When we had settled down, as we did rapidly, into our pretty little house in South Kensington, we began soon to enjoy many social pleasures of a quiet kind. Into Society (with a big S!), we had no pretensions to enter, but we had many friends, very genuine and delightful ones, ere long; and a great many interesting acquaintances. Happily death has spared not a few of these until now, and, of course, of them I shall not write here; but of some of those who have “gone over to the majority” I shall venture to record my recollections, interspersed in some cases with their letters. I may premise that we were much given to dining out, but not to attending late evening parties; and that in our small way we gave little dinners now and then, and occasionally afternoon and evening parties,—the former held sometimes in summer under the lime trees behind our house. I attribute my long retention of good health to my persistence in going to bed before eleven o’clock, and never accepting late invitations.

I hope I shall be acquitted of the presumption of pretending to offer in the scrappy souvenirs I shall now put together any important contribution to the memoirs of the future. At best, a woman’s knowledge of the eminent men whom she only meets at dinner parties, and perhaps in occasional quiet afternoon visits, is not to be compared to that of their associates in their clubs, in Parliament and in all the work of the world. Nevertheless as all of us, human beings, resemble diamonds in having several distinct facets to our characters, and as we always turn one of these to one person and another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem. The relation too, which a good and kindly man (and such I am happy to say were most of my acquaintances) bears to a woman who is neither his mother, sister, daughter, wife or potential wife, but merely a reasonably intelligent listener and companion of restful hours, is so different from that which he holds to his masculine fellow-workers,—rivals, allies or enemies as they may be,—that it can rarely happen but that she sees him in quite a different light from theirs. Englishmen are not eaten up with Invidia, like Italians and Frenchmen, such as made D’ Azeglio say to me that it was a positive danger to a statesman to win a battle, or gain a diplomatic triumph, so much envy did it excite among his own party. In our country, men, and still more emphatically, women, glory enthusiastically in the successes of their friends, if not of others. But the masculine mind, so far as I have got to the bottom of it, (as George Eliot says, “it is always so superior—what there is of it!”), is not so quick in gathering impressions of character as ours of the softer (and therefore, I suppose, more waxlike) sex; and when fifty men have said their say on a great man I should always wish to hear also what the women who knew him socially had to add to their testimony. In short, dear Fanny Kemble’s “Old Woman’s Gossip” seems to me admissible on the subject of the character and “little ways” of everybody worthy of record.

It was certainly an advantage to us in London to be, as we were, without any kind of ulterior aim or object in meeting our friends and acquaintances, beyond the pleasure of the hour. We never had anything in view in the way of social ambition; not even daughters to bring out! It was not “de l’Art pour l’Art,” but la Société pour la Société, and nothing beyond the amusement of the particular day and the interest of the acquaintanceships we had the good fortune to make. We had no rank or dignity of any kind to keep up. I think hardly any of our friends and habitués even knew who we were, from Burke’s point of view! I was really pleased once, after I had been living for years in London, to find at a large dinner-party, where at least half the company were my acquaintances, that not one present suspected that I had any connection with Ireland at all. Our host (a very prominent M.P. at the time) having by chance elicited from me some information on Irish affairs, asked me, “What do you know about Ireland?” “Simply that the first 36 years of my life were spent there,” was my reply; which drew forth a general expression of surprise. The few who had troubled themselves to think who I was, had taken it for granted that I belonged to a family of the same name, minus the final letter, in Oxfordshire. In a country neighbourhood the one prominent fact about me, known and repeated to everyone, would have been that I was the daughter of Charles Cobbe of Newbridge. I was proud to be accepted and, I hope, liked, on the strength of my own talk and books, not on that of my father’s acres.

We did not (of course) live in London all the year round, but came every summer to Wales to enable my friend to look after her estate; and I went every two or three years to Ireland, and more frequently to the houses of my two brothers in England,—Maulden Rectory, in Bedfordshire, and Easton Lyss, near Petersfield,—where they respectively lived, and where both they and their wives were always ready to welcome me affectionately. I also paid occasional visits at two or three country houses, notably Broadlands and Aston Clinton, where I was most kindly invited by the beloved owners; and twice or three times we let our house for a term, and went to live on one occasion in Cheyne Walk, and another time at Byfleet. We always fell back, however, on our dear little house in Hereford Square, till we let it finally to our old friend Mrs. Kemble, and left London for good in the spring of 1884.

I think the first real acquaintances we made in London (whether through Mrs. Somerville or otherwise I cannot recall) were Sir Charles and Lady Lyell, and their brother and sister, Col. and Mrs. Lyell. The house, No. 73, Harley Street—in after years noticeable by its bright blue door, (so painted to catch Sir Charles’ fading eyesight on his return from his daily walks), became very dear to us, and I confess to a pang when it was taken by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone after the death of our dear old friends. Like Lord Shaftesbury’s house in Grosvenor Square, pulled down after his death and replaced by a brand new mansion in the latest Londonesque architecture, there was a “bad-dreaminess” about both transformation scenes. The Lyells regularly attended Mr. Martineau’s chapel in Little Portland Street, as we did; and ere long it became a habit for us to adjourn after the service to Harley Street and spend some of the afternoon with our friends, discussing the large supply of mental food which our pastor never failed to lay before us. Those were never-to-be-forgotten Sundays.

Sir Charles Lyell realised to my mind the Man of Science as he was of old; devout, and yet entirely free-thinking in the true sense; filled with admiring, almost adoring love for Nature, and also (all the more for that enthusiasm), simple and fresh-hearted as a child. When a good story had tickled him he would come and tell it to us with infinite relish. I recollect especially his delight in an American boy (I think somehow connected with our friend Mr. Herman Merivale), who, being directed to say his prayers night and morning, replied that he had no objection to do so at night, but thought that “a boy who is worth anything can take care of himself by day.”^[21] Another time we had been discussing Evolution, and some of us had betrayed the impression that the doctrine, (which he had then recently adopted), involved always the survival of the best, as well as of the “fittest.” Sir Charles left the room and went downstairs, but suddenly rushed back into the drawing-room, and said to me all in a breath, standing on the rug: “I’ll explain it to you in one minute! Suppose you had been living in Spain three hundred years ago, and had had a sister who was a perfectly common-place person, and believed everything she was told. Well! your sister would have been happily married and had a numerous progeny, and that would have been the survival of the fittest; but you would have been burnt at an auto-da-fè, and there would have been an end of you. You would have been unsuited to your environment. There! that’s Evolution! Good-bye!” On went his hat, and we heard the hall door close after him before we had done laughing.

Sir Charles’ interest in his own particular science was eager as that of a boy. One day I had a long conversation with him at his brother, Colonel Lyell’s hospitable house, on the subject of the Glacial period. He told me that he was employing regular calculators at Greenwich to make out the results of the ice-cap and how it would affect land and sea; whether it would cause double tides, &c. He said he had pointed out (what no one else had noticed) that the water to form this ice-cap did not come from another planet, but must have been deducted from the rest of the water on the globe. Another day I met him at a very imposing private concert in Regent’s Park. The following is my description of our conversation in a letter to my friend, Miss Elliot:—

“Sir Charles sat beside me yesterday at a great musical party at the D.’s, and I asked him, ‘Did he like music?’ He said, ‘Yes! for it allowed him to go on thinking his own thoughts.’ And so he evidently did, while they were singing Mendelssohn and Handel! At every interval he turned to me. ‘Agassiz has made a discovery. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. He finds traces of the Glaciers in tropical America.’ (Here intervened a sacred song.) ‘Well, as I was saying, you know 230,000 years ago the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at one of its maximum periods; and we were 11,000,000 miles further from the sun in winter, and the cold of those winters must have been intense; because heat varies, not according to direct ratio, but the squares of the distances.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘but then the summers were as much hotter?’ (Sacred song.) ‘No, the summers wern’t! They could not have conquered the cold.’ ‘Then you think that the astronomical 230,000 years corresponded with the glacial period? Is that time enough for all the strata since?’ (Handel.) ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we must go back to the still greater period of the eccentricity of the orbit three million years ago. Then we were 14 millions of miles out of the circular path.’ (Mendelssohn.) ‘Good-bye, dear Sir Charles—I must be off.’

“Another day last week, he came and sat with me for two hours. I would not light candles, and we got very deep into talk. I was greatly comforted and instructed by all he said. I asked him how the modern attacks on the argument from Design in Nature, and Darwin’s views, touched him religiously? He replied, ‘Not at all.’ He thought the proofs in Nature of the Divine Goodness quite triumphant; and that he watched with secret pleasure even sceptical men of science whenever they forget their theories, instinctively using phrases, all implying designing wisdom.”

I remember on another occasion Sir Charles telling me with much glee of two eminent Agnostic friends of ours who had been discussing some question for a long time, when one said to the other, “You are getting very teleological!” To which the friend responded, “I can’t help it!”

At another of his much prized visits to me (April 19th, 1866) he spoke earnestly of the future life, and made this memorable remark of which I took a note: “The further I advance in science, the less the mere physical difficulties in believing in immortality disturb me. I have learned to think nothing too amazing to be within the order of Nature.”

The great inequalities in the conditions of men and the sufferings of many seemed to be his strongest reasons for believing in another life. He added: “Aristotle says that every creature has its instincts given by its Creator, and each instinct leads to its good. Now the belief in immortality is an instinct tending to good.”

After the death of his beloved wife—the truest “helpmeet” ever man possessed—he became even more absorbed in the problem of a future existence, and very frequently came and talked with me on the subject. The last time I had a real conversation with him was not long before his death, when we met one sweet autumn day by chance in Regent’s Park, not far from the Zoological Gardens. We sat down under a tree and had a long discussion of the validity of religious faith. I think his argument culminated in this position:—

“The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though liable to err, are true in the main, and point to real objects. The religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger; and is, to-day, more developed among the highest races than ever it was before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great truth.”

Here is another glimpse of him from a letter:—

“After service I went to Harley Street, Sir Charles, I thought, looking better than for a long time. He thinks the caves of Aurignac can never be used as evidence; the witnesses were all tampered with from the first. He saw a skeleton found at Mentone 15 feet deep, which he thinks of the same age as the Gibraltar caves. The legs were distinctly platycnemic, and there was also a curious process on the front of the shoulder—like the breast of a chicken. The skull was full-sized and good. I asked him how he accounted for the fact that with the best will in the world we could not find the least difference between the most ancient skulls and our own? He said the theory had been suggested that all the first growth went to brain, so that very early men acquired large brains, as was necessary. This is not very Darwinian, is it?”

It is the destiny of all books of Science to be soon superseded and superannuated, while those of Literature may live for all time. I suppose Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology has undergone, or will undergo, this fate ere long; but the magnanimity and candour which made him, in issuing the 10th edition of that book, abjure all his previous arguments against Evolution and candidly own himself Darwin’s convert, was an evidence of genuine loyalty to truth which I trust can never be quite forgotten. He was, as Prof. Huxley called him, the “greatest Geologist of his day,”—the man “who found Geology an infant science feebly contending for a few scattered truths, and left it a giant, grasping all the ages of the past.” But to my memory he will always be something more than an eminent man of Science. He was the type of what such men ought to be; with the simplicity, humility and gentleness which should be characteristic of the true student of Nature. Of the priestlike arrogance of some representatives of the modern scientific spirit he had not a taint. In one of his last letters to me, he said:

“I am told that the same philosophy which is opposed to a belief in a future state undertakes to prove that every one of our acts and thoughts are the necessary result of antecedent events, and conditions and that there can be no such thing as Free-will in man. I am quite content that both doctrines should stand on the same foundation; for as I cannot help being convinced that I have the power of exerting Free-will, however great a mystery the possibility of this may be, so the continuance of a spiritual life may be true, however inexplicable or incapable of proof.

“I am told by some that if any of our traditionary beliefs make us happier and lead us to estimate humanity more highly, we ought to be careful not to endeavour to establish any scientific truths which would lessen and lower our estimate of Man’s place in Nature; in short, we should do nothing to disturb any man’s faith, if it be a delusion which increases his happiness.

“But I hope and believe that the discovery and propagation of every truth, and the dispelling of every error tends to improve and better the condition of man, though the act of reforming old opinions causes so much pain and misery.”

It will give me pleasure if these few reminiscences of my honoured friend send fresh readers to his excellent and spirited biography by his sister-in-law Mrs. Lyell, Lady Lyell’s sister, who was also his brother, Colonel Lyell’s wife; the mother of Sir Leonard Lyell, M.P.

I saw a great deal of Dr. Colenso during the years he spent in England; I think about 1864–5. He lived near us in a small house in Sussex Place, Glo’ster Road (not Sussex Place, Onslow Square), where his large family of sons and daughters practised the piano below stairs and produced detonations with chemicals above, while visitors called incessantly, interrupting his arduous and anxious studies! He was in all senses an iron-grey man. Iron-grey hair, pale, strong face, fine but somewhat rigid figure, a powerful, strong-willed, resolute man, if ever there were one, and an honest one also, if such there have been on earth. His friend, Sir George W. Cox, who I may venture to call mine also, has, in his admirable biography, printed the three most important letters which the Bishop of Natal wrote to me, and I can add nothing to Sir George’s just estimate of the character of this modern Confessor. I will give here, however, another letter I received from him at the very beginning of our intercourse, when I had only met him once (at Dr. Carpenter’s table); and also a record in a letter to a friend of a tête-à-tête conversation with him, further on. I have always thought that he made a mistake in returning to Natal, and that his true place would have been at the head of a Christian-Theistic Church in London:—

“I thank you sincerely for your letter, and for the volume which you have sent me. I have read the preface with the deepest interest—and heartily respond to every word which you have written in it. A friend at the Cape had lent me a German edition of De Wette, which I had consulted carefully. But, about a fortnight ago, a lady, till then a stranger to me, sent me a copy of Parker’s Edition. I value it most highly for the sake both of the Author’s and Editor’s share in it. But the criticism of the present day goes, if I am not mistaken, considerably beyond even De Wette’s, in clearing up the question of the Age and Authorship of the different parts of the Pentateuch. I shall carefully consider the Tables of Elohistic and Jehovistic portions, as given in De Wette; but, in many important respects, my conclusions will be found to differ from his, and, as I think, upon certain grounds. De W. leant too much to the judgment of Stäbelin.

“The above, however, is the only one of Th. Parker’s works, which has yet come into my hands, till the arrival of your book this morning. When I repeat that every word of your Preface went to my very heart—and that many of them drew the tears from my eyes and the prayer from my heart that God would grant me grace to be in any degree a follower of the noble brother whose life you have sketched, and whose feet have already trodden the path, which now lies open before me—you will believe that I shall not leave long the rest of the volume unread. But, whatever I may find there, your Preface will give comfort and support to thousands, if only they can be brought to read it. Would it not be possible to have it printed separate, as a cheap Tract? It would have the effect of recommending the book itself, and Parker’s works, generally, to multitudes, who might otherwise not have them brought under their notice effectively? I think if largely circulated it might help materially the progress of the great work, in which I am now engaged.

“You will allow me, I hope, to have the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with you, by making a call upon you before long—and may I bring with me Mrs. Colenso, who will be very glad to see you?

“Please accept a copy of my ‘Romans,’ which Macmillan will send you. The spirit of it will remain, I trust, abiding, though much of the letter must now be changed.”

Writing of Dr. Colenso to a friend in February, 1865, I said:—

“I never felt for him so much as last night. We came to talk on what we felt at standing so much alone; and he said that when the extent of his discoveries burst on him he felt as if he had received a paralyzing electric shock. A London clergyman wrote to him the other day to give him solemn warning that he had led one of his parishioners to destruction and drunkenness. Colenso answered him, that ‘it was not he who led men to doubt of God and duty, but those teachers who made them rest their faith on God and Duty on a foundation of falsehood which every new wave of thought was sweeping away.’ The clergyman seems to have been immensely dumbfounded by this reply.”

Another most interesting man whom I met at Dr. Carpenter’s table was Charles Kingsley.

One day, while I was still a miserable cripple, I went to dine in Regent’s Park and came rather late into a drawing-room full of company, supported by what my maid called my “best crutches!” The servant did not know me, and announced “Miss Cobble.” I corrected her loudly enough for the guests to hear, in that moment of pause: “No! Miss Hobble!” There was of course a laugh, and from the little crowd rushed forward to greet me with both hands extended, a tall, slender, stooping figure with that well-known face so full of feeling and tenderness—Charles Kingsley. “At last, Miss Cobbe, at last we meet,” he said, and a moment later gave me his arm to dinner. This greeting touched me, for we had exchanged, as theological opponents, some tolerably sharp blows for years before, but his large, noble nature harboured no spark of resentment. We talked all dinner-time and a good deal in the evening, and then he offered to escort me home to South Kensington—a proposal which I greedily accepted, but, somehow, when he found that I had a brougham, and was not going in miscellaneous vehicles (in my best evening toggery!) from one end of London to the other at night, he retracted, and could not be induced to come with me. We met, however, not unfrequently afterwards, and I always felt much attracted to him; as did, I may mention, my friend’s little fox terrier, who, travelling one day with her mistress in the Underground, spied Kingsley entering the carriage, and incontinently leaving her usual safe retreat under the seat made straight to him, and without invitation, leaped on his knee and began gently kissing his face! The dog never did the same or anything like it to any one else in her life before or afterwards. Of course, my friend apologised to Mr. Kingsley, but he only said in his deep voice, “Dogs always do that to me,”—and coaxed the little beast kindly, till they left the train.

The last time I saw Canon Kingsley was one day late in the autumn some months before he died. Somebody who, I thought, he would like to meet was coming to dine with me at short notice, and I went to Westminster in the hope of catching him and persuading him to come without losing time by sending notes. The evening was closing, and it was growing very dark in the cloisters, where I was seeking his door, when I saw a tall man, strangely bent, coming towards me, evidently seeing neither me nor anything else, and absorbed in some most painful thought. His whole attitude and countenance expressed grief amounting to despair. So terrible was it that I felt it an intrusion on a sacred privacy to have seen it; and would fain have hidden myself, but this was impossible where we were standing at the moment. When he saw me he woke out of his reverie with a start, pulled himself together, shook hands, and begged me to come into his house; which of course I did not do. He had an engagement which prevented him from meeting my guest (I think it must have been Keshub Chunder Sen), and I took myself off as quickly as possible. I have often wondered what dreadful thought was occupying his mind when I caught sight of him that day in the gloomy old cloisters of Westminster in the autumn twilight.

The quotation made a few pages back of Sir Charles Lyell’s observations on belief in Immortality reminds me that I repeated them soon after he had made them, to another great man whom it was my privilege to know—John Stuart Mill. We were spending an afternoon with him and Miss Helen Taylor at Blackheath; and a quiet conversation between Mr. Mill and myself having reached this subject, I told him of what Sir C. Lyell had said. In a moment the quick blood suffused his cheeks and something very like tears were in his eyes. The question, it was plain, touched his very heart. This wonderful sensitiveness of a man generally supposed to be “dry” and devoted to the driest studies, struck me, I think, more than anything about him. His special characteristic was extreme delicacy of feeling; and this showed itself, singularly enough, for a man advanced in life, in transparency of skin, and changes of colour and expression as rapid as those in a mountain lake when the clouds shift over it. When Watts painted his fine portrait of him, he failed to notice this peculiarity of his thin and delicate skin, and gave him the common thick, muddy complexion of elderly Englishmen. The result is that the èthos of the face is missing—just as in the case of the portrait of Dr. Martineau he is represented with weak, sloping shoulders and narrow chest. The look of power which essentially belongs to him is not to be seen. I remarked when I saw this picture first exhibited: “I should never have ‘sat under’ that Dr. Martineau!” Mill and I, of course, met in deep sympathy on the Woman question; and he did me the honour to present me with a copy of his “Subjection of Women” on its publication. He tried to make me write and speak more on the subject of Women’s Claims, and used jestingly to say that my laugh was worth—I forget how much!—to the cause. I insert a letter from him showing the minute care he took about matters hardly worthy of his attention.

“I have lately received communication from the American publisher Putnam, requesting me to write for their Magazine, and I understand that they would be very glad if you would write anything for them, more especially on the Women question, on which the Magazine (a new one) has shown liberal tendencies from the first. The communications I have received have been through Mrs. Hooker, sister of Mrs. Stowe and Dr. Ward Beecher, and herself the author of two excellent articles in the Magazine on the suffrage question, by which we had been much struck before we knew the authorship. I enclose Mrs. Hooker’s last letter to me, and I send by post copies of Mrs. Hooker’s articles and some old numbers of the Magazine, the only ones we have here; and I shall be very happy if I should be the medium of inducing you to write on this question for the American public.

“My daughter desires to be kindly remembered, and I am,

“P.S.—May I ask you to be so kind as to forward Mrs. Hooker’s letter to Mrs. P. A. Taylor, as she will see by it that Mrs. Hooker has no objection to put her name to a reprint of her articles.”

There never was a more unassuming philosopher than Mr. Mill, just as there never was a more unassuming poet than Mr. Browning. All the world knows how Mr. Mill strove to give to his wife the chief credit of his works; and, after her death, his attitude towards her daughter, who was indeed a daughter also to him, was beautiful to witness, and a fine exemplification of his own theories of the rightful position of women. He was, however, equally unpretentious as regarded men. Talking one day about the difficulty of doing mental work when disturbed by street music, and of poor Mr. Babbage’s frenzy on the subject, Mr. Mill said it did not much interfere with him. I told him how intensely Mr. Spencer objected to disturbance. “Ah yes; of course! writing Spencer’s works one must want quiet!” As if nothing of the kind were needed for such trivial books as his own System of Logic, or Political Economy! He really was quite unconscious of the irony of his remark. I have been told that he would allow his cat to interfere sadly with his literary occupation when she preferred to lie on his table, or sometimes on his neck,—a trait like that of Newton and his “Diamond.” This extreme gentleness is ever, surely a note of the highest order of men.

Here are extracts from letters concerning Mr. Mill, which I wrote to Miss Elliot in August, 1869. I believe I had been to Brighton and met Mr. Mill there.

“We talked of many grave things, and in everything his love of right and his immense underlying faith impressed me more than I can describe. I asked him what he thought of coming changes, and he entirely agreed with me about their danger, but thought that the mischief they will entail must be but temporary. He thought the loss of Reverence unspeakably deplorable, but an inevitable feature of an age of such rapid transition that the son does actually outrun the father. He added that he thought even the most sceptical of men generally had an inner altar to the Unseen Perfection while waiting for the true one to be revealed to them. In a word the ‘dry old philosopher’ showed himself to me as an enthusiast in faith and love. The way in which he seemed to have thought out every great question and to express his own so modestly and simply, and yet in such clear-cut outlines, was most impressive. I felt (what one so seldom does!) the delightful sense of being in communication with a mind deeper than one would reach the end of, even after a lifetime of intercourse. I never felt the same, so strongly, except towards Mr. Martineau; and though the forms of his creed and philosophy are, I think, infinitely truer than those of Mill (not to speak of the feelings one has for the man whose prayers one follows), I think it is more in form than in spirit that the two men are distinguished. The one has only an ‘inner,’ the other has an outward ‘altar;’ but both kneel at them.”

A month or two earlier in the same year I wrote to the same friend:—

“Last night I sat beside Mr. Mill at dinner and enjoyed myself exceedingly. He is looking old and worn, and the nervous twitchings of his face are painful to see, but he is so thoroughly genial and gentlemanly, and laughs so heartily at one’s little jokes, and keeps up an argument with so much play and good humour, that I never enjoyed my dinner-neighbourhood more. Mr. Fawcett was objurgating some M.P. for taking office, and said: ‘When I see Tories rejoice, I know it must be an injury to the Liberal Cause.’ ‘Do you never, then, feel a qualm,’ I said, ‘all you Liberal gentlemen, when you see the priests rejoice at what you have just done in Ireland? Do you reflect whether that is likely to be an injury to the Liberal Cause?’ The observation somehow fell like a bomb; (the entire company, as I remember, were Radicals, our host being Mr. P. A. Taylor). For two minutes there was a dead silence. Then Mrs. Taylor said: ‘Ah, Miss Cobbe is a bitter Conservative!’ ‘Not a bitter one,’ said Mr. Mill. ‘Miss Cobbe is a Conservative. I am sorry for it; but Miss Cobbe is never bitter.’”

It has been a constant subject of regret to me that Mr. Mill’s intention (communicated to me by Miss Taylor) of spending the ensuing summer holiday in Wales, on purpose to be near us, was frustrated by his illness and death. How much pleasure and instruction I should have derived from his near neighbourhood there is no need to say.

A friend of Mr. Mill for whom I had great regard was Prof. Cairnes. He underwent treatment at Aix-les-Bains at the same time as I; and we used to while away our long hours by interminable discussions, principally concerning ethics, a subject on which Mr. Cairnes took the Utilitarian side, and I, of course, that of the school of Independent Morality (i.e., of Morality based on other grounds than Utility). He was an ardent disciple of Mill, but his extreme candour caused him to admit frankly that the “mystic extension” of the idea of Usefulness into Right, was unaccountable, or at least unaccounted for; and that when we had proved an act to be pre-eminently useful and likely to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” there yet remained the question for each of us, “Why should I perform that useful action, if it cost me a moment’s pain?” To find the answer (he admitted) we must fall back on an inward “Categoric imperative,” “ought;” and having done so, (I argued,) we must thenceforth admit that the basis of Morality rests on something beside Utility. All these controversies are rather bygone now, since we have been confronted with “hereditary sets of the brain.” I think it was in these discussions with Prof. Cairnes that I struck out what several friends (among others Lord Arthur Russell) considered an “unanswerable” argument against the Utilitarian philosophy; it ran thus:

“Mr. Mill has nobly said, that,—if an Almighty Tyrant were to order him to worship him and threaten to send him to hell if he refused, then, sooner than worship that unjust God, ‘to Hell would I go!’ Mr. Mill, of course, desired every man to do what he himself thought right; therefore it is conceivable that, in the given contingency, we might behold the apostle of the Utilitarian philosophy conducting the whole human race to eternal perdition, for the sake of,—shall we say the ‘Greatest Happiness of the Greatest number?’”

Prof. Cairnes did great public service both to England and America at the time of the war of Secession by his wise and able writing on the subject. In a small way I tried to help the same cause by joining Mrs. P. A. Taylor’s Committee formed to promote and express English sympathy with the North; and wrote several little pamphlets, “The Red Flag in John Bull’s Eyes”; “Rejoinder to Mrs. Stowe,” &c. This common interest increased, of course, my regard for Mr. Cairnes, and it was with real sorrow I saw him slowly sink under the terrible disease, (a sort of general ossification of the joints) of which he died. I have said he sank under it, but assuredly it was only his piteously stiffened body which did so, for I never saw a grander triumph of mind over matter than was shown by the courage and cheerfulness wherewith he bore as dreadful a fate as that of any old martyr. I shall never forget the impression of the nobility of the human Soul rising over its tenement of clay, which he made upon me, on the occasion of my last visit to him at Blackheath.

Another man, much of the character and calibre of Prof. Cairnes, whom I likewise had the privilege to know well, was Prof. Sheldon Amos. He also, alas! died in the prime of life; to the loss and grief of the friends of every generous movement.

The following is a memorandum of the first occasion on which I met Mr. John Bright:—

“February 28th, 1866. Dined at Mr. S.’s, M.P. Sat between Bright and Mr. Buxton. Bright so exquisitely clean and with such a sweet voice! His hands alone are coarse. Great discussion, in which Mr. B. completely took the lead; the other gentlemen present seeming to hang on his words as I never saw Englishmen do on those of one another. Talking of Ireland he said he would, if he ever had the power, force all the English Companies and great English landlords to sell their estates there; the land to be cut up into small farms. I asked, did he believe in small farming in 1866, and in Celtic capitalists ready to purchase farms? He then told us how he picked up much information travelling through Ireland on cars, from the drivers, (as if every Irish car-driver did not recognise him in a moment from Punch’s caricatures!) and how, especially, he visited the only small farm he had heard of where the occupier was a freeholder; and how it was exceedingly prosperous. I asked where this was? He said ‘in a place called the Barony of Forth.’ Of course I explained that Forth and Bargy in Wexford have been for four hundred years isolated English, (or rather Welsh) colonies, and afford no sort of sample of Irish farming. Bright’s way of speaking was dogmatic, but full of genial fun and quiet little bits of wit. He spoke with great feeling of the wrongs and miseries of the poor, but seemed to enjoy in full the delusion that it only depended on rich people being ready to sacrifice themselves, to remove them all to-morrow.

“I ventured to ask him why he laboured so hard to get votes for working carpenters and bricklayers, and never stirred a finger to ask them for women, who possessed already the property qualification? He said: ‘Much was to be said for women,’ but then went on maundering about our proper sphere, and ‘would they go into Parliament?’”

Again another time I sat beside him (I know not at whose hospitable table), and he told me a most affecting story of a poor crippled woman in a miserable cottage near Llandudno, where he usually spent his holidays. He had got into the habit of visiting this poor creature, who could not stir from her bed, but lay there all day long alone, her husband being out at work as a labourer. Sometimes a neighbour would look in and give her food, but unless one did so, she was entirely helpless. Her only comforter was her dog, a fine collie, who lay beside her on the floor, ran in and out, licked her poor useless hands, and showed his affection in a hundred ways. Bright grew fond of the dog, and the dog always welcomed him each year with gambols and joy. One summer he came to the cottage, and the hapless cripple lay on her pallet still, but the dog did not come out to him as usual, and his first question to the woman was: “Where is your collie?” The answer was that her husband had drowned the dog to save the expense of feeding it.

Bright’s voice broke when he came to the end of this story, and we said very little more to each other during that dinner.

Another day I was speaking to Mr. Bright of the extraordinary canard which had appeared in the Times the day before announcing (quite falsely) that Lord Russell, then Premier, had resigned. “What on earth,” I asked, “can have induced the Times to publish such intelligence?” (As it happened, it inconvenienced Lord Russell very much.) “I will tell you,” said Bright; “I am sure it is because Delane is angry that Lady Russell has not asked him to dinner. He expected to go to the Russells’ as he did to the Palmerstons’, and get his news at first hand!” A day or two later I met Lord Russell, and told him what Mr. Bright had said was the reason of the mischievous trick Mr. Delane had played him. Lord Russell chuckled a great deal and said, rubbing his hands in his characteristic way: “I believe it is! I do believe it is!”

My beautiful cousin, Laura, one of my father’s wards, had married (from Newbridge in old days) Mr. John Locke, Q.C., who was for a long time M.P. for Southwark. Their house, 63, Eaton Place, was always most cordially opened to me, and beside Mr. Locke, who was generally brimful of political news, I met at their table many clever barristers and M.P.’s. Among the latter was Mr. Ayrton, against whom a virulent set was made by the scientific clique, in consequence of his endeavours, on behalf of the public, to open Kew Gardens earlier in the day. He was rather saturnine, but an incorruptible, unbending sort of man, for whom I felt respect. Another habitué was Mr. Warren, author of Ten Thousand a Year. He was a little ugly fellow, but full of fire and fun, retorting right and left against the Liberals present. Sergeant Gazelee, a worn-looking man, with keen eyes, one day answered him fairly. There was an amusing discussion whether the Tories could match in ability the men of the opposite party? Warren brought up an array of clever Conservatives, but then pretended to throw up the sponge, exclaiming in a dolorous voice, “but then you Liberals have got—Whalley!”

Beside my cousin Mrs. Locke and her good and able husband, I had the pleasure for many years of constantly seeing in London her two younger sisters, Sophia and Eliza Cobbe, who were my father’s favourite wards and have been from their childhood, when they were always under my charge in their holidays, till now in our old age, almost like younger sisters to me. They were of course rarely absent from the Eaton Place festivities.

There was a considerable difference between dinner parties in the Sixties and those of thirty years later. They lasted longer at the earlier date; a greater number of dishes were served at each course, and much more wine was taken. I cannot but think that there must be a certain declension in the general vitality of our race of late years for, I think, few of us, young or old, would be inclined to share equally now in those banquets of long ago which always lasted two hours and sometimes three. There were scarcely any teetotalers, men or women, at the time I speak of, in the circles to which I belonged; and the butlers, who went round incessantly with half-a-dozen kinds of wine, and (after dinner) liqueurs, were not, as now, continually interrupted in their courses by “No wine, thank you! Have you Appolinaris or Seltzer?” I never saw anyone the worse for the sherry and the milkpunch and the hock or chablis, and champagne and claret; but certainly there was generally a little more gaiety of a well-bred sort towards the end of the long meals. My cousins kept a particularly good cook and good cellar, and their guests—especially some who hailed from the City—certainly enjoyed at their table other “feasts” beside those of reason. And so I must confess did I, in those days of good appetite after a long day’s literary work; and I sincerely pitied Dean Stanley, who had no sense of taste, and scarcely knew the flavour of anything which he put in his mouth. When the company was not quite up to his mark, the tedium of the dinners which he attended must have been dreadful to him; whereas, in my case, I could always,—provided the menu was good,—entertain myself satisfactorily with my plate and knife and fork. The same great surgeon who had treated my sprained ankle so unsuccessfully, told me with solemn warning when we were taking our house in Hereford Square, that, if I lived in South Kensington and went to dinner parties, I should be a regular victim to gout. As it happened I lived in South Kensington for just twenty years, and went out, I should think to some two thousand dinners, great and small, and I never had the gout at all, but, on the contrary, by my own guidance, got rid of the tendency before I left London. There has certainly been a perceptible diminution in the animal spirits of men and women in the last thirty years, if not of their vital powers. Of course there was always, among well-bred people a certain average of spirits in society, neither boisterous nor yet depressed; and the better the company the softer the general “susurro” of the conversation. I could have recognized blindfold certain drawing-rooms wherein a mixed congregation assembled, by the strident, high note which pervaded the crowded room. But the ripple of gentle laughter in good company has decidedly fallen some notes since the Sixties.

I am led to these reflections by remembering among my cousin’s guests that admirable man—Mr. Fawcett. He was always, not merely fairly cheerful, but more gay and apparently light-hearted than those around him who were possessed of their eyesight. The last time I met him was at the house of Madame Bodichon in Blandford Square, and we three were all the company. One would have thought a blind statesman alone with two elderly women, would not have been much exhilarated; but he seemed actually bursting with boyish spirits; pouring out fun, and laughing with all his heart. Certainly his devoted wife (in my humble opinion the ablest woman of this day), succeeded in cheering his darkened lot quite perfectly.

Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett were the third couple who in this century have afforded a study for Mr. Francis Galton of “Hereditary Genius.” The first were Shelley and his Mary (who again was the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft). Their son, the late Sir Percy Shelley, was a very kindly and pleasant gentleman, with good taste for private theatricals, but not a genius. The second were Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They also have left a son, of whose gifts as a painter I do not presume to judge. The third were Mr. Fawcett and Millicent Garrett, who, though not claiming the brilliant genius of the others, were each, as all the world knows, very highly endowed persons. Their daughter, Miss Philippa Garrett Fawcett,—the Senior Wrangler, de jure,—has at all events vindicated Mr. Galton’s theories.

Many of us, in those days of the Sixties, were deeply interested in the efforts of women to enter the medical profession in spite of the bitter opposition which they encountered. Miss Elizabeth Garrett, Mrs. Fawcett’s sister, occupied a particularly prominent place in our eyes, succeeding as she did in obtaining her medical degree in Paris, and afterwards a seat on the London School Board, which last was quite a new kind of elevation for women. While still occupying the foreground of our ambition for our sex, Miss Garrett resolved to make (what has proved, I believe, to be) a happy and well assorted marriage, which put an end, necessarily, to her further projects of public work. I sent her, with my cordial good wishes, the following verses:—