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 Nuts and chestnuts 
 
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NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
NUTS 
 AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 THE HON. LIONEL A. TOLLEMACHE 
 
 ACTHOB OF 
 "BENJAMIN JOWETT," "OLD AND ODD MEMOBTES," ETO. ETO 
 
 LONDON 
 EDWARD ARNOLD 
 
 1911 
 
 I V i 
 
 {AU rights reserved) 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The present work, though independent of my 
 previous writings, is in a sense a continuation 
 and, as it were, a second course {mensa secunda) 
 of my Old and Odd Memories. The Appendix 
 on the last page refers to passages in the earlier 
 volume, which illustrate and are illustrated by 
 what is here recorded. Many parts of this book, 
 including my grandfather's unconventional exploit, 
 the Reminiscences of Sir Francis Galton and the 
 Japanese finale, now see the light for the first 
 time. With respect to the remainder, my thanks 
 are due to the proprietors of the Nation and of 
 other periodicals, by whose permission I republish, 
 generally with alterations and additions, what has 
 appeared in their columns. 
 
 L. A. T. 
 
 Athen^0m Club. 
 
" Knowledge is a thousand times more highly to he 
 prized, when it is not of the sort that is to be gathered 
 from books, but only from the lips of those who have acted 
 a part in the world." — Eothen. 
 
NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 " What are chestnuts to the few are nuts to the many.'' 
 
 — L. A. T. 
 
 It was originally intended to insert in Old and 
 Odd Memories^ the following anecdote about my 
 grandfather, Admiral Tollemache. The intention 
 was given up out of regard to the feelings of 
 his last surviving son, who was devoted to his 
 memory. But my uncle has now, in the (nona- 
 genarian) fullness of years, been gathered to his 
 fathers. The Admiral died in 1837 ; and there is 
 no living member of his family who remembers 
 him. Being thus no longer tongue-tied or pen- 
 tied, I will here relate the incident in its original 
 form. But I may add that anecdotes which have 
 since reached me about my not too pacific grand- 
 father make for the credibility of that amazing 
 incident. It is true that he stood — of course 
 unsuccessfully — for a division of Conservative 
 Cheshire as a Radical. According to my father, he 
 defended this vagary of his by saying that doubt- 
 less, in spite of Reform Bills, milkmaids would go 
 on singing as they carried their pails. But his 
 real motive was known to be the wish for the ex- 
 
 * See Preface and Appendix. 
 
2 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 citement of an election and the love of opposition 
 to his squirearchical neighbours. In reality, his 
 Toryism was such that to him might have been 
 literally applied what Tom Hughes with a touch 
 of exaggeration said to me about Matthew Arnold : 
 " He was a Tory from the crown of his head to the 
 sole of his foot." So little did the Admiral dis- 
 cern the limits of his naval jurisdiction that he 
 might have taken for his motto, " The world's my 
 quarter-deck, which I with cat-o'-nine-tails will 
 govern." 
 
 A Nautocratical Whipping 
 
 My grandfather and grandmother were talking, 
 probably after dinner, with his mother-in-law. 
 Lady Aldborough, and his unmarried sister-in- 
 law, Lady Emily Stratford, who was at least six- 
 teen years old. Something uncouth that my 
 grandfather said or did caused Lady Emily to 
 laugh, not with him, but at him. Such an exhi- 
 bition of her Irish humour was not to his taste. 
 " Emily," he exclaimed, " if you do that again, 
 I'll whip you." Incensed by the threat, which 
 she regarded as a mere piece of sailor's bravado, 
 she repeated the aflfront. But he was not accus- 
 tomed either to break his word or to brook dis- 
 obedience. So the delinquent was at once laid 
 across his knee and flogged like a schoolboy ! 
 Lady Aldborough remonstrated. But she was 
 told that, if she did not mind her own business, 
 
A NAUTOCRATICAL WHIPPING 3 
 
 she would be dealt with as her daughter had been ; 
 and, after the object-lesson which she had just 
 received, she thought it prudent to say no more 
 about it. 
 
 Such is the amazing narrative which Lady 
 Emily's son told me fifty or sixty years after the 
 date of the occurrence. Is his report credible ? 
 Without committing myself to a confident reply, 
 I will adduce two facts which indirectly make 
 in its favour. The first sounds paradoxical. My 
 father seemed to me to confirm the story by his 
 odd way of rejecting it. He would have resented 
 furiously any charge against his father which 
 seemed to him, on the face of it, incredible ; but, 
 when I asked him about this story, which he had 
 not heard before, he showed no such resentment. 
 On the contrary, he answered with a jocular smart- 
 ness which was most unusual with him : " I don't 
 believe a word of it ; and I'll tell you why. Lady 
 Aldborough wouldn't have been angry with my 
 father for whipping her daughter. There's nothing 
 she would have liked better." But will this argu- 
 ment hold water ? Henry IV., though he wanted 
 the captive Richard to be dispatched, was the first 
 to condemn the regicidal loyalty of Exton ; his 
 mood of mind was such as might be indicated by 
 adapting a Shakespearean phrase thus — " Though 
 I wished his death, I needs must blame his exe- 
 cutioner." And, much in the same way. Lady 
 Aldborough, even if she thought that her daughter 
 would be all the better for a chastisement, might 
 
4 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 yet feel that, if her kinsman's unwonted estimate 
 of the privileges of a brother-in-law were suffered 
 to pass unchallenged, it might speedily be extended 
 to the privileges of a son-in-law. Indeed, we have 
 seen that such an application of the principle of 
 Telle fille, telle mere, was within the range of his 
 thoughts. 
 
 The other consideration which makes against 
 the antecedent incredibility of this extraordinary 
 proceeding is based on a comparison between it 
 and a yet more extraordinary one on the part of 
 the Prince, who was styled by his flatterers "the 
 first gentleman in Europe." Modern readers, says 
 Matthew Arnold, have short memories ; and I will 
 therefore quote the extract copied by Mr. George 
 Eussell from the privately printed diary of the 
 late Lord Eobert Seymour. 
 
 " The P. of W. called on Miss Vaneck last week with two 
 of his Equerries. On coming into the room he exclaimed, 
 ' I must do it ; I must do it.' Miss V. asked him what it was 
 that he was obliged to do, when he winked at St. Leger and 
 the other accomplice, who lay'd Miss V. on the floor, and the 
 P. positively wipped {sic) her. The occasion of this extra- 
 ordinary behaviour was a Bett which I suppose he had made 
 in one of his mad Fits. The next day, however, he wrote 
 her a penitential Letter, and she now receives him on the 
 same footing as ever." 
 
 Observe that, in this instance, the outrage was 
 deliberate, that it had not the excuse of irrita- 
 tion, and — more wonderful still — that the lady 
 condoned it. 
 
A NAUTOCRATICAL WHIPPING 5 
 
 In connection with this and as throwing light 
 on the social licence of the past, it may be worth 
 while to record an experience of Lady Mary 
 Wortley Montagu which, though tame when 
 compared with those mentioned above, sounds 
 strange to modern ears. It rests on the authority 
 of Lady Louisa Stuart, who had access to Lady 
 Mary's private diary. 
 
 " She (Lady Mary) had one evening a particular engage- 
 ment that made her wish to be dismissed (by George I.) 
 unusually early ; she explained her reasons to the Duchess 
 of Kendal, and the Duchess informed the King who, after 
 a few complimentary remonstrances, appeared to acquiesce. 
 But, when he saw her about to take her leave, he began 
 battling the point afresh, declaring it was unfair and per- 
 fidious to cheat him in such a manner, and saying many 
 other fine things, in spite of which she at last contrived to 
 escape. At the foot of the great stairs she ran against Secre- 
 tary Oraggs just coming in, who stopped her to inquire what 
 was the matter — ^were the company put o£E ? She told him 
 why she went away, and how urgently the King had pressed 
 her to stay longer ; possibly dwelling on that head with some 
 small complacency. Mr. Craggs made no remark ; but, when 
 he had heard all, snatching her up in his arms as a nurse 
 carries a child, he ran at full speed with her upstairs, de- 
 posited her within the antechamber, kissed both her hands 
 respectfully (still not saying a word), and vanished." 
 
 Emerson has complained that the slow wit of 
 the English generally amounts to a mere esprit 
 d'escalier. It must be understood that the very 
 different sort of esprit d'escalier shown by the 
 quick-witted knight-errant in carrying Lady Mary 
 nolentem volentem upstairs was, even at that 
 
6 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 period, sometliing highly exceptional. Indeed, 
 the King, after hearing Lady Mary's account, 
 inquired of the secretary — "Mais comment done, 
 Monsieur Craggs, est-ce que c'est I'usage de ce 
 pays de porter de belles dames comme un sac 
 ie froment?" The unabashed secretary replied, 
 •'There is nothing I would not do for your 
 Majesty's satisfaction." 
 
 Christian Name or Title ? ^ 
 
 Carteret's daughter, Lady Grace, married the 
 bhen head of my family ; and she was so much 
 beloved (or flattered) that one of the tenants, mis- 
 taking the title for part of the Christian name, called 
 bis own daughter " Ladygrace," and his example 
 is said to have been followed by others. This odd 
 confusion between name and title reminds me of 
 a much later blunder by another of our depen- 
 dents. My late elder brother took a kinsman 
 Qamed Augustus to shoot with him at Helming- 
 ham, and was startled to hear the gamekeeper 
 accost the guest by his plain Christian name. 
 On being rebuked the old man explained that, 
 30 far from wishing to be impertinent, he had 
 thought that " Augustus " was a title of high dis- 
 tinction — a sort of superlative " My Lord." He 
 bad certainly a double portion of East Anglian 
 simplicity ; yet somehow his quaintly plausible 
 mistake is a puzzle to me. The Rev. J. C. Eyle, 
 
 ' See Appendix, 
 
WRONG ENVELOPE 7 
 
 afterwards Bishop of Liverpool, was long our 
 Kector ; and it was his care to keep the con- 
 gregation well up to the mark in Biblical lore. 
 Perhaps the least unlikely solution of the social 
 enigma is that the gamekeeper had heard from 
 the Rector how it came about that the title 
 " Augustus " was applied to the Roman Emperor 
 in St. Luke's Gospel and in the Acts. 
 
 Wrong Envelope 
 
 Mr. M., a missionary, shortly before leaving 
 England, received two letters — one from Arch- 
 bishop Tait asking him to dine, and the other 
 from the secretary of a religious society, a very 
 old friend, asking him to preach. He accepted 
 the Archbishop's invitation, and at the same time 
 wrote to the secretary, but put the letters into the 
 wrong envelopes. After the dinner at Lambeth, 
 the Archbishop said to him, "Mr. M., do you 
 always answer your dinner invitations in the same 
 way ? " "I do not understand your Grace." The 
 letter, which was then shown to the missionary, 
 ran thus : " You old rascal ! Why did you not 
 ask me before ? You know perfectly well that I 
 shall be on the high seas on the date you name." 
 
 The excellent clergyman to whom I am in- 
 debted for this anecdote also relates, as a fact, 
 the following. A zealous parson, preaching at 
 a fashionable watering-place, took for his text, 
 "There shall be no more sea." The sermon 
 
NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 >egan : " You see, my brethren, the Apostle 
 ays there will be no sea in heaven ; and there 
 'nil he no mixed bathing." 
 
 Sydney Smith and Pascal 
 
 " I wish," said Sydney Smith, " after all I have 
 aid about wit and humour, I could satisfy myself 
 f their good eflPects upon the character and dis- 
 osition, but I am convinced the probable ten- 
 ency of both is to corrupt the understanding and 
 he heart." This mournful brooding had been fore- 
 balled by Pascal, who said with laconic certainty ; 
 Diseur de bons mots, mauvais caractfere." The 
 wo verdicts are of course exaggerations. But 
 lay not their authors have felt that the sense of 
 umour is gratified by the manifold incongruities 
 f the world, and that the cult of the incongruous 
 onflicts with the cult of the ideal ? 
 
 Dr. Vaughan's Suavity 
 
 In the account of my Harrow experiences stress 
 i laid on the suavissime in modo to which Dr. 
 '^aughan owed so much of his success as a school- 
 laster. These " Memories " have been so fortu- 
 ate as to draw some interesting information from 
 be son of a late distinguished man whose family 
 ras intimate with that of Dr. Vaughan. My cor- 
 espondent's mother was told by Vaughan's mother 
 bat, when a boy, her son had such a violent tem- 
 er that, "like one possessed," he rolled on the 
 
A JLIJNK WITH JJK. JOHJNSOJN 9 
 
 floor and was unable to speak ; but that, on the 
 day after one of these attacks, he came down with 
 " velvet on his claws," and never afterwards gave 
 way. Well did he deserve the praise bestowed by 
 Ovid and by Bacon on the naturally passionate 
 man who, by a strong effort, once and for ever 
 breaks through the invisible fetters which had 
 well-nigh entered into his soul {Optimus ille 
 animi vindex Icedentia pectus Vincula qui rupit, 
 dedoluitque semel). 
 
 A Link with Dr. Johnson 
 
 Long ago I had an elderly acquaintance who 
 told me that she had formerly known an aged lady 
 — I think an aunt or great-aunt of Dean Burgon 
 — who in her youth had met Johnson at dinner. 
 The matriarch (so to call her), being asked whether 
 she remembered any sayings or doings of the great 
 man, unwillingly admitted that the only trait of 
 his which she could recall was that he took up a 
 sauce tureen of melted butter and poured its con- 
 tents down his throat ! I give this merely for 
 what it is worth ; but, first, it does not seem to 
 me to be the kind of story that is likely to have 
 been invented ; and, secondly, it is kept in counte- 
 nance by some of the philosopher's eccentricities 
 — such as that " he would in a fit of absence 
 stoop down and twitch off a lady's shoe " — which 
 Macaulay has immortalised. It was added by 
 my informant that the alert Boswell was present ; 
 
10 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 that he chanced to be called away from Johnson 
 after dinner ; and that, on his return, he wearied 
 his neighbours with questions as to what the great 
 man had been saying. 
 
 Brookfield and Tennyson 
 
 Brodie used to say that a sermon by Brook- 
 field contained this realistically orthodox sentence 
 about the Day of Judgment : " In what form the 
 Angel will appear I no more know than of what 
 metal his trumpet will be made." There can be 
 little doubt what answer Brookfield would have 
 given in the following case. An old church- 
 warden said to a newly appointed Bishop, "I am 
 anxious, my Lord, to relieve my mind of a great 
 difficulty. May I lay it before you .-' " " Pray do. 
 I will help you if I can." " I want to know, is 
 heaven a place or a state ? " The Bishop looked 
 at his watch, " Oh, I'm extremely sorry ; but I 
 see the carriage is waiting, and I am afraid of 
 missing an appointment." No such hesitation 
 would have been shown by an Oxford don of the 
 old school, who tried to make out how far heaven 
 is from the earth. The inquirer calculated the 
 probable interval of time between the Angel Gab- 
 riel's visit to Elizabeth and his visit to Mary. He 
 assumed, first, that during the interval the angel 
 had gone straight to heaven and straight back ; 
 and secondly, that he travelled to and fro just as 
 fast as light travels. (Can this last assumption 
 
BO WEN AND KUSKIN 11 
 
 have been founded on the seeming connection 
 between the " morning stars " and the " sons of 
 God " indicated in Job xxxviii. 7 ?) 
 
 After reporting the sentence of the Eev. W. H. 
 Brookfield, which Brodie quoted as quite serious, 
 it is right to remind my readers that the accom- 
 plished clergyman was — perhaps later in life — a 
 Liberal Christian, a friend of Arthur Stanley and 
 of Tennyson (the " Old Brooks " of the famous 
 sonnet). In dealing with the latter he showed 
 great tact. They were together at a Club dinner 
 when the poet, with the unsnubbable wayward- 
 ness of genius, insisted, before the guests had 
 risen, on putting his feet on the table. As 
 remonstrances had failed, Brookfield, at the 
 host's request, consented to try his hand ; and, 
 touching a persuasive chord, he whispered, " Do 
 take your legs down, Alfred. They're saying 
 you're Longfellow ! " Down went the legs. 
 
 BOWBN AND RUSKIN^ 
 
 Bowen once playfully compared himself and 
 the other rowers in the Balliol " Torpid " to 
 galley-slaves. The jocular comparison has a 
 serious counterpart in an exclamation of Euskin, 
 who said that the crews of the "Eights" sub- 
 mitted to " that most degrading of occupations, 
 the labour of the galley-slave." The friend to 
 whom Euskin addressed this taunt also tells me 
 
 1 See Appendix. 
 
12 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 that he whimsically compared the crew of an 
 outrigger to " German dolls sitting in a tooth- 
 pick." 
 
 Jottings about Francis Newman ^ 
 
 Mr. Gladstone, while expressing a highly credit- 
 able admiration for Francis Newman, told me that 
 he hated the book which that saintly infidel had 
 written about his brother, the Cardinal. Jowett 
 took a more indulgent view. He regarded the 
 two brothers as made of wholly diflferent clay. 
 Frank Newman carried his love of truth, or at 
 least of minute accuracy, to the point of pedantry, 
 while John Henry was, in Jowett's opinion, by no 
 means thus pedantic. Let me add that Frank 
 Newman was far from regarding Jowett as 
 righteous overmuch in respect to truth. He 
 spoke to me in high praise of the Master's 
 theological essays ; but he could not understand 
 how the author of those essays could reconcile it 
 to his conscience to remain in orders. 
 
 He surprised me by showing — like Jowett, 
 A. P. Stanley, and Pattison — a side of sympathy 
 with the (then) ex-Emperor of the French. He 
 told me that Kossuth had started with a strong 
 prejudice against Louis Napoleon, but that, having 
 communicated with him more than once, he found 
 that his opinion of him, not intellectually only, 
 but morally, was tjontinually raised. 
 
 ' See Appendix. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT FEANCIS NEWMAN 13 
 
 An opponent of women's rights remarked to 
 Newman, in my presence, that, arguing from the 
 analogy of the higher animals, we may infer that 
 the average man is likely to be superior to the 
 average woman in intellect, as he is certainly 
 superior to her not only in size and stature, but 
 in strength and consequent endurance of work. 
 Newman : " Let us assume that men collectively 
 have three-fifths of the intellect of the country. 
 Why should the remaining two-fifths be excluded 
 from all share in the government ? " 
 
 Miss Swanwick amazed me by announcing that 
 Newman had heard in Persia of a certificate of 
 marriage which was to last half-an-hour. I 
 inquired of Newman concerning these toy- 
 marriages (to use no harsher term), and his 
 reply, somewhat abridged, was as follows : — 
 
 " Being in Persia in 1832, I knew a Government official, 
 a religious man, and, in my esteem, highly veracious, who 
 had the Arsenal under his command, with a control over the 
 Persian soldiers and civilians in it. Eecently he had seen a 
 Persian walking in evident intimacy with a woman of bad 
 reputation, and remonstrated with him about it. The man 
 replied by producing the certificate of that form of marriage 
 which they call, I think, cazbeen. My friend read it and 
 found it signed by the priest, and all correct ; but it married 
 the man and woman for half-an-hour. My friend added that 
 when a merchant who has left a wife at home desires a tem- 
 porary wife, he goes to the priest, who keeps a list of women 
 willing to become wives for a specified time, and sends for a 
 company of perhaps half-a-dozen of these to meet the mer- 
 chant. They are all closely veiled, and the applicant must 
 select one without raising her veil ; upon which the priest 
 
14 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 makes out and signs the document of cazbeen. This custom 
 has impressed me with great horror of all marriage that is 
 limited to definite time, so as to contemplate any breach except 
 hy failure of life or of essential duty." 
 
 On another occasion I heard him somewhat 
 qualify the opinion expressed in the words here 
 italicised. He intimated that perhaps divorce 
 should be allowed in cases of confirmed drunken- 
 ness or hopeless insanity. He also mentioned to 
 me, with seeming approval, a custom which was 
 said to prevail in a certain community. He had 
 been told that in that community, when two 
 married persons wish to be divorced for incom- 
 patibility of temper, they notify their wish to a 
 Government official, and are told by him that, if 
 they are of the same mind after the lapse of three 
 years, their request shall be granted. During the 
 interval, unless in extreme cases, friends do their 
 utmost to reconcile this semi-detached couple ; 
 and so effectual is the application of this balm 
 that, when the three years are over, the untoward 
 petition is but seldom renewed. 
 
 That Eadical pioneer, Charles Austin, being a 
 member of Johnson's Club, which sometimes less 
 modestly calls itself the Club, was asked by me, 
 forty years ago, why Francis Newman had not 
 been elected among its members. He replied that 
 Newman was hardly distinguished enough. To 
 which I objected that Lord Stanhope, the his- 
 torian, was one of the members — was he an abler 
 man than Newman 1 Austin: "I should think 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT FEANCIS NEWMAN 15 
 
 that Newman is at least as able as Lord Stanhope ; 
 but we have to take into consideration the various 
 elements of distinction." This rejoinder seems to 
 me noteworthy, or, so to say, quoteworthy, as 
 showing the wide gulf between the Liberals of those 
 days and their modern successors. It is marked 
 by a quaint old-worldliness which a hostile critic 
 might now call snobbishness, and it is curious as 
 coming from one who had been a friend of Ben- 
 tham and of the two Mills, and of whose conversa- 
 tional powers John Mill spoke to me in high terms. 
 But in justice to Austin we must bear in mind, 
 first, that, when he took that line, he had been de- 
 Liberalised by age ; and, secondly, that Newman, 
 with his unpopular opinions and somewhat aggres- 
 sive personality, might have been a source of 
 disturbance in the Club. 
 
 A friend tells me that, having asked Francis 
 Newman whether his brother cared for being made 
 Cardinal, he answered : " The Catholic Bishop of 
 Birmingham used to say that John Newman, with 
 his great intellect, had a profound respect for 
 ecclesiastical rank. ' Whenever he comes into 
 my presence, he kneels down and kisses my ring.' 
 Now that my brother has become the ecclesiastical 
 superior, it will be for the Bishop to kneel down 
 and kiss his ring ; and I cannot help thinking that 
 this latter arrangement will be more to my brother's 
 taste." In order to set this rampant ecclesias- 
 ticism into stronger relief, I will venture to 
 contrast it with the untaught simplicity of the 
 
16 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 American whose presentation to Leo XIII. has 
 been related by Mrs. Hugh Fraser : " Sir," he 
 exclaimed, seizing the Pope's hand and shaking it 
 heartily, " I am glad to meet you. I knew your 
 father, the late Pope ! " 
 
 GOSCHEN AND DiSRAELI 
 
 I once heard on good authority that Disraeli, 
 meeting Mat Arnold at dinner, held a glass of 
 Madeira up to the lamp, and said to him with a 
 touch of irony, " Mr. Arnold, sweetness and light !" 
 On my telling this story to Goschen, he replied 
 that to him it did not " sound quite like Disraeli." 
 He then mentioned an incident which he thought 
 more characteristic of him. Disraeli, then in 
 office, asked Goschen to call on him, as he wished 
 to place him on some Commission. Before the 
 host entered, Goschen had time to look round the 
 room, and observed that it had little furniture 
 except a large picture of Queen Victoria and a 
 single flower, I think a lily, in a vase. When 
 Disraeli appeared, Goschen asked the names of 
 the gentlemen who would sit with him ; and he 
 took special note that Dizzy, writing down their 
 names, was careful to arrange those who had titles 
 in the order of their rank, and to give their titles 
 in full. 
 
F. W. WALKER 17 
 
 Herbert Spencer as a Vegetarian 
 
 Herbert Spencer told Sir Francis Galton that he 
 had tried the experiment of vegetarianism. He 
 felt no ill effects from the change of diet ; but, 
 when he afterwards read over what he had then 
 written, he was convinced that it was not worth 
 preserving. To me the oddest part of this odd 
 experience appears to be, not merely that during 
 the herbivorous episode he flagged mentally with- 
 out being conscious that he flagged physically, but 
 also that he was not fully conscious even of the 
 mental flagging until it was practically over. 
 
 F. W. Walker 
 
 It is elsewhere stated that the Eev. S. H. 
 Reynolds repeated to me the following un- 
 chivalrous apologue, for which he disclaimed 
 originality : 
 
 " 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." 
 
 I am now at liberty to say that the author of 
 the apologue was the late F. W. Walker, who was 
 
 B 
 
18 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 then High Master of St. Paul's School. Here may 
 be given another sample of Walker's lively in- 
 genuity (evrpaTreXia), a sample which, having 
 external as well as internal evidence in its 
 favour, is assuredly founded on fact, though I 
 cannot vouch for all the details. A pupil, pre- 
 paring to try for a scholarship at a great Oxford 
 college, asked Walker if he could give him a hint 
 of any kind. " Very much," was the reply, " will 
 depend on the Latin and English essays. One of 
 them will probably refer to the Earthly Paradise 
 of our aspirations. In such a paradise the dons 
 do not believe ; and you cannot please them more 
 than by bringing a few quotations tending to 
 show that mankind is going to the dogs ! " He 
 went on to call the pupil's attention to such lines 
 as " Damnosa quid non imminuit dies ? " or as 
 "The world is weary of the past." The event 
 proved that he had been wise in his generation. 
 The subject of the English essay was " Fifty Years 
 Hence." On such a thesis the anthology — why 
 may I not call it the toxicology? — of enervating 
 mottoes did signal service ; and the scholarship 
 was gained. Once more : the name of a boy, 
 whose connections were good in the old-world 
 sense, was on the list of candidates for St. Paul's 
 School. As a measure of precaution, his mother, 
 being somewhat high and mighty, inquired of 
 Walker whether anything in the school would 
 jar against her son's "social antecedents." The 
 master, justly oflfended, turned the tables on the 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLD WIN SMITH 19 
 
 inquirer by saying : " Madam, if your son does 
 his work properly, and if his fees are paid regu- 
 larly, no question will be asked about his social 
 antecedents." 
 
 Jottings about Goldwin Smith 
 
 When I was at Oxford (1856-60), Goldwin Smith 
 was Professor of Modern History and conspicuous 
 as a leader of the Liberal Party. Towards the end 
 of that period, he was chosen to instruct his late 
 Majesty, then Prince of Wales, in his own subject, 
 while Sir Benjamin Brodie instructed him, often 
 by deputy, in physical science. Oddly enough, 
 these two Prince-teachers were in theory Re- 
 publicans. In 1860 I had the honour of dining 
 with the Prince when Goldwin Smith was one 
 of the guests. Little of the conversation remains 
 in my memory. The Prince spoke with natural 
 admiration of Adam Bede. But Goldwin Smith 
 frankly owned that he did not care much for either 
 of George Eliot's two novels which had then ap- 
 peared, adding that, of the two, he preferred The 
 Mill on the Floss. He expressed a like opinion 
 at least as strongly to Brodie, who regarded his 
 adverse judgment as a crotchet, if not a craze. 
 
 Brodie also spoke of Goldwin Smith as not 
 unscientific only, but "anti-scientific." Evolution 
 was then on its trial. Every year strengthens 
 my belief in my old contention that the evolu- 
 tionary beatitude, " Blessed are the strong, for 
 
20 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 they shall prey on the weak," has not a Christian 
 ring about it; and Goldwin Smith, who, though 
 unorthodox, was always religious, naturally re- 
 coiled from the doctrine that selfishness and greed ' 
 were main factors in at least the early stages of 
 development. I remember a public lecture in 
 which, while seeking to exhaust a great variety of 
 subjects from Positivism upwards or downwards, 
 he appeared to me to be prolific of pointed epi- 
 grams which were hardly to the point, and, with 
 unrivalled dexterity, to be hitting the wrong nails 
 exactly on the head. At first I supposed that my 
 own judgment was at fault, but I was reassured 
 when one of the ablest Fellows of Balliol said to 
 me with a chuckle, " That man is not a philo- 
 sopher." Of course the brilliant lecturer was 
 thoroughly sincere, and afterwards he gave high 
 praise to Darwin and was intimate with Huxley, 
 Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer. Would it be un- 
 fair to say that he was suspicious of Evolution 
 militant, but loyal to Evolution triumphant ? 
 The Times has said of him : 
 
 "His talk was sententious, but not copious — a pregnant 
 aphorism or a flashing epigram occasionally breaking the 
 spell of an impassive and rather sardonic silence." 
 
 This reminds me of Wellington's description of 
 Talleyrand as being generally dull, but as now 
 and then saying something which you never for- 
 got. Of Goldwin Smith, as of Grant Dufi", it may 
 be affirmed that he was variable in his moods, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLDWIN SMITH 21 
 
 often most agreeable, but sometimes taciturn. 
 He was taciturn when I met him at breakfast 
 with Mr. Gladstone in 1867. I had been present 
 at the public dinner given to Lloyd Garrison when 
 Bright was in the chair, and several other dis- 
 tinguished men, including Earl Russell and Mill, 
 made speeches. I was struck, and Mill's great 
 admirer, Fawcett, was also struck, by Bright's 
 prodigious superiority on that occasion to all the 
 rest. When, at Gladstone's breakfast, I spoke of 
 the disillusion which, being an admirer of Mill, I 
 had then felt, Goldwin Smith replied with astonish- 
 ment, " Did you expect anything else ? " The 
 late Lord Lyttelton then remarked on the fre- 
 quency with which Bright quoted poetry. " The 
 odd thing is," said the Professor, " that one so 
 seldom recognises his quotations. I suppose them 
 to be extracts from poetry peculiar to his sect." 
 This was not always the case. Bright said in a 
 speech that the attitude of Conservatives towards 
 Reform resembled the attitude which, according to 
 the poet (Byron), men in general hold towards 
 death ; it is " the doom they dread, but dwell 
 upon." (It is well known that Bright had an 
 extravagant admiration for " The Epic of Hades." 
 This admiration is partly explained by the fact 
 that, before he read the poem, the tales of the old 
 mythology, as he himself owned, had been un- 
 familiar to him.) Goldwin Smith decidedly pre- 
 ferred Charles Lamb to De Quincey. The preference 
 recalls Goethe's paradox or truism, " Not like to 
 
22 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 like, but like to unlike draws." I remarked that 
 Dr. Vaughan, as a writer, seems liable to the 
 besetting fault of great scholars ; he is too fond 
 of involved and inverted sentences ; nay, he has 
 now and then sentences which bear more than one 
 construction. Goldwin Smith made light of this 
 objection. " Vaughan," he said, " is remarkable 
 for the precision with which he brings out shades 
 of meaning." He was ' asked about Cobbett's 
 objection to the phrase "than whom" which is 
 employed by Milton in the sentence, " Beelzebub, 
 than whom, Satan except, none higher sat " ; 
 here " than who " might seem to be demanded by 
 the analogy of the phrase " than he." He defended 
 " than whom " as being sanctioned by usage, and 
 compared it to the French " C'est moi." It is 
 noteworthy that he thus set usage above what 
 may be termed the logic of grammar. Fifty years 
 ago a Fellow of Balliol, after reading Goldwin 
 Smith's Memoir of Feel, put his diction on a 
 level with Macaulay's, which was then an even 
 greater compliment than it would now be. Per- 
 sonally I should echo this praise of his exquisite 
 style with a word of explanation. He is less 
 rhetorical, and partly on that account more 
 tersely vigorous, than Macaulay ; but somewhat 
 elliptical and perhaps now and then even careless 
 in his syntax (supra grammaticam). 
 
 Early in the nineties, Goldwin Smith called on 
 
 ' me in London. He had taken a very kind interest 
 
 in my Safe Studies and Stones of Stumbling, 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLDWIN SMITH 23 
 
 and talked of recommending them to friends. But 
 he added that, times being bad in America, eco- 
 nomy was the order of the day ; and he warned 
 me that the economy most acceptable to the 
 average American was abstaining from the pur- 
 chase of serious books. 
 
 Being asked what he thought of the mental 
 capacity of negroes, he gave, with evident reluct- 
 ance, an answer which in later years he would 
 doubtless have modified. So far as he was aware, 
 Toussaint L'Ouverture was the only negro who 
 had given proof of great mental power. He was 
 a full-blooded negro, but was said to have sprung 
 from a royal stock. On hearing this, my first 
 impulse was to wonder what inference as to ability 
 could be drawn from royal descent. But it is 
 probable that most rulers of barbarous races are 
 near descendants of a usurper or conqueror, and 
 would inherit some portion of his capacity. 
 Among kings of warlike tribes or nations, the 
 non-survival of the unfit is the general rule. 
 Thus, Mill has somewhere remarked that the cause 
 of the high average ability of our Henrys and 
 Edwards is to be sought in the tragic fate of the 
 sixth Henry and the second Edward. Not, of 
 course, that this principle of dynastic elimination, 
 as we may term it, solves all the difiiculty. Why, 
 for instance, did Jeroboam and Jehu have neither 
 capable descendants nor usurping successors who 
 achieved anything great and lasting ? 
 
 It has been well said that Goldwin Smith was 
 
24 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 at once aggressive and sensitive. I was surprised 
 at the irritation with which he referred to an old 
 friend of mine as having called him a deserter 
 from the Liberal cause. " My principles," he said, 
 " are just the same now as they were forty years 
 ago." Was that quite as it should be ? Maine 
 has somewhere spoken of the "much overrated" 
 virtue of consistency — meaning doubtless that, if 
 a man stands still while the world is going on, his 
 attitude, though absolutely stationary, is relatively 
 retrogressive. In Goldwin Smith's case, there 
 were enemies who suggested that in his youth he 
 had, as Jowett said of Wycliffe, upheld " a doctrine 
 perilously near la propriete, c'est le vol;" and it 
 was cynically suggested that, when his own cir- 
 cumstances were improved by marriage, his views 
 as to the blessedness of poverty were modified. I 
 once asked Matthew Arnold whether he thought 
 that this was so. " Oh no," he replied, " Goldwin 
 Smith's Conservatism is about Ireland, and is ex- 
 plained by the fact that he hates both Catholics 
 and Irishmen." He also seems to have had no 
 love for the French ; and it may be said of him, 
 as Pattison said to me of our common friend, 
 S. H. Eeynolds, "There was no setting limits to 
 his antipathies." Goldwin Smith described Pal- 
 merston as a " reckless and wicked old man," in 
 special reference to his dealings with the Afghans ; 
 he congratulated himself on not having been cor- 
 rupted by invitations to Cambridge House. But 
 his pet aversion is known to have been Disraeli. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLDWIN SMITH 25 
 
 His critics diflfer as to whether he, and he alone, 
 was satirised as the Professor in Dizzy's novel. 
 At the time I heard it conjectured that the Lothai- 
 rian pedant was a sort of composite photograph of 
 Goldwin Smith and Fawcett, but that the former 
 was the chief sitter. Goldwin Smith was said to 
 have put the cap on himself by complaining of the 
 " stingless insults of a coward." Was he specially 
 bitter against Disraeli for having sprung from the 
 Jewish race, or against the Jewish race for having 
 given birth to Disraeli ? 
 
 It is well known that he strongly disapproved 
 of Gladstone's Irish policy. I feel a delicacy in 
 relating an incident which may serve to illustrate 
 his want of sympathy with the great Home Ruler. 
 After reading my Talks with Mr. Gladstone, he 
 paid it the kind, but excessive, compliment of 
 writing : " I am rather inclined to think that in 
 this case the Boswell is worth fully as much as 
 the Johnson." Of course this praise has reference 
 only to the reported conversations, and probably 
 it takes its colour from personal regard for "the 
 Boswell." But, even so, the acute critic would hardly 
 have ventured on the comparison if his admiration 
 for " the Johnson " had been anything like what it 
 was twenty years earlier. Mr. Gladstone was well 
 aware that he had fallen out of favour with the 
 great Professor, as I formerly mentioned : 
 
 "Reference was made to a quondam Professor [G. S.], 
 whose too Catholic antipathies were especially directed 
 against the Jewish race and modern Liberals ; and one of 
 
26 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 the party reported that this Ishmael, on being told that the 
 Jews had a remarkable immunity from cholera, drily ex- 
 claimed, 'That is the worst thing I have heard of the 
 cholera ! ' Gladstone (smiling) : ' He hates the Jews as much 
 as he hates me.' " 
 
 It is satisfactory to add that Goldwin Smith 
 afterwards showed a generosity such as had hardly 
 been expected from him. In the booklet which he 
 wrote on the official " Life " of Mr. Gladstone, he 
 referred with sympathetic admiration to the great 
 man's genius and virtues, — an admiration which 
 showed that, in the case of the patriotic statesman, 
 the good that he had done lived after him, and his 
 memory was hallowed by his death (Libitina sac- 
 ravit. . . . Virtutem incolumem odimus, Suhlatam 
 ex oculis quoBriinus invidi). In other instances, 
 too, the Professor's severity meant but little. 
 Between him and a distinguished man, fully his 
 equal in genius, there had been at least one sharp 
 passage of arms. This wise and wary antagonist 
 was noted for a mildly patronising — may I call 
 it paternising? — manner, probably assumed as a 
 weapon of defence. This purposed aflfectation was 
 hardly less distasteful to Goldwin Smith than 
 Disraeli's; and once, after strong and long pro- 
 vocation, he muttered, when the coast was clear, 
 "Incorrigible puppy!" This monstrous ejacula- 
 tion must not be taken too seriously ; for the 
 unconscious subject of it informed me that, when 
 in America, he received a pressing invitation to 
 visit Goldwin Smith at Toronto. My father told 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLDWIN SMITH 27 
 
 me that, when a legal case came before a Parlia- 
 mentary Committee of which he was a member, 
 the opposing counsel so abused each other that 
 the chairman, at the close of the inquiry, expressed 
 a hope that the gentlemen would shake hands ; 
 whereupon one of them replied that he and his 
 learned friend were presently going together to a 
 whitebait dinner. May not the hard words which 
 political and philosophical disputants are wont to 
 hurl at one another sometimes interfere as little 
 with their social intercourse as did the recrimina- 
 tions of the advocates with the Greenwich sympo- 
 sium? I once fell out of favour with Goldwin 
 Smith by advocating theological conformity. His 
 horror of such compromise may partly account for 
 his severity towards the man of genius aforemen- 
 tioned whose theology — Anglicanism minus Theism 
 — was certainly unconventional. But the same 
 might be said of Mark Pattison, whom I heard 
 him speak of as " a great friend " of his. Of Jowett 
 his view was perplexing. Some fifty years ago he 
 was the reputed author of an article which much 
 annoyed Jowett by saying that he "revelled "in 
 doubt and scepticism. But, denouncer of sceptical 
 conformity though he was, he had a strong friend- 
 ship for Jowett. The last comment on Jowett that 
 he made to me, while affirming Jowett's opinions 
 to be thoroughly unclerical, was itself thoroughly 
 sympathetic : 
 
 "Jowett, you will recollect, was in a singular position. 
 He was the clerical Head of a College ; preaching, I suppose. 
 
28 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 at any rate performing the service and administering the 
 Sacrament ; while, as we now know, he was a sceptic, treat- 
 ing the first three Gospels as what they are : grafts upon an 
 unknown stock, and as such devoid of authority.'' 
 
 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, says Macaulay, 
 " carried to her grave the reputation of being 
 decidedly the best hater of her time." At first 
 sight, Goldwin Smith might be bracketed with 
 Freeman and Canon MacCoU as entitled to a 
 similar pre-eminence. But, in truth, his acerbity 
 was but the seamy side of his somewhat aggressive 
 rectitude (le defaut de ses tres grandes qualites). 
 "A character of pure and inflexible virtue," says 
 Gibbon, " is the most apt to be misled by preju- 
 dice, to be heated by enthusiasm, and to confound 
 private enmities with public justice." Thus it 
 seems to me that the hatred, not of sin only, but 
 of sinners, is, rather than ambition, the last in- 
 firmity of noble minds. This Miltonic adaptation 
 suggests an anecdote with a quaint comparison. 
 Pater, when walking with a friend, passed Goldwin 
 Smith, and remarked, " There goes the Milton of 
 our day, but he has not written and never will 
 write his Paradise Lost." Assuredly he nevei 
 wrote even his Paradise Regained ; and assuredly 
 also a Milton, shorn of his epics, would be half 
 mute and less than half glorious ! Yet, in fairness 
 to Goldwin Smith, it must be remembered that he 
 was a rudimentary poet — not so much because of 
 his graceful rendering into English of Greek epi- 
 grams as by reason of the excellence of his Latin 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLDWIN SMITH 29 
 
 versification. But, if he is (longo intervallo) to be 
 classed with Milton, it must be through his union 
 of the somewhat incongruous qualities of scholar 
 and reformer. His skill in tempering a reformer's 
 zeal for the future with a scholar's love of the past 
 is conspicuous in his delightful Oxford and her 
 Colleges. But the moralist in him, even more 
 than in Milton, dominated the artist. His creed, 
 after all, was the shadow of Milton's ; it may be 
 described as the ghost of Puritanism, or haply as 
 its corpse galvanised for a moment into the 
 semblance of life. And hence arose his short- 
 comings when dealing with history. They illus- 
 trate Kenan's comment on Josephus : "II a le 
 defaut le plus oppose k la saine manifere d'^crire 
 I'histoire, une personnalitd extreme." In truth, the 
 crushing personality of Goldwin Smith stunted his 
 power of sympathy. Like Freeman, and perhaps 
 like Macaulay, he was lacking in the Shakespearean 
 faculty of catching a villain's point of view. He 
 was insensible to the truth of Helvdtius's maxim : 
 " In order to love mankind, we must not expect 
 too much from them," and to the half-truth 
 underlying Thrasea's paradox, " Qui vitia odit, 
 homines odit." In short, he was too good a hater 
 to be a really great historian. 
 
 My notice of this consummate literary artist 
 must end with showing him as a seer. I am 
 informed that, when his great enemy became 
 Prime Minister in 1868, he foretold that the 
 Disraelite ambition would culminate in the crea- 
 
30 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 tion of a Knight of the Garter, a Duke and an 
 Archbishop, and his prophecy was fulfilled. 
 Another forecast of his was so startling that, if 
 it had been made in the Middle Ages, he would 
 have taken rank as either a saint or a sorcerer. 
 His Irish History and Irish Character, written 
 in 1861, contains the passage : "The Irish blood 
 has given a hero, and it may give a ruler, to 
 France in the person! of M'Mahon." This is 
 indeed " a rare prediction, of which the style is 
 unambiguous and the date unquestionable." 
 
 After the perusal of the Reminiscences of Goldwin 
 Smith, I will correct an error of his. My old friend 
 Mrs. Cradock, the wife of the Principal of Brasenose, 
 was born, not a Eussell, but a Lister. She was a 
 sister of the first Lady John Russell. It may be 
 added that she had marked peculiarities in common 
 with the sister of the Squire in Robert Elsmere. 
 
 Goldwin Smith's statement that Jowett was an 
 "Agnostic" certainly requires qualification. A 
 passage quoted by me (Old and Odd Memories, 
 p. 196) points to that conclusion. But this sen- 
 tence was written at the end of his life ; and his 
 opinions, with advancing years, seem to have 
 gradually become more sceptical. At any rate, 
 in my undergraduate days, he told me that he 
 had never doubted the belief in immortality. 
 
 I am glad to find in the Reminiscences Thorold 
 Rogers's couplet : 
 
 " So, ladling flattery from their several tubs, 
 Stubba butters Freeman, Freeman butters Stubbs.'' 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT GOLDWIN SMITH 31 
 
 I had understood that this couplet was with- 
 drawn, as Bishop Stubbs denied that he had 
 flattered Freeman, and as Eogers was unable 
 to cite an instance of such flattery. But Freeman 
 is not spared in the lines : 
 
 " Nor, scarcely sheltered by a paper screen, 
 Should blustering Freeman butter blundering Green." 
 
 The reference is to Freeman's indulgence to the 
 errors of his friend Green as contrasted with his 
 virulence in dealing with those of his enemy, or 
 rather victim, Froude. In the same satire he 
 strikes at very big game ; but he does so with a 
 genial irony and with a wit which excuses his 
 extravagance : 
 
 " Browning I might admire, if I could guess 
 The meaning of the words he sends to press ; 
 I read it forwards, and am never sure ; 
 But backwards, 'tis a little less obscure." 
 
 After reporting the extravagant comment which 
 Goldwin Smith, under irritation, made on Matthew 
 Arnold, I am glad to quote from the Reminiscences 
 his far juster account of him as " the prince of con- 
 noisseurs." By this last word he doubtless meant 
 that Arnold surveyed the world from the outside, 
 and not indeed from a dandified, but from an 
 artistic standpoint. I have sometimes been dis- 
 posed to liken Arnold to Chatham in respect of 
 his deep earnestness masked by superficial affecta- 
 tion. Regarding him thus, I long ago compared 
 him to a Hebrew prophet in white kid gloves. 
 
32 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 Greg must have formed a like estimate of him 
 
 when he said that he took the Bible off one 
 
 pedestal and put it on another with much 
 
 reverence and perhaps a little condescension. 
 
 By the way, T have lately come upon a sentence 
 
 ' of Macaulay about the younger Pitt which exactly 
 
 fits Goldwin Smith ; no one could see or hear him 
 
 j " without perceiving him to bB a man of high, 
 
 ] intrepid, and commanding spirit, proudly conscious 
 
 j of his own rectitude and of his own intellectual 
 
 I superiority, incapable of the low vices of fear and 
 
 f envy, but too prone to feel and to show disdain." 
 
 Jottings about Lecky^ 
 
 In 1871 my wife, having lately read the His- 
 tory of Rationalism, asked Jowett if he did not 
 admire it. " Lecky," was the disappointing reply, 
 " seems to me to have more power of writing than 
 of thought." It is fair to add that Jowett has 
 somewhere published a favourable reference to this 
 very volume. But why did his trumpet blow such 
 an uncertain, if not unfriendly, note ? The answer 
 will perhaps be that, if we compare Lecky with 
 that kindred writer Buckle, we shall feel that, 
 though Lecky's style is far better, we find it more 
 easy to see what Buckle is driving at. This point 
 is clearly brought out in a too hostile, but sug- 
 gestive, review of Lecky contained in George Eliot's 
 essay on " The Influence of Rationalism." In that 
 
 1 See Appendix. 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT LECKY 33 
 
 essay the History of Rationalism is included in 
 the 
 
 " Valuable class of books on great subjects which have 
 something of the character and functions of good popular 
 lecturing. They are not original, not subtle, not of close 
 logical texture. . . . [They are suited to the needs of the 
 general reader who] may be known in conversation by the 
 cordiality with which he assents to indistinct, blurred state- 
 ments : say that black is black, he will shake his head and 
 hardly think it ; say that black is not so very black, he will 
 reply, ' Exactly.' . . . Mr. Lecky does not discriminate, or 
 does not help his reader to discriminate, between objective 
 complexity and subjective confusion." 
 
 Personally I share in the general admiration for 
 Lecky as a historian. His work on European 
 Morals seemed to me specially instructive, but 
 his attack on Utilitarianism in the first chapter 
 did not appeal to me. That chapter was assailed 
 with great — nay, to my mind, excessive — asperity 
 by a distinguished Fortnightly Ke viewer in 1869. 
 A like estimate of it was taken by Charles Austin, to 
 whom I had been praising the work. " I have only 
 seen the first chapter, the chapter about Utili- 
 tarianism," he said, "which is the greatest non- 
 sense I ever read on the subject. But, as you say, 
 a man may fail as a philosopher and yet be an 
 excellent historian." I once had the hardihood to 
 hint to Lecky that he seemed to me in one place 
 to have confounded Utilitarianism proper— which 
 aims at the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number — with that negation of morality which 
 aims only at the happiness of the individual, and 
 
 c 
 
34 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 which is sometimes miscalled Utilitarianism. He 
 took my audacious comment with his wonted 
 courtesy and merely said : " If I confounded 
 those two views, it was unconsciously. I thought 
 I had carefully distinguished them." One unusual 
 opinion on this matter he and I held in common. 
 To give my best statement of the point I must 
 resort to the graceless practice of self-quotation : 
 
 "Mill insists that the Utilitarian principle should be ap- 
 plied, not to man only, but to the entire sentient universe ; 
 and certainly it is less easy to show that the principle ought 
 not to be so extended, than that, if so extended^ it might 
 involve a reduatio ad ewthanadam." 
 
 Lecky agreed that Mill's principle might involve 
 some such extravagant obligation as that of whole- 
 sale suicide ! I shall return to this topic when 
 writing about Galton. At present it may suffice 
 to restate a paradox on which I long ago insisted. 
 A rational evolutionist will strongly disapprove 
 both of slavery and of vegetarianism — of Humani- 
 tarianism set at nought and of Humanitarianism 
 run riot. But, in trying to steer safely between 
 these extremes, he comes upon a logical difficulty 
 which may be formulated thus : Why is it worse 
 to domesticate our thousandth cousin than to kill 
 and eat our millionth ? 
 
 Lecky was the author of a quaint paradox about 
 Whiteside : " He is a most superb humbug, and 
 I have an immense admiration for him." (This 
 brings to my mind a remark of my humorous 
 friend, S. H. Reynolds, who spoke to me of 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT LECKY 35 
 
 Matthew Arnold as "a splendid impostor " ; lie 
 was referring to Matthew Arnold's claim, as 
 Arnold himself expressed it to me, to be a 
 Liberal Anglican ; and in the critic's comment 
 " splendid " was the emphatic word.) I remem- 
 ber that my father once took me to the House 
 of Commons in expectation that I should hear 
 Gladstone ; but just before I entered he told me 
 with a disappointed air that, instead of Gladstone, 
 I should hear Whiteside, who, when he made a 
 great effort, was " quite Gladstone's equal." I 
 heard a long speech from Whiteside, and after- 
 wards thought — well — that my father must have 
 been partial to him. Shakespeare, in the most 
 perpetually misapplied of all famous lines, says : 
 " One touch of Nature makes the whole world 
 kin," meaning " that all with one consent " prefer 
 show without substance to substance without show. 
 From Lecky's mock compliment to Whiteside one 
 might have expected that he would have felt 
 an extreme admiration for Gladstone, in whom 
 splendid eloquence and practical wisdom were so 
 incomparably united. But, in fact, he regarded 
 the great orator with disfavour. He spoke to me 
 more than thirty years ago of the advanced age of 
 Disraeli and of Gladstone as the one bright spot 
 on the political horizon. He went on to explain ; 
 that Gladst one w ould s ometimes introduc e into ' 
 a speech a broad proposition with a reservation j 
 wEIcirsee^3_mily nominal, and that afterwards, ; 
 if aTchangejofjfront was expedient, the reservation 1 
 
36 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 became all-important. Lecky might have isaid 
 that in such cases a pawn on the political chess- 
 board has been suddenly promoted to be a queen : 
 Exceptio Jit regula. My dissent from Lecky's 
 comment on Gladstone has been elsewhere stated 
 — a dissent founded on the necessity for statesmen 
 to have occasional use of what Shakespeare called 
 "indirection" and Tennyson called "diagonal- 
 ising." But this is not all. I thoroughly differed 
 from the opinion expressed to me by my honoured 
 friend Mr. Gladstone that genius cannot be " one- 
 sided." Eather, with the example of Swift before 
 me, am I inclined to agree with Dryden's melan- 
 choly line about " great wits." At any rate, a 
 supremely great orator, such as Chatham, may be 
 said not so much to possess as to be possessed by 
 his genius. In fact, genius is apt to be a too 
 "aviating" Pegasus, which is restive under the 
 hand of its earthly rider {terrenum equitem gra- 
 vatus Bellerophontem). Perhaps the metaphor 
 may be varied by saying that the divine or 
 daemonic gift tends to exhaust the organism, 
 and that, like consumption, it is sometimes a 
 beautiful disease. 
 
 Lecky spoke to me of Cobden's emphatic warn- 
 ing that we ought to strengthen our armaments 
 if threatened with invasion ; but he doubted 
 whether, under Cobdenite rule, the strengthening 
 process would have been completed in time. 
 Weakness glittering with wealth invites aggres- 
 sion. How might Louis Napoleon have dealt 
 
JOTTINGS ABOUT LECKY 37 
 
 with us if our peace party had had its way ? 
 The point was well put by Palmerston when, 
 being asked whether, if invaded, the English 
 would not rise as one man, he made answer : 
 " Yes ; and they would fall as one man." 
 
 I saw much of Lecky at Engelberg nearly thirty 
 years ago. A kinswoman of his told my wife that 
 she generally knew his place at the table d'hote by 
 his ill-roUed-up napkin. But, as mine was equally 
 untidy and as he sat near me, his place and mine 
 were then not easily distinguished. It was a 
 miniature repetition of Morgiana with her door- 
 marks. The historian's absent-mindedness might 
 have been disastrous. The late Lady Donough- 
 more, after taking a long walk with him on the 
 Alps, told me how much she had enjoyed his dis- 
 course, with its abundant and almost continuous 
 flow. During what Sydney Smith would have 
 called his " flashes of silence," he seemed en- 
 grossed, so to say, in his head-in-the-air musing 
 and noontide star-gazing. And thus, whether 
 his talk was active or suspended, his companion 
 felt equally uneasy when he was walking on the 
 mountain-side. 
 
 The historian took me to task for having spoken 
 of Buckle's style as " unformed and diffuse.'' But, 
 on my explaining that the style seemed to me to 
 be limp and even tawdry in some of the rhetorical 
 passages, he admitted that epigrams were not 
 Buckle's strong point. 
 
 Lecky cultivated his epigrammatic faculty with 
 
38 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 energy and success. He kept a notebook, in which 
 he jotted down expressions which had struck him 
 in leisure moments, and which seemed to him tell- 
 ing. He found that, when a pointed phrase of his 
 had made an impression on his reviewers, it was 
 generally one of the weapons, so to say, that he 
 had kept in reserve — one of the ready-prepared 
 epigrams stored up in his Mwcommonplace-book. 
 
 I remarked that Scherer in his Etudes has given 
 an analysis of humour. Lecky, judging (as I in- 
 ferred) from personal acquaintance, told me that 
 Scherer seemed to him utterly without humour. 
 Speaking of Renan, I said that some passages in 
 his writings gave me the impression that he was 
 familiar with English. Lecky replied that he had 
 met him at an evening party in London, and that 
 his knowledge of our language must have been 
 limited, as he did not understand when the servant 
 told him that his carriage was at the door. 
 
 I have referred on p. 319 of Old and Odd 
 Memories to Lecky's anti-Boswellian bias. He 
 carried that bias so far as to say that the risk of 
 being, as it were, mummified in an unfriendly 
 memoir gave " a new terror to death." This iden- 
 tical phrase was addressed by one ex-Chancellor to 
 another in relation to the prospect of his having 
 his Life written by the not too good-natured Lord 
 Campbell. Did Lecky borrow it ? 
 
 He echoed Carlyle's hope that militarism would 
 prove a safeguard against the perils of democracy. 
 Indeed, Carlyle's disciple he reckoned himself to be. 
 
Sm FEANCIS GALTON 39 
 
 premising, however, that Carlyle's mantle did not 
 fall on him as completely as on some other dis- 
 ciples, such as Froude. It may have been partly 
 owing to this cause that he and Froude differed 
 so widely about Ireland, which Froude seemed to 
 regard as a mere thorn in our side. In respect to 
 that irritant or stimulant at close quarters, Lecky 
 once made to me a remark which may be worth 
 recording. I had asked why the Irish, instead of 
 committing outrages, did not urge their grievances 
 with calm reason. He gave a general assent to my 
 not very novel suggestion, and then added, with 
 his giraffe-like bow, lit up by a kind and humor- 
 ous smile : " But have not the Irish learnt long 
 ago what such calm reason is likely to get out of 
 the English Parliament ? " In justice to both the 
 combatants it should be added that Lecky spoke 
 to me of Froude as " a consummate literary artist." 
 Let me sum up by saying that not only was Lecky, 
 like Froude, a consummate master of style, but he 
 was, unlike Froude, a very accurate historian. 
 
 Sir Francis Galton and Heredity 
 
 Mill told me that his father expressed a hope that 
 sooner or later an end would be put to all wars by the 
 simple practice — a practice as old as Ahab's attack 
 on Ramoth Gilead — of " fighting neither with small 
 nor great, save only with the " hostile Commander- 
 in-chief. This wild expectation held by so great 
 a man may serve to keep me in countenance if 
 
40 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 with youthful enthusiasm — calidus juventd Con- 
 sule Russell — I came to regard euthanasia as the 
 destined cure for the worst of human ills. This 
 hope took shape in my plea for that drastic " cure 
 for incurables " which was originally published in 
 the Fortnightly Review in the spring of 1873. It 
 was shortly after the publication of that article 
 that I made the acquaintance of Galton who, I 
 was told, half agreed with me. On my asking 
 him if this was so, he gave me the character- 
 istic answer, " I should say three-quarters." This 
 answer of his has had an abiding interest for me, 
 as it at once opened my eyes to his odd way of 
 expressing himself in terms of arithmetic. A 
 humorous example of this tendency may make my 
 meaning clear. At the close of his life, when he 
 received his knighthood, he explained in his 
 acknowledgment that his state of health prevented 
 him from repairing to London to go through the 
 usual formalities. His plea was of course accepted, 
 and he was, moreover, excused from paying the 
 customary fees. Thereupon, like a born statis- 
 tician, he set himself to calculate how this remis- 
 sion would affect the taxation of the country ; and 
 he came to the conclusion that, on an average, each 
 taxpayer would be impoverished by the value of 
 the fortieth part of a drop of ale. Is there not a 
 fascination in the thought that the lifelong habit 
 had taken such hold of the octogenarian philo- 
 sopher that at the very end he could thus regale 
 himself with an arithmetical puzzle ? The tale is 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 41 
 
 told that in Erewhon, instead of men employing 
 machinery, machines employ " mannery." Well, 
 was not Galton an embryonic Erewhonian — a sort 
 of live calculating machine ? 
 
 Another of his toy-paradoxes may seem a chest- 
 nut to a few of my readers ; but they will bear in 
 mind that the popularity of an anecdote raises a 
 presumption that it deserves to live, and that, in 
 fact, such an epigram as Chestnuts, best nuts would 
 be at least a half-truth. A friend of his relates 
 that, after he had become deaf, a lecture of his 
 was read to an audience in his presence. When 
 it was finished he told the friend that he saw it 
 had been successful. He had observed that, when 
 ladies are not interested, they give way to fidgets, 
 at the average rate of two per minute ; during his 
 lecture the rate had only been two per five minutes. 
 Bacon gives the advice prcBcipere laudando ; 
 Galton practically declared the audience laudare 
 quiescendo. But, if the same lecture had been 
 afterwards delivered amid rustling drapery, would 
 he have been seriously disheartened ? He would 
 certainly have admitted that his rule-of-three 
 solution of every moral enigma {solvitur compu- 
 tando) was trustworthy only if all the contingen- 
 cies were reckoned with ; and, in the case before 
 us, such considerations as the state of the weather, 
 the softness of the seats, the voice of the reader, 
 and the competition of entertainments elsewhere 
 would act on the ladies, and would serve to regulate 
 the ebb or flow of their obstreperous inattention. 
 
42 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 It has been already stated that Galton in the 
 seventies avowed a leaning towards euthanasia. 
 At a much later period he told me that his great 
 kinsman, Charles Darwin, referred sympathetically 
 to euthanasia of a particular form. After remark- 
 ing that incurable madmen often feel an ardent 
 wish to destroy themselves, he added that in such 
 an extreme case Darwin was for allowing small 
 bottles of some poison which was at once deadly 
 and painless to be placed in the asylum, so that 
 the poor wretches might have the remedy within 
 reach. Galton also told me that, even at the time 
 of Darwin's death, the hostility to evolution was 
 so bitter as to leave a doubt whether the Newton 
 of biology, if he had not been honoured with a 
 tomb in the Abbey, would have obtained Christian 
 burial in his own churchyard. 
 
 In another respect, Darwin makes us feel how 
 often a pioneer is without honour in his own neigh- 
 bourhood. A friend asked Darwin's gardener about 
 his master's health, and received the startling 
 reply : " Oh, my poor master has been very sadly. 
 I often wish he had something to do. He moons 
 about in the garden, and I have seen him stand 
 doing nothing before a flower for ten minutes at 
 a time. If he only had something to do I really 
 believe he would be better." This unwitting cari- 
 cature of Darwin suggests a comparison with a like 
 misconceiving of Wordsworth. An old labourer 
 near Eydal, who had often seen the poet, had been 
 struck by his odd way of spouting his verses out- 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 43 
 
 of-doors. When he was thus " booing his pottery " 
 he seemed to the peasant to be quite daft ; but his 
 malady was intermittent, for actually he could 
 sometimes say " Good-morrow, John," just like 
 any one else ! 
 
 Darwin struck Galton much by his cross-examin- 
 ing faculty : " He got very quickly to the bottom 
 of what was in the mind of the person he con- 
 versed with, and to the value of it." Galton had 
 a deep reverence for his kinsman, and he was a 
 thorough evolutionist. But somehow I should 
 hesitate to call him a thorough Darwinian. He 
 did not think that the last word had been spoken 
 as to the laws and processes by which evolution is 
 brought about. Many Darwinians seem to regard 
 all animal and perhaps all vegetable life as having 
 sprung from a single stock. It is as if there was 
 a huge genealogical tree whose branches have 
 overspread the earth and comprise all forms of 
 life. Galton held that there is perhaps, as it 
 were, a grove of smaller genealogical trees. Tyn- 
 dall once told me that, though the attempts to 
 produce spontaneous generation had failed, yet he 
 had no doubt that, if all the laws and other con- 
 ditions which immediately preceded the origin of 
 life could be reproduced, life of the same kind 
 would reappear ; and I heard Herbert Spencer inti- 
 mate a similar opinion. Galton, in like manner, 
 believed that spontaneous generation must have 
 operated in the past, if it does not operate now ; 
 and he further thought that nature may have at 
 
44 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 command several — perhaps very many — moulds 
 through which she can evolve the higher organisms. 
 He held that by such means she seeks to adapt 
 the various living species to their surroundings, 
 and that, when so adapted, they attain what he 
 called a centre of stability which continues un- 
 changed until or unless the conditions of their 
 life change. Not being scientific, I am loth to 
 embark on this inquiry — Ne parva Tyrrhenum 
 per cequor Vela darem. So I will merely state 
 that Galton gave the instance of wingless birds. 
 I am tempted to say that these have no " missing 
 link" to unite them. But I object to that phrase. 
 The use of the term " missing link " for " not- 
 missing link" is a case of lucus a non lucendo 
 with a vengeance. I will therefore remark that, 
 according to Galton, very dissimilar wingless birds 
 have arisen in dilBFerent parts of the world, and 
 that between these no intermediate link has yet 
 been discovered. 
 
 On pp. 212-214 of Old and Odd Memories 
 I have related, on the authority of "a very dis- 
 tinguished man of science," a circumstantial version 
 of the way in which Sir Eichard Owen purloined 
 for dissecting purposes the head of a deceased 
 negro. The man of science, I may now state, was 
 Sir Francis Galton. It may also be mentioned 
 that in one matter this version differs from that 
 which, as I thought and still think, Owen gave to 
 me. Galton told me that the negro died of con- 
 sumption, while my impression was that he had 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 45 
 
 been hanged for murder. Though the latter was 
 the more tragically picturesque variant, I refrained 
 from referring to it even in a footnote, as I thought 
 it just possible that I had misheard Owen. But 
 I have since been assured that Owen's memory 
 sometimes failed him in his old age, and that he 
 even gave this his favourite story in different 
 forms. Whichever is the right version, that of 
 Galton is excellent, and great is my debt of grati- 
 tude to him for it. But to most of my readers he 
 appeals in a different way. He is known to them 
 as one who wished to deal with mankind as a 
 horse-breeder deals with his horses, and, in a word, 
 to improve the race by artificial selection. Of this 
 indefatigable man-breeder some further reminis- 
 cences may be worth recording. 
 
 Galton told me that he had thought of writing 
 a " novelette " — a fable in fact — illustrative of 
 what Herbert Spencer called " animal ethics." 
 An animal congress begins by agreeing that it 
 is the duty of mothers to tend their offspring.. 
 But suddenly the cry of " cuckoo " is raised in 
 protest. Fish also, as a rule, neglect their off- 
 spring. But the stickleback is an exception. The 
 male stickleback fights with bigger fish who would 
 molest his wife when rearing her young. In this 
 fable Galton would have doubtless discussed the 
 strange antipathies which animals sometimes feel 
 on grounds unintelligible to us. We all know 
 that such antipathies are entertained by dogs and 
 parrots ; but Galton referred chiefly to what he 
 
46 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 called " an unclubbable lamb," which did not 
 seem to be especially delicate or unsociably in- 
 clined, but which was boycotted by the rest of 
 the species. 
 
 He was sceptical about many of the alleged 
 cases of animal intelligence. He told a story of 
 an uxorious swan which, having lost his mate, 
 fretted and pined away till, leaving the lake which 
 was now odious to him, he walked to an adjacent 
 villa where, looking through the open door, he 
 saw his stuffed consort. The sight was as great 
 a relief to him as that of Creusa's ghost was to 
 iEneas. He hastened back to the lake ; and, find- 
 ing a comely Lavinia to take Creusa's place, he 
 soon became as fat and well-liking as ever. On 
 my asking Galton whether he believed this anec- 
 dote of the easily consoled widower, he replied 
 with a laugh, " It's probably as true as most of 
 those stories." 
 
 Here is another of his anecdotes. A gamekeeper 
 having told his master that he was troubled with 
 religious doubts and being referred by him to the 
 parson, said that it seemed to him impossible for 
 Samson to have caught 300 foxes. The reverend 
 gentleman assured him that foxes in Palestine 
 are unlike our foxes, being gregarious and easily 
 caught. The explanation served its purpose, and 
 the trustful gamekeeper's churehmanship was re- 
 stored. Fancy if all " Colenso - difficulties," as 
 Jowett once called them, could be thus easily dis- 
 posed of! 
 
SIE FEANCIS GALTON 47 
 
 Of Galton it might be said, as of Enoch Arden, 
 that almost to all things could he turn his hand. 
 It is a signal proof of his versatility that he was 
 consulted by the inventor of the " long-drop " in 
 executions. He gave what aid he could ; but he 
 of course felt that such humane expedients lessen 
 the deterrent^effect of capiFfl"jiunishment. ^ith 
 someBKm^ between a smile and a sigh he ex- 
 claimed : " The worst criminals have the most 
 painless deaths ! " As was said of the clemency 
 of the guillotine : Qa vous fait sauter la Ute et 
 vous ne sentez rien. 
 
 Lord Thring, having been brought, when Parlia- 
 mentary draughtsman, into close personal relations 
 with many of our chief politicians, once told Galton 
 that the ablest of them seemed to him to be Glad- 
 stone, Lowe, and Ayrton ; but he afterwards ex- 
 plained that when he said this he had not been 
 consulted by Disraeli, and that he had come to 
 think that Gladstone and Disraeli were made of 
 different clay from any of the rest. It is perhaps 
 right to add that, as a Parliamentary draughts- 
 man, he saw in disproportionately strong relief 
 certain characteristics of the statesmen who con- 
 sulted him. Thus, his successor, Sir Henry Jenkyns, 
 spoke to me of Mr. Balfour's unrivalled quickness 
 in catching a legal point which could not have 
 been familiar to him ; and in this respect he 
 thought him superior to a highly distinguished 
 Eadical statesman with whom, both politically 
 and philosophically, he had more in common. 
 
48 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 Eenan has said of the author of the Apoca- 
 lypse that, like all Orientals, he had an extrava- 
 gant liking for gold and precious stones. The 
 remark has often reminded me of the gorgeous 
 paraphernalia depicted in Disraeli's novels and of 
 the ostentation which, as a young man, he showed 
 in his dress. Galton called my attention to another 
 peculiarity of his which he took to be an emotional 
 survival inherited from his non-European ancestors. 
 When he was violently attacked in the House of 
 Commons, his face was impassive ; but he could not 
 help moving his feet, as Galton phrased it, "like 
 negroes." Has one not heard that in India a 
 counsel, when cross-examining a native witness 
 whom he suspects of perjury, will sometimes take 
 note whether there is any nervous agitation of his 
 toes? 
 
 Sir Francis was sceptical about some of the com- 
 mon opinions in regard to intellectual or moral 
 qualities being marked by outward and visible 
 characteristics. Thus he had seen some distin- 
 guished painters dining together in the Athen- 
 aeum ; and they did not appear to him to have 
 the tapering fingers which are popularly associated 
 with the artistic temperament. So, again, he had 
 a notion that the qualities betokened by what in 
 England is called the Norman type of countenance 
 are not often such as to fit men for the wear and 
 tear of modern life. He has somewhere mentioned 
 that, in travelling from Vienna to Berlin, he found 
 it painful to pass from the handsome countenances 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 49 
 
 of tlie Austrians to the less attractive features of 
 the North Germans ; and yet, from the standpoint 
 of our modern ideals, salvation is not with the 
 Austrians but with the Prussians. In talking the 
 matter over with me, he said that when looking 
 at the statues of our chief English worthies, he 
 had paid special attention to their noses ; and 
 the only statues that he had remarked as having 
 Norman noses were those of Chatham, Wellington, 
 and the Napiers. But, after all, is it the case that 
 aquiline noses are in a manner the foes of sustained 
 work of a high order ? Columbus had such a nose ; 
 and have not those (literal) figureheads been con- 
 spicuous in many other intellectual heroes ? Dr. 
 Arnold shared Mr. Shandy's belief in big noses. 
 Napoleon certainly had a big and a fine one, 
 though his was not of that high-bridged kind that 
 at Harrow would have been called a beak. 
 
 From what has been said it might be thought 
 that, in Galton's opinion, a good deal may be 
 inferred from physiognomy, though the inferences 
 commonly drawn from it are sometimes incorrect. 
 But there were occasions when he inclined to the 
 Shakespearean view that 
 
 " there's no art. 
 To find the mind's construction in the face." 
 
 In support of this latter thesis he mentioned that 
 Napoleon was unable to guess at any one's char- 
 acter from his appearance, but that, " if he talked 
 to a man for ten minutes, he could turn him inside 
 
50 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 out." Another fact adduced by him for the same 
 purpose is very curious. He had heard of twins 
 whose faces were so like that their own family 
 often did not know them apart, but whose char- 
 acters were so opposed that, even in childhood, 
 one was a little fiend while the other was a little 
 angel. The former, taking advantage of the like- 
 ness, used to do naughty things merely that his 
 brother might be punished, whereas the latter, a 
 willing scapegoat, bore the vicarious chastisement 
 without a murmur. One wonders whether, with 
 advancing years, their countenances would not 
 show signs of their divergent characters ; and also 
 whether the character of the angelic twin would 
 not grow weaker and weaker — whether he would 
 not in a manner become unrighteous through 
 being righteous overmuch. If Michael had been 
 angelic on this wise, how could he have smitten 
 the dragon ? 
 
 The contrast between the unlikeminded twins 
 suggests to me another thought. It brings to my 
 memory Horace Walpole's famous and far-pene- 
 trating apophthegm that " the world is a comedy to 
 those who think." I once heard Galton relate the 
 incident to a cultivated lady ; and she, though she 
 was not usually squeamish, yet, after hearing 
 about the bad twin, naturally exclaimed, " How 
 dreadful ! " Galton, on the other hand, told the 
 whole story with that amused equanimity which 
 the French call " ironie " and which the English 
 might call " world-humour." He held the now 
 
Sm FEANCIS GALTON 51 
 
 received opinion that twins, when not more like 
 each other than ordinary brothers, are generally 
 more unlike. And thus the bad twin was what 
 Bacon would have called an " error of Nature." 
 He had to pay for his brother's goodness. It was 
 as if Nature, after using too much of her best 
 phosphorus in fashioning the brain and nerves of 
 the good twin, had to fall back on the leavings for 
 the construction of the brother. In fact, the inci- 
 dent was to Galton at once an episode in the 
 human comedy and an object-lesson in moral 
 pathology. By taking such a view he showed 
 that his leanings were towards Necessarianism. 
 Indeed, on my once asking him what he thought 
 of Free-will, he answered, " I can't understand 
 any one believing in Free-will ; it would make the 
 world a chaos." This is sometimes thought to be 
 a thoroughly enervating doctrine ; but in fact it is 
 less depressing than it seems. Such fatalists as 
 Zeno and Chrysippus would have admitted that 
 Fate often exposes a man to frightful temptations ; 
 but they would have added that Fate ordains that 
 he ought to struggle against them, and that, if he 
 does not so struggle, he ought to be punished. 
 " Necessity," Jowett said to me, " when rightly 
 understood, remains a sort of theory in the back- 
 ground, and one acts in much the same way 
 whether one believes in it or not." Perhaps a 
 Necessarian would be especially drawn to the 
 parable of the talents, because it places in strong 
 relief the great difference between the number of 
 
52 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 talents entrusted to the different servants ; but he 
 would insist that the combination of the energy 
 and the skill to use those talents aright is itself a 
 natural endowment — is, in fact, as much a talent 
 as the talents commonly so-called. So far all 
 Necessarians would go ; but Galton went further. 
 He reduced the self-improving faculty to a mini- 
 mum. I have formerly insisted that the three 
 modern Fates are Heredity, Education, Environ- 
 ment. Of these three Galton held the first to be 
 far more potent than the other two put together. 
 Shortly before his death he told me that Nature 
 was proved — I know not how — to have five or 
 six times as much influence on the formation of 
 character as Nurture ; and from his occasional way 
 of speaking I should have expected him to say, 
 not six times, but sixty times six. In fact. Nature 
 before Nurture may be taken as his oft-repeated 
 watchword — I had almost said as his paradoxology. 
 He maintained, perhaps truly, that a judge's son 
 has five hundred times as much chance of success 
 in life as an ordinary mortal. Most men would 
 regard this advantage as derived (to say nothing 
 of nepotism) chiefly from his associating with his 
 father and his father's friends and receiving a 
 first-rate education ; but Galton ascribed it mainly 
 to heredity. So, again, Galton, like the rest of 
 us, was bewildered by the galaxy of genius which 
 shone forth at Athens during the century before 
 the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, or, as 
 perhaps he should have said, during the century 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 53 
 
 and a half between Marathon and Chseronea. But 
 he would surely have stood almost alone in con- 
 cluding that the average Athenian of that time 
 was as superior in innate ability to the average 
 Englishman of to-day as the Englishman of to-day 
 is to a negro. Truly he might have taken for his 
 motto : " Pedigree distant and pedigree near — all 
 is pedigree." This is indeed cold comfort. The 
 sin of having mischosen our forefathers has neither 
 remission nor remedy, and will exact the uttermost 
 farthing of penalty even beyond the third or fourth 
 generation. To cope with the diiBculty thus 
 indicated, Galton has recourse to eugenics. But 
 assuredly this scientific man-breeding is but a 
 sorry palliative. As Romney Leigh says : 
 
 " It had not much 
 Consoled the race of mastodons to know, 
 Before they went to fossil, that anon 
 Their place would quicken with the elephant : 
 They were not elephants but mastodons." 
 
 It would be hard to expect that an invalid by 
 inheritance, as we may call him, would so love his 
 unborn neighbours as himself that he would, for 
 their sake, willingly aggravate his natural disad- 
 vantages by lifelong celibacy. I once heard Jowett 
 comment on the connubial anomalies which Plato 
 deemed necessary to a perfect commonwealth, by 
 saying, " He forgot nothing, except human nature." 
 A similar thought is suggested when I remember 
 how Galton insisted that the great man-improver 
 is the man-breeder, and how, in a word, he saw 
 
54 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 heredity in everything "as Malebranche saw all 
 things in God." Certainly, if his theories were 
 ever to be carried out logically, hereditary ailments 
 could hardly find less sympathy in the Platonic 
 than in the Caltonic Eepublic. After thus com- 
 menting on what seems to me the crotchet of my 
 genial, large-minded and accomplished friend, I 
 will add a word of explanation. His shortcomings 
 were only those of a specialist ; and, with the rapid 
 accumulation of knowledge, those shortcomings 
 are necessarily on the increase. The French 
 maxim " II faut soufirir pour 6tre belle " may be 
 capped with such a one as " II faut payer pour 
 6tre sp^cialiste." To specialise on one topic is 
 often to be hindered from even generalising (if 
 the word may be so used) on other topics. Every 
 microscope or telescope magnifies the field of 
 vision by narrowing it. But, though Galton may 
 have over-ridden his hereditarian hobby, he knew 
 that he sometimes had to deal with, so to speak, 
 heredity inverted. He had observed that, if men 
 of extreme ability have a wholly disproportionate 
 number of able sons, they have sometimes a rather 
 disproportionate number of sons distinctly below 
 par. He alluded to two or three eminent men of 
 science to whom this latter remark would apply. 
 He knew also that it could hardly fail to be still 
 more applicable to men of genius, commonly so 
 called — to men richly endowed with the artistic 
 temperament. Indeed, he himself published a statis- 
 tical table showing that — deaths by violence being 
 
SIE FRANCIS GALTON 55 
 
 excluded — artists share with the royal family the 
 melancholy distinction of being the most short- 
 lived body of educated men. He came at last to 
 look upon genius with an odd sort of suspicion ; 
 I have even been told that, if he had repub- 
 lished his book on Hereditary Genius he might 
 have substituted the title of Hereditary Talent. 
 " Great geniuses," says Jowett, " often seem to 
 have uncontrollable fits of intellectual and moral 
 energy, called forth by occasion or necessity, and 
 then to sink back in a kind of exhaustion." Here 
 are indicated the waywardness and the fragility 
 of genius on which Galton looked with a sort of 
 dread. He once said to me paradoxically about 
 Napoleon that he was " above morality," by which 
 he doubtless meant no more than Rochefoucauld 
 meant by saying " II n'appartient qu'aux grands 
 hommes d'avoir de grands defauts." I gathered 
 from conversations with him that his view and 
 mine on this matter were identical ; and, as the 
 subject seems to me important in itself, and espe- 
 cially so in relation to his philosophy, I will set it 
 forth more fully, taking Byron as my object-lesson. 
 But I must first make an admission — Jowett once 
 told me that he looked on Byron as altogether " a 
 finer man than Shelley " ^ ; and it is possible that, 
 partly as a disciple of Jowett, and partly perhaps 
 
 ' I am assured that Lord Jolm Eussell, being consulted by Moore 
 as to whether he should write the Life of Byron, advised him to do 
 so by all means, but on no account to write that of Shelley, for 
 whose character and career he seems, like Jowett, to have felt a 
 somewhat extravagant dislike. 
 
56 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 as an old Harrovian, I have come to look on 
 Byron's faults with an indulgence which some may 
 think excessive. At all events, without taking 
 any part in the unsavoury inquiry into the " Byron 
 mystery," I will call attention to the general and 
 praiseworthy inclination to accept the verdict of 
 " not proven " — an acceptance which almost in- 
 volves the principle that De mortuis illustrihus 
 nil nisi optimum, or at any rate that, in such cases, 
 De non demonstratis et de non existentihus eadem 
 est ratio. It might of course be contended that 
 great men should be judged by an exceptionally 
 high standard, seeing that to whom much is 
 given, of them shall much be required ; but, in 
 fact, most of us are agreed to be to their faults a 
 little blind. One cause of this indulgence is given 
 by Macaulay : 
 
 " There is scarcely any delusion which has a better claim 
 to be indulgently treated than that under the influence of 
 which a man ascribes every moral excellence to those who 
 have left imperishable monuments of their genius. . . . 
 We find it difficult to think well of those by whom we are 
 thwarted or depressed ; and we are ready to admit every 
 excuse for the vices of those who are useful or agreeable to 
 us. Hence it is that the moral character of a man eminent 
 in letters or in the fine arts is treated, often by contem- 
 poraries, almost always by posterity, with extraordinary 
 tenderness. . . . The genius of Sallust is still with us. But 
 the Numidians whom he plundered, and the unfortunate 
 husbands who caught him in their houses at unseasonable 
 hours, are forgotten. We suffer ourselves to be delighted 
 by the keenness of Clarendon's observation, and by the sober 
 majesty of his style, till we forget the oppressor and the 
 
SIR FEANCIS GALTON 57 
 
 bigot in the historian. Falstaff and Tom Jones have sur- 
 vived the gamekeepers whom Shakespeare cudgelled, and the 
 landladies whom Fielding bilked." 
 
 Thus far, as Macaulay hints, the quasi-acquittal 
 of sinners of genius is due to a sort of bribery. 
 They win the favour of the judges by whom they 
 are to be tried ; or, to use a harsh vulgarism, they 
 gain the votes by " greasing the palms " of pos- 
 terity. Goethe sympathetically described "Rey- 
 nard the Fox" as the Weltbibel. Might not the 
 world-Biblical cynic who called " Thou shalt not 
 be found out" the eleventh commandment have 
 carried his perilous half-truth a step further by 
 giving the name of the twelfth commandment to 
 " Thou shalt be successful " ? Witness the social 
 homage paid to the late Jezebel of China and the 
 diplomatic intercourse with the Jehu of Belgrade. 
 In palliation of such worship of success, Froude has 
 laid down the broad paradox that " the capable 
 man is the man to be admired " ; and certainly 
 the capable men most entitled to such admiration 
 or indulgence are those who may be styled posthu- 
 mously and lastingly capable — the possessors of 
 great artistic or literary genius (Opera illorum 
 sequuntur illos). 
 
 Perhaps, too, there is a reason why nowadays 
 salient individuality is acquiring a fancy price. 
 Even strong Liberals will sometimes plead guilty 
 to a fear that, under the dead -levelling sway of 
 Socialism, our posterity may be doomed, like 
 Tithonus and the bewitched Merlin, to languish 
 
58 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 for ever in innocuous decrepitude. Here with 
 a vengeance would be "the coming slavery" to 
 convention which Herbert Spencer declared to be 
 visibly approaching and to be steadily quickening 
 its pace. In the nearing view of such an Eden 
 run to seed, such a lubberland of lotus-eaters, who 
 would not pine for originality though alloyed with 
 eccentricity, or even with more serious defects? 
 And this brings me to my main point : indulgence 
 is due to the defects of genius — that mode of 
 originality raised to the highest power — because 
 of its abnormal sensitiveness. A great writer, 
 after referring to Peel's fatal accident, adds that 
 " three days he lingered in all the pain which the 
 quick nerves of genius can endure." It was in 
 view of such facts that I have contended above 
 that genius tends to wear out the organism, " and 
 that, like consumption, it is sometimes a beautiful 
 disease." I once asked Galton why it is that 
 great genius is so seldom transmitted from father 
 to son. He replied that a man on whose genius 
 fame has set its seal is bound to have had two 
 very different qualities. He must have blended 
 the emotional temperament of the artist with 
 the wakeful and self-regarding prudence which, 
 according to Bacon, is the chief factor of " For- 
 tune " ; and the union of such opposites, rare in 
 itself, is yet more rarely inherited. Carrying out 
 that reasoning, we may add that the self-expansion 
 of the artist does not easily fit in with the self- 
 control of the good citizen. At this point I am 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 59 
 
 glad to appeal to the authority of Jenny Lind, | 
 in whom genius and goodness were so signally 
 combined. In special reference to Byron, she 
 told an able friend of mine that the higher the 
 organisation, the more complex is the mechanism, 
 and the more apt will it be to get out of order. It 
 would perhaps be a misleading metaphor to say 
 that the brain, when overcharged, stunts the 
 heart ; but it is at any rate true that genius 
 not indeed covereth, but explaineth, the multi- 
 tude of sins. In this relation my attention has 
 been called to the translation of an extract from 
 Schopenhauer, which is pitched in the key of 
 Goethe's " The stronger the light, the deeper 
 the shade," and of Shakespeare's " Most subject 
 is the fattest soil to weeds." After saying that 
 certain classes of men have peculiar temptations, 
 the high priest of pessimism goes on : 
 
 " Especially is this the case when the intellect is developed 
 to an abnormal degree of strength and superiority, so as to 
 be out of all proportion to the will, a condition which is the 
 essence of real genius ; the intellect is then not only more 
 than enough for the needs and aims of life, it is absolutely 
 prejudicial to them. The result is that, in youth, excessive 
 energy in grasping the objective world, accompanied by a 
 vivid imagination and a total lack of experience, makes the 
 mind susceptible and an easy prey to extravagant ideas, nay, 
 even to chimseras ; and this issues in an eccentric and phan- 
 tastic character. And when, in later years, this state of 
 mind yields and passes away under the teaching of experi- 
 ence, still the genius never feels himself at home in the 
 common world of every day and the ordinary business of 
 life ; he will never take his place in it, or accommodate him- 
 
60 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 self to it as accurately as the person of normal intellect ; he 
 will be much more likely to make curious mistakes. For the 
 ordinary mind feels itself so completely at home in the narrow 
 circle of its ideas and views of the world that no one can get 
 the better of it in that sphere ; its faculties remain true to 
 their own original purpose, viz. to promote the service of the 
 will, it devotes itself steadfastly to this end and abjures extra- 
 vagant aims. The genius, on the other hand, is at bottom a 
 monsfrum per exeessum.'' 
 
 Is not this thesis, after all, identical with that 
 which Tennyson, with appropriate burlesque, has 
 ascribed to the hero of "Maud" ? — 
 
 " The man of science himself is fonder of glory, and vain, 
 An eye well-practised in nature, a spirit bounded and poor ; 
 The passionate heart of the poet is whirl'd into folly and 
 vice." 
 
 We all know that Byron, after hearing of Sheri- 
 dan's death, first paid a fitting tribute to the great 
 qualities of his fellow old-Harrovian, and then 
 added : " Alas, poor human nature ! " Might not 
 that conclusion have been thus pathetically and 
 self-consciously adapted : " Alas for the persistent 
 and far-reaching transgressions of genius ? " 
 
 It was characteristic of Galton that he took his 
 eugenics with him into politics. He is well known 
 to have thought the Peerage a disastrous institu- 
 tion. It is natural that Peers, present or prospec- 
 tive, should often marry heiresses. Great heiresses, 
 being nearly always brotherless and often sisterless, 
 have commonly sprung from a sterile race. The 
 sterile tendency is apt to be inherited by their 
 
SIR FRANCIS G ALTON 61 
 
 children ; and thus it has come about that so 
 many of our fine old stocks have died off. 
 
 Few changes that have occurred during my life- 
 time have struck me more than the strong flow 
 followed by the strong ebb of the tide of opinion 
 in regard to Malthusianism. In my youth Mill 
 vehemently denounced the rearing of large families, 
 which he compared to " drunkenness and other 
 forms of excess " ; whereas lately Mr. Roosevelt 
 has been preaching homilies against voluntary 
 sterility. I talked the question over with Galton, 
 who gave me from memory some curious statistics. 
 Mill had especially complained of the large families 
 of the upper classes, including the clergy. Galton 
 told me that the change in this matter began about 
 1875. Agricultural depression at that time began 
 to make itself felt, with the result that the gentry 
 and the clergy avoided the expensive luxury of 
 large families. In those classes the average num- 
 ber of children to a marriage is now between two 
 and three ; small families have also become the 
 rule in the middle classes, including the prosperous 
 artisans. But the lowest class has on an average 
 five to a marriage ; and the untoward fecundity is 
 especially noteworthy among the feeble-minded. 
 In the United States a well-to-do couple averages 
 only one or two children. The population of 
 Russia, on the other hand, increases almost 50 
 per cent, in ten years, and more than doubles in 
 twenty. This rapid increase has followed from 
 the emancipation of the serfs, and especially 
 
62 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 from the improvement in the condition of the 
 women of the lower classes. 
 
 The fecundity of drunkards seems to be scarcely- 
 less than that of the feeble-minded. Inebriate 
 mothers, Galton assured me, often have nine 
 children. But he did not regard all children of 
 drunkards as great objects of pity. The children 
 of hereditary drunkards, indeed, he pitied from his 
 heart ; from their birth, he said, " these poor 
 things are washed out, and have no chance " ; but 
 he added that the habit of intoxication is some- 
 times acquired by superior men with overstrained 
 nerves, and these may be the fathers of (intel- 
 lectually) superior children. To the deteriorating 
 effect of converse with inebriate parents he made 
 no reference. A sample was thus given of his 
 eugenetic point of view to which I will return 
 presently. 
 
 I spoke to Galton with regret of the impending 
 extinction of the hereditary element in our Upper 
 Chamber. Under the Orleans Monarchy, the 
 Second Chamber contained many of the ablest 
 men in France ; yet it did not command the 
 influence which was then enjoyed by our House 
 of Lords. Also the hereditary principle is still 
 recognised in our Monarchy. To such reasoning 
 Galton replied that I was confounding heredity 
 with primogeniture. In reference to this latter 
 principle he remarked that the first-born of a 
 family is seldom up to the average in strength 
 either physical or intellectual ; on the other hand, 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 63 
 
 no doubt, children born late in life, as tbe phrase 
 goes, are often wanting in vigour ; it is about the 
 third son — would it not be the third child? — 
 from whom most is to be expected. By the way, 
 he gave me a strange account, which I have not 
 verified, of the succession to the throne in Uganda. 
 When a king dies, his children are carefully ex- 
 amined by the doctors and other wise men. The 
 " best and meetest " of them — to employ Jehu's 
 startlingly eugenetic phrase — is'then placed on the 
 throne ; and the rest are disposed of as drastically 
 as Jehu eventually disposed of the sons of Ahab. 
 Whatever we may think of this summary precau- 
 tion against civil war, we must admit that it is 
 founded on the principle, not of primogeniture, but 
 of optimogeniture — that is, of " aristocracy " in its 
 etymological sense. In various ways Galton made 
 me feel that he surveyed politics from the philo- 
 sophic standpoint. We have seen that he was 
 certainly a humourist ; and of the philosophic 
 humourist Scherer has said, " II s'amuse de 
 I'humanit^, mais sans amertume." In dealing 
 with the tragico- comic side of things, Galton 
 was drawn rather to its humorous than to its 
 tragic aspect. He was himself a Liberal Unionist. 
 But he seems to have regarded the triumph of 
 democracy as hestimmt in Gottes (or perhaps in 
 Teufels) Rath ; and he could not feel that ani- 
 mosity towards the Radical chiefs which the 
 Conservative Philistine pours forth with such 
 wearisome iteration. If our modern Irreconcil- 
 
64 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 ables, like those who disputed with Moses, were 
 swallowed up by an earthquake, there would soon 
 be others to take their place. Truly might Galton 
 have thus adapted Virgil : 
 
 " Non mihi Cambrensis vox detestanda Georgi, 
 Culpandusve Asquith ; divom inclementia, divom, 
 Ha3 evertit opes sternitque a culmine regnum." 
 
 It was, according to Galton, into the form of 
 an angel of light that the " inclement " fates (or 
 fiends) were transfigured. He thought that we 
 cannot now " bear democracy " ; we are too much 
 weakened by humanitarianism which has so much 
 " petted the invalids " — ^that is, which has not only 
 kept them alive, but allowed them to marry. In 
 view of the well-known cases of families more or 
 less mentally afflicted, some of whose members 
 have married, I asked him whether he thought 
 that eugenics had made much progress. He re- 
 plied that something is likely to be done towards 
 restraining the marriage of the feeble-minded. 
 But was the eugenetic seed likely to bear such 
 fruit as to give him confidence in the ultimate 
 improvement of our posterity ? He seemed very 
 doubtful on this point, though it is possible that 
 his trumpet on different occasions may have given 
 a different sound. After all, Tennyson, though 
 during his long career science had made such 
 huge strides, was less convinced that " the 
 world is more and more" when he wrote the 
 second " Locksley Hall " than when he wrote the 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 65 
 
 first. In relation to progress, Galton remarked 
 tlaat the yellow races have good brains, and that 
 the Chinese, if only they can shake off the burden 
 of " their abominable classics," may rise to great 
 achievements. Other philosophers, like the late 
 Mr. Charles Pearson, have warned us that a 
 yellow epidemic — a sort of world-wide jaundice — 
 may morally discolour our descendants. Galton, 
 however, seemed not fearful of a yellow peril, but 
 hopeful of a yellow restorative. But whence, after 
 all, arose his forebodings as to the future of the 
 white races ? They were of course connected with 
 the obscure and far-reaching question as to the 
 causes of national decline. One of those causes 
 may be that, in old countries with a rich upper 
 class, some members of that class are apt to spread 
 the infection of humanitarian effeminac y, while 
 others will have overlearned the half-truth that 
 all is vanity. But whatever the cause or causes 
 of such decline may be, the fact can hardly be dis- 
 puted. It seems certain that, in going through the 
 too familiar round of growth, maturity and decay, 
 nations are formed on the pattern of individuals, 
 so that, in this respect, Ethnology is Anthropology 
 writ large. But, granting that the sad truth indi- 
 cated by the formula Apres Rome, Byzance has, 
 not only a general, but a universal application, we 
 still encounter a grave difficulty. The civilisation 
 of China is older than ours, so that if our European 
 races are aged, that of China must be decrepit ; 
 why then should the veterans fear to be ousted 
 
66 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 by the dotards ? Without pausing to ask whether 
 on an ailing nation, as on an ailing individual, 
 change of air and scene may have a revivifying 
 effect, a disciple of Galton might tentatively put 
 in a plea for him. May not the European nations 
 have, as it were, lived too fast for longevity ? If 
 fifty years of Europe are better than a cycle of 
 Cathay, they may also have been more exhaust- 
 ing. Such a hypothesis would gain support from 
 what, according to Max Miiiler, befell the two 
 classical languages of antiquity : they paid for 
 temporary splendours by premature decay. 
 
 It may well be that Galton's ready acquiescence 
 in Yellow supremacy had in it a touch of conscious 
 exaggeration ; but he certainly was not speaking 
 in mere jest. Jowett also thought that China, 
 with her swarming multitudes, may one day 
 through Western instruction become a standing 
 menace to her instructors ; but the menace was 
 regarded by him with patriotic dread. Is Galton 
 to be censured if a change which may be brutally 
 designated by the formula Pereat Europa, jloreat 
 Humanitas left him comparatively unmoved ? To 
 this I will reply that, in Mark Pattison's opinion, 
 a narrow patriotism will, at least among philo- 
 sophers, be gradually merged in a cosmic philan- 
 thropy. Might it not be argued that in specu- 
 lating on a contingency which at the very earliest 
 may occur — 
 
 "Not in our days nor in our children's days,'' 
 
 we should beware of limiting our sympathies 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 67 
 
 exclusively to our native land and our own de- 
 scendants ? To put the case of a social cataclysm 
 far less subversive and less improbable than that 
 conceived by Galton, we could bear with unshaken 
 nerves to be told that haply, in a century or two, 
 Winnipeg will have become the political as con- 
 trasted with the traditional and, as it were, senti- 
 mental capital of our Empire — will, in fact, be 
 our St. Petersburg, while London will be only our 
 Moscow. At any rate, if in Elysium such Pagans 
 as Epictetus or the Antonines could be made aware 
 of the course of history, they would assuredly 
 think it a less evil that the torch of GrjBco-Roman 
 civilisation should be kept alight by barbarous 
 conquerors and a detested creed {exitiabilis 
 swperstitio) than that it should be altogether 
 extinguished.^ 
 
 The Pale Cast of Thought. — Many years ago 
 I was startled and shocked by a distinguished 
 moralist who spoke of Galton as " an overgrown 
 baby." The phrase of course had reference to 
 Galton's belief in the magic of eugenics. But its 
 disdainful tone serves to mark the antipathy 
 between the self-effacing stoic and the man-breed- 
 ing anthropologist. My meaning may be illus- 
 trated by a remark of Paul Bourget. When 
 
 * Mill somewhere touches on the melancholy and mysterious 
 break-up of the Grseco-Eoman civilisation, and adds that Christi- 
 anity came just in time to keep arts and letters from perishing, and 
 the human race from sinking back into a perhaps endless night. 
 
68 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 conversing with an American lady who had worked 
 hard for the good of the negroes, he vainly tried 
 to convince her of their innate and incurable 
 limitations : " Je sentais dans sa voix le petit 
 fr^missement de malaise, presque de colore que 
 r^vidence des fatalites physiologiques inflige aux 
 S,mes d'ap6tre." Another incident may further 
 illustrate this point. I told Galton that in society 
 I had found Mill more indulgent to conventional 
 morality or, as the late Lord Frederick Cavendish 
 phrased it, " more like the rest of the world " than 
 I should have gathered from his writings. Galton 
 replied that there seemed to him to be always a 
 " sub-acid flavour " in Milk There was certainly 
 a super-acid flavour in Goldwin Smith. These 
 two stoical moralists took the world as it ought to 
 be ; Galton took it as it is. When some grievous 
 sin had been committed, those stoical moralists 
 were disposed to ask how the sinner could have 
 acted as he did ; Galton would rather have asked 
 how he came to act as he did. And thus we see 
 what Renan meant by saying that the typical 
 moralist has both merits and defects which the 
 typical philosopher has not. It has been formerly 
 mentioned that Gladstone spoke to me of Mill 
 as "the saint of rationalism." The poet Clough 
 might perhaps be described as the saint of cyni- 
 cism. Walter Bagehot, after saying that cynicism 
 is generally thought to imply ill-nature, and that 
 Clough was very good-natured, goes on to explain 
 that his salient quality was a " pleasant cynicism." 
 
Sm FRANCIS GALTON 69 
 
 Clough is now almost forgotten ; but Arthur 
 Stanley spoke of him to me as the " Rugby 
 genius," and Matthew Arnold wrote to me, " I 
 was glad to find you quoting Clough ; some very 
 little thing more in him, and he would have had 
 all the public quoting him." In Old and Odd 
 Memories (p. 156), some lines are quoted which 
 illustrate his cynical side. Here is a stanza 
 which he puts into the mouth of the Spirit of the 
 World : 
 
 " This world is very odd, we see, 
 We do not compreliend it ; 
 But in one fact we all agree, 
 
 God won't, and we eaw'f mend it." 
 
 But how did this pupil of Dr. Arnold come by his 
 cynical side ? The fact is partly explained by 
 Froude, who says that he himself and Clough at 
 one time felt scruples about living like gentlemen 
 in England, and thought of migrating to Australia. 
 Happily they both gave up this design. But the 
 state of mind which prompted it left permanent, 
 though different, traces on their characters. 
 George Eliot was impressed by the thought that 
 a hero or saint who degenerates into a man of 
 the world always strikes onlookers with disap- 
 pointment. This is especially the case if the angel 
 with clipped wings seems unaware of the clipping 
 process. Thus Froude, whose genius was flecked 
 with self-deception, to the last believed himself to 
 be an Idealist ; but, after he had become an un- 
 conscious per-(or con-) vert to the conventional 
 
70 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 standard, it was manifest that his Idealism was 
 out of joint. On the other hand, the charm of 
 Clough, who did not thus deceive himself, is 
 heightened by his Idealism seasoned with " pleasant 
 cynicism " or, as I should say, with world-humour. 
 This last description might be applied to the ethical 
 creed of Mark Pattison, when he was in good 
 health ; but, alas, his Idealism turned sour when 
 his liver was unruly ! Pattison, with whom I had 
 an intimate friendship, generally showed me his 
 best side ; and I have tried to bring out that side 
 in my Recollections of him. Galton told me 
 that he felt a strong sympathy with many of 
 Pattison's characteristic sayings as I reported 
 them ; and thus in some respects that introspec- 
 tive anthropologist might be roughly described 
 as Pattison plus eugenics. At any rate, he, like 
 Pattison, was " haunted by the ideal and baffled 
 by philosophic perplexities." One perplexity, in 
 particular, disturbed or amused him. It has been 
 already mentioned that Mill, when pressed by 
 logic, pronounced that it is our duty to aim at 
 the utmost happiness, not of men only, but of all 
 sentient beings ; and some of us think that, while 
 thus seeking to strengthen, he has really over- 
 weighted the Utilitarian fabric : " May it not be 
 argued that, from the philozoic point of view, the 
 existence of the human race is altogether a mishap ? 
 Does the Unconstitutional Monarchy of Man minis- 
 ter to ' the greatest happiness of the greatest 
 number' of sentient beings (including earwigs 
 
SIE FKANCIS GALTON 71 
 
 and animalcules) ? " ^ The doubt here indicated 
 was shared by Gal ton, who quaintly said, "A gnat 
 bites me, and I kill it. But whether I suflfer most 
 from being bitten or the gnat from being crushed, 
 I have no notion." In such a logico-comic inquiry, 
 a strong case might be made out against the use 
 of insecticide powder, whereby, to avert a slight 
 inconvenience from ourselves, a multitude of our 
 fellow sentient beings is pitilessly massacred ! 
 The gist of the whole matter was put into a 
 single sentence by my old friend, the late Provost 
 of Oriel (D. B. Monro) : " Of course the real ex- 
 planation of the way in which we lord it over the 
 lower animals is that we think so much less of 
 their pleasure and pain than of our own" Does 
 not this mean that our right over them is founded 
 on might ? 
 
 Such reasoning makes the ground seem to totter 
 beneath us, and recalls the admonition of the 
 French moralist, " Nous cotoyons I'ablme ; gare 
 au vertige ! " It brings us to such a frame of 
 mind as prompted the Aristophanic foreboding 
 Aji/o? /SacriXevei top At" e^eXijXaKtoy, a play upon 
 words which may be paraphrased by saying — 
 " The deuce reigns, having turned out Zeus." It 
 was in view of such a moral cataclysm that Jowett 
 used to warn his disciples " not to fall under the 
 dominion of logic." But perhaps, after all, the 
 
 1 Stones of Stwmhling, p. 166. In the article from which this is 
 quoted I have tried to give a full and sympathetic account of Mark 
 Pattison's point of view. 
 
72 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 temporary Bubjection to that dominion, however 
 painful, is not profitless. Has not Goethe said of 
 the Philistine to whom the ethical path seems easy 
 and smooth : " He knows not you, ye Heavenly 
 Powers " ? And, in a like spirit, we may ask, 
 Was Christian the worse for having passed through 
 the Slough of Despond ? 
 
 In illustration of the points raised above, 
 two passages may be worth quoting. The first 
 is a warning against overstimulated and preco- 
 cious saintliness. "For the deadliest of all wet 
 blankets," says Lord Morley, " give me a 
 middle-aged man who has been most of a 
 visionary in his youth." The other passage is 
 an apology for self - defensive cynicism and is 
 remarkable as coming from that most anti- 
 cynical writer, E. L. Stevenson : "I hate cyni- 
 cism a great deal worse than I do the devU ; 
 unless perhaps the two are the same thing. 
 And yet 'tis a good tonic, .... positively neces- 
 sary to life in cases of advanced sensibility." In 
 the words here italicised, a form of cynicism is 
 sanctioned as (almost literally) the moralist's 
 life-preserver or, to speak more seriously, as 
 Stoicism run to seed. In other words, cynicism 
 is tolerable only when it is either the mask or 
 the ghost of idealism. To vary the illustration, 
 a moralist who is at once " righteous overmuch " 
 and " overwise " may be likened to a man who 
 gazes at a spherical mirror or at the back of a 
 spoon : nothing appears to him in right propor- 
 
SIR FRANCIS GALTON 73 
 
 tion, and he himself in particular looks out of 
 shape and hideous. Of such an optical illusion, 
 so to call it, is not a " pleasant cynicism " the 
 only corrective ? 
 
 Of our English arch-cynics Bacon is the most 
 distinguished and, perhaps for that reason, the 
 writer whose cynicism is most condoned. His 
 aphorisms are often cynical ; yet Lord Morley, 
 referring to him as an aphorist, calls him " mag- 
 nificent and immortal." To a like efiiect Mr. 
 Gladstone went the length of saying, "It is only 
 with great hesitation that I should diflfer from 
 anything that Bacon says in those Essays of 
 his." ^ Yet, cynical though he was, never did the 
 great Essayist write about cynicism in the abstract ; 
 and, if he had, he would have dealt with the sub- 
 ject and perhaps have used the word in a way 
 which we should now find perplexing. One cause 
 of this difi"erence between him and us is to be 
 found in the rise and rapid growth of evolution. 
 On the day when the ashes of Darwin made the 
 holy precincts of Westminster Abbey holier, the 
 outcry against him was in a manner buried in his 
 tomb. Evolution is now the order of the day. 
 Among the most enlightened Christians, lay and 
 clerical, its prevalence has modified the extreme 
 view of the corruption of human nature. Religious 
 
 * It should be mentioned that he said this at the end of his life ; 
 and I have reason to believe that at that time his memory, like his 
 voice as an orator, though clear and strong under excitement, was 
 not generally what it had been in his prime. 
 
74 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 philosophers now, ofteii unconsciously, regard the 
 present condition of man, not with shame, but 
 with gratitude. They note that he is so much 
 higher than the gorillas rather than that he is a 
 little — perhaps more than a little — lower than the 
 angels. On the other hand, no contemporary of 
 Bacon dared to gainsay the doctrine of human 
 depravity in its extremest shape. Without pur- 
 suing this inquiry further, I will plead guilty to 
 having been haunted by a futile regret that our 
 Essayist, with his inimitable style, was not such 
 a magician as to unite the merits of two far-off 
 generations, and to clothe the Victorian spirit in 
 Elizabethan attire. Feeling that regret so strongly, 
 I made the ambitious effort to bring Bacon up to 
 date {non ita certandi cupidv^ quam propter 
 amorem) and, in a word, to put post-Baconian 
 matter into a quasi-Baconian form. In the hope 
 of thus placing an old problem (or theorem) in a 
 new light, my halting imitation of Bacon is sub- 
 joined. 
 
OF CYNICISM 
 
 I purpose not to write of the Cynicism of Diogenes, nor of 
 his rough speech to Alexander of Macedon, nor of the elegancy 
 of the King's answer. For these be things known unto all 
 men. Likewise, the Cynicism of our day is not sharp and 
 aculeate, like the Cynicism of Diogenes. For, inasmuch as 
 the word Gynic deriveth itself from dogs, the quality of him 
 that dwelt in the tub was such as belongeth to snarling curs. 
 Whereas the Cynicism of our days, which Frenchmen call 
 finis sceculi, putteth me in mind of silky-haired and mangy 
 lap-dogs, the sickly offspring of sickly parents, that have 
 been through many generations tendered and cosseted. A 
 Cynic of this breed is often perfumed like a milliner, and, 
 after the manner of Agag, he walketh delicately. 
 
 We will speak, first, how cynicism is often discovered 
 among men of parts ; secondly, whence it ariseth ; and 
 thirdly, to what sort of persons it should be limited and 
 confined, so as it may be contained from mischief. 
 
 I stand not upon such notable cases of Cynicism as Macbi- 
 avel or as the Sieur de Montaigne, who saith : " He that for- 
 saketh his own healthful and pleasant life, so as he may serve 
 others, foUoweth a course which I hold to be wrong and un- 
 natural." But I pass on to examples which lie less open, or, 
 at the least, are less publicly talked of. 
 
 Augustus Csesar, on the day of his death, caused himself to 
 be bravely attired, and demanded of bis friends that, if the 
 Comedy of his Life had been well enacted, they should clap 
 with their hands ; even as Babelais, on a like occasion, 
 exclaimed : " Tirez le rideau, la farce est jou^e.'' 
 
 You shall hear it said that a grave historian, who hath 
 written excellently well of the Declination and Fall of the 
 
 76 
 
76 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 Roman Empire, suffereth himself not to be decoyed into a 
 smile save when he relateth the murder of a priest. I knew 
 one that dwelt in Oxford, being a divine and the governor of 
 a college there, who had a desperate saying, that " There is 
 no such thing as Sin; there are only mistakes." Neverthe- 
 less, he is herein held in countenance by Goethus of "Weimar 
 — a writer who beautifieth and adorneth the nation of the 
 Germans, who otherwise are less elegant than other nations 
 in their writings (as likewise in their manners) — for, saith he, 
 " The Politick Man never hath a Conscience " ; and a Politick 
 Man out of question Goethus reckoned himself to be. A 
 Cynic, t^o, in his way, was the monk of old time whom 
 Goethus praiseth, who gave unto himself three rules of be- 
 haviour. " Spernere mundum, spernere se ipsum, spernere 
 se sperni.'' 
 
 I cannot choose but impute Cynicism to a late eloquent 
 Privy Councillor, a man that feared God and hated all faction 
 and sedition. Some years ago I asked of that grave and 
 austere person how he valued the changes that were being 
 then wrought in Ireland. He made answer in this wise, 
 pointing therewithal to his little dog : Look at Fido, that now 
 biteth my staff. The staff' profiteth nought by what he doeth ; 
 but I suffer him to bite it, so as he may do no worse havoc else- 
 where. Even so it falleth out with the estate of Ireland. Ire- 
 land preoecupateth the demagogues ; and ceHainly, if they must 
 needs work mischief somewhere, they were better work it any- 
 where but in England. Truly he laughed as he conversed 
 thus with me ; yet methought that he discoursed not wholly 
 as one that jesteth : as Horace saith. What hindereth but a 
 man laughing may speak truth ? 
 
 I marvel that my lord of St. Albans, when he handleth the 
 Topick of Adversity, saith nothing of the consolation to be 
 drawn from looking with a Play Pleasure, as he himself else- 
 where calleth it, on the Theatre of Life. And this is the 
 more strange, inasmuch as this Play Pleasure appertaineth 
 to Cynicism ; and Cynicism is thickly strewn among his 
 pages. Certainly he is a Cynic when he ascribeth Virtue 
 
OF CYNICISM 17 
 
 to such high and great Spints as Alcibiades, Philip le Bel', 
 and Edward the Fourth. And he is cynical likewise when, 
 in his treaty on Anger, his pencil laboureth as much to 
 describe the means of provoking wrath as the means of 
 attempering and appeasing it. As if it could be meet for 
 any Christian man to seek to put another man into a rage. 
 I hold him to be yet more culpable when he exhorteth strong 
 nations to be sensible of wrong, and to search the means of 
 commanding quarrels with their weaker neighbours, so as 
 they may keep the Body Politick in healthful exercise. All 
 which things being weighed and pondered, I trow that whoso 
 taketh delight in my lord's Essays hath somewhat of Cynicism 
 lurking in him ; and, if he sayeth he hath it not, he lieth, or 
 haply, he doth deceive himself. Peradventure, when he ex- 
 alteth those Essays above the Moon, he is in the humour of 
 self-accusation, and thinketh in his heart : " If my lord has 
 praise of all men, although many times he writeth as a 
 Cynic, why should I be dispraised of men if I write and 
 talk as a Cynic; and why should I dispraise myself if I 
 feel as one?" 
 
 Incident to this point is my second Topick : the Propaga- 
 tion of Cynicism, and where and how it springeth up. For 
 self-accusation is the April shower which causeth it to 
 flourish. Few men, I am sure, have a natural wish to be 
 cynical : and fewer still have the wish to be thought so, par- 
 ticularly by women. For indeed all women rail bitterly at 
 Cynicism ; the cause whereof is plain. You shall see that 
 women, when assailed with arguments, do defend themselves 
 after the manner of hedgehogs : they use not their heads at 
 all, but they bristle up and are fain to prick. Therefore, 
 lacking the habit and the skill to cogitate, they dive not 
 deep into their own hearts, and discover not therein the 
 faults for which they reprehend their neighbours. 
 
 And, not being sensible of the wounds of self-reproach, 
 they have no use for the shield of Cynicism ; and therefore, 
 not comprehending that quality, they do utterly abhor it. 
 Certainly, Cynicism often dependeth from self-examining. 
 
78 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 being (as it were) its fringe or its beard. Which appeareth 
 on this wise. Let a man first consider that, as we condemn 
 much that our forefathers approved, even so posterity will, 
 out of question, condemn much that we approve ; and let him 
 then ponder his own nature and all things that he deliberately 
 doeth and purposeth to do; and let him see whether he be 
 not many times a very Tekel, one who, being weighed in the 
 balance, is found wanting; and he shall presently discover 
 that, if he would not be a martyr, he must needs be some- 
 what of a Cynic. At last, peradventure, he will be content 
 to behave even as others behave. Human life, he will say 
 within himself, is beset with Gordian knots, which must be 
 dealt with, and can scarce be unloosed ; the wisest man is he 
 that cutteth them. 
 
 The composition of Cynicism will be better understood if I 
 tell of a shrewd saying of Goethus : " As old age cometh upon 
 me, I wax more lenient, for, whenever I hear of a sin com- 
 mitted, I feel that in the like case I myself might have 
 committed it." He intendeth, without doubt, that he might 
 have so transgressed if he had been born, reared, and 
 tempted as the transgressor was. But it is meet to be 
 wroth with evil doers, as St. Paul saith : " Be ye angry." 
 Now, when a Philosopher groweth as lenient as Goethus, 
 divers stonds and impediments obstruct the path of his 
 righteous anger. So that, when he must needs condemn evil 
 deeds and profess bitter anger thereat, he feeleth that the 
 wheels of his speech keep not way with the wheels of his 
 thought and feeling, as Euripides saith : " My tongue swore, 
 but my mind swore not." And he would scarce traduce such 
 a Cynical Sage that should ascribe to him the quality which 
 my lord pronounceth to be one of the stepping-stones to 
 fortune. He is "not too much of the honest." It is worthy 
 to observe that my lord dealeth with this abated probity as 
 Isaak Walton telleth us that he himself dealt with his live 
 bait — he handleth it tenderly as if he loved it. 
 
 TuUy saith that the vices of the wicked Consul, Afranius, 
 were such as none, save a Philosopher, could contemplate 
 
OF CYNICISM 79 
 
 without a groan : " Consul est impositus is nobis, quem nemo, 
 praeter nos philosophos, aspicere sine suspiratu possit " ; as 
 if the moral palate of Philosophers were used and inured to 
 such divers meats as nought could any more seem unsavoury 
 unto them. Certainly a Philosopher is often at straits to 
 consider any particular sin or sorrow apart and by itself ; 
 insomuch that he must needs interlace it with all the sin 
 and sorrow in the world. And, when he thus surveyeth the 
 world as a whole, he becometh either an Heraclitus or a 
 Democritus. He must either continually weep or continually 
 laugh. But, if he would weep without respite, I see not how 
 the cistern of his eyes can be replenished — 
 
 "Mirandum est unde ille oculis suffeoerit humor.'' 
 Therefore he laugheth at mankind, but he laugheth sar- 
 donically and in his own despite. Such an one is a Cynic of 
 the honourablest sort. If we go back to the source whence 
 the word Cynic is derived, we may say that this Gynique malgre 
 lui, as a Frenchman might name him, hath a bark which 
 importeth more than his bite. If ever he seem to rejoice at 
 evil, it is but with a counterfeit joy which essayeth to dry 
 up the fountain of his tears. He is the opposite of what the 
 Greeks call an Eiron ; for he meaneth less than he saith. 
 Perhaps the " Pecca fortiter " of Luther intendeth no more 
 than " Be not righteous over much " ; and the " Nil admirari " 
 of Horace signifieth " Nil nimium admirari," that is to say, 
 not to regard things too tragically and austerely. If it be 
 asked of me wherefore any teacher should on this wise say 
 more than he meaneth, I reply that he is like to one that 
 crooketh a bent rod in the opposite extreme, so as it may 
 thereby be made straight. " Iniquum petit, ut aequum ferat." 
 There be some that have the imagination that our Earth is 
 of no more account with the Higher Powers than an ant-hill 
 is with us ; for, say they, the learned Copernicus, notwith- 
 standing what my lord hath argued contrariwise, hath cer- 
 tainly proved that the Earth is not the pivot of the Creation ; 
 nay rather, that it is but a mean and commiserable planet, 
 one among millions. Whence they do conclude that we 
 
80 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 should iterate the mournful musings of the Psalmist, or 
 rather that, having chewed and digested the monitions of 
 science, we should exclaim with more of desperation : " When 
 I consider the Heavens, what is Man that Thou shouldest 
 regard him ? " Which disputation, when I ponder it in my 
 heart, so moveth me that I am astonied, and my reason 
 standeth at a stay. But presently I bethink me of words, 
 which the dramatick poet, Shakespeare, hath placed in the 
 mouth of Hamlet of Denmark: "All of which though I 
 most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not 
 honesty to have it thus set down." Certainly those contem- 
 ners of human nature of whom I have spoken deliver them- 
 selves of their judgment : " Fortasse vere, sed ad communem 
 utilitatem parum." If it be indeed true that, by comparison 
 of the infinite tract of space and time, our round World, and 
 all the Pigmies that are therein, and the Oracles and Imagi- 
 nations which they fashion for themselves, are even as the chaff 
 which the wind driveth away, then is the truth such as, if it 
 were proclaimed on the house-top, would be disadvantageable 
 to the public weal. And therefore he that holdeth to that 
 unsavoury and unwholesome doctrine, which is the very root 
 of all Cynicism, ought to keep silence thereon, or else to veU 
 his thoughts in oraculous speeches or, if so it may be, in a 
 language not understanded of the common people. 
 
 For doubt you not but, if men ever come to believe that it 
 importeth little what they say or do, the malignum vulgus 
 will straightways become malignismnum, and more hurt 
 will be done than hath been wrought by all the froward and 
 pestilent fellows at divers times called Root-and-Branch men, 
 or Radicals, who seek to subvert, with tribunioious disturb- 
 ance, whatsoever sorteth to the strength and stability of the 
 Kingdom. God grant that no such ill may reach unto us or 
 our children. 
 
 " Quod procul a nobis flectat Fortuna gubernans ! " 
 Thus far an honest man will go, but no further. For he 
 will forbear to tread in the steps of the French King, who 
 stuck not to say : " Apr6s moi le deluge." 
 
OF CYNICISM 81 
 
 Let this uncomely saying be noted well ; for I can think 
 upon no more particular instance of the baser sort of Cyni- 
 cism, which a good man should do his uttermost to avoid. 
 Nevertheless, if you consider the matter heedfuUy, you 
 shall find that feelings attuned to the note of " Consulant 
 sibi posteri " sometimes make their way unawares even into 
 godly and understanding hearts. For you shall read that 
 Hezekiah, although he was a righteous Prince and laboured 
 for the good estate of his people, yet, when one prophesied 
 unto him that divers and sore evils should come to pass 
 after his decease, he scorned not to make answer : " Good 
 is the word of the Lord. Is it not good if peace and truth 
 be in my day ? " 
 
 The foregoing essay may serve as an illustration 
 of the use of the French word " scepticisme," 
 which, unluckily (like the quasi-hallowed w^ord 
 "patrie" as distinguished from "pays," and also 
 like the familiar and half-naturalised phrase " Au 
 revoir") is without an equivalent in English. 
 Our word " scepticism " was formerly employed, 
 especially by Buckle, more or less vaguely to 
 denote Agnosticism ; but the word, at least in this 
 sense, is becoming obsolete. On the other hand, 
 the French " scepticisme " is a term of ethics 
 rather than of theology ; it represents the prin- 
 ciple so broadly laid down by the Oxford " divine " 
 (Mark Pattison) as cited above in the Baconian 
 essay. Galton, by the way, who was fond of 
 ethical as well as of mathematical curiosities, was 
 much attracted by the Malapropic piety of the 
 French lady who, after lamenting the spread 
 of scepticism, added : " Mais heureusement on a 
 invents des antiseptiques." 
 
 F 
 
A JAPANESE LETTER 
 
 In the foregoing pages two of the matters dis- 
 cussed are the yellow races and cynicism. Oddly 
 enough, these widely dissimilar lines of thought 
 find a meeting-point in a Japanese letter which 
 has lately been shown to me, and which I will 
 here insert. At first sight, its readers are tempted 
 to apply to it the converse of a well-known saying 
 of Gibbon, by exclaiming that its idea is as bar- 
 barous as its language. But, on reflection, they 
 may recall Lafcadio Hearn's opinion that Japan, 
 like the Italy of the Renaissance, is in a transi- 
 tional state. Contact with the West has deprived 
 the Japanese of their old " emotional morality " ; 
 while, on the other hand, our law-bred and law- 
 sustained morality — the morality of the head as 
 well as of the heart — has hardly had time to take 
 root. The names of the two Englishmen referred 
 to in the letter are omitted and every clue is 
 removed which could possibly lead to identification. 
 
 Letter from a Japanese Merchant. 
 
 " Begarding to the matter of escape the penalty for non- 
 delivery of the machine, there is only a way to creep round 
 same by diplomat, and he must make a statement of strike 
 occur our factory (of course big untrue) and please address 
 
84 NUTS AND CHESTNUTS 
 
 my person on enclosed form of letter and believe this will 
 avoid the troubles of penalty of same. As Mr. X. is most 
 religious and competent man, also heavily upright and godly, 
 it fears me that useless apply for his signature. Please there- 
 fore attach same by the office making forge but no cause for 
 fear of prison happenings as this is often operated by other 
 merchants of highest integrity. It is highest unfortunate 
 Mr. Z. so god like man and excessive awkward for business 
 purpose. I think more better add little serpent-like wisdom 
 to upright manhood and thus found good business edifice." 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 Passages to he illustrated from " Old and Odd Memories." 
 
 
 Pages of " 0. amd O.M. 
 
 A Nautocratical Whipping . 
 
 . 26 
 
 Christian Name or Title ? . 
 
 . 24 
 
 Bowen and Euskin 
 
 . 161 
 
 Jottings about Francis Newman 
 
 . 264 
 
 Jottings about Lecky . 
 
 . 316 
 
Printed by BAILANTYNE, HANSON &° Co. 
 Edinburgh &■ Loudon 
 
Second Impression. Illustrated. Price 1 2S. 6d. net 
 
 OLD AND ODD 
 MEMORIES 
 
 By the Hon. LIONEL TOLLEMACHE 
 
 " In his boyhood at Helmingham, at Harrow, at Oxford, and 
 in later Ufe, Mr. Tollemache has moved continually among people 
 worth visualising in anecdote, and he has the facility for treasuring 
 and recounting in a pointed and scholarly way the epigrams and 
 episodes which are best calculated to give a faultless literary 
 vignette of his subjects. . . . 'Old and Odd Memories' conveys 
 unimpaired to its readers the best and most characteristic humour 
 of the many notable men whom Mr. Tollemache has known, and 
 yet reveals its author's own personality in a hundred happy phrases 
 and thoughts." — Spectator. 
 
 "There is for many readers nothing more truly entertaining 
 than the well-presented reminiscences of one in his anecdotage 
 who has known notable men and women of the past, who has 
 heard many things, is possessed of a good memory and a keen 
 sense of humour, and has a certain gusto in recalling and record- 
 ing some of the things which he remembers, bits of characterisation, 
 memorable incidents, anecdotes, and bon-mots. The present 
 season, it may be said at once, is little likely to give us more 
 delightfiil entertainment of this kind than we get in this volume 
 by the Hon. Lionel A. Tollemache." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 "These are the reminiscences of a singularly accomplished and 
 brilliant man. . . . This book is one of those fascinating volumes 
 which may be taken up and read with delight at any time and at 
 any page." — Daily Graphic. 
 
 "The effect of Mr. ToUemache's work is essentially that of 
 creation. Dozens of men can collect good stories (though not 
 all have Mr. ToUemache's facilities), but how many have the 
 faculty of taste, discrimination, individuality, which makes a real 
 work of art out of odds and ends. So these memories are not so 
 much a necklace as a garland. So irresistible a volume of wit and 
 wisdom has not appeared for many a long day." — Observer. 
 
 LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 Maddox Street, W. 
 
 I 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 TALKS WITH Mr. GLADSTONE 
 
 By the Hon. LIONEL TOLLEMACHE 
 
 Fourth Edition. With Latest Photograph. Buckram. Price ds. 
 
 "The best [records of Mr. Gladstone's Table Talk] we have is Mr. 
 ToUemache's journal of their conversations in successive years at Biarritz." 
 — Times. 
 
 " Even in the matter of talking, if Mr. Gladstone is to look for immor- 
 tality, the vates sacer to whom he must go is far less Mr. Morley than Mr. 
 Lionel ToUemache. 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. 
 
 "That Mr. ToUemache is an accomplished writer of reminiscences is 
 known to all Mr. Gladstone's admirers."— ^/^eK««w. 
 
 BENJAMIN JOWETT 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL 
 
 A Personal Memoir 
 
 By the Hon. LIONEL TOLLEMACHE 
 
 Fifth Edition. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Price ^s. 6d. 
 
 "One of the most stimulating writers of the day, especially in the 
 sketch-portraits of the people who have influenced him." — Times. 
 
 " Rather Boswellian and extremely amusing." — Speaker. 
 
 " Displays most fiiUy that combination of Boswellian anecdote, acute 
 criticism, and allusiveness tempered by scrupulous economy of style, which 
 has already marked Mr. ToUemache's former essays with a manner unique 
 among present-day writers." — St. James's Gazette. 
 
 "Since the death of Hayward, we know no English littirateur who 
 has, in the same degree as Mr. ToUemache, 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. Lionel ToUemache, le Boswell de nos iours." — Standard. 
 
 London : EDWARD ARNOLD, 41 & 43 Maddox Street, W. 
 
 2