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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 AND CONFESSIONS OF 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
LIBRARY 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 
o o 
 
"J 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 
 
 CONFESSIONS 
 
 ARTR 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 EDITED BY 
 TIG HE, HOPKINS 
 
 LONDON 
 SIMPKIN, MARS HALL, HAMILTON, 
 KENT & CO. LTD. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNERS SONS 
 
PRINTED. IN GREAT BRITAIN 
 

 THE 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY & 
 CONFESSIONS OF 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
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 A 
 
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 952439 
 
Made and Printed in Great Britain at the 
 Batolph Printing Works, Gate Street., Kingsway , W.C.2 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION D 0 0 . a . , vii 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES— 
 
 First Chapter — The Affliction of Child- 
 hood. . - 3 
 
 Second Chapter — Introduction to the World 
 
 of Strife 31 
 
 Third Chapter — Infant Literature . . 103 
 
 Fourth Chapter— The Female Infidel . . 117 
 
 Fifth Chapter — I am Introduced to the 
 
 Warfare of a Public School . . . 132 
 
 Sixth Chapter — I Enter the World . . 145 
 
 Seventh Chapter — The Nation of London . 163 
 
 Eighth Chapter — Dublin 199 
 
 Ninth Chapter — First Rebellion , . . 216 
 
 Tenth Chapter — French Invasion of Ireland, 
 
 and Second Rebellion .... 240 
 
 Eleventh Chapter — Travelling . . . 259 
 
 Twelfth Chapter — My Brother . . . 280 
 
 Thirteenth Chapter — Premature Manhood . 31 1 
 
 Fourteenth Chapter — Laxton .... 328 
 
 Fifteenth Chapter — The Priory . . . 378 
 
 a 2 
 
VI 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER— 
 
 Preface to the Original Edition of 1822 . 421 
 
 Prefatory Notice to the New and Enlarged 
 
 Edition of 1856 .... . 427 
 
 Part One — Preliminary Confessions . 431 
 
 Part Two — The Pleasures of Opium . . 603 
 
 Part Three-* The, Pains of Cp uj* . . 638 
 
 THE DAUGHTER OF LEB.ANON .... 679 
 
 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS — 
 
 Dreaming ... . . 691 
 
 The Palimpsest of The Human Brain . . 699 
 
 Vision of Life ....... 709 
 
 Memorial Suspiria . . . . . .711 
 
 Savannah-la-Mar ...... 720 
 
 Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow . . 723 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 
 
 BORN IN MANCHESTER AUGUST THE FIFTEENTH 
 MDCCEXXXV 
 
 DIED IN EDINBURGH DECEMBER THE EIGHTH 
 MDCCCLIX 
 
 IN HIS SEVENTY-FIFTH YEAR 
 
 He stood about five feet three or four inches : 
 
 “ ... a little Druid wight 
 Of withered aspect, but his eye was keen, 
 
 With sweetness mixed.” 
 
 His countenance, says Mr. J. R. Findlay, “ the most 
 remarkable for its intellectual attractiveness that I 
 have ever seen ” ; features not regular but “ aristo- 
 cratically fine,” the face pervaded by “ an air of 
 delicate breeding,” forehead “ unusually high, square, 
 and compact.” At his elbow is the phial or decanter 
 of laudanum ; for this is the English Opium-Eater. 
 Eight thousand drops and more' — seven or eight 
 wine-glasses — he can account for in a day. He has 
 slided to his table, with “ an odd one-sided and yet 
 straightforward motion,” through piles and pyramids 
 of books. The coat in which he is huddled has a 
 look “ of extreme age,” and is much too large for the 
 tiny elf-like frame. He wears an old pair of list 
 slippers but no stockings, or stockings but no slip- 
 pers ; his tie, if he has remembered one, is under his 
 ear. From the heaped-up books and papers and 
 magazines he has shyly claimed one corner of the 
 table, Sind there sits crouching, close against the 
 
Vlll 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 light, holding to his eyes the manuscript which he 
 gradually covers with delicate, beautiful handwriting. 
 When his hair catches fire, he runs his fingers through 
 it. Sometimes on a summer’s night he sits beside 
 his open window, from sunset until dawn, motionless, 
 in a reverie of opium. Or, when all is dark and 
 silent, suddenly laying down the book or pen, he will 
 make a furtive exit from his den. Crowned with an 
 outlandish wide-awake, swathed in the coat too big 
 for him, and dangling a lantern in one hand, you 
 might think him an animated mushroom, or a gnome 
 luring wanderers to their doom. If by morn he is 
 still abroad, no harm has taken him ; exhausted by 
 a tramp of miles through the fells of Westmoreland, 
 he has sunk to sleep in a ditch. 
 
 Fantastic, inimitable, and most inexplicable spirit ! 
 Mysterious among men — mysterious above all other 
 men. Soul of fire in that ‘‘grotesque and humble 
 tenement of clay.” Shyest, most elusive, most feeble 
 and most helpless of mortals, and withal the mightiest 
 dreamer in the English language, the magician of our 
 English Men of Letters, whose sweep of thought seems 
 almost to compass “ the gamut of the Knowable.” 
 
 So copiously, concerning his family and himself, 
 with pathos and play of humour, has De Quincey 
 talked in the ear of the world, that no attempt will 
 be made to present his life in a connected form. 
 Let us but glimpse him here and there, in this place 
 and that, in one guise and another. De Quincey’ s 
 childhood fascinates him, and in every page of the 
 “ Autobiographic Sketches ” he has made it fascinating 
 to us. Such store has he of transmuting and idealising 
 fancy, that he finds in everything a tale of wonder and 
 of marvel. Who that knows his De Quincey does 
 not remember that scene where he steals into the 
 chamber in which the little sister Elizabeth lies dead, 
 and “ a solemn wind began to blow . . . that might 
 have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand 
 centuries,” and a vault seemed to open in the zenith 
 of the sky, “ a shaft which ran up for ever ” ? Nearly 
 seventy years did De Quincey bear in his heart the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 IX 
 
 image of the little Elizabeth, and he died calling 
 three times upon her. His endowment in pathos 
 traces, indeed, to the agitations of his tenderest years. 
 “ F rom his earliest infancy,” says Dr. Masson, “a 
 n f the manifold miseries of life had be en. 
 
 ijn pres sed upon_ him by his own experience and 
 
 observation, and h ad settled in him into a kind 
 ofLErooding melancholy. Not only such common 
 calamities as bereavement, disease, physical pain, 
 poverty, oppression, misconstruction, contempt, but 
 the rarer and more secret forms of anguish that 
 belong to peculiar temperaments and fatal shocks 
 of circumstance, had been meditated by him, with 
 the diligence of a constitutional bias to that sombre 
 field of study, and with continued aids from his own 
 troubles, till he had become a master in t he whole 
 .science _^qf-sanu^w^' 7E~Hh~lns personal behaviour, 
 feeble as it was practically, this recollection of the 
 miserable and dismal on all sides of him, this inces- 
 sant wandering of his thoughts to the slave, the 
 pauper, the lazar, the criminal, the street-outcast, 
 and the maniac, had shown itself in a kind of con- 
 stant anti-Pharisaism, a constant self-humiliation and 
 pity for the abject.” 
 
 Nothing could be truer than this, or more truly 
 put ; but there was joined with De Quincey’s power 
 of pathos that other power so often twin with it, 
 the power of humour. The meteoric elder brother 
 William, as created, we may say, by De Quincey, in 
 the chapter of autobiography entitled “ Introduction 
 to the W orld of Strife,” is on its small scale a master- 
 piece in the comic kind. William it was, the terrible, 
 jovial tyrant, who first laid open to poor little shrink- 
 ing Thomas the gates of war ; compelling him to do 
 daily battle with the factory boys of Manchester, 
 whose flesh should be given to the fowls of the air ; 
 placing him under arrest for cowardice in the face 
 of the enemy ; threatening to drum him out of the 
 army (constituted, staff and all, in Thomas’s wee 
 person), and anon to hang him for treacherous cor- 
 respondence with the opposing camp. William it 
 
X 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 was who invented for himself the splendid kingdom 
 of Tigrosyl vania, and for Thomas (that he might 
 be therein incontinently invaded) the contemptible 
 island of Gombroon, the inhabitants whereof, 
 wretched Gombroonians, were so low in the state 
 of civilisation that they had not yet, by sedentary 
 habits, worn away their tails. Plain is it to perceive 
 that for the nervous little creature these were days of 
 terror long drawn out ; but, seen in the mirage of 
 De Quincey’s retrospect, they give us one of the most 
 delicious chapters in the romance of childhood. 
 
 It is noted by Mr. H. A. Page, the earliest of 
 De Quincey’s biographers, that his life exhibits a 
 double drama — “ first, a conflict with constitutional 
 weakness, due to inherited disease, and strong habits 
 superimposed upon it ; and next, a contest against 
 poverty and outward ill-fortune.” We can assign, 
 as one cause of the physical weakness and suffering 
 of his later years, the privation he underwent in two 
 of the most curious and critical periods of his youth. 
 First; however, we must go back a step. In the 
 easy and even opulent home of his parents — the 
 upright Manchester merchant, and the mother whose 
 earthly star was Hannah More — here, where all was 
 gracious and refined; the little De Quincey, nestling 
 with Pink and the beloved sisters, was gently and 
 admirably reared. Tranquil and pleasant also, on 
 the whole, were his school days. A precocious 
 Latinist and a prodigy in Greek (“ That boy, sir,” said 
 one of his masters, “ could harangue an Athenian 
 mob better than you or I could address an English 
 one ”) is apt, indeed, to get some knocks or gibes 
 from the dullards of his class ; but De Quincey 
 seems to have been generally popular. Then come 
 the visit to young Lord Westport at Eton, and 
 the presentation to his Majesty George III. himself 
 (“the English De Quinceys, your Majesty, are as 
 old as the Conquest ”) ; followed by the tour with 
 Lord Westport in Ireland, and the radiant episodes 
 of the beautiful Miss Blake and the beautiful and 
 youthful Lady Carbery. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XI 
 
 Crisis number one is the flight from Manchester 
 Grammar School. This was in the summer of 1802, 
 when De Quincey was just on seventeen. To the 
 elopement from the grammar school succeed those 
 Lavengro-like wanderings in Wales on the guinea 
 a week allowed him by his guardians. This he calls 
 “a very pleasant existence 7 ’; but inasmuch as he 
 would sometimes spend in a day the half of his 
 weekly dole, there must on other days have been 
 pangs of the stomach, and there were nights of 
 bivouacking under hedges. Trivial, however, were 
 these experiences, and probably delightful, in com- 
 parison with those that came next. From Wales he 
 took a mad dive into London. 
 
 “The storms of London,” and the “certain 
 miseries of London,” were duly encountered in the 
 quest of money from the Jews. A creature less 
 debile than De Quincey, in all that had to do with 
 the practical ordering of life, might easily have 
 extricated himself from the slough, but he was 
 within a little of sinking in it. ITunger he certainly 
 knew T , and he came very near to knowledge of star- 
 vation. For us, De Quincey’s readers, these sharp 
 and dolorous experiences are aesthetically good. To 
 them we owe a whole swarm of those emotions 
 which De Quincey alone, among the English 
 writers of his day, is capable of giving us. What 
 scenes are those in the dirty warren of Dell, that 
 amiable ghoul, in Greek Street, Soho, where at 
 night De Quincey shares a horse-rug with the 
 famished little serf-girl of ten — De Quincey, who 
 had informed King George that his family was old 
 at the Conquest ! And to this epoch, when early 
 and late he roamed the terraces of Oxford Street, 
 belongs the exquisite and aching romance of Ann, the 
 poor little street-walker — a child like himself — whose 
 memory haunts him through life, whose soft sad 
 spirit irradiates some of the rarest dreams of the 
 “ Confessions,” and who, as we may fancy, is finally 
 transfigured in “ The Daughter of Lebanon.” But De 
 Quincey himself is all this time snatching the crusts 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xii 
 
 from Dell's breakfast-table, pretty nearly starving, 
 getting himself into a fit condition for opium. A 
 heritage to us, through the inspiration he was after- 
 wards to suck from them, to him these passages 
 were scarifying. They prepare us for, and are the 
 immediate prelude to that great parenthesis in De 
 Quincey's life which is filled by the “ mighty drug." 
 It is a De Quincey in torment from the effects of 
 semi-starvation in London who presently becomes 
 the English Opium-Eater. When he vaunts him- 
 self hedonist, eudaemonist, seeker after pleasure, and 
 avoider of all forms of suffering, we are to remember 
 that De Quincey has his own intense and heightened 
 way of putting things to us, and that his pleasures 
 were all but solely intellectual. Never was man 
 more completely engrossed in the things of the 
 intellect. Scarcely less great than the dreamer under 
 the poppy's spell is the philosopher, metaphysician, 
 and subtle critic, who is debtor only to his vast 
 and splendid erudition, his imagination, his analytic 
 strength, and his absolute command of the entire 
 wealth of our language. But we come back to the 
 point, that these first days in London, with their 
 regular knowledge of hunger, breaking and shattering 
 De Quincey's constitution, left him an easy prey to 
 the dreadful remedy he pitched upon. Magically 
 rescued from the “ storms of London," he is de- 
 posited, in the autumn of 1803, at Worcester College, 
 Oxford. 
 
 De Quincey at Oxford is a somewhat shadowy 
 figure. Dr. Cotton, Provost of Worcester, remem- 
 bered him as a “ quiet and studious man," adding 
 that he was “ remarkable, even in those days, for 
 his rare conversational powers, and for his extra- 
 ordinary stock of information upon every subject 
 that was started." Following his own line of study, 
 his reading was immense and multifarious — Latin, 
 Greek, German, Hebrew, and the stores of English 
 literature. He began his correspondence with 
 Wordsworth. After he had come brilliantly through 
 the written examination for his degree, Dr. Good- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Xlll 
 
 enough of Christchurch, one of the examiners, 
 declared to a member of Worcester College, “You 
 have sent us the cleverest man I ever met with ; if 
 his viva voce examination to-morrow corresponds 
 with what he has done to-day, he will carry every- 
 thing before him.” That second examination, for 
 reasons which were never known, De Quincey did 
 not undertake. 
 
 But what we are chiefly to remark is, that it was 
 during the period of his residence at Oxford that 
 De Quincey first tasted opium. The memorable 
 date is ; 1 804, the season oFThe year either spring 
 or autumn. He was on one of his many flying visits 
 to London, and had been “ suffering severely from 
 a neuralgic affection.” A college friend whom he 
 met in the street suggested or recommended opium ; 
 and near the “ stately Pantheon ” De Quincey dis- 
 covered the “ beatific chemist” who, for a considera- 
 tion of coppers, became forthwith the “ minister of 
 celestial pleasures.” 
 
 “ Here,” cries he, “ was a panacea, a cjjdpfiaKov 
 vryi revOes, for all human woes : here was the secret 
 of happiness, about which philosophers had dis- 
 puted for so many ages, at once discovered : happi- 
 ness might now be bought for a penny, and carried 
 in the waistcoat pocket ; portable ecstasies might be 
 had corked up in a pint bottle, and peace of mind 
 could be sent down in gallons by the mail-coach.” 
 But he laughs not long whose solace is in opium. 
 
 In the beginning, and for a considerable time, 
 De Quincey’s indulgences were occasional, and not 
 altogether excessive. He limited himself to what 
 he calls a carefully precalculated opium -debauch, 
 say about once in three weeks ; and for eight years, 
 with something like impunity, he dailies with the 
 drug. At Grasmere, in 1812, a bachelor still, and 
 Wordsworth's friend and neighbour, he lifts the 
 curtain on his mountain snuggery. He still takes 
 opium, he says, and has “ taken it unblushingly ” 
 ever since “ the rainy Sunday,” and the “ stately 
 Pantheon,” and the “ beatific chemist.” Even so. 
 
XIV 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 “ And how do I find my health after all this opium- 
 eating ? in short, how do I do ? Why, pretty well, 
 I thank you, reader. In fact ... I was never 
 better in my life than in the spring of 1812.” Even 
 yet, his intimate and most terrific experience of the 
 opium-horrors had not begun, but the cloud was 
 very soon to settle on his brain. The year 1816 
 he describes as “a year of brilliant water (to speak 
 after the manner of jewellers), set, as it were, and 
 insulated in the gloomy umbrage of opium. 57 In 
 this year he had married the devoted Margaret 
 Simpson, daughter of the Westmoreland dalesman, 
 
 and the “ dear M 77 of a beautiful passage in the 
 
 ££ Confessions 77 ; and in anticipation of the event he 
 had reduced his daily allowance of opium from 8000 
 to 1000 drops. Terrible, in no long time, was the 
 reaction ; and on into 1819 we find him once again 
 t£ under the full dominion of the fell agent, 77 rising 
 to “ his 8000 drops per diem , or even sometimes to 
 12,000 drops. 77 Days of listlessness, torpor, and 
 misery, and nights of appalling dreams were now 
 his portion. His Iliad of woes was unfolding. Un- 
 utterably wretched as were his waking hours, he 
 dreaded ‘ yet more the visions of the night. “ At 
 length I grew afraid to sleep ; and I shrunk from 
 it as from the most savage tortures. 77 He tells us 
 that he seemed sometimes to have lived for seventy 
 or a hundred years in one night ; <£ nay, sometimes 
 had feelings representative of a millennium passed in 
 that time. 77 He lived with the ££ cursed crocodile,” 
 was buried fathoms deep beneath the ocean, and 
 hidden in Oriental tombs. Madness threatened 
 him, suicide was in his thoughts. Of his wife’s 
 service of love through these days and years of 
 agitation, he says that it went above the ministra- 
 tions of Electra of old. Writing to Miss Mitford 
 as late as 1846 (or thereabouts), he speaks of the 
 t£ undecipherable horror 77 that day and night broods 
 over his nervous system. ££ Whatever I may have 
 been writing is suddenly wrapt, as it were, in one 
 sheet of consuming fire — the very paper is poisoned 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XV 
 
 to my eyes.” Eternally in his ears, like a knell, 
 sounded the words, “ Suffered and was buried.” 
 During his many sad probations, terms of semi- 
 daylight yielding to Cimmerian darkness, he wastes 
 himself in the struggle to untwist the “ accursed 
 chain.” Immense exercise, he fancied, might restore 
 him ; and a letter to the astronomer Nichol, at about 
 the date of the budget to Miss Mitford, shows him 
 pacing, within the forty-four yards’ circuit of his 
 garden, a thousand miles in ninety days. But, if 
 life were to be sustained without lunacy, this weight 
 of insufferable misery, and dread of mere existence, 
 must somehow be got rid of. The prostrate man 
 does at last arise, the skirts of the tempest slowly 
 withdraw, peace begins to settle within his borders, 
 and from the year 1844 the terror gradually subsides. 
 But by no pen save De Quincey’s may the “ pleasures 
 and pains of opium ” be fitly celebrated ; and to the 
 gorgeous page of the “ Confessions ” the reader shall go. 
 
 It was with these “Confessions of an English Opium- / 
 Eater ” that he entered on his calling. Hitherto he 
 had been, not indeed entirely obscure, but known ~ 
 only within a smallish circle of distinguished men. 
 
 At Grasmere, where he held Wordsworth’s cottage 
 for seven-and-twenty years, he was naturally a Lakist. 
 Wordsworth (whom he was among the first to appre- 
 ciate) he had been for some time acquainted with. 
 Coleridge he knew, and Southey, and with John 
 Wilson (Christopher North) he had begun to 
 cement what was to be one of the closest and most 
 intimate friendships of his life. The diminutive 
 De Quincey and the leonine and herculean Wilson 
 took prodigious walks together. His intimacy with 
 Charles and Mary Lamb had begun. Mrs. Siddons 
 he had met, who had talked to him of Johnson and 
 of Garrick. With Wilson he had spent the main 
 V_part of a winter in Edinburgh, and had there en- 
 countered, among others, Sir William Hamilton, 
 William Allan the painter (“ afterwards Sir William 
 Allan and President of the Royal Academy ”), and 
 John Gibson Lockhart. Of Scott and Jeffrey, says 
 
xv; 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Dr. Masson, “ he seems to have seen nothing, or 
 nothing more than their physiognomies in the streets 
 or the Parliament House. ” Already, at about thirty 
 years of age, De Quincey was a scholar of depth and 
 range ; and, his invincible shyness notwithstanding, 
 had begun to put forth those powers of conversa- 
 tion which amazed, fascinated, and enchanted every 
 listener. Says R. P. Gillies (dubbed by Mr. Page 
 “ a sort of Scottish Crabb Robinson ”), one of the 
 Wilson circle at this date : “ The talk might be of 
 4 beeves/ and he could grapple with them, if expected 
 to do so ; but his musical cadences were not in 
 keeping with such work, and in a few minutes (not 
 without some strictly logical sequence) he would 
 escape at will from beeves to butterflies, and thence 
 to the soul’s immortality, to Plato, and Kant, and 
 Schelling, and Fichte, to Milton’s early years and 
 Shakspere’s sonnets, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, 
 to Homer and yEschylus, to St. Thomas of Aquin, 
 St. Basil, and St. Chrysostom.” De Quincey’s very 
 voice seems to have been extraordinary, and is 
 indeed by Gillies expressly so described : a voice, 
 as it were, out of dreamland, but “ the most musical 
 and impressive of voices ” ; and “ every one of his 
 sentences was woven into the most perfect logical 
 texture, and uttered in a tone of sustained melody.” 
 Such, in these days, was the glamour that surrounded 
 him, such the charm that he exerted over the young 
 men of Wilson’s set, the nascent genius of Edinburgh. 
 Untouched as yet, however, is De Quincey’s pen. 
 That period of mortal frost ensues, in which, “ shut 
 as into a cave of Trophonius,” the opium, spells are 
 effectually laid upon him. We have seen him tuss- 
 ling with them. Breaking loose, he plans “ a great 
 philosophic work,” to be called after Spinoza’s De 
 Emendatione Humani Intellectus . It is abandoned. 
 Then he reads Ricardo on Political Economy, which, 
 he says, “ acted like a charm,” and forthwith draws 
 up his own “ Prolegomena to all Future Systems 
 of Political Economy.” This again is but a flare. A 
 desperate descent was made from the altitudes of 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XVII 
 
 Spinoza and Ricardo into the office of the Westmore- 
 land Gazette . This journal De Quincey piloted for 
 a while, with no conspicuous success — albeit there 
 is a hint that from Wordsworth and Coleridge, or 
 Wordsworth and Southey, some promise of help 
 had been secured. The editorship (at a guinea a 
 week !) came to an end. 
 
 £< Not here , O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee A 
 
 At this date (1819-20) he had tried his hand both 
 in Blackwood and in the Quarterly Review , proof 
 sufficient that he drove no mechanical or ordinary 
 quill ; but, in the matter of money, things at home 
 were growing very ticklish, and prospects there were 
 next to none. He had losses, but learned no pru- 
 dence from them, and Mr. Page reports his liber- 
 alities as excessive. He had given Coleridge, 
 through Cottle the publisher, ^300. “ Failures of 
 
 business firms/’ Mr. Page informs us, “ involving 
 great sacrifices of his capital, did not make him 
 slower to aid his friends . . . Loans of large sums 
 were given in many instances, some of which were 
 honourably repaid, some not.” But at this tide in 
 his affairs, buckle to he must ; and the summer of 
 1821 finds him once again in London, “to seek 
 engagements as a writer.” He is suffering still. 
 
 “ I was ill at that time,” he says, “ and for years 
 afterwards — ill from the effects of opium upon the 
 liver ; and one primary indication of any illness 
 felt in that organ is peculiar depression of spirits. 
 Hence arose a singular effect of reciprocal action in 
 maintaining a state of dejection. From the original 
 physical depression caused by the derangement of 
 the liver, arose a sympathetic depression of the 
 mind, disposing me to believe that I never could 
 extricate myself ; and from this belief arose, by 
 reaction, a thousandfold increase of the physical 
 depression. I began to view my unhappy London 
 life — a life of literary toils, odious to my heart — 
 as a permanent state of exile from my Westmoreland 
 home. My three eldest children ” — all his life De 
 
xviii INTRODUCTION 
 
 Quincey loved children with the tenderest of 
 passions — “ at that time in the most interesting 
 stages of childhood and infancy, were in Westmore- 
 land ; and so ' powerful was my feeling (derived 
 merely from a deranged liver) of some long, never- 
 ending separation from my family, that at length, 
 in pure weakness of mind, I was obliged ‘ to relin- 
 quish my daily walks in Hyde Park and Kensington 
 Gardens, from the misery of seeing children in 
 multitudes that too forcibly recalled my own.” 
 
 At times, nevertheless — and chiefly, be it added, 
 when the drug had been at work — he recovered a re- 
 markable glow of spirits ; and during one of these arti- 
 ficial respites it was that, in the autumn of 1821, De 
 Quincey wrote the greater part of the “Confessions. 7 ’ 
 “ These fi Confessions 7 were written, 77 says Mr. H. 
 G. Bohn, in Lowndes’s Bibliographer' s Manual , “ in a 
 little room at the back of what later became Mr. H. 
 G. Bohn’s premises, No. 4 York Street, Covent 
 Garden, where Mr. De Quincey resided, in com- 
 parative seclusion, for several years. He had pre- 
 viously lived in the neighbourhood of Soho Square, 
 and for some years was a frequent visitor to the 
 shop of Mr. Bohn’s father, then the principal dealer 
 in German books. The writer remembers that he 
 always seemed to speak in a kind of whisper. 77 
 
 The two papers that were to become classic ap- 
 peared in September and October of 182 1 in the pages 
 of the London Magazine . This, the leading periodical 
 of London, had just become the property of Messrs. 
 Taylor & Hessey ; and to these gentlemen — intelli- 
 gent and liberal employers they evidently were — 
 De Quincey had been introduced by Lamb. The 
 success of the “ Confessions 77 was instantaneous and 
 emphatic. To the September contribution was 
 appended a brief but flattering editorial note, and 
 in October the editors were crowing loudly over 
 their new star. “We are not often in the habit 
 of eulogising our own work, 77 said they, “ but we 
 cannot neglect the opportunity which the following 
 explanatory note gives us of calling the attention 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XIX 
 
 of our readers to the deep, eloquent, and masterly 
 paper which stands first in our present number.” 
 In a word, De. Quincey at one stroke was incorporate 
 in English letters. 
 
 Among the brotherhood of the London Magazine 
 was Mr. Thomas Hood. Sub-editor he was at this 
 date, and had calls to make in the way of business 
 upon the other Thomas. That erratic, timid little 
 genius, whose pen evoked such dreadful or bewitch- 
 ing harmonies, captivated Hood, who gives him 
 place in his “ Literary Reminiscences ” : — 
 
 “ I have found him at home, quite at home, 
 in the midst of a German Ocean of Literature, 
 in 4 storm — flooding all the floor, the table and 
 the chairs — billows of books, tossing, tumbling, 
 surging open, — on such occasions I have willingly 
 listened by the hour, whilst the Philosopher, stand- 
 ing, with his eyes fixed on one side of the room, 
 seemed to be less speaking than reading from £ a 
 handwriting on the wall ’ . . . Marry, I have one 
 of his Confessions with his own name and mark to 
 it : an apology for a certain stain on his MS., the 
 said stain being a large purplish ring. ‘ Within that 
 circle none durst drink but he ’ — in fact, the impres- 
 sion, coloured, of a tumbler of laudanum negus, 
 warm, without sugar.” 
 
 De Quincey had entered now on what Dr. Masson 
 calls “ the first burst of his magazine articles and 
 cognate publications.” Roughly, it is a four years’ 
 span, from 1821 to 1825, between De Quincey’s 
 thirty-seventh and his forty-first year. Ceasing, in 
 about 1824, his connection with the London , he was 
 at once pounced on by Charles Knight, who counted 
 among the writers for Knighfs Quarterly Magazine 
 the “ brilliant young* Macaulay and the brilliant 
 young Praed.” De Quincey, coming late upon the 
 scene, but with such “ immense, if unintended pre- 
 paration,” could deposit treasures that were strangely 
 new to British magazines ; and had the field been 
 wide enough, and he himself less fastidious in choice 
 of subject and performance, he might have spread 
 
XX 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 himself as he had pleased. But he was earning very 
 little ; and the diffident and almost monastic habit 
 of his life — which was partly character, but greatly 
 encouraged by opium — shut him out almost com- 
 pletely from the social fruition of the literary dis- 
 tinction he had won. He never knew a large 
 celebrity. Those friends who would at any cost 
 partake of his Elysian talk must drag him from his 
 lair of nights. “ Oh for an hour of De Quincey ! ” 
 Charles Knight exclaims, whose guest De Quincey 
 was for a few perturbing but delightful weeks. No 
 host of De Quincey’s could count upon him for an 
 hour. Returning home late one evening, Knight 
 perceived him flown, and the flight held something 
 of mystery. He traced the eloper to a “ miserable 
 lodging ” on the Surrey side of the Thames. De 
 Quincey had received a draft on a London bank, 
 payable at twenty-one days’ sight, had taken it to 
 Lombard Street, and had been told that he must 
 wait for his cash “ until the time was up.” Thinking 
 that he had committed or attempted to commit a 
 fraud on Lombard Street, he had fled over the 
 river. It was “ with surprise, as well as delight, that 
 he received Mr. Knight’s assurance that the difficulty 
 about the draft was not insuperable, and he might 
 have the cash at once.” Such plights he knew in 
 London. Happiness was in the main a stranger 
 to him here. 
 
 He wrote to Wilson in the February of 1825 : 
 “ With a good publisher and leisure to premeditate 
 what I write, I might yet liberate myself ; after 
 which, having paid everybody, I would slink into 
 some dark corner, educate my children, and show 
 my face in the world no more.” He was back in 
 Westmoreland towards the end of 1825. Between 
 1826 and 1830 his most important work was given 
 to Blackwood, a connection that drew him once 
 again to Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, urged thereto 
 by the charming friend and counsellor, Dorothy 
 Wordsworth, De Quincey settled for another ten 
 years. Here he lost two sons, and, a still sorer and 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XXI 
 
 more calamitous stroke, the gentle wife that had 
 been the world to him and his. In 1840, the most 
 helpless of widowers, and nearing fifty-five, he moved 
 to that cottage near Lasswade, some seven miles 
 out of Edinburgh, which was from this time to the 
 end his best and happiest refuge. 
 
 He had been writing, fagging on, as Keats said 
 of himself, for nearly twenty years. If he seldom 
 wrote but under stress and pressure of the hour, 
 he had a lofty ideal of the literary calling, and his 
 desires of perfection compelled him to turn to the 
 best and most consummate account all material, of 
 whatsoever kind, that came beneath his hand. De 
 Quincey’s work is never in the least degree per- 
 functory. The very lightest and most fugitive of his 
 essays show something of the master’s touch. Is 
 it remembered, by the way, that almost everything 
 he ever wrote is of the fugitive kind ? De Quincey 
 was solely, or all but solely, a magazine writer. We 
 have no book, properly speaking, from his pen. He 
 has descended upon posterity in fourteen volumes 
 of magazine articles. De Quincey is almost the 
 only writer of his kind holding a place among the 
 leaders of English literature ; and, if we except the 
 great French critic, Sainte-Beuve, whose reputation 
 rests chiefly on the collected newspaper articles 
 called the Cau series de Lundi , there is scarcely an 
 analogous case in Europe. At the date we are 
 come to, these “ fugitive ” essays number about 
 one hundred and fifty ; and the range and variety 
 of them are indeed amazing. They include auto- 
 biography, biography, history, description, romance, 
 speculation and research, politics, political economy, 
 theology, metaphysics, and literary theory and criti- 
 cism, in addition to all the examples of those “ modes 
 of impassioned prose ” — prose phantasies and lyrics 
 — in which the genius of De Quincey, scaling the 
 heavens or searching the abysses, finds its supreme 
 and flawless utterance. 
 
 “ Seven miles out of Edinburgh,” says Dr. Masson, 
 “ a little beyond the village of Lasswade, on the slope 
 
XXII 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 of a country by-road which descends steeply to the 
 picturesque banks of the well-wooded Esk river, near 
 Polton Mills, stands a cottage, formerly known as 
 Mavis Bush Cottage, but now aggrandised in guide- 
 books into De Quincey Cottage,, or even De Quincey 
 Villa, in recollection of the fact that De Quincey was 
 for a good while its tenant. It is an elegant enough 
 little rustic cottage, of eight rooms, with something 
 of a garden at the back, and pretty surroundings.” 
 Here then was De Quincey in 1 840, in the affectionate 
 keeping of his six surviving children, of whom the 
 eldest daughter, Margaret, was now the angel in the 
 house. Not at any time, however, or in any place, 
 is De Quincey to be thought of as regularly and 
 absolutely domiciled, after the manner of ordinary 
 men. The Opium-Eater was an incalculable person. 
 His ways were bewildering, and bewildering his 
 habits of work. Margaret says playfully that he had 
 “ snowed ” them out of house after house with his 
 ever-mounting accumulations of books and papers. 
 For some temporary purpose, somebody had once, 
 with great imprudence, placed a bath in his study. 
 De Quincey seized on it joyfully as a new receptacle 
 for books, and a “ book-case ” it was for ever. Every 
 lodging or hiding-place he had any time retreated to 
 was “ plugged in its turn with a chaos of books and 
 papers, amid which the little man sat and worked, 
 ruefully recollecting all the while that he had left 
 unknown deposits of books and papers, in tea-chests 
 and band-boxes, in some of those previous lodgings 
 and hiding-holes, the landladies of which he dared 
 not go near and dreaded visits from.” Dr. Masson 
 tells us that he had sometimes the rents of “at least 
 four separate sets of lodgings ” all running on simul- 
 taneously. Lasswade, then, if his abode proper, was 
 not in these later years the only one that knew him ; 
 he had an incurable passion for hiding himself “ at his 
 option” in some obscure Edinburgh lodging. He 
 was writing principally now for Blackwood and Tait, 
 and with as splendid an activity of the understanding 
 as ever ; and from the middle of the forties he was 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XX111 
 
 certainly looked upon as one of the characters of 
 Edinburgh. Though evening and night were still 
 the seasons of his choice for a ramble of many miles, 
 he was occasionally seen, in his odd attire, peering 
 at the contents of a bookseller’s window, or turning 
 over the volumes at a stall, and folks as they passed 
 would nudge one another. Endless were the stories 
 he gave rise to : his eccentricity, his draughts of 
 opium, his whimsical, rash ways of bestowing his 
 money. Where money was concerned, all his friends 
 knew that the profound political economist was as 
 simple as a child. Christopher North has said that if 
 De Quincey fancied himself ^5 in debt, the thought 
 would plunge him in depression. Yet was he the 
 “prince of almoners for sorners and beggars,” and 
 the deferential manner of his giving suggested less 
 the donor than the taker of the alms. Needless to 
 say, he was often without a doit, and now and then 
 his shifts were ludicrous. One story in illustration 
 is Mr. Hill Burton's. Presenting himself late one 
 night at the house of an Edinburgh friend, De 
 Quincey explained, “ with all the skill and pathos of 
 his beautiful rhetoric,” his dire need of 7s. 6d. The 
 friend was so manifestly puzzled that De Quincey, 
 thinking he was about to be repulsed, began to hunt 
 through all his pockets, and presently produced and 
 tendered by way* of security for the loan a tumbled 
 note for ^50. It was the friend’s belief, says Mr. 
 Hill Burton, that had he taken the ^50 in exchange 
 for the 7s. 6d., De Quincey would never again have 
 alluded to the matter. 
 
 Endless at this date were the devices of literary 
 Edinburgh to get the wonderful little man to dinner. 
 A promise might have been wrung from him, but 
 would he come ? Sometimes he did come, under 
 convoy, and then the night was memorable. De 
 Quincey’s costume on such an occasion, Mr. Hill 
 Burton remarks, “consisted of the fragments of 
 apparel nearest at hand. Had chance thrown to him 
 a court single-breasted coat, with a bishop’s apron, a 
 kilt, and top-boots, in these he would have made his 
 
xxiv INTRODUCTION 
 
 entry.” But De Quincey might wear what he pleased; 
 his wizard’s talk was what you wanted. Dr. Masson 
 remembers one of these famous nights, in a room 
 high up in a tall house of the Old Town. A strong, 
 inviolable man had haled De Quincey to the scene. 
 <c There -were but few present. ... In addition to 
 the general impression of diminutiveness and fragility, 
 one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head 
 and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his 
 small wrinkly visage and gentle deep-set eyes. In 
 his talk, which was in the form of really harmonious 
 and considerate colloquy, and not at all in that of 
 monologue, I remember chiefly two incidents. The 
 birthday of some one present having been mentioned, 
 De Quincey immediately said, ‘ Oh, that is the anni- 
 versary of the battle of So-and-so ’ ; and he seemed 
 ready to catch as many birthdays as might be thrown 
 him on the spot, and almanack them all round in a 
 similar manner from memory. The other incident 
 was his use of a phrase very beautiful in itself, and 
 which seemed characteristic of his manner of think- 
 ing. Describing some visionary scene or other, he 
 spoke of it as consisting of ‘ discs of light and inter- 
 spaces of gloom ’ ; and I noticed that, with all the 
 fine distinctness of the phrase, both optical and 
 musical, it came from him with no sort of conscious- 
 ness of its being out of the way in talk, and with no 
 reference whatever to its being appreciated or not by 
 those around him, but simply because, whoever might 
 be listening, he would be thinking as De Quincey.” 
 Dr. Masson brings out in this passage a merit 
 in De Quincey’s talk with which it has been almost 
 universally credited. He never monopolised the 
 table. He did not domineer like the great Lexico- 
 grapher. He did not claim the night as Coleridge 
 did. He did not harangue in the fashion of Carlyle. 
 He did not rub his argument into you in Macaulay’s 
 manner. He was as good a listener as he was a 
 talker : “ always,” says the Rev. Francis Jacox, 
 who knew something of the Lass wade life, “ for 
 giving way ; scrupulously on the watch for any, the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XXV 
 
 slightest, token of interruption, objection, comment, 
 assent, question, or answer — nothing could exceed 
 the tone of unaffected deference with which he gave 
 heed as well as ear to whatever his companion might 
 have to say.” De Quincey has given to Coleridge 
 a great place among the talkers he had known. His 
 own is probably a greater. He understood the art 
 of talk — “ the whole flotsam and jetsam of two 
 minds forced in and in upon the matter in hand 
 from every point of the compass ” — as no other 
 talker of his day understood it, and as, in our own 
 day, it has been understood only by Robert Steven- 
 son. De Quincey’s talk ploughed beneath the surface 
 of life, called up instances, spread into generalities, 
 threw out the voices and systems of men and nations, 
 from Athens to London, and sank into the bosom 
 of things. One of his biographers has regretted that 
 De Quincey had no Boswell. I cannot believe that 
 any Boswell would have conserved for posterity’s 
 ear the very faintest echo of the true De Quinceyan 
 talk. Angelic it was, but not the wit of angels could 
 have imitated it. Has not Christopher North made 
 the effort, in the Nodes Ambrosiance ? — and with 
 how sorry a result ! 
 
 But when all is said, it is in the cottage home at 
 Lasswade that we receive our most grateful impres- 
 sions of De Quincey. Lasswade it was that, after 
 
 “ dear M ” had landed on the silent shore, 
 
 focussed his whole affections. The devoted hus- 
 band — and this, in all his errors and infirmities, he 
 had ever been — was now the thrice-devoted father. 
 One of the letters to Miss Mitford reveals a bright 
 and happy scene. De Quincey writes to her: “My 
 companions, as you know, are my three daughters ” 
 — the household was now growing smaller — “ who, 
 if it should be found that they have no other endow- 
 ment from the bounty of nature, have this one, 
 better perhaps than all that I could ask for them 
 from the most potent of fairies, viz., that they live 
 in the most absolute harmony I have ever witnessed. 
 Such a sound as that of dissension in any shade or 
 
XXVI 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 degree I have not once heard issuing from their lips. 
 And it gladdens me beyond measure that all day long 
 I hear from their little drawing-room intermitting 
 sounds of gaiety and laughter, the most natural and 
 spontaneous. Three sisters more entirely loving to 
 each other, and more unaffectedly drawing their 
 pleasures from sources that will always continue to 
 lie within their power — viz., books and music — I 
 have not either known or heard of.” 
 
 All allowance made for his “ wanderings and fugi- 
 tations,” it was at Lasswade that De Quincey lived 
 oftenest in his later years ; and it was there, Dr. 
 Masson observes, “ that he would have been detained 
 always by those dearest to him.” He loved an 
 evening with his daughters in the drawing-room. 
 Music was a passion with him, but after one of the 
 daughters had sat at the piano, the father would 
 contribute his own share to the pleasures of the 
 evening. “ The newspaper was brought out ” — it 
 is one of the daughters that speaks — “ and he, 
 telling in his own delightful way, rather than reading, 
 the news, would, on questions from this one or that 
 one of the party, often including young friends of 
 his children, neighbours, or visitors from distant 
 places, illuminate the subject with such a wealth of 
 memories, of old stories, of past or present ex- 
 periences, of humour, of suggestion, even of pro- 
 phecy, as by its very wealth makes it impossible to 
 give any taste of it.” There were excursions and 
 alarums, too, in a small way. “ He was not,” adds 
 the same daughter with a delightful touch, “ a 
 reassuring man for nervous people to live with, as 
 those nights were exceptions on which he did not 
 set something on fire, the commonest incident being 
 for some one to look up from book or work to say 
 casually, 4 Papa, your hair is on fire ; ’ of which a 
 calm, £ Is it, my love ? ’ and a hand rubbing out the 
 blaze was all the notice taken.” 
 
 It was in the autumn of 1849 that De Quincey 
 made the acquaintance of Mr. James Hogg, who 
 was to be the first English publisher of his Collected 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 XXV.il 
 
 Works. Mr. Hogg, as he tells us, was one evening 
 fn his office at Canonmills, a suburb of Edinburgh, 
 when he was informed that a gentleman “ urgently 
 wished ” to see him. “ Going down, I was con- 
 fronted by a noticeably small figure, attired in a 
 capacious garment which was much too large, and 
 which served the purpose of both under and over- 
 coat.” This, of course, was the Opium-Eater, who 
 had come to offer himself as a contributor to Hogg's 
 Instructor. “ I was much pleased,” continues the 
 Instructor himself, “ at the offer of the services of 
 so distinguished a writer. The contribution which 
 he had brought with him was forthwith drawn from 
 the capacious inner pocket of his coat ; but, before 
 being handed to me, I was both surprised and 
 amused at a small handbrush being drawn from 
 the same receptable, and the manuscript carefully 
 brushed before it was handed to me. This operation 
 was one which I afterwards found that he invariably 
 performed. The contribution was then and there 
 accepted.” 
 
 It was the beginning of an association which 
 lasted until De Quincey’s death. The event of 
 chief importance arising from it was the publication 
 of the Collected Works, under the author's own 
 editorial supervision. This was the great labour 
 of De Quincey’s closing years. He was aided in 
 it by the American reprint of Messrs. Ticknor & 
 Fields of Boston, which, begun in 1851 and com- 
 pleted in 1855, ran to twenty volumes. In Edin- 
 burgh, at No. 42 Lothian Street, in the very friendly 
 keeping of the widowed Mrs. Wilson and her sister 
 Miss Stark, De Quincey, in his sixty-seventh year, 
 settled heroically down to his gigantic task. “ It was 
 one long struggle between De Quincey and the print- 
 ing press. A message-boy, named Roderick, was kept 
 always ready at the one end, to be shot to Lothian 
 Street or Lasswade for copy when the supply failed ; 
 at the other end was De Quincey himself, groaning 
 and working.” Miss Stark (who was alive when 
 Dr. Masson’s biography of De Quincey, in the 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xxviii 
 
 English Men of Letters series, appeared) remembered 
 that he had “ a peculiar way of notching each slip 
 of manuscript when he had done with it. He had 
 a secret meaning in the practice, which he promised 
 to tell her ; but he never did.” The good Miss 
 Stark, dimly aware of the little lodger’s eminence, 
 grew so familiar with his dealings with the Press, 
 that, says Dr. Masson, “ she began to fancy she was 
 herself a kind of literary lady.” 
 
 In the autumn of 1859 the thirteenth volume of 
 the Collected Works had been issued, “ and the 
 fourteenth and last volume was all but ready for the 
 press, when it became evident that De Quincey’s 
 work in the world was over. His life had gone to 
 the extreme extent for which it had been wound up, 
 and it was no definite malady, but the mere weak- 
 ness of old age that made him take to his bed.” 
 Peacefully, on the 8th of December 1859, he passed 
 away. 
 
 There were aspects of his character in which De 
 Quincey was not great ; but he who would never 
 set himself up for a judge of humanity shall not be 
 judged censoriously here. He was “ solitary and 
 full of sorrow.” Amid storms outward and inward, 
 and through poverty and pains, he had found it hard 
 to guide his life aright, in what we call the practical 
 way. He was little capable of action under any 
 practical rule. Sweet and charitable of soul he 
 was, none the less ; a lover of his kind, and steeped 
 in pity. Pie knew nothing of self-sophistication, he 
 had no taint of worldliness. Few men have been 
 more lovable. 
 
 In the West Churchyard of Edinburgh lies De 
 Quincey, who has extended the horizon of our 
 dreams. 
 
 TIGHE HOPKINS. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
AUTOBIfGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 FIRST CHAPTER 
 
 THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 About the close of my sixth year, suddenly the first 
 chapter of my life came to a violent termination ; 
 that chapter which, even within the gates of re- 
 covered Paradise, might merit a remembrance. 
 “ Life is finished /” was the secret misgiving of my 
 heart ; for the heart of infancy is as apprehensive as 
 that of maturest wisdom in relation to any capital 
 wound inflicted on the happiness. “ Life is finished l 
 Finished it is/” was the hidden meaning that, half- 
 unconsciously to myself, lurked within my sighs ; and, 
 as bells heard from a distance on a summer evening 
 seem charged at times with an articulate form of 
 words, some monitory message, that rolls round un- 
 ceasingly, even so for me some noiseless and sub- 
 terraneous voice seemed to chant continually a secret 
 word, made audible only to my own heart — that 
 “now is the blossoming of life withered for ever.” 
 Not that such words formed themselves vocally 
 within my ear, or issued audibly from my lips : but 
 such a whisper stole silently to my heart. Yet in 
 what sense could that be true ? For an infant not 
 more than six years old, was it possible that the 
 promises of life had been really blighted ? or its 
 golden pleasures exhausted? Had I seen Rome? 
 Had I read Milton ? Had I heard Mozart ? No. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 4 
 
 St. Peter’s, the Paradise Lost , the divine melodies of 
 Don Giovanni , all alike were as yet unrevealed to me, 
 and not more through the accidents of my position 
 than through the necessity of my yet imperfect sensi- 
 bilities. Raptures there might be in arrear ; but rap- 
 tures are modes of troubled pleasure. The peace, 
 the rest, the central security which belong to love 
 that is past all understanding — these^>uld retain ? o 
 more. Such a love, so unfathomable — such a peace, 
 so unvexed by storms, or the fear of storms — had 
 brooded over those four latter years of my infancy, 
 which brought me into special relations to my eldest 
 sister; she beirr r at this pence t oree years older 
 than myself. The circumstances which attended 
 the suddfe dissolution of this most tender connec- 
 tion I will here rehearse. And, that I may do so 
 more intelligibly, I will first describe that serene 
 ,and sequestered position which we. occupied in 
 life . 1 . •• - 
 
 Any expression of personal vanity, intruding upon 
 impassioned records, is fatal to their effect — as being 
 incompatible with that absorption of spirit and that 
 
 1 As occasions arise in these Sketches, when, merely for the 
 purposes of intelligibility, it becomes requisite to call into 
 notice such personal distinctions in my family as otherwise 
 might be unimportant, I here record the entire list of my 
 brothers, and sisters, according to their order of succession ; 
 and Miltonically I include myself; having surely as much 
 logical right to count myself in the series of my own brothers 
 as Milton could have to pronounce Adam the goodliest of his 
 own sons. First and last, we counted as eight children — viz., 
 four brothers and four sisters, though never counting more than 
 six living at once — viz., i. William ,. older than myself by more 
 than five years ; 2. Elizabeth ; 3. Jane , who died in her fourth 
 year; 4. Mary; 5. myself, certainly not the goodliest man of 
 men since born my brothers ; 6. Richard , known to us all by 
 the household name of Pink, who in his after years tilted up 
 and down what might then be called his Britannic Majesty’s 
 Oceans (viz., the Atlantic and Pacific) in the quality of midship- 
 man, until Waterloo in one day put an extinguisher on that 
 whole generation of midshipmen, by extinguishing all further 
 call for their services ; 7. a second Jane; 8. Henry, a posthu- 
 mous child, who belonged to Brasenose College, Oxford, and 
 died about his twenty-sixth year. 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 5 
 
 self-oblivion in which only deep passion originates, or 
 can find a genial home. It would, therefore, to 
 myself be exceedingly painful that even a shadow, or 
 so much as a seeming expression of that tendency, 
 should creep into these reminiscences. And yet, on 
 the other hand, it is so impossible, without laying an 
 injurious restraint upon the natural movement of such 
 a narrative, to prevent oblique gleams reaching the 
 reader from such circumstances of luxury or aristo- 
 cratic elegance as surrounded my childhood, that on 
 all accounts I think it better to tell him, from the 
 first, with the simplicity of truth, in what order of 
 society my family moved at the time from which this 
 preliminary narrative is dated. Otherwise it might 
 happen that, merely by reporting faithfully the facts 
 of this early experience, I could hardly prevent the 
 reader from receiving an impression as of some higher 
 rank than did really belong to my family. And this 
 impression might seem to have been designedly 
 insinuated by myself. 
 
 My father was a merchant ; not in the sense of 
 Scotland, where it means a retail dealer, one, for 
 instance, who sells groceries in a cellar, but in the 
 English sense, a sense rigorously exclusive ; that is, 
 he was a man engaged in foreign commerce, and no 
 other ; therefore, in wholesale commerce, and no 
 other : — which last limitation of the idea is im- 
 portant, because it brings him within the benefit of 
 Cicero’s condescending distinction 1 — as one who 
 ought to be despised certainly, but not too intensely 
 to be despised even by a Roman senator. He — this 
 imperfectly despicable man — died at an early age, 
 and very soon after the incidents recorded in this 
 chapter, leaving to his family, then consisting of a 
 wife and six children, an unburdened estate pro- 
 ducing exactly ^1600 a year. Naturally, therefore, 
 at the date of my narrative — whilst he was still living 
 — he had an income very much larger, from the 
 
 1 Cicero, in a well-known passage of his Ethics , speaks of 
 trade as irredeemably base, if petty, but as not so absolutely 
 felonious if wholesale. 
 
6 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 addition of current commercial profits. Now, to any 
 man who is acquainted with commercial life as it 
 exists in England, it will readily occur, that in an 
 opulent English family of that class — opulent, though 
 not emphatically rich in a mercantile estimate — the 
 domestic economy is pretty sure to move upon a 
 scale of liberality altogether unknown amongst the 
 corresponding orders in foreign nations. The estab- 
 lishment of servants, for instance, in such houses, 
 measured even numerically against those establish- 
 ments in other nations, would somewhat surprise the 
 foreign appraiser, simply as interpreting the relative 
 station in society occupied by the English merchant. 
 But this same establishment, when measured by the 
 quality and amount of the provision made for its 
 comfort, and even elegant accommodation, would fill 
 him with twofold astonishment, as interpreting equally 
 the social valuation of the English merchant and also 
 the social valuation of the English servant : for, in 
 the truest sense, England is the paradise of household 
 servants. Liberal housekeeping, in fact, as extending 
 itself to the meanest servants, and the disdain of 
 petty parsimonies, are peculiar to England. And in 
 this respect the families of English merchants, as a 
 class, far outrun the scale of expenditure prevalent, 
 not only amongst the corresponding bodies of Con- 
 tinental nations, but even amongst the poorer sections 
 of our own nobility — though confessedly the most 
 splendid in Europe ; a fact which, since the period 
 of my infancy, I have had many personal oppor- 
 tunities for verifying both in England and in Ireland. 
 From this peculiar anomaly, affecting the domestic 
 economy of English merchants, there arises a dis- 
 turbance upon the usual scale for measuring the 
 relations of rank. The equation, so to speak, 
 between rank and the ordinary expressions of rank, 
 which usually runs parallel to the graduations of ex- 
 penditure, is here interrupted and confounded, so 
 that one rank would be collected from the name of 
 the occupation, and another rank, much higher, from 
 the splendour of the domestic menage . I warn the 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 
 
 7 
 
 reader, therefore (or, rather, my explanation has 
 already warned him), that he is not to infer, from any 
 casual indications of luxury or elegance, a corre- 
 sponding elevation of rank. 
 
 We, the children of the house, stood, in fact, upon 
 the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all 
 good influences. The prayer of Agar — “ Give me 
 neither poverty nor riches ” — was realised for us. 
 That blessing we had ; being neither too high nor too 
 low. High enough we were to see models of good 
 manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity ; 
 obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of soli- 
 tudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits 
 of wealth, with extra means of health, of intellectual 
 culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand, 
 we knew nothing of i.ts social distinctions. Not de- 
 pressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, 
 not tempted into restlessness by the consciousness of 
 privileges too aspiring', we had no motives for shame, 
 we had none for pride. Grateful, also, to this hour 
 I am that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were 
 trained to a Spartan simplicity of diet — that we fared, 
 in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. 
 And if (after the model of the Emperor Marcus 
 Aurelius) I should return thanks to Providence for 
 all the separate blessings of my early situation, these 
 four I would single out as worthy of special com- 
 memoration — that I lived in a rustic solitude ; that 
 this solitude was in England ; that my infant feel- 
 ings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not 
 by horrid, pugilistic brothers ; finally, that I and they 
 were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and 
 magnificent church. 
 
 The earliest incidents in my life which left stings 
 in my memory so as to be remembered at this day 
 were two, and both before I could have completed 
 my second year ; namely, first, a remarkable dream 
 Of terrific grandeur about a favourite nurse, which 
 is interesting to myself for this reason — that it 
 demonstrates my dreaming tendencies to have been 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 8 
 
 constitutional, and not dependent upon laudanum ; 1 
 and, secondly, the fact of having connected a pro- 
 found sense of pathos with the reappearance, very 
 early in the spring, of some crocuses. This 1 men- 
 tion as inexplicable ; for such annual resurrections of 
 plants and flowers affect us only as memorials, or 
 suggestions of some higher change, and therefore in 
 connection with the idea of death ; yet of death. I 
 could, at that time, have had no experience whatever. 
 
 This, however, I was speedily to acquire. My two 
 eldest sisters — eldest of three then living, and also 
 elder than myself — -were summoned to an early death. 
 The first who died was Jane, about two years older 
 than myself. She was three and a half, I one and a 
 half, more or less by some trifle that I do not recol- 
 lect. But death was then scarcely intelligible to me. 
 and I could not so properly be said to suffer sorrow 
 as a sad perplexity. There was another death in the 
 house about the same time — viz., of a maternal grand- 
 mother ; but, as she had come to us for the express 
 purpose of dying in her daughter’s society, and from 
 illness had lived perfectly secluded, our nursery circle 
 knew her but little, and were certainly more affected 
 by the death (which I witnessed) of a beautiful bird— 
 viz., a kingfisher, which had been injured by an 
 accident. With my sister Jane’s death (though other- 
 wise, as I have said, less sorrowful than perplexing) 
 there was, however, connected an incident which 
 made a most fearful impression upon myself, deepen- 
 ing my tendencies to thoughtfulness and abstraction 
 beyond what would seem credible for my years. If 
 there was one thing in this world from which, more 
 than from any other, nature had forced me to revolt, 
 it was brutality and violence. Now, a whisper arose 
 
 1 It is true that in those days paregoric elixir was occasionally 
 given to children in colds; and in this medicine there is a 
 small proportion of laudanum. But no medicine was ever 
 administered to any member of our nursery except under 
 medical sanction ; and this, assuredly, would not have been 
 obtained to the exhibition of laudanum in a case such as mine. 
 For I was not more than twenty-one months old ; at which age 
 the action of opium is capricious, and therefore perilous. 
 
(THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 9 
 
 in the family that a female servant, who by accident 
 was drawn off from her proper duties to attend my 
 sister Jane for a day or two, had on one occasion 
 treated her harshly, if not brutally ; and as this ill- 
 treatment happened within three or four days of her 
 death, so that the occasion of it must have been 
 some fretfulness in the poor child caused by her 
 sufferings, naturally there was a sense of awe and 
 indignation diffused through the family. I believe 
 the story never reached my mother, and possibly it 
 was exaggerated ; but upon me the effect was terrific. 
 I did not often see the person charged with this 
 cruelty ; but, when I did, my eyes sought the ground ; 
 nor could I have borne to look her in the face ; not, 
 however, in any spirit that could be called anger. 
 The feeling which fell upon me was a shuddering 
 horror, -as upon a first glimpse of the truth that I was 
 in a world of evil and strife. Though born in a large 
 town (the town of Manchester, even then among the 
 largest of the island), I had passed the whole of my 
 childhood, except for the few earliest weeks, in a 
 rural seclusion. With three innocent little sisters for 
 playmates, sleeping always amongst them, and shut 
 up for ever in a silent garden from all knowledge 
 of poverty, or oppression, or outrage, I had not 
 suspected until this moment the true complexion of 
 the world in which myself and my sisters were living. 
 Henceforward the character of my thoughts changed 
 greatly ; for so represeittative are some acts, that one 
 single case of the class is sufficient to throw open 
 before you the whole theatre of possibilities in that 
 direction. I never heard that the woman accused of 
 this cruelty took it at all to heart, even after the 
 event which so immediately succeeded had reflected 
 upon it a more painful emphasis. But for myself, 
 that incident had a lasting revolutionary power in 
 colouring my estimate of life. 
 
 So passed away from earth one of those three 
 sisters that made up my nursery playmates ; and so 
 did my acquaintance (if such it could be called) 
 commence with mortality. Yet, in fact I knew little 
 
 a 2 
 
IO 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 more of mortality than that Jane had disappeared. 
 She had gone away ; but, perhaps, she would come 
 back. Happy interval of heaven-born ignorance ! 
 Gracious immunity of infancy from sorrow dispro 
 portioned to its strength ! I was sad for Jane’s 
 absence. But still in my heart I trusted that she 
 would come again. Summer and winter came again — 
 crocuses and roses; why not little Jane? 
 
 Thus easily was healed, then, the first wound in 
 my infant heart. Not so the second. For thou, 
 dear, noble Elizabeth, around whose ample brow, as 
 often as thy sweet countenance rises upon the dark- 
 ness, I fancy a tiara of light or a gleaming aureola x 
 in token of thy premature intellectual grandeur — 
 thou whose head, for its superb developments, was 
 the astonishment of science 2 — thou next, but after 
 
 1 “ Aureola ” : — The aureola is the name given in the 
 “ Legends of the Christian Saints” to that golden diadem or 
 circlet of supernatural light (that glory , as it is commonly called 
 in English) which, amongst the great masters of painting in 
 Italy, surrounded the heads of Christ and of distinguished 
 saints. 
 
 2 “ The astonishment of science” : — Her medical attendants 
 were Dr. Percival, a well-known literary physician, who had 
 been a correspondent of Condorcet, D’Alembert, &c., and Mr. 
 Charles White, the most distinguished surgeon at that time in 
 the North of England. It was he who pronounced her head 
 to be the finest in its development of any that he had ever 
 seen — an assertion which, to my own knowledge, he repeated 
 in after years, and with enthusiasm. That .he had some 
 acquaintance with the subject may be presumed from this, that, 
 at so early a stage of such inquiries, he had published a work 
 on human craniology, supported by measurements of heads 
 selected from all varieties of the human species. Meantime, 
 as it would grieve me that any trait of what might seem vanity 
 should creep into this record, I will admit that my sister died 
 of hydrocephalus ; and it has been often supposed that the 
 premature expansion of the intellect in cases of that class is 
 altogether morbid — forced on, in fact, by the mere stimulation 
 of the disease. I would, however, suggest, as a possibility, the 
 very opposite order of relation between the disease and the 
 intellectual manifestations. Not the disease may always have 
 caused the preternatural growth of the intellect ; but, inversely, 
 this growth of the intellect coming on spontaneously, and out- 
 running the capacities of the physical structure, may have 
 caused the disease. 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD II 
 
 an interval of happy years, thou also wert summoned 
 away from our nursery ; and the night which for me 
 gathered upon that event ran after my steps far into 
 life ; and perhaps at this day I resemble little for 
 good or for ill that which else I should have been. 
 Pillar of fire that didst go before me to guide and to 
 quicken — pillar of darkness, when thy countenance 
 was turned away to God, that didst too truly reveal 
 to my dawning fears the secret shadow of death, by 
 what mysterious gravitation was it that my heart had 
 been drawn to thine ? Could a child, six years old, 
 place any special value upon intellectual forwardness? 
 Serene and capacious as my sister’s mind appeared 
 to me upon after review, was that a charm for stealing 
 away the heart of an infant ? Oh no 1 I think of it 
 ■now with interest, because it lends, in a stranger’s 
 ear, some justification to the excess of my fondness. 
 But then it was lost upon me ; or, if not lost, was 
 perceived only through its effects. Hadst thou been 
 an idiot, my sister, not the less 1 must have loved 
 thee, having that capacious heart — overflowing, even 
 as mine overflowed, with tenderness, strung, even as 
 mine was strung, by the necessity of loving and being 
 loved. This it was which crowned thee with beauty 
 and power : — 
 
 “ Love, the holy sense, 
 
 Best gift of God, in thee was most intense.” 
 
 That lamp of Paradise was, for myself, kindled by 
 reflection from the living light which burned so 
 steadfastly in thee ; and never but to thee, never 
 again since thy departure, had I power or temptation, 
 courage or desire, to utter the feelings which possessed 
 me. For I was the shyest of children ; and, at all 
 stages of life, a natural sense of personal dignity held 
 me back from exposing the least ray of feelings which 
 I was not encouraged wholly to reveal. 
 
 It is needless to pursue, circumstantially, the 
 course of that sickness which carried off my leader 
 and companion. She (according to my recollection 
 at this moment) was just as near to nine years as I to 
 
12 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 six . 1 And perhaps this natural precedency in autho- 
 rity of years and judgment, united to the tender 
 humility with which she declined to assert it, had 
 been amongst the fascinations of her presence. It 
 was upon a Sunday evening, if such conjectures can be 
 trusted, that the spark of fatal fire fell upon that train 
 of predispositions to a brain complaint which had 
 hitherto slumbered within her. She had been per- 
 mitted to drink tea at the house of a labouring man, 
 the father of a favourite female servant. The sun 
 had set when she returned, in the company of this 
 servant, through meadows reeking with exhalations 
 after a fervent day. From that day she sickened. 
 In such circumstances, a child, as young as myself, 
 feels no anxieties. Looking upon medical men as 
 people privileged, and naturally commissioned, to 
 make war upon pain and sickness, X never had a 
 misgiving about the result. I grieved, indeed, that 
 my sister should lie in bed ; I grieved still more to 
 hear her moan. But all this appeared to me no more 
 than as a night of trouble, on which the dawn would 
 soon arise. Oh ! moment of darkness and delirium, 
 when the elder nurse awakened me from that de- 
 lusion, and launched God’s thunderbolt at my heart 
 in the assurance that my sister must die. Rightly 
 it is said of utter, utter misery, that it “cannot be 
 remembered ” 2 * * Itself, as a rememberable thing, is 
 swallowed up in its own chaos. Blank anarchy and 
 confusion of mind fell upon me. Deaf and blind I 
 was, as I reeled under the revelation. I wish not to 
 recall the circumstances of that time, when my agony 
 was at its height, and hers, in another sense, was 
 approaching. Enough it is to say, that all was soon 
 over ; and the morning of that day had at last arrived 
 which looked down upon her innocent face, sleeping 
 the sleep from which there is no awaking, and upon 
 
 1 De Quincey should here have written seven. 
 
 2 “ I stood in unimaginable trance 
 
 And agony which cannot be remember’d. 5 ’ 
 
 Speech of A lhadra> in Coleridge's “Remorse.” 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 1 3 
 
 me sorrowing the sorrow for which there is no con- 
 solation. 
 
 On the day after my sister’s death, whilst the sweet 
 temple of her brain was yet unviolated by human 
 scrutiny, I formed my own scheme for seeing her 
 once more. Not for the world would I have made 
 this known, nor have suffered a witness to accom- 
 pany me. I had never heard of feelings that take 
 the name of “ sentimental,” nor dreamed of such a 
 possibility. But grief, even in a child, hates the light, 
 and shrinks from human eyes. The house was large 
 enough to have two staircases ; and by one of these I 
 knew that about midday, when all would be quiet 
 (for the servants dined at one o’clock), I could steal 
 up into her chamber. I imagine that it was about 
 an hour after high noon when I reached the chamber 
 door ; it was locked, but the key was not taken away. 
 Entering, I closed the door so softly, that, although 
 it opened upon a hall which ascended through all the 
 storeys, no echo ran along the silent walls. Then, 
 turning round, I sought my sister’s face. But the 
 bed had been moved, and the back was now turned 
 towards myself. Nothing met my eyes but one large 
 window, wide open, through which the sun of mid- 
 summer at midday was showering down torrents of 
 splendour. The weather was dry, the sky was cloud- 
 less, the blue depths seemed the express types of 
 infinity ; and it was not possible for eye to behold, or 
 for heart to conceive, any symbols more pathetic of 
 life and the glory of life. 
 
 Let me pause for one instant in approaching a re- 
 membrance so affecting for my own mind, to mention 
 that, in the “ Opium Confessions,” I endeavoured to 
 explain the reason why death, other conditions re- 
 maining the same, is more profoundly affecting in 
 summer than in other parts of the year — so far, at 
 least, as it is liable to any modification at all from 
 accidents of scenery or season. The reason, as I 
 there suggested, lies in the antagonism between the 
 tropical redundancy of life in summer, and the frozen 
 sterilities of the grave. The summer we see, the 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 14 
 
 grave we haunt with our thoughts ; the glory is 
 around us, the darkness is within us ; and, the two 
 coming into collision, each exalts the other into 
 stronger relief. But, in my case, there was even a 
 subtler reason why the summer had this intense 
 power of vivifying the spectacle or the thoughts of 
 death. And, recollecting it, I am struck with the 
 truth, that far more of our deepest thoughts and 
 feelings pass to us through perplexed combinations 
 of concrete objects, pass to us as involutes (if I may 
 coin that word) in compound experiences incapable 
 of being disentangled, than ever reach us directly , and 
 in their own abstract shapes. It had happened that 
 amongst our vast nursery collection of books was the 
 Bible illustrated with many pictures. And in long 
 dark evenings, as my three sisters with myself sat by 
 the firelight round the guard 1 of our nursery, no 
 book was so much in request among us. It ruled 
 us and swayed us as mysteriously as music. Our 
 younger nurse, whom we all loved, would sometimes, 
 according to her simple powers, endeavour to ex- 
 plain what we found obscure. We, the children, 
 were all constitutionally touched with pensiveness ; 
 the fitful gloom and sudden lambencies of the room 
 by firelight suited our evening state of feelings ; 
 and they suited, also, the divine revelations of power 
 and mysterious beauty which awed us. Above all, 
 the story of a just man — man and yet not man, real 
 above all things, and yet shadowy above all things — 
 who had suffered the passion of death in Palestine, 
 slept upon our minds like early dawn upon the 
 waters. The nurse knew and explained to us the 
 chief differences in Oriental climates ; and all these 
 differences (as it happens) express themselves, more 
 or less, in varying relations to the great accidents and 
 powers of summer. The cloudless sunlights of Syria 
 — those seemed to argue everlasting summer; the 
 
 1 “ The guard ” : — I know not whether the word is a local 
 one in this sense. What I mean is a sort of fender, four or five 
 feet high, which locks up the fire from too near an approach on 
 the part of children. 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 15 
 
 disciples plucking the ears of corn — that must be 
 summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sun- 
 day (a festival in the English Church) troubled me. 
 like an anthem. “Sunday!” what was that? That 
 was the day of peace which masked another peace 
 deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. 
 <£ Palms ! 5; what were they ? That was an equivocal 
 word ; palms, in the sense of trophies, expressed 
 the pomps of life ; palms, as a product of nature, ex- 
 pressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this 
 explanation does not suffice ; it was not merely by 
 th v e peace and by the summer, by the deep sound of 
 rest below all rest and of ascending glory, that I had 
 been haunted. It was also because Jerusalem stood 
 near to those deep images both in time and in place. 
 The great event of Jerusalem was at hand when Palm 
 Sunday came; and the scene of that Sunday was 
 near in place to Jerusalem. What then was Jeru- 
 salem? Did I fancy it to be the omphalos (navel) or 
 physical centre of the earth ? Why should that affect 
 me ? Such a pretension had once been made for Jeru- 
 salem, and once for a Grecian city ; and both pre- 
 tensions had become ridiculous, as the figure of the 
 planet became known. Yes; but if not of the earth, yet 
 of mortality, for earth’s tenant, Jerusalem, had now 
 become the omphalos and absolute centre. Yet how ? 
 There, on the contrary, it was, as we infants under- 
 stood, that mortality had been trampled under foot. 
 True ; but, for that very reason, there it was that 
 mortality had opened its very gloomiest crater. 
 There it was, indeed, that the human had risen on 
 wings from the grave; but, for that reason, there also 
 it was that the divine had been swallowed up by 
 the abyss ; the lesser star could not rise, before the 
 greater should submit to eclipse. Summer, therefore, 
 had connected itself with death, not merely as a 
 mode of antagonism, but also as a phenomenon 
 brought into intricate relations with death by scrip- 
 tural scenery and events. 
 
 Out of this digression, for the purpose of showing 
 how inextricably my feelings and images of death 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 16 
 
 were entangled with those of summer, as connected 
 with Palestine and Jerusalem, let me come back to 
 the bedchamber of my sister. From the gorgeous 
 sunlight I turned round to the corpse. There lay 
 the sweet childish figure ; there the angel face ; and, 
 as people usually fancy, it was said in the house that 
 no features had suffered any change. Had they 
 not? The forehead, indeed — the serene and noble 
 forehead — that might be the same ; but the frozen 
 eyelids, the darkness that seemed to steal from be- 
 neath them, the marble lips, the stiffening hands, 
 laid palm to palm, as if repeating the supplications 
 of closing anguish — could these be mistaken for life ? 
 Had it been so, wherefore did I not spring to those 
 heavenly lips with tears and never-ending kisses? 
 But so it was not . I stood checked for a moment ; 
 
 awe, not fear, fell upon me ; and, whilst I stood, a 
 solemn wind began to blow — the saddest that ear 
 ever heard. It was a wind that might have swept 
 the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries. Many 
 times since, upon summer days, when the sun is 
 about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind 
 arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Mem- 
 nonian , 1 but saintly swell : it is in this world the one 
 
 1 “ Memnonian ” : — For the sake of many readers, whose 
 hearts may go along earnestly with a record of infant sorrow, 
 but whose course of life has not allowed them much leisure for 
 study, I pause to explain — that the head of Memnon, in the 
 British Museum, that sublime head which wears upon its lips 
 a smile coextensive with all time and all space, an ^Eonian 
 smile of gracious love and Panlike mystery, the most diffusive 
 and pathetically divine that the hand of man has created, is 
 represented on the authority of ancient traditions to have 
 uttered at sunrise, or soon after, as the sun’s rays had accumu- 
 lated heat enough to rarefy the air within certain cavities in the 
 bust, a solemn and dirge-like series of intonations ; the simple 
 explanation being, in its general outline, this — that sonorous 
 currents of air were produced by causing chambers of cold and 
 heavy air to press upon other collections of air, warmed, and 
 therefore rarefied, and therefore yielding readily to the pressure 
 of heavier air. Currents being thus established, by artificial 
 arrangements of tubes, a certain succession of notes could be 
 concerted and sustained. Near the Red Sea lie a chain of 
 sand-hills, which, by a natural system of grooves inosculating 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD I 7 
 
 great audible symbol of eternity. And three times 
 in my life have I happened to hear the same sound 
 in the same circumstances — viz., when standing be- 
 tween an open window and a dead body on a 
 summer day. 
 
 Instantly, when my ear caught this vast AEolian 
 intonation, when my eye filled with the golden ful- 
 ness of life, the pomps of the heavens above, or the 
 glory of the flowers below, and turning when it 
 settled upon the frost which overspread my sister's 
 face, instantly a trance fell upon me. A vault 
 seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, 
 a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as 
 if on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever ; and 
 the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but 
 that also ran before us and fled away continually. 
 The flight and the pursuit seemed to go on for ever 
 and ever. Frost gathering frost, some Sarsar wind 
 of death, seemed to repel me ; some mighty relation 
 between God and death dimly struggled to evolve 
 itself from the dreadful antagonism between them ; 
 shadowy meanings even yet continue to exercise and 
 torment, in dreams., the deciphering oracle within 
 
 with each other, become vocal under changing circumstances 
 in the position of the sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon 
 observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that 
 met him in his daily experience — viz., that tubes, through 
 which a stream of water was passing, gave out a very different 
 sound according to the varying slenderness or fulness of the 
 current — devised an instrument that yielded a rude hydraulic 
 gamut of sounds ; and, indeed, upon this simple phenomenon 
 is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly 
 as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden tube, 
 yields a stridulous and plaintive sound compared with the full 
 volume of sound corresponding to the full volume of water — 
 on parity of principles, nobody will doubt that the current of 
 blood pouring through the tubes of the human frame will utter 
 to the learned ear, when armed with the stethoscope, an 
 elaborate gamut or compass of music, recording the ravages 
 of disease, or the glorious plenitudes of health, as faithfully as 
 the cavities within this ancient Memnonian bust reported this 
 mighty event of sunrise to the rejoicing world of light and 
 life — or, again, under the sad passion of the dying day, uttered 
 the sweet requiem that belonged to its departure. 
 
Ib AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 me. I slept — for how long I cannot say ; slowly I 
 recovered my self-possession; and, when I woke, found 
 myself standing, as before, close to my sister’s bed. 
 
 I have reason to believe that a very long interval 
 had elapsed during this wandering or suspension of 
 my perfect mind. When I returned to myself, there 
 was a foot (or I fancied so) on the stairs. I was 
 alarmed ; for, if anybody had detected me, means 
 would have been taken to prevent my coming again. 
 Hastily, therefore, I kissed the lips that I should kiss 
 no more, and slunk, like a guilty thing, with stealthy 
 steps from the room. Thus perished the vision, 
 loveliest amongst all the shows which earth has re- 
 vealed to me ; thus mutilated was the parting which 
 should have lasted for ever; tainted thus with fear 
 was that farewell sacred to love and grief, to perfect 
 love and to grief that could not be healed. 
 
 0 Ahasuerus, everlasting Jew ! 1 fable or not a fable, 
 thou, when first starting on thy endless pilgrimage of 
 woe — thou, when first flying through the gates of 
 Jerusalem, and vainly yearning to leave the pursuing 
 curse behind thee — couldst not more certainly in the 
 words of Christ have read thy doom of endless sorrow, 
 than I when passing for ever from my sister’s room. 
 The worm was at my heart ; and, I may say, the 
 worm that could not die.- Man is doubtless one by 
 some subtle nexus, some system of links, that we 
 cannot perceive, extending from the new-born infant 
 to the superannuated dotard : but, as regards many 
 affections and passions incident to his nature at 
 different stages, he is not one, but an intermitting 
 creature, ending and beginning anew ; the unity of 
 man, in this respect, is coextensive only with the 
 particular stage to which the passion belongs. Some 
 passions, as that of sexual love, are celestial by one 
 half of their origin, animal and earthly by the other 
 half. These will not survive their own appropriate 
 stage. But love which is altogether holy, like that 
 
 1 “ Everlasting Jew ” : — derewige Jude — which is the common 
 German expression for “The Wandering Jew, 5 ’ and sublimer 
 even than our own. 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 1 9 
 
 between two children, is privileged to revisit by 
 glimpses the silence and the darkness of declining 
 years ; and, possibly, this final experience in my 
 sister’s bedroom, or some other in which her inno- 
 cence was concerned, may rise again for me to 
 illuminate the clouds of death. 
 
 On the day following this which I have recorded, 
 came a body of medical men to examine the brain, 
 and the particular nature of the complaint ; for in 
 some of its symptoms it had shown perplexing 
 anomalies. An hour after the strangers had with- 
 drawn, I crept again to the room ; but the door was 
 now locked, the key had been taken away- — and I 
 was shut out for ever. 
 
 Then came the funeral. I, in the ceremonial 
 character of mourner , was carried thither. I was 
 put into a carriage with some gentlemen whom I 
 did not know. They were kind and attentive to 
 me; but naturally they talked of things disconnected 
 with the occasion, and their conversation was a 
 torment. At the church, I was told to hold a white 
 handkerchief to my eyes. Empty hypocrisy ! What 
 need had he of masks or mockeries, whose heart died 
 within him at every word that was uttered ? During 
 that part of the service which passed within the 
 church, I made an effort to attend ; but I sank back 
 continually into my own solitary darkness, and I heard 
 little consciously, except some fugitive strains from 
 the sublime chapter of St. Paul, which in England is 
 always read at burials . 1 
 
 Lastly came that magnificent liturgical service 
 which the English Church performs at the side of 
 the grave; for this church does not forsake her dead 
 so long as they continue in the upper air, but waits 
 for her last “ sweet and solemn farewell ” 2 at the side 
 
 1 First Epistle to Corinthians, chap, xv., beginning at verse 20. 
 
 2 This beautiful expression, I am pretty certain, must belong 
 to Mrs. Trollope ; I read it, probably, in a tale of hers con- 
 nected with the backwoods of America, where the absence of 
 such a farewell must unspeakably aggravate the gloom at any 
 rate belonging to a household separation of that eternal char- 
 acter occurring amongst the shadows of these mighty forests. 
 
20 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 of the grave. There is exposed once again, and for the 
 last time, the coffin. All eyes survey the record of 
 name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from 
 earth — records how shadowy ! and dropped into dark- 
 ness as messages addressed to worms. Almost at the 
 very last comes the symbolic ritual, tearing and shatter- 
 ing the heart with volleying discharges, peal after peal, 
 from the fine artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered 
 into its home ; it has disappeared from all eyes but 
 those that look down into the abyss of the grave. 
 The sacristan stands ready, with his shovel of earth 
 and stones. The priest’s voice is heard once more 
 — earth to earth — and immediately the dread rattle 
 ascends from the lid of the coffin ; ashes to ashes — 
 and again the killing sound is heard ; dust to dust — 
 and the farewell volley announces that the grave, the 
 coffin, the face are sealed up for ever and ever. 
 
 Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing 
 passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the 
 dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou 
 shakest as with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. 
 Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its 
 infirmities. Among the very foremost of mine was 
 morbid sensibility to shame. And, ten years after- 
 wards, I used to throw my self-reproaches with regard 
 to that infirmity into this shape — viz., that if I were 
 summoned to seek aid for a perishing fellow-creature, 
 and that I could obtain that aid only by facing a 
 vast company of critical or sneering faces, I might, 
 perhaps, shrink basely from the duty. It is true that 
 no such case had ever actually occurred ; so that it 
 was a mere romance of casuistry to tax myself with 
 cowardice so shocking. But to feel a doubt was to 
 feel condemnation ; and the crime that might have 
 been, was in my eyes the crime that had been. Now, 
 however, all was changed ; and, for anything which 
 regarded my sister’s memory, in one hour I received 
 a new heart. Once in Westmoreland I saw a case 
 resembling it I saw a ewe suddenly put off and 
 abjure her own nature, in a service of love — yes, 
 slough it as completely as ever serpent sloughed his 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 21 
 
 skin. Her lamb had fallen into a deep trench, from 
 which all escape was hopeless without the aid of man. 
 And to a man she advanced, bleating clamorously, 
 until he followed her and rescued her beloved. 
 Not less was the change in myself. Fifty thousand 
 sneering faces would not have troubled me now 
 in any office of tenderness to my sister’s memory. 
 Ten legions would not have repelled me from seeking 
 her, if there had been a chance that she could be 
 found. Mockery ! it was lost upon me. Laughter ! 
 I valued it not. And when I was taunted insultingly 
 with “ my girlish tears,” that word “ girlish ” had no 
 sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one 
 eternal thought of my heart — that a girl was the 
 sweetest thing which I, in my short life, had known — 
 that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with 
 beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of 
 pure celestial love, from which, in this world, I was 
 to drink no more. 
 
 Now began to unfold themselves the consolations 
 of solitude, those consolations which only I was 
 destined to taste ; now, therefore, began to open 
 upon me those fascinations of solitude, which, when 
 acting as a co-agency with unresisted grief, end in 
 the paradoxical result of making out of grief itself a 
 luxury ; such a luxury as finally becomes a snare, 
 overhanging life itself, and the energies of life, with 
 growing menaces. All deep feelings of a chronic class 
 agree in this, that they seek for solitude, and are fed 
 by solitude. Deep grief, deep love, how naturally do 
 these ally themselves with religious feeling ! and all 
 three — love, grief, religion — are haunters of solitary 
 places. Love, grief, and the mystery of devotion — 
 what were< these without solitude ? All day long, 
 when it was not impossible for me to do so, I sought 
 the most silent and sequestered nooks in the grounds 
 about the house, or in the neighbouring fields. The 
 awful stillness oftentimes of summer noons, when no 
 winds were abroad, the appealing silence of grey or 
 misty afternoons — these were fascinations as of witch- 
 craft. Into the woods, into the desert air, I gazed, 
 
22 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 as if some comfort lay hid in them. I wearied the 
 heavens with my inquest of beseeching looks. Obsti- 
 nately I tormented the blue depths with my scrutiny, 
 
 . sweeping them for ever with my eyes, and searching 
 them for one angelic face that might, perhaps, have 
 permission to reveal itself for a moment. 
 
 At this time, and under this impulse of rapacious 
 grief, that grasped at what it could not obtain, the 
 faculty of shaping images in the distance out of slight 
 elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the 
 heart, grew upon me in morbid excess. And I recall 
 at the present moment one instance of that sort, 
 which may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of 
 brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient 
 basis' for this creative faculty. 
 
 On Sunday mornings I went with the rest of my 
 family to church : it was a church on the ancient 
 model of England, having aisles, galleries , 1 organ, all 
 things ancient and venerable, and the proportions 
 majestic. Here, whilst the congregation knelt through 
 the long litany, as often as we came to that passage, 
 so beautiful amongst many that are so, where God is 
 supplicated on behalf of “all sick persons and young 
 children,” and that he would “ show his pity upon all 
 prisoners and captives,” I wept in secret ; and raising 
 my streaming eyes to the upper windows of the 
 galleries, saw, on days when the sun was shining, a 
 spectacle as affecting as ever prophet can have beheld. 
 The sides of the windows were rich with storied glass ; 
 through the deep purples and crimsons streamed the 
 golden light ; emblazonries of heavenly illumination 
 (from the sun) mingling with the earthly emblazonries 
 (from art and its gorgeous colouring) of what is 
 grandest in man. There were the apostles that had 
 trampled upon earth, and the glories of earth, out of 
 celestial love to man. There were the martyrs that 
 
 1 “ Galleries ” : — These, though condemned on some grounds 
 by the restorers of authentic church architecture, have, never- 
 theless, this one advantage — that, when the height of a church 
 is that dimension which most of all expresses its sacred charac- 
 ter, galleries expound and interpret that height. 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 23 
 
 had borne witness to the truth through flames, through 
 torments, and through armies of fierce, insulting faces. 
 There were the saints who, under intolerable pangs, 
 had glorified God by meek submission to his will. 
 And all the time, whilst this tumult of sublime 
 memorials held on as the deep chords from some 
 accompaniment in the bass, I saw through the wide 
 central field of the window, where the glass was 
 ^coloured, white, fleecy clouds sailing over the azure 
 depths of the sky ; were it but a fragment or a hint 
 of such a cloud, immediately under the flash of my 
 sorrow-haunted eye, it grew and shaped itself into 
 visions of beds with white lawny curtains ; and in 
 the beds lay sick children, dying children, that were 
 tossing in anguish, and weeping clamorously for 
 death. God, for some mysterious reason, could not 
 suddenly release them from their pain ; but he 
 suffered the beds, as it seemed, to rise slowly through 
 the clouds ; slowly the beds ascended into the 
 chambers of the air : slowly also his arms descended 
 from the heavens, that he and his young children, 
 whom in Palestine, once and for ever, he had blessed, 
 though they must pass slowly through the dreadful 
 chasm of separation, might yet meet the sooner. 
 These visions were self-sustained. These visions 
 needed not that any sound should speak to me, or 
 music mould my feelings. The hint from the litany, 
 the fragment from the clouds — those and the storied 
 windows were sufficient. But not the less the blare 
 of the tumultuous organ wrought its own separate 
 creations. And oftentimes in anthems, when the 
 mighty instrument threw its vast columns of sound, 
 fierce yet melodious, over the voices of the choir — 
 high in arches, when it seemed to rise, surmounting 
 and overriding the strife of the vocal parts, and 
 gathering by strong coercion the total storm into 
 unity — sometimes I seemed to rise and walk trium- 
 phantly upon those clouds which, but a moment 
 before, I had looked up to as mementos of pros- 
 trate sorrow ; yes, sometimes under the transfigu- 
 rations of music, felt of grief itself as of a fiery 
 
24 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 chariot for mounting victoriously above the causes of 
 grief. 
 
 God speaks to children, also, in dreams, and by 
 the oracles that lurk in darkness. But in soli- 
 tude, above all things, when made vocal to the 
 meditative heart by the truths and services of a 
 national church, God holds with children “ com- 
 munion undisturbed." Solitude, though it may be 
 silent as light, is, like light, the mightiest of agencies ; 
 for solitude is essential to man. All men come into 
 this world alone; all leave it alone. Even a little 
 child has a dread, whispering consciousness, that, if 
 he should be summoned to travel into God’s presence, 
 no gentle nurse will be allowed to lead him by the 
 hand, nor mother to carry him in her arms, nor 
 little sister to share his trepidations. King and 
 priest, warrior and maiden, philosopher and child, 
 all must walk those mighty galleries alone. The 
 solitude, therefore, which in this world appals or 
 fascinates a child’s heart, is but the echo of a far 
 deeper solitude, through which already he has passed, 
 and of another solitude, deeper still, through which 
 he has to pass : reflex of one solitude — prefiguration 
 of another. 
 
 Oh, burden of solitude, that cleavest to man 
 through every stage of his being ! in his birth, which 
 has been — in his life, which is — in his death, which 
 shall be — mighty and essential solitude ! that wast, 
 and art, and art to be ; thou broodest, like the Spirit 
 of God moving upon the surface of the deeps, over 
 every heart that sleeps in the nurseries of Christen- 
 dom. Like the vast laboratory of the air, which, 
 seeming to be nothing, or less than the shadow of 
 a shade, hides within itself the principles of all 
 things, solitude for the meditating child is the 
 Agrippa’s mirror of the unseen universe. Deep is 
 the solitude of millions who, with hearts welling 
 forth love, have none to love them. Deep is 
 the solitude of those who, under secret griefs, have 
 none to pity them. Deep is the solitude of those 
 who, fighting with doubts or darkness, have none to 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 25 
 
 counsel them. But deeper than the deepest of these 
 solitudes is that which broods over childhood under 
 the passion of sorrow — bringing, before it, at intervals, 
 the final solitude which watches for it, and is waiting 
 for it within the gates of death. Oh, mighty and 
 essential solitude, that wast, and art, and art to be ! 
 thy kingdom is made perfect in the grave ; but even 
 over those that keep watch outside the grave, like 
 myself, an infant of six years old, thou stretchest out 
 a sceptre of fascination. 
 
 Dream-Echoes of these Infant Experiences 
 
 [ Notice to the Reader . — The sun. in rising or setting, would 
 produce little effect if he were defrauded of his rays, and 
 their infinite reverberations. “Seen through a fog,” says 
 Sara Coleridge, the noble daughter of Samuel Taylor 
 Coleridge, “the golden, beaming sun looks like a dull 
 orange, or a red billiard-ball.” — Introd. to Biog. Lit., p. 
 clxii. And upon this same analogy, psychological experi- 
 ences of deep suffering or joy first attain their entire fulness 
 of expression when they are reverberated from dreams. 
 The reader must therefore suppose me at Oxford ; more 
 than twelve years are gone by ; I am in the glory of youth : 
 but I have now first tampered with opium ; and now first 
 the agitations of my childhood reopened in strength ; now 
 first they swept in upon the brain with power and the 
 grandeur of recovered life.] 
 
 Once again, after twelve years’ interval, the nursery 
 of my childhood expanded before me : my sister was 
 moaning in bed ; and I was beginning to be restless 
 with fears not intelligible to myself. Once again the 
 elder nurse, but now dilated to colossal proportions, 
 stood as upon some Grecian stage with her uplifted 
 hand, and, like the superb Medea towering amongst 
 her children in the nursery at Corinth , 1 smote me 
 senseless to the ground. Again I am in the chamber 
 with my sister’s corpse, again the pomps of life 
 rise up in silence, the glory of summer, the Syrian 
 sunlights, the frosts of death. Dream forms itself 
 mysteriously within dream ; within these Oxford 
 dreams remoulds itself continually the trance in my 
 
 1 Euripides. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 26 
 
 sister’s chamber — the blue heavens, the everlasting 
 vault, the soaring billows, the throne steeped in the 
 thought (but not the sight) of “ Who might sit 
 thereon”; the flight, the pursuit, the irrecoverable 
 steps of my return to earth. Once more the funeral 
 procession gathers ; the priest in his white surplice 
 stands waiting with a book by the side of an open 
 grave : the sacristan is waiting with his shovel ; the 
 coffin has sunk ; the dust to dust has descended. 
 Again I was in the church on a heavenly Sunday 
 morning. The golden sunlight of God slept amongst 
 the heads of his apostles, his martyrs, his saints; 
 the fragment from the litany, the fragment from the 
 clouds, awoke again the lawny beds that went up to 
 scale the heavens — awoke again the shadowy arms 
 that moved downward to meet them. Once again 
 arose the swell of the anthem, the burst of the 
 Hallelujah chorus, the storm, the trampling move- 
 ment of the choral passion, the agitation of my own 
 trembling sympathy, the tumult of the choir, the 
 wrath of the organ. Once more I, that wallowed in 
 the dust, became he that rose up to the clouds. And 
 now all was bound up into unity ; the first state and 
 the last were melted into each other as in some sunny, 
 glorifying haze. For high in heaven hovered a gleam- 
 ing host of faces, veiled with wings, around the pillows 
 of the dying children. And such beings sympathise 
 equally with sorrow that grovels, and with sorrow that 
 soars, Such beings pity alike the children that are 
 languishing in death, and the children that live only 
 to languish in tears. 
 
 Dream-Echoes Fifty Years Later 
 
 [In this instance the echoes, that rendered back the infant ex- 
 perience, might be interpreted by the reader as connected 
 with a real ascent of the Brocken ; which was not the case. 
 It was an ascent through all its circumstances executed in 
 dreams, which, under advanced stages in the development 
 of opium, repeat with marvellous accuracy the longest suc- 
 cession of phenomena derived either from reading or from 
 actual experience. That softening or spiritualising haze 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 27 
 
 which belongs at any rate to the action of dreams, and to 
 the transfigurings worked upon troubled remembrances by 
 retrospects so vast as those of fifty years, was in this in- 
 stance greatly aided to my own feelings by the alliance with 
 the ancient phantom of the forest-mountain in North Ger- 
 many. The playfulness of the scene is the very evoker of 
 the solemn remembrances that lie hidden below\ The 
 half-sportive interlusory revealings of the symbolic tend to 
 the same effect. One part of the effect from the symbolic 
 is dependent upon the great catholic principle of the Tdem 
 in alio . The symbol restores the theme, but under new 
 combinations of form or colouring; gives back, but changes; 
 restores, but idealises.] 
 
 Ascend with me on this dazzling Whitsunday the 
 Brocken of North Germany. The dawn opened in 
 cloudless beauty; it is a dawn of bridal June; but, 
 as the hours advanced, her youngest sister April, that 
 sometimes cared little for racing across both frontiers 
 of May — the rearward frontier, and the vanward fron- 
 tier — frets the bridal lady’s sunny temper with sallies 
 of wheeling and careering 'showers, flying and pur- 
 suing, opening and closing, hiding and restoring. On 
 such a morning, and reaching the summits of the 
 forest-mountain about sunrise, we shall have one 
 chance the more for seeing the famous Spectre of the 
 Brocken . 1 Who and what is he ? He is a solitary 
 
 1 “ Spectre of the B 7 'ocken ” : — This very striking phenomenon 
 has been continually described by writers, both German and 
 English, for the last fifty years. Many readers, however, will 
 not have met with these descriptions ; and on their account I 
 add a few words in explanation, referring them for the best 
 scientific comment on the case to Sir David Brewster’s “Natural 
 Magic.” The spectre takes the shape of a human figure, or, if 
 the visitors are more than one, then the spectres multiply ; they 
 arrange themselves on the blue ground of the sky, or the dark 
 ground of any clouds that may be in the right quarter, or per- 
 haps they are strongly relieved against a curtain of rock, at a 
 distance of some miles, and always exhibiting gigantic propor- 
 tions. At first, from the distance and the colossal size, every 
 spectator supposes tbe appearance to be quite independent of 
 himself. But very soon he is surprised to observe his own 
 motions and gestures mimicked : and wakens to the conviction 
 that the phantom is but a dilated reflection of himself. This 
 Titan amongst the apparitions of earth is exceedingly capricious, 
 vanishing abruptly for reasons best known to himself, and more 
 coy in coming forward than the Lady Echo of Ovid. One reason 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 28 
 
 apparition, in the sense of loving solitude ; else he is 
 not always solitary in his personal manifestations, but, 
 on proper occasions, has been known to unmask a 
 strength quite sufficient to alarm those who had been 
 insulting him. 
 
 Now, in order to test the nature of this mysterious 
 apparition, we will try two or three experiments upon 
 him. What we fear, and with some reason, is, that, 
 as he lived so many ages with foul Pagan sorcerers, 
 and witnessed so many centuries of dark idolatries, 
 his heart may have been corrupted ; and that even now 
 his faith may be wavering or impure. We will try. 
 
 Make the sign of the cross, and observe whether 
 he repeats it (as on Whitsunday 1 he surely ought to 
 do). Look ! he does repeat it ; but these driving 
 April showers perplex the images, and that ; perhaps, 
 it is which gives him the air of one who acts reluc- 
 tantly or evasively. Now, again, the sun shines more 
 brightly, and the showers have all swept off like 
 squadrons of cavalry to the rear. We will try him 
 again. 
 
 why he is seen so seldom must be ascribed to the concurrence 
 of conditions under which only the phenomenon can be mani- 
 fested ; the sun must be near to the horizon (which of itself im- 
 plies a time of day inconvenient to a person starting from a 
 station as distant as Elbingerode) ; the spectator must have his 
 back to the sun ; and the air must contain some vapour, but 
 partially distributed. Coleridge ascended the Brocken on the 
 Whitsunday of 1799, with a party of English students from Got- 
 tingen, but failed to see the phantom ; afterwards in England 
 (and under the three same conditions) he saw a much rarer 
 phenomenon, which he described in the following lines : — 
 
 “ Such thou art as when 
 The woodman winding westward up the glen 
 At wintry dawn, when o’er the sheep-track’s maze 
 The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 
 
 Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 
 
 An image with a glory round its head ; 
 
 This shade he worships for its golden hues, 
 
 And makes (not knowing) that which he pursues/’ 
 
 1 “ On Whitsunday ” : — -It is singular, and perhaps owing to 
 the temperature and weather likely to prevail in that early part 
 of summer, that more appearances of the spectre have been 
 witnessed on Whitsunday than on any other day. 
 
THE AFFLICTION OF CHILDHOOD 29 
 
 Pluck an anemone, one of these many anemones 
 which was once called the sorcerer’s flower , 1 and bore 
 a part, perhaps, in this horrid ritual of fear ; carry it 
 to that stone which mimics the outline of a heathen 
 altar, and once was called the sorcerer’s altar ; 1 then, 
 bending your knee, and raising your right hand to 
 God, say — “ Father which art in heaven, this lovely 
 anemone, that once glorified the worship of fear, has 
 travelled back into thy fold ; this altar, which once 
 reeked with bloody rites to Cortho, has long been 
 rebaptized into thy holy service. The darkness is 
 gone ; the cruelty is gone which the darkness bred ; 
 the moans have passed away which the victims 
 uttered ; the cloud has vanished which once sat 
 continually upon their graves, cloud of protestation 
 that ascended for ever to thy throne from the tears 
 of the defenceless, and from the anger of the just. 
 And lo ! we — I thy servant, and this dark phantom, 
 whom for one hour on this thy festival of Pentecost I 
 make my servant — render thee united worship in this 
 thy recovered temple.” 
 
 Lo ! the apparition plucks an anemone, and places 
 it on the altar ; he also bends his knee, he also raises 
 his right hand to God. Dumb he is ; but sometimes 
 the dumb serve God acceptably. Yet still it occurs 
 to you, that perhaps on this high festival of the 
 Christian church he may have been overruled by 
 supernatural influence into confession of his homage, 
 having so often been made to bow and bend his knee 
 at murderous rites. In a service of religion he may 
 be timid. Let us try him, therefore, with an earthly 
 passion, where he will have no bias either from favour 
 or from fear. 
 
 If, then, once in childhood you suffered an afflic- 
 
 1 “ The sorcerer's flower ” and “ the sorcerer's attar ” : — These 
 are names still clinging to the anemone of the Brocken, and 
 to an altar -shaped fragment of granite near one of the sum- 
 mits ; and there is no doubt that they both connect themselves, 
 through links of ancient tradition, with the gloomy realities 
 of Paganism, when the whole Hartz and the Brocken formed 
 for a very long time the last asylum to a ferocious but perishing 
 idolatry. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 30 
 
 tion that was ineffable ; if once, when powerless to 
 face such an enemy, you were summoned to fight 
 with the tiger that couches within the separations of 
 the grave — in that case, after the example of Judea , 1 
 sitting under her palm-tree to weep, but sitting with 
 her head veiled, do you also veil your head. Many 
 years are passed away since then; and perhaps you 
 were a little ignorant thing at that time, hardly above 
 six years old. But your heart was deeper than the 
 Danube ; and, as was your love, so was your grief. 
 Many years are gone since that darkness settled on 
 your head ; many summers, many winters ; yet still 
 its shadows wheel round upon you at intervals, like 
 these April showers upon this glory of bridal June. 
 Therefore now, on this dovelike morning of Pente- 
 cost, do you veil your head like Judea in memory of 
 that transcendent woe, and in testimony that, indeed, 
 it surpassed all utterance of words. Immediately 
 you see that the apparition of the Brocken veils his 
 head, after the model of Judea weeping under her 
 palm-tree, as if he also had a human heart ; and as 
 if he also, in childhood, having suffered an affliction 
 which was ineffable, wished by these mute symbols 
 to breathe a sigh towards heaven in memory of that 
 transcendent woe, and by way of record, though 
 many a year after, that it was indeed unutterable 
 by words. 
 
 1 On the Roman coins. 
 
SECOND CHAPTEE. 
 
 INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF STRIFE 
 
 So, then, one chapter in my life had finished. 
 Already, before the completion of my sixth year, 
 this first chapter had run its circle, had rendered up 
 its music to the final chord — might seem even, like 
 ripe fruit from a tree, to have detached itself for ever 
 from all the rest of the arras that was shaping itself 
 within my loom of life. No Eden of lakes and forest- 
 lawns, such as the mirage suddenly evokes in Arabian 
 sands — no pageant of air-built battlements and towers, 
 that ever burned in dream-like silence amongst the 
 vapours of summer sunsets, mocking and repeating 
 with celestial pencil “ the fuming vanities of earth ”• — 
 could leave behind it the mixed impression of so 
 much truth combined with so much absolute delusion. 
 Truest of all things it seemed by the excess of that 
 happiness which it had sustained : most fraudulent it 
 seemed of all things, when looked back upon as some 
 mysterious parenthesis in the current of life, “ self- 
 withdrawn into a wondrous depth, ;J hurrying as if with 
 headlong malice to extinction, and alienated by every 
 feature from the new aspects of life that seemed to 
 await me. Were it not in the bitter corrosion of heart 
 that I was called upon to face, I should have carried 
 over to the present no connecting link whatever from 
 the past. Mere reality in this fretting it was, and the 
 undeniableness of its too potent remembrances, that 
 forbade me to regard this burnt-out inaugural chapter 
 of my life as no chapter at all, but a pure exhalation 
 of dreams. Mise ry is a gua rantee of truth too sub- . 
 stantial to be refused: el seT^ylts” deter min ate evan- 
 escence, the total experience would have worn the 
 character of a fantastic illusion. 
 
 Well it was for me at this period, if well it were for 
 me to live at all, that from any continued contempla- 
 tion of my misery I was forced to wean myself, and 
 suddenly to assume the harness of life. Else, under 
 the morbid languishing of grief, and of what the 
 
32 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Romans called aesideriu?n (the yearning too obstinate 
 after one irrecoverable face), too probably I should 
 have pined away into an early grave. Harsh was my 
 awaking ; but the rough febrifuge which this awaking 
 administered broke the strength of my sickly reveries 
 through a period of more than two years ; by which 
 time, under the natural expansion of my bodily 
 strength, the danger had passed over. 
 
 In the first chapter I have rendered solemn thanks 
 for having been trained amongst the gentlest of sisters, 
 and not under “ horrid pugilistic brothers.” Mean- 
 time, one such brother I had : senior by much to 
 myself, and the stormiest of his class ; him I will 
 immediately present to the reader; for up to this 
 point of my narrative he may be described as a 
 stranger even to myself. Odd as it sounds, I had at 
 this time both a brother and a father, neither of whom 
 would have been able to challenge me as a relative, 
 nor I hint) had we happened to meet on the public 
 roads. 
 
 In my father’s case, this arose from the accident of 
 his having lived abroad for a space that, measured 
 against my life, was a very long one. First, he lived 
 for months in Portugal, at Lisbon, and at Cintra; 
 next in Madeira ; then in the West Indies ; some- 
 times in Jamaica, sometimes in St. Kitt’s ; courting 
 the supposed benefit of hot climates in his complaint 
 of pulmonary consumption. He had, indeed, re- 
 peatedly returned to England, and met my mother at 
 watering-places on the south coast of Devonshire, &c. 
 But I, as a younger child, had not been one of the 
 party selected for such excursions from home. And 
 now, at last, when all had proved unavailing, he was 
 coming home to die amongst his family, in his 
 thirty-ninth year. My mother had gone to await 
 his arrival at the. port (whatever port) to which the 
 West India packet should bring him ; and amongst 
 the deepest recollections which I connect with that 
 period, is one derived from the night of his arrival 
 at Greenhay. 
 
 It was a summer evening of unusual solemnity. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 33 
 
 The servants, and four of us children, were gathered 
 for hours, on the lawn before the house, listening 
 for the sound of wheels. Sunset came — nine, ten, 
 eleven o’clock, and nearly another hour had passed 
 — without a warning sound ; for Greenhay, being so 
 solitary a house, formed a terminus ad quem , beyond 
 which* was nothing but a cluster of cottages, com- 
 posing the little hamlet of Greenhill ; so that any 
 sound of wheels coming from the winding lane which 
 then connected us with the Rusholme Road carried 
 with it, of necessity, a warning summons to prepare 
 for visitors at Greenhay. No such summons had yet 
 reached us ; it was nearly midnight ; and, for the last 
 time, it was determined that we should move in a 
 body out of the grounds, on the chance of meeting 
 the travelling party, if, at so late an hour, it could 
 yet be expected to arrive. In fact, to our general 
 surprise, we met it almost immediately, but coming 
 at s.o slow a pace, that the fall of the horses’ feet 
 was not audible until we were close upon them. 
 I mention the case for the sake of the undying 
 impressions which connected themselves with the 
 circumstances. The first notice of the approach was 
 the sudden emerging of horses’ heads from the deep 
 gloom of the shady lane ; the next was the mass 
 of white pillows against which the dying patient 
 was reclining. The hearse-like pace at which the 
 carriage moved recalled the overwhelming spectacle 
 of that funeral which had so lately formed part in 
 the most memorable event of my life. But these 
 elements of awe, that might at any rate have struck 
 forcibly upon the mind of a child, were for me, 
 in my condition of morbid nervousness, raised into 
 abiding grandeur by the antecedent experiences cf 
 that particular summer night. The listening for 
 hours to the sounds from horses’ hoofs upon distant 
 roads, rising and falling, caught and lost, upon the 
 gentle undulation of such fitful airs as might be 
 stirring — the peculiar solemnity of the hours suc- 
 ceeding to sunset — the glory of the dying day — the 
 gorgeousness which, by description, so well I knew 
 
34 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 of sunset in those West Indian islands from which 
 my father was returning — the knowledge that he 
 returned only to die — the almighty pomp in which 
 this great idea of Death apparelled itself to my young 
 sorrowing heart — the corresponding pomp in which 
 the antagonistic idea, not less mysterious, of life, 
 rose, as if on wings, amidst tropic glories and floral 
 pageantries, that seemed even more, solemn and 
 pathetic than the vapoury plumes and trophies of 
 mortality — all this chorus of restless images, or of 
 suggestive thoughts, gave to my father’s return, which 
 else had been fitted only to interpose one transitory 
 red-letter day in the calendar of a child, the shadowy 
 power of an ineffaceable agency among my dreams. 
 This, indeed, was the one sole memorial which re- 
 stores my father’s image to me as a personal reality. 
 Otherwise, he would have been for me a bare nominis 
 umbra . He languished, indeed, for weeks upon a 
 sofa ; and during that interval, it happened naturally, 
 from my repose of manners, that I was a privileged 
 visitor to him throughout his waking hours. I was 
 also present at his bedside in the closing hour of 
 his life, which exhaled quietly, amidst snatches of 
 delirious conversation with some imaginary visitors. 
 
 My brother was a stranger from causes quite as 
 little to be foreseen, but seeming quite as natural 
 after they had really occurred. In an early stage of 
 his career, he had been found wholly unmanageable. 
 His genius for mischief amounted to inspiration : it 
 was a divine afflatus which drove him in that direc- 
 tion ; and such was his capacity for riding in whirl- 
 winds and directing storms, that he made it his trade 
 to create them, as a ve^eXrjyepera Zeus, a cloud- 
 compelling Jove, in order that he might direct them. 
 For this, and other reasons, he had been sent to the 
 Grammar School of Louth, in Lincolnshire — one of 
 those many old classic institutions which form the 
 peculiar 1 glory of England. To box, and to box 
 
 1 “ Peculiar ” : — viz., as endowed foundations to which those 
 resort who are rich and pay, and those also who, being poor, 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 35 
 
 under the severest restraint of honourable laws, was 
 in those days a mere necessity of schoolboy life at 
 public schools ; and hence the superior manliness, 
 generosity, and self-control, of those generally who 
 had benefited by such discipline' — so systemati- 
 cally hostile to all meanness, pusillanimity, or in- 
 directness. Cowper, in his “ Tyrocinium,” is far 
 from doing justice to our great public schools. 
 Himself disqualified, by delicacy of temperament, 
 for reaping the benefits from such a warfare, and 
 having suffered too much in his own Westminster 
 experience, he could not judge them from an im- 
 partial station ; but I, though ill enough adapted 
 to an atmosphere so stormy, yet having tried both 
 classes of schools, public and private, am com- 
 pelled in mere conscience to give my vote (and if I 
 had a thousand votes, to give all my votes) for the 
 former. 
 
 Fresh from such a training as this, and at a time 
 when his additional five or six years availed nearly 
 to make his age the double of mine, my brother 
 very naturally despised me ; and, from his exceeding 
 frankness, he took no pains to conceal that he did. 
 Why should he? Who was it that could have a 
 right to feel aggrieved by his contempt? Who, if 
 not myself? But it happened, on the contrary, that 
 I had a perfect craze for being despised. I doted on 
 it; and considered contempt a sort of luxury that I 
 was in continual fear of losing. Why not ? Where- 
 fore should any rational person shrink from con- 
 tempt, if it happen to form the tenure by which he 
 holds his repose in life ? The cases, which are cited 
 from comedy, of such a yearning after contempt, 
 stand upon a footing altogether different : there the 
 
 cannot pay, or cannot pay so much. This most honourable 
 distinction amongst the services of England from ancient times 
 to the interests of education — a service absolutely unapproached 
 by any one nation of Christendom — is amongst the foremost 
 cases of that remarkable class which make England, while 
 often the most aristocratic, yet also, for many noble purposes, 
 the most democratic of lands. 
 
36 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 contempt is wooed as a serviceable ally and tool 
 of religious hypocrisy. But, to me, at that era of 
 life, it formed the main guarantee of an unmolested 
 repose : and security there was not, on any lower 
 terms, for the latentis semita vita, e The slightest 
 approach to any favourable construction of my in- 
 tellectual pretensions alarmed me beyond measure ; 
 because it pledged me in a manner with the hearer 
 to support this first attempt by a second, by a third, 
 by a fourth — O heavens ! there is no saying how far 
 the horrid man might go in his unreasonable demands 
 upon me. I groaned under the weight of his expec- 
 tations; and, if I laid but the first round of such a 
 staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob’s 
 ladder towering upwards to the clouds, mile after 
 mile, league after league ; and myself running up 
 and down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish 
 hodmen, to the top of any Babel which my wretched 
 admirer might choose to build. But I nipped the 
 abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by 
 refusing to take the first step. The man could have 
 no pretence, you know, for expecting me to climb 
 the third or fourth round, when I had seemed quite 
 unequal to the first. Professing the most absolute 
 bankruptcy from the very beginning, giving the man 
 no sort of hope that I would pay even one farthing 
 in the pound, I never could be made miserable by 
 unknown responsibilities. 
 
 Still, with all this passion for being despised, which 
 was so essential to my peace of mind, I found at times 
 an altitude — a starry altitude — in the station of con- 
 tempt for me assumed by my brother that nettled me. 
 Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute 
 carried me, before I was aware of my own imprudence, 
 so far up the staircase of Babel, that my brother was 
 shaken for a moment in the infinity of his contempt : 
 and, before long, when my superiority in some bookish 
 accomplishments displayed itself, by results that could 
 not be entirely dissembled, mere foolish human nature 
 forced me into some trifle of exultation at these re- 
 tributory triumphs. But more often I was disposed 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 37 
 
 to grieve over’ them. They tended to shake that 
 solid foundation of utter despicableness upon which 
 I relied so much for my freedom from anxiety ; and, 
 therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my 
 mind that my brother’s opinion of me, after any little 
 transient oscillation, gravitated determinate^ back 
 towards that settled contempt which had been the 
 result of his original inquest. The pillars of Hercules 
 upon which rested the vast edifice of his scorn were 
 these two — -1st, my physics: he denounced me for 
 effeminacy ; 2nd, he assumed, and even postulated 
 as a datum , which I myself could never have the face 
 to refuse, my general idiocy. Physically, therefore, 
 and intellectually, he looked upon me as below 
 notice ; but, morally , he assured me that he would 
 give me a written character of the very best descrip- 
 tion, whenever I chose to apply for it. “ You’re 
 honest,” he said ; “ you’re willing, though lazy ; you 
 would pull, if you had the strength of a flea ; and, 
 though a monstrous coward, you don’t run away.” 
 My own demurs to these harsh judgments were not 
 so many as they might have been. The idiocy I 
 confessed ; because, though positive that I was not 
 uniformly an idiot, I felt inclined to think that, in 
 a majority of cases, I really was ; and there were 
 more reasons for thinking so than the reader is yet 
 aware of. But, as to the effeminacy, I denied it in 
 toto ; and with good reason, as will be seen. Neither 
 did my brother pretend to have any experimental 
 proofs of it. The ground he went upon was a mere 
 a priori one — viz., that I had always been tied to the 
 apron-string of women or girls ; which amounted at 
 most to this — that, by training and the natural ten- 
 dency of circumstances, I ought to be effeminate : 
 that is, there was reason to expect beforehand that I 
 should be so ; but, then, the more merit in me, if, in 
 spite of such reasonable presumptions, I really were 
 not. In fact, my brother soon learned, by a daily 
 experience, how entirely he might depend upon me 
 for carrying out the most audacious of his own war- 
 like plans ; such plans, it is true, that I abominated ; 
 
38 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 but that made no difference in the fidelity with which 
 I tried to fulfil them. 
 
 This eldest brother of mine was in all respects a 
 remarkable boy. Haughty he was, aspiring, im- 
 measurably active ; fertile in resources as Robinson 
 Crusoe ; but also full of quarrel as it is possible to 
 imagine ; and, in default of any other opponent, he 
 would have fastened a quarrel upon his own shadow 
 for presuming to run before him when going westwards 
 in the morning, whereas, in all reason, a shadow, 
 like a dutiful child, ought to keep deferentially in 
 rear of that majestic substance which is the author 
 of its existence. Books he detested, one and all, 
 excepting only such as he happened to write himself. 
 And these were not a few. On all subjects known 
 to man, from the Thirty-nine Articles of our English 
 Church, down to pyrotechnics, legerdemain, magic, 
 both black and white, thaumaturgy, and necromancy, 
 he favoured the world (which world was the nursery 
 where I lived amongst my sisters) with his select 
 opinions. On this last subject especially — of necro- 
 mancy — he was very great ; witness his profound 
 work, though but a fragment, and, unfortunately, 
 long since departed to the bosom of ‘ Cinderella, 
 entitled, ‘ : How to raise a Ghost; and when you’ve 
 got him down, how to keep him down.” To which 
 work he assured us, that some most learned and 
 enormous man, whose name was a foot and a half 
 long, had promised him an appendix ; which ap- 
 pendix treated of the Red Sea and Solomon’s signet- 
 ring; with forms of mittimus for ghosts that might 
 be refractory ; and probably a riot act, for any emeute 
 amongst ghosts inclined to raise barricades ; since 
 he often thrilled our young hearts by supposing 
 the case (not at all unlikely, he affirmed), that a 
 federation, a solemn league and conspiracy, might 
 take place amongst the infinite generations of ghosts 
 against the single generation of men at any one time 
 composing the garrison of earth. The Roman 
 phrase for expressing that a man had died — viz., 
 “ Abiit ad plures ” (He has gone over to the 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 39 
 
 majority) — my brother explained to us ; and we 
 easily comprehended that any one generation of 
 the living human race, even if combined, and 
 acting in concert, must be in a frightful minority, 
 by comparison with all the incalculable genera- 
 tions that had trod this earth before us. The 
 Parliament of living men, Lords and Commons 
 united, what a miserable array against the Upper 
 and Lower House composing the Parliament of 
 ghosts ! Perhaps the Pre-Adamites would constitute 
 one wing in such a ghostly army. My brother, 
 dying in his sixteenth year, was far enough from 
 seeing or foreseeing Waterloo ; else he might have 
 illustrated this dreadful duel of the living human 
 race with its ghostly predecessors, by the awful 
 apparition which at three o’clock in the afternoon, 
 on the 1 8th of June 1815, the mighty contest 
 at Waterloo must have assumed to eyes that 
 watched over the trembling interests of man. The 
 English army, about that time in the great agony 
 of its strife, was thrown into squares ; and under 
 that arrangement, which condensed and contracted 
 its apparent numbers within a few black geometrical 
 diagrams, how frightfully narrow — how spectral did 
 its slender quadrangles appear at a distance, to any 
 philosophic spectators that knew the amount of 
 human interests confided to that army, and the 
 hopes for Christendom that even were trembling in 
 the balance ! Such a disproportion, it seems, might 
 exist, in the case of a ghostly war, between the 
 harvest of possible results and the slender band 
 of reapers that were to gather it. And there 
 
 was even a worse peril than any analogous one 
 that has been proved to exist at Waterloo. A 
 British surgeon, indeed, in a work of two octavo 
 volumes, has endeavoured to show that a conspiracy 
 was traced at Waterloo, between two or three foreign 
 regiments, for kindling a panic in the heat of the 
 battle, by flight, and by a sustained blowing up of 
 tumbrils, under the miserable purpose of shaking 
 the British steadiness. But the evidences are not 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 4 ° 
 
 clear ; whereas my brother insisted that the presence 
 of sham men, distributed extensively amongst the 
 human race, and meditating treason against us 
 all, had been demonstrated to the satisfaction of all 
 true philosophers. Who were these shams and 
 make-believe men ? They were, in fact, people 
 that had been dead for centuries, but that, for 
 reasons best known to themselves, had returned 
 to this upper earth, walked about amongst us, 
 and were undistinguishable, except by the most 
 learned of necromancers, from authentic men of 
 flesh and blood. I mention this for the sake of 
 illustrating the fact, of which the reader will 
 find a singular instance in the foot-note attached, 
 that the same crazes are everlastingly revolving 
 upon men . 1 
 
 This hypothesis, however, like a thousand others, 
 when it happened that they engaged no durable 
 sympathy from his nursery audience, he did not 
 pursue. For some time he turned his thoughts to 
 
 1 Five years ago, during the carnival of universal anarchy 
 equally amongst doers and thinkers, a closely- printed pamphlet 
 was published with this title, “ A New Revelation ; or the 
 Communion of the Incarnate Dead with the Unconscious 
 Living. Important Fact, without trifling Fiction, by Him.” 
 I have not the pleasure of knowing Him ; but certainly I must 
 concede to Him, that he writes like a man of extreme sobriety, 
 upon his extravagant theme. He is angry with Swedenborg, 
 as might be expected, for his chimeras ; some of which, how- 
 ever, of late years have signally altered their aspect ; but as to 
 Him, there is no chance that he should be occupied with 
 chimeras, because (p. Q “he has met with some who have 
 acknowledged the fact of their having come from the dead 55 
 habes conjitentem reum. Few, however, are endowed with so 
 much candour ; and, in particular, for the honour of literature, 
 it grieves me to find, by p. io, that the largest number of these 
 shams, and perhaps the most uncandid, are to be looked for 
 amongst ‘‘publishers and printers,” of whom, it seems, “ the 
 great majority ” are mere forgeries ; a very few speak frankly 
 about the matter, and say they don’t care who knows it, which, 
 to my thinking, is impudence ; but by far the larger section 
 doggedly deny it, and call a policeman, if you persist in 
 charging them with being shams. Some differences there are 
 between my brother and Him, but in the great outline of their 
 views they coincide. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 4I 
 
 philosophy, and read lectures to us every night upon 
 some branch or other of physics. This undertaking 
 arose upon some one of us envying or admiring flies 
 for their power of walking upon the ceiling. “ Pooh!” 
 he said, “ they are impostors ; they pretend to do it, 
 but they can’t do it as it ought to be done. Ah ! 
 you should see me standing upright on the ceiling, 
 with my head downwards, for half-an-hour together, 
 meditating profoundly.” My sister Mary remarked, 
 that we should all be very glad to see him in that 
 position. “ If that’s the case,” he replied, “ it’s very 
 well that all is ready, except as to a strap or two.” 
 Being an excellent skater, he had first imagined that, 
 if held up until he had started, he might then, by 
 taking a bold sweep ahead, keep himself in position 
 through the continued impetus of skating. But this 
 he found not to answer ; because, as he observed, 
 “ the friction was too retarding from the plaster of 
 Paris ; but the case would be very different if the 
 ceiling were coated with ice.” As it was not , he 
 changed his plan. The true secret, he now dis- 
 covered, was this : he would consider himself in 
 the light of a humming-top ; he would make an 
 apparatus (and he made it) for having himself 
 launched, like a top, upon the ceiling, and regularly 
 spun. Then the vertiginous motion of the human 
 top would overpower the force of gravitation. He 
 should, of course, spin upon his own axis — perhaps 
 he might even dream upon it ; and he laughed at 
 “ those scoundrels, the flies,” that never improved 
 in their pretended art, nor made anything of it. The 
 principle was now discovered ; “ and, of course,” he 
 said, “if a man can keep it up for five minutes, 
 what’s to hinder him from doing so for five months?” 
 “Certainly, nothing that I can think of,” was the 
 reply of my sister, whose scepticism, in fact, had not 
 settled upon the five months, but altogether upon the 
 five minutes. The apparatus for spinning him, how- 
 ever, perhaps from its complexity, would not work ; a 
 fact evidently owing to the stupidity of the gardener. 
 On reconsidering the subject, he announced, to the 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 42 
 
 disappointment of some amongst us, that, although 
 the physical discovery was now complete, he saw a 
 moral difficulty. It was not a humming - top that was 
 required, but a peg- top. Now, this, in order to keep 
 
 up the vertigo at full stretch, without which, to a 
 certainty, gravitation would prove too much for him, 
 needed to be whipped incessantly. But that was pre- 
 cisely what a gentleman ought not to tolerate ; to be 
 scourged unintermittingly on the legs by any grub of 
 a gardener, unless it were Father Adam himself, was 
 a thing he could not bring his mind to face. How- 
 ever, as some compensation, he proposed to improve 
 the art of flying, which was, ^as everybody must 
 acknowledge, in a condition disgraceful to civilised 
 society. As he had made many a fire balloon, and 
 had succeeded in some attempts at bringing down 
 cats by parachutes , it was not very difficult to fly 
 downwards from moderate elevations. But, as he 
 was reproached by my sister for never flying back 
 again, which, however, was a far different thing, and 
 not even attempted by the philosopher in “ Rasselas” 
 (for 
 
 “ Revocare gradum, et superas evadere ad auras, 
 
 Hie labor, hoc opus est”), 
 
 he refused, under such poor encouragement, to try 
 his winged parachutes any more, either “ aloft or 
 alow,” till he had thoroughly studied Bishop Wilkins 1 
 
 1 “ Bishop Wilkins” : — Dr. W., Bishop of Chester, in the 
 reign of Charles II., notoriously wrote a book on the possibility 
 of a voyage to the moon, which, in a bishop, would be called 
 a translation to the moon, and perhaps it was his name in 
 combination with his book that suggested the “Adventures of 
 Peter Wilkins.” It is unfair, however, to mention him in con- 
 nection with that single one of his works which announces 
 an extravagant purpose. He was really a scientific man, 
 and already in the time of Cromwell (about 1656) had pro- 
 jected that Royal Society of London which was afterwards 
 realised and presided over by Isaac Barrow and Isaac New- 
 ton. He was also a learned man, but still with a vein of 
 romance about him, as may be seen in his most elaborate 
 work, “The Essay towards a Philosophic or Universal Lam 
 guage.” 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 43 
 
 on the art of translating right reverend gentlemen to 
 the moon ; and, in the meantime, he resumed his 
 general lectures on physics. From these, however, 
 he was speedily driven, or one might say shelled out, 
 by a concerted assault of my sister Mary’s. He had 
 been in the habit of lowering the pitch of his lectures 
 with ostentatious condescension to the presumed level 
 of our poor understandings. This superciliousness 
 annoyed my sister ; and accordingly, with the help 
 of two young female visitors, and my next younger 
 brother — in subsequent times a little middy on board 
 many a ship of H.M., and the most predestined 
 rebel upon earth against all assumptions, small or 
 great, of superiority — she arranged a mutiny, that 
 had the unexpected effect of suddenly extinguishing 
 the lectures for ever. He had happened to say, what 
 was no unusual thing with him, that he flattered 
 himself he had made the point under discussion 
 tolerably clear ; “ clear,” he added, bowing round 
 the half-circle of us, the audience, ; ‘to the meanest 
 of capacities ” ; and then he repeated, sonorously, 
 “ clear to the most excruciatingly mean of capacities.” 
 Upon which a voice, a female voice — but whose 
 voice, in the tumult that followed, I did not dis- 
 tinguish — retorted, “No, you haven’t ; it’s as dark as 
 sin ; ” and then, without a moment’s interval, a 
 second voice exclaimed, “ Dark as night ; ” then 
 came my younger brother’s insurrectionary yell, 
 “ Dark as midnight ; ” then another female voice 
 chimed in melodiously, “ Dark as pitch ; ” and so 
 the peal continued to come round like a catch, the 
 whole being so well concerted, and the rolling fire 
 so well sustained, that it was impossible to make 
 head against it ; whilst the abruptness of the inter- 
 ruption gave to it the protecting character of an oral 
 “ round-robin,” it being impossible to challenge any 
 one in particular as the ringleader. Burke’s phrase 
 of “ the swinish multitude,” applied to mobs, was 
 then in everybody’s mouth ; and, accordingly, after 
 my brother had recovered from his first astonish- 
 ment at this audacious mutiny, he made us several 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 44 
 
 sweeping bows, that looked very much like tentative 
 rehearsals of a sweepin g fusillade, and then addressed 
 us in a very brief speech, of which we could dis- 
 tinguish the words pearls and swinish multitude , but 
 uttered in a very low key, perhaps out of some 
 lurking consideration for the two young strangers. 
 We all laughed in chorus at this parting salute; my 
 brother himself condescended at last to join us ; but 
 there ended the course of lectures on natural philo- 
 sophy. 
 
 As it was impossible, however, that he should 
 remain quiet, he announced to us, that for the rest 
 of his life he meant to dedicate himself to the in- 
 tense cultivation of the tragic drama. He got to 
 work instantly ; and very soon he had composed the 
 first act of his “ Sultan Selim ” ; but, in defiance of 
 the metre, he soon changed the title to “ Sultan 
 Amurath,” considering that a much fiercer name, 
 more bewhiskered and beturbaned. It was no part 
 of his intention that we should sit lolling on chairs 
 like ladies and gentlemen that had paid opera prices 
 for private boxes. He expected every one of us, he 
 said, to pull an oar. We were to act the tragedy. 
 But, in fact, we had many oars to puli. There were 
 so many characters, that each of us took four at the 
 least, and the future middy had six. He, this wicked 
 little middy, 1 caused the greatest affliction to Sultan 
 Amurath, forcing him to order the amputation of his 
 head six several times (that is, once in every one of 
 his six parts) during the first act. In reality, the 
 sultan, though otherwise a decent man, was too 
 bloody. What by the bowstring, and what by the 
 scimitar, he had S3 thinned the population with 
 which he commenced business, that scarcely any of 
 
 1 “ Middy ” : — I call him so simply to avoid confusion, and 
 by way of anticipation ; else he was too young at this time to 
 serve in the navy. Afterwards he did so for many years, and 
 saw every variety of service in every class of ships belonging to 
 our navy. At one time, when yet - a boy, he was captured by 
 pirates, and compelled to sail with them ; and the end of his 
 adventurous career was, that for many a year he has been lying 
 at the bottom of the Atlantic. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 45 
 
 the characters remained alive at the end of act the 
 first. Sultan Amurath found himself in an awkward 
 situation. Large arrears of work remained, and hardly 
 anybody to do it but the sultan himself. In com- 
 posing act the second, the author had to proceed like 
 Deucalion and Pyrrha, and to create an entirely new 
 generation. Apparently this young generation, that 
 ought to have been so good, took no warning by what 
 had happened to their ancestors in act the first ; one 
 must conclude that they were quite as wicked, since 
 the poor sultan had found himself reduced to order 
 them all for execution in the course of this act 
 the second. To the brazen age had succeeded an 
 iron age ; and the prospects were becoming sadder 
 and sadder as the tragedy advanced. But here the 
 author began to hesitate. He felt it hard to resist 
 the instinct of carnage. And was it right to do 
 so? Which of the felons whom he had cut off 
 prematurely could pretend that a court of appeal 
 would have reversed his sentence? But the con- 
 sequences were distressing. A new set of characters 
 in every act brought with it the necessity of a new 
 plot ; for people could not succeed to the arrears of 
 old actions, or inherit ancient motives, like a landed 
 estate. Five crops, in fact, must be taken off the 
 ground in each separate tragedy, amounting, in short, 
 to five tragedies involved in one. 
 
 Such, according to the rapid sketch which at this 
 moment my memory furnishes, was the brother who 
 now first laid open to me the gates of war. The 
 occasion was this. He had resented, with a shower 
 of stones, an affront offered to us by an individual 
 boy, belonging to a cotton-factory : for more than 
 two years afterwards this became the teterrima 
 causa of a skirmish or a battle as often as we 
 passed the factory ; and, unfortunately, that was 
 twice a day on every day, except Sunday. Our 
 situation in respect to the enemy was as follows : 
 Greenhay, a country - house, newly built by my 
 father, at that time was a clear mile from the out- 
 skirts of Manchester ; but in after years, Manchester, 
 
46 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 throwing out the tentacula of its vast expansions 
 absolutely enveloped Greenhay ; and, for anything I 
 know, the grounds and gardens which then insulated 
 the house may have long disappeared. Being a 
 modest mansion, which (including hot walls, offices, 
 and gardener’s house) had cost only six thousand 
 pounds, I do not know how it should have risen 
 to the distinction of giving name to a region of that 
 great town ; however, it has done so 1 ; and at this 
 time, therefore, after changes so great, it will be diffi- 
 cult for the habitue of that region to understand how 
 my brother and myself could have a solitary road to 
 traverse between Greenhay and Princess Street, then 
 the termination, on that side, of Manchester. But 
 so it was. Oxford Street , like its namesake in London, 
 was then called the Oxford Read ; and during the 
 currency of our acquaintance with it, arose the first 
 three houses in its neighbourhood ; of which the third 
 was built for the Rev. S. H., one of our guardians, 
 for whom his friends had also built the church of 
 St. Peter’s — not a bowshot from the house. At 
 present, however, he resided in Salford, nearly two 
 miles from Greenhay ; and to him we went over 
 daily, for the benefit of his classical instructions. 
 One sole cotton-factory had then risen along the line 
 of Oxford Street ; and this was close to a bridge, 
 which also was a new creation ; for previously all 
 passengers to Manchester went round by Garrat. 
 This factory became to us the officina gentium, from 
 which swarmed forth those Goths and Vandals that 
 continually threatened our steps ; and this bridge 
 became the eternal arena of combat ; we taking good 
 care to be on the right side of the bridge for retreat 
 —i.e. on the town side, or the country side, ac- 
 cordingly as we were going out in the morning, or 
 returning in the afternoon. Stones were the imple- 
 
 1 “Green keys,” with a slight variation in the spelling, is the 
 name given to that district, of which Greenhay formed the 
 original nucleus. Probably, it was the solitary situation of the 
 house which (failing any other grounds of denomination) raised 
 it to this privilege. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 47 
 
 ments of warfare ; and by continual practice both 
 parties became expert in throwing them. 
 
 The origin of the feud it is scarcely requisite to 
 rehearse, since the particular accident which began it 
 was not the true efficient cause of our long warfare, 
 but simply the casual occasion. The cause lay in 
 our aristocratic dress. As children of an opulent 
 family, where all provisions were liberal, and all ap- 
 pointments elegant, we were uniformly well-dressed ; 
 and, in particular, we wore trousers (at that time 
 unheard of, except among sailors), and we also wore 
 Hessian boots — a crime that could not be forgiven 
 in the Lancashire of that day, because it expressed the 
 double offence of being aristocratic and being out- 
 landish. We were aristocrats, and itwas vain to deny it ; 
 could we deny our boots ? whilst our antagonists, if 
 not absolutely sansculottes , were slovenly and forlorn in 
 their dress, often unwashed, with hair totally neglected, 
 and always covered with flakes of cotton. Jacobins 
 they were not, as regarded any sympathy with the 
 Jacobinism that then desolated France ; for, on the 
 contrary, they detested everything French, and an- 
 swered with brotherly signals to the cry of “ Church 
 and King,” or “ King and Constitution.” But, for 
 all that, as they were perfectly independent, getting 
 very high wages, and these wages in a mode of in- 
 dustry that was then taking vast strides ahead, they 
 contrived to reconcile this patriotic anti- Jacobinism 
 with a personal Jacobinism of that sort which is 
 native to the heart of man, who is by natural impulse 
 (and not without a root of nobility, though also of 
 base envy) impatient of inequality, and submits to it 
 only through a sense of its necessity, or under a long 
 experience of its benefits. 
 
 It was on an early day of our new tyrocinium , or 
 perhaps on the very first, that, as we passed the 
 bridge, a boy happening to issue from the factory 1 
 sang out to us, derisively, “ Holloa, Bucks!” In 
 
 1 “ Factory ” : — Such was the designation technically at that 
 time. At present, I believe that a building of that class would 
 be called a “ mill.” 
 
48 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 this the reader may fail to perceive any atrocious 
 insult commensurate to the long war which followed. 
 But the reader is wrong. The word “ dandies 
 which was what the villain meant, had not then been 
 born, so that he could not have called us by that 
 name, unless through the spirit of prophecy. Buck 
 was the nearest word at hand in his Manchester 
 vocabulary; he gave all he could, and let us dream 
 the rest. But in the next moment he discovered our 
 boots, and he consummated his crime by saluting us 
 as “ Boots ! boots ! ” My brother made a dead stop, 
 surveyed him with intense disdain, and bade him 
 draw near, that he might “ give his flesh to the fowls 
 of the air.” The boy declined to accept this liberal 
 invitation, and conveyed his answer by a most con- 
 temptuous and plebeian gesture , 2 upon which my 
 brother drove him in with a show r er of stones. 
 
 During this inaugural flourish of hostilities, I, for 
 my part, remained inactive, and therefore apparently 
 neutral. But this was the last time that I did so : 
 for the moment, indeed, I was taken by surprise. To 
 be called a buck by one that had it in his choice to 
 have called me a coward, a thief, or a murderer, 
 struck me as a most pardonable offence ; and as to 
 boots, that rested upon a flagrant fact that could not 
 be denied : so that at first I was green enough to 
 regard the boy as very considerate and indulgent. 
 But my brother soon rectified my views ; or, if any 
 doubts remained, he impressed me, at least, with a 
 sense of my paramount duty to himself, which was 
 threefold. First, it seems that I owed military allegi- 
 ance to him, as my commander-in-chief, whenever 
 we “took the field”; secondly, by the law of nations 
 I, being a cadet of my house, owed suit and service 
 to him who was its head ; and he assured me, that 
 
 1 This word, however, exists in Jack-a-dandy — a very old 
 English word. But what does that mean ? 
 
 2 Precisely, however, the same gesture, plebeian as it was, by 
 which the English commandant at Heligoland replied to the 
 Danes when civilly inviting him to surrender. Southey, it was, 
 on the authority of Lieutenant Southey, his brother, who com- 
 municated to me this anecdote. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 49 
 
 twice in a year, on my birthday and on his, he had 
 a right, strictly speaking, to make me lie down, and 
 to set his foot upon my neck ; lastly, by a law not so 
 rigorous, but valid amongst gentlemen — viz., “ by the 
 comity of nations ” — it seems I owed eternal deference 
 to one so much older than myself, so much wiser, 
 stronger, braver, more beautiful, and more swift of 
 foot. Something like all this in tendency I had 
 already believed, though I had not so minutely in- 
 vestigated the modes and grounds of my duty. By 
 temperament, and through natural dedication to 
 despondency, 1 felt resting upon me always too deep 
 and gloomy a sense of obscure duties attached to life, 
 that I never should be able to fulfil ; a burden which 
 I could not carry, and which yet I did not know how 
 to throw off. Glad, therefore, I was to find the whole 
 tremendous weight of obligations — the law and the 
 prophets — all crowded into this one pocket command, 
 
 ■ £ Thou shalt obey thy brother as God’s vicar upon 
 earth.” For now, if by any future stone levelled at 
 him who had called me a “ buck,” I should chance 
 to draw blood — perhaps I might not have committed 
 so serious a trespass on any rights which he could 
 plead : but if I had (for on this subject my convictions 
 were still cloudy), at any rate the duty I might have 
 violated in regard to this general brother, in right of 
 Adam, was cancelled when it came into collision 
 with my paramount duty to this liege brother of my 
 own individual house. 
 
 From this day, therefore, I obeyed all my brother’s 
 military commands with the utmost docility ; and 
 happy it made me that every sort of doubt, or 
 question, or opening for demur, was swallowed up 
 in the unity of this one papal principle, discovered 
 by my brother — viz., that all rights and duties of 
 casuistry were transferred from me to himself. His 
 was the judgment — his was the responsibility; and to 
 me belonged only the sublime obligation of uncon- 
 ditional faith in him . That faith I realised. It is 
 true that he taxed me at times, in his reports of 
 particular fights, with “ horrible cowardice,” and even 
 
50 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 with a “cowardice that seemed inexplicable, except 
 on the supposition of treachery/’ But this was only 
 a fci$on de purler with him : the idea of secret perfidy, 
 that was constantly moving underground, gave an 
 interest to the progress of the war, which else tended 
 to the monotonous. It was a dramatic artifice for 
 sustaining the interest, where the incidents might 
 happen to be too slightly diversified. But that he 
 did not believe his own charges was clear, because he 
 never repeated them in his “ General History of the 
 Campaigns,” which was a resu?7ie , or recapitulating 
 digest, of his daily reports. 
 
 We fought every day ; and, generally speaking, 
 twice every day ; and the result was pretty uniform — 
 viz., that my brother and I terminated the battle by 
 insisting upon our undoubted right to run away. 
 Magna Charta , I should fancy, secures that great 
 right to every man ; else, surely, it is sadly defective. 
 But out of this catastrophe to most of our skirmishes, 
 and to all our pitched battles except one, grew a 
 standing schism between my brother and myself. 
 My unlimited obedience had respect to action, but 
 not to opinion. Loyalty to my brother did not rest 
 upon hypocrisy ; because I was faithful, it did not 
 follow that I must be false in relation to his capricious 
 opinions. And these opinions sometimes took the 
 shape of acts. Twice, at the least, in every week, 
 but sometimes every night, my brother insisted on 
 singing “Te Deum ” for supposed victories he had 
 won ; and he insisted also on my bearing a part in 
 these “Te Deums.” Now, as I knew of no such 
 victories, but resolutely asserted the truth — viz., that 
 we ran away — a slight jar was thus given to the else 
 triumphal effect of these musical ovations. Once 
 having uttered my protest, however, willingly I gave 
 my aid to the chanting ; for I loved unspeakably the 
 grand and varied system of chanting in the Romish 
 and English Churches. And, looking back at this 
 day to the ineffable benefits which I derived from the 
 church of my childhood, I account among the very 
 greatest those which reached me through the various 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 5 1 
 
 chants connected with the “ O, Jubilate,” the “ Mag- 
 nificat,” the “ Te Deum,” the “ Benedicite,” & c. 
 Through these chants it was that the sorrow which 
 laid waste my infancy, and the devotion which nature 
 had made a necessity of my being, were profoundly 
 interfused : the sorrow gave reality and depth to the 
 devotion ; the devotion gave grandeur and idealisa- 
 tion to the sorrow. Neither was my love for chanting 
 altogether without knowledge. A son of my reverend 
 guardian, much older than myself, who possessed a 
 singular faculty of producing a sort of organ accom- 
 paniment with one half of his mouth, whilst he sang 
 with the other half, had given me some instructions 
 in the art of chanting : and, as to my brother, he, the 
 hundred-handed Briareus, could do all things ; of 
 course, therefore, he could chant. 
 
 Once having begun, it followed naturally that the 
 war should deepen in bitterness. Wounds that wrote 
 memorials in the flesh, insults that rankled in the 
 heart — these were not features of the case likely to 
 be forgotten by our enemies, and far less by my 
 fiery brother. I, for my part, entered not into any 
 of the passions that war may be supposed to kindle, 
 except only the chronic passion of anxiety. Fear it 
 was not ; for experience had taught me that, under 
 the random firing of our undisciplined enemies, the 
 chances were not many of being wounded. But the 
 uncertainties of the war ; the doubts in every separate 
 action whether I could keep up the requisite connec- 
 tion with my brother ; and, in case I could not, the 
 utter darkness that surrounded my fate ; whether, as 
 a trophy won from Israel, I should be dedicated 
 to the service of some Manchester Dagon, or pass 
 through fire to Moloch ; all these contingencies, for 
 me that had no friend to consult, ran too violently 
 into the master-current of my constitutional despond- 
 ency, ever to give way under any casual elation of 
 success. Success, however, we really had at times ; 
 in slight skirmishes pretty often ; and once, at least, 
 as the reader will find to his mortification, if he is 
 wicked enough to take the side of the Philistines, *a 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 5 2 
 
 most smashing victory in a pitched battle. But even 
 then, and whilst the hurrahs were yet ascending from 
 our jubilating lips, the freezing remembrance came 
 back to my heart of that deadly depression which, 
 duly at the coming round of the morning and even- 
 ing watches, travelled with me like my shadow on 
 our approach to the memorable bridge. A bridge of 
 sighs 1 too surely it was for me ; and even for my 
 brother it formed an object of fierce yet anxious 
 jealousy, that he could not always disguise, as we 
 first came in sight of it : for, if it happened to be 
 occupied in strength, there was an end of all hope 
 that we could attempt the passage ; and that was a 
 fortunate solution of the difficulty, as it imposed no 
 
 1 “ Bridge of Sighs” : — Two men of memorable genius, 
 Hood last, and Lord Byron by many years previously, have so 
 appropriated this phrase, and re-issued it as English currency, 
 that many readers suppose it to be theirs. But the genealogies 
 of fine expressions should be more carefully preserved. The 
 expression belongs originally to Venice. This jus postliminii 
 becomes of real importance in many cases, but especially in the 
 case of Shakspere. Could one have believed it possible 
 beforehand? And yet it is a fact that he is made to seem a 
 robber of the lowest order, by mere dint of suffering robbery. 
 Purely through their own jewelly splendour have many hun- 
 dreds of his phrases forced themselves into usage so general, 
 under the vulgar infirmity of seeking to strengthen weak prose 
 by shreds of poetic quotation, that at length the majority of 
 careless readers come to look upon these phrases as belonging 
 to the language, and traceable to no distinct proprietor any 
 more than proverbs: and thus, on afterwards observing them 
 in Shakspere, they regard him in the light of one accepting 
 alms (like so many meaner persons) from the common treasury 
 of the universal mind, on which treasury, meantime, he had 
 himself conferred these phrases as original donations of his own. 
 Many expressions in the “ Paradise Lost,” in “ II Penseroso,” 
 and in “ L’Allegro,” are in the same predicament. And thus 
 the almost incredible case is realised which I have described— 
 viz., that simply by having suffered a robbery through two 
 centuries (for the first attempt at plundering Milton was made 
 upon his juvenile poems), have Shakspere and Milton come to 
 be taxed as robbers. N.B. — In speaking of Hood as having 
 appropriated the phrase Bridge of Sighs, I would not be under- 
 stood to represent him as by possibility aiming at any conceal- 
 ment. He was far above such a meanness by his nobility of 
 heart, as he was raised above all need for it by the overflowing 
 opulence of his genius. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 53 
 
 evil beyond a circuit ; which, at least, was safe, if the 
 world should choose to call it inglorious. Even this 
 shade of ignominy, however, my brother contrived to 
 colour favourably, by calling us — that is, me and 
 himself — “a corps of observation”; and he con- 
 descendingly explained to me, that, although making 
 “a lateral movement,” he had his eye upon the 
 enemy, and “ might yet come round upon his left 
 flank in a way that wouldn’t, perhaps, prove very 
 agreeable.” This, from the nature of the ground, 
 never happened. We crossed the river at Garrat, 
 out of sight from the enemy’s position ; and, on our 
 return in the evening, when we reached that point of 
 our route from which the retreat was secure to Green- 
 hay, we took such revenge for the morning insult as 
 might belong to extra liberality in our stone dona- 
 tions. On this line of policy there was, therefore, no 
 cause for anxiety ; but the common case was, that 
 the numbers might not be such as to justify this 
 caution, and yet quite enough for mischief. To my 
 brother, however, stung and carried headlong into 
 hostility by the martial instincts of his nature, the 
 uneasiness of doubt or insecurity was swallowed up 
 by his joy in the anticipation of victory, or even of 
 contest ; whilst to myself, whose exultation was purely 
 official and ceremonial, as due by loyalty from a 
 cadet to the head of his house, no such compensa- 
 tion existed. The enemy was no enemy in my eyes ; 
 his affronts were but retaliations ; and his insults were 
 so inapplicable to my unworthy self, being of a calibre 
 exclusively meant for the use of my brother, that from 
 me they recoiled, one and all, as cannon-shot from 
 cotton bags. 
 
 The ordinary course of our day’s warfare was this : 
 between nine and ten in the morning occurred our 
 first transit, and consequently our earliest opportunity 
 for doing business. But at this time the great sub- 
 lunary interest of breakfast, which swallowed up all 
 nobler considerations of glory and ambition, occupied 
 the -work-people of the factory (or what in the pedantic 
 diction of this day are termed the “operatives”), so 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 54 
 
 that very seldom any serious business was transacted. 
 Without any formal armistice, the paramount con- 
 venience of such an arrangement silently secured its 
 own recognition. Notice there needed none of truce, 
 when the one side yearned for breakfast, and the 
 other for a respite ; the groups, therefore, on or about 
 the bridge, if any at all, were loose in their array, and 
 careless. We passed through them rapidly, and, on 
 my part, uneasily; exchanging a few snarls, perhaps, 
 but seldom or never snapping at each other. The 
 tameness was almost shocking of those who, in the 
 afternoon, would inevitably resume their natural 
 characters of tiger-cats and wolves. Sometimes, 
 however, my brother felt it to be a duty that we 
 should fight in the morning ; particularly when any 
 expression of public joy for a victory — bells ringing 
 in the distance — or when a royal birthday, or some 
 traditional commemoration of ancient feuds (such as 
 the 5th of November), irritated his martial propen- 
 sities. Some of these, being religious festivals, seemed 
 to require of us an extra homage, for which we knew 
 not how to find any natural or significant expression, 
 except through sharp discharges of stones, that being 
 a language older than Hebrew or Sanscrit, and uni- 
 versally intelligible. But, excepting these high days 
 of religious solemnity, when a man is called upon to 
 show that he is not a Pagan or a miscreant in the 
 eldest of senses, by thumping, or trying to thump, 
 somebody who is accused or accusable of being hetero- 
 dox, the great ceremony of breakfast was allowed to 
 sanctify the hour. Some natural growls we uttered, 
 but hushed them soon, regardless 
 
 “ Of the sweeping whirlpool’s sway, 
 
 That, hush’d in grim repose, look’d for his evening prey.” 
 
 That came but too surely. Yes, evening never 
 forgot to come ; this odious necessity of fighting 
 never missed its road back, or fell asleep, or loitered 
 by the way, more than a bill of exchange, or a tertian 
 fever. Five times a week (Saturday sometimes, and 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 55 
 
 Sunday always, were days of rest) the same scene 
 rehearsed itself in pretty nearly the same succession of 
 circumstances. Between four and five o’clock we 
 had crossed the bridge to the safe, or Greenhay, side; 
 then we paused, and waited for the enemy. Sooner 
 or later a bell rang, and from the smoky hive issued 
 the hornets that night and day stung incurably my 
 peace of mind. The order and procession of the 
 incidents after this were odiously monotonous. My 
 brother occupied the main high-road, precisely at the 
 point where a very gentle rise of the ground attained 
 its summit ; for the bridge lay in a slight valley ; and 
 the main military position was fifty or eighty yards 
 above the bridge ; then — but having first examined 
 my pockets, in order to be sure that my stock of am- 
 munition — stones, fragments of slate, with a reason- 
 able proportion of brickbats — was all correct and 
 ready for action — he detached me about forty yards 
 to the right, my orders being invariable, and liable to 
 no doubts or 44 quibbling.” Detestable in my ears 
 was that word 44 quibbling ,” by which, for a thousand 
 years, if the war had happened to last so long, he 
 would have fastened upon me the imputation of 
 meaning, or wishing, at least, to do what he called 
 44 pettifogulising ” — that is, to plead some distinction, 
 or verbal demur, in bar of my orders, under some 
 colourable pretence that, according to their literal 
 construction, they really did not admit of being ful- 
 filled, or perhaps that they admitted it too much as 
 being capable of fulfilment in two senses, either of 
 them a practical sense. True it was that my eye was 
 preternaturally keen for flaws of language, not from 
 pedantic exaction of superfluous accuracy, but, on the 
 contrary, from too conscientious a wish to escape the 
 mistakes which language not rigorous is apt to occa- 
 sion. So far from seeking to 44 pettifogulise ” — i.e ., to 
 find evasions for any purpose in a trickster’s minute 
 tortuosities of construction — exactly in the opposite 
 direction, from mere excess of sincerity, most un- 
 willingly I found, in almost everybody’s words, an 
 unintentional opening left for double interpretations. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 56 
 
 Undesigned equivocation prevails everywhere ; 1 and 
 it is not the cavilling hair-splitter, but, on the contrary, 
 the single-eyed servant of truth, that is most likely to 
 insist upon the limitation of expressions too wide or 
 too vague, and upon the decisive election between 
 meanings potentially double. Not in order to resist 
 or evade my brother’s directions, but for the very 
 opposite purpose — viz., that I might fulfil them to 
 the letter — thus and no otherwise it happened that I 
 showed so much scrupulosity about the exact value 
 and position of his words, as finally to draw upon 
 myself the vexatious reproach of being habitually a 
 “pettifoguliser.” 
 
 Meantime, our campaigning continued to rage. 
 Overtures of pacification were never mentioned on 
 either side. And I, for my part, with the passions 
 only of peace at my heart, did the works of war faith- 
 fully, and with distinction. I presume so, at least, 
 from the results. It is true I was continually falling 
 into treason, without exactly knowing how I got into 
 it, or how I got out of it. My brother also, it is true, 
 sometimes assured me that he could, according to the 
 rigour of martial justice, have me hanged on the first 
 tree we passed ; to which my prosaic answer had 
 been, that of trees there were none in Oxford Street 
 — (which, in imitation of Von Troil’s famous chapter 
 on the snakes of Lapland, the reader may accept, if 
 he pleases, as a complete course of lectures on the 
 “ dendrology” of Oxford Street) — but, notwithstanding 
 such little stumblings in my career, I continued to 
 ascend in the service; and I am sure it will gratify 
 
 1 Geometry (it has been said) would not evade disputation, if 
 a man could find his interest in disputing it : such is the spirit 
 of cavil. But I, upon a very opposite ground, assert that there 
 is not one page of prose that could be selected from the best 
 writer in the English language (far less in the German), which, 
 upon a sufficient interest arising, would not furnish matter, 
 simply through its defects in precision, for a suit in Chancery. 
 Chancery suits do not arise, it is true, because the doubtful 
 expressions do not touch any interest of property ; but what 
 does arise is this — that something more valuable than a pecu- 
 niary interest is continually suffering — viz., the interests of 
 truth. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 57 
 
 my friendly readers to hear, that, before my eighth 
 birthday, I was promoted to the rank of major- 
 general. Over this sunshine, however, soon swept a 
 train of clouds. Three times I was taken prisoner ; 
 and with different results. The first time 1 was 
 carried to the rear, and not molested in any way. 
 Finding myself thus ignominiously neglected, I 
 watched my opportunity ; and, by making a wide 
 circuit, easily effected my escape. In the next case, 
 a brief council was held over me ; but I was not 
 allowed to hear the deliberations ; the result only 
 being communicated to me — which result consisted 
 in a message not very complimentary to my brother, 
 and a small present of kicks to myself. This present 
 was paid down without any discount, by means of a 
 general subscription amongst the party surrounding 
 me — that party, luckily, not being very numerous ; be- 
 sides which, I must, in honesty, acknowledge myself, 
 generally speaking, indebted to their forbearance. 
 They were not disposed to be too hard upon me. 
 But, at the same time, they clearly did not think it 
 right that I should escape altogether from tasting the 
 calamities of war. And this translated the estimate 
 of my guilt from the public jurisdiction to that of 
 the individual, sometimes capricious and harsh, and 
 carrying out the public award by means of legs that 
 ranged through all gradations of weight and agility. 
 One kick differed exceedingly from another kick 
 in dynamic value ; and, in some cases, this differ- 
 ence was so distressingly conspicuous, as to imply 
 special malice, unworthy, I conceive, of all generous 
 soldiership. 
 
 On returning to our own frontiers, I had an oppor- 
 tunity of displaying my exemplary greenness. That 
 message to my brother, with all its virus of insolence, 
 I repeated as faithfully for the spirit, and as literally 
 for the expressions, as my memory allowed me to do : 
 and in that troublesome effort, simpleton that I was, 
 fancied myself exhibiting a soldier’s loyalty to his 
 commanding officer. My brother thought otherwise : 
 he was more angry with me than with the enemy. 
 
58 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 I ought, he said, to have refused all participation 
 ■n such sansculottes ? insolence ; to carry it, was to 
 acknowledge it as fit to be carried. One grows wiser 
 every day ; and on this particular day I made a 
 resolution that, if again made prisoner, I would bring 
 110 more “jaw” (so my brother called it) from the 
 Philistines. If these people would send “jaw,” I 
 settled that, henceforwards, it must go through the 
 post-office. 
 
 In my former captures, there had been nothing 
 special or worthy of commemoration in the circum- 
 stances. Neither was there in the third, excepting 
 that, by accident, in the second stage of the case, I 
 was delivered over to the custody of young women 
 and girls ; whereas the ordinary course would have 
 thrown me upon the vigilant attentions (relieved from 
 monotony by the experimental kicks) of boys. So 
 far, the change was very much for the better. I 
 had a feeling myself, on first being presented to my 
 new young mistresses, of a distressing sort. Having 
 always, up to the completion of my sixth year, been 
 a privileged pet, and almost, I might say, ranking 
 amongst the sanctities of the household, with all its 
 female sections, whether young or old (an advantage 
 which I owed originally to a long illness, an ague, 
 stretching over two years of my infancy), naturally I 
 had learned to appreciate the indulgent tenderness 
 of women ; and my heart thrilled with love and grati- 
 tude, as often as they took me up into their arms and 
 kissed me. Here it would have been as everywhere 
 else; but, unfortunately, my introduction to these 
 young women was in the very worst of characters. I 
 had been taken in arms — in arms against their own 
 brothers, cousins, sweethearts, and on pretexts too 
 frivolous to mention. If asked the question, it would 
 be found that I should not myself deny the fact of 
 being at war with their whole order. What was the 
 meaning of that ? What was it to which war pledged 
 a man? It pledged him, in case of opportunity, to 
 burn, ravage, and depopulate the houses and lands 
 of the enemy ; which enemy was these fair girls. The 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 59 
 
 warrior stood committed to universal destruction. 
 Neither sex nor age ; neither the smiles of un- 
 offending infancy nor the grey hairs of the venerable 
 patriarch ; neither the sanctity of the matron nor the 
 loveliness of the youthful bride, would confer any 
 privilege with the warrior, consequently not with me. 
 
 Many other hideous features in the military char- 
 acter will be found in books innumerable — levelled at 
 those who make war, and therefore at myself. And 
 it appears finally by these books — that, as one of my 
 ordinary practices, I make a wilderness, and call it a 
 pacification ; that I hold it a duty to put people to 
 the sword ; which done, to plough up the foun- 
 dations of their hearths and altars, and then to sow 
 the ground with salt. 
 
 All this was passing through my brain, when sud- 
 denly one young woman snatched me up in her 
 arms, and kissed me ; from her , I was passed round 
 to others of the party, who all in turn caressed me, 
 with no allusion to that warlike mission, against them 
 and theirs, which only had procured me the honour 
 of an introduction to themselves in the character of 
 captive. The too palpable fact that I was not the 
 person meant by nature to exterminate their families, 
 or to make wildernesses and call them pacifications, 
 had withdrawn from their minds the counter fact — 
 that, whatever had been my performances, my inten- 
 tions had been hostile, and that in such a character 
 only I could have become their prisoner. Not only 
 did these young people kiss me, but I (seeing no 
 military reason against it) kissed them. Really, if 
 young women will insist on kissing major-generals, 
 they must expect that the generals will retaliate. One 
 only of the crowd adverted to the character in which 
 I came before them : to be a lawful prisoner, it struck 
 her too logical mind that I must have been caught in 
 some aggressive practices. “ Think, ” she said, “of 
 this little dog fighting, and fighting our Jack.” “ But,” 
 said another, in a propitiatory tone, “ perhaps he’ll 
 not do so any more.” I was touched by the kind- 
 ness of her suggestion, and the sweet, merciful sound 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 6o 
 
 of that same “ Not do so any more? which really was 
 prompted, I fear, much more by that charity in her 
 which hopeth all things, than by any signs of amend- 
 ment in myself. Well was it for me that no time' was 
 allowed for investigation into my morals by point- 
 blank questions as to my future intentions. In which 
 case it would have appeared too undeniably, that the 
 same sad necessity which had planted me hitherto in 
 a position of hostility to their estimable families, would 
 continue to persecute me ; and that, on the very next 
 day, duty to my brother, howsoever it might struggle 
 with gratitude to themselves, would range me in 
 martial attitude, with a pocketful of stones, meant, 
 alas ! for the exclusive use of their respectable kins- 
 men. Whilst I was preparing myself, however, for 
 this painful exposition, my female friends observed 
 issuing from the factory a crowd of boys not likely at 
 all to improve my prospects. Instantly setting me 
 down on my feet,, they formed a -sort of cordon 
 sanitaire behind me, by stretching out their petticoats 
 or aprons, as in dancing, so as to touch : and then, 
 crying out, “Now, little dog, run for thy life,’ 7 pre- 
 pared themselves (I doubt not) for rescuing me, 
 should my recapture be effected. 
 
 But this was not effected, although attempted with 
 an energy that alarmed me, and even perplexed me 
 with a vague thought (far too ambitious for my years) 
 that one or two of the pursuing party might be pos- 
 sessed by some demon of jealousy, as eye-witnesses 
 to my revelling amongst the lips of that fair girlish 
 bevy, kissing and being kissed, loving and being 
 loved ; in which case, from all that ever I had read 
 about jealousy (and I had read a great deal — viz., 
 “ Othello,” and Collins’s “ Ode to the Passions ”), I 
 was satisfied that, if again captured, I had very little 
 chance for my life. That jealousy was a green-eyed 
 monster, nobody could know better than I did. 
 “Oh, my lord, beware of jealousy!” Yes; and my 
 lord couldn’t possibly have more reason for bewar- 
 ing of it than myself ; indeed, well it would have 
 been had his lordship run away from all the ministers 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 6 1 
 
 of jealousy — Iago, Cassio, and embroidered handker- 
 chiefs — at the same pace of six miles an hour which 
 kept me ahead of my infuriated pursuers. Ah, that 
 maniac, white as a leper with flakes of cotton, can 
 I ever forget him, him that ran so far in advance of 
 his party ? What b ass i° n > but: jealousy, could have 
 sustained him in so hot a chase ? There were some 
 lovely girls in the fair company that had so con- 
 descendingly caressed me ; but, doubtless, upon that 
 sweet creature his love must have settled, who sug- 
 gested, in her soft, relenting voice, a penitence in 
 me that, alas ! had not dawned, saying, “ Yes ; but 
 perhaps he will not do so any more P Thinking, as I 
 ran, of her beauty, I felt that this jealous demoniac 
 must fancy himself justified in committing seven 
 times seven murders upon me, if he should have it 
 in his power. But, thank heaven, if jealousy can 
 run six miles an hour, there are other passions, as 
 for instance panic, that can run, upon occasion, six 
 and a half ; so, as I had the start of him (you know, 
 reader), and not a very short start — thanks be to the 
 expanded petticoats of my dear female friends !— 
 naturally it happened that the green-eyed monster 
 came in second best. Time luckily was precious 
 with him ; and, accordingly, when he had chased 
 me into the by-road leading down to Greenhay, he 
 turned back. For the moment, therefore, I found 
 myself suddenly released from danger. But this 
 counted for nothing. The same scene would pro- 
 bably revolve upon me continually ; and, on the 
 next rehearsal, Green-eyes might have better luck. 
 It saddened me, besides, to find myself under the 
 political necessity of numbering amongst the Philis- 
 tines, and as daughters of Gath, so many kind- 
 hearted girls, whom, by personal proof, I knew to 
 be such. In the profoundest sense I was unhappy ; 
 and not from any momentary accident of distress, 
 but from deep glimpses which now, and heretofore, 
 had opened themselves, as occasions arose, into the 
 inevitable conflicts of life. One of the saddest 
 among such conflicts is the necessity wheresoever it 
 
62 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 occurs, of adopting — though the heart should disown 
 — the enmities of one’s own family, or country, or 
 religious sect. In forms how afflicting must that 
 necessity have sometimes occurred during the Parlia- 
 mentary War ! And, in after years, amongst our 
 beautiful old English metrical romances, I found the 
 same impassioned complaint uttered by a knight, Sir 
 Ywain, as early as a.d. 1240 — 
 
 “ But now, where’er I stray or go, 
 
 My heart She has that is my foe ! ” 
 
 I knew — I anticipated to a certainty — that my 
 brother would not hear of any merit belonging to 
 the factory population whom every day we had to 
 meet in battle ; on the contrary, even submission on 
 their part, and willingness to walk penitentially 
 through the Furcce CaudincB , would hardly have 
 satisfied his sense of their criminality. Often, 
 indeed, as we came in view of the factory, he would 
 shake his fist at it, and say, in a ferocious tone of 
 voice, “ Delenda esi Carthago /” And certainly, I 
 thought to myself, it must be admitted by every- 
 body, that the factory people are inexcusable in 
 raising a rebellion against my brother. But still 
 rebels were men, and sometimes were women ; and 
 rebels that stretch out their petticoats like fans for 
 the sake of screening one from the hot pursuit of 
 enemies with fiery eyes (green or otherwise) really 
 are not the sort of people that one wishes to hate. 
 
 Homewards, therefore, I drew in sadness, and 
 little doubting that hereafter I might have verbal 
 feuds with my brother on behalf of my fair friends, 
 but not dreaming how much displeasure I had 
 already incurred by my treasonable collusion with 
 their caresses. That part of the affair he had seen 
 with his own eyes, from his position on the field ; 
 and then it was that he left me indignantly to my 
 fate, which, by my first reception, it was easy to see 
 would not prove very gloomy. When I came into 
 our own study, I found him engaged in preparing a 
 bulletin (which word was just then travelling into 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 63 
 
 universal use), reporting briefly the events of the 
 day. The art of drawing, as I shall again have 
 occasion to mention, was amongst his foremost 
 accomplishments ; and round the margin of the 
 bulletin ran a black border, ornamented with cypress, 
 and other funereal emblems. When finished, it was 
 carried into the room of Mrs. Evans. This Mrs. 
 Evans was an important person in our affairs. My 
 mother, who never chose to have any direct com- 
 munication with her servants, always had a house- 
 keeper for the regulation of all domestic business ; 
 and the housekeeper for some years was this Mrs. 
 Evans. Into her private parlour, where she sat 
 aloof from the under-servants, my brother and I 
 had the entree at all times, but upon very different 
 terms of acceptance : he as a favourite of the first 
 class ; /, by sufferance, as a sort of gloomy shadow 
 that ran after his person, and could not well be shut 
 out if he were let in. Him she admired in the very 
 highest degree ; myself, on the contrary, she de- 
 tested, — which made me unhappy. But then, in 
 some measure, she made amends for this, by despis- 
 ing me in extremity ; and for that I was truly thank- 
 ful — I need not say why , as the reader already 
 knows. Why she detested me, so far as I know, 
 arose in part out of my thoughtfulness indisposed to 
 garrulity, and in part out of my savage, Orson-like 
 sincerity. I had a great deal to say, but then I 
 could say it only to a very few people, amongst whom 
 Mrs. Evans was certainly not one ; and when I did 
 say anything, I fear that dire ignorance prevented 
 my laying the proper restraints upon my too liberal 
 candour ; and that could not prove acceptable to 
 one who thought nothing of working for any purpose, 
 or for no purpose, by petty tricks, or even falsehoods 
 — all which I held in stern abhorrence, that I was at 
 no pains to conceal. The bulletin on this occasion, 
 garnished with its pageantry of woe, cypress wreaths, 
 and arms reversed, was read aloud to Mrs. Evans, 
 indirectly therefore to me. It communicated, with 
 Spartan brevity, the sad intelligence (but not sad to 
 
04 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Mrs. E.), “that the major-general had for ever 
 disgraced himself, by submitting to the caresses 
 of the enemy.” I leave a blank for the epithet 
 affixed to “caresses,” not because there was any 
 blank, but, on the contrary, because my brother’s 
 wrath had boiled over in such a hubble-bubble of 
 epithets, some only half erased, some doubtfully 
 erased, that it was impossible, out of the various 
 readings, to pick out the true classical text. “/In- 
 famous,” “ disgusting,” and “ odious,” struggled for 
 precedency ; and infamous they might be ; but on 
 the other affixes I held my own private opinions. 
 For some days, my brother’s displeasure continued 
 to roll in reverberating thunders ; but at length it 
 growled itself to rest ; and at last he descended to 
 mild expostulations with me, showing clearly, in a 
 series of general orders, what frightful consequences 
 must ensue, if major-generals (as a general principle) 
 should allow themselves to be kissed by the enemy. 
 
 About this time, my brother began to issue, instead 
 of occasional bulletins, through which hitherto he had 
 breathed his opinions into the ear of the public (viz., 
 of Mrs. Evans), a regular gazette, which, in imitation 
 of the Lo7idon Gazette , was published twice a week. 
 I suppose that no creature ever led such a life as I 
 did in that gazette. Run up to the giddiest heights 
 of promotion on one day, for merits which I could 
 not myself discern, in a week or two I was brought 
 to a court-martial for offences equally obscure. I 
 was cashiered ; I was restored “ on the intercession 
 of a distinguished lady ” (Mrs. Evans, to wit) ; I was 
 threatened with being drummed out of the army, to 
 the music of the “ Rogue’s March ” : and then, in 
 the midst of all this misery and degradation, upon 
 the discovery of some supposed energy that I had 
 manifested, I was decorated with the Order of the 
 Bath. My reading had been extensive enough to 
 give me some vague aerial sense of the honour in- 
 volved in such a decoration, whilst I was profoundly 
 ignorant of the channels through which it could reach 
 an individual, and of the sole fountain from which it 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 65 
 
 could flow. But, in this enormity of disproportion 
 between the cause and the effect, between the agency 
 and the result, I saw nothing more astonishing than 
 I had seen in many other cases confessedly true. 
 Thousands of vast effects, by all that I had heard, 
 linked themselves to causes apparently trivial. The 
 dreadful taint of scrofula, according to the belief of 
 all Christendom, fled at the simple touch of a Stuart 
 sovereign ; 1 no miracle in the Bible, from Jordan 
 or from Bethesda, could be more sudden or more 
 astoundingly victorious. By my own experience, 
 again, I knew that a styan (as it is called) upon the 
 eyelid could be easily reduced, though not instan- 
 taneously, by the slight application of any golden 
 trinket. Warts upon the fingers of children I had 
 myself known to vanish under the verbal charm of 
 a gipsy woman, without any medicinal application 
 whatever. And I well knew, that almost all nations 
 believed in the dreadful mystery of the evil eye ; some 
 requiring, as a condition of the evil agency, the co- 
 presence of malice in the agent ; but others, as 
 appeared from my father’s Portuguese recollections, 
 ascribing the same horrid power to the eye of certain 
 select persons, even though innocent of all malignant 
 purpose, and absolutely unconscious of their own fatal 
 gift, until awakened to it by the results. Why, there- 
 fore, should there be anything to shock, or even to 
 surprise, in the power claimed by my brother, as an 
 attribute inalienable from primogeniture in certain 
 select families, of conferring knightly honours? The 
 red riband of the Bath he certainly did confer upon 
 me ; and once, in a paroxysm of imprudent liberality, 
 
 1 “ Of a Stuart sovereign” : and by no means of a Stuart 
 only. Queen Anne, the last Stuart who sat on the British 
 throne, was the last of our princes who touched for the king's 
 evil (as scrofula was generally called until lately) ; but the 
 Bourbon Houses, on the thrones of France, Spain, and Naples, 
 as well as the House of Savoy, claimed and exercised the same 
 supernatural privilege down to a much later period than the 
 year 1714 — the last of Queen Anne: according to their own 
 and the popular faith, they could have cleansed Naaman the 
 Syrian, and Gehazi too. 
 
 C 
 
66 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 he promised me at the end of certain months, sup- 
 posing that I swerved from my duty by no atrocious 
 delinquency, the Garter itself. This, I knew, was a 
 far loftier distinction than the Bath. Even then it 
 was so ; and since those days it has become much 
 more so ; because the long roll of martial services in 
 the great war with Napoleon compelled our govern- 
 ment greatly to widen the basis of the Bath. This 
 promise was never fulfilled ; but not for any want of 
 clamorous persecution on my part addressed to my 
 brother’s wearied ear, and somewhat callous sense 
 of honour. Every fortnight or so, I took care that 
 he should receive a “ refresher,” as lawyers call it — 
 a new and revised brief — memorialising my preten- 
 sions. These it was my brother’s policy to parry, by 
 alleged instances of recent misconduct on my part. 
 But all such offences, I insisted, were thoroughly 
 washed away by subsequent services in moments of 
 peril, such as he himself could not always deny. In 
 reality, I believe his real motive for withholding the 
 Garter was, that he had nothing better to bestow 
 upon himself. 
 
 “Now, look here,” he would say, appealing to 
 Mrs. Evans ; “I suppose there’s a matter of half-a- 
 dozen kings on the Continent that would consent 
 to lose three of their fingers, if by such a sacrifice 
 they could purchase the blue riband; and here is 
 this little scamp, conceiting himself entitled to it 
 before he has finished two campaigns.” But I was 
 not the person to be beaten off in this fashion. I 
 took my stand upon the promise. A promise was 
 a promise, even if made to a scamp ; and then, 
 
 besides but there I hesitated ; awful thoughts 
 
 interposed to check me ; else I wished to suggest 
 that, perhaps, some two or three among that half- 
 dozen kings might also be scamps. However, I 
 reduced the case to this plain dilemma : These six 
 kings had received a promise, or they had not. If 
 they had not, my case was better than theirs ; if they 
 
 had , then, said I, “ all seven of us ” 1 was going 
 
 to add, “ are sailing in the same boat,” or something 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 67 
 
 to that effect, though not so picturesquely expressed ; 
 but I was interrupted by his deadly frown at my 
 audacity in thus linking myself on as a seventh to 
 this attelage of kings ; and that such an absolute 
 grub should dream of ranking as one in a bright 
 pleiad of pretenders to the Garter. I had not par- 
 ticularly thought of that ; but, now that such a 
 demur was offered to my consideration, I thought 
 of reminding him that, in a certain shadowy sense, 
 I also might presume to class myself as a king, — 
 the meaning of which was this : Both my brother 
 and myself, for the sake of varying our intellectual 
 amusements, occupied ourselves at times in govern- 
 ing imaginary kingdoms. I do not mention this 
 as anything unusual ; it is a common resource of 
 mental activity and of aspiring energies amongst 
 boys. Hartley Coleridge, for example, had a king- 
 dom which he governed for many years ; whether 
 well or ill, is more than I can say. Kindly, I am 
 sure, he would govern it ; but, unless a machine 
 had been invented for enabling him to write without 
 effort (as was really done for our Fourth George 
 during the pressure of illness), I fear that the public 
 service must have languished deplorably for want 
 of the royal signature. In sailing past his own 
 dominions, what dolorous outcries would have saluted 
 him from the shore — “ Holloa, royal sir! here's the 
 deuce to pay : a perfect lock there is, as tight as 
 locked jaw, upon the course of our public business ; 
 throats there are to be cut, from the product of ten 
 jail-deliveries, and nobody dares to cut them, for want 
 of the proper warrant ; archbishoprics there are to 
 be filled, and, because they are not filled, the whole 
 nation is running helter-skelter into heresy ; — and all 
 in consequence of your majesty’s sacred laziness.” 
 Our governments were less remissly administered ; 
 since each of us, by continued reports of improve- 
 ments and gracious concessions to the folly or the 
 weakness of our subjects, stimulated the zeal of his 
 rival. And here, at least, there seemed to be no 
 reason why I should come into collision with my 
 
68 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 brother. At any rate, I took pains not to do so. 
 But all was in vain. My destiny was, to live in one 
 eternal element of feud. 
 
 My own kingdom was an island called Gombroon. 
 But in what parallel of north or south latitude it lay, 
 I concealed for a time as rigorously as ancient Rome 
 through every century concealed her real name. 1 The 
 object in this provisional concealment was, to regu- 
 late the position of my own territory by that of my 
 brother’s ; for I was determined to place a monstrous 
 world of waters between us. as the only chance (and 
 a very poor one it proved) for compelling my brother 
 to keep the peace. At length, for some reason un- 
 known to me, and much to my astonishment, he 
 located his capital city in the high latitude of 65 deg. 
 north. That fact being once published and settled, 
 instantly I smacked my little kingdom of Gombroon 
 down into the tropics, 10 deg., I think, south of the 
 line. Now, at least, I was on the right side of the 
 hedge, or so I flattered myself ; for it struck me that 
 my brother never would degrade himself by fitting 
 out a costly nautical expedition against poor little 
 Gombroon ; and how else could he get at me ? 
 Surely the very fiend himself, if he happened to be 
 in a high arctic latitude, would not indulge his 
 malice so far as to follow its trail into the Tropic 
 of Capricorn. And what was to be got by such a 
 freak ? There was no Golden Fleece in Gombroon. 
 If the fiend or my brother fancied that , for once 
 they were in the wrong box ; and there was no variety 
 of vegetable produce, for I never denied that the 
 poor little island was only 270 miles in circuit. 
 Think, then, of sailing through 75 deg. of latitude 
 
 1 One reason, I believe, why it was held a point of wisdom, 
 in ancient days, that the metropolis of a warlike state should 
 have a secret name hidden from the world, lay in the Pagan 
 practice of evocation, applied to the tutelary deities of such 
 a state. These deities might be lured by certain rites and 
 briberies into a transfer of their favours to the besieging army. 
 But, in order to make such an evocation effectual, it was 
 necessary to know the original and secret name ot the be- 
 leaguered city ; and this, therefore, was religiously concealed. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 69 
 
 only to crack such a miserable little filbert as that. 
 But my brother stunned me by explaining that, 
 although his capital lay in lat. 65 deg. N., not the 
 less his dominions swept southwards through a matter 
 of 80 or 90 deg. ; and, as to the Tropic of Capricorn, 
 much of it was his own private property. I was 
 aghast at hearing that. It seemed that vast horns 
 and promontories ran down from all parts of his 
 dominions towards any country whatsoever, in either 
 hemisphere — empire, or republic ; monarchy, poly- 
 archy, or anarchy — that he might have reasons for 
 assaulting. 
 
 Here in one moment vanished all that I had relied 
 on for protection : distance I had relied on, and sud- 
 denly I was found in close neighbourhood to my 
 most formidable enemy. Poverty I had relied on, and 
 that was not denied ; he granted the poverty, but it 
 was dependent on the barbarism of the Gombrodnians. 
 It seems that in the central forests of Gombroonia 
 there were diamond mines, which my people, from 
 their low condition of civilisation, did not value, nor 
 had any means of working. Farewell, therefore, on 
 my side, to all hopes of enduring peace, for here was 
 established, in legal phrase, a lie?i for ever upon my 
 island, and not upon its margin, but its very centre, 
 in favour of any invaders, better able than the natives 
 to make its treasures available. For, of old, it was 
 an article in my brother’s code of morals — that, sup- 
 posing a contest between any two parties, of which 
 one possessed an article, whilst the other was better 
 able to use it, the rightful property vested in the latter. 
 As if you met a man with a musket, then you might 
 justly challenge him to a trial in the art of making 
 gunpowder; which if you could make, and he could- 
 not , in that case the musket was de jure yours. For 
 what shadow of a right had the fellow to a noble 
 instrument which he could not “ maintain ” in a 
 serviceable condition, and “ feed ” with its daily 
 rations of powder and shot ? Still, it may be fancied 
 that, since all the relations between us as independent 
 sovereigns (whether of war, or peace, or treaty) rested 
 
70 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 upon our own representations and official reports, it 
 was surely within my competence to deny or qualify, 
 as much as within his to assert. But, in reality, the 
 law of the contest between us, as suggested by some 
 instinct of propriety in my own mind, would not allow 
 me to proceed in such a method. What he said was 
 like a move at chess or draughts, which it was childish 
 to dispute. The move being made, my business was 
 — to face it, to parry it, to evade it, and, if I could, 
 to overthrow it. I proceeded as a lawyer who moves 
 as long as he can, not by blank denial of facts (or 
 co?ning to an issue), but by demurrmg (i.e., admitting 
 the allegations of fact, or otherwise interpreting their 
 construction). It was the understood necessity of the 
 case, that I must passively accept my brother’s state- 
 ments so far as regarded their verbal expression ; and, 
 if I would extricate my poor islanders from their 
 troubles, it must be by some distinction or evasion 
 lying within this expression, or not blankly contra- 
 dicting it. 
 
 “ How, and to what extent,” my brother asked, 
 “did I raise taxes upon my subjects?” My first 
 impulse was to say, that I did not tax them at all, for 
 I had a perfect horror of doing so ; but prudence 
 would not allow of my saying that ; because it was 
 too probable he would demand to know how, in that 
 case, I maintained a standing army; and if I once 
 allowed it to be supposed that I had none, there was 
 an end for ever to the independence of my people. 
 Poor things ! they would have been invaded and 
 dragooned in a month. I took some days, therefore, 
 to consider that point, but at last replied, that my 
 people, being maritime, supported themselves mainly 
 by a herring fishery, from which I deducted a part 
 of the produce, and afterwards sold it for manure 
 to neighbouring nations. This last hint I borrowed 
 from the conversation of a stranger who happened to 
 dine one day at Greenhay, and mentioned that in 
 Devonshire, or at least on the western coast of that 
 country, near Ilfracombe, upon any excessive take of 
 herrings, beyond what the markets could absorb, the 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 7 1 
 
 surplus was applied to the land as a valuable dressing. 
 It might be inferred from this account, however, that 
 the arts must be in a languishing state, amongst a 
 people that did not understand the process of salting 
 fish ; and my brother observed derisively, much to 
 my grief, that a wretched ichthyophagous people must 
 make shocking soldiers, weak as water, and liable to 
 be knocked over like nine-pins ; whereas, in his army, 
 not a man ever ate herrings, pilchards, mackerels, or, 
 in fact, condescended to anything worse than sirloins 
 of beef. 
 
 At every step I had to contend for the honour and 
 independence of my islanders ; so that early I came 
 to understand the weight of Shakspere’s sentiment — 
 
 “ Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ! ” 
 
 Oh, reader, do not laugh ! I lived for ever under the 
 terror of two separate wars in two separate worlds : 
 one against the factory boys, in a real world of flesh 
 and blood, of stones and brickbats, of flight and pur- 
 suit, that were anything but figurative ; the other in 
 a world purely aerial, where all the combats and the 
 sufferings were absolute moonshine. And yet the 
 simple truth is — that, for anxiety and distress of 
 mind, the reality (which almost every morning’s light 
 brought round) was as nothing in comparison of that 
 dream-kingdom which rose like a vapour from my 
 own brain, and which apparently by the fiat of my 
 will could be for ever dissolved. Ah ! but no ; I had 
 contracted obligations to Gombroon ; I had sub- 
 mitted my conscience to a yoke ; and in secret truth 
 my will had no such autocratic power. Long con- 
 templation of a shadow, earnest study for the welfare 
 of that shadow, sympathy with the wounded suscepti- 
 bilities of that shadow under accumulated wrongs, 
 these bitter experiences, nursed by brooding thought, 
 had gradually frozen that shadow into a rigour of 
 reality far denser than the material realities of brass 
 or granite. Who builds the most durable dwellings ? 
 asks the labourer in “ Hamlet ” ; and the answer is, 
 The gravedigger. He builds for corruption ; and yet 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 7 2 
 
 his tenements are incorruptible : “ the houses which 
 he makes last to doomsday.” 1 Who is it that seeks 
 for concealment? Let him hide himself 2 in the un- 
 searchable chambers of light — of light which at noon- 
 day, more effectually than any gloom, conceals the 
 
 1 “Hamlet,” Act v. scene 1. 
 
 2 “ Hide himself in — light ” : — The greatest scholar, by far, 
 that this island ever produced (viz., Richard Bentley) published 
 (as is well known) a 4to volume that in some respects is the 
 very worst 4to now extant in the world — viz., a critical edition 
 of the “Paradise Lost.” I observe, in the Edinburgh Review 
 (July 1851, No. 1 91 , p. 15), that a learned critic supposes 
 Bentley to have meant this edition as a “ practical jest.” Not 
 at all. Neither could the critic have fancied such a possibility, 
 if he had taken the trouble (which / did many a year back) to 
 examine it. A jest-book it certainly is, and the most prosper- 
 ous of jest-books, but undoubtedly never meant for such by the 
 author. A man whose lips are livid with anger does not jest, 
 and does not understand jesting. Still, the Edinburgh Reviewer 
 is right about the proper functions of the book, though wrong 
 about the intentions of the author. The fact is, the man was 
 maniacally in error, and always in error, as regarded the ulti- 
 mate or poetic truth of Milton ; but, as regarded truth reputed 
 and truth apparent , he often had the air of being furiously in 
 the right ; an example of which I will cite. Milton, in the 
 First Book of the “ Paradise Lost,” had said — 
 
 “That from the secret top 
 Of Oreb or of Sinai didst inspire: ” 
 
 upon which Bentley comments in effect thus: “How! — the 
 exposed summit of a mountain secret ? Why, it’s like Charing 
 Cross — always the least secret place in the whole county.” So 
 one might fancy : since the summit of a mountain, like Plin- 
 limmon or Cader Idris in Wales, like Skiddaw or Plelvellyn in 
 England, constitutes a central object of attention and gaze for 
 the whole circumjacent district, measured by a radius sometimes 
 of fifteen to twenty miles. Upon this consideration, Bentley 
 instructs us to substitute as the true reading— “ That on the 
 sacred top,” &c. Meantime, an actual experiment will demon- 
 strate that there is no place so absolutely secret and hidden as 
 the exposed summit of a mountain, 3500 feet high, in respect 
 to an eye stationed in the valley immediately below. A whole 
 party of men, women, horses, and even tents, looked at under 
 those circumstances, is absolutely invisible unless by the aid of 
 glasses : and it becomes evident that a murder might be com- 
 mitted on the bare open summit of such a mountain with more 
 assurance- of absolute secrecy than anywhere else in the whole 
 surrounding district. 
 
INTRODUCTION' TO WORLD OF STRIFE 73 
 
 very brightest stars, rather than in labyrinths of dark- 
 ness the thickest. What criminal is that who wishes 
 to abscond from public justice? Let him hurry into 
 the frantic publicities of London, and by no means 
 into the quiet privacies of the country. So, and upon 
 the analogy of these cases, we may understand that, to 
 make a strife overwhelming by a thousandfold to the 
 feelings, it must not deal with gross material interests, 
 but with such as rise into the world of dreams, and 
 act upon the nerves through spiritual, and not through 
 fleshly, torments. Mine, in the present case, rose 
 suddenly, like a rocket, into their meridian altitude, 
 by means of a hint furnished to my brother from a 
 Scottish advocate’s reveries. 
 
 This advocate, who by his writings became the 
 remote cause of so much affliction to my childhood, 
 and struck a blow at the dignity of Gombroon that 
 neither my brother nor all the forces of Tigrosylvania 
 (my brother’s kingdom) ever could have devised, was 
 the celebrated James Burnett, better known to the 
 English public by his judicial title of Lord Mon- 
 boddo. The Burnetts of Monboddo, I have often 
 heard, were a race distinguished for their intellectual 
 accomplishments through several successive genera- 
 tions ; and the judge in question was eminently so. 
 It did him no injury that many people regarded him 
 as crazy. In England, at the beginning of the last 
 century, we had a saying , 1 in reference to the Harveys 
 of Lord Bristol’s family, equally distinguished for wit, 
 beauty, and eccentricity, that at the creation there 
 had been three kinds of people made — viz., men, 
 women, and Harveys ; and by all accounts some- 
 thing of the same kind might plausibly have been 
 said in Scotland about the Burnetts. Lord Mon- 
 boddo’s nieces, of whom one perished by falling from 
 a precipice (and, as I have heard, through mere 
 absence of mind, whilst musing upon a book which 
 she carried in her hand), still survive in the affection 
 of many friends, through the interest attached to 
 
 1 Which “ saying ” is sometimes ascribed, I know not how 
 truly, to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 74 
 
 their intellectual gifts ; and Miss Burnett, the 
 daughter of the judge, is remembered in all the 
 memorials of Burns the poet, as the most beautiful, 
 and otherwise the most interesting, of his female 
 aristocratic friends in Edinburgh. Lord Monboddo 
 himself trod an eccentric path in literature and 
 philosophy ; and our tutor, who spent his whole life 
 in reading, withdrawing himself in that way from the 
 anxieties incident to a narrow income and a large 
 family, found, no doubt, a vast fund of interesting 
 suggestions in Lord M.’s “ Dissertations on the Origin 
 of Language ” ; but to us he communicated only one 
 section of the work. It was a long passage, contain- 
 ing some very useful illustrations of a Greek idiom ; 
 useful I call them, because four years afterwards, 
 when I had made great advances in my knowledge of 
 Greek, they so appeared to me . 1 But then, being 
 scarcely seven years old, as soon as our tutor had 
 finished his t long extract from the Scottish judge’s 
 prelection, I could express my thankfulness for what 
 I had received only by composing my features to a 
 deeper solemnity and sadness than usual — no very 
 easy task, I have been told ; otherwise, I really had 
 not the remotest conception of what his lordship 
 
 1 It strikes me, upon second thoughts, that the particular 
 idiom which Lord Monboddo illustrated as regarded the Greek 
 language merits a momentary notice ; and for this reason — that 
 it plays a part not at all less conspicuous or less delicate in the 
 Latin. Here is an instance of its use in Greek, taken from 
 the well-known Night-scene in the “ Iliad” : — 
 
 yrjdrjae 5e 7roLju€vos 7 ]tos , 
 
 “ and the heart of the shepherd rejoices ” ; where the verb 
 yyjdrjo-e is in the indefinite or aorist tense, and is meant to in- 
 dicate a condition of feeling not limited to any fime whatever 
 — past, present, or future. In Latin the force and elegance of 
 this usage are equally impressive, if not more so. At this 
 moment I remember two cases of this in Horace — 
 
 1. “ Raro antecedentem scelestum 
 
 Deseruit pede poena claudo”; 
 
 2. “ ssepe Diespiter 
 
 Neglectus incesto addidit integrum.” 
 
 That is — 44 Oftentimes the Supreme Ruler, when treated with 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 75 
 
 meant. I knew very well the thing called a tense ; I 
 knew even then by name the Aoristus Primus , as a 
 respectable tense in the Greek language. It (or shall 
 we say he ?) was known to the whole Christian world by 
 this distinction of Primus ; clearly, therefore, there must 
 be some low, vulgar tense in the background pretend- 
 ing also to the name of Aorist, but universally scouted 
 as the Aoristus Secundus, or Birmingham counter- 
 feit. So that, unable as I was, from ignorance, to go 
 along with Lord M/s appreciation of his pretensions, 
 still, had it been possible to meet an Aoristus Primus 
 in the flesh, I should have bowed to him submissively, 
 as to one apparently endowed with the mysterious 
 rights of primogeniture. Not so my brother. Aorist, 
 indeed ! Primus or Secundus, what mattered it ? 
 Paving-stones were something, brickbats were some- 
 thing, but an old superannuated tense ! That any 
 grown man should trouble himself about that! In- 
 deed, there was something extraordinary there. For 
 it is not amongst the ordinary functions of lawyers to 
 take charge of Greek ; far less, one might suppose, of 
 lawyers in Scotland, where the general system of 
 education has moved for two centuries upon a 
 principle of slight regard to classical literature. Latin 
 literature was very much neglected, and Greek nearly 
 altogether. The more was the astonishment at find- 
 ing a rare delicacy of critical instinct, as well as of 
 
 neglect, confounds or unites (not has united , as the tyro might 
 fancy) the impure man with the upright in one common fate.” 
 
 Exceedingly common is this usage in Latin poetry, when the 
 object is to generalise a remark — as not connected with one 
 mode of time more than another. In reality, all three modes 
 of time — past, present, future — are used (though not equally 
 used) in all languages for this purpose of generalisation. Thus — 
 
 1. The future : as, Sapiens dominabitur astris. 
 
 2. The present : as, Fortes fortuna juvat. 
 
 3. The past : as in the two cases cited from Horace. 
 
 But this practice holds equally in English : as to the future 
 and the present, nobody will doubt it ; and here is a case from 
 the past — “ The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God 
 not meaning that in some past time he hath said so, but that 
 generally in all times he does say so, and will say so. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 76 
 
 critical sagacity, applied to the Greek idiomatic 
 niceties by a Scottish lawyer— viz., that same eccentric 
 judge, first made known to us by our tutor. 
 
 To the majority of readers, meantime, at this day, 
 Lord M. is memorable chiefly for his craze about the 
 degeneracy of us poor moderns, when compared with 
 the men of Pagan antiquity ; which craze itself might 
 possibly not have been generally known, except in 
 connection with the little skirmish between him and 
 Dr. Johnson, noticed in Boswell’s account of the 
 Doctor’s Scottish tour. “ Ah, doctor,” said Lord 
 M., upon some casual suggestion of that topic, “poor 
 creatures are we of this eighteenth century ; our 
 fathers were better men than we!” “Oh no, my 
 lord,” was Johnson’s reply; “we are quite as strong 
 as our forefathers, and a great deal wiser ! ” Such a 
 craze, however, is too widely diffused, and falls in 
 with too obstinate a preconception 1 in the human 
 
 1 “ Too obstinate a preconception” /—Until the birth of 
 geology, and of fossil palaeontology, concurring with vast strides 
 ahead in the science of comparative anatomy, it is a well- 
 established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum 
 admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what 
 in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our earth in her 
 earliest stages of development. This mistake would go some 
 way in accounting for the absurd disposition in all generations 
 to view themselves as abridged editions of their forefathers. 
 Added to which, as a separate cause of error, there can be little 
 doubt that, intermingled with the human race, there has at most 
 periods of the world been a separate and Titanic race, such as 
 the Anakim amongst the peoples of Palestine, the Cyclopean 
 race diffused over the Mediterranean in the elder ages of 
 Greece, and certain tribes amongst the Alps, known to Evelyn 
 in his youth (about Cromwell’s time) by an unpleasant travel- 
 ling experience. Those gigantic races, however, were no 
 arguments for a degeneration amongst the rest of mankind. 
 They were evidently a variety of man, coexistent with the 
 ordinary races, but liable to be absorbed and gradually lost by 
 intermarriage amongst other tribes of the ordinary standard. 
 Occasional exhumations of such Titan skeletons would strengthen 
 the common prejudice. They would be taken not for a local 
 variety, but for an antediluvian or prehistoric type, from which 
 the present races of man had arisen by gradual degeneration. 
 
 These cases of actual but misinterpreted experience, at the 
 same time that they naturally must tend to fortify the popular 
 prejudice, would also, by accounting for it, and engrafting it 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 77 
 
 race, which has in every age hypochondriacally re- 
 garded itself as under some fatal necessity of dwind- 
 ling, much to have challenged public attention. As 
 real paradoxes (spite of the idle meaning attached 
 usually to the word paradox ) have often no falsehood 
 in them, so here, on the contrary, was a falsehood 
 which had in it nothing paradoxical. It contradicted 
 all the indications of history and experience, which 
 
 upon a reasonable origin, so far tend to take from it the 
 reproach of a prejudice. Though erroneous, it would yet seem 
 to us, in looking back upon it, a rational and even an inevitable 
 opinion, having such plausible grounds to stand upon ; plaus- 
 ible, I mean, until science and accurate examination of the 
 several cases had begun to read them into, a different con- 
 struction. Yet, on the other hand, in spite of any colourable 
 excuses that may be pleaded for this prejudice, it is pretty plain 
 that, after all, there is in human nature a deep-laid predisposi- 
 tion to an obstinate craze of this nature. Else why is it that, 
 in every age alike, men have asserted or even assumed the down- 
 ward tendency of the human race in all that regards 7 noral 
 qualities. For the physical degeneration of man there really 
 were some apparent (though erroneous) arguments ; but for the 
 moral degeneration, no argument at all, small or great. Yet, a 
 bigotry of belief in this idle notion has always prevailed amongst 
 moralists, Pagan alike and Christian. Horace, for example, 
 informs us that 
 
 44 Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit 
 Nos nequiores — mox daturos 
 Progeniem vitiosiorem.” 
 
 The last generation w r as worse, it seems, than the penultimate, 
 as the present is worse than the last. We, however, of the 
 present, bad as we may be, shall be kept in countenance by 
 the coming generation, which will prove much worse than our- 
 selves. On the same precedent, all the sermons through the 
 .three last centuries, if traced back through decennial periods, 
 so as to form thirty successive strata, will be found regularly 
 claiming the precedency in wickedness for the immediate period 
 cf the writer. Upon which theories, as men ought physically 
 to have dwindled long ago into pigmies, so, on the other hand, 
 morally they must by this time have left Sodom and Gomorrah 
 far behind. What a strange animal must man upon this scheme 
 offer to our contemplation ; shrinking in size, by graduated 
 process, through every century, until at last he would not rise 
 an inch from the ground ; and, on the other hand, as regards 
 villainy, towering ever more and more up to the heavens. What 
 a dwarf ! what a giant ! Why, the very crows would combine 
 to destroy such a little monster. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 78 
 
 uniformly had pointed in the very opposite direction ; 
 and so far it ought to have been paradoxical (that is, 
 revolting to popular opinion) ; but was not so ; for 
 it fell in with prevailing opinions, with the oldest, 
 blindest, and most inveterate of human superstitions. 
 If extravagant, yet to the multitude it did not seem 
 extravagant. So natural a craze, therefore, however 
 baseless, would never have carried Lord Monboddo’s 
 name into that meteoric notoriety and atmosphere 
 of astonishment which soon invested it in England. 
 And, in that case, my childhood would have- escaped 
 the deadliest blight of mortification and despondency 
 that could have been incident to a most morbid 
 temperament concurring with a situation of visionary 
 (yes ! if you please, of fantastic) but still of most real 
 distress. 
 
 How much it would have astonished Lord Mon- 
 boddo to find himself made answerable — virtually 
 made answerable, by the evidence of secret tears — 
 for the misery of an unknown child in Lancashire. 
 Yet night and day these silent memorials of suffer- 
 ing were accusing him as the founder of a wound 
 that could not be healed. It happened that the 
 several volumes of his work lay for weeks in the 
 study of our tutor. Chance directed the eye of my 
 brother, one day, upon that part of the work in 
 which Lord M. unfolds his hypothesis that originally 
 the human race had been a variety of the ape. On 
 which hypothesis, by the way, Dr. Adam Clarke’s 
 substitution of ape for serpent , in translating the word 
 nachash (the brute temper of Eve), would have 
 fallen to the ground, since this would simply have 
 been the case of one human being tempting another. 
 It followed inevitably, according to Lord M., how- 
 ever painful it might be to human dignity, that, in 
 this their early stage of brutality, men must have had 
 tails. My brother mused upon this reverie, and, in 
 a few days, published an extract from some scoundrel’s 
 travels in Gombroon, according to which the Gom- 
 broonians had not yet emerged from this early con- 
 dition of apedom. They, it seems, were still homines 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 79 
 
 caudati Overwhelming to me and stunning was the 
 ignominy of this horrible discovery. Lord M. had 
 not overlooked the natural question, In what way 
 did men get rid of their tails ! To speak the truth, 
 they never would have got rid of them had they con- 
 tinued to run wild ; but growing civilisation intro- 
 duced arts, and the arts introduced sedentary habits. 
 By these it was, by the mere necessity of continually 
 sitting down, that men gradually wore off their tails ! 
 Well, and what should hinder the Gombroonians 
 from sitting down ? Their tailors and shoemakers 
 would and could, I hope, sit down, as well as those 
 of Tigrosylvania. Why not ? Ay, but my brother 
 had insisted already that they had no tailors, that 
 they had no shoemakers ; which, then , I did not 
 care much about, as it merely put back the clock 
 of our history — throwing us into an earlier, and there- 
 fore, perhaps, into a more warlike stage of society. 
 But, as the case stood now, this want of tailors, &c., 
 showed clearly that the process of sitting down, so 
 essential to the ennobling of the race, had not com- 
 menced. My brother, with an air of consolation, 
 suggested that I might even now, without an hour’s 
 delay, compel the whole nation to sit down for six 
 hours a day, which would always “ make a beginning.” 
 But the truth would remain as before — viz., that I 
 was the king of a people that had tails ; and the 
 slow, slow process by which, in a course of many 
 centuries, their posterity might rub them off, a hope 
 of vintages never to be enjoyed by any generations 
 that are yet heaving in sight — that was to me the 
 worst form of despair. 
 
 Still there was one resource : if I “ didn’t like it ” — 
 meaning the state of things in Gombroon- — I might 
 “abdicate.” Yes, I knew that. I might abdicate; 
 and, once having cut the connection between myself 
 and the poor abject islanders, I might seem to have 
 no further interest in the degradation that affected 
 them. After such a disruption between us, what was 
 it to me if they had even three tails apiece? Ah, 
 that was fine talking ; but this connection with my 
 
80 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 poor subjects had grown up so slowly and so genially, 
 in the midst of struggles so constant against the 
 encroachments of my brother and his rascally people ; 
 we had suffered so much together; and the filaments 
 connecting them with my heart were so aerially fine 
 and fantastic, but for that reason so inseverable, that 
 I abated nothing of my anxiety on their account ; 
 making this difference only in my legislation and 
 administrative cares, that I pursued them more in 
 a spirit of despondency, and retreated more shyly 
 from communicating them. It was in vain that 
 my brother counselled me to dress my people in 
 the Roman toga, as the best means of concealing 
 their ignominious appendages : if he meant this as 
 comfort, it was none to me ; the disgrace lay in the 
 fact, not in its publication ; and, in my heart, though 
 I continued to honour Lord Monboddo (whom I 
 heard my guardian also daily delighting to honour) 
 as a good Grecian, yet secretly I cursed the Aoristus 
 Primus, as the indirect occasion of a misery which 
 was not and could not be comprehended. 
 
 From this deep degradation of myself and my 
 people, I was drawn off at intervals to contemplate 
 a different mode of degradation affecting two persons, 
 twin sisters, whom I saw intermittingly ; sometimes 
 once a week, sometimes frequently on each separate 
 day. You have heard, reader, of pariahs. The 
 pathos of that great idea possibly never reached you. 
 Did it ever strike you how far that idea had ex- 
 tended? Do not fancy it peculiar to Hindostan. 
 Before Delhi was, before Agra, or Lahore, might the 
 pariah say, I was. The most interesting, if only as 
 the most mysterious, race of ancient days, the 
 Pelasgi, that overspread, in early times of Greece, 
 the total Mediterranean — a race distinguished for 
 beauty and for intellect, and sorrowful beyond all 
 power of man to read the cause that could lie deep 
 enough for so imperishable an impression — they were 
 pariahs. The Jews that, in the twenty-eighth chapter 
 of Deuteronomy, were cursed in a certain con- 
 tingency with a sublimer curse than ever rang 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 8 1 
 
 through the passionate wrath of prophecy, and that 
 afterwards, in Jerusalem, cursed themselves, volun- 
 tarily taking on their own heads, and on the heads 
 of their children’s children for ever and ever, the 
 guilt of innocent blood — they are pariahs to this 
 hour. Yet for them there has ever shone a sullen 
 light of hope. The gipsies, for whom no conscious 
 or acknowledged hope burns through the mighty 
 darkness that surrounds them — they are pariahs of 
 pariahs. Lepers were a race of mediaeval pariahs, 
 rejected of men, that now have gone to rest. But 
 travel into the forests of the Pyrenees, and there you 
 will find their modem representatives in the Cagots. 
 Are these Pyrenean Cagots Pagans? Not at all. They 
 are good Christians. Wherefore, then, that low door 
 in the Pyrenean churches, through which the Cagots 
 are forced to enter, and which, obliging them to stoop 
 almost to the ground, is a perpetual memento of their 
 degradation ? Wherefore is it that men of pure 
 Spanish blood will hold no intercourse with the Cagot? 
 Wherefore is it that even the shadow of a Cagot, if 
 it falls across a fountain, is held to have polluted 
 that fountain ? All this points to some dreadful taint 
 of guilt, real or imputed, in ages far remote . 1 
 
 But in ages far nearer to ourselves, nay, in our own 
 generation, and our own land, are many pariahs, 
 sitting amongst us all, nay, oftentimes sitting (yet 
 
 1 The name and history of the Pyrenean Cagots are equally 
 obscure. Some have supposed that, during the period of the 
 Gothic warfare with the Moors, the Cagots were a Christian 
 tribe that betrayed the Christian cause and interests at a 
 critical moment. But all is conjecture. As to the name, 
 Southey has somewhere offered a possible interpretation of it ; 
 but it struck me as far from felicitous, and not what might 
 have been expected from Southey, whose vast historical research 
 and commanding talent should naturally have unlocked this 
 most mysterious of modern secrets, if any unlocking does yet 
 lie within the resources of human skill and combining power, 
 now that so many ages divide us from the original steps of the 
 case. I may here mention, as a fact accidentally made known 
 to myself, and apparently not known to Southey, that the 
 Cagots, under a name very slightly altered, are found in France 
 also, as well as Spain ; and in provinces of France that have 
 no connection at all with Spain. 
 
82 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 not recognised for what they really are) at good 
 men’s tables. How general is that sensuous dulness, 
 that deafness of the heart, which the Scriptures attri- 
 bute to human beings ! “ Having ears, they hear 
 
 not ; and, seeing, they do not understand.” In the 
 very act of facing or touching a dreadful object, they 
 will utterly deny its existence. Men say to me daily, 
 when I ask them, in passing, “Anything in this 
 morning’s paper?” “Oh no, nothing at all.” And, 
 as I never had any other answer, I am bound to 
 suppose that there never was anything in a daily 
 newspaper; and, therefore, that the horrible burden 
 of misery and of change which a century accumu- 
 lates as its facit or total result, has not been dis- 
 tributed at all amongst its thirty-six thousand five 
 hundred and twenty-five days : every day, it seems, 
 was separately a blank day, yielding absolutely 
 nothing — what children call a deaf nut, offering no 
 kernel ; and yet the total product has caused angels 
 to weep and tremble. Meantime, when I come to 
 look at the newspaper with my own eyes, I am 
 astonished at the misreport of my informants. Were 
 there no other section in it than simply that allotted 
 to the police reports, oftentimes I stand aghast at 
 the revelations there made of human life and the 
 human heart — at its colossal guilt, and its colossal 
 misery ; at the suffering which oftentimes throws its 
 shadow over palaces, and the grandeur of mute en- 
 durance which sometimes glorifies a cottage. Here 
 transpires the dreadful truth of what is going on for 
 ever under the thick curtains of domestic life, close 
 behind us, and before us, and all around us. News- 
 papers are evanescent, and are too rapidly recurrent, 
 and people see nothing great in what is familiar, nor 
 can ever be trained to read the silent and the shadowy 
 in what, for the moment, is covered with the babbling 
 garrulity of daylight. I suppose now that, in the 
 next generation after that which is here concerned, 
 had any neighbour of our tutor been questioned on 
 the subject of a domestic tragedy, which travelled 
 through its natural stages in a leisurely way, and 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 83 
 
 tinder the eyes of good Dr. S , he would have 
 
 replied, “ Tragedy ! oh, sir, nothing of the kind ! You 
 have been misled ; the gentleman must lie under a 
 mistake : perhaps it was in the next street.” No, 
 it was not in the next street ; and the gentleman 
 does not lie under a mistake, or, in fact, lie at all. 
 The simple truth is, blind old neighbour, that you, 
 being rarely in the house, and, when there, only in 
 one particular room, saw no more of what was hourly 
 going on, than if you had been residing with the 
 Sultan of Bokhara. But I, a child between seven 
 and eight years old, had access everywhere. I was 
 privileged, and had the entree even of the female 
 apartments ; one consequence of which was, that I 
 put this and that together. A number of syllables, 
 that each for itself separately might have meant 
 nothing at all, did yet, when put together, through 
 weeks and months, read for my eyes into sentences 
 as deadly and significant as Tekel , upharsin . And 
 another consequence was, that being, on account of 
 my age, nobody at all, or very near it, I sometimes 
 witnessed things that perhaps it had not been meant 
 for anybody to witness, or perhaps some half-con- 
 scious negligence overlooked my presence. “ Saw 
 things! What was it now? Was it a man at mid- 
 night, with a dark lantern and a six-barrel revolver ?” 
 No ! that was not in the least like what I saw : it was 
 a great deal more like what I will endeavour to 
 describe. Imagine two young girls, of what exact 
 age I really do not know, but apparently from twelve 
 to fourteen, twins, remarkably plain in person and 
 features, unhealthy, and obscurely reputed to be 
 idiots. Whether they really were such was more 
 than I knew, or could devise any plan for learning. 
 Without dreaming of anything unkind or uncourteous, 
 my original impulse had been to say, “ If you please, 
 are you idiots?” But I felt that such a question 
 had an air of coarseness about it, though, for my 
 own part, I had long reconciled myself to being 
 called an idiot by my brother. There was, however, 
 a further difficulty: breathed as a gentle, murmuring 
 
84 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 whisper, the question might possibly be reconciled to 
 an indulgent ear as confidential and tender. Even 
 to take a liberty with those you love, is to show your 
 trust in their affection ; but, alas ! these poor girls 
 were deaf: and to have shouted out, “Are you idiots, 
 if you please ? ” in a voice that would have rung down 
 three flights of stairs, promised (as I felt, without 
 exactly seeing why) a dreadful exaggeration to what- 
 ever incivility might, at any rate, attach to the 
 question ; and some did attach, that was clear even 
 if warbled through an air of Cherubini’s, and accom- 
 panied on the flute. Perhaps they were not idiots, 
 and only seemed to be such from the slowness 
 of apprehension naturally connected with deafness. 
 That I saw them but seldom, arose from their 
 peculiar position in the family. Their father had 
 no private fortune; his income from the church was 
 very slender ; and, though considerably increased by 
 the allowance made for us, his two pupils, still, in 
 a great town, and with so large a family, it left 
 him little room for luxuries. Consequently, he never 
 had more than two servants, and at times only one. 
 Upon this plea rose the scheme of the mother for 
 employing these two young girls in menial offices 
 of the household economy. One reason for that 
 was, that she . thus indulged her dislike for them, 
 which she took no pains to conceal; and thus, also, 
 she withdrew them from the notice of strangers. In 
 this way, it happened that I saw them myself but at 
 uncertain intervals. Gradually, however, I came to 
 be aware of their forlorn condition, to pity them, and 
 to love them. The poor twins were undoubtedly 
 plain, to the degree which is called, by unfeeling 
 people, ugliness. They were also deaf, as I have 
 said, and they were scrofulous ; one of them was 
 disfigured by the small-pox ; they had glimmering 
 eyes, red, like the eyes of ferrets, and scarcely half 
 open ; and they did not walk so much as stumble 
 along. There, you have the worst of them. Now, 
 hear something on the other side. What first won 
 my pity was, their affection for each other, united to 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 85 
 
 their constant sadness ; secondly, a notion which had 
 crept into my head, probably derived from some- 
 thing said in my presence by elder people, that they 
 were destined to an early death ; and, lastly, the 
 incessant persecutions of their mother. This lady 
 belonged, by birth, to a more elevated rank than 
 that of her husband, and she was remarkably well 
 bred as regarded her manners. But she had pro- 
 bably a weak understanding : she was shrewish in 
 her temper ; was a severe economist ; a merciless 
 exactor of what she viewed as duty ; and, in per- 
 secuting her two unhappy daughters, though she 
 yielded blindly to her unconscious dislike of them, 
 as creatures that disgraced her, she was not aware, 
 perhaps, of ever having put forth more expressions 
 of anger and severity than were absolutely required 
 to rouse the constitutional torpor of her daughters’ 
 nature ; and where disgust has once rooted itself, 
 and been habitually expressed in tones of harshness, 
 the mere sight of the hateful object mechanically 
 calls forth the eternal tones of anger, without distinct 
 consciousness or separate intention in the speaker. 
 Loud speaking, besides, or even shouting, was re- 
 quired by the deafness of the two girls. From anger 
 so constantly discharging its thunders, naturally they 
 did not show open signs of recoiling ; but that they 
 felt it deeply, may be presumed from their sensibility 
 to kindness. My own experience showed that ; for, 
 as often as I met them, we exchanged kisses ; and 
 my wish had always been to beg them, if they really 
 were idiots, not to mind it, since I should not like 
 them the less on that account. This wish of mine 
 never came to utterance ; but not the less they were 
 aware, by my manner of salutation, that one person 
 at least, amongst those who might be considered 
 strangers, did not find anything repulsive about 
 them; nnd the pleasure they felt was expressed 
 broadly upon their kindly faces. 
 
 Such was the outline of their position ; and, that 
 being explained, what I saw was simply this ; it 
 composed a silent and symbolic scene, a momentary 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 86 
 
 interlude in dumb show, which interpreted itself and 
 settled for ever in my recollection, as if it had 
 prophesied and interpreted the event which soon 
 followed. They were resting from toil, and both 
 sitting down. This had lasted for perhaps ten or 
 fifteen minutes. Suddenly from below-stairs the 
 voice of angry summons rang up to their ears. Both 
 rose in an instant, as if the echoing scourge of some 
 avenging Tisiphone were uplifted above their heads ; 
 both opened their arms ; flung them round each 
 other’s necks ; and then, unclasping them, parted to 
 their separate labours. This was my last remember- 
 able interview with the two sisters ; in a week both 
 were corpses. They had died, I believe, of scarlatina, 
 and very nearly at the same moment. 
 
 But surely it was no matter for grief, that the two 
 scrofulous idiots were dead and buried. Oh no ! 
 Call them idiots at your pleasure, serfs, or slaves, 
 strulbrugs 1 or pariahs — their case was certainly not 
 worsened by being booked for places in the grave. 
 Idiocy, for anything I know, may, in that vast kingdom, 
 enjoy a natural precedency ; scrofula and leprosy may 
 have some mystic privilege in a coffin ; and the pariahs 
 of the upper earth may form the aristocracy of the 
 dead. That the idiots, real or reputed, were at rest 
 — that their warfare was accomplished — might, if a 
 man happened to know enough, be interpreted as a 
 
 1 44 Strulbrugs ” : — Hardly strulbru°s, will be the thought of 
 the learned reader, who knows that young women could not be 
 strulbrugs ; since the true strulbrug was one who, from base 
 fear of dying, had lingered on into an old age omnivorous of 
 every genial or vital impulse. The strulbrug of Swift (and 
 Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to understand his own 
 horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been, burned 
 hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clock- 
 work was gone, or carious; only some miserable fragment of a 
 pendulum continued to oscillate paralytically from mere in- 
 capacity of anything so abrupt, and therefore so vigorous, as a 
 decided Halt ! However, the use of this dreadful word may 
 be reasonably extended to the young who happen to have 
 become essentially old in misery. Intensity of a suffering 
 existence may compensate the want of extension ; and a 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 87 
 
 glorious festival. The sisters were seen no more 
 upon staircases or in bedrooms, and deadly silence 
 had succeeded to the sound of continual uproars. 
 Memorials of them were none surviving on earth. 
 Not they it was that furnished mementoes of them- 
 selves. The mother it was, the father it was — that 
 mother who by persecution had avenged the wounds 
 offered to her pride ; that father who had tolerated 
 this persecution she it was, he it was, that by the 
 altered glances of her haunted eye, that by the 
 altered character of his else stationary habits, had 
 revived for vie a spectacle, once real, of visionary 
 twin sisters, moving for ever up and down the stairs 
 — sisters, patient, humble, silent, that snatched con- 
 vulsively at a loving smile, or loving gesture, from a 
 child, as at some message of remembrance from God, 
 whispering to them, “ You are not forgotten ” — sisters 
 born apparently for the single purpose of suffering 
 whose trials, it is true, were over, and could not be 
 repeated, but (alas for her who had been their cause !) 
 could not be recalled. Her face grew thin, her eye 
 sunken and hollow, after the death of her daughters ; 
 and, meeting her on the staircase, I sometimes 
 fancied that she did not see me so much as some- 
 thing beyond me. Did any misfortune befall her 
 after this double funeral? Did the Nemesis that 
 waits upon the sighs of children pursue her steps? 
 Not apparently : externally, things went well ; her 
 sons were reasonably prosperous ; her handsome 
 
 boundless depth of misery may be a transformed expression for 
 a boundless duration of misery. The most aged person, to all 
 appearance, that ever came under my eyes, was an infant — 
 hardly eight months old. He was the illegitimate son of a 
 poor idiot girl, who had herself been shamefully ill-treated ; 
 and the poor infant, falling under the care of an enraged grand- 
 mother, who felt herself at once burdened and disgraced, was 
 certainly not better treated. He was dying, when I saw him, 
 of a lingering malady, with features expressive of frantic 
 misery ; and it seemed to me that he looked at least three 
 centuries old. One might have fancied him one of Swift’s 
 strulbrugs, that, through long attenuation and decay, had 
 dwindled back into infancy, with one organ only left perfect — 
 the organ of fear and misery. 
 
88 AUTOBIOGRAPH IC SKETCHES 
 
 daughter — for she had a more youthful daughter, who 
 really was handsome — continued to improve in 
 personal attractions ; and some years after, I have 
 heard, she married happily. But from herself, so long 
 as I continued to know her, the altered character of 
 countenance did not depart, nor the gloomy eye, that 
 seemed to converse with secret and visionary objects. 
 
 This result from the irrevocable past was not alto- 
 gether confined to herself. It is one evil attached to 
 chronic and domestic oppression, that it draws into 
 its vortex, as unwilling, or even as loathing, co- 
 operators, others who either see but partially the 
 wrong they are abetting, or, in cases where they do 
 see it, are unable to make head against it, through 
 the inertia of their own nature, or through the 
 coercion of circumstances. Too clearly, by the rest- 
 less irritation of his manner for some time after the 
 children’s death, their father testified, in a language 
 not fully, perhaps, perceived by himself, or meant to 
 be understood by others, that to his inner conscience 
 he also was not clear of blame. Had he then in any 
 degree sanctioned the injustice which sometimes he 
 must have witnessed ? Far from it : he had been 
 roused from his habitual indolence into energetic 
 expressions of anger : he had put an end to the 
 wrong, when it came openly before him : I had my- 
 self heard him say on many occasions, with patriarchal 
 fervour, “Woman, they are your children, and God 
 made them. Show mercy to them, as you expect it 
 for yourself.” But he must have been aware that, 
 for any three instances of tyrannical usage that fell 
 under his notice, at least five hundred would escape 
 it. That was the sting of the case — that was its 
 poisonous aggravation. But with a nature that 
 sought for peace before all things, in this very worst 
 of its aggravations was found a morbid cure — the 
 effectual temptation to wilful blindness and forget- 
 fulness. The sting became the palliation of the 
 wrong, and the poison became its anodyne. For 
 together with the five hundred hidden wrongs, arose 
 the necessity that they must be hidden. Could he be 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 89 
 
 pinned on, morning, noon, and night, to his wife’s 
 apron ? And if not, what else should he do by angry 
 interferences at chance times, than add special vin- 
 dictive impulses to those of general irritation and 
 dislike ? Some truth there was in this, it cannot be 
 denied : innumerable cases arise, in which a man the 
 most just is obliged, in some imperfect sense, to 
 connive at injustice ; his chance experience must 
 convince him that injustice is continually going on ; 
 and yet, in any attempt to intercept it or to check it, 
 he is met and baffled by the insuperable obstacles 
 of household necessities. Dr. S , therefore, sur- 
 
 rendered himself, as under a coercion that was no?ie 
 of his creating, to a passive acquiescence and a blind- 
 ness that soothed his constitutional indolence ; and 
 he reconciled his feelings to a tyranny which he 
 tolerated, under some self-flattering idea of submitting 
 with resignation to a calamity that he suffered. 
 
 Some years after this, I read the “ Agamemnon ” of 
 Aeschylus ; and then, in the prophetic horror with 
 which Cassandra surveys the regal abode in Mycenae, 
 destined to be the scene of murders so memorable 
 through the long traditions of the Grecian stage, 
 murders that, many centuries after all the parties to 
 them — perpetrators, sufferers, avengers — had become 
 dust and ashes, kindled again into mighty life through 
 a thousand years upon the vast theatres of Athens 
 and Rome, I retraced the horrors, not prophetic but 
 memorial, with which I myself had invested that 
 humble dwelling of Dr. S ; and read again, re- 
 
 peated in visionary proportions, the sufferings which 
 there had darkened the days of people known to 
 myself through two distinct successions — not, as 
 was natural to expect, of parents first, and then of 
 children, but inversely of children and parents. Man- 
 chester was not Mycenae. No, but by many degrees 
 nobler. In some of the features most favourable to 
 tragic effects, it was so ; and wanted only those 
 idealising advantages for withdrawing mean details 
 which are in the gift of distance and hazy antiquity. 
 Even at that day Manchester was far larger, teeming 
 
go AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 with more and with stronger hearts ; and it contained 
 a population the most energetic even in the modern 
 world — how much more so, therefore, by comparison 
 with any race in ancient Greece, inevitably rendered 
 effeminate by dependence too generally upon slaves. 
 Add to this superior energy in Lancashire, the 
 immeasurably profounder feelings generated by the 
 mysteries which stand behind Christianity, as com- 
 pared with the shallow mysteries that stood behind 
 Paganism, and it would be easy to d~a the inference, 
 that, in the capacity for the infinite and the im- 
 passioned, for horror and for pathos, Mycenae could 
 have had no pretensions to measure herself against 
 Manchester. Not that I had drawn such an inference 
 myself. Why should I ? there being nothing to 
 suggest the points in which the two cities differed, 
 but only the single one in which they agreed — viz., 
 the dusky veil that overshadowed in both the noon- 
 day tragedies haunting their household recesses ; 
 which veil was raised only to the gifted eyes of a 
 Cassandra, or to eyes that, like my own, had ex- 
 perimentally become acquainted with them as facts. 
 Pitiably mean is he that measures the relations of 
 such cases by the scenical apparatus of purple and 
 gold. That which never has been apparelled in 
 royal robes, and hung with theatrical jewels, is but 
 suffering from an accidental fraud, having the same 
 right to them that any similar misery can have, or 
 calamity upon an equal scale. These proportions are 
 best measured from the fathoming ground of a real 
 uncounterfeit sympathy. 
 
 I have mentioned already that we had four male 
 guardians (a fifth being my mother). These four 
 were B., E., G., and H. The two consonants, B. 
 and G., gave us little trouble. G., the wisest of 
 the whole band, lived at a distance, of more than 
 one hundred miles : him, therefore, we rarely saw ; 
 but B., living within four miles of Greenhay, washed 
 his hands of us, by inviting us, every now and then, 
 to spend a few days at his house. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 9 1 
 
 At this house, which stood in the country, there 
 was a family of amiable children, who were more 
 skilfully trained in their musical studies than at that 
 day was usual. They sang the old English glees and 
 madrigals, and correctly enough for me, who, having, 
 even at that childish age, a preternatural sensibility 
 to music, had also, as may be supposed, the most 
 entire want of musical knowledge. No blunders 
 could do much to mar my pleasure. There first I 
 heard the concertos of Corelli ; but also, which far 
 more profoundly affected me, a few selections from 
 Jomelli and Cimarosa. With Handel I had long 
 been familiar, for the famous chorus-singers of Lanca- 
 shire sang continually at churches the most effective 
 parts from his chief oratorios. Mozart was yet to 
 come; for, except perhaps at the opera in London, 
 even at this time his music was most imperfectly 
 diffused through England. But, above all, a thing 
 which to my dying day I could never forget, at the 
 house of this guardian I heard sung a long canon of 
 Cherubini’s. Forty years later, I heard it again, and 
 better sung ; but at that time I needed nothing 
 better. It was sung by four male voices, and rose 
 into a region of thrilling passion, such as my heart 
 had always dimly craved and hungered after, but 
 which now first interpreted itself, as a physical possi- 
 bility, to my ear. 
 
 My brother did not share my inexpressible delight ; 
 his taste ran in a different channel ; and the arrange- 
 ments of the house did not meet his approbation ; 
 particularly this, that either Mrs. B. herself, or else 
 the governess, was always present when the young 
 ladies joined our society, which my brother con- 
 sidered particularly vulgar ; since natural propriety 
 and decorum should have whispered to an old lady 
 that a young gentleman might have “ things ” to say 
 to her daughters which he could not possibly intend 
 for the general ear of eavesdroppers — things tending 
 to the confidential or the sentimental, which none 
 but a shameless old lady would seek to participate ; 
 by that means compelling a young man to talk as 
 
92 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 loud as if he were addressing a mob at Charing 
 Cross, or reading the Riot Act. There were other 
 out-of-door amusements, amongst which a swing — 
 which I mention for the sake of illustrating the 
 passive obedience which my brother levied upon me, 
 either through my conscience, as mastered by his 
 doctrine of primogeniture, or, as in this case, through 
 my sensibility to shame under his taunts of cowardice. 
 It was a most ambitious swing, ascending to a height 
 beyond any that I have since seen in fairs or public 
 gardens. Horror was at my heart regularly as the 
 swing reached its most aerial altitude • for the 
 oily, swallow-like fluency of the swoop downwards 
 threatened always to make me sick, in which case it 
 is probable that I must have relaxed my hold of the 
 ropes, and have been projected, with fatal violence, 
 to the ground. But, in defiance of all this miserable 
 panic, I continued to swing whenever he tauntingly 
 invited me. It was well that my brother’s path in 
 life soon ceased to coincide with my own ; else I 
 should infallibly have broken my neck in confronting 
 perils which brought me neither honour nor profit, 
 and in accepting defiances which, issue how they 
 might, won self-reproach from myself, and sometimes 
 a gaiety of derision from him, One only of these 
 defiances I declined. There was a horse of this 
 same guardian B.’s, who always, after listening to 
 Cherubini's music, grew irritable to excess ; and, if 
 anybody mounted him, would seek relief to his 
 wounded feelings in kicking, more or less violently, 
 for an hour. This habit endeared him to my brother, 
 who acknowledged to a propensity of the same 
 amiable kind ; protesting that an abstract desire of 
 kicking seized him always after hearing good per- 
 formers on particular instruments, especially the 
 bagpipes. Of kicking? But of kicking what or 
 whom ? I fear of kicking the venerable public col- 
 lectively, creditors without exception, but also as 
 many of the debtors as might be found at large ; 
 doctors of medicine more especially, but with no 
 absolute immunity for the majority of their patients ; 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 93 
 
 Jacobins, but not the less Anti-Jacobins; every 
 Calvinist, which seems reasonable ; but then also, 
 which is intolerable, every Arminian. Is philosophy 
 able to account for this morbid affection, and par- 
 ticularly when it takes the restricted form (as some- 
 times it does, in the bagpipe case) of seeking furiously 
 to kick the piper, instead of paying him? In this 
 case, my brother was urgent with me to mount en 
 croupe behind himself. But, weak as I usually was, 
 this proposal I resisted as an immediate suggestion 
 of the fiend ; for I had heard, and have since known 
 proofs of it, that a horse, when he is ingeniously 
 vicious, sometimes has the power, in lashing out, of 
 curving round his hoofs, so as to lodge them, by way 
 of indorsement, in the small of his rider’s back ; and, 
 of course, he would have an advantage for such a 
 purpose, in the case of a rider sitting on the crupper. 
 That sole invitation I persisted in declining. 
 
 A young gentleman had joined us as a fellow- 
 student under the care of our tutor. He was an 
 only son ; indeed, the only child of an amiable 
 widow, whose love and hopes all centred in him. 
 He was destined to inherit several separate estates, 
 and a great deal had been done to spoil him by 
 indulgent aunts ; but his good natural disposition 
 defeated all these efforts ; and, upon joining us, he 
 proved to be a very amiable boy, clever, quick at 
 learning, and abundantly courageous. In the summer 
 months, his mother usually took a house out in the 
 country, sometimes on one side of Manchester, some- 
 times on another. At these rusticating seasons, he 
 had often much further to come than ourselves, and 
 on that account he rode on horseback. Generally it 
 was a fierce mountain-pony that he rode ; and it was 
 worth while to cultivate the pony’s acquaintance, for 
 the sake of understanding the extent to which the 
 fiend can sometimes incarnate himself in a horse. I 
 do not trouble the reader with any account of his 
 tricks, and drolleries, and scoundrelisms ; but this I 
 may mention, that he had the propensity ascribed 
 many centuries ago to the Scandinavian horses for 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 94 
 
 sharing and practically asserting his share in the 
 angry passions of a battle. He would fight, or 
 attempt to fight, on his rider’s side, by biting, rearing, 
 and suddenly wheeling round, for the purpose of 
 lashing out when he found himself within kicking 
 range . 1 This little monster was coal-black ; and, in 
 virtue of his carcase, would not have seemed very 
 formidable ; but his head made amends — it was the 
 head of a buffalo, or of a bison, and his vast jungle 
 of mane was the mane of a lion. His eyes, by reason 
 of this intolerable and unshorn mane, one did not 
 often see, except as lights that sparkled in the rear of 
 a thicket ; but, once seen, they were not easily for- 
 gotten, for their malignity was diabolic. A few miles 
 more or less being a matter of indifference to one 
 who was so well mounted, O. would sometimes ride 
 out with us to the field of battle ; and, by manoeuv- 
 ring so as to menace the enemy on the flanks, in 
 skirmishes he did good service. But at length came 
 a day of pitched battle. The enemy had mustered 
 in unusual strength, and would certainly have accom- 
 plished the usual result of putting us to flight with 
 more than usual ease, but, under the turn which 
 things took, their very numbers aided their over- 
 throw, by deepening their confusion. O. had, on 
 this occasion, accompanied us ; and, as he had 
 hitherto taken no very decisive part in the war, 
 confining himself to distant “ demonstrations,” the 
 enemy did not much regard his presence in the field. 
 This carelessness threw them into a dense mass, 
 upon which my brother’s rapid eye saw instantly the 
 opportunity offered for operating most effectually by 
 a charge. O- saw it too ; and happening to have his 
 spurs on, he complied cheerfully with my brother’s 
 suggestion. He had the advantage of a slight 
 descent : the wicked pony went down “ with a will ” : 
 his echoing hoofs drew the general gaze upon him : 
 his head, his leonine mane, his diabolic eyes, did the 
 
 1 This was a manoeuvre regularly taught to the Austrian 
 cavalry in the middle of the last century, as a ready way of 
 opening the doors of cottages. 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 95 
 
 rest ; and in a moment the whole hostile array had 
 broken, and was in rapid flight across the brick-fields. 
 I leave the reader to judge whether “ Te Deum ” 
 would be sung on that night. A Gazette Extra- 
 ordinary was issued ; and my brother had really 
 some reason for his assertion, “ that in conscience he 
 could not think of comparing Cannae to this smashing 
 defeat ” ; since at Cannae many brave men had 
 refused to fly — the consul himself, Terentius Varro, 
 amongst them ; but, in the present rout, there was 
 no Terentius Varro — everybody fled. 
 
 The victory, indeed, considered in itself, was com- 
 plete. But it had consequences which we had not 
 looked for. In the ardour of our conflict, neither 
 my brother nor myself had remarked a stout, square- 
 built man, mounted on an uneasy horse, who sat 
 quietly in his saddle as spectator of the battle, and, 
 in fact, as the sole non-combatant present. T his man, 
 however, had been observed by O., both before and 
 after his own brilliant charge ; and, by the descrip- 
 tion, there could be no doubt that it had been our 
 guardian B., as also, by the description of the horse, 
 we could as little doubt that he had been mounted 
 on Cherubini. My brother's commentary was in a 
 tone of bitter complaint, that so noble an opportunity 
 should have been lost for strengthening O.'s charge. 
 But the consequences of this incident were graver than 
 we anticipated. A general board of our guardians, 
 vowels and consonants, was summoned to investigate 
 the matter. The origin of the feud, or “ war/' as my 
 brother called it, was inquired into. As well might 
 the war of Troy or the purser's accounts from the 
 Argonautic expedition have been overhauled. Ancient 
 night and chaos had closed over the “incunabula 
 belli ” ; and that point was given up in despair. But 
 what hindered a general pacification, no matter in 
 how many wrongs the original dispute had arisen ? 
 Who stopped the way which led to peace? Not we, 
 was our firm declaration ; we were most pacifically 
 inclined, and ever had been ; we were, in fact, little 
 saints. But the enemy could not be brought to any 
 
<)6 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 terms of accommodation. “ That we will try,” said 
 the vowel amongst our guardians, Mr. E. He, being 
 a magistrate, had naturally some weight with the pro- 
 prietors of the cotton factory. The foremen of the 
 several floors were summoned, and gave it as their 
 humble opinion that we, the aristocratic party in the 
 war, were as bad as the sansculottes — “ not a pin to 
 choose between us.” Well, but no matter for the 
 past : could any plan be devised for a pacific future ? 
 Not easily. The work-people were so thoroughly 
 independent of their employers, and so careless of 
 their displeasure, that finally this only settlement was 
 available, as wearing any promise of permanence — 
 viz., that we should alter our hours, so as not to come 
 into collision with the exits or returns of the boys. 
 
 Under this arrangement, a sort of hollow armistice 
 prevailed for some time ; but it was beginning to 
 give way, when suddenly an internal change in our 
 own home put an end to the war for ever. My 
 brother, amongst his many accomplishments, was 
 distinguished for his skill in drawing. Some of his 
 sketches had been shown to Mr. de Loutherbourg, 
 an academician well known in those days, esteemed 
 even in these days, after he has been dead for forty 
 or fifty years, and personally a distinguished favourite 
 with the king (George III.). He pronounced a very 
 flattering opinion upon my brother’s promise of 
 excellence. This being known, a fee of a thousand 
 guineas was offered to Mr. L. by the guardians ; and 
 finally that gentleman took charge of my brother 
 as a pupil. Now, therefore, my brother, King of 
 Tigrosyl vania, scourge of Gombroon, separated from 
 me ; and, as it turned out, for ever. I never saw him 
 again ; and, at Mr. de L.’s house in Hammersmith, 
 before he had completed his sixteenth year, he died 
 of typhus fever. And thus it happened that a little 
 gold-dust skilfully applied put an end to wars that 
 else threatened to extend into a Carthaginian length. 
 In one week’s time 
 
 “ Hi motus animorum atque hoec certamina tanta 
 Pulveris exigui jactu cornpressa quierunt.” 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 97 
 
 Here I had terminated this chapter — as at a natural 
 pause, which, whilst shutting out for ever my eldest 
 brother from the reader’s sight and from my own, 
 necessarily at the same moment worked a permanent 
 revolution in the character of my daily life. Two such 
 changes, and both so abrupt, indicated imperiously 
 the close of one era and the opening of another. 
 The advantages, indeed, which my brother had over 
 me in years, in physical activities of every kind, in 
 decision of purpose, and in energy of will — all which 
 advantages, besides, borrowed a ratification from an 
 obscure sense, on my part, of duty as incident to what 
 seemed an appointment of Providence — inevitably 
 had controlled, and for years to come would have 
 controlled, the free spontaneous movements of a 
 'contemplative dreamer like myself. Consequently, 
 this separation, which proved an eternal one, and 
 contributed to deepen my constitutional propensity 
 to gloomy meditation, had for me (partly on that 
 account, but much more through the sudden birth 
 of perfect independence which so unexpectedly it 
 opened) the value of a revolutionary experience. A 
 new date, a new starting-point, a redemption (as it 
 might be called) into the golden sleep of halcyon 
 quiet, after everlasting storms, suddenly dawned upon 
 me ; and not as any casual intercalation of holidays 
 that would come to an end — but, for anything that 
 appeared to the contrary, as the perpetual tenor of my 
 future career. No longer was the factory a Carthage 
 for me : if any obdurate old Cato there were who 
 found his amusement in denouncing it with a daily 
 “ Delenda est ,” take notice (I said silently to my- 
 self), that I acknowledge no such tiger for a friend of 
 mine. Never more was the bridge across the I r well 
 a bridge of sighs for me. And the meanest of the 
 factory population — thanks be to their discrimina- 
 tion — despised my pretensions too entirely to waste a 
 thought or a menace upon a cipher so abject. 
 
 This change, therefore, being so sudden and so 
 total, ought to signalise itself externally by a com- 
 mensurate break in the narrative. A new chapter, 
 
 n 
 
98 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 at the least, with a huge interspace of blank white 
 paper, or even a new book, ought rightfully to solem- 
 nise so profound a revolution. And virtually it shall. 
 But, according to the general agreement of antiquity, 
 it is not felt as at all disturbing to the unity of that 
 event which winds up the Iliad — viz., the death of 
 Hector — that Homer expands it circumstantially into 
 the whole ceremonial of his funeral obsequies : and 
 upon that same principle I, when looking back to 
 this abrupt close of all connection with my brother — 
 whether in my character of major-general, or of 
 potentate trembling daily for my people — am re- 
 minded that the very last morning of this connection 
 had its own separate distinction from all other morn- 
 ings, in a way that entitles it to its own separate share 
 in the general commemoration. A shadow fell upori 
 this particular morning as from a cloud of danger 
 that lingered for a moment over our heads, might 
 seem even to muse and hesitate, and then sullenly 
 passed away into distant quarters. It is noticeable 
 that a danger which approaches, but wheels away — 
 which threatens, but finally forbears to strike — is 
 more interesting by much on a distant retrospect 
 than the danger which accomplishes its mission. 
 The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims 
 have fallen, is passed without much attention ; but 
 that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller 
 has passed unconsciously in the dark, first tracing his 
 peril along the snowy margin on the next morning, 
 becomes invested with an attraction of horror for all 
 who hear the story. The dignity of mortal danger 
 ever after consecrates the spot ; and, in this particular 
 case which I am now recalling, the remembrance of 
 such a danger consecrates the day. 
 
 That day was amongst the most splendid in a 
 splendid June: it was, to borrow the line of Words- 
 worth, 
 
 “ One of those heavenly days which cannot die : ” 
 
 and, early as it was at that moment, we children, all 
 six of us that then survived, were already abroad 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE 99 
 
 upon the lawn. There were two lawns at Greenhay 
 in the shrubbery that invested three sides of the 
 house : one of these, which ran along one side of the 
 house, extended to a little bridge traversed by the 
 gates of entrance. The central gate admitted car- 
 riages : on each side of this was a smaller gate for 
 foot passengers ; and, in a family containing so many 
 as six children, it may be supposed that often enough 
 one or other of the gates was open ; which, most 
 fortunately, on this day was not the case. Along the 
 margin of this side-lawn ran a little brook, which had 
 been raised to a uniform level, and kept up by means 
 of a weir at the point where it quitted the premises ; 
 after which it resumed its natural character of wild- 
 ness, as it trotted on to the little, hamlet of Greenhill. 
 This brook my brother was at one time disposed to 
 treat as Remus treated the infant walls of Rome ; 
 but, on maturer thoughts, having built a fleet of rafts, 
 he treated it more respectfully ; and this morning, as 
 will be seen, the breadth of the little brook did us 
 “yeoman’s service.” Me at one time he had meant 
 to put on board this fleet, as his man Friday ; and I 
 had a fair prospect of first entering life in the respec- 
 table character of supercargo. But it happened that 
 the current carried his rafts and himself over the 
 weir ; which, he assured us, was no accident, but a 
 lesson by way of practice in the art of contending 
 with the rapids of the St. Lawrence and other 
 Canadian streams. However, as the danger had 
 been considerable, he was prohibited from trying 
 such experiments with me. On the centre of the 
 lawn stood my eldest surviving sister, Mary, and my 
 brother William. Round him, attracted (as ever) by 
 his inexhaustible opulence of thought and fun, stood., 
 laughing and dancing, my youngest sister, a second 
 Jane, and my youngest brother Henry, a posthumous 
 child, , feeble, and in his nurse’s arms, but on this 
 morning showing signs of unusual animation and of 
 sympathy with the glorious promise of the young 
 June day. Whirling round on his heel, at a little 
 distance, and utterly abstracted from all around him, 
 
IOO AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 my next brother, Richard, he that had caused so much 
 affliction by his incorrigible morals to the Sultan Amu- 
 rath, pursued his own solitary thoughts — whatever those 
 might be. And, finally, as regards myself, it happened 
 that I was standing close to the edge of the brook, 
 looking back at intervals to the group of five children 
 and two nursemaids who occupied the centre of the 
 lawn ; time, about an hour before our breakfast, or 
 about two hours before the world’s breakfast— 
 a little after seven — when as yet in shady parts of the 
 grounds the dazzling jewellery of the early dews had 
 not entirely exhaled. So standing, and so occupied, 
 suddenly we were alarmed by shouts as of some 
 great mob manifestly in rapid motion, and probably, 
 at this instant, taking the right-angled turn into the 
 lane connecting Greenhay with the Oxford Road. 
 The shouts indicated hostile and headlong pursuit : 
 within one minute, another right-angled turn in the 
 lane itself brought the uproar fully upon the ear ; and 
 it became evident that some imminent danger— of 
 what nature it was impossible to guess — must be 
 hastily nearing us. We were all rooted to the spot ; 
 and all turned anxiously to the gates, which happily 
 seemed to be closed. Had this been otherwise, we 
 should have had no time to apply any remedy what- 
 ever, and the consequences must probably have 
 involved us all. In a few seconds, a powerful dog, 
 not much above a furlong ahead of his pursuers, 
 wheeled into sight. We all saw him pause at the 
 gates ; but, finding no ready access through the iron 
 lattice-work that protected the side battlements of the 
 little bridge, and the pursuit being so hot, he resumed 
 his course along the outer margin of the brook. 
 Coming opposite to myself, he made a dead stop. 
 I had thus an opportunity of looking him steadily in 
 the face ; which I did, without more fear than be- 
 longed naturally to a case of so much hurry, and to 
 me, in particular, of mystery. I had never heard of 
 hydrophobia. But, necessarily connecting the furious 
 pursuit with the dog that now gazed at me from the 
 opposite side of the water, and, feeling obliged to 
 
INTRODUCTION TO WORLD OF STRIFE IOI 
 
 presume that he had made an assault upon somebody 
 or other, I looked searchingly into his eyes, and 
 observed that they seemed glazed, and as if in a 
 dreamy state, but at the same time suffused with 
 some watery discharge, while his mouth was covered 
 with masses of white foam. He looked most earnestly 
 at myself and the group beyond me ; but he made no 
 effort whatever to cross the brook, and apparently had 
 not the energy to attempt it by a flying leap. My 
 brother William, who did not in the least suspect the. 
 real danger, invited the dog to try his chance in a leap 
 — assuring him that, if he succeeded, he would knight 
 him on the spot. The temptation of a knighthood, 
 however, did not prove sufficient. A very few seconds 
 brought his pursuers within sight ; and steadily, with- 
 out sound or gesture of any kind, he resumed his 
 flight in the only direction open to him— viz., by a 
 field-path across stiles to Greenhill. Half-an-hour 
 later he would have met a bevy of children going to 
 a dame’s school, or carrying milk to rustic neigh- 
 bours. As it was, the early morning kept the road 
 clear in front. But behind immense was the body of 
 agitated pursuers. Leading the chase, came, pro- 
 bably, half a troop of light cavalry, all on foot, nearly 
 all in their stable dresses, and armed generally with 
 pitchforks, though some eight or ten carried carbines. 
 Half mingled with these, and very little in the rear, 
 succeeded avast miscellaneous mob, that had gathered 
 on the chase as it hurried through the purlieus of 
 Deansgate, and all that populous suburb of Man- 
 chester. From some of these, who halted to recover 
 breath, we obtained an explanation of the affair. 
 About a mile and a half from Greenhay stood some 
 horse-barracks, occupied usually by an entire regi- 
 ment of cavalry. A large dog — one of a multitude 
 that haunted the barracks — had for some days mani- 
 fested an increasing sullenness, snapping occasionally 
 at dogs and horses, but finally at men. Upon this 
 he had been tied up ; but in some way he had this 
 morning liberated himself : two troop-horses he had 
 immediately bitten ; and had made attacks upon 
 
102 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 several of the men, who fortunately parried these 
 attacks by means of the pitchforks standing ready to 
 their hands. On this evidence, coupled with the 
 knowledge of his previous illness, he was summarily 
 condemned as mad ; and the general pursuit com- 
 menced, which brought all parties (hunters and game) 
 sweeping so wildly past the quiet grounds of Green- 
 hay. The sequel of the affair was this : none of the 
 carbineers succeeded in getting a shot at the dog ; in 
 consequence of which, the chase lasted for seventeen 
 miles nominally ; but, allowing for all the doublings 
 and headings-back of the dog, by computation for 
 about twenty-four : and finally, in a state of utter 
 exhaustion, he was run into, and killed, somewhere 
 in Cheshire. Of the two horses whom he had bitten, 
 both treated alike, one died in a state of furious 
 hydrophobia some two months later, but the other 
 (though the more seriously wounded of the two) 
 manifested no symptoms whatever of constitutional 
 derangement. And thus it happened that for me 
 this general event of separation from my eldest 
 brother, and the particular morning on which it 
 occurred, were each for itself separately and equally 
 memorable. Freedom won and death escaped, al- 
 most in the same hour — freedom from a yoke of such 
 secret and fretful annoyance as none could measure 
 but myself— and death probably through the fiercest 
 of torments ; these double cases of deliverance, so 
 sudden and so unlooked for , signalised, by what 
 heraldically might have been described as a two- 
 headed memorial, the establishment of an epoch in 
 my life. Not only was the Chapter of Infancy thus 
 solemnly finished for ever, and the record closed ; 
 but — which cannot often happen — the chapter was 
 closed pompously and conspicuously, by what the 
 early printers through the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries would have called a bright and illuminated 
 Colophon. 
 
THIRD CHAPTER 
 
 INFANT LITERATURE 
 
 “ The child” says Wordsworth, “ is father of the 
 man;” thus calling into conscious notice the fact, 
 else faintly or not at all perceived, that whatsoever is 
 seen in the maturest adult, blossoming and bearing 
 fruit, must have pre-existed by way of germ in the 
 infant. Yes; all that is now broadly emblazoned in 
 the man, once was latent — seen or not seen — as a 
 vernal bud in the child. But not, therefore, is it true 
 inversely — that all which pre-exists in the child finds 
 its development in the man. Rudiments and ten- 
 dencies, which might have found, sometimes by acci- 
 dental, do not find, sometimes under the killing frost 
 of counter forces cannot find, their natural evolution. 
 Infancy, therefore, is to be viewed, not only as part of 
 a larger world that waits for its final complement in 
 old age, but also as a separate world itself; part of a 
 continent, but also a distinct peninsula. Most of 
 what he has, the grown-up man inherits from his 
 infant self; but it does not follow that he always 
 enters upon the whole of his natural inheritance. 
 
 Childhood, therefore, in the midst of its intellectual 
 weakness, and sometimes even by means of this weak- 
 ness, enjoys a limited privilege of strength. The 
 heart in this season of life is apprehensive ; and, 
 where its sensibilities are profound, is endowed with 
 a special power of listening for the tones of truth- 
 hidden, struggling, or remote : for, the knowledge 
 being then narrow, the interest is narrow in the objects 
 of knowledge : consequently the sensibilities are not 
 scattered, are not multiplied, are not crushed and 
 confounded (as afterwards they are) under the burden 
 of that distraction which lurks in the infinite little- 
 ness of details. 
 
 That mighty silence which infancy is thus privileged 
 by nature and by position to enjoy, co-operates with 
 another source of power — almost peculiar to youth 
 and youthful circumstances — which Wordsworth also 
 
 103 
 
104 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 was the first person to notice. It belongs to a pro- 
 found experience of the relations subsisting between 
 ourselves and nature — that not always are we called 
 upon to seek ; sometimes, and in childhood above 
 all, we are sought. 
 
 “ Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum 
 Of things for ever speaking, 
 
 That nothing of itself will come, 
 
 But we must still be seeking ?” 
 
 And again — - 
 
 “ Nor less I deem that there are pow’rs 
 
 Which of themselves our minds impress ; 
 
 And we can feed this mind of ours 
 In a wise passiveness . 55 
 
 These cases of infancy, reached at intervals by 
 special revelations, or creating for itself, through its 
 privileged silence of heart, authentic whispers of truth, 
 or beauty, or power, have some analogy to those 
 other cases, more directly supernatural, in which (ac- 
 cording to the old traditional faith of our ancestors) 
 deep messages of admonition reached an individual 
 through sudden angular deflexions of words, uttered 
 or written, that had not been originally addressed to 
 himself. Of these, there were two distinct classes — 
 those where the person concerned had been purely 
 passive, and, secondly, those in which he himself had 
 to some extent co-operated. The first class have been 
 noticed by Cowper the poet, and by George Herbert, 
 the well-known pious brother of the still better known 
 infidel, Lord Herbert (of Cherbury), in a memorable 
 sonnet ; scintillations they are of what seem nothing 
 less than providential lights, oftentimes arresting our 
 attention, from the very centre of what else seems 
 the blank darkness of chance and blind accident. 
 “ Books lying open, millions of surprises ” — these are 
 among the cases to which Herbert (and to which 
 Cowper) alludes — books, that is to say, left casually 
 open without design or consciousness, from which some 
 careless passer-by, when throwing the most negligent 
 of glances upon the page, has been startled by a 
 
INFANT LITERATURE 
 
 *05 
 
 solitary word, lying, as it were, in ambush, waiting 
 and lurking for him , and looking at him steadily as 
 an eye searching the haunted places in his con- 
 science. These cases are in principle identical with 
 those of the second class, where the inquirer himself 
 co-operated, or was not entirely passive ; cases such 
 as those which the Jews called Bath-col, or daughter 
 of a voice (the echo augury x ) — viz., where a man, per- 
 plexed in judgment, and sighing for some determining 
 counsel, suddenly heard from a stranger in some un- 
 looked-for quarter words not meant for himself, but 
 clamorously applying to the difficulty besetting him. 
 In these instances, the mystical word, that carried a 
 secret meaning and message to one sole ear in the 
 world, was always unsought for : that constituted its 
 virtue and its divinity ; and to arrange means wilfully 
 for catching at such casual words would have defeated 
 the purpose. A well-known variety of augury, con' 
 ducted upon this principle, lay in the “Sortes Bibliae,* 
 where the Bible was the oracular book consulted, and 
 far more extensively at a later period in the “ Sortes 
 Virgilianse ,” 2 where the^Eneid was the oracle consulted. 
 
 1 “ Echo augury ” : — The daughter of a voice meant an echo, 
 the original sound being viewed as the mother, and the rever- 
 beration, or secondary sound, as the daughter. Analogically, 
 therefore, the direct and original meaning of any word, or 
 sentence, or counsel, was the mother meaning ; but the secon- 
 dary, or mystical meaning, created by peculiar circumstances 
 for one separate and peculiar ear, the daughter meaning, or 
 echo meaning. This mode of augury, through secondary 
 interpretations of chance words, is not, as some readers may 
 fancy, an old, obsolete, or merely Jewish form of seeking the 
 divine pleasure. About a century ago, a man so famous, and 
 by repute so unsuperstitious, as Dr. Doddridge, was guided in 
 a primary act of choice, influencing his whole after life, by a 
 few chance words from a child reading aloud to his mother. 
 With the other mode of augury — viz., that noticed by Herbert — 
 where not the ear but the eye presides, catching at some word 
 that chance has thrown upon the eye in some book left open by 
 negligence, or opened at random by one’s self, Cowper the poet, 
 and his friend Newton, with scores of others that could be men- 
 tioned, were made acquainted through practical results and per- 
 sonal experiences that in their belief were memorably important. 
 
 2 “ Soj'tes Virgitiance.” : — Upon what principle could it have 
 been that Virgil was adopted as the oracular fountain in such a 
 
 D 2 
 
106 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Something analogous to these spiritual transfigura- 
 tions of a word or a sentence, by a bodily organ (eye 
 or ear) that has been touched with virtue for evoking 
 the spiritual echo lurking in its recesses, belongs, 
 perhaps, to every impassioned mind for the kindred 
 result of forcing out the peculiar beauty, pathos, or 
 grandeur, that may happen to lodge (unobserved 
 by ruder forms of sensibility) in special passages 
 scattered up and down literature. Meantime, I wish 
 the reader to understand that, in putting forward the 
 peculiar power with which my childish eye detected 
 a grandeur or a pomp of beauty not seen by others 
 in some special instances, I am not arrogating more 
 than it is lawful for every man the very humblest to 
 arrogate — viz., an individuality of mental constitution 
 so far applicable to special and exceptional cases 
 as to reveal in them a life and power of beauty which 
 others (and sometimes, Which all other) had missed. 
 
 The first case belongs to the march (or boundary) 
 line between my eighth and ninth years : the others 
 to a period earlier by two and a half years. But I 
 
 case ? An author so limited even as to bulk, and much more 
 limited as regards compass of thought and variety of situation 
 or character, was about the worst that Pagan literature offered. 
 But I myself once threw out a suggestion, which (if it is sound) 
 exposes a motive in behalf of such a choice that would be likely 
 to overrule the strong motives against it. That motive was, 
 unless my whole speculation is groundless, the very same which 
 led Dante, in an age of ignorance, to select Virgil as his guide 
 in Hades. The seventh son of a seventh son has always tradi- 
 tionally been honoured as the depositary of magical and other 
 supernatural gifts. And the same traditional privilege attached 
 to any man whose maternal grandfather was a sorcerer. Now 
 it happened that Virgil’s maternal grandfather bore the name 
 of Magus. This, by the ignorant multitude in Naples, &c., 
 who had been taught to reverence his tomb, was translated 
 from its true acceptation as a proper name, to a false one 
 as an appellative ; it was supposed to indicate not the name, 
 but the profession of the old gentleman. And thus, accord- 
 ing to the belief of the Lazzaroni, that excellent Christian, 
 P. Virgilius Maro, had stepped by mere succession and 
 right of inheritance into his wicked old grandpapa’s infernal 
 powers and knowledge, both of which he exercised, doubt- 
 less, for centuries without blame, and for the benefit of the 
 faithful. 
 
INFANT LITERATURE 107 
 
 notice the latest case before the others, as it con- 
 nected itself with a great epoch in the movement 
 of my intellect. There is a dignity to every man 
 in the mere historical assigning, if accurately he can 
 assign, the first dawning upon his mind of any god- 
 like faculty or apprehension, and more especially 
 if that first dawning happened to connect itself 
 with circumstances of individual or incommunicable 
 splendour. The passage which I am going to cite 
 first of all revealed to me the immeasurableness 
 of the morally sublime. What was it, and where 
 was it ? Strange the reader will think it, and 
 strange 1 it is, that a case of colossal sublimity 
 should first emerge from such a writer as Phaedrus 
 the PEsopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on 
 the part of Doctor S., that the second book in the 
 Latin language which I was summoned to study 
 should have been Phaedrus — a writer ambitious of 
 investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of 
 PEsop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But 
 so it was ; and Phaedrus naturally towered into 
 enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that 
 the most intellectual of all races amongst men (viz., 
 the Athenians) had raised a mighty statue to one 
 who belonged to the same class in a social sense 
 as himself (viz., the class of slaves), and rose above 
 that class by the same intellectual power applying 
 itself to the same object (viz., the moral apologue). 
 These were the two lines in which that glory of the 
 sublime, so stirring to my childish sense, seemed 
 to bum as in some mighty pharos : — 
 
 “ ^Esopo statuam ingentem posuere Attici ; 
 
 Servumque collocarunt eterna in basi ” : 
 
 A colossal statue did the Athenians raise to AEsop ; 
 and a poor pariah slave they planted upon an ever- 
 
 1 “ Strange &c. : — Yet I remember that, in “The Pursuits 
 of Literature” — a satirical poem once universally famous — 
 the lines about Mnemosyne and her daughters, the Pierides, 
 are cited as exhibiting matchless sublimity. Perhaps, there- 
 fore, if carefully searched, this writer may contain other jewels 
 not yet appreciated. 
 
I 08 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 las tin * pedestal. I have not scrupled to introduce 
 the word pariah, because in that way only could 
 I decipher to the reader by what particular avenue 
 it was that the sublimity which I fancy in the passage 
 reached my heart. This sublimity originated in the 
 awful chasm, in the abyss that no eye could bridge, 
 between the pollution of slavery — the being a man, 
 yet without right or lawful power belonging to a 
 man — between this unutterable degradation and the 
 starry altitude of the slave at that moment when, 
 upon the unveiling of his everlasting statue, all the 
 armies of the earth might be conceived as presenting 
 arms to the emancipated man, the cymbals and 
 kettle-drums of kings as drowning the whispers of 
 his ignominy, and the harps of all his sisters that 
 wept over slavery yet joining in one choral gratula- 
 tion to the regenerated slave. I assign the elements 
 of what I did in reality feel at that time, which to 
 the reader may seem extravagant, and by no means 
 of what it was reasonable to feel. But, in order 
 that full justice may be done to my childish self, 
 I must point out to the reader another source of 
 what strikes me as real grandeur. Horace, that 
 exquisite master of the lyre, and that most shallow 
 of critics, it is needless to say that in those days 
 I had not read. Consequently I knew nothing of 
 his idle canon, that the opening of poems must be 
 humble and subdued. But my own sensibility told 
 me how much of additional grandeur accrued to 
 these two lines as being the immediate and all- 
 pompous opening of the poem. The same feeling 
 I had received from the crashing overture to the 
 grand chapter of Daniel — “ Belshazzar the king made 
 a great feast to a thousand of his lords.” But, above 
 all, I felt this effect produced in the two opening 
 lines of “ Macbeth 75 : — 
 
 “When” (but watch that an emphasis of thunder dwells 
 upon that word “when”) — 
 
 “When shall we three meet again — 
 
 In thunder, lightning, or in rain ? ” 
 
INFANT LITERATURE 
 
 109 
 
 When an orchestral crash bursts upon the ear in 
 that all-shattering question. And one syllable of 
 apologetic preparation, so as to meet the suggestion 
 of Horace, would have the effect of emasculating 
 the whole tremendous alarum. The passage in 
 Phaedrus differs thus far from that in “ Macbeth,” 
 that the first line, simply stating a matter of fact, 
 with no more of sentiment than belongs to the word 
 ingentum , and to the antithesis between the two 
 parties so enormously divided — HLsop the slave and 
 the Athenians — must be read as an apoggiatura , or 
 hurried note of introduction, flying forward as if 
 on wings to descend with the fury and weight of a 
 thousand orchestras upon the immortal passion of the 
 second line — “ Servumque collocarunt Eterna in 
 Basi.” This passage from Phaedrus, which might 
 be briefly designated The Apotheosis of the Slave , 
 gave to me my first grand and jubilant sense of the 
 moral sublime. 
 
 Two other experiences of mine of the same class 
 had been earlier, and these I had shared with my 
 sister Elizabeth. The first was derived from the 
 “ Arabian Nights.” Mrs. Barbauld, a lady now very 
 nearly forgotten, 1 then filled a large space in the 
 public eye ; in fact, as a writer for children, she 
 occupied the place from about 1780 to 1805 which, 
 from 1805 to 1835, was occupied by Miss Edgeworth. 
 Only, as unhappily Miss Edgeworth is also now very 
 nearly forgotten, this is to explain ignotum per ignotius , 
 
 1 “ Very nearly forgotten ” : — Not quite, however. It must 
 be hard upon eighty or eighty-five years since she first: com- 
 menced authorship — a period which allows time for a great 
 deal of forgetting : and yet, in the very week when I am 
 revising this passage, I observe advertised a new edition, 
 attractively illustrated, of the “Evenings at Home” — a joint 
 work of Mrs. Barbauld and her brother (the elder Dr. Aikin). 
 Mrs. Barbauld was exceedingly clever. Her mimicry of Dr. 
 Johnson’s style was the best of all that exist. Her blank-verse 
 “Washing Day/’ descriptive of the discomforts attending a 
 mistimed visit to a rustic friend, under the affliction of a family- 
 washing, is picturesquely circumstantiated. And her prose 
 hymns for children have left upon my childish recollection a 
 deep impression of solemn beauty and simplicity. Coleridge, 
 who scattered his sneering compliments very liberally up and 
 
IIO AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 or at least one ignotum by another ignotum. How- 
 ever, since it cannot be helped, this unknown and 
 also most well-known woman, having occasion, in 
 the days of her glory, to speak of the “ Arabian 
 Nights,” insisted on Aladdin, and secondly on Sinbad, 
 as the two jewels of the collection. Now, on the 
 contrary, my sister and myself pronounced Sinbad to 
 be very bad, and Aladdin to be pretty nearly the 
 worst, and upon grounds that still strike me as just. 
 For, as to Sinbad, it is not a story at all, but a mere 
 succession of adventures, having no unity of interest 
 whatsoever : and in Aladdin, after the possession of 
 the lamp has been once secured by a pure accident, 
 the story ceases to move. All the rest is a mere 
 record of upholstery ; how this saloon was finished 
 to-day, and that window on the next day, with no 
 fresh incident whatever, except the single and tran- 
 sient misfortune arising out of the advantage given to 
 the magician by the unpardonable stupidity of Aladdin 
 in regard to the lamp. But, whilst my sister and I 
 agreed in despising Aladdin so much as almost to be 
 on the verge of despising the queen of all the blue- 
 stockings for so ill-directed a preference, one solitary 
 section there was of that tale which fixed and fas- 
 cinated my gaze, in a degree that I never afterwards 
 forgot, and did not at that time comprehend. The 
 sublimity which it involved was mysterious and 
 unfathomable, as regarded any key which I possessed 
 for deciphering its law or origin. Made restless by 
 the blind sense which I had of its grandeur, I could 
 not for a moment succeed in finding out why it should 
 be grand. Unable to explain my own impressions 
 in Aladdin, I did not the less obstinately persist in 
 believing a sublimity which I could not understand. 
 
 down the world, used to call the elder Dr. Aikin (allusively to 
 Pope’s well-known line — 
 
 “ No craving void left aching in the breast ”) 
 
 an aching void ; and the nephew, Dr. Arthur Aikin, by way of 
 variety, a void aching. Whilst Mrs. Barbauld he designated 
 as that pleonasm of nakedness ; since, as if it were not enough 
 to be bare y she was also bald. 
 
INFANT LITERATURE 
 
 III 
 
 It was, in fact, one of those many important cases 
 which elsewhere I have called involutes of human 
 sensibility ; combinations in which the materials of 
 future thought or feeling are carried as imperceptibly 
 into the mind as vegetable seeds are carried variously 
 combined through the atmosphere, or by means of 
 rivers, by birds, by winds, by waters, into remote 
 countries. But the reader shall judge for himself. 
 At the opening of the tale, a magician living in the 
 central depths of Africa is introduced to us as one 
 made aware by his secret art of an enchanted lamp 
 endowed with supernatural powers, available for the 
 service of any man whatever who should get it into 
 his keeping. But there lies the difficulty. The lamp 
 is imprisoned in subterraneous chambers, and from 
 these it can be released only by the hands of an 
 innocent child. But this is not enough : the child 
 must have a special horoscope written in the stars, or 
 else a peculiar destiny written in his constitution, 
 entitling him to take possession of the lamp. Where 
 shall such a child be found ? Where shall he be 
 sought ? The magician knows : he applies his ear 
 to the earth ; he listens to the innumerable sounds 
 of footsteps that at the moment of his experiment 
 are tormenting the surface of the globe ; and amongst 
 them all, at a distance of six thousand miles, playing 
 in the streets of Bagdad, he distinguishes the peculiar 
 steps of the child Aladdin. Through this mighty 
 labyrinth of sounds, which Archimedes, aided by his 
 arenarius , could not sum or disentangle, one solitary 
 infant’s feet are distinctly recognised on the banks of 
 the Tigris, distant by four hundred and forty days’ 
 march of an army or a caravan. These feet, these 
 steps, the sorcerer knows, and challenges in his heart, 
 as the feet, as the steps of that innocent boy, through 
 whose hands only he could have a chance of reaching 
 the lamp. 
 
 It follows, therefore, that the wicked magician 
 exercises two demoniac gifts. First, he has the 
 power to disarm Babel itself of its confusion. 
 Secondly, after having laid aside as useless many 
 
I 12 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 billions of earthly sounds, and after having fastened 
 his murderous 1 attention upon one insulated tread, 
 he has the power, still more unsearchable, of reading 
 in that hasty movement an alphabet of new and 
 infinite symbols ; for, in order that the sound of the 
 child’s feet should be significant and intelligible, that 
 sound must open into a gamut of infinite compass. 
 The pulses of the heart, the motions of the will, the 
 phantoms of the brain, must repeat themselves in 
 secret hieroglyphics uttered by the flying footsteps. 
 Even the articulate or brutal sounds of the globe 
 must be all so many languages and ciphers that 
 somewhere have their corresponding keys — have their 
 own grammar and syntax ; and thus the least things 
 in the universe must be secret mirrors to the greatest. 
 Palmistry has something of the same dark sublimity. 
 All this, by rude efforts at explanation that mocked 
 my feeble command of words, I communicated to 
 my sister ; and she, whose sympathy with my mean- 
 ing was always so quick and true, often outrunning 
 electrically my imperfect expressions, felt the passage 
 in the same way as myself , 2 but not, perhaps, in the 
 same degree. She was much beyond me in velocity 
 of apprehension, and many other qualities of intellect. 
 Here only, viz., on cases of the dark sublime, where 
 it rested upon dim abstractions, and when no par- 
 ticular trait of moral grandeur came forward, we 
 differed — differed, that is to say, as by more or by 
 less. Else, even as to the sublime, and numbers of 
 other intellectual questions which rose up to us from 
 our immense reading, we drew together with a perfect 
 fidelity of sympathy ; and therefore I pass willingly 
 from a case which exemplified one of our rare 
 
 1 “Murderous” ; for it was his intention to leave Aladdin 
 immured in the subterranean chambers. 
 
 2 The reader will not understand me as attributing to the 
 Arabian originator of Aladdin all the sentiment of the case as 
 I have endeavoured to disentangle it. Pie spoke what he did 
 not understand ; for, as to sentiment of any kind, all Orientals 
 are obtuse and impassive. There are other sublimities (some, 
 at least) in the “ Arabian Nights,” which first became such — 
 a gas that first kindles — when entering into combination with 
 new elements in a Christian atmosphere. 
 
INFANT LITERATURE 
 
 ”3 
 
 differences, to another, not less interesting for itself, 
 which illustrated (what occurred so continually) the 
 intensity of our agreement. 
 
 No instance of noble revenge that ever I heard 
 of seems so effective, if considered as applied to 
 a noble-minded wrong-doer, or in any case as so 
 pathetic. From what quarter the story comes origin- 
 ally, was unknown to us at the time ; and I have 
 never met it since ; so that possibly it may be new 
 to the reader. We, found it in a book written for the 
 use of his own children by Dr. Percival, the physician 
 who attended at Greenhay. Dr. P. was a literary 
 man, of elegant tastes and philosophic habits. Some 
 of his papers may be found in the Manchester 
 Philosophic Transactions ; and these I have heard 
 mentioned with respect, though, for myself, I have 
 no personal knowledge of them. Some presumption 
 meantime arises in their favour, from the fact that 
 he had been a favoured correspondent of the most 
 eminent Frenchmen at that time who cultivated 
 literature jointly with philosophy. Voltaire, Diderot, 
 Maupertuis, Condorcet, and D’Alembert, had all 
 treated him with distinction ; and I have heard my 
 mother say that, in days before I or my sister could 
 have known him, he attempted vainly to interest her 
 in these French luminaries, by reading extracts from 
 their frequent letters ; which, however, so far from 
 reconciling her to the letters, or to the writers of the 
 letters, had the unhappy effect of riveting her dislike 
 (previously budding) to the doctor, as their receiver, 
 and the proneur of their authors. The tone of the 
 letters — hollow, insincere, and full of courtly civilities 
 to Dr. P., as a known friend of “ the tolerance ” 
 (meaning, of toleration) — certainly was not adapted 
 to the English taste ; and in this respect was specially 
 offensive to my mother, as always assuming of the 
 doctor that, by mere necessity, as being a philosopher, 
 he must be an infidel. Dr. P. left that question, I 
 believe, “ in medio? neither assenting nor denying; 
 and undoubtedly there was no particular call upon 
 him to publish his Confession of Faith before one 
 
I 14 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 who, in the midst of her rigorous politeness, suffered 
 it to be too transparent that she did not like him. 
 It is always a pity to see anything lost and wasted, 
 especially love ; and, therefore, it was no subject for 
 lamentation, that too probably the philosophic doctor 
 did not enthusiastically like her. But, if really so, 
 that made no difference in his feelings towards my 
 sister and myself. Us he did like ; and, as one proof 
 of his regard, he presented us jointly with such of his 
 works as could be supposed interesting to two young 
 literati, whose combined ages made no more at this 
 period than a baker’s dozen. These presentation 
 copies amounted to two at the least, both octavos , 
 and one of them entitled The Father's — something 
 or other ; what was it ? — Assistant , perhaps. How 
 much assistance the doctor might furnish to the 
 fathers upon this wicked little planet I cannot say. 
 But fathers are a stubborn- race ; it is very little use 
 trying to assist them. Better always to prescribe for 
 the rising generation. And certainly the impression 
 which he made upon us — my sister and myself — by 
 the story in question, was deep and memorable : my 
 sister wept over it, and wept over the remembrance 
 of it ; and, not long after, carried its sweet aroma off 
 with her to heaven; whilst I, for my part, have never 
 forgotten it. Yet, perhaps, it is injudicious to have 
 too much excited the reader’s expectations ; there- 
 fore, reader, understand what it is that you are invited 
 to hear — not much of a story, but simply a noble 
 sentiment, such as that of Louis XII. when he re- 
 fused, as King of France, to avenge his own injuries 
 as Duke of Orleans — such as that of Hadrian, when 
 he said that a Roman Imperator ought to die stand- 
 ing, meaning that Csesar, as the man who represented 
 almighty Rome, should face the last enemy, as the 
 first, in an attitude of unconquerable defiance. Here 
 is Dr. Percival’s story, which (again I warn you) will 
 collapse into nothing at all, unless you yourself are able 
 to dilate it by expansive sympathy with its sentiment. 
 
 A young officer (in what army, no matter) had so 
 far forgotten himself, in a moment of irritation, as to 
 
INFANT LITERATURE I I 5 
 
 strike a private soldier, full of personal dignity (as 
 sometimes happens in all ranks), and distinguished 
 for his courage. The inexorable laws of military 
 discipline forbade to the injured soldier any practical 
 redress — he could look for no retaliation by acts. 
 Words only were at his command ; and, in a tumult 
 of indignation, as he turned away, the soldier said to 
 his officer that he would “ make him repent it.” 
 This, wearing the shape of a menace, naturally re- 
 kindled the officer’s anger, and intercepted any dis- 
 position which might be rising within him towards 
 a sentiment of remorse ; and thus the irritation be- 
 tween the two young men grew hotter than before. 
 Some weeks after this a partial action took place 
 with the enemy. Suppose yourself a spectator, and 
 looking down into a valley occupied by the two 
 armies. They are facing each other, you see, in 
 martial array. But it is no more than a skirmish 
 which is going on ; in the course of which, however, 
 an occasion suddenly arises for a desperate service. 
 A redoubt, which has fallen into the enemy’s hands, 
 must be recaptured at any price, and under cir- 
 cumstances of all but hopeless difficulty. A strong 
 party has volunteered for the service ; there is a 
 cry for somebody to head them ; you see a soldier 
 step out from the ranks to assume this dangerous 
 leadership ; the party moves rapidly forward ; in 
 a few minutes it is swallowed up from your eyes 
 in clouds of smoke ; for one half-hour, from behind 
 these clouds, you receive hieroglyphic reports of 
 bloody strife — fierce repeating signals, flashes from 
 the guns, rolling musketry, and exulting hurrahs, 
 advancing or receding, slackening or redoubling. 
 At length all is over : the redoubt has been re- 
 covered * that which was lost is found again ; the 
 jewel which had been made captive is ransomed 
 with blood. Crimsoned with glorious gore, the 
 wreck of the conquering party is relieved, and at 
 liberty to return. From the river you see it as- 
 cending. The plume-crested officer in command 
 rushes forward, with his left hand raising his hat 
 
Il6 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 in homage to the blackened fragments of what 
 once was a flag, whilst, with his right hand, he 
 seizes that of the leader, though no more than a 
 private from the ranks. That perplexes you not : 
 mystery you see none in that. For distinctions of 
 order perish, ranks are confounded, “ high and low ” 
 are words without a meaning, and to wreck goes 
 every notion or feeling that divides the noble from 
 the noble, or the brave man from the brave. But 
 wherefore is it that now', when suddenly they wheel 
 into mutual recognition, suddenly they pause ? 
 This soldier, this officer — who are they ? O reader ! 
 once before they had stood face to face — the soldier 
 it is that w r as struck ; the officer it is that struck him. 
 Once again they are meeting ; and the gaze of armies 
 is upon them. If for a moment a doubt divides 
 them, in a moment the doubt has perished. One 
 glance exchanged between them publishes the for- 
 giveness that is sealed for ever. As one v T ho recovers 
 a brother whom he had accounted dead, the officer 
 sprang forward, threw his arms around the neck of 
 the soldier, and kissed him, as if he w^ere some 
 martyr glorified by that shadow of death from which 
 he was returning ; whilst, on his part, the soldier, 
 stepping back, and carrying his open hand through the 
 beautiful motions of the military salute to a superior, 
 makes this immortal answer — that answer which 
 shut up for ever the memory of the indignity offered 
 to him, even whilst for the last time alluding to it : 
 — “ Sir,” he said, “ I told you before that I would 
 make you repent it ” 
 
FOURTH CHAPTER 
 
 THE FEMALE INFIDEL 
 
 At the time of my father’s death, I was nearly seven 
 years old . 1 In the next four years, during which we 
 continued to live at Greenhay, nothing memorable 
 occurred, except, indeed, that troubled parenthesis 
 in my life which connected me with my brother 
 William — this certainly was memorable to myself — > 
 and, secondly, the visit of a most eccentric young 
 woman, who, about nine years later, drew the eyes 
 of all England upon herself, by her unprincipled con- 
 duct in an affair affecting the life of two Oxonian 
 undergraduates. She was the daughter of Lord le 
 Despencer (known previously as Sir Francis Dash- 
 wood) ; and at this time (meaning the time of her 
 visit to Greenhay) she was about twenty-two years 
 old ; with a face and a figure classically beautiful, 
 and with the reputation of extraordinary accomplish- 
 ments ; these accomplishments being not only eminent 
 in their degree, but rare and interesting in their kind. 
 In particular, she astonished every person by her im- 
 promptu performances on the organ, and by her powers 
 of disputation. These last she applied entirely to 
 attacks upon Christianity ; for she openly professed 
 infidelity in the most audacious form ; and at my 
 mother’s table she certainly proved more than a 
 match for all the clergymen of the neighbouring 
 towns, some of whom (as the most intellectual persons 
 of that neighbourhood) were daily invited to meet 
 her. It was a mere accident which had introduced 
 her to my mother’s house. Happening to hear 
 from my sister Mary’s governess 2 that she and her 
 
 1 “Nearly eight years old,” as Dr. Masson points out, “would 
 have been more correct. De Quincey was born 15th August 
 1785 ; and his father died 18th July 1793.” 
 
 2 * 4 My sister Mary's governess ” : — This governess was a 
 Miss Wesley, niece to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. 
 And the mention of her recalls to me a fact, which was 
 recently revived and mis-stated by the whole newspaper press 
 of the island. It had been always known that some relation- 
 
 117 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 I 18 
 
 pupil were going on a visit to an old Catholic family 
 in the county of Durham (the family of Mr. Swin- 
 burne, who was known advantageously to the public 
 by his “ Travels in Spain and Sicily,” &c.), Mrs. Lee, 
 whose education in a French convent, aided by her 
 father’s influence, had introduced her extensively to 
 the knowledge of Catholic families in England, and 
 who had herself an invitation to the same house at the 
 same time, wrote to offer the use of her carriage to 
 convey all three — *>., herself, my sister, and her 
 governess — to Mr. Swinburne’s. This naturally 
 
 ship existed between the Wellesleys and John Wesley. Their 
 names had, in fact, been originally the same ; and the Duke of 
 Wellington himself, in the earlier part of his career, when 
 sitting in the Irish House of Commons, was always known 
 to the Irish journals as Captain Wesley. Upon this arose a 
 natural belief, that the aristocratic branch of the house had 
 improved the name into Wellesley. But the true process of 
 change had been precisely the other way. Not Wesley had 
 been expanded into Wellesley — but, inversely, Wellesley had 
 been contracted by household usage into Wesley. The name 
 must have been Wellesley in its earliest stage, since it was 
 founded upon a connection with Wells Cathedral. It had 
 obeyed the same process as prevails in many hundreds of other 
 names : St. Leger, for instance, is always pronounced as if 
 written Sillinger ; Cholmondeley as Chumleigh ; Marjoribanks 
 as Marchbanks ; and the illustrious name of Cavendish was 
 for centuries familiarly pronounced Candish ; and Wordsworth 
 has even introduced this name into verse, so as to compel the 
 reader, by a metrical coercion, into calling it Candish. Miss 
 Wesley’s family had great musical sensibility and skill. This 
 led the family into giving musical parties, at which was con- 
 stantly to be found Lord Mornington, the father of the Duke of 
 Wellington. For these parties it was, as Miss Wesley informed 
 me, that the Earl composed his most celebrated glee. Here 
 also it was, or in similar musical circles gathered about himself 
 by the first Lord Mornington, that the Duke of Wellington had 
 formed and cultivated his unaffected love for music of the 
 highest class — i,e., for the impassioned music of the serious 
 opera. And it occurs to me as highly probable, that Mrs. Lee’s 
 connection with the Wesleys, through which it was that she 
 became acquainted with my mother, must have rested upon the 
 common interest which she and the Wesleys had in the organ 
 and in the class of music suited to that instrument. Mrs. Lee 
 herself was an improvisatrice of the first class upon the organ ; 
 and the two brothers of Miss Wesley, Sam. and Charles, 
 ranked for very many years as the first organists in Europe. 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL II9 
 
 drew forth from my mother an invitation to Green- 
 hay ; and to Greenhay she came. On the imperial 
 of her .carriage, and elsewhere, she described herself 
 as the Hon . Antonina Dashwood Lee. But, in fact, 
 being only the illegitimate daughter of Lord le 
 Despencer, she was not entitled to that designation. 
 She had, however, received a bequest even more 
 enviable from her father — viz., not less than forty-five 
 thousand pounds. At a very early age, she had 
 married a young Oxonian, distinguished for nothing 
 but a very splendid person, which had procured him 
 the distinguishing title of Handsome Lee ; and from 
 him she had speedily separated, on the agreement 
 of dividing the fortune. 
 
 My mother little guessed what sort of person it 
 was whom she had asked into her family. So much, 
 however, she had understood from Miss Wesley — 
 that Mrs. Lee was a bold thinker ; and that, for a 
 woman, she had an astonishing command of theo- 
 logical learning. This it was that suggested the 
 clerical invitations, as in such a case likely to furnish 
 the most appropriate society. But this led to a pain- 
 ful result. It might easily have happened that a very 
 learned clergyman should not specially have qualified 
 himself for the service of a theological tournament : 
 and my mother’s range of acquaintance was not very 
 extensive amongst the clerical body. But of these 
 the two leaders, as regarded public consideration, 
 
 were Mr. H , my guardian, and Mr. Glowes, 
 
 who for more than fifty years officiated as rector of 
 St. John’s Church in Manchester. In fact, the 
 golden jubilee 1 of his pastoral connection with St. 
 John’s was celebrated many years after with much 
 demonstrative expression of public sympathy on the 
 part of universal Manchester — the most important 
 city in the island next after London. No men could 
 
 1 “ The golden jubilee” : — This, in Germany, is used popu- 
 larly as a technical expression : a married couple, when cele- 
 brating the fiftieth anniversary of their marriage-day, are said 
 to keep their golden jubilee ; but on the twenty-fifth anniversary 
 they have credit only for a silver jubilee. 
 
120 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 have been found who were less fitted to act as 
 champions in a duel on behalf of Christianity. Mr. 
 H — — was dreadfully commonplace ; dull, dreadfully 
 dull ; and, by the necessity of his nature, incapable 
 of being in deadly interest, which his splendid anta- 
 gonist at all times was. His encounter, therefore, 
 with Mrs. Lee presented the distressing spectacle 
 of an old, toothless, mumbling mastiff, fighting for 
 the household to which he owed allegiance,, against 
 a young leopardess fresh from the forests. Every 
 touch from her, every velvety paw, drew blood. And 
 something comic mingled with what my mother felt 
 to be paramount tragedy. Far different was Mr. 
 Clowes : holy, visionary, apostolic, he could not be 
 treated disrespectfully. No man could deny him a 
 qualified homage,. But for any polemic service he 
 wanted the taste, the training, and the particular sort 
 of erudition required. Neither would such advan- 
 tages, if he had happened to possess them, have at 
 all availed him in a case like this. Horror, blank 
 horror, seized him upon seeing a woman, a young 
 woman, a woman of captivating beauty, whom God 
 had adorned so eminently with gifts of person and of 
 mind, breathing sentiments that to him seemed fresh 
 from the mintage of hell. He could have apostro- 
 phised her (as long afterwards he himself told me) 
 in the words of Shakspere’s Juliet — 
 
 “ Beautiful tyrant ! fiend angelical ! 3 ’ 
 
 for he was one of those who never think of Christi- 
 anity as the subject of defence. Could sunshine, 
 could light, could the glories of the dawn, call for 
 defence? Not as a thing to be defended, but as a 
 thing to be interpreted, as a thing to be illuminated, 
 did Christianity exist for him . He, therefore, was 
 
 even more unserviceable as a champion against the 
 deliberate impeacher of Christian evidences than my 
 reverend guardian. 
 
 Thus it was that he himself explained his own 
 position, in after days, when I had reached my six- 
 teenth year, and visited him upon terms of friend- 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL 
 
 I 2 I 
 
 ship as close as can ever have existed between a 
 boy and a man already grey-headed. Him and his 
 noiseless parsonage, the pensive abode for sixty years 
 of religious reverie and anchoritish self-denial, I 
 have described further on. In some limited sense 
 he belongs to our literature ; for he was, in fact, the 
 introducer of Swedenborg to this country; as being 
 himself partially the translator of Swedenborg ; and 
 still more as organising a patronage to other people’s 
 translations ; and also, I believe, as republishing the 
 original Latin works of Swedenborg. To say that of 
 Mr. Clowes was, until lately, but another way of 
 describing him as a delirious dreamer. At present 
 (1853), I presume the reader to be aware that Cam- 
 bridge has, within the last few years, unsettled and 
 even revolutionised our estimates of Swedenborg as 
 a philosopher. That man, indeed, whom Emerson 
 ranks as one amongst his inner consistory of intel- 
 lectual potentates, cannot be the absolute trifler that 
 Kant (who knew him only by the most trivial of 
 his pretensions), eighty years ago, supposed him. 
 Assuredly, Mr. Clowes was no trifler, but lived 
 habitually a life of power, though in a world of 
 religious mysticism and of apocalyptic visions. To 
 him, being such a man by nature and by habit, it 
 was in effect the lofty Lady Geraldine from Coler- 
 idge’s “ Christabelle ” that stood before him in this 
 infidel lady. A magnificent witch she was, like the 
 Lady Geraldine ; having the same superb beauty ; 
 the same power of throwing spells over the ordinary 
 gazer ; and yet at intervals unmasking to some 
 solitary, unfascinated spectator the same dull blink 
 of a snaky eye ; and revealing, through the most 
 fugitive of gleams, a traitress couchant beneath what 
 else to all others seemed the form of a lady, armed 
 with incomparable pretensions — one that was 
 
 “ Beautiful exceedingly, 
 
 Like a lady from a far countrie.” 
 
 The scene, as I heard it sketched long years after- 
 wards by more than one of those who had witnessed 
 
122 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 it, was painful in excess. And the shock given to 
 my mother was memorable. For the first and the 
 last time in her long and healthy life, she suffered an 
 alarming nervous attack. Partly this arose from the 
 conflict between herself in the character of hostess, 
 and herself as a loyal daughter of Christian faith ; 
 she shuddered, in a degree almost uncontrollable and 
 beyond her power to dissemble, at the unfeminine 
 intrepidity with which “the leopardess” conducted 
 her assaults upon the sheepfolds of orthodoxy ; and, 
 partly also, this internal conflict arose from concern 
 on behalf of her own servants, who waited at dinner, 
 and were inevitably liable to impressions from what 
 they heard. My mother, by original choice, and by 
 early training under a very aristocratic father, recoiled 
 as austerely from all direct communication with her 
 servants as the Pythia at Delphi from the attendants 
 that swept out the temple. But not the less her 
 conscience, in all stages of her life, having or not 
 having any special knowledge of religion, acknow- 
 ledged a pathetic weight of obligation to remove from 
 her household all confessedly corrupting influences. 
 And here was one which she could not remove. 
 What chiefly she feared, on behalf of her servants, 
 was either, first, the danger from the simple fact , now 
 suddenly made known to them, that it was possible 
 for a person unusually gifted to deny Christianity : 
 such a denial and haughty abjuration could not but 
 carry itself more profoundly into the reflective mind, 
 even of servants, when the arrow came winged and 
 made buoyant by the gay feathering of so many 
 splendid accomplishments. This general fact was 
 appreciable by those who would forget, and never 
 could have understood, the particular arguments of 
 the infidel. Yet, even as regarded these particular 
 arguments, secondly, my mother feared that some one 
 — brief, telling, and rememberable — might be singled 
 out from the rest, might transplant itself to the 
 servants’ hall, and take root for life in some mind 
 sufficiently thoughtful to invest it with interest, and 
 yet far removed from any opportunities, through 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL 123 
 
 books or society, for disarming the argument of its 
 sting. Such a danger was quickened by the character 
 and pretensions of Mrs. Lee’s footman, who was a 
 daily witness, whilst standing behind his mistress’s 
 chair at dinner, to the confusion which she carried 
 into the hostile camp, and might be supposed to 
 renew such discussions in the servants’ hall with 
 singular advantages for a favourable attention. For 
 he was a showy and most audacious Londoner, and 
 what is technically known, in the language of servants’ 
 hiring-offices, as “a man of figure.” He might, there- 
 fore, be considered as one dangerously armed for 
 shaking religious principles, especially amongst the 
 female servants. Here, however, I believe that my 
 mother was mistaken. Women of humble station 
 less than any other class have any tendency to sym- 
 pathise with boldness that manifests itself in throwing 
 off the yoke of religion. Perhaps a natural instinct 
 tells them that levity of that nature will pretty surely 
 extend itself contagiously to other modes of conscien- 
 tious obligation ; at any rate, my own experience 
 would warrant me in doubting whether any instance 
 were ever known of a woman, in the rank of ser- 
 vant, regarding infidelity or irreligion as something 
 brilliant, or interesting, or in any way as favourably 
 distinguishing a man. Meantime, this conscientious 
 apprehension on account of the servants applied to 
 contingencies that were remote. But the pity on 
 account of the poor lady herself applied to a danger 
 that seemed imminent and deadly. This beautiful 
 and splendid young creature, as my mother knew, 
 was floating, without anchor, or knowledge of any 
 anchoring grounds, upon the unfathomable ocean of 
 a London world, which, for her, was wrapped in 
 darkness as regarded its dangers, and thus for her 
 the chances of shipwreck were seven times multiplied. 
 It was notorious that Mrs. Lee had no protector or 
 guide, natural or legal. Her marriage had, in fact, 
 instead of imposing new restraints, released her from 
 old ones. For the legal separation of Doctors’ Com- 
 mons, technically called a divorce, but a divorce 
 
124 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 simply a mensa et thoro (from bed and board), and 
 not a vinculo matrimonii (from the very tie and 
 obligation of marriage), had removed her by law from 
 the control of her husband ; whilst, at the same time, 
 the matrimonial condition, of course, enlarged that 
 liberty of action which else is unavoidably narrowed 
 by the reserve and delicacy natural to a young woman 
 whilst yet unmarried. Here arose one peril more ; 
 and, secondly, arose this most unusual aggravation 
 of that peril — that Mrs. Lee was deplorably ignorant 
 of English life: indeed, of life universally. Strictly 
 speaking, she was even yet a raw untutored novice 
 turned suddenly loose from the twilight of a monastic 
 seclusion. Under any circumstances, such a situation 
 lay open to an amount of danger that was afflicting 
 to contemplate. But one dreadful exasperation of 
 these fatal auguries lay in the peculiar temper of Mrs. 
 Lee, as connected with her infidel thinking. Her 
 nature was too frank and bold to tolerate any dis- 
 guise: and my mother’s own experience had now 
 taught her that Mrs. Lee would not be content to 
 leave to the random call of accident the avowal of 
 her principles. No passive or latent spirit of free- 
 thinking was hers — headlong it was, uncompromising, 
 almost fierce, and regarding no restraints of place or 
 season. Like Shelley, some few years later, whose 
 day she would have gloried to welcome, she looked 
 upon her principles, not only as conferring rights, 
 but also as imposing duties of active proselytism. 
 From this feature in her character it was that my 
 mother foresaw an instant evil, which she urged Miss 
 Wesley to press earnestly on her attention — viz., the 
 inevitable alienation of all her female friends. In 
 many parts of the Continent (but too much we are 
 all in the habit of calling by the wide name of “the 
 Continent” France, Germany, Switzerland, and Bel- 
 gium), my mother was aware that the most flagrant 
 proclamation of infidelity would not stand in the 
 way of a woman’s favourable reception into society. 
 But in England at that time this was far otherwise. 
 A display such as Mrs. Lee habitually forced upon 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL 1 25 
 
 people’s attention would at once have the effect of 
 banishing from her house all women of respectability. 
 She would be thrown upon the society of men — bold 
 and reckless, such as either agreed with herself, or, 
 being careless on the whole subject of religion, pre- 
 tended to do so. Her income, though diminished 
 now by the partition with Mr. Lee, was still above a 
 thousand per annum ; which, though trivial for any 
 purpose of display in a place so costly as London, 
 was still important enough to gather round her un- 
 principled adventurers, some of whom might be noble 
 enough to obey no attraction but that which lay 
 in her marble beauty, in her Athenian grace and 
 eloquence, and the wild impassioned nature of her 
 accomplishments ; by her acting, her dancing, her 
 conversation, her musical improvisations, she was 
 qualified to attract the most intellectual men ; but 
 baser attractions would exist for baser men ; and my 
 mother urged Miss Wesley, as one whom Mrs. Lee 
 admitted to her confidence, above all things to act 
 upon her pride by forewarning her that such men, 
 in the midst of lip homage to her charms, would be 
 sure to betray its hollowness by declining to let their 
 wives and daughters visit her. Plead what excuses 
 they would, Mrs. Lee might rely upon it, that the 
 true ground for this insulting absence of female 
 visitors would be found to lie in her profession of 
 infidelity. This alienation of female society would, 
 it was clear, be precipitated enormously by Mrs. 
 Lee’s frankness. A result that might, by a dissem- 
 bling policy, have been delayed indefinitely would 
 now be hurried forward to an immediate crisis. And 
 in this result went to wreck the very best part of Mrs. 
 Lee’s securities against ruin. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say that all the evil 
 followed which had been predicted, and through the 
 channels which had been predicted. Some time was 
 required on so vast a stage as London to publish the 
 fact of Mrs Lee’s free-thinking ; that is, to publish it 
 as a matter of systematic purpose. Many persons 
 had at first made a liberal allowance for her, as 
 
126 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 tempted by some momentary impulse into opinions 
 that she had not sufficiently considered, and might 
 forget as hastily as she had adopted them. But no 
 sooner was it made known as a settled fact that 
 she had deliberately dedicated her energies to the 
 interests of an antichristian system, and that she 
 hated Christianity, than the whole body of her 
 friends within the pale of social respectability fell 
 away from her, and forsook her house. To them 
 succeeded a clique of male visitors, some of whom 
 were doubtfully respectable, and others (like Mr. 
 Frend, memorable for his expulsion from Cambridge 
 on account of his public hostility to Trinitarianism) 
 were distinguished by a tone of intemperate defiance 
 to the spirit of English society. Thrown upon such 
 a circle, and emancipated from all that temper of 
 reserve which would have been impressed upon her 
 by habitual anxiety for the good opinion of virtuous 
 and high-principled women, the poor lady was tempted 
 into an elopement with two dissolute brothers * for 
 what ultimate purpose on either side was never made 
 clear to the public. Why a lady should elope from 
 her own house, and the protection of her own ser- 
 vants, under whatever impulse, seemed generally un- 
 intelligible. But apparently it was precisely this 
 protection from her own servants which presented 
 itself to the brothers in the light of an obstacle to 
 their objects. What these, objects might ultimately 
 be, I do not entb'ely know ; and I do not feel myself 
 authorised, by anything which of my own knowledge 
 I know, to load either of them with mercenary 
 imputations. One of them (the younger) was, or 
 fancied himself, in love with Mrs Lee. It was 
 impossible for him to marry her ; and possibly he 
 may have fancied that in some rustic retirement, 
 where the parties were unknown, it would be easier 
 than in London to appease the lady’s scruples in 
 respect to the sole mode of connection which the 
 law left open to them. £ The frailty of the will in 
 Mrs. Lee was as manifest in this stage of the case as 
 subsequently, when she allowed herself to be over^ 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL 1 27 
 
 clamoured by Mr. Lee and his friends into a capital 
 prosecution of the brothers. After she had once 
 allowed herself to be put into a post-chaise, she was 
 persuaded to believe (and such was her ignorance 
 of English society that possibly she did believe) 
 herself through the rest of the journey liable at 
 any moment to summary coercion in the case of 
 attempting any resistance. The brothers and herself 
 left London in the evening. Consequently, it was 
 long after midnight when the party halted at a town 
 in Gloucestershire, two stages beyond Oxford. The 
 younger gentleman then persuaded her, but (as she 
 alleged) under the impression on her part that re- 
 sistance was unavailing, and that the injury to her 
 reputation was by this time irreparable, to allow of 
 his coming to her bedroom. This was perhaps 
 not entirely a fraudulent representation in Mrs. Lee. 
 The whole circumstances of the case made it clear 
 that, with any decided opening for deliverance, she 
 would have caught at it ; and probably would again, 
 from wavering of mind, have dallied with the danger. 
 
 Perhaps at this point, having already in this last 
 paragraph shot ahead by some nine years of the 
 period when she visited Greenhay, allowing myself 
 this license in order to connect my mother’s warning 
 through Miss Wesley with the practical sequel of the 
 case, it may be as well for me to pursue the arrears 
 of the story down to its final incident. In 1804, at 
 the Lent Assizes for the county of Oxford, she 
 appeared as principal witness against two brothers, 
 
 I, 1 G n, and L n G n, on a capital 
 
 charge of having forcibly carried her off from her 
 own house in London, and afterwards of having, 
 at some place in Gloucestershire, by collusion with 
 each other and by terror, enabled one of the brothers 
 to offer the last violence to her person. * The cir- 
 cumstantial accounts published at the time by the 
 newspapers were of a nature to conciliate the public 
 sympathy altogether to the prisoners ; and the general 
 belief accorded with what was, no doubt, the truth — 
 that the lady had been driven into a false accusation 
 
128 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 by the overpowering remonstrances of her friends, 
 joined, in this instance, by her husband, all of whom 
 were willing to believe, or willing to have it believed 
 by the public, that advantage had been taken of 
 her little acquaintance with English usages. I was 
 present at the trial. The court was opened at eight 
 o’clock in the morning ; and such was the interest 
 in the case, that a mob, composed chiefly of gowns- 
 men, besieged the doors for some time before the 
 moment of admission. On this occasion, by the 
 way, I witnessed a remarkable illustration of the 
 profound obedience which Englishmen, under all 
 circumstances, pay to the law. The constables, for 
 what reason I do not know, were very numerous, 
 and very violent. Such of us as happened to have 
 gone in our academic dress had our caps smashed 
 in two by the constables’ staves ; why, it might be 
 difficult for the officers to say, as none of us were 
 making any tumult, nor had any motive for doing 
 so, unless by way of retaliation. Many of these con- 
 stables were bargemen or petty tradesmen, who in 
 their ex-official character had often been engaged 
 in rows with undergraduates, and usually had had 
 the worst of it. At present, in the service of the 
 blindfold goddess, these equitable men were no 
 doubt taking out their vengeance for past favours. 
 But, under all this wanton display of violence, the 
 gownsmen practised the severest forbearance. The 
 pressure from behind made it impossible to forbear 
 pressing ahead ; crushed, you were obliged to crush : 
 but, beyond that, there was no movement or ges- 
 ture on our part to give any colourable warrant to 
 the brutality of the officers. For nearly a whole 
 hour, I saw this expression of reverence to the law 
 triumphant over all provocations. It may be pre- 
 sumed that, to prompt so much crowding, there must 
 have been some commensurate interest. There was 
 so, but that interest was not at all in Mrs. Lee. 
 She was entirely unknown ; and even by reputa- 
 tion or rumour, from so vast a wilderness as London, 
 neither her beauty nor her intellectual pretensions had 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL I 29 
 
 travelled down to Oxford. Possibly, in each section 
 of 300 men, there might be one individual whom 
 accident had brought acquainted, as it had myself, 
 with her extraordinary endowments. But the general 
 and academic interest belonged exclusively to the 
 accused. They were both Oxonians, one belonging 
 to University College, and the other, perhaps, to 
 Balliol : and, as they had severally taken the degree 
 of A.B., which implies a residence of at least three 
 years, they were pretty extensively known. But, 
 known or not known personally, in virtue of the 
 esprit de corps , the accused parties would have 
 benefited in any case by a general brotherly interest. 
 Over and above which, there was in this case the 
 interest attached to an almost unintelligible accu- 
 sation. A charge of personal violence, under the 
 roof of a respectable English posting-house, occupied 
 always by a responsible master and mistress, and 
 within call at every moment of numerous servants — 
 what could that mean ? And again, when it became 
 understood that this violence was alleged to have 
 realised itself under a delusion, under a preoccu- 
 pation of the victim’s mind, that resistance to it was 
 hopeless, how, and under what profound ignorance 
 of English society, had such a preoccupation been 
 possible? To the accused, and to the incompre- 
 hensible accusation, therefore, belonged the whole 
 weight of the interest ; and it was a very secondary 
 interest, indeed, and purely as a reflex interest from 
 the main one, which awaited the prosecutress. And 
 yet, though so little curiosity “ awaited ” her, it 
 happened of necessity that, within a few moments 
 after her first coming forward in the witness-box, 
 she had created a separate one for herself — first, 
 through her impressive appearance ; secondly, through 
 the appalling coolness of her answers. The trial 
 began, I think, about nine o’clock in the morning ; 
 and, as some time was spent on the examination of 
 Mrs. Lee’s servants, of postillions, ostlers, &c., in 
 pursuing the traces of the affair from London to a 
 place seventy miles north of London, it was probably 
 
 E 
 
130 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 about eleven in the forenoon before the prosecutress 
 was summoned. My heart throbbed a little as the 
 court lulled suddenly into the deep stillness of ex- 
 pectation, when that summons was heard : “ Rachael 
 Frances Antonina Dashwood Lee” resounded through 
 all the passages ; and immediately, in an adjoining 
 anteroom, through which she was led by her attorney, 
 for the purpose of evading the mob that surrounded 
 the public approaches, we heard her advancing steps. 
 Pitiable was the humiliation expressed by her carriage 
 as she entered the witness-box. Pitiable was the 
 change, the world of distance between this faltering 
 and dejected accuser, and that wild leopardess that 
 had once worked her pleasure amongst the sheepfolds 
 of Christianity, and had cuffed my poor guardian so 
 unrelentingly, right and left, front and rear, when he 
 attempted the feeblest of defences. However, she 
 was not long exposed to the searching gaze of the 
 court, and the trying embarrassments of her situation. 
 A single question brought the whole investigation to 
 a, close. Mrs. Lee had been sworn. After a few 
 questions, she was suddenly asked by the counsel 
 for the defence whether she believed in the Christian 
 religion ? Her answer was brief and peremptory, 
 without distinction or circumlocution — No. Or, 
 
 perhaps, not in God? Again she replied, No ; and 
 again her answer was prompt and sa?is phrase . 
 Upon this the judge declared that he could not 
 permit the trial to proceed. The jury had heard 
 what the witness said : she only could give evidence 
 upon the capital part of the charge ; and she had 
 qpenly incapacitated herself before the whole court. 
 The jury instantly acquitted the prisoners. In the 
 course of the day I left my name at Mrs. Lee’s 
 lodgings; but her servant assured me that she was 
 too much agitated to see anybody till the evening. 
 At the hour assigned I called again. It was dusk, 
 and a mob had assembled. At the moment I came 
 up to the door, a lady was issuing, muffled up, and 
 in some measure disguised. It was Mrs. Lee. At 
 the corner of an adjacent street a post-chaise was 
 
THE FEMALE INFIDEL 131 
 
 drawn up. Towards this, under the protection of 
 the attorney who had managed her case, she made 
 her way as eagerly as possible. Before she could 
 reach it, however, she was detected ; a savage howl 
 was raised ; and a rush made to seize her. Fortu- 
 nately, a body of gownsmen formed round her, so 
 as to secure her from personal assault ; they put her 
 rapidly into the carriage ; and then, joining the mob 
 in their hootings, sent off the horses at a gallop. 
 Such was the mode of her exit from Oxford. 
 
 Subsequently to this painful collision with Mrs. 
 Lee at the Oxford Assizes, I heard nothing of her 
 for many years, excepting only this — that she was 
 residing in the family of an English clergyman dis- 
 tinguished for his learning and piety. This account 
 gave great pleasure to my mother — not only as im- 
 plying some chance that Mrs. Lee might be finally 
 reclaimed from her unhappy opinions, but also as a 
 proof that, in submitting to a rustication so mortifying 
 to a woman of her brilliant qualifications, she must 
 have fallen under some influences more promising for 
 her respectability and happiness than those which had 
 surrounded her in London. Finally, we saw by the 
 public journals that she had written and published a 
 book. The title I forget ; but by its subject it was 
 connected with political or social philosophy. And 
 one eminent testimony to its merit I myself am able 
 to allege — viz., Wordsworth’s. Singular enough it 
 seems, that he who read so very little of modern 
 literature, in fact, next to nothing, should be the sole 
 critic and reporter whom I have happened to meet 
 upon Mrs. Lee’s work. But so it was : accident had 
 thrown the book in his way during one of his annual 
 visits to London, and a second time at Lowther 
 Castle. He paid to Mrs. Lee a compliment which 
 certainly he paid to no other of her contemporaries — 
 viz., that of reading her book very nearly to the end ; 
 and he spoke of it repeatedly as distinguished for 
 vigour and originality of thought. 
 
FIFTH CHAPTER 
 
 I AM INTRODUCED TO THE WARFARE OF A 
 PUBLIC SCHOOL 
 
 Four years after my father’s death, it began to be 
 perceived that there was no purpose to be answered 
 in any longer keeping up the costly establishment of 
 Greenhay. A head-gardener, besides labourers equal 
 to at least two more, were required for the grounds 
 and gardens. And no motive existed any longer for 
 being near to a great trading town, so long after the 
 commercial connection with it had ceased. Bath 
 seemed, on all accounts, the natural station for a 
 person in my mother’s situation ; and thither, accord- 
 ingly, she went. I, who had been placed under the 
 tuition of one of my guardians, remained some time 
 longer under his care. I was then transferred to Bath. 
 During this interval the sale of the house and grounds 
 took place. It may illustrate the subject of guardian- 
 ship, and the ordinary execution of its duties, to 
 mention the result. The year was in itself a year of 
 great depression, and every way unfavourable to such 
 a transaction ; and the particular night for which the 
 sale had been fixed turned out remarkably wet ; yet 
 no attempt was made to postpone it, and it proceeded. 
 Originally the house and grounds had cost about 
 p£6ooo. I have heard that only one offer was made— 
 viz., of £2500. Be that as it may, for the sum of 
 £ 2500 it was sold; and I have been often assured 
 that, by waiting a few years, four to six times that sum 
 might have been obtained with ease. This is not 
 improbable, as the house was then out in the country ; 
 but since then the town of Manchester has gathered 
 round it and enveloped it. Meantime, my guardians 
 were all men of honour and integrity ; but their hands 
 were filled with their own affairs. One (my tutor) was 
 a clergyman, rector of a church, and having his parish, 
 his large family, and three pupils to attend. He was, 
 besides, a very sedentary and indolent man, loving- 
 books — hating business. Another was a merchant, 
 
 132 
 
WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 1 33 
 
 A third was a country magistrate, overladen with 
 official business : him we rarely saw. Finally, the 
 fourth was a banker in a distant county, having more 
 knowledge of the world, more energy, and more prac- 
 tical wisdom than all the rest united, but too remote 
 for interfering effectually. 
 
 Reflecting upon the evils which befell me, and the 
 gross mismanagement, under my guardians, of my 
 small fortune, and that of my brothers and sisters, it 
 has often occurred to me that so important an office, 
 which, from the time of Demosthenes, has been pro- 
 verbially mal-administered, ought to be put upon a 
 new footing, plainly guarded by a few obvious provi- 
 sions. As under the Roman laws, for a long period, 
 the guardian should be made responsible in law, 
 and should give security from the first for the due 
 performance of his duties. But, to give him a 
 motive for doing this, of course he must be paid. 
 With the new obligations and liabilities will com- 
 mence commensurate emoluments. If a child is 
 made a ward in Chancery, its property is managed 
 expensively, but always advantageously. Some great 
 change is imperatively called for : no duty in the 
 whole compass of human life being so scandalously 
 neglected as this. 
 
 In my twelfth year it was that first of all I entered 
 upon the arena of a great public school — viz., the 
 Grammar School 1 of Bath, over which at that time 
 
 1 “ Grammar School ” By the way, as the grammar schools 
 of England are amongst her most eminent distinctions, and, 
 with submission to the innumerable wretches (gentlemen, I 
 should say) that hate England “ worse than toad or asp,” have 
 never been rivalled by any corresponding institutions in other 
 lands, I may as well take this opportunity of explaining the 
 word grammar , which most people misapprehend. Men sup- 
 pose a grammar school to mean a school where they teach 
 grammar. But this is not the true meaning, and tends to 
 calumniate such schools, by ignoring their highest functions. 
 Limiting by a false limitation the earliest object contemplated 
 by such schools, they obtain a plausible pretext for representing 
 all beyond grammar as something extraneous and casual that 
 did not enter into the original or normal conception of the 
 founders, and that may therefore have been due to alien sug- 
 
134 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 presided a most accomplished Etonian — Mr. (or was 
 he as yet Doctor ?) Morgan. If he was not, I am 
 sure he ought to have been ; and, with the reader’s 
 concurrence, will therefore create him a doctor on 
 the spot. Every man has reason to rejoice who 
 enjoys the advantage of a public training. I con- 
 demned, and do condemn, the practice of sending 
 out into such stormy exposures those who are as yet 
 too young, too dependent on female gentleness, and 
 endowed with sensibilities originally too exquisite for 
 such a warfare. But at nine or ten the masculine 
 energies of the character are beginning to develop 
 themselves ; or, if not, no discipline will better aid in 
 their development than the bracing intercourse of a 
 great English classical school. Even the selfish are 
 there forced into accommodating themselves to a 
 public standard of generosity ; and the effeminate 
 into conforming to a rule of manliness. I was my- 
 self at two public schools, and I think with gratitude 
 of the benefits which I reaped from both ; as also I 
 think with gratitude of that guardian in whose quiet 
 household I learned Latin so effectually. But the 
 small private schools, of which I had opportunities 
 for gathering some brief experience — schools con- 
 taining thirty to forty boys — were models of ignoble 
 manners as regarded part of the juniors, and of 
 
 gestion. But now, when Suetonius writes a little book bearing 
 this title, “ De Illustribus Grammaticis,” what does he mean ? 
 What is it that he promises ? A memoir upon the eminent 
 grammarians of Rome ? Not at all, but a memoir upon the 
 distinguished literati of Rome. Grammatica does certainly 
 mean sometimes grammar ; but it is also the best Latin word 
 for literature. A grammaticus is what the French express by 
 the word litterateur. We unfortunately have no corresponding 
 term in English : a man of letters is our awkward periphrasis 
 in the singular (too apt, as our jest-books remind us, to suggest 
 the postman) ; whilst in the plural we resort to the Latin word 
 literati. The school which professes to teach grammatica pro- 
 fesses, therefore, the culture of literature in the widest and mqst 
 liberal extent, and is opposed generically to schools for teaching 
 mechanic arts ; and, within its own sub-genus of schools dedi- 
 cated to liberal objects, is opposed to schools for teaching 
 mathematics, or, more widely, to schools for teaching science. 
 
WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 135 
 
 favouritism as regarded the masters. Nowhere is 
 the sublimity of public justice so broadly exempli- 
 fied as in an English public school on the old 
 Edward the Sixth or Elizabethan foundation. There 
 is not in the universe such an Areopagus for fair play, 
 and abhorrence of all crooked ways, as an English 
 mob, or one of the time-honoured English “ founda- 
 tion ” schools. But my own first introduction to such 
 an establishment was under peculiar and contra- 
 dictory circumstances. When my “ rating” or gra- 
 duation in the school was to be settled, naturally 
 my altitude (to speak astronomically) was taken by 
 my proficiency in Greek. But here I had no ad- 
 vantage over others of my age. My guardian was 
 a feeble Grecian, and had not excited my ambition ; 
 so that I could barely construe books as easy as the 
 Greek Testament and the Iliad. This was considered 
 quite well enough for my age ; but still it caused 
 me to be placed under the care of Mr. Wilkins, the 
 second master out of four, and not under Dr. Morgan 
 himself. Within one month, however, my talent for 
 Latin verses, which had by this time gathered strength 
 and expansion, became known. Suddenly I was 
 honoured as never was man or boy since Mordecai 
 the Jew. Without any colourable relation to the 
 doctor’s jurisdiction, I was now weekly paraded for 
 distinction at the supreme tribunal of the school ; 
 out of which, at first, grew nothing but a sunshine of 
 approbation delightful to my heart. Within six weeks 
 all this had changed. The approbation, indeed, con- 
 tinued, and the public expression of it. Neither 
 would there, in the ordinary course, have been any 
 painful reaction from jealousy or fretful resistance 
 to the soundness of my pretensions ; since it was 
 sufficiently known to such of my schoolfellows as 
 stood on my own level in the school, that I, who had 
 no male relatives but military men, and those in 
 India, could not have benefited by any clandestine 
 aid. But, unhappily, Dr. Morgan was at that time 
 dissatisfied with some points in the progress of his 
 
136 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 head class ; 1 and, as it soon appeared, was con- 
 tinually throwing in their teeth the brilliancy of my 
 verses at eleven or twelve, by comparison with theirs 
 at seventeen, eighteen, and even nineteen. I had 
 observed him sometimes pointing to myself, and 
 was perplexed at seeing this gesture followed by 
 gloomy lo.oks, and what French reporters call “ sen- 
 sation,” in these young men, whom naturally I viewed 
 with awe as my leaders — boys that were called young 
 men, men that were reading Sophocles (a name that 
 carried with it the sound of something seraphic to 
 my ears), and who never had vouchsafed to waste 
 a word on such a child as myself. The day was 
 come, however, when all that would be changed. 
 One of these leaders strode up to me in the public 
 playground ; and, delivering a blow on my shoulder, 
 which was not intended to hurt me, but as a mere 
 formula of introduction, asked me, “ What the devil 
 I meant by bolting out of the course, and annoying 
 other people in that manner? Were ‘other people' 
 to have no rest for me and my verses, which, after 
 all, were horribly bad ? ” There might have been 
 some difficulty in returning an answer to this address, 
 but none was required. I was briefly admonished to 
 
 see that I wrote worse for the future, or else At 
 
 this aposiopesis I looked inquiringly at the speaker, 
 and he filled up the chasm by saying, that he would 
 “annihilate” me. Could any person fail to be 
 aghast at such a demand ? I was to write worse 
 than my own standard, which, by his account of my 
 verses, must be difficult ; and I was to write worse 
 than himself, which might be impossible. My feel- 
 ings- revolted against so arrogant a demand, unless it 
 had been far otherwise expressed ; if death on the 
 spot had awaited me, I could not have controlled 
 myself ; and, on the next occasion for sending up 
 verses to the headmaster, so far from attending to 
 the orders issued, I double-shotted my guns ; double 
 applause descended on myself ; but I remarked, 
 
 1 “ Class'" or “ form ” : — One knows not how to make one’s 
 self intelligible, so different are the terms locally. 
 
WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 1 37 
 
 with some awe, though not repenting of what I had 
 done, that double confusion seemed to agitate the 
 ranks of my enemies. Amongst them, loomed out 
 in the distance my “ annihilating ” friend, who shook 
 his huge fist at me, but with something like a grim 
 smile about his eyes. He took an early opportunity of 
 paying his respects to me again, saying, “ You little 
 devil, do you call this writing your worst ? ” — “ No,” 
 I replied; “ I call it writing my best.” The anni- 
 hilator, as it turned out, was really a good-natured 
 young man ; but he was on the wing for Cambridge ; 
 and with the rest, or some of them, I continued to 
 wage war for more than a year. And yet, for a word 
 spoken with kindness, how readily I would have 
 resigned (had it been altogether at my own choice 
 to do so) the peacock’s feather in my cap as the 
 merest of baubles. Undoubtedly, praise sounded 
 sweet in my ears also ; but that was nothing by 
 comparison with what stood on the other side. I 
 detested distinctions that were connected with mor- 
 tification to others ; and, even if I could have got 
 over that , the eternal feud fretted and tormented my 
 nature. Love, that once in childhood had been so 
 mere a necessity to me, that had long been a reflected 
 ray from a departed sunset. But peace, and freedom 
 from strife, if love were no longer possible (as so 
 rarely it is in this world), was the clamorous necessity 
 of my nature. To contend with somebody was still 
 my fate ; how to escape the contention I could not 
 see ; and yet, for itself, and for the deadly passions 
 into which it forced me, I hated and loathed it more 
 than death. It added to the distraction and internal 
 feud of my mind, that I could not altogether con- 
 demn the upper boys. I was made a handle of 
 humiliation to them. And, in the meantime, if I had 
 an undeniable advantage in one solitary accomplish- 
 ment, which is still a matter of accident, or some- 
 times of peculiar direction given to the taste, they, 
 on the other hand, had a great advantage over me in 
 the more elaborate difficulties of Greek, and of choral 
 Greek poetry. I could not altogether wonder at 
 
 e 2 
 
138 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 their hatred of myself. Yet still, as they had chosen 
 to adopt this mode of conflict with me, I did not feel 
 that I had any choice but to resist. The contest was 
 terminated for me by my removal from the school, in 
 consequence of a very threatening illness affecting my 
 head ; but it lasted more than a year, and it did not close 
 before several among my public enemies had become 
 my private friends. They were much older, but they 
 invited me to the houses of their friends, and showed 
 me a respect which affected me — this respect having 
 more reference, apparently, to the firmness I had exhi- 
 bited, than to any splendour in my verses. And, indeed, 
 these had rather drooped, from a natural accident ; 
 several persons of my own class had formed the prac- 
 tice of asking me to write verses for them. I could 
 not refuse. But, as the subjects given out were the 
 same for the entire class, it was not possible to take 
 so many crops off the ground, without starving the 
 quality of all. 
 
 The most interesting public event which, during 
 my stay at this school, at all connected itself with 
 Bath, and, indeed, with the school itself, was the 
 sudden escape of Sir Sidney Smith from the prison 
 of the Temple in Paris. The mode of his escape was 
 as striking as its time was critical. Having acci- 
 dentally thrown a ball beyond the prison bounds in 
 playing at tennis, or some such game, Sir Sidney was 
 surprised to observe that the ball thrown back was 
 not the same. Fortunately, he had the presence of 
 mind to dissemble his sudden surprise. He retired, 
 examined the ball, found it stuffed with letters ; and, 
 in the same way, he subsequently conducted a long 
 correspondence, and arranged the whole circum- 
 stances of his escape ; which, remarkably enough, 
 was accomplished exactly eight days before the sail- 
 ing of Napoleon with the Egyptian expedition ; so 
 that Sir Sidney was just in time to confront, and 
 utterly to defeat, Napoleon in the breach of Acre. 
 But for Sir Sidney, Bonaparte would have overrun 
 Syria, that is certain. What would have followed 
 from that event is a far more obscure problem. 
 
WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 1 39 
 
 Sir Sidney Smith, I must explain to readers of this 
 generation, and Sir Edward Pellew (afterwards Lord 
 Exmouth), figured as the two 1 Paladins of the first 
 war with revolutionary France. Rarely were these 
 two names mentioned but in connection with some 
 splendid, prosperous, and unequal contest. Hence 
 the whole nation was saddened by the account of Sir 
 Sidney’s capture ; and this must be understood, in 
 order to make the joy of his sudden return perfectly 
 intelligible. Not even a rumour of Sir Sidney’s 
 escape had or could have run before him ; for, at 
 the moment of reaching the coast of England, he had 
 started with post-horses to Bath. It was about dusk 
 when he arrived ; the postillions were directed to the 
 square in which his mother lived ; in a few minutes 
 he was in his mother’s arms ; and in fifty minutes 
 more the news had flown to the remotest suburb of 
 the city. The agitation of Bath on this occasion was 
 indescribable. All the troops of the line then quar- 
 tered in that city, and a whole regiment of volunteers, 
 immediately got under arms, and marched to the 
 quarter in which Sir Sidney lived. The small square 
 overflowed with the soldiery ; Sir Sidney went out, 
 and was immediately lost to us, who were watching 
 for him, in the closing ranks of the troops. Next 
 morning, however, I, my younger brother, and a 
 schoolfellow of my own age, called formally upon 
 the naval hero. Why , I know not, unless as alumni 
 
 of the school at which Sir Sidney Smith had received 
 his own education. We were admitted without ques- 
 tion or demur ; and I may record it as an amiable 
 trait in Sir Sidney, that he received us then with great 
 kindness, and took us down with him to the pump- 
 room. Considering, however, that we must have 
 
 1 To them in the next stage of the war succeeded Sir Michael 
 Seymour, and Lord Cochrane (the present Earl of Dundonald), 
 and Lord Camelford. The two last were the regular fire-eaters 
 of the day. Sir Horatio Nelson, being already an admiral, was 
 no longer looked to for insulated exploits of brilliant adventure ; 
 his name was now connected with larger and combined attacks, 
 less dashing and adventurous, because including heavier re- 
 sponsibilities. 
 
140 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 been most afflicting bores to Sir Sidney — a fact which 
 no self-esteem could even then disguise from us — it 
 puzzled me at first to understand the principle of his 
 conduct. Having already done more than enough 
 in courteous acknowledgment of our fraternal claims 
 as fellow-students at the Bath Grammar School, why 
 should he think it necessary to burden himself further 
 with our worshipful society ? I found out the secret, 
 and will explain it. A very slight attention to Sir 
 Sidney’s deportment in public revealed to me that 
 he • was morbidly afflicted with nervous sensibility, 
 and with mauvaise honte . He that had faced so cheer- 
 fully crowds of hostile and threatening eyes, could 
 not support without trepidation those gentle eyes, 
 beaming with gracious admiration, of his fair young 
 countrywomen. By accident, at that moment Sir 
 Sidney had no acquaintance in Bath , 1 a fact which 
 is not at all to be wondered at. Living so much 
 abroad and at sea, an English sailor, of whatever 
 rank, has few opportunities for making friends at 
 home. And yet there was a necessity that Sir Sidney 
 should gratify the public interest, so warmly expressed, 
 by presenting himself somewhere or other to the 
 public eye. But how trying a service to the most 
 practised and otherwise most callous veteran on such 
 an occasion — -that he should step forward, saying in 
 effect — “ So you are wanting to see me ; well, then, 
 here I am ; come and look at me ! ” Put it into 
 what language you please, such a summons was 
 written on all faces, and countersigned by his worship 
 the mayor, who began to whisper insinuations of riots 
 if Sir Sidney did not comply. Yet, if he did, inevit- 
 ably his own act of obedience to the public pleasure 
 took the shape of an ostentatious self-parading under 
 the construction of those numerous persons who knew 
 nothing of the public importunity, or of Sir Sidney’s 
 unaffected and even morbid reluctance to obtrude 
 himself upon the public eye. The thing was un- 
 
 1 Lord Camelford was, I believe, his first cousin ; Sir Sidney’s 
 mother and Lady Camelford being sisters. But Lord Camel- 
 ford was then absent from Bath. 
 
WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 14 1 
 
 avoidable ; and the sole palliation that it admitted 
 was, to break the concentration of the public gaze, 
 by associating Sir Sidney with some alien group, no 
 matter of what cattle. Such a group would relieve 
 both parties — gazer and gazee — from too distressing 
 a consciousness of the little business on which they 
 had met. We, the schoolboys, being three, inter- 
 cepted and absorbed part of the enemy’s fire ; and, 
 by furnishing Sir Sidney with real bona fide matter of 
 conversation, we released him from the most dis- 
 tressing part of his sufferings- — viz., the passive and 
 silent acquiescence in his own apotheosis — holding 
 a lighted candle, as it were, to the glorification of his 
 own shrine. With our help, he weathered the storm 
 of homage silently ascending. And we, in fact, 
 whilst seeming to ourselves too undeniably a triad 
 of bores, turned out the most serviceable allies that 
 Sir Sidney ever had by land or sea, until several 
 moons later, when he formed the invaluable acquaint- 
 ance of the Syrian “ butcher” — viz., Djezzar, the 
 pacha of Acre. I record this little trait of Sir 
 Sidney’s constitutional temperament, and the little 
 service through which I and my two comrades con- 
 tributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of 
 that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of 
 our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes 
 amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to 
 suicide. It is a mistake, however, to suppose this 
 morbid affection unknown to Frenchmen, or un- 
 known to men of the world. I have myself known 
 it to exist in both, and particularly in a man that 
 might be said to live in the street, such w r as the 
 American publicity which circumstances threw around 
 his life ; and so far were his habits of life removed 
 from reserve, or from any predisposition to gloom. 
 And at this moment I recall a remarkable illustration 
 of what I am saying, communicated by Wordsworth’s 
 accomplished friend, Sir George Beaumont. To him 
 I had been sketching the distressing sensitiveness of 
 Sir Sidney pretty much as I have sketched it to the 
 reader ; and how he, the man that on the breach at 
 
142 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Acre valued not the eye of Jew, Christian, or Turk, 
 shrank back — -me ipso teste — from the gentle, though 
 eager — from the admiring, yet affectionate — glances 
 of three very young ladies, in Gay Street, Bath, the 
 oldest (I should say) not more than seventeen. Upon 
 which Sir George mentioned, as a parallel experience 
 of his own, that Mr. Canning, being ceremoniously 
 introduced to himself (Sir George), about the time 
 when he had reached the meridian of his fame as an 
 orator, and should therefore have be’come blase to the 
 extremity of being absolutely seared and case-hardened 
 against all impressions whatever appealing to his 
 vanity or egotism, did absolutely ( credite posieri !) 
 blush like any roseate girl of fifteen. And that this 
 was no accident growing out of a momentary agita- 
 tion, no sudden spasmodic pang, anomalous and 
 transitory, appeared from other concurrent anecdotes 
 of Canning, reported by gentlemen from Liverpool, 
 who described to us most graphically and pictur- 
 esquely the wayward fitfulness (not coquettish or 
 wilful, but nervously overmastering, and most un- 
 affectedly distressing) which besieged this great artist 
 in oratory, as the time approached — was coming — - 
 was going, at which the private signal should have 
 been shown for proposing his health. Mr. P. (who 
 had been, I think, the mayor on the particular occa- 
 sion indicated) described the restlessness of his 
 manner ; how he rose, and retired for half a minute 
 into a little parlour behind the chairman’s seat ; then 
 came back ; then whispered, Not yet , I beseech you , 
 I cannot face them yet ; then sipped a little water, 
 then moved uneasily on his chair, saying, One i?ioment , 
 if you please ; stop , stop ; don't hurry ; one moment , 
 and I shall be up to the mark ; in short, fighting with 
 the necessity of taking the final plunge, like one who 
 lingers on the scaffold. 
 
 Sir Sidney was at that time slender and thin; hav- 
 ing an appearance of emaciation, as though he had 
 suffered hardships and ill-treatment ; which, however, 
 I do not remember to have heard. Meantime, his 
 appearance, connected with his recent history, made 
 
WARFARE OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL 1 43 
 
 him a very interesting person to women ; and to this 
 hour it remains a mystery with me why and how it 
 came about that in every distribution of honours Sir 
 Sidney Smith was overlooked. In the Mediterranean 
 he made many enemies, especially amongst those of 
 his own profession, who used to speak of him as far 
 too fine a gentleman, and above his calling. Certain 
 it is, that he liked better to be doing business on 
 shore, as at Acre, although he commanded a fine 
 80-gun ship, the Tiger . But, however that may have 
 been, his services, whether classed as military or 
 naval, were memorably splendid. And, at that time, 
 his connection, of whatsoever- nature, with the late 
 Queen Caroline had not occurred. So that alto- 
 gether, to me. his case is inexplicable. 
 
 From the Bath Grammar School I was removed in 
 consequence of an accident, by which at first it was 
 supposed that my skull had been fractured ; and the 
 surgeon who attended me at one time talked of tre- 
 panning. 1 This was an awful word : but at present 
 I doubt whether in reality anything very serious had 
 happened. In fact, I was always under a nervous 
 panic for my head ; and certainly exaggerated my 
 internal feelings without meaning to do so, and this 
 misled the medical attendants. During a long illness 
 which succeeded, my mother, amongst other books 
 past all counting, read to me, in Hoole’s translation, 
 the whole of the “ Orlando Furioso •” ; meaning by 
 the whole the entire twenty-four books into which 
 Hoole had condensed the original forty-six of Ariosto; 
 and, from my own experience at that time, I am dis- 
 posed to think that the homeliness of this version is 
 an advantage, from not calling off the attention at all 
 from the narration to the narrator. At this time also 
 I first read the “ Paradise Lost but, oddly enough, 
 in the edition of Bentley, that great irapaS to pOiorrjs (or 
 pseudo-restorer of the text). At the close of my ill- 
 ness, the headmaster called upon my mother, in 
 
 1 One of the masters of the school, attempting to strike an- 
 other boy with his cane, made a bad shot, and the blow lell on 
 De Quincey’s head. 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 I44 
 
 company with his son-in-law, Mr. Wilkins, as did a 
 certain Irish Colonel Bowes, who had sons at the 
 school, requesting earnestly, in terms most flattering to 
 myself, that I might be suffered to remain there. But 
 it illustrates my mother’s moral austerity that she was 
 shocked at my hearing compliments to my own merits, 
 and was altogether disturbed at what doubtless these 
 gentlemen expected to see received with maternal 
 pride. She declined to let me continue at the Bath 
 School ; and I went to another, at Winkfield, in the 
 county of Wilts, of which the chief recommendation 
 lay in the religious character of the master . 1 
 
 1 The Rev. Edward Spencer, rector of Winkfield. 
 
SIXTH CHAPTER 
 
 I ENTER THE WORLD 
 
 Yes, at this stage of my life — viz., in my fifteenth 
 year — and from this sequestered school, ankle-deep 
 I first stepped into the world. At Winkfield I had 
 staid about a year, or not much more, when I 
 received a letter from a young friend of my own age, 
 Lord Westport, 1 * * * the son of Lord Altamont, inviting 
 me to accompany him to Ireland for the ensuing 
 summer and autumn. This invitation was repeated 
 by his tutor ; and my mother, after some considera- 
 tion, allowed me to accept it. 
 
 In the spring of 1800, accordingly, I went up to 
 Eton, for the purpose of joining my friend. Here I 
 several times visited the gardens of the Queen’s villa 
 at Frogmore ; and, privileged by my young friend’s 
 introduction, I had opportunities of seeing and 
 hearing the Queen and all the Princesses ; which at 
 that time was a novelty in my life, naturally a good 
 deal prized. Lord Westport’s mother had been, 
 before her marriage, Lady Louisa Howe, daughter 
 to the great admiral, Earl Howe, and intimately 
 known to the Royal Family, who, on her account, 
 took a continual and especial notice of her son. 
 
 On one of these occasions I had the honour of a 
 brief interview with the King. Madame de Campan 
 mentions, as an amusing incident in her early life, 
 though terrific at the time, and overwhelming to 
 her sense of shame, that not long after her estab- 
 lishment at Versailles, in the service of some one 
 amongst the daughters of Louis XV., having as 
 yet never seen the King, she was one day sud- 
 denly introduced to his particular notice, under the 
 following circumstances : The time was morning ; 
 
 1 My acquaintance with Lord Westport was of some years 5 
 
 standing. My father, whose commercial interests led him 
 
 often to Ireland, had many friends there. One of these was 
 a country gentleman connected with the west; and at his 
 
 house I first met Lord Westport. 
 
 145 
 
146 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 the young lady was not fifteen : her spirits were 
 as the spirits of a fawn in May; her tour of duty 
 for the day was either not come, or was gone ; 
 and, finding herself alone in a spacious room, what 
 more reasonable thing could she do than amuse 
 herself with making cheeses ; that is, whirling round, 
 according to a fashion practised by young ladies 
 both in France and England, and pirouetting until 
 the petticoat is inflated like a balloon, and then sink- 
 ing into a curtsey. Mademoiselle was very solemnly 
 rising from one of these curtseys, in the centre of her 
 collapsing petticoats, when a slight noise alarmed 
 her. Jealous of intruding eyes, yet not dreading 
 more than a servant at worst, she turned ; and, oh 
 heavens ! whom should she behold but his most 
 Christian Majesty advancing upon her, with a 
 brilliant suite of gentlemen, young and old, equipped 
 for the chase, who had been all silent spectators of 
 her performances ! From the King to the last of the 
 train, all bowed to her, and all laughed without 
 restraint, as they passed the abashed amateur of 
 cheesemaking. But she, to speak Homerically, 
 wished in that hour that the earth might gape and 
 cover her confusion. Lord Westport and I were 
 about the age of mademoiselle, and not much more 
 decorously engaged, when a turn brought us full in 
 view of a royal party coming along one of the walks 
 at Frogmore. We were, in fact, theorising and 
 practically commenting on the art v of throwing stones. 
 Boys have a peculiar contempt for female attempts 
 in that way. For, besides that girls fling wide of the 
 mark, with a certainty that might have won the 
 applause of Galerius , 1 there is a peculiar sling and 
 rotary motion of the arm in launching a stone, which 
 no girl ever can attain. From ancient practice, I 
 was somewhat of a proficient in this art, and was 
 
 1 “ Sir,” said that Emperor to a soldier who had missed the 
 target in succession I know not how many times (suppose we 
 say fifteen), “ allow me to offer my congratulations on the 
 truly admirable skill you have shown in keeping clear of the 
 mark. Not to have hit once in so many trials argues the most 
 splendid talents for missing.” 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 
 
 147 
 
 discussing the philosophy of female failures, illus- 
 trating my doctrines with pebbles, as the case 
 happened to demand ; whilst Lord Westport was 
 practising on the peculiar whirl of the wrist with a 
 shilling ; when suddenly he turned the head of the 
 coin towards me with a significant glance, and in a 
 low voice he muttered some words, of which I caught 
 “ Grace of Godf “ Fratice 1 and Ireland f “ Defender 
 of the Faith, and so forth I This solemn recitation of 
 
 1 France was at that time among the royal titles, the act for 
 altering the King’s style and title not having then passed. As 
 connected with this subject, I may here mention a project 
 (reported to have been canvassed in council at the time when 
 that alteration did take place) for changing the title from 
 King to Emperor. What then occurred strikingly illustrates 
 the general character of the British policy as to all external 
 demonstrations of pomp and national pretension, and its strong 
 opposition to that of P'rance under corresponding circumstances. 
 The principle of esse quam videri , and the carelessness about 
 names when the thing is unaffected, generally speaking, must 
 command praise and respect. Yet considering how often the 
 reputation of power becomes, for international purposes, nothing 
 less than power itself, and that words, in many relations of 
 human life, are emphatically things, and sometimes are so to 
 the exclusion of the most absolute things themselves — men 
 of all qualities being often governed by names — the policy of 
 France seems the wiser : viz., se faire valoir , even at the price 
 of ostentation. But, at all events, no man is entitled to exercise 
 that extreme candour, forbearance, and spirit of ready concession 
 in re aliena , and, above all, in re politico,, which, on his own 
 account, might be altogether honourable. The council might 
 give away their own honours, but not yours and mine. On a 
 public (or at least on a foreign) interest, it is the duty of a 
 good citizen to be lofty, exacting, almost insolent. And, on 
 this principle, when the ancient style and title of the kingdom 
 fell under revision, if — as I do not deny — it was advisable to 
 retrench all obsolete pretensions as so many memorials of a 
 greatness that in that particular manifestation was now extinct, 
 and therefore, pro tanto , rather presumptions of weakness than 
 of strength, as being mementoes of our losses : yet, on the 
 other hand, all countervailing claims which had since arisen, 
 and had far more than equiponderated the declension in that 
 one direction, should have been then adopted into the titular 
 heraldry of the nation. It was neither wise nor just to insult 
 foreign nations with assumptions which no longer stood upon 
 any basis of reality. And on that ground France was, perhaps, 
 rightly omitted. But why, when the crown was thus remoulded, 
 and its jewellery unset, if this one pearl were to be surrendered 
 
148 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 the legend on the coin was meant as a fanciful way 
 of apprising me that the King was approaching ; for 
 Lord Westport had himself lost somewhat of the 
 awe natural to a young person in a first situation of 
 this nature, through his frequent admissions to the 
 royal presence. For my own part, I was as yet a 
 stranger even to the King’s person. I had, indeed, 
 
 as an ornament no longer ours — why, we may ask, were not 
 the many and gorgeous jewels, achieved by the national wisdom 
 and power in later times, adopted into the recomposed tiara? 
 Upon what principle did the Romans, the wisest among the 
 children of this world, leave so many inscriptions, as records of 
 their power or their triumphs, upon columns, arches, temples, 
 basilica , or medals? A national act, a solemn and deliberate 
 act, delivered to history, is a more imperishable monument 
 than any made by hands : and the title, as revised, which ought 
 to have expressed a change in the dominion simply as to the 
 mode and form of its expansion, now remains as a false, base, 
 abject confession of absolute contraction. Once we had A, B, 
 and C ; now we have dwindled into A and B : true, most 
 unfaithful guardian of the national honours, we had lost C, 
 and that you were careful to remember ; but we happened to 
 have gained D, E, F — and so downwards to Z — all of which 
 duly you forgot. 
 
 On this argument, it was urged at the time, in high quarters, 
 that the new re-cast of the crown and sceptre should come out 
 of the furnace equably improved ; as much for what they were 
 authorised to claim, as for what they were compelled to disclaim. 
 And, as one mode of effecting this, it was proposed that the 
 King should become an Emperor. Some, indeed, alleged that 
 an Emperor, by its very idea, as received in the Chancery of 
 Europe, presupposes a King paramount over vassal or tributary 
 kings. But it is a sufficient answer to say, that an Emperor is 
 a prince uniting in his own person the thrones of several distinct 
 kingdoms ; and in effect we adopt that view of the case in 
 giving the title of imperial to the parliament, or common 
 assembly of the three kingdoms. However, the title of the 
 prince was a matter trivial in comparison of the title of his ditio , 
 or extent of jurisdiction. This point admits of a striking illus- 
 tration. In the “ Paradise Regained,” Milton has given us, in 
 close succession, three matchless pictures of civil grandeur, as 
 exemplified in three different modes by three different states. 
 Availing himself of the brief scriptural notice — “ The devil 
 taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth 
 him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them ” — 
 he causes to pass, as in a solemn pageant before us, the 
 two military empires then coexisting, of Parthia and Rome, 
 and finally (under another idea of poetical greatness) the in- 
 tellectual glories of Athens. From the picture of the Roman 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 1 49 
 
 seen most or all the Princesses in the way I have 
 mentioned above ; and occasionally, in the streets 
 of Windsor, the sudden disappearance' of all hats 
 from all heads had admonished me that some royal 
 personage or other was then traversing (or, if not 
 traversing, was crossing) the street ; but either his 
 Majesty had never been of the party, or, from dis- 
 
 grandeur I extract, and beg the reader to weigh, the following 
 lines : — 
 
 “ Thence to the gates cast round thine eye, and see 
 What conflux issuing forth or entering in : 
 
 Praetors, proconsuls, to their provinces 
 Hasting, or on return in robes of state ; 
 
 Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power ; 
 
 Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings 
 Or embassies from regions far remote, 
 
 In various habits, on the Appian road, 
 
 Or on the Emilian, — some from farthest south, 
 
 Syene, and where the shadow both way falls, 
 
 Meroe, Nilotic isle, and, more to west, 
 
 The realm of Bocchus to the Blackmoor Sea ; . • * 
 
 From India and the Golden Chersonese, 
 
 And utmost Indian isle, Taprobane, 
 
 Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed ; 
 
 From Gallia, Gades, and the British West ; 
 
 Germans, and Scythians, and Sarmatians north 
 Beyond Danubius to the Tauric pool.” 
 
 With this superb picture, or abstraction of the Roman pomps 
 and power, when ascending to their utmost altitude, confront 
 the following representative sketch of a great English levee on 
 some high solemnity, suppose the King’s birthday : “ Amongst 
 the presentations to his Majesty, we noticed Lord O. S., the 
 Governor-General of India, on his departure for Bengal ; Mr. 
 U. Z., with an address from the Upper and Lower Canadas ; 
 Sir L. V., on his appointment as Commander of the Forces in 
 
 Nova Scotia ; General Sir , on his return from the Burmese 
 
 war [‘the Golden Chersonese’]; the Commander-in-Chief of 
 the Mediterranean Fleet; Mr. B. Z., on his appointment to the 
 Chief-Justiceship at Madras ; Sir R. G., the late Attorney- 
 General at the Cape of Good Hope ; General Y. X., on taking 
 leave for the Governorship of Ceylon [‘the utmost Indian isle, 
 Taprobane ’] ; Lord F. M., the bearer of the last despatches 
 from headquarters in Spain ; Col. P., on going out as Captain- 
 General of the Forces in New Holland ; Commodore of St. L., 
 on his return from a voyage of discovery towards the North 
 Pole ; the King of Owhyhee, attended by chieftains from 
 the other islands of that cluster; Col. M‘P.. on his return 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 150 
 
 tance, I had failed to distinguish him. Now, for the 
 first time, I was meeting him nearly face to face ; 
 for, though the walk we occupied was not that in 
 
 from the war in Ashantee, upon which occasion the gallant 
 colonel presented the treaty and tribute from that country ; 
 
 Admiral , on his appointment to the Baltic fleet ; Captain 
 
 O. N., with despatches from the Red Sea, advising the destruc- 
 tion of the piratical armament and settlements in that quarter, 
 as also in the Persian Gulf ; Sir T. O’N., the late resident in 
 Nepaul, to present his report of the war in that territory, and 
 in adjacent regions — names as yet unknown in Europe ; the 
 Governor of the Leeward Islands, on departing for the West 
 Indies ; various deputations, with petitions, addresses, &c., from 
 islands in remote quarters of the globe, amongst which we dis- 
 tinguished those from Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of 
 St. Lawrence, from the Mauritius, from Java, from the British 
 settlement in Terra del Fuego, from the Christian Churches in 
 the Society, Friendly, and Sandwich Islands — as well as other 
 groups less known in the South Seas ; Admiral H. A., on assum- 
 ing the command of the Channel Fleet ; Major-Gen. X. L., on 
 resigning the Lieut. -Governorship of Gibraltar; Hon. G. F., 
 on going out as Secretary to the Governor of Malta,” &c. 
 
 This sketch, too hastily made up, is founded upon a base of 
 a very few years — i.e ., we have, in one or two instances, placed 
 in juxtaposition, as coexistences, events separated by a few 
 years. But, if (like Milton’s picture of the Roman grandeur) 
 the abstraction had been made from a base of thirty years in 
 extent, and had there been added to the picture (according 
 to his precedent) the many and remote embassies to and 
 from independent states in all quarters of the earth, with how 
 many more groups might this spectacle have been crowded, 
 and especially of those who fall within that most picturesque 
 delineation — - 
 
 “ Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed” ? 
 
 As it is, I have noticed hardly any places but such as lie 
 absolutely within our jurisdiction. And yet, even under that 
 limitation, how vastly more comprehensive is the chart of 
 British dominion than of the Roman ! To this gorgeous empire 
 some corresponding style and title should have been adapted at 
 the revision of the old title, and should yet be adapted. 
 
 Apropos of the proposed change in the King’s title : Coler- 
 idge, on being assured that the new title of the King was to 
 be Emperor of the British Islands and their Dependencies, and 
 on the coin Imperator Britcwmiarum , remarked, that, in this 
 re-manufactured form, the title might be said to be japanned : 
 alluding to this fact, — that, amongst insular sovereigns, the only 
 one known to Christian diplomacy by the title of Emperor is 
 the sovereign of Japan. 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 151 
 
 which the royal party were moving, it ran so near it, 
 and was connected by so many cross-walks at short 
 intervals, that it was a matter of necessity for us, as 
 we were now observed, to go and present ourselves. 
 What happened was pretty nearly as follows : The 
 King, having first spoken with great kindness to 
 my companion, inquiring circumstantially about his 
 mother and grandmother, as persons particularly 
 well known to himself, then turned his eye upon 
 me. My name, it seems, had been communicated 
 to him ; he did not, therefore, inquire about that. 
 Was I of Eton ? this was his first question. I replied 
 that I was not, but hoped I should be. Had I a 
 father living ? I had not : my father had been dead 
 about eight years. “But you have a mother?” I 
 had. “ And she thinks of sending you to Eton ? ” 
 I answered that she had expressed such an intention 
 in my hearing ; but I was not sure whether that 
 might not be in order to waive an argument with the 
 person to whom she spoke, who happened to have 
 been an Etonian. “ Oh, but all people think highly 
 of Eton; everybody praises Eton. Your mother 
 does right to inquire ; there can be no harm in that ; 
 but the more she inquires, the more she will be 
 satisfied — that I can answer for.” 
 
 Next came a question which had been suggested 
 by my name. Had my family come into England 
 with the Huguenots at the Revocation of the Edict 
 of Nantz ? This was a tender point with me : of all 
 things, I could not endure to be supposed of French 
 descent ; yet it was a vexation I had constantly to 
 face, as most people supposed that my name argued 
 a French origin ; whereas a Norman origin argued 
 pretty certainly an origin not French. I replied, 
 with some haste, “ Please your Majesty, the family 
 has been in England since the Conquest.” It is 
 probable that I coloured, or showed some mark of 
 discomposure, with which, however, the King was 
 not displeased, for he smiled, and said, “ How do 
 you know that?” Here I was at a loss for a 
 moment how to answer ; for I was sensible that 
 
152 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 it did not become me to occupy the King’s attention 
 with any long stories or traditions about a subject 
 so unimportant as my own family ; and yet it was 
 necessary that I should say something, unless I 
 would be thought to have denied my Huguenot 
 descent upon no reason or authority. After a 
 moment’s hesitation, I said in effect, that the family 
 from which I traced my descent had certainly been 
 a great and leading one at the era of the Barons’ 
 Wars, as also in one at least of the Crusades ; and 
 that I had myself seen many notices of this family, 
 not only in books of heraldry, &c., but in the very 
 earliest of all English books. “ And what book 
 was that?” “Robert of Gloucester’s 4 Metrical 
 Chronicle,’ which I understood, from internal evi- 
 dence, to have been written about 1280.” The 
 King smiled again, and said, “ I know, I know.” 
 But what it was that he knew long afterwards puzzled 
 me to conjecture. I now imagine, however, that he 
 meant to claim a knowledge of the book I referred 
 to, a thing which at that time I thought improbable, 
 supposing the King’s acquaintance with literature 
 not to be very extensive, nor likely to have com- 
 prehended any knowledge at all of the black-letter 
 period. But in this belief I was greatly mistaken, as 
 I was afterwards fully convinced by the best evidence 
 from various quarters. That library of 120,000 
 volumes which George IV. presented to the nation, 
 and which has since gone to swell the collection 
 at the British Museum, had been formed (as I was 
 often assured by persons to whom the whole history 
 of the library, and its growth from small rudiments, 
 was familiarly known) under the direct personal 
 superintendence of George III. It was a favourite 
 and pet creation ; and his care extended even to the 
 dressing of the books in appropriate bindings, and 
 (as one man told me) to their health ; explaining 
 himself to mean, that in any case where a book was 
 worm-eaten, or touched, however slightly, with the 
 worm, the King was anxious to prevent the injury 
 from extending, or from infecting others by close 
 
a ENTER THE WORLD 1 53 
 
 neighbourhood ; for it is supposed by many that 
 such injuries spread rapidly in favourable situations. 
 One of my informants was a German bookbinder 
 of great respectability, settled in London, and for 
 many years employed by the Admiralty as a con- 
 fidential binder of records or journals containing 
 secrets of office, &c. Through this connection he 
 had been recommended to the service of his Majesty, 
 whom he used to see continually in the course of his 
 attendance at Buckingham House, where the books 
 were deposited. This artist had (originally in the 
 way of his trade) become well acquainted with the 
 money value of English books ; and that knowledge 
 cannot be acquired without some concurrent know- 
 ledge of their subject and their kind of merit. 
 Accordingly, he was tolerably well qualified to 
 estimate any man’s attainments as a reading man ; 
 and from him I received such circumstantial ac- 
 counts of many conversations he had held with the 
 King, evidently reported with entire good faith 
 and simplicity, that I cannot doubt the fact of his 
 Majesty’s very general acquaintance with English 
 literature. Not a day passed, whenever the King 
 happened to be at Buckingham House, without 
 his coming into the binding-room, and minutely 
 inspecting the progress of the binder and his allies 
 — the gilders, toolers, &c. From the outside of the 
 book the transition was natural to its value in the 
 scale of bibliography ; and in that way my informant 
 had ascertained that the King was well acquainted, 
 not only with Robert of Gloucester, but with all the 
 other early chronicles, published by Hearne, and, in 
 fact, possessed that entire series which rose at one 
 period to so enormous a price. From this person 
 I learned afterwards that the King prided himself 
 especially upon his early folios of Shakspere ; that 
 is to say, not merely upon the excellence of the 
 individual copies in a bibliographical sense, as “ tall 
 copies,” and having large margins, &c., but chiefly 
 from their value, in relation to the most authentic 
 basis for the text of the poet. And thus it appears 
 
154 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 that at least two of our kings, Charles I. and 
 George III., have made it their pride to profess 
 a reverential esteem for Shakspere. This book- 
 binder added his attestation to the truth (or to the 
 generally reputed truth) of a story which I had 
 heard from other authority — viz., that the librarian, 
 or, if not officially the librarian, at least the chief 
 director in everything relating to the books, was an 
 illegitimate son of Frederick, Prince of Wales (son 
 to George II.), and therefore half-brother of the 
 King. His own taste and inclinations, it seemed, 
 concurred with his brother’s wishes in keeping him 
 in a subordinate rank and an obscure station ; 
 in which, however, he enjoyed affluence without 
 anxiety, or trouble, or courtly envy, and the luxury, 
 which he most valued, of a superb library. He 
 lived and died, I have heard, as plain Mr. Barnard. 
 At one time I disbelieved the story (which possibly 
 may have been long known to the public), on the 
 ground that even George III. would not have differed 
 so widely from princes in general as to leave a 
 brother of his own, however unaspiring, wholly 
 undistinguished by public honours. But, having 
 since ascertained that a naval officer, well known 
 to my own family, and to a naval brother of my 
 own in particular, by assistance rendered to him 
 repeatedly when a midshipman in changing his ship, 
 was undoubtedly an illegitimate son of George III., 
 and yet that he never rose higher than the rank 
 of post captain, though privately acknowledged by 
 his father and other members of the Royal Family, 
 I found the insufficiency of that objection. The 
 fact is, and it does honour to the King’s memory, 
 he reverenced the moral feelings of his country, 
 which are, in this and in all points of domestic 
 morals, severe and high-toned (I say it in defiance 
 of writers such as Lord Byron, Mr. Hazlitt, &c., 
 who hated alike the just and the unjust pretensions 
 of England) in a degree absolutely incomprehensible 
 to Southern Europe. He had his frailties like other 
 children of Adam ; but he did not seek to fix the 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 1 55 
 
 public attention upon them, after the fashion of 
 Louis Quatorze or our Charles II., and so many 
 other Continental princes. There were living wit- 
 nesses (more than one) of his aberrations as of 
 theirs ; but he, with better feelings than they, did 
 not choose, by placing these witnesses upon a ped- 
 estal of honour, surmounted by heraldic trophies, 
 to emblazon his own transgressions to coming 
 generations, and to force back the gaze of a remote 
 posterity upon his own infirmities. It was his am- 
 bition to be the father of his people in a sense 
 not quite so literal. These were things, however, 
 of which at that time I had not heard. 
 
 During the whole dialogue, I did not even once 
 remark that hesitation and iteration of words gene- 
 rally attributed to George III. ; indeed, so generally, 
 that it must often have existed ; but, in this case, I 
 suppose that the brevity of his sentences operated 
 to deliver him from any embarrassment of utterance, 
 such as might have attended longer and more com- 
 plex sentences, where some anxiety was natural to 
 overtake the thoughts as they arose. When we 
 observed that the King had paused in his stream of 
 questions, which succeeded rapidly to each other, we 
 understood it as a signal of dismissal ; and, making a 
 profound obeisance, we retired backwards a few steps. 
 His Majesty smiled in a very gracious manner, waved 
 his hand towards us, and said something (I do not 
 know what) in a peculiarly kind accent ; he then 
 turned round, and the whole party along with him ; 
 which set us at liberty without impropriety to turn to 
 the right-about ourselves, and make our egress from 
 the gardens. 
 
 This incident, to me at my age, was very naturally 
 one of considerable interest. One reflection it sug- 
 gested afterwards, which was this : Could it be likely 
 that much truth of a general nature, bearing upon 
 man and social interests, could ever reach the ear of 
 a king, under the etiquette of a court, and under that 
 one rule which seemed singly sufficient to foreclose 
 all natural avenues to truth — the rule, I mean, by 
 
156 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 which it is forbidden to address a question to the 
 King. I was well aware, before I saw him, that in 
 the royal presence, like the dead soldier in Lucan, 
 whom the mighty necromancing witch tortures back 
 into a momentary life, I must have no voice except 
 for answers : — 
 
 “Vox illi linguaque tantum 
 Respofisui'CL datur. 5 * 1 
 
 I was to originate nothing myself ; and at my age, 
 before so exalted a personage, the mere instincts of 
 reverential demeanour would at any rate have dictated 
 such a rule. But what becomes of that man’s general 
 condition of mind in relation to all the great objects 
 moving on the field of human experience, where it is 
 a law generally for almost all who approach him, that 
 they shall confine themselves to replies, absolute 
 responses, or, at most, to a prosecution or carrying 
 forward of a proposition delivered by the protagonist , 
 or supreme leader of the conversation? For it must 
 be remembered that, generally speaking, the effect of 
 putting no auestion is to transfer into the other 
 party’s hands the entire originating movement of the 
 dialogue ; and thus, in a musical metaphor, the great 
 man is the sole modulator and determiner of the key 
 in which the conversation proceeds. It is true, that 
 sometimes, by travelling a little beyond the question 
 in your answer, you may enlarge the basis, so as 
 to bring up some new train of thought which you 
 wish to introduce ; and may suggest fresh matter as 
 effectually as if you had the liberty of more openly 
 guiding the conversation, whether by way of question 
 or by direct origination of a topic ; but this depends 
 on skill to improve an opening, or vigilance to seize 
 it at the instant ; and, after all, much upon accident : 
 to say nothing of the crime (a sort of petty treason, 
 perhaps, or what is it ?), if you should be detected in 
 your “ improvements ” and ‘‘enlargements of basis.” 
 
 1 For the sake of those who are no classical scholars, I 
 explain : Voice and language are restored to him only to the 
 extent of replying . 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 1 57 
 
 The King might say, — “ Friend, I must tell my 
 attorney-general to speak with you ; for I detect a 
 kind of treason in your replies. They go too far. 
 They include something which tempts my majesty to 
 a notice ; which is, in fact, for the long and the short 
 of it, that you have been circumventing me half 
 unconsciously into answering a question which has 
 silently been insinuated by you.” Freedom of com- 
 munication, unfettered movement of thought, there 
 can be none under such a ritual, which tends violently 
 to a Byzantine, or even to a Chinese, result of freezing 
 as it were, all natural and healthy play of the faculties 
 under the petrific mace of absolute ceremonial and 
 fixed precedent. For it will hardly be objected, that 
 the privileged condition of a few official councillors 
 and state ministers, whose hurry and oppression of 
 thought from public care will rarely allow them to 
 speak on any other subject than business, can be a 
 remedy large enough for so large an evil. True it is, 
 that a peculiarly frank or jovial temperament in a 
 sovereign may do much for a season to thaw this 
 punctilious reserve and ungenial constraint ; but that 
 is an accident, and personal to an individual. And, 
 on the other hand, to balance even this, it may be 
 remarked, that, in all noble and fashionable society, 
 where there happens to be a pride in sustaining what 
 is deemed a good tone in conversation, it is peculiarly 
 aimed at (and even artificially managed), that no 
 lingering or loitering upon one theme, no protracted 
 discussion, shall be allowed. And, doubtless, as 
 regards merely the treatment of convivial or purely 
 social communication of ideas (which also is a great 
 art), this practice is right. I admit willingly that an 
 uncultured brute, who is detected at an elegant table 
 in the atrocity of absolute discussion or disputation, 
 ought to be summarily removed by a police-officer ; 
 and possibly the law will warrant his being held to 
 bail for one or two years, according to the enormity 
 of his case. But men are not always enjoying, or 
 seeking to enjoy, social pleasure ; they seek also, and 
 have need to seek continually, both through books 
 
158 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 and men, intellectual growth, fresh power, fresh 
 strength, to keep themselves ahead or abreast of 
 this moving, surging, billowing world of ours ; especi- 
 ally in these modern times, when society revolves 
 through so many new phases, and shifts its aspects 
 with so much more velocity than in past ages. A 
 king, especially of this country, needs, beyond most 
 other men, to keep himself in a continual state of 
 communication, as it were by some vital and organic 
 sympathy, with the most essential of these changes. 
 And yet this punctilio of etiquette, like some vicious 
 forms of law, or technical fictions grown too narrow 
 for the age, which will not allow of cases coming 
 before the court in a shape desired alike by the 
 plaintiff and the defendant, is so framed as to defeat 
 equally the wishes of a prince disposed to gather 
 knowledge wherever he can find it, and of those who 
 may be best fitted to give it. 
 
 For a few minutes on three other occasions, before 
 we finally quitted Eton, I again saw the King ; and 
 always with renewed interest. He was kind to every- 
 body — condescending and affable in a degree which 
 I am bound to remember with personal gratitude : 
 and one thing I had heard of him, which even then, 
 and much more as my mind opened to a wider 
 compass of deeper reflection, won my respect. I 
 have always reverenced a man of whom it could be 
 truly said, that he had once, and once only (for more 
 than once implies another unsoundness in the quality 
 of the passion), been desperately in love ; in love, 
 that is to say, in a terrific excess, so as to dally, 
 under suitable circumstances, with the thoughts of 
 cutting his own throat, or even (as the case might be) 
 the throat of her whom he loved above all this world. 
 It will be understood that I am not justifying such 
 enormities ; on the contrary, they are wrong, exceed- 
 ingly wrong ; but it is evident that people in general 
 feel pretty much as I do, from the extreme sympathy 
 with which the public always pursue the fate of any 
 criminal who has committed a murder of this class, 
 even though tainted (as generally it is) with jealousy. 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 1 59 
 
 which, in itself, wherever it argues habitual mistrust, 
 is an ignoble passion . 1 
 
 Great passions (do not understand me, reader, as 
 though I meant great appetites), passions moving 
 in a great orbit, and transcending little regards, are 
 always arguments of some latent nobility. There are, 
 indeed, but few men and few women capable of great 
 passions, or (properly speaking) of passions at all. 
 Hartley, in his mechanism of the human mind, pro- 
 pagates the sensations by means of vibrations, and by 
 miniature vibrations, which, in a Roman form for such 
 miniatures, he terms vibratiuncles. Now, of men and 
 women generally, parodying that terminology, we ought 
 to say — not that they are governed by passions, or at 
 all capable of passions, but of passiuncles . And thence 
 it is that few men go, or can go, beyond a little love- 
 liking, as it is called ; and hence also, that, in a world 
 where so little conformity takes place between the ideal 
 speculations of men and the gross realities of life, where 
 marriages are governed in so vast a proportion by 
 convenience, prudence, self-interest — anything, in 
 short, rather than deep sympathy between the parties 
 — and, consequently, where so many men must be 
 crossed in their inclinations, we yet hear of so few 
 tragic catastrophes on that account. The King, how- 
 ever, was certainly among the number of those who 
 are susceptible of a deep passion, if everything be 
 true that is reported of him. All the world has heard 
 that he was passionately devoted to the beautiful 
 sister of the then Duke of Richmond. That was 
 before his marriage : and I believe it is certain that 
 he not only wished, hut sincerely meditated, to have 
 
 1 Accordingly, Coleridge has contended, and I think with 
 truth, that the passion of Othello is not jealousy. So much I 
 know by report, as the result of a lecture which he read at the 
 Royal Institution. His arguments I did not hear. To me it 
 is evident that Othello’s state of feeling was not that of a 
 degrading, suspicious rivalship, but the state of perfect misery, 
 arising out of this dilemma, the most affecting, perhaps, to con- 
 template, of any which can exist — viz., the dire necessity of 
 loving without limit one whom the heart pronounces to be 
 unworthy of that love. 
 
160 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 married her. So much is matter of notoriety. But 
 other circumstances of the case have been sometimes 
 reported, which imply great distraction of mind, and 
 a truly profound possession of his heart by that early 
 passion : which, in a prince whose feelings are liable 
 so much to the dispersing and dissipating power of 
 endless interruption from new objects and fresh claims 
 on the attention, coupled also with the fact that he 
 never but in this one case professed anything amount- 
 ing to extravagant or frantic attachment, do seem to 
 argue that the King was truly and passionately in love 
 with Lady Sarah Lennox. He had a demon upon 
 him, and was under a real possession. If so, what a 
 lively expression of the mixed condition of human 
 fortunes, and not less of another truth equally affecting 
 — viz., the dread conflicts with the will — the mighty 
 agitations which silently, and in darkness, are con- 
 vulsing many a heart, where, to the external eye, all 
 is tranquil — that this King, at the very threshold of 
 his public career, at the very moment when he was 
 binding about his brows the golden circle of sove- 
 reignty ; when Europe watched him with interest, 
 and the kings of the earth with envy ; not one of 
 the vulgar titles to happiness being wanting : — youth, 
 health, a throne the most splendid on this planet — 
 general popularity amongst a nation of freemen, and 
 the hope which belongs to powers as yet almost un- 
 tried — that, even under these most flattering auspices, 
 he should be called upon to make a sacrifice the most 
 bitter of all to which human life is liable ! He made 
 it ; and he might then have said to his people, “ For 
 you, and to my public duties, I have made a sacrifice 
 which none of you would have made for me.” In 
 years long ago, I have heard a woman of rank re- 
 curring to the circumstances of Lady Sarah’s first 
 appearance at court after the King’s marriage. If I 
 recollect rightly, it occurred after that lady’s own 
 marriage with Sir Charles Bunbury. Many eyes were 
 upon both parties at that moment — female eyes, 
 especially — and the speaker did not disguise the ex- 
 cessive interest with which she herself observed them. 
 
I ENTER THE WORLD 
 
 161 
 
 Lady Sarah was not agitated, but the King was. He 
 seemed anxious, sensibly trembled, changed colour, 
 and shivered , as Lady S. B. drew near. But, to quote 
 the one single eloquent sentiment which I remember 
 after a lapse of thirty years in Monk Lewis’s Romantic 
 Tales : “ In this world all things pass away ; blessed 
 be Heaven, and the bitter pangs by which sometimes 
 it is pleased to recall its wanderers, even our passions 
 pass away ! ” And thus it happened that this storm 
 also was laid asleep and forgotten, together with so 
 many others of its kind that have been, and that shall 
 be again, so long as man is man, and woman woman. 
 Meantime, in justification of a passion so profound, 
 one would be glad to think highly of the lady that 
 inspired it ; and, therefore, I heartily hope that the 
 insults offered to her memory in the scandalous 
 “ Memoirs” of the Due de Lauzun are mere calumnies, 
 and records rather of his presumptuous wishes, than 
 of any actual successes . 1 
 
 1 That book, I am aware, is generally treated as a forgery ; 
 but internal evidence, drawn from the tone and quality of the 
 revelations there made, will not allow me to think it altogether 
 such. There is an abandon and carelessness in parts which 
 mark its sincerity. Its authenticity I cannot doubt. But that 
 proves nothing for the truth of the particular stories which it 
 contains. A book of scandalous and defamatory stories, especi- 
 ally where the writer has had the baseness to betray the con- 
 fidence reposed in his honour by women, and to boast of favours 
 alleged to have been granted him, it is always fair to consider 
 as ipso facto a tissue of falsehoods ; and on the following argu- 
 ment, — that these are exposures which, even if true, none but 
 the basest of men would have made. Being, therefore, on the 
 hypothesis most favourable to his veracity, the basest of men, 
 the author is self-denounced as vile enough to have forged the 
 stories, and cannot complain if he should be roundly accused of 
 doing that which he has taken pains to prove himself capable of 
 doing. This way of arguing might be applied with fatal effect 
 to the Due de Lauzun’s “ Memoirs,” supposing them written 
 with a view to publication. But, by possibility, that was not 
 the case. The Due de L. terminated his profligate life, as is 
 well known, on the scaffold, during the storms of the French 
 Revolution ; and nothing in his whole career won him so much 
 credit as the way in which he closed it ; for he went to his death 
 with a romantic carelessness, and even gaiety of demeanour. 
 His “Memoirs” were not published by himself : the publica- 
 tion was posthumous ; and by whom authorised, or for what 
 
 F 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 162 
 
 However, to leave dissertation behind me, and to 
 resume the thread of my narrative, an incident, which 
 about this period impressed me even more profoundly 
 than my introduction to a royal presence, was my 
 first visit to London. 
 
 purpose, is not exactly known. Probably the manuscript fell 
 into mercenary hands, and was published merely on a specula- 
 tion of pecuniary gain. From some passages, however, I cannot 
 but infer that the writer did not mean to bring it before the 
 public, but wrote it rather as a series of private memoranda, to 
 aid his own recollection of circumstances and dates. The Due 
 de Lauzun’s account of his intrigue with Lady Sarah goes so far 
 as to allege that he rode down in disguise, from London to Sir 
 Charles B.’s country seat, agreeably to a previous assignation, 
 and that he was admitted by that lady’s confidential attendant, 
 through a back staircase, at the time when Sir Charles (a fox- 
 hunter, but a man of the highest breeding and fashion) was 
 himself at home, and occupied in the duties of hospitality. 
 
SEVENTH CHAPTER 
 
 THE NATION OF LONDON 
 
 It was a most heavenly day in May of this year 
 (1800) when I first beheld and first entered this 
 mighty wilderness, the city — no ! not the city, but 
 the nation — of London. Often since then, at dis- 
 tances of two and three hundred miles or more from 
 this colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts, and 
 intellectual power, have I felt the sublime expression 
 of her enormous magnitude in one simple form of 
 ordinary occurrence — viz., in the vast droves of cattle, 
 suppose upon the great north roads, all with their 
 heads directed to London, and expounding the size 
 of the attracting body, together with the force of its 
 attractive power, by the never-ending succession of 
 these droves, and the remoteness from the capital of 
 the lines upon which they were moving. A suction 
 so powerful, felt along radii so vast, and a conscious- 
 ness, at the same time, that upon other radii still 
 more vast, both by land and by sea, the same suction 
 is operating, night and day, summer and winter, and 
 hurrying for ever into one centre the infinite means 
 needed for her infinite purposes, and the endless 
 tributes to the skill or to the luxury of her endless 
 population, crowds the imagination with a pomp to 
 which there is nothing corresponding upon this 
 planet, either amongst the things that have been, or 
 the things that are. Or, if any exception there is, it 
 must be sought in ancient Rome. 1 We, upon this 
 
 1 11 Ancient Rome ” : — Vast, however, as the London is of this 
 day, I incline to think that it is below the Rome of Trajan. 
 It has long been a settled opinion among scholars that the 
 computations of Lipsius on this point were prodigiously over- 
 charged ; and formerly I shared in that belief. But closer 
 study of the question, and a laborious collation of the different 
 data (for any single record, independently considered, can here 
 establish nothing), have satisfied me that Lipsius was nearer the 
 truth than his critics ; and that the Roman population of every 
 class — slaves, aliens, peoples of the suburbs, included — lay 
 between four and six millions : in which case the London of 
 
 163 ' 
 
164 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 occasion, were in an open carriage, and, chiefly (as I 
 imagine) to avoid the dust, we approached London 
 by rural lanes, where any such could be found, or, at 
 least, along byroads, quiet and shady, collateral to 
 the main roads. In that mode of approach, we 
 missed some features of the sublimity belonging to 
 any of the common approaches upon a main road ; 
 we missed the whirl and the uproar, the tumult and 
 the agitation, which continually thicken and thicken 
 
 1 833, which counts more than a million and a half, but less 
 than two millions {Note. — Our present London of 1853 counts 
 two milltons, plus as many thousands as there are days in the 
 year], may be taken /caret 7 rXaros, as lying between one-fourth 
 and one-third of Rome. To discuss this question thoroughly 
 would require a separate memoir, for which, after all, there are 
 not sufficient materials : meantime I will make this remark : 
 That the ordinary computations of a million, or a million and 
 a quarter, derived from the surviving accounts of the different 
 “ regions,” apply to Rome within the Pomaerium, and are, 
 therefore, no more valid for the total Rome of Trajan’s time, 
 stretching so many miles beyond it, than the bills of mortality 
 for what is technically “ London within the walls ” can serve at 
 this day as a base for estimating the population of that total 
 London which we mean and presume in our daily conversation. 
 Secondly, even for the Rome within these limits the computa- 
 tions are not commensurate, by not allowing for the prodigious 
 height of the houses in Rome, which much transcended that of 
 modern cities. On this last point, I will translate a remarkable 
 sentence from the Greek rhetorician Aristides [. Note . — Aelius 
 Aristides, Greek by his birth, who flourished in the time of the 
 Antonines] ; to some readers it will be new and interesting : 
 “ And, as oftentimes we see that a man who greatly excels 
 others in bulk and strength is not content with any display, 
 however ostentatious, of his powers, short of that where he is 
 exhibited surmounting himself with a pyramid of other men, one 
 set standing upon the shoulders of another ; so also this city, 
 stretching forth her foundations over areas so vast, is yet not 
 satisfied with those superficial dimensions ; that contents her 
 not ; but upon one city rearing another of corresponding pro- 
 portions, and upon that another, pile resting upon pile, houses 
 overlaying houses, in aerial succession ; so, and by similar 
 steps, she achieves a character of architecture justifying, as it 
 were, the very promise of her name ; and with reference to that 
 name, and its Grecian meaning, we may say, that nothing meets 
 our eyes in any direction but mere Rome ! Rome ! ” [ Note . — 
 This word P w/jlt) (Rome), on which the rhetorician plays, is the 
 common Greek term for strength .] “ And hence,” says 
 
 Aristides, “ I derive the following conclusion : that if any one. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 165 
 
 throughout the last dozen miles before you reach the 
 suburbs. Already at three stages 7 distance (say, forty 
 miles from London), upon some of the greatest roads, 
 the dim presentiment of some vast capital reaches 
 you obscurely, and like a misgiving. This blind 
 sympathy with a mighty but unseen object, some vast 
 magnetic range of Alps, in your neighbourhood, con- 
 tinues to increase, you know not how. Arrived at the 
 last station for changing horses, — Barnet, suppose, on 
 
 decomposing this series of strata, were disposed to unshell, as 
 it were, this existing Rome from its present crowded and towering 
 co-acervations ; and, thus degrading these aerial Romes, were 
 to plant them on the ground, side by side, in orderly succes- 
 sion ; according to all appearance, the whole vacant area of 
 Italy would be filled with these dismantled storeys of Rome, 
 and we should be presented with the spectacle of one con- 
 tinuous city, stretching its labyrinthine pomp to the shores of 
 the Adriatic.” This is so far from being meant as a piece of 
 rhetoric that, on the very contrary, the whole purpose is to 
 substitute, for a vague and rhetorical expression of the Roman 
 grandeur, one of a more definite character — viz., by presenting 
 its dimensions in a new form, and supposing the city to be 
 uncrested, as it were ; its upper tiers to be what the sailors call 
 unshipped ; and the dethroned storeys to be all drawn up in 
 rank and file upon the ground ; according to which assumption 
 he implies that the city would stretch from the mare Stiperum 
 to the mare Inferum — i.e., from the sea of Tuscany to the 
 Adriatic. 
 
 The fact is, as Casaubon remarked, upon occasion of a 
 ridiculous blunder in estimating the largesses of a Roman 
 emperor, that the error on most questions of Roman policy or 
 institutions tends not, as is usual, in the direction of excess, but 
 of defect. All things were colossal there ; and the probable, 
 as estimated upon our modern scale, is not unfrequently the 
 impossible, as regarded Roman habits. Lipsius certainly erred 
 extravagantly at times, and was a rash speculator on many 
 subjects : witness his book on the Roman amphitheatres ; but 
 not on the magnitude of Rome, or the amount of its population. 
 I will add, upon this subject, that the whole political economy 
 of the ancients, if we except Boeckh’s accurate investigations 
 ( Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener), which, properly speaking, 
 cannot be called political economy, is a mine into which scarce 
 a single shaft has yet been sunk. But I must also add, that 
 everything will depend upon collation of facts, and the bring- 
 ing of indirect notices into immediate juxtaposition, so as 
 to throw light on each other. Direct and positive informa- 
 tion there is little on these topics ; and that little has been 
 gleaned. 
 
1 66 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 one of the north roads, or Hounslow on the western, 
 — you no longer think (as in all other places) of naming 
 the next stage ; nobody says, on pulling up, “ Horses 
 on to London ; ” that would sound ridiculous ; one 
 mighty idea broods over all minds, making it im- 
 possible to suppose any other destination. Launched 
 upon this final stage, you soon begin to feel yourself 
 entering the stream as it were of a Norwegian mael- 
 strom ; and the stream at length becomes the rush of 
 a cataract. What is meant by the Latin word trepi- 
 datio ? Not anything peculiarly connected with 
 panic ; it belongs as much to the hurrying to and 
 fro of a coming battle, as of a coming flight ; to a 
 marriage festival as much as to a massacre ; agitation 
 is the nearest English word. This trepidation in- 
 creases both audibly and visibly at every half-mile, 
 pretty much as one may suppose the roar of Niagara 
 and the thrilling of the ground to grow upon the 
 senses in the last ten miles of approach, with the 
 wind in its favour, until at length it would absorb and 
 extinguish all other sounds whatsoever. Finally, for 
 miles before you reach a suburb of London such as 
 Islington, for instance, a last great sign and augury of 
 the immensity which belongs to the coming metro- 
 polis forces itself upon the dullest observer, in the 
 growing sense of his own utter insignificance. Every- 
 where else in England, you yourself, horses, carriage, 
 attendants (if you travel with any), are regarded with 
 attention, perhaps even curiosity : at all events you 
 are seen. But, after passing the final post-house on 
 every avenue to London, for the latter ten or twelve 
 miles, you become aware that you are no longer 
 noticed : nobody sees you ; nobody hears you ; no- 
 body regards you ; you do not even regard yourself. 
 In fact, how should you at the moment of first ascer- 
 taining your own total unimportance in the sum of 
 things — a poor shivering unit in the aggregate of 
 human life ? Now, for the first time, whatever 
 manner of man you were or seemed to be at starting, 
 squire or “ squireen,” lord or lordling, and however 
 related to that city, hamlet, or solitary house, from 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 167 
 
 which yesterday or to-day you slipped your cable — 
 beyond disguise you find yourself but one wave in 
 a total Atlantic, one plant (and a parasitical plant 
 besides, needing alien props) in a forest of America. 
 
 These are feelings which do not belong by prefer- 
 ence to thoughtful people — far less to people merely 
 sentimental. No man ever was left to himself for the 
 first time in the streets, as yet unknown, of London, 
 but he must have been saddened and mortified, per- 
 haps terrified, by the sense of desertion and utter 
 loneliness which belong to his situation. No loneli- 
 ness can be like that which weighs upon the heart in 
 the centre of faces never-ending, without voice or 
 utterance for him; eyes innumerable, that have “no 
 speculation ” in their orbs which he can understand ; 
 and hurrying figures of men and women weaving to 
 and fro, with no apparent purposes intelligible to a 
 stranger, seeming like a mask of maniacs, or, often- 
 times, like a pageant of phantoms. The great length 
 of the streets in many quarters of London ; the con- 
 tinual opening of transient glimpses into other vistas 
 equally far-stretching, going off at right angles to the 
 one which you are traversing ; and the murky atmos- 
 phere which, settling upon the remoter end of every 
 long avenue, wraps its termination in gloom and un- 
 certainty ; all these are circumstances aiding that 
 sense of vastness and illimitable proportions which 
 for ever brood over the aspect of London in its 
 interior. Much of the feeling which belongs to the 
 outside of London, in its approaches for the last few 
 miles, I had lost, in consequence of the stealthy route 
 of byroads, lying near Uxbridge and Watford, through 
 which we crept into the suburbs. But, for that 
 reason, the more abrupt and startling had been the 
 effect of emerging somewhere into the Edgeware 
 Road, and soon afterwards into the very streets of 
 London itself ; — though what streets, or even what 
 quarter of London, is now totally obliterated from my 
 mind, having perhaps never been comprehended. 
 All that I remember is one monotonous awe and 
 blind sense of mysterious grandeur and Babylonian 
 
I 68 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 confusion, which seemed to pursue and to invest the 
 whole equipage of human life, as we moved for nearly 
 two hours 1 * * * through streets ; sometimes brought to 
 anchor for ten minutes or more, by what is techni- 
 cally called a “lock/ 5 — that is, a line of carriages of 
 every description inextricably massed and obstructing 
 each other, far as the eye could stretch ; and then, as 
 if under an enchanter’s rod, the “ lock ” seemed to 
 thaw ; motion spread with the fluent race of light or 
 sound through the whole icebound mass, until the 
 subtle influence reached us also ; who were again 
 absorbed into the great rush of flying carriages ; or, 
 at times, we turned off into some less tumultuous 
 street, but of the same mile-long character ; and 
 finally, drawing up about noon, we alighted at some 
 place, which is as little within my distinct remem- 
 brance as the route by which we reached it. 
 
 For what had we come ? To see London. And 
 what were the limits within which we proposed to 
 crowd that little feat ? At five o’clock we were to 
 
 dine at Porters , a seat of Lord Westport’s 
 
 grandfather ; and, from the distance, it was necessary 
 that we should leave London at half-past three ; so 
 that a little more than three hours were all we had 
 for London. Our charioteer, my friend’s tutor, was 
 summoned away from us on business until that hour ; 
 and we were left, therefore, entirely to ourselves and 
 to our own skill in turning the time to the best 
 account, for contriving (if such a thing were possible) 
 to do something or other which, by any fiction of 
 courtesy, or constructively, so as to satisfy a lawyer, 
 or in a sense sufficient to win a wager, might be taken 
 and received for having “seen London.” 
 
 What could be done ? We sat down, I remember, 
 in a mood of despondency, to consider. The 
 spectacles were too many by thousands; inopes nos 
 copia fecit ; our very wealth made us poor ; and the 
 
 1 “ Two hours ” ; — This slow progress must, however, in 
 
 part be ascribed to Mr. Gr ’s non-acquaintance with the 
 
 roads, both town and rural, along the whole line of our pro- 
 
 gress from Uxbridge. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 169 
 
 choice was distracted. But which of them all could 
 be thought general or representative enough to stand 
 for the universe of London ? We could not traverse 
 the whole circumference of this mighty orb ; that 
 was clear ; and, therefore, the next best thing was to 
 place ourselves as much as possible in some relation 
 to the spectacles of London, which might answer to 
 the centre. Yet how ? That sounded well and 
 metaphysical ; but what did it mean if acted upon ? 
 What was the centre of London for any purpose 
 whatever — latitudinarian or longitudinarian — literary, 
 social, or mercantile — geographical, astronomical, or 
 (as Mrs. Malaprop kindly suggests) diabolical ? 
 Apparently that we should stay at our inn : for in 
 that way we seemed best to distribute our presence 
 equally amongst all — viz., by going to none in 
 particular. 
 
 Three times in my life I have had my taste — that 
 is, my sense of proportions — memorably outraged. 
 Once was, by a painting of Cape Horn, which 
 seemed almost treasonably below its rank and office 
 in this world — as the terminal abutment of our 
 mightiest continent, and also the hinge, as it were, 
 of our greatest circumnavigations — of all, in fact, 
 which can be called classical circumnavigations. 
 
 To have “ doubled Cape Horn ” — at one time, 
 what a sound it had ! — yet how ashamed we should 
 be if that cape were ever to be seen from the moon ! 
 A party of Englishmen, I have heard, went up 
 Mount Etna during the night, to be ready for sunrise 
 — a common practice with tourists both in Switzer- 
 land, Wales, Cumberland, &c. ; but, as all must see 
 who take the trouble to reflect, not likely to repay 
 the trouble ; seeing that everything which offers a 
 picture , when viewed from a station nearly horizontal, 
 becomes a mere map to an eye placed at an elevation 
 of 3000 feet above it ; and so thought, in the sequel, 
 the Etna party. The sun, indeed, rose visibly, and 
 not more apparelled in clouds than was desirable : 
 yet so disappointed were they, and so disgusted with 
 the sun in particular, that they unanimously hissed 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 170 
 
 him, though, of course, it was useless to cry, “Off! 
 off ! ” Here, however, the fault was in their own 
 erroneous expectations and not in the sun, who 
 doubtless did his best. For, generally, a sunrise and 
 a sunset ought to be seen from the valley, or at 
 most horizontally . 1 But as to Cape Horn, that (by 
 comparison with its position and its functions) was 
 really a disgrace to the planet ; it is not the spectator 
 that is in fault here, but the object itself, the Bir- 
 mingham cape. For, consider, it is not only the 
 “ specular mount,” keeping watch and ward over a 
 sort of trinity of oceans, and, by all tradition, the 
 circumnavigator’s gate of entrance to the Pacific, but 
 also it is the temple of the god Terminus for all the 
 Americas. So that, in relation to such dignities, it 
 seemed to me, in the drawing, a makeshift, put up 
 by a carpenter, until the true Cape Horn should be 
 ready ; or, perhaps, a drop-scene from the opera- 
 house. This was one case of disproportion : the 
 others were — the final and ceremonial valediction of 
 Garrick, on retiring from his profession ; and the 
 Pall Mall inauguration of George IV. on the day of 
 his accession 2 to the throne. The utter /^relation, 
 
 1 Hence it may be said, that nature regulates our position 
 for such spectacles, without any intermeddling of ours. When, 
 indeed, a mountain stands, like Snowdon or Great Gavel in 
 Cumberland, at the centre of a mountainous region, it is not 
 denied that, at some seasons, when the early beams strike 
 through great vistas in the hills, splendid effects of light and 
 shade are produced ; strange, however, rather than beautiful. 
 But from an insulated mountain, or one upon the outer ring 
 of the hilly tract, such as Skiddaw in Cumberland, the first 
 effect is to translate the landscape from a picture into a map ; 
 and the total result, as a celebrated author once said, is the 
 infinity of littleness. 
 
 2 Accession was it, or his proclamation ? The case was 
 this: About the middle of the day, the King came out into 
 the portico of Carlton House ; and, addressing himself (address- 
 ing his gestures, I mean) to the assemblage of people in Pall 
 Mall, he bowed repeatedly to the right and to the left, and 
 then retired. I mean no disrespect to that prince in recalling 
 those circumstances : no doubt, he acted upon the suggestion 
 of others ; and, perhaps, also under a sincere emotion on 
 witnessing the enthusiasm of those outside ; but that could not 
 cure the original absurdity of recognising as a representative 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 171 
 
 in both cases, of the audience to the scene ( audience , 
 I say, as say we must, for the sum of the spectators 
 in the second instance, as well as of the auditors 
 in the first) threw upon each a ridicule not to be 
 effaced. It is in any case impossible for an actor 
 to say words of farewell to those for whom he really 
 designs his farewell. He cannot bring his true 
 object before himself. To whom is it that he would 
 offer bis last adieus? We are told by one — who, if 
 he loved Garrick, certainly did not love Garrick’s 
 profession, nor woul 3 even, through him> have paid 
 it any undue compliment — that the retirement of 
 this great artist had “ eclipsed the gaiety of nations.” 
 To nations, then, to his own generation it was, that 
 he owed his farewell : but, of a generation, what 
 organ is there that can sue or be sued, that can 
 thank or be thanked ? Neither by fiction nor by 
 delegation can you bring their bodies into court. 
 A king’s audience, on the other hand, might be had 
 as an authorised representative body. But, when 
 we consider the composition of a casual and chance 
 auditory, whether in a street or a theatre ; secondly, 
 the small size of a modern audience, even in Drury 
 Lane (4500 at the most), not by one-eightieth part 
 the complement of the Circus Maximus ; most of all, 
 when we consider the want of symmetry or com- 
 mensurateness, to any extended duration of time, in 
 the acts of such an audience, which acts lie in the 
 vanishing expressions of its vanishing emotions — acts 
 so essentially fugitive, even when organised into an 
 art and a tactical system of imbrices and bombi (as 
 they were at Alexandria, and afterwards at the 
 Neapolitan and Roman theatres), that they could not 
 protect themselves from dying in the very moment 
 of their birth : laying together all these considera- 
 tions, we see the incongruity of any audience, so 
 
 audience, clothed with the national functions of recognising 
 hi?nself \ a chance gathering of passengers through a single 
 street, between whom and any mob from his own stables and 
 kitchens there could be no essential difference which logic, or 
 law, or constitutional principle could recognise. 
 
172 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 constituted, to any purpose less evanescent than 
 their own tenure of existence. 
 
 Just such in disproportion as these cases had 
 severally been, was our present problem in relation 
 to our time or other means for accomplishing it. 
 In debating the matter, we lost half-an-hour ; but at 
 length we reduced the question to a choice between 
 Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral. I 
 know not that we could have chosen better. The 
 rival edifices, as we understood from the waiter, were 
 about equidistant from our own station ; but, being 
 too remote from each other to allow of our seeing 
 both, “ we tossed up,” to settle the question be- 
 tween the elder lady and the younger. “ Heads ” 
 came up, which stood for the Abbey. But, as 
 neither of us was quite satisfied with this decision, 
 we agreed to make another appeal to the wisdom 
 of chance, second thoughts being best. This time 
 the Cathedral turned up ; and so it came to pass 
 that, with us, the having seen London meant having 
 seen St. Paul’s. 
 
 The first view of St. Paul’s, it may be supposed, 
 overwhelmed us with awe ; and I did not at that 
 time imagine that the sense of magnitude could be 
 more deeply impressed. One thing interrupted our 
 pleasure. The superb objects of curiosity within the 
 Cathedral were shown for separate fees. There were 
 seven, I think ; and any one could be seen inde- 
 pendently of the rest for a few pence. The whole 
 amount was a trifle ; fourteenpence, I think ; but we 
 were followed by a sort of persecution — “ Would we 
 not see the bell ? ” — “ Would we not see the model ? ” 
 — “ Surely we would not go away without visiting the 
 Whispering Gallery ? ” — solicitations which troubled 
 the silence and sanctity of the place and must tease 
 others as it then teased us, who wished to contem- 
 plate in quiet this great monument of the national 
 grandeur, which was at that very time 1 beginning to 
 
 1 Already monuments had been voted by the House of 
 Commons in this cathedral, and I am not sure but they were 
 nearly completed, to two captains who had fallen at the Nile. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 73 
 
 take a station also in the land as a depository for the 
 dust of her heroes. What struck us most in the 
 whole interior of the pile was the view taken from the 
 spot immediately under the dome, being, in fact, the 
 very same which, five years afterwards, received the 
 remains of Lord Nelson. In one of the aisles going 
 off from this centre, we saw the flags of France, 
 Spain, and Holland, the whole trophies of the war, 
 swinging pompously, and expanding their massy 
 draperies, slowly and heavily, in the upper gloom, as 
 they were swept at intervals by currents of air. At 
 this moment we were provoked by the showman at 
 our elbow renewing his vile iteration of “ Twopence, 
 gentlemen ; no more than twopence for each ; ” and 
 so on until we left the place. The same complaint 
 has often been made as to Westminster Abbey, 
 Where the wrong lies, or where it commences, I 
 know not. Certainly I nor any man can have a 
 right to expect that the poor men who attended us 
 should give up their time for nothing, or even to be 
 angry with them for a sort of persecution, on the 
 degree of which possibly might depend the comfort 
 of their own families. Thoughts of famishing children 
 at home leave little room for nice regards of delicacy 
 abroad. The individuals, therefore, might or might 
 not be blameable. But in any case the system is 
 palpably wrong. The nation is entitled to a free 
 enjoyment of its own public monuments : not free 
 only in the sense of being gratuitous, but free also 
 from the molestation of showmen , with their imperfect 
 knowledge and their vulgar sentiment. 
 
 Yet, after all, what is this system of restriction and 
 annoyance, compared with that which operates on 
 the use of the national libraries ; or that, again, to 
 the system of exclusion from some of these, where an 
 absolute interdict lies upon any use at all of that 
 which is confessedly national property ? Books and 
 MSS., which were collected originally, and formally 
 bequeathed to the public, under the generous and 
 noble idea of giving to future generations advantages 
 which the collector had himself not enjoyed, and 
 
174 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 liberating them from obstacles in the pursuit of 
 knowledge which experience had bitterly imprinted 
 upon his own mind, are at this day locked up as 
 absolutely against me, you, or anybody, as collections 
 confessedly private. Nay, far more so ; for most 
 private collectors of eminence (as the late Mr. Heber, 
 for instance) have been distinguished for liberality in 
 lending the rarest of their books to those who knew 
 how to use them with effect. But, in the cases I 
 now contemplate, the whole funds for supporting the 
 proper offices attached to a library, such as librarians, 
 sub-librarians, &c., which of themselves (and without 
 the express verbal evidence of the founder’s will) 
 presume a public in the daily use of the books, else 
 they are superfluous, have been applied to the crea- 
 tion by lazy sinecures in behalf of persons expressly 
 charged with the care of shutting out the public. 
 Therefore, it is true they are not sinecures : for that 
 one care, vigilantly to keep out the public , 1 they do 
 
 1 This place suggests the mention of another crying abuse 
 connected with this subject. In the year 1 8 1 1 or 1810 came 
 under parliamentary notice and revision the law of copyright. 
 In some excellent pamphlets drawn forth by the occasion, from 
 Mr. Duppa, for instance, and several others, the whole subject 
 was well probed, and many aspects, little noticed by the public, 
 were exposed of that extreme injustice attached to the law as it 
 then stood. The several monopolies connected with books 
 were noticed a little ; and not a little notice was taken of the 
 oppressive privilege with which certain public libraries (at that 
 time, I think, eleven) were invested, of exacting, severally, a 
 copy of each new book published. This downright robbery 
 was palliated by some members of the House in that day, 
 under the notion of its being a sort of exchange, or quid pro 
 quo in return for the relief obtained by the statute of Queen 
 Anne — the first which recognised literary property. “For,” 
 argued they, 44 previously to that statute, supposing your book 
 pirated, at common law you could obtain redress only for each 
 copy proved to have been sold by the pirate ; and that might 
 not be a thousandth part of the actual loss. Now, the statute 
 of Queen Anne granting you a general redress, upon proof 
 that a piracy had been committed, you, the party relieved, were 
 bound to express your sense of this relief by a return made to 
 the public ; and the public is here represented by the great 
 endowed libraries of the seven universities, the British 
 Museum,” &c. &c. But, primd facie , this was that selling of 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 75 
 
 take upon themselves ; and why ? A man loving 
 books, like myself, might suppose that their motive 
 was the ungenerous one of keeping the books to 
 themselves. Far from it. In several instances, they 
 will as little use the books as suffer them to be used. 
 And thus the whole plans and cares of the good 
 (weighing his motives, I will say of the pious ) founder 
 have terminated in locking up and sequestering a 
 large collection of books, some being great rarities, 
 in situations where they are not accessible. Had he 
 
 justice which is expressly renounced in Magna Charta : and 
 why were proprietors of copyright, more than other proprietors, 
 to make an “acknowledgment” for their rights? But, sup- 
 posing that just, why, especially, to the given public bodies ? 
 Now, for my part, I think that this admits of an explanation : 
 Nine-tenths of the authors in former days lay amongst the class 
 who had received a college education ; and most of these in 
 their academic life had benefited largely by old endowments. 
 Giving up, therefore, a small tribute from their copyright, there 
 was some colour of justice in supposing that they were making 
 a slight acknowledgment for past benefits received, and exactly 
 for those benefits which enabled them to appear with any ad- 
 vantage as authors. So, I am convinced, the “ servitude ” first 
 arose, and under this construction ; which, even for those days, 
 was often a fiction, but now is generally such. However, be 
 the origin what it may, the ground upon which the public mind 
 in 1811 (that small part of it, at least, which the question 
 attracted) reconciled itself to the abuse was this : For a trivial 
 wrong, they alleged (but it was then shown that the wrong was 
 not always trivial), one great good is achieved — viz,, that all 
 over the kingdom are dispersed eleven great depositories, in 
 which all persons interested may, at all times, be sure of finding 
 one copy of every book published. That did seem a great 
 advantage, and a balance in point of utility (if none in point of 
 justice) to the wrong upon which it grew. But now mark the 
 degree in which this balancing advantage is made available. 
 
 1. The eleven bodies are not equally careful to exact their 
 copies ; that can only be done by retaining an agent in London ; 
 and this agent is careless about books of slight money value. 
 
 2. Were it otherwise, of what final avail would a perfect set of 
 
 the year’s productions prove to a public not admitted freely to 
 the eleven libraries ? 3. But, finally, if they were admitted, to 
 
 what purpose (as regards this particular advantage) under the 
 following custom, which, in some of these eleven libraries 
 (possibly in all, was , I well knew, established : annually the 
 principal librarian weeded the annual crop of all such books as 
 displeased himself; upon which two questions arise : 1. Upon 
 
176 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 bequeathed them to the catacombs of Paris or of 
 Naples, he could not have better provided for their 
 virtual extinction. I ask, does no action at common 
 law lie against the promoters of such enormous 
 abuses ? Oh, thou fervent reformer — whose fatal 
 tread he that puts his ear to the ground may hear at 
 a distance coming onwards upon every road — if too 
 surely thou wilt work for me and others irreparable 
 wrong and suffering, work also for us a little good ; 
 this way turn the great hurricanes and levanters of thy 
 wrath ; winnow me this chaff ; and let us enter at last 
 the garners of pure wheat laid up in elder days for our 
 benefit, and which for two centuries have been closed 
 against our use ! 
 
 what principle ? 2. With what result ? I answer as to the 
 first, that in this lustration he went upon no principle at all, 
 but his own caprice, or what' he called his own discretion ; and 
 accordingly it is a fact known to many as well as myself, that a 
 book, which some people (and certainly not the least meditative 
 of this age) have pronounced the most original work of modern 
 times, was actually amongst the books thus degraded ; it was 
 one of those, as the phrase is, tossed “ into the basket ” ; and 
 universally this fate is more likely to befall a work of original 
 merit, which disturbs the previous way of thinking and feeling, 
 than one of timid compliance with ordinary models. Secondly, 
 with what result? For the present, the degraded books, 
 having been consigned to the basket, were forthwith consigned 
 to a damp cellar. There, at any rate, they were in no condi- 
 tion to be consulted by the public, being piled up in close 
 bales, and in a place not publicly accessible. But there can be 
 no doubt that, sooner or later, their mouldering condition 
 would be made an argument for selling them. And such, when 
 we trace the operation of this law to its final stage, is the 
 ultimate result of an infringement upon private rights almost 
 unexampled in any other part of our civil economy. That sole 
 beneficial result, for the sake of which some legislators were 
 willing to sanction a wrong, otherwise admitted to be inde- 
 fensible, is so little protected and secured to the public, that it 
 is first of all placed at the mercy of an agent in London, whose 
 negligence or indifference may defeat the provision altogether 
 (I know a publisher of a splendid botanical work, who told me 
 that, by forbearing to attract notice to it within the statutable 
 time, he saved his eleven copies) ; and placed at the mercy of a 
 librarian, who (or any one of his successors) may, upon a 
 motive of malice to the author or an impulse of false taste, 
 after all proscribe any part of the bo^ks thus dishonourably 
 acquired. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON I 77 
 
 London we left in haste, to keep an engagement 
 of some standing at the Earl Howe’s, my friend’s 
 grandfather. This great admiral, who had filled so 
 large a station in the public eye, being the earliest 
 among the naval heroes of England in the first war 
 of the Revolution, and the only one of noble birth, 
 I should have been delighted to see ; St. Paul’s, and 
 its naval monuments to Captain Riou and Captain 
 together with its floating pageantries of con- 
 quered flags, having awakened within me, in a form 
 of peculiar solemnity, those patriotic remembrances 
 of past glories which all boys feel so much more 
 vividly than men can do, in whom the sensibility to 
 such impressions is blunted. Lord Howe, however, 
 I was not destined to see ; he had died about a year 
 before. Another death there had been, and very 
 recently, in the family, and under circumstances 
 peculiarly startling ; and the spirits of the whole 
 house were painfully depressed by that event at the 
 time of our visit. One of the daughters, a younger 
 sister of my friend’s mother, had been engaged for 
 some time to. a Scottish nobleman, the Earl of 
 Morton, much esteemed by the Royal Family. The 
 day was at length fixed for the marriage ; and about 
 a fortnight before that day arrived, some particular 
 dress or ornament was brought to Porters, in which 
 it was designed that the bride should appear at the 
 altar. The fashion as to this point has often varied ; 
 but at that time I believe the custom was for bridal 
 parties to be in full dress. The lady, when the dress 
 arrived, was, to all appearance, in good health ; but, 
 by one of those unaccountable misgivings which are 
 on record in so many well-attested cases (as that, for 
 example, of Andrew Marvell’s father), she said, after 
 gazing for a minute or two at the beautiful dress, firmly 
 and pointedly, “ So, then, that is my wedding-dress ; 
 and it is expected that I shall wear it on the 17th; 
 but I shall not ; I shall never wear it. On Thurs- 
 day the 17th I shall be dressed in a shroud!” All 
 present were shocked at such a declaration, which 
 the solemnity of the lady’s manner made it impos- 
 
178 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 sible to receive as a jest. The countess, her mother, 
 even reproved her with some severity for the words, 
 as an expression of distrust in the goodness of God. 
 The bride-elect made no answer, but by sighing 
 heavily. Within a fortnight all happened, to the 
 letter, as she had predicted. She was taken sud- 
 denly ill; she died about three days before the 
 marriage-day ; and was finally dressed in her shroud, 
 according to the natural course of the funeral arrange- 
 ments, on the morning that was to have been the 
 wedding festival. 
 
 Lord Morton, the nobleman thus suddenly and 
 remarkably bereaved of his bride, was the only 
 gentleman who appeared at the dinner-table. He 
 took a particular interest in literature ; and it was, 
 in fact, through his kindness that, for the first time 
 in my life, I found myself somewhat in the situation 
 of a 66 lion” The occasion of Lord Morton’s flatter- 
 ing notice was a particular copy of verses which had 
 gained for me a public distinction ; not, however, 
 I must own, a very brilliant one ; the prize awarded 
 to me being not the first, nor even the second — what 
 on the Continent is called the accessit — it was simply 
 the third : and that fact, stated nakedly, might have 
 left it doubtful whether I were to be considered in 
 the light of one honoured or of one stigmatised. 
 However, the judges in this case, with more honesty, 
 or more self-distrust, than belongs to most adjudica- 
 tions of the kind, had printed the first three of the 
 successful essays. Consequently, it was left open to 
 each of the less successful candidates to benefit by 
 any difference of taste amongst their several friends ; 
 and my friends in particular, with the single and 
 singular exception of my mother, who always thought 
 her own children inferior to other people’s, had 
 generally assigned the palm to myself. Lord Mor- 
 ton protested loudly that the case admitted of no 
 doubt ; that gross injustice had been done me ; and, 
 as the ladies of the family were much influenced 
 by his opinion, I thus came, not only to wear the 
 laurel in their estimation, but also with the advan- 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 79 
 
 tageous addition of having suffered some injustice. 
 I was not only a victor, but a victor in misfor- 
 tune. 
 
 At this moment, looking back from a distance of 
 fifty years upon those trifles, it may well be supposed 
 that I do not attach so much importance to the 
 subject of my fugitive honours as to have any very 
 decided opinion one way or the other upon my own 
 proportion of merit. I do not even recollect the 
 major part of the verses : that which I do recollect 
 inclines me to think that, in the structure of the 
 metre, and in the choice of the expressions, I had 
 some advantage over my competitors, though other- 
 wise, perhaps, my verses were less finished ; Lord 
 Morton might, therefore, in a partial sense, have 
 been just as well as kind. But, little as that may 
 seem likely, even then, and at the moment of reap- 
 ing some advantage from my honours, which gave 
 me a consideration with the family I was amongst 
 such as I could not else have had, most unaffectedly 
 I doubted in my own mind whether I were really 
 entitled to the praises which I received. My own 
 verses had not at all satisfied myself ; and, though I 
 felt elated by the notice they had gairied me, and 
 gratified by the generosity of the earl in taking my 
 part so warmly, I was so more in a spirit of sympathy 
 with the kindness thus manifested in my behalf, and 
 with the consequent kindness which it procured me 
 from others, than from any incitement or support 
 which it gave to my intellectual pride. In fact, 
 whatever estimate I might make of those intellectual 
 gifts which I believed or which I knew myself to 
 possess, I was inclined, even in those days, to doubt 
 whether my natural vocation lay towards poetry. 
 Well, indeed, I knew, and I know that, had I chosen 
 to enlist amongst the soi-disant poets of the day — 
 amongst those, I mean, who by mere force of talent 
 and mimetic skill contrive to sustain the part of poet 
 in a scenical sense, and with a scenical effect — I also 
 could have won such laurels as are won by such 
 merit ; I also could have taken and sustained a 
 
l8o AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 place taliter qualiter amongst the poets of the time. 
 Why not then ? Simply because I knew that me, as 
 them, would await the certain destiny in reversion of 
 resigning that place in the next generation to some 
 younger candidate having equal or greater skill in 
 appropriating the vague sentiments and old tradi- 
 tionary language of passion spread through books, 
 but having also the advantage of novelty, and of a 
 closer adaptation to the prevailing taste of the day. 
 Even at that early age I was keenly alive, if not so 
 keenly as at this moment, to the fact that by far the 
 larger proportion of what is received in every age for 
 poetry, and for a season usurps that consecrated 
 name, is not the spontaneous overflow of real un- 
 affected passion, deep, and at the same time original, 
 and also forced into public manifestation of itself 
 from the necessity which cleaves to all passion alike 
 of seeking external sympathy: this it is not; but a 
 counterfeit assumption of such passion, according 
 to the more or less accurate skill of the writer in 
 distinguishing the key of passion suited to the par- 
 ticular age ; and a concurrent assumption of the 
 language of passion according to his more or less 
 skill in separating the spurious from the native and 
 legitimate diction of genuine emotion. Rarely, in- 
 deed, are the reputed poets of any age men who 
 groan, like prophets, under the burden of a message 
 which they have to deliver, and must deliver, of a 
 mission which they must discharge. Generally — nay, 
 with much fewer exceptions, perhaps, than would be 
 readily believed — they are merely simulators of the 
 part they sustain ; speaking not out of the abundance 
 of their own hearts, but by skill and artifice assuming 
 or personating emotions at second-hand ; and the 
 whole is a business of talent (sometimes even of 
 great talent), but not of original power, of genius , 1 
 or authentic inspiration. 
 
 1 The words genius and talent are frequently distinguished 
 from each other by those who evidently misconstrue the true 
 distinction entirely, and sometimes so grossly, as to use them 
 by way of expressions for a mere difference in degree . Thus, 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON l8l 
 
 From Porters, after a few days’ visit, we returned 
 to Eton. Her Majesty about this time gave some 
 splendid fetes at Frogmore, to one or two of which 
 she had directed that we should be invited. The 
 invitation was, of course, on my friend’s account ; but 
 her Majesty had condescended to direct that I, as his 
 visitor, should be specially included. Lord Westport, 
 young as he was, had become tolerably indifferent 
 about such things ; but to me such a scene was a 
 novelty ; and, on that account, it was settled we 
 should go as early as was permissible. We did go : 
 and I was not sorry to have had the gratification of 
 witnessing (if it were but for once or twice) the 
 splendours of a royal party. But, after the first edge 
 of expectation was taken off, after the vague uncer- 
 tainties of rustic ignorance had given place to abso- 
 
 “a man of great talent, absolutely a genius occurs in a 
 very well -written tale at this moment before me ; as if being 
 a man of genius implied only a greater than ordinary degree 
 of talent. 
 
 Talent and genius are in no one point allied to each other, 
 except generically — that both express modes of intellectual 
 power. But the kinds of power are not merely different, they 
 are in polar opposition to each other. Talent is intellectual 
 power of every kind, which acts and manifests itself by and 
 through the will and the active forces. Genizis , as the verbal 
 origin implies, is that much rarer species of intellectual power 
 which is derived from the genial nature — from the spirit of 
 suffering and enjoying — from the spirit of pleasure and pain, 
 as organised more or less perfectly ; and this is independent 
 of the will. It is a function of the passive nature. Talent is 
 conversant with the adaptation of means to ends. But genius 
 is conversant only with ends. Talent has no sort of connec- 
 tion, not the most remote or shadowy, with the moral nature 
 or temperament — genius is steeped and saturated with this 
 moral nature. 
 
 This was written twenty years ago. Now (1853), when 
 revising it, I am tempted to add three brief annotations : — 
 
 1. It scandalises me that, in the occasional comments upon 
 this distinction which have reached my eye, no attention should 
 have been paid to the profound suggestions as to the radix 
 of what is meant by geirius latent in the word genial. For 
 instance, in an extract made by the Leader , a distinguished 
 literary journal, from a recent work entitled “ Poetics,” by Mr. 
 Dallas, there is not the slightest notice taken of this subtle 
 indication and leading towards the truth. Yet surely that is 
 hardly philosophic. For could Mr. Dallas suppose that the 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 182 
 
 lute realities, and the eye had become a little familiar 
 with the flashing of the jewellery, I began to suffer 
 under the constraints incident to a young person in 
 such a situation — the situation, namely, of sedentary 
 passiveness, where one is acted upon, but does not 
 act. The music, in fact, was all that continued to 
 delight me ; and, but for that, I believe I should 
 have had some difficulty in avoiding so monstrous 
 an indecorum as yawning. I revise this faulty ex- 
 pression, however, on the spot : not the music only it 
 was, but the music combined with the dancing, that 
 so deeply impressed me. The ball-room — a tem- 
 porary erection, with something of the character of a 
 pavilion about it — wore an elegant and festal air ; the 
 part allotted to the dancers being fenced off by a 
 gilded lattice-work, and ornamented beautifully from 
 the upper part with drooping festoons of flowers. 
 But all the luxury that spoke to the eye merely faded 
 at once by the side of impassioned dancing, sustained 
 by impassioned music. Of all the scenes which this 
 world offers, none is to me so profoundly interest- 
 ing, none (I say it deliberately) so affecting, as the 
 spectacle of men and women floating through the 
 
 idea involved in the word genial had no connection, or none 
 but an accidental one, with the idea involved in the word 
 genius ? It is clear that from the Roman conception (whence- 
 soever emanating) of the natal Genius, as the secret and central 
 representative of what is most characteristic and individual in 
 the nature of every human being, are derived alike the notion 
 of the genial and our modern notion of genius as contradis- 
 tinguished from talent . 
 
 2. As another broad character of distinction between genius 
 and talent , I would observe — that genius differentiates a man 
 from all other men ; whereas talent is the same in one man as 
 in another : that is, where it exists at all, it is the mere echo 
 and reflex of the same talent, as seen in thousands of other 
 men, differing only by more and less, but not at all in quality. 
 In genius, on the contrary, no two men were ever duplicates of 
 each other. 
 
 3. All talent, in whatsoever class, reveals itself as an effort 
 — as a counteraction to an opposing difficulty or hindrance,; 
 whereas genius universally moves in headlong sympathy and 
 concurrence with spontaneous power. Talent works univer- 
 sally by intense resistance to an antagonist force, whereas 
 genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 83 
 
 mazes of a dance ; under these conditions, however, 
 that the music shall be rich, resonant, and festal, the 
 execution of the dancers perfect, and the dance itself 
 of a character to admit of free, fluent, and continuous 
 motion. But this last condition will be sought vainly 
 in the quadrilles, &c., which have for so many years 
 banished the truly beautiful country -dances native to 
 England. Those whose taste and sensibility were so 
 defective as to substitute for the beautiful in dancing 
 the merely difficult , were sure, in the end, to transfer 
 the depravations of this art from the opera-house to 
 the floors of private ball-rooms. The tendencies 
 even then were in that direction : but as yet they 
 had not attained their final stage : and the English 
 country-dance 1 was still in estimation at the courts of 
 princes. Now, of all dances, this is the only one, as 
 a class, of which you can truly describe the motion to 
 
 1 This word, I am well aware, grew out of the French word 
 contredanse ; indicating the regular contraposition of male and 
 female partners in the first arrangement of the dancers. The 
 word country-dance was therefore originally a corruption ; but, 
 having once arisen and taken root in the language, it is far 
 better to retain it in its colloquial form : better, I mean, on the 
 general principle concerned in such cases. For it is, in fact, by 
 such corruptions, by offsets upon an old stock, arising through 
 ignorance or mispronunciation originally, that every language 
 is frequently enriched ; and new modifications of thought, 
 unfolding themselves in the progress of society, generate for 
 themselves concurrently appropriate expressions. Many words 
 in the Latin can be pointed out as having passed through this 
 process. It must not be allowed to weigh against the validity 
 of a word once fairly naturalised by use, that originally it crept 
 in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a 
 ground of legitimation in a case of this nature as it is in law. 
 And the old maxim is applicable — Fieri non debuit, factum 
 valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much 
 of their wealth. And, universally, the class of purists, in 
 matters of language, are liable to grievous suspicion, as almost 
 constantly proceeding on half knowledge and on insufficient 
 principles. For example, if I have read one, I have read 
 twenty letters, addressed to newspapers, denouncing the name 
 of a great quarter in London, Mary-le-bone , as ludicrously 
 ungrammatical. The writers had learned (or were learning) 
 French ; and they had thus become aware that neither the 
 article nor the adjective was right. True, not right for the 
 current age, but perfectly right for the age in which the name 
 
184 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 be continuous — that is, not interrupted or fitful, but 
 unfolding its fine mazes with the equability of light 
 in its diffusion through free space. And wherever 
 the music happens to be not of a light, trivial charac- 
 ter, but charged with the spirit of festal pleasure, and 
 the performers in the dance so far skilful as to betray 
 no awkwardness verging on the ludicrous, I believe 
 that many people feel as I feel in such circumstances 
 — viz., derive from the spectacle the very grandest 
 form of passionate sadness which can belong to any 
 spectacle whatsoever. Sadness is not the exact word ; 
 nor is there any word in any language (because none 
 in the finest languages) which exactly expresses the 
 state ; since it is not a depressing, but a most ele- 
 vating state to which I allude. And, certainly, it is 
 easy to understand, that many states of pleasure, and 
 in particular the highest, are the most of all removed 
 from merriment. The day on which a Roman 
 triumphed was the most gladsome day of his ex- 
 istence ; it was the crown and consummation of his 
 prosperity ; yet assuredly it was also to him the most 
 solemn of his days. Festal music, of a rich and 
 passionate character, is the most remote of any from 
 vulgar hilarity. Its very gladness and pomp is im- 
 pregnated with sadness ; but sadness of a grand and 
 aspiring order. Let, for instance (since without in- 
 dividual illustrations there is the greatest risk of 
 being misunderstood), any person of musical sensibility 
 listen to the exquisite music composed by Beethoven 
 as an opening for Burger’s “ Lenore,” the running 
 idea of which is the triumphal return of a crusading 
 host, decorated with laurels and with palms, within 
 the gates of their native city ; and then say whether 
 the presiding feeling, in the midst of this tumultuous 
 festivity, be not, by infinite degrees, transcendent to 
 anything so vulgar as hilarity. In fact, laughter itself 
 is of all things the most equivocal ; as the organ of 
 
 arose : but, for want of elder French, they did not know that 
 in our Chaucer’s time both were right. Le was then the article 
 feminine as well as masculine, and bone was then the true form 
 for the adjective. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 85 
 
 the ludicrous, laughter is allied to the trivial and the 
 mean ; as the organ of joy, it is allied to the passion- 
 ate and the noble. From all which the reader may 
 comprehend, if he should not happen experimentally 
 to have felt, that a spectacle of young men and women 
 flowing through the mazes of an intricate dance under 
 a full volume of music, taken with all the circum- 
 stantial adjuncts of such a scene in rich men’s halls — 
 the blaze of lights and jewels, the life, the motion, the 
 sea-like undulation of heads, the interweaving of the 
 figures, the avaKVKXrjo-is or self-revolving, both of the 
 dance and the music, “ never ending, still beginning,” 
 and the continual regeneration of order from a system 
 of motions which for ever touch the very brink of 
 confusion — that such a spectacle, with such circum- 
 stances, may happen to be capable of exciting and 
 sustaining the very grandest emotions of philosophic 
 melancholy to which the human spirit is open. The 
 reason is, in part, that such a scene presents a sort of 
 mask of human life, with its whole equipage of pomps 
 and glories, its luxury of sight and sound, its hours of 
 golden youth, and the interminable revolution of ages 
 hurrying after ages, and one generation treading upon 
 the flying footsteps of another ; whilst all the while 
 the overruling music attempers the mind to the spec- 
 tacle, the subject to the object, the beholder to the 
 vision. And although this is known to be but one 
 phasis of life — of life culminating and in ascent — yet 
 the other (and repulsive) phasis is concealed upon the 
 hidden or averted side of the golden arras, known but 
 not felt : or is seen but dimly in the rear, crowding 
 into indistinct proportions. The effect of the music 
 is to place the mind in a state of elective attraction 
 for everything in harmony with its own prevailing 
 key. 
 
 This pleasure, as always on similar occasions, I 
 had at present ; but naturally in a degree correspond- 
 ing to the circumstances of royal splendour through 
 which the scene revolved ; and, if I have spent rather 
 more words than should reasonably have been re- 
 quisite in describing any obvious state of emotion* 
 
I 86 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 it is not because, in itself, it is either vague or doubt- 
 ful, but because it is difficult, without calling upon a 
 reader for a little reflection, to convince him that 
 there is not something paradoxical in the assertion, 
 that joy and festal pleasure, of the highest kind, are 
 liable to a natural combination with solemnity, or 
 even with melancholy the most profound. Yet, to 
 speak in the mere simplicity of truth, so mysterious 
 is human nature, and so little to be read by him who 
 runs, that almost every weighty aspect of truth upon 
 that theme will be found at first sight to be startling, 
 or sometimes paradoxical. And so little need is 
 there for chasing or courting paradox, that, on the 
 contrary, he who is faithful to his own experiences 
 will find all his efforts little enough to keep down the 
 paradoxical air besieging much of what he knows to 
 be the truth. No man needs to search for paradox 
 in this world of ours. Let him simply confine himself 
 to the truth, and he will find paradox growing every- 
 where under his hands as rank as weeds. For new 
 truths of importance are rarely agreeable to any pre- 
 conceived theories — that is, cannot be explained by 
 these theories ; which are insufficient, therefore, even 
 when they are true. And universally it must be borne 
 in mind — that not that is paradox which, seeming to be 
 true, is upon examination false, but that which, seeming 
 to be false, may upon examination be found true . 1 
 
 The pleasure of which I have been speaking be- 
 longs to all such scenes ; but on this particular 
 occasion there was also something more. To see 
 persons in “ the body ” of whom you have been 
 reading in newspapers from the very earliest of your 
 reading days — those, who have hitherto been great 
 ideas in your childish thoughts, to see and to hear 
 
 1 And therefore it was with strict propriety that Boyle, 
 anxious to fix public attention upon some truths of hydrostatics, 
 published them avowedly as paradoxes. According to the false 
 popular notion of what it is that constitutes a paradox, Boyle 
 should be taken to mean that these hydrostatic theorems were 
 fallacies. But far from it. Boyle solicits attention to these pro- 
 positions — not as seeming to be true and turning out false ; but, 
 reversely, as wearing an air of falsehood and turning out true. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 87 
 
 moving and talking as carnal existences amongst other 
 human beings — had, for the first half-hour or so, a 
 singular and strange effect. But this naturally waned 
 rapidly, after it had once begun to wane. And when 
 these first startling impressions of novelty had worn 
 off, it must be confessed that the peculiar circum- 
 stances attaching to a royal ball were not favourable 
 to its joyousness or genial spirit of enjoyment. I am 
 not going to repay her Majesty’s condescension so ill, 
 or so much to abuse the privileges of a guest, as 
 to draw upon my recollections of what passed for the 
 materials of a cynical critique. Everything was done, 
 I doubt not, which court etiquette permitted, to thaw 
 these ungenial restraints which gave to the whole too 
 much of a ceremonial and official character, and to 
 each actor in the scene gave too much of the air 
 belonging to one who is discharging a duty, and to 
 the youngest even among the principal personages 
 concerned gave an apparent anxiety and jealousy of 
 manner — jealousy, I mean, not of others, but a 
 prudential jealousy of his own possible oversights or 
 trespasses. In fact, a great personage bearing a state 
 character cannot be regarded, nor regard himself, with 
 the perfect freedom which belongs to social inter- 
 course ; no, nor ought to be. It is not rank alone 
 which is here concerned : that, as being his own, he 
 might lay aside for an hour or two ; but he bears a 
 representative character also. He has not his own 
 rank only, but the rank of others, to protect : he 
 (supposing him the sovereign, or a prince near to the 
 succession) embodies and impersonates the majesty of 
 a great people ; and this character, were you ever so 
 much encouraged to do so, you, the lSlo the lay 
 spectator or “ assister,” neither could nor ought to 
 dismiss from your thoughts. Besides all which, it 
 must be acknowledged, that to see brothers dancing 
 with sisters — as too often occurred in those dances 
 to which the princesses were parties — disturbed the 
 appropriate interest of the scene, being irreconcilable 
 with the allusive meaning of dancing in general, and 
 laid a weight upon its gaiety which no condescensions 
 
1 88 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 from the highest quarter could remove. This infelici- 
 tous arrangement forced the thoughts of all present 
 upon the exalted rank of the parties which could dic- 
 tate and exact so unusual an assortment. And that 
 rank, again, it presented to us under one of its least 
 happy aspects; as insulating a blooming young woman 
 amidst the choir of her coevals, and surrounding her 
 with dreadful solitude amidst a vast crowd of the 
 young, the brave, the beautiful, and the accomplished. 
 
 Meantime, as respected myself individually, I had 
 reason to be grateful : every kindness and attention 
 were shown to me. My invitation I was sensible 
 that I owed entirely to my noble friend. But, 
 having been invited, I felt assured, from what passed, 
 that it was meant and provided that I should not, by 
 any possibility, be suffered to think myself over- 
 looked. Lord Westport and I communicated our 
 thoughts occasionally by means of a language which 
 we, in those days, found useful at times, and which 
 bore the name of Ziph. The language and the name 
 were both derived (that is, were immediately so de- 
 rived ; for remotely the Ziph language may ascend to 
 Nineveh) from Winchester. Dr. Mapleton, a physi- 
 cian in Bath, who attended me in concert with Mr. 
 Grant, an eminent surgeon, during the nondescript 
 malady of the head, happened to have had three sons 
 at Winchester; and his reason for removing them 
 is worth mentioning, as it illustrates the well-known 
 system of fagging. One or more of them showed to 
 the quick medical eye of Dr. Mapleton symptoms 
 of declining health ; and, upon cross-questioning, he 
 found that, being (as juniors)^^ (that is, bondsmen 
 by old prescription) to appointed seniors, they were 
 under the necessity of going out nightly into the 
 town, for the purpose of executing commissions ; but 
 this was not easy, as all the regular outlets were 
 closed at an early hour. In such a dilemma, any 
 route, that was barely practicable at whatever risk, 
 must be traversed by the loyal fag ; and it so hap- 
 pened that none of any kind remained open or 
 accessible, except one ; and this one communication 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 89 
 
 happened to have escaped suspicion, simply because 
 it lay through a succession of temples and sewers 
 sacred to the goddesses Cloacina and Scavengerina. 
 That of itself was not so extraordinary a fact : the 
 wonder lay in the number — viz., seventeen. Such 
 were the actual amount of sacred edifices, which, 
 through all their dust, and garbage, and mephitic 
 morasses, these miserable vassals had to thread all 
 but every night of the week. Dr. Mapleton, when 
 he had made this discovery, ceased to wonder at the 
 medical symptoms ; and, as faggery was an abuse too 
 venerable and sacred to be touched by profane 
 hands, he lodged no idle complaints, but simply 
 removed his sons to a school where the Serbonian 
 bogs of the subterraneous goddess might not intersect 
 the nocturnal line of march so very often. One day, 
 during the worst of my illness, when the kind-hearted 
 doctor was attempting to amuse me with this anec- 
 dote, and asking me whether I thought Hannibal 
 would have attempted his march over the Little 
 St. Bernard, supposing that he and the elephant 
 which he rode had been summoned to explore a 
 route through seventeen similar nuisances, he went 
 on to mention the one sole accomplishment which 
 his sons had imported from Winchester. This was 
 the Ziph language, communicated at Winchester to 
 any aspirant for a fixed fee of one half-guinea, but 
 which the doctor then communicated to me — as I 
 do now to the reader — gratis. I make a present of 
 
 this language without fee, or price, or entrance- 
 money, to my honoured reader ; and let him under- 
 stand that it is undoubtedly a bequest of elder times. 
 Perhaps it may be coeval with the Pyramids. For 
 in the famous “ Essay on a Philosophical Character ” 
 (I forget whether that is the exact title 1 ), a large folio 
 written by the ingenious Dr. Wilkins, Bishop of Ches- 
 ter , 2 and published early in the reign of Charles II., 
 
 1 The exact title is, * 4 Essay towards a Real Character and 
 a Philosophical Language.” — H. 
 
 2 This Dr. Wilkins was related by marriage to Cromwell, 
 and is better known to the world, perhaps, by his Essay on 
 
190 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 a folio which I, in youthful days, not only read 
 but studied, this language is recorded and accurately 
 described amongst many other modes of cryptical 
 communication, oral and visual, spoken, written, or 
 symbolic. And, as the bishop does not speak of it 
 as at all a recent invention, it may probably at that 
 time have been regarded as an antique device for 
 conducting a conversation in secrecy amongst by- 
 standers ; and this advantage it has, that it is ap- 
 plicable to all languages alike ; nor can it possibly 
 be penetrated by one not initiated in the mystery. 
 The secret is this (and the grandeur of simplicity at 
 any rate it has) — repeat the vowel or diphthong of 
 every syllable, prefixing to the vowel so repeated the 
 letter G. Thus, for example : Shall we go away in 
 an hour ? Three hours we have already staid. This 
 in Ziph becomes : Shagall wege gogo agawagay igin 
 agan hougour ? Threegee hougours wege hagave cigal- 
 reageadyygy stagaid . 1 It must not be supposed that 
 Ziph proceeds slowly. A very little practice gives 
 the greatest fluency ; so that even now, though 
 certainly I cannot have practised it for fifty years, 
 my power of speaking the Ziph remains unimpaired. 
 I forget whether in the Bishop of Chester’s account 
 of this cryptical language the consonant intercalated 
 be G or not. Evidently any consonant will answer 
 the purpose. F or L would be softer, and so far 
 better. 
 
 In this learned tongue it was that my friend and 
 I communicated our feelings ; and having staid nearly 
 four hours, a time quite sufficient to express a proper 
 sense of the honour, we departed ; and, on emerging 
 into the open high-road, we threw up our hats and 
 huzzaed, meaning no sort of disrespect, but from 
 uncontrollable pleasure in recovered liberty. 
 
 the possibility of a passage (or, as the famous author of the 
 “Pursuits of Literature” said, by way of an Episcopal meta- 
 phor, the possibility of a translation) to the moon. 
 
 1 One omission occurs to me on reviewing this account of 
 the Ziph — which is, that I should have directed the accent to 
 be placed on the intercalated syllable : thus ship becomes shigipy. 
 with the emphasis on gip ; run becomes rugun , &c. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 191 
 
 Soon after this we left Eton for Ireland. Our first 
 destination being Dublin, of course we went by Holy- 
 head. The route at that time, from Southern England 
 to Dublin, did not (as in elder and in later days) go 
 round by Chester. A few miles after leaving Shrews- 
 bury, somewhere about Oswestry, it entered North 
 Wales ; a stage farther brought us to the celebrated 
 vale of Llangollen ; and, on reaching the approach 
 to this about sunset on a beautiful evening of June, 
 I first found myself amongst the mountains ; a feature 
 in natural scenery for which, from my earliest days, 
 it was not extravagant to say that I had hungered 
 and thirsted. In no one expectation of my life have 
 I been less disappointed ; and I may add, that no 
 one enjoyment has less decayed or palled upon my 
 continued experience. A mountainous region, with 
 a slender population, and that of a simple pastoral 
 character ; behold my chief conditions of a pleasant 
 permanent dwelling-place ! But, thus far I have 
 altered, that now I should greatly prefer forest 
 scenery — such as the New Forest, or the Forest 
 of Dean in Gloucestershire. The mountains of 
 Wales range at about the same elevation as those 
 of Northern England : three thousand and four to 
 six hundred feet being the extreme limit which they 
 reach. Generally speaking, their forms are less 
 picturesque individually, and they are less happily 
 grouped than their English brethren. I have since 
 also been made sensible by Wordsworth of one griev- 
 ous defect in the structure of the Welsh valleys ; too 
 generally they take the basin shape — the level area 
 at their foot does not detach itself with sufficient 
 precision from the declivities that surround them. 
 Of this, however, I was not aware at the time of first 
 seeing Wales ; although the striking effect from the 
 opposite form of the Cumberland and Westmoreland 
 valleys, which almost universally present a flat area 
 at the base of the surrounding hills, level, to use 
 Wordsworth's expression, “as the floor of a temple]’ 
 would, at any rate, have arrested my eye, as a cir- 
 cumstance of impressive beauty, even though the 
 
192 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 want of such a feature might not, in any case, have 
 affected me as a fault As something that had a 
 positive value, this characteristic of the Cumbrian 
 valleys had fixed my attention, but not as any telling 
 point of contrast against the Cambrian valleys. No 
 faults, however, at that early age disturbed my 
 pleasure, except that, after one whole day’s tra- 
 velling (for so long it cost us between Llangollen 
 and Holyhead), the want of water struck me upon 
 review as painfully remarkable. From Conway to 
 Bangor (seventeen miles), we were often in sight of 
 the sea ; but fresh water we had seen hardly any ; 
 no lake, no stream much beyond a brook. This 
 is certainly a conspicuous defect in North Wales, 
 considered as a region of fine scenery. The 
 few lakes I have since become acquainted with, 
 as that near Bala, near Beddkelert, and beyond 
 Machynleth, are not attractive either in their 
 forms or in their accompaniments : the Bala Lake 
 being meagre and insipid : the others as it were 
 unfinished, and unaccompanied with their furniture 
 of wood. 
 
 At the Head (to call it by its common colloquial 
 name) we were detained a few days in those un- 
 steaming times by foul winds. Our time, however, 
 thanks to the hospitality of a certain Captain Skinner on 
 that station, did not hang heavy on our hands, though 
 we were imprisoned, as it were, on a dull rock ; for 
 Holyhead itself is a little island of rock, an insulated 
 dependency of Anglesea ; which, again, is a little in- 
 sulated dependency of North Wales. The packets on 
 this station were at that time lucrative commands ; 
 and they were given (perhaps are 1 given) to post- 
 captains in the navy. Captain Skinner was celebrated 
 for his convivial talents ; he did the honours of the 
 place in a hospitable style ; daily asked us to dine 
 with him, and seemed as inexhaustible in his wit 
 as in his hospitality. 
 
 This answered one purpose, at least, of special 
 
 1 Written twenty years ago. 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 93 
 
 convenience to our party at that moment : it kept us 
 from all necessity of meeting each other during the 
 day, except under circumstances where we escaped 
 the necessity of any familiar communication. Why 
 that should have become desirable arose upon the 
 following mysterious change of relations, between our- 
 selves and the Rev. Mr. Gr , Lord Westport's 
 
 tutor. On the last day of our journey, Mr. G., who 
 had accompanied us thus far, but now at Holyhead 
 was to leave us, suddenly took offence (or, at least, 
 then first showed his offence) at something we had 
 said, done, or omitted, and never spoke one syllable to 
 either of us again. Being both of us amiably disposed, 
 and incapable of having seriously meditated either 
 word or deed likely to wound any person’s feelings, we 
 were much hurt at the time, and often retraced the 
 little incidents upon the road, to discover, if possible, 
 what it was that had laid us open to misconstruction. 
 But it remained to both of us a lasting mystery. 
 This tutor was an Irishman, of Trinity College, 
 Dublin ; and, I believe, of considerable pretensions 
 as a scholar ; but, being reserved and haughty, or 
 else presuming in us a knowledge of our offence, 
 which we really had not, he gave us no opening for 
 any explanation. To the last moment, however, he 
 manifested a punctilious regard to the duties of his 
 charge. He accompanied us in our boat, on a dark 
 and gusty night, to the packet, which lay a little out 
 at sea. He saw us on board ; and then, standing up 
 for one moment, he said, “ Is all right on deck?” — 
 “ All right, sir,” sang out the ship’s steward. — “Have 
 you, Lord Westport, got your boat-cloak with you ? ” 
 — -“Yes, sir.” — “Then pull away, boatmen.” We 
 listened for a time to the measured beat of his re- 
 treating oars, marvelling more and more at the atro- 
 cious nature of our crime which could thus avail to 
 intercept even his last adieus. I, for my part, never 
 saw him again ; nor, as I have reason to think, did 
 Lord Westport. Neither did we ever unravel the 
 Jkiystery. 
 
 iis if to irritate our curiosity still more, Lord 
 
 G 
 
194 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Westport showed me a torn fragment of paper in his 
 tutor’s handwriting, which, together with others, had 
 been thrown (as he believed) purposely in his way. 
 If he was right in that belief, it appeared that he had 
 missed the particular fragment which was designed 
 to raise the veil upon our guilt ; for the one he pro- 
 duced contained exactly these words : “ With respect 
 to your ladyship’s anxiety to know how far the 
 acquaintance with Mr. de Q. is likely to be of service 
 to your son, I think I may now venture to say 
 
 that ” There the sibylline fragment ended ; nor 
 
 could we torture it into any further revelation. How- 
 ever, both of us saw the propriety of not ourselves 
 practising any mystery, nor giving any advantage to 
 Mr. G. by imperfect communications ; and accord- 
 ingly, on the day after we reached Dublin, we 
 addressed a circumstantial account of our journey 
 and our little mystery to Lady Altamont in England ; 
 for to her it was clear that the tutor had confided his 
 mysterious wrongs. Her ladyship answered with 
 kindness ; but did not throw any light on the prob- 
 lem which exercised at once our memories, our skill 
 in conjectural interpretation, and our sincere regrets. 
 Lord Westport and I regretted much that there had 
 not been a wider margin attached to the fragment of 
 Mr. G.’s letter to Lady Altamont ; in which case, as 
 I could readily have mimicked his style of writing, it 
 would have been easy for me to fill up thus : “ With 
 respect to your ladyship’s anxiety, &c., I think I may 
 now venture to say that, if the solar system were 
 searched, there could not be found a companion 
 more serviceable to your son than Mr. de Q. He 
 speaks the Ziph most beautifully. He writes it, I am 
 told, classically. And if there were a Ziph nation as 
 well as a Ziph language, I am satisfied that he would 
 very soon be at the head of it ; as he already is, 
 beyond all competition, at the head of the Ziph 
 literature.” Lady Altamont, on receiving this, would 
 infallibly have supposed him mad ; she would have 
 written so to all her Irish friends, and would hav* 
 commended the poor gentleman to the care of his 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON 1 95 
 
 nearest kinsmen ; and thus we should have had some 
 little indemnification for the annoyance he had caused 
 us. I mention this trifle, simply because, trifle as it 
 is, it involved a mystery, and furnishes an occasion 
 for glancing at that topic. Mysteries as deep, with 
 results a little more important and foundations a little 
 sounder, have many times crossed me in life ; one, 
 for instance, I recollect at this moment, known pretty 
 extensively to the neighbourhood in which it occurred. 
 
 It was in the county of S . A lady married, and 
 
 married well, as was thought. About twelve months 
 afterwards, she returned alone in a post-chaise to 
 her father’s house ; paid, and herself dismissed, the 
 postillion at the gate ; entered the house ; ascended 
 to the room in which she had passed her youth, and 
 known in the family by her name ; took possession 
 of it again ; intimated by signs, and by one short 
 letter at her first arrival, what she would require ; 
 lived for nearly twenty years in this state of La 
 Trappe seclusion and silence ; nor ever, to the hour 
 of her death, explained what circumstances had dis- 
 solved the supposed happy connection she had 
 formed, or what had become of her husband. Her 
 looks and gestures were of a nature to repress all 
 questions in the spirit of mere curiosity ; and the 
 spirit of affection naturally respected a secret which 
 was guarded so severely. This might be supposed 
 a Spanish tale ; yet it happened in England, and 
 in a pretty populous neighbourhood. The romances 
 which occur in real life are too often connected with 
 circumstances of criminality in some one among the 
 parties concerned : on that account, more than any 
 other, they are often suppressed ; else, judging by the 
 number which have fallen within my own knowledge, 
 they must be of more frequent occurrence than is 
 usually supposed. Among such romances, those 
 cases, perhaps, form an unusual proportion in which 
 young, innocent, and high-minded persons have 
 made a sudden discovery of some great profligacy 
 or deep unworthiness in the person to whom they 
 naa surrendered their entire affections. That shock, 
 
196 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 more than any other, is capable of blighting, in one 
 hour, the whole after existence, and sometimes of at 
 once overthrowing the balance of life or of reason. 
 Instances I have known of both ; and such afflictions 
 are the less open to any alleviation, that sometimes 
 they are of a nature so delicate as to preclude all 
 confidential communication of them to another; and 
 sometimes it would be even dangerous, in a legal 
 sense, to communicate them. 
 
 A sort of adventure occurred, and not of a kind 
 pleasant to recall, even on this short voyage. The 
 passage to Dublin from the Head is about sixty 
 miles, I believe ; yet, from baffling winds, it cost us 
 upwards of thirty hours. On the second day, going 
 upon deck, we found that our only fellow-passenger 
 of note was a woman of rank, celebrated for her 
 beauty ; and not undeservedly ; for a lovely creature 
 she was. The body of her travelling-coach had been, 
 as usual, unslung from the “ carriage ” (by which is 
 technically meant the wheels and the perch), and 
 placed upon deck. This she used as a place of 
 retreat from the sun during the day, and as a resting- 
 place at night. For want of more interesting com- 
 panions, she invited us, during the day, into her 
 coach ; and we taxed our abilities to make ourselves 
 as entertaining as we could ; for we were greatly 
 fascinated by the lady’s beauty. The second night 
 proved very sultry ; and Lord Westport and myself, 
 suffering from the oppression of the cabin, left our 
 berths, and lay, wrapped up in cloaks, upon deck. 
 Having talked for some hours, we were both on the 
 point of falling asleep, when a stealthy tread near our 
 heads awoke us. It was starlight; and we traced 
 between ourselves and the sky the outline of a man’s 
 figure. Lying upon a mass of tarpaulins, we were 
 ourselves undistinguishable, and the figure moved in 
 the direction of the coach. Our first thought was to 
 raise an alarm, scarcely doubting that the purpose of 
 the man was to rob the unprotected lady of her watch 
 or purse. But, to our astonishment, we saw the 
 coach-door silently swing open under a touch from 
 
THE NATION OF LONDON J97 
 
 within . All was as silent as a dream ; the figure 
 entered, the door closed, and we were left to inter- 
 pret the case as we might. Strange it was that this 
 lady could permit herself to calculate upon absolute 
 concealment in such circumstances. We recollected 
 afterwards to have heard some indistinct rumour 
 buzzed about the packet on the day preceding, that 
 a gentleman, and some even spoke of him by name 
 
 as a Colonel , for some unknown purpose, was 
 
 concealed in the steerage of the packet. And other 
 appearances, indicated that the affair was not entirely 
 a secret even amongst the lady’s servants. To both 
 of us the story proclaimed a moral already sufficiently 
 current — viz., that women of the highest and the very 
 lowest rank are alike thrown too much into situations 
 of danger and temptation. I might mention some 
 additional circumstances of criminal aggravation in 
 this lady’s case ; but, as they would tend to point out 
 the real person to those acquainted with her history, 
 I shall forbear. She has since made a noise in the 
 world, and has maintained, I believe, a tolerably fair 
 reputation. Soon after sunrise the next morning, a 
 heavenly morning of June, we dropped our anchor in 
 the famous bay of Dublin. There was a dead calm : 
 the sea was like a lake ; and, as we were some miles 
 from the Pigeon-House, a boat was manned to put 
 us on shore. The lovely lady, unaware that we were 
 parties to her guilty secret, went with us, accom- 
 panied by her numerous attendants, and looking as 
 beautiful, and hardly less innocent than an angel. 
 Long afterwards, Lord Westport and I met her, 
 hanging upon the arm of her busband, a manly and 
 good-natured man, of polished manners, to whom 
 she introduced us : for she voluntarily challenged 
 us as her fellow-voyagers, and, I suppose, had no 
 suspicion which pointed in our direction. She even 
 joined her husband in cordially pressing us to visit 
 them at their magnificent chateau , Upon us, mean- 
 time, whatever might be her levity, the secret of 
 which accident had put us in possession pressed with 
 a weight of awe ; we shuddered at our own discovery ; 
 
198 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 and we both agreed to drop no hint of it in any 
 direction . 1 
 
 Landing about three miles from Dublin (according 
 to my present remembrance, at Dunleary), we were 
 not long in reaching Sackville Street. 
 
 1 Lord Westport’s age at that time was the same as my own 
 — that is, we both wanted a few months of being fifteen.* But 
 I had the advantage, perhaps, in thoughtfulness and observation 
 of life. Being thoroughly free, however, from opinionativeness, 
 Lord Westport readily came over to any views of mine for which 
 I could show sufficient grounds. And on this occasion I found 
 no difficulty in convincing him — that honour and fidelity did not 
 form sufficient guarantees for the custody of secrets. Presence 
 of mind so as to revive one’s obligations in time, tenacity of 
 recollection, and vigilance over one’s momentary slips of tongue, 
 so as to keep watch over indirect disclosures, are also requisite. 
 And at that time I had an instance within my own remem- 
 brance where a secret had been betrayed by a person of un- 
 doubted honour, but most inadvertently betrayed, and in pure 
 oblivion of his engagement to silence. Indeed, unless where 
 the secret is of a nature to affect some person’s life, I do not 
 believe that most people would remember beyond a period of 
 two years the most solemn obligations to secrecy. After a lapse 
 of time, varying of course with the person, the substance of the 
 secret will remain upon the mind : but how he came by the 
 secret, or under what circumstances, he will very probably have 
 forgotten. It is unsafe to rely upon the most religious or sacra- 
 mental obligation to secrecy, unless, together with the secret, 
 you could transfer also a magic ring that should, by a growing 
 pressure or puncture, sting a man into timely alarm and warning. 
 
 * A mistake on De Quincey’s part : he was nearly fifteen, and 
 Lord Westport about twelve years of age. The mis-recollection 
 was duly noted by Dr. Masson. — H. 
 
EIGHTH CHAPTER 
 
 DUBLIN 
 
 In Sackville Street stood the town-house of Lord 
 Altamont; and here, in the breakfast-room, we found 
 the earl seated Long and intimately as I had known 
 Lord Westport, it so happened that I had never seen 
 his father, who had, indeed, of late almost pledged 
 himself to a continued residence in Ireland by his 
 own patriotic earnestness as an agricultural improver ; 
 whilst for his son, under the difficulties and delays 
 at that time of all travelling, any residence whatever 
 in England seemed preferable, but especially a resi- 
 dence with his mother amongst the relatives of his 
 distinguished English grandfather, and in such close 
 neighbourhood to Eton. Lord Altamont once told 
 me, that the journey outward and inward between 
 Eton and Westport, taking into account all the un- 
 avoidable deviations from the direct route, in com- 
 pliance with the claims of kinship, &c. (a case which 
 in Ireland forced a traveller often into a perpetual 
 zig-zag), counted up to something more than a thousand 
 miles. That is, in effect, when valued in loss of time, 
 and allowance being made for the want of continuity 
 in those parts of the travelling system that did not 
 accurately dovetail into each other, not less than one 
 entire fortnight must be annually sunk upon a labour 
 that yielded no commensurate fruit. Hence the long 
 three-years interval which had separated father and 
 son : and hence my own nervous apprehension, as 
 we were racing through the suburbs of Dublin, that 
 I should unavoidably lay a freezing restraint upon 
 that reunion to which, after such a separation, both 
 father and son must have looked forward with antici- 
 pation so anxious. Such cases of unintentional in- 
 trusion are at times inevitable ; but, even to the least 
 sensitive, they are always distressing ; most of all 
 they are so to the intruder, who in fact feels himself 
 in the odd position of a criminal without a crime. 
 He is in the situation of one who might have 
 
 i 99 
 
200 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 happened to be chased by a Bengal tiger (or, say that 
 the tiger were a sheriffs-officer) into the very centre 
 of the Eleusinian mysteries. Do not tease me, my 
 reader, by alleging that there were no sheriff s-officers 
 at Athens or Eleusis. Not many, I admit : but per- 
 haps quite as many as there were of Bengal tigers. 
 In such a case, under whatever compulsion, the man 
 has violated a holy seclusion. He has seen that 
 which he ought not to have seen ; and he is viewed 
 with horror by the privileged spectators. Should he 
 plead that this was his misfortune, and not his fault, 
 the answer would be, “ True : it was your misfor- 
 tune ; we know it ; and it is our misfortune to be 
 under the necessity of hating you for it.” But there 
 was no cause for similar fears at present : so uniformly 
 considerate in his kindness was Lord Altamont. It 
 is true, that Lord Westport, as an only child, and a 
 child to be proud of — for he was at that time rather 
 handsome, and conciliated general goodwill by his 
 engaging manners — was viewed by his father with an 
 anxiety of love that sometimes became almost painful 
 to witness. But this natural self-surrender to a first 
 involuntary emotion Lord Altamont did not suffer to 
 usurp any such lengthened expression as might too 
 painfully have reminded me of being “ one too many.” 
 One solitary half- minute being paid down as a tribute 
 to the sanctities of the case, his next care was to 
 withdraw me, the stranger, from any oppressive feeling 
 of strangership. And accordingly, so far from realis- 
 ing the sense of being an intruder, in one minute, 
 under his courteous welcome, I had come to feel that, 
 as the companion of his one darling upon earth, me 
 also he comprehended within his paternal regards. 
 
 It must have been nine o’clock precisely when we 
 entered the breakfast-room. So much I know by an 
 a priori argument, and could wish, therefore, that it 
 had been scientifically important to know it — as im- 
 portant, for instance, as to know the occultation of a 
 star or the transit of Venus to a second. For the urn 
 was at that moment placed on the table ; and though 
 Ireland, as a whole, is privileged to be irregular, yet 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 201 
 
 such was our Sackville Street regularity, that not so 
 much nine o’clock announced this periodic event, as 
 inversely this event announced nine o’clock. And I 
 used to affirm, however shocking it might sound to 
 poor threadbare metaphysicians, incapable of trans- 
 cendental truths, that not nine o’clock was the cause 
 of revealing the breakfast urn, but, on the contrary, 
 that the revelation of the breakfast urn was the true 
 and secret cause of nine o’clock — a phenomenon 
 which otherwise no candid reader will pretend that he 
 can satisfactorily account for, often as he has known 
 it to come round. The urn was already throwing up 
 its column of fuming mist; and the breakfast-table 
 was covered with June flowers sent by a lady on the 
 chance of Lord Westport’s arrival. It was clear, 
 therefore, that we were expected ; but so we had been 
 for three or four days previously ; and it illustrates 
 the enormous uncertainties of travelling at this closing 
 era of the eighteenth century, that for three or four 
 days more we should have been expected without the 
 least anxiety, in case anything had occurred to detain 
 us on the road. In fact, the possibility of a Holyhead 
 packet being lost had no place in the catalogue of 
 adverse contingencies — not even when calculated by 
 mothers. To come by way of Liverpool or Park- 
 gate, was not without grounds of reasonable fear : I 
 myself had lost acquaintances (schoolboys) on each of 
 those lines of transit. Neither Bristol nor Milford 
 Haven was entirely cloudless in reputation. But 
 from Holyhead only one packet had ever been lost ; 
 and that was in the days of Queen Anne, when I have 
 good reason to think that a villain was on board who 
 hated the Duke of Marlborough : so that this one 
 exceptional case, far from being looked upon as a 
 public calamity, would, of course, be received thank- 
 fully, as cleansing the nation from a scamp. 
 
 Ireland was still smoking with the embers of re- 
 bellion ; and Lord Cornwallis, who had been sent 
 expressly to extinguish it, and had won the reputation 
 of having fulfilled this mission with energy and success, 
 was then the Lord-Lieutenant ; and at that moment 
 
202 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 he was regarded with more interest than any other 
 public man. Accordingly I was not sorry when, two 
 mornings after our arrival, Lord Altamont said to us 
 at breakfast, “ Now, if you wish to see what I call a 
 great man, go with me this morning, and you shall 
 see Lord Cornwallis ; for that man who has given 
 peace both to the East and to the West — tamiqg a 
 tiger in the Mysore that hated England as much as 
 Hannibal hated Rome, and in Ireland pulling up by 
 the roots a French invasion, combined with an Irish 
 insurrection — will always for me rank as a great man/’ 
 We willingly accompanied the earl to the Phoenix 
 Park, where the Lord-Lieutenant was then residing, 
 and were privately presented to him. I had seen an 
 engraving (celebrated, I believe, in its day) of Lord 
 Cornwallis receiving the young Mysore princes as 
 hostages at Seringapatam ; and I knew the outline 
 of his public services. This gave me an additional 
 interest in seeing him : but I was disappointed to 
 find no traces in his manner of the energy and activity 
 I presumed him to possess ; he seemed, on the con- 
 trary, slow or even heavy, but benevolent and con- 
 siderate in a degree which won the confidence at 
 once. Him we saw often ; for Lord Altamont took 
 us with him wherever and whenever we wished ; and 
 me in particular (to whom the Irish leaders of society 
 were as yet entirely unknown by sight) it gratified 
 highly to see persons of historical names — names, I 
 mean, historically connected with the great events 
 of Elizabeth’s or Cromwell’s era — attending at the 
 Phoenix Park. But the persons whom I remember 
 most distinctly of all whom I was then in the habit of 
 seeing, were Lord Clare, the Chancellor, the late Lord 
 Londonderry (then Castlereagh), at that time the Irish 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Speaker of the 
 House of Commons (Mr. Foster, since, I believe, 
 created Lord Oriel). With the Speaker, indeed, 
 Lord Altamont had more intimate grounds of con- 
 nection than with any other public man ; both being 
 devoted to the encouragement and personal superin- 
 tendence of great agricultural improvements. Both 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 203 
 
 were bent on introducing, through models diffused 
 extensively on their own estates, English husbandry, 
 English improved breeds of cattle, and, where that 
 was possible, English capital and skill, into the rural 
 economy of Ireland. 
 
 Amongst the splendid spectacles which I witnessed, 
 as the most splendid I may mention an Installation of 
 the Knights of St. Patrick. There were six knights 
 installed on this occasion, one of the six being Lord 
 Altamont. He had, no doubt, received his riband 
 as a reward for his parliamentary votes, and especially 
 in the matter of the Union ; yet, from all his conver- 
 sation upon that question, and from the general con- 
 scientiousness of his private life, I am convinced that 
 he acted all along upon patriotic motives, and in 
 obedience to his real views (whether right or wrong) 
 of the Irish interests. One chief reason, indeed, 
 which detained us in Dublin, was the necessity of 
 staying for this particular Installation. At one time, 
 Lord Altamont had designed to take his son and 
 myself for the two esquires who attend the new-made 
 knight, according to the ritual of this ceremony ; but 
 that plan was laid aside, on learning that the other 
 five knights were to be attended by adults ; and thus, 
 from being partakers as actors, my friend and I 
 became simple spectators of this splendid scene, 
 which took place in the Cathedral of St. Patrick. 
 So easily does mere external pomp slip out of the 
 memory, as to all its circumstantial items, leaving 
 behind nothing beyond the general impression, that 
 at this moment I remember no one incident of the 
 whole ceremonial, except that some foolish person 
 laughed aloud as the knights went up with their 
 offerings to the altar; the object of this unfeeling- 
 laughter being apparently Lord Altamont, who hap- 
 pened to be lame — a singular instance of levity to 
 exhibit within the walls of such a building, and at the 
 most solemn part of such a ceremony, which to my 
 mind had a threefold grandeur : first, as symbolic and 
 shadowy ; secondly, as representing the interlacings 
 of chivalry with religion in the highest aspirations of 
 
204 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 both ; thirdly, as national — placing the heraldries and 
 military pomps of a people, so memorably faithful 
 to St. Peter’s chair, at the foot of the altar. Lord 
 Westport and I sat with Lord and Lady Castlereagh. 
 They were both young at this time, and both wore an 
 impressive appearance of youthful happiness ; neither, 
 happily for their peace of mind, able to pierce that 
 cloud of years, not much more than twenty, which 
 divided them from the day destined in one hour to 
 wreck the happiness of both. We had met both on 
 other occasions ; and their conversation, through the 
 course of that day’s pomps, was the most interesting 
 circumstance to me, and the one which I remember 
 with most distinctness of all that belonged to the 
 Installation. By the way, one morning, on occasion 
 of some conversation arising about Irish bulls, I made 
 an agreement with Lord Altamont to note down in 
 a memorandum-book everything throughout my stay 
 in Ireland which, to my feeling as an Englishman, 
 should seem to be, or should approach to, a bull. 
 And this day, at dinner, I reported from Lady Castle- 
 reagh’s conversation what struck me as such. Lord 
 Altamont laughed, and said, “ My dear child, I am 
 sorry that it should so happen, for it is bad to stumble 
 at the beginning : your bull is certainly a bull 1 ; but 
 as certainly Lady Castlereagh is your countrywoman, 
 and not an Irishwoman at all.” Lady Castlereagh, it 
 seems, was a daughter of Lord Buckinghamshire ; 
 and her maiden name was Lady Emily Hobart. 
 
 1 The idea of a bull is even yet undefined ; which is most 
 extraordinary, considering that Miss Edgeworth has applied all 
 her tact and illustrative power to furnish the matter for such a 
 definition ; and Coleridge all his philosophic subtlety (but in 
 this instance, I think, with a most infelicitous result) to furnish 
 its for?n . But both have been too fastidious in their admission 
 of bulls. Thus, for example, Miss Edgeworth rejects, as no 
 true bull, the common Joe Miller story, that, upon two Irishmen 
 reaching Barnet, and being told that it was still twelve miles to 
 London, one of them remarked, Ah ! just six miles apace” 
 This, says Miss E., is no bull, but a sentimental remark on the 
 maxim that friendship divides our pains. Nothing of the kind: 
 Miss Edgeworth cannot have understood it. The bull is a true 
 representative and exemplary specimen of the genus . 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 2 °5 
 
 One other public scene there was about this time 
 in Dublin, to the eye less captivating, but far more so 
 in a moral sense ; more significant practically, more 
 burdened with hope and with fear. This was the 
 final ratification of the bill which united Ireland to 
 Great Britain. I do not know that any one public 
 act, or celebration, or solemnity, in my time, did, or 
 could, so much engage my profoundest sympathies. 
 Wordsworth’s fine sonnet on the extinction of the 
 Venetian Republic had not then been published, else 
 the last two lines would have expressed my feelings. 
 After admitting that changes had taken place in 
 Venice which in a manner challenged and presumed 
 this last and mortal change, the poet goes on to say 
 that all this long preparation for the event could not 
 break the shock of it. Venice, it is true, had become 
 a shade ; but, after all, 
 
 “ Men are we, and must grieve when even the shade 
 Of that which once was great has pass’d away.” 
 
 But here the previous circumstances were far different 
 from those of Venice. There we saw a superannuated 
 and paralytic state, sinking at any rate into the grave, 
 and yielding, to the touch of military violence, that 
 only which a brief lapse of years must otherwise have 
 yielded to internal decay. Here , on the contrary, we 
 saw a young eagle, rising into power, and robbed pre- 
 maturely of her natural honours, only because she did 
 not comprehend their value, or because at this great 
 crisis she had no champion. Ireland, in a political 
 sense, was surely then in her youth, considering the 
 prodigious developments she has since experienced 
 in population, and in resources of all kinds. 
 
 This great day of Union had been long looked for- 
 ward to by me : with some mixed feelings also by my 
 young friend, for he had an Irish heart, and was 
 jealous of whatever appeared to touch the banner of 
 Ireland. But it was not for him to say anything 
 which should seem to impeach his father’s patriotism 
 in voting for the Union, and promoting it through 
 his borough influence. Yet oftentimes it seemed to 
 
206 autobiographic sketches 
 
 me, when I introduced the subject, and sought to 
 learn from Lord Altamont the main grounds which 
 had reconciled him and other men, anxious for the 
 welfare of Ireland, to a measure which at least robbed 
 her of some splendour, and, above all, robbed her 
 of a name and place amongst the independent states 
 of Europe — that neither father nor son was likely to 
 be displeased should some great popular violence 
 put force upon the recorded will of Parliament, and 
 compel the two Houses to perpetuate themselves. 
 Dolorous they must of course have looked, in mere 
 consistency ; but I fancied that internally they would 
 have laughed. Lord Altamont, I am certain, be- 
 lieved (as multitudes believed) that Ireland would 
 be bettered by the commercial advantages conceded 
 to her as an integral province of the empire, and 
 would have benefits which, as an independent king- 
 dom, she had not. It is notorious that this expecta- 
 tion was partially realised. But let us ask, Could 
 not a large part of these benefits have been secured 
 to Ireland, remaining as she was ? Were they, in 
 any sense, dependent on the sacrifice of her separate 
 parliament ? For my part, I believe that Mr. Pitt’s 
 motive for insisting on a legislative union was, in a 
 small proportion, perhaps, the somewhat elevated 
 desire to connect his own name with the historical 
 changes of the empire ; to have it stamped, not on 
 events so fugitive as those of war and peace, liable to 
 oblivion or eclipse, but on the permanent relations 
 of its integral parts. In a still larger proportion I 
 believe his motive to have been one of pure con- 
 venience, the wish to exonerate himself from the 
 intolerable vexation of a double parliament. In a 
 government such as ours, so care-laden at any rate, 
 it is certainly most harassing to have the task of 
 soliciting a measure by management and influence 
 twice over — two trials to organise, two storms of 
 anxiety to face, and two refractory gangs to discip- 
 line, instead of one. It must also be conceded that 
 no Treasury influence could always avail to prevent 
 injurious collisions between acts of the Irish and the 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 207 
 
 British Parliaments. In Dublin, as in London, the 
 government must lay its account with being occa- 
 sionally outvoted; this would be likely to happen 
 peculiarly upon Irish questions. And acts of favour 
 or protection would at times pass on behalf of Irish 
 interests, not only clashing with more general ones 
 of the central government, but indirectly also (through 
 the virtual consolidation of the two islands since the 
 era of steam) opening endless means for evading 
 British acts even within their own separate sphere of 
 operation. On these considerations, even an Irish- 
 man must grant that public convenience called for 
 the absorption of all local or provincial supremacies 
 into the central supremacy. And there were two 
 brief arguments which gave weight to those con- 
 siderations : first, that the evils likely to arise (and 
 which in France have arisen) from what is termed, 
 in modern politics, the principle of centralisation , 
 have been for us either evaded or neutralised. The 
 provinces, to the very furthest nook of these “ nook- 
 shotten ” islands, react upon London as powerfully 
 as London acts upon them , so that no counterpoise 
 is required with us, as in France it is, to any inordi- 
 nate influence at the centre. Secondly, the very 
 pride and jealousy which could avail to dictate the 
 retention of an independent parliament would effec- 
 tually preclude any modern “ Poynings’ Act,” having 
 for its object to prevent the collision of the local 
 with the central government. Each would be 
 supreme within its own sphere, and those spheres 
 could not but clash. The separate Irish Parliament 
 was originally no badge of honour or independence : 
 it began in motives of convenience, or perhaps neces- 
 sity, at a period when the communication was 
 difficult, slow, and interrupted. Any parliament 
 which arose on that footing it was possible to guard 
 by a Poynings’ Act, making, in effect, all laws null 
 which should happen to contradict the supreme or 
 central will. But what law, in a corresponding 
 temper, could avail to limit the jurisdiction of a 
 Parliament which confessedly had been retained on 
 
208 autobiographic sketches 
 
 a principle of national honour? Upon every con- • 
 sideration, therefore, of convenience, and were it 
 only for the necessities of public business, the ab- 
 sorption of the local into the central parliament had 
 now come to speak a language that perhaps could 
 no longer be evaded ; and that Irishman only could 
 consistently oppose the measure who should take 
 his stand upon principles transcending convenience ; 
 looking, in fact, singly to the honour and dignity of 
 a country which it was annually becoming less absurd 
 to suppose capable of an independent existence. 
 
 Meantime, in those days, Ireland had no adequate 
 champion : the Hoods and the Grattans were not 
 up to the mark. Refractory as they were, they 
 moved within the paling of order and decorum; 
 they were not the Titans for a war against the 
 heavens. When the public feeling beckoned and 
 loudly supported them, they could follow a lead 
 which they appeared to head ; but they could not 
 create such a body of public feeling ; nor, when 
 created, could they throw it into a suitable organisa- 
 tion. What they could do was simply as ministerial 
 agents and rhetoricians to prosecute any general 
 movement, when the national arm had cloven a 
 channel, and opened the road before them. Con- 
 sequently, that great opening for a turbulent son 
 of thunder passed unimproved ; and the great day 
 drew near without symptoms of tempest. At last it 
 arrived ; and I remember nothing which indicated 
 as much ill-temper in the public mind as I have 
 seen on many hundreds of occasions, trivial by com- 
 parison, in London. Lord Westport and I were 
 determined to lose no part of the scene, and we 
 went down with Lord Altamont to the House. It 
 was about the middle of the day, and a great mob 
 filled the whole space about the two Houses. As 
 Lord Altamont’s coach drew up to the steps of that 
 splendid edifice, we heard a prodigious hissing and 
 hooting ; and I was really agitated to think that 
 Lord Altamont, whom I loved and respected, would 
 probably have to make his way through a tempest 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 209 
 
 of public wrath — a situation more terrific to him 
 than to others, from his embarrassed walking. I 
 found, however, that I might have spared my 
 anxiety ; the subject of commotion was, simply, that 
 Major Sirr, or Major Swan, I forget which (both 
 being so celebrated in those days for their energy as 
 leaders of the police), had detected a person in the 
 act of mistaking some other man’s pocket-handker- 
 chief for his own — a most natural mistake, I should 
 fancy, where people stood crowded together so 
 thickly. No storm of any kind awaited us, and yet 
 at that moment there was no other arrival to divide 
 the public attention ; for, in order that we might see 
 everything from first to last, we were amongst the 
 very earliest parties. Neither did our party escape 
 under any mistake of the crowd : silence had suc- 
 ceeded to the uproar caused by the tender meeting 
 between the thief and the major ; and a man, who 
 stood in a conspicuous situation, proclaimed aloud 
 to those below him the name or title of members as 
 they drove up. “That,” said he, “is the Earl of 
 Altamont ; the lame gentleman, I mean.” Perhaps, 
 however, his knowledge did not extend so far as to 
 the politics of a nobleman who had taken no violent 
 or factious part in public affairs. At least the 
 dreaded insults did not follow, or only in the very 
 feeblest manifestations. We entered ; and, by way 
 of seeing everything, we went even to the robing- 
 room. The man who presented his robes to Lord 
 Altamont seemed to me, of all whom I saw on that 
 day, the one who wore the face of deepest depression. 
 But, whether this indicated the loss of a lucrative 
 situation, or was really disinterested sorrow, growing 
 out of a patriotic trouble at the knowledge that he 
 was now officiating for the last time, I could not guess. 
 The House of Lords, decorated (if I remember) with 
 hangings representing the battle of the Boyne, was 
 nearly empty when he entered — an accident which 
 furnished to Lord Altamont the opportunity required 
 for explaining to us the whole course and ceremonial 
 of public business on ordinary occasions. 
 
210 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Gradually the House filled : beautiful women sat 
 intermingled amongst the peers ; and, in one party 
 of these, surrounded by a bevy of admirers, we saw 
 our fair but frail enchantress of the packet. She, on 
 her part, saw and recognised us by an affable nod ; 
 no stain upon her cheek, indicating that she suspected 
 to what extent she was indebted to our discretion ; 
 for it is a proof of the unaffected sorrow and the 
 solemn awe which oppressed us both, that we had 
 not mentioned, even to Lord Altamont, nor ever did 
 mention, the scene which chance had revealed to us. 
 Next came a stir within the House, and an uproar 
 resounding from without, which announced the 
 arrival of his Excellency. Entering the House, he 
 also, like the other peers, wheeled round to the 
 throne, and made to that mysterious seat a profound 
 homage. Then commenced the public business, in 
 which, if I recollect, the Chancellor played the most 
 conspicuous part — that Chancellor (Lord Clare) of 
 whom it was affirmed in those days, by a political 
 opponent, that he might swim in the innocent blood 
 which he had caused to be shed. But nautical men, 
 I suspect, would have demurred to that estimate. 
 Then were summoned to the bar — summoned for 
 the last time — the gentlemen of the House of 
 Commons ; in the van of whom, and drawing all 
 eyes upon himself, stood Lord Castlereagh. Then 
 came the recitation of many acts passed during the 
 session, and the sounding ratification, the jovian 
 
 “ Annuit et nutu totum tremefecit Olympum,” 
 
 contained in the Soit fait comme il est desire, or the 
 more peremptory Le Roi le veut. At which point in 
 the order of succession came the royal assent to the 
 Union Bill, I cannot distinctly recollect. But one 
 thing I do recollect — that no audible expression, 
 no buzz, nor murmur, nor susurrus even, testified 
 the feelings which, doubtless, lay rankling in many 
 bosoms. Setting apart all public or patriotic con- 
 siderations, even then I said to myself, as I sur- 
 veyed the whole assemblage of ermined peers, “ How 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 21 I 
 
 is it, and by what unaccountable magic, that 
 William Pitt can have prevailed on all these heredi- 
 tary legislators and heads of patrician houses to 
 renounce so easily, with nothing worth the name 
 of a struggle, and no reward worth the name of an 
 indemnification, the very brightest jewel in their 
 coronets ? This morning they all rose from their 
 couches Peers of Parliament, individual pillars of 
 the realm, indispensable parties to every law that 
 could pass. To-morrow they will be nobody — men 
 of straw — terra filii . What madness has persuaded 
 them to part with their birthright, and to cashier 
 themselves and their children for ever into mere 
 titular Lords ? ” As to the Commoners at the bar, 
 their case was different : they had no life estate at 
 all events in their honours ; and they might have 
 the same chance for entering the Imperial Parlia- 
 ment amongst the hundred Irish members, as for 
 re-entering a native Parliament. Neither, again, 
 amongst the peers was the case always equal. 
 Several of the higher had English titles, which 
 would, at any rate, open the central Parliament 
 to their ambition. That privilege, in particular, 
 attached to Lord Altamont. And he, in any case, 
 from his large property, was tolerably sure of finding 
 his way thither (as in fact for the rest of his life he 
 did) amongst the twenty-eight Representative Peers. 
 The wonder was in the case of petty and obscure 
 lords, who had no weight personally, and none in 
 right of their estates. Of these men, as they were 
 notoriously not enriched by Mr. Pitt, as the dis- 
 tribution of honours was not very large, and as no 
 honour could countervail the one they lost — I could 
 not, and cannot, fathom the policy. Thus much I 
 am sure of — that, had such a measure been proposed 
 by a political speculator previously to Queen Anne’s 
 reign, he would have been scouted as a dreamer and 
 a visionary, who calculated upon men being generally 
 somewhat worse than Esau — viz., giving up their 
 birthrights, and without the mess of pottage. How- 
 ever, on this memorable day, thus it was the Union 
 
2 12 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 was ratified ; the bill received the royal assent with- 
 out a muttering, or a whispering, or the protesting 
 echo of a sigh. Perhaps there might be a little 
 pause — a silence like that which follows an earth- 
 quake ; but there was no plain - spoken Lord 
 Belhaven, as on the corresponding occasion in 
 Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with, “ So, there’s 
 an end of an auld sang ! ” All was or looked 
 courtly, and free from vulgar emotion. One person 
 only I remarked whose features were suddenly illu- 
 minated by a smile, a sarcastic smile, as I read it ; 
 which, however, might be all a fancy. It was Lord 
 Castlereagh ; who, at the moment when the irre- 
 vocable words were pronounced, looked with a 
 penetrating glance amongst a party of ladies. His 
 own wife was one of that party ; but I did not 
 discover the particular object on whom his smile 
 had settled. After this I had no leisure to be 
 interested in anything which followed. “ You are 
 all,” thought I to myself, “ a pack of vagabonds 
 henceforward, and interlopers, with actually no more 
 right to be here than myself. I am an intruder ; so 
 are you.” Apparently they thought so themselves ; 
 for, soon after this solemn fiat of Jove had gone 
 forth, their lordships, having no farther title to their 
 robes (for which I could not help wishing that a 
 party of Jewish old-clothesmen would at this moment 
 have appeared and made a loud bidding), made 
 what haste they could to lay them aside for ever. 
 The Hoifse dispersed much more rapidly than it 
 had assembled. Major Sirr was found outside, just 
 where we left him, laying down the law (as before) 
 about pocket-handkerchiefs to old and young prac- 
 titioners ; and all parties adjourned to find what 
 consolation they might in the great evening event 
 of dinner. 
 
 Thus we were set at liberty from Dublin. Parlia- 
 ments, and installations, and masked balls, with all 
 other secondary splendours in celebration of primary 
 splendours, reflex glories that reverberated original 
 glories, at length had ceased to shine upon the Irish 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 213 
 
 metropolis. The “ season,” as it is called in great 
 cities, was over ; unfortunately the last season that 
 was ever destined to illuminate the society or to 
 stimulate the domestic trade of Dublin. It began to 
 be thought scandalous to be found in town : nobody , 
 in fact, remained, except some two hundred thousand 
 people, who never did, nor ever would, wear ermine ; 
 and in all Ireland there remained nothing at all to 
 attract, except that which no king, and no two Houses, 
 can by any conspiracy abolish — viz., the beauty of 
 her most verdant scenery. I speak of that part which 
 chiefly it is that I know — the scenery of the west — 
 Connaught beyond other provinces, and, in Connaught, 
 Mayo beyond other counties. There it was, and in 
 the county next adjoining, that Lord Altamont’s large 
 estates were situated ; the family mansion and beauti- 
 ful park being in Mayo. Thither, as nothing else now 
 remained to divert us from what, in fact, we had 
 thirsted for throughout the heats of summer, and 
 throughout the magnificences of the capital, at length 
 we set off by movements as slow and circuitous as 
 those of any royal progress in the reign of Elizabeth. 
 Making but short journeys on each day, and resting 
 always at the house of some private friend, I thus 
 obtained an opportunity of seeing the old Irish 
 nobility and gentry more extensively, and on a more 
 intimate footing, than I had hoped for. No ex- 
 perience of this kind, throughout my whole life, so 
 much interested me. In a little work, not much 
 known, of Suetonius, the most interesting record 
 which survives of the early Roman literature, it comes 
 out incidentally that many books, many idioms, and 
 verbal peculiarities belonging to the primitive ages of 
 Roman culture, were to be found still lingering in the 
 old Roman settlements, both Gaulish and Spanish, 
 long after they had become obsolete (and sometimes 
 unintelligible) in Rome. From the tardiness and the 
 difficulty of communication, the want of newspapers, 
 &c., it followed, naturally enough, that the distant 
 provincial towns, though ">ot without their own 
 separate literature and their wn literary professors, 
 
214 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 were always two or three generations in the rear of 
 the metropolis ; and thus it happened that, about 
 the time of Augustus, there were some grammatici 
 in Rome, answering to our black-letter critics, who 
 sought the material of their researches in Boulogne 
 ( Gessoriacum\ in Arles (A rela ta), or in Marseilles 
 ( Massilia ). Now, the old Irish nobility — that part, 
 I mean, which might be called the rural nobility — 
 stood in the same relation to English manners and 
 customs. Here might be found old rambling houses, 
 in the style of antique English manorial chateaux, 
 ill planned, perhaps, as regarded convenience and 
 economy, with long rambling galleries, and windows 
 innumerable, that evidently had never looked for that 
 severe audit to which they were afterwards summoned 
 by William Pitt ; but displaying, in the dwelling- 
 rooms, a comfort and “cosiness,” combined with 
 magnificence, not always so effectually attained in 
 modern times. Here were old libraries, old butlers, 
 and old customs, that seemed all alike to belong to 
 the era of Cromwell, or even an earlier era than his ; 
 whilst the ancient names, to one who had some 
 acquaintance with the great events of Irish history, 
 often strengthened the illusion. Not that I could 
 pretend to be familiar with Irish history as Irish ; 
 but, as a conspicuous chapter in the difficult policy 
 of Queen Elizabeth, of Charles I., and of Cromwell, 
 nobody who had read the English history could be a 
 stranger to the O’Neils, the O’Donnells, the Ormonds 
 (i.e., the Butlers), the Inchiquins, or the De Burghs, 
 and many scores beside. I soon found, in fact, that 
 the aristocracy of Ireland might be divided into two 
 great sections : the native Irish — territorial fixtures, so 
 powerfully described by Maturin ; and those, on the 
 other hand, who spent so much of their time and 
 revenues at Bath, Cheltenham, Weymouth, London, 
 &c., as to have become almost entirely English. 
 It was the former whom we chiefly visited; and 
 I remarked that, in the midst of hospitality the 
 most unbounded, and the amplest comfort, some of 
 these were conspicuously in the rear of the English 
 
DUBLIN 
 
 2I 5 
 
 commercial gentry, as to modern refinements of luxury. 
 There was at the same time an apparent strength of 
 character, as if formed amidst turbulent scenes, and 
 a raciness of manner, which were fitted to interest a 
 stranger profoundly, and to impress themselves on his 
 recollection. 
 
NINTH CHAPTER 
 
 FIRST REBELLION 1 
 
 In our road to Mayo, we were often upon ground 
 rendered memorable, not only by historical events, 
 but more recently by the disastrous scenes of the 
 Rebellion, by its horrors or its calamities. On reach- 
 ing Westport House, we found ourselves in situations 
 and a neighbourhood which had become the very 
 centre of the final military operations, those which 
 succeeded to the main rebellion ; and which, to the 
 people of England, and still more to the people of 
 the Continent, had offered a character of interest 
 wanting to the inartificial movements of Father Roche 
 and Bagenal Harvey. 
 
 In the year 1798 there were two great popular 
 insurrections in Ireland. It is usual to talk of the 
 Irish Rebellion, as though there had been one re- 
 bellion and no more ; but it must satisfy the reader 
 of the inaccuracy pervading the common reports of 
 this period, when he hears that there were two sepa- 
 rate rebellions : separate in time ; separate in space ; 
 separate by the character of their events ; and sepa- 
 rate even as regarded their proximate causes. The 
 first of these arose in the vernal part of summer, and 
 wasted its fury upon the county of Wexford, in the 
 centre of the kingdom. The second arose in the 
 autumn, and was confined entirely to the western 
 province of Connaught. Each, resting (it is true) 
 upon causes ultimately the same, had yet its own 
 separate occasions and excitements ; for the first 
 arose upon a premature explosion from a secret 
 society of most subtle organisation ; and the second 
 upon the encouragement of a French invasion. And 
 each of these insurrections had its own separate 
 leaders, and its own local agents. The first, though 
 precipitated into action by fortunate discoveries on 
 
 1 This means, of course, the First Irish Rebellion of 
 1798. — H. 
 
 2x6 
 
FIRST REBELLION 
 
 217 
 
 the part of the government, had been anxiously pre- 
 concerted for three years. The second was an un- 
 premeditated effort called forth by a most ill-timed, 
 and also ill-concerted, foreign invasion. The general 
 predisposing causes to rebellion were doubtless the 
 same in both cases : but the exciting causes of the 
 moment were different in each. And, finally, they 
 were divided by a complete interval of two months. 
 
 One very remarkable feature there was, however, 
 in which these two separate rebellions of 1798 coin- 
 cided : and that was, the narrow range, as to time, 
 within which each ran its course. Neither of them 
 outran the limits of one lunar month. It is a fact, 
 however startling, that each, though a perfect civil 
 war in all its proportions, frequent in warlike incident, 
 and the former rich in tragedy, passed through all the 
 stages of growth, maturity, and final extinction, within 
 one single revolution of the moon. For all the rebel 
 movements, subsequent to the morning of Vinegar 
 Hill, are to be viewed not at all in the light of 
 manoeuvres made in the spirit of military hope, but 
 in the light of final struggles for self-preservation 
 made in the spirit of absolute despair, as regarded 
 the original purposes of the war, or, indeed, as re- 
 garded any purposes whatever beyond that of instant 
 safety. The solitary object contemplated was to 
 reach some district lonely enough, and with elbow- 
 room enough, for quiet, unmolested dispersion. 
 
 A few pages will recapitulate these two civil wars. 
 I begin with the first : The War of American Sepa- 
 ration touched and quickened the dry bones that 
 lay waiting as it were for life through the West of 
 Christendom. The year 1782 brought that war to 
 its winding-up ; and the same year it was that called 
 forth Grattan and the Irish volunteers. These volun- 
 teers came forward as allies of England against French 
 and Spanish invasion ; but, once embattled, what 
 should hinder them from detecting a flaw in their 
 commission, and reading it as valid against Eng- 
 ; land herself? In that sense they did read it. That 
 Ireland had seen her own case dimly reflected in that 
 
2 I 8 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 of America, and that such a reference was stirring 
 through the national mind, appears from a remark- 
 able fact in the history of the year which followed. 
 In 1783, a haughty petition was addressed to the 
 throne, on behalf of the Roman Catholics, by an 
 association that arrogated to itself the style and title 
 of a Congress. No man could suppose that a desig- 
 nation so ominously significant had been chosen by 
 accident ; and by the English Government it was re- 
 ceived, as it was meant, for an insult and a menace. 
 What came next? The French Revolution. All 
 flesh moved under that inspiration. Fast and rank 
 now began to germinate the seed sown for the ten 
 years preceding in Ireland ; too fast and too rankly 
 for the policy that suited her situation. Concealment 
 or delay, compromise or temporising, would not have 
 been brooked, at this moment, by the fiery tempera- 
 ment of Ireland, had it not been through the extra- 
 ordinary composition of that secret society into which 
 the management of her affairs now began to devolve. 
 In the year 1792, as we are told, commenced, and in 
 1795 was finished, the famous association of United 
 Irishmen. By these terms commenced and finished, we 
 are to understand not the purposes or the arrange- 
 ments of their conspiracy against the existing govern- 
 ment, but that network of organisation, delicate as lace 
 for ladies, and strong as the harness of artillery horses, 
 which now enmeshed almost every province of Ireland, 
 knitting the strength of her peasantry into unity and 
 disposable divisions. This, it seems, was completed 
 in 1795. In a complete history of these times, no 
 one chapter would deserve so ample an investigation 
 as this subtle web of association, rising upon a large 
 base, expanding in proportion to the extent of the 
 particular county, and by intermediate links ascending 
 to some unknown apex ; all so graduated, and in such 
 nice interdependency, as to secure the instantane- 
 ous propagation upwards and downwards, laterally 
 or obliquely, of any impulse whatever; and yet so 
 effectually shrouded, that nobody knew more than 
 the two or three individual agents in immediate 
 
FIRST REBELLION 219 
 
 juxtaposition with himself, by whom he communi- 
 cated with those above his head or below his feet. 
 This organisation, in fact, of the United Irishmen 
 combined the best features, as to skill, of the two 
 most elaborate and most successful of all secret 
 societies recorded in history ; one of which went 
 before the Irish Society by centuries, and one fol- 
 lowed it after an interval of five-and-twenty years. 
 These two are the Fehm-Gericht , or court of ban 
 and extermination, which, having taken its rise in 
 Westphalia, is usually called the Secret Tribunal of 
 Westphalia, and which reached its full development 
 in the fourteenth century. The other is the Hellen- 
 istic Hetaeria ('Eratpta) — a society which, passing 
 for one of pure literary dilettanti , under the secret 
 countenance of the late Capo d’lstria (then a confi- 
 dential minister of the Czar), did actually succeed so 
 far in hoaxing the cabinets of Europe, that one-third 
 of European kings put down their names, and gave 
 their aid, as conspirators against the Sultan of Turkey, 
 whilst credulously supposing themselves honorary cor- 
 respondents of a learned body for reviving the arts 
 and literature of Athens. These two I call the most 
 successful of all secret societies, because both were 
 arrayed against the existing administrations through- 
 out the entire lands upon which they sought to 
 operate. The German Society disowned the legal 
 authorities as too weak for the ends of justice, and 
 succeeded in bringing the cognisance of crimes 
 within its own secret yet consecrated usurpation. 
 The Grecian Society made the existing powers the 
 final object of its hostility ; lived unarmed amongst 
 the very oppressors whose throats it had dedicated 
 to the sabre ; and, in a very few years, saw its pur- 
 pose accomplished. 
 
 The Society of United Irishmen combined the 
 best parts in the organisation of both these secret 
 fraternities, and obtained their advantages. The 
 society prospered in defiance of the government ; 
 nor would the government, though armed with all 
 the powers of the Dublin police and of state thunder,, 
 
2 20 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 have succeeded in mastering this society; but, on 
 the contrary, the society would assuredly have sur- 
 prised and mastered the government, had it not 
 been undermined by the perfidy of a confidential 
 brother. One instrument for dispersing knowledge, 
 employed by the United Irishmen, is worth mention- 
 ing, as it is applicable to any cause, and may be used 
 with much greater effect in an age when everybody 
 is taught to read. They printed newspapers on a 
 single side of the sheet, which were thus fitted for 
 being placarded against the walls. This expedient 
 had probably been suggested by Paris, where such 
 newspapers were often placarded, and generally 
 for the bloodiest purposes. But Louvet, in his 
 “ Memoirs/’ mentions one conducted by himself 
 on better principles : it was printed at the public 
 expense ; and sometimes more than twenty thousand 
 copies of a single number were attached to the 
 corners of streets. This was called the Centinel : 
 and those who are acquainted with the “ Memoirs 
 of Madame Roland” will remember that she cites 
 Louvet’s paper as a model for all of its class. The 
 Union Star was the paper which the United 
 Irishmen published upon this plan ; previous papers 
 on the ordinary plan — viz., the Northern Star and 
 the Press — having been violently put down by the 
 government. The Union Star however, it must 
 be acknowledged, did not seek much to elevate the 
 people by addressing them through their under- 
 standings : it was merely a violent appeal to their 
 passions, and directed against all who had incurred 
 the displeasure of the society. Newspapers, mean- 
 time, of every kind it was easy for the government 
 to suppress. But the secret society annoyed and 
 crippled the government in other modes, which it 
 was not easy to parry ; and all blows dealt in return 
 were dealt in the dark, and aimed at a shadow. 
 The society called upon Irishmen to abstain generally 
 from ardent spirits, as a means of destroying the 
 excise ; and it is certain that the society was obeyed, 
 in a degree which astonished neutral observers, all 
 
FIRST REBELLION 
 
 221 
 
 over Ireland. The same society, by a printed pro- 
 clamation, called upon the people not to purchase 
 the quit-rents of the crown, which were then on 
 sale ; and not to receive bank-notes in payment, 
 because (as the proclamation told them) a “ burst ” 
 was coming, when such paper, and the securities for 
 such purchases, would fall to a ruinous discount. 
 In this case, after much distress to the public service, 
 government obtained a partial triumph by the law 
 which cancelled the debt on a refusal to receive 
 the state paper, and which quartered soldiers upon 
 all tradesmen who demurred to such a tender. But, 
 upon the whole, it was becoming painfully evident, 
 that in Ireland there were two co-ordinate govern- 
 ments, coming into collision at every step ; and that 
 the one which more generally had the upper hand 
 in the struggle was the secret Society of United 
 Irishmen, whose members individually, and whose 
 local headquarters, were alike screened from the 
 attacks of its rival — viz., the State Government at 
 the Castle — by a cloud of impenetrable darkness. 
 
 That cloud was at last pierced. A treacherous 
 or weak brother, high in the ranks of the society, 
 and deep in their confidence, happened, when 
 travelling up to Dublin in company with a Royalist, 
 to speak half mysteriously, half ostentatiously, upon 
 the delicate position which he held in the councils 
 of his dangerous party. This weak man, Thomas 
 Reynolds, a Roman Catholic gentleman, of Kilkea 
 Castle, in Kildare, colonel of a regiment of United 
 Irish, treasurer for Kildare, and in other offices of 
 trust for the secret society, was prevailed on by 
 Mr. William Cope, a rich merchant of Dublin, who 
 alarmed his mind by pictures of the horrors attending 
 I a revolution under the circumstances of Ireland, to 
 betray all he knew to the government. His treachery 
 was first meditated in the last week of February 
 1798; and, in consequence of his depositions, on 
 1 March 12, at the house of Oliver Bond, in Dublin, 
 the government succeeded in arresting a large body 
 of the leading conspirators. The whole committee 
 
22 2 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 of Leinster, amounting to thirteen members, was 
 captured on this occasion ; but a still more valuable 
 prize was made in the persons of those who presided 
 over the Irish Directory — viz., Emmet, M‘Niven, 
 Arthur O’Connor, and Oliver Bond. As far as 
 names went, their places were immediately filled 
 up ; and a handbill was issued, on the same day, 
 with the purpose of intercepting the effects of 
 despondency amongst the great body of the con- 
 spirators. But Emmet and O’Connor were not men 
 to be effectually replaced : government had struck 
 a fatal blow, without being fully aware at first of 
 their own good luck. On the 19th of May following, 
 in consequence of a proclamation (May n), offering 
 a thousand pounds for his capture, Lord Edward 
 Eitzgerald was apprehended at the house of Mr. 
 Nicholas Murphy, a merchant in Dublin, but after 
 a very desperate resistance. The leader of the 
 arresting party, Major Swan, a Dublin magistrate, 
 distinguished for his energy, was wounded by Lord 
 Edward; and Ryan, one of the officers, so despe- 
 rately, that he died within a fortnight. Lord Edward 
 himself languished for some time, and died in great 
 agony on the 3rd of June, from a pistol-shot which 
 took effect on his shoulder. Lord Edward Fitz- 
 gerald might be regarded as an injured man. From 
 the exuberant generosity of his temper, he had 
 powerfully sympathised with the French Republicans 
 at an early stage of their revolution ; and having, 
 with great indiscretion, but an indiscretion that 
 admitted of some palliation in so young a man 
 and of so ardent a temperament, publicly avowed 
 his sympathy, he was ignominiously dismissed from 
 the army. That act made an enemy of one who, 
 on several grounds, was not a man to be despised ; 
 for, though weak as respected his powers of self- 
 control, Lord Edward was well qualified to make 
 himself beloved ; he had considerable talents ; his 
 very name, as a son of the only ducal house 1 in 
 
 1 “ The only ducal house” : — That is, the only one not 
 joyal. There are four provinces in Ireland — Ulster , Con - 
 
FIRST REBELLION 223 
 
 Ireland, was a spell and a rallying-word for a day 
 of battle to the Irish peasantry ; and, finally, by 
 his marriage with a natural daughter of the then 
 Duke of Orleans, he had founded some important 
 connections and openings to secret influence in 
 France. The young lady whom he had married 
 was generally known by the name of Pamela ; and 
 it has been usually supposed that she is the person 
 described by Miss Edgeworth, under the name of 
 Virginia, in the latter part of her “ Belinda . 57 How 
 that may be, I cannot pretend to say : Pamela was 
 certainly led into some indiscretions ; in particular, 
 she was said to have gone to a ball without shoes 
 or stockings, which seems to argue the same sort 
 of ignorance, ^nd the same docility to any chance 
 impressions, which characterise the Virginia of Miss 
 Edgeworth. She was a reputed daughter (as I have 
 said) of Philippe Egalite, and her putative mother 
 was Madame de Genlis, who had been settled in 
 that prince’s family, as governess to his children, 
 more especially to the sister of the present French 
 King . 1 Lord Edward’s whole course had been 
 marked by generosity and noble feeling. Far better 
 to have pardoned 2 such a man, and (if that were 
 
 naught , Mimster, which three give old traditional titles to 
 three personages of the blood-royal. Remains only Leinster , 
 which gives the title of Duke to the Fitzgeralds. 
 
 1 “ Present French King ” ; — Viz., in the year 1833. 
 
 2 “ To have pardoned ” &c. : — This was written under circum- 
 stances of great hurry ; and, were it not for that palliation, 
 would be inexcusably thoughtless. For, in a double sense, 
 it is doubtful how far the government could have pardoned 
 Lord Edward. First, in a prudential sense, was it possible 
 (except in the spirit of a German sentimentalising drama) 
 to pardon a conspicuous, and, within certain limits, a very 
 influential officer, for publicly avowing opinions tending to 
 treason, and at war with the constitutional system of the 
 land which fed him, and which claimed his allegiance ? Was 
 it possible, in point of prudence or in point of dignity, to over- 
 look such anti-national sentiments, whilst neither disavowed 
 nor ever likely to be disavowed ? Was this possible — regard 
 being had to the inevitable effect of such unearned forgiveness 
 upon the army at large ? But, secondly, in a merely logical 
 sense of practical self-consistency, wouid it have been rational 
 or even intelligible to pardon a man who probably would not 
 
224 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 possible) to have conciliated his support ; but, says 
 a contemporary Irishman, “ those were not times of 
 conciliation.” 
 
 Some days after this event were arrested the two 
 brothers named Shearer, men of talent, who eventu- 
 ally suffered for treason. These discoveries were due 
 to treachery of a peculiar sort ; not to the treachery 
 of an apostate brother breaking his faith, but of 
 a counterfeit brother simulating the character of 
 conspirator, and by that fraud obtaining a key to 
 the fatal secrets of the United Irishmen. His 
 perfidy, therefore, consisted, not in any betrayal 
 of secrets, but in the fraud by which he obtained 
 them. Government, without having yet penetrated 
 to the very heart of the mystery, had now discovered 
 enough to guide them in their most energetic pre- 
 cautions ; and the result was that the conspirators, 
 whose policy had hitherto been to wait for the 
 co-operation of a French army, now suddenly began 
 to distrust this policy : their fear was, that the 
 ground would be cut from beneath their feet 
 if they waited any longer. More was evidently 
 risked by delay than by dispensing altogether with 
 foreign aid. To forego this aid was perilous ; to 
 wait for it was ruin. It was resolved, therefore, 
 to commence the insurrection on the 23rd of May; 
 and, in order to distract the government, to com- 
 mence it by simultaneous assaults upon all the 
 military posts in the neighbourhood of Dublin. 
 This plan was discovered, but scarcely in time to 
 prevent the effects of a surprise. On the 21st, late 
 in the evening, the conspiracy had been announced 
 by the Lord-Lieutenant’s Secretary to the Lord 
 Mayor ; and, on the following day, by a message 
 from his Excellency to both Houses of Parliament. 
 
 The insurrection, however, in spite of this official 
 warning, began at the appointed hour. The skir- 
 mishes were many, and in many places ; but, generally 
 
 be pardoned ; that is, who must (consenting or not consenting) 
 benefit by the concessions of the pardon, whilst disowning all 
 reciprocal obligations ? 
 
FIRST REBELLION 2 2g 
 
 speaking, they were not favourable in their results to 
 the insurgents. The mail-coaches, agreeably to the 
 preconcerted plan, had all been intercepted ; their non- 
 arrival being everywhere understood by the conspira- 
 tors as a silent signal that the war had commenced. 
 Yet this summons to the more distant provinces, though 
 truly interpreted, had not been truly answered. The 
 communication between the capital and the interior, 
 almost completely interrupted at first, had been at 
 length fully restored ; and a few days saw the main 
 strength (as it was supposed) of the insurrection sup- 
 pressed without much bloodshed. But hush ! what 
 is that in the rear ? 
 
 Just at this moment, when all the world was dis- 
 posed to think the whole affair quietly composed, the 
 flame burst out with tenfold fury in a part of the 
 country from which government, with some reason, 
 had turned away their anxieties and preparations. 
 This was the county of Wexford, which the Earl of 
 Mountmorris had described to the government as so 
 entirely well-affected to the Loyal cause, that he had 
 personally pledged himself for its good conduct. On 
 the night before Whitsunday, however, May 27, the 
 standard of revolt was there raised by John Murphy, 
 a Catholic priest, well known henceforwards under the 
 title of Father Murphy. 
 
 The campaign opened unauspiciously for the 
 Royalists. The rebels had posted themselves on two 
 eminences : Kilthomas, about ten miles to the west- 
 ward of Gorey ; and the Hill of Oulart, half-way (/.<?., 
 about a dozen miles) between Gorey and Wexford. 
 They were attacked at each point on Whitsunday. 
 From the first point they were driven easily, and with 
 considerable loss ; but at Oulart the issue was very 
 different. Father Murphy commanded here in per- 
 son ; and, finding that his men gave way in great 
 confusion before a picked body of the North Cork 
 Militia, under the command of Colonel Foote, he 
 contrived to persuade them that their flight was lead- 
 ing them right upon a body of royal cavalry posted to 
 intercept their retreat. This fear effectually halted 
 
 H 
 
2 26 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 them. The insurgents, through a prejudice natural 
 to inexperience, had an unreasonable dread of cavalry. 
 A second time, therefore, facing about to retreat from 
 this imaginary body of horse, they came, of necessity, 
 and without design, full upon their pursuers, whom 
 unhappily the intoxication of victory had by this 
 time brought into the most careless disarray. These, 
 almost to a man, the rebels annihilated ; universal 
 consternation followed amongst the Royalists ; Father 
 Murphy led them to Ferns, and thence to the attack 
 of Enniscorthy. 
 
 Has the reader witnessed, or has he heard de- 
 scribed, the sudden burst — the explosion, one might 
 say — -by which a Swedish winter passes into spring, 
 and spring simultaneously into summer ? The icy 
 sceptre of winter does not there thaw and melt away 
 in just gradations : it is broken, it is shattered, in a 
 day, in an hour, and with a violence brought home 
 to every sense. No second type of resurrection, so 
 mighty or so affecting, is manifested by nature in 
 southern climates. Such is the headlong tumult, 
 such “ the torrent rapture,” by which life is let loose 
 amongst the air, the earth, and the waters under the 
 earth. Exactly what this vernal resurrection is in 
 manifestations of power and life, by comparison with 
 climates that have no winter — such, and marked with 
 features as distinct, was this Irish insurrection, when 
 suddenly surrendered to the whole contagion of 
 politico-religious fanaticism, by comparison with 
 vulgar martinet strategics, and the pedantry of 
 technical warfare. What a picture must Enniscorthy 
 have presented on the 27th of May ! Fugitives 
 crowding in from Ferns announced the rapid ad- 
 vance of the rebels, now at least 7000 strong, drunk 
 with victory, and maddened with vindictive fury. 
 Not long after midday, their advanced guard, well 
 armed with muskets (pillaged, be it observed, from 
 royal magazines, hastily deserted), commenced a 
 tumultuous assault. Less than 300 militia and yeo- 
 manry formed the garrison of the place, which had no 
 sort of defences, except the natural one of the river 
 
FIRST REBELLION 2 2 7 
 
 Slaney. This, however, was fordable, and that the 
 assailants knew. The slaughter amongst the rebels, 
 meantime, from the little caution they exhibited, and 
 their total defect of military skill, was murderous. 
 Spite of their immense numerical advantages, it is 
 probable they would have been defeated. But in 
 Enniscorthy (as where not?) treason from within was 
 emboldened to raise its crest at the very crisis of sus- 
 pense ; incendiaries were at work ; and flames began 
 to issue from many houses at once. Retreat itself 
 became suddenly doubtful ; depending, as it did, 
 altogether upon the state of the wind. At the right 
 hand of every Royalist stood a traitor ; in his own 
 house oftentimes lurked other traitors, waiting for the 
 signal to begin ; in the front was the enemy ; in the 
 rear was a line of blazing streets. Three hours the 
 battle had raged : it was now 4 P.M., and at this 
 
 moment the garrison hastily gave way, and fled to 
 Wexford. 
 
 Now came a scene which swallowed up all distinct 
 or separate features in its frantic confluence of horrors. 
 All the loyalists of Enniscorthy, all the gentry for 
 miles around, who had congregated in that town, as a 
 centre of security, were summoned at that moment, 
 not to an orderly retreat, but to instant flight. At 
 one end of the street were seen the rebel pikes, and 
 bayonets, and fierce faces, already gleaming through 
 the smoke : at the other end volumes of fire, surging 
 and billowing from the thatched roofs and blazing 
 rafters, beginning to block up the avenues of escape. 
 Then began the agony and uttermost conflict of what 
 is worst and what is best in human nature. Then 
 was to be seen the very delirium of fear, and the very 
 delirium of vindictive malice ; private and ignoble 
 hatred, of ancient origin, shrouding itself in the mask 
 of patriotic wrath ; the tiger glare of just vengeance, 
 fresh from intolerable wrongs and the never-to-be- 
 forgotten ignominy of stripes and personal degrada- 
 tion ; panic, self-palsied by its own excess ; flight, 
 eager or stealthy, according to the temper and the 
 means ; volleying pursuit ; the very frenzy of agita- 
 
2 28 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 tion, under every mode of excitement ; and here and 
 there, towering aloft, the desperation of maternal love, 
 victorious and supreme above all lower passions. I 
 recapitulate and gather under general abstractions 
 many an individual anecdote, reported by those who 
 were on that day present in Enniscorthy ; for at 
 Ferns, not far off, and deeply interested in all those 
 transactions, I had private friends, intimate partici- 
 pators in the trials of that fierce hurricane, and joint 
 sufferers with those who suffered most. Ladies were 
 then seen in crowds hurrying on foot to Wexford, the 
 nearest asylum, though fourteen miles distant, many 
 in slippers, bareheaded, and without any supporting 
 arm ; for the flight of their defenders, having been 
 determined by a sudden angular movement of the as- 
 sailants, coinciding with the failure of their own ammu- 
 nition, had left no time for warning ; and fortunate 
 it was for the unhappy fugitives, that the confusion 
 of burning streets, concurring with the seductions of 
 pillage, drew aside so many of the victors as to break 
 the unity of a pursuit else hellishly unrelenting. 
 
 Wexford, meantime, was in no condition to 
 promise more than a momentary shelter. Orders 
 had been already issued to extinguish all domestic 
 fires throughout the town, and to unroof all the 
 thatched houses ; so great was the jealousy of 
 internal treason. From without, also, the alarm 
 was every hour increasing. On Tuesday the 29th 
 of May the rebel army advanced from Enniscorthy 
 to a post called Three Rocks, not much above 
 two miles from Wexford. Their strength was 
 now increased to at least 15,000 men. Never was 
 there a case requiring more energy in the disposers 
 of the royal forces ; never one which met with 
 less, even in the most responsible quarters. The 
 nearest military station was the fort at Duncannon, 
 twenty-three miles distant. Thither, on the 29th, 
 an express had been despatched by the Mayor of 
 Wexford, reporting their situation, and calling for 
 immediate aid. General Fawcet replied, that he 
 would himself march that same evening with the 
 
FIRST REBELLION 229 
 
 13th regiment, part of the Meath Militia, and 
 sufficient artillery. Relying upon these assurances, 
 the small parties of militia and yeomanry then 
 in Wexford gallantly threw themselves upon the 
 most trying services in advance. Some com- 
 panies of the Donegal Militia, not mustering above 
 200 men, marched immediately to a position between 
 the rebel camp and Wexford ; whilst others of the 
 North Cork Militia and the local yeomanry, with 
 equal cheerfulness, undertook the defence of that 
 town. Meantime, General Fawcet had consulted 
 his personal comfort by halting for the night , though 
 aware of the dreadful emergency, at a station sixteen 
 miles short of Wexford A small detachment, how- 
 ever, with part of his artillery, he sent forward ; these 
 were the next morning intercepted by the rebels 
 at Three Rocks, and massacred almost to a man. 
 Two officers, who escaped the slaughter, carried the 
 intelligence to the advance post of the Donegals : 
 but they, so far from being disheartened, marched 
 immediately against the rebel army, enormous as 
 was the disproportion, with the purpose of re- 
 capturing the artillery. A singular contrast this to 
 the conduct of General Fawcet, who retreated 
 hastily to Duncannon upon the first intelligence of 
 this disaster. Such a regressive movement was 
 so little anticipated by the gallant Donegals, that 
 they continued to advance against the enemy, until 
 the precision with which the captured artillery was 
 served against themselves, and the non-appearance 
 of the promised aid, warned them to retire. At 
 Wexford they found all in confusion and the hurry 
 of retreat. The flight, as it may be called, of General 
 Fawcet was now confirmed ; and, as the local position 
 of Wexford made it indefensible against artillery, the 
 whole body of Loyalists, except those whom insuf- 
 ficient warning had thrown into the rear, now fled 
 from the wrath of the rebels to Duncannon. It is 
 a shocking illustration (if truly imported) of the 
 thoughtless ferocity which .characterised too many 
 of the Orange troops, that, along the whole line of 
 
230 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 this retreat, they continued to bum the cabins of 
 Roman Catholics, and often to massacre in cold blood 
 the unoffending inhabitants ; totally forgetful of the 
 many hostages whom the insurgents now held in 
 their power, and careless of the dreadful provocations 
 which they were thus throwing out to the bloodiest 
 reprisals. 
 
 Thus it was, and through mismanagement thus 
 mischievously alert, or through torpor thus unac- 
 countably base, that actually, on the 30th of May, 
 not having raised their standard before the 26th, the 
 rebels had already been permitted to possess them- 
 selves of the county of Wexford in its whole southern 
 division — Ross and Duncannon only excepted ; of 
 which the latter was not liable to capture by coup 
 de main , and the other was saved by the procras- 
 tination of the rebels. The northern division of 
 the county was overrun pretty much in the same 
 hasty style, and through the same desperate neglect in 
 previous concert of plans. Upon first turning their 
 views to the north, the rebels had taken up a position 
 on the Hill of Corrigrua, as a station from which 
 they could march with advantage upon the town 
 of Gorey, lying seven miles to the northward. On 
 the first of June, a truly brilliant affair had taken 
 place between a mere handful of militia and 
 yeomanry from this town of Gorey and a strong 
 detachment from the rebel camp. Many persons 
 at the time regarded this as the best fought action 
 in the whole war. The two parties had met about 
 two miles from Gorey ; and it is pretty certain that, 
 if the yeoman cavalry could have been prevailed 
 on to charge at the critical moment, the defeat 
 would have been a most murderous one to the 
 rebels. As it was, they escaped, though with con- 
 siderable loss of honour. Yet even this they were 
 allowed to retrieve within a few days, in a re- 
 markable way, and with circumstances of still 
 greater scandal to the military discretion in high 
 quarters than had attended the movements of 
 General Fawcet in the south. 
 
FIRST REBELLION 23 I 
 
 On the 4th of June, a little army of 1500 men, 
 under the command of Major-General Loftus, had 
 assembled at Gorey. The plan was — to march by 
 two different roads upon the rebel encampment at 
 Corrigrua ; and this plan was adopted. Meantime, 
 on the same night, the rebel army had put them- 
 selves in motion for Gorey ; and of this counter- 
 movement full and timely information had been 
 given by a farmer at the royal headquarters ; but 
 such was the obstinate infatuation that no officer 
 of rank would condescend to give him a hearing. 
 The consequences may be imagined. Colonel 
 Walpole, an Englishman, full of courage, but pre- 
 sumptuously disdainful of the enemy, led a division 
 upon one of the two roads, having no scouts, nor 
 taking any sort of precaution. Suddenly he found his 
 line of march crossed by the enemy in great strength : 
 he refused to halt or to retire ; was shot through 
 the head ; and a great part of the advanced detach- 
 ment was slaughtered on the spot, and his artillery 
 captured. General Loftus, advancing on the parallel 
 road, heard the firing, and detached the grenadier 
 company of the Antrim Militia to the aid of Walpole. 
 These, to the amount of seventy men, were cut 
 off almost to a man ; and when the general, who 
 could not cross over to the other road through 
 the enclosures, from the encumbrance of his artillery, 
 had at length reached the scene of action by a 
 long circuit, he found himself in the following truly 
 ludicrous position : The rebels had pursued Colonel 
 Walpole’s division to Gorey, and possessed them- 
 selves of that place ; the general had thus lost his 
 headquarters, without having seen the army, whom 
 he had suffered to slip past him in the dark. He 
 marched back disconsolately to Gorey, took a look 
 at the rebel posts which now occupied the town 
 in strength, was saluted with a few rounds from 
 his own cannon, and finally retreated out of the 
 county. 
 
 This movement of General Loftus, and the previous 
 one of General Fawcet, circumstantially illustrate the 
 
232 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 puerile imbecility with which the royal cause was then 
 conducted. Both movements foundered in an hour, 
 through surprises against which each had been amply 
 forewarned. Fortunately for the government, the 
 affairs of the rebels were managed even worse. Two 
 sole enterprises were undertaken by them after this, 
 previously to the closing battle of Vinegar Hill ; both 
 being of the very utmost importance to their interests, 
 and both sure of success, if they had been pushed 
 forward in time. The first was the attack upon 
 Ross, undertaken on the 29th of May, the day after 
 the capture of Enniscorthy. Had that attack been 
 pressed forward without delay, there never were two 
 opinions as to the certainty of its success ; and, having 
 succeeded, it would have laid open to the rebels the 
 important counties of Waterford and Kilkenny. Being 
 delayed until the 5th of June, the assault was repulsed 
 with prodigious slaughter. The other was the attack 
 upon Arklow in the north. On the capture of Gorey, 
 on the night of June 4, as the immediate consequence 
 of Colonel Walpole’s defeat, had the rebels advanced 
 upon Arklow, they would have found it for some days 
 totally undefended ; the whole garrison having re- 
 treated in panic, early on June 5, to Wicklow. The 
 capture of this important place would have laid open 
 the whole road to the capital ; would probably have 
 caused a rising in that great city ; and, in any event, 
 would have indefinitely prolonged the war, and multi- 
 plied the distractions of government. Merely from 
 sloth, and the spirit of procrastination, however, the 
 rebel army halted at Gorey until the 9th, and then 
 advanced with what seemed the overpowering force 
 of 27,000 men. It is a striking lesson upon the sub- 
 ject of procrastination, that precisely on that morning 
 of June 9 the attempt had first become hopeless. 
 Until then the place had been positively emptied of 
 all inhabitants whatsoever. Exactly on the 9th the 
 old garrison had been ordered back from Wicklow, 
 and reinforced by a crack English regiment (the 
 Durham Fencibles), on whom chiefly at this critical 
 hour had devolved the defence ; which was peculiarly 
 
FIRST REBELLION 233 
 
 trying, from the vast numbers of the assailants, but 
 brilliant, masterly, and perfectly successful. 
 
 This obstinate and fiercely-contested battle of Ark- 
 low was indeed, by general consent, the hinge on 
 which the rebellion turned. Nearly 30,000 men, 
 armed every man of them with pikes, and 5000 with 
 muskets, supported also by some artillery, sufficiently 
 well served to do considerable execution at a most 
 important point in the line of defence, could not be 
 defeated without a very trying struggle. And here, 
 again, it is worthy of record, that General Needham, 
 who commanded on this day, would have followed 
 the example of Generals Fawcet and Loftus, and have 
 ordered a retreat, had he not been determinately 
 opposed by Colonel Skerret of the Durham regiment. 
 Such was the imbecility, and the want of moral 
 courage, on the part of the military leaders : for it 
 would be unjust to impute any defect in animal 
 courage to the feeblest of these leaders. General 
 Needham, for example, exposed his person, without 
 reserve, throughout the whole of this difficult day. 
 Any amount of cannon-shot he could face cheerfully, 
 but not a trying responsibility. 
 
 From the defeat of Arklow, the rebels gradually 
 retired, between the 9th and the 20th of June, to their 
 main military position of Vinegar Hill, which lies 
 immediately above the town of Enniscorthy, and had 
 fallen into their hands, concurrently with that place, 
 on the 28th of May. Here their whole forces, with 
 the exception of perhaps 6000, — who attacked General 
 Moore (ten and a half years later the Moore of 
 Corunna) when marching on the 26th towards Wex- 
 ford, — had been concentrated ; and to this point, 
 therefore, as a focus, had the royal army, 13,000 
 strong, with a respectable artillery, under the supreme 
 command of General Lake, converged in four separate 
 divisions, about the 19th and 20th of June. The 
 great blow was to be struck on the 21st; and the 
 plan was, that the royal forces, moving to the assault 
 of the rebel position upon four lines at right angles to 
 each other (as if, for instance, from the four cardinal 
 
 h 2 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 234 
 
 points to the same centre), should surround their en- 
 campment, and shut up every avenue to escape. On 
 this plan, the field of battle would have been one vast 
 slaughter-house ; for quarter was not granted on either 
 side . 1 But the quadrille, if it were ever seriously con- 
 certed, was entirely defeated by the failure of General 
 Needham, who did not present himself with his divi- 
 sion until nine o’clock, a full half-hour after the battle 
 was over, and thus earned the sobriquet of The late 2 
 General Needham. Whether the failure were really in 
 this officer, or (as was alleged by his apologists) had 
 been already preconcerted in the inconsistent orders 
 issued to him by General Lake, with the covert inten- 
 tion, as many believe, of mercifully counteracting his 
 own scheme of wholesale butchery — to this day re- 
 mains obscure. The effect of that delay, in whatever 
 way caused, was for once such as must win every- 
 body’s applause. The action had commenced at 
 seven o’clock in the morning ; by half-past eight, the 
 whole rebel army was in flight ; and, naturally making 
 for the only point left unguarded, it escaped with no 
 great slaughter (but leaving behind all its artillery, 
 and a good deal of valuable plunder), through what 
 was facetiously called ever afterwards Needham's Gap . 
 After this capital rout of Vinegar Hill, the rebel army 
 day by day mouldered away. A large body, however, 
 of the fiercest and most desperate continued for some 
 
 1 st For quarter was not granted on either side ” : — I repeat, 
 as all along and necessarily I have repeated, that which orally 
 I was told at the time, or which subsequently I have read in 
 published accounts. But the reader is aware by this time of my 
 steadfast conviction that more easily might a camel go through 
 the eye of a needle, than a reporter, fresh from a campaign 
 blazing with partisanship, and that partisanship representing 
 ancient and hereditary feuds, could by possibility cleanse him- 
 self from the virus of such a prejudice. 
 
 2 The same jest was applied to Mr. Pitt’s brother. When 
 First Lord of the Admiralty, people calling on him as late as 
 even 10 or 11 p.m. were told that his lordship was riding in the 
 Park. On this account partly, but more pointedly with a 
 malicious reference to the contrast between his languor and the 
 fiery activity of his father, the first earl, he was jocularly called 
 'J'he late Lord Chatha 7 n. 
 
FIRST REBELLION 235 
 
 time to make flying marches in all directions, accord- 
 ing to the positions of the King’s forces, and the 
 momentary favour of accidents. Once or twice they 
 were brought to action by Sir James Duff and Sir 
 Charles Asgill ; and, ludicrously enough, once more 
 they were suffered to escape by the eternal delays of 
 the “ late Needham.” At length, however, after many 
 skirmishes, and all varieties of local success, they 
 finally dispersed upon a bog in the county of Dublin. 
 Many desperadoes, however, took up their quarters 
 for a long time in the dwarf woods of Killaughrin, 
 near Enniscorthy, assuming the trade of marauders, 
 but ludicrously designating themselves the Babes in 
 the Wood. It is an inexplicable fact, that many 
 deserters from the militia regiments, who had behaved 
 well throughout the campaign, and adhered faithfully 
 to their colours, now resorted to this confederation of 
 the woods ; ftom which it cost some trouble to dis- 
 lodge them. Another party, in the woods and moun- 
 tains of Wicklow, were found still more formidable, 
 and continued to infest the adjacent country through 
 the ensuing winter. These were not finally ejected 
 from their lairs until after one of their chiefs had been 
 killed in a night skirmish by a young man defending 
 his house, and the other chief, weary of his savage life, 
 had surrendered himself to transportation. 
 
 It diffused general satisfaction throughout Ireland, 
 that, on the very day before the final engagement of 
 Vinegar Hill, Lord Cornwallis made his entry into 
 Dublin as the new Lord-Lieutenant. A proclamation, 
 issued early in July, of general amnesty to all who 
 had shed no blood except on the field of battle, noti- 
 fied to the country the new spirit of policy which now 
 distinguished the government ; and, doubtless, that 
 one merciful change worked marvels in healing the 
 agitations of the land. Still it was thought necessary 
 that severe justice should take its course amongst 
 the most conspicuous leaders or agents in the insur- 
 rection. Martial law still prevailed ; and under that 
 law we know, through a speech of the Duke of Wel- 
 lington’s, how entirely the very elements of justice are 
 
236 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 dependent upon individual folly or caprice. Many 
 of those who had shown the greatest generosity, and 
 with no slight risk to themselves, were now selected 
 to suffer. Bagenal Harvey, a Protestant gentleman, 
 who had held the supreme command of the rebel 
 army for some time with infinite vexation to himself, 
 and taxed with no one instance of cruelty or excess, 
 was one of those doomed to execution. He had 
 possessed an estate of nearly three thousand per 
 annum ; and at the same time with him was executed 
 another gentleman, of more than three times that 
 estate, Cornelius Grogan. Singular it was, that men 
 of this condition and property, men of feeling and 
 refinement, should have staked the happiness of their 
 families upon a contest so forlorn. Some there were, 
 however, and possibly these gentlemen, who could 
 have explained their motives intelligibly enough : 
 they had been forced by persecution, and actually 
 baited into the ranks of the rebels. One picturesque 
 difference in the deaths of these two gentlemen was 
 remarkable, as contrasted with their previous habits. 
 Grogan was constitutionally timid ; and yet he faced 
 the scaffold and the trying preparations of the execu- 
 tioner with fortitude. On the other hand, Bagenal 
 Harvey, who had fought several duels with coolness, 
 exhibited considerable trepidation in his last moments. 
 Perhaps, in both, the difference might be due entirely 
 to some physical accident of health, or momentary 
 nervous derangement. 1 
 
 1 Perhaps also not. Possibly enough there may be no call 
 for any such exceptional solution : for, after all, there may be 
 nothing to solve — no dignus vindice nodus. As regards the 
 sudden interchange of characters on the scaffold — the constitu- 
 tionally brave man all at once becoming timid, and the timid 
 man becoming brave — it must be remembered that the par- 
 ticular sort of courage applicable to duelling, when the danger 
 is much more of a fugitive and momentary order than that 
 which invests a battle lasting for hours, depends almost entirely 
 upon a man’s confidence in his own luck — a peculiarity of mind 
 which exists altogether apart from native resources of courage, 
 whether moral or physical : usually this mode of courage is but 
 a transformed expression for a sanguine temperament. A man 
 who is habitually depressed by a constitutional taint of de- 
 
FIRST REBELLION 
 
 2 37 
 
 Among the crowd, however, of persons who suffered 
 death at this disastrous era, there were two that merit 
 a special commemoration for their virtuous resistance, 
 in disregard of all personal risk, to a horrid fanaticism 
 of cruelty. One was a butcher, the other a seafaring 
 man — both rebels. But they must have been truly 
 generous, brave, and noble-minded men. During the 
 occupation of Wexford by the rebel army, they were 
 repeatedly the sole opponents, at great personal risk, 
 to the general massacre then meditated by some 
 few popish bigots. And, finally, when all resistance 
 seemed likely to be unavailing, they both demanded 
 
 spondency may carry into a duel a sublime principle of calm, 
 self-sacrificing courage, as being possibly utterly without hope, 
 a courage, therefore, which has to fight with internal resistance, 
 to which there may be nothing corresponding in a cheerful 
 temperament. 
 
 But there is another and separate agency through which the 
 fear of death may happen to act as a disturbing force, and most 
 irregularly, as viewed in relation to moral courage and strength 
 of mind. This anomalous force is the imaginative and shadowy 
 terror with which different minds recoil from death — not con- 
 sidered as an agony or torment, but considered as a mystery, 
 and, next after God, as the most infinite of mysteries. In a 
 brave man this terror may happen to be strong ; in a pusillani- 
 mous man, simply through inertness and original feebleness of 
 imagination, may happen to be scarcely developed. This oscil- 
 lation of horror, alternating between death as an agony and 
 death as a mystery, not only exists with a corresponding set of 
 consequences accordingly as one or other prevails, but is some- 
 times consciously contemplated and put into the scales of com- 
 parison and counter-valuation. For instance, one of the early 
 Csesars reviewed the case thus: “ Emori nolo: me esse mor - 
 tuum nihil cestumo ” (From death as the act and process of 
 dying, I revolt : but as to death, viewed as a permanent state 
 or condition, I don’t value it at a straw). What this particular 
 Caesar detested, and viewed with burning malice, was death 
 the agony — death the physical torment. As to death the 
 mystery, want of sensibility to the infinite and the shadowy 
 had disarmed that of its terrors for him. Yet, on the contrary, 
 how many are there who face the mere physical anguish of 
 dying with stern indifference. But death the mystery — death 
 that, not satisfied with changing our objective, may attack even 
 the roots of our subjective — there lies the mute, ineffable, voice- 
 less horror before which all human courage is abashed, even as 
 all human resistance becomes childish when measuring itself 
 against gravitation. 
 
238 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 resolutely from the chief patron of this atrocious 
 policy that he should fight themselves, armed in 
 whatever way he might prefer, and, as they expressed 
 it, “ prove himself a man / 7 before he should be at 
 liberty to sport in this wholesale way with innocent 
 blood. 
 
 One painful fact I will state, in taking leave of this 
 subject ; and that, I believe, will be quite sufficient to 
 sustain anything I have said in disparagement of the 
 government ; by which, however, I mean, in justice, 
 the local administration of Ireland. For, as to the 
 supreme government in England, that body must be 
 supposed, at the utmost, to have passively acquiesced 
 in the recommendations of the Irish Cabinet, even 
 when it interfered so far. In particular, the scourgings 
 and flagellations resorted to in Wexford and Kildare, 
 &c., must have been originally suggested by minds 
 familiar with the habits of the Irish aristocracy in the 
 treatment of their dependants. Candid Irishmen will 
 admit that the habit of kicking, or threatening to kick, 
 waiters in coffee-houses or other menial dependants 
 — a habit which, in England, would be met instantly 
 by defiance and menaces of action for assault and 
 battery — is not yet altogether obsolete in Ireland . 1 
 Thirty years ago it was still more prevalent, and pre- 
 supposed that spirit and temper in the treatment of 
 menial dependants out of which, doubtless, arose the 
 practice of judicial (i.e. tentative) flagellations. Mean- 
 time, that fact with which I propose to close my re- 
 collections of this great tumult, and which seems to 
 be a sufficient guarantee for the very severest reflec- 
 tions on the spirit of the government, is expressed 
 significantly in the terms, used habitually by Roman 
 Catholic gentlemen, in prudential exculpation of 
 themselves, when threatened with inquiry for their 
 conduct during these times of agitation : “ I thank 
 my God that no man can charge me justly with 
 having saved the life of any Protestant, or his house 
 from pillage, by my intercession with the rebel chiefs . 77 
 How ! Did men boast of collusion with violence and 
 1 “ Not yet altogether obsolete " : — Written in 1833. 
 
FIRST REBELLION 239 
 
 the spirit of massacre ? What did that mean ? It 
 meant this : Some Roman Catholics had pleaded, 
 and pleaded truly, as a reason for special indulgence 
 to themselves, that any influence which might belong 
 to them, on the score of religion or of private friend- 
 ship, with the rebel authorities, had been used by 
 them on behalf of persecuted Protestants, either in 
 delivering them altogether, or in softening their doom. 
 But, to the surprise of everybody, this plea was so far 
 from being entertained favourably by the courts of 
 inquiry, that, on the contrary, an argument was built 
 upon it, dangerous in the last degree to the pleader. 
 “ You admit, then,” it was retorted, “ having had this 
 very considerable influence upon the rebel coun- 
 cils ; your influence extended to the saving of lives ; in 
 that case we must suppose you to have been known 
 privately as their friend and supporter.” Thus to 
 have delivered an innocent man from murder argued 
 that the deliverer must have been an accomplice of 
 the murderous party. Readily it may be supposed 
 that few would be disposed to urge such a vindi- 
 cation, when it became known in what way it was 
 likely to operate. The government itself had made' it 
 perilous to profess humanity ; and every man hence- 
 forward gloried publicly in his callousness and in- 
 sensibility as the one best safeguard to himself on a 
 path so closely beset with rocks. 
 
TENTH CHAPTER 
 
 FRENCH INVASION OF IRELAND, AND SECOND 
 REBELLION 
 
 The decisive battle of Vinegar Hill took place at 
 Midsummer : and with that battle terminated the 
 First Rebellion. Two months later, a French force, 
 not making fully a thousand men, under the com- 
 mand of General Humbert, landed on the west coast 
 of Ireland, and again roused the Irish peasantry to 
 insurrection. This latter insurrection, and the in- 
 vasion which aroused it, naturally had a peculiar 
 interest for Lord Westport and myself, who, in our 
 present abode of Westport House, were living in its 
 local centre. 
 
 I in particular was led, by hearing on every side 
 the conversation reverting to the dangers and tragic 
 incidents of the era, separated from us by not quite 
 two years, to make inquiries of everybody who had 
 personally participated in the commotions. Records 
 there were on every side, and memorials even in 
 our bedrooms, of this French visit ; for at one time 
 they had occupied Westport House in some strength. 
 The largest town in our neighbourhood was Castle- 
 bar, distant about eleven Irish miles. To this it was 
 that the French addressed their very earliest efforts. 
 Advancing rapidly, . and with their usual style of 
 theatrical confidence, they had obtained at first a 
 degree of success which was almost surprising to 
 their own insolent vanity, and which, long afterwards, 
 became a subject of bitter mortification to our own 
 army. Had there been at this point any energy at 
 all corresponding to that of the enemy, or commen- 
 surate to the intrinsic superiority of our own troops 
 in steadiness, the French would have been compelled 
 to lay down their arms. The experience of those 
 days, however, showed how deficient is the finest 
 composition of an army, unless where its martial 
 qualities have been developed by practice ; and how 
 liable is all courage, when utterly inexperienced, to 
 
 240 
 
SECOND REBELLION 24 1 
 
 sudden panics. This gasconading advance, which 
 would have foundered utterly against a single bat- 
 talion of the troops which fought in 1812-13 amongst 
 the Pyrenees, was here for the moment successful. 
 
 The bishop of this see, Dr. Stock, with his whole 
 household, and, indeed, his whole pastoral charge, 
 became on this occasion prisoners to the enemy. 
 The Republican headquarters were fixed for a time 
 in the Episcopal Palace : and there it was that 
 General Humbert and his stalk lived in familiar 
 intercourse with the bishop ; who thus became well 
 qualified to record (which he soon afterwards did in 
 an anonymous pamphlet) the leading circumstances 
 of the French incursion, and the consequent insur- 
 rection in Connaught, as well as the most striking 
 features in the character and deportment of the 
 Republican officers. Riding over the scene of these 
 transactions daily for some months, in company with 
 Dr. Peter Browne, the Dean of Ferns (an illegitimate 
 son of the late Lord Aitamont, and therefore half- 
 brother to the present), w T hose sacred character had 
 not prevented him from taking that military part 
 which seemed, in those difficult moments, a duty of 
 elementary patriotism laid upon all alike. I enjoyed 
 many opportunities for checking the statements of 
 the bishop. The small body of French troops which 
 undertook this remote service had been detached in 
 One half from the army of the Rhine ; the other 
 half had served under Napoleon in his first foreign 
 campaign — viz., the Italian campaign of 1796, 
 which accomplished the conquest of Northern Italy. 
 Those from Germany showed by their looks and 
 their meagre condition how much they had suffered ; 
 and some of them, in describing their hardships, told 
 their Irish acquaintance that, during the siege of 
 Metz, which had occurred in the previous winter of 
 1797, they had slept in holes made four feet below 
 the surface of the snow. One officer declared 
 solemnly that he had not once undressed, further 
 than by taking off his coat, for a period of twelve 
 months. The private soldiers had all the essential 
 
242 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 qualities fitting them for a difficult and trying service 
 — “intelligence, activity, temperance, patience to a 
 surprising degree, together with the exactest disci- 
 pline.” This is the statement of their candid and 
 upright enemy. “Yet,” says the bishop, “with all 
 these martial qualities, if you except the grenadiers, 
 they had nothing to catch the eye. Their stature, 
 for the most part, was low, their complexion pale and 
 yellow, their clothes much the worse for wear; to a 
 superficial observer, they would have appeared incap- 
 able of enduring any hardship. These were the men, 
 however, of whom it was presently observed, that they 
 could be well content to live on bread or potatoes, 
 to drink water, to make the stones of the street their 
 bed, and to sleep in their clothes, with no covering 
 but the canopy of heaven.” — “ How vast,” says Cicero, 
 “ is the revenue of Parsimony ! ” and, by a thousand 
 degrees more striking, how celestial is the strength 
 that descends upon the feeble through Temperance ! 
 
 It may well be imagined in what terror the families 
 of Killala heard of a French invasion, and the neces- 
 sity of immediately receiving a Republican army. 
 As Sansculottes , these men all over Europe had the 
 reputation of pursuing a ferocious marauding policy ; 
 in fact, they were held little better than sanguinary 
 brigands. In candour, it must be admitted that their 
 conduct at Killala belied these reports ; though, on 
 the other hand, an obvious interest obliged them 
 to a more pacific demeanour in a land which they 
 saluted as friendly, and designed to raise into ex- 
 tensive insurrection. The French army, so much 
 dreaded, at length arrived. The general and his 
 staff entered the palace ; and the first act of one 
 officer, in coming into the dining-room, was to ad- 
 vance to the sideboard, sweep all the plate into a 
 basket, and deliver it to the bishop’s butler, with a 
 charge to carry it off to a place of security . 1 
 
 1 As this happened to be the truth, the bishop did right to 
 report it. Otherwise, his lordship does not seem to have had 
 much acquaintance with the French scenical mode of arranging 
 their public acts for purposes of effect. Cynical people (like 
 
SECOND REBELLION 243 
 
 The French officers, with the detachment left under 
 their orders by the commander-in-chief, staid about 
 one month at Killala. This period allowed oppor- 
 tunities enough for observing individual differences 
 of character, and the general tone of their manners. 
 These opportunities were not thrown away upon 
 the bishop : he noticed with a critical eye, and he 
 recorded on the spot, whatever fell within his own 
 experience. Had he, however, happened to be a 
 political or courtier bishop, his record would, perhaps, 
 have been suppressed ; and at any rate it would have 
 been coloured by prejudice. As it was, I believe it 
 to have been the honest testimony of an honest man ; 
 and, considering the minute circumstantiality of its 
 delineations, I do not believe that, throughout the 
 revolutionary war, any one document was made 
 public which throws so much light on the quality 
 and composition of the French Republican armies. 
 On this consideration I shall extract a few passages 
 from the bishop’s personal sketches. 
 
 The commander-in-chief of the French armament 
 is thus delineated by the bishop : — 
 
 “ Humbert, the leader of this singular body of 
 men, was himself as extraordinary a personage as 
 any in his army. Of a good height and shape, in 
 the full vigour of life, prompt to decide, quick in 
 execution, apparently master of his art, you could 
 not refuse him the praise of a good officer, while 
 his physiognomy forbade you to like him as a man. 
 His eye, which was small and sleepy, cast a sidelong 
 glance of insidiousness and even of cruelty ; it was the 
 eye of a cat preparing to spring upon her prey. His 
 education and manners were indicative of a person 
 sprung from the lower orders of society ; though 
 
 myself, when looking back to this anecdote from the year 1833) 
 were too apt to remark that this plate and that basket were 
 carefully numbered ; that the episcopal butler (like Pharaoh’s) 
 was liable, alas ! to be hanged, in case the plate were not 
 forthcoming on a summons from headquarters : and that the 
 Killala “ place of security ” was kindly strengthened, under the 
 maternal anxiety of the French .Republic, by doubling the 
 French sentries. 
 
244 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 he knew how to assume, when it was convenient, 
 the deportment of a gentleman. For learning, he 
 had scarcely enough to enable him to write his name. 
 His passions were furious ; and all his behaviour 
 seemed marked with the character of roughness and 
 insolence. A narrower observation of him, however, 
 seemed to discover that much of his roughness was 
 the result of art, being assumed with the view of 
 extorting by terror a ready compliance with his Com- 
 mands. Of this truth the bishop himself was one of 
 the first who had occasion to be made sensible.” 
 
 The particular occasion here alluded to by the 
 bishop arose out of the first attempts to effect the 
 disembarkation of the military stores and equipments 
 from the French shipping, as also to forward them 
 when landed. The case was one of extreme urgency ; 
 and proportionate allowance must be made for the 
 French general. Every moment might bring the 
 British cruisers in sight — two important expeditions 
 had already been baffled in that way : and the 
 absolute certainty, known to all parties alike, that 
 delay, under these circumstances, was tantamount 
 to ruin ; that upon a difference of ten or fifteen 
 minutes, this way or that, might happen to hinge 
 the whole issue of the expedition • — such a con- 
 sciousness gave unavoidably to every demur at this 
 critical moment the colour of treachery. Neither 
 boats, nor carts, nor horses, could be obtained ; the 
 owners most imprudently and selfishly retiring from 
 that service. Such being the extremity, the French 
 general made the bishop responsible for the execution 
 of his orders : but the bishop had really no means 
 to enforce this commission, and failed. Upon that, 
 General Humbert threatened to send his lordship, 
 together with his whole family, prisoners of war to 
 France, and assumed the air of a man violently 
 provoked. Here came the crisis for determining 
 the bishop’s weight amongst his immediate flock, 
 and his hold upon their affections. One great 
 bishop, not far off, would, on such a trial, have 
 been exultingly consigned to his fate : that I well 
 
SECOND REBELLION 245 
 
 know; for Lord Westport and I, merely as his 
 visitors, were attacked in the dusk so fiercely with 
 stones, that we were obliged to forbear going out, 
 unless in broad daylight. Luckily the Bishop of 
 Killala had shown himself a Christian pastor, and 
 now he reaped the fruits of his goodness. The 
 public selfishness gave way, when the danger of 
 the bishop was made known. The boats, the carts, 
 the horses, were now liberally brought in from their 
 lurking-places ; the artillery and stores were landed ; 
 and the drivers of the carts, &c., were paid in drafts 
 upon the Irish Directory, which (if it were an aerial 
 coin) served at least to mark an unwillingness in 
 the enemy to adopt violent modes of hostility, and 
 ultimately became available in the very character 
 assigned to them by the French general ; not, indeed, 
 as drafts upon the rebel, but as claims upon the 
 equity of the English government 
 
 The officer left in command at Killala, when the 
 presence of the commander-in-chief was required 
 elsewhere, bore the name of Charost. He was a 
 lieutenant-colonel, aged forty-five years, the son of 
 a Parisian watchmaker. Having been sent over at 
 an early age to the unhappy island of St. Domingo, 
 with a view to some connections there by which he 
 hoped to profit, he had been fortunate enough to 
 marry a young woman who brought him a plantation 
 for her dowry which was reputed to have yielded 
 him a revenue of ^2000 sterling per annum. But 
 this, of course, all went to wreck in one day, upon 
 that mad decree of the French Convention which 
 proclaimed liberty without distinction, without re- 
 strictions, and without gradations, to the unprepared 
 and ferocious negroes . 1 Even his wife and daughter 
 would have perished simultaneously with his pro- 
 perty, but for English protection, which delivered 
 them from the black sabre, and transferred them to 
 
 1 I leave this passage as it was written originally under an 
 impression then universally current. But, from what I have 
 since read on this subject, I beg to be considered as speaking 
 very doubtfully on the true causes of the St. Domingo disasters. 
 
246 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Jamaica. There, however, though safe, they were, 
 as respected Colonel Charost, unavoidably captives ; 
 and “ his eyes would fill,” says the bishop, “ when 
 he told the family that he had not seen these dear 
 relatives for six years past, nor even had tidings of 
 them for the last three years.” On his return to 
 France, finding that to have been a watchmaker’s 
 son was no longer a bar to the honours of the 
 military profession, he had entered the army, and 
 had risen by merit to the rank which he now held. 
 “ He had a plain, good understanding. He seemed 
 careless or doubtful of revealed religion ; but said 
 that he believed in God ; was inclined to think that 
 there must be a future state ; and was very sure that, 
 while he lived in this world, it was his duty to do 
 all the good to his fellow-creatures that he could. 
 Yet what he did not exhibit in his own conduct, 
 he appeared to respect in others ; for he took care 
 that no noise or disturbance should be made in the 
 castle [/.<?., the bishop’s palace] on Sundays, while 
 the family, and many Protestants from the town, 
 were assembled in the library at their devotions. 
 
 “ Boudet, the next in command, was a captain 
 of foot, twenty-eight years old. His father, he said, 
 was still living, though sixty-seven years old when he 
 was born. His height was six feet two inches. In 
 person, complexion, and gravity, he was no inadequate 
 representation of the Knight of La Mancha, whose 
 example he followed in a recital of his own prowess 
 and wonderful exploits, delivered in measured lan- 
 guage and an imposing seriousness of aspect.” The 
 bishop represents him as vain and irritable, but dis- 
 tinguished by good feeling and principle. Another 
 officer was Ponson, described as five feet six inches 
 high, lively and animated in excess, volatile, noisy, 
 and chattering, a Voutrance . “He was hardy,” says 
 the bishop, “ and patient to admiration of labour and 
 want of rest.” And of this last quality the follow- 
 ing wonderful illustration is given: “A continued 
 watching of five days and nights together , when the 
 rebels were growing desperate for prey and mischief, 
 
SECOND REBELLION 247 
 
 did not appear to sink his spirits in the smallest 
 degree” 
 
 Contrasting with the known rapacity of the French 
 Republican army in all its ranks the severe honesty 
 of these particular officers, we must come to the 
 conclusion, either that they had been selected for 
 their tried qualities of abstinence and self-control, 
 or else that the perilous tenure of their footing in 
 Ireland had coerced them into forbearance. Of this 
 same Ponson, the last described, the bishop declares 
 that “ he was strictly honest, and could not bear the 
 absence of this quality in others ; so that his patience 
 was pretty well tried by his Irish allies.” At the 
 same time, he expressed his contempt for religion in 
 a way which the bishop saw reason for ascribing to 
 vanity — “ the miserable affection of appearing w r orse 
 than he really was.” One officer there was, named 
 True , whose brutality recalled the impression, so 
 disadvantageous to French republicanism, which else 
 had been partially effaced by the manners and con- 
 duct of his comrades. To him the bishop (and not 
 the bishop only, but many of my own informants, to 
 whom True had been familiarly known) ascribes a a 
 front of brass, and incessant fraudful smile, manners 
 altogether vulgar, and in his dress and person a 
 neglect of cleanliness even beyond the affected 
 negligence of republicans.” 
 
 True, however, happily, was not leader ; and the 
 principles or the policy of his superiors prevailed. 
 To them, not merely in their own conduct, but also 
 in their way of applying that influence which they 
 held over their most bigoted allies, the Protestants 
 of Connaught were under deep obligations. Speaking 
 merely as to property, the honest bishop renders the 
 following justice to the enemy : “ And here it would 
 be an act of great injustice to the excellent discipline 
 constantly maintained by these invaders while they 
 remained in our town, not to remark that, with 
 every temptation to plunder which the time and the 
 number of valuable articles within their reach pre- 
 sented to them in the bishop’s palace, from a side- 
 
248 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 board of plate and glasses, a hall filled with hats, 
 whips, and greatcoats, as well of the guests as of 
 the family, not a single particular of private property 
 was found to have been carried away, when the 
 owners, after the first fright, came to look for their 
 effects, which was not for a day or two after the 
 landing.” Even in matters of delicacy the same 
 forbearance was exhibited : “ Beside the entire use 
 of other apartments, during the stay of the French 
 in Killala, the attic storey, containing a library, and 
 three bedchambers, continued sacred to the bishop 
 and his family. And so scrupulous was the delicacy 
 of the French not to disturb the female part of the 
 house, that not one of them was ever seen to go 
 higher than the middle floor, except on the evening 
 of the success at Castlebar, when two officers begged 
 leave to carry to the family the news of the battle ; 
 and seemed a little mortified that the news was 
 received with an air of dissatisfaction.” These, 
 however, were not the weightiest instances of that 
 eminent service which the French had it in their 
 power to render on this occasion. The royal army 
 behaved ill in every sense. Liable to continual 
 panics in the field — panics which, but for the over- 
 whelming force accumulated, and the discretion of 
 Lord Cornwallis, would have been fatal to the good 
 cause — the royal forces erred, as unthinkingly, in the 
 abuse of any momentary triumph. Forgetting that 
 the rebels held many hostages in their hands, they 
 at once recommenced the old system practised in 
 Wexford and Kildare, of hanging and shooting with- 
 out trial, and without a thought of the horrible 
 reprisals that might be adopted. These reprisals, 
 but for the fortunate influence of the French com- 
 manders, and but for their great energy in applying 
 that influence according to the exigencies of time and 
 place, would have been made : it cost the whole 
 weight of the French power, their influence was 
 stretched almost to breaking, before they could ac- 
 complish their purpose of neutralising the senseless 
 cruelty of the royalists, and of saving the trembling 
 
SECOND REBELLION 249 
 
 Protestants. Dreadful were the anxieties of these 
 moments : and I myself heard persons, at a distance 
 of nearly two years, declare that their lives hung at 
 that time by a thread ; and that, but for the hasty 
 approach of the Lord-Lieutenant by forced marches, 
 that thread would have snapped. “ We heard with 
 panic, ” said they, “ of the madness which characterised 
 the proceedings of our soi-disant friends : and, for any 
 chance of safety, unavoidably we looked only to our 
 nominal enemies — the staff of the French Army.” 
 
 One story was still current, and very frequently 
 repeated, at the time of my own residence upon the 
 scene of these transactions. It would not be fair to 
 mention it, without saying, at the same time, that the 
 bishop, whose discretion was so much impeached by 
 the affair, had the candour to blame himself most 
 heavily, and always applauded the rebel for the 
 lesson he had given him. The case was this : Day 
 after day the royal forces had been accumulating 
 upon military posts in the neighbourhood of Killala, 
 and could be descried from elevated stations in that 
 town. Stories travelled simultaneously to Killala, 
 every hour, of the atrocities which marked their 
 advance ; many, doubtless, being fictions, either of 
 blind hatred, or of that ferocious policy which sought 
 to make the rebels desperate, by tempting them into 
 the last extremities of guilt, but, unhappily, too much 
 countenanced, as to their general outline, by excesses 
 on the royal part, already proved, and undeniable. 
 The ferment and the anxiety increased every hour 
 amongst the rebel occupants of Killala. The French 
 had no power to protect, beyond the moral one of 
 their influence as allies. ; and, in the very crisis of 
 this alarming situation, a rebel came to the bishop, 
 with the news that the royal cavalry was at that 
 moment advancing from Sligo, and could be traced 
 along the country by the line of blazing houses which 
 accompanied their march. The bishop doubted 
 this, and expressed his doubt. “ Come with me,” 
 said the rebel. It was a matter of policy to yield, 
 and his lordship went. They ascended together the 
 
250 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Needle-tower-hill, from the summit of which the 
 bishop now discovered that the fierce rebel had 
 spoken but too truly. A line of smoke and fire ran 
 over the country in the rear of a strong patrol 
 detached from the King’s forces. The moment was 
 critical ; the rebel’s eye expressed the unsettled state 
 of his feelings ; and at that instant the imprudent 
 bishop uttered a sentiment which, to his dying day, 
 he could not forget. “ They,” said he, meaning the 
 ruined houses, “ are only wretched cabins.” The 
 rebel mused, and for a few moments seemed in self- 
 conflict — a dreadful interval to the bishop, who 
 became sensible of his own extreme imprudence 
 the very moment after the words had escaped him. 
 However, the man contented himself with saying, 
 after a pause, “ A poor man’s cabin is to him as dear 
 as a palace.” It is probable that this retort was far 
 from expressing the deep moral indignation at his 
 heart, though his readiness of mind failed to furnish 
 him with any other more stinging ; and, in such 
 cases, all- depends upon the first movement of vin- 
 dictive feeling being broken. The bishop, however, 
 did not forget the lesson he had received ; nor did 
 he fail to blame himself most heavily, not so much 
 for his imprudence, as for his thoughtless adoption 
 of a language expressing an aristocratic hauteur that 
 did not belong to his real character. There was, 
 indeed, ah that moment, no need that fresh fuel 
 should be applied to the irritation of the rebels ; they 
 had already declared their intention of plundering 
 the town ; and, as they added, “ in spite of the 
 French,” whom they now regarded, and openly de- 
 nounced, as “ abetters of the Protestants,” much 
 more than as their own allies. 
 
 Justice, however, must be done to the rebels, as 
 well as to their military associates. If they were 
 disposed to plunder, they were found generally to 
 shrink from bloodshed and cruelty ; and yet from no 
 want of energy or determination. “ The peasantry 
 never appeared to want animal courage,” says the 
 bishop, “ for they flocked together to meet danger 
 
SECOND REBELLION 25 I 
 
 whenc -t it was expected. Had it pleased Heaven 
 to be ; j liberal to them of brains as of hands, it is 
 not easy to say to what length of mischief they might 
 have proceeded ; but they were all along unprovided 
 with leaders of any ability.” This, I believe, was 
 true ; and yet it would be doing poor justice to the 
 Connaught rebels, nor would it be drawing the moral 
 truly as respects this aspect of the rebellion, if their 
 abstinence from mischief, in its worst form, were to 
 be explained out of this defect in their leaders. Nor 
 is it possible to suppose that the bishop’s meaning, 
 though his words seem to tend that way. For he 
 himself elsewhere notices the absence of all wanton 
 bloodshed as a feature of this Connaught rebellion 
 most honourable in itself to the poor misguided 
 rebels, and as distinguishing it very remarkably from 
 the greater insurrection so recently crushed in the 
 centre and the east. “ It is a circumstance,” says he, 
 44 worthy of particular notice, that, during the whole 
 time of this civil commotion, not a single drop of 
 blood was shed by the Connaught rebels, except in 
 the field of war. It is true, the example and in- 
 fluence of the French went a great way to prevent 
 sanguinary excesses. But it will not be deemed fair 
 to ascribe to this cause alone the forbearance of 
 which we were witnesses, when it is considered what 
 a range of country lay at the mercy of the rebels for 
 several days after the French power was known to be 
 at an end.” 
 
 To what, then, are we to ascribe the forbearance 
 of the Connaught men, so singularly contrasted with 
 the hideous excesses of their brethren in the east ? 
 Solely to the different complexion (so, at least, I 
 was told) of the policy pursued by government. In 
 Wexford, Kildare, Meath, Dublin, &c., it had been 
 judged advisable to adopt, as a sort of precautionary 
 policy, not for the punishment, but for the discovery 
 of rebellious purposes, measures of the direst severity; 
 not merely free-quarterings of the soldiery, with liberty 
 (or even an express commission) to commit outrages 
 and insults upon all who were suspected, upon all 
 
252 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 who refused to countenance such measures, upon all 
 who presumed to question their justice ; but even, 
 under colour of martial law, to inflict croppings, 
 and pitch-cappings, half-hangings, and the torture 
 of “ picketings ” ; to say nothing of houses burned, 
 and farms laid waste — things which were done daily, 
 and under military orders ; the purpose avowed being 
 either vengeance for some known act of insurrection, 
 or the determination to extort confessions. Too 
 often, however, as may well be supposed, in such 
 utter disorganisation of society, private malice, either 
 personal or on account of old family feuds, was the 
 true principle at work. And many were thus driven, 
 by mere frenzy of just indignation, or, perhaps, by 
 mere desperation, into acts of rebellion which else 
 they had not meditated. Now, in Connaught at this 
 time the same barbarous policy was no longer pur- 
 sued ; and then it was seen that, unless maddened 
 by ill usage, the peasantry were capable of great self- 
 control. There was no repetition of the Enniscorthy 
 massacres ; and it was impossible to explain honestly 
 why there was none, without, at the same time, 
 reflecting back upon that atrocity some colour of 
 palliation. 
 
 These things considered, it must be granted that 
 there was a spirit of unjustifiable violence in the 
 royal army on achieving their triumph. It is shock- 
 ing, however, to observe the effect of panic to irri- 
 tate the instincts of cruelty and sanguinary violence, 
 even in the gentlest minds. I remember well, on 
 occasion of the memorable tumults in Bristol 
 (autumn of 1831), that I, for my part, could not 
 read without horror and indignation one statement 
 (made, I believe, officially at that time), which yet 
 won the cordial approbation of some ladies who 
 had participated in the panic. I allude to that part 
 of the report which represents several of the dragoons 
 as having dismounted, resigned the care of their 
 horses to persons in the street, and pursued the 
 unhappy fugitives, criminals, undoubtedly, but no 
 longer dangerous, upstairs and downstairs, to the 
 
SECOND REBELLION 253 
 
 last nook of their retreat. The worst criminals could 
 not be known and identified as such ; and, even in 
 a case where they could, vengeance so hellish and 
 so unrelenting was not justified by houses burned or 
 by momentary panics raised. Scenes of the same 
 description were beheld upon the first triumph of 
 the royal cause in Connaught ; and but for Lord 
 Cornwallis, equally firm before his success and 
 moderate in its exercise, they would have prevailed 
 more extensively. The poor rebels were pursued 
 with a needless ferocity on the recapture of Killala. 
 So hotly, indeed, did some of the conquerors hang 
 upon the footsteps of the fugitives, that both rushed 
 almost simultaneously — pursuers and pursued — into 
 the terror-stricken houses of Killala ; and, in some 
 instances, the ball meant for a rebel told with mortal 
 effect upon a royalist. Here, indeed, as in other 
 cases of this rebellion, in candour it should be men- 
 tioned, that the royal army was composed chiefly of 
 militia regiments. Not that militia, or regiments 
 composed chiefly of men who had but just before 
 volunteered for the line, have not often made un- 
 exceptionable soldiers, but in this case there was no 
 reasonable proportion of veterans, or men who had 
 seen any service. The Bishop of Killala was assured 
 by an intelligent officer of the King’s army, that the 
 victors were within a trifle of being beaten. I was 
 myself told by a gentleman who rode as a volunteer 
 on that day, that, to the best of his belief, it was 
 merely a mistaken order of the rebel chiefs, causing 
 a false application of a select reserve at a very 
 critical moment, which had saved his own party 
 from a ruinous defeat. It may be added, upon 
 almost universal testimony, that the recapture of 
 Killala was abused, not only as respected the 
 defeated rebels, but also as respected the royalists 
 of that town. “ The regiments that came to their 
 assistance, being all militia, seemed to think that 
 they had a right to take the property they had been 
 the means of preserving, and to use it as their own 
 whenever they stood in need of it. Their rapacity 
 
254 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 differed in no respect from that of the rebels, except 
 that they seized upon things with less of ceremony 
 and excuse, and that his Majesty’s soldiers were 
 incomparably superior to the Irish traitors in dex- 
 terity at stealing. In consequence, the town grew 
 very weary of their guests, and were glad to see 
 them march off to other quarters.” 
 
 The military operations in this brief campaign 
 were discreditable, in the last degree, to the energy, 
 to the vigilance, and to the steadiness of the Orange 
 army. Humbert had been a leader against the 
 royalists of La Vende, as well as on the Rhine ; con- 
 sequently he was an ambidextrous enemy — fitted 
 equally for partisan warfare, and for the tactics of 
 regular armies. Keenly alive to the necessity, under 
 his circumstances, of vigour and despatch, after 
 occupying Killala on the evening of the 22nd 
 August (the day of his disembarkation), where the 
 small garrison of 50 men (yeomen and fencibles) 
 had made a tolerable resistance, and after other 
 trifling affairs, he had, on the 26th, marched against 
 Castlebar with about 800 of his own men, and 
 perhaps 1200 to 1500 of the rebels. Here was the 
 advanced post of the royal army. General Lake 
 (the Lord Lake of India) and Major-General Hutchi- 
 son (the Lord Hutchison of Egypt) had assembled 
 upon this point a respectable force ; some say up- 
 wards of 4000 — others, not more than ixoo. The 
 disgraceful result is well known : the French, march- 
 ing all night over mountain roads, and through one 
 pass which was thought impregnable if it had been 
 occupied by a battalion instead of a captain’s guard, 
 surprised Castlebar on the morning of the 27th. 
 Surprised, I say, for no word short of that can 
 express the circumstances of the case. About two 
 o’clock in the morning, a courier had brought 
 intelligence of the French advance ; but, from some 
 unaccountable obstinacy at headquarters, such as 
 had proved fatal more than either once or twice in 
 the Wexford campaign, his news was disbelieved ; yet, 
 if disbelieved, why therefore neglected? Neglected, 
 
SECOND REBELLION ~ 
 
 however, it was ; and at seven, when the news 
 proved to be true, the royal army was drawn 
 out in hurry and confusion to meet the enemy. 
 The French, on their part, seeing our strength, 
 looked for no better result to themselves than sum- 
 mary surrender ; more especially as our artillery was. 
 well served, and soon began to tell upon their ranks. 
 Better hopes first arose, as they afterwards declared, 
 upon observing that many of the troops fired in 
 a disorderly way, without waiting for the word of 
 command ; upon this they took new measures : in 
 ,, a few minutes a panic arose ; General Lake ordered 
 retreat ; and then, in spite of all that could be 
 done by the indignant officers, the flight became 
 , irretrievable. The troops reached Tuam, thirty 
 miles distant, on that same day ; and one small 
 party of mounted men actually pushed on to 
 Athlone, which is above sixty miles from the field 
 of battle. Fourteen pieces of artillery were lost on 
 this occasion. However, it ought to be mentioned 
 . that some serious grounds appeared afterwards for 
 suspecting treachery: most of those who had been 
 reported “missing" having been afterwards observed 
 in the ranks of the enemy, where it is remarkable 
 enough (or perhaps not so remarkable, as simply 
 implying how little they were trusted by their new 
 allies, and for that reason how naturally they were 
 put forward on the most dangerous services) that 
 these deserters perished to a man. Meantime, the 
 new Lord- Lieutenant, having his foot constantly in 
 the stirrup, marched from Dublin without a moments 
 delay. By means of the grand canal, he made a 
 forced march of fifty-six English miles in two days ; 
 
 * which brought him to Kilbeggan on the 27th. Very 
 early on the following morning, he received the 
 unpleasant news from Castlebar. Upon this he 
 advanced to Athlone, meeting every indication of 
 a routed and panic-struck army. Lord Lake was 
 retreating upon that town, and thought himself {it is 
 said) so little secure even at this distance from the 
 enemy, that the road from Tuam was covered with 
 
256 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 strong patrols. On the other hand, in ludicrous 
 contrast to these demonstrations of alarm (supposing 
 them to be related without exaggeration ), the French 
 had never stirred from Castlebar. On the 4th of 
 September, Lord Cornwallis was within fourteen 
 miles of that place. Humbert, however, had pre- 
 viously dislodged towards the county of Longford. 
 His motive for this movement was to co-operate 
 with an insurrection in that quarter, which had just 
 then broken out in strength. He was now, however, 
 hemmed in by a large army of perhaps 25,000 men, 
 advancing from all points ; and a few moves were 
 all that remained of the game, played with whatever 
 skill. Colonel Vereker, with about 300 of the 
 Limerick Militia, first came up with him, and 
 skirmished very creditably (September 6) with part, 
 or (as the colonel always maintained) with the whole 
 of the French army. Other affairs of trivial im- 
 portance followed ; and at length, on the 8th of 
 September, General Humbert surrendered with his 
 whole army, now reduced to 844 men, of whom 
 96 were officers ; having lost since their landing 
 at Killala exactly 288 men. The rebels were not 
 admitted to any terms ; they were pursued and cut 
 down without mercy. However, it is pleasant to 
 know that, from their agility in escaping, this cruel 
 policy was defeated : not much above 500 perished : 
 and thus were secured to the royal party the worst 
 results of vengeance the fiercest, and of clemency 
 the most undistinguishing, without any one advant- 
 age of either. Some districts, as Laggan and Eris, 
 were treated with martial rigour ; the cabins being 
 burned, and their unhappy tenants driven out into 
 the mountains for the winter. Rigour, therefore, 
 there was ; for the most humane politicians, errone- 
 ously, as one must believe, fancied it necessary for 
 the army to leave behind some impressions of terror 
 amongst the insurgents. It is certain, however, that, 
 under the counsels of Lord Cornwallis, the standards 
 of public severity were very much lowered, as com- 
 pared with the previous examples in Wexford. 
 
SECOND REBELLION 
 
 2 57 
 
 The tardiness and slovenly execution of the whole 
 service, meantime, was well illustrated in what follows. 
 
 Killala was not delivered from rebel hands until 
 the 23rd of September, notwithstanding the general 
 surrender had occurred on the 8th; and then only 
 in consequence of an express from the Bishop to 
 General Trench, hastening his march. The situa- 
 tion of the Protestants was indeed critical. Plumbert 
 had left three French officers to protect the place, 
 but their influence had gradually sunk to a shadow. 
 And plans of pillage, with all its attendant horrors, 
 were daily debated. Under these circumstances, the 
 French officers behaved honourably and courageously. 
 “Yet,” says the bishop, “the poor commandant had 
 no reason to be pleased with the treatment he had 
 received immediately after the action. He had re- 
 turned to the castle for his sabre, and advanced 
 with it to the gate, in order to deliver it up to some 
 English officer, when it was seized and forced from 
 his hand by a common soldier of Fraser’s. He 
 came in, got another sword, which he surrendered 
 to an officer, and turned to re-enter the hall. At 
 this moment a second Highlander burst through the 
 gate, in spite of the sentinel placed there by the 
 general, and fired at the commandant with an aim 
 that was near proving fatal, for the ball passed under 
 his arm, piercing a very thick door entirely through, 
 and lodging in the jamb. Had we lost the worthy 
 man by such an accident, his death would have 
 spoiled the whole relish of our present enjoyment. 
 He complained, and received an apology for the 
 soldier’s behaviour from his officer. Leave was imme- 
 diately granted to the three French officers (left behind 
 by Humbert at Killala) to keep their swords, their 
 effects, and even their bedchambers in the house.” 
 
 Note applying generally to this chapter on the Second Irish 
 Rebellion. — Already in 1833, when writing this chapter, I 
 felt a secret jealousy (intermittingly recurring) that possibly 
 I might have fallen under a false bias at this point of my 
 youthful memorials. I myself had seen reason to believe, 
 indeed sometimes I knew for certain, that, in the personalities 
 of Irish politics, from Grattan downwards, a spirit of fiery 
 
 I 
 
258 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 misrepresentation prevailed, which made it hopeless to seek 
 for anything resembling truth. If in any quarter you found 
 candour and liberality, that was because no interest existed in 
 anything Irish, and consequently no real information. Find 
 out any man that could furnish you with information such as 
 presupposed an interest in Ireland, and inevitably he turned 
 out a bigoted partisan. There cannot be a stronger proof of 
 this than the ridiculous libels and literary caricatures current 
 even in England, through one whole generation, against the 
 late Lord Londonderry — a most able and faithful manager of 
 our English foreign interests in times of uuparalleled difficulty. 
 Already, in the closing years of the last century, his Irish 
 policy had been inextricably falsified : subsequently, when he 
 came to assume a leading part in the English Parliament, the 
 efforts to calumniate him became even more intense : and it is 
 only within the last five years that a reaction of public opinion 
 on this subject has been strong enough to reach even those 
 among his enemies who were enlightened men. Liberal jour- 
 nals (such, e.g., as the North British Review) now recognise 
 his merits. Naturally it was impossible that the civil war of 
 1798 in Ireland,, and the persons conspicuously connected with 
 it, should escape this general destiny of Irish politics. I 
 wrote, therefore, originally under a jealousy that partially 
 I might have been duped. At present, in reviewing what I 
 had written twenty years ago, I feel this jealousy much more 
 keenly. I shrink from the bishop’s malicious portraitures 
 of our soldiers, sometimes of their officers, as composing a 
 licentious army, without discipline, without humanity, without 
 even steady courage* bias any man a right to ask our tolera- 
 tion for pictures so romantic as these ? Duped, perhaps, I was 
 myself : and it was natural that I should be so under the over- 
 whelming influences oppressing any right that I could have at 
 my early age to a free, independent judgment. But I will not 
 any longer assist . in duping the reader : and I will therefore 
 suggest to him two grounds of vehement suspicion against all 
 the insidious colourings given to his statements by the bishop : — 
 
 1. I beg- fo remind the reader that this army of Mayo, in 
 1798, so unsteady and so undisciplined, if we believe the 
 bishop, was, in part, the army of Egypt in the year 1801 : 
 how would the bishop have answered that ? 
 
 2. The bishop allows great weight, in treating any allega- 
 tions whatever against the English army or the English 
 Government, to the moderation, equity, and self-control, 
 claimed for the Irish peasantry as notorious elements in their 
 character. Meantime he forgets this doctrine most con- 
 spicuously at times ; and represents the safety of the Pro- 
 testants against pillage, or even against a spirit of massacre, 
 as entirely dependent on the influence of the French. Whether 
 for property or life, it was to the French that the Irish Pro- 
 testants looked for protection : not I it is, but the bishop, on 
 whom that representation will be found to rest. 
 
ELEVENTH CHAPTER 
 
 TRAVELLING 
 
 It was late in October, or early in November, that I 
 quitted Connaught with Lord Westport ; and very 
 slowly, making many leisurely deviations from the 
 direct route, travelled back to Dublin. Thence, after 
 some little stay, we recrossed St. George’s Channel ; 
 landed at Holyhead ; and then, by exactly the same 
 route as we had pursued in early June, we posted 
 through Bangor, Conway, Llanrwst, Llangollen, until 
 once again we found ourselves in England ; and, as 
 a matter of course, making for Birmingham. But 
 why making for Birmingham ? Simply because Bir- 
 mingham, under the old dynasty of stage-coaches and 
 post-chaises, was the centre of our travelling system, 
 and held in England something of that rank which 
 the golden milestone of Rome held in the Italian 
 peninsula. 
 
 At Birmingham it was (which I, like myriads be- 
 side, had traversed a score of times, without ever 
 yet having visited it as a terminus ad quem ) that I 
 parted with my friend Lord Westport. His route 
 lay through Oxford; and stopping, therefore, no 
 longer than was necessary to harness fresh horses 
 — an operation, however, which was seldom accom- 
 plished in less than half-an-hour at that era — he 
 went on directly to Stratford. My own destination 
 was yet doubtful. I had been directed, in Dublin, 
 to inquire at the Birmingham post-office for a letter 
 which would guide my motions. There, accordingly, 
 upon sending for it, lay the expected letter from my 
 mother ; from which I learned that my sister was 
 visiting at Laxton, in Northamptonshire, the seat of 
 an old friend, to which I also had an invitation. My 
 route to this lay through Stamford. Thither I could 
 not go by stage-coach until the following day ; and 
 of necessity I prepared to make the most of my 
 present day in gloomy, noisy, and, at that time, dirty 
 Birmingham. 
 
 259 
 
260 autobiographic sketches 
 
 Be not offended, compatriot of Birmingham, that 
 I salute your natal town with these disparaging 
 epithets. It is not my habit to indulge rash im- 
 pulses of contempt towards any man or body of 
 men, wheresoever collected, far less towards a race 
 of high-minded and most intelligent citizens, such 
 as Birmingham has exhibited to the admiration of 
 all Europe. But as to the noise and the gloom 
 which I ascribe to you, those features of your town 
 will illustrate what the Germans mean by a one-sided 1 
 (ein-seitiger) judgment. There are, I can well be- 
 lieve, thousands to whom Birmingham is another 
 name for domestic peace, and for a reasonable share 
 of sunshine. But in my case, who have passed 
 through Birmingham a hundred times, it always 
 happened to rain, except once ; and that once the 
 Shrewsbury mail carried me so rapidly away, that 
 I had not time to examine the sunshine, or see 
 whether it might not be some gilt Birmingham 
 counterfeit ; for you know, men of Birmingham, that 
 you can counterfeit — such is your cleverness — all 
 things in heaven and earth, from Jove’s thunder- 
 bolts down to a tailor’s bodkin. Therefore, the 
 gloom is to be charged to my bad luck. Then, as 
 to the noise, never did I sleep at that enormous 
 Hen and Chickens , 2 to which usually my destiny 
 brought me, but I had reason to complain that 
 
 1 It marks the rapidity with which new phrases float them- 
 selves into currency under our present omnipresence of the 
 press, that this word noiv (viz., in 1853) familiarly used in 
 every newspaper, then (viz., in 1833) required a sort of apology 
 to warrant its introduction. 
 
 2 A well-known hotel, and also a coach-inn, which we 
 English in those days thought colossal. It was, in fact, ac- 
 cording to the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s witty reply to Miss 
 Knight, big enough for an island. But our Transatlantic 
 brothers, dwelling upon so mighty a continent, have gradually 
 enlarged their scale of inns, as of other objects, into a size of 
 commensurate grandeur. In two separate New York journals, 
 which, by the kindness of American friends, are at this moment 
 (April 26) lying before me, I read astounding illustrations of 
 this: For instance (1) In Putnam's Monthly for April 1853, 
 the opening article, a very amusing one, entitled “ New 
 York Daguerrotyped,” estimates the hotel population of that 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 261 
 
 the discreet hen did not gather her vagrant flock 
 to roost at less variable hours. Till two or three, 
 I was kept waking by those who were retiring ; and 
 about three commenced the morning functions of 
 the porter, or of “ boots,” or of “under-boots,” who 
 began their rounds for collecting the several freights 
 for the Highflyer, or the Tallyho, or the Bang-up, 
 to all points of the compass, and too often (as 
 
 vast city as “ not much short of ten thousand ” ; and one indi- 
 vidual hotel, apparently far from being the most conspicuous 
 — viz., the Metropolitan , reputed to have “ more than twelve 
 miles of water and gas pipe, and two hundred and fifty ser- 
 vants ” — offers “accommodations for one thousand guests.” 
 (2) Yet even this Titanic structure dwindles by comparison 
 with the Mount Vernoit Hotel at Cape May, N.J. (meant, I 
 suppose, for New Jersey), which advertises itself in the New 
 York Herald of April 12, 1853, under the authority of Mr. J. 
 Taber, its aspiring landlord, as offering accommodations, from 
 the 20th of next June, to the romantic number of three thousand 
 five hundred guests. The Birmingham Hen and Chickens un- 
 doubtedly had slight pretensions by the side of these Behemoths 
 and Mammoths. And yet, as a street in a very little town may 
 happen to be quite as noisy as a street in London, I can testify 
 that any single gallery in this Birmingham hotel, if measured 
 in importance by the elements of discomfort which it could 
 develop, was entitled to an American rating. But alas ! Fuit 
 Ilium ; I have not seen the ruins of this ancient hotel : but 
 an instinct tells me that the railroad has run right through it ; 
 that the hen has ceased to lay golden eggs, and that her chickens 
 are dispersed. (3) As another illustration, I may mention 
 that, in the middle of March 1853 I received, as a present 
 from New York, the following newspaper. Each page con- 
 tained eleven columns, whereas our London limes contains 
 only six. It was entitled the New York Journal of Com- 
 merce, and was able to proclaim itself with truth the largest 
 journal in the world. For 25^ years it had existed in a smaller 
 size, but even in this infant stage had so far outrun all other 
 journals in size (measuring, from the first, 816 square inches), 
 as to have earned the name of “ the blanket sheet ” : but this 
 thriving baby had continued to grow, until at last, on March I, 
 1853, it came out in a sheet “comprising an area of 2057J 
 square inches, or i6| square feet.” This was the monster sent 
 over the Atlantic to myself : and I really felt it as some relief 
 to my terror, when I found the editor protesting that the 
 monster should not be allowed to grow any more. I presume 
 that it was meant to keep the hotels in countenance ; for a 
 journal on the old scale could not expect to make itself visible 
 in an edifice that offered accommodations to an army. 
 
262 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 must happen in such immense establishments) blun- 
 dered into my room with that appalling, “ Now, sir, 
 the horses are coming out.” So that rarely, indeed, 
 have I happened to sleep in Birmingham. But the 
 dirt ! — that sticks a little with you, friend of Bir- 
 mingham. How do I explain away that l Know, 
 then, reader, that at the time I speak of, and in the 
 way 1 speak of — viz., in streets and inns — all Eng- 
 land was dirty. 
 
 Being left therefore alone for the whole of a rainy 
 day in Birmingham, and Birmingham being as yet 
 the centre of our travelling system, I cannot do 
 better than spend my Birmingham day in reviewing 
 the most lively of its reminiscences. 
 
 The revolution in the whole apparatus, means, 
 machine^ 7 , and dependencies of that system — a 
 revolution begun, carried through, and perfected 
 within the period of my own personal experience — 
 merits a word or two of illustration in the most 
 cursory memoirs that profess any attention at all to 
 the shifting scenery and moving forces of the age, 
 whether manifested in great effects or in little. And 
 these particular effects, though little when regarded 
 in their separate details, are not little in their final 
 amount. On the contrary, I have always maintained, 
 that under a representative government, where the 
 great cities of the empire must naturally have the 
 power, each in its proportion, of reacting upon the 
 capital and the councils of the nation in so con- 
 spicuous a way, there is a result waiting on the final 
 improvements of the arts of travelling, and of trans- 
 mitting intelligence with velocity, such as cannot be 
 properly appreciated in the absence of all histori- 
 cal experience. Conceive a state of communication 
 between the centre and the extremities of a great 
 people, kept up with a uniformity of reciprocation 
 so exquisite, as to imitate the flowing and ebbing 
 of the sea, or the systole and diastole of the human 
 heart ; day and night, waking and sleeping, not 
 succeeding to each other with more absolute 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 263 
 
 certainty than the acts of the metropolis and the 
 controlling notice of the provinces, whether in the 
 way of support or of resistance. Action and re- 
 action from every point of the compass being thus 
 perfect and instantaneous, we should then first begin 
 to understand, in a practical sense, what is meant by 
 the unity of a political body, and we should approach 
 to a more adequate appreciation of the powers which 
 are latent in organisation. For it must be considered 
 that hitherto, under the most complex organisation, 
 and that which has best attained its purposes, the 
 national will has never been able to express itself 
 upon one in a thousand of the public acts, simply 
 because the national voice was lost in the distance, 
 and could not collect itself through the time and the 
 space rapidly enough to connect itself immediately 
 with the evanescent measure of the moment. But, 
 as the system of intercourse is gradually expanding, 
 these bars of space and time are in the same degree 
 contracting, until finally we may expect them alto- 
 gether to vanish : and then every part of the empire 
 will react upon the whole with the power, life, and 
 effect of immediate conference amongst parties 
 brought face to face. Then first will be seen a 
 political system truly organic — i.e. } in which each 
 acts, upon all, and all react upon each : and a new 
 earth will arise from the indirect agency of this 
 merely physical revolution. Already, in this para- 
 graph, written twenty years ago, a prefiguring instinct 
 spoke within me of some great secret yet to come 
 in the art of distant communication. At present I 
 am content to regard the electric telegraph as the 
 oracular response to that prefiguration. But I still 
 look for some higher and transcendent response. 
 
 The reader whose birth attaches him to this 
 present generation, having known only macadamised 
 roads, cannot easily bring before his imagination the 
 antique and almost aboriginal state of things which 
 marked our travelling system down to the end of 
 the eighteenth century, and nearly through the first 
 decennium of the present. A very few lines will 
 
264 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 suffice for some broad notices of our condition, in 
 this respect, through the last two centuries. In the 
 Parliamentary War (1642-46), it is an interesting 
 fact, but at the same time calculated to mislead the 
 incautious reader, that some officers of distinction, on 
 both sides, brought close carriages to headquarters; 
 and sometimes they went even upon the field of 
 battle in these carriages, not mounting on horseback 
 until the preparations were beginning for some im- 
 portant manoeuvre, or for a general movement. The 
 same thing had been done throughout the Thirty 
 Years’ War, both by the Bavarian, Imperial, and 
 afterwards by the Swedish officers of rank. And 
 it marks the great diffusion of these luxuries about 
 this era, that, on occasion of the reinstalment of two 
 princes of Mecklenburg, who had been violently dis- 
 possessed by Wallenstein, upwards of eighty coaches 
 mustered at a short notice, partly from the territorial 
 nobility, partly from the camp. Precisely, however, 
 at military headquarters, and on the route of an 
 army, carriages of this description were an available 
 and a most useful means of transport. Cumbrous 
 and unwieldy they were, as we know by pictures, and 
 they could not have been otherwise, for they were 
 built to meet the roads. Carriages of our present 
 light and reedy (almost, one might say, corky) con- 
 struction would, on the roads of Germany or of Eng- 
 land in that age, have foundered within the first two 
 hours. To our ancestors, such carriages would have 
 seemed playthings for children. Cumbrous as the 
 carriages of that day were, they could not be more so 
 than artillery or baggage waggons : where these could 
 go, coaches could go. So that, in the march of an 
 army, there was a perpetual guarantee to those who 
 had coaches for the possibility of their transit. And 
 hence, and not because the roads were at all better 
 than they have been generally described in those 
 days, we are to explain the fact, that both in the 
 royal camp, in Lord Manchester’s, and afterwards in 
 General Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s, coaches were an 
 ordinary part of the camp equipage. The roads, 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 265 
 
 meantime, were as they have been described — viz., 
 ditches, morasses, and sometimes channels for the 
 course of small brooks. Nor did they improve, 
 except for short reaches, and under peculiar local 
 advantages, throughout that century. Spite of the 
 roads, however, public carriages began to pierce 
 England, in various lines, from the era of 1660. 
 Circumstantial notices of these may be found in 
 Lord Auckland’s (Sir Frederick Eden’s) large work 
 on the Poor Laws. That to York, for example (two 
 hundred miles), took a fortnight in the journey, or 
 about fourteen miles a day. But Chamberlayne, 
 who had a personal knowledge of these public 
 carriages, says enough to show that, if slow, they 
 were cheap ; half-a-crown being the usual rate for 
 fifteen miles (i.e., 2d. a mile). Public conveyances, 
 multiplying rapidly, could not but diffuse a general 
 call for improved roads ; improved both in dimensions 
 and also in the art of construction. For it is ob- 
 servable that, so early as Queen Elizabeth’s days, 
 England, the most equestrian of nations, already 
 presented to its inhabitants a general system of 
 decent bridle-roads. Even at this day, it is doubt- 
 ful whether any man, taking all hindrances into 
 account, and having laid no previous relays of 
 horses, could much exceed the exploit of Cary (after- 
 wards Lord Monmouth), a younger son of the first 
 Lord Hunsden, a cousin of Queen Elizabeth. Yet 
 we must not forget that the particular road concerned 
 in this exploit was the Great North Load (as it is 
 still called by way of distinction), lying through 
 Doncaster and York, between the northern and 
 southern capitals of the island. But roads less 
 frequented were tolerable as bridle-roads ; whilst 
 all alike, having been originally laid down with no 
 view to the broad and ample coaches, from 1570 
 to 1700, scratched the panels on each side as they 
 crept along. Even in the nineteenth century, I have 
 known a case in the sequestered district of Egre- 
 mont in Cumberland, where a post-chaise, of the 
 common narrow dimensions, was obliged to retrace 
 
266 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 its route of fourteen miles on coming to a bridge 
 built in some remote age, when as yet post-chaises 
 were neither known nor anticipated, and, unfor- 
 tunately, too narrow by three or four inches. In 
 all the provinces of England, when the soil was deep 
 and adhesive, a worse evil beset the stately equipage. 
 An Italian of rank, who has left a record of his 
 perilous adventure, visited, or attempted to visit, 
 Petworth, near London (then a seat of the Percys, 
 now of Lord Egremont), about the year 1685. I 
 forget how many times he was overturned within 
 one particular stretch of five miles ; but I remember 
 that it was a subject of gratitude (and, upon medi- 
 tating a return by the same route, a subject of 
 pleasing hope) to dwell upon the soft lying which 
 was to be found in that good-natured morass. Yet 
 this was, doubtless, a pet road (sinful punster ! dream 
 not that I glance at Petworth), and an improved 
 road. Such as this, I have good reason to think, 
 were most of the roads in England, unless upon the 
 rocky strata which stretch northwards from Derby- 
 shire to Cumberland and Northumberland. The 
 public carriages were the first harbingers of a change 
 for the better ; as these grew and prospered, slender 
 lines of improvement began to vein and streak the 
 map. And Parliament began to show their zeal, 
 though not always a corresponding knowledge, by 
 legislating backwards and forwards on the breadth 
 of waggon wheel-tires, &c. But not until our cotton 
 system began to put forth blossoms, not until our 
 trade and our steam-engines began to stimulate the 
 coal-mines, which in their turn stimulated them , did 
 any great energy apply itself to our roads. In my 
 childhood, standing with one or two of my brothers 
 and sisters at the front windows of my mother’s 
 carriage, I remember one unvarying set of images 
 before us. The postillion (for so were all carriages 
 then driven) was employed not by fits and starts, but 
 always and eternally, in quartering -* 1 — i.e., in crossing 
 
 1 Elsewhere I have suggested, as the origin of this term, the 
 French word cartayer , to manoeuvre so as to evade the ruts. 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 267 
 
 from side to side — according to the casualties of the 
 ground. Before you stretched a wintry length of 
 lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture the leg of a 
 horse, filled to the brim with standing pools of rain 
 water ; and the collateral chambers of these ruts 
 kept from becoming confluent by thin ridges, such 
 as the Romans called lira , , to maintain the foot- 
 ing upon which lirce, so as not to swerve (or, as 
 the Romans would say, delirare ), was a trial of some 
 skill both for the horses and their postillion. It was, 
 indeed, next to impossible for any horse, on such a 
 narrow crust of separation, not to grow delirious in 
 the Roman metaphor ; and the nervous anxiety which 
 haunted me when a child was much fed by this very 
 image so often before my eye, and the sympathy 
 with which I followed the motion of the docile 
 creature’s leg. Go to sleep at the beginning of a 
 stage, and the last thing you saw — wake up, and the 
 first thing you saw — was the line of wintry pools, the 
 poor off-horse planting his steps with care, and the 
 cautious postillion gently applying his spur, whilst 
 manoeuvring across this system of grooves with some 
 sort of science that looked like a gipsy’s palmistry ; 
 so equally unintelligible to me were his motions, in 
 what he sought and in what he avoided. 
 
 Whilst reverting to these remembrances of my 
 childhood, I may add, by way of illustration, and at 
 the risk of gossiping, which, after all, is not the worst 
 of things, a brief notice of my very first journey. I 
 might be then seven years old. A young gentleman, 
 the son of a wealthy banker, had to return home for 
 the Christmas holidays to a town in Lincolnshire, 
 distant from the public school where he was pursuing 
 his education about a hundred miles. The school 
 was in the neighbourhood of Greenhay, my father’s 
 house. There were at that time no coaches in that 
 direction ; now (1833) there are many every day. The 
 young gentleman advertised for a person to share the 
 expense of a post-chaise. By accident, I had an in- 
 vitation of some standing to the same town, where 
 I happened to have some female relatives of mature 
 
268 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 age, besides some youthful cousins. The two traw* 
 lers elect soon heard of each other, and the ar- 
 rangement was easily completed. It was my earliest 
 migration from the paternal roof ; and the anxieties 
 of pleasure, too tumultuous, with some slight sense of 
 undefined fears, combined to agitate my childish 
 feelings. I had a vague slight apprehension of my 
 fellow-traveller, whom I had never seen, and whom 
 my nursery-maid, when dressing me, had described in 
 no very amiable colours. But a good deal more I 
 thought of Sherwood Forest (the forest of Robin 
 Hood), which, as I had been told, we should cross 
 after the night set in. At six o’clock I descended, 
 and not, as usual, to the children’s room, but, on this 
 special morning of my life, to a room called the 
 breakfast-room ; where I found a blazing fire, candles 
 lighted, and the whole breakfast equipage, as if for 
 my mother, set out, to my astonishment, for no 
 greater personage than myself. The scene being in 
 England, and on a December morning, I need scarcely 
 say that it rained ; the rain beat violently against the 
 windows ; the wind raved ; and an aged servant, who 
 did the honours of the breakfast-table, pressed me 
 urgently to eat. I need not say that I had no 
 appetite : the fulness of my heart, both from busy 
 anticipation, and from the parting which was at hand, 
 had made me incapable of any other thought or 
 attention but such as pointed to the coming journey. 
 All circumstances in travelling, all scenes and situa- 
 tions of a representative and recurring character, are 
 indescribably affecting, connected, as they have been, 
 in so many myriads of minds, more especially in a 
 land which is sending off for ever its flowers and 
 blossoms to a clime so remote as that of India, with 
 heartrending separations, and with farewells never to 
 be repeated. But, amongst them all, none cleaves 
 to my own feelings more indelibly, from having 
 repeatedly been concerned, either as witness or as a 
 principal party in its little drama, than the early 
 breakfast on a wintry morning long before the dark- 
 ness has given way, when the golden blaze of the 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 269 
 
 hearth, and the bright glitter of candles, with female 
 ministrations of gentleness more touching than on 
 common occasions, all conspire to rekindle, as it were 
 for a farewell gleam, the holy memorials of household 
 affections. And many have, doubtless, had my feel- 
 ings ; for I believe few readers will ever forget the 
 beautiful manner in which Mrs. Inchbald has treated 
 such a scene in winding up the first part of her 
 “ Simple Story/’ and the power with which she has 
 invested it. 
 
 Years that seem innumerable have passed since 
 that December morning in my own life to which I 
 am now recurring ; and yet, even to this moment, I 
 recollect the audible throbbing of heart, the leap and 
 rushing of blood, which suddenly surprised me dur- 
 ing a deep lull of the wind, when the aged attendant 
 said, without hurry or agitation, but with something 
 of a solemn tone, “ That is the sound of wheels. 
 
 I hear the chaise. Mr. H will be here directly.” 
 
 The road ran, for some distance, by a course pretty 
 nearly equidistant from the house, so that the groan- 
 ing of the wheels continued to catch the ear, as it 
 swelled upon the wind, for some time without much 
 alteration. At length a right-angled turn brought 
 the road continually and rapidly nearer to the gates 
 of the grounds, which had purposely been thrown open. 
 At this point, however, a long career of raving 
 arose; all other sounds were lost; and for some 
 time I began to think we had been mistaken, when 
 suddenly the loud trampling of horses’ feet, as they 
 whirled up the sweep below the windows, followed 
 by a peal long and loud upon the bell, announced, 
 beyond question, the summons for my departure. 
 The door being thrown open, steps were heard loud 
 and fast ; and in the next moment, ushered* by a 
 servant, stalked forward, booted and fully equipped, 
 my travelling companion — if such a word can at all 
 express the relation between the arrogant young 
 blood, just fresh from assuming the toga virilis , and a 
 modest child of profound sensibilities, but shy and 
 reserved beyond even English reserve. The aged 
 
270 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 servant, with apparently constrained civility, pre- 
 sented my mother’s compliments to him, with a 
 request that he would take breakfast. This he 
 hastily and rather peremptorily declined. Me, how- 
 ever, he condescended to notice with an approving 
 nod, slightly inquiring if I were the young gentleman 
 who shared his post-chaise. But, without allowing 
 time for an answer, and striking his boot impatiently 
 with a riding-whip, he hoped I was ready. “Not 
 until he has gone up to my mistress,” replied my old 
 protectress, in a tone of some asperity. Thither I 
 ascended. What counsels and directions I might 
 happen to receive at the maternal toilet, naturally I 
 have forgotten. The most memorable circumstance 
 to me was, that I, who had never till that time pos- 
 sessed the least or most contemptible coin, received, 
 in a network purse, six glittering guineas, with in- 
 structions to put three immediately into Mr. H ’s 
 
 hands, and the others when he should call for them. 
 
 The rest of my mother’s counsels, if deep, were 
 not long ; she, who had always something of a 
 Roman firmness, shed more milk of roses, I believe, 
 upon my cheeks than tears 3 and why not ? What 
 should there be to her corresponding to an ignorant 
 child’s sense of pathos, in a little journey of about 
 a hundred miles ? Outside her door, however, there 
 awaited me some silly creatures, women, of course, 
 old and young, from the nursery and the kitchen, 
 who gave, and who received, those fervent kisses 
 which wait only upon love without awe and without 
 disguise. Heavens ! what rosaries might be strung for 
 the memory of sweet female kisses, given without check 
 or art, before one is of an age to value them ! And 
 again, how sweet is the touch of female hands as they 
 array one for a journey ! If anything needs fastening, 
 whether by pinning, tying, or any other contrivance, 
 how perfect is one’s confidence in female skill 3 as if, 
 by mere virtue of her sex and feminine instinct, a 
 woman could not possibly fail to know the best and 
 readiest way of adjusting every case that could arise 
 in dress. Mine was hastily completed amongst them 3 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 271 
 
 each had a pin to draw from her bosom, in order to 
 put something to rights about my throat or hands ; 
 and a chorus of “ God bless hims ! ” was arising, 
 when, from below, young Mephistopheles murmured 
 an impatient groan, and perhaps the horses snorted. 
 I found myself lifted into the chaise : counsels about 
 the night and the cold flowing in upon me, to which 
 Mephistopheles listened with derision or astonish- 
 ment. I and he had each our separate corner ; and, 
 except to request that I would draw up one of the 
 glasses, I do not think he condescended to address 
 one word to me until dusk, when we found ourselves 
 rattling into Chesterfield, having barely accomplished 
 four stages, or forty or forty-two miles, in about nine 
 hours. This, except on the Bath or Great North 
 Roads, may be taken as a standard amount of per- 
 formance, in 1794 (the year I am recording), and 
 even ten years later. 1 In these present hurrying 
 and tumultuous days, whether time is really of more 
 value, I cannot say ; but all people on the establish- 
 ment of inns are required to suppose it of the most 
 awful value. Now-a-days (1833), no sooner have 
 the horses stopped at the gateway of a posting-house, 
 than a summons is passed down to the stables ; and 
 in less than one minute, upon a great road, the horses 
 next in rotation, always ready harnessed when expect- 
 ing to come on duty, are heard trotting down the 
 yard. “ Putting to,” and transferring the luggage 
 (supposing your conveyance a common post-chaise), 
 once a work of at least thirty minutes, is now easily 
 accomplished in three. And scarcely have you paid 
 the ex-postillion before his successor is mounted ; the 
 ostler is standing ready with the steps in his hands to 
 receive his invariable sixpence ; the door is closed ; 
 the representative waiter bows his acknowledgment 
 for the house, and you are off at a pace never less than 
 
 1 It appears, however, from the Life of Hume by my dis- 
 tinguished friend Mr. Hill Burton, that already, in the middle 
 of the last century, the historian accomplished without difficulty 
 six miles an hour with only a pair of horses. But this, it should 
 be observed, was on the Great North Road. 
 
272 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 ten miles an hour ; the total detention at each stage 
 not averaging above four minutes. Then (i.e., at the 
 latter end of the eighteenth and beginning of the 
 nineteenth century), half-an-hour was the minimum 
 of time spent at each change of horses. Your arrival 
 produced a great bustle of unloading and unharness- 
 ing; as a matter of course, you alighted and went 
 into the inn ; if you sallied out to report progress, 
 after waiting twenty minutes, no signs appeared of 
 any stir about the stables. The most choleric person 
 could not much expedite preparations, which loitered 
 not so much from any indolence in the attendants, as 
 from faulty arrangements and total defect of forecast- 
 ing. The pace was such as the roads of that day 
 allowed ; never so much as six miles an hour, except 
 upon a very great road ; and then only by extra pay- 
 ment to the driver. Yet, even under this compara- 
 tively miserable system, how superior was England, 
 as a land for the traveller, to all the rest of the world, 
 Sweden only excepted ! Bad as were the roads, and 
 defective as were all the arrangements, still you had 
 these advantages : no town so insignificant, no post- 
 ing-house so solitary, but that at all seasons, except a 
 contested election, it could furnish horses without 
 delay, and without license to distress the neighbour- 
 ing farmers. On the worst road, and on a winter’s 
 day, with no more than a single pair of horses, you 
 generally made out sixty miles ; even if it were 
 necessary to travel through the night, you could con- 
 tinue to make way, although more slowly ; and 
 finally, if you were of a temper to brook delay, and 
 did not exact from all persons the haste or energy of 
 Hotspurs, the whole system in those days was full of 
 • respectability and luxurious ease, and well fitted to 
 renew the image of the home you had left, if not in 
 its elegancies, yet in all its substantial comforts. 
 What cosy old parlours in those days ! low-roofed, 
 glowing with ample fires, and fenced from the blasts 
 of doors by screens, whose foldings were or seemed 
 to be infinite ! What motherly landladies ! won, how 
 readily, to kindness the most lavish, by the mere 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 273 
 
 attractions of simplicity and youthful innocence, and 
 finding so much interest in the bare circumstance of 
 being a traveller at a childish age ! Then what bloom- 
 ing young handmaidens ; how different from the 
 knowing and worldly demireps of modern high-roads ! 
 And sometimes grey-headed, faithful waiters, how 
 sincere and how r attentive, by comparison with their 
 flippant successors, the eternal “ Coming, sir, coming,” 
 of our improved generation. 
 
 Such an honest old butler-looking servant waited 
 on us during dinner at Chesterfield, carving for me, 
 and urging me to eat. Even Mephistopheles found 
 his pride relax under the influence of wine ; and, 
 when loosened from this restraint, his kindness was 
 not deficient. To me he showed it in pressing wine 
 upon me, without stint or measure. The elegancies 
 which be had observed in such parts of my mother’s 
 establishment as could be supposed to meet his 
 eye on so hasty a visit had impressed him perhaps 
 favourably towards myself : and could I have a little 
 altered my age, or dismissed my excessive reserve, I 
 doubt not that he would have admitted me, in default 
 of a more suitable comrade, to his entire confidence 
 for the rest of the road. Dinner finished, and myself 
 at least, for the first time in my childish life, some- 
 what perhaps overcharged with wine, the bill was 
 called for, the waiter paid in the lavish style of 
 antique England, and we heard our chaise drawing 
 up under the gateway — the invariable custom of those 
 days — by which you were spared the trouble of going 
 into the street ; stepping from the hajl of the inn 
 right into your carriage. I had been kept back for 
 a minute or so by the landlady and her attendant 
 nymphs, to be dressed and kissed ; and, on seating 
 myself in the chaise, which was well lighted with 
 lamps, I found my lordly young principal in conversa- 
 tion with the landlord, first, upon the price of oats — 
 which youthful horsemen always affect to inquire 
 after with interest — but, secondly, upon a topic more 
 immediately at his heart — viz., the reputation of the 
 road. At that time of day, when gold had not yet 
 
274 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 disappeared from the circulation, no traveller carried 
 any other sort of money about him ; and there was 
 consequently a rich encouragement to highwaymen, 
 which vanished almost entirely with Mr. Pitt’s Act of 
 1797 for restricting cash payments. Property which 
 could be identified and traced was a perilous sort of 
 plunder; and from that time the free-trade of the 
 road almost perished as a regular occupation. At 
 this period it did certainly maintain a languishing 
 existence ; here and there it might have a casual run 
 of success : and, as these local ebbs and flows were 
 continually shifting, perhaps, after all, the trade 
 might lie amongst a small number of hands. Uni- 
 versally, however, the landlords showed some shrewd- 
 ness, or even sagacity, in qualifying, according to the 
 circumstances of the inquirer, the sort of credit which 
 they allowed to the exaggerated ill-fame of the roads. 
 Returning on this very road, some months after, with 
 a timid female relative, who put her questions with 
 undisguised and distressing alarm, the very same 
 people, one and all, assured her that the danger was 
 next to nothing. Not so at present: rightly pre- 
 suming that a haughty cavalier of eighteen, flushed 
 with wine and youthful blood, would listen with 
 disgust to a picture too amiable and pacific of the 
 roads before him, Mr. Spread-Eagle replied with the 
 air of one who knew more than he altogether liked to 
 tell, and, looking suspiciously amongst the strange 
 faces lit up by the light of the carriage lamps — “ Why, 
 sir, there have been ugly stories afloat ; I cannot 
 deny it : and sometimes, you know, sir ” — winking 
 sagaciously, to which a knowing nod of assent was 
 returned — “ it may not be quite safe to tell all one 
 knows. But you can understand me. The forest, 
 you are well aware, sir, is the forest : it never was 
 much to be trusted, by all accounts, in my father’s 
 time, and I suppose will not be better in mine. But 
 you must keep a sharp look-out : and, Tom,” speak- 
 ing to the postillion, “ mind, when you pass the third 
 gate, to go pretty smartly by the thicket.” Tom 
 replied in a tone of importance to this professional 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 275 
 
 appeal. General valedictions were exchanged, the 
 landlord bowed, and we moved off for the forest. 
 Mephistopheles had his travelling case of pistols. 
 These he began now to examine ; for sometimes, 
 said he, I have known such a trick as drawing the 
 charge whilst one happened to be taking a glass of 
 wine. Wine had unlocked his heart — the prospect 
 of the forest and the advancing night excited him 
 — and even of such a child as myself he was now 
 disposed to make a confidant. “ Did you observe,” 
 said he, “that ill-looking fellow, as big as a camel, 
 who stood on the landlord’s left hand?” — Was it the 
 man, I asked timidly, who seemed by his dress to be 
 a farmer ? — “ Farmer, you call him ! Ah ! my young 
 friend, that shows your little knowledge of the world. 
 He is a scoundrel, the bloodiest of scoundrels. And 
 so I trust to convince him before many hours are 
 gone over our heads.” Whilst saying this, he em- 
 ployed himself in priming his pistols ; then, after a 
 pause, he went on thus : “No, my young friend, 
 this alone shows his base purposes — his calling 
 himself a farmer. Farmer he is not, but a desperate 
 highwayman, of which I have full proof. I watched 
 his malicious glances, whilst the landlord was talking ; 
 .and I could swear to his traitorous intentions.” So 
 speaking, he threw anxious glances on each side as 
 we continued to advance : we were both somewhat 
 excited ; he by the spirit of adventure, I by sympathy 
 with him — and both by wine. The wine, however, 
 soon applied a remedy to its own delusions ; six 
 miles from the town we had left, both of us were in a 
 bad condition for resisting highwaymen with effect 
 — being fast asleep. Suddenly a most abrupt halt 
 awoke us — Mephistopheles felt for his pistols — the 
 door flew open, and the lights of the assembled group 
 announced to us that we had reached Mansfield. 
 That night we went on to Newark, at which place 
 about forty miles of our journey remained. This 
 distance we performed, of course, on the following 
 day, between breakfast and dinner. But it serves 
 strikingly to illustrate the state of roads in England, 
 
276 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 whenever your affairs led you into districts a little 
 retired from the capital routes of the public travelling, 
 that, for one twenty-mile stage — viz., from Newark to 
 Sleaford — they refused to take us forward with less 
 than four horses. This was neither a fraud, as our 
 eyes soon convinced us (for even four horses could 
 scarcely extricate the chaise from the deep sloughs 
 which occasionally seamed the road through tracts of 
 two or three miles in succession), nor was it an 
 accident of the weather. In all seasons the same 
 demand was enforced, as my female protectress found 
 in conducting me back at a fine season of the year, 
 and had always found in traversing ^the same route. 
 The England of that date (1794) exhibited many 
 similar cases. At present I know of but one stage 
 in all England where a traveller, without regard to 
 weight, is called upon to take four horses ; and that 
 is at Ambleside, in going by the direct road to 
 Carlisle. The first stage to Patterdale lies over the 
 mountain of Kirkstone, and the ascent is not only 
 toilsome (continuing for above three miles, with oc- 
 casional intermissions), but at times is carried over 
 summits too steep for a road by all the rules of 
 engineering, and yet too little frequented to offer 
 any means of repaying the cost of smoothing the 
 difficulties. 
 
 It was not until after the year 1815 that the main 
 improvement took place in the English travelling 
 system, so far as regarded speed. It is, in reality, to 
 Mr. Macadam that we owe it. All the roads in Eng- 
 land, within a few years, were remodelled, and upon 
 principles of Roman science. From mere beds of 
 torrents and systems of ruts, they were raised uni- 
 versally to the condition and appearance of gravel 
 walks in private parks or shrubberies. The average 
 rate of velocity was, in consequence, exactly doubled 
 — ten miles an hour being now generally accom- 
 plished, instead of five. And at the moment when 
 all further improvement upon this system had become 
 hopeless, a new prospect was suddenly opened to us 
 by railroads ; which again, considering how much 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 277 
 
 they have already exceeded the maximum of possi- 
 bility as laid down by all engineers during the pro- 
 gress of the Manchester and Liverpool line, may 
 soon give way to new modes of locomotion still more 
 astonishing to our preconceptions. 
 
 One point of refinement, as regards the comfort of 
 travellers, remains to be mentioned, in which the 
 improvement began a good deal earlier, perhaps 
 by ten years, than in the construction of the roads. 
 Luxurious as was the system of English travelling at 
 all periods, after the general establishment of post- 
 chaises, it must be granted that, in the circumstance 
 of cleanliness, there was far from being that attention, 
 or that provision for the traveller’s comfort, which 
 might have been anticipated from the general habits 
 of the country. I, at all periods of my life a great 
 traveller, was witness to the first steps and the whole 
 struggle of this revolution. Marechal Saxe professed 
 always to look under his bed, applying his caution 
 chiefly to the attempts of robbers. Now, if at the 
 greatest inns of England you had, in the days I speak 
 of, adopted this marechal’s policy of reconnoitring, 
 what would you have seen? Beyond a doubt, you 
 would have seen what, upon all principles of seniority, 
 was entitled to your veneration — viz., a dense accumu- 
 lation of dust far older than yourself. A foreign 
 author made some experiments upon the deposition 
 of dust, and the rate of its accumulation, in a room 
 left wholly undisturbed. If I recollect, a century 
 would produce a stratum about half an inch in depth. 
 Upon this principle, I conjecture that much dust 
 which I have seen in inns, during the first four or 
 five years of the present century, must have belonged 
 to the reign of George II. It was, however, upon 
 travellers by coaches that the full oppression of the 
 old vicious system operated. The elder Scaliger 
 mentions, as a characteristic of the English in his 
 day (about 1530), a horror of cold water ; in which, 
 however, there must have been some mistake. 1 
 
 1 “ Some mistake ” : — The mistake was possibly this: what 
 little water for ablution, and what little rags called towels, a 
 
278 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 Nowhere could he and his foreign companions obtain 
 the luxury of cold water for washing their hands 
 either before or after dinner. One day he and his 
 party dined with the Lord Chancellor; and now, 
 thought he, for very shame they will allow us some 
 means of purification. Not at all : the Chancellor 
 viewed this outlandish novelty with the same jealousy 
 as others. However, on the earnest petition of 
 Scaliger, he made an order that a basin or other 
 vessel of cold water should be produced. His house- 
 hold bowed to this judgment, and a slop-basin was 
 cautiously introduced. “ What ! ” said Scaliger, “only 
 one, and we so many?” Even that one contained 
 but a tea-cupful of water ; but the great scholar soon 
 found that he must be thankful for what he had got. 
 It had cost the whole strength of the English Chan- 
 cery to produce that single cup of water ; and, for 
 that day, no man in his senses could look for 
 a second. Pretty much the same struggle, and for 
 the same cheap reform, commenced about the year 
 1805-6. Post-chaise travellers could, of course, have 
 what they liked, and generally they asked for a 
 bedroom. It is of coach travellers I speak. And 
 the particular innovation in question commenced, as 
 was natural, with the mail-coach, which, from the 
 much higher scale of its fares, commanded a much 
 more select class of company. I was a party to 
 the very earliest attempts at breaking ground in 
 this alarming revolution. Well do I remember the 
 astonishment of some waiters, the indignation of 
 others, the sympathetic uproars which spread to the 
 bar, to the kitchen, and even to the stables, at the 
 first opening of our extravagant demands. Some- 
 times even the landlady thought the case worthy of 
 her interference, and came forward to remonstrate 
 
 foreigner ever sees at home, will at least be always within reach, 
 from the Continental practice of using the bedroom for the sitting- 
 room. But in England our plentiful means of ablution are 
 kept in the background. Scaliger should have asked for a 
 bedroom : the surprise was possibly — not at his wanting water, 
 but at his wanting it in a dining-room. 
 
TRAVELLING 
 
 2 79 
 
 with us upon our unheard-of conduct. But gradually 
 we made way. Like Scaliger, at first we got but one 
 basin amongst us, and that one was brought into the 
 breakfast-room ; but scarcely had two years revolved 2 
 before we began to see four, and all appurtenances, 
 arranged duly in correspondence to the number of 
 inside passengers by the mail : and, as outside travel- 
 ling was continually gaining ground amongst the 
 wealthier classes, more comprehensive arrangements 
 were often made : though, even to this day, so much 
 influence survives from the original aristocratic prin- 
 ciple upon which public carriages were constructed, 
 that on the mail-coaches there still prevails the most 
 scandalous inattention to the comfort, and even to 
 the security, of the outside passengers ; a slippery 
 glazed roof frequently makes the sitting a matter of 
 effort and anxiety, whilst the little iron side-rail of 
 four inches in height serves no one purpose but 
 that of bruising the thigh. Concurrently with these 
 reforms in the system of personal cleanliness, others 
 were silently making way through all departments of 
 the household economy. Dust from the reign of 
 George II. became scarcer; gradually it came to 
 bear an antiquarian value : basins lost their grim 
 
 appearance, and looked as clean as in gentlemen’s 
 houses. And at length the whole system was so 
 thoroughly ventilated and purified, that all good 
 inns, nay, generally speaking, even second-rate inns, 
 at this day reflect the best features, as to cleanliness 
 and neatness, of well-managed private establishments. 
 
TWELFTH CHAPTER 
 
 MY BROTHER 
 
 The reader who may have accompanied me in these 
 wandering memorials of my own life and casual ex- 
 periences, will be aware that in many cases the neglect 
 of chronological order is not merely permitted, but is 
 in fact to some degree inevitable. There are cases, 
 for instance, which, as a whole, connect themselves 
 with my own life at so many different eras that, upon 
 any chronological principle of position, it would have 
 been difficult to assign them a proper place ; back- 
 wards or forwards they must have leaped, in whatever 
 place they had been introduced ; and in their entire 
 compass, from first to last, never could have been 
 represented as properly belonging to any one present 
 time, whensoever that had been selected : belonging 
 to every place alike, they would belong, according to 
 the proverb, to no place at all ; or (reversing that 
 proverb), belonging to no place by preferable right, 
 they would, in fact, belong to every place ; and there- 
 fore to this place. 
 
 The incidents I am now going to relate come under 
 this rule ; for they form part of a story which fell in 
 with my own life at many different points. It is a 
 story taken from the life of my own brother ; and 
 I dwell on it with the more willingness because it 
 furnishes an indirect lesson upon a great principle of 
 social life, now and for many years back struggling 
 for its just supremacy — the principle that all corporal 
 punishments whatsoever, and upon whomsoever in- 
 flicted, are hateful, and an indignity to our common 
 nature, which (with or without our consent) is en- 
 shrined in the person of the sufferer. Degrading 
 him , they degrade us. I will not here add one word 
 upon the general thesis, but go on to the facts of this 
 case; which, if all its incidents could be now re- 
 covered, was perhaps as romantic as any that ever 
 yet has tried the spirit of fortitude and patience in a 
 child. But its moral interest depends upon this — 
 
 280 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 281 
 
 that simply out of one brutal chastisement arose 
 naturally the entire series of events which so very 
 nearly made shipwreck of all hope for one individual, 
 and did in fact poison the tranquillity of a whole family 
 for seven years. 
 
 My next brother, younger by about four years than 
 myself (he, in fact, that caused so much affliction to 
 the Sultan Amurath), was a boy of exquisite and 
 delicate beauty — delicate, that is, in respect to its 
 feminine elegance and bloom ; for else (as regards 
 constitution) he turned out remarkably robust. In 
 such excess did his beauty flourish during childhood 
 that those who remember him and myself at the 
 public school at Bath will also remember the ludicrous 
 molestation in the streets (for to him it was molesta- 
 tion) which it entailed upon him — ladies stopping 
 continually to kiss him. On first coming up to Bath 
 from Greenhay, my mother occupied the very apart- 
 ments on the North Parade just quitted by Edmund 
 Burke, then in a decaying condition, though he did 
 not die (I believe) till 1797. That state of Burke’s 
 health, connected with the expectation of finding him 
 still there, brought for some weeks crowds of inquirers, 
 many of whom saw the childish Adonis, then scarcely 
 seven years old, and inflicted upon him what he 
 viewed as the martyrdom of their caresses. Thus 
 began a persecution which continued as long as his 
 years allowed it. The most brilliant complexion that 
 could be imagined, the features of an Antinous, and 
 perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his life 
 (afterwards he lost it), made him the subject of never- 
 ending admiration to the whole female population, 
 gentle and simple, who passed him in the streets. In 
 after days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse 
 and scornful coyness. But, at that time, so foolishly 
 insensible was he to the honour, that he used to kick 
 and struggle with all his might to liberate himself 
 from the gentle violence which was continually 
 offered ; and he renewed the scene (so elaborately 
 painted by Shakspere) of the conflicts beween Venus 
 and Adonis. For two years, this continued a subject 
 
282 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 of irritation the keenest on the one side, and of 
 laughter on the other, between my brother and his 
 plainer school-fellows. Not that we had the slightest 
 jealousy on the subject — far from it : it struck us all 
 (as it generally does strike boys) in the light of an 
 attaint upon the dignity of a male, that he should be 
 subjected to the caresses of women without leave 
 asked : this was felt to be a badge of childhood, and 
 a proof that the object of such caressing tenderness, 
 so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light 
 of a baby — not to mention that the very foundation 
 of all this distinction, a beautiful face, is as a male 
 distinction regarded in a very questionable light by 
 multitudes, and often by those most who are the 
 possessors of that distinction. Certainly that was 
 the fact in my brother’s case. Not one of us could 
 feel so pointedly as himself the ridicule of his situa- 
 tion ; nor did he cease, when increasing years had 
 liberated him from that female expression of delight 
 in his beauty, to regard the beauty itself as a degra- 
 dation ; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it ; 
 though, in reality, it did him service in after distresses, 
 when no other endowment whatsoever would have 
 been availing. Often, in fact, do men’s natures 
 sternly contradict the promise of their features ; for 
 no person would have believed that, under the bloom- 
 ing loveliness of a Narcissus, lay shrouded a most 
 heroic nature, not merely an adventurous courage, 
 but with a capacity of patient submission to hard- 
 ship, and of wrestling with calamity, such as is rarely 
 found amongst the endowments of youth. I have 
 reason, also, to think that the state of degradation in 
 which he believed himself to have passed his childish 
 years, from the sort of public petting which I have 
 described, and his strong recoil from it as an insult, 
 went much deeper than was supposed, and had much 
 to do in his subsequent conduct, and in nerving him 
 to the strong resolutions he adopted. He seemed to 
 resent, as an original insult of nature, the having given 
 him a false index of character in his feminine beauty, 
 and to take a pleasure in contradicting it. Had it 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 283 
 
 been in his power, he would have spoiled it. Certain 
 it is, that, from the time he reached his eleventh 
 birthday, he had begun already to withdraw himself 
 from the society of all other boys — to fall into long 
 fits of abstraction — and to throw himself upon his 
 own resources in a way neither usual nor necessary. 
 School-fellows of his own age and standing — those, 
 even, who were the most amiable — he shunned ; and, 
 many years after his disappearance, I found, in his 
 handwriting, a collection of fragments, couched in a 
 sort of wild lyrical verses, presenting, unquestionably, 
 the most extraordinary evidences of a proud, self- 
 sustained mind, consciously concentring his own 
 hopes in himself, and abjuring the rest of the world, 
 that can ever have emanated from so young a person ; 
 since, upon the largest allowance, and supposing them 
 to have been written on the eve of his quitting 
 England, they must have been written at the age 
 of twelve. I have often speculated on the subject of 
 these mysterious compositions ; they were of a nature 
 to have proceeded rather from some mystical quietist, 
 such as Madame Guyon, if with this rapt devotion 
 one can suppose the union of a rebellious and mur- 
 muring ambition. Passionate apostrophes there were 
 to nature and the powers of nature ; and what seemed 
 strangest of all was — that, in style, not only were they 
 free from all tumour and inflation which might have 
 been looked for in so young a writer, but were even 
 wilfully childish and colloquial in a pathetic degree ; 
 in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the difference 
 between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they some- 
 what resembled that beautiful poem 1 of George 
 Herbert, entitled Love Unknown, in which he de- 
 scribes symbolically to a friend, under the form of 
 treacherous ill-usage he had experienced, the religious 
 processes by which his soul had been weaned from 
 the world. The most obvious solution of the mystery 
 would be, to suppose these fragments to have been 
 
 1 This poem, from great admiration of its mother English, 
 and to illustrate some ideas upom style, Mr. Coleridge repub- 
 lished in his Biographia Liter aria. 
 
284 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 copied from some obscure author : but, besides that 
 no author could have remained obscure in this age of 
 elaborate research who had been capable of sighs (for 
 such I may call them) drawn up from such well-like 
 depths of feeling, and expressed with such fervour and 
 simplicity of language, there was another testimony to 
 their being the productions of him who owned the 
 penmanship ; which was, that some of the papers 
 exhibited the whole process of creation and growth, 
 such as erasures, substitutions, doubts expressed as 
 to this and that form of expression, together with 
 references backwards and forwards. Now, that the 
 handwriting was my brother’s, admitted to no doubt 
 whatsoever. I go on with his story. 
 
 In 1800 my visit to Ireland, and visits to other 
 places subsequently, separated me from him for above 
 a year. In 1801, we were at very different schools : 
 I in the highest class of a great public school 1 — he 
 at a very sequestered parsonage on a wild moor 
 (Plorwich Moor) in Lancashire. This situation, pro- 
 bably, fed and cherished his melancholy habits ; for 
 he had no society except that of a younger brother, 
 who would give him no disturbance at all. The 
 development of our national resources had not yet 
 gone so far as absolutely to exterminate from the map 
 of England everything like a heath, a breezy down 
 (such as gave so peculiar a character to the counties 
 of Wilts, Somerset, Dorset, &c.), or even a village 
 common. Heaths were yet to be found in England, 
 not so spacious, indeed, as the landes of France, but 
 equally wild and romantic. In such a situation my 
 brother lived, and under the tuition of a clergyman, 
 retired in his habits, and even ascetic, but gentle in 
 his manners. To that I can speak myself ; for in 
 the winter of 1801 I dined with him, and I found 
 that his yoke was, indeed, a mild one ; since, even to 
 my youngest brother H., a headstrong child of seven, 
 he used no stronger remonstrance, in urging him to 
 some essential point of duty, than “ Do be persuaded \ 
 
 1 Manchester Grammar Schoo* 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 285 
 
 sir” On another occasion I, accompanied by a 
 friend, slept at Mr. J.’s : we were accidentally de- 
 tained there through the greater part of the following 
 day by snow ; and, to the inexpressible surprise of 
 my companion, a mercantile man from Manchester, 
 for a considerable time after breakfast the reverend 
 gentleman persisted in pursuing my brother from room 
 to room, and at last from the ground-floor up to the 
 attics, holding a book open (which turned out to be 
 a Latin grammar) ; each of them (pursuer and pur- 
 sued) moving at a tolerably slow pace : my brother 
 H. silent; but Mr. J., with a voice of adjuration, 
 solemn and even sad, yet kind and conciliatory, sing- 
 ing out at intervals, “ Do be persuaded, sir ! ” “ It 
 
 is your welfare I seek ! ” “ Let your own interest, 
 
 sir, plead in this matter between us ! ” And so the 
 chase continued, ascending and descending, up to the 
 very garrets, down to the very cellars, then steadily re- 
 volving from front to rear of the house ; but finally 
 with no result at all. The spectacle reminded me of 
 a groom attempting to catch a coy pony by holding 
 out a sieve containing, or pretending to contain, a 
 bribe of oats. Mrs. J., the reverend gentleman’s 
 wife, assured us that the same process went on at 
 intervals throughout the week : and in any case it 
 was clearly good as a mode of exercise. Now, such 
 a master, though little adapted for the headstrong 
 H., was the very person for the thoughtful and too 
 sensitive R. Search the island through, there could 
 not have been found another situation so suitable to 
 my brother’s wayward and haughty nature. The 
 clergyman was learned, quiet, absorbed in his studies; 
 humble and modest beyond the proprieties of his 
 situation, and treating my brother in all points as a 
 companion : whilst, on the other hand, my brother 
 was not the person to forget the respect due, by 
 a triple title, to a clergyman, a scholar, and his own 
 preceptor — one, besides who so little thought of 
 exacting it. How happy might all parties have been 
 — what suffering, what danger, what years of miser- 
 able anxiety, might have been spared to all who were 
 
286 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 interested — had the guardians and executors of my 
 father’s will thought fit to “ let well alone '*) 
 
 “ per star meglio” 1 they chose to remove my brother 
 from this gentle recluse, to an active bustling man of 
 the world, the very anti-pole in character. What 
 might be the pretensions of this gentleman to scholar- 
 ship,' I never had any means of judging; and, con- 
 sidering that he must now (if living at all), at a 
 distance of thirty-six years, be grey-headed, I shall 
 respect his age so far as to suppress his name. He 
 was of a class now annually declining (and I hope 
 rapidly) to extinction. Thanks be to God, in this 
 point at least, for the dignity of human nature, that, 
 amongst the many, many cases of reform destined 
 eventually to turn out chimerical, this one, at least, 
 never can be defeated, injured, or eclipsed. As man 
 grows more intellectual, the power of managing him 
 by his intellect and his moral nature, in utter con- 
 tempt of all appeals to his mere animal instincts of 
 pain, must go on pari passu. And, if a u Te Deum ,” 
 or an “ O , Jubilate l ” were to be celebrated by all 
 nations and languages for any one advance and ab- 
 solute conquest over wrong and error won by human 
 nature in our times — yes, not excepting 
 
 “ The bloody writing by all nations torn ” — 
 
 the abolition of the commerce in slaves — to my think- 
 ing, that festival should be for the mighty progress 
 made towards the suppression of brutal, bestial modes 
 of punishment. Nay, I may call them worse than 
 bestial ; for a man of any goodness of nature does 
 not willingly or needlessly resort to the spur or the 
 lash with his horse or with his hound. But, with 
 respect to man, if he will not be moved or won over 
 by conciliatory means — by means that presuppose 
 him a reasonable creature — then let him die, con- 
 founded in his own vileness : but let not me, let not 
 the man (that is to say) who has him in his power, 
 
 1 From the well-known Italian epitaph — “ Stciva bene : ma , 
 per star meglio sto qui ” — I was well ; but, because I would be 
 better than well, I am — where you see. 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 >87 
 
 dishonour himself by inflicting punishments, violating 
 that grandeur of human nature which, not in any 
 vague rhetorical sense, but upon a religious principle 
 of duty (viz., the scriptural doctrine that the human 
 person is “ the temple of the Holy Ghost ”), ought 
 to be a consecrated thing in the eyes of all good 
 men ; and of this we may be assured — this is more 
 sure than day or night — that in proportion as man 
 is honoured, exalted, trusted, in that proportion will 
 he become more worthy of honour, of exaltation, of 
 trust. 
 
 This schoolmaster had very different views of man 
 and his nature. He not only thought that physical 
 coercion was the one sole engine by which man could 
 be managed, but, on the principle of that common 
 maxim which declares that, when two schoolboys 
 meet, with powers at all near to a balance, no peace 
 can be expected between them until it is fairly settled 
 which is the master — on that same principle, he 
 fancied that no pupil could adequately or propor- 
 tionably reverence his master, until he had settled the 
 precise proportion of superiority in animal powers by 
 which his master was in advance of himself. Strength 
 of blows only could ascertain that : and, as he was 
 not very nice about creating his opportunities, as he 
 plunged at once “ in medias res” and more especially 
 when he saw or suspected any rebellious tendencies, 
 he soon picked a quarrel with my unfortunate brother. 
 Not, be it observed, that he much cared for a well- 
 looking or respectable quarrel. No. I have been 
 assured that, even when the most fawning obsequious- 
 ness had appealed to his clemency, in the person of 
 some timorous new-comer, appalled by the reports 
 he had heard — even in such cases (deeming it wise 
 to impress, from the beginning, a salutary awe of his 
 Jovian thunders), he made a practice of doing thus : 
 He would speak loud, utter some order, not very 
 clearly, perhaps, as respected the sound, but with 
 perfect perplexity as regarded the sense, to the timid, 
 sensitive boy upon whom he intended to fix a charge 
 of disobedience. “ Sir, if you please, what was it 
 
288 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 that you said ? ” — “ What was it that I said ? What ! 
 playing upon my words? Chopping logic? Strip, 
 sir; strip this instant.” Thenceforward this timid 
 boy became a serviceable instrument in his equipage. 
 Not only was he a proof, even without co-operation 
 on the master’s part, that extreme cases of submission 
 could not insure mercy, but also he, this boy, in 
 his own person, breathed forth, at intervals, a dim 
 sense of awe and worship — the religion of fear — to- 
 wards the grim Moloch of the scene. Hence, as by 
 electrical conductors, was conveyed throughout every 
 region of the establishment a tremulous sensibility 
 that vibrated towards the centre. Different, O 
 Rowland Hill, are the laws of thy establishment ! 
 far other are the echoes heard amid the ancient halls 
 of Bruce. There it is possible for the timid child to 
 be happy — for the child destined to an early grave 
 to reap his brief harvest in peace. Wherefore were 
 there no such asylums in those days ? Man flourished 
 then, as now, in beauty and in power. Wherefore 
 did he not put forth his power upon establishments 
 that might cultivate happiness as well as knowledge ? 
 Wherefore did no man cry aloud, in the spirit of 
 Wordsworth — 
 
 “ Ah, what avails heroic deed? 
 
 What liberty ? if no defence 
 Be won for feeble Innocence ? 
 
 Father of all! though wilful manhood read 
 His punishment in soul-distress, 
 
 Grant to the morn of life its natural blessedness ! ” 
 
 Meantime, my brother R., in an evil hour, having 
 been removed from that most quiet of human sanc- 
 tuaries, having foiteited that peace which possibly 
 he was never to retrieve, fell (as I have said) into 
 the power of this Moloch. And this Moloch upon 
 him illustrated the laws of his establishment : him 
 also, the gentle, the beautiful, but also the proud, 
 the haughty, he beat, kicked, trampled on ! 
 
 In two hours from that time, my brother was on 
 the road to Liverpool. Painfully he made out his 
 way, having not much money, and with a sense 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 ^89 
 
 of total abandonment which made him feel that all 
 he might have would prove little enough for his 
 purposes. 
 
 My brother went to an inn, after his long, long 
 journey to Liverpool, foot-sore (for he had walked 
 through four days, and, from ignorance of the world, 
 combined with excessive shyness — oh ! how shy do 
 people become from pride ! — had not profited by 
 those well-known incidents upon English high-roads 
 — return post-chaises, stage-coaches, led horses, or 
 waggons) — foot-sore, and eager for sleep. Sleep, 
 supper, breakfast in the morning — all these he had ; 
 so far his slender finances reached ; and for these 
 he paid the treacherous landlord : who then proposed 
 to him that they should take a walk out together, by 
 way of looking at the public buildings and the docks. 
 It seems the man had noticed my brother’s beauty, 
 some circumstances about his dress inconsistent with 
 his mode of travelling, and also his style of conversa- 
 tion. Accordingly, he wiled him along from street 
 to street, until they reached the Town Hall. “ Here 
 seems to be a fine building,” said this Jesuitical guide, 
 as if it had been some new Pompeii — some Luxor or 
 Palmyra that he had unexpectedly lit upon amongst 
 the undiscovered parts of Liverpool— “ here seems 
 to be a fine building ; shall we go in and ask leave 
 to look at it ? ” My brother, thinking less of the 
 spectacle than the spectator, whom, in a wilderness 
 of man, naturally he wished to make his friend, con- 
 sented readily. In they went ; and, by the merest 
 accident, Mr. Mayor and the town-council were then 
 sitting. To them the insidious landlord communi- 
 cated privately an account of his suspicions. He 
 himself conducted my brother, under pretence of 
 discovering the best station for picturesque pur- 
 poses, to the particular box for prisoners at the bar. 
 This was not suspected by the poor boy, not even 
 when Mr. Mayor began to question him. He still 
 thought it an accident, though doubtless he blushed 
 excessively on being questioned, and questioned so 
 impertinently, in public. The object of the mayor 
 
 K 
 
290 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 and of other Liverpool gentlemen then present was, 
 to ascertain my brother’s real rank and family : for he 
 persisted in representing himself as a poor wandering 
 boy. Various means were vainly tried to elicit this 
 information ; until at length — like the wily Ulysses, 
 who mixed with his pedlar’s budget of female orna- 
 ments and attire a few arms, by way of tempting 
 Achilles to a self-detection in the court of Lycomedes 
 — one gentleman counselled the mayor to send for a 
 Greek Testament. This was done ; the Testament 
 w T as presented open at St. John’s Gospel to my 
 brother, and he was requested to say whether he 
 knew in what language that book was written ; or 
 whether, perhaps, he could furnish them with a 
 translation from the page before him. R., in his 
 confusion, did not read the meaning of this appeal, 
 and fell into the snare : construed a few verses ; and 
 immediately was consigned to the care of a gentle- 
 man, who won from him by kindness what he had 
 refused to importunities or menaces. His family he 
 confessed at once, but not his school. An express 
 was therefore forwarded from Liverpool to our nearest 
 male relative — a military man, then by accident on 
 leave of absence from India. He came over, took 
 my brother back (looking upon the whole as a boyish 
 frolic of no permanent importance), made some stipu- 
 lations in his behalf for indemnity from punish- 
 ment, and immediately returned home. Left to 
 himself, the grim tyrant of the school easily evaded 
 the stipulations, and repeated his brutalities more 
 fiercely than before — now acting in the double spirit 
 of tyranny and revenge. 
 
 In a few hours, my brother was again on the road 
 to Liverpool. But not on this occasion did he 
 resort to any inn, or visit any treacherous hunter of 
 the picturesque. He offered himself to no tempta- 
 tions now, nor to any risks. Right onwards he went 
 to the docks, addressed himself to a grave, elderly 
 master of a trading vessel, bound upon a distant 
 voyage, and instantly procured an engagement. The 
 skipper was a good and sensible man, and (as it 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 291 
 
 turned out) a sailor accomplished in all parts of his 
 profession. The ship which he commanded was a 
 South Sea whaler, belonging to Lord Grenville — 
 whether lying at Liverpool or in the Thames at that 
 moment, I am not sure. However, they soon after- 
 wards sailed. 
 
 For somewhat less than three years, my brother 
 continued under the care of this good man, who was 
 interested by his appearance, and by some resemblance 
 which he fancied in his features to a son whom he had 
 lost. Fortunate, indeed, for the poor boy was this 
 interval of fatherly superintendence; for, under this 
 captain, he was not only preserved from the perils 
 which afterwards besieged him, until his years had 
 made him more capable of confronting them ; but also 
 he had thus an opportunity, which he improved to 
 the utmost, of making himself acquainted with the 
 two separate branches of his profession — navigation 
 and seamanship, qualifications which are not very 
 often united. 
 
 After the death of this captain, my brother ran 
 through many wild adventures ; until at length, after 
 a severe action fought off the coast of Peru, the 
 armed merchantman in which he then served was 
 captured by pirates. Most of the crew were mas- 
 sacred. My brother, on account of the important 
 services he could render, was spared ; and with these 
 pirates, cruising under a black flag, and perpetrating 
 unnumbered atrocities, he was obliged to sail for the 
 next two years ; nor could he in all that period find 
 any opportunity for effecting his escape. 
 
 During this long expatriation, let any thoughtful 
 reader imagine the perils of every sort which be- 
 sieged one so young, so inexperienced, so sensitive, 
 and so haughty ; perils to his life (but these, it was 
 the very expression of his unhappy situation, were 
 the perils least to be mourned for) ; perils to his 
 good name, going the length of absolute infamy — 
 since, if the piratical ship had been captured by a 
 British man-of-war, he might have found it im- 
 possible to clear himself of a voluntary participation 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 in the bloody actions of his shipmates ; and, on the 
 other hand (a case equally probable in the regions 
 which they frequented), supposing him to have been 
 captured by a Spanish guarda costa , he would scarcely 
 have been able, from his ignorance of the Spanish 
 language, to draw even a momentary attention to the 
 special circumstances of his own situation ; he would 
 have been involved in the general presumptions of 
 the case, and would have been executed in a sum- 
 mary way, upon the prima facie evidence against him, 
 that he did not appear to be in the condition of a 
 prisoner; and, if his name had ever again reached 
 his country, it would have been in some sad list of 
 ruffians, murderers, traitors to their country ; and 
 even these titles, as if not enough in themselves, 
 aggravated by the name of pirate, which at once 
 includes them all, and surpasses them all. These 
 were perils sufficiently distressing at any rate ; but 
 last of all came others even more appalling — the 
 perils of moral contamination, in that excess which 
 might be looked for from such associates : not, be it 
 recollected, a few wild notions or lawless principles 
 adopted into his creed of practical ethics, but that 
 brutal transfiguration of the entire character which 
 occurs, for instance, in the case of the young gipsy 
 son of Effie Deans ; a change making it impossible 
 to rely upon the very holiest instincts of the moral 
 nature, and consigning its victim to hopeless repro- 
 bation. Murder itself might have lost its horrors 
 to one who must have been but too familiar with 
 the spectacle of massacre by wholesale upon unresist- 
 ing crews, upon passengers enfeebled by sickness, or 
 upon sequestered villagers, roused from their slumbers 
 by the glare of conflagration, reflected from gleaming 
 cutlasses, and from the faces of demons. This fear 
 it was — a fear like this, as I have often thought — 
 which must, amidst her other woes, have been the 
 Aaron woe that swallowed up all the rest to the 
 unhappy Marie Antoinette. This must have been 
 the sting of death to her maternal heart, the grief 
 paramount, the “ crowning ” grief — the prospect, 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 293 
 
 namely, that her royal boy would not be dismissed 
 from the horrors of royalty to peace and humble 
 innocence ; but that his fair cheek would be ravaged 
 by vi^o as well as sorrow ; that he would be tempted 
 into brutal orgies, and every mode of moral pollution; 
 until, like poor Constance with her young Arthur, 
 but for a sadder reason, even if it were possible 
 that the royal mother should see her son in “ the 
 courts of heaven,” she would not know again one 
 so fearfully transfigured. This prospect for the royal 
 Constance of revolutionary France was but too pain- 
 fully fulfilled ; as we are taught to guess, even from 
 the faithful records of the Duchesse d’Angouleme. 
 The young Dauphin (it has been said , 1837), to the 
 infamy of his keepers, was so trained as to become 
 loathsome for coarse brutality, as well as for habits 
 of uncleanliness, to all who approached him— one 
 purpose of his guilty tutors being to render royalty 
 and august descent contemptible in his person. And, 
 in fact, they were so far likely to succeed in this 
 purpose for the moment, and to the extent of an 
 individual case, that, upon that account alone, but 
 still more for the sake of the poor child, the most 
 welcome news with respect to him — him whose birth 1 * * * * * * * 
 
 1 To those who are open to the impression of omens, there 
 is a most striking one on record with respect to the birth of 
 this ill-fated prince, not less so than the falling off of the head 
 from the cane of Charles I. at his trial, or the same king’s 
 striking a medal, bearing an oak-tree (prefiguring the oak of 
 Boscobel ), with this prophetic inscription, “ Seris nepotibus 
 umbrami 9 At the very moment when (according to imme- 
 morial usage) the birth of a child was in the act of annunciation 
 to the great officers of state assembled in the Queen’s bed- 
 chamber, and when a private signal froiji a lady had made 
 known the glad tidings that it was a Dauphin (the first child 
 having been a princess, to the signal disappointment of the 
 
 nation ; and the second, who was a boy, having died), the 
 
 whole frame of carved woodwork at the back of the Queen’s 
 
 bed, representing the crown and other regalia of France, with 
 
 the Bourbon lilies, came rattling down in ruins. There is 
 
 another and more direct ill omen connected, apparently, with 
 
 the birth of this prince ; in fact, a distinct prophecy of his 
 
 ruin — a prophecy that he should survive his father, and yet not 
 
 reign — which is so obscurely told, that one knows not in what 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 294 
 
 had drawn anthems of exultation from twenty-five 
 millions of men — was the news of his death. And 
 what else can well be expected for children suddenly 
 withdrawn from parental tenderness, and thrown upon 
 their own guardianship, at such an age as nine or 
 ten, and under the wilful misleading of perfidious 
 guides ? But, in my brother’s case, all the adverse 
 chances, overwhelming as they seemed, were turned 
 aside by some good angel ; all had failed to harm him; 
 and from the fiery furnace he came out unsinged. 
 
 I have said that he would not have appeared to 
 any capturing ship as standing in the situation of 
 prisoner amongst the pirates, nor was he such in 
 the sense of being confined. He moved about, 
 when on board ship, in freedom ; but he was 
 watched, never trusted on shore, unless under very 
 
 light to view it ; and especially since Louis XVIII., who is the 
 original authority for it, obviously confounds the first Dauphin 
 (who died before the calamities of his family commenced) with 
 the second. As to this second, who is of course the prince 
 concerned in the references of the text, a new and most extra- 
 ordinary interest has begun to invest his tragical story in this 
 very month of April 1853 ; at least it is now first brought 
 before universal Christendom. In the monthly Journal of 
 Putnam (published in New York) the number for April con- 
 tains a most interesting memoir upon the subject, signed T. 
 II. Hanson. Naturally, it indisposed most readers to put faith 
 in any fresh pretensions of this nature that at least one false 
 Dauphin had been pronounced such by so undeniable a judge 
 as the Duchesse d’Angouleme. Meantime, it is made probable 
 enough by Mr. Hanson that the true Dauphin did not die in 
 the year 1795 at the Temple, but was personated by a boy 
 unknown : that two separate parties had an equal interest in 
 sustaining this fraud, and did sustain it ; but one would hesitate 
 to believe whether at the price of murdering a celebrated 
 physician ; that they had the prince conveyed secretly to an 
 Indian settlement in Lower Canada, as a situation in which 
 French, being the prevailing language, would attract no atten- 
 tion, as it must have done in most other parts of North 
 America ; that the boy was educated and trained as a missionary 
 clergyman ; and, finally, that he is now acting in that capacity 
 under the name of Eleazer Williams — perfectly aware of the 
 royal pretensions put forward on his behalf, but equally through 
 age (being about 69), and through absorption in spiritual views, 
 indifferent to these pretensions. It is admitted on all hands 
 that the Prince de Joinville had an interview with Eleazer 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 295 
 
 peculiar circumstances ; and tolerated at all only 
 because one accomplishment made him indispensable 
 to the prosperity of the ship. Amongst the various 
 parts of nautical skill communicated to my brother 
 by his first fatherly captain was the management of 
 chronometers. Several had been captured, some of 
 the highest value, in the many prizes, European or 
 American. My brother happened to be perfect in 
 the skill of managing them ; and, fortunately for 
 him, no other person amongst them had that skill, 
 even in its lowest degree. To this one qualification, 
 therefore (and ultimately to this only), he was in- 
 debted for both safety and freedom ; since, though 
 he might have been spared in the first moments 
 of carnage from other considerations, there is little 
 doubt that, in some one of the innumerable brawls 
 which followed through the years of his captivity, 
 
 Williams a dozen years since : the prince alleges through mere 
 accident ; but this seems improbable ; and Mr. Hanson is likely 
 to be right in supposing this visit to have been a preconcerted 
 one, growing out of some anxiety to test the reports current, 
 so far as they were grounded upon resemblances in Mr. 
 Williams’s features to those of the Bourbon and Austrian 
 families. The most pathetic fact is that of the idiocy common 
 to the Dauphin and Mr. Eleazer Williams. It is clear from 
 all the most authentic accounts of the young prince, that idiocy 
 was in reality stealing over him — due doubtless to the stunning 
 nature of the calamities that overwhelmed his family ; to the 
 removal from him by tragical deaths, in so rapid a succession, 
 of the Princesse de Lamballe, of his aunt, of his father, of his 
 mother, and others whom most he had loved ; to his cruel 
 separation from his sister ; and to the astounding (for him 
 naturally incomprehensible) change that had come over the 
 demeanour and language of nearly all the people placed about 
 the persons of himself and his family. An idiocy resulting 
 from what must have seemed a causeless and demoniac con- 
 spiracy would be more likely to melt away under the sudden 
 transfer to kindness and the gaiety of forest life than any 
 idiocy belonging to original organic imbecility. Mr. Williams 
 describes his own confusion of mind as continuing up to his 
 fourteenth year, and all things which had happened in earlier 
 years as gleaming through clouds of oblivion, and as painfully 
 perplexing ; but otherwise he shows no desire to strengthen the 
 pretensions made for himself by any reminiscences piercing 
 these clouds that could point specially to France or to royal 
 experiences. 
 
296 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 he would have fallen a sacrifice to hasty impulses 
 of anger or wantonness, had not his safety been 
 made an object of interest and vigilance to those 
 in command, and to all who assumed any care for 
 the general welfare. Much, therefore, it was that 
 he owed to this accomplishment. Still, there is no 
 good thing without its alloy ; and this great blessing 
 brought along with it something worse than a dull 
 duty — the necessity, in fact, of facing fears and 
 trials to which the sailors heart is pre-eminently 
 sensible. All sailors, it is notorious, are super- 
 stitious ; partly, I suppose, from looking out so 
 much upon the wilderness of waves, empty of all 
 human life; for mighty solitudes are generally fear- 
 haunted and fear-peopled ; such, for instance, as the 
 solitudes of forests, where, in the absence of human 
 forms and ordinary human sounds, are discerned 
 forms more dusky and vague, not referred by the 
 eye to any known type, and sounds imperfectly 
 intelligible. And, therefore, are all German coal- 
 burners, woodcutters, &c., superstitious. Now the 
 sea is often peopled, amidst its ravings, with what 
 seem innumerable human voices — such voices, or 
 as ominous, as what were heard by Kubla Khan — 
 “ ancestral voices prophesying war ” ; oftentimes 
 laughter mixes, from a distance (seeming to come 
 also from distant times, as well as distant places), 
 with the uproar of waters ; and doubtless shapes 
 of fear, or shapes of beauty not less awful, are at 
 times seen upon the waves by the diseased eye of 
 the sailor, in other cases besides the somewhat 
 rare one of calenture. This vast solitude of the 
 sea being taken, therefore, as one condition of the 
 superstitious fear found so commonly among sailors, 
 a second may be the perilous insecurity of their own 
 lives, or (if the lives of sailors, after all, by means 
 of large immunities from danger in other shapes, 
 are not so insecure as is supposed, though, by the 
 way, it is enough for this result that to themselves 
 they seem so) yet at all events the insecurity of the 
 ships in which they sail. In such a case, in the case 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 2 97 
 
 of battle, and in others where the empire of chance 
 seems absolute, there the temptation is greatest to 
 dally with supernatural oracles, and supernatural 
 means of consulting them. Finally, the interrup- 
 tion habitually of all ordinary avenues to information 
 about the fate of their dearest relatives ; the con- 
 sequent agitation which must often possess those 
 who are re-entering upon home waters ; and the 
 sudden burst, upon stepping ashore, of heart-shaking 
 news in long-accumulated arrears — these are cir- 
 cumstances which dispose the mind to look out 
 for relief towards signs and omens as one way of 
 breaking the shock by dim anticipations. Rats 
 leaving a vessel destined to sink, although the 
 political application of it as a name of reproach 
 is purely modern, must be ranked among the oldest 
 of omens ; and perhaps the most sober-minded of 
 men might have leave to be moved with any augury 
 of an ancient traditional order, such as had won 
 faith for centuries, applied to a fate so interesting 
 as that of the ship to which he was on the point 
 of committing himself. Other causes might be 
 assigned, causative of nautical superstition, and 
 tending to feed it. But enough. It is well 
 
 known that the whole family of sailors is super- 
 stitious. My brother, poor Pink (this was an old 
 household name which he retained amongst us from 
 an incident of his childhood), was so in an im- 
 moderate degree. Being a great reader (in fact, 
 he had read everything in his mother tongue that 
 was of general interest), he was pretty well aware 
 how general was the ridicule attached in our times 
 to the subject of ghosts. But this — nor the rever- 
 ence he yielded otherwise to some of those writers 
 who had joined in that ridicule — any more had 
 unsettled his faith in their existence, than the sub- 
 mission of a sailor in a religious sense to his spiritual 
 counsellor, upon the false and fraudulent pleasures 
 of luxury, can ever disturb his remembrance of the 
 virtues lodged in rum or tobacco. His own uncon- 
 querable, unanswerable experience, the blank realities 
 
 K 2 
 
298 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 of pleasure and pain, put to flight all arguments 
 whatsoever that anchor only in his understanding. 
 Pink used, in arguing the case with me, to admit 
 that ghosts might be questionable realities in our 
 hemisphere, but “ it ? s a different thing to the suthard 
 of the line.” And then he would go on to tell me 
 of his own fearful experience ; in particular, of one 
 many times renewed, and investigated to no purpose 
 by parties of men communicating from a distance 
 upon a system of concerted signals, in one of the 
 Gallapagos Islands. These islands, which were 
 visited, and I think described, by Dampier — and 
 therefore must have been an asylum to the Buc- 
 caneers and Flibustiers 1 in the latter part of the 
 seventeenth century — were so still to their more 
 desperate successors, the Pirates, at the beginning 
 of the nineteenth ; and for the same reason — the 
 facilities they offer (rare in those seas) for procuring 
 wood and water. Hither, then, the black flag often 
 resorted ; and here, amidst these romantic solitudes, 
 islands untenanted by man — oftentimes it lay furled 
 up for weeks together ; rapine and murder had rest 
 for a season ; and the bloody cutlass slept within 
 its scabbard. When this happened, and when it 
 became known beforehand that it would happen, 
 a tent was pitched on shore for my brother, and the 
 chronometers were transported thither for the period 
 of their stay. 
 
 The island selected for this purpose, amongst the 
 many equally open to their choice, might, according 
 to circumstances, be that which offered the best 
 anchorage, or that from which the re-embarkation 
 was easiest, or that which allowed the readiest access 
 
 1 “Flibustiers ” : — This word, which is just now revolving 
 upon us in connection with the attempts on Cuba, &c., is 
 constantly spelt by our own and the American journals as 
 Fillibustiers and Fillibusteros. But the true word of nearly 
 two centuries back amongst the old original race of sea-robbers 
 (French and English) that made irregular war upon the Spanish 
 shipping and maritime towns, was that which I have here 
 retained. 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 299 
 
 to wood and water. But, for some or all of these 
 advantages, the particular island most generally 
 honoured by the piratical custom and “ good-will ” 
 was one known to American navigators as “ The 
 Woodcutter’s Island.” There was some old tradi- 
 tion — and I know not but it was a tradition dating 
 from the times of Dampier — that a Spaniard or 
 an Indian settler in this island (relying, perhaps, 
 too entirely upon the protection of perfect solitude) 
 had been murdered in pure wantonness by some of 
 the lawless rovers who frequented this solitary 
 archipelago. Whether it were from some peculiar 
 atrocity of bad faith in the act, or from the sanctity - 
 of the man, or the deep solitude of the island, or with 
 a view to the peculiar edification of mariners in these 
 semi-Christian seas — so, however, it was, and attested 
 by generations of sea-vagabonds (for most of the 
 armed roamers in these ocean Zaaras at one time 
 were of a suspicious order), that every night, duly as 
 the sun went down, and the twilight began to prevail, 
 a sound arose — audible to other islands, and to every 
 ship lying quietly at anchor in that neighbourhood — 
 of a woodcutter’s axe. Sturdy were the blows, and 
 steady the succession in which they followed : some 
 even fancied they could hear that sort of groaning 
 respiration which is made by men who use an axe, 
 or by those who in towns ply the “ three-man beetle ” 
 of Falstaff, as paviors ; echoes they certainly heard 
 of every blow, from the profound woods and the 
 sylvan precipices on the margin of the shores ; 
 which, however, should rather indicate that the 
 sounds were not supernatural, since, if a visual object, 
 falling under hyper-physical or cata-physical laws, 
 loses its shadow, by parity of argument, an audible 
 object, in the same circumstances, should lose its 
 echo. But this was the story ; and amongst sailors 
 there is as little variety of versions in telling any true 
 sea-story as there is in a log-book, or in “ The Flying 
 Dutchman ” : literatim fidelity is, with a sailor, a 
 point at once of religious faith and worldly honour. 
 The close of the story was — that after, suppose, ten 
 
300 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 or twelve minutes of hacking and hewing, a horrid 
 crash was heard, announcing that the tree, if tree it 
 were, that never yet was made visible to daylight 
 search, had yielded to the old woodman’s persecution. 
 It was exactly the crash, so familiar to many ears on 
 board the neighbouring vessels, which expresses the 
 harsh tearing asunder of the fibres caused by the 
 weight of the trunk in falling ; beginning slowly, 
 increasing rapidly, and terminating in one rush of 
 rending. This over — one tree felled “ towards his 
 winter store ” — there was an interval : man must 
 have rest ; and the old woodman, after working for 
 more than a century, must want repose. Time 
 enough to begin again after a quarter of an hour’s 
 relaxation. Sure enough, in that space of time again 
 began, in the words of Comus, u the wonted roar 
 amid the woods.” Again the blows become quicker, 
 as the catastrophe drew nearer ; again the final 
 crash resounded ; and again the mighty echoes 
 travelled through the solitary forests, and were taken 
 up by all the islands near and far, like Joanna’s 
 laugh amongst the Westmoreland hills, to the as- 
 tonishment of the silent ocean. Yet, wherefore 
 should the ocean be astonished — he that had heard 
 this nightly tumult, by all accounts, for more than 
 a century ? My brother, however, poor Pink, was 
 astonished, in good earnest, being, in that respect, 
 of the genus attonitorum ; and as often as the 
 gentlemen pirates steered their course for the Gal- 
 lapagos, he would sink in spirit before the trials he 
 might be summoned to face. No second person 
 was ever put on shore with Pink, lest poor Pink 
 and he might become jovial over the liquor, and the 
 chronometers be broken or neglected ; for a con- 
 siderable quantity of spirits was necessarily landed 
 as well as of provisions, because sometimes a sudden 
 change of weather, or the sudden appearance of a 
 suspicious sail, might draw the ship off the island 
 for a fortnight. My brother could have pleaded his 
 fears without shame ; but he had a character to 
 maintain with the sailors : he was respected equally 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 3 01 
 
 for his seamanship and his shipmanship . 1 By the 
 way, when it is considered that one half of a sailor’s 
 professional science refers him to the stars (though 
 it is true the other half refers him to the sails and 
 shrouds of a ship), just as, in geodesical operations, 
 one part is referred to heaven, and one to earth — 
 when this is considered, another argument arises 
 from the superstition of sailors, so far as it is astro- 
 logical. They who know (but know the on with- 
 out knowing the Sta ™) that the stars have much 
 to do in guiding their own movements, which are 
 yet so far from the stars, and, to all appearance, 
 so little connected with them, may be excused for 
 supposing that the stars are connected astrologically 
 with human destinies. But this by the way. The 
 sailors, looking to Pink’s double skill, and to his 
 experience on shore (more astonishing than all 
 beside, being experience gathered amongst ghosts), 
 expressed an admiration which, to one who was 
 also a sailor, had too genial a sound to be sacrificed, 
 if it could he maintained at any price. Therefore 
 it was that Pink still clung, in spite of his terrors, 
 to his shore appointment. But hard was his trial; 
 and many a time has he described to me one effect 
 of it, when too long continued, or combined with 
 darkness too intense. The woodcutter would begin 
 his operations soon after the sun had set ; but uni- 
 formly, at that time, his noise w T as less. Three 
 
 1 “ Seamanship and shipmanship ” ; — These are two functions 
 of a sailor seldom separated in the mind of a landsman. The 
 conducting a ship (causing her to choose a right path) through 
 the ocean — that is one thing. Then there is the management 
 of the ship within herself, the trimming of her sails, &c. (causing 
 her to keep the line chosen) — that is another thing. The first 
 is called seamanship ; the second might be called shipmanship, 
 but is, I believe, called navigation. They are perfectly dis- 
 tinct : one man rarely has both in perfection. Both may be 
 illustrated from the rudder. The question is, suppose at the 
 Cape of Good Hope, to steer for India : trust the rudder to him, 
 as a seaman, who knows the passage whether within or without 
 Madagascar. The question is to avoid a sunk rock : trust the 
 rudder to him, as a navigator, who understands the art of 
 steering to a nicety. 
 
302 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 hours after sunset it had increased ; and generally 
 at midnight it was greatest, but not always. Some- 
 times the case varied thus far : that it greatly in- 
 creased towards three or four o’clock in the morning; 
 and, as the sound grew louder, and thereby seemed 
 to draw nearer, poor Pink’s ghostly panic grew in- 
 supportable ; and he absolutely crept from his 
 pavilion, and its luxurious comforts, to a point of 
 rock — a promontory — about half a mile off, from 
 which he could see the ship. The mere sight of 
 a human abode, though an abode of ruffians, com- 
 forted his panic. With the approach of daylight, the 
 mysterious sounds ceased. Cock-crow there hap- 
 pened to be none, in those islands of the Galla- 
 pagos, or none in that particular island; though 
 many cocks are heard crowing in the woods of 
 America, and these, perhaps, might be caught by 
 spiritual senses ; or the woodcutter may be supposed, 
 upon Hamlet’s principle, either scenting the morning 
 air, or catching the sounds of Christian matin-bells 
 from some dim convent in the depth of American 
 forests. However, so it was ; the woodcutter’s axe 
 began to intermit about the earliest approach of 
 dawn ; and, as light strengthened, it ceased entirely. 
 At nine, ten, or eleven o’clock in the forenoon, the 
 whole appeared to have been a delusion ; but towards 
 sunset it revived in credit : during twilight it strength- 
 ened ; and very soon afterwards superstitious panic 
 was again seated on her throne. Such were the fluc- 
 tuations of the case. Meantime, Pink, sitting on his 
 promontory in early dawn, and consoling his terrors 
 by looking away from the mighty woods to the 
 tranquil ship, on board of which (in spite of her 
 secret black flag) the whole crew, murderers and all, 
 were sleeping peacefully — he, a beautiful English 
 boy, chased away to the Antipodes from one early 
 home by his sense of wounded honour, and from 
 his immediate home by superstitious fear, recalled 
 to my mind an image and a situation that had been 
 beautifully sketched by Miss Bannerman in “ Basil,” 
 one of the striking (though, to rapid readers, some- 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 3°3 
 
 what unintelligible) metrical tales published early 
 in this century, entitled, “ Tales of Superstition and 
 Chivalry.” Basil is a “ rude sea-boy,” desolate and 
 neglected from infancy, but with feelings profound 
 from nature, and fed by solitude. He dwells alone 
 in a rocky cave ; but, in consequence of some super- 
 natural terrors connected with a murder, arising in 
 some way (not very clearly made out) to trouble the 
 repose of his home, he leaves it in horror, and rushes 
 in the grey dawn to the sea-side rocks ; seated on 
 which, he draws a sort of consolation for his terrors, 
 or of sympathy with his wounded heart, from that 
 mimicry of life which goes on for ever amongst the 
 raving waves. 
 
 From the Gallapagos, Pink went often to Juan (or, 
 as he chose to call it, after Dampier and others, John ) 
 Fernandez. Very lately (December 1837), the news- 
 papers of America informed us, and the story was 
 current for full nine days, that this fair island had 
 been swallowed up by an earthquake ; or, at least, 
 that in some way or other it had disappeared. Had 
 that story proved true, one pleasant bower w r ould 
 have perished — raised by Pink as a memorial expres- 
 sion of his youthful feelings either towards De Foe, 
 or his visionary creature Robinson Crusoe — but 
 rather, perhaps, towards the substantial Alexander 
 Selkirk; for it was raised on some spot known 
 or reputed by tradition to have been one of those 
 most occupied as a home by Selkirk. I say, “ rather 
 towards Alexander Selkirk ” ; for there is a difficulty 
 to the judgment in associating Robinson Crusoe with 
 this lovely island of the Pacific, and a difficulty even 
 to the fancy. Why it is hard to guess, or through 
 what perverse contradiction to the facts, De Foe 
 chose to place the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe 
 upon the eastern side of the American continent. 
 Now, not only was this in direct opposition to the 
 realities of the case on which he built, as first re- 
 ported (I believe) by Woodes Rogers, from the log- 
 book of the Duke and Duchess (a privateer fitted 
 out, to the best of my remembrance, by the Bristol 
 
304 autobiographic sketches 
 
 merchants, two or three years before the Peace of 
 Utrecht ) ; and so far the mind of any man acquainted 
 with these circumstances was staggered, in attempting 
 to associate this eastern wreck of Crusoe with this 
 western island ; but a worse obstacle than that, be- 
 cause a moral one, is this : by thus perversely trans- 
 ferring the scene from the Pacific to the Atlantic, De 
 Foe has transferred it from a quiet and sequestered 
 to a populous and troubled sea — the Fleet Street or 
 Cheapside of the navigating world, the great thorough- 
 fare of nations — and thus has prejudiced the moral 
 sense and the fancy against his fiction still more in- 
 evitably than his judgment, and in a way that was 
 perfectly needless ; for the change brought along with 
 it no shadow of compensation. 
 
 My brother’s wild adventures amongst these despe- 
 rate sea-rovers were afterwards communicated in long 
 letters to a female relative ; and, even as letters, apart 
 from the fearful burden of their contents, I can bear 
 witness that they had very extraordinary merit. This, 
 in fact, was the happy result of writing from his heart ; 
 feeling profoundly what he communicated, and anti- 
 cipating the profoundest sympathy with all that he 
 uttered from her whom he addressed. A man of 
 business, who opened some of these letters, in his 
 character of agent for my brother’s five guardians, 
 and who had not any special interest in the affair, 
 assured me that, throughout the whole course of his 
 life, he had never read anything so affecting, from 
 the facts they contained, and from the sentiments 
 which they expressed ; above all, the yearning for 
 that England which he remembered as the land of 
 his youthful pleasures, but also of his youthful degra- 
 dations. Three of the guardians were present at the 
 reading of these letters, and were all affected to tears, 
 notwithstanding they had been irritated to the utter- 
 most by the course which both myself and my brother 
 had pursued — a course which seemed to argue some 
 defect of judgment, or of reasonable kindness, in 
 themselves. These letters, I hope, are still preserved, 
 though they have been long removed from my con- 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 3°5 
 
 trol. Thinking of them, and their extraordinary 
 merit, I have often been led to believe that every 
 post-town (and many times in the course of a month) 
 carries out numbers of beautifully written letters, and 
 more from women than from men ; not that men are 
 to be supposed less capable of writing good letters ; 
 and, in fact, amongst all the celebrated letter-writers 
 of the past or present times, a large overbalance 
 happens to have been men ; but that more frequently 
 women write from their hearts ; and the very same 
 cause operates to make female letters good, which 
 operated at one period to make the diction of Roman 
 ladies more pure than that of orators or professional 
 cultivators of the Roman language — and which, at 
 another period, in the Byzantine Court, operated to 
 preserve the purity of the mother idiom within the 
 nurseries and the female drawing-rooms of the palace, 
 whilst it was corrupted in the forensic standards and 
 the academic — in the standards of the pulpit and the 
 throne. 
 
 With respect to Pink’s yearning for England, that 
 had been partially gratified in some part of his long 
 exile : twice, as we learned long afterwards, he had 
 landed in England ; but such was his haughty adher- 
 ence to his purpose, and such his consequent terror 
 of being discovered and reclaimed by his guardians, 
 that he never attempted to communicate with any 
 of his brothers or sisters. There he was wrong ; me 
 they should have cut to pieces before I would have 
 betrayed him. I, like him, had been an obstinate 
 recusant to what I viewed as unjust pretensions of 
 authority ; and, having been the first to raise the 
 standard of revolt, had been taxed by my guardians 
 with having seduced Pink by my example. But that 
 was untrue ; Pink acted for himself. However, he 
 could know little of all this ; and he traversed Eng- 
 land twice without making an overture towards any 
 communication with his friends. Two circumstances 
 of these journeys he used to mention : both were 
 from the port of London (for he never contemplated 
 London but as a port) to Liverpool ; or, thus far I 
 
306 autobiographic sketches 
 
 may be wrong, that one of the two might be (in the 
 return order) from Liverpool to London. On the 
 first of these journeys, his route lay through Coventry ; 
 on the other, through Oxford and Birmingham. In 
 neither case had he started with much money ; and 
 he was going to have retired from the coach at the 
 place of supping on the first night (the journey then 
 occupying two entire days and two entire nights), 
 when the passengers insisted on paying for him : that 
 was a tribute to his beauty — not yet extinct. He men- 
 tioned this part of his adventures somewhat shyly, 
 whilst going over them with a sailor’s literal accuracy ; 
 though, as a record belonging to what he viewed as 
 childish years, he had ceased to care about it. On 
 the other journey, his experience was different, but 
 equally testified to the spirit of kindness that is every- 
 where abroad. He had no money, on this occasion, 
 that could purchase even a momentary lift by a stage- 
 coach : as a pedestrian he had travelled down to 
 Oxford, occupying two days in the fifty-four or fifty- 
 six miles which then measured the road from London, 
 and sleeping in a farmer’s barn, without leave asked. 
 Wearied and depressed in spirits, he had reached 
 Oxford, hopeless of any aid, and with a deadly shame 
 at the thought of asking it. But, somewhere in the 
 High Street — and, according to his very accurate 
 sailor’s description of that noble street, it must have 
 been about the entrance of All Souls’ College — he met 
 a gentleman, a gownsman, who (at the very moment of 
 turning into the college gate) looked at Pink earnestly, 
 and then gave him a guinea, saying at the time, “ I 
 know what it is to be in your situation. You are a 
 schoolboy, and you have run away from your school. 
 Well, I was once in your situation, and I pity you.” 
 The kind gownsman, who wore a velvet cap with a 
 silk gown, and must therefore have been what in 
 Oxford is called a gentleman commoner, gave him 
 an address at some college or other (Magdalen, he 
 fancied, in after years), where he instructed him to 
 call before he quitted Oxford. Had Pink done this, 
 and had he frankly communicated his whole story, 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 307 
 
 very probably he would have received, not assistance 
 merely, but the best advice for guiding his future 
 motions. His reason for not keeping the appoint- 
 ment was simply that he was nervously shy ; and, 
 above all things, jealous of being entrapped by in- 
 sidious kindness into revelations that might prove 
 dangerously circumstantial. Oxford had a mayor ; 
 Oxford had a corporation ; Oxford had Greek Testa- 
 ments past all counting ; and so, remembering past 
 experiences, Pink held it to be the wisest counsel 
 that he should pursue his route on foot to Liverpool. 
 That guinea, however, he used to say, saved him from 
 despair. 
 
 One circumstance affected me in this part of Pink’s 
 story. I was a student in Oxford at that time. By 
 comparing dates, there was no doubt whatever that I, 
 who held my guardians in abhorrence, and above all 
 things admired my brother for his conduct, might 
 have rescued him at this point of his youthful trials, 
 four years before the fortunate catastrophe of his 
 case, from the calamities which awaited him. This 
 is felt generally to be the most distressing form of 
 human blindness — the case when accident brings two 
 fraternal hearts, yearning for reunion, into almost 
 touching neighbourhood, and then in a moment 
 after, by the difference, perhaps, of three inches in 
 space, or three seconds in time, will separate them 
 again, unconscious of their brief neighbourhood, per- 
 haps for ever. In the present case, however, it may 
 be doubted whether this unconscious rencounter 
 and unconscious parting in Oxford ought to be 
 viewed as a misfortune. Pink, it is true, endured 
 years of suffering, four at least, that might have been 
 saved by this seasonable rencounter; but, on the 
 other hand, by travelling through his misfortunes 
 with unabated spirit, and to their natural end, he 
 won experience and distinctions that else he would 
 have missed. His further history was briefly this : — 
 
 Somewhere in the river of Plate, he had effected 
 his escape from the pirates ; and a long time after, 
 in 1807, I believe (I write without books to consult), 
 
308 autobiographic sketches 
 
 he joined the storming party of the English at Monte 
 Video. Here he happened fortunately to fall under 
 the eye of Sir Home Popham ; and Sir Home forth- 
 with rated my brother as a midshipman on board his 
 own ship, which was at that time, I think, a fifty-gun 
 ship — the Diadem . Thus, by merits of the most 
 
 appropriate kind, and without one particle of interest, 
 my brother passed into the royal navy. His nautical 
 accomplishments were now of the utmost importance 
 to him ; and, as often as he shifted his ship, which 
 (to say the truth) was far too often — for his temper 
 was fickle and delighting in change — so often these 
 accomplishments were made the basis of very earnest 
 eulogy. I have read a vast heap of certificates 
 vouching for Pink’s qualifications as a sailor, in the 
 highest terms, and from several of the most dis- 
 tinguished officers in the service. Early in his career 
 as a midshipman, he suffered a mortifying interrup- 
 tion of the active life which had long since become 
 essential to his comfort. He had contrived to get 
 appointed on board a fire-ship, the Prometheus (chiefly 
 with a wish to enlarge his experience by this variety 
 of naval warfare), at the time of the last Copenhagen 
 expedition, and he obtained his wish ; for the Pro- 
 metheus had a very distinguished station assigned her 
 on the great night of bombardment ; and from her 
 decks, I believe, was made almost the first effectual 
 trial of the Congreve rockets. Soon after the Danish 
 capital had fallen, and whilst the Prometheus was still 
 cruising in the Baltic, Pink, in company with the 
 purser of his ship, landed on the coast of Jutland, 
 for the purpose of a morning’s sporting. It seems 
 strange that this should have been allowed upon a 
 hostile shore ; and, perhaps, it was not allowed, but 
 might have been a thoughtless abuse of some othei 
 mission shorewards. So it was, unfortunately ; and 
 one at least of the two sailors had reason to rue the 
 sporting of that day for eighteen long months of 
 captivity. They were perfectly unacquainted with 
 the localities, but conceived themselves able at any 
 time to make good their retreat to the boat, by means 
 
MY BROTHER 
 
 309 
 
 of fleet heels, and arms sufficient to deal with any 
 opposition of the sort they apprehended. Venturing, 
 however, too far into the country, they became sud- 
 denly aware of certain sentinels, posted expressly 
 for the benefit of chance English visitors. These 
 men did not pursue, but they did worse, for they 
 fired signal-shots ; and, by the time our two thought- 
 less Jack-tars had reached the shore, they saw a 
 detachment of Danish cavalry trotting their horses 
 pretty coolly down in a direction for the boat. Feel- 
 ing confident of their power to keep ahead of the 
 pursuit, the sailors amused themselves with various 
 sallies of nautical wit ; and Pink, in particular, was 
 just telling them to present his dutiful respects to 
 the Crown Prince, and assure him that,- but for this 
 lubberly interruption, he trusted to have improved 
 his royal dinner by a brace of birds, when — oh, sight 
 of blank confusion X - — all at once they became aware 
 that between themselves and their boat lay a perfect 
 network of streams, deep watery holes, requiring both 
 time and local knowledge to unravel. The purser 
 hit upon a course which enabled him to regain the 
 boat ; but I am not sure whether he also was not 
 captured. Poor Pink was at all events ; and, through 
 seventeen or eighteen months, bewailed this boyish 
 imprudence. At the end of that time there was an 
 exchange of prisoners ; and he was again serving on 
 board various and splendid frigates. Wyborg in 
 Jutland was the seat of his Danish captivity: and 
 such was the amiableness of the Danish character, 
 that, except for the loss of his time to one who was 
 aspiring to distinction and professional honour, none 
 of the prisoners who were on parole could have had 
 much reason for complaint. The street mob, ex- 
 cusably irritated with England at that time (for, with- 
 out entering on the question of right, or of expedience, 
 as regarded that war, it is notorious that such argu- 
 ments as we had for our unannounced hostilities 
 could not be pleaded openly by the English Cabinet, 
 for fear of compromising our private friend and in- 
 formant, the King of Sweden) — the mob, therefore, 
 
310 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 were rough in their treatment of the British prisoners ; 
 at night, they would pelt them with stones ; and here 
 and there some honest burgher, who might have 
 suffered grievously in his property, or in the person 
 of his nearest friends, by the ruin inflicted upon the 
 Danish commercial shipping, or by the dreadful 
 havoc made in Zealand, would show something of 
 the same bitter spirit. But the great body of the 
 richer and more educated inhabitants showed the 
 most hospitable attention to all who justified that 
 sort of notice by their conduct. And their remem- 
 brance of these English friendships was not fugitive ; 
 for, through long years after my brother’s death, I 
 used to receive letters, written in the Danish (a 
 language which I had attained in the course of my 
 studies, and which I have since endeavoured to 
 turn to account in a public journal for some useful 
 purposes of research), from young men as well as 
 women in Jutland; letters couched in the most 
 friendly terms, and recalling to his remembrance 
 scenes and incidents which sufficiently proved the 
 terms of fraternal affection upon which he had lived 
 amongst these public enemies ; and some of them 
 I have preserved to this day, as memorials that do 
 honour, on different considerations, to both parties 
 alike . 1 
 
 1 For this little parenthetical record of my brother’s early 
 history, the exact chronology of the several items in the case 
 may possibly be now irrecoverable ; but any error must be 
 of trivial importance. His two pedestrian journeys between 
 London and Liverpool occurred, I believe, in the same year 
 — viz., after the death of the friendly captain, and during the 
 last visit of his ship to England. The capture of Pink by the 
 pirates took place after the ship’s return to the Pacific. 
 
THIRTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 PREMATURE MANHOOD 
 
 My last two chapters, very slenderly connected with 
 Birmingham, are yet made to rise out of it; the 
 one out of Birmingham’s own relation to the topic 
 concerned (viz., Travelling ), and the other (viz., My 
 Brother ) out of its relation to all possible times in 
 my earlier life, and, therefore, why not to all possible 
 places. Anywhere introduced, the chapter was par- 
 tially out of its place ; as well then to introduce it 
 in Birmingham as elsewhere. Somewhat arbitrary 
 episodes, therefore, are these two last chapters ; yet 
 still endurable as occurring in a work confessedly ram- 
 bling, and whose very duty lies in the pleasant paths 
 of vagrancy. Pretending only to amuse my reader, or 
 pretending chiefly to that , however much I may have 
 sought, or shall seek, to interest him occasionally 
 through his profounder affections, I enjoy a privilege 
 of neglecting harsher logic, and connecting the separate 
 sections of these sketches, not by ropes and cables, 
 but by threads of aerial gossamer. 
 
 This present chapter, it may seem, promises some- 
 thing of the same episodical or parenthetic character. 
 But in reality it does not. I am now returning into 
 the main current of my narrative, although I may 
 need to linger for a moment upon a past anecdote. 
 I have mentioned already that, on inquiring at the Bir- 
 mingham post-office for a letter addressed to myself, 
 I found one directing me to join my sister Mary 
 at Laxton, a seat of Lord Carbery’s in Northampton- 
 shire, and giving me to understand, that, during my 
 residence at this place, some fixed resolution would 
 be taken and announced to me in regard to the future 
 disposal of my time, during the two or three years 
 before I should be old enough on the English system 
 for matriculating at Oxford or Cambridge. In the 
 poor countries of Europe, where they cannot afford 
 double sets of scholastic establishments — having, 
 therefore, no splendid schools, such as are, in fact, 
 
312 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 peculiar to England — they are compelled to throw 
 the duties of such schools upon their universities; 
 and consequently you see boys of thirteen and four- 
 teen, or even younger, crowding such institutions, 
 which, in fact, they ruin for all higher functions. 
 But England, whose regal establishments of both 
 classes emancipate her from this dependency, sends 
 her young men to college not until they have 
 ceased to be boys — not earlier, therefore, than 
 eighteen. 
 
 But when, by what test, by what indication, does 
 manhood commence? Physically by one criterion, 
 legally by another, morally by a third, intellectually 
 by a fourth — and all indefinite. Equator, absolute 
 equator, there is none. Between the two spheres of 
 youth and age, perfect and imperfect manhood, as in 
 all analogous cases, there is no strict line of bisection, 
 the change is a large process, accomplished within 
 a large and corresponding space ; having, perhaps, 
 some central or equatorial line, but lying, like that of 
 our earth, between certain tropics, or limits widely 
 separated. This intertropical region may, and gene- 
 rally does, cover a number of years ; and, therefore, it 
 is hard to say, even for an assigned case, by any 
 tolerable approximation, at what precise era it would 
 be reasonable to describe the individual as having 
 ceased to be a boy, and as having attained his in- 
 auguration as a man. Physically, we know that there 
 is a very large latitude of differences, in the periods of 
 human maturity, not merely between individual and 
 individual, but also between nation and nation ; dif- 
 ferences so great, that, in some southern regions of 
 Asia, we hear of matrons at the age of twelve. And 
 though, as Mr. Sadler rightly insists, a romance of 
 exaggeration has been built upon the facts, enough 
 remains behind a real marvel to irritate the curiosity 
 of the physiologist, as to its efficient, and, perhaps, of 
 the philosopher, as to its final cause. Legally and 
 politically, that is conventionally, the differences are 
 even greater on a comparison of nations and eras. 
 In England we have seen senators of mark and 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 3 I 3 
 
 authority, nay, even a prime minister, the haughtiest , 1 
 the most despotic, and the most irresponsible of his 
 times, at an age which, in many states, both ancient 
 and modern, would have operated as a ground of 
 absolute challenge to the candidate for offices the 
 meanest. Intellectually speaking, again, a very large 
 proportion of men never attain maturity. Nonage is 
 their final destiny ; and manhood, in this respect, is 
 for them a pure idea. Finally, as regards the moral 
 development — by which I mean the whole system and 
 economy of their love and hatred, of their admirations 
 and contempts, the total organisation of their pleasures 
 and their pains — hardly any of our species ever attain 
 manhood. It would be unphilosophic to say that 
 intellects of the highest order were, or could be, de- 
 veloped fully, without a corresponding development 
 of the whole nature. But of such intellects there do 
 not appear above two or three in a thousand years* 
 It is a fact, forced upon one by the whole experience 
 of life, that almost all men are children, more or less, 
 in their tastes and admirations. Were it not for 
 man’s latent tendencies — were it not for that imperish- 
 able grandeur which exists by way of germ and 
 ultimate possibility in his nature, hidden though it is, 
 and often all but effaced — how unlimited would be 
 the contempt amongst all the wise for his species ; 
 and misanthropy would, but for the angelic ideal 
 buried and imbruted in man’s sordid race, become, 
 amongst the noble, fixed, absolute, and deliberately 
 cherished. 
 
 But, to resume my question, how, under so variable 
 a standard, both natural and conventional, of every- 
 thing almost that can be received for a test or a 
 presumption of manhood, shall we seize upon any 
 characteristic feature, sufficiently universal to serve a 
 
 1 “ The haughtiest ” : — Which, however, is very doubtful. 
 Such, certainly, was the popular impression. But people who 
 knew Mr. Pitt intimately have always ascribed to him a nature 
 the most amiable and social, under an unfortunate reserve of 
 manner ; whilst, on the contrary, Mr. Fox, ultra-democratic in 
 his principles and frank in his address, was repulsively aristo- 
 cratic in his temper and sympathies. 
 
314 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES, 
 
 practical use, as a criterion of the transition from the 
 childish mind to the dignity (relative dignity, at least) 
 of that mind which belongs to conscious maturity? 
 One such criterion, and one only, as I believe, there 
 is — all others are variable and uncertain. It lies in 
 the reverential feeling, sometimes suddenly developed, 
 towards woman, and the idea of woman. From that 
 moment when women cease to be regarded with care- 
 lessness, and when the ideal of womanhood, in its 
 total pomp of loveliness and purity, dawns like some 
 vast aurora upon the mind, boyhood has ended ; 
 childish thoughts and inclinations have passed away 
 for ever ; and the gravity of manhood, with the self- 
 respecting views of manhood, have commenced. 
 
 “ Mentemque priorem 
 
 Expulit, atque hominem toto sibi cedere jussit 
 
 Pectare.” — Lucan. 
 
 These feelings, no doubt, depend for their develop- 
 ment in part upon physical causes; but they are also 
 determined by the many retarding or accelerating 
 forces enveloped in circumstances of position, and 
 sometimes in pure accident. For myself, I remem- 
 ber most distinctly the very day-^-the scene, and its 
 accidents — when that mysterious awe fell upon me 
 which belongs to woman in her ideal portrait : and 
 from that hour a profounder gravity coloured all my 
 thoughts, and a 4 ‘ beauty still more beauteous ” was 
 lit up for me in this agitating world. Lord Westport 
 and myself had been on a visit to a noble family 
 about fifty miles from Dublin ; and we were return- 
 ing from Tullamore by a public passage-boat on the 
 splendid canal which connects that place with the 
 metropolis. To avoid attracting an unpleasant at- 
 tention to ourselves in public situations, I observed a 
 rule of never addressing Lord Westport by his title : 
 but it so happened that the canal carried us along 
 the margin of an estate belonging to the Earl (now 
 Marquis) of Westmeath ; and on turning an angle we 
 came suddenly in view of this nobleman taking his 
 morning lounge in the sun. Somewhat loftily he 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 315 
 
 reconnoitred the miscellaneous party of clean and 
 unclean beasts crowded on the deck of our ark, 
 ourselves amongst the number, whom he challenged 
 gaily as young acquaintances from Dublin ; and my 
 friend he saluted more than once as “ My Lord.” 
 This accident made known to the assembled mob of 
 our fellow-travellers Lord Westport’s rank, and led to 
 a scene rather too broadly exposing the spirit of this 
 world. Herded together on the deck (or roof of that 
 den denominated the “ state-cabin ”) stood a party of 
 young ladies, headed by their governess. In the 
 cabin below was mamma, who as yet had not conde- 
 scended to illuminate our circle, for she was an awful 
 personage — a wit, a bluestocking (I call her by the 
 name then current), and a leader of ton in Dublin 
 and Belfast. The fact, however, that a young lord, 
 and one of great expectations, was on board brought 
 her up. A short cross-examination of Lord West- 
 port’s French valet had confirmed the flying report, 
 and at the same time (I suppose) put her in posses- 
 sion of my defect in all those advantages of title, 
 fortune, and expectation which so brilliantly distin- 
 guished my friend. Her admiration of him, and her 
 contempt for myself, were equally undisguised. And 
 in the ring which she soon cleared out for public 
 exhibition, she made us both fully sensible of the 
 very equitable stations which she assigned to us in 
 her regard. She was neither very brilliant nor alto- 
 gether a pretender, but might be described as a showy 
 woman, of slight but popular accomplishments. Any 
 woman, however, has the advantage of possessing the 
 ear of any company : and a woman of forty, with such 
 tact and experience as she will naturally have gathered 
 in a talking practice of such duration, can find little 
 difficulty in mortifying a boy, or sometimes, perhaps, 
 in tempting him to unfortunate sallies of irritation. 
 Me, it was clear, that she viewed in the light of a 
 humble friend, or what is known in fashionable life 
 by the humiliating name of a “ toad-eater.” Lord 
 Westport, full of generosity in what regarded his own 
 pretensions, and who never had violated the perfect 
 
316 autobiographic sketches 
 
 equality which reigned in our deportment to each 
 other, coloured with as much confusion as myself at 
 her coarse insinuations. And, in reality, our ages 
 scarcely allowed of that relation which she supposed 
 to exist between us. Possibly she did not suppose 
 it: but it is essential to the wit and the display of 
 some people that it should have a foundation in 
 malice. A victim and a sacrifice are indispensable 
 conditions in every exhibition. In such a case, my 
 natural sense of justice would generally have armed 
 me a hundredfold for retaliation ; but at present — 
 chiefly, perhaps, because I had no effectual ally, and 
 could count upon no sympathy in my audience — I 
 was mortified beyond the power of retort, and became 
 a passive butt to the lady’s stinging contumely, and 
 the arrowy sleet of her gay rhetoric. The narrow 
 bounds of our deck made it not easy to get beyond 
 talking-range ; and thus it happened that for two 
 hours I stood the worst of this bright lady’s feud. 
 At length the tables turned. Two ladies appeared 
 slowly ascending from the cabin, both in deepest 
 mourning, but else as different in aspect as summer 
 and winter. The elder was the Countess of Errol, 
 then mourning an affliction which had laid her life 
 desolate, and admitted of no human consolation. 
 Heavier grief — grief more self-occupied and deaf to 
 all voice of sympathy — I have not happened to wit- 
 ness. She seemed scarcely aware of our presence, 
 except it were by placing herself as far as was possible 
 from the annoyance of our odious conversation. The 
 circumstances of her loss are now forgotten ; at that 
 time they were known to a large circle in Bath and 
 London, and I violate no confidence in reviewing 
 them. Lord Errol had been privately intrusted by 
 Mr. Pitt with an official secret — viz., the outline and 
 principal details of a foreign expedition ; in which, 
 according to Mr. Pitt’s original purpose, his lordship 
 was to have held a high command. In a moment of 
 intoxication, the earl confided this secret to some 
 false friend, who published the communication and 
 its author. Upon this, the unhappy nobleman, under 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 
 
 317 
 
 too keen a sense of wounded honour, and perhaps 
 with an exaggerated notion of the evils attached to 
 his indiscretion, destroyed himself. Months had 
 passed since that calamity when we met his widow ; 
 but time appeared to have done nothing in mitigating 
 her sorrow. The younger lady, on the other hand, 
 
 who was Lady Errol's sister Heavens ! what a 
 
 spirit of joy and festal pleasure radiated from her 
 eyes, her step, her voice, her manner ! She was 
 Irish, and the very impersonation of innocent gaiety, 
 such as we find oftener, perhaps, amongst Irish 
 women than those of any other country. Mourning, 
 I have said, she wore ; from sisterly consideration, 
 the deepest mourning : that sole expression there was 
 about her of gloom or solemn feeling — 
 
 “ But all things else about her drawn 
 From May-time and the cheerful dawn.” 
 
 Odious bluestocking 1 of Belfast and Dublin ! as some 
 
 1 I have sometimes had occasion to remark, as a noticeable 
 phenomenon of our present times, that the order of ladies called 
 Bluestockings , by way of reproach, has become totally extinct 
 amongst us, except only here and there, with superannuated 
 dingers to obsolete remembrances. The reason of this change 
 is interesting ; and I do not scruple to call it honourable to our 
 intellectual progress. In the last (but still more in the penul- 
 timate) generation, any tincture of literature, of liberal curiosity 
 about science, or of ennobling interest in books, carried with it an 
 air of something unsexual, mannish, and (as it was treated by the 
 sycophantish satirists that for ever humour the prevailing folly) 
 of something ludicrous. This mode of treatment was possible 
 so long as the literary class of ladies formed a feeble minority. 
 But now, when two vast peoples, English and American, count- 
 ing between them forty-nine millions, when the leaders of tran- 
 scendent civilisation (to say nothing of Germany and France), 
 behold their entire educated class, male and female alike, call- 
 ing out, not for Panem et Circenses (Give us this day our daily 
 bread and our games of the circus), but for Panem et Literas 
 (Give us this day our daily bread and literature), the universality 
 of the call has swept away the very name of Bluestocking ; the 
 very possibility of the ridicule has been undermined by stern 
 realities ; and the verbal expression of the reproach is fast 
 becoming not simply obsolete, but even unintelligible to our 
 juniors. By the way, the origin of this term Bluestocking has 
 never been satisfactorily accounted for ; unless the reader 
 should incline to think my account satisfactory. I incline to 
 
318 autobiographic sketches 
 
 would call you, how I hated you up to that moment ! 
 half-an-hour after, how grateful I felt for the hostility 
 which had procured me such arualliance. One minute 
 sufficed to put the quick-witted young Irishwoman 
 in possession of our little drama, and the several 
 parts we were playing. To look was to understand, to 
 wish was to execute, with this ardent child of nature. 
 Like Spenser's Bradamant, with martial scorn she 
 couched her lance on the side of the party suffering 
 wrong. Her rank, as sister-in-law to the Constable 
 of Scotland, gave her some advantage for winning a 
 favourable audience ; and, throwing her aegis over me. 
 she extended that benefit to myself. Road was now 
 made perforce for me also ; my replies were no longer 
 
 that opinion myself. Dr. Bisset (in his Life of Burke) traces it 
 idly to a sobriquet imposed by Mrs. Montagu, and the literary 
 ladies of her circle, upon a certain obscure Dr. Stillingfleet, who 
 was the sole masculine assistant at their literary sittings in Port- 
 man Square, and chose, upon some inexplicable craze, to wear 
 blue stockings. The translation, however, of this name from 
 the doctor’s to the ladies’ legs is still unsolved. That great hiatus 
 needs filling up. I, therefore, whether erroneously or not, in re- 
 viewing a German historical work of some pretensions, where this 
 problem emerges, rejected the Portman Square doctor altogether, 
 and traced the term to an old Oxford statute — one of the many 
 which meddle with dress, and which charges it as a point of 
 conscience upon loyal scholastic students that they shall wear 
 cerulean socks. Such socks, therefore, indicated scholasticism : 
 worn by females, they would indicate a self-dedication to what 
 for them would be regarded as pedantic studies. But, says an 
 objector, no rational female would wear cerulean socks. Perhaps 
 not, female taste being too good. But, as such socks would 
 symbolise such a profession of pedantry, so, inversely, any pro- 
 fession of pedantry, by whatever signs expressed, would be 
 symbolised reproachfully by the imputation of wearing cerulean 
 socks. It classed a woman in effect as a scholastic pedant. 
 Now, however, when the vast diffusion of literature as a sort of 
 daily bread has made all ridicule of female literary culture not 
 less ridiculous than would be the attempt to ridicule that same 
 daily bread, the whole phenomenon, thing and word, substance 
 and shadow, is melting away from amongst us. Something of 
 the same kind has happened in the history of silver forks. 
 Forks of any kind, as is well known, were first introduced into 
 Italy : thence by a fantastic (but in this instance judicious) Eng- 
 lish traveller immediately (and not mediately through France ) 
 were introduced into England. This elegant revolution occurred 
 about 240 years ago : and never since that day have there been 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 319 
 
 stifled in noise and laughter. Personalities were 
 banished ; literature was extensively discussed ; and 
 that is a subject which, offering little room to argu- 
 ment, offers the widest to eloquent display. I had 
 immense reading ; vast command of words, which 
 somewhat diminished as ideas and doubts multiplied ; 
 and, speaking no longer to a deaf audience, but to a 
 generous and indulgent protectress, I threw out, as 
 from a cornucopia, my illustrative details and recol- 
 lections ; trivial enough, perhaps, as I might now 
 think, but the more intelligible to my present circle. 
 It might seem too much the case of a storm in a 
 slop-basin, if I were to spend any words upon the 
 revolution which ensued. Suffice it that I remained 
 
 wanting English protesters against the infamy of eating without 
 forks ; and for the last 160 years, at least, against the paganism 
 of using steel forks, or, 2ndly, two-pronged forks, or, 3rdly, of 
 putting the knife into the mouth. At least 1 20 years ago, the 
 Duchess of Queensberry (Gay’s Duchess), that leonine woman, 
 used to shriek out, on seeing a hyperborean squire conveying 
 peas to his abominable mouth on the point of a knife, “ Oh, 
 stop him, stop him ! — that man’s going to commit suicide.” 
 This anecdote argues silver forks as existing much more than a 
 century back, else the squire had a good defence. Since then, 
 in fact, about the time of the French Revolution, silver forks 
 have been recognised as not less indispensable appendages to 
 any elegant dinner-table than silver spoons : and, along with 
 silver forks, came in the explosion of that anti-Queensberry 
 brutalism which forks first superseded — viz., the fiendish prac- 
 tice of introducing the knife within the lips. But, in defiance 
 of all these facts, certain select hacks of the daily press, who 
 never had an opportunity of seeing a civilised dinner, and fancy- 
 ing that their own obscene modes of feeding prevailed every- 
 where, got up the name of the Silver-fork School (w 7 hich should 
 have indicated the school of decency) as representing some ideal 
 school of fantastic or ultra refinement. At length, however, 
 when cheap counterfeits of silver have made the decent four- 
 pronged fork cheaper than the two-pronged steel barbarism, 
 what has followed ? Why, this — that the universality of the 
 diffusion has made it hopeless any longer to banter it. There 
 is, therefore, this strict analogy between “ the silver-fork” re- 
 proach and “the bluestocking ” reproach — that in both cases 
 alike a recognition, gradually becoming universal, of the thing 
 itself as a social necessity, has put down for ever all attempts to 
 throw ridicule upon it — upon literature, in the one case, as a 
 most appropriate female ornament ; and upon silver forks, on 
 the other, as an element of social decorum. 
 
320 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 the lion of that company which had previously been 
 most insultingly facetious at my expense; and the 
 intellectual lady finally declared the air of the deck 
 unpleasant. 
 
 Never, until this hour, had I thought of women as 
 objects of a possible interest, or of a reverential love. 
 I had known them either in their infirmities and their 
 unamiable aspects, or else in those sterner relations 
 which made them objects of ungenial and uncom- 
 panionable feelings. Now first it struck me that life 
 might owe half its attractions and all its graces to 
 female companionship. Gazing, perhaps, with too 
 earnest an admiration at this generous and spirited 
 young daughter of Ireland, and in that way making 
 her those acknowledgments for her goodness which 
 I could not properly clothe in words, I was roused 
 to a sense of my indecorum by seeing her suddenly 
 
 blush. I believe that Miss B1 interpreted my 
 
 admiration rightly ; for she was not offended ; but, 
 on the contrary, for the rest of the day, when not 
 attending to her sister, conversed almost exclusively, 
 and in a confidential way, with Lord Westport and 
 myself. The whole, in fact, of this conversation 
 must have convinced her that I, mere boy as I was 
 (viz., about fifteen), could not have presumed to 
 direct my admiration to her , a fine young woman of 
 twenty, in any other character than that of a generous 
 champion, and a very adroit mistress in the dazzling 
 fence of colloquial skirmish. My admiration had, in 
 reality, been addressed to her moral qualities, her 
 enthusiasm, her spirit, and her generosity. Yet that 
 blush, evanescent as it was — the mere possibility that 
 I, so very a child, should have called up the most 
 transitory sense of bashfulness or confusion upon any 
 female cheek, first — and suddenly as with a flash of 
 lightning penetrating some utter darkness — illumi- 
 nated to my own startled consciousness, never again 
 to be obscured, the pure and powerful ideal of woman- 
 hood and womanly excellence. This was, in a proper 
 sense, a revelation ; it fixed a great era of change in 
 my life ; and, this new-born idea being agreeable to 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 32 I 
 
 the uniform tendencies of my own nature — that is, 
 lofty and aspiring — it governed my life with great 
 power, and with most salutary effects. Ever after, 
 throughout the period of youth, I was jealous of 
 my own demeanour, reserved and awestruck in the 
 presence of women ; reverencing, often, not so much 
 them , as my own ideal of woman latent in them. For 
 I carried about with me the idea, to which often I 
 seemed to see an approximation, of — 
 
 “ A perfect woman, nobly plann’d, 
 
 To warn, to comfort, to command.” 
 
 And from this day I was an altered creature, never 
 again relapsing into the careless, irreflective mind of 
 childhood. 
 
 At the same time I do not wish, in paying my 
 homage to the other sex, and in glorifying its possible 
 power over ours, to be confounded with those 
 thoughtless and trivial rhetoricians who flatter woman 
 with a false lip-worship, and, like Lord Byron’s 
 buccaneers, hold out to them a picture of their own 
 empire built only upon sensual or upon shadowy 
 excellences. We find continually a false enthusiasm, 
 a mere bacchanalian inebriation, on behalf of woman, 
 put forth by modern verse-writers, expressly at the 
 expense of the other sex, as though women could be 
 of porcelain, whilst man was of common earthenware. 
 Even the testimonies of Ledyard and Park are partly 
 false (though amiable) tributes to female excellence ; 
 at least they are merely one-sided truths — aspects of 
 one phasis, and under a peculiar angle. For, though 
 the sexes differ characteristically, yet they never fail 
 to reflect each other ; nor can they differ as to the 
 general amount of development ; never yet was 
 woman in one stage of elevation and man (of 
 the same community) in another. Thou, therefore, 
 daughter of God and man, all-potent woman ! re- 
 verence thy own ideal ; and, in the wildest of the 
 homage which is paid to thee, as also in the most 
 real aspects of thy wide dominion, read no trophy of 
 
 L 
 
32 2 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 idle vanity, but a silent indication of the possible 
 grandeur enshrined in thy nature; which realise to 
 the extent of thy power, 
 
 “ And show us how divine a thing 
 A woman may become.” 
 
 For what purpose have I repeated this story ? The 
 reader may, perhaps, suppose it introductory to some 
 tale of boyish romantic passion for some female idol 
 clothed with imaginary perfections. But in that 
 case he will be mistaken. Nothing of the kind was 
 possible to me. I was preoccupied by other passions. 
 Under the disease — for disease it was — which at that 
 time mastered me, one solitary desire, one frenzy, 
 one demoniac fascination stronger than the fascina- 
 tions of calenture, brooded over me as the moon 
 over the tides — -forcing me day and night into specu- 
 lations upon great intellectual problems, many times 
 beyond my strength, as indeed often beyond all 
 human strength, but not the less provoking me to 
 pursue them. As a prophet in days of old had no 
 power to resist the voice which, from hidden worlds, 
 called him to a mission, sometimes, perhaps, revolt- 
 ing to his human sensibilities, — as he must deliver, 
 was under a coercion to deliver, the burning word 
 that spoke within his heart ; or as a ship on the 
 Indian Ocean cannot seek rest by anchoring, but 
 must run before the wrath of the monsoon ; such in 
 its fury, such in its unrelentingness, was the persecu- 
 tion that overmastered me. School tasks under these 
 circumstances, it may well be supposed, had become 
 a torment to me. For a long time they had lost even 
 that slight power of stimulation which belongs to the 
 irritation of difficulty. Easy and simple they had 
 now become as the elementary lessons of childhood. 
 Not that it is possible for Greek studies, if pursued 
 with unflinching sincerity, ever to fall so far into the 
 rear as a palcestra for exercising both strength and 
 skill ; but, in a school where the exercises are pur- 
 sued in common by large classes, the burden must 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 323 
 
 be adapted to the powers of the weakest, and not of 
 the strongest. And, apart from that objection, at this 
 period, the hasty unfolding of far different intellectual 
 interests than such as belong to mere literature had, 
 for a time, dimmed in my eyes the lustre of classical 
 studies, pursued at whatsoever depth, and on what- 
 soever scale. For more than a year, everything con- 
 nected with schools and the business of schools had 
 been growing more and more hateful to me. At 
 first, however, my disgust had been merely the disgust 
 of weariness and pride. But now, at this crisis (for 
 crisis it was virtually to me), when a premature 
 development of my whole mind was rushing in like 
 a cataract, forcing channels for itself and for the new 
 tastes which it introduced, my disgust was no longer 
 simply intellectual, but had deepened into a moral 
 sense as of some inner dignity continually violated. 
 Once the petty round of school tasks had been felt 
 as a molestation ; but now, at last, as a degradation. 
 Constant conversation with grown-up men for the last 
 half-year, and upon topics oftentimes of the gravest 
 order — the responsibility that had always in some 
 slight degree settled upon myself since I had become 
 the eldest surviving son of my family, but of late 
 much more so when circumstances had thrown me as 
 an English stranger upon the society of distinguished 
 Irishmen — more, however, than all beside, the inevit- 
 able rebound and counter-growth of internal dignity 
 from the everlasting commerce with lofty specula- 
 tions : these agencies in constant operation had em- 
 bittered my school disgust, until it was travelling fast 
 into a mania. Precisely at this culminating point of 
 my self-conflict did that scene occur which I have 
 
 described with Miss B1 . In that hour another 
 
 element, which assuredly was not wanted, fell into 
 the seething caldron of new-^m impulses that, like 
 the magic caldron of Medea, was now transforming 
 me into a new creature. Then first and suddenly I 
 brought powerfully before myself the change which 
 was worked in the aspects of society by the presence 
 of woman — woman pure, thoughtful, noble, coming 
 
324 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 before me as a Pandora crowned with perfections. 
 Right over against this ennobling spectacle, with 
 equal suddenness, I placed the odious spectacle of 
 schoolboy society — no matter in what region of the 
 earth ; schoolboy society, so frivolous in the matter 
 of its disputes, often so brutal in the manner ; so 
 childish, and yet so remote from simplicity ; so 
 foolishly careless, and yet so revoltingly selfish ; 
 dedicated ostensibly to learning, and yet beyond any 
 section of human beings so conspicuously ignorant. 
 Was it indeed that heavenly, which I was soon to 
 exchange for this earthly ? It seemed to me, when 
 contemplating the possibility that I could yet have 
 nearly three years to pass in such society as this, that 
 I heard some irresistible voice saying : Lay aside thy 
 fleshly robes of humanity, and enter for a season into 
 some brutal incarnation. 
 
 But what connection had this painful prospect with 
 Laxton ! Why should it press upon my anxieties in 
 approaching that mansion, more than it had done at 
 Westport? Naturally enough, in part, because every 
 day brought me nearer to the horror from which I 
 recoiled : my return to England would recall the 
 attention of my guardians to the question, which as 
 yet had slumbered ; and the knowledge that I had 
 reached Northamptonshire would precipitate their 
 decision. Obscurely, besides, through a hint which 
 had reached me, I guessed what this decision was 
 likely to be, and it took the very worst shape it could 
 have taken. All this increased my agitation from 
 hour to hour. But all this was quickened and 
 barbed by the certainty of so immediately meeting 
 Lady Carbery. To her it was, and to her only, that 
 I could look for any useful advice, or any effectual 
 aid. She over my mother, as in turn my mother 
 over her, exercised considerable influence ; whilst 
 my mother’s power was very seldom disturbed by 
 the other guardians. The mistress of Laxton it 
 was, therefore, whose opinion upon the case would 
 virtually be decisive ; since, if she saw no reasonable 
 encouragement to any contest with my guardians, I 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 325 
 
 felt too surely that my own uncountenanced and 
 unaided energies drooped too much for such an 
 effort. Who Lady Carbery was, I will explain in my 
 next chapter, entitled Laxton . Meantime, to me 
 individually, she was the one sole friend that ever I 
 could regard as entirely fulfilling the offices of an 
 honourable friendship. She had known me from 
 infancy : when I was in my first year of life, she — an 
 orphan and a great heiress — was in her tenth or 
 eleventh ; and, on her occasional visits to “ the 
 Farm 77 (a rustic old house, then occupied by my 
 father), I, a household pet, suffering under an ague, 
 which lasted from my first year to my third, naturally 
 fell into her hands as a sort of superior toy, a toy that 
 could breathe and talk. Every year our intimacy had 
 been renewed, until her marriage interrupted it. But, 
 after no very long interval, when my mother had 
 transferred her household to Bath, in that city we 
 frequently met again ; Lord Carbery liking Bath for 
 itself, as well as for its easy connection with London, 
 whilst Lady Carbery's health was supposed to benefit 
 by the waters. Her understanding was justly reputed 
 a fine one ; but, in general, it was calculated to win 
 respect rather than love, for it was masculine and 
 austere, with very little toleration for sentiment or 
 romance. But to myself she had always been indul- 
 gently kind ; I was protected in her regard, beyond 
 anybody’s power to dislodge me, by her childish 
 remembrances ; and of late years she had begun to en- 
 tertain the highest opinion of my intellectual promises. 
 Whatever could be done to assist my views, I most 
 certainly might count upon her doing ; that is to say, 
 within the limits of her conscientious judgment upon 
 the propriety of my own plans. Having, besides, so 
 much more knowledge of the world than myself, she 
 might see cause to dissent widely from my own view 
 of what was expedient as well as what was right ; in 
 which case I was well assured that, in the midst of 
 kindness and unaffected sympathy, she would firmly 
 adhere to the views of my guardians. In any circum- 
 stances she would have done so. But at present a 
 
326 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 new element had begun to mix with the ordinary 
 influences which governed her estimates of things : 
 she had, as I knew from my sister’s report, become 
 religious ; and her new opinions were of a gloomy 
 cast — Calvinistic, in fact, and tending to what is now 
 technically known in England as “ Low Church,” 
 or “ Evangelical Christianity.” These views, being 
 adopted in a great measure from my mother, were 
 naturally the same as my mother’s ; so that I could 
 form some guess as to the general spirit, if not the 
 exact direction, in which her counsels would flow. 
 It is singular that, until this time, I had never re- 
 garded Lady Carbery under any relation whatever to 
 female intellectual society. My early childish know- 
 ledge of her had shut out that mode of viewing her. 
 But now, suddenly, under the new-born sympathies 
 
 awakened by the scene with Miss B1 , I became 
 
 aware of the distinguished place she was qualified to 
 fill in such society. In that Eden — for such it had 
 now consciously become to me — I had no necessity 
 to cultivate an interest or solicit an admission ; 
 already, through Lady Carbery’s too flattering 
 estimate of my own pretensions, and through old 
 childish memories, I held the most distinguished 
 place. This Eden she it was that lighted up suddenly 
 to my new-born powers of appreciation, in all its 
 dreadful points of contrast with the killing society of 
 schoolboys. She it was, fitted to be the glory of such 
 an Eden, who probably would assist in banishing me 
 for the present to the wilderness outside. My distress 
 of mind was inexpressible. And, in the midst of 
 glittering saloons, at times also in the midst of society 
 the most fascinating, I — contemplating the idea of 
 that gloomy academic dungeon to which for three 
 long years I anticipated too certainly a sentence of 
 exile — felt very much as in the middle ages must 
 have felt some victim of evil destiny, inheritor of a 
 false fleeting prosperity, that suddenly in a moment 
 of time, by signs blazing out past all concealment on 
 his forehead, was detected as a leper, and in that 
 character, as a public nuisance and universal horror, 
 
PREMATURE MANHOOD 327 
 
 was summoned instantly to withdraw from society — 
 prince or peasant was indulged with no time for 
 preparation or evasion — and, from the midst of any 
 society, the sweetest or the most dazzling, was driven 
 violently to take up his abode amidst the sorrow- 
 haunted chambers of a lazar-house. 
 
FOURTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 LAXTON 
 
 Section I.— Cymon and Iph.t.genia 
 
 My route, after parting from Lord Westport at Bir- 
 mingham, lay (as perhaps I mentioned before) through 
 Stamford to Laxton, the Northamptonshire seat of 
 Lord Carbery. From Stamford, which I had reached 
 by some intolerable old coach, such as in those days 
 too commonly abused the patience and long-suffering 
 of Young England, I took a post-chaise to Laxton. 
 The distance was but nine miles, and the postillion 
 drove well ; so that I could not really have been 
 long upon the road ; and yet, from gloomy rumi- 
 nation upon the unhappy destination which I believed 
 myself approaching within three or four months, 
 never had I weathered a journey that seemed to 
 me so long and dreary. As I alighted on the steps 
 at Laxton, the first dinner-bell rang ; and I was 
 hurrying to my toilet, when my sister Mary, who 
 had met me in the portico, begged me first of all 
 to come into Lady Carbery ’s dressing-room, her 
 ladyship having something special to communicate, 
 which related (as I understood her) to one Simon. 
 “ What Simon ? Simon Peter ? ” “ Oh no, you 
 
 irreverent boy ; no Simon at all with an S, but 
 Cymon with a C — Dryden’s Cymon — 
 
 6 That whistled as he went for want of thought.’ ” 
 
 This one indication was a key to the whole explana- 
 tion that followed. The sole visitors, it seemed, at 
 that time to Laxton, beside my sister and myself, 
 were Lord and Lady Massey. They were under- 
 stood to be domesticated at Laxton for a very long 
 stay. In reality, my own private construction of the 
 case (though unauthorised by anything ever hinted 
 to me by Lady Carbery) was that Lord Massey might 
 probably be under some cloud of pecuniary embar- 
 rassments, such as suggested prudentially an absence 
 
 328 
 
LAXTON 
 
 329 
 
 from Ireland. Meantime, what was it that made 
 him an object of peculiar interest to Lady Carbery ? 
 It was the singular revolution which in one whom 
 all his friends looked upon as sold to constitutional 
 torpor, suddenly and beyond all hope, had kindled 
 a new and nobler life. Occupied originally by no 
 shadow of an earthly interest, killed by ennui , all at 
 once Lord Massey had fallen passionately in love 
 with a fair young countrywoman, well connected, but 
 bringing him no fortune (I report only from hearsay), 
 and endowing him simply with the priceless blessing 
 of her own womanly charms, her delightful society, 
 and her sweet Irish style of innocent gaiety. No 
 transformation, that ever legends or romances had 
 reported, was more memorable. Lapse of time (for 
 Lord Massey had now been married three or four 
 years), and deep seclusion from general society, had 
 done nothing apparently to lower the tone of his 
 happiness. The expression of this happiness was 
 noiseless and unobtrusive ; no marks were there of 
 vulgar uxoriousness — nothing that could provoke the 
 sneer of the worldling ; but not the less so entirely 
 had the society of his young wife created a new 
 principle of life within him, and evoked some nature 
 hitherto slumbering, and which, no doubt, would 
 else have continued to slumber till his death, that 
 at moments when he believed himself unobserved 
 he still wore the aspect of an impassioned lover. 
 
 “ He beheld 
 
 A vision, and adored the thing he saw. 
 
 Arabian fiction never fill’d the world 
 
 With half the wonders that were wrought for him. 
 
 Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring — 
 
 Her chamber window did surpass in glory 
 The portals of the dawn.” 
 
 And in no case was it more literally realised, as daily 
 almost I witnessed, that 
 
 “ All Paradise 
 
 Could, by the simple opening of a door, 
 
 Let itself in upon him.” 1 
 
 1 Wordsworth’s “ Vaudracour and Julia. 
 
33° AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 For never did the drawing-room door open, and 
 suddenly disclose the beautiful figure of Lady Massey, 
 than a mighty cloud seemed to roll away from the 
 young Irishman's brow. At this time it happened, 
 and indeed it often happened, that Lord Carbery 
 was absent in Ireland. It was probable, therefore, 
 that during the long couple of hours through which 
 the custom of those times bound a man to the dinner- 
 table after the disappearance of the ladies, his time 
 would hang heavily on his hands. To me, therefore, 
 Lady Carbery looked, having first put me in possession 
 of the case, for assistance to her hospitality, under 
 the difficulties I have stated. She thoroughly loved 
 Lady Massey, as, indeed, nobody could help doing ; 
 and for her sake, had there been no separate interest 
 surrounding the young lord, it would have been most 
 painful to her that, through Lord Carbery’s absence, 
 a periodic tedium should oppress her guest at that 
 precise season of the day which traditionally dedi- 
 cated itself to genial enjoyment. Glad, therefore, 
 she was that an ally had come at last to Laxton, who 
 might arm her purposes of hospitality with some 
 powers of self-fulfilment. And yet, for a service of 
 that nature, could she reasonably rely upon me ? 
 Odious is the hobble-de-hoy to the mature young 
 man. Generally speaking, that cannot be denied. But 
 in me, though naturally the shyest of human beings, 
 intense commerce with men of every rank, from the 
 highest to the lowest, had availed to dissipate all 
 arrears of mauvaise honte ; I could talk upon innu- 
 merable subjects ; and, as the readiest means of enter- 
 ing immediately upon business, I was fresh from 
 Ireland — knew multitudes of those whom Lord 
 Massey either knew or felt an interest in — and, at 
 that happy period of life, found it easy, with three or 
 four glasses of wine, to call back the golden spirits 
 which were now so often deserting me. Renovated, 
 meantime, by a hot bath, I was ready at the second 
 summons of the dinner-bell, and descended, a new 
 creature, to the drawing-room. Here I was presented 
 to the noble lord and his wife. Lord Massey was in 
 
LAXTON 
 
 331 
 
 figure shortish, but broad and stout, and wore an 
 amiable expression of face. That I could execute 
 Lady Carbery’s commission, I felt satisfied at once. 
 And, accordingly, when the ladies had retired from 
 the dining-room, I found an easy opening, in various 
 circumstances connected with the Laxton stables, for 
 introducing naturally a picturesque and contrasting 
 sketch of the stud and the stables at Westport. The 
 stables, and everything connected with the stables, at 
 Laxton, were magnificent ; in fact, far out of symmetry 
 with the house, which at that time was elegant and 
 comfortable, but not splendid. As usual in English 
 establishments, all the appointments were complete, 
 and carried to the same point of exquisite finish. The 
 stud of hunters was first-rate and extensive : and the 
 whole scene, at closing the stables for the night, was 
 so splendidly arranged and illuminated that Lady 
 Car'oery would take all her visitors once or twice a 
 week to admire it. On the other hand, at Westport 
 you might fancy yourself overlooking the establishment 
 of some Albanian pacha. Crowds of irregular helpers 
 and grooms, many of them totally unrecognised by 
 Lord Altamont, some half countenanced by this or 
 that upper servant, some doubtfully tolerated, some 
 not tolerated but nevertheless slipping in by postern- 
 doors when the enemy had withdrawn, made up a 
 strange mob as regarded the human element in this 
 establishment. And Dean Browne regularly asserted 
 that five out of six amongst these helpers he himself 
 could swear to as active boys from Vinegar Hill. 
 Trivial enough, meantime, in our eyes, was any little 
 matter of rebellion that they might have upon their 
 consciences. High treason we willingly winked at. 
 But what we could not wink at was the systematic 
 treason which they committed against pur comfort — 
 viz., by teaching our horses all imaginable tricks, and 
 training them up in the way along which they should 
 not go, so that when they were old they were very 
 little likely to depart from it. Such a set of restive, 
 hard-mouthed wretches as Lord Westport and I daily 
 had to bestride, no tongue could describe. There 
 
332 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 was a cousin of Lord Westport’s, subsequently created 
 Lord Oranmore, distinguished for his horsemanship, 
 and always splendidly mounted from his father’s 
 stables at Castle M‘Garret, to whom our stormy 
 contests with ruined tempers and vicious habits 
 yielded a regular comedy of fun ; and, in order to 
 improve it, he would sometimes bribe Lord West- 
 port’s treacherous groom into misleading us, when 
 floundering amongst bogs, into the interior labyrinths 
 of these morasses. Deep, however, as the morass 
 was this man’s remorse when, on leaving Westport, 
 I gave him the heavy golden perquisite which my 
 mother (unaware of the tricks he had practised upon 
 me) had by letter instructed me to give. He was a 
 mere savage boy from the central bogs of Connaught, 
 and, to the great amusement of Lord Westport, he 
 persisted in calling me “ your majesty ” for the rest 
 of that day ; and by all other means open to him he 
 expressed his penitence. But the Dean insisted that, 
 no matter for his penitence in the matter of the bogs, 
 he had certainly carried a pike at Vinegar Hill, and 
 probably had stolen a pair of boots at Furnes, when 
 he kindly made a call at the Deanery, in passing 
 through that place to the held of battle. It is always 
 a pleasure to see the engineer of mischief “hoist with 
 his own petard ” 1 • and it happened that the horses 
 assigned to draw a post-chariot carrying Lord West- 
 port, myself, and the Dean, on our return journey to 
 Dublin, were a pair utterly ruined by a certain under- 
 postillion named Moran. This particular ruin did 
 Mr. Moran boast to have contributed as his separate 
 contribution to the general ruinations of the stables. 
 And the particular object was, that his horses, and 
 consequently himself, might be left in genial laziness. 
 But, as Nemesis would have it, Mr. Moran was the 
 charioteer specially appointed to this particular ser- 
 vice. We were to return by easy journeys of twenty- 
 five miles a day, or even less ; since every such 
 interval brought us to the house of some hospitable 
 
 1 “ Hamlet,” but also “ Ovid ” : — “ Lex nec justior ulla est, 
 Quam necis artifices arte perire sua.” 
 
LAXTON 
 
 333 
 
 family connected by friendship or by blood with 
 Lord Altamont. Fervently had Lord Westport 
 pleaded with his father for an allowance of four 
 horses ; not at all with any foolish view to fleeting 
 aristocratic splendour, but simply to the luxury of 
 rapid motion. But Lord Altamont was firm in 
 resisting this petition at that time. The remote 
 consequence was — that, by way of redressing the 
 violated equilibrium to our feelings, we subscribed 
 throughout Wales to extort six horses from the 
 astonished innkeepers, most of whom declined 
 the requisition, and would furnish only four, on 
 the plea that the leaders would only embarrass the 
 other horses ; but one at Bangor, from whom we 
 coolly requested eight, recoiled from our demand 
 as from a sort of miniature treason. How so ? 
 Because in this island he had always understood 
 eight horses to be consecrated to royal use. Not 
 at all, we assured him * Pickford, the great carrier, 
 always horsed his waggons with eight. And the 
 law knew of no distinction between waggon and 
 post-chaise, coach-horse or cart-horse. However, 
 we could not compass this point of the eight horses, 
 the double quadriga , in one single instance ; but 
 the true reason we surmised to be — not the pretended 
 puritanism of loyalty to the House of Guelph, but 
 the running short of the innkeeper’s funds. If he 
 had to meet a daily average call for twenty-four 
 horses, then it might well happen that our draft 
 upon him for eight horses at one pull would bank- 
 rupt him for a whole day But I am anticipating. 
 Returning to Ireland and Mr. Moran, the vicious 
 driver of vicious horses, the immediate consequence 
 to him of this unexpected limitation to a pair of 
 horses was that all his knavery in one hour recoiled 
 upon himself. The horses whom he had himself 
 trained to vice and restiveness, in the hope that thus 
 his own services and theirs might be less in request, 
 now became the very curse of his life. Every morn- 
 ing, duly as an attempt was made to put them in 
 motion, they began to back, and no arts, gentle or 
 
334 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 harsh, would for a moment avail to coax or to coerce 
 them into the counter direction. Could retrogression 
 by any metaphysics have been translated into pro- 
 gress, we excelled in that ; it was our forte ; we could 
 have backed to the North Pole. That might be the 
 way to glory, or at least to distinction — sic itur ad 
 astra ; unfortunately, it was not the way to Dublin. 
 Consequently, on every day of our journey — and the 
 days were ten — not once, but always, we had the 
 same deadly conflict to repeat ; and this, being 
 always unavailing, found its solution uniformly in 
 the following ultimate resource. Two large-boned 
 horses, usually taken from the plough, were har- 
 nessed on as leaders. By main force they hauled 
 our wicked wheelers into the right direction, and 
 forced them, by pure physical superiority, into work- 
 ing. We furnished a joyous and comic spectacle to 
 every town and village through which we passed. 
 The whole community, men and children, came out 
 to assist at our departure ; and all alike were diverted, 
 but not the less irritated, by the demoniac obstinacy 
 of the brutes, who seemed under the immediate in- 
 spiration of the fiend. Everybody was anxious to 
 share in the scourging which was administered to 
 them right and left ; and, once propelled into a 
 gallop (or such a gallop as our Brobdignagian leaders 
 could accomplish), they were forced into keeping it 
 up. But, without rehearsing all the details of the 
 case, it may be readily conceived that the amount 
 of trouble distributed amongst our whole party was 
 enormous. Once or twice the friends at whose 
 houses we slept were able to assist us. But generally 
 they either had no horses, or none of the command- 
 ing power demanded. Often, again, it happened, as 
 our route was very circuitous, that no inns lay in our 
 neighbourhood ; or, if there were inns, the horses 
 proved to be of too slight a build. At Ballinasloe, 
 and again at Athlone, half the town came out to help 
 us ; and, having no suitable horses, thirty or forty 
 men, with shouts of laughter, pulled at ropes fastened 
 to our pole and splinter-bar, and compelled the 
 
LAXTON 
 
 335 
 
 snorting demons into a flying gallop. But naturally a 
 couple of miles saw this resource exhausted. Then 
 came the necessity of “ drawing the covers/ 7 as the 
 dean called it — i.e., hunting amongst the adjacent 
 farmers for powerful cattle. This labour (O Jupiter, 
 thanks be for that /) fell upon Mr. Moran. And 
 sometimes it would happen that the horses, which 
 it had cost him three or four hours to find, could be 
 spared only for four or five miles. Such a journey 
 can rarely have been accomplished. Our zig-zag 
 course had prolonged it into from 230 to 250 miles ; 
 and it is literally true that of this entire distance from 
 Westport House to Sackville Street, Dublin, not one 
 furlong had been performed under the spontaneous 
 impulse of our own horses. Their diabolic resistance 
 continued to the last. And one may venture to hope 
 that the sense of final subjugation to man must have 
 proved penally bitter to the horses. But meantime 
 it vexes one that such wretches should be fed with 
 good old hay and oats ; as well littered down also in 
 their stalls as a prebendary ; and by many a stranger, 
 ignorant of their true character, should have been 
 patted and caressed. Let us hope that a fate to 
 which more than once they were nearly forcing us — 
 viz., regress over a precipice — may ultimately have 
 been their own. Once I saw such another case 
 dramatically carried through to its natural crisis in 
 the Liverpool Mail. It was on the stage leading into 
 Lichfield : there was no conspiracy, as in our Irish 
 case ; one horse only out of the four was the criminal ; 
 and, according to the Queens Bench (Denman, C. J.), 
 there is no conspiracy common to one agent : but he 
 was even more signally under a demoniac possession 
 of mutinous resistance to man. The case was really 
 a memorable one. If ever there was a distinct pro- 
 clamation of rebellion against man, it was made by 
 that brutal horse ; and I therefore, being a passenger 
 on the box, took a note of the case ; and on a proper 
 occasion I may be induced to publish it, unless some 
 Houynhm should whinny against me a Chancery 
 injunction. 
 
336 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 From these wild, Tartar-like stables of Connaught, 
 how vast was the transition to that perfection of 
 elegance and of adaptation between means and ends 
 that reigned from centre to circumference through 
 the stables at .Laxton ! /, as it happened, could 
 
 report to Lord Massey their earlier condition ; he to 
 me could report their immediate changes. I won 
 him easily to an interest in my own Irish experiences, 
 so fresh, and in parts so grotesque, wilder also by 
 much in Connaught than in Lord Massey’s county 
 of Limerick ; whilst he (without affecting any delight 
 in the hunting systems of Northamptonshire and 
 Leicestershire) yet took pleasure in explaining to me 
 those characteristic features of the English midland 
 hunting, as centralised at Melton, which even then 
 gave to it the supreme rank for brilliancy and unity 
 of effect amongst all varieties of the chase . 1 
 
 Horses had formed the natural and introductory 
 tppic of conversation between us. What we severally 
 knew of Ireland, though in different quarters — what 
 we both knew of Laxton, the barbaric splendour 
 
 1 If mere names were allowed to dazzle the judgment, how 
 magnificent to a gallant young Englishman of twenty seems 
 at first the tiger-hunting of India, which yet (when examined 
 searchingly) turns out the meanest and most coivardly mode 
 of hunting known to human experience. Buffalo-hunting is 
 much more dignified as regards the courageous exposure of the 
 hunter ; but, from all accounts, its excitement is too momentary 
 and evanescent : one rifle-shot, and the crisis is past. Besides 
 that, the generous and honest character of the buffalo disturbs 
 the cordiality of the sport. The very opposite reason disturbs 
 the interest of lion-hunting , especially at the Cape. The lion 
 is everywhere a cowardly wretch, unless when sublimed into 
 courage by famine ; but in Southern Africa he is the most 
 currish of enemies. Those who fancied so much adventurous- 
 ness in the lion conflicts of Mr. Gordon Gumming appear never 
 to have read the missionary travels of Mr. Moffat. The poor 
 missionary, without any arms whatever, came to think lightly 
 of half-a-dozen lions seen drinking through the twilight at 
 the very same pond or river as himself. Nobody can have 
 any wish to undervalue the adventurous gallantry of Mr. G. 
 Cumming. But, in the single case of the Cape lion, there is 
 an unintentional advantage taken from the traditional name 
 of lion, as though the Cape lion were such as that which 
 ranges the torrid zone. 
 
LAXTON 
 
 337 
 
 and the civilised splendour — had naturally an interest 
 for us both in their contrasts (at one time so pic- 
 turesque, at another so grotesque), which illuminated 
 our separate recollections. But my quick instinct 
 soon made me aware that a jealousy was gathering 
 in Lord Massey’s mind around such a topic, as 
 though too ostentatiously levelled to his particular 
 knowledge, or to his animal condition of taste. But 
 easily I slipped off into another key. At Laxton, it 
 happened that the library was excellent. Founded 
 by whom, I never heard : but certainly, when used 
 by a systematic reader, it showed itself to have been 
 systematically collected ; it stretched pretty equably 
 through two centuries — viz., from about 1600 to 
 1800 — and might perhaps amount to 17,000 volumes. 
 Lord Massey was far from illiterate : and his interest 
 in books was unaffected, if limited and too often 
 interrupted by defective knowledge. The library 
 was dispersed through six or seven small rooms, 
 lying between the drawing-room in one wing and 
 the dining-room in the opposite wing. This dis- 
 persion, however, already furnished the ground of a 
 rude classification. In some one of these rooms was 
 Lord Massey always to be found, from the forenoon 
 to the evening. And was it any fault of his , that his 
 daughter, little Grace, about two years old, pursued 
 him down from her nursery every morning, and 
 insisted upon seeing innumerable pictures, lurking 
 (as she had discovered) in many different recesses 
 of the library? More and more from this quarter 
 it was that we drew the materials of our daily after- 
 dinner conversation. One great discouragement arises 
 commonly to the student, where the particular library 
 in which he reads has been so disordinately collected 
 that he cannot pursue a subject once started. Now, 
 at Laxton, the books had been so judiciously brought 
 together, so many hooks and eyes connected them, 
 that the whole library formed what one might call a 
 series of strata, naturally allied, through which you 
 might quarry your way consecutively for many months. 
 On rainy days and often enough one had occasion 
 
33$ AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 to say through rainy weeks, what a delightful resource 
 did this library prove to both of us ! And one day 
 it occurred to us that, whereas the stables and the 
 library were both jewels of attraction, the latter had 
 been by much the least costly. Pretty often I have 
 found, when any opening has existed for making the 
 computation, that, in a library containing a fair pro- 
 portion of books illustrated with plates, about ten 
 shillings a volume might be taken as expressing, upon 
 a sufficiently large number of volumes, small and 
 great, the fair average cost of the whole. On this 
 basis, the library at Laxton would have cost less 
 than ^9000. On the other hand, 35 horses (hunters, 
 racers, roadsters, carriage-horses, &c.) might have cost 
 about ^8000, or a little more. But the library en- 
 tailed no permanent cost beyond the annual loss of 
 interest : the books did not eat, and required no aid 
 from veterinary 1 surgeons : whereas, for the horses, 
 not only such ministrations were intermittingly re- 
 quired, but a costly permanent establishment of 
 grooms and helpers. Lord Carbery, who had re- 
 ceived an elaborate Etonian education, was even more 
 earnestly a student than his friend Lord Massey, who 
 had probably been educated at home under a private 
 tutor. Pie read everything connected with general 
 politics (meaning by general not personal politics) 
 and with social philosophy. At Laxton, indeed, it 
 was that I first saw Godwin’s “Political Justice”; 
 not the second and emasculated edition in octavo , 
 but the original quarto edition, with all its virus as 
 yet undiluted of raw anti-social Jacobinism. 
 
 At Laxton it was that I first saw the entire aggre- 
 gate labours, brigaded, as it were, and paraded as if 
 for martial review, of that most industrious benefactor 
 to the early stages of our English historical literature, 
 
 1 ee Veterinary ” : — By the way, whence comes this odd-looking 
 word ? The word veter ana I have met with in monkish writers, 
 to express domesticated quadrupeds ; and evidently from that 
 word must have originated tke word veterinary. But the 
 question is still but one step removed: for how came veterana 
 by that acceptation in rural economy ? 
 
LAXTON 
 
 339 
 
 Thomas Hearne. Three hundred guineas, I believe, 
 had been the price paid cheerfully at one time for a 
 complete set of Hearne. At Laxton, also, it was that 
 first I saw the total array of works edited by Dr. 
 Birch. It was a complete armilustrium , a recognition 
 or mustering, as it were, not of pompous Praetorian 
 cohorts, or unique guardsmen, but of the yeomanry, 
 the militia, or what, under the old form of expression, 
 you might regard as the trained bands of our litera- 
 ture — the fund from which ultimately, or in the last 
 resort, students look for the materials of our vast 
 and myriad- faced literature. A French author of 
 eminence, fifty years back, having occasion to speak 
 of our English literature collectively, in reference to 
 the one point of its variety , being also a man of 
 honour, and disdaining that sort of patriotism which 
 sacrifices the truth to nationality, speaks of our pre- 
 tensions in these words : Les Anglois qui ont une 
 litterature infiniment plus variee que la noire . This 
 fact is a feature in our national pretensions that could 
 ever have been regarded doubtfully merely through 
 insufficient knowledge. Dr. Johnson, indeed, made 
 it the distinguishing merit of the French, that they 
 “ have a book upon every subject.” But Dr. John- 
 son was not only capricious as regards temper 
 and variable humours, but as regards the in- 
 equality of his knowledge. Incoherent and un- 
 systematic was Dr. Johnson’s information in most 
 cases. Hence his extravagant misappraisement of 
 Knolles, the Turkish historian, which is exposed so 
 severely by Spittler, the German, who, again, is him- 
 self miserably superficial in his analysis of English 
 History. Hence the feeble credulity which Dr. 
 Johnson showed with respect to the forgery of De 
 Foe (under the masque of Captain Carleton) upon 
 the Catalonian campaign of Lord Peterborough. But 
 it is singular that a literature so unrivalled as 
 ours in its compass and variety should not have 
 produced any, even the shallowest, manual of itself. 
 And thus it happens, for example, that writers so 
 laborious and serviceable as Birch are in any popular 
 
340 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 sense scarcely known. I showed to Lord Massey, 
 among others of his works, that which relates to 
 Lord Worcester’s (i.e., Lord Glamorgan’s) negotia- 
 tions with the Papal nuncio in Ireland about the 
 year 1644, &c. Connected with these negotiations 
 were many names amongst Lord Massey’s own 
 ancestors ; so that here he suddenly alighted upon 
 a fund of archaeologic memorabilia, connecting what 
 interested him as an Irishman in general with what 
 most interested him as the head of a particular 
 family. It is remarkable, also, as an indication of 
 the general nobility and elevation which had accom- 
 panied the revolution in his life, that, concurrently 
 with the constitutional torpor previously besetting him, 
 had melted away the intellectual torpor under which 
 he had found books until recently of little practical 
 value. Lady Carbery had herself told me that the 
 two revolutions went on simultaneously. He began 
 to take an interest in literature when life itself un- 
 folded a new interest, under the companionship of 
 his youthful wife. And here, by the way, as sub- 
 sequently in scores of other instances, I saw broad 
 evidences of the credulity with which we have adopted 
 into our grave political faith the rash and malicious 
 sketches of our novelists. With Fielding commenced 
 the practice of systematically traducing our order of 
 country gentlemen. His picture of Squire Western 
 is not only a malicious, but also an incongruous, libel. 
 The squire’s ordinary language is impossible, being 
 alternately bookish and absurdly rustic. In reality, 
 the conventional dialect ascribed to the rustic order 
 in general — to peasants even more than to gentlemen 
 — in our English plays and novels, is a childish and 
 fantastic babble, belonging to no form of real breath- 
 ing life; nowhere intelligible; not in any province; 
 whilst, at the same time, all provinces — Somerset- 
 shire, Devonshire, Hampshire — are confounded with 
 our Midland Counties ; and positively the diction of 
 Parricombe and Charricombe from Exmoor Forest 
 is mixed up with the pure Icelandic forms of the 
 English Lakes, of North Yorkshire, and of Northum- 
 
LAXTON 
 
 341 
 
 berland, In Scotland, it needs but a slight inter- 
 course with the peasantry to distinguish various 
 dialects : the Aberdonian and Fifeshire, for instance, 
 how easily distinguished, even by an English alien, 
 from the western dialects of Ayrshire, &c. And I 
 have heard it said by Scottish purists in this matter 
 that even Sir Walter Scott is chargeable^ with con- 
 siderable licentiousness in the management of his 
 colloquial Scotch. Yet, generally speaking, it bears 
 the strongest impress of truthfulness. But, on the 
 other hand, how false and powerless does this same 
 Sir Walter become, when the necessities of his tale 
 oblige him at any time to come among the English 
 peasantry ! His magic wand is instantaneously 
 broken ; and he moves along by a babble of im- 
 possible forms, as fantastic as any that our London 
 theatres have traditionally ascribed to English rustics, 
 to English sailors, and to Irishmen universally. 
 Fielding is open to the same stern criticism, as a 
 deliberate falsehood-monger, and from the same 
 cause — want of energy to face the difficulty of 
 mastering a real living idiom. This defect in lan- 
 guage, however, I cite only as one feature in the 
 complex falsehood which disfigures Fielding’s por- 
 trait of the English country gentleman. Meantime 
 the question arises, Did he mean his Squire Western 
 for a representative portrait ? Possibly not. He 
 might design it expressly as a sketch of an indi- 
 vidual, and by no means of a class. And the fault 
 may be, after all, not in him , the writer, but in us, 
 the falsely interpreting readers. But be that as it 
 may, and figure to ourselves as we may the rustic 
 squire of a hundred to a hundred and fifty years 
 back (though manifestly at utter war, in the por- 
 traitures of our novelists, with the realities handed 
 down to us by our Parliamentary annals), on that 
 arena we are dealing with objects of pure speculative 
 curiosity. Far different is the same question when 
 practically treated for purposes of present legislation 
 or philosophic inference. One hundred years ago, 
 such was the difficulty of social intercourse, simply 
 
34 2 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 from the difficulty of locomotion (though even then 
 this difficulty was much lowered to the English, as 
 beyond comparison the most equestrian of nations), 
 that it is possible to imagine a shade of difference 
 as still distinguishing the town-bred man from the 
 rustic ; though, considering the multiplied distribu- 
 tion of our assize towns, our cathedral towns, our 
 seaports, and our universities, all so many recurring 
 centres of civility, it is not very easy to imagine such 
 a thing in an island no larger than ours. But can 
 any human indulgence be extended to the credulity 
 which assumes the same possibility as existing for us 
 in the very middle of the nineteenth century ? At a 
 time when every week sees the town banker drawn 
 from our rural gentry, railway directors in every 
 quarter transferring themselves indifferently from 
 town to country, from country to town, lawyers, 
 clergymen, medical men, magistrates, local judges, 
 &c., all shifting in and out between town and 
 country ; rural families all intermarrying on terms 
 of the widest freedom with town families ; all again, 
 in the persons of their children, meeting for study at 
 the same schools, colleges, military academies, &c. : 
 by what furious forgetfulness of the realities belong- 
 ing to the case has it been possible for writers in 
 public journals to persist in arguing national ques- 
 tions upon the assumption of a bisection in our 
 population — a double current, on the one side 
 steeped to the lips in town prejudices, on the other 
 side traditionally sold to rustic views and doctrines ? 
 Such double currents, like the Rhone flowing through 
 the Lake of Geneva, and yet refusing to intermingle, 
 probably did exist, and had an important significance 
 in the Low Countries of the fifteenth century, or 
 between the privileged cities and the unprivileged 
 country of Germany down to the Thirty Years’ War; 
 but, for us, they are in the last degree fabulous dis- 
 tinctions — pure fairy tales ; and the social economist 
 or the historian who builds on such phantoms as that 
 of a rustic aristocracy still retaining any substantial 
 grounds of distinction from the town aristocracies, 
 
LAXTON 
 
 343 
 
 proclaims the hollowness of any and all his doctrines 
 that depend upon such assumptions. Lord Carbery 
 was a thorough fox-hunter. The fox-hunting of the 
 adjacent county of Leicestershire was not then what 
 it is now. The state of the land was radically 
 different for the foot of the horse ; the nature and 
 distribution of the fences were different ; so that a 
 class of horses thoroughly different was then required. 
 But then, as now, it offered the finest exhibition of 
 the fox-chase that is known in Europe : and then, 
 as now, this is the best adapted among all known 
 varieties of hunting to the exhibition of adventurous 
 and skilful riding, and generally, perhaps, to the 
 development of manly and athletic qualities. Lord 
 Carbery, during the season, might be immoderately 
 addicted to this mode of sporting, having naturally a 
 pleasurable feeling connected with his own reputation 
 as a skilful and fearless horseman. But, though the 
 chases were in those days longer than they are at 
 present, small was the amount of time really ab- 
 stracted from that which he had disposable for 
 general purposes ; amongst which purposes ranked 
 foremost his literary pursuits. And, however much 
 he transcended the prevailing conception of his 
 order, as sketched by satiric and often ignorant 
 novelists, he might be regarded, in all that concerned 
 the liberalisation of his views, as pretty fairly repre- 
 senting that order. Thus, through every real ex- 
 perience, the crazy notion of a rural aristocracy 
 flowing apart from the urban aristocracy, and stand- 
 ing on a different level of culture as to intellect, of 
 polish as to manners, and of interests as to social 
 objects — a notion at all times false as a fact — now at 
 length became with all thoughtful men monstrous as 
 a possibility. 
 
 Meantime Lord Massey was reached by reports 
 both through Lady Carbery and myself of something 
 which interested him more profoundly than all earthly 
 records of horsemanship, or any conceivable questions 
 connected with books. Lady Carbery, with a view to 
 the amusement of Lady Massey and my sister, for 
 
344 iiCTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 both of whom youth and previous seclusion had 
 created a natural interest in all such scenes, ac- 
 cepted two or three times in every week dinner 
 invitations to all the families on her visiting list, and 
 lying within her winter circle, which was measured 
 by a radius of about seventeen miles. For, dreadful 
 as were the roads in those days, when the Bath, the 
 Bristol, or the Dover mail was equally perplexed 
 oftentimes to accomplish Mr. Palmer’s rate of seven 
 miles an hour, a distance of seventeen was yet easily 
 accomplished in ioo minutes by the powerful Laxton 
 horses. Magnificent was the Laxton turn-out; and 
 in the roomy travelling-coach of Lady Carbery, made 
 large enough to receive upon occasion even a bed, 
 it would have been an idle scruple to fear the crowd- 
 ing a party which mustered only three besides myself : 
 for Lord Massey uniformly declined joining us, — in 
 which I believe that he was right. A schoolboy like 
 myself had fortunately no dignity to lose. But Lord 
 Massey, a needy Irish peer (or, strictly speaking, since 
 the Union no peer at all, though still a hereditary 
 lord), was bound to be trebly vigilant over his sur- 
 viving honours. This he owed to his country as well 
 as to his family. He recoiled from what he figured 
 to himself (but too often falsely figured) as the 
 haughty and disdainful English nobility — all so rich, 
 all so polished in manner, all so punctiliously correct 
 in the ritual of bienseance. Lord Carbery might face 
 them gaily and boldly; for he was rich, and, although 
 possessing Irish estates and an Irish mansion, was a 
 thorough Englishman by education and early associa- 
 tion. “ But I,” said Lord Massey, “ had a careless 
 Irish education, and am never quite sure that I may 
 not be trespassing on some mysterious law of English 
 good-breeding.” In vain I suggested to him, that 
 most of what passed amongst foreigners and amongst 
 Irishmen for English hauteur was pure reserve, which, 
 among all people that were bound over by the in- 
 evitable restraints of their rank (imposing, it must be 
 remembered, jealous duties as well as privileges), was 
 sure to become the operative feeling. I contended, 
 
LAXTON 
 
 345 
 
 that in the English situation there was no escaping 
 this English reserve, except by great impudence and 
 defective sensibility ; and that, if examined, reserve 
 was the truest expression of respect towards those 
 who were its objects. In vain did Lady Carbery 
 back me in this representation. He stood firm, and 
 never once accompanied us to any dinner party. 
 Northamptonshire, I know not why, is (or then was) 
 more thickly sown with aristocratic families than any 
 in the kingdom. Many elegant and pretty women 
 there naturally were in these parties ; but undoubtedly 
 our two Laxton baronesses shone advantageously 
 amongst them. A boy like myself could lay no re- 
 straint upon the after-dinner feelings of the gentle- 
 men ; and almost uniformly I heard such verdicts 
 passed upon the personal attractions of both, but 
 especially Lady Massey, as tended greatly to soothe 
 the feelings of Lord Massey. It is singular that 
 Lady Massey universally carried off the palm of un- 
 limited homage. Lady Carbery was a regular beauty, 
 and publicly known for such ; both were fine figures, 
 and apparently not older than 26 ; but in her Irish 
 friend people felt something more thoroughly artless 
 and feminine — for the masculine understanding of 
 Lady Carbery in some way communicated its com- 
 manding expression to her deportment. I reported to 
 Lord Massey, in terms of unexceptionable decorum, 
 those flattering expressions of homage which some- 
 times, from the lips of young men partially under the 
 influence of wine, had taken a form somewhat too 
 enthusiastic for literal repetition to a chivalrous and 
 adoring husband. 
 
 Section II. — The Orphan Heiresses 
 
 Meantime, the reader has been kept long enough 
 at Laxton to warrant me in presuming some curiosity 
 or interest to have gathered within his mind about 
 the mistress of the mansion. Who was Lady Car- 
 bery, what was her present position, and what had 
 
346 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 been her original position in society ? All readers 
 of Bishop Jeremy Taylor 1 must be aware of that 
 religious Lady Carbery who was the munificent (and, 
 for her kindness, one might say the filial) patroness 
 of the all-eloquent and subtle divine. She died 
 before the Restoration, and, consequently, before 
 her spiritual director could have ascended the Epis- 
 copal throne. The title of Carbery was at that time 
 an earldom ; the earl married again, and his second 
 countess was also a devout patroness of Taylor. 
 Having no peerage at hand, I do not know by what 
 mode of derivation the modern title of the nine- 
 teenth century had descended from the old one of 
 
 1 The Life of Jeremy Taylor, by Reginald Heber, Bishop 
 of Calcutta, is most elaborately incorrect. From want of re- 
 search, and a chronology in some places thoroughly erroneous, 
 various important facts are utterly mis-stated ; and, what is 
 most to be regretted, in a matter deeply affecting the bishop’s 
 candour and Christian charity — viz., a controversial correspond- 
 ence with a Somersetshire Dissenting clergyman — the wildest 
 misconception has vitiated the entire result. That fractional 
 and splintered condition, into which some person had cut up 
 the controversy with a view to his own more convenient study 
 of its chief elements, Heber had misconceived as -the actual 
 form in which these parts had been originally exchanged be- 
 tween the disputants — a blunder of the worst consequence, and 
 having the effect of translating general expressions (such as 
 recorded a moral indignation against ancient fallacies or evasions 
 connected with the dispute) into direct ebullitions of scorn or 
 displeasure personally against his immediate antagonist. And 
 the charge of intolerance and defective charity becomes thus 
 very much stronger* against the poor bishop, because it takes 
 the shape of a confession extorted by mere force of truth from 
 an else reluctant apologist, that would most gladly have denied 
 everything that he could deny. The Life needs more than 
 ever to be accurately written, since it has been thus chaotically 
 mis- narrated by a prelate of so much undeniable talent. I 
 once began a very elaborate life myself, and in these words : 
 — 4 ‘Jeremy Taylor, the most eloquent and the subtlest of 
 Christian philosophers, was the son of a barber, and the son- 
 in-law of a king” — alluding to the tradition (imperfectly veri- 
 fied, I believe) that he married an illegitimate daughter of 
 Charles I. But this sketch was begun more than thirty years 
 ago ; and I retired from the labour as too overwhelmingly 
 exacting in all that related to the philosophy and theology 
 of that man so “ myriad-minded,” and of that century so 
 anarchical. 
 
LAXTON 
 
 347 
 
 the seventeenth. I presume that some collateral 
 branch of the original family had succeeded to the 
 barony when the limitations of the original settle- 
 ment had extinguished the earldom. But to me, 
 who saw revived another religious Lady Carbery, 
 distinguished for her beauty and accomplishments, 
 it was interesting to read of the two successive ladies 
 who had borne that title 160 years before, and whom 
 no reader of Jeremy Taylor is ever allowed to forget, 
 since almost all his books are dedicated to one or 
 other of the pious family that had protected him. 
 Once more there was a religious Lady Carbery, sup- 
 porting locally the Church of England, patronising 
 schools, diffusing the most extensive relief to every 
 mode of indigence or distress : a century and a half 
 ago such a Lady Carbery was in South Wales, at the 
 “ Golden Grove ” ; now such another Lady Carbery 
 was in central England, at Laxton. The two cases, 
 divided by six generations, interchanged a reciprocal 
 interest, since in both cases it was young ladies, 
 under the age of 30, that originated the movement, 
 and in both cases these ladies bore the same title ; 
 and I will therefore retrace rapidly the outline of that 
 contemporary case so familiarly known to myself. 
 
 Colonel Watson and General Smith had been 
 amongst the earliest friends of my mother’s family. 
 Both served for many years in India : the first in 
 the Company’s army, the other upon the staff of the 
 King’s forces in that country. Each, about the same 
 time, made a visit to England, and each of them, I 
 believe, with the same principal purpose of providing 
 for the education of his daughter ; for each happened 
 to have one sole child, which child, in each case, was 
 a girl of singular beauty; and both of these little 
 ladies were entitled to very large fortunes. The 
 Colonel and the General being on brotherly terms 
 of intimacy, resolved to combine their plans for the 
 welfare of their daughters. What they wanted was, 
 not a lady that could teach them any special arts or 
 accomplishments — all these could be purchased ; but 
 the two qualifications indispensable for the difficult 
 
348 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 situation of lady-superintendent over two children so 
 singularly separated from all relatives whatever were, 
 in the first place, knowledge of the world, and integrity 
 for keeping at a distance all showy adventurers that 
 might else offer themselves, with unusual advantages, 
 as suitors for the favour of two great heiresses ; and 
 secondly, manners exquisitely polished. Looking to 
 that last requisition, it seems romantic to mention 
 that the lady selected for the post, with the fullest 
 approbation of both officers, was one who began life 
 as the daughter of a little Lincolnshire farmer. What 
 her maiden name had been, I do not at this moment 
 remember ; but this name was of very little import- 
 ance, being soon merged in that of Harvey, bestowed 
 on her at the altar by a country gentleman. The 
 squire, — not very rich, I believe, but rich enough to 
 rank as a matrimonial prize in the lottery of a country 
 girl whom one single step of descent in life might 
 have brought within sight of menial service, — had 
 been captivated by the young woman’s beauty ; 
 and this, at that period, when accompanied by the 
 advantages of youth, must have been resplendent. 
 I, who had known her all my life down to my six- 
 teenth year (during which year she died), and who 
 naturally, therefore, referred her origin back to some 
 remote ancestral generation, nevertheless, in her sole 
 case, was made to feel that there might be some justi- 
 fication for the Church of England discountenancing 
 in her Liturgy marriage with your great-grandmother : 
 “ neither shalt thou marry thy great-grandfather’s 
 widow.” She, poor thing ! at that time was thinking 
 little of marriage ; for even then, though known only 
 to herself and her femme de chambre , that dreadful 
 organic malady (cancer) was raising its adder’s crest, 
 under which finally she died. But, in spite of languor 
 interchanging continually with disfiguring anguish, she 
 still impressed one as a regal beauty. Her person, 
 indeed, and figure would have tended towards such 
 a standard ; but all was counteracted and thrown 
 back into the mould of sweet natural womanhood by 
 the cherubic beauty of her features. These it was — 
 
LAXTON 
 
 349 
 
 these features, so purely child-like — that reconciled 
 me in a moment of time to great-grandmotherhood. 
 The stories about Ninon de l’Enclos are French 
 fables — speaking plainly, are falsehoods ; — and sorry 
 I am that a nation so amiable as the French should 
 habitually disregard truth, when coming into collision 
 with their love for the extravagant. But, if anything 
 could reconcile me to these monstrous old fibs about 
 Ninon at ninety, it would be the remembrance of 
 this English enchantress on the high-road to seventy. 
 Guess, reader, what she must have been at twenty- 
 eight to thirty-two, when she became the widow of 
 the Gerenian horseman, Harvey. How bewitching 
 she must have looked in her widow’s caps ! So had 
 once thought Colonel Watson, who happened to be 
 in England at that period ; and to the charming 
 widow this man of war propounded his hand in 
 marriage. This hand — this martial hand — for reason 
 inexplicable to me, Mrs. Harvey declined ; and the 
 Colonel bounced off in a rage to Bengal. There 
 w T ere others who saw young Mrs. Harvey as well as 
 Colonel Watson. And amongst them was an ancient 
 German gentleman, to what century belonging I do 
 not know, who had every possible bad quality known 
 to European experience, and a solitary good one — 
 viz., eight hundred thousand pounds sterling. The 
 man’s name was Schreiber. Schreiber was an aggre- 
 gate resulting from the conflux of all conceivable 
 bad qualities. That was the elementary base of 
 Schreiber ; and the superstructure, or Corinthian 
 decoration of his frontispiece, was that Schreiber 
 cultivated one sole science — viz., the science of 
 taking snuff. Here were two separate objects for 
 contemplation : one, bright as Aurora — that radiant 
 Koh-i-noor, or mountain of light — the eight hundred 
 thousand pounds ; the other, sad, fuscous, begrimed 
 with the snuff of ages — viz., the most ancient Schreiber. 
 Ah ! if they could have been divided — these tw 7 in yoke- 
 fellows — and that ladies might have the privilege of 
 choosing between them ! For the moment there was 
 no prudent course open to Mrs. Harvey, but that of 
 
350 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 marrying Schreiber (which she did, and survived) ; 
 and subsequently, when the state of the market became 
 favourable to such “ conversions ” of stocky then the 
 new Mrs. Schreiber parted from Schreiber, and dis- 
 posed of her interest in Schreiber at a settled rate in 
 three per cent, consols and terminable annuities — 
 for every coiipon of Schreiber receiving a bonus of so 
 many thousand pounds, paid down according to the 
 rate agreed on by the lawyers of the two parties ; or, 
 strictly speaking, quarrelled on between the adverse 
 factions ; for agreement it was hard to effect upon 
 any point. The deadly fear which had been breathed 
 into him by Mrs. Schreiber’s scale of expenditure in 
 a Park Lane House proved her most salutary ally. 
 Coerced by this horrid vision, Schreiber consented 
 (which else he never would have done) to grant her 
 an allowance, for life, of about two thousand per 
 annum. Could that be reckoned an anodyne for the 
 torment connected with a course of Schreiber? I 
 pretend to no opinion. 
 
 Such were the facts : and exactly at this point in 
 her career had Mrs. Schreiber arrived, when, once 
 more, Colonel Watson and General Smith were visit- 
 ing England, and for the last time, on the errand of 
 settling permanently some suitable establishment for 
 their two infant daughters. The superintendence of 
 this they desired to devolve upon some lady, qualified 
 by her manners and her connections for introduc- 
 ing the young ladies, when old enough, into general 
 society. Mrs. Schreiber was the very person required. 
 Intellectually she had no great pretensions ; but these 
 she did not need : her character was irreproachable, 
 her manners were polished, and her own income 
 placed her far above all mercenary temptations. She 
 had not thought fit to accept the station of Colonel 
 Watson’s wife, but some unavowed feeling prompted 
 her to undertake with enthusiasm the duties of a 
 mother to the Colonel’s daughter. Chiefly on Miss 
 Watson’s account it was at first that she extended 
 her maternal cares to General Smith’s daughter ; but, 
 very soon, so sweet and winning was the disposition 
 
LAXTON 351 
 
 of Miss Smith that Mrs. Schreiber apparently loved 
 her the best. 
 
 Both, however, appeared under a combination 
 of circumstances too singularly romantic to fail of 
 creating an interest that was universal. Both were 
 solitary children, unchallenged by any relatives. 
 Neither had ever known what it was to taste of 
 love, paternal or maternal. Their mothers had been 
 long dead — not consciously seen by either ; and their 
 fathers, not surviving their last departure from home 
 long enough to see them again, died before returning 
 from India. What a world of desolation seemed to 
 exist for them ! How silent was every hall into which, 
 by natural right, they should have had entrance.! 
 Several people, kind, cordial people, men and women, 
 were scattered over England, that, during their days 
 of infancy, would have delighted to receive them ; 
 but, by some fatality, when they reached their fifteenth 
 year, and might have been deemed old enough to 
 undertake visits, all of these paternal friends, except 
 two, had died ; nor had they, by that time, any 
 relatives at all that remained alive, or were eligible 
 as associates. Strange, indeed, was the contrast be- 
 tween the silent past of their lives and that populous 
 future to which their large fortunes would probably 
 introduce them. Throw open a door in the rear 
 that should lay bare the long vista of chambers 
 through which their childhood might symbolically be 
 represented as having travelled, — what silence ! — 
 what solemn solitude ! Open a door in advance that 
 should do the same figurative office for the future — 
 suddenly what a jubilation ! what a tumult of festal 
 greetings ! 
 
 But the succeeding stages of life did not, perhaps, 
 in either case, fully correspond to the early promise. 
 Rank and station the two young ladies attained ; but 
 rank and station do not always throw people upon 
 prominent stages of action or display. Many a family, 
 possessing both rank and wealth, and not undistin- 
 guished possibly by natural endowments of an order 
 fitted for brilliant popularity, never emerge from 
 
352 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 obscurity, or not into any splendour that can be 
 called national ; sometimes, perhaps, from a temper 
 unfitted for worldly struggles in the head of the 
 house ; possibly from a haughty, possibly a dignified 
 disdain of popular arts, hatred of petty rhetoric, petty 
 sycophantic courtships, petty canvassing tricks ; or 
 again, in many cases, because accidents of ill luck 
 have intercepted the fair proportion of success due 
 to the merits of the person ; whence, oftentimes, a 
 hasty self-surrender to impulses of permanent disgust. 
 But, more frequently than any other cause, I fancy . 
 that impatience of the long struggle required for any 
 distinguished success interferes to thin the ranks of 
 competitors for the prizes of public ambition. Per- 
 severance is soon refrigerated in those who fall back 
 under any result, defeated or not defeated, upon 
 splendid mansions and luxuries of every kind, already 
 far beyond their needs or their wishes. The soldier 
 described by the Roman satirist as one who had lost 
 his purse was likely enough, under the desperation 
 of his misfortune, to see nothing formidable in any 
 obstacle that crossed his path towards another supple- 
 mentary purse ; whilst the very same obstacle might 
 reasonably alarm one who, in retreating, fell back 
 under the battlements of twenty thousand per annum. 
 In the present case, there was nothing at all to move 
 wonder in the final result under so continual a siege 
 of temptation from the seductions of voluptuous 
 ease ; the only wonder is, that one of the young 
 ladies — viz., Miss Watson, whose mind was masculine, 
 and in some directions aspiring — should so readily 
 have acquiesced in a result which she might have 
 anticipated from the beginning. 
 
 Happy was the childhood, happy the early dawn 
 of womanhood, which these two young ladies passed 
 under the guardianship of Mrs. Schreiber. Educa- 
 tion in those days was not the austere old lady 
 that she is now. At least, in the case of young 
 ladies, her exactions were merciful and considerate. 
 If Miss Smith sang pretty well, and Miss Watson 
 very well, and with the power of singing difficult part 
 
LAXTON 
 
 353 
 
 music at sight, they did so for the same reason that 
 the lark sings, and chiefly under the same gentle 
 tuition — that of nature, glad almighty nature, breath- 
 ing inspiration from her Delphic tripod of happiness, 
 and health, and hope. Mrs. Schreiber pretended to 
 no intellectual gifts whatever, and yet, practically, 
 she was wiser than many who have the greatest. 
 First of all other tasks which she imposed upon her 
 wards, was that of daily exercise, and exercise carried 
 to excess. She insisted upon four hours’ exercise 
 daily ; and, as young ladies walk fast, that would 
 have yielded, at the rate of 3J miles per hour, 13 + J 
 miles. But only 2 J hours were given to walking ; 
 the other to riding. No day was a day of rest : 
 absolutely none. Days so stormy that they “kept 
 the raven to her nest,” snow the heaviest, winds the 
 most frantic, were never listened to as any ground 
 of reprieve from the ordinary exaction. I once knew 
 (that is, not personally, for I never saw her, but 
 through the reports of her many friends) an intrepid 
 lady, 1 living in the city of London (i.e., technically 
 the city , as opposed to Westminster, &c., Mary-le- 
 bone, &c.), who made a point of turning out her 
 new-born infants for a pretty long airing even on the 
 day of their birth. It made no difference to her 
 whether the month were July or January; good un- 
 deniable air is to be had in either month. Once 
 only she was baffled, and most indignant it made 
 her, because the little thing chose to be born at 
 half-past nine p.m. ; so that, by the time its toilet 
 was finished, bonnet and cloak all properly adjusted, 
 the watchman was calling, “ Past eleven, and a 
 cloudy night ” ; upon which, most reluctantly, she 
 was obliged to countermand the orders for that day’s 
 exercise, and considered herself, like the Emperor 
 Titus, to have lost a day. But what came of the 
 
 1 If I remember rightly, some account is given of this palse- 
 stric lady and her stern Paedo-gymnastics, in a clever book on 
 household medicine and surgery under circumstances of inevi- 
 table seclusion from professional aid, written about the year 
 1820-22, by Mr. Haden, a surgeon of London. 
 
 M 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 354 
 
 London lady’s or of Mrs. Schreiber’s Spartan dis- 
 cipline ? Did the little blind kittens of Gracechurch 
 Street, who were ordered by their Penthesilean 
 mamma, on the very day of their nativity, to face 
 the most 'cruel winds — did they , or did Mrs. 
 Schreiber’s wards, justify, in after life, this fierce 
 discipline by commensurate results of hardiness? 
 In words written beyond all doubt by Shakspere, 
 though not generally recognised as his, it might have 
 been said to any one of this Amazonian brood : — 
 
 “ Now mild may be thy life ; 
 
 For a more blust’rous birth had never babe. 
 
 Quiet and gentle be thy temperature ; 
 
 For thou’rt the ruddiest welcomed to this world 
 That e’er was woman’s child. Happy be the sequel ; 
 Thou hast as chiding a nativity 
 As fire, air, water, earth, and heaven can make, 
 
 To herald thee from darkness ! ” — Pericles , Act III. 
 
 As to the city kittens, I heard that the treatment 
 prospered ; but the man who reported this added 
 .that by original constitution they were as strong as 
 .Meaux’s dray-horses ; and thus, after all, they may 
 .simply illustrate the old logical dictum ascribed to 
 some medical man — that the reason why London 
 children of the wealthier classes are noticeable even 
 to a proverb for their robustness and bloom, is be- 
 cause none but those who are already vigorous to 
 excess, and who start with advantages of health far 
 beyond the average scale, have much chance of sur- 
 viving that most searching quarantine which in such 1 
 
 1 For myself, meantime, I am far from assenting to all the 
 romantic abuse applied to the sewerage and the churchyards of 
 London, and even more violently to the river Thames. As a 
 tidal river, even beyond the metropolitan bridges, the Thames 
 undoubtedly does much towards cleansing the atmosphere, 
 'whatever may be the condition of its waters. And one most 
 erroneous postulate there is from which the Times starts in 
 all its arguments — viz., this, that, supposing the Thames to be 
 even a vast sewer, in short, the cloaca maxima of London, 
 there is in that arrangement of things any special reproach 
 applying to our mighty English capital. On the contrary, all 
 .great cities that ever were founded have sought out, as their 
 first and elementary condition, the adjacency of some great 
 
LAXTON 
 
 355 
 
 an atmosphere they are summoned to weather at 
 starting. Coming, however, to the special case of 
 Mrs. Schreiber’s household, I am bound to report, 
 that in no instance have I known young ladies so 
 thoroughly steeled against all the ordinary host of 
 petty maladies which, by way of antithesis to the 
 capital warfare of dangerous complaints, might be 
 called the guerilla nosology : influenza, for instance, 
 in milder forms, catarrh, headache, toothache, dys- 
 pepsy in transitory shapes, &c. Always the spirits 
 of the two girls were exuberant ; the enjoyment of 
 life seemed to be intense, and never did I know 
 either of them to suffer from ennui. My conscious 
 knowledge of them commenced when I was about 
 two years old, they being from ten to twelve years 
 older. Mrs. Schreiber had been amongst my 
 mother’s earliest friends as Mrs. Harvey, and in 
 days when my mother had opportunities of doing 
 her seasonable services. And as there were three 
 special advantages which adorned my mother, and 
 which ranked in Mrs. Schreiber’s estimate as the 
 highest which earth could show- — viz. : j°, that she 
 spoke and wrote English with singular elegance ; 2°, 
 that her manners were eminently polished; and 3 0 , 
 that, even in that early stage of my mother’s life, a 
 certain tone of religiosity and even of ascetic devo- 
 tion, was already diffused as a luminous mist that 
 served to exalt the colouring of her morality. To 
 this extent Mrs. Schreiber approved of religion ; but 
 
 cleansing river. In the long process of development through 
 which cities pass, commerce and other functions of civilisation 
 come to usurp upon the earlier functions of such rivers, and 
 sometimes (through increasing efforts of luxurious refinement) 
 may come entirely to absorb them. But, in the infancy of 
 every great city, the chief function for which she looks to her 
 river is that of purification. Be thou my huge cloaca , says 
 infant Babylon to the Euphrates, says infant Nineveh to the 
 Tigris, says infant Rome to the Tiber. So far is that reproach 
 from having any special application to London. Smoke is not 
 unwholesome ; in many circumstances it is salubrious, as a 
 counter-agent to worse influences. Even sewage is chiefly 
 insalubrious from its moisture- and. not, in any degree yet 
 demonstrated, from its odour 
 
356 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 nothing of a sectarian cast could she have tolerated ; 
 nor had she anything of that nature to apprehend 
 from my mother. Viewing my mother, therefore, as 
 a pure model of an English matron, and feeling for 
 her, besides, a deeper sentiment of friendship and 
 affection than for anybody else on her visiting list, it 
 was natural enough that she should come with her 
 wards on an annual visit to “ The Farm ” (a pretty 
 rustic dwelling occupied by my father in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Manchester), and subsequently (when 
 that arose) to Greenhay . 1 As my father always 
 retained a town-house in Manchester (somewhere 
 in Fountain Street) — -and, though a plain, unpre- 
 tending man, was literary to the extent of having 
 written a book — all things were so arranged that there 
 was no possibility of any commercial mementoes ever 
 penetrating to the rural retreat of his family ; such 
 mementoes, I mean, as, by reviving painful recollec- 
 tions of that ancient Schreiber who was or ought to 
 
 1 “ Greenhay ” : — As this name might, under a false interpre- 
 tation, seem absurd as including incongruous elements, I ought, 
 in justification of my mother, who devised the name, to have 
 mentioned that hay was meant for the old English word (de- 
 rived from the old French word haie') indicating a rural enclosure. 
 Conventionally, a hay or haie was understood to mean a country- 
 house within a verdant ring-fence, narrower than a park : which 
 word park, in Scotch use, means any enclosure whatever, though 
 not twelve feet square ; but in English use (witness Captain 
 Burt’s wager about Culloden parks) means an enclosure measured 
 by square miles, and usually accounted to want its appropriate 
 furniture, unless tenanted by deer. By the way, it is a singular 
 illustration of a fact illustrated in one way or other every hour 
 — viz. , of the imperfect knowledge which England possesses of 
 England — that, within these last eight or nine months, I saw 
 in the Illustrated London News an article assuming that the 
 red deer was unknown in England. Whereas, if the writer 
 had ever been at the English lakes during the hunting season, 
 he might have seen it actually hunted over Martindale Forest 
 and its purlieus. Or, again, in Devonshire and Cornwall, over 
 Dartmoor, &c., and, I believe, in many other regions, though 
 naturally narrowing as civilisation widens. The writer is equally 
 wrong in supposing the prevailing deer of our parks to be the 
 roe deer, which are very little known. It is the fallow deer that 
 chiefly people our parks. Red deer were also found at Blen- 
 heim in Oxfordshire, when it was visited by Dr. Johnson, as may 
 be seen in “ Boswell.” 
 
LAXTON 
 
 357 
 
 be by this time extinct, would naturally be odious 
 and distressing. Here, therefore, liberated from all 
 jealousy of overlooking eyes, such as haunted persons 
 of their expectations at Brighton, Weymouth, Sid- 
 mouth, or Bath, Miss Smith and Miss Watson used 
 to surrender themselves without restraint to their glad 
 animal impulses of girlish gaiety, like the fawns of an- 
 telopes when suddenly transferred from tiger-haunted 
 thickets to the serene preserves of secluded rajahs. 
 On these visits it was that I, as a young pet whom 
 they carried about like a doll from my second to my 
 eighth or ninth year, learned to know them, so as to 
 take a fraternal interest in the succeeding periods of 
 their lives. Their fathers I certainly had not seen ; 
 nor had they, consciously. These two fathers must 
 both have died in India, before my inquiries had 
 begun to travel in that direction. But, as old acquaint- 
 ances of my mother’s, both had visited The Farm 
 before I was born ; and about General Smith, in par- 
 ticular, there had survived amongst the servants a 
 remembrance which seemed to us (that is, to them and 
 to myself) ludicrously awful, though at that time the 
 practice was common throughout our Indian posses- 
 sions. He had a Hindoo servant with him ; and 
 this servant every night stretched himself along the 
 “ sill,” or outer threshold of the door ; so that he 
 might have been trodden on by the General when 
 retiring to rest ; and from this it was but a moderate 
 step in advance to say that he was trodden on. Upon 
 which basis many other wonders were naturally reared. 
 Miss Smith’s father therefore furnished matter for a 
 not very amiable tradition ; but Miss Smith herself 
 was the sweetest- tempered and the loveliest of girls, 
 and the most thoroughly English in the style of her 
 beauty. Far different every way was Miss Watson. In 
 person she was a finished beauty of the very highest 
 pretensions, and generally recognised as such : that 
 is to say, her figure was fine and queenly; her features 
 were exquisitely cut, as regarded their forms and the 
 correspondences of their parts ; and usually by artists 
 her face was said to be Grecian. Perhaps the nostrils, 
 
35^ AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 mouth, and forehead might be so ; but nothing could 
 be less Grecian, or more eccentric in form and posi- 
 tion, than the eyes. They were placed obliquely, in 
 a way that I do not remember to have seen repeated 
 in any other face whatever. Large they were, and 
 particularly long, tending to an almond shape; equally 
 strange, in fact, as to colour, shape, and position : 
 but the remarkable position of these eyes would have 
 absorbed your gaze to the obliteration of all other 
 features or peculiarities in the face, were it not for one 
 other even more remarkable distinction affecting her 
 complexion : this lay in a suffusion that mantled upon 
 her cheeks, of a colour amounting almost to carmine. 
 Perhaps it might be no more than what Pindar meant 
 by the Trop^vpeov c£dL qowros, which Gray has falsely 1 
 translated as “the bloom of young desire, and purple 
 light of love.” It was not unpleasing, and gave a 
 lustre to the eyes, but it added eccentricity of the 
 face ; and by all strangers it was presumed to be an 
 artificial colour, resulting from some mode of applying 
 a preparation more brilliant than rouge. But to us 
 children, so constantly admitted to her toilet, it was 
 well known to be entirely natural. Generally speak- 
 ing, it is not likely to assist the effect of a young 
 woman’s charms, that she presents any such variety 
 
 1 Falsely , because i ropcpbpeos rarely, perhaps, means in the 
 Greek use what we mean properly by purple and could not mean 
 it in the Pindaric passage ; much oftener it denotes some shade 
 of crimson , or else of puniceus , or blood -red. Gibbon was never 
 more mistaken than when he argued that all the endless disput- 
 ing about the purpureus of the ancients might have been evaded 
 by attending to its Greek designation — viz., porphyry -coloured : 
 since, said he, porphyry is always of the same colour. Not at 
 all. Porphyry, I have heard, runs through as large a gamut of 
 hues as marble : but if this should be an exaggeration, at all 
 events porphyry is far from being so monochromatic as Gibbon’s 
 argument would presume. The truth is, colours were as loosely 
 and latitudinarially distinguished by the Greeks and Romans as 
 degrees of affinity and consanguinity are everywhere. My son- 
 in-law , says a woman, and she means my step-son. My cousin , 
 she says, and she means any mode of relationship in the wide, 
 wide world. Nos neveux , says a French writer, and means — not 
 our nephews, but our grandchildren , or more generally our 
 descendants . 
 
LAXTON 
 
 359 
 
 in her style of countenance as could naturally be 
 called odd. But Miss Watson, by the somewhat 
 scenical effect resulting from the harmony between 
 her fine figure and her fine countenance, triumphed 
 over all that might else have been thought a blemish : 
 and when she was presented at court on occasion of 
 her marriage, the King himself pronounced her, to 
 friends of Mrs. Schreiber, the most splendid of all 
 the brides that had yet given lustre to his reign. In 
 such cases the judgments of rustic undisciplined tastes, 
 though marked by narrowness, and often by involun- 
 tary obedience to vulgar ideals (which, for instance, 
 makes them insensible to all the deep sanctities of 
 beauty that sleep amongst the Italian varieties of the 
 Madonna face), is not without its appropriate truth. 
 Servants and rustics all thrilled in sympathy with the 
 sweet English loveliness of Miss Smith : but all alike 
 acknowledged with spontaneous looks of homage the 
 fine presence and finished beauty of Miss Watson. 
 Naturally, from the splendour with which they were 
 surrounded, and the notoriety of their great expecta- 
 tions — so much to dazzle in one direction, and, on 
 the other hand, something for as tender a sentiment 
 as pity, in the fact of both from so early an age having 
 been united in the calamity of orphanage — go where 
 they might, these young women drew all eyes upon 
 themselves ; and, from the audible comparisons some- 
 times made between them, it might be imagined that, 
 if ever there were a situation fitted to nourish rivalship 
 and jealousy between two girls, here it might be anti- 
 cipated in daily operation. But, left to themselves, 
 the yearnings of the female heart tend naturally to- 
 wards what is noble ; and, unless where it has been 
 tried too heavily by artificial incitements applied to 
 the pride, I do not believe that women generally are 
 disposed to any unfriendly jealousy of each other. 
 Why should they ? Almost every woman, when 
 strengthened in those charms which nature has given 
 to her by such as she can in many ways give to her- 
 self, must feel that she has her own separate domain 
 of empire, unaffected by the most sovereign beauty 
 
360 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 upon earth. Every man that ever existed has pro- 
 bably his own peculiar talent (if only it were de- 
 tected), in which he would be found to excel all the 
 rest of his race. And in every female face possessing 
 any attractions at all, no matter what may be her 
 general inferiority, there lurks some secret peculiarity 
 of expression — some mesmeric individuality — which 
 is valid within its narrower range — limited superiority 
 over the supreme of beauties within a narrow circle. 
 It is unintelligibly, but mesmerically potent, this secret 
 fascination attached to features oftentimes that are 
 absolutely plain ; and, as one of many cases within 
 my own range of positive experience, I remember, in 
 confirmation, at this moment, that in a clergyman’s 
 family, counting three daughters, all on a visit to my 
 
 mother, the youngest, Miss F P , who was 
 
 strikingly and memorably plain, never walked out on 
 the Clifton Downs unattended, but she was followed 
 home by a crowd of admiring men, anxious to learn 
 her rank and abode ; whilst the middle sister, emi- 
 nently handsome, levied no such visible tribute of 
 admiration on the public. I mention this fact — one 
 of a thousand similar facts — simply by way of re- 
 minding the reader of what he must himself have 
 often witnessed, viz., that no woman is condemned 
 by nature to any ignoble necessity of repining against 
 the power of other women ; her own may be far more 
 confined, but within its own circle may possibly, 
 measured against that of the haughtiest beauty, be 
 the profounder. However, waiving the question thus 
 generally put here, and as it specially affected these 
 two young women that virtually were sisters, any 
 question of precedency in power or display, when 
 brought into collision with sisterly affection, had not 
 a momentary existence. Each had soon redundant 
 proofs of her own power to attract suitors without 
 end ; and, for the more or the less, that was felt to 
 be a matter of accident. Never on this earth, I am 
 satisfied, did that pure sisterly love breathe a more 
 steady inspiration than now into the hearts and 
 through the acts of these two generous girls : neither 
 
LAXTON 
 
 361 
 
 was there any sacrifice which either would have re- 
 fused to or for the other. The period, however, was 
 now rapidly shortening during which they would have 
 any opportunity for testifying this reciprocal love. 
 Suitors were flocking around them, as rank as cormor- 
 ants in a storm. The grim old Chancellor (one, if 
 not both, of the young ladies having been a ward in 
 Chancery) had all his legal jealousies awakened on 
 their behalf. The worshipful order of adventurers 
 and fortune-hunters , at that time chiefly imported 
 from Ireland, as in times more recent from Germany 
 and other moustachoed parts of the Continent, could 
 not live under the raking fire of Mrs. Schreiber, on 
 the one side, with her female tact and her knowledge 
 of life, and of the Chancellor, with his huge discre- 
 tional power, on the other. That particular Chan- 
 cellor whom the chronology of the case brought 
 chiefly into connection with Miss Watson’s interests 
 was (if my childish remembrances do not greatly mis- 
 lead me) the iracund Lord Thurlow. Lovers and 
 wooers this grim lawyer regarded as the most imper- 
 tinent order of animals in universal zoology ; and of 
 these, in Miss Watson’s case, he had a whole menagerie 
 to tend. Penelope, according to some schoolboy 
 remembrance of mine, had 118 suitors. These young 
 ladies had almost as many. Heavens ! what a crew 
 of Comus to follow or to lead. And what a suitable 
 person was this truculent old lord on the woolsack 
 to enact the part of shepherd — Corydon, suppose, or 
 Alphesiboeus — to this goodly set of lambs ! How he 
 must have admired the hero of the Odyssey, who 
 in one way or other accounted for all the wooers 
 that “sorned” upon his house, and had a receipt 
 for their bodies from the gravedigger of Ithaca ! But 
 even this wily descendant of Sisyphus would have 
 found it no such easy matter to deal with the Eng- 
 lish suitors, who were not the feeble voluptuaries of 
 the Ionian Islands, that suffered themselves to be 
 butchered as unresistingly as sheep in the shambles, 
 actually standing at one end of the banqueting-room 
 to be shot at with bows and arrows, not having pluck 
 
 M 2 
 
362 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 enough to make a rush, but were game men; all 
 young, strong, rich, and in most cases technically 
 “ noble ” ; all, besides, contending for one or other of 
 two prizes a thousand times better fitted to inspire 
 romantic ardour than the poor withered Penelope. 
 
 One, by the way, amongst these suitors (I speak 
 of those who addressed Miss Watson) merits a sepa- 
 rate commemoration, as having drawn from Sheridan 
 his very happiest impromptu — and an impromptu 
 that was really such — (the rarest of all things from 
 Sheridan). This was Lord Belgrave, eldest son of 
 Lord Grosvenor, then an earl, but at some period, 
 long subsequent to this, raised to the marquisate of 
 Westminster — a title naturally suggesting in itself a 
 connection with the vast Grosvenor property, sweep- 
 ing across the whole area of that most aristocratic 
 region in the metropolis now called Belgravia , which 
 was then a name unknown ; and this Hesperian region 
 had as yet no architectural value, and consequently 
 no ground-rent value, simply because the world of 
 fashion and distinction had as yet not expanded 
 itself in that direction. In those days the territorial 
 importance of this great house rested exclusively upon 
 its connection with the county of Chester. In this 
 connection it was that the young Viscount Belgrave 
 had been introduced, by his family interest, into the 
 House of Commons ; he had delivered his maiden 
 speech with some effect ; and had been heard favour- 
 ably on various subsequent occasions ; on one of 
 which it was that, to the extreme surprise of the 
 House, he terminated his speech with a passage 
 from Demosthenes — not presented in English, but in 
 sounding Attic Greek. Latin is a privileged dialect 
 in Parliament. But Greek ! It would not have been 
 at all more startling to the usages of the House, had 
 his lordship quoted Persic or Telinga. Still, though 
 felt as something verging on the ridiculous, there 
 wa,s an indulgent feeling to a young man fresh from 
 academic bowers, which would not have protected a 
 mature man of the world. Everybody bit his lips, 
 and as yet did not laugh. But the final issue stood 
 
LAXTON 
 
 363 
 
 on the edge of a razor. A gas, an inflammable 
 atmosphere, was trembling sympathetically through 
 the whole excited audience ; all depended on a 
 match being applied to this gas whilst yet in the very 
 act of escaping. Deepest silence still prevailed ; and 
 had any commonplace member risen to address the 
 House in an ordinary business key, all would have 
 blown over. Unhappily for Lord Belgrave, in that 
 critical moment up rose the one solitary man— to 
 wit, Sheridan — whose look, whose voice, whose tradi- 
 tional character, formed a prologue to what was 
 coming. Here let the reader understand that, 
 throughout the Iliad, all speeches or commands, 
 questions or answers, are introduced by Homer under 
 some peculiar formula. For instance, replies are 
 usually introduced thus : — 
 
 44 But him answering thus address'd the sovereign Aga- 
 memnon ” ; 
 
 or, in sonorous Greek : — 
 
 “Ton d J apameibomenos prosephe kreion Agamemnon ” ; 
 
 or, again, according to the circumstances : — 
 
 6 4 But him sternly surveying saluted the swift-footed Achilles”; 
 
 44 Ton d’ ar’, upodra idon, prosephe podas okus Achilleus.” 
 
 This being premised, and that every one of the audi- 
 ence, though pretending to no Greek, yet from his 
 schoolboy remembrances was as well acquainted with 
 these formula as with the scriptural formula of Verily , 
 verily , I say unto you , &c., Sheridan, without needing 
 to break its force by explanations, solemnly opened 
 thus : — 
 
 44 Ton cf apameibomenos prosephe Sheridanios her os. ” 
 
 Simply to have commenced his answer in Greek 
 would have sufficiently met the comic expectation 
 then thrilling the House ; but, when it happened 
 that this Greek (so suitable to the occasion) was also 
 the one sole morsel of Greek that everybody in that 
 assembly understood, the effect, as may be supposed, 
 
364 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 was overwhelming, and wrapped the whole House in 
 what might be called a fiery explosion of laughter. 
 
 Meantime, as prizes in the matrimonial lottery, and 
 prizes in all senses, both young ladies were soon 
 carried off. Miss Smith, whose expectations I never 
 happened to hear estimated, married a great West 
 India proprietor ; and Miss Watson, who (according 
 to the popular report) would succeed to six thousand 
 a year on her twenty-first birthday, married Lord 
 Carbery. Miss Watson inherited also from her father 
 something which would not generally be rated very 
 highly — viz., a Chancery lawsuit, with the East India 
 Company for defendant. However, if the Company 
 is a potent antagonist, thus far it is an eligible one, 
 that, in the event of losing the suit, the Honourable 
 Company is solvent ; and such an event, after some 
 nine or ten years’ delay, did really befall the Com- 
 pany. The question at issue respected some docks 
 which Colonel Watson had built for the Company in 
 some Indian port. And in the end this lawsuit, 
 though so many years doubtful in its issue, proved 
 very valuable to Miss Watson ; I have heard (but 
 cannot vouch for it) not less valuable than that 
 large part of her property which had been paid over 
 without demur upon her twenty-first birthday. Both 
 young ladies married happily ; but in marriage they 
 found their separation, and in that separation a shock 
 to their daily comfort which was never replaced to 
 either. As to Miss Smith’s husband, I did not know 
 him ; but Lord Carbery was every way an estimable 
 man ; in some things worthy of admiration ; and his 
 wife never ceased to esteem and admire him. But 
 she yearned for the society of her early friend ; and, 
 this being placed out of her reach by the accidents 
 of life, she fell early into a sort of disgust with her 
 own advantages of wealth and station, which, promis- 
 ing so much, were found able to perform nothing 
 at all in this first and last desire of her heart. A 
 portrait of her friend hung in the drawing-room ; but 
 Lady Carbery did not willingly answer the questions 
 that were sometimes prompted by its extraordinary 
 
LAXTON 
 
 3 6 5 
 
 loveliness. There are women to whom a female 
 friendship is indispensable, and cannot be supplied 
 by any companion of the other sex. That blessing, 
 therefore, of her golden youth turned eventually into 
 a curse for her after-life ; for I believe that, through 
 one accident or another, they never met again after 
 they became married women. To me, as one of 
 those who had known and loved Miss Smith, Lady 
 Carbery always turned the more sunny side of her 
 nature ; but to the world generally she presented a 
 chilling and somewhat severe aspect — as to a vast 
 illusion that rested upon pillars of mockery and 
 frauds. Honours, beauty of the first order, wealth, 
 and the power which follows wealth as its shadow — 
 what could these do ? what had they done ? In pro- 
 portion as they had settled heavily upon herself, she 
 had found them to entail a load of responsibility ; 
 and those claims upon her she had laboured to fulfil 
 conscientiously ; but else they had only precipitated 
 the rupture of such ties as had given sweetness to 
 her life. 
 
 Section III. — Female Students in Theology 
 
 From the first, therefore, I had been aware, on this 
 visit to Laxton, that Lady Carbery had changed, and 
 was changing. She had become religious, so much 
 I knew from my sister’s letters. And, in fact, this 
 change had been due to her intercourse with my 
 mother. But, in reality, her premature disgust with 
 the world would at any rate have made her such ; and, 
 had any mode of monastic life existed for Protestants, 
 I believe that she would before this have entered it, 
 supposing Lord Carbery to have consented. People 
 generally would have stated the case most erroneously ; 
 they would have said that she was sinking into gloom 
 under religious influences ; whereas the very contrary 
 was the truth — viz., that, having sunk into gloomy 
 discontent with life, and its miserable performances 
 as contrasted with its promises, she sought relief and 
 support to her wounded feelings from religion. 
 
366 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 But the change brought with it a difficult trial to 
 myself. She recoiled, by natural temperament and 
 by refinement of taste, from all modes of religious 
 enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a large word, and in 
 many cases I could not go along with her ; but canting 
 of all descriptions was odious to both of us alike. 
 To cultivate religious knowledge in an intellectual way, 
 she very well understood that she must study divinity. 
 And she relied upon me for assisting her. Not that 
 she made the mistake of ascribing to me any know- 
 ledge on that subject ; but I could learn ; and what- 
 soever I had learned, she knew, by experience, that I 
 could make abundantly plain to her understanding. 
 Wherever I did not understand, I was far too sincere 
 to dissemble that fact. Where I did understand, I 
 could enable her to understand. 
 
 On the subject of theology it was not easy indeed 
 for anybody, man or boy, to be more ignorant than 
 myself. My studies in that field had been none at 
 all. Nor was this any subject for wonder, or (con- 
 sidering my age) for blame. In reality, to make 
 theology into a captivating study for the young, it 
 must be translated into controversial theology. And 
 in what way could such a polemic interest be evoked 
 except through political partisanship? But such 
 partisanship connects itself naturally with the irri- 
 tability of sectarianism, and but little with the 
 majestic repose of a church such as the Romish 
 or the Anglican, founded upon the broad basis of 
 national majorities, and sheltered from danger, or the 
 sense of danger, by staR Protection. Dissenters 
 stand upon another footing. The Dissenter from 
 the national church, whether in England or in 
 France, is reminded by his own distinguishing 
 religious opinions of the historic struggles through 
 which those opinions have travelled. The doctrines 
 which give to his own sect a peculiar denomination, 
 are also those which record its honourable political 
 conflicts ; so that his own connection, through his 
 religious brotherhood, with the civil history of his 
 country, furnishes a standing motive of pride for 
 
LAXTON 
 
 367 
 
 some acquaintance more or less with divinity ; since 
 it is by deviating painfully, conscientiously, and at some 
 periods dangerously, from the established divinity, 
 that his fathers have achieved their station in the 
 great drama of the national evolution. 
 
 But, whilst I was ignorant of theology, as a direct 
 and separate branch of study, the points are so many 
 at which theology inosculates with philosophy, and 
 with endless casual and random suggestions of the 
 self-prompted reason, that inevitably from that same 
 moment in which I began to find a motive for 
 directing my thoughts to this new subject, I wanted 
 not something to say that might have perplexed an 
 antagonist, or (in default of such a vicious associate) 
 that might have amused a friend, more especially a 
 friend so predisposed to a high estimate of myself as 
 Lady Carbery. Sometimes I did more than amuse 
 her : I startled her, and I even startled myself, with 
 distinctions that to this hour strike me as profoundly 
 just, and as undeniably novel. Two out of many I 
 will here repeat ; and with the more confidence, that 
 in these two I can be sure of repeating the exact 
 thoughts ; whereas, in very many other cases, it 
 would not be so certain that they might not have 
 been insensibly modified by cross-lights or disturbing 
 shadows from intervening speculations. 
 
 1. Lady Carbery one day told me that she could 
 not see any reasonable ground for what is said of 
 Christ, and elsewhere of John the Baptist, that he 
 opened his mission by preaching “ repentance. 5 ’ 
 Why “repentance”? Why then, more than at any 
 other time ? Her reason for addressing this remark 
 to me was, that she fancied there might be some 
 error in the translation of the Greek expression. I 
 replied that, in my opinion, there was ; and that I 
 had myself always been irritated by the entire irre- 
 levance of the English word, and by something very 
 like cant, on which the whole burden of the passage 
 is thrown. How was it any natural preparation for a 
 vast spiritual revolution, that men should first of all 
 acknowledge any special duty of repentance ? The 
 
368 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 repentance, if any movement of that nature could 
 intelligibly be supposed called for, should more 
 naturally follow this great revolution — which, as yet, 
 both in its principle and in its purpose, was altogether 
 mysterious — than herald it, or ground it. In my 
 opinion, the Greek word metanoia concealed a most 
 profound meaning — a meaning of prodigious compass 
 — which bore no allusion to any ideas whatever of 
 repentance. The meta carried with it an emphatic 
 expression of its original idea — the idea of transfer, of 
 translation, of transformation ; or if we prefer a 
 Grecian to a Roman apparelling, the idea of a 
 metamorphosis . And this idea, to what is it applied ? 
 Upon what object is this idea, of spiritual transfigu- 
 ration made to bear? Simply upon the noetic or 
 intellectual faculty — the faculty of shaping and con- 
 ceiving things under their true relations. The holy 
 herald of Christ, and Christ himself the finisher of 
 prophecy, made proclamation alike of the same 
 mysterious summons, as a baptism or rite of initia- 
 tion— viz., MeravoetTe. Henceforth transfigure your 
 theory of moral truth ; the old theory is laid aside 
 as infinitely insufficient ; a new and spiritual revela- 
 tion is established. Metanoeite — contemplate moral 
 truth as radiating from a new centre : apprehend it 
 under transfigured relations. 
 
 John the Baptist, like other earlier prophets, de- 
 livered a message which, probably enough, he did 
 not himself more than dimly understand, and never 
 in its full compass of meaning. Christ occupied 
 another station. Not only was he the original In- 
 terpreter, but he was himself the Author— Founder, 
 at once, and Finisher — of that great transfiguration, 
 applied to ethics, which he and the Baptist alike 
 announced as forming the code for the new and 
 revolutionary era now opening its endless career. 
 The human race was summoned to bring a trans- 
 figuring sense and spirit of interpretation {metanoia) 
 to a transfigured ethics — an altered organ to an 
 altered object. This is by far the grandest miracle 
 recorded in Scripture. No exhibition of blank 
 
LAXTON 
 
 369 
 
 power — not the arresting of the earth’s motion — not 
 the calling back of the dead unto life — can approach 
 in grandeur to this miracle which we all daily behold : 
 viz., the inconceivable mystery of having written and 
 sculptured upon the tablets of man’s heart a new code 
 of moral distinctions, all modifying — many reversing 
 — the old ones. What would have been thought of 
 any prophet, if he should have promised to trans- 
 figure the celestial mechanics ; if he had said, I will 
 create a new pole-star, a new zodiac, and new laws of 
 gravitation ; briefly, I will make new earth and new 
 heavens ? And yet a thousand times more awful it 
 was to undertake the writing of new laws upon the 
 spiritual conscience of man. Metanoeite (was the cry 
 from the wilderness), wheel into a new centre your 
 moral system ; geocentric has that system been up to 
 this hour — that is, having earth and the earthly for 
 its starting-point ; henceforward make it heliocentric 
 (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its prin- 
 ciple of motion). 
 
 2. A second remark of mine was perhaps not more 
 important, but it was, on the whole, better calculated 
 to startle the prevailing preconceptions : for, as to the 
 new system of morals introduced by Christ, gener- 
 ally speaking, it is too dimly apprehended in its 
 great differential features to allow of its miraculous 
 character being adequately appreciated : one flagrant 
 illustration of which is furnished by our experience in 
 Affghanistan, where some officers, wishing to impress 
 Akhbar Khan with the beauty of Christianity, very 
 judiciously repeated to him the Lord’s Prayer and the 
 Sermon on the Mount, by both of which the Khan 
 was profoundly affected, and often recurred to them • 
 but others, under the notion of conveying to him 
 a more comprehensive view of the scriptural ethics, 
 repeated to him the Ten Commandments ; although, 
 with the sole exception, of the two first, forbidding 
 idolatry and polytheism, there is no word in these 
 which could have displeased or surprised a Pagan, 
 and therefore nothing characteristic of Christianity. 
 Meantime my second remark was substantially this 
 
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 37 ° 
 
 which follows : What is a religion? To Christians it 
 means, over and above a mode of worship, a dogmatic 
 (that is, a doctrinal) system ; a great body of doctrinal 
 truths, moral and spiritual. But to the ancients 
 (to the Greeks and Romans, for instance) it meant 
 nothing of the kind. A religion was simply a cultus , 
 a OprjorKeia, a mode of ritual worship, in which there 
 might be two differences, viz. i. As to the par- 
 ticular deity who furnished the motive to the worship ; 
 2. As to the ceremonial, or mode of conducting the 
 worship. But in no case was there so much as a 
 pretence of communicating any religious truths, far 
 less any moral truths. The obstinate error rooted in 
 modern minds is, that, doubtless, the moral instruction 
 was bad, as being heathen ; but that still it was as 
 good as heathen opportunities allowed it to be. No 
 mistake can be greater. Moral instruction had no 
 existence even in the plan or intention of the religious 
 service. The Pagan priest or flamen never dreamed 
 of any function like that of teaching as in any way 
 connected with his office. He no more undertook to 
 teach morals than to teach geography or cookery. 
 He taught nothing. What he undertook was simply 
 to do , viz., to present authoritatively (that is, authorised 
 and supported by some civil community, Corinth, or 
 Athens, or Rome, which he represented) the homage 
 and gratitude of that community to the particular 
 deity adored. As to morals or just opinions upon 
 the relations to man of the several divinities, all 
 this was resigned to the teaching of nature ; and for 
 any polemic functions the teaching was resigned to 
 the professional philosophers — academic, peripatetic, 
 stoic, &c. By religion it was utterly ignored. 
 
 The reader must do me the favour to fix his atten- 
 tion upon the real question at issue. What I say — 
 what then I said to Lady Carbery — is this: that, by 
 failing to notice as a differential feature of Christianity 
 this involution of a doctrinal part, we elevate Pagan- 
 ism to a dignity which it never dreamed of. Thus, 
 for instance, in the Eleusinian mysteries, what was 
 the main business transacted? I, for my part, in 
 
jlaXTON 371 
 
 harmony with my universal theory on this subject — 
 viz., that there could be no doctrinal truth delivered 
 in a Pagan religion — have always maintained that the 
 only end and purpose of the mysteries was a more 
 solemn and impressive worship of a particular goddess. 
 Warburton, on the other hand, would insist upon it 
 that some great affirmative doctrines, interesting to 
 man, such as the immortality of the soul, a futurity of 
 retribution, &c., might be here commemorated. And 
 now, nearly a hundred years after Warburton, what 
 is the opinion of scholars upon this point? Two of 
 the latest and profoundest I will cite : — 1. Lobeck, in 
 his “ Aglaophamus,” expressly repels all such notions ; 
 2. Otfried Mueller, in the 12th chapter, 24th section, 
 of his “ Introduction to a System of Mythology / 9 
 says : “ I have here gone on the assumption which I 
 consider unavoidable, that there was no regular in- 
 struction, no dogmatical communication, connected 
 with the Grecian worship in general. There could be 
 nothing of the kind introduced into the public service 
 from the way in which it was conducted, for the 
 priest did not address the people at all” These 
 opinions, which exactly tallied with my own assertion 
 to Lady Carbery, that all religion amongst the Pagans 
 resolved itself into a mere system of ceremonial 
 worship, a pompous and elaborate cultus , were not 
 brought forward in Germany until about ten or 
 twelve years ago ; whereas my doctrine was expressly 
 insisted on in 1800 — i.e., forty years earlier than any 
 of these German writers had turned their thoughts in 
 that direction. 
 
 Had I then really all that originality on this subject 
 which for many years I secretly claimed ? Substanti- 
 ally I had, because this great distinction between the 
 modern (or Christian) idea of “a religion/ 7 and the 
 ancient (or Pagan) idea of “ a religion/’ I had no- 
 where openly seen expressed in words. To myself 
 exclusively I was indebted for it. Nevertheless, it 
 is undeniable that this conception must have been 
 long ago germinating in the world, and perhaps 
 bearing fruit. This is past Ml denial, since, about 
 
372 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 thirteen or fourteen years ago, I read in some 
 journal (a French journal, I think) this statement, 
 viz,, that some Oriental people — Turks, according 
 to my present impression, but it might have been 
 Arabs — make an old traditional distinction (so said 
 the French journal) between what they call “religions 
 of the book ” and all other religions. The religions 
 of the book, according to them, are three, all equally 
 founded upon written and producible documents — 
 viz., first, the Judaic system, resting upon the Penta- 
 teuch, or more truly, I should imagine, upon the Law 
 and the Prophets ; secondly, the Christian system, 
 resting upon the Old and New Testaments ; thirdly, 
 the Mahometan system, resting confessedly upon the 
 Koran. The very meaning, therefore, of styling these 
 systems, by way of honourable distinction, religions 
 of the book , is, not that accidentally they had written 
 vouchers for their creed, whereas the others had 
 only oral vouchers, but that they severally offer to 
 men's acceptance a large body of philosophic truth, 
 such as requires and presupposes a book. Whereas 
 the various religions contradistinguished from these 
 three — viz., the whole body of Pagan idolatries — are 
 mere forms of adoration addressed to many different 
 divinities ; and the brief reason why they are essenti- 
 ally opposed to religions of the book is, not that they 
 have not, but logically that they cannot have, books 
 or documents, inasmuch as they have no truths to 
 deliver. They do not profess to teach anything 
 whatsoever. What they profess, as their justifying 
 distinction, is, to adore a certain deity, or a cer- 
 tain collective Pantheon, according to certain old 
 authorised forms — authorised, that is -to say, by 
 fixed, ancient, and oftentimes local traditions. 
 
 What was the great practical inference from the 
 new distinction which I offered ? It was this : that 
 Christianity (which included Judaism as its own 
 germinal principle, and Islamism as its own adap- 
 tation to a barbarous and imperfect civilisation) 
 carried along with itself its own authentication ; 
 since, whilst other religions introduced men simply 
 
LAXTON 
 
 373 
 
 to ceremonies and usages, which could furnish no 
 aliment or material for their intellect, Christianity 
 provided an eternal palcestra or place of' exercise for 
 the human understanding vitalised by human affec- 
 tions : for every problem whatever, interesting to the 
 human intellect, provided only that it bears a moral 
 aspect, immediately passes into the field of religious 
 speculation. Religion had thus become the great 
 organ of human culture. Lady Carbery advanced 
 half-way to meet me in these new views, finding my 
 credentials as a theologian in my earnestness and 
 my sincerity. She herself was painfully and sorrow- 
 fully in earnest. She had come, at this early age of 
 seven or eight and twenty, to the most bitter sense 
 of hollowness, and (in a philosophic sense) of 
 treachery as underlying all things that stood round 
 her; and she sought escape, if escape there were, 
 through religion. Religion was to be sought in the 
 Bible. But was the Bible intelligible at the first 
 glance ? Far from it. Search the Scriptures, was 
 the cry in Protestant lands amongst all people, 
 however much at war with each other. But I often 
 told her that this was a vain pretence without some 
 knowledge of Greek. Or perhaps not always and 
 absolutely a pretence ; because, undoubtedly, it is 
 true that oftentimes mere ignorant simplicity may, 
 by bringing into direct collision passages that are 
 reciprocally illustrative, restrain an error or illuminate 
 a truth. And a reason, which I have since given 
 in print (a reason additional to Bentley’s), for 
 neglecting the 30,000 various readings collected by 
 the diligence of the New Testament collators, applied 
 also to this case — viz., that, first, the transcendent 
 nature, and, secondly, the recurrent nature, of scriptural 
 truths cause them to surmount verbal disturbances. 
 A doctrine, for instance, which is sowed broadcast 
 over the Scriptures, and recurs, on an average, three 
 times in every chapter, cannot be affected by the 
 casual inaccuracy of a phrase, since the phrase is 
 continually varied. And, therefore, I would not 
 deny the possibility of an effectual searching by very 
 
374 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 unlearned persons. Our authorised translators of 
 the Bible in the Shaksperian age were not in any 
 exquisite sense learned men ; they were very able 
 men, and in a better sense able than if they had 
 been philologically profound scholars, which at that 
 time, from the imperfect culture of philology, they 
 could not easily have been ; men they were whom 
 religious feeling guided correctly in choosing their 
 expressions, and with whom the state of the language 
 in some respects co-operated, by furnishing a diction 
 more homely, fervent, and pathetic, than would now 
 be available. For their apostolic functions, English 
 was the language most in demand. But in polemic 
 or controversial cases Greek is indispensable. And 
 of this Lady Carbery was sufficiently convinced by 
 my own demur on the word metanoia. If I were 
 right, how profoundly wrong must those have been 
 whom my new explanations superseded. She re- 
 solved, therefore, immediately on my suggesting it, 
 that she would learn Greek ; or, at least, that limited 
 form of Greek which was required for the New 
 Testament. In the language of Terence, dictum 
 factum — no sooner said than done. On the very 
 next morning we all rode in to Stamford, our nearest 
 town for such a purpose, and astounded the book- 
 seller’s apprentice by ordering four copies of the 
 Clarendon Press Greek Testament, three copies of 
 Parkhurst’s Greek and English Lexicon, and three 
 copies of some grammar, but what I have now 
 forgotten. The books were to come down by the 
 mail-coach without delay. Consequently, we were 
 soon at work. Lady Massey and my sister, not 
 being sustained by the same interest as Lady 
 Carbery, eventually relaxed in their attention. But 
 Lady Carbery was quite in earnest, and very soon 
 became expert in the original language of the New 
 Testament. 
 
 I wished much that she should have gone on to 
 the study of Herodotus. And I described to her the 
 situation of the vivacious and mercurial Athenian, in 
 the early period of Pericles, as repeating in its main 
 
LAXTON 
 
 375 
 
 features, for the great advantage of that Grecian 
 Froissart, the situation of Adam during his earliest 
 hours in Paradise, himself being the describer to the 
 affable archangel. The same genial climate there 
 was ; the same luxuriation of nature in her early prime ; 
 the same ignorance of his own origin in the tenant of 
 this lovely scenery; and the same eager desire to 
 learn it . 1 The very truth, and mere facts of history, 
 reaching Herodotus through such a haze of remote 
 abstraction, and suffering a sort of refraction at each 
 translation from atmosphere to atmosphere, whilst con- 
 tinually the uninteresting parts dropped away as the 
 whole moved onwards, unavoidably assumed the at- 
 tractions of romance. And thus it has happened, that 
 the air of marvellousness, which seems connected with 
 the choice and preferences of Herodotus, is in reality 
 the natural gift of his position. Culling from a field of 
 many nations and many generations, reasonably he 
 preferred such narratives as, though possible enough, 
 wore the colouring of romance. Without any violation 
 of the truth, the more extent of his field as to space 
 and time gave him great advantages for the wild and 
 the marvellous. Meantime this purpose of ours with 
 regard to Herodotus was defeated. Whilst we were 
 making preparations for it, suddenly one morning 
 from his Limerick estate of Carass returned Lord 
 Carbery. And, by accident, his welcome was a 
 
 1 “ About me round I saw 
 Hill, dale, and shady woods, and sunny plains, 
 
 And liquid lapse of murmuring streams ; by these 
 Creatures that lived and moved, and walk’d or flew ; 
 Birds on the branches warbling ; all things smiled ; 
 
 With fragrance, and with joy my heart o’erflow’d. 
 
 Myself I then perused, and limb by limb 
 Survey’d, and sometimes went, and sometimes ran 
 With supple joints, as lively vigour led ; 
 
 But who I was or where , or from what cause , 
 
 Knew not.” 
 
 — Paradise Lost , Book viii. 
 
 The who , the where (in any extended sense, i.e ., as regarded 
 the external relations of his own country), and the from what 
 cause — all these were precisely what the Grecian did not know, 
 and first learned from Herodotus. 
 
376 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 rough one ; for, happening to find Lady Carbery in 
 the breakfast-room, and naturally throwing his arm 
 about her neck to kiss her, “ Ruffian,” a monster 
 of a Newfoundland dog, singularly beautiful in his 
 colouring, and almost as powerful as a leopard, flew 
 at him vindictively as at a stranger committing an 
 assault, and his mistress had great difficulty in calling 
 him off. Lord Carbery smiled a little at our Greek 
 studies ; and, in turn, made us smile, who knew the 
 original object of these studies, when he suggested 
 mildly that three or four books of the Iliad would 
 have been as easily mastered, and might have more 
 fully rewarded our trouble. I contented myself with 
 replying (for I knew how little Lady Carbery would 
 have liked to plead the religious motive to her hus- 
 band) that Parkhurst (and there was at that time 
 no other Greek -English Lexicon) would not have 
 been available for Homer ; neither, it is true, would 
 he have been more available for Herodotus. But, 
 considering the simplicity and uniformity of style in 
 both these authors, I had formed a plan (not very 
 hard of execution) for interleaving Parkhurst with 
 such additional words as might have been easily 
 mustered from the special dictionaries (Graeco-Latin) 
 dedicated separately to the service of the historian 
 and of the poet. I do not believe that more than 
 1500 extra words would have been required; and 
 these, entered at the rate of twenty per hour, would 
 have occupied only ten days, for seven and a half 
 hours each. However, from one cause or other, this 
 plan was never brought to bear. The preliminary 
 labour upon the lexicon always enforced a delay ; and 
 any delay, in such case, makes an opening for the 
 irruption of a thousand unforeseen hindrances, that 
 finally cause the whole plan to droop insensibly. 
 The time came at last for leaving Laxton, and I did 
 not see Lady Carbery again for nearly an entire 
 year. 
 
 In passing through the park-gates of Laxton, on 
 my departure northward, powerfully, and as if “ with 
 the might of waters,” my mind turned round to 
 
LAXTON 
 
 377 
 
 contemplate that strange enlargement of my experience 
 which had happened to me within the last three 
 months. I had seen, and become familiarly acquainted 
 with, a young man, who had in a manner died to 
 every object around him, had died an intellectual 
 death, and suddenly had been called back to life and 
 real happiness — had been, in effect, raised from the 
 dead — by the accident of meeting a congenial female 
 companion. But, secondly, that very lady from whose 
 lips I first heard this remarkable case of blight and 
 restoration, had herself passed through an equal 
 though not a similar blight, and was now seeking 
 earnestly, though with what success I could never 
 estimate, some similar restoration to some new mode 
 of hopeful existence, through intercourse with reli- 
 gious philosophy. What vast revolutions (vast for the 
 individual) within how narrow a circle ! What blind- 
 ness to approaching catastrophes, in the midst of 
 what nearness to the light ! And for myself, whom 
 accident had made the silent observer of these 
 changes, was it not likely enough that I also was 
 rushing forward to court and woo some frantic mode 
 of evading an endurance that by patience might have 
 been borne, or by thoughtfulness might have been 
 disarmed ? Misgivingly I went forwards, feeling for 
 ever that, through clouds of thick darkness, I was 
 continually nearing a danger, or was myself perhaps 
 wilfully provoking a trial, before which my consti- 
 tutional despondency would cause me to lie down 
 without a struggle^ 
 
FIFTEENTH CHAPTER 
 
 THE PRIORY 
 
 To teach is to learn : according to an old experience, 
 it is the very best mode of learning — the surest, and 
 the shortest. And hence, perhaps, it may be, that in 
 the middle ages by the monkish word scholaris was 
 meant indifferently he that learned and he that 
 taught. Never in any equal number of months had 
 my understanding so much expanded as during this 
 visit to Laxton. The incessant demand made upon 
 me by Lady Carbery for solutions of the many diffi- 
 culties besetting the study of divinity and the Greek 
 Testament, or for such approximations to solutions as 
 my resources would furnish, forced me into a preter- 
 natural tension of all the faculties applicable to that 
 purpose. Lady Carbery insisted upon calling me 
 her “ Admirable Crichton v ; and it was in vain that 
 I demurred to this honorary title upon two grounds : 
 first, as being one towards which I had no natu- 
 ral aptitudes or predisposing advantages ; secondly 
 (which made her stare), as carrying with it no real 
 or enviable distinction. The splendour supposed to 
 be connected with the attainments of Crichton I pro- 
 tested against as altogether imaginary. How far that 
 person really had the accomplishments ascribed to 
 him, I waived as a question not worth investigating. 
 My objection commenced ar an earlier point : real or 
 not real, the accomplishments were, as I insisced, 
 vulgar and trivial. Vulgar, that is, when put forward 
 as exponents or adequate expressions of intellectual 
 grandeur. The whole rested on a misconception ; 
 the limitary idea of knowledge was confounded with 
 the infinite idea of power. To have a quickness in 
 copying or mimicking other men, and in learning to 
 do dexterously what they did clumsily, ostentatiously 
 to keep glittering before men’s eyes a thaumaturgic 
 versatility, such as that of a rope-dancer or of an 
 Indian juggler, in petty accomplishments, was a mode 
 of the very vulgarest ambition : one effort of productive 
 378 
 
 1 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 379 
 
 power, a litrle book, for instance, which should im- 
 press or should agitate several successive generations 
 of men, even though far below the higher efforts 
 of human creative art — as, for example, the “ De 
 Imitatione Christi,” or “ The Pilgrim’s Progress,” or 
 “ Robinson Crusoe,” or “ The Vicar of Wakefield ” — 
 was worth any conceivable amount of attainments 
 when rated as an evidence of anything that could 
 justly denominate a man “ admirable.” One felicitous 
 ballad of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton 
 as really admirable, whilst the pretensions actually 
 put forward on his behalf simply instal him as a 
 cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Car- 
 bery did not forego her purpose of causing me to 
 shine under every angle, it would have been ungrate- 
 ful in me to refuse my co-operation with her plans, 
 however little they might wear a face of promise. 
 Accordingly I surrendered myself for two hours daily 
 to the lessons in horsemanship of a principal groom 
 who ranked as a first-rate rough-rider ; and I gathered 
 manifold experiences amongst the horses — so different 
 from the wild, hard-mouthed horses at Westport, that 
 were often vicious, and sometimes trained to vice. 
 Here, though spirited, the horses were pretty generally 
 gentle, and all had been regularly broke. My edu- 
 cation was not entirely neglected even as regarded 
 sportsmanship, that great branch of philosophy being 
 confided to one of the keepers, who was very attentive 
 to me, in deference to the interest in myself expressed 
 by his idolised mistress, but otherwise regarded me 
 probably as an object of mysterious curiosity rather 
 than of a sublunary hope. 
 
 Equally, in fact, as regarded my physics and my 
 metaphysics, — in short, upon all lines of advance that 
 interested my ambition, — I was going rapidly ahead. 
 And, speaking seriously, in what regarded my intellec- 
 tual expansion, never before or since had I been so 
 distinctly made aware of it. No longer did it seem 
 to move upon the hour-hand, whose advance, though 
 certain, is yet a pure matter of inference, but upon 
 the seconds-hand, which visibly comes on at a trotting 
 
380 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 pace. Everything prospered, except my own present 
 happiness, and the possibility of any happiness for 
 some years to come. About two months after leaving 
 Laxton, my fate in the worst shape I had anticipated 
 was solemnly and definitively settled. My guardians 
 agreed that the most prudent course, with a view 
 to my pecuniary interests, was to place me at the 
 Manchester Grammar School ; not with a view to 
 further improvement in my classical knowledge, 
 though the headmaster was a sound scholar, but 
 simply with a view to one of the school exhibitions . 1 
 Amongst the countless establishments, scattered all 
 over England by the noble munificence of English- 
 men and Englishwomen in past generations, for 
 connecting the provincial towns with the two royal 
 universities of the land, this Manchester school was 
 one : in addition to other great local advantages 
 (viz., inter alia , a fine old library and an ecclesi- 
 astical foundation, which in this present generation 
 has furnished the materials for a bishopric of Man- 
 chester, with its deanery and chapter), this noble 
 foundation secured a number of exhibitions at Brase- 
 nose College, Oxford, to those pupils of the school 
 who should study at Manchester for three consecutive 
 
 1 “ Exhibitions ” ; — This is the technical name in many cases, 
 corresponding to the bur see or bursaries of the Continent ; from 
 which word bursae is derived, I believe, the German term 
 Bursch ; that is, a bursarius, or student who lives at college 
 upon the salary allowed by such a bursary. Some years ago 
 the editor of a Glasgow daily paper called upon Oxford and 
 Cambridge, with a patronising flourish, to imitate some one or 
 more of the Scottish universities, in founding such systems of 
 aliment for poor students otherwise excluded from academic 
 advantages. Evidently he was unaware that they had existed 
 for centuries before the state of civilisation in Scotland had 
 allowed any opening for the foundation of colleges or academic 
 life. Scottish bursaries, or exhibitions (a term which Shak- 
 spere uses, very near the close of the first act in the “ Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona,” as the technical expression in England), 
 were few, and not generally, I believe, exceeding ^10 a year. 
 The English were many and of more ancient standing, and 
 running from £40 to ^100 a year. Such was the simple 
 difference between the two countries ; otherwise they agreed 
 altogether. 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 years. The pecuniary amount of these exhibi- 
 tions has since then increased considerably through 
 the accumulation of funds which the commercial 
 character of that great city had caused to be neglected. 
 At that time I believe each exhibition yielded about 
 forty guineas a year, and was legally tenable for seven 
 successive years. Now, to me this would have 
 offered a most seasonable advantage, had it been 
 resorted to some two years earlier. My small patri- 
 monial inheritance gave to me, as it did to each of 
 my four brothers, exactly ^150 a year; and to each 
 of my sisters exactly ^100 a year. The Manchester 
 exhibition of forty guineas a year would have raised 
 this income for seven years to a sum close upon 
 ^200 a year. But at present I was half-way on the 
 road to the completion of my sixteenth year. Com- 
 mencing my period of pupilage from that time, I 
 should not have finished it until I had travelled 
 half-way through my nineteenth year. And the 
 specific evil that already weighed upon me with a 
 sickening oppression was the premature expansion 
 of my mind, and, as a foremost consequence, in- 
 tolerance of boyish society. I ought to have entered 
 upon my triennium of schoolboy servitude at the age 
 of thirteen. As things were, a delay with which I had 
 nothing to do myself, this and the native character of 
 my mind had thrown the whole arrangement awry. 
 For the better half of the three years I endured 
 it patiently. But it had at length begun to eat 
 more corrosively into my peace of mind than ever I 
 had anticipated. The headmaster was substantially 
 superannuated for the duties of his place. Not that 
 intellectually he showed any symptoms of decay ; 
 but in the spirits and physical energies requisite for 
 his duties he did ; not so much age, as disease, it 
 was that incapacitated him. In the course of a long 
 day, beginning at 7 a.m. and stretching down to 
 5 p.m. , he succeeded in reaching the farther end 
 jf his duties. But how? Simply by consolidating 
 pretty nearly into one continuous scene of labour 
 the entire ten hours. The full hour of relaxation 
 
382 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 which the traditions of this ancient school and the 
 bye-laws had consecrated to breakfast, was narrowed 
 into ten or even seven minutes. The two hours’ 
 interval, in like manner prescribed by the old usages 
 from 12 to 2 p . m ., was pared down to forty 
 
 minutes, or less. In this way he walked con- 
 scientiously through the services of the day, fulfilling 
 to the letter every section the minutest of the tra- 
 ditional rubric. But he purchased this consum- 
 mation at the price of all comfort to himself ; and, 
 having done that , he felt himself the more entitled to 
 neglect the comfort of others. The case was singular: 
 he neither showed any indulgence to himself more 
 than to others (which, however, could do nothing 
 towards indemnifying others for the severe confine- 
 ment which his physical decay inflicted upon them 
 —a point wholly forgotten by him) ; nor, secondly, 
 in thus tenaciously holding on to his place, did he 
 (I am satisfied) govern himself by any mercenary 
 thought or wish, but simply by an austere sense of 
 duty. He discharged his public functions with con- 
 stant fidelity and with superfluity of learning ; and 
 felt, perhaps not unreasonably, that possibly the same 
 learning united with the same zeal might not revolve 
 as a matter of course in the event of his resigning 
 the place. I hide from myself no part of the honour- 
 able motives which might (and probably did) ex- 
 clusively govern him in adhering to the place. But 
 not by one atom the less did the grievous results of 
 his inability to grapple with his duties weigh upon all 
 within his sphere, and upon myself, by cutting up the 
 time available for exercise, most ruinously. 
 
 Precisely at the worst crisis of this intolerable dark- 
 ness (for such, without exaggeration, it was in its 
 effects upon my spirits) arose, and for five or six 
 months steadily continued, a consolation of that 
 nature which hardly in dreams I could have antici- 
 pated. For even in dreams would it have seemed 
 reasonable or natural that Laxton, with its entire 
 society, should transfer itself to Manchester ? Some 
 mighty Caliph, or lamp-bearing Aladdin, might have 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 3^3 
 
 worked such marvels ; but else who, or by what 
 machinery? Nevertheless, without either Caliph or 
 Aladdin, and by the most natural of mere human 
 agencies, this change was suddenly accomplished. 
 
 Mr. White, whom I have already had occasion to 
 mention, was in those days the most eminent 
 surgeon by much in the North of England. He 
 had by one whole generation run before the phreno- 
 logists and craniologists — having already measured 
 innumerable skulls amongst the omnigenous sea- 
 faring population of Liverpool, illustrating all the 
 races of men ; and was in society a most urbane and 
 pleasant companion. On my mother’s suggestion, 
 he had been summoned to Laxton, in the hope that 
 he might mitigate the torments of Mrs. Schreiber’s 
 malady. If I am right in supposing that to have 
 been cancer, I presume that he could not have added 
 much to the prescriptions of the local doctor. And 
 yet, on the other hand, it is a fact — so slowly did new 
 views travel in those days, when scientific journals 
 were few, and roads were heavy — that ten years later 
 than this period I knew a case — viz., the case of a 
 butcher’s wife in Somersetshire — -who had never en- 
 joyed the benefit of hemlock in relieving the pangs 
 of a cancerous complaint, until an accident brought 
 Mr. Hey, son to the celebrated Hey of Leeds, into 
 the poor woman’s neighbourhood. 
 
 What might be the quality or the extent of that 
 relief with which Mr. White was able to crown the 
 expectations of poor Mrs. Schreiber, I do not know ; 
 but that the relief could not have been imaginary is 
 certain, for he was earnestly invited to repeat his 
 visits, costly as unavoidably they were. Mrs. Schreiber 
 did not reside at Laxton. Tenderly as she loved 
 Lady Carbery, it did not seem consistent with her 
 dignity that she should take a station that might have 
 been grossly misinterpreted ; and accordingly she 
 bought or hired a miniature kind of villa, called 
 Tixover , distant about four miles from Laxton. A 
 residence in such a house, so sad and silent at this 
 period of affliction for its mistress, would have offered 
 
384 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 too cheerless a life to Mr. White. He took up his 
 abode, therefore, at Laxton during his earliest visit ; 
 and this happened to coincide with that particular 
 visit of my own during which I was initiating Lady 
 Carbery into the mysteries of New Testament Greek. 
 Already as an infant I had known Mr. White; but 
 now, when daily riding over to Tixover in company, 
 and daily meeting at breakfast and dinner, we became 
 intimate. Greatly I profited by this intimacy ; and 
 some part of my pleasure in the Laxton plan of 
 migration to Manchester was drawn from the prospect 
 of renewing it. Such a migration was suggested by 
 Mr. White himself ; and fortunately he could suggest it 
 without even the appearance of any mercenary views. 
 His interest lay the other way. The large special 
 retainer, which it was felt but reasonable to pay him 
 under circumstances so peculiar, naturally disturbed 
 Mr. White ; whilst the benefits of visits so discon- 
 tinuous became more and more doubtful. He pro- 
 posed it, therefore, as a measure of prudence, that 
 Mrs. Schreiber should take up her abode in Man- 
 chester. This counsel was adopted ; and the entire 
 Laxton party in one week struck their Northampton- 
 shire tents, dived as it were into momentary darkness 
 by a loitering journey of stages, short and few, out of 
 consideration for the invalid, and rose again in the 
 gloomy streets of Manchester. 
 
 Gloomy they were at that time — mud below, smoke 
 above — for no torch of improvement had yet explored 
 the ancient habitations of this Lancashire capital. 
 Elsewhere I have expressed the inexhaustible admi- 
 ration which I cherish for the moral qualities, the 
 unrivalled energy and perseverance, of that native 
 Lancashire population, as yet not much alloyed with 
 Celtic adulteration. My feelings towards them are the 
 same as were eloquently and impressively avowed by the 
 late eminent Dr. Cooke Taylor, after an official inquiry 
 into their situation. But in those days the Manchester 
 people realised the aspiration of the noble Scythian ; 
 not the place it was that glorified them , but they that 
 glorified the place. No great city (which technically 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 it then was not, but simply a town or large village) 
 could present so repulsive an exterior as the Man- 
 chester of that day. Lodgings of any sort could with 
 difficulty be obtained, and at last only by breaking 
 up the party. The poor suffering lady, with her 
 two friends, Lady Carbery and my mother, hired 
 one house, Lord and Lady Massey another, and two 
 others were occupied by attendants — all the servants, 
 except one lady’s-maid, being every night separated 
 by a quarter of a mile from their mistresses. To me, 
 however, all these discomforts were scarcely apparent, 
 in the prodigious revolution for the better which was 
 now impressed upon the tenor of my daily life. I 
 lived in the house of the headmaster ; but every 
 night I had leave to adjourn for four or five hours 
 to the drawing-room of Lady Carbery. Her anxiety 
 about Mrs. Schreiber would not allow of her going 
 abroad into society, unless upon the rarest occasions. 
 And I, on my part, was too happy in her conversa- 
 tion — so bold, so novel, and so earnest — voluntarily 
 to have missed any one hour of it. 
 
 Here, by the way, let me mention that on this 
 occasion arose a case of pretended “ tuft -hunting ” 
 which I, who stood by a silent observer, could not 
 but feel to involve a malicious calumny. Naturally 
 it happened that coroneted carriages, superb horses, 
 and numerous servants, in a town so unostentatious 
 and homely as the Manchester of that day, drew the 
 public gaze, and effectually advertised the visit of the 
 Laxton ladies. Respect for the motive which had 
 prompted this visit co-operated with admiration for 
 the distinguished personal qualities of Lady Carbery, 
 to draw upon her from several leading families in 
 the town such little services 'and attentions as pass 
 naturally under a spontaneous law of courtesy between 
 those who are at home and those who suffer under 
 the disadvantages of strangership . The Manchester 
 people, who made friendly advances to Lady Carbery, 
 did so, I am persuaded, with no ulterior objects whatso- 
 ever of pressing into the circle of an aristocratic person *; 
 neither did Lady Carbery herself interpret their atten- 
 
 N 
 
386 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 tions in any such ungenerous spirit, but accepted 
 them cordially, as those expressions of disinterested 
 goodness which I am persuaded that in reality they 
 were. Amongst the families that were thus attentive 
 to her, in throwing open for her use various local 
 advantages of baths, libraries, picture-galleries, &c., 
 were the wife and daughters of Mr. White himself. 
 Now, one of these daughters was herself the wife of a 
 baronet, Sir Richard Clayton, who had honourably 
 distinguished himself in literature by translating and 
 improving the work of Tenhove the Dutchman (or 
 Belgian ?) upon the House of the De ’ Medici — a work 
 which Mr. Roscoe considered “ the most engaging 
 work that has perhaps ever appeared on a subject of 
 literary history. ” Introduced as Lady Clayton had 
 been amongst the elite of our aristocracy, it could not 
 be supposed that she would be at all solicitous about 
 an introduction to the wife of an Irish nobleman, 
 simply as such, and apart from her personal endow- 
 ments. Those endowments, it is true — viz., the 
 beauty and the talents of Lady Carbery, made known 
 in Manchester through Mr. White’s report of them, 
 and combined with the knowledge of her generous 
 devotion to her dying friend, secluding her steadily 
 from all society through a period of very many months 
 — did, and reasonably might, interest many Man- 
 chester people on her behalf. In all this there was 
 nothing to be ashamed of ; and, judging from what 
 personally I witnessed, this seems to have been the 
 true nature and extent of the “ tuft-hunting ” ; and I 
 have noticed it at all simply because there is a habit 
 almost national growing up amongst us of imputing to 
 each other some mode of unmanly prostration before 
 the aristocracy, but with as little foundation for the 
 charge generally, I believe, as I am satisfied there was 
 in this particular instance. 
 
 Mr. White possessed a museum — formed chiefly by 
 himself, and originally, perhaps, directed simply to pro- 
 fessional objects, such as would have little chance for 
 engaging the attention of females. But surgeons and 
 speculative physicians, beyond all other classes of 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 3 8 7 
 
 intellectual men, cultivate the most enlarged and 
 liberal curiosity ; so that Mr. White’s museum fur- 
 nished attractions to an unusually large variety of 
 tastes. I had myself already seen it ; and it struck 
 me that Mr. White would be gratified if Lady Carbery 
 would herself ask to see it ; which accordingly she 
 did ; and thus at once removed the painful feeling 
 that he might be extorting from her an expression of 
 interest in his collection which she did not really 
 feel. 
 
 Amongst the objects which gave a scientific interest 
 to the collection, naturally I have forgotten one and 
 all — first, midst, and last ; for this is one of the cases 
 in which we all felicitate ourselves upon the art and 
 gift of forgetting ; that art which the great Athenian 1 
 noticed as amongst the desiderata of human life — 
 that gift which, if in some rare cases it belongs only 
 to the regal prerogatives of the grave, fortunately in 
 many thousands of other cases is accorded by the 
 treachery of a human brain. Heavens ! what a curse 
 it were, if every chaos, which is stamped upon the 
 mind by fairs such as that London fair of St. Bartholo- 
 mew in years long past, or by the records of battles 
 and skirmishes through the monotonous pages of 
 history, or by the catalogues of libraries stretching 
 over a dozen measured miles, could not be erased, but 
 arrayed itself in endless files incapable of oblitera- 
 tion, as often as the eyes of our human memory 
 happened to throw back their gaze in that direction ! 
 Heaven be praised, I have forgotten everything ; all 
 the earthly trophies of skill or curious research ; even 
 the aeroliths, that might possibly not be earthly, but 
 presents from some superior planet. Nothing survives, 
 except the humanities of the collection ; and amongst 
 these, two only I will molest the reader by noticing. 
 One of the two was a mummy ; the other was a 
 skeleton. I, that had previously seen the museum, 
 warned Lady Carbery of both ; but much it mortified 
 us, that only the skeleton was shown. Perhaps the 
 
 1 (( The great Athenian^ : — Themistocles. 
 
38b AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 mummy was too closely connected with the personal 
 history of Mr. White for exhibition to strangers ! it 
 was that of a lady who had been attended medically 
 for some years by Mr. White, and had owed much 
 alleviation of her sufferings to his inventive skill. She 
 had therefore felt herself called upon to memorialise 
 her gratitude by a very large bequest, not less (I 
 have heard) than ^25,000; but with this condition 
 annexed to the gift — that she should be embalmed as 
 perfectly as the resources in that art of London and 
 Paris could accomplish, and that once a year Mr. 
 White, accompanied by two witnesses of credit, should 
 withdraw the veil from her face. The lady was placed 
 in a common English clock-case, having the usual 
 glass face : but a veil of white velvet obscured from 
 all profane eyes the silent features behind. The 
 clock I had myself seen, when a child, and had gazed 
 upon it with inexpressible awe. But naturally, on 
 my report of the case, the whole of our party were 
 devoured by a curiosity to see the departed fair one. 
 Had Mr. White, indeed, furnished us with the key 
 of the museum, leaving us to our own discretion, 
 but restricting us only (like a cruel Bluebeard) from 
 looking into any anteroom, great is my fear that the 
 perfidious question would have arisen amongst us 
 — what o’clock it was ? and all possible anterooms 
 would have given way to the just fury of our passions. 
 I submitted to Lady Carbery, as a liberty which 
 might be excused by the torrid extremity of our 
 thirst after knowledge, that she (as our leader) should 
 throw out some angling question moving in the line 
 of our desires ; upon which hint Mr. White, if he had 
 any touch of indulgence to human infirmity — unless 
 Mount Caucasus were his mother, and a she-wolf his 
 nurse — would surely relent, and act as his conscience 
 must suggest. But Lady Carbery reminded me of 
 the three Calendars in the “Arabian Nights,” and 
 argued that, as the ladies of Bagdad were justified in 
 calling upon a body of porters to kick those gentle- 
 men into the street, being people who had abused 
 the indulgences of hospitality, much more might Mr. 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 3^9 
 
 White do so with us ; for the Calendars were the 
 children of kings (Shahzades), which we were not ; 
 and had found their curiosity far more furiously 
 irritated : in fact, Zobeide had no right to trifle with 
 any man’s curiosity in that ferocious extent ; and a 
 counter-right arose, as any chancery of human nature 
 would have ruled, to demand a solution of what had 
 been so maliciously arranged towards an anguish of in- 
 supportable temptation. Thus, however, it happened 
 that the mummy, who left such valuable legacies, and 
 founded such bilious fevers of curiosity, was not seen 
 by us ; nor even the miserable clock-case. 
 
 The mummy, therefore, was not seen ; but the 
 skeleton was. Who was he ? It is not every day 
 that one makes the acquaintance of a skeleton ; and 
 with regard to such a thing — thing, shall one say, or 
 person ? — there is a favourable presumption from 
 beforehand; which is this: As he is of no use, 
 neither profitable nor ornamental, to any person what- 
 ever, absolutely de trop in good society, what but 
 distinguished merit of some kind or other could 
 induce any man to interfere with that gravitating 
 tendency that by an eternal nisus is pulling him below 
 ground? Lodgings are dear in England. True it 
 is that, according to the vile usage on the Continent, 
 one room serves a skeleton for bedroom and sitting- 
 room ; neither is his expense heavy, as regards wax- 
 lights, fire, or “ bif-steck.” But still, even a skeleton 
 is chargeable ; and, if any dispute should arise about 
 his maintenance, the parish will do nothing. Mr. 
 White’s skeleton, therefore, being costly, was pre- 
 sumably meritorious, before we had seen him or 
 heard a word in his behalf. It was, in fact, the 
 skeleton of an eminent robber, or perhaps of a 
 murderer. But I, for my part, reserved a faint right 
 of suspense. And, as to the profession of robber 
 in those days exercised on the roads of England, it 
 was a liberal profession, which required more accom- 
 plishments than either the bar or the pulpit ; from 
 the beginning it presumed a most bountiful en- 
 dowment of heroic qualifications — strength, health, 
 
390 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 agility, and exquisite horsemanship, intrepidity of 
 the first order, presence of mind, courtesy, and 
 a general ambidexterity of powers for facing all 
 accidents, and for turning to a good account all 
 unlooked-for contingencies. The finest men in Eng- 
 land, physically speaking, throughout the eighteenth 
 century, the very noblest specimens of man, con- 
 sidered as an animal, were beyond a doubt the 
 mounted robbers who cultivated their profession on 
 the great leading roads — viz., on the road from 
 London to York (technically known as “the Great 
 North Road ”) ; on the road west to Bath, and thence 
 to Exeter and Plymouth ; north-westwards from Lon- 
 don to Oxford, and thence to Chester ; eastwards 
 to Tunbridge; southwards by east to Dover; then 
 inclining westwards to Portsmouth ; more so still, 
 through Salisbury to Dorsetshire and Wilts. These 
 great roads were farmed out as so many Roman 
 provinces amongst proconsuls. Yes, but with a dif- 
 ference, you will say, in respect of moral principles. 
 Certainly with a difference : for the English highway- 
 man had a sort of conscience for gala-days, which 
 could not often be said of the Roman governor or 
 procurator. At this moment we see that the opening 
 for the forger of bank-notes is brilliant; but practically 
 it languishes, as being too brilliant : it demands an 
 array of talent for engraving, &c., which, wherever it 
 exists, is sufficient to carry a man forward upon 
 principles reputed honourable. Why then should 
 he court danger and disreputability ? But in that 
 century the special talents which led to distinction 
 upon the high-road had oftentimes no career open to 
 them elsewhere. The mounted robber on the high- 
 ways of England, in an age when all gentlemen 
 travelled with firearms, lived in an element of danger 
 and adventurous gallantry ; which, even from those 
 who could least allow him any portion of their 
 esteem, extorted sometimes a good deal of their 
 unwilling admiration. By the necessities of the case, 
 he brought into his perilous profession some brilliant 
 qualities — intrepidity, address, promptitude of de- 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 39 1 
 
 cision; and if to these he added courtesy, and a 
 spirit (native or adopted) of forbearing generosity, 
 he seemed almost a man that merited public en- 
 couragement ; since very plausibly it might be argued 
 that his profession was sure to exist ; that, if he were 
 removed, a successor would inevitably arise, and that 
 successor might or might not carry the same liberal 
 and humanising temper into his practice. The man 
 whose skeleton was now before us had ranked amongst 
 the most chivalrous of his order, and was regarded 
 by some people as vindicating the national honour 
 in a point where not very long before it had suffered 
 a transient eclipse. In the preceding generation, it 
 had been felt as throwing a shade of disgrace over 
 the public honour, that the championship of England 
 upon the high-road fell for a time into French hands : 
 upon French prowess rested the burden of English 
 honour, or, in Gallic phrase, of English glory . Claude 
 Duval, a Frenchman of undeniable courage, hand- 
 some, and noted for his chivalrous devotion to women, 
 had been honoured, on his condemnation to the 
 gallows, by the tears of many ladies who attended 
 his trial, and by their sympathising visits during his 
 imprisonment. But the robber represented by the 
 skeleton in Mr. White’s museum (whom let us call X, 
 since his true name has perished), added to the same 
 heroic qualities a person far more superb. Still it 
 was a dreadful drawback from his pretensions, if he 
 had really practised as a murderer. Upon what 
 ground did that suspicion arise? In candour (for 
 candour is due even to a skeleton) it ought to be 
 mentioned that the charge, if it amounted to so 
 much, arose with a lady from some part of Cheshire 
 — -the district of Knutsford, I believe ; but, when- 
 ever it was, in the same district, during the latter part 
 of his career, had resided our X. At first he was not 
 suspected even as a robber — as yet not so much as 
 suspected of being suspicious : in a simple rustic 
 neighbourhood, amongst good-natured peasants, for 
 a long time he was regarded with simple curiosity, 
 rather than suspicion ; and even the curiosity pointed 
 
39 2 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 to his horse more than to himself. The robber had 
 made himself popular amongst the kind - hearted 
 rustics by his general courtesy. Courtesy and the 
 spirit of neighbourliness go a great way amongst 
 country people; and the worst construction of the 
 case was, that he might be an embarrassed gentleman 
 from Manchester or Liverpool, hiding himself from 
 his creditors, who are notoriously a very immoral 
 class of people. At length, however, a violent sus- 
 picion broke loose against him ; for it was ascertained 
 that on certain nights, when perhaps he had exti'ci 
 motives for concealing the fact of having been abroad, 
 he drew woollen stockings over his horse’s feet, with 
 the purpose of deadening the sound in riding up a 
 brick -paved entry, common to his own stable and 
 that of a respectable neighbour. Thus far there was 
 a reasonable foundation laid for suspicion : but sus- 
 picion of what ? Because a man attends to the 
 darning of his horse’s stockings, why must he be 
 meditating murder? The fact is — and known from 
 the very first to a select party of amateurs — that X, 
 our superb-looking skeleton, did^ about three o’clock 
 on a rainy Wednesday morning, in the dead of winter, 
 ride silently out of Knutsford ; and about forty-eight 
 hours afterwards, on a rainy Friday, silently and softly 
 did that same superb blood-horse, carrying that same 
 blood-man — viz., our friend the superb skeleton — 
 pace up the quiet brick entry, in a neat pair of socks, 
 on his return. 
 
 During that interval of forty-eight hours, an atro- 
 cious murder was committed in the ancient city of 
 Bristol. By whom ? That question is to this day 
 unanswered. The scene of it was a house on the 
 west side of the College Green ; which is in fact that 
 same quadrangle, planted with trees, and having on 
 its southern side the Bristol Cathedral, up and down 
 which, early in the reign of George III., Chatter ton 
 walked in jubilant spirits with fair young women of 
 Bristol ; up and down which, some thirty years later, 
 Robert Southey and S. T. C. walked with young 
 Bristol belles from a later generation. The subjects 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 393 
 
 of the murder were an elderly lady, bearing some 
 such name as Rusborough, and her female servant. 
 Mystery there was none as to the motive of the 
 murder — manifestly it was a hoard of money that had 
 attracted the assassin : but there was great perplexity 
 as to the agent or agents concerned in the atrocious 
 act, and as to the mode by which an entrance, under 
 the known precautions of the lady, could have been 
 effected. Because a thoroughbred horse could easily 
 have accomplished the distance to and fro (say 300 
 miles) within the forty-eight hours, and because the 
 two extreme dates of this forty-eight hours’ absence 
 tallied with the requisitions of the Bristol tragedy, it 
 did not follow that X must have had a hand in it. 
 And yet, had these coincidences then been observed, 
 they would certainly — now that strong suspicions had 
 been directed to the man from the extraordinary 
 character of his nocturnal precautions- — not have 
 passed without investigation. But the remoteness of 
 Bristol, and the rarity of newspapers in those days, 
 caused these indications to pass unnoticed. Bristol 
 knew of no such Knutsford highwayman ; Knutsford 
 knew of no such Bristol murder. It is singular 
 enough that these earlier grounds of suspicion 
 against X were not viewed as such by anybody, 
 until they came to be combined with another and 
 final ground. Then the presumptions seemed con- 
 clusive. But by that time X himself had been exe- 
 cuted for a robbery, had been manufactured into a 
 skeleton by the famous surgeon, Cruickshank, assisted 
 by Mr. White and other pupils. All interest in the 
 case had subsided in Knutsford that could now have 
 cleared up the case satisfactorily ; and thus it hap- 
 pened that to this day the riddle, which was read 
 pretty decisively in a northern county, still remains a 
 riddle in the south. When I saw the College Green 
 house in 1809-10, it was apparently empty, and, as I 
 was told, had always been empty since the murder : 
 forty years had not cicatrised the bloody remem- 
 brance ; and to this day, perhaps, it remains amongst 
 the gloomy traditions of Bristol. 
 
 N 2 
 
394 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 But whether the Bristol house has or has not shaken 
 off the odour of blood which offended the nostrils of 
 tenants, it is, I believe, certain that the city annals 
 have not shaken off the mystery : which yet to certain 
 people in Knutsford, as I have said, and to us the 
 spectators of the skeleton, immediately upon hearing 
 one damning fact from the lips of Mr. White, seemed 
 to melt away and evaporate as convincingly as if we 
 had heard the explanation issuing in the terms of 
 a confession from the mouth of the skeleton itself. 
 What, then, was the fact ? With pain, and reluc- 
 tantly, we felt its force, as we looked at the royal 
 skeleton, and reflected on the many evidences which 
 he had given of courage, and perhaps of other noble 
 qualities. The ugly fact was this : In a few weeks 
 after the College Green tragedy, Knutsford, and the 
 whole neighbourhood as far as Warrington (the half- 
 way town between Liverpool and Manchester), were 
 deluged with gold and silver coins, moidores and 
 dollars, from the Spanish mint of Mexico, &c. These, 
 during the frequent scarcities of English silver cur- 
 rency, were notoriously current in England. Now, it 
 is an unhappy fact, and subsequently became known 
 to the Bristol and London police, that a considerable 
 part of poor Mrs. Rusborough’s treasure lay in such 
 coins, gold and silver, from the Spanish colonial 
 mints. 
 
 Lady Carbery at this period made an effort to teach 
 me Hebrew, by way of repaying in kind my pains in 
 teaching Greek to her. Where, and upon what motive, 
 she had herself begun to learn Hebrew, I forget : but 
 in Manchester she had resumed this study with energy 
 on a casual impulse derived from a certain Dr. Bailey, 
 a clergyman of this city who had published a Hebrew 
 Grammar. The doctor was the most unworldly and 
 guileless of men. Amongst his orthodox brethren he 
 was reputed a “ Methodist ” ; and not without reason ; 
 for some of his Low-Church views he pushed into 
 practical extravagances that looked like fanaticism, 
 or even like insanity. Lady Carbery wished naturally 
 to testify her gratitude for his services by various 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 395 
 
 splendid presents : but nothing would the good doctor 
 accept, unless it assumed a shape that might be 
 available for the service of the paupers amongst his 
 congregation. The Hebrew studies, however, not- 
 withstanding the personal assistance which we drew 
 from the kindness of Dr. Bailey, languished. For 
 this there were several reasons ; but it was enough 
 that the systematic vagueness in the pronunciation 
 of this, as of the other Oriental languages, disgusted 
 both of us. A word which could not be pronounced 
 with any certainty was not in a true sense possessed. 
 Let it be understood, however, that it was not the 
 correct and original pronunciation that we cared for 
 — that has perished probably beyond recall even in 
 the case of Greek, in spite of the Asiatic and the 
 Insular Greeks ; what we demanded in vain was any 
 pronunciation whatever that should be articulate, 
 apprehensible, and intercom municable, such as might 
 differentiate the words : whereas a system of mere 
 vowels too inadequately strengthened by consonants, 
 seemed to leave all words pretty nearly alike. One 
 day, in a pause of languor amongst these arid Hebrew 
 studies, I read to her with a beating heart “ The 
 Ancient Mariner.” It had been first published in 
 1798; and about this time (1801) was republished 
 the first two-vo\\ime edition of “ The Lyrical Ballads.” 
 Well I knew Lady Carbery’s constitutional inapti- 
 tude for poetry ; and not for the world would I have 
 sought sympathy from her or from anybody else upon 
 that part of the L. B. which belonged to Words- 
 worth. But I fancied that the wildness of this tale, 
 and the triple majesties of Solitude, of Mist, and of 
 the Ancient Unknown Sea, might have won her 
 into relenting ; and, in fact, she listened with gravity 
 and deep attention. But, on reviewing afterwards in 
 conversation such passages as she happened to re- 
 member, she laughed at the finest parts, and shocked 
 me by calling the mariner himself “an old quiz”; 
 protesting that the latter part of his homily to the 
 wedding-guest clearly pointed him out as the very 
 man meant by Providence for a stipendiary curate 
 
396 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 to the good Dr. Bailey in his overcrowded church . 1 
 With an albatross perched on his shoulder, and who 
 might be introduced to the congregation as the imme- 
 diate organ of his conversion, and supported by the 
 droning of a bassoon, she represented the mariner 
 lecturing to advantage in English ; the doctor over- 
 head in the pulpit enforcing it in Hebrew. Angry 
 I was, though forced to laugh. But of what use is 
 anger or argument in a duel with female criticism ? 
 Our ponderous masculine wits are no match for the 
 mercurial fancy of women. Once, however, I had 
 a triumph : to my great surprise, one day, she sud- 
 denly repeated by heart, to Dr. Bailey, the beautiful 
 passage : — 
 
 “ It ceased, yet still the sails made on,” &c. 
 
 asking what he thought of that ? As it happened, 
 the simple child-like doctor had more sensibility 
 than herself ; for, though he had never in his whole 
 homely life read more of poetry than he had drunk 
 of Tokay or Constantia — in fact, had scarcely heard 
 tell of any poetry but Watts’s Hymns — he seemed 
 petrified : and at last, with a deep sigh, as if recover- 
 ing from the spasms of a new birth, said, “ I never 
 heard anything so beautiful in my whole life.” 
 
 During the long stay of the Laxton party in 
 Manchester occurred a Christmas ; and at Christmas 
 — that is, at the approach of this great Christian 
 festival — so properly substituted in England for the 
 Pagan festival of January and the New Year, there 
 was, according to ancient usage, on the breaking 
 up for the holidays at the Grammar School, a 
 solemn celebration of the season by public speeches. 
 Among the six speakers, I, of course (as one of the 
 three boys who composed the head class), held a 
 distinguished place ; and it followed, also as a matter 
 of course, that all my friends congregated on this 
 occasion to do me honour. What I had to recite 
 was a copy of Latin verses (Alcaics) on the recent 
 conquest of Malta. w Melite Britannis Subacta — this 
 
 1 St. James’s, according to my present recollection. 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 397 
 
 was the title of my worshipful nonsense. The whole 
 strength of the Laxton party had mustered on this 
 occasion. Lady Carbery made a point of bringing 
 in her party every creature whom she could influence. 
 And, probably there were in that crowded audience 
 many old Manchester friends of my father, loving 
 his memory, and thinking to honour it by kindness 
 to his son. Furious, at any rate, was the applause 
 which greeted me : furious was my own disgust. 
 Frantic were the clamours as I concluded my non- 
 sense : frantic was my inner sense of shame at the 
 childish exhibition to which, unavoidably, I was 
 making myself a party. Lady Carbery had, at first, 
 directed towards me occasional glances, expressing 
 a comic sympathy with the thoughts which she 
 supposed to be occupying my mind. But these 
 glances ceased ; and I was recalled, by the gloomy 
 sadness in her altered countenance, to some sense 
 of my own extravagant and disproportionate frenzy 
 on this occasion : from the indulgent kindness with 
 which she honoured me, her countenance on this 
 occasion became a mirror to my own. At night 
 she assured me, when talking over the case, that 
 she had never witnessed an expression of such 
 settled misery, and also (so she fancied) of mis- 
 anthropy, as that which darkened my countenance 
 in those moments of apparent public triumph, no 
 matter how trivial the occasion, and amidst an 
 uproar of friendly felicitation. I look back to that 
 state of mind as almost a criminal reproach to 
 myself, if it were not for the facts of the case. 
 But, in excuse for myself, this fact, above all others, 
 ought to be mentioned — that, over and above the 
 killing oppression to my too sensitive system of 
 the monotonous school tasks, and the ruinous want 
 of exercise, I had fallen under medical advice the 
 most misleading that F ; s possible to imagine. 
 The physician and the surgeon of my family were 
 men too eminent, it seemed to me, and, conse- 
 quently, with time too notoriously bearing a high 
 pecuniary value, for any schoolboy to detain them 
 
398 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 with complaints. Under these circumstances, I 
 threw myself for aid, in a case so simple that any 
 clever boy in a druggist’s shop would have known 
 how to treat it, upon the advice of an old, old 
 apothecary, who had full authority from my guardian 
 to run up a most furious account against me for 
 medicine. This being the regular mode of payment, 
 inevitably, and unconsciously, he was biassed to a 
 mode of treatment — viz., by drastic medicines varied 
 without end — which fearfully exasperated the com- 
 plaint. This complaint, as I now know, was the 
 simplest possible derangement of the liver, a torpor 
 in its action that might have been put to rights 
 in three days. In fact, one • week’s pedestrian 
 travelling amongst the Caernarvonshire mountains 
 effected a revolution in my health such as left me 
 nothing to complain of. 
 
 An odd thing happened by the merest accident. 
 I, when my Alcaics had run down their foolish 
 larum, instead of resuming my official place as one 
 of the trinity who composed the head class, took 
 a seat by the side of Lady Carbery. On the other 
 side of her was seated a stranger ; and this stranger, 
 whom mere chance had thrown next to her, was 
 Lord Belgrave, her old, and at one time (as some 
 people fancied) favoured suitor. In this there was 
 nothing at all extraordinary. Lord Grey de Wilton, 
 an old alumnus of this Manchester Grammar School, 
 and an alumnus during the early reign of this same 
 Archididascalus , made a point of showing honour 
 to his ancient tutor, especially now when reputed 
 to be decaying ; and with the same view he brought 
 Lord Belgrave, who had become his son-in-law after 
 his rejection by Lady Carbery. The whole was a 
 very natural accident. But Lady Carbery was not 
 sufficiently bronzed by worldly habits to treat this 
 accident with nonchalance ; she did not to the public 
 eye betray any embarrassment ; but afterwards she 
 told me that no accident could have been more 
 distressing to her. 
 
 Some months after this, the Laxton party quitted 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 399 
 
 Manchester, having no further motive lor staying. 
 Mrs. Schreiber was now confessedly dying; medical 
 skill could do no more for her ; and, this being so, 
 there was no reason why she should continue to 
 exchange her own quiet little Rutlandshire cottage 
 for the discomforts of smoky lodgings. Lady Car- 
 bery retired like some golden pageant amongst 
 the clouds ; thick darkness succeeded ; the ancient 
 torpor re-established itself ; and my health grew 
 distressingly worse. Then it was, after dreadful 
 self-conflicts, that I took the unhappy resolution 
 of which the results are recorded in the “ Opium 
 Confessions.” At this point, the reader must under- 
 stand, comes in that chapter of my life ; and, for 
 all which concerns that delirious period, I refer him 
 to those “ Confessions.” Some anxiety I had on 
 leaving Manchester, lest my mother should suffer 
 too much from this rash step ; and on that impulse 
 I altered the direction of my wanderings ; not going 
 (as I had originally planned) to the English Lakes, 
 but making first of all for St. John’s Priory, Chester, 
 at that time my mother’s residence. There I found 
 my maternal uncle, Captain Penson, of the Bengal 
 establishment, just recently come home on a two 
 years’ leave of absence ; and there I had an inter- 
 view with my mother. By a temporary arrangement 
 I received a weekly allowance, which would have 
 enabled me to live in any district of Wales, either 
 North or South; for Wales, both North and South, 
 is (or at any rate was) a land of exemplary cheap- 
 ness. For instance, at Talyllyn, in Merionethshire, 
 or anywhere off the line of tourists, I and a lieu- 
 tenant in our English Navy paid sixpence uniformly 
 for a handsome dinner; sixpence, I mean, apiece. 
 But two months later came a golden blockhead, 
 who instructed the people that it was “ sinful ” to 
 charge less than three shillings. In Wales, mean- 
 time, I suffered grievously from want of books ; 
 and fancying, in my profound ignorance of the 
 world, that I could borrow money upon my own 
 expectations, or, at least, that I could do so with 
 
400 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 the joint security of Lord Westport (now Earl of 
 Altamont, upon his father’s elevation to the Marqui- 
 sate of Sligo), or (failing that ) with the security of 
 his amiable and friendly cousin, the Earl of Desart, 
 I had the unpardonable folly to quit the deep 
 tranquillities of North Wales, for the uproars, and 
 perils, and the certain miseries of London. I had 
 borrowed ten guineas from Lady Carbery ; and at 
 that time, when my purpose was known to nobody, 
 I might have borrowed any sum I pleased. But 
 I could never again avail myself of that resource, 
 because I must have given some address, in order 
 to insure the receipt of Lady Carbery’s answer ; 
 and in that case, so sternly conscientious was she 
 that, under the notion of saving me from ruin, my 
 address would have been immediately communicated 
 to my guardians, and by them would have been 
 confided to the unrivalled detective talents, in those 
 days, of Townsend, or some other Bow Street officer. 
 
 That episode, or impassioned parenthesis, in my 
 life which is comprehended in “ The Confessions of 
 an Opium-Eater ” had finished : suppose it over and 
 gone, and once more, after the storms of London, 
 suppose me resting from my dreadful remembrances 
 in the deep monastic tranquillity of St. John’s Priory ; 
 and just then, by accident, with no associates except 
 my mother and my uncle. What was the Priory like ? 
 Was it young or old, handsome or plain ? What was 
 my uncle the captain like ? Young or old, handsome 
 or plain ? Wait a little, my reader ; give me time, 
 and I will tell you all. My uncle’s leave of absence 
 from India had not expired ; in fact, it had nine or 
 ten months still to run ; and this accident furnished 
 us all with an opportunity of witnessing his pre- 
 ternatural activity. One morning early in April of 
 the year 1803, a gentleman called at the Priory, and 
 mentioned, as the news of the morning brought down 
 by the London mail, that there had been a very hot 
 and very sudden “ press ” along the Thames, and 
 simultaneously at the outports. Indeed, before this, 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 401 
 
 the spiteful tone of Sebastiani’s Report, together with 
 the arrogant comment in the Moniteur on the sup- 
 posed inability of Great Britain to contend “ single- 
 handed ” with France, and, finally, the public brutality 
 to our ambassador, had prepared us all for war. But, 
 then, might not all this blow over ? No : apart from 
 any choice or preference of war on the part of 
 Napoleon, his very existence depended upon war. 
 He lived by and through the army. Without a suc- 
 cession of wars and martial glories in reserve for the 
 army, what interest had they in Napoleon ? This 
 was obscurely acknowledged by everybody. More or 
 less consciously perceived, a feeling deep and strong 
 ran through the nation, that it was vain to seek 
 expedients or delays ; a mighty strife had to be 
 fought out, which could not be evaded. Thence it 
 was that the volunteer system was so rapidly and 
 earnestly developed. As a first stage in the process 
 of national enthusiasm, this was invaluable. The 
 first impulse drew out the material. Next, as might 
 have been foreseen, came an experience which taught 
 us seasonably that these redundant materials, crude 
 and miscellaneous, required a winnowing and sifting, 
 which very soon we had ; and the result was — an 
 incomparable militia. Chester shone conspicuously 
 in this noble competition. But here, as elsewhere, 
 at first there was no cavalry. Upon that arose a 
 knot of gentlemen, chiefly those who hunted, and 
 in a very few hours laid the foundation of a small 
 cavalry force. Three troops were raised in the city 
 of Chester — one of the three being given to my 
 uncle. The whole were under the command of 
 Colonel Dod, who had a landed estate in the county, 
 and who (like my uncle) had been in India. But 
 Colonel Dod and the captains of the two other troops 
 gave comparatively little aid. The whole working 
 activities of the system rested with my uncle. Then 
 first I saw energy ; then first I knew what it meant 
 All the officers of the three troops exchanged dinner- 
 parties with each other ; and consequently they dined 
 at the Priory often enough to make us acquainted 
 
402 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHED 
 
 with their characteristic qualities. That period had 
 not yet passed away, though it was already passing, 
 when gentlemen did not willingly leave the dinner- 
 table in a state of absolute sobriety. Colonel Dod 
 and my uncle had learned in Bengal, under the 
 coercion of the climate, habits of temperance. But 
 the others (though few, perhaps, might be systematic 
 drinkers) were careless in this respect, and drank 
 under social excitement quite enough to lay bare the 
 ruling tendencies of their several characters. Being 
 English, naturally the majority were energetic, and 
 beyond all things despised dreaming fainecins (such, 
 for instance, as we find the politicians, or even the 
 conspirators, of Italy, Spain, and Germany, whose 
 whole power of action evaporates in talking, and 
 histrionically gesticulating). Yet still the best of them 
 seemed inert by comparison with my uncle, and to 
 regard his standard of action and exertion as tres- 
 passing to a needless degree upon ordinary human 
 comfort. 
 
 Commonplace, meantime, my uncle w^as in the 
 character of his intellect : there he fell a thousand 
 leagues below r my mother, to whom he looked up 
 with affectionate astonishment. But, as a man of 
 action, he ran so far ahead of men generally, that he 
 ceased to impress one as commonplace. He, if any 
 man ever did, realised the Roman poet’s description 
 of being natus rebus agendis — sent into this w r orld not 
 for talking, but for doing ; not for counsel, but for 
 execution. On that field he was a portentous man — 
 a monster ; and, viewing him as such, I am disposed 
 to concede a few words to what modern slang 
 denominates his 16 antecedents.” 
 
 Two brothers and one sister — viz., my mother — 
 composed the household choir of children gathering 
 round the hearth of my maternal grandparents, 
 whose name was Penson. My grandfather at one 
 time held an office under the king ; how named, I 
 once heard, but have forgotten ; only this I re- 
 member, that it was an office which conferred the 
 title of Esquire ; so that upon each and all of his 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 4 ° 3 
 
 several coffins — lead, oak, mahogany — he was entitled 
 to proclaim himself an Armiger ; which, observe, is 
 the newest — oldest — most classic mode of saying that 
 one is privileged to bear arms in a sense intelligible 
 only to the Heralds’ College. This Armiger , this 
 undeniable Squire, was doubly distinguished : first, 
 by his iron constitution and impregnable health ; 
 which were of such quality, and, like the sword of 
 Michael, the warrior-angel (“ Paradise Lost,” B. vi.), 
 had “ from the armoury of God been given him 
 tempered so,” that no insurance-office, trafficking in 
 life-annuities, would have ventured to look him in 
 the face. People thought him good, like a cat, for 
 eight or nine generations ; nor did any man perceive 
 at what avenue death could find, or disease could 
 force, a practicable breach ; and yet, such anchorage 
 have all human hopes, in the very midst of these 
 windy anticipations, this same granite grandpapa of 
 mine, not yet very far ahead of sixty — being, in fact, 
 threescore years and none — suddenly struck his 
 flag, and found himself, in his privileged character of 
 Armiger , needing those door (coffin-door) plates which 
 all reasonable people had supposed to be reserved 
 for the manufacturing hands of some remote century. 
 “ Armiger , pack up your traps ” — “ Collige sarcinas ” 
 — “ Squire, you’re wanted : ” these dreadful citations 
 were inevitable ; come they must : but surely, as 
 everybody thought, not in the eighteenth, or, perhaps, 
 even the nineteenth century. Diis aliter visum . My 
 grandfather, built for an AEonian duration, did not 
 come within hail of myself ; whilst his gentle partner, 
 my grandmother, who made no show of extra lon- 
 gevity, lived down into my period, and had the benefit 
 of my acquaintance through half-a-dozen years. If she 
 turned this piece of good fortune to no great practi- 
 cal account, that (you know) was no fault of mine. 
 Doubtless, I was ready with my advice, freely and 
 gratuitously, if she had condescended to ask for it. 
 Returning to my grandfather : the other distinguish- 
 ing endowment, by which he was so favourably 
 known and remembered amongst his friends, was the 
 
404 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 magical versatility of his talents, and his power of self- 
 accommodation to all humours, tempers, and ages. 
 
 “ Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res.” 
 
 And in allusion to this line from Horace it was, that 
 amongst his literary friends he was known familiarly 
 by the name of Aristippus. His sons, Edward and 
 Thomas, resembled him, by all accounts, in nothing ; 
 neither physically, nor in moral versatility. These 
 two sons of the Squire, Edward and Thomas, through 
 some traditional prejudice in the family, had always 
 directed their views to the military profession. In 
 such a case, the King’s army is naturally that to which 
 a young man’s expectations turn. But to wait, and 
 after all by possibility to wait in, vain, did not suit 
 my fiery grandfather. The interest which he could 
 put into motion was considerable ; but it was more 
 applicable to the service of the East India Com- 
 pany than to any branch of the Home Service. This 
 interest was so exerted, that in one day he obtained 
 a lieutenancy in the Company’s service for each of 
 his sons. About 1780 or 1781, both young men, aged 
 severally sixteen and seventeen years, went out to join 
 their regiments — both regiments being on the Bengal 
 establishment. Very different were their fates ; yet 
 their qualifications ought to have been the same, or 
 differing only as sixteen differs frc m seventeen, and 
 also as sixteen overflowing with levity differs from 
 seventeen prematurely thoughtful. Edward Penson 
 was early noticed for his high principle, for his be- 
 nignity, and for a thoughtfulness somewhat sorrow- 
 ful, that seemed to have caught in childhood some 
 fugitive glimpse of his own too brief career. At 
 noonday, in some part of Bengal, he went out of 
 doors bareheaded, and died in a few hours. 
 
 In 1 800-1 80 1, my mother had become dissatisfied 
 with Bath as a residence ; and, being free from all ties 
 connecting her with any one county of England rather 
 than another, she resolved to traverse the most attrac- 
 tive parts of the island, and upon personal inspection 
 to select a home ; not a ready-built home, but the 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 405 
 
 ground on which she might herself create one ; for 
 it happened that amongst the few infirmities besetting 
 my mother’s habits and constitution of mind was the 
 costly one of seeking her chief intellectual excitement 
 in architectural creations. She individually might be 
 said to have built Greenhay ; since to her views of 
 domestic elegance and propriety my father had re- 
 signed almost everything. This was her coup dlessai ; 
 secondly, she built the complement to the Priory in 
 Cheshire, which cost about ^1000 ; thirdly, West- 
 hay, in Somersetshire, about twelve miles from Bristol, 
 which, including the land attached to the house, cost 
 ^12,500 — not including subsequent additions; but 
 this was built at the cost of my uncle ; finally, Weston 
 Lea, close to Bath, which, being designed simply for 
 herself in old age, with a moderate establishment 
 of four servants (and some reasonable provision of 
 accommodations for a few' visitors), cost originally, I 
 believe, not more than ^1000 — excluding, how T ever, 
 the cost of all after alterations. It may serve to show 
 how inevitably an amateur architect, without profes- 
 sional aid and counsel, will be defrauded, that the 
 first of these houses, which cost ^6000, sold for no 
 more than ^2500, and the third for no more than 
 ^*5000. The person who superintended the work- 
 men, and had the whole practical management of 
 one amongst these four houses, was a common 
 builder, without capital or education, and the 
 greatest knave that personally I have known. It 
 may illustrate the way in which lady architects, with- 
 out professional aid, are and ever wall be defrauded, 
 that, after all was finished, and the entire woodwork 
 was to be measured and valued, each party, of 
 course, needing to be represented by a professional 
 agent, naturally the knavish builder w^as ready at 
 earliest dawn with his agent ; but, as regarded my 
 mother’s interest, the task of engaging such an agent 
 had been confided to a neighbouring clergyman, 
 “ evangelical,” of course, and a humble sycophant 
 of Hannah More, but otherwise the most helpless of 
 human beings — baptized or infidel. He contented 
 
406 autobiographic sketches 
 
 himself with instructing a young gentleman, aged 
 about fifteen, to take his pony and ride over to a 
 distant cathedral town, which was honoured by The 
 abode of a virtuous though drunken surveyor. This 
 respectable drunkard he was to engage, and also with 
 obvious discretion to fee, beforehand. All which was 
 done : the drunken surveyor had a sort of fits, it was 
 understood, that always towards sunset inclined him 
 to assume the horizontal posture. Fortunately, how- 
 ever, for that part of mankind whom circumstances 
 had brought under the necessity of communicating 
 with him, these fits were intermitting; so that, for 
 instance, in the present case, upon a severe call 
 arising for his pocketing the fee of ten guineas, 
 he astonished his whole household by suddenly 
 standing bolt upright as stiff as a poker ; his sister 
 remarking to the young gentleman that he (the 
 visitor) was in luck that evening : it wasn’t every- 
 body that could get that length in dealing with 
 Mr. X. O. However, it is distressing to relate that 
 the fits immediately returned ; and, with that degree 
 of exasperation which made it dangerous to suggest 
 the idea of a receipt ; since that must have required 
 the vertical attitude. Whether that attitude ever was 
 recovered by the unfortunate gentleman, I do not 
 know. Forty-and-four years have passed since then. 
 Almost everybody connected with the case has had time 
 to assume permanently the horizontal posture: viz., 
 that knave of a builder, whose knaveries (gilded by 
 that morning sun of June) were controlled by nobody 
 —that sycophantish parson — that young gentleman of 
 fifteen (now, alas ! fifty-nine), who must long since have 
 sown his wild oats — that unhappy pony of eighteen 
 (now, alas! sixty -two, if living; ah! venerable pony, 
 that must (or mustest) now require thy oats to be 
 boiled) — in short, one and all of these venerabilities — 
 knaves, ponies, drunkards, receipts — have descended, 
 I believe, to chaos or to Hades, with hardly one excep- 
 tion. Chancery itself, though somewhat of an Indian 
 juggler, could not play with such aerial balls as these. 
 
 On what ground it was that my mother quarrelled 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 4°7 
 
 with the advantages of Bath, so many and so con- 
 spicuous, I cannot guess. At that time— viz., the 
 opening of the nineteenth century — the old tradi- 
 tionary custom of the place had established for 
 young and old the luxury of sedan-chairs. Nine- 
 tenths, at least, of the colds and catarrhs, those 
 initial stages of all pulmonary complaints (the capital 
 scourge of England), are caught in the transit be- 
 tween the door of a carriage and the genial 
 atmosphere of the drawing-room. By a sedan- 
 chair all this danger was evaded ; your two chair- 
 men marched right into the hall : the hall - door 
 was closed ; and not until then was the roof and 
 the door of your chair opened : the translation was 
 — from one room to another. To my mother, and 
 many in her situation, the sedan - chair recom- 
 mended itself also by advantages of another class. 
 Immediately on coming to Bath, her carriage was 
 “ laid up in ordinary.” The trifling rent of a coach- 
 house, some slight annual repairs, and the tax, 
 composed the whole annual cost. At that time, 
 and throughout the war, the usual estimate for the 
 cost of a close carriage in London was ^32 o : since, 
 in order to have the certain services of two horses, 
 it was indispensable to keep three. Add to this 
 the coachman, the wear-and-tear of harness, and 
 the duty; and, even in Bath, a cheaper place than 
 London, you could not accomplish the total service 
 under ^270. Now, except the duty, all this expense 
 was at once superseded by the sedan-chair — rarely 
 costing you above ten shillings a week — i.e ., twenty- 
 five guineas a year, and liberating you from all care 
 or anxiety. The duty on four wheels, it is true, 
 was suddenly exalted by Mr. Pitt’s triple assessment 
 from twelve guineas to thirty-six : but what a trifle 
 by comparison with the cost of horses and coach- 
 man ! And then, no demands for money were ever 
 met so cheerfully by my mother as those which went 
 to support Mr. Pitt’s policy against Jacobinism and 
 Regicide. At present, after five years’ sinecure exist- 
 ence, unless on the rare summons of a journey, 
 
408 autobiographic sketches 
 
 this dormant carriage was suddenly undocked, and 
 put into commission. Taking with her two servants, 
 and one of my sisters, my mother now entered 
 upon a periplus , or systematic circumnavigation of 
 all England ; and in England only, through the 
 admirable machinery matured for such a purpose — 
 viz., inns, innkeepers, servants, horses, all first-rate 
 of their class — it was possible to pursue such a 
 scheme in the midst of domestic comfort. My 
 mother’s resolution was to see all England with 
 her own eyes, and to judge for herself upon the 
 qualifications of each county, each town (not being 
 a bustling seat of commerce), and each village 
 (having any advantages of scenery), for contributing 
 the main elements towards a home that might justify 
 her in building a house. The qualifications insisted 
 on were these five : good medical advice some- 
 where in the neighbourhood ; first-rate means of 
 education ; elegant (or what most people might 
 think aristocratic) society ; agreeable scenery : and 
 so far the difficulty was not insuperable in the way 
 of finding all the four advantages concentrated. 
 But my mother insisted on a fifth, which in those 
 days insured the instant shipwreck of the entire 
 scheme : this was a Church of England parish 
 clergyman, who was to be strictly orthodox, faithful 
 to the articles of our English Church, yet to these 
 articles as interpreted by evangelical divinity. My 
 mother’s views were precisely those of her friend 
 Mrs. Hannah More, of Wilberforce, of Henry 
 Thornton, or Zachary Macaulay (father of the his- 
 torian), and generally of those who were then known 
 amongst sneerers as “the Clapham saints.” This one 
 requisition it was on which the scheme foundered. 
 And the fact merits recording, as an exposition of 
 the broad religious difference between the England 
 of that day and of this. At present, no difficulty 
 would be found as to this fifth requisition. “ Evan- 
 gelical ” clergymen are now sown broadcast ; at that 
 period, there were nob on an average, above six or 
 eight in each of the fifty-two counties. 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 4 ° 9 
 
 The conditions, as a whole, were in fact incapable 
 of being realised ; where two or three were attained, 
 three or two failed. It was too much to exact so 
 many advantages from any one place, unless London; 
 or really, if any other place could be looked to with 
 hope in such a chase, that place was Bath, — the very 
 city my mother was preparing to leave. Yet, had 
 this been otherwise, and the prospect of success 
 more promising, I have not a doubt that the pretty 
 gem which suddenly was offered at a price unin- 
 telligibly low in the ancient city of Chester would 
 have availed (as instantly it did avail, and perhaps 
 ought to have availed) in obscuring those five 
 conditions, of which else each separately for itself 
 had seemed a conditio sine qua non. This gem was 
 an ancient house, on a miniature scale, called the 
 Priory ; and, until the dissolution of religious houses 
 in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, had 
 formed part of the Priory attached to the ancient 
 Church (still flourishing) of St. John’s. Towards 
 the end of the sixteenth, and through the first quarter 
 of the seventeenth century, this Priory had been in 
 the occupation of Sir Robert Cotton, the antiquary, 
 the friend of Ben Jonson, of Coke, of Selden, &c., 
 and advantageously known as one of those who 
 applied his legal and historical knowledge to the 
 bending back into constitutional moulds of those 
 despotic twists which new interests and false counsels 
 had developed in the Tudor and Stuart dynasties. 
 It was an exceedingly pretty place : and the kitchen, 
 upon the ground storey, which had a noble groined 
 ceiling of stone, indicated, by its disproportionate 
 scale, the magnitude of the establishment to which 
 once it had ministered. Attached to this splendid 
 kitchen were tributary offices, &c. On the upper 
 storey were exactly five rooms — viz., a servants’ 
 dormitory, meant in Sir Robert’s day for two beds 1 
 
 1 The contrivance amorist our ancestors, even at haughty 
 Cambridge and haughtier Oxford, was, that one bed rising six 
 inches from the floor ran (in the daytime) under a loftier bed ; 
 
410 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 at the least, and a servants’ sitting-room. These 
 were shut off into a separate section, with a little 
 staircase (like a ship’s companion-ladder) and a little 
 lobby of its own. But the principal section on this 
 upper storey had been dedicated to the use of Sir 
 Robert, and consisted of a pretty old hall, lighted 
 by an old monastic-painted window in the door 
 of entrance ; secondly, a rather elegant dining-room ; 
 thirdly, a bedroom. The glory of the house inter- 
 nally lay in the monastic kitchen, and, secondly, 
 in what a Frenchman would have called, properly, 
 Sir Robert’s own apartment 1 of three rooms; but, 
 thirdly and chiefly, in a pile of ruined archways, most 
 picturesque, so far as they went, but so small that 
 Drury Lane could easily have found room for them 
 on its stage. These stood in the miniature pleasure- 
 ground, and were constantly resorted to by artists 
 for specimens of architectural decays, or of nature 
 working for the concealment of such decays by her 
 ordinary processes of gorgeous floral vegetation. Ten 
 rooms there may have been in the Priory, as offered 
 to my mother for less than ^500. A drawing-room, 
 bedrooms, dressing-rooms, &c., making about ten 
 more, were added by my mother for a sum under 
 ^1000. The same miniature scale was observed 
 in all these additions. And, as the Priory was not 
 within the walls of the city, whilst the river Dee, 
 flowing immediately below, secured it from annoy- 
 ance on one side, and the church, with its adjacent 
 churchyard, insulated it from the tumults of life on 
 all the other sides, an atmosphere of conventual 
 
 it ran upon castors or little wheels. The learned word for a 
 little wheel is trochlea ; from which Grecian and Latin term 
 comes the English word truckle- bed. 
 
 1 “Apartment" : — Our English use of the word “apart- 
 ment ” is absurd, since it leads to total misconceptions. We 
 read in French memoirs innumerable of the kings apartment, 
 of the queen's apartment, &c., and for us English the question 
 arises, How ? had the king, had her majesty, only one room ? 
 But, my friend, they might have a thousand rooms, and yet 
 have only one apartment. An apartment means, in the Con- 
 tinental use, a section or compartment of an edifice. 
 
THE PRIORY 41 I 
 
 stillness and tranquillity brooded over it and all 
 around it for ever. 
 
 Such was the house, such was the society, in which 
 I now found myself ; and upon the whole I might 
 describe myself as being, according to the modern 
 phrase, “in a false position.” I had, for instance, 
 a vast superiority, as was to have been expected, 
 in bookish attainments, and in adroitness of logic ; 
 whilst, on the other hand, I was ridiculously short-* 
 sighted or blind in all fields of ordinary human 
 experience. It must not be supposed that I re- 
 garded my own particular points of superiority, or 
 that I used them with any vanity or view to present 
 advantages. On the contrary, I sickened over them, 
 and laboured to defeat them. But in vain I sowed 
 errors in my premises, or planted absurdities in 
 my assumptions. Vainly I tried such blunders, as 
 putting four terms into a syllogism, which, as all 
 the world knows, ought to run on three ; a tripod 
 it ought to be, by all rules known to man, and, 
 behold, I forced it to become a quadruped. Upon 
 my uncle’s military haste and tumultuous energy in 
 pressing his opinions, all such delicate refinements 
 were absolutely thrown away. With disgust / saw, 
 with disgust he saw, that , too apparently the advan- 
 tage lay with me in the result ; and, whilst I worked 
 like a dragon to place myself in the wrong, some 
 fiend apparently so counterworked me that eternally 
 I was reminded of the Manx halfpennies, which 
 lately I had continually seen current in North Wales, 
 bearing for their heraldic distinction three human 
 legs in armour, but so placed in relation to each 
 other, that always one leg is vertical and mounting 
 guard on behalf of the other two, which, therefore, 
 are enabled to sprawl aloft in the air — in fact, to be 
 as absurdly negligent as they choose, relying upon 
 their vigilant brother below, and upon the written 
 legend or motto, Stabit quocunque jeceris (Stand 
 it will upright, though you should fling it in any 
 conceivable direction). What gave another feature 
 of distraction and incoherency to my position was,, 
 
412 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 that I still occupied the position of a reputed boy, 
 nay, a child, in the estimate of my audience, and of 
 a child in disgrace. Time enough had not passed 
 since my elopement from school to win for me, in 
 minds so fresh from that remembrance, a station of 
 purification and assoilment. Oxford might avail to 
 assoil me, and to throw into a distant retrospect my 
 boyish trespasses ; but as yet Oxford had not arrived. 
 I committed, besides, a great fault in taking often a 
 tone of mock seriousness, when the detection of the 
 playful extravagance was left to the discernment or 
 quick sympathy of the hearer ; and I was blind to 
 the fact, that neither my mother nor my uncle was 
 distinguished by any natural liveliness of vision for 
 the comic, or any toleration for the extravagant. My 
 mother, for example, had an awful sense of con- 
 scientious fidelity in the payment of taxes. Many 
 a respectable family I have known that would 
 privately have encouraged a smuggler, and, in con- 
 sequence, were beset continually by mock smugglers, 
 offering, with airs of affected mystery, home com- 
 modities liable to no custom-house objections what- 
 soever, only at a hyperbolical price. I remember 
 even the case of a duke, who bought in Piccadilly, 
 under laughable circumstances of complex disguise, 
 some silk handkerchiefs, falsely pretending to be 
 foreign, and was so incensed at finding himself to 
 have been committing no breach of law whatever, 
 but simply to have been paying double the ordinary 
 shop price, that he pulled up the soi-disa?it smuggler 
 to Bow Street, even at the certain price of exposure 
 to himself. The charge he alleged against the man 
 was the untenable one of not being a smuggler. My 
 mother, on the contrary, pronounced all such attempts 
 at cheating the King, or, as I less harshly termed it, 
 cheating the tax-gatherer, as being equal in guilt to 
 a fraud upon one's neighbour, or to direct appro- 
 priation of another man’s purse. I, on my part, 
 held that Government, having often defrauded me 
 through its agent and creature the Post-Office, by 
 monstrous overcharges on letters, had thus created 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 4*3 • 
 
 in my behalf a right of retaliation. And dreadfully 
 it annoyed my mother that I, stating this right in a 
 very plausible rule-of-three form, viz., As is the in- 
 come of the said fraudulent Government to my poor 
 patrimonial income of ^150 per annum, so is any 
 one special fraud (as, for instance, that of yesterday 
 morning, amounting to thirteenpence upon a single 
 letter) to that equitable penalty which I am entitled 
 to recover upon the goods and chattels (wherever 
 found) of the ill-advised Britannic Government. 
 During the war with Napoleon, the income of this 
 Government ran, to all amounts, between fifty and 
 seventy million pounds sterling. Awful, therefore, 
 seemed the inheritance of retaliation, inexhaustible 
 the fund of reprisals, into which I stepped, — since 
 even a single case of robbery, such as I could plead 
 by dozens, in the course of a few years, though no 
 more than thirteenpence, yet, multiplied into seventy 
 million times 240 pence, minus ^150, made a very 
 comfortable property. The right was clear ; and the 
 sole difficulty lay in asserting it : in fact, that same 
 difficulty which beset the philosopher of old, in 
 arguing with the Emperor Hadrian, viz., the want 
 of thirty legions for the purpose of clearly point- 
 ing out to Caesar where it was that the truth lay, 
 
 - — the secret truth, that rarest of ail “ nuggets.” 
 
 This counter-challenge of Government, as the first 
 mover in a system of frauds, annoyed, but also per- 
 plexed my mother exceedingly. For an argument 
 that shaped itself into a rule-of-three illustration 
 seemed really to wear too candid an aspect for 
 summary and absolute rejection. 
 
 Such discussions wore to me a comic shape. But 
 altogether serious were the disputes upon India — a 
 topic on separate grounds equally interesting to us 
 all, as the mightiest of English colonies, and the 
 superbest monument of demoniac English energy, 
 revealing itself in such men as Clive, Hastings, and 
 soon after in the two Wellesleys. To my mother, 
 as the grave of one brother, as the home of another, 
 and as a new centre from which Christianity (she 
 
414 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 hoped) would mount like an eagle, — for just about 
 that time the Bible Society was preparing its initial 
 movements : whilst to my uncle India appeared as 
 the arena upon which his activities were yet to 
 find their adequate career. With respect to the 
 Christianisation of India, my uncle assumed a hope 
 which he did not really feel ; and in another point, 
 more trying to himself personally, he had soon an 
 opportunity for showing the sincerity of this deference 
 to his spiritual-minded sister. For, very soon after 
 his return to India, he received a civil appointment 
 ( Super in ten de n t of Military Buildings in Bengal ), 
 highly lucrative; and the more so, as it could be 
 held conjointly with his military rank ; but a good 
 deal of its pecuniary advantages was said to lie in 
 fees, or perquisites, privately offered, but perfectly 
 regular and official, which my mother (misunder- 
 standing the Indian system) chose to call “ bribes.” 
 A very ugly word was that ; but I argued that even 
 at home, even in the courts at Westminster, in the 
 very fountains of justice, private fees constituted one 
 part of the salaries — a fair and official part, so long 
 as Parliament had not made such fees illegal by 
 commuting them for known and fixed equivalents. 
 It was mere ignorance of India, as I dutifully 
 insisted against “ Mamma,” that could confound 
 these regular Oriental “ nuzzers ” with the clandes- 
 tine wages of corruption. The pot-de-vin of French 
 tradition, the pair of gloves (though at one time 
 very costly gloves) to an English judge of assize on 
 certain occasions, never was offered nor received in 
 the light of a bribe. And (until regularly abolished 
 by the legislature) I insisted — but vainly insisted — 
 that these and similar honoraria ought to be accepted, 
 because else you were lowering the prescriptive rights 
 and value of the office, which you — a mere locum 
 tenens for some coming successor — had no right to 
 do upon a solitary scruple or crotchet arising prob- 
 ably from dyspepsy. Better men, no doubt, than 
 ever stood in your stockings, had pocketed thank- 
 fully the gifts of ancient, time-honoured custom. 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 4 T 5. 
 
 My uncle, however, though not with the carnal 
 recusancy which besieged the spiritual efforts of 
 poor Cuthbert Headrigg, that incorrigible world- 
 ling, yet still with intermitting doubts, followed my 
 mother’s earnest entreaties, and the more meritori- 
 ously (I conceive) as he yielded, in a point deeply 
 affecting his interest, to a system of arguments very 
 imperfectly convincing to his understanding. He 
 held the office in question for as much (I believe) 
 as eighteen or nineteen years ; and by knowing old 
 bilious Indians, who laughed immoderately at my 
 uncle and my mother, as the proper growth of a 
 priory or some such monastic establishment, I have 
 been assured that nothing short of ^200,000 ought, 
 under the long tenure of office, to have been re- 
 mitted to England. But then, said one of these 
 gentlemen, if your uncle lived (as I have heard 
 that he did) in Calcutta and Meerut at the rate 
 of ^4000 a year, that would account for a con- 
 siderable share of a mine which else would seem 
 to have been worked in vain. Unquestionably my 
 uncle’s system of living was under no circumstances 
 a self-denying one. To enjoy, and to make others 
 enjoy — that was his law of action. Indeed, a more 
 liberal creature, or one of more princely munificence, 
 never lived. 
 
 It might seem useless to call back any fragment of 
 conversations relating to India which passed more 
 than fifty years ago, were it not for two reasons ; one 
 of which is this, that the errors (natural at that time) 
 which I vehemently opposed, not from any greater 
 knowledge that I had, but from closer reflection, are 
 even now the prevailing errors of the English people. 
 My mother, for instance, uniformly spoke of the 
 English as the subverters of ancient thrones. I, 
 on the contrary, insisted that nothing political was 
 ancient in India. Our own original opponents, the 
 Rajahs of Oude and Bengal, had been all upstarts : 
 in the Mysore, again, our more recent opponents, 
 Hyder and his son Tippoo, were new men altogether, 
 whose grandfathers were quite unknown. Why was 
 
41 6 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 it that my mother, why is it that the English public 
 at this day connect so false an image, that of high 
 cloudy antiquity, with the thrones of India ? It is 
 simply from an old habit of associating the spirit of 
 change and rapid revolution with the activities of 
 Europe, so that, by a natural reaction of thought, the 
 Orient is figured as the home of motionless monotony. 
 In things religious, in habits, in costume, it is so. 
 But so far otherwise in things political, that no 
 instance can be alleged of any dynasty or system 
 of government that has endured beyond a century 
 or two in the East. Taking India in particular, the 
 Mogul dynasty, established by Baber, the great- 
 grandson of Timour, did not subsist in any vigour 
 for two centuries ; and yet this was by far the most 
 durable of all established princely houses. Another 
 argument against England, urged by my mother (but 
 equally urged by the English people at this day), was, 
 that she had in no eminent sense been a benefactress 
 to India ; or, expressing it in words of later date, 
 that the only memorials of our rule, supposing us 
 suddenly ejected from India, would be vast heaps of 
 champagne bottles. I, on the other hand, alleged 
 that our benefits, like all truly great and lasting 
 benefits (religious benefits, for instance), must not be 
 sought in external memorials of stone and masonry. 
 Higher by far than the Mogul gifts of limestones, or 
 travelling stations, or even roads and tanks, were the 
 gifts of security, of peace, of law and settled order. 
 These blessings were travelling as fast as our rule 
 advanced. I could not then appeal to the cases of 
 Thuggee extirpated, of the Pindarees (full 15,000 
 bloody murderers) for ever exterminated, or of the 
 Mahrattas bridled for ever — a robber nation that 
 previously had descended at intervals with a force of 
 sometimes 150,000 troopers upon the afflicted pro- 
 vince of Bengal, and Oude its neighbour ; because 
 these were events as yet unborn. But they were the 
 natural extensions of that beneficent system on which 
 I rested my argument. 
 
 The two terrors of India at that particular time 
 
THE PRIORY 
 
 417 
 
 were Holkar and Scindiah (pronounced Sindy), who 
 were soon cut short in their career by the hostilities 
 which they provoked with us, but would else have 
 proved, in combination, a deadlier scourge to India 
 than either Hyder or his ferocious son. My mother, 
 in fact, a great reader of the poet Cowper, drew from 
 him her notions of Anglo-Indian policy and its effects. 
 Cowper, in his “ Task,” puts the question — 
 
 44 Is India free ? and does she wear her plumed 
 And je well’d turban with a smile of peace, 
 
 Or do we grind her still ?” 
 
 Pretty much the same authority it is which the British 
 public of this day has for its craze upon the subject 
 of English oppression amongst the Hindoos. 
 
 My uncle, meantime, who from his Indian ex- 
 perience should reasonably have known so much 
 better, was disposed, from the mere passive habits of 
 hearing and reading unresistingly so many assaults of 
 this tone against our Indian policy, to go along with 
 my mother. But he was too just, when forced into 
 reflection upon the subject, not to bend at times to 
 my way of stating the case for England. 
 
 Suddenly, however, our Indian discussions were 
 brought to a close by the following incident : My 
 uncle had brought with him to England some Arabian 
 horses, and amongst them a beautiful young Persian 
 mare, called Sumroo, the gentlest of her race. Sumroo 
 it was that he happened to be riding, upon a frosty 
 day. Unused to ice, she came down with him, and 
 broke his right leg. This accident laid him up for a 
 month, during which my mother and I read to him 
 by turns. One book, which one day fell to my share 
 by accident, was De Foe’s “Memoirs of a Cavalier.” 
 This book attempts to give a picture of the Parlia- 
 mentary War, but in some places an unfair, and 
 everywhere a most superficial account. I said so : 
 and my uncle, who had an old craze in behalf of the 
 book, opposed me with asperity ; and in the course 
 of what he said, under some movement of ill temper, 
 he asked me, in a way which ' I felt to be taunting, 
 
 o 
 
41 8 AUTOBIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES 
 
 how I could consent to waste my time as I did. 
 Without any answering warmth, I explained that my 
 guardians, having quarrelled with me, would not grant 
 for my use anything beyond my school allowance of 
 ^"ioo per annum. But was it not possible that even 
 this sum might by economy be made to meet the 
 necessities of the case ? I replied that, from what I 
 had heard, very probably it was. Would I undertake 
 an Oxford life upon such terms? Most gladly, I 
 said. Upon that opening, he spoke to my mother ; 
 and the result was that, within seven days from the 
 above conversation, I found myself entering that 
 time-honoured University. 
 
CONFESSIONS OF AN 
 ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 
 
 AUTHOR'S REVISED AND 
 ENLARGED EDITION OF 
 MDCCCLVI 
 
. 
 
 
 
PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL 
 EDITION OF 1822 
 
 TO THE READER 
 
 x here present you, courteous reader, with the 
 record of a remarkable period of my life : according 
 to my application of it, I trust it will prove not 
 merely an interesting record, but, in a considerable 
 degree, useful and instructive. In that hope it is 
 that I have drawn it up ; and that must be my 
 apology for breaking through that delicate and 
 honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains 
 us from the public exposure of our own errors and 
 infirmities. Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to 
 English feelings than the spectacle of a human being 
 obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers, or scars, 
 and tearing away that “ decent drapery ” which time, 
 or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn over 
 them : accordingly, the greater part of our confessions 
 (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) 
 proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers ; 
 and, for any such acts of gratuitous self-humiliation 
 from those who can be supposed in sympathy with 
 the decent and self-respecting part of society, we 
 must look to French literature, or to that part of the 
 German which is tainted with the spurious and 
 defective sensibility of the French. All this I feel 
 so forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach 
 of this tendency, that I have for many months hesi- 
 tated about the propriety of allowing this, or any 
 part of my narrative, to come before the public eye 
 until after my death (when, for many reasons, the 
 whole will be published) : and it is not without an 
 anxious review of the reasons for and against this 
 step that I have, at last, concluded on taking it. 
 
 421 
 
42 2 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from 
 public notice : they court privacy and solitude ; and, 
 even in their choice of a grave, will sometimes 
 sequester themselves from the general population of 
 the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship 
 with the great family of man, and wishing (in the 
 affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth) — - 
 
 “ humbly to express 
 
 A penitential loneliness.” 
 
 It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest of us 
 all, that it should be so ; nor would I willingly, in 
 my own person, manifest a disregard of such salutary 
 feelings ; nor in act or word do anything to weaken 
 them. But, on the one hand, as my self-accusation 
 does not amount to a confession of guilt, so, on the 
 other, it is possible that, if it did, the benefit resulting 
 to others, from the record of an experience purchased 
 at so heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast 
 overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings I 
 have noticed, and justify a breach of the general 
 rule. Infirmity and misery do not, of necessity, imply 
 guilt. They approach, or recede from, the shades 
 of that dark alliance, in proportion to the probable 
 motives and prospects of the offender, and the pallia- 
 tions, known or secret, of the offence ; in proportion 
 as the temptations to it were potent from the first, 
 and the resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest 
 to the last. For my own part, without breach of 
 truth or modesty, I may affirm that my life has been, 
 on the whole, the life of a philosopher : from my 
 birth I was made an intellectual creature ; and 
 intellectual in the highest sense my pursuits and 
 pleasures have been, even from my school-boy days. 
 If opium-eating be a sensual pleasure, and if I am 
 bound to confess that I have indulged in it to an 
 excess, not yet recorded 1 of any other man, it is no 
 
 1 “ Not yet recorded I say ; for there is one celebrated man 
 of the present day who, if all be true which is reported of him, 
 has greatly exceeded me in quantity. 
 
ORIGINAL PREFACE 
 
 423 
 
 less true that I have struggled against this fascinating 
 enthralment with a religious zeal, and have at length 
 accomplished what I never yet heard attributed to any 
 other man — have untwisted, almost to its final links, 
 the accursed chain which fettered me. Such a self- 
 conquest may reasonably be set off in counterbalance 
 to any kind or degree of self-indulgence. Not to 
 insist that, in my case, the self-conquest was un- 
 questionable, the self-indulgence open to doubts of 
 casuistry, according as that name shall be extended 
 to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall be 
 restricted to such as aim at the excitement of positive 
 pleasure. 
 
 Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge; and, if I 
 did, it is possible that I might still resolve on the 
 present act of confession, in consideration of the 
 service which I may thereby render to the whole 
 class of opium-eaters. But who are they ? Reader. 
 I am sorry to say, a very numerous class indeed. 
 Of this I became convinced, some years ago, by 
 computing, at that time, the number of those in 
 one small class of English society (the class of men 
 distinguished for talents, or of eminent station) who 
 were known to me, directly or indirectly, as opium- 
 eaters : such, for instance, as the eloquent and 
 
 benevolent ; the late Dean of : Lord 
 
 ; Mr. , the philosopher ; a late under- 
 secretary of state (who described to me the sensation 
 which first drove him to the use of opium in the very 
 
 same words as the Dean of , viz., “ that he felt 
 
 as though rats were gnawing and abrading the coats 
 
 of his stomach ”) ; Mr. ; and many others, 
 
 hardly less known, whom it would be tedious to men- 
 tion. Now, if one class, comparatively so limited, 
 could furnish so many scores of cases (and that 
 within the knowledge of one single inquirer), it was 
 a natural inference that the entire population of 
 England would furnish a proportionable number. 
 The soundness of this inference, however, I doubted 
 until some facts became known to me,, which satisfied 
 me that it was not incorrect. I will mention two. 
 
424 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 1. Three respectable London druggists, in widely 
 remote quarters of London, from whom I happened 
 lately to be purchasing small quantities of opium, 
 assured me that the number of amateur opium-eaters 
 (as I may term them) was, at this time, immense ; 
 and that the difficulty of distinguishing these persons, 
 to whom habit had rendered opium necessary, from 
 such as were purchasing it with a view to suicide, 
 occasioned them daily trouble and disputes. This 
 evidence respected London only. But, 2 (which will 
 possibly surprise the reader more), some years ago, 
 on passing through Manchester, I was informed by 
 several cotton manufacturers that their work-people 
 were rapidly getting into the practice of opium-eating ; 
 so much so, that on a Saturday afternoon the counters 
 of the druggists were strewed with pills of one, two, 
 or three grains, in preparation for the known demand 
 of the evening. The immediate occasion of this 
 practice was the lowness of wages, which, at that 
 time, would not allow them to indulge in ale or 
 spirits ; and, wages rising, it may be thought that 
 this practice would cease : but, as I do not readily 
 believe that any man, having once tasted the divine 
 luxuries of opium, will afterwards descend to the 
 gross and mortal enjoyments of alcohol, I take it 
 for granted — 
 
 “ That those eat now who never ate before, 
 
 And those who always ate now eat the more.” 
 
 Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are ad- 
 mitted even by medical writers, who are its greatest 
 enemies : thus, for instance, Awsiter, apothecary to 
 Greenwich Hospital, in his “ Essay on the Effects of 
 Opium” (published in the year 1763), when attempt- 
 ing to explain why Mead had not been sufficiently 
 explicit on the properties, counter-agents, &c., of this 
 drug, expresses himself in the following mysterious 
 terms (c/yuvavra o-vveTolcri) \ “Perhaps he thought the 
 subject of too delicate a nature to be made common ; 
 and, as many people might then indiscriminately use 
 it, it would take from that necessary fear and caution 
 
ORIGINAL PREFACE 425 
 
 which should prevent their experiencing the extensive 
 power of this drug ; for there are many properties in 
 it , if universally known, that would habituate the use, 
 and make it more in request with us than the Turks 
 themselves ; the result of which knowledge,” he adds, 
 “ must prove a general misfortune.” In the necessity 
 of this conclusion I do not altogether concur ; but 
 upon that point I shall have occasion to speak at the 
 close of my “ Confessions,” where I shall present the 
 reader with the moral of my narrative. 
 

 
 
 
 ' 
 
 ' 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
PREFATORY NOTICE TO THE NEW 
 AND ENLARGED EDITION OF 1856 
 
 When it had been settled that, in the general series 
 of these republications, the “ Confessions of an Eng- 
 lish Opium-Eater 57 should occupy the Fifth Volume, 
 I resolved to avail myself most carefully of the open- 
 ing thus made for a revision of the entire work. By 
 accident, a considerable part of the “ Confessions 77 
 (all, in short, except the Dreams) had originally been 
 written hastily ; and, from various causes, had 
 never received any strict revision, or, virtually , so 
 much as an ordinary verbal correction. But a great 
 deal more was wanted than this. The main narrative 
 should naturally have moved through a succession of 
 secondary incidents ; and, with leisure for recalling 
 these, it might have been greatly inspirited. Want- 
 ing all opportunity for such advantages, this narra- 
 tive had been needlessly impoverished. And thus it 
 had happened that not so properly correction and 
 retrenchment were called for as integration of what 
 had been left imperfect, or amplification of what, 
 from the first, had been insufficiently expanded. 
 
 With these views, it would not have been difficult 
 (though toilsome) to re-cast the little work in a 
 better mould ; and the result might, in all reason, 
 count upon the approbation at least of its own former 
 readers. Compared with its own former self, the 
 book must certainly tend, by its very principle of 
 change, whatever should be the execution of that 
 change, to become better : and in my own opinion, 
 after all drawbacks and allowances for the faulty ex- 
 emplification of a good principle, it is better. This 
 should be a matter of mere logical or inferential 
 necessity ; since, in pure addition to everything 
 previously approved, there would now be a clear 
 surplus of extra matter — all that might be good in 
 
42 5 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the old work, and a great deal beside that was 
 new. Meantime this improvement had been won at 
 a price of labour and suffering that, if they could be 
 truly stated, would seem incredible. A nervous 
 malady, of very peculiar character, which has at- 
 tacked me intermittingly for the last eleven years, 
 came on in May last, almost concurrently with the 
 commencement of this revision ; and so obstinately 
 has this malady pursued its noiseless, and what I 
 may call subterraneous, siege, since none of the symp- 
 toms are externally manifested, that, although pretty 
 nearly dedicating myself to this one solitary labour, 
 and . not intermitting or relaxing it for a single day, I 
 have yet spent, within a very few days, six calendar 
 months upon the re-cast of this one small volume. 
 
 The consequences have been distressing to all 
 concerned. The press has groaned under the 
 chronic visitation ; the compositors shudder at the 
 sight of my handwriting, though not objectionable 
 on the score of legibility ; and I have much reason 
 to fear that, on days when the pressure of my com- 
 plaint has been heaviest, I may have so far given 
 way to it as to have suffered greatly in clearness of 
 critical vision. Sometimes I may have overlooked 
 blunders, mis-statements, or repetitions, implicit or 
 even 'express. But more often I may have failed 
 to appreciate the true effects from faulty manage- 
 ment of style and its colourings. Sometimes, for 
 instance, a heavy or too intricate arrangement of 
 sentences may have defeated the tendency of what, 
 under its natural presentation, would have been 
 affecting ; or it is possible enough that, by unseason- 
 able levity at other times, I may have repelled the 
 sympathy of my readers — all or some. Endless are 
 the openings for such kinds of mistake — that is, of 
 mistakes not fully seen as such. % But, even in a case 
 of unequivocal mistake, seen and acknowledged, yet, 
 when it is open to remedy only through a sudden 
 and energetic act then or never, — the press being 
 for twenty minutes, suppose, free to receive an 
 alteration, but beyond that time closed and sealed 
 
PREFACE TO ENLARGED EDITION 429 
 
 inexorably : such being supposed the circumstances, 
 the humane reader will allow for the infirmity which 
 even wilfully and consciously surrenders itself to the 
 error, acquiescing in it deliberately rather than face 
 the cruel exertion of correcting it most elaborately 
 at a moment of sickening misery, and with the 
 prevision that the main correction must draw after 
 it half-a-dozen others for the sake of decent con- 
 sistency. I am not speaking under any present 
 consciousness of such a case existing against myself : 
 I believe there is none such. But I choose to 
 suppose an extreme case of even conscious error, 
 in order that venial cases of oversight may, under 
 shelter of such an outside license, find toleration 
 from a liberal critic. To fight up against a wearing 
 siege of an abiding sickness imposes a fiery combat. 
 I attempt no description of this combat, knowing 
 the unintelligibility and the repulsiveness of all 
 attempts to communicate the incommunicable. But 
 the generous reader will not, for that forbearance on my 
 part, the less readily show his indulgence, if a case 
 should (unexpectedly to myself) arise for claiming it. 
 
 I have thus made the reader acquainted with one 
 out of two cross currents that tended to thwart my 
 efforts for improving this little work. There was, 
 meantime, another, less open to remedy from my 
 own uttermost efforts. All along I had relied upon 
 a crowning grace, which I had reserved for the final 
 pages of this volume, in a succession of some twenty 
 or twenty-five dreams and noonday visions, which 
 had arisen under the latter stages of opium influence. 
 These have disappeared : some under circumstances 
 which allow me a reasonable prospect of recovering 
 them ; some unaccountably ; and some dishonour- 
 ably. Five or six, I believe, were burned in a sudden 
 conflagration which arose from the spark of a candle 
 falling unobserved amongst a very large pile of 
 papers in a bedroom, when I was alone and reading. 
 Falling not on , but amongst and within the papers, 
 the fire would soon have been £ihead of conflict ; and, 
 by communicating with the slight woodwork and 
 
430 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 draperies of the bed, it would have immediately 
 enveloped the laths of a ceiling overhead, and thus 
 the house, far from fire-engines, would have been 
 burned down in half-an hour. My attention was 
 first drawn by a sudden light upon my book : and 
 the whole difference between a total destruction of 
 the premises and a trivial loss (from books charred) 
 of five guineas was due to a large Spanish cloak. 
 This, thrown over, and then drawn down tightly, 
 by the aid of one sole person, somewhat agitated, 
 but retaining her presence of mind, effectually ex- 
 tinguished the fire. Amongst the papers burned 
 partially, but not so burned as to be absolutely 
 irretrievable, was the “ Daughter of Lebanon ” ; and 
 this I have printed, and have intentionally placed 
 it at the end, as appropriately closing a record in 
 which the case of poor Ann the Outcast formed not 
 only the most memorable and the most suggestively 
 pathetic incident, but also that which, more than any 
 other, coloured — or (more truly I should say) shaped, 
 moulded and remoulded, composed and decomposed 
 — the great body of opium dreams. The search 
 after the lost features of Ann, which I spoke of as 
 pursued in the crowds of London, was in a more 
 proper sense pursued through many a year in dreams. 
 The general idea of a search and a chase reproduced 
 itself in many shapes. The person, the rank, the 
 age, the scenical position, all varied themselves for 
 ever ; but the same leading traits more or less 
 faintly remained of a lost Pariah woman, and of some 
 shadowy malice which withdrew her, or attempted to 
 withdraw her, from restoration and from hope. Such 
 is the explanation which I offer why that particular 
 addition which some of my friends had been 
 authorised to look for has not in the main been 
 given, nor for the present could be given ; and, 
 secondly, why that part which is given has been 
 placed in the conspicuous situation (as a closing 
 passage) which it now occupies. 
 
 A ov ember 1856 . 
 
CONFESSIONS OF AN 
 ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 
 
 PART ONE 
 
 PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 
 
 I have often been asked how it was, and through 
 what series of steps, that I became an opium-eater. 
 Was it gradually, tentatively, mistrustingly, as one 
 goes down a shelving beach into a deepening sea, 
 and with a knowledge from the first of the dangers 
 lying on that path ; half courting those dangers, in 
 fact, whilst seeming to defy them ? Or was it, 
 secondly, in pure ignorance of such dangers, under 
 the misleadings of mercenary fraud ? since often- 
 times lozenges for the relief of pulmonary affections 
 found their efficacy upon the opium which they con- 
 tain, — upon this, and this only, though clamorously 
 disavowing so suspicious an alliance, — and under 
 such treacherous disguises multitudes are seduced 
 into a dependency which they had not foreseen upon 
 a drug which they had not known ; not known even 
 by name or by sight : and thus the case is not rare 
 that the chain of abject slavery is first detected when 
 it has inextricably wound itself about the constitutional 
 system. Thirdly, and lastly, was it ( Yes, by passionate 
 anticipation, I answer, before the question is finished) 
 — was it on a sudden, overmastering impulse derived 
 from bodily anguish ? Loudly I repeat, Yes ; loudly 
 and indignantly — as in answer to a wilful calumny. 
 Simply as an anodyne it was, under the mere coercion 
 431 
 
432 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 of pain the severest, that I first resorted to opium 
 and precisely that same torment it is, or some variety 
 of that torment, which drives most people to make 
 acquaintance with that same insidious remedy. Such 
 was the fact ; such by accident. Meantime, without 
 blame it might have been otherwise. If in early days I 
 had fully understood the subtle powers lodged in this 
 mighty drug (when judiciously regulated), (i) to tran- 
 quillise all irritations of the nervous system ; (2) to 
 stimulate the capacities of enjoyment ; and (3) under 
 any call for extraordinary exertion (such as all men 
 meet at times) to sustain through twenty-four conse- 
 cutive hours the else drooping animal energies — most 
 certainly, knowing or suspecting all this, I should 
 have inaugurated my opium career in the character of 
 one seeking extra power and enjoyment, rather than 
 of one shrinking from extra torment. And why not ? 
 If that argued any fault, is it not a ’ fault that most 
 of us commit every day with regard to alcohol ? Are 
 we entitled to use that only as a medicine ? Is wine 
 unlawful except as an anodyne ? I hope not : else I 
 shall be obliged to counterfeit and to plead some 
 anomalous tic in my little finger ; and thus gradually, 
 as in any Ovidian metamorphosis, I, that am at 
 present a truth-loving man, shall change by daily 
 inches into a dissembler. No : the whole race of 
 man proclaim it lawful to drink wine without pleading 
 a medical certificate as a qualification. That same 
 license extends itself therefore to the use of opium ; 
 what a man may lawfully seek in wine surely he may 
 lawfully find in opium ; and much more so in those 
 many cases (of which mine happens to be one) where 
 opium deranges the animal economy less by a great 
 deal than an equivalent quantity of alcohol. Cole- 
 ridge, therefore, was doubly in error when he allowed 
 himself to aim most unfriendly blows at my supposed 
 voluptuousness in the use of opium j in error as to a 
 principle, and in error as to a fact. A letter of his, 
 which I will hope that he did not design to have 
 published, but which, however, has been published, 
 points the attention of his correspondent to a broad 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 
 
 433 
 
 distinction separating my case as an opium-eater from 
 his own. He, it seems, had fallen excusably (because 
 unavoidably) into this habit of eating opium — as the 
 one sole therapeutic resource available against his 
 particular malady ; but I, wretch that I am, being so 
 notoriously charmed by fairies against pain, must 
 have resorted to opium in the abominable character 
 of an adventurous voluptuary, angling in all streams 
 for variety of pleasures. Coleridge is wrong to the 
 whole extent of what was possible ; wrong in his fact, 
 wrong in his doctrine ; in his little fact, and his big 
 doctrine. I did not do the thing which he charges 
 upon me ; and, if I had done it, this would not convict 
 me as a citizen of Sybaris or Daphne. There never 
 was a distinction more groundless and visionary than 
 that which it has pleased him to draw between my 
 motives and his own ; nor could Coleridge have pos- 
 sibly owed this mis-statement to any false information ; 
 since no man sn.rely, on a question of my own private 
 experience, could have pretended to be better in- 
 formed than myself. Or, if there really is such a 
 person, perhaps he will not think it too much trouble 
 to re-write these Confessions from first to last, correct- 
 ing their innumerable faults ; and, as it happens that 
 some parts of the unpublished sections for the present 
 are missing, would he kindly restore them — brighten- 
 ing the colours that may have faded, rekindling the 
 inspiration that may have drooped ; filling up all 
 those chasms which else are likely to remain as per- 
 manent disfigurations of my little work ? Meantime 
 the reader who takes any interest in such a question 
 will find that I myself (upon such a theme not simply 
 the best, but surely the sole authority) have, without 
 a shadow of \ iriation, always given a different account 
 of the matter. Most truly I have told the reader 
 that not any search after pleasure, but mere extremity 
 of pain from rheumatic toothache — this and nothing 
 else it was that first drove me into the use of opium. 
 Coleridge’s bodily affliction was simply rheumatism. 
 Mine, which intermittingly raged for ten years, was 
 rheumatism in the face combined with toothache. 
 
434 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 This I had inherited from my father ; or inherited (I 
 should rather say) from my own desperate ignorance ; 
 since a trifling dose of colocynth, or of any similar 
 medicine, taken three times a week, would more cer- 
 tainly than opium have delivered me from that terrific 
 curse . 1 In this ignorance, however, which misled 
 me into making war upon toothache when ripened 
 and manifesting itself in effects of pain, rather than 
 upon its germs and gathering causes, I did but follow 
 the rest of the world. To intercept the evil whilst 
 yet in elementary stages of formation was the true 
 policy ; whereas I in my blindness sought only for 
 some mitigation to the evil when already formed, and 
 past all reach of interception. In this stage of the 
 suffering, formed and perfect, I was thrown passively 
 upon chance advice, and therefore, by a natural 
 consequence, upon opium — that being the one 
 sole anodyne that is almost notoriously such, and 
 which in that great function is universally appre- 
 ciated. 
 
 1 “ That terrific curse”: — Two things blunt the general 
 sense of horror would else connect itself with toothache : viz., 
 first, its enormous diffusion ; hardly a household in Europe 
 being clear of it, each in turn having some one chamber inter- 
 mittingly echoing the groans extorted by this cruel torture. 
 There — viz., in its ubiquity — lies one cause of its slight valua- 
 tion. A second cause is found in its immunity from danger. This 
 latter ground of undervaluation is noticed in a saying ascribed 
 (but on what authority I know not) to Sir Philip Sidney — viz., 
 that, supposing toothache liable in ever so small a proportion 
 of its cases to a fatal issue, it would be generally ranked as the 
 most dreadful amongst human maladies ; whereas the certainty 
 that it will in no extremity lead to death, and the knowledge 
 that in the very midst of its storms sudden changes may be 
 looked for bringing long halcyon calms, have an unfair effect in 
 lowering the appreciation of this malady considered as a trial of 
 fortitude and patience. No stronger expression of its intensity 
 and scorching fierceness can be imagined than this fact — that, 
 within my private knowledge, two persons who had suffered 
 alike under toothache and cancer have pronounced the former 
 to be, on the scale of torture, by many degrees the worse. In 
 both, there are at times what surgeons call “ lancinating” pangs 
 — keen, glancing, arrowy radiations of anguish ; and upon these 
 the basis of comparison was rested — paroxysm against paroxysm 
 — with the result that I have stated. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 435 
 
 Coleridge, therefore, and myself, as regards our 
 baptismal initiation into the use of that mighty drug, 
 occupy the very same position. We are embarked 
 in the self-same boat ; nor is it within the compass 
 even of angelic hair-splitting to show that the dark 
 shadow thrown by our several trespasses in this field, 
 mine and his, had by so much as a pin’s point any 
 assignable difference. Trespass against trespass (if 
 any trespass there were) — shadow against shadow 
 (if any shadow were really thrown by this trespass 
 over the snowy disk of pure ascetic morality) — in 
 any case, that act in either of us would read into the 
 same meaning, would count up as a debt into the 
 same value, would measure as a delinquency into 
 the same burden of responsibility. And vainly, 
 indeed, does Coleridge attempt to differentiate two 
 cases which ran into absolute identity, differing only 
 as rheumatism differs from toothache. Amongst the 
 admirers of Coleridge, I at all times stood in the 
 foremost rank ; and the more was my astonishment 
 at being summoned so often to witness his careless- 
 ness in the management of controversial questions, 
 and his demoniac inaccuracy in the statement of 
 facts. The more also was my sense of Coleridge’s 
 wanton injustice in relation to myself individually. 
 Coleridge’s gross mis-statement of facts, in regard to 
 our several opium experiences, had its origin, some- 
 times in flighty reading, sometimes in partial and 
 incoherent reading, sometimes in subsequent forget- 
 fulness ; and any one of these lax habits (it will occur 
 to the reader) is a venial infirmity. Certainly it is ; 
 but surely not venial when it is allowed to operate 
 disadvantageous^ upon the character for self-control 
 of a brother, who had never spoken of him but in the 
 spirit of enthusiastic admiration ; of that admiration 
 which his exquisite works so amply challenge. Ima- 
 gine the case that I really had done something 
 wrong, still it would have been ungenerous — me it 
 would have saddened, I confess, to see Coleridge 
 rushing forward with a public denunciation of my 
 fault : “ Know all men by these presents that I, 
 
436 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 S. T. C., a noticeable man with large grey eyes , 1 am a 
 licensed opium-eater, whereas this other . man is a 
 buccaneer, a pirate, a flibustier , 2 and can have none 
 but a forged licence in his disreputable pocket. In 
 the name of Virtue, arrest him ! ” But the truth is, 
 that inaccuracy as to facts and citations from books 
 was in Coleridge a mere necessity of nature. Not 
 three days ago, in reading a short comment of the 
 late Archdeacon Hare (“Guesses at Truth”) upon a 
 bold speculation of Coleridge’s (utterly baseless) with 
 respect to the machinery of Etonian Latin verses, I 
 found my old feelings upon this subject refreshed by 
 an instance that is irresistibly comic, since everything 
 that Coleridge had relied upon as a citation from a 
 book in support of his own hypothesis turns out to 
 be a pure fabrication of his own dreams ; though, 
 doubtless (which indeed it is that constitutes the 
 characteristic interest of the case), without a suspicion 
 on his part of his own furious romancing. The 
 archdeacon’s good-natured smile upon that Etonian 
 case naturally reminded me of the case now before 
 us, with regard to the history of our separate careers 
 as opium-eaters. Upon which case I need say no 
 more, as by this time the reader is aware that Cole- 
 ridge’s entire statement upon that subject is perfect 
 moonshine, and, like the sculptured imagery of the 
 pendulous lamp in “ Christabel,” 
 
 “ All carved from the carver’s brain.” 
 
 This case, therefore, might now be counted on as 
 disposed of ; and what sport it could yield might 
 
 1 See Wordsworth’s exquisite picture of S. T. C. and himself 
 as occasional denizens in the “ Castle of Indolence.” 
 
 2 This word — in common use, and so spelled as I spell it, 
 amongst the grand old French and English buccaneers con- 
 temporary with our own admirable Dampier, at the close of 
 the seventeenth century — has recently been revived in the 
 journals of the United States, with a view to the special case 
 of Cuba, but (for what reason I know not) is now written 
 always as filli busters. Meantime, written in whatsoever way, 
 it is understood to be a Franco-Spanish corruption of the 
 English word freebooter. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 437 
 
 reasonably be thought exhausted. Meantime, on 
 consideration, another and much deeper oversight of 
 Coleridge’s becomes apparent ; and, as this connects 
 itself with an aspect of the case that furnishes the 
 foundation to the whole of these ensuing Confessions, 
 it cannot altogether be neglected. Any attentive 
 reader, after a few moments’ reflection, will perceive 
 that, whatever may have been the casual occasion of 
 mine or Coleridge’s opium-eating, this could not 
 have been the permanent ground of opium-eating ; 
 because neither rheumatism nor toothache is any 
 abiding affection of the system. Both are intermitting 
 maladies, and not at all capable of accounting for a 
 permanent habit of opium-eating. Some months 
 are requisite to found that. Making allowance for 
 constitutional differences, I should say that in less 
 than 120 days no habit of opium-eating could be 
 formed strong enough to call for any extraordinary 
 self-conquest in renouncing it, and even suddenly 
 renouncing it. On Saturday you are an opium- 
 eater, on Sunday no longer such. What then was 
 it, after all, that made Coleridge a slave to opium, 
 and a slave that could not break his chain ? He 
 fancies, in his headlong carelessness, that he has 
 accounted for this habit and this slavery ; and in 
 the meantime he has accounted for nothing at all 
 about which any question has arisen. Rheumatism, 
 he says, drove him to opium. Very well ; but with 
 proper medical treatment the rheumatism would soon 
 have ceased ; or even without medical treatment, 
 under the ordinary oscillations of natural causes. 
 And when the pain ceased, then the opium should 
 have ceased. Why did it not ? Because Coleridge 
 had come to taste the genial pleasure of opium ; and 
 thus the very impeachment which he fancied himself 
 in some mysterious way to have evaded recoils upon 
 him in undiminished force. The rheumatic attack 
 would have retired before the habit could have had 
 time to form itself. Or suppose that I underrate the 
 strength of the possible habit — this tells equally in 
 my favour ; and Coleridge was not entitled to forget 
 
438 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 in my case a plea remembered in his own. It is 
 
 really memorable in the annals of human self- 
 deceptions that Coleridge could have held such 
 language in the face of such facts. I, boasting not 
 at all of my self-conquests, and owning no, moral 
 argument against the free use of opium, nevertheless 
 on mere prudential motives break through the vassal- 
 age more than once, and by efforts which I have 
 recorded as modes of transcendent 'suffering. Cole- 
 ridge, professing to believe (without reason assigned) 
 that opium-eating is criminal, and in some mysterious 
 sense more criminal than wine-drinking or porter- 
 drinking, — having, therefore, the strongest moral 
 motive for abstaining from it, — yet suffers himself 
 to fall into a captivity to this same wicked opium, 
 deadlier than was ever heard of, and under no 
 coercion whatever that he has anywhere explained 
 to us. A slave he was to this potent drug not less 
 abject than Caliban to Prospero — his detested and 
 yet despotic master. Like Caliban, he frets his very 
 heart-strings against the rivets of his chain. Still, at 
 intervals through the gloomy vigils of his prison, you 
 hear muttered growls of impotent mutineering swelling 
 upon the breeze : 
 
 “ Irasque Ieonum 
 Vincla recusantum ” 
 
 recusantum , it is true, still refusing yet still accepting, 
 protesting for ever against the fierce, overmastering 
 curb-chain, yet for ever submitting to receive it into 
 the mouth. It is notorious that in Bristol (to that 
 I can speak myself, but probably in many other 
 places) he went so far as to hire men — porters, 
 hackney-coachmen, and others — to oppose by force 
 his entrance into any druggist’s shop. But, as the 
 authority for stopping him was derived simply from 
 himself, naturally these poor men found themselves 
 in a metaphysical fix, not provided for even by 
 Thomas Aquinas or by the prince of Jesuitical 
 casuists. And in this excruciating dilemma would 
 occur such scenes as the following : — 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 
 
 439 
 
 “ Oh, sir,” would plead the suppliant porter — 
 suppliant, yet semi-imperative (for equally if he did, 
 and if he did not , show fight, the poor man’s daily 
 5 s. seemed endangered) — “really you must not; 
 
 consider, sir, your wife and ” 
 
 Transcendental Philosopher . “ Wife ! what wife ? 
 
 I have no wife .” 1 
 
 Porter. “ But, really now, you must not, sir. 
 
 Didn’t you say no longer ago than yesterday ” 
 
 Tra7iscend. Philos. “ Pooh, pooh ! yesterday is a 
 long time ago. Are you aware, my man, that people 
 are known to have dropped down dead for timely 
 want of opium ? ” 
 
 Porter. “ Ay, but you tell’t me not to hearken ” 
 
 Transcend. Philos. “Oh, nonsense! An emergency, 
 a shocking emergency, has arisen — quite unlooked 
 for. No matter what I told you in times long past. 
 That which I now tell you is — that, if you don’t 
 remove that arm of yours from the doorway of this 
 most respectable druggist, I shall have a good ground 
 of action against you for assault and battery.” 
 
 Am I the man to reproach Coleridge with this 
 vassalage to opium ? Heaven forbid ! Plaving 
 groaned myself under that yoke, I pity, and blame 
 him not. But, undeniably, such a vassalage must 
 have been created wilfully and consciously by his 
 own craving after genial stimulation ; a thing which I 
 do not blame, but Coleridge did. For my own part, 
 duly as the torment relaxed in relief of which I had 
 resorted to opium, I laid aside the opium, not under 
 any meritorious effort of self-conquest ; nothing of 
 that sort do I pretend to ; but simply on a prudential 
 instinct warning me not to trifle with an engine so 
 awful of consolation and support, nor to waste upon 
 a momentary uneasiness what might eventually prove, 
 in the midst of all-shattering hurricanes, the great 
 elixir of resurrection. What was it that did in reality 
 make me an opium-eater ? That affection which 
 finally drove me into the habitual use of opium, what 
 
 1 Vide “ Othello. 
 
44 ° CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 was it? Pain was it? No, but misery. Casual 
 overcasting of sunshine was it ? No, but blank 
 desolation. Gloom was it that might have departed ? 
 No, but settled and abiding darkness — 
 
 “ Total eclipse, 
 
 Without all hope of day ! ” 1 
 
 Yet whence derived? Caused by what? Caused, 
 as I might truly plead, by youthful distresses in 
 London, were it not that these distresses were due, 
 in their ultimate origin, to my own unpardonable 
 folly ; and to that folly I trace many ruins. Oh, 
 spirit of merciful interpretation, angel of forgiveness 
 to youth and its aberrations, that hearkenest for ever 
 as if to some sweet choir of far-off female interces- 
 sions ! will ye, choir that intercede — wilt thou, angel 
 that forgivest — join together, and charm away that 
 mighty phantom, born amidst the gathering mists of 
 remorse, which strides after me in pursuit from for- 
 gotten days — towering for ever into proportions more 
 and more colossal, overhanging and overshadowing 
 my head as if close behind, yet dating its nativity 
 from hours that are fled by more than half a century ? 
 Oh heavens ! that it should be possible for a child 
 not seventeen years old, by a momentary blindness, 
 by listening to a false, false whisper from his own 
 bewildered heart, by one erring step, by a motion 
 this way or that, to change the currents of his destiny, 
 to poison the fountains of his peace, and in the 
 twinkling of an eye to lay the foundations of a life- 
 long repentance ! Yet, alas ! I must abide by the 
 realities of the case. And one thing is clear, — that, 
 amidst such bitter self-reproaches as are now extorted 
 from me by the anguish of my recollections, it cannot 
 be with any purpose of weaving plausible excuses, or 
 of evading blame, that I trace the origin of my con- 
 firmed opium-eating to a necessity growing out of my 
 early sufferings in the streets of London. Because, 
 though true it is that the re-agency of these London 
 
 1 ‘ 4 Samson Agonistes. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 44 1 
 
 sufferings did in after years e? force the use of opium,, 
 equally it is true that the sufferings themselves grew 
 out of my own folly. What really calls for excuse is 
 not the recourse to opium, when opium had become 
 the one sole remedy available for the malady, but 
 those follies which had themselves produced that 
 malady. 
 
 I, for my part, after I had become a regular opium- 
 eater, and from mismanagement had fallen into 
 miserable excesses in the use of opium, did never- 
 theless, four several times, contend successfully 
 against the dominion of this drug ; did four several 
 times renounce it ; renounced it for long intervals ; 
 and finally resumed it upon the warrant of my en- 
 lightened and deliberate judgment, as being of two 
 evils by very much the least. In this I acknowdedge 
 nothing that calls for excuse. I repeat again and 
 again that not the application of opium, with its deep 
 tranquillising powers to the mitigation of evils, be- 
 queathed by my London hardships, is what reasonably 
 calls for sorrow, but that extravagance of childish 
 folly which precipitated me into scenes naturally pro- 
 ducing such hardships. 
 
 These scenes I am now called upon to retrace. 
 Possibly they are sufficiently interesting to merit, 
 even on their own account, some short record ; but . 
 at present, and at this point, they have become 
 indispensable as a key to the proper understanding of 
 all which follows. For in these incidents of my early 
 life is found the entire substratum, together with the 
 secret and underlying motive , 1 of those pompous 
 dreams and dream-sceneries which were in reality the 
 true objects — first and last — contemplated in these 
 Confessions. 
 
 My father died when I was in my seventh year, 
 leaving six children, including myself (viz., four sons 
 
 1 “Motive ” : — The word motive is here used in the sense 
 attached by artists and connoisseurs to the technical word 
 motivo , applied to pictures, or to the separate movements in a 
 musical theme. 
 
44 2 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 and two daughters), to the care of four guardians, 
 and of our mother, who was invested with the legal 
 authority of a guardian. This word “ guardian ” 
 kindles a fiery thrilling in my nerves ; so much was 
 that special power of guardianship, as wielded by one 
 of the four, concerned in the sole capital error of my 
 boyhood. To this error my own folly would hardly 
 have been equal, unless by concurrence with the 
 obstinacy of others. From the bitter remembrance 
 of this error in myself — of this obstinacy in my 
 hostile guardian — suffer me to draw the privilege of 
 making a moment’s pause upon this subject of legal 
 guardianship. 
 
 There is not (I believe) in human society, under 
 whatever form of civilisation, any trust or delegated 
 duty which has more often been negligently or even 
 perfidiously administered. In the days of classical 
 Greece and Rome, my own private impression, 
 founded on the collation of many incidental notices, 
 is — that this, beyond all other forms of domestic 
 authority, furnished to wholesale rapine and pecula- 
 tion their very amplest arena. The relation of father 
 and son, as was that of patron and client , was generally, 
 in the practice of life, cherished with religious fidelity : 
 whereas the solemn duties of the tutor (i.e., the 
 guardian) to his ward, which had their very root and 
 origin in the tenderest adjurations of a dying friend, 
 though subsequently refreshed by the hourly spectacle 
 of helpless orphanage playing round the margins of 
 pitfalls hidden by flowers, spoke but seldom to the 
 sensibilities of a Roman through any language of 
 oracular power. Few indeed, if any, were the obliga- 
 tions in a proper sense moral which pressed upon the 
 Roman. The main fountains of moral obligation 
 had in Rome, by law or by custom, been thoroughly 
 poisoned. Marriage had corrupted itself through the 
 facility of divorce,, and through the consequences of 
 that facility (viz., levity in choosing, and fickleness in 
 adhering to the choice), into so exquisite a traffic 
 of selfishness that it could not yield so much as a 
 phantom model of sanctity. The relation of husband 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 443 
 
 and wife had, for all moral impressions, perished 
 amongst the Romans. The relation of father and 
 child had all its capacities of holy tenderness crushed 
 out of it under the fierce pressure of penal and vin- 
 dictive enforcements. The duties of the client to his 
 patron stood upon no basis of simple gratitude or 
 simple fidelity (corresponding to the feudal fealty ), 
 but upon a basis of prudential terror ; terror from 
 positive law, or from social opinion. From the first 
 intermeddling of law with the movement of the 
 higher moral affections, there is an end to freedom 
 in the act — to purity in the motive — to dignity in 
 the personal relation. Accordingly, in the France of 
 the pre-revolutionary period, and in the China of 
 all periods, it has been with baleful effects to the 
 national morals that positive law has come in aid of 
 the paternal rights. And in the Rome of ancient 
 history it may be said that this one original and 
 rudimental wrong done to the holy freedom of 
 human affections had the effect of extinguishing 
 thenceforward all conscientious movement in whatever 
 direction. And thus, amongst a people naturally 
 more highly principled than the Greeks, if you except 
 ebullitions of public spirit and patriotism (too often 
 of mere ignoble nationality), no class of actions stood 
 upon any higher basis of motive than (1) legal ordi- 
 nance, (2) superstitious fear, or (3) servile compliance 
 with the insolent exactions of popular usage. Strange, 
 therefore, it would have been if the tutor of obscure 
 orphans, with extra temptations, and extra facilities 
 for indulging them, should have shown himself more 
 faithful to his trust than the governor of provinces — 
 praetorian or proconsular. Yet who more treacherous 
 and rapacious than he ? Rarest of men was the 
 upright governor that accepted no bribes from the 
 criminal, and extorted no ransoms from the timid. 
 He nevertheless, as a public trustee, was watched by 
 the jealousy of political competitors, and had by 
 possibility a solemn audit to face in the senate or in 
 the forum ; perhaps in both. But the tutor, who 
 administered a private trust on behalf of orphans, 
 
444 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 might count on the certainty that no public attention 
 could ever be attracted to concerns so obscure, and 
 politically so uninteresting. Reasonably, therefore, 
 and by all analogy, a Roman must have regarded the 
 ordinary domestic tutor as almost inevitably a secret 
 delinquent using the opportunities and privileges of 
 his office as mere instruments for working spoliation 
 and ruin upon the inheritance confided to his care. 
 This deadly and besetting evil of Pagan days must 
 have deepened a hundredfold the glooms overhang- 
 ing the deathbeds of parents. Too often the dying 
 father could not fail to read in his own lifelong 
 experience that, whilst seeking special protection for 
 his children, he might himself be introducing amongst 
 them a separate and imminent danger. Leaving be- 
 hind him a little household of infants, a little fleet 
 (as it might be represented) of fairy pinnaces, just 
 raising their anchors in preparation for crossing the 
 mighty deeps of life, he made signals for “ convoy.” 
 Some one or two (at best imperfectly known to 
 him), amongst those who traversed the same seas, he 
 accepted in that character ; but doubtfully, sorrow- 
 fully, fearfully ; and, at the very moment when the 
 faces of his children were disappearing amongst the 
 vapours of death, the miserable thought would cross 
 his prophetic soul that too probably this pretended 
 “ convoy,” under the strong temptations of the case, 
 might eventually become pirates ; robbers, at the 
 least ; and by possibility wilful misleaders to the in- 
 experience of his children. 
 
 From this dreadful aggravation of the anguish at 
 any rate besetting the deathbeds of parents sum- 
 moned away from a group of infant children, there 
 has been a mighty deliverance wrought in a course 
 of centuries by the vasj diffusion of Christianity. In 
 these days, wheresoever an atmosphere is breathed 
 that has been purified by Christian charities and 
 Christian principles, this household pestilence has 
 been continually dwindling : and in the England 
 of this generation there is no class of peculation 
 which we so seldom hear of : one proof of which 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 445 
 
 is found in the indifference with which most of us 
 regard the absolute security offered to children by 
 the Court of Chancery. My father, therefore, as 
 regarded the quiet of his dying hours, benefited by 
 the felicity of his times and his country. He made 
 the best selection for the future guardianship of his 
 six children that his opportunities allowed ; from his 
 circle of intimate friends, he selected the four who 
 stood highest in his estimation for honour and prac- 
 tical wisdom : which done, and relying for the re- 
 dressing of any harsh tendencies in male guardians 
 upon the discretional power lodged in my mother, 
 thenceforth he rested from his anxieties. Not one 
 of these guardians but justified his choice so far as 
 honour and integrity were concerned. Yet, after all, 
 there is a limit (and sooner reached perhaps in Eng- 
 land than in other divisions of Christendom) to the 
 good that can be achieved in such cases by prospective 
 wisdom. For we, in England, more absolutely than 
 can be asserted of any other nation, are not faineans : 
 rich and poor, all of us have something to do. To 
 Italy it is that we must look for a peasantry idle 
 through two-thirds of their time. To Spain it is that 
 we must look for an aristocracy physically 1 degraded 
 under the ignoble training of women and priests, and 
 for princes (such as Ferdinand VII.) that make it the 
 glory of their lives to have embroidered a petticoat. 
 Amongst ourselves of this current generation, whilst 
 those functions of guardianship may be surely counted 
 on which presume conscientious loyalty to the in- 
 terests of their wards, on the other hand all which 
 presume continued vigilance and provision from afar 
 are, in simple truth, hardly compatible with our 
 
 1 It is asserted by travellers — English, French, and German 
 alike — that the ducal order in Spain (as that order of the 
 Spanish peerage most carefully withdrawn from what Ken- 
 tucky would call the rough-and-tumble discipline of a popular 
 education) exhibit in their very persons and bodily develop- 
 ment undisguised evidences of effeminate habits operating 
 through many generations. It would be satisfactory to know 
 the unexaggerated truth on this point, the truth unbiassed 
 alike by national and by democratic prejudices. 
 
446 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 English state of society. The guardians chosen by 
 my father, had they been the wisest and also the most 
 energetic of men, could not in many conceivable 
 emergencies have fulfilled his secret wishes. Of the 
 four men, one was a merchant (not in the narrow 
 sense of Scotland, derived originally from France, 
 where no class of merchant princes has ever existed, 
 but in the large noble sense of England, of Florence, 
 of Venice) : consequently, his extensive relations with 
 seaports and distant colonies continually drawing off 
 his attention, and even his personal presence, from 
 domestic affairs, made it hopeless that he should 
 even attempt more on behalf of his wards than 
 slightly to watch the administration of their pecu- 
 niary interests. A second of our guardians was a 
 rural magistrate, but in a populous district close upon 
 Manchester, which even at that time was belted with 
 a growing body of turbulent aliens — Welsh and Irish. 
 He therefore, overwhelmed by the distractions of his 
 official station, rightly perhaps conceived himself to 
 have fulfilled his engagements as a guardian if he 
 stood ready to come forward upon any difficulty 
 arising, but else in ordinary cases devolved his func- 
 tions upon those who enjoyed more leisure. In that 
 category stood, beyond a doubt, a third of our guar- 
 dians, the Rev. Samuel H., who was at the time of 
 my father’s death a curate at some church (I believe) 
 in Manchester or in Salford . 1 This gentleman re- 
 presented a class — large enough at all times by 
 necessity of human nature, but in those days far 
 larger than at present — that class, I mean, who 
 
 1 Salford is a large town legally distinguished from Man- 
 chester for parliamentary purposes, and divided from it physically 
 by a river, but else virtually, as regards intercourse and re- 
 ciprocal influence, is a quarter of Manchester — in fact, hold- 
 ing the same relation to Manchester that Southwark does to 
 London ; or, if the reader insists upon having a classical 
 illustration of the case, the same relation that in ancient days 
 Argos did to Mycenae. An invitation given to dinner by the 
 public herald of Argos could be heard to the centre of Mycenae, 
 and by a gourmand, if the dinner promised to be specially good, 
 in the remoter suburb. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 447 
 
 sympathise with no spiritual sense or spiritual capa- 
 cities in man ; who understand by religion simply 
 a respectable code of ethics, leaning for support 
 upon some great mysteries dimly traced in the back- 
 ground, and commemorated in certain great church 
 festivals by the elder churches of Christendom ; as, 
 e.g ., by the English, — which does not stand as to age 
 on the Reformation epoch, — by the Romish, and by 
 the Greek. He had composed a body of about 330 
 sermons, which thus, at the rate of two every Sunday, 
 revolved through a cycle of three years ; that period 
 being modestly assumed as sufficient for insuring to 
 their eloquence total oblivion. Possibly to a cynic 
 some shorter cycle might have seemed equal to that 
 effect, since their topics rose but rarely above the 
 level of prudential ethics, and the style, though 
 scholarly, was not impressive. As a preacher, Mr. H. 
 was sincere, but not earnest. He was a good and 
 conscientious man ; and he made a high valuation 
 of the pulpit as an organ of civilisation for co-operating 
 with books ; but it was impossible for any man start- 
 ing from the low ground of themes so unimpassioned 
 and so desultory as the benefits of industry, the 
 danger from bad companions, the importance of 
 setting a good example, or the value of perseverance, 
 to pump up any persistent stream of earnestness 
 either in himself or in his auditors. These auditors, 
 again, were not of a class to desire much earnestness. 
 There were no naughty people among them : most 
 of them were rich, and came to church in carriages : 
 and, as a natural result of their esteem for my reverend 
 guardian, a number of them combined to build a 
 church for him — viz., St. Peter’s — at the point of 
 confluence between Mosely Street and the newly 
 projected Oxford Street, then existing only as a 
 sketch in the portfolio of a surveyor. But what 
 connected myself individually with Mr. H. was that 
 two or three years previously I, together with one 
 of my brothers (five years my senior), had been 
 placed under his care for classical instruction. This 
 was done, I believe, in obedience to a dying injunc- 
 
448 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 tion of my father, who had a just esteem for Mr. S. 
 H. as an upright man, but apparently too exalted an 
 opinion of his scholarship: for he was but an in- 
 different Grecian. In whatever way the appointment 
 arose, so it was that this gentleman, previously tutor 
 in the Roman sense to all of us, now became to my 
 brother and myself tutor also in the common English 
 sense. From the age of eight, up to eleven and a half, 
 the character and intellectual attainments of Mr. H. 
 were therefore influentially important to myself in the 
 development of my powers, such as they were. Even 
 his 330 sermons, which rolled overhead with such 
 slender effect upon his general congregation, to me 
 became a real instrument of improvement. One half 
 of these, indeed, were all that I heard; for, as my 
 father’s house (Greenhay) stood at this time in the 
 country, Manchester not having yet overtaken it, the 
 distance obliged us to go in a carriage, and only 
 to the morning service ; but every sermon in this 
 morning course was propounded to me as a textual 
 basis upon which I was to raise a mimic duplicate 
 — sometimes a pure miniature abstract — sometimes 
 a rhetorical expansion, but preserving as much as 
 possible of the original language, and also (which 
 puzzled me painfully) preserving the exact succession 
 of the thoughts ; which might be easy where they 
 stood in some dependency upon each other, as, for 
 instance, in the development of an argument, but in 
 arbitrary or chance arrangements was often as trying 
 to my powers as any feat of rope-dancing. I, there- 
 fore, amongst that whole congregation, 1 was the one 
 
 1 “ 7 hat whole congregation ” ; — Originally at churches which 
 I do not remember, where, however, in consideration of my 
 tender age, the demands levied upon my memory were much 
 lighter. Two or three years later, when I must have been 
 nearing my tenth year, and when St. Peter’s had been finished, 
 occurred the opening, and consequently (as an indispensable 
 pre-condition) the consecration of that edifice by the bishop of 
 the diocese (viz., Chester). I, as a ward of the incumbent, was 
 naturally amongst those specially invited to the festival ; and 
 I remember a little incident which exposed broadly the conflict of 
 feelings inherited by the Church of England from the Puritans 
 of the seventeenth century. The architecture of the church was 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 449 
 
 sole careworn auditor — agitated about that which, 
 over all other heads, flowed away like water over 
 marble slabs — viz., the somewhat torpid sermon of my 
 somewhat torpid guardian. But this annoyance was 
 not wholly lost : and those same sermons, which 
 (lasting only through sixteen minutes each) were 
 approved and forgotten by everybody else, for me 
 became a perfect palaestra of intellectual gymnastics, 
 far better suited to my childish weakness than could 
 have been the sermons of Isaac Barrow or Jeremy 
 Taylor. In these last the gorgeous imagery would have 
 dazzled my feeble vision, and in both the gigantic 
 thinking would have crushed my efforts at apprehen- 
 sion. I drew, in fact, the deepest benefits from this 
 weekly exercise. Perhaps, also, in the end it ripened 
 into a great advantage for me, though long and bit- 
 terly I complained of it, that I was not allowed to 
 use a pencil in taking notes : all was to be charged 
 upon the memory. But it is notorious that the 
 memory strengthens as you lay burdens upon it, 
 and becomes trustworthy as you trust it. So that, 
 in my third year of practice, I found my abstract- 
 ing and condensing powers sensibly enlarged. My 
 guardian was gradually better satisfied : for unfor- 
 tunately (and in the beginning it was unfortunate) 
 always one witness could be summoned against 
 me upon any impeachment of my fidelity — viz., the 
 sermon itself ; since, though lurking amongst the 330, 
 
 Grecian ; and certainly the enrichments, inside or outside, were 
 few enough, neither florid nor obtrusive. But in the centre of 
 the ceiling, for the sake of breaking the monotony of so large 
 a blank white surface, there was moulded, in plaster-of-Paris, 
 a large tablet or shield, charged with a cornucopia of fruits and 
 flowers. And yet, when we were all assembled in the vestry wait- 
 ing — rector, churchwardens, architect, and trains of dependants 
 — there arose a deep buzz of anxiety, which soon ripened into 
 an articulate expression of fear, that the bishop would think 
 himself bound, like the horrid eikonoclasts of 1645, to issue his 
 decree of utter averruncation to the simple decoration overhead. 
 Fearfully did we all tread the little aisles in the procession of 
 the prelate. Earnestly my lord looked upwards ; but finally — 
 were it courtesy, or doubtfulness as to his ground, or approbation 
 — he passed on. 
 
 P 
 
450 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the wretch was easily forked out. But these appeals 
 grew fewer ; and my guardian, as - 1 have said, was 
 continually better satisfied. Meantime, might not 
 I be continually less satisfied with him and his 330 
 sermons? Not at all. Loving and trusting, without 
 doubt or reserve, and with the deepest principles of 
 veneration rooted in my nature, I never, upon meet- 
 ing something more impressive than the average 
 complexion of my guardian’s discourses, for one 
 moment thought of him as worse or feebler than 
 others, but simply as different ; and no more quar- 
 relled with him for his characteristic languor than 
 with a green riband for not being blue. By mere 
 accident, I one day heard quoted a couplet which 
 seemed to me sublime. It described a preacher 
 such as sometimes arises in difficult times, or in 
 fermenting times, — a son of thunder, that looks all 
 enemies in the face, and volunteers defiance even 
 when it would have been easy to evade it. The lines 
 were written by Richard Baxter — who battled often 
 with self-created storms from the first dawn of the 
 Parliamentary War in 1642, through the period of 
 Cromwell (to whom he was personally odious), and, 
 finally, through the trying reigns of the second 
 Charles and of the second James. As a pulpit 
 orator, he was perhaps the Whitfield of the seven- 
 teenth century — the Leitconomos of Cowper. And 
 thus it is that he describes the impassioned character 
 of his own preaching — 
 
 “ I preached, as never sure to preach again,” 
 
 (Even that was telling ; but then followed this 
 th'under-ytea/) 
 
 “ And as a dying man to dying men.” 
 
 This couplet, which seemed to me equally for weight 
 and for splendour like molten gold, laid bare another 
 aspect of the Catholic Church; revealed it as a 
 Church militant and crusading. 
 
 Not even thus, however, did I descry any positive 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 45 I 
 
 imperfection in my guardian. He and Baxter had 
 fallen upon different generations. Baxter’s century, 
 from first to last, was revolutionary. Along the entire 
 course of that seventeenth century the great principles 
 of representative government and the rights of con- 
 science 1 were passing through the Anguish of conflict 
 and fiery trial. Now again in my own day, at the 
 close of the* eighteenth century, it is true that all the 
 elements of social life were thrown into the crucible — 
 but on behalf of our neighbours, no longer of our- 
 selves. No longer, therefore, was invoked the heroic 
 pleader, ready for martyrdom, — preaching, therefore, 
 “as never sure to preach again”; and I no more 
 made it a defect in my guardian that he wanted 
 energies for combating evils now forgotten than that 
 he had not in patriotic fervour leaped into a gulf, 
 like the fabulous Roman martyr, Curtius, or in zeal 
 for liberty had not mounted a scaffold, like the real 
 English martyr, Algernon Sidney. Every Sunday, 
 duly as it revolved, brought with it this cruel anxiety. 
 On Saturday night, under sad anticipation, on Sunday 
 night, under sadder experimental knowledge, of my 
 trying task, I slept ill : my pillow was stuffed with 
 thorns ; and until Monday morning’s inspection and 
 armilustriuni had dismissed me from parade to “ stand 
 at ease,” verily I felt like a false steward summoned 
 to some killing audit. Then suppose Monday to be 
 invaded by some horrible intruder, — visitor perhaps 
 from a band of my guardian’s poor relations, that in 
 some undiscovered nook of Lancashire seemed in 
 fancy to blacken all the fields, and suddenly at a 
 single note of “ caw , caw ,” rose in one vast cloud like 
 crows, and settled down for weeks at the table of my 
 guardian and his wife, whose noble hospitality would 
 never allow the humblest among them to be saddened 
 
 1 “ The rights of conscience” : — With which it is painful to 
 know that Baxter did not sympathise. Religious toleration he 
 called “soul-murder.” And, if you reminded him that the 
 want of this toleration had been his own capital grievance, he 
 replied, “ Ah, but the cases were very different : I was in the 
 right ; whereas the vast majority of those who will benefit by 
 this newfangled toleration are shockingly in the wrong.” 
 
452 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 by a faint welcome. In such cases, very possibly the 
 whole week did not see the end of my troubles. 
 
 On these terms, for upwards of three and a half 
 years— that is, from my eighth to beyond my eleventh 
 birthday — my guardian and I went on cordially : he 
 never once angry, as indeed he never had any reason 
 for anger ; I never once treating my task either as 
 odious (which in the most abominable excess it was), 
 or, on the other hand, as costing but a trivial effort, 
 which practice might have taught me to hurry through 
 with contemptuous ease. To the very last I found 
 no ease at all in this weekly task, which never ceased 
 to be “ a thorn in the flesh ” : and I believe that my 
 guardian, like many of the grim Pagan divinities, 
 inhaled a flavour of fragrant incense from the fretting 
 and stinging of anxiety which, as it were some holy 
 vestal fire, he kept alive by this periodic exaction. 
 It gave him pleasure that he could reach me in the 
 very recesses of my dreams, where even a Pariah 
 might look for rest; so that the Sunday, which to 
 man, and even to the brutes within his gates, offered 
 an interval of rest, for me was signalised as a day of 
 martyrdom. Yet in this, after all, it is possible that 
 he did me a service : for my constitutional infirmity 
 of mind ran but too determinately towards the sleep 
 of endless reverie, and of dreamy abstraction from 
 life and its realities. 
 
 Whether serviceable or not, however, the connection 
 between my guardian and myself was now drawing to 
 its close. Some months after my eleventh birthday, 
 Greenhay 1 was sold, and my mother’s establishment 
 — both children and servants — was translated to Bath : 
 only that for a few months I and one brother were 
 still left under the care of Mr. Samuel H. ; so far, 
 that is, as regarded our education. Else, as regarded 
 
 1 “ Greenhay ” : — A country-house built by my father ; and at 
 the time of its foundation (say in 1791 or 1792) separated from 
 the last outskirts of Manchester by an entire mile ; but now, 
 and for many a year, overtaken by the hasty strides of this 
 great city, and long since (I presume) absorbed into its mighty 
 uproar. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 453 
 
 the luxurious comforts of a thoroughly English home, 
 we became the guests, by special invitation, of a 
 young married couple in Manchester — viz., Mr. 
 
 and Mrs. K . This incident, though otherwise 
 
 without results, I look back upon with feelings 
 inexpressibly profound, as a jewelly parenthesis of 
 pathetic happiness — such as emerges but once in 
 
 any man’s life. Mr. K was a young and rising 
 
 American merchant ; by which I mean that he was an 
 Englishman who exported to the United States. He 
 had married about three years previously a pretty and 
 amiable young woman — well educated, and endowed 
 with singular compass of intellect. But the dis- 
 tinguishing feature in this household was the spirit of 
 love which, under the benign superintendence of the 
 mistress, diffused itself through all its members. 
 
 The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby, amongst many 
 novel ideas, which found no welcome even with his 
 friends, insisted earnestly and often upon this — viz., 
 that a great danger was threatening our social system 
 in Great Britain from the austere separation existing 
 between our educated and our working classes, and 
 that a more conciliatory style of intercourse between 
 these two bisections of our social body must be 
 established, or else — a tremendous revolution. This 
 is not the place to discuss so large a question ; and I 
 shall content myself with making two remarks. The 
 first is this — that, although a change of the sort con- 
 templated by Dr. Arnold might, if considered as an 
 operative cause, point forward to some advantages, on 
 the other hand, if considered as an effect , it points 
 backward to a less noble constitution of society by 
 much than we already enjoy. Those nations whose 
 upper classes speak paternally and caressingly to the 
 working classes, and to servants in particular, do so 
 because they speak from the lofty stations of persons 
 having civil rights to those who have none. Two 
 centuries back, when a military chieftain addressed 
 his soldiers as “ my children ,” he did so because he 
 was an irresponsible despot exercising uncontrolled 
 powers of life and death. From the moment when 
 
454 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 legal rights have been won for the poorest classes, 
 inevitable respect on the part of the higher classes 
 extinguishes for ever the affectionate style which 
 belongs naturally to the state of pupilage or infantine 
 bondage. 
 
 That is my first remark : my second is this — that 
 the change advocated by Dr. Arnold, whether pro- 
 mising or not, is practically impossible ; or possible, 
 I should say, through one sole channel — viz., that 
 of domestic servitude. There- only do the two 
 classes concerned come hourly into contact. On 
 that stage only they meet without intrusion upon each 
 other. There only is an opening for change. And a 
 wise mistress, who possesses tact enough to combine 
 a gracious affability with a self-respect that never 
 slumbers nor permits her to descend into gossip, will 
 secure the attachment of all young and impressible 
 
 women. Such a mistress was Mrs. K . She had 
 
 won the gratitude of her servants from the first by 
 making the amplest provision for their comfort ; their 
 confidence, by listening with patience, and counsel- 
 ling with prudence ; and their respect, by refusing 
 to intermeddle with gossiping personalities always 
 tending to slander. To this extent, perhaps, most 
 mistresses might follow her example. But the happi- 
 ness which reigned in Mrs. K ’s house at this 
 
 time depended very much upon special causes. All 
 the eight persons had the advantage of youth ; and 
 the three young female servants were under the spell 
 of fascination, such as could rarely be counted on, 
 from a spectacle held up hourly before their eyes, — 
 that spectacle which of all others is the most touching 
 to womanly sensibilities, and which any one of these 
 servants might hope, without presumption, to realise 
 for herself, — the spectacle, I mean, of a happy marriage 
 union between two persons who lived in harmony so 
 absolute with each other as- to be independent of the 
 world outside. How tender and self-sufficing such a 
 union might be, they saw with their own eyes. The 
 season was then mid-winter, which of itself draws 
 closer all household ties. Their own labours, as 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 455 
 
 generally in respectable English services, were finished 
 for the most part by two o’clock ; and, as the hours 
 of evening drew nearer, when the master’s return 
 might be looked for without fail, beautiful was the 
 smile of anticipation upon the gentle features of the 
 mistress : even more beautiful the reflex of that smile, 
 half unconscious, and half repressed, upon the fea- 
 tures of the sympathising handmaidens. One child, 
 a little girl of two years old, had then crowned the 
 
 happiness of the K s. She naturally lent her 
 
 person at all times, and apparently in all places at 
 once, to the improvement of the family groups. My 
 brother and myself, who had been trained from 
 infancy by the courteous treatment of servants, filled 
 up a vacancy in the graduated scale of ascending 
 ages, and felt in varying degrees the depths of a peace 
 which we could not adequately understand or ap- 
 preciate. Bad tempers there were none amongst us ; 
 nor any opening for personal jealousies ; nor, through 
 the privilege of our common youth, either angry 
 recollections breathing from the past, or fretting 
 anxieties gathering from the future. The spirit of 
 hope and the spirit of peace (so it seemed to me, 
 when looking back upon this profound calm) had, for 
 their own enjoyment, united in a sisterly league to 
 blow a solitary bubble of visionary happiness — and to 
 sequester from the unresting hurricanes of life one 
 solitary household of eight persons within a four 
 months’ lull, as if within some Arabian tent on some 
 untrodden wilderness, withdrawn from human intru- 
 sion, or even from knowledge, by worlds of mist and 
 vapour. 
 
 How deep was that lull ! and yet, as in a human 
 atmosphere, how frail ! Did the visionary bubble 
 burst at once ? Not so : but silently and by measured 
 steps, like a dissolving palace of snow, it collapsed. 
 In the superb expression of Shakspere, minted by 
 himself, and drawn from his own aerial fancy, like a 
 cloud it “ dislwmed” ; lost its lineaments by stealthy 
 steps. Already the word “parting” (for myself and 
 my brother were under summons for Bath) hoisted 
 
456 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the first signal for breaking up. Next, and not very 
 long afterwards, came a mixed signal : alternate words 
 of joy and grief — marriage and death severed the 
 sisterly union amongst the young female servants. 
 Then, thirdly, but many years later, vanished from 
 earth, and from peace the deepest that can support 
 itself on earth, summoned to a far deeper peace, the 
 mistress of the household herself, together with her 
 first-born child. Some years later, perhaps twenty 
 from this time, as I stood sheltering myself from rain 
 in a shop within the most public street of Manchester, 
 the master of the establishment drew my attention 
 to a gentleman on the opposite side of the street — 
 roaming along in a reckless style of movement, and 
 apparently insensible to the notice which he attracted. 
 “■That,” said the master of the shop, “was once a 
 leading merchant in our town ; but he met with 
 great commercial embarrassments. There was no 
 impeachment of his integrity, or (as I believe) of his 
 discretion. But, what with these commercial calami- 
 ties, and deaths in his family, he lost all hope ; and 
 you see what sort of consolation it is that he seeks ” 
 — meaning to say that his style of walking argued in- 
 toxication. I did not think so. There was a settled 
 misery in his eye, but complicated with that an 
 expression of nervous distraction, that, if it should 
 increase, would make life an intolerable burden. I 
 never saw him again, and thought with horror of his 
 being called in old age to face the fierce tragedies of 
 life. For many reasons, I recoiled from forcing my- 
 self upon his notice : but I had ascertained, some 
 time previously to this casual rencounter, that he and 
 myself were, at that date, all that remained of the 
 once joyous household. At present, and for many a 
 year, I am myself the sole relic from that household 
 sanctuary — sweet, solemn, profound — that concealed, 
 as in some ark floating on solitary seas, eight persons, 
 since called away, all except myself, one after one, to 
 that rest which only could be deeper than ours was 
 then. 
 
 When I left the K s, I left Manchester ; and 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 457 
 
 during the next three years I was sent to two very 
 different schools : first, to a public one — viz., the 
 Bath Grammar School, then and since famous for its 
 excellence ; secondly, to a private school in Wiltshire. 
 At the end of the three years, I found myself once 
 again in Manchester. I was then fifteen years old, 
 and a trifle more ; and as it had come to the 
 knowledge of Mr. G., a banker in Lincolnshire 
 (whom hitherto I have omitted to notice amongst my 
 guardians, as the one too generally prevented from 
 interfering by his remoteness from the spot, but whom 
 otherwise I should have recorded with honour, as 
 by much the ablest amongst them) that some pecu- 
 niary advantages were attached to a residence at the 
 Manchester Grammar School, whilst in other respects 
 that school seemed as eligible as any other, he had 
 counselled my mother to send me thither. In fact, 
 a three years’ residence at this school obtained an 
 annual allowance for seven years of nearly (if not 
 quite) ^50 ; which sum, added to my own patri- 
 monial income of £ 150 , would have made up the 
 annual £ 200 ordinarily considered the proper allow- 
 ance for an Oxford undergraduate. No objection 
 arising from any quarter, this plan was adopted, and 
 soon afterwards carried into effect. 
 
 On a day, therefore, it was in the closing autumn 
 (or rather in the opening winter) of 1800 that my first 
 introduction took place to the Manchester Grammar 
 School. The schoolroom showed already in its ample 
 proportions some hint of its pretensions as an en- 
 dowed school, or school of that class which I believe 
 peculiar to England. To this limited extent had the 
 architectural sense of power been timidly and parsi- 
 moniously invoked. Beyond that, nothing had been 
 attempted; and the dreary expanse of whitewashed 
 walls, that at so small a cost might have been em- 
 bellished by plaster-of-Paris friezes and large medal- 
 lions, illustrating to the eye of the youthful student 
 the most memorable glorifications of literature — these 
 were bare as the walls of a poorhouse or a lazaretto ; 
 buildings whose functions, as thoroughly sad and 
 
458 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 gloomy, the mind recoils from drawing into relief by 
 sculpture or painting. But this building was dedi- 
 cated to purposes that were noble. The naked walls 
 clamoured for decoration : and how easily might 
 tablets have been moulded — exhibiting (as a first 
 homage to literature) Athens, with the wisdom of 
 Athens, in the person of Pisistratus, concentrating the 
 general energies upon the revisal and the recasting 
 of the Iliad. Or (second) the Athenian captives 
 in Sicily, within the fifth century B.c., as winning 
 noble mercy for themselves by some 
 
 “ Repeated air 
 Of sad Electra’s poet. ” 
 
 Such, and so sudden, had been the oblivion of earthly 
 passions wrought by the contemporary poet of Athens 
 that in a moment the wrath of Sicily, with all its 
 billows, ran down into a heavenly calm ; and he that 
 could plead for his redemption no closer relation to 
 Euripides than the accident of recalling some scatter- 
 ings from his divine verses suddenly found his chains 
 dropping to the ground, and himself, that in the morn- 
 ing had risen a despairing slave in a stone-quarry, 
 translated at once as a favoured brother into a palace 
 of Syracuse. Or, again, how easy to represent (third) 
 “the great Emathian conqueror,” that in the very 
 opening of his career, whilst visiting Thebes with 
 vengeance, nevertheless relented at the thought of 
 literature, and 
 
 “ Bade spare 
 
 The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower 
 
 Went to the ground.” 
 
 Alexander might have been represented amongst the 
 colonnades of some Persian capital — Ecbatana or 
 Babylon, Susa or Persepolis— in the act of receiving 
 from Greece, as a nuzzur more awful than anything 
 within the gift of the “barbaric East,” a jewelled 
 casket containing the Iliad and the Odyssey ; crea- 
 tions that already have lived almost as long as the 
 Pyramids. 
 
 Puritanically bald and odious, therefore, in my eyes, 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 459 
 
 was the hall up which my guardian and myself paced 
 solemnly — though not Miltonically “ riding up to the 
 Soldan’s chair,’’ yet, in fact, within a more limited 
 kingdom, advancing to the chair of a more absolute 
 despot. This potentate was the headmaster, or 
 a rchididasca lus , of the Manchester Grammar School ; 
 and that school was variously distinguished. It was 
 
 (1) ancient, having in fact been founded by a bishop 
 of Exeter in an early part of the sixteenth century, so 
 as to be now, in 1856, more than 330 years old; 
 
 (2) it was rich, and was annually growing richer ; 
 and (3) it was dignified by a beneficial relation to the 
 magnificent University of Oxford. 
 
 The headmaster at that time was Mr. Charles 
 Lawson. In former editions of this work I created 
 him a doctor ; my object being to evade too close 
 an approach to the realities of the case, and con- 
 sequently to personalities, which (though indifferent 
 to myself) would have been in some cases displeasing 
 to others. A doctor, however, Mr. Lawson was not ; 
 nor in the account of law a clergyman. Yet most 
 people, governed unconsciously by the associations 
 surrounding their composite idea of a dignified 
 schoolmaster, invested him with the clerical character. 
 And in reality he had taken deacon’s orders in the 
 Church of England. But not the less he held him- 
 self to be a layman, and was addressed as such 
 by all his correspondents of rank, who might be 
 supposed best to understand the technical rules of 
 English etiquette. Etiquette in such cases cannot 
 entirely detach itself from law. Now, in English 
 law, as was shown in Horne Tooke’s case, the rule 
 is, Once a clergyman , and always a clergyman. The 
 sacred character with which ordination clothes a man 
 is indelible. But, on the other hand, who is a 
 clergyman? Not he that has taken simply the 
 initial orders of a deacon, — so at least I have heard, 
 — but he that has taken the second and full orders 
 of a priest. If otherwise, then there was a great 
 mistake current amongst Mr. Lawson’s friends in 
 addressing him as an esquire. 
 
460 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Squire or not a squire, however, parson or not 
 a parson — whether sacred or profane — Mr. Lawson 
 was in some degree interesting by his position and 
 his recluse habits. Life was over with him, for its 
 hopes and for its trials. Or at most one trial yet 
 awaited him ; which was — to fight with a painful 
 malady, and fighting to die. He still had his dying 
 to do : he was in arrear as to that : else all was 
 finished. It struck me (but, with such limited 
 means for judging, I might easily be wrong) that his 
 understanding was of a narrow order. But that did 
 not disturb the interest which surrounded him now 
 in his old age (probably seventy-five, or more), nor 
 make any drawback from the desire I had to spell 
 backwards and re-compose the text of his life. What 
 had been his fortunes in this world? Had they 
 travelled upwards or downwards ? What triumphs 
 had he enjoyed in the sweet and solemn cloisters of 
 Oxford ? What mortifications in the harsh world 
 outside? Two only had survived in the malicious 
 traditions of “ his friends.” He was a Jacobite (as 
 were so many amongst my dear Lancastrian com- 
 patriots) ; had drunk the Pretender’s health, and 
 had drunk it in company with that Dr. Byrom who 
 had graced the symposium by the famous equivo- 
 cating impromptu 1 to the health of that prince. 
 
 1 (C Equivocating impromptu ” ; — The party had gathered in 
 a tumultuary way ; so that some Capulets had mingled with 
 the Montagues, one of whom called upon Dr. Byrom to drink 
 The King, God bless him ! and Confusion to the Pretender ! 
 Upon which the doctor sang out — 
 
 “ God bless the king, of church and state defender ; 
 
 God bless (no harm in blessing) the Pretender ! 
 
 But who Pretender is, and who the King — 
 
 God bless us all ! that’s quite another thing.” 
 
 Dr. Byrom [John Byrom, 1691-1763] was otherwise famous 
 than as a Jacobite — viz., as the author of a very elaborate short- 
 hand, which (according to some who have examined it) rises 
 even to a philosophic dignity. David Hartley in particular 
 said of it that <£ if ever a philosophic language (as projected 
 by Bishop Wilkins, by Leibnitz, &c.) should be brought to 
 bear, in that case Dr. Byrom’s work would furnish the proper 
 character for its notation.” 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 461 
 
 Mr. Lawson had therefore been obliged to witness 
 the final prostration of his political party. That was 
 his earliest mortification. His second, about seven 
 years later, was that he had been jilted, and with 
 circumstances (at least so I heard) of cruel scorn. 
 Was it that he had interpreted in a sense too flatter- 
 ing for himself ambiguous expressions of favour in 
 the lady ? or that she in cruel caprice had disowned 
 the hopes which she had authorised ? However this 
 might be, half a century of soothing and reconciling 
 years had cicatrised the wounds of Mr. Lawson’s, 
 heart. The lady of 1752, if living in 1800, must 
 be furiously wrinkled. And a strange metaphysical 
 question arises : Whether, when the object of an 
 impassioned love has herself faded into a shadow, 
 the fiery passion itself can still survive as an abstrac- 
 tion, still mourn over its wrongs, still clamour for 
 redress. I have heard of such cases. In Words- 
 worth’s poem of “ Ruth ” (which was founded, as I 
 happen to know, upon facts) it is recorded as an 
 affecting incident that, some months after the first 
 frenzy of her disturbed mind had given way to 
 medical treatment, and had lapsed into a gentler 
 form of lunacy, she was dismissed from confinement ; 
 and, upon finding herself uncontrolled among the 
 pastoral scenes where she played away her child- 
 hood, she gradually fell back to the original habits 
 of her life whilst yet undisturbed by sorrow. Some- 
 thing similar had happened to Mr. Lawson ; and 
 some time after his first shock, amongst other means 
 for effacing that deep-grooved impression, he had 
 laboured to replace himself, as much as was possible, 
 in the situation of a college student. In this effort 
 he was assisted considerably by the singular arrange- 
 ment of the house attached to his official station. 
 For an English house it was altogether an oddity, 
 being, in fact, built upon a Roman plan. All the 
 rooms on both storeys had their windows looking 
 down upon a little central court. This court was 
 quadrangular, but so limited in its dimensions that 
 by a Roman it would have been regarded as the 
 
462 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 impluvium : for Mr. Lawson, however, with a little 
 exertion of fancy, it transmuted itself into a college 
 quadrangle. Here, therefore, were held the daily 
 “ callings-over,” at which every student was obliged 
 to answer upon being named. And thus the un- 
 happy man, renewing continually the fancy that he 
 was still standing in an Oxford quadrangle, perhaps 
 cheated himself into the belief that all had been a 
 dream which concerned the caprices of the lady, 
 and the lady herself a phantom. College usages 
 also which served to strengthen this fanciful alibi — 
 such, for instance, as the having two plates arranged 
 before him at dinner (one for the animal, the other 
 for the vegetable, food) — were reproduced in Mill- 
 gate. One sole luxury also, somewhat costly, which, 
 like most young men of easy income, he had allowed 
 himself at Oxford, was now retained long after it had 
 become practically useless. This was a hunter for 
 himself, and another for his groom, which he, con- 
 tinued to keep, in spite of the increasing war-taxes, 
 many a year after he had almost ceased to ride. 
 Once in three or four months he would have the 
 horses saddled and brought out. Then, with con- 
 siderable effort, he swung himself into the saddle, 
 moved off at a quiet amble, and in about fifteen or 
 twenty minutes might be seen returning from an 
 excursion of two miles, under the imagination that 
 he had laid in a stock of exercise sufficient for 
 another period of a hundred days. Meantime Mr. 
 Lawson had sought his main consolation in the great 
 classics of elder days. His senior alumni were 
 always working their way through some great scenic 
 poet that had shaken the stage of Athens ; and more 
 than one of his classes, never ending, still beginning, 
 were daily solacing him with the gaieties of Horace, 
 in his Epistles or in his Satires. The Horatian jests 
 indeed to him never grew old. On coming to the 
 plagosus Orbilius , or any other sally of pleasantry, he 
 still threw himself back in his arm-chair, as he had 
 done through fifty years, with what seemed heartshak- 
 ing bursts of sympathetic merriment. Mr. Lawson, 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 4O3 
 
 indeed, could afford to be sincerely mirthful over 
 the word plagosus. There are gloomy tyrants, exult- 
 ing in the discipline of fear, to whom and to whose 
 pupils this word must call up remembrances too 
 degrading for any but affected mirth. Allusions that 
 are too fearfully personal cease to be subjects of 
 playfulness. Sycophancy only it is that laughs ; 
 and the artificial merriment is but the language of 
 shrinking and grovelling deprecation. Different, in- 
 deed, was the condition of the Manchester Grammar 
 School. It was honourable both to the masters and 
 the upper boys, through whom only such a result 
 was possible, that in that school, during my know- 
 ledge of it (viz., during the closing year of the 
 eighteenth century and the two opening years of the 
 nineteenth), all punishments that appealed to the 
 sense of bodily pain had fallen into disuse ; and this 
 at a period long before any public agitation had 
 begun to stir in that direction. How then was 
 discipline maintained? It was maintained through 
 the self-discipline of the senior boys, and through 
 the efficacy of their example, combined with their 
 system of rules. Noble are the impulses of opening 
 manhood where they are not utterly ignoble : at that 
 period, I mean, when the poetic sense begins to 
 blossom, and when boys are first made sensible of 
 the paradise that lurks in female smiles. Had the 
 school been entirely a day-school, too probable it is 
 that the vulgar brawling tendencies of boys left to 
 themselves would have prevailed. But it happened 
 that the elder section of the school — those on the 
 brink of manhood, and by incalculable degrees the 
 more scholar-like section, all who read, meditated, or 
 began to kindle into the love of literature — were 
 boarders in Mr. Lawson’s house. The students, 
 therefore, of the house carried an overwhelming in- 
 fluence into the school. They were bound together 
 by links of brotherhood ; whereas the day-scholars 
 were disconnected. Over and above this, it hap- 
 pened luckily that there was no playground, not the 
 smallest, attached to the ' school ; that is, none was 
 
464 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 attached to the upper ox grammar school. But there 
 was also, and resting on the same liberal endow- 
 ment, a lower school, where the whole machinery of 
 teaching was applied to the lowest mechanical ac- 
 complishments of reading and writing. The hall in 
 which this servile business was conducted ran under 
 the upper school ; it was, therefore, I presume, a 
 subterraneous duplicate of the upper hall. And, 
 since the upper rose only by two or three feet above 
 the level of the neighbouring streets, the lower 
 school should naturally have been at a great depth 
 below these streets. In that case it would be a dark 
 crypt, such as we see under some cathedrals ; and it 
 would have argued a singular want of thoughtfulness 
 in the founder to have laid one part of his establish- 
 ment under an original curse of darkness. As the 
 access to this plebeian school lay downwards through 
 long flights of steps, I never found surplus energy 
 enough for investigating the problem. But, as the 
 ground broke away precipitously at that point into 
 lower levels, I presume, upon consideration, that the 
 subterranean crypt will be found open on one side 
 to visitations from sun and moon. So that, for this 
 base mechanic school there may, after all, have been 
 a playground. But for ours in the upper air, I 
 repeat, there was none ; not so much as would have 
 bleached a lady’s pocket-handkerchief ; and this one 
 defect carried along with it unforeseen advantages. 
 
 Lord Bacon it is who notices the subtle policy 
 which may lurk in the mere external figure of a table. 
 A square table, having an undeniable head and foot, 
 two polar extremities of what is highest and lowest, a 
 perihelion and an aphelion, together with equatorial 
 sides, opens at a glance a large career to ambition ; 
 whilst a circular table sternly represses all such aspir- 
 ing dreams, and so does a triangular table. Yet, if 
 the triangle should be right-angled, then the Lucifer 
 seated at the right angle might argue that he subtended 
 ail the tenants of the hypothenuse ; being, therefore, 
 as much nobler than they as Atlas was nobler than 
 the globe which he carried. It was, by the way, some 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 465 
 
 arrangement of this nature which constituted the 
 original feature of distinction in John o’ Groat’s house, 
 and not at all (as most people suppose) the high 
 northern latitude of this house. John, it seems, 
 finished the feuds for precedency, not by legislating 
 this way or that, but by cutting away the possibility 
 of such feuds through the assistance of a round table. 
 The same principle must have guided King Arthur 
 amongst his knights, Charlemagne amongst his pala- 
 dins, and sailors in their effectual distribution of the 
 peril attached to a mutinous remonstrance by the 
 admirable device of a “ round robin.” Even two 
 little girls, as Harrington remarks in his “ Oceana,” 
 have oftentimes hit upon an expedient, through pure 
 mother-wit, more effectual than all the schools of 
 philosophy could have suggested, for insuring the 
 impartial division of an orange ; which expedient is 
 that either of the two shall divide, but then that the 
 other shall have the right of choice. You divide, 
 and I choose. Such is the formula; and an angel 
 could not devise a more absolute guarantee for the 
 equity of the division than by thus forcing the divider 
 to become the inheritor of any possible disadvantages 
 that he may have succeeded in creating by his own 
 act of division. In all these cases one seemingly 
 trivial precaution opens, in the next stage, into a 
 world of irresistible consequences. And, in our 
 case, an effect not less disproportionate followed out 
 of that one accident, apparently so slight, that we 
 had no playground. We of the seniority, who, by 
 thoughtfulness, and the conscious dignity of dealing 
 largely with literature, were already indisposed to 
 boyish sports, found, through the defect of a play- 
 ground, that our choice and our pride were also our 
 necessity. Even the proudest of us benefited by 
 that coercion ; for many would else have sold their 
 privilege of pride for an hour’s amusement, and have 
 become, at least, occasional conformists. A day 
 more than usually fine, a trial of skill more than 
 usually irritating to the sense of special superiority, 
 would have seduced most of us in the end into the 
 
466 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 surrender of our exclusiveness. Indiscriminate 
 familiarity would have followed as an uncontrollable 
 result ; since to mingle with others in common acts 
 of business may leave the sense of reserve undis- 
 turbed : but all reserve gives way before a common 
 intercourse in pleasure. As it was, what with our 
 confederation through house-membership, what with 
 our reciprocal sympathies in the problems suggested 
 by books, we had become a club of boys (amongst 
 whom might be four or five that were even young 
 men, counting eighteen or nineteen years) altogether 
 as thoughtful and as self-respecting as can often exist 
 even amongst adults. Even the subterraneous school 
 contributed something to our self-esteem. It formed 
 a subordinate section of our own establishment, that 
 kept before our eyes, by force of contrast, the dignity 
 inherent in our own constitution. Its object was 
 to master bumble accomplishments that were within 
 the reach of mechanic efforts : everything mechanic 
 is limited ; whereas we felt that our object, even if 
 our name of grammar school presented that object 
 in what seemed too limited a shape, was susbtantially 
 noble, and tended towards the infinite. But in no 
 long time I came to see that, as to the name , we were 
 all of us under a mistake. Being asked what a gram- 
 mar school indicates, what it professes to teach, there 
 is scarcely any man who would not reply, “Teach? 
 why, it teaches grammar : what else ? ” But this is a 
 mistake : as I have elsewhere explained, grammatica 
 in this combination does not mean grammar (though 
 grammar also obeys the movements of a most subtle 
 philosophy), but literature. Look into Suetonius. 
 Those “ grammatici" whom he memorialises as an 
 ordet of men flocking to Rome in the days of the 
 Flavian family, were not gra?nmarians at all, but what 
 the French by a comprehensive name style litterateurs 
 — that is, they were men who (1) studied literature, 
 (2) who taught literature, (3) who practically produced 
 literature. And, upon the whole, grammatica is per- 
 haps the least objectionable Latin equivalent for our 
 word literature. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 467 
 
 Having thus sketched the characteristic points dis- 
 tinguishing the school and the presiding master (for 
 of masters, senior and junior, there were four in this 
 upper school), I return to my own inaugural examina- 
 tion. On this day, memorable to myself, as furnish- 
 ing the starting-point for so long a series of days, 
 saddened by haughty obstinacy on one side, made 
 effective by folly on the other, no sooner had my 
 guardian retired than Mr. Lawson produced from his 
 desk a volume of the Spectator and instructed me 
 to throw into as good Latin as I could some paper of 
 Steele’s — not the whole, but perhaps a third part. No 
 better exercise could have been devised for testing 
 the extent of my skill as a Latinist. And here I ought 
 to make an explanation. In the previous edition of 
 these te Confessions, ” writing sometimes too rapidly, 
 and with little precision in cases of little importance, 
 I conveyed an impression which I had not designed 
 with regard to the true nature of my pretensions as a 
 Grecian ; and something of the same correction will 
 apply to that narrower accomplishment which was the 
 subject of my present examination. Neither in Greek 
 nor in Latin was my knowledge very extensive ; my 
 age made that impossible ; and especially because in 
 those days there were no decent guides through the 
 thorny jungles of the Latin language, far less of the 
 Greek. When I mention that the Port Royal Greek 
 Grammar translated by Dr. Nugent was about the 
 best key extant in English to the innumerable per- 
 plexities of Greek diction, and that, for the res 
 metrica , Morell’s valuable “ Thesaurus,” having then 
 never been reprinted, was rarely to be seen, the 
 reader will conclude that a schoolboy’s knowledge of 
 Greek could not be other than slender. Slender 
 indeed was mine. Yet stop! what was slender? 
 Simply my k?iowledge of Greek ; for that knowledge 
 stretches by tendency to the infinite : but not there- 
 fore my command of Greek. The knowledge of Greek 
 must always hold some gross proportion to the time 
 spent upon it, — probably, therefore, to the age of the 
 student ; but the command over a language, the power 
 
468 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 of adapting it plastically to the expression of your 
 own thoughts, is almost exclusively a gift of nature, 
 and has very little connection with time. Take the 
 supreme trinity of Greek scholars that flourished 
 between the English Revolution of 1688 and the 
 beginning of the nineteenth century— which trinity 
 I suppose to be, confessedly, Bentley, Valckenaer, 
 and Porson : such are the men, it will be generally 
 fancied, whose aid should be invoked, in the event 
 of our needing some eloquent Greek inscription on 
 a public monument. I am of a different opinion. 
 The greatest scholars have usually proved to be the 
 poorest composers in either of the classic languages. 
 Sixty years ago, we had, from four separate doctors, 
 four separate Greek versions of “ Gray’s Elegy,” all 
 unworthy of the national scholarship. Yet one of 
 these doctors was actually Porson’s predecessor in 
 the Greek chair at Cambridge. But, as he (Dr. 
 Cooke) was an obscure man, take an undeniable 
 Grecian, of punctilious precision — viz., Richard 
 Dawes, the well-known author of the “ Miscellanea 
 Critica.” This man, a very martinet in the delicacies 
 of Greek composition — and who should have been a 
 Greek scholar of some mark, since often enough he 
 flew at the throat of Richard Bentley — wrote and 
 published a specimen of a Greek “ Paradise Lost,” 
 and also two most sycophantic idyls addressed to 
 George II. on the death of his august “papa.” It is 
 difficult to imagine anything meaner in conception 
 or more childish in expression than these attempts. 
 Now, against them I will stake in competition a copy 
 of iambic verses by a boy, who died, I believe, at 
 sixteen — viz., a son of Mr. Pitt’s tutor, Tomline, 
 Bishop of Winchester. 1 Universally I contend that 
 
 1 “ A copy of iambic verses 55 : — They will be found in the 
 work on the Greek article by Middleton, Bishop of Calcutta, 
 who was the boy’s tutor. On this occasion I would wish to 
 observe that verses like Dawes’s, meant to mimic Homer or 
 Theocritus, or more generally dactylic hexameters, are perfectly 
 useless as tests of power to think freely in Greek. If such 
 verses are examined, it will be found that the orchestral magni- 
 ficence of the metre, and the sonorous cadence of each separate 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 469 
 
 the faculty of clothing the thoughts in a Greek dress 
 is a function of natural sensibility, in a great degree 
 disconnected from the extent or the accuracy of the 
 writer’s grammatical skill in Greek. 
 
 These explanations are too long. The reader will 
 understand, as their sum, that what I needed in such 
 a case was, not so much a critical familiarity with the 
 syntax of the language, or a copia verborum , as great 
 agility in reviewing the relations of one idea to another, 
 so as to present modern and unclassical objects under 
 such aspects as might suggest periphrases in substitu- 
 tion for direct names, where names could not be had, 
 and everywhere to colour my translation with as rich 
 a display of idiomatic forms as the circumstances of 
 the case would allow. I succeeded, and beyond my 
 expectation. For once — being the first time that he 
 had been known to do such a thing, but also the very 
 last — Mr. Lawson did absolutely pay me a compli- 
 ment. And with another compliment more than 
 verbal he crowned his gracious condescensions — viz., 
 with my provisional instalment in his highest class ; 
 not the highest at that moment, since there was one 
 other class above us ; but this other was on the wing 
 for Oxford within some few weeks ; which change 
 being accomplished, we (viz., I and two others) imme- 
 diately moved up into the supreme place. 
 
 Two or three days after this examination — viz., on 
 the Sunday following — I transferred myself to head- 
 quarters at Mr. Lawson’s house. About nine o’clock 
 in the evening, I was conducted by a servant up a 
 short flight of stairs, through a series of gloomy and 
 unfurnished little rooms, having small windows but 
 no doors, to the common room (as in Oxford it would 
 technically be called) of the senior boys. Everything 
 had combined to depress me. To leave the society 
 of accomplished women — that was already a signal 
 
 line, absolutely force upon the thoughts a mere necessity of 
 being discontinuous. From this signal defect only iambic senarii 
 are free ; this metre possessing a power of plastic interfusion 
 similar in kind, though inferior in degree, to the English blank 
 verse when Miltonically written. ' 
 
470 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 privation. The season besides was rainy, which in 
 itself is a sure source of depression ; and the forlorn 
 aspect of the rooms completed my dejection. But 
 the scene changed as the door was thrown open ; 
 faces kindling with animation became visible ; and 
 from a company of boys, numbering sixteen or eigh- 
 teen, scattered about the room, two or three, whose 
 age entitled them to the rank of leaders, came forward 
 to receive me with a courtesy which I had not looked 
 for. The grave kindness and the absolute sincerity 
 of their manner impressed me most favourably. I 
 had lived familiarly with boys gathered from all 
 quarters of the island at the Bath Grammar School : 
 and for some time (when visiting Lord Altamont at 
 Eton) with boys of the highest aristocratic pretensions. 
 At Bath and at Eton, though not equally, there pre- 
 vailed a tone of higher polish ; and in the air, speech, 
 deportment of the majority could be traced at once 
 a premature knowledge of the world. They had 
 indeed the advantage over my new friends in graceful 
 self-possession* but, on the other hand, the best of 
 them suffered by comparison with these Manchester 
 boys in the qualities of visible self-restraint and of 
 self-respect. At Eton high rank was distributed pretty 
 liberally ; but in the Manchester school the parents 
 of many boys were artisans, or of that rank ; some 
 even had sisters that were menial servants ; and those 
 who stood higher by pretensions of birth and gentle 
 blood were, at the most, the sons of rural gentry or 
 of clergymen. And I believe that, with the excep- 
 tion of three or four brothers, belonging to a clergy- 
 man’s family at York, all were, like myself, natives 
 of Lancashire. At that time my experience was too 
 limited to warrant me in expressing any opinion, one 
 way or the other, upon the relative pretensions — 
 moral and intellectual — of the several provinces in 
 our island. But since then I have seen reason to 
 agree with the late Dr. Cooke Taylor in awarding 
 the pre-eminence, as regards energy, power to face 
 suffering, and other high qualities, to the natives of 
 Lancashire. Even a century back, they were distin- 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 47 1 
 
 guished for the culture of refined tastes. In musical 
 skill and sensibility, no part of Europe, with the 
 exception of a few places in Germany, could pretend 
 to rival them : and, accordingly, even in Handel’s 
 days, but for the chorus-singers from Lancashire, his 
 oratorios must have remained a treasure, if not abso- 
 lutely sealed, at any rate most imperfectly revealed. 
 
 One of the young men, noticing my state of dejec- 
 tion, brought out some brandy — a form of alcohol 
 which I, for my part, tasted now. for the first time, 
 having previously taken only wine, and never once in 
 quantities to affect my spirits. So much the greater 
 was my astonishment at the rapid change worked in 
 my state of feeling— a change which at once reinstalled 
 me in my natural advantages for conversation. To- 
 wards this nothing was wanting but a question of suf- 
 ficient interest. And a question arose naturally out of 
 a remark addressed by one of the boys to myself, 
 implying that perhaps I had intentionally timed my 
 arrival so as to escape the Sunday evening exercise. 
 No, I replied ; not at all ; what was that exercise ? 
 Simply an off-hand translation from the little work 
 of Grotius 1 on the Evidences of Christianity. Did I 
 know the book ? No, I did not ; all the direct know- 
 ledge which I had of Grotius was built upon his 
 metrical translations into Latin of various fragments 
 surviving from the Greek scenical poets, and these 
 translations had struck me as exceedingly beautiful. 
 On the other hand, his work of highest pretension, 
 De Jure Belli et Pads , so signally praised by Lord 
 Bacon, I had not read at all ; but I had heard such an 
 account of it from a very thoughtful person as made 
 it probable that Grotius was stronger, and felt him- 
 self stronger, on literary than on philosophic ground. 
 Then, with regard to his little work on the Mosaic 
 and Christian revelations, I had heard very disparaging 
 opinions about it ; two especially. One amounted 
 to no more than this — that the question was argued 
 with a logic far inferior, in point of cogency, to that 
 
 1 Entitled De Veritate Christiana Religionis. 
 
472 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 of Lardner and Paley. Plere several boys interposed 
 their loud assent, as regarded Paley in particular. 
 Paley’s “ Evidences/ 7 at that time just seven years old, 
 had already become a subject of study amongst them. 
 But the other objection impeached not so much the 
 dialectic acuteness as the learning of Grotius — at least, 
 the appropriate learning. According to the anecdote 
 current upon this subject, Dr. Edward Pococke, the 
 great Oriental scholar of England in the seventeenth 
 century, when called upon to translate the little work 
 of Grotius into Arabic or Turkish, had replied by 
 pointing to the idle legend of Mahomet’s pigeon or 
 dove, as a reciprocal messenger between the Prophet 
 and heaven — which legend had been accredited and 
 adopted by Grotius in the blindest spirit of credulity. 
 Such a baseless fable, Pococke alleged, would work 
 a double mischief : not only it would ruin the autho- 
 rity of that particular book in the East, but would 
 damage Christianity for generations, by making known 
 to the followers of the Prophet that their master was 
 undervalued amongst the Franks on the authority of 
 nursery tales, and that these tales were accredited by 
 the leading Frankish scholars. 
 
 A twofold result of evil would follow : not only 
 would our Christian erudition and our Christian 
 scholars be scandalously disparaged ; a consequence 
 that in some cases might not be incompatible with 
 a sense amongst Mahometans that the strength of 
 Christianity itself was left unaffected by the errors 
 and blunders of its champions ; but, secondly, there 
 would be in this case a strong reaction against Chris- 
 tianity itself. Plausibly enough it would be inferred 
 that a vast religious philosophy could have no power- 
 ful battery of arguments in reserve, when it placed 
 its main anti-Mahometan reliance upon so childish a 
 fable : since, allowing even for a blameless assent to 
 this fable amongst nations having no direct inter- 
 course with Mussulmans, still it would argue a 
 shocking frailty in Christianity that its main plead- 
 ings rested, not upon any strength of its own, but 
 simply upon a weakness in its antagonist. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 473 
 
 At this point, when the cause of Grotius seemed 
 
 utterly desperate, G (a boy whom subsequently I 
 
 had reason to admire as equally courageous, truthful,, 
 and far-seeing) suddenly changed the whole field of 
 view. He offered no defence for the ridiculous fable 
 of the pigeon ; which pigeon, on the contrary, he re- 
 presented as drawing in harness with that Christian 
 goose which at one time was universally believed by 
 Mahometans to lead the vanguard of the earliest 
 Crusaders, and which, in a limited extent, really 
 had been a true historical personage. So far he 
 gave up Grotius as indefensible. But on the main 
 question, and the very extensive question, of his 
 apparent imbecility when collated with Paley, &c., 
 suddenly and in one sentence he revolutionised the 
 whole logic of that comparison. Paley and Lardner, 
 he said, what was it that they sought? Their object 
 was avowedly to benefit by any argument, evidence, 
 or presumption whatsoever, no matter whence drawn, 
 so long as it was true or probable, and fitted to sus- 
 tain the credibility of any element in the Christian 
 creed. Well, was not that object common to them 
 and to Grotius ? Not at all. Too often had he 
 (the boy G — — ) secretly noticed the abstinence of 
 Grotius (apparently unaccountable) from certain ob- 
 vious advantages of argument, not to suspect that, 
 in narrowing his own field of disputation, he had a 
 deliberate purpose, and was moving upon the line of 
 some very different policy. Clear it was to him that 
 Grotius, for some reason, declined to receive evidence 
 except from one special and limited class of witnesses. 
 Upon this, some of us laughed at such a self-limita- 
 tion as a wild bravado, recalling that rope-dancing 
 feat of some verse- writers who, through each several 
 stanza in its turn, had gloried in dispensing with some 
 one separate consonant, some vowel, or some diph- 
 thong, and thus achieving a triumph such as crowns 
 with laurel that pedestrian athlete who wins a race by 
 hopping on one leg, or wins it under the inhuman 
 condition of confining both legs within a sack. “ No> 
 no impatiently interrupted G . “ All such fan- 
 
474 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 tastic conflicts with self-created difficulties terminate 
 in pure ostentation, and profit nobody. But the ' 
 self-imposed limitations of Grotius had a special pur- 
 pose, and realised a value not otherwise attainable.” 
 If Grotius accepts no arguments or presumptions 
 except from Mussulmans, from Infidels, or from 
 those who rank as Neutrals, then has he adapted 
 his book to a separate and peculiar audience. The 
 Neutral man will hearken to authorities notoriously 
 Neutral ; Mussulmans will show deference to the 
 statements of Mussulmans ; the Sceptic will bow to 
 the reasonings of Scepticism. All these persons, 
 that would have been repelled on the very threshold 
 from such testimonies as begin in a spirit of hostility 
 to themselves, will listen thoughtfully to suggestions 
 offered in a spirit of conciliation ; much more so if 
 offered by people occupying the same ground at 
 starting as themselves. 
 
 At the cost of some disproportion, I have ventured 
 to rehearse this inaugural conversation amongst the 
 leaders of the school. Whether G — — were entirely 
 
 correct in this application of a secret key to the 
 little work of Grotius, I do not know. I take blame 
 to myself that I do not ; for I also must have been 
 called upon for my quota to the Sunday evening 
 studies on the De Veritate , and must therefore 
 have held in my hands the ready means for solving 
 the question . 1 
 
 Meantime, as a solitary act of silent observation in 
 
 a boy not fifteen, this deciphering idea of G ’s, 
 
 in direct resistance to the received idea, extorted my 
 admiration ; and equally, whether true or false as 
 regarded the immediate fact. That any person, in 
 the very middle storm of chase, when a headlong 
 
 1 Some excuse, however, for my own want of energy is 
 suggested by the fact that very soon after my matriculation 
 Mr. Lawson substituted for Grotius, as the Sunday evening 
 lecture-book, Dr. Clarke’s Commentary on the New Testament. 
 “Out of sight, out of mind;” and in that way only can I 
 account for my own neglect to clear up the question. Or per- 
 haps, after all, I did clear it up, and in a long life-march 
 subsequently may have dropped it by the wayside. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 475 
 
 movement carries all impulses into one current, 
 should in the twinkling of an eye recall himself to 
 the unexpected “ doubles ” of the game, wheel as 
 that wheels, and sternly resist the instincts of the 
 one preoccupying assumption, argues a sagacity not 
 
 often heard of in boyhood. Was G right ? In 
 
 that case he picked a lock which others had failed to 
 pick. Was he wrong? In that case he sketched the 
 idea and outline of a better work (better, as more 
 original and more special in its service) than any 
 which Grotius has himself accomplished. 
 
 Not, however, the particular boy, but the particular 
 school, it was my purpose, in this place, to signalise 
 for praise and gratitude. In after years, when an 
 undergraduate at Oxford, I had an opportunity of 
 reading as it were in a mirror the characteristic pre- 
 tensions and the average success of many celebrated 
 schools. Such a mirror I found in the ordinary 
 conversation and in the favourite reading of young 
 gownsmen belonging to the many different colleges 
 of Oxford. Generally speaking, each college had a 
 filial connection (strict or not strict a ) with some one 
 or more of our great public schools. These, for- 
 tunately for England, are diffused through all her 
 counties : and, as the main appointments to the 
 capital offices in such public schools are often vested 
 by law in Oxford or Cambridge, this arrangement 
 guarantees a sound system of teaching ; so that any 
 failures in the result must presumably be due to the 
 individual student. Failures, on the whole, I do 
 not suppose that there were. Classical attainments 
 that might be styled even splendid were not then, 
 nor are now, uncommon. And yet in one great 
 feature many of those schools, even the very best, 
 when thus tried by their fruits, left a painful memento 
 of failure ; or rather not of failure as in relation to any 
 purpose that they steadily recognised, but of wilful 
 
 1 “ Strict or not strict” ; — In some colleges the claims of 
 alumni from certain schools were absolute ; in some, I believe, 
 conditional ; in others, again, concurrent with rival claims 
 from favoured schools or favoured counties. 
 
476 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 and intentional disregard, as towards a purpose alien 
 from any duty of theirs, or any task which they had ever 
 undertaken — a failure, namely, in relation to modern 
 literature — a neglect to unroll its mighty charts : and 
 amongst this modern literature a special neglect (such 
 as seems almost brutal) of our own English literature, 
 though pleading its patent of precedency in a voice 
 so trumpet-tongued. To myself, whose homage as- 
 cended night and day towards the great altars of 
 English Poetry or Eloquence, it was shocking and 
 revolting to find in high-minded young countrymen, 
 burning with sensibility that sought vainly for a cor- 
 responding object, deep unconsciousness of an all- 
 sufficient object — namely, in that great inheritance 
 of our literature which sometimes kindled enthusiasm 
 in our public enemies. How painful to see or to 
 know that vast revelations of grandeur and beauty 
 are wasting themselves for ever — forests teeming 
 with gorgeous life, floral wildernesses hidden inacces- 
 sibly; whilst, at the same time, in contraposition 
 to that evil, behold a corresponding evil — viz., that 
 with equal prodigality the great capacities of enjoy- 
 ment are running also to waste, and are everywhere 
 burning out unexercised — waste, in short, in the 
 world of things enjoyable , balanced by an equal 
 waste in the organs and the machineries of enjoy- 
 ment ! This picture — would it not fret the heart 
 of an Englishman? Some years (say twenty) after 
 the era of my own entrance at that Oxford which 
 then furnished me with records so painful of slight 
 regard to our national literature, behold at the Court 
 of London a French ambassador, a man of genius 
 blazing (as some people thought) with nationality, 
 but, in fact, with something inexpressibly nobler and 
 deeper — viz., patriotism. For true and unaffected 
 patriotism will show its love in a noble form by 
 sincerity and truth. But nationality, as I have 
 always found, is mean ; is dishonest ; is ungenerous ; 
 is incapable of candour ; and, being continually be- 
 sieged with temptations to falsehood, too often ends by 
 becoming habitually mendacious. This Frenchman 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 477 
 
 above all things valued literature : his own trophies 
 of distinction were all won upon that field : and yet, 
 when called upon to review the literature of Europe, 
 he found himself conscientiously coerced into making 
 his work a mere monument to the glory of one man, 
 and that man the son of a hostile land. The name 
 of Milton, in his estimate, swallowed up all others. 
 This Frenchman was Chateaubriand. The personal 
 splendour which surrounded him gave a correspond- 
 ing splendour to his act. And, because he, as an 
 ambassador, was a representative man, this act might 
 be interpreted as a representative act. The tutelary 
 genius of France in this instance might be regarded 
 as bending before that of England. But homage so 
 free, homage so noble, must be interpreted and re- 
 ceived in a corresponding spirit of genersoity. It was 
 not, like the testimony of Balaam on behalf of Israel, 
 an unwilling submission to a hateful truth : it was a 
 concession, in the spirit of saintly magnanimity, to an 
 interest of human nature that, as such, transcended 
 by many degrees all considerations merely national. 
 
 Now, then, with this unlimited devotion to one 
 great luminary of our literary system emblazoned so 
 conspicuously in the testimony of a Frenchman — 
 that is, of one trained, and privileged to be a public 
 enemy — contrast the humiliating spectacle of young 
 Englishmen suffered (so far as their training is con- 
 cerned) to ignore the very existence of this mighty 
 poet. Do I mean, then, that it would have been 
 advisable to place the “ Paradise Lost,” and the 
 “ Paradise Regained,” and the “ Samson,” in the 
 library of schoolboys ? By no means. That mode 
 of sensibility which deals with the Miltonic sublimity 
 is rarely developed in boyhood. And these divine 
 works should in prudence be reserved to the period 
 of mature manhood. But then it should be made 
 known that they are so reserved, and upon what 
 principle of reverential regard for the poet himself. 
 In the meantime, selections from Milton, from Dryden, 
 from Pope, and many other writers, though not every- 
 where appreciable by those who have but small ex- 
 
478 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 perience of life, would not generally transcend the 
 intellect or sensibility of a boy sixteen or seventeen 
 years old. And, beyond all other sections of litera- 
 ture, the two which I am going to mention are fitted 
 (or might be fitted by skilful management) to engage 
 the interest of those who are no longer boys, but have 
 reached the age which is presumable in English uni- 
 versity matriculation — viz., the close of the eighteenth 
 year. Search through all languages, from Benares 
 the mystical, and the banks of the Ganges, travelling 
 westwards to the fountains of the Hudson, I deny 
 that any two such bibliotheca for engaging youthful 
 interest could be brought together as these two which 
 follow : — 
 
 First, In contradiction to M. Cousin’s recent auda- 
 cious assertion (redeemed from the suspicion of 
 mendacity simply by the extremity of ignorance on 
 which it reposes) that we English have no tolerable 
 writer of prose subsequent to Lord Bacon, it so 
 happens that the seventeenth century, and specially 
 that part of it concerned in this case — viz., the latter 
 seventy years (a.d. 1628-1700) — produced the highest 
 efforts of eloquence (philosophic, but at the same time 
 rhetorical and impassioned, in a degree unknown to 
 the prose literature of France) which our literature 
 possesses, and not a line of it but is posterior to 
 the death of Lord Bacon. Donne, Chillingworth, 
 Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, South, 
 Barrow, form a pleiad , a constellation of seven golden 
 stars, such as no literature can match in their 
 own class. From these seven writers, taken apart 
 from all their contemporaries, I would undertake to 
 build up an entire body of philosophy 1 upon the 
 
 1 “ Philosophy ” ; — At this point it is that the main miscon- 
 ception would arise. Theology, and not: philosophy, most 
 people will fancy, is likely to form the staple of these writers. 
 But I have elsewhere maintained that the main bulk of English 
 philosophy has always hidden itself in the English divinity. In 
 Jeremy Taylor, for instance, are exhibited all the practical 
 aspects of philosophy ; of philosophy as it bears upon Life, 
 upon Ethics, and upon Transcendent Prudence — i.c.\ briefly 
 upon the Greek stimmum boniim. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 479 
 
 supieme interests of humanity. One error of M. 
 Cousin’s doubtless lay in overlooking the fact that all 
 conceivable problems of philosophy can reproduce 
 themselves under a theological mask : and thus he 
 had absolved himself from reading many English 
 books, as presumably mere professional pleadings of 
 Protestant polemics, which are in fact mines inex- 
 haustible of eloquence and philosophic speculation. 
 
 Secondly, A full abstract of the English Drama 
 from about the year 1580 to the period (say 1635) at 
 which it was killed by the frost of the Puritanical 
 spirit seasoning all flesh for the Parliamentary 
 War. No literature, not excepting even that of 
 Athens, has ever presented such a multiform theatre, 
 such a carnival display, mask and anti-mask, of 
 impassioned life — breathing, moving, acting, suffer- 
 ing, laughing. 
 
 “ Quicquid agunt homines — votum, timor, ira, voluptas, 
 Gaudia, discursus 55 ; 1 
 
 — all this, but far more truly and adequately than was 
 or could be effected in that field of composition 
 which the gloomy satirist contemplated, — whatsoever 
 in fact our mediaeval ancestors exhibited in their 
 “ Dance of Death/’ drunk with tears and laughter, — 
 may here be reviewed, scenically grouped, draped, and 
 gorgeously coloured. What other national drama 
 can pretend to any competition with this ? The 
 Athenian has in a great proportion perished ; the 
 Roman was killed prematurely by the bloody realities 
 of the amphitheatre, as candlelight by daylight ; the 
 Spanish, even in the hands of Calderon, offers only 
 undeveloped sketchings; and the French, besides 
 other and profounder objections, to which no justice 
 had yet been done, lies under the signal disadvantage 
 of not having reached its meridian until sixty years 
 
 1 ec All that is done by men — movements of prayer, panic, 
 wrath, revels of the voluptuous, festivals of triumph, or gladiator- 
 ship of the intellect. 5 ’— -Juvenal^ in the prefatory lines which 
 rehearse the prevailing themes of his own Satires gathered in 
 the great harvests of Rome. 
 
480 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 (or two generations) after the English. In reality, 
 the great period of the English Drama was exactly 
 closing as the French opened : 1 consequently the 
 French lost the prodigious advantage for scenical 
 effects of a romantic and picturesque age. This had 
 vanished when the French theatre culminated ; and 
 the natural result was that the fastidiousness of French 
 taste, by this time too powerfully developed, stifled or 
 distorted the free movements of French genius. 
 
 I beg the reader’s pardon for this disproportioned 
 digression, into which I was hurried by my love for 
 our great national literature, my anxiety to see it 
 amongst educational resources invested with a minis- 
 terial agency of far ampler character, but at all events 
 to lodge a protest against that wholesale neglect of 
 our supreme authors which leaves us open to the 
 stinging reproach of “ treading daily with our clouted 
 shoon ” (to borrow the words of Comus) upon that 
 whicn high-minded foreigners regard as the one para- 
 mount jewel in our national diadem. 
 
 That reproach fell heavily, as my own limited ex- 
 perience inclined me to fear, upon most of our great 
 
 1 It is remarkable that in the period immediately anterior 
 to that of Corneille, a stronger and more living nature was 
 struggling for utterance in French tragedy. Guizot has cited 
 from an early drama (I forget whether of Rotrou or of Hardy) 
 one scene most thoroughly impassioned. The situation is that 
 of a prince who has fixed his love upon a girl of low birth. She 
 is faithful and constant ; but the courtiers about the prince, for 
 malicious purposes of their own, calumniate her : the prince is 
 deluded by the plausible air of the slanders which they disperse : 
 he believes them ; but not with the result (anticipated by the 
 courtiers) of dismissing the girl from his thoughts. On the con- 
 trary, he is haunted all the more morbidly by her image ; and, 
 in a scene which brings before us one of the vilest amongst 
 these slanderers exerting himself to the uttermost in drawing 
 off the prince’s thoughts to alien objects, we find the prince 
 vainly attempting any self-control, vainly striving to attend, till 
 he is overruled by the tenderness of his sorrowing love into 
 finding new occasions for awakening thoughts of the lost girl 
 in the very words chiefly relied on for calling off his feelings 
 from her image, The scene (as Guizot himself remarks) is 
 thoroughly Shaksperian ; and I venture to think that this judg- 
 ment would have been countersigned by Charles Lamb. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 48 I 
 
 public schools, otherwise so admirably conducted . 1 
 But from the Manchester Grammar School any such 
 reproach altogether rebounded. My very first con- 
 versation with the boys had arisen naturally upon a 
 casual topic, and had shown them to be tolerably 
 familiar with the outline of the Christian polemics in 
 the warfare with Jew, Mahometan, Infidel, and Sceptic. 
 But this was an exceptional case ; and naturally it 
 happened that most of us sought for the ordinary 
 subjects of our conversational discussions in litera- 
 ture — viz., in our own native literature. Here it was 
 that I learned to feel a deep respect for my new 
 schoolfellows : deep it was, then ; and a larger ex- 
 perience has made it deeper. I have since known 
 many literary men ; men whose profession was litera- 
 ture ; who were understood to have dedicated them- 
 selves to literature ; and who sometimes had with 
 some one special section or little nook of literature 
 an acquaintance critically minute. But amongst such 
 men I have found but three or four who had a know- 
 ledge which came as near to what I should consider 
 a comprehensive knowledge as really existed amongst 
 those boys collectively. What one boy had not, 
 another had ; and thus, by continual intercourse, the 
 fragmentary contributions of one being integrated by 
 the fragmentary contributions of others, gradually the 
 attainments of each separate individual became, in 
 some degree, the collective attainments of the whole 
 senior common room. It is true, undoubtedly, that 
 some parts of literature were inaccessible, simply 
 because the books were inaccessible to boys at 
 school, — for instance, Froissart in the old transla- 
 tion by Lord Berners, now more than three centuries 
 old ; and some parts were, to the young, essentially 
 repulsive. But, measuring the general qualifications 
 
 1 It will strike everybody that such works as the Micro- 
 cosm , conducted notoriously by Eton boys, and therefore, in 
 part, by Canning as one of their leaders at that period, must 
 have an admirable effect, since not only it must have made it 
 the interest of each contributor, but must even have made it 
 his necessity, to cultivate some acquaintance with his native 
 literature. 
 
 Q 
 
482 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 by that standard which I have since found to prevail 
 amongst professional litterateurs, I felt more respect- 
 fully towards the majority of my senior schoolfellows 
 than ever I had fancied it possible that I should find 
 occasion to feel towards any boys whatever. My 
 intercourse with those amongst them who had any 
 conversational talents greatly stimulated my intellect. 
 
 This intercourse, however, fell within narrower 
 limits soon after the time of my entrance. I acknow- 
 ledge, with deep self-reproach, that every possible 
 indulgence was allowed to me which the circum- 
 stances of the establishment made possible. I had, 
 for example, a private room allowed, in which I not 
 only studied, but also slept at night. The room 
 being airy and cheerful, I found nothing disagreeable 
 in this double use of it. Naturally, however, this 
 means of retirement tended to sequester me from 
 my companions : for, whilst liking the society of 
 some amongst them, I also had a deadly liking 
 (perhaps a morbid liking) for solitude. To make 
 my present solitude the more fascinating, my mother 
 sent me five guineas extra , , for the purchase of an 
 admission to the Manchester Library ; a library 
 which I should not at present think very extensive, 
 but which, however, benefited in its composition, 
 as also in its administration, by the good sense and 
 intelligence of some amongst its original committees. 
 These two luxuries were truly and indeed such : 
 but a third, from which I had anticipated even 
 greater pleasure, turned out a total failure ; and for 
 a reason which it may be useful to mention, by 
 way of caution to others. This was a pianoforte, 
 together with the sum required for regular lessons 
 from a music-master. But the first discovery I 
 made was that practice through eight or even ten 
 hours a day was indispensable towards any great 
 proficiency on this instrument. Another discovery 
 finished my disenchantment : it was this. For the 
 particular purpose which I had in view, it became 
 clear that no mastery of the instrument, not even 
 that of Thalberg, would be available. Too soon 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 483 
 
 1 became aware that to the deep voluptuous enjoy- 
 ment of music absolute passiveness in the hearer 
 is indispensable. Gain what skill you please, never- 
 theless activity, vigilance, anxiety must always ac- 
 company an elaborate effort of musical execution : 
 and so far is that from being reconcilable with 
 the entrancement and lull essential to the true frui- 
 tion of music, that, even if you should suppose 
 a vast piece of mechanism capable of executing 
 a whole oratorio, but requiring, at intervals, a co- 
 operating impulse from the foot of the auditor, even 
 that , even so much as an occasional touch of the 
 foot, would utterly undermine all your pleasure. A 
 single psychological discovery, therefore, caused my 
 musical anticipations to evanesce. Consequently, 
 one of my luxuries burst like a bubble at an early 
 stage. In this state of things, when the instrument 
 had turned out a bubble, it followed naturally that 
 the music-master should find himself to be a bubble. 
 But he was so thoroughly good-natured and agree- 
 able that I could not reconcile myself to such a 
 catastrophe. Meantime, though accommodating 
 within certain limits, this music-master was yet a 
 conscientious man, and a man of honourable pride. 
 On finding, therefore, that I was not seriously 
 making any effort to improve, he shook hands 
 with me one fine day, and took his leave for ever. 
 Unless it were to point a moral and adorn a tale, 
 the piano had then become useless. It was too big 
 to hang upon willows, and willows there were none 
 in that neighbourhood. But it remained for months 
 as a lumbering monument of labour misapplied, of 
 bubbles that had burst, and of musical visions that, 
 under psychological tests, had foundered for ever. 
 
 Yes, certainly, this particular luxury — one out of 
 three — had proved a bubble ; too surely this had 
 foundered ; but not, therefore, the other two. The 
 quiet study, lifted by two storeys above the vapours 
 of earth, and liable to no unseasonable intrusion ; 
 the Manchester Library, so judiciously and symmetri- 
 cally mounted in all its most attractive departments 
 
484 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 — no class disproportioned to the rest : these were 
 no bubbles ; these had not foundered. Oh, where- 
 fore, then, was it — through what inexplicable growth 
 of evil in myself or in others — that now in the 
 summer of 1802, when peace was brooding over 
 all the land, peace succeeding to a bloody seven 
 years’ war, but peace which already gave signs of 
 breaking into a far bloodier war, some dark sympa- 
 thising movement within my own heart, as if echoing 
 and repeating in mimicry the political menaces of 
 the earth, swept with storm-clouds across that other- 
 wise serene and radiant dawn which should have 
 heralded my approaching entrance into life? Inex- 
 plicable I have allowed myself to call this fatal error 
 in my life, because such it must appear to others ; 
 since, even to myself, so often as X fail to realise 
 the case by reproducing a reflex impression in kind, 
 and in degree, of the suffering before which my 
 better angel gave way — yes, even to myself this 
 collapse of my resisting energies seems inexplicable. 
 Yet, again, in simple truth, now that it becomes 
 possible, through changes worked by time, to tell 
 the whole truth (and not, as in former editions, 
 only a part of it), there really was no absolute 
 mystery at all. But this case, in common with 
 many others, exemplifies to my mind the mere im- 
 possibility of making full and frank “ Confessions,” 
 whilst many of the persons concerned in the in- 
 cidents are themselves surviving, or (which is worse 
 still), if themselves dead and buried, are yet vicari- 
 ously surviving in the persons of near and loving 
 kinsmen. Rather than inflict mortifications upon 
 people so circumstanced, any kind-hearted man will 
 choose to mutilate his narrative ; will suppress facts, 
 and will mystify explanations. For instance, at this 
 point in my record, it has become my right, perhaps 
 X might say my duty, to call a particular medical man 
 of the penultimate generation a blockhead ; nay, 
 doubtfully, to call him a criminal blockhead. But 
 could I do this without deep compunction, so long 
 as sons and daughters of his were still living, from 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 485 
 
 whom I, when a boy, had received most hospitable 
 attentions? Often, on the very same day which 
 brought home to my suffering convictions the atro- 
 cious ignorance of papa, I was benefiting by the 
 courtesies of the daughters, and by the scientific 
 accomplishments of the son. Not the less this man, 
 at that particular moment when a crisis of gloom 
 was gathering over my path, became effectually my 
 evil genius. Not that singly perhaps he could have 
 worked any durable amount of mischief : but he, as 
 a co-operator unconsciously with others, sealed and 
 ratified that sentence of stormy sorrow then hanging 
 over my head. Three separate persons, in fact, made 
 themselves unintentional accomplices in that ruin (a 
 ruin reaching me even at this day by its shadows) 
 which threw me out a homeless vagrant upon the 
 earth before I had accomplished my seventeenth 
 year. Of these three persons, foremost came myself, 
 through my wilful despair and resolute adjuration of 
 all secondary hope : since, after all, some mitigation 
 was possible, supposing that perfect relief might not 
 be possible. Secondly, came that medical ruffian 
 through whose brutal ignorance it happened that 
 my malady had not been arrested before reaching 
 an advanced stage. Thirdly, came Mr. Lawson, 
 through whose growing infirmities it had arisen that 
 this malady ever reached its very earliest stage. 
 Strange it was, but not the less a fact, that Mr. 
 Lawson was gradually becoming a curse to all who 
 fell under his influence, through pure zealotry of 
 conscientiousness. Being a worse man, he would 
 have carried far deeper blessings into his circle. If 
 he could have reconciled himself to an imperfect- 
 discharge of his duties, he would not have betrayed 
 his insufficiency for those duties. But this he would 
 not hear of. He persisted in travelling over the 
 appointed course to the last inch : and the con- 
 sequences told most painfully upon the comfort of 
 all around him. By the old traditionary usages of 
 the school, going in at seven a.m., we ought to have 
 been dismissed for breakfast and a full hour’s repose 
 
486 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 at nine. This hour of rest was in strict justice a debt 
 to the students — liable to no discount either through 
 the caprice or the tardiness of the supreme master. 
 Yet such were the gradual encroachments upon this 
 hour that at length the bells of the collegiate church, 
 — which, by an ancient usage, rang every morning 
 from half-past nine to ten, and through varying 
 modifications of musical keys and rhythmus that 
 marked the advancing stages of the half-hour, — 
 regularly announced to us, on issuing from the 
 school-room, that the bread and milk which com- 
 posed our simple breakfast must be despatched at 
 a pace fitter for the fowls of the air than students 
 of Grecian philosophy. But was no compensatory 
 encroachment for our benefit allowed upon the next 
 hour from ten to eleven? Not for so much as the 
 fraction of a second. Inexorably as the bells, by 
 stopping, announced the hour of ten, was Mr. 
 Lawson to be seen ascending the steps of the school ; 
 and he that suffered most by this rigorous exaction 
 of duties could not allege that Mr. Lawson suffered 
 less. If he required others to pay, he also paid up 
 to the last farthing. The same derangement took 
 place, with the same refusal to benefit by any in- 
 demnification, at what should have been the two- 
 hours’ pause for dinner. Only for some mysterious 
 reason, resting possibly upon the family arrangements 
 of the day-scholars, — which, if once violated, might 
 have provoked a rebellion of fathers and mothers, — 
 he still adhered faithfully to five o’clock p.m. as the 
 closing hour of the day’s labours. 
 
 Here then stood arrayed the whole machinery 
 of mischief in good working order ; and through 
 six months or more, allowing for one short respite 
 of four weeks, this machinery had been operating 
 with effect. Mr. Lawson, to begin, had (without 
 meaning it, or so much as perceiving it) barred up 
 all avenues from morning to night through which 
 any bodily exercise could be obtained. Two or 
 three chance intervals of five minutes each, and 
 even these not consecutively arranged, composed 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 487 
 
 me w.iole available fund of leisure out of which any 
 stroll into the country could have been attempted. 
 But in a great city like Manchester the very suburbs 
 had hardly been reached before that little fraction of 
 time was exhausted. Very soon after Mr. Lawson’s 
 increasing infirmities had begun to tell severely in 
 the contraction of our spare time, the change showed 
 itself powerfully in my drooping health. Gradually 
 the liver became affected : and connected with that 
 affection arose, what often accompanies such ail- 
 ments, profound melancholy. In such circumstances, 
 indeed under any the slightest disturbance of my 
 health, I had authority from my guardians to call 
 for medical advice : but I was not left to my own 
 discretion in selecting the adviser. This person was 
 not a physician, who would of course have expected 
 the ordinary fee of a guinea for every visit ; nor a 
 surgeon ; but simply an apothecary. In any case 
 of serious illness a physician would have been called 
 in. But a less costly style of advice was reasonably 
 held to be sufficient in any illness which left the 
 patient strength sufficient to walk about. Certainly 
 it ought to have been sufficient here : for no case 
 could possibly be simpler. Three doses of calomel 
 or blue-pill, which unhappily I did not then know, 
 would no doubt have re-established me in a week. 
 But far better, as acting always upon me with a 
 magical celerity and a magical certainty, would have 
 been the authoritative prescription (privately notified 
 to Mr. Lawson) of seventy miles’ walking in each 
 week. Unhappily my professional adviser was a 
 comatose old gentleman, rich beyond all his needs, 
 careless of his own practice, and standing under 
 that painful necessity (according to the custom then 
 regulating medical practice, which prohibited fees 
 to apothecaries) of Peking his remuneration in 
 excessive deluges of medicine. Me, however, out 
 of pure idleness, he forbore to plague with any 
 variety of medicines. With sublime simplicity he 
 confined himself to one horrid mixture, that must 
 have suggested itself to him when prescribing for 
 
488 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 a tiger. In ordinary circumstances, and with plenty 
 of exercise, no creature could be healthier than 
 myself. But my organisation was perilously frail. 
 And to fight simultaneously with such a malady 
 and such a medicine seemed really too much. The 
 proverb tells us that three “ flittings ” are as bad 
 as a fire. Very possibly. And I should think that, 
 in the same spirit of reasonable equation, three such 
 tiger-drenches must be equal to one apoplectic fit, 
 or even to the tiger himself. Having taken two 
 of them, which struck me as quite enough for one 
 life, I declined to comply with the injunction of 
 the label pasted upon each several phial — viz., 
 Repetatur haustus ; 1 and, instead of doing any such 
 dangerous thing, called upon Mr. (the apothe- 
 
 cary), begging to know if his art had not amongst 
 its reputed infinity of resources any less abominable, 
 and less shattering to a delicate system than this. 
 “None whatever,” he replied. Exceedingly kind he 
 was ; insisted on my drinking tea with his really 
 amiable daughters ; but continued at intervals to 
 repeat, “None whatever — none whatever;” then, as 
 if rousing himself to an effort, he sang out loudly, 
 “None whatever,” which in this final utterance he 
 toned down syllabically into “ what ever — ever — 
 ver — erP The whole wit of man, it seems, had 
 exhausted itself upon the preparation of that one 
 infernal mixture. 
 
 Now then we three — Mr.. Lawson, the somnolent 
 apothecary, and myself — had amongst us accom- 
 plished a climax of perplexity. Mr. Lawson, by 
 mere dint of conscientiousness, had made health 
 for me impossible. The apothecary had subscribed 
 his little contribution, by ratifying and trebling the 
 ruinous effects of this sedentariness. And for myself, 
 as last in the series, it now remained to clench the 
 operation by my own little contribution, all that I 
 really had to offer — viz., absolute despair. Those 
 who have ever suffered from a profound derangement 
 
 1 “ Let the draught be repeated. : 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 489 
 
 of the liver may happen to know that of human 
 despondencies through all their infinite gamut none 
 is more deadly. Hope died within me. I could 
 not look for medical relief, so deep being my own 
 ignorance, so equally deep being that of my official 
 counsellor. I could not expect that Mr. Lawson 
 would modify his system — his instincts of duty being 
 so strong, his incapacity to face that duty so steadily 
 increasing. “It comes then to this,” thought I, 
 “ that in myself only there lurks any arrear of help : ” 
 as always for every man the ultimate reliance should 
 be on himself. But this self of mine seemed abso- 
 lutely bankrupt ; bankrupt of counsel or device — 
 of effort in the way of action, or of suggestion in the 
 way of plan. I had for two months been pursuing 
 with one of my guardians what I meant for a negotia- 
 tion upon this subject ; the main object being to 
 obtain some considerable abbreviation of my school 
 residence. But negotiation was a self- flattering name 
 for such a correspondence, since there never had 
 been from the beginning any the slightest leaning 
 on my guardian’s part towards the shadow or pre- 
 tence of a compromise. What compromise, indeed, 
 was possible where neither party could concede a 
 part , however small ? the whole must be conceded, 
 or nothing : since no mezzo termine was conceivable. 
 In reality, when my eyes first glanced upon that 
 disagreeable truth — that no opening offered for 
 reciprocal concession, that the concession must all 
 be on one side — naturally it struck me that no 
 guardian could be expected to do that At the 
 same moment it also struck me that my guardian 
 had all along never for a moment been arguing with 
 a view to any practical result, but simply in the hope 
 that he might 7 r in over my assent to the reason- 
 ableness of what, reasonable or not, was settled 
 immovably. These sudden discoveries, flashing 
 upon me simultaneously, were quite sufficient to 
 put a summary close to the correspondence. And 
 I saw also, which strangely had escaped me till this 
 general revelation of disappointments, that any in- 
 
 Q 2 
 
490 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 dividual guardian — even if he had been disposed to 
 concession — was but one after all amongst five. 
 Well : this amongst the general blackness really 
 brought a gleam of comfort. If the whole object 
 on which I had spent so much excellent paper and 
 midnight tallow (I am ashamed to use so vile a word, 
 and yet truth forbids me to say oil), if this would 
 have been so nearly worthless when gained, then it 
 became a kind of pleasure to have lost it. All con- 
 siderations united now in urging me to waste no 
 more of either rhetoric, tallow, or logic, upon my 
 impassive granite block of a guardian. Indeed, I 
 suspected, on reviewing his last communication, that 
 he had just reached the last inch of his patience, or 
 (in nautical diction) had “ paid out ” the entire cable 
 by which he swung ; so that, if I, acting on the 
 apothecary’s precedent of “ repetatur haustus, v had 
 endeavoured to administer another bolus or draught 
 of expostulation, he would have followed my course 
 as to the tiger-drench, in applying his potential No 
 to any such audacious attempt. To my guardian, 
 meantime, I owe this justice — that, over and above 
 the absence on my side of any arguments wearing 
 even a colourable strength (for to him the suffering 
 from biliousness must have been a mere word), he 
 had the following weighty consideration to offer, 
 “ which even this foolish boy ” (to himself he would 
 say) “will think material some three years ahead.” 
 My patrimonial income, at the moment of my 
 father’s death,* like that of all my brothers (then 
 three), was exactly ^*150 per annum. 1 Now, 
 according to the current belief, or boldly, one 
 might say, according to the avowed traditional 
 maxim throughout England, such an income was 
 too little for an undergraduate, keeping his four 
 
 1 “ ^150 per annum ” ; — Why in a long minority of more 
 than fourteen years this was not improved, I never could 
 learn. Nobody was open to any suspicion of positive em- 
 bezzlement: and yet this case must be added to the other 
 cases of passive neglects and negative injuries which so exten- 
 sively disfigure the representative picture of guardianship all 
 over Christendom. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 491 
 
 terms annually at Oxford or Cambridge. Too 
 little — by how much? By ^50: the adequate in- 
 come being set down at just ^200. Consequently 
 the precise sum by which my income was supposed 
 (falsely supposed, as subsequently my own experience 
 convinced me) to fall short of the income needed for 
 Oxford, was that very sum which the funds of the 
 Manchester Grammar School allocated to every 
 student resident for a period of three years ; and 
 allocated not merely through a corresponding period 
 of three years, but of seven years. Strong should 
 have been the reasons that could neutralise such 
 overwhelming pleadings of just and honourable 
 prudence for submitting to the further residence 
 required. O reader, urge not the crying arguments 
 that spoke so tumultuously against me. Too sorrow- 
 fully I feel them. Out of thirty-six months 7 residence 
 required, I had actually completed nineteen— /.<?., the 
 better half. Still, on the other hand, it is true that 
 my sufferings were almost insupportable ; and, but 
 for the blind unconscious conspiracy of two persons, 
 these sufferings would either (1) never have existed, 
 or (2) would have been instantly relieved. In a great 
 city like Manchester lay, probably, a shipload of 
 that same mercury which, by one fragment, not so 
 large as an acorn, would have changed the colour 
 of a human life, or would have intercepted the heavy 
 funeral knell — heavy, though it may be partially 
 muffled — of his own fierce self-reproaches. 
 
 But now, at last, came over me, from the mere 
 excess of bodily suffering and mental disappoint- 
 ments, a frantic and rapturous re-agency. In the 
 United States the case is well known, and many 
 times has been described by travellers, of that furious 
 instinct which, under a secret call for saline variations 
 of diet, drives all the tribes of buffaloes for thousands 
 of miles to the common centre of the “ Salt-licks. 77 
 Under such a compulsion does the locust, under 
 such a compulsion does the leeming, traverse its 
 mysterious pet L 11. They are deaf to danger, deaf to 
 the cry of battle, deaf to the trumpets of death. Let 
 
492 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the sea cross their path, let armies with artillery bar 
 the road, even these terrific powers can arrest only 
 by destroying ; and the most frightful abysses, up to 
 the very last menace of engulfment, up to the very 
 instant of absorption, have no power to alter or retard 
 the line of their inexorable advance. 
 
 Such an instinct it was, such a rapturous command 
 — even so potent, and alas ! even so blind — that, 
 under the whirl of tumultuous indignation and of 
 new r -born hope, suddenly transfigured my whole 
 being. In the twinkling of an eye, I came to an 
 adamantine resolution — not as if issuing from any 
 act or any choice of my own, but as if passively 
 received from some dark oracular legislation ex- 
 ternal to myself. That I would elope from Man- 
 chester — this was the resolution. Abscond would 
 have been the word, if I had meditated anything 
 criminal. But whence came the indignation, and 
 the hope? The indignation arose naturally against 
 my three tormentors (guardian, Archididascalus, and 
 the professor of tigrology) ; for those who do sub- 
 stantially co-operate to one result, however little 
 designing it, unavoidably the mind unifies as a 
 hostile confederacy. But the hope — how shall I 
 explain that ? Was it the first-born of the resolution, 
 or was the resolution the first-born of the hope? 
 Xndivisibly they went together, like thunder and 
 lightning ; or each interchangeably ran before and 
 after the other. Under that transcendent rapture 
 which the prospect of sudden liberation let loose, 
 all that natural anxiety which should otherwise have 
 interlinked itself with my anticipations was actually 
 drowned in the blaze of joy, as the light of the planet 
 Mercury is lost and confounded on sinking too far 
 within the blaze of the solar beams. Practically I 
 felt no care at all stretching beyond two or three 
 weeks. Not as being heedless and improvident ; my 
 tendencies lay generally in the other direction. No ; 
 the cause lurked in what Wordsworth, when describing 
 the festal state of France during the happy morning- 
 tide of her First Revolution (1788-1790), calls “ the 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 493 
 
 senselessness of joy ” : this it was, joy — headlong — 
 frantic — irreflective — and (as Wordsworth truly calls 
 it), for that very reason, sublime 1 — which swallowed 
 up all capacities of rankling care or heart-corroding 
 doubt. I was, I had been long, a captive : I was in 
 a house of bondage : one fulminating word — Let there 
 be freedom — spoken from some hidden recess in my 
 own will, had as by an earthquake rent asunder my 
 prison gates. At any minute I could walk out. 
 Already I trod by anticipation the sweet pastoral 
 hills, already I breathed gales of the everlasting 
 mountains, that to my feelings blew from the garden 
 of Paradise ; and in that vestibule of an earthly 
 heaven it was no more possible for me to see vividly 
 or in any lingering detail the thorny cares which 
 might hereafter multiply around me than amongst 
 the roses of June, and on the loveliest of June morn- 
 ings, I could gather depression from the glooms of 
 the last December. 
 
 To go was settled. But when and whither ? When 
 could have but one answer ; for on more reasons than 
 one I needed summer weather, and as much of it as 
 possible. Besides that, when August came, it would 
 bring along with it my own birthday : now, one 
 codicil in my general vow of freedom had been 
 that my seventeenth birthday should not find me at 
 school. Still I needed some trifle of preparation. 
 Especially I needed a little money. I wrote, there- 
 fore, to the only confidential friend that I had — viz., 
 Lady Carbery. Originally, as early friends of my 
 mother’s, both she and Lord Carbery had dis- 
 tinguished me at Bath and elsewhere, for some years, 
 by flattering attentions ; and, for the last three years 
 in particular, Lady Carbery, a young woman some 
 ten years older than myself, and who was as remark- 
 able for her intellectual pretensions as she was for her 
 beauty and her benevolence, had maintained a corre- 
 
 1 “ The senselessness of joy was then sublime.” — Wordsworth 
 at Calais in 1802 (see his sonnets), looking back through 
 thirteen years to the great era of social resurrection, in 1788-89, 
 from a sleep of ten centuries. 
 
494 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 spondence with me upon questions of literature. She 
 thought too highly of my powers and attainments, 
 and everywhere spoke of me with an enthusiasm 
 that, if I had been five or six years older, and had 
 possessed any personal advantages, might have raised 
 smiles at her expense. To her I now wrote, request- 
 ing the loan of five guineas. A whole week passed 
 without any answer. This perplexed and made me 
 uneasy : for her ladyship was rich by a vast fortune 
 removed entirely from her husband's control ; and, as 
 I felt assured, would have cheerfully sent me twenty 
 times the sum asked, unless her sagacity had sug- 
 gested some suspicion (which seemed impossible) 
 of the real purposes which I contemplated in the 
 employment of the five guineas. Could I incau- 
 tiously have said anything in my own letter tending 
 
 that way ? Certainly not ; then why But at 
 
 that moment my speculations were cut short by a 
 letter bearing a coroneted seal. It was from Lady 
 Carbery, of course, and enclosed ten guineas instead 
 of five. Slow in those days were the mails; besides 
 which, Lady Carbery happened to be down at the 
 seaside, whither my letter had been sent after her. 
 Now, then, including my own pocket-money, I pos- 
 sessed a dozen guineas ; which seemed sufficient for 
 my immediate purpose; and all ulterior emergencies, 
 as the reader understands, I trampled under foot. 
 This sum, however, spent at inns on the most 
 economic footing, could not have held out for much 
 above a calendar month ; and, as to the plan of 
 selecting secondary inns, these are not always cheaper ; 
 but the main objection is that in the solitary stations 
 amongst the mountains (Cambrian no less than 
 Cumbrian) there is often no choice to be found : the 
 high-priced inn is the only one. Even this dozen of 
 guineas it became necessary to diminish by three. 
 The age of “ vails ” and perquisites to three or four 
 servants at any gentleman’s house where you dined — 
 this age, it is true, had passed away by thirty years 
 perhaps. But that flagrant abuse had no connection 
 at all with the English custom of distributing money 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 495 
 
 amongst that part of the domestics whose daily 
 labours may have been increased by a visitor’s 
 residence in the family for some considerable space 
 of time. This custom (almost peculiar, I believe, 
 to the English gentry) is honourable and just. I 
 personally had been trained by my mother, who 
 detested sordid habits, to look upon it as ignominious 
 in a gentleman to leave a household without acknow- 
 ledging the obliging services of those who cannot 
 openly remind him of their claims. On this occasion, 
 mere, necessity compelled me to overlook the house- 
 keeper : for to her I could not have offered less than 
 two or three guineas ; and, as she was a fixture, I 
 reflected that I might send it at some future period. 
 To three inferior servants I found that I ought not to 
 give less than one guinea each : so much, therefore, 
 
 I left in the hands of G , the most honourable 
 
 and upright of boys ; since to have given it myself 
 would have been prematurely to publish my purpose. 
 These three guineas deducted, I still had nine, or 
 thereabouts. And now all things were settled, except 
 one : the when was settled, and the how ; but not the 
 whither . That was still sub judice . 
 
 My plan originally had been to travel northwards 
 — viz., to the region of the English Lakes. That 
 little mountainous district, lying stretched like a 
 pavilion between four well-known points, — viz., the 
 small towns of Ulverstone and Penrith as its two 
 'poles, south and north ; between Kendal, again, on 
 the east, and Egremont on the west, measuring on 
 the one diameter about forty miles, and on the other 
 perhaps thirty-five — had for me a secret fascination, 
 subtle, sweet, fantastic, and even from my seventh or 
 eighth year spiritually strong. The southern section 
 of that district, about eighteen or twenty miles long, 
 which bears the name of Furness, figures in the 
 eccentric geography of English law as a section of 
 Lancashire, though separated from that county by the 
 estuary of Morecambe Bay : and therefore, as Lanca- 
 shire happened to be my own native county, I had 
 from childhood, on the strength of this mere legal 
 
496 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 fiction, cherished as a mystic privilege, slender as a 
 filament of air, some fraction of denizenship in the 
 fairy little domain of the English Lakes. The major 
 part of these lakes lies in Westmoreland and Cumber- 
 land : but the sweet reposing little water of Esthwaite, 
 with its few emerald fields, and the grander one of 
 Coniston, with the sublime cluster of mountain 
 groups, and the little network of quiet dells lurking 
 about its head 1 all the way back to Grasmere, 
 lie in or near the upper chamber of Furness ; and all 
 these, together with the ruins of the once glorious 
 abbey, had been brought out not many years before 
 into sunny splendour by the great enchantress of that 
 generation' — Ann Radcliffe. But more even than 
 Ann Radcliffe had the landscape painters, so many 
 and so various, contributed to the glorification of the 
 English Lake district; drawing out and impressing 
 upon the heart the sanctity of repose in its shy 
 recesses — its alpine grandeurs in such passes as those 
 of Wastdale-head, Langdale-head, Borrowdale, Kirk- 
 stone, Hawsdale, &c., together with the monastic 
 peace which seems to brood over its peculiar form of 
 
 1 “ Its head” : — That end of a lake which receives the 
 rivulets and brooks feeding its waters is locally called its 
 head; and, in continuation of the same constructive image, 
 the counter terminus, which discharges its surplus water, is 
 called its foot. By the way, as a suggestion from this obvious 
 distinction, I may remark that in all cases the very existence of 
 a head and a foot to any sheet of water defeats the malice of 
 Lord Byron’s sneer against the lake poets, in calling them by 
 the contemptuous designation of ‘fond poets”; a variation 
 which some part of the public readily caught up as a natural 
 reverberation of that spitefulness, so petty and apparently so 
 groundless, which notoriously Lord Byron cherished against 
 Wordsworth steadily, and more fitfully against Southey. The 
 effect of transforming a living image — an image of restless 
 motion — into an image of foul stagnation was tangibly appre- 
 hensible. But what was it that contra-distinguished the “ vivi 
 lapis ” of Virgil from rotting ponds mantled with verdant 
 slime? To have, or not to have, a head and a foot a 
 principle of perpetual change) is at the very heart of this dis- 
 tinction ; and to substitute for lake a term which ignores and 
 negatives the very differential principle that constitutes a lake — 
 viz., its current and its eternal mobility — is to offer an insult in 
 which the insulted party has no interest or concern. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 497 
 
 pastoral life, so much nobler (as Wordsworth notices) 
 in its stern simplicity and continual conflict with 
 danger hidden in the vast draperies of mist over- 
 shadowing the hills, and amongst the armies of snow 
 and hail arrayed by fierce northern winters, than the 
 effeminate shepherd’s life in the classical Arcadia, or 
 in the flowery pastures of Sicily. 
 
 Amongst these attractions that drew me so strongly 
 to the Lakes, there had also by that time arisen in 
 this lovely region the deep deep magnet (as to me only 
 in all this world it then was) of William Wordsworth. 
 Inevitably this close connection of the poetry which 
 most of all had moved me with the particular region 
 and scenery that most of all had fastened upon 
 my affections, and led captive my imagination, was 
 calculated, under ordinary circumstances, to impress 
 upon my fluctuating deliberations a summary and 
 decisive bias. But the very depth of the impressions 
 which had been made upon me, either as regarded 
 the poetry or the scenery, was too solemn and (un- 
 affectedly I may say it) too spiritual, to clothe itself 
 in any hasty or chance movement as at all adequately 
 expressing its strength, or reflecting its hallowed 
 character. If you, reader, were a devout Mahometan, 
 throwing gazes of mystical awe daily towards Mecca, 
 or were a Christian devotee looking with the same 
 rapt adoration to St. Peter’s at Rome, or to El Kodah, 
 the Holy City of Jerusalem (so called even amongst 
 the Arabs, who hate both Christian and Jew), — how 
 painfully would it jar upon your sensibilities if some 
 friend, sweeping past you upon a high-road, with a 
 train (according to the circumstances) of dromedaries 
 or of wheel carriages, should suddenly pull up, and 
 say, “ Come, old fellow, jump up alongside of me ; 
 I’m off for the Red Sea, and here’s a spare drome- 
 dary,” or “ Off for Rome, and here’s a well-cushioned 
 barouche.” Seasonable and convenient it might 
 happen that the invitation were ; but still it would 
 shock you that a journey which, with or without your 
 consent, could not but assume the character eventu- 
 ally of a saintly pilgrimage, should arise and take its 
 
498 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 initial movement upon a casual summons, or upon a 
 vulgar opening of momentary convenience. In the 
 present case, under no circumstances should I have 
 dreamed of presenting myself to Wordsworth. The 
 principle of “ veneration ” (to speak phrenologically) 
 was by many degrees too strong in me for any such 
 overture on my part. Hardly could I have found 
 the courage to meet and to answer such an overture 
 coming from him. I could not even tolerate the 
 prospect (as a bare possibility) of Wordsworth’s hear- 
 ing my name first of all associated with some case of 
 pecuniary embarrassment. And, apart from all that, 
 it vulgarised the whole “ interest ” (no other term can 
 I find to express the case collectively) — the whole 
 “ interest ” of poetry and the enchanted land — equally 
 it vulgarised person and thing, the vineyard and the 
 vintage, the gardens and the ladies, of the Hesperides, 
 together with all their golden fruitage, if I should 
 rush upon them in a hurried and thoughtless state 
 of excitement. I remembered the fine caution on 
 this subject involved in a tradition preserved by 
 Pausanias. Those (he tells us) who visited by night 
 the great field of Marathon (where at certain times 
 phantom cavalry careered, flying and pursuing) in a 
 temper of vulgar sight-seeking, and under no higher 
 impulse than the degrading one of curiosity, were 
 met and punished severely in the dark, by the same 
 sort of people, I presume, as those who handled Fal- 
 staff so roughly in the venerable shades of Windsor : 
 whilst loyal visitors, who came bringing a true and 
 filial sympathy with the grand deeds of their Athenian 
 ancestors, who came as children of the same hearth, 
 met with the most gracious acceptance, and fulfilled 
 all the purposes of a pilgrimage or sacred mission. 
 Under my present circumstances, I saw that the 
 very motives of love and honour, which would have 
 inclined the scale so powerfully in favour of the 
 northern lakes, were exactly those which drew most 
 heavily in the other direction — the circumstances 
 being what they were as to hurry and perplexity. 
 And just at that moment suddenly unveiled itself 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 499 
 
 another powerful motive against taking the northern 
 direction — viz., consideration for my mother — which 
 made my heart recoil from giving her too great a 
 shock ; and in what other way could it be mitigated 
 than by my personal presence in a case of emergency ? 
 For such a purpose North Wales would be the best 
 haven to make for, since the road thither from my 
 present home lay through Chester, — where at that 
 time my mother had fixed her residence. 
 
 If I had hesitated (and hesitate I did very sincerely) 
 about such a mode of expressing the consideration 
 due to my mother, it was not from any want of 
 decision in my feeling, but really because I feared 
 to be taunted with this act of tenderness, as arguing 
 an exaggerated estimate of my own importance in my 
 mother’s eyes. To be capable of causing any alarm- 
 ing shock, must I not suppose myself an object of 
 special interest ? No : I did not agree to that infer- 
 ence. But no matter. Better to stand ten thousand 
 sneers than one abiding pang, such as time could not 
 abolish, of bitter self-reproach. So I resolved to face 
 this taunt without flinching, and to steer a course 
 for St. John’s Priory, — my mother’s residence near 
 Chester. At the very instant of coming to this re- 
 solution, a singular accident occurred to confirm it. 
 On the very day before my rash journey commenced, 
 I received through the post-office a letter bearing 
 this address in a foreign handwriting — A Monsieur 
 Monsieur de Quincy , Chester . This iteration of the 
 Monsieur , as a courteous French fashion 1 for effect- 
 ing something equivalent to our own Esquire , was to 
 me at that time an unintelligible novelty. The best 
 way to explain it was to read the letter ; which, to 
 
 1 “ As a courteous French fashion — And not at all a 
 modern fashion. That famous . Countess of Derby (Charlotte 
 de Tremouille) who presided in the defence of Lathom House 
 (which, and not Knowsley, was then the capital domicile of 
 the Stanleys), when addressing Prince Rupert, sometimes super- 
 scribes her envelope A Monseigneur le Prince Rupert , but 
 sometimes A Monsieur Monsieur le Prince Rupert . This was 
 in 1644, the year of Marston Moor, and the penultimate year 
 of the Parliamentary War. 
 
500 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the extent of mon possible , I did, but vainly attempted 
 to decipher. So much, however, I spelled out as 
 satisfied me that the letter could not have been 
 meant for myself. The post-mark was, I think, 
 Hamburgh : hut the date within was from some 
 place in Normandy; and eventually it came out that 
 the person addressed was a poor emigrant, some 
 relative of Quatremere de Quincy, who had come to 
 Chester, probably as a teacher of French, and now in 
 1802 found his return to France made easy by the 
 brief and hollow peace of Amiens. Such an obscure 
 person was naturally unknown to any English post- 
 office ; and the letter had been forwarded to myself, 
 as the oldest male member of a family at that time 
 necessarily well known in Chester. 
 
 I was astonished to find myself translated by a 
 touch of the pen not only into a Monsieur , but even 
 into a self- multiplied Monsieur ; or, speaking algebraic- 
 ally, into the square of Monsieur ; having a chance 
 at some future day of being perhaps cubed into 
 Monsieur. From the letter, as I had hastily torn it 
 open, out dropped a draft upon Smith, Payne, and 
 Smith for somewhere about forty guineas. At this 
 stage of the revelations opening upon me, it might 
 be fancied that the interest of the case thickened : 
 since undoubtedly, if this windfall could be seriously 
 meant for myself, and no mistake , never descended 
 upon the head of man, in the outset of a perilous 
 adventure, aid more seasonable, nay, more melo- 
 dramatically critical. But alas ! my eye is quick to 
 value the logic of evil chances. Prophet of evil I 
 ever am to myself : forced for ever into sorrowful 
 auguries that I have no power to hide from my own 
 heart, no, not through one night's solitary dreams. 
 In a moment I saw too plainly that I was not 
 Monsieur. I might be Monsieur , but not Monsieur 
 to the second power. Who indeed could be my debtor 
 to the amount of forty guineas ? If there really was 
 such a person, why had he been so many years in 
 liquidating his debt ? Flow shameful to suffer me 
 to enter upon my seventeenth year before he made 
 
VKELIMINARY confessions 501 
 
 known his debt, or even his amiable existence. 
 Doubtless, in strict morals, this dreadful procrastina- 
 tion could not be justified. Still, as the man was 
 apparently testifying his penitence, and in the most 
 practical form (viz., payment), I felt perfectly willing 
 to grant him absolution for past sins, and a general 
 release from all arrears, if any should remain, through 
 all coming generations. But alas ! the mere season- 
 ableness of the remittance floored my hopes. A 
 five-guinea debtor might have been a conceivable 
 being : such a debtor might exist in the flesh : him 
 I could believe in ; but further my faith would not 
 go ; and, if the money were, after all, bond fide meant 
 for myself, clearly it must come from the Fiend : in 
 which case it became an open question whether I 
 ought to take it. At this stage the case had become 
 a Sphinx’s riddle ; and the solution, if any, must be 
 sought in the letter. But, as to the letter, O heaven 
 and earth ! if the Sphinx of old conducted her inter- 
 course with Oedipus by way of letter, and propounded 
 her wicked questions through the post-office of Thebes, 
 it strikes me that she needed only to have used French 
 penmanship in order to baffle that fatal decipherer of 
 riddles for ever and ever. At Bath, where the French 
 emigrants mustered in great strength (six thousand, 
 I have heard) during the three closing years of the 
 last century, I, through my mother’s acquaintance 
 with several leading families amongst them, had 
 gained a large experience of French caligraphy. 
 From this experience I had learned that the French 
 aristocracy still persisted (did persist at that period, 
 1797-1800) in a traditional contempt for all accom- 
 plishments of that class as clerkly and plebeian, fitted 
 only (as Shakspere says, when recording similar pre- 
 judices amongst his own countrymen) to do “ yeo- 
 man’s service.” One and all, they delegated the care 
 of their spelling to valets and femmes- de-chamb re ; 
 sometimes even those persons who scoured their 
 blankets and counterpanes scoured their spelling — 
 that is to say, their week-day spelling ; but, as to 
 their Sunday spelling, that superfine spelling which 
 
502 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 they reserved for their efforts in literature, this was 
 consigned to the care of compositors. Letters written 
 by the royal family of France in 1792-93 still survive, 
 in the memoirs of Clery and others amongst their 
 most faithful servants, which display the utmost ex- 
 cess of ignorance as to grammar and orthography. 
 Then, as to the penmanship, all seemed to write 
 the same hand, and with the same piece of most 
 ancient wood, or venerable skewer ; all alike scratch- 
 ing out stiff perpendicular letters, as if executed (I 
 should say) with a pair of snuffers. I do not speak 
 thus in any spirit of derision. Such accomplishments 
 were wilfully neglected, and even ambitiously, as if 
 in open proclamation of scorn for the arts by which 
 humbler people oftentimes got their bread. And 
 a man of rank would no more conceive himself 
 dishonoured by any deficiencies in the snobbish 
 accomplishments of penmanship, grammar, or correct 
 orthography, than a gentleman amongst ourselves 
 by inexpertness in the mystery of cleaning shoes, 
 or of polishing furniture. The result, however, from 
 this systematic and ostentatious neglect of caligraphy 
 is oftentimes most perplexing • to all who are called 
 upon to decipher their MSS. It happens, indeed, 
 that the product of this carelessness thus far differs : 
 always it is coarse and inelegant, but sometimes (say 
 in i-2oth of the cases) it becomes specially legible. 
 Far otherwise was the case before me. Being greatly 
 hurried on this my farewell day, I could not make 
 out two consecutive sentences. Unfortunately, one 
 half of a sentence sufficed to show that the enclosure 
 belonged to some needy Frenchman living in 
 country not his own, and struggling probably with 
 the ordinary evils of such a condition — friendlessness 
 and exile. Before the letter came into my hands, 
 it had already suffered some days’ delay. When I 
 noticed this, I found my sympathy with the poor 
 stranger naturally quickened. Already, and unavoid- 
 ably, he had been suffering from the vexation of a 
 letter delayed ; but henceforth, and continually more 
 so, he must be suffering from the anxieties of a letter 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 503 
 
 gone astray. Throughout this farewell day I was 
 unable to carve out any opportunity for going up to 
 the Manchester post-office; and, without a distinct 
 explanation in my own person, exonerating myself, 
 on the written acknowledgment of the post-office, 
 from all farther responsibility, I was most reluctant 
 to give up the letter. It is true that the necessity of 
 committing a forgery (which crime in those days was 
 punished inexorably with death) before the money 
 could have been fraudulently appropriated would, if 
 made known to the public , have acquitted any casual 
 holder of the letter from all suspicion of dishonest 
 intentions. But the danger was that, during the sus- 
 pense and progress of the case whilst awaitirig its final 
 settlement, ugly rumours should arise and cling to 
 one’s name amongst the many that would hear only 
 a fragmentary version of the whole affair. 
 
 At length all was ready. Midsummer, like an 
 army with banners, was moving through the heavens ; 
 already the longest day had passed ; those arrange- 
 ments, few and imperfect, through which I attempted 
 some partial evasion of disagreeable contingencies 
 likely to arise, had been finished : what more remained 
 for me to do of things that I was able to do ? None ; 
 and yet, though now at last free to move off, I 
 lingered ; lingered as under some sense of dim per- 
 plexity, or even of relenting love for the very cap- 
 tivity itself which I was making so violent an effort 
 to abjure, but more intelligibly for all the external 
 objects, living or inanimate, by which that captivity 
 had been surrounded and gladdened. What I was 
 hastening to desert, nevertheless I grieved to desert ; 
 and, but for the foreign letter, I might have long 
 continued to loiter and procrastinate. That, how- 
 ever, through various and urgent motives which it 
 suggested, quickened my movements ; and the same 
 hour which brought this letter into my hands wit- 
 nessed my resolution (uttered audibly to myself in 
 my study) that early on the next day I would take 
 my departure. A day, therefore, had at length arrived, 
 had somewhat suddenly arrived, which would be the 
 
504 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 last, the very last, on which I should make my appear- 
 ance in the school. 
 
 It is a just and a feeling remark of Dr. Johnson’s 
 that we never do anything consciously for the last 
 time (of things, that is to say, which we have been 
 long in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart. 
 The secret sense of a farewell or testamentary act I 
 carried along with me into every word or deed of this 
 memorable day. Agent or patient, singly or one of 
 a crowd, I heard for ever some sullen echo of valedic- 
 tion in every change, casual or periodic, that varied 
 the revolving hours from morning to night. Most of 
 all I felt this valedictory sound as a .pathetic appeal 
 when the closing hour of 5 p.m. brought with it the 
 solemn evening service of the English Church — read 
 by Mr. Lawson ; read now, as always, under a rever- 
 ential stillness of the entire school. Already in itself, 
 without the solemnity of prayers, the decaying light 
 of the dying day suggests a mood of pensive and 
 sympathetic sadness. And, if the changes in the 
 light are less impressively made known so early as 
 five o’clock in the depth of summer-tide, not the 
 less we are sensible of being as near to the hours 
 of repose, and to the secret dangers of the night, as 
 if the season were mid-winter. Even thus far there 
 was something that oftentimes had profoundly im- 
 pressed me in this evening liturgy, and its special 
 prayer against the perils of darkness. But greatly 
 was that effect deepened by the symbolic treatment 
 which this liturgy gives to this darkness and to these 
 perils. Naturally, when contemplating that treat- 
 ment, I had been led vividly to feel the memorable 
 rhabdotnancy 1 or magical power of evocation which 
 
 1 <c Rhabdomancy 99 : — The Greek word manteia (juLavreia), 
 represented by the English form manoy, constitutes the station- 
 ary element in a large family of compounds : it means divina- 
 tion or the art of magically deducing some weighty inference 
 (generally prophetic) from any one of the many dark sources 
 sanctioned by Pagan superstition. And universally the par- 
 ticular source relied on is expressed in* the prior half of the 
 compound. For instance, oneiros is the Greek word for a 
 dream ; and therefore oneiromancy indicates that mode of 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 505 
 
 Christianity has put forth here and in parallel cases. 
 The ordinary physical rhabdomantist, who undertakes 
 to evoke from the dark chambers of our earth wells 
 of water lying far below its surface, and more rarely 
 to evoke minerals, or hidden deposits of jewels and 
 gold, by some magnetic sympathy between his rod 
 and the occult object of his divination, is able to 
 indicate the spot at which this object can be hope- 
 fully sought for. Not otherwise has the marvellous 
 magnetism of Christianity called up from darkness 
 sentiments the most august, previously inconceivable, 
 formless, and without life ; for previously there had 
 been no religious philosophy equal to the task of 
 ripening such sentiments ; but also, at the same time, 
 by incarnating these sentiments in images of corre- 
 
 prophecy which is founded upon the interpretation of dreams. 
 Ornis , again (in the genitive case ornithos ), is the common 
 Greek word for a bird ; accordingly, ornithomancy means 
 prophecy founded on the particular mode of flight noticed 
 amongst any casual gathering of birds. Cheir (%et/>) is Greek 
 for the hand ; whence cheiromancy expresses the art of pre- 
 dicting a man’s fortune by the lines in his hand, or (under 
 its Latin form from palma) palmistry : Nekros , a dead man, 
 and consequently necro7nancy , prophecy founded on the answer 
 extorted either from phantoms, as by the Witch of Endor, or 
 from the corpse itself, as by Lucan’s witch Erictho. I have 
 allowed myself to wander into this ample illustration of the 
 ease, having for many years been taxed by ingenuous readers 
 (confessing their own classical ignorance) with too scanty 
 explanations of my meaning. I go on to say that the Greek 
 word rhabdos ( pa(35os ), a rod — not that sort of rod which the 
 Roman lictors carried, viz., a bundle of twigs, but a wand about 
 as thick as a common cedar pencil, or, at most, as the ordinary 
 brass rod of stair-carpets — this, when made from a willow-tree, 
 furnished of old, and furnishes to this day in a southern county 
 of England, a potent instrument of divination. But let it be 
 understood that divmation expresses an idea ampler by much 
 than the word prophecy ; whilst even this word p7'ophecy , 
 already more limited than divination, is most injuriously 
 narrowed in our received translation of the Bible. To unveil 
 or decipher what is hidden — that is, in effect, the meaning of 
 divination. And, accordingly, in the writings of St. Paul the 
 phrase gifts of prophecy never once indicates what the English 
 reader supposes, but exegetic gifts, gifts of interpretation applied 
 to what is dark, of analysis applied to what is logically per- 
 plexed, of expansion applied to what is condensed, of practical 
 
506 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 sponding grandeur, it has so exalted their character 
 as to lodge them eternally in human hearts. 
 
 Flowers, for example, that are so pathetic in their 
 beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as 
 gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of 
 years been the heritage of children— honoured as 
 the jewellery of God only by them — when suddenly 
 the voice of Christianity, countersigning the voice of 
 infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the 
 Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, 
 and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be 
 arrayed like one of these. Winds again, hurricanes, 
 the eternal breathings, soft or loud, of JEolian power, 
 wherefore had they, raving or sleeping, escaped all 
 moral arrest and detention? Simply because vain 
 
 improvement applied to what might else be overlooked as 
 purely speculative. In Somersetshire, which is a county the 
 most ill-watered of all in England, upon building a house, 
 there arises uniformly a difficulty in selecting a proper spot 
 for sinking a well. The remedy is to call in a set of local 
 rhabdomantists. These men traverse the adjacent ground, 
 holding the willow rod horizontally : wherever that dips, or 
 inclines itself spontaneously to the ground, there will be found 
 water. I have myself not only seen the process tried with 
 success, but have witnessed the enormous trouble, delay, and 
 expense, accruing to those of the opposite faction who refused 
 to benefit by this art. To pursue the tentative plan ( i.e ., the 
 plan of trying for water by boring at haphazard) ended, so far 
 as I was aware, in multiplied vexation. In reality, these poor 
 men are, after all, more philosophic than those who scornfully 
 reject their services. For the artists obey unconsciously the 
 logic of Lord Bacon : they build upon a long chain of induction, 
 upon the uniform results of their life-long experience. But the 
 counter faction do not deny this experience : all they have to 
 allege is that, agreeably to any laws known to themselves 
 a priori , there ought not to be any such experience. Now, 
 a sufficient course of facts overthrows all antecedent plausi- 
 bilities. Whatever science or scepticism may say, most of the 
 tea-kettles in the vale of Wrington are filled by rhabdomancy . 
 And, after all, the supposed a priori scruples against this rhab- 
 domancy are only such scruples as would, antecedently to a 
 trial, have pronounced the mariner’s compass impossible. There 
 is in both cases alike a blind sympathy of some unknown force, 
 which no man can explain, with a passive index that practically 
 guides you aright — even if Mephistopheles should be at the 
 bottom of the affair. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 507 
 
 it were to offer a nest for the reception of some new 
 moral birth whilst no religion is yet moving amongst 
 men that can furnish such a birth. Vain is the 
 image that should illustrate a heavenly sentiment, 
 if the sentiment is yet unborn. Then, first, when it 
 had become necessary to the purposes of a spiritual 
 religion that the spirit of man, as the fountain of all 
 religion, should in some commensurate reflex image 
 have its grandeur and its mysteriousness emblazoned, 
 suddenly the pomp and mysterious path of winds 
 and tempests, blowing whither they list, and from 
 what fountains no man knows, are cited from dark- 
 ness and neglect, to give and to receive reciprocally 
 an impassioned glorification, where the lower mystery 
 enshrines and illustrates the higher. Call for the 
 grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that ? It 
 is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest 
 of all human sentiments, what is that ? It is that 
 man should forget his anger before he lies down to 
 sleep. And these two grandeurs, the mighty senti- 
 ment and the mighty spectacle, are by Christianity 
 married together. 
 
 Here again, in his prayer “ Lighten our darkness, 
 we beseech thee, O Lord ! ” were the darkness and 
 the great shadows of night made symbolically sig- 
 nificant : these great powers, Night and Darkness, 
 that belong to aboriginal Chaos, were made repre- 
 sentative of the perils that continually menace poor 
 afflicted human nature. With deepest sympathy I 
 accompanied the prayer against the perils of darkness 
 — perils that I seemed to see, in the ambush of mid- 
 night solitude, brooding around the beds of sleeping 
 nations ; perils from even worse forms of darkness 
 shrouded within the recesses of blind human hearts ; 
 perils from temptations weaving unseen snares for our 
 footing ; perils from the limitations of our own mis- 
 leading knowledge. 
 
 Prayers had finished. The school had dissolved 
 itself. Six o’clock came, seven, eight. By three 
 hours nearer stood the dying day to its departure. 
 By three hours nearer, therefore, stood we to that 
 
508 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 darkness which our English liturgy calls into such 
 symbolic grandeur, as hiding beneath its shadowy 
 mantle all perils that besiege our human infirmity. 
 But in summer, in the immediate suburbs of mid- 
 summer, the vast scale of the heavenly movements 
 is read in their slowness. Time becomes tnc ex- 
 pounder of Space. And now, though eight o’clock 
 had struck, the sun was still lingering above the 
 horizon : the light, broad and gaudy, having still 
 two hours of travel to face before it would assume 
 that tender fading hue prelusive to the twilight . 1 
 Now came the last official ceremony of the day : 
 the students were all mustered ; and the names of 
 all were challenged according to the order of pre- 
 cedency. My name, as usual, came first . 2 Stepping 
 forward, I passed Mr. Lawson, and bowed to him, 
 
 1 “ To the twilight” ; — i.e ., to the second twilight: for I 
 remember to have read in some German work upon Hebrew 
 antiquities, and also in a great English divine of 1630 (namely, 
 Isaac Ambrose), that the Jews in elder times made two twilights, 
 first and second : the first they called the dove’s twilight, or 
 crepusculum of the day ; the second they called the raven’s 
 twilight, or crepusculum of the night. 
 
 2 “ First ” ; — Within the school I should not have been first: 
 for in the trinity which composed the head class there was no 
 absolute or meritorious precedency, but simply a precedency of 
 chance. Our dignity, as leaders of the school, raised us above 
 all petty competitions ; yet, as it was unavoidable to stand in 
 some order, this was regulated by seniority. I, therefore, as 
 junior amongst the three, was tertius inter pares . But my two 
 seniors happened to be day-scholars : so that, in Mr. Lawson’s 
 house, I rose into the supreme place. There , I was princeps 
 senatus. Such trivial circumstantialities I notice, as checks 
 upon all openings to inaccuracy, great or small. It would 
 vitiate the interest which any reader might otherwise take in 
 this narrative, if for one moment it were supposed that any 
 feature of the case were varnished or distorted. From the very 
 first, I had been faithful to the most rigorous law of accuracy — 
 even in absolute trifles. But I became even more jealous over 
 myself, after an Irish critic, specially brilliant as a wit and as a 
 scholar, but also specially malicious, had attempted to impeach 
 the accuracy of my narrative, in its London section, upon 
 alleged internal grounds. 
 
 I wish it could have been said with truth, that we of the 
 leading form were, not a triad, but a duad. The facts, how- 
 ever, of the case will not allow me to say this. Facts, as people 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 509 
 
 looking earnestly in his face, and saying to myself, 
 “ He is old and infirm, and in this world I shall 
 not see him again.” I was right; I never did see 
 him again, nor ever shall. He looked at me com- 
 placently ; smiled placidly ; returned my salutation 
 (not knowing it to be my valediction) ; and we 
 parted for ever. Intellectually, I might not have 
 seen cause to reverence him in any emphatic sense. 
 But very sincerely I respected him as a conscientious 
 man, faithful to his duties, and as, even in his latter 
 ineffectual struggle with these duties, inflicting more 
 suffering upon himself than upon others ; finally, 
 I respected him as a sound and accurate (though 
 not brilliant) scholar. Personally I owed him much 
 gratitude; for he had been uniformly kind to me, 
 and had allowed me such indulgences as lay in his 
 power ; and I grieved at the thought of the morti- 
 fication I should inflict upon him. 
 
 The morning came which was to launch me into 
 the world ; that morning from which, and from its 
 consequences, my whole succeeding life has, in many 
 important points, taken its colouring. At half after 
 three I rose, and gazed with deep emotion at the 
 ancient collegiate church, “ dressed in earliest light,” 
 and beginning to crimson with the deep lustre of a 
 cloudless July morning. I w r as firm and immovable 
 in my purpose, but yet agitated by anticipation of 
 uncertain danger and troubles. To this agitation the 
 deep peace of the morning presented an affecting 
 contrast, and in some degree a medicine. The 
 silence was more profound than that of midnight : 
 and to me the silence of a summer morning is more 
 touching than all other silence, because, the light 
 being broad and strong as that of noonday at other 
 
 generally remark, are stubborn things. Yes, and too often very 
 spiteful things ; as in this case, where, if it were not for them, 
 I might describe myself as having one sole assessor in the 
 class, and in that case he and I might have been likened to 
 Castor and Pollux, wdio went up and down like alternate 
 buckets — one rising with the dawn (or Phosphorus), and the 
 other (viz., myself) rising with Hesperus, and reigning all night 
 long. 
 
510 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 seasons of the year, it seems to differ from perfect 
 day chiefly because man is not yet abroad, and thus 
 the peace of nature, and of the innocent creatures of 
 God, seems to be secure and deep only so long as 
 the presence of man, and his unquiet spirit, are not 
 there to trouble its sanctity. I dressed myself, took 
 my hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the room. 
 For nearly a year and a half this room had been 
 my “ pensive citadel ” : here I had read and studied 
 through all the hours of night ; and, though true it 
 was that, for the latter part of this time, I had lost my 
 gaiety and peace of mind during the strife and fever 
 of contention with my guardian, yet, on the other hand, 
 as a boy passionately fond of books, and dedicated to 
 intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to have enjoyed 
 many happy hours in the midst of general dejection. 
 
 Happy hours? Yes; and was it certain that ever 
 again I should enjoy hours as happy ? At this point 
 it is not impossible that, left to my own final im- 
 pressions, I might have receded from my plan. But 
 it seemed to me, as too often happens in such cases, 
 that no retreat was now open. The confidence which 
 unavoidably I had reposed in a groom of Mr. Law- 
 son’s made it dangerous. The effect of this dis- 
 tracted view was, not to alter my plan, but to throw 
 despondency for one sad half-hour over the whole 
 prospect before me. In that condition, with my eyes 
 open, I dreamed. Suddenly a sort of trance, a frost 
 as of some death-like revelation, wrapped round 
 me ; and I found renewed within me a hateful re- 
 membrance derived from a moment that I had long 
 left behind. Two years before, when I wanted about 
 as much of my fifteenth birthday as now of my 
 seventeenth, I happened to be in London for part of 
 a single day, with a friend of my own age. Naturally, 
 amongst some eight or ten great spectacles which 
 challenged our earnest attention, St. Paul’s Cathedral 
 had been one. This we had visited, and conse- 
 quently the Whispering Gallery . 1 More than by all 
 
 1 To those who have never visited the Whispering Gallery, nor 
 have read any account of it amongst other acoustic phenomena 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 511 
 
 beside I had been impressed by this : and some 
 half-hour later, as we were standing beneath the 
 dome, and I should imagine pretty nearly on the 
 very spot where rather more than five years subse- 
 quently Lord Nelson was buried, — a spot from which 
 we saw, pompously floating to and fro in the upper 
 spaces of a great aisle running westwards from our- 
 selves, many flags captured from France, Spain, and 
 Holland, — I, having my previous impressions of awe 
 deepened by these solemn trophies of chance and 
 change amongst mighty nations, had suddenly been 
 surprised by a dream as profound as at present, in 
 which a thought that often had persecuted me figured 
 triumphantly. This thought turned upon' the fatality 
 that must often attend an evil choice. As an oracle 
 of fear I remembered that great Roman warning, 
 Nescit vox missa reverti (that a word once uttered is 
 irrevocable), a freezing arrest upon the motions of 
 hope too sanguine that haunted me in many shapes. 
 Long before that fifteenth year of mine, I had noticed, 
 as a worm lying at the heart of life and fretting its 
 security, the fact that innumerable acts of choice 
 change countenance and are variously appraised at 
 varying stages of life — shift with the shifting hours. 
 Already, at fifteen, I had become deeply ashamed 
 of judgments which I had once pronounced, of idle 
 hopes that I had once encouraged, false admira- 
 tions or contempts with which once I had sympa- 
 thised. And, as to acts which I surveyed with any 
 doubts at all, I never felt sure that after some suc- 
 cession of years I might not feel withering doubts 
 about them, both as to principle and as to inevitable 
 results. 
 
 This sentiment of nervous recoil from any word or 
 deed that could not be recalled had been suddenly 
 re-awakened on that London morning by the im- 
 pressive experience of the Whispering Gallery. At 
 
 described in scientific treatises, it may be proper to mention, 
 as the distinguishing feature of the case, that a word or a 
 question, uttered at one end of the gallery in the gentlest of 
 whispers, is reverberated at the other end in peals of thunder. 
 
512 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the earlier end of the gallery had stood my friend, 
 breathing in the softest of whispers a solemn but not 
 acceptable truth. At the further end, after running 
 along the walls of the gallery, that solemn truth 
 reached me as a deafening menace in tempestuous 
 uproars. And now, in these last lingering moments, 
 when I dreamed ominously with open eyes in my 
 Manchester study, once again that London menace 
 broke angrily upon me as out of a thick cloud with 
 redoubled strength ; a voice, too late for warning, 
 seemed audibly to say, “ Once leave this house, and 
 a Rubicon is placed between thee and all possibility 
 of return. Thou wilt not say that what thou doest is 
 altogether approved in thy secret heart. Even now 
 thy conscience speaks against it in sullen whispers ; 
 but at the other end of thy long life-gallery that same 
 conscience will speak to thee in volleying thunders / 5 
 
 A sudden step upon the stairs broke up my dream, 
 and recalled me to myself. Dangerous hours were now 
 drawing near, and I prepared for a hasty farewell. 
 
 I shed tears as I looked round on the chair, hearth, 
 writing-table, and other familiar objects, knowing too 
 certainly that I looked upon them for the last time. 
 Whilst I write this, it is nineteen 1 years ago ; and 
 yet, at this moment, I see, as if it were but yesterday, 
 the lineaments and expressions of the object on which 
 I fixed my parting gaze. It was the picture of a lovely 
 lady, which hung over the mantelpiece ; the eyes and 
 mouth of which were so beautiful, and the whcfie 
 countenance so radiant with divine tranquillity, that I 
 had a thousand times laid down my pen, or my book, 
 to gather consolation from it, as a devotee from his 
 patron saint . 2 Whilst I was yet gazing upon it, the 
 
 1 Written in the August of 1821. 
 
 2 The housekeeper was in the habit of telling me that the lady 
 had lived (meaning, perhaps, had been born) two centuries ago ; 
 that date would better agree with the tradition that the portrait 
 was a copy from Vandyke. All that she knew further about the 
 lady was that either to the grammar school, or to that particular 
 college at Oxford with which the school was connected, or else 
 to that particular college at Oxford with which Mr. Lawson 
 personally was connected, or else, fourthly, to Mr. Lawson himself 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 5 1 3 
 
 deep tones of the old church clock proclaimed that 
 it was six o’clock. I went up to the picture, kissed 
 it, then gently walked out, and closed the door for 
 ever. . . . . . . 
 
 So blended and intertwisted in this life are occa- 
 sions of laughter and of tears that I cannot yet recall 
 without smiling an incident which occurred at that 
 time, and which had nearly put a stop to the immediate 
 execution of my plan. I had a trunk of immense 
 weight ; for, besides my clothes, it contained nearly 
 all my library. The difficulty was to get this re- 
 moved to a carrier’s, my room being at an aerial 
 elevation in the house ; and (what was worse) the 
 staircase which communicated with this angle of the 
 building was accessible only by a gallery, which passed 
 the headmaster’s chamber door. I was a favourite 
 with all the servants ; and, knowing that any of them 
 would screen me, and act confidentially, I communi- 
 cated my embarrassment to a groom of the head- 
 master’s. The groom declared his readiness to do 
 anything I wished ; and, when the time arrived, went 
 upstairs to bring the trunk down. This I feared 
 was beyond the strength of any one man : however, 
 the groom was a man “ of Atlantean shoulders,” and 
 had a back as spacious as Salisbury Plain. Accord- 
 ingly he persisted in bringing down the trunk alone, 
 whilst I stood waiting at the foot of the last flight, in 
 great anxiety for the event. For some time I heard 
 him descending with steps slow and steady ; but, un- 
 fortunately, from his trepidation, as he drew near the 
 dangerous quarter, within a few steps of the gallery, 
 his foot slipped ; and the mighty burden, falling from 
 his shoulders, gained such increase of impetus at each 
 
 as a private individual, the unknown lady had been a special 
 benefactress. She was also a special benefractress to me, through 
 eighteen months, by means of her sweet Madonna countenance. 
 And in some degree it serves to spiritualise and to hallow this 
 service that of her who unconsciously rendered it I know neither 
 the name, nor the exact rank or age, nor the place where she lived 
 and died. She was parted from me by perhaps two centuries ; 
 I from her by the gulf of eternity. 
 
 R 
 
514 CONFESSIONS OF AN' OPIUM-EATER 
 
 step of the descent, that, on reaching the bottom, it 
 trundled, or rather leaped, right across, with the noise 
 of twenty devils, against the very bedroom door of 
 the Archididascalus. My first thought suggested that 
 all was lost, and that my sole chance for effecting 
 a retreat was to sacrifice my baggage. However, on 
 reflection, I determined to abide the issue. The 
 groom, meantime, was in the utmost alarm, both on 
 his own account and mine : but, in spite of this, so 
 irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous, in this 
 unhappy contretemps , taken possession of his fancy 
 that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal 
 of laughter, that might have wakened the “ Seven 
 Sleepers.” At the sound of this resonant merriment, 
 within the very ears of insulted authority, I could not 
 forbear joining in it ; subdued to this, not so much 
 by the comic wilfulness of the trunk, trundling down 
 from step to step with accelerated pace and multiply- 
 ing uproar, like the Aaas avat 1 (the contumacious 
 stone) of Sisyphus, as by the effect it had upon the 
 groom. We both expected, as a matter of course, 
 that Mr. Lawson would sally out of his room ; for, in 
 general, if but a mouse stirred, he sprang out like a 
 mastiff from his kennel. Strange to say, however, on 
 this occasion, when the noise of laughter had sub- 
 sided, no sound, or rustling even, was to be heard in 
 the bedroom. Mr. Lawson had a painful complaint, 
 which, oftentimes keeping him awake, made his sleep, 
 when it did come, peculiarly deep. Gathering courage 
 from the silence, the groom hoisted his burden again, 
 and accomplished the remainder of his descent with- 
 out accident. I waited until I saw the trunk placed 
 on a wheelbarrow, and on its road to the carrier’s : 
 then, “ with Providence my guide,” or, more truly it 
 might be said, with my own headstrong folly for law 
 and impulse, I set off on foot ; carrying a small parcel 
 with some articles of dress under my arm, a favourite 
 English poet in one pocket, and an odd volume, 
 containing about one-half of Canter’s “Euripides,” in 
 the other. 
 
 1 “ Afiris ZneiTa 7 redovdc kv\'iv8€to Aaas avcudrjs.” — Horn. Odyss. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 515 
 
 On leaving Manchester, by a south-western route, 
 towards Chester and Wales, the first town that I 
 reached (to the best of my remembrance) was Altrin- 
 cham — colloquially called Aw trigem. When a child 
 of three years old, and suffering from the hooping- 
 cough, I had been carried for change of air to different 
 places on the Lancashire coast; and, in order to 
 benefit by as large a compass as possible of varying 
 atmospheres, I and my nurse had been made to rest 
 for the first night of our tour at this cheerful little 
 town of Altrincham. On the next morning, which 
 ushered in a most dazzling day of July, I rose earlier 
 than my nurse fully approved : but in no long time 
 she found it advisable to follow my example ; and, 
 after putting me through my morning’s drill of ablu- 
 tions and the Lord’s Prayer, no sooner had she fully 
 arranged my petticoats than she lifted me up in her 
 arms, threw open the window, and let me suddenly 
 look down upon the gayest scene I had ever beheld 
 — viz., the little market-place of Altrincham at eight 
 o’clock in the morning. It happened to be the 
 market-day ; and I, who till then had never con- 
 sciously been in any town whatever, was equally 
 astonished and delighted with the novel gaiety of the 
 scene. Fruits, such as can be had in July, and flowers 
 were scattered about in profusion : even the stalls of 
 the butchers, from their brilliant cleanliness, appeared 
 attractive : and the bonny young women of Altrin- 
 cham were all tripping about in caps and aprons 
 coquettishly disposed. The general hilarity of the 
 scene at this early hour, with the low murmurings of 
 pleasurable conversation and laughter, that rose up 
 like a fountain to the open window, left so profound 
 an impression upon me that I never lost it. All this 
 occurred, as I have said, about eight o’clock on a 
 superb July morning. Exactly at that time of the 
 morning, on exactly such another heavenly day of 
 July, did I, leaving Manchester at six a.m., naturally 
 enough find myself in the centre of the Altrincham 
 market-place. Nothing had altered. There w r ere the 
 very same fruits and flowers ; the same bonny young 
 
516 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 women tripping up and down in the same (no, not 
 the same) coquettish bonnets ; everything was appar- 
 ently the same : perhaps the window of my bedroom 
 was still open, only my nurse and I were not looking 
 out ; for alas ! on recollection, fourteen years precisely 
 had passed since then. Breakfast-time, however, is 
 always a cheerful stage of the day ; if a man can 
 forget his cares at any season, it is then ; and after a 
 walk of seven miles it is doubly so. I felt it at the 
 time, and have stopped, therefore, to notice it, as a 
 singular coincidence, that twice, and by the merest 
 accident, I should find myself, precisely as the clocks 
 on a July morning were all striking eight, drawing 
 inspiration of pleasurable feelings from the genial 
 sights and sounds in the little market-place of Altrin- 
 cham. There I breakfasted ; and already by the two 
 hours’ exercise I felt myself half restored to health. 
 After an hour’s rest, I started again upon my journey: 
 all my gloom and despondency were already retiring 
 to the rear; and, as I left Altrincham, I said to 
 myself, “ All places, it seems, are not Whispering 
 Galleries.” 
 
 The distance between Manchester and Chester was 
 about forty miles. What it is under railway changes 
 I know not. This I planned to walk in two days : 
 for, though the whole might have been performed 
 in one, I saw no use in exhausting myself ; and 
 my walking powers were rusty from long disuse. 
 I wished to bisect the journey ; and., as nearly as I 
 could expect — i.e., within two or three miles — such 
 a bisection was attained in a clean roadside inn, 
 of the class so commonly found in England. A 
 kind, motherly landlady, easy in her circumstances, 
 having no motive for rapacity, and looking for her 
 livelihood much less to her inn than to her farm, 
 guaranteed to me a safe and profound night’s rest. 
 On the following morning there remained not quite 
 eighteen miles between myself and venerable Chester. 
 Before I reached it, so mighty now (as ever before 
 and since) had become the benefit from the air and 
 the exercise that oftentimes I felt inebriated and 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 5 17 
 
 crazy with ebullient spirits. But for the accursed 
 letter, which sometimes 
 
 “ Came over me, 
 
 As doth the raven o’er the infected house,” 
 
 I should have too much forgot my gravity under 
 this new-born health. For two hours before reach- 
 ing Chester, from the accident of the south-west 
 course which the road itself pursued, I saw held 
 up aloft before my eyes that matchless spectacle, 
 
 “ New, and yet as old 
 
 As the foundations of the heavens and earth,” 
 
 an elaborate and pompous sunset hanging over 
 the mountains of North Wales. The clouds passed 
 slowly through several arrangements, and in the last 
 of these I read the very scene which six months 
 before I had read in a most exquisite poem of 
 Wordsworth’s, extracted entire into a London news- 
 paper (I think the S /. James’s Chronicle ). It was a 
 Canadian lake, 
 
 <£ With all its fairy crowds 
 Of islands that together lie 
 As quietly as spots of sky 
 
 Amongst the evening clouds.” 
 
 The scene in the poem (“ Ruth ”), that had been 
 originally mimicked by the poet from the sky, was 
 here re-mimicked and rehearsed to the life, as it 
 seemed, by the sky from the poet. Was I then, 
 in July 1802, really quoting from Wordsworth? 
 Yes, reader ; and I only in all Europe. In 1799 
 I had become acquainted with “ We are Seven ” 
 at Bath. In the winter of 1801-2 I had read the 
 whole of “Ruth”; early in 1803 I had written to 
 Wordsworth. In May of 1803 I had received a 
 very long answer from Wordsworth. 
 
 The next morning after reaching Chester, my first 
 thought on rising was directed to the vexatious letter 
 in my custody. The odious responsibility, thrust 
 upon me in connection with this letter, was now 
 becoming every hour more irritating, because every 
 hour more embarrassing to the freedom of my 
 
5 1 8 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 own movements, since it must by this time have 
 drawn the post-office into the ranks of my pur- 
 suers. Indignant I was that this letter should 
 have the power of making myself an accomplice 
 in causing anxiety, perhaps even calamity, to the 
 poor emigrant — a man doubly liable to unjust 
 suspicion ; first, as by his profession presumably 
 poor, and, secondly, as an alien. Indignant I was 
 that this most filthy of letters should also have the 
 power of forcing me into all sorts of indirect and 
 cowardly movements at inns : for beyond all things 
 it seemed to me important that I should not be 
 arrested, or even for a moment challenged, as the 
 wrongful holder of an important letter, before I had 
 testified, by my own spontaneous transfer of it, that 
 I had not dallied with any idea of converting it to 
 my own benefit. In some way I must contrive to 
 restore the letter. But was it not then the simplest 
 of all courses to take my hat before sitting down to 
 breakfast, present myself at the post-office, tender my 
 explanation, and then (like Christian in Bunyan’s 
 allegory) to lay down my soul-wearying burden at 
 the feet of those who could sign my certificate of 
 absolution? Was not that simple? Was not that 
 easy ? Oh yes, beyond a doubt. And, if a favourite 
 fawn should be carried off by a lion, would it not 
 be a very simple and easy course to walk after the 
 robber, follow him into his den, and reason with the 
 wretch on the indelicacy of his conduct? In my 
 particular circumstances, the post-office was in rela- 
 tion to myself simply a lion’s den. Two separate 
 parties, I felt satisfied, must by this time be in chase 
 of me ; and the two chasers would be confluent at 
 the post-office. Beyond all other objects which I 
 had to keep in view, paramount was that of fencing 
 against my own re-capture. Anxious I was on behalf 
 of the poor foreigner ; but it did not strike me that 
 to this anxiety I was bound to sacrifice myself. Now, 
 if I went to the post-office, I felt sure that nothing 
 else would be the result ; and afterwards it turned 
 out that in this anticipation I had been right. For 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 519 
 
 it struck me that the nature of the enclosure in the 
 French letter — viz., the fact that without a forgery it 
 was not negotiable — could not be known certainly to 
 anybody but myself. Doubts upon that point must 
 have quickened the anxieties of all connected with 
 myself, or connected with the case. More urgent 
 consequently would have been the applications of 
 “ Monsieur Monsieur ” to the post-office ; and con- 
 sequently of the post-office to the Priory ; and conse- 
 quently more easily suggested and concerted between 
 the post-office and the Priory would be all the 
 arrangements for stopping me, in the event of my 
 taking the route of Chester — in which case it was 
 natural to suppose that I might perso?ially return the 
 letter to the official authorities. Of course, none of 
 these measures was certainly known to myself ; but 
 I guessed at them as reasonable probabilities ; and 
 it was evident that the fifty and odd hours since my 
 elopement from Manchester had allowed ample time 
 for concerting all the requisite preparations. As a 
 last resource, in default of any better occurring, it is 
 likely enough that my anxiety would have tempted 
 me into this mode of surrendering my abominable 
 trust, which by this time I regarded with such eyes 
 of burning malice as Sinbad must have directed at 
 intervals towards the venerable ruffian that sat astride 
 upon his shoulders. But things had not yet come 
 to Sinbad’s state of desperation ; so, immediately 
 after breakfast, I took my hat, determining to review 
 the case and adopt some final decision in the open 
 air. For I have always found it easier to think over 
 a matter of perplexity whilst walking in wide open 
 spaces, under the broad eye of the natural heavens, 
 than whilst shut up in a room. But at the very door 
 of the inn I was suddenly brought to a pause by the 
 recollection that some of the servants from the Priory 
 were sure on every forenoon to be at times in the 
 streets. The streets, however, could be evaded by 
 shaping a course along the city walls ; which I did, 
 and descended into some obscure lane that brought 
 me gradually to the banks of the river Dee. In 
 
520 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the infancy of its course amongst the Denbighshire 
 mountains, this river (famous in our pre-Norman 
 history for the earliest parade 1 of English monarchy) 
 is wild and picturesque ; and even below my mother’s 
 Priory it wears a character of interest. But, a mile 
 or so nearer to its mouth, when leaving Chester for 
 Parkgate, it becomes miserably tame ; and the several 
 reaches of the river take the appearance of formal 
 canals. On the right bank 2 of the river runs an 
 artificial mound, called the Cop. It was, I believe* 
 originally a Danish work ; and certainly its name is 
 Danish (i.e., Icelandic, or old Danish), and the same 
 from which is derived our architectural word coping. 
 Upon this bank I was walking, and throwing my gaze 
 along the formal vista presented by the river. Some 
 trifle of anxiety might mingle with this gaze at the 
 first, lest perhaps Philistines might be abroad ; 
 for it was just possible that I had been watched. 
 But I have generally found that, if you are in 
 quest of some certain escape from Philistines of 
 whatsoever class — sheriff-officers, bores, no matter 
 what — the surest refuge is to be found amongst 
 hedgerows and fields, amongst cows and sheep : in 
 fact, cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing 
 creatures ; none show more passionate tenderness to 
 
 1 “ Earliest parade” : — It was a very scenical parade, for 
 somewhere along this reach of the Dee — viz., immediately 
 below St. John’s Priory — Edgar, the first sovereign of all 
 England, was rowed by nine vassal reguli. 
 
 2 “ Right bank ” : — But which bank is right, and which left, 
 under circumstances of position varying by possibility without 
 end? This is a reasonable demur; but yet it argues an in- 
 experienced reader. For always the position of the spectator 
 is conventionally fixed. In military tactics, in philosophic 
 geography, in history, &c., the uniform assumption is that you 
 are standing with your back to the source of the river, and your 
 eyes travelling along with its current. That bank of the river 
 which under these circumstances lies upon your right is the right 
 bank absolutely , and not relatively only (as would be the case if 
 a room, and not a river, were concerned). Hence it follows that 
 the Middlesex side of the Thames is always the left bank, and 
 the Surrey side always the right bank, no matter whether you 
 are moving from London to Oxford, or reversely from Oxford 
 to London. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 52 I 
 
 their young when deprived of them ; and, in short, I 
 am not ashamed to profess a deep love for these 
 quiet creatures. On the present occasion there were 
 many cows grazing in the fields below the Cop : but 
 all along the Cop itself I could descry no person 
 whatever answering to the idea of a Philistine : in 
 fact, there was nobody at all, except one woman, 
 apparently middle-aged (meaning by that from thirty- 
 five to forty-five), neatly dressed, though perhaps in 
 rustic fashion, and by no possibility belonging to any 
 class of my enemies ; for already I was near enough 
 to see so much. This woman might be a quarter of 
 a mile distant, and was steadily advancing towards 
 me — face to face. Soon, therefore, I was beginning 
 to read the character of her features pretty distinctly : 
 and her countenance naturally served as a mirror to 
 echo and reverberate my own feelings, consequently 
 my own horror (horror without exaggeration it was), 
 at a sudden uproar of tumultuous sounds rising 
 clamorously ahead. Ahead I mean in relation to 
 myself, but to her the sound was from the rear. Our 
 situation was briefly this. Nearly half a mile behind 
 the station of the woman, that reach of the river along 
 which we two were moving came to an abrupt close ; 
 so that the next reach, making nearly a right-angled 
 turn, lay entirely out of view. From this unseen 
 reach it was that the angry clamour, so passionate 
 and so mysterious, arose : and I, for my part, having 
 never heard such a fierce battling outcry, nor even 
 heard 6/ such a cry, either in books or on the stage, 
 in prose or verse, could not so much as whisper a 
 guess to myself upon its probable cause. Only this I 
 felt, that blind, unorganised nature it must be — and 
 nothing in human or in brutal wrath — that could 
 utter itself by such an anarchy of sea-like uproars. 
 What was it ? Where was it ? Whence was it ? 
 Earthquake was it ? convulsion of the steadfast earth ? 
 or was it the breaking loose from ancient chains 
 of some deep morass like that of Solway? More 
 probable it seemed that the arw 7rora/xojr of Euripides 
 (the flowing backwards of rivers to their fountains) 
 
 R 2 
 
52 2 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 now, at last, after ages of expectation, had been 
 suddenly realised. Not long I needed to speculate; 
 for within half a minute, perhaps, from the first arrest 
 of our attention, the proximate cause of this mystery 
 declared itself to our eyes, although the remote cause 
 (the hidden cause of that visible cause) was still as 
 dark as before. Round that right-angled turn which 
 I have mentioned as wheeling into the next succeed- 
 ing reach of the river, suddenly as with the trampling 
 of cavalry — but all dressing accurately — and the water 
 at the outer angle sweeping so much faster than that 
 at the inner angle as to keep the front of advance 
 rigorously in line, violently careered round into our 
 own placid watery vista a huge charging block of 
 waters, filling the whole channel of the river, and 
 coming down upon us at the rate of forty miles an 
 hour. Well was it for us, myself and that respectable 
 rustic woman, us the Deucalion and Pyrrha of this 
 perilous moment, sole survivors apparently of the 
 deluge (since by accident there was at that particular 
 moment on that particular Cop nothing else to 
 survive), that by means of this Cop, and of ancient 
 Danish hands (possibly not yet paid for their work), 
 
 . we could survive. In fact, this watery breastwork, a 
 perpendicular wall of water carrying itself as true as 
 if controlled by a mason’s plumb-line, rode forward 
 at such a pace that obviously the fleetest horse or 
 dromedary would have had no chance of escape. 
 Many a decent railway even, among railways since 
 born its rivals, would not have had above the third 
 of a chance. Naturally, I had too short a time for 
 observing much or accurately ; and universally I am 
 a poor hand at observing ; else I should say that this 
 riding block of crystal waters did not gallop, but went 
 at a long trot ; yes, long trot — that most frightful of 
 paces in a tiger, in a buffalo, or in a rebellion of 
 waters. Even a ghost, I feel convinced, would appal 
 me more if coming up at a long diabolical trot than 
 at a canter or gallop. The first impulse to both of 
 us was derived from cowardice ; cowardice the most 
 abject and selfish. Such is man, though a Deucalion 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 523 
 
 elect ; such is woman, though a decent Fyrrha. Both 
 of us ran like hares ; neither did I, Deucalion, think of 
 poor Pyrrha at all for the first sixty seconds. Yet, on 
 the other hand, why should I ? It struck me seriously 
 that St. George’s Channel (and, if so, beyond a doubt, 
 the Atlantic Ocean) had broke loose, and was, doubt- 
 less, playing the same insufferable gambols upon all 
 rivers along a seaboard of six to seven thousand 
 miles ; in which case, as all the race of woman must 
 be doomed, how romantic a speculation it was for me, 
 sole relic of literature, to think specially of one poor 
 Pyrrha, probably very illiterate, whom I had never yet 
 spoken to ! That idea pulled me up. Not spoken to 
 her ? Then I would speak to her ; and the more so 
 because the sound of the pursuing river told me that 
 flight was useless. And, besides, if any reporter or 
 sub-editor of some Chester chronicle should, at this 
 moment, with his glass be sweeping the Cop, and 
 discover me flying under these unchivalrous circum- 
 stances, he might gibbet me to all eternity. Halting, 
 therefore (and really I had not run above eighty or a 
 hundred steps), I waited for my solitary co-tenant of 
 the Cop. She was a little blown by running, and 
 could not easily speak ; beside^ which, at the very 
 moment of her coming up, the preternatural column 
 of waters, running in the very opposite direction to 
 the natural current of the river, came up with us, ran 
 by with the ferocious uproar of a hurricane, sent up 
 the sides of the Cop a salute of waters, as if hypo- 
 critically pretending to kiss our feet, but secretly 
 understood by all parties as a vain treachery for 
 pulling us down into the flying deluge ; whilst all 
 along both banks the mighty refluent wash was 
 heard as it rode along, leaving memorials, by sight 
 and by sound, of its victorious power. But my female 
 associate in this terrific drama, what said she, on 
 coming up with me ? Or what said I ? For, by 
 accident, I it was that spoke first ; notwithstanding 
 the fact, notorious and undeniable, that I had never 
 been introduced to her. Here, however, be it under- 
 stood, as a case now solemnly adjudicated and set at 
 
524 CONCESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 rest, that, in the midst of any great natural con- 
 vulsion — earthquake, suppose, waterspout, tornado, 
 or eruption of Vesuvius — it shall and may be lawful 
 in all time coming (any usage or tradition to the 
 contrary notwithstanding) for two English people to 
 communicate with each other, although, by affidavit 
 made before two justices of the peace, it shall have 
 been proved that no previous introduction had been 
 possible : in all other cases the old statute of non- 
 intercourse holds good. Meantime, the present case, 
 in default of more circumstantial evidence, might be 
 regarded, if not as an earthquake, yet as ranking 
 amongst the first-fruits or blossoms of an earthquake. 
 So I spoke without scruple. All my freezing English 
 reserve gave way under this boiling sense of having 
 been so recently running for life : and then, again, 
 suppose the water column should come back — riding 
 along with the current, and no longer riding against 
 it — in that case, we and all the County Palatine 
 might soon have to run for our lives. Under such 
 threatenings of common peril, surely the Trappy a- ax, or 
 unlimited licence of speech, ought spontaneously to 
 proclaim itself without waiting for sanction. 
 
 So I asked her the meaning of this horrible tumult 
 in the waters : how did she read the mystery? Her 
 answer was, that, though she had never before seen 
 such a thing, yet from her grandmother she had often 
 heard of it ; and, if she had run before it, that was 
 because / ran ; and a little, perhaps, because the 
 noise frightened her. What was it, then ? I asked. 
 c; It was,’ 7 she said, The Bore; and it was an 
 affection to which only some few rivers here and 
 there were liable ; and the Dee was one of these.” 
 So ignorant was I that, until that moment, I had 
 never heard of such a nervous affection in rivers. 
 Subsequently ' I found that, amongst English rivers, 
 the neighbouring river Severn, a far more important 
 stream, suffered at spring-tides the same kind of 
 hysterics, and perhaps some few other rivers in this 
 British Island; but amongst Indian rivers only the 
 Ganges. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 525 
 
 At last, when The Bore had been discussed to the 
 full extent of our united ignorance, I went off to the 
 subject of that other curse, far more afflicting than 
 any conceivable bore — viz., the foreign letter in my 
 pocket. The Bore had certainly alarmed us for 
 ninety or a hundred seconds, but the letter would 
 poison my very existence, like the bottle-imp, until I 
 could transfer it to some person truly qualified to 
 receive it. Might not my fair friend on the Cop be 
 marked out by Fate as “ the coming woman ” born to 
 deliver me from this pocket curse ? It is true that 
 she displayed a rustic simplicity somewhat resembling 
 that of Audrey in “ As you like it/’ Her , in fact, not 
 at all more than Audrey had the gods been pleased 
 to make “ poetical .’ 7 But, for my particular mission, 
 that might be amongst her best qualifications. At 
 any rate, I was wearied in spirit under my load of 
 responsibility : personally to liberate myself by visit- 
 ing the post-office too surely I felt as the ruin of my 
 enterprise in its very outset. Some agent must be 
 employed ; and where could one be found promis- 
 ing by looks, words, manners, more trustworthiness 
 than this agent, sent by accident ? The case almost 
 explained itself. She readily understood how the 
 resemblance of a name had thrown the letter into my 
 possession ; and that the simple remedy was to restore 
 it to the right owner through the right channel, which 
 channel was the never-enough-to-be-esteemed General 
 Post-Office, at that time pitching its tents and bivou- 
 acking nightly in Lombard Street, but for this special 
 case legally represented by the Chester head-office : a 
 service of no risk to her , for which, on the contrary, 
 all parties would thank her. I, to begin, begged to 
 put my thanks into the shape of half-a-crown : but, as 
 some natural doubts arose with respect to her precise 
 station in life (for she might be a farmer’s wife, and 
 not a servant), I thought it advisable to postulate 
 the existence of some youthful daughter : to which 
 mythological person I begged to address my offering, 
 when incarnated in the shape of a doll. 
 
 I therefore, Deucalion that was or had been pro- 
 
526 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 visionally through a brief interval of panic, took leave 
 of my Pyrrha, sole partner in the perils and anxieties 
 of that astounding Bore, dismissing her — Thessalian 
 Pyrrha — not to any Thessalian vales of Tempe, but 
 — O ye powers of moral anachronism ! — to the 
 Chester post-office ; and warning her on no account 
 to be prematurely wheedled out of her secret. Her 
 position, diplomatically speaking, was better (as I 
 made her understand) than that of the post-office : 
 she having something in her gift — viz., an appoint- 
 ment to forty guineas ; whereas in the counter-gift of 
 the proud post-office was nothing ; neither for instant 
 fruition nor in far-off reversion. Her, in fact, one 
 might regard as a Pandora, carrying a box with some- 
 thing better than hope at the bottom ; for hope too 
 often betrays ; but a draft upon Smith, Payne, and 
 Smith, which never betrays, and for a sum which, on 
 the authority of Goldsmith, makes an English clergy- 
 man “ passing rich ” through a whole twelvemonth, 
 entitled her to look scornfully upon every second 
 person that she met. 
 
 In about two hours the partner of my solitary king- 
 dom upon the Cop reappeared, with the welcome 
 assurance that Chester had survived the Bore, that 
 all was right, and that anything which ever had been 
 looking crooked was now made straight as the path 
 of an arrow. She had given “ my love ” (so she said) 
 to the post-office ; had been thanked by more than 
 either one or two amongst the men of letters who 
 figured in the equipage of that establishment ; and 
 had been assured that, long before daylight de- 
 parted, one large cornucopia of justice and felicity 
 would be emptied out upon the heads of all parties 
 in the drama. I myself, not the least afflicted person 
 on the roll, was already released — suddenly released, 
 and fully — from the iniquitous load of responsibility 
 thrust upon me ; the poor emigrant was released 
 from his conflict with fears that were uncertain, and 
 creditors too certain ; the post-office was released 
 from the scandal and embarrassment of a gross 
 irregularity, that might eventually have brought the 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 527 
 
 l postmaster-general down upon their haunches ; and 
 the household at the Priory were released from all 
 anxieties, great and small, sound and visionary, on 
 the question of my fancied felony. 
 
 In those anxieties one person there was that never 
 had condescended to participate. This was my 
 eldest sister Mary — just eleven months senior to 
 myself. She was among the gentlest of girls, and yet 
 from the very first she had testified the most incredu- 
 lous disdain of all who fancied her brother capable of 
 any thought so base as that of meditating a wrong to 
 a needy exile. At present, after exchanging a few 
 parting words, and a few final or farewell farewells 
 with my faithful female 1 agent, further business I had 
 none to detain me in Chester, except what concerned 
 this particular sister. My business with her was not 
 to thank her for the resolute justice which she had 
 done me, since as yet I could not know of that 
 service, but simply to see her, to learn the domestic 
 news of the Priory, and, according to the possibilities 
 of the case, to concert with her some plan of regu- 
 lar correspondence. Meantime it happened that a 
 maternal uncle, a military man on the Bengal estab- 
 lishment, who had come to England on a three-years’ 
 leave of absence (according to the custom in those 
 days), was at this time a visitor at the Priory. My 
 mother’s establishment of servants was usually limited 
 to five persons — all, except one, elderly and torpid. 
 But my uncle, who had brought to England some 
 beautiful Arab and Persian horses, found it necessary 
 to gather about his stables an extra body of men and 
 boys. These were all alert and active ; so that, when 
 I reconnoitred the windows of the Priory in the dusk, 
 hoping in some way to attract my sister’s attention, I 
 not only failed in that object, seeing no lights in any 
 
 1 Some people are irritated, or even fancy themselves in- 
 sulted, by overt acts of alliteration, as many people are by 
 puns. On their account let me say that, although there are 
 here eight separate f’s in less than half a sentence, this is to be 
 held as pure accident. In fact, at one time there were nine f’s 
 in the original cast of the sentence, until I, in pity of the 
 affronted people, substituted female agent for female friend. 
 
528 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 room which could naturally have been occupied by 
 her, but I also found myself growing into an object 
 of special attention to certain unknown servants, who, 
 having no doubt received instructions to look out for 
 me, easily inferred from my anxious movements that 
 I must be the person “ wanted.” Uneasy at all the 
 novel appearances of things, I went away, and re- 
 turned, after an hour’s interval, armed with a note to 
 my sister, requesting her to watch for an opportunity 
 of coming out for a few minutes under the shadows 
 of the little ruins in the Priory garden, 1 where 1 
 meantime would be waiting. This note I gave to a 
 stranger, whose costume showed him to be a groom, 
 begging him to give it to the young lady whose 
 address it bore. He answered, in a respectful tone, 
 that he would do so ; but he could not sincerely have 
 meant it, since (as I soon learned) it was impossible. 
 In fact, not one minute had I waited, when in glided 
 amongst the ruins — not my fair sister, but my bronzed 
 Bengal uncle ! 
 
 A Bengal tiger would not more have startled me. 
 Now, to a dead certainty, I said, here comes a fatal 
 
 1 “ The little ruins in the Priory garden ” ; — St. John’s 
 Priory had been part of the monastic foundation attached to 
 the very ancient church of St. John, standing beyond the walls 
 of Chester. Early in the seventeenth century, this Priory, or 
 so much of it as remained, was occupied as a dwelling-house 
 by Sir Robert Cotton the antiquary. And there, according 
 to tradition, he had been visited by Ben Jonson. All that 
 remained of the Priory when used as a domestic residence by 
 Cotton was upon a miniature scale, except only the kitchen — 
 a noble room, with a groined roof of stone, exactly as it had 
 been fitted to the uses of the monastic establishment. The 
 little hall of erftrance, the dining-room, and principal bedroom, 
 were in a modest style of elegance, fitted by the scale of 
 accommodation for the abode of a literary bachelor, and pretty 
 nearly as Cotton had left them two centuries before. But the 
 miniature character of the Priory, which had dwindled by 
 successive abridgments from a royal quarto into a pretty 
 duodecimo, was seen chiefly in the beautiful ruins which 
 adorned the little lawn, across which access was gained to 
 the house through the hall. These ruins amounted at the 
 most to three arches — which, because round and not pointed, 
 were then usually called Saxon, as contradistinguished from 
 Gothic. What might be the exact classification of the archi- 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 529 
 
 barrier to the prosecution of iny scheme. I was 
 mistaken. Between my mother and my uncle there 
 existed the very deepest affection ; for they regarded 
 each other as sole reliques of a household once living 
 together in memorable harmony. But in many 
 features of character no human beings could stand 
 off from each other in more lively repulsion. And 
 this was seen on the present occasion. My dear 
 excellent mother, from the eternal quiet of her 
 decorous household, looked upon every violent or 
 irregular movement, and therefore upon mine at 
 present, much as she would have done upon the 
 opening of the seventh seal in the Revelations. But 
 my uncle was thoroughly a man of the world ; and, 
 what told even more powerfully on my behalf in 
 this instance, he was a man of even morbid activity. 
 It was so exquisitely natural in his eyes that any 
 rational person should prefer moving about amongst 
 the breezy mountains of Wales to a slavish routine 
 of study amongst books grim with dust and masters 
 too probably still more dusty, that he seemed dis- 
 posed to regard my conduct as an extraordinary act 
 
 tecture I do not know. Certainly the very ancient church of 
 St. John, to which at one time the Priory must have been an 
 appendage, wore a character of harsh and naked simplicity 
 that was repulsive. But the little ruins were really beautiful, 
 and drew continual visits from artists and sketchers through 
 every successive summer. Whether they had any architectural 
 enrichments I do not remember. But they interested all 
 people — first by their miniature scale, which would have quali- 
 fied them (if portable) for a direct introduction amongst the 
 “properties 5 ’ and dramatis persona on our London opera 
 boards ; and, secondly, by the exquisite beauty of the shrubs, 
 wild flowers; and ferns, that surmounted the arches with 
 natural coronets of the richest composition. In this condition 
 of attractiveness my mother saw this little Priory, which was 
 then on sale. As a residence, it had the great advantage of 
 standing somewhat aloof from the city of Chester, which, how- 
 ever (like all cathedral cities), was quiet and respectable in the 
 composition of its population. My mother bought it, added a 
 drawing-room, eight or nine bedrooms, dressing-rooms, See., all 
 on the miniature scale corresponding to the original plan ; and 
 thus formed a very pretty residence, with the grace of monastic 
 antiquity hanging over the whole little retreat. 
 
530 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 of virtue. On his advice, it was decided that there 
 could be no hope in any contest with my main 
 wishes, and that I should be left to pursue my 
 original purpose of walking amongst the Welsh 
 mountains ; provided I chose to do so upon the 
 slender allowance of a guinea a week. My uncle, 
 whose Indian munificence ran riot upon all occa- 
 sions, would gladly have had a far larger allowance 
 made to me, and would himself have clandestinely 
 given me anything I asked. But I myself, from 
 general ignorance (in which accomplishment I ex- 
 celled), judged this to be sufficient ; and at this 
 point my mother, hitherto passively acquiescent in 
 my uncle’s proposals, interfered with a decisive rigour 
 that in my own heart I could not disapprove. Any 
 larger allowance, most reasonably she urged, what 
 was it but to “ make proclamation to my two younger 
 brothers that rebellion bore a premium, and that 
 mutiny was the ready road to ease and comfort ” ? 
 My conscience smote me at these words : I felt 
 something like an electric shock on this sudden 
 reference, so utterly unexpected, to my brothers ; 
 for, to say the truth, I never once admitted them 
 to my thoughts in forecasting the eventual conse- 
 quences that might possibly unroll themselves from 
 my own headstrong act. Here now, within three 
 days, rang like a solemn knell, reverberating from 
 the sounding-board within my awakened conscience, 
 one of those many self-reproaches so dimly masked, 
 but not circumstantially prefigured, by the secret 
 thought under the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral 
 about its dread Whispering Gallery. In this par- 
 ticular instance I know that the evil consequences 
 from my own example never did take effect. But, 
 at the moment of my mother’s sorrowful suggestion, 
 the fear that they might take effect thrilled me with 
 remorse. My next brother, a boy of generous and 
 heroic temper, was at a school governed by a brutal 
 and savage master. This brother, I well know, had 
 justifying reasons, ten times weightier than any which 
 I could plead, for copying my precedent. Most. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 53 I 
 
 probable it was that he would do so : but I learned 
 many years subsequently from himself that in fact 
 he did not. The man’s diabolical malice at last 
 made further toleration impossible. Without think- 
 ing of my example, under very different circumstances 
 my brother won his own emancipation in ways sug- 
 gested by his own views and limited by his own 
 resources : he got afloat upon the wide, wide world 
 of ocean ; ran along a perilous seven-years’ career of 
 nautical romance ; had his name almost blotted out 
 from all memories in England ; became of necessity 
 a pirate amongst pirates ; was liable to the death of a 
 pirate wherever taken ; then suddenly, on a morning 
 of battle, having effected his escape from the bloody 
 flag, he joined the English storming party at Monte 
 Video, fought under the eye of Sir Home Popham, 
 the commodore, and within twenty-four hours after 
 the victory was rated as a midshipman on board the 
 Diadem (a 64-gun ship), which bore Sir Home’s flag. 
 All this I have more circumstantially narrated else- 
 where in “Autobiographic Sketches.” 1 I repeat the 
 sum of it here, as showing that his elopement from a 
 brutal tyrant was not due to any misleading of mine. 
 I happen to know this now — but then I could not 
 know it. And, if I had so entirely overlooked one 
 such possible result, full of calamity to my youthful 
 brothers, why might I not have overlooked many 
 hundreds beside, equally probable — equally full of 
 peril ? That consideration saddened me, and 
 deepened more and more the ominous suggestion 
 - — the oracle full of woe — that spoke from those 
 Belshazzar thunderings upon the wall of the Whis- 
 pering Gallery. In fact, every intricate and untried 
 path in life, where it was from the first a matter 
 of arbitrary choice to enter upon it or avoid it, is 
 effectually a path through a vast Hercynian forest, 
 unexplored and unmapped, where each several turn 
 in your advance leaves you open to new anticipa- 
 tions of what is next to be expected, and consequently 
 
 1 See chapter, “ My Brother.” 
 
532 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 open to altered valuations of all that has been already 
 traversed. Even the character of your own absolute 
 experience, past and gone, which (if anything in this 
 world) you might surely answer for as sealed and 
 settled for ever — even this you must submit to hold 
 in suspense, as a thing conditional and contingent 
 upon what is yet to come — liable to have its pro- 
 visional character affirmed or reversed, according to 
 the new combinations into which it may enter with 
 elements only yet perhaps in the earliest stages of 
 development. 
 
 Saddened by these reflections, I was still more 
 saddened by the chilling manner of my mother. If 
 I could presume to descry a fault in my mother, it 
 was that she turned the chilling aspects of her high- 
 toned character too exclusively upon those whom, in 
 any degree, she knew or supposed to be promoters of 
 evil. Sometimes her austerity might seem even unjust. 
 But at present the whole artillery of her displeasure 
 seemed to be unmasked, and justly unmasked, against 
 a moral aberration that offered for itself no excuse 
 that was obvious in one moment, that was legible at 
 one glance, that could utter itself in one word. My 
 mother was predisposed to think ill of all causes that 
 required many words : I, predisposed to subtleties of 
 all sorts and degrees, had naturally become acquainted 
 with cases that could not u TObe their apparellings 
 down to that degree of simp 'city. If in this world 
 there is one misery having no relief, it is the pressure, 
 on the heart ffiom the I?icommunicable . And, if 
 
 another Sphinx should arise to propose another 
 enigma to man — saying, What burden is that which 
 only is insupportable by human fortitude? I should 
 answer at once — It is the burden of the Incommuni- 
 cable . At this moment, sitting in the same room of 
 the Priory with my mother, knowing how reasonable 
 she was — how patient of explanations — how candid — 
 how open to pity — not the less I sank away in a hope- 
 lessness that was immeasurable from all effort at 
 explanation. She and I were contemplating the very 
 same act ; but she from one centre, I from another. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 533 
 
 Certain I was that, if through one half-minute she 
 could realise in one deadly experience the suffering 
 with which I had fought through more than three 
 months, the amount of physical anguish, the desola- 
 tion of all genial life, she would have uttered a 
 rapturous absolution of that: which else must always 
 seem to her a mere explosion of wilful insubordina- 
 tion. <£ In this brief experience,” she would exclaim, 
 “ I read the record of your acquittal ; in this fiery 
 torment I acknowledge the gladiatorial resistance.” 
 Such in the case supposed would have been her re- 
 vised verdict. But this case was exquisitely impossible. 
 Nothing which offered itself to my rhetoric gave any 
 but the feeblest and most childish reflection of my 
 past sufferings. Just so helpless did I feel, disarmed 
 into just the same languishing impotence to face (or 
 make an effort at facing) the difficulty before me, as 
 most of us have felt in the dreams of our childhood 
 when lying down without a struggle before some all- 
 conquering lion. I felt that the situation was one 
 without hope ; a solitary word, which I attempted to 
 mould upon my lips, died away into a sigh ; and 
 passively I acquiesced in the apparent confession 
 spread through all the appearances — that in reality I 
 had no palliation to produce. 
 
 One alternative, in the offer made to me, was that 
 I had permission to stay at the Priory. The Priory, 
 or the mountainous region of Wales, was offered 
 freely to my choice. Either of the two offered an 
 attractive abode. The Priory, it may be fancied, was 
 clogged with the liability to fresh and intermitting 
 reproaches. But this was not so. I knew my mother 
 sufficiently to be assured that, once having expressed 
 her sorrowful condemnation of my act, having made 
 it impossible for me to misunderstand her views, she 
 was ready to extend her wonted hospitality to me, 
 and (as regarded all practical matters) her wonted 
 kindness ; but not that sort of kindness which could 
 make me forget that I stood under the deepest 
 shadows of her displeasure, or could leave me for a 
 moment free to converse at my ease upon any and 
 
534 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 every subject. A man that is talking on simple 
 toleration, and, as it were, under permanent protest, 
 cannot feel himself morally at his ease, unless very 
 obtuse and coarse in his sensibilities. 
 
 Mine, under any situation approaching to the 
 present, were so far from being obtuse that they w T ere 
 morbidly and extravagantly acute. I had erred : that 
 I knew, and did not disguise from myself. Indeed, 
 the rapture of anguish with which I had recurred 
 involuntarily to my experience of the Whispering Gal- 
 lery, and the symbolic meaning which I had given to 
 that experience, manifested indirectly my deep sense 
 of error, through the dim misgiving which attended it 
 that in some mysterious way the sense and the con- 
 sequences of this error would magnify themselves at 
 every stage of life, in proportion as they were viewed 
 retrospectively from greater and greater distances. 
 I had, besides, through the casual allusion to my 
 brothers, suddenly become painfully aware of another 
 and separate failure in the filial obligations resting on 
 myself. Any mother who is a widow has especial 
 claims to the co-operation of her eldest son in all 
 means of giving a beneficial bias to the thoughts and 
 purposes of the younger children : and, if any mother, 
 then by a title how special could my own mother 
 invoke such co-operation, who had on her part satis- 
 fied all the claims made upon her maternal character 
 by self-sacrifices as varied as privately I knew them 
 to be exemplary. Whilst yet comparatively young, 
 not more than thirty-six, she had sternly refused all 
 countenance, on at least two separate occasions, to 
 distinguished proposals of marriage, out of pure regard 
 to the memory of my father, and to the interests of 
 his children. Could I fail to read, in such unostenta- 
 tious exemplifications of maternal goodness, a sum- 
 mons to a corresponding earnestness on my part in 
 lightening, as much as possible, the burden of her 
 responsibilities ? Alas ! too certainly, as regarded 
 that duty, I felt my own failure : one opportunity had 
 been signally lost. And yet, on the other hand, I also 
 felt that more might be pleaded on my behalf than 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 535 
 
 could by possibility be apparent to a neutral by- 
 stander. But this, to be pleaded effectually, needed 
 to be said — not by myself, but by a disinterested 
 advocate : and no such advocate was at hand. In 
 blind distress of mind, conscience-stricken and heart- 
 stricken, I stretched out my arms, seeking for my one 
 sole auxiliary ; that was my eldest sister Mary ; for 
 my younger sister Jane was a mere infant. Blindly 
 and mechanically, I stretched out my arms as if to 
 arrest her attention ; and, giving utterance to my 
 labouring thoughts, I was beginning to speak, when 
 all at once I became sensible that Mary was not there. 
 I had heard a step behind me, and supposed it hers : 
 since the groom’s ready acceptance of my letter to her 
 had preoccupied me with the belief that I should see 
 her in a few moments. But she was far away, on a 
 mission of anxious, sisterly love. 
 
 Immediately after my elopement, an express had 
 been sent off to the Priory from Manchester ; this 
 express, well mounted, had not spent more than four 
 hours on the road. He must have passed me on my 
 first day’s walk ; and, within an hour after his arrival, 
 came a communication from the post-office, explain- 
 ing the nature and value of the letter that had been 
 so vexatiously thrust into my hands. Alarm spread 
 through the Priory : for it must be confessed that the 
 coincidence of my elopement with this certified delivery 
 of the letter to myself gave but too reasonable grounds 
 for connecting the two incidents. I was grateful to 
 dear Mary for resisting such strong plausibilities 
 against me ; and yet I could not feel entitled to com- 
 plain of those who had not resisted. The probability 
 seemed that I must have violated the laws to some 
 extent, either by forgery or by fraudulent appropria- 
 tion. In either case, the most eligible course seemed 
 to be my instant expatriation. France (this being the 
 year of peace) or Holland would offer the best asylum 
 until the affair should be settled ; and, as there could 
 be no anxieties in any quarter as to the main thing 
 concerned in the issue — viz., the money — in any case 
 there was no reason to fear a vindictive pursuit, even 
 
53^ CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 on the worst assumption as regarded the offence. 
 An elderly gentleman, long connected with the family, 
 and in many cases an agent for the guardians, at this 
 moment offered his services as counsellor and pro- 
 tector to my sister Mary. Ihvo hours therefore from 
 the arrival of the Manchester express (who, starting 
 about 11 a.m., had reached Chester at 3 p.m.), all the 
 requisite steps having been concerted with one of the 
 Chester banks for getting letters of credit, &c., a 
 carriage-and-four was at the Priory gate, into which 
 stepped my sister Mary, with one female attendant 
 and her friendly escort. And thus, the same day on 
 which I had made my exit from Mr. Lawson’s saw the 
 chase after me commencing. Sunset saw the pur- 
 suers crossing the Mersey, and trotting into Liverpool. 
 Thence to Ormskirk, thirteen miles, and thence to 
 proud Preston , about twenty more. Within a trifle, 
 these three stages make fifty miles ; and so much did 
 my chasers, that pursued when no man fled, accom- 
 plish before sleeping. On the next day, long and 
 long before the time when I, in my humble pedestrian 
 character, reached Chester, my sister’s party had 
 reached Ambleside — distant about ninety-two miles 
 from Liverpool ; consequently somewhere about a 
 hundred and seven miles from the Priory. This 
 chasing party, with good reason, supposed themselves 
 to be on my traces ever after reaching “proud 
 Preston,” which is the point of confluence for the 
 Liverpool and Manchester roads northwards. For 
 I myself, having originally planned my route for the 
 English Lakes, purposely suffered some indications of 
 that plan to remain behind me, in the hope of thus 
 giving a false direction to any pursuit that might be 
 attempted. 
 
 The further course of this chase was disagreeably 
 made known to me about four years later, on attaining 
 my majority, by a “little account” of about .£150 
 against my little patrimonial fortune. Of all the 
 letters from the Priory (which, however, from natural 
 oversight were not thought of until the day after my 
 own arrival at the Priory — i.e ., the third day after 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 537 
 
 my sister’s departure), not one caught them : which 
 was unfortunate. For the journey to and from the 
 Lakes, together with a circuit of more than one 
 hundred and fifty miles amongst the Lakes, would 
 at any rate have run up to nearly four hundred miles. 
 But it happened that my pursuers, not having time 
 to sift such intelligence as they received, were misled 
 into an excursus of full two hundred miles more, by 
 chasing an imaginary “ me ” to the caves, thence to 
 Bolton Abbey, thence nearly to York. Altogether, 
 the journey amounted to above six hundred miles, 
 all performed with four horses. Now, at that time 
 the cost of four horses — which in the cheapest hay 
 and corn seasons was three shillings a mile, and in 
 dear seasons four — was three and sixpence a mile ; 
 to which it was usual to compute an average addition 
 of one shilling a mile for gates^, postillions, ostlers ; so 
 that the total amount, with the natural expenses of 
 the three travellers at the inns, ran up to five shillings 
 a mile. Consequently, five shillings being the quarter 
 of a pound, six hundred miles cost the quarter of 
 ^600. The only item in this long account which 
 consoled me to the amount of a solitary smile for all 
 this money thrown away was an item in a bill at 
 Patterdale (head of Ulleswater) — 
 
 To an echo, first quality .... £0 10 o 
 
 To do., second quality ... 050 
 
 It seems the price of echoes varied, reasonably 
 enough, with the amount of gunpowder consumed. 
 But at Low-wood, on Windermere, half-crown echoes 
 might be had by those base snobs who would put 
 up with a vile Brummagem substitute for “the 
 genuine article.” 
 
 Trivial, meantime, as regarded any permanent- 
 consequences, would have been this casual inroad 
 upon my patrimony. Had I waited until my sister 
 returned home, which I might have been sure could 
 only have been delayed through the imperfectly con- 
 certed system of correspondence, all would have 
 
538 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 prospered. From her I should have received the 
 cordiality and the genial sympathy which I needed ; 
 I could have quietly pursued my studies ; and my 
 Oxford matriculation would have followed as a matter 
 of course. But, unhappily, having for so long a time 
 been seriously shaken in health, any interruption of 
 my wild open-air system of life instantly threw me 
 back into nervous derangements. Past all doubt it 
 had now become that the al fresco life, to which I 
 had looked with so much hopefulness for a sure and 
 rapid restoration to health, was even more potent 
 than I had supposed it. Literally irresistible it 
 seemed in reorganising the system of my languishing 
 powers. Impatient, therefore, under the absence of 
 my sister, and agitated every hour so long as my 
 home wanted its central charm in some household 
 countenance, some crvvrpofpov o/x/xa, beaming with 
 perfect sympathy, I resolved to avail myself of those 
 wild mountainous and sylvan attractions which at 
 present lay nearest to me. Those parts, indeed, of 
 Flintshire, or even of Denbighshire, which lay near 
 to Chester, were not in any very eminent sense 
 attractive. The vale of Gressford, for instance, 
 within the Flintshire border, and yet not more than 
 seven miles distant, offered a lovely little seclusion ; 
 and to this I had a privileged access ; and at first 
 I tried it ; but it was a dressed and ornamented 
 pleasure-ground : and two ladies of some distinction, 
 nearly related to each other s and old friends of my 
 mother, were in a manner the ladies paramount 
 within the ring fence of this Arcadian vale. But this 
 did not offer what I wanted. Everything was elegant, 
 polished, quiet, throughout the lawns and groves of 
 this verdant retreat : no rudeness was allowed here ; 
 even the little brooks were trained to u behave them- 
 selves ” ; and the two villas of the reigning ladies 
 (Mrs. Warrington and Mrs. Parry) showed the per- 
 fection of good taste. For both ladies had cultivated 
 a taste for painting, and I believe some executive 
 power. Here my introductions were rather too 
 favourable ; since they forced me into society. From 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 539 
 
 Gressford, however, the character of the scene, con- 
 sidered as a daily residence, very soon repelled me, 
 however otherwise fascinating by the accomplishments 
 of its two possessors. Just two-and-twenty miles from 
 Chester, meantime, lay a far grander scene, the fine 
 vale of Llangollen in the centre of Denbighshire. 
 Here, also, the presiding residents were two ladies, 
 whose romantic retirement from the world at an 
 early age had attracted for many years a general 
 interest to their persons, habits, and opinions. 
 These ladies were Irish — Miss Ponsonby, and Lady 
 Eleanor Butler, a sister of Lord Ormond. I had 
 twice been formally presented to them by persons 
 of a rank to stamp a value upon this introduction. 
 But, naturally, though high-bred courtesy concealed 
 any such open expressions of feeling, they must have 
 felt a very slight interest in myself or my opinions . 1 
 I grieve to say that my own feelings were not more 
 ardent towards them. Nevertheless, I presented 
 myself at their cottage as often as I passed through 
 Llangollen ; and was always courteously received 
 when they happened to be in the country. How- 
 ever, as it was not ladies that I was seeking in Wales, 
 I now pushed on to Carnarvonshire ; and for some 
 weeks took a very miniature suite of rooms — viz., one 
 room and a closet — at Bangor. 
 
 My landlady had been a lady’s-maid, or a nurse, 
 or something of that sort, in the Bishop of Bangor’s 
 
 1 It is worthy of notice that, w ? hen I, in this year 1802, and 
 again in after years, endeavoured to impress them favourably 
 with regard to Wordsworth as a poet (that subject having not 
 been introduced by myself, but by one of the ladies, ’who 
 happened to have a Cambridge friend intimate with the man, 
 and perhaps with his works), neither of them was disposed to 
 look with any interest or hopefulness upon his pretensions. 
 But, at a period long subsequent to this, when the House of 
 Commons had rung with applause on Sergeant Talfourd’s 
 mention of his name, and when all American tourists of any 
 distinction flocked annually to Rydal Mount, Wordsworth’s own 
 poems bear witness that a great revolution had been worked 
 at Llangollen. I mention this anecdote, because I have good 
 reason to think that a large proportion of the “ conversions ” in 
 the case of Wordsworth took place.under the same influence. 
 
540 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 family ; and had but lately married away from tha f 
 family, or (to use her own expression) had “settled." 
 In a little town like Bangor, barely to have lived in 
 the bishop’s family conferred some distinction ; and 
 my good landlady had rather more than her share 
 of the pride natural to that glorious advantage. 
 What “ my lord " said, and what “ my lord ” did, 
 how useful he was in Parliament, and how indispens- 
 able at Oxford, formed the daily burden of her talk. 
 All this I bore very well ; for it cost no great effort 
 to make allowance for the garrulity of an old servant ; 
 and luckily nothing in our daily routine of life 
 brought us often into each other’s company. Some- 
 times, however, we met ; and of necessity, on such 
 occasions, I must have appeared in her eyes very 
 inadequately impressed with the bishop’s importance, 
 and with the grandeur of having lived in a palace ; 
 and, perhaps, to punish me for my indifference, or 
 it might, after all, be mere accident, she one day 
 repeated to me a conversation in which I was 
 indirectly a party concerned. She had been to 
 the palace ; and, dinner being over, she had been 
 summoned into the dining-room. In giving an 
 account of her household economy, she happened 
 to mention that she had let what she styled some- 
 what magnificently her “apartments." The good 
 bishop (it seemed) had thence taken occasion to 
 caution her as to her selection of inmates; “for," 
 said he, “ you must recollect, Betty, that Bangor is 
 in the high-road to the Head " {the Head was the 
 common colloquial expression for Holyhead), “so 
 that multitudes of Irish swindlers, running away from 
 their debts into England, and of English swindlers, 
 running away from their debts to the Isle of Man, 
 are likely to take this place in their route." Such 
 advice was certainly not without reasonable grounds, 
 but rather fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty’s 
 private meditations than specially reported to me. 
 What followed was worse : “ O my lord,’’ answered 
 my landlady (according to her own representation of 
 the matter), “ I really don’t think that this young 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 54 1 
 
 gentleman is a swindler ; because ” — “ You 
 
 don’t think me a swindler ? ” said I, interrupting 
 her, in a tumult of indignation ; “ for the future I 
 shall spare you the trouble of thinking about it.’ 7 
 And without delay I prepared for my departure. 
 Some concessions the good woman seemed disposed 
 to make ; but a harsh and contemptuous expression, 
 which I fear that I applied to the learned dignitary 
 himself, roused her indignation in turn ; and re- 
 conciliation then became impossible. I was, indeed, 
 greatly irritated at the bishop’s having suggested any 
 grounds of suspicion, however remotely, against a 
 person whom he had never seen ; and I thought 
 of letting him know my mind in Greek ; which, at 
 the same time that it would furnish some presumption 
 in behalf of my respectability, might also (I hoped) 
 compel the bishop to answer in the same language ; 
 and in that case I doubted not to make good my 
 superiority, as a versatile wielder of arms rarely 
 managed with effect, against all the terrors of his 
 lordship’s wig. 
 
 I was wrong if I said anything in my anger that 
 was disparaging or sceptical as to the bishop’s in- 
 tellectual pretensions ; which were not only very 
 sound, but very appropriate to the particular stations 
 which he filled. For the Bishop of Bangor (at that 
 time Dr. Cleaver) was also the head of Brasenose, 
 Oxford — which college was indebted to him for its 
 leadership 1 at that era in scholarship and discipline. 
 
 1 The rank to which Brasenose had suddenly risen in the esti- 
 mation of the world was put to the test in the following year. 
 The leading family in the house (the gens) of Grenville was, at 
 this time, that of the Marquis of Buckingham, not long after 
 elevated to the ducal rank. The second son of this nobleman 
 — viz., Lord George Grenville (subsequently succeeding to the 
 peerage of Nugent, and known in his literary character only 
 as Lord Nugent) — happened, in this or the following year, to 
 be ripe for college ; which means, in England, that he was a 
 young man, and not a boy ; generally, at the very least, 
 eighteen years old. According to all known precedent, he 
 should have gone to Christ Church. But, on such a question 
 arising, naturally his uncle, Lord , Grenville, under whose 
 
542 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 In this academic character I learned afterwards that 
 he might be called almost a reformer, — a wise, tem- 
 perate, and successful reformer ; and, as a scholar, 
 I saw many years later that he had received the 
 laudatory notice of Porson. But, on the other 
 hand, the bishop was not altogether without blame in 
 unchaining his local influence, were it only by hint 
 or insinuation, against a defenceless stranger. For so 
 great a man, in so small a town as Bangor, was really 
 as much of an autocrat as a post-captain on the 
 quarterdeck of his own vessel. A “ sea-lawyer ” in 
 such a case must contrive to pocket his wrongs, 
 until he finds himself and the captain on shore. 
 Yet, after all, my scheme was not altogether so 
 absurd ; and the anger, in which perhaps it might 
 begin, all melted away in the fun which would have 
 
 patronage the Grenville “Homer” had been published, and 
 who was reputed an accomplished scholar, assisted at the 
 family council ; and by his advice, to the astonishment of 
 Oxford, Brasenose was selected in preference to Christ Church; 
 and, I believe, on the one sole ground of deference for the ad- 
 ministrative talents (combined with singular erudition) of Dr. 
 Cleaver. This casual precedency, however, of Brasenose, 
 
 resting (as it did) on a mere personal basis, run down as sud- 
 denly as it had run up, and has long since been forgotten. 
 The fact is that rustic families, at a distance from Oxford, 
 naturally presume some superior dignity in any college that 
 should happen to have a bishop for its ruler ; not knowing 
 that, in Oxford and Cambridge, all heads of considerable 
 colleges hold themselves (and are held) equals in rank and 
 dignity to the bench of bishops. In. Oxford more especially 
 this doctrine receives a standing illustration ; for there the dean 
 of the diocese is necessarily and ex officio the head of Christ 
 Church, which (by the number and the rank of its population) 
 is beyond all competition the supreme college in the whole 
 university. In that character, therefore (of college head), Mr. 
 Dean is a very much greater man than my lord the bishop. 
 This virtual inferiority in the face of an ostensible superiority 
 was, until the new regulations for somewhat equalising the 
 bishoprics, further reinforced by the poverty of Oxford as an 
 episcopal see. It ought to be added that to hold the headship 
 of a college in combination with a bishopric, considering the 
 burdensomeness of irreconcilable functions attached to each of 
 the offices, is a scandalous violation of public duty, such as 
 ought never to have won an hour’s toleration. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 543 
 
 accompanied its execution. It will strike the reader 
 that my plan of retaliation must have failed by 
 arming against me the official pride of the bishop. 
 Any man, it will be thought, occupying so dignified a 
 place in public life — a lord of Parliament, holder of a 
 prize in the episcopal lottery (for Bangor was worth six 
 thousand a year), a leading Don at Oxford — in short, 
 a splendid pluralist, armed with diocesan thunder 
 and lightning — would never stoop from his Jovian 
 altitude to notice any communication whatever from 
 a boy. But it would make all the difference in the 
 world that this communication by the supposition 
 was to be in Greek. Mere curiosity in such a case 
 would compel the bishop to read it. And then, 
 shockingly irregular as such a course would be, a 
 fatal temptation would arise to the hazardous ex- 
 periment of answering it in Greek. It would not be 
 pleasant to shrink from the sort of silent challenge 
 thrown out by such an eccentric form of epistle, when 
 worded in the tone of respect due to the bishop’s 
 age and spiritual office. And certainly the degra- 
 dation would be conspicuously less in replying even 
 to a boy, if armed with that sort of accomplishment. 
 But was not the bishop a learned man, well qualified 
 to answer, whose reading must naturally be greater 
 by a score of times than mine ? I had heard so ; 
 and I was told also, but long after, that he had 
 written well and learnedly {but not in Greek ) on the 
 Arundel marbles ; even to attempt which, in our 
 days, when the forestalling labours of two centuries 
 have so much narrowed the field open to original 
 sagacity, argues an erudition far from common. But 
 I have already given it as my opinion that there is no 
 proportion held between a man’s general knowledge of 
 Greek and the special art of writing Greek ; that is, 
 using it as a vehicle for ordinary and familiar inter- 
 course. This advantage, not necessarily or usually 
 belonging to the most exquisite Greek scholarship, I 
 myself wielded with a preternatural address for varying 
 the forms of expression, and for bringing the most 
 refractory ideas within the harness of Grecian phrase- 
 
544 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 ology. Had the bishop yielded to the temptation 
 of replying, then I figured to myself the inevitable 
 result — the episcopal hulk lying motionless on the 
 water like a huge three-decker, not able to return a 
 gun, whilst I, as a light agile frigate, should have 
 sailed round and round him, and raked him at 
 pleasure as opportunity offered. He could have 
 had no opening for his erudition (as, for instance, 
 upon the Arundel marbles), without too flagrantly 
 recalling the cosmogony man in “The Vicar of 
 Wakefield/’ with his avapyov apa /cat dreXevratov 
 to 7rav. Once falling into the snare of replying at 
 all, his lordship would not be at liberty either to 
 break off the correspondence abruptly, or to continue 
 it without damage to his episcopal pomp. My anger, 
 meantime, sudden and fiery, as under a sense of real 
 injury, had not been malicious ; and it was already 
 propitiated beforehand by the mere fun and comic 
 effect of the picture which I thus prefigured as 
 arising between us. In no case could I have found 
 pleasure in causing any mortifications to the bishop 
 — mortifications which the Methodists (by this time 
 swarming in Carnarvonshire) would exultingly have 
 diffused. In the end I should probably have con- 
 fined myself to a grave and temperate remonstrance, 
 simply stating the distressing consequences which 
 were likely to result to me from the too unguarded 
 insinuations of his lordship. 
 
 But these consequences travelled fast upon the 
 traces of those insinuations ; and already, upon the 
 very day when my foolish landlady (more, perhaps, 
 in thoughtlessness than with any purpose of mischief) 
 had repeated the bishop’s words in what seemed to 
 me so insulting a tone, and so entirely without pro- 
 vocation (since there never had been the smallest 
 irregularity in our little weekly settlements), one of 
 those consequences was that I became houseless. Tor 
 I disdained to profit by the shelter of a house from 
 which truth and courtesy seemed alike banished. 
 And from that one consequence naturally enough 
 flowed others ; for, having, at any rate, to seek a new 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 
 
 545 
 
 home, I left Bangor 1 at once, and rambled away 
 to Carnarvon — distant about two and a half hours’ 
 smart walking. At Carnarvon I found no lodging 
 that altogether suited my purposes, — hired lodgings 
 being then thinly sown in North Wales ; and for some 
 time, therefore, having a small reserve of guineas, I 
 lived very much at inns. 
 
 This change of abode naturally drew my thoughts 
 away from the bishop. And thus gradually all my 
 thoughts of expostulation faded away. This I am dis- 
 posed to regard as an unfortunate solution of the affair, 
 which otherwise would probably have taken the follow- 
 ing course : The bishop, as I afterwards heard when 
 resident myself at Oxford and personally acquainted 
 with men of Brasenose (to which college, indeed, sub- 
 sequently, my own youngest brother belonged), was 
 a reasonable and even amiable man. On receiving, 
 therefore, my Greek remonstrance, he was sure as a 
 scholar to have taken some interest in the writer ; and 
 he was too equitable to have neglected any statement, 
 Greek or not Greek, which reflected, with some appa- 
 rent justice, upon his own conduct as not sufficiently 
 considerate. He would, therefore, almost certainly 
 have replied to me in courteous terms ; regretting the 
 accident which had made me houseless ; but remind- 
 ing me that all communications made to a dependant 
 within a man’s own gates, and never meant as grounds 
 of action, but simply as cautions — general and not 
 special — are in law and usage held to be privileged 
 
 1 In this, except for what concerned the cheapness and the 
 brilliant cleanliness of the lodgings, under the management of 
 an English housemaid approved by an English bishop’s house- 
 keeper, there was little to regret. Bangor, indeed, had few 
 attractions, fewer than any other spot in Carnarvonshire. And 
 yet, was there not the cathedral ? Certainly there was ; and 
 that might have been a great resource to me had there been 
 the regular choir services ; but there were none. Indeed, there 
 could be none ; for, so far as I ever heard, there was no choir. 
 The cathedral cemetery was at that time famous as the most 
 beautiful in the whole kingdom, But the beauty was scarcely 
 appropriate : it was the beauty of a well-kept shrubbery, and 
 not of a cemetery. It contrived to look smiling and attractive 
 by the entire dissembling of its real purposes. 
 
 S 
 
54 6 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 communications, and equally whether written or 
 spoken. The insulting use made of this caution he 
 would have treated as due simply to the woman’s 
 coarseness, but in part, perhaps, as due to a cause 
 which has much to do with the harsh and unciyil 
 expressions of uneducated people — viz., their very 
 limited command of language. They use phrases 
 much stronger than naturally belong to their thoughts 
 and meaning, simply because the narrowness of their 
 vocabulary oftentimes suggests to their embarrassed 
 choice no variation of expression wearing a character 
 less offensive. To such a letter I should have made 
 a suitable reply ; and, thenceforward, it is probable 
 that, until the Michaelmas term drew the bishop’s 
 family away to Oxford, I should have found my abode 
 in Bangor, or its neighbourhood, much improved 
 as regards the command of books. That advantage 
 would have been fugitive. But other and remoter 
 advantages might have been more serious. It hap- 
 pened that the college to which the Manchester 
 Grammar School would have consigned me as a 
 privileged alumnus was that very college over which 
 the bishop presided. I have no reason to think that 
 the bishop would have had power to retrieve for 
 me any part of the privileges which by my elopement 
 I had wilfully forfeited : but he would have had it 
 abundantly in his power to place the ordinary college 
 advantages of Fellowships, &c., within my reach : 
 whereas afterwards, going under erroneous counsel to 
 a college disconnected from my own county and my 
 own schools, I never enjoyed those ordinary oppor- 
 tunities of advancement, and consequently of literary 
 leisure, which the English universities open to almost 
 every man who qualifies himself duly to obtain them. 
 All this, however, was thrown into the world of dreams 
 and fable by my hasty movement to Carnarvon, and 
 that region which Pennant first distinguished by the 
 name of Snowdonia. 
 
 There were already, even in those days of 1802, 
 numerous inns, erected at reasonable distances from 
 each other, for the accommodation of tourists : and 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 547 
 
 no sort of disgrace attached in Wales, as too generally 
 upon the great roads of England, to the pedestrian 
 style of travelling. Indeed, the majority of those 
 whom I met as fellow- tourists in the quiet little cottage- 
 parlours of the Welsh posting-houses were pedestrian 
 travellers. All the way from Shrewsbury through 
 Llangollen, Llanrwst, 1 Conway, Bangor, then turning 
 to the left at right angles through Carnarvon, and so 
 on to Dolgelly (the chief town of Merionethshire), 
 Tan-y-Bwlch, Harlech, Barmouth, and through the 
 sweet solitudes of Cardiganshire, or turning back 
 sharply towards the English border through the 
 gorgeous wood scenery of Montgomeryshire- — every- 
 where, at intermitting distances of twelve to sixteen 
 miles, I found the most comfortable inns. One feature 
 indeed of repose in all this chain of solitary resting- 
 houses — viz., the fact that none of them rose above 
 two storeys in height — was due to the modest scale 
 on which the travelling system of the Principality 
 had moulded itself in correspondence to the calls of 
 England, which then (but be it remembered this then 
 was in 1802, a year of peace) threw a very small 
 proportion of her vast migratory population annually 
 into this sequestered channel. No huge Babylonian 
 centres of commerce towered into the clouds on 
 these sweet sylvan routes : no hurricanes of haste, or 
 fever-stricken armies of horses and flying chariots, 
 tormented the echoes in these mountain recesses. 
 And it has often struck me that a world-wearied man, 
 who sought for the peace of monasteries separated 
 from their gloomy captivity — peace and silence such 
 as theirs, combined with the large liberty of nature — 
 could not do better than revolve amongst these modest 
 inns in the five northern Welsh counties of Denbigh, 
 Montgomery, Carnarvon, Merioneth, and Cardigan. 
 Sleeping, for instance, and breakfasting at Carnarvon ; 
 then, by an easy nine-mile walk, going forwards to 
 dinner at Bangor, thence to Aber, — nine miles ; or to 
 
 1 “ Llanrwst ” : — This is an alarming word for the eye*, one 
 vowel to what the English eye ™unts as seven consonants : but 
 it is easily pronounced as Tlanroostl 
 
548 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Llanberris ; and so on for ever, accomplishing seventy 
 to ninety or one hundred miles in a week. This, upon 
 actual experiment, and for week after week, I found 
 the most delightful of lives. Here was the eternal 
 motion of winds and rivers, or of the Wandering Jew 
 liberated from the persecution which compelled him 
 to move and turned his breezy freedom into a killing 
 captivity. Happier life I cannot imagine than this 
 vagrancy, if the weather were but tolerable, through 
 endless successions of changing beauty, and towards 
 evening a courteous welcome in a pretty rustic home 
 — that, having all the luxuries of a fine hotel (in 
 particular some luxuries 1 that are almost sacred to 
 alpine regions), was at the same time liberated from 
 the inevitable accompaniments of such hotels in great 
 cities or at great travelling stations — viz., the tumult 
 and uproar. 
 
 Life on this model was but too delightful ; and to 
 myself especially, that am never thoroughly in health 
 unless when having pedestrian exercise to the extent 
 of fifteen miles at the most, and eight to ten miles 
 at the least. Living thus, a man earned his daily 
 enjoyment. But what did it cost? About half-a- 
 guinea a day : whilst my boyish allowance was not a 
 third of this. The flagrant health, health boiling over 
 in fiery rapture, which ran along, side by side, with 
 exercise on this scale, whilst all the while from morning 
 to night I was inhaling mountain air, soon passed into 
 a hateful scourge. Perquisites to servants and a bed 
 would have absorbed the whole of my weekly guineaf. 
 My policy therefore was, if the autumnal air were 
 warm enough, to save this expense of a bed and the 
 chambermaid by sleeping amongst ferns or furze upon 
 a hillside ; and perhaps, with a cloak of sufficient 
 weight as well as compass, or an Arab’s burnoose, 
 this would have been no great hardship. But then 
 in the daytime what an oppressive burden to carry ! 
 So perhaps it was as well that I had no cloak at all. 
 
 1 But a luxury of another class, and quite pecul.'ur to Wales, 
 was in those days (I hope in these) the Welsh harp, in attend- 
 ance at every inn. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 549 
 
 I did, however, for some weeks try the plan of carry- 
 ing a canvas tent manufactured by myself, and not 
 larger than an ordinary umbrella : but to pitch this 
 securely I found difficult ; and on windy nights it 
 became a troublesome companion. As winter drew 
 near, this bivouacking system became too dangerous 
 to attempt. Still one may bivouack decently, barring 
 rain and wind, up to the end of October. And I 
 counted, on the whole, that in a fortnight I spent 
 nine nights abroad. There are, as perhaps the 
 reader knows by experience, no jaguars in Wales — 
 nor pumas — nor anacondas — nor (generally speaking) 
 any Thugs. What I feared most, but perhaps only 
 through ignorance of zoology, was lest, whilst my 
 sleeping face was upturned to the stars, some one 
 of the many little Brahminical-looking cows on the 
 Cambrian hills, one or other, might poach her foot 
 into the centre of my face. I do not suppose any 
 fixed hostility of that nature to English faces in Welsh 
 cows : but everywhere I observe in the feminine mind 
 something of beautiful caprice, a floral exuberance of 
 that charming wilfulness which characterises our dear 
 human sisters, I fear, through all worlds. Against 
 Thugs I had Juvenal’s licence to be careless in the 
 emptiness of my pockets ( cantabit vacuus 1 coram 
 latrone viator). But I fear that Juvenal’s licence will 
 not always hold water. There are people bent upon 
 cudgelling one who will persist in excusing one’s 
 having nothing but a bad shilling in one’s purse, 
 without reading in that Juvenalian vacuitas any privi- 
 lege or licence of exemption from the general fate of 
 travellers that intrude upon the solitude of robbers. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, upon some occasion which I have 
 forgotten, is represented by his biographers as ac- 
 counting for an undeserving person’s success in these 
 
 1 “ Vacuus ” ; — I am afraid, though many a year has passed 
 since last I read Juvenal, that the true classical sense of vacuus 
 is careless , clear from all burden of anxiety . so that vacuitas will 
 be the result of immunity from robbery. But suffer me to 
 understand it in the sense of free from the burden of property ; 
 in which sense vacuitas w T ould be the cause of such an immunity. 
 
p5° CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 terms : “ Why, I suppose that his nonsense suited 
 their nonsense.” Can that be the humiliating solu- 
 tion of my own colloquial success at this time in 
 Carnarvonshire inns ? Do not suggest such a thought, 
 most courteous reader. No matter: won in what- 
 soever way, success is success ; and even nonsense, 
 if it is to be victorious nonsense — victorious over the 
 fatal habit of yawning in those who listen, and in 
 some cases over the habit of disputing — must involve 
 a deeper art or more effective secret of power than 
 is easily attained. Nonsense, in fact, is a very difficult 
 thing. Not every seventh son of a seventh son (to 
 use Milton’s words) is equal to the task of keeping 
 and maintaining a company of decent men in orthodox 
 nonsense for a matter of two hours. Come from 
 what fountain it may, all talk that succeeds to the 
 extent of raising a wish to meet the talker again must 
 contain salt ; must be seasoned with some flavouring 
 element pungent enough to neutralise the natural 
 tendencies of all mixed conversation, not vigilantly 
 tended, to lose itself in insipidities and platitudes. 
 Above all things, I shunned, as I would shun a 
 pestilence, Coleridge’s capital error, which through 
 life he practised of keeping the audience in a state 
 of passiveness. Unjust this was to others, but most 
 of all to himself. This eternal stream of talk which 
 never for one instant intermitted, and allowed no 
 momentary opportunity of reaction to the persecuted 
 and baited auditor, was absolute ruin to the interests 
 of the talker himself. Always passive, always acted 
 upon, never allowed to react, into what state did 
 the poor afflicted listener — he that played the role 
 of listener — collapse ? He returned home in the 
 
 exhausted condition of one that has been drawn up 
 just before death from the bottom of a well occupied 
 by foul gases ; and, of course, hours before he had 
 reached that perilous point of depression, he had lost 
 all power of distinguishing, understanding, or con- 
 necting. I, for my part, without needing to think of 
 the unamiable arrogance involved in such a habit, 
 simply on principles of deadliest selfishness, should 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 55 I 
 
 have avoided thus incapacitating my hearer from 
 doing any justice to the rhetoric or the argument 
 with which I might address him. 
 
 Some great advantages I had for colloquial pur- 
 poses, and for engaging the attention of people wiser 
 than myself. Ignorant I was in a degree past all 
 imagination of daily life — even as it exists in England. 
 But, on the other hand, having the advantage of a 
 prodigious memory, and the far greater advantage of 
 a logical instinct for feeling in a moment the secret 
 analogies or parallelisms that connected things else 
 apparently remote, I enjoyed these two peculiar gifts.for 
 conversation : first, an inexhaustible fertility of topics, 
 and therefore of resources for illustrating or for vary- 
 ing any subject that chance or purpose suggested ; 
 secondly, a prematurely awakened sense of art applied 
 to conversation. I had learned the use of vigilance 
 in evading with civility the approach of wearisome 
 discussions, and in impressing, quietly and oftentimes 
 imperceptibly, a new movement upon dialogues that 
 loitered painfully, or see-sawed unprofitably. That 
 it was one function of art to hide and mask itself 
 {art is est artem celare), this I well knew. Neither 
 was there much art required. The chief demand 
 was for new facts, or new views, or for views newly 
 coloured impressing novelty upon old facts. To 
 throw in a little of the mysterious every now and 
 then was useful, even with those that by temperament 
 w 7 ere averse to the mysterious ; pointed epigrammatic 
 sayings and jests — even somewhat worn — were useful ; 
 a seasonable quotation in verse was always effec- 
 tive ; and illustrative anecdotes diffused a grace over 
 the whole movement of the dialogue. It would 
 have been coxcombry to practise any elaborate or 
 any conspicuous art : few and simple were any artifices 
 that I ever employed : but, being hidden and season- 
 able, they were often effective. And the whole result 
 was that I became exceedingly popular within my 
 narrow circle of friends. This circle was necessarily 
 a fluctuating one, since it was mainly composed of 
 tourists that happened to linger for a few weeks in or 
 
552 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 near Snowdonia, making their headquarters at Beth- 
 gellert or Carnarvon, or at the utmost roaming no 
 farther than the foot of Cader Idris. 
 
 Amongst these fugitive members of our society, I 
 recollect with especial pleasure Mr. De Haren, an 
 accomplished young German, who held, or had held, 
 the commission of lieutenant in our British navy, but 
 now, in an interval of peace, was seeking to extend 
 his knowledge of England, and also of the English 
 language ; though in that, as regarded the fullest 
 command of it colloquially, he had little indeed to 
 learn. From him it was that I obtained my first 
 lessons in German and my first acquaintance with 
 German literature. Paul Richter I then first heard 
 of, together with Hippel, a humorist admired by 
 Kant, and Harnann, also classed as a humorist, but 
 a nondescript writer, singularly obscure, whom I have 
 never since seen in the hands of any Englishman, 
 except once of Sir William Hamilton. With all these 
 writers Mr. De Haren had the means of making me 
 usefully acquainted in the small portable library which 
 filled one of his trunks. 
 
 But the most stationary members of this semi- 
 literary circle were Welshmen ; two of them lawyers, 
 one a clergyman. This last had been regularly edu- 
 cated at Oxford — as a member of Jesus (the Welsh 
 college) — and was a man of extensive information. 
 The lawyers had not enjoyed the same advantages, 
 but they had read diligently, and were interesting 
 companions. Wales, as is pretty well known, breeds 
 a population somewhat litigious. I do not think the 
 worse of them for that . The martial Butlers and 
 the heroic Talbots of the fifteenth century, having no 
 regular opening for their warlike fury in the seven- 
 teenth century, took to quarrelling with each other ; 
 and no letters are more bitter than those which to 
 this day survive from the hostile correspondence of 
 the brother Talbots contemporary with the last days 
 of Shakspere. One channel being closed against 
 their martial propensities, naturally they opened such 
 others as circumstances made available. This temper, 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 553 
 
 widely spread amongst the lower classes of the Welsh, 
 made it a necessity that the lawyers should itiner- 
 ate on market-days through all the principal towns 
 in their districts. In those towns continually I 
 met them ; and continually we renewed our literary 
 friendship. 
 
 Meantime alternately I sailed upon the high-priced 
 and the low-priced tack. So exceedingly cheap were 
 provisions at that period, when the war taxation of 
 Mr. Pitt was partially intermitting, that it was easy 
 beyond measure upon any three weeks’ expenditure, 
 by living with cottagers, to save two guineas out of 
 the three. Mr. De Karen assured me that even in 
 an inn, and not in a poor man’s cottage (but an 
 unpretending rustic inn, where the mistress of the 
 house took upon herself the functions of every possible 
 servant in turn — cook, waiter, chambermaid, boots, 
 ostler), he had passed a day or two ; and for what 
 he considered a really elegant dinner, as regarded 
 everything except the table equipage (that being rude 
 and coarse), he had paid only sixpence. This very 
 inn, about ten or twelve miles south of Dolgelly, I 
 myself visited some time later ; and I found Mr. De 
 Haren’s account in all points confirmed : the sole 
 drawback upon the comfort of the visitor being that 
 the fuel was chiefly of green wood, and with a chimney 
 that smoked. I suffered so much under this kind 
 of smoke, which irritates and inflames the eyes more 
 than any other, that on the following day reluctantly I 
 took leave of that obliging pluralist the landlady, and 
 really felt myself blushing on settling the bill, until 
 I bethought me of the green wood, which, upon the 
 whole, seemed to balance the account. ^1 could not 
 then, nor can I now, account for these preposterously 
 low prices ; which same prices, strange to say, ruled 
 (as Wordsworth and his sister often assured me) 
 among the same kind of scenery — i.e., amongst the 
 English lakes — at the very same time. To account 
 for it, as people often do, by alleging the want of 
 markets for agricultural produce, is crazy political 
 economy ; since the remedy for paucity of markets, 
 
554 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 and consequent failure of competition, is, certainly 
 not to sell at losing rates, but to forbear producing, 
 and consequently not to sell at all . 1 
 
 So cheap in fact were all provisions which one 
 had any chance of meeting with in a labouring man’s 
 house that I found it difficult under such a roof to 
 spend sixpence a day. Tea or coffee there was none : 
 and I did not at that period very much care for either. 
 Milk, with bread (coarse, but more agreeable by much 
 
 1 Thirteen years later — viz., in the year of Waterloo — happen- 
 ing to walk through the whole Principality from south to north, 
 beginning at Cardiff and ending at Bangor, I turned aside 
 about twenty-five miles to inquire after the health of my ex- 
 cellent hostess, that determined pluralist and intense antipole 
 of all possible sinecurists. I found her cleaning a pair of boots 
 and spurs, and purposing (I rather think) to enter next upon 
 the elegant office of greasing a horse’s heels. In that design, 
 however, she was thwarted for the present by myself and 
 another tourist, who claimed her services in three or four other 
 characters previously. I inquired after the chimney — was it 
 still smoking? She seemed surprised that it had ever been 
 suspected of anything criminal ; so, as it was not a season for 
 fires, I said no more. But I saw plenty of green wood, and 
 but a small proportion of peats. I fear, therefore, that this, 
 the state-room of the whole concern, still poisons ihe peace of 
 the unhappy tourists. One personal indemnification, meantime, 
 I must mention which this little guilty room made to me on 
 that same night for all the tears it had caused me to shed. It 
 happened that there was a public dance held at this inn on this 
 very night. I therefore retired early to my bedroom, having 
 had so long a walk, and not wishing to annoy the company, or 
 the excellent landlady, who had, I dare say, to play the fiddle 
 to the dancers. The noise and uproar were almost insupport- 
 able ; so that I could not sleep at all. At three o’clock 
 all became silent, the company having departed in a body. 
 Suddenly from the little parlour, separated from my bedroom 
 overhead by the slightest and most pervious of ceilings, arose 
 with the rising dawn the very sweetest of female voices perhaps 
 that ever I had heard, although for many years an habitue of 
 the opera. She was a stranger ; a visitor from some distance ; 
 and (I was^told in the morning) a Methodist. What she sang, 
 or at least sang last, were the beautiful verses of Shirley, 
 ending— 
 
 “ Only the actions of the just 
 
 Smell sweet, and blosspm in the dust.” 
 
 This incident caused me to forget and forgive the wicked little 
 chimney. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 555 
 
 than the insipid whity-grey bread of towns), potatoes 
 if one wished, and also a little goat’s, or kid’s, flesh 
 — these composed the cottager’s choice of viands ; 
 not luxurious, but palatable enough to a person who 
 took much exercise. And, if one wished, fresh- water 
 fish could be had cheap enough ; especially trout of 
 the very finest quality. In these circumstances, I never 
 found it easy to spend even five shillings (no, not 
 three shillings, unless whortleberries or fish had been 
 bought) in one week. And thus it was easy enough 
 to create funds for my periodical transmigrations back* 
 into the character of gentleman-tourist. Even the 
 half of five shillings I could not always find means to 
 spend : for in some families, raised above dependence 
 upon daily wages, when I performed any services in 
 the way of letter-writing, I found it impossible at 
 times to force any money at all upon them. Once, 
 in particular, near the small lake of Talyllyn (so 
 written, I believe, but pronounced Taltlyn), in a 
 sequestered part of Merionethshire, I was entertained 
 for upwards of three days by a family of young people, 
 with an affectionate and fraternal kindness that left 
 an impression upon my heart not yet impaired. 
 The family consisted, at that time, of four sisters 
 and three brothers, all grown up, and remarkable for 
 elegance and delicacy of manners. So much beaut} 7 , 
 or so much native good breeding and refinement, I 
 do not remember to have seen before or since in any 
 cottage, except once or twice in Westmoreland and 
 Devonshire. They spoke English ; an accomplish- 
 ment not often met with in so many members of one 
 Welsh family, especially in villages remote from the 
 high-road. Here I wrote, on my first introduction, 
 a letter about prize-money for one of the brothers, 
 who had served on board an English man-of-war ; 
 and, more privately, two letters to sweethearts for two 
 of the sisters. They were both interesting in appear- 
 ance ; and one of uncommon loveliness. In the 
 midst of their confusion and blushes, whilst dictating,, 
 or rather giving me general instructions, it did not 
 require any great penetration to discover that they 
 
55° CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 wished their letters to be as kind as was consistent with 
 proper maidenly reserve. I contrived so to temper my 
 expressions as to reconcile the gratification of both 
 feelings ; and they were as much pleased with the 
 way in which I had given expression to their thoughts 
 as (in their simplicity) they were astonished at my 
 having so readily discovered them. The reception 
 one meets with from the women of a family generally 
 determines the tenor of one’s whole entertainment. 
 In this case I had discharged my confidential duties as 
 secretary so much to the general satisfaction, perhaps 
 also amusing them with my conversation, that I 
 was pressed to stay ; and pressed with a cordiality 
 which I had little inclination to resist. I slept un- 
 avoidably with the brothers, the only unoccupied bed 
 standing in the chamber of the young women : but 
 in all other points they treated me with a respect not 
 usually paid to purses as light as mine ; making it 
 evident that my scholarship and courteous demeanour 
 were considered sufficient arguments of gentle blood. 
 Thus I lived with them for three days, and great part 
 of a fourth ; and, from the undiminished kindness 
 which they continued to show me, I believe that I 
 might have stayed with them up to this time, if their 
 power had corresponded with their wishes. On the 
 last morning, however, I perceived upon their coun- 
 tenances, as they sat at breakfast, the approach of 
 some unpleasant communication ; and soon after one 
 of the brothers explained to me that, on the day 
 before my arrival, their parents had gone to an annual 
 meeting of Methodists, held at Carnarvon , 1 and in 
 the course of that day were expected to return ; “ and, 
 if they should not be so civil as they ought to be,” he 
 
 1 “ At Carnarvon ” : — It was on this occasion that I learned 
 how vague are the ideas of number in unpractised minds. 
 “What number of people, do you think,” said I to an elderly 
 person, “ will be assembled this day at Carnarvon ? ” — “ What 
 number?” rejoined the person addressed — “what number? 
 Well, really now, I should reckon — perhaps a matter of four 
 millions.” Four millions of extra people in little Carnarvon, 
 that could barely find accommodation (I should calculate) for 
 an extra four hundred. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 557 
 
 begged, on the part of all the young people, that I 
 would not take it amiss. The parents returned with 
 churlish faces, and u Dym Sassenach ” {no English ) 
 in answer to all my addresses. I saw how matters 
 stood ; and so, taking an affectionate leave of my 
 kind and interesting young hosts, I went my way. 
 For, though they spoke warmly to their parents on 
 my behalf, and often excused the manner of the old 
 people by saying that it was “ only their way,” yet 
 I easily understood that my talent for writing love- 
 letters would do as little to recommend me with two 
 sexagenarian Welsh Methodists as my Greek Sapphics 
 or Alcaics ; and what had been hospitality, when 
 offered with the gracious courtesy of my young friends, 
 would become charity, when connected with the harsh 
 demeanour of their parents. 
 
 About this time' — just when it was becoming daily 
 more difficult to eke out the weekly funds for high- 
 priced inns by the bivouacking system — as if some 
 overmastering fiend, some instinct of migration, sorrow- 
 ful but irresistible, were driving me forth to wander 
 like the unhappy Io of the Grecian mythu's, some 
 oestrus of hidden persecution that bade me fly when 
 no man pursued — not in false hope, for my hopes 
 whispered but a doubtful chance — not in reasonable 
 fear, for all was sweet pastoral quiet and autumnal 
 beauty around me, — suddenly I took a fierce reso- 
 lution to sacrifice my weekly allowance, to slip my 
 anchor, and to throw myself in desperation upon 
 London. Not to make the case more frantic than it 
 really was, let the reader remember what it was that I 
 found grievous in my present position, and upon what 
 possibilities it was that I relied for bettering it. With 
 a more extended knowledge of life than I at that time 
 had, it would not have been so hopeless a speculation 
 for a boy having my accomplishments to launch him- 
 self on the boundless ocean of London. I possessed 
 attainments that bore a money value. For instance, 
 as a “ Reader ” to the Press in the field of Greek re- 
 publications, I might perhaps have earned a liveli- 
 hood. But these chances, which I really had, never 
 
558 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 occurred to me in the light of useful resources ; or, 
 to speak the truth, they were unknown to me : and 
 those which I chiefly relied on were most unlikely to 
 prove available. _ 
 
 But what, meantime, was it that I complained of 
 in the life that I was at present living ? It was this : 
 the dilemma proposed to my choice was that, if I 
 would — positively would — have society, I must live 
 at inns. But, if I reconciled myself to a quiet 
 stationary abode in some village or hamlet, in that 
 case for me , so transcendently careless about diet, my 
 weekly guinea would have procured all that I wanted, 
 and in some houses the advantage, quite indispensable 
 to my comfort, of a private sitting-room. Yet even 
 here the expense was most needlessly enhanced by 
 the aristocratic luxuriousness of our English system, 
 which presumes it impossible for a gentleman to 
 sleep in his sitting-room. On this footing, however, 
 I might perhaps have commanded clean and comfort- 
 able accommodations in some respectable families, 
 to whom my noiseless habits, and my respectful 
 courtesy to women, would have recommended me 
 as a desirable inmate. But the deadly drawback on 
 this scheme was the utter want of access to books, or 
 (generally speaking) to any intellectual intercourse. 
 I languished all the day through, and all the week 
 through — with nothing whatever, not so much as the 
 county newspaper once in seven days to relieve my 
 mortal ennui. 
 
 I have told the reader how inexplicably cheap was 
 the life in poor men’s cottages. But this did not 
 affect the prices at the first-class hotels, where only 
 I had any chance of meeting society. Those, and 
 chiefly on the plea that the season was so brief, 
 charged London prices. To meet such prices, it 
 would no longer be possible, as winter came on, to 
 raise one half the funds by passing half the time in a 
 less costly mode. There was an end of any feasible 
 plan for interleaving days of hardship with days of 
 ease and intellectual luxury. Meantime, whilst this 
 perplexity was resounding in one ear, in the other 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 559 
 
 were continually echoing the kind offers of my Welsh 
 friends, especially the two lawyers, to furnish me with 
 any money which I might think necessary for my 
 visit to London. Twelve guineas, at length, I men- 
 tioned as probably enough. This they lent me on 
 the spot. And now, all at once, I was — ready for 
 London, t 
 
 My farewell to the Principality was in the same 
 unassuming character of pedestrian tourist as that in 
 which I had entered it. Impedimenta of any kind — 
 that is, the encumbrances of horse or baggage — I had 
 none even to the last. Where I pleased, and when 
 I pleased, I could call a halt. My last halt of any 
 duration was at Oswestry. Mere accident carried me 
 thither, and accident very naturally in so small a town 
 threw me across the path of the very warmest amongst 
 my Welsh friends, who, as it turned out, resided there. 
 He, by mere coercion of kindness, detained me for 
 several days ; for denial he would not take. Being as 
 yet unmarried, he could not vivify the other attractions 
 of his most hospitable abode by the reinforcement of 
 female society. His own, however, coming recom- 
 mended as it did by the graces of a youthful frank- 
 ness and a kindling intellect, was all-sufficient for the 
 beguiling of the longest day. This Welsh friend was 
 one of many whom I have crossed in life, chained by 
 early accident or by domestic necessity to the calls of 
 a professional service, whilst all the while his whole 
 nature, wild and refractory, ran headlong into intel- 
 lectual channels that would not be trained into recon- 
 ciliation with his hourly duties. His library was 
 already large, and as select as under the ordinary 
 chances of provincial book-collection could be reason- 
 ably expected. For generally one half, at the least, 
 of a young man’s library in a provincial town may be 
 characterised as a mere dropping or deposition from 
 local accidents, a casual windfall of fruits stripped 
 and strewed by the rough storms of bankruptcy. In 
 many cases, again, such a provincial library will re- 
 present simply that part of the heavy baggage which 
 many a family, on removing to some distant quarter, 
 
560 ^ CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 has shrunk from the cost of transporting, — books being 
 amongst the heaviest of household goods. Sometimes 
 also, though more rarely, it happens that, — an ancient 
 family, dying out, having unavoidably left to executors 
 the duty of selling every chattel attached to its ancient 
 habits of life, — suddenly with meteoric glare there 
 emerges from its hiding-place of centuries some great 
 jewel of literature, a First Folio of the 1623 Shak- 
 spere, an uncastrated Decanter one, or other dazzling 
 K€i[X7j \ lov. And thus it is that a large provincial 
 library, though naturally and peacefully accumulated, 
 yet sometimes shows mute evidence of convulsions 
 and household tragedies ; speaks as if by records of 
 storms, and through dim mementoes of half-forgotten 
 shipwrecks. Real shipwrecks present often such 
 incoherent libraries on the floors of the hungry 
 sea. Magnificent is the library that sleeps unvexed 
 by criticism at the bottom of the ocean, Indian or 
 Atlantic, from the mere annual contributions and 
 keepsakes, the never-ending Forget-me-nots , of mighty 
 English Indiamen. The Halsewell , with its sad 
 parting between the captain and his daughters, the 
 Grosvenor, the Winterton , the Abergavenny , and 
 scores of vessels on the same scale, with populations 
 varying by births, deaths, and marriages, populations 
 large as cities, and rich as gold mines, capable of 
 factions and rebellions, all and each have liberally 
 patronised, by the gift of many Large-Paper copies, 
 that vast submarine Bodleian, which stands in far 
 less risk from fire than the insolent Bodleian of the 
 upper world. This private Oswestry library wore 
 something of the same wild tumultuary aspect, fan- 
 tastic and disordinate, but was not for that reason the 
 less attractive ; everything was there that you never 
 expected to meet anywhere, but certainly not to meet 
 in company ; so that, what between the library and 
 the mercurial conversation of its proprietor, elated by 
 the rare advantage of fraternal sympathy, I was in 
 danger of finding attractions strong enough to lay me 
 asleep over the proprieties of the case, or even to set 
 me a-dreaming over imaginary cases. In fact, I had 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 561 
 
 some excuse for doing so ; since I knew very im- 
 perfectly the common routine of my friend’s life ; 
 and, from his lofty-Castilian sense of the obligations 
 imposed by the great goddess Hospitality, I never 
 should have been suffered to guess at the extent in 
 which I was now gradually and unconsciously coming 
 daily into collision with the regular calls upon his time. 
 To ride off, under mask of “business,” upon a circuit 
 of a week, would, in his eyes, have been virtually , as 
 regards the result, — meanly and evasively, as regards 
 the mode, — to turn me out of his house. He 
 would sooner have died. But in the meantime an 
 accident, which revealed to me the true state of 
 things, or at least revealed a suspicion of it, all at 
 once armed my sense of delicacy against any further 
 lingering. Suddenly and peremptorily I announced 
 my departure — that , and the mode of it. For a long 
 time he fought with unaffected zeal against my pur- 
 pose, as nowise essential to his own free action. But 
 at last, seeing that I was in earnest, he forbore to 
 oppose my plan, contenting himself with guiding and 
 improving its details. My plan had been to walk 
 over the border into England, as far as Shrewsbury 
 (distant from Oswestry, I think, about eighteen miles), 
 and there to ascend any of the heavy stages which 
 would convey me cheaply to Birmingham — the grand 
 focus to which all the routes of England in its main 
 central area converge. Any such plan moved on the 
 assumption that rain would be falling steadily and 
 heavily — a reasonable assumption at the close of 
 November. But, in the possible event of fair weather 
 lasting over four or five days, what should prevent me 
 from traversing the whole distance on foot? It is 
 true that the aristocratic scowl of the landlord might 
 be looked for as a customary salutation at the close of 
 each day’s journey ; but, unless at solitary posting- 
 houses, this criminal fact of having advanced by base 
 pedestrian methods, known only to patriarchs of older 
 days and to modern “ tramps ” (so they are called in 
 solemn acts of Parliament), is easily expiated and 
 cleansed by distributing your dust, should you for- 
 
562 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 tunately have any to show, amongst the streets that you 
 have invaded as a stranger. Happily the scandal of 
 pedestrianism is in one respect more hopefully situ- 
 ated than that of scrofula or leprosy ; it is not in any 
 case written in your face. The man who is guilty of 
 pedestrianism, on entering any town whatever, by the 
 simple artifice of diving into the crowds of those un- 
 tainted by that guilt, will emerge, for all practical pur- 
 poses, washed and re-baptized. The landlord, indeed, 
 of any one inn knows that you did not reach him on 
 horseback, or in a carriage ; but you may have been 
 visiting for weeks at the house of some distinguished 
 citizen, whom it might be dangerous to offend ; and 
 you may even be favourably known at some other inn. 
 Else, as a general imputation, undoubtedly pedestrian- 
 ism, in the estimate of English landlords, carries with 
 it the most awful shadow and shibboleth of the pariah. 
 My Welsh friend knew this, and strongly urged me to 
 take advantage of the public carriages, both on that 
 motive and others. A journey of a hundred and 
 eighty miles, as a pedestrian, would cost me nine or 
 ten days ; for which extent the mere amount of 
 expenses at inns would more than defray the fare of 
 the dearest carriage. To this there was no sound 
 reply, except that corresponding expenses would arise, 
 at any rate, on these nine or ten days, wherever I 
 might be — in London, or on the road. However, 
 as it seemed ungracious to offer too obstinate a re- 
 sistance to suggestions prompted so entirely by con- 
 sideration for my own comfort, I submitted to my 
 friend’s plan in all its details ; one being that I 
 should go by the Holyhead Mail, and not by any of 
 the heavy coaches. This stipulation pointed to a 
 novel feature in the machinery of travelling just then 
 emerging. The light coaches charged almost mail 
 prices. But the heavy coaches were at that time 
 beginning to assume a new and dreadful form. 
 Locomotion was so prodigiously on the increase that, 
 in order to meet its demands, the old form of coach 
 {carrying at most six inside) was exchanging itself, 
 on all great roads, for a long, boatlike vehicle, very 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 563 
 
 much resembling our modern detestable omnibus , 
 but without our modern improvements. This car- 
 riage was called a “ iong coach” and the passengers, 
 twelve or fourteen inside, sat along the sides ; and, 
 as ventilation was little regarded in those days — the 
 very existence of an atmosphere being usually ignored 
 —it followed that the horrors of Governor Holywell’s 
 black cage at Calcutta were every night repeated, in 
 smaller proportions, upon every great English road. 
 It was finally agreed that I should leave Oswestry on 
 foot, simply with a view to the best enjoyment of the 
 lovely weather ; but that, as the mail passed through 
 Oswestry, my friend should secure a place for me the 
 whole way to London, so as to shut out competitors. 
 
 The day on which I left Oswestry (convoyed for 
 nearly five miles by my warm-hearted friend) was a 
 day of golden sunshine amongst the closing days of 
 November. As truly as Jessica’s moonlight (“ Mer- 
 chant of Venice”), this golden sunshine might be 
 said to sleep upon the woods and the fields ; so awful 
 was the universal silence, so profound the death- 
 like stillness. It was a day belonging to a brief 
 and pathetic season of farewell summer resurrection, 
 which, under one name or other, is known almost 
 everywhere. In North America it is called the 
 “ Indian Summer.” In North Germany and Mid- 
 land Germany it is called the “ Old Wives’ Summer,” 
 and more rarely the “ Girls’ Summer.” It is that 
 last brief resurrection of summer in its most brilliant 
 memorials, a resurrection that has no root in the past 
 nor steady hold upon the future, like the lambent 
 and fitful gleams from an expiring lamp, mimicking 
 what is called the “ lightning before death” in sick 
 patients, when close upon their end. There is the 
 feeling of a conflict that has been going on between 
 the lingering powers of summer and the strengthen- 
 ing powers of winter, not unlike that which moves by 
 antagonist forces in some deadly inflammation hurry- 
 ing forwards through fierce struggles into the final 
 repose of mortification. For a time the equilibrium 
 has been maintained between the hostile forces ; but 
 
564 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 at last the antagonism is overthrown ; the victory is 
 accomplished for the powers that fight on the side of 
 death ; simultaneously with the conflict, the pain of 
 conflict has departed : and thenceforward the gentle 
 process of collapsing life, no longer fretted by counter- 
 movements, slips away with holy peace into the noise- 
 less deeps of the Infinite. So sweet, so ghostly, in 
 its soft, golden smiles, silent as a dream, and quiet as 
 the dying trance of a saint, faded through all its stages 
 this departing day, along the whole length of which I 
 bade farewell for many a year to Wales, and farewell 
 to summer. In the very aspect and the sepulchral 
 stillness of the motionless day, as solemnly it wore 
 away through morning, noontide, afternoon, to meet 
 the darkness that was hurrying to swallow up its 
 beauty, I had a fantastic feeling as though I read the 
 very language of resignation when bending before 
 some irresistible agency. And at intervals I heard — 
 in how different a key ! — the raving, the everlasting 
 uproar, of that dreadful metropolis which at every 
 step was coming nearer, and beckoning (as it seemed) 
 to myself for purposes as dim, for issues as incalcul- 
 able, as the path of cannon-shots fired at random and 
 in darkness. 
 
 It was not late, but it was at least two hours after 
 nightfall, when I reached Shrewsbury. Was I not 
 liable to the suspicion of pedestrianism ? Certainly 
 I was : but, even if my criminality had been more 
 unequivocally attested than it could be under the 
 circumstances, still there is a locus penitentice. in such 
 a case. Surely a man may repent of any crime ; and 
 therefore of pedestrianism. I might have erred ; and 
 a court of pie poudre (dusty foot) might have found 
 the evidences of my crime on my shoes. Yet secretly 
 I might be forming good resolutions to do so no more. 
 Certainly it looked like this, when I announcd myself 
 as a passenger fC booked ” for that night’s mail. This 
 character at once installed me as rightfully a guest of 
 the inn, however profligate a life I might have previ- 
 ously led as a pedestrian. Accordingly I was received 
 with special courtesy ; and it so happened that I was 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 565 
 
 received with something even like pomp. Four wax- 
 lights carried before me by obedient mutes, these 
 were but ordinary honours, meant (as old experience 
 had instructed me) for the first engineering step 
 towards effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s 
 purse. In fact the wax-lights are used by innkeepers, 
 both abroad and at home, to “ try the range of their 
 guns.” If the stranger submits quietly, as a good 
 anti-pedestrian ought surely to do, and fires no counter 
 gun by way of protest, then he is recognised at once 
 as passively within range, and amenable to orders. I 
 have always looked upon this fine of five or seven 
 shillings (for wax that you do not absolutely need) as 
 a sort of inaugural honorarium , entrance-money, — 
 what in jails used to be known as smart money, — 
 proclaiming me to be a man comme il faut ; and no 
 toll in this world of tolls do I pay so cheerfully. 
 This, meantime, as I have said, was too customary a 
 form to confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to 
 use the magnificent Grecian phrase eTro/xTreve , moved 
 pompously before me, as the holy — holy fire, the 
 inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth, moved 
 before Caesar semper Augustus, when he made his 
 official or ceremonial avatars. Yet still this moved 
 along the ordinary channels of glorification : it rolled 
 along ancient grooves : I might say, indeed, like one 
 of the twelve Caesars when dying, Ut puto , Deus fio 
 (It’s my private opinion that at this very moment I 
 am turning into a god) ; but still the metamorphosis 
 was not complete. That was accomplished when I 
 stepped into the sumptuous room allotted to me. It 
 was a ball-room 1 of noble proportions — lighted, if I 
 chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous chandeliers, 
 not basely wrapped up in paper, but sparkling through 
 all their thickets of crystal branches, and flashing back 
 
 1 “ It zvas a ball-room ” : — The explanation of the case was 
 simply that the hotel was under some extensive process of 
 purification, adornment, and, I believe, extension : and, under 
 the accident of being myself on that particular night the sole 
 visitor of the house, I slipped unavoidably into the honours of 
 a semi-regal reception. 
 
\ 
 
 566 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the soft rays of my tall waxen lights. There were, 
 moreover, two orchestras, which money would have 
 filled within thirty minutes. And, upon the whole, 
 one thing only was wanting — viz., a throne— for the 
 completion of my apotheosis. 
 
 It might be 7 p.m. when first I entered upon 
 my kingdom. About three hours later I rose from 
 my chair, and with considerable interest looked out 
 into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard 
 fierce winds arising ; and the whole atmosphere had, 
 by this time, become one vast laboratory of hostile 
 movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a 
 distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those 
 awful “ sounds that live in darkness 77 (Wordsworth’s 
 t£ Excursion ”), never had I consciously witnessed. 
 Rightly, and by a true instinct, had I made my fare- 
 well adieus to summer. All through the day, Wales 
 and her grand mountain ranges — Penmaenmawr, 
 Snowdon, Cader Idris — had divided my thoughts 
 with London. But now rose London — sole, dark, 
 infinite — brooding over the whole capacities of my 
 heart. Other object, other thought, I could not 
 admit. Long before midnight the whole household 
 (with the exception of a solitary waiter) had retired 
 to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to me, after 
 twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflec- 
 tions. More than ever I stood upon the brink of a 
 precipice; and the local circumstances around me 
 deepened and intensified these reflections, impressed 
 upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even 
 horror. It is all but inconceivable to men of un- 
 yielding and callous sensibilities how profoundly 
 others find their reveries modified and overruled by 
 the external characters of the immediate scene 
 around them. Many a suicide that hung dubiously 
 in the balances has been ratified, and carried into 
 summary effect, through the forlorn, soul-revolting 
 aspect of a crazy, dilapidated home. Oftentimes, 
 without extravagance, the whole difference between 
 a mind that spurns life and the same mind recon- 
 ciled to life turns upon the outside features of that 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 567 
 
 particular domestic scenery which hourly besieges 
 the eyes. I, in this Shrewsbury hotel, naturally con- 
 templated a group of objects tending to far different 
 results. And yet in some respects they agreed. 
 
 The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially 
 their towering height, brought up continually and 
 obstinately, through natural links of associated feel- 
 ings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting 
 for me afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty 
 feet showed itself unavoidably upon an exaggerated 
 scale in some of the smaller side-rooms, meant pro- 
 bably for cards or for refreshments. This single 
 feature of the rooms — their unusual altitude, and 
 the echoing hollowness which had become the ex- 
 ponent of that altitude — this one terrific feature (for 
 terrific it was in the effect), together with crowding 
 and evanescent images of the flying feet that so often 
 had spread gladness through these halls on the wings 
 of youth and hope at seasons when every room rang 
 with music : all this, rising in tumultuous vision, 
 whilst the dead hours of night were stealing along, 
 — all around me, household and town, sleeping, — 
 and whilst against the windows more and more the 
 storm outside was raving, and to all appearance 
 endlessly growing, — threw me into the deadliest 
 condition of nervous emotion under contradictory 
 forces, high over which predominated horror recoil- 
 ing from that unfathomed abyss in London into 
 which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself. 
 Often I looked out and examined the night. Wild 
 it was beyond all description, and dark as “the 
 inside of a wolf’s throat.” But at intervals, when 
 the wind, shifting continually, swept in such a 
 direction as to clear away the vast curtain of vapour, 
 the stars shone out, though with a light unusually 
 dim and distant. Still, as I turned inwards to 
 the echoing chambers, or outwards to the wild, 
 wild night, I saw London expanding her visionary 
 gates to receive me, like some dreadful mouth of 
 Acheron {Acherontis avari\ Thou also, Whisper- 
 ing Gallery ! once again in those moments of 
 
568 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 conscious and wilful desolation didst to my ear utter 
 monitorial sighs. For once again I was preparing to 
 utter an irrevocable word, to enter upon one of those 
 fatally tortuous paths of which the windings can never 
 be unlinked. 
 
 Such thoughts, and visions without number corre- 
 sponding to them, were moving across the camera 
 obscura of my fermenting fancy, when suddenly I 
 heard a sound of wheels ; which, however, soon died 
 off into some remote quarter. I guessed at the 
 truth — viz., that it was the Holyhead Mail 1 wheeling 
 off on its primary duty of delivering its bags at the 
 post-office. In a few minutes it was announced as 
 having changed horses ; and off I was to London. 
 
 All the mails in the kingdom, with one solitary 
 exception (that of Liverpool), in those days, were so 
 arranged as to reach London early in the morning. 
 Between the hours of four and six a.m., one after the 
 other, according to their station upon the roll, all the 
 mails to the N[orth], the E[ast], the W[est], the 
 S[outh] — whence, according to some curious etymo- 
 logists, comes the magical word NE IV S — drove 
 up successively to the post-office, and rendered up 
 their heart-shaking budgets ■; none earlier than four 
 o’clock, none later than six. I am speaking of days 
 when all things moved slowly. The condition of 
 the roads was then such that, in order to face it, a 
 
 1 The Holyhead Mail, depending in its earliest stages upon 
 winds and waters (though not upon tides), could not realise the 
 same exquisite accuracy as mails that moved exclusively upon 
 land. Sixty miles of watery transit between Dublin and Holy- 
 head were performed with miraculous precision. The packets 
 were intrusted by the General Post-Office to none but post- 
 captains, who had commanded frigates. And the salaries 
 were so high as to make these commands confessedly prizes 
 in nautical life, and objects of keen competition. No evil, 
 therefore, which care, foresight, and professional skill could 
 remedy, was suffered to exist. Yet, after all, baffling winds 
 would now and then (especially in three or four weeks after the 
 equinox) make it impossible for the very ablest man, under the 
 total defect of steam resources, to keep his time. Six hours, I 
 believe, were allowed by the Post-Office for the sixty miles ; but 
 at times this must have proved a very inadequate allowance. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 569 
 
 corresponding build of coaches hyperbolically massive 
 was rendered necessary : the mails were upon prin- 
 ciple made so strong as to be the heaviest of all 
 carriages known to the wit or the experience of man ; 
 and, from these joint evils cf ponderous coaches and 
 roads that were quagmires, it was impossible for even 
 the picked breed of English coach-horses, all bone 
 and blood, to carry forward their huge tonnage at a 
 greater rate than six and a half miles an hour. Con- 
 sequently, it cost eight-and-twenty massy hours for 
 us, leaving Shrewsbury at two o’clock in the dead 
 of night, to reach the General Post-Office, and faith- 
 fully to deposit upon the threshing-floors of Lombard 
 Street all that weight of love and hatred which 
 Ireland had found herself able to muster through 
 twenty-four hours in the great depot of Dublin, by 
 way of donation to England. 
 
 On reflection, I have done myself some injustice. 
 Not altogether without a plan had I been from the 
 first ; and in coming along I had matured it. My 
 success in such a plan would turn upon my chance 
 of borrowing on personal security. ^200, without 
 counting any interest upon it, would subdivide into 
 four sums of ^50. Now, what interval was it that 
 divided me from my majority? Simply an interval 
 of four years. London, I knew or believed, was the 
 dearest of all cities for three items of expenditure : 
 (1) servants’ wages; (2) lodgings; 1 (3) dairy pro- 
 duce. In other things, London was often cheaper 
 than most towns. Now, in a London street, having 
 no pretensions beyond those of decent respectability, 
 it has always been possible for the last half-century 
 to obtain two furnished rooms at a weekly cost of 
 
 1 Not universally. Glasgow, if you travel from Hammerfest 
 southwards (that is, from the northernmost point of Norway, or 
 Swedish Lapland, traversing all latitudes of Europe to Gibraltar 
 on the w T est, or Naples on the east), is the one dearest place 
 for lodgings known to man. A decent lodging for a single 
 person in Edinburgh which could be had readily for half-a- 
 guinea a-week, will in Glasgow cost a guinea. Glasgow, 
 except as to servants, is a dearer abode than London. 
 
570 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 half-a-guinea. This sum (or say ^25) deducted 
 would leave me annually about the same sum for my 
 other expenses. Too certainly I knew that this 
 would suffice. If, therefore, I could obtain the 
 ^200, my plan was to withdraw from the knowledge 
 of all my connections until I should become mei 
 juris by course of law. In such a case, it is true 
 that I must have waived all the advantages, fancied 
 or real, small or great, from residence at a university. 
 But, as in fact I never drew the slightest advantage 
 or emolument from any university, my scheme when 
 realised would have landed me in the same point 
 which finally I attained by its failure. The plan was 
 simple enough, but it rested on the assumption that 
 I could melt the obduracy of money-lenders. On 
 this point I had both hopes and fears. But more 
 irritating than either was the delay which eventually I 
 came to recognise as an essential element in the 
 policy of all money-lenders : in that way only can 
 they raise up such claims on behalf of their law- 
 agents as may be fitted for sustaining their zeal. 
 
 I lost no time in opening the business which had 
 brought me to London. By 10 a.m., an hour when 
 all men of business are presumed to be at their posts, 
 personally or by proxy, I presented myself at the 
 money-lender’s office. My name was already known 
 there : for I had, by letters from Wales, containing 
 very plain and very accurate statements of my posi- 
 tion in life and my pecuniary expectations (some of 
 which statements it afterwards appeared that he had 
 personally investigated and verified), endeavoured to 
 win his favourable attention. 
 
 The money-lender, as it turned out, had one fixed 
 rule of action. He never granted a personal inter- 
 view to any man ; no, not to the most beloved of his 
 clients. One and all — myself, therefore, among the 
 crowd — he referred for information, and for the 
 means of prosecuting any kind of negotiation, to an 
 attorney, who called himself, on most days of the 
 week, by the name of Brunell, but occasionally 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 571 
 
 (might it perhaps be on red-leiter days ?) by the more 
 common name of Brown. Mr. Brunell-Brown, or 
 Brown-Brunell, had located his heart (if ever he had 
 possessed one), and his household gods (when they 
 were not in the custody of the sheriff), in Greek 
 Street, Soho. The house was not in itself, supposing 
 that its face had been washed now and then, at all 
 disrespectable. But it wore an unhappy counten- 
 ance of gloom and unsocial fretfulness, due in reality 
 to the long neglect of painting, cleansing, and in 
 some instances of repairing. There were, however, 
 no fractured panes of glass in the windows ; and the 
 deep silence which invested the house, not only from 
 the absence of all visitors, but also of those com- 
 mon household functionaries, bakers, butchers, beer- 
 carriers, sufficiently accounted for the desolation, by 
 suggesting an excuse not strictly true — viz., that it 
 might be tenantless. The house already had tenants 
 through the day, though of a noiseless order, and 
 was destined soon to increase them. 
 
 Mr. Brown-Brunell, after reconnoitring me through 
 a narrow side-window (such as is often attached to 
 front doo‘rs in London), admitted me cheerfully, and 
 conducted me, as an honoured guest, to his private 
 officina diplomatum at the back of the house. From 
 the expression of his face, but much more from 
 the contradictory and self-counteracting play of his 
 features, you gathered in a moment that he was a 
 man who had much to conceal, and much, perhaps, 
 that he would gladly forget. Flis eye expressed 
 wariness against surprise, and passed in a moment 
 into irrepressible glances of suspicion and alarm. 
 No smile that ever his face naturally assumed but 
 was pulled short up by some freezing counteraction, 
 or was chased by some close-following expression of 
 sadness. One feature there was of relenting good- 
 ness and nobleness in Mr. Brunell’s character, to 
 which it was that subsequently I myself was most pro- 
 foundly indebted for an asylum that saved my life. 
 Lie had the deepest, the most liberal, and unaffected 
 love of knowledge, but, above all, of that specific 
 
572 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 knowledge which we all call literature. His own 
 stormy (and no doubt oftentimes disgraceful) career 
 in life, that had entangled him in perpetual feuds with 
 his fellow-men, he ascribed, with bitter imprecations, 
 to the sudden interruption of his studies consequent 
 upon his father’s violent death, and to the necessity 
 which threw him, at a boyish age, upon a professional 
 life in the lower branches of law — threw him, there- 
 fore, upon daily temptations, by surrounding him 
 with opportunities for taking advantages not strictly 
 honourable, before he had formed any fixed prin- 
 ciples at all. From the very first, Mr. Brunell had 
 entered zealously into such conversations with myself 
 as either gave openings for reviving his own delight- 
 ful remembrances of classic authors, or brought up 
 sometimes doubts for solution, sometimes perplexities 
 and cases of intricate construction for illustration 
 and disentanglement. 
 
 Hunger-bitten as the house and the household 
 genius seemed, wearing the legend of Famine upon 
 every mantelpiece and “coigne of vantage,” and 
 vehemently protesting, as it must have done through 
 all its echoes, against the introduction of super- 
 numerary mouths, nevertheless there was (and, I 
 suppose, of necessity) a clerk, who bore the name 
 of Pyment, or Pyemont, then first of all, then last 
 of all, made known to me as a possible surname. 
 Mr. Pyment had no alias — or not to my knowledge 
 — except, indeed, in the vituperative vocabulary of 
 Mr. Brunell ; in which most variegated nomencla- 
 ture he bore many scores of opprobrious names, 
 having no reference whatever to any real habits of 
 the man, good or bad. At two rooms’ distance, 
 Mr. Brunell always assumed a minute and circum- 
 stantial knowledge of what Pyment was doing then, 
 and what he was going to do next. All which 
 Pyment gave himself little trouble to answer, unless 
 it happened (as now and then it did) that he could 
 do so with ludicrous effect. What made the neces- 
 sity for Pyment was the continual call for “ an 
 appearance ” to be put in at some of the subordinate 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 573 
 
 courts in Westminster — courts of conscience, sheriff 
 courts, &c. But it happens often that he who is 
 most indispensable, and gets through most work 
 at one hour, becomes a useless burden at another * 
 as the hardest-working reaper seems, in the eyes 
 of an ignoramus, on a wet, wintry day, to be a 
 luxurious idler. Of these ups and downs in 
 Pyment’s working life Mr. Brunell made a most 
 cynical use ; making out that Pyment not only did 
 nothing, but also that he created much work for 
 the afflicted Brunell. However, it happened occa- 
 sionally that the truth vindicated itself, by making 
 a call upon Pyment’s physics — aggressive or de- 
 fensive — that needed an instant attention. “ Pyment, 
 I say ; this way, Pyment — you’re wanted, Pyment.” 
 In fact, both were big, hulking men, and had need: 
 to be so ; for sometimes, whether with good reason 
 or none, clients at the end of a losing suit, or of a 
 suit nominally gained, but unexpectedly laden with 
 heavy expenses, became refractory, showed fight, and 
 gave Pyment reason for saying that at least on this 
 day he had earned his salary by serving an ejectment 
 on a client whom on any other plan it might have 
 been hard to settle with. 
 
 But I am anticipating. I go back, therefore, for 
 a few explanatory words, to the day of my arrival 
 in London. How beneficial to me would a little 
 candour have been at that early period ! If (which 
 was the simple truth, known to all parties but myself) 
 I had been told that nothing would be brought to 
 a close in less than six months, even assuming the 
 ultimate adoption of my proposals, I should from 
 the first have dismissed all hopes of this nature, 
 as being unsuited to the practicabilities of my 
 situation. It will be seen further on that there 
 w r as a real and sincere intention of advancing the 
 money wanted. But it was then too late. And 
 universally I believe myself entitled to say that 
 even honourable lawyers will not in a case of 
 this nature move at a faster pace : they will all 
 alike loiter upon varied allegations through six 
 
574 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 months ; and for this reason, — that any shorter 
 period, they fancy, will hardly seem to justify, in 
 the eyes of their client, the sum which they find 
 themselves entitled to charge for their trouble and 
 their preliminary correspondence. How much better 
 for both sides, and more honourable, as more frank 
 and free from disguises, that the client should say, 
 “Raise this sum (of, suppose, ^400) “in three 
 weeks, — which can be done, if it can be done in 
 three years; and here is a bonus of ^100. Delay 
 for two months, and I decline the whole transaction. 
 Treated with that sort of openness, how much bodily 
 suffering of an extreme order, and how much of the 
 sickness from hope deferred, should I have escaped ! 
 Whereas, under the system (pursued with me as with 
 all clients) of continually refreshing my hopes with 
 new delusions, whiling me on with pretended pre- 
 paration of deeds, and extorting from me, out of 
 every little remittance I received from old family 
 friends casually met in London, as much as possible 
 for the purchase of imaginary stamps, the result was 
 that I myself was brought to the brink of destruction 
 through pure inanition ; whilst, on the other hand, 
 those concerned in these deceptions gained nothing 
 that might not have been gained honourably and 
 rightfully under a system of plain dealing. 
 
 As it was, subject to these eternal deceptions, I 
 continued for seven or eight weeks to live most: 
 parsimoniously in lodgings. These lodgings, though 
 barely decent in my eyes, ran away with at least two- 
 thirds of my remaining guineas. At length, whilst 
 it was yet possible to reserve a solitary half-guinea 
 towards the more urgent interest of finding daily 
 food, I gave up my room, and, stating exactly the 
 circumstances in which I stood, requested permission 
 of Mr. Brunell to make use of his large house as 
 a nightly asylum from the open air. Parliament had 
 not then made it a crime, next door to a felony, for 
 a man to sleep out-of-doors (as some twenty years 
 later was done by our benign legislators) ; as yet 
 that was no crime. By the law I came to know sin, 
 
preliminary confessions 575 
 
 and, looking back to the Cambrian hills from distant 
 years, discovered to my surprise what a parliamen- 
 tary wretch I had been in elder days, when I slept 
 amongst cows on the open hill-sides. Lawful as. 
 yet this was ; but not, therefore, less full of misery. 
 Naturally, then, I was delighted when Mr. Brunell 
 not only most readily assented to my request, but 
 begged of me to come that very night, and turn the 
 house to account as fully as I possibly could. The 
 cheerfulness of such a concession brought with it 
 one drawback. I now regretted that I had not, at 
 a much earlier period, applied for this liberty; since 
 I might thus have saved a considerable fund of 
 guineas, applicable, of course, to all urgent neces- 
 sities, but at this particular moment to one of 
 clamorous urgency — viz., the purchase of blankets. 
 O ancient women, daughters of toil and suffering, 
 amongst all the hardships and bitter inheritances 
 of flesh that ye are called upon to face, not one — 
 not even hunger — seems in my eyes comparable to 
 that of nightly cold. To seek a refuge from cold 
 in bed, and then, from the thin, gauzy texture of 
 the miserable, worn-out blankets, “ not to sleep a 
 wink/ 5 as Wordsworth records of poor old women 
 in Dorsetshire, where coals, from local causes, were 
 at the very dearest — what a terrific enemy was that 
 for poor old grandmothers to face in fight ! How 
 feelingly I learned at this time, as heretofore I had 
 learned on the wild hill-sides in Wales, what an 
 unspeakable blessing is that of warmth ! A more 
 killing curse there does not exist for man or woman 
 than that bitter combat between the weariness that 
 prompts sleep and the keen, searching cold that 
 forces you from the first access of sleep to start up 
 horror-stricken, and to seek warmth vainly in renewed 
 exercise, though long since fainting under fatigue. 
 However, even without blankets, it was a fine thing. to 
 have an asylum from the open air, and to be assured 
 of this asylum as long as I was likely to want it. 
 
 Towards nightfall J vent down to Greek Street, 
 and found, on taking possession of my new quarters. 
 
576 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 that the house already contained one single inmate,' — 
 a poor, friendless child, apparently ten years old ; but 
 she seemed hunger-bitten ; and sufferings of that sort 
 often make children look older than they are. From 
 this forlorn child I learned that she had slept and 
 lived there alone for some time before I came ; and 
 great joy the poor creature expressed when she found 
 that I was in future to be her companion through 
 the hours of darkness. The house could hardly be 
 called large — that is, it was not large on each 
 separate storey ; but, having four storeys in all, 
 it was large enough to impress vividly the sense 
 of its echoing loneliness ; and, from the want of 
 furniture, the noise of the rats made a prodigious 
 uproar on the staircase and hall ; so that, amidst 
 the real fleshly ills of cold and hunger, the forsaken 
 child had found leisure to suffer 'still more from the 
 self-created . one of ghosts. Against these enemies 
 I could promise her protection ; human companion- 
 ship was in itself protection ; but of other and more 
 needful aid I had, alas ! little to offer. We lay upon 
 the floor, with a bundle of law-papers for a pillow, 
 but with no other covering than a large horseman’s 
 cloak ; afterwards, however, we discovered in a garret 
 an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some 
 fragments of other articles, which added a little to 
 our comfort. The poor child crept close to me 
 for warmth, and for security against her ghostly 
 enemies. When I was not more than usually ill, 
 I took her into my arms, so that, in general, she 
 was tolerably warm, and often slept when I could 
 not ; for, during the last two months of my sufferings, 
 I slept much in the daytime, and was apt to fall into 
 transient dozings at all hours. But my sleep dis- 
 tressed me more than my watching ; for, besides the 
 tumultuousness of my dreams (which were only not 
 so awful as those which I shall have hereafter to 
 describe as produced by opium), my sleep was never 
 more than what is called dog-sleep ; so that I could 
 hear myself moaning; and very often I was awakened 
 suddenly by my own voice. About this time, a 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 577 
 
 'hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as 
 I fell into a slumber, which has since returned upon 
 me, at different periods of my life — viz., a sort of 
 twitching (I knew not where, but apparently about 
 ' the region of the stomach), which compelled me 
 violently to throw out my feet for the sake of 
 relieving it. This sensation coming on as soon as 
 I began to sleep, and the effort to relieve it con- 
 stantly awaking me, at length I slept only from 
 ; exhaustion ; and, through increasing weakness (as 
 I said before), I was constantly falling asleep and 
 constantly awaking. Too generally the very attain- 
 ment of any deep repose seemed as if mechanically 
 linked to some fatal necessity of self-interruption. 
 It was as though a cup were gradually filled by 
 the sleepy overflow of some natural fountain, the 
 fulness of the cup expressing symbolically the com- 
 pleteness of the rest : but then, in the next stage of 
 the process, it seemed as though the rush and torrent- 
 like babbling of the redundant waters, when running 
 over from every part of the cup, interrupted the 
 slumber which in their earlier stage of silent gather- 
 ing they had so naturally produced. Such and so 
 regular in its swell and its collapse — in its tardy 
 growth and its violent dispersion — did this endless 
 alternation of stealthy sleep and stormy awaking 
 travel through stages as natural as the increments 
 of twilight, or the kindlings of the dawn : no rest 
 that was not a prologue to terror; no sweet tremulous 
 pulses of restoration that did not suddenly explode 
 through rolling clamours of fiery disruption. 
 
 Meantime, the master of the house sometimes 
 came in upon us suddenly, and very early ; some- 
 times not till ten o’clock ; sometimes not at all. 
 He was in constant fear of arrest. Improving on 
 the plan of Cromwell, every night he slept in a 
 different quarter of London ; and I observed that 
 he never failed to examine, through a private 
 window, the appearance of those who knocked at 
 the door, before he would allow it to be opened. 
 He breakfasted alone ; indeed, his tea equipage 
 
57^ CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 would hardly have admitted of his hazarding an 
 invitation to a second person, any more than the 
 quantity of esculent material , which, for the most 
 part, was little more than a roll, or a few biscuits, 
 purchased on his road from the place where he had 
 slept. Or, if he had asked a party, as I once 
 learnedly observed to him, the several members of 
 it must have stood in the relation to each other 
 (not sat in any relation whatever) of succession, 
 and not of coexistence ; in the relation of parts 
 of time, and not of the parts of space. During 
 his breakfast, I generally contrived a reason for 
 lounging in; and, with an air of as much indiffer- 
 ence as I could assume, took up such fragments 
 as might chance to remain ; sometimes, indeed, none 
 at all remained. In doing this, I committed no 
 robbery, except upon Mr. Brunell himself, who was 
 thus obliged, now and then, to send out at noon for 
 an extra biscuit ; but he, through channels subse- 
 quently explained, was repaid a thousand-fold ; and, 
 as to the poor child, she was never admitted into 
 his study (if I may give that name to his chief 
 depository of parchments, law-writings, &c.) ; that 
 room was to her the Bluebeard room of the house, 
 being regularly locked on his departure to dinner, 
 about six o’clock, which usually was his final de- 
 parture for the day. Whether this child were 
 an illegitimate daughter of Mr. Brunell, or only a 
 servant, I could not ascertain ; she did not herself 
 know; but certainly she was treated altogether as 
 a menial servant. No sooner did Mr. Brunell make 
 his appearance than she went below-stairs, brushed 
 his shoes, coat, &c. ; and, except when she was 
 summoned to run upon some errand, she never 
 emerged from the dismal Tartarus of the kitchens 
 to the upper air until my welcome knock towards 
 nightfall called up her little trembling footsteps to 
 the front door. Of her life during the daytime, 
 however, I knew little but what I gathered from 
 her own account at night ; for, as soon as the 
 hours of business commenced, I saw that my 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 579 
 
 absence would be acceptable ; and, in general, 
 therefore, I went off and sat in the parks or else- 
 where until the approach of twilight. 
 
 But who, and what, meantime, was the master of 
 the house himself? Reader, he was one of those 
 anomalous practitioners in lower departments of the 
 law who, on prudential reasons, or from necessity, 
 deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of too 
 delicate a conscience. In many walks of life a con- 
 science is a more expensive encumbrance than a wife 
 or a carriage ; and, as people talk of “ laying down ” 
 their carriages, so I suppose my friend Mr. Brunell 
 had “ laid down ” his conscience for a time ; mean- 
 ing, doubtless, to resume it as soon as he could afford 
 it. He was an advertising attorney, who continually 
 notified to the public, through the morning papers, 
 that he undertook to raise loans for approved parties 
 in what would generally be regarded as desperate 
 cases — viz., where there was nothing better than 
 personal security to offer. But, as he took good care 
 to ascertain that there were ample funds in reversion 
 to be counted on, or near connections that would not 
 suffer the family name to be dishonoured, and as he 
 insured the borrower’s life over a sufficient period, 
 the risk was not great ; and even of this the whole 
 rested upon the actual money-lender, who stood aloof 
 in the background, and .never revealed himself to 
 clients in his proper person, transacting all affairs 
 through his proxies learned in the law, — Mr. Brunell 
 or others. The inner economy of such a man’s daily 
 life would present a monstrous picture. Even with 
 my limited opportunities for observing what went on, 
 I saw scenes of intrigue and complex chicanery at 
 which I sometimes smile to this day, and at which 
 I smiled then in spite of my misery. My situation, 
 however, at that time, gave me little experience, in my 
 own person, of any qualities in Mr. Brunell’s character 
 but such as did him honour ; and of his whole strange 
 composition I ought to forget everything, but that 
 towards me he was obliging, and, to the extent of his 
 power, generous. 
 
580 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 That power was not, indeed, very extensive. How- 
 ever, in common with the rats, I sat rent free ; and, 
 as Dr. Johnson has recorded that he never but once 
 in his life had as much wall-fruit as he wished, so let 
 me be grateful that, on that single occasion, I had as 
 large a choice of rooms, or even of apartments, in a 
 London mansion — viz., as I am now at liberty to 
 add, at the north-west corner of Greek Street, being 
 the house on that side the street nearest to Soho 
 Square — as I could possibly desire. Except the 
 Bluebeard room, which the poor child believed to be 
 permanently haunted, and which, besides, was locked, 
 all others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our 
 service. “The world was all before us,” and we 
 pitched our tent for the night in any spot we might 
 fancy. 
 
 This house I have described as roomy and respect- 
 able. It stands in a conspicuous situation, and in a 
 well-known part of London. Many of my readers 
 will have passed it, I doubt not, within a few hours 
 of reading this. For myself, 1 never fail to visit it 
 when accident draws me to London. About ten 
 o’clock this very night (August 15, 1821, being my 
 birthday), I turned aside from my evening walk 
 along Oxford Street, in order to take a glance at 
 it. It is now in the occupation of some family, 
 apparently respectable. The windows are no longer 
 coated by a paste composed of ancient soot and 
 superannuated rain ; and the whole exterior no 
 longer wears an aspect of gloom. By the lights in 
 the front drawing-room, I observed a domestic party, 
 assembled, perhaps, at tea, and apparently cheerful 
 and gay — marvellous contrast, in my eyes, to the 
 darkness, cold, silence, and desolation, of that same 
 house nineteen years ago, when its nightly occupants 
 were one famishing scholar and a poor, neglected 
 child. Her, by-the-bye, in after years, I vainly 
 endeavoured to trace. Apart from her situation, 
 she was not what would be called an interesting 
 child. She was neither pretty, nor quick in under- 
 standing, nor remarkably pleasing in manners. But, 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 581 
 
 thank God ! even in those years I needed not the 
 embellishments of elegant accessories to conciliate 
 my affections. Plain human nature, in its humblest 
 and most homely apparel, was enough for me ; and 
 I loved the child because she was my partner in 
 wretchedness. If she is now living, she is probably 
 a mother, with children of her own ; but, as I have 
 said, I could never trace her. 
 
 This I regret ; but another person there was, at 
 that time, whom I have since sought to trace with far 
 deeper earnestness, and with far deeper sorrow at my 
 failure. This person was a young woman, and one of 
 that unhappy class who belong to the outcasts and 
 pariahs of our female population. I feel no shame, 
 nor have any reason to feel it, in avowing that I was 
 then on familiar and friendly terms with many women 
 in that unfortunate condition. Smile not, reader too 
 carelessly facile ! Frown not, reader too unseason- 
 ably austere ! Little call was there here either for 
 smiles or frowns. A penniless schoolboy could not 
 be supposed to stand within the range of such 
 temptations ; besides that, according to the ancient 
 Latin proverb, “ sine Cerere et Baccho ,” &c. These 
 unhappy women, to me, were simply sisters in 
 calamity ; and sisters amongst whom, in as large 
 measure as amongst any other equal number of 
 persons commanding more of the world’s respect, 
 were to be found humanity, disinterested generosity, 
 courage that would not falter in defence of the help- 
 less, and fidelity that would have scorned to take 
 bribes for betraying. But the truth is that at no time 
 of my life have I been a person to hold myself 
 polluted by the touch or approach of any creature 
 that wore a human shape. I cannot suppose, I will 
 not believe, that any creatures wearing the form of 
 man or woman are so absolutely rejected and repro- 
 bate outcasts that merely to talk with them inflicts 
 pollution. On the contrary, from my very earliest 
 youth, it has been my pride to converse familiarly, 
 more Socratico , with all human beings — man; woman, 
 and child — that chance might fling in my way ; for a 
 
582 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor 
 limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, 
 filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of 
 birth and education, but should look upon himself as 
 a catholic creature, and as standing in an equal rela- 
 tion to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to 
 the guilty and the innocent. Being myself, at that 
 time, of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the 
 streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those 
 female peripatetics who are technically called street- 
 walkers. Some of these women had occasionally taken 
 my part against watchmen who wished to drive me off 
 the steps of houses where I was sitting ; others had 
 protected me against more serious aggressions. But 
 one amongst them — the one on whose account I have 
 at all introduced this subject — yet no ! let me not 
 
 class thee, O noble-minded Ann , with that order 
 
 of women ; let me find, if it be possible, some gentler 
 name to designate the condition of her to whose 
 bounty and compassion — ministering to my neces- 
 sities when all the world stood aloof from me — I owe 
 it that I am at this time alive. For many weeks I 
 had walked, at nights, with this poor friendless girl 
 up and down Oxford Street, or had rested with her 
 on steps and under the shelter of porticos. 
 
 She could not be so old as myself : she told me, 
 indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth 
 year. By such questions as my interest about her 
 prompted, I had gradually drawn forth her simple 
 history. Hers was a case of ordinary occurrence 
 (as I have since had reason to think), and one in 
 which, if London beneficence had better adapted its 
 arrangements to meet it, the power of the law might 
 oftener be interposed to protect and to avenge. But 
 the stream of London charity flows in a channel 
 which, though deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and 
 underground; — not obvious or readily accessible to 
 poor, houseless wanderers ; and it cannot be denied 
 that the outside air and framework of society in 
 London, as in all vast capitals, is unavoidably harsh, 
 cruel, and repulsive. In any case, however, I saw 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 583 
 
 that part of her injuries might have been redressed ; 
 and I urged her often and earnestly to lay her com- 
 plaint before a magistrate. Friendless as she was, I 
 assured her that she would meet with immediate 
 attention ; and that English justice, which was no 
 respecter of persons, would speedily and amply 
 avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had plundered 
 her little property. She promised me often that she 
 would ; but she delayed taking the steps I pointed 
 out, from time to time ; for she was timid and de- 
 jected to a degree which showed how deeply sorrow 
 had taken hold of her young heart ; and perhaps she 
 thought justly that the most upright judge and the 
 most righteous tribunals could do nothing to repair 
 her heaviest wrongs. Something, however, would 
 perhaps have been done ; for it had been settled 
 between us at length (but, unhappily, on the very 
 last time but one that I was ever to see her) that in 
 a day or two I, accompanied by her, should state 
 her case to a magistrate. This little service it was 
 destined, however, that I should never realise. Mean- 
 time, that which she rendered to me, and which was 
 greater than I could ever have repaid her, w T as this : 
 One night, when we were pacing slowly along Oxford 
 Street, and after a day wffien I had felt unusually ill 
 and faint, I requested her to turn off with me into 
 Soho Square. Thither we went ; and we sat down 
 on the steps of a house, which to this hour I never 
 pass without a pang of grief, and an inner act of 
 homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in memory 
 of the noble act which she there performed. Sud- 
 denly, as we sat, I grew much worse. I had been 
 leaning my head against her bosom, and all at once 
 I sank from her arms, and fell backwards on the 
 steps. From the sensations I then had, I felt an 
 inner conviction of the liveliest kind that, without 
 some powerful and reviving stimulus, I should either 
 have died on the spot, or should, at least, have sunk 
 to a point of exhaustion from which all re-ascent, 
 under my friendless circumstances, would soon have 
 become hopeless. Then it was, at this crisis of my 
 
584 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 fate, that my poor orphan companion, who had her- 
 self met with little but injuries in this world, stretched 
 out a saving hand to me. Uttering a cry of terror, 
 but without a moment's delay, she ran off into Ox- 
 ford Street, and, in less time than could be imagined, 
 returned to me with a glass of port-wine and spices, 
 that acted upon my empty stomach (which at that 
 time would have rejected all solid food) with an 
 instantaneous power of restoration ; and for this glass 
 the generous girl, without a murmur, paid out of her 
 own humble purse, at a time, be it remembered, when 
 she had scarcely wherewithal to purchase the bare 
 necessaries of life, and when she could have no 
 reason to expect that I should ever be able to re- 
 imburse her. O youthful benefactress ! how often 
 in succeeding years, standing in solitary places, and 
 thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect love 
 — how often have I wished that, as in ancient times 
 the curse of a father was believed to have a super- 
 natural power, and to pursue its object with a fatal 
 necessity of self-fulfilment, even so the benediction of 
 a heart oppressed with gratitude might have a like 
 prerogative ; might have power given it from above 
 to chase, to haunt, to waylay, to pursue thee into 
 the central darkness of a London brothel, or (if it 
 were possible) even into the darkness of the grave, 
 there to awaken thee with an authentic message of 
 peace and forgiveness, and of final reconciliation ! 
 
 Some feelings, though not deeper or more pas- 
 sionate, are more tender than others ; and often 
 when I walk, at this time, in Oxford Street by 
 dreamy lamplight, and hear those airs played on 
 a common street-organ which years ago solaced me 
 and my dear youthful companion, I shed tears, and 
 muse with myself at the mysterious dispensation 
 which so suddenly and so critically separated us for 
 ever. How it happened, the reader will understand 
 from what remains of this introductory narration. 
 
 Soon after the period of the last incident I have 
 recorded, I met in Albemarle Street a gentleman of 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 585 
 
 his late Majesty’s household. This gentleman had 
 received hospitalities, on different occasions, from 
 my family ; and he challenged me upon the strength 
 of my family likeness. I did not attempt any dis- 
 guise, but answered his questions ingenuously ; and, 
 on his pledging his word of honour that he would 
 not betray me to my guardians, I gave him my real 
 address in Greek Street. The next day I received 
 from him a ten-pound bank-note. The letter enclos- 
 ing it was delivered, with other letters of business, 
 to the attorney ; but, though his look and manner 
 informed me that he suspected its contents, he gave 
 it up to me honourably, and without demur. 
 
 This present, from the particular service to which 
 much of it was applied, leads me naturally to speak 
 again of the original purpose which had allured me 
 up to London, and which I had been without inter- 
 mission prosecuting through Mr. Brunell from the 
 first day of my arrival in London. 
 
 In so mighty a world as London, it will surprise 
 my readers that I should not have found some means 
 of staving off the last extremities of penury ; and it 
 will strike them that two resources, at least, must have 
 been open to me : viz., either to seek assistance from 
 the friends of my family, or to turn my youthful 
 accomplishments, such as they were, into some 
 channel of pecuniary emolument. As to the first 
 course, I may observe, generally, that what I dreaded 
 beyond all other evils was the chance of being re- 
 claimed by my guardians ; not doubting that whatever 
 power the law gave them would have been enforced 
 against me to the utmost ; that is, to the extremity 
 of forcibly restoring me to the school which I had 
 quitted, — a restoration which, as it would, in my eyes, 
 have been a dishonour even if submitted to volun- 
 tarily, could not fail, when extorted from me in con- 
 tempt and defiance of my own known wishes and 
 earnest resistance, to have proved a humiliation worse 
 to me than death, and which would, indeed, have 
 terminated in death. I was, therefore, shy enough 
 of applying for assistance even in those quarters 
 
586 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 where I was sure of receiving it, if at any risk of 
 furnishing my guardians with a clue for tracing me. 
 My father’s friends, no doubt, had been many, and 
 were scattered all over the kingdom ; but, as to 
 London in particular, though a large section of these 
 friends would certainly be found there, yet (as full 
 ten years had passed since his death) I knew very 
 few of them even by name ; and, never having seen 
 London before — except once, in my fifteenth year, 
 for a few hours — I knew not the address of even 
 those few. To this mode of gaining help, therefore, 
 in part the difficulty, but much more the danger 
 which I have mentioned, habitually indisposed me. 
 In regard to the other mode — that of turning any 
 talents or knowledge that I might possess to a lucra- 
 tive use — I now feel half inclined to join my reader 
 in wondering that I should have overlooked it. As 
 a corrector of Greek proofs (if in no other way), 
 I might surely have gained enough for my slender 
 wants. Such an office as this I could have dis- 
 charged with an exemplary and punctual accuracy 
 that would soon have gained me the confidence of 
 my employers. And there was this great preliminary 
 advantage in giving such a direction to my efforts, 
 that the intellectual dignity and elegance associated 
 with all ministerial services about the press would 
 have saved my pride and self-respect from mortifica- 
 tion. In an extreme case, such as mine had now 
 become, I should not have absolutely disdained the 
 humble station of “ devil.” A subaltern situation in 
 a service inherently honourable is better than a much 
 higher situation in a service pointing to ultimate 
 objects that are mean or ignoble. I am, indeed, not 
 sure that I could adequately have discharged the 
 functions of this office. To the perfection of the 
 diabolic character I fear that patience is one of the 
 indispensable graces ; more, perhaps, than I should 
 be found on trial to possess for dancing attendance 
 upon crotchety authors, superstitiously fastidious in 
 matters of punctuation. But why talk of my quali- 
 fications? Qualified or not, where could I obtain 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 587 
 
 such an office ? For it must not be forgotten that 
 even a diabolic appointment requires interest. To- 
 wards that I must first of all have an introduction to 
 some respectable publisher ; and this I had no means 
 of obtaining. To say the truth, however, it had never 
 once occurred to me to think of literary labours as a 
 source of profit. No mode sufficiently speedy of 
 obtaining money had ever suggested itself but that of 
 borrowing it on the strength of my future claims and 
 expectations. This mode I sought by every avenue 
 to compass ; and amongst other persons I applied to 
 a Jew named D - 1 
 
 1 At this period (autumn of 1856), when thirty-five years 
 have elapsed since the first publication of these memoirs, 
 reasons of delicacy can no longer claim respect for concealing 
 the Jew’s name, or at least the name which he adopted in his 
 dealings with the Gentiles. I say, therefore, without scruple, 
 that the name was Dell : and some years later it was one of 
 the names that came before the House of Commons in con- 
 nection with something or other (I have long since forgotten 
 what ) growing out of the parliamentary movement against the 
 Duke of York, in reference to Mrs. Clark, &c. Like all the 
 other Jews with whom I have had negotiations, he was frank 
 and honourable in his mode of conducting business. What 
 he promised he performed ; and, if his terms were high, as 
 naturally they could not but be, to cover his risks, he avowed 
 
 them from the first. To this same Mr. Dell, by the way, 
 
 some eighteen months afterwards, I applied again on the same 
 business ; and, dating at that time from a respectable college, 
 I was fortunate enough to win his serious attention to my pro- 
 posals. My necessities had not arisen from any extravagance 
 or youthful levities (these my habits forbade), but simply from 
 the vindictive malice of my guardian, who, when he found 
 himself no longer able to prevent me from going to the 
 university, had, as a parting token of his regard, refused to 
 sign an order for granting me a shilling beyond the allowance 
 made to me at school — viz., ^100 per annum. Upon this sum 
 it was, in my time (i.e., in the first decennium of this century), 
 barely possible to have lived at college ; and not possible to a 
 man who, though above the affectation of ostentatious disregard 
 for money, and without any expensive tastes, confided, never- 
 theless, rather too much in servants, and did not delight in 
 the petty details of minute economy. I soon, therefore, be- 
 came embarrassed : in a movement of impatience, instead of 
 candidly avowing my condition to my mother, or to some one 
 of the guardians, more than one of whom would have advanced 
 me the ^250 wanted (not in hisUegal character of guardian. 
 
^88 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 ' To this Jew, and to other advertising money- 
 lenders, I had introduced myself, with an account 
 of my expectations ; which account they had little 
 difficulty in ascertaining to be correct. The person 
 
 there mentioned as the second son of was found 
 
 to have all the claims (or more than all) that I had 
 stated : but one question still remained, which the 
 faces of the Jews pretty significantly suggested, — was 
 I that person ? This doubt had never occurred to 
 me as a possible one ; I had rather feared, whenever 
 my Jewish friends scrutinised me keenly, that I might 
 be too well known to be that person, and that 
 some scheme might be passing in their minds for 
 entrapping me and selling me to my guardians. It 
 was strange to me to find my own self, materialiter 
 considered (so I expressed it, for I doated on logical 
 accuracy of distinctions), suspected of counterfeiting 
 my own self, fprmaliter considered. However, to 
 satisfy their scruples, I took the only course in 
 my power. Whilst I was in Wales, I had received 
 various letters from young friends ; these I produced, 
 for I carried them constantly in my pocket. Most of 
 these letters were from the Earl of Altamont, who 
 was at that time, and had been for some years back, 
 amongst my confidential friends. These were dated 
 from Eton. I had also some from the Marquis of 
 Sligo, his father ; who, though absorbed in agricul- 
 tural pursuits, yet having been an Etonian himself, 
 and as good a scholar as a nobleman needs to be, 
 still retained an affection for classical studies and for 
 youthful scholars. He had, accordingly, from the 
 time that I was fifteen, corresponded with me — some- 
 
 but as a private friend), I was so foolish as to engage in a 
 voluminous negotiation with the Jew, and was put in possession 
 of the sum I asked for, on the 4 4 regular 55 terms of paying 
 seventeen and a half per cent, by way of annuity on all the 
 money furnished ; Israel, on his part, graciously resuming no 
 more than about ninety guineas of the said money, on account 
 of an attorney’s bill (for what services, to whom rendered, and 
 when — whether at the siege of Jerusalem, or at the building of 
 the Second Temple — I have not yet discovered). How many 
 perches this bill measured I really forget ; but I still keep it in 
 a cabinet of natural curiosities. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 589 
 
 times upon the great improvements which he had 
 made, or was meditating, in the counties of Mayo 
 and Sligo, since I had been there ; sometimes upon 
 the merits of a Latin poet ; at other times, suggesting 
 subjects on which he fancied that I could write verses 
 myself, or breathe poetic inspiration into the mind of 
 my once familiar companion, his son. 
 
 On reading the letters, one of my Jewish friends 
 agreed to furnish two or three hundred pounds on 
 my personal security, provided I could persuade the 
 young earl — who was, by the way, not older than 
 myself — to guarantee the payment on our joint 
 coming of age; the Jew’s final object being, as I now 
 suppose, not the trifling profit he could expect to 
 make by me, but the prospect of establishing a con- 
 nection with my noble friend, whose great expectations 
 were well known to him. In pursuance of this pro- 
 posal on the part of the Jew, about eight or nine 
 days after I had received the ^10, I prepared to 
 visit Eton. Nearly three guineas of the money I had 
 given to my money-lending friend in the background; 
 or, more accurately, I had given that sum to Mr. 
 Brunnel, alias Brown, as representing Mr. Dell, the 
 Jew; and a smaller sum I had given directly to 
 himself, on his own separate account. What he 
 alleged in excuse for thus draining my purse at so 
 critical a moment was that stamps must be bought, 
 in order that the writings might be prepared whilst I 
 was away from London. I thought in my heart that 
 he was lying, but I did not wish to give him any 
 excuse for charging his own delays upon me. About 
 fifteen shillings I had employed in re-establishing 
 (though in a very humble way) my dress. Of the 
 remainder, I gave one quarter (something more than 
 a guinea) to Ann, meaning, on my return, to have 
 divided with her whatever might remain. 
 
 These arrangements made, soon after six o’clock, 
 on a dark winter evening, I set off, accompanied by 
 Ann, towards Piccadilly ; for it was my intention to 
 go down as far as the turn to Salt Hill and Slough on 
 the Bath or Bristol mail. Our course lay through a 
 
590 CONFESSIONS ON AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 part of the town which has now totally disappeared, so 
 that I can no longer retrace its ancient boundaries — 
 having been replaced by Regent Street and its ad- 
 jacencies. Swallow Street is all that I remember 
 of the names superseded by this large revolutionary 
 usurpation. Having time enough before us, however, 
 we bore away to the left, until we came into Golden 
 Square. There, near the corner of Sherrard Street, 
 we sat down, not wishing to part in the tumult and 
 blaze of Piccadilly. I had told Ann of my plans some 
 time before, and now I assured her again that she 
 should share in my good fortune, if I met with any, 
 and that I would never forsake her, as soon as I had 
 power to protect her. This I fully intended, as much 
 from inclination as from a sense of duty ; for, setting 
 aside gratitude (which in any case must have made 
 me her debtor for life), I loved her as affectionately as 
 if she had been my sister ; and at this moment with 
 sevenfold tenderness, from pity at witnessing her 
 extreme dejection. I had apparently most reason 
 for dejection, because I was leaving the saviour of 
 my life ; yet I, considering the shock my health had 
 received, was cheerful and full of hope. She, on the 
 contrary, who was parting with one who had had little 
 means of serving her, except by kindness and brotherly 
 treatment, was overcome by sorrow, so that, when I 
 kissed her at our final farewell, she put her arms about 
 my neck, and wept, without speaking a word. I 
 hoped to return in a week, at furthest, and I agreed 
 with her that, on the fifth night from that, and every 
 night afterwards, she should wait for me, at six o’clock, 
 near the bottom of Great Titchfield Street ; which had 
 formerly been our customary haven of rendezvous, to 
 prevent our missing each other in the great Mediter- 
 ranean of Oxford Street. This, and other measures 
 of precaution, I took ; one, only, I forgot. She had 
 either never told me, or (as a matter of no great in- 
 terest) I had forgotten, her surname. It is a general 
 practice, indeed, with girls of humble rank in her 
 unhappy condition, not (as novel-reading women of 
 higher pretensions) to style themselves Miss Douglas , 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 
 
 591 
 
 ( Miss Montague , &c., but simply by their Christian 
 names, Mary, Jane, Frances, &c. Her surname, as 
 
 ' the surest means of tracing her, I ought now to have 
 inquired ; but the truth is, having no reason to think 
 that our meeting again could, in consequence of 
 a short interruption, be more difficult or uncertain 
 than it had been for so many weeks, I scarcely for 
 a moment adverted to it as necessary, or placed it 
 amongst my memoranda against this parting inter- 
 view; and, my final anxieties being spent in comforting 
 her with hopes, and in pressing upon her the necessity 
 of getting some medicine for a violent cough with 
 which she was troubled, I wholly forgot this precaution 
 until it was too late to recall her. 
 
 When I reached the Gloucester Coffee-house in 
 Piccadilly, at which, in those days, all the western 
 mails stopped for a few minutes in going out of 
 London, it was already a quarter of an hour past eight 
 o’clock ; the Bristol Mail was on the point of going 
 off, and I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent 
 motion 1 of this mail soon laid me asleep. It is 
 somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing 
 sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on 
 the outside of a mail-coach — a bed which, at this day, 
 I find rather an uneasy one. Connected with this 
 sleep was a little incident which served, as hundreds 
 of others did at that time, to convince me how easily 
 a man who has never been in any great distress may 
 pass through life without knowing in his own person, 
 and experimentally testing, the possible goodness of 
 the human heart, or, as unwillingly I add, its possible 
 churlishness. So thick a curtain of manners is drawn 
 over the features and expression of men’s natures that, 
 to the ordinary observer, the two extremities, and the 
 infinite field of varieties which lie between them, are 
 
 1 The Bristol Mail was at that time the best appointed in the 
 kingdom — owing that advantage, first of all, to an unusuahy 
 good road — and this advantage it shared with the Bath Mail 
 (their route being exactly the same for a hundred and five miles); 
 but, secondly, it had the separate advantage of an extra sum for 
 expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. 
 
592 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 all confounded under one neutral disguise. The 
 case was this : For the first four or five miles out of 
 London, I annoyed my fellow-passenger on the roof 
 by occasionally falling against him when the coach 
 gave a lurch ; and, indeed, if the road had been less 
 smooth and level than it was, I should have fallen off 
 from weakness. Of this annoyance he complained 
 heavily ; as, perhaps, in the same circumstances, most 
 people would. He expressed his complaint, however, 
 more morosely than the occasion seemed to warrant ; 
 and, if I had parted with him at that moment, I 
 should have thought of him as a surly and almost 
 brutal fellow. Still I was conscious that I had given 
 him some cause for complaint ; and therefore I 
 apologised, assuring him that I would do what I 
 could to avoid falling asleep for the future ; and, at 
 the same time, in as few words as possible, I ex- 
 plained to him that I was ill, and in a weak state from 
 long suffering, and that I could not afford to take an 
 inside place. The man’s manner changed upon hear- 
 ing this explanation in an instant : and, when I next 
 woke for a minute, from the noise and lights of 
 Hounslow (for, in spite of my efforts, I had again 
 fallen asleep within two minutes), I found that he 
 had put his arm round me to protect me from falling 
 off ; and for the rest of my journey he behaved to me 
 with the gentleness of a woman. And this was the 
 more kind, as he could not have known that I was not 
 going the whole way to Bath or Bristol. Unfortu- 
 nately, indeed, I did go further than I intended ; for 
 so genial and refreshing was my sleep, being in the 
 open air, that, upon the sudden pulling up of the mail 
 (possibly at a post-office), I found that we had reached 
 some place six or seven miles to the west of Salt Hill. 
 Here I alighted , and, during the half-minute that the 
 mail stopped, I was entreated by my friendly com- 
 panion (who, from the transient glimpse I had of him 
 under the glaring lights of Piccadilly, might be a re- 
 spectable upper servant) to go to bed without delay. 
 This, under the feeling that some consideration was 
 due to one who had done me so seasonable a service, 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 
 
 593 
 
 I promised, though with no intention of doing so ; 
 and, in fact, I immediately moved forward on foot. 
 
 It must then have been nearly eleven ; but so 
 slowly did I creep along that I heard a clock in a 
 cottage strike four as I was on the point of turning 
 down the road from Slough to Eton. The air and 
 the sleep had both refreshed me ; but I was weary, 
 nevertheless. I remember a thought (obvious enough, 
 and pointedly expressed by a Roman poet) which 
 gave me some consolation, at that moment, under 
 my poverty. There had been, some weeks before, a 
 murder committed on Hounslow Heath, which at 
 that time was really a heath, entirely unenclosed, and 
 exhibiting a sea-like expanse in all directions, except 
 one. I cannot be mistaken when I say that the name 
 of the murdered person was Steele , and that he was 
 the owner of a lavender plantation in that neighbour- 
 hood . 1 Every step of my regress (for I now walked 
 with my face towards London) was bringing me nearer 
 to the heath ; and it naturally occurred to me that I 
 and the accursed murderer, if he were that night 
 abroad, might, at every instant, be unconsciously ap- 
 proaching each other through the darkness ; in which 
 case, said I, supposing myself — instead of being little 
 better than an outcast, 
 
 “ Lord of my learning, and no land beside ” — 
 
 1 Two men, Holloway and Haggerty, were long afterwards ' 
 convicted, upon very questionable evidence, as the perpetrators 
 of this murder. The main testimony against them was that of 
 a Newgate turnkey, who had imperfectly overheard a conversa- 
 tion between the two men. The current impression was that of 
 great dissatisfaction with the evidence ; and this impression was 
 strengthened by the pamphlet of an acute lawyer, exposing the 
 unsoundness and incoherency of the statements relied upon by 
 the court. They were executed, however, in the teeth of all 
 opposition. And, as it happened that an enormous wreck of 
 life occurred at the execution (not fewer, I believe, than sixty 
 persons having been trampled under foot by the unusual pres» 
 sure of some brewers’ draymen forcing their way with linked 
 arms to the space below the drop), this tragedy was regarded 
 for many years by a section of the London mob as a provides® 
 tial judgment upon the passive metropolis 
 
594 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 like my friend Lord Altamont, heir, by general repute, 
 to ,£30,000 P er annum, what a panic should I be 
 under at this moment about my throat ! Indeed, it 
 was not likely that Lord Altamont should ever be in 
 my situation ; but, nevertheless, the spirit of the re- 
 mark remains true, that vast power and possessions 
 make a man shamefully afraid of dying ; and I am 
 convinced that many of the most intrepid adven- 
 turers who, being poor, enjoy the full use of their 
 natural energies, would, if at the very instant of going 
 into action news were brought to them that they had 
 unexpectedly succeeded to an estate in England of 
 £50,000 a- year, feel their dislike to bullets furiously 
 sharpened, 1 and their efforts at self-possession pro- 
 portionably difficult. So true it is, in the language 
 of a wise man, whose own experience had made him 
 acquainted equally with good and evil fortune, that 
 riches are better fitted 
 
 “ To slacken virtue, and abate her edge, 
 
 Than tempt her to do aught may merit praise.” 
 
 — Paradise Regained. 
 
 I dally with my subject, because, to myself, the 
 remembrance of these times is profoundly interesting, 
 But my reader shall not have any further cause to 
 complain ; for now I hasten to its close. In the road 
 between Slough and Eton I fell asleep ; and, just as 
 the morning began to dawn, I was awakened by the 
 voice of a man standing over me, and apparently 
 studying my physics , whilst to me — upon so sudden 
 an introduction to him in so suspicious a situation 
 — his morals naturally suggested a more interesting 
 subject of inquiry. I know not what he was. He 
 was an ill-looking fellow, but not, therefore, of neces- 
 sity, an ill-meaning fellow ; or, if he were, I suppose 
 he thought that no person sleeping out-of-doors in 
 
 •■-) , ' in" 
 
 1 It will be objected that many men, of the highest rank and 
 wealth, have, notwithstanding, in our day, as well as throughout 
 our history, been amongst the foremost in courting danger on 
 the field of battle. True ; but this is not the case supposed. 
 Long familiarity with power and with wealth has, to them, 
 deadened their effect and attractions. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 595 
 
 l winter could be worth robbing. In which conclusion, 
 however, as it regarded myself, I have the honour 
 
 ' to assure him, supposing him ever to find himself 
 amongst my readers, that he was entirely mistaken. 
 I was not sorry at his disturbance, as it roused me to 
 pass through Eton before people were generally astir. 
 The night had been heavy and misty ; but towards 
 the morning it had changed to a slight frost, and the 
 trees were now covered with rime. 
 
 I slipped through Eton unobserved ; washed my- 
 self, and as far as possible adjusted my dress, at a 
 little public-house in Windsor ; and, about eight 
 o’clock, went down towards the precincts of the 
 college, near which were congregated the houses of 
 the “ Dames.” On my road I met some junior boys, 
 of whom I made inquiries. An Etonian is always a 
 gentleman ; and, in spite of my shabby habiliments, 
 they answered me civilly. My friend Lord Altamont 
 was gone to Jesus College, Cambridge. “ Ibi omnis 
 effusus labor ! ” I had, however, other friends at 
 Eton ; but it is not to all who wear that name in 
 prosperity that a man is willing to present himself in 
 distress On recollecting myself, however, I asked 
 for the Earl of Desart , 1 to whom (though my acquaint- 
 ance with him was not so intimate as with some 
 others) I should not have shrunk from presenting 
 myself under any circumstances. He was still at 
 Eton, though, I believe, on the wing for Cambridge. 
 I called, was received kindly, and asked to breakfast. 
 
 Lord Desart placed before me a magnificent break- 
 fast. It was really such ; but in my eyes it seemed 
 trebly magnificent from being the first regular meal, 
 the first “good man’s table,” that I had sat down to 
 for months. Strange to say, I could scarcely eat 
 anything. On the day when I first received my ten- 
 
 1 I had known Lord Desart, the eldest son of a very large 
 family, some years earlier, when bearing the title of Lord 
 Castlecuffe. Cuffe was the family name ; and I believe that they 
 traced their descent from a person of some historic interest — 
 viz., that Cuffe who was secretary to. the unhappy Earl of Essex 
 during his treasonable emeute against the government of Queen 
 Elizabeth. 
 
596 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 pound bank-note, I had gone to a baker’s shop and 
 bought a couple of rolls ; this very shop I had some 
 weeks before surveyed with an eagerness of desire 
 which it was humiliating to recollect. I remembered 
 the story (which, however, I now believed to be a 
 falsehood) about Otway, and feared that there might 
 be danger in eating too rapidly. But there was no 
 cause for alarm ; my appetite was utterly gone, and 
 I nauseated food of every kind. This effect, from 
 eating what approached to a meal, I continued to 
 feel for weeks. On the present occasion, at Lord 
 Desart’s table, I found myself not at all better than 
 usual ; and, in the midst of luxuries, appetite I had 
 none. I had, however, unfortunately, at all times a 
 craving for wine : I explained my situation, therefore, 
 to Lord Desart, and gave him a short account of my 
 late sufferings ; with which he expressed deep sym- 
 pathy, and called for wine. This gave me instan- 
 taneous relief and immoderate pleasure; and on all 
 occasions, when I had an opportunity, I never failed 
 to drink wine. Obvious it is, however, that this 
 indulgence in wine would continue to strengthen my 
 malady, for the tone of my stomach was apparently 
 quite sunk ; but, by a better regimen, it might sooner, 
 and, perhaps, effectually, have been restored. 
 
 I hope that it was not from this love of wine that 
 I lingered in the neighbourhood of my Eton friends ; 
 1 persuaded myself then that it was from reluctance 
 to ask Lord Desart, on whom I was conscious of 
 having no sufficient claims, the particular service in 
 quest of which I had come to Eton. I was, however, 
 unwilling to lose my journey, and — I asked it. Lord 
 Desart, whose good-nature was unbounded, and 
 which, in regard to myself, had been measured rather 
 by his compassion, perhaps, for my condition, and 
 his knowledge of my intimacy with several of his 
 relatives, than by an over-rigorous inquiry into the 
 extent of my own direct claims, faltered, nevertheless, 
 at this request. A He acknowledged that he did not 
 like to have v&ny dealings with money-lenders, and 
 feared lest such a transaction, might come to the ears 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 597 
 
 of his connections. Moreover, he doubted whether 
 his signature, whose expectations were so much more 
 bounded than those of his cousin, would avail with 
 my unchristian friends. Still he did not wish, appa- 
 rently, to mortify me by a refusal peremptory and 
 absolute ; for, after a little consideration, he promised, 
 under certain conditions, which he pointed out, to 
 give his security. Lord Desart was at this time 
 not above eighteen years of age ; but I have often 
 doubted, on recollecting since the good sense and 
 prudence which on this occasion he mingled with so 
 much urbanity of manner (which in him wore the 
 grace of youthful sincerity), whether any statesman, 
 the oldest and the most accomplished in diplomacy, 
 could have acquitted himself better under the same 
 circumstances. 
 
 Re-comforted by this promise, which was not quite 
 equal to the best, but far above the worst that I had 
 anticipated, I returned in a Windsor coach to London 
 three days after I had quitted it. And now I come 
 to the end of my story. The Jews did not approve 
 of Lord Desart’s conditions, or so they said. Whether 
 they would in the end have acceded to them, and 
 were only seeking time for making further inquiries, 
 I know not ; but many delays were made — time 
 passed on — the small fragment of my bank-note had 
 just melted away, and before any conclusion could have 
 been put to the business I must have relapsed into 
 my former state of wretchedness. Suddenly, at this 
 crisis, an opening was made, almost by accident, for 
 reconciliation with my guardians. I quitted London 
 in haste, and returned to the Priory; after some 
 time, I proceeded to Oxford ; and it was not until 
 many months had passed away that I had it in my 
 power again to revisit the ground which had become 
 so interesting to me, and to this day remains so, as 
 the chief scene of my youthful sufferings. 
 
 Meantime, what had become of Ann? Where was 
 she? Whither had she gone? According to our 
 agreement, I sought her daily, and waited for her 
 every night, so long as I staid in London, at the 
 
59^ CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 corner of Titchfield Street ; and during the last days 
 of my stay in London I put into activity every means 
 of tracing her that my knowledge of London sug- 
 gested , and the limited extent of my power made 
 possible. The street where she had lodged I knew, 
 but not the house ; and I remembered, at last, some 
 account which she had given of ill-treatment from 
 her landlord, which made it probable that she had 
 quitted those lodgings before we parted. She had 
 few acquaintance ; most people, besides, thought that 
 the earnestness of my inquiries arose from motives 
 which moved their laughter or their slight regard ; 
 and others, thinking that I was in chase of a girl who 
 had robbed me of some trifles, were naturally and 
 excusably indisposed to give me any clue to her, if 
 indeed they had any to give. Finally, as my despair- 
 ing resource, on the day I left London I put into the 
 hands of the only person who (I was sure) must know 
 Ann by sight, from having been in company with us 
 once or twice, an address to the Priory. All was in 
 vain. To this hour I have never heard a syllable 
 about her. This, amongst such troubles as most 
 men meet with in this life, has been my heaviest 
 affliction. If she lived, doubtless we must have been 
 sometimes in search of each other, at the very same 
 moment, through the mighty labyrinths of London ; 
 perhaps even within a few feet of each other — a 
 barrier no wider, in a London street, often amounting 
 in the end to a separation for eternity ! During some 
 years I hoped that she did live ; and I suppose that, 
 in the literal and unrhetorical use of the word myriad, 
 I must, on my different visits to London, have looked 
 into many myriads of female faces, in the hope of 
 meeting Ann. I should know her again amongst a 
 thousand, and if seen but for a moment. Handsome 
 she was not ; but she had a sweet expression of coun- 
 tenance, and a peculiarly graceful carriage of the 
 head. I sought her, I have said, in hope. So it 
 was for years ; but now I should fear to see her ; and 
 her cough, which grieved me when I parted with her, 
 is now my consolation. Now I wish to see her no 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 599 
 
 longer, but think of her, more gladly, as one long 
 since laid in the grave — in the grave, I would 
 hope, of a Magdalen ; taken away before injuries and 
 cruelty had blotted out and transfigured her ingenu- 
 ous nature, or the brutalities of ruffians had completed 
 the ruin they had begun. 
 
 So then, Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother, 
 thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and 
 drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dis- 
 missed from thee ! The time was come that I no 
 more should pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces, 
 no more should wake and dream in captivity to the 
 pangs of hunger. Successors too many to myself and 
 Ann have, doubtless, since then trodden in our foot- 
 steps, inheritors of our calamities. Other orphans 
 than Ann have sighed ; tears have been shed by 
 other children ; and thou, Oxford Street, hast since 
 those days echoed to the groans of innumerable 
 hearts. For myself, however, the storm which I had 
 outlived seemed to have been the pledge of a long 
 fair weather ; the premature sufferings which I had 
 paid down to have been accepted as a ransom for 
 many years to come, as a price of long immunity 
 from sorrow ; and, if again I walked in London, a 
 solitary and contemplative man (as often times I did), 
 I walked for the most part in serenity and peace of 
 mind. And, although it is true that the calamities of 
 my novitiate in London had struck root so deeply in 
 my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot up 
 arid flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious um- 
 brage that has overshadowed and darkened my latter 
 years, yet these second assaults of suffering were met 
 with a fortitude more confirmed, with the resources of 
 a maturer intellect, and with alleviations, how deep ! 
 from sympathising affection. 
 
 Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, years 
 far asunder were bound together by subtle links of 
 suffering derived from a common root. And herein 
 I notice the short-sightedness of human desires — 
 that oftentimes, on moonlight nights, during my first 
 
6oq confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 mournful abode in London, my consolation was (if 
 such it could be thought) to gaze from Oxford Street 
 up every avenue in succession which pierces north- 
 wards through the heart of Marylebone to the fields 
 and the woods ; for that, said I, travelling with my 
 eyes up the long vistas which lay part in light and 
 part in shade — “ that is the road to the north, and, 
 therefore, to Grasmere ” (upon which, though as yet 
 unknown to me, I had a presentiment that I should 
 fix my choice for a residence) ; “ and, if I had the 
 wings of a dove, that way I would fly for rest.” Thus 
 I said, and thus I wished in my blindness ; yet, even 
 in that very northern region it was, in that very valley 
 to which my erroneous * wishes pointed, that this 
 second birth of my sufferings began, and that they 
 again threatened to besiege the citadel of life and 
 hope. There it was that for years I was persecuted by 
 visions as ugly, and by phantoms as ghastly, as ever 
 haunted the couch of Orestes ; and in this unhappier 
 than he — that sleep, which comes to all as a respite 
 and a restoration, and to him especially as a blessed 
 balm for his wounded heart and his haunted brain, 
 visited me as my bitterest scourge. Thus blind was 
 I in my desires. And yet, if a veil interposes be- 
 tween the dim-sightedness of man and his future 
 calamities, the same veil hides from him their 
 alleviations ; and a grief which had not been feared 
 is met by consolations which had not been hoped. 
 I, therefore, who participated, as it were, in the 
 troubles of Orestes (excepting only in his agitated 
 conscience), participated no less in all his supports ; 
 my Eumenides, like his, were at my bed-feet, and 
 stared in upon me through the curtains ; but, 
 watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of 
 sleep to bear me company through the heavy watches 
 of the night, sat my Electra ; for thou, beloved 
 
 M , dear companion of my later years , 1 thou wast 
 
 my Electra, and neither in nobility of mind nor in 
 long-suffering affection wouldst permit that a Grecian 
 
 De Quincey’s wife, Margaret Simpson. — H. 
 
PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 6oi 
 
 1 sister should excel an English wife. For thou 
 thoughtest not much to stoop to humble offices of 
 
 ' kindness, and to servile ministrations of tenderest 
 affection ; to wipe away for years the unwholesome 
 dews upon the forehead, or to refresh the lips when 
 parched and baked with fever; nor even when thy 
 own peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy become 
 infected with the spectacle of my dread contest with 
 phantoms and shadowy enemies that oftentimes bade 
 me “ sleep no more ” — not even then didst thou 
 utter a complaint or any murmur, nor withdraw thy 
 angelic smiles, nor shrink from thy service of love, 
 more than Electra did of old. For she, too, though 
 she was a Grecian woman, and the daughter of the 
 king of men , 1 yet wept sometimes, and hid her face 2 
 in her robe. 
 
 But these troubles are past, and thou wilt read 
 these records of a period so dolorous to us both as 
 the legend of some hideous dream that can return no 
 more. Meantime I am again in London, and again 
 I pace the terraces of Oxford Street by night ; and * 
 oftentimes — when I am oppressed by anxieties that 
 demand all my philosophy and the comfort of thy 
 presence to support, and yet remember that I am 
 separated from thee by three hundred miles and the 
 length of three dreary months — I look up the streets 
 that run northward from Oxford Street, upon moon- 
 light nights, and recollect my youthful ejaculation 
 of anguish ; but then, remembering that thou art 
 sitting alone in that same valley, and mistress of that 
 very house to which my heart turned in its blindness 
 
 1 Agamemnon — ava% avSpCov. 
 
 2 ’'O/uL/uia Gets’ ds ttgtt\ov. The scholar will know that through- 
 out this passage I refer to the early scenes of the Orestes , — one 
 of the most beautiful exhibitions of the domestic affections which 
 even the dramas of Euripides can furnish. To the unlearned 
 reader it may be necessary to say that the situation at the open- 
 ing of the drama is that of a brother attended only by his sister 
 during the demoniacal possession of a suffering conscience (or, 
 in the mythology of the play, haunted by the Furies), under' 
 circumstances of immediate danger from enemies, and of desertion 
 or cold regard from nominal friends. 
 
602 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 nineteen years ago, I think that, though blind indeed, 
 and scattered to the winds of late, the promptings of 
 my heart may yet have had reference to a remoter 
 time, and may be justified if read in another meaning ; 
 and, if I could allow myself to descend again to the 
 impotent wishes of childhood, I should again say to 
 myself, as I look to the north, “ Oh, that I had the 
 wings of a dove ! ” and with how just a confidence in 
 thy good and gracious nature might I add the other 
 half of my early ejaculation — “ and that way I would 
 fly for comfort ! ” 
 
PART TWO 
 
 THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 
 
 It is very long since I first took opium ; so long that, 
 if it had been a trifling incident in my life, I might 
 have forgotten its date : but cardinal events are not 
 to be forgotten ; and, from circumstances connected 
 with it, I remember that this inauguration into the 
 use of opium must be referred to the spring or to 
 the autumn of 1804; during which seasons I was in 
 London, having come thither for the first time since 
 my entrance at Oxford. And this event arose in 
 the following way : From an early age I had been 
 accustomed to wash my head in cold water at least 
 once a day. Being suddenly seized with toothache, 
 I attributed it to some relaxation caused by a casual 
 intermission of that practice, jumped out of bed, 
 plunged my head into a basin of cold water, and 
 with hair’ thus wetted went to sleep. The next 
 morning, as I need hardly say, I awoke with ex- 
 cruciating rheumatic pains of the head and face, 
 from which I had hardly any respite for about twenty 
 days. On the twenty-first day I think it was, and on 
 a Sunday, that I went out into the streets ; rather to 
 run away, if possible, from my torments, than with 
 any distinct purpose of relief. By accident, I met 
 a college acquaintance, who recommended opium. 
 Opium ! dread agent of unimaginable pleasure and 
 pain ! I had heard of it as I had heard of manna 
 or of ambrosia, but no further. How unmeaning a 
 sound was opium at that time ! what solemn chords 
 does it now strike upon my heart ! what heartquaking 
 vibrations of sad and happy remembrances ! Revert- 
 ing for a moment to these, I feel a mystic importance 
 attached to the minutest circumstances connected 
 with the place, and the time, and the man (if man he 
 was), that first laid open to me the paradise of opium- 
 eaters. It was a Sunday afternoon, wet and cheer- 
 less ; and a duller spectacle this earth of ours has not 
 to show than a rainy Sunday in London. My road 
 
 603 
 
604 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 homewards lay through Oxford Street ; and near “ the 
 stately Pantheon ” (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly 
 called it 2 ) I saw a druggist’s shop. The druggist 
 (unconscious minister of celestial pleasures !), as if 
 in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked dull and 
 stupid, just as any mortal druggist might be expected 
 to look on a rainy London Sunday ; and, when I 
 asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me 
 as any other man might do ; and, furthermore, out of 
 my shilling returned to me what seemed to be real 
 copper halfpence, taken out of a real wooden drawer. 
 Nevertheless, and notwithstanding all such indica- 
 tions of humanity, he has ever since figured in my 
 mind as a beatific vision of an immortal druggist, 
 sent down to earth on a special mission to myself. 
 And it confirms me in this way of considering him 
 that, when I next came up to London, I sought him 
 near the stately Pantheon, and found him not ; and 
 thus to me, who knew not his name (if, indeed, he 
 had one), he seemed rather to have vanished from 
 Oxford Street than to have flitted into any other 
 locality, or (which some abominable man suggested) 
 to have absconded from the rent. The reader may 
 choose to think of him as, possibly, no more than a 
 sublunary druggist ; it may be so, but my faith is 
 better. I believe him to have evanesced . 2 So 
 unwillingly would I connect any mortal remem- 
 brances with that hour, and place, and creature 
 
 1 “Stately” : — It is but fair to say that Wordsworth meant 
 to speak of the interior , which could very little be inferred from 
 the mean, undistinguished outside, as seen presenting itself 
 endw T ays in Oxford Street. 
 
 2 “ Evanesced ” : — This way of going off from the stage of life 
 appears to have been well known in the seventeenth century, 
 but at that time to have been considered a peculiar privilege of 
 royalty, and by no means open to the use of druggists. For, 
 about the year 1686, a poet of rather ominous name (and who, 
 apparently, did justice to his name) — viz., Mr. Flatman — in 
 speaking of the death of Charles II., expresses his surprise that 
 any prince should commit so vulgar an act as dying ; because, 
 says he, 
 
 “ Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear i 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 605 
 
 that first brought me acquainted with the celestial 
 drug. . 
 
 Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed that I 
 lost not a moment in taking the quantity prescribed. 
 I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and 
 mystery of opium -taking ; and what I took I took 
 under every disadvantage. But I took it ; and in 
 an hour, O heavens ! what a revulsion ! what a resur- 
 rection, from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit ! 
 what an apocalypse of the world within me ! That 
 my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes ; 
 this negative effect was swallowed up in the immen- 
 sity of those positive effects which had opened before 
 me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly 
 revealed. Here was a panacea, a cfrapjMiKov vrjTrevOes 
 for all human woes : here was the secret of happiness, 
 about which philosophers had disputed for so many 
 ages, at once discovered ; happiness might now be 
 bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat- 
 pocket ; portable ecstasies might be had corked up 
 in a pint-bottle ; and peace of mind could be sent 
 down by the mail. 
 
 And, first, one word with respect to its bodily 
 effects ; for upon all that has been hitherto written 
 on the subject of opium, whether by travellers in 
 Turkey (who may plead their privilege, of lying as an 
 old immemorial right), or by professors of medicine 
 writing ex cathedra , I have but one emphatic criticism 
 to pronounce — Nonsense! I remember once, in 
 passing a book-stall, to have caught these words 
 from a page of some satiric author : “ By this time 
 I became convinced that the London newspapers 
 spoke truth at least twice a- week — viz., on Tuesday 
 and Saturday 1 — and might safely be depended upon 
 for — the list of bankrupts .’ 7 In like manner, I do by 
 no means deny that some truths have been delivered 
 to the world in regard to opium : thus, it has been 
 repeatedly affirmed by the learned that opium is a 
 tawny brown in colour — and this, take notice, I 
 
 1 “ Tuesday and Saturday ” • — viz., the two days on which 
 the Gazette is (or used to be) published. 
 
606 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 grant ; secondly, that it is rather dear — which also I 
 grant, for in my time East India opium has been 
 three guineas a pound, and Turkey eight ; and, thirdly, 
 that, if you eat a good deal of it, most probably you 
 must do what is disagreeable to any man of regular 
 habits — viz., die . 1 These weighty propositions are, all 
 and singular, true ; I cannot gainsay them ; and truth 
 ever was, and will be, commendable. But in these 
 three theorems I believe we have exhausted the stock 
 of knowledge as yet accumulated by man on the 
 subject of opium. And therefore, worthy doctors, as 
 there seems to be room for further discoveries, stand 
 aside, and allow me to come forward and lecture on 
 this matter. 
 
 First, then, it is not so much affirmed as taken for 
 granted by all who ever mention opium, formally or 
 incidentally, that it does or can produce intoxication. 
 Now, reader, assure yourself, meo periculo , that no 
 quantity of opium ever did, or could, intoxicate. As 
 to the tincture of opium (commonly called laudanum), 
 that might certainly intoxicate, if a man could bear to 
 take enough of it ; but why ? Because it contains so 
 much proof spirits of wine, and not because it con- 
 tains so much opium. But crude opium, I affirm 
 peremptorily, is incapable of producing any state of 
 body at all resembling that which is produced by 
 alcohol ; and not in degree only incapable, but even in 
 kind : it is not in the quantity of its effects merely, 
 but in the quality, that it differs altogether. The 
 pleasure given by wine is always rapidly mounting, 
 and tending to a crisis, after which as rapidly it 
 
 1 Of this, however, the learned appear latterly to have 
 doubted; for, in a pirated edition of Buchan’s “ Domestic 
 Medicine,” which I once sa-" T in the hands of a farmer’s wife, 
 who was studying it for the benefit of her health, the doctor was 
 made to caution his readers against taking more than “ twenty- 
 five ounces ” of laudanum at one dose. The true reading had 
 doubtless been twenty-five drops or minims, which in a gross 
 equation is held equivalent to one grain of average opium ; but 
 opium itself — crude opium — varies enormously in purity and 
 strength ; consequently the tincture prepared from it. And 
 most of the medical connoisseurs whom I have known boiled 
 their opium, so as to cleanse it from gross impurities. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 607 
 
 declines ; that from opium, when once generated, 
 is stationary for eight or ten hours : the first, to 
 borrow a technical distinction from medicine, is a 
 case of acute, the second of chronic, pleasure ; the 
 one is a flickering flame, the other a steady and 
 equable glow. But the main distinction lies in this — 
 that, whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, 
 opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), 
 introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, 
 legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his 
 self-possession ; opium sustains and reinforces it. 
 Wine unsettles the judgment, and gives a preter- 
 natural brightness and a vivid exaltation to the con- 
 tempts and the admirations, to the loves and the 
 hatreds, of the drinker ; opium, on the contrary, 
 communicates serenity and equipose to all the facul- 
 ties, active or passive ; and, with respect to the temper 
 and moral feelings in general, it gives simply that 
 sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judg- 
 ment, and which would probably always accompany a 
 bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. 
 Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expan- 
 sion to the heart and the benevolent affections ; but, 
 then, with this remarkable difference, that, in the 
 sudden development of kindheartedness which accom- 
 panies inebriation, there is always more or less of a 
 maudlin and a transitory character, which exposes it 
 to the contempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, 
 swear eternal friendship, and shed tears— no mortal 
 knows why ; and the animal nature is clearly upper- 
 most. But the expansion of the benigner feelings 
 incident to opium is no febrile access, no fugitive 
 paroxysm ; it is a healthy restoration to that state 
 which the mind would naturally recover upon the 
 removal of any deep-seated irritation from pain that 
 had disturbed and quarrelled with the impulses of a 
 heart originally just and good. True it is that even 
 wine up to a certain point, and with certain men, 
 rather tends to exalt and to steady the intellect ; I 
 myself, who have never been a great wine-drinker, 
 used to find that half-a-dozen glasses of wine advan- 
 
6o8 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 tageously affected the faculties, brightened and inten- 
 sified the consciousness, and gave to the mind a 
 feeling of being “ponderibus librata suis” ; and cer- 
 tainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language, 
 of any man, that he is disguised in liquor; for, on the 
 contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety, and 
 exceedingly disguised; and it is when they are drinking 
 that men display themselves in their true complexion 
 of character ; which surely is not disguising them- 
 selves. But still, wine constantly leads a man to the 
 brink of absurdity and extravagance ; and, beyond a 
 certain point, it is sure to volatilise and to disperse 
 the intellectual energies ; whereas opium alway seems 
 to compose what had been agitated, and to concen- 
 trate what had been distracted. In short, to sum up 
 all in one word, a man who is inebriated, or tending 
 to inebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition 
 which calls up into supremacy the merely human, too 
 often the brutal, part of his nature ; but the opium- 
 eater (I speak of him simply as such, and assume 
 that he is in a normal state of health) feels that the 
 diviner part of his nature is paramount — that is, the 
 moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity, 
 and high over all the great light of the majestic 
 intellect* 
 
 This is the doctrine of the true church on the 
 subject of opium : of which church I acknowledge 
 myself to be the Pope (consequently infallible), and 
 self-appointed legate a latere to all degrees of latitude 
 and longitude. But then it is to be recollected that 
 I speak from the ground of a large and profound 
 personal experience, whereas most of the unscientific 1 
 
 1 Amongst the great herd of travellers, &c., who show suffi- 
 ciently by their thoughtlessness that they never held any 
 intercourse with opium, I must caution my readers specially 
 against the brilliant author of “ Anastasius.” This gentleman, 
 whose wit would lead one to presume him an opium-eater, 
 has made it impossible to consider him in that character, 
 from the grievous misrepresentation which he has given of its 
 -effects at pages 2x5-217 of vol. i. Upon consideration, it must 
 appear such to the author himself ; for, waiving the errors I 
 have insisted on in the text, which (and others) are adopted 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 
 
 609 
 
 authors who have at all treated of opium, and even 
 of those who have written professionally on the 
 materia medica , make it evident, by the horror they 
 express of it, that their experimental knowledge of 
 its action is none at all. I will, however, candidly 
 acknowledge that I have met with one person who 
 bore evidence to its intoxicating power, such as 
 staggered my own incredulity ; for he was a surgeon, 
 and had himself taken opium largely for a most 
 miserable affection (past all hope of cure) seated 
 in one particular organ. This affection was a subtle 
 inflammation, not acute, but chronic ; and with this 
 he fought for more (I believe) than twenty years ; 
 fought victoriously, if victory it were, to make life 
 supportable for himself, and during all that time to 
 maintain in respectability a wife and a family of 
 children altogether dependent on him . 1 I happened 
 to say to him, that his enemies (as I had heard) 
 charged him with talking nonsense on politics, and 
 that his friends apologised for him, by suggesting 
 that he was constantly in a state of intoxication from 
 
 in the fullest manner, he will himself admit that an old gentle- 
 man, “ with a snow-white beard,” who eats “ample doses of 
 opium,” and is yet able to deliver what is meant and received 
 as very weighty counsel on the bad effects of that practice, is 
 but an indifferent evidence that opium either kills people pre- 
 maturely, or sends them into a madhouse. But, for my part, 
 I see into this old gentleman and his motives : the fact is, 
 he was enamoured of “the little golden receptacle of the per- 
 nicious drug ” which Anastasius carried about him ; and no 
 way of obtaining it so safe and so feasible occurred as that 
 of frightening its owner out of his wits. This commentary 
 throws a new light upon the case, and greatly improves it as 
 a story ; for the old gentleman’s speech, as a lecture on phar- 
 macy, is absurd ; but, considered as a hoax on Anastasius, it 
 reads excellently. 
 
 1 This surgeon it was who first made me aware of the dan- 
 gerous variability in opium as to strength under the shifting 
 proportions of its combination with alien impurities. Naturally, 
 as a man professionally alive to the danger of creating any 
 artificial need of opium beyond what the anguish of his malady 
 at any rate demanded, trembling every hour on behalf of his 
 poor children, lest, by any indiscretion of his own, he should 
 precipitate the crisis of his disorder, he saw the necessity of 
 reducing the daily dose to a minimum . But to do this he 
 
 U 
 
6lO CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 opium. Now, the accusation, said I, is not prima 
 facie an absurd one ; but the defence is. To my 
 surprise, however, he insisted that both his enemies 
 and his friends were in the right. “ I will maintain,” 
 said he, “that I do talk nonsense; and, secondly, 
 I will maintain that I do not talk nonsense upon 
 principle, or with any view to profit, but solely and 
 simply,” said he — “solely and simply — solely and 
 simply (repeating it three times over) because I 
 am drunk with opium; and that daily.” I replied 
 that, as to the allegation of his enemies, as it seemed 
 to be established upon such respectable testimony, 
 seeing that the three parties concerned all agreed so 
 far, it did not become me to question it; but the 
 defence set up I must demur to. He proceeded to 
 discuss the matter, and to lay down his reasons : but 
 it seemed to me so impolite to pursue an argument 
 which must have presumed a man mistaken in a 
 point belonging to his own profession, that I did not 
 press him, even when his course of argument seemed 
 open to objection ; not to mention that a man who 
 
 must first obtain the means of measuring the quantities of 
 opium ; not the apparent quantities as determined by weighing, 
 but the virtual quantities after allowing for the alloy or 
 varying amounts of impurity. This, however, was a visionary 
 problem. To allow for it was simply, impossible. The prob- 
 lem, therefore, changed its character. Not to measure the 
 impurities was the object; for, whilst entangled with the 
 operative and efficient parts of the opium, they could not be 
 measured. To separate and eliminate the impure (or inert) 
 parts, this was now the object. And this was effected finally 
 by a particular mode of boiling the opium. That done, the 
 residuum became equable in strength ; and the daily doses 
 could be nicely adjusted. About 18 grains formed his daily 
 ration for many years. This, upon the common hospital 
 equation, expresses 18 times 25 drops of laudanum. But, 
 since 25 is^ 1 ^ 9 , therefore 18 times one quarter of a hundred 
 is = one quarter of 1800, and that, I suppose, is 450. So much 
 this surgeon averaged upon each day for about twenty years. 
 Then suddenly began a fiercer stage of the anguish from his 
 disease. But then, also, the fight was finished, and the victory 
 was won. All duties were fulfilled : his children prosperously 
 launched in life ; and death, which to himself was becoming 
 daily more necessary as a relief from torment, now fell in- 
 juriously upon nobody. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 6ll 
 
 talks nonsense, even though “ with no view to profit,” 
 is not altogether the most agreeable respondent in 
 a dispute. I confess, however, that the authority of 
 a surgeon, and one who was reputed a good one, 
 may seem a weighty one to my prejudice; but still 
 I must plead my experience, which was greater than 
 his greatest by more than seven thousand drops 
 a day ; and, though it was not possible to suppose 
 a medical man unacquainted with the characteristic 
 symptoms of vinous intoxication, yet it struck me 
 that he might proceed on a logical error of using 
 the word intoxication with too careless a latitude, 
 extending it generically to all modes of nervous ex- 
 citement, instead of restricting it to one special 
 quality of pleasurable elevation, distinguished by 
 well-known symptoms, and connected with ten- 
 dencies not to be evaded. Two of these tendencies 
 I will mention as diagnostic, or characteristic and 
 inseparable marks of ordinary alcoholic intoxication, 
 but which no excess in the use of opium ever 
 develops. One is the loss of self-command, in 
 relation to all one’s acts and purposes, which steals 
 gradually (though with varying degrees of speed) 
 over all persons indiscriminately when indulging in 
 wine or distilled liquors beyond a certain limit. The 
 tongue and other organs become unmanageable : the 
 intoxicated man speaks inarticulately ; and, with re- 
 gard to certain words, makes efforts ludicrously 
 earnest, yet oftentimes unavailing, to utter them. 
 The eyes are bewildered, and see double; grasping 
 too little, and too much. The hand aims awry. 
 The legs stumble, and lose their power of concurrent 
 action. To this result all people tend, though by 
 varying rates of acceleration. Secondly, as another 
 characteristic, it may be noticed that in alcoholic 
 intoxication the movement is. always along a kind 
 of arch ; the drinker rises through continual ascents 
 to a summit or apex, from which he descends through 
 corresponding steps of declension. There is a crown- 
 ing point in the movement upwards, which once 
 attained cannot be renewed : and it is the blind, 
 
612 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 unconscious, but always unsuccessful effort of the 
 obstinate drinker to restore this supreme altitude 
 of enjoyment which tempts him into excesses that 
 become dangerous. After reaching this acme of 
 genial pleasure, it is a mere necessity of the case 
 to sink through corresponding stages of collapse. 
 Some people have maintained, in my hearing, that 
 they had been drunk upon green tea ; and a medical 
 student in London, for whose knowledge in his pro- 
 fession I have reason to feel great respect, assured 
 me, the other day, that a patient, in recovering from 
 an illness, had got drunk on a beef-steak. All turns, 
 in fact, upon a rigorous definition of intoxication. 
 
 Having dwelt so much on this first and leading 
 error in respect to opium, I shall notice briefly a 
 second and a third ; which are, that the elevation 
 of spirits produced by opium is necessarily followed 
 by a proportionate depression, and that the natural 
 and even immediate consequence of opium is torpor 
 and stagnation, animal as well as mental. The first 
 of these errors I shall content myself with simply 
 denying ; assuring my reader that, for ten years 
 during which I took opium not regularly but inter- 
 mittingly, the day succeeding to that on which I 
 allowed myself this luxury was always a day of 
 unusually good spirits. 
 
 With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or 
 rather (if we were to credit the numerous pictures 
 of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany, the practice 
 of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium 
 is classed under the head of narcotics, and some 
 such effect it may produce in the end; but the 
 primary effects of opium are always, and in the 
 highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system. 
 This first stage of its action always lasted with me, 
 during my novitiate, .for upwards of eight hours ; so 
 that it must be the fault of the opium-eater himself 
 if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose as 
 that the whole weight of its narcotic influence may 
 descend upon his sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it 
 seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many eques- 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 613 
 
 trian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. 
 But, that the reader may judge of the degree in which 
 opium is likely to stupefy the faculties of an English- 
 man, I shall (by way of treating the question illus- 
 tratively, rather than argumentatively) describe the 
 way in which I myself often passed an opium evening 
 in London during the period between 1804 and 1812. 
 It will be seen that at least opium did not move me 
 to seek solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, 
 or the torpid state of self-involution ascribed to the 
 Turks. I give this account at the risk of being pro- 
 nounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary ; but I re- 
 gard that little.. I must desire my reader to bear in 
 mind that I was a hard student, and at severe studies 
 for all the rest of my time ; and certainly I had 
 a right occasionally to relaxations as well as other 
 people. 
 
 The late Duke of Norfolk 1 used to say, “Next 
 Monday, wind and weather permitting, I purpose to 
 be drunk ” ; and in like manner I used to fix before- 
 hand how often within a given time, when, and with 
 what accessory circumstances of festal joy, I would 
 commit a debauch of opium. This was seldom more 
 than once in three weeks ; for at that time I could 
 not have ventured to call every day (as afterwards 
 I did) for “ a glass of laudanum negus , warm , and 
 without sugar ” No ; once in three weeks sufficed ; 
 and the time selected was either a Tuesday or a 
 Saturday night ; my reason for which was this : 
 Tuesday and Saturday were for many years the 
 regular nights of performance at the King’s Theatre 
 
 1 “ The late Duke of Norfolk" : — My authority was the late 
 Sir George Beaumont, an old familiar acquaintance of the 
 duke’s. But such expressions are always liable to grievous 
 misapplication. By “the late” duke Sir George meant that 
 duke once so well known to the nation as the partisan friend 
 of Fox, Burke, Sheridan, &c., at the era of the great French 
 Revolution in 1789-93. Since his time, I believe there have 
 been three generations of ducal Howards : who are always 
 interesting to the English nation : first, from the bloody his- 
 toric traditions surrounding their great house ; secondly, from 
 the fact of their being at the head of the British Peerage. 
 
614 confessions of an opium-eater 
 
 (or Opera House) ; and there it was in those times 
 that Grassini sang ; and her voice (the richest of 
 contraltos) was delightful to me beyond all that I 
 had ever heard. Yes; or have since heard; or ever 
 shall hear. I know not what may be the state of 
 the opera-house now, having never been within its 
 walls for seven or eight years ; but at that time it 
 was by much the most pleasant place of resort in 
 London for passing an evening . 1 Half-a-guinea ad- 
 mitted you to the pit, under the troublesome con- 
 dition, however, of being en grande tenue. But to 
 the gallery five shillings admitted you ; and that 
 gallery was subject to far less annoyance than the 
 pit of most theatres. The orchestra was distinguished 
 by its sweet and melodious grandeur from all English 
 orchestras; the composition of which, I confess, is 
 not acceptable to my ear, from the predominance of 
 the clangorous instruments, and in some instances 
 from the tyranny of the violin. Thrilling was the 
 pleasure with which almost always I heard this angelic 
 Grassini. Shivering with expectation I sat, when the 
 time drew near for her golden epiphany; shivering 
 I rose from my seat, incapable of rest, when that 
 heavenly and harp-like voice sang its own victorious 
 welcome in its preclusive threttanelo — threttdnelo 2 
 (OperrdveXix) — OperraveXto)). The choruses were divine 
 
 1 I trust that my reader has not been so inattentive to the 
 windings of my narrative as to fancy me speaking here of the 
 Brown-Brunell and Pyment period. Naturally I had no money 
 disposable at that period for the opera. I am speaking here 
 of years stretching far beyond those boyish scenes — interludes 
 in my Oxford life, or long after Oxford. 
 
 2 ‘ ‘ Threttanello — threttanello ” : — The beautiful representa- 
 tive echo by which Aristophanes expresses the sound of the 
 Grecian phorminx , or of some other instrument, which con- 
 jecturally has been shown most to resemble our modern 
 European harp. In the case of ancient Hebrew instruments 
 used in the temple service, random and idle must be all the 
 guesses through the Greek Septuagint or the Latin Vulgate to 
 identify any one of them. But as to Grecian instruments the 
 case is different ; always there is a remote chance of digging 
 up some marble sculpture of orchestral appurtenances and 
 properties. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 615 
 
 to hear ; and, when Grassini 1 appeared in some 
 interlude, as she often did, and poured forth her 
 passionate soul as Andromache at the tomb of 
 Elector, &c., I question whether any Turk, of all 
 that ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, can 
 have had half the pleasure I had. But, indeed, I 
 honour the barbarians too much by supposing them 
 capable of any pleasures approaching to the intel- 
 lectual ones of an Englishman. For music is an 
 intellectual or a sensual pleasure, according to the 
 temperament of him who hears it. And, by-the-bye, 
 with the exception of the fine extravaganza on that 
 subject in “ Twelfth Night,” I do not recollect more 
 than one thing said adequately on the subject of 
 music in all literature. It is a passage in the Religio 
 Medici 2 of Sir T. Browne, and, though chiefly 
 remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philosophic 
 value, inasmuch as it points to the true theory of 
 musical effects. The mistake of most people is, to 
 suppose that it is by the ear they communicate with 
 music, and therefore that they are purely passive as 
 to its effects. But this is not so ; it is by the reaction 
 of the mind upon the notices of the ear (the matter 
 coming by the senses, the form from the mind) that 
 the pleasure is constructed ; and therefore it is that 
 people of equally good ear differ so much in this 
 point from one another. Now opium, by greatly in- 
 creasing the activity of the mind, generally increases, 
 of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by 
 
 1 Yet all things change : this same Grassini, whom once I 
 adored, afterwards, when gorged with English gold, went off 
 to Paris ; and, when I heard on what terms she lived with a 
 man so unmagnanimous as Napoleon, I came to hate her. 
 Did I complain of any man’s hating England, or teaching a 
 woman to hate her benefactress? Not at all; but simply of 
 his adopting at second-hand the malice of a jealous nation, 
 with which originally he could have had no sincere sympathy. 
 Hate us, if you please ; but not sycophantishly, by way of 
 paying court to others. 
 
 2 I have not the book at this moment to consult ; but I think 
 the passage begins, “ And even that tavern music, which makes 
 one man merry, another mad, in me strikes a deep fit of 
 devotion,” &c. 
 
6l6 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 which we are able to construct out of the raw material 
 of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. 
 “ But,” says a friend, “a succession of musical sounds 
 is to me like a collection of Arabic characters : I can 
 attach no ideas to them.” Ideas ! my dear friend ! 
 there is no occasion for them ; all that class of ideas 
 which can be available in such a case has a language 
 of representative feelings. But this is a subject foreign 
 to my present purposes ; it is sufficient to say that 
 a chorus, &c., of elaborate harmony displayed before 
 me, as in a piece of arras-work, the whole of my 
 past life — not as if recalled by an act of memory, 
 but as if present and incarnated in the music ; no 
 longer painful to dwell upon, but the detail of its 
 incidents removed, or blended in some hazy abstrac- 
 tion, and its passions exalted, spiritualised, and sub- 
 limed. All this was to be had for five shillings — 
 that being the price of admission to the gallery ; or, 
 if a man preferred the high-bred society of the pit, 
 even this might be had for half-a-guinea ; or, in fact, 
 for half-a-crown less, by purchasing beforehand a 
 ticket at the music shops. And, over and above 
 the music of the stage and the orchestra, I had all 
 around me, in the intervals of the performance, the 
 music of the Italian language talked by Italian women 
 — for the gallery was usually crowded with Italians — 
 and I listened with a pleasure such as that with 
 which Weld, the traveller, lay and listened, in Canada, 
 to the sweet laughter of Indian women : for, the less 
 you understand of a language, the more sensible you 
 are to the melody or harshness of its sounds. For 
 such a purpose, therefore, it was an advantage to 
 me that in those days I was a poor Italian scholar, 
 reading it but little, and not speaking it at all, nor 
 understanding a tenth part of what I heard spoken. 
 
 These were my opera pleasures ; but another 
 pleasure I had, which, as it could be had only on 
 a Saturday night, occasionally struggled with my 
 love of the opera ; for, in those years, Tuesday and 
 Saturday were the regular opera nights. On this 
 subject I am afraid I shall be rather obscure, but, I 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM biy 
 
 can assure the reader, not at all more so than Marinus 
 in his life of Proclus, or many other biographers and 
 autobiographers of fair reputation. This pleasure, I 
 have said, was to be had only on a Saturday night. 
 What, then, was Saturday night to me more than any 
 other night ? I had no labours that I rested from ; 
 no wages to receive; what needed I to care for 
 Saturday night, more than as it was a summons to 
 hear Grassini ? True, most logical reader ; what 
 thou sayest is, and ever will be, unanswerable. 
 And yet so it was that, whereas different men throw 
 their feelings into different channels, and most men 
 are apt to show their interest in the concerns of the 
 poor chiefly by sympathy with their distresses and 
 sorrows, I at that time was disposed to express mine 
 by sympathising with their pleasures. The pains of 
 poverty I had lately seen too much of — more than I 
 wished to remember; but the pleasures of the poor, 
 their hopes, their consolations of spirit, and their 
 restings from toil, can never become oppressive to 
 contemplate. Now, Saturday night is the season for 
 the chief regular and periodic return of rest to the 
 poor, and to all that live by bodily labour ; in this 
 point the most hostile sects unite, and acknowledge 
 a common link of brotherhood : almost all Christen- 
 dom rests from its labours. It is a rest introductory 
 to another rest, and divided by a whole day and two 
 nights from the renewal of toil. On this account I 
 feel always on a Saturday night as though I also were 
 released from some yoke of bondage, had some wages 
 to receive, and some luxury of repose to enjoy. For 
 the sake, therefore, of witnessing, upon as large a 
 scale as possible, a spectacle with which my sympathy 
 was so entire, I used often, on Saturday nights, after 
 I had taken opium, to wander forth, without much 
 regarding the direction or the distance, to all the 
 markets, and other parts of London, whither the poor 
 resort on a Saturday night for laying out their wages. 
 Many a family party, consisting of a man, his wife, 
 and sometimes one or two of their children, have I 
 listened to, as they stood consulting on their ways 
 
 U 2 
 
6l8 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 and means, or the strength of their exchequer, or 
 the price of household articles. Gradually I became 
 familiar with their wishes, their difficulties, and their 
 opinions. Sometimes there might be heard murmurs 
 of discontent ; but far oftener expressions on the 
 countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, of hope, 
 and of reconciliation to their lot. Generally speaking, 
 the impression left upon my mind was that the poor 
 are practically more philosophic than the rich ; that 
 they show a more ready and cheerful submission to 
 what they consider as irremediable evils or irrepar- 
 able losses. Whenever I saw occasion, or could do 
 it without appearing to be intrusive, I joined their 
 parties, and gave my opinion upon the matter in 
 discussion, which, if not always judicious, was always 
 received indulgently. If wages were a little higher, 
 or were expected to be so — if the quartern loaf were 
 a little lower, or it was reported that onions and 
 butter were falling — I was glad ; yet, if the contrary 
 were true, I drew from opium some means of con- 
 solation. For opium (like the bee, that extracts its 
 materials indiscriminately from roses and from the 
 soot 1 of chimneys) can overrule all feelings into a 
 compliance with the master-key. Some of these 
 rambles led me to great distances ; for an opium- 
 eater is too happy to observe the motion of time. 
 And sometimes, in my attempts to steer homewards, 
 upon nautical principles, by fixing my eye on the 
 pole-star, and seeking ambitiously for a north-west 
 passage, instead of circumnavigating all the capes 
 and headlands I had doubled in my outward voyage, 
 I came suddenly upon such knotty problems of alleys, 
 alleys without soundings, such enigmatical entries, 
 
 1 “ Soot ” : — In the large capacious chimneys of the rustic 
 cottages throughout the Lake district you can see up the 
 entire cavity from the seat which you occupy, as an honoured 
 visitor, in the chimney corner. There I used often to hear 
 (though not to see) bees. Their murmuring was audible, 
 though their bodily forms were too small to be visible at that 
 altitude. On inquiry, I found that soot (chiefly from wood and 
 peats) was useful in some stage of their wax or honey manu- 
 facture. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 619 
 
 and such sphinx’s riddles of streets without obvious 
 outlets or thoroughfares, as must baffle the audacity 
 of porters, and confound the intellects of hackney 
 coachmen. I could almost have believed, at times, 
 that I must be the first discoverer of some of these 
 terra incognita , and doubted whether they had yet 
 been laid down in the modern charts of London. 
 Positively, in one line of communication to the south 
 of Holborn for foot passengers (known, I doubt not, 
 to many of my London readers), the road lay through 
 a man’s kitchen ; and, as it was a small kitchen, you 
 needed to steer cautiously, or else you might run 
 foul of the dripping-pan. For all this, however, 
 I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the 
 human face tyrannised over my dreams, and the per- 
 plexities of my steps in London came back and 
 haunted my sleep with the feeling of perplexities, 
 moral or intellectual, that brought confusion to the 
 reason, that brought anguish and remorse to the 
 conscience. 
 
 Thus I have shown, or tried to show, that opium 
 does not of necessity produce inactivity or torpor ; 
 but that, on the contrary, it often led me into 
 markets and theatres. Yet, in candour, I will admit 
 that markets and theatres are not the appropriate 
 haunts of the opium-eater, when in the divinest state 
 incident to his enjoyment. In that state crowds 
 become an oppression to him ; music, even, too 
 sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude and 
 silence, as indispensable conditions of those trances, 
 or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and 
 consummation of what opium can do for human 
 nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too 
 much and to observe too little, and who, upon my 
 first entrance at college, was nearly falling into a deep 
 melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings 
 which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently 
 aware of these tendencies in my own thoughts to do 
 all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like 
 a person who, according to the old Pagan legend, 
 had entered the cave of Trophonius ; and the 
 
620 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 remedies I sought were to force myself into society, 
 and to keep my understanding in continual activity 
 upon subtleties of philosophic speculation. But for 
 these remedies, I should certainly have become 
 hypochondriacally melancholy. In after years, how- 
 ever, when my cheerfulness was more fully re- 
 established, I yielded to my natural inclination for 
 a solitary life. At that time I often fell into such 
 reveries after taking opium ; and many a time it 
 has happened to me on a summer night — when I 
 have been seated at an open window, from which 
 I could overlook the sea at a mile below me, and 
 could at the same time command a view of some 
 great town standing on a different radius of my 
 circular prospect, but at nearly the same distance — - 
 that from sunset to sunrise, all through the hours 
 of night, I have continued motionless, as if frozen, 
 without consciousness of myself as of an object 
 anywise distinct from the multiform scene which I 
 contemplated from above. Such a scene in all its 
 elements was not unfrequently realised for me on 
 the gentle eminence of Everton. Obliquely to the 
 left lay the many-languaged town of Liverpool ; 
 obliquely to the right, the multitudinous sea. The 
 scene itself was somewhat typical of what took place 
 in such a reverie. The town of Liverpool represented 
 the earth, with its sorrows and its graves left behind, 
 yet not out of sight, nor wholly forgotten. The 
 ocean, in everlasting but gentle agitation, yet brooded 
 over by dove-like calm, might not unfitly typify the 
 mind, and the mood which then swayed it. For 
 it seemed to me as if then first I stood at a distance 
 aloof from the uproar of life ; as if the tumult, the 
 fever, and the strife, were suspended ; a respite were 
 granted from the secret burdens of the heart, — some 
 sabbath of repose, some resting from human labours. 
 Here were the hopes which bloss'om in the paths 
 of life, reconciled with the peace which is in the 
 grave ; motions of the intellect as unwearied as the 
 heavens, yet for all anxieties a halcyon calm ; tran- 
 quillity that seemed no product of inertia, but as if 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 6?I 
 
 resulting from mighty and equal antagonisms ; infinite 
 activities, infinite repose. 
 
 0 just, subtle, and all-conquering opium ! that, to 
 the hearts of rich and poor alike, for the wounds 
 that will never heal, and for the pangs of grief tJ at 
 “ tempt the spirit to rebel,” bringest an assuagmg 
 balm ; — eloquent opium ! that with thy potent rhetoric 
 stealest away the purposes of wrath, pleadest effec- 
 tually for relenting pity, and through one night’s 
 heavenly sleep callest back to the guilty man the 
 visions of his infancy, and hands washed pure from 
 blood ; — O just and righteous opium ! that to the 
 chancery of dreams summonest, for the triumphs 
 of despairing innocence, false witnesses, and con- 
 foundest perjury, and dost reverse the sentences of 
 unrighteous judges ; — thou buildest upon the bosom 
 of darkness, out of the fantastic imagery of the brain, 
 cities and temples, beyond the art of Phidias and 
 Praxiteles, beyond the splendours of Babylon and 
 Hekatompylos ; 1 and, “ from the anarchy of dream- 
 ing sleep,” callest into sunny light the faces of 
 long-buried beauties, and the blessed household 
 countenances, cleansed from the “ dishonours of the 
 grave.” Thou only givest these gifts to man ; and 
 thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and 
 mighty opium ! 
 
 Courteous, and I hope indulgent, reader, having 
 accompanied me thus far, now let me request you 
 to move onwards for about eight years ; that is to 
 say, from 1804 (when I said that my acquaintance 
 with opium began) to 1812. The years of academic 
 life are now over and gone — almost forgotten ; the 
 student’s cap no longer presses my temples ; if my 
 cap exists at all, it presses those of some youthful 
 scholar, I trust, as happy as myself, and as passionate 
 
 1 i.e., the hundred- gated (from i Karov, hekaton , a hundred, 
 and TnjXrj, fiyle , a gate). This epithet of hundred-gated was 
 applied to the Egyptian Thebes in contradistinction to the 
 €7rrd,7ruXos ( heptapylos , or seven-gated) which designated the 
 Grecian Thebes, within one day’s journey of Athens. 
 
622 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 a lover of knowledge. My gown is, by this time, 
 I dare to say, in the same condition with many 
 thousands of excellent books in the Bodleian, — 
 viz., diligently perused by certain studious moths 
 and worms ; or departed, however (which is all that 
 I know of its fate), to that great reservoir of some- 
 where, to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, tea-pots, 
 tea-kettles, &c., have departed, which occasional 
 resemblances in the present generation of tea-cups, 
 &c., remind me of having once possessed, but of 
 whose departure and final fate I, in common with 
 most gownsmen of either university, could give but 
 an obscure and conjectural history. The persecutions 
 of the chapel bell, sounding its unwelcome summons 
 to matins, interrupts my slumbers no longer; the 
 porter who rang it is dead, and has ceased to disturb 
 anybody ; and I, with many others who suffered 
 much from his tintinnabulous propensities, have 
 now agreed to overlook his errors, and have for- 
 given him. Even with the bell I am now in charity ; 
 it rings, I suppose, as formerly, thrice a day, and 
 cruelly annoys, I doubt not, many worthy gentle- 
 men, and disturbs their peace of mind; but, as to 
 me, in this year 1812, I regard its treacherous voice 
 no longer (treacherous I call it, for, by some refine- 
 ment of malice, it spoke in as sweet and silvery 
 tones as if it had been inviting one to a party) ; its 
 tones have no longer, indeed, power to reach me, 
 let the wind set as favourably as the malice of the 
 bell itself could wish ; for I am two hundred and 
 fifty miles away from it, and buried in the depth of 
 mountains. 
 
 And what am I doing amongst the mountains ? 
 Taking opium. Yes ; but what else ? Why, reader, 
 in 1812, the year we are now arrived at, as well as 
 for some years previous, I have been chiefly study- 
 ing German metaphysics, in the writings of Kant, 
 Fichte, Schelling, & c. And how, and in what 
 
 manner, do I live ? in short, what class or descrip- 
 tion of men do I belong to ? I am at this period 
 ■ — viz., in 1812 — living in a cottage; and with a 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 623 
 
 I single female servant ( honi soil qui mal y flense), who, 
 amongst my neighbours, passes by the name of my 
 
 ■ “ housekeeper.” And, as a scholar and a man of 
 learned education, I may presume to class myself 
 as an unworthy member of that indefinite body called 
 gentlemen . Partly on the ground I have assigned — 
 
 partly because, from having no visible calling or busi- 
 ness, it is rightly judged that I must be living on my 
 private fortune — I am so classed by my neighbours ; 
 and, by the courtesy of modern England, I am 
 usually addressed on letters, &c., Esquire , though 
 having, I fear, in the rigorous construction of heralds, 
 antique or antic, dressed like the knaves of spades 
 or diamonds, but slender pretensions to that dis- 
 tinguished honour; — yes, in popular estimation, I 
 am X. Y. Z., Esquire, but not Justice of the Peace, 
 nor Custos Rotulorum. Am I married? Not yet. 
 And I still take opium ? On Saturday nights. And, 
 perhaps, have taken it unblushingly ever since “ the 
 rainy Sunday,” and “ the stately Pantheon,” and 
 “ the beatific druggist” of 1804? Even so. And 
 how do I find my health after all this opium- 
 eating ? in short, how do I do ? Why, pretty well, 
 I thank you, reader. In fact, if I dared to say the 
 real and simple truth (though, in order to satisfy the 
 theories of some medical men, I ought to be ill), I 
 was never better in my life than in the spring of 
 1812 ; and I hope sincerely that the quantity of claret, 
 port, or “ London particular Madeira,” which, in all 
 probability, you, good reader, have taken, and design 
 to take, for every term of eight years during your 
 natural life, may as little disorder your health as 
 mine was disordered by all the opium I had taken 
 (though in quantity such that I might well have bathed 
 and swum in it) for the eight years between 1804 
 and 1812. Hence you may see again the danger 
 of taking any medical advice from “ Anastasius ” ; 1 
 
 1 “ Anastasius ” ; — The reader of this generation will marvel 
 at these repeated references to “ Anastasius ” : it is now an 
 almost forgotten book, so vast has been the deluge of novel- 
 writing talent, really original and powerful, which has over- 
 
624 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 in divinity, for anything I know, he may be a safe 
 counsellor, but not in medicine. No; it is far 
 better to consult Dr. Buchan, as I did ; for I never 
 forgot that worthy man’s excellent suggestion, and 
 I was “ particularly careful not to take above five- 
 and- twenty ounces of laudanum.” To this modera- 
 tion and temperate use of the article I may ascribe it, 
 I suppose, that as yet at least (that is, in 1812), I am 
 ignorant and unsuspicious of the avenging terrors 
 which opium has in store for those who abuse its 
 long-suffering. At the same time, as yet I had been 
 only a dilettante eater of opium ; even eight years’ 
 practice, with the single precaution of allowing 
 sufficient intervals between every indulgence, has 
 not been sufficient to make opium necessary to me 
 as an article of daily diet. 
 
 But now comes a different era. Move on, then, 
 if you please, reader, to 1813. In the summer of 
 the year we have just quitted I had suffered much 
 in bodily health from distress of mind connected 
 with a melancholy event. This event, being nowise 
 related to the subject now before me, further than 
 through the bodily illness which it produced, I need 
 not more particularly notice. Whether this illness 
 of 1812 had any share in that of 1813, I know not; 
 but so it was that, in the latter year, I was attacked 
 by a most appalling irritation of the stomach, in all 
 respects the same as that which had caused me so 
 much suffering in youth, and accompanied by a 
 revival of all the old dreams. Now, then, it was — 
 viz., in the year 1813 — that I became a regular and 
 confirmed (no longer an intermitting) opium-eater. 
 And here I find myself in a perplexing dilemma. 
 Either, on the one hand, I must exhaust the reader’s 
 patience by such a detail of my malady, and of my 
 struggles with it, as might suffice to establish the 
 
 flowed our literature during the lapse of thirtyrfive years from 
 the publication of these Confessions. “ Anastasius ” was 
 written by the famous and opulent Mr. Hope, and was in 1821 
 a book both of high reputation and of great influence amongst 
 the leading circles of society. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 625 
 
 fact of my inability to wrestle any longer with irrita- 
 tion and constant suffering; or, on the other hand, 
 by passing lightly over this critical part of my story, 
 I must forego the benefit of a stronger impression 
 left on the mind of the reader, and must lay myself 
 open to the misconstruction of having slipped, by 
 the easy and gradual steps of self-indulging persons, 
 from the first to the final stage of opium-eating (a 
 misconstruction to which there will be a lurking 
 predisposition in most readers from my previous 
 acknowledgments). This is the dilemma, the first 
 horn of which is not to be thought of. It remains, 
 then, that I postulate so much as is necessary for 
 my purpose. And let me take as full credit for this 
 as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, at the 
 expense of your patience and my own. Be not so 
 ungenerous as to let me suffer in your good opinion 
 through my own forbearance and regard for 'your 
 comfort. No; believe all that I ask of you — viz., 
 that I could resist no longer — believe it liberally, 
 and as an act of grace, or else in mere prudence ; 
 for, if not, then in my next edition I will make you 
 believe and tremble ; and, a force dlennuyer , by mere 
 dint of pandiculation, vulgarly called yawning, I will 
 terrify all readers of mine from ever again question- 
 ing any postulate that I shall think fit to make. 
 
 This, then, let me repeat : I postulate that, at the 
 time I began to take opium daily, I could not have 
 done otherwise. Whether, indeed, afterwards I might 
 not have succeeded in breaking off the habit, even 
 when it seemed to me that all efforts would be un- 
 availing, and whether many of the innumerable 
 efforts which I did make might not have been 
 carried much further, and my gradual re-conquests 
 of lost ground might not have been followed up 
 much more energetically — these are questions which 
 I must decline. Perhaps I might make out a case 
 of palliation ; but (shall I speak ingenuously ?) I 
 confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I 
 am too much of an Eudaemonist ; I hanker too 
 much after a state of happiness, both for myself and 
 
626 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 others ; I cannot face misery, whether my own or 
 not, with an eye of sufficient firmness, and am little 
 capable of encountering present pain for the sake of 
 any reversionary benefit. On some other matters, I 
 can agree with the gentlemen of The Porch 1 at 
 Manchester in affecting the Stoic philosophy ; but 
 not in this. Here I take the liberty of an Eclectic 
 philosopher, and I look out for some courteous and 
 considerate sect that will condescend more to the 
 infirm condition of an opium-eater, — that are pleasant 
 men and courteous, such as Chaucer describes, to 
 hear confession or to give absolution, and will show 
 so ne conscience in the penances they inflict, or the 
 efforts of abstinence they exact from poor sinners 
 like myself. An inhuman moralist I can no more 
 endure, in my nervous state, than opium that has 
 not been boiled. At any rate, he who summons me 
 to send out a large freight of self-denial and mortifi- 
 cation upon any cruising voyage of moral improve- 
 ment must make it clear to my understanding that 
 the concern is a hopeful one. At my time of life 
 (six-and-thirty years of age), it cannot be supposed 
 that I have much energy to spare ; in fact, I find it 
 all little enough for the intellectual labours I have 
 on my hands ; and, therefore, let no man expect 
 to frighten me, by a few hard words, into embark- 
 ing any part of it upon desperate adventures of 
 morality. 
 
 Desperate or not, however, the issue of the 
 struggle in 1813 was what I have mentioned; and 
 from this date the reader is to consider me as a 
 regular and confirmed opium-eater, of whom to ask 
 whether on any particular day he had or had not 
 taken opium would be to ask whether his lungs 
 had performed respiration, or the heart fulfilled its 
 
 1 A handsome news-room, of which I was very courteously 
 made free, in passing through Manchester, by several gentle- 
 men of that place, is called either The Porch or The Portico , 
 which in Greek is the Stoa; from which I, a stranger in Man- 
 chester, inferred that the subscribers meant to profess them- 
 selves Stoics, or followers of Zeno. But I have been since 
 assured that this is a mistake. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 627 
 
 functions. Now, then, reader, you understand what 
 I am ; and you are by this time aware that no old 
 gentleman, “ with a snow-white beard,” will have any 
 chance of persuading me (like Anastasius) to sur- 
 render “ the little golden receptacle of the pernicious 
 drug.” No ; I give notice to all, whether moralists 
 or surgeons, that, whatever be their pretensions and 
 skill in their respective lines of practice, they must 
 not hope for any countenance from me, if they think 
 to begin by any savage proposition for a Lent or 
 Ramadan of abstinence from opium. This being 
 fully understood between us, we shall in future sail 
 before the wind. Now, then, reader, from the year 
 1813, where all this time we have been sitting down 
 and loitering, rise up, if you please ; walk forward 
 about three years more ; draw up the curtain, and 
 you shall see me in a new character. 
 
 If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he 
 would tell us what had been the happiest day in his 
 life, and the why and the wherefore, I suppose that 
 we should all cry out, Hear him ! hear him ! As to 
 the happiest day, that must be very difficult for any 
 wise man to assign ; because any event that could 
 occupy so distinguished a place in a man’s retrospect 
 of life, or be entitled to have shed a special, separate, 
 and supreme felicity on any one day, ought to be 
 of such an enduring character as that (accidents 
 apart) it should have continued to shed the same 
 felicity, or one not distinguishably less, on very 
 many years together. To the happiest lustrum , 
 however, or even to the happiest year , a man may 
 perhaps allowably point without discountenance 
 from wisdom. This year, in my case, reader, was 
 the one which we have now reached; though it 
 stood, I confess, as a parenthesis between years of a 
 gloomier character. It was a year of brilliant water 
 (to speak after the manner of jewellers), set, as it 
 were, and insulated, in the gloomy umbrage of 
 opium. Strange as it may sound, I had a little 
 before this time descended suddenly, and without 
 any considerable effort, from three hundred and 
 
628 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 twenty grains of opium (that is, eight 1 thousand 
 drops of laudanum) per day, to forty grains, or one- 
 eighth part. Instantaneously, and as if by magic, 
 the cloud of profoundest melancholy w*hich rested 
 upon my brain, like some black vapours that I 
 have seen roll away from the summit of a mountain, 
 drew off in one week ; passed away with its murky 
 banners as simultaneously as a ship that has been 
 stranded, and is floated off by a spring-tide, 
 
 4 4 That moveth altogether, if it move at all.” 
 
 Now, then, I was again happy : I now took only 
 one thousand drops of laudanum per day — and what 
 was that? A latter spring had come to close up 
 the season of youth. My brain performed its func- 
 tions as healthily as ever before. I read Kant 
 again ; and again I understood him, or fancied that 
 I did. Again my feelings of pleasure expanded 
 themselves to all around me ; and, if any man from 
 Oxford or Cambridge, or from neither, had been 
 announced to me in my unpretending cottage, I 
 should have welcomed him with as sumptuous a 
 reception as so poor a man could offer. Whatever 
 else might be wanting to a wise man’s happiness, of 
 laudanum I would have given him as much as he 
 wished, and in a silver-gilt, if not golden, cup. And, 
 by the way, now that I speak of giving laudanum 
 away, I remember about this time a little incident, 
 which I mention because, trifling as it was, the 
 reader will soon meet it again in my dreams, which 
 it influenced more fearfully than could be imagined. 
 
 1 I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equivalent 
 to one grain of opium ; which, I believe, is the common esti- 
 mate. However, as both may be considered variable quantities 
 (the crude opium varying much in strength, and the tincture 
 still more), I suppose that no infinitesimal accuracy can be had 
 in such a calculation. Tea-spoons vary as much in size as 
 opium in strength. Small ones hold about one hundred drops ; 
 so that eight thousand drops, which obviously read into eighty 
 hundred drops, fill a small tea-spoon eighty times. But large 
 modern tea-spoons hold very much more. Some even approach 
 in their capacity to dessert-spoons. The reader sees how much 
 I kept within Dr. Buchan’s indulgent allowance. 
 
* HE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 629 
 
 One day a Malay knocked at my door. What busi- 
 ness a Malay could have to transact amongst the 
 recesses of English mountains is not my business to 
 conjecture; but possibly he was on his road to a 
 seaport — viz., Whitehaven, Workington, &c. — about 
 forty miles distant . 1 
 
 The servant who opened the door to him was a 
 young girl, born and bred amongst the mountains, 
 who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any sort : 
 his turban, therefore, confounded her not a little ; 
 and, as it turned out that his knowledge of English 
 was exactly commensurate with hers of Malay, there 
 seemed to be an impassable gulf fixed between all 
 communication of ideas, if either party had happened 
 to possess any. In this dilemma, the girl, recollecting 
 the reputed learning of her master (and, doubtless, 
 giving me credit for a knowledge of all the languages 
 of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of the lunar 
 ones), came and gave me to understand that there 
 was a sort of demon below, whom she clearly ima- 
 gined that my art could exorcise from the house. 
 The group which presented itself, arranged as it was 
 by accident, though not very elaborate, took hold of 
 my fancy and my eye more powerfully than any of 
 the statuesque attitudes or groups exhibited in the 
 ballets at the opera-house, though so ostentatiously 
 
 1 Between the seafaring populations on the coast of Lan- 
 cashire and the corresponding populations on the coast of 
 Cumberland (such as Ravenglass, Whitehaven, Workington, 
 Maryport, &c.) there was a slender current of interchange con- 
 stantly going on, and especially in the days of pressgangs — in 
 part by sea, but in part also by land. By the way, I may men- 
 tion, as an interesting fact which I discovered from an almanack 
 and itinerary, dated about the middle of Queen Elizabeth’s 
 reign (say 1579), that the official route in her days for queen’s 
 messengers to the north of Ireland, and of course for travellers 
 generally, was not (as now) through Grasmere, and thence by 
 St. John’s Vale, Threlkeld (for the short cut by Shoulthwaite 
 Moss was then unknown), Keswick, Cockermouth, and White- 
 haven. Up to St. Oswald’s Church, Gresmere (so it was then 
 spelled, in deference to its Danish original), the route lay as at 
 present. Thence it turned round the lake to the left, crossed 
 Hammerscar, up Little Langdale, across Wrynose to Egremont, 
 and from Egremont to Whitehaven. 
 
630 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 complex. In a cottage kitchen, but not looking so 
 much like that as a rustic hall of entrance, being 
 pannelled on the wall with dark wood, that from age 
 and rubbing resembled oak, stood the Malay, his 
 turban and loose trousers of dingy white relieved 
 upon the dark pannelling ; he had placed himself 
 nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish, though 
 her native spirit of mountain intrepidity contended 
 with the feeling of simple awe which her countenance 
 expressed as she gazed upon the tiger-cat before her. 
 A more striking picture there could not be imagined 
 than the beautiful English face of the girl , 1 and its 
 exquisite bloom, together with her erect and inde- 
 pendent attitude, contrasted with the sallow and 
 bilious skin of the Malay, veneered with mahogany 
 tints by climate and marine air, his small, fierce, 
 restless eyes, thin lips, slavish gestures and adora- 
 tions. Half hidden by the ferocious-looking Malay, 
 was a little child from a neighbouring cottage, who 
 had crept in after him, and was now in the act of 
 reverting its head and gazing upwards at the turban 
 and the fiery eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand 
 he caught at the dress of the lovely girl for pro- 
 tection. 
 
 My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not 
 
 1 This girl, Barbara Lewthwaite, was already at that time a 
 person of some poetic distinction, being (unconsciously to her- 
 self) the chief speaker in a little pastoral poem of Wordsworth’s. 
 That she was really beautiful, and not merely so described by 
 me for the sake of improving the picturesque effect, the reader 
 will judge from this line in the poem, written perhaps ten years 
 earlier, when Barbara might be six years old : — 
 
 “ ’Twas little Barbara Lewthwaite, a child of beauty rare ! ” 
 
 This, coming from William Wordsworth, both a fastidious judge 
 and a truth-speaker of the severest literality, argues some real 
 pretensions to beauty, or real at that time. But it is notorious 
 that, in the anthologies of earth, through all her zones, one 
 flower beyond every other is liable to change, which flower is 
 the countenance of woman. Whether in his fine stanzas upon 
 “ Mutability,” where the most pathetic instances of this earthly 
 doom are solemnly arrayed, Spenser has dwelt sufficiently upon 
 this, the saddest of all, I do not remember. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 631 
 
 remarkably extensive, being, indeed, confined to two 
 words — the Arabic word for barley, and the Turkish 
 for opium ( madjoon ), which I have learned from 
 “ Anastasius.” And, as I had neither a Malay 
 dictionary, nor even Adelung’s “ Mithridates,” which 
 might have helped me to a few words, I addressed 
 him in some lines from the Iliad ; considering 
 that, of such languages as I possessed, the Greek, in 
 point of longitude, came geographically nearest to an 
 Oriental one. He worshipped me in a devout manner, 
 and replied in what I suppose to have been Malay. 
 In this way I saved my reputation as a linguist with 
 my neighbours ; for the Malay had no means of be- 
 traying the secret. He lay down upon the floor for 
 about an hour, and then pursued his journey. On 
 his departure, I presented him, inter alia , with a 
 piece of opium. To him, as a native of the East, I 
 could have no doubt that opium was not less familiar 
 than his daily bread ; and the expression of his face 
 . convinced me that it was. Nevertheless, I was struck 
 with some little consternation when I saw him sud- 
 denly raise his hand to his mouth, and bolt the whole, 
 divided into three pieces, at one mouthful. The 
 quantity was enough to kill some half-dozen dragoons, 
 together with their horses, supposing neither bipeds 
 nor quadrupeds to be regularly trained opium-eaters. 
 I felt some alarm for the poor creature ; but what 
 could be done ? I had given him the opium in pure 
 compassion for his solitary life, since, if he had tra- 
 velled on foot from London, it must be nearly three 
 weeks since he could have exchanged a thought with 
 any human being. Ought I to have violated the laws 
 of hospitality by having him seized and drenched with 
 an emetic, thus frightening him into a notion that we 
 were going to sacrifice him to some English idol ? No : 
 there was clearly no help for it. The mischief, if any, 
 was done. He took his leave, and for some days I felt 
 anxious ; but, as I never heard of any Makiy, or of any 
 man in a turban, being found dead on any part of the 
 very slenderly peopled road between Grasmere and 
 Whitehaven, I became satisfied that he was familiar 
 
632 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 with opium , 1 and that I must doubtless have done 
 him the service I designed, by giving him one night 
 of respite from the pains of wandering. 
 
 This incident I have digressed to mention, because 
 this Malay (partly from the picturesque exhibition he 
 assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected 
 with his image for some days) fastened afterwards 
 upon my fancy, and through that upon my dreams, 
 bringing with him other Malays worse than himself, 
 that ran “a-muck ” 2 at me, and led me into a world 
 of nocturnal troubles. But, to quit this episode, and 
 to return to my intercalary year of happiness. I have 
 already said that, on a subject so important to us all 
 as happiness, we should listen with pleasure to any 
 man’s experience or experiments, even though he were 
 but a ploughboy, who cannot be supposed to have 
 ploughed very deep in such an intractable soil as that 
 of human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted 
 his researches upon any very enlightened principles. 
 But I, who have taken happiness, both in a solid 
 and a liquid shape, both boiled and unboiled, both 
 Bast Indian and Turkish — who have conducted my 
 experiments upon this interesting subject with a sort 
 of galvanic battery, and have, for the general benefit 
 of the world, inoculated myself, as it were, with the 
 poison of eight thousand drops of laudanum per day 
 (and for the same reason as a French surgeon inocu- 
 lated himself lately with a cancer, an English one 
 twenty years ago with plague, and a third , 3 who was 
 also English, with hydrophobia), I, it will be admitted, 
 
 1 This, however, is not a necessary conclusion ; the varieties 
 of effect produced by opium on different constitutions are in- 
 finite. A London magistrate (Harriott’s 44 Struggles through 
 Life,” vol. iii. p. 391, third edition) has recorded that, on the 
 first occasion of his trying laudanum for the gout, he took 
 FORTY drops, the next night SIXTY, and on the fifth night 
 eighty, without any effect whatever ; and this at an advanced 
 age. 
 
 2 See the common accounts, in any eastern traveller or 
 voyager, of the frantic excesses committed by Malays who 
 have taken opium, or are reduced to desperation by ill luck 
 at gambling. 
 
 3 He was a surgeon at Brighton. 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 
 
 633 
 
 must surely now know what happiness is, if anybody 
 does. And therefore I will here lay down an analysis 
 of happiness ; and, as the most interesting mode of 
 communicating it, I will give it, not didactically, but 
 wrapped up and involved in a picture of. one evening, 
 as I spent every evening during the intercalary year 
 when laudanum, though taken daily, was to me no 
 more than the elixir of pleasure. 
 
 Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley , 1 
 eighteen miles from any town ; no spacious valley, 
 but about two miles long by three quarters of a 
 mile in average width, — the benefit of which pro- 
 vision is that all the families resident within its 
 circuit will compose, as it were, one larger house- 
 hold, personally familiar to your eye, and more or 
 less interesting to your affections. Let the moun- 
 tains be real mountains, between three and four 
 thousand feet high, and the cottage a real cottage, 
 
 1 The cottage and the valley concerned in this description 
 were not imaginary : the valley was the lovely one, in those 
 days , of Grasmere ; and the cottage was occupied for more than 
 twenty years by myself, as immediate successor, in the year 
 1809, to Wordsworth. Looking to the limitation here laid 
 down — viz., in those days — the reader will inquire in what way 
 Time can have affected the beauty of Grasmere. Do the West- 
 moreland valleys turn grey-headed ? O reader ! this is a painful 
 memento for some of us ! Thirty years ago, a gang of Vandals 
 (nameless, I thank heaven, to me), for the sake of building a 
 mail-coach road that never would be wanted, carried, at a cost 
 of ^3000 to the defrauded parish, a horrid causeway of sheer 
 granite masonry, for three quarters of a mile, right through the 
 loveliest succession of secret forest-dells and shy recesses of 
 the lake, margined by unrivalled ferns, amongst which was 
 the Osmunda regalis . This sequestered angle of Grasmere is 
 described by Wordsworth, as it unveiled itself on a September 
 morning, in the exquisite poems on the ‘‘Naming of Places.” 
 From this also — viz., this spot of ground, and this magnificent 
 crest (the Osmunda) — was suggested that unique line, the finest 
 independent line through all the records of verse, 
 
 “ Or lady of the lake, 
 
 Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance.” 
 
 Rightly, therefore, did I introduce this limitation. The 
 Grasmere before and after this outrage were two different 
 vales. 
 
634 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATEI 
 
 not (as a witty author has it) “a cottage with a 
 double coach-house ” ; let it be, in fact (for I must 
 abide by the actual scene), a white cottage, em- 
 bowered with flowering shrubs, so chosen as to 
 unfold a succession of flowers upon the walls, and 
 clustering around the windows, through all the 
 months of spring, summer, and autumn ; begin- 
 ning, in fact, with May roses, and ending with jas- 
 mine. Let it, however, not be spring, nor summer, 
 nor autumn ; but winter, in its sternest shape. This 
 is a most important point in the science of happi- 
 ness. And I am surprised to see people overlook it, 
 as if it were actually matter of congratulation that 
 winter is going, or, if coming, is not likely to be a 
 severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition, 
 annually, for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm of 
 one kind or other, as the skies can possibly afford. 
 Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures 
 which attend a winter fireside — candles at four 
 o’clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, 
 shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies 
 on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging 
 audibly without, 
 
 <e And at the doors and windows seem to call, 
 
 As heaven and earth they would together mell ; 
 
 Yet the least entrance find they none at all ; 
 
 Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall.” 
 
 — Castle of Indolence. 
 
 All these are items in the description of a winter 
 evening which must surely be familiar to everybody 
 born in a high latitude. And it is evident that 
 most of these delicacies cannot be ripened without 
 weather stormy or inclement in some way or other. 
 I am not “ particular ” whether it be snow, or black 
 frost, or wind so strong that (as Mr. Anti-slavery 
 Clarkson says) “ you may lean your back against 
 it like a post.” I can put up even with rain, pro- 
 vided that it rains cats and dogs, or, as sailors say, 
 “ great guns and marline-spikes ” ; but something of 
 the sort I must have ; and, if I have it not, I think 
 myself in a manner ill-used : for why am I called 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM 635 
 
 | on to pay so heavily for winter in coals, candles, &c. y 
 if I am not to have the article good of its kind ? 
 No : a Canadian winter for my money, or a Russian 
 one, where every man is but a co-proprietor with the 
 north wind in the fee-simple of his own ears. In- 
 deed, so great an epicure am I in this matter that I 
 cannot relish a winter night fully if it be much past 
 St. Thomas’s Day, and have degenerated into dis- 
 gusting tendencies towards vernal indications : in 
 fact, it must be divided by a thick wall of dark nights 
 from all return of light and sunshine. Start, there- 
 fore, at the first week of November : thence to the 
 end of January, Christmas Eve being the meridian 
 line, you may compute the period when happiness 
 is in season,— which, in my judgment, enters the 
 room with the tea-tray. For tea, though ridiculed 
 by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous 
 sensibilities, or are become so from wine-drinking, 
 and are not susceptible of influence from so refined 
 a stimulant, will always be the favourite beverage of 
 the intellectual ; and, for my part, I would have 
 joined Dr. Johnson in a bellum inter?iecinum against 
 Jonas Han way, or any other impious person who 
 should have presumed to disparage it. But here, to 
 save myself the trouble of too much verbal descrip- 
 tion, I will introduce a painter, and give him direc- 
 tions for the rest of the picture. Painters do not 
 like white cottages, unless a good deal weather- 
 stained ; but, as the reader now understands that 
 it is a winter night, his services will not be required 
 except for the inside of the house. 
 
 Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by twelve, 
 and not more than seven and a half feet high. This, 
 reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, in my family, 
 the drawing-room ; but, being contrived “ a double 
 debt to pay,” it is also, and more justly, termed the 
 library ; for it happens that books are the only article 
 of property in which I am richer than my neigh- 
 bours. Of these I have about five thousand, col- 
 lected gradually since my eighteenth year. Therefore, 
 painter, put as many as you can into this room. 
 
636 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Make it populous with books ; and, furthermore, 
 paint me a good fire ; and furniture plain and 
 modest, befitting the unpretending cottage of a 
 scholar. And near the fire paint me a tea-table ; and 
 (as it is clear that no creature can come to see one 
 on such a stormy night) place only two cups and 
 saucers on the tea-tray ; and, if you know how to 
 paint such a thing, symbolically or otherwise, paint 
 me an eternal tea-pot — eternal a parte ante , and a 
 parte post ; for I usually drink tea from eight o’clock 
 at night to four in the morning. And, as it is very 
 unpleasant to make tea, or to pour it out for one’s 
 self, paint me a lovely young woman sitting at the 
 table. Paint her arms like Aurora’s, and her smiles 
 
 like Hebe’s ; but no, dear M ! not even in jest 
 
 let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my 
 cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere 
 personal beauty, or that the witchcraft of angelic 
 smiles lies within the empire of any earthly pencil. 
 Pass, then, my good painter, to something more 
 within its power ; and the next article brought for- 
 ward should naturally be myself — a picture of the 
 Opium-eater, with his “ little golden receptacle of the 
 pernicious drug” lying beside him on the table. As 
 to the opium, I have no objection to see a picture of 
 that ; you may paint it, if you choose ; but I apprise 
 you that no “ little ” receptacle would, even in 1816, 
 answer my purpose, who was at a distance from the 
 “ stately Pantheon ” and all druggists (mortal or 
 otherwise). No: you may as well, paint the real 
 receptacle, which was not of gold, but of glass, and 
 as much like a sublunary wine-decanter as possible. 
 In fact, one day, by a series of happily-conceived 
 experiments, I discovered that it 20 as a decanter. 
 Into this you may put a quart of ruby-coloured 
 laudanum ; that, and a book of German metaphysics 
 placed by its side, will sufficiently attest my being in 
 the neighbourhood ; but, as to myself, there I demur. 
 I admit that, naturally, I ought to occupy the fore- 
 ground of the picture ; that, being the hero of the 
 piece, or (if you choose) the criminal at the bar, my 
 
THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM U37 
 
 | body should be had into court. This seems reason 
 able; but why should I confess on this point to 
 a painter? or why confess it at all? If the public 
 (into whose private ear I am confidentially whispering 
 my “ Confessions,” and not into any painter’s) should 
 chance to have framed some agreeable picture fi r 
 itself of the Opium-eater’s exterior — should have 
 ascribed to him, romantically, an elegant person or 
 a handsome face — why should I barbarously tear 
 from it so pleasing a delusion ? — pleasing both to the 
 public and to me. No : paint me, if at all, according 
 to your own fancy ; and, since a painter’s fancy 
 should teem with beautiful creations, I cannot fail, 
 in that way, to be a gainer. 
 
 And now, reader, we have run through all the ten 
 categories of my condition, as it stood about 1816-17, 
 up to the middle of which latter year I judge my- 
 self to have been a happy man ; and the elements of 
 that happiness I have endeavoured to place before 
 you, in the above sketch of the interior of a scholar's 
 library, in a cottage among the mountains, on a 
 stormy winter evening, rain driving vindictively and 
 with malice aforethought against the windows, and 
 darkness such that you cannot see your own hand 
 when held up against the sky. 
 
 But now farewell, a long farewell, to happiness, 
 winter or summer ! farewell to smiles and laughter ! 
 farewell to peace of mind, to tranquil dreams, and to 
 the blessed consolations of sleep ! For more than 
 three years and a half I am summoned away from 
 these. Here opens upon me an Iliad of woes : for 
 I now enter upon 
 
PART THREE 
 
 THE PAINS OF OPIUM 
 
 “ As when some great painter dips 
 His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. 
 
 — Shelley’s Revolt of Islam. 
 
 Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, I must 
 request your attention, before we go farther, to a few 
 explanatory notes. 
 
 I. You are already aware, I hope — else you must 
 have a low opinion of my logic— that the opium 
 miseries, which are now on the point of pressing 
 forward to the front of this narrative, connect them- 
 selves with my early hardships in London (and 
 therefore more remotely with those in Wales) by 
 natural links of affiliation — that is, the early series 
 of sufferings was the parent of the later. Other- 
 wise, these “ Confessions ” would break up into two 
 disconnected sections : first, a record of boyish 
 calamities ; secondly, a record (totally independent) 
 of sufferings consequent upon excesses in opium. 
 And the two sections would have no link whatever 
 to connect them, except the slight one of having 
 both happened to the same person. But a little 
 attention will show the strictness of the inter-con- 
 nection. The boyish sufferings, whether in Wales 
 or London, pressing upon an organ peculiarly weak 
 in my bodily system — viz., the stomach — caused 
 that subsequent distress and irritability of the 
 stomach which drove me to the use of opium as 
 the sole remedy potent enough to control it. Here 
 already there is exposed a sufficient causal connection 
 between the two several sections of my experience. 
 The opium would probably never have been pro- 
 moted into the dignity of a daily and a lifelong 
 resource, had it not proved itself to be the one sole 
 agent equal to the task of tranquillising the miseries 
 left behind by the youthful privations. Thus far the 
 nexus , as between cause and effect, is sufficiently 
 established between the one experience and the 
 
 638 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 639 
 
 1 other — between the boyish records and the records 
 of mature life. There needed no other nexus to 
 
 1 justify the unity of the entire “ Confessions.” But, 
 though not wanted, nevertheless it happens that 
 there is another and a distinct link connecting the 
 two separate records. The main phenomenon by 
 which opium expressed itself permanently, and the 
 sole phenomenon that was communicable, lay in the 
 dreams (and in the peculiar dream-scenery) which 
 followed the opium excesses. But naturally these 
 dreams, and this dream-scenery, drew their outlines 
 and materials — their great lights and shadows — from 
 those profound revelations which had been ploughed 
 so deeply into the heart, from those encaustic records 
 which in the mighty furnaces of London life had 
 been burned into the undying memory by the fierce 
 action of misery. And thus in reality the early 
 experiences of erring childhood not only led to the 
 secondary experiences of opium, but also determined 
 the particular form and pressure of the chief pheno- 
 mena in those secondary experiences. Here is the 
 briefest possible abstract of the total case : The 
 final object of the whole record lay in the dreams. 
 For the sake of those the entire narrative arose. 
 But what caused the dreams? Opium used in un- 
 exampled excess. But what caused this excess in 
 the use of opium ? Simply the early sufferings ; 
 these, and these only, through the derangements 
 which they left behind in the animal economy. On 
 this mode of viewing the case, moving regressively 
 from the end to the beginning, it will be seen that 
 there is one uninterrupted bond of unity running 
 through the entire succession of experiences, first 
 and last : the dreams were an inheritance from the 
 opium ; the opium was an inheritance from the 
 boyish follies. 
 
 II. You will think, perhaps, that I am too con- 
 fidential and communicative of my own private 
 history. It may be so. But my way of writing is 
 rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, 
 than much to inquire who is listening to me ; for, if 
 
O40 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 once I stop to consider what is proper to be said, I 
 shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is 
 proper. The fact is, I imagine myself writing at a 
 distance of twenty — thirty — fifty years ahead of this 
 present moment, either for the satisfaction of the 
 few who may then retain any interest in myself, or of 
 the many (a number that is sure to be continually 
 growing) who will take an inextinguishable interest 
 in the mysterious powers of opium. For opium 
 is mysterious ; mysterious to the extent, at times, of 
 apparent self-contradiction ; and so mysterious that 
 my own long experience in its use— sometimes even 
 in its abuse — did but mislead me into conclusions 
 ever more and more remote from what I now suppose 
 to be the truth. Fifty-and-two years’ experience of 
 opium, as a magical resource under all modes of 
 bodily suffering, I may now claim to have had — * 
 allowing only for some periods of four or six months, 
 during which, by unexampled efforts of self-conquest, 
 I had accomplished a determined abstinence from 
 opium . 1 These parentheses being subtracted, as 
 also, and secondly, some off-and-on fits of tentative 
 and intermitting dalliance with opium in the opening 
 of my career — these deductions allowed for, I may 
 describe myself as experimentally acquainted with 
 
 1 With what final result I have much difficulty in saying. 
 Invariably, after such victories, I returned, upon deli- 
 berate choice (after weighing all the consequences on this 
 side and on that), to the daily use of opium, but with 
 silent changes, many and great (worked apparently by these 
 reiterated struggles), in the opium-eating habits. Amongst 
 other changes was this, that the quantity required gradually 
 fell by an enormous proportion. According to the modern 
 slang phrase, I had in the meridian stage of my opium career 
 used “ fabulous ” quantities. Stating the quantities — not in 
 solid opium, but in the tincture (known to everybody as 
 laudanum ) — my daily ration was eight thousand drops. If 
 you write down that amount in the ordinary way as 8000, you 
 see at a glance that you may read it into eight quantities of a 
 thousand, or into eight hundred quantities of ten, or lastly, into 
 eighty quantities of one hundred. Now, a single quantity of one 
 hundred will about fill a very old-fashioned obsolete tea-spoon, 
 of that order which you find still lingering amongst the re- 
 spectable poor. Eighty such quantities, therefore, would have 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 641 
 
 opium for something more than half-a-century. 
 What, then, is my final report upon its good and 
 evil results ? In particular, upon these two capi- 
 tal tendencies of habitual opium-eating under the 
 popular misconceptions : viz., its supposed necessity 
 of continually clamouring for increasing quantities ; 
 secondly, its supposed corresponding declension 
 in power and efficacy. Upon these ugly scandals 
 what is my most deliberate award ? At the age 
 of forty, the reader is aware that, under our ances- 
 tral proverb, every man is a fool or a physician. 
 Apparently our excellent ancestors, aiming undeniably 
 at alliteration, spelled physician with an f. And 
 why not? A man’s physic might be undeniable, 
 although his spelling should be open to some slight 
 improvements. But I presume that the proverb 
 meant to exact from any man only so much medical 
 skill as should undertake the responsibility of his 
 own individual health. It is my duty, it seems, thus 
 far to be a physician — to guarantee, so far as human 
 foresight can guarantee, my own corporeal sanity. 
 And this, trying the case by ordinary practical tests, 
 I have accomplished. And I add solemnly that 
 without opium most certainly I could not have 
 accomplished such a result. Thirty-five years ago, 
 beyond all doubt, I should have been in my grave. 
 
 filled eighty of such antediluvian spoons — that is, it would have 
 been the common hospital dose for three hundred and twenty 
 adult patients. But the ordinary tea-spoon of this present 
 nineteenth century is nearly as capacious as the dessert-spoon 
 of our ancestors. Which I have heard accounted for thus : 
 Throughout the eighteenth century, when first tea became 
 known to the working population, the tea-drinkers were almost 
 exclusively women ; men, even in educated classes, very often 
 persisting (down to the French Revolution) in treating such a 
 beverage as an idle and effeminate indulgence. This obstinate 
 twist in masculine habits it was that secretly controlled the 
 manufacture of tea-spoons. Up to Waterloo, tea-spoons were 
 adjusted chiefly to the calibre of female mouths. Since then, 
 greatly to the benefit of the national health, the grosser and 
 browner sex have universally fallen into the effeminate habit of 
 tea-drinking ; and the capacity of tea-spoons has naturally con- 
 formed to the new order of cormorant mouths that have alighted 
 by myriads upon the tea-trays of these later generations. 
 
 X 
 
642 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 And, as to the two popular dilemmas : that either you 
 must renounce opium, or else indefinitely augment 
 the daily ration ; and, secondly, that, even submitting 
 to such a postulate, you must content yourself, under 
 any scale of doses, wth an effect continually decaying, 
 — in fact, that you must ultimately descend into the 
 despairing condition of the martyr to dram-drinking : 
 — at this point I make a resolute stand, in blank 
 denial of the whole doctrine. Originally, when first 
 entering upon my opium career, I did so with great 
 anxiety : and before my eyes floated for ever the 
 analogies — dim, or not dim, according to my spirits 
 at the moment — of the poor, perishing brandy- 
 drinker, often on the brink of delirium tremens! 
 Opium I pursued under a harsh necessity, as an un- 
 known, shadowy power, leading I knew not whither, 
 and a power that might suddenly change counten- 
 ance upon this unknown road. Habitually I lived 
 under such an impression of awe as we have all felt 
 from stories of fawns, or seeming fawns, that have 
 run before some mounted hunter for many a league, 
 until they have tempted him far into the mazes of a 
 boundless forest, and at that point, where all regress 
 had become lost and impossible, either suddenly 
 vanished, leaving the man utterly bewildered, or 
 assumed some more fearful shape. A part of the 
 evil which I feared actually unfolded itself ; but all 
 was due to my own ignorance, to neglect of 
 cautionary measures, or to gross mismanagement 
 of my health in points where I well knew the 
 risks, but grievously underrated their urgency and 
 pressure. I was temperate : that solitary advantage 
 I had ; but I sank under the lulling seductions of 
 opium into total sedentariness, and that whilst holding 
 firmly the belief that powerful exercise was omni- 
 potent against all modes of debility or obscure ner- 
 vous irritations. The account of my depression, and 
 almost of my helplessness, in the next memorandum 
 (No. III.), is faithful as a description to the real case. 
 But, in ascribing that case to opium, as any tran- 
 scendent and overmastering agency, I was thoroughly 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 643 
 
 wrong. Twenty days of exercise, twenty times twenty 
 miles of walking, at the ordinary pace of three and a 
 half miles an hour, or perhaps half that amount, would 
 have sent me up as buoyantly as a balloon into regions 
 of natural and healthy excitement, where dejection 
 is an impossible phenomenon. O heavens ! how 
 man abuses or neglects his natural resources ! Yes, 
 the thoughtful reader is disposed to say ; but very 
 possibly distinguishing between such natural re- 
 sources and opium as a resource that is not natural, 
 but highly artificial, or even absolutely unnatural. I 
 think otherwise. Upon the basis of my really vast, 
 perhaps unequalled, experience (let me add of my 
 tentative experience, varying its trials in every con- 
 ceivable mode so as to meet the question at issue 
 under every angle), I advance these three following 
 propositions, all of them unsuspected by the popular 
 mind, and the last of them (as cannot much longer fail 
 to be discovered) bearing a national value — I mean, 
 as meeting our English hereditary complaint : — 
 
 1. With respect to the morbid growth upon the 
 opium-eater of his peculiar habit, when once rooted 
 in the system, and throwing out tentacula like a cancer, 
 it is out of my power to deliver any such oracular 
 judgment upon the case — i.e., upon the apparent 
 danger of such a course, and by what stages it might 
 be expected to travel towards its final consummation 
 — as naturally I should wish to do. Being an oracle, 
 it is my wish to behave myself like an oracle, and 
 not to evade any decent man’s questions in the 
 way that Apollo too often did at Delphi. But, in 
 this particular instance before me, the accident of 
 my own individual seamanship in presence of this 
 storm interfered with the natural evolution of the 
 problem in its extreme form of danger. I had 
 become too uneasy under the consciousness of that 
 intensely artificial condition into which I had im- 
 perceptibly lapsed through unprecedented quantities 
 of opium ; the shadows of eclipse were too dark 
 and lurid not to rouse and alarm me into a spasmodic 
 effort for reconquering the ground which I had lost 
 
644 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Such an effort I made : every step by which I had 
 gone astray did I patiently unthread. And thus 
 I fought off the natural and spontaneous catastrophe, 
 whatever that might be, which mighty Nature would 
 else have let loose for redressing the wrongs offered 
 to herself. But what followed ? In six or eight 
 months more, upon fresh movements arising of in- 
 supportable nervous irritation, I fleeted back into 
 the same opium lull. To and fro, up and down, 
 did I tilt upon those mountainous seas, for year 
 after year. “ See-saw , 1 like Margery Daw, that sold 
 her bed and lay on straw.” Even so did I, led 
 astray, perhaps, by the classical example of Miss 
 Daw, see-saw for year after year, out and in, of 
 manoeuvres the most intricate, dances the most ela- 
 borate, receding or approaching, round my great 
 central sun of opium. Sometimes I ran perilously 
 close into my perihelion ; sometimes I became 
 frightened, and wheeled off into a vast cometary 
 aphelion, where for six months “ opium ” was a word 
 unknown. How nature stood all these see-sawings 
 is quite a mystery to me : I must have led her a 
 sad life in those days. Nervous irritation forced 
 me, at times, upon frightful excesses ; but terror 
 from anomalous symptoms sooner or later forced 
 me back. This terror was strengthened by the 
 vague hypotheses current at that period about spon- 
 taneous combustion. Might I not myself take leave 
 of the literary world in that fashion ? According to 
 the popular fancy, there were two modes of this 
 spontaneity, and really very little to choose between 
 them. Upon one variety of this explosion, a man 
 blew up in the dark, without match or candle near 
 him, leaving nothing behind him but some bones, 
 of no use to anybody, and which were supposed 
 to be his only because nobody else ever applied 
 
 1 “ See-saw” &c. : — O dear reader, surely you don’t want an 
 oracle to tell you that this is a good old nursery lyric, which 
 through four centuries has stood the criticism, stood the 
 anger against Daw’s enemies, stood the pity for Daw herself, 
 so infamously reduced to straw, of children through eighty 
 generations, reckoning five years to each nursery succession. 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 645 
 
 for them. It was fancied that some volcanic agency 
 — an unknown deposition — accumulated from some 
 vast redundancy of brandy, furnished the self-ex- 
 ploding principle. But this startled the faith of 
 most people ; and a more plausible scheme suggested 
 itself, which depended upon the concurrence of a 
 lucifer-match. Without an incendiary, a man could 
 not take fire. We sometimes see the hands of 
 inveterate dram-drinkers throw off an atmosphere 
 of intoxicating vapours, strong enough to lay flies 
 into a state of sleep or coi?ia ; and on the same 
 principle it was supposed that the breath might be 
 so loaded with spirituous particles as to catch fire 
 from a match applied to a pipe when held between 
 the lips. If so, then what should hinder the 
 “ devouring element ” (as newspapers call fire) from 
 spreading through the throat to the cavity of the 
 chest? in which case, not being insured, the man 
 would naturally become a total loss. Opium, how- 
 ever, it will occur to the reader, is not alcohol. 
 That is true. But it might, for anything that was 
 known experimentally, be ultimately worse. Cole- 
 ridge, the only person known to the public as 
 having dallied systematically and for many years 
 with opium, could not be looked to for any candid 
 report of its history and progress ; besides that, 
 Coleridge was under a permanent craze of having 
 nearly accomplished his own liberation from opium ; 
 and thus he had come to have an extra reason for 
 self-delusion. Finding myself, therefore, walking on a 
 solitary path of bad repute,- leading whither no man’s 
 experience could tell me, I became proportionably 
 cautious ; and, if nature had any plot for making 
 an example of me, I was resolved to baulk her. 
 Thus it was that I never followed out the seductions 
 of opium to their final extremity. But, nevertheless, 
 in evading that extremity, I stumbled upon as great 
 a discovery as if I had not evaded it. % After the first 
 or second self-conquest in this conflict — although 
 finding it impossible to persist through more than 
 a few months in the abstinence from opium — I 
 
646 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 remarked, however, that the domineering tyranny of 
 its exactions was at length steadily declining. Quan- 
 tities noticeably less had now become sufficient : and, 
 after the fourth of these victories, won with con- 
 tinually decreasing efforts, I found that not only had 
 the daily dose (upon relapsing) suffered a self-limi- 
 tation to an enormous extent, but also that, upon 
 any attempt obstinately to renew the old doses, 
 there arose a new symptom — viz., an irritation on the 
 surface of the skin — which soon became insupport- 
 able, and tended to distraction. In about four years, 
 without any further efforts, my daily ration had fallen 
 spontaneously from a varying quantity of eight, ten, or 
 twelve thousand drops of laudanum to about three 
 hundred. I describe the drug as laudanum , because 
 another change ran along collaterally with this 
 supreme change — viz., that the solid opium began 
 to require a length of time, continually increasing, 
 to expand its effects sensibly, oftentimes not less 
 than four hours ; whereas the tincture manifested its 
 presence instantaneously. 
 
 Thus, then, I had reached a position from which 
 authoritatively it might be pronounced, as a result 
 of long, anxious, and vigilant experience, that, on the 
 assumption of earnest (even though intermitting) 
 efforts towards recurrent abstinences on the part of 
 the opium-eater, the practice of indulging to the 
 very greatest excess in this narcotic tends to a 
 natural (almost an inevitable) euthanasy. Many 
 years ago, when briefly touching on this subject, 
 I announced (as a fact even then made known to 
 me) that no instance of abstinence, though it were 
 but of three days’ continuance, ever perishes. Ten 
 grains, deducted from a daily ration of five hundred, 
 will tell through a series of many weeks, and will be 
 found again modifying the final result, even at the 
 close of the year’s reckoning. At this day, after a 
 half-century of oscillating experience, and after no 
 efforts or trying acts of self-denial beyond those 
 severe ones attached to the several processes (five 
 or six in all) of reconquering my freedom from the 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 647 
 
 yoke of opium, I find myself pretty nearly at the 
 same station which I occupied at that vast distance 
 of time. It is recorded of Lord Nelson that, even 
 after the Nile and Copenhagen, he still paid the 
 penalty, on the first days of resuming his naval life, 
 which is generally exacted by nature from the 
 youngest little middy or the rawest griffin — viz., 
 sea-sickness. And this happens to a considerable 
 proportion of sailors : they do not recover their sea- 
 legs till some days after getting afloat. The very 
 same thing happens to veteran opium-eaters, when 
 first, after long intermissions, resuming too abruptly 
 their ancient familiarities with opium. It is a fact, 
 which I mention as indicating the enormous re- 
 volutions passed through, that, within these five 
 years, I have turned pale, and felt warnings, pointing 
 towards such an uneasiness, after taking not more 
 than twenty grains of opium. At present, and for 
 some years, I have been habitually content with five 
 or six grains daily, instead of three hundred and 
 twenty to four hundred grains. Let me wind up this 
 retrospect with saying that the powers of opium, as 
 an anodyne, but still more as a tranquilliser of 
 nervous and anomalous sensations, have not in the 
 smallest degree decayed, and that, if it has casually 
 unveiled its early power of exacting slight penalties 
 from any trivial inattention to accurate proportions, 
 it has more than commensurately renewed its ancient 
 privilege of lulling irritation and of supporting pre- 
 ternatural calls for exertion. 
 
 My first proposition, therefore, amounts to this — 
 that the process of weaning one’s self from the deep 
 bondage of opium, by many people viewed with 
 despairing eyes, is not only a possible achievement, 
 and one which grows easier in every stage of its pro- 
 gress, but is favoured and promoted by nature in 
 secret ways that could not, without some experience, 
 have been suspected. This, however, is but a sorry 
 commendation of any resource making great preten- 
 sions, that, by a process confessedly trying to human 
 firmness, it can ultimately be thrown aside. Certainly 
 
648 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 little would be gained by the negative service of 
 cancelling a drawback upon any agency whatever, 
 until it were shown that this drawback has availed to 
 disturb and neutralise great positive blessings lying 
 within the gift of that agency. What ate the 
 advantages connected with opium that can merit any 
 such name as blessings ? 
 
 2. Briefly let me say, in the second proposition, 
 that, if the reader had, in any South American forest, 
 seen growing rankly some great febrifuge (such as the 
 Jesuits' bark), he would probably have noticed it with 
 slight regard. To understand its value, he must first 
 have suffered from intermittent fever. Bark might 
 strike him as an unnatural stimulant ; but, when he 
 came to see that tertian or quartan fever was also an 
 unnatural pressure upon human energies, he would 
 begin to guess that two counter unnaturals may ter- 
 minate in one most natural and salubrious result. 
 Nervous irritation is the secret desolator of human 
 life ; and for this there is probably no adequate con- 
 trolling power but that of opium, taken daily, under 
 steady regulation. 
 
 3. But even more momentous is the burden of 
 my third proposition. Are you aware, reader, what 
 it is that constitutes the scourge (physically speaking) 
 of Great Britain and Ireland ? All readers who direct 
 any part of their attention to medical subjects must 
 know that it is pulmonary consumption. If you walk 
 through a forest at certain seasons, you will see what 
 is called a blaze of white paint upon a certain elite of 
 the trees marked out by the forester as ripe for the 
 axe. Such a blaze, if the shadowy world could reveal 
 its futurities, would be seen everywhere distributing 
 its secret badges of cognisance amongst our youthful 
 men and women. Of those that, in the expression of 
 Pericles, constitute the vernal section of our popula- 
 tion, what a multitudinous crowd would be seen to 
 wear upon their foreheads the same sad ghastly blaze, 
 or some equivalent symbol of dedication to an early 
 grave. How appalling in its amount is this annual 
 slaughter amongst those that should by birthright be 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 649 
 
 specially the children of hope, and levied impartially 
 from every rank of society ! Is the income-tax or the 
 poor-rate, faithful as each is to its regulating tide- 
 tables, paid by any class with as much punctuality as 
 this premature florilegium , this gathering and render- 
 ing up of blighted blossoms, by all classes? Then 
 comes the startling question — that pierces the break- 
 ing hearts of so many thousand afflicted relatives — Is 
 there no remedy ? Is there no palliation of the evil ? 
 Waste not a thought upon the idle question whether 
 he that speaks is armed with this form or that form of 
 authorisation and sanction ! Think within yourself 
 how infinite would be the scorn of any poor sorrow- 
 stricken mother, if she — standing over the coffin of 
 her daughter — could believe or could imagine that 
 any vestige of ceremonial scruples, or of fool-born 
 superstitions, or the terror of a word, or old tradi- 
 tional prejudice, had been allowed to neutralise one 
 chance in a thousand for her daughter — had by 
 possibility (but, as I could tell her, had sometimes to 
 a certainty) stepped between patients and deliverance 
 from the grave, sure and perfect ! “ What matter,” 
 
 she would cry out indignantly, “ who it is that says 
 the thing, so long as the thing itself is true ? ” It is 
 the potent and faithful word that is wanted, in perfect 
 slight of the organ through which it is uttered. Let 
 me premise this notorious fact, that all consumption, 
 though latent in the constitution, and indicated often 
 to the eye in bodily conformation, does not there- 
 fore manifest itself as a disease, until some form of 
 “ cold,” or bronchitis, some familiar affection of the 
 chest or of the lungs, arises to furnish a starting-point 
 for the morbid development . 1 Now the one fatal 
 
 1 Here is a parallel case, equally fatal where it occurs, but 
 happily moving within a far narrower circle. About fifty 
 years ago, Sir Everard Home, a surgeon of the highest class, 
 mentioned as a dreadful caution that, within his own experience, 
 many an indolent tumour in the face, not unfrequently the most 
 trifling pimple, which for thirty or more years had caused no 
 uneasiness whatever, suddenly might chance to receive the 
 slightest possible wound from a razor in the act of shaving. 
 What followed ? Once disturbed, the trivial excrescence 
 
 X 2 
 
650 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 blunder lies in suffering that development to occur; 
 and the one counter- working secret for pre-arrestment 
 of this evil lies in steadily, by whatever means, keep- 
 ing up and promoting the insensible perspiration. In 
 that one simple art of controlling a constant function 
 of the animal economy lies a magician’s talisman for 
 defeating the forces leagued against the great organs 
 of respiration. Pulmonary affections, if not previously 
 suffered to develop themselves, cannot live under the 
 hourly counter-working of this magical force. Conse- 
 quently, the one question in arrear is, what potent 
 drug is that which possesses this power, a power 
 like that of “Amram’s son,” for evoking salubrious 
 streams, welling forth benignly from systems else 
 parched and arid as rocks in the wilderness ? There 
 is none that I know of answering the need but 
 opium. The powers of that great agent I first 
 learned dimly to guess at from a remark made to 
 me by a lady in London : then, and for some time 
 previously, she had been hospitably entertaining 
 Coleridge, whom, indeed, she tended with the anxiety 
 of a daughter. Consequently, she was familiarly ac- 
 quainted with his opium habits ; and, on my asking, in 
 reply to some remark of hers, how she could be so 
 sure as her words implied that Coleridge was just 
 then likely to be incapacitated for writing (or, indeed, 
 for any literary exertion ), she said, “ Oh, I know it 
 well by the glistening of his cheeks.” Coleridge’s 
 face, as is well known to his acquaintances, exposed 
 a large surface of cheek ; too large for the intellectual 
 expression of his features generally, had not the final 
 effect been redeemed by what Wordsworth styled his 
 “ godlike forehead.” The result was that no possible 
 face so broadly betrayed and published any effects 
 whatever, especially these lustrous effects from ex- 
 cesses in opium. For some years I failed to consider 
 
 became an open cancer. Is the parallel catastrophe in the 
 pulmonary system, when pushed forward into development, at 
 all less likely to hide its importance from uninstructed eyes ? 
 Yet, on the other hand, it is a thousand times more likely to 
 happen. 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 651 
 
 reflectively, or else, reflecting, I failed to decipher, 
 this resplendent acreage of cheek. But at last, either 
 proprio marte , or prompted by some medical hint, I 
 came to understand that the glistening face, glorious 
 from afar like the old Pagan face of the demigod 
 FEsculapius, simply reported the gathering accumula- 
 tions of insensible perspiration. In the very hour, a 
 memorable hour, of making that discovery, I made 
 another. My own history, medically speaking, in- 
 volved a mystery. At the commencement of my 
 opium career, I had myself been pronounced re- 
 peatedly a martyr elect to pulmonary consumption. 
 And, although, in the common decencies of humanity, 
 this opinion upon my prospects had always been 
 accompanied with some formal words of encourage- 
 ment — as, for instance, that constitutions, after all, 
 varied by endless differences — that nobody could fix 
 limits to the powers of medicine, or, in default of 
 medicine, to the healing resources of nature herself — 
 yet, without something like a miracle in my favour, I 
 was instructed to regard myself as a condemned sub- 
 ject. That was the upshot of these agreeable com- 
 munications ; alarming enough ; and they were 
 rendered more so by these three facts : First, the 
 opinions were pronounced by the highest authorities 
 in Christendom — viz., the physicians at Clifton and 
 the Bristol Hotwells, who saw more of pulmonary 
 disorders in one twelvemonth than the rest of the 
 profession through all Europe in a century ; for the 
 disease, it must be remembered, was almost peculiar 
 as a national scourge to Britain, interlinked with the 
 local accidents of the climate and its restless changes : 
 so that only in England could it be studied, and even 
 there only in perfection at these Bristolian adja- 
 cencies — the reason being that all opulent patients 
 resorted to the Devonshire watering-places, where the 
 balmy temperature of the air and prevailing winds 
 allowed the myrtle and other greenhouse shrubs to 
 stand out of doors all winter through, and naturally 
 on the road to Devonshire all patients alike touched 
 at Clifton. There I was myself continually resident. 
 
6^2 confessions of an opium-eatek 
 
 j <SJ> 
 
 Many, therefore, and of supreme authority, were the 
 prophets of evil that announced to me my doom. 
 Secondly, they were countenanced by the ugly fact 
 that I out of eight children was the one who most 
 closely inherited the bodily conformation of a father 
 who had died of consumption at the early age of 
 thirty-nine. Thirdly, I offered at the first glance, to 
 a medical eye, every symptom of phthisis broadly and 
 conspicuously developed. The hectic colours on the 
 face, the nocturnal perspirations, the growing em- 
 barrassment of the respiration, and other expressions 
 of gathering feebleness under any attempts at taking 
 exercise — all these symptoms were steadily accumulat- 
 ing between the age of twenty-two and twenty-four. 
 What was it that first arrested them ? Simply the 
 use, continually becoming more regular, of opium. 
 Nobody recommended this drug to me; on the 
 contrary, under that ignorant horror which every- 
 where invested opium, I saw too clearly that any 
 avowed use of it would expose me to a rabid perse- 
 cution . 1 Under the sincere and unaffected hope of 
 saving me from destruction, I should have been 
 hunted into the grave within six months. I kept my 
 own counsel ; said nothing ; awakened no suspicions ; 
 persevered more and more determinately in the use 
 of opium ; and finally effected so absolute a conquest 
 over all pulmonary symptoms as could not have 
 failed to fix upon me the astonishment of Clifton, had 
 not the sense of wonder been broken by the lingering 
 time consumed in the several stages of the malady, 
 
 1 “ Rabid persecution ” : — I do not mean that, in the circum- 
 stances of my individual position, any opening could have 
 arisen to an opposition more than verbal : since it would have 
 been easy for me at all times to withdraw myself by hundreds 
 of leagues from controversies upon the case. But the reasons 
 for concealment were not the less urgent. For it would have 
 been painful to find myself reduced to the dilemma of either 
 practising habitual and complex dissimulation, or, on the other 
 hand, of throwing myself headlong into that fiery vortex of hot- 
 headed ignorance upon the very name of opium which to this 
 hour (though with less of rancorous bigotry) makes it hazardous 
 to avow any daily use of so potent a drug. 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 653 
 
 and still more effectually by my own personal with- 
 drawal from Clifton and its neighbourhoods. 
 
 Finally arose what will inevitably turn out a more 
 decisive chapter in such a record. I had always 
 fixed my eyes and my expectations upon a revolution 
 in the social history of opium which could not (as I 
 assured myself) by accident or by art be materially 
 deferred. The great social machinery of life-insur- 
 ance, supposing no other agency to be brought into 
 play, how would that affect the great medicinal 
 interests of opium ? I knew that insurance offices, 
 and the ablest actuaries of such offices, were not less 
 ignorant upon the real merits of the opium question, 
 and (which was worse) not less profoundly prejudiced , 
 or less fanatical in their prejudices, than the rest of 
 society. But, then, there were interests, growing con- 
 tinually, which would very soon force them into 
 relaxing these prejudices. It would be alleged, at 
 first, that opium-eating increased the risk of a life- 
 insurance. Waiving the question whether it really 
 did increase that risk, in any case that increase of 
 risk, like other risks, could be valued, and must be 
 valued. New habits were arising in society : that I 
 well knew. And the old machineries for insuring life 
 interests, under these or any other shifting conditions, 
 would be obliged to adapt themselves to changing 
 circumstances. If the old offices should be weak 
 enough to persist in their misdirected obstinacy, new 
 ones would arise. Meantime the history of this ques- 
 tion moved through the following aspects : Sixteen 
 and seventeen years ago, the offices all looked with 
 horror upon opium-eaters. Thus far, all men must 
 have disapproved the principles of their policy. 
 Habitual brandy-drinkers met with no repulse. And 
 yet alcohol leads into daily dangers — for instance, 
 that or delirium tremens. But no man ever heard 
 of opium leading into delirium tremens. In the 
 one case, there are well-ascertained and notorious 
 dangers besetting the path ; but, in the other, sup- 
 posing any corresponding dangers to exist, they have 
 yet to be discovered. However, the offices would 
 
654 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 not look at us who came forward avowing ourselves 
 to be opium-eaters. Myself in particular they re- 
 garded, I believe, as the abomination of desolation. 
 And fourteen offices in succession, within a few 
 months, repulsed me as a candidate for insurance 
 on that solitary ground of having owned myself to be 
 an opium-eater. The insurance was of very little 
 consequence to myself, though involving some interest 
 to others. And I contented myself with saying, 
 “ Ten years hence, gentlemen, you will have come to 
 understand your own interests better.” In less than 
 seven years I received a letter from Mr. Tait, surgeon 
 to the Police Force in Edinburgh, reporting a direct 
 investigation officially pursued by him under private 
 instructions received from two or more insurance 
 offices. I knew, at the beginning of these seven 
 years, or had strong reasons for believing, that the 
 habit of opium-eating was spreading extensively, and 
 through classes of society widely disconnected. This 
 diffusion would, beyond a douht, as one of its earliest 
 consequences, coerce the insurance offices into a 
 strict revision of their old blind policy. Accordingly 
 it had already done so ; and the earliest fruits of this 
 revolution were now before me in the proof-sheets so 
 obligingly transmitted by Mr. Tait. His object, as 
 I understood it, in sending these proofs to myself, 
 was simply to collect such additional notices, sugges- 
 tions, or sceptical queries, as might reasonably be 
 anticipated from any reflective opium experience so 
 extensive as my own. Most unhappily, this gentle- 
 man, during the course of our brief correspondence, 
 was suddenly attacked by typhus fever ; and, after a 
 short illness, to my own exceeding regret, he died. 
 On all accounts I had reason for sorrow. Knowing 
 him only through his very interesting correspondence 
 with myself, I had learned to form high expectations 
 from Mr. Tait’s philosophic spirit and his determined 
 hostility to traditional cant. He had recorded, in the 
 communications made to myself, with great minute- 
 ness and anxiety for rigour of accuracy, the cases of 
 more than ninety patients. And he had shown him- 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 655 
 
 I self inexorably deaf to all attempts at confounding 
 evils specially belonging to opium as a stimulant, as 
 
 j a narcotic, or as a poison, with those which belong 
 to opium merely as a cause of constipation or other 
 ordinary irregularities in the animal economy. Most 
 people of sedentary habits, but amongst such people 
 notoriously those who think much, need some slight 
 means of stimulating the watchwork of the animal 
 system into action. Neglect of such means will of 
 course derange the health. But in such derange- 
 ments there is no special impeachment of opium : 
 many thousands of agents terminate in the same 
 or more obstinate derangements, unless vigilantly 
 counteracted. The paramount mission of Mr. Tait, 
 under his instructions from insurance offices, as I 
 interpreted his own account of his mission, was to 
 report firmly and decisively upon the tendencies of 
 opium in relation to the lengthening or shortening 
 of life. At that point where his proof-sheets were 
 interrupted by the fatal attack of fever, he had not 
 entirely finished his record of cases ; so that his final 
 judgment or summing up had not commenced. It 
 was, however, evident to me in what channel this 
 final judgment would have flowed. To a certainty, 
 he would have authorised his clients (the insurance 
 offices) to dismiss all anxiety as to the life-abridging 
 tendencies of opium. But he would have pointed 
 their jealousy in another direction — viz., this, that 
 in some proportion of cases there may always be a 
 reasonable ground for suspecting, not the opium as 
 separately in itself any cause of mischief, but the 
 opium as a conjectural indication of some secret dis- 
 tress or irritation that had fastened upon the system, 
 and had in that way sought relief ; cases, in short, 
 which the use of opium had not caused, but which, 
 on the contrary, had caused the use of opium — 
 opium having been called in to redress or to relieve 
 the affection. In all such circumstances, the in- 
 surance office is entitled to call for a frank disclosure 
 of the ailment ; but not, as hitherto, entitled to 
 assume the opium as itself an ailment. It may very 
 
656 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 easily have happened that simply the genial restora- 
 tion derived from opium, its power of qualifying a 
 man suddenly to face (that is, upon an hour’s warn- 
 ing to face) some twelve hours’ unusual exertion, — 
 qualifying him both as to spirits and as to strength ; 
 or again, simply the general purpose of seeking relief 
 from ennui, or toediuni vita — any one of these motives 
 may satisfactorily account for the applicant’s having 
 resorted to opium. He might reply to the office 
 in Professor Wilson’s word , 1 “Gentlemen, I am a 
 Hedonist ; and, if you must know why I take opium, 
 that’s the reason why.” But still, upon every admis- 
 sion from a candidate that he took opium, it would 
 be a prudent question and a just question on the 
 part of the office, to ask “why” and in what circum- 
 stances the practice had originated. If in any local 
 uneasiness, then would arise a natural right on the 
 part of the office to press for a surgical examination. 
 But, apart from such special cases, it was evident that 
 this acute and experienced surgeon saw no reason 
 whatever in the simple practice of opium-eating for 
 hesitating upon a life-insurance proposal, or for exact- 
 ing a higher rate of premium. 
 
 Here I pause. The reader will infer, from what I 
 have now said, that all passages, written at an earlier 
 period under cloudy and uncorrected views of the 
 evil agencies presumable in opium, stand retracted ; 
 although, shrinking from the labour of altering an 
 error diffused so widely under my own early miscon- 
 ceptions of the truth, I have suffered them to remain 
 as they were. My general views upon the powers 
 and natural tendencies of opium were all supported 
 and strengthened by this fortunate advantage of a 
 professional correspondency. My special doctrine I 
 now repeat at this point of valediction, and in a 
 rememberable form. Lord Bacon said once, too 
 boldly and hazardously, that he who discovers the 
 
 1 From the Greek word for voluptuous pleasure — viz., Hedone 
 ('H dovi'i ) — Professor Wilson coined the English word Hedonist , 
 which he sometimes applied in playful reproach to myself and 
 others. 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 657 
 
 secret of making myrrh soluble by human blood has 
 discovered the secret of immortal life. I propose a 
 more modest form of magic — that he who discovers 
 the secret of stimulating and keeping up unintermit- 
 tingly the insensible perspiration has discovered the 
 secret of intercepting pulmonary consumption. In 
 my medical character, I here take leave of the reader, 
 and fall back into the current of my regular narrative. 
 
 III. My studies have now been long interrupted. 
 I cannot read to myself with any pleasure, hardly 
 with a moment’s endurance. Yet I sometimes read 
 aloud for the pleasure of others ; because reading is 
 an accomplishment of mine, and, in the slang use of 
 the word accomplishment as a superficial and orna- 
 mental attainment, almost the only one I possess ; 
 and formerly, if I had any vanity at all connected 
 with any endowment or attainment of mine, it was 
 with this ; for I had observed that no accomplish- 
 ment is more rare. Actors are the worst readers of 
 all. John Kemble is not effective as a reader, though 
 he has the great advantage of mature scholarship ; 
 and his sister, the immortal Siddons, with all her 
 superiority to him in voice, reads even less effectively. 
 She reads nothing well but dramatic works. In the 
 “ Paradise Lost,” which I heard her attempt at Barley 
 Wood, her failure was distressing ; almost as distress- 
 ing as the sycophantic applause of the surrounding 
 company — all lost, of course, in nearly speechless 
 admiration. (Yet I am sensible that this contemp- 
 tuous feeling for the circle of admirers is scarcely 
 justified. What should the poor creatures have done? 
 Already, in the mere attempt to win their suffrages, 
 in placing herself once again upon trial, there was a 
 condescension on the part of Mrs. Siddons, after 
 which free judgment became impossible. I felt a 
 wish to address Mrs. Siddons thus : You that have 
 read to royalty at Windsor, nay, have even been 
 desired to sit down at Windsor whilst reading, -ever 
 afterwards are a privileged person, liable to no accent 
 of truth. Our feelings, as not free to take any natural 
 
658 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 expression, can be of no value. Suffer us to be silent, 
 if only for the dignity of human nature. And do you 
 yourself be silent, if only for the dignity of that once 
 unequalled voice.) Neither Coleridge nor Southey is 
 a good reader of verse. Southey is admirable almost 
 in all things, but not in this. Both he and Coleridge 
 read as if crying, or at least wailing lugubriously. 
 People in general either read poetry without any 
 passion at all, or else overstep the modesty of nature. 
 Of late, if I have felt moved by anything in books, 
 it has been by the grand lamentations of “ Samson 
 Agonistes,” or the great harmonies of the Satanic 
 speeches in “ Paradise Regained/’ when read aloud 
 by myself. We are far from towns; but a young 
 lady sometimes comes and drinks tea with us ; at her 
 request and M ’s, I now and then read Words- 
 
 worth’s poems to them. (Wordsworth, by-the-bye, is 
 the only poet I ever met who could read his own 
 verses ; often, indeed, he reads admirably.) 
 
 For nearly two years I believe that I read nothing 
 and studied nothing. Analytic studies are continuous 
 studies, and not to be pursued by fits and starts, or 
 fragmentary efforts. All these were become insup- 
 portable to me ; I shrank from them with a sense of 
 powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me an 
 anguish the greater from remembering the time when 
 I grappled with them to my own hourly delight ; and 
 for this further reason, because I had devoted the 
 labour of my whole life, had dedicated my intellect, 
 blossoms and fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of 
 constructing one single work, to which I had pre- 
 sumed to give the title of an unfinished work of 
 Spinosa’s — viz., “ De Emendatione Elumani Intel- 
 lectus This was now lying locked up as by frost, 
 like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct begun upon too 
 great a scale for the resources of the architect ; and, 
 instead of surviving me, as a monument of wishes at 
 least, and aspirations, and long labours, dedicated to 
 the exaltation of human nature in that way in which 
 God had best fitted me to promote so great an object, 
 it was likely to stand a memorial to my children of 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 0^9 
 
 hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials use- 
 lessly accumulated, of foundations laid that were never 
 to support a superstructure, of the grief and the ruin 
 of the architect. In this state of imbecility, I had, for 
 amusement, turned my attention to political economy. 
 My understanding, which formerly had been as active 
 and restless as a panther, could not, I suppose (so 
 long as I lived at all), sink into utter lethargy; and 
 political economy offers this advantage to a person in 
 my state, — that, though it is eminently an organic 
 science (no part, that is to say, but what acts on the 
 whole, as the whole again reacts on and through each 
 part), yet still the several parts may be detached and 
 contemplated singly. Great as was the prostration of 
 my powers at this time, yet I could not forget my 
 knowledge; and my understanding had been for too 
 many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, 
 and the great masters of knowledge, not to be aware 
 of a great call made by political economy at this crisis 
 for a new law and a transcendent legislator. Sud- 
 denly, in 1818, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down 
 Mr. Ricardo’s book ; and, recurring to my own pro- 
 phetic anticipation of some coming legislator for this 
 science, I said, before I had finished the first chapter, 
 “Thou art the man!” Wonder and curiosity were 
 emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I 
 wondered once more — wondered at myself that could 
 once again be stimulated to the effort of reading ; and 
 much more I wondered at the book. Had this pro- 
 found work been really written during the tumultuous 
 hurry of the nineteenth century ? Could it be that an 
 Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but 
 oppressed by mercantile and senatorial cares, had 
 accomplished what all the universities of Europe, and 
 a century of thought, had failed even to advance by 
 one hair’s-breadth ? Previous writers had been crushed 
 and overlaid by the enormous weights of facts, details, 
 and exceptions ; Mr. Ricardo had deduced, a priori , 
 from the understanding itself, laws which first shot 
 arrowy light into the dark chaos of materials, and had 
 thus constructed what hitherto was but a collection of 
 
660 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 tentative discussions into a science of regular propor- 
 tions, now first standing upon an eternal basis. 
 
 Thus did one simple work of a profound under- 
 standing avail to give me a pleasure and an activity 
 which I had not known for years ; it roused me even 
 
 to write, or, at least, to dictate what M wrote for 
 
 me. It seemed to me that some important truths had 
 escaped even “ the inevitable eye ” of Mr. Ricardo ; 
 and, as these were, for the most part, of such a nature 
 that I could express or illustrate them briefly and 
 elegantly by algebraic symbols, the whole would hardly 
 
 have reached the bulk of a pamphlet. With M 
 
 for my amanuensis, even at this time, incapable as I 
 was of all general exertion, I drew up, therefore, 
 my “ Prolegomena to all Future Systems of Political 
 Economy.” 
 
 This exertion, however, was but a momentary flash, 
 as the sequel showed. Arrangements were made at 
 a provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for 
 printing it. An additional compositor was retained 
 for some days on this account. The work was even 
 twice advertised ; and I was, in a manner, pledged to 
 the fulfilment of my intention. But I had a preface 
 to write, and a dedication, which I wished to make 
 impressive, to Mr. Ricardo. I found myself quite 
 unable to accomplish all this. The arrangements 
 were countermanded, the compositor dismissed, and 
 my “ Prolegomena ” rested peacefully by the side of 
 its elder and more dignified brother. 
 
 In thus describing and illustrating my intellectual 
 torpor, I use terms that apply, more or less, to every 
 part of the years during which I was under the Circean 
 spells of opium. But for misery and suffering, I 
 might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant 
 state. I seldom could prevail on myself to write a 
 letter ; an answer of a few words to any that I received, 
 was the utmost that I could accomplish ; and often 
 that not until the letter had lain for weeks, or even 
 months, on my writing-table. Without the aid of 
 M , my whole domestic economy, whatever be- 
 
 came of political economy, must have gone into 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 66l 
 
 irretrievable confusion. I shall not afterwards allude 
 to this part of the case ; it is one, however, which the 
 opium-eater will find, in the end, most oppressive and 
 tormenting, from the sense of incapacity and feeble- 
 ness, from the direct embarrassments incident to the 
 neglect or procrastination of each day’s appropriate 
 labours, and from the remorse which must often 
 exasperate the stings of these evils to a conscientious 
 mind. The opium-eater loses none of his moral 
 sensibilities or aspirations ; he wishes and longs as 
 earnestly as ever to realise what he believes possible, 
 and feels to be exacted by duty ; but his intellectual 
 apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his 
 power, not of execution only, but even of proposing 
 or willing. He lies under a world's weight of incubus 
 and nightmare ; he lies in sight of all that he would 
 fain perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his 
 bed by the mortal languor of paralysis, who is com- 
 pelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some 
 object of his tenderest love : — he would lay down his 
 life if he might but rise and walk ; but he is powerless 
 as an infant, and cannot so much as make an effort 
 to move. 
 
 But from this I now pass to what is the main subject 
 of these latter Confessions — to the history and journal 
 of what took place in my dreams ; for these were the 
 immediate and proximate cause of shadowy terrors 
 that settled and brooded over my whole waking life. 
 
 The first notice I had of any important change 
 going on in this part of my physical economy was 
 from the re-awaking of a state of eye oftentimes inci- 
 dent to childhood. I know not whether my reader is 
 aware that many children have a power of painting, as 
 it were, upon the darkness all sorts of phantoms : in 
 some that power is simply a mechanic affection of the 
 eye ; others have a voluntary or semi- voluntary power 
 to dismiss or summon such phantoms ; or, as a child 
 once said to me^when I questioned him on this 
 matter, “ I can tell them to go, and they go ; but 
 sometimes they come when I don’t tell them to 
 come.” He had by one half as unlimited a command 
 
662 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 over apparitions as a Roman centurion over his j 
 soldiers. In the middle of 1817 this faculty became 
 increasingly distressing to me : at night, when I lay 
 awake in bed, vast processions moved along con- 
 tinually in mournful pomp ; friezes of never-ending 
 stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn 
 as stories drawn from times before CEdipus or Priam, 
 before Tyre, before Memphis. And, concurrently 
 with this, a corresponding change took place in my 
 dreams ; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and 
 lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly 
 spectacles of more than earthly splendour. And the 
 four following facts may be mentioned, as noticeable 
 at this time : — - 
 
 1. That, as the creative state of the eye increased, 
 a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and 
 the dreaming states of the brain in one point — that 
 whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a 
 voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to trans- 
 fer itself to my dreams ; and at length I feared to 
 exercise this faculty ; for, as Midas turned all things 
 to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his 
 human desires, so whatsoever things capable of being 
 visually represented I did but think of in the darkness 
 immediately shaped themselves into phantoms for the 
 eye ; and, by a process apparently no less inevitable, 
 when thus once traced in faint and visionary colours, 
 like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out, 
 by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable 
 splendour that fretted my heart. 
 
 2. This and all other changes in my dreams were 
 accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and funereal 
 melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by 
 words. I seemed every night to descend — not meta- 
 phorically, but literally to descend — into chasms and 
 sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it 
 seemed hopeless that I could ever re-ascend. Nor 
 did I, by waking, feel that I had re-ascended. Why 
 should I dwell upon this ? For indeed the state of 
 gloom which attended these gorgeous spectacles, 
 amounting at last to utter darkness, as of some 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 663 
 
 suicidal despondency, cannot be approached by 
 words. 
 
 3. The sense of space, and in the end the sense 
 of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, 
 landscapes, &c., were exhibited in proportions so 
 vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space 
 swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutter- 
 able and self-repeating infinity. This disturbed me 
 very much less than the vast expansion of time. 
 Sometimes I seemed to have lived for seventy or 
 a hundred years in one night ; nay, sometimes had 
 feelings representative of a duration far beyond the 
 limits of any human experience. 
 
 4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or for- 
 gotten scenes of later years, were often revived. I 
 could not be said to recollect them ; for, if I had 
 been told of them when waking, I should not have 
 been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past 
 experience. But, placed as they were before me in 
 dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evan- 
 escent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I 
 recognised them instantaneously. I was once told by 
 a near relative of mine that, having in her childhood 
 fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of 
 death but for the assistance which reached her at the 
 last critical moment, she saw in a moment her whole 
 life, clothed in its forgotten incidents, arrayed before 
 her as in a mirror, not successively, but simultane- 
 ously ; and she had a faculty developed as suddenly 
 for comprehending the whole and every part. 1 This, 
 
 1 The heroine of this remarkable case was a girl about nine 
 years old ; and there can be little doubt that she looked down 
 as far within the crater of death — that awful volcano — as any 
 human being ever can have done that has lived to draw back 
 and to report her experience. Not less than ninety years did 
 she survive this memorable escape ; and I may describe her as 
 in all respects a woman of remarkable and interesting qualities. 
 She enjoyed throughout her long life, as the reader will readily 
 infer, serene and cloudless health ; had a masculine under- 
 standing ; reverenced truth not less than did the Evangelists ; 
 and led a life of saintly devotion, such as might have glorified 
 “ Hilarion or Paul ” — (The words in italic are Ariosto’s.) — I 
 
664 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 from some opium experiences, I can believe ; I have, 
 indeed, seen the same thing asserted twice in modern 
 books, and accompanied by a remark which probably 
 is true — viz., that the dread book of account which 
 the Scriptures speak of is, in fact, the mind itself of 
 each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that 
 there is no such thing as ultimate forgetting ; traces 
 once impressed upon the memory are indestructible ; 
 a thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil 
 
 mention these traits as characterising her in a memorable ex- 
 tent, that the reader may not suppose himself relying upon a 
 dealer in exaggerations, upon a credulous enthusiast, or upon 
 a careless wielder of language. Forty-five years had intervened 
 between the first time and the last time of her telling me this 
 anecdote, and not one iota had shifted its ground amongst the 
 incidents, nor had any the most trivial of the circumstantiations 
 suffered change. The scene of the accident was the least of 
 valleys, — what the Greeks of old would have called an ayicos , 
 and we English should properly call a dell. Human tenant it 
 had none : even at noonday it was a solitude, and would often- 
 times have been a silent solitude, but for the brawling of a brook 
 —not broad, but occasionally deep — which ran along the base 
 of the little hills. Into this brook, probably into one of its 
 dangerous pools, the child fell : and, according to the ordinary 
 chances, she could have had but a slender prospect indeed of 
 any deliverance ; for, although a dwelling-house was close by, 
 it was shut out from view by the undulations of the ground. 
 How long the child lay in the water was probably never in- 
 quired earnestly until the answer had become irrecoverable : 
 for a servant, to whose care the child was then confided, had 
 a natural interest in suppressing the whole case. From the 
 child’s own account, it should seem that asphyxia must have 
 announced its commencement. A process of struggle and 
 deadly suffocation was passed through half consciously. This 
 process terminated by a sudden blow apparently on or in the 
 brain, after which there was no pain or conflict ; but in an 
 instant succeeded a dazzling rush of light ; immediately after 
 which came the solemn apocalypse of the entire past life. 
 Meantime, the child’s disappearance in the water had happily 
 been witnessed by a farmer who rented some fields in this little 
 solitude, and by a rare accident was riding through them at the 
 moment. Not being very well mounted, he was retarded by 
 the hedges and other fences in making his way down to the 
 water ; some time was thus lost ; but, once at the spot, he 
 leaped in, booted and spurred, and succeeded in delivering one 
 that must have been as nearly counted amongst the populations 
 of the grave as perhaps the laws of the shadowy world can 
 suffer to return ! 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 665 
 
 between our present consciousness and the secret 
 inscriptions on the mind. Accidents of the same 
 sort will also rend away this veil. But alike, whether 
 veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever ; 
 just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common 
 light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is 
 the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that 
 they are waiting to be revealed whenever the obscuring 
 daylight itself shall have withdrawn. 
 
 Having noticed these four facts as memorably 
 distinguishing my dreams from those of health, I 
 shall now cite a few illustrative cases ; and shall 
 then cite such others as I remember, in any order 
 that may give them most effect as pictures to the 
 reader. 
 
 I had been in youth, and ever since, for occasional 
 amusement, a great reader of Livy, whom I confess 
 that I prefer, both for style and matter, to any other 
 of the Roman historians ; and I had often felt as 
 solemn and appalling sounds, emphatically represen- 
 tative of Roman majesty, the two words so often 
 occurring in Livy, Consul Romanus ; especially when 
 the consul is introduced in his military character. 
 I mean to say that the words king; sultan , regent , &c., 
 or any other titles of those who embody in their own 
 persons the collective majesty of a great people, had 
 less power over my reverential feelings. I had also, 
 though no great reader of History, made myself criti- 
 cally familiar with one period of English history — 
 viz., the period of the Parliamentary War — having 
 been attracted by the moral grandeur of some who 
 figured in that day, and by the interesting memoirs 
 which survive those unquiet times. Both these parts 
 of my lighter reading, having furnished me often with 
 matter of reflection, now furnished me with matter 
 for my dreams. Often I used to see, after painting 
 upon the blank darkness a sort of rehearsal whilst 
 waking, a crowd of ladies, and perhaps a festival and 
 dances. And I heard it said, or I said to myself, 
 “ These are English ladies from the unhappy times 
 of Charles I. These are the wives and daughters of 
 
666 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 those who met in peace, and sat at the same tables, 
 and were allied by marriage or by blood ; and 
 yet, after a certain day in August 1642, 1 never 
 smiled upon ,each other again, nor met but in the 
 field of battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, 
 or at Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the cruel 
 sabre, and washed away in. blood the memory of 
 ancient friendship.” The ladies danced, and looked 
 as lovely as at the court of George IV. Yet even in 
 my dream I knew that they had been in the grave for 
 nearly two centuries. This pageant would suddenly 
 dissolve ; and, at a clapping of hands, would be 
 heard the heart-shaking sound of Consul Romanus ; 
 and immediately came “sweeping by,” in gorgeous 
 paludaments, Paullus or Marius, girt around by a 
 company of centurions, with the crimson tunic 2 
 hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos 3 
 of the Roman legions. 
 
 Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi’s 
 “ Antiquities of Rome,” Coleridge, then standing by, 
 described to me a set of plates from that artist, called 
 his “ Dreams,” and which record the scenery of his 
 own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some of 
 these (I describe only from memory of Coleridge’s 
 account) represented vast Gothic halls ; on the floor 
 of which stood mighty engines and machinery, wheels, 
 cables, catapults, &c., expressive of enormous power 
 put forth, or resistance overcome. Creeping along 
 
 1 I think (but at the moment have no means of verifying my 
 conjecture) that this day was the 24th of August. On or about 
 that day Charles raised the royal standard at Nottingham ; 
 which, ominously enough (considering the strength of such 
 superstitions in the seventeenth century, and, amongst the 
 generations of that century, more especially in this particular 
 generation of the Parliamentary War), was blown down during 
 the succeeding night. Let me remark, in passing, that no 
 falsehood can virtually be greater or more malicious than that 
 which imputes to Archbishop Laud a special or exceptional 
 faith in such mute warnings. 
 
 2 “ The crimson tunic ” ; — The signal which announced a 
 
 day of battle. C 
 
 3 “ Alalagmos ” : — A word expressing collectively the gather- 
 ing of the Roman war-cries — Alala , Alala! 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 667 
 
 the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase ; and 
 upon this, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi 
 himself. Follow the stairs a little farther, and you 
 perceive them reaching an abrupt termination, with- 
 out any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards 
 to him who should reach the extremity, except into 
 the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor 
 Piranesi, at least you suppose that his labours must 
 now in some way terminate. But raise your eyes, 
 and behold a second flight of stairs still higher, on 
 which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time stand- 
 ing on the very brink of the abyss. Once again 
 elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of 
 stairs is descried ; and there, again, is the delirious 
 Piranesi, busy on his aspiring labours : and so on, 
 until the unfinished stairs and the hopeless Piranesi 
 both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall. With 
 the same power of endless growth and self-reproduc- 
 tion did my architecture proceed in dreams. In 
 the early stage of the malady, the splendours of my 
 dreams were indeed chiefly architectural ; and I 
 beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as never 
 yet was beheld by the waking eye, unless in the 
 clouds. From a great modern poet 1 I cite the 
 part of a passage which describes, as an appearance 
 
 1 “ From a great modern poet ” : — What poet? It was 
 Wordsworth ; and why did I not formally name him ? This 
 throws a light backwards upon the strange history of Words- 
 worth’s reputation. The year in which I wrote and published 
 these Confessions was 1821 ; and at that time the name of 
 Wordsworth, though beginning to emerge from the dark cloud 
 of scorn and contumely which had hitherto overshadowed it, 
 was yet most imperfectly established. Not until ten years later 
 was his greatness cheerfully and generally acknowledged. I, 
 therefore, as the very earliest (without one exception) of all 
 who came forward, in the beginning of his career, to honour 
 and welcome him, shrank with disgust from making any sen- 
 tence of mine the occasion for an explosion of vulgar malice 
 against him. But the grandeur of the passage here cited 
 inevitably spoke for itself ; and he that would have been most 
 scornful on hearing the name of the poet coupled with this 
 epithet of “ great ” could not but find his malice intercepted, 
 and himself cheated into cordial admiration, by the splendour 
 of the verses. 
 
668 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 actually beheld in the clouds, what in many of its 
 circumstances I saw frequently in 'sleep : — 
 
 “ The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
 
 Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
 A wilderness of building, sinking far 
 And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth, 
 
 Far sinking into splendour without end ! 
 
 Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold, 
 
 With alabaster domes and silver spires, 
 
 And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
 Uplifted ; here, serene pavilions bright, 
 
 In avenues disposed ; there, towers begirt 
 With battlements that on their restless fronts 
 Bore stars — illumination of all gems ! 
 
 By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
 Upon the dark materials of the storm 
 Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves, 
 
 And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
 The vapours had receded, taking there 
 Their station under a cerulean sky.” 
 
 The sublime circumstance — “that on their restless 
 fronts bore stars ” — might have been copied from 
 my own architectural dreams, so often did it occur. 
 We hear it reported of Dryden, and in later times 
 of Fuseli, that they ate raw meat for the sake of 
 obtaining splendid dreams : -how much better, for 
 such a purpose, to have eaten opium, which yet 
 I do not remember that any poet is recorded to 
 have done, except the dramatist Shadwell ; and in 
 ancient days, Homer is, I think, rightly reputed to 
 have known the virtues of opium as a <£ap/xa/vov 
 vrjTrevOes — t\e., as an anodyne. 
 
 To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes 
 and silvery expanses of water : these haunted me 
 so much that I feared lest some dropsical state 
 or tendency of the brain might thus be making 
 itself (to use a metaphysical word) objective} and 
 that the sentient organ might be projecting itself 
 
 i “ Objective” : — This word, so nearly unintelligible in 1821, 
 so intensely scholastic, and, consequently, when surrounded by 
 familiar and vernacular words, so apparently pedantic, yet, on 
 the other hand, so indispensable to accurate thinking, and to 
 wide thinking, has since 1821 become too common to need any 
 apology. 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 669 
 
 1 as its own object. For two months I suffered greatly 
 in my head — a part of my bodily structure which had 
 
 ' hitherto been so clear from all touch or taint of 
 weakness (physically, I mean) that I used to say 
 of it, as the last Lord Orford said of his stomach, 
 that it seemed likely to survive the rest of my person. 
 Till now I had never felt a headache even, or any 
 the slightest pain, except rheumatic pains caused 
 by my own folly. 
 
 The waters gradually changed their character — 
 from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they 
 became seas and oceans. And now came a tre- 
 mendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like 
 a scroll, through many months, promised an abiding 
 torment ; and, in fact, it never left me, though 
 recurring more or less intermittingly. Hitherto the 
 human face had often mixed in my dreams, but 
 not despotically, nor with any special power of 
 tormenting. But now that affection which I have 
 called the tyranny of the human face began to 
 unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London 
 life (the searching for Ann amongst fluctuating 
 crowds) might be answerable for this. Be that as 
 it may, now it was that upon the rocking waters 
 of the ocean the human face began to reveal itself ; 
 the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, 
 upturned to the heavens ; faces, imploring, wrath- 
 ful, despairing; faces that surged upwards by thou- 
 sands, by myriads, by generations : infinite was my 
 agitation ; my mind tossed, as it seemed, upon the 
 billowy ocean, and weltered upon the weltering 
 waves. 
 
 May 1818. — The Malay has been a fearful enemy 
 for months. Every night, through his means, I have 
 been transported into Asiastic scenery. I know not 
 whether others share in my feelings on this point ; 
 but I have often thought that, if I were compelled 
 to forego England, and to live in China, among 
 Chinese manners and modes of life and scenery, 
 I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie 
 deep, and some of them must be common to others. 
 
670 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images 
 and associations. As the cradle of the human race 
 if on no other ground, it would have a dim, reverem 
 tial feeling connected with it. But there are other 
 reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, bar- 
 barous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of 
 savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that 
 he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel, 
 and elaborate religions of Hindostan. The mere 
 antiquity of Asiastic things, of their institutions, 
 histories, — above all, of their mythologies, &c., — is 
 so impressive that to me the vast age of the race and 
 name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. 
 A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man # 
 renewed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in any 
 knowledge of such institutions, cannot but shudder 
 at the mystic sublimity of castes that have flowed 
 apart, and refused to mix, through such immemorial 
 tracts of time ; nor can any man fail to be awed 
 by the sanctity of the Ganges, or by the very name 
 of the Euphrates. It contributes much to these 
 feelings that South-eastern Asia is, and has been 
 for thousands of years, the part of the earth most 
 swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. 
 Man is a weed in those regions. The vast empires, 
 also, into which the enormous population of Asia 
 has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the 
 feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. 
 In China, over and above what it has in common 
 with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the 
 modes of life, by the manners, by the barrier of 
 utter abhorrence placed between myself and them, 
 by counter-sympathies deeper than I can analyse. 
 
 I could sooner live with lunatics, with vermin, with 
 crocodiles or snakes. All this, and much more 
 than I can say, the reader must enter into before 
 he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which 
 these dreams of Oriental imagery and mythological 
 tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting 
 feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I 
 brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 671 
 
 all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that 
 are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them 
 together in China or Hindostan. From kindred 
 feelings, I soon brought Egypt and her gods under 
 the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned 
 at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by 
 cockatoos* I ran into pagodas, and was fixed for 
 centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms ; I was 
 the idol ; I was the priest ; I was worshipped ; I was 
 sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of Brama through 
 all the forests of Asia ; Vishnu hated me ; Seeva 
 lay in wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis 
 and Osiris : I had done a deed, they said, which 
 the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Thousands 
 of years I lived and was buried in stone coffins, 
 with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at 
 the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with 
 cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, con- 
 founded with all unutterable abortions, amongst 
 reeds and Nilotic mud. 
 
 Some slight abstraction I thus attempt of my 
 Oriental dreams, which filled me always with such 
 amazement at the monstrous scenery that horror 
 seemed absorbed for a while in sheer astonishment. 
 Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed 
 up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in 
 terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. 
 Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and 
 dim sightless incarceration, brooded a killing sense 
 of eternity and infinity. Into these dreams only it 
 was, with one or two slight exceptions, that any 
 circumstances of physical horror entered. All before 
 had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here the 
 main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, 
 especially the last. The cursed crocodile became 
 to me the object of more horror than all the rest. 
 I was compelled to live with him ; and (as was 
 always the case in my dreams) for centuries. Some- 
 times I escaped, and found myself in Chinese 
 houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, &c., soon 
 became instinct with life : the abominable head of 
 
672 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 Ihe crocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at 
 me, multiplied into ten thousand repetitions ; and 
 I stood loathing and fascinated. So often did this 
 hideous reptile haunt my dreams that many times 
 the very same dream was broken up in the very same 
 way : I heard gentle voices speaking to me (I hear 
 everything when I am sleeping), and instantly I 
 awoke ; it was broad noon, and my children were 
 standing, hand in hand, at my bedside, come to 
 show me their coloured shoes, or new frocks, or 
 to let me see them dressed for going out. No 
 experience was so awful to me, and at the same 
 time so pathetic, as this abrupt translation from 
 the darkness of the infinite to the gaudy summer 
 air of highest noon, and from the unutterable 
 abortions of miscreated gigantic vermin to the sight 
 of infancy and innocent human natures. 
 
 June 1819. — I have had occasion to remark, at 
 various periods of my life, that the deaths of those 
 whom we love, and, indeed, the contemplation of 
 death generally, is ( cceteris paribus ) more affecting 
 in summer than in any other season of the year. 
 And the reasons are these three, 1 think : first, that 
 the visible heavens in summer appear far higher, 
 more distant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) 
 more infinite; the clouds by which chiefly the eye 
 expounds the distance of the blue pavilion stretched 
 over our heads are in summer more voluminous, 
 more massed, and are accumulated in far grander 
 and more towering piles ; secondly, the light and 
 the appearances of the declining and the setting sun 
 are much more fitted to be types and characters 
 of the infinite ; and, thirdly (which is the main 
 reason), the exuberant and riotous prodigality of 
 life naturally forces the mind more powerfully upon 
 the antagonist thought of death, and the wintry 
 sterility of the grave. For it may be observed 
 generally that, wherever two thoughts stand related 
 to each other by a law of antagonism, and exist, 
 as it were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to 
 suggest each other. On these accounts it is that 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 673 
 
 I find it impossible to banish the thought of death 
 when I am walking alone in the endless days of 
 summer; and any particular death, if not actually 
 more affecting, at least haunts my mind more 
 obstinately and besiegingly, in that season. Perhaps 
 this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, might 
 have been the immediate occasions of the following 
 dream, to which, however, a predisposition must 
 always have existed in my mind ; but, having been 
 once roused, it never left me, and split into a 
 thousand fantastic variations, which often suddenly 
 re-combined, locked back into startling unity, and 
 restored the original dream. 
 
 I thought that it was a Sunday morning in May ; 
 that it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in 
 the morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, 
 at the door of my own cottage. Right before me 
 lay the very scene which could really be commanded 
 from that situation, but exalted, as was usual, and 
 solemnised by the power of dreams. There were 
 the same mountains, and the same lovely valley at 
 their feet ; but the mountains were raised to more 
 than Alpine height, and there was interspace far 
 larger between them of savannahs and forest lawns ; 
 the hedges were rich with white roses ; and no living 
 creature was to be seen, excepting that in the green 
 churchyard there were cattle tranquilly reposing upon 
 the verdant graves, and particularly round about the 
 grave of a child whom I had once tenderly loved, just 
 as I had really beheld them, a little before sunrise, 
 in the same summer when that child died. I gazed 
 upon the well-known scene, and I said to myself, “ It 
 yet wants much of sunrise ; and it is Easter Sunday ; 
 and that is the day on which they celebrate the 
 first-fruits of Resurrection. . I will walk abroad ; old 
 griefs shall be forgotten to-day : for the air is cool 
 and still, and the hills are high, and stretch away to 
 heaven ; and the churchyard is as verdant as the 
 forest lawns, and the forest lawns are as quiet as the 
 churchyard ; and with the dew I can wash the fever 
 from my forehead ; and then I shall be unhappy no 
 
674 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 longer.” I turned, as if to open my garden gate, and 
 immediately I saw upon the left a scene far different ; 
 but which yet the power of dreams had reconciled 
 into harmony. The scene was an Oriental one ; and 
 there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early in 
 the morning. And at a vast distance were visible, 
 as a stain upon the horizon, the domes and cupolas 
 of a great city — an image or faint abstraction, caught 
 perhaps in childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. 
 And not a bow-shot from me, upon a stone, shaded 
 by Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked, 
 and it was — Ann ! She fixed her eyes upon me 
 earnestly ; and I said to her at length, “ So, then, I 
 have found you at last.” I waited ; but she answered 
 me not a word. Her face was the same as when I 
 saw it last ; the same, and yet, again, how different ! 
 Seventeen years ago, when the lamplight of mighty 
 London fell upon her face, as for the last time I 
 kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not 
 polluted !), her eyes were streaming with tears. The 
 tears were now no longer seen. Sometimes she 
 seemed altered ; yet again sometimes not altered ; 
 and hardly older. Her looks were tranquil, but with 
 unusual solemnity of expression, and I now gazed 
 upon her with some awe. Suddenly her countenance 
 grew dim ; and, turning to the mountains, I per- 
 ceived vapours rolling between us ; in a moment all 
 had vanished ; thick darkness came on ; and in the 
 twinkling of an eye I was far away from mountains, 
 and by lamplight in London, walking again with 
 Ann — just as we had walked, when both children, 
 eighteen years before, along the endless terraces of 
 Oxford Street. 
 
 Then suddenly would come a dream of far different 
 character — a tumultuous dream — commencing with 
 a music such as now I often heard in sleep — music 
 of preparation and of awakening suspense. The 
 undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the 
 opening of the Coronation Anthem ; and, like that, 
 gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of in- 
 finite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumer- 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 675 
 
 able armies. The morning was come of a mighty 
 day — a day of crisis and of ultimate hope for human 
 nature, then suffering mysterious eclipse, and labour- 
 ing in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I 
 knew not where — somehow, but I knew not how — by 
 some beings, but I knew not by whom — a battle, a 
 strife, an agony, was travelling through all its stages — 
 was evolving itself, like the catastrophe of some mighty 
 drama, with which my sympathy was the more in- 
 supportable from deepening confusion as to its local 
 scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable 
 issue. I (as is usual in dreams where, of necessity, 
 we make ourselves central to every movement) had 
 the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. 
 I had the power, if I could raise myself to will it ; 
 and yet again had not the power, for the weight of 
 twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression 
 of inexpiable guilt. “ Deeper than ever plummet 
 sounded,” I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the 
 passion deepened. Some greater interest was at 
 stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword 
 had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then 
 came sudden alarms ; hurryings to and fro ; trepida- 
 tions of innumerable fugitives, I knew not whether 
 from the good cause or the bad ; darkness and lights ; 
 tempest and human faces ; and at last, with the sense 
 that all was lost, female forms, and the features that 
 were worth all the world to me ; and but a moment 
 allowed — and clasped hands, with heart-breaking 
 partings, and then — everlasting farewells ! and, with 
 a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the 
 incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of 
 Death, the sound was reverberated — everlasting fare- 
 wells ! and again, and yet again reverberated — ever- 
 lasting farewells ! r 
 
 And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud, “ I will 
 sleep no more ! ” 
 
 Now, at last, I had become awestruck at the 
 approach of sleep, under the condition of visions 
 so afflicting, and so intensely lifelike as those which 
 persecuted my phantom-haunted brain. More and 
 
676 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 more also I felt violent palpitations in some internal 
 region, such as are commonly, but erroneously, called 
 palpitations of the heart — being, as I suppose, refer- 
 able exclusively to derangements in the stomach. 
 These were evidently increasing rapidly in fre- 
 quency and in strength. Naturally, therefore, on 
 considering how important my life had become to 
 others besides myself, I became alarmed ; and I 
 paused seasonably ; but with a difficulty that is past 
 all description. Either way it seemed as though death 
 had, in military language, “ thrown himself astride of 
 my path.” Nothing short of mortal anguish, in a 
 physical sense, it seemed, to wean myself from opium : 
 yet, on the other hand, death through overwhelming 
 nervous terrors — death by brain-fever or by lunacy 
 — seemed too certainly to besiege the alternative 
 course. Fortunately I had still so much of firmness 
 left as to face that choice, which, with most of instant 
 suffering, showed in the far distance a possibility of 
 final escape. 
 
 This possibility was realised : I did accomplish my 
 escape. And the issue of that particular stage in 
 my opium experiences (for such it was — simply a 
 provisional stage, that paved the way subsequently 
 for many milder stages, to which gradually my con- 
 stitutional system accommodated itself) was, pretty 
 nearly in the following words, communicated to my 
 readers in the earliest edition of these Confessions : — 
 
 I triumphed. <But infer not, reader, from this 
 word “ triumphed ,” a condition of joy or exultation. 
 Think of me as of one, even when four months had 
 passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpitating, 
 shattered ; and much, perhaps, in the situation of 
 him who has been racked, as I collect the torments 
 of that state from the affecting account of them left 
 by a most innocent sufferer in the time of James I . 1 
 
 1 William Lithgow. His book (Travels, &c. ) is tedious and 
 not well written ; but the account of his own sufferings on the 
 rack at Malaga, and subsequently, is overpoweringly affecting. 
 Less circumstantial, but the same in tendency, is the report of 
 the results from torture published in 1830 by Juan Van Halen. 
 
THE PAINS OF OPIUM 677 
 
 Meantime, I derived no benefit from any medicine 
 whatever, except ammoniated tincture of valerian. 
 The moral of the narrative is addressed to the opium- 
 eater ; and therefore, of necessity, limited in its 
 application. If he is taught to fear and tremble, 
 enough has been effected. But he may say that the 
 issue of my ease is ac least a proof that opium, after 
 an eighteen years’ use, and an eight years’ abuse, of 
 its powers, may still be renounced ; and that he may 
 chance to bring to the task greater energy than I did, 
 or that, with a stronger constitution, he may obtain 
 the same results with less. This may be true ; I 
 would not presume to measure the efforts of other 
 men by my own. Heartily I wish him more resolu- 
 tion ; heartily I wish him an equal success. Never- 
 theless, I had motives external to myself which he 
 may unfortunately want ; and these supplied me 
 with conscientious supports, such as merely selfish 
 interests might fail in supplying to a mind debilitated 
 by opium. 
 
 Lord Bacon conjectures that it may be as painful 
 to be born as to die . 1 That seems probable; and, 
 during the whole period of diminishing the opium, 
 I had the torments of a man passing out of one 
 mode of existence into another, and liable to the 
 mixed or the alternate pains of birth and death. 
 The issue was not death, but a sort of physical 
 regeneration ; and I may add that ever since, at 
 intervals, I have had a restoration of more than 
 youthful spirits. 
 
 One memorial of my former condition nevertheless 
 remains : my dreams are not calm ; the dread swell 
 and agitation of the storm have not wholly subsided ; 
 
 1 In all former editions I had ascribed this sentiment to 
 Jeremy Taylor. On a close search, however, wishing to verify 
 the quotation, it appeared that I had been mistaken. Some- 
 thing very like it occurs more than once in the bishop’s volu- 
 minous writings : but the exact passage moving in my mind 
 had evidently been this which follows, from Lord Bacon’s 
 “Essay on Death” : “It is as natural to die as to be born; 
 and to a little infant perhaps the one is as painful as the 
 other.” 
 
678 CONFESSIONS OF AN OPIUM-EATER 
 
 the legions that encamped in them are drawing off, 
 but not departed ; my sleep is still tumultuous ; and, 
 like the gates of Paradise to our first parents when 
 looking back from afar, it is still (in the tremendous 
 line of Milton) — 
 
 “With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms. 1 
 
THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 
 

THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 
 
 Damascus, first-born of cities, Om el Denia} mother 
 of generations, that wast before Abraham, that wast 
 before the Pyramids ! what sounds are those that, 
 from a postern gate, looking eastwards over secret 
 paths that wind away to the far distant desert, break 
 the solemn silence of an Oriental night? Whose voice 
 is that which calls upon the spearsmen, keeping watch 
 for ever in the turret surmounting the gate, to receive 
 him back into his Syrian home ? Thou knowest him, 
 Damascus, and hast known him in seasons of trouble 
 as one learned in the afflictions of man ; wise alike 
 to take counsel for the suffering spirit or for the suffer- 
 ing body. The voice that breaks upon the night is 
 the voice of a great evangelist — one of the four ; and 
 he is also a great physician. This do the watchmen 
 at the gate thankfully acknowledge, and joyfully they 
 give him entrance. His sandals are white with dust ; 
 for he has been roaming for weeks beyond the desert, 
 under the guidance of Arabs, on missions of hopeful 
 benignity to Palmyra ; 1 2 and in spirit he is weary of 
 all things, except faithfulness to God, and burning- 
 love to man. 
 
 1 “ Om el Denia ” .* — Mother of the World is‘the Arabic title 
 of Damascus. That it was before Abraham — i.e., already an old 
 establishment much more than a thousand years before the siege 
 of Troy, and than two thousand years before our Christian era 
 — may be inferred from Gen. xv. 2 ; and, by the general consent 
 of all eastern races, Damascus is accredited as taking precedency 
 in age of all cities to the west of the Indus. 
 
 2 Palmyra had not yet reached its meridian splendour of 
 Grecian development, as afterwards near the age of Aurelian ; 
 but it was already a noble city. 
 
 68i 
 
 Y 2 
 
682 THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 
 
 Eastern cities are asleep betimes ; and sounds few 
 or none fretted the quiet of all around him, as the 
 evangelist paced onward to the market-place ; but 
 there another scene awaited him. On the right hand, 
 in an upper chamber, with lattices widely expanded, 
 sat a festal company of youths, revelling under a 
 noonday blaze of light from cressets and from bright 
 tripods that burned fragrant woods — all joining in 
 choral songs, all crowned with odorous wreaths from 
 Daphne and the banks of the Orontes. Them the 
 evangelist heeded not ; but far away upon the left, 
 close upon a sheltered nook, lighted up by a solitary 
 vase of iron fretwork filled with cedar boughs, and 
 hoisted high upon a spear, behold there sat a woman 
 of loveliness so transcendent that, when suddenly re- 
 vealed, as now, out of deepest darkness, she appalled 
 men as a mockery, or a birth of the air. Was she 
 born of woman ? Was it perhaps the angel — so the 
 evangelist argued with himself — that met him in the 
 desert after sunset, and strengthened him by secret 
 talk ? The evangelist went up, and touched her fore- 
 head; and, when he found that was indeed human, 
 and guessed, from the station which she had chosen, 
 that she waited for some one amongst this dissolute 
 crew as her companion, he groaned heavily in spirit, 
 and said, half to himself, but half to her, “ Wert thou, 
 poor ruined flower, adorned so divinely at thy birth 
 — glorified in such excess that not Solomon in all 
 his pomp — no, nor even the lilies of the field — can 
 approach thy gifts — only that thou shouldest grieve 
 the Holy Spirit of God ? ” The woman trembled 
 exceedingly, and said, “ Rabbi, what should I do ? 
 For behold ! all men forsake me.” The evangelist 
 mused a little, and then secretly to himself he said, 
 “ Now will I search this woman’s heart — whether in 
 very truth it inclineth itself to God, and hath strayed 
 only before fiery compulsion.” Turning therefore to 
 the woman, the Prophet 1 said, “ Listen : I am the 
 
 1 “ The Prophet ” .• — Though a Prophet was not therefore and 
 in virtue of that character an Evangelist, yet every Evangelist 
 was necessarily in the scriptural sense a Prophet. For let it be 
 
THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 683 
 
 messenger of him whom thou hast not known ; of 
 him that made Lebanon and the cedars of Lebanon ; 
 that made the sea, and the heavens, and the host of 
 the stars ; that made the light ; that made the dark- 
 ness ; that blew the spirit of life into the nostrils of 
 man. His messenger I am ; and from him all power 
 is given me to bind and to loose, to build and to pull 
 down. Ask, therefore, whatsoever thou wilt — great 
 or small — and through me thou shalt receive it from 
 God. But, my child, ask not amiss. For God is 
 able out of thy own evil asking to weave snares for 
 thy footing. And oftentimes to the lambs whom he 
 loves he gives by seeming to refuse ; gives in some 
 better sense, or” (and his voice swelled into the 
 power of anthems) “ in some far happier world. 
 Now, therefore, my daughter, be wise on thy own 
 behalf ; and say what it is that I shall ask for thee from 
 God.” But the Daughter of Lebanon needed not his 
 caution ; for immediately, dropping on one knee to 
 God’s ambassador, whilst the full radiance from the 
 cedar torch fell upon the glory of a penitential eye, 
 she raised her clasped hands in supplication, and said, 
 in answer to the evangelist asking for a second time 
 what gift he should call down upon her from heaven, 
 “ Lord, that thou wouldest put me back into my 
 father’s house.” And the evangelist, because he was 
 human, dropped a tear as he stooped to kiss her 
 forehead, saying, “ Daughter, thy prayer is heard in 
 heaven ; and I tell thee that the daylight shall not 
 come and go for thirty times, not for the thirtieth 
 time shall the sun drop behind Lebanon, before T 
 will put thee back into \hy father’s house.” 
 
 remembered that a Prophet did not mean a Pre dieter or Fore ■ 
 shower of events, except derivatively and inferentially. What 
 was a Prophet in the uniform scriptural sense ? He was a man 
 who drew aside the curtain from the secret counsels of Heaven. 
 He declared, or made public, the previously hidden truths of 
 God : and, because future events might chance to involve divine 
 truth, therefore a revealer of future events might happen so far 
 to be a Prophet. Yet still small was that part of a Prophet’s 
 functions which concerned the foreshowing of events ; and not 
 necessarily any part. 
 
684 THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 
 
 Thus the lovely lady came into the guardianship of 
 the evangelist. She sought not to varnish her history, 
 or to palliate her own transgressions. In so far as 
 she had offended at all, her case was that of millions 
 in every generation.- Her father was a prince in 
 Lebanon, proud, unforgiving, austere. The wrongs 
 done to his daughter by -her dishonourable lover, 
 because done under favour of opportunities created 
 by her confidence in his integrity, her father persisted 
 in resenting as wrongs done by this injured daughter 
 herself ; and, refusing to her all protection, drove her, 
 whilst yet confessedly innocent, into criminal com- 
 pliances under sudden necessities of seeking daily 
 bread from her own uninstructed efforts. Great was 
 the wrong she suffered both from father and lover ; 
 great was the retribution. She lost a churlish father 
 and a wicked lover ; she gained an apostolic guardian. 
 She lost a princely station in Lebanon ; she gained 
 an early heritage in heaven. For this heritage is hers 
 within thirty days, if she will not defeat it herself. 
 And, whilst the stealthy motion of time travelled 
 towards this thirtieth day, behold! a burning fever 
 desolated Damascus, which also laid its arrest upon 
 the Daughter of Lebanon, yet gently, and so that 
 hardly for an hour did it withdraw her from the 
 heavenly teachings of the evangelist. And thus daily 
 the doubt was strengthened would the holy apostle 
 suddenly touch her with his hand, and say, “ Woman, 
 be thou whole ! ” or would he present her on the 
 thirtieth day as a pure bride to Christ ? But perfect 
 freedom belongs to Christian service, and she only 
 must make the election. 
 
 Up rose the sun on the thirtieth morning in all his 
 pomp, but suddenly was darkened by driving storms. 
 Not until noon was the heavenly orb again revealed : 
 then the glorjous light was again unmasked, and 
 again the Syrian valleys rejoiced. This was the 
 hour already appointed for the baptism of the new 
 Christian daughter. Heaven and earth shed gratula- 
 tion on the happy festival ; and, when all was finished, 
 under an awning raised above the level roof of her 
 
THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 685 
 
 dwelling-house, the regenerate Daughter of Lebanon, 
 looking over the rose-gardens of Damascus, with 
 amplest prospect of her native hills, lay in blissful 
 trance, making proclamation, by her white baptismal 
 robes, of recovered innocence and of reconciliation 
 with God. And, when the sun was declining to the 
 west, the evangelist, who had sat from noon by the 
 bedside of his spiritual daughter, rose solemnly, and 
 said, “ Lady of Lebanon, the day is already come, 
 and the hour is coming, in which my covenant must 
 be fulfilled with thee. Wilt thou, therefore, being 
 now wiser in thy thoughts, suffer God thy new Father 
 to give by seeming to refuse ; to give in some better 
 sense, or in some far happier world ?” But the 
 Daughter of Lebanon sorrowed at these words ; she 
 yearned after her native hills ; not for themselves, but 
 because there it was that she had left that sweet twin- 
 born sister with whom from infant days hand-in-hand 
 she had wandered amongst the everlasting cedars. 
 And again the evangelist sat down by her bedside ; 
 whilst she by intervals communed with him, and by 
 intervals slept gently under the oppression of her 
 fever. But, as evening drew nearer, and it wanted 
 now but a brief space to the going down of the sun, 
 once again, and with deeper solemnity, the evangelist 
 rose to his feet, and said, “ O daughter ! this is the 
 thirtieth day, and the sun is drawing near to his rest ; 
 brief, therefore, is the time within which I must 
 fulfil the word that God spoke to thee by me.” Then, 
 because light clouds of delirium were playing about 
 her brain, he raised his pastoral staff, and, pointing it 
 to her temples, rebuked the clouds, and bade that 
 no more they should trouble her vision, or stand 
 between her and the forests of Lebanon. And the 
 delirious clouds parted asunder, breaking away to 
 the right and to the left. But upon the forests of 
 Lebanon there hung a mighty mass of overshadowing 
 vapours, bequeathed by the morning’s storm. And a 
 second time the evangelist raised his pastoral staff, 
 and, pointing it to the gloomy vapours, rebuked 
 them, and bade that no more they should stand 
 
686 THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 
 
 between his daughter and her father’s house. And 
 immediately the dark vapours broke away from 
 Lebanon to the right and to the left ; and the fare- 
 well radiance of the sun lighted up all the paths that 
 ran between the everlasting cedars and her father’s 
 palace. But vainly the lady of Lebanon searched 
 every path with her eyes for memorials of her sister. 
 And the evangelist, pitying her sorrow, turned away 
 her eyes to the clear blue sky, which the departing 
 vapours had exposed. And he showed her the peace 
 which was there. And then he said, “ O daughter ! 
 this also is but a mask.” And immediately for the 
 third time he raised his pastoral staff, and, pointing 
 it to the fair blue sky, he rebuked it, and bade that 
 no more it should stand between, her and the vision 
 of God. Immediately the blue sky parted to the 
 right and to the left, laying bare the infinite revela- 
 tions that can be made visible only to dying eyes. 
 And the Daughter of Lebanon said to the evangelist, 
 “ O father ! what armies are these that I see muster- 
 ing within the infinite chasm ? ” And the evangelist 
 replied, “ These are the armies of Christ, and they 
 are mustering to receive some dear human blossom, 
 some first-fruits of Christian faith, that shall rise this 
 night to Christ from Damascus.” Suddenly, as thus 
 the child of Lebanon gazed upon the mighty vision, 
 she saw bending forward from the heavenly host, as 
 if in gratulation to herself, the one countenance for 
 which she hungered and thirsted. < The twin-sister, 
 that should have waited for her in Lebanon, had died 
 of grief, and was waiting for her in Paradise. Im- 
 mediately in rapture she soared upwards from her 
 couch ; immediately in weakness she fell back ; and, 
 being caught by the evangelist, she flung her arms 
 around his neck ; whilst he breathed into her ear his 
 final whisper, “Wilt thou now suffer that God should 
 give by seeming to refuse?” — “Oh yes — yes — yes,” 
 was the fervent answer from the Daughter of Lebanon. 
 Immediately the evangelist gave the signal to the 
 heavens, and the heavens gave the signal to the sun ; 
 and in one minute after the Daughter of Lebanon 
 
THE DAUGHTER OF LEBANON 687 
 
 had fallen back a marble corpse amongst her white 
 baptismal robes ; the solar orb dropped 'behind 
 Lebanon ; and the evangelist, with eyes glorified by 
 mortal and immortal tears, rendered thanks to God 
 that had thus accomplished the word which he spoke 
 through himself to the Magdalen of Lebanon — that 
 not for the thirtieth time should the sun go down 
 behind her native hills before he had put her back 
 into her Father’s house. 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 

SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 DREAMING 
 
 In 1821, as a contribution to a periodical work, — in 
 1822, as a separate volume, — appeared the “ Con- 
 fessions of an English Opium-Eater.” The object of 
 that work was to reveal something of the grandeur 
 which belongs potentially to human dreams. What- 
 ever may be the number of those in whom this 
 faculty of dreaming splendidly can be supposed to 
 lurk, there are not, perhaps, very many in whom it is 
 developed. He whose talk is of oxen will probably 
 dream of oxen ; and the condition of human life 
 which yokes so vast a majority to a daily experience 
 incompatible with much elevation of thought often- 
 times neutralises the tone of grandeur in the repro- 
 ductive faculty of dreaming, even for those whose 
 minds are populous with solemn imagery. Habitually 
 to dream magnificently, a man must have a consti- 
 tutional determination to reverie. This in the first 
 place ; and even this, where it exists strongly, is too 
 much liable to disturbance from the gathering agita- 
 tion of our present English life. Already, what by 
 the procession through fifty years of mighty revolu- 
 tions amongst the kingdoms of the earth, what by the 
 continual development of vast physical agencies, — 
 steam in all its applications, light getting under 
 harness as a slave for man, powers from heaven 
 descending upon education and accelerations of the 
 press, powers from hell (as it might seem, but these 
 also celestial) coming round upon artillery and the 
 
 691 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 692 
 
 forces of destruction, — the eye of the calmest observer 
 is troubled ; the brain is haunted as if by some 
 jealousy of ghostly beings moving amongst us ; and 
 it becomes too evident that, unless this colossal pace 
 of advance can be retarded (a thing not to be ex- 
 pected), or, which is happily more probable, can be 
 met by counter-forces of corresponding magnitude, — 
 forces in the direction of religion or profound philo- 
 sophy that shall radiate centrifugally against this 
 storm of life so perilously centripetal towards the 
 vortex of the merely human,— left to itself, the natural 
 tendency of so chaotic a tumult must be to evil ; for 
 some minds to lunacy, for others a reagency of fleshly 
 torpor. How much this fierce condition of eternal 
 hurry upon an arena too exclusively human in its 
 interests is likely to defeat the grandeur which is 
 latent in all men, may be seen in the ordinary effect 
 from living too constantly in varied company. The 
 word dissipation , in one of its uses, expresses that 
 effect ; the action of thought and feeling is consciously 
 dissipated and squandered. To reconcentrate them 
 into meditative habits, a necessity is felt by all ob- 
 serving persons for sometimes retiring from crowds. 
 No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own 
 intellect who does not at least checker his life with 
 solitude. How much solitude, so much power. Or, 
 if not true in that rigour of expression, to this formula 
 undoubtedly it is that the wise rule of life must 
 approximate. 
 
 Among the powers in man which suffer by this too 
 intense life of the social lnadncts, none suffers more 
 than the power of dreaming. Let no man think this 
 a trifle. The machinery for dreaming planted in the 
 human brain was not planted for nothing. That 
 faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is 
 the one great tube through which man communicates 
 with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in con- 
 nection with the heart, the eye, and the ear, composes 
 the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite 
 into the chambers of a human brain, and throws dark 
 reflections from eternities below all life upon the 
 
DREAMING 693 
 
 mirrors of that mysterious camera obscura — the sleep- 
 ing mind. 
 
 But, if this faculty suffers from the decay of soli- 
 tude, which is becoming a visionary idea in England, 
 on the other hand it is certain that some merely 
 physical agencies can and do assist the faculty of 
 dreaming almost preternatu rally. Amongst these is 
 intense exercise, — to some extent at least, for some 
 persons ; but beyond all others is opium : which 
 indeed seems to possess a specific power in that direc- 
 tion ; not merely for exalting the colours of dream- 
 scenery, but for deepening its shadows, and, above 
 all, for strengthening the sense of its fearful realities . 
 
 The “ Opium Confessions ” were written with some 
 slight secondary purpose of exposing this specific 
 power of opium upon the faculty of dreaming, but 
 much more with the purpose of displaying the faculty 
 itself ; and the outline of the work travelled in this 
 course : Supposing a reader acquainted with the true 
 object of the “ Confessions ” as here stated — namely, 
 the revelation of dreaming — to have put this question, 
 “ But how came you to dream more splendidly 
 than others ? ” 
 
 The answer would have been — 
 
 “ Because ( prcemissis prcemittendis) T took excessive 
 quantities of opium.” 
 
 Secondly, suppose him to say, “ But how came you 
 to take opium in this excess » 
 
 The answer to that would be, “ Because some early 
 events in my life had left a weakness in one organ 
 which required (or seemed to require) that stimulant.” 
 Then, because the opium dreams could not always 
 have been understood without a knowledge of these 
 events, it became necessary to relate them. Now, 
 these two questions and answers exhibit the law of 
 the work, — that is, the principle which determined 
 its form, — but precisely in the inverse or regressive 
 order. The work itself opened with the narration of 
 my early adventures. These, in the natural order of 
 succession, led to the opium as a resource for healing 
 their consequences ; and the opium as naturally led 
 
694 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 to the dreams. But, in the synthetic order of pre- 
 senting the facts, what stood last in the succession of 
 development stood first in the order of my purposes. 
 
 At the close of this little work, the reader was 
 instructed to believe, and truly instructed, that I had 
 mastered the tyranny of opium. The fact is that 
 twice I mastered it, and by efforts even more pro- 
 digious in the second of these cases than in the first. 
 But one error I committed in both. I did not con- 
 nect with the abstinence from opium, so trying to the 
 fortitude under any circumstances, that enormity of 
 exercise which (as I have since learned) is the one 
 sole resource for making it endurable. I overlooked, 
 in those days, the one sine qua non for making the 
 triumph permanent. Twice I sank, twice I rose 
 again. A third time I sank ; partly from the cause 
 mentioned (the oversight as to exercise), partly from 
 other causes,^ on which it avails not now to trouble 
 the reader. I could moralise, if I chose, and per- 
 haps he will moralise, whether I choose it or not. 
 But, in the meantime, neither of us is acquainted 
 properly with the circumstances of the case : I, from 
 natural bias of judgment, not altogether acquainted ; 
 and he (with his permission) not at all. 
 
 During this third prostration before the dark idol, 
 and after some years, new and monstrous pheno- 
 mena began slowly to arise. For a time, these were 
 neglected as accidents, or palliated by such remedies 
 as I knew of. But, when I could no longer con- 
 ceal from myself that these dreadful symptoms were 
 moving forward for ever, by a pace steadily, solemnly, 
 and equably increasing, I endeavoured, with some 
 feeling of panic, for a third time to retrace my steps. 
 But I had not reversed my motions for many weeks 
 before I became profoundly aware that this was im- 
 possible. Or, in the imagery of my dreams, which 
 translated everything into their own language, I saw, 
 through vast avenues of gloom, those towering gates 
 of ingress which hitherto had always seemed to stand 
 open now at last barred against my retreat, and hung 
 with funeral crape. 
 
DREAMING 
 
 695 
 
 As applicable to this tremendous situation (the 
 situation of one escaping by some refluent current 
 from, the maelstrom roaring for him in the distance, 
 who finds suddenly that this current is but an eddy 
 wheeling round upon the same maelstrom), I have 
 since remembered a striking incident in a modern 
 novel. 
 
 A lady-abbess of a convent, herself suspected of 
 Protestant leanings, and in that way already disarmed 
 of all effectual power, finds one of her own nuns 
 (whom she knows to be innocent) accused of an 
 offence leading to the most terrific of punishments. 
 The nun will be immured alive if she is found guilty ; 
 and there is no chance that she will not, — for the 
 evidence against her is strong, unless something were 
 made known that cannot be made known, and the 
 judges are hostile. All follows in the order of the 
 reader’s fears. The witnesses depose • the evidence 
 is without effectual contradiction ; the conviction is 
 declared ; the judgment is delivered ; nothing re- 
 mains but to see execution done. At this crisis, the 
 abbess, alarmed too late for effectual interposition, 
 considers with herself that, according to the regular 
 forms, there will be one single night open, during 
 which the prisoner cannot be withdrawn from her 
 own separate jurisdiction. This one night, therefore, 
 she will use, at any hazard to herself, for the salvation 
 of her friend. At midnight, when all is hushed in 
 the convent, the lady traverses the passages which 
 lead to the cells of prisoners. She bears a master- 
 key under her professional habit. As this will open 
 every door in every corridor, already, by anticipation, 
 she feels the luxury of holding her emancipated friend 
 within her arms. Suddenly she has reached the door ; 
 she descries a dusky object ; she raises her lamp ; 
 and, ranged within the recess of the entrance, she 
 beholds the funeral banner of the holy office, and the 
 black robes of its inexorable officials. 
 
 I apprehend that, in a situation such as this, sup- 
 posing it a real one, the lady-abbess would not start, 
 would not show any marks externally of consternation 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS. 
 
 696 
 
 or horror. The case was beyond that . The senti- 
 ment which attends the sudden revelation that all is 
 lost silently is gathered up into the heart ; it is too 
 deep for gestures or for words ; and no part of it 
 passes to the outside. Were the ruin conditional, or 
 were it in any point doubtful, it would be natural to 
 utter ejaculations, and to seek sympathy. But, where 
 the ruin is understood to be absolute, where sympathy 
 cannot be consolation, and counsel cannot be hope, 
 this is otherwise. The voice perishes ; the gestures 
 are frozen ; and the spirit of man flies back upon its 
 own centre. I, at least, upon seeing those awful 
 gates closed and hung with draperies of woe, as 
 for a death already past, spoke not, nor started, nor 
 groaned. One profound sigh ascended from my 
 heart, and I was silent for days. 
 
 In the “ Opium Confessions ” I touched a little 
 upon the extraordinary power connected with opium 
 (after long use) of amplifying the dimensions of time. 
 Space, also, it amplifies by degrees that are some- 
 times terrific. But time it is upon which the exalting 
 and multiplying power of opium, chiefly spends its 
 operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretch- 
 ing out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini 
 that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it, 
 on waking, by expressions commensurate to human 
 life. As in starry fields one computes by diameters 
 of the Earth’s orbit, or of Jupiter’s, so, in valuing the 
 virtual time lived during some d r eams, the measure- 
 ment by generations is ridiculo ,s — by millennia is 
 ridiculous ; by aeons, I should say, if aeons were more 
 determinate, would be also ridiculous. 
 
 Here pause, reader ! Imagine yourself seated in 
 some cloud-scaling swing, oscillating under the im- 
 pulse of lunatic hands ; for the strength of lunacy 
 may belong to human dreams, the fearful caprice 
 of lunacy, and the malice of lunacy, whilst the victim 
 of those dreams may be all the more certainly re- 
 moved from lunacy ; even as a bridge gathers 
 
DREAMING 
 
 697 
 
 cohesion and strength from the increasing resistance 
 into which it is forced by increasing pressure. 
 Seated in such a swing, fast as you reach the lowest 
 point of depression, may you rely on racing up to 
 a starry altitude of corresponding ascent. Ups and 
 downs you will see, heights and depths, in our fiery 
 course together, such as will sometimes tempt you 
 to look shyly and suspiciously at me, your guide, 
 and the ruler of the oscillations. Here, at the point 
 where I have called a halt, the reader has reached 
 the lowest depths in my nursery afflictions. From 
 that point according to the principles of art which 
 govern the movement of these Confessions, I had 
 meant to launch him upwards through the whole 
 arch of ascending visions which seemed requisite to 
 balance the sweep downwards, so recently described 
 in his course. But accidents of the press have made 
 it impossible to accomplish this purpose. There is 
 reason to regret that the advantages of position which 
 were essential to the full effect of passages planned 
 for the equipoise and mutual resistance have thus 
 been lost. Meantime, upon the principle of the 
 mariner who rigs a jury - mast in default of his regular 
 spars, I find my resource in a sort of “jury” perora- 
 tion, not sufficient in the way of a balance by its 
 proportions , but sufficient to indicate the quality of 
 the balance which I had t contemplated. He who has 
 really read the preceding parts of these present Con- 
 fessions will be aware that a stricter scrutiny of the 
 past, such as was natural after the whole economy 
 of the dreaming faculty had been convulsed beyond 
 all precedents on record, led me to the conviction 
 that not one agency,, but two agencies had co- 
 operated to the tremendous result. The nursery 
 experience had been the ally and the natural co- 
 efficient of the opium. For that reason it was that 
 the nursery experience has been narrated. Logically 
 it bears the very same relation to the convulsions of 
 the dreaming faculty as the opium. The idealising 
 tendency existed in the dream-theatre of my child- 
 hood ; but the preternatural strength of its action 
 
698 STjSPIRIA DE PR0FUNDI1 
 
 and colouring was first developed after the confluence 
 of the two causes. The reader must suppose me at 
 Oxford ; twelve years and a half are gone by ; I am 
 in the glory of youthful happiness : but I have now 
 first tampered with opium ; and now first the agita- 
 tions of my childhood re-opened in strength ; now 
 first they swept in upon the brain with power and 
 the grandeur of recovered life under the separate 
 and the concurring inspirations of opium. 
 
THE PALIMPSEST OF THE HUMAN 
 BRAIN 
 
 You know, perhaps, masculine reader, better than 
 I can tell you, what is a Palimpsest . Possibly you 
 have one in your own library. But yet, for the sake 
 of others who may not know, or may have forgotten, 
 suffer me to explain it here, lest any female reader 
 who honours these papers with her notice should tax 
 me with explaining it once too seldom ; which would 
 be worse to bear than a simultaneous complaint from 
 twelve proud men that I had explained it three times 
 too often. You, therefore, fair reader, understand 
 that for youi - accommodation exclusively I explain 
 the meaning of this word. It is Greek ; and our sex 
 enjoys the office and privilege of standing counsel 
 to yours in all questions of Greek. We are, under 
 favour, perpetual and hereditary dragomans to you. 
 So that if, by accident, you know the meaning of 
 a Greek word, yet by courtesy to us, your counsel 
 learned in that matter, you will always seem not to 
 know it. 
 
 A palimpsest, then, is a membrane or roll cleansed 
 of its manuscript by reiterated successions. 
 
 What was the reason that the Greeks and the 
 Romans had not the advantage of printed books ? 
 The answer will be, from ninety-nine persons in a 
 hundred, — Because the mystery of printing was not 
 then discovered. But this is altogether a mistake. 
 The secret of printing must have been discovered 
 many thousands of times before it was used, or could 
 be used. The inventive powers of man are divine ; 
 and also his stupidity is divine, as Cowper so play- 
 fully illustrates in the slow development of the sofa 
 through successive generations of immortal dulness. 
 It took centuries of blockheads to raise a joint stool 
 into a chair ; and it required something like a miracle 
 of genius, in the estimate of elder generations, to 
 reveal the possibility of lengthening a chair into a 
 chaise-longue , or a sofa. Yes, these were inventions 
 that cost mighty throes of intellectual power. But 
 699 
 
700 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 still, as respects printing, and admirable as is the 
 stupidity of man, it was really not quite equal to the 
 task of evading an object which stared him in the 
 face with so broad a gaze. It did not require an 
 Athenian intellect to read the main secret of print- 
 ing in many scores of processes which the ordinary 
 uses of life were daily repeating. To say nothing of 
 analogous artifices amongst various mechanic artisans, 
 all that is essential in printing must have been known 
 to every nation that struck coins and medals. Not, 
 therefore, any want of a printing art, — that is, of an 
 art for multiplying impressions, — but the want of a 
 cheap material for receiving such impressions, was 
 the obstacle to an introduction of printed books even 
 as early as Pisistratus. The ancients did apply print- 
 ing to records of silver and gold ; to marble, and 
 many other substances cheaper than gold or silver, 
 they did not, since each monument required a separate 
 effort of inscription. Simply this defect it was of a 
 cheap material for receiving impresses which froze in, 
 its very fountains the early resources of printing. 
 
 Some twenty years ago this view of the case was 
 luminously expounded by Dr. Whately, and with the 
 merit, I believe, of having first suggested it. Since 
 then, this theory has received indirect confirmation. 
 Now, out of that original scarcity affecting all materials 
 proper for durable books, which continued up to 
 times comparatively modern, grew the opening for 
 palimpsests. Naturally, when once a roll of parch- 
 ment or of vellum had done its office, by propagating 
 through a series of generations what once had pos- 
 sessed an interest for them , but which, under changes 
 of opinion or of taste, had faded to their feelings or 
 had become obsolete for their undertakings, the whole 
 memhrana or vellum skin, the twofold product of 
 human skill and costly material, and the costly freight 
 of thought which it carried, drooped in value con- 
 currently — supposing that each were inalienably asso- 
 ciated to the other. Once it had been the impress 
 of a human mind which stamped its value upon the 
 vellum ; the vellum, though costly, had contributed 
 
THE PALIMPSEST OF THE HUMAN BRAIN 701 
 
 but a secondary element of value to the total result. 
 At length, however, this relation between the vehicle 
 and its freight has gradually been undermined. The 
 vellum, from having been the setting of the jewel, 
 has risen at length to be the jewel itself ; and the 
 burden of thought, from having given the chief value 
 to the vellum, has now become the chief obstacle 
 to its value ; nay, has totally extinguished its value, 
 unless it can be dissociated from the connection. 
 Yet, if this unlinking can be effected, then, fast as 
 the inscription upon the membrane is sinking into 
 rubbish, the membrane itself is reviving in its separate 
 importance ; and, from bearing a ministerial value, 
 the vellum has come at last to absorb the whole 
 value. 
 
 Hence the importance for our ancestors that the 
 separation should be effected. Hence it arose in the 
 Middle Ages as a considerable object for chemistry 
 to discharge the writing from the roll, and thus to 
 make it available for a new succession of thoughts. 
 The soil, if cleansed from what once had been hot- 
 house plants, but now were held to be weeds, would 
 be ready to. receive a fresh and more appropriate 
 crop. In that object the monkish chemists suc- 
 ceeded ; but after a fashion which seems almost 
 incredible, — incredible not as regards the extent of 
 their success, but as regards the delicacy of restraints 
 under which it moved, — so equally adjusted was their 
 success to the immediate interests of that period, and 
 to the reversionary objects of our own. They did 
 the thing ; but not so radically as to prevent us, their 
 posterity, from undoing it. They expelled the writing 
 sufficiently to leave a field for the new manuscript, 
 and yet not sufficiently to make the traces of the 
 elder manuscript irrecoverable for us. < Could magic, 
 could Hermes Trismegistus, have done more? What 
 would you think, fair reader, of a problem such as 
 this : to write a book which should be sense for 
 your own generation, nonsense for the next ; should 
 revive into sense for the next after that, but again 
 become nonsense for the fourth ; and so on by 
 
702 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 alternate successions sinking into night or blazing 
 into day, like the Sicilian river Arethusa and the 
 English river Mole, or like the undulating motions 
 of a flattened stone which children cause to skim 
 the breast of a river, now diving below the water, 
 now grazing its surface, sinking heavily into darkness, 
 rising buoyantly into light, through a long vista of 
 alternations ? Such a problem, you say, is impossible. 
 But really it is a problem not harder apparently than 
 to bid a generation kill, so that a subsequent genera- 
 tion may call back into life; bury, so that posterity 
 may command to rise again. Yet that was what the 
 rude chemistry of past ages effected when coming 
 into combination with the reaction from the more 
 refined chemistry of our own. Had they been better 
 chemists, had we been worse, the mixed result, — 
 namely, that, dying for them, the flower should revive 
 for us , — could not have been effected. They did the 
 thing proposed to them : they did it effectually, for 
 they founded upon it all that was wanted : and yet 
 ineffectually, since we unravelled their work, — effacing 
 all above which they had superscribed, restoring all 
 below which they had effaced. 
 
 Here, for instance, is a parchment which contained 
 some Grecian tragedy, — the Agamemnon of H^schylus, 
 or the Phoenissae of Euripides. This had possessed 
 a value almost inappreciable in the eyes of accom- 
 plished scholars, continually growing rarer through 
 generations. But four centuries are gone by since 
 the destruction of the Western Empire. Christianity, 
 with towering grandeurs of another class, has founded 
 a different empire; and some bigoted, yet perhaps holy, 
 monk has washed away (as he persuades himself) the 
 heathen’s tragedy, replacing it with a monastic legend ; 
 which legend is disfigured with fables in its incidents, 
 and yet in a higher sense is true, because inter- 
 woven with Christian morals, and with the sublimest 
 of Christian revelations. Three, four, five, centuries 
 more find man still devout as ever ; but the language 
 has become obsolete ; and even for Christian devo- 
 tion a new era has arisen, throwing it into the channel 
 
THE PALIMPSEST OF THE HUMAN BRAIN 703 
 
 of crusading zeal or of chivalrous enthusiasm. The 
 merjibrana is wanted now for a knightly romance — 
 for “ My Cid” or Cert ur de Lion, for Sir Tristrem or 
 Lybaeus Disconus. In this way, by means of the 
 imperfect chemistry known to the mediaeval period, 
 the same roll has served as a conservatory for three 
 separate generations of flowers and fruits, all perfectly 
 different, and yet all specially adapted to the wants 
 of the successive possessors. The Greek tragedy, the 
 monkish legend, the knightly romance, each has ruled 
 its own period. One harvest after another has been 
 gathered into the garners of man through ages far 
 apart. And the same hydraulic machinery has dis- 
 tributed, through the same marble fountains, water, 
 milk, or wine, according to the habits and training 
 of the generations that came to quench their thirst. 
 
 Such were the achievements of rude monastic 
 chemistry. But the more elaborate chemistry of our 
 own days has reversed all these motions of our simple 
 ancestors, with results in every stage that to them 
 would have realised the most fantastic amongst the 
 promises of thaumaturgy. Insolent vaunt of Para- 
 celsus, that he would restore the original rose or 
 violet out of the ashes settling from its combustion 
 — that is now rivalled in this modern achievement. 
 The traces of each successive handwriting, regularly 
 effaced, as *had been imagined, have, in the inverse 
 order, been regularly called back : the footsteps of 
 the game pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, 
 have been unlinked, and hunted back through all 
 their doubles ; and, as the chorus of the Athenian 
 stage unwove through the antistrophe every step that 
 had been mystically woven through the strophe, so, 
 by our modern conjurations of science, secrets of ages 
 remote from each other have been exorcised 1 from 
 the accumulated shadows of centuries. Chemistry, 
 
 1 Some readers may be apt to suppose, from all English 
 experience, that the word exorcise means properly banishment 
 to the shades. Not so. Citation from the shades, or some- 
 times the torturing coercion of mystic adjurations, is more truly 
 the primary sense. 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 7°4 
 
 a witch as potent as the Erictho of Lucan (. Pharsalia , 
 lib. vi. or vii.), has extorted by her torments, from the 
 dust and ashes of forgotten centuries, the secret of a 
 life extinct for the general eye, but still glowing in 
 the embers. Even the fable of the Phoenix, that 
 secular bird who propagated his solitary existence, 
 and his solitary births, along the line of centuries, 
 through eternal relays of funeral mists, is but a type 
 of what we have done with Palimpsests. We have 
 backed upon each phoenix in the long regressus, and 
 forced him to expose his ancestral phoenix, sleeping 
 in the ashes below his own ashes. Our good old 
 forefathers would have been aghast at our sorceries ; 
 and, if they speculated on the propriety of burning 
 Dr. Faustus, us they would have burned by acclama- 
 tion. Trial there would have been none ; and they 
 could not otherwise have satisfied their horror of the 
 brazen profligacy marking our modern magic than by 
 ploughing up the houses of all who had been parties 
 to it, and sowing the ground with salt. 
 
 Fancy not, reader, that this tumult of images, 
 illustrative or allusive, moves under any impulse or 
 purpose of mirth. It is but the coruscation of a 
 restless understanding, often made ten times more so 
 by irritation of the nerves, such as you will first learn 
 to comprehend (its how and its why ) some stage or 
 two ahead. The image, the memorial, *the record, 
 which for me is derived from a palimpsest as to one 
 great fact in our human being, and which immediately 
 I will show you, is but too repellent of laughter ; or, 
 even if laughter had been possible, it would have 
 been such laughter as oftentimes is thrown off from the 
 fields of ocean, 1 — laughter that hides, or that seems to 
 
 1 Many readers will recall, though, at the moment of writing, 
 my own thoughts did not recall, the well-known passage in the 
 Prometheus — 
 
 • 7 tovtojov re kvjulcltcov 
 
 AvrjpLdfJLOv ye\a(r/na. 
 
 “ O multitudinous laughter of the ocean billows !” It is not 
 clear whether ^Eschylus contemplated the laughter as address- 
 ing the ear or the eye. 
 
THE PALIMPSEST OF THE HUMAN BRAIN 705 
 
 evade, mustering tumult ; foam-bells that weave gar- 
 lands of phosphoric radiance for one moment round 
 the eddies of gleaming abysses ; mimicries of earth- 
 born flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gaiety, 
 as oftentimes for the ear they raise the echoes of 
 fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and choir- 
 voices of an angry sea. 
 
 What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is 
 the human brain ? Such a palimpsest is my brain ; 
 such a palimpsest, O reader ! is yours. Everlasting 
 layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon 
 your brain softly as light. Each succession has 
 seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in 
 reality, not one has been extinguished. And, if in 
 the vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other diplo- 
 mata of human archives or libraries, there is any- 
 thing fantastic or which moves to laughter, as often- 
 times there is in the grotesque collisions of those 
 successive themes, having no natural connection, 
 which by pure accident have consecutively occupied 
 the roll, yet, in our own heaven-created palimpsest, 
 the deep memorial palimpsest of the brain, there 
 are not and cannot be such incoherencies. The 
 fleeting accidents of a man’s life, and its exter- 
 nal shows, may indeed be irrelate and incongru- 
 ous ; but the organising principles which fuse into 
 harmony, and gather about fixed predetermined 
 centres, whatever heterogeneous elements life may 
 have accumulated from without, will not permit the 
 grandeur of human unity greatly to be violated, 
 or its ultimate repose to be troubled, in the re- 
 trospect from dying moments, or from other great 
 convulsions. 
 
 Such a convulsion is the struggle of gradual suffo- 
 cation, as in drowning; and in the original “Opium 
 Confessions ” I mentioned a case of that nature com- 
 municated to me by a lady from her own childish 
 experience. The lady was then still living, though of 
 unusually great age; and I may mention that amongst 
 her faults never was numbered any levity of principle, 
 or carelessness of the most scrupulous veracity, but, 
 
 z 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 706 
 
 on the contrary, such faults as arise from austerity, 
 too harsh, perhaps, and gloomy, indulgent neither to 
 others nor herself. And, at the time of relating this 
 incident, when already very old, she had become 
 religious to asceticism. According to my present 
 belief, she had completed her ninth year when, play- 
 ing by the side of a solitary brook, she fell into one 
 of its deepest pools. Eventually, but after what lapse 
 of time nobody ever knew, she was saved from death 
 by a farmer, who, riding in some distant lane, had 
 seen her rise to the surface ; but not until she had 
 descended within the abyss of death and looked into 
 its secrets, as far, perhaps, as ever human eye can 
 have looked that had permission to return. At a 
 certain stage of this descent, a blow seemed to strike 
 her ; phosphoric radiance sprang forth from her eye- 
 balls ; and immediately a mighty theatre expanded 
 within her brain. In a moment, in the twinkling of 
 an eye, every act, every design of her past life, lived 
 again, arraying themselves not as a succession, but as 
 parts of a coexistence. Such a light fell upon the 
 whole path of her life backwards into the shades of 
 infancy as the light, perhaps, which wrapt the destined 
 Apostle on his road to Damascus. Yet that light 
 blinded for a season ; but hers poured celestial vision 
 upon the brain, so that her consciousness became 
 omnipresent at one moment to every feature in 
 the infinite review. 
 
 This anecdote was treated sceptically at the time 
 by some critics. But, besides that it has since been 
 confirmed by other experience essentially the same, 
 reported by other parties in the same circumstances, 
 who had never heard of each other, the true point for 
 astonishment is not the simultaneity of arrangement 
 under which the past events of life, though in fact 
 successive, had formed their dread line of revelation. 
 This was but a secondary phenomenon ; the deeper 
 lay in the resurrection itself, and the possibility of 
 resurrection for what had so long slept in the dust. 
 A pall, deep as oblivion, had been thrown by life 
 over every trace of these experiences ; and yet sud- 
 
THE PALIMPSEST OF THE HUMAN BRAIN 707 
 
 denly, at a silent command, at the signal of a blazing 
 rocket sent up from the brain, the pall draws up, 
 and the whole depths of the theatre are exposed. 
 Here was the great mystery. Now, this mystery is 
 liable to no doubt ; for it is repeated, and ten thou- 
 sand times repeated, by opium, for those who are its 
 martyrs. 
 
 Yes, reader, countless are the mysterious handwrit- 
 ings of grief or joy which have inscribed themselves 
 successively upon the palimpsest of your brain ; and, 
 like the annual leaves of aboriginal forests, or the 
 undissolving snows on the Himalaya, or light falling 
 upon light, the endless strata have covered up each 
 other in forgetfulness. But by the hour of death, but 
 by fever, but by the searchings of opium, all these 
 can revive in strength. They are not dead, but 
 sleeping. In the illustration imagined by myself 
 from the case of some individual palimpsest, the 
 Grecian tragedy had seemed to be displaced, but was 
 not displaced, by the monkish legend ; and the 
 monkish legend had seemed to be displaced, but was 
 not displaced, by the knightly romance. In some 
 potent convulsion of the system, all wheels back 
 into its earliest elementary stage. The bewildering 
 romance, light tarnished with darkness, the semi- 
 fabulous legend, truth celestial mixed with human 
 falsehoods, these fade even of themselves as life ad- 
 vances. The romance has perished that the young man 
 adored ; the legend has gone that deluded the boy ; 
 but the deep, deep tragedies of infancy, as when the 
 child’s hands were unlinked for ever from his mother’s 
 neck, or his lips for ever from his sister’s kisses, these 
 remain lurking below all, and these lurk to the last. 
 Alchemy there is none of passion or disease that 
 can scorch away these immortal impresses ; and the 
 dream which closed the preceding section, together 
 with the succeeding dreams of this (which may be 
 viewed as in the nature of choruses winding up the 
 overture contained in Part I.), are but illustrations of 
 this truth, such as every man probably will pieet ex- 
 perimentally who passes through similar convulsions 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 708 
 
 of dreaming or delirium from any similar or equal dis- 
 turbance in his nature . 1 
 
 1 This, it may be said, requires a corresponding duration of 
 experience ; but, as an argument for this mysterious power 
 lurking in our nature, I may remind the reader of one pheno- 
 menon open to the notice of everybody, — namely, the tendency 
 of very aged persons to throw back and concentrate the light of 
 their memory upon scenes of early childhood, as to which they 
 recall many traces that had faded even to themselves in middle 
 life, whilst they often forget altogether the whole intermediate 
 stages of their experience. This shows that naturally, and with- 
 out violent agencies, the human brain is by tendency a pal- 
 impsest. 
 
VISION OF LIFE 
 
 Upon me, as upon others scattered thinly by tens 
 and twenties over every thousand years, fell too 
 powerfully and too early the vision of life. The 
 horror of life mixed itself already in earliest youth 
 with the heavenly sweetness of life ; that grief which 
 one in a hundred has sensibility enough to gather 
 from the sad retrospect of life in its closing stage for 
 me shed its dews as a prelibation upon the fountains 
 of life whilst yet sparkling to the morning sun. I 
 saw from afar and from before what I was to see from 
 behind. Is this the description of an early youth 
 passed in the shades of gloom ? No ; but of a youth 
 passed in the divinest happiness. And, if the reader 
 has (which so few have) the passion without which 
 there is no reading of the legend and superscription 
 upon man’s brow, if he is not (as most are) deafer 
 than the grave to every deep note that sighs upwards 
 from the Delphic caves of human life, he will know 
 that the rapture of life (or anything which by approach 
 can merit that name) does not arise, unless as perfect 
 music arises, music of Mozart or Beethoven, by the 
 confluence of the mighty and terrific discords with 
 the subtile "concords. Not by contrast, or as re- 
 ciprocal foils, do these elements act,— which is the 
 feeble conception of many, — but by union. They 
 are the sexual forces in music : “ male and female 
 created he them and these mighty antagonists do 
 not put forth their hostilities by repulsion, but by 
 deepest attraction. 
 
 As “ in to-day already walks to-morrow,” so in the 
 past experience of a youthful life may be seen dimly 
 the future. The collisions with alien interests or 
 hostile views of a child, boy, or very young man, so 
 insulated as each of these is sure to be, — those aspects 
 of opposition which such a person can occupy, — are 
 limited by the exceedingly few and trivial lines of 
 connection along which he is able to radiate any 
 essential influence whatever upon the fortunes or 
 happiness of others. Circumstances may magnify 
 
710 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 his importance for the moment; but, after all, any 
 cable which he carries out upon other vessels is easily 
 slipped upon a feud arising. Far otherwise is the 
 state of relations connecting an adult or responsible 
 man with the circles around him as life advances. 
 The network of these relations is a thousand times 
 more intricate, the jarring of these intricate relations 
 a thousand times more frequent, and the vibrations a 
 thousand times harsher which these jarrings diffuse. 
 This truth is felt beforehand, misgivingly and in 
 troubled vision, by a young man who stands upon 
 the threshold of manhood. One earliest instinct of 
 fear and horror would darken his spirit if it could be 
 revealed to itself and self-questioned at the moment 
 of birth : a second instinct of the same nature would 
 again pollute that tremulous mirror if the moment 
 were as punctually marked as physical birth is marked 
 which dismisses him finally upon the tides of absolute 
 self-control. A dark ocean would seem the total ex- 
 panse of life from the first ; but far darker and more 
 appalling would seem that inferior and second cham- 
 ber of the ocean which called him away for ever from 
 the direct accountability of others. Dreadful would be 
 the morning which should say, “ Be thou a human 
 child incarnate ; ” but more dreadful the morning 
 which should say, “ Bear thou henceforth the sceptre 
 of thy self-dominion through life, and the passion of 
 life ! ” Yes, dreadful would be both ; but without a 
 basis of the dreadful there is no perfect rapture. It 
 is in part through the sorrow of life, growing out of 
 dark events, that this basis of awe and solemn dark- 
 ness slowly accumulates. That I have illustrated. 
 But, as life expands, it is more through the strife 
 which besets us, strife from conflicting opinions, 
 positions, passions, interests, that the funereal ground 
 settles and deposits itself which sends upward the 
 dark lustrous brilliancy through the jewel of life, 
 else revealing a pale and superficial glitter. Either 
 the human being must suffer and struggle, as the 
 price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must 
 be shallow and without intellectual revelation. 
 
MEMORIAL SUSPIRIA 
 
 EIeavens ! when I look back to the sufferings which 
 I have witnessed or heard of, I say, if life could throw 
 open its long suites of chambers to our eyes from 
 some station beforehand , — if from some secret stand 
 we could look by anticipation along its vast corridors, 
 and aside into the recesses opening upon them from 
 either hand halls of tragedy or chambers of retribu- 
 tion, — simply in that small wing and no more of the 
 great caravanserai which we ourselves shall haunt, — 
 simply in that narrow tract of time, and no more, 
 where we ourselves shall range, and confining our 
 gaze to those and no others for whom personally we 
 shall be interested, — What, a recoil we should suffer 
 of horror in our estimate of life ! What if those 
 sudden catastrophes, or those inexpiable afflictions, 
 which have already descended upon the people within 
 my own knowledge, and almost below my own eyes, 
 all of them now gone past, and some long past, had 
 been thrown open before me as a secret exhibition 
 when first I and they stood within the vestibule of 
 morning hopes, — when the calamities themselves had 
 hardly begun to gather in their elements of possibility, 
 and when some of the parties to them were as yet no 
 more than infants ! The past viewed not as the past, 
 but by a spectator who steps back ten years deeper 
 into the rear in order that he may regard it as a future, 
 — the calamity of 1840 contemplated from the station 
 of 1830, — the doom that rang the knell of happiness 
 viewed from a point of time when as yet it was neither 
 feared nor would even have been intelligible, — the 
 name that killed in 1843 which in 1835 would have 
 struck no vibration upon the heart, — the portrait that 
 on the day of her Majesty’s coronation would have 
 been admired by you with a pure disinterested admi- 
 ration, but which, if seen to-day, would draw forth an 
 involuntary groan : cases such as these are strangely 
 moving for all who add deep thoughtfulness to deep 
 sensibility. As the hastiest of improvisations, accept, 
 fair reader (for such reader it is that will chiefly feel 
 
712 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 such an invocation of the past), three or four illustra- 
 tions from my own experience : — 
 
 Who is this distinguished-looking young woman, 
 with her eyes drooping, and the shadow of a dreadful 
 shock yet fresh upon every feature ? Who is the 
 elderly lady, with her eyes flashing fire ? Who is the 
 downcast child of sixteen ? What is that torn paper 
 lying at their feet ? Who is the writer ? Whom does 
 the paper concern ? Ah ! if she, if the central figure 
 in the group — twenty-two at the moment when she is 
 revealed to us — could, on her happy birthday at sweet 
 seventeen, have seen the image of herself five years 
 onwards just as we see it now, would she have prayed 
 for life as for an absolute' blessing ? or would she not 
 have prayed to be taken from the evil to come — to 
 be taken away one evening, at least, before this day’s 
 sun arose ? It is true, she still wears a look of gentle 
 pride, and a relic of that noble smile which belongs 
 to her that suffers an injury which many times over 
 she would have died sooner than inflict. Womanly 
 pride refuses itself before witnesses to the total prostra- 
 tion of the blow ; but, for all that, you may see that 
 she longs to be left alone, and that her tears will flow 
 without restraint when she is so. This room is her 
 pretty boudoir, in which, till to-night — poor thing ! 
 — she has been glad and happy. There stands her 
 miniature conservatory, and there expands her minia- 
 ture library ; as we circumnavigators of literature are 
 apt (you know) to regard all female libraries in the 
 light of miniatures. None of these will ever rekindle 
 a smile on her face ; and there, beyond, is her music, 
 which only of all that she possesses will now become 
 dearer to her than ever ; but, not, as once, to feed a 
 self-mocked pensiveness, or to cheat a half-visionary 
 sadness. She will be sad, indeed. But she is one 
 of those that will suffer in silence. Nobody will ever 
 detect her failing in any point of duty, or querulously 
 seeking the support in others which she can find for 
 herself in this solitary room. Droop she will not in 
 the sight of men ; and, for all beyond, nobody has 
 
MEMORIAL SUSPIRIA 
 
 713 
 
 any concern with that , except God. You shall hear 
 what becomes of her before we take our departure ; 
 but now let me tell you what has happened. 
 
 In the main outline I am sure you guess already, 
 without aid of mine ; for we leaden-eyed men, in 
 such cases, see nothing by comparison with you our 
 quick-witted sisters. That haughty-looking lady, with 
 the Roman cast of features, who must once have 
 been strikingly handsome,- — an Agrippina even yet 
 in a favourable presentation,* — is the younger lady's 
 aunt. She, it is rumoured, once sustained, in her 
 younger days, some injury of that same cruel nature 
 which has this day assailed her niece, and ever since 
 she has worn an air of disdain, not altogether un- 
 supported by real dignity, towards men. This aunt 
 it was that tore the letter which lies upon the floor. 
 It deserved to be torn ; and yet she that had the 
 best right to do so would not have torn it. That 
 letter was an elaborate attempt on the part of an 
 accomplished young man to release himself from 
 sacred engagements. What need was there to argue 
 the case of such engagements ? Could it have been 
 requisite with pure female dignity to plead anything, 
 or do more than look an indisposition to fulfil them ? 
 The aunt is now moving towards the door,- — which 
 I am glad to see ; and she is followed by that pale, 
 timid girl of sixteen, a cousin, who feels the case 
 profoundly, but is too young and shy to offer an 
 intellectual sympathy. 
 
 One only person in this world there is who could 
 to-night have been a supporting friend to our young 
 sufferer ; and that is her dear, loving twin-sister, that 
 for eighteen years read and wrote, thought and sang, 
 slept and breathed, with the dividing-door open for 
 ever between their bedrooms, and never once a 
 separation between their hearts. But she is in a far 
 distant land. Who else is there at her call ? Except 
 God, nobody. Her aunt had somewhat sternly 
 admonished her, though still with a relenting in her 
 eye as she glanced aside at the expression in her 
 niece's face, that she must “ call pride to her assist- 
 
 z 2 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 714 
 
 ance.” Ay, true ; but pride, though a strong ally in 
 public, is apt in private to turn as treacherous as the 
 worst of those against whom she is invoked. How 
 could it be dreamed, by a person of sense, that a 
 brilliant young man, of merits various and eminent 
 in spite of his baseness, to whom for nearly two years 
 this young woman had given her whole confiding 
 love, might be dismissed from a heart like hers on 
 the earliest summons of pride, simply because she 
 herself had been dismissed from his, or seemed to 
 have been dismissed, on a summons of mercenary 
 calculation ? Look ! now that she is relieved from 
 the weight of an unconfidential presence, she ha& sat 
 for two hours with her head buried in her hands. 
 At last she rises to look for something. A thought 
 has struck her ; and, taking a little golden key which 
 hangs by a chain within her bosom, she searches for 
 something locked up amongst her few j ewels. What is 
 it ? It is a Bible exquisitely illuminated, with a letter 
 attached by some pretty silken artifice to the blank 
 leaves at the end. This letter is a beautiful record, 
 wisely and pathetically composed, of maternal anxiety 
 still burning strong in death, and yearning, when all 
 objects beside were fast fading from her eyes, after one 
 parting act of communion with the twin darlings of her 
 heart. Both were thirteen years old, within a week 
 or two, as on the night before her death they sat 
 weeping by the bedside of their mother, and hanging 
 on her lips, now for farewell whispers and now for 
 farewell kisses . They both knew that , as her strength 
 had permitted during the latter month of her life, she 
 had thrown the last anguish of love in her beseeching 
 heart into a letter of counsel to themselves. Through 
 this, of which each sister had a copy, she trusted long 
 to converse with her orphans. And the last promise 
 which she had entreated on this evening from both 
 was that in either of two contingencies they would 
 review her counsels, and the passages to which she 
 pointed their attention in the Scriptures : namely, 
 first, in the event of any calamity that, for one sister 
 or for both, should overspread their paths with total 
 
MEMORIAL SUSPIRIA 715 
 
 darkness ; and, secondly, in the event of life flowing 
 in too profound a stream of prosperity, so as to 
 threaten them with an alienation of interest from all 
 spiritual objects. She had not concealed that, of 
 these two extreme cases, she would prefer for her 
 own children the first. And now had that case 
 arrived, indeed, which she in spirit had desired to 
 meet. Nine years ago, just as the silvery voice 
 of a dial in the dying lady's bedroom was striking 
 nine, upon a summer evening, had the last visual 
 ray streamed from her seeking eyes upon her orphan 
 twins ; after which, throughout the night, she had 
 slept away into heaven. Now again had come a 
 summer evening memorable for unhappiness ; now 
 again the daughter thought of those dying lights of 
 love which streamed at sunset from the closing eyes 
 of her mother ; again, and just as she went back in 
 thought to this image, the same silvery voice of the 
 dial sounded nine o'clock. Again she remembered 
 her mother's dying request ; again her own tear- 
 hallowed promises ; and, with her heart in her 
 mother's grave, she now rose to fulfil it. Here, 
 then, when this solemn recurrence to a testamen- 
 tary counsel has ceased to be a mere office of duty 
 towards the departed, having taken the shape of a 
 consolation for herself, let us pause. 
 
 Now, fair companion in this exploring voyage of 
 inquest into hidden scenes or forgotten scenes of 
 human life, perhaps it might be instructive to direct 
 our glasses upon the false, perfidious lover. It might. 
 But do not let us do so. We might like him better, 
 or pity him more, than either of us would desire. 
 His name and memory have long since dropped out 
 of everybody's thoughts. Of prosperity, and (what 
 is more important) of internal peace, he is reputed 
 to have had no gleam from the moment when he 
 betrayed his faith, and in one day threw away the 
 jewel of good conscience, and “ a pearl richer than 
 all his tribe." - But, however that may be, it is certain 
 that, finally, he became a wreck ; and of any hopeless 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 716 
 
 wreck it is painful to talk,- — much more so when 
 through him others also became wrecks.* 
 
 Shall we, then, after an interval of nearly two years 
 has passed over the young lady in the boudoir, look 
 in again upon her ? You hesitate, fair friend; and 
 I myself hesitate. For, in fact, she also has become 
 a wreck ; and it would grieve us both to see her 
 altered. At the end of twenty-one months she 
 retains hardly a vestige of resemblance to the fine 
 young woman we saw on that unhappy evening with 
 her aunt and cousin. On consideration, therefore, 
 let us do this : We will direct our glasses to her 
 
 room at a point of time about six weeks further on. 
 Suppose this time gone ; suppose her now dressed 
 for her grave, and placed in her coffin. The advan- 
 tage of that is that, though no change can restore the 
 ravages of the past, yet (as often is found to happen 
 with young persons) the expression has revived from 
 her girlish years. The child-like aspect has revolved, 
 and settled back upon her features. The wasting 
 away of the flesh is less apparent in the face ; and 
 one might imagine that in this sweet marble coun- 
 tenance was seen the very same upon which, eleven 
 years ago, her mother's darkening eyes had lingered 
 to the last, until clouds had swallowed up the vision 
 of her beloved twins. Yet, if that were in part a 
 fancy, this, at least, is no fancy,- — that not only much 
 of a child-like truth and simplicity has reinstated 
 itself in the temple of her now reposing features, 
 but also tranquillity and perfect peace, such as are 
 appropriate to eternity, but which from the living 
 countenance had taken their flight for ever on that 
 memorable evening when we looked in upon the 
 impassioned group,* — upon the towering and de- 
 nouncing aunt, the sympathising but silent cousin, 
 the poor, blighted niece, and the wicked letter lying 
 In fragments at their feet. 
 
 Cloud, that hast revealed to us this young creature 
 and her blighted hopes, close up again ! And now, 
 a few years later,- — not more than four or five,* — give 
 back to us the latest arrears of the changes which 
 
MEMORIAL SUSPIRIA 
 
 717 
 
 thou concealest within thy draperies. Once more, 
 " Open sesame ! ” and show us a third generation. 
 
 Behold a lawn islanded with thickets ! How perfect 
 is the verdure ; how rich the blossoming shrubberies 
 that screen with verdurous walls from the possibility 
 of intrusion., whilst by their own wandering line of 
 distribution they shape, and umbrageously embay, 
 what one might call lawny saloons and vestibules, 
 sylvan galleries and closets ! Some of these recesses 
 which unlink themselves as fluently as snakes, and 
 unexpectedly as the shyest nooks, watery cells, and 
 crypts amongst the shores of a forest-lake, being 
 formed by the mere caprices and ramblings of the 
 luxuriant shrubs, are so small and so quiet that one 
 might fancy them meant for boudoirs. Here is one 
 that in a less fickle climate would make the love- 
 liest of studies for a writer of breathings from some 
 solitary heart, or of suspina from some impassioned 
 memory ! And, opening from one angle of this em- 
 bowered study, issues a little narrow corridor, that , after 
 almost wheeling back upon itself in its playful mazes, 
 finally widens into a little circular chamber ; out of 
 which there is no exit (except back again by the en- 
 trance) , small or great ; so that, adjacent to his study, 
 the writer would command how sweet a bedroom, 
 permitting him to lie the summer through, gazing all 
 night long at the burning host of heaven. How silent 
 that would be at the noon of summer nights,- — how 
 grave-like in its quiet ! And yet need there be asked 
 a stillness or a silence more profound than is felt 
 at this present noon of day ? One reason for such 
 peculiar repose, over and above the tranquil character 
 of the day, and the distance of the place from the 
 high-roads, is the outer zone of woods which almost 
 on every quarter invests the shrubberies, swathing 
 them (as one may express it), belting them and over- 
 looking them, from a varying distance of two and 
 three furlongs, so as oftentimes to keep the winds at 
 a distance. But, however caused and supported, the 
 silence of these fanciful lawns and lawny chambers 
 is oftentimes oppressive in the depths of summer to 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 718 
 
 people unfamiliar with solitudes either mountainous 
 or sylvan ; and many would be apt to suppose that 
 the villa to which these pretty shrubberies form the 
 chief dependencies must be untenanted. But that is 
 not the case. The house is inhabited, and by its own 
 legal mistress, the proprietress of the whole domain ; 
 and not at all a silent mistress, but as noisy as most 
 little ladies of five years old ; for that is her age. 
 Now, and just as we are speaking, you may hear her 
 little joyous clamour, as she issues from the house. 
 This way she comes, bounding like a fawn ; and soon 
 she rushes into the little recess which I pointed out 
 as a proper study for any man who should be weaving 
 the deep harmonies of memorial suspiria. But I 
 fancy that she will soon dispossess it of that character 
 for her suspiria are not many at this stage of her life. 
 Now she comes dancing into sight ; and you see that, 
 if she keeps the promise of her infancy, she will be an 
 interesting creature to the eye in after-life. In other 
 respects, also, she is an engaging child,- — loving, 
 natural, and wild as any one of her neighbours for 
 some miles round,' — namely, leverets, squirrels, and 
 ringdoves. But what will surprise you most is that, 
 although a child of pure English blood, she speaks 
 very little English, but more Bengalee than perhaps 
 you will find it convenient to construe. That is her 
 ayah, who comes up from behind at a pace so different 
 from her youthful mistress's. But, if their paces are 
 different, in other things they agree most cordially ; 
 and dearly they love each other. In reality, the child 
 has passed her whole life in the arms of this ayah. 
 She remembers nothing elder than her ; eldest of 
 things is the ayah in her eyes ; and, if the ayah should 
 insist on her worshipping herself as the goddess Rail- 
 roadina or Steamboatina, that made England, and the 
 sea, and Bengal, it is certain that the little thing would 
 do so, asking no question but this,' — whether kissing 
 would do for worshipping. 
 
 Every evening at nine o'clock, as the ayah sits by 
 the little creature lying awake in bed, the silvery 
 tongue of a dial tolls the hour. Reader, you know 
 
MEMORIAL SUSPIRIA 719 
 
 who she is. She is the grand-daughter of her that 
 faded away about sunset in gazing at her twin orphans. 
 Her name is Grace. And she is the niece of that 
 elder and once happy Grace who spent so much of 
 her happiness in this very room, but whom, in her 
 utter desolation, we saw in the boudoir, with the torn 
 letter at her feet. She is the daughter of that other 
 sister, wife to a military officer who died abroad. 
 Cittle Grace never saw her grandmamma, nor her 
 lovely aunt that was her namesake, nor consciously 
 her mamma. She was born six months after the 
 death of the elder Grace ; and her mother saw her 
 only through the mists of mortal suffering, which 
 carried her off three weeks after the birth of her 
 daughter. 
 
 This view was taken several years ago ; and since 
 then the younger Grace, in her turn, is under a 
 cloud of affliction. But she is still under eighteen ; 
 and of her there may be hopes. Seeing such things 
 in so short a space of years,- — for the grandmother 
 died at thirty-two,- — we say,* — “ Death we can face ; 
 but, knowing as some of us do what is human life, 
 which of us is it that without shuddering could (if 
 consciously we were summoned) face the hour of 
 birth ? ” 
 
SAVANNAH-LA-MAR 
 
 God smote Savannah-la-mar, and in one night, by 
 earthquake, removed her, with all her towers standing 
 and population sleeping, from the steadfast foundations 
 of the shore to the coral floors of ocean. And God 
 said, — •“ Pompeii did I bury and conceal from men 
 through seventeen centuries : this city I will bury, but 
 not conceal. She shall be a monument to men of my 
 mysterious anger, set in azure light through genera- 
 tions to come ; for I will enshrine her in a crystal 
 dome of my tropic seas/' This city, therefore, like a 
 mighty galleon with all her apparel mounted, streamers 
 flying, and tackling perfect, seems floating along 
 the noiseless depths of ocean ; and oftentimes in 
 glassy calms, through the translucid atmosphere of 
 water that now stretches like an air-woven awning 
 above the silent encampment, mariners from every 
 clime look down into her courts and terraces, count 
 her gates, and number the spires of her churches. 
 She is one ample cemetery, and has been for many a 
 year ; but, in the mighty calms that brood for weeks 
 over tropic latitudes, she fascinates the eye with a 
 Fata-M organa revelation, as of human life still sub- 
 sisting in submarine asylums sacred from the storms 
 that torment our upper air. 
 
 Thither, lured by the loveliness of cerulean depths, 
 by the peace of human dwellings privileged from 
 molestation, by the gleam of marble altars sleeping in 
 everlasting sanctity, oftentimes in dreams did I and 
 the Dark Interpreter cleave the watery veil that 
 divided us from her streets.' We looked into the 
 belfries, where the pendulous bells were waiting in 
 vain for the summons which should awaken their 
 marriage peals ; together we touched the mighty 
 organ-keys, that sang no jubilates for the ear of 
 heaven, that sang no requiems for the ear of human 
 sorrow ; together we searched the silent nurseries, 
 where the children were all asleep, and had been 
 asleep through five generations. “ They are waiting 
 for the heavenly dawn,” whispered the interpreter to 
 
 720 
 
SAVANNAH-LA-MAR 721 
 
 iiimself : “ and, when that, comes, the bells and the 
 organs will utter a jubilate repeated by the echoes of 
 Paradise/' Then, turning to me, he said, “ This is 
 sad, this is piteous ; but less would not have sufficed for 
 the purpose of God. Look here. Put into a Roman 
 clepsydra one hundred drops of water ; let these run 
 out as the sands in an hour-glass, every drop measur- 
 ing the hundredth part of a second, so that each shall 
 represent but the three-hundred-and-sixty-thousandth 
 part of an hour. Now. count the drops as they race 
 along ; and, when the fiftieth of the hundred is pass- 
 ing, behold ! forty-nine are not, because already they 
 have perished, and fifty are not, because they are yet 
 to come. You see, therefore, how narrow, how in- 
 calculably narrow, is the true and actual present. Of 
 that time which we call the present, hardly a hundredth 
 part but belongs either to a past which has fled, or to 
 a future which is still on the wing. It has perished, 
 or it is not born. It was, or it is not. Yet even this 
 approximation to the truth is infinitely false. For 
 again subdivide that solitary drop, which only was 
 found to represent the present, into a lower series of 
 similar fractions, and the actual present which you 
 arrest measures now but the thirty-six-millionth of 
 an hour ; and so by infinite declensions the true and 
 Very present, in which only we live and enjoy, will 
 vanish into a mote of a mote, distinguishable only by 
 a heavenly vision. Therefore the present, which only 
 man possesses, offers less capacity for his footing than 
 the slenderest film that ever spider twisted from her 
 wortib. Therefore, also, even this incalculable shadow 
 from the narrowest pencil of moonlight is more transi- 
 tory than geometry can measure, or thought of angel 
 can overtake. The time which is contracts into a 
 mathematic point ; and even that point perishes a 
 thousand times before we can utter its birth. All is 
 finite in the present ; and even that finite is infinite 
 in its velocity of flight towards death. Rut in God 
 there is nothing finite ; but in God there is nothing 
 transitory ; but in God there can be nothing that 
 tends to death. Therefore it follows that for God 
 
722 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 there can be no present. The future is the present 
 of God, and to the future it is that he sacrifices 
 the human present. Therefore it is that he works 
 by earthquake. Therefore it is that he works by 
 grief. O, deep is the ploughing of earthquake ! O, 
 deep” — (and his voice swelled like a sanctus rising from 
 the choir of a cathedral) — “ O, deep is the ploughing 
 of grief! But oftentimes less would not suffice for 
 the agriculture of God. Upon a night of earthquake 
 he builds a thousand years of pleasant habitations for 
 man. Upon the sorrow of an infant he raises often- 
 times from human intellects glorious vintages that 
 could not else have been. Less than these fierce 
 ploughshares would not have stirred the stubborn 
 soil. The one is needed for Earth, our planet, — for 
 Earth itself as the dwelling-place of man ; but the 
 other is needed yet oftener for God’s mightiest instru- 
 ment, — yes” (and he looked solemnly at myself), “ is 
 needed for the mysterious children of the Earth ! ” 
 
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW 
 
 Oftentimes at Oxford I saw Levana in my dreams. 
 I knew her by her Roman symbols. Who is Levana ? 
 Reader, that do not pretend to have leisure for very 
 much scholarship, you will not be angry with me for 
 telling you. Levana was the Roman goddess that 
 performed for the new-born infant the earliest office 
 of ennobling kindness, — typical, by its mode, of that 
 grandeur which belongs to man everywhere, and of 
 that benignity in powers invisible which even in Pagan 
 worlds sometimes descends to sustain it. At the 
 very moment of birth, just as the infant tasted for 
 the first time the atmosphere of our troubled planet, 
 it was laid on the ground. That might bear different 
 interpretations. But immediately, lest so grand a 
 creature should grovel there for more than one 
 instant, either the paternal hand, as proxy for the 
 goddess Levana, or some near kinsman, as proxy for 
 the father, raised it upright, bade it look erect as the 
 king of all this world, and presented its forehead to 
 the stars, saying, perhaps, in his heart, “ Behold 
 what is greater than yourselves ! This symbolic act 
 represented the function of Levana. And that mys- 
 terious lady, who never revealed her face (except to 
 me in dreams), but always acted by delegation, had 
 her name from the Latin verb (as still it is the Italian 
 verb) lev are , to raise aloft. 
 
 This is the explanation of Levana. And hence it 
 has arisen that some people have understood by 
 Levana the tutelary power that controls the educa- 
 tion of the nursery. She, that would not suffer at 
 his birth even a prefigurative or mimic degradation 
 for her awful ward, far less could be supposed to 
 suffer the real degradation attaching to the non- 
 development of his powers. She therefore watches 
 over human education. Now, the word educo^ with 
 the penultimate short, was derived (by a process 
 often exemplified in the crystallisation of languages) 
 from the word educo , with the penultimate long. 
 Whatsoever educes , or develops, educates . By the 
 
 723 
 
SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 7 2 4 
 
 education of Levana, therefore, is meant, — not the 
 poor machinery that moves by spelling-books and 
 grammars, but by that mighty system of central 
 forces hidden in the deep bosom of human life, 
 which by passion, by strife, by temptation, by the 
 energies of resistance, works for ever upon children, — 
 resting not day or night, any more than the mighty 
 wheel of day and night themselves, whose moments, 
 like restless spokes, are glimmering 1 for ever as they 
 revolve. 
 
 If, then, these are the ministries by which Levana 
 works, how profoundly must she reverence the 
 agencies of grief! But you, reader, think that chil- 
 dren generally are not liable to grief such as mine. 
 There are two senses in the word generally , — the 
 sense of Euclid, where it means universally (or in 
 the whole extent of the genus), and a foolish sense of 
 this world, where it means usually. Now, I am far 
 from saying that children universally are capable of 
 grief like mine. But there are more than you ever 
 heard of who die of grief in this island of ours. I 
 will tell you a common case. The rules of Eton 
 require that a boy on the foundation should be there 
 twelve years : he is superannuated at eighteen ; con- 
 sequently he must come at six. Children torn away 
 from mothers and sisters at that age not unfrequently 
 die. I speak of what I know. The complaint is not 
 entered by the registrar as grief ; but that it is. Grief 
 
 1 As I have never allowed myself to covet any man’s ox nor 
 his ass, nor anything that is his, still less would it become a 
 philosopher to covet other people’s images or metaphors. 
 Here, therefore, I restore to Mr. Wordsworth this fine image 
 of the revolving wheel and the glimmering spokes, as applied 
 by him to the flying successions of day and night. I borrowed 
 it for one moment in order to point my own sentence ; which 
 being done, the reader is witness that I now pay it back in- 
 stantly by a note made for that sole purpose. On the same 
 principle I often borrow their seals from young ladies, when 
 closing my letters, because there is sure to be some tender 
 sentiment upon them about “memory,” or “hope,” or 
 
 “roses,” or “reunion,” and my correspondent must be a sad 
 brute who is not touched by the eloquence of the seal, even if 
 his taste is so bad that he remains deaf to mine. 
 
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW 725 
 
 of that sort, and at that age, has killed more than 
 ever have been counted amongst its martyrs. 
 
 Therefore it is that Levana often communes with 
 the powers that shake man's heart ; therefore it is 
 that she dotes upon grief. “ These ladies/’ said I 
 softly to myself, on seeing the ministers with whom 
 Levana was conversing, “ these are the Sorrows ; 
 and they are three in number : as the Graces are 
 three, who dress man’s life with beauty ; the Parcce 
 are three, who weave the dark arras of man’s life in 
 their mysterious loom always with colours sad in part, 
 sometimes angry with tragic crimson and black ; the 
 Furies are three, who visit with retributions called 
 from the other side of the grave offences that walk 
 upon this ; and once even the Muses were but three, 
 who fit the harp, the trumpet, or the lute, to the 
 great burdens of man’s impassioned creations. These 
 are the Sorrows ; all three of whom I know.” The 
 last words I say now; but in Oxford I said, “one of 
 whom I know, and the others too surely I shall 
 know.” For already, in my fervent youth, I saw (dimly 
 relieved upon the dark background of my dreams) 
 the imperfect lineaments of the awful Sisters. 
 
 These Sisters — by what name shall we call them ? 
 If I say simply “ The Sorrows,” there will be a chance 
 of mistaking the term ; it might be understood of in- 
 dividual sorrow, — separate cases of sorrow, — whereas 
 I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that 
 incarnate themselves in all individual sufferings of 
 man’s heart, and I wish to have these abstractions 
 presented as impersonations, — that is, as clothed with 
 human attributes of life, and with functions pointing 
 to flesh. Let us call them, therefore, Our Ladies of 
 Sorrow. 
 
 I know them thoroughly, and have walked in all 
 their kingdoms. Three Sisters they are, of one mys- 
 terious household ; and their paths are wide apart ; 
 but of their dominion there is no end. Them I saw 
 often conversing with Levana, and sometimes about 
 myself. Do they talk, then? O no! Mighty phan- 
 toms like these disdain the infirmities of language. 
 
726 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 They may utter voices through the organs of man 
 when they dwell in human hearts, but amongst them- 
 selves is no voice nor sound ; eternal silence reigns 
 in their kingdoms. They spoke not as they talked 
 with Levana ; they whispered not ; they sang not ; 
 though oftentimes methought they might have sung : 
 for I upon earth had heard their mysteries oftentimes 
 deciphered by harp and timbrel, by dulcimer and 
 organ. Like God, whose servants they are, they 
 utter their pleasure not by sounds that perish, or by 
 words that go astray, but by signs in heaven, by 
 changes on earth, by pulses in secret rivers, heral- 
 dries painted on darkness, and hieroglyphics written 
 on the tablets of the brain. They wheeled in mazes ; 
 I spelled the steps. They telegraphed from afar ; I 
 read the signals. They conspired together ; and on 
 the mirrors of darkness my eye traced the plots. 
 r Theirs were the symbols ; mine are the words. 
 
 What is it the Sisters are ? What is it that they 
 do ? Let me describe their form and their presence, 
 if form it were that still fluctuated in its outline, or 
 presence it were that for ever advanced to the front or 
 for ever receded amongst shades. 
 
 The eldest of the three is named Mater Lachry- 
 marum , Our Lady of Tears. She it is that night and 
 day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces. 
 She stood in Rama, where a voice was heard of 
 lamentation, — Rachel weeping for her children, and 
 refusing to be comforted. She 'it was that stood in 
 Bethlehem on the night when Herod’s sword swept 
 its nurseries of Innocents, and the little feet were 
 stiffened for ever which, heard at times as they 
 trotted along floors overhead, woke pulses of love in 
 household hearts that were not unmarked in heaven. 
 Her eyes are sweet and subtle, wild and sleepy, by 
 turns ; oftentimes rising to the clouds, oftentimes 
 challenging the heavens. She wears a diadem round 
 her head. And I knew by childish memories that 
 she could go abroad upon the winds, when she heard 
 the sobbing of litanies, or the thundering of organs, 
 and when she beheld the mustering of summer 
 
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW 727 
 
 clouds. This Sister, the elder, it is that carries keys 
 more than papal at her girdle, which open every 
 cottage and every palace. She, to my knowledge, 
 sat all last summer by the bedside of the blind beggar, 
 him that so often and so gladly I talked with, whose 
 pious daughter, eight years old, with the sunny coun- 
 tenance, resisted the temptations of play and village 
 mirth, to travel all day long on dusty roads with her 
 afflicted father. For this did God send her a great 
 reward. In the spring-time of the year, and whilst 
 yet her own spring was budding, He recalled her to 
 himself. But her blind father mourns for ever over 
 her : still he dreams at midnight that the little guiding 
 hand is locked within his own ; and still he wakens 
 to a darkness that is now within a second and a 
 deeper darkness. This Mater Lachrymarum also has 
 been sitting all this winter of 1844-5 within the bed- 
 chamber of the Czar, bringing before his eyes a 
 daughter (not less pious) that vanished to God not 
 less suddenly, and left behind her a darkness not less 
 profound. By the power of the keys it is that Our 
 Lady of Tears glides, a ghostly intruder, into the 
 chambers of sleepless men, sleepless women, sleepless 
 children, from Ganges to the Nile, from Nile to Mis- 
 sissippi. And her, because she is the first-born of 
 her house, and has the widest empire, let us honour 
 with the title of “ Madonna.” 
 
 The second Sister is called Mater Suspiriorum , 
 Our Lady of Sighs. She never scales the clouds, 
 nor walks abroad upon the winds. She wears no 
 diadem. And her eyes, if they were ever seen, 
 would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could 
 read their story ; they would be found filled with 
 perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten 
 delirium. But she raises not her eyes ; her head, 
 on which sits a dilapidated turban, droops for ever, 
 for ever fastens on the dust. She weeps not. She 
 groans not. But she sighs inaudibly at intervals. 
 Her sister, Madonna, is oftentimes stormy and 
 frantic, raging in the highest against heaven, and 
 demanding back her darlings. But Our Lady of 
 
728 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 Sighs never clamours, never defies, dreams not 
 of rebellious aspirations. She is humble to abject- 
 ness. Hers is the meekness that belongs to the 
 hopeless. Murmur she may, but it is in her sleep. 
 Whisper she may, but it is to herself in the twilight. 
 Mutter she does at times, but it is in solitary places 
 that are desolate as she is desolate, in ruined cities, 
 and when the sun has gone down to his rest. This 
 Sister is the visitor of the Pariah, of the Jew, of the 
 bondsman to the oar in the Mediterranean galleys ; 
 of the English criminal in Norfolk Island, blotted 
 out from the books of remembrance in sweet far-off 
 England; of the baffled penitent reverting his eyes 
 for ever upon a solitary grave, which to him seems 
 the altar overthrown of some past and bloody sacri- 
 fice, on which altar no oblations can now be availing, 
 whether towards pardon that he might implore, or 
 towards reparation that he might attempt. Every 
 slave that at noonday looks up to the tropical sun 
 with timid reproach, as he points with one hand 
 to the earth, our general mother, but for him a 
 stepmother, as he points with the other hand to the 
 Bible, our general teacher, but against him sealed 
 and sequestered ; 1 every woman sitting in darkness, 
 without love to shelter her head, or hope to illumine 
 her solitude, because the heaven-born instincts kind- 
 ling in her nature germs of holy affections, which 
 God implanted in her womanly bosom, having been 
 stifled by social necessities, now burn sullenly to 
 waste, like sepulchral lamps amongst the ancients ; 
 every nun defrauded of her unreturning May-time 
 by wicked kinsman, whom God will judge ; every 
 captive in every dungeon ; all that are betrayed, and 
 all that are rejected ; outcasts by traditionary law, 
 and children of hereditary disgrace : all these walk 
 
 1 This, the reader will be aware, applies chiefly to the cotton 
 and tobacco States of North America ; but not to them only : 
 on which account I have not scrupled to figure the sun which 
 looks down upon slavery as tropical , — no matter if strictly 
 within the tropics, or simply so near to them as to produce 
 a similar climate. 
 
LEVANA AND OUR LADIES OF SORROW 729 
 
 with Our Lady of Sighs. She also carries a key ; but 
 she needs it little. For her kingdom is chiefly 
 amongst the tents of Shem, and the houseless vagrant 
 of every clime. Yet in the very highest ranks of 
 man she finds chapels of her own ; and even in 
 glorious England there are some that, to the world, 
 carry their heads as proudly as the reindeer, who yet 
 secretly have received her mark upon their foreheads. 
 
 But the third Sister, who is also the youngest ! 
 
 Hush ! whisper whilst we talk of her ! Her kingdom, 
 is not large, or else no flesh should live ; but within 
 that kingdom all power is hers. Her head, turreted 
 like that of Cybele, rises almost beyond the reach of 
 sight. She droops not ; and her eyes, rising so high, 
 might be hidden by distance. But, being what they 
 are, they cannot be hidden : through the treble veil 
 of crape which she wears the fierce light of a blazing 
 misery, that rests not for matins or for vespers, for 
 noon of day or noon of night, for ebbing or for flow- 
 ing tide, may be read from the very ground. She 
 is the defier of God. She also is the mother of 
 lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides. Deep lie 
 the roots of her power ; but narrow is the nation that 
 she rules. For she can approach only those in whom 
 a profound nature has been upheaved by central 
 convulsions ; in whom the heart trembles and the 
 brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from with- 
 out and tempest from within. Madonna moves with 
 uncertain steps, fast or slow, but still with tragic 
 grace. Our Lady of Sighs creeps ^timidly and 
 stealthily. But this youngest Sister moves with in- 
 calculable motions, bounding, and with tiger’s leaps. 
 She carries no key ; for, though coming rarely 
 amongst men, she storms all doors at which she is 
 permitted to enter at all. And her name is Mater 
 Tenebrarum , — Our Lady of Darkness. 
 
 These were th eSemnai Theai or Sublime Goddesses , 2 
 
 1 “ Sublime Goddesses ” : — The word aefxvos is usually rendered 
 venerable in dictionaries, — not a very flattering epithet for 
 females. But I am disposed to think that it comes nearest to 
 our idea of the sublime , — as near as a Greek word could come. 
 
730 SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS 
 
 these were the Eumenides or Gracious Ladies (so 
 called by antiquity in shuddering propitiation) of 
 my Oxford dreams. Madonna spoke. She spoke 
 by her mysterious hand. Touching my head, she 
 beckoned to Our Lady of Sighs ; and what she spoke, 
 translated out of the signs which (except in dreams) 
 no man reads, was this : — 
 
 “ Lo ! here is he whom in childhood I dedicated 
 to my altars. This is he that once I made my 
 darling. Him I led astray, him I beguiled * and 
 from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine. 
 Through me did he become idolatrous ; and through 
 me it was, by languishing desires, that he worshipped 
 the worm, and prayed to the • wormy grave. Holy 
 was the grave to him ; lovely was its darkness ; 
 saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolater, I 
 have seasoned for thee, dear gentle Sister of Sighs 1 
 Do thou take him now to thy heart, and season him 
 for our dreadful sister. And thou,” — turning to the 
 Mater Tenebrarwn , she said, — “ wicked sister, that 
 temptest and hatest, do thou take him from her. See 
 that thy sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not 
 woman and her tenderness to sit near him in his 
 darkness. Banish the frailties of hope ; wither the 
 relenting of love ; scorch the fountains of tears ; curse 
 him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be ac- 
 complished in the furnace ; so shall he see the things 
 that ought not to be seen, sights that are abominable, 
 and secrets that are unutterable. So shall he rekd 
 elder truths^ sad truths, grand truths, fearful truths. 
 So shall he rise again before he dies. And so shall 
 our commission be accomplished which from God we 
 had, — to plague his heart until we had unfolded the 
 capacities of his spirit.” 
 
 THE END