of reminiscences 
 is known to all Mr. Gladstone's admirers.' — Athenaum. 
 
 ' One of the most interesting books of reminiscences I have ever 
 read.' — Queen. 
 
 ' Mr. Lionel Tollemache, le Boswell de nos jours, has published his 
 gossipy, slightly indiscreet, but very lively " Talks with Mr. Glad- 
 stone." ' — Standard. 
 
 ' Mr. Lionel Tollemache is the Boswell of our age. His mono- 
 graph on Mr. Gladstone has a cachet of its own, which distinguishes 
 it from the mass of ephemeral literature.' — Journal of Education. 
 
 London : EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 Maddox Street, W. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 STONES OF STUMBLING. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 Fifth Edition. Demy Svo., 262 pages. Cloth elegant, gilt top, 3^. 6d. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 THE CURE FOR INCURABLES — THE FEAR OF DEATH FEARLESS 
 
 DEATHS — DIVINE ECONOMY OF TRUTH — APPENDICES : REC-OTrECTIONS 
 
 OF" MARK PATTISON — MR. ROMANES'S CATECHISM NEO-CHRISTIANITY 
 
 AND NEO-CATHOLICISM : A SEQUEL INDEX TO CLASSICAL AND OTHER 
 
 QUOTATIONS, WITH ENGLISH RENDERINGS. 
 
 ' It will not be surprising to any clear-minded reader of this and 
 its companion essays, that in Pattison's final letter to his friend 
 from Oxford, he should have finished it with the following words : 
 " For my part I cannot expect ever to see you again, and I must 
 content myself with here recording my experience that your con- 
 versation was to me more stimulating than that of any man I ever 
 met." These essays must have a striking resemblance to that con- 
 versation.' — Literary World. 
 
 ' Since the death of Hay ward, we know no English litterateur who 
 has, in the same degree as Mr. Tollemache, the happy knack of 
 recollecting or collecting the characteristic sayings and doings of a 
 distinguished man, and piecing them together in a finished mosaic' 
 — Daily Chronicle. 
 
 ' Mr. Tollemache is one of the wisest as well as most charming 
 writers left to us.' — Liverpool Daily Post. 
 
 ' Essayists like Mr. Tollemache have done their tale of work, and 
 deserve their place amongst Harrow worthies.' — Spectator. 
 
 ' The recollections of personal friends are so vividly realistic that 
 the reader feels himself drawn into the inner privileged circle of 
 these lofty congenial spirits, and shares familiarly their exalted 
 fellowship and delightful interchange of thought and feeling.' — 
 Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 RECOLLECTIONS OF PATTISON, one of the Appendices 
 to " Stones of Stumbling," is also published separately, demy 
 8vo., cloth, price is. 
 
 London : WILLIAM RICE, 3, Broadway. Lddgate Hill, E.C. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 SAFE STUDIES. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 With Photogravure Portraits. Eighth Edition. Cloth elegant, gilt top, 
 
 is. 6d. 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 HISTORICAL PREDICTION — SIR G. C. LEWIS AND LONGEVITY 
 
 LITERARY EGOTISM CHARLES AUSTIN — RECOLLECTIONS OF MR. GROTE 
 
 AND MR. BABBAGE— MR. TENNYSON'S SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY PHYSICAL 
 
 AND MORAL COURAGE THE UPPER ENGADINE — NOTES AND RECOL- 
 LECTIONS OF SIR CHARLES WHEATSTONE, DEAN STANLEY, AND CANON 
 
 KINGSLEY THE EPICURIST's LAMENT — POEMS BY B. L. T. INDEX TO 
 
 CLASSICAL AND OTHER QUOTATIONS, WITH ENGLISH RENDERINGS. 
 
 ' The " Safe Studies " are those to which it is impossible for any 
 human creature to raise the smallest objection on any ground what- 
 ever, and they are about four times as long as the " Stones of 
 Stumbling." These stumbling-blocks may possibly at some period 
 or other have given scandal to a part of the population by no means 
 likely to read them ; but in these days the public has swallowed so 
 many camels that we do not think Mr. Tollemache's gnats would 
 even make any considerable portion of them cough. . . . We pro- 
 pose to make some observations on the most important of these 
 charming essays. They are all singularly well worth reading, and 
 may be described as the works of a most ingenious, accomplished, 
 and cultivated man of leisure, who writes in order to fix recollections 
 and systematize speculations which interest him, and not for the 
 purpose of advocating particular views in the spirit of a partisan or 
 propagandist. . . . The only likelihood of Charles Austin being 
 remembered at all lies in the chance of the survival of the touching 
 and striking account given of him by his accomplished, grateful, 
 and most appreciative pupil.' — The late Sir James Fitzjames 
 Stephen, in St. James's Gazette. 
 
 ' Mr. Tollemache is a born raconteur.' — Evening Standard. 
 
 ' Mr. Lionel Tollemache, le Boswell de nos jours.' — Standard. 
 
 London : WILLIAM RICE, 3, Broadway, Lddgate Hill, E.C. 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT, 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL. 
 
 H personal /IDemoir. 
 
 BY THE 
 
 HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE. 
 
 Fifth Edition. With Portrait. Crown 8vo„ cloth. Price y. 6d. 
 
 ' One of the most stimulating writers of the day, especially in the 
 sketch-portraits of the people who have influenced him. His essay 
 on Mark Pattison is not likely to be forgotten by any other Oxford 
 man, or, indeed, by any other student of modern letters who has 
 chanced to read it, and it is safe to foretell that the same will be the 
 case with the " personal memoir " in which he has enshrined his 
 recollections of the late Master of Balliol.' — Times. 
 
 ' Mr. Tollemache's little volume is a collection of striking anecdotes 
 and clever reflections illustrative of Jowett's peculiar habits and 
 qualities of mind and character.' — Church Times. 
 
 < Mr. Lionel Tollemache has never produced anything before so 
 interesting or showing so much insight as his little monograph, 
 " Benjamin Jowett." It is amusing, and at the same time gives the 
 reader a better idea of Jowett than anything that has hitherto been 
 written about him by his friends.' — Athenaum. 
 
 ' Rather Boswellian and extremely amusing.' — Speaker. 
 
 ' Displays most fully that combination of Boswellian anecdote, 
 acute criticism, and allusiveness tempered by scrupulous economy 
 of style, which has already marked Mr. Tollemache's former essays 
 with a manner unique among present-day writers.' — St. James's 
 
 Gazette. 
 
 ' A remarkable picture of a remarkable man.' — Manchester Guardian. 
 
 London : EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 Maddox Street, W.