WHAT I REMEMBER

VOL. I.

Printed in Paris

WHAT I REMEMBER

BY
THOMAS ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE

IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
SECOND EDITION
LONDON
RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON
Publishers in Ordinary to Her Majesty the Queen
1887

Richard Clay and Sons,
london and bungay.

OMNIBUS WICCAMICIS
T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE
B. M. DE WINTON PROPE WINTON COLL.
OLIM ALUMNUS
GRATO ANIMO
D. D. D.

CONTENTS.

WHAT I REMEMBER

CHAPTER I.

I have no intention of writing an autobiography. There has been nothing in my life which could justify such a pretension. But I have lived a long time. I remember an aged porter at the monastery of the “Sagro Eremo,” above Camaldoli, who had taken brevet rank as a saint solely on the score of his ninety years. His brethren called him and considered him as Saint Simon simply because he had been porter at that gate for more than sixty years. Now my credentials as a babbler of reminiscences are of a similar nature to those of the old porter. I have been here so many, many years. And then those years have comprised the best part of the nineteenth century—a century during which change has been more rapidly at work among all the surroundings of Englishmen than probably during any other century of which social history has to tell.

Of course middle-aged men know, as well as we ancients, the fact that social life in England—or rather let me say in Europe—is very different from what it was in the days of their fathers, and are perfectly well acquainted with the great and oftentimes celebrated causes which have differentiated the Victorian era from all others. But only the small records of an unimportant individual life, only the memories which happen to linger in an old man’s brain, like bits of drift-weed floating round and round in the eddies of a back-water, can bring vividly before the young of the present generation those ways and manners of acting and thinking and talking in the ordinary every-day affairs of life which indicate the differences between themselves and their grandfathers.

I was born in the year 1810 at No. 16, Keppel Street, Russell Square. The region was at that time inhabited by the professional classes, mainly lawyers. My father was a barrister of the Middle Temple to the best of my recollection, but having chambers in the Old Square, Lincoln’s Inn. A quarter of a century or so later, all the district in question became rather deteriorated in social estimation, but has, I am told, recently recovered itself in this respect under the careful and judicious administration of the Duke of Bedford. The whole region appeared to me, when I was recently in London, about the least changed part of the London of my youthful days. As I walked up Store Street, which runs in a line from Keppel Street to Tottenham Court Road, I spied the name of “Pidding, Confectioner.” I immediately entered the shop and made a purchase at the counter. “I did not in the least want this tart,” said I to the girl who was serving in the shop. “Why did you take it, then?” said she, with a little toss of her head. “Nobody asked you to buy it.” “I bought it,” rejoined I, “because I used to buy pastry of Mr. Pidding in this shop seventy years ago.” “Lor’, sir!” said the girl, “did you really?” She probably considered me to be the Wandering Jew.

I remember well that my father used to point out to me houses in Russell Square, Bedford Square, and Bloomsbury Square in which judges and other notable legal luminaries used to live. But even in those days the localities in question, especially the last named of them, were beginning to be deserted by such personages, who were already moving farther westward. The occasion of these walks with my father through the squares I have named—to which Red Lion Square might have been added—was one the painful nature of which has fixed it in my memory indelibly.

“Infandam memoria jubes renovare dolorem.”

For the object of these walks was the rendering an account of the morning’s studies. I was about six years old, when under my father’s auspices I was first introduced to the Eton Latin Grammar. He was a Wykehamist, had been a fellow of New College, and had held a Vinerian Fellowship. And his great ambition was, that his eldest son, myself, should tread in his steps and pursue the same career. Dîs aliter visum!—as regards at least the latter stages of that career. For I did become, and am, a Wykehamist, as much as eight years at Coll. B. M. Winton prope Winton can make me.

Of which more anon.

For the present I see myself alone in the back drawing-room of No. 16, Keppel Street, in which room the family breakfast took place—probably to avoid the necessity of lighting another fire in the dining-room below—at 7 A.M., on my knees before the sofa, with my head in my hands and my eyes fixed on the Eton Latin Grammar laid on the sofa cushion before me. My parents had not yet come down to breakfast, nor had the tea urn been brought up by the footman. Nota bene.—My father was a poor man, and his establishment altogether on a modest footing. But it never would have occurred to him or to my mother that they could get on without a man-servant in livery. And though this liveried footman served a family in which two tallow candles with their snuffer dish supplied the whole illumination of the evening, had the livery been an invented one instead of that proper to the family, the circumstance would have been an absurdity exciting the ridicule of all the society in which my parents lived. Tempora mutantur! Certainly at the present day an equally unpretending household would be burthened by no footman. But on the morning which memory is recalling to me the footman was coming up with the urn, and my parents were coming down to breakfast, probably simultaneously; and the question of the hour was whether I could get the due relationship of relative and antecedent into my little head before the two events arrived.

And that, as I remember it, was the almost unvaried routine for more than a year or two. I think, however, that the walks of which I was speaking when this retrospect presented itself to me must have belonged to a time a little, but not much later; for I had then advanced to the making of Latin verses. We used to begin in those days by making “nonsense verses.” And many of us ended in the same way! The next step—Gradus ad Parnassum—consisted in turning into Latin verse certain English materials provided for the purpose, and so cunningly prepared as to fall easily and almost inevitably into the required form. And these were the studies which, as I specially remember, were the subject of rehearsal during those walks from Lincoln’s Inn to Keppel Street.

My father was in the habit of returning from his chambers to a five o’clock dinner—rather a late hour, because he was an industrious and laborious man. Well! we, that is my next brother (not the one whose name became subsequently well known in the world, but my brother Henry, who died early) and myself, used to walk from Keppel Street to Lincoln’s Inn, so as to arrive in time to walk back with my father. He was a fast walker; and as we trotted along one on each side of him, the repetition of our morning’s poetical achievements did not tend, as I well remember, to facilitate the difficulty of “keeping our wind.”

But what has probably fixed all this in my mind during nearly three quarters of a century was my father’s pat application of one of our lines to the difficulties of those peripatetic poetizings. “Muse and sound of wheel do not well agree,” read the cunningly prepared original, which the alumnus with wonderful sagacity was to turn into, “Non bene conveniunt Musa rotæque sonus.” “That,” said my father, as he turned sharp round the corner into the comparative quiet of Featherstone Buildings, “is exactly why I turned out of Holborn!”

I do not know whether children of eight years old, or thereabouts, would at the present day be allowed to range London so freely as we were. But our great amusement and delight was to take long exploring walks in as distant parts of the huge (though then comparatively small) city as could be compassed within the time at our disposition. One especially favourite excursion, I well remember, was to the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly to see the coaches start or arrive. I knew all their names, and their supposed comparative speed. By this means, indeed, came my first introduction to English geography. Formal lessons on such a thoroughly “commercial academy” subject were not, of course, thought of for an aspiring Wykehamist. But for the due enjoyment of the White Horse Cellar spectacle it was necessary to know the whereabouts of the cities, their distance from London, and the routes by which they were reached. It thus came to pass that our geographical notions were of a curiously partial description—tolerably copious and accurate as regards the south and west of England, far less so as regards the north. For the north country coaches did not start from Piccadilly. On the opposite side of the way to the White Horse Cellar there was another coaching inn, the White Bear, on which I remember we used to look with much contempt, from the belief, whether in any degree well founded I know not, that the coaches which stopped there on their way out of town, or arrived there, were mainly slow coaches.

One does not traverse well nigh four score years without having experienced longings for the unattainable on several occasions. But I have no remembrance of any such eager, craving longing as the chronic longing of those days to make one of the great-coated companies who were departing to their various destinations by those “Telegraphs,” “High-Flyers,” “Magnets,” and “Independents.” (The more suggestive names of the “Wonder,” and its rival the “No Wonder!” once celebrated on the north-western road, belonged to a later day.) Had I been offered a seat on any of these vehicles my choice would have been dictated solely by considerations of distance—Falmouth for choice, as the westward Ultima Thule of coaching experience. With what rapture should I have climbed, in my little round jacket as I was, and without a thought of any other protection, to the roof of the Falmouth mail—the mail for choice, the Devonport “Quicksilver” being then in the womb of the future—and started to fetch a forgotten letter (say) of the utmost importance, with strict injunctions to bring it back by the returning coach! I don’t think my imagination had yet soared to the supreme glories of the box seat. That came later. To have been a booked passenger, that that horn should have sounded for me, that I should have been included in the guard’s final and cheery assurance, that at length all was “right”—would have been ample enough for an ecstasy of happiness. What an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What an infinite succession of “teams!” What a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important and adventurous section of humanity as we should clatter at midnight, or even at three or four o’clock in the morning, through the streets of quiet little country towns, ourselves the only souls awake in all the place! What speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the coachman, when he “left you here, sir!” in the small hours! What a delightful sense of the possible dangers of the undertaking as testified by many eagerly read narratives of the disasters of the road. Alas! I had no share in it all, save to stand on the curbstone amid the crowd of Jew boys selling oranges and cedar pencils sixpence a dozen, and hurrying passengers and guards and porters, and look on them all with envious longing.

Nota bene. On such an occasion at the present day—if it be possible to conceive such an anachronism—the Jew boys above referred to would be probably Christian boys, and the object of their commerce, the evening papers. But I have no recollection of any such element in the scene at the White Horse Cellar some sixty-eight years since.

Occasionally when a holiday from lessons occurred—I am afraid most probably in consequence of my father being confined to his bed with headaches, which even at that early day, and increasingly, as years went on, afflicted him—we, my brother Henry and I, obtained permission for a longer ramble. I have no recollection that on these occasions either the parks (unless perhaps sometimes St. James’s Park), or Kensington Gardens, or Hampstead, or Highgate, or any of the places that might be supposed to be attractive had any attractions for us. Our faces were ever turned eastward. The city with its narrow mysterious lanes, and still more mysterious wharves, its quaint secluded churches, its Guildhall, and its Gog and Magog, the queer localities of the halls of its Companies, and specially the abstruse mystery of that venerable Palladium, the London stone, excited in those days an irresistible influence on my imagination. But above all else the grand object of a much-planned eastern pilgrimage was the Docks!—with the out-going ships bearing, tied to their shrouds, boards indicating their destinations. Here again was unsatisfied longing! But it was a longing more tempered by awe and uncertainty. I am not sure that I would, if it had been offered to me, have stepped on board an East Indiaman bound for Bombay as eagerly as I would have climbed a coach starting for the Land’s End. But it was a great triumph to have seen with our own eyes the Agra (or some other) Castle majestically passing through the dock gates, while passengers on deck, men and women, whose feet would absolutely touch land no more till they stopped at far Bombay on the other side of the world, spoke last farewells to friends standing on the dock walls or even on the gates themselves.

But I can recall no less vividly certain expeditions of a kind which appeared to our imaginations to be—and which perhaps really were in some degree—fraught with a certain amount of peril. Stories had reached us of sundry mysteriously wicked regions, where the bandit bands of the great city consorted and lived outlaw lives under circumstances and conditions that powerfully excited our young imaginations. Especially accounts of a certain lane had reached us, where it was said all the pocket handkerchiefs stolen by all the pickpockets in London were to be seen exposed in a sort of unholy market. The name of this place was Saffron Hill. Whether any such place still exists, I know not. It has probably been swept away by the march of recent improvement. But it did in those days veritably exist. And to this extraordinary spot—as remote and strange to our fancy as the realms of Prester John—it was determined after protracted consideration by my brother and myself, that our next long ramble should be devoted. We had ascertained that the dingy land of our researches lay somewhat to the westward of Smithfield—which had already been the object of a most successful, adventurous, and delightful expedition, not without pleasurable perils of its own from excited bullocks, still more excited drovers and their dogs—and by dint of considerable perseverance we reached it, and were richly rewarded for our toil and enterprise. Report had spoken truly. Saffron Hill was a world of pocket-handkerchiefs. From every window and on lines stretched across the narrow street they fluttered in all the colours of the rainbow, and of all sizes and qualities. The whole lane was a long vista of pennon-like pocket-handkerchiefs! We should have much liked to attempt to deal in this strange market, not so much for the sake of possessing any of the articles, as with a view of obtaining experience, and informing ourselves respecting the manners and customs of the country. But we were protected from the possibly unpleasant results of any such tentative by the total absence from our pockets of any coin of the realm. We doubtless had pocket-handkerchiefs, and I have no recollection of their having been stolen. Probably it was ascertained by the inhabitants that they were not worth their notice.

But the subject reminds me of an experience of the pocket-picking world which occurred to me some twenty years later. It was at Naples. People generally in those days carried silk pocket-handkerchiefs instead of the scraps of muslin which are affected nowadays. And five silk pocket-handkerchiefs were abstracted from my pockets during my walks abroad in as many days. I then took to wearing very common ones, and lost no more! An American then at Naples, whose experiences of the proclivities of that population had been similar to mine, was not so fortunate in the result of the defensive measures he adopted. He sewed strongly into the interior of his pocket a large fish-hook. The result which he anticipated followed. The thief’s hand was caught, and the American, turning sharply, seized him by the wrist and held him in a grasp like a vice till he could hand him over to a gendarme. But within a fortnight that American was stabbed to the heart one night as he was going home from the theatre. The light-fingered fraternity, it would seem, considered that such a practice was not within the laws of the game; whereas my more moderate ruse did not offend their sense of justice and fair play.

My brother and I reached home safely enough after our expedition to thief-land; and were inexhaustible in our accounts of the wonders we had witnessed. For it formed no part of our plan, and would not have been at all in accordance with the general practice of our lives to conceal the facts from our parents. Probably we had a sufficient suspicion of the questionable nature of the expedition we contemplated to prevent us from declaring it beforehand. But our education and habits would have forbidden any dream of concealing it.

As far as my recollection serves me, our moral and religious education led us to consider the whole duty of boy to be summed up in the two precepts, “obey,” and “tell no lies.” I think there was a perfunctory saying of some portion of the catechism on a Sunday morning. But I am very sure that in our own minds, and apparently in those of all concerned, the vastly superior importance of the Virgil lesson admitted of no moment’s doubt. But it must not be imagined from this that my parents were more irreligious people than their neighbours; still less that they were not most affectionately and indeed supremely solicitous for the well-being and education of their children. My father was the son of a priest of the Church of England, and my mother the daughter of another, the Rev. William Milton, Vicar of Heckfield, a New College living not far from Reading. Their associates were mainly barristers or clergy. My father was wholly and absolutely free from the prevailing vice of the time, and I never remember to have seen him in any slightest degree the worse for drink. And in the whole manière d’être of the house and home there was no note or symptom of any life save one of the most correct respectability and propriety, fully up to the average of the time. But my parents were by no means what was called in the language of the time “evangelicals.” And in the social atmosphere of those days, any more decided and marked amount of religious instruction and teaching would have unmistakably indicated “evangelical tendencies.” Moreover, though I cannot remember, and it is exceedingly improbable, that any ideas were directly instilled into our minds on the subject, it certainly is the fact that I grew into boyhood with the notion that “evangelicalism” or “low churchism” was a note of vulgarity—a sort of thing that might be expected to be met with in tradesmen’s back parlours, and “academies,” where the youths who came from such places were instructed in English grammar and arithmetic, but was not to be met with, and was utterly out of place, among gentlemen and in gentlemanlike places of education, where nothing of the kind was taught.

All this to mark the change of tempora and mores, in these as in so many other respects, since George the Third was king.

Among the few surviving remembrances of those childhood’s years in Keppel Street, I can still recall to the mind’s eye the face and features of “Farmer,” the highly trustworthy and responsible middle-aged woman who ruled the nursery there, into which a rapid succession of brothers and sisters was being introduced in those years. Farmer, as I remember her, inspired more awe than affection. She was an austere and somewhat grim sort of body. And somehow or other the obscurely terrible fact that she was an Anabaptist (!) had reached the world of the nursery. I need hardly say that the accusation carried with it no sort of idea whatever to our minds. I don’t think we had any knowledge that the mystic term in question had reference to any forms or modifications of religious belief. But we were well assured that it implied something mysterious and terrible. And I am afraid that we gracelessly availed ourselves of what we should have considered a misfortune, if we had at all known what it meant, to express on occasions of revolt against discipline, our scorn for an individual so disgraced by nature. I have still in my ear the lilt of a wicked chorus the burthen of which ran:—

“Old Farmer is an Anabaptist!
When she is gone, she will not be missed!”

I remember in connection with poor Farmer and her heresies, an incident which must have been ridiculous enough to the adult actors in it. Dr. Nott, one of the prebendaries of Winchester, was an old and intimate friend of my mother’s—had been such I believe, before her marriage. The mention of this gentleman recalls to my mind—but this recollection dates from a later day,—that it used to be said satirically, with what truth I will not attempt to guess, that there was a large Chapter at Winchester and Nott, one of them, a clergyman: the intention being to insinuate that he was the only properly clerical character among them. At all events, Dr. Nott was an exemplary dignitary of the Church, not only in character, tastes, and pursuits, but in outward presentment also. I remember well his spare figure, his pale and delicately cut features, his black gaiters to the knee, and his elaborate white neckcloth. He was a competent, and what would have been called in that day an “elegant” Italian scholar. It was wholly under his supervision, that a few years subsequently the extensive restoration and repair of Winchester Cathedral was executed; a supervision which cost him, in consequence of a fall from a ladder in the nave, a broken leg and subsequent lameness for life. He had, if I mistake not, been one of the tutors of the Princess Charlotte.

Well, upon one occasion of a visit of Dr. Nott’s in Keppel Street, we children were summoned to the drawing-room for his inspection; and in reply to a variety of questions as to progress, and goodness in the nursery, etc., I, as the eldest, took courage to reply that if we were not always as good and obedient in the nursery as might be desired, the circumstance was to be attributed to the painful fact that our nurse was an Anabaptist! Whether Dr. Nott was selected as the recipient of this confidential communication because I had any vague idea that this disgraceful circumstance had any special connection with his department of human affairs, I cannot say. We were however told that the fact was no wise incompatible with Farmer’s character as an excellent nurse and good servant, and least of all could be considered as absolving us from the duty of obedience. I remember that I wondered then,—and I wonder still—what passed upon the subject between my mother and the Doctor after our dismissal to the nursery.

Another intimate friend of my mother’s and frequent visitor in Keppel Street was Lady Dyer, the wife, and subsequently widow of General Sir Thomas Dyer. Sir Thomas resided on his estate of Ovington, near Winchester; and I take it that my mother’s intimacy with Lady Dyer had been brought about by the friendship existing between both ladies and Miss Gabell, the eldest daughter of Dr. Gabell, the Head Master of Winchester College. Lady Dyer, after several years of widowhood, married the Baron de Zandt; and I remember, very many years subsequently to the time that I am here writing of, visiting her with my mother at her schloss, near Bamberg, where she lived in the huge house alone after losing her second husband.

I fancy it was mainly due to her intimacy with my mother during those years in Keppel Street that the house was frequented by several Italians; exiles from their own country under stress of political troubles. Especially I remember among these General Guglielmo Pepe, subsequently the hero of the hopeless defence of Venice against the Austrians. Of course I was too young to know or see much of him in the Keppel Street days; but many years afterwards I had abundant opportunities of knowing Pepe’s genuine nobility of character, high honour, and ardent patriotism. He was a remarkably handsome man, but not a brilliant or amusing companion. I remember that his sobriquet among the three ladies mentioned together above was Gateau de Plomb! But none the less was he highly and genuinely respected by them. He had a kind of simple, dignified, placid manner of enunciating the most astounding platitudes, and replying to the laughter they sometimes produced by a calm, gentle smile, which showed how impossible it was for his simple soul to imagine that his hearers were otherwise than delighted with his wit and wisdom. How well I can remember the pleasure his visits were wont to afford in the nursery by reason of the dried Neapolitan figs and Mandarin oranges, which he used to receive from his brother, General Fiorestano Pepe, and never failed to distribute among his English friends. His brother, when Guglielmo threw in his lot with the “patriots,” never forfeited his allegiance or quarrelled with the King of Naples. Yet the two brothers continued on affectionately fraternal terms to the last.

The quiet course of those Keppel Street years was, as I remember, once or twice broken by the great event of a visit to Heckfield to my maternal grandfather, the Rev. William Milton, a ci-devant Fellow of New College. He had at that time married a second wife, a Miss Partington, his first wife, a Derbyshire Gresley, my maternal grandmother, whom I had never seen, having died young. As my grandfather Milton was the son of a Bristol saddler (who lived to the age of ninety-nine), I suppose his marriage with a Gresley must have been deemed a mésalliance for the lady. But her death having occurred before my time, I never heard anything of this.

The vicar of Heckfield held the adjoining chapelry of Mattingly, at which place the morning service was performed on alternate Sundays. He was an excellent parish priest after the fashion of his day;—that is to say he was kindly to all, liberal to the poor to the utmost extent of his means, and well beloved by his neighbours, high and low. He was a charming old man, markedly gentlemanlike and suave in his manner; very nice in his person; clever unquestionably in a queer, crotchety sort of way; and thoroughly minded to do his duty according to his lights in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call him. But he would have had no more idea of attempting anything of the nature of active parochial work or reform, as understood at the present day, than he would have had of scheming to pay the National Debt. Indeed, the latter would have been the more likely to occupy his mind of the two, for he was crotchety and full of schemes. Especially he was fond of mechanics, and spent much money and much labour during many years on a favourite scheme for obviating the danger arising from the liability of a stage coach to be upset. He published more than one pamphlet on the subject, illustrated—I can see the pages before me now—by designs of various queer-looking models. There was a large coach-house attached to the vicarage, and it was always full of the strangest collection of models of coaches. I remember well that they all appeared to me hideous, and as æsthetically inferior to my admired “Telegraphs” and “High-Flyers” as a modern ironclad seems to the three-decker of his youth in the eyes of an old sailor. But, as may be imagined. I never ventured to broach any such heresy in my grandfather’s hearing! I should unquestionably have done so had it been my father. But lesser acquaintanceship and the venerable age of my grandfather checked my presumption.

There was—and doubtless is—a very pretty evergreen-embowered lawn at the vicarage, and on this also there always used to be some model or other intended to illustrate the principles of traction. One I especially remember which was called (not, it may seem, very grammatically) rotis volventibus. This machine consisted of two huge wheels, some ten feet high, joined together by a number of cross-bars at a distance of a foot or so from each other. It will be understood what a delightful amusement it must have been to creep into the interior of this structure, and cause it to roll over the smoothly shaven turf by stepping treadmill fashion on the cross-bars one after the other. But unfortunately in one part of the lawn there was a steep declivity, and one day, when the idea of making rotis volventibus descend this slope became irresistible, there was a tremendous smashing of the evergreen hedge, and a black-and-blue little body, whose escape without broken bones was deemed truly prodigious.

“Never, Tom,” said my grandfather, “put in motion forces which you are unable to control!”

The words remained implanted in my memory. But I do not suppose they carried much instruction with them to my mind at the time.

I believe my grandfather spent more money on his mechanical fads than was quite prudent, and took out patents which were about as remunerative and useful as that which Charles the Second is said to have granted to a sailor who stood on his head on the top of Salisbury steeple, securing to him the monopoly of that practice!

I remember another eccentricity in which the vicar indulged. He said the contact of a knife’s edge with earthenware, or porcelain, was extremely disagreeable. He caused, therefore, a number of dinner plates to be made with a little circular depression some two inches in diameter and about as deep as a crown piece in the centre, and had some round pieces of silver to fit into these receptacles, on which he cut his meat.

He was withal a very popular man, a good scholar, with decidedly scholarly tastes, much of a mathematician, a genuine humourist, with a sort of Horatian easy-going geniality about him, which was very charming even to us boys.

My brother Henry was one year my junior; my brother Anthony, with whom the world subsequently became acquainted, was five years younger than I. Henry, therefore, was the companion of all the London rambles which have been mentioned. I think we were tolerably good boys, truthful and obedient to legitimate authority. I was, however, if nursery traditions of a somewhat later day may be accepted as embodying real facts, rather too much given to yielding obedience only on reason shown; to “argify,” as certain authoritarians are wont to call it; and to make plenary submission only when consciously defeated in argument.

We had little or nothing of the “amusements” nowadays so liberally supplied to children. There was the pantomime at Christmas, intensely enjoyed. And I remember well pondering on the insoluble question, why my parents, who evidently, I thought, could if they chose it, go to the theatre every night of their lives, should abstain from doing so.

I do not remember any discontented longings for more or other amusements than we had. I was a thoroughly well constituted and healthy child, but without the smallest pretention to good looks, either in esse or in posse; sturdily built, with flaxen head, rosy cheeks, and blue eyes; broad of hand and foot; strong as a little pony—a veritable Saxon in type. I seem to my recollections to have been somewhat bravely ready to accept a life, in which the kicks might be more superabundant than the halfpence, not without complacent mental reference to the moral and physical breadth of shoulders, ready for whatever fate might lay on them. The nature of my childish mind, as I remember, was to place its ideas of heroism in capacity for uncomplaining endurance, rather than in capability for mastering others.

All the usual childish complaints and maladies touched me very lightly. I was as indifferent to weather, wet or dry, wind or shine, as a Shetland pony. Feet wet through had to remain in statu quo till they were dry again. Assiduously taught by my mother, I read at a very early age. Her plan for teaching the letters was as follows. She had a great number of bone counters with the alphabet in capitals and small letters on either side printed on them; then having invited a charming little girl, the daughter of a neighbour—(Katie Gibbon, laid to rest this many a year under the yew tree in the churchyard of the village of Stanton, near Monmouth)—who was just my own age, she tossed the counters broadcast over the floor, instituting prizes for him, or her, who should in crawling races over the floor, soonest bring the letter demanded. Reading thus began to be an amusement to me at an unusually early age. I believe I gave early indications of possessing a certain quantum of brain power; but had no reputation for cleverness. Indeed, had my parents ever formed the opinion that any one of their children was in any way markedly clever, they would have carefully concealed it from the subject of it. I take it, I was far from being what is called a prepossessing child. I had, I well remember, a reputation for an uncompromising expression of opinion, which was not altogether admirable. My mother used to tell in after years how, when once I had been, at about four years old, attentively watching her dressing for dinner, while standing on a chair by the side of her dressing table, I broke silence when the work was completed to say very judicially, “Now you have made yourself as fine as poso—(possible)—and you look worse than you did when you began!”

I am tempted to insert here a letter to my father from Dr. Williams, my old Winchester master, which (amusingly to me) illustrates what I have here written of my nursery tendencies. It belongs to a later date, when I was within half a year of leaving Winchester. I had not found it among my papers when I wrote the passage to which it is now appended. But I place it here in homage to the dictum that the child is father to the man.

“I have the pleasure,” Dr. Williams writes, “to express my approbation of your son’s conduct during the last half-year. His firmness in maintaining what was right and putting down what was wrong was very conspicuous in the early part of that time; not that I imagine it was less afterwards, but occasion did not call it forth so much.”

What the occasion was I entirely forget; evidently he refers to some exercise of my power as a Prefect.

“I have remarked to you before that he is fond of having a reason assigned for every thing; but he must take care that this do not degenerate into captiousness. His temper is generally good, but a little too sensitive when he fancies a smile is raised at his expense.”

I feel no confidence that years have rendered me safe from the first fault which my excellent master thus warned me against; but I am sure they have cured me of the second.

I remember too, in connection with those Keppel Street days, to have heard my mother speak of an incident which somewhat curiously illustrates the ways and habits of a time already so far left behind us by a whole world of social changes. It was nothing more than a simple visit to the theatre to hear Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth. But this exploit involved circumstances that rendered it memorable for other reasons besides the intense gratification derived from the performance. In the first place “the pit” was the destination to which my father and mother were bound; not altogether, I take it, so much for the sake of the lower price of admission (though my father was a sufficiently poor and a sufficiently careful man to render this a consideration), as from the idea that the pit offered the best vantage ground for a thoroughly appreciative and critical judgment of the performance. For when we children were taken to see a pantomime we went, as I remember, to the boxes. But this visit to the pit involved the necessity of being at the theatre at two in the afternoon, and then standing in the crowd till, if I rightly remember, six in the evening! Of course food had to be carried. And each man there did his best to support and assist the lady under his charge. But the ordeal must have been something tremendous, and the amount of enthusiasm needed to induce a lady to face it something scarcely to be understood at the present day. My mother used to relate that sundry women were carried out from the crowd at the theatre door fainting.

Before closing this Keppel Street chapter of my existence I may mention one or two circumstances of the family life there which illustrate the social habits of those days. The family dinner-hour was five. There were no dinner napkins to be seen; they were perhaps less needed by clean-shaven chins and lips. Two tallow candles, requiring to be snuffed by snuffers lying in a little plated tray ad hoc every now and then, partially illumined the table, but scarcely at all the more distant corners of the room. Nor were any more or better lights used during the evening in the drawing-room. The only alternative would have been wax lights at half-a-crown a pound—an extravagance not to be thought of. Port and sherry were always placed on the shining mahogany table when the cloth was withdrawn, and no other wine. Only on the occasion of having friends to dinner, the port became a “magnum” of a vintage for which my father’s cellar was famous, and possibly Madeira might be added.

Perhaps it may be worth noting here as an incident illustrating change of manners that I vividly remember my mother often singing to us children in Keppel Street an old song about an “unfortunate Miss Bayly,” who had been seduced by a “Captain bold of Halifax, who dwelt in country quarters.” Now a purer or more innocent-minded woman than my mother did not live, nor one less likely to have suffered aught that she imagined to be unfitted virginibus puerisque to reach the ears of her children. Nor do I suppose that we had the faintest notion of the nature of the evil inflicted on the unfortunate Miss Bayly by the Captain bold, nor that we were in any degree scandalised by the subsequent incident of the parish priest being bribed by “a one pound note” to accord Christian burial to the corpse of a suicide, which he had previously refused to bury. It may be feared that quite as many “unfortunates” share the fate of Miss Bayly either in town or country quarters at the present day as in the early days of the century. But I take it that the old world ditty in question would not be selected for nursery use at the present day.

I could chatter on about those childish days in Keppel Street, and have been, I am afraid, too garrulous already. What I have said, however, is all illustrative of the social changes seventy years have wrought, and may at the same time serve to show that I started on my octogenarian career a sturdy, hardy little mortal, non sine Dîs animosus infans.

CHAPTER II.

These fragmentary recollections of our childish days may have served to suggest some hints of the changes which have made the London of the present day almost—perhaps quite—as different from the London of the second decade of this century as the latter was from “the town” in the days of George the First. But it is difficult for middle-aged people of the present day to form any vivid and sufficient conception of the greatness of them. Of course the mere material ameliorations and extensions have so metamorphosed the localities that I, on returning after long years to the London I once knew, topographically at least, so well, find myself in a new town of which the geography is in some parts strange to me, with just so much of the old landmarks remaining as serves to suggest false clues to the labyrinth and render the matter more puzzling. But the changes in ways and habits and modes of living and feeling and thinking are still greater and of much more profound significance.

To say that there were in those days no omnibuses and no cabs, and of course no railways, either under ground or over it, is a simple matter, and very easily stated. But it is not easy to picture to oneself the whole meaning and consequences of their non-existence. Let any Londoner, with the exception of the comparatively small number of those who use carriages of their own, think what his life would be, and the transaction of his day’s work or of his day’s pleasure, without any means of locomotion save his own legs or a hackney coach, which, at a cost of about five times the cab hire of the present day, used to shut him up in an atmosphere like that of a very dirty stable, and jolt him over the uneven pavement at a pace of about four miles an hour. Dickens has given in his own graphic way more than one sketch of the old hackney coach. I do not think that I ever saw a hackney coach that had been built for the work it was engaged in as such. They were heavy, old-fashioned, rickety vehicles, which had become too heavy, too old-fashioned, too rickety to be retained in the service of the families to which they had once belonged. They were built for the most part with hammer cloths, and many of them exhibited huge and gorgeously-painted armorial bearings on the panels. (By the by, why did not the officials of the Inland Revenue come down on the proprietors of these venerable vehicles for the use of armorial bearings? I take it that the march of modern intelligence, acuens mortalia corda, would impel their successors of the present day to do so.) The drivers of those carriages were “in a concatenation accordingly”—shabby, slow, stupid, dirty, and often muddled with drink. We hear occasionally nowadays of a cabman “driving furiously” when drunk. The wording of the charge smacks of another era. Not all the gin in London could have stimulated the old “Jarvey” to drive his skeletons of horses furiously. He was not often incapacitated by drink, but very frequently muddled. If it was necessary for him to descend from his hammer-cloth for the purpose of opening the door of his carriage, which the presence of the “waterman” of the stand for the most part rendered unnecessary, he was a long time about it, and a longer in clambering back to his seat, loaded as he generally was in all weathers with an immense greatcoat of many capes, weatherbeaten out of all resemblance to its original colour. The “watermen,” so-called, as we know from high authority, “because they opens the coach doors,” were nevertheless surrounded by their half-a-dozen or so of little shallow pails of water, as they stood by the side of the curbstone near a coach stand. They were to the hackney-coachman what the bricklayer’s labourer is to the bricklayer. And a more sorry sight can hardly be conceived than the “stand” with its broken-down carriages, more broken-down drivers, and most of all broken-down horses, which supplied us in the days when we “called a coach, and let a coach be called, and he that calls it, let him be the caller,” as it stands written in a page almost as much (but far less deservedly) forgotten as the hackney coach.

Already in my boyhood “Oxford Road” was beginning to be called “Oxford Street.” But my father and his contemporaries always used the former phrase. At the end of Oxford Street was Tyburn turnpike; not a mere name, but a veritable barrier closing not only the continuation of the Oxford Road but also the Edgware Road, turning at right angles to the north of it. And there stood one turnpike-man to receive the toll and give tickets in return for the whole of the Oxford Street traffic! I can see him now, with his low-crowned hat, a straw in his mouth, his vigilant eye, and the preternatural quickness and coolness, as it seemed to me, with which, standing in the centre between his two gates, he took the halfpence and delivered the tickets. He had always an irreproachably clean white apron with pockets in the front of it, one for halfpence and one for tickets.

I have spoken of my delight in the spectacle of the coaches starting from and arriving at the White Horse Cellar in Piccadilly. But there were many other aspects of London life in the days before railroads in which the coaches made a leading feature. One of the sights of London for country cousins was to see the mails starting at 8 P.M. from the Post Office. To view it under the most favourable circumstances, one went there on the anniversary of the king’s birthday, when all the guards had their scarlet coats new, and the horses’ heads were all decked with flowers. And truly the yard around the Post Office offered on such an occasion a prettier sight than all the travelling arrangements of the present day could supply. Of course I am speaking of a time a little subsequent to my earliest recollections. For I can remember when the huge edifice in Saint Martin’s le Grand was built; and remember well, too, the ridicule and the outcry that was raised at the size of the building, so enormously larger, it was supposed, than could possibly be needed! But it has now long since been found altogether insufficient for the needs of the service.

A journey on the box of the mail was a great delight to me in those days—days somewhere in the third decade of the century; and faith! I believe would be still, if there were any mails available for the purpose. One journey frequently performed by me with infinite delight was to Exeter. My business was to visit two old ladies living there, Miss Mary and Miss Fanny Bent. The Rev. John Bent, rector of Crediton, had married the sister of my grandmother, the Rev. William Milton’s wife. Miss Mary Bent was his daughter by a second wife; but her half-sister, Fanny Bent, as we and everybody else called her, was thus my mother’s first cousin, and the tie between Fanny Milton and Fanny Bent had always from their earliest years been a very close one.

And that is how I came on several occasions to find myself on the box of the Exeter mail. A new and accelerated mail service had been recently established under the title of the “Devonport Mail.” It was at that time the fastest, I believe, in England. Its performances caused somewhat of a sensation in the coaching world, and it was known in those circles as “the Quicksilver Mail.” Its early days had chanced unfortunately to be marked by two or three accidents, which naturally gave it an increased celebrity. And truly, if it is considered what those men and horses were required to perform, the wonder was, not that “the Quicksilver” should have come to grief two or three times, but rather that it ever made its journey without doing so. What does the railway traveller of the present day, who sees a travelling post office, and its huge tender crammed with postal matter, think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his solitary post behind the coach, on the top of the receptacle called, with reference to the constructions of still earlier days, the hinder boot, sat on a little seat made for one, with his pistols and blunderbuss in a box in front of him. And the original notion of those who first planned the modern mail coach was, that the bags containing the letters should be carried in that “hinder boot.” The “fore boot,” beneath the driver’s box, was considered to be appropriated to the baggage of the three outside and four inside passengers, which was the mail’s entire complement. One of the former shared the box with the driver, and two occupied the seat on the roof behind him. The accommodation provided for these two was not of a very comfortable description. They were not indeed crowded as the four, who occupied a similar position on another coach, often were; but they had a mere board to sit on, whereas the seats on the roof of an ordinary stage coach were provided with cushions. The fares by the mail were always somewhat higher than those by even equally fast, or in some cases faster, coaches; and it seems unreasonable, therefore, that the accommodation should be inferior. I can only suppose that the patrons of “the mail” were understood to be compensated for its material imperfections by the superior dignity of their position. The box seat, however, was well cushioned.

But if the despatches, which it was the mail’s business to carry, could once upon a time be contained in that hinder boot, such had ceased to be the case before my day. The bulk of postal matter which had to be carried was continually and rapidly increasing, and I have often seen as many as nine enormous sacks heaped on the coach roof. The length of these sacks was just sufficient to reach from one side of the coach to the other, and the huge heap of them, three or even four tiers high, was piled to a height which was sufficient to prevent the guard, even when standing, from seeing or communicating with the coachman. If to the consideration of all this the reader will add (if he can) a remembrance of the Somersetshire and Devonshire roads, over which this top-heavy load had to be carried at about twelve miles an hour, it will not seem strange to him that accidents should have occurred. Not that the roads were bad; they were, thanks to Macadam, good, hard, and smooth; but the hills are numerous, and in many cases very steep.

But the journey, especially on the box seat, was a very pleasant thing. The whole of the service was so well done, and in every detail so admirable. It need hardly be said that the men selected for the drivers of such a coach were masters of their profession. The work was hard, but the remuneration was very good. There were fewer passengers by the mail to “remember the coachman,” but it was more uniformly full, and somewhat more was expected from a traveller by the mail. It was a beautiful thing to see a splendid team going over their short stage at twelve miles an hour! Of course none but good cattle in first-rate condition could do the work. A mot of old Mrs. Mountain, for many years the well-known proprietress of one of the large coaching inns in London, used to be quoted as having been addressed by her to one of her drivers: “You find whipcord, John, and I’ll find oats!” And, as it used to be said, the measure of the corn supplied to a coach-horse was his stomach.

It was a pretty thing to see the changing of the horses. There stood the fresh team, two on the off side, two on the near side, and the coach was drawn up with the utmost exactitude between them. Four ostlers jump to the splinter-bars and loose the traces; the reins have already been thrown down. The driver retains his seat, and within the minute (more than once within fifty seconds by the watch in my hand) the coach is again on its onward journey.

Then how welcome was breakfast at an excellent old-world country inn—twenty minutes allowed. The hot tea, after your night’s drive, the fresh cream, butter, eggs, hot toast, and cold beef, and then, with cigar alight, back to the box and off again!

I once witnessed on that road—not quite that road, for the Quicksilver took a somewhat different line—the stage of four miles between Ilchester and Ilminster done in twenty minutes, and a trace broken and mended on the road! The mending was effected by the guard almost before the coach stopped. It is a level bit of road, four miles only for the entire stage, and was performed at a full gallop. That was done by a coach called the Telegraph, which was started some years after the Quicksilver, to do the distance from Exeter to London in the day. We left Exeter at 5 A.M., and reached London between nine and ten, with time for both breakfast and dinner on the road. I think the performance of the Exeter Telegraph was about the ne plus ultra of coach travelling. One man drove fifty miles, and then meeting the other coach on the road, changed from one box to the other and drove back again. It was tremendously hard work! I once remarked to him as I sat beside him, that there was not much work for his whip arm. “Not much, sir,” he replied; “but just put your hand on my left arm!” I did, and felt the muscle swollen to its utmost, and hard as iron. “Many people think,” he said, “that it is easier work to drive such a coach and such a team as this, than to have to flog a dull team up to eight miles an hour. Nobody would think so that had ever tried both!”

I once persuaded my mother, who was returning with me from Exeter to London, to make the journey on the box of the Telegraph, while I sat behind her. She had been a good deal afraid of the experiment, but admitted that she had never enjoyed a journey more.

But having been led by my coaching reminiscences to speak of my visits to Exeter and to Fanny Bent, I must not turn that page of the past without dedicating a few lines to one to whom I had great cause to be gratefully attached, and whose character both in its high worth and its originality and singularity was a product of that day hardly likely to be reproduced in this.

Very plain in feature, and dressed with Quaker-like simplicity and utter disregard for appearance, her figure was as well known in Exeter as the cathedral towers. She held a position and enjoyed an amount of respect which was really singular in the case of a very homely-featured old maid of very small fortune. She affected, like some other persons I have known both in the far west and the far north of England, to speak the dialect of her country. Though without any pretension to literary tastes or pursuits, she was a fairly well-read woman, and was perfectly able to speak better English than many a Londoner. But she chose when in Devonshire to speak as Devonshire folks spoke. She was a thoroughgoing Churchwoman and Conservative, though too universally popular with all classes to confine her sympathies within any party bounds. She had a strong native sense of humour, and despite the traditions and principles which taught her to consider “Peter Pindar” as a reprobate, she could not resist the enjoyment of his description of the king’s visit to Exeter. It was a treat to hear her read the verses in her own Devon vernacular. And I shall never forget her whispering to me as we walked up the nave of the cathedral, “Nate, nate! Clane, clane! Do ye mop it, mop it, Mister Dane?” And how Dane Buller replied, “In all our Ex’ter shops we do not meet with such long mops. Our mops don’t reach so high!” I quote possibly incorrectly from the recollections of some sixty years ago; and I have never studied Mr. Woolcott’s works since. But the very tones of the dear old lady’s voice, as she whispered the words, bursting the while with suppressed laughter, remain in my ears.

A pious Churchwoman of these improved days would not, I take it, select such a place and such a time for such whisperings. But I am sure it would be difficult to find a better or more sincere Christian than dear old Fanny Bent. And the anecdote may be accepted as one more illustration of change in manners, feeling, and decencies.

Then there were strawberry and cream parties at a place called, it I remember right, Hoopern Bowers, always with a bevy of pretty girls, for attracting whom my plain old spinster cousin seemed to possess a special secret; and excursions to Marypole Head, and drives over Haldon Down. When I revisited Exeter some months ago Hoopern Bowers seemed to have passed from the memory of man! And whether any one of the laughing girls I had known there was still extant as a grey-headed crone, I could not learn! Marypole Head too has been nearly swallowed up by the advancing tide of “villas” surging up the hill, though the look-down on the other side over Upton Pynes and the valley of the Exe is lovely as ever. And Haldon Down at all events is as breezy as of yore!

Dr. Bowring—subsequently Sir John—was at that time resident in Exeter with his two daughters. The doctor was hardly likely to be intimate with Fanny Bent’s Conservative and mainly clerical friends, but, knowing everybody, she knew him too, and rather specially liked his girls, who used to be of our Hoopern Bower parties. Lucy Bowring was some years my senior, but I remember thinking her very charming; she was a tall, handsome, dark-eyed girl, decidedly clever, and a little more inclined to be emancipée in matters ecclesiastical than were the others of the little world around her. Then there was gentle Rachel Hutchinson! How strangely names that have not been in my mind for half a century or more come back to me! Rachel was the daughter of a retired physician, a widower, whom I recognised as a man of elegant and refined culture, somewhat superior to the majority of the local clergy among whom he lived. I can see him now, a slender, somewhat daintily dressed figure, punctiliously courteous, with a pleasant old-world flavour in his manner; with carefully arranged grey hair, double gold eye-glass, a blue swallow-tailed coat, nankin trousers and polished shoes. But he did not come to Hoopern Bowers. His daughter Rachel did; and was curiously contrasted with Lucy Bowring in every respect. She was a small sylph-like little figure, with blue eyes, blond hair, very pretty and very like an angel. She was also very, very religious after the evangelical fashion of that day, and gave me a volume of Low Church literature, which I preserved many years with much sentiment, but, I fear, no further profit. I think that the talks which Lucy and Rachel and I had together over our strawberries and cream must have had some flavour of originality about them. I do not imagine that Lucy thought or cared much about my soul; but I fancy that Rachel felt herself to be contending for it.

And now, all gone! Probably not one of all those who made those little festivities so pleasant to me remains on the face of the earth! At all events every one of them has many many years ago passed out of the circle of light projected by my magic lanthorn!

And how many others have passed like phantasmagoric shadows across that little circle of light! It is one of the results of such a rolling-stone life as mine has been, that the number of persons I have known, and even made friends of for the time, has been immense; but they all pass like a phantom procession! How many! How many! They have trooped on into the outer darkness and been lost!

I suppose that during the half century, or nearly that time—from 1840 to 1886—that I knew little or nothing of England, the change that has come upon all English life has been nearly as great in one part of the country as another. But on visiting Exeter a few months ago I was much struck at its altered aspect, because I had known it well in my youth. It was not so much that the new rows of houses and detached villas seemed to have nearly doubled the extent of the city, and obliterated many of the old features of it, as that the character of the population seemed changed. It was less provincial—a term which cockneys naturally use in a disparaging sense, but which in truth implies quite as much that is pleasant, as the reverse. It seemed to have been infected by much of the ways and spirit of London, without of course having anything of the special advantages of London to offer. People no longer walked down the High Street along a pavement abundantly ample for the traffic, nodding right and left to acquaintances. Everybody knew everybody no longer. The leisurely gossiping ways of the shopkeepers had been exchanged for the short and sharp promptitude of London habits. I recognised indeed the well-remembered tone of the cathedral bells. But the cathedral and its associations and influences did not seem to hold the same place in the city life as it did in the olden time of my young days. There was an impalpable and very indescribable but yet unmistakably sensible something which seemed to shut off the ecclesiastical life on one side of the close precincts from the town life on the other, in a manner which was new to me. I have little doubt that if I had casually asked in any large—say—grocer’s shop in the High Street, who was the canon in residence, I should have received a reply indicating that the person inquired of had not an idea of what I was talking about; and am very sure that half a century ago the reply to the same question would have been everywhere a prompt one.

The lovely garden close under the city wall on the northern side,—perhaps the prettiest city garden in England—with its remarkably beautiful view of the cathedral (which used to belong to old Edmund Granger, an especial crony of Fanny Bent’s) exists still, somewhat more closely shut in by buildings. We were indeed permitted to walk there the other day by the kindness of the present proprietor, merely as members of “the public,” which would not have been dreamed of in those old days when “the public” was less thought of than at present. But I could not help thinking that “the public” and I, as a portion and representative of it, must be a terrible nuisance to the owner of that beautiful and tranquil spot, so great as seriously to diminish the value of it.

Another small difference occurs to me as illustrative of the changes that time and the rail have brought about. I heard very little of the once familiar Devonshire dialect. Something of intonation there may yet linger, but of the old idioms and phraseology little or nothing.

But I have been beguiled into all these reminiscences of the fair capital of the west and my early days there, by the quicksilver mail, itself a most compendious and almost complete illustration of the nature of the differences between its own day and that of its successor, the rail!

To the rail is due principally much of the changed appearance of London. Certainly the domestic architecture of the Georgian period has little enough of beauty to recommend it. It is insignificant, mean and prosaic to an extraordinary degree, as we all know. But it is not marked by the audacious, ostentatious, nightmare-hideousness of the railway arches and viaducts and stations of modern London. It is difficult to say whether the greatest change in the daily life and habits of a Londoner has been produced by gas, by Peel’s police, electric telegraphy, modern postal arrangements, or the underground railway. Can the present generation picture to itself what London was and looked like when lighted only by the few twinkling oil lamps which seemed to serve no other purpose save to make darkness visible? Can it conceive a London policeless by day, and protected at night only by a few heavily great-coated watchmen, very generally asleep in their “boxes,” and equipped with a huge rattle in one hand and a large stable lanthorn in the other? The twopenny post was considered an immense boon to Londoners and their needs of quick communication between the different districts of their even then overgrown town. But what would they have thought of an almost hourly postal delivery, and of the insufficient quickness of that being supplemented by telegraphic messages, to be outstripped in their turn by telephony? And what would the modern Londoner think of doing without all these things?

But perhaps the underground railways have most of all revolutionised the London habits of the present day. Why, even to me, who knew cabless London, they seem to have become indispensable. I loathe them! The hurry-scurry! The necessity of “looking sharp!” The difficulty of ascertaining which carriage you are to take, and of knowing when you have arrived at your journey’s end! The horrible atmosphere! All strong against the deed! And yet the necessities of time and place in the huge overgrown monster of a town seem to compel me to pass a large portion of my hours among the sewers, when I find myself a dazed and puzzled stranger in the town I once knew so well.

Another very striking change in the appearance of London in the jubilee year of Queen Victoria as contrasted with the London of George the Third and the Regency, is caused by the preposterous excess of the system of advertising. Of course the practice is deeply rooted in causes which profoundly affect all the developments of social life and modes of thought, as Carlyle well understood. But I am now speaking merely of the exterior and surface effect of the ubiquitous sheets of paper of all colours of the rainbow, with their monstrous pictorial illustrations. I know that to say that it vulgarises the town to a quite infinite degree may be thought to be mere meaningless cant, or illiberal affectation, itself truly vulgar. Yet surely the accusation must be allowed to be a just one. If brazen-faced self-assertion, frantically eager competition in the struggle for profit, and the persuasion that this can best be attained by the sort of assertions and inducements with which the walls are covered, be not vulgar, what is? And what of the public which is attracted by the devices which the experience of those who cater for it, teach them to employ? I miss in the London of the present day a kind of shop which was not uncommon in the days when I first knew the town—shops at which one description of article only was sold, and where that one was to be had notoriously of the best possible quality; shops that appeared to despise all the finery of glass and brass and mahogany; where prices were not cut down to the lowest possible figure by the competitive necessity of underselling, but where every article could be trusted to be what it pretended to be. Shops of this kind never advertised at all, but were content to trust for business to the reputation they had made for themselves. I am told that everything is a great deal cheaper than it used to be, and truly find that such is the case. But I am not at all persuaded that I get better value for my money. To tell the truth, it seems to my old-fashioned notions and habits that in commercial matters we have arrived at the cheap and nasty stage of development. I am a poor man—far too poor a man to drink Lafitte Bordeaux. But that need not compel me to drink cheap claret or any abomination of the kind! Good ale is far better than bad wine, and good water better than bad beer! At least that is what the experience of well nigh four score years has taught me!

One of my earliest strolls in London revisited lately, was to the old haunts I had once known so well at Lincoln’s Inn. I had walked along the new embankment lost in wonder and admiration. The most incorrigible laudator temporis acti cannot but admit that nineteenth century London has there done something and possesses something which any city on this earth may well be proud of! And so I came to the Temple, and rambling through its renovated gardens and courts thought how infinitely more inviting they looked than anything in Belgrave Square, or Mayfair! Templa quam dilecta! Why, if only a wall could be built around the precincts high enough and strong enough to shut out London sounds and London smells and London atmosphere, one might be almost as well there as in Magdalen at Oxford!

And Alsatia too, its next door neighbour to the eastward, all ravaged and routed out, its mysterious courts and light-abhorring alleys exposed to the flouting glare of a sunshine baking a barren extent, devoted apparently to dead cats and potsherds! That Whitefriars district used to be a favourite exploring ground of mine after the publication of The Fortunes of Nigel. How the copper captains, if condemned to walk their former haunts, would slink away in search of the cover of darksome nooks no longer to be found! What would Miss Trapbois’s ghost, wandering in the unsheltered publicity of the new embankment, think of the cataclysm which has overwhelmed the world she knew!

Then, marvelling at the ubiquitous railway bridges and arches, which seem to return again and again like the recurring horrors of a nightmare dream, I passed westward, where the Fleet Prison is not, and where even Temple Bar is no more, till I came to Chancery Lane, which seemed to retain much of its old dinginess, and passed thence under the unchanged old gateway into Lincoln’s Inn Old Square, where my father’s chambers were, and where I used to go to him with my nonsense verses.

Old Square looks much as it used to look, I think. And the recollection darted across my mind—who shall say why?—of a queer-looking shambling figure, whom my father pointed out to me one day from the window of his chambers. “That,” said he, “is Jockey Bell, perhaps the first conveyancer in England. He probably knows more of the law of real property than any man breathing.” He was a rather short, squab-looking, and very shabby figure, who walked, I think, a little lame. He came, I was told, from the north country, and spoke with a strong Northumbrian accent. “It is a dreadful thing to have to decipher an opinion of his,” said my father; “he is said to have three handwritings—one when he is sober, which he can read himself; one when he is drunk, which his clerk can read; and one next morning after being drunk, which no human being can read!”

And I looked for the little shabby stuffy court, in which I had so often watched Eldon’s lowering brow, as he doubted over some knotty point. My father had the highest opinion of his intellectual power and legal knowledge. But he did not like him. He used to say that his mind was an instrument of admirable precision, but his soul the soul of a pedlar. I take it Eldon’s quintessential Toryism was obnoxious to my father’s Liberalism. He used to repeat the following “report” of a case in the Court of Chancery:—

“Mr. Leech[A] made a speech;
’Twas learned, terse, and strong.
Mr. Hart on the other part,
Was neat and glib, but wrong.
Mr. Parker made it darker;
’Twas dark enough without!
Mr. Cook cited a book;
And the Chancellor said, I doubt.”

Una omnes premit nox!

Of course among the other changes of sixty years language had changed. There had been a change especially in pronunciation, a little before my time. Only very old and old-fashioned people continued in my earliest years to say Room for Rome; gould for gold; obleege for oblige; Jeames for James (one of our chaplains at Winchester, I remember, always used to speak of St. Jeames); a beef-steek for a beef-steak; or to pronounce the “a” in danger, stranger, and the like, as it is in “man.” But it is a singular fact, that despite the spread, and supposed improvement of education, the literary—or perhaps it would be better to say the printed—language of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century was much more correct than that of the latter part of it. I constantly find passages in books and newspapers written with the sublimest indifference to all grammatical rules, and all proprieties of construction. A popular writer of fiction says that her hero “rose his head”! And another tells her readers that something happened when “the brunt of the edge had worn off”! There are certain words, such as “idiosyncrasy,” “type,” “momentary,” and many others which I cannot while writing recollect, which are constantly used, not by one writer only, but by many, to express meanings wholly different from those which they really bear. There is another word which is worth mentioning, because the misuse of it is rapidly becoming endemic. I mean the verb trouble; which it seems to me all the world before the birth of the present generation very well knew to be an active not a neuter verb. Now scarcely a day passes without my meeting with such phrases as “he did not trouble,” meaning, trouble himself; “I hope you won’t trouble,” instead of trouble yourself. To old-fashioned ears it seems a detestable vulgarism. But as far as I can gather from observing books that have a greater, and books that have a lesser degree, of success, and from the remarks of the critical journals, a book is in these latter days deemed none the worse, nor is at all less likely to find favour with the public, because it is full of grammatical or linguistic solecisms. Now certainly this is an instance and indication of changed ideas; for it assuredly was not the case when George the Third was king.

Another difference between that day and this of very considerable social significance may be observed in the character and development of the slang in use. There was at the former period very little slang of the kind that may be considered universal. Different classes had different phrases and locutions that were peculiar to them, and served more or less as a bond of union and exclusiveness as regarded outsiders. The criminal classes had their slang. The Universities had theirs. There was costermongers’ slang. And there was a slang peculiar to the inner circles of the fashionable world, together with many other special dialects that might be named. But the specialities of these various idioms were not interchangeable, nor for the most part intelligible outside the world to which they belonged. Nor—and this difference is a very notable one—did slang phrases grow into acceptance with the rapidity or universality which now characterises their advent—a notable difference, because it, of course, arises from the increased rapidity of communication and from the much greater degree in which all classes and all provincial and town populations are mixed together and rubbed against each other. It used to be said, and is still said by some old world folks, that the use of slang is vulgar. And the younger generation, which uses it universally, ridicules much the old fogey narrowness which so considers it. But the truth is, that there was in the older time nothing really vulgar in the use of the slang which then prevailed. Why should not every class and every profession have its own shibboleths and its own phrases? And is there not real vulgarity in the mind which considers a man vulgar for using the language of the class to which he really belongs? But the modern use of slang is truly vulgar for a very different reason. It is vulgar because it arises from one of the most intrinsically vulgar of all the vulgar tendencies of a vulgar mind—imitation. There are slang phrases, which, because they vividly or graphically express a conception, or clothe it with humour, are admirable. But they are admirable only in the mouths of their inventors.

Of course it is an abuse of language to say that the beauty of a pretty girl strikes you with awe. But he who first said of some girl that she was “awfully” pretty, was abundantly justified by the half humorous half serious consideration of all the effects such loveliness may produce. But then, because this was felt to be the case, and the mot was accepted, all the tens of thousands of idiotic cretins who have been rubbed down into exact similarity to each other by excessive locomotion and the “spread” of education—spread indeed after the fashion in which a gold-beater spreads his metal—imitate each other in the senseless use of it. They are just like the man in the Joe Miller story, who, because a laugh followed when a host, whose servant let fall a dish with a boiled tongue in it, said it was only a lapsus linguæ, ordered his own servant to throw down a leg of mutton, and then made the same remark!

There was an old gentleman who had a very tolerable notion of what is vulgar and what is not, and who characterised “imitators” as a “servile herd.” And surely, if, as we are often told, this is a vulgar age, the fact is due to the prevalence of this very tap-root of vulgarity, imitation. Of course I am not speaking of imitation in any of the various cases in which there is an end in view outside the fact of the imitation. The child in order to speak must imitate those whom it hears speaking. If you would make a pudding, you must imitate the cook; if a coat, the tailor. But the imitation which is essentially vulgar, the very tap-root, as I have said, of vulgarity, is imitation for imitation’s sake. And that is why I think modern slang is essentially vulgar. If it is your real opinion—right or wrong matters not—that any slang phrase expresses any idea with peculiar accuracy, vividness, or humour, use it by all means; and he is a narrow blockhead who sees any vulgarity in your doing so. But for heaven’s sake, my dear Dick, don’t use it merely because you heard Bob use it!

Yet there is something pathetically humble too about a man so conscious of his own worthlessness as to be ever anxious to look like somebody else. And surely a man must have a painful consciousness of his inability to utter any word of his own with either wit or wisdom or sense in it, who habitually strives to borrow the wit of the last retailer of the current slang whom he has heard.

In some respects, however, this is, I think, a less vulgar age than that of my youth. Vulgar exclusiveness on grounds essentially illiberal was far more common. It will perhaps seem hardly credible at the present day that middle-class professional society, such as that of barristers, physicians, rectors, and vicars, should sixty years ago have deemed attorneys and general medical practitioners (or apothecaries, as the usual, and somewhat depreciatory term was) inadmissible to social equality. But such was the case. My reminiscences of half a century or more ago seem to indicate also that professional etiquette has been relaxed in various other particulars. I hear of physicians being in partnership with others of the same profession—an arrangement which has a commercial savour in it that would have been thought quite infra dig. in my younger day. I hear also of their accepting, if not perhaps exacting, payments of a smaller amount than the traditional guinea. This was unheard of in the old days. An English physician is a member of the most generously liberal profession that exists or ever existed on earth. And it was an every-day occurrence for a physician to think more of the purse of his patient than of the value of his own services. But he did this either by refusing to accept any fee whatever, or by declining it on the occasion of subsequent visits: never by diminishing the amount of it. In some other cases professional dignity had to be maintained under circumstances that entailed considerable sacrifices on those who were called upon to maintain it. It was not etiquette, for instance, for a barrister going on circuit to travel otherwise than by a private conveyance. He might hire a post chaise, or he might ride his own horse, or even a hired one, but he must not travel by a stage coach, or put up at an hotel. I have heard it said that this rule originated in the notion that a barrister travelling to an assize town by the public coach might fall in with some attorney bound on a similar errand, and might so be led, if not into the sin, at least into temptation to the sin of “huggery.” I dare say many a young barrister of the present day does not know what huggery means or meant!

Among the sights and sounds which were familiar to the eye and ear in the London of my youth, and which are so no longer, may be mentioned the twopenny postman. Not many probably of the rising generation are aware, that in their fathers’ days the London postal service was dual The “twopenny postman,” who delivered letters sent from one part of London to another, was a different person from the “general postman,” who delivered those which came from the country. The latter wore a scarlet, the former a blue livery. And the two administrations were entirely distinct. In those days, when a letter from York to London cost a shilling, or not much less, the weight of a single letter was limited solely by the condition that it must be written on one sheet or piece of paper only. Two pieces of paper, however small, or however light, incurred a double postage. I have sent for a single postage an enormous sheet of double folio outweighing some ten sheets of ordinary post paper. Of course envelopes were unknown. Every sheet had to be folded so that it could be sealed and the address written on the back of it.

Another notable London change which occurs to me is that which has come to the Haymarket. In my day it was really such. The whole right hand side of the street going downwards, from the Piccadilly end to the Opera House, used to be lined with loads of hay. The carts were arranged in close order side by side with their back parts towards the foot pavement, which was crowded by the salesmen and their customers.

I might say a good deal too about the changes in the theatrical London world and habits, but the subject is a large one, and has been abundantly illustrated. It is moreover one which in its details is not of an edifying nature. And it must suffice, therefore, to bear my testimony to the greatness of the purifying change which has been brought about in all the habits of playgoers and playhouses mainly and firstly by the exertions of my mother’s old and valued friend Mr. Macready.

CHAPTER III.

I was, I think, about eight years old when my parents removed from Keppel Street to Harrow-on-the-Hill. My father’s practice, I take it, was becoming less and less satisfactory, and his health equally so. And the move to Harrow was intended as a remedy or palliation for both these evils. My father was a very especially industrious and laborious man. And I have the authority of more than one very competent judge among his professional contemporaries for believing that he was as learned a Chancery lawyer as was to be found among them. How then was his want of success to be accounted for? One of the competent authorities above alluded to accounted for it thus: “Your father,” he said to me many years afterwards, when his troubles and failures had at last ceased to afflict him, “never came into contact with a blockhead without insisting on irrefutably demonstrating to him that he was such. And the blockhead did not like it! He was a disputatious man; and he was almost in variably—at least on a point of law—right. But the world differed from him in the opinion that being so gave him the right of rolling his antagonist in the dust and executing an intellectual dance of triumph on his prostrate form.” He was very fond of whist, and was I believe a good player. But people did not like to play with him. “Many men,” said an old friend once, “will scold their partners occasionally. But Trollope invariably scolds us all round with the utmost impartiality; and that every deal!”

He was, in a word, a highly respected, but not a popular or well-beloved man. Worst of all, alas! he was not popular in his own home. No one of all the family circle was happy in his presence. Assuredly he was as affectionate and anxiously solicitous a father as any children ever had. I never remember his caning, whipping, beating or striking any one of us. But he used during the detested Latin lessons to sit with his arm over the back of the pupil’s chair, so that his hand might be ready to inflict an instantaneous pull of the hair as the pœna (by no means pede claudo) for every blundered concord or false quantity; the result being to the scholar a nervous state of expectancy, not judiciously calculated to increase intellectual receptivity. There was also a strange sort of asceticism about him, which seemed to make enjoyment or any employment of the hours save work, distasteful and offensive to him. Lessons for us boys were never over and done with. It was sufficient for my father to see any one of us “idling,” i.e. not occupied with book work, to set us to work quite irrespectively of the previously assigned task of the day having been accomplished. And this we considered to be unjust and unfair.

I have said that the move to Harrow was in some degree caused by a hope that the change might be beneficial to my father’s health. He had suffered very distressingly for many years from bilious headache, which gradually increased upon him during the whole of his life. I may say parenthetically that from about fifteen to forty I suffered occasionally, about once a fortnight perhaps, from the same malady, though in a much less intense form. But at about forty years old I seemed to have grown out of it, and since that time have never been troubled by it. But in my father’s day the common practice was to treat such complaints with calomel. He was constantly having recourse to that drug. And I believe that it had the effect of shattering his nervous system in a deplorable manner. He became increasingly irritable; never with the effect of causing him to raise a hand against any one of us, but with the effect of making intercourse with him so sure to issue in something unpleasant, that unconsciously we sought to avoid his presence, and to consider as hours of enjoyment only those that could be passed away from it.

My mother’s disposition on the other hand was of the most genial, cheerful, happy, enjoué nature imaginable. All our happiest hours were spent with her; and to any one of us a tête-à-tête with her was preferable to any other disposal of a holiday hour. But even this under all the circumstances did not tend to the general harmony and happiness of the family circle. For of course the facts and the results of them must have been visible to my father; and though wholly inoperative to produce the smallest change in his ways, must, I cannot doubt, have been painful to him. It was all very sad. My father was essentially a good man. But he was, I fear, a very unhappy one.

He was extremely fond of reading aloud to the assembled family in the evening; and there was not one individual of those who heard him who would not have escaped from doing so, at almost any cost. Of course it was our duty to conceal this extreme reluctance to endure what was to him a pleasure—a duty which I much fear was very imperfectly performed. I remember—oh, how well!—the nightly readings during one winter of Sir Charles Grandison, and the loathing disgust for that production which they occasioned.

But I do not think that I and my brothers were bad boys. We were, I take it, always obedient. And one incident remains in my mind from a day now nearly seventy years ago, which seems to prove that the practice of that virtue was habitual to me. An old friend of my mother’s, Mrs. Gibbon, with her daughter Kate, mentioned on a former page as the companion of my lessons in the alphabet, were staying with us at Harrow. Mrs. Gibbon and Kate, and my mother and I were returning from a long country ramble, across some fields in a part of the country my mother was not acquainted with. There was a steep grassy declivity, down which I and the little girl, my contemporary, hand in hand were running headlong in front of our respective parents, when my mother suddenly called out, “Stop, Tom!” I stopped forthwith, and came to heel as obediently as a well-trained pointer. And about five minutes later, my mother and Mrs. Gibbon, following exactly in the line in which we had been running, discovered a long disused but perfectly open and unfenced well!

If I had not obeyed so promptly as I did, I should not now be writing “reminiscences,” and poor “Katy ’Bon,” as I used to call her, would have gone to her rest some ten years earlier than she found it. My mother always said that she could in no wise account for the impulse which prompted her to call to me to stop!

The move to Harrow was as infelicitous a step in the economic point of view as it was inefficacious as a measure of health. My father took a farm, of some three or four hundred acres, to the best of my recollection, from Lord Northwick. It was a wholly disastrous speculation. It certainly was the case that he paid a rent for it far in excess of its fair value; and he always maintained that he had been led to undertake to do so by inaccurate and false representations. I have no knowledge of these representations, but I am absolutely certain that my father was entirely convinced that they were such as he characterised them. But he was educated to be a lawyer, and was a good one. He had never been educated to be a farmer; and was, I take it, despite unwearied activity, and rising up early and late taking rest, a bad one.

To make matters worse moreover he built on that land, of which he held only a long lease, a large and very good house. The position was excellently chosen, the house was well conceived and well built, and the extensive gardens and grounds were well designed and laid out; but the unwisdom of doing all that on land the property of another is but too obvious.

The excuse that my father might have alleged was that he was by no means wholly dependent either on his profession or on his farm, or on the not inconsiderable property which he had inherited from his father or enjoyed in right of his wife. He had an old maternal uncle, Adolphus Meetkerke, who lived on his estate near Royston in Hertfordshire, called Julians. Mr. Meetkerke—the descendant of a Dutchman who had come to this country some time in the eighteenth century as diplomatic representative of his country, and had settled here—lived at Julians with an old childless wife—the daughter, I believe, of a General Chapman—and my father was his declared heir. He had another nephew, Mr. John Young, as flourishing and prosperous an attorney as my father was an unsuccessful and unprosperous barrister. John Young, too, was as worthy and as highly-respected a man as any in the profession. But my father, as settled long years before, was to be the heir; and I was in due time shown to the tenantry as their future landlord, and all that sort of thing. I suppose my grandfather, the Rev. Anthony Trollope, of Cottenham in Hertfordshire, married an elder sister of old Adolphus Meetkerke, while the father of John Young married a younger one. And so, come what might of the Harrow farm and the new house, I was to be the future owner of Julians, and live on my own acres.

Again, Dîs aliter visum!

I well remember more than one visit to Julians with my parents about this time—visits singularly contrasted with those to my Grandfather Milton, the vicar of Heckfield. The house and establishment at Julians were on a far more pretentious scale than the home of the vicar, and the mode of life in the squire’s establishment larger and freer. But I liked Heckfield better than Julians; partly, I think, even at that early age, because the former is situated in an extremely pretty country, whereas the neighbourhood of the other is by no means such. But I please myself with thinking, and do really believe, that the main reason for the preference was that the old Bristol saddler’s son was a far more highly-cultured man than the Hertfordshire squire.

He was a good man, too, was old Adolphus Meetkerke; a good landlord, a kindly natured man, a good sportsman, an active magistrate, and a good husband to his old wife. But there was a sort of flavour of roughness about the old squire and his surroundings which impressed itself on my observation even in those days, and would, I take it, nowadays be deemed almost clownish rusticity.

Right well do I remember the look and figure of my Aunt Meetkerke, properly great-aunt-in-law. She was an admirable specimen of a squiress, as people and things were in that day. I suppose that there was not a poor man or woman in the parish with whose affairs of all sorts she was not intimately acquainted, and to whom she did not play the part of an ever-active providence. She always came down to breakfast clad in a green riding-habit, and passed most of her life on horseback. After dinner, in the long low drawing-room, with its faded stone-coloured curtains and bookless desert spaces, she always slept, as peacefully as she does now in Julians churchyard. She never meddled at all with the housekeeping of her establishment. That was in the hands of “Mrs. Anne,” an old maiden sister of Mr. Meetkerke. She was a prim-looking, rosy-apple-faced, most good-natured little woman. She always carried a little basket in her hand, in which were the keys, and a never-changed volume of Miss Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which she always recommenced as soon as she had worked her way to the end of it. Though a very precise sort of person, she would frequently come down to breakfast a few minutes late, to find her brother standing on the hearth-rug with his prayer-book open in his hand waiting for her arrival to begin prayers to the assembled household. He had a wonderfully strong rasping voice, the tones of which were rarely modulated under any circumstances. I can hear now his reverberating, “Five minutes too late again, Mrs. Anne; ‘Dearly beloved brethren,’” ... etc., the change of person addressed, and of subject, having been marked by no pause or break whatever save the sudden kneeling at the head of the breakfast table; while at the conclusion of the short, but never missed prayers, the transition from “Amen” to “William, bring round the brown mare after breakfast” was equally unmarked by pause or change of voice or manner.

The parish in which Julians is situated is a small vicarage, the incumbent of which was at that time a bachelor, Mr. Skinner. The church was a very small one, and my great-uncle and his family the only persons in the congregation above the rank of the two or three small farmers and the agricultural labourers who mainly composed it. Whether there was any clerk or not I do not remember. But if any such official existed, the performance of his office in church was altogether not only overlaid but extinguished by the great rough “view-halloa” sort of voice of my uncle. He never missed going to church, and never missed a word of the responses, which were given in far louder tones than those of the vicar. Something of a hymn was always attempted, I remember, by the rustic congregation; with what sort of musical effect may be imagined! I don’t think my Uncle Meetkerke could have distinguished much between their efforts and the music of the spheres. But the singers were so well pleased with the exercise that they were apt to prolong it, as my uncle thought, somewhat unduly. And on such occasions he would cut the performance short with a rasping “That’s enough!” which effectually brought it to an abrupt conclusion. The very short sermon—probably a better one for the purpose in hand than South or Andrews would have preached—having been brought to an end, my uncle would sing out to the vicar, as he was descending the pulpit stairs, “Come up to dinner, Skinner!” And then we all marched out, while the rustics, still retaining their places till we were fairly out of the door, made their obeisances as we passed. All which phenomena, strongly contrasted as they were with the decorous if somewhat sleepy performance in my grandfather’s church at Heckfield, greatly excited my interest. I remember that I had no dislike to attending service either at Heckfield or Julians, while I intensely disliked making one of a London congregation.

If I remember right there were two or three Dissenters and their families at Heckfield, generally considered by their neighbours much as so many Chinese settled among them might have been—as unaccountably strange and as objectionable. But nothing of the sort existed at Julians; and I take it, as far as may be judged from my uncle’s general tone and manner in managing his parish, that any individual guilty of such monstrous and unnatural depravity would at once have been consigned to the parish stocks.

Mr. Meetkerke was, as I have said, an active magistrate. But only one instance of his activity in this respect dwells in my recollection. I remember to have seen, in the nondescript little room that he called his study, a collection of some ten or a dozen very nasty-looking pots, with some white pasty looking substance in each of them, and to have wondered greatly what mystery could have been attached to them. I learned from the butler’s curt word of information that they were connected with my uncle’s magisterial duties, and my mind immediately began to construct all kinds of imaginings about wholesale poisonings. I had heard the story of the “Untori” at Milan, and had little doubt that we were in the midst of some such horrible conspiracy. A few days later I learned that the nasty-looking pots were the result of a magisterial raid among the bakers, and contained nothing worse than alum.

These reminiscences of Julians and its little world recurred to me when speaking of my father’s financial position at the time he took a farm at Harrow and built a handsome house on another man’s land. He was at that time Mr. Meetkerke’s declared heir, and would doubtless have inherited his property in due time had childless old Mrs. Meetkerke lived. But one day she unexpectedly took off her green habit for the last time, and in a day or two was laid under yet more perennial green in the little churchyard! Mr. Meetkerke was at that time over sixty. But he was as fine an old man physically as anybody could wish to see. Before long he married a young wife, and became the father of six children! It was of course a tremendous blow to my father, and never, as I can say from much subsequent information, was such a blow better or more bravely borne. As for myself, I cannot remember that the circumstance impressed me as having any bearing whatsoever on my personal fate and fortunes. In after years I heard it asserted in more than one quarter that my father had in a great measure himself to thank for his disappointment. He was a Liberal in politics after the fashion of those days, (which would make excellent Conservatism in these,) while Mr. Meetkerke was a Tory of the very oldest school. The Tory uncle was very far indeed from being an intellectual match for his Liberal nephew, and no doubt used to talk in his fine old hunting-field voice a great deal of nonsense which no consideration of either affection, respect, or prudence, could induce my father to spare. I fear he used to jump on the hearty old squire very persistently, with the result à la longue of ceasing to be a personâ gratâ to the old man. It may be that had it been otherwise he might have sought affection and companionship elsewhere than from a young wife. But ...!

My father, as I have said, struggled bravely with fortune, but as far as I have ever been able to learn, with ever increasing insuccess. His practice as a barrister dwindled away gradually till it became not worth while to keep chambers; and his farming accounts showed very frequently—every year, I suspect—a deficit.

One of the reasons for selecting Harrow as his scene of rustication had been the existence of the school there. I and my brothers were all of us destined from our cradles to become Wykehamists, and it was never my father’s intention that Harrow instead of Winchester should be our definitive place of education. But the idea was, that we might, before going to Winchester, avail ourselves of the right to attend his parish school which John Lyon bequeathed to the parishioners of Harrow.

I went to Winchester at ten years old. The time for me to do so did not wholly depend on the will of my parents, for the admission in those days, as in all former days up to quite recent times, was by nomination in this wise. There were six electors:—1. the Warden of New College, (otherwise more accurately in accordance with the terms of Wykeham’s foundation, the College of St. Mary Winton prope Winton); 2. the Warden of Winchester College; 3. the Sub-Warden of Winchester; 4. the “Informator” or head master of Winchester; and 5. and 6. two “Posers” sent yearly by New College, according to a certain cycle framed ad hoc, to the Winchester election. It was at the election which took place in July that all vacancies among the seventy scholars, who together with the warden, fellows, two masters, chaplains, and choristers constituted the members of Wykeham’s foundation, were filled. The vacancies were caused either by the election of scholars to be fellows of New College, or by their superannuation at eighteen years of age, or by their withdrawal from the school. The number of vacancies in any year was therefore altogether uncertain. The first two vacancies were filled by boys who came in as “College Founders,” i.e. as of kin to the founder. Of course the bishop’s kin could be only collateral; and I remember that “the best blood,” was considered to be that of the Twistletons. Originally there had been an absolute preference for those who could show such relationship. But as time went on it became apparent that the entire college would thus be filled with Founder’s kin; and it was determined that two such only should be admitted to Winchester every year, and two only sent out to fellowships at New College. Even so the proportion of fellowships at the Oxford College awarded to Founder’s kin was large, for it was reckoned in those days that the average vacancies at New College, which were caused only by death, marriage, or the acceptance of a college living, amounted to seven in two years, of which the Founder’s kin took four. And this rule operated with certain regularity. For the superannuation at eighteen did not apply to Founder’s kin, who remained in the school, be their age what it might, till they went to New College.

These two boys of Founder’s kin were admitted by the votes of the six electors. After them came the boy nominated by the Warden of New College; then the nominee of the Warden of Winchester; and so on till the eighth vacancy was filled by the nominee of the junior “Poser.” Then a ninth vacancy was taken by the Warden of New College’s second nomination, and so on. Of course the vacancies for Winchester were much more numerous than those for the Oxford College; and it often happened that the “Poser’s” second or sometimes even third nomination had a very good chance of getting in in the course of the year. The cycle for “Posers,” which I have mentioned, allowed it to be known who would be “Poser” for a given year many years in advance; and the senior “Poser’s” first nomination for 1820 had been promised to me before I was out of my cradle. He was the Rev. Mr. Lipscomb, who subsequently became Bishop of Jamaica. It was written therefore in the book of fate that I was to go to Winchester in the year 1820, when I should be ten years old.

That time, however, was not yet; but was looked forward to by me with a somewhat weighty sense of the inevitability of destiny. And I can well remember meditating on the three fateful epochs which awaited me—to wit, having certain teeth taken out in the immediate future; going to Winchester in the paulo post futurum; and being married in the ultimate consummation of things. All three seemed to me to need being faced with a certain dogged fortitude of endurance. But I think that the terrors of the first loomed the largest in my imagination, doubtless by virtue of its greater proximity.

I remember, too, at a very early age maintaining in my own mind, if not in argument with others, that to be brave one must be very much afraid and act in despite of fear, and uninfluenced by it and that not to fear at all, as I heard predicated of themselves by sundry contemporaries, indicated simply stupidity. And when the day for the dentist came my heart was in my boots, but they carried me unfalteringly to St. Martin’s Lane all the same.

At present, however, we are at Harrow getting into my father’s new house, and establishing ourselves in our new home. It was soon arranged that I was to attend the school, scarcely, as I remember, as a regular inscribed scholar attending the lessons in the school-room, but as a private pupil of the Rev. Mark Drury. I was about eight years old at the time; and I suppose should hardly have been accepted as an admitted member of the school.

At that time Dr. Butler, afterwards Bishop of Peterborough, was the head master. He was not the right man in the right place. He was, I take it, far more adapted for a bishop than a schoolmaster. Moreover, there were certain difficulties in his position not necessarily connected with the calling of a head master. He had succeeded Dr. Drury in the head mastership, and he found the school full of Drurys. Mark, the brother of Dr. Drury, was the second master; a Mr. Evans, a respectable quiet nonentity, was the third; Harry Drury, a son of the old doctor, was the fourth, and was the most energetic and influential man in the place; William Drury, the son of Mark, was the fifth; and two young men of the names of Mills and Batten were the sixth and seventh masters. They were all in priests’ orders, and all received as many boarders as they could get. For the objectionable system, which made the fortunes of the masters far more dependent on their trade as victuallers than on their profession as teachers, had been copied from Eton, with the further evil consequence of swamping John Lyon’s parochial school by the creation of a huge boarding school. This, however eminently successful, has no proper claim to be called a “public school,” save by a modern laxity of language, which has lost sight of the fact that the only meaning or possible definition of a “public school” is, one the foundation of which was intended not for a parish or other district, but for all England. If merely success, and consequent size, be held to confer a claim to the title, it is clear that there is no “private” school which would not become a “public school” to-morrow if the master and proprietor of it could command a sufficient amount of success. And even then the question would remain, What amount of success must that be?

The world in general, however, dislikes accuracy of speaking. And Harrow was then, and has been since, abundantly large enough and successful enough to be called and considered a “public school” by the generality, who never take the trouble to ask themselves, What makes it such?

Dr. Butler was eminently a gentleman, extremely suave in manner, gentle in dealing with those under his authority, mild and moderate in his ideas of discipline, a genuinely scholarly man in tastes and pursuits, though probably not what experts in such a matter would have called a profound scholar. But he had not the energetic hand needed for ruling a large school; and his rule was not a success. Mark Drury, though from the old Drury connection his house was always full of pupils, cannot be said to have exercised any influence at all on the general condition and management of the school by reason of the extraordinary and abnormal corpulence which kept him pretty well a prisoner to the armchair in his study. He had long since, at the time when I first knew him, abandoned the practice of “going up,” as it was technically called, i.e., of climbing the last portion of Harrow Hill through the village street. On this topmost part of the hill are situated the church, the churchyard, and the school-house, rebuilt, enlarged, beautified, since my day; and this “going up” had to be performed by all the masters and all the boys every time school was attended. But of this climb Mark Drury had been incapable for many years, solely by reason of his immense corpulence. Naturally a small delicately-made man, with small hands and feet, he had become in old age the fattest man I think I ever saw. He used to sit in his study, and there conduct the business of tuition, leaving to others the work of hearing lessons in school.

His house had the reputation of being the most comfortable of all the boarding houses—a fact due to the unstinting liberality, careful supervision, and motherly kindness of “Mother Mark,” an excellent and admirable old lady, than whom it would be impossible to conceive any one more fitted for the position she occupied. The unstinting liberality, it is fair to say, characterised all the Drury houses; and probably the others also. But for truly motherly care there was but one “Mother Mark.” “Old Mark” was exceedingly popular, as indeed he deserved to be, for a more kindly-natured man never existed. He had an old-fashioned belief in the virtues of the rod; and though his bodily infirmity combined with his good nature to make him sparing in the application of it, a flogging was at his hands sufficiently disagreeable to make one desirous of avoiding it. “Your clock,” he would say, “requires to be wound up every Monday morning,” meaning that a Monday morning flogging was a good beginning of the week. But the rods were kept in a cupboard in the study—how well I remember the Bluebeard-closet sort of reputation which surrounded it!—and the cupboard was always kept locked. And very often it happened that somehow or other the key was in the keeping of Mrs. Drury. Then a message would be sent to Mrs. Drury for the key, and very probably the proposed patient was the messenger, in which case—and it is strange that the recurrence of the fact did not suggest suspicion to old Mark—it almost invariably happened that Mrs. Drury was very sorry, but she could not find the key anywhere! There never surely was a key so frequently mislaid as the key of that terrible cupboard!

Well, it was arranged that I was to go every day to Mark Drury’s study, not, as I have said, as a regular member of the school, but to get such tuition as might be picked up from the genius loci, and from such personal teaching as the old man could bestow on me at moments unoccupied by his own pupils. And this arrangement, it must be understood, was entirely a matter of friendship—one incident of the many years’ friendship between my parents and all the Drurys. There was no question of any honorarium in the matter.

My father’s appetite for teaching was such that he would, I am very sure, have much preferred keeping my brother and myself under his sole tuition. But he used to drive up to London in his gig daily to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, for he still struggled to hope on at his profession. (I remember that these drives down in the dark winter evenings became a source of some anxiety when a messenger travelling with despatches for the French Minister, who at that time rented Lord Northwick’s house at Harrow, was mysteriously murdered and his despatches stolen.) And it thus became necessary that some means should be found for preventing us boys from making école buissonière in the fields and under the hedgerows.

I do not think I profited much by my attendance at old Mark’s pupil-room. The boys whose lessons he was hearing stood in a row in front of his armchair, and I sat behind him, supposed to be intently occupied in conning the task he had set me, in preparation for the moment, when, the class before him having been dismissed, he would have little me, all alone, in front of him for a few minutes, while another class was mustering.

How I hated it all! How very much more bitterly I hated it than I ever hated any subsequent school troubles! What a Pariah I was among these denizens of Mark’s and other pupil-rooms! For I was a “town boy,” “village boy” would have been a more correct designation; one of the very few, who by the terms of the founder’s will, had any right to be there at all; and was in consequence an object of scorn and contumely on the part of all the paying pupils. I was a charity boy. But at Winchester subsequently I was far more of a charity boy, for William of Wykeham’s foundation provided me with food and lodging as well as tuition; whereas I claimed and received nothing save a modicum of the latter at the hands of those who enjoyed and administered John Lyon’s bounty. Yet, though at Winchester there were only seventy scholars and a hundred and thirty private pupils of the head master, or “commoners,” there was no trace whatsoever of any analogous feeling, no slightest arrogation of any superiority, social or other, on the part of the commoner over the collegian. In fact the matter was rather the other way; any difference between the son of the presumably richer man, and the presumably poorer, having been merged and lost sight of entirely in the higher scholastic dignity of the college boy.

I remember also, more vividly than I could wish, the bullying to which I and others were subjected at Harrow. There was much of a very brutal description. And in this respect also the difference at Winchester was very marked. The theory of the two places on the subject was entirely different, with the result I have stated. At Harrow, in those days—how it may be now I know not—no “fagging” was authorised or permitted by the masters. No boy had any legitimate authority over any other boy. And inasmuch as it was, is, and ever will be, in every large school impossible to achieve such a Saturnian state of things, the result was that the bigger and stronger assumed an authority supported by sheer violence over the smaller and weaker. At Winchester, on the other hand, the subjection of those below them in college to the “prefects” or upper class, was not only recognised but enforced by the authorities. It thus came to pass that many a big hulking fellow was subjected to the authority of a “prefect” whom he could have tossed over his head. It was an authority nobody dreamed of resisting; a matter of course; not a rule of the stronger supported by violence. And the result—contributed to, also, by other arrangements, of which I shall speak hereafter—was that anything of the nature of “bullying” was infinitely rarer at Winchester than at Harrow.

Despite old Mark’s invariable good-nature and kindness, my hours in his study were very unhappy ones; and I was hardly disposed to consider as a misfortune a severe illness which attacked me and my brother Henry, and for the nonce put an end to them. Very shortly it became clear that we were both suffering from a bad form of typhus. How was such an attack to be accounted for? My father’s new house was visited, and examined, and found to be above suspicion. But further inquiry elicited the fact that we boys had passed a half hour before breakfast in watching the proceedings of some men engaged in cleaning and restoring an old drain connected with a neighbouring farm house. The case was clear! It would seem, however, that the proper mode of treatment was not so clear to the Harrow general practitioner—a village apothecary of the old school, who, strange as it may seem, was the only available medico at Harrow in those far off days. He treated us with calomel, and very, very nearly let me slip through his hands. It would have been quite, but for a fortunate chance. Among our Harrow friends was a Mrs. Edwards, the widow of a once very well known bookseller—not a publisher, but a scholarly, and indeed learned, seller of old books—who had, I believe, left her a considerable fortune. She was a highly cultured, and very clever woman, and a special friend of my mother’s. Now it so happened that a Dr. Butt, a physician, her brother, or brother-in-law, I forget which, paid her a visit just at the time we boys were at the worst. Mrs. Edwards brought him to our bedsides. I was altogether unconscious, and had been raving about masters coming in at the window to drag me off to the pupil-room. My knowledge of what followed therefore is derived wholly from my mother’s subsequent telling. Dr. Butt, having learned the treatment to which we had been subjected, said only “No more calomel, I think. Let me have a glass of port wine immediately.” And with his finger on my wrist, he proceeded to administer a teaspoonful at a time of the cordial. A few more visits from Dr. Butt set us fairly on the way to recovery; and from that day, some sixty-eight years ago, to the present, I have never passed one day in bed from illness.

CHAPTER IV.

Another incident of these boyish years of a very different complexion has made a far deeper impression on my memory. It must have been, to the best of my remembrance, about the same time, probably some six months later in the same year, that it was decided that I was to accompany my father and mother in a “long vacation” ramble which had long been projected. My father’s method of travel on this excursion, which was to include parts of Sussex, Hampshire, Wilts, Devon, Somerset, and Monmouth, was to drive my mother and myself in his gig, accompanied by a servant riding another horse, who was provided with a pair of traces to hook on as tandem whenever the nature of the road required such assistance. I think that this tour afforded me some of the happiest days and hours I have ever known. I can never forget the ecstasy of delight with which I looked forward to it, and the preparations I made—suggested probably, some of them, by the experiences of Robinson Crusoe. The distance and differentiation between me and other boys of my acquaintance which was caused by my destination to this great adventure I felt to be such as that which may be supposed to exist between Livingstone and the stay-at-home mortals who read his books.

We started after breakfast one fine morning, “George,” the footman, turned into groom and courier, riding after the gig. I considered this a disappointingly tame proceeding. I had been up myself considerably before daylight, and considered that, looking to the arduous nature of the journey before us (we were to sleep at Dorking that night), we ought at least to have been on the road while the less adventurous part of the world were still asleep.

We had not proceeded many miles before an amari aliquid disclosed itself of a very distressing kind. I was seated on a little box placed on the floor of the gig between the knees of my father and mother, and was “as happy as a prince,” or probably much happier than any contemporaneous prince then in Christendom, when my father produced from out of the driving seat beneath him a Delphin Virgil, and intimated to me that our journey must by no means entail an entire interruption of my education; that our travelling was not at all incompatible with a little study; and that he was ready to hear me construe. It may be readily imagined how much such “study” was likely to profit me. Every incident of the road, every waggon, every stage coach we met, every village church seen across the fields, every milestone even, was a matter of intense interest to me. Had I been Argus-eyed every eye would have been busy. I remember that my mother remonstrated, but in vain. And an hour or two of otherwise intense delight was turned into something which it is scarcely an exaggeration to call torture. I think, however, that my mother must have subsequently renewed her pleadings, for on the second day’s journey the Virgil was not brought out. It was reserved for the days when we were stationary, but no longer poisoned our absolute travel.

If I never became a distinguished scholar it was assuredly from no want of urgency in season and out of season on the part of my poor father. But not even Virgil himself, backed by an Eton Latin Grammar and a small travelling dictionary, could altogether destroy the manifold delights of that journey. I must not inflict on my reader all or a tithe of my topographical reminiscences: but I will relate one little adventure which went near to saving him not only from this volume but from all that half a century, and more, of subsequent pen-work may have inflicted on him. It was at Gloucester. My parents and I had gone to the cathedral about a quarter of an hour before the time for service on a Sunday morning. The great bell was being rung—an operation which was at that time performed by seven bell-ringers down in the body of the church. One large rope, descending from an aperture in the vault, was, at some dozen or so of feet from the pavement, divided into seven—one for each of the bell-ringers. Now it so happened that on that day one of the men was absent from his post, and one rope hung loose and unoccupied. No sooner had I espied this state of things than I rushed forward and seized the vacant rope, intending to add my efforts to those of the six men at work. But it so happened that at the moment when I thus clutched the rope the men had raised the bell, and of course at the end of their pull allowed the ropes to fly upwards through their hands. But I, knowing nothing of bell-ringing, clung tightly to my rope, and was of course swung up from the pavement with terrific speed. Fortunately the height of the vault was so great as to allow the full swing of the bell to complete itself without bringing me into contact with the roof. The men cried out to me to hold on tight. I did so, and descended safely—so unharmed that I was very desirous of repeating the experiment, which, as may be supposed, was not allowed. I can pull a bell more knowingly now.

The charming old church at Gloucester was not kept and cared for in those days as it is now—a remark which is applicable, as recent visits have shown me, to nearly all the cathedral churches in England. I may observe also, since one object of these pages is to mark the social changes in English life since my young days, that the improvement in the tone and manner of performing the choral service in our cathedrals is as striking as the increased care for the fabrics. It used for the most part to be a careless, perfunctory, and not very reverent or decorous performance when George the Third was king. Those were the days when one minor canon could be backed to give another to “Pontius Pilate” in the Creed, and beat him! Other times, other manners!

I think that the points in that still well-remembered tour, that most of all delighted me, were, first of all, Lynton and Lynmouth, on the north coast of Devon; then the banks of the Wye from Chepstow to Ross; and thirdly, Raglan Castle. I had already read the Mysteries of Udolpho, with more enjoyment probably than any other reading has ever afforded me. It was an ecstasy of delight, tempered only by the impossibility of gratifying my intense longing to start forthwith to see the places and countries described. And when I did in long after years see them! Oh, Mrs. Ratcliffe, how could you tell such tales! What! this the lovely Provence of my dreams? But I was fresh from The Mysteries, and full of faith when I went to Raglan, and strove to apply, at least as a matter of possibility, the incidents of the romance to the localities of the delightful ruin.

Nor was Raglan in those days cared for with the loving care now bestowed on it by the Duke of Somerset. I have heard people complain of the restrictions, and of the small entrance fee now demanded for admittance to the ruins, and regret the days when the traveller could, as in my time, wander over every part of it at will. All that was very charming, but the place was not as beautiful as it is now. The necessary expense for the due conservation of the ruins must be very considerable. And when one hears, as I did recently at Raglan, that steam and bank-holidays have brought as many as fifteen hundred (!) visitors to the spot in one day, it may be easily imagined what the condition of the place would shortly become if careful restrictions were not enforced. Of lovely—ever lovely—Tintern, the same remarks may be made. Certainly there was a charm in wandering there, as I did when a boy, almost justified by the solitude in feeling myself to be the discoverer of the spot. Now there is a fine hotel, with waiters in black-tailed coats, and dinners à la carte! And huge vans pouring in “tourists” by the thousand. Between four and five thousand persons, I was told, visited Tintern in one August day! Scott tells those who would “view fair Melrose aright” to “visit it by the pale moonlight.” But I fear me that no such precaution could secure solitude, though it might beauty, at Tintern in August. But the care bestowed upon it makes the place more beautiful than ever. The guardians by dint of locked gates prevent the lovely sward from being defiled by sandwich papers and empty bottles, as the neighbouring woods are. But he who would view fair Tintern aright, had better not visit it on a bank holiday.

A similarly striking change between the England of sixty years since and the England of to-day may be observed at beautiful Lynmouth and Lynton. The place was a solitude when my parents and I visited it in, I think, 1818. We had a narrow escape in driving down from Lynton to the mouth of the little stream. A low wall of unmortared stones alone protected the road from the edge of a very formidable precipice; and just at the worst point the horse my father was driving took fright at something, and becoming unmanageable, dashed at the low wall, and absolutely got his fore-feet over it! “George,” riding the other horse behind, was at an hundred yards or so distance. But my father, with one bound to the horse’s head, caught him by the bridle, and, by the sheer strength of his remarkably powerful frame, forced him back into the road. It was not a mauvais quart d’heure, but a very mauvais quart de minute—for it was, I take it, all over in that time. Now the road is excellent, and traversed daily in the summer season by some half dozen huge vans carrying “tourists” from Ilfracombe to Lynton.

At the latter place, too, there is a large and extremely prettily situated hotel, where, on the occasion of my first visit, I remember that we obtained a modicum of bread and cheese at a lone cottage. Even the Valley of Rocks is not altogether what it was, for the celebrated “Castle Rock” has now well contrived paths to the top of it. I wrote a few months ago in the book kept at the hotel, ad hoc that I had climbed the Castle Rock more than sixty years ago, and had now repeated the feat. But in truth, the “climb” was in those days a different affair. I remember my mother had a story of some old friend of hers having been accompanied by her maid during a ramble through the Valley of Rocks, and having been told, when she asked the maid what she thought of it, that she considered it was kept very untidy! And truly the criticism might be repeated at the present day not altogether unreasonably, for the whole place is defiled by the traces of feeding.

Truly England, whether for better or worse, “non è più come era prima!”

That was my first journey! Has any one of the very many others which I have undertaken since equalled it in enjoyment? Ah! how sad was the return to Harrow and lessons and pupil-room! And how I wished that the old gig, with me on the little box between my parents’ knees, could have been bound on an expedition round the world!

A leading feature, perhaps I should say the leading feature, of the social life of Harrow in those days consisted in a certain antagonism between the vicar, the Rev. Mr. Cunningham, and the clerical element of the school world, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, the Drury element. Mr. Cunningham was in those days rather a man of mark among the Low Church party. He was an ally of the Venns, of Daniel Wilson, and that school, and was well known in his day as “Velvet-Cushion Cunningham,” from a little book with that title which he had published. He was of course an “evangelical” of the evangelicals; and among the seven masters of the school there was not the slightest—I must not say taint, but—savour of anything of the kind. Dr. Butler probably would have found no difficulty in living in perfect harmony with the vicar; but the latter—he and his ways and his doctrines—were especially abhorrent to the Drurys. Of course they were not High Churchmen in the sense which the term has acquired in these latter days, for nothing of the kind was then known. They were of the old-fashioned sort, which had come to be somewhat depreciatingly spoken of as “high and dry”!—though in truth it is difficult to see with what justice the latter epithet could be applied to many of them.

Harry Drury, who was perhaps foremost in his feeling of antagonism to the vicar, was a man of decidedly literary tastes, though they shared his devotion with those of a bon vivant. He was a ripe scholar, and undoubtedly the vicar’s superior in talent and intellect. But he was essentially a coarse man, coarse in manner and coarse in feeling. Cunningham was the reverse of all this. He was, I believe, the son of a London hatter, but in external manner and appearance he was a more gentlemanlike man than any of the Harrow masters of that day, save Dr. Butler. He had the advantage, too, of a handsome person and good presence. But there was a something too suave and too soft, carrying with it a certain suspicion of insincerity which prevented him from presenting a genuine specimen of the real article. I believe his father purchased the living for him under circumstances which were not altogether free from suspicion of simony. I know nothing, however, of these circumstances, and my impressions on the subject are doubtless derived from the flouts and skits of his avowed enemies the Drurys. There was, I remember, a story of his having, soon after coming to Harrow, in conversation with some of his new parishioners, attributed with much self-complacency his presentation to the living to his having upon some occasion preached before Lord Northwick!—a result which no Harrow inhabitant, clerk or layman, would have believed in the case of his lordship, then often a resident on his property there, if the preacher had been St. Paul. But again, Audi alteram partem! which I had no chance of doing, for we, though living on terms of neighbourly intercourse with the vicar, were of the Drury faction.

I remember well an incident which may serve to illustrate the condition of “tension” which prevailed during those years in the little Harrow world. Mark Drury had two remarkably pretty daughters. They were in all respects as thoroughly good and charming girls as they were pretty, and were universal favourites in the society. Now Mark Drury’s pew in the parish church, where of course he never appeared himself, for the reason assigned on a former page, was situated immediately below the pulpit. And on one occasion the vicar saw, or thought he saw, the two young ladies in question laughing during his sermon, and so far forgot himself, and was sufficiently ill-judged, indiscreet, wrong-headed, and wrong-hearted to stop in his discourse, and, leaning over the pulpit cushion to say aloud that he would resume it when his hearers could listen to it with decency! The amount of ill-feeling and heart-burning which the incident gave rise to may be imagined. Harry Drury, the cousin of the young ladies, and, as I have said, Cunningham’s principal antagonist, never for a long time afterwards came within speaking distance of the vicar without growling “Brawler!” in a perfectly audible voice.

I well remember, though I suppose it must be mainly from subsequent hearing of it, the storm that was raised in the tea-cup of the Harrow world by the incident of Byron’s natural daughter, Allegra, having been sent home to be buried in Harrow Church. A solemn meeting was held in the vestry, at which the vicar, all the masters (except poor old Mark), and sundry of the leading parishioners were present, and at which it was decided that no stone should be placed to commemorate the poor infant’s name or mark the spot where her remains rested, the principal reason assigned being that such a memorial might be injurious to the morals of the Harrow schoolboys! Amid all this Cunningham’s innate and invincible flunkeyism asserted itself, to the immense amusement of the non-evangelical part of the society of the place, by his attempts to send a message to Lord Byron through Harry Drury, Byron’s old tutor and continued friend, to the effect that he, Cunningham, had, on reading Cain, which was then scandalising the world, “felt a profound admiration for the genius of the author”! “Did you indeed,” said Harry Drury; “I think it the most blasphemous publication that ever came from the pen.”

The whole circumstances, object, and upshot of this singular vestry meeting were too tempting a subject to escape my mother’s satirical vein. She described the whole affair in some five hundred verses, now before me, in which the curiously contrasted characteristics of the debaters at the meeting were very cleverly hit off. This was afterwards shown to Harry Drury, who, though he himself was not altogether spared, was so delighted with it, that he rewarded it by the present of a very remarkable autograph of Lord Byron, now in my possession. It consists of a quarto page, on which is copied the little poem, “Weep, daughters of a royal line,” beginning with a stanza which was suppressed in the publication. And all round the edges of the MS. is an inscription stating that the verses were “copied for my friend, the Rev. Harry Drury.”

Of course all this did not tend much to harmonise the conflicting partisans of High and Low Church in the Harrow world of that day.

I may add here another “reminiscence” of those days, which is not without significance as an illustration of manners.

Among the neighbours at Harrow was a Mr. —— (well, I won’t print the name, though all the parties in question must long since, I suppose, have joined the majority) who had a family of daughters, the second of whom was exceedingly pretty. One day this girl of some eighteen years or so, came to my mother, who was always a special friend of all the young girls, with a long eulogistic defence of the vicar. She was describing at much length the delight of the assurances of grace which he had given her, when my mother suddenly looking her straight in the eyes, said, “Did he kiss you, Carrie?”

“Yes, Mrs. Trollope. He did give me the kiss of peace. I am sure there was no harm in that!”

“None at all, Carrie! For I am sure you meant none!” returned my mother. “Honi soit qui mal y pense! But remember, Carrie, that the kiss of peace is apt to change its quality if repeated!”

CHAPTER V.

Meanwhile the fateful year 1820, when I was to be translated from the world of Harrow, and know nothing more of its friendships, quarrels, and politics, was at hand. At the election of July in that year was to begin my Winchester life. I certainly looked forward to it with a feeling of awe approaching terror, yet not untempered by a sense of increased dignity and the somewhat self-complacent feeling of one destined by fate to meet great and perilous adventures, and acquire large stores of experience.

The sadness of departure was tempered also, as I remember, by the immediate delight of a journey to be performed. Certainly it was not the unmixed delight with which Rousseau contemplated his voyage à faire et Paris au bout. Something very different lay at the end of my voyage. Nevertheless, so intense was my delight in “the road” at that time (and to a great degree ever since), that the sixty miles journey to be performed was a great alleviation.

The expedition was to be made with my father in his gig. A horse was to be sent on to Guildford, and by dint of starting at a very early hour, and there changing horses, the distance was to be performed in one day. We were to travel, not by the more generally used coach road by Hounslow and Bagshot, but over the district called the Hog’s Back from Guildford to Farnham—chiefly, as I remember, for the sake of showing me that beautiful bit of country. For to my father beautiful scenery was as great a delight as it has always been to myself.

At Farnham there was time, while the horse was being baited at “The Bush,” for us, after snatching a morsel of cold meat, to visit hurriedly the park and residence of the Bishop of Winchester. I, very contentedly trotting by the side of my father’s long strides, was much impressed by the beauty of the park. But, as I remember, my mind was very much exercised by the fact, then first learned, that the Bishop’s diocese extended all the way to London. And I think that it seemed somehow to my child’s mind that the dignity of my position as one of William of Wykeham’s scholars was enhanced by the enormous extent of the diocese of his successor.

We reached Winchester late in the evening of the day before the election, putting up, not at “The George,” or at “The White Hart,” as most people would have done, but at the “Fleur de Lys,” pronounced “Flower de Luce,” a very ancient, but then third-rate hostelry, which my father preferred, partly probably because he thought the charges might be less there, but mainly because it is situated in the vicinity of the college, and he had known and used it of old. We spent the evening at the house of Dr. Gabell, the head master, an old friend of my father’s, where his eldest daughter, an intimate friend of my mother’s, who had often been a visitor in Keppel Street, made much of me.

And the next day I became a Wykehamist! And the manner of so becoming was in this wise. The real serious business of the six electors—three sent from New College, and three belonging to Winchester, as has been set forth on a previous page—consisted in the examination of those scholars, who, standing at the top of the school, were in that year candidates for New College. All the eighteen “prefects,” who formed the highest class in the school, were examined; but the most serious part of the business was the examination of the first half dozen or so, who were probably superannuated at the age of eighteen that year, and who might have a fair chance of finding a vacancy at New College (if there were not one at that present moment) in the course of the ensuing twelve months. And this was a very fateful and serious examination, for the examiners in “the election chamber” would, if the examination disclosed due cause, change the order of the roll as it came up to them, placing a boy, who had distinguished himself, before another, who had not done so. And as the roll thus settled was the order in which vacancies at New College were taken, the work in “the chamber” was of life-long importance to the subjects of it.

Very different was the “election” of the children, who were to go into Winchester. Duly instructed as to the part we were to play, we went marvelling up the ancient stone corkscrew stair to the mysterious chamber situated over the “middle gate,” i.e. the gateway between the outer court and the second quadrangle where the chapel, the hall, and the chambers are. The “election chamber” always maintained a certain character of mystery to us, because it was never opened or used save on the great occasion of the annual election. In that chamber we found the six solemn electors in their gowns waiting for us; especially the Bishop of Hereford, who was then Warden of Winchester College, an aged man with his peculiar wig and gown was an object of awe. No Bishop had in those days dreamed as yet of discarding the episcopal wig.

And then the examination began as follows: “Well, boy, can you sing?” “Yes, sir.” “Let us hear you.” “‘All people that on earth do dwell,’” responded the neophyte—duly instructed previously in his part of the proceeding—without attempting in the smallest degree to modify in any way his ordinary speech. “Very well, boy. That will do!” returned the examiner. The examination was over, and you were a member of William of Wykeham’s college, Sancta Mariæ de Winton prope Winton. “Prope Winton,” observe, for the college is situated outside the ancient city walls.

The explanation of this survival of the simulacrum of an examination is that the ancient statutes require that candidates for admission as scholars must be competently instructed in plano cantu—in plain chant; the intention of the founder being that all his scholars should take part in the choral service of the chapel.

I and my fellow novices thus admitted as scholars in that July of 1820 were not about to join the school immediately. We had the six weeks holidays before us, the election taking place at the end of the summer half year. Election week was the grand festival of the Wykehamical year. For three days high feast was held in the noble old hall. The “high table” was spread on the dais, and all old Wykehamists were welcome at it. The boys in the lower part of the hall were regaled with mutton pies and “stuckling.” That was their appointed fare; but in point of fact they feasted on dishes or portions of dishes sent down from the abundantly-spread high table, and the pies were carried away for the next morning’s breakfast. I do not think anybody ate much “stuckling” beyond a mouthful pro formâ. It was a sort of flat pastry made of chopped apples and currants. And the specialty of it was that the apples must be that year’s apples. They used to be sent up from Devonshire or Cornwall, and sometimes were with difficulty obtained. Then there was the singing of the Latin grace, with its beautiful responses, performed by the chapel choir and as many others as were capable of taking part in it. The grace with its music has been published, and I need not occupy these pages with a reprint of it. And then in the afternoon came the singing of “Domum” on the fives court behind the school, by the whole strength of the company.

Nine such election weeks did I see, counting from that which made me a Wykehamist in 1820 to that which saw me out a superannuate in 1828. I did not get a fellowship at New College, having narrowly missed it for want of a vacancy by one. I was much mortified at the time, but have seen long since that probably all was for the best for me. It was a mere chance, as has been shown at a former page, whether a boy at the head or nearly at the head of the school went to New College or not.

The interesting event of a vacancy having occurred at New College, whether by death, marriage, or the acceptance of a living, was announced by the arrival of “speedyman” at Winchester College. “Speedyman,” in conformity with immemorial usage, used to bring the news on foot from Oxford to Winchester. How well I remember the look of the man, as he used to arrive with all the appearance of having made a breathless journey, a spare, active-looking fellow, in brown cloth breeches and gaiters covered with dust. Of course letters telling the facts had long outstripped “speedyman.” But with the charming and reverent spirit of conservatism, which in those days ruled all things at Winchester, “speedyman” made his journey on foot all the same!

Of course one of the first matters in hand when this fateful messenger arrived was to regale him with college beer, and right good beer it was in those days. In connection with it may be mentioned the rather singular fact, that, whereas all other supplies from the college buttery to the boys—the bread, the cheese, the butter, the meat—were accurately measured, the beer was given absolutely ad libitum. In fact it was not given out at all, but taken. Thrice a day the way to the cellar was open, a back stair leading from the hall to the superb old vaulted cellar, with its central pillar and arches springing from it in every direction. All around were the hogsheads, and the proper tools for tapping one as soon as another should be out. And to this cellar the boys—or rather the junior boys at each mess—went freely to draw as much as they chose.

And the beer thus freely supplied was our only beverage, for not only was tea or coffee not furnished, it was not permitted. Some of the prefects (the eighteen first boys in college) would have “tea-messes,” provided out of their own pocket money, and served by their “fags.” But if, as would sometimes happen, either of the masters chanced to appear on the scene before the tea-things could be got out of the way, he used to smash them all, using his large pass key for the purpose, and saying “What are all these things, sir? William of Wykeham knew nothing, I think, of tea!”

We used to breakfast at ten, after morning school, on bread and butter and beer, having got up at half-past five, gone to chapel at half-past six, and into school at half-past seven. At a quarter to one we again went up into hall. It was a specialty of college phraseology to suppress the definite article. We always said “to hall,” “to meads” (the playground), “to school,” “to chambers,” and the like. The visit to hall at that time was properly for dinner, though it had long ceased to be such. The middle of the day “hall” served in my day only for the purpose of luncheon (though no such modern word was ever used), and only those “juniors” attended whose office it was to bring away the portions of bread and cheese and “bobs” (i.e. huge jugs) of beer for consumption in the afternoon.

Sunday formed an exception to this practice. We all went up into “hall” in the middle of the day on Sunday, and dined on roast beef, the noontide dinner consisting of roast beef on that day, boiled beef on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and baked plum pudding on Friday and Saturday. But the boiled beef, with the exception of certain portions reserved for the next morning’s breakfast of the seniors of the messes, or companies into which the “inferiors” (i.e., non-prefects) were divided, was not eaten, but given away. During the war Winchester had been one of the depots of French prisoners, and the beef in question was then given to them. When there were no more Frenchmen it was given to twenty-four old women who were appointed to do the weeding of the college quadrangles. It must be understood that this arrangement was entirely spontaneous on the part of the boys, though it would have been quite out of the question for any individual to say that he for his part would eat his own beef. How all this may be now I know not. Probably the college, under the enlightened guidance of Her Majesty’s Commissioners, have seen the propriety of providing the youthful Wykehamists with table napkins and caper sauce, while the old women go without their dole of beef. On the Friday and Saturday the pudding was carried down out of hall by the juniors for consumption during the afternoon.

At about a quarter-past six, at the conclusion of afternoon school, we went up into hall for dinner—originally, of course, supper. This consisted of mutton, roast or boiled, every evening of the year, with potatoes and beer. But it was such mutton as is not to be found in English butchers’ shops nowadays, scientific breeding having improved it from off the face of the land. It was small Southdown mutton, uncrossed by any of the coarser, rapidly-growing, and fat-making breeds. And that it should be such was insured by the curious rule, that, though only a given number of pounds of mutton were required and paid for to the contractor, the daily supply was always to be one sheep and a half. So that if large mutton was sent it was to the loss of the contractor.

Furthermore it was the duty of the “prefect of tub” to see that the mutton was in all ways satisfactory. The “prefect of tub” was one of the five boys at the head of the school; another was the “prefect of hall”; a third “prefect of school”; and the fourth and fifth “prefects of chapel.” These offices were all positions of emolument. That of the “prefect of tub” was far the most so, and was usually held by the senior college “founder,” or boy of “founder’s kin,” during his last year before going to New College. The titles of the other offices explain themselves, but that of “prefect of tub” requires some elucidation.

In the hall, placed just inside the screen which divided the buttery hatches from the body of the hall, there was an ancient covered “tub.” In the course of my eight years’ stay at Winchester this venerable tub—damnosa quid non diminuit dies?—had to be renewed. It was replaced by a much handsomer one; but, as I remember, the change had rather the effect on the popular mind in college of diminishing our confidence in the permanency of human institutions generally. The original purpose of this tub was to receive fragments and remains of food, together with such portions—“dispers” we called them—of the evening mutton supper as were not duly claimed by the destined recipient of them at his place at the table, that they might be given to the poor; and the “prefect of tub” was so called because it was part of his office to see that this was duly done. It was also his duty to preside over the distribution of the aforesaid “dispers”—not quasi dispars, as might be supposed by those who can appreciate the difference between a prime cut out of a leg of mutton and a bit of the breast of a sheep, but “dispers” from dispertio. Now the distribution in question was effected in this wise. The joints were cut up in the kitchen always accurately in the same manner. The leg made eight “dispers,” the shoulder seven, and so on. The “dispers” thus prepared were put into four immense pewter dishes, and these were carried up into hall by four choristers under the superintendence of the “prefect of tub” and distributed among the fifty-two “inferiors”—i.e., non-prefects. The eighteen prefects dined at two tables by themselves. Their joints were not cut into “dispers,” but were dressed by the cook according to their own orders, paid for by themselves according to an established tariff drawn with reference to the extra expense of the mode of preparation ordered. The long narrow tables were six in number, ranged on either side of the noble hall, exactly as in a monastic refectory. The dais was left unoccupied, save at election time, when the “high table” was spread there. At the first two tables on the left hand side as one entered the hall, the eighteen prefects dined.

This bloated aristocracy was supplied with plates to eat their dinner from. The populace—mere mutton consumere nati—the fifty-two inferiors, had only “trenchers,” flat pieces of wood about nine inches square. These fifty-two “inferiors” were divided into eight companies, and occupied the remaining four tables. But this division was so arranged that one of the eight seniors of the “inferiors” was at the head of each company, and one of the eight juniors at the bottom of each, the whole body being similarly distributed. And each of these companies occupied a different table every day, the party who sat at the lowest table on Monday occupying the highest on Tuesday, and so on. So that when the “prefect of tub” entered the hall at the head of the procession of four choristers, carrying the four “gomers” (such was the phrase) of dispers, he proceeded first to the table on the opposite side of the hall to that of the prefects, and saw that the senior of the mess occupying that table selected as many of the most eligible dispers as there were persons present. If any junior were absent by authority of, or on the business of, any prefect, his disper was allowed to be taken for him. This senior of the mess, it may be mentioned obiter was called, for some reason hidden in the obscurity of time, the “candlekeeper.” Assuredly neither he nor his office had any known connection with the keeping of candles. Any dispers remaining unclaimed at the end of his tour of the hall belonged to “the tub.”

In return for the performance of this important office, the “prefect of tub” was entitled to the heads, feet, and all such portions of the sheep as were not comprised in legs, shoulders, necks, loins, and breasts, as well as to the dispers of any individuals who might from any cause be absent from college. Of course he did not meddle personally with any of these perquisites, but had a contract with the college manciple, the value of which was, I believe, about £80 a year. Such was the “prefect of tub.”

Orderly conduct in hall generally, which did not imply any degree of violence, was maintained by the “prefect of hall,” the dignity of whose office, though it was by no means so profitable as that of the “prefect of tub,” ranked above that of all the other “officers.” No master was ever present in hall.

But the most onerous and important duty of the prefect of hall consisted in superintending the excursion to “hills,”—i.e. to St. Catherine’s Hill, which took place twice on every holiday, once on every half-holiday during the year, and every evening during the summer months. On these occasions the “prefect of hall” had under his guidance and authority not only William of Wykeham’s seventy scholars, but the whole of the hundred and thirty pupils of the head master, who were called commoners. The scholars marched first, two and two (with the exception of the prefects who walked as they pleased), and then followed the commoners. And it was the duty of the prefect of hall to keep the column in good and compact order until the top of the hill was reached. Then all dispersed to amuse themselves as they pleased. But the prefect of hall still remained responsible for his flock keeping within bounds.

St. Catherine’s Hill is a notably isolated down in the immediate neighbourhood of Winchester, and just above the charming little village of St. Cross. There is a clump of firs on the top, and the unusually well marked circumvallation of a Roman (or British?) camp around the circle of the hill. The ditch of this circumvallation formed our “bounds.” The straying beyond them, however, in the direction of the open downs away from the city, and from St. Cross, was deemed a very venial offence by either the prefect of hall or the masters. But not so in the direction of the town. It was the duty of the three “juniors” in college—one of whom I was during my first half-year—to “call domum.” When the time came for returning to college one of those three walked over the top of the hill from one side to the other, while the other two went round the circumvallation—each one half of it—calling perpetually “Domum ... domum” as loudly as they could. All the year round we went to “morning hills” before breakfast, and to afternoon hills about three. In the summer we went, as I have said, every evening after “hall,” but not to the top of the hill, only to the water-meads at the foot of it, the object being to bathe in the Itchen.

Many of the Winchester recollections most indelibly fixed in my memory are connected with “hills.” It seems impossible that sixty years can have passed since I stood on the bank of the circumvallation facing towards Winchester, and gazed down on the white morning mist that entirely concealed the city and valley. How many mornings in the late autumn have I stood and watched the moving, but scarcely moving masses of billowy white cloud! And what strange similitudes and contrasts suggested themselves to my mind as I recently looked down from the heights of Monte Gennaro on the Roman Campagna similarly cloud hidden! The phenomenon exhibited itself on an infinitely larger scale in the latter case, but it did not suggest to me such thick-coming fancies and fantastic imaginings as the water-mead-born mists of the Itchen!

There were two special amusements connected with our excursions to St. Catherine’s Hill—badger baiting and “mouse-digging,” the former patronised mainly by the bigger fellows, the latter by their juniors. There was a man in the town, a not very reputable fellow I fancy, who had constituted himself “badger keeper” to the college. It was his business to provide a badger and dogs, and to bring them to certain appointed trysting places at “hill times” for the sport. The places in question were not within our “bounds,” but at no great distance in some combe or chalk-pit of the neighbouring downs. Of course it was not permitted by the authorities; but I think it might easily have been prevented had any attempt to do so been made in earnest. It seems strange, considering my eight years’ residence in college, that I never once was present at a badger baiting. I am afraid that my absence was not caused by distinct disapproval of the cruelty of the sport, but simply by the fact that my favourite “hill-times” occupations took me in other directions.

Nor, probably for the same reason, was I a great mouse-digger. Very many of us never went to “hills” unarmed with a “mouse-digger.” This was a sort of miniature pickaxe, which was used to dig the field-mice out of their holes. The skill and the amusement consisted in following the labyrinthine windings of these, which are exceedingly numerous on the chalk downs, in such sort as to capture the inmate and her brood without injuring her, and carry her home in triumph to be kept in cages provided ad hoc.

There was—and doubtless is—a clump of firs on the very centre and summit of St. Catherine’s Hill. They are very tall and spindly trees, with not a branch until the tuft at the top is reached. And my great delight when I was in my first or second year was to climb these. Of course I was fond of doing what few, if any, of my compeers could do as well. And this was the case as regarded “swarming up” those tall and slippery stems. I could reach the topmost top, and gloried much in doing so.

But during my later years the occupation of a hill morning which most commended itself to me was ranging as widely as possible over the neighbouring hills. Like the fox in the old song, I was “off to the downs O!” As I have said, the straying beyond bounds in this direction, away from the town, was considered a very light offence; but I was apt to make it a somewhat more serious one by not getting back from my rambling, despite good running, till it was too late to return duly with the main body to college. It was very probable that this might pass without detection, if there were no roll-call on the way back. But it frequently happened that “Gaffer” (such was Dr. Williams’s sobriquet among us) on his white horse met us on our homeward march, and stopped the column, while the prefect of hall called names. As these escapades in my case occurred mainly during my last three years, I being a prefect myself owed no allegiance to the authority of the prefect of hall. But the roll-call revealing my absence would probably issue in my having to learn by heart one of the epistles of Horace. Prefects learned their “impositions” by heart, “inferiors” wrote them.

Every here and there the sides of these downs are scored by large chalk-pits. There is a very large one on St. Catherine’s Hill on the side looking towards St. Cross; and this was a favourite scene of exploits in which I may boast myself (’tis sixty years since!) to have been unrivalled. There was a very steep and rugged path by which it was possible to descend from the upper edge of this chalk-pit to the bottom of it. And it was a feat, in which I confess I took some pride, to take a fellow on my shoulders (not on my back), while he had a smaller boy on his shoulders, and thus with two living stories on my shoulders to descend the difficult path in question. And the boy in the middle—the first story—could not be a very small one, for it was requisite that he also should hold and balance his burthen thoroughly well. I think I could carry one very little boy down now!

It was the “prefect of hall” who managed the whole business of our holidays—as they would be called elsewhere—which we called “remedies.” A “holiday” meant at Winchester a red-letter day; and was duly kept as such. But if no such day occurred in the week, the “prefect of hall” went on the Tuesday morning to the head master (Wiccamice “informator”) and asked for a “remedy,” which, unless there were any reason, such as very bad weather, or a holiday coming later in the week, was granted by handing to the prefect a ring, which remained in his keeping till the following morning. This symbol was inscribed “Commendat rarior usus.”

But in addition to these important duties the “prefect of hall” discharged another, of which I must say a few words, with reference to the considerable amount of interest which the outside world was good enough to take in the subject a few years ago, with all that accurate knowledge of facts, and that discrimination which people usually display when talking of what they know nothing about.

It was the “prefect of hall,” who ordered the infliction of a “public tunding.” The strange phrase, dropped by some unlucky chance into ears to which it conveyed no definite meaning, seems to have inspired vague terrors of the most terrific kind. Very much nonsense was talked and printed at the time I refer to. But the following simple and truthful statement of what a public tunding was, may enable those, who take an interest in the matter, to form some reasonable opinion whether the infliction of such punishment were a good or a bad thing.

At the conclusion of the evening dinner or supper, whichever it may be called, the “prefect of hall” summoned the boys to the dais for the singing of grace. Some dozen or so of boys, who had the best capacities for the performance, were appointed by him for the purpose, and the whole assembly stood around the dais, while the hymn, Te de Profundis, was sung. When all were thus assembled, and before the singers commenced, the culprit who had been sentenced to a tunding stepped out, pulled off his gown, and received from the hands of one deputed by the “prefect of hall,” and armed with a tough, pliant ground-ash stick, a severe beating. I never had a tunding; but I have no doubt that the punishment was severe, though I never heard of any boy disabled by it from pursuing his usual work or his usual amusements. It was judiciously ordered by the “prefect of hall” for offences deemed unbecoming the character of a Wykehamist and a gentleman, and only for such. Any such petty larceny exploits as the scholars at some other “seats of learning” are popularly said to be not unfrequently guilty of, such as robberies of orchards or poultry-yards or the like, would have inevitably entailed a public tunding. Any attempt whatsoever to appropriate unduly either by fraud or violence anything sent to another boy from home—any portion of a “cargo,” as such despatches were called—and à fortiori any money or money’s value, would have necessitated a public tunding. The infliction was rare. Many half years passed without any public tunding having been administered. And my own impression is, that the practice was eminently calculated to foster among us a high tone of moral and gentlemanlike feeling.

These reminiscences of the penal code that was in vigour among ourselves are naturally connected with those referring to the subject of corporal punishment in its more official form.

On one of the whitewashed walls of the huge schoolroom was an inscription conceived and illustrated as follows: “Aut disce!” and there followed a depicted book and inkstand; “Aut discede!” followed by a handsomely painted sword, as who should say, “Go and be a soldier!” (offering that as an alternative for which no learning was needed, after the fashion of a day before examinations for commissions were dreamed of!); and then lastly, “Manet sors tertia cædi,” followed by the portraiture of a rod.

But this rod is of so special and peculiar a kind, and so dissimilar from any such instrument as used elsewhere, that I must try to explain the nature of it to my non-Wiccamical readers. A stick of some hard wood, beech I think it was, turned into a shape convenient to the hand, about a yard long, and with four grooves about three inches long and as large as a cedar pencil, cut in the extremity of it, formed the handle. Into these four grooves were fitted four slender apple twigs about five feet long. They were sent up from Herefordshire in bundles, cut and prepared for the purpose, and it was the duty of the “prefect of school” to provide them. These twigs, fitted into the grooves, were fixed by a string which bound them tightly to the handle, and a rod was thus formed, the four-fold switches of which stood out some foot—or more than that towards the end—from each other.

The words “flog,” or “flogging,” it is to be observed, were never heard among us, in the mouth either of the masters or of the boys. We were “scourged.” And a scourging was administered in this wise. At a certain spot in the school—near the seat of the “informator,” when he was the executioner, and near that of the “hostiarius” or under master when he had to perform—in front of a fixed form, the patient kneeled down. Two boys, any who chanced to be at hand, stepped behind the form, turned the gown of a collegian or the coat tails of a commoner over his shoulders, and unbuttoned his brace buttons, leaving bare at the part where the braces join the trousers a space equal to the diameter of a crown-piece—such was the traditional rule. And aiming at this with more or less exactitude the master inflicted three cuts. Such was a “scourging.”

Prefects, it may be observed, were never scourged.

The “best possible instructors” of this enlightened age, who never treat of subjects the facts of which they are not conversant with, have said much of the “cruelty,” and the “indecency” of such infliction of corporal punishment, and of the moral degradation necessarily entailed on the sufferers of it. As to the cruelty, it will be readily understood from the above description of the rod, that it was quite as likely as not that no one of the four twigs, at either of the three cuts, touched the narrow bare part; especially as the operator—proceeding from one patient to another with the utmost possible despatch, and with his eyes probably on the list in his left hand of the culprits to be operated on—had little leisure or care for aiming. The fact simply was that the pain was really not worth speaking of, and that nobody cared the least about it.

The affair passed somewhat in this wise. It is ten o’clock; the morning school is over; and we are all in a hurry to get out to breakfast. There are probably about a dozen or a score of boys to be scourged. Dr. Williams, as well beloved a master as ever presided over any school in the world, has come down from his seat, elevated three steps above the floor of the school, putting on his great cocked hat as he does so. He steps to the form where the scourging is to be done; the list of those to be scourged, with the reasons why, is handed to him by the prefect, charged for the week with this duty, together with the rod. He calls “Jones” ... swish, swish, swish!... “Brown” ... swish, swish, swish!... “Robinson” ... swish, swish, swish! as rapidly as it can be done. Each operation takes perhaps twenty seconds. Having got through the list, he flings the rod on the ground, makes a demi-volte so as to face the whole school, taking off his hat as he does so, and the “prefect of school” who has been waiting on the steps of the master’s seat, with the prayer-book open in his hand, instantly reads the short prayer with which the school concludes, while those who have been scourged stand in the background hurriedly readjusting their brace buttons so as not to be behind hand at the buttery hatch for breakfast. Of any disgrace attached to the reception of a scourging, no one had any smallest conception.

Of the cruelty of the infliction the reader may judge for himself. Of the indecent talk about indecency he may also know from the above accurate account what to think. The degree of “moral degradation” inflicted on the sufferers may perhaps be estimated by a reference to the roll of those whom Winchester has supplied to serve their country in Church and State.

The real and unanswerable objection to the infliction of “corporal punishment,” as it was used in my day at Winchester, was that it was a mere form and farce. It caused neither pain nor disgrace, and assuredly morally degraded nobody. I have been scourged five times in the day; not because, as might be supposed, I was so incorrigible that the master found it necessary to go on scourging me, but simply because it so chanced. I had, say, come into chapel “tardè,” i.e. after the service had commenced; I had omitted to send in duly my “vulgus”; I had been “floored” in my Horace; I had missed duly answering “sum,” when on returning from “hills” “Gaffer” had met the procession on his grey horse and caused the “prefect of hall” “to call names,” the reason being that I had been far away over the downs to Twyford, and had not been able to run back in time; and an unlucky simultaneousness of these or of a dozen other such sins of omission or commission had occurred, which had to be wiped off by a scourging by the “hostiarius” at the morning school, and another by the “informator;” by a third from the former at “middle school,” when the head master did not attend; by a fourth from the “hostiarius” at evening school, and a fifth from the “informator” the last thing before going out to dinner at six. But this was a rare tour de force, scarcely likely to occur again. I was rather proud of it, and wholly unconscious of any “moral degradation.”

I have spoken of the “informator” putting on his cocked hat when about to commence his work of scourging. I am at a loss to account for his having worn this very unacademical costume. It was a huge three-cornered cocked hat very much like that of a coachman on state occasions; and must, I take it, have been a survival from about the time of Charles the Second. It has, I believe, been since discarded.

The mention above of a “vulgus” requires some explanation. Every “inferior,” i.e. non-prefect, in the school was required every night to produce a copy of verses of from two to six lines on a given theme; four or six lines for the upper classes, two for the lowest. This was independent of a weekly “verse task” of greater length, and was called a “vulgus,” I suppose, because everybody—the vulgus—had to do it. The prefects were exercised in the same manner but with a difference. Immediately before going out from morning or from evening school, at the conclusion of the day’s lesson, the “informator” would give a theme, and each boy was expected then and there without the assistance of pen, paper, or any book, to compose a couple, or two couple, of lines, and give them vivâ voce. He got up, and scraped with his foot to call the master’s attention when he was ready; and as not above five or ten minutes were available for the business, a considerable degree of promptitude was requisite. The theory was that these compositions—“varying” was the term in the case of the prefects, as “vulgus” in that of the inferiors—should be epigrammatic in their nature, and that Martial rather than Ovid should be the model. Of course but little of an epigrammatic nature was for the most part achieved; but great readiness was made habitual by the practice. And sometimes the result was creditable to something more than readiness.

I am tempted to give one instance of such a “varying.” It belonged to an earlier time than mine—the time when Decus et tutamen was adopted as the motto cut on the rim of the five-shilling pieces. The author of the “varying” in question had been ill with fever, and his head had been shaved, causing him to wear a wig. Decus et tutamen was the theme given. In a minute or two he was ready, stood up, and taking off his wig, said, “Aspicite hos crines! duplicem servantur in usum! Hi mihi tutamen nocte”—putting the wig on wrong side outwards; “Dieque decus,” reversing it as he spoke the words. The memory of this “varying” lives—or lived!—at Winchester. But I do not think it has ever been published, and really it deserves preservation. I wish I could give the author’s name.

When at the end of the summer holidays in that year, 1820, I returned to college, again brought down to Winchester by my father in his gig, I confess to having felt for some short time a very desolate little waif. As I, at the time a child barely out of the nursery, look back upon it, it seems to my recollection that the strongest sense of being shoved off from shore without guidance, help, or protection, arose from never seeing or speaking to a female human being. To be sure there was at the sick-house the presiding “mother”—Gumbrell her name was, usually pronounced “Grumble”—but she was not a fascinating representative of the sex. An aged woman once nearly six feet high, then much bent by rheumatism, rather grim and somewhat stern, she very conscientiously administered the prescribed “black-dose and calomel pill” to those under her care at the sick-house. To be there was called being “continent;” to leave it was “going abroad”—intelligibly enough. Tea was provided there for those “continent” instead of the usual breakfast of bread and butter and beer; and I remember overhearing Mother Gumbrell, oppressed by an unusual number of inmates, say, “Talk of Job indeed! Job never had to cut crusty loaves into bread and butter!”

I saw the old woman die! I was by chance in the sick-house kitchen—in after years, when a prefect—and “Dicky Gumbrell,” the old woman’s husband, who had been butler to Dean Ogle, and who by special and exceptional favour was allowed to live with his wife in the sick-house, was reading to her the story of Joseph and his Brethren, while she was knitting a stocking, and sipping occasionally from a jug of college beer which stood between them, when quite suddenly her hands fell on to her lap and her head on to her bosom, and she was dead! while poor old Dicky quite unconsciously went on with his reading.

But I mentioned Mother Gumbrell only to observe that she, the only petticoated creature whom we ever saw or spoke with, was scarcely calculated to supply, even to the imagination, the feminine element which had till then made so large a part of the lives of ten-year-old children fresh from their mother’s knee.

Perhaps the most markedly distinctive feature of the school life was the degree in which we were uninterfered with by any personal superintendence. The two masters came into the school-room to hear the different classes at the hours which have been mentioned, also, when we were “in chambers” in the evening, either during the hour of study which intervened between the six o’clock dinner and the eight o’clock prayers in the chapel, or during the subsequent hour between that and nine o’clock, when all went, or ought to have gone, to bed; and subsequently to that, when all were supposed to be in bed and asleep, we were at any moment liable to the sudden unannounced visit of the “hostiarius” or second master. The visit was a mere “going round.” If all was in order, it passed in silence, and was over in a minute. If any tea-things were surprised, they were broken, as before mentioned. If beer, or traces of the consumption of beer, were apparent, that was all right. The supply of a provision of that refreshment was recognised, it being a part of the duty of the bedmakers to carry every evening into each of the seven “chambers” a huge “nipperkin” of beer, “to last,” as I remember one of the bedmakers telling me when I first went into college, “for all night.” The supply, as far as my recollection goes, was always considerably in excess of the consumption. If all was not in order, “the prefect in course”—i.e. the prefect who in each chamber was responsible for due order during the current week—was briefly told to speak with the master next morning. And this comprises about all the personal intercourse that took place between us and the masters.

Not that it is to be understood that any hour of our lives was left to our own discretion as to the employment of it; but this was attained by no immediate personal superintendence or direction. The systematised routine was so perfect, and so similar in its operation to the movements of some huge irresistible machine, that the disposal of each one of our hours seemed to be as natural, as necessary, and as inevitable as the waxing and waning of the moon. And the impression left on my mind by eight years’ experience of such a system is, that it was pre-eminently calculated to engender and foster habitual conceptions of the paramount authority of law, as distinguished from the dictates of personal notions or caprices; of self-reliance, and of conscious responsibility in the individual as forming an unit in an organised whole. Of course the eighteen prefects were to a much smaller degree coerced by the machine, and to a very great degree active agents in the working of it. And I was a prefect during three years of my eight in college. But at first, when a little fellow of, say, ten years old, entered this new world, it was not without a desolate sensation of abandonment, which it needed a month or two’s experience to get the better of.

All this, however, was largely corrected and modified by one admirable institution, which was a cardinal point in the Wiccamical system. To every “inferior” was appointed one of the prefects as a “tutor.” It was the duty of this tutor to superintend and see to the learning of his lessons by the inferior, and the due performance of his written “prose” and “verse tasks,” to protect him against all ill-usage or “bullying,” and to be in all ways his providence and friend. These appointments were made by the “informator.” The three or four senior prefects had as many as seven pupils, the junior prefects one or two only; and the tutor received from the parents of each pupil, by the hands of the master, two guineas yearly.

In order rightly to understand the working of all these arrangements, it must be explained that each individual’s place in “the school” and his place “in college” were two entirely different things. The first depended on his acquirements when he entered the college and his subsequent scholastic progress. The latter depended solely on his seniority “in college.” The junior in college was the last boy whose nomination succeeded in finding a vacancy in any given year; and he remained “junior” till the admission of another boy next year, when he had one junior below him, and so on. Thus it might happen, and constantly did happen, that a boy’s junior in college might be much above him in the school, either from having come in at a later age, or from being a better prepared or cleverer boy. And all the arrangements of the domestic college life, the fagging, &c., depended wholly on juniority “in college,” and had no reference to the place held by each in the school. But all this seniority and juniority “in college” ceased to operate in any way as soon as the individual in question became a prefect. He had then equal authority over every “inferior,” whether such inferior were his senior or junior in college.

It is evident, therefore, that the prefect’s authority was frequently exercised over individuals older, bigger, stronger than himself; and for the due and regular working of this system it was necessary that the authority of the prefect should be absolute and irresistible. It was traditionally supposed in college that for an “inferior” to raise his hand against a prefect would be a case of expulsion. Whether expulsion would have actually followed, I cannot say, for during my eight years’ residence in college I never remember such a case to have occurred. I have heard my father and other old Wykehamists of his day declare that no such absolute authority as that of a prefect at Winchester existed in England, save in the case of the captain of a man-of-war. It should be observed, however, in modification of this, that any abuse of this authority in the way of bullying or cruelty would at once have been interfered with by that other prefect, the victim’s tutor. An appeal to the master would have been about as much thought of as an appeal to Jupiter or Mars.

CHAPTER VI.

When I went into college in 1820, at ten years old, Dr. Gabell was the “informator,” and Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Williams the “hostiarius,” or second master. When I quitted it in 1828, Dr. Williams was head master, and Mr. Ridding second master. I do not know that Gabell was altogether an unpopular man, but he never inspired that strong affection that his successor did. His manner was disagreeable. In short, he was not so completely a gentleman as Williams was.

I am tempted to give here an anecdote that was currently told of Gabell—though I cannot say that it occurred within my knowledge—because it is at all events a very characteristic one.

Some boy or other—he was, I fancy, a “commoner,” or one of Dr. Gabell’s private pupils—was guilty of some small delinquency which had the unfortunate effect of especially angering the Doctor, who, in his rage, without giving a second thought to the matter, wrote off a hurried letter to the boy’s father, telling him that if his son continued his present conduct he was on the high road to ruin.

Unfortunately, the parent lived in one of the far northern counties. In extreme distress he at once left home and posted to Winchester.

Rushing, in agitation and anxiety, into Gabell’s study, he gasped out, “What is it? Tell it me at once! What has my unhappy boy done?”

“What boy?” snorted Gabell. “What do you mean? I don’t know what you are talking about!”

The father, much relieved, but more amazed, pulls out the terrible letter which had summoned him, and puts it before the much crestfallen “informator.”

“I had forgotten all about it!” he was compelled to own. “The boy is a good boy enough. You had better go and talk to him yourself, and—and tell him not to miss answering his name again!” The parent’s feelings and his expression of them may be imagined.

It used to be said, I remember, that of the two masters of Winchester, one snored without sleeping (Gabell), and the other slept without snoring. Gabell was, in truth, always snorting or snoring (so to call it); but the accusation against Williams of sleeping was, I think, justified only by his peculiarly placid and quiet manner. He was a remarkably handsome man; and his sobriquet, among those of the previous generation rather than among us boys, was, “The Beauty of Holiness”—again with reference to the unruffled repose of his manner. We boys invariably called him “Gaffer.” Why, I know not.

Gabell, I think, had no nickname; but there was a phrase among us, as common as any household word, which was in some degree characteristic of the man. Any conduct which was supposed likely to turn out eventually to the detriment of the actor was called “spiting Gabell;” and the expression was continually used when the speaker intended no more reference to Dr. Gabell than a man who orders a spencer has to the first wearer of that garment.

Mr. Ridding was not a popular master, though I do not know that he had any worse fault than a bad manner. It was a jaunty, jerky, snappish manner, totally devoid of personal dignity. It was said that in school he was not impartial. But by the time he became second master, on the retirement of Gabell, I had reached that part of the school which was under the head master, and have no personal knowledge of the matter. I do not think any boy would have gone to Ridding in any private trouble or difficulty. There was not one who would not have gone to Williams as to a father.

But in my reminiscences of the college authorities, I must not omit the first and greatest of all—the Warden. Huntingford, Bishop of Hereford, was Warden during the whole of my college career. He was an aged man, and somewhat of a valetudinarian. And to the imagination of us boys, who rarely saw him, he assumed something of the mystic, awe-inspiring character of a “veiled prophet of Khorassan.” The most awful threat that could be fulminated against any boy, was that he should be had up before the Warden. I do not remember that any boy ever was. He alone could expel a boy; and he alone could give leave out from college; as was testified by the appearance every Sunday of a great folio sheet, on which were inscribed, in his own peculiar great square characters, each letter standing by itself, the names of those who had been invited by friends to dine in the town, and who were thereby permitted to go out from, I think, one to five. To go out of the college gates without that permission was expulsion. But it was a crime never committed. There were traditional stories of scaling of walls, but I remember no case of the kind.

There was one occasion on which every boy had an interview with the Warden—that of taking before him the “college oath,” which took place when we were, as I remember, fourteen. On a certain day in every year the “prefect of hall” made inquiry for all of that age who had not taken the oath, and required them to copy a sheet of writing handed to them. I cannot remember the words in which the oath was couched, but the main provisions of it were to the effect that you would never by word or deed do aught to injure the college or its revenues; that you would be obedient to the authorities; and that you would never in any way by word or deed look down on any scholar of the college, the social position of whose family might be inferior to your own. And I remember that there was appended to the oath the story of a certain captain in Cromwell’s forces, who, when the Parliament troopers were about to invade, and probably sack, the college, so exercised his authority as to prevent that misfortune, being influenced thereto by the remembrance of his college oath. Before swearing, which we did with much awe, we had to read over the oath. And I well remember that if a boy in reading pronounced the word “revenue” with the accent on the first syllable (as it was already at that time the usual mode to do), the Warden invariably corrected him with, “Revènue, boy!” It was, I suppose, an exemplification of the dictum “No innovation,” which (with the “a” pronounced as in “father,”) was said to be continually the rule of his conduct.

Probably it did not occur to him that the Herefordshire people might have considered it an innovation that Herefordshire candidates for orders should be obliged to come to be ordained in Winchester College Chapel, as was the case, instead of finding their Bishop in his own cathedral church!

Bishop Huntingford was a notable Grecian, and had published a rudimentary book of Greek exercises, which was at one time largely used. I take it he was not in any larger sense a profound scholar. But I remember a story which was illustrative of his grammatical accuracy. The Dean of Winchester, Dr. Rennell, was an enthusiastic Platonist, and upon one occasion in conversation with the Warden and others, quoted a passage from Plato, in which the adjective “παντων” occurred. Upon which the Bishop promptly denied that any such words were to be found in Plato. The controversy was said to have been remitted to the arbitrament of a wager of a dinner and dozen of port, when the Warden, who in fact knew nothing of the passage quoted, but knew that the Dean had said “παντων” in the masculine, when the substantive with which it was made to agree required the feminine, said, “No! no! πασων, Mr. Dean, πασων!” and so won his wager.

The Warden’s nickname, borne among sundry generations of Wykehamists, was Tupto (τυπτω), as we always supposed from that Greek verb used as the example in the Greek grammar. But I have heard from those of an earlier generation that it was quasi dicas “tiptoe,” from the fact of his father having been a dancing-master. The former derivation seems to me the more plausible.

“Tupto” very rarely came to college chapel, and when he did so in his episcopal wig and lawn sleeves, it was felt by us that his presence gave a very marked additional solemnity to the occasion. Though assuredly far from being a model bishop according to the estimate of these latter days, I believe him to have been a very good man. He lived and died a bachelor, having at a very early period of his life undertaken the support of a brother’s widow and family, who had been left unprovided for. And it was reported among Wykehamists of an earlier generation than mine that never was husband so severely ruled by a wife as the Bishop was by his sister-in-law. “Peace to his manes,” as old Cramer, the pianist, used to say, always pronouncing it monosyllabically, “mains”! His rule of Winchester College was a long and prosperous one; and as long as it lasted he was able to carry out his favourite maxim, “No innovation!”

But when old Tupto went over to the majority, the spirit of innovation, so long repressed, began to exert itself in many directions. I am told for instance that it has been found too much for young Wykehamists of the present generation to wait for their breakfasts till ten in the morning, and that the excursion to “morning hills” before breakfast is declared to be too much for their strength. Well, I wish it may answer, as Sterne’s Uncle Toby said. But I do not think that the college during the latter years of our century can show better bills of health than it did in its earlier decades.

The dormitory arrangements are much changed, I believe, and it may be worth while to record a few reminiscences of what they were in my day.

The second or inner quadrangle of the college buildings was formed by the chapel and hall and kitchen on one side, and on the other three by the lodgings of the fellows and the “hostiarius” on the first floor, and the “chambers” of the scholars on the ground floor. These chambers were seven in number. They contained therefore on an average ten beds each. But they were by no means equal in size. The largest, “seventh” (for they were all known by their numbers), held thirteen beds; the smallest, “fifth,” only eight. A few years before my time, that side of the quadrangle under which were situated the “first” and “second” chambers was burned. And the beds and other arrangements in these two chambers were of a more modern model. In the other five the old bedsteads remained as they had been from time immemorial. They were of solid oak of two to three inches thickness in every part, and were black with age. The part which held the bed was a box, about six feet and a half long, by three wide, with solid sides some six inches deep, and supported on four massive legs. But at the head for about eighteen inches or so these sides were raised to a height of about four or five feet, and covered in. The whole construction was massive, and afforded an extremely snug and comfortable sleeping place, which was much preferred to the iron bedsteads in the two new chambers. Older bones might perhaps have found the oak planking under the bed somewhat hard, but we were entirely unconscious of any such objection.

The door in every chamber was well screened from the beds. There was a huge fireplace with heavy iron dogs, on which we burned in winter large faggots about four feet long. Four of such faggots was the allowance for each evening, and it was abundantly sufficient. It was the duty of the bedmakers, whose operations were all performed when we were in school, to put four faggots in each chamber, which we used at our discretion—i. e. at the discretion of the prefects in the chamber. As the eighteen prefects were distributed among the seven chambers, there were three prefects in each of the larger, and two in each of the smaller chambers. By the side of each bed was a little desk, with a cupboard above, which was called a “toys,” in which each boy kept the books he needed for work “in chambers,” and any other private property. For his clothes he had also by his bedside a large chest, of a make contemporary with the bedstead, which served him also for a seat at the desk of the “toys.” In the middle of the chamber was a pillar, around which were hung our surplices. Over the huge fireplace was an iron sconce fixed in the wall, in which a rushlight, called by us a “functure” was burned all night. And the “prefect in course” was responsible for its being kept duly burning. The nightly rounds of the “hostiarius” were not frequent, but he might come at any minute of any night. Suddenly his pass key would be heard in the door—for it was the rule that every chamber door should be kept locked all night; he came in with a lanthorn in his hand, and if all was right, i. e. if the functure was duly burning, every boy in his bed, and his candle put out, he merely looked around and passed on to another chamber. If otherwise, the “prefect in course” had an interview with him on the following morning. These chamber doors, which, as I have said, it was the rule to keep always locked during the night, were exceedingly massive, ironbound, and with enormous locks and hinges. Now there was a tradition in college that a certain former “senior prefect in third” (subaudi chamber) had carried the door of that chamber round the quadrangle. The Atlas thus remembered was a minor canon of the cathedral, when I was “senior prefect in third,” and the tradition of his prowess excited my emulation. So I had the door in question taken from its hinges and laid upon my bent back, and caused the door of “fourth” to be carefully placed on the top of it, and so carried both doors round the quadrangle, thus outdoing the minor canon by a hundred per cent. In due proportion the feat should surely have made me in time a canon! But it has not done so. I think, however, that I might challenge any one of my schoolfellows of the present generation, whose constitutions are cared for by the early breakfasts, which we did not get, to do likewise—supposing, that is, the old doors to be still in existence, and in statu quo. From seven to eight we were, or ought to have been, at work, seated at our “toys” in chambers. And during that hour no “inferior” could leave the chamber without the permission of the “prefect in course.” At eight we went into chapel—or rather into the ante-chapel only—for short prayers, and after that till nine we were free to do as we pleased. Some would walk up and down “sands,” as the broad flagstone pavement below the chapel wall was called.

Each prefect in the chamber had a little table, at which he sat during the evening, and which in the morning served as a washing-stand, on which it was the duty of the “junior,” who was his “valet,” to place his basin and washing things. But all “inferiors” had to perform their ablutions at the “conduit” in the open quadrangle. In severe or wet weather this was not Sybaritic! But again I say that it would have been difficult to find a healthier collection of boys than we were.

The discipline which regulated that part of college life spent “in chambers,” must have been, I think, much more lax at a former day, than it was in my time, for I remember to have heard my father, who was in college under Dr. Warton, say that Tom Warton, the head master’s brother (and the well-known author of the History of Poetry) used frequently to be with the boys “in chambers” of an evening; that he would often knock off a companion’s “verse task” for him, and that the Doctor the next morning would recognise “that rascal Tom’s work.” Now in my day it would have been altogether impossible and out of the question for any outsider, however much an old Wykehamist, and brother of the master, to be with us in chambers.

There was an anecdote current I remember among Wykehamists of that generation respecting “that rascal Tom,” to the effect that he narrowly missed becoming head of Trinity, of which college at Oxford he was a fellow, under the following circumstances. There was a certain fellow of the college, whose name need not here be recorded, rather famous among his contemporaries for the reverse of wisdom or intelligence. Upon one occasion, Tom Warton, sitting in his stall in chapel close to the gentleman in question, who was reading the Psalms, and when the latter came to the verse, “Lord, thou knowest my simpleness,” was so indiscreet as to mutter in an almost audible tone, “Ay! we all know that!” But it so chanced that not very long afterwards there was an election for the presidentship of the college, and Warton, who was a very popular man, was one of two candidates. The college, however, was very closely divided between them, and “that rascal Tom” had to apply to his “simple” colleague for his vote. “Not so simple as all that, Mr. Warton!” was the reply; and the story goes that the historian of poetry lost his election by that one vote.

And this college chapel anecdote reminds me to say, before concluding my Wiccamical reminiscences, a few words about our chapel-going in the olden time. In this department also very much of change has taken place, doubtless here at least for the better.

But it must be remembered that any change of this sort has been contemporaneous with change, at least as strongly marked in the same direction, in the general tone of English manners, sentiments, and habits. We English were not a devout people in the days when George the Third was king, especially as regards all that portion of the world which held aloof from evangelicalism and dissent. We were not altogether without religious feeling in college, but it manifested itself chiefly in the form of a pronounced abhorrence for those two, as we considered them, ungentlemanlike propensities. For about three weeks at Easter time the lower classes in the school read the Greek Testament instead of the usual Greek authors, and the upper classes read Lowth’s Prælections on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews—a book unimpeachable in point of Latinity and orthodoxy, for was not the author a Wykehamist? But I do not remember aught else in the way of religious instruction, unless it were found in the assiduity of our attendances at chapel.

We went to chapel twice (including the short evening prayers in the ante-chapel) every day. On Fridays we went three times, and on Saturdays also three times; the service in the afternoon being choral. On Sundays we went thrice to chapel, and twice to the cathedral; on red-letter days thrice to chapel, and as often on “Founder’s commemoration,” and “Founder’s obit.” These latter services, as also those on Sundays and holidays, were choral. We had three chaplains, an organist, four vicars choral, and six choristers for the service of the chapel. The “choristers,” who were mentioned at a former page as carrying the “dispers” up into hall, though so called, had nothing to do with the choral service. They were twelve in number, were fed, clothed, and educated by a master of their own, and discharged the duty of waiting on the scholars as messengers, etc., at certain hours.

Our three chaplains were all of them also minor canons of the cathedral. Very worthy, good men they were—one of them especially and exceptionally exemplary in his family relations; but their mode of performing the service in the chapel was not what would in these days be considered decorous or reverential. Besides the chaplaincy of the college, and the minor canonry of the cathedral, these gentlemen—all three of them, I believe—held small livings in the city. And the multiplicity of duty which had thus to be done rendered a decree of speed in the performance of the service so often a desideratum, and sometimes an absolute necessity, that that became the most marked characteristic of the performers. In reading, or rather intoning the prayers, the habit was to allow no time at all for the choir to chant their “Amen,” which had to be interjected in such sort that when the tones of it died away the priest had already got through two or three lines of the following prayer. One of our chaplains, who had the well-deserved character of being the fastest of the three, we called the diver. For it was his practice in reading or intoning to continue with great rapidity as long as his breath would last, and then, while recovering it, to proceed mentally without interruption, so that we lost sight (or hearing) of him at one point, and when he came to the surface, i.e., became audible again, he was several lines further down the page; and this we called “diving.” It was proudly believed in college that this was the gentleman of whom the story was first told, that he was ready to give any man to “Pontius Pilate” in the Creed, and arrive at the end before him. But however worthy competitor he may have been in such a race, I have reason to believe that the chaplain of a certain college in Oxford was the original of the story.

Another of our three chaplains was a great sportsman. It was the practice that the lessons were always read in chapel by one of the prefects.

I remember by the bye (but this is parenthetical), that one of our number was unable to pronounce the letter “r,” and we used to scheme that it should fall to his lot to tell us that “Bawabbas was a wobber.”

Now the boy who read the lessons, sat, not in his usual place, but by the side of the chaplain who was performing the service. And it was the habit of the reverend sportsman I have referred to, to intercalate with the verses of the Psalm he was reading, sotto voce, anecdotes of his most recent sporting achievements, addressed to the youth at his side, using for the purpose the interval during which the choir recited the alternate verse.

As thus, on one twenty-eighth evening of the month, well remembered after some sixty years:

“Who smote great kings: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

Then aside, in the well-known great rolling, mellow voice (I can hear it now):

“On Hurstley Down yesterday I was out with Jack Woodburn” (this was another minor canon of the cathedral, but not one of our chaplains)....

“Sehon king of the Amorites: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

“My black bitch Juno put up a covey almost at our feet.”

“And gave away their land for an heritage: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

“I blazed away with both barrels and brought down a brace.”

“Who remembered us when we were in trouble: for his mercy endureth for ever.”

“But Jack fired too soon and never touched a feather.” And so on.

Now there would be no sort of interest in recording that we unfortunately chanced to have at one time a very graceless chaplain, if such had been the case, which it was not. The interest lies in the fact that the gentleman in question was a worthy and excellent man in all the relations of life; that he was absolutely innocent of intentional impropriety; and that, as far as I can remember, we had none of us the faintest idea that we ought to have been shocked or scandalised. Such was the state of things and men’s minds “sixty years since.”

The brother of this chaplain was the manciple of the college, and was known among us as “Damme Hopkins,” from the following circumstance. His manner was a quaint mixture of pomposity and bonhomie, which made a conversation with him a rather favourite amusement with some of us. Now the manciple was a very well-to-do man, and was rather fond of letting it be known that his independent circumstances made the emoluments of the place he held a matter of no importance to him. “Indeed,” he would say, “I spoke to the Bishop [the Warden] a few months ago of resigning, but the Bishop says to me, ‘No, no, Damme Hopkins, you must keep the place.’” And I have no doubt that the deficiency of dramatic instinct which thus led the worthy manciple to transfer his own phraseology to his right reverend interlocutor rendered him quite unconscious of any inaccuracy in his narration.

We used to go twice every Sunday, as I have said, to the cathedral. But we did not attend the whole morning service. We timed our arrival there so as to reach the cathedral at the beginning of the Communion service, and to be present at that and at the sermon which followed it. We had no sermons in college chapel, save on certain special occasions, such as 5th of November, “Founder’s commemoration,” or “Founder’s obit.” On the former of these occasions a sermon used to be preached with which we had become familiar by the annual repetition of it during a succession of years. I wonder how many there are left who will remember the words, “A letter was sent, couched in the most ambiguous terms, and who so likely to detect it as the King himself?”

At the cathedral a series of benches between the pulpit and Bishop’s throne and the altar were reserved for us, so that the preacher was immediately in front and to the right of us. The surplice was used in the cathedral pulpit at the morning service, the Geneva gown at that in the afternoon. At the former one of the prebendaries or the dean was the preacher, at the latter a minor canon.

I remember that we used to think a good deal of the dean’s sermons, and always attended to them—a compliment which was not often paid, to the best of my recollection, to the other preachers. Dean Rennell was a man of very superior abilities, but of great eccentricity, mainly due to extreme absence of mind. It used to be told of him that unless Mrs. Rennell took good care, he was tolerably certain, when he went up to his room to dress for a dinner-party, to go to bed. It will be understood from what has been said of the accommodation provided for us in the cathedral, that in order to face us, the preacher, addressing himself to the body of the congregation in the choir, must have turned himself round in the pulpit. And this Rennell would sometimes do, when he thought what he was saying especially calculated for our edification. He was, as I have already mentioned, a great Platonist, and when he alluded, as he not unfrequently did, to some doctrine or opinion of the Grecian philosopher, he would turn to us and say, in a sort of parenthetical aside, “Plato I mean.”

Among the stories that were current of Rennell I remember one to the effect that when upon one occasion he was posting from Winchester to London he stopped at Egham for luncheon. A huge round of boiled beef, nearly uncut, was placed upon the table. But the dean found it was, as he thought, far too much boiled; so without more ado he cut the huge mass into four quarters and helped himself to a morsel from the centre! The landlady, when the mutilated joint was carried out, was exceedingly indignant, and insisted that a guinea should be paid for the entirety of it. The dean, much against the grain, as the chronicle goes, paid his guinea, but packed up the four quarters of the round and carried them off with him.

Further indication of his eccentricity might be seen, as I remember, in his habit of wearing in the cathedral pulpit in cold weather, not a skull cap, but a flat square of velvet on his head, with which occasionally he would in the heat of his discourse wipe his face, then clap it on his head again.

The cathedral, as I have had occasion to mention in a former chapter, had been undergoing a very extensive restoration, one operation in the course of which had been the removal of the organ from over the screen; and the question whether it should be replaced there or be transferred to the north transept was very earnestly, and, it was said, somewhat hotly debated by the chapter. The dean was exceedingly vehement in supporting the latter course, which was eventually adopted, it can scarcely be doubted by those who see the church as it now is, with entire judiciousness.

I could, not without gratification to myself, chatter much more about reminiscences of the years I passed at Winchester. But I feel that the only excuse for having yielded to the temptation as far as I have must be sought in the illustrations afforded by what I have written of the large changes in habits, thoughts, customs, feelings that have been wrought in English society and English institutions by the lapse of some sixty years.

And now the time had come when I, having attained the age of eighteen, was superannuated at the election in the July of 1828. It was not at that time certain whether I should or should not succeed to a fellowship at New College, for that depended upon the number of vacancies that might occur in the year up to the election of 1829. Eventually I missed it by, as I remember, one only. One more journey of “Speedyman” before July, 1829, announcing the marriage or the death of a fellow of New College, or the acceptance of a college living by one of them, would have made me a fellow of New College. But “Speedyman” did not make his appearance.

I left Winchester a fairly good Latin scholar, and well grounded—I do not think I can say more—in Greek; and very ignorant indeed of all else. According to what I hear of the requirements at the present day, I had no scholarly knowledge whatever of my own language. I knew nothing whatsoever of Anglo-Saxon, or of mediæval English. I had never—have never, I may rather say—had any English grammar in my hand from my cradle to the present hour.

It is certain, however, that the enlarged requirements in this department, to which I have referred, have somehow or other failed to banish from the current literature of the day a vast number of solecisms, vulgarisms, and grammatical atrocities of all sorts, which defile the language to a much greater degree than was the case at the time of which I have been writing, and which would have been as abhorrent to me when I left Winchester as they are now.

Of arithmetic I knew nothing—I should write “know”—and of all that arithmetic should be the first step to, à fortiori, still less. In the art of writing I received the best possible instruction, for I was licked by my tutor and scourged by the masters if my writing was illegible. Of less indirect tuition I had none.

There was a writing master—one Mr. Bower, Fungy Bower he was called, why, I know not—who sat at a certain low desk in the school during; school hours. I never received from him, or saw any one else receive from him, any instruction in writing. Nor did he, to the best of my knowledge and belief, form any part of William of Wykeham’s foundation. The only purpose his presence in school appeared to serve was to mend pens and make up the weekly account of marks received by each boy which regulated his place in the class.

The register containing the account of these marks was called the “classicus paper,” and was kept in this wise. All the members of each “class”—or “form” as it is called in other schools—continually changed places while proceeding with the lesson before the master, each, if able to answer a question which those above him could not answer, passing up above them. And part of the punishment for failing altogether in any lesson, for being as the phrase was “crippled in Virgil,” or “crippled in Homer,” was to go to the bottom of the class. Thus the order in which the class sat was continually changed. And the first business every morning was for the two boys at the head of the class to take the “classicus paper,” and mark 1. against the name of the boy at the bottom, 2. against the next, and so on; so that the mark assigned to him at the head was equal to the number in the class. And this record of the marks was handed every week to Fungy Bower to be made up, so as to indicate the place in the class held by each member of it. But though this was done weekly the account was carried on during the whole half year, so that a boy’s final place in the class was the accurate result of his diligence and success during the whole “half.”

Of course I was a cricketer—we all were, and were indeed obliged to be, whether willingly or not, until we became prefects, when, of course, those only who loved the game continued to practise it. I never was a great cricketer, but have been “long stop” quite often enough to know how great is the nonsense talked by those of the present generation, who maintain that all the elaborate precautions against being hurt which are so abundantly taken by the players of these latter days are necessitated by the greater force of the bowling as now practised. In simple truth this is all bosh! though I can hardly expect a generation in cute curandâ plus æquo operata to believe a very old batter and fielder when he tells them so!

My favourite game was fives. We had a splendid fives court, and the game was played in a manner altogether peculiar to Winchester; now I believe—like so much else—abandoned. We used a very small ball, hardly bigger than a good-sized walnut, and as hard as if made of wood, called a “snack.” And this was driven against the wall by a bat of quite peculiar construction. It was made, I think, of ash, and there were only two men, rivals, who could make it. It was about a yard long, the handle round, and somewhat less than an inch in diameter. It then became gradually thinner and wider, till at about the distance of six inches from the extremity it was perhaps an inch and a half wide, and not thicker than half-a-crown. Then it expanded and thickened again into a head somewhat of the shape of an ace of spades, some three inches across and half an inch thick. The thin part was kept continually well oiled—in such sort that it became so elastic, that the heavy head might almost be doubled back so as to touch the part nearer the hand. It will be understood both that the difficulty of striking a bounding ball with this instrument was considerable, and that the momentum imparted to the small hard ball by the blow was very great indeed. It is true that accidents occasionally, though very rarely, happened from a misdirected blow. But it does not seem necessary that the old bat should be abandoned, for our judicious grandsons might play with great comfort and safety in helmets!

Of course I, like most of my contemporaries, left Winchester—and indeed subsequently left Oxford—as ignorant of any modern language, save English, as of Chinese! And as for music—though Oxford and Cambridge are the only universities in Europe which give degrees in music—it is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with very rare exceptions, to have taught an undergraduate, or a boy at a public school, music, would have been thought much on a par with teaching him to hem a pocket-handkerchief. And here the present generation has the pull to a degree which it perhaps hardly sufficiently recognises!

It was during my last year at Winchester that I made my first attempt at authorship. Old Robbins, the grey-headed bookseller of College Street, who had been the college bookseller for many years, had recently taken a younger partner of the name of Wheeler, and this gentleman established a monthly magazine, called the Hampshire and West of England Magazine, to which I contributed three or four articles on matters Wiccamical. I have the volume before me now—perhaps the only extant copy of that long since forgotten publication. The Rev. E. Poulter, one of the prebendaries of Winchester, who had a somewhat wider than local reputation as a wit in those days, was the anonymous contributor of a poetical prologue of such unconscionable proportions that poor Wheeler was sadly puzzled what to do with it. It was impossible to refuse or neglect a reverend prebendary’s contribution, besides that the verses, often doggerel, had some good fun in them. So they were all printed by instalments in successive numbers, despite the title of prologue which their author gives them.

CHAPTER VII.

I came back from Winchester for the last time after the election of 1828, to find a great change at home. My father, pressed more and more by pecuniary difficulties, had quitted Harrow, and established himself at Harrow Weald, a hamlet of the large parish in the direction of Pinner. He had not given up his farm at Harrow. He would have been only too glad to do so, for it involved an annual loss undeviatingly; but that he could not do, for his lease tied him to the stake. But he took another farm at Harrow Weald, on which there was an old farm-house, which had once been a very good one, and, living there, carried on both farms. How far this speculation was a wise one I have no means of judging. Doubtless he took the Harrow Weald farm upon very largely more advantageous terms than those which he had accepted from Lord Northwick for the farm at Harrow; but having been absent all the time at Winchester, I knew so little about the matter that I do not now know even who his Harrow Weald landlord was. Possibly I did know but have forgotten. But I think I remember to have heard my father say that the Harrow Weald farm did in some decree alleviate the loss sustained by the larger farm at Harrow, and that, could he have got rid of the latter, the Harrow Weald farm might have paid its way. The excellent house he had built at Harrow was in the meantime let to Mr. Cunningham, the vicar.

The change from it to the old farm-house at Harrow Weald, as a home, was not a pleasant one; but a very far worse and more important change awaited my home coming, in the absence of my mother. She had gone to America.

Where, or under what circumstances, my parents had first become acquainted with General La Fayette I do not know. I myself never saw him; but I know that it was during a visit to La Grange, his estate in France, that my mother first met Miss Frances Wright, one of two sisters, his wards. I believe she became acquainted with Camilla Wright, the sister, at the same time.

It is odd, considering the very close intimacy that took place between my mother and Frances Wright, that I never knew anything of the parentage and family of these ladies, or how they came to be wards of General La Fayette. But with Miss Frances Wright I did become subsequently well acquainted. She was in many respects a very remarkable personage. She was very handsome in a large and almost masculine style of beauty, with a most commanding presence, a superb figure, and stature fully masculine. Her features both in form and expression were really noble. There exists—still findable, I suppose, in some London fonds de magasin—a large lithographed portrait of her. She is represented standing, with her hand on the neck of a grey horse (the same old gig horse that had drawn my parents and myself over so many miles of Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Monmouthshire roads and cross roads—not that which so nearly made an end of us near Lynmouth, but his companion), and, if I remember rightly, in Turkish trousers.

But these particulars of her bodily form and presentment constituted the least remarkable specialties of her individuality. She was unquestionably a very clever woman. She wrote a slender octavo volume, entitled A Few Days in Athens, which was published by Longman. It was little more than a brochure, and it is many years since I have seen it, but the impression that it was very clever abides in my mind. I remember the fact that the whole edition was sold. And the mention of this book reminds me of a circumstance that seems to show that my parents must have become to a considerable degree intimate with these wards of General La Fayette at some period preceding the visit to La Grange, which exercised in the sequel so large an influence over my own, and my mother’s, and brothers’ future. This circumstance is that I recollect my father to have been in communication with the Longmans on behalf of Miss Wright in respect to her work.

Be this how it may, at the time of that visit to La Grange spoken of above, Miss Wright’s thoughts and aspirations were directed with a persistent and indomitable enthusiasm, which made the groundwork of her character, to doing something for the improvement of the condition of the slave populations in the southern states of the great transatlantic republic. Both Frances and Camilla Wright were ladies of considerable fortune; and I believe that General La Fayette wished much to induce his ward Frances not to employ her means in the scheme she was now bent on. But she was of age,—I fancy some six or seven years more than that—and he had no authority to interfere with her purpose, with which besides, otherwise than as likely to be pecuniarily disastrous to her, he entirely sympathised.

Her purpose was to purchase a property in the valley of the Mississippi—in Alabama I think it was—with the slaves upon it, to free them all immediately, and to cultivate the estate by their free labour, living there with them in a sort of community, the principles and plan of which were, I fancy, very largely based upon the ideas and schemes of Mr. Owen of Lanark. His son, Robert Dale Owen, subsequently well known in Europe as the author of sundry works on spiritualism and political speculations, and as United States Consul at Naples and perhaps other cities, was a life-long friend of Miss Wright’s.

Now, my parents had taken with them to La Grange my next brother, Henry, who has been mentioned as the companion of my early London rambles, and who was then rapidly approaching manhood without having found for himself, or having had found for him, any clear prospect of earning the livelihood which it was clearly enough necessary that he should earn in some way; and Miss Wright proposed to my mother to bring him to America to join in her projected establishment and experiment at “New Harmony”—such I believe to have been the name which Miss Wright gave to her property. The original name, I think, was Nashoba, but my knowledge of any of these matters is very imperfect. I know that the whole scheme ended in complete disappointment to all concerned, and entire failure. To Miss Wright it involved very considerable pecuniary loss, which, as I learned subsequently from my mother, she bore with the utmost fortitude and cheerfulness, but without any great access of wisdom as regarded her benevolent schemes for the political and economical improvement of human, and especially black, society. I never saw her again; but remember to have heard of her marrying a French teacher of languages at the close of a course of lectures given by her against the institution of matrimony. All that I heard from my mother and my brother of their connection with Miss Wright, of her administration of affairs at New Harmony, and her conduct when her experiment issued in failure and disappointment, left with me the impression of her genuinely highminded enthusiasm, her unselfishness, bravery, and generosity, but, at the same time, of her deficiency in the qualities which can alone make departure from the world’s beaten tracks—mill-horse tracks though they be—either wise, profitable, or safe. She had a fine and large intelligence, but not fine or large enough for going quite unpiloted across country.

Whether my mother resided any time at Nashoba I am not sure, but I think not. At all events, very shortly after her arrival in America she established herself at Cincinnati. And when it became evident that there was no prospect of permanent work for my brother in the business of regenerating the negroes, it was determined—by the advice of what Cincinnati friends I know not—that he should join my mother there, and undertake the establishment and conduct of an institution which, as far as I was able to understand the plan, was to combine the specialities of an Athenæum, a lecture hall, and a bazaar! And it was when this enterprise had been decided upon, but before any steps had been taken for the realising of it, that I accompanied my father on a visit to America.

When I returned from Winchester in July, there were still many months before me of uncertainty whether I might get a vacancy at New College or not, and my father, having determined on going for a short visit to Cincinnati, proposed to take me with him. After what I have written in a previous chapter of my early tastes and proclivities, I need hardly say that the prospect of this travel was in the highest degree delightful to me. I am afraid that, at the time, any call to New College, which should have had the effect of preventing it, would have been to me a very unwelcome one. Our departure was fixed for September, and the intervening time was spent by me in preparations for the great adventure, very much such as Livingstone may be supposed to have made on quitting England for the “dark continent.”

I was, as it seems to me now, still a very boyish boy, all ex-Wiccamical prefect as I was, and, I cannot help thinking, younger and more childish than the youngsters of equal age of the present generation.

The voyage, however, really was a bigger affair in those days than it has become in these times, for it was before the iron horse had been trained to cross the Atlantic. And my father made it a very much more serious business still by engaging for us berths in the steerage of a passenger ship. I hardly think that he would have done so had he been at all aware of what he was undertaking. It is true that he was undoubtedly hard pressed for money, though I have not now, and had not then any such knowledge of his affairs as to enable me to judge to what degree he was straitened. But there was also about my father a sort of Spartan contempt for comfort, and determination not to expend money on his own personal well-being, which was a prominent feature in his character, and which, I have no doubt, contributed to the formation of his resolution to make this journey in the least costly manner possible.

But, as I have said, I think that he had no very clear notion of what a steerage passage across the Atlantic implied. As for me, if he had proposed to make the voyage on a raft I should have jumped at the offer! It was, in truth, a sufficiently severe experience. But, as I was then at eighteen, I should have welcomed the chance of making such an expedition, even if I had accurately realised all the accompaniments and all the details of it.