“Je ne vous ai pas oubliée, on ne vous oublie pas quand on a eu l’honneur et le plaisir de vous connaître. Moi je suis accablé d’ouvrage et je ne fais pas la moitié de ce que je voudrais faire. Je ne manque pas toutefois de lire votre Zoophile Français qui aidera puissamment notre Ligue à combattre les abus de la Vivisection. Tous ceux qui ont quelque sentiment d’humanité écouteront votre voix en faveur des pauvres animaux et vous aideront de toutes leur forces à les protéger contre un genre d’étude veritablement barbare. Quand à moi, l’activité, la persévérance et le talent que vous montrez dans votre œuvre de charité m’inspirent le plus vif et le plus respectueux intérêt.
“Ne croyez pas ceux qui tentent de vous décourager en prétendant que votre journal est une substance trop aride pour attacher le lecteur Français. Je le sais; il est convenu en Angleterre que les Français sont un peuple léger. Mais c’est là un vieux préjugé que ne gardent pas les Anglais instruits. Soyez bien assuré que vos efforts ne seront pas plus peine perdue dans mon noble pays que dans le votre. Notre Société Protectrice des Animaux a quarante ans d’existence.
“À mon prochain voyage à Londres je m’empresserai d’aller vous faire visite pour retrouver le plaisir que j’ai gouté dans votre conversation et pour vous répéter, Dear Miss Power Cobbe, that I am your’s most respectfully and faithfully,
“Permettez moi de vous prier de me rappeler au souvenir de Madame la Doctoresse, et de M. le Dr. Hoggan.”
It was M. Schœlcher who effected in 1848 the abolition of Negro Slavery in the French Colonies. He was a charming companion and a most excellent man. I interceded once with him to make interest with the proper authorities in France for the relaxation of the extremely severe penalties which Louise Michel had incurred by one of her extravagances. To my surprise, I learned from him that I had gone to head-quarters, since the matter would mainly rest in his hands. He was Vice-President,—practically President—of the Department of Prisons in France. He repeated with indulgence, “Mais, Madame, elle est folle! elle est parfaitement folle, et très dangereuse.” I quite agreed, but still thought she was well-meaning, and that her sentence was excessive. He promised that when the first year of her imprisonment was over (with which, he said, they made it a rule never to interfere so as not to insult the judges,) he would see what could be done to let her off by degrees. He observed, with more earnestness than I should have expected from one of his political school, how wrong, dangerous and wicked it was to go about with a black flag at the head of a mob. Still he agreed with my view that the length of Louise Michel’s sentence was unjustly great. Eventually the penalty was actually commuted; I conclude through the intervention of M. Schœlcher.
M. Schœlcher was the most attractive Frenchman I ever met. At the time I knew him, he was old and feeble and had a miserable cough; but he was most emphatically a gentleman, a tender, even soft-hearted man; and a brilliantly agreeable talker. He had made a magnificent collection of 9,000 engravings, and told me he was going to present it to the Beaux Arts in Paris. While sitting talking in my drawing-room his eye constantly turned to a particularly fine cast which I possess of the Psyche of Praxiteles, made expressly for Harriet Hosmer and given by her to me in Rome. When he rose to leave me, he stood under the lovely creature and worshipped her as she deserves!
We had also many delightful American visitors, whose visits gave me so much pleasure and profit that I easily forgave one or two others who provoked Fanny Kemble’s remark that “if the engineers would lay on Miss P. or Mr. H. the Alps would be bored through without any trouble!” Most of my American friendly visitors are, I rejoice to say, still living, so I will only name them with an expression of my great esteem for all and affection for several of them. Among them were Col. Higginson, Mr. George Curtis, Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Livermore, Mr. and Mrs. Loring-Brace, Rev. J. Freeman Clarke, Rev. W. Alger, Dr. O. W. Holmes, Mr. Peabody, Miss Harriet Hosmer, Mr. Hazard, Mrs. Lockwood, and my dearly beloved friends, W. H. Channing, Mrs. Apthorp, Mrs. Wister, Miss Schuyler and Miss Georgina Schuyler. Sometimes American ladies would come to me as perfect strangers with a letter from some mutual friend, and would take me by storm and after a couple of hours’ conversation we parted as if we had known and loved each other for years. There is something to my mind unique in the attractiveness of American women, when they are, as usual, attractive; but they are like the famous little girl with the “curl in the middle of her forehead,”—
The wholesome horror felt by us, Londoners, of outstaying our welcome when visiting acquaintances, and of trespassing too long at any hour, seems to be an unknown sentiment to some Americans, and also to some Australian ladies; and for my own part I fear that being bored is a kind of martyrdom which I can never endure in a Christian spirit, or without beginning to regard the man or woman who bores me with most uncharitable sentiments. My young Hindoo visitors drove me distracted till I discovered that they imagined a visit to me to be an audience, and that it was for me to dismiss them!
I met Longfellow during his last visit to England at the house of Mr. Wynne-Finch. His large, leonine head, surmounted at that date by a nimbus of white hair, was very striking indeed. I saw him standing a few moments alone, and ventured to introduce myself as a friend of his friends, the Apthorps, of Boston, and when I gave my name he took both my hands and pressed them with delightful cordiality. We talked for a good while, but I cannot recall any particular remark he may have made.
Mr. Wynne-Finch was stepfather of Alice L’Estrange, who, before her marriage with Laurence Oliphant was for a long time our most assiduous and affectionate visitor, having taken a young girl’s engouement for us two elderly women. Never was there a more bewitching young creature, so sweetly affectionate, so clever and brilliant in every way. It was quite dazzling to see such youth and brightness flitting about us. An old letter of hers to my friend which I chance to have fallen on is alive still with her playfulness and tenderness. It begins thus:—
“O yes! I know! It isn’t so very long since I heard last, and I am in London, which I am enjoying, and am busy in a thousand little messy things which amuse me, and I was with Miss Cobbe on Tuesday which was bliss absolute, and above all I heard about you from her (beside all the talk on that forbidden subject,—it is so disagreeable of us, isn’t it?). I felt that ingratitude for mercies received which characterises our race so strong in me that I want a sight of your writing, as that is all I can get just now,” &c., &c.
Alice was of an extremely sceptical turn of mind (which made her subsequent fanaticism the more inexplicable), and for months before she fell in with Mr. Oliphant in Paris I had been labouring with all my strength to lead her simply to believe in God. She did not see her way to such faith at all, though she was docile enough to read the many books I gave her, and to come with us and her stepfather to hear Dr. Martineau’s sermons. She incessantly discussed theological questions, but always from the point of view of the evil in creation, and, as she used to say pathetically, of “the insufferableness of the suffering of others.” She argued that the misery of the world was so great that a good God if He could not relieve it, ought to hurl it to destruction. In vain I argued that there is a higher end of creation than Happiness, to be wrought out through trial and pain. She would never admit the loftier conception of God’s purposes as they appeared to me, and was to all intents and purposes an Atheist when she said good-bye to me, before a short trip to Paris. She came back in a month or six weeks, not merely a believer in the ordinary orthodox creed, but inspired with the zeal of an energumène for the doctrines, very much over and above orthodoxy, of Mr. Harris! Our gentle, caressing, modest young friend was entirely transformed. She stood upright and walked up and down our rooms, talking with vehemence about Mr. Harris’ doctrines, and the necessity for adopting his views, obeying his guidance, and going immediately to live on the shores of Lake Erie! The transfiguration was, I suppose, au fond, one of the many miracles of the little god with the bow and arrows and Mr. Oliphant was certainly not unconcerned therein. But still there was no adequate explanation of this change, or of the boasting (difficult to hear with patience from a clever and sceptical woman) of the famous “method” of obtaining fresh supplies of Divine spirit, by the process of holding one’s breath for some minutes—according to Mr. Harris’ pneumatology! The whole thing was infinitely distressing, even revolting to us; and we sympathised much with her stepfather (my friend’s old friend) who had loved her like a father, and was driven wild by the insolent pretentions of Mr. Harris to stop the marriage, of which all London had heard, unless his monstrous demands were previously obeyed! At last Alice walked by herself one morning to her Bank, and ordered her whole fortune to be transferred to Mr. Harris; and this without the simplest settlement or security for her future support! After this heroic proceeding, the Prophet of Lake Erie graciously consented, (in a way,) to her marriage; and England saw her and Mr. Oliphant no more for many years. What that very helpless and self-indulgent young creature must have gone through in her solitary cottage on Lake Erie, and subsequently in her poor little school in California, can scarcely be guessed. When she returned to England she wrote to us from Hunstanton Hall, (her brother’s house), offering to come and see us, but we felt that it would cause us more pain than pleasure to meet her again, and, in a kindly way, we declined the proposal. Since her sad death, and that of Mr. Oliphant, an American friend of mine, Dr. Leffingwell, travelling in Syria, wrote me a letter from her house at Haifa. He found her books still on the shelves where she had left them; and the first he took down was Parker’s Discourse of Religion inscribed “From Frances Power Cobbe to Alice L’Estrange.”
A less tragic souvenir of poor Alice occurs to me as I write. It is so good an illustration of the difference between English and French politeness that I must record it.
Alice was going over to Paris alone, and as I happened to know that a distinguished and very agreeable old French gentleman of my acquaintance was crossing by the same train, I wrote and begged him to look after her on the way. He replied in the kindest and most graceful manner as follows:—
“Vraiment vous me comblez de toutes les manières. Après l’aimable accueil que vous avez bien voulu me faire, vous songez encore à mes ennuis de voyage seul, et vous voulez bien me procurer la société la plus agréable. Agréez en tous mes remercîments, quoique je ne puisse m’empêcher de songer que s’il avait moins neigé sur la montagne (comme disent les Orientaux) vous seriez moins confiante. Je serai trop heureux de me mettre au service de votre amie.
“Agréez, chère Mademoiselle, les hommages respectueux de votre,
They met at Charing Cross, and no man could be more charming than M. le Baron de T. made himself in the train and on the boat. But on arrival at Boulogne it appeared that Alice’s luggage had either gone astray or been stopped by the custom-house people; and she was in a difficulty, the train for Paris being ready to start, and the French officials paying no attention to her entreaty that her trunks should be delivered and put into the van to take with her. Of course the appearance by her side of a French gentleman with the Legion d’Honneur in his buttonhole would have probably decided the case in her favour at once. But M. de T. had not the least idea of losing his train and getting into an imbroglio for sake of a damsel in distress,—so, with many assurances that he was quite désolé to lose the enchanting pleasure of her society up to Paris, he got into his carriage and was quickly carried out of sight. Meanwhile a rather ordinary-looking Englishman who had noted Miss L’Estrange’s awkward situation, went up to her and asked in a gruff fashion; what was the matter? When he was informed, he let his train go off and ran hither and thither about the station, till at last the luggage was found and restored to its owner. Then, when Alice strove naturally, to thank him, he simply raised his hat,—said, it was of “no consequence,” and disappeared to trouble her no more.
“Which, therefore, was neighbour to him that fell among thieves?”
So many recollections of Mr. Gladstone have been published since his death that it seems hardly worth while to record mine. I saw him only at intervals and never had the honour of any intimate acquaintance with him; but one or two glimpses of him may perhaps amuse my readers as exhibiting his astonishing versatility.
I first met him, some time in the Sixties, in North Wales when he came from Hawarden to visit at a house where I was spending a few days, and joined me in walking to the summit of Penmaen-bach. He talked, I need not say, delightfully all the way as we sauntered up, but I remember only his sympathetic rejoinder to my dislike of mules for such mountain expeditions,—that he had felt quite remorseful on concluding some tour (I think in the Pyrenees), for hating so much a beast to which he had often owed his life!
Some years after this pleasant climb, I was surprised and, of course, much flattered to receive from him the following note. I know not who was the friend who sent him my pamphlet. It had not occurred to me to do so.
“I do not know whom I have to thank for sending me your” (word illegible) “article on Vivisection, but the obligation is great, for I seldom read a paper possessed with such a spirit of nobleness from first to last.
“It is long since we met on the slopes of Penmaen-bach. Do you ever go out to breakfast, and could we persuade you to be so kind as to come to us on Thursday, March 9, at ten?
The breakfast in Carlton Gardens was a very interesting one. Before it began Mr. Gladstone took me into his library, and we talked for a considerable time on the subject of Vivisection. At the close of our conversation, finding him apparently agreeing very cordially with me, I asked, if he would not join the Victoria Street Society which I had then recently founded? He replied that he would rather not do so; but that if ever he returned to office, he would help me to the best of his power. This promise, I may here say, was given very seriously after making the observation that he was no longer (at that time) in the position of influence he had occupied in previous years; but he obviously anticipated his return to power,—which actually followed not long afterwards. He repeated this promise of help to me four times in conversation and once on one of his famous post-cards; and again in writing to Lord Shaftesbury in reply to a Memorial which the latter presented to him, signed by 100 of the foremost names, as regarded intellect and character, in England. Always Mr. Gladstone repeated the same assurance: “All his sympathies were” with us. Here is the letter on the card, dated April 1st, 1877, in reply to my request that he would write a few words to be read by Lord Shaftesbury at one of our Meetings. It ran as follows:—
“You are already aware that my sympathies and prepossessions are greatly with you, nor do I wish this to be a secret, but I am overwhelmed with occupations, and I cannot overtake my arrears, and my letters have been so constantly put before the world (often, of course, without warrant) that I cannot, I am afraid, appear in the form of an epistle ad hoc, more than I can in person.
(Half the words in his apology for not writing would of course have more than sufficed for the letter desired.)
Naturally, after all this, I looked to Mr. Gladstone as a most powerful friend of the Anti-vivisection cause; and though I had no sympathy with his religious views, and thought his policy very dangerous, I counted on him as a man who, since his suffrage had been obtained in a great moral question, was sure to give it his support in fitting time and place. The sequel showed how delusive was my trust.
To return to the breakfast in Carlton Gardens. There sat down with us, to my amusement, a gentleman with whom I had already made acquaintance, an ex-priest of some distinction, Rev. Rudolph Suffield, who had recently quitted the Church of Rome but retained enough of priestly looks and manners to be rather antipathetic to me. Mr. Gladstone ingeniously picked Mr. Suffield’s brains for half-an-hour, eliciting all manner of information on Romish doctrines and practice, till the conversation drifted to Pascal’s Provinciales, I expressed my admiration for the book, and recalled Gibbon’s droll confession that he, whom Byron styled “The Lord of irony, that master spell,” had learned the sanglant sarcasm of his XV. and XVI. chapters from the pious author of the Pensées. Mr. Gladstone eagerly interposed with some fine criticisms, and ended with the amazing remark: “I have read all the Jesuit answers to Pascal (!) to ascertain whether he had misquoted Suarez and Escobar and the rest, and I found that he had not done so. You may take my word for it.”
From this theological discussion there was a diversion when a gentleman on the other side of the breakfast table handed across to Mr. Gladstone certain drawings of the legs of horses. They proved to be sketches of several pairs in the Panathenaic frieze and were produced to settle the highly interesting question (to Mr. Gladstone) whether Greek horses ever trotted, or only walked, cantered, and ambled. I forget how the drawings were supposed finally to settle the controversy, but I made him laugh by telling him that a party of the servants of one of my Irish friends having paid a visit to the Elgin Gallery, the lady’s maid told her mistress next morning that they had been puzzled to understand why all those men without legs or arms had been stuck up on the wall? At last the butler had suggested that they were “intended to commemorate the railway accidents.”
From that time I met Mr. Gladstone occasionally at the houses of friends, and was, of course, like all the world, charmed with his winning manners and brilliant talk, though never, that I can recall, struck by any thought expressed by him which could be called a “great” one, or which lifted up one’s spirit. It seemed more as if half a dozen splendidly cultivated and brilliant intellects—but all of medium height—had been incarnated in one vivacious body, than a single Mind of colossal altitude. The religious element in him was in almost feverish activity, but it always appeared to me that it was not on the greatest things of Religion that his attention fastened. It was on its fringe, rather than on its robe.
That Mr. Gladstone was a sincerely pious man I do not question. But his piety was of the Sacerdotal rather than of the Puritan type. The “single eye” was never his. If it had been, he would not have employed the tortuous and ambiguous oratory which so often left his friends and foes to interpret his utterances in opposite senses. Neither did he appear—at all events to his more distant observers—to feel adequately the tremendous responsibility to God and man which rested on the well-nigh omnipotent Prime Minister of England, during the years when it was rare to open a newspaper without reading of some military disaster like the death of Gordon, or of some Agrarian murder like the assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish and of a score of hapless Irish landlords—calamities which his policy had failed to prevent if it had not directly occasioned. The gaiety of spirits and the animation of interest respecting a hundred trivial topics which Mr. Gladstone exhibited unfailingly through that fearfully anxious period, approached perhaps sometimes too nearly to levity to accord with our older ideal of a devout mind loaded with the weight “almost not to be borne” of world-wide cares.
The differences between Church and dissent occupied Mr. Gladstone, I fancy, very much at all times. One day he remarked to me—as if it were a valuable new light on the subject—that an eminent Nonconformist had just told him that the Dissenters generally “did not object either to the Doctrine or the Discipline of the Church of England, but that they found no warrant in Scripture for the existence of a State Church.” Mr. Gladstone looked as if he were seeking an answer to this objection to conformity. I replied that I wondered they did not see that the whole Old Testament might be taken as the history of a Divinely appointed State Church. Mr. Gladstone lifted his marvellous, eagle-like eyes with a quick glance which might be held to signify “That’s an idea!” When the little incident was told soon after to Dean Stanley he rubbed his hands and laughingly said, “This may put off disestablishment yet awhile!”
As a member of society Mr. Gladstone, as everybody knows, was inexhaustibly interesting. I once heard him after a small dinner party criticise and describe with astonishing vividness and minuteness the sermons of at least twenty popular preachers. At last I ventured to interpose with some impatience and say: “But, Mr. Gladstone, you have not mentioned the greatest of them all, my pastor, Dr. Martineau?” He paused, and then said, weighing his words, carefully: “Dr. Martineau is unquestionably the greatest of living thinkers.”
Speaking of the Jews, he once afforded the company at a dinner table a lively and interesting sketch of the ubiquity of the race all over the globe, except in Scotland. The Scotch, he said, knew as well as they the value of bawbees! There was a general laugh, and some one remarked: “Why, then, are there so few in Ireland?” Mr. Gladstone answered that he supposed the Irish were too poor to afford them fair pasture. I said: “Perhaps so, now, but when you, Mr. Gladstone, have given the Irish farmers fixity of tenure, so that they can give security for loans, we shall see the Jews flocking over to Ireland.” This observation was made in 1879; and in the intervening twenty years I am informed that the Jews have settled down in Ireland like sea-gulls on the land after a storm. The old “Gombeen man” has been ousted all over the country, and a whole Jew quarter, (near the Circular Road) and a new synagogue in Dublin, have verified my prophecy.
At last the day came when the sympathy of which Mr. Gladstone had so often assured Lord Shaftesbury and myself, was to be put to the simplest test. Mr. Reid (now Sir Robert Reid) was to introduce our Bill for the Prohibition of Vivisection into Parliament (April 4th, 1883). I wrote to Mr. Gladstone a short note imploring him to lift his hand to help us; and if it were impossible for him to speak in the House in our favour, at least to let his friends know that he wished well to our Bill. I do not remember the words of that note. I know that it was a cry from my very heart to the man who held it in his power to save the poor brutes from their tortures for ever; to do what I was spending my life’s last years in vainly trying to accomplish.
He received the note; I had a formal acknowledgment of it. But Mr. Gladstone did nothing. He left us to the tender mercies of Sir William Harcourt, whose audacious (and mendacious) contradiction of Mr. George Russell, our seconder, I have detailed elsewhere.[23] From that day I never met, nor ever desired to meet, Mr. Gladstone again.
A friend whom I greatly admired and valued, and whose intercourse I enjoyed during all my residence in London, from first to last, was Mr. Froude. He died just after the first edition of this book (of which I had of course sent him a copy) was published; and I was told it supplied welcome amusement to him in his last days.
The world, I think, has never done quite justice to Mr. Froude; albeit, when he was gone the newspapers spoke of him as “the last of the giants.” He always seemed to me to belong to the loftier race, of whom there were then not a few living; and though his unhappy Nemesis of Faith (for which I make no defence whatever) and his Carlyle drew on him endless blame, and his splendid History equally endless cavil and criticism, his greatness was to my apprehension something apart from his books. His Essays,—especially the magnificent one on Job—give, I think, a better idea of the man than was derivable from any other source, except personal intimacy. “He touched nothing which he did not” enlarge, if not “adorn.” Subjects expanded when talked of easily, and even lightly, with him. There was a background of space always above and behind him. Though he had no little cause for it, he was not bitter. I never saw him angry or heard him express resentment, except once when his benevolent efforts had failed to obtain from Mr. Gladstone’s Government a pension for a poverty-stricken, meritorious woman of letters, while far less deserving persons received the bounty. But when he let the Marah waters of Mr. Carlyle’s private reflexions loose on the world their bitterness seemed to communicate itself to all the readers of the book. Even the silver pen of Mrs. Oliphant for once was dipped in gall; and it was she, if I mistake not, who in her wrath devised the ferocious adjective “Froudacious” to convey her rage and scorn. As for myself, when that book appeared I frankly told Mr. Froude that I rejoiced, because I had always deprecated Mr. Carlyle’s influence, and I thought this revelation of him would do much to destroy it. Mr. Froude laughed good-humouredly, but naturally showed a little consternation. His sentiment about the Saturday Reviewers, who at that time buzzed round his writings and stung him every week, was much that of a St. Bernard or a Newfoundland towards a pack of snarling terriers. One day a clergyman very well known in London, wrote to me after one of our little parties to beg that I would do him the favour, when next Mr. Froude was coming to me, to invite him also, and permit him to bring his particular friend Mr. X, who greatly desired to meet his brother historian. I was very willing to oblige the clergyman in question, and before long we had a gathering at our house of forty or fifty people, among whom were Mr. Froude and Mr. X. I knew that the moment for the introduction had arrived, but of course I was not going to take the liberty of presenting any stranger to Mr. Froude without asking his consent. That consent was not so readily granted as I had anticipated. “Who? Mr. X? Let me look at him first.” “There he is,” I said, pointing to a small figure half hidden in a group of ladies and gentlemen. “That is he, is it?” said Mr. Froude. “Oh, No! No! Don’t introduce him to me. He has the Saturday Review written all over his face!” There was nothing to do but to laugh, and presently, when my clerical friend came up and urged me to fulfil my promise and make the introduction, to hurry down on some excuse into the tea room and never reappear till the disappointed Mr. X had departed.
I have kept 34 letters received from Mr. Froude during the years in which I had the good fortune to contribute to Fraser’s Magazine when he was the Editor, and later, when, as friends and neighbours in South Kensington, we had the usual little interchange of message and invitations. Among these, to me precious, letters there are some passages which I shall venture to copy, assured that his representatives cannot possibly object to my doing so. I may first as an introduction of myself, quote one in a letter to my eldest brother, who had invited him to stay at Newbridge during one of his visits to Ireland. Mr. Froude wrote to him:—
“I knew your brother Henry intimately 30 years ago, and your sister is one of the most valued friends of my later life.”
His affection for Carlyle spoke in this eager refutation of some idle story in the newspapers:
“There is hardly a single word in it which is not untrue. Ruskin is as much attached to Mr. Carlyle as ever. There is not one of his friends to whom he is not growing dearer as he approaches the end of his time, nor has the wonderful beauty and noble tenderness of his character been ever more conspicuous. The only difference visible in him from what he was in past years is that his wife’s death has broken his heart. He is gentler and more forbearing to human weakness. He feels that his own work is finished, and he is waiting hopefully till it please God to take him away.”
Here is evidence of his deep enjoyment of Nature. He writes, October 31st, from Dereen, Kenmare:—
“I return to London most reluctantly at the end of the week. The summer refuses to leave us, and while you are shivering in the North wind we retain here the still blue cloudlessness of August. This morning is the loveliest I ever saw here. The woods swarm with blackbirds and thrushes, the ‘autumn note not all unlike to that of spring.’ I am so bewitched with the place that (having finished my History) I mean to spend the winter here and try to throw the story of the last Desmond into a novel.”
In reply to a request that he would attend an Anti-vivisection meeting at Lord Shaftesbury’s house, he wrote:—
“Vivisection is a hateful illustration of the consequences of the silent supersession of Morality by Utilitarianism. Until men can be brought back to the old lines, neither this nor any other evil tendency can be really stemmed. Till the world learns again to hate what is in itself evil, in spite of alleged advantages to be derived from it, it will never consent to violent legal restrictions.”
His last letter from Oxford is pleasant to recall:—
“I am strangely placed here. The Dons were shy of me when I first came, but all is well now, and the undergraduates seem really interested in what I have to tell them. I am quite free, and tell them precisely what I think.”
I do not think that Mr. Froude was otherwise than a happy man. He was particularly so as regarded his feminine surroundings, and a most genial and indulgent husband and father. He had also intense enjoyment both of Nature and of the great field of Literature into which he delved so zealously. He once told me that he had visited every spot, except the Tower of London (!) where the great scenes of his History took place, and had ransacked every library in Europe likely to contain materials for his work; not omitting the record chambers of the Inquisition at Simancas, where he spent many shuddering days which he vividly described to me. He also greatly enjoyed his long voyages and visits to the West Indies and to New Zealand; and especially the one he made to America. He admired almost everything, I think, in America; and more than once remarked to me (in reference particularly to the subject of mixed education in which I was interested): “The young men are so nice! What might be difficult here, is easy there. You have no idea what nice fellows they are.” There was, however, certainly something in Mr. Froude’s handsome and noble physiognomy which conveyed the idea of mournfulness. His eyes were wells of darkness on which, by some singularity, the light never seemed to fall either in life or when represented in a photograph; and his laugh, which was not infrequent, was mirthless. I never heard a laugh which it was so hard to echo, so little contagious.
The last time I ever saw Mr. Froude was at the house of our common friend, Miss Elliot, where he was always to be found at his best. Her other visitors had departed and we three old friends sat on in the late and quiet Sunday afternoon, talking of serious things, and at last of our hopes and beliefs respecting a future life. Mr. Froude startled us somewhat by saying he did not wish to live again. He felt that his life had been enough, and would be well content not to awake when it was over. “But,” said he, in conclusion, with sudden vigour, “I believe there is another life, you know! I am quite sure there is.” The clearness and emphasis of this conviction were parallel to those he had used before to me in talking of the probable extension of Atheism in coming years. “But, as there IS a God,” said Mr. Froude, “Religion can never die.”