Ex Libris < 
 
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 C. K. OGDEN • 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 REMINISCENT GOSSIP OF MEN 
 AND MATTERS
 
 WORKS 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 QUIET WAR SCENES : Poems and Translations 
 
 DAYS AFOOT AND EUROPEAN SKETCHES 
 
 JOHN WESTACOTT 
 
 BY THE WESTERN SEA 
 
 OUR FOREIGN COMPETITORS 
 
 MARK TILLOTSON 
 
 A FORGOTTEN GREAT ENGLISHMAN 
 
 PICTURES FROM BOHEMIA 
 
 THE GLEAMING DAWN 
 
 THE CARDINAL'S PAGE 
 
 A DOUBLE CHOICE 
 
 A NATIONAL EDUCATION TO NATIONAL AD- 
 VANCEMENT 
 
 THE INSEPARABLES 
 
 LITERARY AND BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES 
 
 AUSTRIA: HER PEOPLE AND THEIR HOME- 
 LANDS 
 
 REPORT ON TECHNICAL AND COMMERCIAL 
 EDUCATION IN CENTRAL FUROPE FOR 
 THE BOARD OF EDUCATION 
 Etc. Etc.
 
 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 OF 
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES BAKER, F.R.G.S. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "jOHN WESTACOTT," " THE CARDINAl's PAGE,' 
 
 "the GLEAMING DAWN," " THE INSEPARABLES," 
 
 "AUSTRIA : HER PEOPLE AND THEIR 
 
 HOMELANDS," ETC. 
 
 "Our bending author hath pursued his story 
 In a little room confining mighty men." 
 
 LONDON 
 
 CHAPMAN £5* HALL, LTD. 
 
 1913
 
 C I 
 
 TO 
 MY SISTER 
 
 10JJS5C1.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 An inconsequential book, following no order, mere 
 gossip, personal and literary ; of scenes and inci- 
 dents. A book to be opened at any page ; but in 
 that page the reader should find incident or 
 reminiscence to excite interest. 
 
 " Our bending author hath pursued his story 
 In a h'ttle room confining mighty men." 
 
 So runs the couplet printed on the title page. 
 
 The author doth indeed bend, to the storm of 
 criticism he is likely to incur for so orderless a 
 book. 
 
 But the " little room," the book, slight as it is, 
 does confine mighty men ; how many famous men, 
 and famous women whom I have met, appear in its 
 pages ; what a wealth of noted historic incidents, that 
 give occasion for gossip from intimate observation ; 
 and the gossips range from the deepest thought to the 
 flippant pun. Glimpses, snatches, stories, incidents. 
 
 The stage is never kept waiting, but the actors 
 have little method in their entries or exits, and
 
 viii PREFACE 
 
 thought leaps upon thought, to be dwelt upon by 
 the reader who lays down the book to think 
 awhile ; for surely this book is not one to be read 
 through at a sitting, though I hope it may prove to 
 be one to be picked up again and again by all types 
 of readers. 
 
 Nine of the gossips appeared in the St. James's 
 Gazette^ and I have to thank the Editor of that 
 journal for permission to reprint these chapters.
 
 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 OF MEN &" MATTERS 
 
 There is a subtle charm in looking over old note- 
 books, wherein, as the years have flown on, facts 
 have been commented on, striking incidents 
 noted, travel hints preserved, books culled from, 
 and thoughts inscribed. 
 
 Some of the notes seem vivid prophecies ; 
 others, false reading of past portents. 
 
 Historical notes on famous scenes bring up 
 visions of hours spent in spots whence the world 
 has been influenced by men's action. 
 
 Some slight word, on some witnessed historic 
 pageant of our own days, forces to the mind how 
 swiftly the world's judgments are reversed. 
 
 " Je suis un ancetre " (" I am an ancestor "), 
 said Napoleon Premier, and yet to-day where are 
 his descendants to speak of him as that ancestor ? 
 
 This note of this proud, defiant statement, " I 
 am an ancestor," comes just after a note made in
 
 2 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 the year 1867, upon a scene at St. Cloud, when, 
 amidst crowds of folk from all nations clustered 
 about the Imperial palace, a little knot of English 
 gave Napoleon III a cheer, as he drove up to his 
 palace gates to look in upon his son, who was then 
 lying unwell at St. Cloud. 
 
 The palace is burnt to the ground, a permanent 
 pleasure fair invades the quiet allies of St. Cloud, 
 Napoleon III Hes in an English grave in England, 
 and that sick son now lies in an EngHsh grave in 
 South Africa, So the old notebooks pick up 
 history, and preach the moral of Ecclesiastes. 
 
 But in the same little black book is this note, 
 upon the capital of the state, that prevented 
 Napoleon's threat to become an ancestor being 
 fulfilled. 
 
 " From 1547 to 1579 there is only one reference 
 in the EngHsh State papers to Berlin ; and that is 
 on March 6th, 1564, when Joachim, Marquis of 
 Brandenburg, desires licence ' for his procurator 
 at Hamburg to purchase 300 yards of cloth in 
 England free from export duty ' (the fiscal 
 question was with us then)." In those not far 
 distant days so little weight had BerHn in the 
 councils of the nations ! 
 
 There is a constant change of subject in these
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 3 
 
 notebooks. Sudden leaps from solid facts to the 
 frivolous ; reminding one of the solemn, slow 
 utterance of the countryman who was given a 
 dictionary, and who declared it was a good book, 
 but changed the subject so often. 
 
 Here is a note on a clergyman, who announced 
 that next Sunday they would have a collection, 
 God willing, or on the Sunday after whether or 
 no ; that is culled from Longfellow's Life, and 
 reminds one of the old Somersetshire clergyman 
 who, when winter was coming on, used to an- 
 nounce, " Now, my friends, we can't go on much 
 longer with evening service, unless we have some 
 lights ; so that we must have a collection next 
 Sunday to pay for them, unless you don't think 
 the game is worth the candle." 
 
 A little glimpse, this, into simple village life — 
 the waning year, the twilight cutting short the 
 sermon, and the groups halting but a short time 
 amidst the gravestones outside, for night is 
 falling. Simple life sans pomp ; and as it were 
 a reflection on the opposite type of life, the 
 pomp of Court and City, and the greed for 
 adulation, comes this note : " Pomp so necessary 
 to the decoration of empty little great men." 
 What a definition of self-importance !
 
 4 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 What quiet, forceful sarcasm there is in the 
 quotation from a French writer, Borel — " Le 
 publique, qui veut etre dupe a tout prix, en 
 etait fort satisfait " (" The populace, that loves 
 to be duped at any price, was well satisfied "). 
 A French rendering of the statement that the 
 mob never grows old : from the mobs that 
 hailed Alcibiades and then savagely denounced 
 him, to the mobs who in their varying moods 
 cheer you, or yell against our statesmen of to-day. 
 
 There are two notes upon writers, in the Httle 
 book, that forcibly exempHfy the vast amount 
 of splendid work that may be done after middle 
 life. The one is on Scott, recording the well- 
 known fact that from the age of forty-three to 
 fifty-five — that is in twelve years — and then only 
 working in the morning hours and in other 
 spare time, he wrote the whole of his Waverley 
 novels ; and, as a still greater tour de force, 
 Anthony Trollope's mother, Frances TroUope, 
 from the age of fifty to seventy-six, wrote no less 
 than a hundred and fourteen books, whereby she 
 kept her family ; that is more than four books a 
 year, and the length of a book in her day and in 
 Scott's days, was very far beyond the length of a 
 novel at the present time.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 5 
 
 Where does this little couplet come from ? Is 
 it a translation or an English quotation ? There 
 is no note of its origin, but it is from a true lover 
 of pure humanity : — 
 
 " Naught is sweeter in all the land 
 Than children's lips and a woman's hand." 
 
 It reminds me of another absolutely true couplet, 
 translated from my old friend Friedrich von 
 Bodenstedt : — 
 
 *' No road is so far in all the land 
 As that from the heart and the head to the hand." 
 
 The hand here is no longer that of the tender, 
 loving woman, but of the hand raised in depreca- 
 tion at folly's fall, or sw^eeping the air in repressive 
 horror at some evil it abhors, but giving no aid 
 to repress or assist. 
 
 The hints on Hfe in these faded little books are 
 ofttimes full of utihty. What irritable, excited 
 moments — moments of nervous tension and 
 anxiety — men who have to make pubhc speeches 
 might spare themselves by obeying the command 
 made upon this subject in an American magazine, 
 culled, if memory does not play me false, from a 
 word of John Bright's :' " Do not torment your- 
 self up to the last moment about your speech.
 
 6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 but give your mind a rest before it." Then 
 comes this reflection upon the dictum : " It is not 
 the pubHc speaking that wears a man ; it is the 
 waiting for it." 
 
 Who that has waited before a vast audience 
 whilst a prior speaker lengthens out his remarks 
 (prior speakers always do " lengthen ") does not 
 know the heart-thumping, the twitching of the 
 fingers, the full sensation in the throat, that all 
 disappear when the audience is faced, and the 
 first word uttered ? Even old hands like the late 
 Lord Salisbury experience these sensations, if 
 they will allow the mind to fret over the im- 
 pending task. I have seen Lord Salisbury's 
 knees lift themselves and shake until his heels 
 made a tapping on the floor, whilst he was waiting 
 on some great occasion for the previous speaker 
 to come to an end. Then, with a firm pressure 
 of the hand upon his knees, he would rise, go 
 slowly to that brass bar he always had fixed to 
 lean upon and clutch, and all this trembling 
 tension and excitement were gone ; but what 
 energy expended, and what wear and tear of 
 brain and nerve incurred, that the following of 
 this simple rule would have spared him. 
 
 These fugitive, curt notes bring up visions of
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 7 
 
 scenes of many lands in long, bygone days — aye, 
 and visions of famous men passed onward to their 
 higher tasks. In one note are linked the names of 
 Ruskin, Tennyson, Blackmore, Matthew Arnold, 
 Froude, and Shorthouse. All gone. But all with 
 glorious works left behind them. The note calls 
 up memories of that work, and grateful thoughts 
 for helpful letters and kindly friendship from 
 three of these six immortals ; and as an intense 
 contrast comes a note upon tramps, and queer 
 examples of these outcasts and vagabonds, met 
 in such varied scenes as the village of Rathduff, 
 in Ireland, on the pass of the Simplon, and at 
 Sinzig, on the Rhine, in the days when the Rhine 
 was a pastoral and not a manufacturing river, 
 and at the village of Patchway, near the tawny 
 Severn Sea. The Irish tramp was met in the 
 autumn of 1866, when Fenian meetings were 
 being held on the hillsides, and when the Irish 
 roadsides were deserted, and two young English 
 lads suddenly rounding a corner of a road saw 
 a crowd of men on the low hillside — a crowd that 
 swiftly dispersed into the neighbouring wood on 
 the strangers being espied. One of these same 
 strangers who made the note, was told on his 
 enquiring why so many men were in the field,
 
 8 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 " Oh, it's just Mr. McMonaghal has bought in 
 some grass, and they were looking at it for him." 
 Ah ! These Httle old notebooks ! They bring 
 back "sometimes forgotten things long cast be- 
 hind." Friendships with men and friendships with 
 books. Talks with some of the most famous of 
 our day, and some of the most ignoble, in that 
 they worked for self and pelf. Some of the 
 poorest and some of the most wealthy. Noble 
 and peasant. Philosophy and poetry ; scenes of 
 beauty from Arctic circle to Tropic zone, 
 evoking many pleasant memories and some sad 
 ones. Will this gossip round about them and 
 from them awaken in other minds thoughts 
 pleasant and retrospective, or will it evoke 
 interest from those who are looking out in the 
 pride of youth with life before them ?
 
 II 
 
 To know everything of something and something 
 of everything is perhaps the best aim for a journal- 
 ist — that is, to be an authority on one subject, 
 but to be able to seize on any subject and write 
 intelligently upon it, after a furbishing up of 
 facts and a dipping into the latest developments 
 of the subject. And so with old notebooks. 
 Some one or two subjects recur continuously, 
 but the most interesting notes are the fugitive 
 ones on subjects, men, and books that come in 
 ken and then are lost to sight and memory. 
 No ! not to memory — nothing is ever really 
 forgotten. 
 
 Here is a little bit of history that shows what 
 might happen again if England lost command of 
 the sea. It is a statement of the examination of 
 one John Daniel, of Salcombe, the lovely little 
 Devon village where James Anthony Froude 
 lived, and where Alfred Tennyson wrote his 
 death song, " Crossing the Bar." The note is 
 
 9
 
 10 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 taken from the State papers, and so is exact. 
 This John Daniel was owner of the Swan of Sal- 
 combe, and in the year 1636 he sailed out of 
 Tenby in her, to run back home. Off Padstow 
 he saw two big ships which he took to be King's 
 ships, but off Mounts Bay a Turkish man-o'-war 
 of one hundred tons gave chase to these two ships 
 and ran them ashore. The crews all escaped 
 except one man, who stayed on board. He was 
 taken by the Turks, who plundered and rifled 
 the ships and sank them, then sailing off ; John 
 Daniel watched all this and learned the details, 
 and then safely sailed into Salcombe in the 
 Swan, thankful when the heave of the sea lifted 
 him in over that bar, now so interwoven into the 
 literary life of England. 
 
 A fair place indeed is Salcombe. As quaint in 
 the year 1888, when I described it in the Qentle- 
 man^s Magazine ; being not only without an 
 hotel, but without even a hostelry where one 
 might lodge ; but now, thanks to the initiative 
 of an old Crimean ofliicer. Major Bennet, there is 
 an hotel at Salcombe, and there is no fear of 
 Turkish corsairs in the bay. 
 
 There is a little note taken from a writer of a 
 httle earher time than the date of this Salcombe
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS ii 
 
 incident that is very apposite to the statement 
 that men should know everything o£ something ; 
 it is from the Table Talk o£ John Selden, who 
 married a Margaret Baker : who knows ? per- 
 chance, one of my forbears — one fain would 
 think so. Selden says : " Few men make them- 
 selves masters of the thing they write or speak " ; 
 that is they never know one subject thoroughly. 
 How terribly true in these days of striving after 
 universal knowledge, and yet how untrue when 
 the specialist is such as a Ramsay or Beddoe, a 
 Nansen or a Marconi ! — all men who appear in 
 these little black notebooks, in notes on chats 
 with them ; but this present book at first seems 
 to linger on past centuries, for just after the curt 
 note from John Selden comes a note of a visit 
 paid to the cottage of a certain John Syme, who 
 lived at Chapweek, on Sedgemoor. 
 
 It was a lonely little cottage deep in the moor, 
 and far from any highway, but John Syme had 
 made a collection of relics of the battle of Sedge- 
 moor, mostly from things he had ploughed up ; 
 and in a corner of his cottage stood a barrel with 
 cannon balls and bullets, pieces of swords, 
 soldiers' pipes, the head of a red deer, some 
 old pottery and coins, amongst which was a
 
 12 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 German token with the motto " Gott allein in 
 Herzen" ("God only in the heart"), a couple 
 of Bristol farthings dated 1652 and 1662, and a 
 coin of Louis XVI dated 1791. 
 
 It was a pleasant little old farm-house, nestled 
 among some tall elms on Sedgemoor, and John 
 Syme's widow chatted on upon her husband 
 finding all these things, with the exception of 
 some of the coins, in their own fields. 
 
 The genuine old chimney corner was still 
 there, with two settles or wooden seats literally 
 in the chimney, and with the dog-irons for 
 holding the wood logs. The old soul was gar- 
 rulous of her lost husband, and of a son in Wales 
 and a daughter in America, but no word would 
 she hear of selling the treasures her husband and 
 son had dug up. But she passed onward, and all 
 her barrelful of relics was dispersed and lost. 
 So this tramp across the fields of Sedgemoor 
 links itself up in the little notebook, where bits 
 of philosophy and cynicism hurtle against tender 
 bits of description of scenes in lovely spots of 
 this beauteous earth. 
 
 " You must serve God, but you need not anger 
 the devil," is a bit of Machiavellism from the 
 German novel Marienburg, that is next to a
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 13 
 
 thought on man's incomprehension of God's 
 actions. 
 
 " As a man in mercy crushes a burnt moth, and 
 the moth knows only a something crushes it, and 
 not a Hving — aye, a beneficent soul, so God 
 crushes a man." And then, like Slav music, with 
 a bound from the deep and sombre to the gay 
 and flippant, the notes leap to a couple of puns. 
 The one in English I will not praise ; it sprang 
 from a pessimistic utterance by one who, looking 
 at the vast spread of towns over whilom green 
 fields, exclaimed, " Ah ! if the country is all 
 built over, there will be nothing left for the 
 maintenance of the people." 
 
 " Then the main tenants will have to go too," 
 was the re-plique. And this pun seems to have 
 called up the memory of a pun I read when 
 tramping France in the fateful year of 1870. 
 " Pourquoi les Prussiens demandent-ils les con- 
 federations du Sud ? " " Parce que c'est la, qu'on 
 fait des rations," was the reply. Perhaps the 
 most perfect pun ever made ; the one word 
 turned into five, pronunciation almost absolutely 
 the same, the meaning wholly different. So the 
 French could pun even in August, 1870. 
 
 And almost apposite of August, 1870, comes a
 
 14 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 note on Rhine scenery. " Like potato fields, 
 only that is maligning the potato plant." For 
 a potato field in full blossom is a far more beauti- 
 ful sight than the rows of the vine on the dry, 
 bare, rocky heights. 
 
 Lying snugly tucked in between these notes 
 on France and Germany is a lady's card — Adrienne 
 von Kola. This name is bi-lingual, and brings up 
 memories of a scene in the rooms of the famous 
 old poet " Mirza Schaffy," whose poems went 
 into hundreds of editions, and who, as Friedrich 
 von Bodenstedt, was director of the theatre at 
 Wiesbaden ; Adrienne von Kola was a beauti- 
 ful lady, the leading actress at the date when 
 Bodenstedt kept his sixty-eighth birthday, and 
 I was his guest. 
 
 The old poet had not lost his admiration for 
 beauty, wit, and wine, about which he had so 
 often sung in his poems, dated from the then 
 Persian town of Tiflis, on the Kura. A town 
 that then seemed far, far away, but that since 
 has come under my ken ; and it is still, in spite 
 of Russian dominance, full of romance and 
 beauty. 
 
 Bodenstedt had a tremendous head and a 
 marvellous memory. As to his head, as a joke a
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 15 
 
 friend clapped his hat upon my head. It came 
 down on my shoulders. And as for his memory, 
 he could cap almost any line in Shakespeare ; 
 and great was the scorn he poured one morning 
 upon a Halle professor who wanted to hint at 
 the nonsense of Bacon writing Shakespeare's 
 plays. " Conciseness proves the master " was 
 one of his favourite mottoes. 
 
 The notes leap from Wiesbaden to Lynmouth, 
 in Devon — " By the Western Sea " ; and note 
 follows note upon all the beauty of coast and 
 inland vale ; and as apropos of Bodenstedt and 
 his Persian poems, comes this note : " Parsee at 
 dinner, and North Walk Sunset." Here in far 
 western Devon was a Parsee, and after dinner 
 we strolled together along that glorious cliif 
 walk, looking out westward, as the sun god in 
 all his glory sank slowly down to the glittering 
 waters ; and as it sank, the Parsee left us, turned 
 his back upon us, and in an attitude of reverence 
 addressed his orisons to that glowing orb as the 
 home of God. An incident that fitted so well 
 into my " artist dwarf " story that I called " By 
 the Western Sea." 
 
 What a suggestion for a thoughtful and delight- 
 ful literary article lies in the notes on the names
 
 i6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 of great writers ! Bacon ! At once suggestive of 
 high philosophy and keen thought, yet really the 
 word should call up visions of pigsties and bucolics, 
 a gross word full of low ideas, even descending to 
 the hideous horror of the abattoirs of Chicago. 
 How curiously commonplace and ineuphonious 
 are the names of so many writers, as " Longfellow," 
 and yet at the word, no " long fellow " four rite 
 springs to the vision, but thoughts of beauty of 
 diction, rippling rhythm, and delightful prose ; 
 and so with other names : Chatterton, Lamb, 
 Dickens, Thomson, Johnson, even Shakespeare is 
 a name that the boy of his period would probably 
 turn to ridicule. Yet now it rings to us with a 
 full round of mellifluous beauty and of splendid 
 power. 
 
 Samuel Baker is a name decidedly not of power, 
 but in Egypt it at once commands respect, so the 
 name becomes linked with the work and is en- 
 nobled, until all sense of the ludicrous or the 
 mean is absolutely lost, and the low word at once 
 arouses thoughts of beauty, poesy, glorious 
 diction, or strenuous work. 
 
 And whilst thinking of great writers who for 
 centuries have held the world in thrall, how apt 
 is the curt quotation, " Between artifice, however
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 17 
 
 high, and art, there is a great gulf fixed," and 
 adjoining this are two bits of German philosophy 
 — one is a fragment from my old friend Boden- 
 stedt's novel of Die letzen Falkenhurger. 
 
 " Es ist leichter, gliicklicher zusammen zu 
 kommen, als gliicklich beisammen zu bleiben " 
 (" It is easier happily to come together than 
 happily to remain together "). A httle sarcasm 
 on human nature many a wedded couple have 
 proved ! 
 
 But the next item of German thought is a 
 useful diplomatic lesson : — 
 
 " Mit dem Hute in der Hand 
 Kommt Man durch das ganze Land." 
 
 (" With hat well doffed, and in the hand, 
 One passes freely through all the land.") 
 
 And, perchance, this second bit of German 
 teaching might help those who have proved the 
 truth of the first dictum. At least it is worth 
 pondering over.
 
 Ill 
 
 The pleasures of Memory ! How these old note- 
 books bring back pleasures of the past — aye, and 
 regrets ! The first note in the little black book I 
 take up is on the Academy of Plato, and calls up 
 memories of a little expedition Walter Crane 
 and I made from Athens one day, to find the 
 groves of the Academy, and those shady walks 
 where, to the sound of the rippling fountains, 
 Plato and Sophocles argued and taught. We 
 found the River Kephisos, we were waited upon 
 by a lad, who brought us roses by the shaded 
 stream ere he brought us to drink, and we found 
 the garden, where wondrous fragments of rich 
 altars and statuary stand beneath the old olives. 
 We heard the frogs piping their chorus as of old, 
 and looked up through the grey old olives to 
 where Lycabettus towered up, and the Parthenon 
 gleamed in the sunshine ; and memory playing 
 around those days in sunny Greece suddenly 
 alights upon a pathetic little incident that gives 
 
 i8
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 19 
 
 an insight into the kindly helpful nature of a 
 man who has since become a very famous phy- 
 sician. 
 
 A party had arrived at our hotel in Athens from 
 the Holy Land, much stricken with fever, and 
 two sisters were exceptionally ill — one seriously so 
 — and the doctor volunteered to do all he could for 
 her, but she had to be taken to the hospital, where 
 all the nurses and doctors were Greeks, under- 
 standing no word of Enghsh. How welcome was 
 this Englishman's assistance and help ; he had 
 arranged to go down to Nauplia, but he paid 
 daily visits to the hospital to comfort the poor 
 English girl, and one day I had arranged to ac- 
 company the doctor and his brother on a climb 
 up Pentelicus to look down on Marathon. 
 
 We were to drive to the foot of the mountain, 
 but the doctor said, " You do not mind passing 
 the hospital and waiting a little ? I want to see 
 this poor girl." On his return to the carriage we 
 asked how she was. The doctor looked very 
 serious. " I don't know her constitution," he 
 said ; " it all depends on that. She is very ill." 
 " But," I said, " you go on to-morrow ; what will 
 she do ? " " No," he answered, " I've given up 
 going on. I will stay to the end with her." The
 
 20 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 poor girl died in a few days, but Dr. Thomas 
 Barlow's kindness in giving up his own pleasure 
 will always be remembered by me. 
 
 Just on the slopes of Pentelicus we had an- 
 other instance of his kindly nature : this time 
 bestowed on the brute creation. We were having 
 our lunch under some trees, at the commence- 
 ment of the climb of the mountain, and some 
 great dogs of the deerhound type came near. 
 The peasants drove them off, telling us they were 
 mad. Dr. Barlow said, " Nonsense," and gave 
 them the bones and debris of our meal without 
 fear of their madness, ejaculating, " They are 
 starving, that is their madness." 
 
 So the first little note has taken us into a bit of 
 biography of Queen Victoria's physician, and as 
 I pass on through the little book, the eye rests on 
 a quotation copied from Carlyle : " He who can 
 write a true book, is he not a Primate ? " Aye, if 
 the word " true " is considered in all its bearings. 
 Then comes a curious little note upon a Greek 
 saint, Blazios. Our good St. Blazios that gave us 
 the phrase " Drunk as Blazes " ; for this saint 
 was pleasantly done to death by having his flesh 
 torn off by woolcombs, and so he became the 
 patron saint of the English woolcombers ; and
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 21 
 
 as a high feast was kept up on his day, and the 
 people who frequented the feast were called 
 Blazers, so the saying grew into the English 
 tongue, and remains there fixed and useful. 
 
 Feasting brings one to the subject of dining, 
 and also of fasting, and a note upon how Prince 
 Metternich and King Victor Emmanuel both 
 fasted, whilst seated at the table when their 
 guests feasted, is curious. Prince Metternich 
 compromised matters by having a brown loaf and 
 butter by his side, whereof he cut slices as the 
 feast went on, but King Victor Emmanuel 
 simply ate nothing, reminding me of that most 
 charming personage the Princess Scalea of 
 Sicily, whom Mrs. Lynn Linton introduced as a 
 character in one of her novels. 
 
 I was seated next the Princess one day at dinner 
 in her villa near Palermo, and I noticed she 
 partook of nothing ; and as dinner had been 
 tremendously delayed by some of the guests 
 missing their way out of Palermo, I remarked 
 that I feared the delay had upset her. But she 
 quietly answered that she never ate anything, 
 and had not for years. She lived on milk, and 
 at that time was able to take her part in Society 
 and entertain in the villa that was so delightful
 
 22 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 and was so packed with relics of the past glories 
 of Sicily. Ah ! she has passed onward — and I see 
 in apposite juxtaposition to this Sicilian note a 
 bit of Itahan, " E pur si muove ! " So exclaimed 
 GaHleo after his recantation, to escape from the 
 Roman Inquisition. " And yet it moves." So 
 might exclaim those who think the question of 
 education does not move forward in England, 
 for it would be scarcely possible to discover in 
 Britain to-day a village schoolmistress passing 
 rich on twenty pounds a year ; living in a loft 
 over part of the schoolroom, that had a floor of 
 stone and mud. Yet such was the description of 
 a village school in Gloucestershire in 1861, and 
 the mistress survived her trials and lived until 
 1906, probably complaining, as a note on Hypatia 
 complains, that Pelagia, the beauty and power of 
 flesh, has to-day its ascendancy over mind. This 
 note was made in connection with some French 
 hterature of the gutter order ; and it continues : 
 " At least this flesh (Pelagia) was dainty ; but in 
 this Zolasque literature it is of the foulest " ; 
 and quite apropos comes this forceful note, 
 from old rugged Carlyle, " Hypocrisy and Atheism, 
 with the ghoul Sensuality, stalk abroad over the 
 earth."
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 23 
 
 But as though to pull one up from too severe 
 a sudden judgment, comes this warning fragment: 
 " Every one cries out for justice, but few would 
 care to have it dealt out to them." We had 
 better not dwell too minutely over this little 
 note, for did not Shakespeare exclaim, " Use 
 every man after his desert, and who should 
 'scape whipping ? " So we turn over the 
 leaves and alight upon an interview, of many 
 years ago, with Madge Robertson, as old 
 Bristolians love to call her — Mrs. Kendal as the 
 world knows her. As I called upon her she was 
 sitting knitting before the fire, and Mr. Kendal 
 was smoking ; and after a little general chat we 
 drifted into a talk on the old days, in the old 
 theatre in Bristol ; old then, for did not Garrick 
 write the prologue for its opening ? What a 
 chat we had on the old stock companies then in 
 vogue ! One bill, with the name of Kate and 
 Ellen Terry, Madge Robertson, Charles Coghlan, 
 Henrietta Hodgson (Mrs. Labouchere — her por- 
 trait is in the Toole group in Bram Stoker's 
 Reminiscences of Henry Irving), and Arthur 
 Stirling in it. Think what a cast ! Would they 
 ever come again, these stock companies ? Mr. 
 Kendal thought not, unless six or seven managers
 
 24 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 combined. Mrs. Kendal told of the time when 
 the Terrys were playing at Bristol, and o£ the 
 dramatist Tom Taylor's infatuation under their 
 spell, until he got nicknamed the Terrified Taylor. 
 In the burlesque of Endymion Kate Terry 
 played Diana, and Ellen, Cupid; and Madge 
 Robertson the boy. So the pleasant chat ran 
 on, enough to make a page of this gossip. The 
 Kendals were going to produce on that night a 
 new Australian play, and some wattle was re- 
 quired, for they strove for reality in detail even, 
 and " worked for the thoughtful few rather than 
 for the thousands." 
 
 Drifting away to death scenes on the stage, 
 Mr. Kendal said men did not die melodramatic- 
 ally. He had seen death in all shapes — by the 
 guillotine and hanging, and in the hospitals, 
 but rarely would a man tear his shirt-front open ; 
 and so actors' and actresses' modes came under 
 review, and the fashion of the stage, varying as 
 the years roll on. 
 
 How apropos to the career of the artist of the 
 stage, of painting, or of literature, is this little 
 note : " Success begins when failure is imminent." 
 How many halt at the imminence ! It is the few 
 who, undaunted, go on to success ; and how fre-
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 25 
 
 quently it is true of the really great ones of the 
 earth, who go on from success to success, in- 
 fluencing, by the power, greatness, and goodness 
 of their work, that " great souls are always 
 loyally submissive, and reverence to nobility is 
 nobility." 
 
 And after all this philosophising comes a note 
 upon the talk of two tramps. The contrasts of 
 hfe are the interests of life, and as journaHst and 
 writer I have chatted in palaces with royalties, 
 or in the well-furnished libraries of the learned, 
 and on the same day chummed in with vagabonds 
 on the road, both at home and abroad ; and 
 sometimes the derelicts of society have been the 
 more interesting. 
 
 One of these two tramps was of the jovial type, 
 enjoyed life, told of the square meals good- 
 natured farmers had given him ; sold his boots 
 to a man for two shillings, and begged a pair 
 of the buyer to go on with ; managed to get 
 a police fare for a hundred and twenty miles 
 of rail to London, and then got sent back 
 again. He triumphed over getting sixpence 
 from the workhouse clerk ; revelled in " doing " 
 the very people who are supposed to check 
 the man who won't work, and work he certainly
 
 26 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 never looked for. A jovial vagabond, whose lip- 
 smacking description of a meal a farmer gave him 
 and his pal — " A whole dishful of taters and 
 beans, and a plate regular full of mutton, as much 
 as ever we could eat " — ^would surely have made 
 the veriest dyspeptic or malade imaginaire yearn 
 for food. A merry churl, a past-master in the art 
 of vagabondage !
 
 IV 
 
 The little black book I take up starts with the 
 word Greece, and at first sight seems full of 
 notes upon Colonnos and Marathon, Corinth and 
 Athens. " Subjects too dry for gossip," one 
 hears the reader exclaim; but there is a wonderful 
 melange in these books, and a note upon Nauplia 
 brings up remembrances of a mighty world's 
 worker, for the note runs : " SchHemann stops 
 at the Hotel des Etrangers and dines in the 
 restaurant," and vividly the scene comes back to 
 me of the moment when the great explorer and 
 delver into Greek and Trojan history told mc he 
 stopped in Nauplia at the Hotel des Etrangers — 
 a moment that introduced me to another of the 
 most famous men of the nineteenth century. 
 
 I was chatting with Dr. SchHemann in his 
 wonderful museum house. He sat before me, 
 the short, round-headed little man who upset 
 so many old myths of education. He did not 
 look a powerful man in body, but yet had a 
 
 27
 
 28 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 sturdy strength about him. I suddenly reminded 
 him I had two friends below in a carriage waiting 
 for me, Walter Crane and the editor of a well- 
 known journal, both highly interested in his 
 work. " Oh, tell them to come up," said Schlie- 
 mann ; so I stepped out on to the balcony and 
 called them to come up, and I presented them to 
 the doctor. " Ah," he said, " it is a pity I am so 
 busy or I could show you over my house." But 
 as he spoke a man entered, and he exclaimed, 
 " Here is some one who could do it as well as I, 
 but he speaks German." " That does not matter," 
 I replied ; and we were presented to Professor 
 Virchow, and were shown the museum by this 
 famous German physician. Coffee was then brought 
 in, and Schliemann showed us the museum in 
 the upper rooms, and later on called to Tela- 
 mon, his servant, to take us down into the base- 
 ment, which was crowded with antique treasures. 
 Ah, a memorable hour with the pioneer of teach- 
 ing history with the spade — that is after Layard, 
 with whom I once chatted, for Layard's Nineveh 
 work led the way to Schliemann's work. 
 
 How curiously apropos comes in a little 
 quotation from Schopenhauer, amidst all these 
 Greek notes, upon the grades of Authors. " Shoot-
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 29 
 
 ing Stars, Planets, and Fixed Stars." Surely 
 Schliemann and Layard may be placed amongst 
 the fixed stars ; for the effect of their work is 
 endurable, and as Schopenhauer says, not for a 
 nation, but for the world. 
 
 Singularly opposite, and yet apposite, are two 
 notes in this little book, one about Mars Hill, in 
 Athens, upon which Paul told the learned 
 Athenians that their unknown God was the 
 mighty God of Heaven and Earth. How, from 
 that spot, standing on that little hill, he could 
 point away to the glorious sapphire sea, and in- 
 land to the ethereal hills, so soft and beautiful 
 in the clear yet mystic light ; such a God was 
 greater than their gods of sea, vine, or olive. 
 Just upon this note there comes one upon a 
 chat upon the Samogiten, with Max Miiller, 
 after he had been lecturing upon the religions 
 of the world ; and what he said is as true to-day 
 as in the days of the old Greek priests : that 
 too often, when religion became a profession, 
 what is true and divine is forgotten ; but that 
 men to-day, as then, all have their bookless 
 religion ; for the churches never retained a re- 
 ligion in its purity. 
 
 There are two curious little notes upon Society
 
 30 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 life in Greece that ring almost as of to-day. The 
 one is, that no shopkeeper in Thespiae was 
 allowed in Society until after he had given up 
 business for ten years ; the other note is that 
 Simon, when he became rich, adds two syllables 
 to his name and becomes Simonides. 
 
 To-day a shopkeeper must be a multi-shop- 
 keeper, run scores of shops, and we make him a 
 baronet, and so add two syllables, one before and 
 the other after his name. But oh, the snobbery 
 of those old Greeks, quite equal to that of to-day, 
 as though the man working at his shop was not 
 a far more valuable man than the ten years' 
 faineant, idler. 
 
 A little short note upon the famous Tom 
 Coryat, whose Crudities, hastily gobbled up in 
 five months' travel, have been so often reprinted 
 since his death, in 1617, reminds me of a visit I 
 paid to the church where he hung up his boots 
 as a thankoffering for his safe-conduct from the 
 Almighty, in the days when travel meant danger 
 and risk. A peaceful old village is Tom Coryat's 
 native village of Odcombe, in Somerset ; and I 
 dined with a substantial yeoman of the district 
 who remembered as a child seeing the boots 
 hanging in the church : soon after to be removed
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 31 
 
 by a parson who thought them out of place. 
 " Autres temps, autres moeurs." On the same 
 page o£ my Httle notebook is a chat with an 
 old fellow who claimed to be a hundred and 
 thirteen years of age, and a terrible list of ques- 
 tions I see I had prepared for him. He was a 
 bright, cheery old fellow, named Grubb. But 
 most of my questions, such as if he remembered 
 people talk of Burke as M.P. for Bristol, or of the 
 French Revolution, he could not answer. He 
 could remember how the women-folk were 
 dressed in " skimming-dish bonnets and bed- 
 gowns," and Tyburn Turnpike, where they hung 
 people, and how country people made their wills 
 before taking the journey up to London ; but to 
 get him back before the coronation of King George, 
 and how Queen Caroline broke her heart " that 
 same summer," was impossible : so he remembered 
 history. I soon found that this wonderful little, 
 fresh, ruddy-faced man was an illusionary and 
 no centenarian ; about ninety-five years of age 
 instead of a hundred and thirteen, and a copy 
 of his father's tombstone in Kingsland, near 
 Leominster, verified this decision : but he had 
 given me an interesting chat. He was the second 
 centenarian I had proved an exaggerator of age.
 
 32 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 I was afterwards to get my faith in cen- 
 tenarians restored by a most delightful talk with 
 a charming old lady born in 1792, but notes 
 upon the chat with her are in a little black book 
 far ahead of the one I am now running through. 
 In this little book are a wonderful lot of notes 
 upon the books read by Coleridge, Southey, 
 Humphry Davy, Cottle, the Wedgwoods, Eagles, 
 and Beddoes, and all other notabilities who lived 
 in Bristol late in the eighteenth century. 
 
 I was excited one morning by the news that in 
 a garret at the Queen's Road Library, Bristol, now 
 become part of the Natural History Museum, a 
 find had been made of the old lending library 
 registers of this date, 1790, etc., and each person 
 had entered out his own books, and sometimes 
 made comments, and very soon I was seated in an 
 inner room at the library with those precious 
 dusty old books before me, and had soon dug out 
 an article for the Athenceum^ which was afterwards 
 enlarged and appeared in Chamhers's Journal in 
 March, 1890. 
 
 Some most interesting items illustrative of the 
 feeling of the period came out of these notes, one 
 most striking when on November 4th, 1796, 
 S. J. Coleridge signs in a hurry for Apuleia Opera,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 33 
 
 Vol. I, but takes time to add, " 9 Dutch ships 
 taken with 3000 troops. Bravo ! " 
 
 But there is a note following which tells me 
 to halt, " In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst 
 der Meister " — a quotation I well remember 
 having quoted to me as we walked down the 
 streets of Wiesbaden by Friedrich von Bodenstedt. 
 " In conciseness the mastery is shown." The 
 exact opposite this to the work of the speaker, who 
 never used one word where twenty would do. We 
 were walking down the Taunus Strasse in Wies- 
 baden, and in front of one of the hotels a sentry- 
 box was placed. Bodenstedt stopped, and pointed 
 this out to me. It was an honour from the 
 German authorities because the Empress Eugenie 
 was staying at the hotel. How that sentry must 
 have brought up memories of twenty years be- 
 fore, when her husband was taken prisoner to 
 Wilhelmshohe. Oh, the satire of time, the 
 sarcasm of events !
 
 V 
 
 "Tom Moore buried at Bromham, near Devizes," 
 is the first thing my eye lights upon as 1 take up 
 again the little black notebooks, a note made in 
 1889, with the intention of making a Httle pil- 
 grimage to the Irish singer's grave. But that 
 pilgrimage was never accomplished, until in 1906 
 I had an invitation from the Irish Literary 
 Society to be present at the unveiHng of the 
 great Celtic cross in the picturesque village 
 churchyard where " those evening bells, those 
 evening bells " had so often rung out, and incited 
 sweet poetical thoughts in the mind of the poet. 
 Gathered over the dead body of that poet on 
 this winter's day were men and women of all 
 shades of religion and politics, all asperities 
 softened in the presence of the singer of a past 
 century. From such a subject the notes jump to 
 a strange statement of fact that might give a hint 
 to a novehst for a plot : " A man had dined 
 every Sunday for thirty years with his mother, 
 
 34
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 35 
 
 and never knew she was his mother." Sounds 
 strange this, but the name o£ my informant is 
 given, and the note added : " His grandmother 
 has passed herself off as his mother." Was this 
 idyll, romance, or tragedy ? Truly tragedy to 
 the man, if the truth ever burst in on his life. 
 
 And as I turn over the little notebook, but a 
 few pages on, is a note on a novelist and puppets 
 that seems hard upon a novelist who was a 
 great worker and a great helper of his fellow- 
 men. It ran thus : " W. Besant says of 
 Jefferies, ' When he had a lot of puppets in 
 his hands he could not make them act.' He, 
 B., could : all or most of his characters are 
 puppets, cleverly handled." This was written 
 about 1889, and may be true of much of Walter 
 Besant's work, but a kinder-hearted man, or one 
 who devoted himself more to the betterment of 
 his fellow-men, never breathed, and his topo- 
 graphical work will be of use when his " puppets," 
 that were of great use in their time, are forgotten. 
 
 It is fitting a note should immediately follow 
 this upon the life-work of another great helper 
 of his fellow-men, or, rather, children, in this 
 case. The note is in German and is stuffed with 
 thought material : " Wen du die Nachte durch
 
 36 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 wachen musstest, und deinen Kindern mit zwei 
 Worter zu sagen was andre mit zwanzig erklaren, 
 so lass dich dein Schlaflosen nicht dauern," which 
 curtly translated means, " If you have to stay 
 awake at nights, but in the end can tell your 
 pupils in two words what others take twenty 
 to tell them, do not sorrow over your lost 
 sleep." 
 
 What a leap then comes from this quiet 
 musing upon literary and educational methods, 
 right into the seething tumult of fierce 
 political and legal strife. " Parnell Com- 
 mission, Feb. 22 " is the heading of the 
 note, and recalls the fact that I, on that 
 day, made my appearance through the judges' 
 entrance just before the sitting of the court 
 began ; in fact, a part of the court arose 
 as I opened the door, thinking the judges were 
 entering, but quickly resumed their seats as I 
 came down to take my place on the front seat, 
 with a word from Mr. Cunningham, the clerk of 
 the court, that I was to give place, stand up if 
 necessary, when the defendants came in. 
 
 It was the only chance of a seat left, and I was 
 grateful ; for the egregious Pigott was to be 
 examined that day by Sir Charles Russell, and
 
 of' men and matters 37 
 
 intense was the desire to get into court. These 
 are some of my notes : — 
 
 " Biggar, the hunchback ; Labouchere, spick 
 and span ; Pigott, high, bald forehead, white 
 beard and moustache ; the quiet, clear face of 
 Sir Charles Russell." 
 
 Sir Wilfrid Lawson had been trying to get in 
 at the Strand door as I entered, and had been 
 refused admission, but he suddenly appeared at 
 a little door at the side of the Bench, and Sir 
 Charles Russell exclaimed, sotto voce, as he took 
 a pinch of snuff, " Oh, Sir Wilfrid, Sir Wilfrid ! " 
 
 When the defendants came in I stood up 
 as requested, and found myself wedged in with 
 Wemyss Reid, burly, long-haired Oscar Wilde, 
 and an Irish priest, and while Mr. Asquith was 
 reading Forster's letters, I heard a voice behind 
 me exclaim, " You can't get by." " I'm going 
 to try, anyhow," was the retort. " How is it you 
 aren't in gaol ? " " Plenty of time yet," was the 
 response. It was John O'Connor, a tall man with 
 big whiskers and a red moustache, and John 
 squeezed himself close to me as Pigott stood up 
 in the witness-box, pen in hand, as though writ- 
 ing. I heard O'Connor mutter, " He [Pigott] 
 could never be satisfied with cheating one person,
 
 38 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 he must be cheating two." But even when under 
 fire from Sir Charles Russell, old Pigott's nerve 
 permitted him to hold up the fly-leaf of a letter 
 with a quill pen, and neither leaf nor quill 
 trembled. " It's blood - curdling," exclaimed 
 O'Connor ; " Green for ould Ireland and Pigott 
 for ever," and certainly Pigott was excessively 
 cool, as in spite of Sir Charles Russell emphati- 
 cally telling him he was not to read the letter, 
 but only to look at certain words, he coolly went 
 on reading, saying, " I'm examining it." The 
 next morning, all England knows, he never ap- 
 peared, but fled to Spain, and Mr. Labouchere 
 and G. Augustus Sala were probably the sole 
 two who knew the truth about Pigott and the 
 forged letters — those letters that shook the 
 English-speaking world. 
 
 These now faint notes bring up the whole scene 
 of the famous trial, and most apropos comes my 
 next item on the reign of character. 
 
 I ask, is the reign of character approaching ? 
 For a statesman has fallen because of loss of 
 character. This not referring to Parnell, but to 
 another statesman who had broken the moral 
 law, and it runs on, " Like St. Paul's bishop the 
 leaders of men should be — the powerful man.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 39 
 
 the able and clever man, the good and the noble 
 man, but have we not too often the reign of bad 
 character ? The powerful and the unscrupulous, 
 rather than the noble and good. It is this lack of 
 recognition on the part of the mob, the populace 
 that never grows old, that causes most of the 
 world's troubles." A French note amplifies this, 
 for it quotes the saying about Talleyrand, that 
 he was a " Bas de sole rempli de boue," a " silk 
 stocking filled with mud." 
 
 That reading makes the strong man, although 
 it may not make for greatness and goodness, is 
 interestingly and fully exemplified by a long 
 series of notes that follow, upon the extracts 
 from the registers of the Bristol Library in the 
 eighteenth century, where I see the signatures 
 for books taken out to read by young men 
 like Humphry Davy, Southey, and Coleridge. 
 Amongst the books read by Davy were Voltaire's 
 Philosophic Dictionary, Bacon's works, Priestley's 
 experiments, Rousseau's works, Linnaean trans- 
 actions, Foster's voyages round the world, etc. 
 etc. — all works showing that these readers had a 
 greed for knowledge, and this greed led them on 
 to work that is alive to-day, a hundred years after- 
 wards.
 
 40 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Another note upon a mode of getting know- 
 ledge is sandwiched in between these references 
 to these voluminous readers of the eighteenth 
 century. It is Laurence Oliphant's idea, at the 
 age of seventeen, upon education, by travel. 
 
 And certainly travel with open eyes is a great 
 educator, but in these days of travel by motor I 
 have known men go through Ludlow and be in 
 doubt whether they saw the castle, and pass 
 through Fairford and not see that wondrous gem 
 the church, with its perfect beauty of stained 
 glass, only surpassed in England by the windows 
 in King's College, Cambridge. 
 
 Ah, these little notebooks call up visions of 
 beauty in many a land, and none more lovely 
 than those seen in England, that " little body with 
 a mighty heart " that is never known but by the 
 traveller who comes home to it.
 
 VI 
 
 " Go to a gossip's feast, and go with me," is the 
 appeal of the Abbess in the Comedy of Errors, 
 when she has found again husband and sons. 
 Shakespeare makes Ephesus still a seaport, and they 
 of Syracuse and Corinth land there. The plot 
 works around these Greek ports, and correctly 
 enough for the period, although to-day Ephesus 
 is many miles from the sea — the sea that pre- 
 serves the liberties of England. One of the first 
 items I light upon in my next little black book is 
 the witticism of Douglas Jerrold's that " the 
 liberty of England was preserved in brine," and 
 will be until the Channel tunnel is foolishly 
 attempted, or the Pas de Calais has silted up like 
 the harbour of Ephesus. 
 
 An excellent motive for keeping notebooks is 
 given by a bit of conversation with a droll in- 
 dividual who was lamenting his lack of memory. 
 " I meet lots of people," he exclaimed, " and they 
 tell me things, only I forget them. I could be 
 
 41
 
 42 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 very amusing if I had a good memory." He was 
 amusing, for his lack of memory ran to words as 
 well as things. Seeing me one day with a book 
 under my arm he exclaimed, " Been book-buy- 
 ing ! Let me see, what is it they call people that 
 get such a love for old books : dipsomaniacs, 
 ain't it ? No, it's not dipsomaniacs ; oh, that's 
 prigging ; I know the words, but I forget 
 them." 
 
 Just beyond this bit of conversation comes the 
 quotation from Goethe, " There are many 
 echoes in the world, but few voices," and then 
 the highly useful note on enjoyments, " Never 
 allow them to punish you." What a wealth of 
 selfish philosophy in the one phrase, but yet very 
 valuable philosophy, as valuable as the little short 
 apothegm for the fiction writer, that " he should 
 possess the prime elements of earnestness and 
 purity, with the added gifts of humour and pathos 
 and an appreciation of dramatic situation." The 
 second quality, whether in style or morals, is not 
 considered necessary to-day. Yet all our greatest 
 writers aim at purifying, although they have to 
 deal with human nature that can never attain to 
 purity, and how appropriate is the following 
 quotation from VVilhelm Meister that " from
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 43 
 
 Nature we possess no fault which may not be- 
 come a virtue, and no virtue which may not 
 become a fault " — a saying aptly illustrated by a 
 note upon a famous painter whom I had gone to 
 visit in the " Palace of Pleasure and Beauty " 
 he was just building. " Herkomer painted 
 thirty-four portraits in 1886" — so runs the 
 entry. 
 
 I well remember that afternoon I spent at 
 Bushey, delighted with the beauty of the work I 
 saw around me and with the master. What his 
 energy was in those days is illustrated by this 
 note : " In 1887 he had to paint forty water- 
 colours of scenes around his home for the F.A. 
 Society. He arose at 4.0 a.m., sketched until 
 7.0, caught the 8.0 train and painted three sitters 
 in London, and then returned to Bushey to study 
 the evening effects." 
 
 I went back from Bushey that night to Carl 
 Haag's, the veteran artist, who was such a friend 
 of Queen Victoria's, and he and I went to Edwin 
 Long's and spent the evening in Long's studio 
 over coffee and cigars, and a great talk on work 
 in general, and Long's pictures in particular. 
 He was engaged on " Christ Preaching on the 
 Lake," and he asked us both to criticise. His son
 
 44 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 was the only other person present. I held my 
 peace, but Haag found fault with a figure that 
 dominated the picture too much, and Long agreed 
 with him ; but how to alter it ? Haag took up 
 a sketch of Long's, turned it over, and on the 
 back gave his idea of how the figure might be 
 subdued, and Long accepted his suggestions as 
 good. 
 
 That picture was never finished ; within a 
 short time Edwin Long, the courteous, noble 
 Englishman, who had risen by his art to a high 
 pinnacle of fame, was dead, and his son was 
 shortly after killed in a railway accident in Spain. 
 Carl Haag still lives, a veteran who has done 
 splendid Eastern work, now, after fifty years of 
 English life and exciting travel, in quiet retire- 
 ment in his tower on the Rhine. 
 
 " Mit Freunden nicht mit Wallen unschanze 
 dich " is the apt quotation in German (though 
 from an old Bohemian saying) that comes in face 
 of these notes on Herkomer and Haag, two 
 German artists — " With friends and not with 
 walls surround thyself." 
 
 There is a curious little passage following, upon 
 writing. It runs thus : " Great writers even in 
 dull pages awake some thought. Little writers'
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 45 
 
 work may be a pastime, but generally is more of a 
 waste time." And a little quotation comes aptly 
 enough from a writer who always endued thought: 
 " Let us not be ignorant we are ignorant," wrote 
 Disraeli, whom I remember seeing as he sat 
 twiddling his thin goatee beard on the front seat 
 in the House of Commons. How fitting is the 
 next quotation : " Every year buries its own 
 literature " ! Disraeli's work is not buried yet, 
 and his prophetic Sybil and Coningsby might 
 well be read to-day by those who aspire to be 
 leaders of the working man. 
 
 A note upon the life of the great German writer 
 Friedrich von Bodenstedt gives a hint we have 
 been struggling for years to adopt. He is 
 speaking of learning Latin and Greek, and 
 the method adopted in Moscow of learning 
 these languages as the modern tongues, as living 
 languages ; even the German professors in the 
 Russian capital found the pupils learned more in 
 one year in this fashion than in four years in a 
 German university. This was in the 'forties, 
 seventy years ago. I heard Schliemann state the 
 same fact in the 'eighties in Athens, but we still 
 go on wasting our boys' time and lives in the same 
 foolish pedagogic fashion, and they come out
 
 46 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 ignorant even of Latin after a dozen years of 
 school and college life. 
 
 But we are getting too solid in this gossip, and 
 a word on laughter pulls me up : " Laughter is 
 the salt of life ; it keeps it sweet, prevents it from 
 turning sour or decaying ; it gives fertility." 
 And then follows a note upon the personal 
 appearance of a most genial man who did some 
 marvellous work in the days when travel was 
 arduous. " Sir Henry Layard, of Nineveh fame," 
 so runs the note, " a fine old head, high forehead, 
 white silky hair, and full white beard." He was 
 the first to teach the value of the spade in verify- 
 ing history, and what immense results have en- 
 sued from his work, and that of his followers 
 throughout the world, but especially in the East 
 and Egypt, as I have witnessed in Ephesus 
 and Thebes, Tiryns and Caerwent, Riigen and 
 Rome, Carthage and Salona. 
 
 These little books, blotched and stained 
 and faint, bring up visions of faces, quick with 
 the eagerness of quest, and happy in work that 
 has helped the world ; and visions of beauty spots 
 of the earth that make one marvel what can be 
 the glories of heaven to exceed these terrestrial 
 glories.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 47 
 
 And then, in the midst of such thought-inspir- 
 ing notes, comes as a sharp blow the word " Me- 
 diocrity," and the note : " What makes the suc- 
 cess of numerous works is the affinity of the ideas 
 of the author, and the mediocrity of the ideas of 
 the public." A translation this from Chamfort. 
 What a keen satire upon the writer who has 
 attained the " success of the season," or the sensa- 
 tionalist whose " name is on every one's lips," 
 and as an exact counterpart to the flimsy popu- 
 larity comes a quotation from Goethe, whose 
 work, like Shakespeare's, was " no crowd-exciting 
 sensation," and in this little phrase is the key to 
 his power. " It is a false yielding to the crowd 
 when you arouse in them a sentiment they 
 want to have, and not a sentiment they ought 
 to have." The exact opposite this to the 
 ideas of the present-day publisher, who says, 
 " Tell us what the public want, and we will give 
 it them." 
 
 In the midst of all this philosophy comes an 
 item of fact, a very stern fact for Englishmen. 
 It is dated August 2nd, 1889, and is upon the 
 visit of the German Emperor, with his fleet of 
 those days, to our fleet at Spithead. I well re- 
 member the laugh that arose from naval and
 
 48 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 nautical men as the high great hulks of the Ger- 
 man fleet hove in sight, such a contrast to our 
 fleet, such an easy mark, and so obsolete ; and 
 as the Royal yacht steamed up our lines, and the 
 thunder and crack of guns followed her path, I 
 see the note I made is : " What must the Kaiser 
 think as he goes up the lines ? " We know now 
 what he thought, for that day was the commence- 
 ment of the real German navy, and a little 
 quotation on sleeplessness that is on the opposite 
 page somewhat appositely describes the German 
 Emperor : " The sleepless energy that knows no 
 strength." For has not he isolated Germany in 
 that isolation that, unlike the splendid isolation 
 of England, has, to quote a Frenchman, " Rien 
 du splendide " about it ? Yet, from the points 
 of view of race, and language, and sentiment, and 
 thought, the English and Germans should be the 
 nearest allies. How many times I have seen the 
 Kaiser at weddings and funerals, at the opening 
 of art exhibitions, and on parade, or at " Alarmi- 
 rungs," and heard that terrible voice, the very 
 accents of which, I saw made tears well into his 
 mother's eyes on one memorable occasion. The 
 value of his intense belief in his country is vitiated 
 by a super-intense belief in himself ; and yet he
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 49 
 
 has withal urged on his country to vast develop- 
 ments. A little quotation that seems apropos 
 must end this gossip : " Great souls are 
 loyally submissive and reverent to what is over 
 them."
 
 VII 
 
 The little black notebook that I take up again (for 
 I did not reach its conclusion in my last chapter) 
 has numerous notes on Russia, that prove how 
 slowly changes are wrought in that colossal 
 Empire, and yet one of the first entries is a com- 
 parison between Russia and volatile France. So 
 run the words : " Is not the genius of revolu- 
 tion as tyrannical at Paris as the genius of despot- 
 ism at St. Petersburg ? " Then follows the 
 significant note proving how this despotism is up- 
 held. " Tchinn in Russian, or Rank, is of fourteen 
 classes, and promotion is by the Emperor." One 
 only has to think of all the Tchinnovniks and all 
 their relations, at once to understand how diffi- 
 cult is the task of breaking down this system. 
 
 Another interesting and strangely suggestive 
 word is upon the custom of crossing oneself in 
 Russia, before every church, and every cross, and 
 every ikon or sacred picture ; and they are in 
 every home and in every room. The cross has to 
 
 50
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 51 
 
 be made according to the rank of the person. 
 Very high rank—" first-chop people "—just cross 
 with the finger, to satisfy the form ; but the 
 poorest cross themselves as far as they can reach 
 with the body low bent — I have seen the peasant 
 throw his arm over his shoulder in crossing ; 
 highly symboHc this of the crosses borne through 
 life by peasant and noble. 
 
 And then the entries jump from places to 
 people, and I see two entries upon the personal 
 appearance nearly twenty years ago of two famous 
 people, man and woman. One is now Bishop of 
 Oxford, and I note him as he is preaching a 
 Bampton Lecture at Oxford, as " looking weary 
 and sad, with thick sandy beard and a quick toss 
 of the head — a touch of the ascetic about him." 
 One phrase of the lecture I will quote : " Christ 
 worked, and thought not of majorities." And 
 just two pages on comes a description of another 
 of the world's famous workers — a woman who 
 has seen much of life in France from the days of 
 the disastrous war of 1870 — Mrs. Crawford, the 
 famous correspondent of the Daily News. It was 
 in the pretty home of Warley Abbey, then the resi- 
 dence of Mr., (afterwards Sir) Hugh Gilzean-Reid, 
 in company with the handsome and charming Mrs.
 
 52 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Reid, that I first met her, to meet her again in Paris. 
 I see my note upon her is, " Deep, dark eyes, with 
 a full face and ' acquisitive' nose, with a full mass 
 of white frizzy hair and well-marked dark eye- 
 brows ! A woman who silently, quietly grasped 
 situation and character, and utilised them." 
 
 What giants in literature there seemed to be 
 in the 'eighties. In a diary of that date, amongst 
 a list of those with whom I had correspondence 
 were James Payn, Walter Besant, Alfred Tenny- 
 son, Baring Gould, John Percival, John Ruskin, 
 James Anthony Froude, Hubert Herkomer, Row- 
 land Prothero, and E. A. Freeman ; and a card 
 falls out of L'Abbe Paulus, who discovered the 
 curious briquetage in the Seille Valley upon 
 which I wrote in the Athenceum. How many of 
 this list have passed onward, and whom have we 
 to replace them ? Who are now our gods ? 
 
 But we shall meet with other notes upon these 
 giants of the past as we stroll onward through 
 these notebooks, and the eyes light upon another 
 name that conjures up delightful work, in an ex- 
 cerpt upon Brain Power or Cerehricity ; it is by 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, and verified by a curious 
 corroboration that happened to me a year after. 
 
 Holmes writes that this cerebricity, as he calls it,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 53 
 
 communicates itself from letters, etc., and affects 
 people with whom they come into contact. For 
 example, a letter yet unseen and unopened makes 
 one think of the subject contained in that letter. 
 I see I put a " ? " against this, but a year after 
 add, " I had the very thing happen in connection 
 with a letter I received." 
 
 One morning, before I left my bedroom, my 
 thoughts, with apparently no reason, suddenly 
 fell upon my eldest son, who was away from home 
 on business, and acutely I felt — what if something 
 had happened to him ? What if he were seriously 
 ill, and worse, far worse, what if he died ? The 
 thing seemed to get possession of me and I went 
 downstairs. Amongst my letters was nothing 
 from my son, but there was a letter from an old 
 friend whose son had been taken suddenly ill 
 and had died. My own son was well, and nothing 
 of evil came to him. Perchance only a coinci- 
 dence, but a curious one. 
 
 My notes leap from the tragic to the amusing, 
 and from the pleasant little circumstances of 
 life worthy of note to the blackguardly incidents 
 that illustrate the depravity of the human mind 
 when the soulful higher influences are starved. 
 
 One winter's night in a tram in a West-country
 
 54 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 town, I heard a poor woman nursing a child, hush 
 it with the words, " Go couchee," and I found 
 that this bit of old Norman French was still in 
 use in the West of England, and in Cardiff ; and 
 in Somerset how many a fine bit of old Saxon 
 still clings to the peasants' tongues. 
 
 It was in this same district that a bit of refined 
 blackguardism came out at a funeral in a country 
 " God's acre." The clergyman was a racing man 
 and utterly indolent of church work, and habitu- 
 ally went out when the hymns were sung, rumour 
 had it, to get a drink. A villager had died, and he 
 and his curate were commencing the service when 
 a man came up and spoke to him. " Here," said 
 the vicar to the curate, " you look after the dead, 
 I must go and look after the living." The man had 
 told him that some pigs he had lately bought at a 
 city market near by had arrived. So the proverb 
 had a new illustration, " The nearer the church 
 the farther from God." How Hke this to a 
 Russian proverb I see in this notebook, " The 
 nearer the Tsar the nearer Death." 
 
 A delightful Httle bit of sarcasm against doctors 
 I see, culled from Young's travels, written over 
 a century ago, but having some truth in it to-day. 
 " There is a good difference between a good doc-
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 55 
 
 tor and a bad one, but very little between a good 
 doctor and none at all." This can hardly be said 
 of surgeons, they have made immense strides 
 forward in knowledge ; as two men whose names 
 I see in close proximity could well have testified. 
 Old Charlie Williams, the war correspondent 
 who had gone through a score of campaigns, and 
 Archibald Forbes, the brilliant war correspon- 
 dent of the Franco-Prussian War. A fine hand- 
 some fellow, who had a terrible breakdown ere 
 his death, and his wife denied him to his old 
 chums, Henty and Williams ; an absolute neces- 
 sity, perhaps, in his state of health. 
 
 I met Williams on the railway platform at 
 Moscow with Sir Edwin Arnold, when we were 
 all gathering there for the coronation of the 
 Tsar Nicholas II. A reign begun in tremendous 
 magnificence and tremendous disaster, for 
 Williams said of the scene on the Khodynsky 
 Plain, where in struggling to obtain the Tsar's 
 gifts, of a mug and a bag of food, five thou- 
 sand mortals were trampled to death : " No 
 battlefield I have ever seen was so gruesome." 
 
 I pass on to notes upon two famous books. One 
 not written by its so-called author, and at once 
 accepted ; the other refused. The first, a book
 
 56 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 on cricket, by a famous cricketer, who never 
 wrote a line of it. A syndicate of twenty-five 
 people put down twenty-five pounds each, and 
 the book was written by a friend of the cricketer, 
 but the cricketer's name was appended to it, 
 though he did not go through a single proof, but 
 met the real author once a week to talk it over, 
 and give some personal bits. The writer said it 
 was difficult to keep him up to it, but they made 
 thirteen hundred pounds by the book up to the 
 time of my chat with the real writer, who jok- 
 ingly said, " I tried to make it like 's style," 
 
 at which we both laughed at the idea of a non- 
 writer having style. The other note is upon the 
 famous work John Inglesant. This clever and 
 fascinating work was sent in print, by the traveller 
 of a London firm, for that firm's consideration. 
 Within twenty-four hours it was returned as 
 not suitable for pubfication. Thus Mr. James 
 Payn refused one of the classics of the Victorian 
 era. Mr. James Payn was a delightful raconteur, 
 but as a reader he had strange reasons for refus- 
 ing books. He told me once at the Reform Club 
 he would never recommend one of my books to 
 be published in the Tauchnitz edition, for which 
 he was the reader, as I laid my scenes abroad ;
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 57 
 
 although Baron Tauchnitz had promised me to 
 write to him about them, English readers did not 
 care, he said, to read books in which foreign scenes 
 were depicted ; and so he effectually blocked 
 their issue in that series, and to the end he wrote 
 and spoke against English books with foreign 
 mise en scene. Let me finish this gossip with a 
 striking French quotation on Life : — 
 
 " On entre, on crie 
 C'est la vie. 
 On crie, on sort 
 C'est la mort."
 
 VIII 
 
 " A GOSSIP like humour," as Shakespeare hath it ; 
 how tedious it may be ! or how tempting to sit 
 and hnger and Hsten. 
 
 I remember once sitting over a scanty bit of 
 fire in a Naples hotel, with the snow lying in the 
 streets outside, and having a great gossip with Sir 
 Baker Russell, over the days of Arabi Pasha in 
 Egypt, when Sir Baker made a bold rush with 
 but a handful of men on Cairo, and captured the 
 citadel. We had just come from Egypt, ninety 
 degrees in the shade, and what a memorable little 
 company we had on board ! Lady Cavagnari, a 
 charming old lady whose presence called up 
 scenes of horror and scenes of heroism in India, 
 Major Coetlegon, who delivered up the keys of 
 Khartoum to Gordon, and who brought down 
 the women and children to safety from that 
 doomed city. Aye, such gossips as these are 
 memorable ; but this was in '95, and I must 
 hark back to pick up my gossip threads, to a little 
 
 58
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 59 
 
 book dated some years earlier. We shall get to 
 Egypt and her rulers again later on. 
 
 But very apropos o£ the East comes a series of 
 notes upon a delightful piece of imagery and 
 high ideals, by one whom we met in our last 
 gossip, Sir Edwin Arnold. His " Light of Asia " 
 is a thought-enduing poem, so full of optimism 
 and the beauty of life. Eternal life ; not for to- 
 morrow or hereafter. No, already round, and in, 
 and over us. " The work done for reward wins 
 no reward " ; such thought-suggesting, soul- 
 invigorating phrases make the poem worth 
 reading and re-reading. 
 
 But the little notebook leaves it, and the entries 
 leap away to a curious statement, from a German 
 source, that the famous revolutionary, and now 
 national, air of the French, the Marseillaise, was 
 taken from a Mass by Hoffmann, of 1776. It was 
 the Credo of this Mass. Strange if the Germans 
 inspired this fierce song that led the French on 
 to their victories in the early nineteenth century. 
 Another note that is of interest about the early 
 work of one of the last of the giants of Hterature 
 of the Victorian age, is the Httle item that the 
 first piece of work printed by George Meredith 
 appeared in Chambers'' s Journal in July, 1849.
 
 6o REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 His very name, and the thought of all his con- 
 temporaries and their masterful, soul-helpful 
 work, lend a peculiar piquancy to the next word 
 that is upon a debate at the Union in Oxford, 
 the subject being : " That this House disap- 
 proves of the present condition of English 
 literature " ; and even as I write, some sixteen 
 years after that note was written, a letter comes 
 from Egypt, saying, " I have just read two novels 
 from England, recommended as illustrative of 
 modern English work, and they are about as 
 filthy as it is possible to write ; and if they are a 
 type of English work, prove decided degeneracy, 
 if the EngHsh public read them." I used above 
 the word " soul." Lies not the difference 
 between the work of our " gods " of to-day, and 
 the men of the past, that the triplex character of 
 man was considered by such writers as Tennyson, 
 Ruskin, Browning ? The trinity of body, mind, 
 and soul. The mighty tremendous forces of the 
 soul are brought into play, and urge on humanity 
 to glorious aims ; but to-day mind and body alone 
 are to satisfy us : the quick and pale cynicisms 
 are, with bodily excitement, to make us content, 
 and so all this work lacks greatness, lacks the 
 highest power.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 6i 
 
 Weighty gossip this, will cry out the flippant 
 reader, but with a rush, in this little note on 
 Oxford, come the names of Keble, Ruskin, and 
 Newman, Evelyn and Pepys, and then, as though 
 to emphasise what is really great work, comes the 
 quotation from Freytag upon vanity : " Of atl 
 vanities upon earth. Parliamentary Vanity is the 
 most hateful and the most fatal." It was almost 
 a paraphrase of this, the phrase once said to me 
 by Carl Haag, the famous German artist. " Of 
 all ambitions," he said, " parliamentary ambition 
 is the most pitiful," and yet if gone into, with 
 the thought that is enunciated by Burke, and 
 placed on his monument at Bristol, surely it is not 
 a pitiful ambition : " I wish to be a Member of 
 Parliament, to have my share of doing good and 
 resisting evil." 
 
 A little quotation from a later politician, 
 Disraeli, aptly illustrates the inner value of 
 Burke's dictum : " No man ever rises to greatness 
 in this world who does not aim at objects beyond 
 his powers." 
 
 A quaint little illustration of polite letter- 
 writing of the sixteenth century is illustrated 
 by the answer of the Protestant nobles who 
 were invited by the Pope, in 1561, to attend
 
 62 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 the Council o£ Trent, that glorious spot 
 under the Alps, where to-day the old church 
 stands intact and deeply interesting, where that 
 council was held. The briefs from the Pope 
 began, " To my beloved Sons," to which the 
 nobles replied, " We believe our Mothers to have 
 been honest women, and hope that we had better 
 fathers." 
 
 These rough, outspoken advocates of freedom 
 of conscience were but forestalling the freedom 
 of thought and action demanded by an English 
 poet who lived much in Italy ; so writes 
 Robert Browning : "As I began so shall I 
 end, taking my own course, pleasing myself, 
 or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, 
 pleasing God." 
 
 Just the type of freedom that is forbidden by 
 two rulers who both claim to be the heads of 
 their Church, the Tsar and the Pope. Every one 
 acknowledges the Pope as head of the Roman 
 Church, and knows how he attains the position ; 
 but few know how it came about that the Tsar 
 is head of the Russian branch of the Greek Church. 
 Curtly stated from Russian histories, the auto- 
 cracy grew from the village commune's vote to 
 elect a head, then instead of head, as commune
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 63 
 
 fought against commune, a prince was chosen, 
 until outside invasion enforced combination, 
 and the strongest prince then became a Tsar ; 
 and when the Tsar married Sophia Palaeologus, 
 the head of the Greek Dynasty, he became head 
 of the Church, and so of Holy Russia. 
 
 After these dives into biography and history I 
 come upon a curious little statement of how 
 Nemesis dogs our steps when wrong is committed, 
 even if the wrong be but selfishness. It is upon 
 the strange ending to a prosperous career of a 
 well-to-do business man who, after thirty years 
 in his business, exactly at twelve o'clock walks 
 out of the firm, as he has withdrawn from the 
 concern on that date, without one word of 
 good-bye or farewell to a single employee, though 
 he had amassed a considerable fortune with their 
 aid. He goes to the Alps and his carriage falls 
 over a precipice, killing his wife and breaking 
 his own legs. He gets well and comes back to 
 England and marries again ; then one day, coming 
 out of his club, he slips on a piece of orange peel 
 on the kerb and is killed. 
 
 How often is it proved no hell is necessary. 
 Men pay here for all their actions. 
 
 We are getting very solid in this gossip, and a
 
 64 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 queer, grim note on Travel Chat forces its grue- 
 someness upon me from the little book. 
 
 The scene is at Carlsbad, and two of those 
 abnormally fat women, who go there for the cure, 
 enter a cafe, and like two tuns place themselves 
 at a table. 
 
 " What a sketch they would make ! " exclaims 
 one sitting near. " How quickly they will 
 have to be buried when they die," says another. 
 How queerly illustrative of the different grooves 
 in which men's thoughts work. A lighter 
 illustration of this occurs on the next page. 
 Meeting an Irishman in a bitter winter's wind 
 he exclaims : " The wind's sharp enough to 
 shave a priest without soap," a saying that brought 
 the stubby fat jowl of a priest of the west of 
 Ireland forcibly before me. How different this 
 from Browning's description of a cold wind, that 
 " it was a razor wrapped up in the flannel of 
 sunshine " ; but both aptly illustrative of the 
 blustering keen northern wind, and the insidious, 
 hidden danger of the wind of the south.
 
 IX 
 
 It would be difficult to find a more appropriate 
 quotation wherewith to start a gossip chapter 
 than the one from Goethe, which is on the first 
 page of the next little black book I take up. 
 " Augenbhck was glanzt ist fur den AugenbHck 
 geboren. Das Echte bleibt den Nachwelt un- 
 verloren." That which glitters for the moment 
 is for the moment born, the trueJ work remains 
 and is not lost to posterity ; and then, as though 
 with a burst of sardonic laughter at this positive, 
 determined statement, there faces it a little 
 quatrain by an author who, early in the 
 sixteenth century, thought he had written a 
 book for all time, so he prefaced it with a 
 couplet in Latin, that has been translated by 
 this quatrain : 
 
 " May this volume continue in motion, 
 And its pages each day be unfurled, 
 Till a beetle has drunk up the ocean, 
 
 And a tortoise has crawled round the world." 
 
 F 65
 
 66 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 The mention of the title of the book is proof 
 enough that the sanguine author was misled in 
 his judgment, for who has heard to-day of this 
 book, The Pragmatic Sanction, or of its author, 
 Bocard ? But how difficult it is to judge of con- 
 temporary literature, almost a safe judgment is, 
 " A blaze of triumph, future oblivion," and Rogers 
 was right when he said, " When I hear a new book 
 talked about, and have it pressed upon me, I 
 read an old one." But that great books, that after 
 centuries are alive, are ignored and are unknown 
 to the multitude, was aptly illustrated by two 
 remarks, overheard in a bookseller's shop. A 
 sixth-form boy from a great public school was 
 looking at a set of the works of Henry Fielding, 
 and he exclaimed, " Fielding, who is Henry 
 Fielding ? " and a lady caught sight of the book 
 entitled Philip Massinger and asked, " Who is 
 that by ? I have heard of it." Was it not 
 Lackington who said, " Among all the schools 
 where a knowledge of mankind may be acquired, 
 I know of none equal to that of a bookseller's 
 shop " ? 
 
 But my next hint suggests that a bank clerk might 
 say that human nature could well be studied over 
 the bank counter ; it is a note upon the striking
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 67 
 
 fact that a great bank failure of Berlin would 
 have been saved by keeping open five minutes 
 longer, for a clerk from a great commercial house 
 came up with a deposit of twenty-five thousand 
 pounds, just to find the doors closed and stoppage 
 announced. 
 
 My little books have notes that ramble from 
 people to things, from incident and event to 
 philosophic citations, or to hints for stories, that 
 give strange versatility to their contents. Real 
 life gives the strangest and wildest of incidents. 
 Here is a note that might form the foundation 
 of a story of disappearance and wrongful heir- 
 ship that even Clark Russell could not beat. A 
 certain merchant of Brooklyn was bathing in the 
 year 1891 at Coney Island, his clothes were found 
 and he did not return, so he was given up as 
 drowned. Nearly a month afterwards a telegram 
 was received from Florida, saying he had been 
 landed at Jacksonville ; and it was proved he had 
 been carried away by a current, and after keeping 
 himself afloat a long time, he struck against a piece 
 of wreckage, and on this he drifted until he was 
 sighted by a passing ship and landed destitute at 
 Florida. 
 
 Notes on folklore succeed this statement of
 
 68 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 fact with hints upon omens, but then follows a 
 word upon real history that, unwittingly at the 
 time, included a note upon one of the most 
 striking omens it was ever my lot to witness, save, 
 perhaps, that strange, ominous fact that hap- 
 pened to Tsar Nicholas II at his coronation, 
 close to me and in my sight, an omen that has 
 been terribly fulfilled ; but of that a later article 
 must speak. This present omen occurred at a 
 Royal incident, when the freedom of the city of 
 Bristol was being presented to the Duke of Edin- 
 burgh. The Httle ceremony had been rushed 
 upon the councillors by an ambitious mayor who 
 had an eye to honours and title, the councillors 
 being called together to agree to the presentation, 
 as they supposed, and not to the actual presenta- 
 tion ; but the picturesque little ceremony went 
 off smoothly, the portrait of Burke by Reynolds 
 being in the room where we awaited the Royal 
 Duke, the powerful head, and firm, sarcastic lip, 
 and far-seeing eye of Burke looking down on the 
 councillors in their red gowns, the town clerk in 
 black, and the sword-bearer in quaint fur coat 
 and robes. The mayor, in stammering, stuttering 
 words, greeted the prince, then in clear tones the 
 town clerk read the roll, and amidst the clapping
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 69 
 
 of hands the mayor offered the hand o£ citizen- 
 ship, and the Duke repHed with thanks ; but 
 then the mayor, in his awkwardness, began to dis- 
 robe, Hfted the heavy gold chain from his neck, 
 and in his nervousness let it fall clattering on the 
 floor. The prince leant forward instinctively to 
 pick it up, but, it appeared, bethought himself and 
 stood upright, the stout mayor with difficulty 
 raising the chain from the ground. The gold 
 links had rattled when they fell on the floor, 
 " An omen, it would have been said, in the 
 olden days," I wrote at the time, and weirdly 
 enough, within four months the omen was ful- 
 filled, for that same mayor suddenly fell down 
 dead upon the floor upon which the falHng chain 
 had clattered. Curiously enough, just following 
 the notes upon this scene picturing local egotism 
 comes a note upon Goethe's ideals, in which he 
 represents egotism as a pernicious power, and if 
 egotism be a pernicious power, what of the power 
 that holds men, and alas, women too, fascinated 
 by the description of the evil and filth of 
 life ? 
 
 This thought springs up from a note upon 
 the misery wrought by base writings, giving 
 an incident induced by the works of Guy
 
 70 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 de Maupassant, a writer whom I was once 
 asked to meet at Etretat, but the httle I 
 had seen of his work made me dedine the intro- 
 duction. 
 
 But upon the next pages of my little book 
 occur the names of two writers of very different 
 calibre and aims, Laurence Oliphant and Oliver 
 Wendell Holmes. The note upon Oliphant is 
 a political one, quoting his statement that 
 " Gladstone was a Moody of politics, and his 
 powers of canting reservation unsurpassed," but 
 that upon Holmes is on a wider subject, it 
 is his history of this world and the next, told 
 by two signs so placed : — 
 
 as he gives it, endless doubt and unrest here 
 below, wondering, adoring, admiring certainty 
 above. 
 
 In the same book, Over the 7ea-cups, that is so 
 full of thought-enduing work, he has a sensible 
 passage on realism in literature, that is the 
 " realism " of the Zola type.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 71 
 
 " Leave the description of the drains and the 
 cesspool," says OHver Wendell Holmes, " to the 
 hygienic specialist, the painful facts of disease to 
 the physician, and the laundry to the washer- 
 woman." 
 
 In connection with this extract from the Ameri- 
 can writer is a word upon an English writer, whom 
 I have met in his home in Dorset and for whose 
 early work I have a great respect, but upon whose 
 bookshelves I saw a line of Zola's works, proving 
 probably what had influenced his latter work, that 
 deals too much with drains and cesspool. William 
 Morris says of Thomas Hardy's peasants, " One 
 never met in the country, heroes and heroines like 
 those whom he describes," and another West- 
 country writer in a review says, " They are stage 
 peasants " ; and certainly the Dorset peasants, 
 whom I know well, are not the animals Hardy has 
 striven to prove them, but more often clean- 
 living, right-thinking, honourable, and virtuous 
 men and women. 
 
 But after these solid notes, a curious item upon 
 laughter comes in refreshingly; it is upon the 
 vowels used in laughing, and the expression ob- 
 tained from those vowels. Laughter in " A " 
 gives forth a frank and sincere if somewhat tur_
 
 72 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 bulent laugh ; " E " is suggestive o£ melancholia ; 
 " I " hints at childishness ; " O " is generous and 
 frank, whilst " U " is grumpy and grumbling. A 
 little heeding will prove there is much truth in 
 this analysis.
 
 X 
 
 *' No ! No ! I will not dream amidst the strife. 
 There is no after-life we all may know. 
 Some fuller, nobler, purer, higher life. 
 Some region blessed, where the good may go." 
 
 So commences a page in these little black note- 
 books, and it is followed by the bold statement 
 that " nobleness " is never popular. Exception 
 may be taken to the word " good " in the quat- 
 rain, and also to the word " nobleness " in the 
 next ejaculation, and yet goodness is a higher 
 quality than nobleness, for nobility is a part of 
 goodness. Goodness need not include high in- 
 tellectual attainments, but is not keen intellec- 
 tual activity sans goodness a very unpleasant and 
 often a very dangerous possession ? A quotation 
 from Croyle used by Bulwer seems to imply that 
 the nobleness that is never popular must include 
 goodness, for it runs thus : — 
 
 " Popularity is given to the vulgar qualities of men, 
 and where a noble nature becomes popular (a rare 
 occurrence), it is despite the nobleness, and not because 
 of it." 
 
 71
 
 74 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 And so it comes about so often that the popular 
 god of to-day is the scoffed-at idol of to-morrow. 
 A very interesting, and not to say deep argument 
 might be worked up from the use of these two 
 words in these two quotations, but too lengthy 
 would it become for our gossip, and the note- 
 book promptly breaks off into two statements, 
 that show the infantile beginnings of two great 
 institutions. 
 
 The National Gallery began in 1824 by buying 
 eighteen pictures from Mr. Angerstein ; that is, 
 men still alive saw the beginnings of the glorious 
 collection, now the envy of the nations. The 
 other note is on the curious origin of the Order of 
 St. Michael and St. George, that now has so many 
 illustrious men in its ranks. When we held the 
 Ionian Islands, and gave, to Corfu especially, the 
 prosperity of which one sees now but the remnants 
 in its roads and decaying buildings, it was found 
 that the islanders went on foot to St. Petersburg 
 to get some decoration, and so the English 
 Government instituted a decoration with a 
 religious title, and when the Ionian Islands were 
 given up, this order became a colonial distinction. 
 
 An order, I suppose, all Irishmen will strive to 
 possess, when Ireland becomes a Crown Colony,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 75 
 
 and establishes her tariff against all English manu- 
 factures. What delightful fun used to be got 
 out of Irish travel, when wit rippled off the lips 
 of peasant and citizen. I am reminded of this 
 by a quotation from a quotation, from a book of 
 Reininiscences by Judge Porter, given me by a 
 relation of his, that is full of good and astound- 
 ingly strange things ; here is one of them upon 
 hanging and quartering in the year 1781, when a 
 man named Lassergan was condemned to be 
 hanged and quartered. 
 
 He was hung with a short drop, two incisions 
 across the back of his neck sufficed for quartering 
 from the friendly executioner, the " body " was got 
 away to the house of a friend, whilst a coffin was 
 buried, and then the " dead " man was smuggled 
 to America via Bristol, and in America he got 
 his living successfully by teaching. 
 
 A delicious little contrast to this rather grue- 
 some story comes from a book I picked up in an 
 inn at Macroom. Two of the constabulary were 
 lounging outside the door, as in the next house 
 was a man under police protection. One morn- 
 ing this man put his hand outside the window to 
 take in a birdcage and a shot whizzed past, grazing 
 his hand. " They'll have him," was the ejacu-
 
 ']6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 lation I heard from more than one pair of Hps. 
 It was the second time I had been in Ireland when 
 shooting was to the fore, the first time being in 
 ''66^ the Fenian year. But my quotation, written 
 in pencil, had naught to do with this, but ran thus : 
 
 *' Her mouth is sweet — about her lips 
 A song forever dwells, 
 Like the soft murmur of the sea 
 Ujion the lips of shells." 
 
 A delicate, tender bit of poetry, that I have never 
 traced to its source. 
 
 That we British persistently talk round and 
 round a subject before acting, to bring about a 
 beneficial and desired end, is aptly illustrated in a 
 lengthy note upon small holdings and decentralisa- 
 tion. These notes are for a speech made in 1892, 
 and they refer to a leader I wrote in the Tork- 
 shire Post on March 24th, 1884. Over a quarter 
 of a century has elapsed and we are still building 
 slum cities, and talking about decentrahsation, 
 and yet, oh, the sarcasm of it ! The next note 
 is these two lines : — 
 
 " Time rushes on, we heed it not, 
 And yet, it's Life ! that's flying fast," 
 
 and this is followed by a definition of tragedy : 
 " The essence of tragedy is the loss of happiness
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS ']■] 
 
 by a hair's breadth " ; and to lighten these weighty 
 words a Httle French conundrum pops in : " What 
 three French towns make twenty-one ? Troyes, 
 Foix, Cette," i.e. trois fois sept make vingt et un. 
 This frivolous little item is followed by some 
 interesting notes upon the real discoverers of 
 America, with an interlarded word, on standing 
 by the side of that most impressive monument to 
 Columbus, moved from Havana after the Ameri- 
 can-Spanish War, and now in Seville Cathedral. 
 
 In 1498, runs the note, Don Pedro de Ayala 
 says in a letter to King Ferdinand, " The people 
 of Bristol have for the last seven years sent out 
 three or four ships " ; this is in reference to Colum- 
 bus, and Western voyages, and brings the Bristol 
 work to the year 1491, before Columbus dis- 
 covered the Cuban Islands and San Salvador on 
 October 12th, 1492; and, according to Cabot's 
 original map now in Paris, the date of his dis- 
 covery of the American mainland was in 1494, 
 although the date usually given is June 24th, 
 1497 ; but this is prior to Columbus, who only 
 sighted the mainland in 1498 ; and not until 1502 
 did he really get inside the belt of the West 
 Indies to Honduras. All proving that the Bristol 
 ships under John Cabot were as active in Western
 
 78 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 exploration as Columbus with the patronage of 
 Ferdinand and Isabella. But for centuries this 
 work of the British ships was blotted out by our 
 schoolmasters reiterating " Columbus discovered 
 America."
 
 XI 
 
 The next little black notebook I take up starts 
 with a solid subject, the labourer in country 
 districts ; but it is enlivened with bucolic jokes, 
 and the dry humour of the agriculturists is often 
 very pregnant with keen sense, as in the descrip- 
 tion of spouting agitators, by the thatcher in 
 a village barn : " They don't never put their 
 shoulders out, 'cept it's telHn' lies." 
 
 But what a ghmpse of the honest struggles 
 of these good folk in the past is contained in the 
 description of a carter's cottage. His wife, a 
 clean, motherly old soul, who in her neat Httle 
 room, with a dresser full of willow-pattern crock- 
 ery, tells of how she and her good man had seven 
 shillings a week to live on when they were married, 
 and now they had twelve to fourteen, a cottage 
 and garden, ducks and flowers ; a veritable object 
 lesson of thrift and cheery thankfulness for what 
 most would term terrible poverty. 
 
 The woman herself, a fine specimen of the 
 79
 
 8o REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Anglo-Saxon, just the type my old friend Dr. 
 John Beddoe, whose name comes into the next 
 note, would have delighted to study, and if 
 possible, take measure of the old dame's head. 
 The measure of her wit would be a wide one, for 
 she was apt at repartee. 
 
 The famous ethnologist's name occurs in con- 
 nection with a presentation made him on his 
 leaving Clifton, where for thirty-five years he 
 worked as a physician, after an experience in the 
 Crimean War. How keen he was upon race types ! 
 One of the quaintest little scenes I remember, 
 years after this note was taken, was when, upon a 
 hot summer's day amidst the sand-hills of Harlyn, 
 Cornwall, the Rev. S. Baring Gould was seated 
 under a tamarisk tree. Dr. Beddoe was measuring 
 his powerful head, that has produced such a mass 
 of Hterary work, and I was taking down the 
 measurements. We were all in our shirt-sleeves, 
 for we were digging in the prehistoric neolithic 
 cemetery just discovered ; would that some one 
 had snapshotted the group ! 
 
 There is a curious little entry that suddenly 
 comes in after the Beddoe note, somewhat akin to 
 agriculture, on turkeys. How they were brought 
 into England by WilHam Strickland, a lieutenant
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 8i 
 
 to Sebastian Cabot, who went out in the expedi- 
 tion sent by Henry VII to discover new lands, 
 and this Strickland has a fine turkey over his arms 
 in Baynton Church. 
 
 These notes are a strange medley, jumping in 
 a most incongruous fashion from flippancy to 
 soHdity, and from comedy to tragedy ; and the 
 next one refers to what was near to being tragedy, 
 or at least death to myself, and was followed by 
 one of those strange coincidences that happen 
 more frequently in real life than in fiction. Real 
 coincidences are frequently too glaringly astound- 
 ing to be used in artistic fiction, but this coin- 
 cidence was more of the curious than astounding 
 type. 
 
 It was the night of one of the dinners of the 
 Authors' Society, a bright affair, and after the 
 dinner was over I turned into the Yorick Club, 
 then housed in Beaufort Buildings, to write a 
 note upon the speeches, afterwards going to my 
 hotel, then the old " Tavistock." The hotel was 
 full, for it was the eve of the Derby. In the night 
 I woke up with a curious sense of a strange smell, 
 felt annoyed they should be painting the house, 
 and went to sleep again, but providentially re- 
 awoke, and thought it must be new linoleum, and
 
 82 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 was just going to strike a light, when the inspira- 
 tion came : it may be gas ! I got up, opened the 
 door, and felt the full rush of gas ; the room was 
 full. I rang the bell and went into the corridor, 
 and the night porter came up ; I called to him 
 to drop his lantern and open every window, and 
 then staggered. He got me into the reading- 
 room, and I lay there — it was then 3.30 a.m. — 
 until the morning dawned, and when the work- 
 men came at eight they found an inch pipe had 
 shifted a joint, and was pouring gas into my room. 
 I had a most awful headache, but took train at 
 Paddington for the west, and on opening my 
 paper, the first item I saw was an inquest held by 
 Dr. E. M. Grace, the famous cricketer, Teddy of 
 old days, on a man who had been suffocated 
 by gas escaping from a three-eighths of an 
 inch pipe, and I had been saved by those two 
 awakenings from an escape from an inch pipe. 
 
 What a delicious contrast to this is the next 
 note ; it has the date against it, July 9th, and the 
 suggestive words, " Doone Valley." " Hot and 
 silence," so run the disjointed words, " as go up 
 the Slide with all its lovely beauty and rippling 
 waters. The silence, save the hum of insect life 
 and ripple. The wide-spreading valley at the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 83 
 
 top." How this calls up the glorious Devon 
 scene immortalised by my old friend R. D. 
 Blackmore. 
 
 Then comes a thing he would have chuckled 
 over ; a clergyman's seamanship. A note taken 
 far away from Devon, in the grand old church of 
 St. Wolfrans, Grantham. " St. Paul," exclaimed 
 the preacher, " rowed in the boat, he stood at the 
 helm." We all know St. Paul was versatile, and 
 this proves he was also ubiquitous. 
 
 Another note follows this, taken in a Bristol 
 church. The preacher was getting earnest, there 
 was danger of wrecked lives. " They cast out the 
 anchor," he exclaimed, " but it was sand, and 
 would not hold ; again they cast it out, but it 
 was mud ; but at last they cast it out and it was 
 rock, and the ship was safe." The delicious 
 ignorance of this, enunciated in a seaport town, 
 is very charming. 
 
 I have given one coincidence in this article ; 
 here is another, upon that supposed-to-be remark- 
 able rarity a generous editor. A certain author 
 who has done good critical work, but who began 
 late in life, was telling me of his earlier days, how 
 he was getting on well in his younger days, and 
 then fell over a barrow and was laid up for four
 
 84 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 years. An editor, he said, told him not to work, 
 and actually, for two years, paid him not to work. 
 I only remarked " Extraordinary ! " Now the 
 coincidence was this : That same week I was in 
 another part of England and called upon a friend 
 I had not seen for years. In chat this author's 
 name came up, and my old friend knew him and of 
 his early life, and how some money went through 
 a relation's hands to keep him because he was so 
 ill ; it really came from an uncle of the sick 
 author. Alas, alas, the generous editor was a 
 myth, and but the agent of a genuine friend. 
 But why should I get the Hnks of the story in the 
 same week ? 
 
 A note upon a successful author, whose work 
 seems to have wholly died with him, succeeds 
 this item upon coincidence, and this proves how 
 men who write much, contradict themselves. It 
 was James Payn who in his Modern Dick Whitting- 
 ton wrote, " In dreams, personages in fiction 
 never appear, not even to him who creates them." 
 And then, in his chat column, " Our Notebook," 
 he wrote of Treasure Island, that " that charming 
 person with one leg often leaps into my dreams." 
 
 What a vast difference there was between 
 Payn's work and that of R. D. Blackmore ; Payn's
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 85 
 
 a souffle, slight, light, sweet : the latter's work 
 earnest, soHd, tragic, yet with a charming hu- 
 mour. The work of Payn died with him, he is 
 unknown to the present-day reader, although he 
 had an excellent vogue in his day, but Blackmore's 
 work is very much alive, and repays many readings. 
 It was in the church he made famous, Oare 
 Church, that I copied down the quaint epitaph 
 wherewith I will close this gossip. 
 
 The lines were very queerly broken up, but I 
 give them, following the rhyme, retaining the 
 spelling. 
 
 " Here underneath three of one name do ly 
 By God's decree that lived successfully 
 And alsoe dyed and did yeld to death 
 Cause pain and labour made them out of Breath. 
 They lived to Dy and Dyd to live again 
 And now reap pleasure from a worlde of Paine 
 In Peace they laboured till their Labours past 
 In Living Truth they rest in Peace at last." 
 
 And, curiously enough, the next extract is from 
 Laurence Oliphant's life : " They feel them- 
 selves in Eternity, and are not in haste."
 
 XII 
 
 " They feel themselves in Eternity, and are not 
 in haste." What a vast realm of thought this 
 quotation from Laurence Oliphant opens up. This 
 little life is but a beginning or an interlude, and 
 there is time, in eternity, for everything ; and 
 then these terrible little black notebooks, that 
 rest calmly upon no theme, but touch on all 
 themes, spring suddenly to a quatrain in English, 
 proving how we to-day do not live in this calm, 
 high atmosphere : — 
 
 " Hurry, worry, scurry, and flurry : 
 So is our life in this latter-day rush ; 
 Calm meditation, cool contemplation, 
 Scarcely find space, in these days of gush." 
 
 And near by are two terribly suggestive notes, one 
 in German, the other in French. The German is 
 but three words, " Kleider machen Leute " 
 ("Clothes make people) " ; then to lift the mind 
 from this terribly sardonic view of humanity, 
 there is the French note from Victor Hugo, that 
 
 86
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 87 
 
 the French had attacked CathoHcism and so 
 Christianity, and there will be an end o£ that 
 religion, to be replaced by three words, " Dieu, 
 Ame, Responsabilite." 
 
 Hugo was so narrowly French in his ideas that 
 he used the word Catholicism for Romanism, a 
 religion wandering far from the beauteous 
 simplicity of Christianity, that has survived far 
 more than the French attack, for it has survived 
 the corruptions of all the Churches ; but Hugo's 
 words are full of the essence and soul of religion. 
 
 Several short notes upon religious matters 
 follow, although under very different headings, 
 as the phrase from a sermon from St. Giles's 
 Cathedral, Edinburgh. 
 
 " Nazareth," said the preacher, " was nae too 
 big for neighbourly disparagement." What a 
 mass of thought-matter in these eight words ! 
 Then comes a note upon what one may reveren- 
 tially term Deity disparagement : it is a definition 
 of an Agnostic, as " one who, being bounded in 
 powers of comprehension, will not allow of powers 
 unbounded and infinite," and immediately, as 
 though to illustrate what is sometimes taken for 
 religion, there is the grotesque quotation of the 
 hymn sung with many turns in the tune, upon a
 
 88 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 split word : " Oh turn my pi, oh turn my pi, oh 
 turn my pious soul to heaven." 
 
 " The Churches have killed their Christ " 
 flashes into the mind. Hugo's three words are only 
 understandable through Christianity. And as 
 the long procession of mighty minds passes 
 onward, ever vanishing into the unknown, yet 
 ever continuing, the beneficent, lovable teaching 
 of Christ ever holds sway, even with those who 
 yield no allegiance to any Church. 
 
 Here is a quotation from one of the world's 
 teachers, W. E. H. Lecky , whom I last saw 
 standing at the head of an open grave wherein 
 the body of Alfred Tennyson had just been laid. 
 The quotation is a sarcasm on the judgments of 
 our contemporaries. " The books that live, are 
 not the books by which authors live." 
 
 " How akin to religion is art. The truest art, 
 that strives for the highest beauty, to express 
 outwardly the inner glory of things in human 
 being, or in the glory of Nature " — a thought 
 brought up by a note upon a chat in the old 
 Hogarth Club with Mr. Orrock, Vice-President 
 of the Royal Institute of Water-Colour Painters. 
 He was speaking of Henry Moore and Walter 
 Shaw's sea-painting. " They painted the sea
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 89 
 
 exactly, but it was not art. Turner's work was 
 art. And just so," he added, " in Literature : 
 people do not talk as Shakespeare's characters, 
 that is art, high Idealism." 
 
 But the clever novelist must depict people 
 as they are, and if the inner soul of those 
 depicted is made evident^ truly to their nature, 
 that, too, is art ; and so also with the Nature- 
 painter, who sees and depicts nature as it is. 
 His work is also art, if his mind be attuned 
 with the mood for Nature; for without this 
 attuning he will not reproduce Nature with true 
 feeling. This note upon this club chat came into 
 juxtaposition with a note written months before, 
 but how aptly apropos. 
 
 " Nature composes with an intensity of beauty 
 hardly to be grasped by human mind or soul ; 
 but a few souls do grasp this inner glory, do com- 
 prehend all this delicate yet mighty grandeur." 
 What a scathing sarcasm is this upon the petty 
 picture-painters, who say grandly as they stick 
 in a tree here and there, " Nature wants a little 
 assisting." Had they walked a little further, with 
 keener brain, they would have found where 
 Nature had composed her perfect picture ; and I 
 see, leaping over some pages, the final note in
 
 90 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 this little book is this, with no author given (is it 
 Carlyle ?) : " If thou knowest a work of art from 
 a daub of artifice, wilt thou discern Eternity look- 
 ing through Time. The Godlike rendered visible." 
 
 Why is it that political notes rarely have any 
 lasting interest ? In these old notebooks come 
 in notes on famous speeches I have heard by 
 famous politicians. Here are the names of 
 Salisbury and John Morley, but the notes seem 
 gone off, flat, no longer " drinkable." Were 
 they written during an exciting political meet- 
 ing, in, perhaps, disgust at the evanescent 
 humours of the mob, the mob that never grows 
 old? 
 
 What thoughts are brought up by the next 
 note, starting with the word Becket. It is my 
 comparing, after the first night of Irving's play- 
 ing Tennyson's Becket at the Lyceum, the acting 
 edition with the book. What nights were those 
 first nights at the Lyceum ! The brains in the 
 audience, and the culture on the stage. Nowhere 
 so forcibly as in Becket did Henry Irving give the 
 lie to the sneer that he was all mannerisms, and 
 those were ever the same. In Becket he was the 
 dignified, dominant churchman ; and after the 
 play came the chat on the stage, amidst the crowd
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 91 
 
 of notables ; some there because it was the thing 
 of all others to obtain the entree to, but many in 
 reverence for the great actor's genius, for the 
 man who, from the village lad, had by his own 
 indomitable will, study, and perseverance, raised 
 himself to be the power to raise the stage to a 
 hitherto unknown dignity. 
 
 One of these first nights was that of Mme. 
 Sans Gene ; I had received no commission nor 
 any ticket, and at six o'clock was in Somerset, 
 just descending from the summit of Dolebury 
 Camp, from whence Irving's birthplace, near 
 Glastonbury, can perchance be seen, but on 
 arriving in Bristol I was met at the station by my 
 son, with a message and a telegram that I must be 
 at Mme. Sans Gene, and I was in the Lyceum 
 Theatre before 10 p.m., and saw half the play. 
 What was Irving's astonishment when I told him 
 I was looking down on the Somerset plains, 
 wherein lay his birthplace, at 6 p.m. " But 
 you could not have been," he exclaimed, and he 
 posted me in a corner to come back to me from 
 the crowd who were pressing round to shake 
 hands with him, that he might then hear the 
 story of how I did it. He was a veritable knight 
 of old in his courtesy.
 
 92 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 But the Stage waits for the next scene in these 
 ever-changing reminiscences, and the note meets 
 my eye — how fitting is it for an actor's evanescent 
 fame : — 
 
 " Contemporary. Three-quarters of what is 
 Contemporary is temporary," a very concise and 
 incisive jeu de mots. 
 
 It is a far cry from the first-night crowd at the 
 Lyceum Theatre to the distant wilds on the 
 island of Islay in Scotland, but so jump the notes, 
 with many excursions into history and folk-lore, 
 and a quaint one proving that Ireland was always 
 troublesome, even to her saints, for on Islay, 
 at the Rhinns, is the chapel that St. Columba 
 built. Now when he left Ireland he made a vow 
 never to settle within sight of it, and lo, on a clear 
 day, he found, from the Rhinns, it was in full 
 view, so he retreated. Islay is a wonderful 
 island for scenery, and historic interest, and 
 monuments, and yet how few go there. It was 
 Mr. David McBrayne, the steamship owner of 
 Glasgow, telling me that no one went there 
 that sent me there, and afterwards I thanked him 
 heartily for the suggestion. What a vast ocean of 
 intellectual pleasure there is in the world, and how 
 apropos, as time sweeps on and age advances on
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 93 
 
 us, is the apothegm, " We should so arrange that 
 the things we wish for should not come too late," 
 and how true this is with travel. A man can rough 
 it when young ; the deck of a steamer makes a 
 good bed, as I have often proved ; but the nearer 
 scenes can be visited in comfort in later life. 
 
 But this comfortable and useful bit of philo- 
 sophy is abruptly interrupted by the word Revolu- 
 tion, and the sarcastic note that in 1848, in Paris, 
 nearly every one connected with the National 
 newspapers got good fat berths, twenty-seven 
 in all, even reporters and occasional contributors, 
 and then following is Guizot's definition of a 
 RepubHc, that it begins with Plato and ends with 
 a Gendarme, and with this word for reflection 
 we will close this gossip.
 
 XIII 
 
 These old notebooks are veritable strands of 
 Life. Strands that weave into a warp that is 
 made up of other lives, strands telling of the 
 events that have moulded, sometimes the policy 
 of nations, at others the existence of unknown 
 and humble individuals ; but all life is full of 
 interest, and these notebooks chronicle incidents 
 in the lives of poor lads who became Presi- 
 dents of Republics or Cabinet Ministers, so 
 strange and insignificant seem some of the faint, 
 weak strands in life that yet are continuing to 
 form the powerful warp that shall moor a ship 
 of State. 
 
 This train of thought is brought about by the 
 word Sigmaringen in the next note I light 
 upon, a word that brings back to my memory 
 the scenes at one of the most picturesque and 
 romantic Royal weddings ever witnessed, and 
 one that yielded a happy union and not a sad 
 drama or tragedy as other Royal weddings at 
 
 94
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 95 
 
 which I have " assisted," as the French have 
 it. 
 
 The mediaeval old castle on the tiny River 
 Danube, here not as wide as the Thames at Lech- 
 lade ! Pure frost and frozen snow setting the castle 
 in a crystal setting. No soldiery, no police, no big 
 bands. Just a big family party, and a jovial 
 wedding, the peasantry, led by the burly old 
 captain of the fire brigade, forming the chorus of 
 villagers. 
 
 At all these big events where Royalty is thickly 
 clustered together, there are always side incidents 
 that are comic yet never get into the journals, 
 for special correspondents are discreet. The 
 night before the wedding, I and the famous war 
 correspondent Fred Villiers thought wc were in 
 for a bit of romance, for very late at night we 
 had strolled up to the castle through the dark 
 archways, when a short figure in a heavy overcoat 
 issued from a side door, and as he came past us 
 under our archway, by the light of a lantern we 
 saw it was the bridegroom. Alone, going down 
 into the town at this time of night. 
 
 " He's going to bid good-bye to the other girl," 
 whispered Villiers, and scenting a bit of romance, 
 we watched him disappear under the vaulted gate-
 
 96 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 way of the castle, and turn to the town ; we then 
 followed him at a distance. Yes, he certainly was 
 going to some house in the town. He dived into 
 a narrow street, and we dived too, but he went on 
 out of this dark little street across an open square 
 and up to the portals of the palace in the town 
 where dwelt His Excellency Herr von Arnin, the 
 Hof Marschall, and so our hopes for a Httle bit of 
 secret history of a future King vanished ; and 
 chuckling over how the Prince had sold us by his 
 lonely walk on the eve of his marriage, we crossed 
 the glittering frozen snow, for it was fifty degrees 
 below freezing (Fah.), and sought the warmth of 
 the cosy inn. 
 
 A striking incident at this wedding, unnoticed 
 by the Press, was the presence of two officers, 
 twins, Fabian and Sebastian Knoch, one in the 
 Austrian army, one in the Prussian, who had 
 fought on opposite sides in the war of ''66^ and 
 now were seated together at the age of ninety at 
 this wedding, where many a foe met his ancient 
 enemy on friendly terms. 
 
 There was nearly a terrible catastrophe on 
 two occasions at this idyllic wedding, one nearly 
 tragic, one irresistibly comic. The first I had 
 the pleasure of averting, for on coming down
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 97 
 
 from the castle, by the covered way that led 
 by a bridge across the street, direct into the Royal 
 loge in the church, a short time before the 
 ceremony was to begin, I found the loge densely 
 filled with gas. I went to the front of the loge, 
 and called down to some men who were putting 
 the final touches to the arrangements in the 
 chancel, and told them to open windows promptly 
 as the whole upper part of the building was full 
 of gas, and on their seeking for the cause, it was 
 found that of two enormous stoves that had been 
 brought into the church to counteract the in- 
 tense frost, both had been turned on, but only 
 one had been Ht, so that the whole of the gas 
 from one stove was pouring into the building ; 
 my coming into the church fortunately at the 
 upper level had told me of the danger ; a light 
 brought into the church at this level would have 
 blown up the whole building. 
 
 The comic averting of a catastrophe was at the 
 banquet after the wedding. There were the 
 Kaiser Wilhelm II and the King of Roumania, 
 and the father of the bride, the Duke of Edin- 
 burgh, and the pretty bride. Princess Marie, and 
 her bridegroom. Prince Ferdinand of Roumania, 
 and all the other famous guests. The Prince had
 
 98 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 toasted the guests, the King the wedded couple, 
 and then the Duke of Edinburgh rose to toast the 
 Princesses and Princes of the House of Hohen- 
 zoUern, with especial reference to the Kaiser, 
 who was expected to answer the toast, when 
 suddenly, in the midst of the speech, there rushed 
 past us at the end of the second table the major- 
 domo of the castle, with agony on his face and 
 the ejaculation, " Mein Gott, er hat kein Wein." 
 (" Mv God, he has no wine.") The Kaiser had no 
 wine to lift his glass in reply. In a few moments 
 the major-domo was back, and before the Duke 
 had finished his speech, had stealthily filled the 
 Kaiser's glass with the special wine, and as 
 " Hoch, Hoch " came from the Duke's lips, 
 " God save the Queen " from the band, which 
 meant, of course, the German " Heil dir im 
 Siegerkranz," and cannon thundered without, 
 the Kaiser lifted his filled glass but did not speak. 
 At that time the Kaiser hated journahsts, and it 
 was only after a good deal of diplomacy two of us 
 had been admitted to the banquet. Had he 
 heard of this ? 
 
 I see my notes say that Princess Marie looked 
 very happy and Prince Ferdinand jovial. But 
 why was the band so fond of " Oh where, and oh
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 99 
 
 where is my Hieland laddy gone ? " It was 
 suggestive that the Princess had left a Schatz 
 behind at Balmoral or Osborne, if Prince 
 Ferdinand was innocent of the Schatz, we had 
 evilly assigned him. 
 
 But this gossip is becoming descriptive and on 
 one subject, yet these side incidents at Royal 
 shows do not get into the staid reports, and are 
 interesting. 
 
 I see the next notes in this little book are 
 those taken at a very different event, but one of 
 intense interest, Tennyson's funeral, that I 
 have so fully written upon in the " Retrospect 
 and Reverie " in my Literary and Biographical 
 Studies, I but mention it here as a contrast to the 
 brilliant, hearty joviality of the wedding scene. 
 
 Then comes a curious and thought-enduing 
 note from Carlyle : " BeHef has done much 
 evil. But it has done all the good," and the 
 little book ends with a lot of notes on the sayings 
 of a little child of three years of age. 
 
 How wondrously quaint are such sayings, and 
 the strange way in which a little child will evolve 
 an idea, or work out its own set problem, is a 
 thing full of wonder and mystery, and of intense 
 interest. What a quaint thought must have been
 
 100 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 running in this little child's head, of waste and 
 power, when he says half his prayers, and then 
 begins them all over again, and then, finding what 
 he has done, stops, and looking up, says, " I've 
 wasted half my prayers." 
 
 Children think a great deal about their elders, 
 and could we only get glimpses of their ideas and 
 judgments of us, we should often modify or 
 change our conduct ; but a whole chapter of 
 gossip could be written on children's sayings.
 
 XIV 
 
 *• The Cheapness of Real Pleasure " — so ran the 
 title of an article I once wrote long years ago for 
 John Latey, the famous old editor of the Illus- 
 trated London News. The object of the article 
 was to prove that genuine pleasure costs but 
 little money to obtain. Often denied to the 
 careworn millionaire, it was to be had by the 
 cultured man of little means, and the first entry in 
 the next little book I take up illustrates this, for 
 it has the notes made on a glorious day by the 
 glittering tawny Severn Sea. A walk over the 
 hills and through the lush meadows by Severn- 
 side to historic Aust, the delight of the geologist 
 and historian. Not " a cup of wine beneath the 
 bough," but I see we had a cup of milk and some 
 bread and cheese at an old farm-house, with its 
 low beams and fine old oak furniture ; and chats 
 with farmer and labourers and parsons ; and also 
 a glorious sunset. Ah, the contentment and 
 sweet pleasure, all costing but a few coppers.
 
 102 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Here is a quaint epitaph, copied on that 
 pleasant day, quaint for the blunder in the 
 last line : — 
 
 " Here lies lamented in his silent grave, 
 A tender husband and a parent brave, 
 Pale King of Terrors, how couldst Thou destroy 
 The widow's hope, and her dear children's joy ? " 
 
 Then comes a note of a little bit of supersti- 
 tion as to a bird haunting the windows of a dying 
 person. For three days before the death of the 
 indomitable Sir Richard Burton, a bird kept 
 tapping at his window, and I note beside this a 
 curious case of my own knowledge ; in fact, 
 referring to a relation on my wife's side. 
 
 For a long time during this old gentleman's 
 illness a very pretty and unusual bird kept flutter- 
 ing at the sick man's window, but on the day he 
 died it did not appear, nor did it ever come 
 again. I attended the funeral, and on my return 
 home found, lying on my table, a glass case with 
 a specimen of bird-mounting for educational 
 purposes, from Germany ; and lo, it was the very 
 type of bird that had fluttered at the window, 
 but which my country friends had not recognised, 
 a yellow wagtail. In connection with Sir Richard 
 Burton, there is a note that he talked Agnosti-
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 103 
 
 cism bravely in public, but prayed in private, and 
 adjoining this is a note upon another Agnostic, a 
 musician who died miserably, poor fellow, and 
 left a note to his free-thinking friends that he 
 died a true free-thinker, but " prayed to God, if 
 there be a God." 
 
 So hopelessly sad is this denial of God. Is not 
 the saying from the Sanscrit, however, often 
 true — He is unknown to those who think they 
 know, and known to those who know they know 
 Him not ? The curious inconsequence of these 
 notebooks is aptly illustrated by a note, succeed- 
 ing this terribly serious entry, from J. Russell 
 Lowell, whose after-dinner speeches were so full 
 of wit and happy turns of thought. It is his well- 
 known dictum on W. E. Gladstone : — 
 
 " His greatness not so much in genius lies, 
 As in adroitness, when occasions rise, 
 Lifelong convictions to extemporize." 
 
 What link is there between W. E. Gladstone 
 and superstition, except that the mob in his life- 
 time developed a superstitious belief in his power 
 and greatness that led England into some disas- 
 trous adventures ? But next to these notes upon 
 his magnetic influence comes a curious note 
 upon the belief that touching the hump of a
 
 104 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 hunchback brings good luck. Mme. Severine, 
 the French noveHst, obtained permission for a 
 poor hunchback to stand outside the door of the 
 Casino at that Paradis aux diables, Monte Carlo, 
 and the tips he got meant a good living to 
 him. 
 
 " Honour, not Honours." Such a motto 
 clashing against this note upon a place where 
 honour is but too often left outside the door, 
 perhaps in the keeping of the poor hunchback. 
 This was the motto of the strong man Sir Richard 
 Burton. A terribly difficult motto to live up to. 
 There are a good many notes upon Burton in this 
 notebook, and I well remember a letter from 
 Lady Burton giving me her reason for destroying 
 the MS. of The Scented Garden. I agreed with 
 her action, and she asked me to call and see 
 her ; alas ! I put that off until it was too late, 
 and so I never talked with that devoted wife. 
 One of his notes is upon the Dead Sea, copied by 
 me years before I stood by, and bathed in, that 
 wondrous lake, but the same idea came to me as, 
 it appears, came to him : " What a spot for a 
 health resort. Intensely dry air ; a natural brine 
 bath, very delightful." Burton calls it the great 
 Consumptive Hospital of the future. To me it
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 105 
 
 seemed to be a future Helouan, where many a man 
 and woman might Hve and enjoy Hfe, who would 
 die in England. 
 
 What a wondrous life was Burton's ; very like 
 Gifford Palgrave's, and both men had handsome, 
 devoted wives, who accompanied them in some 
 of their most arduous and tiresome journeys. I 
 well remember on a Saturday reading an excellent 
 review of Palgrave's last book, Ulysses, and send- 
 ing it to Mrs. Palgrave, and on the Monday morn- 
 ing seeing in the Times the note of his sudden 
 death in South America. What that shock meant 
 to his wife her terrible immediate illness plainly 
 told. Palgrave, like Burton, had pierced into the 
 inner life of Islamism, and had entered Mecca 
 and seen the Kaaba, and he had also pierced into 
 the inner Hfe of Jesuitism ; and there is still 
 extant the correspondence between him and the 
 General of the Order, which Mrs. Palgrave in- 
 sisted should never be published. 
 
 Burton had a great fund of grim humour and 
 apt repartee. It was a good answer he gave to 
 the Roman archbishop who, seeing some monkeys 
 in the rigging, said to Burton, " There are some 
 of your ancestors." " Well," said Burton, " I 
 at least have progressed ; but what of your lord-
 
 io6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 ship, who descended from the angels ? " There 
 are some strange detached sayings in these note- 
 books that I can attribute to no one ; here is an 
 expressive dictum : " Illiterate as the back of a 
 tombstone." 
 
 It sounds Irish and was probably noted down in 
 Ireland, for the next note is, " There are more 
 LoyaHsts in Ulster than people in all Wales." 
 But that scents of politics, that are not for these 
 gossips. 
 
 That Irish troubles are no new thing in Eng- 
 Hsh life is very aptly illustrated by an item on 
 Oxford. In 141 3, owing to the great trouble 
 because of University riots and crime, the Irish 
 were forbidden to live in Oxford, except under 
 strict control, and even after this they had to be 
 banished ; when allowed to return and there 
 was a recurrence of the rows, they were again 
 banished in 1422, this time for the robberies, and 
 manslaughters, and hindering of the King's 
 " baillives " in collecting the fee-farm rents, etc., 
 and so the Irish, except those of civil carriage, 
 had to give security for their good behaviour. 
 
 What a contrast is it to leap from this note of 
 the turbulency of Irish students to the calm 
 philosophy of the Arab proverb, that of late has
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 107 
 
 fallen out of sight and might well be quoted. It 
 comes sandwiched in between the notes upon 
 Queen Victoria's opening the Imperial Institute 
 — a great imposing ceremony full of pregnant 
 meaning to England and her colonies. I had one 
 of the very few, tiny white passes printed with 
 red letters, '* Pass bearer everywhere," and with 
 this I could break the line of military or police, 
 and so get a consecutive account of the whole 
 day's proceedings. 
 
 The comic element was not absent ; it never is 
 in these Royal pageants. One of the funniest 
 little incidents was upon the great steps leading 
 up to the main entrance. A crush of peers and 
 countesses, field-marshals and admirals, all in 
 full dress, glittering with orders. One old lady in 
 the crush, on the arm of a general whose breast 
 was brilliant with orders and medals, was 
 holding in her right hand a penny bun ! The 
 crush was great, and soon the old lady was seen 
 coming back peering for something ; she had 
 dropped her bun, but it had escaped being 
 crushed, she picked it up, and, again joined by the 
 general, went on her way. She was not going 
 to sit all those hours without her chosen re- 
 freshment.
 
 io8 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 But the Arab proverb awaits quotation where- 
 with to close this gossip : — 
 
 " He who knows not, and knows not he knows not, 
 he is a fool, shun him. He who knows not, and knows 
 he knows not, he is simple, teach him. He who knows, 
 and knows not he knows, he is asleep, wake him. He 
 who knows and knows he knows, he is wise, follow him." 
 
 Matter enough there, on which to hang a whole 
 chapter on character.
 
 XV 
 
 What is reminiscence but the usage of memory ? 
 The recurrence to the mind of the past ; and what 
 is memory ? Alas ! too often but faulty recol- 
 lection of past events. 
 
 As the years roll on we find ourselves telling 
 the story of an event, an incident, or but a story, 
 and suddenly we come upon a note of the inci- 
 dent or story taken at the moment of the occur- 
 rence, or upon the first hearing of the tale ; and 
 how we have deviated from, or enlarged upon, 
 the original. And so these little black notebooks 
 pull one back to the actual incident. 
 
 Memory ! Charles Dickens's prayer to keep 
 his memory green is a rather curious one for a 
 journahst, even of the early nineteenth cen- 
 tury. 
 
 It suited his story, but personally he should 
 have prayed his notebooks might never be 
 neglected. How true is this note on memory, a 
 note quoted years ago : " No one who means to 
 
 109
 
 no REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 write should ever trust to memory, because scene 
 after scene fades as a dissolving view, and is never 
 caught again, whilst others rise to replace 
 them." 
 
 Most true, but given a note upon the scene 
 and all comes back. Even the expression upon 
 the actors' faces, the intonation of their voices, 
 the scene, the wayside footpath, or the moun- 
 tain's rugged ascent ; or, perchance, the leaning 
 over the bulwark of a ship looking out over the 
 uplifting seas. 
 
 We cannot trust to memory, yet we forget 
 nothing, but where find the key that shall un- 
 lock the particular tiny cell where memory has 
 stored the incident ? 
 
 What a curious medley of notes I next light 
 upon ; that delightful old-world village of Newn- 
 ham-on-Severn, and the courteous old rector and 
 his accomplished wife, Mrs. Bagnall-Oakley ; 
 where the fields and crofts bear the same names 
 to-day as they did in the thirteenth century, and 
 where the speech of the good old folk is often 
 Chaucerian. Then we jump to Old Sarum and a 
 description of its mighty earthworks ; but we 
 leave this to read a quaint note on printing, from 
 Anthony Wood, of how Turnour and Caxton
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS iii 
 
 smuggled over a workman, Sasellis, by stealth to 
 London, and then to Oxford, and there he was 
 guarded so well he could not escape until he had 
 taught them printing ; and the Press here, says 
 Wood, was ten years before Europe, except 
 Mainz and Haarlem. But I have seen a copy of 
 the Siege of Troy, printed in the town of Pilsen, 
 dated 1466. So Wood's patriotism led him 
 astray in this assertion. But he is as pleasant to 
 read as are the Paston Letters ; of which I remem- 
 ber a certain limb of the law, a member of a book 
 society, stating they might be dubbed the 
 " Passed-on Letters," for none of the members 
 had even cut the leaves. If they had known of 
 the outspoken bits in those letters, many would 
 have read them, for there is a great deal of truth 
 in a note I see recorded here of a dictum on " Pay- 
 ing Literature " : " If you are a fourth-rate Hterary 
 person, and want to become notorious, you take 
 up a fad calculated to shock, as that every man 
 should have two wives, or that marriage is an 
 anachronism, or suicide a moral act." Women 
 novelists and some playwrights have learnt this 
 truth thoroughly of late. 
 
 But fortunately for humanity, the life of this 
 type of writing is short, as in a garden the year's
 
 112 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 rubbish is quickly buried, and already half rotten, 
 soon disappears. The sarcasm of the import- 
 ance or non-importance of events is aptly illus- 
 trated by a French quotation : " Si vous voulez 
 faire de la politique lisez les Journaux du jour. 
 Si vous voulez faire de la Philosophie lisez de I'an 
 passe." (" If you wish to be a politician read to- 
 day's papers : if you wish to be a philosopher 
 read last year's papers.") The seeming vastly im- 
 portant events that move the crowds are at a 
 year's perspective shrunk to insignificant pro- 
 portions, and often the most unchronicled event 
 or incident is become of the deepest import. 
 
 I see in this notebook a number of notes upon 
 Oxford in mediaeval days. It was a study of the 
 fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that enabled 
 me to write the two Oxford novels, the one, The 
 Gleaming Dawn, of the earlier period, and to lay 
 the scenes of The Insef arables, a twentieth-cen- 
 tury novel, in the same Oxford gardens, with the 
 same old walls and towers o'ertopping the heads 
 of the actors in the dramas ; and many of the 
 same customs being carried out, although five 
 hundred years intervene between the dates of 
 the events in the two stories. How many places 
 are there in the world and in the heart of life,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 113 
 
 not in some quiet backwater, where such a thing 
 could be done ? Truly Oxford is a thing of beauty 
 and interest. Unique in the world. And then 
 away from the scent of old tomes in the Bodleian, 
 and Merton and other Colleges, after lighting 
 upon facts that proved Oxford's actions in the 
 world's advancement that had been blotted out 
 by sectarian partisanship, the little notebooks 
 take me with a rush to a glorious heath in East 
 Anglia, where one gets the scent of the gorse 
 before seeing it. The larks are rising with full 
 flood of song, and the golden sea comes in sight, 
 lifting and swelling over the hillocky heath. The 
 note brings the soft, sweet languorous odour of 
 the gorse into the nostrils, and one breathes the 
 fresh sea-breeze in the May sunshine : pure, clear, 
 health-giving, and the very next note takes one 
 with an awful contrast into the close, hot, crowded 
 Salle de Jeu of Monte Carlo. 
 
 Here is the routine for rouge et noir, and the 
 fact stated, that the maximum allowed to be 
 staked at once, is twelve thousand francs, nearly five 
 hundred pounds, and the significant word placed 
 afterwards that at roulette the bank has the ad- 
 vantage over the players of nineteen to eighteen, 
 but, of course, the single player has also all the
 
 114 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 other players' chances against him. The Casino 
 at Monte Carlo seems to have foetid air after 
 the fresh breezes on Rushmere Heath, but there 
 is a glorious Nature round Monte Carlo by sea- 
 shore and on the mountains. 
 
 It is beyond belief how many are gulled, by the 
 stories of wealth won at Monte Carlo, into the 
 most absurd risks to attempt to win that wealth. 
 Women with limited incomes will sell out every- 
 thing, and travel down to this Paradis du Diable, 
 thinking to come back rich ; some end in 
 suicide, others go whining and weeping to the 
 British Consul, to help them back to an English 
 workhouse. The facts told me by the late Consul 
 seemed totally unbelievable ; but how humanity 
 is always easily gulled is aptly illustrated by a note 
 on a bit of Chinese history, that reads exactly 
 like a note of to-day upon Socialistic panaceas for 
 poverty. 
 
 The reformer was desirous of uprooting all 
 past history and introducing his own ideas and 
 maxims. Of course, his own followers were to be 
 put in office ; he was to give happiness to all, and 
 his Government's first duty was to love the 
 people and give to them plenty and pleasure. 
 The State was to take possession of all, and to be
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 115 
 
 the sole employer, and to succour the working 
 classes, and fix the price of provisions. The rich 
 were to pay the taxes, and the poor were to be 
 exempt (sounds like the very modern statement 
 of robbing hen-roosts to raise revenue, made 
 early in the twentieth century by a British Cabinet 
 Minister). 
 
 Whenever any one was out of work he was 
 to receive aid. The State was to hold the land 
 and give out the seed, which was to be repaid. 
 The crops were to be fixed by the certain officers 
 who supplied the seed, and happiness was to 
 reign everywhere. The State was to be the only 
 creditor and never to take interest, and only the 
 monopolist would be injured. If famine came, 
 the State would restore the equilibrium, and 
 necessities would be sold at fixed prices, and, 
 of course, all large fortunes were to be done away 
 with. 
 
 This seems to contain all that the Socialists 
 aim at, but they are very late in the field, for this 
 Chinese reformer practised in the eleventh 
 century, with a result much like that in the French 
 Revolutions ; when State granaries and State 
 employment were adopted, " the nation became 
 sunk in misery. The reformer's partisans had to
 
 ii6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 quit, and passing beyond the walls became 
 hordes of robbers." But in this twentieth cen- 
 tury there are some who would have us go back 
 to this eleventh-century experiment. Truly, 
 indeed, human nature never changes.
 
 XVI 
 
 Here is a thoughtful word of that genial old 
 reprobate Pepys. 
 
 He is speaking of the silent marvels of Stone- 
 henge, and these mighty monoliths and trilithons 
 seem to impress him with their gigantic solemnity. 
 " God knows," he exclaims, " what their use 
 was. They are hard to tell, but yet it may be 
 told." Ah ! the centuries have rolled on, but 
 still the secret is only very partially unveiled. 
 
 I must have been upon archaeology bent at the 
 moment this notebook was in use, for there is an 
 interesting entry upon a very little-known spot 
 not far from Wellow, in Somersetshire, Stoney 
 Littleton. Here there is a long tumulus, one of 
 the most perfect, probably, in Britain. A hundred 
 and seven feet in length, and it is not merely an 
 earth mound over a great dolmen, but a beauti- 
 fully built chamber of most regular dry walling. 
 It has a passage leading to the great chamber 
 and transepts, and at the end of the great cham- 
 
 117
 
 ii8 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 ber are three recesses. The building is an excel- 
 lent example of prehistoric work ; and spots 
 where repairs have been made prove we have 
 lost the art of this type of building. 
 
 But these are gossips and not the place for long 
 archaeological description, but if the chatty and 
 discursive Samuel Pepys is weightily impressed 
 with Stonehenge, may I not be allowed to tell of 
 a little-known wonder of Britain ? 
 
 " Do no wrong, and then do what thou wilt : 
 My statutes recognise no other guih." 
 
 So runs a note from Hafiz, the Persian poet, and 
 from this apt quotation I fall upon a name of an 
 English clergyman, a witty, genial, but most 
 learned personage, who might have taken this 
 motto for his rule of life. The man who made 
 the gentle Charles Lamb his chief study, and ob- 
 tained a literary reputation by this one study, 
 yet he was many-sided in his knowledge and 
 talks — Alfred Ainger, Master of the Temple and 
 Canon of Bristol. Perhaps the most celebrated 
 of Bristol's canons since Sydney Smith. The 
 note is upon his lecturing upon mediocre poets. 
 He was a most interesting lecturer, but a still 
 more interesting reader. He could take the part 
 of a street arab, or an Eton boy at the Eton and
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 119 
 
 Harrow match, to the Hfe. He Uved the character 
 he was reading, and I have seen him hurl his 
 book down in a fit of passion, so lost did he 
 become to his audience. 
 
 A little incident that proves his versatility 
 happened once at the Temple Church. I had 
 taken a literary American to hear Ainger 
 preach, and on his announcing the text, I found 
 that it was the same I had heard him utilise 
 years before. After the sermon my friend was 
 anxious to speak to Canon Ainger, so I took him 
 round to the Master's lodgings. The Canon had 
 other visitors, but we were asked to wait, and 
 after a while he came in, and when my friend had 
 had a short chat, I said, " You preached from 
 that text eight years ago, Canon." He looked 
 at me in astonishment, and said, " How do you 
 know that ? " " Ah," I said, " I am just come 
 from abroad, and I happen to have my little 
 travel prayer-book with me, in which I make 
 notes of very special sermons, and I see you 
 preached from that text on July 22nd, 1894." 
 / He looked at me with a keen, cunning smile, 
 and very quietly said, " It was not the same 
 sermon, though." 
 
 " No, it was not," I replied, and I showed him
 
 120 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 the faint pencil notes. The text was, " Every 
 good gift, and every perfect gift." Just the text 
 such a man would love. Let me quote one phrase 
 from the first sermon, " Temptations are never 
 obsolete." In his lectures were such phrases as, 
 " We can hardly find literature for the books," 
 of course an echo of the well-known saying of the 
 lad who could not see the town for the houses, 
 but like an Irish echo well varied ; another phrase 
 was, " Time makes no mistakes, it wants no 
 mimicrv." 
 
 My next notes are upon another famous 
 Englishman and his reason for wishing to be a 
 Member of Parliament. " I wish to be a Member 
 of Parliament to have my share of doing good 
 and resisting evil." So run the words on the 
 statue to Burke, at Bristol, quoted from his 
 speech at Bristol in 1780. 
 
 I had penetrated through the scaffolding and 
 hoarding around this statue some few days before 
 it was unveiled by Lord Rosebery, to write a de- 
 scription of the statue, that was by a then un- 
 known Bristol sculptor. I ventured to say the 
 statue had " a sense of action and yet of repose of 
 power, and retained strength ; in the face a 
 touch of cynicism and of pity ; and in the pose
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 121 
 
 of the figure, of repression and yet of aid," and 
 so I became one of the few to praise the early- 
 work of one who afterwards took England by 
 storm with his Lycidas, and other fine conceptions 
 — Havard Thomas. I went on to say that the 
 statue would give Bristol a lesson, but when Lord 
 Rosebery unveiled it, and spoke of Bristol's 
 past neglect of her great men, and of this tardy 
 expiation, he did not know that the one man un- 
 invited to the ceremony was the sculptor. When 
 will cities learn their great men are not the self- 
 exalting possessors of much cash, but the men of 
 science or art, of learning, and of literature ; the 
 men who are really weaving the lasting history 
 of the city ? 
 
 It was a revivifying leap to jump from these 
 solid notes to some quaint notes of children's 
 sayings. Here is one : A Httle fellow of four and 
 a half years cuts two of his fingers, the last one 
 very badly. Next day he was asked if he cried. 
 " No," he replies, " I did it myself"; and then, 
 after a time, he adds, " if any one else had done 
 it I could have cried, couldn't I ? " 
 
 Another small boy had his first Bible lesson 
 and was told of Cain and Abel, and the next day 
 he was asked what were the names of Adam's
 
 122 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 sons, and promptly replied, " Stick and Abel." 
 The philosopher of four and a half, when eight 
 years of age, hears of a friend of his father's being 
 struck down by apoplexy, and tells his brother, 
 " Mr. M. is very ill ; got hypocrisy all down his 
 left side." Having been told by an old-fashioned 
 doctor on one occasion to go to his dispensary for 
 some medicine, the next time he has to get 
 medicine he asks the doctor if he shall " come to 
 the cemet'ry for it." 
 
 The delightful, unconscious humour of chil- 
 dren is richly quaint. I once wrote a story in the 
 Christmas number of the Queen, called, " Little 
 Sunshine," that was compiled from my own 
 children's sayings, and these are more of their im- 
 promptu insouciant utterances. Parents should 
 jot down their children's sayings. 
 
 A very curious and interesting character 
 suddenly intervenes between these sayings of 
 children. 
 
 A " diviner," a water-finder by the hazel rod. 
 He was about eighty when I had a long chat with 
 him, although I had known him all my life. A 
 well-set-up, ruddy-faced old gentleman whose 
 father had been well-to-do, and he, in his younger 
 days, had been well off, lived in a good country
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 123 
 
 house, and drove his own horses. He had been 
 married twice, and had had twenty-six children, 
 seventeen of whom were then Hving, but he had 
 experienced losses, and now was none too well off, 
 and made money by his divining. He claimed to 
 have found metals in Cornwall and the Mendips, 
 and water all over Britain ; that year he had been 
 to Aberdeen, Surrey, Essex, Kent, Gloucester, 
 Wales, Bucks, Devon, and Somerset. 
 
 It was curious how it exhausted him when try- 
 ing to find silver under plates, but he succeeded ; 
 and on another occasion, on Clifton Down, I got 
 him to test for water, and checked, him by certain 
 landmarks without his knowledge ; and on re- 
 turning succeeded in getting him to try again, 
 and the tremors of the watch-spring, used instead 
 of the twig, came on at the same spot so vigor- 
 ously the old man was quite exhausted after- 
 wards. Perhaps he was the last of the educated 
 diviners, most certainly he believed in his own 
 power, did William Scott Lawrence, and with 
 this note upon this cheery old gentleman of a 
 past age this gossip must end.
 
 XVII 
 
 " Fashion is the stepmother of good taste, and 
 tyrannises over it." So runs a quotation from the 
 German, and how rarely is anything fashionable 
 in good taste. When will woman dress as becomes 
 her personality ? What an interesting study, then, 
 woman's dress would be, and what a picturesque 
 world would be woman's world ! Again, on 
 woman, comes a quatrain from the French : — 
 
 " Femme plaint, femme deult 
 
 Femme est malade, quand elle veult 
 
 Et par Ste Marie 
 
 Quant elle veult elle est guerye." 
 
 An old saying, as proved by the spelling, bring- 
 ing home the delightful inconsequence and in- 
 congruity of women's actions. But we leap from 
 these speculations upon woman's life into the 
 diplomatic sphere, led by the words Salisbury 
 and Hatfield. I see these notes were made 
 upon the occasion when a party of foreign 
 journalists visited Hatfield, amongst them being 
 the author who, many French felt, had dragged 
 
 124
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 125 
 
 French thought through quagmires of filth — Emile 
 Zola. In those days he knew no word of English, 
 and I had to point out to him and Mme. Zola 
 some of the historical treasures of Hatfield, and 
 a very awkward question Madame put to me when 
 she drew Emile's attention to some French flags 
 hanging in the dining-hall, and persisted in asking 
 why they were there, until I had quietly to say 
 they were taken at Waterloo. " Ah," said Zola, 
 " Ces sont les drapeaux perdus a Waterloo ! " 
 
 I had a long chat with Zola, during this visit 
 of his to England, and he told me he was aston- 
 ished he was si bien acclame here, as the English 
 were not demonstrative. He did not know of 
 the strong feeling there was against his reception. 
 A feeling that led to blows amongst some of the 
 journalists. But when I asked him why he had 
 said such — " duretes " was the mild word I used, 
 of his compatriots, the Italian blazed up in him 
 and he retorted ; he had not said all he could say. 
 " But," I said, " I have tramped through your 
 villages and lived amidst your peasants, and they 
 are not the filthy animals you make them out to 
 be." " Oh," he said, " Les paysans are always 
 the same everywhere, as in England." " Yes," 
 I said, " we can show you sights in London that
 
 126 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 are very disgusting, but that is not the life of 
 London." "Ah," he retorted, "the truth can 
 never harm." The romance writers were not 
 to cure, but to describe and tell the truth. He 
 seemed decidedly surprised at being so questioned, 
 instead of being met with the usual adulation, 
 and I asked him what about young men and 
 young girls reading his books ; was it good for 
 them ? " They were not for jeunes jilles,^'' he 
 retorted, but said nothing about young men, 
 and he rightly added that there were other 
 things in his books than of what we were speaking. 
 Our talk was interrupted by another visitor 
 whom I happened to know, and as I shook hands 
 with this visitor, I saw Zola looking at me very 
 straight and keenly, and he watched me whilst 
 I spoke to the new-comer. Zola had a good fore- 
 head, sharp dark eyes, and a black beard, a la 
 Espagnol, and big ears. He was more Italian 
 than French, and always seemed glad to say hard 
 things of Frenchmen, but, of course, his hard 
 fight for truth over the Dreyfus question re- 
 deemed him from the statement I heard said of 
 him once on the chffs at Fecamp by a cultured 
 Frenchman : " I want you to read Zola's work 
 to learn how low down he has pulled us French."
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 127 
 
 Perhaps an Italian saying, quoted on a near 
 page, of an Englishman, might apply to Zola : 
 " Un Englese Italianato e un diavolo incarnato " ; 
 alter this into " A Frenchman Italianised is a 
 devil incarnate," and it may explain Zola's hatred 
 of Frenchmen, more than their neglect of him 
 when young, and their refusal to make him 
 academician. 
 
 What a striking quotation I light upon next, 
 from Richard Burton : — 
 
 " With ignorance wage eternal war, 
 To know thyself for ever strain ; 
 Thine ignorance of thine ignorance is 
 Thy fiercest foe, thy deadliest bane." 
 
 The little notebook jumps away to a famous 
 American, Leland, and there are many notes 
 upon his life. I see he met in early days, in the 
 stress of revolution, some whom I met in after- 
 years, in peace and honour, amongst others old 
 Pulsky, one of the Hungarian heroes of 1 848, whom 
 I afterwards knew as the Director of the Library 
 and Museums in Buda-Pesth. He also met Votja 
 Naprstek, of Prague, who founded the great 
 Naprstek Museum, a most remarkable man. His 
 opinion of Yankees is quaintly summed up in his 
 statement that a Yankee's idea of hell is that
 
 128 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 it is " a place where he must mind his own 
 business." 
 
 Leland was a great traveller and a great 
 Hnguist, and adjoining my note upon his work is 
 a story told me one night at dinner by my next 
 neighbour, another great traveller, Sir Henry 
 Howorth ; it has often been told, but worth 
 repeating, as I had it from his lips. 
 
 A lady at dinner persistently turned the talk 
 on to dogs, and at last asked Sir Henry what he 
 would recommend her for her pet dog that was 
 suffering from some complaint. Sir Henry 
 retorted he scarcely knew anything about dogs. 
 " But," said the lady, " did you not write a big 
 book on the History of Mongrels F " The name 
 of the work, that was in four volumes, was 
 The History of the Mongols. 
 
 No respecter of persons are my little note- 
 books ; all here are on an equality, and next to 
 the learned and knighted traveller comes an old 
 Somerset shepherd, one of the keenest old fellows 
 at his own work, and with a wondrous insight 
 into the character of men as well as of sheep. 
 One day I asked him how it was he knew so much, 
 where did he go to school ? " I bain't no scholar," 
 was his retort ; " never went to school but half
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 129 
 
 a day and then they made I a Teacher, and so I 
 told t'others all I learnt, and don't know nothin' 
 now." A lovely bit of sarcasm on the school 
 "larnin"' that we give to young agriculturists. 
 As a delightful contrast to this clever old shepherd 
 who rarely forgot or neglected an order given, 
 and had a marvellous knowledge of the individual 
 sheep, that to ordinary men like myself were 
 all alike, I come upon a curious note upon a 
 famous academician who wrote to the editor of a 
 well-known magazine a highly indignant letter at 
 their issuing a copy of one of his pictures. " At 
 least," he said, " they might have written and 
 asked his permission and as to his wishes as regards 
 colour." Alas for the power of forgetfulness of 
 the R.A. They had actually received from him 
 a coloured photograph of the picture, and had 
 paid him for the right of using it, and had his 
 own signature for the receipt. 
 
 So will intense absorption in one's work drive 
 out all memory of important though, compared 
 to the work, trivial facts. 
 
 We leap from these curious and homely facts 
 far away to distant Bokhara, through the notes 
 of a long chat with Dr. Lansdell, whose volumes 
 on Chinese Central Asia, A Ride to Little Tihet^
 
 130 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 and other books, opened up new ground to 
 English readers. He was, and is, a most interest- 
 ing man, with keen dark eyes, and in those days 
 swarthy complexion, with a black moustache and 
 full whiskers and thin dark hair. He did not 
 agree with Kennan's description of Siberia, he 
 said he began fairly, and then got excited and 
 could see only evil. I know full well how cour- 
 teous, polished, and helpful Russian officials can 
 be, but ever when in their company one gets 
 a glimpse of the terribly repressive and auto- 
 cratic system of government by punishment. 
 Lansdell was the first Englishman to enter China 
 from the West, a most interesting man to talk to, 
 and a pioneer in Tibetan travel, although he 
 never entered the real Tibet or reached Lhassa, 
 the marvels of which are now known to English- 
 men. 
 
 The little book ends with a word upon the 
 opening of the Corinth Canal, a work I saw in 
 progress, after having been projected by Alex- 
 ander the Great, resolved on by Julius Caesar, 
 and actually commenced by Nero, only to be 
 completed in the nineteenth century a.d. A 
 curious sight it was to see the Eastern workers 
 from many lands camped on the heights above
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 131 
 
 the deep cutting, at length finishing the work 
 planned thus thousands of years ago. But fact 
 is quickly interrupted by philosophy, so I end 
 this gossip with a saint's dictum : " Rest and 
 calm are the soul's greatest enemy."
 
 XVIII 
 
 I SEE my next little black book begins with whole 
 pages of notes upon one subject : that of a fam- 
 ous Royal wedding, and a Royal betrothal, the 
 latter being that of the Tsarevitch to Princess 
 Alex Victoria of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the former 
 the marriage of the daughter of the Duke of 
 Edinburgh to Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of 
 Hesse-Darmstadt. 
 
 Old gossip this, but noteworthy for the won- 
 drous group of reigning monarchs gathered at 
 Coburg, and for its being the last ceremony at 
 which Queen Victoria appeared in Europe. I well 
 remember the blaze of diamonds on the ladies, 
 and the glitter of orders on the breasts of the 
 men, and through the lines of this brilliant crowd 
 there passed up, leaning on her stick and the arm 
 of the German Kaiser, that weak little form of 
 Queen Victoria, with a tiny diamond crown 
 upon her head. The crown of the Kingdom 
 and Empire of Great Britain. A curious little 
 
 132
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 133 
 
 incident happened when all were in the castle 
 chapel : the Prince of Wales — afterwards King 
 Edward VII — seated himself, oblivious of the 
 fact that the German Kaiser and all the others 
 were standing ; but he quickly saw his error, 
 and rose and spoke to those near him to pass off 
 this faux fas. Bearing special letters of intro- 
 duction from the Duke of Edinburgh, I was 
 permitted to roam at will through the Palais 
 Edinburgh, and in strolling through the rooms 
 of the palace I found myself in the Queen's 
 especial room ; one letter only awaited her upon 
 the table, and it was the sight of this letter from 
 Esher, awaiting her arrival, that told me whose 
 apartment I had unwittingly entered. The 
 whole of Coburg and its castle is of interest from 
 the associations of Queen Victoria and her be- 
 loved husband, Albert ; deeply interesting it 
 was to see the Queen in these surroundings, where 
 fifty years before, she had been able to say, 
 " We can walk about here and are never fol- 
 lowed." 
 
 This, too, she could say at Osborne in the early 
 days of their wedded hfe. 
 
 " He seems very human," remarked to me a 
 learned professor of literature, who was present
 
 134 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 in the Savage Club on the night when 
 King George V, then Prince of Wales, was 
 in the chair, and it is the stifling of their 
 humanity through etiquette that lends to 
 Royalty such keen enjoyment when all cere- 
 mony can be ignored. 
 
 From all the glitter of a Royal wedding, 
 I leap away to the early married life of a 
 young poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The note 
 was made at Nether Stowey, in the cottage 
 where he and Sara made their home, and from 
 whence he took that glorious walk to Watchet, 
 on to Lynton, and the Valley of Stones 
 (now called the Valley of Rocks), in the com- 
 pany of Dorothy and William Wordsworth. 
 A famous walk, for the idyllic scenery and 
 the look-out over the western sea inspired him 
 to begin that weird poem " The Ancient 
 Mariner." 
 
 At another time he walked from here to 
 Bristol and back, in the day, to see Mrs. Bar- 
 bauld, a distance of seventy miles. 
 
 Nether Stowey is still a calm, picturesque 
 village, with an interesting church and an inn 
 where good West-country fare is served by a 
 genuine, jovial Boniface. Ah ! such days in
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 135 
 
 such spots cling lovingly to the memory and leave 
 sweeter impressions than do Royal festivities or 
 elongated banquets. 
 
 Village life brings up village custom and the 
 superstition as to the bringing into a house, before 
 Palm Sunday, the soft silken buds of the sallow 
 tree that serve as "palms" here in England in the 
 Roman Church. A little child did this terrible 
 act in a farm-house in Somerset, and the farmer 
 lost a favourite horse and had all his ricks and 
 cart-horses and buildings burnt the same year, 
 and the farmer's wife told the child it was " all 
 her fault." 
 
 What leaps my little book makes ! On the 
 next page to these notes upon bucolic lives, 
 there comes a series upon the exciting debates 
 in half a dozen or more tongues at the Inter- 
 national Press Congress at Bordeaux. But how 
 saddening it is to read the names of so many 
 famous journalists who have now passed onward. 
 The genial, witty Irishman, Tom Crosbie, the 
 bosom friend of Justin McCarthy ; the cour- 
 teous Italian Torrelli VioUier, and the courtly 
 Sefior Berazza, the Spaniard ; Albert Bataille, 
 the keen debater of the Figaro, and others ; all 
 gone, but all men who influenced their country
 
 136 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 and their age, and whom it is a pleasant thing to 
 remember. 
 
 One meets striking characters at these inter- 
 national gatherings ; perhaps one of the strangest, 
 and one who had influenced the history of 
 Europe in her time, was Madame Rattazzi. 
 I had met her before in Brussels, when she 
 was editress of a French review, in which she 
 wrote also very cleverly under three or four 
 names. 
 
 Born a Bonaparte, and widow of an Italian 
 Premier, I had seen her at Laeken cut dead by 
 the King and Queen of Belgium at a reception, 
 although at the moment she hung upon the arm 
 of Signor Bonghi, an ex-Premier of Italy. She 
 bore a strange reputation in Brussels. In spite 
 of her age she made up young, and still tried to 
 exercise her powers of fascination on young men. • 
 She had been a pensioner of Napoleon III, 
 receiving one thousand pounds a year pension, 
 as proved by the papers found at the Tuileries 
 by the Commune. 
 
 I met in Italy the banker who had yearly to 
 pay her this pension, which always had to be 
 given into her own hands, and queer stories he 
 told me of her passion for men. At Bordeaux
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 137 
 
 she was wearing a gold bandelet in her black hair, 
 diamond earrings, and a black band round her 
 neck with a diamond pendant ; an echarfe of 
 purple and white, and the star of an order, all of 
 which scarcely suited her sunken black eyes and 
 reddened lips, and in spite of her age, a very 
 decollete dress and bare arms. A woman whose 
 hfe and intrigues would form the foundation of 
 more than one novel, but enough of Mme. 
 Rattazzi pour le moment. 
 
 It is curious how links between visits to remote 
 English villages and foreign capitals, bring out 
 bits of our own history. I light upon some notes 
 of a visit to Stourhead, in Wiltshire, and there is 
 a word upon the fact that in the Manor House 
 at East Stour, Henry Fielding hved riotously 
 for three years, and that the incumbent of 
 West Stour was the model for his Parson Adams. 
 I add to this, " See Lisbon," and very shortly 
 afterwards I was standing in the cemetery 
 of Lisbon reading the inscription on Field- 
 ing's tomb. He lies not far from the tomb 
 of another English writer, Richard Doddridge, 
 who gave his name to my old friend Richard 
 Doddridge Blackmore, a later link in the genera- 
 tions of West-country writers who have made
 
 138 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 the West-country and its people famous in 
 English literature. 
 
 What a wealth of incident and material these 
 names awaken, but a note upon a public speaker 
 pulls one up with a jerk : " He never uses one 
 word where five will do," and so I cry " Halt " 
 to this gossip.
 
 XIX 
 
 We think the plan of medical men specialising, to 
 be modern : but in the time of Rameses the 
 Great, in Egypt, the custom when a person was 
 ill was to send him to the Temple, and the best 
 physician for the special complaint was then 
 sent to the patient. An excellent idea this : one 
 that, if promptly carried out to-day, might save 
 many a life; simply substituting the word hospital, 
 for Temple. 
 
 Egypt appears to have been a special subject 
 when the little black notebook under present 
 notice was in use, for there are very numerous 
 notes upon that fascinating country, and upon 
 books such as George Ebers's Uarda^ one of the 
 most interesting novels of early Egyptian life, a 
 book that proves most emphatically how little 
 changed even to-day is Hfe in Egypt, save where 
 the Western tourist spoils Eastern Hfe. 
 
 In the nineteenth century I have had experi- 
 ences exactly as the following described by Ebers, 
 
 139
 
 140 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 when eating or living with Arabs. " Men tear their 
 meat and wipe their fingers in the flat bread." 
 " Little girls in long shirt-like garments follow 
 the procession carrying water-jars." Negroes 
 pour water from skins on the road to lay the dust, 
 and there is one scene in a tent, of jugglers and 
 dancing girls, that, although it happened four 
 thousand years ago, is an exact description of a 
 scene witnessed at a lone village on the Nile one 
 night, when we were tied up there in the year of 
 our Lord 1895. 
 
 This book proves, also, how human nature to- 
 day and its ambitions of four thousand years since 
 are the same. There is the dominant priest, 
 whose idea of priestcraft is to rule men and the 
 King. The toast of to-day of certain " tur- 
 bulent priests " who give " the Church " before 
 the King. 
 
 But we are gossiping and must not dogmatise, 
 and are quickly taken into another sphere of 
 thought upon art and nature ; the incident 
 tells of a veterinary surgeon looking at a picture 
 of horses drinking. " Why," he exclaims, " who 
 ever saw a horse drink like that ? Why, he'd 
 be suffocated. He's got his nostrils under- 
 water."
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 141 
 
 Then we leap from a question of art to stern 
 sarcasm on American politics, exemplified in the 
 quotation that America would be a grand land 
 " if every Irishman would kill a negro and be 
 hanged for it." And the word Irishman brings 
 on the page three bulls : one at least by an Irish- 
 man, who said of a famous war correspondent, 
 " He went out to his death once too often." 
 Another bull noted is made in the House of 
 Commons in the year 1896, when an honourable 
 member said, " I will just reiterate what I was 
 going to say," whilst another member, speaking 
 of some patriots, said, " They were climbing on 
 each other's shoulders." 
 
 From Irish bulls to wine is no far cry, nor from 
 " Och sure " to " hock " ; and two very sugges- 
 tive notes come together upon the similarity of 
 good cider and hock ; I know both, and have 
 drunk of the best of both, but my notes are not 
 of my own experience ; the one is upon a con- 
 versation with a hop merchant who had been to 
 Bude, in Cornwall, upon business, and we travelled 
 together on the coach to Holsworthy before the 
 railway had invaded Bude. The hop merchant 
 assured me that he had given a wine merchant 
 decantered cider of a choice description, and the
 
 142 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 wine merchant took it for still hock, and praised 
 it. With this note comes another on the same 
 subject : o£ a wealthy farmer who made most 
 choice cider, a delightful drink if rather heady ; 
 one had to be careful : a smooth, sound drink, 
 but not sweet nor yet rough. A gentleman who 
 liked the liquor immensely, asked if he could not 
 purchase a cask of this pleasant beverage, but he 
 was told that all that could be spared went to 
 London, perhaps he could get some from the 
 address given him ; but on writing, the answer 
 came back that some mistake seemed to have 
 been made, the firm to whom the letter had been 
 addressed were not beer and cider merchants, 
 but only wine merchants ! 
 
 We have leaped, it seems, from Egypt to sunny 
 Devon, and I light upon examples of Devon 
 speech and pronunciation, and then comes a 
 little picture in verse of " A Devon Hill." 
 
 " A Rugged Tor where earth's old ribs peep out, 
 Above the yielding sward so soft and green. 
 The sheep path twists, and curls and winds about, 
 Around the craggy ledge, where winds cut keen. 
 
 " And where the Jackdaw floats, and swiftly turns, 
 Then wheels, and gleams, beneath the sun's warm rays, 
 That ne'er in summer here too fiercely burns, 
 For salt sea breezes cool e'en July days.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 143 
 
 " Far out the sea plain glitters 'neath the sky, 
 With leaping wavelets, glimmering peacefully ; 
 Foreboding naught of waves full ship-mast high, 
 And howling tempests raging treacherously. 
 
 " Yet still the waves' speech climbs the craggy peak, 
 Now whispering lowly, then in bolder tones. 
 Filling the air as though it fain would speak, 
 And tell the secrets that its depth aye owns." 
 
 There are few greater pleasures than lying on 
 a Devon tor on a summer day looking out over the 
 western sea, and musing over Nature and all her 
 glories, perhaps jotting down in verse some of 
 the thoughts induced by her beauty : but as I 
 turn over a leaf there comes a stern dictum on 
 poetry from the German novel Ekkehardt : " Echte 
 Dichtung macht dem Menchen frisch und 
 gesund " (" Genuine poetry makes men fresh 
 and healthy "). Um ! Some poets have laboured 
 to make men morbid and unclean, but were they 
 poets ? Were they not rather " versifiers of 
 man's degradation," but in these I by no means 
 include the lusty singers of wine, woman, and 
 song ; there is no degradation in the healthy, 
 clean enjoyment of life. 
 
 A singular comment upon the well-known fact 
 that healthiness does not always pay in writing, 
 when unhealthiness and uncleanness do pay, is
 
 144 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 given by a note upon the life of Richard Jefferies, 
 the Nature-writer ; with the note is a copy of a 
 letter he wrote to Tinsley the publisher, asking 
 him if he will pubHsh a novel called The Dewy 
 Morn : A Summer Story. " There is no murder 
 in it, and no immorahty," writes Jefferies. We all 
 know how poor Jefferies was nearly starved to 
 death, but hke many another martyr he did the 
 world good and not harm, and so the world 
 stoned him. 
 
 Ah, surely Dame Fortune is indeed a " humor- 
 ous ladyship " in literature as in other things. 
 
 I once met in the South of England, at a country 
 inn, a man who was indeed the butt of her lady- 
 ship, if truthful be his story. He was then earn- 
 ing a modest living as a commercial traveller, and 
 told us how fortune had always befooled him. 
 " Once, in 1866, he bought a hundred and fifty 
 acres of scrub and brush in Austraha for a pound 
 an acre, and they called him a fool, and his bar- 
 gain ' Wallace's folly,' because he gave one hun- 
 dred and fifty pounds for such a tract of land " ; 
 but when he left Australia he sold it for thirty 
 shiUings an acre, to a man who went to California 
 but kept the land. In 1894 he heard that the 
 land was selling at one pound a foot, and was now
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 145 
 
 the town of Rockhampton. The same man said 
 he was once offered the eighth of a share in a 
 gold mine, or what they hoped would be a gold 
 mine, for seventy pounds, and he refused. After- 
 wards that mine was known as Mount Morgan, 
 and was worth nine millions sterling. Surely this 
 Mr. Wallace might exclaim, " I am a man whom 
 fortune hath cruelly scratched." 
 
 Material for romance and plot is always more 
 outrageously strange in real life than is permis- 
 sible in fiction. Inartistic plot-weaving may 
 utilise apparent exaggerations ; but in this note- 
 book are two strange incidents, of how informa- 
 tion may fall into the hands of an opponent, that 
 would be almost too exaggerated for fiction. One 
 case was this : A letter was returned to me opened 
 from London, as being found in a newspaper that 
 I had sent to a friend ; that letter was from a 
 firm with whom at the moment I had a lawsuit, 
 and it was directed to their lawyers. Now why, 
 out of all the newspapers sent to London on that 
 day, should it get tucked into my newspaper and 
 so get sent back to my hands ? the one pair of 
 hands in all England the senders wished it not to 
 fall into. 
 
 The other case was more simple and not so un- 
 
 L
 
 146 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 canny in its strangeness. A strong and somewhat 
 vicious attack had been made upon me by a 
 member o£ a certain association, and the secre- 
 tary of the association wrote a rather warm letter 
 to this attacking member, but, alas, the secretary's 
 clerk, in copying a letter sent to me on the same 
 day, left the letter to my opponent in the press, 
 and I had a full copy of this letter upon the back 
 of the one intended for me. 
 
 Two curious incidents of information falling 
 into my hands that may be useful to some story- 
 writer, but the reader would probably cry out as he 
 read at least the first incident, " I could condemn 
 it as an improbable fiction."
 
 XX 
 
 " The mob can never ripen into manhood." 
 How applicable to-day ; be it applied to Maf eking 
 outbursts or football mob fury ; but it is one of 
 Ebers's notes upon life in Egypt in the days of the 
 Rameses. Following this come other notes upon 
 Egypt from the lips of one who, when imprisoned 
 by the Mahdi in Omdurman, had bitter, awful 
 experience of Nile mobs and their leaders. It 
 was Slatin Pasha, whom I met soon after his 
 escape. What a strange, far-away look he had 
 in his eyes, as if always watching, hopelessly 
 watching, for something, from somewhere ; and 
 following this comes a word upon Lord Cromer, 
 the man who regenerated Egypt and who 
 rescued the Soudan from the bloodthirsty rule 
 of that Mahdi. A quiet, genial, ruddy-faced 
 Englishman, but what a reserve of power lay in 
 that calm face ! I talked with him at his rooms 
 in the Agency in Cairo, just after he had had a 
 keen bout with the then young, restless Khedive. 
 
 147
 
 148 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 It was a struggle of life and death, Moslem 
 against Christian ; terrible tragedy threatened, 
 but the cool head and keen determination, the 
 velvet glove showing the mailed hand, ready to 
 strike fiercely, won ; and Egypt has prospered 
 marvellously, and the fellah has been yielded 
 freedom from corrupt Pashas and rapacious 
 Mudirs. Yes, to have met and talked with such 
 mighty actors in the world's drama is pleasurable 
 thought-matter. 
 
 Perhaps the next greatest pleasure is to associate 
 with the great men of the past through their works, 
 or their actions, and I come upon a group of notes 
 upon men who have largely been done out of 
 their heritage of the world's gratitude, through 
 others, a century later, building upon their work 
 and securing fame ; Sir John Oldcastle and Sir 
 John Fastolf, like Peter Payne, the Forgotten 
 Great Englishman, have had scant justice yet ; 
 they, with Wyclif, were the real reformers, and 
 they prepared England for the revolt from 
 lustful superstition, and by Payne's work spread 
 the truth in Central Europe, until Luther reaped 
 the crops they had sown and tilled, even until 
 harvest. Oxford is the birthplace and the 
 succourer of the Reformation, and should not be
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 149 
 
 displaced from her heritage by a German sup- 
 planter, although he did splendid harvesting. 
 Even the banners of the triumphant armies of the 
 Bohemians who defied dominating Rome and 
 Kaiser Sigmund, were copies of Sir John Old- 
 castle's banner — a Cup and a round loaf of 
 bread ; but the Bohemians retained later the cup 
 only on some of their banners, hence their name 
 of " The Chancers." 
 
 But surely this is becoming historical and not 
 gossiping ; the little black notebook, however, 
 quickly changes the subject, and we are pulled 
 back to modern England by a reference to a rail- 
 way station that has no attendant at all ; no porter 
 even to call out the name. This is at Wanstrow, 
 in Somerset, and there is a notice put up that 
 " all persons not being passengers are requested 
 not to appear on the platform when the train is 
 in sight." If you were a passenger you stood on 
 the platform and waved your hands or umbrella, 
 and the train stopped ; one day we halted there, 
 and the guard got out some milk tins and left 
 them on the platform, and then called out to 
 the driver, " See any one coming down the road, 
 Bill ? " A loud " No " from BiU settled the 
 matter, we might go on ; and even the whistle
 
 150 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 did not bring a belated, would-be passenger in 
 sight. 
 
 If this is a curious railway station, what about 
 the curt description of a grammar school, in the 
 fairly populous market town of Chippenham, so 
 late as the year of grace 1894 ? To get to this 
 school one had to go through a stable-yard and up 
 some stairs, and in one room there was a fat, 
 white-haired old man, with his school of about 
 fifteen boys clustered around him, in an unruly 
 group. Somewhat astonished at a visitor, the old 
 fellow sat down, and the boys swarmed round 
 him whilst he talked to me and told me of all the 
 iniquities of big schools. It was almost as bad, 
 but not quite so smelly, as a visit to the Koutabs 
 or Koran schools in Egypt. Very amusing ; but 
 to think that such a sight could still be seen in 
 England in 1894, proves how slow country 
 towns and villages in England have been to 
 utilise, and modernise, all existing means of 
 education. 
 
 Here is another school incident of the same year. 
 An unctuous, modern edition of Mr. Squeers, 
 interviewing some parents about to place a boy 
 at his private school. " Ah, the dear boys," he 
 says, laying his hand on the young hopeful, " I
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 151 
 
 have so little trouble with them." The mother 
 expresses her astonishment, and the boy is dumb. 
 " Ah, no," says the old master, " I do not think 
 boys are so troublesome as they were." And, as 
 in Mr. Squeers's case, this unctuousness secured 
 him a goodly number of pupils in a fashionable 
 watering-place. 
 
 Here, two very interesting names suddenly 
 flash into my notebook, Ernest Renan and Sir 
 John Thurston ; the latter boasted he ruled 
 more of the world's surface than any other 
 ruler, only his part was mostly water. He was 
 then High Commissioner and Administrator 
 of the Pacific. An interesting man, governing a 
 type of life that is fast disappearing, having had 
 to vigorously suppress a recrudescence of cannibal- 
 ism in Fiji. A period of intense activity and great 
 tension that brought on a strange disease, every 
 nerve and muscle positively continually leaping 
 in his body, even raising his clothing ; one could 
 see the movement in his hands, and see the 
 trousers upon his legs lifting with the muscular 
 movement. A puzzle, and a new thing for the 
 doctors, he told me laughingly. I asked him if he 
 was nervous with it. " Not at all," he said. 
 " If a bomb were to go off in this room it would
 
 152 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 not startle me." No, but it quickly killed 
 him. 
 
 Ah, these proconsuls of England, what gigantic 
 tasks they undertake, regardless of danger and life, 
 and how often England ignores them ; whilst the 
 blatant politician is the god of the moment, and 
 the evil-working god at that. 
 
 But face, no moralising, or the next extract 
 might send us far ; for it is on St. Paul's famous 
 injunction to Timothy, that he used a little wine 
 for his stomach's sake. To get over this terribly 
 immoral teaching, a teetotal orator stated St. 
 Paul meant the wine to be used for outward 
 application only. 
 
 An Egyptian description of wine is that it is 
 like soap, it cleanses the soul of sorrow. 
 
 From the jovial singer of wine to the " Old 
 Lion of England, who ruled the world," is a 
 great leap, but a note comes in on the personal 
 appearance of old Lord Salisbury, taken as I 
 sat close to him in the pavilion at Brighton, in 
 November, 1895, when he made that announce- 
 ment which electrified the vast audience : 
 that he had a letter from the Sultan of Turkey 
 to the people of England. A big, solid, heavy- 
 headed old man, with full grey beard and mous-
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 153 
 
 tache ; how like a calm old majestic lion he stood 
 before that excited audience, holding the peace 
 of the world in his hands. 
 
 One of his curt, sententious sentences, uttered 
 on that night, might be of value to other than 
 Foreign Ministers. " The Foreign Minister was 
 bound to consult the virtue of silence," was his 
 dictum on this memorable night. 
 
 Here is another dictum — ^whose I know not — 
 but a horribly true one. " Enjoyment of a 
 moment is often the remorse of a whole future." 
 And close to this saying is a curious little bit from 
 the Persian : " Day begins when one can tell a 
 white thread from a black one " ; but if one had 
 to set clocks by this, as the Moslem does daily 
 by the sunrise, how about the variations of 
 sight ? 
 
 There are other notes that speak of events 
 that were happening in 1895. I see, on going 
 up to town from Brighton, I looked in at the 
 Authors' Club and met for the first time, at a 
 ladies' reception, Helen Mathers, the novelist, an 
 old school-fellow of my wife's. That night I 
 climbed the stairs of the Yorick Club, then housed 
 in Savoy Buildings. I heard steps on the stairs 
 above me, and lo, it was E. F. Knight, just back
 
 154 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 from the siege of Antananarivo, and five of us 
 dined together and heard his story of this French 
 expedition, and a queer story it was. Knight then 
 had two arms ; one was afterwards blown off in 
 a white-flag incident in the Boer War. He was a 
 stout, broad-shouldered man, of middle height, 
 with a thick, dark moustache, and his dark eyes 
 gleamed keenly through his glasses, from a full, 
 ruddy face with a well-shaped nose. A keen, 
 quick, decisive man, and deeply interesting was 
 his talk that night of the weak, cowardly Hovas, 
 who were well armed, but who fled from the weak 
 flying column of the French, who were dropping 
 with fever, and dying, as they came into the 
 street. 
 
 A war correspondent, like a Foreign Minister, 
 has often to consult the virtue of silence, and 
 that is what makes a confidential chat of this sort 
 of the greater interest, for one gets into the inner 
 life of events ; and how often are fact and coinci- 
 dence far stranger than fiction. 
 
 As though to corroborate this, I turn over a 
 page, and here is a note upon a positively un- 
 behevable fact, were it not a fact. 
 
 A man goes at night to the Clifton Suspension 
 bridge, that is two hundred and fifty feet above
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 155 
 
 the river, with his two children, one three and the 
 other twelve years of age. He stays by one of the 
 piers for a long time, sheltering the children from 
 the rain, and then he goes across and throws 
 both over, one after the other. It happens to be 
 high tide, and it happens also that a boatman is 
 rowing up the river, and hears a child cry, and 
 fishes it out of the water, and the child asks, 
 " Where's Elsie ? " " What, is there another ? " 
 says the boatman, and he searches and finds the 
 other ; the little one of three is not hurt, and the 
 one of twelve only slightly injured in the neck. 
 A veritable miracle, but a fact. Why should the 
 tide have been high ? Why a boatman exactly 
 there at midnight hour ? With this strange 
 problem of how our destinies are ruled, I close this 
 chapter.
 
 XXI 
 
 Facts and persons, extracts from books under 
 notice at the moment, notes for expeditions, a 
 perfect olla fodrida are these little notebooks. 
 Not a review of the times, but glimpses into some 
 of the great events of the world's history for 
 many a year. 
 
 Russia is the dominant key in the next book I 
 take up, for it opens at the moment I was pre- 
 paring, as special correspondent, to go to Moscow 
 for the Coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. How 
 well I remember the death of the first Nicholas, 
 and all the jubilation over the fall of Sebastopol. 
 But Lamartine's description of Russia is still 
 very true, " Une place ingrate mais immense sur 
 la Globe " ; the old national formula, " The 
 Tsar has decreed, the boyars have consulted," 
 has changed to-day into " The Duma has con- 
 sulted " ; but flus (a change -plus c^est la mime 
 chose. But lest the notes should become too 
 solid, there rush in amidst Russian statistics a 
 
 156
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 157 
 
 couple of Irish bulls, one hy a member of the 
 House of Commons, who exclaimed that he had a 
 public opinion of his own ; and his friend cried out 
 that " the Hon'ble Member was trying to thrust 
 this Bill down our throats behind our backs." 
 
 This is the type of trivial humour that enlivens 
 the " monotonous drip " of incessant talk in the 
 great palaver house. How different the general 
 run of speeches there, from the great speeches of 
 such men as Russell Lowell, about whom a note 
 pleasantly intrudes itself. 
 
 It is upon the famous speech made one night 
 in London, at the dinner of the Society of 
 Authors. A brilliant gathering of English men 
 and women, and LoweU was wittily impressive. 
 How silent was the room when he spoke those 
 oft-quoted, memorable words on London : " One 
 thing about London impresses me beyond any 
 other sound I have heard, and that is the low, 
 unceasing roar that one hears always in the air. 
 It is not a mere accident, like the tempest of the 
 cataract, but it is impressive, because it indi- 
 cates human will and impulse, and conscious 
 movement ; and I confess that when I hear it, I 
 almost feel that I am listening to the roaring 
 loom of time."
 
 158 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 There was another great moment in this speech, 
 when he was speaking of the characteristics of 
 the Americans. " We have our faults," he 
 exclaimed ; " I don't know where we get them 
 from," and then, with a significant pause, he 
 leant over the table, looked that assembly of 
 English men and women in the face, and softly- 
 said, " Do you ? " 
 
 The outbursting roar of laughter told the hit 
 he had made. Ah, it was a great speech ; a 
 reminiscence of delightful memory. 
 
 From the sublime to the ridiculous is a frequent 
 step in these notes, and one can imagine the 
 surprise of Madame at a Swiss pension, when an 
 English lady explained that, for comfort's sake, 
 " Je dors toujours avec deux matelots." Matelas 
 was the word she meant to use. 
 
 And from this question of mattresses for 
 Madame the notes fly off to the sleeping-clothes 
 of Fridtjof Nansen, whom I met on his return 
 from his Polar expedition, when he brought back 
 the clothes he had lived and slept in for fifteen 
 months. What a wiry, strenuous, dogged per- 
 sonage he was ! I saw him worried once — it was 
 at the Royal Geographical reception at the 
 Albert Hall. He was looking very anxious.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 159 
 
 Just before the meeting began, I think the 
 Prince of Wales, afterwards King Edward VII, 
 noticed it, for he began chatting to him ; but the 
 worried look increased when the preliminary 
 speeches began, but at last he seemed to recover. 
 I learnt afterwards that he could not see his wife. 
 She and Lady Markham were both blocked out of 
 the hall because they had no tickets, and it was 
 useless their saying who they were ; the ticket- 
 takers were inexorable, and it was only at the 
 last moment when a hall official was found to 
 explain, that the two most important women of 
 the whole assembly were able to get to their seats, 
 and reassure the hero of the hour that nothing 
 serious had happened to his wife, Eva Nansen ; a 
 charming woman and a delightful singer, but 
 alas, not for many years was her life spared to her 
 intrepid husband. 
 
 I see my note on the skis worn by Nansen's 
 crew is " Awkward to wear " ; but I have since tried 
 them on the Swiss mountains, and found them 
 by no means so awkward as they appear to be. 
 
 What an interesting cluster of names come 
 into this notebook amidst the notes on the 
 Tsar's coronation. The Bishop of Peterborough, 
 Bishop Creighton, was there to represent the
 
 i6o REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 English Church, also the Duke of Connaught, and 
 he who afterwards was known as the " mailed 
 fist," Prince Henry of Prussia ; and I see there 
 is my rough plan of the six tables of the dinner 
 given at the English Embassy by Sir Nicholas 
 O'Conor in honour of our Queen's birthday. 
 None of the Royalties at that dinner knew that 
 a solitary journalist was in the room, in a very 
 commanding position, looking down on them all. 
 
 The central round table was distinguished from 
 the others by having gold cups and tankards upon 
 it, instead of silver, as had the other five sur- 
 rounding tables. 
 
 It was a pretty sight when, at ten minutes to 
 eight, " God save the Queen " was played in the 
 Russian capital, and the Duke of Connaught led 
 in the Princess Marie of Roumania, that charm- 
 ingly pretty Princess at whose wedding I was 
 present at picturesque Sigmaringen, on the 
 Danube. Then came the Duke of Edinburgh, or 
 rather of Saxe-Coburg, her father, with the 
 Duchess of Connaught, and all the other Royal- 
 ties and notables. I sat and enjoyed the scene 
 for some little time, unseen by all there, and then 
 left for a great international dinner to corre- 
 spondents at the Hermitage.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS i6i 
 
 And here occurred more than one noteworthy 
 occurrence; but at the end of the dinner was the 
 most notable incident. A Httle Japanese corre- 
 spondent was placed in a tablecloth and tossed 
 high in the air ; the Russians and French said 
 jokingly they were introducing the Jap to 
 civilisation. 
 
 He bore it laughingly. The big Russians 
 little thought how these same little Japs would 
 quickly give them such a crushing lesson in 
 civilisation's art of war, ere but a few years had 
 elapsed. 
 
 The freedom of action of our English princes 
 and princesses at Moscow astounded the resi- 
 dents of Moscow. At the full-dress rehearsal 
 of the wonderful drama the Life of the Tsar, I 
 noticed the Duke of Edinburgh and his son 
 Duke Alfred of Saxe-Coburg, Prince Ferdinand 
 and the Princess Marie of Roumania, and her 
 mother, the imperious Duchess of Edinburgh, 
 come into the pit, or parterre. They looked 
 about and then took seats in the third row, as 
 ordinary mortals. A Russian who was with me 
 in a box would not believe the possibility of 
 such an incident. " I will not believe it," he 
 exclaims ; but at length had to allow himself 
 
 M
 
 i62 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 to be convinced that Grand Dukes would some- 
 times be as other mortals, and enjoy a rehearsal 
 from the pit. 
 
 There were wonderful sights in Moscow at 
 these coronation festivities of Nicholas II. 
 
 One of the strangest, a little incident seen but 
 by very few, was the ominous incident I referred 
 to in the ninth gossip. 
 
 It was after the coronation in the Cathedral 
 of the Assumption, and the Tsar with face of a 
 deathly hue, from fasting, fatigue, and nervous 
 strain, halted at the door of the Church of 
 St. Michael. Before entering, the Archbishop 
 advanced to asperge the monarch with holy 
 water, but the brush fell from the Prelate's 
 hands ; it was picked up by the Grand Duke 
 Vladimir, but it was defiled : and a terrible wait 
 occurred, the almost fainting Monarch being 
 supported by the Grand Dukes, and the Empress 
 with bowed head and worn face halting in the 
 crowd of notables, until a fresh brush was 
 brought, and the holy water duly administered. 
 An evil omen this, that was promptly fulfilled, 
 folk said, by the awful catastrophe on the 
 Khodinsky plain, and by many another tragedy 
 during the reign.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 163 
 
 I see my notebook ends with some notes on the 
 striking sermon preached by Bishop Creighton at 
 the EngHsh Church, upon " Diversity of Gifts." 
 A service where the Duke of Connaught was 
 present and was much touched by the pathetic, 
 reverential words upon the Hfe of his mother, 
 Queen Victoria ; and what a strange thrill 
 seemed to run through that little congregation 
 when, at the end of the service, " God save the 
 Queen " was played. 
 
 It is at such moments in foreign lands that the 
 greatness, the vastness of England's power and 
 majesty seems to come forth, from all the varied 
 struggles and dissensions that at home so obscure 
 her dignity and might. England, the Mother of 
 Nations, the Ruler of Peoples, the Leader of the 
 World in the gift of freedom and justice appears, 
 and one knows the proud feeling that asserts 
 itself in the words, " I am English."
 
 XXII 
 
 My little black notebooks bring back memories 
 not only o£ incidents and literary memories, 
 but of strange actualities that have befallen 
 men I have met, or men that my friends have 
 met. 
 
 Here is a note in the next book I take up 
 that carries me back to the time when I was 
 much interested in the lives of several who 
 were occupied in quelling the Mashona and 
 Matabele rising in South Africa. Colonel Colin 
 Harding, c.m.g., the discoverer of the source 
 of the Zambesi, and a man with a wonderful 
 record of great work, was then a " galloper " only, 
 and it must have been from his lips, or from those 
 of another^friend who was fighting in the same 
 rising, that came the story of Captain-Surgeon 
 Grey, whose horse so intelligently saved his life. 
 It was whilst riding with the ambulance in the 
 Hart Egg patrol that he was shot, and wounded 
 in the hip and knocked off his horse. He fell and 
 
 164
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 165 
 
 lay on his face in the grass, the enemy keeping up 
 their fire. The horse apparently did not at first 
 notice that his master was gone and trotted off 
 with the rear-guard, but then seems to have dis- 
 covered his loss, stopped, thought (shall we say ?) 
 and trotted back to where his master lay and put 
 his head down to see what was the matter. 
 Captain Grey saw his chance of life, caught the 
 reins, pulled himself on to the sagacious beast, 
 and managed to join the column and was saved. 
 And yet it was Captain Hayes, the great au- 
 thority upon horses, who once declared to me 
 that the horse is one of the stupidest of beasts. 
 
 Every one has heard of the Oxford boat that 
 was so nicely balanced that the men had to part 
 their hair in the middle lest they should capsize 
 her ; but Fridtjof Nansen in Greenland rode in a 
 yet more cranky craft, for they had to keep their 
 tongues pretty straight in their mouths or she 
 would go over. And in the midst of these hints 
 of desperate adventures in savage regions, there 
 drop into these notes quiet little bits of philosophy 
 from the Garden of Delights by an Abbess of 
 Hohenberg, wherein the high dame apostrophises 
 herself with the words, " Despise the world, 
 despise nothing. Despise thyself ; despise de-
 
 i66 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 spising thyself." What does she mean ? At 
 least there is much awakening of thought by the 
 words. Following this are words upon the French 
 Revolution that are well worth remembering and 
 quoting, in days when democracy is almost a 
 fetish, to be worshipped without debate or reason. 
 How quaintly the phrase runs : " Speaking of the 
 sovereignty of the people does not make the 
 people lit to be sovereigns," and then the Social- 
 istic idea of dividing up, is aptly hit by the passage, 
 " The pleasure of spending the money of other 
 people for one's own benefit, is probably one of 
 the oldest passions of humanity." Another note is : 
 "The abolition of religion, and weakness of the 
 Government cause, pushed the people to such 
 excesses " ; and yet they were to give to every man 
 in France two acres of land ; but this type of rule 
 led to forty, fifty, even to sixty a day being 
 guillotined. Truly other nations have blessed 
 England with object lessons in history; and there 
 follow on these notes of that awful time in 
 France, renewed in our own time under the 
 Commune, the names of two men who have made 
 history in England, Gordon and Cromer, It is 
 merely a little note that these two men met for 
 the last time in the rooms of the pleasant Turf
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 167 
 
 Club in Cairo ; a club the name of which rather 
 beHes its character, for most serious and por- 
 tentous have been many of the meetings and talks 
 held in its rooms. Well may some diplomatists, 
 still living, exclaim with the Httle French quota- 
 tion that creeps into this page apropos of ghosts, 
 *' ]e n'y crois pas, mais je les crains." Ghosts have 
 lost most of their terror, however, to-day, save for 
 those who give credit to spooks or spiritualism ; 
 but what must have been the terror of the old 
 days, when men and women were tortured, is 
 brought sharply to the mind by a whole series 
 of notes upon the dehcacies of torture under the 
 Inquisition. 
 
 Far too heavy these for gossip, but as a con- 
 trast to the hghter notes, here is just one on the 
 five degrees of torture. First, threatening to 
 torture ; secondly, taking to the place of torture ; 
 thirdly, being stripped and bound ; fourth, 
 being hoisted on the rack ; fifth, squassation, i.e. 
 pulled and let go. The victim was stripped to 
 nakedness, and then straight Hnen drawers were 
 put on. Then come the degrees of actual tor- 
 ture. No. I was simply called tortured, and 
 simply meant one squassation. No. 2 was well 
 tortured, and meant two squassations. No. 3 was
 
 i68 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 severely tortured with three squassations, and 
 No. 4 very severely, and had the additional 
 horror of added twistings, etc. 
 
 Small wonder that the chronicler of these 
 horrors goes on to say that one has seen several 
 who have been for ever lame after torture. 
 
 It is the fashion to-day to try to blot out the 
 memory of these horrors, but they went on in 
 the eighteenth century, for at Lisbon, in January, 
 1706, the most horrible deaths by slow burning 
 were inflicted at an auto-da-fe, in the presence of 
 the minister to the English factory, the King 
 of Portugal and his brothers. 
 
 What a leap from the hot, blood-stained air 
 of the horrible past, to notes upon talks with two 
 men of to-day of very different natures, Fridtjof 
 Nansen and Carl Peters, the one a clear-eyed, tall, 
 athletic, lithe-bodied man, the other a short, 
 quick little man, with somewhat bloated face, 
 bald-headed, with nervous, quick action. Peters 
 hated the English ; they had frustrated him more 
 than once. I said to him, " You were anxious 
 to get more territory for Germany, and if the 
 Germans had listened to you they would have had 
 more." " Five times as much," he exclaimed. 
 A man of varied fortunes ; intimate with the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 169 
 
 Kaiser at one time, so intimate that the Kaiser 
 would stop him if he met him on the Linden or 
 elsewhere, and talk ; then degraded and almost 
 banished, and afterwards obtaining a verdict 
 against those who had libelled him. A most 
 strange study in many ways of human nature. 
 What a contrast to Nansen and his yearnings, 
 in his solitude amidst Arctic ice, with all his 
 longings for news of his wife and child, and his 
 aspirations and high ideals of life. 
 
 As if in sarcasm at all this solidity, the next 
 page of my notebook has three curt little quota- 
 tions ; let me end this gossip with them. 
 
 One from Victor Hugo : " I only read the 
 books that are not read." Another in French on 
 republics : " Le tout un vol de sons dans un 
 bruit de parlotte " ; very expressive this, only the 
 -parlotte (chatter) so frequently meant murder, 
 unless you agreed with it. The third quotation ; 
 where does it come from ? I know not, but it 
 runs : " To require little, is better capital than 
 to earn much," a most excellent motto for all 
 authors, save only the very few.
 
 XXIII 
 
 The commonplace books of writers in past days 
 were often elaborate quarto volumes, in which 
 long extracts were carefully copied out with 
 great pains ; and these commonplace books often 
 made excellent reading of excerpts from forgotten 
 but pleasant books ; but my little black books are 
 rather of the waistcoat-pocket type of notebook, 
 for the prompt jotting down at the moment, of 
 an extract, or the coup d'ceil of a scene, or quick 
 notes of a conversation ; and so no lengthy piece 
 of literature appears in them, but many a flash of 
 thought, or a curt note on a passing incident, that 
 endues thought and awakens memories. 
 
 Here is a description of a rough sea by a Chinese 
 steward, as he looks plaintively at an empty 
 saloon dinner-table. " Heapy wobbly wobbly, no 
 gobbly gobbly." That, and the statement of 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the reckless passen- 
 gers " said their breakfast backwards, whilst he 
 
 was not so extravagant of his victuals," brings up 
 
 170
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 171 
 
 pretty realistically the state of travellers in a storm 
 at sea. And on the subject of eating, there comes 
 in a curious note upon a custom of Sir Walter 
 Scott's, told by Leslie the artist, that he at dinner 
 would eat heartily of many dishes and drink a 
 variety of wines, and at dessert drink port, and then 
 a servant would bring a small wooden bowl full of 
 neat whisky, which he drank off; afterwards he 
 would talk or write until midnight, refreshing him- 
 self with a few glasses of porter before going to bed. 
 
 In Scotland to-day it is not unusual to see a man 
 drink off a pint or so of beer and then a tot, and a 
 stiff one, of neat whisky ; but if Sir Walter kept 
 up his custom, small wonder that when the great 
 strain came, he broke down and died. 
 
 " A disciplined thunderbolt " is a curious note 
 that puzzles, but I see it is applied to the Red 
 Prince, that German leader who did great work 
 in the war of 1870. 
 
 And the date brings up many a memory of a 
 tramp I was doing in France, with a knapsack 
 on my back, in August and September of that 
 annee terrible, but one must not become historic 
 in these gossip chapters, and there rushes in as it 
 were a terribly sad note upon tragedy and beauty. 
 One of the saddest stories ever told me by
 
 172 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 man or woman was told by one of the sufferers 
 in the tragedy, whilst walking from one of the 
 Royal residences, that looks out on to St. James's 
 Park, to St. James's Square. 
 
 A Court beauty ! One of whom all the Royal 
 family spoke as the greatest beauty at Court. 
 It was her husband who was telling me the sad 
 story. There was always a hush as she entered 
 a room or a Drawing-room. Queen Victoria 
 spoke of her as the most lovely woman, and the 
 old Queen was a great lover of pure beauty. One 
 evening, in her dressing-room, she was taking down 
 a small iron box with some keys in it, and it fell upon 
 her chest, causing apparently only a slight injury ; 
 but a lump formed, and the doctors decided it must 
 be cut away. But again the growth came, an opera- 
 tion was necessary, and the whole of that beautiful 
 breast was taken away ; yet still the beauty of face 
 and form, now partly hidden, caused a hush in the 
 brilliant crowds, as she passed with her hidden 
 sorrow and mutilation among them. 
 
 Had they acted vigorously at first, the doctors 
 said they would have saved her life ; now they 
 feared the evil, but at least she was safe for three 
 years. But a son had been born since the fall of 
 the iron box. Had he inherited this terrible
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 173 
 
 cancer ? In three years' time to a week, the 
 terrible growth appeared again, and the beauteous 
 Court favourite died, and all the bitter sorrow 
 and anxiety of the husband was transferred to the 
 care of the boy. Was he safe from this awful 
 scourge ? The presage of evil bore heavily upon 
 the loving father as he yearned that his boy's 
 life might be spared, but he, the strong man, then 
 pouring out his heart to me as we walked round 
 the square, was dead himself within the year. 
 
 The hidden sorrows of the supremely happy, 
 or of those supremely happy to the eyes of the 
 world, would make a terribly saddening, and 
 yet to some who mourn, perchance, their evil 
 lot, a comforting article, but my notes would not 
 dwell on such a succession of tragedies. 
 
 They rush off to notes on a sermon by that 
 witty Canon Ainger at the Temple Church on 
 Palm Sunday, and then away to a night at the 
 Royal Geographical Society, when the Bristol 
 sailor who first landed on the mainland of America 
 was the subject of paper and discussion, when 
 a comparison was made between the documents 
 connected with Columbus and with Cabot ; 
 as the President, Sir Clements Markham, re- 
 marked, in the one case all were kept, in the
 
 174 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 other all lost ; and thus we know so little of the 
 Bristol venture, that was as plucky as the Genoese- 
 Spanish undertaking. 
 
 Weighty matter still, but a pleasant little 
 suggestion of savoir vivre comes in to lighten 
 matters in a note on how to live. " The present 
 should be the summer waves in which we are 
 floating, heedless of the shores of past or future." 
 
 Very pretty philosophy, much on a par with 
 the old philosophy that we can only live in the 
 present ; but suppose the present is, say, the 
 dentist's chair ; a possibility brought to the mind 
 by a note of the phrase that slipped from my lips 
 when once in that nicely arranged seat. The 
 dentist had expressed the hope that I did not 
 mind his little tortures. " It varies the monotony 
 of a healthy existence " came somehow or other 
 to my mind and lips, and so tickled the operator 
 that he laid down his drill, keeping me in suspense 
 during his laughter. Egotism this, repeating one's 
 own words, and aptly enough comes a note on 
 egotism, a little bit of American egotism, a book 
 by an American on joyful Russia, where the author, 
 with delicious impudence and naivete says : 
 " The bells of Moscow are about as celebrated as 
 those of Newport."
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 175 
 
 Think of it, the thousands of Moscow bells, 
 including the great Ivan Veliky bell, that gives 
 such a sonorous boom, filling in with a rich bass 
 the strange, wild cling-clang and rhythm of all 
 the other bells, — these compared to the bells of 
 one of the Newports of America ! 
 
 Truly some men travel in the body, with their 
 minds clinging to the native hamlet ; reminding 
 me of the old lady and gentleman who were talk- 
 ing, whilst sitting on a seat on CHfton Down, of 
 their great tour through Europe, and their Ustener 
 asked them if they went to Venice. " No," said 
 the old lady, " I don't think we went to Venice." 
 " Yes, we did," interjected the husband. " Don't 
 you mind we just drove round in a cab ? " 
 
 How a name calls up memories of incidents and 
 events that have agitated all England, nay, often 
 the world. 
 
 Here is a name, at the top of a page in this 
 notebook, — Governor Eyre, linked with that of 
 Tennyson, for it is a note upon Tennyson's 
 subscribing to the defence fund for Eyre, when 
 Gladstone thought Eyre was terribly in the wrong, 
 but Tennyson, and nearly all the intellectuals 
 of England with him, asked, " Could revolution 
 and massacre have been prevented otherwise ? "
 
 176 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 and so Tennyson sent a subscription as a protest 
 against a man being hunted down ; but Colonel 
 Eyre, the fine, stalwart, massive Englishman, the 
 man who with intrepid, dogged pluck was the first 
 to penetrate into Central Australia, and to walk 
 across the Great Australian Bight to King George's 
 Sound, in the years 1840 and 1841, was hunted 
 down and his career ended. 
 
 As he told me in a letter in the year 1898, 
 " The result, ruin to my career as a Governor of 
 twenty years' service, in four different colonies, 
 does not hold out much encouragement to public 
 servants to undertake responsibilities in circum- 
 stances of sudden emergency and peril. But there 
 is one thing the Government could not deprive 
 me of, the " Mens conscia recti." 
 
 Some time after this I had a long chat with 
 Governor Eyre in his quiet Devon home near 
 Tavistock, and he showed me some trophies of 
 his sons, who were still serving well the ungrateful 
 country — no, it was not England, but the party 
 Government of the moment who ruined Eyre, 
 as later on they ruined Gordon. 
 
 But pohtics are barred in these gossips, at least 
 nearly always ; so here this chapter had better 
 cease.
 
 XXIV 
 
 " Our bending author hath pursued his story, 
 In a little room confining mighty men." 
 
 Words that well apply to these old notebooks. 
 
 I open my little book and find hurriedly 
 scribbled notes, hardly decipherable. They were 
 written at an exciting moment, when the Presi- 
 dent o£ the French Republic, M. Faure, was to 
 land on Russian soil at Peterhof. Cannons were 
 firing near me and bands playing, and as the 
 President came along the little gangway on to 
 the pier, a few bars of welcome were played, and 
 then the Russian musicians, the bands of the 
 Autocratic Tsar (who, after a word with an 
 officer, followed the President), burst forth 
 with the fiercely democratic " Marseillaise." 
 When last had it been played on Russian soil ? 
 Never by Russian bands. What might it lead to ? 
 
 It seemed to thrill, and vibrate, and crash, and 
 then to wail importunely, and then denounce with 
 passion, as the tall President in civilian clothes 
 
 N 177
 
 178 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 marched beside, but with head and shoulders 
 above the Tsar, along the lines of Cossacks and 
 sailors drawn up on the pier. Then the French 
 and Russian flags were run up side by side on the 
 palace, an act that cost the French nation some 
 hundreds of millions in the shape of Russian 
 loans. How anxiously the world waited for the 
 word " alliance," that never came but in a 
 modified form from the lips of the Tsar. But 
 autocratic Russia got her millions from demo- 
 cratic France. 
 
 Wedged in between these notes on Tsar and 
 Tsarina, President and Grand Dukes, is perhaps 
 the best humorous description of golf ever given : 
 " Runnin' aboot wi' a bag o' sticks efter a wee 
 bit ba'." And then come notes on the review at 
 Tsarskoe Selo, when Louis Napoleon led his regi- 
 ment of Russian Guards past the President of the 
 French Republic and the Tsar of Russia, and 
 galloped up, lowering his sword to the salute. 
 Was ever a more ironic instance of historical 
 sarcasm enacted in the world's history ? A 
 Napoleon in the service of the Tsar, saluting the 
 honoured guest of that Tsar, the republican 
 French President ! 
 
 But that all the lavish hospitality showered —
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 179 
 
 fit word that, for much of it was hquid — on the 
 French visitors and correspondents was only 
 surface friendship, was proved by a remark made 
 to me by a high official, as we madly galloped off 
 the field in a troika : " These French corre- 
 spondents, when they are before our Emperor, 
 they should be more modest, they are disagree- 
 able." Ah, not many are left of them ; some 
 were excellent, ces Franfais, but some deserved 
 well such a reproach. 
 
 It is curious the contrasts in life, and in these 
 notebooks. What an intense contrast to this 
 scene of an Imperial Review in 1897 the next 
 words on the same page revivify ! 
 
 " George Muller. Fell asleep March loth, 1898, 
 in his 90th year." Words copied at his funeral, 
 from the plate on the coffin of the great philan- 
 thropist and orphan's friend. This was no pageant, 
 but the streets of the city of Bristol, where he 
 had lived modestly, and always in what might 
 even be termed poverty, were closely packed with 
 reverential respecters of his work. George 
 Muller was one of the few men who, receiving 
 tens of thousands, carefully refrained from taking 
 for himself more than sufficient for bare necessity. 
 His rooms were scantily furnished, his food was
 
 i8o REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 of the slightest and simplest, he indeed honour- 
 ably fulfilled his trust. 
 
 Notes upon an interview with another famous 
 Bristolian follow these notes upon George 
 Muller. A woman, whose glorious voice has 
 made her name known throughout the world — 
 Clara Butt. It was in her mother's home that I 
 was chatting with her. What absurd envious 
 stories have been circulated about her. The 
 penalty of fame. One characteristic touch in 
 our chat was her telling me her height : " Six 
 feet two inches and a quarter, and mind you give 
 the quarter." Her great wish was to take the 
 part of Cleopatra in opera, and Sir Arthur 
 Sullivan had a yearning to write such an opera ; 
 but to find an Antony to such a Cleopatra ! 
 
 But England does not hold us long ; we are 
 swiftly away again, to Lapland now, and amidst 
 the notes upon the Lapps, and reindeer, and pros- 
 pecting up in the Arctic circle, there comes in a 
 joke upon the awful plague of mosquitoes one 
 meets in the stunted fir forests in these northern 
 latitudes. It was a reverend canon who warned 
 me of the viciousness of these fierce insects, 
 telling me that " a good many of them weigh a 
 pound, and they sit on the trees and bark as the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS i8i 
 
 wretched traveller passes by." " Exaggeration, 
 Canon," I exclaimed, not promptly seeing the 
 jeu de mots. 
 
 What a good saying is that o£ the Lapps : 
 " Where there is room in the heart, there is 
 found room in the hut." 
 
 The etiquette in a Lapp hut is strict, master 
 and mistress having the place of honour farthest 
 from the door, the honoured guest coming near 
 them, the servants lying near the door, where the 
 smoke goes out. 
 
 Presumably it was on the road back from 
 Lapland, that I got a note upon the hours of 
 schooling enjoyed by Kaiser Wilhelm II when a 
 lad. Six hours in class and seven hours' home 
 lessons. Small wonder he has such an all-round 
 knowledge of things, if these were indeed the 
 hours he worked at lessons, knowing the immense 
 amount of work given to German children, the 
 note is probably true. 
 
 There is another en-route note from the far 
 North, upon the fact that at Kronberg Castle, in 
 Elsinore, in the Renaissance chamber, there are 
 full-length portraits of the Danish kings in 
 tapestry, and that Shakespeare's friends, Kemp, 
 Pope, and Bryan, acted there in 1586. I put a
 
 I«2 
 
 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 query, "Did young Shakespeare travel there also ?" 
 The note is from Jon Stefanson. 
 
 There is a sudden leap from this note upon the 
 greatest of England's, nay, of the world's writers, 
 to the name of a writer of the nineteenth century. 
 A man who, in the early years of that century, 
 made a name as the delineator of the Jack Tars 
 in the old wooden walls of England ; a contempo- 
 rary of Captain Marryat, but one who described 
 the seaman, whilst Marryat dealt with the naval 
 officer. Matthew Henry Barker, who wrote, 
 under the name of " The Old Sailor " many books 
 illustrated by Cruikshank. I see I was chatting 
 with his son, who told me interesting facts of 
 the men of his father's period, Clarkson Stan- 
 field, Douglas Jerrold, Jerdan, and others. One 
 of his treasures was a bit of the flag that covered 
 the dead body of Nelson; another the log-book of 
 the ship in which Falconer, the author of the 
 Shipzvreck, sailed. It seemed a breath of the 
 old salt sea hfe to chat with this old, interesting 
 man, for Robert Barker, the son, was over eighty 
 when these notes were written ; a rare link 
 with a type of life wholly vanished. The old 
 *' chanties " are at least being collected and pre- 
 served, i.e. the songs sung and invented by sailors,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 183 
 
 for inciting vigour and precision when hauling in 
 the anchors, or heaving at anything that needed a 
 long pull and a strong pull and a pull all together, 
 songs that were sung when men had to " know 
 the ropes," a saying that has now lost all meaning. 
 I saw the last review of the old three-decker 
 saiHng ships after the Crimean War, when steam 
 was used as an auxiliary force. What a change in 
 the life of the sea since those days ! 
 
 I see that the next name that comes into the 
 ken of my notes is that of a man who, in the 
 Maid of Sker, sketched in old Davy a good life- 
 portrait of an old sailor, but not of the man-of-war 
 type. 
 
 There are many notes upon chats with R. D. 
 Blackmore, but I have written upon his life in my 
 Literary and Biographical Studies, and though 
 the genial old scholar and gardener always tempts 
 one to talk about him, I must obey his wish not 
 to say any more about his home life. 
 
 How true it is, that in nearly all cases to 
 prophesy is dangerous, is exemplified most em- 
 phatically by positive statements made by 
 Matthew Arnold, who was too frequently over- 
 sure in his dogmatic statements. When he went 
 on his school-examining tour in Europe, he always
 
 i84 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 placed French education above the German, and 
 once stated that it was the Norman element in 
 England which has kept her from getting stupid 
 and humdrum, as the pure Germanic nations tend 
 to become ; and at another time he stated that 
 the French would beat the Prussians all to pieces, 
 even far more completely than they are beating 
 the Austrians (in 1859), there cannot be a 
 moment's doubt. Frenchmen always beat any 
 number of Germans. Had he no vision of 1870, 
 only ten years ahead ? Another strange prophecy 
 of Arnold is his statement that he agreed with 
 Lamartine that in a hundred years, that is from 
 1848, the continent of Europe will be a great 
 united federal republic, and England, with all her 
 colonies gone, will be in full steady decay. Europe 
 seems very far from being a federated republic, 
 and the colonies of England are by no means less 
 than they were in 1848, but there are yet some 
 thirty years to run of Arnold's century. 
 
 I follow this note from Matthew Arnold by an 
 item that would have pleased him as a school 
 inspector, about a lad's local pronunciation, and 
 how it would puzzle any foreigner who was a 
 student of our tongue. Phonetically put, the 
 phrase ran thus : " Goan oldered wur Garges " ;
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 185 
 
 said quickly, how many foreign students of 
 English could translate this into " Go and hold 
 her head, where George is " ? And yet perchance 
 Matthew Arnold thought education would sweep 
 away local English.
 
 XXV 
 
 " Why should I write this down, that's riveted 
 to my memory ? " Aye, it may indeed be 
 riveted, even welded into your existence, and 
 yet time will often vary the account of an inci- 
 dent, so that, unless written down at the moment, 
 memory is unreliable. But these gossips are all 
 from notes jotted down at the moment, whilst 
 incidents and personages filled the brain with 
 actualities ; or they may have been reminiscences 
 of reading, linked with many whom I have met. 
 Here is an interesting note of a conversation 
 with a gentleman who was taking his son to the 
 Jesuit Beaumont College, near Eton, where he 
 was being educated. He was speaking upon the 
 advance in the Church of England towards the 
 Church of Rome, and said that childish and 
 dishonest was the claim, that there had been no 
 break in the very thing so often denounced, 
 viz. the Mass. He did not think this action was 
 good, or even proselytising for the Church of Rome, 
 
 1 86
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 187 
 
 although the change that had come over the 
 English clergy in speaking of the Mass, and 
 Absolution, and confession, made the final step 
 to Rome so easy. 
 
 These gossips have naught to do with contro- 
 versy in politics or religions, and merely state 
 facts, but the note of this chat may in years to 
 come be useful as a bit of history of the period of 
 1898. 
 
 I see my next notes are jottings of a conversa- 
 tion with one of the most intrepid and modest 
 women I have ever met, Mary Kingsley. A 
 slight, fair-haired, lithely built woman, but one 
 who feared no hardship of savage travel. It was 
 at the time when, as Miss Kingsley said, the French 
 were advancing toward their great idea of a 
 great African Empire, and she expected them to 
 estabhsh a chain of posts from Lake Chad to 
 Uganda. Probably the Fashoda incident stopped 
 that. Our chat was full of interest ; and, 
 seated in her cosy London rooms, filled with 
 trophies of her travel, over a cup of tea, I won- 
 dered how this frail, slight woman could say she 
 was going out again, as soon as possible to wade 
 rivers and traverse swamps for exploration's sake. 
 Alas, the Boer War broke out, and she who
 
 i88 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 boasted to me, in all her hardships she had never 
 had fever, succumbed to enteric when bravely 
 nursing our sick soldiers. It came as a blow to 
 me when, shortly after the Boer War, I suddenly 
 found myself face to face in the Pitt Rivers 
 Museum at Oxford with a hideous ju-ju, and 
 other African trophies, I had last seen in Mary 
 Kingsley's rooms. My conversation with this 
 interesting and charming personage led into 
 talks with certain West African merchants upon 
 English work and English possessions in West 
 Africa, and the outcome of it all was summed up 
 in three notes. " In 1865 a Committee of the 
 House of Commons suggested we should get rid 
 of all our possessions in West Africa ; in 1874 we 
 could have had the whole of it ; in 1885 other 
 Powers began to step in." The dates are curiously 
 instructive as to home politics and colonial 
 affairs. 
 
 Africa, out of which comes always something 
 new, seems to have been prominently linked with 
 my work in this notebook, for the next name that 
 crops up is that of another worker in a very differ- 
 ent part of Africa, E. F. Knight, the war corre- 
 spondent and brilliant descriptive writer. I met 
 him at the Yorick Club on February 21st, 1898,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 189 
 
 on his return from the Soudan. He had ridden 
 from Berber to Suakim, and south to Massowah, 
 and on to Kassala, and back to Suakim, and 
 he looked remarkably hearty and strong after 
 his rough work in the Soudan campaign, finishing 
 up with this exploring ride. 
 
 How time and circumstances alter men's words ! 
 In the midst of all this African talk a note is 
 wedged in of a word of Canon Gore's at an 
 English Church Union meeting. He advised his 
 hearers to take as much liberty as they could 
 squeeze from any particular member of the 
 Episcopate ; they should draw back in order to 
 jump better. As he became afterwards a member 
 of the Episcopate, did he continue that advice 
 to his clergy, or did he come down heavily on 
 a drawer back who was preparing to jump 
 better ? 
 
 Incongruity is the dominant note in all these 
 little notebooks, and so there peeps into the pages 
 a recipe for writing a sonnet, and even as I 
 write, I was told by a young lady, who brought 
 me a volume of poems in MS. to look over, that 
 she thought a sonnet only had to have fourteen 
 lines. Perhaps the reprinting of this quaint but 
 accurate recipe may be of use. Certainly if
 
 190 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 the last line is obeyed it will save some editors 
 trouble. 
 
 " You build a sonnet on this simple plan, 
 Your first line ground out, take the next one, so : 
 And make it rhyme with the one next below. 
 Then next you match the first one, if you can : 
 Don't hurry the machine, the lines must scan. 
 With steady motion turn the crank, you know 
 'Tis not a sonnet if it limps, go slow. 
 Now find some rhyme for scan, for instance man, 
 As to the last six lines some latitude 
 May be allowed, take any word, as grove ; 
 Now hunt a rhyme for latitude, try shrewd. 
 This line must end with dove, or love, or shove ; 
 And this, with mood, or crude, or prude, or dude. 
 And there's your sonnet ! Throw it in the stove." 
 
 Our next little jump amidst the notes is scarcely 
 so incongruous, and yet to-day it is somewhat so, 
 for the theatre has Httle to do with poetry, save 
 of the sort for which the stove should be useful. 
 But this leap is into a long series of notes upon the 
 play-bills of the sixties of the nineteenth century. 
 Play-bills of the Old Theatre Royal at Bristol, the 
 house that was opened with an address written 
 by David Garrick, in the days when Hannah More 
 was his friend. These play-bills are of the date 
 when Mrs. Kendal, then known as Madge Robert- 
 son, Kate and Ellen Terry, Henrietta Hodgson, 
 afterwards Mrs. Henry Labouchere, Arthur
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 191 
 
 Stirling, George and William Rignold, and many 
 another actress and actor, afterwards to become 
 famous, were all playing in the stock company of 
 this theatre under the management of James 
 Henry Chute and Mrs. Chute, the latter being 
 the daughter of William Macready. 
 
 Many a time in those long bygone days have I 
 stood in the corner of the pit, and been moved 
 and enthralled by the vigour and natural dramatic 
 power of these genuine artists, who threw them- 
 selves into their work, and in later years as an 
 amateur, I acted upon the old stage with some 
 of the stock company. 
 
 The first appearance I have noted of Madge 
 Robertson is on October 1st, i860, when she 
 played Arthur in King John^ and in the same 
 month she played Leolyn, a dumb boy, in 
 One o'clock^ or the Knight and the Wood Demon. 
 On Easter Monday, April 21st, 1862, the bill 
 consisted of the Pee-p of Day and T^he Jngel of 
 Midnight, and I think this was the first dramatic 
 performance I ever witnessed. I see in August 
 of that year the " Immense Success of the new 
 Company " was announced, and as it included 
 Miss Kate Terry, Miss Robertson, Mr. and Mrs. 
 Charles Vincent, Ada Dyas, Miss Hodgson, and
 
 192 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 produced such plays as Extremes, and The Lady of 
 Lyons, with Kate Terry as PauHne, small wonder 
 at the success. Other plays this all-round com- 
 pany acted were Black-eyed Susan, Hamlet, The 
 Corsican Brothers, burlesques such as Endymion, 
 in which Kate Terry played Endymion, and Miss 
 Ellen Terry, who, it was explained in the bill, 
 was a sister of Miss Kate Terry, played Cupid, 
 and Miss Robertson was a nymph. 
 
 But a whole article could be written upon these 
 old play-bills ; they bring back many a dramatic 
 sensation and artistic treat, as enjoyable as 
 those experienced when, long years after, I sat 
 in the stalls on a first night of Henry Irving at 
 the Lyceum, and saw our old favourite, Ellen 
 Terry in her great dramatic triumphs. 
 
 This notebook ends with chats with two 
 enthusiastic workers each in his own sphere : 
 Wyke Bayliss the painter, and Count Liitzow 
 the English writer and Bohemian noble. 
 
 It was at the time when Wyke Bayliss was full 
 of the subject of the varied portraits of Christ. 
 He was a devotee and an enthusiast, loving his 
 work, and striving to put soul into it ; and he 
 was very emphatic about the true art in the 
 portraits of Christ, and the attempt to paint a
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 193 
 
 creed, when in the sixth century an effort was 
 made to paint a crucifix likeness. Curiously 
 enough, Count Liitzow, in his writings, has had 
 to deal very fully with these attempts to idealise 
 — or shall we say dramatise ? — Christianity, in 
 his accounts o£ the fierce, savage warfare of the 
 fifteenth and seventeenth centuries in Bohemia 
 and Central Europe. A warfare that is full of the 
 most awful tragedy ever perpetrated on earth. 
 The Count loves England, and especially the 
 literary life here, and his books on Bohemia and 
 Bohemian literature have helped to make known 
 to England of to-day, the country that mediseval 
 England influenced greatly, and the country 
 that in return upheld the teaching of Wyclif 
 until the middle of the fifteenth century. 
 
 The rise of the Slav in Europe was the subject 
 of our talk, but that is far too weighty and 
 ponderous a subject for this volume.
 
 XXVI 
 
 Neat, incisive, and effective repartee ! How 
 rarely one hears it, and what a pleasure it gives, save 
 to the crushed victim. I see a note, made soon 
 after the Cuban War, when I was present in 
 Burgos Cathedral at the requiem given for the 
 Spanish soldiers fallen in the war. They had 
 better have given warm coats to those who, 
 returned from hot and sunny Cuba, were 
 shivering in white canvas clothes in fiercely 
 chilly Burgos. 
 
 But it was not in Spain the repartee was given, 
 it was in America. A Yankee who wanted re- 
 flected glory accosted the hero of the American 
 Squadron, Admiral Dewey, with, " Admiral, 
 I bet you don't remember me." " You win," 
 said the Admiral, and walked on. 
 
 The entries in these notebooks leap from the 
 gayest scenes to the fiercest tragedy, and perhaps 
 no such long-drawn-out tragedy has ever been 
 lived as that by the veteran monarch who rules 
 
 194
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 195 
 
 over polyglot Austria. And I see two entries 
 made of words attributed to him, after two awful 
 incidents of that continuous tragedy ; the first 
 after the terrible suicide of his son Rudolf at 
 Meyerling, when he said of his wife, the brilliant, 
 handsome Empress, " I cannot thank Heaven too 
 much for giving me such a companion of my life," 
 and then, when all Europe was reading of the 
 mad rejoicing of the Dutch people at the corona- 
 tion of their little Queen Wilhelmina, there 
 came to us in Amsterdam the awful news of the 
 assassination of that faithful wife. The Empress 
 Elizabeth had been stabbed to death at Geneva, 
 and the Emperor cried out in his loneliness, 
 " Nothing is left me in this world." 
 
 Many of the notes in this little book are upon 
 Dutch incident, for I was present at that oath- 
 taking of the Dutch Queen. There was no 
 crowning ceremony. Some of the notes are 
 on Arnhem, that lovely hill district of Holland 
 that is so little known, and also upon Loo and 
 Soestdyke, the Queen's country palaces ; and on 
 Rosendaal, a wonderful old castle that retains 
 some of its underground dungeons, intact as they 
 were used in medieval and William of Orange 
 times. One dungeon a cell three feet by five feet,
 
 196 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 with walls eighteen feet thick, and the most 
 horrible sanitary arrangements, and leg irons in- 
 tact, giving one an awfully realistic glimpse of the 
 " Good old times." Our escort from this old 
 castle was a picturesque group of Dutch farmers 
 well mounted. 
 
 What an interesting group of people were 
 gathered together at this coronation of Queen 
 Wilhelmina ; but two men who stand out 
 clearly in my memory were Mesdag, the Dutch 
 sea-painter, and Joseph Israels, the famous artist 
 whose work is known everywhere. Mesdag in- 
 invited us to his studio with its glorious collection 
 of pictures ; a strong, robust, typical Dutchman, 
 and yet the frail, aged Israels outlived him. 
 
 Some of the stories that I heard at the country 
 homes of the little Queen were very character- 
 istic. One English governess she much disliked ; 
 and when she had to draw a map of Europe, to 
 spite her teacher she drew Holland large, but 
 England small. 
 
 Always very self-willed, when one of her 
 " dollies " was said to be ill, she was told she must 
 have the doctor ; but she exclaimed, " Doctor ! 
 no, I will cure her myself." But the Dutch 
 cherish every story of the traits of their Queen,
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 197 
 
 and at these festivities went mad, and threw away 
 all Dutch stolidity night and day for a fortnight ; 
 sang and danced, and made all strangers dance 
 with them down the Kalverstraat. One sedate 
 Englishman whom they captured and made dance 
 the whole length of that long street was Sir 
 Howard Vincent, m.p., the former mihtary head 
 of the Criminal Investigation Department. One 
 would have thought Sir Howard's strident voice 
 would have made them let him go, but he en- 
 joyed the experience. As a little interlude 
 comes the following : — 
 
 What a dehcate and delightfully put compli- 
 ment, is veiled in the reply of Lord Monck to 
 Thackeray, when Cardwell and Thackeray were 
 opponents as candidates for Parliament. Lord 
 Monck was supporting Cardwell, and after a chat 
 Thackeray exclaimed, " May the best man win ! " 
 " I hope not," was the courtier's reply to the 
 famous writer. 
 
 But a swift leap and I am away from noisy, 
 uproarious, convivial Holland, away to the blue 
 waters of the Mediterranean and the jutting 
 headland of Monaco, with its gay adjunct of 
 Monte Carlo. This paradise of devils, and yet a 
 paradise of beauteous Nature and good music.
 
 198 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 What stories I heard there from our Consul of 
 the incredible madness of those, bitten with the 
 gambling fever ; and what tales of lost oppor- 
 tunities of making a fortune. Here is one. 
 A handsome woman, bien -preserve, was standing 
 by the tables, consumed with envy of a friend who 
 was winning a sequence. " Give me a number," 
 she pleaded, and handing her a handful of louis, 
 he said, " Put them on your age, and you'll win." 
 " Faites vos jeux " was called. She hesitated ; her 
 age. Make that known, which she had so carefully 
 concealed ? Another moment, and " Rien ne va 
 plus " would be called. So down went the gold 
 on twenty-seven ; the ball wms trickling into its 
 number. " Rien ne va plus." " Trente-six ; 
 rouge gagne ! " was called. " Mon Dieu ! " she 
 screamed ; " c'est mon age exacte ! " Gold and 
 secret both gone ! 
 
 Such little scenes are common enough, if one 
 quietly watches the players, though the exclama- 
 tions are rarely heard round the tables ; but 
 follow the player who creeps silently away from 
 the tables, and then the truth is often heard. 
 
 Still further south goes the little book to Egypt, 
 and I see the notes are upon an interview with the 
 man who did so much to give justice to the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 199 
 
 fellahs in Egypt, Sir John Scott. I had met him 
 in Cairo, when, as special correspondent for the 
 Pall Mall Gazette, I was going over the prisons 
 and law courts of Egypt, after travelling up the 
 river. But these notes were taken at a later time, 
 when Sir John Scott had returned to London, 
 after a most interesting and busy life in India and 
 Egypt. 
 
 His rooms looked out on to a bit of Egypt, 
 for, from a corner window one could see the 
 obelisk on the Embankment, looking so sadly 
 against the murky sky of London, instead of the 
 clear, deep, hot blue heaven of Egypt. 
 
 Sir John's rooms were full of Egyptian curios : 
 bronze and glazed gods, Osiris and Pasht, Isis 
 and Amen Ra. Prehistoric flints and the later blue 
 gods were mingled together, showing glimpses 
 of the life in many ages of these Egyptians, to 
 whom Sir John had given, for the first time in 
 their ages of history, equal justice to rich and poor. 
 
 Amongst the books on his shelves were Tour- 
 guenief. Browning, Carlyle, and Rossetti. It 
 was interesting to hear him give the reply of the 
 old Sheikh when he was questioned as to whether 
 under the English rule there was not better 
 justice. " Oh, yes," said the Sheikh. " Is there
 
 200 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 not more water ? " " Oh, yes," was the reply. 
 " Is not Hfe safer ? " " Yes." " And to whom 
 do you owe all this ? " " It is the will of Allah," 
 came as reply. No word of the English as His 
 instruments. 
 
 I had seen the old prisons and old law courts, 
 and knew what a wondrous transformation had 
 been effected, and it was interesting to talk to 
 Sir John of his reforms. 
 
 *' Ah," he said, " are you going out again ? " 
 and then he quoted in French the old saying, 
 " He who has drunk of the Nile will return to 
 drink of it again," and, surely enough, before long 
 I was again on the banks of the old Nile ; but ere 
 then, Sir John had travelled over the Styx, to 
 begin his work in other worlds. 
 
 I see there are entries following these Egypt 
 notes, upon a book that is but little known, and 
 yet it is one of the most delightful books of travel 
 I have ever read, A Vagabond in Spai7i, by a 
 Mr. Luffmann, delightful in style, and full of good 
 things. 
 
 Here is a comforting extract, full of the best 
 of vagabondage : " I notice nearly every one 
 looks back with regret on the past. As for me, I 
 am satisfied with the present I know more than
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 201 
 
 I did yesterday, and this is the only kind of wealth 
 I care to heap up." 
 
 This is of the same type of happy philosophy 
 as the exclamation of T. E. Brown, the 
 Manx poet : " Bill of fare. Poh ! I value not 
 your bill of fare, give me your bill of com- 
 pany," 
 
 There was a curious resemblance between 
 Brown and R. D. Blackmore ; both were Oxford 
 men of scholarly fame. Blackmore became noted 
 as a market gardener and " the writer of a novel 
 called Lorna Doone,'' the public ignoring nearly 
 all his other delightful work ; and Brown was 
 annoyed that he was being focussed as a dialect 
 poet. " Shall I put Fellow of Oriel ? " he asked. 
 Just as Blackmore asked if people did not think 
 he, the gardener, could have written that transla- 
 tion of the Georgics, a translation still widely 
 used. 
 
 Both men loved manly, robust, clean work. 
 Brown did not like Hardy's later works. " Hardy 
 does not know his people," he wrote, " and for 
 sensational effect will take one of his own sweet 
 countrywomen and drag her through all this 
 impossible and inconsistent dirt. Don't tell me 
 this is the aim of a true artist."
 
 202 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Both would have agreed with the words of a 
 Hbrarian at the Congress in New York, who said, 
 " The true question to ask of any book is, Has it 
 helped any human soul ? " 
 
 But my notes leap away from this thoughtful 
 talk on books to a little story of autocracy from 
 St. Petersburg ; of how the Empress Catherine, 
 in the garden there, saw an early snowdrop, and 
 gave an order it was not to be plucked ; so a 
 sentry was placed there ; and there a sentry 
 patrols to this day, guarding the memory of this 
 little snowdrop.
 
 XXVII 
 
 A TRITE and triste little quatrain wherewith to 
 start a gossip chapter, from a monument to a 
 shipwright and mariner in Cumnor Church : — 
 
 " Our Life is ever on the wing, 
 And death is ever nigh ; 
 The moment we begin to live, 
 We all begin to die." 
 
 A veritable truism, but one that need throw no 
 gloom over our gossip, unless we live as suggested 
 by another note : — 
 
 " The petty done, the vast undone," 
 
 and yet, as a fact, that is how we all must live. 
 The mightiest hero deals but with the petty, 
 when eternity, or the system of the universe, is 
 considered. 
 
 Quaintly enough there follows a note upon a 
 book that approaches the immortal, the ever- 
 renascent Robinson Crusoe. The note tells how 
 it was inspired and where, even the very house. 
 A Mrs. Daniells was living in the corner house 
 
 203
 
 204 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 of St. James's Square, Bristol, the house diagon- 
 ally opposite to the narrow entrance to the square 
 leading in from the St. James Barton, when she 
 was visited by a Mr. Alexander Selkirk, at the 
 time when she was accustomed to entertain 
 Daniel Defoe ; and it was in her house that 
 Selkirk told his adventures. This statement, 
 made in the Bristol papers, January, 1901, 
 brought forth an interesting confirmation from a 
 Miss P. A. Fry, of the well-known Quaker family 
 of Frys, stating that Defoe, at the time he was 
 visiting Mrs. Daniells in St. James's Square, was 
 living at the Star Inn, in Castle Street, Bristol. 
 
 An interesting note this upon a world-famous 
 book ; followed by a little quatrain upon Hfe and 
 our friends, or famiHars,with no note from whence 
 it comes : — 
 
 " Have communion with few, 
 Be familiar with one. 
 Deal justly with all, 
 And speak evil of none." 
 
 Most excellent advice ; but how to choose the 
 one ? Even King David had to reproach his own 
 familiar friend. 
 
 Ah, these little books are full of quaint con- 
 ceits upon life. Concise dicta which clearly 
 give rules of Hfe that we all know are good ; and
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 205 
 
 then, in the midst of them, come the notes of the 
 sermon preached at the little church of Whipping- 
 ham on February 4th, 1901, in memory of Queen 
 Victoria, who had so often worshipped with her 
 husband and children in that church. She, 
 perhaps, had learnt most truly the secret of how 
 to live, in spite of her isolated position. 
 
 And quite apropos there comes jostling these 
 notes a story on a Scotch sermon she would have 
 enjoyed. It tells of a preacher in a Scotch kirk 
 whose " seventhly " was elongated ; and a man 
 coming in late asked " What his grunds [anglicey 
 texts] were ? " " Eh, mon," said the sexton, 
 " he's just left his grunds half an hour sin' ; 
 and he's just swummin', and swummin', and 
 swummin'." 
 
 It is probably the fact that I was one of the 
 four or five special correspondents who were 
 admitted to Osborne on the day of the funeral 
 of Her Majesty that influences the notebook in 
 use at this moment. The notes upon Royal 
 lives are frequent, and there is one upon the 
 origin of our national air, " God save the King," 
 that hardly coincides with the often accepted 
 statement that it was composed by Dr. Henry 
 Carey. It is strange that there should be any
 
 2o6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 doubt about so modern an air used by us, and by 
 the Germans, as a national air. My note has it 
 that it was composed by a younger son of a 
 Somerset family, whose pedigree may still be 
 seen at Shapwick Manor, amidst the turf moors 
 of Somerset ; and that the composer was a 
 Dr. John Bull, who was born in 1563 and died 
 in 1628. He was a Musician to the Taylors' 
 Company, and they gave a feast to King James, to 
 celebrate that monarch's escape from the plot of 
 Guy Fawkes, the air was sung by a choir of 
 boys, but there is no reference to the composer 
 of the words. Books of reference state that Dr. 
 Bull was Musician to Gresham College and to 
 James I. Would not a Httle careful referencing 
 put this really interesting point beyond a doubt ? 
 At least, we might settle that it is an English air, 
 and not German. 
 
 But matters of research and of solemnity do 
 not hold domination long in my little books. 
 Like MoHere, I take my good things from 
 wherever I meet with them, from chat, or read- 
 ing, or incident ; and in leaps an Irish story, a 
 soldier's tale, with no note as to whence it comes. 
 
 A private, who had let himself go, was run, 
 drunk, into the guard-room ; and the next
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 207 
 
 morning, in his muddy tunic and torn trousers, 
 was marched across the parade before the whole 
 regiment. When he got to the end of the Hne 
 he turned and said : " Thank ye. Colonel. 
 Faith, it's one of the foinest regiments I've ever 
 seen. Ye may dismiss them." 
 
 By way of a contrast, there comes a little 
 incident which happened at Bristol, when Bristol 
 had re-established its bishopric, and built a 
 palace for the new Bishop, who still holds sway 
 in the Western diocese, Bishop G. Forrest 
 Browne. The palace was not yet well known, 
 and one day the new Bishop sent a wire to 
 " Browne, Palace, Bristol," that a carriage 
 should meet him. But there was a better-known 
 " Palace " in Bristol, a music-hall ; and the wire 
 came during rehearsal, so the manager announced 
 the fact, and called out, " Do any of you Johnnies 
 know of this ? " But they all decided there was 
 no " Browne " taking a turn at the Palace that 
 night ; the Bishop took a cab. 
 
 From the same town comes a delightful mixed 
 metaphor. A member of the School Board, 
 speaking of the extra holidays because of the 
 Coronation, said, " The teachers would come back 
 like lions refreshed with new wine."
 
 2o8 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 The sayings of the quarter educated, who so 
 often get themselves elected upon town councils 
 and other public bodies, are often delightfully 
 amusing ; they ignore the apt quotation of one 
 of their members, who reminded his fellow- 
 members : — 
 
 " A little learning is a dangerous thing, 
 Drink, deep or taste not the ' aperient ' spring." 
 
 And so they say queer things, as did one who, 
 knowing nothing of books, was, of course, placed 
 on the Library Committee ; and speaking at a 
 festive gathering, he enlarged upon the antiquity 
 of his family. He had lately been informed by a 
 pedigree dealer that he was of an ancient house. 
 He referred to a noble lord of the district, and 
 said his own family went much further back 
 than did the noble lord's ; some of them went 
 on the Crusades, and one of them wrote " Dooms- 
 day Book." 
 
 It was the same councillor who advised his 
 electors on one occasion that " they were in a 
 tight place. So you must put your necks in the 
 collar, your shoulders to the wheel, and pull for 
 all you're worth." 
 
 I light upon quite a group of these queer say- 
 ings. Here is one of an old gardener upon the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 209 
 
 approaching marriage of one of his young 
 mistresses, the plainest daughter of the house. 
 " Wal now. Them that's the least loikly, is 
 sometimes more loiklyer, than them that's the 
 most loiklyest." 
 
 And what about the Captain of Volunteers, 
 who, praising his company, said, " Our Company 
 has made great strides, but do not let us rest on 
 our oars, or we shall fall into the fire " ? 
 
 But we break away from this and dive into 
 deeper work ; a very easy thing to add more solid 
 work, but how, then, could one dive into solids ? 
 And yet the phrase is often used. 
 
 Hannah More comes upon the pages, and a note 
 is made that an American writer says she was born 
 at the little school in Stapleton, whereas her birth- 
 place was the old grey school-house that stood at the 
 head of Fishponds Common, adjoining the church. 
 True, Fishponds was in Stapleton parish, but the 
 two villages were more than a mile apart. I well 
 remember in the fifties of the nineteenth century, 
 the building being used as a Sunday school and 
 living-house, a purpose apropos of the work of 
 Hannah More, who was one of the first to begin 
 to teach village children, and was served with a 
 writ by the farmers of Wedmore, in Somerset, for
 
 210 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 teaching children without a Hcence. There peep 
 in between other items, notes of a meeting of the 
 National Home Reading Union, when such men as 
 Frederic Harrison, Michael Sadler, Lord Reay, 
 and Lewis Paton were amongst the speakers, 
 and the last, referring to some speeches, said 
 he wished to " bring them down from the 
 mountains to Mother Earth " ; surely the 
 mountains are part of our earth. There were 
 other well-known men at the meeting. Sir 
 Joshua Fitch and Sir James Yoxall ; and yet how 
 little does such a meeting as this help to keep 
 back the flood of inane or worse reading ; we 
 can find excuses for all our faults, like the Irish- 
 man who was blamed for putting up a crooked 
 wall. " Shure and there isn't a straight piece of 
 string in all that'woman's shop."
 
 XXVIII 
 
 I REOPEN my notebooks and see words hastily 
 scrawled at the last pubhc function performed in 
 England by Queen Victoria. A busy, hard, 
 eventful day. A lovely autumn day in Novem- 
 ber, with some of the elms on CHfton Down still 
 in golden glory, as the old Queen drove beneath 
 them on her way to open a convalescent home 
 on Durdham Down. 
 
 Some curious incidents happened on that day 
 of the type that never gets chronicled. One very 
 disconcerting incident to the special corre- 
 spondents was, that after the ceremony at the 
 Council House, on hasting to the telegraph 
 office to get off the wires, not a soul was there to 
 take them ; and yet the ceremony at the home 
 had to be followed up. The office was open, but 
 all the clerks had gone to see the Queen, and 
 no amount of hammering or shouting made a 
 clerk appear. At last a porter turned up, and 
 precious messages were entrusted to him, and as 
 the streets were blocked by a vast crowd, a cab 
 
 211
 
 212 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 drove me madly, against all rules, the reverse 
 route of the procession, for it was still being kept 
 open, and the home was reached before the 
 Queen arrived. 
 
 What is fame was well illustrated by the 
 appearance of Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Baronet, 
 in a Windsor uniform. " Who is that ? " asked 
 one lady. On being told, she said, " I did not 
 know he was a knight " ; and a well-known 
 Nonconformist divine, on seeing him, said, " I 
 did not know Sir Michael was in the Army." 
 
 Side scenes at Royal shows should make a good 
 title for an article. The only time I saw genial 
 King Edward really angry was at the opening of 
 the Imperial Institute. It had been arranged 
 that the Queen should come from her specially 
 fitted boudoir out on to the top of the great flight 
 of steps, and from thence have the vista of the 
 building and its packed audience in the galleries 
 and terraces pointed out to her. It was the only 
 chance many in that vast audience had of seeing 
 Her Majesty, and when Prince Albert Edward 
 stepped out to see all was ready, he found a con- 
 fined, cramped little circle of notable guests, 
 blocked in by the Gentlemen-at-Arms, no digni- 
 fied space for Her Majesty. He was savage, and
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 213 
 
 looked it, said a few curt words, that " it would 
 not do," and retired to the boudoir. The group 
 was pressed back, more space was given, and then 
 he came forth again. 
 
 " Ah, that is better, that is better," he ejacu- 
 lated, and again he retired, and brought out his 
 aged mother leaning on his arm, and at the 
 head of the steps she received the plaudits of the 
 thousands. 
 
 But from Royal shows we leap to the king of 
 dramatists, and a note from the Frankfurter 
 Zeitung, on a document found at Elsinore. This 
 states that the Burgomeister erected a wooden 
 fence there in 1585, but it was destroyed by a 
 troupe of Enghsh actors, giving the names of 
 some who were in Shakespeare's company of 
 players, to whom I refer in a former gossip. 
 
 This may account for Shakespeare's intimate 
 knowledge of Elsinore and its platform, half 
 earth, half cellarage. 
 
 What queer little notes intrude amidst this 
 solid suggestion. Here is one of a Canon B. at 
 sea in the Bay of Biscay, who had agreed to hold 
 a service, but only got as far as " The Scripture 
 moveth us in sundry places," when he had to 
 escape from the saloon.
 
 214 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 I light soon after upon this sentence : " No 
 word of mine shall blot a human soul." Had 
 " written " prefixed " word," it would be an 
 almost impossible and yet an attainable aim ; 
 the spoken and written words of a whole life 
 must, alas, blot and smudge other lives, but not 
 with ineradicable blurs. 
 
 Then, as intense sarcasm, there follow a batch 
 of notes upon education — the spread of educa- 
 tion, and the schemes for educating the people — 
 and such names appear as R. B. Haldane, 
 R. Morant, and others ; yet how often the 
 outcome of all this education seems to be to 
 teach the masses to read words that blot the 
 human soul. 
 
 We leap from these educational squabblings 
 over Bills that are narrowly sectarian, to the 
 wider, more breezy, purer life of the explorer, and 
 yet one of these gives a sentence that explains all 
 this argument. 
 
 It is Fridtjof Nansen who exclaims, " Man 
 wants to know. When he ceases to want to 
 know, he ceases to be a man " ; only a paraphrase 
 this of Aristotle, who said, " All men are by nature 
 actuated by the desire for knowledge." 
 
 If this be so, how faulty must be our system of
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 215 
 
 primary education, for the masses seem to feel 
 naught of this desire for knowledge. 
 
 It is only with the very few that educators 
 succeed in making men love knowledge, and this 
 is exemplified curiously enough in a batch of 
 notes that follow, upon an interview at No. 11 
 Downing Street with the Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach; " Black 
 Michael," as he was called by those who feared 
 his straightforward hitting. 
 
 In talking with him of his early days he said, 
 " Education was not my hobby. I did not work 
 at school. Boys laughed then at foreign languages 
 and mathematics. I did work at Oxford ; in fact, 
 I am really self-educated." The chat in that dull, 
 dark, historic little house occurred many years 
 ago ; but how truly some of the words said then, 
 that I did not print at the time, have come true ; 
 for example, " Germany is more dangerous than 
 Russia," and that " Russia was too well organised 
 to be broken up," " German Socialism was more 
 likely to break up that country." And in close 
 proximity to these notes there is one upon a 
 Dr. Lindelof, a most learned and interesting per- 
 sonage I met in Helsingfors, who had to resign 
 his position as head of education there, because
 
 2i6 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 he ventured to write and speak o£ Finland from 
 a national point of view. Russia has again crushed 
 down rebellion by sheer force, not by broad- 
 minded government. Her vast bureaucracy still 
 holds sway. 
 
 An amusing article might be written upon the 
 exaggerated phraseology of critics. Here is a 
 note upon a local writer's criticism of a concert 
 in which the famous contralto Clara Butt was 
 singing ; it speaks of the " tonal banquet " and 
 then, describing the rendering of a song, in 
 speaking of the words states : " Their peaceful, 
 suave, dramatic, or impassioned character are 
 enhanced by the orchestral coloration and garni- 
 ture." 
 
 From such a reckless splasher of words, we pass 
 to a note from some original documents connected 
 with " Tom Macaulay " and upon his father 
 Zachary's first meeting with SeHna Mills, who was 
 to become the mother of " Tom." It was at 
 Cowslip Green, at the house of Hannah More, 
 that Selina first saw Zachary, but I have written 
 fairly fully upon Zachary's letters upon his 
 marriage and early wedded days, in my Literary 
 and Biographical Studies^ and so gossip no more 
 on them here ; and the same thing applies to a
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 217 
 
 series of notes from documents giving the 
 history of Osborne as the island home of Queen 
 Victoria and Prince Albert. Many of these 
 notes have most intimate touches of the home 
 life of those devoted lovers. I was fortunate 
 in being granted a sight of them, and in King 
 Edward's permitting my pubhcation of some of 
 the facts, he graciously retaining the first proof 
 copy of the volume. 
 
 This Httle black book seems crowded with 
 notes of high import ; from Royalties we leap to 
 foreign competition, and some striking words of 
 men Hke R. B. Haldane and Sir Alfred Jones. 
 
 Here is a dictum that is full of sound advice : 
 " If there are a few left who do not understand, 
 give them fifty pounds and then compel them to 
 travel " ; but crowds travel, and spend the fifty 
 pounds, and come back having gone the usual 
 round and learnt nothing. The speaker did not 
 mean that sort of travel. 
 
 But with a leap we are away and in the swing 
 and bustle and breezy excitement of Eights Week 
 at Oxford. Notes of the famous 1901, when 
 five boats crashed all of a heap together ; 
 Queen's, Jesus, Wadham, John's, and " Cats," an 
 exciting scene, and I was there to see, with a son
 
 2i8 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 rowing in one of the cut-up boats. I found it a 
 useful incident for my book The Inseparables. One 
 incident I did not use ; of a white-headed old 
 gentleman tumbling into the river from a barge, 
 and being fished out. 
 
 Notes upon strange incidents absolutely pillule 
 in this little notebook. Here is the name of 
 a well-known Roman Catholic Bishop with 
 whom I was a guest in the house party of a 
 Roman Catholic Earl. His name comes into a 
 terrible scandal in the Roman Church, one of the 
 strangest ever divulged ; and this Bishop in a 
 weak moment attacked the Abbess, who was 
 divulging the secrets, as an Agnostic ; the Abbess 
 retorting with the statement that the Bishop knew 
 her for years as an Agnostic, for she confessed 
 to him ; and yet she held her position until the 
 awful scandal, that broke up the community in 
 Rome, exploded upon the world. 
 
 Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. One 
 cannot take the strangest incidents one meets 
 with in real life, they are far too improbable for 
 fiction ; and some beauties, did they know their 
 fate, would wish they had the plain features of 
 an unfortunate maid " whose face was so ugly 
 it would stop a clock."
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 219 
 
 What tragedies in real life often centre round a 
 pretty face ! There comes into my notebook a fair- 
 haired, blue-eyed, charming-featured girl, living 
 in an old house with a fruit-tree-shadowed garden. 
 A great flirt, sought after by many a young fellow, 
 and living near by, is a handsome young man of 
 the fair, Scandinavian type ; a good match, say the 
 neighbours. But what is the life history ? The 
 young man goes abroad, and the young girl 
 flirts on, and at last marries a rich man in a very 
 low type of business ; but he speculates, commits 
 suicide, and his wife, enceinte at the time, goes 
 mad ; and the pretty face of the bygone days is 
 immured in an asylum. The young man returns 
 to England and marries a rich and very religious 
 woman ; and passes through some terrible vicissi- 
 tudes. What a drama ! that with so happy an 
 opening ends in an awful tragedy. Whereas, had 
 these two young people been happily wedded, the 
 story might have been so happy in its ending.
 
 XXIX 
 
 " We are but tiny atoms on a little world, 
 amidst God's vast universe " ; such is the head- 
 ing of my next little notebook. Yet the too 
 frequent conception of God is the parochial one, 
 with no idea of the vast systems of creation, all 
 fitting into a wondrous unity, overruled by 
 " Our Father." A deep thought this to com- 
 mence a gossip, but the charm of gossip is 
 variety, and the next note upon the work of 
 Lord Avebury, with whom at the date of these 
 entries I was linked upon various matters, is 
 very apropos ; for, in speaking of Sir John 
 Lubbock's home in Kent, the note recalls the 
 fact that the Avebury grounds run up to 
 the village of Down, and in this village of 
 Down lived Darwin, and here he wrote his 
 Origin of Species, a note given me by a resident 
 in the district. 
 
 But we have to live in this little world, and that 
 it is vast enough for study, in the little span of 
 earth's time allotted to us, is fully proved by the
 
 MEN AND MATTERS 221 
 
 next note, that is tells of the work of Harry de 
 Windt, whom I met again on his return from his 
 terrible journey overland from Paris to New York, 
 a journey that took him into that fierce district in 
 Northern Asiatic Russia where the averaged tem- 
 perature was fifty-one degrees below zero, and 
 even fell to eighty. It was somewhere up 
 in these latitudes that he came across a little 
 unknown settlement of political prisoners. One 
 prisoner was a woman, who had intended to 
 assassinate the Tsar Nicholas II on his coronation. 
 A thrill went through me as he told me how she 
 had a bomb concealed in a case in the form of a 
 prayer book, for did her seizure account for an 
 incident that sent our hearts into our throats, 
 whilst we, at the coronation at Moscow, were 
 waiting for the Tsar to come oat of the Cathedral 
 of the Assumption, and cross the square to the 
 Cathedral of St. Michael ? 
 
 He did not come, and suddenly, in the vast 
 crowd, there was a thud and a moving struggle, 
 the dust went up, and then all was quiet ; still 
 the Tsar did not come, but when he did come, 
 it was not from the appointed door, but from an 
 unexpected opening between the tribunes, and 
 when he stepped out from beneath the canopy near
 
 222 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 where I was placed, he looked deadly blue-white ; 
 it was at that moment I was able to take the 
 photograph of the scene, afterwards enlarged by 
 Russell, our Court photographer, for His Majesty 
 and the Grand Dukes. Was this thud and scuffle, 
 about which we never heard a word, the seizure 
 of this woman, who told her story to my friend 
 de Windt in the icy North ? 
 
 From the blasts of these frozen regions to 
 Egypt, to sunny, palm-shaded Thebes, with the 
 impressive note, " Egypt is a palimpsest in which 
 the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran 
 over that." A note this from the writing of that 
 remarkable woman Lady Duff Gordon, with whose 
 work I became linked by my conversations with 
 Mustapha A'gha, one of her proteges. 
 
 How astounding to him was the change wrought 
 in Egypt by British rule, from the days under 
 Ismail Pasha and the French influence, when Lady 
 Gordon could say, " The courbash (whip) has 
 been going on my neighbours' backs and feet all 
 the morning, one man having a thousand lashes 
 on his feet, and five hundred on his loins," to the 
 days when I was chatting with him under Lord 
 Cromer's rule in the 'nineties, when even a fellah 
 had justice against a Mudir.
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 223 
 
 Perhaps the very summit of intense resignation 
 was reached in the Egyptian who said, " My 
 master, I will always thank Allah for this day." 
 " Why ? " asked the master. " Because never 
 again can I be so unhappy as to-day " ; and what a 
 depth of thought there is in that attribute of 
 God, " He who separates us " — a phrase used 
 by the Moslem to those who hold a religion they 
 can respect ; for by religions even are we 
 separated. 
 
 But we are carried away to Hghter thoughts by 
 a curious little note on Dumas -pere, the magician 
 whose work still holds sway, though the present 
 generation of readers know less than their fore- 
 runners of this charm. What Heine thought of 
 him is crystallised in the phrase uttered when 
 some one spoke of Dumas's vanity and egotism : 
 " However great might be his vanity, it could 
 never reach up to the knees of his talent." 
 
 The references in this notebook seem to be 
 wholly upon thoughtful matters. There comes 
 in after this peep at Heine a series of notes upon 
 the life of the Wedgwoods, who lived at the 
 big Cornwallis house that I can see from the 
 windows of my room where I am now writing, 
 looking out upon the fields and trees that still
 
 224 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 give pleasure beneath the great house, although 
 we are in the heart of Clifton, now linked with 
 Bristol. 
 
 How few know that Lord Salisbury was linked 
 by marriage with the family of the famous 
 potters ; and there also come interesting notes 
 upon the families of the Macaulays and Mills, 
 made whilst I was looking up all the links between 
 Lord Macaulay and the home of his mother, 
 Selina Mills, the daughter of the Bristol book- 
 seller, and the friend of Hannah More. 
 
 But gleams of humour give lightness to the 
 notes. The changing fashions in the Church of 
 England are well illustrated by the saying of the 
 old beadle who was plaintively lamenting new- 
 fangled ideas : " Well, sir, you see," said he, 
 " the old parson used to call me a beetle, but the 
 next, he said beetles was out o' fashion, so he 
 called me a sextant, and now this incumbrance, 
 he calls me a virgin, so I don't rightly know 
 what I be." 
 
 The words " journey to Tiflis," bring up 
 recollections of a visit to that still half-Persian 
 city, where my old friend Friedrich von Boden- 
 stedt spent many years of his life, and wrote those 
 poems of " Mirza Schaffy," that foreran the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 225 
 
 vogue of Omar Khayyam. Russian, Batoum, and 
 Crimean notes. Prince Galitzin's name comes in 
 on the first page, with a reference to his wearing a 
 coat of mail, since he had been fired at. He was 
 Governor-General of the Caucasus, and I had a 
 long chat with him in his palace, just a day or 
 two before he was savagely attacked in his carriage, 
 and slashed with knives and nearly killed. A 
 genial, pleasant man to chat with, but on the 
 least reference to diplomatic or Russian matters 
 the subject changed, and the Opera or the 
 dancers led the conversation to trivial matters, 
 I think he would have agreed with the designation 
 given by a German of a pretty girl, that she was 
 " appetitlich kolossal," which may be rendered 
 " colossally appetising." I had been in the box 
 opposite His Excellency at the Opera the night 
 before our chat, and he rallied me on my judg- 
 ment of the beauty of the -prima donna. 
 
 Here are notes on Balaclava and Alma. I well 
 remember my old drill sergeant, who was at the 
 latter battle, describing to me, then a lad, how 
 they raced up the heights, stopping to load, and 
 potting the Russians " Hke rabbits." The Crimea 
 was far oflf in those days, and I never expected to 
 wander amidst the trenches and batteries or the
 
 226 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Redan and Malakoff, many of which are still 
 well defined. 
 
 How curiously these notes link up the thought 
 o£ centuries. Here are a batch of notes on Erasmus 
 and Luther. I owe much to sturdy Martin 
 Luther ; the first article of mine accepted by a 
 London magazine was on Luther's home at 
 Wittenberg. But here are notes on Erasmus and 
 his work, and a statement that he tried to be 
 neutral ; but it was useless. Luther could not 
 and did not try to be half and half ; and 
 in the midst of these fifteenth-century notes 
 comes a word said to me at lunch by a nine- 
 teenth-century bishop : " We clergy so often 
 appear in our slippers, and we don't always pull 
 them up at heel." The talk that led up to this 
 dictum is gone from memory, though the occa- 
 sion is well remembered, as it was prior to 
 my having for the first time in my Hfe to 
 make a speech in a cathedral ; but how aptly 
 the words illustrate the lazy, noncombatant mood 
 of some of the clergy to-day, combined with the 
 sensual love of medisevalism ; and, as it were, 
 aptly to illustrate the vigorous denunciation of 
 bygone days, in the heart of these notes, half 
 hidden by them, is a rough sketch of the present
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 227 
 
 plain of Ephesus, with temple and stadium and 
 theatre marked, where St. Paul's words rang out, 
 that still echo clearly down the centuries. It 
 was a day to remember, our ride over that ruin- 
 strewn plain ; but this book is of gossip, not travel 
 or autobiography. 
 
 A little impromptu that was not fait a loisir 
 squeezes itself into these far-wandering notes ; 
 it is of a certain town councillor who protested 
 that " it was downright unfair of Mr. Barnes to 
 give me so short notice of his sudden indisposi- 
 tion," and this mot comes in to lighten whole 
 pages on Tariff Reform, and the Irish question, the 
 decay of land cultivation in England, and the con- 
 trasting scientific development in other countries. 
 
 But let me close this gossip with a strange story 
 about the Koh-i-noor diamond, told me by a 
 civil engineer, a Mr. Alton, who had the story 
 from the lips of Sir G. Lawrence. 
 
 In the sack of Lahore there was a good deal of 
 looting, and Sir Henry Lawrence took the Koh-i- 
 noor to save it, and said to John, " Here, you had 
 better keep this," and John put it in his pocket. 
 The next day Henry said to John, " You've got that 
 diamond all right ? " John, with an exclamation, 
 rushed off ; he had left it loose in his waistcoat
 
 228 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 pocket, and that garment had been thrown aside 
 dirty, for the wash, but he found the diamond 
 all right — the diamond now resplendent in the 
 Crown Jewels. 
 
 I gleaned this striking story from my old friend, 
 when arranging and writing a tablet to be placed 
 in the house where the three young brothers 
 Laurence lived in Clifton, whence they went 
 daily across Brandon Hill to school at Mr. Gough's, 
 in College Green, Bristol. A severe school, for 
 John said, " I was flogged every day of my life, 
 except once, and then I was flogged twice." But 
 what men England bred in those days, and shall 
 again.
 
 XXX 
 
 To start the last of these chatty chapters. Have 
 they been " full of warm blood, of mirth, of 
 gossiping," and yet with some interest, some 
 enduing of correlated thought ? 
 
 My test of a good book is, open any page and 
 read. Comes there a wish to read on, an aroused 
 interest, or a thought that induces pause and 
 other thought ; or a thought, a phrase, that 
 relaxes the eye muscles and leads to pleasant 
 laughter, or in contrary fashion contracts the 
 muscles of the face with wonder, sorrow or some- 
 times horror, if so then read on, there is something 
 in the book. But it must stand this test on every 
 page, and nigh combine all these sensations in its 
 pages, to be a great book. 
 
 A book of gossip can never be a great book. 
 Yet have I failed wholly in this test ? The 
 readers must decide, and the critics attack. 
 
 A very pretty mixed metaphor I see where- 
 with to start. I heard it in a Yorkshire church. 
 The preacher waxed earnest. " An open door 
 
 229
 
 230 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 is presented to you, my brethren, if vou will 
 but embrace it, it will afford you an abundant 
 harvest." The seed-fructifying door deserved 
 embraces ; and just near is the dictum of the 
 famous French counsel, M. Labori, that 
 " on peut naitre Femme d'esprit ; je ne crois 
 pas qu'on naisse Femme du Monde, on le devient 
 par I'education." 
 
 But we leave these little Mondainites and sud- 
 denly are deep in lengthy notes on the fiscal ques- 
 tion, and then leap away to the fascinating grotto 
 on the side of that rocky hill in the island of Patmos 
 where St. John had that wondrous and beauteous 
 vision embodied in the Revelation. But, looking 
 out into that marvellously beautiful sea, the ques- 
 tion came, why did St. John say, "There shall be 
 no more sea " in the beatified state ? 
 
 But these relentless notes suddenly take us back 
 from luminous Patmos to coaly Tyne, and to 
 canny Shields, and to the speeches of a solicitor- 
 general, whom I was pressed more than once to 
 oppose. My retort, that I had neither the time 
 nor the money, was met with the answer, 
 " You find the time, we will find the money " ; 
 but in my absence, I think in Egypt, my wife 
 settled the matter on a halfpenny post card, by
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 231 
 
 stating she was sure I did not want to go in for 
 Parliament. But that there was a wish to convert 
 me to Liberal ideas is evidenced in a note of a 
 political garden party at DoUis Hill, where Lady 
 Aberdeen, in speaking, very pointedly referred to 
 at least one Conservative present, who could be 
 converted, and I believe I was the only Conserva- 
 tive invited by the host. Sir Hugh Gilzean-Reid, 
 who was then living at Gladstone's historic 
 residence, where the ink splashes on the wains- 
 coting in the small writing-room showed where 
 Gladstone had sat and flicked his pen. Now these 
 rooms are a public resort. What a pity this room 
 with its ink splashes was not kept intact. 
 
 In curious juxtaposition to this reminiscent 
 note on Gladstone's work, there is placed in the 
 little notebook a quaint woodcut of the sixteenth 
 century, of a company of ecclesiastics bearing a 
 shrine, surrounded by acolytes with lighted 
 torches, and beneath it a quaint verse that 
 illustrates the work of the whirligig of time. A 
 little hand points to the first line of the verse, that 
 runs thus : — 
 
 " Alasse poore fooles, so sore be ye lade, 
 No Maurel it is thoughe your shoulders ake 
 For ye beare a great God, which ye yourselves made. 
 Make of it what ye wyl, it is wafar cake,
 
 2 32 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 And between two Irons prented it is & bake. 
 And loke, where Idolatrye is, Christ will not be there, 
 Wherefore lay down your burden. An idole ye do beare, 
 Alasse poore Fooles." 
 
 And in apt linking come lengthy notes on Spanish 
 and English marriages from the days of Edward I 
 until our own times, for I was preparing to go 
 over to Madrid for the marriage of King Alfonso 
 and the Princess Ena, and on that wedding day 
 was in most unpleasant proximity to the terrible 
 bomb attack that killed over twenty people and 
 wounded a hundred. 
 
 Stories of ecclesiastics are to the fore at this 
 moment in my notes. One is of the difficulty 
 and danger of disgrace the dons of Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, were placed in, when Van 
 Tromp was entertained by them after peace was 
 signed. The Dutch captain drank so heavily 
 that all the dons were under the table, but Van 
 Tromp was as sober as a judge. The honour of 
 the College was at stake, so they sent, literally 
 post haste, to an old vicar of a parish in the Fens. 
 He came, and they sat him opposite Van Tromp, 
 and the Dutchman succumbed before the Fen- 
 man, and the honour of Trinity was saved. 
 This story was told me at the Yorick Club on the
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 233 
 
 morning I was en route to Cambridge to be the 
 guest of Trinity for some days, and I found their 
 wines were good, especially their claret, but we 
 kept above the table. 
 
 There is a rather good retort to a parson who 
 found fault with his liquor, though of a different 
 type from that loved by Van Tromp. He told his 
 milkman that he required the milk strictly for 
 drinking, and not for christening ; but the 
 milkman awaited his chance, and when the parson, 
 during Lent, blandly asked him if he was going to 
 deny himself, said, " Yes, certainly, I'll come to 
 hear you preach." 
 
 How pleasurable it is to light upon some new, 
 hitherto unknown bit of information upon some 
 famous man, worshipped in our youth, be he 
 valorous hero or one famed in the intellectual 
 world — here I see are notes upon some un- 
 known sketches of Thackeray shown to me at 
 Clevedon Court by Lady Elton. Quaint and 
 characteristic, slightly caricaturing his subjects, 
 as in the one " Miss Burdett Coutts walking in 
 her sleep," and its companion, " Miss Coutts's 
 terror on awakening." I thought I should hke 
 to get this incident verified, and ventured to 
 write to the aged Baroness, but I received a note
 
 234 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 that she had no recollection of this incident 
 Thackeray had sketched, but I easily found out 
 who Sir Benjamin Hall was, who is sketched 
 starting with astonishment at the vision of the 
 lady in her night-gear, bearing a candlestick in 
 her hand. 
 
 Clevedon Court is a dream of present-day 
 beauty, with reminiscences of nigh on six hundred 
 years clinging to its heavy mullioned windows, a 
 spot whereon to link a page of literary history 
 of the Victorian era, or a romance of the fierce 
 old days of chivalry, when its walls were raised 
 and its towers built. 
 
 And close by, in my notebook, come notes of a 
 visit paid to the house of Thomas Carlyle, who 
 could have told the latter tale in rugged English. 
 I remember the day I paid this visit to the 
 shrine of history, sitting down, after going 
 over the house, on the seat on the Embankment 
 near Carlyle's statue, and casually getting into 
 chat with an old lady, whom I told of the rever- 
 ence I had just paid to Carlyle's memory. And 
 lo, it was Mrs. De Morgan with whom I was 
 talking, Carlyle's friend ; and she verified my 
 notes upon his study at the top of the house, with 
 no outlook, and a double wall built to keep out
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 235 
 
 all sound, and of the comfortless kitchen where 
 Carlyle and Tennyson sat, and smoked, and did 
 not talk. 
 
 Carlyle's idea of " Le Bonheur de ce Monde " 
 seems to have been the exact opposite to the 
 Plantin of Antwerp, who hung a sonnet with this 
 title in his rooms. His house was to be *' commode, 
 propre et belle, ^^ with a garden walled, with 
 sweetly odorous espaliers laden with fruit. The 
 whole sonnet breathes of breadth, and open air, 
 the few friends, and faithful wife, and calm life ; 
 the very opposite to the double-walled study 
 and underground kitchen of Carlyle. 
 
 But Tennyson's name, linked with Carlyle's, 
 brings up a note on the judge who had to take 
 up Admiralty cases and who expressed a hope : 
 " And may there be no moaning at the Bar when 
 I put out to sea," a Httle joke probably appreci- 
 ated by the barristers present. Why is it so trivial 
 a witticism wins laughter in a law court ? I see 
 there is a note close by, of a foolish attempt at a 
 joke I once made in an omnibus. A stranger, 
 as we were near St. Paul's, asked if any one knew 
 where Camomile Street was, and I could not help 
 ejaculating, " It ought to be near Doctor's 
 Commons " ; but I was seriously told it was not
 
 236 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 near there ; an omnibus is not a law court, bien 
 entendu. I wonder whether the Professor's lapse 
 before his students was received as stolidly when 
 on a certain day, a child being born to him at the 
 moment when a volume of his wife's work, she 
 being a very literary lady, had just appeared ; 
 the students greeted him with a cheer on the 
 birth of his firstborn, but the Professor, thinking 
 only of the book, said, " Entirely my wife's 
 conception, gentlemen, I assure you I had nothing 
 to do with it." 
 
 And as in delightful opposition to the Pro- 
 fessor's cultured speech to his students, if a little 
 absent-minded, there comes in a most expressive 
 bit of local grammar, where persons and cases 
 are magnificently mixed, in a Wiltshire epitaph. 
 
 " Her shall not return to we, 
 But us do hope to go to she." 
 
 Epitaphs seem to force themselves to be present 
 in this last gossip, and very pretty reading they 
 often are. Here is one that is known to few, yet 
 it is in a God's acre that is one of the most lovely 
 spots in all our beauteous England ; in the 
 village of Abbots Leigh, looking out over the 
 fruitful Severn Vale, with the tawny Severn
 
 OF MEN AND MATTERS 237 
 
 Sea glinting and glittering in the distance. A 
 grand old yew, aged, perchance, a thousand years, 
 shadows the tomb, and these are the lines : — 
 
 " Here would I sleep, this is the spot 
 Which I have long marked out to lay my bones in. 
 Tired out and wearied with this naughty world, 
 Beneath this yew I would be sepulchred. 
 It is a lovely spot. The sultry sun 
 From his meridian height endeavours vainly 
 To pierce the shadowy foliage." 
 
 Aye, the aged yew, that has witnessed the 
 centuries pass o'er England's travail and glory, 
 gives pleasant shadow from whence to look out 
 o'er the fruitful plain and hills of Somerset. 
 But halt, for the next entry says, " Literature 
 is art, and the artist should never preach " ; but 
 I see added to this quotation : query, " always 
 teach," and that, surely, Hterature must always do. 
 
 But here comes a little French quotation that 
 aptly tells me I must close this book of gossip. A 
 quotation on life from the French standpoint : — 
 
 " La vie est breve 
 Un peu d'espoir, 
 Un peu de reve, 
 Et puis ; Bon soir." 
 
 But between the hope of youth and the dreaming 
 of old age there is all the work of manhood to be
 
 238 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 done, and these gossips have, perchance, been an 
 epitome of life and work, of frivolity and laughter, 
 of serious fact and fierce dramatic incident. 
 Just chatter over events, a book to take up at 
 any moment, to open at any page, for it is but 
 Reminiscent Gossip.
 
 REMINISCENT GOSSIP 
 
 Owing to a change in the make-up of this book at the last 
 moment, the following errors appear in the Index : — 
 
 Academy of Plato 
 
 Ainger, Alfred 
 
 Cairo .... 
 
 Clifton Down 
 
 Connaught, Duke of 
 
 Cromer, Lord 
 
 Creighton, Bishop . 
 
 Ephesus 
 
 Gordon 
 
 Harding, Colonel Colin, c.m.g 
 
 Hayes, Captain 
 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 
 
 Lisbon 
 
 Nansen, Fridtjof . 
 
 Queen Victoria 
 
 Royal Geographical Society 
 Sir John Scott 
 
 For page 1 4 read 1 8 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred 
 
 Venice 
 Victor Hugo 
 
 172 
 198 
 
 174 
 162 
 
 165 
 162 
 226 
 
 165 
 163 
 164 
 169 
 136 
 167 
 164 
 167 
 109 
 162 
 
 171 
 172 
 198 
 199 
 174 
 234 
 174 
 168 
 
 173 
 199 
 
 175 
 163 
 166 
 163 
 227 
 166 
 164 
 
 165 
 170 
 
 137 
 168 
 
 165 
 168 
 107 
 163 
 
 172 
 
 173 
 199 
 200 
 175 
 235 
 175 
 169
 
 INDEX 
 
 OF PERSONS AND PLACES 
 
 Abbots Leigh, 236 
 Aberdeen, Lady, 231 
 Academy of Plato, 14 
 Ainger, Alfred, 118, 172 
 Arnold, Matthew, 7, 183, 184, 
 
 185 
 Arnold, Sir Edwin, 55, 59 
 Athens, 18 
 Authors' Club, 153 
 Authors' Society, 8i 
 Avebury, Lord, 220 
 
 B 
 
 Balaclava and Alma, 225 
 Barker, Matthew Henry, 182 
 Barker, Robert, 182 
 Barlow, Dr. now Sir, Thomas 
 
 20 
 Bataille, Albert, 135 
 
 Bayliss, Wyke, 192 
 Beddoe, Dr. John, 11, 80 
 Berlin, 2, d"] 
 Besant, Walter, 35, 52 
 Blackmore, R. D., 7, 83, 84, 
 
 85. 137, 183, 201 
 Bocard, 66 
 Bonghi, Signor, 136 
 Bodenstedt, Friedrich von, 5, 
 
 H. 33> 45, 224 
 Bristol, 68, 77, 83, 179 
 Bristol, Old Theatre Royal, 
 
 190 
 Brown, T. E., 201 
 Browne, Bishop G. Forrest, 
 
 207 
 Browning, Robert, 60, 62, 
 
 64 
 Bude, 141 
 Bulwer Lytton, 73 
 
 239
 
 240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Burgos Cathedral, 194 
 Burke, 68, 120 
 Burton, Lady, 104 
 Burton, Sir Richard, 102, 104, 
 
 127 
 Butt, Clara, 180, 216 
 
 Cabot, John and Sebastian, "]"], 
 
 81, 173 
 Cairo, 198 
 Carlsbad, 64 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 99, 234 
 Cavignari, Lady, 58 
 Chippenham, 150 
 Chute, James Henry, 191 
 Clevedon Court, 233, 234 
 Clifton, 80, 154 
 Clifton Down, 123, 174, 21 1 
 Coetlegon, Major, 58 
 Coghlan, Charles, 23 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1 34 
 Columbus, 173 
 Connaught, Duchess of, 160 
 Connaught, Duke of, 160, 162 
 Corfu, 74 
 
 Corinth Canal, 130 
 Coronation of Queen Wilhel- 
 
 mina, 196 
 Coronation of Tsar Nicholas 
 
 II, 156 
 Coutts, Miss Burdett, 233 
 Crane, Walter, 18, 28 
 Crawford, Mrs., 51 
 Cromer, Lord, 147, 165 
 Creighton, Bishop, 159, 162 
 
 D 
 
 Dead Sea, 104 
 Disraeli, 61 
 Dolebury Camp, 91 
 Doone Valley, 82 
 
 Edinburgh, Duchess of, 161 
 Edinburgh, Duke of, 68, 97, 
 132, 160, 161 
 
 Egypt, 139. 198, 230 
 
 Eights Week at Oxford, 217 
 Ekkehardt, 143 
 Elsinore, 213 
 Elton, Lady, 233
 
 INDEX 
 
 241 
 
 Ephesus, 41, 226 
 Evelyn, John, 61 
 
 Falconer, 182 
 Fastolf, Sir John, 148 
 Fecamp, 126 
 Fenian Meetings, 7 
 Ferdinand of Roumania, 
 
 Prince, 97 
 Fielding, Henry, 66, 137 
 Fitch, Sir Joshua, 210 
 Forbes, Archibald, 55 
 Freeman, E. A., 52 
 Freytag, 61 
 Froude, James Anthony, 7, 9, 
 
 G 
 
 Galitzin, Prince, 225 
 German Emperor with his 
 
 fleet, 47 
 Gladstone, W. E., 70, 103, 
 
 175, 231 
 Gleaming Dawn, The, 112 
 Goethe, 65, 69 
 Gordon, 165, 176 
 R 
 
 Gordon, Lady Duff, 222 
 Gore, Canon, 189 
 Gould, S. Baring, 52, 80 
 Governor Eyre, 175, 176 
 Grace, Dr. E. M., 82 
 
 H 
 
 Haag, Carl, 43, 61 
 
 Hafiz, 118 
 
 Haldane, R. B. (now Lord), 
 
 214, 217 
 Harding, Colonel Colin, cm. c, 
 
 163 
 Hardy, Thomas, 71, 201 
 Plarrison, Frederick, 210 
 Hayes, Captain, 164 
 Heine, 223 
 
 Herkomer, Sir Hubert, 43, 52 
 Hicks-Beach, Sir Michael, 212, 
 
 215 
 Hodgson, Henrietta, 23, 190 
 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 52, 
 
 70, 169 
 Holsworthy, 141 
 Howorth, Sir Henry, 128 
 
 I 
 
 Imperial Institute, 107
 
 242 
 
 Inseparables, The, 112, 218 
 
 Irish Bulls, 141 
 
 Irving, Henry, 90, 91, 192 
 
 Islay, 92 
 
 Israels, Joseph, 196 
 
 J 
 
 Japanese Correspondent, 161 
 Jefferies, Richard, 144 
 Jerrold, Douglas, 182 
 Jones, Sir Alfred, 217 
 
 K 
 
 Kaiser Wilhelm II, 97, 181 
 
 Kendal, Mr., 23 
 
 Kendal, Mrs., 23 
 
 Keble, 61 
 
 King Alfonso, 232 
 
 King George V, 134 
 
 King Edward VII, 133. 1 59' 
 
 212 
 King of Belgium, 136 
 King of Roumania, 97 
 Kingsley, Mary, 187 
 Knight, E. F., 15 3> 188 
 
 Koh-i-noor, 227 
 Kronberg Castle, 181 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Labori, M., 230 
 Lamb, Charles, 118 
 Lansdell, Dr., 129 
 
 Lapland, 181 
 
 Laurence, Sir G , 227 
 
 Laurence, Sir Henry, 227 
 
 Lawrence, WilUam Scott, 121 
 
 Layard, Sir Henry, 29, 46 
 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 88 
 
 Lindelof, Dr., 215 
 
 Lisbon, 136, 167 
 
 Literary and Biographical 
 Studies, 99 
 
 Long, Edwin, 43 
 
 Lorna Doone, 201 
 Louis Napoleon, 178 
 Lowell, Russell, 157 
 ; Luffmann, Mr., 200 
 I Luther, Martin, 148, 226 
 j Lutzow, Count, 192, 193 
 I Lyceum Theatre, 91 
 Lynton, 134 
 
 M 
 
 Macaulay, Tom, 216, 224
 
 INDEX 
 
 Macroom, 75 
 Marconi, Signer, 11 
 Markham, Lady, 159 
 Markham, Sir Clement, 173 
 Marryat, Captain, 182 
 Marseillaise, The, 177 
 Massinger, Philip, 66 
 Mathers, Helen, 153 
 Maupassant, Guy de, 69 
 McCarthy, Justin, 135 
 Meredith, George, 59 
 Mills, Selina, 216, 224 
 Mirza SchafFy, 14, 33 
 Monaco, 197 
 Monte Carlo, 113, 197 
 Moore, Henry, 88 
 Morant, Robert, now Sir, 214 
 More, Hannah, 209, 224 
 Morgan, Mrs. De, 234 
 Morley, John, 90 
 Morris, William, 71 
 Moscow, 156, 161, 174 
 Muller, George, 179 
 Mijller, Max, 29 
 
 N 
 Nansen, Eva, 159 
 
 Nansen, Fridtjof, 11, 158, 164, 
 
 167, 214 
 Napoleon HI, 2, 136 
 Napoleon Premier, i 
 Naprstek, Votja, 127 
 Nazareth, 87 
 Newman, 61 
 
 Newnham-on-Severn, no 
 Nether Stowey, 134 
 
 o 
 
 O'Conor, Sir Nicholas, 160 
 Oldcastle, Sir John, 148 
 Oliphant, .Laurence, 70, 85, 
 
 86 
 Orrock, Mr., 88 
 Osborne, 205 
 Oxford, 106, 113, 148 
 
 Palaeologus, Sophia, 63 
 
 Palgrave, Gifford, 105 
 
 Parnell Commission, 36 
 
 Patmos, 230 
 
 Paton, Lewis, 210 
 
 Payn, James, 52, 56, 84, 85
 
 244 
 
 Pepys, Samuel, 6i, 117, 118 
 
 Percival, John, now Bishop, 52 
 
 Peterhof, 177 
 
 Peter Payne, the Forgotten 
 Great EngHshman, 148 
 
 Peters, Carl, 167 
 
 Pigott, 36 
 
 President of the French Re- 
 public, M. Faure, 177 
 
 Prince Albert, 217 
 
 Princess Ena, 232 
 
 Princess Marie of Roumania, 
 97, 160, 161 
 
 Princess Scalea, 21 
 
 Princess Alex Victoria of 
 
 Hesse-Darmstadt, 132 
 Prothero, Rowland, 52 
 Prussia, Prince Henry of, 160 
 
 Queen Victoria, 20, 43, 109, 
 132, 162, 171, 205, 211, 
 Z17 
 
 INDEX 
 
 R 
 
 Ramsay, 11 
 
 Ratazzi, Madame, 136 
 
 Reay, Lord, 210 
 
 Reid, Sir Gilzean, 51, 
 231 
 
 Reminiscences by Judge Por- 
 ter, 75 
 
 Renan, Ernest, 151 
 
 Rignold, George, 191 
 
 Rignold, William, 191 
 
 Robertson, Madge, 23, 
 190 
 
 Robinson Crusoe, 203 
 
 Rockhampton, 145 
 
 Rosebery, Lord, 121 
 
 Royal Geographical Society, 
 172 
 
 Ruskin, John, 7, 52, 60, 
 
 61 
 Russell, Clarke, ()"] 
 Russell, Sir Baker, 58 
 Russell, Sir Charles, 36 
 
 Sadler, Michael, 210 
 
 Salcombe, 9 
 
 Salisbury, Lord, 6, 90, 152
 
 INDEX 
 
 245 
 
 Sanction, The Pragmatic, df) 
 Sans Gene, Mme., 91 
 Sarum, no 
 Saxe-Coburg, Duke Alfred of, 
 
 161 
 Savage Club, 134 
 Schliemann, Dr., 27, 45 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 170 
 Scott, Sir John, 198, 199 
 Sedgemoor, 11 
 Severn Sea, loi 
 Seville Cathedral, 77 
 Shakespeare's friends, Kemp, 
 
 Pope, and Bryan, 181 
 Shaw, Walter, 88 
 
 Shorthouse, John, 7 
 
 Sigmaringen, 94 
 
 Slatin Pasha, 147 
 
 Smith, Sydney, 1 18 
 
 Socialistic panaceas, 114 
 
 Society of Authors, 157 
 
 Stonehenge, 117 
 
 Stoney Littleton, 117 
 
 6t. Blazios, 20 
 
 St. Giles's Cathedral, Edin 
 burgh, 87 
 
 St. Petersburg, 74 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 7, 9, 52, 60, 
 
 88, 99, I74> 234 
 Tennyson's Becket, 90 
 Terry, Ellen, 23, 190 
 Terry, Kate, 23, 190 
 Thackeray, 197, 233 
 Thomas, Havard, 121 
 Thurston, Sir John, 151 
 Tiflis, 14 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, 
 
 232 
 Tsar Nicholas II, 55, 68, 221 
 Tsar of Russia, 178 
 Tsarskoe Selo, 178 
 Turf Club in Cairo, 166 
 
 Venice, 174 
 
 Victor Hugo, 86, 88, 168 
 Villiers, Fred, 95 
 Vincent, Sir Howard, 197 
 Virchow, Professor, 28 
 
 w 
 
 Wallace's Folly, 144
 
 246 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Wanstrow in Somerset, 149 
 Windt, Harry de, 221 
 Wordsworth, William, 134 
 
 Yorick Club, 81, 188, 232 
 
 2'orkshire Post, 76 
 Yoxall, Sir James, 210 
 
 Zola, 70, 71, 125 
 Zolasque literature, 22
 
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