What is Chance? How often does that question recur in the course of every history, small or great? My whole course of life was deflected by the mishap of stepping a little awry out of a train at Bath, and miscalculating the height of the platform, which is there unusually low. I had gone to spend a day with a friend, and on my way back to Bristol I thus sprained my ankle. I was at that time forty years of age (a date I now alas! regard as quite the prime of life!), and in splendid health and spirits, fully intending to continue for the rest of my days labouring on the same lines as prospects of usefulness might open. I remember feeling the delight of walking over the springy sward of the Downs and laughing as I said to myself “I do believe I could walk down anybody and perhaps talk down anybody too!” The next week I was a poor cripple on crutches, never to take a step without them for four long years, during which period I grew practically into an old woman, and (unhappily for me) into a very large and heavy one for want of the exercise to which I had been accustomed. The morning after my mishap, finding my ankle much swollen and being in a great hurry to go on with my work, I sent for one of the principal surgeons in Bristol, who bound the limb so tightly that the circulation (always rather feeble) was impeded, and every sort of distressful condition supervened. Of course the surgeon threw the blame on me for attempting to use the leg; but it was very little I could do in this way even if I had tried, without excessive pain; and, after a few weeks, I went to London in the full confidence that I had only to bespeak “the best advice” to be speedily cured. I did get what all the world would still consider the “best advice;” but bad was that best. Guineas I could ill spare ran away like water while the great surgeon came and went, doing me no good at all; the evil conditions growing worse daily. I returned back from London and spent some wretched months at Clifton. An artery, I believe, was stopped, and there was danger of inflammation of the joint. At last with infinite regret I gave up the hope of ever recovering such activity as would permit me to carry on my work either in the schools or workhouse. No one who has not known the miseries of lameness, the perpetual contention with ignoble difficulties which it involves, can judge how hard a trial it is to an active mind to become a cripple.
Still believing in my simplicity that great surgeons might remedy every evil, I went again to London to consult the most eminent, and by the mistake of a friend, it chanced that I summoned two very great personages on the same day, though, fortunately, at different hours. The case was, of course, of the simplest; but the two gentlemen gave me precisely opposite advice. One sent me abroad to certain baths, which proved to be the wrong ones for my trouble, and gave me a letter to his friend there, a certain Baron. The moment the Baron-Doctor saw my foot he exclaimed that it ought never to have been allowed to get into the state of swollen veins and arrested circulation in which he found it; astringents and all sorts of measures ought to have been applied. In truth I was in a most miserable condition, for I could not drop the limb for two minutes without the blood running into it till it became like an ink-bottle, when, if I held it up, it became as white as if dead. And all this had been getting worse and worse while I was consulting ten doctors in succession, and chiefly the most eminent in England! The Baron-Doctor first told me that the waters would bring out the gout, and then, when I objected, assured me they should not bring it out; after which I relinquished the privilege of his visits and he charged me for an entire course of treatment.
The second great London surgeon told me not to go abroad, but to have a gutta-percha boot made for my leg to keep it stiff. I had the boot made, (with much distress and expense), took it abroad in my trunk, and asked the successor of the Baron-Doctor (who could make the waters give the gout or not as he pleased), “Whether he advised me to wear the wonderful machine?” The good old Frenchman, who was also Mayor of his town, and who did me more good than anybody else, replied cautiously, “If you wish, Madame, to be lame for life you will wear that boot. A great many English come to us here to be unstiffened after having had their joints stiffened by English surgeons’ devices of this sort, but we can do nothing for them. A joint once thoroughly stiff can never be restored.” It may be guessed that the expensive boot was quietly deposited on the nearest heap of rubbish.
After that experience I tried the baths in Savoy and others in Italy. But my lameness seemed permanent. A great Italian Doctor could think of nothing better than to put a few walnut-leaves on my ankle—a process which might perhaps have effected something in fifty years! Only the good and great Nélaton, whom I consulted in Paris, told me he believed I should recover some time; but he could not tell me anything to do to hasten the event. Returned to London I sent for Sir William Fergusson, and that honest man on hearing my story said simply: “And if you had gone to nobody and not bandaged your ankle, but merely bathed it, you would have been well in three weeks.” Thus I learned from the best authority, that I had paid for the folly of consulting an eminent surgeon for a common sprain, by four years of miserable helplessness and by the breaking up of my whole plan of life.
I must conclude this dismal record by one last trait of medical character. I had determined, after seeing Fergusson, to consult no other doctor; indeed I could ill afford to do so. But a friend conveyed to me a message from a London surgeon of repute (since dead) that he would like to be allowed to treat me gratuitously; having felt much interest in my books. I was simple enough to fall into the trap and to feel grateful for his offer: and I paid him several visits, during which he chatted pleasantly, and once did some trifling thing to relieve my foot. One day I wrote and asked him kindly to advise me by letter about some directions he had given me; whereupon he answered tartly that he “could not correspond; and that I must always attend at his house.” The suspicion dawned on me, and soon reached conviction, that what he wanted was not so much to cure me, as to swell the scanty show of patients in his waiting-room! Of course after this, I speedily retreated; offering many thanks and some small, and as I hoped, acceptable souvenir with inscription to lie on his table. But when I thought this had concluded my relations with Mr. ——, I found I had reckoned without my—doctor! One after another he wrote to me three or four peremptory notes requesting me to send him introductions for himself or his family, to influential friends of mine rather out of his sphere. I would rather have paid him fifty fees than have felt bound to give these introductions.
Finally I ceased to do anything whatever to my unfortunate ankle, except what most of my advisers had forbidden, namely, to walk upon it,—and a year or two afterwards I climbed Cader Idris; walking quietly with my friend to the summit. Sitting there, on the Giants’ Chair we passed an unanimous resolution. It was: “Hang the Doctors!”
I must now set down a few recollections of the many friends and interesting acquaintances whom I met at Bristol. In the first place I may say briefly that all Miss Carpenter’s friends (mostly Unitarians) were very kind to me, and that though I did not go out to any sort of entertainment while I lived with her, it was not for lack of hospitable invitations.
The family next to that of the Dean with which I became closely acquainted and to which I owed most, was that of Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, whose labours (summed up in his own Repression of Crime and in his Biography by his daughters) did more, I believe, than those of any other philanthropist beside Mary Carpenter, to improve the treatment of both adult and juvenile crime in England. I am not competent to offer judgment on the many questions of jurisprudence with which he dealt, but I can well testify to the exceeding goodness of his large heart, the massiveness of his grasp of his subjects, and (never-to-be-forgotten) his most delightful humour. He was a man who from unlucky chances never attained a position commensurate with his abilities and his worth, but who was beloved and admired in no ordinary degree by all who came near him. His family of sons and daughters formed a centre of usefulness in the neighbourhood of Bristol as they have since done in London, where Miss Hill is, I believe, now the senior member of the School Board, while her sister, Miss Florence Davenport Hill, has been equally active as a Poor Law Guardian, and most especially as the promoter of the great and farreaching reform in the management of pauper orphans, known as the system of Boarding-out, of which I have spoken in the last chapter. I must not indulge myself by writing at too great length of such friends, but will insert here a few notes I made of Recorder Hill’s wonderfully interesting conversation during a Christmas visit I paid to him at Heath House.
“Dec. 26th. I spent yesterday and last night with my kind friends the Hills at Heath House. In the evening I drew out the Recorder to speak of questions of evidence, and he told me many remarkable anecdotes in his own practice at the Bar, of doubtful identity, &c. On one occasion a case was tried three times; and he observed how the certainty of the witnesses, the clearness of details, and unhesitating asseveration of facts which at first had been doubtfully stated, grew in each trial. He said ‘the most dangerous of all witnesses are those who honestly give false witness—a most numerous class.’
“To-day he invited me to walk with him on his terrace and up and down the approach. The snow lay thick on the grass, but the sun shone bright, and I walked for more than an hour and a-half beside the dear old man. He told me how he had by degrees learned to distrust all ideas of Retribution, and to believe in the ‘aggressive power of love and kindness,’ (a phrase Lady Byron had liked); and how at last it struck him that all this was in the new Testament; and that few, except religious Christians, ever aided the great causes of philanthropy. I said, it was quite true, Christ had revealed that religion of love; and that there were unhappily very few who, having intellectually doubted the Christian creed, pressed on further to any clear or fervent religion beyond; but that without religion, i.e., love of God, I hardly believed it possible to work for man. He said he had known nearly all the eminent men of his time in every line, and had somehow got close to them, and had never found one of them really believe Christianity. I said, ‘No; no strong intellect of our day could do so, altogether; but that I thought it was faithless in us to doubt that if we pushed bravely on to whatever seemed truth we should there find all the more reason to love God and man, and never lose any real good of Christianity.’ He agreed, but said, ‘You are a watchmaker, I am a weaver; this is your work, I have a different one,—and I cannot afford to part with the Evangelicals, who are my best helpers. Thus though I wholly disagree with them about Sunday I never publish my difference.’ I said I felt the great danger of pushing uneducated people beyond the bounds of an authoritative creed, and for my own part would think it safest that Jowett’s views should prevail for a generation, preparatory to Theism.
“Then we spoke of Immortality, and he expressed himself nobly on the thought that all our differences of rich and poor, wise or ignorant, are lost in comparison of that one fact of our common Immortality. As he said, he felt that waiting a moment jostled in a crowd at a railway station, was a larger point in comparison of his whole life than this life is, to the future. We joined in condemning Emerson and George Eliot’s ideas of the ‘little value’ of ordinary souls. His burst of indignation at her phrase ‘Guano races of men’ was very fine. He said, talking of Reformatories, ‘A century hence,—in 1960,—some people will walk this terrace and talk of the great improvement of the new asylums where hopeless criminals and vicious persons will be permanently consigned. They will not be formally condemned for life, but we shall all know that they will never fulfil the conditions of their release. They will not be made unhappy, but forced to work and kept under strong control; the happiest state for them.’”
Here is a very flattering letter from Mr. Hill written a few years later, on receipt of a copy of my Italics:—
“Although I am kept out of court to-day at the instance of my physician, who threatens me with bronchitis if I do not keep house, yet it has been a day not devoid of much enjoyment. Your charming book which, alas, I have nearly finished, is carrying me through it only too rapidly. What a harvest of observation, thought, reading, and discourse have you brought home from Italy! But I am too much overwhelmed with it to talk much about it, especially in the obfuscated state of my intellect to which I am just now reduced. But I must just tell you how I am amused in midst of my admiration, with your humility as regards your sex; said humility being a cloak which, opening a little at one page, discloses a rich garment of pride underneath (vide page 438 towards the bottom). I say no more, only as I don’t mean to give up the follies of youth for the next eight years, that is until I am eighty, I don’t choose to be called ‘venerable.’ One might as well consent to become an Archdeacon at once!
“Your portraits are delightful, some of the originals I know, and the likeness is good, but alas, idealized!
“To call your book a ‘trifling’ work is just as absurd as to call me ‘venerable.’ It deals nobly, fearlessly, and I will add in many parts profoundly, with the greatest questions that can employ human intellect or touch the human heart, and although I do not always agree with you, I always respect your opinions and learn from the arguments by which they are supported. But certainly in the vast majority of instances I do agree with you, and more than agree, which is a cold, unimpressive term.
“That is to say falsest of woman-kind! You have cruelly jilted me. Florry wrote to say you were coming here as you ought to have done long ago. Well, as your countryman, Ossian, or his double, Macpherson, says, ‘Age is dark and unlovely,’ and therefore the rival of the American Giantess turns a broad back upon me. I must submit to my fall....
“Though I take in the Echo, I have not lately seen any article which I could confidently attribute to your pen.
“I have, however, been much gratified with your article on The Devil, the only writing I ever read on the origin of evil which did not appear to me absolutely contemptible. Talking of these matters, Coleridge said to Thelwall (ex relatione Thelwall), ‘God has all the power that is, but there is no power over a contradiction expressed or implied.’ Your suggestion that the existence of evil is due to contradiction, is, I have no doubt, very just, but my stupid head is this morning quite unable to put on paper what is foggily floating in my mind, and so I leave it.
“I spent a good part of yesterday morning in reading the Westminster Review of Walt Whitman’s works, which quite laid hold of me.
Another interesting person whom I first came to know at Bristol, (where he visited at the Deanery and at Dr. Symonds’ house,) was the late Master of Balliol. I have already cited some kind letters from him referring to our plans for Incurables and Workhouse Girls. I will be vain enough to quote here, with the permission of the friend to whom they were addressed, some of his remarks about my Intuitive Morals and Broken Lights; and also his opinion of Theodore Parker, which will interest many readers:—
“From Rev. Benjamin Jowett.
“I heard of your friend Miss Cobbe the other day at Fulham.... Pray urge her to go on with her books and try to make them more interesting. (This can only be done by throwing more feeling into them and adapting them more to what other people are thinking and feeling about). I am not speaking of changing her ideas, but the mode of expressing them. The great labour of writing is adapting what you say to others. She has great ability, and there is something really fine and striking in her views of things, so that it is worth while she should consider the form of her writings.”...
“Let me pass to a more interesting subject—Miss Cobbe. Since I wrote to you last I have read the greater part of her book” (Intuitive Morals) “which I quite agree with you in thinking full of interest. It shows great power and knowledge of the subject, yet I should fear it would be hardly intelligible to anyone who had not been nourished at some time of their lives on the philosophy of Kant; and also she seems to me to be too exclusive and antagonistic towards other systems—e.g., the Utilitarian. All systems of Philosophy have their place and use, and lay hold on some minds, and therefore though they are not all equally true, it is no use to rail at Bentham and the Utilitarians after the manner of Blackwood’s Magazine. Perhaps, however, Miss Cobbe would retort on me that her attacks on the Utilitarians have their place and their use too; only they were not meant for people who ‘revel in Scepticism’ like me (the Saturday Review says, is it not very Irish of them to say so?) Pray exhort her to write (for it is really worth while) and not to spend her money and time wholly in schemes of philanthropy. For a woman of her ability, writing offers a great field, better in many respects than practical life.”
“A day or two ago I was at Clifton and saw Miss Cobbe, who might be truly described as very ‘jolly.’ I went to a five o’clock tea with her and met various people—an aged physician named Dr. Brabant who about thirty years ago gave up his practice to study Hebrew and became the friend of German Theologians; Miss Blagden, whom you probably know, an amiable lady who has written a novel and is the owner of a little white puppy wearing a scarlet coat; Dr. Goodeve, an Indian Medical Officer; and various others.”...
“Remember me to Miss Cobbe. I hope she gains from you sound notions on Political Economy. I shall always maintain that Philanthropy is intolerable when not based on sound ideas of Political Economy.”
“The articles in the Daily News I did not see. Were they Miss Cobbe’s? I read her paper in Fraser in which the story of the Carnival was extremely well told.”...
“I write to thank you for Miss Cobbe’s pamphlet, which I have read with great pleasure. I think her writing is always good and able. I have never seen Theodore Parker’s works: he was, I imagine, a sort of hero and prophet; but I think I would rather have the Church of England large enough for us all with old memories and feelings, notwithstanding many difficulties and some iniquities, than new systems of Theism.”...
“Miss Cobbe has also kindly sent me a little book called Broken Lights, which appears to me to be extremely good. (I think the title is rather a mistake.) I dare say that you have read the book. The style is excellent, and the moderation and calmness with which the different parties are treated is beyond praise. The only adverse criticism that I should venture to make is that the latter part is too much narrowed to Theodore Parker’s point of view, who was a great man, but too confident, I think, that the world could be held together by spiritual instincts.”
And here are three charming letters from Mr. Jowett to me, one of them in reply to a letter from me from Rome, the others of a later date.
“I write to thank you for the Fraser which I received this morning and have read with great amusement and interest. I think that I should really feel happier living to see the end of the Pope, at least in his present mode of existence.
“I did indeed receive a most capital letter from you with a kind note from Miss Elliot. And ‘I do remember me of my faults this day.’ The truth is that being very busy with Plato (do you know the intolerable burden of writing a fat book in two vols.?) I put off answering the letters until I was not quite certain whether the kind writers of them were still at Rome. I thought the Plato would have been out by this time, but this was only one of the numerous delusions in which authors indulge. The notes, however, are really finished, and the Essays will be done in a few months. I suspect you can read Greek, and shall therefore hope to send you a copy.
“I was always inclined to think well of the Romans from their defence of Rome in 1848, and their greatness and strength really does seem to show that they mean to be the centre of a great nation.
“Will you give my very kind regards to the Elliots? I should write to them if I knew exactly where: I hear that the Dean is transformed into a worshipper of the Virgin and of other pictures of the Saints.[17]
“I shall certainly read your paper on Political Economy. Political Economy seems to me in this imperfect world to be Humanity on a large scale (though not the whole of humanity). And I am always afraid of it being partially supplanted by humanity on the small scale, which relieves one-sixth of the poor whom we see, and pauperizes the mind of five-sixths whom we don’t see.
“I won’t trouble you with any more reflections on such an old subject. Remember me most kindly to the Dean and his daughters. I was going to send him a copy of the Articles against Dr. Williams. But upon second thoughts, I won’t. It is such an ungracious, unsavoury matter. I hope that he won’t give up the Prolocutorship, or that, if he does, he will state boldly his reasons for doing so. It is true that neither he nor anyone can do much good there. But the mere fact of a great position in the Church of England being held by a liberal clergyman is of great importance.
“I should have much liked to go to Rome this winter. But I am so entangled, first, with Plato, and, second, with the necessity of getting rid of Plato and writing something on Theology, that I do not feel justified in leaving my work. The vote of last Tuesday deferring indefinitely the endowment of my Professorship makes me feel that life is becoming a serious business to me. Not that I complain; the amount of sympathy and support which I have received has been enough to sustain anyone, if they needed it, (you should have seen an excellent squib written by a young undergraduate). But my friends are sanguine in imagining they will succeed hereafter. Next year it is true that they probably will get a small majority in Congregation. This, however, is of no use, as the other party will always bring up the country clergy in Convocation. I have, therefore, requested Dr. Stanley to take no further steps in the Council on the subject; it seems to me undignified to keep the University squabbling about my income.
“Excuse this long story which is partly suggested by your kind letter. I hope you will enjoy Rome. With sincere regard,
“I write to thank you for your very kind note. I am much more pleased at the rejoicings of my friends than at the result which has been so long delayed as to be almost indifferent to me. I used to be annoyed at feeling that I was such a bad example to young men, because they saw, as they were intended to see, that unless they concealed their opinions they would suffer. I hope they will have more cheerful prospects now.
“I trust that some day I shall be able to write something more on Theology. But the Plato has proved an enormous work, having expanded into a sort of translation of the whole of the Dialogues. I believe this will be finished and printed about Christmas, but not before.
“I have been sorry to hear of your continued illness. When I come to London I shall hope to look in upon you in Hereford Square.
“I read a book of Theodore Parker’s the other day—‘Discourses on Religion.’ He was a friend of yours, I believe? I admire his character—a sort of religious Titan. But I thought his philosophy seemed to rest too much on instincts.”
How much Mr. Jowett had to bear from the animosity of his orthodox contemporaries in the Sixties at Oxford was illustrated by the following incident. I was, one day about this time, showing his photograph to a lady, when her son, late from Oxford, came into the room with a dog at his heels. Seeing the photograph, he remarked, “Ah, yes! very like. This dog pinned him in quod one day, and was made so much of afterwards! The Dean of —— especially invited him” (the dog) “to lunch. Jowett complained of me, and I had to send all my dogs out of Oxford!”
The following is a Note which I made of two of his visits to me on Durdham Down:
“Two visits from Mr. Jowett, who each time drank tea with me. He said he felt writing to be a great labour; but regularly wrote one page every day. The liberal, benevolent way he spoke of all creeds was delightful. In particular he spoke of the temptation to Pantheism and praised Hegel, whom, he said, he had studied deeply. Advising me kindly to go on writing books, he maintained against me the vast power of books in the world.”
Mr. Jowett was, of course, at all times a most interesting personality, and one whose intercourse was delightful and highly exciting to the intellect. But his excessive shyness, combined with his faculty for saying exceedingly sharp things, must have precluded, I should think, much ease of conversation between him and the majority of his friends. As usually happens in the case of shy people, he exhibited rather less of the characteristic with an acquaintance like myself who was never shy (my mother’s training saved me from that affliction!) and who was not at all afraid of him.
In later years Mr. Jowett obtained for me (in 1876) the signatures of the Heads of every College in Oxford to a Petition which I had myself written, to the House of Lords in favour of Lord Carnarvon’s original Bill for the restriction of Vivisection. At a later date the Master of Balliol declined to support me further in the agitation for the prohibition of the practice; referring me to the assurances of a certain eminent Boanerges of Science as guarantee for the necessity of the practice and the humanity of vivisectors. It is very surprising to me how good and strong men, who would disdain to accept a religious principle or dogma from pope or Council, will take a moral one without hesitation from any doctor or professor of science who may lay down the law for them, and present the facts so as to make the scale turn his way. Where would Protestant divines be, if they squared their theologies with all the historical statements and legends of Romanism? If we construct our ethical judgments upon the statements and representations of persons interested in maintaining a practice, what chance is there that they should be sound?
I find, in a letter to a friend (dated May, 1868) the following souvenir of a sermon by Mr. Jowett, delivered in a church near Soho:—
“We went to that sermon on Sunday. It was really very fine and very bold; much better than the report in the Pall Mall Gazette made it. Mr. Albert D—— was there, but few else who looked as if they could understand him. He has a good voice and delivery, and the “cherubic” countenance and appealing eyes suit the pulpit; but he looks at one as I never knew any preacher do. We sat close to him, and it was as if we were in a drawing-room. M. says that all the first part was taken from my Broken Lights; that is,—it was a sketch of existing opinions on the same plan. It was good when he said:
“The High church watchword is: The Church; always and ever the same.
“The Low church watchword is: The Bible only the Religion of Protestants.
“The party of Knowledge has for its principle: ‘The Truth ever and always, and wherever it be found.’
“He gave each their share of praise and blame, saying: ‘the fault of the last party’ (his own, of course) was—that ‘sometimes in the pursuit of Knowledge they forgot Goodness.’”
I heard him preach more than once afterwards in the same gloomy old church. His aspect in his surplice was exceedingly quaint. His face, even in old age, was like that of an innocent, round-faced child; and his short, slender figure, wrapped in the long white garment, irresistibly suggested to me the idea of “an elderly cherub prepared for bed”! Altogether, taking into account his entire career, the Master of Balliol was an unique figure in English life, whom I much rejoice to have known; a modern Melchisedek.
Here is another memorandum about the same date, respecting another eminent man, interesting in another way:—
“Sept. 25th, 1860. A pleasant evening at Canon Guthrie’s. Introduced to old Lord Lansdowne; a gentle, courteous old man with deep-set, faded grey eyes, and heavy eyebrows; a blue coat and brass buttons! In the course of the evening I was carrying on war in a corner of the room against the Dean of Bristol, Mr. C—— and Margaret Elliot, about Toryism. I argued that if Justice to all were the chief end of Government, the power should be lodged in the hands of the class who best understood Justice; and that the consequence of the opposite course was manifest in America, where the freest government which had ever existed, supported also the most gigantic of all wrongs—Slavery. On this Countess Rothkirch who sat by, clapped her hands with joy; and the Dean came down on me saying, ‘That if power should only be given to those who would use it justly, then the Tories should never have any power at all; for they never used it justly.’ Hearing the laughter at my discomfiture, Lord Lansdowne toddled across the room and sat down beside me saying: ‘What is it all about?’ I cried: ‘Oh Lord Lansdowne! you are the very person in the whole world to help me—I am defending Tory principles!’ He laughed heartily, and said ‘I am afraid I can hardly do that.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘you may be converted at the eleventh hour!’ ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘what a child asked her mother: “Are Tories born wicked, mother, or do they only become so?”’ Margaret said this was really asked by a cousin of her own, one of the Adam family. It ended in much laughter and talking about ‘Transformation,’ and the ‘Semi-attached Couple‘—which Lord Lansdowne said he was just reading. ‘I like novels very much,’ he said, ‘only I take a little time between each of them.’ When I got up to go away the kind old man rose in the most courtly way to shake hands, and paid me a little old-world compliment.”
This was the eloquent statesman and patron of literature, Henry, third Marquis of Lansdowne, in whose time his house, (Bowood,) was the resort of the finest intellectual society of England. I have a droll letter in my possession referring to this Bowood society, by Sydney Smith, written to Mrs. Kemble, then Mrs. Butler. It has come to me with all her other papers and with seven letters from Lord Lansdowne pressing her to pay him visits. Sydney Smith writes on his invitation to her to come to Combe Fleury; after minute directions about the route:—
“The interval between breakfast and dinner brings you to Combe Fleury. We are the next stage (to Bowood). Lord Lansdowne’s guests commonly come here dilated and disordered with high living.”
In another letter conveying a similar invitation he says, with his usual bitterness and injustice as regards America:
“Be brave my dear lady. Hoist the American flag. Barbarise your manners. Dissyntax your language. Fling a thick mantle over your lively spirits, and become the fust of American women. You will always remain a bright vision in my recollection. Do not forget me. Call me Butler’s Hudibras. Any appellation provided I am not forgotten.”
Among the residents in Clifton and at Stoke Bishop over the Downs I had many kind friends, some of whom helped me essentially in my work by placing tickets for hospitals and money in my hands for the poor. One of these whom I specially recall with gratitude was that ever zealous moral reformer, Mrs. Woolcott Browne, who is still working bravely with her daughter for many good causes in London. I must not write here without permission of the many others whose names have not come before the public, but whose affectionate consideration made my life very pleasant, and whom I ever remember with tender regard. Of one excellent couple I may venture to speak,—Dr. and Mrs. Goodeve of Cook’s Folly. Mrs. Goodeve herself told me their singular and beautiful story, and since she and her husband are now both dead, I think I may allow myself to repeat it.
Dr. Goodeve was a young medical man who had just married, and was going out to seek his fortune in India, having no prospects in England. As part of their honeymoon holiday the young couple went to visit Cook’s Folly; then a small, half-ruinous, castellated building, standing in a spot of extraordinary beauty over the Avon, looking down the Bristol Channel. As they were descending the turret-stair and taking, as they thought, a last look on the loveliness of England, the young wife perceived that her husband’s head was bent down in deep depression. She laid her hand on his shoulder and whispered “Never mind, Harry? You shall make a fortune in India and we will come back and buy Cook’s Folly.”
They went to Calcutta and were there most kindly received by a gentleman named Hurry, who edited a newspaper and whose own history had been strange and tragic. Started in his profession by his interest, Dr. Goodeve soon fell into good practice, and by degrees became a very successful physician, the founder (I believe) of the existing Medical College of Calcutta. Going on a shooting party, his face was most terribly shattered by a chance shot which threatened to prove mortal, but Mrs. Goodeve, without help or appliances, alone with him in a tent in a wild district, pulled him back to life. At last they returned to England, wealthy and respected by all, and bringing a splendid collection of Indian furniture and curios. The very week they landed, Cook’s Folly was advertised to be sold! They remembered it well,—went to see it,—bought it—and rebuilded it; making it a most charming and beautiful house. A peculiarity of its structure as remodelled by them was, that there was an entire suite of rooms,—a large library overlooking the river Avon, bedroom, bathroom and servant’s room,—all capable of being shut off from the rest of the house, by double doors, so that the occupant might be quite undisturbed. When everything was finished, and splendidly furnished, the Goodeves wrote to Mr. Hurry: “It is time for you to give up your paper and come home. You acted a father’s part to us when we went out first to India. Now come to us, and live as with your son and daughter.”
Mr. Hurry accepted the invitation and found waiting for him and his Indian servant the beautiful suite of rooms built for him, and the tenderest welcome. I saw him often seated by their fireside just as a father might have been. When the time came for him to die, Mrs. Goodeve nursed him with such devoted care, and strained herself so much in lifting and helping him, that her own health was irretrievably injured, and she died not long afterwards.
I could write more of Bristol and Clifton friends, high and low, but must draw this chapter of my life to a close. I went to Bristol an utter stranger, knowing no human being there. I left it after a few years all peopled, as it seemed to me, with kind souls; and without one single remembrance of anything else but kindness received there either from gentle or simple.