What I Remember, Volume 1

I possess this remarkable work of art to the present day!

At another page I stumble on the record of a conversation with the sexton of Leatherhead, whom, in one of my rambles, I found digging a grave in the churchyard there. Three shillings, I learned, was the price of a grave of the ordinary depth of five feet. Those, however, who could afford the luxury of lying deeper paid a shilling a foot more.

One more note from the diaries of those days I will venture to give, because it may be taken as a paraleipomenon to that Autobiography of my brother, which the world was kindly pleased to take some interest in:—

“Went to town yesterday [from Harrow], and among other commissions bought a couple of single-sticks with strong basket handles. Anthony much approves of them, and this morning we had a bout with them. One of the sticks bought yesterday soon broke, and we supplied its place by a tremendous blackthorn. Neither of us left the arena without a fair share of rather severe wales; but Anthony is far my superior in quickness and adroitness, and perhaps in bearing pain too. I fear he is likely to remain so in the first two, but in the third I am determined he shall not.”

Thus says the yellow fifty-seven-year-old page!

And I have literally thousands of such pages; voluminous records—among other matters—of walking excursions in the home counties, in Devon, in Wales, in Gloucestershire, and the banks of the Severn and Wye, not a page of which fails to bear its testimony to the curiously changed circumstances under which a pedestrian would now undertake such wanderings. I find among other jottings—deemed memorabilia at the time—that I carried a knapsack weighing twenty-eight pounds over the top of Plinlimmon, because I considered seven and sixpence demanded by the guide for accompanying me, excessive.

But ohe! jam satis. I will inflict no more upon the patient reader—the impatient will have skipped much of what I have already given him.

Alas! the amari aliquid of these old records is the unblushing chronicle of intentions, enough to have paved all Acheron with a durability unachieved by any highway board! The only comfort for diarists so imprudently candid as to record such aspirations, and so yet more imprudent as to read them half a century after the penning of them, is the consideration that au bout des comptes the question is, not what one has done, but what one has become. If one could flatter oneself that one has the mens sana in corpore sano at seventy-seven years, one might accept and condone the past without too much regret; and at all events it is something to have undeniably brought the latter to its seventy-eighth year.

CHAPTER XI.

But my mother was one of those people who carry sunshine with them! The place did not seem the same! The old house, whatever else it may have been, was roomy; and a very short time elapsed before my mother had got round her one or two nice girl guests to help her in brightening it.

I may mention here a singular circumstance, which furnished me with means of estimating my mother’s character in a phase of her life which rarely comes within the purview of a son. Some years ago, not many years I think after my mother’s death, an anonymous stranger sent my brother Anthony a packet of old letters written by my mother to my father shortly before and shortly after their marriage. He never was able to ascertain who his benevolent correspondent was, nor how the papers in question came into his possession. There they are, carefully tied up in a neat packet, most of them undated by her, but carefully docketed with the date by my father’s hand. The handwriting, not spoiled as it afterwards became by writing over a hundred volumes, is a very elegant one.

There is a singularly old-world flavour about them. There is a staid moderation in their tone, which a reader of the present day, fresh from the perusal of similar literature, as supplied by Mr. Mudie, would probably call coldness. In the few letters which precede the marriage there are no warm assurances of affection. After marriage the language becomes more warm. I am tempted to transcribe a few passages that the girls of the period may see how their great-grandmothers did these things.

“It does not require three weeks’ consideration, Mr. Trollope”—thus begins the first letter, undated, but docketed by my father, “F. M. undated, received 2nd Nov., 1808”—“to enable me to tell you that the letter you left with me last night was most flattering and gratifying to me. I value your good opinion too highly not to feel that the generous proof you have given me of it must for ever, and in any event, be remembered by me with pride and gratitude. But I fear you are not sufficiently aware that your choice, so flattering to me, is for yourself a very imprudent one.” And then follows a business-like statement of possessions and prospects, which the writer fears fall much short of what her suitor might reasonably expect.

But none of my father’s faults tended in the slightest degree to lead him to marry a millionnaire, whom he cared less for, in preference to a girl without a sixpence, whom he loved better.

“In an affair of this kind,” the letter I have cited goes on to say, “I do not think it any disadvantage to either party that some time should elapse between the first contemplation and final decision of it. It gives each an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the other’s opinion on many important points, which could not be canvassed before it was thought of, and which it would be useless to discuss after it was settled.”

Could Mrs. Chapone have expressed herself better?

I find in another letter, dated (by my father) 6th December, 1808, the following George-the-Thirdian passage: “The most disagreeable of created beings, Col. —— by name, by profession Sir ——’s led captain, is, while I am writing, talking in an animated strain of eloquence to Mrs. Milton” (my grandfather the vicar’s second wife and the writer’s stepmother), “frequently seasoning his discourse with the polished phrase, ‘Blood and thunder, ma’am!’ so if I happen to swear a little before I conclude, be so good as to believe that I am accidentally writing down what he is saying.... Poor dear innocent Dr. Nott! His simplicity is quite pathetic! I am really afraid that he will be taking twopence instead of two pounds from his parishioners, merely because he does not know the difference between them. I cannot help feeling a tender interest for such lamb-like innocence of the ways of this wicked world. I dare say the night I saw him at the opera, he thought he was only” (note the distinction) “at the play, nay, perhaps believed they were performing an oratorio.”

In one letter of the 9th of April, 1809, I find a mention of “a frank” sent by Mr. Mathias with a translation by him into Italian of the “Echo Song” in Comus, of which the writer says that it is “elegantly done, but is not Milton.”

In another of the 18th of May, 1809—the last before the marriage took place—I find the following, which may interest some people. “I wish you could be here to-morrow,” she writes, “we are going to see the prisoners of war at Odiam (near Reading) perform one of Molière’s plays. Two years ago we attended several of them, and I never enjoyed anything more.”

More than a score of these faded eighty-year-old letters are before me; and I might perhaps have gleaned from them some other little touches illustrative of men and manners when George the Third was king, but were I to yield to all the temptations of the sort that beset the path on which I am travelling, I should try my readers’ patience beyond all hope of forgiveness.

My mother had brought home with her the MS. of a couple of volumes on America; and the principal business on hand when I came home from Oxford was the finding a publisher for these. In this quest she was zealously and very energetically assisted by Captain Basil Hall, himself the author of a work on America and sundry other books, which at that time had made a considerable reputation. Basil Hall’s book on America did not take a favourable view of the Americans or their institutions; and it had been mercilessly attacked and accused of misrepresentation by all the critics of the Liberal party. For Hall’s book, and everything else concerning America, was in those days looked at from a political party point of view. America and the Americans were understood to be anti-everything that was dear to Conservatives. They were accordingly the pets of the Whigs (Radicals and Radicalism had not yet emerged into the ken of respectable folk, either Whig or Tory), and Hall’s book had been abused accordingly. He was very sore about the accusations of untruthfulness, and was delighted with a book which supported his assertions and his views. How my mother came to be introduced to him, and how it came to pass that the MS. of her work was shown to him, I do not remember, but the result was that he was zealously eager for the publication of it. The title, if I recollect rightly, was proposed by him. The Domestic Manners of the Americans was published, and made an immediate and great success. It was emphatically the book of the season, was talked of everywhere, and read by all sorts and conditions of men and women. It was highly praised by all the Conservative organs of the press, and vehemently abused by all those of the opposite party. Edition after edition was sold, and the pecuniary results were large enough to avert from the family of the successful authoress the results of her husband’s ruined fortunes.

The Americans were made very angry by this account of their “domestic manners”—very naturally, but not very wisely. Of course, it was asserted that many of the statements made were false and many of the descriptions caricatured. Nothing in the book from beginning to end was false; nothing of minutest detail which was asserted to have been seen had not been seen; nor was anything intentionally caricatured or exaggerated for the sake of enhancing literary effect. But the tone of the book was unfriendly, and was throughout the result of offended taste rather than of well-weighed opinion. It was full of universal conclusions drawn from particular premises; and no sufficient weight, or rather no weight at all, was allowed to the fact that the observations on which the recorded judgments were founded had been gathered almost entirely in what was then the Far West, and represented the “domestic manners” of the Atlantic states hardly at all. Unquestionably the book was a very clever one, and written with infinite verve and brightness. But—save for the fact that censure and satire are always more amusing than the reverse—an equally clever and equally truthful book might have been written in a diametrically opposite spirit.

No doubt the markedly favourable reception of the book was what mainly irritated our American cousins. But they certainly were angry far beyond what the importance of the matter would seem to have justified. I remember that Colley Grattan, whose fame as the author of Highways and Byways was then at its zenith, in writing to me from Boston, where he resided for many years as British Consul, inviting me to visit him there, went into the question of the reception I might be likely to meet with on that side of the Atlantic. “I think,” he wrote, “that to come over under a false name would be infra dig. But really I fear that if you come under your own, you may be in for a dig!”

Whether Grattan exaggerated the wrath of his Bostonian friends for the sake of his joke, I do not know. Unquestionably the Americans, even speaking of them as a nation, were made very angry by my mother’s book. But the anger was not of a very spiteful or rancorous description, for from that day to this I have never met with anything but kindness and cordial friendliness from all the Americans I have known—and I have known very many.

The return of my mother, and the success of her book, produced a change in the condition and circumstances of affairs at home which resembled the transformation scene in a pantomime that takes place at the advent of the good fairy. Even the old farm-house at Harrow Weald was brightened up physically, and to a far greater degree morally, by her presence. But we did not remain long there. Very shortly she took us back to Harrow, not to the large house built by my father on Lord Northwick’s land, but to another very good house on the same farm—not above a stone’s throw from the previous one, which he had made (very imprudently) by adding to and improving the original farm-house—a very comfortable residence. This was the house which the world has heard of as “Orley Farm.”

And there my mother became immediately surrounded by many old friends and many new ones. I remember among the latter Letitia Landon, better known to the world as “L. E. L.” She was a petite figure, very insignificant-looking, with a sharp chin, turn-up nose, and on the whole rather piquante face, though without any pretension to good looks. I remember her being seated one day at dinner by the side of a certain dignitary of the Church, who had the reputation of being more of a bon vivant than a theologian, and who was old enough to have been her father; and on my asking her afterwards what they had been talking about so earnestly, as I had seen them, “About eating, to be sure!” said she. “I always talk to everybody on their strong point. I told him that writing poetry was my trade, but that eating was my pleasure, and we were fast friends before the fish was finished!” Her sad fate and tragic ending, poor soul! attracted much attention and sympathy at the time. And doubtless fate and the world used her hardly; but she was one of those who never under any circumstances would have run a straight and prosperous course.

Another visitor whom I remember well at that and other times was the Rev. Henry Milman, the third son of Sir Francis Milman, who was, if I rightly recollect, physician to Queen Charlotte. I remember hearing him say (but this was long previously) that no man need think much about the gout, who had never had it till he was forty. His widow, Lady Milman, lived with her daughter many years at Pinner, near Harrow, and they were very old friends of my mother. She was a dear old lady with certain points of eccentricity about her. She used always to carry a volume of South’s sermons with her to church for perusal during the less satisfactory discourse of her more immediate pastor; and I am afraid was not sufficiently careful to conceal her preference. It must be over sixty years since, lunching one day at Pinner, I was much amused at her insisting that Abraham, the old one-eyed footman, who had lived in the family all his life, should kneel before the dining-room fire to warm her plate of pickled salmon! I remember walking with her shortly before her death in the kitchen garden at Pinner, when Saunders, the old butler, who had developed into a sort of upper gardener, was pruning the peach trees. “Oh! don’t cut that, Saunders,” said my lady; “I want to see those blossoms. And I shall never see them another year!” “Must come off, my lady,” said Saunders inexorably, as he sheared away the branch. “He never will let me have my way,” grumbled the little old lady, as she resumed her trot along the gravel walk under the peach wall. My lady, however, could assert herself sufficiently on some occasions. I happened to be at Pinner one day when Mrs. Archdeacon Hodgson, a neighbour, called somewhat earlier in the day than the recognised hour for morning visits. “Very glad to see you, my dear,” said my lady, rising to meet her astonished visitor, who was at least twice as big a woman as herself, I mean physically, “but you must not do this sort of thing again!”

Her third son, Henry Milman, who, having begun his career as the author of perhaps the best “Newdegate” ever written, was famous during the earlier part of it as a poet and dramatist, and during the latter portion of it (more durably) as an historian, was, with his very beautiful wife, one of our visitors at this period. He was at that time certainly a very brilliant man, but I did not like him as well as I did his elder brother, Sir William. I give only the impressions of an undergraduate, who was, I think, rather boyish for his age. But it seemed to me that the poet had a strain of worldliness in his character, and a certain flavour of cynicism (not incompatible, however, with serious views and earnest feeling on religious subjects), which were wholly absent from the elder brother, who wrote neither poems nor histories, but was to my then thinking a very perfect gentleman. “Nec vixit male qui natus moriensque fefellit.”

I find recorded in a diary of that time (November, 1832) some notes of a conversation with Henry Milman one evening when I, with my parents and sister, had been dining with Lady Milman at Pinner, which are perhaps worth reproducing here.

I asked him in the course of a long after-dinner conversation what he thought of Shuttleworth’s book on the Consistency of Revelation with Itself and with Human Reason, which formed the second volume of the series called the “Theological Library,” and which I had recently been reading. He said the work had a great many faults, one of the principal of which was its great difficulty. On this point I find, from other entries in my diary, that my undergraduate experience fully coincided with his more valuable judgment. The reasoning in a great many places was, he said, false; and in that part which treated of the Mosaic account of the creation of the world, the great question was entirely blinked. The abstract of moral duties appeared to him, he said, to be by far the most able part of the book. He considered Shuttleworth “a man of very limited reading.” And this perhaps he may have seemed to one of whom it used to be said jocosely in his own family that “Henry reads a book, not as other mortals do, line after line, but obliquely, from the left hand upper corner of a page to the right hand lower corner of the same!”

Milman, on the same occasion, spoke much of the decay of a love of learning in England generally, and particularly at Oxford. He said that no four men could be found there who were up to the European level of the day in any branch of learning—not even in theology. And speaking of England generally, he said that in no one public library in the country could the books requisite for a man, who wished to write a learned work on any subject whatever, be found. Germany was, and was, he thought, likely to remain, the great emporium of all learning.

As for the Church, he said that it would never be the profession that it had been—that it would not be his choice for a son of his; and that the law was the only profession for talent in these days. He observed that it was very remarkable that no change—no revolution—had ever passed over this country without adding power and wealth to that profession.

Here, also, I may record, if the reader will pardon the abruptness of a transition that hurries him from scholarly disquisition to antipodean regions of subject and social atmosphere, an expedition I and my brother Anthony made together, which recurs to my mind in connection with those days. But I think that it must have belonged to the Harrow Weald times before the return of my mother from America, because the extreme impecuniosity, which made the principal feature of it, would not have occurred subsequently. We saw—my brother and I—some advertisement of an extra-magnificent entertainment that was to take place at Vauxhall; something of so gorgeous promise in the way of illuminations and fireworks, and all for the specially reduced entrance fee of one shilling each person, that, chancing to possess just that amount, we determined to profit by so unique an occasion. Any means of conveyance other than legs, ignorant in those days of defeat, was not to be thought of. We had just the necessary two shillings, and no more. So we set off to walk the (at least) fourteen miles from Harrow Weald to Vauxhall, timing ourselves to arrive there about nine in the evening. Anthony danced all night. I took no part in that amusement, but contented myself with looking on and with the truly superb display of fireworks. Then at about 1 A.M. we set off and walked back our fourteen miles home again without having touched bite or sup! Did anybody else ever purchase the delight of an evening at Vauxhall at so high a price?

I did, however, much about the same time a harder day’s walk. I was returning from Oxford to Harrow Weald, and I determined to walk it, not, I think, on this occasion, deficiente crumenâ, but for pleasure, and to try my powers. The distance, I think, is, as near as may be, forty-seven miles. But I carried a very heavy knapsack—a far heavier one than any experienced campaigner would have advised. This was the longest day’s walk I ever achieved; and I arrived very tired and footsore. But the next morning I was perfectly well, and ready to have taken the road again. Upon this occasion I walked my first stage of twelve miles before breakfast; absolutely, that is to say, before breaking my fast. I think that not very many persons could do this, and I am sure that the few, who could do it, had much better not do so.

I have spoken of the immense change operated in the circumstances and surroundings of all of us by my mother’s return from America and the success of her first work, the Domestic Manners of the Americans. But, efficacious as this success was for producing so great a change, and sufficient as the continued success of her subsequent works was to rescue the whole of her family from the slough of ruin, in which my father’s farming operations, and to some extent, I suppose his injudicious commercial attempt at Cincinnati, had involved him, the results of this success were very far from availing to stem the tide of ruin as regarded his affairs. They were sufficient to relieve him from all expenses connected with the household or its individual members, but not to supply in addition to all these, the annual losses on the Harrow farm. Hence the break-up described by my brother Anthony in his Autobiography, and my father’s exodus from Harrow as there narrated.

CHAPTER XII.

Of all that Anthony there describes I saw nothing. I was attending the “divinity lectures” in Oxford. But as soon as the short course of them was completed, I left England to join my parents at Bruges. And here is the condensed record of the journey as performed in 1834. I suppose that I went by the Thames to Calais, instead of by Dover, as a measure of economy. I left Oxford by the “Rocket” at three in the morning on Tuesday, the 20th May, and on reaching London found that there was no packet to Ostend till the following Saturday. I determined, therefore, to go to Calais by that which left Tower Stairs on the Wednesday. It was the first time I had ever crossed the Channel. The times I have crossed that salt girdle subsequently must be counted by hundreds! I observe that having begun my journey at 3 A.M. did not prevent me from finding “Farren admirable” in both The Minister and the Mercer and in Secret Service, at Drury Lane that Tuesday evening. I slept at the Spread Eagle in Gracechurch Street that night, and left Tower Stairs at 10 A.M. the next morning in the Lord Melville, Captain Middleton (names of ship and captain duly recorded), and had a rough passage of thirteen hours; all hands sick, “even I a little at last,” says the veracious chronicle. I was taken by the victor in a sharp contest with half a dozen rivals over my body, to the Hôtel de Londres, a clean, comfortable, and quiet, but, I suppose, quite second-rate inn. There was no conveyance to Dunkirk before one the next day. So, “after a delicious breakfast on coffee.” (Ah! how la belle France has dégringoléd in respect to coffee and some other matters since those happy days! Then coffee really was always good everywhere in France. Now England has no cause whatever to envy her neighbour in that respect.) I spent the intervening hours in going (of all things in the world) to the top of the church tower. The diligence brought me to Dunkirk in time for supper at the Tête de Flandres Hôtel, at which “a Frenchman, who sat next me, insisted on my sharing his bottle of vin de Bourdeaux, and would not hear of my paying my share of the cost, saying that he was at home in his own country.” I find that I went after supper “to the top of a fine tower” (my second that day! I had a mania, not quite cured yet, for ascending towers), and started at five the next morning for Nieuport “in a vile little barge, in company with two young pedestrianising Belgians,” and arrived there about noon, after a most tedious voyage, and changing, without bettering, our barge three or four times. At Nieuport we found “a sort of immense overgrown gig with two horses, which conveyed eight of us to Ostend.”

There I was most kindly and hospitably received by Mr. Fauche, the English Consul, and his very lovely wife. Mrs. Fauche had been before her marriage one of my mother’s cohort of pretty girl friends, and was already my old acquaintance. She was the daughter of Mr. Tomkisson, a pianoforte manufacturer, who had married the daughter of an Irish clergyman. Their daughter Mary was, as I first knew her, more than a pretty girl. She was a very beautiful and accomplished woman, with one of the most delicious soprano voices I ever heard. I was anxious to join my mother at Bruges, who, despite her literary triumphs, had passed through so much trouble since I had seen her. But it needed the reinforcement of this anxiety by a sense of duty to enable me to resist Mrs. Fauche’s invitation to remain a day or two at Ostend.

I found my father and mother, and my two sisters, Cecilia and Emily, established in a large and very roomy house, just outside the southern gate of the city, known as the Château d’Hondt. It was a thoroughly good and comfortable house, and, taken unfurnished, speedily became under my mother’s hands a very pleasant one. Nor was it long before it became socially a very agreeable one, for the invariable result of my mother’s presence, which drew what was pleasant around her as surely as a magnet draws iron, showed itself in the collection of a variety of agreeable people—some from the other side of the Channel, some from Ostend, and some few from Bruges.

All this made a social atmosphere, which with the foreign flavouring so wholly new to me, was very pleasant; but it seems not to have sufficed to prevent me from seizing the opportunity for a little of that locomotive sight-seeing, the passion for which, still unquenched, appears to have been as strong in me as when I hankered after a place on some one of the “down” coaches starting from the “Cellar” in Piccadilly, or gazed enviously at the outward bound ships in the docks. For I find the record of a little week’s tour among the Belgian cities, with full details of all the towers I ascended, observations of an ecclesiological neophyte on the churches I everywhere visited, and remarks on men and manners, the rawness of which does not entirely destroy the value of them, as illustrating the changes wrought there too by the lapse of half a century.

In one place I find myself tasting the contents of the library of a Carmelite monastery, and remarking on the strangeness of the sole exception to the theological character of the collection having consisted in a Cours Gastronomique, which appeared to me scarcely needed by a community bound by its vows to perpetual abstinence from animal food.

Some pages of the record also are devoted to the statement of “a case” which I lighted on in some folio on casuistry, on the question “whether it is lawful to adore a crucifix, when there is strong ground for supposing that a demon may be concealed in the material of which it is constructed!”

It seems to me on reading these pages (for the first time since they were written), that I was to no small degree seductively impressed by the music, architectural beauties, and splendid ceremonial of the Roman Catholic worship, seen in those days to much better effect in Belgium, than at the present time in Rome. But amid it all, the sturdy Protestantism of Whately’s pupil manifests itself in a moan over the pity, the pity of it, that it should “all be based on falsehood.”

All the pleasant state of things at the Château d’Hondt at Bruges, described above, was of short duration however, for disquieting accounts of the health of my brother Henry, who had been staying at Exeter with that dear old friend, Fanny Bent, to whom the reader has already been introduced, began to arrive from Devonshire.

It was moreover necessary that I should without loss of time set my hand to something that might furnish me with daily bread. So on the 21st of June I “went on board Captain Smithett’s vessel the Arrow and had a quiet passage to Dover.” On arriving there I “hastened to secure my place on a coach about to start, and the first turn for having my baggage examined at the custom-house. This examination was rather a rigid one, and they made me pay 4s. 7d. for two or three books I had with me. We reached Canterbury about nightfall, breakfasted at Rochester, and arrived at Charing Cross at six.” My diary does not say “six P.M.,” and it seems incredible that any coach—though on the slowest road out of London, as the Dover road always was—should have breakfasted at Rochester, and taken the whole day to travel thence to Charing Cross; but it is more incredible still that we should have stopped to breakfast at Rochester, and then reached London at 6 A.M.

It must have been 6 P.M.; but I read that “I started at once to walk to Harrow by the canal (!) where I was received with more than kindness by the Grants.”

I had come to London with the intention of giving classical teaching to any who were willing to pay about ten shillings an hour for it. I had testimonials and recommendations galore from a very varied collection of pastors, masters, and friends. Several of the latter also were actively eager to assist my object, foremost among whom I may name with unforgetting gratitude Dr. David Williams, my old master at Winchester, then Warden of New College. Thus furnished, pupils were not wanting, and money amply sufficient for my immediate needs seemed to come in easily. I did my best with my pupils during the short hours of my work; but much success is not to be expected from pupils the very circumstance and terms of whose tuition gives rise to the presumption that they are irremediably stupid or idle, and the hired “coach” a dernier resort. Such employers as I had to deal with, however, if they assigned you somewhat hopeless tasks, appeared to be satisfied with an infinitesimal amount of results, and I believe I gave satisfaction in all cases save that of a lady, the widowed mother of an only son, a very elegant and fashionable dame in Belgrave Square, who complained once to the clergyman who had recommended me to her, that I had come to her house one Monday morning “in a very dusty condition.” I fear she might have said every Monday morning, for my custom was to walk up to my lesson from Harrow, where I had been spending the Sunday with the Grants, and “immer noch stäuben die Wege” hardly less on the Harrow road, than Goethe found them to do in Italy! I had to tell her that the dust on my shoes had not reached my brain, and that I had no pretension, and entirely declined, to be an exemplar to her son in the matter of his toilet. We parted very good friends however at the end of my engagement. When she said some complimentary words about my work with her son, I could not refrain from saying that I had done my best to prepare myself for it by having my shoes carefully blacked. She laughed, and said, “I could not find fault with your Latin and Greek, Mr. Trollope. And would it not be better if people always confined their criticism to what they do understand?”

I was living during these months in Little Marlborough Street, in a house kept by a tailor and his mother. It was a queer house, disconnected with the row of buildings in which it stood, a survival of some earlier period. It stood in its own court, by which it was separated from the street. I found all the place transmogrified when I visited it a year or two ago. During the latter part of my residence there the lodgings were shared by my brother Anthony, who, as related by himself, had accepted a place in the secretary’s office in the Post Office. The lodgings were very cheap, more so I think than the goodness of them might have justified. We were the only lodgers; and the cheapness of the rooms was, I suspect, in some degree caused by the fact that the majority of young men lodgers would not have tolerated the despotic rule of our old landlady, the tailor’s mother. She made us very comfortable; but her laws were many, and of the nature of those of the Medes and Persians.

Meantime matters were becoming more and more gloomy in the Château d’Hondt, outside the St. Peter’s Gate, at Bruges. My brother Henry had returned thither from Devonshire; and his condition was unmistakably becoming worse. While I was still living in Little Marlborough Street, my mother came over hurriedly to London, bringing him and my sister Emily with her. They travelled by boat from Ostend to London to avoid the land journey, I take it poor Henry was led to suppose that the journey was altogether caused by the necessity of interviews between my mother and her publishers. But the real motive of it was to obtain the best medical advice for him and (as, alas! it began to appear to be necessary) for my sister Emily.

All kinds of schemes of southern travel, and voyages to Madeira, &c., had been proposed for Henry, who, having himself, with the hopefulness peculiar to his malady, no shadow of a doubt of his own recovery, entered into them all with the utmost zest. A kind friend, I forget by what means or interest, had offered to provide free passages to Madeira. Alas! the first consultation with the medical authorities put an end to all such schemes. And my poor mother had the inexpressibly sad and difficult task of quashing them all without allowing her patient to suspect the real reason of their being given up.

She had to take him back to Bruges; and I accompanied them to the boat lying off the Tower, and remained with them an hour before it weighed anchor. And then and there I took the last leave of my brother Henry, I well knowing, he never imagining, that it was for ever.

And now began at Bruges a time of such stress and trouble for my mother as few women have ever passed through. The grief, the Rachel sorrows of mothers watching by the dying beds of those, to save whose lives they would—ah! how readily!—give their own, are, alas, common enough. But no account, no contemplation of any such scene of anguish can give an adequate conception of what my mother went through victoriously.

Her literary career had hitherto been a succession of triumphs. Money was coming in with increasing abundance. But these successes had not yet lasted long enough to enable her, in the face of all she had done for the ruined household to which she had returned from America, to lay by any fund for the future. And though the proceeds of her labour were amply sufficient for all current needs, it was imperative that that labour should not be suspended.

It was under these circumstances that she had to pass her days in watching by the bedside of a very irritable invalid, and her nights—when he fortunately for the most part slept—in composing fiction! It was desirable to keep the invalid’s mind from dwelling on the hopelessness of his condition. And, indeed, he was constantly occupied in planning travels and schemes of activity for the anticipated time of his recovery, which she had to enter into and discuss with a cheerful countenance and bleeding heart. It was also especially necessary that my sisters, especially the younger, already threatened by the same malady, should be kept cheerful, and prevented from dwelling on the phases of their brother’s illness. This was the task in which, with agonised mind, she never faltered from about nine o’clock every morning till eight o’clock in the evening! Then with wearied body, and mind attuned to such thoughts as one may imagine, she had to sit down to her desk to write her novel with all the verve at her command, to please light-hearted readers, till two or three in the morning! This, by the help of green tea and sometimes laudanum, she did daily and nightly till the morning of the 23rd of December of that sad 1834; and lived after it to be eighty-three!

But her mind was one of the most extraordinarily constituted in regard to recuperative power and the capacity of throwing off sorrow, that I ever knew or read of. Any one who did not know her, as her own son knew her, might have supposed that she was deficient in sensibility. No judgment could be more mistaken. She felt acutely, vehemently. But she seemed to throw off sorrow as, to use the vulgar phrase, a duck’s back throws off water, because the nature of the organism will not suffer it to rest there. How often have I applied to her the words of David under a similar affliction!

My brother died on the 23rd of December, 1834, and was buried at Bruges, in the Protestant portion of the city cemetery. Had his life been much prolonged, I think that that of my mother must have sunk under the burthen laid upon it. I hastened to cross the Channel as soon as I heard of my brother’s death, but did not arrive in time for his funeral.

A few days later I was, I find, consulting a Bruges physician, a Dr. Herbout, whom I still remember perfectly well, about the health of my father, which had recently been causing my mother some anxiety. Herbout was an old army doctor who had served under Napoleon. It is probable that he was more of a surgeon than a physician. His opinion was that my father’s condition, though not satisfactory, did not indicate any cause for immediate alarm.

I remained at Bruges till the first week in April. That is to say, the Château d’Hondt was my home during those months, but the monotony of it was varied by frequent visits to Ostend, which Mrs. Fauche always found the means of making agreeable. One week of the time also was spent in a little tour through those parts of Belgium which I had not yet seen, in company with my old friend, and the reader’s old acquaintance, Fanny Bent. It was an oddly constituted travelling party—the young man full of strength, activity, and eagerness to see everything that indefatigable exertion could show him, and the very plain, Quaker-like, middle-aged old maid, absolutely new to Continental ways and manners and habits. Yet few people, I think, have ever seen the many interesting sights of the region we travelled over more completely than I and Fanny Bent. The number of towers (Antwerp among them) to the tops of which I took her, as recorded in my diary, seems preposterous. But Fanny Bent bravely stuck to her work, and where I led she followed. I have since squired many fairer and younger dames, but never one so bravely determined on doing all that was to be done. And very much we both enjoyed it.

Almost immediately after my return from this little excursion I received a letter from an old Wykehamist schoolfellow, the Rev. George Hall, of Magdalen, son of the head of Pembroke at Oxford, offering me a mastership in King Edward’s Grammar School, at Birmingham. The head master of that school was at that time Dr. Jeune, a Pembroke man, and thence a close friend of George Hall, who himself held one of the masterships, which he was about to resign. The salary of the mastership offered me was 200l. a year, with, of course, prospects of advancement. I at once determined to accept it, and with the promptitude which in those days characterised me (at least in all cases in which promptitude involved immediate locomotion), I decided to leave Bruges for Birmingham on the morrow. I slept at Ostend the next night, and the following day crossed to Dover with my friend Captain Smithett, of the Arrow, “the only other passengers,” says my diary, “being a maniac and a corpse.”

Smithett was a remarkably handsome man, and the very beau-idéal of a sailor. For many years he was the man always selected to carry any royal or distinguished personage who had to cross the Channel from or to Dover. He was an immense favourite with all the little Ostend world—with the female part of it, of course, especially. I remember his showing me with much laughter an anonymous billet doux which had reached him, beginning, “O toi qui commandes la Flèche, tu peux aussi commander les cœurs,” &c., &c. I discovered the writer some time subsequently in an extremely pretty baigneuse, the wife, I am sorry to say, of a highly respected Belgian banker. Perhaps all his Ostend admirers did not know that he had a charming wife at Dover. He was all the more an object of our admiration from the singular contrast between him and his colleague, a certain Captain Murch. Between them they did in those days the whole of the Ostend and Dover mail business. Poor Murch was much of an invalid, and, strange as it may seem, suffered invariably on every passage, from year’s end to year’s end, from sea sickness. Think of the purgatory involved in the combination of such a constitution with such a profession! The port of Ostend was at that time somewhat difficult to enter in heavy weather, and bad fogs were very frequent on that coast. Poor Murch was always getting into difficulties which involved “lying to,” and reaching his destination long after time; whereas we held that the dashing Arrow would go wherever the Flying Dutchman could. And indeed I have seen her come in when I could only remain at the pier-head by lashing myself to a post. So much for “le beau, Capitaine Smitète.”

Losing no time in London I reached Birmingham on the evening of Sunday the 5th, and found my friend Hall quite sure of my election by the governors of the school on the recommendation of his friend Jeune. But then began a whole series of slips between the cup and the lip! There appeared to be no doubt of their electing me if they elected anybody; but a part of the board wished, on financial grounds, to defer the election of a new master for a while. The governors at their meeting put off the decision of the matter to another meeting on the 24th. On the 24th the matter was again put off. I had left Birmingham on the 12th, with the promise from Jeune, in whom on that, and on subsequent occasions, I found a most kind friend, that he would do all he could to urge the governors to a decision, and lose no time in letting me know the result. On the 24th the election of a new master was again “deferred” by the governors, and the prospect of their coming to a decision to elect one shortly seemed to become more uncertain. Many other meetings of the board took place with a similar result. On one occasion Jeune told me that, had he been in Birmingham at the time of the meeting, he felt sure that he could have induced them to come to an election; but he had unfortunately been absent. At another meeting I was told that I should have been elected had not Sir Edward Thomason, one of the governors who wished to elect a master, run away to a dinner party, thus leaving the non-content party in the majority.

Meantime I took my degree at Oxford on the 29th of April, which was needed for holding the appointment in question, and waited with what patience I could in London, dividing my time between the dear and ever kind Grants, and my brother Anthony, who was doing—or rather getting into continual hot water for not doing;—his work at the Post Office. He was, I take it, a very bad office clerk; but as soon as he was appointed a surveyor’s clerk became at once one of the most efficient and valuable officers in the Post Office.

Leaving Oxford on the night of the 29th I returned to Birmingham, and was again tantalised by repeated inconclusive meetings of the school governors, till at last, on the 6th of May, Jeune told me that he thought that they would not come to an election till midsummer, but that in any case there was another of the masters whose resignation he had reason to believe would not be long deferred, and I should assuredly have his place. On this I returned to London, and on the 8th of May left it for Dover on my way to join my mother in Paris.

Having spoken of Anthony’s efficiency as an officer of the Post Office, I may, I think, in the case of so well known a man, venture to expend a page in giving the reader an anecdote of his promptness, of which, as of dozens of other similar experiences, he says nothing in his Autobiography. He had visited the office of a certain postmaster in the south-west of Ireland in the usual course of his duties, had taken stock of the man, and had observed him in the course of his interview carefully lock a large desk in the office. Two days afterwards there came from head-quarters an urgent inquiry about a lost letter, the contents of which were of considerable value. The information reached the surveyor late at night, and he at once put the matter into the hands of his subordinate. There was no conveyance to the place where my brother determined his first investigations should be made till the following morning. But it did not suit him to wait for that, so he hired a horse, and, riding hard, knocked up the postmaster whom he had interviewed, as related, a couple of days before, in the small hours. Possibly the demeanour of the man in some decree influenced his further proceedings. Be this as it may, he walked straight into the office, and said, “Open that desk!” The key, he was told, had been lost for some time past. Without another word he smashed the desk with one kick, and—there found the stolen letter!

I have heard from him so many good stories of his official experiences, that I feel myself tolerably competent to write a volume of “Memoirs of a Post Office Surveyor.” But for the present I must content myself with one other of his adventures. He had been sent to South America to arrange some difficulties about postal communication in those parts which our authorities wished to be accomplished in a shorter time than had been previously the practice. There was a certain journey that had to be done by a mounted courier, for which it was insisted that three days were necessary, while my brother was persuaded it could be done in two. He was told that he knew nothing of their roads and their horses, &c. “Well,” said he, “I will ask you to do nothing that I, who know nothing of the country, and can only have such a horse as your post can furnish me, cannot do myself. I will ride with your courier, and then I shall be able to judge.” And at daybreak the next morning they started. The brute they gave him to ride was of course selected with a view of making good their case, and the saddle was simply an instrument of torture. He rode through that hot day and kept the courier to his work in a style that rather astonished that official. But at night, when they were to rest for a few hours, Anthony confessed that he was in such a state that he began to think that he should have to throw up the sponge, which would have been dreadful to him. So he ordered two bottles of brandy, poured them into a wash-hand basin, and sat in it! His description of the agonising result was graphic! But the next day, he said, he was able to sit in his saddle without pain, did the journey in the two days, and carried his point.

But I must abstain from further anticipations of the memoirs above spoken of, the more especially as I left my own story at the point where I had before me, like Rousseau—and probably with no less rose-coloured anticipations—un voyage à faire, et Paris au bout, and that for the first time in my life!

CHAPTER XIII.

We breakfasted at Abbeville, and dined at Beauvais. And I find it recorded that I contrived at both places to find time for a flying visit to the cathedral, and was highly delighted with the noble fragment of a church at the latter city.

I went to bed on arriving at the Hôtel de Lille et d’Albion, which was in those days a very different place from its noisy, pretentious, and vulgar successor of the same name in the Rue St. Honoré. The old house in the Rue des Filles de St. Thomas has long since disappeared, together with the quiet little street in which it was situated. Like its successor it was almost exclusively used by English, but they were the English of the days when personally conducted herds were not. The service was performed by handmaidens in neat caps and white bodices over their coloured skirts. There were no swallow-tail-coated waiters, and the coffee was exquisite! Tempi passati, perchè non tornate più?

At ten the next morning I went to No. 6, Rue de Provence, where I found my parents and my sisters at breakfast.

The object of this Paris journey was twofold—the writing a book in accordance with an agreement which my mother had entered into with Mr. Richard Bentley, the father of the publisher of these volumes, and the consultation of a physician to whom she had been especially recommended respecting my father’s health, which was rapidly and too evidently declining. They had been in Paris some time already, and had formed a large circle of acquaintance, both English and French. I was told by my mother that the physician, who had seen my father several times, had made no pleasant report of his condition. He did not apprehend any immediately alarming phase of illness, but said that had he been left to guess my father’s age after visiting him, he should have supposed him to be more than four score, the truth being that he was very little more than sixty.

This, my first visit to Paris, lasted one month only, from the 9th of May to the 9th of June, and many of the recollections which seem to me now to be connected with it very probably belong to subsequent visits, for my diary, re-opened now for the first time after the interval of more than half a century, was kept, I find, in a very intermittent and slovenly manner. No doubt I found very few minutes for journalising in the four-and-twenty hours of each day.

I well remember that my first impression of Lutetia Parisiorum—“Mudtown of the Parisians,” as Carlyle translates it—was that of having stepped back a couple of centuries or so in the history of European civilisation and progress. We are much impressed at home, and talk much of the vastness of the changes which the last fifty years have made in our own city, but I think that which the same time has operated in Paris is much greater. Putting aside the mere extension of streets and dwellings, which, great as it has been in Paris, has been much greater in London, the changes in the former city have been far more radical. Certainly there are many quarters of London where the eye now rests on that which is magnificent, and which at the time when I knew the town well, presented nothing but what was, if not sordid, at least ugly. But to those who remember the streets of Louis Philippe’s city, the change in the whole conception of city life, and the manière d’être of the population, is far greater. With the exception of the principal boulevards in the neighbourhood of the recently completed “Madeleine,” and its then recently established flower market, the streets were still traversed by filthy and malodorous open ditches, which did more or less imperfectly the duty of sewers, and Paris still deserved its name of “Mudtown”. Wretched little oil lamps, suspended on ropes stretched across the streets, barely served to make darkness visible. Water was still carried at so much the bucket up the interminable staircases of the Parisian houses by stalwart Auvergnats, who came from their mountains to do a work more severe than the Parisians could do for themselves.

But another specialty, which very forcibly struck me, and which cannot be said to have been any survival of ways and habits obsolete on the other side of the Channel, was the remarkable manner in which the political life of the hour, with its emotions, opinions, and passions, was enacted, so to speak, on the stage of the streets, as a drama is presented on the boards of a theatre. Truly he who ran through the streets of Paris in those days might read, and indeed could not help reading, the reflection and the manifestation of the political divisions and passions which animated the reign of the bourgeois king, and ended by destroying it.

And in this respect the time of my first visit to Paris was a very interesting one. The Parisian world was, of course, divided into Monarchists and Republicans, the latter of whom laboured under the imputation, in some cases probably unjust, but in more entirely merited (as in certain other more modern instances), of being willing and ready to bring their theories into practice by perpetrating or conniving at any odious monstrosity of crime, violence and bloodshed. The Fieschi incident had recently enlightened the world on the justice of such accusations.

But the Monarchists were more amusingly divided into “Parceque Bourbon,” supporters of the existing régime, and “Quoique Bourbon,” tolerators of it. The former, of course, would have preferred the white flag and Charles Dix; but failing the possibility of such a return to the old ways, were content to live under the rule of a sovereign, who, though not the legitimate monarch by right divine, was at least a scion of the old legitimate race. The “Quoique Bourbon” partisans were the men who, denying all right to the throne save that which emanated from the will of the people, were yet Monarchists from their well-rooted dread of the intolerable evils which Republicanism had brought, and, as they were convinced, would bring again upon France, and were therefore contented to support the bourgeois monarchy “although” the man on the throne was an undeniable Bourbon.

But what made the streets, the boulevards, the Champs Elysées, and especially the Tuileries garden peculiarly amusing to a stranger, was the circumstance that the Parisians all got themselves up with strict attention to the recognised costume proper to their political party. The Legitimist, the “Quoique Bourbon” bourgeois, (very probably in the uniform of the then immensely popular National Guard) and the Republican in his appropriate bandit-shaped hat and coat with exaggeratedly large lappels, or draped picturesquely in the folds of a cloak, after a fashion borrowed from the other side of the Alps, were all distinguishable at a glance. It was then that deliciously graphic line (I forget who wrote it) “Feignons à feindre à fin de mieux dissimuler” was applied to characterise the conspirator-like attitudes it pleased these gentlemen to assume.

The truth was that Paris was still very much afraid of them. I remember the infinite glee, and the outpouring of ridicule, which hailed the dispersion of a Republican “demonstration” (the reader will forgive the anachronism of the phrase), at the Porte St. Martin, by the judicious use of a powerful fire-engine. The heroes of the drapeau rouge had boasted they would stand their ground against any charge of soldiery. Perhaps they would have done so. But the helter-skelter that ensued on the first well-directed jet of cold water from the pipe of a fire-engine furnished Paris with laughter for days afterwards.

But, as I have said, Paris, not unreasonably, feared them. Secret conspiracy is always an ugly enemy to deal with. And no violence of mere speculative opinion would have sufficed, had fear been absent, to cause the very marked repulsion with which all the Parisians, who had anything to lose, in that day regarded their Republican fellow citizens.

Assuredly the Conservatives of the Parisian world of 1835 were not “the stupid party.” Both in their newspapers, and other ephemeral literature, and in the never-ending succession of current mots and jokes which circulated in the Parisian salons, they had the pull very decidedly. I remember some words of a parody on one of the Republican songs of the day, which had an immense vogue at that time. “On devrait planter le chêne,” it ran, “pour l’arbre de la liberté” (it will be remembered that planting “trees of liberty” was one of the common and more harmless “demonstrations” of the Republican party). “Ses glands nouriraient sans peine les cochons qui l’ont planté.” And the burthen of the original which ran, “Mourir pour la patrie, C’est le sort le plus beau le plus digne d’envie,” was sufficiently and very appositely caricatured by the slight change of “Mourir pour la patrie” into “Nourris par la patrie,” &c.

To a stranger seeing Paris as I saw it, and frequenting the houses which I frequented, it seemed strange that such a community should have considered itself in serious danger from men who seemed to me, looking from such a stand-point, a mere handful of skulking melodramatic enthusiasts, playing at conspiracy and rebellion rather than really meditating it. But I was not at that time fully aware how entirely the real danger was to be found in regions of Paris, and strata of its population which were as entirely hidden from my observation, as if they had been a thousand miles away. But though I could not see the danger, I saw unmistakably enough the fear it inspired in all classes of those who, as I said before, had anything to lose.

It was this fear that made the National Guard the heroes of the hour. It was impossible but that such a body of men—Parisian shopkeepers put into uniform (those of them who would condescend to wear it; for many used to be seen, who contented themselves with girding on a sabre and assuming a firelock, while others would go to the extent of surmounting the ordinary black coat with the regulation military shako)—should afford a target for many shafts of ridicule. The capon-lined paunches of a considerable contingent of these well-to-do warriors were an inexhaustible source of not very pungent jokes. But Paris would have been frightened out of its wits at the bare suggestion of suppressing these citizen saviours of society. Of course they were petted at the Tuileries. No reception or fête of any kind was complete without a large sprinkling of these shopkeeping guardsmen, and their presence on such occasions was the subject of an unfailing series of historiettes.

I remember an anecdote excellently illustrative of the time, which was current in the salons of the “Parceque Bourbon” society of the day. A certain elderly duchess of the vieille roche, a dainty little woman, very mignonne, whose exquisite parure and still more exquisite manners scented the air at a league’s distance, to use the common French phrase, with the odour of the most aristocratic salons of the Quartier St. Germain, was, at one of Louis Philippe’s Tuileries receptions, about to take from the tray handed round by a servant the last of the ices which it had contained, when a huge outstretched hand, with its five wide-spread fingers, was protruded from behind over her shoulder, and the refreshment of which she was about to avail herself was seized by a big National Guard with the exclamation, “Enfoncèe la petite mère!”

Nevertheless, it may be safely asserted that the little duchess, and all the world she moved in, would have been infinitely more dismayed had they gone to the Tuileries and seen no National Guards there.

Among the many persons of note with whom I became more or less well acquainted during that month, no one perhaps stands out more vividly in my recollection than Chateaubriand. He also, though standing much aloof from the noise and movement of the political passions of the time, was an aristocrat jusqu’au bout des ongles, in appearance, in manners, in opinions, and general tone of mind. The impression to this effect immediately produced on one’s first presentation was in no degree due to any personal advantages. He was not, when I knew him, nor do I think he ever could have been, a good looking man. He stooped a good deal, and his head and shoulders gave me the impression of being somewhat too large for the rest of his person. The lower part of his face too, was, I thought, rather heavy.

But his every word and movement were characterised by that exquisite courtesy which was the inalienable, and it would seem incommunicable, specialty of the seigneurs of the ancien régime. And in his case the dignified bearing of the grand seigneur was tempered by a bonhomie which produced a manner truly charming.

And having said all this, it may seem to argue want of taste or want of sense in myself, to own, as truthfulness compels me to do, that I did not altogether like him. I had a good deal of talk with him, and that to a youngster of my years and standing was in itself very flattering, and I felt as if I were ungrateful for not liking him. But the truth in one word is, that he appeared to me to be a “tinkling cymbal.” I don’t mean that he was specially insincere as regarded the person he was talking to at the moment. What I do mean is, that the man did not seem to me to have a mind capable of genuine sincerity in the conduct of its operations. He seemed to me a theatrically-minded man. Immediately after making his acquaintance I read the Génie du Chrétienisme, and the book confirmed my impression of the man. He honestly intends to play a very good and virtuous part, but he is playing a part.

He was much petted in those days by the men, and more especially by the women of the ancien régime and the Quartier St. Germain. But I suspect that he was a good deal quizzed, and considered an object of more or less good-natured ridicule by the rest of the Parisian world. I fancy that he was in straitened circumstances. And the story went that he and his wife put all they possessed into a box, of which each of them had a key, and took from day to day what they needed, till one fine day they met over the empty box with no little surprise and dismay.

Chateaubriand thought he understood English well, and rather piqued himself upon the accomplishment. But I well remember his one day asking me to explain to him the construction of the sentence, “Let but the cheat endure, I ask not aught beside.” My efforts to do so during the best part of half an hour ended in entire failure.

He was in those days reading in Madame Récamier’s salon at the Abbaye-aux-Bois (in which building my mother’s friend, Miss Clarke, also had her residence), those celebrated Mémoires d’Outretombe, of which all Paris, or at least all literary and political Paris, was talking. Immense efforts were made by all kinds of notabilities to obtain an admission to these readings. But the favoured ones had been very few. And my mother was proportionably delighted at the arrangement that a reading should be given expressly for her benefit. M. de Chateaubriand had ceased these séances for the nonce, and the gentleman who had been in the habit of reading for him had left Paris. But by the kindness of Miss Clarke and Madame Récamier, he was induced to give a sitting at the Abbaye expressly for my mother. This arrangement had been made before I reached Paris, and I consequently to my great regret was not one of the very select party. My mother was accompanied by my sisters only. I benefited however in my turn by the acquaintance thus formed, and subsequently passed more than one evening in Madame Récamier’s salon at the Abbaye-aux-Bois in the Rue du Bac.

My mother, in her book on Paris and the Parisians, writes of that reading as follows:—“The party assembled at Madame Récamier’s on this occasion did not, I think, exceed seventeen, including Madame Récamier and M. de Chateaubriand. Most of these had been present at former readings. The Duchesses de Larochefoucauld and de Noailles, and one or two other noble ladies, were among them. And I felt it was a proof that genius is of no party, when I saw a grand-daughter of General Lafayette enter among us. She is married to a gentleman who is said to be of the extreme coté gauche.” The passage of the Mémoires selected for the evening’s reading was the account of the author’s memorable visit to Prague to visit the royal exiles. “Many passages,” writes my mother, “made a profound impression on my fancy and on my memory, and I think I could give a better account of some of the scenes described than I should feel justified in doing, as long as the noble author chooses to keep them from the public eye. There were touches that made us weep abundantly; and then he changed the key, and gave us the prettiest, the most gracious, the most smiling picture of the young princess and her brother that it was possible for pen to trace. And I could have said, as one does in seeing a clever portrait, ‘That is a likeness, I’ll be sworn for it.’”

It may be seen from the above passage, and from some others in my mother’s book on Paris and the Parisians, that her estimate of the man Chateaubriand was a somewhat higher one, than that which I have expressed in the preceding pages. She was under the influence of the exceeding charm of his exquisite manner. But in the following passage, which I am tempted to transcribe by the curious light it throws on the genesis of the present literary history of France, I can more entirely subscribe to the opinions expressed:—

“The active, busy, bustling politicians of the hour have succeeded in thrusting everything else out of place, and themselves into it. One dynasty has been overthrown, and another established; old laws have been abrogated, and hundreds of new ones formed; hereditary nobles have been disinherited, and little men made great. But amidst this plenitude of destructiveness, they have not yet contrived to make any one of the puny literary reputations of the day weigh down the renown of those who have never lent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity. The literary reputations both of Chateaubriand and Lamartine stand higher beyond all comparison than those of any other living French authors. Yet the first, with all his genius, has often suffered his imagination to run riot; and the last has only given to the public the leisure of his literary life. But both of them are men of honour and principle, as well as men of genius; and it comforts one’s human nature to see that these qualities will keep themselves aloft, despite whatever squally winds may blow, or blustering floods assail them. That both Chateaubriand and Lamartine belong rather to the imaginative than to the positif class cannot be denied; but they are renowned throughout the world, and France is proud of them. The most curious literary speculations, however, suggested by the present state of letters in this country, are not respecting authors such as these. They speak for themselves, and all the world knows them and their position. The circumstance decidedly the most worthy of remark in the literature of France at the present time is the effect which the last revolution appears to have produced. With the exception of history, to which both Thiers (?)[B] and Mignet have added something that may live, notwithstanding their very defective philosophy, no single work has appeared since the revolution of 1830 which has obtained a substantial, elevated, and generally acknowledged reputation for any author unknown before that period—not even among all the unbridled ebullitions of imagination, though restrained neither by decorum, principle, nor taste. Not even here, except from one female pen, which might become, were it the pleasure of the hand that wields it, the first now extant in the world of fiction,” (of course, Georges Sand is alluded to,) “has anything appeared likely to survive its author. Nor is there any writer, who during the same period has raised himself to that station in society by means of his literary productions, which is so universally accorded to all who have acquired high literary celebrity in any country.