Chapter 3 No.3

Returning from my Breton journey, I reached my mother's house in York Street on the 23rd of July, 1839, and on the 26th of the same month left London with her to visit my married sister in her new home at Penrith, where Mr. Tilley had established himself as Post Office surveyor of the northern district. His home was a pretty house situated between the town and the well-known beacon on the hill to the north of it.

The first persons I became acquainted with in this, to me, entirely new region, were Sir George Musgrave, of Edenhall, and his wife, who was a sister of Sir James Graham. My brother-in-law took me over to Edenhall, a lovely walk from Penrith, and we found both Sir George and Lady Musgrave at home. We-my mother and I-had not at that time conceived the idea of becoming residents at Penrith. But when subsequently we were led to do so, we found extremely pleasant and friendly neighbours at Edenhall, and though not in strict chronology due in this place, I may throw together my few reminiscences of Sir George.

He was the beau-idéal of a country gentleman of the old school. He rarely or never went to London-not, as was the case with some of his neighbours, because the expense of a season there was formidable, for his estate was a fine one, and he was a rich man living largely within his income, but because his idea was, that a country gentleman's proper place was on his own acres, and because London had no temptations for him. He was said to be the best landlord in the county, and really seemed to look upon all his numerous tenants, and all their labourers, as his born subjects, to whom protection, kindness, assistance, and general looking after were due, in return for their fealty and loyal attachment. I think he would have kicked off his land (and he was a man who could kick) any man who talked in his hearing of the purely commercial relationship between a landlord and his tenants. Of course he was adored by all the country side. No doubt the stout Cumberland and Westmoreland farmers and hinds were good and loyal subjects of Queen Victoria, but for all practical purposes of reverence and obedience, Musgrave was king at Edenhall.

Lady Musgrave was a particularly lady-like woman, the marked elegance of whose breeding might, with advantage, have given the tone to many a London drawing-room. I have seen her surrounded by country neighbours, and though she was velut inter ignes luna minores, I never saw the country squire's or country parson's wife, who was not perfectly happy and at ease in her drawing-room, while unconsciously all the time taking a lesson in good breeding and lady-like manners. She was thoroughly a help-meet for her husband in all his care for his people. I believe that both he and she were convinced at the bottom of their hearts that Cumberland and Westmoreland constituted the choicest, best, and most highly civilised part of England. And she was one of those of whom I was thinking, when in a former chapter I spoke of highly educated people whom I had known to affect provincialism of speech. Lady Musgrave always, or perhaps it would be more correct to say generally, called a cow a "coo," and though I suspect she would have left Westmoreland behind if evil fate had called her to London, on her own hill-sides she preferred the accents of the native speech.

Sir George had, or affected to have, considerable respect for all the little local superstitions and beliefs which are so prevalent in that "north countree." And the kindness with which he welcomed us as neighbours, when we built a house and came to live there, was shown despite a strong feeling which he had, or affected to have, with regard to an incident which fatally marked our début in that country.

We bought a field in a very beautiful situation overlooking the ruins of Brougham Castle and the confluence of the Eden with the Lowther, and proceeded to build a house on the higher part of it. But there was a considerable drop from the lower limit of our ground to the road which skirted the property, and furnished the only access to it. There was some difficulty, therefore, in contriving a tolerable entrance from the road for wheel traffic, and it was found necessary to cause a tiny little spring that rose in the bank by the roadside to change its course in some small degree. The affair seemed to us a matter of infinitesimal importance, but Sir George was dismayed. We had moved, he said, a holy well, and the consequence would surely be that we should never succeed in establishing ourselves in that spot.

And surely enough we never did so succeed; for, after having built a very nice little house, and lived in it one winter and half a summer, we-for I cannot say that it was my mother more than I, or I more than my mother-made up our minds that "the sun yoked his horses too far from Penrith town," and that we had had enough of it. Sir George, of course, when he heard our determination, while he expressed all possible regret at losing us as neighbours, said that he knew perfectly well that it must be so, from the time that we so recklessly meddled with the holy well.

He was the most hospitable man in the world, and could never let many days pass without asking us to dine with him. But his hospitality was of quite the old world school. One day, but that was after our journey to Italy and when he had become intimate with us, being in a hurry to get back into the drawing-room to rejoin a pretty girl next whom I had sat at dinner, I tried to escape from the dining-room. "Come back!" he roared, before I could get to the door, "we won't have any of your d-d forineering habits here! Come back and stick to your wine, or by the Lord I'll have the door locked."

He was, unlike most men of his sort, not very fond of riding, but was a great walker. He used to take the men he could get to walk with him a tramp over the hill, till they were fain to cry "Hold! enough!" But there I was his match.

Most of my readers have probably heard of the "Luck of Edenhall," for besides Longfellow's[1] well-known poem, the legend relating to it has often been told in print. I refer to it here merely to mention a curious trait of character in Sir George Musgrave in connection with it. The "Luck of Edenhall" is an ancient decorated glass goblet, which has belonged to the Musgraves time out of mind, and which bears on it the legend:-

"When this cup shall break or fall,

Farewell the luck of Edenhall."

[Footnote 1: Subsequently to the publication of his poem Musgrave asked Longfellow to dine at Edenhall, and "picked a crow" with him on the conclusion of the poem, which represents the "Luck" to have been broken, which Sir George considered a flight of imagination quite transcending all permissible poetical licence.]

After what I have written of Sir George and the holy well, which we so unfortunately moved from its proper site, it will be readily imagined that he attached no small importance to the safe keeping of the "Luck;" and truly he did so. But instead of simply locking it up, where he might feel sure it could neither break nor fall, he would show it to all visitors, and not content with that, would insist on their taking it into their hands to examine and handle it. He maintained that otherwise there was no fair submission to the test of luck, which was intended by the inscription. It would have been mere cowardly prevarication to lock it away under circumstances which took the matter out of the dominion of "luck" altogether. I wonder that under such circumstances it has not fallen, for the nervous trepidation of the folks who were made to handle it may be imagined!

I made another friend at Penrith in the person of a man as strongly contrasted with Sir George Musgrave as two north-country Englishmen could well be. This was a Dr. Nicholson, who has died within the last few months, to my great regret, for I had promised myself the great pleasure of taking him by the hand yet once again before starting on the journey on which we may, or may not meet. He was my senior by a few years, but not by many. Nicholson was a man of very extensive reading and of profound Biblical learning. It may be deemed surprising by others, as it was, and is, to me, that such a man should have been an earnest and thoroughly convinced Swedenborgian-but such was the case. And I can conscientiously give this testimony to the excellence of that creed-that it produced in the person of its learned north-country disciple at least one truly good and amiable man. Dr. Nicholson was emphatically such in all the relations of life. He was the good and loving husband of a very charming wife, the unremittingly careful and affectionate father of a large family, a delightful host at his own table, an excellent and instructive companion over a cigar (hardly correctly alluded to in the singular number!) and a most jucundus comes in a tramp over the hills.

Amusing to me still is the contrast between those Cumberland walks with Sir George and my ramblings over the same or nearly the same ground with the meditative Swedenborgian doctor;-the first always pushing ahead as if shouldering along a victorious path through life, knowing the history of every foot of ground he passed over, interested in every detail of it, and with an air of continually saying "Ha! ha!" among the breezy trumpets of those hills, like the scriptural war-horse; the second with his gaze very imperfectly turned outward, but very fruitfully turned inward, frequently pausing with argumentative finger laid on his companion's breast, and smile half satirical half kindly as the flow of discourse revealed theological lacunae in my acquirements, which, I fear, irreparably and most unfairly injured the Regius professor of divinity in the mind of the German graduate. For Nicholson was a theological "doctor" by virtue of a degree from I forget what German university, and had a low estimate, perhaps more justified at that day than it would be now, of the extent and calibre of Oxford theological learning. He was himself a disciple, and an enthusiastic admirer of Ewald, a very learned Hebraist, and an unflagging student.

I was more capable of appreciating at its due value the extent and accuracy of his knowledge upon another subject-a leg of mutton! It may be a mere coincidence, but certainly the most learned Hebraist it was ever my lot to know was also the best and most satisfactory carver of a leg of mutton.

Nobody knows anything about mutton in these days, for the very sufficient reason that there is no mutton worth knowing anything about. Scientific breeding has improved it off the face of the earth. The immature meat is killed at two years old, and only we few survivors of a former generation know how little like it is to the mutton of former days. The Monmouthshire farmers told me the other day that they could not keep Welsh sheep of pure breed, because nothing under an eight-foot park paling would confine them. Just as if they did not jump in the days when I jumped too! Believe me, my young friends, that George the Third knew what he was talking about (as upon certain other occasions) when he said that very little venison was equal to a haunch of four-year-old mutton. And the gravy!-chocolate-coloured, not pink, my innocent young friends. Ichabod! Ichabod!

My uncle, too, Mr. Partington-who married my father's sister, and lived many years chairman of quarter sessions at Offham, among the South Downs, near Lewes-there was a man who understood mutton! A little silver saucepan was placed by his side when the leg of mutton, or sometimes two, about as big as fine fowls, were placed in one dish before him. Then, after the mutton had been cut, the abundantly flowing gravy was transferred to the saucepan, a couple of glasses of tawny old port, and a quantum suff. of currant jelly and cayenne were added, the whole was warmed in the dining-room, and then-we ate mutton, as I shall never eat it again in this world!

Well! revenir a nos moutons we never, never shall! So we must, alas! do the reverse in returning to my Penrith reminiscences.

I remember specially an excellent old fellow and very friendly neighbour, Colonel Macleod, a bachelor, who having fallen in love with a very beautiful spot, in the valley of the Lowther, built an ugly brick house, three stories high, because, as he said, he was so greedy of the view, forgetful apparently that he was providing it mainly for his maid servants. Then there was the old maiden lady, with a name that might have been found in north-country annals at almost any date during the last seven hundred years, who mildly and maternally corrected my sister at table for speaking of vol-au-vent, telling her that the correct expression was voulez-vous! My sister always adopted the old lady's correction in future, at least when addressing her.

Then there were two pretty girls, Margaret and Charlotte Story, the nieces of old De Whelpdale, the lord of the manor. I think he and Mrs. De Whelpdale never left their room, for I do not remember to have ever seen either of them; nor do I remember that I at all resented their absence from the drawing-room when I used to call at the manor house. One of the girls was understood to be engaged to be married to a far distant lieutenant, of whom Penrith knew nothing, which circumstance gave rise to sundry ingenious conceits in the acrostic line, based on allusions to "his story" and "mystery!" I wonder whether Charlotte is alive! If she is, and should see this page, she will remember! It was for her sake that I deserted, or tried to desert, Sir George's port, as related above.

We left Penrith on that occasion without having formed any decided intention of establishing ourselves there, and returned to London towards the end of August, 1839. During the next two months I was hard at work completing the MS. of my volumes on Brittany. And in November of the same year, after that long fast from all journeying, my mother and I left London for a second visit to Paris. But we did not on this occasion travel together.

I left London some days earlier than she did, and travelled by Ostend, Cologne, and Mannheim, my principal object being to visit my old friend, Mrs. Fauche, who was living at the latter place. I passed three or four very pleasant days there, including, as I find by my diary, sundry agreeable jaunts to Heidelberg, Carlsruhe, &c. My mother and I had arranged to meet at Paris on the 4th of December, and at that date I punctually turned up there.

I think that I saw Paris and the Parisians much more satisfactorily on this occasion than during my first visit; and I suspect that some of the recollections recorded in these pages as connected with my first visit to Paris, belong really to this second stay there, especially I think that this must have been the case with regard to my acquaintance with Chateaubriand, though I certainly was introduced to him at the earlier period, for I find the record of much talk with him about Brittany, which was a specially welcome subject to him.

It was during this second visit that I became acquainted with Henry Bulwer, afterwards Lord Dalling, and at that time first secretary of the British legation. My visits were generally, perhaps always, paid to him when he was in bed, where he was lying confined by, if I remember rightly, a broken leg, I used to find his bed covered with papers and blue-books, and the like. And I was told that the whole, or at all events the more important part of the business of the embassy was done by him as he lay there on the bed, which must have been for many a long hour a bed of suffering.

Despite certain affectations-which were so palpably affectations, and scarcely pretended to be aught else, that there was little or nothing annoying or offensive in them-he was a very agreeable man, and was unquestionably a very brilliant one. He came to dine with me, I remember, many years afterwards at my house in Florence, when he insisted (the dining-room being on the first floor) on being carried up stairs, as we thought at the time very unnecessarily. But for aught I know such suspicion may have wronged him. At all events his disability, whatever it may have been, did not prevent him from making himself very agreeable.

One of our guests upon that same occasion (I must drag the mention of the fact in head and shoulders here, or else I shall forget it), was that extraordinary man, Baron Ward, who was, or perhaps I ought to say at that time had been, prime minister and general administrator to the Duke of Lucca. Ward had been originally brought from Yorkshire to be an assistant in the ducal stables. There, doubtless because he knew more about the business than anybody else concerned with it, he soon became chief. In that capacity he made himself so acceptable to the Duke, that he was taken from the stables to be his highness's personal attendant. His excellence in that position soon enlarged his duties to those of controller of the whole ducal household. And thence, by degrees that were more imperceptible in the case of such a government than they could have been in a larger and more regularly administered state, Ward became the recognised, and nearly all-powerful head, manager, and ruler of the little Duchy of Lucca. And I believe the strange promotion was much for the advantage of the Duke and of the Duke's subjects. Ward, I take it, never robbed him or any one else. And this eccentric specialty, the Duke, though he was no Solomon, had the wit to discover. In his cups the ex-groom, ex-valet, was not reticent about his sovereign master, and his talk was not altogether of an edifying nature. One sally sticks in my memory. "Ah, yes! He was a grand favourite with the women. But I have had the grooming of him; and it was a wuss job than ever grooming his hosses was!"

Ward got very drunk that night, I remember, and we deemed it fortunate that our diplomatist guest had departed before the outward signs of his condition became manifest.

Henry Bulwer, by mere circumstance of synchronism, has suggested the remembrance of Ward, Ward has called up the Duke of Lucca, and he brings with him a host of Baths of Lucca reminiscences respecting his Serene Highness and others. But all these must be left to find their places, if anywhere, when I come to them later on, or we shall never get back to Paris.

It was on this our second visit to Lutetia Parisiorum that my mother and I made acquaintance with a very specially charming family of the name of D'Henin. The family circle consisted of General le Vicomte D'Henin, his English wife, and their daughter. The general was a delightful old man, more like an English general officer than any other Frenchman I ever met. Madame D'Henin was like an Englishwoman not unaccustomed to courts and wholly unspoiled by them. Mademoiselle D'Henin, very pretty, united the qualities of a denizen of the inmost circles of the fashionable world with those of a really serious student, to a degree I have never seen equalled. They were great friends of the Bishop of London, and Mademoiselle D'Henin used to correspond with him. She was earnestly religious, and I remember her telling me of a démêlé she had had with her confessor. She had told him in confession that she was in the habit of reading the English Bible. He strongly objected, and at last told her that he could not give her absolution unless she promised to discontinue the practice. She told him that rather than do so, she would take what would be to her the painful step of declaring herself a Protestant, whereupon he undertook to obtain a special permission for her to read the English Bible. Whether he did really take any such measures I don't know, and I fancy she never knew; but the upshot was that she continued to read the heretical book, and nothing more was ever said of refusing her absolution.

I have a large bundle of letters from this highly accomplished young lady to my mother. Many passages of them would be interesting and valuable to an historian of the reign of Louis Philippe. She writes at great length, and her standpoint is the very centre of the monarchical side of the French political world of that day. But as I am not writing a history of the reign of Louis Philippe, I must content myself with extracting two or three suggestive notices.

In a letter dated from Paris, 19th July, 1840, she writes:-"You shew much hospitality towards your royal guests. But I assure you it will not in this instance be taken as an homage to superior merit-words which I have heard frequently applied here to John Bull's frenzy about Soult, and to the hospitality of the English towards the Duc de N[emours], When I told him how much I should like to be in his place (i.e., about to go to England), he protested that he would change places with no one, 'quand il s'agissait d'aller dans un aussi delicieux pays, que cette belle Angleterre, que vous avez si bonne raison d'aimer et d'admirer.'"

On the 29th of August in the same year she writes at great length of the indignation and fury produced in Paris by the announcement of the Quadruple Alliance. She is immensely impressed by the fact that "people gathered in the streets and discussed the question in the open air." "Ireland, Poland, and Italy are to rise to the cry of Liberty." But she goes on to say, "Small causes produce great effects. Much of this warlike disposition has arisen from the fact of Thiers having bought a magnificent horse to ride beside the King at the late review." She proceeds to ridicule the minister in a tone very naturally suggested by the personal appearance of the little great man under such circumstances, which no doubt furnished Paris with much fun. But she goes on to suggest that the personal vanity which made the prospect of such a public appearance alluring to him was reinforced by "certain other secondary but still important considerations of a different nature, looking to the results which might follow from the exhibition of a war policy. This desirable end being attained beyond even the most sanguine hopes, the martial fever seems on the decline."

Now all this gossip may be accepted as evidencing the tone prevailing in the very inmost circles of the citizen king's friends and surroundings, and as such is curious.

Writing on the 8th of October in the same year, after speaking at great length of Madame Laffarge, and of the extraordinary interest her trial excited, dividing all Paris into Laffargists and anti-Laffargists, and almost superseding war as a general topic of conversation, she passes to the then burning subject of the fortification of Paris, and writes as follows-curiously enough, considering the date of her letter:-

"Louis Philippe, whose favourite hobby it has ever been, from the idea that it makes him master of Paris, lays the first stone to-day. Some people consider it the first stone of the mausoleum of his dynasty. I sincerely hope not; for everything that can be called lady or gentleman runs a good chance of forming part of the funeral pile. The political madness which has taken possession of the public mind is fearful. Foreign or civil war! Such is the alternative. Thiers, who governs the masses, flatters them by promises of war and conquest. The Marsellaise, so lately a sign of rebellion, is sung openly in the theatres; the soldiers under arms sing it in chorus. The Guarde Nationale urges the King to declare war. He has resisted it with all his power, but has now, they say, given way, and has given Thiers carte blanche. He is in fact entirely under his control. The Chambers are not consulted. Thiers is our absolute sovereign. We call ourselves a free people. We have beheaded one monarch, exiled three generations of kings merely to have a dictator, 'mal né, mal fait, et mal élevé.' There has been a rumour of a change of ministry, but no one believes it. The overthrow of Thiers would be the signal for a revolution, and the fortifications are not yet completed to master it. May not all these armaments be the precursors of some coup d'état? A general gloom is over all around us. All the faces are long; all the conversations are sad!"

This may be accepted as a thoroughly accurate and trustworthy representation of the then state of feeling and opinion among the friends of Louis Philippe's Government, whether Parceque Bourbon or Quoique Bourbon, and as such is valuable. It is curious too, to find a staunch friend of the existing government, who may be said to have been even intimate with the younger members of the royal family, speaking of the Prime Minister with the detestation which these letters again and again express for Thiers.

In a letter of the 19th November, 1840, the writer describes at great length the recent opening of the Chamber by the King. She enlarges on the intensity of the anxiety felt for the tenor of the King's speech, which was supposed to be the announcement of war or peace; and describes the deep emotion, with which Louis Philippe, declaring his hope that peace might yet be preserved, called upon the nation to assist him in the effort to maintain it; and expresses the scorn and loathing with which she overheard one republican deputy say to another as the King spoke, "Voyez donc ce Robert Macaire, comme il fait semblant d'avoir du coeur!"

A letter of the 14th March, 1842, is written in better spirits and a lighter tone. Speaking of the prevalent hostile feeling towards England the writer wishes that her countrymen would remember Lamartine's observation that "ce patriotisme co?te peu! Il suffit d'ignorer, d'injurier et de hair." She tells her correspondent that "if Lord Cowley has much to do to establish the exact line between Lord Aberdeen's observations and objections, Lady Cowley has no less difficulty in keeping a nice balance between dignity and popularity," as "the Embassy is besieged by all sets and all parties; the tag and rag, because pushing is a part of their nature; the juste milieu [how the very phrase recalls a whole forgotten world!] because they consider the English Embassy as their property; the noble Faubourg because they are tired of sulking, and would not object to treating Lady Cowley as they treated Colonel Thorn,[1] viz., establishing their quarters at the 'Cowley Arms,' as they did at the 'Thorn's Head,' and inviting their friends on the recognised principle, 'C'est moi qui invite, et Monsieur qui paie'"

[Footnote 1: Colonel Thorn was an American of fabulous wealth, who was for a season or two very notorious in Paris. He was the hero of the often-told story of the two drives to Longchamps the same day; first with one gorgeous equipment of liveries, and a second time with other and more resplendently clothed retainers.]

Then follows an account of a fancy bal monstre at the Tuileries, which might have turned out, says the writer, to deserve that title in another sense. It was believed that a plot had been formed for the assassination of the King, at the moment, when, according to his invariable custom, he took his stand at the door of the supper-room to receive the ladies there. Four thousand five hundred tickets had been issued and a certain number of these, still blank, had disappeared. That was certain. And it was also certain that the King did not go to the door of the supper-room as usual. But the writer remarks that the tickets may have been stolen by, or for, people who could not obtain them legitimately. But the instantly conceived suspicion of a plot is illustrative of the conditions of feeling and opinions in Paris at the time.

"For my part," continues Mademoiselle D'Henin, "I never enjoyed a ball so much; perhaps because I did not expect to be amused; perhaps because all the royal family, the Jockey Club, and the fastidious Frenchwomen congratulated me upon my toilet, and voted it one of the handsomest there. They said the most becoming (but that was de l'eau bénite de Cour); perhaps it was because the Dukes of Orleans, Nemours, and Aumale, who never dance, and did so very little that evening, all three honoured me with a quadrille. You see I expose to you all the very linings of my heart I dissect it and exhibit all the vanity it contains. But you will excuse me when I tell you of a compliment that might have turned a wiser head than mine. The fame of my huntress's costume (Mademoiselle D'Henin was in those days the very beau-idéal of a Diana!) was such that it reached the ears of the wife of our butcher, who sent to beg that I would lend it to her to copy, as she was going to a fancy ball!"

A letter of the 8th of August, 1842, written from Fulham Palace, contains some interesting notices of the grief and desolation caused by the sad death of the Duke of Orleans.

"Was there ever a more afflicting calamity!" she writes. "When last I wrote his name in a letter to you, it was to describe him as the admired of all beholders, the hero of the féte, the pride and honour of France, and now what remains of him is in his grave! The affliction of his family baffles all description. I receive the most touching accounts from Paris. Some ladies about the Court write to me that nothing can equal their grief. As long as the coffin remained in the chapel at Neuilly, the members of the family were incessantly kneeling by the side of it, praying and weeping. The King so far mastered his feelings, that whenever he had official duties to perform, he was sufficiently composed to perform son métier de Roi. But when the painful task was done he would rush to the chapel, and weep over the dead body of his son, till the whole palace rang with his cries and lamentations. When the body was removed from Neuilly to Notre Dame, the scene at Neuilly was truly heartrending. My father has seen the King and the Princes several times since the catastrophe, and he says it has done the work of years on their personal appearance, The Due de Nemours has neither eaten nor slept since his brother died, and looks as if walking out of his grave. Mamma wrote him a few lines of condolence, which he answered by a most affecting note. Papa was summoned to attend the King to the House, as Grand Officier, and says he never witnessed such a scene. Even the opposition shed their crocodile tears. Placed immediately near the King on the steps of the throne, he saw the struggle between kingly decorum and fatherly affliction. Nature had the victory. Three times the King attempted to speak, three times he was obliged to stop, and at last burst into a flood of tears. The contagion gained all around him. And it was only interrupted by sobs that he could proceed. And it is in the face of this despair, when the body of the prince is scarcely cold, that that horrid Thiers and his associates begin afresh their infernal manoeuvres!"

A letter of the 3rd April, 1842, contains among a quantity of the gossip of the day an odd story, which, the writer says, "is putting Rome in a ferment, and the clergy in raptures." I think I remember that it made a considerable stir in ecclesiastic circles at the time. A certain M. Ratisbonne, a Jew, it seems entered a church in Rome (the writer does not say so, but if I remember rightly, it was the "Gesu"), with a friend, a M. de Bussières, who had some business to transact in the sacristy. The Jew, who professed complete infidelity, meantime was looking at the pictures. But M. de Bussières, when his business was done, found him prostrate on the pavement in front of a picture of the Madonna. The Jew on coming to himself declared that the Virgin had stepped from her frame, and addressed him, with the result, as he said, that having fallen to the ground an infidel, he rose a convinced Christian! Mademoiselle D'Henin writes in a tone which indicates small belief in the miracle, but seems to accept as certain the further facts, that the convert gave all he possessed to the Church and became a monk.

I have recently-even while transcribing these extracts from her letters-heard of the death, within the last few years, of the writer of them. She died in England, I am told, and unmarried. Her sympathies and affections were always strongly turned to her mother's country, as indeed may be in some degree inferred from even those passages of her letters which have been given. And I can well conceive that the events which, each more disastrous than its predecessor, followed in France shortly after the date of the last of them, may have rendered, especially after the death of her parents, a life in France distasteful to her. But I, and, I think, my mother also, had entirely lost sight of her for very many years. Had I imagined that she was living in England, I should undoubtedly have endeavoured to see her.

I have known many women, denizens of le grand monde, who have adorned it with equally brilliant talents, equally captivating beauty, equally sparkling wit and vivacity of intelligence. And I have known many, denizens of the studious and the book world, gifted with larger powers of intellect, and more richly dowered with the results of thought and study But I do not think that I ever met with one who possessed in so large a degree the choice product resulting from conversance with both these worlds. She was in truth a very brilliant creature.

Madame D'Henin I remember made us laugh heartily one evening by telling us the following anecdote. At one of those remarkable omnium-gatherum receptions at the Tuileries, of which I have spoken in a former chapter, she heard an American lady, to whom Louis Philippe was talking of his American recollections and of various persons he had known there, say to him, "Oh, sire, they all retain the most lively recollections of your majesty's sojourn among them, and wish nothing more than that you should return among them again!" The Duke of Orleans, who was standing behind the King, fairly burst into a guffaw.

There was a story current in Rome, in the days of Pius the Ninth, which may be coupled with this as a good pendant. His Holiness, when he had occupied the papal throne for a period considerably exceeding the legendary twenty-five years of St. Peter, was one day very affably asking an Englishman, who had been presented to him, whether he had seen everything in Rome most calculated to interest a stranger, and was answered; "Yes indeed, your Holiness, I think almost everything, except one which I confess I have been particularly anxious to witness-a conclave!"

Here are a few jottings at random from my diary, which may still have some little interest.

"Madame Le Roi, a daughter of General Hoche, told me (22nd January, 1840), that as she was driving on the boulevard a day or two ago, a sou piece was thrown with great violence at the window of her carriage, smashing it to pieces. This, she said, was because her family arms were emblazoned on the panel. Most of the carriages in Paris, she said, had no arms on them for fear of similar attacks."

Then we were active frequenters of the theatres. We go, I find, to the Fran?ais, to see Mars, then sixty years old, in Les Dehors Trompeurs and in the Fausses Confidences; to the opera to hear Robert le Diable and Lucia di Lammermuir, with Persiani, Tamburini, and Rubini; and the following night to the Fran?ais again, to see Rachel in Cinna.

I thought her personally, I observe, very attractive. But that, and sundry other subsequent experiences, left me with the impression that she was truly very powerful in the representation of scorn, indignation, hatred, and all the sterner and less amiable passions of the soul, but failed painfully when her r?le required the exhibition of tenderness or any of the gentler emotions. These were my impressions when she was young and I was comparatively so. But when, many years afterwards, I saw her repeatedly in Italy, they were not, I think, much modified.

The frequent occasions on which subsequently I saw Ristori produced an impression on me very much the reverse. I remember thinking Ristori's "Mirra" too good, so terribly true as to be almost too painful for the theatre. I thought Rachel's "Marie Stuart" upon the whole her finest performance, though "Adrienne" ran it hard.

Persiani, I note, supported by Lablache and Rubini, had a most triumphant reception in Inez de Castro, while Albertazzi was very coldly received in Blanche de Castille. Grisi in Norma was "superb." "Persiani and P. Garcia sang a duet from Tancredi; it was divine! I think I like Garcia's voice better than any of them. Nor could I think her ugly, as it is the fashion to call her, though it must be admitted that her mouth and teeth are alarming."

Then there were brilliant receptions at the English Embassy (Lord Granville) and at the Austrian Embassy (Comte d'Appony). My diary remarks that stars and gold lace and ribbons of all the Orders in Christendom were more abundant at the latter, but female beauty at the former. I remember much admiring that of Lady Honoria Cadogan, and that of a very remarkably lovely Visconti girl, a younger sister of the Princess Belgiojoso. But despite this perfect beauty, my diary notes, that it was "curious to observe the unmistakable superiority as a human being of the young English patrician." I remember that the "sit-down" suppers at the Austrian Embassy-a separate little table for every two, three, or four guests-were remarked on as a novelty (and applauded) by the Parisians.

Then at Miss Clarke's (afterwards Madame Mohl) I find Fauriel, "the first Proven?al scholar in Europe," delightful, and am disgusted with Merimée, because he manifested self-sufficiency, as it seemed to my youthful criticism, by pooh-poohing the probability of the temple at Lanleff in Brittany having been aught else than a church of the Templars.

Then Arago reads an Eloge on "old Ampère," of which I only remark that it lasted two hours and a half. Then there was a dinner at Dr. Gilchrist's whose widow our old friend Pepe, who for many years had always called her "Madame Ghee-cree," subsequently married. My notes, written the same evening, remind me that "I did not much like the radical old Doctor (his wife was an old acquaintance, but I had never seen him before); he is eighty, and ought to know better. Old Nymzevitch (I am not sure of the spelling), the ex-Chancellor of Poland, dined with us. He is eighty-four. When he said that he had conversed with the Duc de Richelieu, I started as if he had announced himself as the Wandering Jew. But, in fact, he had had, when a young man, an interview with the Duc, then ninety. He was, Nymzevitch told me, dreadfully emaciated, but dressed very splendidly in a purple coat all bedizened with silver lace. He received me, said the old ex-Chancellor, with much affable dignity."'

Then comes a breakfast with Pepe, at which I met the President Thibeaudeau, "a grey old man who makes a point of saying rude, coarse, and disagreeable things, which his friends call dry humour. He found fault with everything at the breakfast table."

Then a visit to the Chamber (where I heard Soult, Dupin, and Teste speak, and thought it "a terrible bear-garden)" is followed by attendance at a sermon by Athanase Coquerel, the Protestant preacher whose reputation in the Parisian beau monde was great in those days. He was, says my diary, "exceedingly eloquent, but I did not like his sermon;" for which dislike my notes proceed to give the reasons, which I spare the, I hope grateful, reader. Then I went to hear Bishop Luscombe at the Ambassador's chapel, and listened to "a very stupid sermon." I seem, somewhat to my surprise as I read the records of it, to have had a pronounced taste for sermons in those days, which I fear I have somehow outgrown. But then I have been very deaf during my later decades.

Bishop Luscombe may perhaps however be made more amusing to the reader than he was to me in the Embassy chapel by the following fragment of his experience. The Bishop arrived one day at Paddington, and could not find his luggage. He called a porter to find it for him, telling him the name to be read on the articles. The man, very busy with other people, answered hurriedly, "You must go to hell for your luggage." Now, Luscombe, who was a somewhat pompous and very bishopy man, was dreadfully shocked, and felt, as he said, as if the porter had struck him in the face. In extreme indignation he demanded where he could speak with any of the authorities, and was told that "the Board" was then sitting up stairs. So to the boardroom the Bishop went straightway, and announcing himself, made his complaint. The chairman, professing his regret that such offence should have been given, said he feared the man must have been drunk, but that he should be immediately summoned to give an account of his conduct. So the porter in great trepidation appeared in a few minutes before the august tribunal of "the Board."

"Well, sir," said he in reply to the chairman's indignant questioning, "what could I do? I was werry busy at the time. So when the gentleman says as his name was Luscombe, I could do no better than tell him to go to h'ell for his luggage, and he'd have found it there all right!"

"Oh! I see," said the chairman, "it is a case of misplaced aspirate! We have spaces on the wall marked with the letters of the alphabet, and you would have found your luggage at the letter L. You will see that the man meant no offence. I am sorry you should have been so scandalised, but though we succeed, I hope, in making our porters civil to our customers, it would be hopeless, I fear, to attempt to make them say L correctly." Solvuntur risu tabulae.

I find chronicled a long talk with Mohl one evening at Madame Récamier's. The room was very full of notable people of all sorts, and the tide of chattering was running very strong. "How can anything last long in France?" said he, in reply to my having said (in answer to his assertion that Cousin's philosophy had gone by) that it had been somewhat short-lived. "Reputations are made and pass away. It is impossible that they should endure. It is in such places as this that they are destroyed. The friction is prodigious!"

We then began to talk of the state of religion in France. He said that among a large set, religion was now à la mode. But he did not suppose that many of the fine folks who patronised it had much belief in it. The clergy of France were, he said, almost invariably very illiterate. Guizot, I remembered, calls them in his History of Civilisation doctes et crudits, but I abstained from quoting him. Mohl went on to tell me a story of a newspaper that had been about to be established, called Le Democrat. The shareholders met, when it appeared that one party wished to make it a Roman Catholic, and the other an atheist organ. Whereupon the existence of God was put to the vote and carried by a majority of one, at which the atheist party were so disgusted that they seceded in a body.

I got to like Mohl much, and had more conversation, I think, with him than with any other of the numerous men of note with whom I became more or less acquainted. On another occasion, when I found him in his cabinet, walled up as usual among his books, our talk fell on his great work, the edition of the oriental MSS. in the Bibliothèque Royale, which was to be completed in ten folio volumes, the first of which, just out, he was showing me. He complained of the extreme slowness of the Government presses in getting on with the work. This he attributed to the absurd costliness, as he considered it, of the style in which the work was brought out. The cost of producing that first volume he told me had been over 1,600_l_. sterling. It was to be sold at a little less than a hundred francs. Something was said (by me, I think) of the possibility of obtaining assistance from the King, who was generally supposed to be immensely wealthy. Mohl said that he did not believe Louis Philippe to be nearly so rich a man as he was supposed to be. He had spent, he said, enormous sums on the chateaux he had restored, and was affirmed by those who had the means of knowing the fact, to be at that time twelve millions of francs in debt.

My liking for Mohl seems to have been fully justified by the estimation he was generally held in. I find in a recently published volume by Kathleen O'Meara on the life of my old friend, Miss Clarke, who afterwards became his wife, the following passage quoted from Sainte-Beuve, who describes him as "a man who was the very embodiment of learning and of inquiry, an oriental savant-more than a savant-a sage, with a mind clear, loyal, and vast; a German mind passed through an English filter, a cloudless, unruffled mirror, open and limpid; of pure and frank morality; early disenchanted with all things; with a grain of irony devoid of all bitterness, the laugh of a child under a bald head; a Goethe-like intelligence, but free from all prejudice." "A charming and spirituelle Frenchwoman," Miss O'Meara goes on to say, "said of Julius Mohl that Nature in forming his character had skimmed the cream of the three nationalities to which he belonged by birth, by adoption and by marriage, making him deep as a German, spirituel as a Frenchman, and loyal as an Englishman."

I may insert here the following short note from Madame Mohl, because the manner of it is very characteristic of her. It is, as was usual with her, undated.

* * * * *

"MY DEAR MR. TROLLOPE,-By accident I have just learned that you are in London. If I could see you and talk over my dear old friend (Madame Récamier) I should be so much obliged and so glad. I live 68 Oxford Terrace, Hyde Park. If you would write me a note to say when I should be at home for the purpose. But if you can't, I am generally, not always, found after four. But if you could come on the 10th or 12th after nine we have a party. I am living at Mrs. Schwabe's just now till 16th this month. Pray write me a note, even If you can't come.

"Yours ever,

"MARY MOHL."

* * * * *

All the capital letters in the above transcript, except those in her name are mine, she uses none. The note is written in headlong hurry.

Mignet, whom I met at the house of Thiers, I liked too, but Mohl was my favourite.

It was all very amusing, with as much excitement and interest of all kinds crammed into a few weeks as might have lasted one for a twelvemonth. And I liked it better than teaching Latin to the youth of Birmingham. But it would seem that there was something that I liked better still. For on March 30th, leaving my mother in the full swing of the Parisian gaieties, I bade adieu to them all and once again "took to the road," bound on an excursion through Central France.