LORD BANTAM / had forgot one half, I do protest, And now am sent again to speak the rest. LORD BANTAM A SATIRE AUTHOR OF "GINX'S BABY 1 AUTHORS EDITION NEW YORK GEORGE ROUTLEDGE & SONS 416 BROOME STREET 1872 P/?4SZS > Stereotyped at the women's printing house, Corner Avenue A and Eighth Street, New York. 3 1929 PREFACE. Critic. Such wild, lunatic, incongruous, whimsical, fan- tastical, grotesque, im Author. Stay thy prating, friend; what hast thou read? Critic. Read ! why, this manuscript of thine, every word and every line of it ; and I say such a farrago Author. Nay, but hast thou only read the words and lines thou seest upon the scrip there? Critic. What else should I read? CONTENTS. PART I. HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD. PAGE I. Delicate Announcements ...... I II. Preliminaries 3 III. A Land Slip 9 IV. A Son . 15 V. The First Accident 16 PART II. HOW HE CAME TO BE LORD BANTAM. I. A Human Feeding Bottle . . . . .18 II. Passages from a Diary . . . . . . .21 III. Academic Groves ........ 29 IV. A Young Aristocrat 31 PART III. HOW HE LEARNED HIS LETTERS. I. Words versus Wit ........ 35 II. Digression. Benevolently dedicated to American Readers 37 III. A Juvenile Tourist and Author . . . . .38 IV. A Scotch Tutor 42 V. Catholicism ......... 54 VI. Agape . . . . . .62 VII. Human sympathy in its influence on Catholicity . . 64 VII 1. At the University . 67 IX. The Radish Club 69 X. The Essenes 70 PART IV. HOW HE CAME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION AND OTHERWISE. I. Citizen Bantam . . . . . . . -75 II. A Rank Communist . . ... . . 78 III. A School for fledging Nobles ...... 82 IV. A Proletarian Compliment -85 V. Newspaper Moralizers . . . . . .9^ VI. Economic Notes .07 VII. The Seat for Briggshire . . . . . .163 VIII. A Startling Lecture 107 CONTENTS PART V. HOW HE BECAME A LEGISLATOR. PAGE I. Preliminaries . . . . . . . .114 II. Diversities of Operations . . . . . .118 III. Taking no part in it . . . . . . .121 IV. Fencing . . . . . . . . .127 V. Party Tactics ........ 129 VI. Marching Orders 133 VII. Too much of a good thing . , . . . . 135 VIII. The Placard Trick 138 IX. A Fogy Candidate 144 X. Canvassing for Election 146 XI. Canvassing Extraordinary ...... 149 XII. Inconvenient Result of Popular Reform . , . 154 XIII. Explosion — of a totally new Fulminating Agent . . 156 XIV. The Press express then* Opinion ... . . 159 XV. In Parliament . .-■■'•■' 1 61 XVI. Disaster to a Prig Ministry ..... 162 XVII. The Claims of Society on its Gods . , . .166 XVIII. The Nobility . . . . , . . .169 PART VI. HOW HE EMBRACED THE ECLECTIC RELIGION. I. Society — at large . . . . . . .174 II. The Women's Society , . . . . . 179 III. The Eclectic Religion . . . , . , . 1 S3 IV. Eclecticism in Raptures . . . , . .192 V. By Civil Contract 197 VI. An Eclectic Symposium ...... 201 PART VII. HOW HE COQUETTED WITH THE PROLETARIAT. I. Reductio ad absurdum of Philosophic theories . . 208 II. The Creed of Party 209 III. Parliamentary Conscience ...... 214 IV. Stirring up the Church . . . . . .216 V. Transmontane Plots . , 218 VI. A Willing Sacrifice 219 VII. Transmontane Reformers . . , . . .221 VIII. A New Charter 221 IX. Death and Sunshine 224 X. Party versus Principles ...... 22S XL A Constitutional Crisis ...... 230 PART VIII. HOW HE CAME TO HIS ESTATE. I, The Ruling Passion strong in Death .... 236 PART I . HOW HE CAME INTO THE WORLD. I. — Delicate Announcements. On the fifth day of April, a.d. 18 — , the following an- nouncement appeared in the Piccadilly Journal : Sons. Ffowlsmere, Countess of, on the 1st inst., at 20, Hi ton Place. The excitement created by the event thus dryly and sta- tistically chronicled was not confined to the distinguished lady and the little individual of the species under which he was classified. In Lord Ffowlsmere' s noble breast, in that general bosom which every Englishman's family is said to possess, and in the society wherein the Earl and Countess of Ffowlsmere were distinguished political leaders, the birth thus baldly scheduled sent a thrill of unusual feeling. There is nothing wonderful in the birth of a son, even among the higher aristocracy when married ; why, then, may some inquisitive person ask, should there be any rare ex- citement when to Lady Ffowlsmere happened so common- place an accident ? So might I, along with several million compatriots of the Ffowlsmere family have inquired, who were not sufficiently high-bred to know the causes that agi- tate the inner circles of society : and, as a fact, we should LORD BANTAM. have been as ignorant of the trepidation as of its reason, had not the Piccadilly Journal printed a few days after the advertisement the following paragraph : " We understand that the Countess of Ffowlsmere is progressing very favorably since the birth of a son on the ist instant. It is a cu- rious fact that her ladyship's last child, the present Lord Bantam, and heir to the peerage, was born so far back as June, 18 — , a period of nearly nineteen years." This delicate intimation awakened in my mind an inter- est in the fate Of the boy who seemed to have been born out of time, and from that day to this I have closely followed the changes of his history. My original curiosity was to ascertain how Earl Ffowlsmere would deal with the editor of the Piccadilly Journal or of the medical review, from which the information had been clipped, but he appeared to have been too indifferent or too haughty to horsewhip those egregious prigs. The information, however, having come to me through this public channel, I am entitled to use it. The disclosure in question amply accounts for much emo- tion on the part of the Earl and Countess of Ffowlsmere, and a very pretty gossip throughout the vast bounds of their acquaintanceship. I have rather reflected on the Piccadilly Journal, but I will report a conversation, overheard about the same time at the Hon. Mrs. Trippety's ball. The personages were none other than Lady Eaton, Mrs. Everard Chesham, and those charming girls the two Misses Du Pont. Mrs. Chesham. Have you heard the news? O, so funny ! Lady Ffowlsmere has a son. PRELIMINARIES. Laura Du Pont. O, nonsense, dear Mrs. Chesham. You must be mistaken. Why, Lord Bantam is over eighteen, and there are no other children. It's quite impos- sible. Mrs. Chesham. Hush, dear, you don't know whaf s possible or impossible. I'm sure it's true, because our carriage drove over the straw as we came here to-night. Lady Mary Eaton (convinced by this evidence). I'm afraid it is true ; but really, is it not most extraordinary ! If I were Lady Ffowlsmere, I could never show my face in London again. Why, it's really shocking ! It's like a loosis — loosis — Mrs. Chesham. Natures, dear ; you oughtn't to try Latin words, you know. But, indeed, that expresses ex- actly what it ought to be called — poor thing ! Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. If the female part of society was scandalized by the frank announcement in the Piccadilly Journal, the Editor, for his part, might have retorted on the ladies, that his knowledge of society afforded him ground to believe himself, as re- garded that, quite en rapport with them. II. — Preliminaries. How Lady Ffowlsmere' s baby came into the world is a matter involving, on my part, such sacred and even translu- nary knowledge, that I almost fear, if I proceed to divulge the facts, I shall either lose credit with everyone for truth- LORD BANTAM fulness, or be suspected of some Satanic means of informa- tion. The common bantling of Mrs. Ginx may come into the world with somewhat rough concomitancy of circumstances, but what are the happy accidentia of a birth like that of Lady Ffowlsmere's baby? As to Lady Ffowlsmere herself, she was the subject of nine months' astonishment. She looked at young Lord Bantam when he came home from Winton with sensations of awkward wonder. How long ago it seemed since he was little baby Bantam, laughing and coughing in her young ladyship's lap. Now, after a pause of nineteen years, after she had buried the hopes of rejuvenescent motherhood, when she had thrown herself with rare ability and finesse into political intrigue, and had become the social head of the feminine Prig clique — now, when she was almost regarded as a states/;z##, or, at all events, as a most noble, most charming, but confirmed political intriguante, here, by a ridiculous ac- cident, she was obliged to await an event which she knew would make her the laughing-stock of society. I am bound to believe that she never spent so uncomfortable a nine months in her life. None the less needful was it to prepare for the coming trouble in true aristocratic fashion. Every morning at eleven, for six months, Sir Samuel Horn- bill, F.R.C.S., whose distinguished services to royalty in dif- ficulties had procured him honors not to be won in any other medical or surgical field, visited her ladyship and chatted PRELIMINARIES. with her for ten minutes, while she, enveloped in a rich Cashmere robe, took chocolate out of an elegant Dresden service, presented by as pretty a little maid as ever distressed a footman's heart. Later in the day, her ladyship took an airing. Gillow, the coachman, was instructed to drive with double caution, and above all to avoid taking her ladyship in the direction of any street row, monster or accident. It was the groom's special duty to keep on the watch for ex- traordinary instances of deformity or ugliness on either side of the way, and to warn the maid, who forthwith diverted her ladyship's attention until they were past the dangerous object. One thing of which the Countess had a rooted dis- like was red hair. The most disagreeable relation of her husband's family was a red-headed Marquis, and him she hated so cordially that his hair could scarcely escape her re- sentment. Blinks, therefore — whose own locks were snow- white with floury filth — was strictly cautioned not to permit a carrot-head, aristocratic or plebeian, to come within the range of his mistress's vision. Poor Blinks ! He was sit- ting on the box one day, at the corner, when that pretty Jemima Mosely, the undernurse at Lord Evergood's, was passing with the little lords and ladies out for an airing, and never saw the fiery locks of the Marquis of Arran, who, rec- ognizing the carriage, actually rode up to the wheel, and, uncovering his orange-tawny pate, bowed it portentously forward almost in the Countess's lap. Lady Ffowlsmere, giving a little shriek, buried her face in her handkerchief. The Marquis thought she had gone mad, and went off blaz- LORD BANTA ing like a turkey cock. Blinks, after handing the Countess up the steps at Hiton Place, packed his clothes and left without waiting for his wages or any formal excommunica- tion. He felt like a man who had committed murder. The children of rank and wealth are taken care of before they are born. What are we to expect of the babes whose mothers carry them where awful, devil-features abound, and where grotesqueries of Hell are the environments of their daily life ? For months before the arrival of Lady Ffowlsmere's baby, her ladyship was dangerously excited about his natalia. Almost daily the carriage went to Williams's, whose shop windows are a perfect and open instruction to any observant bachelor in all the mysteries of feminine or infantine equip- ment. — Ah ! I well remember how one day sauntering in Re- gent street I saw my lovely little cousin Angela in her pretty brougham drive up to such a shop, with its white-lined win- dows there before me, and that mysterious word Layettes in gilded characters upon the cornice, and I, awkward idiot that I was, stood talking, and never saw the changing pinks upon the sweet young face, and even begged she would let me be her groom for the nonce, and hand her to the coun- ter ; and she, how perplexed she was, and how shy, and she said she thought she would not stay there just now, she had just driven to the pavement to see me — the little story- teller ! — and how I, a few days after, lounging over the Chimes at the club, saw the announcement of her first infant, PRELIMINARIES. and, as I recalled the scene, the shop, the embarrassment, my great coarse face and ears grew red and hot with shame, that I should have been so thick a fool ! I reverenced her ever after for that true, godly touch of shy innocence, and everywhere I see it I recognize it as a pure relic of Eden. — But I come back to Williams's. In the midst of white and colored robes de jour et denuit, was a bust of a Royal Princess, fitted with an exquisitely-shaped corset of blue satin edged with ermine. Other nameless shadows of form, elaborately fine, were arranged in suggestive positions. Why in ordinary life it should be considered right to conceal such pretty mysteries beneath conventional robes, yet pro- per to expose them to every rude gaze in this manner, has long been to me a matter of speculation. It is useless to say that the stronger half of creation should shut its eyes to what is put under its noses. Is there any necessity for the exposure ? Our old English prudery — now, alas ! fast dying out — and it was a grand, dignified, purine sentiment, used to be based on this : to avoid by look or gesture, by hint or display anything however distantly exciting the imagination in a wrong direction. It was a point of training with our mothers and grandmothers and the society they adorned. " Mais / nous avons change tout cela!" cries Mrs. Cro- quet, and we all admit she is a charming woman. "We are no longer afraid to call a spade a spade ; and I am happy to say my daughters are strong-minded enough to read, or see, or say anything without the slightest sense of impropriety. Laura made a speech the other day for the hospital for LORD BANTAM lying-in women, and went into the whole question of the reasons for their being there ; and every one was astounded at her freedom from the silly restraints of conventional de- corum. Evil be to him that evil thinks. To the pure, all things are pure. What a man can do, a woman may. I have no notion of your dainty decency. It often serves for a mere cover to impurity." Dear Madam ! I wish your apophthegms were relevant and true ; I wish your theories were consistent with the facts of human nature ! I have seen rare girls demoralized, nay lost by association with foul ideas ; and God forbid my little daughter, whose tender freshness is the most piquant joy of my life, whose jealously guarded simplicity is my daily bur- den and hope, should ever come to know more than she does of the unnameable, or, as a matter of moral pride, unsex herself to win what I can only call a foul and tawdry admiration. This though is a sheer digression from Lady Ffowlsmere's preparations. These were extensive enough to have stocked a bazaar. Robes miraculously embroidered, mantlets trimmed with ermine, long gowns and short coats, night dresses and day frocks, flannels decorated with herring-bone stitch, diminutive — but there, I need not schedule every- thing. The coming little Bantam, male or female, had a wardrobe of clothes before it drew breath. In the North of Ireland a christening-robe was being embroidered to cost a hundred guineas. The bassinet was a picture. Messrs. Jackson and Gra- A LAND SLIP, ham lavished upon its production all their classic skill It was a white and gold shell, swung by gilded cords from two Italian pillars, and was, they slyly informed her ladyship, in the purest Re-naissance style. Delicate sky-silk hangings subdued by the finest muslin drooped round the shell ; and the Countess used to go and hang over it, and wonder what little form would press the downy bed and satin-like pillow. * * * III.— A Land Slip. The Earl of Ffowlsmere was one of the wealthiest men in the three kingdoms, His possessions in agricultural coun- ties, in mineral districts, in the metropolis — not to mention half the vast manufacturing town of Ironchester — were so enormous and their returns so lucrative, that the public may be forgiven for attributing to him fabulous riches, and enter- taining itself with calculations that every second of the day or night the Earl was receiving a sum equivalent to a re- spectable man's salary for a year. A clever ancestor of the Earl, duly encouraged and assisted by the laws of these realms, happening, by good luck to him, to possess land that grew in great request for the houses of a pushing population, had been able to grant leases of it to various tenants for just ninety-nine years. In effect, this was to keep the real ownership of the land in abeyance while two or perhaps three generations lived and died, and then, long after the clever old man was in his grave, to cause the immensely enhanced freehold to fail in IO LORD BANTAM. to a person he had never seen, and whom he could only prophetically and vaguely designate as the next heir of some one. It was the merest " fluke," — if I may use a felicitous vulgarism — that the Earl of Ffowlsmere's father happened to be that fortunate next heir. He had done or conceived of nothing on earth to entitle him to take a vast property, a noble name, a place in the legislature of the country, the right of nominating a hundred clergy to as many perishing flocks ; all that fell upon him simply by fate and the custom of England. In defiance of economy, the land was locked up for those ninety-nine years from public enterprise and general exchange. No one could build on it anything but what was permitted by the terms of the leases. One term, for instance, had been that no shops were to be opened upon the land. No shops were or could be opened, and the line of healthy trade was blocked out of a large' area to be sent winding about in neighboring slums and byways. No churches other than those of the estab- lishment were to be erected within the sacred precincts. Hence every dissenter who lived there was forced to wor- ship, like a leper in Israel, "without the camp." The natural and legitimate changes which pass over such areas in great cities — the transformation of dwellings into places of business, or of moderate houses into palaces, in fact, every concomitant of natural progress was balked in this district by the ninety-nine-year leaseholds. Progress had to pass over and round it, and at great inconvenience to find expansion farther off. It is scarcely possible to trace out A LAND SLIP. II with fulness the vicious effects of the law under which such a prescription was legal. How it locked up for years from public competition, from healthy and beneficent activity of exchange, hundreds upon hundreds of properties ; how it restrained — as we have seen — the uses to which the proper- ties might have been put ; how it limited the number of persons in the community that could possibly gain livelihood or profit from the existence of the land ; how it affected the character and architecture of the buildings erected on the soil ; how, in fact, the tendency of this arrangement was to diminish in a certain proportion for every man in England the chances — chances that have an important influence upon the enterprise and vigor of the greater number of people in a state — of acquiring landed property. In fact, it is no un- truth to say that the State had permitted this old peer, in common with half a hundred more, to rob posterity of pos- sibilities of action and advantage to which it was righteously entitled. I have said it was by the merest fluke that the present Lord Ffowlsmere's father happened to be the person de- scribed as the next heir. But it is some compensation to know that he was the very person whom the vener- able grantor of leases, had he been alive, would have given his eyes not to see in possession. It happened in this wise. Earl Ffowlsmere, fifth Earl, had issue by Caroline his wife, a son and a daughter. Son married the Hon. Lucinda Lucretia Bella De Lancey, daughter of Nugent-Nugent, Earl of Foswick, by whom he had issue three sons — I need 12 LORD BANTAM not name them, for they all died unmarried and there was an end of that line. While they were living and dying, the reversions of all the leases made by the fifth Earl were hov- ering about in the clouds, waiting to descend and light down on a certain day in a certain year upon any one who was so fortunate as to be properly in the way. The only daughter of Caroline, Countess of Ffowlsmere, made a sad mistake, for she fell in love with the gayest and handsomest man in the army, Captain Harrow of the — th Hussars, ran away with him and married him at Gretna Green. Whereupon the Earl cursed her and hers, and forbade her his presence for evermore. Should he perchance have reached heaven his aristocratic wish may deprive poor Honoria of the joys of Paradise ; should he have gone elsewhere she may not altogether regret the proscription. Captain Harrow found that he could not keep both his family and his regi- ment, so he sold out. Every year Honoria presented him with a diminutive fresh Harrow, and this drove him to try his fortunes in trade — the wine trade. A dragoon in the wine trade is a fish in the water, but certainly not in his proper element ; and poor Captain Harrow, tasting too freely of his wares, lost by degrees his fine gentleman's manner, his clear manly voice, his moulded features, his gallant honor — and fell : no matter where. Honoria would never own the change in her heart's man, and shut from her vision the sickly sense of it that often came over her. She would love him all the same : and when at last hard want enjoined k, she worked from yellow morn to dusky eve, away up in A LAND SLIP 13 a sky pent-house, toiled and kept a dying man with the craving children for months and months, with the energy of those white, blue-coralled fingers, till even the hag who kept the house and exacted the rent grew sorry and sympa- thetic. So on, so on, till one day Harrow died. Then Honoria broke down, and lay there stony-hearted, stony- looking, by the body — lay while the children wondered that papa and mamma did not move or talk. The woman sent away to a well-known association to say that a man had died and a woman was dying in her house. By some God's chance, there came a General, interested in the society, who volunteered to investigate the case. When he took the face-cloth from the dead man's face he recognized an early friend. Within a few hours Honoria opened her eyes on a comfortable room, pervaded with warmth such as she had not felt about her for many a day, a soft bed, and her chil- dren transformed, smiling at the transformation. A few hundred pounds collected from former friends of her hus- band — the old Earl would do nothing — placed her in a country town where there was a free school. There she decently brought up her children and there she died. Her eldest boy married a pretty damsel, daughter of a not over rich vicar, and following his father's example, surrounded himself with little shoots. His son and heir became a schoolmaster, who taking a fancy to a decent housekeeper at the neighboring park, also married and maintained the Bantam line. Imagine the surprise of this worthy couple, always proud of the tradition of their descent, but hopeful 14 LORD BANTAM, of no good from it, when one day a breathless attorney rushes by train into the town, with rapid and distracted inquiries finds them out, and informs them, listening aghast, that Master Eugene George Augustus Harrow, aged ten, is heir to unlimited estates, and will be the richest man in the three kingdoms ! For the ninety-nine year leases were shortly to fall in, and the reversion was to descend upon the very last person whom the fifth Earl would have wished to benefit. The present Earl had been that lucky boy. Reared in a school of adversity — a man of iron rigidity of character — he was celebrated for his thrift in the man- agement of his almost regal wealth. His business talents enabled him to develop their productive capabilities, spite of the legal parasites that everywhere and continually sought to feed upon the plethoric body. He was an attorney and a tradesman in a peer's robes. Proud of his riches, his pride led him to take care that they should not be carelessly distributed. He watched every penny of expenditure, every item of income. The aforesaid parasites were checked though not always thwarted — they were too clever for that — at every turn. The Earl had one grotesque peculiarity. In his youth, he had heard his father sing with much spirit, a comic song en- titled "The Cork Leg." Some of the stanzas adhered to his memory and suggested a strange community between himself and the hero of them. They were constantly A SON. *5 recalled to his mind. When alone and unoccupied with business he invariably repeated them to himself : There was an old merchant of Rotterdam — And every morning he said, " I am The richest merchant in Rotterdam." * * * IV.— A Son. The day at length arrived when the Countess must face the cross of woman's curse. No avoidance — no circuity — it stood in her life-path, and she should either pass it or die at its base. Herein my lady and Mrs. Ginx are one. Through the vast regions of the mansion thrilled subdued excitement. Some of its tenants were anxious — some fool- ish. There was the grave butler, the discountenanced foot- man, the deeply-agitated cook, the shocked or giggling maids ; and all stepped lightly over the velvet carpets, gossipping only in whispers. The Earl retired to his library, where he pre- tended to himself to be reading a blue-book report on the condition of his own tenantry in various shires. In her ladyship's room — no matter : there were Sir Samuel Horn- bill, Mr. Burton, F.R.C.S., and the nurse ; who require neither you nor me with any impertinent curiosity. Happily, the Countess passed through the gate of sorrow, faced and went by the painful cross — and a piping little voice in the next room seemed to her, lying in a half-sense- less dream, to come and go like a soft, glad music. l6 LORD BANTAM "A son, Countess," whispered Sir Samuel, mildly. "I congratulate you." A palpitating maid outside the chamber had run to the footman at the head of the stairs, and the footman had car- ried his mighty legs swiftly down to the butler who waited in the hall ; and the butler, almost void of speech, had pre- cipitated himself through the library-door and caught the Earl with the agricultural blue-book in his hand, standing at the mantel-piece, blanched with anxiety, which he endeav- ored to repress by repeating to himself: There was an old merchant of Rotterdam— And every morning he said, " I am The richest merchant in Rotter — When in burst Trayfoot the butler — —DAM said the Earl, in his nervousness, involuntarily repeating that syllable out very loud as he turned round. " I 'umbly beg pardon, your lawdship," gasped Trayfoot, clearly spelling the syllable the wrong way, and dumbfounded by the Earl's vehemence, " but if you please my lawd it's a son, and her Ladyship's as well as could be expected." * * * V.—The First Accident. " Thank God," said the Earl, and leaving the bewildered Trayfoot to reconcile this expression with the other, set to work reading at his blue-book in the sheer excitement of pleasure. THE FIRST ACCIDENT. 17 The eminent surgeon and his coadjutor had gone : the Countess was to receive a visit from the Earl before she was settled for the night. Softly he entered the room, slip- ped over the moss-like carpet, and stood beside the purple hangings of the bed. Gently he caressed a moment the pale, sweet, glorified face — glorified by the joy that had come out of pain. Countess. Have you seen him ? Earl. No. Countess. Neither have I. Earl (whispering to the nurse, whose back appeared through the door). Struthers, bring the baby. She brought him in. The Earl fetched a candle, the nurse held up the little lace-swathed honorable, the Count- ess turned languidly towards her child — no sooner turned than she uttered a shriek and fainted away. The Earl dropped the candle — the nurse dropped the baby. —The little honorable' s head was the color of a Maltese orange. PART II. HOW HE CAME TO BE LORD BANTAM. I. — A Human Feeding Bottle. Had the young honorable fallen on his head, his yellow hair had been the death of him. He luckily touched the ground elsewhere, — in fact with a part not vital. Beyond a little screaming, he showed no sign of harm. He was other- wise quite a pretty baby, and the obnoxious hair being con- cealed for a few weeks under a cap, her Ladyship grew ac- customed to him, though she vowed eternal enmity to her cousin of Arran. I believe no Countess ever thinks of nursing her own baby. Middle and low class people enjoy a monopoly of that privilege. I think if I were a woman — and it is the best thing I could wish to be this side of heaven — I could imagine no greater ecstasy than to enfold with motherly arms my own flesh and blood, while it drew from me, a con- sciously pure fountain, the spring-flow of life. But to some minds that would seem to be too vulgar a sympathy. At all events, the Countess required a proper young woman not embarrassed with matrimonial trammels yet in a situation to perform a mother's part ; such an one as is frequently de- scribed by the advertisement, " As wet nurse. Fine breast of milk. Single ; highly respectable." Mr. Burton was consulted. A HUMAN FEEDING BOTTLE. 19 " Burton, mind you get a proper person. Please be care- ful. You don't know how terribly I should feel it if the woman were not perfectly healthy. Inquire into her ante- cedents. See the other members of her family and ascertain if they have any deformity or peculiarity, especially insanity. Young Airsleigh's singularity, you know, is directly traceable to his nurse's aunt, who was a low sort of Radical — a preacher in some odd dissenting sect. And, by the way, that reminds me, — inquire if she has been baptized and con- firmed, and properly churched — for though we are Populars, you know we must not go too far — and don't get a shocking creature with red hair, whatever you do ! " Mr. Burton, like most members of his profession, managed to satisfy his patient's whims without paying the least heed to them. He went to his own hospital, where a sort of wet- nurses' fair was held every morning, and picking out a fresh- looking young woman, who declared herself unembarrassed, and held a visibly healthy baby in her arms, informed her that she and her progenitors had never been dissenters, had always been of exceedingly sound mind and body, that she herself was an accredited member of the Church of England, and must forthwith go and be churched. A well-known author has touchingly told how, by the rigorous rule of the society in which the Countess moved, the poor women who are hired to supply strength to infant Bantams are also bound over to desert their own children absolutely, to have no inter- views with any relatives during the time of their engagement, and to do their best to keep themselves in good health. 20 LORD BANTA I think, my lady, you would have been touched had you seen her, when the hard bargain was concluded, clinging to the baby as one would do who was never to see it again. . . . . Indeed the child of fortune was destined to rob the child of fate. The nurse's fine little girl was consigned to a neighbor, whose trade it was to " farm " such deserted ones, and sadly did a mother's forebodings about the dubious kindness of the baby-farmer pierce her heart as she gave up the child. True and fearful instinct ! When she kissed the small face, and wrapped the little form as tenderly as possi- ble in her coarse shawl, she might as well have buried it alive then and there. It was the last kiss, the last look for her — the last touch of joy for that little one on earth. Eight months after, when young Bantam took to pap, and his nurse came out of the palatial tomb, the cab she hired in her ma- ternal eagerness took her — Heaven help me ! I cannot tell you the rest. Imagine it, if you please, for yourself. The woman's sin had been buried out of her sight. Rackett's place (Rackett was the woman's name) in the mansion at Hiton Place was, to tell the truth, simply to be a human feeding-bottle. Her foster-child was not confided to her care. She was not even permitted to enjoy the thousand pleasures, to a true natural woman, of tending and caressing the infant she suckled. When the young Bantam grew hungry and signified it by vulgar screams, he was con- veyed by the extremely lady-like person who was called his nurse to Rackett's room, and she, when his cravings were satisfied, delivered him up again. Very strict orders had PASSAGES FROM A DIARY. 21 been given by her Ladyship that the person was not to kiss the child on any pretence, but I fear all concerned were too womanly to obey her orders. I have gone into these nursery details, your Royal High- nesses, my Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, not because I like to discuss such matters, but because they are true and common as life, and yet mayhap will wear a strangely novel aspect when thus put down in black and white. I should be sorry to think so meanly of your sensibilities as to sup- pose that the sketch will simply amuse you. * * * II. — -Passages from a Diary. The young honorable took kindly to Rackett's attentions, and his body and the golden hair grew together. I cannot afford to waste much space over his infantile experiences. He fed, he hiccoughed, he drivelled, he screamed, he kicked like any other baby : he passed through eyery phase of ca- tarrh : but then he was bathed in porcelain, swathed in lawns and laces, embroideries and velvet ; he lay in the Re- naissance cradle with the soft-hued curtains drawn around him, keeping out the evil-tempered air. He was watched and waited on by half a dozen servants, guarded in his airings by a careful groom, handled and dandled like a humming-bird's egg. So valuable a contribution to the population of these kingdoms must be reared, spite of accident or fate. Messrs. Mai thus and Mill never put their heads inside a nobleman's 22 LORD BANTAM. house to forbid the banns or play the part of cross-legged Juno. Yet it would require many philosophic treatises to prove to me that my young Bantam, as he lay and fluttered in the Renaissance shell, was any more likely than the child of some sturdy navigator rolling in a washerwoman's basket to be in the long run useful t'o society. Might he not be- come a roue, a rake, a screw, a Fogey, or even a Prig ? Lady Ffowlsmere kept a diary. It was a wonderful con- glomeration. Among other things were occasional hints of her baby's life. The Countess's royal mistress had set a fashion for keeping such records. In volumes guarded by handsome Chubb' s locks, she had very simply and prettily written down from time to time her home experiences, and every Court lady for awhile took to a similar historiography, not always, I fear, so pure and true as hers — much to Mr. Chubb' s advantage. Magnificent bindings, illuminated mon- ograms, and marvellous mechanisms with gold keys often en- closed from profane vision some of the least or some of the most extraordinary things in the world. The Countess wrote a swift running hand. I find, in looking through the vol- ume, among social and political gossip, a few scandals, notes of sermons preached at St. Elias's Chapel, Ely Square, others of new fashions, a tolerably constant account at first of little Master Bantam's doings, whence I extract the following memorabilia : " May 10. Baby christened by the Bishop of Dunshire. Cou- sin Duke of Scrambleton and dear Lady Goding Goding were the godfather and godmother. Ffowlsmere and I had a great PASSAGES FROM A DIARY. 23 deal of difficulty in selecting his names, our circle is so large. It was impossible to please everybody. He was christened Albert Alfred Augustus Adolphus. Loftus Ciceley Chester ; we mean to call him Albert. We had a very pleasant party afterwards. What a charming man the Bishop is ! So bril- liant, so well-bred, so perfectly a man of the world, yet so pious, so sympathetic and sentimental, with such soft and delicate hands. He is a thorough Churchman, and an ex- quisite gentleman. I often wonder why people ridicule him so much. He is so able. He goes about so mildly, and seems to have no evil whatever in him. When I see him, I cannot help thinking ' of such is the kingdom of heaven ' — though I don't think he is a 'little child' quite. Here is rather an irrelevant but interesting entry : " June 2. Cabinet Council to-day. Ffowlsmere says the ministers are very uneasy about the attitude of the Extrem- ists in the House. Some of them are very fractious, and there is ground to believe that they have been angling with the other side for a coalition. That must be impossible, though in the present state of parties one knows not what to expect. Ffowlsmere thinks they want office, but it is out of the question to take any of them into the Cabinet, as he and the other Prigs would instantly retire. They belong to a new and dangerous school of politics ; in fact, it is said some of them are Communists. They charge the Govern- ment with too much political intrigue and too little real re- form. And indeed I think they are not so far wrong in that. I never saw it so difficult to keep a Government together. 24 LORD BANTAM It takes all my wit to manage these new vulgarians. Besides, there are two or three men in the Cabinet who are enough to swamp any ministry. Tandem is always going to do something, and never does it. Some one in the House said the other night, that he wished the President of the Board would be true to his name, and at length do something. Happily many of these Extremists are more loud than dan- gerous. They don't like to risk their chance of office, though they are obliged every now and then to express violent opin- ions. I found outlast evening that Mingo's wife and daugh- ter are dying to be presented, and must manage it for them. Tumbril is troublesome. He has a large family, and I must show them some attention. Ay me ! Politics is a trouble- some affair." Farther on I find that Mingo's wife and' daughter have been duly presented, and that he was behaving much more reasonably, but that Tandem still, to the distraction of his colleagues, pursued his wavering and unproductive career. "June 23. Little Albert was this morning seized with twitchings in the face soon after feeding ; his mouth worked fearfully, and there seemed to be a discharge from it. I sent at once for Mr. Burton, who came in haste and pro- nounced it to be nothing but colic. I at once sent for Mrs. Rackett and blew her up 11 Sept. 5. (Shufflestraw Castle.) We had a great alarm to-day with little Albert. I went into the nursery, and found him screaming with might and main. His face was scarlet. Swanston could not pacify him ; and though he was taken to PASSAGES FROM A DIARY. 2$ Mrs. Rackett, he would not be quiet. At length it seemed certain it would end in convulsions ; and Mr. Bellew was fetched from Rotherhedge. He was unpleasantly calm about it, and said no boy could be very ill who screamed like that. He insisted on taking off his clothes, and found that Swan- ston's maid, in dressing the poor little fellow, had bound a nursery pin tightly into his little back, so as to mark him se- verely. It was so grossly careless, I instantly dismissed her. I am glad to see that his hair is getting a little browner. " Sept. 20. We are full of company — a great shooting party with us. The bishop is here, and stays at home with the ladies. I haven't much time for little Albert. Mr. Bel- low vaccinated him to-day, from a very fine child, after a careful examination to decide whether he was strong enough to bear it. Sept. 24. Alfred's vaccination took : he is very feverish and restless. I asked Mr. Bellew and he tells me he never knew it to be fatal. " Sept. 25. Alfred's arm very much inflamed. Swan- ston- says he is a screamer, and attributes it to his red hair. She says all children with red hair are bad tempered. What a. pity, to be sure ! Otherwise he is perfect. " I've had a most terrible fright. The person Mr. Bellew brought to the castle the other day, with her child, to vacci- nate Albert from, was recognized by some of the servants, and it turns out that she is the wife of that shoemaker Broad- bent, who is a?t infidel Chartist ! ! / the plague of the town. He is repeatedly addressing meetings and getting up oppo- 26 LORD BANTAM. sition to us at elections, and has insulted the vicar by calling him " an ecclesiastical speaking-trumpet." I was most in- dignant that such shocking blood should be transferred to poor little Alfred, and sent for Mr. Bellew immediately. He had nothing to say for himself, except that it was the healthi- est child in the neighborhood ! I told him he ought to have known that though we were free in our politics, we hated such vulgar and seditious wretches ; and it was an everlast- ing disgrace to us to have their brand on a scion of our house. The Earl gave him a cheque, and he is never to enter the castle again. I have sent to town for Mr. Burton to come and see him. I shall be in terror now, lest the child has been inoculated with some low Red opinions. The Earl says he is not likely, with the property he will get, to practise them, even if they are in his blood ; but I have the utmost horror of extremists." The Countess was unquestionably a Prig. Later on I find little scraps here and there which I need not date. " Albert beginning to teeth. Mr. Burton has been to see him every day for a fortnight. Albert terribly cross." The family have evidently returned to town and Mr. Burton again. " Steedman's soothing-powder to Al- bert." " Gave Albert magnesia. Convulsions threatened. Mr. Burton waited here to lunch, and for some hours. A highly gentlemanly person and peculiarly clever with chil- dren." " Lady Goding Goding recommended me to try the ' Sister of Mercy for the Nursery,' a new soothing compound, for little Albert. I got some from Corbyn, and Swanston PASSAGES FROM A DIARY. 27 tells me it stops his worst fits, and she seems to like it. She is a very experienced and valuable nurse." Next day I find : "I happened to mention to Burton that we were using the ' Sister of Mercy for the Nursery,' and he was hor- rified ! He said it was a morphitic drug ! of a highly detri- mental nature, sometimes producing idiocy ! ! I threw the bottle into the fire, and gave Swanston a sound rating for not knowing better than to administer poison to a child. I am seriously thinking of looking out for another nurse. It is positively frightful to think of his taking any incentive to idiocy." — " Little Albert has a tooth / I can just see a white line in the lower gum," etc., etc., etc., etc. Then he walked, then he talked, then he grew, then he fell into his hot-water bath before the cold had been added, and for a while his head was denuded of its objectionable orange at- tachments. This accident led to the extradition of poor Swanston, who happened to be absent from the room at the time, a fact of which her maid was taking advantage to signal out of the window to a groom in the mews behind. Why do I transcribe these frivolous items ? Not certainly to induce a smile at Lady Ffowlsmere's expense, who, God bless her, was writing so far as her child was concerned the petty details of a large and honest affection ; proving herself natural indeed, spite of philosophy, politics, and position. Yet I would have you note the weakness there was in that love and estimate of her child which was biassed enough to overpower the sense of justice to others : how unconsciously selfish, foolish and unfair a woman may be in the strength 28 LORD BANTAM. of maternal affection and the assumption of class superiority : further, how extreme a contrast you may draw between the minute anxiety, the lavish carefulness bestowed upon this in- fant compatriot, and the dubious, cursory, nay injurious dis- regard, whereof many a sad young immortal in these rich islands is a daily martyr. The satirist who turns his glass upon these discrepancies of humanity executes no willing task if he be a true man, yet most certainly is discharging a public duty. We need throughout society a wider recogni- tion of human equality, not in condition, but in right and fact. In the high latitudes of aristocratic birth and breed- ing, I for one grudge no little lord or lady devoted kindness and all the minute luxurious comfort money can secure. But let them not congratulate themselves that this is more than circumstance, or that it confers a right to qualify the rights of others. The egotism of class is a danger impreg- nate with bitter seeds. It is fostered at the expense of that broad humanity which seeking finds on every hand some chain of sympathy with those around it — which recognizes a duty rising above self and reaching also downwards to the very depth of brother-nature. The prejudices based in this assumption corrupt even still the principles of legislation and the roots of society. Title is made a term of substance, not of relation ; vested interests are accepted as a justifica- tion for the intolerable ; property is looked upon as a thing of right and not of trust; superiority -, even in its relation to social status a fallacious and impudent assumption, is made the ground of an unequal distribution of power and the in- ACADEMIC GROVES. 29 equitable administration of justice. No marvel if the man who suffers from these brilliant imposfures of society, who is sensible how much they impede the fine sweep of free principles, should sometimes turn with a sort of horrified resignation to force as the only solvent of conditions too hard to be longer endured ! You, who in exalted places have in your own pure souls struggled successfully against the blinding vanity of class, are heroes and heroines whom I reverence, — for your tempta- tion is not such as is common to man. III. — Academic Groves. At this period of our hero's life, the affairs of his elder brother, Lord Bantam, began to attract the painful attention of his father, as they had for some time acquired a curious notoriety out of doors. The Earl brought up his heir as he had himself been reared. He restricted him to a small allowance, and urged him, as a matter of habit, to maintain over his expenditure a rigid control. Then he sent him to Win ton. There Lord Bantam repaid the advice he had re- ceived by incurring debts to the extent of ^3,000. His creditors were too glad to have such a debtor, and too clever to let out the young nobleman's secrets. So his father knew nothing of them, and supposed that he had managed well on his allowance of ^"ioo a year. These debts were running on at thirty per cent, interest compounded every three months. From Winton he went to Camford. 30 LORD BANTAM Camford to visit is a charming place ; it seems to breathe of quiet, of patient monastic study and noble wisdom-bearing silence. Its gray stones are as if strewn with the hoar of antique and classic pedantry. As you pass through its groined passages, cross its cloistered quadrangles, survey its stately halls or worship in its venerable churches, you think that here at least learning has found her proper seat ; se- questered from the rough passions of the world, secure from the intrusion of vanity and debauch, silent with Herself, Her duty, and Her God. It ought to be so, but it is not. I know not why it should not be. The passage through those splendid portals no gold should buy, no rank should gain. It should, with all the honors and comforts of these noble foundations, be free to any son of England who has the worth and wit to win the right. Surely you should shut from thence your maudlin or your fool, your roue, your turfman, your fashionable lounger, whatever his name or estate ; and open these serious gates alone to the sons of work and thought and duty. As it is, in this rank soil, many a prom- ising grain of wheat is choked and smothered amidst the strong growths of folly and sin, while the husbandmen look on, their hands too idle or too craven to weed them out. Depend upon it, you select company of ecclesiastics, dons and tutors, if you don't set about this reform yourselves, a healthy tide from without will sweep into and around your cosy haven, and drift you out to perdition with the foul wreck you have permitted to accumulate about you. * * * A YOUNG ARISTOCRAT. 31 IV. — A young Aristocrat. To Camford went Lord Bantam. Its trading harpies hastened to offer to so good a customer every facility for •ruining himself. He accepted their kind offices. Never even in that luxurious place were rooms so handsomely furnished, horses so good, traps so elegant, dinners and wines so expensive, pictures so costly, and women so fast as those of Lord Bantam's establishments in High Church and the town. Much of this was notorious through- out the university, and must have been as patent to some of the dons as to the gossips in High street. But they made no protest except when the noble undergraduate came under proctorial notice in a drunken row ; and once, when he and a few select companions had contrived to enter the cathedral at night, and color a fine marble with lines in zebra-fashion, they expelled two of his accomplices who were so unfortunate as to have no titled name to dishonor ; forced the young gentleman to apologize, and wrote to the Earl that " a recurrence of such conduct might lead to the most serious consequences." The syndicate must have had a curious notion of education. They could hardly have be- lieved that the spectacle of folly and prodigality was so in- nocuous to university tone and discipline ! Is it theirs only to open their eyes to deficiencies in ecclesiastical, classical and philosophic acquirements, and to shut them to the ex- travagance and sin of the alumni ? or were it not a chiefest 32 LORD BANTAM. part of education to teach the lessons of high humanity — ingenues, et humancB artes ? Should it be possible for any pupil at a seat of learning to emulate the vices of Com- modus, or ought not sumptuary laws to confine the rivalry of prodigals within bounds less perilous to studious morali- ties ? Of a morning, towards noon, a quadrangle hard by the great cathedral rang with loud voices. Perched upon his window-sill, velvet capped, with pewter in hand, Lord Bantam held spicy converse with the son of a prime minister who leaned smoking out of an opposite casement, or exchanged bets and jokes of a dubious character with a knot of noisy men on the pavement below. You, an honest Englishman, wishing well for your country, and having a kindly heart for manly and generous youth, might well wonder as you tra- versed the court and gazed upon this scene, whether idle nobility and parvenu wealth should be afforded in the pre- cincts of hallowed shrines and the cloisters of learning, foot- holds to corrupt the hopes of coming generations. Lord Bantam's expenses, his first year at Camford, were ;£i 5,000; he owed ^11,000 to money-lenders on his own notes and those of his friends. His father's steward had managed to get him allowed ^4,000. His tailor stood cred- itor for ^3,000. That clever gentleman did not confine his shears to cutting cloth ; he snipped off many a young man's income with a sharpness and skill sometimes wanting in his proper work. He charged young Bantam in his bill with clothes and jewellery never supplied ; and thus, on condition A YOUNG ARISTOCRAT. 33 of sharing the product, enabled him to cheat his father. The noble youth began to evince a taste for the turf. He won the High Church sweepstakes for the Derby — in which, by the way, several dons had their money — amounting to " 800 sovs— " as at Winton, under the noses of the masters, he had won a school sweepstakes before. He picked up a shrewd gambler named Tom Rendle, made him his factotum, and in his name bought and ran his horses. At first they were suc- cessful. He resolved to have stables of his own. Rendle was an admirable factotum. He found the money, the horses, the stables, the jockeys, took sheaves of notes, nego- tiated them with innocent friends, and never troubled his master with accounts. He looked upon the young lord as the richest mine in England for a clever man. All this was concealed from the Earl, who, engrossed in politics and Rot- terdam riches, knew little of racing matters, would not have known his son's colors if he had seen them ; and society does not care to tattle the peccadillos of a coming star to a noble statesman. When he came of age Lord Bantam owed ^"40,000. By the end of that year his liabilities reached ^95,000, and in two years- more were ^£200,000. He had of course left Camford, and had his secret nests about the country; formed liaison after liaison with masculine indif- ference to the other sex ; and at length fell into the net of an infinitely clever beauty, provided along with the other animals by the attentive Rendle. This person was now a gentleman, a "financier," who kept his carriage and gave select dinners to the princes of the turf. The woman was his slave. ' She 34 LORD BANTAM. pretended that Lord Bantam had seduced her. He was in- fatuated with her almost to idiocy. She threatened to expose him to the Earl, was backed up by Rendle, and the pair, keeping their game for a fortnight in a state of alternate drunkenness, maudlinism and fear, — at length succeeded in getting him to marry her. Returning from the unholy ceremony as with a blast upon him from the shrine he had profaned; wedded in delirium and never recognizing his infamous wife * * * * ***** ***** Does any one ask whether it be true that a thing so horri- ble could happen in England in these days ? The Earl paid his son's debts like an Earl. After all, they did not absorb a year's income. Not long after the factotum married Lady Bantam. Thus at four years old our hero became Lord Bantam, and it was fortunate for him that he was too young to know the scandal he inherited with the name. It was a scandal of a sort whereof society does not make more than a nine day's wonder. There is great repairing power in an Earl- dom and several hundred thousands a year. * * * PART III HOW HE LEARNED HIS LETTERS. I. — Words versus Wit. Earl Ffowlsmere was so distraught by the hapless fate of his elder son that he shrank from sending our hero to Winton. He therefore provided tutors at home. No doubt this had a peculiar influence on the young lord's future character. It deprived him of a society in which he would have found rank, prospects and good-breeding on a par with his own, yet not unduly asserting themselves over less fortunate accidents. He might also have acquired a con- siderable skill in writing verses in languages hardly an Englishman would venture to attempt to speak, a quantity of valuable aphorisms for quotation in his future elevated sphere, a crude idea of English, an ingeniously bad handwrit- ing, and probably some proficiency in cricket and rowing. The curriculum would not have afforded him much more, un- less indeed we include an acquisition, perforce of continued iteration, of certain prayers, psalms and lessons of the Church. At home, if he were deprived of the companion- ship and the sports and the finished elegance of classic com- position, his range of acquisition went deeper into the well of knowledge and wider over its fields. He was taught French and German by conversation. He learned his Latin to speak it, not neglecting the verses as trifles con- 2,6 LORD BANTAM. tributing to polish his style. A scientific German tutor opened to him the rich veins of natural science, and laid the foundation for some knowledge of the world about him. The Earl himself took in hand historical instruction, con- veyed more by conversation and illustration than by tasks, seeking to indoctrinate him as he advanced from boyhood with his own political ideas and a reverence for the British Constitution. This latter teaching afterwards refuted its own purpose ; for the youth, as we shall see, did not accept with perfect faith the political theses of the statesman. The Earl was particularly eager that his son should be "a speaker." Recognizing the power of talk in modern repre- sentative systems, he desired that the future Earl should be versed in all its clever and seductive tricks. Almost before he had emerged from boyhood he trained him in elocution ; he set him to declaim the orations of ancient and modern masters : he drilled him in Quintilian. Adopting the exam- ple of Lord Chatham with his son, he put him to translate extempore from classic authors : finally, he announced to him topics for off-hand speeches. Hence at fifteen, when Lord Bantam went to Oxbridge, he was an expert speaker, and took his place at the Union among its chief debaters. Whether this facility of utterance was given at the expense of better acquirements may hereafter appear ; at present we may mention it procured for our hero the sobriquet of "Crowing Bantam." If sobriquets were only fatal, one would hope that such an one might be attached to not a few of our parliamentarian orators. It is conceivable that the DIGRE SSION. 37 ensuing mortality might be a wholesome thing for the State. II. — Digression. Benevolently dedicated to American Readers. I have seen occasional suggestions in the press that on this branch of education it would be well to assimilate our system to that of America. But, if there is a root of wisdom in the hint, there are also roots of evil. Mr. Carlyle has embodied in language too vigorous and noble to be emu- lated his protest against present-day chatter, and one may only very diffidently say a word or two on the matter in its relation to education. In the United States the culture of speech-making begins almost before the culture of thought. Indeed, not long after a few words and ideas have found some lodgment in a young mind, they are casually and cursorily shaken up within it by the demand for an " oration" on some impossible thesis. Fact and history are necessarily awanting to such juvenile spouters, wherefore they are forced to concoct their exercitations partly from imagination and partly from imperfect data. They are encouraged to be theorists before they become cognizant of truths. So uni- versal is the Yankee propensity to orationizing, that to it must be attributed in no small degree the singularly metaphysical and theoretic character of ordinary American reasoning, even on the commonest matters of social or political life ; still more those rare and monstrous forms of argument they are wont to advance in international negotiation. You find $8 LORD BANTAM. your neighbor at a dinner-table, in defiance of Baconian maxims, elaborately generalizing from one particular. No people in the world has equal talent for the ornamental ex- pression of nothing. Tracing the effect of this on all popu- lar thought, all popular opinion, all popular action, — it is to substitute " smartness " for learning — plausibility for fact — to dissolve instead of to crystallize truth in words. Few Americans estimate a word at its correct value. Few of them seem to feel it to be a precious thing not to be squan- dered : not to be abused to set untruth or commonplace or unreality : a thing which wielded with exactness and care carries in it a glorious might, but which thrown out with slovenly or shallow incaution is a folly or a sin. To be ready in expressing the results of study and thought is a faculty of faculties : to cover with thin and melting flakes of eloquence an undergound of ignorance, is to spread delu- sion for the weakest and most numerous of mankind. * III. — A juvenile Tourist and Author. Our hero having safely passed the measles, reached the comparatively mature age of twelve years. "Compara- tively " with all the children and most of the adults that were huddled together in the murky mews and alleys over which he looked from his high schoolroom windows. Mature in things they recked not of — a reader, a speaker of French with a touch of German, advanced in Latin : deft at composing A JUVENILE TOURIST AND AUTHOR. 39 elegant nonsense lyrics : a juvenile methematician : learned in Bible and Catechism ; familiar with that skeleton of the past called history. He could also cut a tolerable figure in a drawing-room, make a neat bow, and give an opinion with sufficient aristo- cratic confidence. In other matters comparison finds him unequal to his hapless compatriots. In forward shrewdness, cat-like cunning, ready resource, bold defiance of law and cool irrecognition of gospel, in early precocity of talent for business, he was necessarily inferior to his inferiors. As nature had imperfectly constructed him for fighting, he would also have taken a mean place in an alley scrimmage. Is there no drawing these two extremes nearer together, the one up, the other down ? Is it the inevitable predestina- tion of the Almighty that the young Lord Bantam shall be and dwell thus : and the child of Ginx shall be and dwell so — Lazarus and Dives, with a great gulf fixed between them ? At this stage of their son's life, the Earl and Countess re- solved upon passing some months at various Courts on the continent. Like the meteors their movements were chroni- cled in the newspapers, and gave rise to grave conjectures that they had gone abroad on some political mission. From Paris the correspondent of the Electro Magnet wrote the startling information that he "had met the Earl at a petit dejeilner of three, in a certain Imperial sanctum, where secrets had transpired which mortal might not utter ; but he might say, without breaking any confidence, that the world 40 LORD BANTAM. would, in the course of three weeks or so, hear news that would rouse Empires and disturb the equilibrium of centu- ries." The result was a confidential despatch from Berlin to the Prussian Ambassador in London, instructing him to ascertain if possible what secret mission was sending the Earl and Countess of Ffowlsmere intriguing in half the Courts of Europe. The ambassador's reply was as sarcastic as it was reassuring. He informed his Government that "he had lived long enough in England to learn that its diplomacy- proceeded not by intrigue but by blunders : that it was im- possible to suppose his excellent and mediocre friend the Earl of Ffowlsmere to be engaged, either of his own motion or by direction of the British Government, in any diplomatic mission ; that, as to the Government, it was the English cus- tom to declare its objects beforehand : and even if the re- port were true, he was sure no harm could come of it to any nation but England herself, since the avowed course of English policy — by which the Earl must necessarily be re- stricted — was to disown anything but peace and its result — ■ money ; and to play for plausible if sometimes undignified releases from inconvenient obligations." Young Bantam with his tutor accompanied this distin- guished party from London to Paris : from Paris to Vienna : from Vienna to the Danubian Provinces : to Constantinople, Athens, and Rome. He was observant, was well primed by his tutor, conversed with his father on elementary politics, and was petted by Princes who desired to maintain good re- A JUVENILE TOURIST AND AUTHOR. 41 lations with England. He received the Pope's benediction. As with other young persons, when his mind began to work it became eager to afford visible evidence thereof ; so the young lord wrote a book. It is the fashion nowadays for youthful lords, baronets and gentlemen of wealth to make grand tours in out-of-the-way regions, and to record their hasty observations and necessarily limited generalizations in books that not many years afterwards they are glad if others are as willing to forget as themselves. " The Danubian Provinces : with notes social and statistical : by Lord Ban- tam," was not the worst of such productions I have seen. It related very simply what he had experienced ; recorded opinions founded on facts ; and being written by an Earl's son and to be had at all the libraries could not fail to gain a temporary notoriety in middle-class drawing-rooms. I may select a specimen from the chapter on " Rowmania." " Lord F . and I went to call upon the Prince of Rowmania. He did not look like a Prince. He was bandy-legged. I did not wonder therefore when I was told, that his people did not like him. While he was talking to papa he said he was a good deal on horseback. He also said he had to keep horses saddled day and night, because every few weeks there was a revolution, and he had to ride away for his life. I asked him why he did not cut off the heads of the people who rebelled. He said that if he were to do that he would have no subjects left. It struck me, on the other hand, that it would be better to do that than to have one's own head cut off: and my father said 'there 42 LORD BANTAM. were precedents for that opinion of a ruler's duty to him- self.' Coming away, another remark of Lord F par- ticularly struck me : namely, ' that it was a wonder any one should persist in trying to govern when it was so plain his efforts were unsatisfactory to the people : but that the ambition of ruling often makes men insensible to its ab- surdities.' " Simple as were young Bantam's observations, there was found to be an unconscious satirical flavor about them, which one or two clever journalists utilized for home appli- cation. IV.— A Scotch Tutor. One of the tutors engaged for Lord Bantam was a Mr. Kelso, a Scotchman, who had been strongly recommended to the Earl. The latter and his lady both hesitated about bringing the young heir into contact with a man whom they expected to be imbued with the religious views of the Pres- byterians — but on the other hand, they had reason to be- lieve that his ability and morality were unexceptionable. It turned out that this gentleman had been educated at a Scotch University, and had undergone the necessary studies to fit him for the ministry of the Scotch Church. In the course of his reading — he was omnivorous in books — he struck out for himself some lines of thought not quite con- sistent with the interpretation put by his Church Courts, upon the Confession of Faith. Hence when he came to A SCOTCH TUTOR. 43 apply to the Presbytery to license him as a preacher, and to submit himself for the necessary examination, it was discov- ered that on some points of doctrine he was " unsound." He was not quite clear about the legal obligation of the Sab- bath, though he admitted it to be practically enjoined on his conscience. This was hinted to the Presbytery by some ready officer, and without proof that his heterodoxy was heinous, a vote consigned him to perpetual laity, so far as that Church was concerned. I have nothing at this moment to do with the merits of the objections — but I have to do with the fact that they drove into opposition a man whom perhaps a little kindliness would have brought either to ab- jure his errors or to show that he had none. As it was, he left with a sense of injury that rankled deeply in his breast, and he looked upon the rejectors as a lot of unconscientious bigots, which they really never meant to be. We have the measure of Lord Bantam's grounding in the faith. He had been taught with some rigor the truths of the Christian religion and the formulas of his Church. He could state them all with tolerable readiness and exactness — so far as words went. They were not, however, crystal- lized in his life. But then he had been taught to be afraid not to believe, instead of to believe and not be afraid. There could hardly be much groundwork of faith. No doubt the Earl and Countess would have been deeply and sincerely resentful had any one suggested a question of their religiousness. Were they not extremely precise in their conduct ? honorable and sensitive in their motives ? 44 LORD BANTAM. sufficiently attentive to the ritual of their Church? Was there any voice so firm as the Earl's, so decorously reverent as that of the Countess in the responses to the service? Did they not with regularity receive the sacrament of Com- munion ? Were not all forms of heresy equally odious to them — whether it were Erastian or Roman or Arian or Soc'inian ? Yet it may be that in their deep probing of other things, the noble pair had but scratched the surface of true religion. The fact that they would have resented criticism of the character of their faith would have evidenced how little they had appreciated what a religion is ; for true reli- gion is insensible to criticism : it is beyond its reach. This is a matter irrespective of the mere substance of belief. A religion, in its integrity, whatever a man may believe, is that which informs and possesses his soul and rules with despotic sway his whole life. You could scarcely say that of the high- bred consent accorded by Lord and Lady Ffowlsmere to a supremely respectable form of church doctrine and ritual. You may test it, if you please, by their conduct respecting young Bantam. They brought him up as they themselves had been brought up. He was duly catechised, the Earl himself not disdaining to overlook so important a business. He went to church and attended morning prayers as regularly as the Earl's servants — and with equally good results. He was warned of sundry deadly sins, which however it seemed to be as much a part of gentility as of religion to avoid. He heard continually expressed and saw repeatedly exhibited his parents' abhorrence of all manner of meanness, bias- A SCOTCH TUTOR. 45 phemy, impropriety and heresy. But nothing he heard or saw or was taught went down to the roots of his nature, and that is the very part of a man where true religion begins to work, and thence like nourishment to a tree flows up in healthy sap, carrying strength and life, and greenness, and fruitfulness through the whole being. To sum up the result of his religious discipline, it taught him to be moral and rev- erential — but not to be religious. He learned to respect the Church, but was not quite so fixed in his affection for God — a Deity who loves his creatures, and whom it becomes them ingenuously to love. That was presented to his mind as an Entity too awful and sequestered to be a subject of common thought. — Yet there is a noble passage in the preaching of a noble Apostle — which says that God is not far from any one of us ; and it seems to me that the Church or the creed or the ritual or the dogma that intervenes with a screen, however beautiful and elaborate, between me, panting for a parent's love and daily familiarity, and the parent yearning for my childlike affection, is a barrier to be swept away, unless it will of itself open up to show me more clearly the vision and fruition of that divine joy. His first tutor, a former Westminster man, had followed with his pupil the course prescribed in that celebrated school, and had carefully conveyed through the chilling winter climate of "Pearson on the Creed," a mind just budding into its young spring life, and unequal to the cold hardness of the metaphysic, before it had learned to appre- 46 LORDBANTAM. date the practical bearings on his daily actions of religious and moral principles. To touch his heart, to reach his conscience, to awaken his most generous sentiments, to prompt his aspirations after all things pure, noble, virtuous, honest, of good report, to raise his thoughts to God as his Creator, Redeemer, and Friend, — all this was made second- ary — though not entirely forgotten — to denning in his mind a strict outline of dogmas, the truth or untruth of which matters not in this relation. The more truthful, the greater the impolicy of pressing them in this hard form, and at this stage of growth on the fledgling mind. Bantam became very fond of his Scotch tutor. There was something attractive in the man's peculiar shrewdness and tenacity of intellect, the breadth of his comprehensive views of every topic, the enormous store of material which loving and incessant study had accumulated in his mind. The quaint humor, the genial tenderness of sympathy, the half-worshipping appreciation of great men and great words : the reverence and piety, along with the strange cold dogmatism of much of his belief; the whole tempered by the charity, not so much of principle as of a loving nature, made a character not uncommon in Scotland, and perhaps agreeable only to a select few. From this man the young lord learned many heresies. Kelso had read history as men seldom read it, with a broad apprehension of movements and results which gave to his conclusions peculiar force and splendor. He tracked with keen scent the course of liberty in the communities of Greece, in Rome, through the Dark A SCOTCH TUTOR. 47 Ages ; took up the double thread of her movement in re- ligious and political combination at the Reformation, and showed how Bible principles, and Bible forms of thought, and the subtle puissant influences of Christ's wonderful teaching, had helped to dissolve the ancient forces of society, had even marked the outlines of modern liberalism, and aided in modifying forms of government. To the Puritan or Presbyterian element he showed how much of modern republican and democratic sentiment was due, based as its ecclesiastical organization had always been on the recognition for the laity of freedom of thought and equality of representation in church-government. He showed how this, backed by a strangely firm faith in a few great dogmas, had worked with almost invincible power, and so always must work when such an organization is true to its principles and itself. Bantam, whose vague young notions had exalted episcopacy to almost divine establish- ment, began to believe that it and the monarchical and aristocratic institutions of his country all stood on the same basis, human invention — lived only on the same condition — human patience; and that there was good reason to doubt if any or all of these vast institutions would bear criticism in the light of truth or Christianity, of experience, or even of common sense. Instead of feeling proud of his lineage, his wealth, and his religion, he was led to question the honor of the one, the justice of the other, and the purity of the third. At the same time Mr. Kelso pointed out to him how much good there was in each. 48 LORDBANTAM. Specially did Kelso protest to his young charge against the creed- worship of the day. " A creed," he used to say, " is a declaration of faith ; it ought to be the crystallization in words of a man's soul-thoughts and faith, the outlines of his daily life with God. In fact the best creed I know is the beatitudes. They embody practical faith. But simply ac- cepted from another man, adopted in terror, and held under the threats of a terrible sanction — not grasped and brought into the soul, and incorporated with its life — a creed is only a semblance ; it is * Nehushtan : ' stuffs not life. Strauss used to begin one of his lectures by saying, ' Gentlemen, we will now proceed to construct God.' He was not more pro- fane than many a man who shrinks from his profanity. I have often thought, when I have seen men going about to construct creeds, or limning out for themselves Gsd's fea- tures and decrees, in their own words and ideas, of Isaiah's scornful satire on the wooden-god makers of his day : The carpenter stretcheth out his rule ; lie marketh it out with a line ; he fitteth it with planes, and he marketh it out with the compass, and maketh it after the figure of a man, according to the beauty of a man ; that it may remain in the house. He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak, which he strengtheneth for himself among the trees of the forest : he planteth an ash, and the rain doth nourish it. Then shall it be for a man to burn : for he shall take thereof and warm himself ; yea, he kindleth zV, and baketh bread ; yea, he maketh a god, and worshippeth it : he maketh it a graven image, and falleth down thereto. He burnetii part thereof in the fire ; with part thereof he eateth flesh ; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied : yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire : A SCOTCH TUTOR. 49 And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image : he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me ; for thou art my god. "What cutting ridicule, what a sarcastic rebuke of man's assumption ! And there is little difference between wood and words. From both you may make your idols : your fetish may be one of sentences. Unless we bow reverently before God, own our ignorance and His omniscience, hum- bly and contritely wait upon the high and lofty One who in- habiteth eternity, till He condescends to invision with Him- self the lowly spirit — unless we will permit God to declare Himself, instead of ourselves constructing Him, we can have no genuine insight into His being, or into our relations to Him." Kelso's secular teaching was equally broad, and I am not prepared to exonerate him from blame for taking advantage of his position to instil such ideas into the mind of a young lord, already red-headed, and vaccinated with Radical lymph. The tutor's views were singularly unlike those of the Prigs. " Look," said he, " at the way in which the high business of our government is now carried on. Can you pick out a single man who looks beyond the limits of the present, or the narrow circuit of these islands, or who takes any broad, practical view of the Imperial future ? One only of them all has uttered a timorous squeak about a great confedera- tion of English-speaking peoples ; but from the rest, on the destinies of Empire, we have had nothing but dead silence, or twitterings about cost and policy, as abject, narrow, and 50 LORD BANTAM. disloyal as they were perilous. As yet no man of them has propounded, in noble, heart-stirring, vivid language, the idea of an united Britain — not the isolated nodules of these petty isles, but the far-stretching Imperial boulder of a third of the globe. The grand erTort of organizing the disjecta membra of this enormous dominion into a concrete federation appalls men bent on conciliating Irish irreconcilables with Church bills, Westmeath commissions, and the truncheons of police- men or the cutlasses and revolvers of a constabulary. " Let us look at home. Take the conditions of our so- ciety. See the laboring classes seething and uneasy, feeling the pressure of a yoke they cannot define, though it is hard as iron, restless for remedies they know not how to invent : conscious only, and rightly conscious, that their state is not what God meant it to be, nor what, in the face of man, it ought to be, nor what, by the help of God to the contrary, they intend it shall be. Where is the statesman who seems to appreciate the perils of the hour- — who, by temperate and judicious handling of the body politic, can facilitate the re- adjustment of the disproportioned or disjointed members, and set it fairly on its four feet ? The Commune flourishes on the antagonism of the economists — living logic of facts against dead logic of principle. Is there no God-ordained statesman to see that vents must be found for the pent-up forces of society, or that inevitable explosion of fierce, pe- trolous horror will shatter it again to a chaos of primitive atoms. Let us be sure of one thing — sure as the sun shines, sure as God's existence — such a man must rise, must lead A SCOTCH TUTOR. 51 the people of these realms in the direction of reforms now scouted by the self-inspired so-called, economic seers, shin- ing newspaper demi-gods, and Idol Statesmen, or Inferno it- self will come up through the ground, and spread its horrors over this fair England. Happy for us that, from time to time, such vents have been found in Reform Bills, in eman- cipation from religious bondage, in Free Corn, and Free Trade ; but now these have largely worked out their remedy, society is getting clogged again, and the voice of resistless human progress shouts for more. Do you think you can stop it with doctrinaire objections ? Do you think you can choke it with political sugar-plums, with the ballot, with half- concessions to trades unions, nay, even with education? This education is the lever which must upheave the very foundations of our present society. Will the Nehushtans of monarchy, of State-Church, of House of Peers and heredi- tary successions, of Land Monopolizers, Charitable Corpor- ations, Bumbledoms, stand when that huge lever, worked by twenty millions, is brought to bear upon them ? No ! Hence the man who would see these ancient tenements gradually and securely taken to pieces, not shattering down with blood and terror on their hapless inhabitants, will wisely commence his reforms now, lest the tower of Siloam prove a grave to many not unrighteous persons. We must recog- nize the fact at once, that society, which means the state, has more to do than register the occurrence of politico-economic facts : it must grasp and deal with the evils of the com- munity in a spirit of politic generosity. The spirit of legis- 52 LORD BANTAM. lation must be transformed. Revolutionary remedies are not necessary. They may by judicious foresight be pre- vented. The coming struggle is between laissez-faire and that almost equally bad and perilous socialism which looks to the State to do everything. Between these two lies the happy mean. The State cannot refuse to take its part in its own reorganization ; the people must do their part in their own improvement. You are shut in with them ; you must face them and their demands ; you must admit their diffi- culties, disabilities, distresses ; you must concede to them that you owe them more than the duty of paying some im- perfect quid pi' o quo ; you must find out some way of dis- tributing more equally the plethoric wealth of these king- doms amongst its people, or prepare for the deluge. Even the ancient Spanish family that had an ark of its own in Noah's inundation would be hard bestead to find anything that would float above this one." Another time he spoke in a somewhat similar strain : "Make the best of your day. Your class and wealth dis- tinction is one that your grandchild may not see. This is a rapid era. The strata of society that hitherto have looked so solid and fixed give signs of volcanic motion. The aristocratic fabric of our constitution is swiftly, daily becoming inconsistent with the rising power and forces of society. There are two methods of convulsion : either the lowest stratum will be upheaved with terrific force, and bursting through the others come up at last to the surface through the old red sandstone of feudocracy ; or it is just A SCOTCH TUTOR. 53 possible that such a fortunate convulsion may take place as you can see in a bay in the Isle of Wight, where all the strata have risen together and stand almost perpendicular, side by side, mutually supporting, no one above another. Much depends on the upper stratum. If it is thick and in- flexible, it will be split and shivered by the lower upheaving forces. The feudal system has been decaying with the growth of English liberty — which like ivy has spread and flourished over its crumbling glories. Relics still remain, but they are incompatible with the changes that have been wrought in our social ideas and political bases ; they must give way, and your class gives way with them. It will be the last to give way, because of the vitality constantly im- ported into it from the middle classes. But two dangers menace it. One danger is the weakness, ignorance, or folly of the class itself. The other is the breaking down of its main tower, the monarchy. An unpopular monarch will not only commit suicide for the royalty of England, but will carry with him to extinction the fabric of aristocracy. Pos- sibly the former will be the method of disaster to the most concrete anomaly of modern constitutions — an aristocracy based on feudal fictions, existing on popular sufferance, and maintained only by the fortuitous dignity and sagacity of its members. You must see that such a patent incongruity cannot long brave the criticism of political philosophy or the selfish keenness of vulgar instinct." * * * 54 LORD BANTAM. V. — Catholicism. One peculiar phrase of Mr. Kelso's teaching afterwards exercised on Lord Bantam's opinions a permanent influ- ence. The tutor might boast of a broad experience of " churches." As a student for the ministry he had been at various times utilized by Wesleyans, Baptists, Primitives, and Independents: he had preached for Morrisonians, Burghers, Anti-Burghers, Old Lights and New Lights — and Plymouth Brethren. Of each and all he could sharply ex- pose the weaknesses ; but of every one he also held some approving opinion. He endeavored to convey to his pupil the lesson he had himself learned from this unique inter- course with the sects ; namely, that while there was much that was grotesque in each, — while every one needed apology, reform, and " the gift of charity," — there was not one in which might not be found many good points. In his view, each of these sects had a great deal to learn from the others. His comprehensive acquaintance with them enabled him also to illustrate the fact, that many of the matters wherein they were most viciously antagonistic were those that appeared to be the least relevant to a broad and true religion. "You see," said Kelso, one day, "religion ought to be adaptive. If it were not so it could not be universal, and CATHOLICISM. 55 no religion not fitted to become universal can be a true re- ligion. It is impossible to conceive of so unreasonable a thing as a religion to be true when appropriate only to a fraction of mankind. The Christian religion alone, in its purity, answers to that test. It meets all natures and all circumstances and all times. Hence you observe its various aspects. With some people it assumes the form of an intel- lectual adoption of principles with rigid adherence to regu- lations. In other cases, it is a matter of emotion or even passion, and plays upon its subjects with strange and almost grotesque influences. With some it is a soft spiritual influ- ence transfusing the life — to others a rough series of strug- gles, with their alternating hope and despair. Endless modifications naturally result ; but after all you will find at the bottom of many of them the same facts, the same ideas, producing the various developments of religious feeling, ac- tion, form — and that the greatest apparent discrepancies are incrustations on a pure and common ideal. I now disregard these incrustations, and with difficulty, but I hope with suc- cess, seek this pure basis. I can worship with almost any sect of Christians, since I can disregard the accidents and agree in the substance." " I have never seen any religious ceremonies other than those of our own Church," said young Bantam, " and am curious to know the distinctions in ritual and manner be- tween the various denominations." " That," said Kelso, " would undoubtedly be useful to you. Many of the prejudices maintained between opposing 56 LORD BANTAM sects would melt away or be qualified by more intimate con- tact with them. I have been often struck with the igno- rance displayed by polemical disputants of the real practice and belief of their antagonists. In many cases, no doubt, a hopeless want of human sympathy or a dishonest indiffer- ence prevents men from acquiring such knowledge." They agreed to visit some of the dissenting chapels, and, as a specimen of their experiences, it is necessary that I should describe the first introduction of the young aristocrat and churchman to an unfamiliar phase of Protestantism. One day the tutor and his pupil, in the course of a long walk from ShufHestraw Castle, returning through the town of Ffowlsmere, noticed a placard on an obscure chapel of the sort that sometimes crouch in the neighborhood of old town churches. It announced that the Reverend Dr. Roper, a famous leader among the Primitive Christians, would preach at a certain service to be held in the chapel on the succeeding evening, and that after the service a love-feast would be held. Kelso seized the opportunity. " You cannot do better than go to this," said he ; "I have heard this man, who really has a great deal of originality, and the ' love-feast ' is sure to acquaint you with an interest- ing phase of enthusiasm." Accordingly, the next evening the two slipped away from the castle. The chapel was a rectangular structure of brick, with a false pediment of the same material. On the frieze below it, in stucco letters, were the words, CATHOLICISM. 57 ZEBOIM. 1789. Within, it presented an array of high, narrow pews on the floor, galleries supported on wooden columns, which exhibited an alarming tendency to bulge, and a pulpit in shape having the appearing of a red mahogany tulip exalted on a very in- adequate stem. To this a serpentine staircase afforded ac- cess. Entering the gallery the gentlemen found that the seats seemed designed to prove that purgatory might exist on earth, and therefore need not be looked for half-way to heaven. But the people appeared unconscious of discom- fort. They were of a class somewhat novel to the church- going young lord : many women, tradespeople, small farm- ers, laborers and domestics. Some of them had walked ten or twelve miles to hear the preacher, and would afterwards walk home again without grumbling. As Lord Bantam looked round, he observed a freedom of demeanor, which indicated that for them the place itself had no special sacrerl- ness. Some talked, one or two men retained their hats, but 3 few seemed to be engaged in silent prayer. Presently a small door behind the pulpit opened, and two or three Dersons came out, one a short, stout man, with a round face, straight black hair, and a large mouth, his white, ex- pansive, and untidy necktie designating the preacher of the day. The others were clearly official brethren of some weight in the community, one of whom Lord Bantam recognized as the principal grocer of Ffowlsmere. 58 LORD BANTAM. Instant silence fell upon the congregation as the heavy- looking minister slowly labored up the corkscrew staircase to the pulpit, holding the rails on either hand, and creaking the steps with his weight as he went. Once up and shut sharply into the tulip by the attendant, he knelt in prayer, and on rising opened the book before him and gave out a hymn. When he had read the hymn through, he re-read the first two lines. A pause ensued. It was clear the musical resources of the meeting were limited. The minister looked round calmly and said : " Is there no one who can start the tune ?" Lord Bantam smiled, but a whisper from Kelso warned him not to allow his own sense of ecclesiastical decorum to warp his judgment. "This is unusual to you," said he ; "but nothing really absurd has happened as yet. With these people, you see, religion is quite an at home affair." No one seem inclined to " start the tune," whereupon in a cheery voice the minister himself led off to a jolly air, which was instantly taken up with spirit by the whole con- gregation, Lord Bantam finding himself irresistibly drawn into the performance. After reading a lesson from Scrip- ture, Dr. Roper knelt down, and waiting a few seconds for the establishment of perfect stillness, began in a low, well- managed tone, a prayer that seemed to strike and thrill through every fibre of the people's hearts. He appeared to have forgotten everything but the Maker above and the creatures below — the majesty of the one, the abjectness of CATHOLICISM 59 the other ; and as one or other idea came uppermost in his mind, his voice rose and rung like a war-shout, or fell into the whisper of penitential sorrow and entreaty. Young Bantam had often heard the Bishop of Dunshire animadvert on the irregular extempore exercitations of sectaries, but as his eyes shot down the eager drops upon the floor, he bore witness to a power which, whatever its results, had never been present to him elsewhere. One peculiarity about it was, however, obnoxious to the young man. The Doctor was praying, but he was also preaching. Every now and then his doctrine came out in some strong, sharp proposition which prefaced its appropriate entreaty. "We know, O God, that Thou art a Judge — terrible in Thy power ! inflexible in Thy justice ! that to be consistent with Thyself Thou must and wilt punish the wicked. Yet, how merciful Thou art ! providing a Saviour in Christ : and here are sinners before Thee — men and women lost in sin, who have never sought Thee, who know not the love of Jesus, who have not found peace in their Saviour, who have not realized the power of His redeeming blood, who have not put on the robes of His righteousness : they are dead in trespasses and sins, they are lost to grace, they descend the paths of destruction. Hell opens its mouth unto them with eternal fires — O God of mercy, have mercy, and — " ' — snatch them from the burning grave ! ' " The congregation grew gradually excited, the occasional " aniens " gave place to fervent and 'repeated exclamations 60 LORD BANTAM. from all parts of the building. A low wail here and there showed some conscience-stricken soul to be giving vent to its feelings, and Lord Bantam began to feel it too painful to be endured. At length the man ceased, and changing his tone rapidly repeated the Lord's Prayer. As he ended, a great sigh went up from the people, and a general movement for a few moments delayed the service. The minister stood wiping the beads from his face. He had been having a strong wrestle with Satan. Moved as Bantam was, he thought all this in shockingly bad taste, but he began never- theless to have a respect for the preacher. After another hymn had been sung, Dr. Roper announced his text : " It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." He began at the last word, and painted in lively colors the " natural state of man." He showed him lost and hopeless, and with powerful fancy and pathos depicted his certain fate in the defect of any succor. He unquestionably reached the imagination of his hearers with his striking description of the sorrows and penalties of sin ; while his analysis of the consciousness of it was singularly complete and startling. Then he showed that Christ Jesus came to save such sinners, and briefly declared the nature and operation of the Atone- ment. To this succeeded a perfectly irrelevant and gratuit-i ous attack on various other churches ! His exegesis was simple, and his treatment of many points novel and graphic. It was clear that he was more careful to bring these points home to his hearers' hearts than to work CATHOLICISM. 6 1 out a symmetrical and logical discourse. He concluded with a powerful appeal to them to " accept the Cross," and begin at once a self-dedication to holy life. Simple as were the elements of the discourse, the effect upon the hearers was very potent. Some could not restrain their feelings, and had sunk upon their knees sobbing or groaning. The preacher took advantage of the excitement. He an- nounced that the service would be " protracted" for a while, and in a few words invited those who were " convinced of sin to come up to the communion-rail," where " Brothers Patton and Simpson would receive them." Meanwhile the congregation was in treated to pray heartily for the "in- quirers." What was the young lord's astonishment to see several persons respond to this invitation, and go forward to kneel in front of the congregation while fervent prayers were offered on their behalf. Every now and then some cheery soul in the crowd set up a spontaneous hymn, which was instantly joined in by the people. At the end of half an hour it was announced that " a brother and sister had found peace," and prayers were intreated for others " under conviction." The service was concluded, and the people, in a subdued and solemn manner, prepared to de- part, such of them remaining as were entitled to attend the love-feast. Kelso had already obtained permission from one of the " leaders " to be present at this meeting. * * * 62 LORD BANTAM VI. — Agape. To the love-feast, persons were admitted by small tokens or tickets. When these had been verified, and one of the brethren had been invited by Dr. Roper to "engage in prayer," baskets containing soft plain biscuits were handed round, followed by large jugs of water, out of which the cel- ebrants drank without the medium of cups. This simple service was performed in silence. The preacher then op- ened the more serious part of the proceedings with a brief address, which concluded with an intimation that it was free to the brothers or sisters " to give their experience." " I feel how good the Lord is," said a man with his eyes shut and in a trembling voice. " He brought me out of the miry clay. He set my feet upon a rock — He hath estab^ lished my goings. I served the Devil many years. He tried me sorely. I was the prey of evil passions. I used to gamble, drink, and neglect my work. I was fast going down to Hell. When my Saviour stopped me, I was in the gall of bitterness. One evening as I was going from my work, intending to visit the theatre, a man came up to me in the street and gave me a tract. -He looked at me and said, " The way of transgressors is hard. 11 I could not get it out of my mind. I felt my way was hard. It led me to waste, folly, and ruin. It made every morning a pain with remorse for the deeds of the night before. It made my work unhappy — my amusements were irksome. I read the AGAPE. 6$ tract. It was addressed To the ungodly. I trembled, I be- came convinced of sin, I went on my knees and prayed, but could get no comfort. The heavens seemed black above me. I was in that state for weeks — till one day I happened to be passing a Chapel. I heard singing, and went in — and there I found peace. I have ever since been walking in the way of life. Glory be to God. I am weak, but Christ is strong." Lord Bantam had listened attentively. " There is nothing so repulsive in that," whispered Kelso, " granting the Christian premises,'this man has very simply told a very ordinary experience." After a long silence, an old woman stood up, and detailed her story in blank-verse sentences, with a quavering sing- song, in this wise : I want tu tell ov my luv for Jesus, 'Ee luved mean' I luv *im. 'Ee av ben a good Saviour tu me : 'Ee 'av a 1 ben my friend these many 'yers, An' shall be ontu death. I remembers well 'ow first 'Ee cum tu me. I wos young an' silly fond ov vanity an' shaw — 'ow good of 'im to bearwi' may sins ! — 1 'ardened my yeart agenst the 'Oly Wurd. My faather and muther besowt me tu giv My yearttu 'im — But I woold not : I luved the Oorld, the flesh an' the Devil. The day it was 'Ee cum to me — I remembers it clear as yesternday \ I wos goin' hout in the gloamin' tu the well for water, An' suddintly, jist as I wos a unyoalking the paal, I saw a bright light drup down upon the well, It were like a ball o' fire — an' I yeard 'im say to me, " Meary, why do 'ee 'ate me? I am yower Saviour." — An' I swoonded away ! 64 LORD BANTAM. When I cum tu I began to pray. Thank God I found peace, an' ever since I've served my Saviour, Glory be to God. Aiimen. The old woman subsided amidst a chorus of glories, and Bantam and his tutor took advantage of the break to get away. * VII. — Human sympathy in its influence on Catholicity. The young lord was for some time lost in thought. So novel and so extraordinary had been the experience of the night that it seemed to him like a dream — and I am bound to say not a pleasant one. It is a very rude transition from the impassioned dignity and self-control of refined culture or a cool temperament to hysterical emotion and vulgar unre- straint. At length he broke silence. Bantam. I hardly know what to think of this. It rakes one's feelings very uncomfortably. Yet, I must confess to a strange influence upon me. Kelso. There would no doubt be a certain amount of emotional sympathy amidst such excitement. But try to form a judgment on it. Bantam. I am puzzled. I must own we have witnessed earnestness, anxiety, and talent of a peculiar sort in the high business of ' saving souls.' We have also seen appar- ently genuine feelings of shame, humiliation, anguish, confes- sion, on the part of persons who were unused to such emo- tions. There must have been people at that Communion HUMAN SYMPATHY. 65 * rail — as the preacher called it — who two or three hours since had as much intention of going to the moon as of ex- posing themselves publicly under the influence of acute feeling. How long does this last ? Kelso. With many of them it rapidly passes away, with others it is clearly genuine. It completely alters their lives. Believe me this is so. Bantam. But it seems so irrational. Kelso. But it is a fact \ and you and I are arguing on the basis of revelation and of a faith in most points common with that of these people. You are discontented more at the manner of its action than at the results or the cause of it. Bantam. Yes. Their wild emotions, their strange expres- sions, their crude form of worship, their still more singular exposure of inner feelings and secrets too sacred, I should think, for display to the curiosity of a public meeting, test my charity very much. Are these things consistent with reverence, humility, self-forgetfulness and sincerity. Kelso. Experience has proved that they are. Many men of as refined a nature as yours have become familiar with these scenes, have themselves passed through such ex- periences and have afterwards been able to join in them with pleasure. Take Wesley himself for an instance. Bantam. I could not possibly become accustomed to this sort of thing. Kelso. Possibly : but it might be owing more to want of sympathy in yourself than to any real defect in the people. 66 LORD BANTAM This is the religion that suits them — less emotional forms please others — but you must have learned enough to-night to cause you to look with respect and charity even on dem- onstrations like these. I admit that they contain many ob- jectionable elements. Bantam. Then there was the old woman ! She is a trial to your theory. She repeated that odd and utterly incred- ible story as if she had learned it off by heart. Kelso. No doubt she has by constant repetition. Bantam. But it is untrue. Kelso. Not quite. Consider her age. What she affects to describe must have happened nearly sixty years ago. I can account for it satisfactorily ; so do most of those who hear her. They take it in the figurative sense in which, in her younger days, no doubt, she originally used to couch the recital of her conversion. Gradually the poor old soul, from constant brooding on it, has come to believe that the spir- itual influence, which she used to liken to a fire and a voice, did reach her through visible and audible realities, and it does not harm her. She believes in the real thing, which is after all the great matter. Bantam. These are phenomena to be studied. I never looked at them in this way before. Kelso. Very few people do. It needs a large human sympathy to understand the varieties of human feeling and to overlook the mere accidents of its expression. Cultivate that, and you will be astonished to find how many barriers will be broken down between you and your human brotheis. AT THE UNIVERSITY. 67 Bantam's method of applying Kelso's principles turned out to be wrong, but to candid men the principles must answer for themselves. * VIII.— At the University. It was resolved that the second Lord Bantam should go for a year to the sister university. The inexpediency of sending him to the scene of his brother's errors was obvious. He was therefore entered at the ancient foundation of St. Thomas, in the University of Oxbridge. No one expected him either to work or to win University honors, but it could not be otherwise than a good thing for him to mix in learned society. Up to this time, as we have seen, he had had the advantages of almost hothouse forcing in every branch of learning ; of travel ; of a precocious introduction to politics, and of intercourse with an extraordinarily vigorous and origi- nal mind. As to religion, he had only I fear brought away the lesson to be broad without being deep. In fact, admir- able and genial as was Kelso's teaching, it could only take root and bear fruit in a groundwork of faith : not the faith of dogmas ; not a faith formulated in however perfect a creed ; but a faith informing — to use that word in its ancient sense — the life. So different are the outshoots of the same things in different grounds ! Bantam never had a religion — he therefore had none to lose. The charities which his tutor so earnestly enforced upon him, were to him sentiments ; they were not living experiences of his soul. 68 LORD BANTAM. In the University an undergraduate so eminent as our hero in both name and prospects was sure to find free to him the cream of its intellectualism. From the venerable master of his College, from a well-known coterie of mutual admirers in literature and philosophy to obscurer religious or political associations, he was everywhere welcome. A disciple so ex- alted, such a consociate, was a tower of strength to any theory. The benefit of the strangely diversified intercourse this posi- tion afforded him, was real enough, but not unalloyed with evil. Opinions in themselves worth little, were by the hear- ers of them weighted with undue gravity when they fell from his lips, and it is not strange that he came to form an extrav- agant estimate of himself. Moreover, the ease with which 'tolerably clear views of various subjects could be acquired by him in conversation with some of the ablest talkers of the day, tended to divert him from the more thorough and trouble- some labor of studying them for himself. Hence by a semi-royal road the child of fortune became an adept without being a student. His disposition was to philosophic reading and disquisi- tion ; and, whether owing most to his hair or the unlucky vaccination or Mr. Kelso's arguments, I cannot say, he soon began to develop "advanced" — even revolutionary tendencies. He affected reading considerably beyond him at that stage of his life — Voltaire, Rousseau, Comte, Bentham, Emerson — and it proved the wisdom of Agricola's mother as described by Tacitus, that these difficult authors THE RADISH CLUB. 69 seemed to throw off its balance his too ardent and ambitious mind. * * * IX.— The Radish Club. Two clubs of essentially different character at this time existed in Oxbridge. One was the Radish Club, so called from the color of its opinions and perhaps from their pun- gency. The Radish Club consisted of what were termed " advanced men." It was said their ideas were revolution- ary, but when these came to be examined they were found to be consistent with a great deal of liberalism to existing institutions. True, some of the opinions enunciated by the young gentlemen, and two or three professors whose names alone gave any lustre to the club, were startling. Appar- ently nothing short of an abolition of Queens, Lords and Commons, and a periodical redistribution of property, would satisfy this blood-red association. At the time, nothing could be less practical or more foolish than such an association. Any one who attentively studied the constitu- tion of England must have seen that with all its faults it was far better adapted to the best purposes of legislative Reform than any other governmental institution in the world. It might in fact be correctly termed a Republican Monarchy, and as, after all, forms of government and political recon- struction are only means to an end, it was well worth considering whether the constitution did not afford every facility for safe and sure social reforms, and whether these 70 LORD BANTAM. were not the matters that at the moment required the gravest attention. But for youths possessed of the " inc en- sum ac flagrantem animum" as well — alas ! — as for some statesmen of maturer growth, the brilliancy of political revolution seems to be more attractive than the humble utilitarian movements of social reform. It is doubtful whether these earnest gentlemen were all so anxious for the success of their opinions as for the sweets of notoriety. Even a tin kettle at the tail may seem to some animals better than absolute oblivion and silence. However, here Bantam was to be persuaded that he himself was an anomaly — a living specimen of unjust laws and unwise political economy ; that the monarch was an anachronism ; that the purest and best form of government was a republic ; that the proper check to the danger of a republic was education and the minority system of representation ; and with this singular programme, and a denial of all religious ideas, this club was prepared to go forth and regenerate or enlighten mankind. In this large project it has hitherto failed, and we have yet to see its influence upon that unit of man, Lord Bantam. * X. — The Essenes. The other club was a religious club, or rather, a club with- out a religion, since it subjected all faiths to the a priori test, and found them wanting ; and up to that time had been unable to construct by any eclectic formulae a system of its I THE ESSENES. 7 1 own. It was breadth without length or any substance. With that strange straining after paradox thct was in vulgar use at the time, the members called themselves The Essenes, although in fact they combined the self-conceit of the Phar- isees with the scepticism of the Sadducees. The meetings of this club, which were held on Sunday evenings, took place in the rooms of a fellow and tutor of some eminence, whose father, the Rev. Shadrach Ventom, had been a fa- mous dissenting minister. His son, Reginald Ventom, dis- tinguishing himself at a grammar school, won a mathemati- cal scholarship, and with a robust body and unwearied in- dustry attained the position of Senior Wrangler. Of no particular religious bias, he had not permitted his father's creed to interfere with his own elevation, and had qualified for a fellowship by making a declaration that was untrue — an event too common to be worth criticising in this instance. With equal indifference, and for the same purpose, he adopted the clerical profession. Let any one read carefully the Ser- vice for the Ordination of Deacons in the Book of Common Prayer, if he would gauge the unconscientious nature of this proceeding and the deadness of a moral sense which could face that solemn ordeal with indifference, much more with disdain. I cannot say it affected his belief. He had never been troubled" with any. His mind was large — his body healthy — his instincts were animal — he was wide in his sym- pathies, though these to a shrewd observer seemed rather assumed and sensational — easy-going rather than principled in his charity. He thought he was always looking for truth, 72 LORD BANTAM. but in fact he was never expecting to find it. From the narrowness of his father's creed he had turned with abhor- rence. It was far too exacting, too inspired with the idea of sacrifice, for a man unprepared to concede to any religion more than a fraction of his being. He sought for, and was content with, a general average of good in mankind ; that is, in all portions not "Evangelical." Towards that section whom he called " Calvinists," he ceased to be charitable ; he was vindictive. Round him Ventom had attracted a coterie of similarly e?sy-fitting minds. These gentlemen made the loudest pro- fessions of catholicity. They took an ostentatious interest in lower-class propagandism. Their humanity was extrava- gant. Their sentimental protests against evil and wrong were even exaggerated. Their breadth was enormous. They professed to find in Quakerism symptoms of "a phil- osophic basis of practical religion ; " viewed in Methodism, " some aspects of the highest evidences of an emotional spiritualism ; " and studied Mormonism in its phenomena of "an abnormal development of one of the divine ideas." In their researches among these " peculiar phases of fetish- ism" they also included investigations into the unnatural outbreaks of human enthusiasm, whereof a work of some notoriety, entitled "Hyper-Transcendent Spouses," was a fitting text-book. They were Athenian in their readiness to hear every new thing — but their credulity was reserved for negatives. Compare this with the lesson which Kelso had THEESSENES. 73 drawn for the young Lord from their singular visits to vari- ous sectarian services. It is impossible to deny the charm where with this breadth of theoretic sympathy enveloped this society. It seemed as if the millennium had dawned in a few preliminary streaks upon a dozen or two of common-place students in that un- likely place. No man's faith was actually despised — nor was any man's unbelief matter of abhorrence. They professed to be scientific searchers after truth, and regarded the relig- ions as part of their facts. A pi'iori was their watchword against an antiquated authoritative formula, Thus saith the Lord. If it was an advantage of their religious art that it had no principle, it was a natural correlative of it that had no practice. Between these two associations Lord Bantam's principles and politics assumed an alarming shape. He began to as- tonish his tutors by his political contortions and the breadth of his disbelief; but throwing over faith is not throwing over credulity. In fact he became a conspicuous instance of that increasingly common paradox, a credulous believer in anything that is unbelief. This was very far beyond Mr. Kelso, and doubtless a partial reason of his extravagance was, that he had heard Mr. Kelso's conclusions, without reaching the bases of that vast fabric of knowledge on which they were built. The change was gradual. He at first pro- fessed to be a Catholic in the broadest sense — to recognize the good in all, the pre-eminence of none. Then he dis- claimed the superiority of the Bible over other philosophical 74 LORD BANTAM. or religious authorities, and shifted the tests from the held of revelation to that of a priori reasoning This is dangerous, unless a man has an almost infinite range of knowledge, for a priori to ignorant or half-instructed minds is little else than Ego. The bonds of religion and the restraints of society be- came equal wrongs in his eyes. He saw in property a rob- bery of the community by a selfish individual. He saw in Church and Dogma a tyranny over the individual by the community. These anomalies it would be his duty to help to redress. He was clearly unfitting himself for the respec- table superstition and the selfish complacency necessary to sustain the role of an aristocrat. * * * PART IV. HOW HE CAME TO YEARS OF DISCRETION AND OTHERWISE. I. — Citizen Bantam. Lord Bantam returned home from the University. He might now claim to be somewhat of a man. His title had brought him in contact with men who without it would scarcely have condescended to talk with him. The care taken with his education had produced some fruit in qualify- ing him to take a*prominent position at the Union. His reputation as a fluent speaker had transcended the bounds of the University. He was shortly to come of age. The Earl and Countess had been considering plans for those vast festivities which were, in accordance with aristocratic custom, to signalize this event. The stewards of the various estates, manors, mines and properties, had been invited to send suggestions for the proper celebration, in their respective jurisdictions, of the heir's majority ; and the Earl's chamber- lain was over head and ears in plans, estimates and contracts connected with the approaching fetes. The Countess re- ferred to the trouble one day in a jocose manner to her son, who, having taken earnestly to the study of the French phil- osophy, paid little attention to family matters. " You must really throw away your books for a while," said she, "and help us in devising how to bring you out 76 LORD BANTAM. with due honor. It's an affair of months, for you know we have thousands of people to provide for." " To provide for thousands of people ! What for ? " " For the fetes on your coming of age. The heir to the wealthiest earldom in England must have no ordinary rejoic- ings on attaining his majority." "Rejoicings! My dear mother, what is a birthday? And what is the good of rejoicing because I have attained a certain anniversary? You would put me on a par with young Foley, who is the greatest idiot I know : and they say his people spent ten thousand pounds to celebrate his reaching the indifferent age of twenty-one years. Surely, my father," he added, with a twinkle of satire, " won't waste any money on my majority." " Indeed, he will," replied her ladyship, " and more than ten thousand if it is necessary. On a matter of that kind no one shall surpass us." " Well then, my dear mother, let me tell you what to do with the money. Give it away, and spare the folly and license and absurdity of such an exhibition in a civilized country." " Folly, Albert ! License ! Absurdity ! in a civilized country. What do you mean ? " " I mean that I am ashamed of my position, one I have done nothing to deserve, and one quite inconsistent with social rights. Altogether, I am pained that I should succeed to so much while others succeed to nothing ; and my claim to a title ought not to depend on my being born to it, but CITIZEN BANTAM. 77 should be proved by my work. I am entirely opposed to an aristocracy at all, and only wish I had been born in a garret. Instead of spending money on fetes, we should be ashamed to celebrate our own monstrous selfishness." " Good God ! " said the Countess, " what has befallen you ? How wildly you are talking. Why, sir, you don't deserve your good fortune. Born in a garret forsooth ! Oh, I see," added the poor Countess, covering her eyes as his red hair flashed upon them, but too good a woman and too noble a lady to allude to that to her son, " that horrid vac- cination ! I knew it would be so ! " " Vaccination, Lady Ffowlsmere ; what can that have to do with my opinions ? " " You were vaccinated from that Radical child, and I am sure it has affected you," said the Countess, having recourse to her handkerchief. Bantam heard of his Radical inoculation for the first time, and was highly amused, not to say gratified, to learn that he had some vulgar fluid in his body. He strove to comfort his mother, while he smiled at her superstition, at the same time assuring her that he could not conscientiously allow himself to be made the subject of any foolish demonstrations. He preferred to be considered "Citizen Bantam," and to give away a few thousands in charity would please him bet- ter than many rejoicings and feasts. I need not say that every word he spoke was making the Countess worse. His vaccination had "taken" with a vengeance. * * * 78 LORD BANTAM II. — A Rank Communist. The Countess said not a word to the Earl about her curi- ous conversation with our hero. The preparations went on. She wisely resolved to allow her husband to find out his son's views for himself. The denoument was not long in coming. One morning the trio were seated at the breakfast table in Hiton Place, her ladyship sipping her coffee, the young lord deep in the leaders of the Chimes, and the Earl reading his letters, when an unusually excited exclamation from the peer startled his companions. Bantam. What's the matter, my lord? Earl. That stupid fellow Cringeley, steward of my Pen- shurst property, has failed in an action of ejectment; it will cost me a pretty penny. He wrote me he was certain of succeeding, as he had retained all the best counsel on the Circuit. Now he tells me that the tenant specially retained that clever fellow Hawkeye, the sharpest advocate in England, and they've succeeded — not even a point of law reserved by the Chief Justice. Bantam. What was the point ? Earl. The tenant Turfman has a long lease at a low rental, and has been at sword' s-point with my people down there for the last five years. They have been keeping a sharp lookout on him, in hope of finding a chance to turn him out — he's rather a speculative, needy sort of fellow I A RANK COMMUNIST. 79 think : actually stood for Parliament once — a tenant farmer — stood for the House, and was beaten two to one, and served him right. His property lies very awkwardly right across the estate, and somehow or other he tricked old Ball, Cringeley's predecessor, into giving him a lease with right to destroy all the ground game. Since then rabbits have be- come very valuable, and if it were not for that restraint on the game, the whole of which he prevents from crossing the estate, we could make ^200 a year out of that alone. But this infernal fellow comes between. He keeps terriers, and not a single lop-ear dare show itself his side of the hedge. Bantam. But you don't mean to say, my lord, you object to that? Ground game destroy cultivation. It's contrary to good management to encourage it at all. I wouldn't have a lop-ear on my estate. And the man has his rights, has he not ? Is it a question of money ? Earl. Why, sir, of course it is ; I'm entitled to make all I can out of my property. Bantam. Yes, subject to his rights legal and moral, and your duties legal and moral, my lord ; and I may also add, the proper economy of society. Earl. I am aware of that, Lord Bantam, except as to what you call " the proper economy of society," which I take to be that every man must look out for himself; but I may be allowed to regret, that owing to the folly of my for- mer agent I am proscribed from controlling my own estate : and owing to the incapacity of the present one, I have not recovered that power. So LORD BANTAM. Bantam. But, my dear father, do you mean to ' say that you have put this poor fellow to the expense of defending his tenancy, because your agent thought he had detected some flaw in his conduct which worked a forfeiture of his lease ? Earl. Good heavens ! sir, why not ? Bantam. Why, my lord, because it is inhuman and un- just for you, a great Earl, with an immense income, to take advantage of any such circumstances to injure, perhaps to ruin a man who happens to be inconvenient to you. Ad- mitting you were legally right, it seems to me that agent of yours has acted most iniquitously, and you ought to pay the poor man's expenses. If not, you will have used your su- perior wealth and position to damage the rights of a man en- titled to perfect equality with you, before God and the coun- try. Earl. Heyday, my young moralist, what have " God and the country " to do with my property at Penshurst, I wonder? And hasn't the man an equality, as you call it? He goes before a jury, and gets his rights just as I do. Bantam. No, he has not an equality. He seems to have; that is to say the law treats him exactly as it treats you, but you have the advantage. You can afford to be indifferent to the result, he cannot. " Cringeley with your money bought up all the available talent of the Circuit to help to win your case — which if it were an honest one ought not to need it — in the hope of gaining an unfair advantage. That is legal, but is it fair dealing between man and man ? He was A RANK COMMUNIST. 8l luckily able to checkmate you, by getting a first-class advo- cate ; but I suppose at great expense, perhaps a ruinous one. He has not been treated generously, or as one fellow-citizen ought to be treated by another ; therefore I take it he is wronged. This is not social communism or equality of rights. The Earl was accustomed to command his temper, or he might have received this harangue with a resentment fatal to the forward young gentleman's political education. He gave a long low whistle. Earl. What do you think of that, Lady Ffowlsmere? Social Communism / Equality of Rights ! is that what you have learnt at Oxbridge ? However (said the old diplomat, smiling), you may thank your stars, sir, that your condition and prospects will compel you to drop these dangerous here- sies. A man with a half a million a year is not likely to be a Communist. The young lord stoutly maintained, amid deprecating cries from his mother, that he was a Communist and in favor of an equal distribution of property. The Earl became amused. The joke was too good. For the wealthiest man in England to advocate Communism, was like a bishop preaching the untruthfulness of Moses. So he terminated the discussion by retreating to his library, where for a long time he might have been heard whistling, There was a rich merchant of Rotterdam— And every morning he said, " I am The richest merchant in Rotterdam." 4* 82 LO RD BANTAM. — " and," said he to himself, " a Communist ! He ! He ! He!" * III. — A School for fledgling Nobles. Lord Ffowlsmere was a shrewd, long-headed man. He maintained towards his son the most perfect kindliness. His policy, declared to and approved by the Countess, was to offer no opposition to the young lord's whims. He even compromised the majority matter. There was to be but one celebration at Shufflestraw Castle, to which all his Shufflestraw tenants and the inhabitants generally of the town of Ffowlsmere were to be invited. For the rest, the day was to be signalized by concessions to the tenants on the various estates, and by the distribution of gifts to vast numbers of employes. Moreover sundry charities were to be some thousands the better of the heir's majority. The distressing peculiarities of the youth led the Earl to consider that it would be healthy to divert his attention as soon as possible from theoretic and philosophic to practical politics. In working out these, he conceived, his son's ideas would gradually be led to harmonize more completely with the spirit of the age and the principles proper to his station. He took an opportunity of broaching this to Lord Bantam, suggesting that soon after he was qualified he should prepare himself to take a seat in the House of Com- mons. Valuable institution, which affords a free school of politics to an unoccupied aristocracy ! A'SCHOOL FOR FLEDGLING NOBLES. 83 " Every young man in your position should obtain a seat in the Lower House first. It brings him in contact with the most powerful body in the kingdom, and with men who are the best tutors in political principles and tactics. It also enables him to judge of the tendency of present legislation, and is a training-school for office, should he have the ability to obtain it. The actual power of the House of Peers as a House is decreasing, but that decrease of power may be partially balanced by taking every opportunity to acquire, through relatives or nominees, increased representation in the Lower Chamber. As leader of the party in the Upper House I shall no doubt be able to seat you! I have several places of my own, but I think you should aim at some pop- ular constituency, where your return would be a triumph to you and an actual gain of influence to me. I can always get safe men for my boroughs." " I am sure, my lord," said the incorrigible Bantam, " you are sincerely anxious for my welfare ; but I am very sorry that neither my opinions nor my ambition coincide with yours. A man should go into Parliament with a purpose, with some inspiration of a duty to be done ; not as the tool of his party, or even of his own ambition " "Oh! hang your opinions," says the Earl ; "I'll take the risk of that. I want you to learn politics — " " But how can I possibly work with you, my dear father ? I am a Radical, you are a Prig. I wish to see all undue influences in the State neutralized ; you wish to strengthen them. You desire to give the people exactly the least 84 LORD BANTAM. freedom that will pacify them. I wish to see complete and unqualified acknowledgment of their just rights. I cannot help deeming myself the most unfortunate man in the world ! There is no scope for my ambition. I am placed on an aristocratic tramway ; I must either run along it, or run off to ruin and confusion." " Most fortunate for you, Sir, that you are so restricted. Many would be glad to change places with you. You are the most unreasonable man I ever heard of ! You are unworthy of your good fortune." " Good fortune, my lord ! The best fortune is a good conscience and a true aim in the world. And what are my hopes? Those of every young peer who keeps himself respectable. I may enter the House of Commons for a few years, and there by judicious airing of my democratic sympathies startle the middle-class men into raptures. I may even manage to absorb into my nature by a sort of en- dosmose" — " Hem ! " said the Earl. — " Some notion of the feelings and aspirations of the lower classes, and be enthusiastic a while against my own. But should you decease — which God avert in my lifetime ! — cus- tom decrees that I should cast away my private opinions and accept an uncongenial rtle. In the House of Lords I could not be a democrat. The air would freeze my enthu- siasm. Vainly should I ply my lance against the hide of class prejudice! I should become a bore, a nuisance, a malapert, a madman ; not only inside, but worst of all, out- A PROLETARIAN COMPLIMENT. 85 side the House. I read somewhere the other day : The world never forgives a man for not succeeding in his own line of life. No other arena would be open to my ardent desire for propagandism, but that of which the stump is the rostrum ; and I fear if I tried it the people would soon tum- ble me off that as an asinine incongruity. Even the most extreme of them would never believe a peer, who practically disendowed and disestablished himself, to be a man of sense." " Hum," said the Earl ; who had noticed with some in- ward satisfaction, how precociously the young man express- ed and argued his views, the more since at the same time he recognized the barriers that shut him in from any other destiny. * * * IV. — A Proletarian Compliment. The festivities which marked Lord Bantam's attainment of manhood require no lengthened notice from the historian. In one respect they were remarkable, and I select that par- ticular as a subject of history. ShufHestraw Castle, through its broad sweep of lawn and park, its beechen walks, its terraces and courts, and even over its cold gray stones and battlemented towers, wore the brilliant tokens of a festal time. Flags and banners, tents and pavilions, triumphal arches and vast wreaths or festoons of leaves and flowers everywhere entertained the eye; while under and among them all thousands of brightly-dressed and 86 LORD BANTAM happy-faced people enlivened the scene. The sounds of trumpets or bands, the ringing shouts, the voices of some impromptu choir cheered the soft, sleepy air of a summer's day. Over the park, under the broad-timbered ancient beeches, far away by the glittering lake, and in and through the sloping tents thronged the tenants of the estate and the middle and lower classes of Ffowlsmere. In the castle- rooms, on its trim gardens, over its brilliantly flowered ter- races, among the gay pavilions circled the aristocracy of the county and the vast concourse of the Earl's relations. Staid elders chatted softly in the gilded summer-houses ; happy couples loitered in the pleached walks, or sat on the soft turf listening to the plash and bubble of the fountains ; youths and misses crowded the canvas theatre wherein the prima donnas of the day gave the tribute of their sweet voices to a young noble's birth — for a consideration. All went merry as a marriage-bell. But in the midst of this happiness there were two disturb- ing elements. One was the heir himself. He looked or affected to look with disgust upon the huge outcry made about so simple an occurrence as the anniversary of his birth. The other was nothing less than the obnoxious Broad- bent, now an old man of rugged and leonine aspect, the Nestor of the Socialists of Ffowlsmere, the person whose blood had tainted the body of Bantam with revolutionary matter. What was he doing at Shufflestraw Castle ? When notice was given to the Mayor and Council of Ffowlsmere that the noble Earl and Countess requested the A PROLETARIAN COMPLIMENT. 87 honor of the company of the aforesaid dignitaries of the town and the rest of its inhabitants at the festivities to take place on the attainment of the majority of Lord Bantam ; and when they, in accordance with instructions to that effect, forwarded to every house a gilded and emblazoned card conveying this invitation and calling upon all good and loyal inhabitants to come forward and represent the town in a proper and becoming manner ; and when they proposed that an address to the Earl and his Lady and to the young Lord, should be drawn up " for the auspicious occasion," and engrossed upon vellum in notable and brilliant charac- ters, Broadbent's brows bent with a portentous frown. Here was nobility patronizing the sovereign people. Not only that, it was trying to bribe them to acquiesce in their own enslavement in the old way, through " guzzling and soddening, getting at their hearts by way of their bellies," said Mr. B. And here were the guardians of the freedom of a free town proposing to " Kotow to a blaiik Fetish." Mr. Broadbent determined all this should not pass unchal- lenged. He was a shoemaker, a man we have said of leo- nine countenance, grizzly, big-browed. Why is it that shoe- makers are so often revolutionary ? Is it that their cramped attitude, notwithstanding the hard muscular employment of their arms, induces indigestion and morbidity ? Mr. Broad- bent was a good talker, a strong thinker, well-read and as- tute. He concocted a remonstrance against the proposed address in terms the reverse of parliamentary, and sent it round to his compact little party for signature. The town 88 LORD BANTAM. council considered it for three hours with closed doors, and eventually resolving " not to consider it, on account of its improper terms," returned it to the memorialists. Upon this Broadbent changed his tactics. He and his friends ac- cepted the invitations to the Castle ; and here they were all together, lying and talking apart from the general throng under a clump of trees in the park. It was clear they had something in hand. So the mayor and council thought, and so they suggested to the Earl's steward. Consequently, some of those gentlemen denominated " policemen in plain clothes " were always loitering in the neighborhood of this dangerous body. So the day wore on, and tables, groaning under noble loads, w T ere rapidly released from the incubus, and oceans of jolly ale or finer tipples told, not only on the feelings, but on the spirits of the guests. At length a great bell rang out a signal for a general concourse, and preceded by a fine band a procession in which Lord *Bantam occupied an honorable though awkward place, filing majestically out of the castle, wended its way to a gloriously decorated plat- form, in front of which on the green turf thousands of seats had been prepared. Then the addresses from tenants and others were delivered, and a general toast was drunk, and universal enthusiasm was culminating towards the point of the young lord's speech, when the aforesaid leonine head of Broadbent — an apparition at which the Countess shuddered and hid her face — was raised upon four strong shoulders, and he, holding up a scroll in his hand, in a steady voice A PROLETARIAN COMPLIMENT. 89 asked leave to present trie young lord with another address. At the same moment a few rough-looking Titans closed round the old man, while through the crowd as by one im- pulse twenty or thirty determined men evidently bent on dissolving the shoemaker's party, were seen converging on the spot. The clever old Earl took the cue in a moment. Holding up his hand for silence he called out : " I think I recognize Mr. Broadbent, an old friend. [Mr. Broadbent's grimace was a study.] I see he wishes to pre- sent some memorial. I am sorry we did not know of it be- fore, so as to have arranged for its reception ; but if you will kindly open the way for Mr. Broadbent and his friends, we will make room for them on the platform." In a few minutes, dukes, marquises, earls, and their cor- relatives in the female department had vacated twenty chairs in the very front and midst of that brilliant throng, and thither with the deepest gravity and attention the republicans were escorted by two stewards. They came up the back steps boldly enough, but when they stood out in face of the noble assemblage, and felt themselves riddled with the quiet, cynical stare of hundreds of eyes, they looked rather abashed. Even their leader was afflicted with awkwardness. But he recovered himself, like a wild beast at bay. " Earl Ffowlsmere," he said, " I and my friends are here to-day by your invitation, but not of our own liking. We are simple townsmen asking only our rights, and wishing to interfere with no one else's. You invited us ; we did not want to see your heir or to mix with your aristocratic 9