I have enjoyed through life the advantage of being, in the true sense of the words, “well-born.” My parents were good and wise; honourable and honoured; sound in body and in mind. From them I have inherited a physical frame which, however defective even to the verge of grotesqueness from the æsthetic point of view, has been, as regards health and energy, a source of endless enjoyment to me. From childhood till now in my old age—except during a few years interval of lameness from an accident,—mere natural existence has always been to me a positive pleasure. Exercise and rest, food and warmth, work, play and sleep, each in its turn has been delightful; and my spirits, though of course now no longer as gay as in youth, have kept a level of cheerfulness subject to no alternatives of depression save under the stress of actual sorrow. How much of the optimism which I am aware has coloured my philosophy ought to be laid to the account of this bodily bien être, it would be superfluous to enquire too nicely. At least I may fairly maintain that, as Health is the normal condition of existence, the views which a particularly healthy person takes of things are presumably more sound than those adopted by one habitually in the abnormal condition of an invalid.

As regards the inheritance of mental faculties, of which so much has been talked of late years, I cannot trace it in my own experience in any way. My father was a very able, energetic man; but his abilities all lay in the direction of administration, while those of my dear mother were of the order which made the charming hostess and cultivated member of society with the now forgotten grace of the eighteenth century. Neither paternal nor maternal gifts or graces have descended to me; and such faculties as have fallen to my lot have been of a different kind; a kind which, I fear, my good father and his forbears would have regarded as incongruous and unseemly for a daughter of their house to exhibit. Sometimes I have pictured to myself the shock which “The old Master” would have felt could he have seen me—for example—trudging three times a week for seven years to an office in the purlieus of the Strand to write articles for a half-penny newspaper. Not one of my ancestors, so far as I have heard, ever dabbled in printer’s ink.

My brothers were all older than I; the eldest eleven, the youngest five years older; and my mother, when I was born, was in her forty-seventh year; a circumstance which perhaps makes it remarkable that the physical energy and high animal spirits of which I have just made mention came to me in so large a share. My old friend Harriet St. Leger, Fanny Kemble’s “dear H. S.,” who knew us all well, said to me one day laughing: “You know you are your Father’s Son!” Had I been a man, and had possessed my brother’s facilities for entering Parliament or any profession,^[2] I have sometimes dreamed I could have made my mark and done some masculine service to my fellow-creatures. But the woman’s destiny which God allotted to me has been, I do not question, the best and happiest for me; nor have I ever seriously wished it had been otherwise, albeit I have gone through life without that interest which has been styled “woman’s whole existence.” Perhaps if this book be found to have any value it will partly consist in the evidence it must afford of how pleasant and interesting, and withal, I hope, not altogether useless a life is open to a woman, though no man has ever desired to share it, nor has she seen the man she would have wished to ask her to do so. The days which many maidens my contemporaries and acquaintances,—

(or in being pursued, which comes to the same thing); were spent by me, free from all such distractions, in study and in the performance of happy and healthful filial and housewifely duties. Destiny, too, was kind to me, likewise, by relieving me from care respecting the other great object of human anxiety,—to wit, Money. The prophet’s prayer, “Give me neither poverty nor riches” was granted to me, and I have probably needed to spend altogether fewer thoughts on £ s. d. than could happen to anyone who has either to solve the problems “How to keep the Wolf from the door” and “How to make both ends meet?” or “How, justly and conscientiously, to expend a large income?” Wealth has only come to me in my old age, and now it is easy to know how to spend it. Thus it has happened that in early womanhood and middle life I enjoyed a degree of real leisure of mind possessed by few; and to it, I think, must be chiefly attributed anything which in my doings may have worn the semblance of exceptional ability. I had good, sound working brains to start with, and much fewer hindrances than the majority of women in improving and employing them. Voilà tout.

I began by saying that I was well-born in the true sense of the words, being the child of parents morally good and physically sound. I reckon it also to have been an advantage,—though immeasurably a minor one,—to have been well-born, likewise, in the conventional sense. My ancestors, it is true, were rather like those of Sir Leicester Dedlock, “chiefly remarkable for never having done anything remarkable for so many generations.”^[3] But they were honourable specimens of county squires; and never, during the four centuries through which I have traced them, do they seem to have been guilty of any action of which I need to be ashamed.

My mother’s father was Captain Thomas Conway, of Morden Park, representative of a branch of that family. Her only brother was Adjutant General Conway, whose name Lord Roberts has kindly informed me is still, after fifty years, an “honoured word in Madras.” My father’s progenitors were, from the fifteenth century, for many generations owners of Swarraton, now Lord Ashburton’s beautiful “Grange” in Hampshire; the scene of poor Mrs. Carlyle’s mortifications. While at Swarraton the heads of the family married, in their later generations, the daughters of Welborne of Allington; of Sir John Owen; of Sir Richard Norton of Rotherfield (whose wife was the daughter of Bishop Bilson, one of the translators of the Bible); and of James Chaloner, Governor of the Isle of Man, one of the Judges of Charles I. The wife of this last remarkable man was Ursula Fairfax, niece of Lord Fairfax.^[4]

On one occasion only do the Cobbes of Swarraton seem to have transcended the “Dedlock” programme. Richard Cobbe was Knight of the Shire for Hants in Cromwell’s short Parliament of 1656, with Richard Cromwell for a colleague. What he did therein History saith not! The grandson of this Richard Cobbe, a younger son named Charles, went to Ireland in 1717 as Chaplain to the Duke of Bolton with whom he was connected through the Norton’s; and a few years later he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin,—a post which he held with great honour until his death in 1765. On every occasion when penal laws against Catholics were proposed in the Irish House of Lords Archbishop Cobbe contended vigorously against them, dividing the House again and again on the Bills; and his numerous letters and papers in the Irish State-Paper office (as Mr. Froude has assured me after inspection) bear high testimony to his liberality and integrity in that age of corruption. Two traditions concerning him have a certain degree of general interest. One, that John Wesley called upon him at his country house,—my old home, Newbridge;—and that the interview was perfectly friendly; Wesley approving himself and his work to the Archbishop’s mind. The other is; that when Handel came to Dublin, bringing with him the MS. of the Messiah, of which he could not succeed in obtaining the production in London, Archbishop Cobbe, then Bishop of Kildare, took lively interest in the work, and under his patronage, as well as that of several Irishmen of rank, the great Oratorio was produced in Dublin.

Good Archbishop Cobbe had not neglected the affairs of his own household. He bought considerable estates in Louth, Carlow, and Co. Dublin, and on the latter, about twelve miles north of Dublin and two miles from the pretty rocky coast of Portrane, he built his country house of Newbridge, which has ever since been the home of our family. As half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope the reader will look at the pictures of it which must be inserted in this book and think of it as it was in my youth, bright and smiling and yet dignified; bosomed among its old trees and with the green, wide-spreading park opened out before the noble granite perron of the hall door. There is another country house on the adjoining estate, Turvey, the property of Lord Trimleston, and I have often amused myself by comparing the two. Turvey is really a wicked-looking house, with half-moon windows which suggest leering eyes, and partition walls so thick that secret passages run through them; and bedrooms with tapestry and ruelles and hidden doors in the wainscot. There were there, also, when I was young, certain very objectionable pictures, beside several portraits of the “beauties” of Charles II.’s court, (to the last degree decolletées) who had been, no doubt, friends of the first master of the house, their contemporary. In the garden was a grotto with a deep cold bath in it, which, in the climate of Ireland, suggested suicide rather than ablution. Altogether the place had the same suggestiveness of “deeds of darkness” which I remember feeling profoundly when I went over Holyrood with Dr. John Brown; and it was quite natural to attach to Turvey one of the worst of the traditional Irish curses. This curse was pronounced by the Abbess of the neighbouring convent (long in ruins) of Grace-Dieu when Lord Kingsland, then lord of Turvey, had by some nefarious means induced the English Government of the day to make over the lands of the convent to himself. On announcing this intelligence in his own hall to the assembled nuns, the poor ladies took refuge very naturally in malediction, went down simultaneously on their knees, and repeated after their Abbess a denunciation of Heaven’s vengeance on the traitor. “There should never want an idiot or a lawsuit in the family; and the rightful heir should never see the smoke of the chimney.” Needless to add, lawsuits and idiots have been plentiful ever since, and, after several generations of absentees, Turvey stands in a treeless desert, and has descended in the world from lordly to humble owners.

How different was Newbridge! Built not by a dissolute courtier of Charles II., but by the sensible Whig, and eminently Protestant Archbishop, it has as open and honest a countenance as its neighbour has the reverse. The solid walls, about three feet and a-half thick in most parts, keep out the cold, but neither darken the large, lofty rooms, nor afford space for devious and secret passages. The house stands broadly-built and strong, not high or frowning; its Portland-stone colour warm against the green of Irish woods and grass. Within doors every room is airy and lightsome, and more than one is beautiful. There is a fine staircase out of the second hall, the walls of which are covered with old family pictures which the Archbishop had obtained from his elder brother, Col. Richard Chaloner Cobbe, who had somehow lost Swarraton, and whose line ended in an heiress, wife of the 11th Earl of Huntingdon. A long corridor downstairs was, I have heard, formerly hung from end to end with arms intended for defence in case of attack. When the Rebellion of 1798 took place the weapons were hidden in a hole into which I have peered, under the floor of a room off the great drawing-room, but what became of them afterwards I do not know. My father possessed only a few pairs of handsome pistols, two or three blunderbusses, sundry guns of various kinds, and his own regimental sword which he had used at Assaye. All these hung in his study. The drawing-room with its noble proportions and its fifty-three pictures by Vandyke, Ruysdael, Guercino, Vanderveldt and other old masters, was the glory of the house. In it the happiest hours of my life were passed.

Of this house and of the various estates bought and leased by the Archbishop his only surviving son, Thomas Cobbe, my great-grandfather, came into possession in the year 1765. Irreverently known to his posterity as “Old Tommy” this gentleman after the fashion of his contemporaries muddled away in keeping open house a good deal of the property, and eventually sold one estate and (what was worse) his father’s fine library. Per contra he made the remarkable collection of pictures of which I have spoken as adorning the walls of Newbridge. Pilkington, the author of the Dictionary of Painters, was incumbent of the little Vicarage of Donabate, and naturally somewhat in the relation of chaplain to the squire of Newbridge, who had the good sense to send him to Holland and Italy to buy the above-mentioned pictures, many of which are described in the Dictionary. Some time previously, when Pilkington had come out as an Art-critic, the Archbishop had remonstrated with him on his unclerical pursuit; but the poor man disarmed episcopal censure by replying, “Your Grace, I have preached for a dozen years to an old woman who can’t hear, and to a young woman who won’t hear; and now I think I may attend to other things!”

Thomas Cobbe’s wife’s name has been often before the public in connection with the story, told by Crabbe, Walter Scott and many others, of the lady who wore a black ribbon on her wrist to conceal the marks of a ghost’s fingers. The real ghost-seer in question, Lady Beresford, was confounded by many with her granddaughter Lady Eliza Beresford, or, as she was commonly called after her marriage, Lady Betty Cobbe. How the confusion came about I do not know, but Lady Betty, who was a spirited woman much renowned in the palmy days of Bath, was very indignant when asked any questions on the subject. Once she received a letter from one of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies-in-Waiting begging her to tell the Queen the true story. Lady Betty in reply “presented her compliments but was sure the Queen of England would not pry into the private affairs of her subjects, and had no intention of gratifying the impertinent curiosity of a Lady-in-Waiting!” Considerable labour was expended some years ago by the late Primate (Marcus Beresford) of Ireland, another descendant of the ghost-seer in identifying the real personages and dates of this curious tradition. The story which came to me directly through my great-aunt, Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady Betty’s favourite daughter, was, that the ghost was John Le Poer, Second Earl of Tyrone; and the ghost-seer was his cousin, Nichola Hamilton, daughter of Lord Glerawly, wife of Sir Tristram Beresford. The cousins had promised each other to appear,—whichever of them first departed this life,—to the survivor. Lady Beresford, who did not know that Lord Tyrone was dead, awoke one night and found him sitting by her bedside. He gave her (so goes the story) a short, but, under the circumstances, no doubt impressive lesson, in the elements of orthodox theology; and then to satisfy her of the reality of his presence, which she persisted in doubting, he twisted the curtains of her bed through a ring in the ceiling, placed his hand on a wardrobe and left on it the ominous mark of five burning fingers (the late Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor of Ardgillan Castle told me he had seen this wardrobe!) and finally touched her wrist, which shrunk incontinently and never recovered its natural hue. Before he vanished the Ghost told Lady Beresford that her son should marry his brother’s daughter and heiress; and that she herself should die at the birth of a child after a second marriage, in her forty-second year. All these prophecies, of course, came to pass. From the marriage of Sir Marcus Beresford with the ghost’s niece, Catharine, Baroness Le Poer of Curraghmore, has descended the whole clan of Irish Beresfords. He was created Earl of Tyrone; his eldest son was the first Marquis of Waterford; another son was Archbishop of Tuam, created Lord Decies; and his fifth daughter was the Lady Betty Cobbe, my great-grandmother, concerning whom I have told this old story. In these days of Psychological Research I could not take on myself to omit it, though my own private impression is, that Lady Beresford accidentally gave her wrist a severe blow against her bedstead while she was asleep; and that, by a law of dreaming which I have endeavoured to trace in my essay on the subject, her mind instantly created the myth of Lord Tyrone’s apparition. Allowing for a fair amount of subsequent agglomeration of incidents and wonders in the tradition, this hypothesis, I think quite meets the exigencies of the case; and in obedience to the law of Parsimony, we need not run to a preternatural explanation of the Black Ribbon on the Wrist, no doubt the actual nucleus of the tale.

I do not disbelieve in ghosts; but unfortunately I have never been able comfortably to believe in any particular ghost-story. The overwhelming argument against the veracity of the majority of such narrations is, that they contradict the great truth beautifully set forth by Southey—

The ghost of popular belief almost invariably exhibits the survival of Avarice, Revenge, or some other thoroughly earthly passion, while for the sake of the purest, noblest, tenderest Love scarcely ever has a single Spirit of the departed been even supposed to return to comfort the heart which death has left desolate. The famous story of Miss Lee is one exception to this rule, and so is another tale which I found recorded in an MS. Memorandum in the writing of my uncle the Rev. Henry Cobbe, Rector of Templeton (died 1823).

“Lady Moira^[5] was at one time extremely uneasy about her sister, Lady Selina Hastings, from whom she had not heard for a considerable time. One night she dreamed that her sister came to her, sat down by her bedside, and said to her, ‘My dear sister, I am dying of fever. They will not tell you of it because of your situation’ (she was then with child), ‘but I shall die, and the account will be brought to your husband by letter directed like a foreign one in a foreign hand.’ She told her dream to her attendant, Mrs. Moth, as soon as she awoke, was extremely unhappy for letters, till at length, the day after, there arrived one, directed as she had been told, which contained an account of her sister’s death. It had been written by her brother, Lord Huntingdon, and in a feigned hand, lest she should ask to know the contents.

“She had many other extraordinary dreams, and it is very remarkable that after the death of her attendant, Moth, who had educated her and her children, and was the niece of the famous Bishop Hough, that she (Moth) generally took a part in them, particularly if they related to any loss in her family. Indeed, I believe she never dreamed of her except when she was to undergo a loss. Lady Granard told me an instance of this: Her second son Colonel Rawdon died very suddenly. He had not been on good terms with Lady Moira for some time. One night she dreamed that Moth came into the room, and upon her asking her what she wanted she said, ‘My lady, I am come to bring the Colonel to you.’ Then he entered, came near her, and coming within the curtains, sat on the bed and said, ‘My dearest mother, I am going a very long journey, and I cannot bear to go without the assurance of your forgiveness.’ Then she threw her arms about his neck and said, ‘Dear Son, can you doubt my forgiving you? But where are you going?’ He replied, ‘A long journey, but I am happy now that I have seen you.’ The next day she received an account of his death.

“About a fortnight before her death, when Lady Granard and Lady Charlotte Rawdon, her daughters, were sitting up in her room, she awoke suddenly, very ill and very much agitated, saying that she had dreamed that Mrs. Moth came into her room. When she saw her she was so full of the idea that evils always attended her appearance that she said, ‘Ah, Moth, I fear you are come for my Selina’ (Lady G.). Moth replied, ‘No, my Lady, but I am come for Mr. John.’ They gave her composing drops and soothed her; she soon fell asleep, and from that time never mentioned her son’s name nor made any inquiry about him; but he died on the very day of her dream, though she never knew it.”

Old Thomas Cobbe and after him his only son, Charles Cobbe, represented the (exceedingly-rotten) Borough of Swords for a great many years in the Irish Parliament, which was then in its glory, resonant with the eloquence of Flood (who had married Lady Betty’s sister, Lady Jane) and of Henry Grattan. On searching the archives of Dublin, however, in the hope of discovering that our great-grandfather had done some public good in his time, my brother and I had the mortification to find that on the only occasion when reference was made to his name, it was in connection with charges of bribery and corruption! On the other hand, it is recorded to his honour that he was almost the only one among the Members of the Irish Parliament who voted for the Union, and yet refused either a peerage or money compensation for his seat. Instead of these he obtained for Swords some educational endowments by which I believe the little town still profits. In the record of corruption sent by Lord Randolph Churchill to the Times (May 29th, 1893), in which appears a charge of interested motives against nearly every Member of the Irish Parliament of 1784, “Mr. Cobbe” stands honourably alone as without any “object” whatever.

Thomas Cobbe’s two daughters, my great-aunts and immediate predecessors as the Misses Cobbe, of Newbridge, (my grandfather having only sons) differed considerably in all respects from their unworthy niece. They occupied, so said tradition, the large cheerful room which afterwards became my nursery. A beam across the ceiling still bore, in my time, a large iron staple firmly fixed in the centre from whence had dangled a hand-swing. On this swing my great-aunts were wont to hang by their arms, to enable their maids to lace their stays to greater advantage. One of them, afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Caroline, likewise wore the high-heeled shoes of the period; and when she was an aged woman she showed her horribly deformed feet to one of my brothers, and remarked to him: “See, Tom, what comes of high-heeled shoes!” I am afraid many of the girls now wearing similarly monstrous foot-gear will learn the same lesson too late. Mrs. Pelham, I have heard, was the person who practically brought the house about the ears of the unfortunate Queen Caroline; being the first to throw up her appointment at Court when she became aware of the Queen’s private on-goings. Her own character stood high; and the fact that she would no longer serve the Queen naturally called attention to all the circumstances. Bad as Queen Caroline was, George the Fourth was assuredly worse than she. In his old age he was personally very disgusting. My mother told me that when she received his kiss on presentation at his Drawing-Room, the contact with his face was sickening, like that with a corpse. I still possess the dress she wore on that occasion.

Mrs. Pelham’s sister married Sir Henry Tuite, of Sonnagh, and for many years of her widowhood lived in the Circus, Bath, and perhaps may still be remembered there by a few as driving about her own team of four horses in her curricle, in days when such doings by ladies were more rare than they are now.

The only brother of these two Miss Cobbes of the past, Charles Cobbe, of Newbridge, M.P., married Anne Power Trench, of Garbally, sister of the first Earl of Clancarty. The multitudinous clans of Trenches and Moncks, in addition to Lady Betty’s Beresford relations, of course thenceforth adopted the habit of paying visitations at Newbridge. Arriving by coachloads, with trains of servants, they remained for months at a time. A pack of hounds was kept, and the whole train de vie was liberal in the extreme. Naturally, after a certain number of years of this kind of thing, embarrassments beset the family finances; but fortunately at the crisis Lady Betty came under the influence of her husband’s cousin, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, and ere long renounced the vanities and pleasures of the world, and persuaded her husband to retire with her and live quietly at Bath, where they died and were buried in Weston churchyard. Fifty years afterwards I found in the library at Newbridge the little batch of books which had belonged to my great-grandmother in this phase of her life, and were marked by her pencil: Jacob Boehmen and the Life of Madame Guyon being those which I now recall. The peculiar, ecstatic pietism which these books breathe, differing toto cœlo from the “other worldliness” of the divines of about 1810, with whose works the “Good-book Rows” of our library were replenished, impressed me very vividly.^[6]

I have often tried to construct in my mind some sort of picture of the society which existed in Ireland a hundred years ago, and moved in those old rooms wherein the first half of my life was spent, but I have found it a very baffling undertaking. Apparently it combined a considerable amount of æsthetic taste with traits of genuine barbarism; and high religious pretension with a disregard of everyday duties and a penchant for gambling and drinking which would now place the most avowedly worldly persons under a cloud of opprobrium. Card-playing was carried on incessantly. Tradition says that the tables were laid for it on rainy days at 10 o’clock in the morning in Newbridge drawing-room; and on every day in the interminable evenings which followed the then fashionable four o’clock dinner. My grandmother was so excellent a whist-player that to extreme old age in Bath she habitually made a small, but appreciable, addition to her income out of her “card purse”; an ornamental appendage of the toilet then, and even in my time, in universal use. I was given one as a birthday present in my tenth year. She was greatly respected by all, and beloved by her five sons; every one of whom, however, she had sent out to be nursed at a cottage in the park till they were three years old. Her motherly duties were supposed to be amply fulfilled by occasionally stopping her carriage to see how the children were getting on.

As to the drinking among the men, (the women seem not to have shared the vice) it must have prevailed to a disgusting extent upstairs and downstairs. A fuddled condition after dinner was accepted as the normal one of a gentleman, and entailed no sort of disgrace. On the contrary, my father has told me that in his youth his own extreme sobriety gave constant offence to his grandfather, and to his comrades in the army; and only by showing the latter that he would sooner fight than be bullied to drink to excess could he obtain peace. Unhappily, poor man! while his grandfather, who seldom went to bed quite sober for forty years, lived to the fine old age of 82, enjoying good health to the last, his temperate grandson inherited the gout and in his latter years was a martyr thereto. Among the exceedingly beautiful old Indian and old Worcester china which belonged to Thomas Cobbe and showed his good taste and also the splendid scale of his entertainments (one dessert-service for 36 persons was magnificent) there stands a large goblet calculated to hold three bottles of wine. This glass (tradition avers) used to be filled with claret, seven guineas were placed at the bottom, and he who drank it pocketed the coin.

The behaviour of these Anglo-Irish gentry of the last century to their tenants and dependants seems to have proceeded on the truly Irish principle of being generous before you are just. The poor people lived in miserable hovels which nobody dreamed of repairing; but then they were welcome to come and eat and drink at the great house on every excuse or without any excuse at all. This state of things was so perfectly in harmony with Celtic ideas that the days when it prevailed are still sighed after as the “good old times.” Of course there was a great deal of Lady Bountiful business, and also of medical charity-work going forward. Archbishop Cobbe was fully impressed with the merits of the Tar-water so marvellously set forth by his suffragan, Bishop Berkeley, and I have seen in his handwriting in a book of his wife’s cookery receipts, a receipt for making it, beginning with the formidable item: “Take six gallons of the best French brandy.” Lady Betty was a famous compounder of simples, and of things that were not simple, and a “Chilblain Plaister” which bore her name, was not many years ago still to be procured in the chemists’ shops in Bath. I fear her prescriptions were not always of so unambitious a kind as this. One day she stopped a man on the road and asked his name—“Ah, then, my lady,” was the reply, “don’t you remember me? Why, I am the husband of the woman your ladyship gave the medicine to and she died the next day. Long life to your Ladyship!”

As I have said, the open-housekeeping at Newbridge at last came to an end, and the family migrated to No. 9 and No. 22, Marlborough Buildings, Bath, where two generations spent their latter years, died, and were buried in Weston churchyard, where I have lately restored their tombstones.

My grandfather died long before his father, and my father, another Charles Cobbe, found himself at eighteen pretty well his own master, the eldest of five brothers. He had been educated at Winchester, where his ancestors for eleven generations went to school in the old days of Swarraton; and to the end of his life he was wont to recite lines of Anacreon learned therein. But his tastes were active rather than studious, and disliking the idea of hanging about his mother’s house till his grandfather’s death should put him in possession of Newbridge, he listened with an enchanted ear to a glowing account which somebody gave him of India, where the Mahratta wars were just beginning.

Without much reflection or delay, he obtained a cornet’s commission in the 19th Light Dragoons and sailed for Madras. Very shortly he was engaged in active service under Wellesley, who always treated him with special kindness as another Anglo-Irish gentleman. He fought at many minor battles and sieges, and also at Assaye and Argaum; receiving his medal for these two, just fifty years afterwards. I shall write of this again a little further on in this book.

At last he fell ill of the fever of the country, which in those days was called “ague,” and was left in a remote place absolutely helpless. He was lying in bed one day in his tent when a Hindoo came in and addressed him very courteously, asking after his health. My father incautiously replied that he was quite prostrated by the fever. “What! Not able to move at all, not to walk a step?” said his visitor. “No! I cannot stir,” said my father. “Oh, in that case, then,” said the man,—and without more ado he seized my father’s desk, in which were all his money and valuables, and straightway made off with it before my father could summon his servants. His condition, thus left alone in an enemy’s country without money, was bad enough, but he managed to send a trusty messenger to Sir Arthur Wellesley, who promptly lent him all he required.

Finding that there was no chance of his health being sufficiently restored in India to permit of further active service, and the Mahratta wars being practically concluded, my father sold his commission of Lieutenant and returned to England, quietly letting himself into his mother’s house in Bath on his return by the latch-key, which he had carried with him through all his journeys. All his life long the impress made both on his outward bearing and character by those five years of war were very visible. He was a fine soldier-like figure, six feet high, and had ridden eighteen stone in his full equipment. His face was, I suppose, ugly, but it was very intelligent, very strong willed, and very unmistakeably that of a gentleman. He was under-jawed, very pale, with a large nose, and small, grey, very lively eyes; but he had a beautiful white forehead from which his hair, even in old age, grew handsomely, and his head was very well set on his broad shoulders. The photograph in the next volume represents him at 76. He rode admirably, and a better figure on horseback could not be seen. At all times there was an aspect of strength and command about him, which his vigorous will and (truth compels me to add) his not seldom fiery temper, fully sustained. On the many occasions when we had dinner parties at Newbridge, he was a charming, gay and courteous host; and I remember being struck, when he once wore a court dress and took me with him to pay his respects to a Tory Lord Lieutenant, by the contrast which his figure and bearing presented to that of nearly all the other men in similar attire. They looked as if they were masquerading, and he as if the lace-ruffles and plum coat and sword were his habitual dress. He had beautiful hands, of extraordinary strength.

One day he was walking with one of his lady cousins on his arm in the street. A certain famous prize-fighting bully, the Sayers or Heenan of the period, came up hustling and elbowing every passenger off the pavement. When my father saw him approach he made his cousin take his left arm, and as the prize-fighter prepared to shoulder him, he delivered with his right fist, without raising it, a blow which sent the ruffian fainting into the arms of his companions. Having deposited his cousin in a shop, my father went back for the sequel of the adventure, and was told that the “Chicken” (or whatever he was called) had had his ribs broken.

After his return from India, my father soon sought a wife. He flirted sadly, I fear, with his beautiful cousin, Louisa Beresford, the daughter of his great-uncle, the Archbishop of Tuam; and one of the ways in which he endeavoured to ingratiate himself was to carry about at all times a provision of bon-bons and barley-sugar with which to ply the venerable and sweet-toothed prelate; who was generally known as “The Beauty of Holiness.” How the wooing would have prospered cannot be told, but before it had reached a crisis a far richer lover appeared on the scene—Mr. Hope. “Anastasius Hope,” as he was called from the work of which he was the author, was immensely wealthy, and a man of great taste in art, but he had the misfortune to be so excessively ugly that a painter whom he offended by not buying his picture, depicted him and Miss Beresford as “Beauty and the Beast,” and exhibited his painting at the Bath Pump-room, where her brother, John Beresford (afterwards the second Lord Decies) cut it deliberately to pieces. An engagement between Mr. Hope and Miss Beresford was announced not long after the arrival of Mr. Hope in Bath; and my mother, then Miss Conway, going to pay a visit of congratulation to Miss Beresford, found her reclining on a blue silk sofa appropriately perusing The Pleasures of Hope. After the death of Mr. Hope (by whom she was the mother of Mr. Beresford-Hope, Mr. Adrian and Mr. Henry Hope), Mrs. Hope married the illegitimate son of her uncle, the Marquis of Waterford—Field Marshal Lord Beresford—a fine old veteran, with whom she long lived happily in the corner house in Cavendish Square, where my father and brothers always found a warm welcome.

At length, after some delays, my father had the great good fortune to induce my dear mother to become his wife, and they were married at Bath, March 13th, 1809. Frances Conway was, as I have said, daughter of Capt. Thomas Conway, of Morden Park. Her father and mother both died whilst she was young and she was sent to the famous school of Mrs. Devis, in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, of which I shall have something presently to say, and afterwards lived with her grandmother, who at her death bequeathed to her a handsome legacy, at Southampton. When her grandmother died, she being then sixteen years of age, received an invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Champion to live with them and become their adopted daughter. The history of this invitation is rather touching. Mrs. Champion’s parents had, many years before, suffered great reverses, and my mother’s grandfather had done much to help them, and, in particular, had furnished means for Mrs. Champion to go out to India. She returned after twenty years as the childless wife of the rich and kindly old Colonel, the friend of Warren Hastings, who having been commander-in-chief of the Forces of the East India Company had had a good “shake of the Pagoda tree.” She repaid to the grandchild the kindness done by the grandfather; and was henceforth really a mother to my mother, who dearly loved both her and Col. Champion. In their beautiful house, No. 29, Royal Crescent, she saw all the society of Bath in its palmiest days, Mrs. Champion’s Wednesday evening parties being among the most important in the place. My mother’s part as daughter of the house was an agreeable one, and her social talents and accomplishments fitted her perfectly for the part. The gentle gaiety, the sweet dignity and ease of her manners and conversation remain to me as the memory of something exquisite, far different even from the best manner and talk of my own or the present generation; and I know that the same impression was always made on her visitors in her old age. I can compare it to nothing but the delicate odour of the dried rose leaves with which her china vases were filled and her wardrobes perfumed.

I hardly know whether my mother were really beautiful, though many of the friends who remembered her in early womanhood spoke of her as being so. To me her face was always the loveliest in the world; indeed it was the one through which my first dawning perception of beauty was awakened. I can remember looking at her as I lay beside her on the sofa, where many of her suffering hours were spent, and suddenly saying, “Mamma you are so pretty!” She laughed and kissed me, saying, “I am glad you think so my child;” but that moment really brought the revelation to me of that wonderful thing in God’s creation, the Beautiful! She had fine features, a particularly delicate, rather thin-lipped mouth; magnificent chestnut hair, which remained scarcely changed in colour or quantity till her death at seventy years of age; and the clear, pale complexion and hazel eyes which belong to such hair. She always dressed very well and carefully. I never remember seeing her downstairs except in some rich dark silk, and with a good deal of fine lace about her cap and old-fashioned fichu. Her voice and low laughter were singularly sweet, and she possessed both in speaking and writing a full and varied diction which in later years she carefully endeavoured to make me share, instead of satisfying myself, in school-girl fashion, with making one word serve a dozen purposes. She was an almost omnivorous reader; and, according to the standard of female education in her generation, highly cultivated in every way; a good musician with a very sweet touch of the piano, and speaking French perfectly well.

Immediately after their marriage my parents took possession of Newbridge, and my father began earnestly the fulfilment of all the duties of a country gentleman, landlord and magistrate. My mother, indeed, used laughingly to aver that he “went to jail on their wedding day,” for he stopped at Bristol on the road and visited a new prison with a view to introducing improvements into Irish jails. It was due principally to his exertions that the county jail, the now celebrated Kilmainham, was afterwards erected.

Newbridge having been deserted for nearly thirty years, the woods had been sorely injured and the house and out-buildings dilapidated, but with my father’s energy and my mother’s money things were put straight; and from that time till his death in 1857 my father lived and worked among his people.

Though often hard pressed to carry out with a very moderate income all his projects of improvements, he was never in debt. One by one he rebuilt or re-roofed almost every cottage on his estate, making what had been little better than pig-styes, fit for human habitation; and when he found that his annual rents could never suffice to do all that was required in this way for his tenants in his mountain property, he induced my eldest brother, then just of age, to join with him in selling two of the pictures which were the heirlooms of the family and the pride of the house, a Gaspar Poussin and a Hobbema, which last now adorns the walls of Dorchester House. I remember as a child seeing the tears in his eyes as this beautiful painting was taken out of the room in which it had been like a perpetual ray of sunshine. But the sacrifice was completed, and 80 good stone and slate “Hobbema Cottages,” as we called them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil. Be it noted by those who deny every merit in an Anglo-Irish landlord, that not a farthing was added to the rent of the tenants who profited by this real act of self-denial.

All this however refers to later years. I have now reached to the period when I may introduce myself on the scene. Before doing so, however, I am tempted to print here a letter which my much valued friend, Miss Felicia Skene, of Oxford, has written to me on learning that I am preparing this autobiography. She is one of the very few now living who can remember my mother, and I gratefully quote what she has written of her as corroborating my own memories, else, perhaps, discounted by the reader as coloured by a daughter’s partiality.

I know well that in recalling the days of your bright youth in your grand old home, the most prominent figure amongst those who surrounded you then, must be that of your justly idolised mother, and I cannot help wishing to add my testimony, as of one unbiassed by family ties, to all that you possessed in her while she remained with you; and all that you so sadly lost when she was taken from you. To remember the châtelaine of Newbridge is to recall one of the fairest and sweetest memories of my early life. When I first saw that lovely, gracious lady with her almost angelic countenance and her perfect dignity of manner, I had just come from a gay Eastern capital,—my home from childhood, where no such vision of a typical English gentlewoman had ever appeared before me; and the impression she made upon me was therefore almost a revelation of what a refined, high-bred lady could be in all that was pure and lovely and of good report, and yet I think I only shared in the fascination which she exercised on all who came within the sphere of her influence. To me, almost a stranger, whom she welcomed as your friend under her roof, her exquisite courtesy would alone have been most charming, but for your sake she showed me all the tenderness of her sweet sympathetic nature, and it was no marvel to me that she was the idol of her children and the object of deepest respect and admiration to all who knew her.

Beautiful Newbridge with its splendid hospitality is like a dream to me now, of what a gentleman’s estate and country home could be in those days when ancient race and noble family traditions were still of some account.

13, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford.