What I Remember, Volume 1

“The name of Guizot was too well known before the revolution for these observations to have any reference to him.” (Cousin should not have been forgotten.) “And however much he may have distinguished himself since July, 1830, his reputation was made before. There are, however, little writers in prodigious abundance.... Never, I believe, was there any period in which the printing presses of France worked so hard as at present. The revolution of 1830 seems to have set all the minor spirits in motion. There is scarcely a boy so insignificant, or a workman so unlearned, as to doubt his having the power and the right to instruct the world.... To me, I confess, it is perfectly astonishing that any one can be found to class the writers of this restless clique as ‘the literary men of France.’... Do not, however, believe me guilty of such presumption as to give you my own unsupported judgment as to the position which this ‘new school,’ as the décousu folks always call themselves, hold in the public esteem. My opinion on this subject is the result of careful inquiry among those who are most competent to give information respecting it. When the names of such as are best known among this class of authors are mentioned in society, let the politics of the circle be what they may, they are constantly spoken of as a pariah caste that must be kept apart.

“‘Do you know ——?’ has been a question I have repeatedly asked respecting a person whose name is cited in England as the most esteemed French writer of the age—and so cited, moreover, to prove the low standard of French taste and principle.

“‘No, madame,’ has been invariably the cold answer.

“‘Or——?’

“‘No; he is not in society.’

“‘Or——?’

“‘Oh, no! His works live an hour—too long—and are forgotten.’”

Now, are the writers of French literature of the present day, whose names will at once present themselves to every reader’s mind, to be deemed superior to those of Louis Philippe, who “lent their voices to the cause of treason, regicide, rebellion, or obscenity,” and were unrestrained by either “decorum, principle, or taste”? For it is most assuredly no longer true that the writers in question are held to be a “pariah caste,” or that they are not known and sought by “society.” The facilis decensus progress of the half century that has elapsed since the cited passages were written, is certainly remarkable.

There is one name, however, which cannot be simply classed as one of the décousus. Victor Hugo had already at that day made an European reputation. But the following passage about him from my mother’s book on Paris and the Parisians is so curious, and to the present generation must appear so, one may almost say, monstrous, that it is well worth while to reproduce it.

“I have before stated,” she writes, “that I have uniformly heard the whole of the décousu school of authors spoken of with unmitigated contempt, and that not only by the venerable advocates for the bon vieux temps, but also, and equally, by the distinguished men of the present day—distinguished both by position and ability. Respecting Victor Hugo, the only one of the tribe to which I allude who has been sufficiently read in England to justify his being classed by us as a person of general celebrity, the feeling is more remarkable still. I have never mentioned him or his works to any person of good moral feeling or cultivated mind who did not appear to shrink from according him even the degree of reputation that those who are received as authority among our own cities have been disposed to allow him. I might say that of him France seems to be ashamed.” (My italics.) “‘Permit me to assure you,’ said one gentleman gravely and earnestly, ‘that no idea was ever more entirely and altogether erroneous than that of supposing that Victor Hugo and his productions can be looked on as a sort of type or specimen of the literature of France at the present hour. He is the head of a sect, the high priest of a congregation who have abolished every law, moral and intellectual, by which the efforts of the human mind have hitherto been regulated. He has attained this pre-eminence, and I trust that no other will arise to dispute it with him. But Victor Hugo is NOT a popular French author.’”

My recollections of all that I heard in Paris, and my knowledge of the circles (more than one) in which my mother used to live, enable me to testify to the absolute truth of the above representation of the prevalent Parisian feeling at that day respecting Victor Hugo. Yet he had then published his Lyrics, Notre Dame de Paris, and the most notable of his dramas; and I think no such wonderful change of national opinion and sentiment as the change from the above estimate to that now universally recognised in France, can be met with in the records of European literary history. Is it not passing strange that whole regions of Paris should have been but the other day turned, so to speak, into a vast mausoleum to this same “pariah,” and that I myself should have seen, as I did, the Pantheon not yet cleared from the wreck of garlands and inscriptions and scaffoldings for spectators, all of which had been prepared to do honour to his obsequies?

But it must be observed that the violent repulsion and reprobation with which he was in those days regarded by all his countrymen, save the extreme and restless spirits of the Republican party, cannot fairly be taken as the result and outcome of genuine literary criticism. All literary judgments in France were then subordinated to political party feeling, and that was intensified by the most fatal of all disqualifications for the formation of sound and equable estimates—by fear. All those well-to-do detesters of Victor Hugo and all his works, the “Quoique Bourbons” as well as the “Parceque Bourbons,” the prosperous supporters of the new régime as well as the regretful adherents of the old, lived in perpetual fear of the men whose corypheus and hierophant was Victor Hugo, and felt, not without reason, that the admittedly ricketty throne of the citizen king and those sleek and paunchy National Guardsmen alone stood between them and the loss of all they held dearest in the world. Nevertheless, the contrast between the judgments and the feeling of 1835 and those of fifty years later is sufficiently remarkable.

Much has been said, especially in England, of the great writer’s historical inaccuracy in treating of English matters. But an anecdote which my mother gives in her book is worth reproducing for the sake of the evidence it gives that in truth Victor Hugo was equally ignorantly and carelessly inaccurate when speaking of home matters, on which, at least, it might have been thought that he would have been better informed.

“An able lawyer, and most accomplished gentleman and scholar, who holds a distinguished station in the cour royale” (in all probability Berryer), “took us to see the Palais de Justice. Having shown us the chamber where criminal trials are carried on, he observed that this was the room described by Victor Hugo in his romance, adding, ‘He was, however, mistaken here, as in most places where he affects a knowledge of the times of which he writes. In the reign of Louis XI. no criminal trials ever took place within the walls of this building, and all the ceremonies as described by him resemble much more a trial of yesterday than of the age at which he dates his tale.’”

Georges Sand, certainly upon the whole the most remarkable literary figure in the French world at the time of my visit to Paris, vidi tantum. That I had an opportunity of doing on various occasions. She was a person on whom, quite apart from her literary celebrity, the eye of any observer would have dwelt with some speculative curiosity. She was hardly to be called handsome, or even pretty, but was still decidedly attractive. The large eyes à fleur de tête, and the mobile and remarkably expressive mouth rendered the face both attractive and stimulative of interest. The features were unmistakably refined in character and expression, and the mouth—the most trustworthy evidence-giving feature upon that point—was decidedly that of a high-bred woman.

She was at that period of her varied career acting as well as writing in a manner which attracted the attention of Louis Philippe’s very vigilant and abnormally suspicious police. She had recently left Paris for an excursion in the tête-à-tête company of the well known Abbé de Lamenais, who was at that time giving much trouble and disquietude to the official guardians of the altar and the throne. His comings and goings were the object of vigilant supervision on the part of the police authorities; and it so happened by a strange chance that the report of the official observers of this little excursion, which reached the official head-quarters, reached me also. And all the watchers had to tell was that the abbé and the lady his companion shared the same bedchamber at the end of their first day’s journey. Now the Abbé de Lamenais was an old, little, wizened, dried-up, dirty—very dirty—priest. It is possible, but I have reason to think highly improbable, that economy was the motive of this strange chamber comradeship. But I was then, and am still, very strongly convinced that the sole purpose of it was to outrage the lady’s (and the priest’s) censors, to act differently from everybody else, and to give evidence of superiority to conventionality and “prejudice.”

I wrote very carefully and conscientiously some few years subsequently a long article on Georges Sand in the Foreign Quarterly which attracted some attention at the time. I should write in many respects differently now. The lady in subsequent years put a considerable quantity of “water into her wine”—and though not altogether in the same sense,—I have done so too.

To both Guizot and Thiers I had the honour of being introduced. If I were to say that neither of them seemed to me to have entirely the manners and bearing of a gentleman, I should probably be thought to be talking affected and offensive nonsense. And I do not mean to say so in the ordinary English every-day use of the term. What I mean is that they were both of them very far from possessing that grand seigneur manner, which as I have said so markedly distinguished Chateaubriand, and many another Frenchman whom I knew in those days; by no means all of them belonging to the aristocratic caste, party, or class. Guizot looked for all the world like a village schoolmaster, and seemed to me to have much the manner of one. He stooped a good deal, and poked his head forwards. I remember thinking that he was, in manner, more like an Englishman than a Frenchman; and that it was a matter of curious speculation to me at the time, whether this effect might have been produced by the fact that he was a Protestant, and an earnest one, instead of being a Roman Catholic. Possibly my impression of his schoolmaster-like deportment may have been the result of his manner to me. I was but a boy, with no claim at all to the honour of being noticed by him in any way. But I remember being struck by the difference of the manner of Thiers in this respect.

All my prejudices and all that I knew of the two men disposed me to feel far the higher respect for Guizot. And my opinion still is that I judged rightly, whether in respect to character or intellectual capacity. Not but that I thought and think that Thiers was the brighter and in the ordinary sense of the term the cleverer man of the two. There was no brightness about the premier abord of Guizot, though doubtless a longer and more intimate acquaintance than was granted to me would have corrected this impression. But Thiers was, from the bow with which he first received you to the latest word you heard from him, all brightness. Of dignity he had nothing at all. If Guizot might have been taken for a schoolmaster, Thiers might have been mistaken for a stockbroker, say, a prosperous, busy, bustling, cheery stockbroker, or any such man of business. And if Guizot gave one the impression of being more English than French, his great rival was unmistakeably and intensely French. I have no recollection of having much enjoyed my interview with M. Guizot. But I was happy during more than one evening spent in Thiers’s house in Paris.

Of Madame Récamier I should have said the few words I have to say about the impression so celebrated a woman produced upon me, when I was speaking of her salon in a previous page. But they may be just as well said here. Of the beauty for which she was famed throughout Europe, of course little remained, when I saw her in 1835. But the grace, which was in a far greater degree unique, remained in its entirety. I think she was the most gracefully moving woman I ever saw. The expression of her face had become perhaps a little sad, but it was sweet, attractive, full of the promise of all good things of heart and mind. If I were to say that her management of her salon might be compared in the perfection of its tactical success with that of a successful general on the field, it might give the idea that management and discipline were visible, which would be a very erroneous one. That the perfection of art lies in the concealment of it, was never more admirably evidenced than in her “administration” as a reine de salon. A close observer might perceive, or perhaps rather divine only, that all was marshalled, ordered, and designed. Yet all was, on the part at least of the guests, unconstrained ease and enjoyment. That much native talent, much knowledge of men and women, and exquisite tact must have been needed for this perfection in the art of tenir salon cannot be denied. Finally it may be said that a great variety of historiettes, old and new, left me with the unhesitating conviction that despite the unfailing tribute to an éclat such as hers, of malicious insinuations (all already ancient history at the time of which I am writing), Madame Récamier was and had always been a truly good and virtuous Christian woman.

Miss Clarke, also, as has been said an inmate of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and a close friend of her celebrated neighbour, I became intimate with. She was an eccentric little lady, very plain, brimfull of talent, who had achieved the wonderful triumph of living, in the midst of the choicest society of Paris, her own life after her own fashion, which was often in many respects a very different fashion from that of those around her, without incurring any of the ridicule or anathemas with which such society is wont to visit eccentricity. I remember a good-naturedly recounted legend to the effect, that she used to have her chemises, which were constructed after the manner of those worn by the grandmothers of the present generation, marked with her name in full on the front flap of them; and that this flap was often exhibited over the bosom of her dress in front! She too was a reine de salon after her fashion—a somewhat different one from that of her elegant neighbour. There was, at all events, a greater and more piquant variety to be found in it. All those to be found there were, however, worth seeing or hearing for one reason or another. Her method of ruling the frequenters of her receptions might be described as simply shaking the heterogeneous elements well together. But it answered so far as to make an evening at her house unfailingly amusing and enjoyable. She was very, and I think I may say, universally popular. She subsequently married M. Mohl, the well-known Orientalist, whom I remember to have always found, when calling upon him on various occasions, sitting in a tiny cabinet so absolutely surrounded by books, built up into walls all round him, as to suggest almost inevitably the idea of a mouse in a cheese, eating out the hollow it lived in.

Referring to my mother’s book on Paris and the Parisians for those extracts from it which I have given in the preceding pages, I find the following passage, the singular forecast of which, and its bearing on the present state of things in France, tempts me to transcribe it. Speaking in 1835, and quoting the words of a high political authority, whom she had met “at the house of the beautiful Princess B——” (Belgiojoso), she writes: “‘You know,’ he said, ‘how devoted all France was to the Emperor, though the police was somewhat tight, and the conscriptions heavy. But he had saved us from a Republic, and we adored him. For a few days, or rather hours, we were threatened again five years ago by the same terrible apparition. The result is that four millions of armed men stand ready to protect the prince who chased it. Were it to appear a third time, which Heaven forbid! you may depend upon it, that the monarch who should next ascend the throne of France might play at “le jeu de quilles” with his subjects and no one be found to complain.’” (My italics.) On the margin of the page on which this is printed, my mother has written in the copy of the book before me, “Vu et approuvé. Dec. 10th, 1853. F. T.”

The mention of the Princess Belgiojoso in the above passage reminds me of a memorable evening which I spent at her house, and of my witnessing there a singular scene, which at the present day may be worth recounting.

The amusement of the evening consisted in hearing Liszt and the princess play on two pianos the whole of the score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni! The treat was a delightful one; but I dare say that I should have forgotten it but for the finale of the performance. No sooner was the last note ended than the nervous musician swooned and slid from his seat, while the charming princess, in whom apparently matter was less under the dominion of mind, or at least of nerve, was as fresh as at the beginning!

My month at Paris, with its poor thirty times twenty-four hours, was all too short for half of what I strove to cram into it. And of course I could please myself with an infinitude of recollections of things and places, and occasions, and above all, persons, who doubtless contributed more to the making of that month one of the pleasantest I have to look back on, than any of the celebrities whom I had the good fortune to meet. But it may be doubted whether any such rambling reminiscences would be equally pleasing to my readers.

There is one anecdote, however, of a well remembered day, which I must tell, before bringing the record of my first visit to Paris to a conclusion.

A picnic party—rather a large one, and consisting of men and women of various nationalities—had been organised for a visit to the famous and historic woods of Montmorenci. We had a delightful day, and my memory is still, after half a century, crowded with very vivid remembrances of the places and persons, and things done and things said, which rendered it such. But as for the places, have they not been described and re-described in all the guide books that were ever written? And as for the persons, alas! the tongues that chattered so fast and so pleasantly are still for evermore, and the eyes that shone so brightly are dim, if not, as in most instances, closed in their last sleep! But it is only with an incident that formed the finale of our day there that I mean to trouble the reader.

Thackeray, then an unknown young man, with whom I that day became acquainted for the first time, was one of our party. Some half-dozen of us—the boys of the party—thinking that a day at Montmorenci could not be passed selon les prescriptions without a cavalcade on the famous donkeys, selected a number of them, and proceeded to urge the strongly conservative animals probably into places, and certainly into paces, for which their life-long training had in no wise prepared them. A variety of struggles between man and beast ensued with divers vicissitudes of victory, till at last Thackeray’s donkey, which certainly must have been a plucky and vigorous beast, succeeded in tossing his rider clean over his long ears, and as ill luck would have it, depositing him on a heap of newly broken stones. The fall was really a severe one, and at first it was feared that our picnic would have a truly tragic conclusion. But it was soon ascertained that no serious mischief had been done, beyond that, the mark of which the victim of the accident bore on his face to his dying day.

I think that when I climbed to the banquette of the Lille diligence to leave Paris, on the morning of the 7th of June, 1835, it was the first time that the prospect of a journey failed in any way to compensate me for quitting what I was leaving behind.

CHAPTER XIV.

One used to go from Bruges to Ostend in those days by “Torreborre’s” barge, which was towed by a couple of horses. There was a lumbering but very roomy diligence drawn by three horses abreast. But the barge, though yet slower than the diligence, was the pleasanter mode of making the journey. The cost of it, I well remember, was one franc ten centimes, which included (in going by the morning barge, which started, if I remember rightly, at six A.M.), as much bread and butter and really excellent café au lait as the traveller chose to consume—and I chose in those days to consume a considerable quantity. What the journey cost without any breakfast, I forget, if I ever knew. I fancy no such contingency as any passenger declining his bread and butter and coffee was contemplated, and that the charge was always the same whether you took breakfast or not. It was not an unpleasant manner of travelling, though specially adapted for the inmates of the Castle of Indolence. The cabin was roomy and comfortably furnished, and infinitely superior to the accommodation of any of the Dutch trekschuyts of the present day. One took one’s book with one. And a cigar on the well-seated cabin roof was in excellent keeping with the lazy smoothness of the movement, and the flat sleepy monotony of the banks.

And these visits to Ostend were very pleasant. Consul Fauche’s hospitable door was always open to me, and there was usually sure to be something pleasant going on within it—very generally excellent music. I have already spoken of Mrs. Fauche’s charming voice. Any pleasant English, who might be passing through, or spending the bathing season at Ostend, were sure to be found at the Consul’s—especially if they brought voices or any musical dispositions with them. But Mary Fauche herself was in those days a sufficient attraction to make the whitest stone evening of all that when no other visitor was found there. Noctes cœnæque Deûm!

But those pleasant Ostend days were before the summer ended overshadowed by a tragedy, which I will not omit to record, because the story of it carries a valuable warning with it.

We had made acquaintance at Paris with a Mrs. Mackintosh and her daughter, very charming Scotch people. Mrs. Mackintosh was a widow, and Margaret was her only child. She was an extremely handsome girl, nineteen years of age, and as magnificent a specimen of young womanhood as can be conceived. “More than common tall,” she showed in her whole person the development of a Juno, enhanced by the vigour, elasticity and blooming health of a Diana. She and her mother came to Ostend for the bathing season. Margaret was a great swimmer; and her delight was to pass nearly the whole of those hot July days in the water. Twice, or even thrice every day she would return to her favourite element. And soon she began to complain of lassitude, and to lose her appetite and the splendour of her complexion. Oh! it was the heat, which really only the constant stimulus of her bath and swim could render tolerable. She was warned that excess in bathing, especially in salt water, may sometimes be as dangerous as any other excess, but the young naiad, who had never in her life needed to pay heed to any medical word or warning, would not believe, or would not heed. And before the September was over we followed poor Margaret Mackintosh to the little Ostend cemetery, killed by over bathing as decidedly as if she had held her head under water!

This sad tragedy brought to a gloomy end a season which had been, if not a very profitable, a very amusing one. There was a ci-devant Don Quixote sort of a looking man, a Count Melfort, whose young and buxom wife boasted some strain of I forget what noble English blood, and who used to give the Consul good dinners such as he particularly affected, which his wife was neither asked nor cared to share, though the ladies as well as the gentlemen were excellent good friends. There was a wealthy Colonel Dickson who also used to give dinners, at one of which, having been present, I remember the host fussing in and out of the room during the quarter of an hour before dinner, till at last he rushed into the drawing-room with his coat sleeves drawn up to his elbows, horror and despair in his mien, as he cried, “Great heaven! the cook has cut the fins off the turbot!” If any who partook of that mutilated fish survive to this present year of grace (which, I fear, is hardly likely to be the case) I am sure they will recall the scene which ensued on the dreadful announcement. There was the very pretty and abnormally silly little banker’s wife, who supplied my old friend, Captain Smithett, with billets doux and fun, and who used to adapt verses sent her by a still sillier youthful adorer of her own to the purpose of expressing her own devotion to quite other swains.

It was a queer and not very edifying society, exceedingly strange, and somewhat bewildering to a lad fresh from Oxford who was making his first acquaintance with Continental ways and manners. All the married couples seemed to be continually dancing the figure of chassée croisez, and I, who had no wife of my own, and was not yet old enough to know better, thought it extremely amusing.

When October came, and I had not heard anything from Birmingham of the appointment to a mastership in the school there, for which I had been all this time waiting, I thought it was time to look up my Birmingham friends and see how matters stood there. At Birmingham I found that the governors of King Edward’s School were still shilly-shallying; but I heard enough to convince me that no new master would be appointed till the very fine new building which now ornaments the town, but was then in course of construction, should be completed.

Having become convinced of this, in which it eventually turned out that I was right, it only remained to me to return to Bruges, with the assurance from Dr. Jeune and several of the governors that I and nobody else should have the mastership when the appointment should be made. I returned to Bruges, passing one day with the dear Grants at Harrow, and an evening with my brother Anthony in London by the way, and reached the Château d’Hondt on the 15th of October, to find my father very much worse than I had left him. He was in bed, and was attended by the Dr. Herbout of whom I have before spoken. But he was too evidently drawing towards his end; and after much suffering breathed his last in the afternoon of the 23rd of October, 1835. On the 25th I followed his body to his grave, close to that of my brother Henry, in the cemetery outside the Catherine Gate of the town.

The duty was a very specially sad one. When I followed my mother to the grave at Florence many years afterwards my thoughts were far from being as painfully sad, though she was, I fear, the better loved parent of the two. She died in a ripe old age after a singularly happy, though not untroubled, life, during many years of which it was permissible to me to believe that I had had no small share in ministering to her happiness. It was otherwise in the case of my father. He was, and had been, I take it, for many years a very unhappy man. All had gone wrong with him; misfortunes fell on him, one on the back of the other. Yet I do not think that these misfortunes were the real and efficient causes of his unhappiness. I do not see what concatenation of circumstances could have made him happy. He was in many respects a singular man. Ill-health and physical suffering, of course, are great causes of an unhappy life; but all suffering invalids are not unhappy. My father’s mind was, I think, to a singular degree under the dominion of his body. The terrible irritability of his temper, which sometimes in his latter years reached a pitch that made one fear his reason was, or would become, unhinged, was undoubtedly due to the shattering of his nervous system, caused by the habitual use of calomel. But it is difficult for one who has never had a similar experience to conceive the degree in which this irritability made the misery of all who were called upon habitually to come into contact with it. I do not think that it would be an exaggeration to say that for many years no person came into my father’s presence who did not forthwith desire to escape from it. Of course, this desire was not yielded to by those of his own household, but they were none the less conscious of it. Happiness, mirth, contentment, pleasant conversation, seemed to fly before him as if a malevolent spirit emanated from him. And all the time no human being was more innocent of all malevolence towards his fellow creatures; and he was a man who would fain have been loved, and who knew that he was not loved, but knew neither how to manifest his desire for affection nor how to conciliate it.

I am the more convinced that bodily ailment was the causa causans of most, if not of all, of this unhappy idiosyncrasy, that I have before me abundant evidence that as a young man he was beloved and esteemed by his cotemporaries and associates. I have many letters from college friends, fellows of New College, his cotemporaries, several of them thanking him for kindnesses of a more or less important kind, and all written in a spirit of high regard and esteem.

What so grievously changed him? I do not believe that he was soured by pecuniary misfortune, though he had more than enough. His first great misfortune—the marriage of his old widower uncle, whose heir he was to have been—was, I have the means of knowing, borne by him well, bravely and with dignity. I believe that he was destroyed mind and body by calomel, habitually used during long years.

Throughout life he was a laborious and industrious man. I have seen few things of the kind with more of pathos in it than his persevering attempt to render his labour of some value by compiling a dictionary of ecclesiastical terms. He had quite sufficient learning and sufficient industry to have produced an useful book upon the subject if he had only had the possibility of consulting the, of course, almost innumerable necessary authorities. The book was published in quarto by subscription, and two or three parts of it had been delivered to the subscribers when death delivered him from his thankless labour and his subscribers from further demands on their purses. I do not suppose that any human being purchased the book because they wished to possess it. And truly, as I have said, it was a pathetic thing to see him in his room at Château d’Hondt, ill, suffering, striving with the absolutely miserable, ridiculously insufficient means he had been able with much difficulty to collect, to carry on his work. He was dying—he must, I think, have known that he was; he had not got beyond D in his dictionary; all the alphabet was before him, but he would not give up; he would labour to the last. My mother was labouring hard, and her labour was earning all that supplied very abundantly the needs of the whole family. And I cannot help thinking that a painful but not ignoble feeling urged my poor father to live at least equally laborious days, even though his labour was profitless.

Poor father! My thoughts as I followed him to the grave were that I had not done all that I might have done to alleviate the burthen of unhappiness that was laid upon him. Yet looking back on it all from the vantage-ground of my own old age (some fifteen years greater than that which he attained) I do not see or think that any conduct of mine would have made matters better for him.

My father’s death naturally made an important change in my mother’s plans for the future. The Château d’Hondt was given up, adieus were said, not without many au revoirs, to many kind friends at Bruges, and more especially at Ostend, and we left Belgium for England. After some time spent in house-hunting, my mother hired a pleasant house with a good garden on the common at Hadley, near Barnet, and there I remained with her, still awaiting my Birmingham preferment, all that winter and the following spring. The earlier part of the time was saddened by the rapid decline and death of my younger sister, Emily. We knew before leaving Bruges that there was but a slender hope of saving her from the same malady which had been fatal to my brother Henry. But the medical men hoped or professed to hope, that much might be expected from her return to her native air. But the mark of the cruel disease was upon her, and very rapidly after our establishment at Hadley she sank and painlessly breathed her last.

Poor little Emily! She was a very bright espiègle child, full of fun and high spirits. There is a picture of her exactly as I remember her. She is represented with flowing flaxen curls and wide china-blue eyes, sitting with a brown holland pinafore on before a writing-desk and blowing a prismatically-coloured soap-bubble. The writing copy on the desk lying above the half-covered and neglected page of copy-book bears the legend “Study with determined zeal!”

Her youngest child had ever been to my mother as the apple of her eye, and her loss was for the passing day a crushing blow. But, as usual with her, her mind refused to remain crushed, any more than the grass is permanently crushed by the storm wind that blows over it. She had the innate faculty and tendency to throw sorrow off when the cause of it had passed. She owed herself to the living, and refused to allow unavailing regret for those who had been taken from her to incapacitate her for paying that debt to the utmost.

And once again, as was usual with her, her new home became a centre of social enjoyment and attraction for all, especially the young, who were admitted to it. I do not remember that with the exception of the family of the rector, Mr. Thackeray, we had many acquaintances at Hadley. I remember a bit of fun, long current among us, which was furnished by the reception my mother met with when returning the call of the wife of a wealthy distiller resident in the neighbourhood. The lady was of abnormal bulk, and when my mother entered the room in which she was sitting, she said, “Excuse me, ma’am, if I keep my chair, I never raise. But I am glad to see you—glad to see anybody,” with much emphasis on the last word. I wish every caller was received with as truthful an expression of sentiments.

Our society consisted mainly of friends staying in the house, or of flying visitors from London. As usual, too, my mother soon gathered around her a knot of nice girls, who made the house bright. For herself she seemed always ready to take part in all the fun and amusement that was going; and was the first to plan dances, and charades, and picnics, and theatricals on a small and unpretending scale. But five o’clock of every morning saw her at her desk; and the production of the series of novels, which was not brought to a conclusion till it had reached the hundred and fifteenth volume, though it was not begun till she was past fifty, never ceased.

The Christmas was, I remember, a very merry one. We were seeing a good deal of a young fellow-clerk of my brother’s in the secretary’s office at the Post Office, who was then beginning to fall in love with my sister Cecilia, whom he married not long afterwards. He was then at the beginning of a long official life, from which he retired some years ago as Sir John Tilley, K.C.B. Among others of our little circle, I especially remember Joseph Henry Green, the celebrated surgeon, Coleridge’s literary executor, who first became known to us through his brother-in-law, Mr. Hammond, who was in practice at Hadley. Green was an immensely tall man, with a face of no beauty, but as brightly alive with humour as any I ever saw. He was a delightful companion in a walk; and I remember to the present hour much of the curious and out-of-the-way information I picked up from him, mainly on subjects more or less connected with his profession—for he, as well as I, utterly scouted the stupid sink-the-shop rule of conversation. I remember especially his saying of Coleridge, à propos of a passage in his biography which speaks of the singular habit (noticed by his amanuensis) that he had of occupying his mind with the coming passage, which he was about to dictate, while uttering that with which the writer was busy, that he (Green) had frequently observed the same peculiarity in his conversation.

Some few of our guests came to us from beyond the Channel, among them, charming Mrs. Fauche, with her lovely voice and equally lovely face, whose Ostend hospitalities my mother was glad to have an opportunity of returning.

Among these visitors from the other side of the Channel, I remember one elderly lady of the Roman Catholic faith, and a strict observer of its precepts, who was pleased to express a very strong approbation of a certain oyster soup, which made its appearance one day at my mother’s table. She was charmed at the idea of being able to eat such soup for a maigre dinner, and begged that the receipt might be written out for her. “Oyster soup! Just the thing for a Friday!” So the mode of preparing the desired dainty was duly written out for her. But her face was a study for a physiognomist when she read the first line of it, to the effect that she was to “Take of prime beef” so much. Oyster soup, indeed!

It was a pleasant time—so pleasant that I am afraid that I did not regret perhaps so much as I ought to have done the continued delay of the Birmingham appointment for which I was all this time waiting. But pleasant as it was, its pleasantness was not sufficient wholly to restrain me from indulging in that propensity for rambling which has been with me the ruling passion of a long life-time.

It was in the spring following that merry Christmas that I found time for a little tour of about three weeks in Normandy. The reader need not fear that I am going to tell him anything of all I did and all I saw, though every detail of it seemed to me at the time worthy of minute record. But it has all been written and printed some scores of times since those days—by myself once among the rest—and may now be dismissed with a “See guide-books passim.” The expenses of my travel accurately recorded I have also before me. There indeed I might furnish some facts which would be new and surprising to tourists of the present day, but they would only serve to make him discontented with his generation.

There is one anecdote, however, connected with this little journey, which I must relate. I was returning from southern Normandy and reached Caen without a penny in my pocket. My funds, carefully husbanded as they had been, had sufficed to carry me so far and no further. There were no such things as telegrams or railways in those days; and I had nothing for it but to go to an hotel and there remain till my application to Hadley for funds could be answered—an affair of some ten or twelve days as things then were. While I was waiting and kicking my heels about the old Norman city, from which I had already extracted all the interest it could afford me, I lounged into the shop of a bookseller, M. Mancel. I revisited him on a subsequent occasion, and find the record of this second visit in the first of two volumes which I wrote, and entitled A Summer in Brittany. There I find that M. Mancel is “the publisher of numerous works on the history and antiquities of Normandy.... M. Mancel has also an extensive collection of old books on Norman history; but the rarest and most curious articles are congregated into a most bibliomaniacal looking cabinet, and are not for sale.”

Well, this was the gentleman into whose very tempting shop I strayed with empty pockets. He was extremely civil, showed me many interesting things, and finding that I was not altogether an ignoramus as regarded his specialty, observed ever and anon “That is a book which you ought to have!” “That is a work which you will find very useful!” till at last I said “Very true! There are two or three books here that I should like to have; but I have no money!” He instantly begged me to take any book or books I should like to buy, and pay for them when I got to London. “But,” rejoined I, “I don’t know when I shall get to London, for I have no money at all. I reached Caen with my purse empty, and am stranded here!” M. Mancel thereupon eagerly begged me to let him be my banker for my immediate needs, as well as for the price of any volumes I chose to purchase. And though he had never seen my face or heard my name before, he absolutely did furnish me with money to reach home, and gave me credit for some two or three pounds’ worth of books, it being arranged that I should on reaching London pay the amount to M. Dulau in Soho Square.

A few years ago on passing through Caen I went to the old book shop; but M. Mancel had long since gone to join the majority, and his place knew him no more. His successor, however, on my explaining to him the motive of my visit, remarked with a truly French bow, “My predecessor seems to have been a good physiognomist, monsieur!”

I returned to Hadley to find my mother eagerly occupied with the scheme of a journey to Vienna, and a book as the result of it. She had had, after the publication of her book on Paris and the Parisians, some idea of undertaking an Italian tour, but that was now abandoned in favour of a German journey, whether on the suggestion of her publisher, or from any other cause of preference, I do not know. Of course I entered into such a scheme heart and soul. My only fear now was that news of my appointment to a mastership at Birmingham might arrive in time to destroy my hopes of accompanying my mother. But no such tidings came; on the contrary, there seemed every reason to suppose that no new master would be appointed till after the following Christmas holidays. My mother was as anxious as I was that I should be free to act as her courier, for in truth she could hardly dispense with some such assistance; and I alone remained who could give it to her. My sister Cecilia was to accompany my mother. She wished also to take with her M. Hervieu, the artist who illustrated her former books; and I obtained her permission to ask an Oxford friend to make one of the party. We were thus a party of five, without counting my mother’s maid, an old and trusted servant, the taking of whom, however, she subsequently considered so great a mistake that she never fell into it on any other occasion.

My delight at the prospect of such a journey was intense. I surrounded myself forthwith with an amazing supply of maps and guide-books, and was busy from morning to night with the thoroughly congenial task of studying and preparing our proposed route.

CHAPTER XV.

A part of the journey was performed in a yet slower fashion, and one which was still richer in its opportunities for seeing both men and things. For we descended the Danube on one of those barges which ply on the river, used mainly for cargo, but also occasionally for passengers. When I look back upon that part of our expedition I feel some astonishment at not only the hardihood of my mother and sister in consenting to such an enterprise, but more still at my own—it really seems to my present notions—almost reckless audacity in counselling and undertaking to protect them in such a scheme.

Whether any such boats still continue to navigate the Danube, I do not know. I should think that quicker and better modes of transporting both human beings and goods have long since driven them from their many time secular occupation. In any case it is hardly likely that any English travellers will ever again have such an experience. The Lohnkutscher with his thirty or forty miles a day, and his easy-going lotus-eating-like habitudes is hardly like to tempt the traveller who is wont to grumble at the tediousness of an express train. But a voyage on a Danube carrier barge would be relegated to the category of those things which might be done, “could a man be secure, that his life should endure As of old, for a thousand long years,” but which are quite out of the question in any other circumstances.

Here is the account which my mother gives of the boat on which we were about to embark at Ratisbon for the voyage down the river to Vienna.

“We start to-morrow, and I can hardly tell you whether I dread it or wish for it most. We have been down to the river’s bank to see the boat, and it certainly does not look very promising of comfort. But there is nothing better to be had. It is a large structure of unpainted deal boards, almost the whole of which is occupied by a sort of ark-like cabin erected in the middle. This is very nearly filled by boxes, casks, and bales; the small portion not so occupied being provided with planks for benches, and a species of rough dresser placed between them for a table. This we are given to understand is fitted up for the express accommodation of the cabin passengers.”

In point of fact, we had, as I remember, no fellow passengers in any part of our voyage. I take it that nobody, save perhaps the peasants of the villages on the banks of the stream, for short passages from one of them to the other, ever thought of travelling by these barges even in those days. They were in fact merely transports for merchandise of the heavier and rougher sort. The extreme rudeness of their construction, merely rough planks roughly nailed together, is explained by the fact that they are not intended ever to make the return voyage against the stream, but on arriving at Vienna are knocked to pieces and sold for boarding.

“But the worst thing I saw,” continues my mother, “is the ladder which, in case of rain, is to take us down to this place of little ease. It consists of a plank with sticks nailed across it to sustain the toes of the crawler who would wish to avoid jumping down seven or eight feet. The sloping roof of the ark is furnished with one bench of about six feet long, from which the legs of the brave souls who sit on it dangle down over the river. There is not the slightest protection whatever at the edge of this abruptly sloping roof, which forms the only deck; and nothing but the rough unslippery surface of the deal planks, of which it is formed, with the occasional aid of a bit of stick about three inches long nailed here and there, can prevent those who stand or walk upon it from gently sliding down into the stream.... Well! we have determined, one and all of us, to navigate the Danube between Ratisbon and Vienna; and I will neither disappoint myself nor my party from the fear of a fit of vertigo, or a scramble down a ladder.”

But if the courage of the ladies did not fail them, mine, as that of the person most responsible for the adventure, did! And I find that, on the day following that on which the last extract was written, my mother writes:

“At a very early hour this morning T. [Tom] was up and on board, and perceiving by a final examination of the deck, its one giddy little bench, and all things appertaining thereto, that we should inevitably be extremely uncomfortable there, he set about considering the ways and means by which such martyrdom might be avoided. He at last got hold of the Schiffmeister, which he had found impossible yesterday, and by a little persuasion and a little bribery, induced him to have a plank fixed for us at the extreme bow of the boat, which we can not only reach without difficulty, but have a space of some nine or ten feet square for our sole use, on condition of leaving it free for the captain about five minutes before each landing. This perch is perfectly delightful in all respects. Our fruit, cold meat, wine, bread, and so forth are stowed near us. Desks and drawing books can all find place; and in short, if the sun will but continue to shine as it does now, all will be well.... Our crew are a very motley set, and as we look at them from our dignified retirement, they seem likely to afford us a variety of very picturesque groups. On the platforms, which project at each end of the ark, stand the men—and the women too—who work the vessel. This is performed by means of four immense oars protruding lengthwise [i.e. in a fore and aft direction], two in front and two towards the stern, by which the boat is steered. Besides these, there are two others to row with. These latter are always in action, and are each worked by six or eight men and women, the others being only used occasionally, when the boat requires steering. It appears that there are many passengers who work for their passage [but this I take to have been inference only], as the seats at the oars are frequently changed, and as soon as their allotted task is done, they dip down into the unknown region beyond the ark and are no more seen till their turn for rowing comes round again. I presume the labour, thus divided, is not very severe, for they appear to work with much gaiety and good humour, sometimes singing, sometimes chatting, and often bursting into shouts of light-hearted laughter.”

It was a strange voyage; curious, novel, and full of never-failing interest; luxurious even in its way, in many respects; which may now be considered an old world experience; which probably has never been tried since, and certainly will never be tried again, however many wandering young Englishmen (of whom there are a hundred now for every one to be met with in those days) might fancy trying it. No danger whatever of the kind which my mother appears to have anticipated threatened any of the party. But the adventure was not without danger of another kind, as the sequel showed.

Of course all the people with whom we were brought into contact—the captain and crew of the boat, the riverside loungers at the landing-places, the hosts and households of the little inns in the small places at which the boat stopped every night (it never travelled save by daylight)—were all mystified, and had all their ideas of the proprieties and the eternal fitness of things outraged by the phenomenon of a party of English ladies and gentlemen—supposed by virtue of ancient and well recognised reputation to be all as rich as Crœsus, and who were at all events manifestly able to pay for a carriage—choosing such a method of travelling. Nor had English wanderers at that time earned the privilege since accorded to their numerousness, of doing all sorts of strange things unquestioned on the score of the well-known prevalent insanity of the race. All who came within sight of us were utterly puzzled at the unaccountableness of the phenomenon. And one does not mystify the whole of a somewhat rude population without risking disagreeables of various sorts.

On looking back on the circumstances from my present lofty and calm observatory, I am disposed to wonder that nothing worse betided us than the one adventure of which I am about to speak. But, as I remember, the people generally were, if somewhat ruder and rougher than an English population of similar status, upon the whole very kindly and good-natured.

But at one place—a village called Pleintling—we did get into trouble, which very nearly ended tragically. The terms upon which we were to be housed for the night, and the price to be paid for our accommodation of all sorts had been settled overnight, and the consciousness that we were giving unusual trouble induced us to pay without grumbling such a price for our beds and supper and breakfast as the host had assuredly never received for his food and lodging in all his previous experience. But it was doubtless this very absence of bargaining which led our landlord to imagine that he had made a mistake in not demanding far more, and that any amount might be had for asking it from so mysterious a party who parted, too, so easily with their money. So as we were stepping on board the next morning he came down to the water’s edge, and with loud vociferation demanded a sum more than the double of that which we had already paid him. The ladies, and indeed all the party save myself, who was the paymaster, had already gone on board, and I was about to follow, unheeding his demands and his threats, when he seized me by the throat, and dragging me backwards, declared in stentorian tones that he had not been paid. I sturdily refused to disburse another kreutzer. The other men, who had gone on board, jumped back to my assistance. But suddenly, as if they had risen from the earth, several other fellows surrounded us and dragged down my friends. The old landlord, beside himself with rage, lifted an axe which he had in his hand, and was about to deal me a blow which would probably have relieved the reading world of this and many another page! But my mother, shrieking with alarm, had meantime besought the captain of the boat to settle the matter by paying whatever was demanded. He also jumped on shore just in time, and released us from our foes, and himself from further delay, by doing so.

At the next place at which we could go on shore we made a complaint to the police officials; and it is not without satisfaction even after the lapse of half a century that I am able to say that a communication from the police in an Austrian town some days subsequently, and after we had crossed the Bavarian frontier, informed us that the old scoundrel at Pleintling had not only been made to disgorge the sum he had robbed us of, but had been trounced as he deserved. I suspect that he had imagined from the strangeness of our party, and our mode of travelling, that there were reasons why we should not be inclined to seek any interview with the officers of the police.

With that sole exception our voyage from Ratisbon to Vienna was a prosperous, and on the whole, pleasant one, varied only by not unfrequently recurring difficulties occasioned by shoals and sandbanks, when all hands, save the non-working party in the bow, would take to the water in a truly amphibious fashion to drag the boat off.

But I must not be led by these moving accidents by flood and field to forget a visit paid to the sculptor Dannecker in his studio at Stuttgardt. There is in my mother’s book an etching by M. Hervieu of the man and place. I remember well the affectionate reverence with which he uncovered for us his colossal bust of Schiller, as described by my mother, and the reasons which he assigned (mistaken as they appeared to me, but it is presumptuous in me to say so) for making it colossal. Schiller had been his life-long friend, and these reasons, whether artistically good or not, were at all events morally admirable and pathetically touching as given by the old man, while looking up at his work with tears in his octogenarian eyes. I do not think the reproduction of the bust in M. Hervieu’s etching is a very happy one, but I can testify to the full-length portrait of the aged sculptor being a thoroughly life-like one. It is the old man himself. He died a year or two after the date of our visit.

Uhland too we visited, and Gustav Schwab. Of the former I may say literally vidi tantum, for I could speak then no German, and very few words now, and Uhland could speak no other language. And our interview is worth recording mainly for the case of the noticeable fact that such a man, holding the position he did and does in the literature of his country, should at that day have been unable to converse in French.

Gustav Schwab, though talking French fluently, and, as I remember, a little English also, impressed me as quintessentially German in manner, in appearance, and ways of thinking. He was one of the kindliest of men, contented with you only on condition of being permitted to be of service to you, and at the end of half an hour making you somehow or other feel as if he must have been an old friend, if not in your present, at least in some former state of existence.

My journey among these southern Germans left me with the impression that they are generally a kindly and good-natured people. A little incident occurred at Tübingen which I thought notably illustrated this. The university library there is a very fine one; and while the rest of our party were busied with some other sight-seeing, I went thither and applied to the librarian for some information respecting the departments in which it was strong, its rules, &c. He immediately set about complying with my wishes in the most obliging manner, going through the magnificent suite of rooms with me himself, and pausing before the shelves wherever he had any special treasure to show. All of a sudden, without any warning, just as we were passing through the marble jambs of a doorway from one room to another, my head began to swim; I lost consciousness, and fell, cutting my head against the marble sufficiently to cause much bloodshed. When I recovered my senses I found the librarian standing in consternation over me, and his pretty young wife on her knees with a basin of water bathing my head. She had been summoned from her dwelling to attend me, and there was no end to their kindness. I never experienced such a queer attack before or since. I suppose it must have been occasioned by too much erudition on an empty stomach!

Our route to Vienna was a very devious one, including southern Bavaria, Salzburg, and great part of the Tyrol. But I must not indulge in any journalising reminiscences of it. Were I to do so in the case of all the interesting journeys I have made since that day how many volumes would suffice for the purpose! When calling the other day, only two or three months ago, on Cardinal Massaia at the Propaganda in Rome in order to have some conversation with him respecting his thirty-five years’ missionary work in Africa, on returning from which he received the purple from Leo XIII., he obligingly showed me the MS. which he had prepared from his recollection of the contents of the original notes, unfortunately destroyed during his imprisonment by hostile tribes in Africa, and which is now being printed at the Propaganda Press in ten volumes quarto. His Eminence was desirous that it should be translated into English, and published in London with the interesting illustrations he brought home with him, and which adorn the Roman edition. But as the wish of his Eminence was that it should be published unabridged (!) I was obliged to tell him that I feared he would not find a London publisher. We parted very good friends, and on taking my leave of him he said, pressing my hand kindly, that we should shortly meet again in heaven—which, considering that he knew he was talking to a heretic, I felt to be a manifestation of liberal feeling worthy of note in a cardinal of the Church of Rome.

Will the kind reader, bearing in mind the recognised and almost privileged garrulity of old age, pardon the chronology-defying introduction of this anecdote here, which was suggested to me solely by the vision of what my reminiscences would extend to if I were to treat of all my wanderings up and down this globe in extenso?

The latter part of our voyage was especially interesting and beautiful, but tantalising from the impossibility of landing on every lovely spot which enticed us. Nevertheless, we at last found ourselves at Vienna with much delight, and our first glimpses of the city disposed us to acquiesce heartily in the burthen of the favourite Viennese folk-song, “Es ist nur ein Kaiserstadt, es ist nur ein Wien!”

I remember well an incident which my mother does not mention, but which seemed likely to make our first début in the Kaiserstadt an embarrassing one. There was in some hand-bag belonging to some one of the party an old forgotten pack of playing cards, which the examining officer of the customs pounced on with an expression of almost consternation on his face.

“Oh, well, throw them away,” said the spokesman of our party airily, “or, if the regulations require it, we will pay the duty, though we have not the least desire to retain possession of them.”

But this we soon found did not meet the case by any means. We had been guilty of a serious misdemeanour and offence against the law by having such things (undeclared too) amongst our baggage! There must be a report, and a written petition, setting forth with due contrition, and humble peccavi admissions, our lamentable ignorance, and perhaps the enormity might be condoned to a foreigner! After a little talk, however, and the incense of a little consternation on our faces, duly offered to the official Jove (who entirely spurned any offering of another sort), the said Jove wrote the petition for us himself, carried it somewhere behind the scenes, and shortly announced that it was benignly granted: as I believe, by himself! The accursed thing was ceremoniously destroyed before our eyes, and we were free to walk forth into the streets of the Kaiserstadt.

I revisited Vienna two or three years ago, and found that “ein Wien” had become at least three! If the increase and changes of London and Paris have made my early recollections of those cities emphatically those of a former age, the changes at Vienna, though of course smaller in absolute extent, have yet more entirely metamorphosed the character of the place. The abolition of the wall, which used to shut in the exclusive little city, and placed between it and the suburbs not only a material barrier, but a gulf such as that which divided Dives from Lazarus, has changed the social habitudes and even the moral characteristics of the inhabitants.

In the days of my first visit, now just a little more than fifty years ago, nobody who was anybody would have dreamed of living on the outside of the sacred barrier of the wall, any more than a member of the fashionable world of London would dream of living to the eastward of Temple Bar. I think, indeed, that the former would have been more utterly out of the question than the latter. I remember that even in the case of foreigners like ourselves, it was deemed, in accordance with the best advice we could procure on the subject, necessary, or at least expedient, that we should find lodgings in the city, despite the exceeding difficulty and the high price involved in procuring them. The division of the society into classes, still more marked in Vienna than probably in any other city of Europe, at that time almost amounted to a division into castes; and in the case of the higher aristocracy to have lived in any one of the suburbs would assuredly have involved a loss of social caste.

Mainly this arose of course from the inappellable law of fashion that so it should be. But in part also it probably arose from the little social inconveniences arising from mere distance. The society of Vienna at that day—society par excellence—was a very small one. Everybody knew everybody, not only their pedigree and all their quarterings (very necessary to be known), but the men and women themselves personally. I forget entirely what were the introductions which placed my mother and her party at once in the very core of this small and exclusive society. But we did find ourselves so placed, and that at once. Probably the general notion in England was then, and may be still, that the aristocratic society of Vienna would be less likely to open its doors to one who had no title whatever to enter them save a literary reputation, than the corresponding classes in any other European capital. But whatever was the “Open Sesame” my mother possessed, the fact was that all doors were open to her with the most open-handed hospitality. And, as I have said, to know one was, even in the case of a stranger, pretty nearly equivalent to knowing them all.

The by far greater number of this small society of nobles were, as was to be expected, wealthy men; some, more especially the Hungarians, were such even if estimated by English standards. But there were some among them who were very much the reverse. And my opportunities of observation were abundantly sufficient to enable me to perceive without any fear of being mistaken, that the terms of intimacy and equality upon which these latter lived with their wealthier neighbours were no whit affected by their comparative impecuniosity. One single lady of very noble birth I well remember, who to a great pressure of the res angusta domi added no small spice of eccentricity; but there was no mansion so magnificent that did not open its doors very widely to her. No fête was complete without her. She always wore a turban, and always carried it about with her in her pocket. And I have seen her pause in the midst of a splendid entrance hall, with half a dozen lackeys standing around, while she took her turban from her pocket, adjusted it on her head, and changed her shoes.

The ladies of the grand monde in Vienna in those days had the queer habit of writing no notes. Their invitations and the answers to them, and the excuses, or any other communications arising from the social intercourse of the day, were all sent by word of mouth by footmen. Whether the highest bon ton required an affectation of not being able to write, I cannot say! But such was the practice.

Another specialty consisted in a practice of the young men of the same world. Every man of them retained in his special pay and service one of the (very excellent) hackney coaches of the city, which he always expected to find ready for his service, and the driver of which was trusted by him as much, or more perhaps, than a man is in the habit of trusting his own servant.

The social division between the different castes—between the noble and the non-noble—was absolute in those days; and of course both parties were the losers in sundry respects by such separation. But the results were not bad in all respects. One was an exceeding simplicity and absence of any affectation of finery or morgue on the part of the noble class, and a corresponding easy-going freedom from the small forms of social ambition on the part of the non-noble. There was among the latter no attempt or thought of attempting to enter the noble society. It was out of the question; and as far as I could see such entry did not appear to be an object of ambition, or the impossibility of it to occasion either heart-burning or jealousy. In the case of the ladies of the deux mondes, the separation was absolute and without exception. But I was told that in some few cases the young men of the upper class might be seen in the houses of certain of their non-noble fellow-citizens, but never with any reciprocity of toleration. In respect of mere wealth and luxury in the manner of living, there were many bourgeois families on a par, and in many cases on far more than a par, with those of the nobles. And no doubt it frequently occurred that the social law which forbade all intercourse between the two septs, was felt to be as inconvenient and as much a matter of regret on one side of the barrier as on the other. But, noblesse oblige, and the law was not transgressed.

In the case of foreigners, however, or at least of English foreigners, we were very soon given to understand that the law in question was not applicable. We were perfectly free to make acquaintances in either world, and some of the most valued friends we made in Vienna, and some of the pleasantest hospitalities we accepted, were found in bourgeois houses. I remember two different instances of a very amusing curiosity on the part of certain noble ladies, which prompted them to avail themselves of our chartered liberty in the matter, for the obtaining of tidings of the ways and manners of the inmates of certain houses, which there was no possibility of their ever having an opportunity of observing for themselves. But on ransacking my memory for instances of the kind, I must say that all that occur to me, refer to curiosity of the upper respecting the nether world; and that I do not recollect any vice versâ cases.

I have said that the rule of exclusion as regards all that part of the Vienna world not nobly born was absolute. But if absoluteness can be conceived as ever becoming more absolute, the social law did so in the case of Jewish families. These were numerous, and many of them in respect of wealth, and more in respect of culture, were on a par with the best and highest portion of the Viennese society. I remember one Jewish family in particular, consisting of a widow and her daughter and her niece, with whom we became intimately acquainted, and in whom and whose surroundings we found a level of high culture (taking that word in its largest extension to all that goes to form the idiosyncrasy of a human being), far in advance of anything we met with among their social superiors.

In fact the grand monde of that far distant day in Vienna was frivolous, unintellectual, and, I am afraid I must say, uneducated to a remarkable degree. It had its own peculiar charm, which consisted in the most perfectly high-bred tone of manner combined with complete simplicity, the absolute absence of any sort of affectation whatever, and great good-nature. But in all my experience of them there was not to be found a salon among them of equal social attraction to that of my above-mentioned Jewish friends.

But all this refers to the social conditions of a day, which, as my recent visits to Vienna have shown me, is one passed away and gone. It belongs to the days when “Vater Franz” was, or, to be accurate, had only two years previously ceased to be, the idol of Austrian, and especially Viennese loyalty and affection. The most striking instances of the devotion of all classes of the population to their emperor were constantly narrated to me. I specially remember the tale of one occasion, when the emperor had remained shut up in the palace for three or four days—or perhaps the period was somewhat longer—because he had caught a cold. A cloud seemed to have passed over the blue Vienna sky. The occasion of his first drive through the streets of the city after his little indisposition was an ovation! The people filled the streets, and hung about his carriage. Market women poked their faces in at the window to assure themselves that “Vater Franz” was restored to them none the worse for his confinement. It was, to the best of my remembrance, on every Thursday, at that time, that it had been the emperor’s practice to devote a certain number of hours in the day to receiving any one of his subjects who had notified in the proper quarter a desire to speak with him. But might not some socialist or nihilist, or other description of radical, have easily shot him at one of those entirely unguarded interviews? Aye! but I am writing of half a century ago, before such things and persons had appeared upon the scene. And assuredly the possibility of such a catastrophe had never entered into the brain of any man, woman, or child in the Kaiserstadt.