Four Generations Of A Literary Family The Hazilitts In England Ireland And America Vol II

HAZLITT MEMOIRS

FOUR GENERATIONS OF A
LITERARY FAMILY

THE HAZLITTS IN ENGLAND, IRELAND, AND
AMERICA

THKIR KRIKNIXS AND THKIR FORTUNKvS
1725 1896

Y

W , C A R K W H A Z L I T T

WITH PORTRAITS REPRODUCED FROM MINIATURES BY
JOHN ItAZUTT

IN TWO V O L U M K S
VOL. H.

LONDON AND NEW YORK

G E O R G E R 1C I) W A Y

97

CHAPTER V.

The Court of Bankruptcy My father's legal experiences and
friends Baron Grant Vice-Chancellor Bacon Mr. Com-
missioner Goulburn Hazlitt Road, West Kensington Lord
Kenyon Lord Brougham Lord Chancellor Westbury
Lord Coleridge Mr. Justice Hawkins Serjeant Wilkins
Street and the Law Courts Baxter and the Tichborne case
Sir Charles Lewis, M. P. Illiteracy of lawyers My father
and George Henry Lewes John Payne Collier The Second
Shakespear Folio.

WHEN my father first went to the Court of Bank-
ruptcy in 1854, his knowledge of his work was,
I fear, very rudimentary. But by application and
through a receptive mind he gradually became one
of the most efficient officers in the building. Of
his successor I hear on all sides a very poor account.
His Honour seems, so far, to know as little as my
father did, and to be unable or unwilling to learn.

The late Chief Registrar, when I spoke to him of
the editor and proprietor of a society paper now
departed, mentioning his apparently flourishing state,
observed that he thought the time had come for

THIRD GENERATION

him to pay his creditors the remaining 193. 6cL in
the pound.

My father has ere now consulted the present
writer on cases before him, and he occasionally
instanced remarkable courage on the part of solici-
tors in the direction of charges. I remember that
he reduced one claim from ^192 to 12, and then
deemed the amount allowed to the honest practitioner
too high, He had a good deal of trouble with some
eminent firms, whose representatives came to the
Court with an equally imperfect knowledge of their
business and of the law. Baron Grant, while he
was still in evidence, called at the Court, and laid
before the Registrar, in connection with some
pending arrangement, securities valued by him at
,200,000. My father had to signify to the Baron
that commercially they were worth precisely nothing.

Vice- Chancellor Bacon was of a very placid laisscr
aller temperament, and seldom allowed himself to
be perturbed by any untoward incident or turn. He
more than once said to my father, when the latter
seemed excited about some case before the Court :
4 Point de zele, my dear fellow point de z&le.'

At the time that Mr. Kay, afterward judge,
practised before Bacon, it used to be said that the
latter spelled equity with a k because he was ruled

OF A LITERARY FAMILY

by the counsel's views, and so long as suitors might
choose the V.C. before whom they would appear,
the plan in a doubtful case was to retain Kay, and
have the matter tried by Bacon.

1 could never exactly understand why Bacon was
promoted to the Bench. He certainly disappointed
the expectations which had been formed of him
while he wore silk, and no man's judgments were
more frequently reversed on appeal. To succeed in
the discharge of judicial functions, as in other things,
demands unwearied industry, even though one
possess greater talent than Bacon had; but I do
not think that Bacon was what the copy-books call
appliqud he took matters too easily, as the anecdote
which I have given above may imply.

My father had a much wider experience of practice
in bankruptcy, and would have been better qualified
than either Bacon or Cave for the place of Chief
Judge. His decisions, when he has sat vicariously
on the Bench, have been almost invariably upheld ;

but

' Non cuivis homini contingit adire Corinthum.'

I suppose that there never was a man so extrava-
gantly estimated as Bacon.

It is not generally known that one of the two
persons to whom the Turk appeals in the cartoon in

THIRD GENERATION

PuncA,> July 31, 1880, is my father the other, of
course, is Gladstone.

I was talking to my father at the Bankruptcy
Court about some one whom we both thought to be
not overwise. 'Well,' said Mr. Registrar dryly,
* he was a fool, and as much of a rogue with it as
his incapacity would permit'

The Registrar, on his way home by train from
the Court to Richmond, observed that one of his
fellow-passengers had let something in her hand
drop, and he said to the fellow with her : * I think
the young woman has let her parcel fall.' The
party referred to looked daggers, but made no
remark till she left the carriage just after, and, turn-
ing to the venerable Registrar, relieved her pent-up
resentment by the crushing retort, delivered with an
immense air : ' Thank you, young man/

Mr. Commissioner Goulburn, who had been a
Cornet in the army, in answer to some one who had
asked him if he was not once a Welsh judge, said :
4 Yes ; I was one with an understanding' meaning,
on certain conditions. * Oh,' returned his friend,
4 1 never heard before of a Welsh judge who pos-
sessed such a thing/

Goulburn told my father, when the law permitting
personal petitions in bankruptcy was passed, that

OF A LITERARY FAMILY

he knew a Cornet Goulburn who would have been
very glad of such a facility.

Though I think that I have seen the same joke
related of some one else, I perfectly remember, when
Goulburn once fell on his head out of his carriage
on the pavement, an inquiry was made as to the
damage done to the latter.

It was Mr. Commissioner Fonblanque, of the
Bankruptcy Court, who, when a suitable motto for
the Serjeants' rings was mooted, suggested Scilicet.

When Hazlitt Road, West Kensington, was so
christened, some one asked the builder why he gave
it that name, and whether it was after the author
of Table-Talk (Maclise Road being immediately
adjacent). ' Oh no !' he replied ; ' after dear old
Mr. Registrar Hazlitt!' That gentleman, perhaps,
in his official capacity had let him off more easily
than he expected or deserved.

Lord Kenyon spoke of Julian the Apostate as
Julian the Apostle. But perhaps one appellation is
as sensible and fit as the other. The Emperor
provoked the enmity of the clergy or priesthood by
his advanced opinions, and since the Church for-
merly influenced so much the making of history,
all who incurred its displeasure have naturally come
down to us with tarnished characters.

THIRD GENERATION

Of the old school of lawyers Brougham was
perhaps the last, if he was not the greatest. He
was a man of varied attainments, and spared no
labour to render himself conversant with every
subject which happened to be coming before him
as a judge or as a legislator, and which he had not
studied, no matter how mean or trivial it might
appear. He did not account it sufficient for a
lawyer to be read only in the statute-book, the rules
of the turf, the daily paper, and Joe Miller, or
deem that the demands of culture were satisfied by
the possession of a library. He was my father's
steadfast friend, and the intimate associate from
college days of my great-uncle Stoddart.

Brougham's physical constitution was as perfect
a marvel as his intellectual activity and versatility.
His power of endurance must have been enormous,
and he was far from abstemious in any sense. The
fatigue and strain which, in his earlier professional
career he constantly bore, would have killed nine
men out of ten. Port and brandy, of which he so
freely partook, instead of impairing his energy,
served as invigorating and recuperative stimu-
lants.

The great Chancellor was apparently led by the
coincidence of the name to make his country seat

OF A LITERARY FAMILY

(Brougham Hall) near the ancient castle in West-
moreland where Queen Elizabeth stayed and was
entertained in one of her numerous progresses.

Lord Chancellor Westbury once took part in a
discussion on eternal punishment, of which he
repudiated the existence, and, lawyer-like, he wound
up his argument by saying : 'Hell is dismissed with
costs P

Westbury was remarkable for preserving the old
pronunciation of certain words, such as whole, hot,
which he pronounced wote, wot. When Mr.
Registrar Hazlitt was at work with him on the
Bankruptcy Bill, 1869, he once said to him : * I am
sick, Hazlitt, of the wole business.'

His lordship, like many other great men, had his
foibles, and one of them was in the shape of an
Italian Countess, whom he scandalized some of his
guests at Hackwood Hall by placing at the head of
his table. Yet he was not wanting in polite atten-
tions to his wife, whose parcels, and even bonnet-
boxes, he would often be seen carrying home.
Many a time he borrowed sixpence of some one at
hand to pay for his omnibus.

A bookseller assured me that he had been com-
missioned to make the catalogue of the late Lord
Coleridge's private library, but that, owing to certain

io THIRD GENERATION

circumstances, the business was a rather delicate
one. I believe that this was a thorough fiction, for
Coleridge's books were sold in the ordinary way by
Sotheby and Co., and the person who was employed
by the auctioneers to go to the house to look at the
collection informed me that he discovered no trace
of anything of the sort beyond the presence of such
generally recognised works as the Arabian Nights
or Payne's version of Boccaccio.

As Lamb's friend and correspondent, Alsop, very
truly pointed out, the man to whom his family owed
any distinction which they acquired was neglected
by them, and the anticlimax was reached in a noble
and learned lord, who inherited the name and
nothing "else.

Mr. Justice Hawkins, whose partiality for the
turf is very well known, had once a horse case
before him. There had been some betting on a
horse for the Derby, and at the last moment the
animal was scratched. His lordship interrupted the
speech of the learned counsel in order to inquire
what he meant by scratched. l My lord,' said the
counsel, looking very significantly at Hawkins, 1 1
am not exactly in a position to tell your lordship off-
hand, but I will consult' eyeing the Bench all the
time 'a very high judicial authority, and shall be

OF A LITERARY FAMILY u

prepared to give your lordship the information to-
morrow morning.'

Serjeant Wilkins, who died in poverty, com-
menced his professional career at Liverpool, but
afterward removed his practice to Durham. His
first case there was the defence of a young woman
committed for the murder of her illegitimate child,
and it brought him at once into notoriety. When
the case for the Crown had closed, leaving no doubt
of the prisoner's guilt, Wilkins rose, looked at the
judge, then at the prisoner, then at the jury. Then
he seemed to be collecting himself; but a second
and third time he did the same thing. The Court
was in a state of astonishment ; but after the third
repetition Wilkins left his place, went up to the
dock, tore off a piece from the wretched tatters in
which the girl was dressed, and, holding it up, cried :
4 This was the cause of all ! Now, gentlemen, I
consent to a verdict of Guilty.' The prisoner was
convicted, but her sentence was commuted at a
time when commutations were less usual. At the
next sessions thirty briefs awaited Wilkins.

Street, who took the superintendence and drew
the plans of the new Courts of Justice in London,
had travelled a good deal abroad, including . Italy ^
and had seen many public buildings everywhere,

12 THIRD GENERATION

erected at intervals piecemeal from pecuniary or
other exigencies in various tastes or schools of
architecture. He had the opportunity, with the
fine area cleared for the purpose, of placing on the
site a grand homogeneous structure there was no
pretence for irregularity of design and what did
he do? He did just as a Chinese tailor would do,
if you gave him a pair of breeches with a patch in
them as a pattern. It was certainly a deplorable
muddle, yet characteristic enough, no doubt, of all
similar arrangements in this country. There was
no adequate provision for light, air, or hearing, and
solid mahogany doors had to be unhinged, that the
panels might be cut out and glass squares sub-
stituted, when it was found by this person of genius
that staircases or corridors were in almost complete
darkness at mid-day.

Baxter, of the great firm of solicitors, Baxter,
Rose and Norton, in Great Queen Street, West-
minster, afterward in Victoria Street, was an Evan-
gelical preacher, and used to go down to Alder-
shot to deliver discourses to the soldiers. This pro-
cured him the name of Holy Baxter. The business
of his firm was at one time extraordinarily great ;
they had 130 clerks in 32 rooms. It might be said
of them, as Horace does of Rome :

' Suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit.'

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 13

Baxter himself was not considered a first-rate
man of business ; but he was an excellent lawyer,
and much consulted in railway cases. He carried
about an inch of pencil, and often amended a clause
in a Bill by adding a few words, as when he out-
witted Sir James Allport, of the Midland, in the
4 running ' question with the Wolverhampton and
Walsall, by inserting the words 'and account,' which
precluded the Midland from evading the liability to
pay under certain contingencies.

The misfortune of Baxter was his support of the
Tichborne Claimant ; it led to a reconstruction of
the firm, and he died a poor man. I have been
told that there was little doubt as to the relationship
of Orton to the family, and that the Colonel of the
regiment to which Tichborne had belonged re-
cognised the Claimant as the same man who had
served under him, when he happened to see him
coming out of Court, and mentioned the matter to
Baxter casually, without knowing that the latter was
concerned in the defence.

A late well-known jeweller in Richmond, Surrey,
was saying that, while he was engaged in breaking
up sovereigns for his professional purposes, Mr.
Arnold, the police magistrate, came into the shop,
and asked him what he was doing. He answered

i 4 THIRD GENERATION

that he hoped he was doing no harm, but did not
like being challenged by such an authority. There
seems, however, no objection to utilizing the currency
for jewellery, so long as it is not defaced and passed
into other hands. You may destroy it, but you
must not tamper with it.

In a case at a London police court, where two
Jews were parties, the magistrate asked one of them
whether he called himself Montagu. He replied in
the affirmative. He asked him again if it had
always been his name, and he said that he believed
so. ' Had it ever been Moses ?' * Well, yes ; but
Moses and Montagu were the same,' * Oh, then/
said the magistrate, * I suppose that the Moses in
the Bible was also known as Montagu.' The race
being so ancient, and its prospective advantages so
exceptional, it seems strange that so many Jews
should be anxious to disguise their nationality and
nomenclature. The late Mr. Hyman Montagu, the
numismatist, married a Miss Moses, who became
Mrs. Montagu ; but she ought by right to have kept
her maiden, name. Montagu did not desire to pass
as a Jew, but it was relevantly to him that some one
expressed to me his regret that the extinction of the
Hebrews had not been accomplished by King John.

My father told me the following anecdote about

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 15

Sir Charles Lewis, M.P. Lewis had had his full-
length portrait presented to him by his constituents
just before some one called to see him. * I have
something to shew you,' said Lewis, and took the
other into the room where the likeness had been
placed. * What do you think of it ?' he asked.
* Very good indeed,' replied the friend, 'except that
the artist has painted you with your hands in your
own pockets/

A curious circumstance happened to an intimate
friend. Several thousand pounds, which he had
been entitled to expect, were left elsewhere, owing
to offence taken by the lady-relative who had the
money at her disposition. He came behind her
chair at dinner one day as a boy, and pulled her cap
or her wig. At the death of the party to whom she
bequeathed it, he willed it away with other property,
but this money could only pass by deed ; my friend
brought his action, and recovered it. I observed
to him that in this instance the will was not as good
as the deed.

A man, who had bought land at Brockley in
Kent, when it was cheap, and boundaries were
occasionally obscure, used to classify his property
jocularly among his intimates as freehold, leasehold,
and catchkold.

1 6 THIRD GENERATION

The general illiteracy of the legal profession is
tolerably well known to such as have mixed in that
kind of society, or even have taken the trouble to
study the Law Reports in the daily press. The
explanation is that lawyers are specialists, and have
no leisure to devote to topics outside their vocation.
Of the two, barristers are perhaps more open to this
charge than solicitors ; yet there is little enough to
choose between them. An eminent Q.C, speaking
on this subject to my father, observed that he was
not at all so well versed as he could have desired
in points of general culture, but that most men at
the Bar were utterly ignorant of languages, even of
Latin and French, and of literary history. Another
learned counsel mentioned to myself his intention of
writing a monogram on a subject in which he
happened to feel an interest.

It is a painful business if you have to go into
Court on any matter pertaining to literary copyright.
It is vast odds if the judge, the counsel, and the
solicitors are not absolute blanks, unless they have
very greatly improved since I committed my father
to an action in respect to his edition of Montaigne.
I was never more frightened in my whole life, for it
was not more than a sum of 10 that was at issue.
I worked hard, however, to protect my father's

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 17

pocket, and the result was that the defendant had
to pay about ^"300 in costs on both sides. If the
suit had concerned the Turf, the Stock Exchange,
or the Prize Ring, there would have been less
difficulty,

But the Lord Chief Baron Pollock was an honour-
able exception to the prevailing rule. He was a
person of cultivated taste, and liked to gather round
him men of letters and artists. Thackeray used to
visit at the house. The Chief Baron expressed
in a letter of 1868 to his friend Dr. Diamond, of
Twickenham, a warm admiration of my grandfather,
and he stated there that he always kept Hazlitt's
volumes near him.

The late Lord Chief Justice Coleridge and Mr.
Justice Day belong to the roll of book-collectors.

The last time that my father saw George Henry
Lewes, husband of George Eliot (Miss Mary
Evans), he was standing, like Collier, at Charing
Cross, and presented a singular appearance, being
dressed from top to toe in white, and the only thing
about him that was not white was his red hair and
beard.

There is always in printing even unpublished
matter of comparatively modern date a feeling of
uncertainty and indecision as to the wisdom of the

VOL. n. 21

1 8 THIRD GENERATION

proceeding. A letter which has the sanction of
age does not require such high testimonials as one
of perhaps superior interest, of which the subject-
matter bears on persons either still among us or
recently added to the appurtenances of the past. I
hold a large number of notes, many curious in their
way, from Leigh Hunt, Douglas Jerrold, William
Jerdan, Bulwer, the Procters, Dickens, Harrison
Ainsworth, Laman Blanchard, and others, on which
the crust, I take it, will have to accumulate some-
what before they become publisher's game.

There are here and there a few which may
possess a special interest, or which, though of recent
origin, treat of questions which have acquired a
tincture of historical character, and I may not be
blamed for citing them in evidence, if I do not
transcribe them at length.

But there is in my collection, independently of all
these, a large assortment of communications on
literary topics from several of my own more par-
ticular correspondents Payne Collier, Halliwell-
Phillipps, and so on which must certainly await
the time when they may have gained a sort of
classic nosegay, and be read by some forthcoming
generation in a longer perspective.

Some of these epistolary remains owe their

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 19

interest to bygone days, and incidentally illustrate
points of biography and literature already beginning,
like wine of the fifth year, to acquire a tone and
a bouquet. I could fill volumes with such things ;
but let me select from a bundle of about sixty two
or three letters from John Payne Collier, whose
father was acquainted with the Lamb circle, and
who was for some time a colleague of Hazlitt on
the Morning Chronicle. The first and second are
addressed to my father ; the former was written
in consequence of the scandal arising from the
alleged Shakespear fabrications.

Collier often joined Hazlitt in his box at the
theatre, and would ask his opinion about the piece
in course of performance what he thought of this
or of that and 'then the next morning/ said
my grandfather, ' what I had told him appeared
in the newspaper as his/ Peter Patmore did much
the same thing.

Riverside,

Maidenhead,

March 22, 1860.
MY DEAR HAZLITT,

I am especially gratified by your note, because it so
happens that you seem almost the only one of my old co-mates
who remember me with any feeling of regard. I do not say that
you are the only one, because there is one other who has expressed
somewhat similar sentiments regarding me. You know that while

20 THIRD GENERATION

you and I were fellow labourers in the same not very profitable,
nor very agreeable field, if I did not do my best to make every
man rny friend, I did nothing to render any man my enemy. Yet
I hear that the great body of those who were similarly employed
are now, for some reason or other, opposed to me, and take
pleasure in forwarding the views of my adversaries by such means
as happen to be in their power.

This is rather hard upon a man who all his life exerted him-
self, as far as he could, to advance and elevate the position of
journalists. God knows that I never was, and certainly am not
now, in a position to excite the envy of my contemporaries.

Therefore I thank you the more heartily for coming forward in
the unsolicited way you have done.

The discovery of that corrected folio, 1632, is to be made the
bane of the latter part of my life, if my enemies can accomplish it.

I know that you have got on, and are getting on well, and I am
most rejoiced at it. I trust, too, that all about you are prosperous

and happy.

I am, as I have always been,

Yours most sincerely,

J. PAYNE COLLIER.
William Hazlitt, Esq.

What the true history of the Shakespear emen-
dations in the folio of 1632 was and is, and whence
they were derived, I am far from pretending to
know. But Collier, like the majority of our com-
mentators on old English literature, was essentially
a dull man ; and it is incontestable that, while
nearly all the proposed improvements were too-
clever for him to have originated, some of them
were such as only an ear-witness could have handed

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 21

down. My father was always of opinion that, who-
ever inserted the manuscript matter in the Devon-
shire second folio, it was not Collier, and I quoted
to him in support of such a view that splendid
correction of the passage where Mrs. Quickly
narrates the end of Falstaff.

I am bound to confess that whenever I applied
to Collier for information on literary facts within
his presumed knowledge, I always found him anxious
to parry inquiry. He usually sent evasive answers
to my not unreasonable call for fuller particulars
about a book or a statement, for which he was
perhaps the sole authority.

In the second (1865), also to my father, the
writer, after entering into some matters of unim-
portant detail, goes on to refer to his literary amuse-
ments, his personal affairs, and his mode of life.

This trifling diverts my old age (I am nearly 77), and keeps me
from being devoured by ennui and selfishness. Men who have no
employment at my time of life think a great deal too much about
themselves.

You are prosperous, and your family, I am rejoiced to hear,
sufficiently so. They say that it is bad for a family to be too well
provided for. I should like to try the experiment, as I told the
late Duke of Devonshire, when he asserted that I was richer and
happier than he.

Both my sons and one of my daughters are married, and the
two first have large families.

What a time it is since we met or rather parted at Charing

22 THIRD GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

Cross, when you told me that you hoped to obtain some office.
You have a good one, and deserve it. I have none, and deserve
none. I might have been a Police Magistrate or a Colonial
Judge, but I refused the first, and my late wife would not let me
take the last. She would rather have lived upon ^300 a year
here, than upon ,3,000 a year in Ceylon or the West Indies.
Now 3 or 400 a year is the extent of my income ; but I live by
the riverside in a charming part of the country, and rny daughter
keeps my house never sparingly, but always economically.

I declare that I am writing almost as badly as you or your son
Carew. The fact is that my old hand is rheumatic.

Good-bye. Health and happiness to you and yours !

The concluding specimen to myself was a reply
to an application for assistance in the preparation
of the Memoirs, and is dated June 2, 1867. The
interesting portion, after all, is that which immediately
concerns Hazlitt :

'The only remembrance I have of your Grandfather is the
note-book I mentioned to you, and which he gave me. You will
not be surprised, therefore, at my unwillingness to part with it.
If I had any other relic, it should be yours. He was not in the
habit of writing to me, and we, of course, often met at the
M\prning\ C\]ironicle\ Office and at the Fives Court, where I was
fond of seeing him play. He was famous for what was called
Volley.'

The manuscript volume here mentioned has been
already described by me in the Memoirs as the one
which was among Collier's books, and as containing
the transcript of Coleridge's ChristabcL

CHAPTER VI.

The Club founded by Jerrold and his friends Its distinguished
members and guests Thackeray The melodists and other
entertainers Charles Dickens the younger, my father, Holl,
and Dillon Croker Hazlitt's Wiltshire songs 'The Wilt-
shire Convict's Farewell* A general favourite Anecdotes
of Jerrold Sir B. W. Richardson Dr. Diamond Farther
glimpses of John Hazlitt the painter Sundays at Twicken-
ham House Account of the house, its contents and its
visitors Sir Frederick Pollock Hepworth Dixon Dr.
Doran The Fasti of Our Club c Shakespear at Our
Club,' 1860 Evans's.

BETWEEN forty and fifty years ago Douglas Jerrold
and a few friends established a social club called
the Hooks and Eyes. I believe that the number
was very limited at first, but it was at all events
made up to forty, when the name was changed to
the Forty Thieves. The final nomenclature, Our
Club, was adopted in or prior to 1860. My father
was an original member, either a Hook or an Eye.
He became in due course one of the Forty, and he
continued with the set when it was rebaptized for
the third time. One by one all have passed away.

24 THIRD GENERATION

During a long series of seasons a good evening
might be fairly counted upon. Jerrold himself, his
son Blanchard Jerrold, Shirley Brooks, the younger
Dickens, Dillon Croker, Henry Holl, Dr. Diamond,
Dr. Richardson, F. W. Cosens, Sir George Jessel,
Charles Knight, Hep worth Dixon, Professor Masson,
Joseph Durham and Richard Woolner the sculptors,
Robert Keeley, Dr. Doran, my father, and others
all these I have seen round the dinner - table
together or in succession, and besides the roll of
members there were the guests, as each fellow
had the privilege of introducing one or more
friends.

I remember that Horace Mayhew once brought
Thackeray. They came after dinner, and I recollect
Thackeray's commanding figure as he entered the
door. It was the only time I ever saw him. He
paused on the threshold in a hesitating manner,
as if uncertain of his reception, and his introducer
had almost to push him forward.

The younger Dickens, my father, Holl, and
Croker were the mainstay of the institution in one
respect, for each of them, if present, was expected
to favour the company with a song or recitation.
Dickens generally sang 'Tom Bowling.' Holl and
Croker furnished recollections of the old and living

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 25

actors. Hazlitt contributed one of his West-Country
songs. There was a fair gathering, as a rule, of
men of mark and likelihood, and some good talk
passed.

Chappell, in his Popular Music of the Olden Time,
has printed one of Hazlitt's Wiltshire ditties, which
I have so often heard my father give with all the
gusto and raciness of the local twang, to the infinite
enjoyment of the audience, and here is the remain-
ing production from a copy in Mr. Registrar's
autograph :

THE WILTSHIRE CONVICT'S FAREWELL.

Come, all you young fellaws, wherever that you be ;
Come, all you young m'idens, j'in choruus with me \
Tis of ten stout young fellaws as was tried the other d'y ;
And they are bound doon for Woolwich to set s'il for Botany B'y.
With a right fol de riddle, fol de ray.

Then we went from the D'vizes bound doon in iron so strong ;
From DVizes unto Fisherton they march'd us all along ;
As I was passing by I heard the people s'y :
* What a pity such foine fellaws should be gaain' to Botany B'y !'
With a right foli etc.

Then in comes the j'iler about six o'clock ;
Then in comes the j'iler our doors to unlock,
Saying : ' Come, my lads, make ready, for ye must haste aw'y,
For you're boun' doon for Woolwich to set s'il for Botany B'y.'
With a right fol* etc.

26 THIRD GENERATION

Then in comes pretty Sally, with ten guineas in her han',
Saying: 'Take this, my laddies, I've brought ye all I can.'
So fill us up a glass, I will drink my love's adieu ;
'Tis ten thousan' to one I ever more sees you.
With a right fol, etc.

And when we gets to Botany B'y some letters we will write,
Unto our loving sweethearts and pretty girls in white ;
So kind heaven now protect us for ever and a d'y,
And God send every Wiltshire lad safe home fro' Botany B'y !'
With a right fol, etc.

This effusion was a wonderful favourite, and was
invariably encored, a circumstance which made the
singer a less frequent visitor of late years, as a call
for Hazlitt was as much a part of the evening as the
dinner itself. The Lord Chief Baron Pollock, whom
I have already introduced, was greatly delighted
with the performance when he heard it.

My father not only possessed a voice, which with
proper training might have proved a fine one, but
was a highly proficient whistler, and would accom-
pany himself or another to the piano. He carried
what is generally a nuisance to a pleasing accom-
plishment, as those who have heard him might
testify. During the besc years of his life, and
chiefly in Brompton and Chelsea days, he was
much in request at musical soirees. He once
laboured under a not uncommon form of delicate

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 27

embarrassment, in going in morning dress, and
told me that he kept himself intrenched behind
the piano to conceal the incorrectness of his nether
habiliments.

It was an inexorable ordinance of the club that
invited guests should, in response to the toast of
their health, which was equally peremptory, deliver
an oration. But if there was more than a single
stranger, one spoke for the rest, whereas at the
Noviomagian gatherings each individual had to rise
in turn a refinement of cruelty.

Professor Bain, of Aberdeen, told me, when I
once met him out at dinner, two or three anecdotes
of Jerrold which I had not heard before.

Jerrold was dining at some place where a salad
was put on the table. Some one observed that it was
unusually gritty. Jerrold calls the waiter, and says :

* What's this? 1 ' Salad, sir/ ' No,' says Jerrold,

* it's a gravel walk with a good many weeds in it'

He was at a lecture on the races of men, and
specimens of the various types were exhibited.
When the Caucasian type was shown, 'Ah/ he
says, ' that's the type I would go to press with/

This reminded me of the story of the girl in an
omnibus on a very cold day, who observed to a
fellow-passenger that it was fine embracing weather.

28 THIRD GENERATION

In reference to a literary man, who was supposed
to be dead, but who, though of great age, proved to
be still extant, Jerrold said : ' He may be ever green,
but he is never red"

Holl and Croker, of whom the latter was never, I
believe, a member, were excellent mimics. I used
to prefer Holl. His impersonations of some of the
characters of O' Smith, Keeley, Macready, Fechter,
Charles Kean, Buckstone, and Webster were capital.
He was always ready, when he was in fair cue, to
favour us with a specimen at his own house in
camcrd. My old friend, Henry James Byron, was
also a very clever hand at hitting off Buckstone and
other artists of his own day ; but some of those
whom Holl had known were before his time.

One of the standard pleasantries at Our Club was
at the expense of Dr. (now Sir B. W.) Richardson,
an extremely pleasant and popular member, but a
prominent advocate of teetotalism. A noble lord
having bequeathed his fine cellar of wines to
Richardson, the latter found himself in possession
of a white elephant of very unusual dimensions.
Of course, the doctor could not dream of drinking
the wine himself, still less of offering it to his friends.
Nor could he sell it, nor could he present it to a
public institution. What would he do? One

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 29

suggestion was that he should run it down the
sewer, where it would destroy the rats ; but this
was deliberate cruelty to animals, and the doctor
was a kind-hearted man. The liquor was ultimately
wasted, I believe.

Dr. Diamond, of Our Club, and Dr. Powell, were
the two earliest amateur photographers in England.
The latter dined with my father at Brompton when
he was last in England on a visit from the Mauritius.
He had become acquainted there with the only son
of John Hazlitt the miniature-painter, who, after
settling at Demerara, removed to Mauritius, and
died there. He possessed a few miniatures executed
by his father, but I never heard what became of
them. He had at one time accumulated a tolerable
fortune, and lived to lose it, to make a second, and
lose a great part of that, too, in a commercial paper.
We corresponded together during many years, and
his letters to me contain many interesting particulars
relating to the island. He once forwarded to me
some representations as to political parties there,
with the desire that I should get them printed. I
submitted them (unread, I confess) to an editor,
who returned them with the observation that their
appearance in his columns would have probably
involved the paper In several lawsuits.

30 THIRD GENERATION

The Sundays at Twickenham House, while
Diamond resided there, and so long as the establish-
ment and its excellent host were in their palmier
state, were remarkably enjoyable and instructive.
The circle which collected round the Doctor during
several years included a long catalogue of names
illustrious in letters and art. Some of the same set
which assembled at Our Club and at the Novio-
magians formed also the habitual visitors at Twicken-
ham, where there was a free entree and a hearty
welcome for every recognised comer. Three o'clock
was the dinner- hour.

The house was filled with valuable curiosities of
every description ; but the speciality of Diamond was
old china, about which his knowledge and fund of
anecdote were inexhaustible. The room in which
we all dined resembled a crockery shop : every
available nook and corner was filled ; the cases were
two or three deep, and the drawers of the cabinets,
if opened, disclosed treasures which the owner him-
self had almost forgotten, but of which he soon
recalled every particular the place and date of
purchase, the name and personal history of the
former owner, and the circumstances under which
he had secured this teapot or that jar.

It was not an unfrequent observation on his part

OF A LITERARY FAMILY

that his friend Lord Willoughby d'Eresby, who was
a connoisseur of old china, considered no thorough
judge ought to require to see the potter's mark, but
should be able to pronounce what the piece was
from the texture and the paste.

The Doctor had also a few cdins, a few prints, and
a few books, and latterly he was bitten by the rat-
tailed spoon and Queen Anne plate crazes. I
remember him when he was extraordinarily tenacious
of his acquisitions, and would not have listened to
any proposal to part with his specimens. One day
he shewed me a very fine old Vincennes saucer, to
which I had the cup ; but his piece was badly
broken, and I should not have valued it, yet
he anticipated me by saying that he never let
anything leave his hands.

Toward the end, however, his feeling in ' this
respect underwent a great change, and many of the
beautiful old bits of plate and other rarities mysteri-
ously disappeared ; and the house with its circular
drawing-room, once the residence of Sir John
Hawkins, and the grounds, and our kind-hearted
entertainer, and nearly all who once met under that
hospitable roof, have disappeared, too. There was
an atmosphere enveloping the whole spot, and
seeming to raise it out of the dead level of common-

32 THIRD GENERATION

place every-day life ; and of good fare there was no
stint, nor of good talk.

May I be pardoned for perpetuating so trivial a
trait as the way the good Doctor had, on a Sunday
in spring or in summer, in the garden, of finding a
worm, placing it on the open palm of one hand, and
whistling, when a robin appeared, and, after circum-
spectly reconnoitring for a few moments, alighted on
Diamond's hand, seized its prey, and flew off to a
more convenient place for its meal. Our host used
to relate that it was his practice to patronize the
Maid of Honour shop at Richmond for his cheese-
cakes ; but he had them made at home after detecting
a hair of a maid in one of those acquired by
purchase. A very similar confection was formerly,
and may be yet, made at an old-fashioned dep6t at
Wokingham in Berkshire. The Doctor had an
eccentric lady patient, who once engaged with him
in a theological discussion on the teaching of
St rt Paul the Apostle. He entered a little into the
views and doctrines of the latter on a certain point ;
but his listener interrupted him by observing : * Ah,
yes, I am aware of it ; but that's just where Paul and
I differ/

Diamond unquestionably carried away with him
much curious and unique information about those

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 33

matters which interested him, and it was hard to
say what had not done so at some period or other
of his active and observant life. On china, books,
engravings, birds' eggs, stuffed birds, medals, and
coins, he could discourse largely and learnedly, and
in conversation on any of these topics, he was
peculiarly supplemental. He generally knew all
that you did and a little more. If you mentioned
a man who was tolerably in years in your youth,
and narrated some trait of him, the Doctor would be
very apt to chime in with, 4 Ah, sir, I knew his
father/ and so forth ; and he did so without improper
assumption or any desire to give umbrage.

Diamond wrote little ; I think that he occasionally
contributed to Notes and Queries an excellent mis-
cellany at one time, notwithstanding that Thomas
Wright assured me he never saw anyone read it
except an old woman once in an omnibus. The
Doctor's friends often pressed him to prepare a
"descriptive catalogue of his ghina, with all the
valuable and attractive minutite, of which he was
the sole repository. But he never did.

My late brother was his executor ; and I conclude
that it was only in a Pickwickian sense that he once
said of him, that he was the most trustworthy man
he knew, for if he engaged to do anything, you

VOL. II. 22

34 THIRD GENERATION

might depend upon it that he would not. My
brother had no literary taste, but was a reader, and
possessed some sense of humour. He repeated to
me what an omnibus-driver had once said to him, as
he sat by him on the box : ' Ave 'eared say, sir, as
there's countries where elephants burrows in the
ground.'

Mr. Hepworth Dixon, at one time editor of the
Athenaeum^ was, I have understood, the son of a
Lancashire mill-hand. He was a clever but super-
ficial person, and had no breeding. Jerrold used
to call him ' Ha'porth Dixon.' I had a conversa-
tion with Dixon at the Athen&um office about the
relative merits of two of our old poets, Herbert
and Crashaw, and he said to me, paring his nails,
when I had expressed my preference for Crashaw :
' Well, that's a matter of opinion/ I do not imagine
he knew anything about either ; and when Henry
Holl was once speaking at Our Club about our old
writers, Dixon broke in with some critical remarks,
and concluded with, * Just the sort of thing, you
know, that Jack Webster would have said/ without
the faintest idea of Webster or his style of writing.
He never did much after leaving the At/ienamm.
Dilke took him rather unexpectedly at his word
when they differed on some principle, and he told

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 35

* Charlie ' that he was ready to go if he could get
another man to suit him better, which 'Charlie'
did.

As an editor, Dixon was, on the whole, com-
paratively fair and moderate in the tone which he
maintained, and which he prescribed to his staff of
reviewers. He enjoined them, I understand, not
only to be just, but to be generous, where a book
possessed a reasonable share of merit and evidences
of genuine work.

It was a trait perfectly in keeping with Dixon's
utter want of sensibility and training, that one
Sunday, at Diamond's, he took up his son, and
threw him into the centre of a splendid box hedge
on which the doctor especially prided himself a
hedge, so far as I recollect, some four feet across.
It stood alas! it stands no longer close by a
fence formed of old Culloden sword-blades.

Dixon utilized his vacations by visiting some
locality likely to yield marketable stuff for a book
against the next winter season. One year he went
to Cyprus, and after a six weeks' stay appeared
in due course as the historian of that island and
ancient seat of arts and government. These literary
manufactures can only be viewed in the same light
as the artist's ' pot-boiler,' but in this particular case

5 6 THIRD GENERATION

the question is whether the writer was capable of
anything better and more durable.

The author of Spiritual Wives was gifted with
the art of quick study. He came, saw, and con-
quered. The history of an ancient empire or the
picture of a latter-day heresy, it mattered little. He
had the knack of disguising his lack of knowledge and
information under a specious and flippant style em-
phatically Dixonian, and his object was achieved. H is
work meant money, even if at present it means naught.

It was amusing to listen to him as he delivered
a speech on some subject, such as Shakespear,
with which his conversance was of the most de-
plorably limited and inaccurate nature ; and it was
this facility for uttering a string of commonplaces
in the absence of a competent knowledge of the
topic under treatment which first led me to speculate
on the title of Parliamentary and other orators to
rank ipso facto as possessors of first-class gifts, or,
in other words, whether fluency of speech is not,
except in a few cases, the actual outcome of a
deficiency of critical acquaintance with a subject.

The younger Dickens sang well, and Lawrence
had his song, too, with the peculiarity of ignoring
a certain letter of the alphabet. The last visit I
paid with my father to the Club, there were only

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 37

nine present Cordy jeaffreson, he and I, and six
others (all knights).

Dr. Doran came to dine at my father's at Brompton
about 1857. I was a very young man then, and
heard Doran, in speaking of books, declare to my
father that he never gave more than fourpence
for any. I had at that time a very imperfect
acquaintance with bibliography, but I remember
that I formed a very unfavourable estimate of
Doran's library. I do not think that it was ever
publicly sold.

The last letter which Doran ever wrote was
addressed to my father, and is inserted by Mr.
Cordy Jeaffreson in the biographical notice which
he wrote at the time of our common friend's death.
Doran had been private physician at one period
of his life to the Earl of Harewood. I once met
him and Dixon at a private dinner given by
F. W. Cosens, and I was infinitely disgusted by the
coarseness of both in their conversation. I do not
think that our kind host was either pleased or
flattered by the gross vulgarity of the two distin-
guished litterateurs.

The Club passed some of its happiest and most
prosperous times under the Piazza in Covent Garden,
while it occupied a room at Clun's Hotel, next door

38 THIRD GENERATION

to Evans's. It has since migrated from place to
place, and at each removal has, I fear, left some
of its old prestige behind. It bids fair to shrink
into a caput mortuum. My father, ' the last of the
Romans/ at length gave up attending ; and, as
Lamb said of himself in reference to the London
Magazine in its declining days, Cordy Jeaffreson
and Macmillan (not the publisher) linger among
the rafters of the sinking ship like the last rats.

Our Club long kept up its Shakespear night,
when it became from season to season increasingly
difficult to moot any fresh point, and to lend an
original air to the gathering, of which the guests
form a majority. There is also the annual meeting.
Some years ago it was held at Richmond. My
father invited me to join him, and Woolner was
there. The^chief thing which I recollect is that, as
we were coming away to the train, Woolner's laugh
could be heard from one end of the hill to the other.

What may- be called the Fasti of the club were
composed by Holl and Brooks at different times.
The production of the former bears no note of date,
and describes a representative evening in the*
earlier and brighter epoch, but after the loss of
Jerrold. It is entitled, The Retaliation Imitated.

Shirley Brooks prepared his effusion, the only

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 39

other relic of the kind, for a special occasion the
Shakespear anniversary. It proceeds on the plan
of making each of the company, members or guests,
deliver a sentiment more or less appropriate to the
circumstances or characteristic of the supposed
speaker. It is sufficiently clever and interesting
to warrant its insertion here, more particularly as
it is probably almost unknown even to the present
generation :

SHAKESPEAR AT OUR CLUB.
April 21, 1860.

R. FENTON.

Why, how now, what does Master Fenton here? Truly an
honest gentleman.

O. DELEPIERRE.

He has done nobly, and cannot go without any honest man's
voice ; therefore let him be Consul, and the Gods give him joy.

G. DUPLEX.
How he solicits Heaven

Himself best knows. But strangely visited people,
The mere despair of surgery, he cures.

P. CUNNINGHAM.

If you want drier logs,

Call Peter, he will tell you where they lie.

F. LAWRENCE.

Now, afore God, this reverend holy Lawrence^
All our whole city is much bound to him.

40 THIRD GENERATION

J. H. PARRY.
This is the Serjeant.

I charge you by the law,
Whereof you are a well-deserving pillar,
Proceed to [the bench of] Judgment.

G. JESSEL.

And you, his yoke fellow of Equity,
Bench by his side.

H. MAYHEW.

The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman,
Modo he's called, and Mahu.

C DICKENS, JUNR.

Your mind is tossing on the ocean. They are not China dishes,
but very good dishes.

G. CHESTERTON.
Not your Gaoler, then,
But your kind host.

W. HAZLITT.
Or Zummerset or York, all's one to him.

W. H. COOKE.

Yea, marry, William Cook, bid him come hither. Any pretty
little tiny kickshaws tell William Cook.

J. C. O'DowD.

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great Globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve.

ALLEN.

He sings several tunes, faster than you'll tell money. He hath
songs for man or woman, and the prettiest love songs for maids,
without mischief, which is strange.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 41

H. DIXON.

He gives you all the duties of a man,
Trims up your praises with a princely tongue,
Speaks your deservings like a chronicle,
And chides your truant youth with such a grace.

H. HOLL.

He shall taste of my bottle. If he have never tasted wine before,
it will go near to remove his fit. ...

He's a Brave God, and bears Celestial Liquor.

F. JOYCE.

He is something stern,
But, if he vow a friendship, he'll perform it.

F. SIBSON.

He is a gentleman. One that indeed
Physics the subject.

W. A, MATTHEWS.
My man's as true as steel.

W. B. JERROLD.

Thou bearest thy father's face.

Thy father's moral part
Mayst thou inherit too.

D. MASSON.

Sir, we bless God for you. Your reasons at dinner (and else
where) have been sharp and sententious, pleasant without scurrility,
witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned
without opinion, and strange without heresy. . . . Well said,

Davy.

J. HANNAV.

He did ever fence the right,
Nor buckle falsehood with & pedigree.

42 THIRD GENERATION

J. B. TOMALIN.

Now, what news on the Rialto ?
What news among the Merchants ?

F. M. EVANS.

In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read, and profited,
And wondrous affable, and bountiful.

C. KNIGHT.

(Shakespear log.} He is a Knight, and will not any way dis-
honour me.

T. REEKS.
Shall we be thus afflicted in his wreaks ?

J. W. DAVISON.
He hath the musician's melancholy, which is fantastical.

R. ORRIDGE.

Sing, sir ! You shall not bob us out of our melody. He gave
you such a masterly Report for art and exercise in your Defence.

J. DORAN.

After my death I wish no other herald,
No other speaker of my living actions,
Than such a chronicler.

S. BROOKS.
Such Brooks are welcome to me that overflow such liquor.

THK TREASURER.
(F. HAMSTEDE loq.) You owe me No SUBSCRIPTION.

I have entered into these details about Our
Club, because it has constituted since its commence-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 43

ment a feature in the social life of my father nay, in
my own ; and it was the only institution of the kind
with which either of us has ever been connected,
save a concern in Arundel Street, of which my
father* enjoyed an ephemeral membership ; this must
have been the place to which, no liquor fit to touch
being procurable on the premises, Frank Talfourd
said that it was necessary to come drunk. I have,
no doubt, kept unwisely aloof from literary fellow-
ship, and my life has been disadvantageous^
secluded. A lady, when I once, in reply to an in-
quiry, told her that I had never joined any society,
turned round on me, and rather unkindly observed :
' Perhaps you think that you are a society in your-
self. 1

I did not even join the Merchant Taylors' Old
Boys Club, though I have been repeatedly honoured
by an invitation to do so. I once attended a dinner
as a guest, and all the faces were strange. There
was no one there, save perhaps the Vicar of Upper
Hackney, who had been with me in the forties in
Suffolk Lane. I left the scene early, never to
revisit it.

* My father died at Addlestone in Surrey, February 21, 1893,
in his eighty-second year. His grandfather, the Rev. W. H., was
living there in 1814. See i., 127.

44 THIRD GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

A famous resort close by Clun's was Evans's.

Evans, who started the Cider Cellars in Maiden

Lane about 1831, was originally a singer, and had

an engagement at one of the theatres at what was

then accounted a heavy salary. But, losing his

voice, he arranged to retire with a sum, and started

the establishment so well identified with his name.

The speciality in Maiden Lane was kidneys and

stout ; there was no wine till just before the removal

to the Piazza in Covent Garden ; and no women

were admitted. There was music and singing, and

for some time a man named Sloman was the

pianist

THE FOURTH GENERATION
PART I.

CHAPTER I.

Childhood of the writer Merchant Taylors' School The old-
fashioned regime What I learned there, and did not learn
Anecdotes of the place and the masters Remarks on
University education The treatment of the classical writers
Dr. Bellamy The Rev. John Bathurst Deane The
Merchant Taylors' Company The War Office in 1854
Sir Robert Hamilton My intimacy with him and his family
Abuses in the service and mismanagement of our military
affairs Recollections of two years' stay in the War Office
My Irish programme Hamilton's tale of second-sight My
Venetian studies Macaulay and Ruskin The librarian at
St. Mark's A little incident on the Piazzetta My maiden
literary publication Murray's proposed Dictionary of National
Biography My Early Popular Poetry.

THE narrative, as we proceed, has necessarily and
unavoidably become rather involved and irregular
by reason of the extent to which the later portions
overlap each other, and the writer plays the double
part of a showman and an actor in his own person.
I have done my best to obviate the admitted incon-
venience and impropriety, so far as the circumstances
and my ability would permit.

Two of the earliest reminiscences which I have

48 FOURTH GENERATION

are connected with our residence at Alfred Place ;
the death of my younger brother Richard in a fit
in 1839 he lies, poor little fellow! in Brompton
churchyard ; and the visit of Lord Lansdowne to
my father on horseback to deliver a copy of the
catalogue of his pictures for a projected edition of
Hazlitt's Criticisms on Art.

I also realize the almost opaque deafness of John
Landseer, whom my father, when I was as a great
treat in his company, met at one of the theatres, and
with whom it amounted to an interruption of the
performance to converse. The great painter, Sir
Edwin, inherited, or at least acquired in later life, this
unfortunate characteristic. The elder Landseer had
known Hazlitt himself in the London Magazine
days.

The principal part of my education was received
at Merchant Taylors 7 School, in Suffolk Lane, to
which I was nominated through my father's cousin,
the Rev. William Welwood Stoddart, of St. John's
College, Oxford, in 1842. The course of studies
there at that time was very slightly varied, I appre-
hend, from what it had been a century before. The
only subjects taught were Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
writing, mathematics, and arithmetic. The school
was held in an upper and a lower room, of which

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 49

the latter was reserved for the writing and arithmetic
classes in the afternoon. In the upper apartment
during the mornings, the five forms, with the
Monitors and Prompters, and sixth form, on a sort
of raised platform at the top, followed their studies
or repeated their lessons to four masters. In 1842,
and for some time after, these were Dr. Bellamy,
Mr. Bathurst Deane, Mr. Blunt, and Mr. Russell.
In the afternoons this room was devoted to mathe-
matics. There were about 200 boys altogether ;
but a small minority took the more difficult classics
and mathematics, and a still smaller one Hebrew,
although I understood that Bellamy was a fair
Hebraist. Prayers were read every fnorning before
school by one of the sixth form, who knelt in the
centre of the room just below the Monitors' table,
and held a printed sheet in front of him with the
appointed ritual. It was long my duty to perform
this ceremony.

Before I quitted this institution in 1850, it had
undergone a remarkable development. Vigorous
efforts were made to meet modern demands by
enlarging the programme and extending the utility
of the old foundation. One by one, French, draw-
ing, music, and other sciences, were added to the
meagre educational regime of my own earlier boy-

VOL. II. 2 3

5 o FOURTH GENERATION

hood. I stayed long enough to join the French
class, and one of my most agreeable associations is
the delightful manner of Delille, who presided over
it. What a contrast to the other instructors ! He
was before his time.

I never heard to what influence or agency the
improvement of the school was due, but as it existed
down to 1850 it was little better than a charity
school of a high grade. There was once a year a
strange piece of archaism in the shape of an
Examination or Probation Day, when we had to
put in an appearance at eight o'clock in the morning,
and to have our breakfast on the premises. All
the arrangements were of the meanest and most
barbarous character. Except that the menu was
differentiated by the modern introduction of sausage
rolls, three-cornered-tarts, and Bath buns, the scene
was perchance, in its general costume, not dissimilar
from what it had been in the founder's life-time. Of
course the Merchant Taylors' Company could not
afford to find us our modest repast. For 200
boys it might have involved them in an outlay
of /ro.

It long used to be considered a good joke to lay
hold of every newcomer to the establishment, and
throw him into a large clothes-chest upstairs as an

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 51

introductory ceremony ; it was at any rate a dry
christening ; and if it did no good, it did little harm.
It is curious how a mere accident gave me a peculiar
ascendency over nearly the whole school. While I
was in the fifth form, a schoolfellow (Fat Nelham)
attacked me one day, and I went for him. I was
very strong, and I thrashed him well. My reputa-
tion and prestige were placed on the most solid
foundation from that hour till the day on which I
left I was honoured by the sobriquet of the ' Black
Sheep/ not by reason of any misdemeanour of which
I had to plead guilty, but on account of the awe
which my exploit inspired.

Better books, better masters, more liberal ideas,
have no doubt set Merchant Taylors' on a totally
different footing from the place as I knew it nearly
fifty years ago. I spent eight years of my life within
the walls of the old mansion in Suffolk Lane, and I
came out grounded.

I believe that I possessed a slight knowledge of
figures, of Latin, of Greek, and of French. I had
mastered a few of the problems of Euclid, and
quadratic equations. Writing was an art which I
never acquired either then or since, although many
of the printers of Great Britain, and a very large
number of correspondents all over the world, have

52 FOURTH GENERATION

made the best of a sort of substitute for the English
written character in vogue with me.

I shall never forget the mingled despair and con-
tempt which his futile endeavours to educate me in
this direction inspired in the breast of an eminent
calligrapher, commissioned by my father in after-
years to qualify me for clerical duties. My chief at
the War Office declared that, if he had not had
absolute ocular testimony to the contrary, he should
have thought that I held my pen with my left
foot.

They employed Lemprire, Anthon, and Bos,
among other class-books in my day. The informa-
tion imparted by these works was, according to
present notions, meagre and imperfect enough ; but
they marked an advance on the yet older material.
Lempriere's Classical Dictionary was, in particular,
a highly creditable commencement on modern lines.
The first edition was in 1792, but Hazlitt, as a boy,
met the author at Liverpool two years before, and
tells his father in a letter that he paid him (L.)
great attention.

The Lemprieres are Jersey people, and the
lexicographer's grandson is now living at Roselle.
The late Sir John Millais was a countryman of theirs,
and is made by an interviewer to offer very high

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 53

testimony to their character and breeding. By the
way, the said interviewer misunderstood the Presi-
dent of the Academy where he refers to his know-
ledge of Hazlittl& meant my father. Sir John
was not born till 1829.

In the main, whatever I have acquired may be
regarded not unfairly or very disrespectfully as self-
taught I have in nearly the whole intervening
period occupied my time in reading and writing
books by way of supplementing compulsorily my
shortcomings ; and here I must not be understood
to imply that the deficiency would or could have
been made good by a longer course at the school
and a translation to the University, for on that
topic I hold my own special convictions, which gain
strength as I grow older ; an academical career may
be socially beneficial ; but it warps and narrows the
intellect, and as the colleges of Oxford and Cam-
bridge are constituted, they do not form the best
training for a man who aspires to independent
thought, although I quite see and grant that they
are excellent nurseries for clergymen, schoolmasters,
and mathematicians. I never met with any Mer-
chant Taylor who had attained distinction beyond
that possibly latent in a colonial bishopric or a silk
gown ; and all the University men with whom I

54 FOURTH GENERATION

have associated have struck me as wanting in
originality of ideas.

Even in those isolated instances, where distin-
guished persons have belonged to one of our
ancient seminaries of learning, I am tempted to
ask myself the question, how far greater they
might have been, had they never graduated. There
seems to be an atmosphere about those time-
hallowed spots, to which the blood assimilates, and
which renders the brain proof against external
thought and progress. Time will alone modify
this growth of centuries, and then everyone who
is really great will be, from contact with the master-
minds of antiquity, and from a power of collating
ancient with modern philosophy, all the more
eminent.

The spirit and temper in which the classical
authors, as they are termed, were taught, were
utterly deceptive and unprofitable. Poets and
prose-writers, like Homer, Horace, Herodotus,
Caesar, instead of being introduced to our notice
and rendered intelligible and tangible to us as
writers, of whom the best part still lived, were
made to appear impersonal abstractions. There
was no attempt to bring these masters before us
in their relationship to their own times and to ours.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 55

I was usually considered a rather proficient scholar.
My name repeatedly, almost habitually, stands at
the head of the respective forms in the printed
school-lists, and I preserve five volumes purchased
at the cost of the Gild of Merchant Taylors, and
handed to me as prizes between 1845 and 1850 ;
they are of the usual type and quality.

But I declare that it was not till long after I had
bidden farewell to Suffolk Lane that I acquired any-
thing resembling a correct estimate of the great
authors of antiquity, and learned that they were
men of flesh and blood, actual realities, as much
as Chaucer and Spenser, or as Shakespear and
Milton.

Progress has been made since that day in this
salutary direction. There is Sir Theodore Martin's
charming monograph on Horace, and the present
writer printed long since a paper having a similar
aim on a particular aspect of Homer's Odyssey.

When I entered Merchant Taylors' I was eight
years old, and I continued for some time after, while
I was an occupant of the Petty Form, to wear a
tunic or frock with clocked stockings. I believe that
I was rather proud of a very smart red velvet dress
which my mother had made me ; but Dr. Bellamy
beckoned me up to him one memorable day, and,

5 6 FOURTH GENERATION

made a deep impression on my mind by saying,
though good-humouredly enough, that if my parents
did not find me a pair of trousers, he thought he
should have to try and see what he could do to
make a man of me.

It was a very long journey for a little boy in those
days from Old Brompton to Suffolk Lane. We
were due at nine in the morning. The founders of
the charity had not provided for scholars residing
beyond the precincts of the City. Not merely were
there no trains, but the omnibus service was very
imperfect, and with my parents' humble means cabs
were out of the question. There were small
omnibuses, holding ten inside, plying between
London and Hounslow, Brentford, and Richmond,
and a few others which accommodated twelve. On
the Brompton and Chelsea roads I do not retain in
my memory the first experiments. I walked to and
from Sloane Street, and from or to that point a
Hounslow omnibus conveyed me to my destination ;
my place was reserved. All these vehicles were in
the hands of private proprietors. There were no
fares below sixpence when I began to ride to and
tro. The Richmond hackney carriages had drivers
and conductors in livery, but their terminus was
jn St Paul's Churchyard, and the charge for the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 57

entire distance was a shilling. I jot down these
trivial facts for the sake of comparison.

Deane, who was master of the fourth and fifth
forms in my time, was author of the first work in
English on Serpent-worship and of a biography of
his ancestor, General Deane. He was a rather
irascible and foolish person, addicted to giving
extravagant tasks and personal chastisement, and
to Bath buns, of which the undevoured remainder
often distended his cheek on entering the school-
room after lunch, awakening a titter which, if the
culprit was detected, brought down on him an
order (usually rescinded) to write out the Iliad or
the sEneid. But these vagaries indicate to us a
little in how untrue and unfortunate a light the
classics were viewed by the teachers of a generation
or so back, and made to appear to their pupils.

I once fell under the displeasure of Deane when
he was giving our form some English dictation to
turn into Latin by rendering * the soil of Rhodes '
solum viaruni ; and I also incurred his censure by
making virtuosus the Latin equivalent of ' virtuous.'

Mr. Barlow, who presided over the junior after-
noon classes in arithmetic and writing, was, of
course, baptized Billy Barlow. An unlucky wight
was overheard by him using this irreverent sobriquet,

58 FOURTH GENERATION

and summoned to his desk. Taking him by one ear,
he said to him : ' My name, small boy, is not Mr.
Wil-li-am Barlow, but Mr. Sam-u-el Barlow,' spell-
ing out the words, and giving at each syllable a
lug at the offender's auricular pendant. Barlow was
rather short-sighted. A boy played him a practical
joke one day by spitting on the floor just where the
old fellow used to patrol up and down before the
tables, and poor Barlow stooped down, mistaking the
white object for a shilling.

Of the seminary where I acquired my alphabet I
have given some further particulars in Schools,
School-books, and Schoolmasters, 1888.

I witnessed one morning on Ludgate Hill, as I
passed to school in the omnibus, a not unusual
spectacle in those days. At the turning to the Old
Bailey a man who had been hanged that morning
was still suspended in the air, preparatory to being
cut down. It was not then quite nine o'clock, and
an hour was always allowed to intervene. This was
about 1845.

In the printed account of the Merchant Taylors'
Company there is some difficulty about a piece of
land which was left to the Gild in trust, and I
mentioned to Mr. Nash, the clerk, one day, in much
later life, that I thought I knew where it was.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 59

4 Where? 1 he asked. 'Why, 1 said I, 'your hall
stands upon it.'

I confess that I look back without pleasure at the
two years which I passed during the Crimean cam-
paign in the War Office about 1854, and a few
years after quitting school.

The late Sir Robert Hamilton and I were both
supernumeraries, and both failed to pass the examina-
tion for the permanent staff. All our colleagues,
high and low, temporary or otherwise, were men, as
a rule, of inferior type. I believe that Hamilton
and myself are the only two who succeeded in our
several ways in emerging from that slough, or rising-
above the ordinary dead-level of official routine.

Hamilton, whose family belonged to Shetland,
was always considered a remarkably able accountant
and man of business. He constantly came down to
my father's house at Brompton to dinner c when we
were clerks together, 1 but I lost sight of him when,
by the assiduous support of Sir Charles Trevelyan
(his father's distant connection by marriage), he
succeeded in outstripping me, so far as official status
went.

He was a son of the Rev. Zachary Macaulay
Hamilton, a relative of the historian, and incumbent
of a parish in Shetland not far from Lerwick, where

60 FOURTH GENERATION

part of his income was derived from a tithe of
herring. It was through Macaulay and his sister,
who married Trevelyan, that my fellow-clerk was
enabled to profit by his natural intelligence and
industry.

An extremely intimate friend of Hamilton was
Charles Ogilvy of Lerwick, who is, however, not
otherwise memorable than as the victim of a strange
corruption of his name by a correspondent into
Huckleford. An old acquaintance of my uncle
Reynell, a Mr. Hicks, was transformed in a similar
way into Tir.

The Crimean War thus found Hamilton and
myself a little behind the scenes. I had acted
during a short time before as editor of the evening
edition of the Daily News, where my successor was
the present Sir John Robinson. It was certainly
not a very creditable campaign from beginning to
end, whatever the general reader or critic, looking
back after forty years, may think of it. I was in
two or three departments, and Hamilton visited the
Crimea, as did my own brother ; and we all heard
more than enough of the shameful abuses and
blunders in the commissariat, clothing, medical, and
other services, of the shoddy arms and accoutre-
ments, the brown-paper boots, the useless swords

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 61

and bayonets, and the surgeons sent in one direction,
and their drugs and appliances in another. Then,
when we had everything in order, because the
French could not proceed, we abandoned the busi-
ness, and let Russia restore Sebastopol. What we
did achieve was by pluck and muscle ; our Generals
were deplorable. The part played by His Royal
Highness the late Commander-in-Chief is familiar.

If we had to do the same kind of thing over again,
should we not perpetrate the same blunders and
incur enormous outlay before we were thoroughly
in working order ? We want plenty of time to look
round. If we were as great as a Government as we
are as a people, we should be strong, ancl we might
be proud, indeed. But there is no School of States-
manship, and we are ruled by a succession of gentle-
men-adventurers of ancient family and their pluto-
cratic allies, who spend our money and amerce us in
credit without remorse. See, at the present moment
have we not at the helm the old firm of Derby,
Disraeli, and Cecil reconstructed, with the junior
partner at the head? The new members of the
house are as dear to the latter as holy-water is said to
be to H.M. the Devil ; but, you perceive, Salisbury
is where he is through them ; they hold him up ; and
in his riper life he has grown so that he requires a

62 FOURTH GENERATION

good deal of that. It comes to this, with our make-
shift political system, that our rulers are periodically,
whenever there is any real difficulty or peril, falling
back on the nation, and the ' Humble and Obliged' has
to pay the double bill in honour and cash. Luckily,
our foreign friends know pretty well that, when it
comes to the point, they have to reckon with the
people, and not with the Government.

The only gain I derived from my two years' stay
at the War Office was the information with which
my colleague, Mr. Leslie, furnished me about my
grandfather's second wife, whom he had known as a
girl of about nineteen in her parents' home in Scot-
land before she married Colonel Briclgewater. But,
curiously enough, he had not retained her maiden
name.

I am not, however, without some curious reminis-
cences of my association with that establishment.
One of the most genial and conciliatory personages
with whom I was brought into contact was Gleig,
the Chaplain- General, who was at Waterloo, and
who lived to a patriarchal age (ninety-four, I believe) ;
and one of the most distasteful, the Right Honour-
able Sir Frederic Peel, about whom I committed to
writing an official minute, for which, looking back,
I feel surprised that I was not cashiered, inasmuch

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 63

as I gave the Under-Secretary of State the lie direct.
I remember the late Marquis of Clanricarde coming
to Whitehall Place in the summer season in a pair
of trousers which I took it that his lordship had pur-
chased from a necessitous Ethiopian minstrel ; and I
had a very agreeable chat one day with the Marquis
of Westminster, father of the present Duke, a man
concerning whom all sorts of odd contradictory
stories used to circulate.

Of course, my colleagues were individuals infinitely
various in their ideas and qualifications, and the
majority struck me as having little enough of one
or the other. Many were grossly ignorant ; hardly
one possessed a considerable degree of gentlemanly
culture, save Mr. Wheeler, who published the book
on Herodotus. The reply to a letter from a noble
Duke was addressed by one of these luminaries to
'Messrs. Buckingham and Chandos/ but it was
luckily intercepted.

If I had pursued my official career, I might be at
present a richer and more dignified member of
society, but I should not be writing these Memorials.

When Hamilton was Under-Secretary for Ireland,
I roughly formulated a scheme for the settlement of
that unhappy country, and it may be known to a
few that in 1886, in a pamphlet, which was mainly

64 FOURTH GENERATION

a criticism on Mr. Gladstone's policy at home and
abroad, I pointed out what had struck me as being
the weak points in his management of Irish affairs.

But in my plan I entered a little further into
detail, and set forth what appeared to me at that
time the only method of vindicating- public order,
and protecting the peaceable portion of the com-
munity in that part of the Empire. I scarcely see
ground for hoping that without a stronger element
of militarism any plans for the gradual social and
moral amelioration of the country are likely to
succeed, and I should be one for giving Mr. Balfour,
or anyone else who is willing to accept such a thank-
less commission, even a freer hand than at present
against a factious and selfish minority.

Hamilton told me this curious little story of
second-sight : A party of fishermen started one
day from Lerwick ; the weather was pretty fair,
and their friends were there to see them off.
After their departure, a storm arose, and great
anxiety was felt for the absent boat. The relatives
came down to the shore to make inquiries and to
watch, but nothing was heard of it, till one of the
look-out group (so ran the tale) descried the craft
nearing land, saw it touch the ground, and the
inmates file out, one by one, and proceed to their

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 65

homes in the town. But the boat had really been
wrecked, and all hands lost, and some of the bodies
were subsequently washed ashore.

I see no objection to state that a version of The
Months from the French of Garcin de Tassy,
printed in Chambers^ Journal for December 10,
1853, was, so far as my memory goes, niy first in-
dependent literary effort, and brought me the
apparently extravagant sum of fifty shillings. I
certainly did not look for so much money, but it
was a form of surprise and oppression of which in
later life I have not been troubled by too frequent
experience.

Before Smith and Elder started their Dictionary
of National Biography, John Murray projected a
similar undertaking under the inevitable William
Smith, with Thompson Cooper as sub-editor. The
latter was a capable man. He set me to compile
certain lives, and the manuscript was duly delivered.
After a lapse of time, I wrote to Smith (the late Sir
William), and suggested a settlement He asked
me to wait till the book was printed. I might have
waited till the proverbial Greek Calends. The
work was abandoned. Of course Albemarle Street
paid the score.

F. spoke favourably of my Early Popular Poetry,

VOL. II. 24

66 FOURTH GENERATION

published over thirty years ago in the ' Library of
Old Authors,' and remarked that it was the best
twenty shilling's worth he knew. 'But,' said he,
'of course you did not write all the notes yourself/
He meant to flatter me, perhaps. There are various
ways of doing that. I know full well that the work
cost me a vast amount of labour, and brought me a
very small return.

It is comparatively immaterial at the present
juncture under what circumstances my career shaped
itself after War Office days to what it has been
and is.

My interest in the historical antiquities of Venice
arose, I remember, from reading Smedley's Sketches
from Venetian History, and I flattered myself that
something more worthy of the subject might be the
result of my own labours, more especially when I
was apprised that the large French work by Count
Daru was far from satisfactory. This was in 1853,
when I was a youth of nineteen ; my opportunities
of consulting books were rather limited, and my
father's circumstances rendered it at that time out
of the question to purchase any. I succeeded, how-
ever, in procuring a reading ticket for the British
Museum, and we had a subscription to the London
Library. At a distance of forty-four years from

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 67

that date, when we were residing in Chelsea, I am
still keenly looking out for every fresh point illustra-
tive of that subject ; I have already printed separate
papers from time to time illustrative of Venetian
Architecture, Trade, Coinage, Prison Discipline, and
other points, and some day I shall reproduce the
book in a different form from the edition of 1860,
in four volumes, which was only too indulgently
received. But it was the work of a young man of
five-and-twenty.

While I was planning my history, I wrote a
polite letter to Mr. Ruskin, soliciting his advice
regarding method and authorities, and that philan-
thropist did me the honour to leave my appeal un~
answered. When the first crude edition appeared
in 1858 (I was only twenty- three), my father sent a
copy to Macaulay, who replied in a most kind note,
saying all that he could say that the work did
credit to so young a writer.

I have always thought that in Mr. Ruskin's
literary vein was to be detected a trace of his
physical conditions, which so influentially operated
on his life.

When I was at Venice in 1883, 1 visited the Library
of St. Mark, and asked the custodian whether he
could shew me any interesting manuscripts or

68 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

other archives relating to the old Republic. He
went away, and when he returned he bore in his
hands a copy of my own book on the subject. I
suppose that he thought it the only one which I was
likely to understand.

A friend and myself were one day strolling about
the Piazzetta, and we noticed a couple of women,
who might have stepped out of some cinquecento
canvas, and presently a gondolier (perhaps in league
with them) made signs to us, and called out :
' Comandare, signori ?' He saw that we were not
keen upon his boat, and he added, as an induce-
ment, in another tongue : l Avec mesdames ?'

CHAPTER II.

The Letters of Charles Lamb The two concurrent editions by
Canon Ainger and the writer Observations on the Canon's
treatment of the subject, and attitude toward me Mischief
arising from imperfect and unfaithful texts The Canon's
lost opportunity His want of care, knowledge, and ex-
perience Talfourd and the Letters My other literary
efforts Bibliographical labours Samples of my corre-
spondents.

Two essays of recent years in the direction of pre-
senting the singular and extensive correspondence
of Charles Lamb in a better and more complete
shape appear to have been undertaken about the
same time, independently of each other, by the
present writer and Canon Ainger. Both had before
them the antecedent labours of Talfourd, Fitzgerald,
Babson, Cowden Clarke, Kegan Paul, Procter, and
one or two more, not to mention that I enjoyed the
advantage of having already launched an edition of
the works in 1868 and a monograph on Charles
and Mary Lamb six years later, while Canon Ainger
had in addition an opportunity of consulting and

70 FOURTH GENERATION

using the Hazlitt book, which preceded his own in
order of publication by two years.

The Ainger and Hazlitt collections of the Letters
constitute, as I have said, the two latest attempts
to serve the English-speaking community in this
particular direction. But than the treatment and
temper manifest in the books of the layman and
the Canon nothing can well be imagined more
thoroughly distinct and unsympathetic. The evi-
dent object of the latter has been to draw together
as many specimens as he, in council with a few
trusted advisers, deemed sufficient to convey to the
reader an idea of the subject, and to eliminate with-
out comment all passages calculated to shock the
delicacy of prudish perusers, however characteristic
they might be of the author and the age, and how-
ever important for a full comprehension of the
subject-matter. The writings of Lamb are to be
administered to us in elegant or genteel extracts,
like spoon-meat. On this principle, nothing in time
would be sacred from these meddling Philistines.
All our classics nay, the Bible would have their
turn.

It may be a moot point whether the Church is
entitled to lay a veto on the exercise of private
judgment in religious questions ; but an ecclesiastic

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 71

who devotes his leisure to the belles lettres ought
surely to permit some latitude to his readers in a
purely literary question affecting, comparatively
speaking, a very limited and a very liberal con-
stituency.

The committal by God-fearing publishers of the
letters and other writings of Lamb to the editorial
supervision and censorship of reverend personages
must strike thousands on both sides of the Atlantic
and among English-speaking communities in general
as a grotesque anticlimax. We recall to our
memory somehow the passage in the Elian paper
on the " Old and New Schoolmaster," where Lamb
describes the pedagogue who offered to instruct him
in the science of literary composition. Because the
sensitive imagination of a lawyer or a Churchman
descries indelicacy where none was intended, and at
the time none was perceived, are the writings of an
English classic to be emasculated?

And if English publishers insist on employing
gentlemen of dignified position and squeamish
temper to edit their books, and there arises a
natural reaction against this sort of abuse, the
porcess, instead of being, as now, openly avowed,
will be carried out under the rose, so that by
degrees ordinary readers will scarcely know what

72 FOURTH GENERATION

the older writers committed to paper, but will be
helped to just as much as is considered good and
safe for them to receive. This is the clerical
element under new colours.

The Master of the Temple is entitled to the
honour of having given for the first time much
valuable matter, and in numerous instances of
having restored missing or corrupt passages; but
his undertaking is far from satisfactory, nor could
it well be expected to be otherwise. It was due
to the co-operation of others, who were more
familiar with the ground than himself, that the
Canon's labours proved even so fruitful as they
actually are, for he was a comparatively new
worker in the field.

Nevertheless, the opportunity was before him,
with the prestige and reputation which his pro-
fessional rank conferred, of rendering a signal
service to the Lambs and to us by bringing within
reach of everyone such a body and sequence
of epistolary matter as it had never fallen to the
lot of any preceding editor to accumulate. Yet
he did nothing of the sort, but laid before the
public professedly not as an exhaustive assemblage
of letters, but as one embracing everything of
importance and interest (in his opinion) an arbitrary

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 73

selection arbitrary in two ways : in the rejection
of entire documents, and in the castration without
reason of many of those actually printed ; and I
maintain that an irreparable wrong has been done
to literature by this mauvaise honte and this counter-
feit gentility.

The Works of Lamb, if w r e take out of the account
Mrs. Leicester s School and the rest of that little
group, can never be widely popular reading. By
the younger student they will, as time goes on,
be less and less appreciated, with the exception
of a few of the lighter articles in Elia ; and now
that all personal motives for suppression have ceased
to operate, what useful end is attained by the
continuance of Bowdler in office ?

Canon Ainger was, in 1887, as I have said, a
rather new hand at this sort of work, and was
indebted to friends all round for help and guidance,
not merely in the editorship of the Letters, but
in that of the Essays. I feel bound in self-defence
to state that he consulted me, among many others,
on questions of authorship, and in particular he
asked whether two papers in the London Magazine
by Procter and Allan Cunningham were by Lamb
a circumstance which I should not have mentioned,
had not the Canon, after adopting so much of my

74 FOURTH GENERATION

plan and text, improved the occasion by a dis-
ingenuous and improper disparagement of my enter-
prize. There comes into one's head a passage in
a great dramatist about a man's purse and his good
name.

As for the Talfourd text of his friend's epistolary
writings, one can never tell whether one is reading
Lamb or his executor. Even in 1848, however,
Talfourd was hampered by the survival of many
who might be naturally supposed to take umbrage
at certain allusions in the correspondence, and he
held it to be necessary, as perhaps it was, to refuse
admittance into his select garland of much which
there is no longer any adequate justification for
keeping back. The judge was to Lamb what
Southey might have been to his own offspring
if he had yielded to the temporary clamour, and
brought into the world the k Family' Doctor.

Canon Ainger was quite differently situated in
1808. His hands were free.

. The Canon's volumes constitute a disappointing
un-Elia-like medley of texts good, bad, and in-
different and of letters often deficient of beginning,
middle, or end. Instead of being, as they might
have been, and as we were entitled to expect
that they would have been, a marked step in

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 75

advance of the 1886 book, they are actually re-
trogressive and reactionary, a backsliding Tal-
fourdward.

Incidit in Ainger, cupiens vitare Talfourdum?

The worst feature about the Canon's book, next
to his insufficient recognition of previous labours,
is his exasperating revelation in his prefatory
remarks, that there were, and are, certain letters
to Manning, Procter, and so forth, which he has
not given. He tantalizes us with extracts which
only render us desirous of the whole, nor does
he plead any valid reason for the exclusion. Again,
it is surely bad enough to find that some of the
letters were not received or admitted till it became
necessary to throw them into the notes at the
end. But, with portions of the correspondence
under his eyes by the favour of the owners, to
help us, and that out of due chronological order,
only to extracts, is heinous.

It has not been without the deepest regret that
I have offered the comment which precedes on
the book of the Master of the Temple a gentleman
of whose learning and amiability one hears equally
good accounts.

Of my own I have only a few more words to

76 FOURTH GENERATION

say. Although I was indefatigable in hunting on
the last occasion for unpublished letters of Lamb,
as well as for the means of collating those already
in type with the original manuscripts, I was by
no means so successful as. I could have desired
in either of these respects. Not merely the ap-
pearance at intervals of letters unknown to Talfourd
in the publications of others, but my own systematic
appropriation of every autograph scrap which came
into the market or into the hands of friends, has
gradually, however, produced a result which, still
imperfect as I know it to be, even those (including
myself) who were aware that a considerable un-
printed residue was in existence, could scarcely
have hoped to realize.

My Elian Recoveries, rather than Discoveries,
are divisible into four epochs or stages : 1868, when
I added very notably to the correspondence in
Moxon and Co.'s edition; 1874, when I brought
out my Mary and Charles Lamb, on which the
late Mrs. Gilchrist based much of her volume ;
1886, when I completed Bell and Sons' edition,
already specified ; and. 1896, when I have just
recently gathered into a small book the biographical
and epistolary gleanings of the last decade, including,
sixty- four new or uncollected notes and letters.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 77

The aggregate effect has been, and is, to cast
a vast amount of new and unexpected light on
the personal and literary history of the brother
and sister, and to widen very importantly and
interestingly their already fairly large circle of
friends and admirers.

My other literary publications extend over an
exceptionally large area from the self-educational
motive, which has partly underlain them through-
out ; they embrace Early and Modern History and
Biography, Poetry and the Drama, and other depart-
ments of the belles lettres. But they are before the
section of the reading community which cares for
such topics as I have happened to treat, and I shall
say no more about that point. My bibliographical
researches, stretching over thirty-six years (1860 to
1896), have, I hope, been of value to some, as I
am sure that they have been a source of pleasure to
myself.

This is the only civilized country in the world in
which an undertaking of national magnitude would
have been permitted to devolve on an individual of
slender means, and where fre would have found him-
self reduced to the necessity of printing his Collec-
tions at a pecuniary sacrifice. I have at last six
volumes in type, and I add to my manuscript

78 FOURTH GENERATION

accumulations day by day ; it is my ambition to
consolidate the whole in one alphabet, and to enable
Great Britain to point to such a work of reference
and authority as no other European literature can
boast of possessing. This is a part of my habitual
employment, yet only a part a small one.

An acquaintance flattered me by saying that he
thought I was the most indolent person whom he
had ever known, and my brother would declare that
he never saw me doing any work. Only to think,
what a plague I should have been to society had I
been even moderately industrious 4 ! I once discon-
certed O. by observing to him mischievously that
I had laid myself across the age. ' Laid yo^lrself
across the age ?' he repeated after me with his eyes
fully expanded. He did not quite perceive my
drift. What I meant was that I had produced
certain books which would in all probability perforce
remain works of reference and keep my name before
a portion, at least, of the public during, if not after,
my life. O. did not pursue the subject, nor did I
open my mind to him ; but he left me, considerably
to my amusement, with the impression that I was a
deuced conceited fellow.

From my personal point of view, gentlemen,
during the last thirty and odd years, seem to have

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 79

gathered together, regardless of time and cost, all
the most curious and rare books of former periods
in order to send them, when the result in each case
justified them in giving me so much trouble, to the
auction-rooms for my use. It is so infinitely more
comfortable, you perceive, to work in this sort of
piecemeal fashion a library or so at a time and
the process can always be going on. Other parties
do their share, and I mine. They beat the bush,
and I catch the bird.

There still remain a few collections which I have
not yet had the means of examining, particularly
those at Ham House, and in the possession of the
representative of Mr. Cunliffe of the Albany. The
former library, when I applied for leave to take a
note of a certain volume, was declared to be * in a
state of chaos 5 rather a good hearing for an
opportunist !

It is, I venture to conclude, superfluous to mention
that I could readily fill more than a single volume
with details of my literary correspondence and biblio-
graphical experiences. Probably no one has an
adequate idea of the extraordinary variety of the
written demands or representations which have
been addressed to me since I began to assume the
form of a distinct individuality on certain branches

80 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILV

of knowledge and inquiry. My special bent might
lead some to augur that my views were almost
exclusively sought on matters connected with old
books ; but such is by no means the case.

I have in my mind's eye about a ream of paper
covered with extracts from Burns by a clerk in the
service of the Great Western Railway, soliciting my
opinion, and a long letter from an operative at
Nevvcastle-on-Tyne, wishing to know if I deemed it
expedient for him to emigrate with his family.
Some of those who honoured me with these and
other questions were occasional in their appeals ;
others, till I had in self-defence to expostulate,
interviewed me through the post two or three times
a week. Now and then my help was recognised ;
more frequently it was not.

But the worst luck was, where one had furnished
the most important material to a Reverend Doctor
for his edition of an early poet, and he disparaged
its value in acknowledging its arrival, was absolutely
silent as to the source whence he derived the manu-
scripts, and cited them throughout as the basis and
backbone of his volumes. He was not merely a
Doctor, but a Reverend one. Think of that, Master
Brook!

CHAPTER III.

The western suburbs of London Their aspect half a century since
The made ground in Knightsbridge, Battersea, Westminster,
and elsewhere Delahaye Street and the chief pastrycook of
Charles IL Long Ditch Gradual formation of highways
and growth of buildings The ancient waterways in Knights-
bridge and Old Brompton Carriers' carts, waggons, and
coaches Some account of the system and its incidence
Suggestion as to Shakespear The primitive omnibus That
which ran to Edmonton in Charles Lamb's time Loneliness
and insecurity of the suburban roads Anecdote of Hazlitt
Precautions against highwaymen and footpads Notting or
Nutting Hill Waggon houses at Knightsbridge, and on the
Oxford and Uxbridge Roads Changes on the northern side
of the Metropolis The scattered markets Their value
That at Knightsbridge Snipe in Tuthill Fields and at Mill-
bank Partridges, snipe, and rabbits on Barnes Common
The turnpikes Those at Hyde Park Corner and Tyburn, etc.
The Farmer of the Gates.

I NOW propose to devote some space to a description
of the suburban districts in which we as a family,
,and I as the founder of an independent home in the
usual course of events, resided and moved between
1838 and the present time, taking occasion to inter-
sperse the topographical sketch with particulars of
VOL. ii. 25

82 FOURTH GENERATION

such friends and acquaintances as we were fortunate
enough to acquire within this radius, and especially
in Old Brompton from time to time, and of others
of whom our knowledge was more indirect, yet
sufficiently considerable to justify a passing mention.

The westward route from Sloane Street as at
one time, indeed, from Hyde Park Corner lay fifty
years since between garden-houses, only broken
occasionally by stretches of dead wall appertaining
to the Park or some ancient mansion, by lines of
fencing where a nursery abutted on the road, or by
the boundary hedge of a market-garden. The
undulating and uneven surface betrayed the absence
of a Highway Board for the parish ; and the varia-
tions in the elevation and width of the footpaths,
were traceable to changes in the character of the
buildings adjoining.

If there were such a thing* as a plan of Old
Brompton and the environs as they appeared many
hundreds of years ago, it would present to our view
an open and probably uncultivated tract, abounding-
in wood and morass, and intersected by streams,
flowing from the northern heights of Hampstead,
Highgate, and Hollo way. Within living memory
a few of these water-courses still existed, while others,
had dwindled into ditches or, as in the case of the-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 83

Efra, which flowed into the Thames at Vauxhall,
and was navigable by small craft up to Brixton or
further, had been converted into an underground
sewer, except where a portion may be yet seen
dammed up at the Lawn. Queen Elizabeth is
said to have ascended the Efra in her barge,
possibly on a visit to one of her court at Streatham
or Brixton.

There are probably many who have not taken
into account the vast changes produced in the course
of ages by the creation or improvement of thorough-
fares. Modern Paris is said to be eight feet higher
than it was in the days of Philip Augustus. Modern
London stands twenty feet above the Roman city.
The bulk of the superficial area of all great centres
of population and building is made giwtnd, which, as
immense bodies of soil or muck are frequently
transported from a distance to supply a vacuum
where the gravel or sand has been removed, as
well 'as for the purpose of raising the level, is apt to
do violence to geological harmony.

Thus, in the decline of a district from its early
speciality of aspect, and its adaptation to a general
standard suitable to the requirements of the builder,
we find a variety of contributing factors. Some of the
details are bound to vary according to the level ; but

84 FOURTH GENERATION

the reforming hand of the enterprising owner or
speculator is equal to all emergencies. In lowlands
the causeway and the shoot play a leading part.
They did so in Battersea, where they are even now
emptying the mud-carts day by day, and in Pimlico,
where, between Knightsbridge and the river, lay a
desolate waste, dotted with ponds, the wreckage of
Kbury Farm and the contiguous fields. I used
to think that Battersea Fields, with the Red House
and other amenities, were not all that could be
desired ; yet I would joyfully vote for their restora-
tion instead of the actual scene which they present,
with their honeycomb of railway-line and doleful
blocks of poverty-stricken houses.

The hedge, the park-pale, or the buttress wall,
gives way to the railing before a terrace or a row of
detached or semi-detached houses, and these are
subsequently degraded into places of business, of
which the front-gardens make a part. So it has
been in Brompton on the West, and in Whitechapel
on the East exactly the same law and same process.

In parts of Westminster, built on the ancient
Thorny Island, they have come, in laying founda-
tions, on submerged and buried willows, formerly
flourishing on the banks of the water-courses, which
branched from the Thames inland, and of which the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 85

sole modern vestige is the Long Water in St. James's
Park. One of these channels passed through the
existing Delahaye Street, a thoroughfare named
after Pierre de la Haye, Chief Confectioner to
Charles II., who died in 1684, and is buried at
Mickleham. He had two houses here, of which
one went to the St. Aubyns with his coheiress ; the
other belongs to a personal friend of the writer, and
it was in rebuilding the premises about fifty years
since that the original nature of the soil, and the
strangely altered conditions of the scene, were
brought to light.

The site of the southern extremity of Delahaye
Street, where Royal Charles's head - pastrycook
lived, was once designated Long Ditch, the original
stream having degenerated in the usual manner*
But the levels hereabout must have suffered a
remarkable change, and nearly the whole of the
ground, as it now stands, is doubtless artificial. It
was two centuries ago several feet lower in a line
with the Stuart willow-beds.

Then, again, in the City proper, look at the
Wallbrook, which once flowed through the moor,
now only known by tradition, but originally stretch-
ing at least as far as the site of the Bank of England.
On removing an old house in Coleman Street in

86 FOURTH GENERATION

1 896, the peaty bottom was reached, with its Roman
remains.

The brook degenerates into a ditch, the latter into
a sewer, as civilization advances or as the builder
spreads his ravages. The old maps do not assist us
much in tracing the waterways of this particular
tract. There were at least two, of which one, the
most westerly, flowed through Brompton Vale
across the fields and the Fulham Road, before it
was constructed as a highway, and so through
Chelsea to the Thames. A second traversed Hyde
Park and Knightsbridge, as I have elsewhere noted.

Of the rivulet which crossed the Western Road at
Knightsbridge, mention occurs in the literature of the
Tudor era, and my uncle Reynell remembers it
before it was transformed into a covered drain.
Some of the portion which flowed through Hyde
Park has been filled up within my time.

The environs of London on all sides were formerly
rich in roadside inns, of which the custom was
derived in principal measure from the waggoners,
carriers, and stage-coaches which plied between
the Metropolis and the provinces. The carriers
and coaches had regular days for going and return-
ing to London, Westminster, and Southwark, and
small penny and twopenny handbooks were published

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 87

from time to time to enable travellers, or persons
desirous of transmitting parcels and messages, to
keep themselves informed of the times of arrival and
departure on the various routes.

It once took my own family a week to reach
Wales or Cornwall.

Anterior to omnibuses and railways, the transport
service was, in fact, performed by coaches, waggons,
and carts ; the two latter were employed not only
by the lower, but by the middle class, and such a
man as Shakespear, when even the coach was un-
known, must have journeyed to and from Stratford
in a waggoner's or carrier's conveyance. The
supply of fish to inland towns within a measurable
time was by cart or van from the nearest port
The local dealer kept a vehicle constantly on the
road, and had to arrange for relays of horses.

Folks whose traditions happen to be associated
with the West End may not have heard, as a rule,
of any halting-stages or starting-points less central
than the White Horse Cellar (whence my grand-
father set out for Winterslow Hut, and on a special
occasion on his way to see the Fight), or the houses
in Coventry Street and Holborn, where the Old
Bell yet survives. But about Bishopsgate and in
the Borough this feature in everyday life,, prior to

88 FOURTH GENERATION

railways and other modern appliances, was seen in
its fullest vigour and picturesqueness, and the atten-
dant costliness and loss of time would under present
mercantile and social conditions be out of the ques-
tion. A late City Chamberlain (Scott), who died at
eighty-nine, and had known personally sixty Lord
Mayors, paid half a crown, when he became rich
enough to afford it, for his fare part of the journey
from Hampstead to the City, in what he described
as ' a blue-bellied ' coach.

Piccadilly, Westminster, Holborn, Bishopsgate,
Islington, and the Borough, we see, were the points
of departure and arrival for the mails, and a little
later on came the long-distance omnibus, starting
from some of these centres. Judging from the
number of coaches (about sixteen) which left Picca-
dilly and the Angel at Islington daily, there must
have been a large complement altogether; and
there were also the mail-carts and post-chaises, the
latter with the boy - outrider. This illustrates
Dunton's periodical, 1698 to 1700, entitled The Post-
boy robbed of his Mail. One prime feature in the
coach was the guard, with his blunderbuss and
pistols, which were so carefully wrapped up against
the weather that a highwayman might have scuttled
the conveyance before they could be disengaged.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 89

The Piccadilly coaches chiefly took the Great
Western Road on their way to Oxford, Worcester,
Salisbury, Devizes, and elsewhere ; but one crossed
Putney Bridge en route for Portsmouth. The
northern, eastern, and southern counties were served
from Islington, Bishopsgate, Westminster, and
South wark. In my earlier days, the omnibus which
used to take Charles Lamb and his friends to and
from Edmonton still started regularly from the
Flower- Pot at Bishopsgate. I never went by it
further than Tottenham. A second ran between
the Bell, in Holborn, and Wendover, and a tedious
journey it was. You had earned more than the fare
when you alighted, if it was in the winter, after
nightfall.

Places which now constitute part of our great
city were till a comparatively recent date com-
pletely isolated from it, and distinct hamlets or
townships. Hounslow. Turnham Green, Brent-
ford, and even Kensington and Old Brompton,
were rendered independent of the capital by wide
stretches of open ground and impracticable roads
the latter such as are pictured by Macaulay in his
History of England and by many travellers and
diarists of the eighteenth century. Yet within my
time and recollection many of these outskirts were

90 FOURTH GENERATION

delightful retreats, and to a modern eye fabulously
rural and solitary. Those who have only known
the western approach to London since 1850 must
be strangers to what it was when I was a boy.
My mother, who was born in 1804, remembers that
when she was a child, and lived in her father's
house in Black Lion Lane, Bayswater, there were
no buildings between them and Harrow, The
Oxford Road, as it was called, was so desolate in
Hazlitt's day that he was afraid to traverse it by
night.

My grandfather, when he walked to the Reynells',
became at last so alarmed by the reports which
reached his ears that he purchased a brace of
pistols, which his son used to carry, till, growing
more afraid of the weapons than of the footpads, he
discarded them.

Within comparatively recent years what is Lan-
caster Gate was a meadow with a hedge to the
highway. Between this meadow and Porchester
Terrace was a tea-garden. The property here-
about included the Bread and Cheese land left to
Paddington parish by maiden ladies for the periodi-
cal distribution of relief from the church-steeple. It
was after my settlement in Addison Road, Kensing-
ton, in 1862, that those sweeping changes occurred,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 91

which thoroughly demoralized the neighbourhood
and drove me to Barnes. Like old General Boone,
who hunted up to ninety, I retreat before civilization.

Notting Hill, properly Nutting Hill, is at present
beyond redemption. I recollect it a very pleasant
countrified locality, surrounded on the north and
west by fields. I have walked from Clarendon
Road, even after that was built, the whole way to
Hampstead with very few houses, and those
scattered about, between. Notting Barns, which
was a farm lying between Notting Hill and Camp-
den Hill, still survives in a small patch of open
ground near Bute House and in Farm Street,
which is just where the old turnpike gate stood.
You go down from the main thoroughfare in enter-
ing Farm Street, probably because the highroad has
been much raised.

I have mentioned that the environs of London
on this side were down even to 1850 very lonely
and insecure, and that both the highwayman and
footpad formerly infested the whole tract of country
now almost completely covered by houses and pro-
tected by well -lighted thoroughfares and police.
In the Kensington highroad, near Knightsbridge
Barracks, stood a queer old hostelry with the back
looking to the Park, and I have always understood

92 FOURTH GENERATION

that this was a regular haunt of the knights of the
post, who, if pursued into the premises, escaped at
the rear into the large open space behind, and so
got away from the not very dexterous or alert
guardians of public safety and order who preceded
our modern constable. A second lay at the junction
of the Fulham Road and Bell and Horns Lane,
and a third formed part of a short row of very
antique shops on the northern side of the Fulham
Road, opposite Stewart's Grove. In the Fulham
Fields there was a very quaint halting-place of this
kind; it was on the right-hand going toward Ham-
mersmith Broadway. It was known as the Grey-
hound, and was a noted haunt of highwaymen ; and
the site of Holcrofts in the village itself was origin-
ally occupied by a similar establishment before it
was transformed into a private mansion the usual
process inverted.

The oldest house at Walham Green was the
King's Head, previously known as the Hare and
Hounds, and dating from 1680; and at Putney the
Fox and Hounds, of Henry VIII.'s time, once
famous for its bowling-green.

There were waggon-houses of a similar type, no
doubt, on those sides of the city with which I was
less familiar. Three yet lingered in modern times :

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 93

two on the Uxbridge and one on the Oxford Road.
Of the former, one lay at the corner of Wood Lane,
facing Shepherd's Bush ; the other, not far from
Kew Bridge, was a halting-place for George III.
on his way to Windsor. Many must call to mind
how recently at Bayswater, opposite the Park,
survived an ancient structure seeming to have no
relationship to the scene around it.

The changes in the route from the Metropolis to
the north have been, even since the present century,
equally immense. The road to Barnet used to be
straight down Gray's Inn Lane, till it was diverted
through the Bishop of London's park at Padding-
ton. The gate which gave its name to Highgate
was placed to collect the Bishop's tolls. I personally
spoke at the Holborn end of Gray's Inn Lane to a
well-known artist about forty years since, who re-
membered a haystack where the St. Pancras station
now is.

The scattered markets, which formerly lay at
intervals over all this area, possess greater signifi-
cance than may at first sight appear. They were
the sole depots for the convenience of the house-
holder when all the small neighbourhoods about
the west and other parts of the Metropolis were
yet detached hamlets, with oases of meadow or

94 FOURTH GENERATION

demesne between them. I may mention Oxford
Market, Newport Market, Clare Market, Carnaby
Market, Shepherd's Market (at the foot of Down
Street, Piccadilly), Chelsea Market, and the one
which, ever since I can remember, has been at
Knightsbridge, or rather on the western side of
Sloane Street, near the remains of Knightsbridge
Green.

My maternal grandfather Reynell, who was born
in 1777, remembered Sloane Street partly in carcase,
and his son (my uncle) has fished for sticklebacks
in the ponds about the Five Fields, Pimlico the
area between Sloane Square and St. Peter's Church.
Cattle used to graze on the site of Belgrave Square
within living memory, and my informant recollected
the erection of the Square railing.

We have all heard of the sport enjoyed by
General Oglethorpe in the time of Queen Anne,
where Regent Street now is, and snipe were also
shot within living memory in Tuthill Fields behind
Bird Cage Walk. The old door belonging to the
barracks, from which some of the officers sallied
in pursuit of their game, was till lately preserved
in situ ; but snipe were also to be found in the
osier-beds and the Willow Walk at Pimlico, near
the present Warwick Square and Street.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 95

It is curious how many changes of this kind
have been accomplished by the builder. Partridges
were occasionally seen, not many years ago, in the
immediate neighbourhood of Barnes Common, in
the eight-acre field adjoining Mill Lodge they
may have been strays from Richmond Park and
I have been credibly informed that on the common
itself snipe were to be got. There are still rabbit-
burrows there, but the population will soon drive
away the makers and occupants. The cuckoo and
the nightingale are yet habitual visitors ; but they
become year by year rarer and shyer.

London, in allusion to its numerous turnpikes,
gained the Theban sobriquet of the Hundred-gated.
There was a parallel series on all the main roads.
From the Piccadilly side, the first was at Hyde
Park Corner, with the weighing apparatus a little
lower down for the heavier traffic. This bar was
successively set back to Sloane Street and the
Queen's Elm, before which within living memory
the actual tree spread its branches and its shadow,
lending its name equally to the terrace opposite,
which dates from about 1822, when Mayers the
baker built his premises at the corner of what was
long known as Elm Terrace. The general structure
on the northern side from the church to the end

96 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

of Brompton Row has not yet undergone vital
alteration, except the removal of the gardens and
the enlargement of frontages ; but opposite the
entire aspect is changed for better or for worse,
as people may think. These suburban gates were
long farmed by Jonas Levi, whose name was to
be found upon them, and who is recollected by old
inhabitants coming periodically down to inspect his
property. The speculation must have succeeded,
for Levi lived in good style at Kingsgate Castle,
near Broadstairs. He was a large shareholder in
the Brighton Railway.

I take it that the King's and Queen's Roads
were originally out of the category of public
thoroughfares, and had consequently no toll-gates.
The latter was a virtual cul-de-sac at both ends
till it was opened up by the modern builder and
the removal of the barrier at Chelsea Hospital,
and even now it is not a main artery.

The gate at Hyde Park Corner was exactly
.parallel with the one at Tyburn, near the Marble
Arch. The latter was removed in 1829. On a
blue earthenware cheese - plate belonging to the
commencement of the present century is painted
a view of Tyburn turnpike, with all the country
toward Bays water and Edgeware open.

CHAPTER IV.

Knightsbridge Original levels and boundaries Traces of it in
1371 and 1526 Knightsbridge Green The old watch-house
Old Brompton Brompton Row Some of its early in-
habitants Count Rumford Anecdote of the Duchess of
Kent Mrs. Lloyd of Crown Court Grove House William
Wilberforce Elliot's Pine Pits John Hunt Some account
of Faulkner the historian Bell and Horns Lane Pollard's
School Gore Lane Charles Mathews Robert Cruikshank
Sir John Fleming's daughters Cromwell House Bromp-
ton Vale Chelsea Pound Curious discovery there Vestiges
of Chelsea Common Brompton nurseries Walnut-tree
Walk The Bull Gunter the pastrycook Brompton Heath
Thistle Grove Little Chelsea Purser's Cross.

IN 1840 there were very few shops in the Brompton
Road between Sloane Street and the Bell and
Horns, and again between that and the Queen's
Elm.

The original village of Knightsbridge extended
in a broken and irregular manner or form from
the western corner of Sloane Street (then unknown)
to the end of Queen's Buildings. There were at
the outset no houses on the southern side till you
passed Sloane Street, nor on the northern till

VOL. n* 26

98 FOURTH GENERATION

you reached the village of Brompton. Even now
the peculiar levels shew that the primitive road
(including the pathway) has undergone repeated
alterations. Of the mediaeval Knightsbridge men-
tioned in records of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries, probably not a vestige remains ;
and the made ground here, as well as at Brompton
Row, was found necessary to lift the residences,
which were gradually erected, above the uncared-
for and sometimes almost impassable coach and
cart track. The place derived its name from the
bridge which (above the modern Albert Gate)
spanned the stream running from the North of
London across Hyde Park and Pimlico to its
outlet into the Thames opposite Vauxhall. This
structure in some shape was of very great antiquity.
It was the theatre of an adventure narrated in the
Hundred Merry Tales, 1526, but one by no means
merry in its denouement.

We hear in 1371 525 years ago of Knights-
bridge as a hamlet, to which the Butchers' Gild
was permitted to send cattle for slaughtering
purposes. A second principal abattoir was Strat-
ford-le-Bow.

Plantagenet Knightsbridge presumably consisted
of a single row of tenements, first on the northern

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 99

side by the old bridge, and then (after an interval)
of others on the southern side, where Queen's
Buildings at present stand, the former facing the
fields toward the river, where Ebury Farm subse-
quently extended, and having at the back an
enormous sandy area, now r partly represented by
Hyde Park, the latter facing an open heath,
successively reduced to a green and a triangular
grass-plot, and looking behind, till the eighteenth
century was far advanced, on a wide expanse of
waste. I have understood that there was no
regular grass -land in the Park till George III.
caused parts to be sown with seed as a relief to
his eyes when he began to suffer from ophthalmia*
There used to lie in the rear toward Sloane Street
a nest of curious antique hovels, which might have
been part, in their first state, of the primaeval hamlet.
They were reached by a court, possibly once a
lane.

On the once waste plot between the present
Knightsbridge Green and Sloane Street stood the
watch-house for the district, and a friend remembers
peeping in at the window one day when he was
a boy, and seeing the body of a woman just re-
covered from the Serpentine lying for identification.
The ordinary use of these places was as a lock-up

ioo FOURTH GENERATION

for pickpockets and other nocturnal offenders till
they were taken before the magistrate.

Knightsbridge Green must have been in its
second state, so to speak that is, subsequently
to the creation of Brompton Row and Queen's
Buildings of much greater extent than I can
recollect it. It appears to have fallen a gradual
prey to encroachment by private persons and the
Highway Board ; but it is easy to recognise that
the whole tract was at the outset waste of the
Manor of Kensington, and came down in a fork
to the point where Sloane Street at present opens
into Knightsbridge.

Queen's Buildings, which face the Green, were
originally private residences, with small plots of
pleasure-ground divided from them by the footway
exactly as the case was in Brompton Row ; and
these spaces were gradually absorbed into the
thoroughfare, one or two at the western extremity
being the last to disappear. At the opposite corner,
where the ground began to recover the natural
level, you formerly descended a short flight of
steps to the first shop. Here, in fact, the country
at one time recommenced, and all was open in
the rear. There is in a story-book of 1526 an
account of a thief making his escape across the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 101

fields just at this point. There were down to my
time only a few primitive places of business on
the southern side, facing Brompton Row, and then
private houses standing back in long gardens, That
was doubtless the second state of the locality, when
it had ceased to be meadow or arable land protected
by hedges.

Many of us recall the cavalry barracks in Ken-
sington Gardens, near the turnpike at Gloucester
Road ; but there were also barracks for the foot-
guards on the site of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge,
the church standing where the old barrack-yard
once was.

The scene is as different as if we were looking
back on occurrences of two centuries ago. The
exigencies of traffic, the feverish competition of
trade, the seething population springing up around
us and choking many healthy forms of the earlier
English life, have accomplished the metamor-
phosis :

' In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
Corpora. 1

The region now incorporated in South Kensington,
but formerly known as Old Brompton, was once
and long a country village, or little more. The

102 FOURTH GENERATION

scenes amid which I spent much of my youth
now survive only in the mind's eye. The ancient
mansions which abounded there, the historical sites
or records, the delightful residences in grounds,
the market gardens, and, best of all, the quaint
Old Vale, have vanished like a dream.

Brompton Row, which connected the place itself
on the northern side of the road with Knightsbridge
Green (in its far greater amplitude) at an epoch
long posterior to the existence of Old Brompton as
an independent name and locality, I take to have a
topographical affinity with Chigwell Row, Channor
Row, and Forest Row, a block of buildings erected
on the skirt of a hamlet or a waste. The first
houses which occupied the site were of low eleva-
tion and humble pretensions ; they lay back some
forty or fifty feet from the main road, and the
boundary-line of their front-gardens, with the pro-
jection on the opposite side, where Grove House
stood, left a narrow passage for vehicles of all kinds,
yet enough to meet the demand of that day. During
a protracted period the dwellings just here enjoyed
an uninterrupted view of the open area behind, so
far as the eye could scan.

The Row about 1840 presented altogether a
sufficiently picturesque aspect; it was quiet, "green,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 103

arid rural ; and the grape vines trained over one or
two of the exteriors, with the clusters hanging un-
molested in the season, may give some idea of the
thorough transition which the locality has undergone
since my early years.

Faulkner, in speaking of the villages which
bounded the town of Kensington proper on the
southern side, mentions Old and New Brompton ;
but he omits to delimit them, and to do so would
now involve greater trouble than it would have done
seventy years ago, when Faulkner wrote his account
of Kensington.

Still, I think it probable that New Brompton was
the name applied to the eastern end, including
Brompton Row, and that Old Brompton centred
round Cromwell or Hale House, Cromwell Lane,
and the lower end of Bell and Horns Lane toward
.Brompton Hall and Cowper House. The Row was
plainly, as I have suggested, an aftergrowth, and
originally abutted on the waste of Kensington
Manor, without any other buildings between it and
the Manor of Hyde. Like Queen's Buildings oppo-
site, its level was probably raised to what we now
see it, when at a later date private residences of a
superior character were erected there.
- , Two. celebrities who resided in Brompton Row

FOURTH GENERATION

were Sir Benjamin Thompson, better known as
Count Rumford, who was there quite in the begin-
ning of the century, and Leach, a boatswain who
had served on the Victory, and had lost an arm.
He was full of all sorts of yarns, and his conversa-
tion was eagerly sought by the frequenters of the
Crown and Sceptre at the corner of Rauston Street,
going toward Montpelier Square, where Trafalgar
was fought over again almost nightly in a recital
accompanied by copious potations of malt liquor.
Leach had an adroit way of ordering a half-pint of
beer in a quart measure, and his tankard was con-
stantly replenished for him by his admiring audience.
He it was who used to give an account of the
Duchess of Kent, the Queen's mother, tripping on
some occasion and saving herself by catching at
the stump of Leach's arm, on which occasion Her
Royal Highness, according to the narrator, ex-
pressed her satisfaction at being able to lean on the
buttocks (bulwarks) of England. This may have
been while the Duke and his wife resided at Kent
House, Kensington Gore.

Count Rumford did not probably reside long at
Old Brompton. I have seen a letter from him
written there in 1801, and in the following year he
settled in France. He was one of the earliest im-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 105

provers of our domestic stove. John Reeve I
notice elsewhere.

I must not omit to record Mrs. Cooper, who in
my boyhood kept the confectioner's shop in the
Row, and made a speciality of the Brompton Bun,
of which I was a munificent patron.

A notability of a different character in the Row
was denoted by a brass plate with the name Lloyd
on it, attached to one of the doors. Mrs. Lloyd
resided here, and was a person of some means. She
had a son, an officer in one of the line regiments.
Mrs. Lloyd was, in fact, in business what business
was not exactly known, not even to her son. Her
headquarters, however, as a matter of fact, were in
Crown Court, St. James's, where she could shew a
cheval-glass in a silver mounting, given to her by
H.R.H. the Prince Regent; I dare say that she
was very proud of it.

A very sad story was connected with this woman
and this house. One day a lady brought a gentle-
man there, and the door was opened by Mrs. Lloyd.
The gentleman was her son he had discovered the
secret ; and he never recovered from the shock.
The poor fellow's commission had been bought out
of Crown Court.

Facing Brompton Row lay Grove House and

106 FOURTH GENERATION

other private residences in grounds. Grove House
had been the abode of William Wilberforce, but in
1840 was converted into a dame-school, kept by
Mrs. Warne, a connection of Colonel Maceroni,
aide-de-camp to Murat, the brother-in-law of
Napoleon. Mrs. Warne did her best to initiate the
writer into some of the rudiments of learning. Her
governess, Miss Foster, who married Osborn the
nurseryman, tried to make me an advanced scholar
by teaching me a few words of French, and one
day it came to the turn of the word oui. ' Say oui,
Willy,' quoth the lady. 4 I won't say om, Miss
Foster,' was my hardy, Loftus-like reply.

A portion of the extensive gardens once attached
to these old buildings survives in the small oblong
enclosure of Ovington Square.

At the back of Grove Place, Elliot's Pine Pits
occupied ten acres, extending nearly to the western
side of Hans Place, formerly a delightful spot where
Sir Charles Shuckborough had a mansion in grounds.
Elliot afterward removed to Fulham, but he
naturally found pine-growing unremunerative when
a better specimen than he could produce for a
guinea was obtained from abroad for half a crown.

In one of the small houses in Grove Place, Mr.
John Hunt, Leigh Hunt's elder brother, .spent his

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 107

last days and died. I recall visits which we paid
to him there. His wife, like old Mrs. Hazlitt, was
addicted to distinguishing him as 'my Mr. Hunt.'
She might have had good reasons for this.

In Alexander Place was a magazine for the sale,
among other sundries, of short basket-hiked iron
swords and wooden broadswords. My brother and
I fought a F out ranee with the former, and exhausted
many a pair, regardless of the outlay, which was
fourpence each ; but the broadsword was a shilling,
and was only for ceremonial use. The reports
which came to us from our elders of the sanguinary
conflicts in transpontine melodramas led to this play-
ing at soldiers or brigands ; but I think that the
shilling weapon associated itself in my mind with a
commission in the Household Cavalry. How many
foster such illusions and mental cobwebs, varying
only in character as time goes on !

Faulkner, who wrote the local histories of Chelsea
and other places, was a second-hand bookseller at
the corner of Smith Street, Chelsea, nearly opposite
Gough House. He was a little man, and had a
brother as small as himself, who lately (1895) died
in Paulton Square. Faulkner brought out his
Brentford and Ealing in 1843, and proposed to my
father, then living in Church Street, Chelsea, to

io8 FOURTH GENERATION

exchange a copy for some book of my father's doing.
I recollect it was about 1847 Faulkner left his
own book, the equivalent not being ready, and called
nearly every day, till my father told him, I think, he
might have his volume back again.

I have the most distinct impression of Bell and
Horns Lane, commencing with the old-fashioned
unpretending hostelry at the corner, with its yard,
in which a cobbler had his stall

A hedge bounded the lane right down the south
side, where Thurloe Place and Square were subse-
quently erected, and the ditch was a good hunting-
ground for the rat-catcher. On the north side of
the lane beyond Brompton Church lay Pollard's
School, a nursery ground, Ingestrie House, and a
number of other detached residences in their own
grounds. Webster and Harley the actors lived
there. The high massive wall enclosing the nursery
and Ingestrie House was supported by buttresses,
which formed a source of alarm in those days to
women and children who were passing after dusk,
from fear of attacks by thieves or footpads. Leigh
Hunt said that these buttresses reminded him of
the legs of the Knave of Clubs. At the other end
of the lane was the Hoop and Toy public-house,
originally a very primitive establishment, with trees

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 109

in front of it. Nearly opposite on the north was
Gore Lane, leading to Kensington Govor or Gore,
and down there, on the right hand, was a house
once tenanted by Charles Mathews the younger.

I accompanied my father as a child to the sale of
the effects at Ingestrie House prior to its demoli-
tion. The only private residence of all those once
standing hereabout which still remains is that
formerly rented by Sir John Fleming, who had
two handsome daughters. These ladies long kept
their maiden condition, but had their love affairs.
Their father used to say that they were very good
girls, and never did him any discredit.

Prospect Place owed its once more appropriate
designation to the complete absence of any buildings
between the lane at that point and the Fulham
Road, till the first wing of the Consumption Hospital
was begun, and Sumner Terrace was erected.

On some of the ground nearly opposite the
Toxophilite Society held its meetings. Robert
Cruikshank, the brother of George, was one of the
members.

Pursuing the course of the lane, one had Cowper
House on the left and Brompton Hall, a house with
eagles over the entrance, on the right, and turning
sharply round by the latter, the pedestrian found

no FOURTH GENERATION

himself in another and narrower lane, which led
to Brompton Vale, the Almshouses, two or three
nurseries, and then either to Gloucester Road through
a turning to the left or to Kensington across the
fields. By taking the right-hand instead of the left,
which brought you to Gloucester Road, you reached,
down a short cul-de-sac, the entrance to Cromwell
House, otherwise called Hale House, one of the
many reputed residences of the Protector Cromwell,
and of which my uncle. Reynell was the latest
occupier. One of the mantels from this ancient
edifice, which stood in four acres of ground, is now
in the South Kensington Museum, but it has been
unskilfully repaired.

The Vale, of which no trace now remains, lay on
the right-hand side of Cromwell Lane, turning down
from Brompton Hall toward Gloucester Road and
Kensington. It was approached through a door-
way, and consisted of a group of cottages on either
side of a sinuous footpath. There was no carriage-
road. Each residence stood in about half an acre of
garden ground, and was enclosed by a high black
fence. The Vale, which partly abutted on Crom-
well Lane, had been originally formed by the
enclosure of some of the demesne of Cromwell
House, and the waste plots along the lane were

OF A LITERARY FAMILY in

gradually occupied by houses of various styles,
including one where the Gunnings formerly lived,
On the left-hand side once stood Bute House, and
beyond it the Almshouses.

When I knew the Vale, three of the residents
were the Reynells, the Spagnolettis, and the
Edward Wrights. The ditch which traversed it
and skirted the Reynells' garden on the southern
side (one of its slopes was their strawberry-bed)
came out at the Admiral Keppel inn, where the
Chelsea Pound stood, and where there was a meet-
ing of cross-roads. When they were draining this
ground about sixty years since, the skeleton of a
man who had been buried in lime a suicide or a
murderer was discovered.

On the site of Pelham Crescent was Colville's
Nursery, or, rather, one of them. A path, flanked
by a ditch on one side and a hedge on the other,
led right across to that portion of Bell and Horns
Lane, by Brompton Hall. The Crescent was built
about 1837 by Bonnin. Old people recollect the
fields there, and the stile over which you had to
climb to the path which led to Brompton HalL
Pelham Place was a much later creation, teste
meipso. Our relatives, Sir John and Lady S tod-
dart, on their return from Malta, were among

U2 FOURTH GENERATION

the earliest residents there. This was about
1845.

I am reminded that opposite Pelham Crescent
there was in my early time a considerable open
space immediately at the back of Pond Place, and
I went with H. J. Byron, when we were quite lads,
to see a fair held there. This space may have been
the last vestige of Chelsea Common, which, accord-
ing to Lysons, consisted of thirty-seven acres, and
lay between the Fulham and King's Roads. I
believe that St. Luke's Church and churchyard
occupy part of the area, for it is observable that an
unusually large piece of ground was assigned to this
purpose, bespeaking the relatively small value of
land at the time.

Onslow Square covers the old grounds of several
mansions, including Cowper House. It is the
mutilated avenue of the last which is seen in the
centre and in a passage leading from the Fulham
Road. Many years since a gentleman in this
square had a large collection of papers on Old
Brompton, but who he was, and what became of
them, I never heard.

Bell and Horns Lane practically extended to
Earl's Court, and was bounded on both sides the
whole way down to about 1850 by private mansions

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 113

or other houses, market-gardens, and nurseries,
among which I may mention those of Gray,
Siggers, Colville, Con way (by the turnpike, where
the Bolton estate was laid out), Rigby, and Kirke.
My mother bought her morello cherries for pre-
serving at Conway's.

The lane eventually debouched near what is now
the Brompton Cemetery and the Redcliffe estate,
and on the left was Walnut-tree Walk, leading to
the Fulham Road (a not very safe place for pedes-
trians, as I have known ladies robbed at mid-day),
while on the right the road wound round to
Kensington, and brought one out opposite Holland
House.

On the right and left of Walnut-tree Walk, and
between that and the cemetery, there was nothing
but market-grounds and orchards, except a field on
the right, where, years after the presence of any
actual danger, a board was to be seen, warning the
public * to beware of the bull/

On the other side of the cemetery toward the
Fulham Fields was a country road, where one of
my godfathers, Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, inventor
of the Bude Light and of the Steam Tram, was the
first, I believe, to put up houses. I accompanied
him as a youth on his visits to his property, ' an^d

VOL. n. 27

n 4 FOURTH GENERATION

have the flavour of the red currants yet on my
palate, which I gathered in the remains of the old
dismantled orchard.

An amusing experience befell my father while he
was in his early married life a visitor at Gurney's in
Cornwall. He was rather addicted to woodmanship,,
and sallied out one day with an axe, wherewith he
lopped a number of trees on somebody else's estate.
The owner applied to Gurney, who was on the
commission of the peace, for a warrant for his
guest's apprehension, and that document I possess.
But I believe that the matter occasioned some
merriment, and was amicably settled.

The ground now occupied by the Brompton
Cemetery was a market - garden down to 1836,
when, or in 1837, it was surveyed, enclosed, and
laid out. The whole area between it and Walnut-
tree Walk, and between the Earl's Court and
Fulham Roads, was also cultivated, and principally
orchards. The grounds of Mr. Toogood's house at
the Earl's Court end of the Walk, and Mr. Popart's
at the other, nearly met. This was a thoroughly
rural bit,

Gunter the pastrycook lived at Earl's Court,
while it was still a retired and rustic neighbour-
h6od. Of course, he had had the opportunity of

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 115

buying up all the parcels of land outside the
Harrington and other estates on both sides of the
Fulham Road, and he eventually employed George
Godwin the architect, one of the first occupiers of
the houses in Pelham Crescent, to lay out the
property for him in what is known as Bolton's,
Tregunter Road, where Halliwell-Phillipps resided
many years, and (on the opposite side) in Gunter's
Grove, on the borders of Chelsea and Fulham.

A friend of mine, who was articled to Godwin,
recollects Pollard the schoolmaster, next door to
Brompton Church, coming in every week to see the
Bitilder, which was then a comparatively new under-
taking, at Pelham Crescent. Pollard sold his school-
site to the Oratory.

Opposite Chelsea Park, or Wharton Park, as it
was originally named, in Little Chelsea, lay Brompton
Heath, an open space which must have originally
extended from the village of Little Chelsea to Swan
Lane on the east side, and have abutted on the
Earl's Court Road, or continuation of Bell and
Horns Lane. This has all utterly vanished.
Thistle Grove preserves in its name an indication
of the former condition of the site.

Thistle Grove appears to have been parcelled out
into building allotments about 1 8 1 6, and was a cul-

n6 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

de-sac at the northern end, the extension known as
Drayton Grove being under cultivation, and the
sole approach from the Fulham Road at this point
to EarTs Court and Kensington being through the
narrow lane at the back of the Grove.

Beyond Little Chelsea lay Walham Green and
Fulham, and to the south Sand's End and Parson's
Green, all detached hamlets separated from London
and each other by wide stretches of open land or
garden, now consolidated into one huge continuous
street, as it were, resonant with some of the least
attractive forms of modern life. Scarcely anything
but Peterborough House and Fulham Palace remain
to shew what this side of the Metropolis originally
was. Fulham Palace possesses a unique interest
as the only moated house within the Metropolitan
area.

Between Walham Green and Fulham, on the left-
hand side, after turning the angle in the road by
the modern fire-engine house, lay Purser's Cross,
which is lost in the so-called Percy Cross House
opposite.

CHAPTER V.

Anecdotes of the Duke of York and Duke of Wellington Thomas
Wright, F.S.A., and Madame Wright The Carter Halls at the
Rosery Anecdote about Tennyson Guizot at Old Brompton
An original letter from him to my father Gloucester Lodge
George Canning Don Carlos Braham the singer
Brompton * parliament ' A mysterious resident in Brompton
Vale The Spagnolettis The Holls Henry Holl the actor
His circle G. V. Brooke Holl as a mimic and story-
teller Dickens and Forster Some account of the latter
Frank Holl, R.A. Dr. Duplex.

FIFTY years ago, Siggers the market-gardener had
a large piece of the ground on the Earl's Court side,
opposite Conway's Nursery, and contiguous to the
turnpike. I met Siggers by chance many years
since, and entered into conversation with him about
the old place. He narrated a curious anecdote of
the Duke of York. He had instructed all his
children never to accept gratuities from strangers ;
it was a very secluded and thinly-populated part,
and the precaution was necessary enough. His
daughters came home one day, and told him that a
gentleman on horseback had stopped them, asked

u8 FOURTH GENERATION

them their names, and, pulling a shilling out of his
pocket, stooped to offer it to them. They declined
to receive it, and the gentleman asked their reason.
They said that their father had ordered them not to
take money from anyone. From their description
Siggers guessed who their interviewer had been.

This account probably referred to the time when
the Duke kept Mrs. Carey at Fulham or another
lady at the White House, Putney. His Royal
Highness had children by the former, who passed
under the name of Gibbs, and strongly resembled
the Georges. They went to Roy's school, at
Burlington House, Fulham, and were afterward
drafted into the War Office.

The public service at that period was the ordinary
destination of the offshoots or superannuated ser-
vants of the nobility and of Royalty. Indeed, so
late as the time of the Crimean War such was still
the case. While I was at the War Office, a son of
Sidney Herbert was on the staff under an assumed
name ; he was well nursed.

Siggers told me some queer and unproducible
stories of the old Duke of Wellington in connection
with Brompton, where he favoured a resort par-
taking of the character of a casino and something
else. His Grace was a regular Orlando Inamorato

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 1 19

or Don Juan, and not always of a very high
type.

He had the habit of keeping at Apsley House a
considerable amount in bank-notes, and on one
occasion, when he was paying for a heavy purchase,
the vendor respectfully suggested a cheque. But
the Duke told him that he liked to settle such
matters in cash, as he did not wish Coutts's to know
what a fool he was sometimes.

In Sydney Street, Fulham Road, during the last
years of his life resided Thomas Wright, the dis-
tinguished antiquary and man of letters, the intimate
associate of H alii well- Phillipps. Wright married
a discarded mistress of Francisque Michel. I saw
her once or twice a lady of imposing appearance,
but, from what H alii well gave me to understand, and
from what I learned otherwise, by no means a
crown to her husband, unless it was one of thorns.
A credulous relative of mine described her to me
on one occasion as a scion of the ancient French
noblesse. Very possible ; and this noblesse yielded
an abundant crop of such phenomena.

She was poor Wright's evil genius. He was a
man of vast industry and erudition, and deserved a
better fortune. H alii well allowed him a pension
supplemental to the munificent one of 6$ with

120 FOURTH GENERATION

which the discerning and impartial British Govern-
ment requited thirty years of archaeological scholar-
ship and research.

The royal housekeeper at Kew Palace, her
nephew informs me, has ^350 a year, with lodging
and perquisites. How equitable and how con-
sistent !

Wright was not a journalist, nor a Liverpool
man, nor a Scot, or Mr. Gladstone and his alter ego
might have made him a grant out of the public
funds, followed at a decent interval by a pension for
life, as they did in the case of a very young man
who had written a few copies of verses, and who
will, it is to be feared, be a charge on the taxpayers
during the next forty or fifty years, thanks to these
two eminent Liberal statesmen.

One of the small detached houses along the
Earl's Court Road, before you came to Jenny
Lind's, was the Rosery, or, as Jerrold called it, the
Roguery. I recollect being taken here as a boy to
see the Carter Halls, and being struck by their
wall-plums, the bloom on which yet lives in my
mind's eye. My companion (or, rather, I suppose
I ought to say, escort) was Lily Blanchard, after-
ward Mrs. Blanchard Jerrold.

Mrs. Carter Hall was generally allowed to be a

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 121

very accomplished and able woman ; I have always
heard that the gray mare was the better horse in
this case, and * Cairter,' as she used to call him, was
little better than a book-maker. Yet he continued
during a long series of years to earn a handsome
income out of journalism and letters, and to secure
a pension. He never failed from lack of courage.
He asked Moxon and Co. ^'600 for the right to
reprint in book -form his Memories of Writers,
which he had communicated to some periodical.

This was toward the close of his career. I
happened to be the next client whom the firm was
to see, and Hall went out as I went in. His aspect
was truly venerable, and I noted the amplitude of
his shirt-collar, to which he was indebted for the
sobriquet of Shirt-Collar Hall.

The personage who received us both in succes-
sion was the manager engaged to look after Moxon's
business after his death for the benefit of the widow,
Lamb's Emma Isola. He did not do much to pro-
mote the interests of his unlucky employer. One
of his exploits, I was informed, was to signify his
disapprobation of the late Poet Laureate by surmount-
ing his portrait in Moxon's parlour with ass's ears.
Because the present deponent objected to certain
commercial irregularities in connection with an

122 FOURTH GENERATION

edition of Charles Lamb's works in 1868, the same
individual launched through the hospitable columns
of the Athenceum some amenities not worth remem-
bering about 'the tribe of Hazlitt,' which yet sur-
vives.

A temporary resident in Brompton about this
time was the ex- Minister Guizot, whose works on
Civilization and the English Revolution of 1 640 my
father translated. He sent the books to Guizot,
and received the following acknowledgment :

SIR,

Je vous remercie beaucoup des quatre volumes que vous
avez voulu m'envoyer. Je suis heureux que mes ouvrages aient
rencontr un traducteur tel que vous, et si je rencontre en lisant
votre traduction quelques inexactitudes qui meritent d'etre re-
marquees, je m'impresserai de vous les signaler.

Regevez, je vous prie, Tassurance de ma consideration trbs

distingue^.

GUIZOT.

Brompton, Juillet, 1848.

The father of Guizot had perished on the scaffold
in the first Revolution, and as, next to his master,
he was the best hated man in France in 1848, he
naturally lost no time in placing the Channel
between himself and his countrymen. Those who
were in Paris at the acute crisis must remember the
ominous cries of l A has Guizot /'

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 123

One of the famous old houses in Brompton was
Gloucester Lodge, built for the Duke of Gloucester,
one of the sons of George III. It stood on the
right-hand side of the Gloucester Road on the way
to Kensington. George Canning afterward lived
there, and at a later period Don Carlos, whose
sudden disappearance one morning in July, 1834,
was soon explained by his arrival as the head of an
insurrectionary movement in Spain. The building,
which occupied with its grounds a considerable
area, surrounded by a very high fence, remained
unoccupied for a long time, and was at last pulled
down. Just before its demolition I went over it
with my boyish and almost life-long acquaintance,
Henry James Byron, whose name will recur.

Although Michael's Place and Grove and Bromp-
ton Crescent, now no more, are in the parish of
Chelsea, they were in such immediate contiguity to
Old Brompton that I may be excused for mention*
ing the residence of Braham the singer Lamb's
*Jew, gentleman, and angel' in the house at the
end of Michael's Grove. The singer's daughter
became Lady Waldegrave. My father, who had a
very promising voice, was, as we have heard, very
nearly becoming his pupil.

Leading up to Braham's house, on the left hand,

124 FOURTH GENERATION

and not far from the highroad, was Hume the
baker's, a depot for white and brown parliament,
oblong cakes of farinaceous material slightly
sweetened, and cruciformly divided on the face
into four smaller squares. The brown variety is
still in commerce ; but the other is forgotten, and
the cruciformity has been discontinued. A curious
book might be written on the origin and archaeology
of sweets.

Within the limits of Chelsea lay also York Place,
adjoining the Jewish Burial Ground, and opposite
the Consumption Hospital. I merely refer to it
because there was in my nonage a preparatory
establishment kept in one of the houses by Dr.
Frampton, who, when I was among his pupils, freely
applied the ruler to our knuckles, and also employed
the old-fashioned abacus for arithmetical purposes.
I was of the day-scholars, and Frampton rather un-
commercially took us out for a walk before dinner,
which put & serious edge on our appetites. We had
pudding twice a week plum-pudding on Tuesdays
and baked rice on Thursdays. The former was
always the day when my step on the homeward
route was most elastic.

From the preference shown by many of the
musical and theatrical professions for this delightful

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 125

retreat, we are led to infer that the soft air of the
locality recommended itself to the bronchial require-
ments of these gentlemen and ladies, as well as
the attraction of the rural scenery and quiet.

I judge it to have been one of the truest pleasures
of my life, if not one of its greatest privileges, to
contemplate with my own eyes the beautiful hamlet
of Old Brompton, as it appeared prior to the
Exhibition of 1851, which virtually destroyed it
and not it alone. When I was a child this outskirt
of London was much in its primitive condition as
it had been in the days of the early Georges, if
not of the Stuarts. Fragments of it yet remain to
shew what it has been, just about Alexander Place
and Square, the old Church, the Queen's Elm, and
a few other points.

A mysterious personage preceded my uncle as
tenant of the premises in the Vale. It was a forger
or utterer, or both, of flash bank-notes ; and an old
gardener, who afterward worked for Mr. Reynell,
gave this account of him, that he rode out every
morning on horseback, and returned in the evening,
both his beast and himself presenting the appearance
of having ridden far and hard. It was conjectured
that his practice was to change the notes at different
points, and at as considerable a distance as possible

126 FOURTH GENERATION

from headquarters. What became of the fellow the
narrator did not know ; if he was apprehended, the
* three-legged mare ' was his infallible destiny, and
the mere fact that his proceedings were capable of
explanation seems to shew that the fraud was dis-
covered, if it was not punished.

Through the Reynells we knew the Spagnolettis,
through the latter the Farrens, and through these
the Rolls, and so on. This was in the early forties.
The Byrons became acquainted with us through my
father's engagement in the reporting gallery.

Spagnoletti, father of my old friend Charles
Spagnoletti, was not only the son of the famous
leader of the Italian Opera, and one of the immortal
triumvirate in the ballad of Old King Cole, but he
married the daughter of Stowasser, leader of the
Horse Guards Band. My friend's father was a
first-rate musical teacher, and might have done very
well in his profession. But he was not very
methodical, and was greatly addicted to the gentle,
but not remunerative, science of angling. Many a
time, when his pupils were expecting him, Spagno-
letti absented himself on the plea of indisposition,
while he had really set off on a pleasant little excur-
sion with his rod and bag. He was another of the
worthies of the Vale.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 127

Charles Spagnoletti narrated to me the following-
naughty little story :

A lad, whose mother had bought some lamb, and
had forgotten to ask her husband, who was the
leader of the church choir, how she was to dress it,
was sent after his father to make the inouiry, and
reached the place when the service had already
commenced. He went up into the organ-loft and
affected to join in the anthem, chanting :

' Mother has bought a quarter of lamb, and how shall she
doit?'

To which the parent, responding, said :

'Roast the leg, boil the loin, and make a pudding of the
suet. 5

It is well known that the boys in the choir
frequently mimic the choral intonation in talking to
each other, when they have cast their white clerical
bed-gowns.

I also owe to him a second anecdote :
Mr. James Forbes and Sir Edward Watkin,
long the two leading spirits on the Chatham and
Dover and South-Eastern Railways, conferring to-
gether on some arrangements propounded by the
former to be for mutual advantage, Watkin allowed

128 FOURTH GENERATION

his friend to go on for some time, but, at last inter-
rupting, said very quietly : ' And where do I come
in, James?'

When we first knew the Holls, they resided in a
small cottage in Stewart's Grove, a turning out of
the Fulham Road. He was a handsome man, and
had married a very pretty woman. So far back as
I can remember, Henry Holl had an engagement at
the Haymarket under Webster's management, but
latterly he joined Gustavus Vasa Brooke at the
Olympic, and eventually gave up the stage. He
was the author of a few dramatic trifles and two or
three novels, of which the best, the Kings Mail,
was founded on an incident connected with the
Haslemere district his wife's native place.

We often saw Brooke at Chelsea. He was one
of those lost in the London in 1866. Holl played
second to him in Shakespear and melodrama. As
a boy I was most impressed by the American
tragedian's Othello, Richard III., and Sir Giles
Overreach. I presumed to set him before Charles
Kean all round ; he had a better presence and voice.
Alike in Kean and in his wife the voice failed, but
he (Kean) was fairly good in such pieces as the
Corsican Brothers and Pizarro.

Holl had known a very wide circle of educated

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 1*9

and intelligent people ; his family had been always
associated with art ; and his own ties were princi-
pally dramatic and literary. He was fond of books,
and sought the acquaintance of bookish men. There
were few of the prominent authors of his day whom
he had not met, and with some of them he was on
Intimate terms. He was a man of excellent address,
but I always looked upon him as rather artificial.

I mention elsewhere his entertaining imitations of
his leading theatrical contemporaries Keeley, Buck-
stone, Macready, Webster, and others. When Holl
was in the right cue, an evening spent at his house
in Brompton over talk about the old poets and
playwrights, or, as an alternative, a taste of our host's
quality as a remembrancer of other men's styles, was
an enrichment of the experience and the thought.
To his great annoyance, people often confounded
the late Henry Howe and him, both at one time
members of the Haymarket establishment ; and I
believe that the displeasure was reciprocal.

Holl used to say that when Dickens and Forster
took a long walk together, the latter, being some-
what pursy, had to pause occasionally to get breath,
and would try to make Dickens relax his pace by
drawing his attention to the beauty of the scenery,
especially if the route was uphill. Holl's mode of

VOL. ii. 28

FOURTH GENERATION

telling the story was very funny the way* that
Forster puffed and blew, and held his sides with,

1 My dear Dickens, just observe that bit ' He

was an excellent raconteur as well as mimic.

I pointed out long ago that the Bill Stumps
pleasantry in Pickwick was borrowed from the
School for Wits, a jest-book published in 1813. I
have heard that the notion of the Golden Dustman
in O^tr Mittual friend was derived from the
immense pile of dust which remained for many
years untouched at the back of Gray's Inn Lane,
somewhere between Coldbath Fields and Mount
Pleasant, and that a large sum was eventually
cleared by the owner, who sold it to the Russian
Government in 18 1 2, after the destruction of Moscow,
to mix with the lime for cement. I give this dit for
what it is worth.

John Forster Lady Bulwer's Butcher's Boy
was a self-made man, very agreeable to those who
could keep him at a distance, but highly unpleasant
when he chose. A cabman once described him
idiomatically as 'an arbitrary cove.' There was a
small jeu d* esprit about him related in connection
with some wine at the dinner-table, of which Forster,
on being asked, characteristically affected to know
nothing.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 131

' What's this wine, John ?' he says to his man.

4 Three-and-six,' says John.

The artificial condescension of Forster was a
thing never to be forgotten. This manner arose
from his poor training, and was a kind of self-
protection. He did not know how you were going
to approach him, and he put out his elbow first.
His letters to me were polite enough, but he was
unpleasantly overbearing to those who did not hold
their ground. He was a thorough beggar on horse-
back.

Frank Holl, the Academician, a nephew of our
old acquaintance, was most unassuming and agree-
able, but very irritable, partly owing, perhaps, to
his always indifferent health, for he was a chronic
sufferer from angina pectoris, and I was surprised at
his lasting even so long as he did.

One day, when a right reverend prelate was
sitting for his portrait, everything seemed to go
wrong. Holl could not find his colours, and when
he found them he missed something else. Then
something slipped down ; Holl began to mutter
curses on Fortune, and at last he swore audibly,
till the Bishop got up and, taking his hat, wished
the painter good-morning, observing, 'You are the
most ungentlemanly man, Mr. Holl, I ever met.'

132 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

A common acquaintance of the Rolls and our-
selves was Dr. Duplex, M.D., to whom I have
understood that the Duplex lamp owed its origin.
The name always haunts me as a felicitous one
for a novel, where the central character was some
medical Janus.

CHAPTER VI.

The Byrons H. J. Byron and his family Early development of
a dramatic taste As a medical student My peculiar intimacy
with him Our evenings together People I met at his house
Story of him and Arthur Sketchley Byron's earliest love-
affair The Bancrofts Mary Wilton at the Strand Robert-
sonAnecdotes of Byron One of his last sayings Robinson
Crusoe and Miss Larkin Cupid and Psyche,

THE Byrons were a second family with whom
we met in those days. Henry Byron, father of
Henry James Byron the dramatist, was on the
Morning Post, and secretary of the Conservative
Association. He had married Josephine Bradley,
daughter of a medical man at Buxton, and an
extremely attractive woman ; and young Byron,
when he left school, was intended to take up
his grandfather's profession. I, of course, knew
him when we were lads together, and his father
lived in a small house near Eaton Square. Henry
Byron, who was related to the poet, had been
a College man, and had squandered a fortune.
He obtained a consular appointment in later life.

134 FOURTH GENERATION

The elder Byron was a most genial fellow, and
a thorough gentleman by breeding and instinct ;
but he was deplorably insincere, and that defect
was doubtless aggravated by his straitened circum-
stances and his fondness for little dinners and
other sweet impoverishments. I remember that we
generally knew when the Byrons of Pimlico were
expecting friends to dinner, as an application for
a loan of wine, if not of other accessories, was
at the last almost a matter of course. When he
obtained his appointment, he proposed to requite
my father's manifold kindness by an early consign-
ment of choice cigars and preserved ortolans, which
never presented themselves. Nor did we expect
them.

The dramatic bias of young Byron betrayed itself
at a very precocious age. He used, almost as a
schoolboy at St. Peter's, to compose scenes, and,
like a second Moliere, recite them before his father's
cook when Mr. and Mrs. Byron were out. From
the date of his father's departure for Hayti till
his marriage and settlement in Brompton, I saw
nothing of him. The last glimpse which I had
had was as a medical student with a practitioner
near Westbourne Grove.

It was of the latter individual that he quoted

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 135

the joke about the boiled rice on two successive
days for dinner, and his principal's exclamation :
'What! boiled rice again! How we do live!' It
was to Hepworth Dixon that they used to ascribe
the impatient rejection of ice-pudding at a dinner,
because he understood the waiter to offer a more
familiar dish.

Subsequently to Henry James Byron and myself
resuming our intercourse, in direct consequence of
our accidental meeting one day in 1858 near the
Queen's Elm, I probably saw more of him than
anyone till within a few years of his death, when
certain private circumstances produced an estrange-
ment. But during a long succession of years I
had the good fortune to enjoy his society and
conversation, and I affirm that, while I knew Byron,
I owed to him some of the pleasantest days of
my life, and that in losing him I lost that which
it was out of my power to replace.

The evenings which he and myself had
together at Brompton and in Doughty Street
proved to me his inexhaustible store of humour
and fun, and that his productions for the stage
and the press were very inferior to his real powers
of talk and aptitude for repartee. His remarks
and his anecdotes, unlike those of duller men, were

j 3 6 FOURTH GENERATION

diverting and racy without being coarse ; and I
believe that if his training had been better, and
his mind more balanced, he might have shone in
the most brilliant society. The lax and corrupt
school into which he was brought by his choice
of a dramatic and theatrical career exercised the
most pernicious influence on a not very staunch
character. The environments of the theatres and
the seductions of the green-room sapped his morals
and his health.

At Doughty Street I met Sothern and his wife,
Mrs. Charles Mathews, Edward and Albert Levi,
Arthur Sketchley, Tom Robertson, Marie Wilton,
Bancroft, and many others. It was the house
associated with Byron's most prosperous period
and with his unhappy downfall through the Liver-
pool speculation. The Levis were the sons of
J, M. Levi, who was at one time a printer in
Fleet Street. He published a sixpenny series of
Tales, including Joan of Naples, for which he
paid my father as the translator j IDS. I
recollect Mr. Levi handing me the sum on my
father's account, and I likewise call to mind a
small trait of the same gentleman when he was
proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, namely, his>
aversion to tautology. He must have emphasized

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 137

this sentiment to lead Byron to mention it to me.
The Levis were long on the most cordial terms
with my friend.

While Byron, Arthur Sketchley, and myself were
once at early dinner, an area sneak found his way
to the kitchen window, and made off with the
silver teapot and some spoons. It was very droll
to watch Byron, with his tall, slim figure, and
George Rose (Sketchley's real name), a very
Falstaff, pursuing the thief into the neighbouring
square, and picking up the spoons, which the
fellow dropped one by one, to enable him to
secure the teapot, at all events. But he was
overtaken.

Byron's earliest acknowledged theatrical flame
was the accomplished lady once known far and
wide as Miss Woolgar. It was a lad's fancy for
a woman considerably his senior, and the passion,
such as it was, was quenched by the mortifying
discovery that his goddess was in reality a married
person playing under her maiden name in fact,
that she was the wife of Alfred Mellon.

Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft were architects of their
own fortune. He was a provincial actor, whom
Byron took up, and brought from Liverpool to
the Prince of Wales's Theatre, formerly the Queens

138 FOURTH GENERATION

Dusthole, when it was first opened under the joint
management of Byron and Marie Wilton. Bancroft,
although barely tolerable in private life as I saw
him on his first settlement in London, made a very
gentlemanly and careful performer on the boards.

Marie Wilton, I heard from Byron, who was very
intimate with her through their theatrical companion-
ship, and called her indifferently Marie and Wilton,
was the daughter of strolling players. I knew
nothing of her till through his association with
the Strand Theatre I saw her in his burlesques,
where she was very much applauded for her success
in the breakdowns. I recollect her retrousst nose,
her very curtailed petticoats, and her saucy carriage.
Quantum mutata ! They tell me she is now a
gravde dame living in a fashionable square, and
plays now and then ' to oblige.'

Robertson, author of several well-known Society
pieces, attracted notice as a playwright at last ; but
his fortunes had been sadly checkered, and his
success came too late to be of much service to him.
When his comedy of Ours was in course of perform-
ance at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, the name
was posted up all over the neighbourhood, and some
Frenchmen went, thinking it was an exhibition of
bears.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 139

When Byron and I have been together talking
over things, putting matters in queer lights, or doing
a little quiet scandal about common acquaintance,
we have sometimes become so convulsed with
laughter that we have been scarcely able to keep
our feet. It was a favourite trick to pace up and
down, the room while we talked, and often he took
one side and I the other. He was thoroughly
honourable, though extravagant and unbusinesslike.
When his affairs were on the drift, and he was short
of money, I offered to lend him a considerable sum ;
but he declined to take it, not being certain whether
he should have it in his power to repay me.

He proposed as a motto for the booking-office at
the Prince of Wales's, l So much for Booking 'rn.'

My old friend was a lover of good things in a
convivial sense as well as otherwise, and keenly-
enjoyed his meals when there was anything to his
liking on the table. I once impudently suggested
that the family motto, instead of Crede Byron, should
be Greedy Byron.

Byron amused me by his description of his inter-
views with old Mr. Swanborough, who was stone deaf.
The two sat at opposite sides of a table, and Byron,
having provided himself with a series of small slips
of paper, had to do his part of the conversation by

j 4 o FOURTH GENERATION

writing down what he had to say, and passing the
memorandum over to the manager. Swanborough
read it, and replied orally ; but sometimes, when the
topic under discussion involved a serious divergence
of opinion, the singular medley of written and verbal
dialogue became more and more animated, till the
dramatist exhausted his stock of material and his
companion grew breathless with excitement and
indignant gesticulation. Byron, however, main-
tained his amicable relations with the Strand during
many years, and it was the scene of some of his
earliest successes.

He was mentioning one clay at dinner that he
had met the manager of the Surrey Theatre, This
was when his pieces were commanding high figures,
or bringing him in a splendid royalty. The manager
said that he should be very happy to arrange for
something. . : ' Well, it's only a question of
price. How much do you give?' 'Well,' replied
Manager, ' I have given ^5.' B. : ' Oh, don't let
me rob you of all that money, my boy/

I was told a story about a barn-stormer who used
to make the round of the out-of-the-way Scotish
towns and play the regular pieces, not forgetting
Hamkt. He and his company were so successful
that they ventured at last to raise the tariff from

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 141

threepence to sixpence, when the Prince of Denmark
was put upon the stage. The audience was, of
course, rather dissatisfied and mutinous, and after
the performance, says Sandy to Jock : * Wall, an*
what did ye think of it ?' * Wall/ says Jock, 4 it
war pratty well, but war not a saxpenny Hamlet"

Someone having been sent up into the gallery of a
theatre where Nelly Farren was playing in C^t,pid
and Psyche, to test the acoustic properties of the
building for her voice, heard two men debating the
signification of the title of the piece and the proper
mode of pronouncing the name ; one said to the
other : * It's Cupid and Zych, you know ; you must
pronounce it like z in zinc.'

As in the case of Henry Holl and so many others,
the special characteristics of Byron were purely
personal. He was in a certain sense the first and
the last of his family. He had a daughter, however,
who married Major Seton. She was telling me one
day that the present Lord Byron called at Colonel
Byron's while she was staying there to ask the
Colonel or one of his sisters what relation he was to
the poet of the same name, in case he should be
questioned.

Byron and myself happened to bring out a novel
concurrently. I forger the title of his, and that of

J4 2 FOURTH GENERATION

mine is not worth preserving. It was in 1865.

We both knew the editor of the very well, and

I applied to that gentleman for leave to review my
friend's book, and he to review mine. We were
mutually encomiastic too much so, I fear. Gentle
reader, if you have not yet printed anything, be sure,
before you do, that you engage your critics, and see
that they are perfect in their parts. Of course, they
must all be friendly, but their friendliness has to be
adroitly varied, and even to be thinly sprinkled
with guarded qualification, for that evinces a dis-
criminating vein and the hand of a man whom money
will not buy. I am rather proud to be able to say
that this was the sole occasion on which I thus
compromised myself

When Byron brought out his Robinson Crusoe, he
had a little difficulty with one of the lady artistes^
Miss Sophia Larkin, because the latter had a part
assigned to her (that of the mariner of York himself)
which required her investiture in tights, and the fair
performer was not too slight in figure. There was
some fun over the matter at the time, but Miss
Larkin pulled through the tights and the part.
The author was immensely tickled, however, when
his buxom Crusoe presented herself for approval.

The remarkable gauckeries about persons who

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 143

were till yesterday, so to speak, among us, only
become amusing from their preposterous character.
The son of a publisher in Fleet Street, who had
something to do with Byron's literary productions,
when 1 asked him whether he had not frequently
seen him at his father's place of business, promptly
replied : ' Yes ; he wrote the School for Scandal'

One of the last sayings recorded of him was when
Hollingshead and one or two others were with him
at the last, and John Col man the actor asked him
if he was not the first Hamlet he ever saw. c No/
replied Byron, leaning on his arm in bed, ' you
mistook me, John ; I said you were the worst"

I used now and then to venture at Byron's table
to edge in something of my own. When the
advertisements of a now wellnigh forgotten public
character were placarded everywhere in the London
thoroughfares, I remarked that those were the Woodin
walls of old England. Woodin was for some time
the rage. He was to be seen at the Hall in King
William Street, Strand, where the Christy Minstrels
once performed, and where Toole's Theatre now
stands.

Neighbours of the Byrons that is, of H. J.
Byron's parents in the region bordering on Sloane
Square, and equally a family which my father knew

i 44 FOURTH GENERATION

through his association with the press, were the
McCabes. They were Irish folks and Romanists,
and had literary evenings, at which my father was
occasionally present. He would say that if he got
McCabe on a theological point, and fancied that he
had him in a corner, his opponent would always slip
somehow between his legs. He used to speak of
this gentleman as Father McCabe or as the Patriarch
of Pimlico. Many years after McCabes retirement
to Ireland, he wrote to me personally to solicit my
aid in obtaining a publisher for a monograph which
he had written on the Romano- British Emperor
Carausius The work was scholarly enough, but
the topic was not judged to be saleable.

Two names intimately identified with our Bromp-
ton, and indeed Chelsea, life are those of
Blanchard and Keymer, families connected by
marriage. I have, I find, mentioned both else-
where,* and incidentally I refer in these pages to
Blanchard and his daughter, wife of Blanchard
Jerrold. Keymer lived at Kennington, opposite
the Common, and subsequently at Peckham Rye,
and under his hospitable roof assembled Kenny
Meadows, James Hannay, F. G. Stephens, whom
I so vividly remember in his studio at Lupus
* Letters of Charles Lamb, 1886, ii. 290, 433.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY i 45

Street, Pimlico, and many other literary men and
artists.

Our host's eldest daughter is best known as the
late Mrs. Charles Heaton, and as Editor of Cunning-
ham's Lives of the Painters.

Meadows was a desperate stay-maker. He liked
his glass perhaps a little too well, and he had no
notion of hours. The Keymers often went to bed,
and left their guest to finish the bottle and find his
way out. Meadows was a fair designer, but had a
very poor idea of drawing.

There are many who look upon Rowland's
Odonto and Macassar Oil as mere trade terms, but
Rowland and his wife lived somewhere about Forest
Hill, and were, at any rate, acquainted with the
Keymers. He was a small man and she a large
lady. One night there was an alarm of thieves, and
the two got out of bed and proceeded downstairs to
reconnoitre, she leading the way, and little Rowland
bringing up the rear with the hem of her night-dress
in his hand. So the scene was described to me at
the time, and it must have been one calculated to
disconcert the apprehended invaders.

One of Charles Lamb's latest contributions to a
particular class of literature was written in Keymer's
album.

VOL. ii. 29

146 FOURTH GENERA TION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

At that time, what a neighbourhood it was ! All
the environs were rural ; they had not been
socialized ; Dulwich Wood had not been desecrated.
Halliwell-Phillipps lived at Brixton Rise, Ruskin
at Denmark Hill. City merchants chose' these
southern suburbs for their residences, as they had
the northern a generation earlier.

CHAPTER VII.

The old actors at Brompton John Reeve Liston The Keeleys
Mrs. Chatterton Some account of Mr. and Mrs. Keeley
The Farrens Characters played by old Mr. Farren Contre-
temps at a dinner-party at Thurloe Place Durrant Cooper,
F.S.A. His canards One about the Queen and Prince
Albert William Farren the younger Sir Henry Irving
Webster and Harley Anecdotes of both Buckstone As an
actor The short-petticoat movement Madame Vestris and
Miss Priscilla Horton Menken's Mazeppa Mrs. Fitzwilliam
The Spanish Dancers Behind the scenes at Jerrold's
benefit Charles Mathews and his second wife Edward
Wright Paul Bedford The Adelphi melodrama The more
modern pantomime A daily incident at Old Brompton
The French Plays and Ethiopian Serenaders at the St James's
The Kenneys The Baron de Merger His father and
Napoleon I. My visit to the Chateau of Plessis-Barbe,
near Tours De Merger and the Third Empire My first
acquaintance with the illustrated French literature Dumas
Henri Miirger's Scenes de la Vie Boheme Compared with
Du Maurier's Trilby Saxe Bannister His Life of Paterson,
founder of the Bank of England Mrs. Astor at Old Bromp-
ton Her relationship to the Reynells John Jacob Astor
Origin of his fortune.

AMONG the actors who formerly made Old Brompton
their home from its rural attractions, which recom-
mended it to them, or otherwise, was John Reeve,

i 4 8 FOURTH GENERATION

who lived in Brompton Row, and whom a few still
surviving may remember at the Adelphi in the
Commissariat ; Liston, who had one of the smaller
houses, afterward for years in Chancery, in St.
George's Terrace, opposite Hyde Park ; Mr. and
Mrs. Keeley, the Buckstones, the Farrens, Mathews
the younger, who had a place in large grounds in
Gore Lane, and Edward Wright. Reeve, who
died in 1838, lies in Brompton churchyard. I have
noted above the connection of Mrs. Chatterton with
Brompton Square after her marriage to Place, the
literary tailor.

The Earl of Carlisle, whose name is associated
with the Russell, Grey, and Minto set, is said to-
have resembled Liston ; they were both remarkable
for their plainness.

The Keeleys were familiar figures in Brompton
in my boyhood, and Mrs. Keeley still survives.
The last time I met them was in Brompton Row,
and my impression was that they were even then
it is fifty years ago pretty old. But young people
have that sort of notion about their seniors, where
the difference is sometimes not so very considerable.
This distinguished couple belonged to an epoch
which can never return or be so much as realized
by those who did not form part of it either

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 149

personally or by direct tradition. Such as had the
privilege of intimacy with Keeley or his wife might
listen to their account of the stage as they found
it as it was ivhen Hazlitt wrote. What have we
now but a shrunk volume of capacity spread over
an infinitely ampler superficies ?

I have personally known three generations of
Farren. The original William Farren lived, when
I first remember him, in Brompton Square. He
was a man of the most gentlemanly appearance and
address, and his wife was a handsome and showy
woman. My father, when he lived at Thurloe
Place, got into trouble by asking some rather
starchy people to meet them at dinner. Farren
excelled in old men's parts. I saw him in Grand-
father Whitehead, the character he was playing at
the Strand when he was seized with a fit.

His son Henry, who died young, took the same
sort of business, when he was hardly more than
twenty. His other son William, who cut a sorry
figure when he first came on the boards, became
eventually a finished and delightful artist.

My uncle Reynell told me that the elder Farren
was considered very fine as Dr. Primrose in the
Vicar of Wakefield.

It was Durrant Cooper, the Sussex antiquary,

150 FOURTH GENERATION

and his amiable sister, who met the Farrens on
the occasion just alluded to, and the former was
scandalized at having to sit down at table, or at
his sister having to do so, with well, it was
a case, as rumour went, of Bonaparte and Josephine,
according to Talleyrand's mot, over again, and per-
haps with no better foundation, Farren and his
wife were a remarkably majestic couple. It is more
than fifty years since, yet I retain their appearance
distinctly. Child as I was, I thought the Coopers
too squeamish ; perhaps it was because my parents
did so.

Cooper had been solicitor to the Reform Club,
but proved too porous. He was a lamentable
chatterbox, and some of his canards were excruci-
ating, but a thoroughly good-hearted fellow and an
excellent local archaeologist. One of Cooper's tales
for the Marines was about the late Prince Consort.
He made out that the Queen, when Her Majesty
found her husband stopping out late rather frequently,
put her royal foot down, and declared that she would
not permit him to go so often to that Mr. Cooper's
in Bloomsbury.

William Farren the younger, as we used to call
him, succeeded in keeping or recovering some of
the property left by his father, and latterly per-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 151

formed only very occasionally, or for benefits. He
formed a plan one autumn for revisiting Italy, when
an offer or proposal arrived from one of the theatres,
inviting him to take his favourite part in Holcroft's
Road to Ruin. He wrote back, asking, as his
daughter told me, exorbitant terms, in the hope
that the manager might decline, and he might go
abroad. But I believe that he was disappointed.

Farren resembled, in the extraordinary change
which occurred in the public estimation of his power
and value as an actor, a second distinguished
theatrical character of our time, Sir Henry Irving r
than whom any one more desperately hopeless at
the outset probably never trod the stage. But the
comparison ends with the broad circumstances ; for
Farren has risen to his present position by un-
assisted ability and genius, while Irving seems to
have owed his triumph to collateral auspices and the
happy (not new) idea of making his pieces spectacu-
larly attractive and accurate accurate, so far as his
knowledge permits. Sir H. Irving does not seem
to be 1 very well advised in his presentments, which
are, of course, useful to make out any shortcomings
in strict dramatic art. The popular ideas, or want
of ideas, -on certain theatrical subjects may answer
for a Cdvent Garden or Drury Lane pantomime ;

152 FOURTH GENERATION

but when a manager aspires to classical propriety,
we expect something rather better.

Benjamin Webster and John Harley were both
inhabitants of Bell and Horns Lane. The former
had a house in that portion which was demolished
to widen the thoroughfare opposite the Kensington
Museum. Harley lived in one lower down on ;he
same side of the way, facing the site of Thurloe
Square. He had quitted the stage before my time,
but I recollect Webster both at the Adelphi and
Haymarket. He was in his true element in melo-
drama, and might have done infinitely better if he
had never deserted his old quarters in the Strand.
I retain in my mind a trivial incident about Harley,
which must be half a century old. Some street
musicians played before his house, to his infinite
annoyance, and when they asked the servant for a
douceur, Harley desired to see them personally.
They were not pleased when he, in response to
their appeal, explained his idea that they had come
to apologize.

When Webster brought out Monte Cristo at the
Adelphi, it was thought, as his daughter had married
Mr. Edward Levi, son of the proprietor of the
Daily Telegraph, that a good lift might be fairly
looked for in that quarter. Sala was sent to notice

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 153

it, and the critique was anxiously expected. The
next morning a most elaborate and characteristic
account of Dumas, pere et fits, their various works,
their careers, and so forth, running to two or three
columns, appeared in the Telegraph, and at the very
end there was a casual announcement that Mr.
Webster had recently produced a drama on the
romance of Monte Cristo.

Webster was a liberal, kind-hearted man. When
Dion Boucicault was once on the eve of starting
for America, he went to him, and asked him to
advance him ^100 on a manuscript play he brought
with him. Webster did so, and did not discover,
till his good friend had gone, that only the title-leaf
was filled in.

This reminds me once more of Byron, who, being
very behindhand with some piece he had undertaken
to write for one of the theatres, was waited on by the
lessee. The latter complaining of delay, H. J. B.
assured him that he had begun the production, and
shewed him a sheet of paper on which was written
Act /., Scene i.

Webster died poor, yet it used to be averred that
at more than one period of his career he might have
retired with an ample fortune.

In a note from Buckstone to my father he men-

154 FOURTH GENERATION

tibns the Crimson Hermit as a piece which the
latter had recommended to his notice. The title is
suggestive of the Coburg or the Surrey, or even of
the meridian of Shoreditch. It was beyond doubt
abundantly sensational and sanguinary perhaps
rather too much so for the Theatre Royal, Hay-
market.

It must have struck many besides myself that the
parts in which Buckstone appeared were mere noms
de theatre. His acting was essentially personal.
He performed under a variety of designations, but
it was always Buckstone under an alias : the same
voice, the same gestures, the same mannerism. He
never threw himself into a part, or realized to the
spectators any character but his own ; and if he is
remembered as having excelled in anything, I take
it to be the case that it was a creation which fairly
suited his style, and in which he could not perpe-
trate any serious impropriety.

The short-skirt movement in the ballet and ex-
travaganza under the auspices of Vestris at the
Lyceum, and during Buckstone's management at the
Haymarket in Miss Priscilla Horton's palmy days,
made considerable progress just before the period
when the burlesque came so much into vogue, with
its supremely offensive and silly impersonations of

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 155

female characters by men. The abridged petticoats
of the ladies proceeded, no doubt, to an intolerable
pitch ; and they tried, as Byron said, to outstrip
one another. Speaking of Menken, he remarked
that her costume began too late, and ended too
soon, and with more particular reference to his
Mazeppa, he calculated her toilet in the first act
at thousands, and in the third, where she is lashed
to the wild steed of the desert, at 4|d.

The Spanish Dancers also made their d^but at
the Hay market about forty years since, and I, as a
mere spectator, was very agreeably impressed by
their graceful and restrained action, shewing the
compatibility of this class of art with decorum.

Buckstone was very deaf, and his son, who lived
under the same roof with him in Brompton Square,
inherited the infirmity. Such as were familiar with
the men will appreciate the oddity of the two Buck-
stones conversing and shouting at each other, each
in turn with his hand to his ear to catch what the
other said. The younger Buckstone had at one
time an engagement under his father at the Hay-
market.

I was once taken by my father to Richmond
Lodge, Putney, where Mrs. Fitzwilliam lived under
Buckstone's protection. It was a low-pitched

156 FOURTH GENERATION

bungalow house, lying back from the road, just
before you came to the Arab Boy ; it has now been
pulled down to make room for a row of modern
buildings of the common stereotyped character.

The very first time I was behind the scenes at
any theatre was at the performance for Jerrold's
benefit at the Olympic, when I saw Mrs. Fitz-
william and Madame Vestris. I went behind once
or twice during Byron's management of the Prince
of Wales's ; but I found the practice rather dis-
illusionizing. There was, of course, a wonderful
contrast between what Madame Vestris had been,
and what she became in old age. Byron went to
see her toward the last at the house called Holcrofts
at Fulham, and found her darning Charles Mathews's
stockings.

They were both mournfully extravagant creatures,
and had run through a fortune or two. The
second Mrs. Mathews, whom I met at Doughty
Street, tried hard to induce her husband to economize.
The very last time I saw him was in Sotheran's
shop in the Strand. He was as jaunty as could be,
with his cigar in his mouth and the old gay swagger ;
it cannot have been long before his death.

A near neighbour of my uncle Reynell, while he
was in Brompton Vale, was Edward Wright, the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 157

eminent Adelphi comedian, whose name used to be
so much coupled with that of Paul Bedford. The
Wrights and Reynells became very intimate, and
the friendship even survived* the lifetime of Wright
himself. He afterward removed to Merton Villa
at Chelsea, and I have often seen him standing at
the corner, in the King's Road, waiting for the
omnibus. During a length of years he was para-
mount at the Adelphi, and excelled in farce and
melodrama. Bedford and he generally played to-
gether, and Wright saved money, which partly dis-
appeared in bricks and mortar (his besetting sin)
and partly through legal channels.

Wright belonged to the school of Liston, Robson,
Toole, and Buckstone, but was unlike them all. He
was a genuine personality, and could hold the
Adelphi audience in the hollow of his hand, so to
speak. He had only to shew half his droll face,
and the house was convulsed. Bedford and he.
Celeste and Webster, went far to make the Adelphi
what it was in the days of the I V 'reck Ashore and
the Green B^lshes.

Wallack is not much remembered by the play-
goers of our day ; but in the once favourite melo-
drama of Don C4sar de Bazan, when he supported
the chief part, he was thought unsurpassed. I have

1S 8 FOURTH GENERATION

seen him more than once at the Haymarket in that
piece, and vividly retain the song, accompanied by
the guitar, where the disguised brigand reveals him-
self to the terrified heroine.

They at present produce pantomimes year by year
at the houses with names which are little more than
clothes-pegs. Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Aladdin,
Robinson Crusoe, All Baba, are mere noms de guerre.
There is scarcely any of the true comic element
left ; they are pieces of spectacular incongruity,
setting at defiance all known or accepted facts.
But these meretricious shows seem to> appeal suc-
cessfully to uncritical sightseers. The earliest thing
of the kind I can call to mind was at Covent Garden.
It was Robinson Crusoe, where the curtain rose to
a view of the ship, occupying the whole of the stage,
and the hero the only person seen. The serious
piece of the evening was Balfe's Bohemian Girl.

Many of these theatrical celebrities were, we thus
see, associated with Old Brompton, Kensington, or
Chelsea, and it was an every-day occurrence to meet
some of them walking to town in the forenoon on
their way to rehearsal, or in the sixpenny omnibus
proceeding to the business of the evening. Penny
fares and morning performances were yet to come.
I am also speaking of a period when theatres

OF A LITERARY FAMILY

were few, and when Sadler's Wells was very little
frequented by West-Enders, while the Theatre
Royal, Shoreditch, might have as well been in
Tasmania. But the Adelphi, Surrey, and Astley's
were great houses for certain specialities.

I accompanied my father as a boy to see at
St. James's Theatre two very dissimilar entertain-
ments, the French Plays, where Lablache, Lemaitre,
Achard, Cartigny, and other artists, made their first
appearance before a London audience, and the
Ethiopian Screnaders, the prototype of Christy s
Minstrels.

Comparatively limited, however, as the theatres
were in number, some of them were often let,
faute de miezix, for conjuring and other miscellaneous
purposes. M. Philippe, at the St. James's, was the
first conjurer I ever saw.

When we were in Brompton, either at Alfred
or Prospect Place, the Kenneys lived in South
Strjeet, Alexander Square. The name and fame
of Kenney are at the present moment chiefly
identified with his Sweethearts and Wives. He
had married the widow of Holcroft, and was a
dramatist almost jure itxoris. When I saw him
he was sadly afflicted, and the household was
broken up by his death. All the members of the

160 FOURTH GENERATION

family, including Mrs. Kenney, were delightful
associates, and accomplished men and women.

James, the eldest son, was in the Post-Office,
and was a short, dark man, very pleasant and
full of anecdote, like his mother, but strangely
choleric. He had lodgings in an upper story
in the Strand at one time, and owing to some
squabble over the tea-table threw a quartern loaf
out of the window on to the hat of a passer-by.
His younger brother, Charles, was a mercurial,
hilarious fellow, who carried the garfon into middle
life. He used to prepare librettos for the operas,
and pretty indifferent they were.

All the Kenneys shone in a particular sort of
conversation ; they had mixed in very good society,
and in their company there was very slight risk
of not being entertained. They were all rather
prone to hyperbole, and the odd part was that
each would put you on your guard as to the
propensity of the rest in this direction.

One of Mrs. Kenney 's daughters by Holcroft
married the Baron de Merger, of Plessis Barbe,
near Tours, and her brother was settled at' Tours
itself as a civil engineer. I spent some time at
the Mergers' in 1855 or thereabout, and I laid the
opening scene of the ballad of the Barous Daughter

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 161

at the point where the bridge spans the Loire
by the city.

De Merger's father had been in the service of
the great Napoleon, and had been invited by him
to become one of his aides-de-camp, but he declined.
His son used to tell me how the Emperor never
met the elder Merger without saying to him : * Ah,
M. Merger, why would you not become my aide-
de-camp ?'

My host spoke very fair English. I suppose
that it was hot, thirsty weather when I was at
the chateau, but I have in my remembrance the
Baron's disinterested counsel to me on sanitary
grounds never to swallow down too much claret,
but to moisten the lips and throat with it. I had
contracted the tertian ague during a previous visit
to the Netherlands, and had a recurrence of it
here. De Merger cured me with a tasteless coffee-
coloured tisane, in which the leading ingredient was
the inner bark of the elm.

De Merger was in politics a Rouge, and belonged
to a very advanced political club at Tours, to which
he took me one evening, and where I was some-
what uneasy, lest the police should pay us a visit.
It was the dawn of the Third Empire. In fact,
he himself was rather alarmed one day when a

VOL. n. 30

162 FOURTH GENERATION

small detachment of cavalry galloped over the
bridge of the moat, and drew up in front of the
house. He imagined that the soldiers might have
instructions to arrest him as a malcontent. It turned
out, however, that they had merely come to solicit
a boire.

It was while I was in the South of France that
I first made an acquaintance with the illustrated
French literature of the Dumas type and period.
It was early in the fifties. Perhaps the most
interesting and remarkable books were Monte
Cristo and Henri Miirger's Scenes de la Vie Bohcme,
1851, the former, of course, still well remembered,
but Miirger's admirable book only a few years ago
made familiar to the modern English reader in a
translation issued by the late Henry Vizetelly.

The nearest approach to it that we have is Mr.
Du Maurier's Trilby, where his own student life
and that of some of his friends are evidently
portrayed. I think that I could fill in the names.
Trilby herself is an idealized model, and the English
writer's altogether appears to be a translation and
not a very good one of the French * ensemble/
the expression used when a woman poses for the
whole figure.

A daughter of Mrs. Kenney by her final husband

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 163

married rather late in life Cox, proprietor of the
British Gallery in Pall Mall. This person was
very intimate with Joseph Gillott, the Birmingham
pen-manufacturer, whose collection of paintings he
assisted to form. I believe thaty^, as Cox called
him, was largely instrumental in building up the
other's fortune. The contents of the British Gallery
were estimated by the owner at ; 100,000 ; but
when a day of adversity arrived, and the property
was sold, the public modified these figures to a
very serious extent.

There was another household of which we saw
some little about this time that of Mr. Saxe
Bannister, who wrote the Life of Pater son, founder
of the Bank of England. Bannister had been
.Attorney-General in one of our colonies, and was
a man with a grievance which, with Paterson and
teetotalism, absorbed his whole thought and con-
versation, and constituted, I believe, no inconsider-
able part of his estate. It was Paterson who
originated the Council of Trade and Plantations,
the prototype of the Board of Agriculture, which
Arthur Young, its other promoter, not improbably
conceived to be a novelty in our administrative
system.

I may also mention the widow of Astor, of the

1 64 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

Tottenham Court Road, the pianoforte-maker. She
lived, I have heard, in Brompton Crescent. One
of her daughters was the second wife of Mr. George
Reynell, my maternal great-uncle. The American
millionaire, John Jacob Astor, was a younger
brother of this one, who fitted him out when he
went to America to make, not seek, his fortune,
which was largely due to successful investments
in land in or near New York. Of this his sister-
in-law assured Mr. Reynell, when he once called
on her at Brompton. John Jacob Astor used to
send his nephews and nieces in England every
year handsome presents. Considering his vast
wealth, they were poor. Mrs. George Reynell
had only about ^300 a year of private income.

CHAPTER VIII.

Kensington A relic of St. Mary Abbot's Norland House and its
spring Former solitariness of the neighbourhood General
Fox Carl Engel The Bowmans Fulham Walham Green
and the vicinity Primaeval forest State of the roads between

Fulham and the adjacent places C Cottage Captain

Webb, the highwayman Specimens of our causeries at C

Cottage Anecdotes related by both of us of our professional
and other acquaintances Lock Sir Matthew Thompson
Brunei Cockburn George and Robert Stephenson
Thomas Brassey Lord Grimthorpe Some of my tales.

MY walks when I lived at Kensington (1862 to 1881)
as a householder on my own account, extended over
the whole region within a dozen miles or so, and
of course took in places in the immediate vicinity.
It may be worth noting, in reference to St. Mary
Abbot's, of which the grounds once probably ex-
tended to Addison Road, that during my residence
in the immediate neighbourhood an ancient silver
crucifix was dug up in one of the gardens on the
eastern side of the road; the relic was by possi-
bility the property of one of the members of the
Abbey.

i66 FOURTH GENERATION

One of the earliest attempts to build on the high-
road to Uxbridge was on the site of Norland House,
for many years occupied by the Drummonds. It
was a very large structure, standing back from the
thoroughfare, and was celebrated for a spring, called
the Norland Spring, within the walls. This still
exists in a house in Norland Terrace. But at the
time that the original mansion stood, the whole
neighbourhood was perfectly countrified, and very
desolate. There were only a few dwellings dotted
here and there. The builder had not entered upon
the ground. No one had dreamed of Addison
Road and its surroundings. My uncle Reynell
recollected the spot when there was scarcely a house
there. I remember it a private thoroughfare with a
bar at the northern extremity, and not a break or
turning from end to end. General Charles Fox,
brother of Lord Holland, lived in a house on the
Uxbridge Road in large grounds taken out of
Holland Park. He had married Lady Mary Fitz-
clarence, one of the daughters of William IV. by
Mrs. Jordan ; and he was a noted coin-collector,
particularly of the Greek series. After his death
his cabinet was sold to the German Government
for ,23,000. Fox was a familiar figure in Addison
Road about 1860.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 167

Next door to us at Addison Road lived Carl
Engel, the eminent musical antiquary and expert.
He had married a sister of the late Sir William
Bowman the oculist. Bowman's daughter was a
somewhat studious maiden, and I used to see her
occasionally at Engel's. I remember that she spoke
to me of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a book of
which she had heard, and which she would like to
read. I lent it to her without reflection, and it was
returned to me with compliments and many thanks
too soon to admit the possibility of the girl having
read it. She had shown it to mamma. What
would Chaucer have thought of the works of fiction
which were not, I presume, judged unfit for Miss
Bowman's perusal, and which were either vapid or
meretricious? Her brother, whom I also saw at
Engel's, the latter always alluded to as 'the good
bo-oy ' the present Sir Paget Bowman, I appre-
hend. After his first wife's death Engel engaged
himself to a second lady, but on the eve of the
marriage hanged himself in a bedroom cupboard.

Fulham, like Brompton, was a quiet country
hamlet, apportioned between labourers' cottages ;
mansions of long standing and historical interest,
such as Moore Park and Fulham Park (both oblite-
rated), and Holcrofts, where Charles , Mathews

168 FOURTH GENERATION

latterly resided of course in style (also a thing
of the past) ; wide acres of arable and pasture ;
the village itself; and the old-fashioned moated
Palace, where the vernal glory of the scene on an
April day is worth the whole episcopal bench.

Walham and Parson's Greens, again, and Eel-
brook Common, mark the site of an extensive
primeval forest of which the vestiges were dis-
covered in forming the line of railway from Earl's
Court, and which was long sparingly covered with
buildings. This forest doubtless stretched from
the river-banks over the whole adjacent country ;
the subsoil below the alluvial formation was de-
scribed to me as resembling black soap ; and its
effect on vegetation was electrical

What a retrospect the imagination fills up behind
one of the sluggish rivulet meandering through the
dark unbroken wold to the Thames, and of Master
Piers of Fulham, that angler ages before Walton,
and Master Geoffrey Chaucer enjoying together a
spring morning's fishing or fowling, where now

The greater portion of the common at Walham
Green has been ruthlessly absorbed ; the erection of
a church was, as usual, the first act of spoliation.

It may be taken for granted that all the by-paths
and lanes connecting Fulham with Hammersmith

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 169

and Kensington were, half a century since, alike
lonely and insecure. The roads on the outskirts in
this as in other directions were infested by high-
waymen of various pretensions. In old C

Cottage, opposite the Bishop's Palace, while it re-
mained what its name imports, lived during some
time a Captain Webb, whose business called him
away after dusk. He used to saddle his horse
every evening, and sally forth in quest of booty.
He was of the race of Turpin and Macheath. He
haunted doubtless some locality at a measurable
distance from his headquarters. There was an
ample choice : Putney and Wimbledon, Hounslow
and Bagshot, and much of the route between these
points and home.

The evenings at C Cottage, Fulham not

Captain's Webb's, but a gentler entertainer s, who
had a share in the promotion of the North- Western,
Midland, and other railways have formed within
the last twenty years the opportunity of collecting
numerous notices of bygone and forgotten facts
about persons and places, with which the owner as
my by a long way senior was more or less intimately
conversant. He was educated at Burlington House,
Fulham, which has been already mentioned. His
earliest recollection is being taken on somebody's

170 FOURTH GENERATION

shoulder to see the procession at the coronation of
George IV.

My friend met with a cooper in Fulham who had

been Webb's servant at C Cottage as a youth,

and who remembered waiting on the company whom
his master occasionally invited to dinner. In these
cases the party usually broke up about midnight,
but, instead of going home, dispersed on their re-
spective beats in quest of plunder. It was like a
meet before the hunt. Webb lies in Fulham church-
yard.

The principal market-gardeners and florists in
Fulham were Osborn and the Bagleys. The latter
had two extensive plots of ground at Sand's End.
One of them was a great tomato-grower. Osborn
faced Elysium Villas, now meriting that name no
longer.

A. told me that he dined with Lock the engineer
the evening that the line from Vauxhall to Waterloo
was opened. It cost upwards of ^"800,000, on
which he understood that Lock took 5 per cent.

The most expensive piece of work on which he
himself was ever engaged was the Wolverhampton
and Walsall, the extent being only six and a half
miles, and the cost ,650,000.

He was mentioning on the same occasion that,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 171

when he was in full professional swing, if a ^10,000
job had been brought to him, he would have given
100 to have it taken away again, as these small
contracts often involved an actual loss.

The late Sir Matthew Thompson used to say to
him : ' When I am at Guisley, I am the squire ;
when I am at Derby, I am chairman of the Midland
Railway ; and when I am at Bradford, I am a
common brewer/

A. said that it was through Brunei asking him
to recommend a counsel for a great case which was
then impending in Parliament that the late Chief
Justice Cockburn obtained his first important brief.
Cockburn was then, curiously enough, in the Queen's
Bench not as a judge, but as a debtor for ^150, and
Brunei had to get him out before his services were
available.

My friend often saw him after that, and furnished
him with technical information, which enabled Cock-
burn to surprise witnesses by the amount of know-
ledge which he appeared to possess of the minutice
of engineering work. The old judge would call at
A.'s office either on his way to the Court or on his
return.

When Cockburn went down to Leicester as a
commissioner to inquire into the management of

172 FOURTH GENERATION

the Corporation, he spent a good deal of his time
at Mother Slack's, and if he was wanted, it was the
surest place to find him. It used to be alleged that
he drew up his report there. In his earlier pro-
fessional life a lady (not always the same) was often
to be observed walking up and down outside West-
minster Hall waiting for the learned counsel No
one probably could have related such a varied series
of bonnes-fortunes. To the country, which paid
him so well for his services, he proved himself grate-
ful by distributing his sinistral representatives of both
sexes pretty freely, when there was a berth at his
disposal or the conditional holder of one, as the case
might be. You took the place perhaps the place
and the lady, perhaps. Cockburn was a familiar
figure in the thoroughfares which he had to traverse
from the Court to his house : a small man, negligent
in his attire, and with his neckerchief as frequently
as not hind part before. But he was a great lawyer ;
some of his successors on the Bench have proved
themselves his inferiors in capacity, and his equals,
or nearly so, in less desirable respects.

Cockburn was very grateful to those who had
served him in early life. He was, like the present
Mr. Justice Hawkins, one of the party which accom-
panied A. in his shooting excursions.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 173

George Stephenson, even in his time, said that,
give him a clear and good road without fishings,
and he would make a train run a hundred miles an
hour. He had a poor opinion of canals, and declared
that they would all become in the end dry ditches.
A. observed to me, when I referred to the railway
journey between Manchester and Warrington over
Chat Moss, that the most striking thing was to
stand on the line a quarter of an hour before a
train came up, and feel the vibration arise and
gradually increase, as if the whole spongy mass had
one pulse and one centre of motion.

It was from Robert Stephenson that my friend
acquired the habit of leaving his throat open and
not wearing a comforter, which, as Stephenson said,
tended to render you susceptible to cold, especially
when, as in those days, and in both their cases, you had
to travel so constantly at all hours of the day and night.

Not long before Thomas Brassey's death, while
he was staying at Hastings, he sent for John
Stephenson, who had rendered him valuable service
in his undertakings as an assistant. When he
arrived, the old contractor was very kind in his
manner and kept him for some time in conversation ;
and when at last he left, Brassey pressed something
into his hand. It was a cheque for ,5,000.

i 74 FOURTH GENERATION

John Flabell, the contractor from the Black
Country, was selected to do the tunnelling on
the Brighton line, and had some 350 men under
him. These rough fellows rather scandalized the
then quiet district, and the local parson begged
Flabell to try and keep them in better order.
'And can't you get them to come to church?'
Flabell on the next Saturday pay-day bribed the
navvies with a promise of a pint each if they
came to church next day in their best; and they
not only came accordingly, but filled the building
before the rest of the congregation arrived. Flabell
and his lady were there, too. The other worshippers
presented themselves, saw no room, and went away
in a fume. Presently a loud tap was heard on
one of the windows, and a voice outside shouted :
' Gaffer, gaffer ; can't get in. Dorit forget the

pint ?

The printed evidence taken in railway bills before
Parliamentary committees occasionally offers rather
amusing features, and it is necessarily little known.
Lord Grimthorpe as Mr. Beckett- Denison was a
very noted figure in these matters and scenes in
the old days. His cross-examination of Sir Frederick
Bramwell, whose name is so much associated with
public business, arbitrations, and so forth, in one

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 175

instance, when Bramwell opposed the promoters
of a new northern line, was inimitable for its
dexterity. From posing as a personage of immense
practical experience in that class of enterprise, he
was by a series of cleverly-marshalled questions
whittled down at last to the solitary superintendence
of the West Bromwich Gas Works ; and when
Beckett - Denison had forced from his adversary
this admission, he said to him with exasperating
suavity : ' I think, Sir Frederick, we need not
detain you any longer.' Of course, I am relating
an incident which is now only historical.

Hawksley the engineer, being under examination
in some case by Lord Grimthorpe, was very decided
in his replies, and Grimthorpe observed to him :
' You appear, Mr. Hawksley, to have formed very
definite opinions about most things.' The other
assenting, Beckett-Denison added : ' And pray tell
us, are there any points on which you have not
arrived at a conclusion ?' ' Why, yes/ returned
Hawksley ; ' I can think of three.' ' What are
they?' Beckett-Denison inquired. * Wills, clocks,
and bells,' said Hawksley, referring to the other's
three failures. Had he lived to the present day, he
might have added to the list.

A. and myself knew in common the two Kennies

176 FOURTH GENERATION

Sir John and his brother George. The original
Rennie died in 1821. He was an eminent book-
collector, and his library was sold some years
after his death. His son, Sir John, reserved the
first and third folios of Shakespear 1623-63. I
have a very lively remembrance of accompanying
the second Rennie (Sir John, not George) to
Antwerp when I was a youth, and his impatience
to disembark, which nearly led to my immersion
in the Scheldt It was just then thought that
I might try my hand at engineering, and I did
for eight months.

Anyone who only knows Antwerp as it is to-day
can have a very imperfect idea of what it was when
I landed there with Rennie in 1852.

If I was under no other obligations to the Rennies,
I owed to them this that I planted my foot on
that historical ground, that my eye fell on Antwerp,
before a thousand gables and a labyrinth of steep,
tortuous, dark streets or water-lanes were clean
swept away to meet the demands of commerce,
more tyrannous than Spaniard or Austrian.

Before I knew Antwerp well, I asked a Belgian
the way one day to the Cathedral. I inquired for
la Cathddrale. He regarded me with an opaque
stare. I repeated the question. He shook his

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 177

head. Presently a light began to break on his
honest countenance, and he lifted a finger signifi-
cantly. ' Ah !' he cried, ' Monsieur cherche la

Cath6-DRALE 1 J

In the Galerie du Rot, at Brussels, I was once
accosted by a person who spoke good English, and
demanded if he could serve me in his capacity as
cicerone to one of the places of resort for a certain
purpose in the City. He said that his fee was five
francs. 'Well, 1 I answered, 'and do you depend on
this employment?' * No/ said he. * What do you
do, then, in the day?' 'Why,' said he, 'I shew
gentlemen and ladies over St. Gudule.' This ran
on all fours with the female pluralist, who, C.
mentioned, in an island not a thousand miles from
Southampton was reputed to be the only suspicious
character, but who on Sundays acted as pew-opener
at her parish church.

I related to A. a singular little episode which
occurred while I was in the Netherlands under the
Kennies. I often spent from Saturday to Monday
under the hospitable roof of an English friend at
Yerseke, a few miles from Bath. We played at
whist one Saturday evening, and suddenly a card
was missed. We searched for it everywhere in
vain till by chance someone descried it stuck fast

VOL. ii. 31

178 FOURTH GENERATION

in my slipper. No effort or ingenuity of mine
could have placed it there.

Henry Wright, my host, who afterward married
a daughter of the second Duke of Wellington and
became secretary to the Duke of Sutherland, was
a low-built man about five-and-twenty, and was
extraordinarily supple and agile. I have seen him
clear eighteen feet on the level with a very short
run, and when we were alone at Yerseke he
would in the not very spacious drawing-room go
to one end, and spring over the loo-table with a
fresh pair of long wax candles in the centre of
it without extinguishing the lights.

I used to travel from Bath to Yerseke in a
top - heavy antediluvian coach, passing through
several villages on the way. In one, on either
side of the road, was an avenue of pear-trees,
with the ripe fruit hanging from the branches.
When I told A. of this, he concurred with me
in thinking that if it had been in England the
public would have picked the pears to prove their
social and political equality.

My lodgings at Bath faced the chapel. I re-
counted to A. a petty incident which I witnessed
one day as I looked out of my window. A small
procession, headed by a man and a woman, came

OF A LITERARY FAMILY r79

up and entered the chapel. I asked my landlady
what they were going to do. To be married.
Well, they had lived together twenty years, these
two Hollanders, just to see how they suited each
other before they passed the probationary stage.

Among my associates on the polders, which
Rennie engaged to enclose and reclaim, were
Mr. Winder and Heer Miiller, the last a most
gentlemanly and agreeable Hollander, who spoke
broken English, with a very pretty and very French
wife. I was once with him on the river (that is,
the Scheldt) in a boat, and seeing how inveterately
he smoked, I naturally asked him whether he was
very fond of it. 'Yes/ was his answer, ' for it
do make me dink/ At a dinner given by Winder
to the Dutch officers of the small garrison at Bath,
he, in responding to the toast of his absent wife's
health, declared that he loved her better than his
life; but he put life in the wrong gender. The
two old women with whom I lodged in this place
remembered the visit of Napol6on and Maria
Louisa there more than forty years before.

Sub rosd, I fell in love at Bath (which they pro-
nounce Bats), or rather just outside it, with a maiden
of the country called Antje Dronkers, whose papa
pursued some local industry ; but we were both

i8o FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

persons unius lingua, and this kept the flame low,
I do not recollect any tears.

But I told A. that I did recollect crying, because
I had sent to my father for a little pecuniary aid,
my salary being modest, and he had remitted half a
crown, which was all he could afford, he wrote. I
felt ashamed of myself that I should not have been
more thoughtful than to ask for the money, and I
tried to earn forgiveness some time afterward, when
I had saved enough, by purchasing a scent- bottle,
which I took to the captain of one of the steam-
boats plying between London and Antwerp, and
asked him to deliver it to my mother at Chelsea,
which he did.

I put it to A. whether such reminiscences were
not prouder and sweeter than fame or wealth, and
he said that he thought so. He was much my
senior, but his mother was constantly on his lips.

A., as a former large employer of labour, appre-
ciated my relation of a small experience, when I
was last in Rouen. I saw a man sauntering, as
I was, up a street, pipe in mouth, and took him
for a fellow-traveller. He turned out to be a
Londoner, who had come there in search of work,
and wanted to know if I could recommend him.

CHAPTER IX.

Fulham cauteries (continued) Earnshaw the chronometer-maker
Tom Sayers the pugilist Watch-house in Marylebone Lane
Glyn the banker Laura Bell SkittlesThe Leicestershire
set The Bell at Leicester Captain Haymes Story of a
Bishop at Harrogate An adventure at York George Tom-
line Some account of him and his father The Paston
Letters Barrington the pickpocket A curious shop in
Seven Dials.

OF Thomas Earnshaw, the famous chronometer-
maker in Bloomsbury (the second of the name),
my friend was full of anecdotes. He possesses
a chronometer, which Earnshaw gave him. The
latter, a small man with a disproportionately large
head, and not remarkable for the elegance either
of his dress or his diction, was a violent democrat
and something of a freethinker. He did not prosper
very much with the clerical authorities in his parish.
When the collector called for an Easter offering,
he feigned a difficulty in comprehending his mean-
ing. ' Easter offering ? What is that, sir ?' ' Why,
Mr. Earnshaw, what they give every year to the

1 82 FOURTH GENERATION

rector. It is usual, sir.' ' Is it, sir? Well, here is
sixpence to buy a length of rope for his reverence
to hang himself.' He once took part in a political
open-air meeting in Clerkenwell, and was very
fierce and trenchant in his language before he
addressed his audience. When he ascended the
platform, he was going to commence, when the
superintendent of police pulled him by the skirt
of his coat, and whispered to him, as a man whom
he knew and humoured : ' Mr. Earnshaw, pray
come down. If you speak, I must take you. J And
Earnshaw melted away among the crowd.

It must have been very funny when little
Earnshaw, having been chosen headborough for
his parish, called on the rector-archdeacon and
apprised him of his nomination by the votes of
his fellow-parishioners ; and, says he, ' I shall be
obliged, Mr. Archdeacon, if you will accompany
me to explain to me my outdoor duties, as I am
in a difficulty about them, and the law prescribes
that in such case I shall apply to you, sir.'

A. is of the Clcjckmakers' Gild. I told him
about the watch which Calvert had mentioned to
me (whether truly or not, God knows) as having
been made about 1680 for his ancestor Lord
Baltimore, proprietor of Maryland, by John Pepys,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 183

who, according to my informant, occupied seven
months in the work. He offered to shew it to me
if I would go up to his house in Camden Town.

We were speaking of Tom Sayers the pugilist.
He was a Staffordshire man, and a bricklayer by
trade. Brassey employed him to do some of the
two-arched bridge at Rugeley on the North Western.
He was a pleasant, civil little fellow, nimble on
his feet, and standing about five feet six ; but
the muscles of his arms were as hard as iron.

The old watch-house in Marylebone Lane, from
which the Charlies for that district used to turn
out every evening to the number of the days in
the year, was referred to. No man knew before-
hand to what beat he would be ordered, and the
practice was to bring the file to a halt, call a
name, and give him his round. This checked
collusion and bribery. There was a similar insti-
tution on Islington Green, at Knightsbridge, and
elsewhere.

Glyn the banker, speaking to A. about the
gain to the Bank of England and other similar
institutions from the loss of their notes, related
a curious instance of the ignorance of seamen in
money matters. Before Trafalgar, the crews had
been paid in Bank of England notes, the wages

1 84 FOURTH GENERATION

having accumulated and specie being scarce ; and
many of them, not having the opportunity, perhaps,
of spending their earnings in the free manner
usual with the profession, carried them down to
Portsmouth, but before embarking took the pre-
caution to exchange them for local Bank paper,
which, like the Scotchman of former days and
his i note, they thought better security than
that of the National establishment. The Portsea
Bank made a good haul over the transaction, as
so many of the holders of its paper went to the
bottom.

Thistlethwaite, who was a life-tenant of a large
property on the Paddington estate, and who
married Laura Bell, lived in Grosvenor Square.
A singular illustration of the universality of com-
missions or tips occurred one day. He had told
a man to send him round a horse on approval
or inspection, and the animal was duly trotted
up and down his side of the square, when

Captain , of the Guards, happened by the

merest accident to pass that way. He learned
what was going on, and his opinion was asked
by T. He was loud in his commendations ; but
unluckily T. differed and declined, and the Captain
in the Guards lost his percentage.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 185

It was a singular household. Thistlethwaite and
his wife, a very pretty little woman, did not see
much company, and did not agree very well.
Every evening there was a sort of state dinner
at eight, and a costly dessert, and only those two,
one at one extremity of a long table, and the
other at the other. The latest occasion on which
they came before the public was in a sort of petty
cause ctlebre, which T. won, arising from Laura's
extravagance and a huge bill sent in by a West
End firm for dress. Before she married, Laura
Bell had a house in Wilton Place, where she
received her gentlemen friends, like a modern

Aspasia or Phryne. The late Marquis of

was a noted figure there, and he often came on
his white pony. The pony was carried off one
day by a preconcerted arrangement, and was not
recovered without a handsome reward.

Skittles, who was of a similar type to Laura
Bell, was at one time in equal vogue, and used
to hold a sort of Iev6e at a West End Restaurant.
A noble Lord paid her homage in his younger
days, if he did not keep her. I have heard that
when his lordship told her that he had spent upon
her enough to build the Great Eastern, she replied
that she had spent upon him enough to float that

1 86 FOURTH GENERATION

ship. But poor Skittles came to grief, and died
in very bad circumstances indeed.

We spoke of the British earthworks so widely
spread over England, and sometimes buried in
underwood. I had just returned from Elsted in
Sussex. Outside the Fitzhall estate there, I told
A., I noticed some remains of this sort. They
lie unheeded, being so common. I added that,
as I was climbing up Trundle Hill by Goodwood
with Mr. Piggott, of Fitzhall, he informed me that
from the summit one could see almost all the
kingdoms of the earth. 'And are you/ I inquired,
' the gentleman who shews them ?'

I mentioned to A. a trait of the unphilosophical
and guileless simplicity of childhood. My son,
when he was a very little fellow, was with me
in a field in Wales, and we observed a cow gazing
at a dog, after the manner of her kind. The boy
looked up at me, and said with a dry gravity :
' Might be its mother/

The late Mr. Thomas Miles, land - agent of
Keyham, near Leicester, who probably knew more
of the concerns of the families for miles round than
any individual of his time, used to tell A. that
Jones, the parson at Ashby, would have a cloth
laid over the drawing-room carpet on Sundays

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 187

between services, and have a couple of cocks in
* to give them wind/ This was about 1830.

Mr. Miles, who was born at the close of the
last century, was one of those rare characters
who seem to possess in one sense neither progenitors
nor descendants. He left no actual representative
to fill his place. In his professional capacity he
naturally enjoyed a good deal of the confidence
of his clients, but Miles was regarded by all those
who employed him as a personal friend. He was
the never - failing resource when anyone was in
trouble or in straits, and many a delicate piece
of business outside his immediate or strict functions
it fell to his lot, in the course of a prolonged life,
to discharge.

A remarkably fine Stilton cheese received from
Leicester one Christmas (1889-90) led to a con-
versation on the subject; Stilton cheese, A. said,
had been made at Leicester, Coldnewton, and
other places near ever since he remembered.
They got their name from the circumstance that
their peculiar character was first noticed by the
frequenters of the Angel at Stilton, which is some
thirty-five miles from Leicester, and they became
known as Stilton cheeses. But they were never
made there. Of late years, since the practice of

T 88 FOURTH GENERATION

sending the milk away to London and other great
centres set in, they have lost their reputation,
and a cheese of the old type, full of butter, is an
absolute rarity. You have, in fact, to get it built
expressly for you.

Among the Leicestershire set in the forties was
Captain Haymes, formerly of the Guards, and a
Waterloo man. He lived to be ninety-four, and
hunted within six months of his death. He lived
at Great Glen, near Leicester, had a select circle
of intimates, a good cellar of port, and a knife
and fork for any of the set at three p.m. the
then usual hour for dinner in the middle classes
both in town and country. Haymes and his guests
drank water with their dinner, and port after, and
each man had his bin and his bottle. The butler
knew everybody's taste. Haymes deprecated too
much talk over the wine. He would say, if there
was a tendency to conversation in excess of what
he judged desirable : ' Gentlemen, I hope you like
your wine? Drink it, then. Don't talk, or you'll
get drunk.'

But Hanbury the brewer used to hold that no
man should be pronounced drunk if he could lie
in bed without being held there.

Haymes and Mrs. Packe-Reading owned between

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 189

them nearly the whole of the parish. The latter
conceived the notion of establishing schools for the
children, and sent Mr. Miles to Haymes to invite
him to join her. * What !' said the Waterloo man,
1 schools education ! Damn education ! There
was my old soldier who could neither read nor
write, and he attended to his business as my
body - servant. Now I have a fellow who is a
scholar forsooth ; why, he spends most of his time
in reading the paper and my letters/

Miss Reading, who married Charles William
Packe, M.P. for the southern division of Lincoln-
shire, kept her maiden name. Her husband took
the property with the proviso that there should
be no jointures or dowers made ; and as she had
a separate estate, it was arranged in that way.

Michael Bass the brewer told Packe that when
the Bank holiday had been instituted, the first
year's brewings of his firm alone increased by
^90,000, and had never receded.

Leicester itself in the early times was, as we
all know, an important coaching and hunting centre,
and I believe that the Bell was one of the leading
houses. A. remembered it before the place had
declined through the railways. Yet I stayed there
with him a few years since only on our way from

i go FOURTH GENERATION

H arrogate, and we found a capital cellar of port
or the remains of one, at least left by Boyer the
landlord, who had been chef at Badminton. They
let us have an excellent bottle of '47 for ios.,
which in London would have cost a guinea or
more. This is a class of possibility which shrinks
day by day.

Speaking of Harrogate, there was a Bishop at
one of the hotels. His lordship desired to insert
his address on a letter, and was dubious on a
point of orthography. ' Waiter, is there a w in
Harrogate?' 'Well, my lord, they do say as
the sexton's wife sometimes, my lord/ ' Answer
my question, sir. Is Harrogate spelled with or
without aw?' The prelate's dilemma was so far
excusable, for the Spa owed its name to its con-
tiguity to one of the gates of Knaresborough Forest,
of which the Stray is the last vestige.

A. and I strolled one day into a curiosity shop
in York. We saw nothing ; but the owner invited
us to accompany him to his other store, and we
followed him up a ladder into a chamber above.
The place was a model of disorder and congestion.
My eye caught sight of two large china figures
in the distance. ' What were they ?' ' Chelsea
old magnificent.' This owner evidently read in

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 191

our looks our desire to enjoy a closer inspection,
but the position was impregnable. We seemed
as if we might be customers. Isaac looked about
him, seized a pair of tongs, balanced his person
with much adroitness and agility, and the objects
were before us. A. turned to me. I shook my
head and muttered Tournai. We did not exchange
any more words, but while the tongs were absorbed
with the restoration of the magnificent old Chelsea
to its stronghold, we descended the ladder, pro-
fessing our acknowledgments, and emerged. I
asked A. if he felt more easy outside, and he
said that he did.

There was a settlement in the Bradgate estate
of the Earl of Stamford requiring the outlay of
i, ooo a year on plate, and at last this obligation
led to the grates in the reception and other rooms
being of silver.

Beriah Botfield, best known from his work on
the Cathedral Libraries of England, also produced
other books, especially the Stemmata Bottevilliana,
where he laboured to prove his consanguinity with
the Thyhnes of Longleat, more to his own satis-
faction, I have understood, than that of the late
Lord Bath ; and he formed a considerable library
at Decker Hill, Shifnal, dispersed after his death.

1 92 FOURTH GENERATION

In Brompton Cemetery is a tomb inscribed only
with the single word LAURA. There lies interred
a lady, to whom Botfield was romantically attached.

It was a settlement in this estate that a pipe
of port should be laid down every year ; but when
the property passed to Mr. Garnett, a clergyman
with a large family and an abstainer, he had the
proviso set aside by the Court of Chancery.

A. had always kept a good cellar of wine, and
we had frequent conversations on the subject. I
found that he was interested when I mentioned
that at the sale of Lord Peterborough's collection
in Portman Square in 1812, port of 1802 (only
ten years old) brought 903. a dozen ; while claret
of the same year was carried to 6 IDS. a dozen ;
and six bottles of malaga, said to be fifty years
old, reached 6 i is., or upward of a guinea each.

I took the occasion to notice that Athenseus,
in his DeipnosophistcB) lets us understand how the
ancient Greeks laid down their wine from three
to sixty years, according to its strength and character,
just as we do.

The coal-field in the Forest of Dean is one of
the latest geological deposits or formations of the
kind, said A. to me. In some of the coal which
used to be got thence there are traces of the fir-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY i 93

bark almost visible to the naked eye, but readily
distinguishable under the microscope.

Sir Roderick Murchison held that coal existed
everywhere. Yes, the possibilities of it, given suf-
ficient pressure. But a good deal never becomes
more than lignite, and that is probably what the
Dover seam is.

When the Earl of Lichfield's property was sold
at Shuckborough, George Robins was employed
as the auctioneer, and, from his usual fashion of
delivering an impressive preliminary address, some-
thing uncommon was expected on this occasion.
But George ascended the rostrum and said : ' My
name is George Robins. Porter, bring the first
lot/

After the death of Mr. George Tomline in 1889,
the portion of the famous Paston Correspondence,
which appears to have been lent out of the Royal
collection in the last century, and which Mr. Gairdner
was unable to trace, was discovered among the papers
at Orwell Park, near Ipswich. Considering the
circumstances connected with the matter, it is strange
that Mr. Gairdner should not have thought of
making an inquiry in that quarter ; but his edition
is not at all satisfactory, and I now hope to see a
new and complete one. From what one knows of

VOL. ii. 32

194 FOURTH GENERATION

George Tomline himself, I do not imagine that he
had any notion personally that he possessed these 1
manuscripts. He had no taste for literature.

Comparatively trifling incidents are so soon for-
gotten nowadays, that it may be hardly recollected
that it was Tomline who for years kept up a
controversy with the Government as to the right of
every British subject to have his bullion coined into
money at the Mint on demand.

Tomline 's father, Dr. George Pretty man, had
taken the name of Tomline on succession to the
property of Tomline, the Bristol sugar-baker. The
latter, it is traditionally said, made the acquaintance
of the prelate in a perfectly accidental manner
through seeing him in his park, where Tomline was,
as a stranger and a visitor to the locality, strolling
about. The Bishop at first sent someone to warn
the trespasser off, then, learning at the inn where
he stayed who he was, invited him to breakfast the
next morning, and finally put him up at the palace.
Tomline left him all his money about a million,
something like half of which his son lost in the
Felixstow railway scheme.

The unreserved portion of the effects of Tomline
was sold lately at Christie's and on the premises.
Mr. Miles of Keyham remembered well his father,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 195

the Bishop of Winchester, who had been tutor to
the younger Pitt. Through this connection Dr.
Tomline succeeded in obtaining a footing in nearly
all the Enclosure Acts, and particularly in Charn-
wood Forest and at Banbury. On his mother's side,
George Tomline was allied to the Bagot-Lanes,
descendants of the Lane who befriended Charles II.
after the Battle of Worcester ; and it was from this
source that the Ribey Grove estate, comprising a
large property in Great Grimsby, was derived.

The Orwell Park estate, twenty-four miles long
by seven miles wide, was all in a ring-fence, except
a small triangular piece owned by a lawyer. This
Tomline never succeeded in securing, and it vexed
him, because it broke the continuity of his shooting.
He used to say that he would have covered it with
five-pound notes to get rid of the proprietor.

A fashionably attired gentleman called on a
London mechanician with a sketch of an instrument
which he desired to be made for him. The shop-
keeper examined the drawing with some curiosity,
and at last undertook to execute the order, but
observed that it would cost fifteen guineas.- His
customer did not object, however, so long as the
work was done to his satisfaction, and went away,
promising to call at an appointed time. He came

1 96 FOURTH GENERATION

accordingly, approved of the work, and put down
the money, which the other deposited in his purse.
Before the party left the shop, the mechanician took
the liberty of demanding, as the instrument was of
such a peculiar character, what its utility was. ' I
will tell you, sir/ quoth his customer, leaning across
the counter to him ; ' the fact is, it is a contrivance
for picking pockets' The man was so disconcerted
that he lost all presence of mind, and before he could
collect himself, Barrington (for it was he) had left
the premises, carrying with him the apparatus and
the purse. Barrington was a regular frequenter of
Ranelagh Gardens, which he found a highly lucrative
hunting-ground.

Bull-baiting was still carried on in the Midlands
and in the North down to the second half of the
nineteenth century ; and the women enjoyed the
sport as keenly as the men. At Leigh, near Preston,
according to a story told me by a Leigh man, a
fellow, in a room with his wife and a dog trained to
this exercise, laid his head on the table ; the dog
rushed at his nose, the husband cried out from the
pain, and would have gpt up ; but says the woman,
* Lie still, man, he must draw blood, or he will be
just ruined.'

A., all the years I have known him, has taken the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 197

Times newspaper. The unique and long unassail-
able prestige enjoyed by Mr. Walter's undertaking
is a phenomenon unlike anything else in journalistic
literature. It was almost a fetich. Without being
so constituted, the organ possessed an official
authority. Its statements were judicial. A good
deal of this superstition (for superstition it was)
proceeded from the consummate tact of the manage-
ment. The Editor of the Times was impersonal ;
no one was supposed to know who he was ; the
public had as distinct a notion of his individuality as
of the Cumaean Sibyl or the Grand Lama of Thibet.
Now all is changed. Yet A. is of the old school ;
and he clings to his Times, and will do so usque ad
finem. When you have disposed of his other pleas
for it, he brings up his last reserve it is printed on
better paper. The field is to him !

A. referred to Buckingham in Seven Dials, who
supplied the rope for executions, and mentioned
that there used to be in the window a specimen with
a notice ' Any length cut. 7 It was a peculiar twist,
and specially manufactured for the purpose.

CHAPTER X.

Hammersmith Turnham Green Linden House Its association
with a cause dtebre Dr. Griffiths and his distinguished
friends Origin of his fortune Thomas Griffiths Wainewright,
the poisoner Putney Ladies' Schools The Trimmers
Fairfax House Madame Daranda's Alterations in the
High Street Remains of an ancient building The rivulet
down the street Tokenhouse Yard Morris and his father
Anecdote of them relative to the occupation of Paris in 1815
Edward Gibbon's birthplace Roehampton Wandsworth
The 'Black Sea* Beauties of the neighbourhood
Wimbledon Common Its historical interest and import-
ance Barnes Explanation of the discovery of Roman coins
there.

THE state of the village of Hammersmith is slightly
indicated by a very rough woodcut on the title of a
tract of 1641, shewing a few low-pitched cottages
by the side of the highroad, such as lately existed
beyond the site of the new St. Paul's School. Few
places near London have so thoroughly lost within
the last two generations their old aspect and attrac-
tion, and are more hopelessly abandoned to the forms
of modern suburban life. The engraving to which 1
have referred represents the flight of the Vicar of

FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY 199

Christ Church, Newgate Street, from his Parlia-
mentary enemies, and there is the inscription on it :
* The Way to Hammersmith'

We hear very little indeed of this hamlet (for
it was nothing more) in history and literature.
There was a very curious case of alleged diabolical
possession connected with it, in which the principal
actor was Susanna, wife of John Fowles. The
particulars are printed in a contemporary pamphlet

Many years subsequently to my settlement in
the neighbourhood Hammersmith preserved a fair
share of its original appearance and seclusion, and
could boast many historical residences, foremost
among which was Brandenburg House, removed
about 1827 to make room for the new bridge.

I trust that my distinguished friend, Mr. G. L.
Gomme, F.S,A., may find leisure to publish his
father's and his own Collections toward a new
History of this parish.

TURNHAM GREEN was another of the spots which
I periodically visited in my desultory rambles in
the neighbourhood of Kensington during the twenty
years which I passed in that once pleasant suburb*
In the earlier part of my sojourn there Turnham

200 FOURTH GENERATION

Green had not lost by any means so much of
its original character and aspect as it has since,
and most of the fine old houses in grounds were
still standing.

Among them, foremost in more than one point
of interest, was Linden House, on the left side
of the highroad as you approach the Green.
This ' capital J mansion, which was demolished in
1879, was for many years the residence of Dr.
Ralph Griffiths, proprietor of the Monthly Review,
and he died here in 1803. Griffiths had been
acquainted with many of the famous men of his
time, including Johnson and Goldsmith ; and he
was on intimate terms with Wedgwood, whose
partner Bentley was his neighbour at one time.
The Doctor, of whom I gave many years since
all the particulars within my reach, played his
trump card by buying of Cleland the manuscript
of Fanny Hill, and employing a second hand to
improve the book, which is said to have been
worth ^20,000 to him.

I visited the house shortly prior to its removal,
and as I passed along the spacious passage leading
from the grand old-fashioned doorway to the hall,
ascending on the way two or three short flights
of steps, it awakened an interesting reflection

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 201

how often that very ground had been trodden
before me by the literary and artistic ornaments
of the preceding century.

But nearer my own time it had a very different
association and quite another sort of tenant in that
consummate scoundrel, Thomas Griffiths Waine-
wright, the Janus Weathercock of the London
Magazine, and the intimate on equal terms at one
period of his life of well-nigh the whole world of
letters and art.

Wainewright was on his mother's side the grandson
of Dr. Griffiths, and by administering strychnine
to the only son of his benefactor became heir
to such portion of the property as was represented
by the house and its effects. I was the first to
trace the consanguinity between these two men
with so little in common, and to furnish, so far
as I could, the whole sad and terrible story of
Wainewright's career down to his apprehension by
one of the Bow Street runners at the Tavistock
in Covent Garden in 1837. I likewise identified
him under two other previously unsuspected noms
de plume.

PUTNEY has always been noted for its schools,
and some of the earliest Ladies' Colleges in England

FOURTH GENERATION

were established there. Evelyn refers to that kept
by Mistress Bathsua Makins, who before the
Troubles had been governess to the Princess
Henrietta, one of the daughters of Charles I. ; and
Herrick, in his Hesperides, 1648, commemorates
Mistress Mary Portman as " The School and pearl
of Putney." She died in 1671.

Mrs. Trimmer kept a ladies' school here, and
her family had establishments for young gentlemen
through at least two generations at the large house
where Colonel Chambers, Garibaldi's Englishman,
afterward lived. This school was founded by Mr.
Carmalt, whose name survives in the block of
houses erected on the site.

By the way, at Wimbledon, some time since,
Dr. Birch kept a seminary for youths. Had
Thackeray's eye fallen on the brass plate outside ?

A very early and curious glimpse of Putney occurs
in a few of his letters in 1519, to his Government,
of the Venetian Envoy to the Court of Henry VI 1 1.,
Sebastian Giustinian, who retired hither, while the
plague was prevailing in London.

In one of Lilburne's tracts, printed in 1649,
he speaks of the future Protector and his son-
in - law, Ireton, holding an earnest conversa-
tion in a garden-house at Putney ; but he does

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 203

not specify whether it was Fairfax House or some
other, and the writer on the next page brings
before us Ireton standing before the fireside at
his quarters in Kingston, so that he had probably
come over to consult the Lord General. And
after the interview we hear that he mounted his
horse, and departed hurriedly on his return. The
little village (for it was no more) was for the time
the centre of England.

The two capital mansions were, at all events,
Fairfax House and the one formerly occupied by
Madame Daranda, of which the site was subse-
quently converted into a terrace, now swept away.
It has been said that at the sale of the Daranda
effects title-deeds to certain property in Putney
were acquired, or were, at least, brought to light.
This and Fairfax House were the places where
the Parliamentary leaders met during the Civil
War, and where they were quartered.

There used to be Pike Lane near the church.
It was the spot where the soldiers piled their
weapons during their stay here.

I possess an etching by Arthur Ball of the
supposed nunnery (ultimately converted into shops)
which immediately faced the church just by the
Surrey end of the old bridge.

204 FOURTH GENERATION

At present what was down to 1860 a village
is a sorrowful desolation of bricks and mortar,
touching Wandsworth on one hand and Barnes
on the other. The whole of the High Street
appears to be made ground ; the levels must formerly
have been far lower ; for in carrying out long since
some public works, at the corner facing the entrance
gates to Lime Grove, the foundations of an extensive
red-brick building were discovered below the surface,
and a rivulet flowed from the top of the street to
the river on the right-hand side within memory.
A second stream divided Putney from Wandsworth
just by the modern railway bridge and East Putney
station. It has long been converted into a closed
sewer. The 'spacious house with gardens and
lands,' to use the historian's own expression, which
was the birthplace of the illustrious Gibbon, I
suppose to have faced the dead wall of Lime
Grove, the seat of the St. Aubyn family down
to about 1858, and extended back to the present
site of St. John's Church, which was in comparatively
recent times a meadow. It is customary to identify
the residence of Gibbon's father with Lime Grove
itself; but this I apprehend to be erroneous. The
description of the place scarcely answers to the
latter, which was a mansion in an extensive park,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 205

stretching up Putney Hill in one direction, and
along the Upper Richmond Road toward Wands-
worth in another.

All trace of either building has disappeared, as
well as that of the home of the Portens, his
maternal relatives, where he spent a portion of his
childhood, unless, which is not improbable, it is
substantially the same as the residence immediately
adjoining the church and churchyard, as Gibbon
himself describes it in his Autobiography, long
occupied by Mrs. Major.

The only personages whom we have at present
in Putney seem to be the author of Atalanta in
Calydon, and his friend and companion, Mr.
Theodore Watts- Dunton. It is unnecessary to
say that a fund of gossip and anecdote has already
accumulated round the former.

It is an illustration of altered conditions that, when
the South- Western Railway opened its station here,
it was feared that the traffic would only be a summer
one. Time was when the shooting of the George I.
wooden bridge, with its irregular square openings
for traffic and its picturesque Dutch toll-house,
was accounted by oarsmen a notable feat, as it
demanded a quick eye and a knowledge of the
current

206 FOURTH GENERATION

I have never seen any explanation of the name
still attached to a minor turning out of the High
Street Tokenhoitse Yard. Here, no doubt, were
struck or at least issued the tokens of the seven-
teenth century (1657-68) enumerated by Williamson,
and some of them especially relevant to the local ferry.

A singular character lived at Putney many years
a Mr. Morris. He had been a tailor, like his
father before him. He was with Poole and Buck-
master before he set up for himself on Ludgate Hill.
Morris was an astronomer, a musician, a mechanic,
and a botanist, and, indeed, seemed to possess some
knowledge of everything. H e had been a great reader.

His father was at one time in the army, and
served at Waterloo. He was afterward orderly
Serjeant to the Duke of Wellington, and was with
him at Paris during the occupation in 1815. One
of young Morris's earliest reminiscences was going
with his father one day to the Palace with despatches
for the Duke, and being patted on the head by
Louis XVIII., who held out his hand for him to
kiss. But he would not, he told me, because
he disliked Frenchmen, who, he had heard, ate frog.

I think that the ordinary authorities are silent on
the point ; but Lamb, in a letter to Patmore, men-
tions that the legs are the only edible part of this

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 207

creature, and that they are of a rabbity flavour. If
a cat takes possession of one in a garden, it eats
the legs and leaves the rest.

My uncle Reynell, who lived here from 1855 to
1892, told me that he had seen the late Mr. W. H.
Smith, M.P., First Lord of the Treasury, at the
bookstall personally inspecting the accounts, and
satisfying himself that everything was in order.

The original hamlet of ROEHAMPTON, on the
western side of Putney Heath, on rather low ground,
consisted of the King's Head, a wooden structure,
and forty or fifty cottages and shops of timber and
thatch. There was only a single narrow, steep
street, with a quaint side-alley or so. It is at present
greatly improved. Does the name import a fairly
remote epoch, before Wimbledon Park was enclosed,
or the various encroachments on the Heath had
commenced, when the deer roamed at pleasure over
the whole adjoining area, and the village was a mere
group of keepers' and labourers' huts ?

Wandsworth Common, on the other side of Putney,
was in my time a magnificent expanse, and preserved
its dimensions down to about 1875, when much fell
a prey to Railway, Builder, Church, and Patriotic
Institution. Those who are as old as myself, or

2o8 FOURTH GENERATION

older, must remember the lovely spot known as the
Black Sea, which was equally used for bathing and
angling. It was a large sheet of water over-canopied
with ancient trees.

The entrance from Putney into Wandsworth was
twenty years ago a pleasingly rural and characteristic
bit, resonant with the music of Nature. You had
not to go as far as Nightingale Lane, Tooting, to
hear that songster. Not only in Turnham Green,
Chiswick, Bedford Park, Fulham, and Barnes, were
it and the cuckoo regular visitors in their respective
seasons, but at the point where Putney merges in
Wandsworth, so long as the vicinity was open and
quiet. Both on the right and left hand of the road
formerly lay stretches of garden and pasture, and
on the former side the footway rose two or three
feet above the road, and was bordered by fine old
trees. The carriage-way had been even then widened
from the original dimensions, when the whole extent
from the village was a lane, the dead wall of Lime
Grove, Sir John St. Aubyn's, occupying the greater
part of the southern side. Altogether, Wandsworth
has so far been less denaturalized than its more
westerly neighbour. The lane at the top of Putney
Hill leading into Wandsworth used to be called
Cutathwart, vulgarly Cut-throat, Lane.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 209

Beyond Roehampton, to the south and west, ex-
tends WIMBLEDON COMMON, of which the more thickly
wooded portion on the Kingston side forms one of
the most interesting spots in the vicinity of the
Metropolis, as it is, to a large extent, in its primitive
condition, and may be once more enjoyed, when the
shooting-butts are happily abandoned, by the pedes-
trian without danger and molestation, provided that
the golf-players are kept within reasonable bounds.
There is very slight doubt that the point known as
Caesar's Camp was the site of British earthworks,
and that the entire ground represents the scene of
conflicts between the Britons and the Romans, and
a fortified position of the former, when they retired
from the more immediate precincts of the river.

BARNES may be regarded as the last important
suburban survival, with its own common, the ex-
tensive grounds of Barn Elms, and an expanse
behind of 3,000 or 4,000 acres of heath, parkland,
and demesne, including that unique feature, Putney
Park Lane and its immediate environs. Barnes has
lived to see the successive degradation of Putney,
Wands worth, Richmond, Hammersmith, Fulham,
Chiswick, Turnham Green, Acton, and Ealing.
In the Antiquary for July, 1885, I collected all
VOL. IT. 33

210 FOURTH GENERATION

the available information of a local or manorial
nature. One of the quern stones is still to be seen
at the garden entrance to a house on Mill Hill.
The common was once the home of many rare
descriptions of fern and aquatic plants ; and in the
marshy part near the cemetery the latter still flourish
to some extent, and attract certain uncommon genera
of the moth. Altogether, the entomology of this
narrow area is still fairly extensive and interesting.
Dr. Diamond told me that the common was once
famous for a particular species of fly, of which he
mentioned the name ; but it has escaped my memory.

Prior to the advent of the railway and the builder,
it was a sequestered spot. I have bathed as a boy in
the large sheet of water on the southern side near
the present station ; and I remember a foot-race
which Sir Robert Hamilton and myself had at the
cross-roads when we were at the War Office together,
but his longer legs made me a very bad second.
My uncle Foulkes was intimate with Mr. Scarth,
owner of a large estate at Barnes, now divided.
He lived at Mill Hill, and had an Arab boy as one
of his servants. He had brought him home from
his travels in the East, and eventually set him up in
a public-house at Putney, still called after him.

Northcote the painter once met Hazlitt with the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 211

remark, * There's been such a beau-ti-ful murder,
sir.' There must be some inborn principle in our
moral nature which renders these things attractive,
and holds them fast in the memory. Those which
I never forgot are the cases of James Greenacre,
in Putney Park Lane, immediately adjacent to
Barnes, in 1837; of Mr. De la Rue, murdered at
Highgate, by Hocker, in 1845; and of Mr. O'Connor,
the victim of the Mannings, in 1849. My father
was personally acquainted with O'Connor, who
was a reporter on one of the papers. Not far from
St. Helier, Jersey, you have the small house pointed
out where the Mannings lived prior to their settle-
ment in London.

In Barnes churchyard is a yew-tree, planted, as
appears from the register, in 1653 (possibly to
inaugurate the Protectorate). When I last saw it,
it did not present an aspect of great antiquity. Here
was buried in 1672 Abiezer Cobb alias Higham, a
fanatic in the days of Cromwell ; he was a native of
Warwick, and was at one time post-master of Merton
College, Oxford.

Lysons, writing nearly a century ago, loosely
estimates the common at about 150 acres; but its
extent was formerly greater. On the southern side
the Charity estate and the South-Western Railway

212

FOURTH GENERA TION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

premises, and on the northern the cemetery, have
been taken out of it, and encroachments have
formerly been made everywhere. It originally
stretched from the Richmond Road on the south, to
the borders of Mortlake on the west, to the village
of Barnes on the north, and the boundary ditch
between Barnes and Putney eastward. Of course,
it has fallen, in common with other open spaces, a
prey to indifference, ignorance, and dishonesty (the
most ancient trespass dating back to the Plantagenet
times). The pound, which stood near Mill Hill, no
longer exists ; it forms the scene of a well-known
metrical jeu $ esprit, in which Quin and Foote are
the actors. The mill was valued at fifteen shillings
a year 800 years ago.

Between this and Roehampton, in relaying the
drains, many years since, between the Jesuits' College
and the Convent, the workmen came upon a con-
siderable number of children's skeletons, of which
the history was unknown.

It may be convenient to mention that the occa-
sional discovery of Roman coins on the shore at
Barnes is supposed to be due to the utilization of
the soil removed in laying the foundations of the
modern London Bridge up the river, where it served
to make up the towing-path at the point named.

THE FOURTH GENERATION
PART II.

CHAPTER I.

The Royal Family The library given by George IV. to the
nation The Duke of Sussex The Queen The c Jubilee '
coinage Our obligations to Her Majesty Orders of Merit
for civilians Penalty of a long reign The Queen thinks a
book too dear The offer of Her Majesty to pay income-tax
A curious disillusionizing glimpse The Royal Family as
people of business The Prince Consort The Albert
Memorial A few particulars and anecdotes Princess
Beatrice at Darmstadt The Battenbergs and Batenborgs
The Duke of Cambridge The Kaiser Le Grand Monarque
Caroline Bonaparte Louis XVIII. Nicholas of Russia
and his son Sir Roderick Murchison Napoleon III. and
my father The Emperor's alleged parentage.

THE late Lord Romilly used to say that the great
book-collector, Richard Heber, was once dining with
George IV. soon after the accession of the latter,
and the Russian Ambassador was also at table.
The King was speaking to the Ambassador about
the library his father had collected, and was saying
that he did not care much about it. He added that
he thought he should not mind letting it go, and the
Russian Envoy intimated that his Imperial master,
he felt assured, would be only too glad to become

216 FOURTH GENERATION

the purchaser. The King seemed to like the
notion ; but nothing more was said just then.
Heber left the table, to hasten to the Premier's,
told him what had passed, said that it would be a
disgrace to the country if the books went, and so on,
and Lord Liverpool waited on His Majesty and gave
him to understand that it would not do, but that if
he would present them to the nation, he (Liverpool)
would use his influence to get a vote in the Commons
to pay the King's debts.

This view of the circumstance attending the gift
to the public in 1823 f the Royal Library formed
by George III. is in direct conflict with that
commonly received, and will read curiously by the
side of the glowing eulogiums on the munificence
and literary zeal of His Majesty, both as Prince and
King, which meet our eye in various contemporary
publications.

Miss Clara Maceroni said that at a party, where
she met the Duke of Sussex, the King's brother,
His Royal Highness was asked to sing, and when
he had finished there was cordial applause. He
whispered to someone near him : ' It was well
enough for a Duke. 5 This was the collector of
Bibles and miscellaneous literature sold in 1827.
The taste for books certainly appears to have been

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 217

hereditary in the older members of the Hanoverian
line ; and we trace it back to other branches, beside
that of Ltineburg. Now Books have gone out of
favour, and Horses and Cards have their turn. The
Kaiser Napoleon-Nelson's toys, soldiers and ships,
are perhaps to be preferred. The Duke belonged
to the Second St. James's Royal Arch Lodge
of Masons, which is entitled to wear a crown in
its badge. I have given some account in my
Livery Companies of London of the probable origin
of this movement.

I have only once seen the Queen. It was on
Constitution Hill, when Her Majesty was driving
in a carriage and pair with one or two others ; the
Prince was not with her. In response to my
respectful salutation, Her Majesty bowed to me ;
for not a soul save myself was in sight. This was
in the days when the old Duke of Wellington was
to be met with in Piccadilly sometimes, leading his
horse at the edge of the kerb.

How many hundreds of thousands must be in the
position of never having seen our present Sovereign,
and of being acquainted with her features only
through the coinage. They may well wonder
whether all the pieces of money represent the same
personage.

2i8 FOURTH GENERATION

The most singular circumstance connected with
what is improperly termed the Jubilee money for
the type was settled without reference to that
anniversary is that, although it is by a German
artist, it is not even by a good one. Her Majesty's
Government, perhaps, would not pay the price for a
first-class design, like that for the beautiful com-
memorative thaler of Maria Theresa, produced in
1888 under the auspices of the Numismatic Society
of Vienna.

It really constitutes an interesting consideration,
that the majority of the subjects of the British
Crown have never beheld the countenance of the
Sovereign, nor heard the tone of her voice. It is
an understood thing that there is an august
personage at the head of affairs, and the machinery
works tolerably well But what effect the stealthy
levelling down may produce, no one is far-sighted
enough to forecast. We might go farther and fare
worse ; and perhaps sufficient influence may be
brought to bear on popular sentiment by the united
agency of all responsible citizens to stop at such
reforms as may be practicable in the existing system
without changing its external characteristics.

Her Majesty has unquestionably contributed to
impart a higher and purer tone to society, and if

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 219

there are such things as corruption and immorality
(are there ?), they have to be a good deal more sub
rosd. It was quite time in 1837 that a term should
be put to the scandalous state of affairs under the
four Georges and William IV., which Greville in his
Memoirs, and Thackeray and Carlyle, and indeed
Dickens, in their works, did so much to expose.

We complain of having rulers of foreign origin,
yet we never succeeded very well when we had
Englishmen over us. Since Bos worth 410 years
ago our Kings and Queens have been Welsh,
Scotish, Dutch, or German.

There seems a probability that in the future, if
Great Britain chooses to retain the present form of
government, the succession will pass to the indirect
line, and we shall find ourselves once again with an
Anglo-Scotish instead of an Anglo-German dynasty.
It seems singular that at a distance of 182 years
from the Hanoverian accession the Court should
still be so German in sympathy and spirit ; but so
it is.

It is the inevitable penalty of a lengthened reign
to lose all early, and many later, friends, associates,
and servants. The Queen has lived to see one old
face disappear after another, and to be surrounded
by almost totally different conditions from those in

220 FOURTH GENERATION

which she was brought up, and it is no slight praise
to say that our Sovereign has in large measure
adapted herself to the vast change.

It is characteristic of Her Majesty's usual frugality,
that when a bookseller sent a stray from the old
Royal Library to be submitted to her by the
librarian at Windsor, for ^150, she wrote on the
memorandum : * A very nice book but the price !'

How different from her royal grandfather, who
was a munificent book-buyer, and, even if the figure
had been rather outrageous, would not in his better
days have stuck at a few pounds to secure such an
article, and he had probably far less means for the
purpose than Her Majesty.

The alleged offer of our Sovereign at the outset to
pay income-tax was very properly met in the nega-
tive. A certain specific sum having been set aside
for' the Queen's use in her official capacity, it would
have been undignified on the part of the nation to
have insisted on any deduction. On the contrary,
the Prince Consort was said to have left a will, which
was never proved, its provisions being kept a secret ;
and it seems a question whether, had the point been
pressed, it was, under such circumstances, a valid
document, the Prince being a subject of the Crown,
however exalted his rank.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 221

Is it not apt to strike one as a case where the
realities of life infringe on the melodramatic present-
ment, where one, going through the throne-room at
Buckingham Palace, and seeing no one, ventures to
approach the seat of majesty, only to discover beneath
it a dustpan and a broom ? But it is, after all, yet
stranger that we should so constantly forget that
kings and queens are human beings like ourselves,
who look down upon us from the very elevation con-
ferred on them by us for our own convenience.

The creation, with the Queen's approval, of Orders
of Merit of late years, and the admission in some
cases of ladies, is, as it appears to me, a very
sagacious and opportune movement. Civilians, as
well as soldiers and sailors, must be freely decorated
and honoured. We shall want a solid barrier against
aggressive Socialism ; and the Queen and the Court
are apparently aware of it, judging from their some-
what promiscuous affability and their almost affecting
solicitude for the health even of the Unpresented.

Our Royal Family are excellent people of business,
and from the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851
onward have had the most favourable opportunities
of making advantageous investments in every direc-
tion, and of almost every class. The late Prince
Consort knew how to manage his private affairs with

222 FOURTH GENERATION

all that attention to detail which is so essential to
commercial success an aptitude derived from his
youthful experiences in the Vaterland. Was there
not a story of some cheque which a certain artist
framed, and hung on the wall, as a souvenir of a:
transaction with His Royal Highness?

But His Royal Highness shewed his common
sense in declining to join the Freemasons, on the
ground that he would not swear allegiance to laws
of which he had no previous cognizance. The lady,
whose newly-admitted husband refused disclosure
of the arcana, was perhaps not far from the truth
when she said that they amounted to nothing more
than early duck and green peas a housekeeper's
way of putting it.

, My uncle Reynell gave me to understand that the
late Duke of Cambridge, father of the ex-Com-
mander-in-Chief, acquired from the Government for
;8,ooo the Combe Wood property, for which a
farmer in the neighbourhood was prepared to give
double the money.

My wife came home to our house at Kensington
one afternoon, and told me that she had seen the
Queen at the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park. She
was standing there when Her Majesty drove up and
approached the spot. The Queen stopped in front

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 223

of the Memorial, close by my wife, and the latter
heard her say, ' Very nice/ This made me laugh,
for it reminded me of what the fellow said about the
Marlborough gems. But it was declared at the time
that the Memorial was not at first, when brand new,
unlike a large piece of gilt gingerbread.

I was crossing Putney Bridge on the evening of
December 14, 1861, when I heard the Bell of
St. Paul's toll, and I asked the gatekeeper what was
the matter. He told me that the Prince Consort
was dead.

It was a saying that His Royal Highness set the
example of men dispensing with gloves on ordinary
occasions.

After the death of the Prince Consort at so early
an age, the Queen is said to have suffered from
insomnia to such an extent that Her Majesty's
health was seriously impaired, and there was even a
degree of anxiety on the subject.

There used to be a curious superstition about
* Queen's weather.' It was said that Her Majesty
appointed a day for a given ceremony, and the rest
was a foregone conclusion. Anyone might securely
make his own arrangements ; it would be ' Queen's
weather.' His Grace the Primate of All England
formerly authorized special forms of prayer for rain

224 FOURTH GENERATION

or drought ; but, as the more candid country parson
declared, it depends on the quarter from which the
wind blows* We do improve a little, in spite of the
Church.

A Swiss gentleman from Zurich, whom I met at
a house in the country, gave me an odd account of
the fire near Darmstadt, where the Princess Beatrice
was staying. She was in bed, about one in the
morning, and was so tormented by mosquitoes that
she rose, lit a candle, and rang for her maid. The
two, in their nightdresses, candle in hand, began to
hunt for the small game. When a gnat was seen
overhead, one or the other bobbed up to try and
catch it in the flame, and at last one of them set fire
to the curtains. The whole place was soon in a
blaze, and the Princess and her maid ran down to
the courtyard for their lives, just as they were. Her
Royal Highness lost all her clothes, as well as
(I understood) the pearls of the Duchess of Kent,
which she had had from the Queen.

The Battenbergs of Hesse - Darmstadt have
nothing to do with the great house of Brederode,
Barons of Bronkhorst in Gronsfelt and of Baten-
borg, which belonged to Gelderland, and became,
and remained during centuries, one of the most dis-
tinguished families in the Low Countries. It was

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 225

Hendrik van Brederode of this ancient and illus-
trious line who personally presented to the Duchess
of Parma in 1566, on behalf of the Netherlands, a
protest against the establishment there of the In-
quisition, and who raised troops at his own expense
to resist the Spaniards.

When the Prince of Wales brought his new wife
from abroad, and arrived with her in London, it was
remarked that the first thing the Princess did was to
run into the Bricklayers' Arms.

His Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge
married a Miss Fairbrother, daughter of the
theatrical publisher in Catherine Street, Strand,
who was the mother of Colonel Fitzgeorge and
other children. The Colonel, whom I have met at
a boarding-house at Ramsgate, united himself to a
Quaker lady, whose parents used to frequent the
same watering-place. The Duke's alliance was
equally creditable to his courage and judgment.
The lady was an excellent and exemplary person,
whose memory is sweeter and purer than that of
some royal and serene highnesses.
The German Kaiser is understood to ascribe his
withered arm to the corrupt blood on his mother's
side. It has no doubt been deteriorating through
intermarriages and other agencies, and it was not

VOL. ii. , 34

226 FOURTH GENERATION

very pure when George I. came over, so that it is
no doubt a step in the right direction to have begun
to seek alliances outside the charmed circle. But,
after all, the alleged taint has only gone back
whence it came, to the Vaterland.

No Act of Parliament can safeguard even imperial
and royal personages from the pernicious conse-
quences of contravening the law of nature.

If Louis XIV. was, as reported, the son of M. le
Grand by the Queen, he was very properly called
Le Grand Monarque. The word carrosse in French
was originally feminine. But Louis, when young,
having once called for mon carrosse, its gender was,
from deference to his most Christian majesty, altered
thenceforward. Madame de Maintenon succeeded
to other ladies, whose influence had been paramount
with the King by turn. Some one proposed to call
her Madame Maintenant.

It used to be said that the Bourbons never forgot
and never learned anything. Is not this equally
true of the Stuarts ?

An English gentleman who was in Paris in. 1848,
when the remains of the First Napoleon arrived
there from St. Helena, saw the coffin, which was on
view for a short time at the Invalides, and described
it as hardly larger than a child's. The Duke of

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 227

Wellington and the Emperor are said to have been
of the same height, five feet six inches, and the
latter would be wasted by illness before his death.
Yet this account seems scarcely credible.

The Napoleon relics at Madame Tussaud's are
the most interesting feature in the exhibition, and
they will remain so.

There are, of course, persons living who recollect
the foundress of this place of entertainment ; she
died in the forties, and her wax figure, which used
to be not far from the entrance in Baker Street,
was so realistic that when my father-in-law came up
from the country in 1851, and visited Tussaud's, he
took it to be the little old lady herself; and next to
her, I think, was Cobbett, to whom, the story goes,
he offered a pinch of snuff.

I confess that I laid down Masson's Napol&on
et les Femmes with a very unusual feeling that I
could read it again. It is decidedly a piece justifica-
tive, and one not without its sadness.

Caroline Buonaparte sat to Canova for one of his
classical models absolutely naked. Being asked
whether she did not feel uncomfortable, she replied,
4 Why, no ; it was not cold ; there was a fire in the
room/ There is a medalet with the three sisters
of Napol6on as the Three Graces.

228 FOURTH GENERATION

There is an on dit about Louis XVI I L which
may be true or not. After his restoration, he asked
Fouch6 whether he had ever set spies over him.
The Minister of Police under Napoleon admitted
that he had. The King asked who it was. Fouch6
said, 'The Comte de Blacas.' ' How much did he
get ?' was the farther inquiry. ' Two hundred
thousand francs a year.' * Ah, well,' said Louis,
* he was honest, after all. / had half'

This was the same nobleman whose collections,
partly acquired, perhaps, out of the secret-service
money, are now in the British Museum.

I have heard it said of Nicholas of Russia that
he remarked on one occasion to his son, afterward
Alexander II., 'You and I are the only honest
men in the Empire,' and that was because it did
not pay them to be otherwise. Sir Roderick
Murchison, who had, in the course of his geological
researches,, experienced great assistance from the
Czar Nicholas, and been enabled to explore the
mineral riches of the Ural range, inverted his glass
when, in the Crimean war, he was present at a
banquet, and the success of the operations against
Russia was proposed as a toast.

While the late Emperor Napoleon III. was
residing in London in 1839, my father sent him a

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 229

copy of the biography of his illustrious relative,
and received as a souvenir in return the Lettres
de Napoleon a Josephine, 1833, with an inscription
on the flyleaf: 'Offert par le P ce Napoleon Louis a
Monsieur Hazlitt en memoire de 1'ouvrage de son
pere sur 1'empereur Napoleon. Londres, le 18 Mai,

1839.'

His Majesty favoured a certain Dutch Admiral
in his phlegmatic temperament ; he bore no resem-
blance to his reputed father, the King of Holland ;
and until the matter was more or less generally
known, his cousin Jerome, who was in the secret,
and was in possession of all the facts, used his
power as a financial lever. Prince Napoleon used
to call the Emperor the kite in the eagle's nest.

CHAPTER II.

Sir Robert Peel in 1817 Mr. Gladstone My pamphlet on
public affairs (1886) General Gordon Illustrations of Mr.
Gladstone's acquaintance with Ireland and its events Sir
Henry Taylor General Cunningham Lord Rosebery The
Primroses of Adelaide, South Australia A Scotish friend's
recollections of them and other early colonists Draper,
the chaplain of the London Instances of longevity The
Tollemaches Our great families Mr. Evelyn, of Wootton
A visit to the house The library Martin Tupper
Charles Mackay.

THE late Mr. Henderson, who was sixty-three years
clerk to the Homers* Company, told me (January
17, 1890) that he was eighty-eight years of age.
He had a remarkably full head of hair and a flowing
beard, with very little admixture of gray ; but he
was much bent, and walked feebly. He mentioned
to me that his father took him in 1817 to the
House of Commons, and that he often went there
afterward. He recollected listening to the speeches
of Canning and Peel, of whom the latter struck him
at the time as very young in appearance, like a red-
headed boy. His father, he said, pointed to Peel,

FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY 231

and declared that if he lived he would make a
name.

I was told by one of the older officials in Cox
and Greenwood's, in Craig's Court, that Sir Robert
Peel on one occasion applied at some moment of
pressure to Mr. Cox for an advance of ^500,000
for a few days for the Government, and that Cox
said that he could have a million the next morning
if he wanted it.

A reference has been already made to Lord
Palmerston in connection with my father's career
as a journalist. It was Palmerston who was ques-
tioned in the House as to the duties of archdeacons.
He had not an idea himself, and asked everybody
near him. Not a soul could say. No one was
aware that an archdeacon was a sort of ecclesiastical
surveyor and appraiser appointed for each county
or district. The minister had to inform the honour-
able member that an archdeacon was a personage
who discharged archidiaconal functions.

When a stipendiary magistrate's place fell vacant
during Palmerston's Home Secretaryship, he arrived
at Downing Street one morning, and was con-
fronted with a pile of letters. 'What the devil
are these ?' said he to his subordinate. ' Applica-
tions for the vacant magistracy.' ' Do they think

232 FOURTH GENERATION

I am going to read all these damned things ?
D'ye know/ addressing the sub, * anyone who
would do ?' ' There's Mr. Burrell, my lord Mr.
Burrell of Gray's Inn, a very good man.' ' Well,
well,' said Palmerston, 'let him have it, then.'
And Burrell had it, and held it many years. He
was an intimate friend of Sir John Stoddart and
of my father, from whom I had the story.

I first saw Mr. Gladstone at the London Library,
St. James's Square, in 1859. I had never seen
him before, and likenesses of him were comparatively
rare at that time. But I felt sure it was he. I
saw him again at his own house in the following
year, and after that I never set eyes on him till
1890, when I 'met him at a book-shop in New
Oxford Street. I had meanwhile published, prior
to the General Election of 1887, my Address to
the Electors of Mid-Surrey (Kingston Division),
which one of the Conservative party described as
'a parting kick' to the Separatists and Home
Rulers. In that interval of thirty years Mr. Glad-
stone reached the summit of his political glory and
the lowest point of his political impotence.

One of the counts in my indictment against
him in rny pamphlet was the treatment by the
Ministry, of which he was the responsible head,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 233

of poor, brave Gordon. It was impressive to
read in the papers recently that Gordon admitted
having carried out many executions, but always,
before he gave the order, laid his Bible on his
knee, that the Almighty might reverse his judg-
ment if He thought fit, and, quoth Gordon, He
never did. What sublime fanaticism ! What fatuity
beyond all redemption almost beyond credibility !
A child's brain joined to a man's heart ! This
was the very Bible, perchance, which the General's
sister gave to the Queen after his death.

Mr. told me one day that Mr. Gladstone

had been in his shop, and he had told him that
if he desired to study the history of Ireland, and
had not leisure to work up the subject, he (the
bookseller) had a gentleman who would do it for
him. But Mr. Gladstone replied that he only wanted
knowledge sufficient for Parliamentary purposes.
This was * the old Parliamentary hand, 1 of whom we
have all heard more than enough; and who has
inflicted greater injury on the country than any
individual within my knowledge, and the observa-
tion reads with the letter he wrote to a cor-
respondent, advising him to study Irish history,
which he had done, so far as his engagements
would permit.

2 3 4 FOURTH GENERATION

If 'the fatal gift of beauty' was the curse of
Italy, the fatal gift of words has been the curse
of England in the person of a gentleman who
was unfit to become a responsible Minister of the
Crown.

Sir Henry Taylor used to relate an anecdote
of Mr Stephen, father of Sir James, illustrative
of the gratitude of the authorities toward those
who exert themselves in the civil service. You
may, he said, wear out a finger in writing; you
may wear out a second and a third, and all they
will have to remark is, What deformed fingers
you have !

The late General Cunningham, one of a trio
of accomplished brothers, sons of Allan Cunning-
ham, mentioned that the word pussy for a cat
came, he believed, from the Persian p^tshy, and
was used to distinguish the Persian breed from
our own. He also suggested that hogshead was
a corruption of ox-hide^ a measure equal to the
capacity of an ox's hide. It might therefore
somewhat vary according to the prevailing breed
in different countries.

Lord Rosebery once said a good thing about
Lord Meath and his fondness for securing re-
creation-grounds. 'Why, you know/ said he,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 235

' Meath would like to pull down the whole of
London, and make it an open space for the use
of the inhabitants/

Mr. Primrose, an uncle of Lord Rosebery, was
a brewer at Adelaide, South Australia, and was
a near neighbour of my friend the late Mr.
Archibald Jaffrey. He lived to a good old age,
but was a great tippler, and was very unfortunate
in his family, nearly the whole of which predeceased
him. When Lord Rosebery visited Adelaide, he
called on the Primroses, and went over the
brewery, tasting the various ales ; and he was
very well received. These Primroses first figure
in the time of James VI. of Scotland, under whom
they laid the foundation of their fortunes.

Lord Rosebery was a special prot6g6 of Mr.
Gladstone, and an admitted failure as a political
and Parliamentary leader. As a rich man, he
was apt to be a valuable ally, and when Mr.
Gladstone felt it necessary to retire, he let his
lordship slip into his seat, ere long to slip out
of it again. I was brought up among Liberals,
and with a respect for their principles, till I
could not avoid seeing that those principles were
merely a passport to office, and that much of
the Liberalism consisted in being free with other

236 FOURTH GENERATION

people's money in a public sense. Lord Rosebery's
premiership was not entirely bond fide, so long
as Mr. Gladstone was in the prompter's box. It
was a disagreeable blend, of which even his lord-
ship, perhaps, grew a little tired, if not ashamed.

Jaffrey was saying that a visitor to the gallery
at Holyrood, after looking at the portraits of the
Scotish kings on the walls, inquired of the old
woman who shewed the place to him : ' Did you
do these ?' And, she shaking her head, he added :
1 You might have done better/

Jaffrey was born near Stirling in 1817, and left
his home January i, 1839, on his way to seek
his fortune in South Australia. He witnessed at
Liverpool the terrific storm of that month, which
strewed the whole coast with bodies and wreckage,
and the splendid sight, when the calm returned,
of the Mersey filled with craft in full sail pre-
paring to leave for their destinations. He re-
minded me of the later one of January, 1866, in
which the London was lost in the Bay of Biscay,
Draper, the chaplain, praying to the last in the
midst of the drowning crew and passengers. At
that moment Draper's son was proceeding to one
of our convict settlements, unknown to him, having
been found guilty of some felony.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 237

The old-fashioned type of pedagogue survived in
Scotland in the actual flesh in Sir Walter's day, for
Jaffrey gave me a description of Munro, his own
schoolmaster at Stirling, with his ballups and his
spectacles on the top of his head two or three
pairs sometimes which impressed me at the time
with a persuasion that the cause of learning was
even more backward in the North than with us ; and
this would have been about 1825.

It is a singular circumstance that, from its geo-
logical lay, Stirling is affected by nearly every shock
of earthquake of a severe character which occurs
within a very broad zone.

Jaffrey told me many curious stories about the
earlier settlers in South Australia among others, a
brother of George Grote the historian, and a son of
Charles Babbage. He was mentioning to me that
Sir Henry Ayers, who at one time filled a high
position at Adelaide, used to say that David, ' the
man after God's own heart,' probably had no hand
whatever in the Psalms which pass under his name,
unless it was the one where he speaks of walking up
to his ankles in the blood of his enemies.

He (that is, Jaffrey) assured me that he was per-
sonally acquainted with all the circumstances of the
case where a man in, a Scotish village, when gold

238 FOURTH GENERATION

was much scarcer than it is at present, made-money
by exhibiting at a bawbee a head a sovereign in his
possession. He had cleared a fair amount in this
way, when someone (there is always a last man)
came, and put down his coin. The other, however,
said : * I canna shew ye the piece ; but ye can see
the paper it was wrop in.'

My old acquaintance died in 1893. ^ ' IS remark-
able enough that his father was born in 1766, so
that the two lives covered 127 years. The family
at one time owned the property on which the field
of Bannockburn is situated. I shall notice two
other striking cases of transmission of a name and
race through few links, partly arising from late
marriages, which, so far as Scotland was concerned,
were formerly much more usual.

A son of Captain Groves, R.N., was born in
1829, when his father was sixty years of age. The
latter was born in 1769, The Captain used to tell
a story apropos of the former defective victualling
of ships, even those belonging to the service, and
how, when his vessel was once weather-bound, they
had to catch all the rats aboard, and cook them.
They tasted like chicken.

The late Captain Maude, R.N., who died in
October, 1886, in his eighty-eighth year, was the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 239

son of the first Lord Hawarden, who was born in
1729, and whose father, again, Sir Robert Maude,
was born in 1673. Here three generations lasted
213 years.

I have in an antecedent chapter furnished some
analogous data in relation to our own family.

Lord Tollemache sold his Reynolds and Gains-
borough portraits, I understand, to Colnaghi for
,60,000, to provide for his second family of nine.
He did not wish to send them to Christie's, on
account of the publicity, and came to terms with the
print-seller, whose first business would be, of course,
to notify the fact to everyone likely to be a cus-
tomer. His lordship bargained for an engraving of
each to put in the places of the oils. I believe that
his estate in Cheshire is charged with a heavy
annual sum for plantations,

A neighbour of mine at Kensington knew one of
the Tollemaches in New Zealand, where he had a
large property. He told me that this gentleman
would take off his shirt and stockings, and wash
them himself in a roadside pool.

Another of this race, a tall, ungainly, ill-dressed
man of elderly appearance, with a cape which
barely covered his elbows, and a weather-beaten
umbrella, used to frequent in my brother's time the

240 " FOURTH GENERATION

Judges' Chambers, and declaim with equal vehe-
mence and zest against the rascality of his brother,
with whom he was engaged in some mysterious
litigation. It appeared to be his chief employ-
ment

It is to be lamented, for their own sakes and that
of their country, that the British aristocracy is either
so poor, or, if otherwise, so sordid. The recent
death of Baron Hirsch put it into my head to con-
sider how much prouder we might be of those who
enjoy sundry mediaeval designations, no longer
articulate or proper to the time, if they could follow
a little to the extent of their power in each case
the example of such a man, or of Count Tolstoi.
One can scarcely wonder at Lord R. and Lord C.
not being anxious to take their seats in the Upper
Chamber.

The great families of the country, titled and un-
titled, appear to be broadly classifiable into two cate-
gories : those which accumulate and hoard their
resources, and those which dissipate them ; and it
may be difficult to determine which involves the
larger amount of injustice and inconvenience. In a
vast artificial community no ideal redistributive
arrangement is probably feasible.

A lady, who had been employed as a governess

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 241

in some of the great German houses, was describing
to me the extraordinary wealth and splendour of
some of their establishments, and was saying that
in England we have a very imperfect idea of this
question, deriving our knowledge from the impe-
cunious foreigners who come over here. My in-
formant instanced to the contrary Count Schonborn,
whose family repeatedly filled the archiepiscopal see
of Mainz, and who possessed nine residences at
least, all maintained in perfect repair, and many of
them seldom or never visited by him. Pommers-
felder Castle appears to be the principal mansion.
The present (1896) Count's grandfather sold some
of the Gobelin tapestry and other effects ; but the
furniture, books, and pictures are said to be very
fine, and the first named to be in the English taste
of the beginning of the century.

A friend at Dorking, whom I was visiting, gave
me an account of his visit to Mr. W. J. Evelyn at
Wootton. He and a companion found Evelyn alone,
and the latter asked them to stay dinner. The
somewhat Barmecide repast was laid in the ban-
queting-hall a pair of soles, a fowl, and a jelly.
They had coffee before dinner, and tea with it, but
no wine or beer. The servant-maid brought in the
dishes, and left them to help themselves. Evelyn

VOL. ii. 35

242 FOURTH GENERATION

rose when he had finished his fish, and put the
empty plate on the sideboard. The others had to
do the same. Evelyn grasped his teacup with his
hand, instead of taking it by the handle. He spoke
very brusquely, and was dressed in a very rough
manner. He had been gardening when they
arrived.

My friend noticed a good many books in the
library, a model of John Evelyn's tomb in Wootton
Church, the manuscript of the Diary, and some fine
old plate of the Diarist's time, including a tall silver
cup in the original leathern case.

Evelyn and Martin Tupper were schoolfellows,
and Tupper used to be invited to stay at Wootton.
Charles Mackay, the poet, who spent his last days,
and died, in a small cottage at the foot of Box Hill,
was also occasionally asked there. This was so far
creditable to Evelyn, as poor Mackay could not
possibly be of the slightest utility to him, and did
not offer the same sort of interesting personal asso-
ciation as Tupper.

The name of Mackay awakens in my mind the
curious reflection that John Timbs and he were
two of the men whom my good father, solicitous
for my settlement in life, held up to me as great
exemplars, and likely to prove influential helpers ;

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 243

for at one period both lived in good style, and
seemed to make literature pay. Timbs died in
the Charterhouse.

I have observed that librarians are often selected
with a special regard to their ignorance of literature
and books, and such was the case here. Evelyn
himself has no feeling in this direction, though a
fairly good botanist, and so far doing credit to his
name ; but he might have pitched on someone who
would have helped to recover the numerous volumes
which, in Upcott's time, were abstracted from the
collection. These are sometimes reported to Evelyn
at exorbitant prices ; but he has most frequently
missed them altogether, when they might, by a little
management, be secured on moderate terms. The
list of these strays, which I have drawn up and
printed, and which receives periodical additions,
begins to be a sadly long one.

The house has, in short, been mercilessly stripped
of its ancient treasures, and the present owner is
not proud enough, though to the full rich enough,
to redeem them when he can, notwithstanding the
somewhat heavy penalty payable for his predecessors'
gross neglect of the acquisitions and belongings of
the historical Evelyn. It was only the other day
that the Wootton copy of the first edition of

244 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

Spenser's Faery Queen was sold at an auction for
ji. It is many years since it left its old home.

My Dorking friend related to me the following.
A clergyman there meets a little girl, and, regarding
her thoughtfully and solemnly, says, * Child, do you
know who made that vile body of yours ?' ' Yes,
sir/ replies the child ; ' mother made the body, and
I made the skirt/

It was from this gentleman, who had been many
years on the medical staff under the Indian Govern-
ment, that I heard a singular case of infectious
disease missing a generation. An Englishman,
walking somewhere outside a town in British India,
saw a beautiful Hindoo girl bathing in a pool, and
was irresistibly smitten by her attractions. The
result was a daughter, who married, and who herself
had one. The Hindoo's child never betrayed any
symptom of carrying in her blood the germ of a
particular malady actually communicated by the
mother ; but the taint betrayed itself in the grand-
daughter, to whom it proved fatal, after she had
conveyed it to her husband. A tardy retribution,
and an unmerited one !

CHAPTER III.

Literary jottings Shakespear The Shakespear Papers Shake-
spear and Bacon The Sonnets Yorick Tennyson Some
new particulars of him and his father Longfellow Brown-
ing The poet and Lord Coleridge The Browning Society
The arrangements for his interment Amusing anecdote
The Trinity College MS. of Chaucer Halliwell's Shake-
speariana A curious episode at his daughter's wedding
Dr. Ingleby The Hatless Headman G. A. Sala Alexander
Ireland.

IT seems to me obvious that one main source of the
obscurity of Shakespear's life was the failure of his
contemporaries to understand his greatness. Other-
wise they must have committed to writing more
about him. But probably a second reason was the
puritanical element in the family, which would view
at best with indifference any monuments or records
illustrative of the dramatist. In a former section I
have cited a passage from Miss Hazlitt's American
Diary, where she speaks of having met at Perth
Amboy a Mr. Shakespear, who resembled the
portraits which she had seen of the great poet.
It is not generally known that, in April, 1616, the

246 FOURTH GENERATION

very month of Shakespear's death, there was a great
fire at Stratford ; but whether any of the papers or
books perished there, we do not learn.

Our information about Bacon is meagre enough,
although he moved in so much higher a sphere,
socially speaking.

Rightly or wrongly, I formulated, in early days,
in my own mind an impression that Bacon was a
man of short stature, from his disparaging allusion
in one of his Essays to tall persons, whose heads he
likens to the meanly-furnished upper storeys of lofty
houses.

The most curious part of his personal history
seems to be that which has no direct connection
with it that is to say, the fact that the two greatest
Englishmen should have been contemporaries, and
yet have apparently known nothing of each other,
which probably led to the silly theory that both
were one and the same.

Shakespear, in the line,

' From fairest creatures we desire increase/

has touched the voluptuous or sensual side of
cruelty.

It has constantly struck me, from my intimacy as
a bibliographer with the elaborate and explanatory
style of Elizabethan title-pages, how remarkable in

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 247

its simplicity, brevity, and unobtrusiveness, is that
to our poet's two earliest productions, which came
from the press, let us bear in mind, when he was
barely thirty, yet when he was already making his
mark. You have to turn over the leaf to discover
the author. There are only half a dozen other
examples of such reticence in or about the same
period within my knowledge. Barnfield, in his
Affectionate Shepherd, 1594, published when he
was a youth of twenty, and the editor of England's
Helicon, 1600, may have equally borrowed from
Shakespear. Barnfield does not even disclose his
name in a dedication.

It has long since been mentioned by the present
writer that the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets was
almost undoubtedly not the Earl of Pembroke. We
have two sorts of testimony to the contrary, which,
taken together, seem to be fairly conclusive. In
1 6 10, Thomas Thorp, the T. T. of the Sonnets,
inscribed to John Florio the first edition of a version
of Epictetus and Cedes in English in terms pedantic
and mysterious enough, yet such as the stationer
might employ toward a man of letters. In 1616
Thorp brought out an enlarged impression, and
dedicated it to William, Earl of Pembroke, in a
totally different strain ; for even where Thorp applies

248 FOURTH GENERATION

the expression, ' True and real upholder of learned
endeavours/ to his lordship, he merely quotes what
the translator had said. So, in 1610 and 1616, we
trace the state of feeling of Thorp toward Florio
and Lord Pembroke respectively, and it does not
accord with the hypothesis that the person addressed
in 1609 by him as Mr. W. //. can be the same as
the person addressed by him in 1616 as ' The Right
Honourable William, Earl of Pembroke/

In an early manuscript copy of Middleton's Game
at Chess, formerly in the possession of Mr. C. J.
Stewart the bookseller, there is a dedication to
Mr. William Hammond^ evidently a coeval lover
and patron of letters ; and how much more likely it
is that Thorp, having acquired the Sonnets in the
form of loose, unconse.cutive papers, should have
arranged them to the best of his ability, and have
connected with them on publication such a name as
that of Hammond !

I cannot help cherishing the belief that in Yorick
the poet had an eye to Tarlton. He makes Hamlet
call him * The King's Jester/ and say, ' He hath
borne me on his back a thousand times/ Tarlton
died in 1588, when Shakespear was still a young
man.

One of the most prominent of the gentry at ,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 249

and a justice of peace and quorum, expressed his
opinion that I was a clever man. It may be easily
imagined how sensible I was of the flattery, when I
add that he thought Shakespear a clever man too.
But, seriously speaking, cleverness has become an
equivocal term.

The obscurity of Shakespear's personal history
impels one to seek explanations which are, after all,
at best empirical. His unique genius made him
stand out so conspicuously from among his literary
contemporaries, ' Sicut inter ignes luna minores/
that there was a sort of repellent influence, amount-
ing in the case of a man like Jonson to pique or
jealousy, and in still less distinguished persons to
awe. The sun draws toward it lesser bodies ; but,
then, they are planetary ones of inferior magnitude,
in which sensibility is absent. I conjecture that our
great poet, a sort of human Sun, lacked camaraderie.
Who but he, save perhaps Daniel from a clearly
different motive, ever withdrew from the scene of
his triumphs to end his days in a dull and bigoted
country village? Had he been only such another
as Jonson, or Beaumont, or Shirley, we should have
known more about him. Shakespear must have
secretly felt his own immense transcendency, and at
the same time the failure of others to recognise it ;

250 FOURTH GENERATION

and to such a cause one may not err in assigning
his retirement to Stratford in the prime of life,
although there again the sympathy with him was
even slighter either among the townspeople or
his own circle. Was it not a most self-contained
career ?

A neighbour told me one day an anecdote of
Tennyson. About thirty-five years ago this gentle-
man was at Somersby, in Lincolnshire, where the
poet's father lived, and an old servant of the family,
when he went away, said to him, ' You'll be sure,
sir, and remember me to Master Alfred/

Old Dr. Tennyson was rather well, very irritable.
The tale goes that his cook, her dress having caught
fire one day, first ran to her master's door, but, being
afraid of his temper, went back, and out into the
yard, screaming for help. The air fanned the flames,
and the woman died of her burns. The Doctor, to
prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy, had a butt
of water placed outside the kitchen door, so that the
cook, if she became ignited again, might jump or be
lifted into it, and not trouble him.

Rich men, and even lords, may make verses,
though they do not usually cut a very good figure
among the freemen of Parnassus. Tennyson was
made a peer, because he had first proved himself a

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 251

man of genius, and had, moreover, written adulatory
addresses ex officio to the Sovereign.

Emily Davison, daughter of Sir Henry, an Indian
functionary of our acquaintance in Brompton days,
used to visit a friend of her father's in Onslow
Square, and met Tennyson there. The first time
she saw him, he was leaning out of the drawing-
room window, smoking a pipe with the strongest
tobacco, and very roughly dressed, and, the house
being in the painters hands, she took him for one
of the workmen a not unnatural notion for a
schoolgirl, as Miss Davison then was.

A pretty little story is told of Longfellow and his
love for children, which, as usual, was understood
and reciprocated. A little fellow was taken to the
poet's house, and found Longfellow in his library.
The child looked round the room, and after a while
ventured to ask if his host, among his books, had
Jack the Giant-killer. Longfellow had to own that
his collection did not boast it. The boy said nothing,
but, paying a second visit, approached Longfellow,
holding something in one hand very firmly. He
had brought him two cents to buy a copy of the de-
ficient romance, which was to be * all his own book.'

At one time Robert Browning used to follow the
dictates of his own inspiration, and produced poetry,

252 FOURTH GENERATION

when he had anything worth saying and printing.
But latterly I understand that his publishers would
jog him on the elbow, and let him know that there
was room for a new volume, and the bard would
cast about for a subject or a peg to hang a book
upon. Messrs. Smith and Elders' cheques are very
excellent securities ; but they are an indifferent
Tenth Muse.

My uncle once went with Robertson, editor of the
Westminster Review, to wait on Browning at his
London residence on the subject of an article for the
periodical, and vividly retained an impression of the
flowered dressing-gown in which the poet came
down to them. There was no idea at that time that
he would become a writer of such importance.

Browning having sent to Lord Coleridge one of
his new poetical productions, the latter expressed his
admiration of what little he was able to understand.
Browning observed that if such a reader could com-
prehend ten per cent, of his work, he ought to be
well satisfied.

I agree so far with the late Mr. Reynell, that it
was a bizarre kind of proceeding to start a Society
to expound the writings of a living author, and I
have heard it whispered that the oracle, on being
pressed for a solution of some obscure passage in a

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 253

composition, had sometimes to confess that he could
not help the inquirer, though he had no doubt that
he knew what he meant when he wrote it. This
goes some way to justify Lord Coleridge's criticism.

Browning died without doing more than leave
verbal instructions in respect to his funeral or
burial-place. He said that, if he died at Paris, he
desired to lie by his father there ; if at Florence, by
his wife in the old cemetery ; and if at Venice, in
some particular church, which I have forgotten
not, I believe, at Lido. The difficulty was-, so far
as Florence was concerned, that the old cemetery
had been closed, and that the municipality could
not grant permission for his interment there without
some special Ministerial authority; and the family de-
clined the proposal to exhume his wife, and lay both
together in the new ground. It was then that Dean
Bradley, who had wavered so long as it was a mere
question of compliment, came forward, and assented
to his remains being deposited in the Abbey.

I heard from F. an odd story related to him by
A. S. of a visit paid to two sporting acquaintances
in Buckinghamshire. S. referred to the recent
death of Browning, and one of the Nimrods, turn-
ing to the other thoughtfully, said, ' Poor Browning !
did he hunt with you ?'

254 FOURTH GENERATION

F. has, as I always maintain, one ruling charac-
teristic. He is the most uncommercial man I ever
met. It has not been my lot to come across a
person so thoroughly superior to pecuniary con-
siderations. On one occasion, when the money
could scarcely have been indifferent to him, two
literary commissions were thrown in his way : one
was worth ^120; the other was gratuitous what
they term honorary. He preferred the latter. He
was mentioning to me the case of the Trinity
College manuscript of Chaucer, borrowed by
H alii well- Phillipps from the then librarian without
any voucher given, and never returned, as the
borrower alleged, after the death of the librarian,
that he had restored it to him. It was afterward
in a lot which came into the hands of Rodd, the
bookseller, either from an auction or by private
purchase, and shown to Sir F. Madden, then Keeper
of the Manuscripts at the British Museum. Madden
recognised the volume, although the Chaucer portion
had been taken out and destroyed, and the remain-
ing two parts bound up separately ; but he could
hardly swear to it in its altered state ; it is now in
the Museum. Bond told me without reserve, when
he was Keeper, that he would not buy any manu-
script from Phillipps ; and, in fact, I have heard

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 255

that he did one or two queer things in the printed
book department.

When the Birmingham folks declined his Shakes-
peariana at /7,ooo, an American lady offered to
buy them, and present them to the New York
Shakespear Society, if they would undertake to
preserve them. H alii well, I understand, was made
F.R.S. on the belief that he would draw up the
catalogue of the Society's library, which he never
did, though he had promised to do it. But it was
easier fifty years ago to gain admission.

I have already referred to Phillipps's extraordinary
nervousness. He invited me to the wedding of his
second daughter to Mr. Hall, and at the breakfast,
when the health of the father of the bride was pro-
posed and drunk, I heard a sudden rustle of paper
all over the room, and anon perceived that (by a
preconcerted arrangement, no doubt) the response
was being circulated in the form of a printed slip,
owing to Phillipps's constitutional inability to get on
his feet and say a few words.

. I saw his second wife once or twice at Holling-
bury Copse. It was said that her aunt imagined
that Phillipps had his eye on her, and was surprised
and piqued when she found that it was ' my niece '
who was the object of pursuit.

256 FOURTH GENERATION

Dr. Ingleby, of Valentines, near Ilford, the Shake-
spearian scholar, used to drive out about the neigh-
bourhood without his hat, and went by the name of
the Hatless Headman. When I knew Ingleby, he
rented Wanstead from Lord Cowley, and I recall
a delightful drive with him in a dogcart through the
woods, and the imminent risk I more than once ran
of having my head broken by contact with some
overhanging bough.

Valentines is a historical mansion, where Arch-
bishop Tillotson formerly resided, and an avenue
called his Walk still remains. But all the fine
old wood-carving by Grinling Gibbons has been
replaced by plaster.

The late G. A. Sala was a man of rare industry
and capacity. He was a journalist par excellence,
and his other works were assemblages of articles in
book form. But he shewed great power and fluency
as a public speaker. I heard him with a good deal
of interest and amusement one evening at a dinner
at the Mansion House, where he was far away the
leading star among the after-dinner orators. He
poked some fun at Sir William Smith, of the
Dictionaries, as to his (Sala's) notion, till he met
him there in the flesh, that he was a sort of nominis
umbra.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 257

Sala was an unimaginative Alexandra Dumas
pere. He was eminently successful, I should
imagine, in a pecuniary point of view, yet, like the
true Bohemian, died none the richer for that.

The late Mr. Alexander Ireland, of Manchester,
who was, I believe, an Edinburgh man, made him-
self known to me about 1866. He professed to
take a warm interest in the writings of my grand-
father, and during many years we corresponded
together. But, as a person who has alike inherited
and accumulated a vast amount of information on
all sorts of subjects and people, I have met with
passing many of these almost hysterically enthusi-
astic interviewers, asking one for opinions about
British Columbia, Burns, Lamb, Hazlitt, the early
English poets, and a legion of other topics ; and
Ireland was no exception to the rule These folks
gush for a season, while they glean and recon-
noitre, then put up their note-books and wish you
good-day.

The gentleman just now in question overrated
his intimacy with me, as I have already implied,
by appropriating without leave or adequate acknow-
ledgment the material collected by me and printed
in my 1867 Hazlitt book. I was more sorry than
angry, because in the interval I had brought

VOL. ii. 36

258 FOURTH GENERATION

together, unknown to him, a mass of new informa-
tion, which placed my worthy acquaintance in the
unenviable situation described by Macaulay, I
cannot altogether refrain from dwelling on the
matter, because I am constantly given to under-
stand that the person who thus obliged me is the
only recognised authority on the subject !

I have involuntarily acted as bush-beater to two
in succession to Mr. Ireland for Hazlitt and to
Canon Ainger for Lamb, and need I say how
deeply sensible I am of the double honour ?

Ireland was engaged to print in confidence the
Vestiges of Creation,, by the late Robert Chambers,
published anonymously. The copies were sent up
by the typographer to the London houses, and the
authorship was for some time kept as a close secret.
But, like other secrets, greater and smaller, it was
in due course divulged.

When I first visited him at Bowdon, on the
Cheshire side of the Irwell, he appeared to be in
affluent circumstances through his interest in the
Manchester Examiner and his general printing
business, and he subsequently built a large house
in the same suburb to accommodate his library.
Of his later history I know very little, except that
he sold his books, retired to Southport, and ulti-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 259

mately returned to Bowdon. There was a serious
loss of money, I understood, by the editorial mis-
management of the paper, and Ireland and his wife
were temporarily in great straits. It was then, I
suppose, that Mr. Gladstone gave him ^"200 out of
the Royal Bounty.

He had an old-fashioned way of asking after my
wife. He would always say : c I hope that Mistress
Hazlitt is well. Mistress Ireland is pretty well, I
thank you.' The second Mistress Ireland, who is
also no more, was a remarkably intelligent and
agreeable woman, the daughter of a gentleman
named Nicholson, in Cumberland ; her brother,
Henry Alley ne Nicholson, published an interesting
monograph on the geology of Cumberland and
Westmoreland, 1868.

Ireland had a son and a daughter by his first
wife. The son I never met, but I recollect Miss
Ireland, who resembled her father in height and
general appearance. There was at one time a talk
of this lady marrying one of our modern verse-
writers.

CHAPTER IV.

Literary acquaintances The Rev. Thomas Corser His early
knowledge of our family at Wem Mr. James Crossley A
Milton anecdote The Rev. Alexander Dyce My personal
contact with him The Rev. John Mitford Henry Bradshaw
My obligations to him His peculiarities Henry Huth
Sketch of his life My long and intimate acquaintance with
him His earliest experiences as a collector His library
catalogue Mrs. Huth Huth's indifferent health Circum-
stances of his death My conversations with him on various
subjects Herbert Spencer The Leigh Hunt memorial
Huth's liberality of character and feeling.

MY old and excellent acquaintance, the Rev.
Thomas Corser, the distinguished book-collector,
of Stand, near Manchester, was a native of Whit-
church, and had been a great angler in his earlier
days. He interested me, when I saw him at Stand,
by telling me that his father was very intimate with
Mr. Jenkins, who was Presbyterian minister at
Whitchurch, and on very affectionate terms with
my great-grandfather at Wem. I went to Stand
two or three times, and Corser was always most
friendly. The Rectory was a small detached house

FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY 261

near the church, and the books were from insuffi-
cient space stowed away in bedroom cupboards and
even under beds* Corser had to light a candle to
look for a Caxton in a cupboard. He could give
you a good glass of port, and was not averse to it
himself. His library cost, he told me, ,9,000, and,
although many of the books were given away,
realized ^"20,000. It curiously illustrates the change
in the market value of some old books, that Corser
kept his second folio Shakespear in the dining-room
among the more ordinary works. A five-pound
note secured a good copy in his day.

A second leading figure in Manchester literary
circles some years since was Mr. James Crossley,
a retired solicitor and an enthusiastic book-lover.
I saw him repeatedly, when I visited the city, and
I ever found him most urbane and communicative.
He remembered Piccadilly, Manchester, when two
vehicles could not pass each other there. His
collection of books was very extensive and multi-
farious ; but he had certain specialities, particularly
the writings of Defoe and of Lancashire and
Cheshire authors.

The removal of his library, when he left Picca-
dilly to reside elsewhere, occupied three weeks, to
the amazement and loss of the contractor, who,

262 FOURTH GENERATION

surveying it cursorily, calculated on achieving the
task in as many days, and estimated accordingly.

Crossley was rather a keen -hand at a bargain,
and was during months engaged in a treaty for a
copy of the first edition of Paradise Lost. When
he had settled on the price, he asked the vendor if
he had any more copies ; he would take all he had.
The price for a fine copy thirty years ago was a
couple of guineas, at which figure I acquired a
beautiful one in the original sheep from Tomlins,
in Great Russell Street, and when an American
agent offered me double, I thought that he was in
jest.

The Rev. Alexander Dyce was invariably willing
to afford any information to me on literary or
bibliographical subjects. When my father was first
acquainted with him he lived in Gray's Inn, He
was a bachelor. I met him one day at Russell
Smith's, in Soho Square, a singularly huge, sham-
bling, awkward, ungainly figure. He had come
about an eighteenpenny book he required for use.
There was some negotiation as to an abatement of
the price, and ultimately he left the shop, book in
hand. In a few moments he returned, and asked
Smith if, when he had done with it, he would take
the volume back at a reasonable reduction. On

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 263

another occasion when I met Dyce, it was the
sale of the library of the Rev. John Mitford in
1860, and he spoke of Mitford's handwriting as a
curious mixture of neatness and illegibility in fact,
that the writer had come to him before then to
ask him to assist in deciphering it.

There was a creepy story about Mitford and a
mysterious affair which took place at his rectory in
Suffolk. A dead child was discovered behind a
chimney-piece.

This gentleman edited many of the modern poets
for Whittingham ; but all that he did, I understand,
was to prefix a poorly- worded memoir and a passable
sonnet. The texts took care of themselves.

Of the late Mr. Henry Bradshaw, of the Univer-
sity Library, Cambridge, I now regret that I saw
so little. Through my old friend, Mr. G. A. Green-
hill, of Emmanuel, whom I have known since he
was a Bluecoat boy, I had been in communication
with Bradshaw some little time before I went up to
Cambridge in 1875 to examine personally as many
of the rarities there as I could.

I was in the habit of applying to Bradshaw for
occasional assistance in regard to unique books at
Cambridge, and as he was a very bad correspondent,
I employed Greenhill to go to him, and obtain the

264 FOURTH GENERATION

required information. The curious part was that
Bradshaw seated himself at one of the tables with
Greenhill, and wrote him a note, which he threw
across. When I waited on him myself, however,
no man could have been more courteous or more
liberal. Incidentally naming to him one day in
conversation the Oxendens of Barham, near Canter-
bury, he gave me to understand that he was related
to that family. I think that his sister was Lady
Oxenden.

Bradshaw was sadly unpractical and inconsequent.
He entered warmly into projects, but scarcely ever
pursued the matter any farther. Publishers an-
nounced books by him as about to appear, because,
judging him by ordinary rules, they concluded that
some arrangement, into which he had ostensibly
entered, was a settled affair, whereas our excellent
friend probably thought no more about it.

Bradshaw had some project for rearranging Sir
David Lyndsay's works, as they occur in my Collec-
tions, according to Furnivall ; but I never under-
stood what it was, nor did it come to anything, and
when I mentioned the matter to David Laing, he
did not seem to see what room or scope there could
be for it ; Lyndsay's case stands so differently from
Chaucer and the author of Piers Ploughman.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 265

The last time we met was in London, not very
long prior to his unexpected death, and he informed
me that a gentleman at Cambridge had just brought
to light a tract which had been mislaid, adding that,
as soon as he returned home, he would ask him to
transmit me a full account. I knew too well that
this was all that 1 should ever hear of it.

I honestly consider it nevertheless a privilege and
an honour to have met Bradshaw, and to have asso-
ciated with him, for however brief a term. He was
so thoroughly genuine and original. It was Furni-
vall who gave me the account of him which was
substantially printed at the time in a memoir. Brad-
shaw's life was sacrificed to his inveterate neglect to
take exercise.

It was somewhat amusing to hear George Bullen
speak of him as a man who had been absurdly over-
rated in his (Bullen's) opinion.

During my stay at the University upward of
twenty years since, I visited most of the libraries,
and left very little unnoted. I had at Magdalen
a rather interesting conversation with the chamber-
fellow of Minors Bright, who was himself away. He
furnished me with a few samples of the passages in
Pepys's Diary which Bright had deemed it necessary
to suppress. One I remember was where the Secre-

266 FOURTH GENERATION

tary to the Admiralty described his intrigue with a
pretty Dutch lady (it was well for his domestic
peace that the account was in cryptogram), and
another referred to his dilemma at his lodgings,
where he was overtaken in the night, and secreted
something in the chimney, faute de cabinet.

A perfectly fortuitous circumstance introduced me
in the winter of 1866 to the late Mr. Henry Huth.
I solicited in writing the particulars of a unique
volume which he had lately acquired, and he
responded by inviting me to his house to inspect
it. My conversance with the class of literature in
which he ultimately took the greatest amount of
interest, and for which his library is remarkable, led
to a continuance of our intercourse, and during ten
years I saw him regularly, as a rule, on Sunday
afternoons when he was in town. My practice was
to go to his house about one, lunch with the family,
and spend two or three hours afterward in the
library with Mr. Huth. Sometimes a guest or two
called Mr. Turner, Mr. Russell, or Mr. Gayangos ;
but more frequently we were alone.

Mr. Huth was a gentleman, a scholar, and a
linguist. He was particularly affable and kind, and
no one could be less ostentatious and presuming.
He afforded me enormous assistance in the prepara-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 267

tion of the later letters of my Handbook, and was at
all times ready to lend me books, irrespectively of
their pecuniary value. I have known what it was
to return home from one of my afternoons with him
with a hundred-guinea tome under my arm or in
my pocket.

He was born in 1815, I believe in Finsbury,
where his father, Mr. Frederick Huth, lived at all
events when he was a boy. He told me that his
brothers and sisters and himself were taken out for
exercise in what was then the open ground about.
It was still the fashion for men of business in the
City to fix themselves tolerably near to their offices,
and the Huths removed from Finsbury to Clapton,
formerly another favourite resort of City men.

The founder of the firm of F. Huth and Co. was
originally a clerk in a mercantile establishment at
Hamburg. He went thence to Spain, where he
settled and married a Spanish lady; but in 1812,
during the disturbances in the Peninsula, he
determined to remove to England. It was with
great difficulty that he escaped, and shots were
fired into the vessel in which he embarked. His
aptitude for business gradually gave him a footing
in London, and he, from modest beginnings, rose to
a share in more ambitious transactions. His son,

268 FOURTH GENERATION

who characteristically described his father to me as
an adventurer, mentioned that folks opened their
eyes when a bill drawn upon F. Huth and Co. for
,30,000 came into the market, and was duly met.
But Frederick Huth was evidently a man of
genius.

The house accepted any sort of factorship on
a large scale. Huth told me, by way of illustration,
that a single transaction in silkworms' eggs from
Japan to Italy was worth to them ,25,000, or
10 per cent, on a quarter of a million. It is not
everybody who can afford to be generous that
proves so ; but F. Huth and Co., as the firm
continues to be called, were in nearly every public
subscription in London for a handsome figure
where or what the object was, so long as it was
legitimate, it did not signify.

Huth never went back beyond his father, but
he shewed me a queer - looking portrait on the
staircase at Prince's Gate, which purported to be
the effigy of a certain person of his name, whether
related to him or not, I am, as he was, uncertain.
My former acquaintance married a Viennese, whose
brother was a Consul at Hamburg, and a quiet,
pleasant fellow enough. Mrs. Huth laid greater
stress, poor soul! on her husband's wealth than

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 269

he did, for of all the men whom I have known
he was the most unassuming. As a book- collector,
he possessed a tolerable knowledge of the insides
of volumes, and he was the master of several
languages. It was a saying of his that no man
could be a gentleman who did not understand Latin.

He has said to me more than once that all that
he wanted was peace and quietness. In anyone
else this would have been affectation ; but I think
it was the beginning of that nervous debility which
so strongly developed itself, and led to his going
abroad one year for change and relief. I have
known him so overcome by depression that he
declared himself to me unable to face the process
of looking for a book on the shelves. Halliwell-
Phillipps was nearly as hypochondriacal while he
lived at Brompton.

Although Huth had the command of a well-
appointed stable in town (that at Wykehurst, he
told me, was nearly as large as the house), his
regular routine was to go to the City in the morning
in a four-wheeled cab, and to walk home, taking
the booksellers in his way. The carriages were
for the ladies.

The earliest dealings of Huth with booksellers
were when he was quite a young man, and he

270 FOURTH GENERATION

used to buy classics of Baldock in Holborn. I
do not fancy that he retained any of his juvenile
acquisitions. At a later period his brother Louis,
to whom he once introduced me, and who lived
with his wife (there was no family) in a large
house, jocularly termed Windsor Castle, in Sussex,
was slightly smitten by bibliomania, and frequented
the shop of Payne and Foss. Old Spanish romances
were his game, and one day, when the two brothers
were there together, Henry diffidently asked the
price of one of those excessively rare early folio
tales of chivalry. The bookseller replied, Eight ;
but his questioner did not know whether he meant
pounds or shillings. Louis Huth, however, bought
it, and subsequently, when he abandoned the pursuit,
handed over the volume to the other.

While the Daniel sale was going on in 1864, my
friend was at Thames Ditton, and Joseph Lilly used
to bring down the day's purchases every evening.
Huth gave me a droll account of Lilly's embarrass-
ment, when he asked him on one of these occa-
sions into the room where they were at dessert,
and begged him to take a glass of wine* The
old bookseller spilled the liquor over the table-
cloth and his own clothes, and retreated in the
utmost confusion into the servants' hall.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 271

The circumstances of poor Huth's tragic end
are perhaps not generally known. One evening
in December, 1878, when the other members of
the family were from home, he appears to have
sat as usual in the little book-room out of the
hall, and in rising to have had a slight fit, as
there was evidence that, in trying to save himself,
he bent the fire-screen. He recovered, however,
for the time, and went up by the front-staircase
to bed. On the way he experienced a second
and more violent seizure, and fell backward,
fracturing the skull ; and the next morning the
servants, not finding him in the breakfast-room,
discovered him on the stairs. Life had been long
extinct, but there is the possibility that, had his
wife and children not been in the country, he might
have been saved.

I shall never cease to regret that Huth permitted
the catalogue of his library to suffer curtailment,
and to fall under the control of a gentleman of
great experience and capacity in certain directions,
but of no literary training or sympathy. The
consequence is that the volumes, which the owner
of the collection fondly hoped to render immaculate,
are replete alike with grave and with absurd errors,
and that, in spite of my earnest representations,

272 FOURTH GENERATION

much valuable information has been suppressed.
Yet it was peculiarly a case in which expense
was immaterial, and it did not signify a straw
whether the work made five, or six, or ten volumes.

The catalogue does not contain all the Huth
books. He did not for some reason wish the
Chinese Bible, which someone sold to him in the
streets of Mexico, inserted ; and he always told
me that there was a copy of one of Southwell's
books, which he intended to restore to Stony hurst
College, from which it was a stray, not desiring to
keep anything under such circumstances. I do not
know what was actually done.

His successor in the possession of the books
projects, I understand, a Supplement, including
his own acquisitions since his father's death. Of
these I have very slight knowledge, except that
they comprise an undescribed translation by Haring-
ton (not Sir John) of Cornelius Agrippa in Com-
mendation of Matrimony, printed by John Skot
in 1528. A Table of Errata might be a desirable
feature in the proposed Appendix, and it would
be a long one. For instance, in one place the
Romish Breviary of 1518 is stated to have been
printed at the expense of the Count and Countess
Frangepane [Frangipani] while they were confined

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 273

as prisoners of war 'in the gaol called Dcrasel
(Torcello, near Venice)' But Dorasel was the
Venetian form of Torricella, the state-prison con-
tiguous to the Ducal Palace at Venice itself. This
is merely by way of example. The particular item
was not catalogued by me.

Huth, as a commercial man, regarded the ' knock-
out ' in auctions as a moot question. He saw, what
many others cannot help seeing, the injustice of one,
or two, or more experts attending a public sale of
any kind, and virtually giving away the fruit of a
life-long study of some subject for the benefit of the
vendor's estate ; and it is to be noted that, while a
share of the prejudice against the process is due to
the class of persons principally concerned in it, an
arrangement substantially similar is capable of being
made between two gentlemen or two purchasers of
acknowledged position, who may say to one another:
' I will leave such a lot to you, if you will leave such
another to me'; or, * Do you buy lot 10, and what-
ever you give for it I will recoup you, instead of
bidding myself, and perhaps, by drawing attention,
making it dearer.' The methods of varying the
' knock-out/ in short, are numerous ; and it may
seem to many (I think it did so to Huth) that the
chief objection is superficial, in two senses an

VOL. ii. 37

274 FOURTH GENERATION

objection to the idea of vulgar brokers reselling
goods in a vulgar pot-house parlour over their
liquor, and the objection which a judge or other
illiterate person might raise primd Jade without
any practical conversance with the bearings of the
matter.

It is related that at the Mason sale in 1798 the
Duke of Roxburgh and Lord Althorp obtained
what they severally wanted at moderate prices by
one bidding for the two, and then tossing up after-
ward. This was a type of ' knock-out/ omitting
some of the less genteel agrdmens.

It was Huth who laid down very fairly, as I
thought, the principle on which men should be
estimated and accepted by society. This is a most
important point at the present time, when the classes
have become so mixed. He considered that the
character of the occupation ought to govern the
matter; he remarked that he would not recognise
a lucifer-match-maker, a blacking-maker, or a dealer
in any other sordid or offensive commodity, what-
ever his means or surroundings might be.

But this does not appear to me to cover the whole
ground, or even to touch the most material element.
Something depends, no doubt, on the employment ;
but we have also to look at what a man is, and there

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 275

is then the chronic difficulty that the acquaintance
must be personal, as the master of the house is
nearly always in these cases far superior to the rest.
It asks three generations to make a family, and too
often by that time the money has disappeared, and
the members are statu quo ante not quite so well
off, because they have pretensions which they are
too poor to support.

Mr. Huth set aside Sunday afternoons, as I
mention, for the visits of his bibliographical acquaint-
ance, and he would make no exceptions to this rule,
although I have occasionally called on a week-day
in the evening, when I saw so much of him. The
late Lord Ashburnham expressed a desire to see the
library, but intimated some difficulty or scruple
about Sundays, and Mr. Huth told me that there
the matter rested. I never heard that his lordship
came.

Here I once or twice met Herbert Spencer. He
struck me as rather frail and languid. I do not
know that any very striking observation escaped
from him in my hearing. But I was impressed by
his statement of the breakdown of a trial which he
had given to vegetarianism, and the loss of brain-
power which he had experienced from that sort of
diet. F, found the same thing. He came to one's

276 FOURTH GENERATION

house and dined, like a rabbit, on a cabbage or a
lettuce ; but he had to return to animal food.

Herbert Spencer stayed three or four years ago
at Dorking with Grant Allen, while I was in the
same neighbourhood ; and I heard that he was then
in very failing health and terribly nervous and
crotchety. He had conceived an intolerance of
remarks of a commonplace and unfruitful character,
and had brought with him an apparatus which he
could at pleasure slip over his ears, and which spared
him the pain of auricular contact with less gifted
mortals. Yet how vast a profit some of our greatest
writers have derived from the comparative study of
inferior minds ; and the investigation of graduated
intellectual force must be very incomplete without
a survey of every form and measure -of development.
But I conclude that Herbert Spencer adopted this
precaution as a valetudinarian in self-defence.
We sometimes talked on religious topics. Huth
used to say that he was not himself a church-goer,
but that he never interfered with the arrangements
of the house in this respect, leaving it open to his
children to follow their own inclinations. As so
often happens, whatever distinguished him above
other persons of great wealth was a life-tenancy ;
his qualities were personal and not transferable.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 277

When the Leigh Hunt Memorial started, he gave
me ^5 toward it, and it led to him remarking that he
once sent 20 to a son of the author, who pleaded
great distress. I felt bound to explain to him that
it was probably no such matter, and that the
applicant was a person who made use of his name
for begging purposes.

He seldom spoke about money, unless it was to
ask the price of a book, and that was not often.
Even when he employed me to execute literary
work, he left the remuneration open. But I recollect
that, when I once spoke of someone who had ^"7,000
a year, he quietly observed that it was a very nice
income to have, yet a man could not do much
with it.

It was a pleasant little trait which Huth once
related to me of his sister, who lived on Wimbledon
Common. A very old friend arrived at the house
on a visit, and she (I forget her married name, but
she was the wife of a partner in the house) was at
hand to receive him personally in the hall, and to
take his bag, or whatever he carried, from him, of
course, to transfer it to a servant. But the attention
under the circumstances was what Huth's own wife
would have called very * sweet/

He was rather ceremonious and reserved ; I

278 FOURTH GENERATION

ascribed this to his Spanish blood. At first, in
his letters, I was Sir, then Dear Sir. Once I
became My Dear Sir; but he repented this gushing
familiarity, and returned and adhered to the middle
form. I was comparatively indifferent to these
details. Huth maintained me for over ten years,
and enabled me to carry out my bibliographical
design. That was his value, and it was a high one.

Huth mentioned to me once at table that the
firm kept a certain number of professional works in
Moorgate Street, where their place of business was
at that time, for reference and consultation. * Ah !'
I was tempted to say, ' that is your Ckitty library.
But my worthy acquaintance was joke-proof.

He was more exempt than anyone I have met
from that narrow partiality for their own property,
whatever it may be, which distinguishes the majority
of amateurs. He was essentially a man of liberal
feeling in all questions ; but he offered a powerful
contrast to such petty-minded collectors as George
Daniel, of Canonbury, who invariably pronounced
his own copies of books the ne plus ultra of
excellence and value.

The prepossession in favour of personal appur-
tenances, no matter how unimportant they may be,
frequently co-exists, however, with the most amiable

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 279

qualities. The owner of a few defaced coins, some
odds and ends of china, a ragged regiment of non-
descript books, does not seek to enlarge his know-
ledge or to refine his taste, even if he has the
opportunity. You may tell him where the true
examples are to be seen, or you may possess them
yourself, and exhibit them to him. It is his mission
or cue to admire, not what is worthy of admiration,
but what is his. He has passed through life with
his eyes shut, and declines to open them to please
you or me. The brokers' shops have made his house
a shoot for the last half-century ; but he is perfectly
satisfied, and is impervious to argument. This is
he history of the lamentable assemblages of literary
and artistic effects which every season brings to the
hammer. The unsophisticated enthusiast is the
dealers and auctioneer's godsend.

Huth and some of his friends projected about
1868 a new literary paper, and promised me a place
upon the staff ; but nothing came of it Truth was
once wittily defined to be another and better World;
we certainly want another and better Athenceum
something, as Huth thought, younger and healthier.
Periodicals experience the ailments of old age, like
ourselves. I do not see Sir Charles Dilke's paper
myself once in ten years, but I understand, from the

280 FOURTH GENERATION

author of the Sorrows of Satan and other reliable
authorities, that it does not improve in amiability or
generosity.

Macaulay pronounced criticism extinct in this
country long before he died ; but it would be
desirable to possess, at any rate, an organ free from
bias and animus, and capable of informing its readers
what the books sent to it for notice really are. There
is no necessity, in general, to call into service the
almost painful culture of official pluralists ; all that
seems to be ordinarily required is a certain measure
of educated intelligence and a certain measure of
equity. Of course, we want something more than
the flippant school-usher and the strait-witted com-
positor, whose eyes instinctively gravitate to accents
and commas, something higher than the Erratum-
hunter, and more respectable than the party with the
vendetta, whose commission, or even whose friend's,
to execute a book you may have unluckily inter-
cepted. These prevailing types demonstrate the
justice of Macaulay's remark, and explain Mr.
Huth's sense of a deficiency in this direction.

I may honestly affirm that I am profoundly in-
different on the subject; but the publishers may
naturally complain that their commercial investments
suffer from the present unsatisfactory condition of

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 281

affairs, while they so importantly contribute to keep
the paper on its feet by their advertisements. Might
not the proprietor of the At/ienaum, who is so very
liberal in politics, carry the feeling and principle
into the conduct of his periodical ? Or, as an
alternative, might not the Law of Libel be made
more stringent and summary ?

Reviewing in the press is a process and system of
which the general reader of daily and weekly pub-
lications has a very limited and imperfect idea. He
is apt to misunderstand its nature and significance.
A review of a work is simply the opinion of one
man about another man's book. The critic may by
possibility come to his task with some foreknowledge
of the subject, as when a member of the staff of a
public institution is employed to notice ex cathedra a
book dealing with his speciality, and rubs down any
unfortunate wight who has presumed to encroach
on the peculiar domain of these Trades- Unionists
only themselves or their assigns warranted. This
signifies, so far as the official range goes, that the
normal literary man contributes to pay the salary of
the very person who thus narrows his opportunities
of employment, and is not unlikely, in addition, to
lampoon him in the papers, while the official enjoys
the advantage of his prestige in Bloomsbury and

282 FOURTH GENERATION

elsewhere in granting audiences to publishers eager
to have the honour of placing his name on their
title-pages, in lieu of ignobly waiting on them. By
all means let us have a schedule of themes which
may only be handled by the Illuminati. Or, shall
certain books not be legally current without the old
Permissu Superiorum ?

But, as a rule, it is almost necessarily the case
that the critic derives his acquaintance with the
topic treated from a more or less cursory perusal
of the volume in his hands, and it is not invariably
found that he takes such pains as a conscientious
judge should do to make himself a master of
the bearings and of the author's plan. Of course,
the instances are phenomenally rare where a re-
viewer bestows on his undertaking an adequate
amount of labour and thought, to say nothing of his
outlay for material to enable him to do justice to his
author and to himself. I do not wish to dwell too
much on the less usual aspect of the matter, where it
is the fashion to say all that is pleasant about the
production of a friend, and much that is false and
foolish about that of an enemy or rival book-builder,
for I verily believe this cruel and cowardly practice
to be on the decline among critics of any repute.

There is one thing to be said in favour of the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 283

hypercritical and drastic style which distinguishes a
few organs : it keeps authors and editors in their
places. They might, after a while, begin to fancy
themselves rather clever fellows with a middling
knowledge of a subject or so ; but the heel of the
censor presses on their neck ever and anon, and they
are reminded by him or his assigns that they are
damned fools,

I have alluded to my personal want of interest in
the notices of my literary efforts. I have also, I
fear, been rather backward in replying to challenges
in the press. Once it happened that someone wished
to know my authority for ascribing a particular tract
to a particular writer, and Mr, Huth recommended
me to send a reply to the editor. Eventually, when
he found me indomitably apathetic on the point, he
very kindly set to work and wrote a letter for me, or
in my name, I forget which. He was certainly most
friendly, and when I borrowed a valuable book now
and then, and I suggested that it should be packed
up, he, instead of calling a servant, did it himself,
for, if there is a thing in which I succeed worse than
in writing, it is in making a parcel.

I surprised C. by saying that although I had seen
the finest libraries in the country, and they had
served me passing well in a bibliographical sense, my

284 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

private inclination as a book-lover was in favour of
the humbler gathering which a man makes from
choice of the authors or volumes for which he has
a genuine personal affection. I like the old-fashioned
book-closet, as I do the china-closet. There are two
classes of literature to which one may be partial :
one, which it seems sufficient to borrow at need, and
another, which cannot be spared, lest we should
desire to turn to a passage or to peruse once more a
favourite poem or paper. There is a want of intimacy
between the book and its owner in your great library.
He is the caretaker rather than the master.

CHAPTER V.

Literary acquaintances (continued} The Tyssens F. W. Cosens
What he said to me about himself His taste for Spanish
literature and early English books His generous contribution
to the Stratford-on-Avon Fund A strange mistake by a noble
lord The first book printed at New York Mr. E. P. Shirley
Value of pamphlets illustrated David Laing His varied
acquirements and disinterested character A member of the
old Scotish school His literary performances What they
cost him and what he gained by them Sir Walter Scott's
< Dear George 'Relics of Sir Walter The Britwell Library
Its origin and fortunes Samuel Christie-Miller His
criticisms on the books Indebtedness of the library to the
Heber sale Frederic Locker-Lampson His advantages
as a man of fortune Comparison of himself with Henry
Huth His vers de sod'ctk As a man As a buyer Locker's
father and brother The Mutual Admiration Society.

THREE members of the Tyssen family were dis-
tinguished early in the century in different ways.
One brother was a book-collector, a second a numis-
matist, a third a sportsman. At dinner one evening,
when the three were together, and a friend, an
Admiral R.N., made the fourth, the enthusiast for
coins threw on the table a rare early English silver
penny. ' There !' cried he. ' Congratulate me. I

286 FOURTH GENERATION

gave twenty guineas for it.' Of course they did.
When he left the room, the sportsman remarked,
' What a fool ! Why, he might have got a couple of
pointers with the money!' ' Ah !' chimed in the
sailor ; 'or, better still, the model of a ship/ The
bibliophile was generous enough to say nothing.
This I had from the son of one of those present.

Concurrently with my knowledge of Mr. Huth, I
formed the acquaintance of the late Mr. Frederic
William Cosens, the wine-shipper, a self-raised and
self-educated man, but a person of the kindest and
most amiable character, and of tastes which did him
infinite honour. He laboured under many draw-
backs. He told me that he was thrown on the world
to make his living at fifteen ; he had worked hard at
his business during the best years of his life ; and
when he sought me out some five-and-twenty years
since, he was only just beginning to relax his attend-
ance on his commercial duties. His relationship
with Spain as a wine-importer had naturally led him
to contract an interest in the literature of that
country, and the circle into which he was drawn at
home lent him an inducement to extend his range
as a collector to our own early literature, especially
Shakesperiana and poetical manuscripts. H e was one
of the most munificent contributors to the Stratford-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 287

on- A von Fund; and he was of the Forty whom I have
commemorated in a preceding section. Huth, as a
Spanish scholar, thought rather poorly, I must own,
of Cosens's efforts as a translator from Lope de Vega
of certain novels cognate in their subject to Shake-
spear.

Book-collectors are, as a rule, remarkably super-
ficial. I was once at a bookseller's while the present

Earl of C was looking at the first book printed

at New York the Laws and Acts of the State,
which issued from the parent-press of William Brad-
ford in 1693-94, bearing, of course, the same relation
to American literature and bibliography as a Caxton
does to our own. Yet, incredible as it may appear,
his lordship put the precious volume down, with the
remark that it did not interest him, not having been
printed in America. At the foot of the title-page
he might have read : 'At New York, Printed and
sold by William Bradford, Printer to Their
Majesties^ King William and Queen Mary, 1694.'
It was the copy which had belonged to Lord Chan-
cellor Somers.

Mr. Charlemagne Tower knew better, and the
unique book is at present, by his bequest, in the
library of the Pennsylvania Historical Society. From
having been since Lord Somers's day in the centre

288 FOURTH GENERATION

of a volume of tracts, it is in the most beautiful con-
dition imaginable.

It rather surprised me, I confess, to hear the late
Mr. Evelyn Philip Shirley, who was greatly in-
terested in all matters relating to early Irish history,
say that he did not include tracts in his collection,
as it is to that class of record, transmitting to us, as
they do, the impressions of contemporaries, and pre-
serving facts not to be found in larger works, that
we owe so much information which would have been
otherwise lost

Fox, in his Book of Martyrs, especially in the
first edition, has inserted the texts of a large number
of pamphlets, sometimes ipsissimis verbis, but more
usually in substance, and in certain cases we are
unable, perhaps, to detect his obligations from the
disappearance of the originals. Stow did much the
same, I think, in his Chronicle.

I hold a number of letters on literary or biblio-
graphical topics from David Laing, who was not
only an interesting man as a link between the Scot-
land of Sir Walter Scott and the Scotland which
we know, but was quite an Aristarchus in his way,
occupying a position, as I have always contended,
never attained by any literary person on this side of
Tweed. Laing was, in a certain sense, ambidexter.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 289

He was equally at home in the old Scotish writers
and in the more modern. While he intimately knew,
and cordially appreciated, the author of Waverley,
he vindicated from oblivion and neglect the writings
of Knox and of the early makars. But I suspect
that with us Southrons his sympathy was less pro-
found.

The only occasion on which I had the honour
of shaking him by the hand was in the Museum
Reading Room. We met by appointment, and I
shall never forget the veteran antiquary's change of
countenance and accent when I suggested that he
should dine with me at Kensington on the next
ensuing Sabbath. He might have been the disciple
of Knox, as well as his editor. He was of the unco'
guid and godly. I heard from him, however, almost
down to the last, and often forwarded information
to him about books beyond his reach, bearing on
some undertaking on which he was engaged. He
was the very opposite to a bookmaker. Except
Henry Bradshaw, no one of my time ever chewed
the cud over an author or a subject v as Laing did.
His edition of William D unbar, which had been
commenced in 1820, was not published till 1834,
nor did the supplement appear till 1865, because he
had been hoping to "recover certain pieces or facts,

VOL. n. 38

290 FOURTH GENERATION

which, after all, he never did ; and his edition of
Robert Henry son, although he was collecting the
material for it pari passu with Dunbar, did not see
the light till the Supplement to the latter poet just
mentioned came out. It was in hand between thirty
and forty years.

He used to explain how this arose. He did not
derive any pecuniary advantage from these publica-
tions ; his personal means were limited. He had
manifold occupations, and the printing process had
to await a convenient opportunity. He was a pure
litterateur, and a fine old fellow, to boot. I have
known him travel miles at his own expense to verify
some trivial point in person, instead of acquiring the
information at second-hand.

When I was in Edinburgh about 1855, Sir Walter
Scott's ' dear George ' was dead ; but his son, T. G.
Stevenson, kept a bookshop in Prince's Street in, a
sort of cellar, to which you descended by a few steps.
His near neighbour, William Paterson, and he ,had
an odd way of putting visitors, to whom they gave
their confidence, on their guard one against the
other.

Sir Walter's inkstand, which he used in his office
at Edinburgh while he discharged the duties of
Sheriff-deputy, came to his assistant or closet-keeper,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 291

Mr. Carmichael, whose daughter Charlotte inherited
it, and used to shew it as a curiosity.

Messrs. Ballantyne and Co. have at their London
house the desk upon which Scott corrected his
proofs in his private room at their office.

Mr. William Henry Miller, the founder of the
celebrated Britwell Library, was an attorney at Edin-
burgh, and made his fortune by farming the City
sewage, or, at all events, by a share in the enter-
prise. When ' Measure * Miller, as he was called,
from his habit of carrying about an inch-rule to test
the relative tallness of copies, began to collect, I do
not quite know ; but he was a buyer at the White
Knights sale in 1819, where he gave over 60 for
the Book of 6/. Albans, printed by Wynkyn de
Worde in 1496. An odd story was once afloat that
Miller was really a woman ; but how that may have
been, I cannot say. He had no family, at any rate,
and died without issue in or about 1849, leaving
sisters, but bequeathing his property, including the
library, to his cousin, Miss Marsh, as I am credibly
informed, who left it to a Mr. Samuel Christy, of
i;he firm of hatters in Piccadilly, to whom he or she
had taken a liking. This individual took the name
of Miller, and altered his original name into Christie.
He came into a pretty good thing for a hatter, as

292 FOURTH GENERATION

Riviere the bookbinder used to remark to me.
He had the house at Craigentinny, near Edinburgh ;
a second at Britwell, near Maidenhead ; and a town
house in St James's Place the same which had
once belonged to Samuel Rogers. Christie-Miller
was a very commonplace, illiterate man, very proud
of his possessions, of which he spoke as if they had
been in his family since the Conquest, and laughably
distrustful of any and every one. Bradshaw once
went to Britwell to see some of the books, and little
Miller watched him, as a cat watches a mouse. His
own vulgar instincts led him to suspect even a man
above suspicion.

He remarked to me one day that he did not quite
understand the value and interest of these old books,
and he particularly insisted on the incorrectness of
the orthography, which was a further betrayal of his
extraction.

He more than once rather contemptuously referred
to the Huth books, saying that it was impossible for
the owner to have secured more than a few here
and there of the rarer early English works in poetry
and romance; and, of course, had it not been for
the Daniel and Corser sales, Huth would have
never succeeded in obtaining much, although his
large resources and the incessant vigilance of Lilly

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 293

and other caterers for him did a great deal. It was
rather absurd, however, for a parvenu like the
hatter to pose as a man of the old school, seeing
that the library came to him ready-made and by a
fluke, and that his knowledge of it was infinitesimal.
It may be added that the Britwell Library itself is
what we see it mainly through the acquisition by
the founder at the Heber sale of the rarest early
English books at relatively nominal amounts.

Mr. Frederic Locker- Lampson always struck me
as a droll figure. He posed as a friend to men of
letters, and subscribed, I believe, to the Literary
Fund ; yet he held up his head as if his sole status
had been his ancient descent and his territorial
importance, whereas in reality his main title to
notice was what he did in vers de socittd some very
clever and pretty things, but assuredly no poetry.
Like Tennyson, he was destitute of humour ; but of
course he lacked Tennyson's power.

Mr. Locker- Lampson was comparing his position
with that of Huth one day in conversation with me,
and pleading on his own behalf that he had at any
rate done something meaning the London Lyrics.
But Huth was a man of altogether superior calibre
and morale. The other was a virtuoso, and perhaps
a little of the petit matire. He was one of the

294 FOURTH GENERATION

spoiled children of fortune. His metrical trifles
shewed you, if you did not know him, that he had
a taste for culture and a handsome balance at his
banker's. Canon G. very judiciously observed to
me that culture might make or mar ; the young
men who affect it too frequently carry the hobby
to a point where it becomes distasteful or ridiculous.
But Locker, as a man of fortune, had no object to
gain by enunciating extreme opinions. He held the
middle way.

It was one of the most grotesque sights possible
to see him, as I did one day, arrive in a high-pitched
chariot at Coutts's with some of his belongings. He
was perched up on a seat which placed him on a
level with the top of an omnibus or a hay-cart,
and his expression and air were ludicrously cox-
ombical.

But it was when I had occasion to call at his
residence one evening, and he was in full dress, that
I was most amused. I had met him in town just
before in a stupendous fur- coat, in which he might
have passed for a man of fifteen stone ; and in his
swallow-tails, with his attenuated frame and his
wizen face, you felt as if you could lift him with one
hand,
i He honoured me by sending me a volume called

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 295

Patchwvrk, published in 1879 ; but he did not
mention that it was on the exact lines of one edited
by myself a few years before. He might be sup-
posed not to be aware of it ; we moved in such
different circles.

Locker also gave me a copy of his London
Lyrics, with a request that I would send him my
written opinion of it. I did so with a certain diffi-
culty, as in a budget of vers de socittd, not of the
highest class, one scarcely knew what to say. I
have not looked into the book for years ; it left on
my mind an agreeable impression of a few neatly-
turned and graceful stanzas with the same fault
which the writer displayed as a collector an absence
of breadth and strength. I remember that Locker
characteristically asked me to call for the little
volume at a wine-shop in Piccadilly, in which he
then had an interest.

Locker, in his parsimonious ways, curiously
resembled his relative by marriage, the late Poet
Laureate. I met him in the Strand shortly after his
accession to the Lampson property through his
second wife, and congratulated him. He looked
rather grave, and said, * Ah, yes ; but it is terrible
to think of the expense I have to incur for
repairs/

296 FOURTH GENERATION

It always seemed to me that Locker assumed a
false attitude. His claim to consideration was not
that he enjoyed so many thousands a year jure
nxoris, but (as he owned himself) that he was the
author of a creditable little book of verses, a lover
of old literature, and the possessor of a certain
feeling for art. A man of fortune who is also a
man of letters is apt to be persuaded by his friends
that he is a man of genius. Locker was a second-
rate versifier of the Dobson and Calverley school.

He was very manneristic in the way in which he
approached you as an applicant for information on
literary or bibliographical matters. He assumed an
air of bland and almost infantile simplicity, and was
apt to draw you out, unless you were on your guard*
He once asked me, when I was at his house, to
write a note on a flyleaf of a very rare edition of
Heywood's Epigrams, 1550, which he had bought
of John Pearson, calculating that some day my
attestation as to the book might make it fetch a few
pounds more.

He was a very poor and injudicious buyer. He
selected, it is true, for the reputation rather than for
the mere rarity, and was so far wise. But he had a
fiddling, undecided way of setting about his acquisi-
tions, and the booksellers thought him mean. His

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 297

collection was formed without any particular method,
and its importance has been greatly overrated. Most
of his rarest books are miserable copies.

One day, at Chesham Place, Locker was speaking
of the habit of stealing books, apropos of something
I had told him about a fellow who habitually
abstracted a volume whenever he went to Russell
Smith's in Soho Square, and, like Lamb in writing
about Fauntleroy, he looked at his own hands, and
laughingly wondered whether, had he been put to
his shifts, he might not have done something of the
same sort. His daughter, who afterward married
one of Tennyson's sons, was in the room.

By the way, the modus qperandi of the party
above mentioned was remarkable ; he stood on the
mat by the door out of sheer humility (as it was
thought), with his hands behind his back, and while
he engaged the bookseller's attention by some
query, he managed to insinuate any volume on the
shelves in the rear, which happened to be accessible,
into his tail-pocket.

An odd adventure which I once had in reference
to a rare Elizabethan tract in Locker's hands
reminds me that the pursuit of knowledge under
difficulties receives its share of illustration from the
experiences of the book-hunter. Infinitely diverse

298 FOURTH GENERATION

are the methods by which I have accomplished the
task, piecemeal, of drawing together authentic parti-
culars of the early printed literature of my country
for the first time on a systematic and comprehensive
principle ; how far I have succeeded I shall leave
others to discover and decide ; but I may just
suggest a comparison between my Collections 1867-
96 and the best authorities previously available or
extant. At the auction-rooms I have seldom met
with much inconvenience ; the leading members of
the book-trade have, as a rule, been most helpful ;
and the British Museum staff has invariably done
its best to promote my objects. But among the
minor dealers I have known what it is to witness
disappointment, when, instead of an expected and
desired customer, it was only a person in search of
a title, or some such matter, who had presented
himself.

I have just above alluded to Locker. He had
agreed, if I would come to Chesham Place, where
he then resided, that he would let me see the
volume in question ; but when I went, everyone
was out, and the book was in charge of a domestic,
apparently a kitchenmaid, who apprised me that I
might look at it, but that I was on no account to
take it away, Mr. Locker said. I archly feigned

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 299

unawareness of this superfluous communication for
the sake of the highly welcome addition to my
stores, yet thinking how differently Huth would
have behaved. The latter, in truth, possessed
qualities rarer and more valuable than the rarest
and most valuable book in his fine library.

Altogether Locker was a man of the time, and
owed his position to the fact that he was a person
of means and a genuine amateur. His taste for
books he had perhaps inherited from his father,
Captain Locker, who seems to have been a collector,
and whose ex libris I have seen. This was the
Edward Locker who published the Naval Gallery
of Greenwich Hospital and other now not very well
recollected works.

Locker was accustomed to say of a certain book-
seller who had 'done time/ that when he met him
his eyes always mechanically gravitated to his hair.

I shall never forget his gratification, when I once
met him in a shop, and shewed him, at his request,
while the owner had gone upstairs in quest of some-
thing, a copy of a very rare old play, at intercepting
it on its way to Mr. Huth, who subsequently found
another copy. Locker clapped it in his pocket as
if he had purloined it

Locker was assuredly not prepossessing in his

3 oo FOURTH GENERATION

physical appearance, yet he seems to be entitled to
rank among modern lady-killers, and owed his
fortune, which so materially seconded his literary
and social advancement, as it had done in the case
of Disraeli, to two successive marriages.

I have often smiled at the sort of common accord
with which the booksellers spoke of him as ' Fred
Locker ' ; it was a piece of affectionate familiarity,
almost camaraderie, by which he might or might
not have been flattered. I cannot be sure whether
his rather artificial affability or bonhomie was mis-
construed by some of those to whom he addressed
himself.

He was eminently a gentleman, however, and
his manners were even courtly, yet virile. He
struck one as a person accustomed to excellent
society, as of course he was. Some men are apt
to be a little too effeminate too ladylike. There

is , for example. A couple of girls looking in

at a photographer's window, one exclaimed, 'Oh,
there's Mr. ! Isn't he pretty ?

Locker's brother, who formerly edited the Graphic,
paid him full fraternal homage by the sympathetic
and obsequious way in which he deployed his eye-
glass. I do not know what other literary claims he
possessed.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 301

The Mutual Admiration Society, to which this
class of writer has owed so much, and which, again,
thence derives its raison d?$tre y have of late had a
merry and triumphant time of it, puffing their friends
and themselves on strict debtor and creditor prin-
ciples, and abusing non-subscribers till, as a natural
consequence, they have done their full part in
discrediting criticism, even among persons not
professedly versed in literary matters, and in pros-
tituting the press, so far as they can, to party and
personal objects.

But this unhealthy and mischievous movement
has far outgrown the promise of its youth its
limits, as Locker knew it and the production of a
species of literary work, accompanied by so-called
artistic embellishments, is at present arranged with
the most minute and laborious attention to every
detail. The text of a book may be apparently
worthless, and the illustrations equally so, but by
favour of a sort of critical* mesmerism two negatives
become an affirmative.

Imprimis, you must buy the book written by one
of the set ; the progress toward publication, and
the actual day of appearance, will be brought under
your notice by a succession of paragraphs, diplo-
matically distanced, which it is to be hoped you

3 02 FOURTH GENERATION

will not find too exciting; but you must not read
the volume till you have gone through the official
reviews of it, which will guide you to the beauties,
and instruct you how to appreciate them. Other-
wise you may miss the clue.

It was a very different matter when the old
writers, as Professor Arber points out, in his Preface
to TottelFs Miscellany, 1557, 'wrote for their own
delectation and for that of their friends : and not for
the general public.' The new school has no such
disinterested enthusiasm and retiring temper, but
is a systematic scheme for hoaxing the readers and
buyers of books by means of puffs in the organs
of the press, with which it is their first business to
connect themselves. The book itself is a secondary
consideration ; it is sufficient for the purchaser or
peruser to understand that it is written by the great

Mr. , whose name and doings he sees so often

recorded in . the columns of a particular class of
paper ; he is not to know that the paragraph is from
the same pen as the book, or from that of some
alter ego> another member of this distinguished co-
operative society of Horn and Bellows Blowers, and
he must sometimes wonder, when he takes a copy
in his hand, whether it is really the article of which
so much has been said.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 303

All that seems requisite to complete this ingenious
machinery seems to be the hoarding and the sand-
wich.

Even this sort of history repeats itself. The
silly and fulsome descriptions of the home life, the
elegant interior, the toilette, the familiar mood, the
diet, of these exquisites of the age, recall the
Sentimentalities of that prince of prigs and cox-
combs, Mr. Janus Weathercock, satirized by Hazlitt
in the Dandy School alas, in vain ! Tamen usque
recurrit. One sickens of the trash spun out about
the Great Impressionists dismounted from their
pedestals and consorting with ordinary mortals, like
the gods of Olympos.

CHAPTER VI.

Robert Herrick and the Perry-Herricks of Beaumanor Park,
Loughborough My visit to the house Cherry Ripe
Dorothy King To keep a true Lent Other book-col-
lectors of my time R. S. Turner E. H. Lawrence
Story of Ruskin and the Cypriot antiquities of Cesnola
The Freres of Roydon Hall Their literary associations
A portion of the Paston Letters sold with the library
My Cornish acquaintances Llanhydrock Mr. and
Mrs. Agar-Robartes Thomas Couch of Bodmin and
Jonathan Couch of Polperro Henry Sewell Stokes, the
poet My conversation with him about Tennyson The
pack-horse road and the British huts near Bodmin Mr.
Aldrich of Iowa, a friend of Jefferson Davis and an
autograph-collector, at Barnes.

I PAID a flying visit to Beaumanor Park, near
Loughborough, in 1869, to see the Herrick manu-
scripts, which it was necessary to collate for an
edition of the poet undertaken gratuitously by
me for the Library of Old Authors.

Mr. W. Perry- Herrick, an indirect descendant
of the poet, shewed me the stables on this occasion,
with some of the curious old-fashioned carriages,

FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY 305

which had belonged to members of his family
in the present and last century ; and in the house
was the truckle-bed on which, according to his
account, Richard III. slept the night before
Bosworth. You see at Leicester the little bridge
over the Stour which occupies the site, and may
follow the lines, of that which Richard crossed on
horseback on his way to the fatal field, and they
shew you the very spot where his foot struck
against the side, and refer to the old woman's
prophecy.

Mr. Perry-Herrick more immediately owed his
large fortune to his connection with the Perrys of
Wolverhampton, two brothers, who had an interest
in the deep coal, and by very penurious habits
amassed, it is said, ^2, 000,000. I do not think that
much, if any, of the house built by the poet's uncle
remains.

It is a highly touching trait, which a writer in
the Quarterly Review for 1810 preserves, of an
old woman, named Dorothy King, who lived, as
her parents had done, at Dean Prior, the poet
Herrick's residence and preferment in Devonshire.
The Reviewer states that he found, on a visit to
the spot, that Mrs. King used to repeat five of
Herrick's Noble Numbers, including his Litany,

VOL, n. 39

306 FOURTH GENERATION

which she called her Prayers, and she had no
idea that they had ever been printed, or that
the writer's name was known outside her native
village. She had learned them, as a child, from
her mother.

Only a few days ago I heard a common boy
in the street singing Cherry Ripe. Of course, he
had no idea who wrote the verses, nor had he
the whole poem. He had caught it from someone
else. If you had stopped him and said that it
was produced by a clergyman in Devonshire, named
Robert Herrick, two hundred and odd years since,
he would have grinned from ear to ear and been
as wise as before. I passed on.

There i$ a tradition that Herrick, on his super-
session at the time of the Commonwealth, repeated
to himself his ' Farewell to ' Dean Bourn ' as he
crossed the brook on his way to return to London,

But I think that the finest thing in all the
Hesperides is to be found among the Nobk
Numbers :

TO KEEP A TRUE LENT.

i. Is this a Fast, to keep

The Larder leane ?

And cleane
From fat of Veales, and Sheep ?

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 307

2. Is it to quit the dish

Of Flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with Fish?

3. Is it to fast an houre,

Or rag'd to go,

Or show
A down-cast look, and sowre ?

4. No : 'tis a Fast, to dole

Thy sheaf of wheat,

And meat
Unto the hungry Soule.

5. It is to fast from strife,

From old debate,

And hate ;
To circumcise thy life.

6. To show a heart grief-rent :

To sterve thy sin,

Not Bin i
And that's to keep thy Lent.

R, S. Turner and E. H. Lawrence were, as
collectors, two men of the rarest taste and dis-
crimination, and in their personal appearance two
of the most commonplace. Lawrence had a curious
idiosyncrasy of signing himself F.S.A. even on
his cheques. But no one comprehended better
the difference between a fine article and a poor
one than he did. He was, I believe, a thoroughly
kind-hearted fellow, and from his vocation as a

3 o8 FOURTH GENERATION

stockbroker must have accumulated a handsome
fortune. The only purchase on his part I never
understood was that of a miscellaneous assemblage
of Cypriot glass and pottery.

I am prompted to mention here that while the
Cypriot antiquities of Cesnola were being packed
at Rollin and Feuardent's in Great Russell Street,
preparatory to their transfer to the American
Government, which bought them entire for ,16,000,
several distinguished persons interested in art came
to see them, among others Ruskin, who made some
sketches from these fine objects.

He went down on his knees to examine the
details more carefully, but many had been already
packed up. 'Ah/ said he, M wish I had known
of this before. I must go to America to see them
when they are on view/ Did he ?

The British Museum would have gladly purchased
a few ; but, as Cesnola observed, they would have
left him with the less valuable bulk.

Turner's death was even more melancholy than
Huth's. He had long suffered from morbid depres-
sion, and at last threw himself from the top of the
well-staircase of a hotel at Brighton. His physical
bearing was just as unprepossessing and unaristo-
cratic as Lawrence's ; but he had a more polished

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 309

manner, and spoke correctly. I do not think that
he was a scholar, but he knew a great deal about
French and Italian books. The former, which cost
him about ,3,000, fetched ^15,000.

Among the sufferers from the acute agricultural
depression in East Anglia were the Freres of
Roydon Hall, Norfolk. In February, 1896, as I
was laying down my pen, Mr. John Tudor Frere,
who had previously sold other inherited effects, and
had found it necessary to live in the lodge attached
to the Hall, parted at Sotheby's rooms with certain
of his books, which derived their chief interest from
including the collections of Sir John Fenn. The
library had been formed by Sheppard Frere, John
Frere, and John Hookham Frere, the last a man of
some literary and political repute in his day, and a
friend of Byron, Coleridge, etc. The prices realized
were wholly in excess of the value. I saw three or
four members of the family in the auction-room, and
I understood that many lots were bought in, and
that there is a considerable body of books behind
unsold. A portion of the Paston Letters (about
two-fifths) fetched ^400, and ought, with the Tom-
line volumes elsewhere referred to, to find a home
in the British Museum.

Another of my bibliographical expeditions was to

3io FOURTH GENERATION

Llanhydrock, near Bodmin, Cornwall, the seat of
the late Mr. Agar-Robartes, M.P., afterward Lord
Robartes. ,He had married the daughter of Mr.
Carew of Antony. Both Robartes and his wife
were very polite and attentive, and shewed me, or
allowed me to examine, the rare and curious books
in the Long Room there. The house was built by
John, Lord Roberts, first Earl of Radnor, Lord-
Lieutenant of Ireland in the time of Charles II.,
and had his initials and the date of erection carved
on several parts of the premises. I once attended
the little church in the Park, and Robartes himself
read the lessons. There were several old horses
wandering about, their term of service expired ;
for their master never allowed one to be de-
stroyed.

I was permitted to take what notes I pleased of
the old books in the Long Room, and I met with a
few singularly rare items. Mrs. Robartes was good
enough to look out personally for me some volumes
containing manuscript remarks by the first Earl of
Radnor, who died in 1685. My examination of the
library was very cursory, as I was accompanied by
a friend who entertained no literary sympathies ;
and I have recently understood that there are some
undescribed books and tracts overlooked by me,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 3 n

and that a catalogue of the whole collection may be
expected.

Robartes was a very benevolent man, and spent
a good deal in charity in the poorer quarters of
London, as well as in his native county. His only
son Charles, the present Lord Robartes, was a lad
when I was last in Cornwall ; he had been very
simply brought up, and it was said that he thought
much of being asked out to tea.
, One of our common acquaintances at this time
(1875) was Mr. Thomas Couch of Bodmin, the
eminent archaeologist, whose father, Jonathan Couch
of Polperro, wrote the work on British Fishes.
The latter derived his information on ichthyology
from personal research, and was often to be seen
about the precincts of the fishing village, where he
lived and died, in primitive attire and barefoot, on
his way to the shore and rocks or on his return.
Thomas Couch, who assisted me in my edition of
Brand's Popular Antiquities, compiled a Glossary
of Words used in East Cornwall, of which a copy,
given me by him in 1865, contains large manuscript
additions made by me in the course of my Cornish
sojourns. He long acted as confidential adviser to
Robartes in matters of local charity and distress.
, The last time I was at Bodmin, I saw in the

312 FOURTH GENERATION

Asylum poor Blight, the accomplished artist, and
author of A Week at the Land's End\ he was
hopelessly hypochondriacal.

But one of the most noted characters in those
parts, thirty years or so since, was Mr. William
Hicks, whose powers as a raconteur of Cornish
stories have probably never been surpassed. His
accurate and droll rendering of the provincial patois
and mannerism was irresistible. He was a perfect
host in himself at any entertainment. Hicks was
intimate with Jackson the water-colour painter, and
received him at his house during many years ; and
Jackson executed quite a series of complimentary
pictures for Hicks, who highly prized them. After
his death, they were unfortunately removed to a
damp house, and I understood that they suffered
serious detriment.

The literary circle here in my time also com-
prised Sir John Maclean, author of a History of the
Deanery of Trigg Minor and other works ; William
Jago, a thoughtful and well-informed local antiquary ;
and Henry Sewell Stokes, the Cornish poet ; and
there was Blight.

My daughter had written to Mr. Jago's, describing
in rather glowing colours an article of dress just
acquired; and her young correspondent replied,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 313

' Your hat is a dream.' She was probably un-
acquainted with the fact that this expression is
common in French literature.

When I met Stokes, he spoke of Tennyson
having been with him, and of their conversation
together about the Arthur Poems. Stokes said
that T. admitted to him his obligations to the old
metrical Morte Arthur^ and I went so far as to
express my opinion that, looking at the antiquity
and priority of it, the prototype was the finer pro-
duction, and it is extraordinary how modern it
strikes one as being in comparison with much of
the poetry belonging to the same period. This is
the common attribute of genius to make us lose
sight of chronological boundaries. It is so with
Chaucer. It is so with Shakespear. I would add,
it is so largely with the author of Piers Ploughman.
The essence is of all time ; the outward texture
only is antique.

The County Asylum occupies a large plot of
ground formerly open and the site of the gallows.
The name Bodmin is identical with Bodnam or
Bodenham; the original town lay at some distance in
the valley.

On the high ground above, three roads run
parallel with each other : the pack-horse road, the

3 i4 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

old coach road, and the modern coach road. Just
about here there are some strange low-pitched
hovels, which they call British huts.

The pack-horse tracks are of the greatest antiquity.
They just remind me of those over the mountains
in Cumberland, some distance from Broughton-in-
Furness. The keeper of the inn at Broughton, in
former days, used to see the packmen from a long
way off coming over the hills, and set to work to
brew his ale, which was ready against their arrival.
They eat the oat-cake in this country, as they do in
Nidderdale, instead of bread.

Mr. Aldrich of Iowa, who has been only one of
the gentlemen on the other side of the Atlantic to
honour me by their correspondence and personal
visits, formed the plan of establishing at Webster
City, where he lived, a public collection of auto-
graphs and manuscripts, and he had met with some
considerable success in inducing people, her Britannic
Majesty included, to contribute to his .object I
gave him some Hazlitt manuscript.

When he last called on me, he had not long since
visited Jefferson Davis and his wife, who were very
cheerful, with just enough to live upon from the
wreck of their fortune. His attainder was never
reversed ; but he was left unmolested.

CHAPTER VII.

The auction-rooms Development and machinery of sales by
auction The cataloguer Influence of sale-catalogues on
prices- Origin of my career as a bibliographer Sotheby's
Account of some of the early sales there Strange personality
of Mister Sotheby The Wolfreston sale in 1856 How it
came about.

MY bibliographical, numismatic, and other cognate
pursuits naturally brought me into contact with those
auction-rooms which lend themselves to the disper-
sion of literary and artistic objects. Of all my
haunts in pursuit of information, the famous
emporium in Wellington Street has been the most
constant and the most productive.

Sales under the hammer originally embraced every
description of merchandise within the covers of a
single catalogue, just as the fine art auctioneer was
a gradual evolution from the house-salesman. A
very cursory examination of the catalogues of the
last and earliest quarter of the present century will
satisfy one that such was the case. As matters now
stand, the various kinds of property submitted to

316 FOURTH GENERATION

competition are not only as a rule carefully classified
and separately offered, but certain houses are con-
sidered the most advantageous for the realization of
particular effects. You are told that you must send
pictures and china to Christie's ; books, manuscripts,
autographs, and coins to Sotheby's ; and musical
copyrights and literature, and theatrical wardrobes,
to Puttick's.

There is some truth in this ; but there is a good
deal of superstition and prejudice, too, founded on
an imperfect conversance with the bearings and
inner working of the system. For much depends
on an agency to a certain extent independent of the
auctioneer. A large proportion of the property sent
into the rooms for sale is catalogued by outsiders ;
there is in many cases no one on the premises
qualified to describe correctly and advantageously
antiquities, coins, autographs, prints, or even manu-
scripts and books of other than ordinary character.
The expert has to be called in ; it does not signify
what house it is ; the work is his, not the auctioneer's ;
and the result is mainly in his hands.

If things of value are consigned to Christie's,
Sotheby's, Puttick's, or elsewhere, the same course
is pursued, and more than probably the same persons
are employed. The immediate seller is the medium

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 317

for taking the order from the owners, commissioning
the expert, and keeping the account. If he is above
the normal standard, he may have a fair idea before-
hand of the nature of the issue, or he may be
acquainted with one class of goods more than with
another. Not seldom his estimate is derived from
the information supplied to him by his agent, the
cataloguer ; and, of course, this is a common incident
in these transactions, as parties so frequently apply
for advances to meet pressing engagements. The
auctioneer is, then, mainly a book-keeper, a financier,
and a salesman. The volume of his business is apt
to be in the ratio of his floating capital, his adminis-
trative machinery, and his competence in the
rostrum.

The machinery, as we perceive, is threefold : the
counting-house and establishment, the expert in
the background, and the auctioneer's more or less
influential personality. Where you have these three
conditions fulfilled to a nicety, the success of a house
almost follows as a corollary. But how rarely such
a thing occurs !

And, again, the expert that very important
factor in this industry is a Free Lance, whose
services are at the command of every paymaster.
Given a good time, a good cataloguer, and good

FOURTH GENERATION

property, the counting-house is nearly bound to
prove secondary ; and any respectable firm has it
in its power to arrange with owners in need of
immediate accommodation. Perhaps middle-class
or neiitral effects depend in chief measure on the
atmosphere in which they are submitted for sale.
You can give away your property, if it is second-
rate, at Christie's or Sotheby's without going farther :
you can sell it for the maximum worth on any
recognised ground, if certain essential conditions are
complied with.

The principle of publishing the results of sales of
literary and other high-class property has had the
effect of opening the eyes of persons who happen to
possess anything of value, and even in the most
pressing cases to render careful realization almost
as important to the credit of an auctioneer as the
payment on account and a prompt settlement are in
their way ; and here the expert comes in at every
turn. The auctioneer, unless he is a Crichton
among auctioneers, may, if he acts on his own
judgment, either lose his money by lending too
much, or may lose the business by offering too
little ; the details of the sale have to be controlled
by the cataloguer, and, if he is worthy of his hire,
are safest in his hands ; and, after all, the means

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 319

which are open to any or every house of providing
itself with proper financial and executive resources
are normal mercantile problems. A well-established
and straightforward firm, with an untarnished record
and known facilities for converting property into the
utmost equivalent cash, may treat the rest as a fore-
gone conclusion.

Many things have occurred since I first became
acquainted with Sotheby's. As a mere youth, .1
had collected for a passing literary purpose an
assortment of books which circumstances obliged
me to realize when I had done with them. I
sent them there. It was my first experience of
an auction, and it was a sorrowful one. The
volumes, many in handsome new liveries, went
for next to nothing. Someone then in Castle
Street, now in Piccadilly, bought largely at the
sale. It was somewhere about 1858. I thought
that I had made up my mind to turn my back
on Sotheby's for ever. To buy books and sell
them again was clearly a losing game. How little
I knew about myself, of what the future would
develop, of the direction given to a career by
some slight and fortuitous cause !

A copy of Lowndes's Bibliographer's Manual^
purporting to be a guide to old English books,

320 FOURTH GENERATION

fell just about the same time in my way. I can
hardly tell how it was, but I began to discern
and note shortcomings in it. My copy became
a repository for marginalia and cuttings. It was
as if Sotheby's had baited a hook with that work,
guessing that I must bite and be caught ; and I
did, and was ! This is another way of saying that
I forgave Sotheby's, and stole back to the old
ground.

I found myself once more in Wellington Street,
yet with a difference. Some three years had
elapsed. A strange new awakening had taken
place. I was a bibliographer, with some of the
chrysalis still visible. I had begun to make
memoranda and copy titles. Neither myself nor
anyone else at that juncture was aware that I
should carry the hobby further than scores of
others who have done the same thing ever since
Sotheby's was established, left their mark on a
few fly-leaves, and there stopped.

In 1858 the celebrated library of Dr. Philip
Bliss was sold here. I did not attend it, but I
purchased a lot or so. I had sold my own property
rather cheaply. I bought these new items rather
dear. I was not discouraged, simply because I
was impelled by a secret bent, an innate lues,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 32I

which was steadily and irresistibly disclosing itself.
My eyes were turned on other publications treating
of our old English authors, and I saw how curiously
they resembled the Manual I had and each other
in the imperfect justice which they did to the
subject. I felt that I could do something better,
and I soon began to try.

Of Christie's and Puttick's, and the other emporia
where books are knocked clown, and occasionally,
as in my case, the hopes of their owners with them,
I have enjoyed a more limited experience. One
point the three haunts which I have been specify-
ing have in common, for as there is no Christie
and no Puttick, so there is no Sotheby. It is a
nom de marteau. Everybody knows Sotheby's.
No one would dream of mentioning to you that
he was going to Wilkinson's, or had made a
purchase at Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge's.
These modern excrescences the public repudiates.

The business of the house has enormously ex-
panded; it has identified itself with almost every
big affair in books, prints, coins, china, all the
days I am able to recall. I have grown up into
a slowly-developing knowledge of that eventful and
ever-changing scene. I have witnessed all the most
important properties which have been submitted to

VOL. ii. 40

322 FOURTH GENERATION

the hammer in those rooms. I have beheld genera-
tions of collectors, generations of booksellers, come
and go. It is not that I am very old, but it has
been my fortune to mingle much with my seniors,
and I once surprised and amused someone who
was speaking to me of Mr. Coventry Patmore
by saying : ' Yes, I knew his father and mother,
and his grandmother/ What is more to the im-
mediate purpose, I knew Sotheby's when there was
a Sotheby, and was in the room when, in 1864,
the tidings came of his death by drowning while
on an angling excursion. I retain his short, slight
figure perfectly in my mind.

The last of the Sotheby s, besides the works on
typographical antiquities and other matters with
which his name is honourably connected, compiled
a bibliographical account of the Early English Poets,
so far as their publications came under the notice
of the firm in Wellington Street. The manuscript
was offered to the British Museum by his widow,
and Bond consulted me about the purchase, from
which I felt bound to dissuade him, as it was an
imperfect and jejune performance which my own
labours had gone very far to reduce to. a caput
mortuum.

It was precisely when the sale of the grand

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 323

Harleian library, of which the catalogue was drawn
up for Osborne by Dr. Johnson, was impending,
and a larger share of public notice was attracted
to these matters, that Samuel Baker started in
York Street, Covent Garden. The maiden sale
was the collection of books belonging to Thomas
Pellet, M.D., which lasted sixteen days, and pro-
duced ^"859 odd.

Of course, very interesting days have been ex-
perienced where the financial result was not very
striking, as when, in 1799, the firm disposed of
the library of the Right Hon. Joseph Addison,
4 Author and Secretary of State/ for ^533 43. 4d. ;
and in 1833 of that of * the Emperor Napol6on
Buonaparte' (sic), removed from St. Helena, for
^"450 93. (his tortoiseshell walking-stick bringing
^38 175,) ; and, once more, when the drawings
of T. Rowlandson, the caricaturist, were sold in
1818 for ^700. Are not those living who would
now add a third o, and think the lot not too high ?
But the portions of the stupendous Heber library
dispersed here in 1834, owing to what Dibdin
called the biblioplwbia, nearly ruined the auctioneers.
They rallied from the blow, however, and have
never suffered any relapse to bad times, whatever
account they may be pleased to give of the very

324 FOURTH GENERATION

piping ones which they have known pretty well
ever since '45, when Mr. Benjamin Heywood
Bright's important library was entrusted to their care.

I cannot help thinking, however, that whatever
credit the existing management may fairly claim, it
was the second Sotheby the Mister Sotheby of or
about 1816-30 who impressed on the concern his
powerful and enduring individuality. He had a
long innings, and had excellent opportunities of
building up the structure which his son and suc-
cessor inherited. The latter was the link between
the old regime and the new. He lived to see many
modifications, and to contract an alliance with fresh
blood ; and he survives to-day in Wellington Street,
hard by Waterloo Bridge, as certainly as Shake-
speare does in Stratford-upon-Avon, and elsewhere,
carrying on his affairs by proxy, as it were. Others,
for the sake of convenience, act on his behalf;
nevertheless, no one should deceive himself. The
place is ' Sotheby's' in 1896 just as it was in 1796.

Two more modern personalities with whom I
have come into very frequent contact during my
visits to Sotheby's were Mr. John Wilkinson, who
died in the commencement of 1894 at a patriarchal
age, and Mr. Edward Grose Hodge. Of the latter,
who in bygone half-historical times occupied a

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 325

stool in the counting-house as a book-keeper, and
was conspicuous by his raven-black locks, I shall
say nothing", because I could only reiterate the
common feeling about his capacity for business, his
gentlemanly address, and his thorough independence
of character.

Mr. Wilkinson was the principal seller in my
earlier days. His appearance, as it was impressed
on my mind when I became an habitual frequenter of
the rooms about 1858, was very agreeable, and his
manner highly prepossessing ; he was then in the
full vigour of life. H alii well and he were very
intimate, and I have dined with him at Halliwell's
table. One not very unreasonable idiosyncrasy on
his part was his tenacious resistance to the admis-
sion of anyone else to a share in the conduct of the
sales ; he persisted in keeping his junior partner out
so long as he physically could. He liked to lord
over the whole show to the very last. I think that
the spirit of monarchy remains rather strong in-
Wellington Street.

I understand that the ivory hammer which Mr.
George Leigh used during his brief association with
the house as a partner had belonged to Langford
the auctioneer. It was given by the former to Mr,
Benjamin Wheatley, an employ^ at that time, after-

326 FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY

ward a partner in another firm ; and it is now in the
possession of his son, Mr. H. B. Wheatley.

I can just recall the Wolfreston sale in 1856. I
was not actually present, but I heard a good deal
about it soon afterward. It was a small collection
of early English books and tracts formed under the
Tudors and Stuarts ; the copies were often uncut,
and as often imperfect or dog's-eared. But there
were among them a few startling rarities some not
even till then put on record by the learned in these
affairs. The owner would have gladly accepted
^"30 for the lot, and the day's sale realized ^750.
Think of that ! Is it nothing to have Sotheby's to
our friend? In spite of disappointments, which will
sometimes happen, and flat Saturday afternoons,
when sovereigns are constantly knocked down for
ten shillings each, this institution is among our
public benefactors not the least.

One of the family the Wolfrestons, not the
Sothebys dined with me years after, and told me
how it was. The books had lain in a corner of the
library time out of mind unnoticed and unheeded,
and it was thought as well to get rid of them. They
should have marked the day with a white stone
when a friend (he was a friend) recommended them
to apply to Wellington Street.

CHAPTER VIII.

Persons whom I have met at Sotheby's A recollection of 1858
George Daniel of Canonbury Some account of him and his
books His visit to Charles Mathews the elder at Highgate
He tells me a story of Charles Lamb Samuel Addington
His extraordinary character as a collector His method of
buying Compared with Quaritch The Sixpenny Solicitor
Booksellers at Sotheby's Curious methods of bidding
The bundle-hunter, past and present His fallen fortunes
The smaller room at Sotheby's Anecdote of a Bristol
teapot.

LETTING alone the professional element at Sotheby's,
to which I shall advert in a moment, think of the
names which rise up to one's lips names of persons
eminent in nearly every vocation and walk of life :
men of genius, of culture, of rank, the student,
the amateur, the spectator ! I have beheld with my
own eyes J. B. Inglis, who had sold a magnificent
library in 1826, before I was born, and lived to
form a second ; George Daniel, David Laing, Henry
Bradshaw, Alexander Dyce, John Forster, J. (X
Halliwell, Sir Stirling Maxwell, Henry Stevens of
Vermont, Sir Thomas Phillipps of Middle Hill,

328 FOURTH GENERATION

George Smith, Christie-Miller, R. S. Turner, and
Samuel Addington. But Lord Melbourne, Tommy
Hill (Paul Pry), Lord Macaulay, M. Libri, Philip
Bliss, Bulkeley Bandinel, Lord Crawford, and a
host of others, have crossed this threshold. Henry
Huth looked in once or twice while the Daniel sale
was going on, and you brush elbows at this moment
with other notabilities of our own day.

So it has always been ; there is a weird fascina-
tion, there is a charm, which draws us all more or
less toward the spot where the game of chance (for
such it is) is being played, even if we do not enter
the lists, or let our own voices become audible.
Leigh Hunt used to be fond of telling me how he
had attended the Roxburghe sale in 1812, just as
a looker-on, out of a sort of speculative curiosity,
which it might ask a separate paper to define.

The tap of the hammer against the desk is often
awaited with considerable anxiety by those actually
competing for the lot before the room.

I had a singular adventure here in 1858. Among
a mass of rubbish a unique copy of the Earl of
Surrey's English Virgil was put up one day. The
bidding for it stopped at 6 1 2s. 6d. At that sum
it was mine. But the hammer did not fall. The
auctioneer repeated the amount several times, and

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 329

kept his eye on the open door. The company did
not understand what this strange movement signi-
fied. No one topped my offer. All at once, breath-
less, rushed in Mr. Thorpe, agent for the library at
BritwelL asked what lot was up, and what price
had been reached. * 6 I2S. 6d./ now said Mr.
Wilkinson, unmasking, and I lost my gem, which
Mr. Thorpe carried off at 20. How I disliked
him !

An occasional visitor to the rooms was George
Daniel, of Canonbury, whom I well recollect. I
sat next to him at a sale, and when some ordinary
bookseller's lot was knocked down in his name, I
innocently inquired if he had purchased it. ' No,
sir/ he urbanely replied ; ' if I were to buy all that
Mr. Daniel does, I should have an Alexandrian
library/ The authentic G. D. was a retired
accountant, whose idiosyncrasy consisted of rares
morfeaux, bonnes bouches, uniques copies of books
with a provenance, or in jackets made for them by
Roger Payne ; nay, in the original parchment or
paper wrapper, or in a bit of real mutton, which
certain men call sheep. He was a person of literary
tastes, and had written books in his day. But his
chief celebrity was as an acquirer of those of others,
provided always that they were old enough or rare

330 FOURTH GENERATION

enough. An item never passed into his possession
without at once ipso facto gaining new attributes,
almost invariably worded in a holograph memor-
andum on the fly-leaf.

Daniel was in the market at a fortunate and
peculiar juncture, just when prices were depressed,
about the time of the great Heber sale. His
marvellous gleanings came to the hammer pre-
cisely when the quarto Shakespear, the black-letter
romance, the unique book of Elizabethan verse,
had grown worth ten times their weight in sover-
eigns. Sir William Tite, J. O. Halliwell, and
Henry Huth, were to the front.

It was in 1864. What a wonderful sight it was!
No living man had ever witnessed the like. Copies
of Shakespear printed from the prompters' manu-
scripts and published at fourpence, fetched ^300 or
^400. I remember old Joseph Lilly, when he had
secured the famous ballads, which came from the
Tollemaches of Helmingham Hall, holding up
the folio volume in which they were contained in
triumph, as Mr. Huth happened to enter the room.

Poor Daniel ! He had no mean estimate of his
treasures ; what he had was always better than
what you had. Books, prints, autographs, it was all
the same. I met him one morning in Long Acre.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 331

I had bought a very fine copy of Taylor the Water
Poet. ' Oh yes, sir/ he said, ' I saw it ; but not
quite so fine as mine.' He went up to Highgate
to look through Charles Mathews the elder's
engravings. They were all duplicates of course,
inferior ones. * Damn him, sir !' cried Mathews
afterward to a friend ; * I should like him to have
had a duplicate of my poor leg/

This was the commercial bias of the ex-
accountant.

Another thing which I had direct from Daniel
was the occasional habit which Charles Lamb had
of paying him a visit, and looking at his old books
looking at them, not touching. ' For/ said Daniel
to me, ' you know, sir, I could not have allowed
that. Why, Mr. Lamb would turn over the leaves
of a volume with his wet finger ' and the narrator
represented the operation in the street, so far as
he could without a book and with gloved hands
1 and I always kept a particular copy of old ballads
for him/

While Daniel's books were on view at the
auction-room, in 1864, one of his family came for
the purpose of seeing them, as it appeared that he
never shewed his treasures to his children. From
the account which a descendant gave me, I judge

332 FOURTH GENERATION

that the handsome result of the sale did not prove
of much benefit to those interested.

Daniel was a virtuoso rather than a connoisseur.
He studied the commercial barometer, and knew
the right things to buy. Still, as the money expended
would have realized at compound interest more than
even the extravagant prices paid for his biblio-
graphical rarities in 1864, and as he could not have
forecast the issue, some credit is due to him for
having preferred to invest his savings as he did in
early English books. He purchased in later life
very sparingly, and so far did not obey the ordinary
instincts of the collector, whose zest is derived from
acquiring, not from possessing. He is apt to contem-
plate the treasures which he has secured with the
sated feeling of the author toward the printed
transfers from his own mind.

A noted and conspicuous character in the rooms
during many years, whenever any remarkable
objects were to be submitted to competition, was
Mr, Samuel Addington, of St. Martin's Lane. A
tall, imposing figure, with an inclination at the last
to stoop somewhat, Addington deserves to be
regarded in one or two respects as the most extra-
ordinary person who frequented Sotheby's in my
earlier recollection. He was, like R. S. Turner

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 333

and Edwin Lawrence, illiterate, but also, like them,
a man of the keenest and truest instinct for what
was worth having, and withal of commanding
presence.

His collections of Prints, Miniatures, Books, Manu-
scripts, Coins, were a-per-se. I once had occasion to
solicit for a literary acquaintance the loan of the
miniature of Dr. Donne by Oliver, and Addington
shewed me some of his gems, and gems they were.
His knowledge of them was mainly per Catalogue.
When he upset a tray of coins, someone had to go
and set it in order again. It was his instinct which
was so surprising. His handwriting was rather
worse, I think, than mine, and was wanting in
character.

I frequently met him at Sotheby's and in the
street (he generally walked with his head slightly
inclined and his hands crossed behind his back), and
have more than once seen him arming Mrs. Noseda,
the printseller, to the Royal Academy. She was the
only person on whose judgment in her particular line
he relied. But Addington also saw a good deal of
Wareham, the dealer in antiquities, and, it is said,
helped him.

He bought in his time almost everything, and of
the finest and choicest, for the cost did not signify.

334 FOURTH GENERATION

He lived over his shop in the Lane, and was a
bachelor with some ;i 5,000 a year. I think that he
dined nearer the Elizabethan hour than most of us
do ; and when there was something to attract him
to Wellington Street, it was his not unfrequent habit
to arrive there on the stroke of one p.m., his frugal
dessert an orange in his hand. If you were on
the scent after a prize in the rooms, and Addington
had fixed his mind upon the same lot, you were as
one whose chance had gone.

He was perhaps the first who set the precedent of
giving prices for articles totally beyond record and
example. It was his cue, and it is, so to speak, his
epitaph. Addington, as a collector, followed some-
what parallel lines to Quaritch as a man of busi-
ness he declined to be beaten. As some of us are
said to be makers of history, Addington was, and
the autocrat of the auction-room still is, a maker of
market values and prices current. I hardly believe
that his knowledge of books and other curiosities
was in any way great. He watched the biddings
carefully, ignored all lots which fell at humble prices,
but began to prick up his ears when 10 or 20
had been reached. His entrance into the fray was
ordinarily prefigured by the relegation of his glasses
to the top of his head.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 335

Let me consecrate a few lines to a widely different
individual who haunted this purlieu in my youth, the
Sixpenny Solicitor. He was a tall, poorly-clad man
who wore an appallingly bad hat. I kept his name
in my head, as I did the odour which accompanied
him in my nostrils, for years. I regret the loss of
the one, not that of the other. Someone thinks that
it was Adams ; perhaps so but no matter. He used
to sit at the table too, but as far as he could from
everybody else. He might harbour a consciousness
that he was not too welcome ; and sixpence was his
Alpha and his Omega. Ay, and you would have been
surprised at the lots which fell to him. He was one
of the surest customers of the firm, for he invariably
paid cash, which is a strongly-marked exception to
the general rule. Poor fellow ! at last I lost sight of
him, Of his humble profits much, I fear, went in
the purchase of liquor, probably on a par in quality
with his habiliments and his hat.

Among 1 the booksellers who have assembled here,
and .whose acquaintance and sympathy I have
enjoyed through many pleasant, if laborious, years,
I may enumerate Joseph Lilly, the Boones, Bernard
Quaritch, F, S, Ellis, the two Molini, the younger
Pickering, James Toovey (of the Temple of Leather
and Literature, Piccadilly), George Willis, Edward

33 6 FOURTH GENERATION

Stibbs, the two Wallers, the Russell-Smiths, the
Walfords, William Reeves, George Bumstead, and
the Rimells. I once fell in with Robert Triphook,
and conversed with him ; but he had retired before
my time. The elder Boone had a curious way of
bidding ; he sat just under the auctioneer, and would
tap the heel of Mr. Wilkinson's boot with his pencil.

Bumstead, who executed commissions for George
Smith and Sir Stirling Maxwell, usually stood by
the side of the rostrum, and, laying his hand on his
right cheek, made his thumb turn as on a hinge,
each movement signifying an advance. A third was
supposed to remain in the field so long as he kept
his eye on the seller, or continued to strike his
catalogue with his pencil.

These and other droles were the strategists, the
employers of a secret language. Is it necessary to
say that they ail conceived themselves unobserved ?
But, again, there was the opposite extreme the
stentorian throat, generally of some provincial or
Continental tyro, which made the room vibrate, and
everybody present look round; and an occasional
episode, a generation ago, was the shout with which
poor Tom Arthur, if he had indulged rather too
freely at his mid-day repast before the sale, bade
at random for whatever was on the table*

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 337

One signal difference between Sotheby's as it now
exists, and the house as I was familiar with it in my
younger days, lies in the almost ruined hopes of the
Bundle-hunter. There was a time when this
peculiar pursuit was attended by lucrative results,
and partook of that adventurous complexion so dear
to the trader, the dream of whose life it is to become
rich soon and retire early. Weird tales used to be
related of fabulous bargains acquired by keen and
persistent study of the Bundle.

Those are living who remember what it was to
discover in the heart of one some gem beyond price,
some reputed introuvablc. The very interior was a
terra incognita, a Pandora's box, a possible Eldorado.
A relic of the days of the earlier Tudors or a
Wynkyn de Worde, a lost Elizabethan fragment or
some piece by Taylor the Water Poet, which the
world had long despaired of ever beholding, can it
be that such, and many more like these nay, better
were once not seldom the portions of the wary
and diligent harvestman ? Ay, indeed ; and not very
different was it of old with the composite volume
the heterogeneous assemblage of pieces united by
unforeseeing owners or indiscreet bibliopegists (bless
them both !) in unholy wedlock ; nor with the folio
volume, lettered outside perchance, ' Old News-

VOL. n. 4 1

338 FOURTH GENERATION

papers/ and the resting-place of black-letter ballads
threescore and upward, which, a beneficent spirit
casting a spell on all save one alone, no other eye
discerned.

Yet now and again the labours of the seeker are
still rewarded. Stories have been rife within reason-
able years of literary bijoux disinterred by the vigilant
and sagacious explorer from unpromising, nay,
repellent, upper stratifications of ragged, dust-
ingrained, penny-box ware. Mark you, the suc-
cessful expert of the Victorian era has all his work
before him. He has to be wary to excess. He
has to snatch the right moment for investigating the
contents of these * parcels/ as the phrase is. He
must assure himself that no enemy is in ambush.
A quick eye, a deft hand, and an impassible
demeanour are essential.

Let him not be too sanguine till the hammer is
down, and the prize is his ; for instances are cited
by the knowing in these by-paths of research where
the hidden quarry has been secretly noted by more
than a single hunter by a second Argus and then,
while others have beaten the bush, the auctioneer it
is who catches the hare ; for, however sorrowful it
may be to relate it, the baffled game operates
exactly in a contrary direction, and the article,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 339

instead of dropping for a song, realizes in the heat
of exasperated competition a figure which makes
the occupant of the rostrum lick his lips, as it is not
etiquette for him to betray emotion in any other
way.

But the prevailing experience at present is cer-
tainly in the direction opposite to that which the
nugget-digger desiderates. The auctioneer's staff,
doubtless obeying instructions, is most distastefully
minute in detailing out the contents of lots and
parcels, and in searching beforehand for hidden ore.
From the bundle-hunter's seeing-point the game is
well-nigh up. Ere long the bladder will be pricked,
and he will be like another Othello. When a
volume of commonplace tracts fills an entire page,
if not two, of a catalogue, it is time for him to break,
his staff. The latter-day auctioneer, sooth to say,
errs on the side of accentuation.

It seems, however, as if the keenest and most
jealous competition, the most strongly emphasized
printed accounts, and the latest improvements in
distributing and circulating catalogues of sales, are
unequal to the removal of a curious phenomenon
which periodically recurs, and yet on each occasion
is declared to be so remarkable that it cannot by
possibility happen again : I mean the Frost the

340 FOURTH GENERATION

sudden and capricious fall of the temperature in the
room, or in the veins of those frequenting it, to zero.

Who shall attempt to explain it ? Provided always
that property of a certain stamp usually protects
itself by guaranteeing attendance and opposition,
it is not that the character of the sale is unfavour-
able, or that of the articles offered liable to question,
for I have had personal experience of cases where
some of the rarest books and best copies went at
nominal figures. The trade 'hung off'; there was
a likelier sale elsewhere ; business was quiet and
stocks were full ; or it was an occasion where the
national library might have filled many gaps, and
the authorities were enjoying a nap, or the Trustees
had sagaciously interdicted farther expenditure for
the time being, because Parliament had not passed
the vote, and they were too proud or too cautious
to go on credit. At one time, mediocre copies of
more or less common books are found realizing
artificially high prices ; at another, old English
plays and poetry, and historical tracts of the utmost
rarity, are given away. Lotteries are forbidden by
statute, yet this is the greatest lottery of all !

Now it begins, I apprehend, to be better under-
stood that it is not only the property which governs
the result, but the atmosphere and the name. Some
years ago, for instance, Mr. Gladstone placed his

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 341

old china in the hands of Christie's for sale. It was
a very second-rate collection, but the reputation of
the owner drew a company which was willing to pay
for sentiment.

Of the smaller room looking to Wellington Street,
and a later addition, where the coin, print, and
autograph sales are often held, I do not profess to
know much. The earliest boom, by the way, in
the numismatic department was the noble collection
of Marmaduke Trattle in 1832, which brought
nearly ^ir,ooo. In later life, when my own atten-
tion was directed to one or two studies outside the
library, I acquired the habit of looking on now and
then while these collateral descriptions of property
were changing hands, but I seldom intervened.

On the dispersion of the Edkins collection of
Bristol porcelain many years ago, my brother had
been asked by Dr. Diamond of Twickenham, who
could not be there in person, if he would mind
going to 20 for a certain teapot. The trust was
accepted, and the holder of this heavy commission
(as it seemed to him to be) imagined himself the
central figure in a thrilling episode the hero, in
fact, of the day. When the item came on, a gentle-
man stepped forward and said to the auctioneer : 'If
it will save the time of the company, sir, I will say
^105 just to start you 1'

CHAPTER IX.

One or two coin-collectors Lord Ashburnham How he lost his
first collection Edward Wigan Illustration of his en-
thusiasm The Blenheim sale The Marlborough gems
The Althorp Library The house in Leicester Square
Its history and development Remarkable sales which
have been held by Messrs. Puttick and Simpson Books
Manuscripts Autographs My obligations to the house
The Somers Tracts.

THE late Earl of Ashburnham formed two collec-
tions of Greek coins. The first he used to carry
about with him in his yacht, and it was taken by
pirates. Lord A. saw one of his coins offered for
sale in a Greek or Mediterranean town, and it led
to a revival of the hobby. His cabinet was not
extensive, but included many rare pieces.

Mr. Edward Wigan, of the great hop firm in the
Borough, whose cabinets were privately bought by
Rollin and Feuardent of Paris after his death, was
one of the most ardent collectors we have ever had
of Greek and Roman silver and copper coins. But
of Greek copper he made a speciality. He bought

FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY 343

a good deal of Whelan in the Haymarket, and Mr.
F. Whelan, then a boy, recollects his visits to his
father's, when the sherry was invariably brought
out, and any fresh acquisition discussed. One day
a rare type of Greek money lay on Whelan J s table,
and Wigan was tantalized by the announcement
that it was not for immediate sale. He went on
talking to Whelan, and every now and then
reverting to the coin. At last he took up a slip
of paper, and, writing his name at the foot,
cried : ' There, fill it up with what figure you
like/ He could afford to be liberal He told
F. W. that his share of the profits one half-year
was ,34,000.

Wigan to a considerable extent derived his taste
for coins from General York- Moore, with whom
he grew very intimate, and in whose company* he
was often to be seen too often, some say ; for the
General was convivial to a fault.

The Duke of Marlborough, I believe, imagined that
the proceeds of the sale of the Blenheim library would
be handed over to him ; but the trustees insisted on the
fund being applied to the improvement of the estate,
and a round sum went in a contract with Fentums
for new grates for Blenheim. While the auction
was going on in Leicester Square, a firm of solicitors

344 FOURTH GENERATION

at Manchester was kept informed from day to day
of the result.

The gentleman who' gave a large sum for the
Marlborough gems, without knowing much about
them, once allowed the Rev. S. S. Lewis, of Corpus,
Cambridge, to shew the collection to a friend of
his. But the owner chose to be present, and after
observing silence for some time, while Lewis was
doing the honours, he ventured to interpolate at a
pause in the proceedings a humble piece of criticism.
Taking up one of the treasures, he said to the
visitor: * That's nice f 'Nice! Mr. / ex-
claimed Lewis; '"nice" is a word to apply to a
jam-tart, not to an ancient gem.'

Lewis himself left an important collection of coins
and other antiquities to Corpus. I was told that
he had laid out ^"500 a year on this fancy or pursuit
during more than twenty years. Among much that
was mediocre in point of preservation (for Lewis did
not specially study what is called state], there were
many fine things which he had acquired during his
travels in Greece and elsewhere. Someone related
to me an odd trait in him, when a young lady who
had died testified her regard for Lewis by leaving
him .5,000. He went into an ordinary shop with
the cheque, and asked my informant if he would

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 345

oblige him with change. He had a brother, whom
I never saw, but who had, I was told, a funny way,
if he met you and you made an observation which
struck him, of saying : * Ah ! very curious/ pulling
out a memorandum - book ; * would you mind me
jotting that down ?'

Lord Spencer told me in 1868, when I paid a
visit to Althorp to take notes of some of the books
so far unseen by me, many years prior to the dis-
persion of the Blenheim-Sunderland library, that
the latter books were so neglected that birds had
built their nests behind the shelves.

Hearing recently that the Spencer collection
had gone to Manchester, and recalling the look of
Althorp as it was when the library remained there, I
asked someone in town what had been done to fill
up the gaps ; and I was told that the large billiard
room with the gallery had been clean swept away,
and that the empty shelves were replenished with
all sorts of commonplace stuff gathered from the
shops. What a fall ! They sold Wimbledon to
save the books, and they have sold the books to
save themselves. What would Dibdin's Spencer
say, if he could behold Althorp almost a sepulchre?
Let the pictures and china go, and the house might
as well be levelled with the ground.

346 FOURTH GENERATION

There are many not willing to acknowledge them-
selves very old who remember the porticoed entrance
in Piccadilly, a little westward from St. James's
Church, where lay the place of business of Messrs.
Puttick and Simpson. It is only about a dozen
years since the building stood there ; but the sale-
room itself had been already demolished, necessi-
tating the removal elsewhere ; and every trace of it
and the other buildings which occupied the site has
disappeared. Nor had the names which I now
give been identified with the locality much more
than a decade. But it was old ground, and they
succeeded to an established and respectable inherit-
ance. In 1794 this s P ot h^d the Great Room of
Mr. Stewart, who continued here alone till 1825-26,
when Mr. Benjamin Wheatley, a member of the
staff at Sotheby's, and Mr. Adlard, a son of the
printer of that name, purchased the business with
the understanding that the old name should
stand for a time, the house being styled Stewart,
Wheatley and Adlard. It was in the days of the
nominal triumvirate that the famous library of the
Rev. Theodore Williams was sold here.

Mr. Stewart did not long survive his arrangement
with Messrs. Wheatley and Adlard, the two latter
being found carrying on the concern in 1830, and in

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 347

1837 Mr. Wheatley died. The latter was a man of
superior attainments, and sold many fine collections,
including part of the Heber library. The interest
seems to have passed into the hands of Messrs.
John and James Fletcher shortly afterward, but a
son of Mr. Wheatley was admitted for the sake of
the familiar name ; the style of the firm for a short
time was Fletcher and Wheatley, but in 1843 ' Mr.
Fletcher ' occurs on the catalogues, and he inserts,
as a novel feature, a notice to executors, assignees,
and others, stating that he is prepared to make
advances to the extent of three-fourths of the value
of goods actually in his hands. Of course, the value
was what Mr. Fletcher computed it to be, and, to go
back for a moment to 1837, we observe at the end
of a catalogue of dramatic poetry an announcement
of other sales in prospect, in one of which there was
to be a fine portrait of the second Marquis of Bute
by Gainsborough.

It was while the late Mr, B. R. Wheatley belonged
to the firm, and prior to his father s death, that the
auction-room was converted on one occasion into a
theatre for the production of Goldsmith's She Stoops
to Conquer by amateurs, Mr. Wheatley himself,
then quite a lad, with a strong taste and talent for
theatricals, taking the part of Tony Lumpkin.

548 FOURTH GENERATION

We lose sight of Mr. Fletcher in 1846, in which
year he sold a further portion of the stock of Mr.
John Bohn, and come face to face with the now long-
familiar names of Puttick and Simpson, the former,
who had been a clerk to Mr. Fletcher, taking Mr.
Simpson into partnership. This change took place
between April and July, 1846, and in all their earlier
catalogues the new firm describe themselves as suc-
cessors to Mr. Fletcher. Mr. Puttick was an active
man of business, and from this point we have to date
the commencement of a period of distinct progress
and improvement.

To enumerate even the more important auctions
which have been held in the Great Room, 191, Pic-
cadilly, and since the removal to 47, Leicester
Square, in 1858, would occupy more space than I
can spare. Taking, so far as literary property is
concerned, 1846 as my point of departure, I may
give a few items :

The Donnadieu Books and Manuscripts, ^3,923 ; the Libri
Collection, ^8,929 ; Books and Manuscripts of Dawson Turner,
^"9,453 195. ; Books and Manuscripts of Edward Crowninshield,
of Boston, N.E., ^4,826 6s. ; Books and Manuscripts of Sir
Edward Dering, ^7,259 i6s, ; the Emperor Maximilian's Mexican
Library (1869), ^3,985 128. 6d. ; Books from William Penn's
Library, ^1,350; Books of Sir Edward Nicholas, Secretary to
Charles I. (1877), ^977 i6s. ; the Sunderland Library (1881-83)
;6o,ooo; the Gosford Library (1884), ^"11,318 53, 6d, ; the
Hartley Library (1885-87), ;x 6,530.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 349

But the list is inexhaustible.

Then, in the department of Autograph Letters,
there is a continuous record from 1848, if we exclude
such as form part of prior miscellaneous sales. Many
of us recollect the Oilier Collection not so long ago
when a sonnet, and a published one, too, in the
handwriting of Keats, realized here S 153.

Numerous catalogues before us shew that Mr-
Redford in his * Art Sales,' as well as Mr. Tuer in
his Bartolozzi volume, does imperfect justice to the
pictures and prints which have found new owners
under the hammer here and in Piccadilly right away
from 1806. A suggestive clause presents itself in
the Conditions of Sale attached to this class of pro-
perty so far back as 1812, when intending buyers of
paintings are apprised by Mr. Stewart that 'to
prevent inconveniences that frequently attend long
and open accounts, the remainder of the purchase-
money is to be absolutely paid on or before delivery. 7

The prices obtained were, in the old days, fairly
high ; but even chef Douvres (as Mr. Stewart was
pleased to write it) did not invariably answer the
expectations of the parties interested. Do we not
still find the same thing occasionally ?

The series of priced catalogues from 1805 (the
earliest in the possession of Messrs. Puttick and

350 FOURTH GENERATION

Simpson) to the present time is a strange sort of
homily on the fortunes of families, the progress of
learning, and the caprices of taste.

To the litterateur and bibliographer, through all
the long vista of years, these classic rooms, associated
with Sir Joshua Reynolds and his friends, and with
the Western Literary Institution, have afforded
many and many a precious gem and fascinating dis-
covery.

It would be ungrateful to the house in Leicester
Square if I were not to confess that it has yielded
me in my time many a pleasant discovery and many
an excellent bargain. Was it not there that I bought
the classic Somers Tracts in thirty folio volumes,
with the ' Laws of New York/ 1693 the first book
printed there, I take it and several other unique
Americana among them ? Did I not attend the
great Surrenden sale there, when the Dering books
were offered, and have to my next neighbour at the
table no less a man than John Forster, Esquire?
How vividly I call to mind pointing out to him the
rarity and interest of an uncut copy on large paper
of Archbishop Laud's ' Speech in the Star Chamber/
1637, and his magnificent affability in rendering me
thanks !

The contributors to the press, as a rule, depend on

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 351

the priced catalogue of a sale for their guidance in
selecting the items for the paragraph which they
draw up for the organ by which they happen to be
employed. They seldom possess much independent
experience. They let their eyes run down the
columns, and note the highest prices, the disadvan-
tage being that they are apt to miss the rarities
which go, perchance, below their value, no less than
to cite without comment the lots which on some
special account fetch artificial figures.

CHAPTER X.

The British Museum My recollection of the old building and
Reading Room Members of the staff whom I have known
Panizzi and the New General Catalogue Sir Henry Ellis
George Bullen Grenville Collection Mr. Grenville and my
father The frequenters of the Reading Room Mr. Glad-
stone's views about the Museum staff Proposed insulation
of the national collections Publishers Different schools or
types George Routledge Henry George Bohn George
Willis A literary adventure Some other booksellers The
Leadenhall and Cornhill schools of painting The 'edition
de luxe The Illustrated Copy.

THE present Principal Librarian and Keeper of
the Printed Books at the British Museum are
respectively the fifth and fourth holders of the
office whom I have known. After the retirement
of Sir Henry Ellis in 1856, the influence of Lord
Brougham procured the appointment of Antonio
Panizzi, who had succeeded in ingratiating himself
with that once powerful statesman and Minister.
He also courted old Mr. Grenville.

Jones, who followed Panizzi, owed his fortune
to the latter ; but, Dr. Bond was selected partly

FOURTH GENERATION OF A LITERARY FAMILY 353

on the alternate principle, and partly from the
absence of anyone at the moment from the other
Departments willing or competent to take the post.
Dr. Newton had the first offer, and declined. Bond
was by far the best and most liberal man whom
we have had ; but Sir E. M. Thompson, who was
brought up under him in the Manuscript Depart-
ment, was the most judicious choice which the
Trustees could have made when Bond resigned.

When I first frequented the Museum, the old
Reading Room was, of course, still in use. Mr.
Watts was keeper of the Printed Books. At that
time the national library was very weak in early
English literature, and Watts took comparatively
little interest in it, having made no special study
of the subject Under the advice of one or another,
certain gaps had been filled up as opportunities
presented themselves, and at the Bright sale in
1845 more particularly the Museum authorities
secured many valuable items. Within the last
thirty years, however, under the auspices of Mr.
Rye Mr. Bullen, and Mr. Garnett, the acquisitions
in this direction have been continuous and immense.
Even phenomenal prices have been given for ex-
ceptionally interesting and important articles, and
had it not been for the keenness of private compe-

VOL. II, 42

354 FOURTH GENERATION

tition, the national collection would at this moment
be marvellously complete. But the annual grant
for the library is moderate ; and while the English
or American amateur can afford to outbid the
Trustees, the latter can afford on their part to
wait. They are, as I have more than once re-
marked, the heirs of all men.

Yet it is more than ridiculoustoexpend ,22, 000,000
on the Navy, because that step strengthens the
Government in the popular estimation, and to
make a pretence of economy in another direction,
of which the general knowledge is less clear,
by paring down the allowance for books and
manuscripts a thousand or so. It is not that
Ministers care for the Navy more than the
Museum ; but the Navy means Votes, and the
other does not.

At the same time, the steady absorption of our
early literature by the British Museum, and of
ancient books generally by that and other public
libraries in Europe and America, with the tendency
to destroy volumes belonging to the theological
and scientific series, for which the demand has
ceased, must have the ultimate effect of narrowing
the opportunities for forming important private
cabinets, and of gradually diminishing the bulk of

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 355

old printed matter in existence ; and with what
is actually valueless much which was highly de-
serving of preservation has not only perished in
the past, but perishes from ignorance or accident
year by year.

Take one case out of thousands. An old gentleman
in Suffolk was discovered by his cousin, my in-
formant, not long since, making a bonfire of some
old books, including a copy of Burton's Anatomy
of Melancholy, 1621. On being challenged for
his reason for committing this act of vandalism,
the owner remarked that he had been looking into
the Burton, and did not think it was a fit book
for the girls his four daughters, of whom the
most juvenile was about fifty.

Here was one of the makers of rare books !
The same wise gentleman had included in the
holocaust a manuscript Diary kept by his father
during sixty years.

The magnum opus of Panizzi was, I believe, the
New General Catalogue of the Printed Books. On
this scheme and his editorial work on the lives and
writings of Dante, Ariosto, and Boiardo, his fame
rests. I prefer to limit myself to a passing criticism
on that section of the Panizzi undertaking of which
my bibliographical labours and researches have led

356 FOURTH GENERATION

me to take special cognizance, and I must affirm
that the arrangement of the entries is most em-
barrassing and most troublesome. Items, instead
of being placed under obvious heads, are reached
with more or less sacrifice of time by cross-references
to other volumes of the Catalogue and other letters
of the alphabet, necessarily occupying the time of
workers and consulters.

Some of the present staff of officials are fully
sensible of the injudicious character of the plan
pursued, and seem to be of my opinion, that the
whole fabric ought to be reconstructed in the public
interest. The pedantic and nonsensical practice ot
mixing up I and J and U and V, and of ranging
certain classes of books under Academies, must
ultimately be given up.

The fifth article of the Protest made by the late
Mr. Bolton Corney against the appointment of
Panizzi to the head of the Museum in 1856 runs
thus : * Because the said Antonio Panizzi, on account
of the failure of his engagements with regard to
the Catalogue of printed books, and the fictions
and absurdities of the only fragment thereof hitherto
published, appears to have deserved reprehension
rather than promotion/

When my father lived in Great Russell Street

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 357

in 1846, the Museum was still enclosed within a
dead wall, and was guarded by sentinels.

It was from Sir Henry Ellis that I obtained my
first reader s ticket. My next step was to lose it,
and during about twenty years I held none, nor
was ever challenged. Then came the dynamite
scare, and one day I was stopped at the door
of the Library. ' You know me ?' I said. * Yes,
sir.' * How singular!' * Well, you see, sir, it is
our orders. If you were the Archbishop of

Canterbury, sir ' This appeal I was powerless

to resist, and I went round the other way.

I never saw Ellis ; but I had to communicate
with him in 1869 on a literary matter in which he
had a voice. So far back as 1813 he had edited
Brand's Popular Antiquities ; and without taking
into account the legal bearing of his phenomenal
survivorship till I had printed off, and was ready
to issue, my new recension, I found myself in the
dilemma of having to secure his assent prior to
publication. Ellis peremptorily refused ; but twelve
days after he died, and, although the copyright did
not ipso facto determine, I launched my scheme
neck or naught The letter to me, written in his
ninety-second year, was probably the last which the
old gentleman ever despatched.

358 FOURTH GENERATION

My father found himself in a similar dilemma,
when he inserted in the Romancist, in 1840, a tale
called the Children of the Abbey, written generations
before ; but he was less fortunate than myself. The
authoress emerged, to his consternation, from her
hiding-place, and had to be 'squared.' God knows
if she might not do the same thing now, if anyone
had the hardihood to try the experiment !

The late Mr. George Bullen is my authority for
stating that at Paris they have among the archives
both the original Edict of Nantes and the original
Revocation. Panizzi told Bullen that * he never
knew a Protestant turn Papist unless he was a
damned fool, or a Papist turn Protestant unless he
was a damned rogue/

Bullen was civilly elbowed out of the Keepership
of the Printed Books, as Reid was out of that of
the Prints. He had applied to F. for a testimonial
to support his candidature for Bond's place as prin-
cipal librarian ; but F. excused himself. At the
same time, it is due alike to Bullen and Reid, and
I may add Vaux, to testify that they always dis-
played toward myself, as a student and inquirer, the
utmost amount of friendly sympathy and interest.

Bullen had, however, a tiresome and tantalizing
way of disparaging the commercial value (of which

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 359

he, in fact, knew little or nothing) of any rare book
submitted to his approval, and then making a great
splutter about the remarkable acquisition which the
Museum had obtained through his discernment.
From his want of knowledge, the national library
missed many desiderata. His predecessor Rye was
a stronger man, and relied on his own judgment ;
whereas Bullen made the circuit of the building, if
something was offered, in quest of opinions upon
it. For what was he there? He was paid for his
opinion ; and he had none.

The weakest proceeding under his Keepership
was the compilation of the three-volume catalogue
of Early English Literature, which might, without
detriment on the one hand, and with positive ad-
vantage on the other, have been, in the first place,
digested into one ; but the book abounds with errors
of every description, nor is it easy to see of what
use, save as a work of strictly local reference, a new
and improved edition would be, since the whole of
the most valuable material is more fully, if not 4 more
accurately, described elsewhere.

I recollect, as an old frequenter of the place, the
curious episodes of Vaux and Madden ; but I desist
from entering into them, as they are of no general
interest

360 FOURTH GENERATION

A reminiscence of the Museum, as agreeable as
it is permanent, is the gracious reply by Mr. Watts,
when he was superintendent of the Reading Room,
to my explanation that I was Mr. Hazlitt's son.
1 Mr. Hazlitt yourself," Mr. Watts was kind enough
to say. The words made me feel that I was really
an individual.

The Grenville collection at the Museum is, of
course, infinitely precious ; but the owner unfor-
tunately displayed too little caution in examining
the copies of books which he bought, and many
of which have proved imperfect. I recollect that,
when my father resided at Old Brompton in the
early forties in Mr. Grenville's lifetime, he occa-
sionally obtained the loan of some volume for a
passing literary purpose, and that the old servant
who brought it to our house flattered his master,
as we thought, by his resemblance to him in his
general manner and bearing.

How many a worthy soul with a mysterious pied
d terre God knows where or what finds shelter
and warmth beneath the ample and friendly dome
of the new Reading Room ! What many of them
do, how they live, may be within the knowledge of
some ; all that I can affirm is that, within my ex-
perience, a succession of them, which seems inter-

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 361

minable, has corne and gone, and has vexed the
souls of hapless officials, to whom Job the prophetic
was, in point of patience, a baby.

The Superintendent must perforce be genial and
obliging to all comers. It is in his diploma. The
public has been exceedingly fortunate here, Mr.
Watts, Mr. Bullen, Mr. Garnett, Mr. Fortescue,
and Mr. Wilson, have left in succession nothing to
be desired in the way of courtesy and good temper.
I once watched a lady-reader, who had manifestly
made some subject her absorbing study, while she
catechized Mr. Garnett, and I have to avow that
even he at last came to the end of his resources.
But he had a thousand topics at his fingers* ends,
the lady, perhaps, only that one.

I am not going for an instant to allege that Mr.
Garnett is addicted to favouritism ; but if any gentle-
man calls to see him, and finds that he has an American
lady with him, his best plan is to say that he will look
in again that day week. Our lady-cousins from
the other side are certainly desperate button-holers.

Such odd figures, occasionally with cloaks of im-
posing amplitude such bizarre costumes ! Gentle-
men of foreign extraction and ancient lineage
maybe, counts in the land of their birth ; elderly
persons of the softer sex in motley toilettes, in

362 FOURTH GENERATION

whom the softness has become barely recognisable,
with whom one almost associates the notion of a
snuffbox ; damsels in spectacles, who, if they do
time-work, spend unconscionably too large a share
of the day in mild flirtations with picturesquely
pallid and ntgligd young men, which relieve the
pervading silence with a sort of sotto-voce buzz. If
one had the means of forming these and the rest
to be found in the Rotunda any given morning into
a procession, what spectacle stranger ? and if one
could get at the story of the Thousand and One
Readers, it might have its instructive and amusing
side. Ah me ! it would have its mournful and tragic.
I have now and then used the Medal and Print
rooms, and have always met with the utmost con-
sideration. The lace Keeper of the Prints told me
a curious anecdote about the Temptation by Dilrer.
The Museum example was very fine ; but a gentle-
man called one day, asked to see it, and said that
he had a better one, he thought. Would they like
to look at his ? Of course, Mr. Reid was incredu-
lous, and replied that they would. The owner
brought it shortly after : it completely eclipsed the
one in the national collection, and Mr. Edwards
presented it. They never heard a word more about
him, except that that was his name.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 363

Dr. Gray, of the Natural History Section, received
Du Chaillu, the African explorer, on his visit to
London and the Museum, and, there being some
scepticism at the time as to the truth of the writer's
account of the gorilla, and Gray seeming to share
the prevailing doubts, Du Chaillu expressed his
disapprobation by spitting in his face. It was a
brother of Gray who was engaged as an assistant
by Sir Richard Phillips, and who is the boy attend-
ing the author on the vignette of the title-page of
Phillips's Mornings Walk from London to Kew,
1817. Gray's brother had also a taste for natural
history and botany. He was subsequently secretary
at Crockford's.

The shabbiest tricks arc played by persons
frequenting the Reading Room, as no one will be
surprised to hear who has studied the physiognomy
and costume of many of those admitted. Bullen
shewed me one day a volume of one of the Quarterlies
with several pages cut out by a student, who had
presumably a commission to copy the matter.
Another time both copies of H alii well's Dictionary
of Old Plays had been simultaneously stolen, Even
the leaden weights disappeared. A detective was
placed at a reading-desk to reconnoitre ; he lost his
great-coat, which he had laid on the back of his

364 FOURTH GENERATION

chair ; and the thief was not detected till a second
spy was stationed in the roof to watch for him,

Mr. Gladstone used to hold that the employments
here were of such an exceptionally agreeable and
compensating character that gentlemen should be
readily found willing to fulfil them on the most
reasonable terms a proposition which might be
equally applicable to the staff of a pastrycook or a
dealer in sweetmeats. The result not a very satis-
factory or proud one is seen in the notorious resort
to outside work for publishers, periodicals, and
auctioneers. Certain members of the staff, in fact,
go so far as to look upon given topics as their free-
hold, and resent personally, or through their friends
on the press, the interference of unofficial workers,
as if some provinces of research were a sort of
literary Tom Tiddlers Ground. This seems to be
an injustice and an anomaly calling for rectifica-
tion.

The scheme for insulating the building as a means
of security against fire, and of obtaining additional
space by the demolition of all the surrounding
houses, is all very well ; but a still more immediate
danger is the residential principle and privilege,
which involve a peculiar risk, owing to the exemp-
tion of the officials in their homes from the eye of

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 365

any night-watcher; and at the South Kensington
establishment it is even worse, as certain members
of the staff have open fires in their private rooms,
and smoke there, as they do in some of the Oxford
and Cambridge college libraries. There will be a
terrible catastrophe one day, and has not Parliament
given ,200,000 to remove, as we were told, the
mischief? In 1865 there was a fire in the Binding
Department, but the loss was happily less serious
than it might have been.

There are schools of Publishers as there are of
Art and Cookery. We get the old-established
respectable houses, which deal only with certain
classes of books and people, and correspond with
you on quarto paper. There are the specialists,
who limit themselves to subjects or topics. There
are the opportunists, who seek to profit by every
ephemeral taste and fancy which takes the public
captive. There are the book-drapers, who treat
literature like any other dry goods, and sell it in
gross, as if it were cheese or sugar. They will
deliver you a hundredweight of Dickens, or shoot
down into your shop-cellar half a ton of * assorted *
sixpenny ware.

Someone was speaking to me of a publisher who
suffered imprisonment for issuing immoral French

3 66 FOURTH GENERATION

books in an English dress, and was reminding me
of the applicability of Macaulay's criticism on the
spasmodic virtue of the British public and authorities;
for almost before the prisoner's term had expired,
another house brought out the same things without
comment. It is not what is done, but the doer and
the manner of doing.

'One man may steal a horse, and another may
not look over the hedge.' A person is prosecuted
and imprisoned, no doubt deservedly, for publishing
objectionable books. The auctioneers issue cata-
logues giving full and appetizing titles of others ten
times as bad, and offer them for public inspection
and sale with impunity.

There comes into my hands opportunely for
recommendation as a model and beau iddal of what
I mean, a * Catalogue of Valuable and Rare Books
and Manuscripts, Consisting of Duplicates from the
Library of the Right Hon. the Earl of Crawford,
and A Selection from the French Library of the
Right Hon. Lord Ashburton.' The singular and
unusual part is that one does not know where the
first Right Honourable ends, and the second Right
Honourable begins. Mayhap, one has bought up
the other; but however that may be, the foreign
element is a fairly representative one as regards the

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 367

most licentious literature of all periods, with notes
drawing attention to the character of the lot in many
instances, where there might be a doubt in the mind
of the bidder.

It is a great mistake to suppose that improper
literature is mostly sold in such places as Holy well
Street. The West End is the actual centre. The

residual stock of the late Mr. was said at the

time to have been secured en bloc for a foreign
market ; mats on ne sait pas toujours. I was told
(to be sure, not by a person of unimpeachable
veracity) that those items in a celebrated Yorkshire
library which were too bad for the auctioneers were
not thrown into the moat, as generally believed, but
secured by him by a coup dc main, of which he was
justly proud.

Two men whom I should select as, in their re-
spective lines, models of integrity in the publishing
way are Mr. William Reeves and the late Mn John
Russell-Smith ; but the latter was less liberal than
Reeves. Certain houses, of course, carry loyally
out any undertaking into which they may enter, and
their word is as good as their bond. But there are
others with which it is an absolute courtship of
misery to deal, even if you hold them in the clauses
of an agreement as in a vice,

3 68 FOURTH GENERATION

The late George Routledge was a very frank and
unpretending North -Countryman, though latterly
rather fond of letting one know that he was a justice
of the peace. The last time I saw him was at his
place of business at the back of Ludgate Hill. He
mentioned to me that he had been served with a
notice of action by a lady for some remark about
her in a book recently published by him, but which
he had not examined, or even seen, prior to issue ;
and he also told me that he had just had an in-
dignant letter from some clergyman for reprinting
Voltaire's Candide in Professor Morley's cheap
series. I took the occasion to inquire where the
Professor saw the affinity between Candide and
Johnson's Rasselas, which he had put together in a
volume on that account.

When I first remember Routledge, he was in
Soho Square, where Chidley had been before him,
and where Russell-Smith succeeded him. My old
acquaintance, Mr. Henry Pyne, late Assistant Tithe
Commissioner, used to refer sometimes to him, for
Routledge had been at first, by the interest of the
Member for Carlisle, a clerk in that office, and
occasionally his first wife would bring him his
dinner in a pocket-handkerchief.

I was in lodgings in Buckingham Street, Strand,

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 369

in 1862, when I was informed that a gentleman
wished to see me. I went down, and found Rout-
ledge on the stairs. He had come personally to
ask me to prepare a second edition of a small
fugitive volume, which he had published in 1858,
on British Columbia, and which I had with my
excellent father's help compiled in the first furor
of the emigration movement in two or three
weeks.

The firm of Chapman and Hall, like many others,
traded, to a certain extent, for many years under a
nom de guerre 9 one of the partners being non-
existent. Somebody once asked Frederick Chap-
man of whom the house really consisted. ' I'm
Chapman/ he replied, * and that's Hall!

Some memorabilia about the late Henry George
Bohn are already in print. Many others might, no
doubt, be collected.

I was told that at a wine sale Bohn insisted on
tasting all the samples, and became incapable of
looking after himself ; they had to carry him down
and put him into a cab. He found the next morn-
ing that he had bought two hundred dozen.

He was very fond of boasting about being invited
to great folks' houses. He told a confrere one day
that it was a very singular thing that at Lord *s

VOL, it. 43

370 FOURTH GENERATION

there was no fish. ' Ah,' rejoined the other wickedly,
' perhaps they ate it all upstairs/

It was an edifying spectacle to watch Henry
Bohn and his brother John verbally sparring across
the table at Sotheby's. I was not present when
E. is reported to have openly told Bohn that
some statement was the biggest lie which he had
ever uttered, and that it must by consequence be a
big one.

As regarded the relations between Bohn and his
sisters, he used to insist that he had made them
handsome proposals, which they rejected. They
came into Russell-Smith's, in Soho Square, when
I was there one day, to beg him to give them
sixpence.

The predecessor of John Bohn as principal cata-
loguer at Sotheby's was Bryant, of Wardour Street,
who supplied Dr. Bliss and other collectors of a
bygone generation with some of their treasures, and
who had a hand in the new edition of Lowndes.
Bryant, who died in 1864, once made this very
judicious observation to me that there were many
books which occurred very seldom, and when they
did, were worth very little.

The edition of Lowndes which bears the name
of H. G. Bohn as the overseer was, in fact, done.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 371

so far as it was done at all, by Bryant, with the
occasional assistance of others. Bohn, when anyone
came to him with a complaint of mistakes in the
book, used always to exclaim, * Oh, it was that ass
Bryant ' ; but if you went to Bohn, and mentioned
that some particular article was improved, he would
say, * Ah, yes, I did that myself, '

J. W. Parker, the publisher, speaking of books
which paid, asked F. what book he supposed had
proved most remunerative to him. On F. shaking
his head, Parker said, ' Why, I gave my daughter
^"25, thirty-six years ago, to compile a little selec-
tion of hymns and psalms, and last year it brought in
200 profit, and it has never been worthless to me.'

There are here and there instances where a firm,
enjoying an independent fortune, consults its own
pleasure or caprice in its selection of authors and its
espousal of schemes, sometimes quite irrespectively
of the financial question ; it is Maecenas in the
counting-house ; and modern litterateurs, even if
they are not Horaces, might be apt to find a better
account in paying their addresses to such than to
noble lords or royal highnesses, who have nowa-
days, as a rule, very different fish to fry.

If ever there should come a time when publisher
and author act in loyal and mutually satisfactory

372 FOURTH GENERATION

co-operation, it would be the Golden Age indeed
the lion lying down with the lamb, although which
is the lion and which is the lamb in this case I
forbear to pronounce.

1 Repairs neatly executed ' might be a good title
for a paper on the well-known literary contingency,

where a famous author, such as , or , or

, is just the least weak in his information, his

grammar, and his points, and where some obscure
person in the background is engaged by the pub-
lisher with his privity and at his cost to make the
otherwise chef d'ceuvre exactly suitable for public
use and view. The odd part comes when the
famous author carries about his volume, as a sample
of his cunning and style, and perhaps receives a
commission to execute a second masterpiece.

It can only yield astonishment to general readers
to hear that there have long been individuals whose
most lucrative employment consists in * finishing 1 / to
use bookbinders' parlance, works which have been
* forwarded' by the author. The name of the
former seldom appears, and it is often the case
always, where it happens that anyone has much
credit to lose that it is to the reviser's advantage
that he should preserve a strict incognito. For
here the exceptions, where a manuscript emerges

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 373

from this process a source of gratifying surprise to
the parties concerned, are so rare, that they prove
the rule indeed. Every season witnesses the sale
of hundredweights of written matter by auction or
otherwise, which has been carefully prepared by
the departed author with a view to publication by
Murray or Longman, and which is at last en route
to that Alma Mater of Scriblerus, the omnivorous
paper-mill.

George Willis the bookseller, who recently
passed away at an advanced age, and who is asso-
ciated in the mincl of the more modern collector
with the late firm of Willis and Sotheran, was an
Essex man* My father told me that he recollected
him as a stall-keeper in Prince's Street, Coventry
Street, and his wife attended to the stall while he
went in quest of stock. He used to say that his
main idea was to buy for a shilling and sell for
eighteen-pence very good interest, but only six-
pence, Mrs. Willis has been seen at her husband's
stall with an umbrella over her head.

I believe that he subsequently occupied the corner
shop where Noah Huett was in my time originally
small premises, which Huett enlarged. Then he
went to the Piazza in Covent Garden, where he
failed* But he was a man of persevering character

374 FOURTH GENERATION

and commercial aptitude, and during the time that
he was in partnership with Mr. Sotheran com-
pletely recovered his position. Willis and Sotheran's
General Catalogue for 1862 long remained a
standard work of reference.

I personally remember Willis as a very pleasant,
courteous, and intelligent man of business, and his
Current Notes*, sort of illustrated Notes and
Queries -is a favourite book with many. He joined
his sons in the card-making way, and, as I heard,
lost a good deal of the money which he had taken
out of the concern in the Strand.

I owed to Willis a rather curious experience. He
introduced me, about 1865, to a member of the
Society of Friends, a former neighbour of his at
Reigate, and an eminent photographer, who, having
executed a series of views in Egypt, desired to
publish the work with a poetical letter-press in the
old spelling. I agreed to revise this for him, and
after some delay the first instalment arrived, was
put as far as possible into form in a couple of hours,
and was despatched home. Hearing no more for
some time, I dropped the poetical photographer a
civil reminder, and was then apprised that he had
abandoned the project But he kept his engage-
ment with me. It was ^25 not very hardly earned.

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 375

I have sometimes speculated whether he would
have printed the text in Gothic letter. Good, as
Jerrold once said of a weak play shown to him, was
not the word for his literary offspring.

Baldock in Holborn I have already introduced.
Not far from him were the places of business of
Petheram and Newman. The former had an
assistant named John Hotten, a Cornish man, better
known as John Camden Hotten, who, before he set
up in business in London, spent some time in the
United States at Petheram's suggestion. Newman
was a strictly upright man, and dealt in topography.
He found in his later days, when his health failed, a
valuable friend in Leonard Hartley the collector, at
whose house in Hastings he died.

A rather good story was once told about Newman.
There was a sale at Sotheby's just in his way, rich
in the very class of books which he wanted for
Hartley and other clients. He was not an habitual
attendant at the auctions, but on this occasion he
was there in person, and bade for every lot. A
whisper circulated that it was a rig, that it was
Newman's property. * Let him have his stuff back
again,* said his confreres. But it turned out that
they were mistaken ; and some of them had to go
round to him the next day and give him his own

376 FOURTH GENERATION

price for what they required, or find that the items
were bought on commission for common acquaint-
ances.

Mr. F. S. Ellis used to say that the meaning of
the term confrere in the book trade was a man
who would cut your throat, if he could do it with
impunity.

Another person of whom I bought a few curious
books was Elkins. He had an odd little shop at the
top of Lombard Street, about the size of a rabbit-
hutch, into which, as into a spider's web, he was wont
to inveigle the unwary. Let it pass. He did me no
great harm. He laid his net, I conceive, for the
City groundlings, who are still affectionately nursed
by Jew and Gentile, planting on the route from rail-
way terminus to counting-house triumphs of pictorial
art. Occasionally these interesting characters reside
on a line, and enter into conversation with their
fellow-passengers, who are quite casually apprised
that certain masterpieces of the Leadenhall or
Cornhill school are to be seen at such and such
an address* But the old book-shop has migrated
westward.

The book-buyer is not exempt from the danger
which besets all other classes of enthusiasts for what
strikes the fancy as rare or curious, or both. It is

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 377

by no means invariably the case that an inexperi-
enced collector can safely place himself in the hands
of an occupier of ordinary business premises ; he will
probably have to pay for his education before he can
trust to his own judgment ; but the back-parlour,
where property is introduced to gentlemen of means
by enterprising merchants, whose affairs are entirely
conducted by correspondence, is the rock to be
avoided. It is a type of the confidence- trick.

E. H. was laughing at that almost effete phan-
tasma, the Edition de luxe; and he said that he
thought, if the craze had gone much farther, it would
have been necessary for an intending purchaser,
before his book came home, to hire a paddock. The
only kind of work suitable for such treatment is what
may be termed literary bijouterie.

Another unwholesome development is the Illus-
trated Copy. This first arose from the Grangerite
movement, and, the trade having accumulated a
vast number of portraits and views, every book
which contained copious references to persons and
places became a convenient and remunerative shoot
for these productions, intrinsically and independently
unsaleable. The conception has been worn well-
nigh threadbare, but there must be up and down the
world cartloads of this species of manufacture, since

378 FOURTH GENERATION

it was found to be so profitable, and appealed to so
many who were not critical judges of prints or
drawings.

There is- not one book of this character in ten
thousand which is unimpeachable throughout. To
obtain certain material it is necessary to wait perhaps
months, perhaps years ; and the commercial illus-
trator cannot afford to lock up his capital too long.
It is only in those excessively rare cases where a
private connoisseur of fortune engages in the under-
taking that a creditable result accrues. But, from
the increasing scarcity of fine early prints in the
right state, the pursuit has become almost hopelessly
difficult Even the few examples purchased by the
late Mr. Huth struck me as very unequal and
unsatisfying.

I have arrived at the conclusion of my somewhat
peculiar and somewhat difficult undertaking, of which
the scope and dimensions exceed by much my
original estimate. But there was a strong tempta-
tion throughout, under the different sections into
which I have divided the work, to bring forward
as I proceeded, details only occurring to my memory
by association or accident ; and I sincerely and
respectfully hope that these may not too often

OF A LITERARY FAMILY 379

strike my readers either as trivial or obnoxious.
It becomes rather hard, when one has to deal
with a vast number of names, and with infinite
matters of fact, opinion, and taste, to draw the line
with absolute precision, and to avoid in all cases
personalities affecting the departed, or expressions
of feeling which may prove unpalatable to a few still
among us. There has not been on my part any
desire to give wilful or wanton umbrage to anyone.
I think that my references to living contemporaries,
as well as to those whom we have lost, are, as a rule,
neither unjust nor intemperate ; and my farewell
wish is, that my volumes may, on the whole, be
treated as a not unacceptable addition to the class
to which they belong.

T1IK END.

HILLING AND SONS, 1'KINTBM, GUILDFORD-

Date Due

Hunt Library

Carnegie Institute of Technology
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

38360