HERE AND THERE HERE AND THERE MEMORIES INDIAN AND OTHER BY H. G. KEENE, C.I.E AUTHOR OF " A SERVANT OF JOHN COMPANY " "SKETCHES IN INDIAN INK," ETC. Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim Credebat libris ; neque, si male cesserat, unquam Decurrens alio, neque si bene." HORACE, Sat. II. i, 30 ff. " He to his books, as if to faithful friends, Used to impart what others would conceal ; Nor swerved from truth, to favour private ends Concerning what it pleased him to reveal." Xonfcon BROWN, LANGHAM AND COMPANY 78, NEW BOND STREET, W. 1906 PEEFATOEY NOTE THE latter half of the following book, relating as it does to men and things in England as observed after an exile of thirty-five years, may perhaps be not without interest to the general reader, who might care to know how such experiences strike a visitor from the planet Mars. But in the earlier section the writer ventures to hope that matter of more serious interest may be found. So many persons are now directly or indirectly connected with India that a certain curiosity may be looked for as to the original character of British administration in that country, and some of the changes which have been caused by the progress of events and of public feeling. The object of the writer is social rather than political, the storing of the flotsam and jetsam of tradition rather than of the solemn facts of history, yet for this also there may be a modest opening. In the earlier years of the last century, while the red colour was gradually stealing over the map of India, a very anomalous state of things certainly prevailed. To the vast majority of the population the King of England was an absolutely unknown personage, and even the governing classes themselves took no account of that august being. The Company's coinage continued to bear no superscription save the name and title of the pen- sioned Emperor, who lived in the seclusion of the Delhi 51.3278 vi PREFATORY NOTE Palace ; and when an official proclamation was announced it was in the following terms : " The people is of God : the land is of the Emperor : the ordinances are of the Company." In accordance with this curious standpoint the law was scarcely changed from that which had existed under the Moghuls, civil suits being tried according to the legal system of the defendant, whether Moslem or Hindu ; in either case the Court was assisted by an expert, versed in whichever system was to be followed. In criminal trials the law of Islam was supposed to prevail, though some of its provisions and punishments were mitigated or modi- fied in accordance with Western ideas ; and a schedule of misdemeanours was promulgated so that light sentences, might be passed for offences not contemplated by Maho- medan law. All this sort of thing necessarily implied great latitude in the administration ; indeed in ordinary life the district officer and his assistants were the only representatives of authority, and the welfare of millions of human beings might depend upon the character and intelligence of one man. In such conditions did the British Provinces of India remain from the acquisition of the Lower Provinces by Clive and his immediate succes- sors until the accession to office of Lord William Ben- tinck, and in all that long period of about seventy years the members of the Civil Service had a free hand. Some rules indeed were issued from time to time by the Governor-General and his Council, by which it was sought to guide and control the local officers, Courts of Justice, and Boards being established, to which dissatisfied parties might appeal, and by which indolence and caprice might be to some extent corrected. But the " Regula- tions " chiefly related to fiscal subjects, while the power of appeal was greatly impeded by a general poverty, by the defective means of communication, and similar obstacles. It is evident from this slight sketch that great variations must have existed in the administration of the various PREFATORY NOTE vii districts, according to the temperament and abilities of the Englishmen to whose charge they were entrusted, and the only wonder is that such an unsystematic scheme of instruction worked as well as it did, for even the reforms of Bentinck did not at first strike very deep ; and it is hardly too much to say that the methods of adminis- tration and the general condition of the people remained almost unaffected until after the Mutiny, and the direct assumption of Indian government by the Crown in 1858. Until the last few years, indeed, the Indian Civil Service was a thing of special and peculiar conditions, arising out of the circumstances in which it had originated. The East India Company had been at first a mere syndicate of merchants, incorporated by royal charter, and their business consisted simply of buying muslins, spices, and other peculiar products of the East, shipping them to London, and disposing of them there to the best advan- tage. The procuring of these investments required the agency of men in whose ability and honesty some con- f dence could be reposed, and who, under the titles of " Writers, Merchants, and Factors," resided in fortified counting-houses at the ports of exportation. With the growth of political power their duties became more varied and important. Nevertheless the old title long remained, and up to the time of the Regency the personnel of the Indian Civil Service continued to be much what it had been as reorganised by Lord Cornwallis and the Marquis Wellesley, and typical representations will be found in the pages of "Vanity Fair" and "The Newcomes." Thackeray, the author of those books, was born in India, and many of his kindred were members of the Service, so that it is quite likely that, making allowance for cari- cature, Messrs. Jos. Sedley and James Binnie may have been drawn from the life. Though there were, no doubt, many distinguished exceptions, we shall hardly go wrong in supposing the average civilian of those days to have been an ordinary middle-class Briton, whether from viii PREFATORY NOTE Edinburgh or from London, principally bent upon making a purse wherewith to retire to his native land, and in the meanwhile leaving the administration of his District principally to his native officials, while he devoted his ample leisure to hog-hunting, shooting tigers from the backs of elephants, playing whist, and smoking a hookah. Nevertheless signs of change were not want- ing ; in 1806 a College had been established on Hertford Heath, in which nominees of the Directors of the East India Company might be prepared for the duties before them. As will be subsequently seen (Part I., pp. 4, 5), some modifications in the system of appointment were pro- posed in Parliament in 1813, and although these were not fully adopted, a certain number of nominations were allotted to the Board of Control, and some changes intro- duced into the constitution of the College. The civilians now gradually became somewhat better than of old. Under Lord W. Bentinck the laws were reformed and the details of administration improved, though the officers might still be regarded as falling into three classes the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good outnumbered the bad, and the Service, which had never been wanting in distinguished men, continued to produce officers who rose to a level with their opportunities. Elphinstone, Met- calfe, Jenkins, were the result of the old system ; among their immediate successors were Torrens and Elliot, Colvin and John Lawrence, with many others whose names are still well known in India. What the ordinary bulk of the Service was may be conjectured from the works of Mrs. Parkes and the Hon. Emily Eden ; men whose pursuits were the same as those of their pre- decessors, but with much less leisure and much more attention to official duty. The Secretariat of those days contained many able men who stamped their mark upon the future. The District Officer was the jack-of -all- trades, though perhaps often master of none, the agent of some PREFATORY NOTE ix twenty departments, responsible for the management of jails, schools, dispensaries, road and ferry funds, the maintenance of village records and surveys, the assess- ment of the land revenue, the management of stamps and taxes, the solemnisation of Christian marriages, and the church services on Sundays. When it is remembered that these multifarious duties were interspersed with the daily trial of criminal charges and summary suits, the charge of the Treasury, and the preparation of monthly, quarterly, and yearly returns and reports, it will be seen that the Early Victorian District Officer had plenty of work on his hands; and it may fairly be said that when the great revolt of 1857 arrived, it found the greater part of the Service, in those regions to which it extended, in possession of most of the strings of administration. The officers of the bad class, often spoken of as the Company's "hard bargains," could never have been very numerous, for the administration of the country pro- ceeded with considerable success. From time to time, however, there were undoubtedly isolated cases of mis- conduct and negligence. For example, in 1812, when the Prince Regent insisted on appointing Lord Moira to the government of India, that nobleman, before leaving England, met at dinner in London a Mr. B , then on furlough, and contemplating retirement from the Service on the completion of his leave. Interested in Mr. B 's accounts of his experience, the Governor-General elect .asked if he could not be induced to return to India, and it was finally agreed that Mr. B was to resume his place in the Service on a salary of rupees five thousand per mensem. Unhappily when they arrived in India no such post was for the moment available, and the only thing that could be done for Mr. B was to make him Commissioner of Customs at Mirzapore, with a salary somewhat less than what he had stipulated for. The duties of his office consisted chiefly in signing permits x PREFATORY NOTE while he pulled at his after-breakfast ckillum; but he declared that for four thousand a month he could not afford to write his full name, and during his tenure of office the papers continued to be attested by writing but the initials B. B. B. This statement rests upon the testimony of the late Mr. Kalph John Tayler, who added that when the Governor-General, on an official tour, came up the Biver Ganges, his house-boat stuck on a sand-bank opposite the Commissioner's compound ; but the offended Mr. B resolutely refused to extend any sort of hospi- tality to His Excellency. A little later there was a Collector at Cawnpore, who may be indicated by the letter B, , the initial of his name. This gentleman, having lost a considerable sum of money at cock-fighting to a neighbouring Nawab, was imprudent enough to make payment out of the public Treasury in his charge, and the sum was entered by the clerks in what was then known as " the inefficient balance." The attention of the Board of Bevenue falling on this item, one of their members repaired to Cawnpore to examine Mr. B 's accounts, and the unfortunate Collector, instead of waiting to explain matters and make provision for replacing the defalcation, lost heart, and fled secretly from the station with his wife. Hastening to his friend the Nawab, he stated his difficulty, and obtained from him a farm, on which he proceeded to cultivate indigo. A proclamation was issued by the Government, offering a reward for Mr. B 's discovery and apprehension, but although military officers from the nearest British station con- tinued to visit Mr. and Mrs. B on their newly acquired estate, the Government could obtain no trace of his whereabouts until he was murdered one evening by a neighbouring Zemindar with whom he had got into a boundary dispute, and the widow repaired to Lucknow, where she sought the protection of the British Besident, another member of the Service, who made her his wife. This man also came to grief, for he had for some time PREFATORY NOTE xi been in the habit of receiving unlawful gifts from the King and other nobles of the Kingdom of Oudh, and these malpractices, coming to light in a very curious way, was compelled to retire from the Service. It appears he had been in the habit of transmitting his irregular gain to Europe through a house in St. Petersburg, which ulti- mately failed. On hearing of this the Russian Minister in London mentioned the fact apologetically to Lord John Russell, who immediately communicated it to the Board of Control. An inquiry was instituted, and the erring Resident had to leave the Service a remarkable expe- rience for the lady, who thus became intimately connected with two unfortunate samples of the Indian Civil Service. Cases of actual corruption and embezzlement were not indeed of frequent occurrence, though it is related that when Lord William Bentinck was on a tour of inspection and asked a certain Collector what he made by his post, he was met with the startling answer from the irritated official, "Every damned pice I can." Instances of the most remarkable eccentricity were not rare. Thus, a District Officer in the Upper Provinces, the bearer of two names illustrious in jurisprudence and philosophy, was in the habit of holding office at midnight, sitting with his face to the wall and his back turned to the parties and spectators. A Lieut. -Governor of those days was a mild gentleman, extremely averse to friction and scandal, but the flood of petitions from the district of this officer pouring continuously into the Government House at Agra led to inquiries, which resulted in the deputation of another officer to relieve Mr. M . On arrival at the station the new Collector proceeded to M 's house, where he was received in a singular and most unsatisfactory manner : necessarily he had to carry out his instructions, and in the course of the day Mr. M mounted a swift camel and made tracks for Bombay, where he took ship for Europe, and India saw him no more. xii PREFATORY NOTE Another case of a like nature was that of a well-born Scot, brother to a prominent Member of Parliament, whose eccentricities in their turn attracted Government notice. This also was a District Officer, who, being a single man, took up his abode in his office, the floors of which were strewn with disarranged records. Among his peculiarities was an unusual impatience of heat, and one particularly hot summer morning he emerged into the public room in a state of nature. The Serishtadar (the Clerk of the Court) courteously bringing to his notice that some trifling article of costume might be more becoming in his magisterial capacity, the District Officer retired into his private apartment and quickly re- appeared with two sheets of newspaper pinned round his loins so as to hang down before and behind. When the Government at last plucked up heart and sent another officer to take his place, that gentleman (from whom, it may be added, the present writer derived his story) found the gentleman whom he was to relieve standing on the top of the office steps in a defiant attitude, with a pistol in each hand. The relieving officer promptly retired, and obtained the support of a troop of horse from the colonel commanding the station. Returning with this escort, he found that the Collector had reconsidered the situation, and departed without going through the formality of making over charge. It would be no safer to take such cases as these for types than it would be to judge the old nomination service by the respectable and orderly gentlemen, who gravitated to the centre of authority to rise in the Secretariate to become members of Council, where their labours were not always regarded as wholly advantageous to the country. The merits of the body will be best seen from the spirit and character of that far more numerous class who con- ducted the ordinary details of local administration. Being ior the most part men of good family, accustomed from PREFATORY NOTE xiii their boyhood to hunt and shoot, to rule stableboys and manage gamekeepers, they brought to their duties just sufficient intelligence to enable them to put healthy vigour into routine work, and to rule men by personal influence. When the great storm broke upon Upper India it found a body of brave and simple-hearted gentle- men, not unprepared to cope with it. In the Punjaub, John Lawrence, ably seconded by Montgomery and McLeod, with lieutenants like Fred Cowper and George Ricketts, and many excellent military subordinates, kept the peace in the vast region extending from Peshawar to Paniput, and sent reinforcements to Delhi till the rebel city fell. In the adjacent province Spankie, Wallace Dunlop, Sapte, Hume, Mayne, F. Gubbins, and others held their district against overwhelming odds. Further south the energy of Eobert Ellis saved Nagpore, and so prevented all danger of the conflagration spreading to the Deccan. Full details of these services may be found in Kaye and Malleson's concluding volumes, as also in a little book especially devoted to the subject, published some thirty years after the event.* About 40 per cent, of these officers fell during that terrible year, but their work was done. And be it remembered that it was not the work of the ordinary gentleman in high places at the Presidency, for, indeed, these long misread the signs of the times, and led poor Lord Canning into more than one serious error, until he went up country and saw things for his own eyes. Such facts went far to justify the remark of old Mr. Tucker, when Chairman of the Court of Directors at the time of the discussion of 1813. Hearing of the proposal of Lord Grenville, this veteran expert observed that he saw no necessity for the change. He quoted Goldsmith, and said you did not want razors with which to cut blocks. The moral appears to be that * '57 "Some account of the Administration of Civil Districts, during the revolt of the Indian Army. By H. G. Keene. (W. EL Allen and Co., 1883.) xiv PREFATORY NOTE wherever there are blocks to cut, axes will still be found more useful than razors; but where civilised life has become established there will be a need for more delicate instruments. It will be the duty of Britain to provide men for both classes of employment. How far the present system of appointment by compe- titive examination is an ideal fulfilment of that duty may be a subject of inquiry : objections have been brought against it, and it does not appear to find favour with other nations having colonies to administer beyond sea. It has certainly raised the level of the average officers, and has probably rendered impossible the recurrence of what has been above designated as " hard bargains." But it may be urged against it that this very success involves a difficulty ; for the uniform training prepares men cast in one mould to be subsequently further assimilated by the pressure of a highly organised system. Originality may be thus repressed, yet it cannot be altogether destroyed ; the half-century of appointment by competi- tive examination may neither have produced so many great scholars and administrators as the period between Elphinstone and Sir Alfred Lyall; but the fact that it produces men so distinguished yet so diverse as Hunter and Burnell, Sir Antony MacDonnell and Sir Mortimer Durand, is sufficient testimony to the elasticity of human nature. CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER I PAGE OLD HAILEYBUBY . . . . . .3 CHAPTER II OLD HAILEYBUBY (continued) . . . . 13 ! CHAPTER III LONDON AND OXFOBD IN THE FOBTIES . . .23 CHAPTER IV LONDON AND OXFOBD (continued) ... 38 CHAPTER V MOFUSSIL LIFE BEFOBE THE MUTINY . . .44 CHAPTER VI THE GBEAT BEVOLT ... 56 CHAPTER VII FBESH WOODS AND PASTUBES NEW . . .68 xv xvi CONTENTS CHAPTER VIII AGRA . . . . . .79 INTERCHAPTER AN ALIEN YOKE . . . . . . 8$ PART II CHAPTER I GOING HOME, 1883 . ... 101 CHAPTER II LONDON, 1884 . . . . . .112 CHAPTER III JERSEY, 1885 ...... 123 CHAPTER IV JERSEY (continued), 1886, 1887 . . . .138 CHAPTER V OXFORD REVISITED, 1888, 1889 . . .156 CHAPTER VI JERSEY AND NORWOOD, 1890 . . . 167 CHAPTER VII NORWOOD (continued), 1891 .... 176 CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION, 1893 ...... 197 INDEX 213 PART I CHAPTEK I OLD HAILEYBUEY THE first part of this work may be regarded as supplementary to a book by the same author, published a few years ago, under the title " A Servant of John Company." The object of that work was to record some experiences of an Indian official who, owing his appointment to the Hon. Court of Directors, continued to work after the extinction of that body ; not, indeed, in the higher places of Government, but in those relations with local administration which afford a closer acquaintance with the people. This first part is followed by an inter-chapter giving some account of the almost revolutionary change that succeeded the Mutiny of 1857 ; summing up the writer's impressions of the manner in which the present and the future of the country have been affected. The second part relates to the experi- ences of a returned exile in London, Oxford, and Jersey, with gossip about some distinguished persons whom the writer had the fortune to meet. At the Athenaeum Club especially was such a privilege to be enjoyed with the attitude of looking up, at once so useful and so becoming to an ordinary mortal. A shrewd observer, the late M. Blouet (Max O'Kell) once remarked that he did not care for the British patricians, whom he found idle and often insolent : the democracy pleased him no better ; what he did like was the savant class "That," he said, "is your true aristocracy." 4 HERE AND THERE The writer is no longer a member of the Athenaeum, but he will always remember the happy and profitable time that he spent under its roof; and he earnestly hopes that nothing here said can be considered a breach of the confidence which is due to an honourable but private society. The author has endeavoured in these pages to com- pensate for the somewhat subjective character of his former work by dwelling on the things and persons seen, and suppressing as far as possible the mention of him who saw them. The first distinguished person who occurs to one's recollection is her late Majesty Queen Victoria. The writer recalls the time when he used to meet the Princess Victoria walking with her august mother about the lanes and downs of Tunbridge Wells. Her life almost extended from the fall of the feudal system to the establishment of modern democracy ; passing through the short interval of burgess-rule when the Ten Pound Franchise was deemed final, and our trade was to rule the world. India was then the " Empire of the middle classes " ; the Cheese- mongers of Leadenhall to borrow Lord Wellesley's phrase were still dominant in the choice of men to administer that remote, almost unknown, land, though they had ceased to hold monopoly of its traffic or even of its political supremacy. It says much for the activity of Yankee intelligence that our Transatlantic cousins, on being confronted by a similar problem, should have immediately cast back their attention to those distant days. In beginning to organise an oversea dependency in the Philippines, they have had to study the means by which the East India Company provided for work of the kind.* The Company, it may * " Colonial Civil Service," A. Lawrence Lowell "and H. Morse Stephens, New York, 1900. OLD HAILEYBURY 5 be remembered, had a College for training their Civil Servants ; and the Americans point to its inherent flaw, namely, the controlling of the College by the same body by whose members the students had been nominated. Holding their offices by the pleasure of the same men, the Principal and his council were unwilling to ruin their own patron's nominees ; and hence the discipline of the place lacked the ultimate sanction of expulsion, by which alone it could have been made effective. Cases, therefore, occurred in which men were sent out to govern India who had never been reduced to obedience or taught to govern themselves. A shrewd female observer in the first half of the century gave instances of some of the men whom she met, regarding them from the point of view offered to a lady visitor. " Their poor dear manners were quite gone. . . . The gentlemen talk of Vizier AH and Lord Cornwallis ; the ladies do not talk at all ; and I don't know which I like best. Towards the end of the rainy season the lowness of spirits that comes on is quite dreadful : every one fancies that he is going to die ; and then, he thinks, no one will bury him, as there is no other European at hand. Moral : Never send a son to India." * Such was the impression made on the Governor- General's sister by the Haileybury civilians of 1839 ; and however we may suspect a little caricature, we can easily imagine a certain lack of energy in the administration of those forlorn exiles. Very unflattering pictures, also, of their military confreres appear in works of the day ; and it must be borne in mind that the Company's army furnished many an understudy for the most important parts in the drama of public life. Kaye's "LongEngage- ments" a forgotten fiction of the first Afghan War and Sir William Sleeman's "Rambles and Recollections " may in this connection deserve a passing notice ; as also * "Up the Country," Hon. Emily Eden, 2 vols., third edition, London, 1866. 6 HERE AND THERE " Oakfield," a somewhat later work, by W. D. Arnold.* It was ungraciously observed, by Arnold's more famous brother Matthew, that "no Arnold could write a novel " the subsequent successes of Mrs. Humphry Ward not being visible to her uncle's prophetic soul. Certainly, "Oakfield" is dead and buried: it was never very suc- cessful as a story ; yet there could be no doubt as to the author's honest, if unflattering, view of Anglo-Indian society, or what he called "Fellowship in the East." He soon left the army for educational work, and died young, leaving a son, the energetic military reformer known to the present generation, and worthily represent- ing two distinguished names. All these books have a distinct social interest and importance; though it is rather the general tone of Anglo-Indian society that they represent than that of any special department of the Company's service. In one respect, at least, it may be hoped that Anglo-Indian administration made a great advance under the Empress. Inspired by the influences of public opinion and of improved civilisation, greater earnestness may be well supposed to have established itself ; and with a diminution of selfishness and injustice in high places. In the times of Mrs. Eden, say the first twenty years of the late reign, the officers entrusted with civil charges in the Indian moffusils could not, unless protected by strong interest, rely on Governmental recog- nition, or expect to prosper in direct ratio to their merits and deserts. It would be a strong indication of ignorance of the world if one were to assume that all men became perf ect'in wisdom and in virtue by wriggling from stool to stool in a Government office ; on the other hand, it would be absurd to argue that these merits are hopelessly excluded from the arena of an official hierarchy. But the familiar instances of Sir D. Ochterlony in 1825 and of William Taylor in 1857 are enough to show the powers of a bureaucracy, and the occasional lapses from justice * Father of Mr. Arnold Forster, M.P. OLD HAILEYBURY 7 to which it may be liable. Failures of another sort were always possible where the civilians of the old school had lost touch with the people. The Orissa Famine of 1866 is a case in point. Its treatment, according to a most loyal supporter of the Indian Government in general, "left a deep stain on the reputation of the Bengal authorities" (Marsham). Admissions of this kind, it must be remembered, do not necessarily involve the character of the whole body of men turned out from the Company's College. Some were hard bargains indeed ; men who would never have got into the Service but for the favour of their patrons and the unwillingness of the principal to ruin their careers; but even of these there were some brave and honest men who made an excellent use of their slender faculties and powers in times of stress like the Mutiny. Others, of a more disciplined and plodding order, rose in the Secretariat to become conscientious, if somewhat formal, Ministers and Lieutenant- Governors. All honour to the men who founded and consolidated the great " Empire of the middle classes," and to those who rule it at the present hour. The provincial staff has always been devoted and earnest ; while the central authorities, if not free from the temptations of their place, have gene- rally held and followed a high ideal of duty. The writer of these pages may perhaps incur the charge of egotism ; his only excuse is that what he has to say about the Company's College and the service which it engendered is based upon direct personal obser- vation. As readers of Mr. Lowell will remember, his name is given as of one not only trained at Haileybury but actually born there : including his father's traditions, his memory covers a period extending from 1824 when the College was but fifteen years old to the time when he left it in 1847. In the former of these years his father had lately settled there as Professor of Arabic and Persian ; and amongst his colleagues were several dis- 8 HERE AND THERE tinguished men Cobbett's "Parson Malthus" and C. W. Lebas, a divine of the via media; presently after came J. A. Jeremie, in later years Begins Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, with others whose names would convey little meaning now, but who nevertheless were good men in their time ; law was taught by Empson, editor of the Edinburgh Review. The period was not exciting. In the earlier years the throne was occupied by that mediaeval roue, George IV., a monarch who had but little influence on the affairs of India or of the Company beyond originating the appoint- ment of Lord Moira to be Governor- General. Before coming to the royal title George IV. had for about ten years been Kegent ; and it was during the Eegency that the Company's charter came up for renewal, not without much preliminary discussion or patronage in Parliament and in the Press. Already, in 1806, a staff of teachers had been selected by the Court of Directors, and a train- ing-school for the aspirants to Indian administration had been opened in Hertford Castle, to be transferred to Haileybury a small manor about two miles off some three years later. At first little more was proposed than a seminary " for the reception of students at the age of fifteen, to remain till they are eighteen, or till they are sent by the Court to their respective destinations." The academical character of the College was not finally determined until 1813. During the discussions preliminary to the renewal of the charter in that year the question of nomination to the Indian Civil Service had been among the points debated. And Lord Grenville one of Pitt's ablest followers, kept out of office by his liberal opinions made a proposal which in some degree anticipated the modern system of competitive examination. He refused to allow that the retention of this valuable patronage by the Company's Directors was the only alternative to its being made an engine of political corruption. That, indeed, might have OLD HAILEYBURY 9 been the rock on which the ship split in Fox's charge thirty years before as no one knew better than Grenville, who had been a party to the wreck. What he now sug- gested was that the nominations should be taken out of the hands of the Company, not to be transferred to the Board of Control or any other organ of the Govern- ment, but to be offered to a competition among the boys at public schools ; and the selected candidates were to receive their training not at a special college like Haileybury, but at the national universities among youths of their class. The danger passed, the Company's charter was renewed without detriment to the power of nomination. By the Act of 1813 the College obtained parliamentary recog- nition, and acquired the status of an academy of adult students in caps and gowns, on a similar footing to one of the Colleges in the Universities. No person, it was provided, should be sent out in the Service who had not passed two years at the College ; and the minimum age for entrance was fixed at seventeen. Such was the condition of the College when the writer's father joined in 1824 ; shortly after he was made Eegistrar much the same office as that of the Bursar at Oxford. His lodging was in a commodious house on the northern side of the quadrangle, in the upper part of which was fixed the College clock ; and in this house his eldest son, the present writer, was born. The Principal in those days was a distinguished Cambridge man, who had been third Wrangler and fellow of Trinity, the Eev. Joseph Hallett Batten, D.D., Fellow of theKoyal Society, who had begun his connection with the College as Professor of Classics. This accomplished man, whose house was at the south-west angle next the chapel, held office no less than three-and-twenty years ; and under him were trained most of the men who made the great repu- tation of the Company's Service, among others being Mr. James Thomason, Sir Charles Trevelyan, and Lord Lawrence, "the Saviour of India." 10 HERE AND THERE If the Eeverend Professor of Arabic had less aca- demical distinction to show than Dr. Batten, he had seen a great deal more of the world. Originally a soldier, Mr. Keene had borne part, under Arthur Wellesley, the future conqueror of Napoleon, in the short campaign which ended in the fall of Tippoo Sultan and the usurp- ing dynasty of Mysore. Afterwards entering the College of Fort William, where the civilians were trained before the establishment of Haileybury, he passed a few years in the Madras Civil Service. He retired on an invalid pension, and entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, as a Fellow Commoner in 1810 ; became a man of some note as an orientalist, and graduated in honours, ulti- mately becoming a clergyman of the Anglican Church. After the fall of Napoleon he made a tour in Europe with Lord Mahon, afterwards Earl Stanhope, F.R.S., the well-known historian : finally settling down in England to contest the Arabic Chair at Cambridge and, on being defeated by the eminent Hebraist, Dr. Samuel Lee, ob- tained the appointment at Haileybury as already stated.* One's earliest memory of the College is thus different from that of most others, having been received from the point of view offered by a professor's house. It is some- what obliterated, no doubt, by the later recollections of a student, like an old MS. obscured on a 'palimpsest. Only two aspects are left at all distinct : one of a general complaint of lawlessness ; the other of a certain atmos- phere of a good old-world social life. Instances of the latter occur in connection with some frequency. Miss Martineau used to come to Haileybury as the guest of Mr. and Mrs. Malthus; we exchanged visits with Lord John Townshend, of Balls, an old viveur of the days of Fitzpatrick, Fox, and the Dandies ; on the occasion of terminal inspections we saw Sir Charles Wilkins, who had known Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones, * See article in vol. xxx. of the " Dictionary of National Bio- graphy." OLD HAILEYBURY 11 having been one of the early members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in the eighteenth century. Francis Jeffrey used to appear at Empson's, who had married Jeffrey's daughter. As for the students, a certain element of apprehension was certainly not altogether absent; although some of them had been tamed so far as to be admitted to the Professors' houses, the results were not always quite satisfactory. A young man, afterwards a decorous and indeed decorated member of the Indian Government, went to Gorhambury races, and, returning late at night, availed himself of his knowledge of our premises to let himself in by the kitchen window, and enter the College quadrangle by unlocking our front door from within. Occasionally the conduct of these young libertines assumed a wilder license. One evening, when Mrs. Lebas had been at our house, my father was escorting her to the sedan-chair which awaited her at the door, when he was forcibly restrained by some of the students who had been of the party. In another moment was heard a loud explosion, and the sedan-chair was hoisted into the air, a charge of gunpowder having been placed in a drain-pipe, and fired just as the good lady was stepping into her vehicle. She escaped with a fright, and I fear that my father never disclosed the identity of his well- wishers whose favourable intervention must have betrayed a guilty knowledge. At another time, when the infant who has since developed into the present old babbler was lying in his cradle, a huge boulder came crashing through the nursery window, and lodged on the arched top of the bassinette. On hearing the nurse's outcry my father rushed out into the quadrangle to find two or three students, who apologised for the fractured pane on the ground that the clock was too fast, and they had no means of correction but by throwing stones at the hands. One of the most lawless of the students of that time is said to have been named John Lawrence, who entered 12 HERE AND THERE in 1827. He obtained a nomination vacated by the late Charles Merivale, who died Dean of Ely, and who was wont to say that, as the cause of Lawrence's appointment, he (Merivale) was the real Saviour of India. CHAPTEE II OLD HAILEYBURY (continued) THE second quarter of the nineteenth century brought many changes to the College. Amongst the deaths the most noticeable were those of Mr. Malthus and Dr. Batten. The former was succeeded in the Chair of Political Economy ("Polly Con," as the young men said) by the Eev. Kichard Jones, a Poor Law Commissioner and a writer of some temporary authority on the subject of rent. The demise of Dr. Batten a few years later left the post of Principal open to the Dean, Mr. Lebas, in whose hands the discipline of the College is believed to have somewhat suffered. Before his accession, however, our direct knowledge of the matter had ceased, my father having retired in 1834. The personal peculiarities which made Lebas an in- adequate ruler of turbulent youths, fully aware of the immunities which they derived from the protection of their patrons, are stated by Mr. Stephens with much frankness in the volume cited above ; and one's own recollection of the worthy gentleman is in general agree- ment with what is stated by him. In appearance Mr. Lebas somewhat resembled Charles Lamb, with a smooth, low-comedy countenance, an undersized figure, and little legs clothed in shorts and black gaiters. Add to this that he was very hard of hearing, with a high, uncontrolled voice, and a quaint way of interlarding his talk with Latin quotations and words that he himself would 13 14 HERE AND THERE probably have styled " sesquipedalian." For example, I remember going to Brighton just after passing out of College after several false starts. One day I walked to the post-office to put a letter into the box ; there was a bit of a crowd at the window, and out of the crowd behind me I heard a shrill cry " Well, sir, so you've got out at last. I congratulate you. Post tot naufragia tutus ! " It was the ex-Principal, who had chosen Brighton for his residence, and who, coming on a like errand with myself, had recognised me as I stood before him and crowed the classic greeting. Sir M. Monier- Williams mentions his rebuking some of the stone-throwers of the Quad., by reminding them that it was forbidden to " lithobolise " there ; and a case was on record in which, sending for a student who had been reported to have given a wine party on a Sunday evening, " the Prin " as he was called added the special re- proach "And I understand, sir, that you were the Coryphaus of this unhallowed assemblage." Lebas had just ceased to govern when I entered the College as a student, but I had found him there the year before when I visited it from Oxford. On that occasion I dined at the high table in Hall, and was honoured with a seat next to the Principal. During dinner our atten- tion was pretty well occupied, but in a pause he curved his hand over his ear, and loudly demanded : " How is your grandmother, sir? " " She is dead, sir," was my reply. Before the cloth was drawn occurred another pause, during which the courteous but forgetful old man again asked me the same question. From the pitch of his voice all in the neighbourhood were now roused, and amid the curious gaze of surrounding professors, waiters, and students, he presently added in some impatience: "I'm asking about your grandmother." Thus urged, I too had OLD HAILEYBURY 15 to raise my voice as I gave the only possible answer, " She's still dead." * When I got my nomination to the College the good old mannerist was gone, having been succeeded by Henry Melvill, brother of the Secretary to the India House. The Principal's name is probably not very familiar now, but Melvill was a well-known man at the time genial, strong, and eloquent, the Chrysostom of Evangelicalism. Jeremie had succeeded Lebas when the latter was pro- moted from Dean to Principal, and he was understood to feel resentment at not being made his successor now. Bmpson was still lecturing on Law and Morals in other words, pouring out an indistinct torrent of utilitarian philo- sophy, in which morsels of common law, statute, civil law, and equity came floating along. Jones held forth on rent, land tenures, and Indian history an awful but grotesque figure, with a bloated red face surmounted by a chestnut wig. It is hardly needful to add that the student who chose to attend carefully and continuously at the lecture-rooms of these able teachers soon found his account in so doing : the ludicrous element was super- ficial, the solid value of the well-digested information could not be denied. The way of it was this. The Professor undertook to explain certain authoritative text-books, and expected the students to take notes of what he said. At the end of the term those who had taken such notes intelligently and without interruption could submit them to the Professor for inspection, after which there would be a general examination of the class by some noted outside expert, the questions being based upon the course that had been delivered during the term. Bad work was denoted by the letter " L " printed against one's name, the better performances being labelled " G.," or " Gt.," and a handsome prize of books or a silver medal * By a droll coincidence this niaiserie was reproduced by a popular comedian nearly half a century later, as will be found recorded in a subsequent chapter. 16 HERE AND THERE awarded to the best. " L." meant " little progress," while " G." and " Gt." stood respectively for "good" and "great." I may illustrate the system by stating what occurred at the end of a term between Mr. Jones and a student who found that attendance at the Professor's lectures inter- fered with breakfast, and who, therefore, contented him- self with studying the text-book, and reading up the notes taken by one of his friends. When the examination was over Jones sent for the young man, and bluntly accused him of having copied his papers from other men's work. "You could not have sent in such a paper otherwise, as you have not been at any of my lectures." On the young man repudiating the charge, and explaining his modus operandi y Jones offered alternatives. Either the paper should be marked " G.," or the student might undergo a viva-voce examination, in which as the Professor hinted his ignorance would be soon brought to light, the exact words of his warning taking the unclerical form of " Don't you be a d d fool." Kightly surmising that Jones would resent the trouble of a special examination, the young man shrewdly answered "Well, sir, I have told you the truth, and cannot do better than leave myself in your hands." The kindly Professor ultimately awarded the mark of " Gt.," to which the intrinsic quality of the work was admitted to have established a title. During the three years of my student life at the old College the times were tranquil. The Afghan War was just over; the main excitement of the country always excitable was over Maynooth and the common laws, and both questions were earnestly discussed amongst us youngsters, mainly from the high Tory point of view. Our life was joyous rather than wilfully insubordinate, and the authorities for the most part connived at little irregularities conceived in that spirit. We had a Debating Society, in which the Conservative majority was led by Temple, since distinguished as Governor of Bombay and OLD HAILEYBURY 17 Vice-Chairman of the London School Board. The Liberals were best represented by Mr. Hodgson Pratt, known to later times as President of the Association for Promoting International Arbitration. Besides the Debating Society there was a Social Club the " Welles- ley " which was a little exclusive, and jealously guarded the admission to its limited ranks. We had a " chartered toast," accompanied by a song with the refrain, " A health to the Marquess : God bless him ! " This posthumous homage to a long-departed Governor-General was cele- brated by help of a grand silver cup filled with generous port wine, and had probably more effect on our own health than on that of the deceased. But the practical result was that we constituted ourselves a medium of communication between the College and the world, and assumed the duty of entertaining distinguished visitors to Haileybury. It will be understood that all such revelry was against rules, and the authorities had ample means of control in the system of nightly inspection carried on by the ser- vants. There was but one entrance to the College quad- rangle from without, namely, the western gate facing the London road. Here was installed a janitor Wiltshire by name whose duty it was to lock up at sunset, and enter in his book the names of all students entering after a certain hour. We were then supposed to pass the evenings in our rooms, absorbed in study either solitary, or shared with an equally assiduous comrade ; and at the hour assigned for retirement one of the staff went round knocking at each door with the question, " Alone, sir? " If this was sometimes answered by a cheerful chorus of convivial voices no evil consequences usually resulted. The relaxation of rules hereby involved was mainly due to the progress of time and the mitigating action of experience. In the earlier constitution of the College it had been intended that discipline should be administered by the collective body of the Professors sitting in Council. 3 18 HERE AND THERE But in Melvill's day the power and responsibility had been consolidated in the hands of the Principal, and his ability, good-nature, and genial hospitality had combined to give him great and beneficial influence. It is not too much to say that the more valuable features of academic discipline had been greatly strengthened by the apparent relaxation of vigour which ensued. I recollect an instance of the tact with which Melvill turned aside what might have proved a dangerous blow to the well-being of the College, or, at least, to that of some of its alumni. It occurred in this wise. A number of the students had combined their resources for the purchase of a billiard-table, which, with due fittings and appurtenances, had been erected in the old Eye House, famous as the scene of Kumbold's abortive plot against the life of King Charles II., on the opposite shore of the Eiver Lea, which was here crossed by a road-bridge. There was an inn much frequented by cockney anglers, and used by members of the College addicted to boating and bathing in the river. The innkeeper having failed, the estate passed into the hands of trustees in bankruptcy, who attached our billiard-table, &c., as forming part of the assets. In vain we pointed out the hardship of this, seeing that the property obviously did not belong to the estate. The solicitor to the trustees would only answer that he found the names of many of the students on the inn-books as debtors for dinners and drinks ; he would therefore hold the things as security for such claims until we could prove our case in court. On receiving this ulti- matum we resolved to break the lien asserted to exist by carrying off the property, fortified, as we were, by the opinion of counsel that, if it were once taken out of the possession of the trustees, all such claims would lapse.* Accordingly, one dark November night, we went down with a waggon and carried off the table, with cues, balls, * Our learned friend was no other than the late Mr. Thomas Paynter, at that time one of the London police magistrates. OLD HAILEYBURY 19 lamps, and furniture, depositing them in a friendly quarter at Ware. As soon as Mr. Murray, the man in possession, discovered the loss, he proceeded to the residence of the nearest magistrate, to whom, in spite of the late hour, he insisted on relating the case, with a demand for warrants on a charge of burglary. Among the members of the club were some who afterwards filled high offices in the Indian Empire; but the only men whom Mr. Murray could identify were the writer of these lines and the present Marquess of Tweeddale then Lord William Hay and in their names accordingly were the nocturnal warrants made out. On the following morning Murray presented himself at Wiltshire's gates, demanding execution of these warrants, but Wiltshire would only refer him to the Principal. Melvill accordingly sent for Hay and myself, and concealing Murray behind a door, proceeded to ask us for an explanation. On hearing the facts the good Prin- cipal broke into a hearty fit of laughter, and dismissed us. We heard no more of the warrants, and could only pre- sume that our Principal had sent Murray away, as he had himself promised, " with a flea in his ear." My connection with the College ceased in 1846, and of its later fortunes I have no personal experience ; but a pleasant picture has been supplied by Mr. E. Lockwood, who was a student there in the years immediately pre- ceding the discontinuance of the system to which it owed existence. Discipline and training appear to have gone on improving, and the men turned out during those closing years were perhaps up to even higher general level than had hitherto been usual. A few notably Sir Alfred Lyall and Sir Auckland Colvin lived to earn distinction in many important fields, and to become, in a most conspicuous degree, Men of the Time. The conclusion arrived at by Messrs. Lowell and Stephens is remarkable, opposed as it is to modern ideas, however supported by the facts. "It appears clearly," says Mr. Stephens, "from this 20 HERE AND THERE story of the patronage system of the E.I. Company as to appointment . . . that patronage, when checked by training at a special college entered only after a qualifying examination, produces results not inferior to open com- petitive examination. . . . Most clearly of all is it proved that the chief advantage of such a college as Haileybury lay not so much in the actual instruction afforded as in the association together of young men intended for a career in common in which they specially needed the traditions of a noble service." In the earlier portion of the work Mr. Lowell applies these and similar considerations to the support of his pro- posal that American Colonial work should be entrusted to young men specially prepared. In any case it is presum- able that the people of the United States would never agree to the adoption of a system under which an over- educated Bengali can be sent to govern Sikhs or Afridis, and the administration of an important Colonial seaport be trusted to a full-blooded buck negro. The stress laid by the authors on the association of the young men is by no means exaggerated. Not only were traditions of honourable duty established, but the corpo- rate spirit fostered was on the whole beneficial. And these things were perhaps more practically useful than all the book-learning in the world. No properly informed person will contend that old Haileybury was an ideal place of education, or deny that, in comparison with other institutions, it was a rather lath-and-plaster Temple of the Muses. All that can be claimed for it is, perhaps, that it answered the purpose for which it was intended, and that it went on improving itself to the last. The declared intention was to provide a place where young men of a certain solid class, after giving proofs of good character and attainments, should live together for a time and receive instruction in certain branches of knowledge which would be useful to them in the career which they had undertaken. Whatever pro- OLD HAILEYBURY 21 tection may have attended the sons and nephews of the Directors after they had become students at the College, the entrance examinations at least were conducted by competent and impartial scholars; and it was my per- sonal conviction going up as I did from Oxford that a knowledge of the required subjects would have more than sufficed to ensure a University degree. Nor, indeed, was the ordeal without its terrors ; some candi- dates abstained from presenting themselves, and were consoled by commissions in the Company's army ; while others only qualified themselves by the aid of special trainers, amongst whom I particularly remember hearing of a Mr. Rowsell, by whom several of my contemporaries were prepared to face the examiners. This ordeal once passed, with certain satisfaction of the Court in regard to moral character, the youths entered the College and became exposed to temptations incidental to their age and circumstances. The defect in sanction, arising from the known reluctance to blight a protege's career, has been already shown. It would be quite a mistake to infer that the students' progress was neglected, or that they were usually sent to their impor- tant work in India as perfect dunces. The nature of two of the " European" courses Political Economy and Law has been already mentioned. Other subjects were equally attended to. Jeremie lectured in the Library, expounding Plato and Cicero with a wide and various apparatus of illustration. Heaviside afterwards Canon of Norwich taught science or some branch of applied mathematics. In the Oriental side we had Francis Johnson, editor of " Richardson's Arabic Dictionary," and Monier- Williams, afterwards Boden Professor at Oxford. Eastwick and Ouseley looked after Urdu and Persian, provision being also made for the languages of Madras and Bombay. Nor was this all mere show. Eminent scholars came down to test our work at the end of each term, or what 22 HERE AND THERE was known as " Dis " Day. In the terminal examinations a certain number of " L " marks involved the loss of the term, and the loss of two consecutive terms vacated one's appointment. If, after all precautions, a dunce did occa- sionally succeed in getting to India, he was not always a bad fellow for rough work ; in any case he had not made culture an industry or learned to loathe books like a grocer's boy surfeited with figs. Clearly the names recorded in this book of Messrs. Lowell and Stephens are enough to show that old Haileybury was quite able to turn out men whose reputation extended even beyond the limits of India. Competition has probably raised the general level of knowledge ; it has not yet produced better scholars than Brian Hodgson or better statesmen than John Lawrence. CHAPTEK III LONDON AND OXFORD IN THE FORTIES WHEN Sir Walter Scott published " Waverley " with an alternative title of " 'Tis Sixty Years Since," he assumed a considerable license, for it was only begun in 1805, to be laid by for so long that the interval separating the book from the events related was nearer seventy than sixty years, under shelter of which great authority the writer of the present little record hopes to escape censure if he adopts a similar liberty in looking back towards the earlier part of the Victorian epoch. Nor does he propose to try the reader's patience with a repetition of the well-worn comparison of the two ends of that protracted period. Great indeed have been the transformations evolved in many of life's aspects by the introduction of railroads and telegraphs, bicycle-riding, and the penny post. Untaxed newspapers now supply facts and fancies to an enfran- chised democracy; chartism has been killed by conces- sion ; the Irish Church has been disestablished, and the disestablishment of the Church of England has become a topic of discussion even among her own votaries. Edu- cation has been made compulsory, though, on the other hand, if in science and in politics advances have been made, it is doubtful whether the general intellectual and moral level has not been lowered. At the beginning of the reign the Poet Laureate was named William Words- worth; Macaulay and Mill were at their zenith as popular writers ; among the rising stars were Tennyson, 24 HERE AND THERE Thackeray, Dickens ; theologic teaching and controversy were in the hands of Chalmers and Newman. To none of these names could the end of the reign supply an adequate comparison, any more than the ephemeral fiction which now usurps the name of " literature " can rival the work of Bulwer, Lever, or Currer Bell to say nothing of Dickens, Thackeray, or George Eliot. One of the earliest events in the world of English letters by which the commencement of the Victorian age was marked was the first appearance of a periodical destined to a long and influential career. On July 17, 1841, was published the opening number of Punch, or the London Charivari, inspired, as the second title shows, by a comic paper of the Parisian boulevard, which it was ultimately to outdo in almost every respect. The Mayhew Brothers had much to do with the inception of Punch, but the first official editor was Mark Lemon, a portly publican from Holy well Street. During his incumbency Mr. W. S. Gilbert became an aspirant for that public favour which he has since so fully and so deservedly enjoyed ; and a story used to be told of his having sent the earlier of his afterwards popular "Bab Ballads " to Punch, to be declined by Lemon. It was added that some time afterwards the young author met Lemon at dinner and proceeded to score in his most characteristic manner. "You edit Punch, I believe, Mr. Lemon?" "Yes." "And I daresay you have some funny things sent to you from time to time?" "Oh, yes," answered the genial Mark; "very funny things indeed." "Ah!" said Gilbert meditatively, "what a pity you never use any of them in your paper!" The writer would be far from endorsing this bitter joke. The Punch of Jerrold and the Mayhews, Kenny Meadows, and Leech, was not better than the paper has been in later hands, but it had plenty of funny things." It must have been soon after the date referred to when the AthencBum then under the father of Sir Charles LONDON AND OXFORD 25 Dilke pointed out the ascension of a new star in a review of the volume containing "Mariana" and "The Lotus Eaters," " The Lady of Shalott," and other poems, 1842. The new author was encountered at Culverden, the house of some neighbours of ours at Tunbridge Wells a stately presence with long black hair and retired manners. Wordsworth ere long pronounced him " the greatest of our living poets " a high benediction from the father of our poetic reformation. Walter Scott had been dead some ten years, but the influence of his imaginative treatment of the past was exerting itself upon our cultured classes, giving rise to the " Puseyite " movement at Oxford and to the " Young England " party in Parliament and in society. Charlie- over-the- water to use Borrow's phrase symbolised not only a political ideal, but still more a religious reaction ; and the principles of poor decapitated old Laud, though not in so many words propagated by the author of "Waverley," derived popularity from his teaching. Of the Coryphaeus of the movement if nicknames go for anything nothing need be said here. Dr. Pusey's piety and learning, coupled with his birth and social standing, made him a prominent leader, according to general opinion; but he was a moderate man, and hardly a champion. John Newman was of a different character, and soon led the more ardent spirits of his school to what he and they deemed a logical conclusion. Of his abilities an undiscriminating admiration has appeared universal since his death ; but survivors will remember that Arnold, who had known him when they were both Fellows of Oriel, vehemently controverted his reasoning, while Carlyle said he had " the brains of a buck rabbit." The truth probably was midway of two extremes. Newman's earnestness was joined to a consummate controversial irony which had a singular effect on men's minds ; but his great powers were not always used with due dis- cretion. Years after the time now under notice he was 26 HERE AND THERE sentenced to a fine for libelling an opponent, and nothing could well be more severe than the admonition then addressed to him by Sir J. D. Coleridge, the presiding judge. And his subsequent attack on poor Charles Kingsley, though a wonderful piece of triumphant dialectic, was not felt by every one at the time to be altogether fair. Impartial critics may well have felt that Newman's keen, bright faculty was a weapon in his hand rather than a complete expression of his mind (see Maudsley's " Natural Causes," &c., p. 292, and footnote on the next page). Nevertheless, with whatever draw- backs, Newman had the heart of a heroic combatant, and to that he has been indebted for the position he has attained amongst the intellectual idols of the age. It is not less noticeable that his University was at that very day producing men destined in some measure to counter- act his influence such as Clough, Stanley, Matthew Arnold, and others, who have perhaps supplanted him as leaders of the best modern thought. The pupils of Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett are doing more to-day than the Neo-Laudians, of whom the strongest have deserted the ranks of freedom. Oxford is totally changed since the beginning of the reign, whether materially, socially, or as a place of learning. In those days you went up as vacancies occurred in your college, of which you could not be a member until you had matriculated, which was done after an examination by the college authorities, mainly directed to the discovery of the class of your attainments in view to arranging what lectures would be most suitable for you to attend. The lectures in each college were delivered exclusively to their own pupils by the tutors of each, and attendance with due answering and construing formed the great part of your studies, the lectures of the University professors being either non-existent or matter of option, if not a mere formality. In your fourth term you went through what was called " Sitting for Kesponsions," LONDON AND OXFORD 27 when you took your place in the Schools' Gallery to witness the examination of your seniors for their " Little- Go " ; and in the succeeding term you were expected to present yourself for a like ordeal. There were no Moderation Examinations, and only two final schools for " Greats," in which the more promising of the under- graduates were encouraged by the authorities of their respective colleges to try for honours in humane letters, or in mathematics, or in both. By the former is to be understood what is known at Cambridge as the " Classical Tripos," but in place of genuine scholarship such as that of a Person or a Shilleto, the Oxonians had to display his acquirements chiefly in logic, Aristotle, and Greek verse. Such was the path indicated for the ambition of the studious youth of the University. The reading-men, however, were in the minority, those to whom the approval of the Dons was as the breath of the nostril, and who shunned delight and lived laborious days. From morn to dewy eve they read, only inter- mitting their labours to sally forth for a " constitutional " walk up Headington, to Godstow, or some other fixed point not too remote ; halls and chapels, as a matter of course ; and a rare visit to the Union to listen to, perhaps join in, a debate.* Their destiny was clear ; some would become Fellows and settle down, each in turn, to a College living with vague views of deanery or bishopric ; others would become ushers in public schools with hopes more or less justified of succeeding to the head- master's ferule. A certain number went to the Bar, whence they might, or might not, extract a fortune or rise to the Bench ; a few might graduate in medicine and set up as consulting physicians, awaiting their guinea fees, while the general practitioner, less hampered by edu- cation and etiquette, chased the nimble shillings in his gig, or compounded pills and potions in his odorous surgery. * These debates were then held in the parlour of a shop, or some such modest resort. 28 HERE AND THERE This was the ideal of the reading-man : a Double First often becoming something less in actual result ; a decorous and lucrative career not seldom attaining more of the former than of the latter. But there were others, at the extreme opposite, who were quite insensible to such considerations. There were the "fast men," using or abusing the supplies sadly made to them by encumbered parents ; crossing the quadrangle to each other's rooms in ragged academicals, or " doing the High" in unbecoming splendour. Dog-fighting, billiards and beer, bad company and vingt-et-un formed the occu- pation of their lives, which, indeed, they might have carried on without coming to college at all. Pluck and rustication failing to reform or warn them, they went to the dogs in their respective ways ; some to a hall where, under a relaxed discipline, they hold out until, in the fulness of time, a Pass degree might be filched from a weary University ; others to the post of billiard-marker, private soldier, or penniless emigrant. It is hardly necessary to add that the great majority of undergradu- ates had little in common with either of these extremes ; consisting of brave youths, happy in emancipation from school, living on their allowances, observing rules in a general way, taking their B.A. in due course, and dis- appearing into the midway paths of life, neither much better nor much worse for having spent three years at the University. Oxford has indeed changed, in social matters especially. Many of the Dons are now married and live in the pretty northern suburbs, where their wives entertain under- graduate friends at tea and tennis. Noblemen and gentlemen commoners no longer dine at high-table in silken gowns, though there is elsewhere more association than of old between the older and younger men. You can take honours in "Mods" and graduate, afterwards, in fancy subjects ; when you return to college after the Long Vacation you find that your rooms have been occupied LONDON AND OXFORD 29 by an Extension lecturer or, perhaps, by an enthusiastic school-marm." * Materially, also, the place is a good deal altered. No longer do you enter over Magdalen Bridge ; the " Angel " has fallen, and in his vacant place arise Jackson's new " Schools." Trams run through the streets, and B. N. C. has a neo-gothic frontage on the High. Nevertheless, a certain mediaeval air clings to the old city, and even lingers about the common-rooms of the colleges ; and Oxford, more than any place in England, still links the present to the past. One great change there certainly is. In the early days of railroad travelling the University authorities, in the interests of discipline, contrived to prevent the Great Western Company from bringing their line to Oxford. The nearest station was then at Steventon ; and the con- sequence as might have been foreseen was not to prevent the young men from running up to London, but merely to add to the expense of the journey the cost of a trap to Steventon, and another to bring one back next day. There was no local theatre either, so that the most innocent undergraduate had always an excuse for an occasional visit to the centre of music and the drama, t Those were in London days of good acting and poor staging ; in place of elaborate structures built up on the stage, while the audience waits on the carpenters, you had to be satisfied with flats and hanging sheets. But you had Macready, Phelps, Harley, Farren, Buckstone, the Keeleys, Madame Vestris, Mr. Nisbett, and excellent plays replaced after a short run by others equally enjoy- able. The pit was a pleasant rendezvous for critics and * A vivid impression remains on memory of the late Lord Ward, in silk and gold, rustling into Jubber's with a train of admiring henchmen. f Further details of University life at the eve of the Victorian epoch and on to the middle of the nineteenth century will be found in Mr. ThekwelPs " Beminiscences " 1900. 30 HERE AND THERE people of moderate means, where, for a couple of shillings, you could get a seat in a good angle of vision for the stage the same, in fact, as the seat now called a " stall," for which you may be charged half-a-guinea ; and there you may (between the ladies' hats) see a problem-play in which the actors and actresses go through their hundred and fiftieth performance with mechanical accuracy. A favourite resort with young Oxonians of those days was the Haymarket ; and that little theatre had a speci- ality in which we took great interest. It was, probably, the precursor of the comic operetta in which the Savoy has since become so conspicuous; but it was a cruder and less ambitious undertaking, known to the time as " Burlesque." The idea was to take a well-known fairy tale, dress it in drama, and throw in a lot of topical songs written to familiar airs. The writer was generally Mr. J. E. Planche, an official of the Herald's College, whose antiquarian tastes combined with light artistic instincts derived from French blood ; and among the performers were Charles Mathews and " Polly Horton," known to later admirers as Mrs. German Reed. One of these entertainments exhibited the gods of Olympus coming down to London, and the part of Mars was taken by a stentorian baritone, Mr. James Bland, who sang a song in praise of gun-cotton, an explosive just then pro- duced by a German professor. Bland' s song on this topic regarded as congenial to the God of War may be quoted as an example of Blanche's manner " Some talk of Captain Warner, Of Lord Dundonald some, Of shooting round the corner, Or of something quite as rum; But of all the strange inventions The strangest this appears, If with cotton-twist you the charge can resist Of the British Grenadiers." We have got a good deal further in the finish of our LONDON AND OXFORD 31 comic ballads since then, though many playgoers of that period are still able to go to the theatre ; and the exploits commemorated have been as much superseded and made obsolete as the verse in which they were sung. Captain Warner invented a " long range " by which he blew up a boat at a distance of 300 yards ; and Professor Schonbein with a charge of cotton sent a round-shot through eight inches of deal board at a distance of nearly one hundred. These feats would not attract attention in China now. At Drury Lane English Opera made a fairly successful stand under the management of Alfred Bunn remem- bered by a few on account of his quarrel with Macready. The tenor parts in these performances were taken by Mr. Harrison, one of whose sons in due course married Charles Kingsley's daughter, known to modern novel readers as " Lucas Malet." Mrs. Nisbett for a time left the stage to become the wife of Sir William Boothby, a Derbyshire baronet. Among the frequenters of the " Omnibus Box" at old Drury were Sir Charles Shakerley, Sir Harry de Bathe, and Michael Bruce of the Coldstream Guards, the ardent admirer of the beautiful but ill-fated Clara Webster, whose dress took fire at the footlights, and who was killed before his eyes. Among the beauties of the higher social sphere were Miss Virginia Pattle afterwards Lady Somers with Lady Pollington, Lady Dorothy Walpole, and the daughters of Lady Jersey. Like the stars of the theatrical world, these too have passed from sight, like comets moving in hyperbola ; and the rare survivors are left to echo the sad song of Captain Morris "There's many a lad I loved is dead, And many a lass grown old; And, when I think of themes like that, My weary heart grows cold." Other notable men about town were Count Alfred d'Orsay the glass of fashion and his friend Prince Louis Napoleon then chiefly known for ambitious under- 32 HERE AND THERE takings which might seem to have been borrowed from Planche Lord Alfred Paget, Sir Charles Kent, of the Life Guards, and a few others, among whom a young Jew M.P. was being much talked about, partly for his eccentric writings, but more for his audacious attacks on Sir Kobert Peel in the House of Commons. (Mr. Benjamin Disraeli was only young as a politician in a world where men unconnected with great houses rose slowly, having been, of course, born nearly forty years before.) The day of great houses is over ; their last stand was in opposition to Free Trade, but the changes in the poli- tical system that the last sixty years have witnessed have been celebrated elsewhere ; fortunate in this respect has our country been that change, which might have been caused by sudden violence, has been the work of time. Though so gradual, however, it has been very complete ; and Demos, who was battering the gates with his five- pointed Charter at the opening of the period, is now solidly established in the high places of the city. Every great department of State is affected by the new system ; in one respect at least most patriotic Britons will admit an evident advance. At the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria what has now dwindled into " Little England," of which even its friends seem half ashamed, was called "Manchester School," and was connected with high and serious politics. " Cut the painter " was a common cry in regard to the colonies ; " Perish India ! " was an aspiration hardly disowned by some of the Chiefs of Freedom. In one direction, indeed, it was found by a practical test that the imperial instinct was not lulled beyond arousing. In 1837 a French Canadian of the name of Papineau raised his standard in much the same spirit shown in recent times by Paul Kruger. The revolt was energetically and wisely met, being put down by General Colborne, an old Waterloo veteran, ultimately raised to LONDON AND OXFORD 33 the Peerage as Lord Seaton. Papineau was allowed to go to Paris, a constitution was granted to Canada, the French Province was united to the rest of the colony without detriment to French susceptibilities, either as to law, language, or religion. Ultimately the United Provinces, under a French premier, have rendered valu- able aid to the Empire in a moment of trouble due to an almost exactly similar cause in South Africa. No greater proof can be given of the amendment in spirit all round, nor of the good that may come out of a hearty struggle followed by a just and humane settlement. One of the most prominent public men of the early Vic- torian period was the conqueror of Napoleon, a man whose active service had begun in the eighteenth century. The Duke of Wellington was then a very familiar figure in the London streets, where he often walked unattended, or rode with a single groom behind him; his mighty antagonist had long since fretted himself out on his rock a modern Prometheus with a British general for his Vulture. Like Napoleon, " the Duke" had but little love for " the people " as a separate organ in the State, and he was prepared to do all in his power to preserve, as intact as possible, the existing framework of society. It was no part of his business to foresee the future. Heine called Napoleon " Gonfalonier of the Revolution" an over- statement. Republican Napoleon w r as not, but with greater truth might Wellington have been called the swordsman of conservatism, for he knew, if only by instinct, what danger was involved in a too sudden breaking up of existing manners and customs. The destruction of feudal privilege was begun by Grey and Russell in 1830, when they brought forward their first proposals for " Reform " in other words, for such a recon- struction of national representative government as must for ever destroy the privileges of the territorial aristocracy. The Duke regarded this as "fatal to the Constitution" (vide citation in Maxwell's "Life," vol. ii. p. 270). 4 34 HERE AND THERE Nevertheless, to " take the King out of the hands of the Kadicals," he was prepared, as late as May, 1832, to introduce "an extensive measure of Keform." King William was supposed to be favourable to some such measure, and Theodore Hook on this occasion published a squib in his paper called " John Bull " : " Bull and Bill went up a hill to make a revolution ; Bill fell down and lost his crown And Bull his constitution." The Duke's anxieties on the subject have been hardly justified. The destruction of feudal privilege has not produced in England that utter disfranchisement of the aristocracy that we see in France. Let us hope that in our islands it may rather take the form of raising the lowly with no corresponding depression of other classes the spelling of Ke volution without the K. As servile labour is more and more replaced by machinery, we may approach the ideal condition when all citizens may have the habits of gentlemen. But "the Duke," bred in another system and menaced for many months with mob violence, can hardly deserve blame if he did not perceive this tendency. It is hard to find a criterion for the just comparison of the two ends of our era. " The Duke's " ideal was a strong centralised system, but the introduction of the ten-pound voter had undermined all that, and things were bound to go further. The rule of the lower middle classes was based, it is to be feared, on narrow and ignoble ideas. The mention of Harrison, the tenor of old Drury, reminds one of the following display of artistic conception characteristic of the class. A gentleman was manifesting displeasure at Harrison, one night, when his next neighbour in the dress-circle begged him to desist. "I don't like," said the worthy citizen, " to 'ear any one 'iss Mr. 'Arrison." "What," said the other, "not if he sings flat? " " No, sir," was the reply. " 'E is a good LONDON AND OXFORD 35 'usband and a good father, and 'is word is as good as 'is bond." Such was the type of man to whom the Act of 1832 had given the control of our destinies. The constituency of to-day is greatly composed of a different sort of men : persons who use their hands, perhaps, more than they use their heads ; who are ambitious and given to ask for rates of emolument which are inconvenient and even dangerous to the commerce of the country; but they speak good English, have just canons of art, and are more ready to make sacrifices for the Empire than were the believers in Bright and Cobden. The democratic system that has been established among us for the last twenty years or so of the nineteenth century has not been ignoble ; neither can that epithet be fairly held applicable to the aristo- cratic government that resisted Louis XIV. and ruined Napoleon ; but the intervening regime, which ruled from the 1832 settlement to the period of household suffrage, can hardly be regarded as anything more than a national eclipse. The proofs are familiar; no Cabinet dared to attend to the Duke's almost passionate prayers for national defence ; the war with Russia, entered into without consideration, was conducted in a spirit of scandalous negligence ; Free Trade and Universal Exhibitions were held to be efficient substitutions for public vigilance and private virtue. From that base nightmare our nation has been roused, just in time to save it from becoming the spoil and laughing-stock of Europe. John Bull is no longer the fat man walking in dangerous ways with his pockets unbuttoned, his watch- chain hanging loose, and his stick replaced by a five- shilling umbrella ; he is more anxious than of old, but ready to take his own part, and " gare a qui le touched Having written above concerning " fast " men at the University, it may not be out of place if I conclude with an experience of a tragical character concerning one of 36 HERE AND THERE the class, occurring in India, not many years after my entrance into the Service. Having been invited to assist at the terminal examination of a private school in a Hill Station, I observed at one end of the schoolroom a desk by which was standing a gentlemanly looking young man plainly dressed, with a face that I thought I recognised. On my asking the headmaster who this was, I was told he was a gunner in the Bengal Artillery attached to the con- valescent depot and officiating as teacher in the school by arrangement with the commandant. His name was said to be "Mortimer"; but that sounded so very like the sort of name that would be taken by a man anxious to mask himself that I was not satisfied. As I passed his desk I said : " Have we not met before ? " and was answered as I expected. The gunner-usher was a man who had been at Christ Church when I was an under- graduate, the son of an eminent scholar and D.D., the name of Mortimer being only a nom d'emprunt. On subsequent occasions the whole story came out. My contemporary had got into the toils of a moneylender named Lewis Joel, who, by the help of a cigar shop and a showy wife, had endeared himself to many of the gilded youth of the time. Having taken his degree, my friend went to the Bar ; but Joel's claims went on as such things had a special way of doing and poor was threatened with the then very severe operation of the law. At length, in a moment of despair, he was accosted in the now vanished King Street, Westminster, where the E. I. Company's recruiting agency was then held at a low tavern. It was an opening of escape from Joel ; the sergeant was persuasive, and, in fine, " Mortimer " took the Company's shilling and was sent out to Dum-Dum in the Bengal regiment of artillery. A few months later he saw in the home papers that Joel had been convicted of felony and transported ! But that, of course, was of no avail to him now ; his health broke down in the Service, and he was sent to the Depot for change of air. He had LONDON AND OXFORD 37 influential friends, however, and hoped soon to buy his discharge. I left the Hills and went to Muzaffarnagar in 1854 ; while there I one day got a scrap of paper signed by my friend, asking me to come and see him in the sarai (native inn) ; and here, sure enough, was Mortimer with a small country cart, wandering without means or object. At his request I supplied his immediate wants and gave him a letter to the manager of a newspaper published at Meerut, on which he forthwith promised an engagement. But he did not remain there long, and, on being dis- charged, re-enlisted in the King's Royal Rifles. On the evening of May 10, 1857, he was murdered by the muti- neers as he was loafing on the Delhi road. Such was the tragical fate of a " fast " man in the last generation. CHAPTEK IV LONDON AND OXFORD (continued) THE beginning of the Victorian era was a time of hope- fulness, and its first decade to those who can remember it will appear as one of apogee for the British nation. A famine visited Ireland, which permanently reduced the population, though it may have left no further immediate effect but the repeal of the Corn Laws and a new impetus to the national prosperity, before which the English dis- content expressed by Chartism recoiled and collapsed.* The Crimean War had not yet revealed the incompetence of our administration, nor had the Indian Mutiny revealed the thinness of the crust over Plutonian forces. Alike in England and in France so near and yet so far were laid the foundations of a new feudalism ; and the barons of military conquest were being superseded by the lords of finance. It is said that the famous headmaster of Kugby Thomas Arnold expressed his joy over the opening of the North- Western Kailway (then called the London and Birmingham) on the ground that it an- nounced the end of the feudal system. His joy would have been tempered if he had known that it might also indicate the coming of a harder and more ignoble oppres- sion provocative of strife more deadly than the Peasant Wars of the past. It is, indeed, no more than the plain truth that, in England at least, the aristocracy has shown more care for the working classes than the direct em- * All most serious insurrections have had their origin in misery. 38 LONDON AND OXFORD 39 ployers of labour and their representatives in the House of Commons.* The French ^Revolution, too, was begun by the liberal nobles, rather than by the bourgeoisie, if we take Mirabeau and Condorcet into account. Less able, perhaps, but more fortunate, the English nobility was able to enter the popular ranks without much suffering, while that of France was swept away or suppressed. Just before the middle of the nineteenth century it may have seemed, in both countries, as if a new oligarchy of capital was to take the whole command but in Britain, if nowhere else, it was soon to be discovered that prosperity was not to be obtained that way. In the long run, how- ever useful a factor might be the benevolent leadership of culture and capital, it was on their own resources that the rank and file of labour must depend if they were to share in the profits of production and build for permanence the national welfare. Hence it was but natural that reform should have been at that period represented as coincident with the interest of the middle classes. So acute an observer as Benjamin Disraeli produced a most successful work of fiction in 1845, with the misspelt title of " Sybil," in which he postulated that we were still " Two Nations."! It was a land of Cockaigne on which the day of Democracy was hardly dawning. That was the state of affairs at home when the present writer landed in Calcutta during the month of October, 1847. It was a period of apparent prosperity there also. The Governor-General was on his way down the country, after having conquered the Sikhs, and concluded treaties with Lahore, Kashmir, and Nepal. He was General * Instances will be found on the Bolls of Parliament as far back as the reigns of Edward III. and his grandson, where the King and Council, or the House of Lords, refused to sanction Bills sent up by the Commons having an oppressive tendency. f " Sybil ; or, the Two Nations " was a story of capital and labour. The orthography of the word is, of course, " Sibyl." 40 HERE AND THERE Hardinge, famous for his services in the Peninsular War and in the Waterloo campaign, where he lost his left arm ; a man of whom the Duke of Wellington testified that he never undertook anything that he did not understand, on whose tomb Queen Victoria was eventually to record that " no sovereign ever possessed a more honest and faithful councillor, a more loyal, fearless, and devoted servant." The veteran was received in Calcutta with a sort of Roman triumph, the captured Sikh guns 256 in number being paraded on the maidan, and a warm address of congratulation offered by the community (Native and European), culminating ultimately in the erection of a fine statue. His actual appearance at the time was rather pleasing than imperial; a brisk English gentleman, of moderate stature only, with a good forehead, a mild eye, and the clean-shaven countenance of the Wellingtonian school. Though born of good old stock, the Governor- General was not ennobled until 1846, after the conclusion of the war of which he had shared the labour and peril in person the last occupant of the post who has done so. He had served as a volunteer by the side of old Gough, the Commander-in-Chief, whom he had been ordered to supersede if he should find it necessary. Hardinge, how- ever, had kept the matter to himself ; and, in spite of disaster and discussion, maintained his secondary soldier- ship to the last. When all was over he, as head of the Government, bore liberal testimony to the good qualities of the brave old Irish chief. The period of one's arrival in India was that signalised by Hunter as the break between the old and the new Anglo-India.* Just two years earlier Captain Waghorn had delivered " the express " portion of the mail by the overland route, which was permanently established in 1846, though an experimental despatch had been made five years before, taking just two months in transit. Up to these days and, indeed, for some time later our * " Life of Brian Hodgson," p. 26. LONDON AND OXFORD 41 Honourable Masters did not allow their servants leave beyond the Cape of Good Hope; and many, who had been from nine to twelve months on the voyage out, remained forty or fifty years in the country and often left their bones there. One of the last of these old " Qui Hyes" only died during the last nineties Mr. Fleet wood Williams, C.S.I., who had left England before the intro- duction of railway travelling. I think he smoked his hukka to the last. This was a stately tobacco cere- monial of which no trace remains in European circles, though practised universally in Bengal when I entered the Service. The manner of it was this : after the ladies left the dining-room, if not before, each man was provided (by a special attendant) with a silver mouthpiece in a bowl of perfumed water, a strip of carpet being laid behind the chair, on which was placed the crystal vase containing the water through which the smoke was to pass and be inhaled in a cool condition. In the top of this vase was placed the bowl containing the chillum, a paste of tobacco and conserve ; a glowing ball of ignited charcoal was laid on this, and the end of the "snake" at the same time introduced under the right-hand arm of your chair. You then inserted the mouthpiece, and in another minute the room was full of gurgling sound as of camels protesting against their loads. Such was the solemnity witnessed after every Anglo-Indian dinner ; to which it remains to add that it was a deadly affront to step over that portion of the snake which lay upon the carpet. Another social function of the day was the taking of wine with one another confined in England to mess- rooms and practised between persons near enough to catch one another's eye. In India, however, it would sometimes happen that a guest at one end of a long table wished to exchange greetings with a friend at the other whom he knew to be present even if he could barely see him. It even happened occasionally that the parties had quarrelled and one, or both, desired to renew 42 HERE AND THERE amicable relations. In all such cases the man making the overture would send his servant round to the other with the message, "So-and-so sends compliments" ("Sahib salaam deta"). On which the recipient was expected to lean forward and " look towards you," each raising his glass and making a bow over it at the same moment. We youngsters were supposed to be on probation, being technically described as " in College." There were not, indeed any traces left of the collegiate life and discipline that Lord Wellesley had endeavoured to institute a generation earlier, but there were still periodical exami- nations to test our progress in Persian and the vernacular of Bengal or of the North- West Provinces. The pursuit of that curriculum, however, left us abundant leisure, more or less of which was devoted to Society (with a capital S). Sir Lawrence Peel, Mr. and Mrs. C. H. Cameron, and some of the military officials tendered us hospitality more, indeed, than the members of our own Service. Mrs. Cameron was one of the famous Pattle family, sister of the beautiful Virginia, Lady Somers. Her uncle, Colonel Pattle, familiarly known as " Jemmy Blazes," had been somewhat notorious a few years before on account of his prowess as a raconteur, and many were the anecdotes about him which were still current in those days. He had risen in the 9th Bengal Light Cavalry, and commanded the corps at the battle of Miani, where Sir Charles Napier broke the resistance of the Amirs of Sindh in 1843. Miyan is the Persian for " scabbard," and it was related that the Colonel accounted for the name of the field in some such terms as these : "In the thick of the melee Sir Charles rode up to me, crying, ' By G , Colonel, this is butchery ; give me your sword, sir ! ' I had, of course to obey ; but my blood was up. Calling on my men to follow, I returned to the charge and you may believe me or not killed eleven of the enemy with my empty scabbard. Hence the name." LONDON AND OXFORD 43 The officers of that period were less afflicted with examinations and intellectual training than at present, and perhaps had not- so much actual experience in war as their immediate predecessors, the followers of Wellington. Neither in point of conviviality or of expenditure are the present-day officers likely to emulate the men of old, although the traditions of a Service die hard, especially among Britons. But it is obvious that when the officers of an army are chosen on purely intellectual grounds, they must more and more tend to diverge from the old semi-feudal type. And when one adds the consideration that they work hard all day and, in some cases, pursue professional studies at night, one sees that officers can no longer lead the sort of life depicted, with more or less accuracy, by Charles Lever and the author of "Guy Livingstone." Among the picturesque elements now eliminated from British army life was the practice of private warfare. Duelling, as noticed in a former work,* arose out of the ordeal by battle, it being a result of the form of belief prevalent in the Dark Ages that Providence interposed on behalf of just causes. Something of the same kind again revealed itself when one assumed judicial functions up-country and found Hindu villages settling boundary disputes by club-law, or referring them to local arbitra- ment on the venue, with the traditional adage, "Panch- mew Parmeshwar," or "God is with the five." In the same work it is stated that the last duel between Anglo- Indians took place as late as 1855, some time after the practice had died out at home. It may be presumed that the Anglo-Indian officers hardly shared the belief of their continental predecessors or their Native contemporaries ; they fought each other on all sorts of motives, but not that God should " show the right." Nevertheless, fight they most certainly did, down to the very end of the old regime that terminated in the Annee Terrible of 'Fifty-seven. * " Servant of John Company," p. 76. CHAPTER V MOFUSSIL LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY FROM the beginning of the British civil administration there have always been two distinct sections of the Service in the " Bengal Presidency," to use a familiar phrase, now obsolete. In Calcutta lived the Governor- General, not yet raised to the dignity of Viceroy appointed, indeed, on the nomination of the Crown Ministers, yet commissioned by the Company and liable to be recalled by the fiat of its Directors. This latter statement has an incredible appearance, but it is true so true that the predecessor of Lord Hardinge, the able but eccentric Lord Ellenborough, was absolutely so recalled. About the Governor-General gyrated all the centres of administration, save when occasions of State or of incli- nation took his Excellency to Simla, when he was usually attended by some of the minor Panjandrums. Thus, in 1837-8, Lord Auckland made a progress, which furnished substance for his sister's amusing letters, afterwards published in the form of a book. * But when he got to Simla he lived in a cottage and only one secretary attended him, with two juniors, Messrs. J. B. Colvin and Henry Torrens. The acting Governor of Bengal and the Supreme Council remained at Calcutta, with all the heads of Civil and Military Departments. The rest of Bengal and Hindustan was vaguely known as the * " Up the Country," by the Hon. Emily Eden, third ed. London, 1866. 44 LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY 45 " Mofussil," * an unequal partition in all respects save that of power and dignity. It is with this enormously larger section of the Empire that the young official had to concern himself when once he left the charmed circle of the capital. It can hardly be necessary to add that between the two classes, the majority who proceeded to up-country stations and the favoured few who remained at headquarters, there was a chronic mistrust almost amounting to hostility. For the Mofussilite the head- quarter men felt a suspicion not unblended with a ten- dency to take him for granted until you could trip him up ; whilst he, on the other hand, regarded his fortunate colleague with envy, perhaps tending towards insubor- dination. Metcalfe afterwards a Peer and Governor- General of Canada was one of the few whose exceptional ability led to his being employed in both classes, for he was at one time the Government Agent and Commis- sioner at Delhi, at another a member of Council at Calcutta ; yet he denounced the members in general as a " caste " of which the suppression was essential to the wellbeing of the Empire. Instances of serious mis- understanding between the two classes were not, perhaps, very numerous, for on both sides there were principles of loyalty and patriotism. But such cases as that of Ochterlony in Amherst's reign, and that of William Tayler during the Mutiny, were enough to show what possi- bilities of evil might lie beneath the surface. The antagonism referred to had found voice towards the end of the Bentinck period in the pages of the Meerut Universal Magazine, whose affectionately shortened title was " M.U.M," a periodical set going by an officer of the llth Hussars named Tuckett, and supported by two very able young civilians, Henry Torrens and H. M. Elliott, who were then serving at Meerut. t * Properly " Mofassal," q.d. separate. t Torrens afterwards became Under- Secretary to Government, and was popularly debited with the policy that led to the Afghan 46 HERE AND THERE It was the postulate and position of the provincial staff of those days that its members passed their lives in correcting the blunders of the departmental chiefs at Calcutta, whom they pictured as overpaid bureaucrats wallowing in a pool of selfish ignorance and imbecility ; and although the M.U.M. expired after a brilliant exist- ence of barely two years, a more durable organ arose on its ashes with a somewhat similar programme. This was the Mofussilite, a weekly paper edited by a young barrister named John Lang, which for several years indeed, up to the outbreak of May, 1857 continued to appear at Meerut. Lang himself loved to enjoy the social pleasures which he found during the hot and rainy seasons on the cool heights of Simla, where also he could procure help of all sorts from visitors of culture at the sanatorium. But he had able assistants at Meerut, at one time an accomplished and well-read Canadian, G. R. Wilby ; and his printer, Mr. Gibbons. It was in those days that the memorable one-line leader appeared, of which something has been said elsewhere "TheGor- ham Case ; damn the Gorham case ! " * The Gorham Case is well-nigh forgotten now ; but it made a stir about the year 1850, and the commotion became perceptible all through the Empire, being indeed a distinct but connected outcome of the Anglo- Catholic movement. The " case " arose out of a controversy on baptismal regeneration, a subject unlikely to possess the least interest for Mr. Lang ; and in the book cited above a rumour was mentioned assigning the credit or debit of the contemptuously laconic editorial to W. F. Courtenay, private secretary to Lord Dalhousie, then Governor- General of India. Since the publication of my former work another account has come to notice, according to which the War. Elliot became Foreign Secretary in Dalhousie's time and a Knight of the Bath. * " A Servant of John Company," p. 123. LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY 47 briefest of leaderettes had its origin in a private note addressed by the editor to Mr. Gibbons at the Meerut office, enclosing or including a second note from an impatient Simla friend to whom Lang had applied for an article on the question of the day, and whose want of leisure or inclination took this familiar form. And Gibbons always according to this version being in urgent need of copy, and rightly gauging the taste of his public, printed the curt comment as a leading article. Certainly, there was nothing in the relations existing at the time between Lang and Courtenay to forbid conjec- ture that the latter was the writer, though he may have had no idea that his somewhat petulant refusal would be itself turned into a contribution. In any case the readers of the Mofussilite applauded it as being a consummate sample of the editor's genius ; and the applause presently developed into gaping admiration of the ensuing apology. This explanation ended with words to the following effect : " We have been requested to take this opportunity of announcing that the notice of the Gorham Case was not from the pen of the Rev. Mr. Quartley, the respected chaplain of Simla." Many anecdotes of Lang were in circulation at the time ; but their repetition here might lead to scandal and wounded feeling. The one incident of a public character which occurs to memory is by no means to be regarded as a champion specimen of his audacious humour. Such as it was, it occurred in a trial arising out of commissariat expense alleged to have been enhanced fraudulently by the chief contractor of those days, Lala Joti Prasad, and Lang was retained for the defence. The prosecution was imprudent and the con- duct of the case not very able, so that Lang's brief was not perhaps very difficult. Mr. S. S. Brown, of the Civil Service, was deputed to preside as a sort of Special Commissioner, and a jury of clerks was empanelled for the trial. Availing himself of these conditions, Lang 48 HERE AND THERE pleaded with complete success, in spite of one of the most impudent perorations ever delivered before a British tribunal. The hearing began at Agra on the 27th of March, 1851, no less than twelve long, hot days being occupied by the evidence and arguments. At the con- clusion Lang addressed the court in a telling speech, ending with the following remarkable comparison : " The scene," he said, " reminded him of one of those days on board ship when pork, in one shape or other, was all that could be had to eat. Pork, all pork, typified the present case. He stood in a Company's court, beside a Company's prosecutor, pleading before a Company's judge, and awaiting the verdict of a Company's jury."* Undeterred by this unpleasant simile, the court did its duty. Without expecting the accused to prove a nega- tive, it found that Joti Prasad had been a most useful man to the Government, whom it would be monstrous to hold answerable for every little job and trick perpetrated in his name by underlings whom he could not possibly control. The Lala was acquitted, and bore so little malice as to render very important service to the Govern- ment during the Mutiny. The life of the Mofussil officials of those days was calm, with plenty of work, mostly of a routine character, though sometimes diversified with less familiar incidents. During my apprenticeship in the Muttra District I was sent out, at the beginning of the hot weather, to report upon damage done by hail, and was thus furnished with my first insight into the rural existence of the people ; and attached to me, as dry nurse, was the Sub-Collector, a highly-descended Moslem, of the tribe called " Sayyad," held to be of the same stock as the prophet Muhamad. My headquarters were in an empty bungalow built by some former collector, but long abandoned. During the * Trotter's " India under Victoria," i. 262. This is a very valu- able record of the events of the middle of the century in the Indian Empire. LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY 49 day we rode about, examining the peasants and inspect- ing the injured crops, in the evening we sat in the verandah of the bungalow exchanging views on all sorts of subjects. I recollect that, among other topics, the goodness of the Creator arose for discussion ; the Sayyad contending that Allah had provided all nature for the use and enjoyment of mankind. He was gravelled for a moment when I objected to the mosquito, an animal from whose incursions we were just then suffering ; but after alittle reflection the Moslem observed thatplaguesand afflictions were equally useful, since they afforded oppor- tunities for the exercise of our patience. This incorri- gible optimist also surprised me by objecting to tobacco, on principle ; which, to my imperfect experience, appeared strange in an Oriental. Ultimately one learned one's own ignorance, abstinence from indulgences, as smoking, being a voluntary rule of the genuine Sayyad not, of course, imposed by the law of Islam, to which the weed was unknown, but adopted out of ascetic scruple and maintained as a token of purity. In due time I was vested with " full powers," and sent as a second-in-command to the district of Mainpuri, in succession to Mr. Eobert Spankie, afterwards a puisne judge of the High Court at Allahabad. And here let a passing tribute be paid to the honoured memory of a good and able man. Mr. Justice Spankie retired from the Bench about 1880, amid expressions of general esteem and regret ; and he died very suddenly while waiting for a train at Paddington in November, 1893. My chief was Mr. Charles Kaikes, an able official in much sympathy with the people, an agreeable colleague being Mr. (afterwards Sir Eichard) Oldfield. From Mainpuri I was soon after moved to a better climate, being appointed Assistant to the Superintendent of Dehra Doon, and in that capacity had jurisdiction of the hill station of Masuri, containing it was believed the strongest white population north of Calcutta during 50 HERE AND THERE the hot weather. In winter it was deserted by all but the very few permanent residents. Masuri or " Mussoorie," as it was written in those days is a collection of cottages and larger buildings spread over the foremost heights of the Sub-Himalaya, an average altitude of about 6,500 feet. At the back, but connected by a narrow isthmus, is the military can- tonment of Landour, somewhat higher and with a fine view of the peaks and glaciers of eternal snow on the northern side ; being the seat of a convalescent depot for European soldiers, it is external to the civil power and administered by the commandant and his station staff. On the connecting isthmus lies the bazar, or native place of business unless, indeed, all such arrangements have been altered in recent days. When the writer was there the European convalescents had a number of detached cottages assigned them as residences, and appeared to pass a great part of their time in wandering about the hillsides, collecting ferns and butterflies. The roads were steep and narrow ; wheel traffic was, under the then existing conditions, impossible; all locomotion was on the backs of ponies or in a sort of light sedan called "jhampan," long ago displaced by the more convenient rickshaw of Japan. Just above the Landour bazar were the premises of Mr. L., at whose school I came upon my contemporary, Gunner Mortimer; a school of a some- what higher type being carried on, near the Masuri Church, by an English clergyman, the Eev. E. N. Maddock. This gentleman took much care in obtaining the services of good assistant masters, graduates of English universities; among whom may be particularised Mr. A. B. Samson, the Eev. Charles Walford, and the late Mr. Matthews Kempson, once famous as a Cam- bridge cricketer and afterwards as a Persian scholar and as Director-General of Education in the North- West Provinces. To say that Maddock was popular at Masuri would be a weak understatement. Men yet remember LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY 51 the little Sunday suppers in the principal's private room, and many distinguished officers of the Indian army can still look back to the days of their pupilage at the Masuri school. Maddock was especially adored by the young ladies, although a confirmed celibate; and no wedding would have been considered valid, I believe, unless consecrated by his celebration. Unhappily he died prematurely of small-pox, his school devolving, how- ever, into the hands of a worthy successor. In the fallen condition of the rupee many retired officers remain in India, keeping their sons and daughters with them ; and Masuri School is now a permanent national institution. Amongst items of home news that interested us in those days has already been mentioned the outbreak of religious fanaticism over the Rev. Mr. Gorham's presentation to a living in the diocese of Exeter, the refusal of the fiery Bishop Philpotts to perform the due ceremony of induc- tion, and the subsequent proceedings, in the course of which Philpotts felt it his duty to pronounce sentence of excommunication against his Metropolitan, the Arch- bishop ! The next exciting item was the coup d'etat of 1852 in Paris and the disgrace of Lord Palmerston because, as Foreign Secretary, he had expressed to the French Ambassador in London his warm approval of the doings of the Prince-President, while conveying to the British Envoy in Paris the far more moderate views of the collective Cabinet. On the 3rd of February, the Premier Lord John Eussell offered his explanation and Palmerston replied. The occasion has a literary element as having given rise to a very spirited ballad by Tennyson who took strong ground in favour of freedom of speech e.g. : "If you be fearful then must we be bold, Our Britain cannot salve a tyrant o'er; Better the waste Atlantic rolled On her and us and ours for evermore. Whatl Have we fought for freedom from our prime At last to dodge and palter with a public crime ? " 52 HERE AND THERE Those who loved to look deep had a notion that Lord John was only carrying out the wishes of illustrious personages to whom Palmerston's jaunty independence had for some time been causing offence. In that case the affair would be the more memorable as being the last case in which prerogative was directly exercised on Cabinet affairs. Shortly after that episode we heard of the calm passing of the great soldier who had so long laboured to support the throne while providing for the defence of the country against invading foes. The death and funeral of Wellington were perhaps symptoms of a vanishing era. No future general is likely to quite take the place of the Prince of Waterloo. But for these occasional glimpses of the great world and far-off echoes of the roaring loom of time, our lives in the Mofussil held their even tenour. In 1853 I was sent to Hissar, once the capital of the Sailor Raja, George Thomas, whose romantic career has been recorded in a recent work.* Thomas had been dead more than half a century, and his contemporaries had for the most part passed away ; but there was one old Jemadar (Native captain) who had tales to tell of his commander's prowess, varied by long bouts of drinking. These reminiscences appeared genuine observations of an Anglo- Irish bluejacket as seen in the Asiatic camera-obscura, rolling up his shirt-sleeves to knock down a mutineer or rush into battle with defiant cheers. James Skinner, however, relates that he saw Thomas fighting in chain- mail on the occasion of his last defence, when he had a hand-to-hand encounter with Skinner's brother.! Be- tween chain-armour and rolled shirt-sleeves a reconcilia- tion may be possible, but is not obvious; possibly the shirt-sleeves were a kind of undress and the armour a * " The Great Anarchy," Calcutta, 1901. f " Military Memoir of Lt.-Col. James Skinner,' J. B. Fraser, London, 1861. LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY 53 compliment to great occasions. Of Thomas in his cups the pictures are less discordant. In the capacity of acting district officer of Muzaffar- nagar something equivalent to a French Prefect I was present at the opening of the Ganges Canal, returning by a bright moon in the carriage of the great and good Sir Henry Lawrence. Time flies, and the past is so soon left behind that it may be necessary to remind twentieth- century readers that Sir Henry was the eldest of the famous family of his name, who died at Lucknow in the darkest hour of the great revolt of 1857, with the pro- visional patent of Governor-General in his possession. Originally an officer of Bengal artillery, he had shown his resourceful character and his commanding influence on Asiatics in the Afghan War, and afterwards by the side of Hardinge in the Sikh campaign that ended in the Treaty of Lahore. Associated later with his brother John the first Lord Lawrence in the civil administra- tion of the Punjab, he had come into serious conflict with that masterful man, and had been removed by Dalhousie, whose policy the younger brother was prepared to en- force. His great deserts, however, protected him against oblivion, and he was honourably relegated to diplomatic duty. At the time of the opening of the Ganges Canal he was Governor-General's Agent in Rajputana, and gladly undertook the journey from that remote province to do honour to the great work of Sir Proby Cautley. It will ever be a matter of regret that I did not realise the privileges of that nocturnal journey enough ; I took no notes of Sir Henry's conversation as I should have done on reaching home. All that at a later time remained in memory was that he spoke with some asperity of his gallant but eccentric contemporary, Sir Charles Napier, a brave and brilliant soldier, whom Lawrence seemed in- clined to regard as deficient in that sort of generous scrupulosity which formed a marked feature of his own character. 54 HERE AND THERE An amusing record of Napier's command of the Indian armies had appeared a year or two earlier in the form of a collection of the remarks penned by him on various court-martials whose awards had been submitted to him for confirmation.* The book was done by a Mr. Mawson, a Bombay editor, and contained much racy writing, not always ballasted with sufficient taste or judgment on the part of Sir Charles. Mention having been made of Lang and his under- study, G. Ei. Wilby, one is reminded of a gibe that they passed upon a brother editor. This gentleman for a time conducted the Delhi Gazette, with which the Mofus- silite waged an unceasing Eatanswill feud ; and the recrimination extended into personal attacks, arising, among other grounds, out of Mr. M.'s infirm aspirates. His Christian name being Harry, it occurred one day to these remorseless foes to print in their columns a little scrap of verse by Catullus entitled " De Arrio," in which the poet ridicules a similar weakness in the case of a Roman dandy of his day. Our Harry, of whose literary outfit the classics had formed no part, assumed that the verses were an original composition of his persecutors, and fell headlong into the snare, announcing in his next issue that since a ribald contemporary had taken to veil- ing its obscenities in a foreign tongue he had seen no reason to deviate from his established rule of not allowing the Mofussilite to appear in the apartments occupied by his family. Such, in brief, was our Anglo-India: a society of frivolity and confidence. As in the days of Noe, we took the world as it came, accepted appearances for truths, and made but little endeavour after improvement. The Hindus and Moslems around us made no complaints, asked for no alterations. There was no Congress nor vernacular press, no Penal Code, no Law of Landlord * "Kecords of the Indian Command of Gen. Sir C. J. Napier comprising all his general orders, &c.," Calcutta, 1851. LIFE BEFORE THE MUTINY 55 and Tenant, no established system of Criminal Pro- cedure. European offenders could only be tried in Cal- cutta, and enjoyed a virtual impunity, because it so seldom seemed worth while to send witnesses and accused hundreds of miles over a country where there was no more rapid transit than could be had in a litter borne on men's shoulders. " Mill on Liberty " was our gospel ; events not yet foreseen were to show us that liberty was vain unless limited by law. Discipline is an essential element of perfect freedom, and a time was at hand which was to show that this truth was never so true as in the case of a population numerous and intelli- gent, and asking not to govern but to be governed. CHAPTEE VI THE GEEAT REVOLT THE outbreak of 1857 came upon an unprepared but benevolent Government occupied with many schemes for the public welfare. Lord Dalhousie had dawned upon our apathetic contentment like a disturbing day-star, although it remained for other times and other hands to deal with the disturbance. It has sometimes been said that reforming rulers have often been the precursors of revo- lution, and certainly the administration of the Company's last Governor-General was far from stultifying the con- clusion. Sir W. Hunter,* while over-estimating Dal- housie's individual action, has truly summarised the main aspects of his rule " in the three words conquest, consolidation, and development." It was only a step towards the making of India, a reform that may be called "Whig" rather than "Badical." But it would be unjust to blame Whig reformers without grateful acknowledgment of what they have achieved. They may be preparing a time which will make plain that the old structure is too corrupt and obsolete to be profitably repaired, and their successors may resent the hard work bequeathed to them. But such lessons are often left to tragic teaching and the inexorable logic of events. Meanwhile the work described by Hunter went on, and when Dalhousie laid down his office, with hopelessly shattered health but a high reputation, he was able to * " Dalhousie " ("Bulers of India" series), Oxford, 1890. 56 THE GREAT REVOLT 57 record a minute in which he justly assumed credit not only for many useful measures in connection with rail- ways, canals, and telegraphs, but also for some bearing on education and other non-material subjects. Never- theless Hunter's monograph, cited above, is too partisan in language and in spirit. Dalhousie initiated little in these directions, all that he did being to give energetic issue to the schemes of his predecessors. The policy which he pursued of his own accord, or under the inspira- tion of ambitious advisers, was criticised at the time and mostly annulled by the results of the Mutiny. His car- dinal error appears to have been making annexations of territory on a priori grounds before he had obtained the additional strength in European soldiers for which he besought the Court of Directors in vain. Yet his farewell to the army contained no hint of danger or difficulty ; and the last addition to the dominions for which his Govern- ment was answerable was the province of Oude, the home of the Sepoys. It is urged that he had asked for seven additional battalions of British infantry, of which he only received permission to raise three ; seven batta- lions would not have sufficed for the new provinces, Punjab, Burma, and Oude, and the problems and perils of the Native army would still have remained unsolved. People out of the charmed circle of the Calcutta Council could have told him that all was not right. Henry Lawrence and others had raised warning voices in the Calcutta Eeview and elsewhere. An article that appeared in 1856 ended in these words : " A day may come when . . . the utmost address may be required to conciliate Native society and preserve the fidelity of the army. It was when France was in much the same condition . . . when finances were growing worse and worse, the people living no one knew how under the dominion of an unsympathising aristocracy, and a middle class bringing up in infidel philosophism intellectual without moral culture that the upheaving 58 HERE AND THERE masses . . . hurled to the four winds of heaven both friend and foe. . . . " There are many points of difference between the two states of society in regard to which we have been suggest- ing a parallel. ... It will be enough to remind the reader that a ' paper-age ' of hope, doctrine, and retrench- ment preceded the Deluge in the one case, and to record a sincere hope that it may not do so in the other." Canning, too, though at that time without the help of local experience, had lapsed into a prophetic strain before leaving England. At the inaugural dinner given him by the Court of Directors in August, 1855, he said in what a historian calls "the eloquence of sincerity" "I wish for a peaceful time of office, but I cannot forget that in our Empire that greatest of all blessings depends upon a greater variety of chances and a more precarious tenure than in any other quarter of the globe. We must not forget that in the sky of India, serene as it is, a small cloud may arise . . . which, growing larger and larger, may at last threaten to overwhelm us with ruin. What has happened once may happen again." * On the 29th of February, 1856, the two rulers met, friends from youthful days, for the last time on the steps of Government House, Calcutta. The outgoing hero was worn to a skeleton by labour and long pain, but his eye was proud and his mouth firmly shut under an aquiline beak. The successor whom he was thus receiving was big and loosely built, with a pale brow and somewhat heavy features ; a bystander was reminded of an encounter between a carriage horse and a high- mettled racer. Yet the former was soon to show that in courage and endurance he was inferior to no one. Few characters offered more scope for discussion than that of Lord Canning. Under the influence of his Calcutta sur- roundings he was sluggish and unsympathetic,! yet he * Trotter. f " History of the Mutiny," by T. B. Holmes, third edition, 1891. THE GREAT REVOLT 59 remained at his post with unshrinking calm all through the most trying days. He proceeded in the autumn to take charge of the disturbed districts from Allahabad ; and he made a personal tour of inspection during the winter of 1858-9, when they had scarcely yet resumed their good order or even got rid of the armed rebels. By that time he had learned to act and think for himself. A friend who saw something of him at Allahabad, writes the following an acute diagnosis founded on close per- sonal observation : " He was a man of intellectual gifts, who doubtless acted best when not advised; but idle and irresolute, putting off work, and then, at last, doing things in a hurry. In one sense a good man for the crisis, not easily stirred, and therefore not subject to panic ; but he was not a man of energy or resource, nothing commanding about him as a king of men ; he sate staring through the trouble, occasionally doing odd things in an abrupt way, and then defending them with great skill and cleverness." It should, however, be added that Canning was the object of much affection among his friends, one of whom was the late Lord Harris, then Governor of Madras, afterwards Chamberlain to H.B..H. the Princess of Wales. A touching aspect of Canning during the troubles is to be found in Mr. Hare's "Two Noble Lives." Considerable friction arose at the time out of the excited passions of the planters and other white residents of the Mofussil, who were not unwilling to fight for their lives, but thought the Governor-General might give them a freer hand. One, an Irish gentleman with whom I was well acquainted, had an interview with the Governor-General at Allahabad, after the suppression of some local marauding, and was asked by His Excellency in what way the Government could show its sense of his services. "Well, me Lord," said Paddy Dunn, " I hear there's a column going into Bundlekand, av ye could give me the command of a shmall thrup of horse " 60 HERE AND THERE " My God ! " cried Canning, raising his hands, " is this never to cease? " Dunn told me this himself.* Besides planters, lawyers, and tradespeople, the non- official white population consisted chiefly of men answer- ing to the Polynesian beachcombers ; officers who, for various reasons, had been removed to the Invalid Estab- lishment, and had settled in some favouring climate, like Dehra or the hill stations, probably with Native families and with no very clearly-defined occupation. During the five months of the Delhi siege all these good folks were in a state of natural uneasiness : at a distance of less than ten days' march was a fortified city garrisoned by 50,000 trained desperados, with difficulty restrained by a force one-tenth of their number. If the task of the restraining force ever proved too heavy there would be absolutely nothing between us and the most horrible form of destruction. Hence the work of provisioning, encouraging, and to some extent protecting, the men, women, and children of our race collected in the Doon and in the adjoining hill stations, was by no means light. A small excited community, all whose members were in habits of daily intercourse, made a formidable blast of public opinion, and a magistrate's conduct would be closely, if not quite accurately, criticised. Considerations of interest and duty forbade acts of indiscriminate severity ; and a memorial was got up calling for inquiry into one's conduct on the ground of alleged scandalous lenience to natives. Lord Canning was eventually good enough to record his complete satisfaction ; though with characteristic reserve he insisted that his approbation was not to be used to influence the local Government. All the hours of that stormy time were not, of course, equally preoccupied ; and I remember one peaceful incident which was not without a pleasant interest. Supported by the Royal Zoological Society, Her Majesty the Queen sent out a naturalist to collect game birds in * See " A Servant of John Company," chap. viii. THE GREAT REVOLT 61 the Himalayas, for acclimatisation in Britain. Lord William Hay afterward Marquess of Tweeddale was at the time Deputy Commissioner at Simla ; and he and myself combined to collect a boatload of rare pheasants which, when order had been partly restored (or perhaps in the winter immediately preceding the outbreak) went to be shipped in Calcutta, via the Ganges Canal. Among them was the beautiful spotted Argus and the prismatic Impeyan, or Minal ; and the Society in acknowledgment voted each of us a handsome silver medal. Among scientific missions of those days ought to be mentioned that of the Schlagentwel brothers, sent out by the Prussian Government at the instance of W. von Humboldt; but the little I knew of them has been related elsewhere.* The ex-jockey with whom the dis- tinguished travellers put up at Dehra did not seem to be aware of the honour that had been conferred upon him, and regarded the foreign savants exclusively from a pro- fessional point. In a similar spirit he spoke of a clever little Polish clergyman Lowenthal as one who might be all that was said of him in the matter of piety and learning, but chiefly remarkable as a loss to the Turf. " Why, sir ! said Williams, " he hardly turns the scale at six stun." Poor Lowenthal met with a sad end. He proceeded to the Punjab frontier, whence he hoped to utilise his remarkable powers as a linguist in preaching the gospel among the Afridis and Afghans, had not reasons of State hindered. Lord Canning's Government refused to sanc- tion his crossing the border ; and he settled at Peshawar, where he was killed, in his own compound, by a mistaken display of zeal on the part of a watchman in the dusk of the evening. It has been affirmed I know not with what amount of accuracy that the epitaph on his tombstone ended " Shot by his own Chaukidar. * Well done, good and faithful servant 1 ' " * " A Servant of John Company," p. 154. 62 HERE AND THERE On the suppression of the revolt I visited Allahabad and shared in the inception of a newspaper there, which may be noted as an attempt to inaugurate the changed system of the Indian Empire. The old Company, with all its faults and merits, had been abolished by an Act which received the royal sanction on August 2, 1858. A few individuals, of whom the most distinguised was Mr. A. O. Hume, C.B., bethought themselves of forming a small syndicate to conduct a journal in the Provinces, under the ambitious title of The New Times for all India* The editorial chair was assigned to Sydney Laman Blanchard, a London litterateur, son of the Blanchard who married the daughter of Douglas Jerrold, and was much befriended by the first Lord Lytton. My own contribu- tions included a light serial, on the lines of " Humphry Clinker," to which I gave the title of " The Simpkinses in India," it being intended to describe Anglo-Indian life as seen by a Cockney family who had come out to settle on a tea plantation. The paper swiftly collapsed ; but Blanchard finished my serial and published it, with some papers of his own, in a two-volume book entitled " The Ganges and the Seine." Of the causes of the Mutiny many things have been said ; and, as the distinguished men of the Dalhousie school who have expressed their opinions are agreed that it originated in the greased cartridge, it would ill become a humble chronicler of personal memories to enter upon the path of controversy. In the volume already cited will be found some experiences pointing to a political origin ; but this is ancient history, and our business here is of a less dignified character. The military aspects of the time will be found admirably treated in the well-known work of the illustrious Lord * The idea was quite sound, as may be seen from the success of the Pioneer, founded some years later by the late Rev. Julian Bobinson. It is published at Allahabad, but is ecumenical to the whole country. THE GREAT REVOLT 63 Koberts ("Forty-one Years in India," vol. i.). The delay in advancing from Umballa, which exercised our minds sorely at the time, is shown by Lord Roberts to have been no fault of the Commander-in-Chief the Hon. George Anson in regard to whom, by the by, there was at the time current a rather good story attributed to John Lawrence. General Anson, it was said, sent a note to Lawrence at Lahore, in which he suggested that the force he was leading to Delhi might be intrenched at Umballa until it could be strengthened by reinforcements and supplied with ordnance stores. Anson was the great authority on the game of whist, and Lawrence is said to have returned the laconic answer " Clubs are trumps, not spades." Anson, unhappily, had no opportunity of acting on the suggestion of his civilian partner, for he died then and there ; but the force advanced, was joined by Wilson from Delhi, and continued to act loyally and bravely under Lawrence's advice and assistance, until, many months later, the rebel stronghold fell. It was, perhaps, not wholly a misfortune that telegraphic com- munication with Calcutta was so soon cut off, and the conduct of the siege left to the inspiration of the vigorous Provincial. So far as Calcutta counsels prevailed say as far north as Arrah and Patna British prestige was less maintained, power there being for some time centralised in a small group of what Lord Eoberts has described as "men of the doctrinaire type." Nevertheless, regard being had to the general blindness and infatuation of almost all, it is hardly fair to single out any group of individuals for severe and special condemnation. The most that can be justly done will be to record that the suspension of telegraph and letter-post left distant local officers a somewhat free hand ; and that it was not until then that the mutiny of the sepoys was brought within bounds and kept from merging into a general rising of the whole population. Next to the unexampled capture of Delhi than which history presents no more heroic 64 HERE AND THERE feat of arms India may possibly owe the speedy restora- tion of her peace and order to the destruction of com- munication between Calcutta and the Provinces, and to the action of emancipated subordinates. Some exception may perhaps be taken on the ground of Lawrence's pro- posed temporary abandonment of Peshawar, which was forbidden from Calcutta. Having referred the reader to a work of which he is not very likely to be ignorant, the author may well be satisfied to leave him in the brave and kindly keeping of Lord Roberts. Other excellent accounts of the great catastrophe exist ; and it can never lose interest for those who love a story of active and passive courage, and who realise the magnitude of the British Empire in India sufficiently to care for the toils and troubles to which it owes its strength. Besides Lord Roberts, and the able and impartial work of Mr. Holmes, already cited, mention may be made of the ampler record of Sir John Kaye, completed by the late Colonel Malleson. An interesting military memoir has also been published by General McLeod Innes, V.C.* Among Native friends in the Doon may be enumerated Raja Lai Singh, a political detenu there, and then under my charge. The Raja had been a Regent of the Punjab and in joint command of the Sikh army during Hardinge's campaign; he was not, however, a Sikh, and was suspected of a lack both of courage and patriotism. Be that as it may, he was a fine, robust-looking man, always very well dressed, and of frank, conciliatory manners. Though unwilling to take part, personally, in any expedi- tion against the rebels, he freely placed at my disposal the men he was allowed to retain as a bodyguard ; and he was far from sympathising with the mutinous sepoys, * "The Sepoy Eevolt," with [maps and plans. London, 1897. There is a delightful side-view in Mr. Sherer's " Daily Life during the Indian Mutiny," London, 1898. THE GREAT REVOLT 65 for whom he professed the most profound contempt. He told me a story, one day, bearing on the point. He said that, after the war, he was asked by Lord Hardinge what was the true raason why the proportion of casualties had been greater among British troops than among the sepoys ; whether there was any brotherhood feeling between the latter and the Sikhs? The Eaja replied, " No ! Whatever enemies came against the Khalsa (Sikh army) would be regarded as hostile, and treated as such. But with those who did not come, what was to be done ? Your Excellency's Europeans came, fighting like men, and suffered accordingly: the sepoys remained behind."* Though of great intelligence and good breed- ing, the Raja was completely illiterate, being unable to read or write. Another of his yarns was of a somewhat marvellous character, though related with artistic simplicity. " One day," he said, " I was in attendance on the late Maharaj (Lai Singh had been an orderly at the court of Eunjeet Singh) when a fakir was introduced, who offered if it were made worth his while to die, and to rise from the grave after an interval of sepulture. So the court went out to the jungle, and the fakir got into his coffin and expired. A grave being dug, the coffin was lowered into it, and then the ground was levelled and a crop of rice sown upon the place. When the rice was reported ripe for the sickle the court went once more to the spot, and when all were seated the Maharaj ordered men to cut the crop and dig up the coffin. And when it was opened the fakir's man came forward and dashed water on the body, making passes and uttering charms, until the life returned, and the fakir stood on his feet and made a salaam to the Maharaj. And the Maharaj gave the * Lai Singh's testimony here tallies with what Hardinge wrote at the time : " The British infantry carried the day ; I can't say I admire sepoy-fighting." This was in a private letter; publicly the sepoys were always extolled and flattered. 6 66 HERE AND THERE fakir a lakh of rupees, and a British officer was present and saw it all." This solemnly substantiated narrative long continued to be the cause of much perplexity ; for one did not see how it could be true, nor yet how such a man as Lai Singh should have invented such a monstrous falsehood as it seemed to be. One had heard of Colonel Townshend, whose catalepsies endured about forty-eight hours; but never of animation and respiration renewed after many months' discontinuance. But ultimately some explana- tion was obtained by the mere chance of one's coming across a book by Captain Lord William Osborne, who had been on Lord Auckland's staff, and who brought his experiences before the public after his return from a diplomatic mission to Lahore in 1838.* Osborne relates that he was indeed present when the man made his offer, and that the Maharaj promised to bestow five villages on him if he carried out the programme, asking what the English officers would give on their parts. One of the party was a doctor, after consulting with whom Osborne said that they were unable to emulate the liberality of his Highness, being poor young men, with no possessions but their swords, nor could they engage to wait at Lahore until the crop grew over the fakir's grave. Nevertheless, they were prepared to make up a purse of Es. 1,500 on condition that after the man had been buried the place should be guarded for ten days and nights by British sentries. On hearing this the man fell at the feet of the Maharaj, crying that he must do as his Highness ordered, but that it would be his death. Such is Oriental testimony : not consciously false, but, so to say, subjective. Lai Singh did not know that what he related was impossible ; that was the way the affair stood in his mind, and he told it in perfect good * " The Court and Camp of Runjeet Singh," London, 1840. Osborne was a brother of the Rev. Lord Sydney, once well known as " S. G. 0." in the columns of the Times. THE GREAT REVOLT 67 faith, only his memory dropped a link of which he did not perceive the importance. Probably the fakir had a secret communication by which his friend brought him food and water. Or perhaps the man really remained in a trance for a short time, and the rice-crop was added as an after- thought. I may here close my collection of unconnected pictures from a long- vanished time. In the next chapters an attempt will be made to show the beginning of Imperial India, as it now exists, or, at least, began to exist after the old system had been swept away by a terrible but beneficent tornado. CHAPTEK VII FRESH WOODS AND PASTURES NEW WE sometimes hear old Indians bewailing their altered lot and wishing themselves back in what one of the most dis- tinguished of their body has called "The Land of Eegrets." So far as these laments are founded on a supposed loss of consideration, power, or luxurious living, they will be less likely to excite sympathy than to make the judicious grieve. We may be sure that these are the very people who, when in India, were always abusing the land and its inhabitants, professing to hanker after the advowson of a broom in a Piccadilly crossing. Nevertheless, any one who has experienced the life of a " settlement officer " will wish he could have it again, provided, at least, that there was no hot season. The summer in an up-country station must always be a time of solitude, confinement, and depression; but no sooner are the monsoon rains over and the autumn crops ready for the sickle than off roll the hackeries, the camels grumble, the horses neigh, all is bustle in the clear dawn, as the Huzoor sets out on his first day's march. At the end he finds a groom ready to take his horse, tents pitched in the shade of a mango- grove, breakfast laid under the shamiana, and an able, industrious Mokurrir awaiting orders with a pile of vernacular reports.* My new station of Mozaf arnagar was about thirty-three miles from Meerut, which was an especially pleasant goal * Shamiana, an awning ; Mohurrir, Native clerk. 6 PASTURES NEW 69 for a holiday outing by reason of its club, artillery mess, and general social enlivenments. It was on one of these occasional visits that I met the then Commander-in-Chief , Sir Hugh Eose afterwards Lord Strathnairn whose gal- lant deeds in Central India have been pleasantly recorded in the " Kulers of India " series by Sir Owen Burne. Though an earnest warrior in the field, Rose was a man of refined bearing and courteous address, having the in- definable charm that such a combination cannot fail to bear. Your hero is too often truculent or grim in general society, but Eose was rather of the type of the illustrious Nelson desiring to please however determined to com- mand. In the one class, as in the other, a strong instinct of ruling must always exist : all depends on whether you prefer to rule through love or to act on meaner motives. The period of which I am now speaking was one in which recuperation was going on in Upper India, hindered and delayed by the first appearance of drought and dearth since the great famine of 1837. A country more than one thousand miles from the sea, and dependent on incalculable vicissitudes of wealth, must always lie exposed to such chances. Some relief is, indeed, expected to follow from the restoration of timber growth which has been under- taken by the Forest Department ; but history has to admit the recurrence of famines in times when the country was far better wooded than now, and when there was less capacity for relieving distress than has been the case under British administration. The Government of India in 1861 was without practical experience on these subjects ; but that of our Provinces expended a quarter of a million on various measures of relief, besides remitting about 10 per cent, of the year's land revenue. (For further details the reader may profitably consult Trotter's book, " India under Victoria," ii. 135). In connection with prices and distress I may adduce a curious little experience of my own. One fine evening, in the winter of 1861-2, 1 was returning to camp after a day 70 HERE AND THERE in the fields, when my path led me by the wall of a large garden. The gates being open, out of mere cariosity I strolled in, followed by an orderly to whom I was speak- ing, when I heard a voice from the wayside, " Is that a European that is talking ? " Turning round I perceived, seated on a terrace, a gigantic old fellow, evidently blind, whose broad chest was bare save for a thick natural cover- ing of brown fur, and on my giving a courteous answer he asked me to sit down and chat, at the same time producing a paper of snuff, of which he offered me a pinch. "Hard time, Baba ! " said I. "Aye, Sahib," replied he ; "I never recollect the price of food so high since the Chalisa " that being the traditional word for the great famine of 1783. I expressed surprise at his speaking of an event of that date as if he had known it personally. " Eighty years ago, was it ? " said the veteran. " I dare say it may have been ; all I know is that I was then a soldier in Himmat Bahadur's Gosains,* and I can assure you that food was as dear as it is now." Then, taking a pinch of snuff, he added reflectively, " I do not find the distress now so great as it was then ; you only get eight seers (16 Ibs.) of meal now for a rupee, and that was all you got then ; but there are more rupees now." Here was a practical lesson in political economy which may be commended to the attention of any who may be inclined to the belief that famines are peculiar to the British administration of India. Doubtless there were other features of those anarchic days which tended to produce that intensity of distress which the aged gosain had evidently not forgotten. A local collector of traditions published in a paper of the day some account of the Chalisa, to the effect that " the Native Governments rendered no assistance to ... relieve the wants of their * Himmat Bahadur was a leader of mercenaries during the decline of the Moghul Empire, whose followers professed to be gosains, or friars, of the fighting kind. Chafosa is from the word for " forty," 1783 corresponding to 1840 of the Hindi era. PASTURES NEW 71 unfortunate subjects." He learned that " people died by thousands, or were eaten by wild beasts " (presumably these died also) . Other multitudes sought safety in flight to less afflicted regions. But popular memories, however tenacious of ill-usage, seem unable to retain a sense of any improvement in the conduct of their rulers. In the spring of 1862 I obtained a few months' sick leave, and, proceeding to Europe, passed a week in Egypt, which was then a comparatively little-known country. On this occasion I visited Memphis with its fallen colos- sus, as also the remains of the Sphinx, the Pyramids of Cheops and Chephren monuments of great age and impressive dignity. The colossus has since been raised, and identifies itself we are told as an effigy of Ramses the Great. The Sphinx, in its integrity, may have been admired by Abraham. Taking ship anew at Alexandria, I went to Trieste and Venice, places too familiar to require description, both at that time occupied by strong Austrian garrisons. After short sojourns at Milan and the Lakes, I crossed the Alps by the Devil's Bridge and the Pass of St. Gothard, now left high and dry by the railway tunnel, making another halt at Lucerne. Here, it may be worth while noticing, was to be found a human link with the eighteenth century, almost more interesting than the old Muzafarnagar gosain. This was one Paul Joss, survivor (probably the last) of the Swiss Guard massacred at the Tuileries on the 10th of August, 1792. Most travellers have seen the monument, a dying lion ; but not many, perhaps, can have seen the old custodian who, in his red uniform, guarded the memorial of his comrades, slaugh- tered seventy years before. He showed a facsimile of the autograph order sent by Louis XVI. from the chamber where he had taken shelter. It was in these words : " Le Eoi ordonne aux Suisses de deposer a 1'instant leurs armes, et de se retirer dans leurs casernes." It was this order probably dictated by some revolutionary leader which finally broke the defence of the Swiss and entailed 72 HERE AND THERE the slaughter of seven hundred and fifty men, with twenty of their officers, whose brave loyalty is commemorated by the Lion of Lucerne. From hence I remember driving north to Schaffhausen, and enjoyed the beautiful scene where the young Rhine, already remarkable for an azure breadth of clear five hundred feet, plunges over a fall of seventy feet, in three successive leaps. Thence, still by road, I passed along the bank through a fertile valley to Winterthur not " the gate of winter," but a corruption of the old Helvetian Vitodurum and so through Waldshut to the ancient town of Basel the Roman Basilia a city cut in two by the Ehine. Very pleasant was a rest in the hotel of " The Three Kings," with the beautiful young stream flowing softly under the balconies. My next halt was in Paris, where I had some influential acquaintances, amongst others the Marquis de Bassano, younger son of the diplomatist Maret. His brother, the Due, was High Chamberlain at the Tuileries ; and one got in this way a glimpse of the adventurer who then occupied the throne. After eight years of almost un- ruffled prosperity Napoleon III. was now entering upon a second period marked by more or less convulsive efforts to preserve equilibrium ; but of that the public had not yet any clear perception. It was the heyday of sport and Anglomania, with trust in the Drei Kaiser Bund, of which Hugo said: "A Trinity of Emperors may be a trinity, like any other : but it is not unity." Looking back on the apparent calm of France on the eve of the Mexican expedition, we see how very illusory it was ; to use the eloquent simile of the poet Campbell, " The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below." But, as Fleury afterwards admitted, it was an " amusing" time. The autumn was chiefly passed in country visits ; one in Lincolnshire, where, at the house of the Rev. Charles Moore, near Boston, I saw a fragment of the triumphal car to which the first Napoleon harnessed the horses of Lysippus, which he had brought from Venice ; these, PASTURES NEW 73 being restored after the fall of the Empire, are still to be seen arching their bronze crests above the great door of St. Marc's Cathedral. When they were being taken down from the Arc de Triomphe, 1815, Mr. Moore was looking on, and this piece, being broken off from the stucco vehicle, was picked up by him and brought home to England. From Lincolnshire I went on to Scotland, where I was hospitably entertained in the modern Athens, and met interesting people, including the late Mr. John Blackwood and Prof. W. E. Aytoun, author of " Firmi- lian: a Spasmodic Tragedy," and "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers." His last work, entitled " Norman Sinclair," had recently appeared, an autobiographical romance.* He seemed in poor health, and was, in fact, within three years of his death; but gleams of his peculiar humour were often seen. Thus, on return from a visit to London, he was with some young advocates in the smoke-room of the then famous tobacconist Cotton, of Prince's Street, and happened to mention having shown some of the cigars there purchased to Alvarez, a Spaniard, who had a shop in a corner of the Opera Colonnade. On being asked by Cotton what Mr. Alvarez might have said of these weeds, the Professor slowly answered, " I offered him one to smoke ; but he said, * Tank you : I will not light dat cigar. He is not foreign tabac ; not even foreign cabadge.' ' In the spring I made a short tour through the Basque Provinces, in whose hilly solitudes our soldiers had once marched and fought under Wellington. In recent times the Basques an interesting and mysterious race have shown considerable energy as emigrants, and are said to be useful colonists in the congenial climes of South America. They were once the mainstay of Carlist pre- tensions, and have, indeed, through all historic times * Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, born in Edinburgh, 1813 ; in 1845 appointed to the chair of Ehetoric in Edinburgh University. Died August 4, 1865. 74 HERE AND THERE evinced a good deal of character, preserving a certain amount of Home Kule to quite recent days. Both Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier were of this ancient stock, as were in later days Mendizabal and Zumulacarregni, the man who so nearly restored the cause of Don Carlos.* The ethnology of the Basque race has been much debated, the most accepted theory being that it is representative of the neolithic population who occupied Europe after the last glacial period. The vocabulary and doubtless the blood of the Basques has been modified by generations of intercourse with Spain ; but the structure and the grammar are believed to be quite unique. I found nothing in the parts of Spain that I next visited more interesting than the famous collection of paintings at Madrid. Murillo is, of course, well repre- sented there, as is but natural and right. The question, however, whether the Assumption of the Virgin there ascribed to him is or is not genuine is matter for con- siderable discussion. The better-known copy is that with which many of us are familiar I mean that at the Louvre, in Paris. The Madrid picture may be no more than a replica ; nevertheless, the face is quite magical in sentiment ; and I remember seeing several artists engaged in unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the expression as correctly as could be found in a fifty centime photograph. It must, however, be remembered that in France the Louvre picture has always passed for the original, having been bought by the Government at the death of Marshal Soult in 1852 for the then high price of 23,440. It was obtained by the Marshal in the plunder of a convent during his retreat from the Peninsula in 1814. After a short stay at Borne and Naples, well-known places much altered since 1863, I returned to India, to find that the completion of the Muzafarnagar settlement * The great guerillero was shot at the siege of Bilbao in 1835. His name affords a hint of the wonderful Basque language. PASTURES NEW 75 had been entrusted to another officer, and to lead for some years a wandering life, without meeting with important people or interesting adventures. John Lawrence was Viceroy of India, and held the post until the beginning of 1866, when he was succeeded by the Earl of Mayo. His reign was diversified by certain unhappy incidents, wars on the frontiers, and disasters in Orissa; but it was on the whole a period of great and almost inconvenient prosperity, arising out of the Civil War in the United States and the consequent demand for Indian cotton. Lawrence was by nature and by training an administrator rather than a statesman, and he had made vigorous attempts to ameliorate the con- dition of the people, of which a notion may be formed from a work by the present writer.* Of his relations towards Native chiefs and rulers it may be said that they were generous to an extent that might not altogether have been expected from so faithful a disciple of Dalhousie. It was sometimes imputed to Lawrence that he was wanting in the sauvity which lends grace to lofty station ; and there is no doubt that his type was Cromwell rather than Chesterfield,! which might perhaps be unwelcome to Asiatic grandees. But he had the great gift of being able to learn in the school of experience; and he con- tinued all his life to be more and more esteemed by a sensitive class of the Indian community. I well remember, at the end of the year 1866, a tour that Lawrence made in Upper India, in the course of which he held a Durbar at Agra for the purpose of con- ferring the insignia of the Star of India in the Queen's name on a number of distinguished persons, potentates, and individuals. The affluence of chieftains was con- siderable : there was Sindhia, the Maharaja of Gwalior, in opulent but tasteful magnificence, with the quaint * "History of India; for the use of Students," chap, xxi., London, 1893. f Chesterfield, the Viceroy of Ireland, it should be noted. 76 HERE AND THERE little Begum of Bhopal, unique among female Asiatics ; and Bajahs from remote Bikanir and Marwar, followed by men-at-arms in mediaeval caparisons. A strong force of British troops of all arms attended, and a grand review was held on the same parade-ground that had been the scene of Greathed's surprise nine years before. The investiture took place in a vast canvas hall, on the fore- noon of November 12th. Lawrence received the chiefs again the following day, standing up, rugged, burly ; addressing the assembled chiefs, in their own language, a very solemn and serious admonition on the duties they owed their subjects and the determination of the Govern- ment of India to have those duties properly discharged. Some soreness was understood to have arisen in princely breasts at the preference shown on this occasion to the Gwalior chief ; and the Pioneer (a paper already mentioned) published some lines on the subject, adapted from the celebrated song by Shakespeare, "Who is Silvia?" "Who is Sindia;? What is he That all our swells attend him ? First in rank and place is he, Such grace Sir John doth lend him, That kotowed to he must be. " Then of Sindia let us sing, That Sindia is excelling ; He excels each Indian King, In Eajputana dwelling ; To him Khilats let us bring." In the summer of 1867 I was once more ordered home on the ground of sickness. Arrived in Paris, I did not fail to visit the excellently managed Exposition, enjoying the excitement of the Parisians over the concourse of sovereigns and grandees by whom the show was attended. Both as a glorification of the "Light City" and as a spectacle in itself it was a great success ; yet an acute PASTURES NEW 77 observer the late General Fleury deplored it as " cette damnee Exposition " : he would have preferred an attack on the Prussians, who were somewhat exhausted by the " Brothers' War " of the preceding year. But his Imperial master gave him three years of preparation, with the results that we know. In the winter I went to Guernsey. The visit was interesting in several ways, especially as one's first introduction to those queer self -governed little fragments of the old Norman Duchy by which our England was once conquered and annexed. It was just at the height of the Fenian scare, when the American-Irish were creating so many alarms in London and elsewhere, that, coming home early from a country walk, I went into a shop in the town of St. Peter Port and inquired into the reason of my having met so many blue-bloused peasants carrying firelocks. I was informed that a ship had come into the harbour over night from Cork ; there were Irish navvies employed quarrying stone on the island, with whose aid it was supposed that an attack would be made on the arsenal in order to ship the arms and carry them over to the rebels. A council of war had met during the night, and the men whom I had met were militiamen in plain clothes providing themselves with weapons. Next night and until the departure of the suspected craft these men joined the regulars, and doubled all their guards. It was a curious instance of the result of Home Kule. Another odd thing that I witnessed was the hearing of a petition by a philanthropic half-pay officer, in which the " States" of Guernsey were invited to introduce the " Maine" law prohibiting the sale of liquor. It was of the nature of a trial, the petitioner addressing the court, and the law officers being heard in reply. I recollect the defence of the existing institutions made by Mr. Utermarck, the Attorney-General, who said, in effect, that the gallant petitioner had asserted that drink was 78 HERE AND THERE the great cause of crime, and had added that Guernsey was the most drunken community in Europe. As the public prosecutor of that island he was able to assure them that there was no country in Europe where the percentage of crime was so low as in this drunken population ! CHAPTEK VIII AGRA AFTER these somewhat wide and barren wanderings I was not sorry to get back to the work of a District and Sessions Court, and in 1870 I obtained a longer and more pleasant tenure than usual, in the station of Agra, which before the Mutiny had been the headquarters of the provincial government. Though the Court of Appeal and Revision (reconstituted as " the High Court ") had been transferred to Allahabad, some of the advocates had preferred to remain in local practice rather than break up old associations and habits of life. The commodious buildings also remained ; and thus it happened that the Judge of Agra had what was in many ways the pleasantest post of the kind in the north-west. Some of the subordinate Courts, too, were under able and agreeable men, with whom to work was a real pleasure ; indeed, the result of my fifteen years' tenure of office, there and in other judgeships, was that natives of India are specially fitted for judicial duty. I remember one of those gentlemen, a Hindu of good birth and education, making a very shrewd diagnosis of the famous Keshab Chander, whom at a distance he had once admired. Baboo Keshab Chander visiting Agra in the course of an autumn tour, I took occasion to ask my friend, the Moonsiff, what he thought of the teacher now. And the Moonsiff had to reply frankly that he feared that the Baboo was a very vain man. " For," said 79 80 HERE AND THERE my friend, "the teacher objects to be judged by ordinary rules and standards. He asked me whether I did not count one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And on my answering that of course I did, he said, ' Well ! for my part I count ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.' Now, what can you make of a man who does that ? " And I was only able to answer that I did not know. Life at Agra was much diversified and cheered by visits from interesting travellers, amongst whom was the famous Russian artist who has done so much by personal observation to place the horrors of war before the European public. At the time when Basil Vereschagin * to use the spelling of his own autograph was at Agra, he was most peacefully employed, and would sit for hours, almost regardless of heat and glare, while he sketched a group of Moghul minarets or copied the diaper of an interior panel ! He was at that time in the prime of life, with keen blue eyes and golden beard ; adverse to general society, but one of the most friendly and agreeable of companions in a tete-a-tete. French he spoke fluently, also writing the language with ease and practical correct- ness. In English he was not so strong. Another of these inquiring foreigners was the King of Siam the same who came to Europe in 1897. At the time of his visit he was quite a young man, speaking English well, and showing much intelligent curiosity. Having studied history and written a guide-book to the local monuments, I was told off by the Government to act as showman to his Majesty. I had thus an oppor- tunity of observing an Asiatic despot whose demeanour was not without a certain charm. One seemed to notice, * Drowned in the sinking of the Russian battleship PetropavlovsTc by a Japanese mine at Port Arthur on April 13, 1904. He was invited on board by the Russian Admiral Makaroff (who also perished) to witness a naval battle and gather materials for fresh war pictures, and thus met with his tragic fate. AGRA 81 indeed, a look which is, perhaps, found on most royal faces, betokening less any impatience of contradiction than a tacit assumption that contradiction was impossible. But, so far as voluntary kindness was concerned, the monarch's manner left little to be desired; whenever a statement was made by which he was at all impressed, he would turn about so as to face the suite and explain it to his followers in their own language. They ate and drank with us, appearing to have no caste prejudices, but mixing their liquors to an extent that can hardly have been wholesome. The mention of the Agra monuments allows a brief explanation. They are of great beauty, but mostly of like age and character, the place having been the capital of the Moghul Empire, though only for about one hundred years. That empire had been founded in the first half of the sixteenth century A.D. by Baber, chief of a Tartar tribe, who established themselves in India much as the Manchus have done in the adjacent regions of China. One great difference, however, exists between the two cases, for the Manchus have assimilated with the conquered people, whereas the Moghuls, bringing down a strong tincture of Persian civilisation, preserved their manners, languages, and arts to such an extent as to have modified the indigenous habits of India to a great and durable degree. Among the various buildings of this dynasty at Agra are many vast and beautiful edifices blending Persian and Indian taste, and dating from the Fort or Castle of Akbar, Baber's grandson, who finished it about 1566 A.D. But in addition to Akbar's buildings it contains a mosque of white marble, built by his grand- son so late as in 1653 ; the name of this grandson was Shah Jahan. But of all these monuments none is so well known throughout the world as the mausoleum of this last-mentioned Emperor, known to us as " The Taj," which was completed in 1648, excepting as to the tomb of himself, which was added at his death eight 7 82 HERE AND THERE years later. This building, to view which pilgrims go yearly from all the ends of the earth, was originally undertaken by Shah Jahan in honour of a dearly loved consort, Arjumand Banoo, whom he had lost in 1631, the fourth year of his reign. In spite of its great celebrity, the Taj is not quite according to our ideas of architecture; and the too- studied symmetry of its design long caused critics to hesitate about accepting the current tradition which ascribed it to a European architect. But in recent times the discovery of an old Spanish book of travels has deter- mined all these questions, and has demonstrated, beyond all possibility of doubt, that the general plan and elevation were due to an Italian artist. The monotony of the out- line is attributable, in all probability, to the taste of the imperial founder, who wished to have it modelled from already existing monuments, especially the tomb of his ancestor, Humayun.* The Spanish book is the record of a mission undertaken by an Augustinian friar named Manrique, who visited the court of Shah Jahan in the interest of some Portuguese Christians who had been made captives at the siege of Hooghly in 1632, and it contains very curious details of the life and manners of the Moghuls in Hindustan. Among other things Manrique relates that he went to Agra in the winter of 1640, when he saw the mausoleum in progress, and learned that the original specifications had been sub- mitted to the Emperor by a Venetian named Geronimo Verroneo, and approved by his Majesty in all respects excepting as to the estimate, the latter being returned to the architect to be enhanced to the high figure of fifteen millions of dollars. Verroneo was dead when the friar visited Agra ; but he knew the executor or administrator of Verroneo' s estate, and saw his papers. Native tradi- * Memorable as the hiding-place of the last of the line, the aged Bahadur Shah, who was captured there by Major Hodson after the fall of Delhi, in September, 1857. AGRA 83 tion mentions another European, a Turk sent by the Sultan from Constantinople ; and perhaps this man may have completed the work with alterations of his own, as happened to St. Peter's at Borne. The coloured stone incrustations of the interior walls are usually ascribed to a French artist, whose portrait in the same material used, before the Mutiny, to be the centre of a pietra-dura panel in the throne-room at Delhi. Such was the build- ing especially admired by the King of Siam. In 1875 another royal visit occurred, that of H.R.H. the Heir- Apparent to the British throne, and my humble services were again in requisition. I was also fortunate in renewing my acquaintance with several of the Prince's followers, amongst whom was Sir Bartle Frere, one of the last of the great servants of John Company, a man of courtly manners and fine presence ; meeting also, for the time, Count Goblet d'Alviella, whom I have since had the great privilege to call my friend. Ere long the Earl of Northbrook visited us, to be followed, soon after, by his successor as Viceroy, Lord Lytton, known in literature as " Owen Meredith," a man of a type quite unlike that presented by any other occupant of his distinguished station that I ever encountered. An imposing brow over visionary eyes of pale blue, a prominent, but not arched, nose, that was all you saw ; the mouth which you con- jectured to be somewhat full being completely masked by a full, brown beard which descended to the breast ; there was something Oriental in the whole aspect. He had both in speaking and writing an extraordinary flow of language, alike spontaneous and elaborate. In the decorative aspect of his great office he was impressive and admirable ; the more cultured among Anglo-Indians highly relished his mordant humour and affable manners. Of the former an instance occurs to memory. Looking down a long room at the wife of a newly-made knight, Lytton murmured in his dreamy way, " The more I think of that woman, the more convinced I feel of the 84 HERE AND THERE omnipotence of the Government of India ; we have made her a lady a thing that the Almighty Himself could never do." To those who feel inclined to criticise his administration harshly, it might be sufficient to point out that he literally had greatness thrust upon him. A diplomatic lounger of literary habits, he refused the Governorship of Madras when offered him by his father's old friend, the late Lord Beaconsfield, alleging the warn- ings of a physician whom he had consulted. The veteran politician is said to have replied, "Ah, Robert! You should consult nothing but the demon in your own breast." The refusal, however, was condoned; and the demon which consisted of organic disease was con- ciliated or put to silence. Lytton was ill all the time he was in India, and did not live many years after his return. I recollect one of his terse phrases which struck me very much at the time. I mentioned an opinion that his father's fictions were always improving, and that every one seemed to find " The Caxtons," " My Novel," &c., showing an advance over " Pelham " and "Ernest Maltravers." " Do you know why? " he asked instantly ; "it was because he was always taking in coals." Another great man to whom I did showman at Agra was the late Duke of Buckingham. His Grace had not the externals of a Puissant Prince such as I believe he would be described by the Heralds nor did he behold the sights with either sentiment or enthusiasm. When we were going up the cypress avenue, at the end of which gleamed the white marble of the Taj, the Duke did not betray any interest in the imperial lovers nor any admiration for their monument. " Do you think," he asked, "that there would be any objection to my going down into the basement to see how the place is drained?" In the winter of 1878 Agra was visited by General and Mrs. U. S. Grant. The ex-President was a shortish man, of the appearance of a middle-class Scotchman, AGRA 85 with a red moustache clipped to the calibre of a tooth- brush. I took Mrs. Grant in to dinner, and well recollect her homely but agreeable manners and her na'ive con- versation. One remark especially impressed me. "I can sit and cry," said the kindly woman, " over the foolishest novel ; now, Mr. Grant is entirely different." It was hardly necessary, with the veteran's firm face before me, to have recourse to history for a confirmation of that testimony ; the bullet head, close lips, and sturdy figure spoke of one who would not weep on trifling pro- vocation. The General or " Mr. Grant," as his wife said was grimly amused at the attention of an energetic official on the other side of the table, who kept pressing various dishes upon him with an assurance that he had personally attended id their preparation. At last he muttered, so that his neighbours on either side could hear, " We are a tolerant people at home ; but we do not have our coloured stewards to meals with us." In truth, the gentleman in question was of a somewhat swarthy hue; and it was said of him, when boasting of his ancestry, that " he might have plenty of European blood, but he kept it dark." In parting from the ex-President who was pursuing his circumnavigation of the globe, and believed to have a third chance of the Presidency I said that I hoped for an opportunity of presenting my respects to him at the White House. "Well, Judge," the President answered, " if you come to the United States while I am there, I'll put you through ; but there's one thing I'll not do : I shan't embarrass you as you did me by making speeches in your honour." I could not help thinking the same characteristic. I had made a little speech in proposing his health at the dinner-table, and to this he had deemed it necessary to make a short reply; his modesty and taciturnity were alike disturbed, though he must have been aware that the chairman of a gathering like that was bound to say something. 86 HERE AND THERE One result of one's interest in local archaeology was that one was demi-officially associated with the Govern- ment architects in preserving and even judiciously repair- ing the remains of the past for which Agra is so famous. We set up a small antiquarian museum in the Fort, where we placed the notorious "Gates of Somnath," carried off, by Lord Ellenborough's orders, from the tomb of the Sultan at Ghazni, as also some of the Moghul kettledrums found in a neglected corner. Here, too, was found room for some minor sculptures, Buddhist, Hindu, and other, which had escaped the general removal of such things to Allahabad after the transfer of head- quarters. Some undesirable efforts of " restoring " zeal were checked, and several important monuments were preserved from decay, the initiation of the good work being due to the taste and judgment of Sir John Strachey, then Lieutenant-Go vernor of the Province. In 1877 another famine visited us, more general and more severe than the one noted in Chapter VII. The question of the social habits and condition of the people began to attract attention, and a commission was issued to several experts, Sir Charles Elliott, afterwards Governor of Bengal, being the able secretary. The late Sir James Caird was one of the members ; and I remember hearing him relate that his party, going round on inspection in the Agra district, once found an aged peasant sitting against a sunshiny wall, shivering as in an ague fit, and with bones pushing through his ill-furnished and half- naked skin. Being asked what had brought him to this pass, he sadly answered, " Shadi " a word which in Persian means "gladness," but doubtless used by him in its more ordinary vernacular sense of wedding.* The rural population, demoralised by generations of anarchy * The unlimited extravagance with which the rural population of Hindustan celebrate the nuptials of their children has been often deplored ; but, as the one glory of a most dull existence, the practice will not be easily abolished. AGRA 87 and uncertainty, had lost all idea of economy, and lived from hand to mouth, squandering on fakirs and fireworks, spending on the marriages of their offspring sums that would go far towards launching them in life. Finding it desirable to leave Agra in 1879, 1 obtained a transfer to Meerut, where I spent the next two years, and where I endeavoured to do the little modicum of good permitted to a bird of passage. Here also were excellent Subordinate Judges, into whose lives one was able to introduce elements of self-respect and comfort, with a Bar, less numerous perhaps than that of Agra, but eminently capable and well conducted. A Bar Library was opened in the Judge's Court House, chambers being at the same time provided for the senior advocates ; but much remained to be done, especially for the accommo- dation of the Lower Courts, of which there were eight or ten scattered about the district. Meerut is not a place of interest like Agra. In history it will be known as the scene of the outburst of arson and murder which ushered in the great Kevolt on May 10, 1857. It is only relatively old namely, as one of the first British cantonments founded after Lake entered Delhi in the autumn of 1803. It is not altogether an ideal seat of military occupation, being in so low a bottom as to have no natural outfall; in the rainy season the drains overflow, and sewage-water percolates into the wells. Hence it has long been the breeding-ground of malarial and enteric fevers. A few miles to the west is Sardhana, once the principality of Begum Sumroo, with a Catholic church, a convent, and a palace which, in the days of my record, contained a few portraits, and was somewhat of a show-place. It was then the property of Lady Forester, but has been since sold, having been knocked down for twenty-five thousand rupees to the Kev. Father Philip, on behalf of the Koman Catholic Archbishop of the Agra diocese.* * For an account of this building, and of the career of the Begum, the reader may be referred to " The Great Anarchy," Calcutta, 1901. 88 HERE AND THERE And so an official course one can hardly call it a 11 career" dawdled slowly away, until in the autumn of 1882 the end finally came. Yet there is doubtless a side to such cas^s which the merry essayist did not just then care to bring into pro- minence. Officials taunted with neglecting popular measures and men marked by public opinion can answer that they can only do what they think right, and charge themselves with the fortunes of those in whose loyalty they feel confidence. Young officers, therefore, should beware; remembering that unless they can really com- mand the respect of their superiors they will do well to seek their regard. The late Master of Balliol, whose energy and originality did not always perhaps advance his personal aims, was wont to quote a passage of the unhappy Rochester, to the following effect : "Till old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, and make him understand, After a search so eager and so long, That, all his life, he has been in the wrong." Many a good public servant, both at home and abroad, has missed complete success by a want of skill in com- mending himself to the dispenser of patronage. Sidney Smith was perhaps as fitted for lawn-sleeves as Bishop Blougram. In any case there were cakes and ale while the life lasted ; and a fairly good time was to be had in India whether in the service of the Company or under the Empress. INTEECHAPTEE AN ALIEN YOKE AT the time of the Mutiny of the Bengal Army there was a report current among the natives that British rule in Hindustan (or, as they called it, the Company's Eaj) was to come to an end witn the centenary of the battle of Plassy, which occurred, as we know, on June 23, 1757. The promise was fulfilled to the ear, if not precisely to the hope ; for the dominion of the Company came to an end in consequence of the Mutiny. One who served both before and after that revolution may perhaps be permitted to say a word as to the exact nature of the change, its effects on the people of Hindustan, and its prospect of duration. Of the former indeed there can be but little question ; for the introduction of direct 'parliamentary control was the beginning of a scientific system of government, totally different from the somewhat hap- hazard methods of the earlier men. It is true that soon after the reform of Parliament in 1832 certain reforms were initiated in India by Lord William Bentinck ; widow-burning was abolished, the effigy of King William IV. was substituted on the Company's coinage for the superscription of the effete titular of Delhi; although the Mahommedan and Hindu codes continued to be administered in the Company's courts, yet a Law Com- mission was set on foot with Macaulay for the President ; the statutes obtained the title of " acts" in place of the humbler name " regulations," and the highway between 89 90 HERE AND THERE Bengal and the Punjaub frontier was metalled and planted with wayside trees for the comfort of travellers. Little more, however, was accomplished until the time of Dalhousie, after which the events of '57 swept every- thing clean for a new departure. We have next to see the condition and probable destiny of the succeeding administration. The question how it affects the people is one that demands a little more consideration. It is not likely that our hearty forefathers had any clear notion of reforming or benefiting the people of India; the early agents of the Company resembled a party of sportsmen who should land on a distant shore and pitch their tents in the ruins of a deserted city, looking forward to pleasure and profit from their stay, and only caring to provide for the subsistence of themselves and their followers so long as their visit lasted. The work of architects, engineers, and rulers would be left to a more serious and self-conscious generation. But whether the later and more careful operations are or are not beneficial to the original inhabitants of the country must depend partly upon the spirit in which they are carried out, and partly on the spirit in which they are received. The doings of the Spaniards in Mexico and in Peru were not altogether advantageous to the people of those countries ; but the example of Japan seems to show that new wine may sometimes be poured into old bottles without danger of explosion ; and in the case of India a change in manners and ideals may be brought about in a similar manner. The question whether an alien yoke is always an evil for a people may seem at first sight almost absurd. We are always accustomed from our childhood to hear of nations groaning under foreign oppression, or nobly struggling to be free ; yet a little closer observation will serve to show that almost all races who have made any figure in history have been founded by conquest. Usually indeed the conquerors have disappeared in the process of time ; either the climate and other conditions have suited AN ALIEN YOKE 91 them, and in that case amalgamation has ensued, as when the British inhabitants of these islands were invaded three times between the fifth and eleventh centuries of our era by Saxons, Danes, and Normans successively. All these invaders in their turn exercising a more or less severe discipline, gradually lost their supremacy to unite as members of a new and mingled nationality. In other cases where circumstances were less favourable the conquerors became extinct, as with the Spaniards and French in Hispaniola. Both processes have been seen in India, which has always been peculiarly open to the invader, and has in a most peculiar degree possessed the faculty of assimilating the invader to itself. In all the long period over which historic memory can stretch, India has never long produced indigenous systems of govern- ment, and when such have existed they have only exercised a partial and limited jurisdiction. Only once has there been anything like a universal monarchy ; and even that was exercised by foreign invaders, and was never perma- nently established in the southern regions of the Peninsula. The Moghul Empire, of which Delhi was the capital, was indeed for a short while an object of admiration to the civilised world. Travellers from many European countries visited the court and the Provinces, and the splendour of the emperors formed a commonplace of literature, and was twice alluded to by the great English poet John Milton. Originally founded by a fugitive Turkoman chief, the Empire developed extraordinary qualities under his grandson, the famous Akbar. During the reign of this exceptionally conscientious despot religious toleration then hardly dreamt of in Europe became a fixed principle of the State. The Emperor repressed the insolence of his own congeners, employed the native Hindus and Moslems in the highest offices of the State, making fiscal arrangements to provide for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of his subjects. Akbar's grandson in turn, known to us as the Emperor 92 HERE AND THERE Shah Jahan, though less of a reformer than Akbar, maintained the general system of administration, and may be regarded as exhibiting the Empire in its most prosperous and glorious condition. To illustrate this statement it will be necessary to go into a few technical details, which, however, need not be very wearisome if we can only bear in mind that India belonged, and to a great extent still belongs, to a form of civilisation entirely differing from that which has been attained in European countries. It is estimated that at the present day a number of people, amounting to nearly 80 per cent, of the inhabitants, are dependent on the land ; and it is natural to suppose that the ratio stood no lower in the days of Shah Jahan. To raise the revenue by taxing people of this sort with no secondary wants, and incomes seldom exceeding the means of subsistence, would have been impossible ; in the few cities and commercial centres that then existed something might be realised from house rates and duties on markets ; the rest of the direct revenue of the State was derived from the surplus produce of the soil, paid by the agriculturists through contractors or through official agents of the Government, in either of which cases it can hardly be doubted that a considerable margin remained in the hands of these middlemen. Nevertheless, such was the severity of the assessment that the net proceeds which reached the treasury of Shah Jahan are stated by a contemporary to have mounted to a sum of no less than 22,000,000 sterling, which far exceeds that realised by the modern British Government with better administrative skill and from a far wider area. But besides this direct source of revenue, the military administration was such as to make great inroads on the resources of the land, however favourably it may appear to effect the Imperial Budget. That was because, with the exception of a bodyguard of cadets and a small personal retinue, the Emperor carried on his wars by means of a feudal militia, recruited by a class of life- AN ALIEN YOKE 93 peers, who received assignments of land which would otherwise have been chargeable to the fisc. The Moslem Church was supported in a similar manner, only that these religious endowments were perpetual, while those of the military leaders were liable to revocation at their death. Such as the administration was, it excited the admiration of European visitors, one of whom said that the Emperor ruled rather as a father over his children than as a monarch over his subjects. But the Imperial family continued to be essentially alien to the country; they spoke the Turkish language among themselves; and Father Manrique, a Spanish missionary, gives some curious glimpses of their domestic life, noticing especially what he calls the " rutilous " complexion of the royal ladies whom he met. The more public aspect of the Imperial court was merely a development of the Tartar encampment of their ancestors. The visitor was conducted through a covered entry bordered by the stalls of goldsmiths, jewellers, drapers, &c. ; before him he found a court- yard on three sides of which were cloisters wherein the members of the public found shelter from the sun ; as in the Place du Carrousel at the Louvre, or the tilt-yard at Westminster, the space was occupied by shows and sports ; on the fourth side stretched a pillared hall, backed by grated galleries, where the court ladies might witness the proceedings without being seen. Eaised above all this was a wide alcove in which stood the throne, and at an appointed hour, with a salvo of great guns and the clamour of kettledrums and shawms, surrounded by members of his family, and followed by swarthy Amazons with swords by their sides waving fans of feathers, the Emperor came forth from his private apartments. Clad in delicate white muslin, and with a priceless jewel in his cap, he seated himself cross-legged upon the throne to receive petitions from those privileged to approach his presence, an act which if no more than 94 HERE AND THERE ceremonial was at least a symbolical acknowledgment that a sovereign is the fountain of justice. The Provinces were governed by satraps, reproducing the Imperial splendour on a reduced scale. Such was the condition of India under the best alien yoke that the country has seen till our own times. Her condition under British rule it is at present much less simple to describe. In all the symptoms which are usually considered indicative of progress and prosperity the country is in a far more advanced condition than it was under the Moghuls. Great steps have been taken towards unification. From Cape Comorin to Peshawar beyond the Indus a uniform criminal law the Indian Penal Code, with which the name of Macaulay is usually associated will be found protecting the people against evil-doers ; the Urdu language is becoming a lingua franca amidst a babel of conflicting dialects ; the extension of railways permits the circulation of the people and the transmission of merchandise at very low cost ; much has been done by the extension of irrigation to ensure against the vicissitudes of climate; the ravages of famine and pestilence are combated ; domestic strife and external war are both alike repressed ; and the population, freed from all these causes of decrease, appears to be advancing at the rate of about 5 per cent, in every decade. If there- fore it should be said that the public revenue is becoming large in relation to the resources of the country, it must at least be admitted that it is expended in a manner more profitable to the general welfare than in the erection of sculptured palaces for the residence of princes, and marble monuments in honour of their dead. Even the large sums annually remitted to London cannot fairly be excluded from this category, forming as it does payment for various kinds of services past and present. But there is another side to this pleasing picture. Educated natives of India and their European sympathisers will tell you of widespread indigence, of a population AN ALIEN YOKE 95 increasing beyond the means of subsistence, of racial discord due to the hauteur of one side and the discontent of the other; and for all these complaints too there is probably substantial ground. Some of these unpleasant symptoms may doubtless be disregarded as the growing- pains of an adolescent community, or the unavoidable inconveniences of a salutary, if unwelcome, discipline. But it would seem that there is a large body of benevolent persons who consider the alien yoke imposed upon India to be something more permanent. They regard the natives as people of like passions with themselves, only differing from Europeans in the colour of their skin ; they would like to alter all the immemorial sentiments and usages of a civilisation vastly older than their own ; and perhaps they take it for granted that when all this has gone on for a certain time the millions of India's inhabitants will be nothing but so many English men and women, a little different perhaps in colour, but as like in manners and beliefs as if they lived in the Channel Islands. Let it be noted, however, that this was not the ideal of the Anglo-Indian fathers by whom the British Empire in those regions was founded. In their eyes the sceptre of the sovereign was the schoolmaster, and there was in their minds a clear perception that whenever the schoolmaster's work was done, the pupils would be set free to live their own life. Mr. Mountstuart Elphinstone, the famous historian of Mahommedan India, was Governor of Bombay during the first quarter of the nineteenth century and in constant communication with other great Anglo-Indians of the time Sir John Malcolm, Sir Thomas Munro, and Sir James Macintosh and in a letter to the latter of June, 1819, he thus expressed his ideas : " I am afraid the belief that our Indian Empire will not be long-lived is reason and not prejudice. It is difficult to guess the death it may die ; but if it escapes the Eussians and other foreign attacks I think the seeds of 96 HERE AND THERE its ruin will be found in the Native army a delicate and dangerous machine which a little mismanagement may easily turn against us. The most desirable death for us to die of should be the improvement of the natives reaching such a pitch as would render it impossible for a foreign nation to retain the government ; but this seems at an immeasurable distance." Mr. Elphinstone's predictions as to the army were so thoroughly made good in 1857 that some of us may be tempted to believe that the rest may be fulfilled in due course. In conclusion it may be permissible to give a few figures illustrative of the different ideas of the two Governments on the subject of national expenditure. The Emperor Shah Jahan was unquestionably a good financier, and in all probability as conscientious a ruler as any of his royal contemporaries, and although it was believed that he left in his treasury bullion and jewels to the value of 128,000,000 of our money, he must have spent considerable sums in public works, of which many remain to the present day. But when we examine the nature of these works, we shall find that their primary object was the enjoyment of the monarch rather than the welfare of the people. Thus, while he took water from the Upper Jumna to flow into Delhi by a canal which in modern times has developed into an important system of irrigation, -it is evident that the chief, if not the only object of the original undertaking was to bring potable water into the palace. In like manner the mosques, mausolea, gardens, and palaces were all works whose cost were out of all proportion to their economic value. For example, in the case of the Taj Mahal at Agra, which was nothing but the monument of his departed consort, we learn from Manrique, who saw the architect's papers, that it was the subject of most lavish expenditure ; although the marble was the free gift of Hindu rajahs, the actual sum allotted for the tomb was fifteen millions AN ALIEN YOKE 97 of dollars. Tavernier a French jeweller who visited Delhi during this reign, estimated the famous Peacock Throne on which the Emperor sat in the ceremonies mentioned above, at a sum equivalent to six millions of modern sterling ; and although lower estimates have been suggested, this sumptuous piece of furniture was evidently covered with precious stones of enormous value. If now we contrast expenditure of this kind with that of the present Government of India, we see that however much educated natives may be disposed to complain of what they consider extravagant outlay, it is at least made conscientiously for the public benefit. The army is relatively small and inexpensive for the protection of an area and a population scarcely inferior to those of the whole continent of Europe, without Russia. Two years ago no less than 14,830,000 acres of culturable land had been insured against drought by works of irrigation,* while 25,373 miles of railway had been spread like a network over the land, and in favouring circumstances the transport of heavy goods is facilitated by navigable canals. All these things imply considerable expense ; and it may be argued that more is being done than the country is quite prepared for. Nevertheless such com- plaints need hardly be too seriously regarded when we remember that the pressure of taxation pure and simple only represents an average incidence of Is. lOd. per head per annum, and that even of this by far the greater part represents payments which only fall on the consumers of luxuries, and that an ordinary Indian peasant may get through life in the manner of his forefathers with no further contribution for the purposes of government than the excise on salt, amounting to about 6d. a head yearly. Candqur demands the admission that the alien yoke presses lightly on the Indians, and is not one of which it can be their present interest to be rid. * From this year onward the annual sum allotted for irrigation will not be far short of 1,000,000 sterling. 8 PART II CHAPTEK I GOING HOME (1883) ON October 25, 1882, we raised anchor at Kalpi, and soon got into open water. Kemembrance of the first sight of these low, wooded shores just thirty-five years ago a mere episode, and how unprofitable ! The pilot went on board his brig about 2 p.m., bearing our last letters, and soon after we were in the blue ocean. The vessel The City of Oxford belonged to Messrs. Smith of Glasgow, and was rated, we were told, at 2,800 tons for canal dues, but her actual cargo was said to be 5,000 tons. Here was a nautical problem that inquiry did not altogether solve ; she was built of iron, and her weight was 3,500 tons. The freight was carried at 5s. a ton a dead loss undergone for the purposes of com- petition. She steamed twelve knots an hour; but set her trysails that evening to try and do a little more. On the following Sunday, under the combined action of sail and steam, we passed along the southern side of the island of Ceylon, and signalled Galle about noon. Our not landing was a source of gratification to those who remembered former visits and vain expenditure on sham jewellery. On Saturday, November 4th, we passed south of Socotra, then " the Brothers," two apparently volcanic 101 102 HERE AND THERE piles ; towards evening Abd-ul-Karim, about 20 miles long and 1,000 feet high. We thought of Moses as on November 9th we glided past the Sinai Peninsula. If any display such as his were to occur now the New York Herald would send out a special correspondent, and it would be reproduced at the Crystal Palace. After all, Professor Sayce doubts whether the Israelites ever visited the peninsula, and seems in- clined to think that Sinai and Horeb were far away northward in the Idumean Hills; so strangely does modern research love to undermine established conclusions. On November 10th we awoke at four p.m. by the engine stopping, having glided into Suez Harbour in a beautiful dawn : "Sirius is set: no sound is on the sea Where late the ship's green fire was backward rolled; But see the comet's beard of spreading gold Is tangled in the swarming Pleiades. Yon shore, from whence we catch the landward breeze, Is Egypt, where the monuments were old When Joseph to the Ishmaelite was sold: Before Rome rose, she fell ; her kings' decrees, Her arts of peace and armaments of war, Her laws, her hopes of Immortality, Sunk in the sand to-day, can scarce suffice To give our Island autumn exercise; Our Island that has all she had of yore, And what she is will some day surely be." On Sunday, the 12th, we reached Port Said, a shimmy little Venice, which is testimony to the power of commerce that any kind of town should be erected on what was no more than a spit of sand, barely large enough to hold a lighthouse, twenty years ago. The next day we went ashore with the captain, who took us to his agents, where we passed a couple of hours with M. Savin, the local director, an agreeable French- man, who showed the skin of a fine lion that he had lately shot. GOING HOME 103 We sighted Malta on the morning of November 16th. After midday dinner all went on deck to see the ship glide in among the numerous lights of Valetta harbour and town. Went ashore about eight, and to the large and comfortable Opera House orchestra stalls, three shillings. The piece was called " lone," founded on Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," pretty well rendered, but somewhat noisy. Military officers (infantry and gunners) in uniform, also some from German and Yankee ships in harbour. Supper at the Gran Gaffe, and back on board, where coaling was going on with great vigour. And so on, through squalls and falling temperature, past the coasts of Tunis and Algeria, now restored to Latin civilisation ; past the gardant lion of Gibraltar, and the historic shores of Trafalgar and Cadiz ; sighted Lisbon and Cape Roca, and once more into the boundless waters, with the long wave rolled in from Labrador, and all the cold racket of the Bay of Biscay ; till we sighted Start Point on the 25th, and proceeded up the Channel. Next day we turned the North Foreland, passed up the river, and reached the docks about 4 p.m. And then, a few weeks having been spent in looking up friends and making preliminary arrangements, we settled down before the end of December in a temporary abode at Ealing, near enough to town for business, yet affording the means for sleeping in fresh air. The place was, even then, large and populous, with one or two old houses of which the best were occupied by the Bight Hon. S. Walpole and his relations, the daughters of Mr. Perceval, the minister shot in the House of Commons so far back as 1812.* One considerable compensation for living on the out- skirts of the metropolis was being able to resort to the Royal Asiatic Society and the Athenaeum Club (of which * The Perceval house and grounds have since been bought by the Municipality for the public use. 104 HERE AND THERE one had been a member for years past), where one met wise and learned men, the true aristocracy of England. Only to mention a few who have since departed, there were James Fergusson, the architectural critic ; Vaux, the accomplished Secretary ; Matthew Arnold, Sir Louis Malet, Sir James Stephen, Lord Bowen, Henry Keeve, Lord Monkswell (first), Lord Lytton, and old Kich- mond, B.A., with the artists Calderon and Du Maurier, all of whom it was once a pleasure and a privilege to meet, as well as many who are still happily on this side of Charon's Ferry. London life I found much altered from what I re- membered it at the commencement of the Victorian era, when the ideal of one's ambition was to form one of the persons who with scant social acknowledgment were to be directors of human opinion. The traditions of Grub Street, or what it was the fashion to call "Bohemia," were then still operative. Maginn was gone, but Mahony, Thackeray, and other less famous men remembered him and his attitude of careless omniscience and schoolboy scurrility. The period of coffee-houses and sponging-houses was over, with its atmosphere of drink, debt, and duelling ; but there still clung to the literary calling a kind of " Fra Diavolo " romance, which had a strong fascination for a certain class of youthful minds. Now, after thirty-five years of peaceful prosperity, one found the man of letters trans- planted and transformed. Grub Street was improved off the face of the earth ; the editor, even the contributor, had become a power in the State, driving to his club in his own carriage, and quaffing champagne at the dinner- tables of dukes. Obviously this was a career completely closed to the Beturned Empty. His only prospect was to look on from the outside, and observe where he could no longer hope to participate. One's youthful ideals had proved false youthful ideals mostly do. It was now to be seen GOING HOME 105 whether the new position that of an undistinguished onlooker would be more fruitful. ***** A very few words may be convenient as to the con- ditions of public life in 1883. In the previous December some important events had occurred, and some important men had passed away. On the last day of the month Leon Gambetta died, from a mysterious wound, at Ville d'Avray, near Paris; and if no equally distinguished Briton had disappeared during the period, yet the decease of Archbishop Tait and of Anthony Trollope made a blank in the ranks of Englishmen. On the 1st a new set of procedure rules was agreed to by the House of Commons ; on the 4th the Queen opened the new Law Courts, Temple Bar, on which occasion the late Mr. Justice Spankie, of the Allahabad High Court, accom- panied the writer by the aid of tickets kindly supplied by the Eight Hon. G. J. Shaw-Lefevre, then the head of the Public Works. The sight was impressive, a crowd of barristers being present in their forensic costume, the Queen's Counsel in full-bottomed perukes ; as Her Majesty entered a sunbeam pierced the wintry sky and crossed the Gothic Hall, and the gracious lady proceeded to her dais, whence she delivered a short address in her clear, sweet voice, supported on either side by Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt in their glittering robes of office. In the following February an inquiry was held at Dublin into the circumstances of the Phoenix Park murders, and the discovery was made that the Fenian Society included an inner ring of criminals associated for the assassination of public servants, James Carey, a Dublin town councillor, who had been privy to the murders, being among the Approvers. The Parliamentary Session was almost entirely absorbed in two subjects Irish dis- affection and Mr. Bradlaugh's endeavours to force his way into the House, culminating in a riotous meeting in 106 HERE AND THERE Trafalgar Square, and an action at law in which the Free- thinking M.P. was sentenced to a fine of 500, on the 30th of June. Unusual attention was drawn to India by the agitation arising out of the proposed alteration of the law of Criminal Procedure, oddly designated " the Ilbert Bill," after the legislative Member of Council who had drafted the measure in the ordinary routine of his duties. On the 27th of June Lord Salisbury made a speech in which he said that Mr. Chamberlain's programme was pure Jacobinism, and that it was a source of wonder that Mr. Chamberlain was allowed a seat in the Ministry (Mr. Chamberlain being President of the Board of Trade under Gladstone). On the 29th Sir W. Harcourt, for his part, expressed warm appreciation of Lord Eosebery. Such &re the vicissitudes of opinion in high places. In July Carey, the Dublin Approver, was assassinated at Port Elizabeth by one O'Donnell, doubtless an agent of Fenian vengeance.* In the following month four Irishmen were sentenced to penal servitude for life on a charge of con- spiring to destroy public buildings a new Gunpowder Plot with the improved resources of modern science. On the 6th of December Lord Eipon announced in the Calcutta Council that the "Ilbert Bill" had been approved by the home Government with modifications restricting jurisdiction to District Magistrates and Ses- sions Judges, who would be ex-officio Justices of the Peace. These were some of the salient features of the year in which were recorded the notes from which I proceed to make a few extracts. On Thursday, 15th February, 1883, Parliament was opened by Commission. Tried to get through crowd ; at last arrived in Broad Sanctuary, by St. Margaret's, to the Peers' entrance, and into the Lords' lobby ; here T. came to me and took me in. Debate on the Address, .and funny spectacle of old men in robes, taking off and replacing cocked hats that did not fit. * O'Donnell was hanged at Newgate on December 27th. GOING HOME 107 On Saturday, 23rd, had an interesting conversation with at the Athenaeum. He said that Max Miiller made Indian Aryans and their institutions too primitive. In modern matters English society hastening to disintegration ; Chamberlain practically a Tory ; Con- servatism idle in itself, as health in social organism must -demand a change; but it might be useful to slacken down-hill speed, like a brake. In the same month I finished a work by Mr. W. H. Mallock called " Social Equality," a book that may be .applicable to Anarchists, but it is no refutation of Liberals. He shows what is pretty obvious that a graded society is favourable to ambition, and so to progress. But what Liberals appear to insist on is that the minority of persons naturally privileged born with silver or gold spoons in their mouths ought not to be further endowed with advantages other than what Fortune has already given them. It is not social but political inequality that is the blot of the old sort of European societies, founded mostly on conquest. On Tuesday, 6th April, I went to a meeting at Gros- venor House to see a testimonial presented to Mr. Ernest Hart. I did not quite know why, but was glad to see a number of distinguished folks, and still more so to make acquaintance with the Duke's small but beautiful collection of pictures, among them Gainsborough's famous "Blue Boy," and one of the three copies of Keynolds's " Mrs. Siddons." When I say " copy," I would not imply that the one at Grosvenor House is not an original, but only that there is another at Dulwich, and a third some- where else, while Sir Joshua's " Note-book " only mentions the painting of one, for which he records that he was paid 700 guineas. I asked Eichmond, the oldest of extant Academicians, to tell me which he thought the original. He was born in 1809, and might have heard authentic traditions. He would not, however, undertake to say which of the three was original, adding : " You see, we 108 HERE AND THERE don't paint any of our pictures ; we only sketch them in, and then make them over to our pupils. When they think the work finished, we take it into our studios and play with it, and put in what we call ' artistic merit ' ! " I knew that this was done by sculptors, having seen mason-looking men in paper caps chiselling in Gibson's atelier at Eome, but did not know that similar procedure was usual in painting. On Friday, 27th, I went to the House of Commons, where Gladstone made a great speech on the Affirmation Bill : " I do not hesitate to say that the specific form of irreligion with which in the educated society of the country you have to deal .... is not blank atheism ; that is a rare opinion, and seldom met with ; but .... those forms of thought which hold that whatever is beyond the short span of life, you know and can know nothing about ; it is a visionary and bootless under- taking to try to establish relations with it." Of course this, if true, is a description of Epicurus, his school, and takes us back to the days of Lucretius. One doubts if our modern Agnostics go quite so far (G. 0. M. not in touch with contemporary opinions). On Saturday, 12th May, met Genevieve Ward and Mathilde Blind at Lady W.'s. Eeceived a note from Lord N. about a club he was instituting for the excellent purpose of enabling those interested in India to meet natives of that country visiting England.* On Wednesday, 23rd, went with Mr. C. J.t to see the Duke of Devonshire's famous villa at Chiswick, by the permission of the late Marquis of Bute, in whose occu- pation it then was. It is a fine house, said to have been built by Inigo Jones from a design by Palladio, standing * This club ultimately failed, and the premises are now in the occupation of a publishing firm. It was known to the profane as " The Black Hole of Calcutta." t Son of Sir Alexander Johnstone of Carnsalloch, sometime Governor of Ceylon (vide " Dictionary of National Biography," vol. 29). GOING HOME 109 in twenty-five acres of ground, with superb hothouses, 100 yards in length. In front some fine cedars, dating from the Kevolution, sweep the green velvet of the lawn with dark branches. The ground floor only meant for use in hot weather; an external staircase leads to the principal suite, which is magnificently furnished and hung with rare pictures, including Vandykes, Teniers, a fine Rubens, and two good Tintorets. We were shown the bedroom in which George Canning died. It seemed strange to find such a scene of rural beauty within five miles of Charing Cross, and to see a heron rise out of the sedges, as his ancestors may have done before the beginning of history. In the afternoon of Thursday, June 1th, I saw a sight I should not have expected in this highly-policed land. A youth galloped down the lane by my study window, leaped his horse o\er the gate at the end of the lane, flung himself off, and disappeared. Presently followed a mounted constable in pursuit, who got the horse, but not the rider, who, it was said, had stolen the animal and ridden it over in broad daylight from Hounslow. Went to the Olympic with E. and A. on Thursday, 14th. The piece, called in English " The Queen's Favourite," was an adaptation of Scribe's " Un Verre d'Eau," and very well played by Miss G. Ward and Mr. W. H. Vernon. A daughter of old Buckstone's made a pretty Abigail, and a minor part was taken by Miss Achurch.* As history the play is stark nought, being merely an impossible version of the dismissal of the Duchess of Marlborough in favour of Abigail Hill, afterwards Lady Masham. But Miss Gene vie ve Ward put her culture and her fire into the part of the Duchess. I visited her behind the scenes with the compliments of our party, and was introduced into the Green-room. On Tuesday, VAfh July, to Twickenham with E. S. P., * Janet Achurch, since married to Mr. C. Charrington, and well known as the interpreter of Ibsen's female characters. 110 HERE AND THERE an old brother officer and a man of culture, to see the contents of Strawberry Hill. The former sale (April , 1842) had dispersed much of the old collection of Horace Walpole ; but some pictures still remained, including an alleged Gian Bellini, some fair historical portraits, and the marvellous group of three ladies by Sir Joshua which was long since insured for 10,000. The rooms in the old part of the house are too low, but the more modern rooms are very good. There was some very pretty china, with very quaint furniture. The grounds were not open. It was interesting to see the last of a famous house, inherited by Lady Waldegrave from her husband, whose mother was Walpole' s niece, the lady herself being a daughter of the famous singer Braham (1774- 1856), married for the fourth time to the late Lord Carlingford, and for many years a leader of Society. She died in 1879. On Wednesday, 21th August, lunched with the Warden at the " Old College," Dulwich. (Of course this is the real " College of God's Gift," founded by Alleyne, temp. Jacob. I. ; the other is a mere school, misnamed " Col- lege," according to the loose magniloquence of our day.) It is a fine old building, and the Warden's rooms look out upon a still and sheltered garden. We enjoyed the picture gallery, with many fine works, from Teniers to Reynolds, so strangely brought together by Desenfours and Bourgeois. Amongst them is the replica of Sir Joshua Reynolds's "Mrs. Siddons," referred to in the mention of the Duke of Westminster's collection above (10th April). The Dulwich pictures were collected for Stanislaus King of Poland, but that monarch coming to grief, the pictures were for some time left neglected in a private house in London, and finally bequeathed to the College by Sir Francis Bourgeois. On Thursday, November Z2nd, there was a singular inquest on an Afghan residing in Montague Place. His name was Ismail Khan, and he had passed as a surgeon GOING HOME 111 and also as a physician, but had failed in obtaining" employment. He took prussic acid, recording his con- viction that the act was a "sane" one, and bequeathing his body to the London University Hospital for scien- tific purposes. Like the case of poor Dyce Sombre, a warning to Asiatics purposing to settle in England ! Two days later I was reading an autobiography of Sir A. Alison, the historian evidently a courageous, indefatigable man, whose narrowness gives his readers an occasional start. He tells us, in so many words, that Providence collaborated in his " History of Modern Europe " by arranging the incidents in an instructive sequence. ***** Experiences of a London suburb may be summed up in the subjoined doggerel : " Ah ! London, dear London ! what joy to regain The streets and the parks that we loved so in youth ; And loved they are still, though the wind and the rain Take the charm from the scene if they add to its truth. How often, when parched by a tropical sun, For a chill or a shower one hungered and prayed; And now, when our exile is over and done, One is wrong to complain of the damp and the shade. It is true that the life is both irksome and grey, And the sky of our fortunes is oftentimes dark ; That Honesta works kerchiefs at ninepence a day, While her sister Anonyma rides in the Park. If a house in the suburbs is all you maintain, The rent will be high though the site may be low, And they'll offer a dado instead of a drain, With fac-simile tenements ending the row. Then the neighbours will stare at you all the first year, As if wondering, ' Who can this pickpocket be ? ' In the second some cards at your door may appear, And the clergyman asks you to five-o'clock tea. Yet you live, while life lasts, in your own motherland, Whose sons may be rough, but are truthful and brave, And whatever their conduct you quite understand If she grudge you a home she will grant you a grave ! " CHAPTEK II LONDON (1884) FOB the greater part of this year we remained at Ealing, interested spectators of a drama very new to our ex- perience. London had many shocks daring the earlier months shocks of which some were physical as well as moral : the playful Fenians pursued their dynamitic diversions; the Russians made moves in Central Asia which gave us fits of what the Duke of Argyll called " mervousness " ; the dispatch of Chinese Gordon on a mission to withdraw the Egyptian garrisons from the Sudan led to anxiety and expense which seemed to have no promise of advantage ; a small rebellion had to be dealt with in British America, concluded by the in- cident so rare in modern times of a rebel leader dying on the scaffold ; Gladstone and his then followers felt the recoil of the Sudan disasters in spite of a spirited little campaign on the Bed Sea littoral. The veteran parlia- mentary hand did not, indeed, shake ostensibly, and the fiery cross began to wave in Midlothians ; but some of the other ministers gave signs of weariness or weakened allegiance, while one or two announced views bordering on Socialism. The cold, sinister in- fluence of the Irish conspirators was working half unseen. On Monday, January 14th, I finished " Bishop Wilber- 112 LONDON 113 force's Life " a not very skilful or amiable book, yet yielding a clear picture. The man was a somewhat worldly-minded and under a bland exterior a pug- nacious priest, with extreme views as to the need and power of dogma. But there was a thicker stratum of sincerity in his character than what was inferred from superficial symptoms. His chief defect was, perhaps, a failure to realise the principle of evolution changes in the organism in response to changes in surroundings. So he went on offering stones from the Past to a time that demanded not only the bread of life but also the fruit of the Hesperides. But it was an acute and able personality. I heard him preach, in 1862, and was somehow reminded of Spurgeon. On Thursday, 24&, Gordon left London to go to the Sudan ; the British Government having ordered all the Egyptian garrisons to be withdrawn, which was resented by the Egyptian Government, all whose members resigned. Saturday, February 2nd. A familiar figure gone from the Athenaeum in Abraham Hay ward, Q.C., famous in the imbroglio of Mrs. Norton and a deceased statesman.* His notice of " Vanity Fair " in the Quarterly was said to have given the needful push when that great work of fiction was making an almost hopeless struggle in monthly parts. A fine cartoon by Tenniel in Punch, representing General Gordon Pasha giving Mr. Gladstone " a lift." A Kadical M.P. says the G. 0. M. looked at it sadly, murmuring, " Yes, it is quite true, and when he falls I shall fall too." On Thursday, 1th, there was great excitement over a rumour that Gordon had been captured. Every one speculated on the effect that such a disaster might have on current affairs. Will ministers be seriously * Afterwards idealised in Mr. Meredith's very charming tale, "Diana of the Crossways." 9 114 HERE AND THERE attacked by the Opposition? They have probably a substantial majority in the House, but the country may turn very hostile. Tros, Rutilusve . . . 'tis all one to Heracleides. Tuesday, 12^. News of the fall of Sinkat and mas- sacre of garrison. Verses in Vanity Fair : SINKAT. Another slaughter by Egypt's water, Another multitude betrayed, More speech deceiving, more widows grieving, More English laurel- wreaths to fade ! The wars that bled us when the nobles led us Still made our glory to increase ; Now England her Crown sells for prudent counsels, But neither honour comes nor peace. It was never so men encountered foemen To wrest salvation from their hand ; But shoulder to shoulder, growing ever bolder, Till danger was driven from the land. What is it cows you ? Will no shame rouse you ? Your fathers suffer in their graves 1 Is pedant's pallor to replace their valour ? Are the sons of heroes to be slaves? Oh! strike with power, ere the passing hour Be passed, and your striking vain; And let disaster be your true taskmaster, And your losses an everlasting gain. Yote of censure in the House of Lords 100 majority; Tote negatived Commons by a narrow majority of 13. Friday, 2%nd. Dynamite explosions apprehended. On Thursday, 28th, there was general anxiety about Sir Gerald Graham's position at Suakim.* Went with S. to the chapel of the convent in Kensington Square, * General Sir G. Graham, V.C., &c., died at Bideford in the t>eginning of 1900; one of the bravest and most courteous of knights. LONDON 115 where the Perpetual Adoration was being held. Ghost- like gliding of nuns in the still precincts was very impressive, even to an outsider ; one is always on duty, so that the Adoration never ceases. Heard on coming out that Graham's advance had been stopped. Explosion at Charing Cross only frustrated by time, fuse not acting as intended. On Tuesday, March 4th, there was a meeting in Parliament Street to found " Indian Keform Association." Why? The next day went to an enormous crush at Lady F's ; seven hundred said to have been in the house at once. The performance included selections from an opera called " Ostrolenko," by Bonawitz, who conducted, on a piano, & little afterpiece called " Darby and Joan," in which only two characters appeared, which were played by George Alexander and Miss Lucy Roche. Among the audience were the Princess Frederica of Hanover and the fair American, Miss Mary Anderson.* The refresh- ments were on the scale of a gorgeous ball-supper. On Sunday, 30th, went to some studio in Kensington. Met Mrs. Stirling, t an interesting old lady whom I recollected as a lovely young woman and excellent actress when I used to frequent the Haymarket in Buckstone's days. These mornings with the artists or rather after- noons, but your visit must be before the light fails .are full of pleasure, and you need only pay with a little benevolent appreciation. On Thursday, April 3rd, there was an attack on the Government in the House of Commons, meant evidently to annoy, possibly to defeat and overturn principally arising out of Egypt and Gordon. Lord Hartington explained the refusal of Gordon's application for services of Zebehr Pasha, saying that the Government thought the risk too great. Gordon had never been promised support from this country, but had full authority to * Afterwards Madame Navarro de Viana. f Lady Gregory. 116 HERE AND THERE return if he found his task too difficult. He had never asked for military aid, clearly understanding that, if he executed his mission, it must be with resources on the spot. The following day Lord Granville took up the parable in the Lords, repeating the explanations given in the other Chamber. He said that he himself had been more anxious for Gordon at the beginning of his incumbency in the Sudan than he was now. Friday, 18th. Harcourt made a speech at Derby yesterday defending the action of Government in re- gard to Gordon ; denying most peremptorily that they were indifferent to the interests of " that illustrious man, who had sent no accounts that would intimate that he considered himself in any personal danger at Khartum.'* Not the sort of thing he would do ! A member of his family told me that every confidence was felt in his resourcefulness. Monday, 28th. Lord Granville announced yesterday that a Joint Commission had been agreed upon between this country and Russia for delimitation of Afghan frontier. On Wednesday, 30&, went to Grosvenor Gallery and met Sir R. Cross,* an old contemporary at Anstey's, Rugby. Friday, May 2nd. Dinner at Northbrook Club to send off Evelyn Baring, t A distinguished assemblage, including Lords Northbrook, Kimberley, and Lawrence, Sir Ashley Eden, Sir Lewis Pelly, Sir George Kellner, Hon. E. Drummond, General Keatinge, Colonel Benyon, and many others, chiefly of the Anglo-Indian type. Lord Northbrook spoke well and Baring excellently, referring to the ability shown in Indian administration and to the want of it in that of Egypt which, indeed, he * Afterwards Viscount Cross. f- Afterwards so distinguished in Egyptian administration as Earl of Cromer, G.C.B., &c. LONDON 117 called " detestably bad." Perhaps the contrast may be overworked. On Wednesday, 1th, we heard that Deceased Wife's Sister had got through the Commons with over one hundred majority. Will the prospect of having only one mother-in-law prove equally seductive to their Lordships in the Upper House ? On Monday, I2th, went to Exeter Hall to deliver an address on the North- West Frontier of India. Colonel Malleson in the chair. In the subsequent discussion Marvin and Leitner took part. Among others present were Lord Stanley of Alderley, Sir Orfeur Cavanagh, Messrs. Martin Wood and Seton-Kerr. My paper seemed to be favourably received. The situation was exciting, and we heard that Sir Peter Lumsden had been recalled. On Sunday, 18th, the Observer announced that Lord Granville had addressed the Charge d' Affaires at Cairo, directing him to inform General Gordon that, as the original plan for evacuating Khartum proved futile, and there was no immediate prospect of aggressive operations against the Mahdi, he should arrange to remove himself and garrison from Khartum. These middle-aged men (who were no conjurors) reminded one of the conjurors of the Middle Ages threatened by their unemployed familiar. Lord Lytton told me the other day that he liked Watts's portrait of him in the Grosvenor Gallery. But who could do justice to those dreamy eyes? I spent the forenoon of Friday, 23rd, at the Academy, where there were some interesting pictures by artists one knew Calderon, Prinsep, Solomon, McCullum, &c. Lunched at club with Sir H. Maine and Matthew Arnold, and played billiards with Sir B. Collier,* who told me a curious thing about the Allahabad High Court. * Afterwards Lord Monkswell, member of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. 118 HERE AND THERE He said that they had reversed every judgment that had come thence before the Privy Council since had been Chief (I presume he meant " reversed or disturbed"). The next day I went to a bachelor dinner-party in Cornwall Gardens, meeting Lord G. H. and some other M.P.'s and journalists, the guest of honour being a young noble from Haidarabad Nawab Zafar Jang. On Friday, 30th, there was a dynamite explosion in the basement of the Junior Carlton Club (paries cum proximus ardet) a sad perversion of science that vin- dicates Irish national aspirations by blowing up London kitchen-maids ! Dined at the Wards, meeting Colonel Morse, U.S.A., and Colonel A. Ward, Miss Ward's brother, who was formerly in Mr. Washbourne's Em- bassy at Paris during the great war. The old mother was a most able and interesting woman, widow of the son of General Ward, who commanded the first force raised in New England during the Eevolution. Con- sulted Colonel Morse about lecturing in America, and arrived at the conclusion that the Yankees only cared for celebrated names.* On the evening of Tuesday, June 3rd, went to Globe Theatre, where T. had a box for Lady G. and Mrs. A. The piece was " The Private Secretary," a three-act farce from the German, in which Penley played a weak- minded curate with astonishing realism. The two widows laughed till they cried. On Tuesday, IQtk, there were Indian tableaux by Val Prinsep at the Princes Hall ; very gorgeous show, with flabby words. Lord Northbrook, Sir William Muir, General Walker, &c., there. Monday, 23rd. " Song of the Bell" tableaux at Lady F.'s ; music by Bomberg, on which Lawson had embroidered patterns from himself and Wagner. The * An anecdote illustrative of this was told me long afterwards by Mr. Holman Hunt, as will be recorded in its due order. LONDON 119 lighting was better than at Princes Hall, and the show otherwise quite as good. On Tuesday, July 22nd, a "Special Matinee" at the Globe, to give dramatic and other rights to a new play, " The Lost Cause," of which the title was too prophetic, in spite of Miss Lingard and pretty Lucy Buckstone. On Friday, August 1st, had an interesting talk at the Athenaeum with several prominent men. One, a Cabinet Minister, looked white and weary, and said that "he did not like the life ; out of bed till three every morning, badgered and baited" (I must not say by whom). He evidently thought that it would be a happy release to be turned out, only the Tories could not retain power unless they could get forty votes, which would involve a transaction with Parnell. Called on Mr. Albert Grey* at Dorchester House a magnificent place with some good pictures. The following Tuesday to dinner at Northbrook Club : met Sir C. Petheran,t Mr. St. John Ackers, the friend of the dumb ; Sir Eichard Temple, and other Anglo- Indian worthies. Lord N. made a nice little speech, and Sir William Hunter responded gracefully; about 120 present. Mr. Ackers explained his system of lip- reading, the essence of which was no talking on the fingers, and said that there were many people conducting factories and places where a great many hands worked, the conductors being both deaf and dumb. (For the next few days travelled in the West : to Mai- vern, Hereford, and N. Wales. Had kind invitation to visit "Tom" Hughes at Chester,! which unhappily did not come off, and I never saw him again, as he died in the spring of 1886.) * Afterwards Earl Grey. f About to sail for India as Chief Justice North-West Provinces. | Judge of County Court, and famous author of the day (" Tom Brown's Schooldays," &c.). We had never met since Rugby days. 120 HERE AND THERE Saturday 30th. London season quite over ; close time for politics ought to have been beginning when that of partridges ended, but the buoyant G. 0. M. was off to Midlothian to seek a fresh lease of popular support among the canny compatriots of those regions. In his " Triumphal Progress " from Hawarden to Dalmeny he sounded the praises of his new Franchise Bill, which after all was the logical issue of Dizzy's legislation in 1867. Wednesday, September 3rd. In Gladstone's first speech (Edinburgh, 1st current) he claimed that his Bill was a very moderate measure, full of concessions to Tory feeling. He would not wait for Redistribution, and ended by throwing out threats to the Lords. On the following day he took up his parable, concluding by the announcement that ministers were " considering the best way of fulfilling obligations to General Gordon " (which they had repudiated in May). On Friday, 19th, Mr. J. Cowen, M.P., made an eloquent and in all respects remarkable speech. He told the working men that political enfranchisement was nothing unless they could enfranchise themselves mentally and morally. He warned them against drink and against rash wage combinations. Of pauperism he said, in con- clusion, that " if Society did not settle it, in time it will settle Society." Towards the end of the summer an opportunity offered for transferring the lease of our house ; and we resolved to adopt it and seek some other residence with better educational advantages, and otherwise more suitable for a large and growing family. With these views we fixed on the Channel Islands, with which indeed we were not altogether unacquainted, having had a home for the children in Guernsey during the later years of our Indian life ; and on the 24th of September I left Ealing to join the family, who had already arrived and were looking round for a settlement, not this time in Guernsey, but in LONDON 121 the larger neighbouring island. Before saying anything, however, about life in Jersey, I may mention that the India Office recalled me before the end of the year to take charge of a young Hindu nobleman who had been selected for the Indian Civil Service under Lord Lytton's recent scheme known as " Statutory." It was intended that the Kumar should pass his preparatory period in England, seeing something of English life, and studying law ; and I had been selected to introduce him into London society, take him to the Law Courts, and generally act as bear-leader. (Among public events in which the writer had no concern was the accomplished century of Sir Moses Montefiore, celebrated with much eclat at Broadstairs. It might be argued that a century is an artificial division, but the interest here is that a distinguished man, the late Sir G. C. Lewis, had publicly declared that no case had ever been proved of a person living 36,500 days ; and this was one. In November a vote was taken for an expedi- tion to rescue Gordon, which, of course, ought to have been done long before if it was to be done at all, but that was long denied by the Government. On November 20th Miss Finney known on the stage as Miss Fortes- cue got heavy damages in an action for breach against the eldest son of Earl Cairns, whose courtesy- title was Lord Garmoyle. The case gave rise to the following mild joke: " The dearest oil in London is Garm-oil ; ten thousand pounds per gal. (girl !) "). On December Qth the Franchise Bill was reported to have passed its third reading in the Lords, not without threats as we have seen from Gladstone, enforced by Mr. Chamberlain and other supporters of the policy. The Kedistribution Bill by a compromise was read a second time in the Commons. It passed next day with slight alterations, and a general sense of relief appeared to prevail. Some thought democracy was a tide which 122 HERE AND THERE could not be resisted or turned back. Others, taking a less fatalistic view, still seemed to think it better that Demos should be admitted to the freedom of the city than left to batter the walls from without. All alike were glad to get rid of a controversy of which all had grown tired ; and the waters closed and the ship held her way with little change of course. The only subse- quent event had nothing to do with the Franchise, being no more than another exhibition of Irish humours in the shape of a dynamite explosion at London Bridge, which did no injury to the pier, though it was said to have shaken a few foot-passengers. I find in my Memoranda at the end of this year a sketch of a book on " Politics for Children," to begin from the Kevolution of 1688. It never got beyond I'etat de pro jet, but indicates a gap that ought to be some day filled. CHAPTEE III JEESEY (1885) THE visitor on arriving at St. Heliers will generally succeed in effecting a landing ; for although the harbour for half the twenty-four hours is little more than a muddy enclosure he will be rescued by friendly boatmen who, unless in exceptional weather, will row him to shore for a small consideration. Arrived in the town, he will not at first be conscious of any great change from the English port that he may have left over night, Southamp- ton or Weymouth. He will find English spoken at his- hotel, and the signs and notices in the streets are mostly in that language ; the cabs and waggons resemble those of England, although the traffic that they create is some- what tumultuous for so small a place, from the prevalent use of boulder pavements. Nevertheless, a sympathetic observer will find after a short residence that the likeness is mainly on the surface. If he visits a court of law he will see advocates without wigs, and judges in the same condition ; the pleadings will be conducted in French, and the law itself of an unfamiliar kind ; should the local Parliament be in session, the proceedings would be in the same language. Should he wander into the interior, he will hear the inhabitants speaking a third language, neither French nor English. The fields are small, with stone walls almost amounting to fortifica- 123 124 HERE AND THERE tions ; and the houses are of the plainest architecture, neither old nor new, and without balcony, verandah, or any decorative feature. Gradually it will dawn upon him that he is in a country neither British, nor colonial, nor foreign : something, in fact, absolutely singular and un- precedented. The main details of all these peculiarities are, of course, set forth in the current guide-books, yet one or two may deserve a passing notice without dis- paragement to those useful auxiliaries.* The racial origins and affinities of the people are by no means simple. The late Professor Freeman being asked what he thought of the matter, answered in his most emphatic style, " Normans, of course," but it is certainly not the fact that the first inhabitants of Jersey belonged to that adventurous race. The island is so near the mainland, and the evidences of its former connection are so strong, as to produce a positive conviction that it was peopled by the same race, of whom traces are still to be seen in the rude stone monuments exactly resembling those of the French coast, and still known to the islanders by the Celtic name Pouquelaye.t The race, therefore, was in all probability that primitive one whose descendants are known in modern Europe as Basques, or that blend with later comers to whom the Romans gave the name of Celtiberian, the more distant islands being doubtless occupied in process of time by emigration from Jersey. When, in the beginning of the tenth century, the feeble Carlovingian made over the province of Neustria to the Viking Bolf Ganger, the Cotentin oppo- site which Jersey lies continued for some time to be a portion of the province of Brittany, and it was not until the succeeding generation that the Normans obtained any footing there. After this no doubt several Norman chiefs obtained estates in the island, and when, some two cen- * See an article by the present writer in the third volume of "Chambers's Encyclopaedia." | See Metivier's " Dictionnaire Franco-Normand," p. 402. JERSEY 125 turies later, the mainland province was confiscated by the French king, these barons adhered to John of England, and a few of their descendants are still Seigneurs of Jersey fiefs. But it may be questioned whether out of the 50,000 or 60,000 souls now forming the community more than a very small proportion can be regarded as belonging to this class ; their physical type presents nothing Scandinavian, and the word Norman is so com- pletely a term of abuse among them that a case is recorded in which a man was fined in a Jersey court for saying to a brother islander, " Tu es Normand, et fils de Normand," such language being regarded as calculated to provoke a breach of the peace. ***** Leaving the family to settle in the midst of this singular little community, the writer proceeds to notice a few events of public interest which occurred after his temporary return to England. In public affairs the year was the inevitable offspring of the preceding, beginning with a terrible Guy Fawkes affair in Parliament, fortunately before the sitting had opened. News soon came of the practical failure of the Sudan expedition and the death of General Gordon, fol- lowed by the already mentioned trouble in North America, terminated by the execution of the law on the French half- breed named Biel, and a serious difficulty on the Afghan frontier arising out of an attack on the Ameer's troops by a Eussian force. Later on peace was patched up with Russia, owing greatly to the Ameer's moderation, and without any conclusion as to the question of the Muscovite general's veracity. Ere long the ministry broke down from sheer im- becility, or weariness, as it seemed, Gladstone resigning (without losing his majority on general questions) in preference to dissolving Parliament. The late Lord Randolph Churchill now made his appearance as M.P. for Woodstock, and soon began his brief meteoric career. 126 HERE AND THERE He had already signalised himself in connection with the foundation of the Primrose League, and was presently made Secretary of State for India. The Sudan expedi- tion was arrested, for the time, on the advice of Sir Redvers Buller ; but provision was made for carrying on the railway from Wady Haifa to the Border. In July General Grant twice President of the United States died in private life and somewhat straitened circum- stances ; and Sir Moses Montefiore passed away in his 101st year. The South African Republic of the Trans- vaal, being unable to meet its liabilities, suspended payment in July, not foreseeing what a change was about to arise in its financial position. In August Mr. Joseph Chamberlain made a speech at Hull in which, while disclaiming revolutionary intentions, he announced his adherence to a scheme of Socialist legislation, in- cluding a graduated property tax and an alteration of the death duties principles which, in all probability, he after- wards saw reason to modify. Mr. Gladstone issued a strong manifesto in September, indicative of an accept- ance of the principle of federal relations with Ireland; Lord Salisbury replying next month in his famous ^Newport address, and charging Mr. Chamberlain with '" baseless libel." On November Stk Mr. W. T. Stead was found guilty of taking a girl from her father's custody, and, although given credit for the purest motives, was told by the judge that he had been, " and I don't hesitate to say will ever be, a disgrace to journalism."* On the llth Mr. Glad- stone addressed a fervid oration to his friends at Edin- burgh, claiming a substantial majority at the coming election, to enable him to deal with questions pertaining to Ireland, and other matters which could be adequately dealt with only if his government should be in "a position to act independently of the Irish vote." The * The author of these uncompromising observations was Mr. Justice Lopes, afterwards Lord Ludlow ; died January, 1900. JERSEY 127 surrender of King Thebaw to General Prendergast vir- tually led to the extension of British rule to the south- west border of the Chinese Empire ; and this was the last important event of the year in which our country was concerned.* I resume the extracts from notes recorded at the moment. On Wednesday, January 21st, I read a paper by Leslie Stephen on Thackeray's writings. The critic is not impartial, but he does not profess impartiality. He wrote with good faith and stern earnestness ; his great and deserved reputation must ensure respectful acceptance. Yet the question remains : " Was Titmarsh as a writer a cherisher of tender thought and genuine sympathy?" That he could adopt such sentiments was certain, and in doing so he certainly obtained for some of his later writings a popularity which was refused to " Catherine Hayes," "The Fatal Boots," and even to that little masterpiece, " Barry Lindon." But the Swift-like sentiments and pictures of human nature with which these works abound, did they not spring from some intrinsic mood that was more inbred and spontaneous ; and why do they contain so little that is tender, sympathetic, or reverential? It was no want of work- manship that obstructed the reception of those earlier works, in all of which the technique is quite as consummate as in "Pendennis" or "Philip." His contemporary, Charles Dickens, was surely not his equal as an artist ; yet his manly heartiness took the world by storm, and has held possession without a break ever since. On Friday, 30th, went to the Haymarket with Kumar to see "Diplomacy." He unhesitatingly expressed his approval of the Bancrofts, which showed good taste in so complete a novice. * The annexation of Upper Burma was proclaimed on the first day of 1886. 128 HERE AND THERE On the way to the District Station on the morning of Thursday, February 5th, saw placard with the miserable story of Gordon's fate. At a concert in Elvaston Place saw a curious meeting between Halliday and William Tayler* when I say "meeting," they did not speak. But what must have been their thoughts after an enmity of forty years! On Wednesday, 11th, went to the India Office to speak to F. about my pupil going to the levee. He wanted to wear European court dress, but the official view was that ill-str-s personages would not like it. He was a strange being, this Black Buck, unlike any type of educated Hindu with whom one was acquainted. He resembled neither the religious Brahmin of Bombay, nor the scholarly Babu from Calcutta; still less did he display the somewhat sheepish loyalty of the North- West Province Nanya of whom we see samples reading at Gray's Inn nor the becoming pride of the highborn Rajput prince. He was bucolic, yet vain, and I feared not very truthful. Informed him that I could only present him in his own handsome native dress. The following Sunday dined with the Wards at St. John's Wood, where I met Mr. Pigott,t examiner of plays, an agreeable man ; said that the only actor who could deliver blank verse properly was Arthur Stirling, the Friar Lawrence at the Lyceum. My Oriental " Tony Lumpkin " was much perturbed by a D.O. letter from the authorities on Saturday, 21st, asking him why he did not go to the Eipon dinner. Drafted a reply, at his request, which he was to sign and deliver. The next day I took him to morning service at * Poor Tayler was Commissioner of Patna during the Eevolt of '57, but did not please the Bengal Government ; died some years back. An accomplished man, who published " Eecollections," in two vols. f Pigott, E. F. S. (1823-1895), an accomplished and much-respected man of letters. JERSEY 129 the Temple Church : " Stainer in A," anthem by Dr. Croft. Foolish sermon on being turned into pillars of salt if we looked back, which made one wish that the preacher had been tempted to turn his head on the way to church, there being no salt about him at present, Attic or otherwise. On Tuesday, QAth, I took my pupil to the Privy Council Office to hear an Indian appeal tried. Couch, B. Peacock, and B. Collier* present, with other councillors unknown. For appellant Leith and Doyne (but no case). For respondent J. D. Mayne, not called on for reply. Next day the Kumar insisted on going with me to Messrs. S. to order a quantity of coats and waistcoats. Lunched at the Athenaeum, where a Cabinet Minister, sitting at the same table, said : " How nearly we have the materials of optimisim in England, and just a something to defeat it ! " He seemed very weary of public life ; though it cost him, doubtless, much prolonged and strenuous exertion to attain his present position. On Monday, March 2nd, I went to St. James's Palace with the Kumar, who was gorgeous in drapery of kincob and satin ; he was not pleased with himself, and thought (most mistakenly) that he would have looked much better in knee-breeches. After I had presented him we went, by his desire, to Mr. Mendelssohn's, where he was photo- graphed in many attitudes and "panel" size. On Friday, 6th, the Kumar was sentimental, saying that his brother required him to return to India, which was probably not true. On Thursday, I2th, went with the Kumar to the Privy Council to hear Mayne t argue in a Madras appeal (we were reading Mayne's "Hindu Law" together). The following day I was struck by a remark of Spencer * Sir E. Couch and Sir Barnes Peacock, ex-C.F.S. Collier, afterwards first Lord Monkswell, my frequent and friendly antagonist at billiards; a fine landscape painter. f The late Mr. J. D. Mayne, formerly Madras Bar. 10 130 HERE AND THERE on Carlyle, whom he characterised as " a strong but not deep thinker, afraid of science." It was so true, though so singular, considering that Carlyle began life as a mathematician. On Tuesday, llth, I called on Mr. and Mrs. A. P. S. He said that it was not true that an outsider could not get work on the London Press, but afterwards admitted that it could only be done by " shoving," as of the unemployed at dockyard gates. Thursday, ISth, was fine, but with a cold wind from the N.E. My Hindu "Lumpkin " was sick, sulky, and idle. On Wednesday, 25th, war with Russia was expected. On Friday, 27th, Lord Granville stated that the Afghans were in possession of Panjdeh before Sir Peter Lumsden got his instructions.* On Sunday I called at M.'s studio to see his new picture, and met Sir C. Gregory and his charming wife once the beautiful Mrs. Stirling of the Haymarket Theatre. We talked of "Rome and Juliet," in which she had lately played the Nurse. On being asked how she liked Mary Anderson's Juliet, she fenced by answering that no one under sixty years of age could understand the character. "Well," said I, "you have delighted us for so many years that I hope that I may be so bold as to ask when will you undertake Juliet ? To which she immediately replied : " I will play the part whenever you will play Romeo to me ! " (She came out before Queen Victoria's accession.) On Tuesday, 31st, the Kumar made a bolt of it. On Wednesday, April 1st, read what seemed a positive assurance of a peaceable solution of the Panjdeh scare, with honourable security for India, t * A day or two later the matter was seriously discussed in conference between Lord Dufferin and the Ameer, but the Kussian attitude continued eminently unsatisfactory. f The Native States offered support, but Mr. Gladstone preferred to accept the olive-branch tendered by the Czar. The Kussian JERSEY 131 On Good Friday, 3rd, went to the C.'s, where I met Wills, the dramatist author of " Claudian," " Charles the First," &c. a pleasant Irishman. He said that play- writing was a fearful trade ; you never could tell whether a piece would hit or miss with the public. Next day I went back to Jersey, where the next three months passed in an uneventful way, and in July I returned to London. On Saturday, July 18th, went to Broadstairs on a visit to old B. I remember going there last about the time of the cholera scare (1832), when my father took me there by river steamer. The little place did not seem much changed. On Sunday, 19th, my kind host drove me to Sandwich, a wonderful place, once a seaport, now nearly four miles inland, though still nominally one of the " Cinque Ports." We visited the old church of St. Clements, with a fine square tower of Norman architecture, dated 1135 A.D. Some Early English work in the choir, nave with large peep- windows of Henry VII. 's time ; an old stone altar long used as tombstone of the Spencer family, now restored to its original site and kept beneath the communion-table ; ancient tiles and brasses. The old fortifications have been converted into smooth promen- ades, as at Hereford and elsewhere, but there is an old gateway opening on a- primitive paved street. One solitary boat lay on the stagnant Stour. The next day I had a curious talk with H., a well- known horse-breaker, and we discussed the reasons of senility, and said that it might be kept off by eating great quantities of fruit. He also said that horses ought to live to forty, but died prematurely from unscientific feeding, and that they ought not to have so much corn. Government agreed to the neutralisation of the debatable land until delimitation should be concluded, and to refer to the judgment of a neutral State any difference that might be found insoluble. 132 HERE AND THERE On Sunday, 26th, back to Jersey, where life resumed its even tenour. I find a note that might be worth preserving under date of Thursday, September 3rd, when I went to the old manor-house of the Lempriere family at Maufat. It is now, and has been for some generations, part of the farm premises of a yeoman race who have bought the property, including the manorial rights of the seigneur. The old man whom we found in possession was working in his shirt-sleeves, a sort that would have delighted J. S. Mill a true peasant proprietor, such as must be rare in modern England ; handsome, courteous, contented, and somewhat proud, quite ignorant of the world and of books ; unable to speak either English or correct French, yet very keen about his own affairs, and answering to one's ideas of a Scottish laird of the eigh- teenth century. He showed us everything, and escorted us to the gate hat in hand.* On Thursday, September IQth, called at Government House and made the acquaintance of the late Mrs. Lynn Linton, whose curious semi-ideal autobiography appeared under the title of " Christopher Kirkland." In this the lady has given her experiences of London journalism in the days of Douglas Cooke, but under the travesty of a male character. She was a bright, handsome, well-bred lady of one's own exact age, with eyes kind but keen under her spectacles. I made bold to ask her some questions about the curious book above mentioned, to which she was good enough to make some reply. She said that she had altered the names of those who had been much mixed up in her life, and pleaded shyness in treating of them. The work is, therefore, of the Dichtung und Wahrheit class, the mischief of which is that one * I was writing a little semi-historical tale about Jersey during the Civil War, which required some description of this place " St. George's Cross; or, England Above All," an Episode of Channel Island history (Guernsey : Frederick Clarke. London : W. H. Allen & Co. 1887). JERSEY 133 cannot say where the poetry begins and the truth ends. On Thursday, 11th, I called on Mrs. Linton at Government House. She thought Pessimism condemned as a system or school of thought.* The power of criticising and controlling the forces of the planet is exclusively possessed by man, and is a proof and instrument of good. As to the need of a belief in a future life to redress the balance of the supposed evil present, she asked : "Why not then for the wasps that we persecute and kill? Yet they go through their appointed task without audible complaint." I wish I could give her argument in her own clear language. She also held that sickly people ought to be kept from marrying by law. (Why not also criminals?) On Friday, September 25th, went with E. and A. to call at L. Manor, a lovely old wainscoted house, well kept and furnished. The mother of the chatelaine, an old Irishwoman who had literally risen from the ranks, having been successively married to a private, a sergeant, and a commissioned officer, all in the same regiment. She had extraordinary spirits and a natural flow of witty speech, and told us the drollest yarns. One, about some people who endeavoured to get refined service out of an untrained bog-trotter girl, left no details upon the memory; but her account of the cholera at an Indian station where the corps had been quartered was good enough to stand on its merits without the charm of the narrator's inimitable verve. A soldier's wife of her acquaintance, she related, had been to the bazaar to get some arrack, which she had so freely sampled as to have quite lost the control of her legs, though her Irish wit was still unsubdued. On her way back to barracks, whom * These were the halcyon days when people had leisure to be miserable, and when Edward Von Hartman's imaginary woefulness was widely relished and enjoyed. Englishmen have tasted the bitter tonic of real trouble since then. 134 HERE AND THERE should she meet but the colonel, riding along slowly with no attendant but the sais. She knew that if the C.O. saw her reeling and staggering he would mark her for condign punishment, so she promptly sat down by the roadside, emitting the most plaintive groans. The colonel dismounted at once, and, to his anxious inquiries, received for answer that the patient had been attacked by cholera morbus. To offer his arm and lead her home was the immediate impulse of the kindly commandant, who deposited his burden in the gateway under the unquenchable mirth of the sentries, who had no difficulty in understanding what was the true condition of affairs. Mrs. was immediately taken to hospital and put to bed, while an orderly hurried off to fetch the surgeon, who had gone away for a little shooting. He was not, however, very far off or hard to trace, and he promptly hurried back to the supposed case of cholera. The patient was asleep by this time, but the diagnosis was soon made. " A sunstroke," pronounrced the medical officer, and ordered the patient's head to be shaved, and that she should be kept in bed on tea and toast till his next visit. When he came to pay his morning visit, poor Mrs. was sitting up with the mien of a Chinese Joss, and was pronounced convalescent. " Ah, Dochter dear," she cried, as the surgeon approached her couch, " how could ye be so crule as to have me head shaved ? " When reminded that she had complained of serious illness, the impenitent Bacchanal made answer, " Sure, it was not in me head the cholera was ! " Thursday, October 2Qth, was a lovely day for a great local fete the unveiling of the Don monument, which we went to see. It seemed that General Don was Lieutenant- Governor from 1806 to 1813, during which period he did a good deal for the Island, especially in the matter of roads ; much against the will (at the time) of a primitive community given to stand upon the ancient ways. He JERSEY 135 seemed to have lived down his unpopularity, and, his fame increasing during the next two generations, a some- what tardy recognition took the form of a substantial vote of 4,000. The result was a poor statue on a monstrosity of a pedestal, and a presentment of the unfortunate hero of which he has been spared the beholding. Such is popular gratitude. On Thursday, November 3rd, went with Sir A. C. S.,* to see the old buildings at St. Ouen, the seat of the historic family of Carteret, for many generations the chief seigneurs of the western side of the Island, finally dis- tinguished by the accomplished minister of King George II. The house contains much fifteenth century work, and was under careful restoration by the then seigneur, Colonel Malet de Carteret ; and the church, hard by, has had the singular fortune to have been begun in A.D. 1130 and finished about A.D. 1868. On December 1st I read Sir H. Maine's " Popular Government," in which the distinguished writer does not appear quite just to the fact that democracy, after all, must be the proper ideal for an educated community, no matter what there may be to say against it in practice. Doubtless, discipline is needed, under any form of Govern- ment whatever ; but so far as consists with preservation of due order an ultimate appeal to the wants of citizens has to be provided : to use the old figure, the pyramid is best founded on the broadest base. As to the particular form of consultation known as " Referendum, " where no law is passed until it has been accepted by a certain majority in the constituencies, it has at least this recom- mendation, that, wherever it has been tried, it has tended to reduce the bulk of new legislation. Perhaps Maine, having been for years a professed lawmaker, did not see the advantage ; but surely changes in the social organism should do no more than keep pace with changes in surroundings ; and a political constitution should grow * Sir Arthur Cowel Stepney, Bart., formerly M.P. 136 HERE AND THERE less by artificial treatment than by natural exigencies and mutual concessions. On Thursday, 24th, I had a visit from Kev. K. B., a curious type of human nature ; learned archaeologic, even versed in anthropology; yet unaware that the Jewish Scriptures which he read in the original Hebrew are not authoritative on science or history. I made him a present of a " Kevised Version," which he had not seen. Few noted books appeared during the year of war and excitement thus concluded. But a note upon Froude's "Life of Carlyle" (1882-4) may suggest a not unim- portant inquiry. I mean the doctrine about Heroes imputed quite correctly to the Sage of Chelsea, and applied to life in general by his disciple and biographer. If great men are the creators of all that is good in their respective eras, it is evident that we have only to learn from Carlyle and Co. how to identify them and then let them work their beneficent will. If, on the other hand, they are only the product and best fruit of their era, then the light that is seen upon their faces is at best thrown from without, and not always clearly visible. In this latter case all competent citizens have a claim to take part in the direction of affairs ; and Universal Suffrage, with or without Referendum, is only a question of time. When knowledge is becoming general, the time is at hand. A second point of importance is as to the power of imaginative literature. No doubt it may be argued that, in the hand of a man like Carlyle, the pen idealises all that it touches. His Mirabeau, his Cromwell, his Frederic, what are they ? Not photographs, surely : idealisations, rather. One is reminded of a saying of Hugo's remarkably pro- found for a youngster of twenty-two, as he was when he put it on paper. " Below the surface of the actual world exists an ideal world full of glory for those who have JERSEY 137 learned to see by contemplation the thing that in all things lies beyond." That is not really a defence of poetry, as Sidney or Shelley might have put it, but it contains a doctrine of surpassing interest, if only we find it to be true. It may, perhaps, turn out that the Hero, or Great Man, who is represented to us as the creator of his era, is rather the idealised product of a mind which has contemplated the era after the accomplishment of its facts and shares the vision of a truth below the surface, together with the faculty of giving to that truth its appropriate expression. To such, at least, the Hero may seem the incarnation of his age. CHAPTEE IV JEESEY (continued) (1886-1887) THIS year (1886) was principally marked in the British Islands by the acceptance of the " Home Eule " cause by Mr. Gladstone and the bulk of his followers. Some of the more prominent of these, however, broke off on this subject ; and on the last day of May occurred one of the most memorable moments in modern political life. On that occasion Mr. Chamberlain led a band of malcontents, of whom forty-six determined that they would oppose the second reading of the Bill to provide " a legislative body to sit at Dublin for the conduct of Irish business." As this is not the place for political controversy, it will only be necessary to observe that this event was the actual commencement of the new party system ; amounting virtually to an approximation of the "right centre" and " left centre," and involving that absorption of the extreme right which still characterises British politics. The Bill was rejected in the Commons, and Parliament was dissolved before midsummer. The General Election that followed was decided against the Gladstonians owing to the defection of the " Liberal Unionists," as the new party of concentration began to be called : the result being that the Cabinet resigned in July, and a ministry was formed by Lord Salisbury, which was in the nature of a coalition. Mr. Goschen, however, was the only pro- 138 JERSEY 139 minent Liberal to take high office ; Lord Hartington only offering general support.* Other matters of minor public interest were a riot in spring, in the West End, with destruction of property this was attributed to neglect or mismanagement on the part of the police, whose chief, Sir E. Henderson, resigned and was succeeded by Sir Charles Warren. In the early part of the London season, too, an exhibition of Indian and Colonial produce was opened by Queen Victoria in person, and was popularly known as " The Colinderies." The writer's time during this year was principally passed between Jersey and Oxford, with occasional runs to London. On Friday, January %2nd, I went to Oxford by invita- tion from Sir N. W. to work at the Indian Institute. Put up at the " Mitre," and went for a walk, looking in at Wadham Quad, where I noticed a bruise on the masonry of a window of my rooms which I seemed to recognise after an absence of forty-three years. On Tuesday, February 2nd, I went to Convocation ; defeat of Sir M. W.'s two amendments to statute on Oriental studies : 1. That Persian should not take rank as a " classical " subject along with Sanskrit and Arabic. 2. If it were so to rank, then it should be coupled with comparative Iranian grammar. The second, at the least, appeared reasonable. Modern Persian is no more a classical language than modern Greek ; but, taken with the grammar and philology of the Avesta, it would form an interesting branch of Aryan work. On Sunday, March 21st, spent the afternoon at M.'s tobacco parliament. Had some talk with the late * Mr. Goschen did not assume office until the first month of the following year, when Lord Randolph Churchill resigned the Exchequer. Lord Hartington described the situation as a coalition of party but not of Government. 140 HERE AND THERE Thorold Kogers.* Professor Khys came late, also Pro- fessor Stoddart, an interesting Yankee scholar. Dined with the Warden at Wadham, and drank 1854 port, which was wonderfully fruity for its age. The following Tuesday I went back to Jersey to Bagot Manor, an old house modernised, with a large kitchen- garden and greenhouse. The weather in April was cold and showery, and the garden backward. During the month I read Greville's new series (1837 ff.), a valuable record of minor political and social affairs in the early part of Queen Victoria's reign, which I only knew as a boy ; faded and forgotten party politics, and glimpses of some memorable men. Greville was an able and fundamentally modest man, with a sound appreciation of the great Duke that did him credit ; the great Duke, who was a most masculine creature, not always correctly valued. Greville's portraits remind one of Clarendon ; that of Lord George Bentinck in particular, masterly beyond anything of our day. Of course one cannot take all the interest in those past politics and personages that they caused at the time ; and the " Gruncher " appears somewhat in the character of a Resurrectionist. Yet he does make these characters so interesting that one learns to admire him for the skill and subdued sympathy involved in the feat. And he saw deeper than most English aristocrats of his day into the misery that inspired the discontent of the Irish peasantry. Coming home from the club on Tuesday, 20th, I saw a pretty episode. A poor tatterdemalion was playing the concertina at a street-corner, and some children came and gathered round. One of them, about four years old, began dancing to the music in an artless but serious manner, doing steps instinctively without taking her feet off the pavement, with all the solemn unconscious grace * Ex-member for Bermondsey, afterwards Professor of Political Economy in the University. A robust intellect trained to deep historical research; died 1890. JERSEY 141 of childhood. The vagrant was touched, and, bending down without a pause in his mechanical and mercenary performance, watched the baby's pretty movements with a smile that quite shone through his squalid surface. It was nought, and yet it was a sort of revelation. On Saturday, May 1st, crossed over to Southampton with Campbell,* and accompanied him to Southwell House, where I was his guest. On the Tuesday following I went once more to Oxford, the city and gardens of which were in the full loveliness of a late spring. On Wednesday, 12th, returned to London and called on at the Indian Office. He was out, so I left a note, and returning later found , who asked if I could take charge of a Hindu noble from the Bombay side? I agreed to try it for a month. On Wednesday, 19th, went to a conversazione at South Kensington given by the Pharmaceutical Society. It was a curious affair ; we can't all be druggists. The only person we knew was T., but there was a band, and the museum looked its best with lights and crowd. Two days later my pupil rebelled, declaring that he had promised himself to an older acquaintance, and that he would go back to India if he couldn't have his own way. There had been a muddle at the Office, so I had no more to say to him. On Thursday, June 3rd, returned to Jersey with E. The following Monday a man, called a " Philistine," answered " Yes ; that is, I suppose, why I am overthrown by the jaw of an ass." "Which calls to mind a story of Jowett that has not so far as I know been published. He took Miss Jex Blake into dinner and manifested relief when the ladies left the room at the conclusion of the meal. His host asking him if he had not enjoyed the conver- sation, was answered, " Oh ! she is a learned lady and * Campbell, Sir G., at that time a Liberal member of Parliament. 142 HERE AND THERE knows that Lex is Latin for ' law ' ; I fancy she infers that Jex is Latin for ' jaw.' " On Friday, 30th, read George Meredith's " Diana" ; very able, but surely too obscure in its diction ; full of oracle and epigram of which the point is not always easy to discover : e.g., " The worldling holds to-day but not the morrow. Us, too, he holds for the day, to punish us if we have temporal cravings. He scatters his gifts to the abject, tossing to us rebels bare dog biscuit. But the life of the spirit is beyond his region, we have our morrow in his day when we crave nought of him." A meaning is to be found, but it does not represent ease for the novel- reader. The book strikes me as full of good qualities but deficient in small charms. After a visit to Liverpool and North Wales returned to Oxford on October 12th, where I met Morfill, Master of Balliol, K. Poole, and Warden. On Sunday went to St. Mary's Church, where I heard an interesting but rather sceptical sermon by , and was reminded of the story of the beadle who said, " I have heard sermons from this pulpit for thirty years and am still a Christian ! " In the afternoon to Morfill's Tabagie, meeting Ehys and Eogers. The latter told a story of a Western magnate seeing a print of the Madonna in a cottage, with a pope or saint kneeling at her feet. The noble lord said something about super- stition : "Lor ! no," said the good woman of the house ; " that's a lady as don't want to marry, but she tells the good gentleman to take her sister. ' Ave Maria,' ses she, as you see it printed at the bottom." T. E. told the story with a skill probably derived from much practice. Dined in Hall at Balliol. Spent the forenoon of Monday, 25th, at the India Office, looking at portraits by Keynolds, Lawrence, Zoffany, &c. In the afternoon attended an interesting meeting of the Eoyal Historical Society at the Eecord Office in Fetter Lane. Mr. Hubert Hall read a paper on the Dooms- JERSEY 143 day Book, and Lord Aberdare made a very good address. The next day I returned to Oxford. On Friday, November 5th, went to the new theatre, where Mr. Benson played Othello to Beerbohm Tree's lago ; good acting with modest accessories. Benson struck us as too declamatory. But one often feels in- clined to agree with Charles Lamb about Shakespeare : i.e., that he reads better than he plays. Yet it is un- doubted that he wrote chiefly to fill his theatre and showed no consciousness that he was producing literature, as he does in the Sonnets. And think of the theatre of his day, a scaffold without scenery ; and Desdemona or Ophelia rendered by blackguard boys of fifteen. On Tuesday, Ilth, read Oliphant's "Ancient England," a book of much instruction and pleasure ; only that the author expresses somewhat exaggerated sorrow at what he calls the neglect of our language and its "roman- cising" in the reign of Henry III. and his son, when the higher classes in England had more important work in hand than the academic preservation of the vernacular. And it is just the pleasant blending of Platt-Deutsch and Romance in our speech that forms the prosperity of our literature. But the exclusive pursuit of any study tends to narrow the mind, and specialists like this author learn to love Bede and Layamon more than they do Milton or Gibbon. Then again (for plain folks) what a confusion to find these writings, that are unintelligible without grammar and dictionary, called " English " ! What on earth has it in common with what is known to us by that name ? On the other hand there had been for years an accepted name for which every one understood, and which, quite correctly enough, represented it as a combination of the dialects of the Anglians of the East and the Saxons of the South. The following Sunday I dined with Rev. LI. Thomas, at Jesus College, and afterwards sat in his rooms with 144 HERE AND THERE Lindsay, Grose of Queen's, and other agreeable company. The host had composed a sonnet upon the learned Professor of History, of which I obtained a copy. (Mr. Thomas was shy about showing the lines, but L. wrote them out for me, from memory.) A POETKAIT. I am Sir Oracle ; when my tongue wags Aye 1 or my beard let no man call his soul His own, or flout me with the filthy rags Of an opinion free from my control ; Let Shelly- chatterers style my gait a roll, And witless upstarts criticise my bags : I am English, Saxon ; rough as Keltic crags, One grand historic rude self-centred whole. Ancient is modern, modern ancient, too, I have said so myriad times : who doubts it ? Fool 1 I want some nincompoop to state his view, I'll smash him, flat as Froude or Martin Kule, Yea 1 by my halidom, certes, God wot, I am the Oxford Witenagemot. On Thursday, ISth, dined at Queen's with M., and afterwards he and Dr. Birkbeck Hill* came to my quarters. Dr. H. observed that Croker, however in- accurate in a few minor matters, was a valuable source of information, quite unjustly discredited by Macaulay. In London again on Thursday, 25th, and had an after- noon tete-a-tete with Lady , who made a noticeable remark on the decay of the feudal aristocracy: "It was our own fault ; we went too fast. We thought it would last for ever." On Sunday, 28th, went to St. Bride's morning service, and lunched at the Vicarage ; then A. H. went with me to Paddington, where I took the G.W.K. for Slough, and there dined and slept. My host, as usual, was full of knowledgable talk and courteous consideration. Ours had been an unbroken friendship of half a century. * Hill, G. Birkbeck, D.C.L., born 1835, editor of the definitive edition of Boswell's "Johnson." JERSEY 145 The next day I dined with Ralston at the Arts Club : * Forbes Eobertson, Professor Douglas, two Mahommedan nobles from Haidarabad, a Russian General, two natives of the Sandwich Islands, &c. The strangest medley, but very agreeable. The Russian made the sensible remark that national misunderstandings arose from nations not understanding one another ; put into French it made a passable epigram. On Wednesday, December 1st, undertook some Lives for the "Dictionary of National Biography," returning to Jersey by the Southampton boat. 1887. In public affairs the year 1887 was less gloomy than its predecessor. The separation between Mr. Gladstone and the Liberal Unionists became quite final, unless an exception be made of Sir G. Trevelyan, who endeavoured for some time to discover a modus vivendi. Mr. Parnell threw the weight of a compact following of some ninety members into the scale of the Opposition ; but the cause of the Government was warmly espoused by the Times newspaper, that journal having published a letter pur- porting to contain an expression of the Irish leader's approval in regard to the murder of Cavendish and Bourke in Dublin, for which the proprietors were eventually fain to compound by a payment of ^5,000. In Mr. William Stillman's remarkable " Autobiography " (vol. ii.) will be found a curious account of this affair, tending to exonerate the Times, and to even lighten the cloud on poor old Pigott's reputation. The great event of the year was the celebration of the * William Sheddon, who assumed the name of Kalston, born 1828, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge ; called to the Bar, but never practised ; employed in British Museum Library ; died 1889. Spent some time in Eussia and published works on the history and literature of that country, with translations of some of the writings of Turgenieff. 11 146 HERE AND THERE fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession, of which some notice will be found under date of June 21st. The writer passed his time between London, Oxford, and the Channel Islands, preparing a book* and some con- tributions to the "Dictionary of National Biography," published by Smith and Elder under the able editorship of Mr. Leslie Stephen. On Thursday, January 8th, I read "La France Juive," by M. Drumont.t The book is not without force, exhibiting both research and courage. Unfortunately it is weakened by exaggeration and by obvious omissions. It has been said that every nation has the Jews that it deserves ; and perhaps the merits of France have not been the greatest in this matter. But when, going beyond the frontier, he treats Spinoza as a mere spectacle-maker the unfair- ness is palpable ; and he makes no mention of the Mendelssohns or Herschels, which is absurd. On Thursday, 2Qth, being at Oxford, I went to a debate at the Union on the Irish Government question, in which none of the undergraduate speakers were very effective on either side. Mr. T. P. O'Connor made a plausible speech; and having the twofold advantage of parliamentary practice and the special suspension of the time-limit, gave his views in an address that was ready, clever, and well delivered. I do not suppose that very many of the audience were in sympathy with him, but they listened and applauded with the generosity of youth. Monday, 31st. Thorold Rogers, in spite of strong peculiarities, impresses himself on one as an important personality, wise and honest. Have been informed and stimulated of late by his writings. His " Work and Wages" * This was an edition of Beale's " Oriental Biographical Dictionary," finally brought out in 1894. f M. Edouard Drumont began the Anti-Semitic Crusade which, taken up by some of the French clergy and their disciples, reached formidable dimensions in 1899, coming to a head in the acrimonies inspired by the Dreyfus Case. JERSEY 147 contains original first-hand knowledge ; but one noticed omissions e.g. , nothing is said of Commanditarian partnership, which many persons accept as a solution of questions between employer and operative. Nor could I see any sufficient reference to the great addition to the currency after the Spanish discoveries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which must have been a main cause why prices rose faster than wages, and affected what he noticed the prosperity which had prevailed among the working classes in the period immediately preceding. He goes, indeed, so far as to say that low prices must raise wages. On Wednesday, February 2nd, heard of the sad case of a youth who had just taken his degree, and was committed to the Assizes on a charge of stealing books from the Union Library. What a blow it must have been for his parents ! On Thursday, April 21st (in Jersey), had a strange experience at 3.10 a.m., when I woke with a feeling as if I had been struck on the nape of the neck. On going for an early walk learned that a shock of earthquake had been felt in the Island, and some neighbours asserted that their house had reeled and rocked. So the great creature whose parasites we are must have had a spasm. On Monday, May 9th, went to London again. Two days later I was advised at the India Office to migrate to Cambridge, and was given to understand that none of the Indian noblemen would ever be sent to Oxford. Saw some good paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery in charge of my old friend Beck, who showed some good water-colours of his own. The Academy was a very fair show, especially in the way of portraits by Watts, Millais,* Ouless, and Herkomer. Ouless specially clever with the human eye ; the late Sir John Millais was the man whose work called to you from the wall ; you could not pass his pictures without looking at them long. * Millais and Ouless were both Jerseymen. 148 HERE AND THERE The following Saturday I went to the National Gallery, where I relished the Dutch pictures more than I used to do, and the Turners less. Was that a deterioration of one's own taste, or could it be that Turner's tints are fading ? I once thought that his atmospheric effects illuminated the room ; now they looked chalky. On Thursday, ISth (Oxford), said farewell to M., who advised me against settling the family there, saying that it was only " a club, to be visited as a change." Left at noon, halting at Winchester, where I went over the vast and ponderous Cathedral of perpendicular architecture on Norman nucleus; it contains the soi-disant tomb of the Bed King, which is probably the monument of a bishop. On return to the station I met the late Lord Lytton, who did not seem well ; our conversation was cut short by the train in which I departed for Eyde, where I passed a few pleasant days as the guest of my old schoolfellow, the late General N. On Wednesday, June Sth (London), went to Ascot in a very crowded train. How sheeplike we are ! A very small percentage of these crowds could tell you why they go ! On Saturday, llth, at Oxford, where I voted for H. Godfray,* of Exeter, as President of the Union ; a courteous and resolute young student, who seemed destined to make his mark hereafter. In the evening went to a large room in Holywell to hear a lecture on Political Economy by Cotter Morison : the undergraduates called it " The Cottar's Saturday Night." Next day (Sunday), spent a pleasant afternoon with some interesting company in M.'s garden, the brightness of summer shining on the bloom of spring. One was reminded of Omar Khayyam's parties six hundred years ago. Certainly it is hard to imagine an Oxford Don * He became Registrar (Greffier) of the Royal Court of Jersey, and his premature death cut short a promising career. JERSEY 149 calling on us to stay him with flagons, or saying in so many words " Ah, comrades ! strengthen me with cups of wine Until my sallow cheeks like ruby shine ; And wash me in it after I am dead, And stitch my shroud with tendrils of the vine." Also there must have been, in the Persian programme, an element of disreputability from which we were free to- day ; yellow maidens odorous of garlic and cocoa-nut oil. But though men differ from time to time in the details of their enjoyment, the general principle will be always much the same weib, wein, und gesang : such is the theme, with whatever variations. After luncheon on Tuesday, 14th, I went to Convocation to receive honorary degree of M.A. ; was kept in the Apodyterium while the " grace " was being passed ; then three mace-bearers came out and ushered one into the hall in academicals. Here the public Orator (Dr. Merry)* came and took charge, presenting one to the Vice-Chan- cellor (Dr. Bellamy, of St. John's) in a Latin speech, on conclusion of which the Vice-Chancellor said "Domine! accipio te in gradum magistri artium honoris causa ; " then M. came up in his humorous way, handing one the speech which he said one would certainly write to him for in the evening if he did not prevent the corre- spondence. The Vice-Chancellor shook hands, as did also many M.A. friends who were there. Next day I dined at Wadham, meeting the Beverend , who had been an undergraduate with me forty- four years ago. Youth lingered in his manner and his smile, but he gave a sad account of the present state of a rural parish. He held a College living, of which the income had fallen from ^750 to 150 per annum. Farmers could still pay tithes if they would, but accord- ing to him they simply would not. A very startling * Afterwards Eector of Lincoln. 150 HERE AND THERE condition of affairs, if generally true; if not it is the alternative of agricultural ruin, which is even worse. I remember in my youth one of the arguments against the proposed repeal of the Corn Laws was that it would be fatal to home agriculture. It is quite possible that with the immense increase of English population taxes on food could not be maintained ; but the result may be to render the British Islands a mere hive of manufactur- ing produce, quite dependent on imported food, and deprived of the peasantry who formed our good old armies of Waterloo and Blenheim times. Something of the same kind led to the decline of the Roman Empire. Absit omen! On Sunday, ~LWi, I went to St. Mary's, where the sermon was preached by Dr. Stubbs, who was possessed of a fine head and an eloquent tongue.* Lunched with Professor Rhys, t and spent the afternoon at M's. Dined with Firth I at Balliol, and heard the concert in the Hall one of Jowett's institutions, I believe. Had some interesting talk with Mr. G. Putnam, the American publisher. Tuesday, 21st (London). A great crowd at the Athen- aeum (said to be 800 ladies and gentlemen) to witness the procession to and from the Abbey in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's accession. I had a ticket for the exterior gallery, but gave it up to a lady and stood over the portico with Sir Thomas Wade (formerly Ambassador in China). We had a fine view of the cortege, the guard of Princes, headed by the noble figure of the then Crown Prince of Prussia in cuirass and silver helmet ; great heat, and people were occasionally carried off in police ambulances. Rev. C. W. came over * Dr. Stubbs became afterwards Bishop of Oxford, having been some time Professor of Modern History (Eegius). f John Ehys, famous Keltic scholar, afterwards Principal of Jesus- I Charles H. Firth, late scholar of Balliol, and a high authority on the Cromwellian period. JERSEY 151 from the Abbey for the purpose of seeing me and obtain- ing lunch, which in spite of my ticket the rules of the Club prevented me from offering. Droll effect of Oxford dons, in scarlet Doctor's robes, perched on top of a four- wheeler. Dined with Morison at Hampstead, where I met pleasant company. The day had been the climax of an era ; and it was a privilege to have seen the gracious lady (whom I remem- bered as a girl) borne along the crowded and decorated streets, escorted by over threescore royal personages some her own offspring acknowledging with smiles and bows the greetings of her subjects from all ends of the earth. * The next few days I passed in the Isle of Wight, in a beautiful house and grounds where the sea washed the brink of the lawn. I noted a curious parallel to the case of Sandwich at the little old village of Brading, now high and dry, which is credibly recorded to have furnished four ships for the repulse of the Spanish Armada three hundred years ago. At Carisbrooke found the custodian of the Castle living in a part of the old building with his daughter a very fine girl, who gave our party tea. She said that they expected to be turned out in Septem- ber, when she had hopes of employment as a barmaid. It seemed a rather sad downcome for a major's daughter. On Wednesday, 29^, had a visit from General Abbott, f He had lived a life of the most romantic adventure and devoted public service. He had borne a part in making history on more than one occasion, and had been delibe- * There was, as is well known, a sort of repetition of the scene ten years later, without, indeed, the noble Prussian son-in-law, removed in the interim by a lingering death. But the presence of Colonial and Indian representatives distinguished this from the original Jubilee. f Made K.C.B. in 1894, in his eighty- seventh year, and died two years after. Sir James rode from Herat to Khiva in 1839, and wrote an account of his ride, which was published by W. H. Allen & Co. (third edition, 2 vols., 1884). 152 HERE AND THERE rately mutilated in his right hand while in captivity among the Afghans ; and it was strange to see this verit- able hero living alone at Kyde, a gentle, sweet-voiced little old man, not without a touch of something like poetry. He expressed a great jealousy of Russian pro- gress in Central Asia, and thought that we had let her approach too near our frontier. Like most of his class, he was unable to say how the progress might have been arrested. On Friday, July 1st, left by mail steamer from South- ampton to Jersey. Beached Guernsey at 9 a.m., and, after leaving the harbour, while conversing on deck with the captain and a French gentleman, I was asked by the former to continue the conversation whilst he, the cap- tain, attended to some point of duty elsewhere. The Frenchman was tall and handsome, and we had a long talk on things in general. When asked what he thought of the rumoured alliance between France and Eussia, he answered frankly that it would depend on what projects the two Governments had in common, adding reflectively, " Chaque nation a ses interets." On my making the obvious reply " Us ne sont pas desinteresses, MM. les Busses," he replied : " Mon Dieu ! Us seraient bien betes s'ils Petaient." I then asked what he thought of the prospects of monarchy in France, on which subject he proved less open. By way of starting him I suggested that it must be a difficult thing for the House of Orleans to administer to the succession of the Compte de Cham- bord ; to run up so I expressed it the white flag with one hand while waving the tricolour in the other. By this time we were entering the harbour of St. Helier, round which were ranged a row of people, all shouting "Vive le Boi!" to which my companion responded by waving his hat ; and then for the first time dawned upon me the appalling truth that I had been airing opinions on French politics for the behoof of the Comte de Paris. The following day to Noirrnont, where I accompanied JERSEY 153 the seigneur to pay our respects to Philippe VII., who was encamped in the hotel at the gate of the Manor grounds. We found the Due de la T., a middle-aged nobleman with the true courtier manner ; very empresse, but not paying you the smallest attention in reality. He led the way to the Eoyal presence, and we found his Majesty looking very well after a night's rest and the good valetising that rich people can command. He received us with dignified courtesy, very gracious to my companion about his beautiful grounds, and civil to my- self. I offered apologies for my indiscretions of the previous day, but he was good enough to assure me that he had heard me with great interest. At parting he shook our hands, and, clicking his heels together after the manner of a German officer, said in excellent English, "You have my best wishes"; but his accent in speak- ing our language was not good or pleasant, and he gave us generally the impression of a fatigued man, not much in earnest about himself. A number of gentilshommes Bretons had come to see him, antiquated fossils of a vanishing type, and his time, during his short stay, was much filled up with their reception the Republic not being a penny the worse ! On Tuesday, November 8th, went off to England again in lovely weather. Next day I went to Toole's Theatre with my son Alfred, and saw that very clever play "Dandy Dick." Mrs. John Wood, as the sporting widow, was convincing, and John Clayton made exactly the sort of rather aristocratic Dean that one meets in the coffee-room of the Athenaeum. On Friday, llth, 1 called on Vereschagin* at the Grosvenor Gallery. Stopping before his (fancy) picture of British artillerymen blowing sepoys from the mouths of guns, he said, " That is what you shall always do in India." On saying that I hoped " Never again," he drew * M. B. Vereschagin, the great Russian painter, whom we had known from the time of his visit to Agra (vide Part I. chap. viii). 154 HERE AND THERE his heels together, made a bow to M., who was looking shocked, and said, " Your pardon ; you shall do." All the Russians I have ever talked with on the subject have similar ideas, and think that we hold India by mere force and terror. I hope not. Being at Oxford on Sunday, 13th, went to St. Mary's, where I heard a clever, learned and eloquent sermon preached by Hatch.* Afternoon was spent at M.'st Tabagie, and evening dinner at Wadham. On Wednesday, IQth, being again in London, wandered down to Queen's Gate Hall, in a fog that rendered every- thing invisible. Heard Leuville | recite, and dined with General N. The following Saturday, ISth, returned to Jersey, after seeing Alfred off for India. Friday, December %nd, was a lovely day. Played billiards at the Victoria Club with an officer who had been under Sir Robert Sale at Jellalabad in 1842 as corporal in the 13th. How incredulous he would have been if a fortune-teller had then announced that he would be living in Jersey as a colonel nearly half a century later ! This was the last item of any general interest for that year. It may be permitted to add that, besides the work already noted, I had engaged to prepare a course of lectures on Indian History for the Oxford University Extension. These gave pleasant employment, and were ultimately adapted for Indian educational purposes some years later. || As a course, however, for Extension lec- * Edwin H., D.D., Professor of Classical Literature in Canada, and later of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford; Banipton Lecturer in 1880 ; a learned and earnest opponent of all forms of High Church claims. | Morfill, W. E., educated at Oxford (M.A.), Eeader in Eussian, Oxford University ; Curator of the Taylor Institution ; probably the most accomplished linguist of the day. I The Marquis of Leuville, an extraordinary character. Colonel A. Keene, E.A., D.S.O., my second son. |1 " The Making of India," Indian Press, Allahabad, 1896. JERSEY 155 ture purposes they failed to draw. And here let me observe, once for all, that India and her history have no attraction for the British public unless treated by pens that as Stella said of Swift could give glory to a broomstick ; of whom, in regard to Indian history, there have been perhaps three Edmund Burke, Lord Ma- caulay, and, in our own day, Sir William Hunter.* * Sir Alfred Lyall, K.C.B., would have made a good fourth if he had chosen to enter the field. Sir William Hunter (1840-1900) was possessed of vast information and a fascinating style. CHAPTEK V OXFORD REVISITED (1888-1889) FEW events of public importance came under notice during the year 1888; attention was chiefly occupied with the proceedings attending the charge against Mr. C. S. Parnell of complicity in the crimes of the Irish Invincibles brought by the Times. These were heard before a Special Court, the hearing not being concluded until late in the succeeding year. The most interesting events occurred in connection with the showy General Boulanger, a very different sort of adventurer from Parnell if "adventurer" be the right word. Dismissed from the French army in March, Boulanger turned to politics, and was elected a deputy in two departments. Then came his duel with the Prime Minister, M. Floquet, in which the soldier got worsted and wounded an omen, as it afterwards turned out. The Conservative Government continued in power under the since familiar premiership of Lord Salis- bury, Mr. Gladstone adhering to his association with the Irish " Nationalists," which had cost him his place. During April met Matthew Arnold at Athenaeum ; he spoke very kindly of my paper on Omar Khayyam in Macmillan's Magazine, and urged me to bring out a complete version in prose.* That was one of his doc- * Matthew Arnold, a great critic, a true poet, and useful public servant, died suddenly at Liverpool ten days later. When I had the 156 OXFORD REVISITED 157 trines ; even if you are a poet yourself you cannot make a sound version of poetry in metre. But surely it is the office of a translator to convey something of the effect of his original. What of Coleridge's " Wallenstein" or Wors- ley's " Odyssey " ? Are they not permanent possessions of the English reader? Even Pope's " Iliad," though (as Bentley said) you must not call it " Homer " ; but it is a classic of our literature all the same. A few days later the late Sir James Stephen, K.C.S.I.,* on leaving the club remarked to me, " I do not much care for the club; it is getting too full of ghosts." I know what he meant : if it takes a man sixteen years of waiting before his name comes up for ballot, he is bound to be well stricken in years at his election. And then the old Mower soon comes in with his inevitable scythe. On Friday, 20th, saw a ridiculous play called " The Pompadour " which was being played at the Haymarket neither true to history nor to nature. My countrymen are easily pleased. On Sunday, 22nd, returned to Jersey, and shortly after had a visit from the late Sir B. Temple, who had come over to obtain information about the agriculture and commerce of the Islands. This remarkable man, who had been my contemporary at Kugby and Haileybury, was a signal instance of the success which attends a certain combination of intelligence, amiability, and energetic devotion to one's task in life. He was a good classical scholar, a fearless horseman, and an indefatigable public servant, and no one who had the privilege of his ac- quaintance could grudge him the prizes which his merits obtained. He had been Governor of Bombay, British conversation with him here noted he looked a fine man in the prime of life, in spite of his sixty-five years. * Legal member of the Viceroy of India's Council, writer of numerous law books, judge of the High Court in London, created K.C.S.I. in 1877, died March 12, 1894. 158 HERE AND THERE Kesident at Hyderabad, Financial Member and Foreign Secretary to Government of India, Lieut. -Governor of Bengal, an M.P., Vice-Chairman London School Board, President National Association, Privy Councillor, G.C.S.I., C.I.E., D.C.L., LL.D., F.K.S. A very interesting and pleasant couple were spending a few months in Jersey. He had been an old Confederate officer, a fine specimen of the Southern aristocracy, tall, handsome, and courteous. The colonel's adventures must have been marvellous. While in command of a regiment attacking a Yankee battery, his horse was struck by a round-shot which broke the saddle-tree and grievously wounded the gallant rider. He was reported dead, but taken into hospital, where he recovered, to find his estate confiscated and himself without a Father- land. He had a chateau at Tours his wife's property. They seemed both contented and cheerful, with quiet, gracious ways. The colonel gave one a notion of what the better sort of Tory may have been in England temp. Anne. On Sunday, June 3rd, had an invitation to take a trip to Guernsey on board the man-of-war stationed in Gorey Harbour. The men manoeuvred and did gun-drill, and the Captain showed how Jersey might be reduced by one French war vessel with modern guns. Landing in Guern- sey, we called on the late Sir Edgar McCulloch.* He took us to Castle Cornet, and guided us over the singular old building which held out so long under Dorothy Osborn's father during the Civil War. After lunch he took us to see Captain L.'s interesting museum, where, among palaeolithic and neolithic remains, we saw an undoubted Viking sword, confirmatory of the belief that the old Norse rovers made the Island a place d'armes for their operations against Neustria. On July, 25th, I was in London again and went to see the Irish Exhibition, but it was very poor. In the * Then Bailiff of Guernsey, jurist and antiquarian. OXFORD REVISITED 159 evening the dinner of the Authors' Society was held in the Criterion. Bryce in the chair, very courteous and effective. The ladies rather a dowdy lot with brilliant exceptions ; men interesting. Sat next to Mr. Baker,* " discoverer of Bohemia ; " was introduced to the late Sir Walter Besant,t and to Mr. George Meredith, with whom I had some interesting talk. The speeches generally were very good. Eeturned to Jersey in August and had many pleasant walks and talks with the Confederate colonel, whose reminiscences were very good. He said he heard of the death of the Prince Consort and of the appointment of Ulysses Grant to command the Federals at the same moment. The comment was, "We were sorry for the Queen's misfortune even in the midst of our own ; but we soon forgot it in thinking we should not be in trouble long if that was the sort of General the Yankees were going to employ against us." They soon learnt their error. In September there was a Field meeting of the Societe Jersiaise. We walked over Trinity parish, once co- extensive with a manor of the Carterets, being joined by the Lieut.-Governor and some more local antiquaries. In one place were evident traces of ancient fortifica- tions. At Bozel the Lempriere Manor we came upon another encampment, but there seemed no means of determining whether either was of Roman times. For my own part, pending measurements and ground-plan, it seemed to me very likely that the Eozel camp, being on the hill immediately above the little harbour, was originally made by the Vikings, who would want to guard their ships, and to have a place wherein to secure their persons and their plunder before returning to their transports. Whether for the homeward voyage or for * James B., F.R.G.S., a well-known traveller and journalist, f Afterwards Sir Walter ; well-known novelist and founder of the " Authors' Society." 160 HERE AND THERE a descent upon the coasts of Neustria, now called Normandy after them, it would be needful to have such a station, and this bay with its crowning heights would be very suitable. I believe some mention of these Islands have been found in the old Norse poetry ; the Viking sword discovered in Guernsey is a proof of the presence of the rovers. It was a charming excursion, through leafy lanes and woods, and over green and breezy downs. November was wild and wet but very warm. On the 24th we were able to sit with open windows and no fires. On the 27th read a paper on the Jacquerie before the Lieut. -Governor and a distinguished audience. It is very curious to compare that abortive movement with the social risings of the period in England ; especially to observe that the rise of our Parliament was almost simultaneous with the decline of the French " Etats." For the Tiers in the days of Marcol must have ap- peared to be in the ascendant in the eyes of contem- poraries, while our House of 'Commons consisted of urban delegates coming before the King and Council like so many humble suitors. During December the weather still continued mild. I finished the Life of Warren Hastings for the " National Biographical Dictionary," endeavouring to be impartial. The estimate of Macaulay was inspired by his admira- tion for Burke, James Mill also took a similar line. Now we seem to be going into the other extreme, of seeing nothing to blame, which is absurd. Erskine's position is the fairest ; Hastings often did wrong, but the wrong was the outcome of the prevailing policy, not of his own character. It was perhaps right that he was not made a peer; it was certainly right that the E.I. Company should give him a handsome pension. During the month returned to London to examination of students for Civil Service. The young men of the usual type, well informed and in good mental condition. OXFORD REVISITED 161 I would not join the common cry against the competitive system ; it is obvious that a young man who outstrips his contemporaries must have " grit " and other good gifts ; and as a means of selection it is the only alternative to patronage, as Lord Granville pointed out in 1813. As a preparation for high office it seems less commendable ; and it would never, perhaps, produce a Warren Hastings or a Wellington. But the greatest objection is that it degrades literature to the level of an industry, and greatly impedes the swoop of genius. When Southey was telling the Quakeress of his hard work, she asked him, "When dost thou think?" The young man who has passed his school-time in getting up answers to test papers has had no time for the cultivation of observation and reflection; and he very probably ends by loathing the sight of a book as much as the grocers' boys are understood to hate figs. In the afternoon after the examination called on the late Mrs. Lynn Lint on in her pretty flat in Queen Ann's Gate, where she seemed very cheerful. Found she was dead against the "New Woman." Visited at the Savile Club as the guest of Mr. Middleton Wake, and met many pleasant men.* A very delightful rendezvous, originally in Savile Row, whence the name. Present house was once the residence of the late Lady Eosebery before her marriage. The club seems in some respects a succursale of the Athenaeum, men using it while waiting for ballot at the latter. But there are many old members who are content to remain where they are ; besides some who belong to both, like the late Mr. Herbert Spencer, who liked a place where Tie could play billiards on a Sunday. The front windows have a charming outlook over the Green Park, almost like a country house. On Sunday, 23rd, returned to Jersey, where I found .all well. * I was shortly afterwards elected a member of the Savile Club. 12 162 HERE AND THERE (1889) This year witnessed the apogee of the two melodramatic- personages, Boulanger and Parnell men very dissimilar in character, yet alike in having risen to very high power and still higher hope (which they proved unable to carry to final achievement) and not less alike in premature ruin and death. The Frenchman became rather formidable to the con- stitutional authorities of his country, by means of money supplied to him by his political intriguers, among whom my friend, Philippe VII., was grievously suspected of figuring. But the Republic took heart; and, being prosecuted criminally, the brave General retreated and came to Jersey with his fair friend, Madame de B. In home politics there was little doing; the public mind was much occupied with the protracted sittings of the Parnell Commission. In the early part of this year I made the acquaintance of Pere Monrier, rector of the Jesuit Seminary, which I remember as the "Imperial Hotel " in 1868. It is now, of course, quite refitted, and applied to the purposes of a monastery with a school attached, where many cadets of good French families are trained for their navy. The- rector, a typical Jesuit, of the severer class, lent me Eegnier's " Satires " under promise of secrecy. The Library has a splendid collection of old books. In April back in London, visiting a good deal at my old friend the Vicar of St. Bride's, and meeting his- talented son, the well-known novelist, " Anthony Hope." Went often to hear the music at St. Paul's, where all the congregation seemed well dressed say 2,000, and perhaps one artisan. The music was magnificent. Sir John Stainer says Gounod told him it was the finest in Europe. Went one evening with A. H. to the Globe Theatre to see Mr. Mansfield's " Eichard III." * An intelligent and * Mr. Mansfield, a young American actor, at that time of much promise ; played the tyrant ably, especially in the wooing of the shrewish Lady Ann. OXFORD REVISITED 163 careful rendering, not overlaid with costume and scenery. The house was anything but full. " Eichard " is, of course, one of Shakespeare's immature works, and the period is incurably ignoble ; think of the principal public men, Louis XI., Edward IV., Ferdinand the Catholic, and Pope Alexander VI. Shakespeare hardly brings out the special selfishness of the period, crepuscular between barbarism and civilisation. On Friday, 5th, went to the Savile, where Mr. E. Balfour suggested that the Authors' Society should offer a dinner to French writers this season, and get Lord Lytton to take the chair. Monday, 8th, called at the Vicarage, Stepney, on the Rev. S. V., whom I had met in Jersey ; he was a wealthy man, married to an energetic and charming lady, and they were doing great things in Whitechapel. He was rebuilding the church mainly, I believe, at his own cost, and he had thrown out recreation-rooms of all sorts at the back of his parsonage. The male parishioners ac- cepted all that he did to brighten their lives; on con- dition, however, that he was not to ask them to come to church. On Thursday April llth, accompanied A. H. on a visit to the Stuart Exhibition ; very interesting. It is difficult to account for the attraction exercised by that family. There used to be a tale of Macaulay, on his famous stay at Windsor Castle; he was looking at a portrait of King James II., whom his Gracious Hostess called, " My unfortunate ancestor, Mr. Macaulay ! " "Your Majesty's unfortunate predecessor, ma'am," cor- rected the historian. Macaulay, at least, did not share the hypnotism. In June there was a sad article by Mr. F. Greenwood in Knowles' Eeview subject, the Poor of London. He seemed to regard their case as almost irremediable. What he said of the increasing sympathy of the more comfortable classes is consolatory, and marks a difference 164 HERE AND THERE between our condition and that of Rome under the Caesars. It is, however, a dark analogy that remains; the decline of Eome began when the Empire expanded beyond its normal powers of defence, and the rural districts were depopulated. The lines that Johnson put into Goldsmith's "Traveller" have been derided ("Princes and Peers," &c.), but no greater danger can be imagined than a dwindling defence spread over an ever-expanding surface. On Wednesday, July 3rd, the Authors' Dinner came off at which I was one of the stewards but not a success as far as the attendance of French authors ; the only men of letters from France were MM. Yriarte and " Max O'Bell," which is much the same as if, some years ago, Pinnock and Albert Smith had represented English literature in Paris. Lord Pembroke* was a handsome and effective chairman, and Lady P. wore some sparkling jewels. Besant and old Sala t spoke as they always did, most ably; and I had a pleasant neighbour in the late Sir John Stainer. I The heat was very great in July, with a north-east wind blowing. On Friday, July 5th, went to the Criterion Theatre with Lord H. The play was a revival of Tom Taylor's rococo farce, " Still Waters Eun Deep " ; but the cast was good, and Mrs. Bernard Beere's costumes were gorgeous. The guests at a suburban villa waiting for dinner were whiling away time by the usual desultory talk ; and Blakeley, as an elderly gentleman, had asked a younger member of the company after his uncle, and had been told that the gentleman was dead. After some * George, thirteenth Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery ; son of Sidney Herbert, or Lord Herbert of Lea (whose statue is in front of the War Office in Pall Mall). The Earl died in 1895. j- G. A. Sala, well-known journalist ; died 1895. J Sir J. S., Mus.Doc., Professor of Music in Oxford University, died 1900. OXFORD REVISITED 165 other attempts to start a conversation, the old man turned again to the other and asked him as if it were a new subject the same question that he had asked before : " How is your uncle, sir ? " and as he was a little deaf and listening with a great air of attention, the young man answered, in a strong Cork accent, " He's still dead, sir." (A scene oddly anticipated by myself in talk with the Rev. C. W. Le Bas nearly fifty years before.) On Saturday, July 6th, there was a great gathering at the Crystal Palace, Norwood, to see the Shah of Persia, for whom fireworks were to be let off. His Majesty sat in a box on the upper gallery, the only thing we saw of him being a reflected light on his spectacles. The com- missariat broke down, and it was not until 9 p.m. that we got a scrap of cold meat on the roof by corrupting a waiter. Lunching next day at the Savile, met Dr. Duka, who, having begun life as a Magyar conspirator with Andrassy and Kossuth, had come to be civil surgeon at Simla, and was now a retired British officer living in a suburb of London. On Saturday, the 21th, I tried to cross St. James and Green Parks to the Savile, but found it difficult. There was a dense crowd about the Mall to see the Prince of Wales pass escorted by a guard of cuirassiers, His Eoyal Highness being on his way to the Palace to " give away " his daughter to the Duke of Fife. I got through, and on returning after lunch met the bride and bridegroom, just turning into Constitution Hill ; they were not in a Royal carriage, but in the newly created Duke's brougham drawn by a pair of splendid dark horses, from which one caught a glimpse of a pale, sweet face. The evening was stormy, with very heavy torrents of rain. Being back in Jersey in October was asked by a French friend if Great Britain ("England," as he called us) should call on all nations to disarm. I replied in the words of Alphonse Karr " Que MM. les assassins commencent." 166 HERE AND THERE It is curious to trace the cause of the divergence between the national life of France and Britain, the constituent elements of population being not very dis- similar. I would attribute it to *the overwhelming influence of the Eoman Empire on the Continent, which here was entirely obliterated by the waves of Low Dutch and Scandinavian conquest that have poured over most parts of our island, drawing in the Gaels and Cymry. Then, of course, the joining of our Third Estate by the minor baronage must have given it a strength which the corresponding class in France wanted. It seems certain that the ravages among the working people in the middle of the fourteenth century (due to the Black Death) were immediately followed by the entrance into the House of Commons of the knights, and the com- bination of all employers, whether urban or rural, to keep down the wages of labour. It was a selfish motive ; but of such is Progress. During the latter part of this year lectured on Indian history at Brecon, and visited the "Priory," a cruciform church of the Decorated Period, one of the finest I ever saw. Some interesting old monuments. The inn at which I lodged stands on the site of the old castle where Bishop Morton was kept prisoner by Buckingham temp. Hi chard III. It was demolished during the Civil War by a clever municipality, who argued that so long as it was a place of strength one party would certainly take possession and the other as certainly lay siege ; by its destruction they hoped to keep out of the sphere of war and they did. Another day was spent at Bristol, looking over the church of St. Mary Kedcliffe, associated with the memory of Chatterton, and pronounced by Queen Elizabeth " the goodliest parish church in her dominions." Keturning to Jersey I called on Fred. Tennyson (who lived and died there), and borrowed a copy of his poems. His illustrious brother told him they wanted technique. He was older than the Laureate, and a believer in the occult. CHAPTEK VI JERSEY AND NORWOOD (1890) THIS year saw the fall of Parnell due to the decree of the Divorce Court (November 17th), and the action of the Nonconformist Conscience exerted through that stern champion of righteousness, Mr. Gladstone. No imme- diate effect on British politics ensued ; the " Unionists " continued in power under the premiership of Lord Salis- bury, but with what the old Tories regard with uneasiness as "Badical" tendencies. Indeed, it seemed to many that the whole programme of popular Govern- ment was now virtually realised, and the role of the old Liberals played out. In that case the parties of the future would be wholly reconstructed. In January read Bryce's book on the United States ("American Commonwealth"), and an excellent book I found it. One feels that he sees two dangers threaten- ing our cousins; one the "spoils" system, by which so many offices are distributed on party lines that the whole Civil Service must be dislocated ere it has time to become efficient ; the other the competition for voting power among the various States, which has ended in giving citizenship to a crowd of foreigners who have hardly become naturalised. Some of the ladies there are a caution : but " His tenderness to women still must be The measure of the manliness in man." 167 168 HERE AND THERE Also finished Fitzpatrick's book on Daniel O'Connell ; a collection of the Liberator's letters, with some biographic notes. O'Connell evidently sympathised with the sufferings of the misgoverned peasantry of Ireland, and foresaw the agrarian agitation of our day. But he loved peace and was a loyal subject ; as true a Briton as Edmund Burke. His plan of Federal Union (sketched in 1844) is given in the Appendix to vol. ii., and it is a wise and thoughtful paper. If it could be carried out it might satisfy all reasonable Irish aspirations while freeing the Imperial Parliament from troublesome members. It might not, however, win the support of professional politicians. On Thursday, February 6th, heard on good authority that the Laureate was "not an orthodox believer," though he shrank from writing anything to shock or unsettle. Tennyson's volume, published about this time shows unwearied verve and skill. The shadow of the funeral cypress seems to lie on the work, brightening the remaining lights. The tone is thus rather solemn than sad. On Thursday, 25th, I read A. Symonds on Shelley. He seems to agree with those who regard genius as a form of epilepsy ; or, at best, a hypertrophe of some organ at the expense of the rest. Shelley had the germ of great powers, which were, however, sacrificed to Idealism. Even as a poet he might have had more force if he had gone off on a less unprofitable path. He was not wholly wanting in objective skill, and his language was often perfect ; but his gaze was too constantly fixed on clouds and rainbows. Amongst other works at this time was one relating the last of Gouverneur Morris, a most interesting man ; born when Yankees were still British subjects, and having a brother in the Royal service, he was a good sample of the old aristocratic colonists who resisted the King as Manchester and Fairfax, Payne and Hampden did a JERSEY AND NORWOOD 169- century and a half earlier. A little fussy about matters that did not much concern him, and not free from fatuity in his relations with women. Above all, strongly opposed to democratic claims. He informs us that his colleague, A. Hamilton, was distinctly in favour of a monarchy. But the people of the United States took the settlement of that question into their own hands. Morris saw the difficulty of having a monarchy that should be at once efficient and popular; but the people there can always- secure the advantages of a temporary despotism or dictatorship, as they did towards the close of the Civil War in the case of Mr. Lincoln. The " Life and Letters of M. W. Shelley," by Mrs. Marshall, are not ill edited, though a little incomplete. Mary was a genial female creature who did one indiscreet thing at sixteen and suffered for it forty years. Her almost unbroken penance was caused or deepened by the universal misconduct of her male friends, from her Micawber of a father to her incalculable Ariel. The son seems to have done his best as he matured ; but the story is most sad. March 24/&. In London again to examine the young civilians in Indian history and geography. The young men will not study the subject, but are very indignant if not allotted good marks. Wednesday, 26^. Went to the Tudor Exhibition, where there were fine portraits by Holbein. All the great folks in those days seem to have been blonde, even to the Spaniards ; the type seems dying out. On Sunday, 30th, to church at St. Philip's noble interior. A curate occupying the pulpit, Mrs. V. came out, and I judged it allowable to imitate the Vicaress. We found an old man looking at the unfinished building, who, to Mrs. V.'s invitation to come in and see the inside, answered, "No, I thankye, ma'am; they are all going over to Home." He added the information that he had seen the first stone laid of the previous church, which V. 170 HERE AND THERE had demolished to make room for the present building ; this was in 1818, and he said that the ceremony was performed by the then Duke of York (Field Marshall the Bishop of Osnaburgh). In the afternoon we went to see the pictures at St. Jude's; a good show intelligently observed by a number of working people. Sunday, April 13th. Got back to Jersey, after a very rough passage. Later in the month read the " Corre- spondence of Lord Grey and Madame de Lieven." They were a curiously assorted pair. The lady may have been a sort of intriguer, the gentleman high-bred but probably not difficult to hoodwink and deceive. On the whole she does not seem to have had so much the advantage ; but in the end Kussia got the treaty of Unkiar Skelem, and we had no Ambassador at St. Petersburg for some two jears ; a small economy which did the Russians no harm. In June we commenced the usual trouble of packing, taking inventories, &c., previous to our departure from the sunny isle where we had been so kindly treated and made many friends French, English, and Islanders ; but the step was necessary, as the constant crossings in all seasons to and fro were not only expensive, but distinctly disagreeable. We settled in Norwood, where there was more amusement, but a far less agreeable climate. London was a shilling fare ; and we all enjoyed the music, &c., at the Crystal Palace, where also I found .a library of reference, and a club with pleasant company and good billiard-tables. London was, as usual, delightful in June the season at its height, and weather delightful. Before settling down I spent ten days in the Isle of Wight in repose, and nothing worthy of record except meeting a lady whom I had not seen since she was a gracious hostess in Mauritius forty-two years before. Among some pictures which a Jew was trying to sell at Eyde (under pretence of an Exhibition) I saw a curious attempt at comic genre by poor Haydon ; the subject a sort of disturbance in a JERSEY AND NORWOOD 171 debtor's prison, with the title " Chairing the Member." I never heard of it again, and suppose it was hardly worth a place in the National Gallery, where they have better work of the same kind by Wilkie. Also saw some- thing of Miss Genevieve Ward and her very agreeable brother, who were staying at Shanklin. Wednesday, September Zth. Went to the Crystal Palace to hear Mr. Maiden lecture on " Shakespeare's Religion. " It was very well done, and one quite under- stood that W. S. had to please his public rather than to -express himself. Many of the persons who attended his theatre were somewhat indifferent to things of the spirit, ^nd had been brought up as Catholics or in Catholic traditions. Indeed, the lecturer gave reasons for believ- ing that the poet's parents had been of the old creed, while his daughter, Mrs. Hall, was a notorious Puritan. Sunday, %8th. Spent afternoon at the Athenaeum. Herbert Spencer said he considered Buskin's reputation a disgrace to our age. Becalled' Morison's phrase, who 'Once called B. "an arrogant capon." And I believe that Parisian critics think he has done irreparable injury to our national art. I do not, however, see how this can very well apply to a gorgeous phrase-maker, who has never laid down any consistent set of art principles. He praised Turner for dwelling on the focal point of his landscapes, /and he praised the Prae-Baphaelites for bestowing equal care on all their foreground details. Now, which did he mean to inculcate ? * Tuesday, 30th. Went to the Charter House, where the Rev. H. V. Le Bas t showed me over the old place the * Since the above hasty remarks were penned the seal of death has been put on this remarkable man's reputation, and we have learned that he belonged to a class of which Count Leo Tolstoi is the living type. Men, that is to say, who influence mankind by a prestige of superiority rather than by any direct didactic method. f H. Le B., son of Mr. C. W. Le Bas, mentioned in earlier parts of this work. 172 HERE AND THERE remains of the Priory, the house where the Duke of Norfolk was betrayed in 1571, the still courts where the noise of Holborn and of Smithfield hardly penetrates, and where the old " Codds " stroll about in their long black gowns. In the chapel lies the effigy of Sutton, the prosperous trader, under a painted and gilded canopy : memorable to posterity for his munificent benevolence. There I was pleased to see Madison Morton.* October. Monday, %lth. Full moon and fine weather, but there was a very sudden fall of temperature, and it was said there were fourteen degrees of frost. What a climate ! November. Saturday, 1st. Went with M. de L. to- Gamier 's Show, Cockspur Street. Illustrations of " Eabe- lais "; rather what is called " Eealist." t Monday, Ylth. Afternoon at Saville. E. H. told a curious story of the late Sir F. Pollock. J Being himself the real author of the saying attributed to Sydney Smith (about caressing a tortoise being like stroking the dome of St. Paul's to please the Dean and Chapter), he asked Lady Holland if she meant to quote it as her father's in the ' ' Biography ' ' she was writing ? On her answering that she certainly meant to do so, he asked, " Did your father say it?" "Oh! indeed he did," she answered, "for I have seen the tortoise." Wednesday, ~L7th. Casting about for materials for my little monograph for Hunter, I came upon a book in the India Office Library called " The House of Scindia." It was the work of an uneducated man named Hope, and proves to have been written for the purpose of vilifying * Author of " Box and Cox " which brought him 1,000 first and last. Became a " poor brothei " in 1881, and died ten years later. f This Exhibition, afterwards closed by the police, led to the usual sneers at our national hypocrisy. J Sir W. F., a Master of the High Court, died 1888. " Madhava Eao Sindhia, and the Hindu Eeconquest of India, " Oxford, 1895, third thousand. JERSEY AND NORWOOD 173 the British Government. It gives, however, some curious facts about later members of the dynasty, especially in connection with Lord Ellenborough. December. Monday, 8th. Cold less severe than it has been for the last fortnight. Had a good deal of discussion with Clodd and others of late, arising out of Weissman's very symmetric and plausible theory. The result of W.'s distinction between germ-cell and body-cell is a curious analogy with certain systems of law; e.g., that of the Hindus. According to the theory in question, ancestral property ought to be permanent and continuous; that which the head of the family may from time to time acquire being the only possession which is free and not subject to rules of succession. This, in some sort, corresponds to Weissman's conception of the non- heritability of acquired qualities. But the analogy may turn against him in this way. B. inherits A.'s ancestral estates, but makes additions and improvements out of monies earned in the practice of a profession ; when his heir comes into possession, the property though dealt with as ancestral still is evidently not exactly the same that was held as such by A., and so on through the alphabet. Similarly, the continuity of the germinal essence does not involve its complete identity. It is argued, indeed, that the influences of function and environment affect the individual alone and not the species. But, if so, how can we account for the extreme degeneration of so many animal and vegetable races in certain climates ? A Hindu friend once laid his hand on my arm as an omnibus was halted opposite to us in Bayswater Koad: "Why, sir, the very horses in this country are civilised." If, again, dogs all rose from some primal type, such as the jackal, whence the difference between the Skye terrier and the pariah of the Indian village street ; or why, among European canines, does the pointer learn to stop at his game, while the greyhound rushes on it with open mouth ? 174 HERE AND THERE On Wednesday, IQth, reading very attentively " Childe Harold," find the same affectation and insincerity by which so much of Byron's best work is weakened, added to bad workmanship in too many places. Yet there is no lack of manly eloquence, however deficient in continuity,, and a conviction grows upon one that the author was better than he took himself to be, better even than he wished to be taken for by others. And the poem does not dwindle ; on the contrary, grows in strength and beauty to the end. To say nothing of the hackneyed and perhaps somewhat over-estimated stanzas on the ocean, the better Byron appears in the passage on Princess Charlotte, and in the whole tone of the Fourth Canto. In point, however, of mere workmanship there is nothing in any of " Childe Harold " to be compared with the "Vision of Judgment." Sunday, ~L4Jh. Went in a day of intense cold to dine and sleep at York House, Twickenham, at present the property of Sir M. E. Grant-Duff,* whose guest I was. It is a fine old house on the banks of the Thames, once the residence of the great Lord Clarendon, whose grand- daughter the future Queen Anne was born there. The host most kind and interesting. I took a pencil copy of the portrait of the great Madhava Sindhia, whose story I am telling in the Oxford Series, of which Hunter is the editor. Thursday, 18th. Cold continues. Beading Lowell'^ " Critical Essays " lately, have been much struck with his good sense and witty language. Of Buskin the writer says that he mistakes for general principles what are nothing but his own fluctuating impulses; certainly except in his mastery of English Buskin has little in common with Lowell ; and one fears that, if the former be more of a popular favourite, the advantage is due to anything but superior merit. My people love to have it so Populus vult decipi. * Grant-Duff, Sir Mount Stuart E., sometime Governor of Madras- JERSEY AND NORWOOD 175 And so the year ended, in early, almost polar, winter, all the more depressing after Jersey ; but the constant feeling that London was close by made a compensating stimulus; and altogether things might be a good deal worse. CHAPTER VII NOEWOOD (continued) (1891) THE year witnessed no very important events, save that two romantic personages whose names had been so long in men's mouths died within a few weeks of each other General Boulanger and his friend Mme. de Bonnemain left Jersey and went to Brussels, where the lady presently dying, was buried in the rural cemetery of Ixelles, a suburb to the north-east of that city. The General by this time had lost his means of action, perhaps even of subsistence, but he laid a stone over his friend's remains with an inscription asking how he could live without her ; and on the 30th of September he walked up to the graveside and there shot himself through the head. During the summer Mr. C. S. Parnell married a lady whose husband had divorced her on his account ; and on the 6th of October he died in Brighton. Lord Salisbury continued in office during the year, somewhat relieved of the stress of Irish politics by the dissensions which had arisen among members of the Nationalist party, which Parnell's death had done nothing to appease. On January Qth read the November numbers of Eevue des Deux Mondes, containing an interesting article on " Pascal's Wager " by the poet Sully Prudhomme. Pascal says we must have a bet on the subject of God's 176 NORWOOD 177 existence, whether we desire it or not ; for not to bet that He exists is to bet that He does not (which Voltaire denies). M. Sully Prudhomme does not appear to think that we have much option ; but, as to the presence of evil in the world, he will not allow that it is an argument against the power or goodness of the Deity. It may be the Divine law that we, by suffering or self-denial, should enhance the value of our race. In which case there is still room for responsibility ; and the man who loves, or who yields to moral evil, must be held blameworthy for descending where he ought to rise, and so retarding the Great Purpose. There seems, however, still a difficulty, namely, to see how the Divinity can be frustrated or helped by such creatures as we are. My next book was Voltaire's "Louis XIV." It is a model of lucidity, somewhat disturbed by flaws of ill- temper against La Beaumelle. The contemporary Zoilus had criticised the author's " Henriade " without much knowledge or power; but he was, probably, not worth powder and shot ; otherwise the thinking in "Louis XIV.'* is so passionless that one feels the apparently effortless style to be a carefully prepared and most appropriate vehicle. It is also noticeable for an urbane impartiality; the merits of the British, whether as soldiers or as statesmen, receive just recognition ; only a little note of Chauvinism is heard, in such moments as when the reader is reminded that Lord Gal way was a Frenchman. We need not grudge this ; after all, Galway was beaten at Almanza ; and the French Army that beat him was com- manded by an Englishman.* Again in the Revue, an article by Brunetiere, very ingeniously defending the pessimism of Schopenhauer, who according to the French critic is misrepresented by people who have never read his writings. M. Brunetiere argues that Schopenhauer is no supporter of suicide, or even of quietism ; his meaning * The Commander-in-Chief of the French Army was James FitzJames, Duke of Berwick, uncle of the great Marlborough. 13 178 HERE AND THERE is, by inductive reasoning, to recommend that contempt of the world which religion teaches on a priori grounds. Once get the idea of renunciation as an object of attrac- tion for the will and death will cease to be a bugbear, and will become a desired refuge. In abjuring the passion for existence we part with the motives of selfishness and learn to live for humanity. The most orthodox can accept this, seeing that the Divine protection is much more plainly visible in the affairs of the race than in those of the individual. This will not lead to apathy, but may dispose us rather to make use of our day for the general welfare. " Travailler, sans raisonner, c'est le seul moyen de rendre la vie supportable " (Candide). This is in complete accordance with Christian teaching. On Monday, 19&, went to Hereford to deliver a course of lectures on Indian History. The cold was intense; the ice broke on the Wye and came down very swiftly in great floating masses. The river fell three feet in six hours. Friday, 23rd, to Ludlow, a place of singular interest. Called on Mr. C. Forty, whom I found in the Museum, and who was kind enough to take me over the Castle, where Catherine of Aragon was married to the short-lived Prince Arthur, where "Comus" was acted in the banquet- hall, and where S . Butler wrote * ' Hudibras . ' ' Also saw the fine cruciform church, then in process of moderate and judicious restoration. In the grand old parqueted inn ("The Feathers") is the council-room with the royal arms (temp. Jac. I.) and other carving. On Saturday, %4th, went to Belmont, where I saw the Benedictine Priory, and a fine church, built mainly by Mr. Wegg-Prosser within the last half-century. The prior, a very cultured and agreeable man, told some anecdotes of the first Catholic bishop, who used to relate that when he founded the settlement the neighbouring Welsh were only nominal Christians, who had preserved some Koman customs, received by tradition from their fathers. NORWOOD 179 Monday, February 9th. In Hereford again. Mr. Dun- combe showed me the Cathedral Library, Chained Bible and rare MSS., printed books of the fifteenth century, and the famous Mappa Mundi.* In the evening a lecture on the Crusades, by a Nonconformist minister, who spoke loudly and fluently, but did not seem to have reflected much. That, I suppose, is the Nemesis of eloquence. Tuesday, 10th. Was shown over Mr. Godwin's Pottery at Lugwardine : a marvellous mass of building and machinery, with great ingenuity and management, and lovely results in tiling, both encaustic and surface-painted. On Thursday, 19th, read a new book about the Civil War (Cordery and Philpotts, " King and Common- wealth"). The authors for some not obvious reason exaggerate the backwardness of the time, saying, for example, that country gentlemen's daughters were un- lettered and could not do anything but cook; they can hardly have read Dorothy Osborn's "Letters." They seem also wrong in saying that all houses in towns were built of wood. Cromwell's house is still to be seen at Huntingdon; and what do they say to the "Feathers " at Ludlow ? One fails to understand such overstatement. Thursday, 5th March. Went to Leominster and saw the very curious old double church, one aisle being Norman, the other a later addition partly Decorated and partly Perpendicular. Visited a family who lived near in an old house, like an Italian Broletto, which had been moved bodily from the town. Walking thither before leaving saw an old almshouse with a strange device over the entry a naked man (carved in wood apparently) with a cocked hat on his head and an axe in his hand. This was the legend : " To give away your goods before you are dead Let 'em take this axe and chop off his head." * Mediaeval Map of the World, by Eichard de Bells, Prebendary of Lincoln (1283) ; was translated to Hereford, where he died, 1305. 180 HERE AND THERE Monday, $th. Last night was intensely cold with a heavy fall of snow. Visited Gloucester Cathedral; no Norman work like that at Hereford, but a larger and, on the whole, a grander church with crypt and fine triforium. The general effect very rich, especially the transition work and fan-tracery in the cloister ; Lady Chapel and Chapter-house of evident antiquity; tombs of Robert Curthose and Edward II. The whole thing illustrates several most impressive chapters of history. Still earlier remains to be seen in the city ; for example, behind the shop of the late Mr. John Bellows, the famous Quaker bookseller, a piece of the wall that once defended the Roman Glevium, where are bricks bearing masons' marks coeval with some in Herod's wall at Jerusalem.* On Wednesday, llth, returned to Norwood, where the snow was lying deep ; many accounts of trains being blocked, but the Great Western was clear. Thursday, 12th. Spent the afternoon at Savile. My Gunner son lunched with me, and we had a game of billiards, Rudyard Kipling marking for us. Thence to House of Commons to hear a debate sustained by Harcourt, Labouchere, Gladstone, and A. Balfour, the last not the best, as we thought. Thinking of a magazine article, that appeared in Macmillans on " Conflicts of Experience," have been puzzled by the repeated assertion of man's ingratitude to departed merit. Thus Antony says (in " Julius Caesar ") : " The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones " ; and else- where, even more strongly : " Men's evil manners live in brass, their virtues we write in water." The in- scriptions on a thousand monuments are a testimony that this is not so. Let a man be ever so disagreeable * John Bellows (he disdains the Mr.) is well known for his ex- cellent " French Dictionary," and is immortalised in the " Hundred Days " of the late Dr. O. W. Holmes. NORWOOD 181 during his lifetime, his family and friends will find nothing but good to record in his epitaph at least such was usual in Shakespeare's day and much later. And Horace, dealing with a more deserving class, tells us that real merit is hated while it prospers and deeply regretted when taken away. On Wednesday, March 18th, finished " Evan Harring- ton," an easy book for Meredithian beginners. It is impossible as a story of events, and the conclusion does not seem artistic. But what a capital "clown" Raikes made ; and surely the Countess is one of the finest pictures in English fiction! To few male novelists indeed has it been given to read female character and present it in their books; but G. M.'s are frequently convincing. Tuesday, April 28th. At Athenaeum ; had some talk about French literature with Calderon* and Du Maurier,t who were both as much French as English. Jerning- ham 1 too ; you may find cases of the kind in Jersey, but you would not easily find in a London room another triad of Englishmen who were so completely saturated with all that is good in the culture of France. Weather became warmer for a short spell, then cold, damp and wind set in. Friday, May 15th. Went down to Aldeburgh to visit my old friend, Mr. Clodd, where I found a pleasant party consisting of William Simpson, the artist, Grant Allen, Rev. Dr. Morris, and Holman Hunt, one of the most interesting of artists and of men. After dinner, as we sat round the fire, he told us the romance of his life. On June 16th took some friends to the Crystal Palace, where we listened to a rehearsal of the approaching Handel Festival, in which Mr. Eyre played on the organ with his wonted skill. Manns appeared dissatisfied with * Calderon, P., E.A., Keeper of the Royal Academy, f Du Maurier, G., the celebrated illustrator of Punch. J Jerningham, Sir Hubert, diplomatist (v. inf., July 30th). Both Calderon and Du Maurier since dead. 182 HERE AND THERE some of the stringed instruments, slating the performers roundly, and himself singing some of the music as an indication of the time he wished them to take. It is evident that he has that part of genius that consists in taking pains, in addition to the more essential elements of success. Last night in the House Sir J. Gorst made a bold speech about the disaster at Manipur ; speaking of the Indian Government, he said it always " hated and dis- couraged independent, original talent, and always loved and promoted docile and unpretending mediocrity," which drew a laugh from his hearers in Parliament, but, if true, seems a matter for serious reflection. On Wednesday, 2th, went by invitation of Mr. W. S. Caine to see some Indian water-colour pictures at a hall in Piccadilly ; beautiful effects of sunshine, but the drawing a little unequal. Mr. Caine,* a courteous host ; some of his own sketches exhibited, but the bulk of the work was by Mr. Allan,! of Glasgow. Sunday, 2Sth, was a bright, breezy day. Went to Holman Hunt's, at Fulham ; a charming old house with large walled garden, in which a pleasant party was collected. The host related an incident illustrative of the American reverence for a name. At the time when he had a studio at Jerusalem he was visited by the officers of a Yankee vessel, to whom he showed the studies on which he was engaged, but found but little interest in art evinced. After a decorous interval the visitors took leave and filed out one by one, the skipper departing last r with the remark that " they could not think of leaving Jerusalem without having seen him." They had come all the way from Jaffa, and regarded H. H. as one of the standard shows of the Holy City. Tuesday, 3Qth. Wadham dinner at the Holborn * Caine, William Sprostan, once M.P. and a Lord of the Admiralty* Author of " Picturesque India " and other works. f Allan, Kobert W., K.W.S. NORWOOD 183 Kestaurant : an incoherent gathering of old and middle- aged men. Mr. Diggle * in the chair. Dr. Jessopp t spoke well ; the Warden looked a bit bored. I July 16^. Authors' Society dinner. Lord Monkswell in the chair; met Clodd, Mrs. Chandler Moulton, Sir John Stainer, Eider Haggard, and others of my acquaint- ance. Sat by Mr. A. A'Beckett. Mr. Lincoln, || the U.S. Minister, made a speech, introducing the very interesting theme of identity of language, which, how- ever, a Yankee present was half inclined to question ; gentleman's speech was irresistibly droll, all the same. On Tuesday, 21s, went to Mrs. Moulton's;1T an interesting party, including Miss Ward, Mrs. Campbell Praed, M. Blouet (" Max O'Kell "), Mr. Theodore Watts Dunton, and Mr. Bentley, the publisher. The talk was not important, except a remark of Max O'Kell, who gave one his opinion of London Society ; saying that the working men were not to his taste nor the lower middle class, while the aristocracy seemed to him frivolous and not very well mannered. " But," he added, " you have a savant type such as one meets at a place like the Athenaeum whose social charm and bearing are un- equalled." August. Thursday, 21th. Kead Ingram's " Life of Poe " ; the author is not a literary expert, but he seems to write in good faith, and he makes out a good case for his wretched hero, a wondrous being, almost too intelligent for the society in which his lot was cast. His * Diggle, T. B., M.A., at that time Chairman of the London School Board. f Jessopp, Kev. A., D.D., author of " The Coming of the Friars," &c. | Thorley, G. E., M.A., Warden of Wadham. A'Beckett, Arthur William, journalist and author. || Lincoln, Hon. B. T., U. S. Minister at the Court of St. James, 1889-93. U Moulton, Louise Chandler, poet and writer of children's books. A native of Boston, Mass., who was then living in London. 184 HERE AND THERE artistic judgment was unerring, being founded on the same power of analytic reasoning which enabled him to solve at a glance the most secret cryptogram. And all the while condemned to the most depressing drudgery, and by nature wanting in the sympathetic sanity which we find in most of the writers of very successful fiction. He resembles the school of Swift in prevailing over men by strength rather than by love. On Saturday, 29th, finished F. Harrison's " Cromwell," a pleasant little study. Some of Oliver's work in Ireland admits of no palliation, and the author does well to glide over it. Few more shocking things than this of Drogheda : "I believe all their friars were knocked on the head but two : the one of which was Father Peter, brother to the Lord Taaffe, whom the soldiers took the next day, and made an end of." (" Cromwell to the Speaker," Dublin, September 17, 1649). Few greater atrocities could have been committed than this cold- blooded murder of non-combatants ; yet here we have the Commander-in-Chief reporting it in an official despatch among the exploits of the army of which he is proud. September. Tuesday, 1st. To Inner Temple Hall, for opening of Oriental Congress.* Canon Taylor, Master of St. John's, Cambridge, took the chair in the regretted absence of Lord Dufferin, and delivered the " inaugural " address. On Thursday, 3rd, attended Congress; interesting address on Egyptian chronology and tombs by Professor Petrie.t In the afternoon another meeting; Gayangos t in the chair, gave a short address on the importance of conciliating Moslem opinion. Leitner did not by any means agree. * Much discussion arose as to whether this might be the true Congress or not ? Dr. Leitner's energy, however, succeeded in getting valuable support. | Petrie, William Matthew Flinders, University College, London. | Don Pasecual de Gayangos, Oriental scholar already mentioned. NORWOOD 185 On Tuesday, 8th, began to read Caine's " Young India," a sincere and amiable aspect, but suggestive of grave questions. He says of the Congress * in substance that it is either seditious and ought to be stopped, or else the Government should accept it as a means of enlight- enment as to the position and prospects of the ruling race in India. If there be any preponderating hostility towards the Queen's rule among the people, then it may become necessary to reconsider and to ask what is the end and object of our civil and military establishments in that country ? If merely the extension and security of our commerce, are we, or are we not, exceeding the exigencies ? Monday, 14Jh. The old soldiers from over the way crowding the smoking and billiard-rooms at the Athenaeum, the hall of which has been beautifully decorated by Alma Tadema. Friday, ISth. Had an interesting conversation with Herbert Spencer at the Athenaeum ; he was in good form and spoke of himself and other distinguished men with impressive frankness. Of Huxley he said " that man, with independent means, would have been the greatest of biologists." On being reminded of the common notion that poverty was the stimulus of exertion, he replied that it was not so when a man needed means and leisure to enable him to make original research and establish a position for which there was no popular demand ; having to provide for the daily wants of them- selves and their families, they simply could not afford to follow out their natural destiny. He also pointed out the field awaiting any one who could devote himself to a thorough scrutiny of the older statute-books in order to * The National Indian Congress which meets annually at various places of importance in the country, such as Calcutta, Allahabad, &c., for the purpose of giving expression to Native opinion on reforms -considered desirable. Having no power of their purse, their repre- sentations are probably not regarded by the Government as very urgent. 186 HERE AND THERE find out why the more important Acts had been intro- duced and why other Acts had been repealed. " Here," he said, " you ought to discover the social history of our nation." He also observed in relation to the former subject that he had produced books for sixteen years, without obtaining any return, and had only been enabled to do so by the help of occasional legacies, until at last he obtained public recognition.* On Monday, October 3rd, M. M. de L. called, a man of some ability, born in one country, educated in another ; a retired officer from the French army, bringing up his son to be an Anglican clergyman. Heard particulars of Boulanger's end ; in some respects he reminds one of what Caius Marius might have been had he not conquered the Barbarian invaders. Jugurtha, on the other hand,, finds a modern anti-type in Tantia Topi, the Mahratta hunted down by Sir Hugh Rose in 1858. Friday, 9th. Went to Mrs. C.'s afternoon. A large brazen sort of woman brought a quiet-looking girl as a medium, whom she put through some hypnotic evolu- tions which might, one thought, be only acting ; and one rather hoped so, as it was otherwise rather shocking ta see a young creature in such abject control of another. On Friday, %3rd, Mrs. A. Besant lectured for our Society on Theosophy. The Rev. R. B. at the conclusion asked a pertinent question; seeing that the lady had already been an Evangelical, a Puseyite, and a Materialist, he would be glad to know whether she had better evidence for her present opinions than for those which she had successively abandoned ? The somewhat indignant reply was a debater's triumph, but did not meet the point. On November 3rd, Tuesday, the late Mr. Haweis t came to lecture for our Society on Music ; very clever and * Mr. Spencer died in the beginning of 1904, having achieved a reputation and obtained an influence in all parts of the globe. f Haweis, Rer. H. R., a well known and esteemed London, clergyman. NORWOOD 187 amusing. His violin is superb, and he illustrated what he had to say with great skill and taste. He joined us at B's afterwards, where we had supper and a good talk. December. Tuesday, 8th. Lecture by Dr. Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Bipon ; a genial prelate with a slight Irish accent, and a sort of confidential fluency ; he told anecdotes of Gautama, the Founder of Buddhism, winding up by comparing him to Jesus ; of course to the disadvantage of the Indian teacher. Of the real merits of his system, or why after being made the State religion it lost hold of the land of its original success, wander- ing to barbarous nations, who turned it into image worship and mechanical ritual, of all this the Bight Bev. lecturer had no account to give. An English officer who was present discussed these questions with some shrewdness on our way home, suggesting that Buddhism was too pure for human practice, and in allying itself with legend and thaumaturgy entered into rivalry with popular Indian creeds by which it was overpowered. But in other countries, which had not such a complete mythology or such a populous Pantheon, it met with better fortune. It is as if missionaries were to propagate some form of Christianity amongst Africans and Poly- nesians after it had been rejected by the educated and uneducated in Europe and America ! I noted to him one remarkable difference. The ideal of Christianity brought forth heroes and world-betterers ; Buddhism could pro- duce nothing greater than hermits, quietists, and other admirable but not very useful characters. Friday, 28^. Called on Mrs. Keeley, the retired actress, whose first appearance was in the year of my own birth, and whom I found most agreeable and active. She walked all the way downstairs from her drawing-room to open the front door when we left.* * Mrs. Keeley (nee Mary Goward), born 1806, widow of a once famous low comedian. One of her daughters became the wife of Albert Smith, of Mont Blanc celebrity. 188 HERE AND THERE Monday, 28th. A family party at the Avenue Theatre to see a clever but incoherent piece by Mr. H. A. Jones, entitled " The Crusaders." It does not promise to last long, being too witty for the gallery and too ill-blended for the stalls. All our modern plays seem either too literary or too farcical. W. Hazlitt has a remarkable forecast ; he says, " When a whole generation read they will read none but contemporary productions ; the taste for literature becomes superficial as it becomes univer- sal." In the present day our book-market is inundated with trumpery fiction, evidently produced for the railway stall and the third-class passengers. (1892.) This year witnessed the short-lived recovery of the Gladstonian Liberals, who with the help of the Irish Nationalists regained a small majority at the General Election of July. Lord Salisbury resigned office, and was succeeded by Gladstone, pledged to pass a Home Kule Bill for Ireland. On Wednesday, January 6th, there was an interesting article in the Contemporary on the work of the late E. de Laveleye on Democracy.* No writer appears to have paid due attention to the fact that in most modern nations a conquering race is still fusing itself slowly or swiftly with a race more germane to the country, and gradually giving way before the regeneration of the latter, or in some happier cases voluntarily admitting the aborigines to equal rights. Social democracy has been disarmed in England by the last-named process ; carried on from the days when the Barons extorted the Great Charter from King John to the time when Grey and Russell carried Reform in 1832. In the older Common- wealths in India, Greece, Rome the dominant class * Laveleye was a Belgian economist of distinction (1822-1892). See Life by Count Goblet d'AlvieUa, Paris, 1895. NORWOOD 189 united with the higher plebeians to form a new aristo- cracy, while the bulk of the population were slaves or unenfranchised for political purposes until some revolu- tionary change. But in Great Britain enfranchisement has been natural, gradual, and ultimately universal. True Liberalism has thus, with us, conformed to evolu- tion; the nation has become a united whole, and privilege has been neutralised less by destruction than by communication. On Thursday, 7th, we had a visit from Madame de T., a Russian lady of French extraction, very charming and intelligent. She gave a dark picture of the social condition of her country, saying that there was room for serious alarm lest the peasantry should be frightened into outbreaks. They are found (since the emancipation of the serfs) refusing to labour, and claiming that it is the business of the Government to support them ; the inability of the priests to direct and control the people is much lamented. On Saturday, 9th, I took two Russian ladies to the New Gallery in Regent Street, where some of the pictures impressed them. On Wednesday, February 3rd, Mr. G. Smith gave a "Dictionary" dinner in Park Lane : a splendid house and wonderful banquet. Leslie Stephen and Dr. Jessopp made excellent speeches ; and the host, addressing his contri- butors, announced his intention of carrying out the " Dictionary of National Biography " whatever it might cost him, and told a story of poor Matthew Arnold. It was to this effect. Arnold rushed into his office one day saying that somebody at the Athenaeum had just spoken of him as " the greatest poet of the age." On Mr. G. asking him if he thought that such a statement could possibly be sincere, Arnold replied, " Oh ! I don't know whether it was sincere, but I know that I liked it ! " Sunday, 28th, was a dull, cold day. Went to church and heard a capital sermon by Tipple on the " blameless 190 HERE AND THERE brother," in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Whether it was quite sound I will not undertake to say ; but it was certainly ingenious, explaining the adage, " The greater the sinner, the greater the saint." The young man who resented his father's reception of the returning penitent may have been morally perfect, but what can be more intolerant (or indeed more intolerable) than moral per- fection ? So argued the preacher, sending away the numerous sinners of his congregation in the confirmed persuasion that it was better to be sympathetic than sinless. The next day Manns' Eossini concert took place. It was the centenary of the master's birth, though anything but his 100th birthday ; * counting by those anniversaries he would have been barely twenty-five ! Perhaps Mr. Manns would have preferred some other subjects ; never- theless the concert was most charming ; the elegant melodies and the intricate orchestration could not fail to captivate. Miss Thudichum gave Di Placer and Una Voce, but none of Eossini 's sacred music was offered. In the afternoon of Thursday, March 3rd (wintry weather still continuing), returning from a walk, we found a decent-looking woman with a baby, making a pretence of selling oranges. E. gave her tea, and she told her story sad, if true, as it seemed to be. Her husband was laid up in hospital, and the guardians told her to go to her parish, which was in Wales. She did not care to go so far away, and desired to await her husband's discharge from Croydon Hospital, eking out her own living by the paltry and precarious trade in which we found her engaged. There must be many such ; but when you see one sitting pn your own doorstep, with the east wind flinging the blizzard into her pinched face, there is something in the recollection of the question, "Who is my neighbour?" * Kossini, G. A., born at Pescard, February 29, 1792 (Leap Year). NORWOOD 191 On Sunday, 6th, heard another sermon in continuation of the last. Mr. Tipple will have to whitewash the saint next. I called in the afternoon upon a lady who had been ill, and who asked pathetically if her good looks would ever return. This is the Nemesis of Beauty's Day. The following Wednesday in reading Pascal came to the conclusion that he must have been mad, but the notion was humiliating. Here was a mathematician and a wit failing to be practically useful to mankind, exempli- fying the danger of extremes, even in so vital a virtue as conscience. After all, as my then pastor told me, the world wants a religion of love, not of opinion. On Tuesday, April 5th, had an interesting talk at the Athenaeum with Giffen,* who seemed to regard the monetary condition of the United States with some ^anxiety, inasmuch as their paper issue was equal to their gold. He believed that the output of the silver mines would decrease, perhaps cease ; nevertheless the Indian Government would do well to adopt a gold currency.! He also thought it a question whether Peel, in reforming the Corn Law, might not have retained a five shilling duty, for which, however, it was now too late. On Thursday, 14th, had a talk withL. about a Commer- cial school on a somewhat novel basis. The following Saturday there were eleven degrees of frost ! On Wednesday, 2Qth I called on Sir H. E., once 41 King of Kumaon," now tenant of a small semi- detached house in this suburb. Les Hois ne exile might be re- writ ten in English. And time was when Le Nabob was the appropriate title for men of the same class ! The Monday following read an article in the January Quarterly on Hafiz, by a writer who is quite clever, but * G., Sir Robert, K.C.B., the well-known economist. | As it did some years later, in a modified form (1900). 192 HERE AND THERE does not seem to know much Persian, or ever to have heard of Omar Khayyam. On Sunday, May 8th, in reading the Vulgate, came on a curious passage on Inspiration, of which the literal English is, " She can change all things ; and transferring herself into holy souls among the Gentiles creates friends of God and Prophets" (Sap. vii. 27). Strange to find a Hebrew writer of Maccabean times going so far as to admit the existence of prophets among the Gentiles (per nationes). On Thursday, 31st, went to town with Conan Doyle,* attending a dinner of authors at the Holborn Kestaurant. Professor M. Foster t in the chair. Sat between Mr. Julian Sturgis and Miss V. Hunt, the clever daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. Hunt.]: Met Harry Jones, Du Maurier, W. Besant, Mrs. L. Linton, Nettleship of Balliol, and Clodd. The speaking was very good, especially by the chairman and Mr. Stockton, author of "Budder Grange."" The late Corney Grain sang some songs with great spirit, accompanying himself on an excellent pianoforte pro- vided for the purpose. These dinners were very pleasant, though some of the company seemed to think that they would prefer a conversazione where one could move about and mix more freely. The price of the tickets was- generally thought too high. Had a long day on Wednesday, June 8th. Went to- Egham by the G.W.B., and had the prospect of a hot walk to Englefield Green, but a pleasant young lady in a wagonette took pity on me, and conveyed me and my bag the greater part of the way. Found the Archdeacon at work in his pretty house ; and after some tea walked through the park, by Windsor and Eton, to Slough, where * Dr., now Sir A. C. Doyle, nephew of the famous " Dicky " of Pwncli, and author of so many clever fictions, was then our neighbour and friend. f Now Sir M. Foster, M.P. for London University. Mr. Hunt was an artist, and his wife wrote novels. NORWOOD 193 I dined and slept. The Park was lovely in this season of sun and shadow.* Saturday, llth, was a mild, showery day, which I passed mostly in the house, comparing Matthew Arnold with Voltaire, especially in regard to their dramas on the subject of "Merope." The Englishman's tone is the more graceful, and the Frenchman's workmanship more finished and strong. The ethnologic problems did not occur to Voltaire, but he might have worked out the other motives and given more effect to the feelings of the persons. In Arnold's drama you have a distinct attempt to exhibit character. The stories in verse of the earlier author could not have been produced by our English contemporary, and the attacks on Kousseau and Freron would hardly have found a publisher one hopes in modern London ; nor would Arnold have so departed from his urbanity as to make them. On Thursday, 30th, the inaugural dinner of the Authors' Club took place, Mr. Oswald Crawford being in the chair. Walter Besant made a very pleasant speech, and read a list of absent members. Most of those present were (like myself) nonentities. The Club was at a temporary house in St. James's Place, nearly opposite what used to loe Lord Tweeddale's. On Wednesday, July 6th, went to Brockwell Park with the children, an old mansion and walled garden in large and beautiful grounds. In one's youth such places were inhabited and enjoyed by private families indeed, a few still are, like Holland House and Chiswick. But by degrees they all come to minister to the health and happiness of many thousands. One hears the cry, " Oh ! how sad to see these beautiful homes empty of their owners ! " but it is not so. You see the children at their games on the grass, and the parents seated under the old * The Venerable Archdeacon Baly held as he still holds the chaplaincy at Englefield Green, an ideal cure, where his parishioners consist mainly of the rangers and keepers of the Koyal Forest. 14 194 HERE AND THERE elms ; and you remember that but for such pleasantnesses as these all would be sweltering and swearing in city courts and cellars, without a notion of the shape of a tree or the colours of the sunset. In the afternoon of Sunday, September 18th, had a talk with young Viard, who raised a point in respect of the impropriety of rendering French words by the same words of our own language. Homme de genie, he main- tained, ought to be translated "great man," and not "man of genius"; the phrase with them indicating a person who moved mankind, while in English it gave him the idea of a person of ill-balanced mind, or hypertrophe of certain faculties to the detriment of others. (Buffon, by the by, gives his definition of genius as "nothing but a great capacity of patience " ; this seems the source of Carlyle's famous saying.) On Saturday, 24th, met Sir A. A. at the Athenaeum, who thought the new rules for the Indian Civil Service examinations would be favourable to crammers. Also that Lord Salisbury was disposed towards a decentralising of Indian Governments on lines similar to those advocated by John Bright. Weather very warm. On Monday, October 3rd, had an interesting talk with old Richmond,* who went through a portfolio of his sketches of celebrities of the early Victorian epoch ; how great a change in half a century ! The following Thursday dined at Mr. B.'s to meet Sir John Lubbock,f thence with him to the Blind School where he gave a lecture on Ants to a crowded audience. On Saturday, 15th, meeting Lord M. just over from Ireland, I asked if there was a troublesome winter expected there? " Divvel a worse," he replied gaily. He had been at a wedding a few days before in Dublin, and when the bride and bridegroom left he said to Father H., who was standing by him at the door, that it was a * George Eichmond, R.A., born 1809, died 1896. f Since created Lord Avebury. NORWOOD 195 pity they had nothing to throw after them. " 'Tis a pity it can't be your brogue, M.," was the quick reply. On Wednesday, November 2nd, there was a good meeting at the Blind School to hear Conan Doyle, who read an excellent paper on George Meredith's writings : few of the large audience had read them, I fear ; I thought perhaps they would do so now. On Tuesday, 15th, wrote a short review of a long book by a Mr. Herbert Compton, which dealt with some of the military Adventurers of India * in the last century ; it showed research and labour, but I found it too wordy and prolix for the subject. I fear the British public is too indifferent to Indian history for such an undertaking to be very successful. On the Friday following I went with N. to a concert at St. James's Hall, Piccadilly. Mascagni's Cavalleria Eusticana was given by a band of eighty stringed instru- ments with one row of wind, to give what is called colour. The music, so rendered, gave one an impression of virile tenderness, not too pathetic and all the more agreeable. On Saturday, 19th, some of the family returned from a visit to Kochester, where they had been guests at Kest ora- tion House, and where they were shown an underground passage communicating with the river. This, they under- stood, had been prepared for the withdrawal of Charles II. if anything had gone wrong after his arrival from Dover in May, 1660. On Friday, 23rd, read Broadfoot's Life ; he was a fine character. Yet there is something in the Anglo-Indian hero of those days that causes offence. A sort of ill-brea sternness and self-conscious austerity; so different from their predecessors, the jovial Malcolm or the urbane Elphinstone. Can it have been due to the evangelical training of the period ? So long as religion was moderate * Since then I have ventured to handle the same subject in a little book called " The Great Anarchy," published in 1901. 196 HERE AND THERE thing for Sunday observance and social conformity it kept people straight and sweet. But the Punjab Ironsides were otherwise minded. They were, no doubt, virtuous, but had little sympathy either for cakes and ale, or for any opinions but their own. Yet they did good work. CHAPTEK VIII CONCLUSION (1893) IN home politics it will be remembered that this year was one of controversy and surprise. At the General Election Gladstone obtained a small majority, which, consisting entirely of Irish Nationalists, obliged him to renew his attempts at giving the sister Island a measure of auto- nomy. His Home Rule Bill was carried in the House of Commons, but failed to pass the Lords as must, one would suppose, have been foreseen. The veteran Experi- menter being now in his eighty-fourth year, people began to anticipate an early termination to the tremendous anxieties which his irrepressible initiative and indomitable energy had imposed on the public. In France affairs had somewhat emerged from the chaos into which they had been thrown by the strange combination of a brainless adventurer with reactionary support ; but the Panama scandal continued to trouble the Chamber and to disturb Parisian Society. On Friday, January 27th, went to a dinner given by the Omar Khayyam Club, at the Florence Restaurant. Mr. J. H. McCarthy was in the chair. Sat between Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. Barry Pain, both agreeable neighbours. There was some good speaking ; Gosse from an aesthetic point of view, and humorsome addresses 197 198 HERE AND THERE from Messrs. Austin and Low.* I had to make a speech myself, but as I took up the poet as a Persian, while my hearers appeared only to know him as the basis of Fitz- gerald's " Quatrains," I fell rather flat. Quaritch, the famous bookseller, recounted the genesis of the latter, which interested every one.t Saturday, 28th, was a lovely day. I spent the after- noon at Mrs. A. Hunt's on Campden Hill, and met her clever daughter, I also Dr. Moncure Conway. The latter spoke in a very interesting way of Emerson and Lowell, which latter he considered a light of American letters, but not an original thinker, though possessed of a fine style. He was disposed to compare him with Joseph Addison, who never told anything new, but dis- closed our own thoughts to us better than we could do for ourselves. Had heard Emerson say that he thought the Komish Church the best for the stage. I recom- mended him to join the Omar Khayyam Club. The next day (Sunday) had a visit from M. H. V. He was intelligent, but had the usual Continental's difficulty in regard to our anomalous Constitution. The Queen, according to him, ought to have been able to dissolve Parliament rather than give her assent to the Home Rule Bill. I did not enter on any discussion as to Her Majesty's duties, contenting myself with pointing out that the Crown could do nothing of its own motion. 11 What?" he cried, "not turn out the Ministry?" I had to admit that, in theory, the Crown had that power, though it was last exerted nearly two generations ago, and did not prosper then. * Austin, L. F., an American by birth, author and journalist ; and Low, Sidney J., Lecturer on History, King's College, London. f Quaritch, B., a well-known bibliophile in Piccadilly; died 1899. I Hunt, Violet, mentioned in the last chapter, author of " The Human Interest," and other tales. Conway, M., minister of South Place Ethical Society, born in Virginia, author. CONCLUSION 199 On Saturday, February 4th, met Lord C. at the Athenaeum, and he asked how old I thought T. was. I said, "Sixty-six, the prime of life." "Oh! no," he replied, "eighty-three is now the prime; I am quite looking forward to it to make a new start." 4 'Yes," said I, "by that time you will be a Home Euler." On Wednesday, 22nd, talked with Sir E. P. about Lord Lawrence as a Viceroy, and was glad to find him confirming the opinion recorded of him in the twenty-first chapter of my little " History." He was great rather as administrator than as statesman ; a District Officer reduced to the nth. On Tuesday, April th, went to lunch with the Grant- Duffs at Twickenham; had a pleasant talk with Sir M., strolling over the lawn, with the shining Thames by the side. This house formerly belonged to Lord Clarendon, and in the beginning of the nineteenth century was occupied by the Orleans family. On Thursday, 13th, there was a musical gathering of Mme. V/s pupils, Lady Tweeddale * in the chair, assisted by Barnby.f Her ladyship spoke with grace and ability in giving prizes. On the following Saturday some of us went to the Crystal Palace to hear the tremendous Faust of Berlioz. The orchestra was very good, but the chorus unsteady ; Herschel J gave his music with care and spirit ; B. Davies was rather stale, and Miss Macintyre sang as usual. It is a great work. On Tuesday, 18th, met Sir W. 0., who was breathing threat enings and slaughter on the subject of Home Rule for Ireland, assuring us that there would be civil war in Ulster, for which 50,000 men would come over from Glasgow, and he would lead them. The combination * Wife of my accomplice in burglary 1 (See Part I. chap, ii.) f Barnby, Sir Joseph ; died 1896. J Herschel, GL, composer and conductor ; born at Breslau. 200 HERE AND THERE of Orangeman and Anglo-Indian hero. Weather like early summer. On Saturday, 29th, finished "Beauchamp's Career," which struck one as the deepest note that had been sounded in tragic fiction since " The Bride of Lammer- moor." It is not, of course, free from the author's peculiarities. The style is enough to handicap him heavily; either the eccentric turns are intentional or they are not ; in the one case they are weak, in the other uncivil. If a writer has thought out what he has to say he ought to know how to say it; if not he is coming before the public in deshabille, which is not respectful. We do not want to see him either in his nightgown or in an impenetrable disguise. The disciples will call this a Philistine view, and may plead with some justice that the Master has compelled us to listen to him, and with more permanent attention than we pay to more conven- tional entertainers. On Tuesday, May 2nd, I read some of Colonel Inger- soll's bitter Yankee pleasantries at the expense of ortho- doxy.* A land of plain language and Puritanism is able to bring forth queer results. Persons now living may see Protestantism largely turned to Free-thought of which it contains the principle. What remains i& Conduct. The next day I visited J. W. S. at Slough. In the afternoon we walked by the playing-fields to Eton and Windsor, and called on Holmes at the Castle. He received us very kindly, showing us the beautiful library of which he is custodian ; rooms and galleries of Tudor times, all wainscoted with tall folios in glazed cases on the table, one book alone being valued at ^10,000. All this was framed in a series of windows looking on a lovely landscape. On Monday, Sth, I joined the Anglo-Russian Society * Son of a Congregational minister of New York State ; born 1833, died 1899. CONCLUSION 201 on the invitation of Mr. Cazalet. Bearing in mind the remark of General Boutourlin (at Ralston's dinner), one cannot fail to sympathise with a movement tending to obliterate misunderstandings between the two great Asian powers. The following day I read Froude on Disraeli, which is clever but not quite convincing. The late brilliant author could see little but faults. This is a sort of inverted sympathy that some of us have, a quickness to see the weaknesses of others rather than their merits. I found two fine suggestions in the book : one that we ought to think only or mainly at least of the prosperity of the work itself, and to subordinate all care for our own fame and profit ; the other that the brilliant adventurer made a mistake in applying himself too exclusively to party politics, to the neglect of social problems. As a politician, however, he did one enormous service, by so far blending the popular cause with the policy of the brake as to resuscitate a considerable body of Conser- vatism and retard a revolution. But his odd combination of histrionism with neglect of detail impeded his influence and hindered him from doing as much as he otherwise might. On Wednesday, 10th, spent a quiet day at home, reading the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which there was a really fine essay, by Jusserand, on our poet Chaucer. Though there is a gulf between us and our French neighbours, it is possible that international studies of this kind may gradually help to fill it ; in the meantime it is too deep, though not so wide as to quite hide us from one another. Even at that early day the English mind had its peculi- arities, and to these the writer had done justice ; the cheerful seriousness, sympathetic observation, and pathetic humour. What a fine couplet is that which comes last of all in the best editions : "Forth, Pilgrim, forth! Forth, beast of thy stall; Look up on liigh ; and thank the Lord of all." 202 HERE AND THERE He seems to have begun with a playful comparison, to end in a sense of duty that becomes austere. On Tuesday, 16th, read more about Chaucer, the poet of May ; but his May was ten days later than ours. On Friday, June 2nd, I discovered a strange error by Jusserand usually so accurate in matters of literature. He translated the title, " Summers' last Will and Testa- ment,'' " Derniers volonte's de Vete (Le Koman anglais"). The " Will " meant is, of course, that of W. Summers, the King's fool. M. Jusserand's version reminds me of the old joke about the French rendering of the "green man and still " " I'homme vert et tranquil" On Monday, 5th, went to the hotel Metropole to meet Madame de T's friend, Stephansky, whom I took to the National Gallery (where he was much pleased). He was a well-bred specimen of the Kussian gentleman. On the following Friday I read a statement in a delight- ful volume of essays by Mr. Andrew Lang to the effect that before Budyard Kipling there had been no Anglo- Indian contributions to literature but by Meadows Taylor, Sir H. Cunningham, and Sir A. Lyall. Surely, unless this was only a new instance of the indifference and ignorance that affect the whole subject, this is a strange belief. Has the able writer never heard of Heber, Slee- man, Kaye, Hunter, Sherer, Temple to name but a few ? It would be a want of knowledge or of urbanity to say that, with the exception of Dr. John Brown and E. L. Stevenson, Scotland had produced no humorist in the reign of Queen Victoria. Even taking "literature" in the modern sense of fiction and light articles, Mr. Forrest and Mrs. Steel count for something ; while " His Honour and a Lady " by an American whose married name was believed to be Coates is a novel of great merit and interest. On Thursday, 15th, went to the Eoyal Academy exhi- bition and passed through the rooms, noting the catalogue for a report to an Indian paper. In general the work CONCLUSION 203 struck one as ambitious, what might be called " literary " rather than artistic, as is too much our British way. In- deed, some of the best pictures are by naturalised foreigners Alma Tadema and Herkomer. But our portraits are above the general level, though even here Herkomer is almost best. Sunday, 18th, was the seventy-eight anniversary of the Great Sunday of Waterloo or Mont St. Jean, as the losers more correctly say. It was a severe stroke of Nemesis on Egotism, pointing a moral of eternal import. No man, even were he a Napoleon, could stand against * l all the world," though Hero-worship applauded the attempt. The greatest man only does great work as part of a whole family, nation, Church, or whatsoever it be. Napoleon ignored this. Count Flahaut used to relate that, as they rode in the moonlight over the fields between Oenappe and Charleroi, he ventured to ask, " Has not jour Majesty been astonished to-day? " And, according to him, the answer was, " No ! The French have always been the same ever since Crecy." Considering how they had fought for him every third man of them being left upon the field it was not for him to say so. But he was not the victim of any fault but his own ; always isolated. There is a homely word on this matter in an old Sanskrit poem " Fallen from their proper place, how can Prosper tooth, nail, nerve or man ? " Sunday, %th, was a rainy day. I undertook to edit " Childe Harold" for Messrs. Bell. It is, of course, unequal ; abounding in virile reflection and declamation, yet often careless in execution, and sometimes sinking into amateurish slip-slop. Two of the best passages contain instances of absolute insincerity. In describing the great cathedral of St. Peter at Eome, Byron praises the building for what is really its chief defect. In the famous address to the ocean he begins by looking down upon it from the Alban Mount, yet speaks at last about 204 HERE AND THERE laying a hand upon its mane, which would, indeed, be making a long arm. The following Friday was a very hot day. I lunched at the Athenaeum, and went thence to the Westminster- Palace Hotel to attend a meeting of the International Arbitration Society, Mr. Stansfeld, M.P., in the chair.* My old friend, Hodgson Pratt, read the annual report, and the chairman congratulated the Association on the recent vote in the Commons regarding a proposed arbi- tration treaty with the United States. The Marquess of Bristol, in moving that the report be adopted, looked forward to a movement among the great Powers of Christendom in the direction indicated by the English- speaking nations of America and Europe. Being called upon, I seconded the motion, guarding against a belief that defensive war could ever be abolished. Conan Doyle moved a resolution expressing profound satisfaction at the action of the House of Commons, in which he was seconded by an American citizen, Mr. Horace Smith, of Philadelphia; and Moncure Con way added a rider for the neutralisation of trade in time of war on lines originally laid down by Paine and Franklin. There was very great heat on Sunday, July 2nd. Heard a fine discourse by Tipple on the institution and true significance of the Eucharist. It was perhaps a little heretical and over the heads of most of us as a lady remarked with whom I walked home. But the language was most eloquent, with flashes of a noble poetry. He showed us the Master, sensitive of danger and doom, desiring to leave to His friends at their last meeting a memorial of Himself, using this power of symbolism and making vehicles out of familiar objects and ideas. t * Stansfeld, Rt. Hon. Jas., once a leading Liberal politician, since deceased. f Tipple, the Reverend S., an Independent minister, whose preaching drew large congregations, and was highly esteemed by the late Dean Stanley. CONCLUSION 205 The following Monday was another baking day. Went to the Oxford and Cambridge match at Lords ricket Ground, where there is always a fresher air than anywhere else in London. In the evening went to the Eugby dinner at the Metropole, at which I met a few old shadows like myself. There was a good spread, and fairly good speaking ; Sir Horace Davey, Q.C., was in the chair.* There were speeches from the Bishop of London t and Mr. Selous, the African shikari. Sat next to my friend General Newall,J with the late Sir A. Blomfield on the other side. On Thursday, 6th, the heat was greater than ever. The shops were mostly all closed for the Duke of York's marriage. I worked at French papers for the Sandhurst exam. ; answers not quite up to the Indian Civil Service level. One candidate wrote that " Directoire was Napoleon's first wife." The family went at night to see the fireworks in the Palace grounds. Question : Whether the pleasure caused by such displays is full value for the money, nothing visible being left but empty cases and rocket sticks ! (The next two days were still hotter ; no one could with any pleasure go out of doors from noon till near sunset. On the 8th, however, a change came in the afternoon, and before night the rain and thunder reminded one of the monsoon of India.) Tuesday, ~L~Lth, was a pleasant day. We went to the Imperial Institute to see the York wedding presents. There was a great crush. On Saturday, 22nd, enjoyed Grant-Duff's book on * Now Lord Davey of Fernhurst. f Eight Kev. F. Temple, once Head Master of Rugby, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of the Church of England. I Newall, Major-General David J. F. (late Royal Artillery), my old Rugbean contemporary ; born 1825, died 1901. Noted for having blown up the enemy's powder magazine in the siege of Mooltan, December, 1848, sending 500 men to destruction. Blomfield, a well-known architect. 206 HERE AND THERE Eenan, whose sayings are distinguished by subtlety and grace. In his address at " Louis le Grand," in January, 1884, Eenan said, " He who complains of life is almost always one who has sought the impossible ; " the whole i& full of wise and kind exhortations against pessimism.. The conclusion is "Believe in good; good is as real as evil and produces something unlike evil, which is barren." On Sunday, 30th, Tipple was brilliant, but extremely bold on a text that must have exercised many and many a mind " Inasmuch as ye did it to the least of these My little ones, ye did it unto Me " yet they did not even know Him ! The next evening I read Morley's "Burke"; very clever and quite impartial. The author does not always accord, but never fails to appreciate ; and points out that the reactionary spirit of Burke's latter days is accounted for, and even partly justified, by the extravagance of the revolution doctrines. However inevitable and essential to human progress was the break with the feudal past in France, it was better for us that our change should be more gradual; it is therefore to the eternal credit of Burke that he anticipated the modern doctrine of evolution in withstanding cataclysm. Perhaps Mr. Morley might have more clearly brought out the deterioration of temper which came over the great political philosopher in his declining years, till friendly observers thought the balance of his mind overthrown. No sane man ought to have used some of the language in Burke's speeches against Hastings. Lord Teignmouth recorded the opinion that Burke was mad; and even although that may be a crude form of the opinion, it indicates an impression produced upon an earnest mind. Sunday, August 6th, was a crowded day. I took M. to St. Paul's in the forenoon ; the church was very full, two of the congregation being turned out during service. We left at the end of prayers and went to the sermon at CONCLUSION 207 St. Bride's, by the vicar, who gave a humane and sympathetic discourse on doing right whilst we had a chance left. In the afternoon to the service at the Charter House, where a pathetic sight was afforded by the old " Codds," with patient, venerable faces some of soldierly bearing seated in the chapel like a lot of schoolboys, and then trooping eagerly to tea in their warm Hall. Their faces looked both harmless and happy, and one of them said that " it was the best life in London." (A week of very hot weather followed, during which no outside event took place, but the time was filled with work at home.) On Monday, %8th, looked into a book once very familiar to one's younger mind : Coleridge's " Biographia Literaria." With lights that have subsequently arisen one takes a less enthusiastic estimate than one did in the roaring forties. 'Tis a chaotic encounter of paradox and platitude ; very solemn twaddling alternating with very subtle thought ; a Libyan waste dotted with colossal images. One notes a sort of prevision here and there , as of the dawn of our modern day, e.g. : " Philosophy should at once explain and collect the fragments of truth scattered through systems apparently the most incongruous." Many subsequent thinkers have tried this method : Cousin, in France, almost professedly. And the late Herbert Spencer, though far more original than Cousin, had undoubted symptoms of a desire to harmonise the principles of predecessors, and embody them in his own system. Pascal, in a well-known fragment, endeavoured to establish a synthesis or com- bination between Stoicism and Epicureanism ; or, as he put it, between Epictetus and Montaigne ; of the success of that endeavour let his readers judge for themselves. But certainly very useful results have come from the reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle, and other apparent dissidents, in the modern synthetic. 208 HERE AND THERE The next day (Tuesday) a friend looked in and sug- gested a book : " Specimens of Elizabethan English." I objected to the name, because I think that the particular style extended from More to Milton. Something of the kind has already been attempted in Basil Montagu's " Selections," which range from Latimer to South.* By the way, what a very singular history was that of Basil Montagu ! The son of the ill-fated Miss Kay, shot by a discarded lover the Eev. James Hackman he became a Queen's Counsel in the early years of Queen Victoria ; a writer on Bankruptcy, and grandfather of the poetess Adelaide Procter.! On Thursday, 31st, S. and self went to the India Office, where we were shown over the pictures by Mr. W. F., who with his MS. catalogue in his hand told us all that is known about them. On Saturday, September $th, the weather was cooler after a heavy storm of yesterday. I went to the Athenaeum and found the smoke- and billiard-rooms full of the warriors over the way, whence they had been temporarily evicted by painters. Dined with the late Surgeon-General O'C. at Queen's Mansions, meeting General T., a retired officer of distinction (E.E., and V.C.). He said one thing which seemed very true and sharp : " An Indian career had this great advantage, that it enabled a well-educated young man to be sure of leading the life of a gentleman ; and from that point of view it did not really much matter whether you had or had not what is commonly known as success. In the meantime it was much that for so many years you had escaped the meanness and misery of a middle-class English existence." ***** In October the family left Norwood for the Continent, * " Selections," &c., by Basil Montagu, Esq., M.A., fifth edition, 1839. f Basil Montagu, Q.C., born 1779, died 1851. Son of the Lord Sandwich of " Junius " and his mistress, Miss Bay. His " Bacon " had the honour to be reviewed by Macaulay. CONCLUSION 209 and the writer bade a final adieu to London and the Athenaeum, his experiences henceforth becoming wholly devoid of interest for even the most indulgent reader. It is hoped, however, that these trivial, fond records will, so far as they have gone, meet with some indulgence. There was a story current in Grub Street some thirty years ago how a journalist of the period, who was having his hair cut, was subjected to the usual criticism "Your hair is rather thin on top, sir." He (the journalist) explained that being a literary man he supposed that the fact was due to the use of the brain, but was cut short by the operator assuring him that that could not be the case : " The brain," added the barber, " permeates the skull, and nourishes the roots of the hair ; that's what it is for, sir." The writer would therefore beg that any baldness that may be observed in his work may be attributed rather to defective cerebral energy than to any failure to do his best for the reader's entertainment. The gentle Virgil has given a sketch of the unambitious man's retirement in lines which may be thus para- phrased : " I count him fortunate and him alone Who will not seek the service of the State, The suffrage of the mob, or of the great : Frustrated craving never bids him moan To whom the pleasures of the fields are known, Without the pangs of rivalry and hate ; Nor is he scared by presages of Fate, Or foreign politician's hostile tone. He envies not the rich nor courts the poor,* Nurses no craze nor hankers for a bribe, * Nee dolivit miser ans inopem could not be a sentiment of com- mendation now. We not only pity the poor man, but we pamper him. 15 210 HERE AND THERE Nor haunts the Lobby, nor delights to read The speculations of the daily scribe;* Contented if the garden at his door Afford the food his just occasions need." 11 Solve senescentem / " cried the ancient Roman as, suiting the action to the word, he pitched his aged father into the Tiber from the Sublician Bridge. The modern view, less drastic, but not less impatient, takes the form of saying : " Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage." Yet the retiring comedian is allowed to take leave of his audience ; and one would beg toleration for a few words in a like case. One's memories are not, perhaps, very important ; yet to have seen one part of His Majesty's dominions at the foot of the loftiest chain of mountains in the world, and another among the stormy waves of the Channel, must have varied one's experience in addition to what one may have seen of England during two generations. An eloquent pulpit orator t in an early discourse of the Victorian era remarked that "the Eoman eagle in his loftiest flight never waved his wing over half our Colonial Empire ; " but the expression was, as it still is, seriously misleading. The British colonies are not a portion of the " Empire " in the sense in which the word was used by those for whose behoof it was invented. The Eoman Empire of the Augustan Age was the area ruled by the Imperium or authority of the Republic exercised through the Chief of the Senate, known in his military capacity as Imperator ; an unbroken era of subjugated provinces permeated and united by solid roads from the Pillars of Hercules to the Caucasus, and from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the estuary of the Rhine. It is no vain pedantry to point out that such a description could * Populi tdbularia may well be applied to our journalism, f Eev. H. Melville, B.D., last principal of Old Haileybury. CONCLUSION 211 not truthfully apply to the number of sea-sundered regions peopled by free communities who may indeed admit a titular Governor at their own pleasure and for their own convenience, but who send no tribute to the Mother Country, nor take any orders from her. Senti- ment apart, the Canadians of to-day are at least as free as their neighbours in the United States ; and the true British Empire is nothing but the region ruled by the Imperial Parliament. The only possible exception, on a scale of any importance, is India, of which so much has been said in the preceding pages, and which, in its dependent and tributary position, presents certain features of resemblance to the Roman Empire. Here, accord- ingly, we may apply the noble precepts put into the mouth of Anchises by Virgil, and not unworthily rendered in the virile version of our own Dry den : "But Rome, 'tis thine alone, with awful sway, To rule mankind and make the world obey, Disposing peace and war thine own majestic way. To tame the proud, the fettered slave to free These are imperial arts, and worthy thee." If now we turn to the Channel Islands we shall find a case less of Imperial expansion than of the propagation of a political gospel. The ancient Norman Duchy, of which these miniature Eepublics are the surviving fragments, is the source of our national brain and nerve : Domesday Book, Magna Charta, representative government, legisla- tion by Parliamentary statute, redress of grievances before Supply, are all principles introduced into our Con- stitution by Normans and their Frankish comrades. Without them we should have been, at the utmost, a mere commercial community like the Dutch ; and what the Normans have been to us is very much what we have been to the young and mighty nation beyond the Atlantic. Mixed as is their blood, the people of the United States owe to us their law, their language, their literary tradi- 212 HERE AND THERE tions, and their canons of taste and conduct, without which they would perhaps have been no greater as a nation than the people of Mexico or Brazil. Their glorious course is but beginning, but it bids fair to pre- serve for a remote posterity the distinguishing doctrines of Norman England, and to justify the memorable predic- tion of Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) : 11 Westward the course of empire takes its way : The four first acts already past, A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time's noblest offspring is the last." The contrast between the two cases illustrates the doc- trine of le milieu laid down by the late H. Taine. In the region of the East we see India invaded by Aryan con- querors, but the unresisting medium and the facile con- ditions of nature sapped their energy and gradually assimilated them to the indigenous population. On the other hand, when the Northerner occupied the fields of Neustria and the adjacent islands, they found themselves in many respects inferior to the natives, whose laws and language they immediately adopted, while they preserved their own wise and resolute character. Hence they were enabled to become strong and able administrators, regene- rators of the old world and creators of the new. INDEX Abbott, General, 151 Academy, the, and National Gal- lery, 147, 148 Affirmation Bill and Gladstone's Speech on it, 108 Agra in 1870, 79 ; the Taj, 82 Akbar at Agra, 81 Anglo-Indian writers, 202 Anson, General, 63 Athenaeum Club, the, some of its members, 104 Athenaum, the, early notice of Tennyson, 25 Auckland, Lord, 44 Authors' Society Dinner, 183 B Baring, Evelyn, dinner to on his going to Egypt, 116 Batten, J. H., Principal of Hailey- bury College, 9 " Beauchamp's Career," 200 Belmont, the Benedictine Priory at, 178 Bentinck, Lord W., reforms by, 89 Besant, Mrs., 186 Bible, chained, at Hereford, 179 Boulanger, General, 176 Brockwell Park, visit to, 193 Bryce's "American Common- wealth," 167 Byron, " Childe Harold," 174 Caine's " Young India," 185 Canning, Lord, 58 Carlyle, Froude's Life of, 136 Carpenter, Dr. Boyd, and Budd- hism, 187 Charter House, the, 207 Coleridge's " Biographia Lite- raria," 207 College, the, in Calcutta, 42 Competitive Examinations for the Indian Civil Service, 160, 161 Comte de Paris, a conversation with, 152, 153 D Dalhousie, Lord, 56, 57 Delhi Gazette, the, 54 Democracy, de Lavelye on, 188 "Dictionary of National Bio- graphy," the, 189 Disraeli, 32 Duelling in India, 43 Dulwich, " Old College," 110 Durbar at Agra, 1866, 75 East India Company, the, its early constitution, 4, 5 Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 95 England in the early forties, 23 Famines in India, 70, 86 213 214 INDEX Fitzpatrick's "Daniel O'Connell," 168 Frere, Sir Bartle, 83 Froude on Disraeli, 201 Furlough in 1862 ; author's travels in Egypt and Europe, 71 ft G Ganges Canal, the, opening of, 53 Gladstone and Home Rule, 138 Gloucester Cathedral, 180 Gordon, General, death of, 125 Grant, Ulysses, General, 84, 85, 126 Guernsey, visit to ; alarm of in- vasion, 77 Haileybury College, its students, their training, and character, 5-22 Hardinge, Lord, 39, 40 Hazlitt, W., on modern literature, 188 Hunt, Holman, 181, 2 International Arbitration Society, meeting of, 204 Jeremie, J. A., Professor in Hailey- bury College, 15 Jersey, its inhabitants, customs, &c., 123-25 Jusserand on Chaucer, 201 K Keene, the Reverend H. G., Pro- fessor in Haileybury College, 10 Kempson, M., 50 " King and Commonwealth," by Cordery and Philpotts, 179 Lai Sing, Raja, 64 Lang, J., 46 Lawrence, H., 53 Lawrence, J., at Haileybury, 11 ; as an administrator, 75 Life in London in 1883, 104 LoweU's " Critical Essay's," 174 Ludlow Castle, visit to, 178 Lynn Linton, Mrs. , 132 Lytton, Lord, 83 M M.A., Honorary Degree of, con- ferred on author, 149 Maine, Sir H., 135 Mappa Mundi at Hereford, 179 N Meerut Universal Magazine, the, 45 MelviU, H., Principal of Hailey- bury College, 15 Mofussitite, the, 46 Moghul Empire, the, 91 Montagu, Basil, 208 Morley's " Burke," 206 Morris, Gouverneur, 168 Mussoorie, 50 Mutiny, the, 56 ff., 62 ff. N Newman, J., and Carlyle's opinion of him, 25 Oliphant, L., his "Ancient Eng- land," 143 Overland Route, the, established in 1846, 40. Oxford in the early forties, 25- 30 ; return to in 1886, 139 ff., 156 ff. Papineau, 32 Peacock Throne, the, 97 Poe, Edgar Allen, 183 Rogers, Thorold, his " Work and Wages," 146, 147 INDEX 215 Eugby Dinner, 205 S Sardana, 87 Savile Club, the, 161 Schopenhauer, 177 Shah Jahan, his revenues, public works, court, 96 f. Spankie, E., 49 Spencer, Herbert., on Euskin's reputation, 171 ; on Huxley, 185 Stirling, Mrs., 130 Strawberry Hill, visit to, 110 Temple, Sir E., 157 Tennyson, F., in Jersey, 166 Thackeray, a criticism of, 127 Thomas, G., 52 Vereschagin, B., 80, 153 Voltaire's " Louis XIV.," 177 W Wellington, Duke of, his political views, 33 Wilberforce, Bishop, Life of, 113 Williams, Monier, 21 Windsor Castle, the library, 200 UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKINQ AND LONDON. . RETURN CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT TO* 202 Main Library LOAN PERIOD 1 HOME USE 2 3 4 5 6 ALL BOOKS MAY BE RECALLED AFTER 7 DAYS 1 -month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405 6-month loans may be recharged by bringing books to Circulation Desk Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior to due date DUE AS STAMPED BELOW OCF 1 8 1991 MTO WC IW-4-J? "ai sMfLL* 1 MAR 1 2004 U. C. BERKELEY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY FORM NO. DD6, 60m, 12/80 BERKELEY, CA 94720 $ U,C, BERKELEY LIBRARIES CD3ST7M231 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY