What I Remember, Volume 2
by Thomas Adolphus Trollope
Part 5 out of 6
"I don't think I ever told you how very much your _History of
Florence_ interested me. I am shockingly ignorant of the subject, and
not at all competent to speak, except as one of the public; but you
made the political life of the people clear to me. I only regretted
here and there a newspaper style which was not historic. Oscar
Browning has sent me his review, but I have not read it yet. It is at
the printers. Polly sends her love.
"Ever faithfully yours,
"G.H.L."
* * * * *
He writes again, dating his letter 1st January, 1866, but post-marked
1865. It is singular, that the date as given by the writer, 1866, must
have been right, and that given by the post-mark, 1865, wrong. And
the fact may possibly some day be useful to some counsel having to
struggle against the evidence of a post-mark. The letter commences:--
* * * * *
"MY DEAR TROLLOPE,--A happy new year to you and Bice!
[It is quite impossible that Lewes could have so written, while my
wife, Theodosia, so great a favourite with both him and his wife, and
so constantly inquired for tenderly by them, was yet alive. I lost
her on the 13th of April, 1865. It is certain therefore, that Lewes's
letter was written in 1866, and not as the post-mark declares in 1865.
After speaking of some literary business matters, the letter goes
on:--]
"And when am I to receive those articles from you, which you
projected? I suppose other work keeps you ever on the stretch. But so
active a man must needs 'fulfil himself in many ways.'
"We have been ailing constantly without being ill, but our work gets
on somehow or other. Polly is miserable over a new novel, and I am
happy over the very hard work of a new edition of my _History of
Philosophy_, which will almost be a new book, so great are the changes
and additions. Polly sends her love to you and Bice.
"Yours very faithfully,
"G.H. LEWES."
* * * * *
Then after a long break, and after a new phase of my life had
commenced, Lewes writes on the 14th of January, 1869, from "21, North
Bank":--
* * * * *
"DEAR T.T.,--We did not meet in Germany because our plans were
altogether changed. We passed all the time in the Black Forest, and
came home through the Oberland. I did write to Salzburg however, and
perhaps the letter is still there; but there was nothing in it.
"You know how fond we are of you, and the pleasure it always gives
us to get a glimpse of you. (Not that we have not also very pleasant
associations with your wife,[1] but she is as yet stranger to us of
course.) But we went away in search of complete repose. And in the
Black Forest there was not a soul to speak to, and we liked it so much
as to stay on there.
[Footnote 1: I had married my second wife on the 29th of October,
1866.]
"We contemplate moving southwards in the spring, and if we go to Italy
and come _near_ Florence, we shall assuredly make a _detour_ and come
and see you. Polly wants to see Arezzo and Perugia. And I suppose we
can still get a _vetturino_ to take us that way to Rome? Don't want
railways, if to be avoided. I don't think we can get away before
March, for my researches are so absorbing, that, if health holds out,
I must go on, if not, we shall pack up earlier. The worst of Lent is
that one gets no theatres, and precisely because we never go to the
theatre in London, we hugely enjoy it abroad. Yesterday we took the
child of a friend of ours to a morning performance of the pantomime,
and are utterly knocked up in consequence. Somehow or other abroad the
theatre agrees with us. Polly sends the kindest remembrances to you
and your wife. Whenever you want anything done in London, consider me
an idle man.
"Ever yours faithfully,
"G.H. LEWES."
* * * * *
And on the 28th February, in the same year, accordingly he writes:--
* * * * *
"Touching our visit to Florence, you may be sure we could not lightly
forego such a pleasure. We start to-morrow, and unless we are recalled
by my mother's health, we calculate being with you about the end of
March. But we shall give due warning of our arrival. We both look
forward to this holiday, and 'languish for the purple seas;' though
the high winds now howl a threat of anything but a pleasant crossing
to Calais. _Che! Che!_ One must pay for one's pleasure! With both of
our warmest salutations to you and yours,
"Believe me, yours faithfully,
"G.H. LEWES."
* * * * *
The travellers must, however, have reached us some days before the end
of March, for I have a letter to my wife from George Eliot, dated
from Naples on the 1st of April, 1869, after they had left us. She
writes:--
* * * * *
"MY DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE,--The kindness which induces you to shelter
travellers will make you willing to hear something of their subsequent
fate. And I am the more inclined to send you some news of ourselves
because I have nothing dismal to tell. We bore our long journey better
than we dared to expect, for the night was made short by sleep in
our large coupe, and during the day we had no more than one headache
between us. Mr. Lewes really looks better, and has lost his twinges.
And though pleasure-seekers are notoriously the most aggrieved and
howling inhabitants of the universe, we can allege nothing against
our lot here but the persistent coldness of the wind, which is in
dangerously sudden contrast with the warmth of the sunshine whenever
one gets on the wrong side of a wall. This prevents us from
undertaking any carriage expeditions, which is rather unfortunate,
because such expeditions are among the chief charms of Naples. We have
not been able to renew our old memories of that sort at all, except by
a railway journey to Pompeii; and our days are spent in the museum
and in the sunniest out-of-door spots. We have been twice to the San
Carlo, which we were the more pleased to do, because when we were here
before, that fine theatre was closed. The singing is so-so, and the
tenor especially is gifted with limbs rather than with voice or
ear. But there is a baritone worth hearing and a soprano, whom the
Neapolitans delight to honour with hideous sounds of applause.
"We are longing for a soft wind, which will allow us to take the long
drive to Baiae during one of our remaining days here. At present we
think of leaving for Rome on Sunday or Monday. But our departure will
probably be determined by an answer from the landlord of the Hotel
de Minerva, to whom Mr. Lewes has written. We have very comfortable
quarters here, out of the way of that English and American society,
whose charms you can imagine. Our private dinner is well served; and I
am glad to be away from the Chiaja, except--the exception is a great
one--for the sake of the sunsets which I should have seen there.
"Mr. Lewes has found a book by an Italian named Franchi, formerly a
priest, on the present condition of philosophy in Italy. He emerges
from its depths--or shallows--to send his best remembrances; and to
Bice he begs especially to recommend Plantation Bitters.
"I usually think all the more of things and places the farther I get
from them, and, on that ground, you will understand that at Naples
I think of Florence, and the kindness I found there under my small
miseries. Pray offer my kind regards to Miss Blagden when you see
her, and tell her that I hope to shake hands with her in London this
spring.
"We shall obey Mr. Trollope's injunctions to write again from Perugia
or elsewhere, according to our route homeward. But pray warn him, that
when my throat is not sore, and my head not stagnant, I am a much
fiercer antagonist. It is perhaps a delight to one's egoism to have a
friend who is among the best of men with the worst of theories. One
can be at once affectionate and spit-fire. Pray remember me with
indulgence, all of you, and believe, dear Mrs. Trollope,
"Most truly yours,
"M.E. LEWES."
* * * * *
It will be seen from the above that George Eliot had very quickly
fraternised--what is the feminine form?--with my second wife, as I,
without any misgivings, foresaw would be the case. Indeed subsequent
circumstances allowed a greater degree of intimacy to grow up
between them than had been possible in the case of my Bice's mother,
restricted as her intercourse with the latter had been by failing
health, and the comparative fewness of the hours they had passed
together. Neither she nor Lewes had ever passed a night under my roof
until I received them in the villa at Ricorboli, where I lived with my
second wife.
What was the subject of the "antagonism" to which the above letter
alludes, I have entirely forgotten. In all probability we differed on
some subject of politics,[1] by reason of the then rapidly maturing
Conservatism which my outlook ahead forced upon me. Nevertheless it
would seem from some words in a letter written to me by Lewes in the
November of 1869, that my political heresies were not deemed
deeply damning. There was a question of my undertaking the foreign
correspondence of a London paper, which came to nothing till some four
years later, under other circumstances; and with reference to that
project he writes:--
[Footnote 1: My wife, on reading this passage, tells me that according
to her recollection the differences in question had no reference to
politics at all, but to matters of higher interest relating to man's
ultimate destinies.]
* * * * *
"Polly and I were immensely pleased at the prospect for you. She
was rejoiced that you should once more be giving yourself to public
affairs, which you so well understand.... We are but just come back
from the solitudes of a farm-house in Surrey, whither I took Polly
immediately after our loss [of his son], of which I suppose Anthony
told you. It had shaken her seriously. She had lavished almost a
mother's love on the dear boy, and suffered a mother's grief in the
bereavement. He died in her arms; and for a long while it seemed as if
she could never get over the pain. But now she is calm again, though
very sad. But she will get to work, and _that_ will aid her.
"For me, I was as fully prepared (by three or four months' conviction
of its inevitableness) as one can be in such cases. It is always
sudden, however foreseen. Yet the preparation was of great use; and
I now have only a beautiful image living with me, and a deep
thankfulness that his sufferings are at an end, since recovery was
impossible.
"Give my love to your wife and Bice, and believe ever in yours
faithfully,
"G.H. LEWES."
* * * * *
The following highly interesting letter was written to my wife by
Mrs. Lewes, about a year after his death. It is dated "The Priory, 19
December, 1879":--
* * * * *
"DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE,--In sending me Dr. Haller's words you have sent
me a great comfort. A just appreciation of my husband's work from a
competent person is what I am most athirst for; and Dr. Haller has
put his finger on a true characteristic. I only wish he could print
something to the same effect in any pages that would be generally
read.
"There is no biography. An article entitled 'George Henry Lewes'
appeared in the last _New London Quarterly_. It was written by a man
for whom he had much esteem; but it is not strong. A few facts about
the early life and education are given with tolerable accuracy, but
the estimate of the philosophic and scientific activity is inadequate.
Still it is the best thing you could mention to Dr. Haller. You know
perhaps that a volume entitled _The Study of Psychology_ appeared in
May last, and that another volume (500 pp.) of _Problems of Life
and Mind_ has just been published. The best history of a writer is
contained in his writings; these are his chief actions. If he happens
to have left an autobiography telling (what nobody else can tell) how
his mind grew, how it was determined by the joys, sorrows, and other
influences of childhood and youth--that is a precious contribution
to knowledge. But biographies generally are a disease of English
literature.
"I have never yet told you how grateful I was to you for writing to me
a year ago. For a long while I could read no letter. But now I have
read yours more than once, and it is carefully preserved. You had been
with us in our happiness so near the time when it left me--you and
your husband are peculiarly bound up with the latest memories.
"You must have had a mournful summer. But Mr. Trollope's thorough
recovery from his severe attack is a fresh proof of his constitutional
strength. We cannot properly count age by years. See what Mr.
Gladstone does with seventy of them in his frame. And my lost one had
but sixty-one and a half.
"You are to come to England again in 1881, I remember, and then, if I
am alive, I hope to see you. With best love to you both, always, dear
Mrs. Trollope,
"Yours faithfully,
"M.E. LEWES."
* * * * *
The "words of Dr. Haller," to which the above letter refers, were to
the effect that one of Lewes's great advantages in scientific and
philosophical research was his familiar acquaintance with the works
of German and French writers, which enabled him to follow the
contemporaneous movement of science throughout Europe, whereas many
writers of learning and ability wasted their own and their readers'
time in investigating questions already fully investigated elsewhere,
and advancing theories which had been previously proved or disproved
without their knowledge. Dr. Ludwig Haller, of Berlin, in writing to
me about G.H. Lewes, then recently deceased, had said, if I remember
rightly, that he had some intention of publishing a sketch of Lewes in
some German periodical. I am not aware whether this intention was ever
carried into effect.
The attack to which the above letter alludes was a very bad one
of sciatica. At length the baths of Baden in Switzerland cured me
permanently, but after their--it is said ordinary and normal, but very
perverse--fashion, having first made me incomparably worse. I suffered
excruciatingly, consolingly (!) assured by the doctor that sciatica
never kills--only makes you wish that it would! While I was at the
worst my brother came to Baden to see me, and on leaving me after
a couple of days, wrote to my wife the following letter, which I
confiscated and keep as a memorial.
After expressing his commiseration for me, he continues:--
"For you, I cannot tell you the admiration I have for you. Your
affection and care and assiduity were to be expected. I knew you well
enough to take them as a matter of course from you to him. But your
mental and physical capacity, your power of sustaining him by your
own cheerfulness, and supporting him by your own attention, are
marvellous. When I consider all the circumstances I hardly know how to
reconcile so much love with so much self-control."
Every word true! And what he saw for a few hours in each of a couple
of days, I saw every hour of the day and night for four terrible
months!
But all this is a parenthesis into which I have been led, I hope
excusably, by Mrs. Lewes's mention of my illness.
N.B.--I said at an early page of these recollections that I had never
been confined to my bed by illness for a single day during more than
sixty years. The above-mentioned illness leaves the statement still
true. The sciatica was bad, but never kept me in bed. Indeed I was
perhaps in less torment out of it.
Here is the last letter of George Eliot's which reached us. It is
written by Mrs. Lewes to my wife, from "The Priory, 30 December,
1879":--
* * * * *
"DEAR MRS. TROLLOPE,--I inclose the best photograph within my reach.
To me all portraits of him are objectionable, because I see him more
vividly and truly without them. But I think this is the most like what
he was as you knew him. I have sent your anecdote about the boy to Mr.
Du Maurier, whom it will suit exactly. I asked Charles Lewes to copy
it from your letter with your own pretty words of introduction.
"Yours affectionately,
"M.E. LEWES."
* * * * *
It is pretty well too late in the day for me to lament the loss of old
friends. They have been well-nigh some time past all gone. I have
been exceptionally fortunate in an aftermath belonging to a younger
generation. But they too are dropping around me! And few losses from
this second crop have left a more regretted void than George Henry
Lewes and his wife.
CHAPTER XVII.
I have thought that it might be more convenient to the reader to have
the letters contained in the foregoing chapter all together, and have
not interrupted them therefore to speak of any of the events which
were meantime happening in my own life.
But during the period which the letters cover the two greatest sorrows
of my life had fallen upon me--I had lost first my mother, then my
wife.
The bereavement, however, was very different in the two cases. If my
mother had died a dozen years earlier I should have felt the loss as
the end of all things to me--as leaving me desolate and causing a void
which nothing could ever fill. But when she died at eighty-three she
had lived her life, upon the whole a very happy one, to the happiness
of which I had (and have) the satisfaction of believing I largely
contributed.
It is very common for a mother and daughter to live during many years
of life together in as close companionship as I lived with my mother,
but it is not common for a son to do so. During many years, and many,
many journeyings, and more _tete-a-tete_ walks, and yet more of
_tete-a-tete_ home hours, we were inseparable companions and friends.
I can truly say that, from the time when we put our horses together on
my return from Birmingham to the time of my marriage, she was all in
all to me! During some four or five days in the early time of our
residence at Florence I thought I was going to lose her, and I can
never forget the blank wretchedness of the prospect that seemed to be
before me.
She had a very serious illness, and was, as I had subsequently
reason to believe, very mistakenly treated. She was attended by a
practitioner of the old school, who had at that time the leading
practice in Florence. He was a very good fellow, and an admirable
whist player; and I do not think the members of our little colony
drew a sufficiently sharp line of division between his social and his
professional qualifications. He was, as I have said, essentially a man
of the (even then) old school, and retained the old-fashioned general
practitioners phraseology. I remember his once mortally disgusting an
unhappy dyspeptic old lady by asking her, "Do we go to our dinner with
glee?" As if the poor soul had ever done anything with glee!
This gentleman had bled my mother, and had appointed another bleeding
for the evening. I believe she would assuredly have died if that had
been done, and I attribute to Lord Holland the saving of her. Her
doctor had very wrongly resisted the calling in of other English
advice, professional jealousy, and indeed enmity, running high just
then among us. Lord Holland came to the house just in the nick of
time; and over-ruling authoritatively all the difficulties raised by
the Esculapius in possession of the field, insisted on at once sending
his own medical attendant. The result was the immediate administration
of port wine instead of phlebotomy, and the patient's rapid recovery.
My mother was at the time far past taking any part in the discussion
of the medical measures to be adopted in her case. But I am not
without a suspicion that she too, if she could have been consulted,
would have sided with phlebotomy and whist, as against modern practice
unrelieved by any such alleviation. For the phlebotomist had been a
constant attendant at her Friday night whist-table; and as it was she
lost him, for he naturally was offended at her recovery under rival
hands.
What my mother _was_ I have already said enough to show, as far as
my imperfect words can show it, in divers passages of these
reminiscences. She was the happiest natured person I ever knew--happy
in the intense power of enjoyment, happier still in the conscious
exercise of the power of making others happy; and this continued to
be the case till nearly the end. During the last few years the bright
lamp began to grow dim and gradually sink into the socket. She
suffered but little physically, but she lost her memory, and then
gradually more and more the powers of her mind generally. I have often
thought that this perishing of the mind before the exceptionally
healthy and well-constituted physical frame, in which it was housed,
may have been due to the tremendous strain to which she was subjected
during those terrible months at Bruges, when she was watching the
dying bed of a much-loved son during the day, and, dieted on green tea
and laudanum, was writing fiction most part of the night. The cause,
if such were the case, would have preceded the effect by some forty
years; but whether it is on the cards to suppose that such an effect
may have been produced after such a length of time, I have not
physiological knowledge enough to tell.
She was, I think, to an exceptional degree surrounded by very many
friends, mostly women, but including many men, at every period of her
life. But the circumstances of it caused the world of her intimates
during her youth, her middle life, and her old age, to be to a great
degree peopled by different figures.
She was during all her life full of, and fond of, fun; had an
exquisite sense of humour; and at all times valued her friends and
acquaintances more exclusively, I think, than most people do, for
their intrinsic qualities, mainly those of heart, and, not so much
perhaps intellect, accurately speaking, as brightness. There is a
passage in my brother's _Autobiography_ which grates upon my mind,
and, I think, very signally fails to hit the mark.
He writes (vol. i. p. 28):--"She loved society, affecting a somewhat
Liberal _role_, and professing an emotional dislike to tyrants, which
sprung from the wrongs of would-be regicides and the poverty of
patriot exiles. An Italian marquis who had escaped with only a second
shirt from the clutches of some archduke whom he had wished to
exterminate, or a French _proletaire_ with distant ideas of
sacrificing himself to the cause of liberty, were always welcome to
the modest hospitality of her house. In after years, when marquises of
another caste had been gracious to her, she became a strong Tory, and
thought that archduchesses were sweet. But with her, politics were
always an affair of the heart, as indeed were all her convictions. Of
reasoning from causes I think that she knew nothing."
Now there is hardly a word of this in which Anthony is not more
or less mistaken; and that simply because he had not adequate
opportunities for close observation. The affection which subsisted
between my mother and my brother Anthony was from the beginning to the
end of their lives as tender and as warm as ever existed between a
mother and son. Indeed I remember that in the old days of our youth
we used to consider Anthony the Benjamin. But from the time that he
became a clerk in the Post Office to her death, he and my mother were
never together but as visitors during the limited period of a visit.
From the time that I resigned my position at Birmingham to the time
of her death, I was uninterruptedly an inmate of her house, or she of
mine. And I think that I knew her, as few sons know their mothers.
No regicide, would-be or other, ever darkened her doors. No French
_proletaire_, or other French political refugee was ever among her
guests. She never was acquainted with any Italian marquis who had
escaped in any degree of distress from poverty. With General Pepe she
was intimate for years. But of him the world knows enough to perceive
that my brother cannot have alluded to him. And I recollect no other
marquis. It is very true that in the old Keppel Street and Harrow days
several Italian exiles, and I think some Spaniards, used to be her
occasional guests. This had come to pass by means of her intimacy with
Lady Dyer, the wife and subsequently widow of Sir Thomas Dyer, whose
years of foreign service had interested him and her in many such
persons. The friends of her friend were her friends. They were not
such by virtue of their political position and ideas. Though it is no
doubt true, that caring little about politics, and in a jesting way
(how jesting many a memorial of fun between her and Lady Dyer, and
Miss Gabell, the daughter of Dr. Gabell of Winchester, is still extant
in my hands to prove;) the general tone of the house was "Liberal."
But nothing can be farther from the truth than the idea that my mother
was led to become a Tory by the "graciousness" of any "marquises" or
great folks of any kind. I am inclined to think that there was _one_
great personage, whose (not graciousness, but) intellectual influence
_did_ impel her mind in a Conservative direction. And this was
Metternich. She had more talk with him than her book on Vienna would
lead a reader to suppose; and very far more of his mind and influence
reached her through the medium of the Princess.
To how great a degree this is likely to have been the case may be in
some measure perceived from a letter which the Princess addressed to
my mother shortly after she had left Vienna. She preserved it among a
few others, which she specially valued, and I transcribe it from the
original now before me.
* * * * *
"Vous ne pourriez croire, chere Madame Trollope, combien le portrait
que vous avez charge le Baron Huegel de me remettre m'a fait de
plaisir!
"Il y a longtemps que je cachais au fonds de mon coeur le desir de
posseder votre portrait, qui, interressant pour le monde, est devenu
precieux pour moi, puisque j'ai le plaisir de vous connaitre telle
que vous etes, bonne, simple, bienveillante, et loin de tout ce qui
effroie et eloigne des reputations literaires. Je remercie M. Hervieu
de Tavoir fait aussi ressemblant. Et je vous assure, chere Madame
Trollope, que rien ne pouvait me toucher aussi vivement et me faire
autant de plaisir que ce souvenir venant de vous, qui me rappelera
sans cesse les bons moments que j'ai eu la satisfaction de passer avec
vous et qui resteront a jamais cheres a ma memoire.
"MELANIE, PRINCESSE DE METTERNICH."
* * * * *
I think that the hours passed by the Princess and my mother
_tete-a-tete_, save for the presence of the artist occupied by his
work during the painting of the Princess Melanie's portrait for
my mother, were mainly the cause of the real intimacy of mind and
affection which grew up between them--though, of course, the painting
of the portrait shows that a considerable intimacy had previously
arisen. And it had been arranged that the portrait of my mother, which
was the occasion of the above letter, should be exchanged for that of
the Princess. But there had been no time amid the whirl of the Vienna
gaieties to get it executed. It was, therefore, sent from England by
Baron Huegel when he called on my mother, on visiting this country
shortly after her return from Austria.
It occurs to me here to mention a circumstance which was, I think,
the first thing to begin--not the acquaintance but--the intimacy in
question; and which may be related as possessing an interest not
confined to either of the ladies in question.
The Archduchess Sophie had graciously intimated her desire that my
mother should be presented to her, and an evening had been named
for the purpose. But a few days before--just three, if I remember
rightly--my mother caught a cold, which resulted in erysipelas,
causing her head to become swollen to nearly double its usual size!
Great was the dismay of the ladies who had arranged the meeting with
the Archduchess, chief among whom had been the Princess Melanie.
She came to my mother, and insisted upon sending to her an old
homoeopathic physician, who was her own medical attendant, and had
been Hahnemann's favourite pupil. He came, saw his patient, and
was told that what he had to do was to make her presentable by the
following Friday! He shook his head, said the time was too short--but
he would do his best. And the desired object was _fully_ attained.
I have no doubt that my mother returned from her Vienna visit a more
strongly convinced Conservative in politics than she had hitherto
been. And it does not seem to me that the modification of her
opinions in that direction, which was doubtless largely operated by
conversation with the great Conservative statesman and his _alter
ego_, the Princess, needs to be in any degree attributed to the
"graciousness" of people in high position either male or female. Is
it not very intelligible and very likely that such opinions, so set
forth, as she from day to day heard them, should have honestly and
legitimately influenced her own?
But I think that I should be speaking, if perhaps presumptuously, yet
truly, if I were to add that there was also one very far from great
personage, whose influence in the same direction was greater than even
that of Prince Metternich or of any other great folks whatever; and
that was the son in daily and almost hourly communion and conversation
with whom she lived. I also had begun life as a "Liberal," and was
such in the days when Mr. Gladstone was a high Tory. But my mind had
long been travelling in an inverse direction to his. And far too large
a number of my contemporaries distinguished and undistinguished have
been moving in the same direction for it to be at all necessary to
say that most assuredly my slowly maturing convictions were neither
generated nor fostered by any "graciousness" or other influence of
dukes or duchesses or great people of any sort.
That my mother's political ideas were in no degree "an affair of the
heart," I will not say, and by no means regret not being able to say.
But I cannot but assert that it is a great mistake to say that they
were uninfluenced by "reasoning from causes," or that the movement
of her mind in this respect was in any degree whatever due to the
caresses which my brother imagines to have caused it.
She was not a great or careful preserver of papers and letters, or
I might have been able to print here very many communications from
persons in whom the world feels an interest. Among her early and very
dear friends was Mary Mitford.
I have a very vivid remembrance of the appearance of Mary Russell
Mitford as I used to see her on the occasions of my visits to Reading,
where my grandfather's second wife and then widow was residing. She
was not corpulent, but her figure gave one the idea of almost cubical
solidity. She had a round and red full moon sort of face, from the
ample forehead above which the hair was all dragged back and stowed
away under a small and close-fitting cap, which surrounding her face
increased the effect of full-blown rotundity. But the grey eye and
even the little snub nose were full of drollery and humour, and the
lines about the generally somewhat closely shut mouth indicated
unmistakable intellectual power. There is a singular resemblance
between her handwriting and that of my mother. Very numerous letters
must have passed between them. But of all these I have been able to
find but four.
On the 3rd of April, 1832, she writes from the "Three Mile Cross," so
familiar to many readers, as follows:--
* * * * *
"My dear Mrs. Trollope,--I thank you most sincerely for your very
delightful book, as well as for its great kindness towards me; and I
wish you joy from the bottom of my heart of the splendid success which
has not merely attended but awaited its career--a happy and I trust
certain augury of your literary good fortune in every line which you
may pursue. I assure you that my political prejudices are by no
means shocked at your dislike of Republicanism. I was always a very
aristocratic Whig, and since these reforming days am well-nigh become
a staunch Tory, for pretty nearly the same reason that converted
you--a dislike to mobs in action.... Refinement follows wealth,
but not often closely, as witness the parvenu people even in dear
England.... I heard of your plunge into the Backwoods first from Mr.
Owen himself, with whom I foregathered three years ago in London,
and of whom you have given so very true and graphic a picture. What
extraordinary mildness and plausibility that man possesses! I
never before saw an instance of actual wildness--madness of theory
accompanied by such suavity and soberness of manner. Did you see my
friend, Miss Sedgwick? Her letters show a large and amiable mind, and
a little niece of nine years old, who generally writes in them, has
a style very unusual in so young a girl, and yet most youthful and
natural too.... Can you tell me if Mr. Flint be the author of _George
Mason, or the Young Backwoodsman_? I think that he is; and whether
the name of a young satirical writer be Sams or Sands? Your answering
these questions will stead me much, and I am sure that you will answer
them if you can.
"Now to your kind questions. I am getting ready a fifth and last
volume of _Our Village_ as fast as I can, though with pain and
difficulty, having hurt my left hand so much by a fall from an
open carriage that it affects the right, and makes writing very
uncomfortable to me. And I am in a most perplexed state about my
opera, not knowing whether it will be produced this season or not, in
consequence of Captain Polhill and his singers having parted. This
would not have happened had my coadjutor the composer kept to his
time. And I have still hopes that when the opera be [shall, omitted
probably] taken in (the music is even now not finished), a sense of
interest will bring the parties together again. I hope that it may,
for it will not only be a tremendous hit for all of us, but it will
take me to London and give me the pleasure of a peep at you, a
happiness to which I look forward very anxiously. I know Mr. Tom, and
like him of all things, as everybody who knows him must, and I hear
that his sisters are charming. God bless you, my dear friend. My
father joins me in every good wish, and
"I am ever most affectionately yours,
"M.R. MITFORD."
* * * * *
A few weeks later she writes a very long letter almost entirely filled
with a discussion of the desirability or non-desirability of writing
in this, that, and the other "annual" or magazine. Most of those she
alludes to are dead, and there is no interest in preserving her mainly
unfavourable remarks concerning them and their editors and publishers.
One sentence, however, is so singularly and amusingly suggestive
of change in men and women and things, that I must give it. After
reviewing a great number of the leading monthlies she says "as for
Fraser's and Blackwood's, they are hardly such as a lady likes to
write for"!
After advising my mother to stick to writing novels, she says, "I have
not a doubt that that is by far the most profitable branch of the
literary profession. If ever I be bold enough to try that arduous
path, I shall endeavour to come as near as I can to Miss Austen, my
idol. You are very good about my opera. I am sorry to tell you, and
you will be sorry to hear, that the composer has disappointed me,
that the music is not even yet ready, and that the piece is therefore
necessarily delayed till next season. I am very sorry for this on
account of the money, and because I have many friends in and near
town, yourself amongst the rest, whom I was desirous to see. But
I suppose it will be for the good of the opera to wait till the
beginning of a season. It is to be produced with extraordinary
splendour, and will, I think, be a tremendous hit. I hope also to have
a tragedy out at nearly the same time in the autumn, and _then_ I
trust we shall meet, and I shall see your dear girls.
"How glad I am to find that you partake of my great aversion to the
sort of puffery belonging to literature. I hate it! and always did,
and love you all the better for partaking of my feeling on the
subject. I believe that with me it is pride that revolts at the trash.
And then it is so false; the people are so clearly flattering to be
flattered. Oh, I hate it!!!
"Make my kindest regards [_sic_] and accept my father's.
"Ever most faithfully and affectionately yours,
"M.R. MITFORD.
"P.S.--I suppose my book will be out in about a month. I shall desire
Whittaker to send you a copy. It is the fifth and last volume."
* * * * *
The following interesting letter, franked by her friend Talfourd, and
shown only by the post-mark to have been posted on the 20th of June,
1836, is apparently only part of a letter, for it is written upon one
page, and the two "turnovers" only; and begins abruptly:--
* * * * *
"My being in London this year seems very uncertain, although if Mr.
Sergeant Talfourd's _Ion_ be played, as I believe it will, for Mr.
Macready's benefit, I shall hardly be able to resist the temptation of
going up for a very few days to be present upon that occasion. But
I scarcely ever stir. I am not strong, and am subject to a painful
complaint, which renders the service of a maid indispensable not only
to my comfort but to my health; and that, besides the expense, has an
appearance of fuss and finery, to which I have a great objection, and
to which indeed I have from station no claim. My father, too, hates to
be left even for a day. And splendid old man as he is in his healthful
and vigorous age, I cannot but recollect that he is seventy-five, and
that he is my only tie upon earth--the only relation (except, indeed,
a few very distant cousins, Russells, Greys, Ogles, and Deans, whom I
am too proud and too poor to hook on upon), my only relation in the
wide world. This is a desolate view of things; but it explains a
degree of clinging to that one most precious parent which people can
hardly comprehend. You can scarcely imagine how fine an old man he is;
how clear of head and warm of heart. He almost wept over your letter
to-day, and reads your book with singular delight and satisfaction,
in spite of the difference in politics. He feels strongly, and so, I
assure you, do I, your kind mention of me and my poor writings--a sort
of testimony always gratifying, but doubly so when the distinguished
writer is a dear friend. Even in this desolation, your success--that
of your last work [_Paris and the Parisians_] especially must be
satisfactory to you. I have no doubt that two volumes on Italy will
prove equally delightful to your readers, whilst the journey will be
the best possible remedy for all that you have suffered in spirits and
health.
"I am attempting a novel, for which Messieurs Saunders and Ottley have
agreed to give 700_l_. It is to be ready some time in September--I
mean the MS.--and I am most anxious upon every account to make it as
good as possible, one very great reason being the fair, candid, and
liberal conduct of the intended publishers. I shall do my very best.
Shall I, do you think, succeed? I take for granted that our loss is
your gain, and that you see Mr. Milman and his charming wife, who
will, I am sure, sympathise most sincerely in your present[1]
affliction.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Milman had resigned recently the incumbency of a
parish in Reading. My mother's affliction alluded to was the death of
her youngest daughter, Emily.]
"Adieu, my dear friend. I am tying myself up from letter-writing until
I have finished my novel. While I cannot but hope for one line from
you to say that you are recovering. Letters to me may always be
inclosed to Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, M.P., 2, Elm Court, Temple. Even if
he be on circuit, they will reach me after a short delay. God bless
you all. My father joins heartily in this prayer, with
"Your faithful and affectionate,
"M.R. MITFORD."
* * * * *
The next, and last which I have found, is entirely undated, but
post-marked 20th April, 1837.
* * * * *
"MY DEAR FRIEND,--I don't know when a trifle has pleased me so much as
the coincidence which set us a-writing to each other just at the same
time. I have all the north-country superstition flowing through my
veins, and do really believe in the exploded doctrine of sympathies.
That is to say, I believe in all _genial_ superstitions, and don't
like this steam-packet railway world of ours, which puts aside with so
much scorn that which for certain Shakespeare and Ben Jonson held for
true. I am charmed at your own account of yourself and your doings.
Mr. Edward Kenyon--(whose brother, John Kenyon, of Harley Place, the
most delightful man in London--of course you know him--is my especial
friend)--Mr. Edward Kenyon, who lives chiefly at Vienna, although,
I believe, in great retirement, spending 200_l_. upon himself, and
giving away 2,000_l_.--Mr. Edward Kenyon spoke of you to me as having
such opportunities of knowing both the city and the country as rarely
befell even a resident, and what you say of the peasantry gives me a
strong desire to see your book.
"A happy subject is in my mind, a great thing, especially for you
whose descriptions are so graphic. The thing that would interest me
in Austria, and for the maintenance of which one almost pardons (not
quite) their retaining that other old-fashioned thing, the State
prisons, is their having kept up in their splendour those grand old
monasteries, which are swept away now in Spain and Portugal. I have
a passion for Gothic architecture, and a leaning towards the
magnificence of the old religion, the foster-mother of all that is
finest and highest in art, and if I have such a thing as a literary
project, it is to write a romance, of which Reading Abbey in its
primal magnificence should form a part, not the least about forms
of faith, understand, but as an element of the picturesque, and as
embodying a very grand and influential part of bygone days. At present
I have just finished (since writing _Country Stories_, which people
seem so good as to like) writing all the prose (except one story about
the fashionable subject of Egyptian magicians, furnished to me by your
admirer, Henry Chorley; I wish you had seen him taking off his hat to
the walls as I showed him your father's old residence at Heckfield),
all the prose of the most splendid of the annuals, Finden's
_Tableaux_, of which my longest and best story--a Young Pretender
story--I have been obliged to omit in consequence of not calculating
on the length of my poetical contributors. But my poetry, especially
that by that wonderful young creature Miss Barrett, Mr. Kenyon, and
Mr. Procter, is certainly such as has seldom before been seen in an
annual, and joined with Finden's magnificent engravings ought to make
an attractive work.
"I am now going to my novel, if it please God to grant me health. For
the last two months I have only once crossed the outer threshold, and,
indeed, I have never been a day well since the united effects of the
tragedy and the influenza ... [word destroyed by the seal]. What will
become of that poor play is in the womb of time. But its being by
universal admission a far more striking drama than _Rienzi_, and by
very far the best thing I ever wrote, it follows almost of course,
that it will share the fate of its predecessor, and be tossed about
the theatres for three or four years to come. Of course I should be
only too happy that it should be brought out at Covent Garden under
the united auspices of Mr. Macready and Mr. Bartley.[1] But I am in
constitution and in feeling a much older person than you, my dear
friend, as well as in look, however the acknowledgment of age (I
am 48) may stand between us; and belonging to a most sanguine and
confiding person, I am of course as prone to anticipate all probable
evil as he is to forestall impossible good. He, my dear father, is,
I thank Heaven, splendidly well. He speaks of you always with much
delight, is charmed with your writings, and I do hope that you will
come to Reading and give him as well as me the great pleasure of
seeing you at our poor cottage by the roadside. You would like my
flower-garden. It is really a flower-garden becoming a duchess. People
are so good in ministering to this, my only amusement. And the effect
is heightened by passing through a labourer's cottage to get at it,
for such our poor hut literally is.
[Footnote 1: This gentleman was an old and highly valued friend of my
mother.]
"You have heard, I suppose, that Mr. Wordsworth's eldest son, who
married a daughter of Mr. Curwen, has lost nearly, if not quite, all
of his wife's portion by the sea flowing in upon the mine, and has now
nothing left but a living of 200_l._ given him by his father-in-law.
So are we all touched in turn.
"I have written to the Sedgwicks for the scarlet lilies mentioned by
Miss Martineau in her American book. Did you happen to see them in
their glory? of course they would flourish here; and having sent them
primroses, cowslips, ivy, and many other English wild flowers, which
took Theodore Sedgwick's fancy, I have a right to the return. How glad
I am to hear the good you tell me of my friend Tom. His fortune seems
now assured. My father's kindest regards.
"Ever my dear friend,
"Very faithfully yours,
"M.R. MITFORD.
"P.S.--Mr. Carey, the translator of Dante, has just been here. He
says that he visited Cowper's residence at Olney lately, and that his
garden room, which suggested mine, is incredibly small, and not
near so pretty. Come and see. You know, of course, that the 'Modern
Antiques' in _Our Village_ were Theodosia and Frances Hill, sisters of
Joseph Hill, cousins and friends of poor Cowper."
* * * * *
What the "good" was by which my "fortune was assured" I am unable
to guess. But I am sure of the sincerity of the writer's rejoicing
thereat.
Mary Mitford was a genuinely warm-hearted woman, and much of her talk
would probably be stigmatised by the young gentlemen of the present
generation, who consider the moral temperature of a fish to be "good
form," as "gush." How old Landor, who "gushed" from cradle to grave,
would have massacred and rended in his wrath such talkers! Mary
Mitford's "gush" was sincere at all events. But there is a
"hall-mark," for those who can decipher it, "without which none is
genuine."
A considerable intimacy grew up between my mother and the author of
_Highways and Byeways_ during the latter part of his residence in
England, and subsequently, when returning from Boston on leave, he
visited Florence and Rome. Many letters passed between them after
his establishment as British Consul at Boston, some characteristic
selections from which will, I doubt not, be acceptable to many
readers.
The following was written on the envelope enclosing a very long letter
from Mrs. Grattan, and was written, I think, in 1840:--
* * * * *
"I cannot avoid squeezing in a few words more just as the ship is on
the point of sailing or steaming away for England ... 'The President'
has been a fatal title this spring. Poor Harrison, a good and honest
man, died in a month after he was elected, and this fine ship, about
which we have been at this side of the Atlantic so painfully excited
ever since March, is, I fear, gone down with its gallant captain
(Roberts, with whom we crossed the Atlantic in the _British Queen_)
and poor Power, whom the public cannot afford to lose.
"Since I wrote my letter three days ago--pardon the boldly original
topic--the weather has mended considerably. Tell Tom that every tree
is also striving to turn over a new leaf, and it is well for you that
I have not another to turn too. God bless you.
"T.C.G."
* * * * *
I beg to observe that the exhortation addressed to me had no moral
significance, but was the writer's characteristic mode of exciting me
to new scribblements.
The following, also written on the envelope enclosing a letter from
Mrs. Grattan, is dated the 30th of July, 1840:--
* * * * *
"I cannot let the envelope go quite a blank, though I cannot quite
make it a prize ... In literature I have done nothing but write a
preface and notes for two new editions of the old _Highways and
Byeways_, and a short sketchy article in this month's number of the
_North American Review_ on the present state of Ireland. I am going to
follow it up in the next number in reference to the state of the Irish
in America, and I hope I shall thus do some good to a subject I have
much at heart. I have had various applications to deliver lectures at
Lyceums, &c, and to preside at public meetings for various objects.
All this I have declined. I have been very much before the public at
dinners for various purposes, and have refused many invitations to
several neighbouring cities. I must now draw back a little. I think I
have hitherto done good to the cause of peace and friendship between
the countries. But I know these continued public appearances will
expose me to envy, hatred, and malice. I hope to do something
historical by and by, and perhaps an occasional article in the _North
American Review_. But anything like light writing I never can again
turn to."
* * * * *
From a very long letter written on the 13th of May, 1841, I will give
a, few extracts:--
* * * * *
"MY DEAR AND VALUED FRIEND,--Your letter from Penryth [_sic_] without
date, but bearing the ominous post-mark, 'April 1st,' has completely
made a fool of me, in that sense which implies that nothing else can
excuse a grey head and a seared heart for thinking and feeling that
there are such things in the world as affection and sincerity. Being
fond of flying in the face of reason, and despising experience,
whenever they lay down general rules, I am resolved to believe in
exceptions, to delight in instances, and to be quite satisfied that I
have 'troops of friends'--you being one of the troopers--no matter how
few others there may be, or where they are to be found.
"You really must imagine how glad we were to see your handwriting
again, and I may say also, how surprised; for it passeth our
understanding to discover how you _make_ time for any correspondence
at all. We have followed all your literary doings step by step since
we left Europe, and we never cease wondering at your fertility and
rejoicing at your success. But I am grieved to think that all this is
at the cost of your comfort. Or is it that you wrote in a querulous
mood, when you said those sharp things about your grey goose quill.
Surely composition must be pleasant to you. No one who writes so fast
and so well can find it actually irksome. I am aware that people
sometimes think they find it so. But we may deceive ourselves on the
dark as well as on the bright side of our road, and more easily,
because it _is_ the dark. That is to say, we may not only cheat
ourselves with false hopes of good, but with false notions of
evil, which proves, if it proves anything just now, that you are
considerably mistaken when you fancy writing to be a bore, and that I
know infinitely better than you do what you like or dislike."
It is rather singular to find a literary _workman_ talking in this
style. Grattan was not a fertile writer, and, I must suppose, was
never a very industrious one. But he surely must have known that talk
about the pleasures of "composition" was wholly beside the mark.
_That_ may be, often is, pleasant enough, and if the thoughts could
be telephoned from the brain to the types it would all be mighty
agreeable; and the world would be very considerably more overwhelmed
with authorship than it is. It is the "grey goose quill" work, the
necessity for incarnating the creatures of the brain in black and
white, that is the world's protection from this avalanche. And I for
one do not understand how anybody who, eschewing the sunshine and
the fields and the song of birds, or the enjoyment of other people's
brain-work, has glued himself to his desk for long hours, can say
or imagine that his task is, or has been, aught else than hard and
distasteful work, demanding unrelaxing self-denial and industry. And
however fine the frenzy in which the poet's eye may roll while he
builds the lofty line, the work of putting some thousands of them on
the paper when built must be as irksome to him as the penny-a-liner's
task is to _him_--more so, in that the mind of the latter does not
need to be forcibly and painfully restrained from rushing on to the
new pastures which invite it, and curbed to the pack-horse pace of the
quill-driving process.
"You must not," he continues, "allow yourself to be, or even to fancy
that you are tired or tormented, or worn out. Work the mine to the
last. Pump up every drop out of the well. Put money i' thy purse; and
add story after story to that structure of fame, which will enable you
to do as much to that house by the lake side, where I _will_ hope to
see you yet."
* * * * *
He then goes on to speak at considerable length of the society of
Boston, praising it much, yet saying that it is made more charming to
a visitor than to a permanent resident. "In this it differs," he says,
"from almost all the countries I have lived in in Europe, except
Holland."
Speaking of a visit to Washington during the inauguration of General
Harrison, which seems to have delighted him much, he says he travelled
back with a family, "at least with the master and mistress of it,
of whom I must tell you something. Mr. Paige is a merchant, and
brother-in-law of Mr. Webster; Mrs. Paige a niece of Judge Story. From
this double connection with two of the first men in the country their
family associations are particularly agreeable. Mrs. Paige is one of
three sisters, all very handsome, spirited, and full of talent. One is
married to Mr. Webster's eldest son. Another, Mrs. Joy, has for her
husband an idle gentleman, a rare thing in this place. Mrs. Paige was
in Europe two years ago with Mr. and Mrs. Webster senior (the latter
by the bye is a _most_ charming person) and had the advantage of
seeing society in England and France in its best aspect, and is one
who can compare as well as see ... Among the men [of the Boston
society] are Dr. Chinning, a prophet in our country, a pamphleteer
in his own; Bancroft, _the_ historian of America, a man of superior
talents and great agreeability, but a black sheep in society, on
account of his Van Buren politics, against whom the white sheep of the
Whig party will not rub themselves; Prescott, the author of _Ferdinand
and Isabella_, a handsome, half blind shunner of the vanities of the
world, with some others, who read and write a good deal, and no one
the wiser for it. Edward Everett is in Italy, where you will surely
meet him [we saw a good deal of him]. He is rather formal than
cold, if all I hear whispered of him be true; of elegant taste in
literature, though not of easy manners, and altogether an admirable
specimen of an American orator and scholar. At Cambridge, three miles
off, we have Judge Story, of the Supreme Court, eloquent, deeply
learned, garrulous, lively, amiable, excellent in all and every way
that a mortal can be. He is decidedly the gem of this western world.
Mr. Webster is now settled at Washington, though here at this moment
on a visit to Mrs. Paige. Among our neighbouring notabilities is John
Quincy Adams, an ex-President of the United States, ex-Minister at
half the courts in Europe, and now at seventy-five, a simple Member of
Congress, hard as a piece of granite, and cold as a lump of ice."
Speaking of his having very frequently appeared at public meetings
during the first year of his Consulship, and of his having since that
refrained from such appearances, he continues: "I was doubtful as to
the way my being so much _en evidence_ might be relished _at home_. Of
late public matters have been on so ticklish a footing, that all the
less a British functionary was seen the better.
"In literature I have done nothing barring a couple of articles on
Ireland and the Irish in America, a subject I have much at heart.
But much as I feel for them and with them, I refused dining with my
countrymen on St. Patrick's Day because they had the _gaucherie_ (of
which I had previous notice), to turn the festive meeting into a
political one, by giving 'O'Connell and success to repeal' as one of
their 'regular' toasts, and by leaving out the Queen's health, which
they gave when I dined with them last year."
Then after detailed notices of the movements of his sons, he goes on:
"We have many plans in perspective, Niagara, Canada, Halifax, the
mountains, the springs, the sea; the result of which you shall know as
soon as we receive a true and faithful account of your adventures in
just as many pages as you can afford; but Tom must in the meantime
send me a long letter ... Tell Tom I have half resolved to give up
punning and take to repartee. A young fellow said to me the other day,
'Ah! Mr. Consul (as I am always called), I wish I could discover a
new pleasure.' 'Try virtue!' was my reply. A pompous ex-Governor said
swaggeringly to me at the last dinner party at which I assisted,
'Well, Mr. Consul, I suppose you Europeans think us semi-civilised
here in America?' 'Almost!' said I. Now ask Tom if that was not pretty
considerable smart. But assure him at the same time, it is nothing at
all to what I _could_ do in the way of impertinence! Need I say how
truly and affectionately we all love you?
"T.C. GRATTAN."
* * * * *
I wrote back that I would enter the lists with him in the matter of
impertinence; and as a sample told him that I thought he had better
return to the punning.
I could, I doubt not, find among my mother's papers some further
letters that might be worth printing or quoting. But my waning space
warns me that I must not indulge myself with doing so.
CHAPTER XVIII.
I said at the beginning of the last chapter, that during the period,
some of the recollections of which I had been chronicling, the two
greatest sorrows I had ever known had befallen me. A third came
subsequently. But that belonged to a period of my life which does not
fall within the limits I have assigned to these reminiscences. Of the
first, the death of my mother, I have spoken. The other, the death of
my wife, followed it at no great distance, and was of course a far
more terrible one. She had been ailing--so long indeed that I had
become habituated to it, and thought that she would continue to live
as she had been living. We had been travelling in Switzerland, in the
autumn of 1864; and I remember very vividly her saying on board the
steamer, by which we were leaving Colico at the head of the Lake of
Como, on our return to Italy, as she turned on the deck to take a last
look at the mountains, "Good-bye, you big beauties!" I little thought
it was her last adieu to them; but I thought afterwards that she
probably may have had some misgiving that it was so.
But it was not till the following spring that I began to realise that
I must lose her. She died on the 13th of April, 1865.
I have spoken of her as she was when she became my wife, but without
much hope of representing her to those who never had the happiness
of knowing her, as she really was, not only in person, which matters
little, but in mind and intellectual powers. And to tell what she was
in heart, in disposition--in a word, in soul--would be a far more
difficult task.
In her the aesthetic faculties were probably the most markedly
exceptional portion of her intellectual constitution. The often cited
dictum, _les races se feminisent_ was not exemplified in her case.
From her mother, an accomplished musician, she inherited her very
pronounced musical[1] faculty and tendencies, and, I think, little
else. From her father, a man of very varied capacities and culture,
she drew much more. How far, if in any degree, this fact may be
supposed to have been connected in the relation of cause and effect,
with the other fact that her mother was more than fifty years of age
at the time of her birth, I leave to the speculations of physiological
inquirers. In bodily constitution her inheritance from her father's
mother was most marked. To that source must be traced, I conceive, the
delicacy of constitution, speaking medically, which deprived me of
her at a comparatively early age; for both father and mother were
of thoroughly healthy and strong constitutions. But if it may be
suspected that the Brahmin Sultana, her grandmother, bequeathed her
her frail diathesis, there was no doubt or difficulty in tracing to
that source the exterior delicacy of formation which characterised
her. I remember her telling me that the last words a dying sister of
her mother's ever spoke, when Theodosia standing by the bedside placed
her hand on the dying woman's forehead were, "Ah, that is Theo's
little Indian hand," And truly the slender delicacy of hand and foot,
which characterised her, were unmistakably due to her Indian descent.
In person she in nowise resembled either father or mother, unless it
were possibly her father in the conformation and shape of the teeth.
[Footnote 1: But this she might also have got from her father, who was
passionately fond of music, and was a very respectable performer on
the violin.]
I have already in a previous chapter of these reminiscences given
a letter from Mrs. Browning in which she speaks of Theodosia's
"multiform faculty." And the phrase, which so occurring, might in
the case of almost any other writer be taken as a mere epistolary
civility, is in the case of one whose absolute accuracy of veracity
never swerved a hair's-breadth, equivalent to a formal certificate of
the fact to the best of her knowledge. And she knew my wife well both
before and after the marriage of either of them. Her faculty was truly
_multiform_.
She was not a great musician; but her singing had for great musicians
a charm which the performances of many of their equals in the art
failed to afford them. She had never much voice, but I have rarely
seen the hearer to whose eyes she could not bring the tears. She had
a spell for awakening emotional sympathy which I have never seen
surpassed, rarely indeed equalled.
For language she had an especial talent, was dainty in the use of
her own, and astonishingly apt in acquiring--not merely the use for
speaking as well as reading purposes, but--the delicacies of other
tongues. Of Italian, with which she was naturally _most_ conversant,
she was recognised by acknowledged experts to be a thoroughly
competent critic.
She published, now many years ago, in the _Athenaeum_, some
translations from the satirist Giusti, which any intelligent reader
would, I think, recognise to be cleverly done. But none save the very
few in this country, who know and can understand the Tuscan poet's
works in the original, can at all conceive the difficulty of
translating him into tolerable English verse. And I have no hesitation
in asserting, that any competent judge, who is such by virtue of
understanding the original, would pronounce her translations of Giusti
to be a masterpiece, which very few indeed of contemporary men or
women could have produced. I have more than once surprised her in
tears occasioned by her obstinate struggles with some passage of
the intensely idiomatic satirist, which she found it almost--but
eventually not quite--impossible to render to her satisfaction.
She published a translation of Niccolini's _Arnaldo da Brescia_, which
won the cordial admiration and friendship of that great poet. And
neither Niccolini's admiration nor his friendship were easily won. He
was, when we knew him at Florence in his old age, a somewhat crabbed
old man, not at all disposed to make new acquaintances, and, I think,
somewhat soured and disappointed, not certainly with the meed of
admiration he had won from his countrymen as a poet, but with the
amount of effect which his writings had availed to produce in the
political sentiments and then apparent destinies of the Italians.
But he was conquered by the young Englishwoman's translation of
his favourite, and, I think, his finest work. It is a thoroughly
trustworthy and excellent translation; but the execution of it was
child's play in comparison with the translations from Giusti.
She translated a number of the curiously characteristic _stornelli_ of
Tuscany, and especially of the Pistoja mountains. And here again it
is impossible to make any one, who has never been familiar with these
_stornelli_ understand the especial difficulty of translating them. Of
course the task was a slighter and less significant one than that of
translating Giusti, nor was the same degree of critical accuracy and
nicety in rendering shades of meaning called for. But there were
not--are not--many persons who could cope with the especial
difficulties of the attempt as successfully as she did. She produced
also a number of pen-and-ink drawings illustrating these _stornelli_,
which I still possess, and in which the spirited, graphic, and
accurately truthful characterisation of the figures could only have
been achieved by an artist very intimately acquainted _intus et in
cute_ with the subjects of her pencil.
She published a volume on the Tuscan revolution, which was very
favourably received. The _Examiner_, among other critics--all of them,
to the best of my remembrance, more or less favourable--said of these
_Letters_ (for that was the form in which the work was published, all
of them, I think, having been previously printed in the _Athenaeum_),
"Better political information than this book gives may be had in
plenty; but it has a special value which we might almost represent by
comparing it to the report of a very watchful nurse, who, without the
physician's scientific knowledge, uses her own womanly instinct in
observing every change of countenance and every movement indicating
the return of health and strength to the patient ... She has written a
very vivid and truthful account." The critic has very accurately, and,
it may be said, graphically, assigned its true value and character to
the book.
I have found it necessary in a former chapter, where I have given a
number of interesting and characteristic letters from Landor to my
wife's father, to insert a deprecatory _caveat_ against the exuberant
enthusiasm of admiration which led him to talk of the probability of
her eclipsing the names and fame of other poets, including in this
estimate Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The preposterousness of this
no human being would have felt more strongly than Theodosia Garrow,
except Theodosia Trollope, when such an estimate had become yet
more preposterous. But Landor, whose unstinted admiration of Mrs.
Browning's poetry is vigorously enough expressed in his own strong
language, as may be seen in Mr. Forster's pages, would not have
dreamed of instituting any such comparison at a later day. But that
his critical acumen and judgment were not altogether destroyed by the
enthusiasm of his friendship, is, I think, shown by the following
little poem by Theodosia Trollope, written a few years after the birth
of her child. I don't think I need apologise for printing it.
The original MS. of it before me gives no title; nor do I remember
that the authoress ever assigned one to the verses.
I.
"In the noon-day's golden pleasance,
Little Bice, baby fair,
With a fresh and flowery presence,
Dances round her nurse's chair,
In the old grey loggia dances, haloed by her shining hair.
II.
"Pretty pearl in sober setting,
Where the arches garner shade!
Cones of maize like golden netting,
Fringe the sturdy colonnade,
And the lizards pertly pausing glance across the balustrade.
III.
"Brown cicala drily proses,
Creaking the hot air to sleep,
Bounteous orange flowers and roses,
Yield the wealth of love they keep,
To the sun's imperious ardour in a dream of fragrance deep.
IV.
"And a cypress, mystic hearted,
Cleaves the quiet dome of light
With its black green masses parted
But by gaps of blacker night,
Which the giddy moth and beetle circle round in dubious flight.
V.
"Here the well chain's pleasant clanging,
Sings of coolness deep below;
There the vine leaves breathless hanging,
Shine transfigured in the glow,
And the pillars stare in silence at the shadows which they throw.
VI.
"Portly nurse, black-browed, red-vested,
Knits and dozes, drowsed with heat;
Bice, like a wren gold-crested,
Chirps and teases round her seat,
Hides the needles, plucks the stocking, rolls the cotton o'er her feet.
VII.
"Nurse must fetch a draught of water,
In the glass with painted wings,[1]
Nurse must show her little daughter
All her tale of silver rings,
Dear sweet nurse must sing a couplet--solemn nurse, who _never_
sings!
VIII.
"Blest Madonna! what a clamour!
Now the little torment tries,
Perched on tiptoe, all the glamour
Of her coaxing hands and eyes!
May she hold the glass she drinks from--just one moment, Bice cries.
IX.
"Nurse lifts high the Venice beaker,
Bossed with masks, and flecked with gold,
Scarce in time to 'scape the quicker
Little fingers over-bold,
Craving tendril-like to grasp it, with the will of four years old.
X.
"Pretty wood bird, pecking, flitting,
Round the cherries on the tree.
Ware the scarecrow, grimly sitting,
Crouched for silly things, like thee!
Nurse hath plenty such in ambush. 'Touch not, for it burns,'[2] quoth
she.
XI.
"And thine eyes' blue mirror widens
With an awestroke of belief;
Meekly following that blind guidance,
On thy finger's rosy sheaf,
Blow'st thou softly, fancy wounded, soothing down a painless grief.
XII.
"Nurse and nursling, learner, teacher,
Thus foreshadow things to come,
When the girl shall grow the creature
Of false terrors vain and dumb,
And entrust their baleful fetish with her being's scope and sum.
XIII.
"Then her heart shall shrink and wither,
Custom-straitened like her waist,
All her thought to cower together,
Huddling sheep-like with the rest,
With the flock of soulless bodies on a pattern schooled and laced.
XIV.
"Till the stream of years encrust her
With a numbing mail of stone,
Till her laugh lose half its lustre,
And her truth forswear its tone,
And she see God's might and mercy darkly through a glass alone!
XV.
"While our childhood fair and sacred.
Sapless doctrines doth rehearse,
And the milk of falsehoods acrid,
Burns our babe-lips like a curse,
Cling we must to godless prophets, as the suckling to the nurse.
XVI.
"As the seed time, so the reaping,
Shame on us who overreach,
While our eyes yet smart with weeping,
Hearts so all our own to teach,
Better they and we lay sleeping where the darkness hath no speech!"
[Footnote 1: Those unacquainted with the forms of the old decorated
Venetian glass will hardly understand the phrase in the text. Those
who know them will feel the accuracy of the picture.]
[Footnote 2: "_Non toccare che brucia_," Tuscan proverb.]
It is impossible for any but those who know--not Florence, but--rural
Tuscany well, to appreciate the really wonderful accuracy and
picturesque perfection of the above scene from a Tuscan afternoon. But
I think many others will feel the lines to be good. In the concluding
stanzas, in which the writer draws her moral, there are weak lines.
But in the first eleven, which paint her picture, there is not one.
Every touch tells, and tells with admirable truth and vividness of
presentation. In one copy of the lines which I have, the name is
changed from Bice to "Flavia," and this, I take it, because of the
entire non-applicability of the latter stanzas to the child, whose
rearing was in her own hands. But the picture of child and nurse--how
life-like none can tell, but I--was the picture of her "baby
Beatrice," and the description simply the reproduction of things seen.
I think I may venture to print also the following lines. They are, in
my opinion, far from being equal in merit to the little poem printed
above, but they are pretty, and I think sufficiently good to do no
discredit to her memory. Like the preceding, they have no title.
I.
"I built me a temple, and said it should be
A shrine, and a home where the past meets me,
And the most evanescent and fleeting of things,
Should be lured to my temple, and shorn of their wings,
To adorn my palace of memories.
II.
"The pearl of the morning, the glow of the noon,
The play of the clouds as they float past the moon,
The most magical tint on the snowiest peak,
They are gone while I gaze, fade before you can speak,
Yet they stay in my palace of memories.
III.
"I stood in the midst of the forest trees,
And heard the sweet sigh of the wandering breeze,
And this with the tinkle of heifer bells,
As they trill on the ear from the dewy dells,
Are the sounds in my palace of memories.
IV.
"I looked in the face of a little child,
With its fugitive dimples and eyes so wild,
It springs off with a bound like a wild gazelle,
It is off and away, but I've caught my[1]
And here's mirth for my palace of memories.
V.
"In the morning we meet on a mountain height,
And we walk and converse till the fall of night,
We hold hands for a moment, then pass on our way,
But that which I've got from the friend of a day,
I'll keep in my palace of memories."
[Footnote 1: Word here illegible.]
The verses which Landor praised with enthusiasm so excessive were
most, or I think all of them, published in the annual edited by his
friend Lady Blessington, and were all written before our marriage. I
have many long letters addressed to her by that lady, and several by
her niece Miss Power, respecting them. They always in every instance
ask for "more."
Many of her verses she set to music, especially one little poemlet,
which I remember to this day the tune of, which she called the _Song
of the Blackbird_, and which was, if I remember rightly, made to
consist wholly of the notes uttered by the bird.
Another instance of her "multiform faculty" was her learning landscape
sketching. I have spoken of her figure drawing. And this, I take it,
was the real bent of her talent in that line. But unable to compass
the likeness of a haystack myself, I was desirous of possessing some
record of the many journeys which I designed to take, and eventually
did take with her. And wholly to please me she forthwith made the
attempt, and though her landscape was never equal to her figure
drawing, I possess some couple of hundred of water-colour sketches
done by her from nature on the spot.
I used to say that if I wanted a Sanscrit dictionary, I had only to
put her head straight at it, and let her feel the spur, and it would
have been done!
We lived together seventeen happy years. During the five first, I
think I may say that she lived wholly and solely in, by, and for me.
That she should live for somebody other than herself was an absolute
indefeasible necessity of her nature. During the last twelve years I
shared her heart with her daughter. Her intense worship for her "Baby
Beatrice" was equalled only by--that of all the silliest and all the
wisest women, who have true womanly hearts in their bosoms, for their
children. The worship was, of course, all the more absorbing that the
object of it was unique. I take it that, after the birth of her child,
I came second in her heart. But I was not jealous of little Bice.
I do not think that she would have quite subscribed to the opinion of
Garibaldi on the subject of the priesthood, which I mentioned in a
former chapter--that they ought all to be forthwith put to death. But
all her feelings and opinions were bitterly antagonistic to them. She
was so deeply convinced of the magnitude of the evil inflicted by them
and their Church on the character of the Italians, for whom she ever
felt a great affection, that she was bitter on the subject. And it
is the only subject on which I ever knew her to feel in any degree
bitterly. Many of her verses written during her latter years are
fiercely denunciatory or humorously satirical of the Italian
priesthood, and especially of the Pontifical Government. I wish that
my space permitted me to give further specimens of them here. But I
must content myself with giving one line, which haunts my memory, and
appears to me excessively happy In the accurate truthfulness of its
simile. She is writing of the journey which Pius the Ninth made, and
describing his equipment, says that he started "with strings of cheap
blessings, like glass beads for savages."
With the exception of this strong sentiment my wife was one of the
most tolerant people I ever knew. What she most avoided in those with
whom she associated was, not so much ignorance, or even vulgarity of
manner, as pure native stupidity. But even of that, when the need
arose, she was tolerant. I never knew her in the selection of an
acquaintance, or even of a friend, to be influenced to the extent
of even a hair's-breadth, by station, rank, wealth, fashion, or any
consideration whatever, save personal liking and sympathy, which was,
in her case, perfectly compatible with the widest divergence of views
and opinions on nearly any of the great subjects which most divide
mankind, and even with divergence of rules of conduct. Her own
opinions were the honest results of original thinking, and her conduct
the outcome of the dictates of her own heart--of her heart rather than
of her reasoning powers, or of any code of law--a condition of mind
which might be dangerous to individuals with less native purity of
heart than hers.
As a wife, as a daughter, as a daughter-in-law, as a mother, she was
absolutely irreproachable. In the first relationship she was all in
all to me for seventeen years. She brought sweetness and light into
my life and into my dwelling. She was the angel in the house, if ever
human being was.
Her father became an inmate of our house after the death of his wife
at a great age at Torquay, whither they had returned after the
death of my wife's half-sister, Harriet Fisher. He was a jealously
affectionate, but very exacting father; and few daughters, I think,
could have been more admirable in her affection for him, her attention
to him, her care of him. And I may very safely say that very few
mothers of sons have the fortune of finding such a daughter-in-law.
My mother had been very fond of her before our marriage, and became
afterwards as devotedly attached to her as she was to me, of whom she
knew her to be an indivisible part, while she was to my mother simply
perfect. Her own mother she had always been in the habit of calling by
that name. She always spoke to and of my mother as "mammy." What she
was to her own daughter I have already said. There was somewhat of
the tendency towards "spoiling," which is mostly inseparable from
the adoration which a young mother, of the right sort, feels for her
firstborn child, but she never made any attempt to avert or counteract
my endeavours to prevent such spoiling. When little Bice had to be
punished by solitary confinement for half an hour, she only watched
anxiously for the expiration of the sentence.[1]
[Footnote 1: I do not remember that little Bice ever consoled herself
under the disgrace of such captivity as my present wife has confessed
to me that she did when suffering under the same condemnation. _Her_
method of combining the maintenance of personal dignity with revenge
on the oppressor, was to say to the first person who came to take her
out of prison: "No! you can't come into _my_ parlour!"]
But that her worth, her talent, her social qualities, were recognised
by a wider world than that of her own family, or her own circle of
friends, is testified by the recording stone, which the Municipality
placed on my house at the corner of the Piazza dell' Independenza,
where it may still be seen. Indeed the honour was not undeserved. For
during the whole of her residence in Italy, which nearly synchronised
with the struggle of Italy for her independence and unity, she had
adopted the Italian cause heart and soul, and done what was in her to
do, for its advancement. The honour was rendered the more signal, and
the more acceptable, from the fact that the same had recently been
rendered by the same body to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
CHAPTER XIX.
The house in the Piazza dell' Independenza, which was known in the
city as "Villino Trollope," and of which I have spoken at the close of
the last chapter, was my property, and I had lived in it nearly the
whole of my married life. During that time four deaths had occurred
among its inmates.
The first to happen was that of the old and highly valued servant
of whom I had occasion to speak when upon the subject of Mr. Hume's
spiritualistic experiences at my house. She had been for many years
a much trusted and beloved servant in the family of Mr. Garrow at
Torquay, and had accompanied them abroad. Her name was Elizabeth
Shinner. Her death was felt by all of us as that of a member of our
family, and she lies in the Protestant cemetery at Florence by the
side of her former master, and of the young mistress whom she had
loved as a child of her own.
The next to go was Mr. Garrow. His death was a very sudden and
unexpected one. He was a robust and apparently perfectly healthy man.
I was absent from home when he died. I had gone with a Cornishman, a
Mr. Trewhella, who was desirous of visiting Mr. Sloane's copper mine,
in the neighbourhood of Volterra, of which I have before spoken. We
had accomplished our visit, and were returning over the Apennine about
six o'clock in the morning in a little _bagherino_, as the country
cart-gigs are called, when we were hailed by a man in a similar
carriage meeting us, whom I recognised as the foreman of a carpenter
we employed. He had been sent to find me, and bring me home with all
speed, in consequence of the sudden illness of Mr. Garrow. As far as
I could learn from him there was little probability of finding my
father-in-law alive. I made the best of my way to Florence. But he had
been dead several hours when I arrived. He had waked with a paralytic
attack on him, which deprived him of the power of moving on the left
side, and drawing his face awry, made speech almost impossible to him.
He assured his servant--who was almost immediately with him--speaking
with much difficulty, that it was nothing of any importance, and that
he should soon get over it. But these were the last words he ever
spoke, and in two or three hours afterwards he breathed his last.
Then in a few years more the _crescendo_ wave of trouble took my
mother from me at the age of eighty-three. For the last two or three
years she had entirely lost her memory, and for the last few months
the use of her mental faculties. And she did not suffer much. The last
words she uttered were "Poor Cecilia!"--her mind reverting in her
latest moments to the child whose loss had been the most recent. She
had for years entertained a great horror and dread of the possibility
of being buried alive, in consequence of the very short time allowed
by the law for a body to remain unburied after death; and she had
exacted from me a promise that I would in any case cause a vein to be
opened in her arm after death. In her case there could be no possible
room for the shadow of doubt as to the certainty of death; but I was
bound by my promise, and found some difficulty in the performance of
it. The medical man in attendance, declaring the absolute absurdity of
any doubt on the subject, refused to perform an operation which, he
said, was wholly uncalled for, and argued that my promise could only
be understood to apply to a case of possible doubt. I had none; but
was none the less determined to be faithful to my promise. But it
was not till I declared that I would myself sever a vein, in however
butcher-like a manner, that I induced him to accompany me to the
death-chamber and perform under my eyes the necessary operation.
My mother, the inseparable companion of so many wanderings in so many
lands, the indefatigable labourer of so many years, found her rest
near to the two who had gone from my house before, in the beautiful
little cemetery on which the Apennine looks down.
But it was not long before this sorrow was followed by a very much
sorer one--by the worst of all that could have happened to me! After
what I have written in the last chapter it is needless to say anything
of the blank despair that fell upon me when my wife died, on the 13th
of April, 1865. She also lies near the others.
My house was indeed left unto me desolate, and I thought that life and
all its sweetness was over for me!
I immediately took measures for disposing of the house in the Piazza
dell' Independenza, and before long found a purchaser for it. I had
bought it when the speculator, who had become the owner of the ground
at the corner of the space which was beginning to assume the semblance
of a "square" or "piazza," had put in the foundations but had not
proceeded much further with his work. I completed it, improving
largely, as I thought, on his plan; adapted it for a single residence,
instead of its division into sundry dwellings; obtained possession of
additional ground between the house and the city wall, sufficient for
a large garden; built around it, looking to the south, the largest and
handsomest "stanzone"[1] for orange and lemon plants in Florence, and
gathered together a collection of very fine trees, the profits from
which (much smaller in my hands than would have been the case in those
of a Florentine to the manner born) nevertheless abundantly sufficed
to defray the expenses of the garden and gardeners. In a word, I made
the place a very complete and comfortable residence. Nearly the whole
of my first married life was spent in it. And much of the literary
work of my life has been done in it.
[Footnote 1: "Stanzone" is the term used in Tuscany to signify the
buildings destined to shelter the "Agrumi," as the orange and lemon
plants are called generically, in the winter; which in Florence is too
severe to permit of their being left in the open air.]
I used in those days, and for very many years afterwards, to do all
my writing standing; and I strongly recommend the practice to brother
quill-drivers. Pauses, often considerable intervals, occur for thought
while the pen is in the hand. And if one is seated at a table, one
remains sitting during these intervals. But if one is standing, it
becomes natural to one, during even a small pause, to take a turn up
and down the room, or even, as I often used to do, in the garden. And
such change and movement I consider eminently salutary both for mind
and body.
I had specially contrived a little window immediately above the desk
at which I stood, fixed to the wall. The room looking on the "loggia,"
which was the scene of the little poem transcribed in the preceding
chapter, was abundantly lighted, but I liked some extra light close to
my desk.
In that room my Bice was born. For it was subsequently to her birth
that the destination of it was changed from a bedroom to a study.
Few men have passed years of more unchequered happiness than I did in
that house. And I was very fond of it.
But, as may be readily imagined, it became all the more odious and
intolerable to me when the "angel in the house" had been taken from
me.
CHAPTER XX.
CONCLUSION.
Assuredly it seemed to me that all was over; and the future a dead
blank. And for a time I was as a man stunned.
But in truth it was very far otherwise! I was fifty-five; but I was in
good health, young for my years, strong and vigorous in constitution,
and before a year had passed it began to seem to me that a future,
and life and its prospects, might open to me afresh; that the curtain
might be dropped on the drama that was passed, and a new phase of life
begun.
I had had, and vividly enjoyed an entire life, according to the
measure that is meted out to many, perhaps I may say to most men.
But I felt myself ready for another! And--thanks this time also to
a woman--I have _had_ another, _in no wise_ less happy, in some
respects, as less chequered by sorrows--more happy than the first! I
am in better health too, having outgrown apparently several of the
maladies which young people are subject to!
Of this second life I am not now going to tell my readers anything.
"What I remember" of my first life may be, and I hope has been, told
frankly without giving offence or annoyance to any human being. I
don't know that the telling of the story of my second life would
necessarily lead me to say anything which could hurt anybody. But
mixed up as its incidents and interests and associations have been
with a great multitude of men and women still living and moving and
talking and writing round about me, I should not feel myself so
comfortably at liberty to write whatever offered itself to my memory.
Ten years hence, perhaps ("Please God, the public lives!" as a
speculative showman said), I may tell the reader, if he cares to hear
it, the story of my second life. For the present we will break off
here.
But not without some words of parting kindness--and shall we say,
wisdom!--from an old man to readers, most of whom probably might be
his sons, and many doubtless his grandsons.
Especially, my young friends, don't pay overmuch attention to what the
Psalmist says about "the years of man." I knew _dans le temps_ a fine
old octo-and-nearly-nonogenarian, one Graberg de Hemsoe, a Swede (a man
with a singular history, who passed ten years of his early life in the
British navy, and was, when I knew him, librarian at the Pitti Palace
in Florence), who used to complain of the Florentine doctors that "Dey
doosen't know what de nordern constitooshions is!" and I take it the
same may be said of the Psalmist. The years beyond three score and
ten need not be all sorrow and trouble. Depend upon it kindly
nature--_prudens_, as that jolly fellow, fine gentleman, and true
philosopher, Horace, says in a similar connection--kindly nature knows
how to make the closing decade of life every whit as delightful as any
of the preceding, if only you don't baulk her purposes. Don't weigh
down your souls, and pin your particles of divine essence to earth by
your yesterday's vices; be sure that when you cannot jump over the
chairs so featly as you can now, you will not want to do so; tell the
girls with genial old Anacreon, when the time comes, that whether the
hairs on your forehead be many or few, you know not, but do know
well that it behoves an old man to be cheery in proportion to the
propinquity of his exit, and go on your way rejoicing through this
beautiful world, which not even the Radicals have quite spoilt yet.
And so _a rivederci_--_au revoir_--_auf Wiedersehn_--why have we no
English equivalent better than "Here's to our next pleasant meeting!"
INDEX.
A.
Abbey, Reading, Mary Mitford's project concerning
Aberdeen, Lord, and Lord Cowley
Abrams, the Misses
Absolute, Sir A., my representation of
Ackland, Captain
Adam, Sir Frederick
Adam the forger, Dante's
Adams, John Quincy, Grattan on
Affinities Elective
Age not counted by years
Aladdin's lamp, G. Eliot wishes for
Albani, Margherita
Alberi, Signor
Albertazzi in 1840
Alinari, photographer at Florence
_All the Year Round_, contributions to
American lady at Tuileries
Americans at the Pitti Palace
anecdote of
meeting Lewes at an
America, my brother's book on
criticised by Lewes
Irish in, Grattan on
Amiens, excursion to
Ampere, his eloge at the Academy by Arago
Amphytrion, Venice as
Anacreon on old age
Antagonism with G. Eliot, subject of
Antagonist, G. Eliot as an
Antiboini, the
Antiques, modern, in _Our Village_
Antonelli, Cardinal
Apennines, Grand Duke crossing the
figure representing the, by Michael Angelo
scenery among the
Apoplexy, man dying of, anecdote of
Appony, Comte d', his receptions in Paris
April fool, Grattan an
Arago, M., at the Academy
Archduchesses, sweetness of
Archduchess Sophie
Arezzo, marshes near
Pulszky at
G. Eliot wishes to see
Aristotle's Natural Science
Army, Tuscan attitude of at the Revolution
_Arnaldo da Brescia_, Niccolini's
Arno river in flood
the
Articulation, George Eliot's
Ashley, Lord, letter from
Aspirates, Landor used to drop them
Aspirations, early
_Athenaeum_, my wife's letters in the
_Atlantic Monthly_ on Landor
Aubrey, Miss
Aumale, Duke of
Aunt, Dante's
Aural circulation, Lewes on
_Aurora Leigh_, Mrs. Browning's
Austen, Miss, Mary Mitford's idol
Austin, Alfred
Austrian troops in Florence
officers, anecdote of
Austria, Mary Mitford on
Napoleon III.'s negotiations with
Autobiography, G. Eliot on
Autograph collectors
Autolycus, his song
Auvergne, pedestrianising in
dialect of
Aylmer, Admiral
Lord
Azeglio d'Massimo, anecdote of
B.
Baby Beatrice
_Backwoodsman, Young_, Mary Mitford asks about
Baden in Switzerland
Bagni Caldi at Lucca Baths
Baiae, excursion to, G. Eliot's
Balzac's suppressed play
Bamberg, Baroness Zandt at
Banagher, my brother at
Bancroft, the Historian, Grattan on
his anti-Whig politics
Bandi, the family at Florence
Barbaras, Hermolaus
Bargello, at Florence, Dante's portrait in
Baritone of our way, Lewes
Barrett, Elizabeth, at Torquay
Theodosia Garrow's appreciation of
her affection for Isa Blagden
Landor on
Mary Mitford's admiration for
Bartley, Mrs., and Mary Mitford
Bartolomei, Marchese
Bath, and W.S. Landor
Bavaria, ramble in
Bay tree, Wordsworth's
Beacon Terrace, Torquay, Mrs. Browning at
_Beata, La_, my novel, Lewes and G. Eliot on
Mrs. Carlyle on
Beatrice, my daughter, George Eliot on
Beaufort, Duke of
Belial, Bishop, Landor calls Philpotts a
Bellosguardo, at Florence
Benjamin, my mother's
Ben Jonson's superstition, Mary Mitford on
Bereavements, different
Berkeley, Grantley, and Landor
Berington's _Middle Ages_
Berti Palazzo, in Florence,
Bezzi, Signor A. and Landor
Bible, persecution for reading the
Bier, open, used in Florence
_Biglow Papers_, Lowell's
Biographies, G. Eliot on
Birmingham, my return from
Blackbird, Song of the
Black Down, Tennyson's house at
Black Forest, Leweses in the
_Blackwood's Magazine_, Mary Mitford on
Blagden, Isa, Miss
her poems
her death
note from
Lewes inquires after
and George Eliot
Blandford Square, Leweses at
Blaze de Bury, Madame
Blessington, Lady
Bob Acres, my representation of
Boboli Gardens, the, at Florence
anecdote of Lady Bulwer in
Bohemia, Grand Duke's estates in
Bologna, Grand Duke on way to
Austrians at
Bologna, "la Grassa"
Boodh, Landor on
_Book of Beauty_, Lady Blessington's
Booksellers, Landor eschews all
Bordeaux, Conversations at
Borgo, San Sepolcro, Pulszky at
Boston Consulate, Grattan on leave from
Society of, Grattan on the
"Boto," Florentine for "Voto"
Bourbonnais, travels in
Boutourlin family
Braddons, the, at Torquay
Brahman Princess, my wife's grandmother
Brest
Bretons, changes in character of
Brightness, my mother's value for
Brittany, book on
costume in
Broons in Brittany, costume of
innkeeper's daughter, at
Brougham Castle
Browning, Oscar
Browning, Robert
at Florence
his care for Landor in Florence
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, specialties of her character
letters from
her absolute truthfulness
on Napoleon III
and Theodosia Garrow
her handwriting
her death, Lewes on
on Theodosia Trollope's faculty
Bull, Rev. Mr., of Bradford
Bullock, Reuben
Bully, an Irish
Bulwer, Lord, Landor on
Bulwer, Henry, at Paris
Bulwer, Lady, at Florence
her character
anecdote of
in Boboli gardens
letters from her
Burial, manner of, in Florence
Burial, premature fear of
Burridge, Landor's landlady at Torquay
Butcher's wife, anecdote of the
Butter, not used by Tuscans
Byron
C
Cadogan, Lady Honoria
Calais, crossing to, Lewes on
Camaldoli, with George Eliot to
_Padre forestieraio_ at
Cambridge, near Boston, notable men there
Canada
Cancellieri, Francesco, his mode of writing
Canigiani family at Florence
Canino, Prince
Back to Full Books
|