Opening…

Introduction

The story of the beautiful life which came to an end on the 5th of April, 1904, is told by Miss Cobbe herself in the following pages up to the close of 1898. Nothing is left for another pen but to sketch in the events of the few remaining years.

But first a word or two as to the origin of the book. One spring day in 1891 or ’92, when Miss Cobbe was walking with me through the Hengwrt grounds on my way to the station, after some hours spent in listening to her brilliant stories of men and things, I asked her if she would not some day write her autobiography. She stood still, laughing, and shook her head. Nothing in her life, she said, was of sufficient importance to record, or for other people to read. Naturally I urged that what had interested me so greatly would interest others, and that her life told by herself could not fail to make a delightful book. She still laughed at the idea; and the next time I saw her and repeated my suggestion, told me that she had not time for such an undertaking, and also that she did not think her friend, Miss Lloyd, would like it. At last, however, to my great satisfaction, I heard that the friends had talked the matter over, and were busily engaged in looking at old letters and records of past days, and both becoming interested in the retrospection. So the book grew slowly into an accomplished fact, and Miss Cobbe often referred to it laughingly as “your” book, to which I replied that then I had not lived in vain! It is possible that the idea had occurred to her before; but she always gave me to understand that my persuasion had induced her to write the book. She came to enjoy writing it. Once when I said:—“I want you to tell us everything; all your love-stories—and everything!” she took me up to her study and read me the passage she had written in the 1st Chapter concerning such matters. The great success of the book was a real pleasure to both Miss Cobbe and her friend. She told me that it brought her more profit than any of her books. Most of them had merely a succès d’estime. Better still, it brought her a number of kindly letters from old and new friends, and from strangers in far off lands; and these proofs of the place she held in many hearts was a true solace to a woman of tender affections, who had to bear more than the usual share of the abuse and misrepresentation which always fall to those who engage in public work and enter into public controversies.

The sorrow of Miss Lloyd’s death changed the whole aspect of existence for Miss Cobbe. The joy of life had gone. It had been such a friendship as is rarely seen—perfect in love, sympathy, and mutual understanding. No other friend—though Miss Cobbe was rich in friends—could fill the vacant place, and henceforward her loneliness was great even when surrounded by those she loved and valued. To the very last she could never mention the name of “my dear Mary,” or of her own mother, without a break in her voice. I remember once being alone with her in her study when she had been showing me boxes filled with Miss Lloyd’s letters. Suddenly she turned from me towards her bookshelves as though to look for something, and throwing up her arms cried, with a little sob, “My God! how lonely I am!”

It was always her custom, while health lasted, to rise early, and she often went to Miss Lloyd’s grave in the fresh morning hours, especially when she was in any trouble or perplexity. Up to within a few days of her death she had visited this—to her—most dear and sacred spot. Doubtless she seemed to find a closer communion possible with one who had been her counsellor in all difficulties, her helper in all troubles, at the graveside than elsewhere. She planted her choicest roses there, and watched over them with tender care. Now she rests beside her friend.

Yet this anguish of heart was bravely borne. There was nothing morbid in her grief. She took the same keen interest as before in the daily affairs of life—in politics and literature and social matters. There never was a nature more made for the enjoyment of social intercourse. She loved to have visitors, to take them for drives about her beautiful home, and to invite her neighbours to pleasant little luncheons and dinners to meet them. Especially she enjoyed the summer glories of her sweet old garden, and liked to give an occasional garden party, and still oftener to take tea with her friends under the shade of the big cherry tree on the lawn. How charming a hostess she was no one who has ever enjoyed her hospitality can forget. “A good talk” never lost its zest for her; until quite the end she would throw off langour and fatigue under the spell of congenial companionship, and her talk would sparkle with its old brilliance—her laugh ring with its old gaiety.

Her courtesy to guests was perfect. When they happened not to be in accord with her in their views upon Vivisection (which was always in these years the chief object of her work and thought), she never obtruded the question, and it was her rule not to allow it to be discussed at table. It was too painful and serious a subject to be an accompaniment of what she thought should be one of the minor pleasures of life. For though intensely religious, there was no touch of the ascetic in Miss Cobbe’s nature. She enjoyed everything; and guests might come and go and never dream that the genial, charming hostess, who deferred to their opinions on art or music or books, who conversed so brilliantly on every subject which came up, was all the time engaged in a hand to hand struggle against an evil which she believed to be sapping the courage and consciences of English men and women.

It is pleasant to look back upon sunny hours spent among the roses she loved, or under the fine old trees she never ceased to admire; upon the gay company gathered round the tea-table in the dark-panelled hall of Hengwrt; best of all, on quiet twilight talks by the fireside or in the great window of her drawing-room watching the last gleams of sunset fade from hill and valley, and the stars come out above the trees. But it is sadly true that the last few years of Miss Cobbe’s life were not as peacefully happy as one would have loved to paint them to complete the pleasant picture she had drawn in 1894. Even her cheery optimism would hardly have led her to write that she would “gladly have lived over again” this last decade.

The pain of separating herself from the old Victoria Street Society was all the harder to bear because it came upon her when the loss of Miss Lloyd was still almost fresh. Only those who saw much of her during that anxious spring of 1898 can understand how bitter was this pain. Miss Cobbe has sometimes been blamed for—as it is said—causing the division. But in truth, no other course was possible to one of her character. When the alternative was to give up a principle which she believed vital to the cause of Anti-Vivisection, or to withdraw from her old Society, no one who knew Miss Cobbe could doubt for an instant which course she would take. It was deeply pathetic to see the brave old veteran of this crusade brace up her failing strength to meet the trial, resolved that she would never lower the flag she had upheld for five-and-twenty years. It was a lesson to those who grow discouraged after a few disappointments, and faint-hearted at the first failure. This, it seems to me, was the strongest proof Miss Cobbe’s whole life affords of her wonderful mental energy. Few men, well past 70, when the work they have begun and brought to maturity is turned into what they feel to be a wrong direction, have courage to begin again and lay the foundations of a new enterprise. Miss Cobbe has herself told the story of how she founded the “British Union;” and I dwell upon it here only because it shows the intensity of her conviction that Vivisection was an evil thing which she must oppose to the death, and with which no compromise was possible. She did not flinch from the pain and labour and ceaseless anxiety which she plainly foresaw. She never said—as most of us would have held her justified in saying—“I have done all I could. I have spent myself—time, money, and strength—in this fight. Now I shall rest.” She took no rest until death brought it to her. Probably few realise the immense sacrifices Miss Cobbe made when she devoted herself to the unpopular cause which absorbed the last 30 years of her life. It was not only money and strength which were given. She lost many friends, and much social influence and esteem. This was no light matter to a woman who valued the regard of her fellows, and had heartily enjoyed the position she had won for herself in the world of letters. She often spoke sadly of this loss, though I am sure that she never for an instant regretted that she had come forward as the helper of the helpless.

From 1898 until the last day of her life the interests of the new Society occupied her brain and pen. It was at this time that I became more closely intimate with her than before. Her help and encouragement of those who worked under her were unfailing. No detail was too trifling to bring to her consideration. Her immense knowledge of the whole subject, her great experience and ready judgment were always at one’s service. She soon had the care of all the branches of the Union on her shoulders; she kept all the threads in her hand, and the particulars of each small organisation clear in her mind. For myself, I can bear this testimony. Never once did Miss Cobbe urge upon me any step or course of action which I seriously disliked. When, on one or two occasions, I ventured to object to her view of what was best, she instantly withdrew her suggestion, and left me a free hand. If there were times when one felt that she expected more than was possible, or when she showed a slight impatience of one’s mistakes or failures, these were as nothing compared with her generous praise for the little one achieved, her warm congratulation for any small success. It was indeed easy to be loyal to such a chief!

Much of Miss Cobbe’s leisure time during the years after Miss Lloyd’s death was spent in reading over the records of their old life. I find the following passage in a letter of December, 1900:—

“I have this last week broken open the lock of an old note-book of my dear Mary’s, kept about 1882–85. Among many things of deep interest to me are letters to and from various people and myself on matters of theology, which I used to show her, and she took the trouble to copy into this book, along with memoranda of our daily life. It is unspeakably touching to me, you may well believe, to find our old life thus revived, and such tokens of her interest in my mental problems. I think several of the letters would be rather interesting to others, and perhaps useful.”

There remain in my possession an immense number of letters, carefully arranged in packets and docketed, to and from Miss Lloyd, Lord Shaftesbury, Theodore Parker, Fanny Kemble, and others. These have all been read through lately by Miss Cobbe, and endorsed to that effect. Up to the very end Miss Cobbe’s large correspondence was kept up punctually. She always found time to answer a letter, even on quite trivial matters; and among the mass which fell into my hands on her death were recent letters from America, India, Australia, South Africa, and all parts of England, asking for advice on many subjects, thanking for various kindnesses, and expressing warm affection and admiration for the pioneer worker in so many good causes. With all these interests, her life was very full. Nothing that took place in the world of politics, history, or literature, was indifferent to her. She never lost her pleasure in reading, though her eyes gave her some trouble of late years. At night, two books—generally Biography, Egyptology, Biblical Criticism, or Poetry—were placed by her bedside for study in the wakeful hours of the early morning. In spite of all these resources within herself, she sorely missed the companionship of kindred spirits. She was, as I have said, eminently fitted for the enjoyment of social life, and had missed it after she left London for North Wales. Up to the last, even when visitors tired her, she was mentally cheered and refreshed by contact with those who cared for the things she cared for.

In the winter of 1901–2 she was occupied in bringing out a new edition of her first book, “The Theory of Intuitive Morals.” She wrote thus of it to me at the time:—

“I have resolved not to leave the magnum opus of my small literary life out of print, so I am arranging to reprint ‘Intuitive Morals,’ with my essay on ‘Darwinism in Morals’ at the end of it, and a new Preface, so that when I go out of the world, this, my Credo for moral science and religion, will remain after me. Nobody but myself could correct it or preface it.... As I look back on it now, I feel glad to be able to re-circulate it, though very few will read anything so dry! It was written just 50 years ago, and I am able to say with truth that I have not seen reason to abandon the position I then took, although the ‘cocksureness’ of 30 can never be maintained to 80!”

During the same winter, Miss Cobbe joined the Women’s Liberal Federation, moved to take this decided step not only by her strong disapproval of the war in South Africa, but by her belief that the then existing government was in opposition to all the movements which she longed to see carried forward. Her accession to their ranks met with a warm welcome from the President and Committee of the Women’s Liberal Federation, many of whom were already her personal friends. To the end she kept in close touch with all that concerned women; and only a few days before her death, was asked to allow her name to be given to the Council as an Honorary Vice-President of the National Union of Women Workers of Great Britain and Ireland.

In the summer of 1902 an incident occurred—small in itself, but causing such intense mortification to Miss Cobbe that it cannot be passed over in any true account of the closing years of her life. In fact, those who saw most of her at the time, and knew her best, believe that she never recovered from the effects of it. A charge was brought against her of cruelly overdriving an old horse—a horse which had been a special pet. The absurdity of such a charge was the first thing that struck those who heard of it; but to Miss Cobbe it came as a personal insult of the cruellest kind. The charge was pressed on with what looked like malicious vindictiveness, and though it failed, the intention to give her pain did not fail. She wrote to me at the time that she was “wounded to the quick.” The insult to her character, the attempt to throw discredit upon her life’s work for the protection of animals from suffering, the unchivalrousness of such an attack upon an old and lonely woman—all this embittered the very springs of her life, and for a time she felt as if she could not stay any longer in a neighbourhood where such a thing had been possible. The results were very grievous for all who loved her, as well as for herself. It had been one of her pleasantest recreations to drive by the lovely road—which was full of associations to her—between Hengwrt and Barmouth, to spend two or three hours enjoying the sea air and sunshine, and the society of the old friends who were delighted to meet her there. To Barmouth also she had a few years previously bequeathed her library, and had taken great interest and pleasure in the room prepared for the reception of her “dear books.” Yet it was in Barmouth that the blow was struck, and she never visited the little town again. It was pitiful! She had but a few more months to live, and this was what a little group of her enemies did to darken and embitter those few months!

On September 6th, she wrote to me:—

“This week I have had to keep quite to myself. I am, of course, enduring now the results of the strain of the previous weeks, and they are bad enough. The recuperative powers of 80 are—nil! My old friends, Percy Bunting and his wife, offered themselves for a few days last week, and I could not bear to refuse their offer. As it proved, his fine talk on all things to me most interesting—modern theological changes, Higher Criticism, etc.—and her splendid philanthropy on the lines I once humbly followed (she is the leading woman on the M.A.B.Y.S., which I had practically founded in Bristol forty years ago), made me go back years of life, and seem as if I were once more living in the blessed Seventies.... Altogether, their visit, though it left me quite exhausted, did my brains and my heart good. O! what friends I once had! How rich I was! How poor I am now!”

In October of that year she decided to leave Hengwrt for the winter. It was a great effort. She had not left her home for eight years, and dreaded the uprooting. But it was a wise move. One is glad now to remember how happy Miss Cobbe was during that winter in Clifton. She lived over again the old days of her work in Bristol with Mary Carpenter; visited the old scenes, and noted the changes that had taken place. Some old friends were left, and greatly she enjoyed their company. At Clifton she had many more opportunities of seeing people engaged in the pursuits which interested her than in her remote Welsh home. Her letters at that time were full of renewed cheeriness. I quote a few sentences:

“November 13th.

“... I hope you have had as beautiful bright weather as we have had here, and been able to get some walks on the mountain. Now I can no longer ‘take a walk,’ I know how much such exercise helped me of old, mentally and morally, quite as much as physically. I see a good many old friends here, and a few new ones, and my niece comes to tea with me every afternoon. They are all very kind, and make more of me than I am worth; but it is a City of the Dead to me, so many are gone who were my friends long ago; and what is harder to bear is that when I was here last, eight or ten years ago, I was always thinking of returning home, and writing daily all that happened to dear Mary—and now, it is all a blank.”

“November 16th.

“... It is so nice to think I am missed and wanted! If I do get back to Hengwrt, we must manage to see more of each other.... I have come to the conclusion that for such little time as may remain for me, I will not shut myself up again, and if I am at all able for it, I will return home very early in the spring. I see a good many nice, kind people here, old friends and new, and I have nice rooms; but I sadly miss my own home and, still more, garden. And the eternal noise of a town, the screaming children and detestable hurdy-gurdies, torment my ears after their long enjoyment of peace—and thrushes.... I am shocked to find that people here read nothing but novels; but they flock to any abstruse lectures, e.g., those of Estlin Carpenter on Biblical Criticism. I have just had an amusing experience—a journalist sent up to gather my views as to changes in Bristol in the last forty years. Goodness knows what a hash he will make of them!”

During this autumn, the thought occurred to me that as Miss Cobbe’s 80th birthday was at hand, a congratulatory address from the men and women who appreciated the work she had done for humanity and the lofty, spiritual influence of her writings, might cheer her, and help to remove some of the soreness of heart which the recent trouble at Barmouth had left behind. Through the kind help of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting and Mr. Verschoyle in England, and of Miss Schuyler and Mrs. Wister in America, an address was drawn up, and a notable list of signatures quickly and most cordially affixed to it. The address was as follows:—

“To FRANCES POWER COBBE

“DECEMBER 4th, 1902.

“On this your eightieth birthday, we, who recognize the strenuous philanthropic activity and the high moral purpose of your long life, wish to offer you this congratulatory address as an expression of sincere regard.

“You were among the first publicly to urge the right of women to university degrees, and your powerful pen has done much to advance that movement towards equality of treatment for them, in educational and other matters, which is one of the distinguishing marks of our time.

“In social amelioration, such as Ragged Schools and Workhouse reform, you did the work of a pioneer. By your lucid and thoughtful works on religion and ethics, you have contributed in no small degree to that broader and more humane view, which has so greatly influenced modern theology in all creeds and all schools of thought.

“But it is your chief distinction that you were practically the first to explore the dark continent of our relations to our dumb fellow-creatures, to let in light on their wrongs, and to base on the firm foundation of the moral law their rights and our duty towards them. They cannot thank you, but we can.

“We hope that this expression of our regard and appreciation may bring some contribution of warmth and light to the evening of a well spent life, and may strengthen your sense of a fellowship that looks beyond the grave.”

The Address happily gave Miss Cobbe all the gratification we had hoped. I quote from her letters the following passages:—

“Clifton, December 5th.

“I learn that it is to you I owe what has certainly been the greatest honour I have ever received in my long life—the address from English and American friends on my 80th birthday. I can hardly say how touched I am by this token of your great friendship, and the cheer which such an address could not fail to give me. The handsome album containing it and all the English signatures (the American ones—autographs—are on their way, but I have the names in type-writing) was brought to me yesterday by Mrs. Bunting and Mr. Verschoyle. I had three reporters dodging in and out all day to get news of it, and have posted to you the Bristol Mercury with the best of their reports. It is really a very splendid set of signatures, and a most flattering expression of sympathy and approval from so many eminent men and women. It is encouraging to think that they would endorse the words about my care for animals.”

“December 8th.

“You may not know that a very fair account of the address appeared in the Times of Saturday, and also in at least twenty other papers, so my fame! has gone evidently through the land. I also had addresses from the Women’s Suffrage people, with Lady Frances Balfour at their head, and from the A.V. (German) Society at Dresden, Ragged School, etc.... I am greatly enjoying the visits of many literary men and women, old friends and new—people interested in theology and ethics and Egypt, and all things which interest me....”

“December 24th.

“Only think that I am booked to make an address on Women Suffrage to a ladies’ club, five doors off, on the 2nd.... The trouble you must have taken (about the address) really overwhelms me! You certainly succeeded in doing me a really great honour, and in cheering me. I confess I was very downhearted when I came here, but I am better now. I feel like the man who ‘woke one morning and found himself famous.’”

“January 4th.

“I like to hear of your fine walk on the mountain. How good such walks are for soul and body! I miss them dreadfully—for my temper as well as my health and strength. Walking in the streets is most disagreeable to me, especially now that I go slower than other people, so that I feel myself an obstacle, and everybody brushes past me. I sigh for my own private walks, small as they are, where nobody has a right to come but myself, and my thoughts can go their ways uninterrupted. But oh, for the old precipice walk and Moel Ispry solitudes! You will be amused to hear that I actually gave an hour’s address to about 100 ladies at a new club, five doors from me in this crescent, on Friday.... I was not sorry to say a word more on that subject, and, of course, to bring in how I trusted the votes of women to be against all sorts of cruelty, including Vivisection. I found I had my voice and words still at command.... They were nice, ladylike women in the club. One said she would have seven votes if she were a man. I do believe that it would be an immense gain for women themselves to have the larger interest which politics would bring into their cramped lives, and to cease to be de-considered as children.”

Miss Cobbe was too human, too full of sympathy with her fellow-creatures, to know anything of the self-esteem which makes one indifferent to the affection and admiration of others. She was simply and openly pleased by this address, as the words I have quoted show; and more than a year later, only a few days before her death, she wrote to an old friend on her 80th birthday:—

“My own experience of an 80th birthday was so much brightened by that address ... that it stands out as a happy, albeit solemn, day in my memory.”

While in Clifton, Miss Cobbe presided at the committee meetings of the Bristol Branch of the British Union; and she even considered the possibility of taking up the work once more in London. But a brief visit, when she occupied rooms in Thurloe Gardens, proved too much for her strength. The noise at night prevented her from sleeping, and she was reluctantly—for she enjoyed this opportunity of seeing old friends—obliged to return to North Wales. One Sunday morning when in London, she told me that she walked to Hereford Square to see the little house in which she and Miss Lloyd had spent the happiest years of their lives. But the changed aspect of the rooms in which they had received most of the distinguished men and women of that time distressed her, and she regretted her visit. On February 21st, she wrote to me from Hengwrt:—

“Dearest Blanche,

“As you see I have got home all right, and this morning meant to write to announce my arrival.... I have heaps of things to tell you, but to-day am dazed by fatigue and change of air. It was quite warm in London, and the cold here is great. But oh, how glad I am to be in the peace of Hengwrt again—how thankful that I have such a refuge in my old age! You will be glad, I know, that I can tell you I am in a great deal better health than when I left.”

The first time I went to see her after her return, I found her standing in front of an immense chart which was spread out on a table, studying the successions of Egyptian dynasties. The address she had given in Clifton at the ladies’ club was about to be printed in the Contemporary Review, and she wanted to verify a statement she had made in it about an Egyptian queen. She told me that this elaborate chronological and genealogical chart had been made by her, when a girl of 18, on her own plan. “How happy I was doing it,” she said, “with my mother on her sofa watching me, and taking such interest in it!” It was very delightful to find the old woman of 80 consulting the work of the girl of 18.

Alas! the improvement in her health did not continue long. From that time till the end, I hardly received a letter from Miss Cobbe without some reference to the cheerless, gloomy weather. She was very sensitive to the influences of the weather; and as one of her greatest pleasures had always been to pass much time out of doors, it became a serious deprivation to her when rain and cold made it impossible to take her daily drive, or to walk and sit in her beloved garden. She thought that some real and permanent change had come over our climate, and the want of sunshine, during the last winter especially, terribly depressed her spirits and health. I spent two or three happy days with her in the spring, and one drive on an exquisite morning at the end of May will long live in my memory. No one ever loved trees and flowers, mountain and river, more than she, or took more delight in the pleasure they gave to others.

Gradually, as the year went on, serious symptoms showed themselves—and she knew them to be serious. Attacks of faintness and complete exhaustion often prevented her from enjoying the society of even her dearest friends, though in spite of increasing weakness she struggled on with all the weight of private correspondence and the business of her new society; and sometimes, when strangers went to see her, they would find her so bright and animated that they came away thinking our fears for her unfounded.

A visit from two American friends in the summer gave her much pleasure; but all last year her anxieties and disappointments were great, and wore down her strength. The Bayliss v. Coleridge case tried her grievously, and the adverse verdict was a severe blow. The evident animus of the public made her almost despair of ever obtaining that justice for animals which had been the object of her efforts for so many years. Hope deferred, and the growing opposition of principalities and powers, made even her brave heart quail at times. One result of the trial, however, gave her real satisfaction. The Daily News opened its columns to a correspondence on the subject of Vivisection, and the wide-spread sympathy expressed with those who oppose it was, Miss Cobbe said, “the greatest cheer she had known in this sad cause for years.” The two young Swedish ladies who had been the principal witnesses at the trial, visited her at Hengwrt in November, and I met them there one afternoon at, I think, the last of her pleasant receptions. I have never seen her more interested, more graciously hospitable, than on that day. She listened to the account of the trial, sometimes with a smile of approval, sometimes with tears in her eyes; and when we went into the hall for tea, where the blazing wood fire lighted up the dark panelling, and gleamed upon pictures, flowers, and curtains, and she moved about talking to one and another with her sweet smile and kindly, earnest words, some one present said to me, “How young she looks!” I think it was the simplicity, the perfect naturalness of her manner and speech that gave an aspect of almost childlikeness to the dear old face at times. Every thought found expression in her countenance and voice. The eyes, laughing or tearful, the gestures of her beautifully shaped hands, were, to the last, full of animation.

There was indeed a perennial flow of vitality which seemed to overcome all physical weakness in Miss Cobbe. But if others were deceived as to her health, she was not. As the dark, dreary winter went on, she grew more and more depressed. Four days before the end came, I received the following sad letter. Illness and other causes had made it impossible for me to go to Hengwrt for some weeks. The day after her death I was to have gone.

“It is very sad how the weeks go by, and we, living almost within sight of each other, fail to meet. It is most horribly cold to-day, and I would not have had you come for anything.... I think our best plan by far will be to settle that whenever you make your proposed start abroad, you come to me for three or four days on your way. This will let us have a little peaceful confab. I really want very much to do what I have been thinking of so long, but have never done yet, and give you advice about your future editorship of my poor books. To tell you my own conviction, even if I should be living when you return, I do not think I shall be up to this sort of business. I am getting into a wretched state of inability to give attention to things, and now the chances are all for a speedy collapse. This winter has been too great a trial for my old worn brains, and now the cold returning is killing.”

Happily for her, she was spared the pain of any protracted period of mental or bodily weakness. On Monday, April 4th, she drove out as usual, wrote her letters (one to me, received after she was dead), and in the afternoon enjoyed the visit of a neighbour, who took tea with her. It was a better day with her than many had been of late, and she went to bed cheerful and well. In the morning, having opened her shutters to let in the blessed daylight, and to look her last upon the familiar scene of mountain, valley, river, and wood, with the grey headstone visible in the churchyard where her friend rested, she passed swiftly away, and was found dead, with a smile of peace upon her face. A short time before, she had written to me:—

“I am touched by your affectionate words, dear Blanche, but nobody must be sorry when that time comes, least of all those who love me.”

We can obey her request not to sorrow for her; but for all those—and they are more than she ever realised—who loved her, the loss is beyond words to tell.

Miss Cobbe’s personality breathes through all her writings. Yet there was a charm about her which not even her autobiography is able to convey. It was the charm of an intensely sympathetic nature, quickly moved to laughter or to tears, passionately indignant at cruelty and cowardice, tender to suffering, touched to a generous delight at any story of heroism. As an instance of this, I may recall that in the spring of 1899 Miss Cobbe started a memorial to Mrs. Rogers, stewardess of the Stella, by the gift of £25. The closing words of the inscription she wrote for the beautiful drinking fountain which was erected to that brave woman’s memory are worth recording here:

“ACTIONS SUCH AS THESE— SHOWING STEADFAST PERFORMANCE OF DUTY IN THE FACE OF DEATH, READY SELF-SACRIFICE FOR SAKE OF OTHERS, RELIANCE ON GOD— CONSTITUTE THE GLORIOUS HERITAGE OF OUR ENGLISH RACE. THEY DESERVE PERPETUAL COMMEMORATION: BECAUSE AMONG THE TRIVIAL PLEASURES AND SORDID STRIFE OF THE WORLD THEY REVEAL TO US FOR EVER THE NOBILITY AND LOVE-WORTHINESS OF HUMAN NATURE.”

In Miss Cobbe’s nature a gift of humour was joined to strong practical sense. No one who ever lived less deserved the term “Faddist” or “Sentimentalist.” Miss Cobbe was impatient of fads. She liked “normal” people best—those who ate and drank, and dressed and lived according to ordinary conventions. Though, for convenience sake, she had adopted a style of dress for herself to which she kept, letting “Fashions” come and go unheeded, she was not indifferent to dress in other women, and admired colours and materials, or noted eccentricities as quickly as anyone. She once referred laughingly to her own dress as “obvious.” For many years dressmaker’s dresses would have been impossible to her; but she had no sympathy with the effort some women make to look peculiar at all costs. She could thoroughly enjoy a good story, or even a bit of amusing gossip. With her own strong religious convictions, she had the utmost respect for other people’s opinions. Her chosen friends held widely different creeds, and I do not think that she ever dreamt of proselytising.

No literary person, surely, ever had less self-conceit. What she had written was not flourished in one’s face; other people’s smallest doings were not ignored. One felt always on leaving her that every one else was lacking in something indefinable—was dull, uninteresting and common-place. One felt, too, that the whole conception of womanhood was raised. This was what a woman might be. Whatever her faults, they were the faults of a great-hearted, noble nature—faults which all generous persons would be quick to forget. Nothing small or mean could be tolerated by her.

Her character, as I read it, was drawn on large and simple lines, and was of a type that is out of fashion to-day. She had many points of resemblance to Samuel Johnson. With a strong and logical brain, she scorned all sophistries, evasions, compromises, and half measures, and was impatient of the wire-drawn subtleties in which modern moralists revel. With intensely warm affections, she was, like the great doctor, “a good hater.” He would undoubtedly have classified her as “a clubbable woman”; and his famous saying, “Clear your mind of cant,” would have come as appropriately from her lips as from his. If a sin was hateful to her, she could not feel amiably towards the sinner; and for the spiritual sins of selfishness, hypocrisy, avarice, cruelty, and callousness, she had no mercy, ranking them as far more fatal to character than the sins of the flesh. Like Johnson, too, she valued good birth, good breeding, and good manners, and was instinctively conservative, though liberal in her religious and political opinions.

She intensely disliked the license of modern life, both in manners and morals, and had no toleration for the laxity so often pardoned in persons of social or intellectual eminence. Her mind and her tastes were strictly pure, orderly, and regular. It is characteristic of this type of mind that she most admired the classical in architecture, the grand style in art, the polished and finished verse of Pope and Tennyson in poetry. These were the two whose words she most frequently quoted, though she tells us that Shelley was her favourite poet.

Her gift of order was exemplified in the smallest details and the kindred power of organisation was equally well marked. It was the combination of impulsiveness and enthusiasm with practical judgment and a due sense of proportion that made her so splendid a leader in any cause she championed.

Miss Cobbe was what is often called “generous to a fault.” It was a lesson in liberality to go with her into the garden when she cut flowers to send away. She did not look for the defective blooms, or for those which would not be missed. It was always the best and the finest which she gave. How often I have held the basket while she cut rose after rose, or great sprays of rhododendron or azælea with the knife she wielded so vigorously. “Take as much as you like,” she would say, if she sent you to help yourself. She gave not only material things, but affection, interest sympathy, bountifully.

She hated a lie of any kind; her first instinct was always to stamp it out when she came across one. Perhaps, in her stronger days, she “drank delight of battle with her peers,” and did not crave over much for peace. But she was not quarrelsome, and could differ without wrangling, and dispute without bitterness.

A woman without husband or child is fortunate if, in her old age, she has one or two friends who really love her. Miss Cobbe was devotedly loved by a large number of men and women. Indeed, I do not think that anyone could come close to her and not love her. She was so richly gifted, and gave so freely of herself.

To many younger women she had become the inspiration of and guide to a life of high endeavour, and the letters of gratitude and devotion which were addressed to her from all parts of the world bear witness, as nothing else can, to the extent of her splendid influence upon the characters of others. Only a day or two before her death she received letters from strangers who had lately read her autobiography and felt impelled to write and thank her for this story of a brave life. It is in the hope that through it her influence may go on growing, and that her spirit of self-sacrifice, of service to humanity, and faithfulness to the Divine law may spread until the causes she fought for so valiantly are victorious, that this new edition of the “Life of Frances Power Cobbe” is sent out.

BLANCHE ATKINSON.

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Author’S Preface

My life has been an interesting one to live and I hope that this record of it may not prove too dull to read. The days are past when biographers thought it necessary to apologize for the paucity of the adventures which they could recall and the obscurity of the achievements which their heroes might accomplish. We have gone far in the opposite direction, and are wont to relate in extenso details decidedly trivial, and to reproduce in imposing type correspondence which was scarcely worth the postage of the original manuscript. Our sense of the intrinsic interest of Humanity, as depicted either in biography or fiction,—that is, of the character of the personages of the drama going on upon our little stage,—has continually risen, while that of the action of the piece,—the “incidents” which our fathers chiefly regarded,—has fallen into the second plane. I fear I have been guilty in this book of recording many trifling memories and of reproducing some letters of little importance; but only through small touches could a happy childhood and youth be possibly depicted: and all the Letters have, I think, a certain value as relics and tokens of friendship, if not as expressions (as many of them are) of opinions carrying the weight of honoured names.

As regards these Letters (exclusively, of course, those of friends and correspondents now dead), I earnestly beg the heirs of the writers to pardon me if I have not asked their permission for the publication of them. To have ascertained, in the first place, who such representatives are and where they might be addressed, would, in many cases, have been a task presenting prohibitive difficulties; and as the contents of the Letters are wholly honourable to the heads and hearts of their authors, I may fairly hope that surviving relatives will be pleased that they should see the light, and will not grudge the testimony they bear to kindly sentiments entertained towards myself.[1]

There is in this book of mine a good deal of “Old Woman’s Gossip,” (I hope of a harmless sort), concerning many interesting men and women with whom it was my high privilege to associate freely twenty, thirty and forty years ago. But if it correspond at all to my design, it is not only, or chiefly, a collection of social sketches and friendly correspondence. I have tried to make it the true and complete history of a woman’s existence as seen from within; a real LIFE, which he who reads may take as representing fairly the joys, sorrows and interests, the powers and limitations, of one of my sex and class in the era which is now drawing to a close. The world when I entered it was a very different place from the world I must shortly quit, most markedly so as regards the position in it of women and of persons like myself holding heterodox opinions, and my experience practically bridges the gulf which divides the English ancien régime from the new.

Whether my readers will think at the end of these volumes that such a life as mine was worth recording I cannot foretell; but that it has been a “Life Worth Living” I distinctly affirm; so well worth it, that,—though I entirely believe in a higher existence hereafter, both for myself and for those whose less happy lives on earth entitle them far more to expect it from eternal love and justice,—I would gladly accept the permission to run my earthly race once more from beginning to end, taking sunshine and shade just as they have flickered over the long vista of my seventy years. Even the retrospect of my life in these volumes has been a pleasure; a chewing of the cud of memories,—mostly sweet, none very bitter,—while I lie still a little while in the sunshine, ere the soon-closing night.

F. P. C.

CHAP. PAGE INTRODUCTION v PREFACE xxvii I. FAMILY AND HOME 1 II. CHILDHOOD 29 III. SCHOOL AND AFTER 55 IV. RELIGION 79 V. MY FIRST BOOK 107 VI. IRELAND IN THE FORTIES. THE PEASANTRY 135 VII. IRELAND IN THE FORTIES. THE GENTRY 163 VIII. UPROOTED 201 IX. LONG JOURNEY 217 X. BRISTOL. REFORMATORIES AND RAGGED SCHOOLS 273 XI. BRISTOL. THE SICK IN THE WORKHOUSE 301 XII. BRISTOL. WORKHOUSE GIRLS 325 XIII. BRISTOL FRIENDS 341 XIV. ITALY. 1857–1879 363 XV. MY LITERARY LIFE IN LONDON 397 XVI. MY JOURNALIST LIFE IN LONDON 427 XVII. MY SOCIAL LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES 441 XVIII. MY SOCIAL LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES 517 XIX. THE CLAIMS OF WOMEN 581 XX. THE CLAIMS OF BRUTES 613 XXI. MY HOME IN WALES 693 INDEX 713

ERRATA

For Berwick read Bewick, p. 179, last line. For Goldsmiths read Goldschmidts, p. 237, 8 lines from bottom. For Goodwin read Godwin, p. 257, line 12. For Macpelah read Machpelah, p. 237, line 12.

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I. FAMILY AND HOME.

I have enjoyed through life the advantage of being, in the true sense of the words, “well-born.” My parents were good and wise; honourable and honoured; sound in body and in mind. From them I have inherited a physical frame which, however defective even to the verge of grotesqueness from the æsthetic point of view, has been, as regards health and energy, a source of endless enjoyment to me. From childhood till now in my old age—except during a few years interval of lameness from an accident,—mere natural existence has always been to me a positive pleasure. Exercise and rest, food and warmth, work, play and sleep, each in its turn has been delightful; and my spirits, though of course now no longer as gay as in youth, have kept a level of cheerfulness subject to no alternatives of depression save under the stress of actual sorrow. How much of the optimism which I am aware has coloured my philosophy ought to be laid to the account of this bodily bien être, it would be superfluous to enquire too nicely. At least I may fairly maintain that, as Health is the normal condition of existence, the views which a particularly healthy person takes of things are presumably more sound than those adopted by one habitually in the abnormal condition of an invalid.

As regards the inheritance of mental faculties, of which so much has been talked of late years, I cannot trace it in my own experience in any way. My father was a very able, energetic man; but his abilities all lay in the direction of administration, while those of my dear mother were of the order which made the charming hostess and cultivated member of society with the now forgotten grace of the eighteenth century. Neither paternal nor maternal gifts or graces have descended to me; and such faculties as have fallen to my lot have been of a different kind; a kind which, I fear, my good father and his forbears would have regarded as incongruous and unseemly for a daughter of their house to exhibit. Sometimes I have pictured to myself the shock which “The old Master” would have felt could he have seen me—for example—trudging three times a week for seven years to an office in the purlieus of the Strand to write articles for a half-penny newspaper. Not one of my ancestors, so far as I have heard, ever dabbled in printer’s ink.

My brothers were all older than I; the eldest eleven, the youngest five years older; and my mother, when I was born, was in her forty-seventh year; a circumstance which perhaps makes it remarkable that the physical energy and high animal spirits of which I have just made mention came to me in so large a share. My old friend Harriet St. Leger, Fanny Kemble’s “dear H. S.,” who knew us all well, said to me one day laughing: “You know you are your Father’s Son!” Had I been a man, and had possessed my brother’s facilities for entering Parliament or any profession,[2] I have sometimes dreamed I could have made my mark and done some masculine service to my fellow-creatures. But the woman’s destiny which God allotted to me has been, I do not question, the best and happiest for me; nor have I ever seriously wished it had been otherwise, albeit I have gone through life without that interest which has been styled “woman’s whole existence.” Perhaps if this book be found to have any value it will partly consist in the evidence it must afford of how pleasant and interesting, and withal, I hope, not altogether useless a life is open to a woman, though no man has ever desired to share it, nor has she seen the man she would have wished to ask her to do so. The days which many maidens my contemporaries and acquaintances,—

“Lost in wooing In watching and pursuing,”—

(or in being pursued, which comes to the same thing); were spent by me, free from all such distractions, in study and in the performance of happy and healthful filial and housewifely duties. Destiny, too, was kind to me, likewise, by relieving me from care respecting the other great object of human anxiety,—to wit, Money. The prophet’s prayer, “Give me neither poverty nor riches” was granted to me, and I have probably needed to spend altogether fewer thoughts on £ s. d. than could happen to anyone who has either to solve the problems “How to keep the Wolf from the door” and “How to make both ends meet?” or “How, justly and conscientiously, to expend a large income?” Wealth has only come to me in my old age, and now it is easy to know how to spend it. Thus it has happened that in early womanhood and middle life I enjoyed a degree of real leisure of mind possessed by few; and to it, I think, must be chiefly attributed anything which in my doings may have worn the semblance of exceptional ability. I had good, sound working brains to start with, and much fewer hindrances than the majority of women in improving and employing them. Voilà tout.

I began by saying that I was well-born in the true sense of the words, being the child of parents morally good and physically sound. I reckon it also to have been an advantage,—though immeasurably a minor one,—to have been well-born, likewise, in the conventional sense. My ancestors, it is true, were rather like those of Sir Leicester Dedlock, “chiefly remarkable for never having done anything remarkable for so many generations.”[3] But they were honourable specimens of county squires; and never, during the four centuries through which I have traced them, do they seem to have been guilty of any action of which I need to be ashamed.

My mother’s father was Captain Thomas Conway, of Morden Park, representative of a branch of that family. Her only brother was Adjutant General Conway, whose name Lord Roberts has kindly informed me is still, after fifty years, an “honoured word in Madras.” My father’s progenitors were, from the fifteenth century, for many generations owners of Swarraton, now Lord Ashburton’s beautiful “Grange” in Hampshire; the scene of poor Mrs. Carlyle’s mortifications. While at Swarraton the heads of the family married, in their later generations, the daughters of Welborne of Allington; of Sir John Owen; of Sir Richard Norton of Rotherfield (whose wife was the daughter of Bishop Bilson, one of the translators of the Bible); and of James Chaloner, Governor of the Isle of Man, one of the Judges of Charles I. The wife of this last remarkable man was Ursula Fairfax, niece of Lord Fairfax.[4]

On one occasion only do the Cobbes of Swarraton seem to have transcended the “Dedlock” programme. Richard Cobbe was Knight of the Shire for Hants in Cromwell’s short Parliament of 1656, with Richard Cromwell for a colleague. What he did therein History saith not! The grandson of this Richard Cobbe, a younger son named Charles, went to Ireland in 1717 as Chaplain to the Duke of Bolton with whom he was connected through the Norton’s; and a few years later he was appointed Archbishop of Dublin,—a post which he held with great honour until his death in 1765. On every occasion when penal laws against Catholics were proposed in the Irish House of Lords Archbishop Cobbe contended vigorously against them, dividing the House again and again on the Bills; and his numerous letters and papers in the Irish State-Paper office (as Mr. Froude has assured me after inspection) bear high testimony to his liberality and integrity in that age of corruption. Two traditions concerning him have a certain degree of general interest. One, that John Wesley called upon him at his country house,—my old home, Newbridge;—and that the interview was perfectly friendly; Wesley approving himself and his work to the Archbishop’s mind. The other is; that when Handel came to Dublin, bringing with him the MS. of the Messiah, of which he could not succeed in obtaining the production in London, Archbishop Cobbe, then Bishop of Kildare, took lively interest in the work, and under his patronage, as well as that of several Irishmen of rank, the great Oratorio was produced in Dublin.

Good Archbishop Cobbe had not neglected the affairs of his own household. He bought considerable estates in Louth, Carlow, and Co. Dublin, and on the latter, about twelve miles north of Dublin and two miles from the pretty rocky coast of Portrane, he built his country house of Newbridge, which has ever since been the home of our family. As half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope the reader will look at the pictures of it which must be inserted in this book and think of it as it was in my youth, bright and smiling and yet dignified; bosomed among its old trees and with the green, wide-spreading park opened out before the noble granite perron of the hall door. There is another country house on the adjoining estate, Turvey, the property of Lord Trimleston, and I have often amused myself by comparing the two. Turvey is really a wicked-looking house, with half-moon windows which suggest leering eyes, and partition walls so thick that secret passages run through them; and bedrooms with tapestry and ruelles and hidden doors in the wainscot. There were there, also, when I was young, certain very objectionable pictures, beside several portraits of the “beauties” of Charles II.’s court, (to the last degree decolletées) who had been, no doubt, friends of the first master of the house, their contemporary. In the garden was a grotto with a deep cold bath in it, which, in the climate of Ireland, suggested suicide rather than ablution. Altogether the place had the same suggestiveness of “deeds of darkness” which I remember feeling profoundly when I went over Holyrood with Dr. John Brown; and it was quite natural to attach to Turvey one of the worst of the traditional Irish curses. This curse was pronounced by the Abbess of the neighbouring convent (long in ruins) of Grace-Dieu when Lord Kingsland, then lord of Turvey, had by some nefarious means induced the English Government of the day to make over the lands of the convent to himself. On announcing this intelligence in his own hall to the assembled nuns, the poor ladies took refuge very naturally in malediction, went down simultaneously on their knees, and repeated after their Abbess a denunciation of Heaven’s vengeance on the traitor. “There should never want an idiot or a lawsuit in the family; and the rightful heir should never see the smoke of the chimney.” Needless to add, lawsuits and idiots have been plentiful ever since, and, after several generations of absentees, Turvey stands in a treeless desert, and has descended in the world from lordly to humble owners.

How different was Newbridge! Built not by a dissolute courtier of Charles II., but by the sensible Whig, and eminently Protestant Archbishop, it has as open and honest a countenance as its neighbour has the reverse. The solid walls, about three feet and a-half thick in most parts, keep out the cold, but neither darken the large, lofty rooms, nor afford space for devious and secret passages. The house stands broadly-built and strong, not high or frowning; its Portland-stone colour warm against the green of Irish woods and grass. Within doors every room is airy and lightsome, and more than one is beautiful. There is a fine staircase out of the second hall, the walls of which are covered with old family pictures which the Archbishop had obtained from his elder brother, Col. Richard Chaloner Cobbe, who had somehow lost Swarraton, and whose line ended in an heiress, wife of the 11th Earl of Huntingdon. A long corridor downstairs was, I have heard, formerly hung from end to end with arms intended for defence in case of attack. When the Rebellion of 1798 took place the weapons were hidden in a hole into which I have peered, under the floor of a room off the great drawing-room, but what became of them afterwards I do not know. My father possessed only a few pairs of handsome pistols, two or three blunderbusses, sundry guns of various kinds, and his own regimental sword which he had used at Assaye. All these hung in his study. The drawing-room with its noble proportions and its fifty-three pictures by Vandyke, Ruysdael, Guercino, Vanderveldt and other old masters, was the glory of the house. In it the happiest hours of my life were passed.

Of this house and of the various estates bought and leased by the Archbishop his only surviving son, Thomas Cobbe, my great-grandfather, came into possession in the year 1765. Irreverently known to his posterity as “Old Tommy” this gentleman after the fashion of his contemporaries muddled away in keeping open house a good deal of the property, and eventually sold one estate and (what was worse) his father’s fine library. Per contra he made the remarkable collection of pictures of which I have spoken as adorning the walls of Newbridge. Pilkington, the author of the Dictionary of Painters, was incumbent of the little Vicarage of Donabate, and naturally somewhat in the relation of chaplain to the squire of Newbridge, who had the good sense to send him to Holland and Italy to buy the above-mentioned pictures, many of which are described in the Dictionary. Some time previously, when Pilkington had come out as an Art-critic, the Archbishop had remonstrated with him on his unclerical pursuit; but the poor man disarmed episcopal censure by replying, “Your Grace, I have preached for a dozen years to an old woman who can’t hear, and to a young woman who won’t hear; and now I think I may attend to other things!”

Thomas Cobbe’s wife’s name has been often before the public in connection with the story, told by Crabbe, Walter Scott and many others, of the lady who wore a black ribbon on her wrist to conceal the marks of a ghost’s fingers. The real ghost-seer in question, Lady Beresford, was confounded by many with her granddaughter Lady Eliza Beresford, or, as she was commonly called after her marriage, Lady Betty Cobbe. How the confusion came about I do not know, but Lady Betty, who was a spirited woman much renowned in the palmy days of Bath, was very indignant when asked any questions on the subject. Once she received a letter from one of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies-in-Waiting begging her to tell the Queen the true story. Lady Betty in reply “presented her compliments but was sure the Queen of England would not pry into the private affairs of her subjects, and had no intention of gratifying the impertinent curiosity of a Lady-in-Waiting!” Considerable labour was expended some years ago by the late Primate (Marcus Beresford) of Ireland, another descendant of the ghost-seer in identifying the real personages and dates of this curious tradition. The story which came to me directly through my great-aunt, Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady Betty’s favourite daughter, was, that the ghost was John Le Poer, Second Earl of Tyrone; and the ghost-seer was his cousin, Nichola Hamilton, daughter of Lord Glerawly, wife of Sir Tristram Beresford. The cousins had promised each other to appear,—whichever of them first departed this life,—to the survivor. Lady Beresford, who did not know that Lord Tyrone was dead, awoke one night and found him sitting by her bedside. He gave her (so goes the story) a short, but, under the circumstances, no doubt impressive lesson, in the elements of orthodox theology; and then to satisfy her of the reality of his presence, which she persisted in doubting, he twisted the curtains of her bed through a ring in the ceiling, placed his hand on a wardrobe and left on it the ominous mark of five burning fingers (the late Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor of Ardgillan Castle told me he had seen this wardrobe!) and finally touched her wrist, which shrunk incontinently and never recovered its natural hue. Before he vanished the Ghost told Lady Beresford that her son should marry his brother’s daughter and heiress; and that she herself should die at the birth of a child after a second marriage, in her forty-second year. All these prophecies, of course, came to pass. From the marriage of Sir Marcus Beresford with the ghost’s niece, Catharine, Baroness Le Poer of Curraghmore, has descended the whole clan of Irish Beresfords. He was created Earl of Tyrone; his eldest son was the first Marquis of Waterford; another son was Archbishop of Tuam, created Lord Decies; and his fifth daughter was the Lady Betty Cobbe, my great-grandmother, concerning whom I have told this old story. In these days of Psychological Research I could not take on myself to omit it, though my own private impression is, that Lady Beresford accidentally gave her wrist a severe blow against her bedstead while she was asleep; and that, by a law of dreaming which I have endeavoured to trace in my essay on the subject, her mind instantly created the myth of Lord Tyrone’s apparition. Allowing for a fair amount of subsequent agglomeration of incidents and wonders in the tradition, this hypothesis, I think quite meets the exigencies of the case; and in obedience to the law of Parsimony, we need not run to a preternatural explanation of the Black Ribbon on the Wrist, no doubt the actual nucleus of the tale.

I do not _dis_believe in ghosts; but unfortunately I have never been able comfortably to believe in any particular ghost-story. The overwhelming argument against the veracity of the majority of such narrations is, that they contradict the great truth beautifully set forth by Southey—

“They sin who tell us Love can die!— With life all other passions fly All others are but vanity— In Heaven, Ambition cannot dwell, Nor Avarice in the vaults of hell. Earthly these passions as of earth, They perish where they had their birth— But Love is indestructible....”

The ghost of popular belief almost invariably exhibits the survival of Avarice, Revenge, or some other thoroughly earthly passion, while for the sake of the purest, noblest, tenderest Love scarcely ever has a single Spirit of the departed been even supposed to return to comfort the heart which death has left desolate. The famous story of Miss Lee is one exception to this rule, and so is another tale which I found recorded in an MS. Memorandum in the writing of my uncle the Rev. Henry Cobbe, Rector of Templeton (died 1823).

“Lady Moira[5] was at one time extremely uneasy about her sister, Lady Selina Hastings, from whom she had not heard for a considerable time. One night she dreamed that her sister came to her, sat down by her bedside, and said to her, ‘My dear sister, I am dying of fever. They will not tell you of it because of your situation’ (she was then with child), ‘but I shall die, and the account will be brought to your husband by letter directed like a foreign one in a foreign hand.’ She told her dream to her attendant, Mrs. Moth, as soon as she awoke, was extremely unhappy for letters, till at length, the day after, there arrived one, directed as she had been told, which contained an account of her sister’s death. It had been written by her brother, Lord Huntingdon, and in a feigned hand, lest she should ask to know the contents.

“She had many other extraordinary dreams, and it is very remarkable that after the death of her attendant, Moth, who had educated her and her children, and was the niece of the famous Bishop Hough, that she (Moth) generally took a part in them, particularly if they related to any loss in her family. Indeed, I believe she never dreamed of her except when she was to undergo a loss. Lady Granard told me an instance of this: Her second son Colonel Rawdon died very suddenly. He had not been on good terms with Lady Moira for some time. One night she dreamed that Moth came into the room, and upon her asking her what she wanted she said, ‘My lady, I am come to bring the Colonel to you.’ Then he entered, came near her, and coming within the curtains, sat on the bed and said, ‘My dearest mother, I am going a very long journey, and I cannot bear to go without the assurance of your forgiveness.’ Then she threw her arms about his neck and said, ‘Dear Son, can you doubt my forgiving you? But where are you going?’ He replied, ‘A long journey, but I am happy now that I have seen you.’ The next day she received an account of his death.

“About a fortnight before her death, when Lady Granard and Lady Charlotte Rawdon, her daughters, were sitting up in her room, she awoke suddenly, very ill and very much agitated, saying that she had dreamed that Mrs. Moth came into her room. When she saw her she was so full of the idea that evils always attended her appearance that she said, ‘Ah, Moth, I fear you are come for my Selina’ (Lady G.). Moth replied, ‘No, my Lady, but I am come for Mr. John.’ They gave her composing drops and soothed her; she soon fell asleep, and from that time never mentioned her son’s name nor made any inquiry about him; but he died on the very day of her dream, though she never knew it.”

Old Thomas Cobbe and after him his only son, Charles Cobbe, represented the (exceedingly-rotten) Borough of Swords for a great many years in the Irish Parliament, which was then in its glory, resonant with the eloquence of Flood (who had married Lady Betty’s sister, Lady Jane) and of Henry Grattan. On searching the archives of Dublin, however, in the hope of discovering that our great-grandfather had done some public good in his time, my brother and I had the mortification to find that on the only occasion when reference was made to his name, it was in connection with charges of bribery and corruption! On the other hand, it is recorded to his honour that he was almost the only one among the Members of the Irish Parliament who voted for the Union, and yet refused either a peerage or money compensation for his seat. Instead of these he obtained for Swords some educational endowments by which I believe the little town still profits. In the record of corruption sent by Lord Randolph Churchill to the Times (May 29th, 1893), in which appears a charge of interested motives against nearly every Member of the Irish Parliament of 1784, “Mr. Cobbe” stands honourably alone as without any “object” whatever.

Thomas Cobbe’s two daughters, my great-aunts and immediate predecessors as the Misses Cobbe, of Newbridge, (my grandfather having only sons) differed considerably in all respects from their unworthy niece. They occupied, so said tradition, the large cheerful room which afterwards became my nursery. A beam across the ceiling still bore, in my time, a large iron staple firmly fixed in the centre from whence had dangled a hand-swing. On this swing my great-aunts were wont to hang by their arms, to enable their maids to lace their stays to greater advantage. One of them, afterwards the Hon. Mrs. Henry Pelham, Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Caroline, likewise wore the high-heeled shoes of the period; and when she was an aged woman she showed her horribly deformed feet to one of my brothers, and remarked to him: “See, Tom, what comes of high-heeled shoes!” I am afraid many of the girls now wearing similarly monstrous foot-gear will learn the same lesson too late. Mrs. Pelham, I have heard, was the person who practically brought the house about the ears of the unfortunate Queen Caroline; being the first to throw up her appointment at Court when she became aware of the Queen’s private on-goings. Her own character stood high; and the fact that she would no longer serve the Queen naturally called attention to all the circumstances. Bad as Queen Caroline was, George the Fourth was assuredly worse than she. In his old age he was personally very disgusting. My mother told me that when she received his kiss on presentation at his Drawing-Room, the contact with his face was sickening, like that with a corpse. I still possess the dress she wore on that occasion.

Mrs. Pelham’s sister married Sir Henry Tuite, of Sonnagh, and for many years of her widowhood lived in the Circus, Bath, and perhaps may still be remembered there by a few as driving about her own team of four horses in her curricle, in days when such doings by ladies were more rare than they are now.

The only brother of these two Miss Cobbes of the past, Charles Cobbe, of Newbridge, M.P., married Anne Power Trench, of Garbally, sister of the first Earl of Clancarty. The multitudinous clans of Trenches and Moncks, in addition to Lady Betty’s Beresford relations, of course thenceforth adopted the habit of paying visitations at Newbridge. Arriving by coachloads, with trains of servants, they remained for months at a time. A pack of hounds was kept, and the whole train de vie was liberal in the extreme. Naturally, after a certain number of years of this kind of thing, embarrassments beset the family finances; but fortunately at the crisis Lady Betty came under the influence of her husband’s cousin, the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon, and ere long renounced the vanities and pleasures of the world, and persuaded her husband to retire with her and live quietly at Bath, where they died and were buried in Weston churchyard. Fifty years afterwards I found in the library at Newbridge the little batch of books which had belonged to my great-grandmother in this phase of her life, and were marked by her pencil: Jacob Boehmen and the Life of Madame Guyon being those which I now recall. The peculiar, ecstatic pietism which these books breathe, differing toto cœlo from the “other worldliness” of the divines of about 1810, with whose works the “Good-book Rows” of our library were replenished, impressed me very vividly.[6]

I have often tried to construct in my mind some sort of picture of the society which existed in Ireland a hundred years ago, and moved in those old rooms wherein the first half of my life was spent, but I have found it a very baffling undertaking. Apparently it combined a considerable amount of æsthetic taste with traits of genuine barbarism; and high religious pretension with a disregard of everyday duties and a penchant for gambling and drinking which would now place the most avowedly worldly persons under a cloud of opprobrium. Card-playing was carried on incessantly. Tradition says that the tables were laid for it on rainy days at 10 o’clock in the morning in Newbridge drawing-room; and on every day in the interminable evenings which followed the then fashionable four o’clock dinner. My grandmother was so excellent a whist-player that to extreme old age in Bath she habitually made a small, but appreciable, addition to her income out of her “card purse”; an ornamental appendage of the toilet then, and even in my time, in universal use. I was given one as a birthday present in my tenth year. She was greatly respected by all, and beloved by her five sons; every one of whom, however, she had sent out to be nursed at a cottage in the park till they were three years old. Her motherly duties were supposed to be amply fulfilled by occasionally stopping her carriage to see how the children were getting on.

As to the drinking among the men, (the women seem not to have shared the vice) it must have prevailed to a disgusting extent upstairs and downstairs. A fuddled condition after dinner was accepted as the normal one of a gentleman, and entailed no sort of disgrace. On the contrary, my father has told me that in his youth his own extreme sobriety gave constant offence to his grandfather, and to his comrades in the army; and only by showing the latter that he would sooner fight than be bullied to drink to excess could he obtain peace. Unhappily, poor man! while his grandfather, who seldom went to bed quite sober for forty years, lived to the fine old age of 82, enjoying good health to the last, his temperate grandson inherited the gout and in his latter years was a martyr thereto. Among the exceedingly beautiful old Indian and old Worcester china which belonged to Thomas Cobbe and showed his good taste and also the splendid scale of his entertainments (one dessert-service for 36 persons was magnificent) there stands a large goblet calculated to hold three bottles of wine. This glass (tradition avers) used to be filled with claret, seven guineas were placed at the bottom, and he who drank it pocketed the coin.

The behaviour of these Anglo-Irish gentry of the last century to their tenants and dependants seems to have proceeded on the truly Irish principle of being generous before you are just. The poor people lived in miserable hovels which nobody dreamed of repairing; but then they were welcome to come and eat and drink at the great house on every excuse or without any excuse at all. This state of things was so perfectly in harmony with Celtic ideas that the days when it prevailed are still sighed after as the “good old times.” Of course there was a great deal of Lady Bountiful business, and also of medical charity-work going forward. Archbishop Cobbe was fully impressed with the merits of the Tar-water so marvellously set forth by his suffragan, Bishop Berkeley, and I have seen in his handwriting in a book of his wife’s cookery receipts, a receipt for making it, beginning with the formidable item: “Take six gallons of the best French brandy.” Lady Betty was a famous compounder of simples, and of things that were not simple, and a “Chilblain Plaister” which bore her name, was not many years ago still to be procured in the chemists’ shops in Bath. I fear her prescriptions were not always of so unambitious a kind as this. One day she stopped a man on the road and asked his name—“Ah, then, my lady,” was the reply, “don’t you remember me? Why, I am the husband of the woman your ladyship gave the medicine to and she died the next day. Long life to your Ladyship!”

As I have said, the open-housekeeping at Newbridge at last came to an end, and the family migrated to No. 9 and No. 22, Marlborough Buildings, Bath, where two generations spent their latter years, died, and were buried in Weston churchyard, where I have lately restored their tombstones.

My grandfather died long before his father, and my father, another Charles Cobbe, found himself at eighteen pretty well his own master, the eldest of five brothers. He had been educated at Winchester, where his ancestors for eleven generations went to school in the old days of Swarraton; and to the end of his life he was wont to recite lines of Anacreon learned therein. But his tastes were active rather than studious, and disliking the idea of hanging about his mother’s house till his grandfather’s death should put him in possession of Newbridge, he listened with an enchanted ear to a glowing account which somebody gave him of India, where the Mahratta wars were just beginning.

Without much reflection or delay, he obtained a cornet’s commission in the 19th Light Dragoons and sailed for Madras. Very shortly he was engaged in active service under Wellesley, who always treated him with special kindness as another Anglo-Irish gentleman. He fought at many minor battles and sieges, and also at Assaye and Argaum; receiving his medal for these two, just fifty years afterwards. I shall write of this again a little further on in this book.

At last he fell ill of the fever of the country, which in those days was called “ague,” and was left in a remote place absolutely helpless. He was lying in bed one day in his tent when a Hindoo came in and addressed him very courteously, asking after his health. My father incautiously replied that he was quite prostrated by the fever. “What! Not able to move at all, not to walk a step?” said his visitor. “No! I cannot stir,” said my father. “Oh, in that case, then,” said the man,—and without more ado he seized my father’s desk, in which were all his money and valuables, and straightway made off with it before my father could summon his servants. His condition, thus left alone in an enemy’s country without money, was bad enough, but he managed to send a trusty messenger to Sir Arthur Wellesley, who promptly lent him all he required.

Finding that there was no chance of his health being sufficiently restored in India to permit of further active service, and the Mahratta wars being practically concluded, my father sold his commission of Lieutenant and returned to England, quietly letting himself into his mother’s house in Bath on his return by the latch-key, which he had carried with him through all his journeys. All his life long the impress made both on his outward bearing and character by those five years of war were very visible. He was a fine soldier-like figure, six feet high, and had ridden eighteen stone in his full equipment. His face was, I suppose, ugly, but it was very intelligent, very strong willed, and very unmistakeably that of a gentleman. He was under-jawed, very pale, with a large nose, and small, grey, very lively eyes; but he had a beautiful white forehead from which his hair, even in old age, grew handsomely, and his head was very well set on his broad shoulders. The photograph in the next volume represents him at 76. He rode admirably, and a better figure on horseback could not be seen. At all times there was an aspect of strength and command about him, which his vigorous will and (truth compels me to add) his not seldom fiery temper, fully sustained. On the many occasions when we had dinner parties at Newbridge, he was a charming, gay and courteous host; and I remember being struck, when he once wore a court dress and took me with him to pay his respects to a Tory Lord Lieutenant, by the contrast which his figure and bearing presented to that of nearly all the other men in similar attire. They looked as if they were masquerading, and he as if the lace-ruffles and plum coat and sword were his habitual dress. He had beautiful hands, of extraordinary strength.

One day he was walking with one of his lady cousins on his arm in the street. A certain famous prize-fighting bully, the Sayers or Heenan of the period, came up hustling and elbowing every passenger off the pavement. When my father saw him approach he made his cousin take his left arm, and as the prize-fighter prepared to shoulder him, he delivered with his right fist, without raising it, a blow which sent the ruffian fainting into the arms of his companions. Having deposited his cousin in a shop, my father went back for the sequel of the adventure, and was told that the “Chicken” (or whatever he was called) had had his ribs broken.

After his return from India, my father soon sought a wife. He flirted sadly, I fear, with his beautiful cousin, Louisa Beresford, the daughter of his great-uncle, the Archbishop of Tuam; and one of the ways in which he endeavoured to ingratiate himself was to carry about at all times a provision of bon-bons and barley-sugar with which to ply the venerable and sweet-toothed prelate; who was generally known as “The Beauty of Holiness.” How the wooing would have prospered cannot be told, but before it had reached a crisis a far richer lover appeared on the scene—Mr. Hope. “Anastasius Hope,” as he was called from the work of which he was the author, was immensely wealthy, and a man of great taste in art, but he had the misfortune to be so excessively ugly that a painter whom he offended by not buying his picture, depicted him and Miss Beresford as “Beauty and the Beast,” and exhibited his painting at the Bath Pump-room, where her brother, John Beresford (afterwards the second Lord Decies) cut it deliberately to pieces. An engagement between Mr. Hope and Miss Beresford was announced not long after the arrival of Mr. Hope in Bath; and my mother, then Miss Conway, going to pay a visit of congratulation to Miss Beresford, found her reclining on a blue silk sofa appropriately perusing The Pleasures of Hope. After the death of Mr. Hope (by whom she was the mother of Mr. Beresford-Hope, Mr. Adrian and Mr. Henry Hope), Mrs. Hope married the illegitimate son of her uncle, the Marquis of Waterford—Field Marshal Lord Beresford—a fine old veteran, with whom she long lived happily in the corner house in Cavendish Square, where my father and brothers always found a warm welcome.

At length, after some delays, my father had the great good fortune to induce my dear mother to become his wife, and they were married at Bath, March 13th, 1809. Frances Conway was, as I have said, daughter of Capt. Thomas Conway, of Morden Park. Her father and mother both died whilst she was young and she was sent to the famous school of Mrs. Devis, in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, of which I shall have something presently to say, and afterwards lived with her grandmother, who at her death bequeathed to her a handsome legacy, at Southampton. When her grandmother died, she being then sixteen years of age, received an invitation from Colonel and Mrs. Champion to live with them and become their adopted daughter. The history of this invitation is rather touching. Mrs. Champion’s parents had, many years before, suffered great reverses, and my mother’s grandfather had done much to help them, and, in particular, had furnished means for Mrs. Champion to go out to India. She returned after twenty years as the childless wife of the rich and kindly old Colonel, the friend of Warren Hastings, who having been commander-in-chief of the Forces of the East India Company had had a good “shake of the Pagoda tree.” She repaid to the grandchild the kindness done by the grandfather; and was henceforth really a mother to my mother, who dearly loved both her and Col. Champion. In their beautiful house, No. 29, Royal Crescent, she saw all the society of Bath in its palmiest days, Mrs. Champion’s Wednesday evening parties being among the most important in the place. My mother’s part as daughter of the house was an agreeable one, and her social talents and accomplishments fitted her perfectly for the part. The gentle gaiety, the sweet dignity and ease of her manners and conversation remain to me as the memory of something exquisite, far different even from the best manner and talk of my own or the present generation; and I know that the same impression was always made on her visitors in her old age. I can compare it to nothing but the delicate odour of the dried rose leaves with which her china vases were filled and her wardrobes perfumed.

I hardly know whether my mother were really beautiful, though many of the friends who remembered her in early womanhood spoke of her as being so. To me her face was always the loveliest in the world; indeed it was the one through which my first dawning perception of beauty was awakened. I can remember looking at her as I lay beside her on the sofa, where many of her suffering hours were spent, and suddenly saying, “Mamma you are so pretty!” She laughed and kissed me, saying, “I am glad you think so my child;” but that moment really brought the revelation to me of that wonderful thing in God’s creation, the Beautiful! She had fine features, a particularly delicate, rather thin-lipped mouth; magnificent chestnut hair, which remained scarcely changed in colour or quantity till her death at seventy years of age; and the clear, pale complexion and hazel eyes which belong to such hair. She always dressed very well and carefully. I never remember seeing her downstairs except in some rich dark silk, and with a good deal of fine lace about her cap and old-fashioned fichu. Her voice and low laughter were singularly sweet, and she possessed both in speaking and writing a full and varied diction which in later years she carefully endeavoured to make me share, instead of satisfying myself, in school-girl fashion, with making one word serve a dozen purposes. She was an almost omnivorous reader; and, according to the standard of female education in her generation, highly cultivated in every way; a good musician with a very sweet touch of the piano, and speaking French perfectly well.

Immediately after their marriage my parents took possession of Newbridge, and my father began earnestly the fulfilment of all the duties of a country gentleman, landlord and magistrate. My mother, indeed, used laughingly to aver that he “went to jail on their wedding day,” for he stopped at Bristol on the road and visited a new prison with a view to introducing improvements into Irish jails. It was due principally to his exertions that the county jail, the now celebrated Kilmainham, was afterwards erected.

Newbridge having been deserted for nearly thirty years, the woods had been sorely injured and the house and out-buildings dilapidated, but with my father’s energy and my mother’s money things were put straight; and from that time till his death in 1857 my father lived and worked among his people.

Though often hard pressed to carry out with a very moderate income all his projects of improvements, he was never in debt. One by one he rebuilt or re-roofed almost every cottage on his estate, making what had been little better than pig-styes, fit for human habitation; and when he found that his annual rents could never suffice to do all that was required in this way for his tenants in his mountain property, he induced my eldest brother, then just of age, to join with him in selling two of the pictures which were the heirlooms of the family and the pride of the house, a Gaspar Poussin and a Hobbema, which last now adorns the walls of Dorchester House. I remember as a child seeing the tears in his eyes as this beautiful painting was taken out of the room in which it had been like a perpetual ray of sunshine. But the sacrifice was completed, and 80 good stone and slate “Hobbema Cottages,” as we called them, soon rose all over Glenasmoil. Be it noted by those who deny every merit in an Anglo-Irish landlord, that not a farthing was added to the rent of the tenants who profited by this real act of self-denial.

All this however refers to later years. I have now reached to the period when I may introduce myself on the scene. Before doing so, however, I am tempted to print here a letter which my much valued friend, Miss Felicia Skene, of Oxford, has written to me on learning that I am preparing this autobiography. She is one of the very few now living who can remember my mother, and I gratefully quote what she has written of her as corroborating my own memories, else, perhaps, discounted by the reader as coloured by a daughter’s partiality.

April 4th, 1894.

My dearest Frances,—

I know well that in recalling the days of your bright youth in your grand old home, the most prominent figure amongst those who surrounded you then, must be that of your justly idolised mother, and I cannot help wishing to add my testimony, as of one unbiassed by family ties, to all that you possessed in her while she remained with you; and all that you so sadly lost when she was taken from you. To remember the châtelaine of Newbridge is to recall one of the fairest and sweetest memories of my early life. When I first saw that lovely, gracious lady with her almost angelic countenance and her perfect dignity of manner, I had just come from a gay Eastern capital,—my home from childhood, where no such vision of a typical English gentlewoman had ever appeared before me; and the impression she made upon me was therefore almost a revelation of what a refined, high-bred lady could be in all that was pure and lovely and of good report, and yet I think I only shared in the fascination which she exercised on all who came within the sphere of her influence. To me, almost a stranger, whom she welcomed as your friend under her roof, her exquisite courtesy would alone have been most charming, but for your sake she showed me all the tenderness of her sweet sympathetic nature, and it was no marvel to me that she was the idol of her children and the object of deepest respect and admiration to all who knew her.

Beautiful Newbridge with its splendid hospitality is like a dream to me now, of what a gentleman’s estate and country home could be in those days when ancient race and noble family traditions were still of some account.

Ever affectionately yours, F. M. F. SKENE.

13, New Inn Hall Street, Oxford.

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II. CHILDHOOD.

I was born on the morning of the 4th December, 1822; at sunrise. There had been a memorable storm during the night, and Dublin, where my father had taken a house that my mother might be near her doctor, was strewn with the wrecks of trees and chimney pots. My parents had already four sons, and after the interval of five years since the birth of the youngest, a girl was by no means welcome. I have never had reason, however, to complain of being less cared for or less well treated in every way than my brothers. If I have become in mature years a “Woman’s Rights’ Woman” it has not been because in my own person I have been made to feel a Woman’s Wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers’ kindness and tenderness to me have been unfailing from my infancy. I was their “little Fà’,” their pet and plaything when they came home for their holidays; and rough words not to speak of knocks,—never reached me from any of them or from my many masculine cousins, some of whom, as my father’s wards, I hardly distinguished in childhood from brothers.

A few months after my birth my parents moved to a house named Bower Hill Lodge in Melksham, which my father hired, I believe, to be near his boys at school, and I have some dim recollections of the verandah of the house, and also of certain raisins which I appropriated, and of suffering direful punishment at my father’s hands for the crime! Before I was four years old we returned to Newbridge, and I was duly installed with my good old Irish nurse, Mary Malone, in the large nursery at the end of the north corridor—the most charming room for a child’s abode I have ever seen. It was so distant from the regions inhabited by my parents that I was at full liberty to make any amount of noise I pleased; and from the three windows I possessed a commanding view of the stable yard, wherein there was always visible an enchanting spectacle of dogs, cats, horses, grooms, gardeners, and milkmaids. A grand old courtyard it is; a quadrangle about a rood in size surrounded by stables, coach-houses, kennels, a laundry, a beautiful dairy, a labourer’s room, a paint shop, a carpenter’s shop, a range of granaries and fruitlofts with a great clock in the pediment in the centre; and a well in the midst of all. Behind the stables and the kennels appear the tops of walnut and chestnut trees and over the coach-houses on the other side can be seen the beautiful old kitchen garden of six acres with its lichen-covered red brick walls, backed again by trees; and its formal straight terraces and broad grass walks.

In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to their full stature. When I compare such a lot as this (the common lot, of course, of English girls of the richer classes, blessed with good fathers and mothers) with the case of the hapless young creatures who are fed from infancy with insufficient and unwholesome food, perhaps dosed with gin and opium from the cradle, and who, even as they acquire language, learn foul words, curses and blasphemies,—when I compare, I say, my happy lot with the miserable one of tens of thousands of my brother men and sister women, I feel appalled to reflect, by how different a standard must they and I be judged by eternal Justice!

In such an infancy the events were few, but I can remember with amusement the great exercise of my little mind concerning a certain mythical being known as “Peter.” The story affords a droll example of the way in which fetishes are created among child-minded savages. One day, (as my mother long afterwards explained to me), I had been hungrily eating a piece of bread and butter out of doors, when one of the greyhounds, of which my father kept several couples, bounded past me and snatched the bread and butter from my little hands. The outcry which I was preparing to raise on my loss was suddenly stopped by the bystanders judiciously awakening my sympathy in Peter’s enjoyment, and I was led up to stroke the big dog and make friends with him. Seeing how successful was this diversion, my nurse thenceforward adopted the practice of seizing everything in the way of food, knives, &c., which it was undesirable I should handle, and also of shutting objectionably open doors and windows, exclaiming “O! Peter! Peter has got it! Peter has shut it!”—as the case might be. Accustomed to succumb to this unseen Fate under the name of Peter, and soon forgetting the dog, I came to think there was an all-powerful, invisible Being constantly behind the scenes, and had so far pictured him as distinct from the real original Peter that on one occasion when I was taken to visit at some house where there was an odd looking end of a beam jutting out under the ceiling, I asked in awe-struck tones: “Mama! is that Peter’s head?”

My childhood, though a singularly happy, was an unusually lonely one. My dear mother very soon after I was born became lame from a trifling accident to her ankle (ill-treated, unhappily, by the doctors) and she was never once able in all her life to take a walk with me. Of course I was brought to her continually; first to be nursed,—for she fulfilled that sacred duty of motherhood to all her children, believing that she could never be so sure of the healthfulness of any other woman’s constitution as of her own. Later, I seem to my own memory to have been often cuddled up close to her on her sofa, or learning my little lessons, mounted on my high chair beside her, or repeating the Lord’s Prayer at her knee. All these memories are infinitely sweet to me. Her low, gentle voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere of dignity which always surrounded her,—the very odour of her clothes and lace, redolent of dried roses, come back to me after three-score years with nothing to mar their sweetness. She never once spoke angrily or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me; and I—it is a comfort to think it—never, so far as I can recall, disobeyed or seriously vexed her. She had regretted my birth, thinking that she could not live to see me grow to womanhood, and shrinking from a renewal of the cares of motherhood with the additional anxiety of a daughter’s education. But I believe she soon reconciled herself to my existence, and made me, first her pet, and then her companion and even her counsellor. She told me, laughingly, how, when I was four years old, my father happening to be away from home she made me dine with her, and as I sat in great state beside her on my little chair I solemnly remarked: “Mama, is it not a very comflin thing to have a little girl?” an observation which she justly thought went to prove that she had betrayed sufficiently to my infantine perspicacity that she enjoyed my company at least as much as hers was enjoyed by me.

My nurse who had attended all my brothers, was already an elderly woman when recalled to Newbridge to take charge of me; and though a dear, kind old soul and an excellent nurse, she was naturally not much of a playfellow for a little child, and it was very rarely indeed that I had any young visitor in my nursery or was taken to see any of my small neighbours. Thus I was from infancy much thrown on my own resources for play and amusement; and from that time to this I have been rather a solitary mortal, enjoying above all things lonely walks and studies; and always finding my spirits rise in hours and days of isolation. I think I may say I have never felt depressed when living alone. As a child I have been told I was a very merry little chick, with a round, fair face and abundance of golden hair; a typical sort of Saxon child. I was subject then and for many years after, to furious fits of anger, and on such occasions I misbehaved myself exceedingly. “Nanno” was then wont peremptorily to push me out into the long corridor and bolt the nursery door in my face, saying in her vernacular, “Ah, then! you bould Puckhawn (audacious child of Puck)! I’ll get shut of you!” I think I feel now the hardness of that door against my little toes, as I kicked at it in frenzy. Sometimes, when things were very bad indeed, Nanno conducted me to the end of the corridor at the top of a very long winding stone stair, near the bottom of which my father occasionally passed on his way to the stables. “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! She’ll be good immadiently, Sir, you needn’t come upstairs, Sir!” Then, sotto voce, to me, “Don’t ye hear the Masther? Be quiet now, my darlint, or he’ll come up the stairs!” Of course, “the Masther” seldom or never was really within earshot on these occasions. Had he been so Nanno would have been the last person seriously to invoke his dreaded interference in my discipline. But the alarm usually sufficed to reduce me to submission. I had plenty of toddling about out of doors and sitting in the sweet grass making daisy and dandelion chains, and at home playing with the remnants of my brother’s Noah’s Ark, and a magnificent old baby-house which stood in one of the bedrooms, and was so large that I can dimly remember climbing up and getting into the doll’s drawing-room.

My fifth birthday was the first milestone on Life’s road which I can recall. I recollect being brought in the morning into my mother’s darkened bedroom (she was already then a confirmed invalid), and how she kissed and blessed me, and gave me childish presents, and also a beautiful emerald ring which I still possess, and pearl bracelets which she fastened on my little arms. No doubt she wished to make sure that whenever she might die these trinkets should be known to be mine. She and my father also gave me a Bible and Prayer Book, which I could read quite well, and proudly took next Sunday to church for my first attendance, when the solemn occasion was much disturbed by a little girl in a pew below howling for envy of my white beaver bonnet, displayed in the fore-front of the gallery which formed our family seat. “Why did little Miss Robinson cry?” I was deeply inquisitive on the subject, having then and always during my childhood regarded “best clothes” with abhorrence.

Two years later my grandmother, having bestowed on me, at Bath, a sky-blue silk pelisse, I managed nefariously to tumble down on purpose into a gutter full of melted snow the first day it was put on, so as to be permitted to resume my little cloth coat.

Now, aged five, I was emancipated from the nursery and allowed to dine thenceforward at my parents’ late dinner, while my good nurse was settled for the rest of her days in a pretty ivy-covered cottage with large garden, at the end of the shrubbery. She lived there for several years with an old woman for servant, who I can well remember, but who must have been of great age, for she had been under-dairymaid to my great great-grandfather, the Archbishop, and used to tell us stories of “old times.” This “old Ally’s” great grandchildren were still living, recently, in the family service in the same cottage which poor “Nanno” occupied. Ally was the last wearer of the real old Irish scarlet cloak in our part of the country; and I can remember admiring it greatly when I used to run by her side and help her to carry her bundle of sticks. Since those days, even the long blue frieze cloak which succeeded universally to the scarlet—a most comfortable, decent, and withal graceful peasant garment, very like the blue cotton one of the Arab fellah-women—has itself nearly or totally disappeared in Fingal.

On the retirement of my nurse, the charge of my little person was committed to my mother’s maid and housekeeper, Martha Jones. She came to my mother a blooming girl of eighteen, and she died of old age and sorrow when I left Newbridge at my father’s death half-a-century afterwards. She was a fine, fair, broad-shouldered woman, with a certain refinement above her class. Her father had been an officer in the army, and she was educated (not very extensively) at some little school in Dublin where her particular friend was Moore’s (the poet’s) sister. She used to tell us how Moore as a lad was always contriving to get into the school and romping with the girls. The legend has sufficient verisimilitude to need no confirmation!

“Joney” was indulgence itself, and under her mild sway, and with my mother for instructress in my little lessons of spelling and geography, Mrs. Barbauld, Dr. Watts and Jane Taylor, I was as happy a little animal as well might be. One day being allowed as usual to play on the grass before the drawing-room windows I took it into my head that I should dearly like to go and pay a visit to my nurse at her cottage at the end of the shrubbery. “Joney” had taken me there more than once, but still the mile-long shrubbery, some of it very dark with fir trees and great laurels, complicated with crossing walks, and containing two or three alarming shelter-huts and tonnelles (which I long after regarded with awe), was a tremendous pilgrimage to encounter alone. After some hesitation I set off; ran as long as I could, and then with panting chest and beating heart, went on, daring not to look to right or left, till (after ages as it seemed to me) I reached the little window of my nurse’s house in the ivy wall; and set up—loud enough no doubt—a call for “Nanno!” The good soul could not believe her eyes when she found me alone but, hugging me in her arms, brought me back as fast as she could to my distracted mother who had, of course, discovered my evasion. Two years later, when I was seven years old, I was naughty enough to run away again, this time in the streets of Bath, in company with a hoop, and the Town Crier was engaged to “cry” me, but I found my way home at last alone. How curiously vividly silly little incidents like these stand out in the misty memory of childhood, like objects suddenly perceived close to us in a fog! I seem now, after sixty years, to see my nurse’s little brown figure and white kerchief, as she rushed out and caught her stray “darlint” in her arms; and also I see a dignified, gouty gentleman leaning on his stick, parading the broad pavement of Bath Crescent, up whose whole person my misguided and muddy hoop went bounding in my second escapade. I ought to apologise perhaps to the reader for narrating such trivial incidents, but they have left a charm in my memory.

At seven I was provided with a nursery governess, and my dear mother’s lessons came to an end. So gentle and sweet had they been that I have loved ever since everything she taught me, and have a vivid recollection of the old map book from whence she had herself learned Geography, and of Mrs. Trimmer’s Histories, “Sacred” and “Profane”; not forgetting the almost incredibly bad accompanying volumes of woodcuts with poor Eli a complete smudge and Sesostris driving the nine kings (with their crowns, of course) harnessed to his chariot. Who would have dreamed we should now possess photos of the mummy of the real Sesostris (Rameses II.), who seemed then quite as mythical a personage as Polyphemus? To remember the hideous aberrations of Art which then illustrated books for children, and compare them to the exquisite pictures in “Little Folks,” is to realise one of the many changes the world has seen since my childhood. Mrs. Trimmer’s books cost, I remember being told, ten shillings apiece! My governess Miss Kinnear’s lessons, though not very severe (our old doctor, bless him for it! solemnly advised that I should never be called on to study after twelve o’clock), were far from being as attractive as those of my mother, and as soon as I learned to write, I drew on the gravel walk this, as I conceived, deeply touching and impressive sentence: “Lessons! Thou tyrant of the mind!” I could not at all understand my mother’s hilarity over this inscription, which proved so convincingly my need, at all events of those particular lessons of which Lindley Murray was the author. I envied the peacock who could sit all day in the sun, and who ate bowls-full of the griddle-bread of which I was so fond; and never was expected to learn anything? Poor bird, he came to a sad end. A dog terrified him one day and he took a great flight and was observed to go into one of the tall limes near the house but was never seen alive again. When the leaves fell in the autumn the rain-washed feathers and skeleton of poor Pe-ho were found wedged in a fork of the tree. He had met the fate of “Lost Sir Massingberd.”

Some years later, my antipathy to lessons having not at all diminished, I read a book which had just appeared, and of which all the elders of the house were talking, Keith’s Signs of the Times. In this work, as I remember, it was set forth that a “Vial” was shortly to be emptied into or near the Euphrates, after which the end of the world was to follow immediately. The writer accordingly warned his readers that they would soon hear startling news from the Euphrates. From that time I persistently inquired of anybody whom I saw reading the newspaper (a small sheet which in the Thirties only came three times a week) or who seemed well-informed about public affairs, “What news was there from the Euphrates?” The singular question at last called forth the inquiry, “Why I wanted to know?” and I was obliged to confess that I was hoping for the emptying of the “Vial” which would put an end to my sums and spelling lessons.

My seventh year was spent with my parents at Bath, where we had a house for the winter in James’ Square, where brothers and cousins came for the holidays, and in London, where I well remember going with my mother to see the Diorama in the Colosseum in Regent’s Park, of St. Peter’s, and a Swiss Cottage, and the statues of Tam o’ Shanter and his wife (which I had implored her to be allowed to see, having imagined them to be living ogres) and vainly entreating to be taken to see the Siamese Twins. This last longing, however, was gratified just thirty years afterwards. We travelled back to Ireland, posting all the way to Holyhead by the then new high road through Wales and over the Menai Bridge. My chief recollection of the long journey is humiliating. A box of Shrewsbury cakes, exactly like those now sold in the town, was bought for me in situ, and I was told to bring it over to Ireland to give to my little cousin Charley. I was pleased to give the cakes to Charley, but then Charley was at the moment far away, and the cakes were always at hand in the carriage; and the road was tedious and the cakes delicious; and so it came to pass somehow that I broke off first a little bit, and then another day a larger bit, till cake after cake vanished, and with sorrow and shame I was obliged to present the empty box to Charley on my arrival. Greediness alas! has been a besetting sin of mine all my life.

This Charley was a dear little boy, and about this date was occasionally my companion. His father, my uncle, was Captain William Cobbe, R.N., who had fought under Nelson, and at the end of the war, married and took a house near Newbridge, where he acted as my father’s agent. He was a fine, brave fellow, and much beloved by every one. One day, long after his sudden, untimely death, we heard from a coastguardsman who had been a sailor in his ship, that he had probably caught the disease of which he died in the performance of a gallant action, of which he had never told any one, even his wife. A man had fallen overboard from his ship one bitterly cold night in the northern seas near Copenhagen. My uncle, on hearing what had happened, jumped from his warm berth and plunged into the sea, where he succeeded in rescuing the sailor, but in doing so caught a chill which eventually shortened his days. He had five children, the eldest being Charley, some months younger than I. When my uncle came over to see his brother and do business, Charley, as he grew old enough to take the walk, was often allowed to come with him; and great was my enjoyment of the unwonted pleasure of a young companion. Considerably greater, I believe, than that of my mother and governess, who justly dreaded the escapades which our fertile little brains rarely failed to devise. We climbed over everything climbable by aid of the arrangement that Charley always mounted on my strong shoulders and then helped me up. One day my father said to us: “Children, there is a savage bull come, you must take care not to go near him.” Charley and I looked at each other and mutually understood. The next moment we were alone we whispered, “We must get some hairs of his tail!” and away we scampered till we found the new bull in a shed in the cow-yard. Valiantly we seized the tail, and as the bull fortunately paid no attention to his Lilliputian foes, we escaped in triumph with the hairs. Another time, a lovely April evening, I remember we were told it was damp, and that we must not go out of the house. We had discovered, however, a door leading out upon the roof,—and we agreed that “on” the house could not properly be considered “out” of the house; and very soon we were clambering up the slates, and walking along the parapet at a height of fifty or sixty feet from the ground. My mother, passing through one of the halls, observed a group of servants looking up in evident alarm and making signs to us to come down. As quickly as her feebleness permitted she climbed to our door of exit, and called to us over the roofs. Charley and I felt like Adam and Eve on the fatal evening after they had eaten the apple! After dreadful moments of hesitation we came down and received the solemn rebuke and condemnation we deserved. It was not a very severe chastisement allotted to us, though we considered it such. We were told that the game of Pope Joan, promised for the evening, should not be played. That was the severest, if not the only punishment, my mother ever inflicted on me.

On rainy days when Charley and I were driven to amuse ourselves in the great empty rooms and corridors upstairs, we were wont to discuss profound problems of theology. I remember one conclusion relating thereto at which we unanimously arrived. Both of us bore the name of “Power” as a second name, in honour of our grandmother Anne Trench’s mother, Fanny Power of Coreen. On this circumstance we founded the certainty that we should both go to Heaven, because we heard it said in church, “The Heavens and all the Powers therein.”

Alas poor “Little Charley” as everybody called him, after growing to be a fine six-foot fellow, and a very popular officer, died sadly while still young, at the Cape.

In those early days, let us say about my tenth year, and for long afterwards, it was my father’s habit to fill his house with all the offshoots of the family at Christmas, and with a good many of them for the Midsummer holidays, when my two eldest brothers and the youngest came home from Charterhouse and Oxford, and the third from Sandhurst. These brothers of mine were kind, dear lads, always gentle and petting to their little sister, who was a mere baby when they were schoolboys, and of course never really a companion to them. I recollect they once tried to teach me Cricket, and straightway knocked me over with a ball; and then carried me, all four in tears and despair, to our mother thinking they had broken my ribs. I was very fond of them, and thought a great deal about their holidays, but naturally in early years saw very little of them.

Beside my brothers, and generally coming to Newbridge at the same holiday seasons, there was a regiment of young cousins, male and female. My mother’s only brother, Adjutant General Conway, had five children, all of whom were practically my father’s wards during the years of their education at Haileybury and in a ladies’ boarding-school in London. Then, beside my father’s youngest brother William’s family of five, of whom I have already spoken, his next eldest brother, George, of the Horse Artillery (Lieut. General Cobbe in his later years), had five more, and finally the third brother, Thomas, went out to India in his youth as aide-de-camp to his cousin, the Marquis of Hastings, held several good appointments (at Moorshedabad and elsewhere), married and had ten children, (all of whom passed into my father’s charge) and finally died, poor fellow! on his voyage home from India, after thirty years’ absence. Thus there were, in fact, including his own children, thirty young people more or less my father’s wards, and all of them looking to Newbridge as the place where holidays were naturally spent, and to my father’s not very long purse as the resource for everybody in emergencies. One of them, indeed, carried this view of the case rather unfortunately far. A gentleman visiting us, happening to mention that he had lately been to Malta, we naturally asked him if he had met a young officer of our name quartered there? “Oh dear, yes! a delightful fellow! All the ladies adore him. He gives charming picnics, and gets nosegays for them all from Naples.” “I am afraid he can scarcely afford that sort of thing,” someone timidly observed. “Oh, he says,” replied the visitor, “that he has an old uncle somewhere who——Good Lord! I am afraid I have put my foot in it,” abruptly concluded our friend, noticing the looks exchanged round the circle.

My father’s brother Henry, my god-father, died early and unmarried. He was Rector of Templeton, and was very intimate with his neighbours there, the Edgeworths and Granards. The greater part of the library at Newbridge, as it was in my time, had been collected by him, and included an alarming proportion of divinity. The story of his life might serve for such a novel as his friend, Miss Edgeworth, would have written and entitled “Procrastination.” He was much attached for a long time to a charming Miss Lindsay, who was quite willing to accept his hand, had he offered it. My poor uncle, however, continued to flirt and dangle and to postpone any definite declaration, till at last the girl’s mother—who, I rather believe, was a Lady Charlotte Lindsay, well known in her generation—told her that a conclusion must be put to this sort of thing. She would invite Mr. Cobbe to their house for a fortnight, and during that time every opportunity should be afforded him of making a proposal in form, if he should be so minded. If, however, at the end of this probation, he had said nothing, Miss Lindsay was to give him up, and he was to be allowed no more chances of addressing her. The visit was paid, and nothing could be more agreeable or devoted than my uncle; but he did not propose to Miss Lindsay! The days passed, and as the end of the allotted time drew near, the lady innocently arranged a few walks en tête-à-tête, and talked in a manner which afforded him every opportunity of saying the words which seemed always on the tip of his tongue. At last the final day arrived. “My dear,” said Lady Charlotte (if such was the mother’s name) to her daughter, “I shall go out with the rest of the party for the whole day and leave you and Mr. Cobbe together. When I return, it must be decided one way or the other.”

The hours flew in pleasant and confidential talk—still no proposal! Miss Lindsay, who knew that the final minutes of grace were passing for her unconscious lover, once more despairingly tried, being really attached to him, to make him say something which she could report to her mother. As he afterwards averred he was on the very brink of asking her to marry him when he caught the sound of her mother’s carriage returning to the door, and said to himself, “I’ll wait for another opportunity.”

The opportunity was never granted to him. Lady Charlotte gave him his congé very peremptorily next morning. My uncle was furious, and in despair; but it was too late! Like other disappointed men he went off rashly, and almost immediately engaged himself (with no delay this time) to Miss Flora Long of Rood Ashton, Wiltshire, a lady of considerable fortune and attractions and of excellent connections, but of such exceedingly rigid piety of the Calvinistic type of the period, that I believe my uncle was soon fairly afraid of his promised bride. At all events his procrastinations began afresh. He remained at Templeton on one excuse after another, till Miss Long wrote to ask; “Whether he wished to keep their engagement?” My poor uncle was nearly driven now to the wall, but his health was bad and might prove his apology for fresh delays. Before replying to his Flora, he went to Dublin and consulted Sir Philip Crampton. After detailing his ailments, he asked what he ought to do, hoping (I am afraid) that the great surgeon would say, “O you must keep quiet!” Instead of this verdict Crampton said, “Go and get married by all means!” No further excuse was possible, and my poor uncle wrote to say he was on his way to claim his bride. Ere he reached her, however, while stopping at his mother’s house in Bath, he was found dead in his bed on the morning on which he should have gone to Rood Ashton. He must have expired suddenly while reading a good little book. All this happened somewhere about 1823.

To return to our old life at Newbridge, about 1833 and for many years afterwards, the assembling of my father’s brothers, and brothers’ wives and children at Christmas was the great event of the year in my almost solitary childhood. Often a party of twenty or more sat down every day for three or four weeks together in the dining-room, and we younger ones naturally spent the short days and long evenings in boyish and girlish sports and play. Certain very noisy and romping games—Blindman’s buff, Prisoner’s Bass, Giant, and Puss in the Corner and Hunt the Hare—as we played them through the halls below stairs, and the long corridors and rooms above, still appear to me as among the most delightful things in a world which was then all delight. As we grew a little older and my dear, clever brother Tom came home from Oxford and Germany, charades and plays and masquerading and dancing came into fashion. In short ours was, for the time, like other large country houses, full of happy young people, with the high spirits common in those old days. The rest of the year, except during the summer vacation, when brothers and cousins mustered again, the place was singularly quiet, and my life strangely solitary for a child. Very early I made a concordat with each of my four successive governesses, that when lessons were ended, precisely at twelve, I was free to wander where I pleased about the park and woods, to row the boat on the pond or ride my pony on the sands of the sea-shore two miles from the house. I was not to be expected to have any concern with my instructress outside the doors. The arrangement suited them, of course, perfectly; and my childhood was thus mainly a lonely one. I was so uniformly happy that I was (what I suppose few children are) quite conscious of my own happiness. I remember often thinking whether other children were all as happy as I, and sometimes, especially on a spring morning of the 18th March,—my mother’s birthday, when I had a holiday, and used to make coronets of primroses and violets for her,—I can recall walking along the grass walks of that beautiful old garden and feeling as if everything in the world was perfect, and my life complete bliss for which I could never thank God enough.

When the weather was too bad to spend my leisure hours out of doors I plunged into the library at haphazard, often making “discovery” of books of which I had never been told, but which, thus found for myself, were doubly precious. Never shall I forget thus falling by chance on Kubla Khan in its first pamphlet-shape. I also gloated over Southey’s Curse of Kehama, and The Cid and Scott’s earlier works. My mother did very wisely, I think, to allow me thus to rove over the shelves at my own will. By degrees a genuine appetite for reading awoke in me, and I became a studious girl, as I shall presently describe. Beside the library, however, I had a play-house of my own for wet days. There were, at that time, two garrets only in the house (the bedrooms having all lofty coved ceilings), and these two garrets, over the lobbies, were altogether disused. I took possession of them, and kept the keys lest anybody should pry into them, and truly they must have been a remarkable sight! On the sloping roofs I pinned the eyes of my peacock’s feathers in the relative positions of the stars of the chief constellations; one of my hobbies being Astronomy. On another wall I fastened a rack full of carpenter’s tools, which I could use pretty deftly on the bench beneath. The principal wall was an armoury of old court-swords, and home-made pikes, decorated with green and white flags (I was an Irish patriot at that epoch), sundry javelins, bows and arrows, and a magnificently painted shield with the family arms. On the floor of one room was a collection of shells from the neighbouring shore, and lastly there was a table with pens, ink and paper; implements wherewith I perpetrated, inter alia, several poems of which I can just recall one. The motif of the story was obviously borrowed from a stanza in Moore’s Irish Melodies. Even now I do not think the verses very bad for 12 or 13 years old.

THE FISHERMAN OF LOUGH NEAGH.

The autumn wind was roaring high And the tempest raved in the midnight sky, When the fisherman’s father sank to rest And left O’Nial the last and best Of a race of kings who once held sway From far Fingal to dark Lough Neagh.[7]

The morning shone and the fisherman’s bark Was wafted o’er those waters dark. And he thought as he sailed of his father’s name Of the kings of Erin’s ancient fame, Of days when ‘neath those waters green The banners of Nial were ever seen, And where the Knights of the Blood-Red-Tree Had held of old their revelry; And where O’Nial’s race alone Had sat upon the regal throne.

While the fisherman thought of the days of old The sun had left the western sky And the moon had risen a lamp of gold, Ere O’Nial deemed that the eve was nigh, He turned his boat to the mountain side And it darted away o’er the rippling tide; Like arrow from an Indian bow Shot o’er the waves the glancing prow.

The fisherman saw not the point beneath Which beckoned him on to instant death. It struck—yet he shrieked not, although his blood Ran chill at the thought of that fatal flood; And the voice of O’Nial was silent that day As he sank ‘neath the waters of dark Lough Neagh;

Like when Adam rose from the dust of earth And felt the joy of his glorious birth, And where’er he gazed, and where’er he trod, He felt the presence and smile of God,— Like the breath of morning to him who long Has ceased to hear the warblers’ song, And who, in the chamber of death hath lain With a sickening heart and a burning brain; So rushed the joy through O’Nial’s mind When the waters dark above him joined, And he felt that Heaven had made him be A spirit of light and eternity.

He gazed around, but his dazzled sight Saw not the spot from whence he fell, For beside him rose a spire so bright No mortal tongue could its splendours tell Nor human eye endure its light. And he looked and saw that pillars of gold The crystal column did proudly hold; And he turned and walked in the light blue sea Upon a silver balcony, Which rolled around the spire of light And laid on the golden pillars bright.

Descending from the pillars high, He passed through portals of ivory E’en to the hall of living gold The palace of the kings of old. The harp of Erin sounded high And the crotal joined the melody, And the voice of happy spirits round Prolonged and harmonized the sound.

“All hail, O’Nial!”—

and so on, and so on! I wrote a great deal of this sort of thing then and for a few years afterwards; and of course, like everyone else who has ever been given to waste paper and ink, I tried my hand on a tragedy. I had no real power or originality, only a little Fancy perhaps, and a dangerous facility for flowing versification. After a time my early ambition to become a Poet died out under the terrible hard mental strain and very serious study through which I passed in seeking religious faith. But I have always passionately loved poetry of a certain kind, specially that of Shelley; and perhaps some of my prose writings have been the better for my early efforts to cultivate harmony and for my delight in good similes. This last propensity is even now very strong in me, and whenever I write con amore, comparisons and metaphors come tumbling out of my head, till my difficulty is to exclude mixed ones!

My education at this time was of a simple kind. After Miss Kinnear left us to marry, I had another nursery governess, a good creature properly entitled “Miss Daly,” but called by my profane brothers, “the Daily Nuisance.” After her came a real governess, the daughter of a bankrupt Liverpool merchant who made my life a burden with her strict discipline and her “I-have-seen-better-days” airs; and who, at last, I detected in a trick which to me appeared one of unparalleled turpitude! She had asked me to let her read something which I had written in a copy-book and I had peremptorily declined to obey her request, and had locked up my papers in my beloved little writing-desk which my dear brother Tom had bought for me out of his school-boy’s pocket-money. The keys of this desk I kept with other things in one of the old-fashioned pockets which everybody then wore, and which formed a separate article of under clothing. This pocket my maid naturally placed at night on the chair beside my little bed, and the curtains of the bed being drawn, Miss W. no doubt after a time concluded I was asleep and cautiously approached the chair on tiptoe. As it happened I was wide awake, having at that time the habit of repeating certain hymns and other religious things to myself before I went to sleep; and when I perceived through the white curtain the shadow of my governess close outside, and then heard the slight jingle made by my keys as she abstracted them from my pocket, I felt as if I were witness of a crime! Anything so base I had never dreamed as existing outside story books of wicked children. Drawing the curtain I could see that Miss W. had gone with her candle into the inner room (one of the old “powdering closets” attached to all the rooms in Newbridge) and was busy with the desk which lay on the table therein. Very shortly I heard the desk close again with an angry click,—and no wonder! Poor Miss W., who no doubt fancied she was going to detect her strange pupil in some particular naughtiness, found the MS. in the desk, to consist of solemn religious “Reflections,” in the style of Mrs. Trimmer; and of a poetical description (in round hand) of the Last Judgment! My governess replaced the bunch of keys in my pocket and noiselessly withdrew, but it was long before I could sleep for sheer horror; and next day I, of course, confided to my mother the terrible incident. Nothing, I think, was said to Miss W. about it, but she was very shortly afterwards allowed to return to her beloved Liverpool, where, for all I know, she may be living still.

My fourth and last governess was a remarkable woman, a Mdlle. Montriou, a person of considerable force of character, and in many respects an admirable teacher. With her I read a good deal of solid history, beginning with Rollin and going on to Plutarch and Gibbon; also some modern historians. She further taught me systematically a scheme of chronology and royal successions, till I had an amount of knowledge of such things which I afterwards found was not shared by any of my schoolfellows. She had the excellent sense also to allow me to use a considerable part of my lesson hours with a map book before me, asking her endless questions on all things connected with the various countries; and as she was extremely well and widely informed, this was almost the best part of my instruction. I became really interested in these studies, and also in the great poets, French and English, to whom she introduced me. Of course my governess taught me music, including what was then called Thorough Bass, and now Harmony; but very little of the practical part of performance could I learn then or at any time. Independently of her, I read every book on Astronomy which I could lay hold of, and I well remember the excitement wherewith I waited for years for the appearance of the Comet of 1835, which one of these books had foretold. At last a report reached me that the village tailor had seen the comet the previous night. Of course I scanned the sky with renewed ardour, and thought I had discovered the desired object in a misty-looking star of which my planisphere gave no notice. My father however pooh-poohed this bold hypothesis, and I was fain to wait till the next night. Then, as soon as it was dark, I ran up to a window whence I could command the constellation wherein the comet was bound to show itself. A small hazy star—and a long train of light from it—greeted my enchanted eyes! My limbs could hardly bear me as I tore downstairs into the drawing-room, nor my voice publish the triumphant intelligence, “It is the comet!” “It has a tail!” Everybody (in far too leisurely a way as I considered) went up and saw it, and confessed that the comet it certainly must be, with that appendage of the tail! Few events in my long life have caused me such delightful excitement. This was in 1835.

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III. SCHOOL AND AFTER.

When my father, in 1836, had decided, by my governess’s advice, to send me to school, my dear mother, though already old and feeble, made the journey, long as it was in those days, from Ireland to Brighton to see for herself where I was to be placed, and to invoke the kindness of my schoolmistresses for me. We sailed to Bristol—a 30 hours’ passage usually, but sometimes longer,—and then travelled by postchaises to Brighton, taking, I think, three days on the road and visiting Stonehenge by the way, to my mother’s great delight. My eldest brother, then at Oxford, attended her and acted courier. When we came in sight of Brighton the lamps were lighted along the long perspective of the shore. Gas was still sufficiently a novelty to cause this sight to be immensely impressive to us all.

Next day my mother took me to my future tyrants, and fondly bargained (as she was paying enormously) that I should have sundry indulgences, and principally a bedroom to myself. A room was shown to her with only one small bed in it, and this she was told would be mine. When I went to it next night, heart broken after her departure, I found that another bed had been put up, and a schoolfellow was already asleep in it. I flung myself down on my knees by my own and cried my heart out, and was accordingly reprimanded next morning before the whole school for having been seen to cry at my prayers.[8]

The education of women was probably at its lowest ebb about half-a-century ago. It was at that period more pretentious than it had ever been before, and infinitely more costly than it is now; and it was likewise more shallow and senseless than can easily be believed. To inspire young women with due gratitude for their present privileges, won for them by my contemporaries, I can think of nothing better than to acquaint them with some of the features of school life in England in the days of their mothers. I say advisedly the days of their mothers, for in those of their grandmothers, things were by no means equally bad. There was much less pretence and more genuine instruction, so far as it extended.

For a moment let us, however, go back to these earlier grandmothers’ schools, say those of the year 1790 or thereabouts. From the reports of my own mother, and of a friend whose mother was educated in the same place, I can accurately describe a school which flourished at that date in the fashionable region of Queen Square, Bloomsbury. The mistress was a certain Mrs. Devis, who must have been a woman of ability for she published a very good little English Grammar for the express use of her pupils; also a Geography, and a capital book of maps, which possessed the inestimable advantage of recording only those towns, cities, rivers, and mountains which were mentioned in the Geography, and not confusing the mind (as maps are too apt to do) with extraneous and superfluous towns and hills. I speak with personal gratitude of those venerable books, for out of them chiefly I obtained such inklings of Geography as have sufficed generally for my wants through life; the only disadvantage they entailed being a firm impression, still rooted in my mind, that there is a “Kingdom of Poland” somewhere about the middle of Europe.

Beside Grammar and Geography and a very fair share of history (“Ancient” derived from Rollin, and “Sacred” from Mrs. Trimmer), the young ladies at Mrs. Devis’ school learned to speak and read French with a very good accent, and to play the harpsichord with taste, if not with a very learned appreciation of “severe” music. The “Battle of Prague” and Hook’s Sonatas were, I believe, their culminating achievements. But it was not considered in those times that packing the brains of girls with facts, or even teaching their fingers to run over the keys of instruments, or to handle pen and pencil, was the Alpha and Omega of education. William of Wykeham’s motto, “Manners makyth Manne,” was understood to hold good emphatically concerning the making of Woman. The abrupt speaking, courtesy-neglecting, slouching, slangy young damsel who may now perhaps carry off the glories of a University degree, would have seemed to Mrs. Devis still needing to be taught the very rudiments of feminine knowledge. “Decorum” (delightful word! the very sound of which brings back the smell of Maréchale powder) was the imperative law of a lady’s inner life as well as of her outward habits; and in Queen Square nothing that was not decorous was for a moment admitted. Every movement of the body in entering and quitting a room, in taking a seat and rising from it, was duly criticised. There was kept, in the back premises, a carriage taken off the wheels, and propped up en permanence, for the purpose of enabling the young ladies to practise ascending and descending with calmness and grace, and without any unnecessary display of their ankles. Every girl was dressed in the full fashion of the day. My mother, like all her companions, wore hair-powder and rouge on her cheeks when she entered the school a blooming girl of fifteen; that excellent rouge at five guineas a pot, which (as she explained to me in later years) did not spoil the complexion like ordinary compounds, and which I can witness really left a beautiful, clear skin when disused thirty years afterwards.

Beyond these matters of fashion, however,—so droll now to remember,—there must have been at Mrs. Devis’ seminary a great deal of careful training in what may be called the great Art of Society; the art of properly paying and receiving visits, of saluting acquaintances in the street and drawing-room; and of writing letters of compliment. When I recall the type of perfect womanly gentleness and high breeding which then and there was formed, it seems to me as if, in comparison, modern manners are all rough and brusque. We have graceful women in abundance still, but the peculiar old-fashioned suavity, the tact which made everybody in a company happy and at ease,—most of all the humblest individual present,—and which at the same time effectually prevented the most audacious from transgressing les bienséances by a hair; of that suavity and tact we seem to have lost the tradition.

The great Bloomsbury school, however, passed away at length, good Mrs. Devis having departed to the land where I trust the Rivers of Paradise formed part of her new study of Geography. Nearly half-a-century later, when it came to my turn to receive education, it was not in London but in Brighton that the ladies’ schools most in estimation were to be found. There were even then (about 1836) not less than a hundred such establishments in the town, but that at No. 32, Brunswick Terrace, of which Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts were mistresses, and which had been founded some time before by a celebrated Miss Poggi, was supposed to be nec pluribus impar. It was, at all events, the most outrageously expensive, the nominal tariff of £120 or £130 per annum representing scarcely a fourth of the charges for “extras” which actually appeared in the bills of many of the pupils. My own, I know, amounted to £1,000 for two years’ schooling.

I shall write of this school quite frankly, since the two poor ladies, well-meaning but very unwise, to whom it belonged have been dead for nearly thirty years, and it can hurt nobody to record my conviction that a better system than theirs could scarcely have been devised had it been designed to attain the maximum of cost and labour and the minimum of solid results. It was the typical Higher Education of the period, carried out to the extreme of expenditure and high pressure.

Profane persons were apt to describe our school as a Convent, and to refer to the back door of our garden, whence we issued on our dismal diurnal walks, as the “postern.” If we in any degree resembled nuns, however, it was assuredly not those of either a Contemplative or Silent Order. The din of our large double schoolrooms was something frightful. Sitting in either of them, four pianos might be heard going at once in rooms above and around us, while at numerous tables scattered about the rooms there were girls reading aloud to the governesses and reciting lessons in English, French, German, and Italian. This hideous clatter continued the entire day till we went to bed at night, there being no time whatever allowed for recreation, unless the dreary hour of walking with our teachers (when we recited our verbs), could so be described by a fantastic imagination. In the midst of the uproar we were obliged to write our exercises, to compose our themes, and to commit to memory whole pages of prose. On Saturday afternoons, instead of play, there was a terrible ordeal generally known as the “Judgment Day.” The two schoolmistresses sat side by side, solemn and stern, at the head of the long table. Behind them sat all the governesses as Assessors. On the table were the books wherein our evil deeds of the week were recorded; and round the room against the wall, seated on stools of penitential discomfort, we sat, five-and-twenty “damosels,” anything but “Blessed,” expecting our sentences according to our ill-deserts. It must be explained that the fiendish ingenuity of some teacher had invented for our torment a system of imaginary “cards,” which we were supposed to “lose” (though we never gained any) whenever we had not finished all our various lessons and practisings every night before bed-time, or whenever we had been given the mark for “stooping,” or had been impertinent, or had been “turned” in our lessons, or had been marked “P” by the music master, or had been convicted of “disorder” (e.g., having our long shoe-strings untied), or, lastly, had told lies! Any one crime in this heterogeneous list entailed the same penalty, namely, the sentence, “You have lost your card, Miss So and so, for such and such a thing;” and when Saturday came round, if three cards had been lost in the week, the law wreaked its justice on the unhappy sinner’s head! Her confession having been wrung from her at the awful judgment-seat above described, and the books having been consulted, she was solemnly scolded and told to sit in the corner for the rest of the evening! Anything more ridiculous than the scene which followed can hardly be conceived. I have seen (after a week in which a sort of feminine barring-out had taken place) no less than nine young ladies obliged to sit for hours in the angles of the three rooms, like naughty babies, with their faces to the wall; half of them being quite of marriageable age, and all dressed, as was de rigueur with us every day, in full evening attire of silk or muslin, with gloves and kid slippers. Naturally, Saturday evenings, instead of affording some relief to the incessant overstrain of the week, were looked upon with terror as the worst time of all. Those who escaped the fell destiny of the corner were allowed, if they chose to write to their parents, but our letters were perforce committed at night to the schoolmistress to seal, and were not as may be imagined, exactly the natural outpouring of our sentiments as regarded those ladies and their school.

Our household was a large one. It consisted of the two schoolmistresses and joint proprietors, of the sister of one of them and another English governess; of a French, an Italian, and a German lady teacher; of a considerable staff of respectable servants; and finally of twenty-five or twenty-six pupils, varying in age from nine to nineteen. All the pupils were daughters of men of some standing, mostly country gentlemen, members of Parliament, and offshoots of the peerage. There were several heiresses amongst us, and one girl whom we all liked and recognised as the beauty of the school, the daughter of Horace Smith, author of Rejected Addresses. On the whole, looking back after the long interval, it seems to me that the young creatures there assembled were full of capabilities for widely extended usefulness and influence. Many were decidedly clever and nearly all were well disposed. There was very little malice or any other vicious ideas or feelings, and no worldliness at all amongst us. I make this last remark because the novel of Rose, Blanche and Violet, by the late Mr. G. H. Lewes, is evidently intended in sundry details to describe this particular school, and yet most falsely represents the girls as thinking a great deal of each other’s wealth or comparative poverty. Nothing was further from the fact. One of our heiresses, I well remember, and another damsel of high degree, the granddaughter of a duke, were our constant butts for their ignorance and stupidity, rather than the objects of any preferential flattery. Of vulgarity of feeling of the kind imagined by Mr. Lewes, I cannot recall a trace.

But all this fine human material was deplorably wasted. Nobody dreamed that any one of us could in later life be more or less than an “Ornament of Society.” That a pupil in that school should ever become an artist, or authoress, would have been looked upon by both Miss Runciman and Miss Roberts as a deplorable dereliction. Not that which was good in itself or useful to the community, or even that which would be delightful to ourselves, but that which would make us admired in society, was the raison d’être of each acquirement. Everything was taught us in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing; miserably poor music, too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano. I can recall an amusing instance in which the order of precedence above described was naïvely betrayed by one of our schoolmistresses when she was admonishing one of the girls who had been detected in a lie. “Don’t you know, you naughty girl,” said Miss R. impressively, before the whole school: “don’t you know we had almost rather find you have a P——” (the mark of Pretty Well) “in your music, than tell such falsehoods?”

It mattered nothing whether we had any “music in our souls” or any voices in our throats, equally we were driven through the dreary course of practising daily for a couple of hours under a German teacher, and then receiving lessons twice or three times a week from a music master (Griesbach by name) and a singing master. Many of us, myself in particular, in addition to these had a harp master, a Frenchman named Labarre, who gave us lessons at a guinea apiece, while we could only play with one hand at a time. Lastly there were a few young ladies who took instructions in the new instruments, the concertina and the accordion!

The waste of money involved in all this, the piles of useless music, and songs never to be sung, for which our parents had to pay, and the loss of priceless time for ourselves, were truly deplorable; and the result of course in many cases (as in my own) complete failure. One day I said to the good little German teacher, who nourished a hopeless attachment for Schiller’s Marquis Posa, and was altogether a sympathetic person, “My dear Fraulein, I mean to practise this piece of Beethoven’s till I conquer it.” “My dear,” responded the honest Fraulein, “you do practice that piece for seex hours a day, and you do live till you are seexty, at the end you will not play it!” Yet so hopeless a pupil was compelled to learn for years, not only the piano, but the harp and singing!

Next to music in importance in our curriculum came dancing. The famous old Madame Michaud and her husband both attended us constantly, and we danced to their direction in our large play-room (lucus a non lucendo), till we had learned not only all the dances in use in England in that ante-polka epoch, but almost every national dance in Europe, the Minuet, the Gavotte, the Cachucha, the Bolero, the Mazurka, and the Tarantella. To see the stout old lady in her heavy green velvet dress, with furbelow a foot deep of sable, going through the latter cheerful performance for our ensample, was a sight not to be forgotten. Beside the dancing we had “calisthenic” lessons every week from a “Capitaine” Somebody, who put us through manifold exercises with poles and dumbbells. How much better a few good country scrambles would have been than all these calisthenics it is needless to say, but our dismal walks were confined to parading the esplanade and neighbouring terraces. Our parties never exceeded six, a governess being one of the number, and we looked down from an immeasurable height of superiority on the processions of twenty and thirty girls belonging to other schools. The governess who accompanied us had enough to do with her small party, for it was her duty to utilise these brief hours of bodily exercise by hearing us repeat our French, Italian or German verbs, according to her own nationality.

Next to Music and Dancing and Deportment, came Drawing, but that was not a sufficiently voyant accomplishment, and no great attention was paid to it; the instruction also being of a second-rate kind, except that it included lessons in perspective which have been useful to me ever since. Then followed Modern Languages. No Greek or Latin were heard of at the school, but French, Italian and German were chattered all day long, our tongues being only set at liberty at six o’clock to speak English. Such French, such Italian, and such German as we actually spoke may be more easily imagined than described. We had bad “Marks” for speaking wrong languages, e.g., French when we bound to speak Italian or German, and a dreadful mark for bad French, which was transferred from one to another all day long, and was a fertile source of tears and quarrels, involving as it did a heavy lesson out of Noel et Chapsal’s Grammar on the last holder at night. We also read in each language every day to the French, Italian and German ladies, recited lessons to them, and wrote exercises for the respective masters who attended every week. One of these foreign masters, by the way, was the patriot Berchet; a sad, grim-looking man of whom I am afraid we rather made fun; and on one occasion, when he had gone back to Italy, a compatriot, whom we were told was a very great personage indeed, took his classes to prevent them from being transferred to any other of the Brighton teachers of Italian. If my memory have not played me a trick, this illustrious substitute for Berchet was Manzoni, the author of the Promessi Sposi; a distinguished-looking middle-aged man, who won all our hearts by pronouncing everything we did admirable, even, I think, on the occasion when one young lady freely translated Tasso,—

“Fama e terre acquistasse,”

into French as follows:—

“Il acquit la femme et la terre!”

Naturally after (a very long way after) foreign languages came the study of English. We had a writing and arithmetic master (whom we unanimously abhorred and despised, though one and all of us grievously needed his instructions) and an “English master,” who taught us to write “themes,” and to whom I, for one, feel that I owe, perhaps, more than to any other teacher in that school, few as were the hours which we were permitted to waste on so insignificant an art as composition in our native tongue!

Beyond all this, our English studies embraced one long, awful lesson each week to be repeated to the schoolmistress herself by a class, in history one week, in geography the week following. Our first class, I remember, had once to commit to memory—Heaven alone knows how—no less than thirteen pages of Woodhouselee’s Universal History!

Lastly, as I have said, in point of importance, came our religious instruction. Our well-meaning schoolmistresses thought it was obligatory on them to teach us something of the kind, but, being very obviously altogether worldly women themselves, they were puzzled how to carry out their intentions. They marched us to church every Sunday when it did not rain, and they made us on Sunday mornings repeat the Collect and Catechism; but beyond these exercises of body and mind, it was hard for them to see what to do for our spiritual welfare. One Ash Wednesday, I remember, they provided us with a dish of salt-fish, and when this was removed to make room for the roast mutton, they addressed us in a short discourse, setting forth the merits of fasting, and ending by the remark that they left us free to take meat or not as we pleased, but that they hoped we should fast; “it would be good for our souls AND OUR FIGURES!”

Each morning we were bound publicly to repeat a text out of certain little books, called Daily Bread, left in our bedrooms, and always scanned in frantic haste while “doing-up” our hair at the glass, or gabbled aloud by one damsel so occupied while her room-fellow (there were never more than two in each bed-chamber) was splashing about behind the screen in her bath. Down, when the prayer-bell rang, both were obliged to hurry and breathlessly to await the chance of being called on first to repeat the text of the day, the penalty for oblivion being the loss of a “card.” Then came a chapter of the Bible, read verse by verse amongst us, and then our books were shut and a solemn question was asked. On one occasion I remember it was: “What have you just been reading, Miss S——?” Miss S—— (now a lady of high rank and fashion, whose small wits had been woolgathering) peeped surreptitiously into her Bible again, and then responded with just confidence, “The First Epistle, Ma’am, of General Peter.”

It is almost needless to add, in concluding these reminiscences, that the heterogeneous studies pursued in this helter-skelter fashion were of the smallest possible utility in later life; each acquirement being of the shallowest and most imperfect kind, and all real education worthy of the name having to be begun on our return home, after we had been pronounced “finished.” Meanwhile the strain on our mental powers of getting through daily, for six months at a time, this mass of ill-arranged and miscellaneous lessons, was extremely great and trying.

One droll reminiscence must not be forgotten. The pupils at Miss Runciman’s and Miss Roberts’ were all supposed to have obtained the fullest instruction in Science by attending a course of Nine Lectures delivered by a gentleman named Walker in a public room in Brighton. The course comprised one Lecture on Electricity, another on Galvanism, another on Optics, others I think, on Hydrostatics, Mechanics, and Pneumatics, and finally three, which gave me infinite satisfaction, on Astronomy.

If true education be the instilling into the mind, not so much Knowledge, as the desire for Knowledge, mine at school certainly proved a notable failure. I was brought home (no girl could travel in those days alone) from Brighton by a coach called the Red Rover, which performed, as a species of miracle, in one day the journey to Bristol, from whence I embarked for Ireland. My convoy-brother naturally mounted the box, and left me to enjoy the interior all day by myself; and the reflections of those solitary hours of first emancipation remain with me as lively as if they had taken place yesterday. “What a delightful thing it is,” so ran my thoughts “to have done with study! Now I may really enjoy myself! I know as much as any girl in our school, and since it is the best school in England, I must know all that it can ever be necessary for a lady to know. I will not trouble my head ever again with learning anything; but read novels and amuse myself for the rest of my life.”

This noble resolve lasted I fancy a few months, and then, depth below depth of my ignorance revealed itself very unpleasantly! I tried to supply first one deficiency and then another, till after a year or two, I began to educate myself in earnest. The reader need not be troubled with a long story. I spent four years in the study of History—constructing while I did so some Tables of Royal Successions on a plan of my own which enabled me to see at a glance the descent, succession and date of each reigning sovereign of every country, ancient and modern, possessing any History of which I could find a trace. These Tables I still have by me, and they certainly testify to considerable industry. Then the parson of our parish, who had been a tutor in Dublin College, came up three times a week for several years, and taught me a little Greek (enough to read the Gospels and to stumble through Plato’s Krito), and rather more geometry, to which science I took an immense fancy, and in which he carried me over Euclid and Conic Sections, and through two most delightful books of Archimedes’ spherics. I tried Algebra, but had as much disinclination for that form of mental labour as I had enjoyment in the reasoning required by Geometry. My tutor told me he was able to teach me in one lesson as many propositions as he habitually taught the undergraduates of Dublin College in two. I have ever since strongly recommended this study to women as specially fitted to counteract our habits of hasty judgment and slovenly statement, and to impress upon us the nature of real demonstration.

I also read at this time, by myself, as many of the great books of the world as I could reach; making it a rule always (whether bored or not) to go on to the end of each, and also following generally Gibbon’s advice, viz., to rehearse in one’s mind in a walk before beginning a great book all that one knows of the subject, and then, having finished it, to take another walk, and register how much has been added to our store of ideas. In these ways I read all the Faery Queen, all Milton’s poetry, and the Divina Commedia and Gerusalemme Liberata in the originals. Also (in translations) I read through the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, Pharsalia, and all or nearly all, Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, &c. There was a fairly good library at Newbridge, and I could also go when I pleased, and read in Archbishop Marsh’s old library in Dublin, where there were splendid old books, though none I think more recent than a hundred and fifty years before my time. My mother possessed a small collection of classics—Dryden, Pope, Milton, Horace, &c., which she gave me, and I bought for myself such other books as I needed out of my liberal pin-money. Happily, I had at that time a really good memory for literature, being able to carry away almost the words of passages which much interested me in prose or verse, and to bring them into use when required, though I had, oddly enough, at the same period so imperfect a recollection of persons and daily events that, being very anxious to do justice to our servants, I was obliged to keep a book of memoranda of the characters and circumstances of all who left us, that I might give accurate and truthful recommendations.

By degrees these discursive studies—I took up various hobbies from time to time—Astronomy, Architecture, Heraldry, and many others—centred more and more on the answers which have been made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil du Perron’s Zend Avesta (twice); and Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Menu; and all I could learn about the Greek and Alexandrian philosophers from Diogenes Laertius and the old translators (Taylor, of Norwich, and others) and a large Biographical Dictionary which we had in our library. Having always a passion for Synopses, I constructed, somewhere about 1840, a Table, big enough to cover a sheet of double-elephant paper, wherein the principal Greek philosophers were ranged,—their lives, ethics, cosmogonies and special doctrines,—in separate columns. After this I made a similar Table of the early Gnostics and other heresiarchs, with the aid of Mosheim, Sozomen, and Eusebius.

Does the reader smile to find these studies recorded as the principal concern of the life of a young lady from 16 to 20, and in fact to 35 years of age? It was even so! They were (beside Religion, of which I shall speak elsewhere) my supreme interest. As I have said in the beginning, I had neither cares of love, or cares of money to occupy my mind or my heart. My parents wished me to go a little into society when I was about 18, and I was, for the moment, pleased and interested in the few balls and drawing-rooms (in Dublin) to which my father and afterwards my uncle, General George Cobbe, conducted me. But I was rather bored than amused by my dancing partners, and my dear mother, already in declining years and completely an invalid, could never accompany me, and I pined for her motherly presence and guidance, the loss of which was only half compensated for by her comments on the long reports of all I had seen and said and done, as I sat on her bed, on my return home. By degrees also, my thoughts came to be so gravely employed by efforts to find my way to religious truth, that the whole glamour of social pleasures disappeared and became a weariness; and by the time I was 19 I begged to be allowed to stay at home and only to receive our own guests, and attend the occasional dinners in our neighbourhood. With some regret my parents yielded the point, and except for a visit every two or three years to London for a few weeks of sightseeing, and one or two trips in Ireland to houses of our relations, my life, for a long time, was perfectly secluded. I have found some verses in which I described it.

“I live! I live! and never to man More joy in life was given, Or power to make, as I can make, Of this bright world a heaven.

“My mind is free; my limbs are clad With strength which few may know, And every eye smiles lovingly; On earth I have no foe.

“With pure and peaceful pleasures blessed Speed my calm and studious days, While the noblest works of mightiest minds Lie open to my gaze.”

In one of our summer excursions I remember my father and one of my brothers and I lionized Winchester, and came upon an exquisite chapel, which was at that time, and perhaps still is, a sort of sanctuary of books, in the midst of a lovely, silent cloister. To describe the longing I felt then, and long after, to spend all my life studying there in peace and undisturbed, “hiving learning with each studious year,”—would be impossible!

I think there is a great, and it must be said lamentable, difference between the genuine passion for study such as many men and women in my time and before it experienced, and the hurried anxious gobbling up of knowledge which has been introduced by competitive examinations, and the eternal necessity for getting something else beside knowledge; something to be represented by M.A. or B.Sch., or, perhaps, by £ s. d.! When I was young there were no honours, no rewards of any kind for a woman’s learning; and as there were no examinations, there was no hurry or anxiety. There was only healthy thirst for knowledge of one kind or another, and of one kind after another. When I came across a reference to a matter which I did not understand, it was not then necessary, as it seems to be to young students now, to hasten over it, leaving the unknown name, or event, or doctrine, like an enemy’s fortress on the road of an advancing army. I stopped and sat down before it, perhaps for days and weeks, but I conquered it at last, and then went on my way strengthened by the victory. Recently, I have actually heard of students at a college for ladies being advised by their “coach” to skip a number of propositions in Euclid, as it was certain they would not be examined in them! One might as well help a climber by taking rungs out of his ladder! I can make no sort of pretensions to have acquired, even in my best days, anything like the instruction which the young students of Girton and Newnham and Lady Margaret Hall are so fortunate as to possess; and much I envy their opportunities for obtaining accurate scholarship. But I know not whether the method they follow can, on the whole, convey as much of the pure delight in learning as did my solitary early studies. When the summer morning sun rose over the trees and shone as it often did into my bedroom finding me still over my books from the evening before, and when I then sauntered out to take a sleep on one of the garden seats in the shrubbery, the sense of having learned something, or cleared up some hitherto doubted point, or added a store of fresh ideas to my mental riches, was one of purest satisfaction.

As to writing as well as reading, I had very early a great love of the art and frequently wrote small essays and stories, working my way towards something of good style. Our English master at school on seeing my first exercise (on Roman History, I think it was), had asked Miss Runciman whether she were sure I had written it unaided, and observed that the turn of the sentences was not girl-like, and that he “thought I should grow up to be a fine writer.” My schoolmistress laughed, of course, at the suggestion, and I fancy she thought less of poor Mr. Turnbull for his absurd judgment. But as men and women who are to be good musicians love their pianos and violins as children, so I early began to love that noble instrument, the English Language, and in my small way to study how to play upon it. At one time when quite young I wrote several imitations of the style of Gibbon and other authors, just as an exercise. Eventually without of course copying anybody in particular, I fell into what I must suppose to be a style of my own, since those familiar with it easily detect passages of my writing wherever they come across them. I was at a later time much interested in seeing many of my articles translated into French (chiefly in the French Protestant periodicals) and to note how little it is possible to render the real feeling of such words as those with which our tongue supplies us by those of that language. At a still later date, when I edited the Zoophile, I was perpetually disappointed by the failures of the best translators I could engage, to render my meaning. Among the things for which to be thankful in life, I think we, English, ought to assign no small place to our inheritance of that grand legacy of our forefathers, the English Language.

While these studies were going on, from the time I left school in 1838 till I left Newbridge in 1857, it may be noted that I had the not inconsiderable charge of keeping house for my father. My mother at once put the whole responsibility of the matter in my hands, refusing even to be told beforehand what I had ordered for the rather formal dinner parties of those days, and I accepted the task with pleasure, both because I could thus relieve her, and also because then and ever since I have really liked housekeeping. I love a well-ordered house and table, rooms pleasantly arranged and lighted, and decorated with flowers, hospitable attentions to guests, and all the other pleasant cares of the mistress of a family. In the midst of my studies I always went every morning regularly to my housekeeper’s room and wrote out a careful menu for the upstairs and downstairs meals. I visited the larders and the fine old kitchen frequently, and paid the servants’ wages on every quarter day; and once a year went over my lists of everything in the charge of either the men or women servants. In particular I took very special care of the china, which happened to be magnificent; and hereby hangs the memory of a droll incident with which I may close this chapter.

A certain dignified old lady, the Hon. Mrs. X., had paid a visit to Newbridge with her daughters, and in return she invited one of my brothers and myself to spend some days at her “show” place in ——. While stopping there I talked with the enthusiasm of my age to her very charming young daughters of the pleasures of study, urging them strenuously to learn Greek and Mathematics. Mrs. X., overhearing me, intervened in the conversation, and said somewhat tartly, “I do not at all agree with you, Miss Cobbe! I think the duty of a lady is to attend to her house, and to her husband and children. I beg you will not incite my girls to take up your studies.”

Of course I bowed to the decree, and soon after began admiring some of the china about the room. “There is,” said Mrs. X., “some very fine old china belonging to this house. There is one dessert-service which is said to have cost £800 forty or fifty years ago. Would you like to see it?”

Having gratefully accepted the invitation, I followed my hostess to the basement of the house, and there, for the first time in my life, I recognised that condition of disorder and slatternliness which I had heard described as characteristic of Irish houses. At last we reached an underground china closet, and after some delay and reluctance on the part of the servant, a key was found and the door opened. There, on the shelves and the floor, lay piled, higgledy-piggledy, dishes and plates of exquisite china mixed up with the commonest earthenware jugs, basins, cups, and willow-pattern kitchen dishes; and the great dessert-service among the rest—with the dessert of the previous summer rotting on the plates! Yes! there was no mistake. Some of the superb plates handed to me by the servant for examination by the light of the window, had on them peach and plum-stones and grape-stalks, obviously left as they had been taken from the table in the dining-room many months before! Poor Mrs. X. muttered some expressions of dismay and reproach to her servants, which of course I did not seem to hear, but I had not the strength of mind to resist saying: “Indeed this is a splendid service; Style de l’Empire I should call it. We have nothing like it, but when next you do us the pleasure to come to Newbridge I shall like to show you our Indian and Worcester services. Do you know I always take up all the plates and dishes myself when they have been washed the day after a party, and put them on their proper shelves with my own hands,—though I do know a little Greek and geometry, Mrs. X.!”

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IV. RELIGION.

I do not think that any one not being a fanatic, can regret having been brought up as an Evangelical Christian. I do not include Calvinistic Christianity in this remark; for it must surely cloud all the years of mortal life to have received the first impressions of Time and Eternity through that dreadful, discoloured glass whereby the “Sun is turned into darkness and the moon into blood.” I speak of the mild, devout, philanthropic Arminianism of the Clapham School, which prevailed amongst pious people in England and Ireland from the beginning of the century till the rise of the Oxford movement, and of which William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury were successively representatives. To this school my parents belonged. The conversion of my father’s grandmother by Lady Huntingdon, of which I have spoken, had, no doubt, directed his attention in early life to religion, but he was himself no Methodist, or Quietist, but a typical Churchman as Churchmen were in the first half of the century. All our relatives far and near, so far as I have ever heard, were the same. We had five archbishops and a bishop among our near kindred,—Cobbe, Beresfords, and Trenchs, great-grandfather, uncle, and cousins,—and (as I have narrated) my father’s ablest brother, my god-father, was a clergyman. I was the first heretic ever known amongst us.

My earliest recollections include the lessons of both my father and mother in religion. I can almost feel myself now kneeling at my dear mother’s knees repeating the Lord’s Prayer after her clear sweet voice. Then came learning the magnificent Collects, to be repeated to my father on Sunday mornings in his study; and later the church catechism and a great many hymns. Sunday was kept exceedingly strictly at Newbridge in those days; and no books were allowed except religious ones, nor any amusement, save a walk after church. Thus there was abundant time for reading the Bible and looking over the pictures in various large editions, and in Calmet’s great folio Dictionary, beside listening to the sermon in church, and to another sermon which my father read in the evening to the assembled household. Of course, every day of the week there were Morning Prayers in the library,—and a “Short Discourse” from good, prosy old Jay, of Bath’s “Exercises.” In this way, altogether I received a good deal of direct religious instruction, beside very frequent reference to God and Duty and Heaven, in the ordinary talk of my parents with their children.

What was the result of this training? I can only suppose that my nature was a favourable soil for such seed, for it took root early and grew apace. I cannot recall any time when I could not have been described by any one who knew my little heart (I was very shy about it, and few, if any, did know it)—as a very religious child. Religious ideas were from the first intensely interesting and exciting to me. In great measure I fancy it was the element of the sublime in them which moved me first, just as I was moved by the thunder, and the storm and was wont to go out alone into the woods or into the long, solitary corridors to enjoy them more fully. I recollect being stirred to rapture by a little poem which I can repeat to this day, beginning:

Where is Thy dwelling place? Is it in the realms of space, By angels and just spirits only trod? Or is it in the bright And ever-burning light Of the sun’s flaming disk that Thou art throned, O God?

One of the stanzas suggested that the Divine seat might be in some region of the starry universe:

“Far in the unmeasured, unimagined Heaven, So distant that its light Could never reach our sight Though with the speed of thought for endless ages driven.”

Ideas like these used to make my cheek turn pale and lift me as if on wings; and naturally Religion was the great storehouse of them. But I think, even in childhood, there was in me a good deal beside of the moral, if not yet the spiritual element of real Religion. Of course the great beauty and glory of Evangelical Christianity, its thorough amalgamation of the ideas of Duty and Devotion (elsewhere often so lamentably distinct), was very prominent in my parents’ lessons. God was always to me the All-seeing Judge. His eye looking into my heart and beholding all its naughtiness and little duplicities (which of course I was taught to consider serious sins) was so familiar a conception that I might be said to live and move in the sense of it. Thus my life in childhood morally, was much the same as it is physically to live in a room full of sunlight. Later on, the evils which belong to this Evangelical training, the excessive self-introspection and self-consciousness, made themselves painfully felt, but in early years there was nothing that was not perfectly wholesome in the religion which I had so readily assimilated.

Further, I was, as I have said, a very happy child, even conscious of my own happiness; and gratitude to God or man has always come to me as a sentiment enhancing my enjoyment of the good for which I have been thankful. Thus I was,—not conventionally merely,—but genuinely and spontaneously grateful to the Giver of all the pleasures which were poured on my head. I think I may say, that I loved God, when I was quite a young child. I can even remember being dimly conscious that my good father and mother performed their religious exercises more as a duty,—whereas to me such things, so far as I could understand them, were real pleasures; like being taken to see somebody I loved. I have since recognised that both my parents were, in Evangelical parlance, “under the law;” while in my childish heart the germ of the mysterious New Life was already planted. I think my mother was aware of something of the kind and looked with a little wonder, blended with her tenderness at my violent outbursts of penitence, and at my strange fancy for reading the most serious books in my playhours. My brothers had not exhibited any such symptoms, but then they were healthy schoolboys, always engaged eagerly in their natural sports and pursuits; while I was a lonely, dreaming girl.

When I was seven years old, my father undertook to read the Pilgrim’s Progress to my brothers, then aged from 12 to 18, and I was allowed to sit in the room and provided with a slate and sums. The sums, it appeared, were never worked, while my eyes were fixed in absorbed interest on the reader, evening after evening. Once or twice when the delightful old copy of Bunyan was left about after the lesson, my slate was covered with drawings of Apollyon and Great Heart which were pronounced “wonderful for the child.” By the time Christian had come to the Dark River, all pretence of arithmetic was abandoned and I was permitted, proud and enchanted, to join the group of boys and listen with my whole soul to the marvellous tale. When the reading was over my father gave the volume (which had belonged to his grandmother) to me, for my “very own”; and I read it over and over continually for years, till the idea it is meant to convey,—Life a progress to Heaven—was engraved indelibly on my mind. It seems to me that few of those who have praised Bunyan most loudly have recognized that he was not only a great religious genius, but a born poet, a Puritan-Tinker-Shelley; possessed of what is almost the highest gift of poetry, the sense of the analogy between outward nature and the human soul. He used allegory instead of metaphor, a clumsier vehicle by far, but it carried the same exquisite thoughts. I have the dear old book still, and it is one of my treasures with its ineffably quaint old woodcuts and its delicious marginal notes; as, for example, when “Giant Despair” is said to be unable one day to maul the pilgrims in his dungeon, because he had fits. “For sometimes,” says Bunyan, “in sunshiny weather Giant Despair has fits.” Could any one believe that this gem of poetical thought and deep experience is noted by the words in the margin, “His Fits!”? My father wrote on the flyleaf of the blessed old book these still legible words:—

1830.

“This book, which belonged to my grandmother, was given as a present to my dear daughter Fanny upon witnessing her delight in reading it. May she keep the Celestial City steadfastly in view; may she surmount the dangers and trials she must meet with on the road; and, finally, be re-united with those she loved on earth in singing praises for ever and ever to Him who loved them and gave himself for them, is the fervent prayer of her affectionate father,

“CHARLES COBBE.”

The notion of “getting to Heaven” by means of a faithful pilgrimage through this “Vale of Tears” was the prominent feature I think, always, in my father’s religion, and naturally took great hold on me. When the day came whereon I began to doubt whether there were any Heaven to be reached, that moral earthquake, as was inevitable, shook not only my religion but my morality to their foundations; and my experience of the perils of those years, has made me ever since anxious to base religion in every young mind, on ground liable to no such catastrophes. The danger came to me on this wise.

Up to my eleventh year, my little life inward and outward had flown in a bright and even current. Looking back at it and comparing my childhood with that of others I seem to have been—probably from the effects of solitude—devout beyond what was normal at my age. I used to spend a great deal of time secretly reading the Bible and that dullest of dull books The Whole Duty of Man (the latter a curious foretaste of my subsequent life-long interest in the study of ethics)—not exactly enjoying them but happy in the feeling that I was somehow approaching God. I used to keep awake at night to repeat various prayers and (wonderful to remember!) the Creed and Commandments! I made all sorts of severe rules for myself, and if I broke them, manfully mulcted myself of any little pleasures or endured some small self-imposed penance. Of none of these things had any one, even my dear mother, the remotest idea, except once when I felt driven like a veritable Cain, by my agonised conscience to go and confess to her that I had said in a recent rage (to myself) “Curse them all!” referring to my family in general and to my governess in particular! The tempest of my tears and sobs on this occasion evidently astonished her, and I remember lying exhausted on the floor in a recess in her bedroom, for a long time before I was able to move.

But the hour of doubt and difficulty was approaching. The first question which ever arose in my mind was concerning the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. I can recall the scene vividly. It was a winter’s night, my father was reading the Sunday evening Sermon in the dining-room. The servants, whose attendance was de rigueur, were seated in a row down the room. My father faced them, and my mother and I and my governess sat round the fire near him. I was opposite the beautiful classic black marble mantelpiece, surmounted with an antique head of Jupiter Serapis (all photographed on my brain even now), and listening with all my might, as in duty bound, to the sermon which described the miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. “How did it happen exactly?” I began cheerfully to think, quite imagining I was doing the right thing to try to understand it all. “Well! first there were the fishes and the loaves. But what was done to them? Did the fish grow and grow as they were eaten and broken? And the bread the same? No! that is nonsense. And then the twelve basketsful taken up at the end, when there was not nearly so much at the beginning. It is not possible!” “O! Heavens! (was the next thought) I am doubting the Bible! God forgive me! I must never think of it again.”

But the little rift had begun, and as time went on other difficulties arose. Nothing very seriously, however, distracted my faith or altered the intensity of my religious feelings for the next two years, till in October, 1836, I was sent to school as I have narrated in the last chapter, at Brighton and a new description of life opened. At school I came under influence of two kinds. One was the preaching of the Evangelical Mr. Vaughan, in whose church (Christ Church) were our seats; and I recall vividly the emotion with which one winter’s night I listened to his sermon on the great theme, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as wool.” The sense of “the exceeding sinfulness of sin,” the rapturous joy of purification therefrom, came home to me, and as I walked back to school with the waves thundering up the Brighton beach beside us and the wind tossing the clouds in the evening sky overhead, the whole tremendous realities of the moral life seemed borne in on my heart. On the other hand, the perpetual overstrain of schoolwork, and unjust blame and penalty for failure to do what it was impossible to accomplish in the given time, drove me to all sorts of faults for which I hated and despised myself. When I knelt by my bed at night, after the schoolfellow who shared my room was, as I fancied, asleep, she would get up and pound my head with a bolster, laughing and crying out, “Get up, you horrid hypocrite; get up! I’ll go on beating you till you do!” It was not strange if, under such circumstances, my beautiful childish religion fell into abeyance and my conscience into disquietude. But, as I have narrated, I came home at sixteen, and then, once more able to enjoy the solitude of the woods and of my own bedroom and its inner study where no one intruded, the old feelings, tinged with deep remorse for the failures of my school life and for many present faults (amongst others a very bitter and unforgiving temper) come back with fresh vigour. I have always considered that in that summer in my seventeenth year I went through what Evangelical Christians call “conversion.” Religion became the supreme interest of life; and the sense that I was pardoned its greatest joy. I was, of course, a Christian of the usual Protestant type, finding infinite pleasure in the simple old “Communion” of those pre-ritualistic days, and in endless Bible readings to myself. Sometimes I rose in the early summer dawn and read a whole Gospel before I dressed. I think I never ran up into my room in the daytime for any change of attire without glancing into the book and carrying away some echo of what I believed to be “God’s Word.” Nobody knew anything about all this, of course; but as time went on there were great and terrible perturbations in my inner life, and these perhaps I did not always succeed in concealing from the watchful eyes of my dear mother.

So far as I can recall, the ideas of Christ and of God the Father, were for all practical religious purposes identified in my young mind. It was as God upon earth,—the Redeemer God, that I worshipped Jesus. To be pardoned through his “atonement” and at death to enter Heaven, were the religious objects of life. But a new and most disturbing element here entered my thoughts. How did anybody know all that story of Galilee to be true? How could we believe the miracles? I had read very carefully Gibbon’s XV. and XVI. chapters, and other books enough to teach me that everything in historical Christianity had been questioned; and my own awakening critical, and reasoning, and above all, ethical,—faculties supplied fresh crops of doubts of the truth of the story and of the morality of much of the Old Testament history, and of the scheme of Atonement itself.

Then ensued four years on which I look back as pitiful in the extreme. In complete mental solitude and great ignorance, I found myself facing all the dread problems of human existence. For a long time my intense desire to remain a Christian predominated, and brought me back from each return to scepticism in a passion of repentance and prayer to Christ to take my life or my reason sooner than allow me to stray from his fold. In those days no such thing was heard of as “Broad” interpretations of Scripture doctrines. We were fifty years before Lux Mundi and thirty before even Essays and Reviews. To be a “Christian,” then, was to believe implicitly in the verbal inspiration of every word of the Bible, and to adore Christ as “very God of very God.” With such implicit belief it was permitted to hope we might, by a good life and through Christ’s Atonement, attain after death to Heaven. Without the faith or the good life, it was certain we should go to hell. It was taught us all that to be good only from fear of Hell was not the highest motive; the highest motive was the hope of Heaven! Had anything like modern rationalising theories of the Atonement, or modern expositions of the Bible stories, or finally modern loftier doctrines of disinterested morality and religion, been known to me at this crisis of my life, it is possible that the whole course of my spiritual history would have been different. But of all such “raising up the astral spirits of dead creeds,” as Carlyle called it, or as Broad churchmen say, “Liberating the kernel of Christianity from the husk,” I knew, and could know nothing. Evangelical Christianity in 1840 presented itself as a thing to be taken whole, or rejected wholly; and for years the alternations went on in my poor young heart and brain, one week or month of rational and moral disbelief, and the next of vehement, remorseful return to the faith which I supposed could alone give me the joy of religion. As time went on, and my reading supplied me with a little more knowledge and my doubts deepened and accumulated, the returns to Christian faith grew fewer and shorter, and, as I had no idea of the possibility of reaching any other vital religion, I saw all that had made to me the supreme joy and glory of life fade out of it, while that motive which had been presented to me as the mainspring of duty and curb of passion, namely, the Hope of Heaven, vanished as a dream. I always had, as I have described, somewhat of that mal-du-ciel which Lamartine talks of, that longing, as from the very depths of our being for an Eden of Divine eternal love. I could scarcely in those days read even such poor stuff as the song of the Peri in Moore’s Lalla Rookh (not to speak of Bunyan’s vision of the Celestial City) without tears rushing to my eyes. But this, I saw, must all go with the rest. If, as Clough was saying, all unknown to me, about that same time,—

“Christ is not risen, no! He lies and moulders low.”

If all the Christian revelation were a mass of mistakes and errors, no firmer ground on which to build than the promises of Mahomet, or of Buddha, or of the Old Man of the Mountain,—of course there was (so far as I saw) no reason left for believing in any Heaven at all, or any life after death. Neither had the Moral Law, which had come to me through that supposed revelation on Sinai and the Mount of Galilee, any claim to my obedience other than might be made out by identifying it with principles common to heathen and Christian alike; an identity of which, at that epoch, I had as yet only the vaguest ideas. In short my poor young soul was in a fearful dilemma. On the one hand I had the choice to accept a whole mass of dogmas against which my reason and conscience rebelled; on the other, to abandon those dogmas and strive no more to believe the incredible, or to revere what I instinctively condemned; and then, as a necessary sequel, to cast aside the laws of Duty which I had hitherto cherished; to cease to pray or take the sacrament; and to relinquish the hope of a life beyond the grave.

It was not very wonderful if, as I think I can recall, my disposition underwent a considerable change for the worse while all these tremendous questions were being debated in my solitary walks in the woods and by the sea-shore, and in my room at night over my Gibbon or my Bible. I know I was often bitter and morose and selfish; and then came the alternate spell of paroxysms of self-reproach and fanciful self-tormentings.

The life of a young woman in such a home as mine is so guarded round on every side and the instincts of a girl are so healthy, that the dangers incurred even in such a spiritual landslip as I have described are very limited compared to what they must inevitably be in the case of young men or of women less happily circumstanced. It has been my profound sense of the awful perils of such a downfall of faith as I experienced, the peril of moral shipwreck without compass or anchorage amid the tempests of youth, which has spurred me ever since to strive to forestall for others the hour of danger.

At last my efforts to believe in orthodox Christianity ceased altogether. In the summer after my twentieth birthday I had reached the end of the long struggle. The complete downfall of Evangelicalism,—which seems to have been effected in George Eliot’s strong brain in a single fortnight of intercourse with Mr. and Mrs. Bray,—had taken in my case four long years of miserable mental conflict and unspeakable pain. It left me with something as nearly like a Tabula rasa of faith as can well be imagined. I definitely disbelieved in human immortality and in a supernatural revelation. The existence of God I neither denied nor affirmed. I felt I had no means of coming to any knowledge of Him. I was, in fact (long before the word was invented), precisely—an Agnostic.

One day, while thus literally creedless, I wandered out alone as was my wont into a part of our park a little more wild than the rest, where deer were formerly kept and sat down among the rocks and the gorse which was then in its summer glory of odorous blossoms, ever since rich to me with memories of that hour. It was a sunny day in May, and after reading a little of my favourite Shelley, I fell, as often happened, into mournful thought. I was profoundly miserable; profoundly conscious of the deterioration and sliding down of all my feelings and conduct from the high ambitions of righteousness and holiness which had been mine in the days of my Christian faith and prayer; and at the same time I knew that the whole scaffolding of that higher life had fallen to pieces and could never be built up again. While I was thus musing despairingly, something stirred within me, and I asked myself, “Can I not rise once more, conquer my faults, and live up to my own idea of what is right and good? Even though there be no life after death, I may yet deserve my own respect here and now, and, if there be a God, He must approve me.”

The resolution was made very seriously. I came home to begin a new course and to cultivate a different spirit. Was it strange that in a few days I began instinctively, and almost without reflection, to pray again? No longer did I make any kind of effort to believe this thing or the other about God. I simply addressed Him as the Lord of conscience, whom I implored to strengthen my good resolutions, to forgive my faults, “to lift me out of the mire and clay and set my feet upon a rock and order my goings.” Of course, there was Christian sentiment and the results of Christian training in all I felt and did. I could no more have cast them off than I could have leaped off my shadow. But of dogmatical Christianity there was never any more. I have never from that time, now more than fifty years ago, attached, or wished I could attach, credence to any part of what Dr. Martineau has called the Apocalyptic side of Christianity, nor (I may add with thankfulness) have I ever lost faith in God.

The storms of my youth were over. Henceforth through many years there was a progressive advance to Theism as I have attempted to describe it in my books; and there were many, many hard moral fights with various Apollyons all along the road; but no more spiritual revolutions.

About thirty years after that day, to me so memorable, I read in Mr. Stopford Brooke’s Life of Robertson, these words which seem truly to tell my own story and which I believe recorded Robertson’s own experience, a little while later:

“It is an awful moment when the soul begins to find that the props on which it blindly rested are many of them rotten.... I know but one way in which a man can come forth from this agony scatheless: it is by holding fast to those things which are certain still. In the darkest hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain. If there be no God and no future state, even then it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be true than false, better to be brave than a coward. Blessed beyond all earthly blessedness is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has dared to hold fast to these landmarks. I appeal to the recollection of any man who has passed through that agony and stood upon the rock at last, with a faith and hope and trust no longer traditional but his own.”

It may be asked, “What was my creed for those first years of what I may call indigenous religion?” Naturally, with no better guide than the inductive philosophy of Locke and Bacon, I could have no outlook beyond the Deism of the last century. Miracles and miraculous inspiration being formally given up, there remained only (as I supposed) as testimony to the existence and character of God such inductions as were drawn in Paley’s Theology and the Bridgwater Treatises; with all of which I was very familiar. Voltaire’s “Dieu Toutpuissant, Remunerateur Vengeur,” the God whose garb (as Goethe says,) is woven in “Nature’s roaring loom”; the Beneficent Creator, from whom came all the blessings which filled my cup; these were the outlines of Deity for me for the time. The theoretical connection between such a God and my own duty I had yet to work out through much hard study, but fortunately moral instinct was practically sufficient to identify them; nay, it was, as I have just narrated, through such moral instincts that I was led back straight to religion, and began to pray to my Maker as my Moral Lord, so soon as ever I strove in earnest to obey my conscience.

There was nothing in such simple Deism to warrant a belief in a future life, and I deliberately trained myself to abandon a hope which was always very dear to me. As regards Christ, there was inevitably, at first, some reaction in my mind from the worship of my Christian days. I almost felt I had been led into idolatry, and I bitterly resented then (and ever since) the paramount prominence, the genuflexions at the creed, and the especially reverential voice and language applied constantly by Christians to the Son, rather than to the Father. But after I had read F. W. Newman’s book of the Soul, I recognised, with relief, how many of the phenomena of the spiritual life which Christians are wont to treat as exclusively bound up with their creed are, in truth, phases of the natural history of all devout spirits; and my longing has ever since been rather to find grounds of sympathy with believers in Christ and for union with them on the broadest bases of common gratitude, penitence, restoration and adoration, rather than to accentuate our differences. The view which I eventually reached of Christ as an historical human character, is set forth at large in my Broken Lights. He was, I think, the man whose life was to the life of Humanity what Regeneration is to the individual soul.

I may here conclude the story of my religious life extending through the years after the above described momentous change. After a time, occupied in part with study and with efforts to be useful to our poor neighbours and to my parents, my Deism was lifted to a higher plane by one of those inflowings of truth which seem the simplest things in the world, but are as rain on the dry ground in summer to the mind which receives them. One day while praying quietly, the thought came to me with extraordinary lucidity: “God’s Goodness is what I mean by Goodness! It is not a mere title, like the ‘Majesty’ of a King. He has really that character which we call ‘Good.’ He is Just, as I understand Justice, only more perfectly just. He is Good as I understand Goodness, only more perfectly good. He is not good in time and tremendous in eternity; not good to some of His creatures and cruel to others, but wholly, eternally, universally good. If I could know and understand all His acts from eternity, there would not be one which would not deepen my reverence and call forth my adoring praise.”

To some readers this discovery may seem a mere platitude and truism: the assertion of a thing which they have never failed to understand. To me it was a real revelation which transformed my religion from one of reverence only into one of vivid love for that Infinite Goodness which I then beheld unclouded. The deep shadow left for years on my soul by the doctrine of eternal Hell had rolled away at last. Another truth came home to me many years later, and not till after I had written my first book. It was one night, after sitting up late in my room reading (for once) no grave work, but a pretty little story by Mrs. Gaskell. Up to that time I had found the pleasures of knowledge the keenest of all, and gloried in the old philosopher’s dictum, “Man was created to know and to contemplate.” I looked on the pleasures of the affections as secondary and inferior to those of the intellect, and I strove to perform my duties to those around me, rather in a spirit of moral rectitude and obedience to law than in one of lovingkindness. Suddenly again it came to me to see that Love is greater than Knowledge; that it is more beautiful to serve our brothers freely and tenderly, than to “hive up learning with each studious year,” to compassionate the failures of others and ignore them when possible, rather than undertake the hard process (I always found it so!) of forgiveness of injuries; to say, “What may I be allowed to do to help and bless this one—or that?” rather than “What am I bound by duty to do for him, or her; and how little will suffice?” As these thoughts swelled in my heart, I threw myself down in a passion of happy tears, and passed most of the night thinking how I should work out what I had learned. I had scarcely fallen asleep towards morning when I was wakened by the intelligence that one of the servants, a young laundress, was dying. I hurried to the poor woman’s room which was at a great distance from mine, and found all the men and women servants collected round her. She wished for some one to pray for her, and there was no one to do it but myself, and so, while the innocent girl’s soul passed away, I led, for the first and only time, the prayers of my father’s household.

I had read a good number of books by Deists during the preceding years. Gibbon’s Miscellaneous Works (which I greatly admired), Hume, Tindal, Collins, Voltaire, beside as many of the old heathen moralists and philosophers as I could reach; Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, Plutarch’s Moralia, Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and a little of Plato. But of any modern book touching on the particular questions which had tortured me I knew nothing till, by the merest good fortune, I fell in with Blanco White’s Life. How much comfort and help I found in his Meditations the reader may guess. Curiously enough, long years afterwards, Bishop Colenso told me that the same book, falling into his hands in Natal by the singular chance of a colonist possessing the volumes, had determined him to come over to England and bring out his Pentateuch. Thus poor Blanco White, after all prophesied rightly when he said that he was “one of those who, falling in the ditch, help other men to pass over”!

Another book some years later was very helpful to me—F. W. Newman’s Soul. Dean Stanley told me that he thought in the far future that single book would be held to outweigh in value all that the author’s brother, Cardinal Newman, had ever written. I entered not long after into correspondence with Professor Newman, and have had the pleasure of calling him my friend ever since. We have interchanged letters, or at least friendly greetings, at short intervals now for nearly fifty years.

But the epoch-making book for me was Theodore Parker’s Discourse of Religion. Reading a notice of it in the Athenæum, soon after its publication (somewhere about the year 1845), I sent for it, and words fail to tell the satisfaction and encouragement it gave me. One must have been isolated and care-laden as I to estimate the value of such a book. I had come, as I have narrated above, to the main conclusions of Parker,—namely, the absolute goodness of God and the non-veracity of popular Christianity,—three years before; so that it has been a mistake into which some of my friends have fallen when they have described me as converted from orthodoxy by Parker. But his book threw a flood of light on my difficult way. It was, in the first place, infinitely satisfactory to find the ideas which I had hammered out painfully and often imperfectly, at last welded together, set forth in lucid order, supported by apparently adequate erudition and heartwarmed by fervent piety. But, in the second place, the Discourse helped me most importantly by teaching me to regard Divine Inspiration no longer as a miraculous and therefore incredible thing; but as normal, and in accordance with the natural relations of the infinite and finite spirit; a Divine inflowing of mental Light precisely analogous to that moral influence which divines call Grace. As every devout and obedient soul may expect to share in Divine Grace, so the devout and obedient souls of all the ages have shared (as Parker taught) in Divine Inspiration. And, as the reception of Grace, even in large measure, does not render us impeccable, so neither does the reception of Inspiration make us Infallible. It is at this point that Deism stops and Theism begins; namely, when our faith transcends all that can be gleaned from the testimony of the bodily senses and accepts as supremely trustworthy the direct Divine teaching, the “original revelation” of God’s holiness and love in the depths of the soul. Theodore Parker adopted the alternative synonym to mark the vital difference in the philosophy which underlies the two creeds; a theoretic difference leading to most important practical consequences in the whole temper and spirit of Theism as distinct from Deism. I saw all this clearly ere long, and ranged myself thenceforth as a THEIST: a name now familiar to everybody, but which, when my family came to know I took it, led them to tell me with some contempt that it was “a word in a Dictionary, not a Religion.”

A few months after I had absorbed Parker’s Discourse, the great sorrow of my life befell me. My mother, whose health had been feeble ever since I could remember her, and who was now seventy years of age, passed away from a world which has surely held few spirits so pure and sweet. She died with her weeping husband and sons beside her bed and with her head resting on my breast. Almost her last words were to tell me I had been “the pride and joy” of her life. The agony I suffered when I realised that she was gone I shall not try to tell. She was the one being in the world whom I truly loved through all the passionate years of youth and early womanhood; the only one who really loved me. Never one word of anger or bitterness had passed from her lips to me, nor (thank God!) from mine to her in the twenty-four years in which she blessed my life; and for the latter part of that time her physical weakness had drawn a thousand tender cares of mine around her. No relationship in all the world, I think, can ever be so perfect as that of mother and daughter under such circumstances, when the strength of youth becomes the support of age, and the sweet dependance of childhood is reversed.

But it was all over—I was alone; no more motherly love and tenderness were ever again to reach my thirsting heart. But this was not as I recall it, the worst pang in that dreadful agony. I had (as I said above) ceased to believe in a future life, and therefore I had no choice but to think that that most beautiful soul which was worth all the kingdoms of earth had actually ceased to be. She was a “Memory;” nothing more

I was not then or at any time one of those fortunate people who can suddenly cast aside the conclusions which they have reached by careful intellectual processes, and leap to opposite opinions at the call of sentiment. I played no tricks with my convictions, but strove as best I could to endure the awful strain, and to recognise the Divine Justice and Goodness through the darkness of death. I need not and cannot say more on the subject.

Happily for me, there were many duties waiting for me, and I could recognise even then that, though pleasure seemed gone for ever, yet it was a relief to feel I had still duties. “Something to do for others” was an assuagement of misery. My father claimed first and much attention, and the position I now held of the female head of the family and household gave me a good deal of employment. To this I added teaching in my village school a mile from our house two or three times a week, and looking after all the sick and hungry in the two villages of Donabate and Balisk. Those were the years of Famine and Fever in Ireland, and there was abundant call for all our energies to combat them. I shall write of these matters in the next chapter.

I had, though with pain, kept my heresies secret during my mother’s declining years and till my father had somewhat recovered from his sorrow. I had continued to attend family prayers and church services, with the exception of the Communion, and had only vaguely allowed it to be understood that I was not in harmony with them all. When my poor father learned the full extent of my “infidelity,” it was a terrible blow to him, for which I have, in later years, sincerely pitied him. He could not trust himself to speak to me, but though I was in his house, he wrote to tell me I had better go away. My second brother, a barrister, had a year before given up his house in Queen Anne Street under a terrible affliction, and had gone, broken-hearted, to live on a farm which he hired in the wilds of Donegal. There I went as my father desired and remained for nearly a year; not knowing whether I should ever be permitted to return home and rather expecting to be disinherited. He wrote to me two or three times and said that if my doubts only extended in certain directions he could bear with them, “but if I rejected Christ and disbelieved the Bible, a man was called upon to keep the plague of such opinions from his own house.” Then he required me to answer him on those points categorically. Of course I did so plainly, and told him I did not believe that Christ was God; and I did not (in his sense) believe in the inspiration or authority of the Bible. After this ensued a very long silence, in which I remained entirely ignorant of my destiny and braced myself to think of earning my future livelihood. I was absolutely lonely; my brother, though always very kind to me, had not the least sympathy with my heresies, and thought my father’s conduct (as I do) quite natural; and I had not a friend or relative from whom I could look for any sort of comfort. A young cousin to whom I had spoken of them freely, and who had, in a way, adopted my ideas, wrote to me to say she had been shown the error of them, and was shocked to think she had been so misguided. This was the last straw. After I received this letter I wandered out in the dusk as usual down to a favourite nook—a natural seat under the bank in a bend of the river which ran through Bonny Glen,—and buried my face in the grass. As I did so my lips touched a primrose which had blossomed in that precise spot since I had last been there, and the soft, sweet flower which I had in childhood chosen for my mother’s birthday garland seemed actually to kiss my face. No one who has not experienced utter loneliness can perhaps quite imagine how much comfort such an incident can bring.

As I had no duties in Donegal, and seldom saw our few neighbours, I occupied myself, often for seven or eight or even nine hours a day, in writing an Essay on True Religion. I possess this MS. still, and have been lately examining it. Of course, as a first literary effort, it has many faults, and my limited opportunities for reference render parts of it very incomplete; but it is not a bad piece of work. The first part is employed in setting forth my reasons for belief in God. The second, those for not believing in (the apocalyptic part of) Christianity. The chapter on Miracles and Prophecy (written from the literal and matter-of-fact standpoint of that epoch) are not ill-done, while the moral failure of the Bible and of the orthodox theology, the histories of Jacob, Jael, David, &c., and the dogmas of Original Sin, the Atonement, a Devil and eternal Hell, are criticised pretty successfully. A considerable part of the book consists in a comparison in parallel columns of moral precepts from the Old and New Testaments on one side, and from non-Christian writers, Euripides, Socrates (Xenophon), Plutarch, Sextius, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, the Zend Avesta (Anquetil du Perron’s), The Institutes of Menu (Sir W. Jones’), the Damma Padan, the Talmud, &c., on the other. For years I had seized every opportunity of collecting the most striking ethical dicta, and I thus marshalled them to what appeared to me good purpose, namely, the disproof of the originality or exceptional loftiness of Christian Morals. I did not apprehend till later years, how the supreme achievement of Christianity was not the inculcation of a new, still less of a systematic Morality; but the introduction of a new spirit into Morality; as Christ himself said, a leaven into the lump.

Reading Parker’s Discourse, as I did very naturally in my solitude once again, it occurred to me to write to him and ask him to tell me on what ground he based the faith which I perceived he held, in a life after death? It had seemed to me that the guarantee of Revelation having proved worthless, there remained no sufficient reason for hope to counter-weigh the obvious difficulty of conceiving of a survival of the soul. Parker answered me in a most kind letter, accompanied by his Sermon of the Immortal Life. Of course I studied this with utmost care and sympathy, and by slow, very slow degrees, as I came more to take in the full scope of the Theistic, as distinguished from the Deistic view, I saw my way to a renewal of the Hope of the Human Race which, twenty years later, I set forth as best as I could in the little book of that name. I learned to trust the intuition of Immortality which is “written in the heart of man by a Hand which writes no falsehoods.” I deemed also that I could see (as Parker says) the evidence of “a summer yet to be in the buds which lie folded through our northern winter;” the presence in human nature of many efflorescences—and they the fairest of all—quite unaccountable and unmeaning on the hypothesis that the end of the man is in the grave. In later years I think, as the gloom of the evil and cruelty of the world has shrouded more the almost cloudless skies of my youth, I have almost fervently held by the doctrine of Immortality because it is, to me the indispensable corollary of that of the Goodness of God. I am not afraid to repeat the words, which so deeply shocked, when they were first published, my old friend, F. W. Newman. “If Man be not immortal, God is not Just.”

Recovering this faith, as I may say, rationally and not by any gust of emotion, I had the inexpressible happiness of thinking henceforth of my mother as still existing in God’s universe, and (as well as I knew) loving me wherever she might be, and under whatever loftier condition of being. To meet her again “spirit to spirit, ghost to ghost,” has been to me for forty years, the sweetest thought connected with death. Ere long, now, it must be realised.

After nine or ten months of this, by no means harsh, exile, my father summoned me to return home. I resumed my place as his daughter in doing all I could for his comfort, and as the head of his house; merely thenceforth abstaining from attendance either at Church or at family prayer. I had several favourite nooks and huts near and far in the woods, which I made into little Oratories for myself, and to one or other of them I resorted almost every evening at dusk; making it a habit—not broken for many years afterwards, to repeat a certain versified Litany of Thanksgiving which I had written and read to my mother. On Sundays, when the rest of the family went to the village church, I had the old garden for a beautiful cathedral. Having let myself in with my own key, and locked the doors, I knew I had the lovely six acres within the high walls, free for hours from all observation or intrusion. How much difference it makes in life to have at command such peace and solitude it is hard to estimate. I look back to some of the summer forenoons spent alone in that garden as to the flowering time of my seventy years. God grant that the afterglow of such hours may remain with me to the last, and that “at eventide it may be light!”

I knew that there were Unitarian chapels in Dublin at this time, and much wished to attend them now and then; but I would not cause annoyance to my father by the notice which my journey to the town on a Sunday would have attracted. Only on New Year’s Day I thought I might go unobserved and interpolate attendance at the service among my usual engagements. I went accordingly to Dublin one 1st of January and drove to the chapel of which I had heard in Eustace Street. It was a big, dreary place with scarcely a quarter of the seats occupied, and a middle-class congregation apparently very cool and indifferent. The service was a miserable, hybrid affair, neither Christian as I understood Christianity, nor yet Theistic; but it was a pleasure to me merely to stand and kneel with other people at the hymns and prayers. At last, the sermon, for which I might almost say, I was hungry, arrived. The old Minister in his black-gown ascended the pulpit, having taken with him—what?—could I believe my eyes? It was an old printed book, bound in the blue and drab old fuzzy paper of the year 1810 or thereabouts, and out of this he proceeded to read an erudite discourse by some father of English Socinianism, on the precise value of the Greek article when used before the word Θεός! My disappointment not to say disgust were such that,—as it was easy from my seat to leave the place without disturbing any one,—I escaped into the street, never (it may be believed) to repeat my experiment.

It was an anomalous position that which I held at Newbridge from the time of my return from Donegal, till my father’s death eight years later. I took my place as head of the household at the family table and in welcoming our guests, but I was all the time in a sort of moral Coventry, under a vague atmosphere of disapprobation wherein all I said was listened to cautiously as likely to conceal some poisonous heresy. Everything of this kind, however, wears down and becomes easier and softer as time goes on, and most so when people are, au fond, just-minded and good-hearted; and the years during which I remained at home till my father’s death, though mentally very lonely, were far from unhappy. In particular, the perfect clearness and straightforwardness of my position was, and has ever since been, a source of strength and satisfaction to me, for which I have thanked God a thousand times. My inner life was made happy by my simple faith in God’s infinite and perfect love; and I never had any doubt whether I had erred in abandoning the creed of my youth. On the contrary, as the whole tendency of modern science and criticism showed itself stronger and stronger against the old orthodoxy, my hopes were unduly raised of a not distant New Reformation which I might even live to see. These sanguine hopes have faded. As Dean Stanley seems to have felt, there was, somewhere between the years ’74 and ’78, a turn in the tide of men’s thoughts (due, I think, to the paramount influence and insolence which physical science then assumed), which has postponed any decisive “broad” movement for years beyond my possible span of life. But though nothing appears quite so bright to my old eyes as all things did to me in youth, though familiarity with human wickedness and misery, and still more with the horrors of scientific cruelty to animals, have strained my faith in God’s justice sometimes even to agony,—I know that no form of religious creed could have helped me any more than my own or as much as it has done to bear the brunt of such trial; and I remain to the present unshaken both in respect to the denials and the affirmations of Theism. There are great difficulties, soul-torturing difficulties besetting it; but the same or worse, beset every other form of faith in God; and infinitely more, and to my mind insurmountable ones, beset Atheism.

For fifty years Theism has been my staff of life. I must soon try how it will support me down the last few steps of my earthly way. I believe it will do so well.

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