V. MY FIRST BOOK.…

V. MY FIRST BOOK.

When I was thirty years of age I had an attack of bronchitis from which I nearly died. When very ill and not expecting to recover, I reflected that while my own life had been made happy and strong by the faith which had been given to me, I had done nothing to help any other human soul to find that solution of the dread problem which had brought such peace to me. I felt, as Mrs. Browning says, that a Truth was “like bread at Sacrament” to be passed on. When, unexpectedly to myself, I slowly recovered after a sojourn in Devonshire, I resolved to set about writing something which should convey as much as possible of my own convictions to whosoever should read it. For a time I thought of enlarging and completing my MS. Essay on True Religion, written for my own instruction; but the more I reflected the less I cared to labour to pull down hastily the crumbling walls which yet sheltered millions of souls, and the more I longed to build up anew on solid base a stronghold of refuge for those driven like myself from the old ground of faith in God and Duty. Especially I felt that as the worst dangers of such transitions lay in the sudden snapping of the supposed bond of Morality, and collapse of the hopes of heaven and terrors of hell which had been used as motives of virtue and deterrents from vice; so the most urgent need lay in the direction of a system of ethics which should base Duty on ground absolutely apart from that of the supposed supernatural revelation and supply sanctions and motives unconnected therewith. As it happened at this very time, my good (orthodox) friend, Miss Felicia Skene, had recommended me to read Kant’s Metaphysic of Ethics, and I had procured Semple’s translation and found it almost dazzlingly enlightening to my mind. It would be presumptuous for me to say that then, or at any time, I have thoroughly mastered either this book or the Reinun Vernunft of this greatest of thinkers; but, so far as I have been able to do so, I can say for my own individual mind (as his German disciples were wont to do for themselves), “God said, Let there be Light! and there was—the Kantian Philosophy.” It has been, and no doubt will be still further, modified by succeeding metaphysicians and sometimes it may appear to have been superseded, but I cannot think otherwise than that Kant was and will finally be recognised to have been the Newton of the laws of Mind.

I shall now endeavour to explain the purpose of my first book (which is also my magnum opus) by quoting the Preface at some length; and, as the third edition has long been out of print and is unattainable in England or America, I shall permit myself to embody in this chapter a general account of the drift of it, with extracts sufficient to serve as samples of the whole. Looking over it now, after the lapse of just forty years, I can see that my reading at that time had lain so much among old books that the style is almost that of a didactic Treatise of the seventeenth century; and the ideas, likewise, are necessarily exclusively those of the pre-Darwinian Era. Conceptions so familiar to us now as that of an “hereditary set of the brain,” and of the “Capitalised experience of the tribe,” were then utterly unthought of. I have been well aware that it would, consequently, have been necessary,—had the book been republished any time during the last twenty years,—to rewrite much of it and define the standpoint of an Intuitionist as regards the theory of Evolution in its bearing on the foundation of ethics. For this task, however, I have always lacked leisure: and my article on “Darwinism in Morals” (reprinted in the book of that name) has been the best effort I have made in such direction. I may here, perhaps, nevertheless be allowed to say as a last word in favour of this Essay, namely, that such as it is, it has served me, personally, as a scaffolding for all my life-work, a key to open most of the locks which might have barred my way. If now I feel (as men and women are wont to do at three-score years and ten), that I hold all philosophic opinions with less tenacious grasp, less “cocksureness” than in earlier days, and know that the great realities to which they led, will remain realities for me still should those opinions prove here and there unstable,—it is not that I am disposed in any way to abandon them, still less that I have found any other systems of ethics or theology more, or equally, sound and self-consistent.

I wrote the “Essay on the Theory of Intuitive Morals” between my thirtieth and thirty-third years. I had a great deal else to do—to amuse and help my father (then growing old); to direct our household, entertain our guests, carry on the feminine correspondence of the family, teach in my village school twice a week or so, and to attend every case of illness or other tribulation in Donabate and Balisk. My leisure for writing and for the preliminary reading for writing, was principally at night or in the early morning; and at last it was accomplished. No one but my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, had seen any part of the MS., and, as I have said, nobody belonging to my family had ever (so far as I know) employed a printer or publisher before. I took the MS. with me to London, where my father and I were fortunately going for a holiday, and called with it in Paternoster Row, on Mr. William Longman, to whom I had a letter of business introduction from my Dublin bookseller. When I opened my affair to Mr. Longman, it was truly a case of Byron’s address to Murray—

“To thee with hope and terror dumb, The unfledged MS. authors come; Thou printest all, and sellest some, My Murray!”

Mr. Longman politely veiled a smile, and adopted the voice of friendly dissuasion from my enterprise, looking no doubt on a young lady (as I still was) as a very unpromising author for a treatise on Kantian ethics! My spirit, however, rose with the challenge. I poured out for some minutes much that I had been thinking over for years, and as I paused at last, Mr. Longman said briefly, but decidedly, “I’ll publish your book.”

After this fateful interview, I remember going into St. Paul’s and sitting there a long while alone.

The sheets of the book passed rapidly through the press, and I usually took them to the British Museum to verify quotations and work quietly over difficulties, for in the house which we occupied in Connaught Square I had no study to myself. The foot-notes to the book (collected some in the Museum, some from my own books and some from old works in Archbishop Marsh’s Library) were themselves a heavy part of the work. Glancing over the pages as I write, I see extracts, for example, from the following:—Cudworth (I had got at some inedited MSS. of his in the British Museum), Montesquieu, Philo, Hooker, Proclus, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Descartes, Müller, Whewell, Mozley, Leibnitz, St. Augustine, Phillipsohn, Strabo, St. Chrysostom, Morell, Lewes, Dugald Stewart, Mill, Oërsted, the Adée-Grunt’h (sacred book of the Sikhs), Herbert Spencer, Hume, Maximus Tyriensis, Institutes of Menu, Victor Cousin, Sir William Hamilton, Lucian, Seneca, Cory’s Fragments, St. Gregory the Great, Justin Martyr, Jeremy Taylor, the Yajur Veda, Shaftesbury, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Confucius, and many more. There are also in the Notes sketches of the history of the doctrines of Predestination, and of Original Sin, which involved very considerable research.

At last the proofs were corrected, the Notes verified, and the time had come when the Preface must be written! How was I to find a quiet hour to compose it? Like most women I was bound hand and foot by a fine web of little duties and attentions, which men never feel or brush aside remorselessly, (it was only Hooker, who rocked a cradle with his foot while he wrote the Ecclesiastical Polity!); and it was a serious question for me when I could find leisure and solitude. Luckily, just on the critical day, my father was seized with a fancy to go to the play, and, equally luckily, I had so bad a cold that it was out of question that I should, as usual, accompany him. Accordingly I had an evening all alone, and wrote fast and hard the pages which I shall presently quote, finishing the last sentence of my Preface as I heard my father’s knock at the hall door.

I had all along told my father (though, alas; to his displeasure), that I was going to publish a book; of course, anonymously, to save him annoyance. When the printing was completed, the torn and defaced sheets of the MS. lay together in a heap for removal by the housemaid. Pointing to this, my poor father said solemnly to me: “Don’t leave those about; you don’t know into whose hands they may fall.” It was needless to observe to him, that I was on the point of publishing the “perilous stuff”!

The book was brought out by Longmans that year (1855) and afterwards by Crosby and Nichols in Boston, and again by Trübner in London. It was reviewed rather largely and, on the whole, very kindly, considering it was by an unknown and altogether unfriended author; but sometimes also in a manner which it is pleasant to know has gone out of fashion in these latter days. It was amusing to see that not one of my critics had a suspicion they were dealing with a woman’s work. They all said, “He reasons clearly.” “His spirit and manner are particularly well suited to ethical discussion.” “His treatment of morals” (said the Guardian) “is often both true and beautiful.” “It is a most noble performance,” (said the Caledonian Mercury), “the work of a masculine and lofty mind.” “It is impossible,” (said the Scotsman), “to deny the ability of the writer, or not to admire his high moral tone, his earnestness and the fulness of his knowledge.” But the heresy of the book brought down heavy denunciation from the “religious” papers on the audacious writer who, “instead of walking softly and humbly on the firm ground and taking the Word of God as a lamp,” &c., had indulged in “insect reasonings.” A rumour at last went out that a woman was the author of this “able and attractive but deceptive and dangerous work,” and then the criticisms were barbed with sharper teeth. “The writer” (says the Christian Observer), “we are told, is a lady, but there is nothing feeble or even feminine in the tone of the work.... Our dislike is increased when we are told it is a female (!) who has propounded so unfeminine and stoical a theory ... and has contradicted openly the true sayings of the living God!” The Guardian (November 21st, 1855) finally had this delightful paragraph: “The author professes great admiration for Theodore Parker and Francis Newman, but his own pages are not disfigured by the arrogance of the one or the shallow levity of the other” (think of the shallow levity of Newman’s book of the Soul!). “He writes gravely, not defiantly, as befits a man giving utterance to thoughts which he knows will be generally regarded as impious.”

I shall now offer the reader a few extracts; and first from the Preface:—

“It cannot surely be questioned but that we want a System of Morals better than any of those which are current amongst us. We want a system which shall neither be too shallow for the requirements of thinking men, nor too abstruse for popular acceptation; but which shall be based upon the ultimate grounds of philosophy, and be developed with such distinctness as to be understood by every one capable of studying the subject. We want a System of Morals which shall not entangle itself with sectarian creeds, nor imperil its authority with that of tottering Churches, but which shall be indissolubly blended with a Theology fulfilling all the demands of the Religious Sentiment—a Theology forming a part, and the one living part, of all the theologies which ever have been or shall be. We want a system which shall not degrade the Law of the Eternal Right by announcing it as a mere contrivance for the production of human happiness, or by tracing our knowledge of it to the experience of the senses, or by cajoling us into obeying it as a matter of expediency; but a system which shall ascribe to that Law its own sublime office in the universe, which shall recognise in man the faculties by which he obtains a supersensible knowledge of it, and which shall inculcate obedience to it on motives so pure and holy, that the mere statement of them shall awaken in every breast that higher and better self which can never be aroused by the call of interest or expediency.

“It would be in itself a presumption for me to disclaim the ability necessary for supplying such a want as this. In writing this book, I have aimed chiefly at two objects. First. I have sought to unite into one homogeneous and self-consistent whole the purest and most enlarged theories hitherto propounded on ethical science. Especially I have endeavoured to popularise those of Kant, by giving the simplest possible presentation to his doctrines regarding the Freedom of the Will and the supersensible source of our knowledge of all Necessary Truths, including those of Morals. I do not claim however, even so far as regards these doctrines, to be an exact exponent of Kant’s opinions.... Secondly. I have sought (and this has been my chief aim) to place for the first time, at the foundation of ethics, the great but neglected truth that the End of Creation is not the Happiness, but the Virtue, of Rational Souls. I believe that this truth will be found to throw most valuable light, not only upon the Theory, but upon all the details of Practical Morals. Nay, more, I believe that we must look to it for such a solution of the ‘Riddle of the World’ as shall satisfy the demands of the Intellect while presenting to the Religious Sentiment that same God of perfect Justice and Goodness whose ideal it intuitively conceives and spontaneously adores. Only with this view of the Designs of God can we understand how His Moral Attributes are consistent with the creation of a race which is indeed ‘groaning in sin’ and ‘travailing in sorrow’; but by whose freedom to sin and trial of sorrow shall be worked out at last the most blessed End which Infinite Love could devise. With this clew, we shall also see how (as the Virtue of each individual must be produced by himself, and is the share committed to him in the grand end of creation) all Duties must necessarily range themselves accordingly—the Personal before the Social—in a sequence entirely different from that which is comformable with the hypothesis that Happiness is ‘our being’s end and aim’; but which is, nevertheless, precisely the sequence in which Intuition has always peremptorily demanded that they should be arranged. We shall see how (as the bestowal of Happiness on man must always be postponed by God to the still more blessed aim of conducing to his Virtue) the greatest outward woes and trials, so far from inspiring us with doubts of His Goodness, must be taken as evidences of the glory of that End of Virtue to which they lead, even as the depths of the foundations of a cathedral may show how high the towers and spires will one day ascend.”—Pref., pp. V.–X.

In the first chapter, entitled What is the Moral Law? I take for motto Antigone’s great speech:—

“ἄγραπτα κᾀσφαλῆ θεῶν νόμιμα.... οὐ γἀρ τι νῦν γε κᾀχθὲς, ἀλλ’ ἀεί ποτε ζῇ ταῦτα, κοὐδεὶς οἶδεν ἐξ ὅτου ‘φάνη. Σοφ. Ἀντιγ. 454.”

I begin by defining Moral actions and sentiments as those of Rational Free Agents, to which alone may be applied the terms of Right or Wrong, Good or Evil, Virtuous or Vicious. I then proceed to say:—

“This moral character of good or evil is a real, universal and eternal distinction, existing through all worlds and for ever, wherever there are rational creatures and free agents. As one kind of line is a straight line, and another a crooked line, and as no line can be both straight and crooked, so one kind of action or sentiment is right, and another is wrong, and no action or sentiment can be both right or wrong. And as the same line which is straight on this planet would be straight in Sirius or Alcyone, and what constitutes straightness in the nineteenth century will constitute straightness in the nineteenth millennium, so that sentiment or action which is right in our world, is right in all worlds; and that which constitutes righteousness now will constitute righteousness through all eternity. And as the character of straightness belongs to the line, by whatsoever hand it may have been traced, so the character of righteousness belongs to the sentiment or action, by what rational free agent soever it may have been felt or performed.”

“And of this distinction language affords a reliable exponent. When we have designated one kind of figure by the word Circle, and another by the word Triangle, those terms, having become the names of the respective figures, cannot be transposed without transgression of the laws of language. Thus it would be absurd to argue that the figure we call a circle, may not be a circle; that a ‘plane figure, containing a point from which all right lines drawn to the circumference shall be equal,’ may not be a circle, but a triangle. In like manner, when we have designated one kind of sentiment or action as Right, and another as Wrong, it becomes an absurdity to say that the kind of sentiments or actions we call Right may, perhaps, be Wrong. If a figure be not a circle, according to our sense of the word, it is not a circle at all, but an Ellipse, a Triangle, Trapezium, or something else. If a sentiment or action be not Right, according to our sense of the word, it is not Right at all, but, according to the laws of language, must be called Wrong.

“It is not maintained that we can commit no error in affixing the name of Circle to a particular figure, or of Right to a particular sentiment or action. We may at a hasty glance pronounce an ellipse to be a circle; but when we have proved the radii to be unequal, needs must we arrive at a better judgment. Our error was caused by our first haste and misjudgment, not by our inability to decide whether an object presented to us bears or does not bear a character to which we have agreed to affix a certain name. In like manner, from haste or prejudice, we may pronounce a faulty sentiment or action to be Right; but when we have examined it in all its bearings, we ourselves are the first to call it Wrong.”—Pp. 4–7.

After much more on the positive nature of Good, and the negative nature of Evil, and on the relation of the Moral Law to God as impersonated in His Will, and not the result (as Ockham taught) of his arbitrary decree,—I sum up the argument of this first chapter. To the question, What is the Moral Law? I answer:—

“The Moral Law is the embodiment of the eternal Necessary obligation of all Rational Free Agents to do and feel those actions and sentiments which are Right. The identification of this law with His will constitutes the Holiness of the infinite God. Voluntary and disinterested obedience to this law constitutes the Virtue of all finite creatures. Virtue is capable of infinite growth, of endless approach to the Divine nature, and to perfect conformity with the law. God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and (doubtless) all worlds for rational free agents. The Moral Law, therefore, not only reigns throughout His creation (its behests being finally enforced therein by His power), but is itself the reason why that creation exists. The material universe, with all its laws, and all the events which result therefrom, has one great purpose, and tends to one great end. It is that end which infinite Love has designed, and which infinite Power shall surely accomplish,—the everlasting approximation of all created souls to Goodness and to God.”—(Pp. 62, 63.)

The second chapter undertakes to answer the question, Where is the Moral Law Found? and begins by a brief analysis of the two great classes of human knowledge as a preliminary to ascertaining to which of these our knowledge of ethics belongs.

“All sciences are either Exact or Physical (or are applications of Exact to Physical science).

“Exact sciences are deduced from axiomatic Necessary truths and results in universal propositions, each of which is a Necessary Truth.

“Physical sciences are induced from Experimental Contingent truths, and result in General Propositions, each of which is a contingent truth.

“We obtain our knowledge of the Experimental Contingent Truths from which Physical science is induced, by the united action of our bodily senses and of our minds themselves, which must both in each case contribute their proper quota to make knowledge possible. Every perception necessitates this double element of sensation and intuition,—the objective and subjective factor in combination.

“We obtain our knowledge of the axiomatic Necessary Truths from which Exact science is deduced, by the à priori operation of the mind alone, and (quoad the exact science in question) without the aid of sensation (not, indeed, by à priori operation of a mind which has never worked with sensation, for such a mind would be altogether barren; but of one which has reached normal development under normal conditions; which conditions involve the continual united action productive of perceptions of contingent truths).

“In this distinction between the sources of our knowledge lies the most important discovery of philosophy. Into whatsoever knowledge the element of Sensation necessarily enters as a constituent part, therein there can be no absolute certainty of truth; the fallibility of Sensation being recognised on all hands, and neutralising the certainty of the pure mental element. But when we discover an order of sciences which, without aid from sensation, are deduced by the mind’s own operation from those Necessary truths which we hold on a tenure marking indelibly their distinction from all contingent truths whatsoever, then we obtain footing in a new realm....

“In the ensuing pages I shall endeavour to demonstrate that the science of Morals belongs to the class of Exact sciences, and that it has consequently a right to that credence wherewith we hold the truths of arithmetic and geometry....”

The test which divides the two classes is as follows:—

“What truth soever is Necessary and of universal extent is derived by the mind from its own operation, and does not rest on observation or experience; as, conversely, what truth or perception soever is present to the mind with a consciousness, not of its Necessity, but of its Contingency, is ascribable not to the original agency of the mind itself, but derives its origin from observation and experience.”

After lengthened discussion on this head and on the supposed mistakes of moral intuition, I go on to say:

“The consciousness of the Contingency, or the consciousness of the Necessity (i.e., the consciousness that the truth cannot be contingent, but must hold good in all worlds for ever), these consciousnesses are to be relied on, for they have their origin in, and are the marks of, the different elements from which they have been derived.[9] We may apply them to the fundamental truths of any science, and by observing whether the reception of such truths into our minds be accompanied by the consciousness of Necessity or of Contingency, we may decide whether the science be rightfully Exact or Physical, deductive or inductive.

“For example, we take the axioms of arithmetic and geometry, and we find that we have distinct consciousness that they are Necessary truths. We cannot conceive them altered any where or at any time. The sciences which are deduced from these and from similar axioms are then, Exact sciences.

“Again: we take the ultimate facts of geology and anatomy, and we find that we have distinct consciousness that they are Contingent truths. We can readily suppose them other than we find them. The sciences, then, which are induced from these and similar facts are not Exact sciences.

“If, then, morals can be shown to bear this test equally with mathematics,—if there be any fundamental truths of morals holding in our minds the status of those axioms of geometry and arithmetic of whose Necessity we are conscious, then these fundamental truths of morals are entitled to be made the basis of an Exact science the subsequent theorems of which must all be deduced from them.—(P. 76.)...

“Men like Hume traverse the history of our race, to collect all the piteous instances of aberrations which have resulted from neglect or imperfect study of the moral consciousness; and then they cry, ‘Behold what it teaches!’ Yet I suppose that it will be admitted that Man is an animal capable of knowing geometry; though, if we were to go up and down the world, asking rich and poor, Englishman and Esquimaux, what are the ratios of solidity and superficies of a sphere, a right cylinder and an equilateral cone circumscribed about it, there are sundry chances that we should hear of other ratios besides the sesquialterate.

“He who should argue that, because people ignorant of geometry did not know the sesquialterate ratio of the sphere, cylinder and cone, therefore no man could know it, or that because they disputed it, that therefore it was uncertain, would argue no more absurdly than he who urges the divergencies of half civilised and barbarian nations as a reason why no man could know, or know with certainty, the higher propositions of morals.”

After analysing the Utilitarian and other theories which derive Morality from Contingent truths, I conclude that “the truths of Morals are Necessary Truths. The origin of our knowledge of them is Intuitive, and their proper treatment is Deductive.”

The third Chapter treats of the proposition, “That the Moral Law can be obeyed,” and discusses the doctrine of Kant, that the true self of Man, the Homo Noumenon, is free, self-legislative of Law fit for Law Universal; while as the Homo Phenomenon, an inhabitant of the world of sense, he is a mere link in the chain of causes and effects, and his actions are locked up in mechanic laws which, had he no other rank, would ensue exactly according to the physical impulses given by the instincts and solicitations in the sensory. But as an inhabitant (also) of the supersensitive world his position is among the causalities which taking their rise therein, are the intimate ground of phenomena. The discussion in this chapter on the above proposition cannot be condensed into any space admissible here.

The fourth Chapter seeks to determine Why the Moral Law should be Obeyed. It begins thus:—

“In the last Chapter (Chapter III.) I endeavoured to demonstrate that the pure Will, the true self of man, is by nature righteous; self-legislative of the only Universal Law, viz., the Moral; and that by this spontaneous autonomy would all his actions be squared, were it not for his lower nature, which is by its constitution unmoral, neither righteous nor unrighteous, but capable only of determining its choice by its instinctive propensities and the gratifications offered to them. Thus these two are contrary one to another, ‘and the spirit lusteth against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit.’ In the valour of the higher nature acquired by its victory over the lower, in the virtue of the tried and conquering soul, we look for the glorious end of creation, the sublime result contemplated by Infinite Benevolence in calling man into existence and fitting him with the complicated nature capable of developing that Virtue which alone can be the crown of finite intelligences. The great practical problem of human life is this: ‘How is the Moral Will to gain the victory over the unmoral instincts, the Homo Noumenon over the Homo Phenomenon, Michael over the Evil One, Mithras over Hyle?’”

In pursuing this enquiry of how the Moral Will is to be rendered victorious, I am led back to the question: Is Happiness “our end and aim?” What relation does it bear to Morality as a motive?

“I have already argued, in Chapter I., that Happiness, properly speaking, is the gratification of all the desires of our compound nature, and that moral, intellectual, affectional, and sensual pleasures are all to be considered as integers, whose sum, when complete, would constitute perfect Happiness. From this multiform nature of Happiness it has arisen, that those systems of ethics which set it forth as the proper motive of Virtue have differed immensely from one another, according as the Happiness they respectively contemplated was thought of as consisting in the pleasures of our Moral, or of our Intellectual, Affectional, and Sensual natures; whether the pleasures were to be sought by the virtuous man for his own enjoyment, or for the general happiness of the community.

“The pursuit of Virtue for the sake of its intrinsic, i.e., Moral pleasure, is designated EUTHUMISM.

“The pursuit of Virtue for the sake of the extrinsic Affectional, Intellectual, and Sensual pleasure resulting from it, is designated EUDAIMONISM.

“Euthumism is of one kind only, for the individual can only seek the intrinsic pleasure of Virtue for his own enjoyment thereof.

“Eudaimonism, on the contrary, is of two most distinct lands. That which I have called PUBLIC EUDAIMONISM sets forth the intellectual, affectional, and sensual pleasures of all mankind as the proper object of the Virtue of each individual. PRIVATE EUDAIMONISM sets forth the same pleasures of the individual himself as the proper object of his Virtue.

“These two latter systems are commonly confounded under the name of ‘UTILITARIAN ETHICS.’ Their principles, as I have stated them, will be seen to be wide asunder; yet there are few of the advocates of either who have not endeavoured to stand on the grounds of both, and even to borrow elevation from those of the Euthumist. Thus, by appealing alternately to philanthropy[10] and to a gross and a refined Selfishness, they suit the purpose of the moment, and prevent their scheme from deviating too far from the intuitive conscience of mankind. It may be remarked, also, that the Private Eudaimonists insist more particularly on the pleasure of a Future Life; and in the exposition of them necessarily approach nearer to the Euthumists.”

I here proceeded to discuss the three systems which have arisen from the above-defined different views of Happiness; each contemplating it as the proper motive of Virtue: namely, 1st, Euthumism; 2nd, Public Eudaimonism; and 3rd, Private Eudaimonism.

“1st. Euthumism. This system, as I have said, sets forth the Moral Pleasure, the peace and cheerfulness of mind, and applause of conscience enjoyed in Virtue, as the proper motive for its practice. Conversely, it sets forth as the dissuadent from Vice, the pain of remorse, the inward uneasiness and self-contempt which belong to it.

“Democritus appears to have been the first who gave clear utterance to this doctrine, maintaining that Εύθυμία was the proper End of human actions, and sharply distinguishing it from the ‘Ηδονή’ proposed as such by Aristippus. The claims of a ‘mens conscia recti’ to be the ‘Summum Bonum,’ occupied, as is well known, a large portion of the subsequent disputes of the Epicureans, Cynics, Stoics and Academics, and were eagerly argued by Cicero, and even down to the time of Boethius. Many of these sects, however, and in particular the Stoics, though maintaining that Virtue alone is sufficient for Happiness (that is, that the inward joy of Virtue is enough to constitute Happiness in the midst of torments), yet by no means set forth that Happiness as the sole motive of Virtue. They held, on the contrary, the noblest ideas of ‘living according to Nature,’ that is, as Chrysippus explained it, according to the ‘Nature of the universe, the common Law of all, which is the right reason spread everywhere, the same by which Jupiter governs the world’; and that both Virtue and Happiness consisted in so regulating our actions that they should produce harmony between the Spirit in each of us, and the Will of Him who rules the universe. There is little or no trace of Euthumism in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures, or (to my knowledge) in the sacred books of the Brahmins, Buddhists, or Parsees. The ethical problems argued by the mediæval Schoolmen do not, so far as I am aware, embrace the subject in question. The doctrine was revived, however, in the seventeenth century, and besides blending with more or less distinctness with the views of a vast number of lesser moralists, it reckons among its professed adherents no less names than Henry More and Bishop Cumberland. Euthumism, philosophically considered, will be found to affix itself most properly on the doctrine of the ‘Moral Sense’ laid down by Shaftesbury as the origin of our knowledge of moral distinctions, which, if it were, it would naturally follow that it must afford also the right motive of Virtue. Hutcheson, also, still more distinctly stated that this Moral Pleasure in Virtue (which both he and Shaftesbury likened to the æsthetic Pleasure in Beauty) was the true ground of our choice. To this Balguy replied, that ‘to make the rectitude of moral actions depend upon instinct, and, in proportion to the warmth and strength of the Moral Sense, rise and fall like spirits in a thermometer, is depreciating the most sacred thing in the world, and almost exposing it to ridicule.’ And Whewell has shown that the doctrine of the Moral Sense as the foundation of Morals must always fail, whether understood as meaning a sense like that of Beauty (which may or may not be merely a modification of the Agreeable), or a sense like those of Touch or Taste (which no one can fairly maintain that any of our moral perceptions really resemble).

“But though neither the true source of our Knowledge of Moral Distinctions nor yet the right Motive why we are to choose the Good, this Moral Sense of Pleasure in Virtue, and Pain in Vice, is a psychological fact demanding the investigation of the Moralist. Moreover, the error of allowing our moral choice to be decided by a regard to the pure joy of Virtue or awful pangs of self-condemnation, is an error so venial in comparison of other moral heresies, and so easily to be confounded with a truer principle of Morals, that it is particularly necessary to warn generous natures against it. ‘It is quite beyond the grasp of human thought,’ says Kant, ‘to explain how reason can be practical; how the mere Morality of the law, independently of every object man can be interested in, can itself beget an interest which is purely Ethical; how a naked thought, containing in it nothing of the sensory, can bring forth an emotion of pleasure or pain.’

“Unconsciously this Sense of Pleasure in a Virtuous Act, the thought of the peace of conscience which will follow it, or the dread of remorse for its neglect, must mingle with our motives. But we can never be permitted, consciously to exhibit them to ourselves as the ground of our resolution to obey the Law. That Law is not valid for man because it interests him, but it interests him because it has validity for him—because it springs from his true being, his proper self. The interest he feels is an Effect, not a Cause; a Contingency, not a Necessity. Were he to obey the Law merely from this Interest, it would not be free Self-legislation (autonomy), but (heteronomy) subservience of the Pure Will to a lower faculty—a Sense of Pleasure. And, practically, we may perceive that all manner of mischiefs and absurdities must arise if a man set forth Moral Pleasure as the determinator of his Will....

“Thus, the maxim of Euthumism, ‘Be virtuous for the sake of the Moral Pleasure of Virtue,’ may be pronounced false.

“2nd. Public Eudaimonism sets forth, both as the ground of our knowledge of Virtue and the motive for our practice of it, ‘The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number.’ This Happiness, as Paley understood it, is composed of Pleasures to be estimated only by their Intensity and Duration; or, as Bentham added, by their Certainty, Propinquity, Fecundity, and Purity (or freedom from admixture of evil).

“Let it be granted for argument’s sake, that the calculable Happiness resulting from actions can determine their Virtue (although all experience teaches that resulting Happiness is not calculable, and that the Virtue must at least be one of the items determining the resulting Happiness). On the Utilitarian’s own assumption, what sort of motive for Virtue can be his end of ‘The Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number?’

“No sooner had Paley laid down the grand principle of his system, ‘Whatever is Expedient is Right,’ than he proceeds (as he thinks) to guard against its malapplication by arguing that nothing is expedient which produces, along with particular good consequences, general bad ones, and that this is done by the violation of any general rule. ‘You cannot,’ says he, ‘permit one action, and forbid another without showing a difference between them. Consequently the same sort of actions must be generally permitted or generally forbidden. Where therefore, the general permission of them would be pernicious, it becomes necessary to lay down and support the rule which generally forbids them.’

“Now, let the number of experienced consequences of actions be ever so great, it must be admitted that the Inductions we draw therefrom can, at the utmost, be only provisional, and subject to revision should new facts be brought in to bear in an opposite scale....

“Further, the rules induced by experience must be not only provisional, but partial. The lax term ‘general’ misleads us. A Moral Rule must be either universal and open to no exception, or, properly speaking, no rule at all. Each case of Morals stands alone.

“Thus, the Experimentalist’s conclusion, for example, that ‘Lying does more harm than good,’ may be quite remodelled by the fortunate discovery of so prudent a kind of falsification as shall obviate the mischief and leave the advantage. No doubt can remain on the mind of any student of Paley, that this would have been his own line of argument: ‘If we can only prove that a lie be expedient, then it becomes a duty to lie.’ As he says himself of the rule (which if any rule may do so may surely claim to be general) ‘Do not do evil that good may come,’ that it is ‘salutary, for the most part, the advantage seldom compensating for the violation of the rule.’ So to do evil is sometimes salutary, and does now and then compensate for disregarding even the Eudaimonist’s last resource—a General Rule!

“2nd. Private Eudaimonism. There are several formulas, in which this system, (the lowest, but the most logical, of Moral heresies) is embodied. Rutherford puts it thus: ‘Every man’s Happiness is the ultimate end which Reason teaches him to pursue, and the constant and uniform practice of Virtue towards all mankind becomes our duty, when Revelation has informed us that God will make us finally happy in a life after this.’ Paley (who properly belongs to this school, but endeavours frequently to seat himself on the corners of the stools of Euthumism and Public Eudaimonism), Paley, the standard Moralist of England,[11] defines Virtue thus: ‘Virtue is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of Everlasting Happiness. According to which definition, the good of mankind is the subject; the will of God the rule; and Everlasting Happiness the motive of Virtue.’

“Yet it seems to me, that if there be any one truth which intuition does teach us more clearly than another, it is precisely this one—that Virtue to be Virtue must be disinterested. The moment we picture any species of reward becoming the bait of our Morality, that moment we see the holy flame of Virtue annihilated in the noxious gas. A man is not Virtuous at all who is honest because it is ‘good policy,’ beneficent from love of approbation, pious for the sake of heaven. All this is prudence not virtue, selfishness not self-sacrifice. If he be honest for sake of policy, would he be dishonest, if it could be proved that it were more politic? If he would not, then he is not really honest from policy but from some deeper principle thrust into the background of his consciousness. If he would, then it is idlest mockery to call that honesty Virtuous which only waits a bribe to become dishonest.

“But there are many Eudaimonists who will be ready to acknowledge that a prudent postponement of our happiness in this world cannot constitute virtue. But wherefore do they say we are to postpone it? Not for present pleasure or pain, that would be base; but for that anticipation of future pleasure or pain which we call Hope and Fear. And this, not for the Hope and Fear of this world, which are still admitted to be base motives; but for Hope and Fear extended one step beyond the tomb—the Hope of Heaven and the Fear of Hell.”

After a general glance at the doctrine of Future Rewards and Punishments as held by Christians and heathens, I go on to argue:

“But in truth this doctrine of the Hope of Heaven being the true Motive of Virtue is (at least in theory) just as destructive of Virtue as that which makes the rewards of this life—health, wealth, or reputation—the motive of it. Well says brave Kingsley:

‘Is selfishness for time a sin, Stretched out into eternity celestial prudence?’

“If to act for a small reward cannot be virtuous, to act for a large one can certainly merit no more. To be bribed by a guinea is surely no better than to be bribed by a penny. To be deterred from ruin by fear of transportation for life, is no more noble than to be deterred by fear of twenty-four hours in prison. There is no use multiplying illustrations. He who can think that Virtue is the doing right for pay, may think himself very judicious to leave his pay in the savings-bank now and come into a fortune all at once by and by; but he who thinks that Virtue is the doing right for Right’s own sake, cannot possibly draw a distinction between small bribes and large ones; a reward to be given to-day, and a reward to be given in eternity.

“Nevertheless it cannot be denied that the belief in immortal progress is of incalculable value. Such belief, and that in an ever-present God, may be called the two wings of human Virtue. I look on the advantages of a faith in immortality to be two-fold. First, it cuts the knot of the world, and gives to our apprehension a God whose providence need no longer perplex us, and whose immeasurable and never-ending goodness shines ever brighter before our contemplating souls. Secondly, it gives an importance to personal progress which we can hardly attribute to it so long as we deem it is to be arrested for ever by death. The man who does not believe in Immortality may be, and often actually is, more virtuous than his neighbour; and it is quite certain that his Virtue is of far purer character than that which bargains for Heaven as its pay. But his task is a very hard one, a task without a result; and his road a dreary one, unenlightened even by the distant dawn of

‘That great world of light which lies Behind all human destinies.’

We can scarcely do him better service than by leading him to trust that intuition of Immortality which is written in the heart of the human race by that Hand which writes no falsehoods.

“But if the attainment of Heaven be no true motive for the pursuit of Virtue, surely I may be held excused from denouncing that practice of holding out the fear of Hell wherewith many fill up the measure of moral degradation? Here it is vain to suppose that the fear is that of the immortality of sin and banishment from God; as we are sometimes told the hope of Heaven is that of an immortality of Virtue and union with Him. The mind which sinks to the debasement of any Fear is already below the level at which sin and estrangement are terrors. It is his weakness of will which alone hinders the Prodigal from saying, ‘I will arise and go to my Father,’ and unless we can strengthen that Will by some different motive, it is idle to threaten him with its own persistence.

* * * * *

“Returning from the contemplation of the lowness of aim common to all the forms of Eudaimonism, how magnificent seems the grand and holy doctrine of true Intuitive Morality? DO RIGHT FOR THE RIGHT’S OWN SAKE: Love God and Goodness because they are Good! The soul seems to awake from death at such archangel’s call as this, and mortal man puts on his rightful immortality. The prodigal grovels no longer, seeking for Happiness amid the husks of pleasure; but, ‘coming to himself,’ he arises and goes to his Father, heedless if it be but as the lowest of His servants he may yet dwell beneath that Father’s smile. Hope and fear for this life or the next, mercenary bargainings, and labour of eye-service, all are at end. He is a Freeman, and free shall be the oblation of his soul and body, the reasonable, holy, and acceptable sacrifice.

“O Living Soul! wilt thou follow that mighty hand, and obey that summons of the trumpet? Perchance thou hast reached life’s solemn noon, and with the bright hues of thy morning have faded away the beautiful aspirations of thy youth. Doubtless thou hast often struggled for the Right; but, weary with frequent overthrows, thou criest, ‘This also is vanity.’ But think again, O Soul, whose sun shall never set! Have no poor and selfish ambitions mingled with those struggles and made them vanity? Have no theologic dogmas from which thy maturer reason revolts, been blended with thy purer principle? Hast thou nourished no extravagant hope of becoming suddenly sinless, or of heaping up with an hour’s labour a mountain of benefits on thy race? Surely some mistake like these lies at the root of all moral discouragement. But mark:—

“Pure morals forbid all base and selfish motives—all happiness-seeking, fame-seeking, love-seeking—in this world or the next, as motives of Virtue. Pure Morals rest not on any traditional dogma, not on history, on philology, on criticism, but on those intuitions, clear as the axioms of geometry, which thine own soul finds in its depths, and knows to be necessary truths, which, short of madness, it cannot disbelieve.

“Pure Morals offer no panacea to cure in a moment all the diseases of the human heart, and transform the sinner into the saint. They teach that the passions, which are the machinery of our moral life, are not to be miraculously annihilated, but by slow and unwearying endeavour to be brought into obedience to the Holy Will; while to fall and rise again many a time in the path of virtue is the inevitable lot of every pilgrim therein.... Our hearts burn within us when for a moment the vision rises before our sight of what we might make our life even here upon earth. Faintly can any words picture that vision!

“A life of Benevolence, in which every word of our lips, every work of our hands, had been a contribution to human virtue or human happiness; a life in which, ever wider and warmer through its three score years and ten had grown our pure, unwavering, Godlike Love, till we had spread the same philanthropy through a thousand hearts ere we passed away from earth to love yet better still our brethren in the sky.

“A life of Personal Virtue, in which every evil disposition had been trampled down, every noble sentiment called forth and strengthened; a life in which, leaving day by day further behind us the pollutions of sin, we had also ascended daily to fresh heights of purity, till self-conquest, unceasingly achieved, became continually more secure and more complete, and at last—

‘The lordly Will o’er its subject powers Like a thronèd God prevailed,’

and we could look back upon the great task of earth, and say, ‘It is finished!’

“A life of Religion, in which the delight in God’s presence, the reverence for His moral attributes, the desire to obey His Will, and the consciousness of His everlasting love, had grown continually clearer and stronger, and of which Prayer, deepest and intensest, had been the very heart and nucleus, till we had found God drawing ever nearer to us as we drew near to him, and vouchsafing to us a communion the bliss of which no human speech may ever tell; the dawning of that day of adoration which shall grow brighter and brighter still while all the clusters of the suns fade out and die.

“And turning from our own destiny, from the endless career opened to our Benevolence, our Personal Virtue, and our Piety, we take in a yet broader view, and behold the whole universe of God mapped out in one stupendous Plan of Love. In the abyss of the past eternity we see the Creator for ever designing and for ever accomplishing the supremest end at which infinite Justice and Goodness could aim, and absolute Wisdom and Power bring to pass. For this end, for the Virtue of all finite Intelligences, we behold Him building up millions of starry abodes and peopling them with immortal spirits clothed in the garbs of flesh, and endowed with that moral freedom whose bestowal was the highest boon of Omnipotence. As ages of millenniums roll away, we see a double progress working through all the realms of space; a progress of each race and of each individual. Slowly and securely, though with many an apparent retrogression, does each world-family become better, wiser, nobler, happier. Slowly and securely, though with many a grievous backsliding, each living soul grows up to Virtue. Nor pauses that awful march for a moment, even in the death of the being or the cataclysm of the world. Over all Death and Change reigns that Almighty changeless will which has decreed the holiness and happiness of every spirit He hath made. Through the gates of the grave, and on the ruins of worlds, shall those spirits climb, higher and yet higher through the infinite ages, nearer and yet nearer to Goodness and to God.”

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VI. IRELAND IN THE FORTIES. THE PEASANTRY.

The prominence which Irish grievances have taken of late years in English politics has caused me often to review with fresh eyes the state of the country as it existed in my childhood and youth, when, of course, both the good and evil of it appeared to me to be part of the order of nature itself.

I will first speak of the condition of the working classes, then of the gentry and clergy.

I had considerable opportunities for many years of hearing and seeing all that was going on in our neighbourhood, which was in the district known as “Fingal” (the White Strangers’ land), having been once the territory of the Danes. Fingal extends along the sea-coast between Dublin and Drogheda, and our part lay exactly between Malahide and Rush. My father, and at a later time my eldest brother, were indefatigable as magistrates, Poor law Guardians and landlords, in their efforts to relieve the wants and improve the condition of the people; and it fell on me naturally, as the only active woman of the family, to play the part of Lady Bountiful on a rather large scale. There was my father’s own small village of Donabate in the first place, claiming my attention; and beyond it a larger straggling collection of mud cabins named “Balisk”; the landlord of which, Lord Trimleston, was an absentee, and the village a centre of fever and misery. In Donabate there was never any real distress. In every house there were wage-earners or pensioners enough to keep the wolf from the door. Only when sickness came was there need for extra food, wine, and so on. The wages of a field-labourer were, at that time, about 8s. a week; of course without keep. His diet consisted of oatmeal porridge, wheaten griddle-bread, potatoes and abundance of buttermilk. The potatoes, before the Famine, were delicious tubers. Many of the best kinds disappeared at that time (notably I recall the “Black Bangers”), and the Irish housewife cooked them in a manner which no English or French Cordon Bleu can approach. I remember constantly seeing little girls bringing the mid-day dinners to their fathers, who sat in summer under the trees, and in winter in a comfortable room in our stable-yard, with fire and tables and chairs. The cloth which carried the dinner being removed there appeared a plate of “smiling” potatoes (i.e., with cracked and peeling skins) and in the midst a well of about a sixth of a pound of butter. Along with the plate of potatoes was a big jug of milk, and a hunch of griddle-bread. On this food the men worked in summer from six (or earlier, if mowing was to be done) till breakfast, and from thence till one o’clock. After an hour’s dinner the great bell tolled again, and work went on till 6. In winter there was no cessation of work from 8 a.m. till 5 p.m., when it ended. Of course these long hours of labour in the fields, without the modern interruptions, were immensely valuable on the farm. I do not think I err in saying that my father had thirty per cent. more profitable labour from his men for 8s. a week, than is now to be had from labourers at 16s.; at all events where I live here, in Wales. It is fair to note that beside their wages my father’s men, and also the old women whose daughters (eight in number) worked in the shrubberies and other light work all the year round, were allowed each the grazing of a cow on his pastures, and were able to get coal from the ships he chartered every winter from Whitehaven for 11s. a ton, drawn to the village by his horses. At Christmas an ox was divided among them, and generally also a good quantity of frieze for the coats of the men, and for the capes of the eight “Amazons.”

I cannot say what amount of genuine loyalty really existed among our people at that time. Outwardly, it appeared they were happy and contented, though, in talking to the old people, one never failed to hear lamentations for the “good old times” of the past generations. In those times, as we knew very well, nothing like the care we gave to the wants of the working classes was so much as dreamed of by our forefathers. But they kept open house, where all comers were welcome to eat and drink in the servants’ hall when they came up on any pretext; and this kind of hospitality has ever been a supreme merit in Celtic eyes. Some readers will remember that the famous chieftainess, Grana Uaile, invading Howth in one of her piratical expeditions in the “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” found the gates of the ancient castle of the St. Lawrences, closed, though it was dinner-time! Indignant at this breach of decency, Grana Uaile kidnapped the heir of the lordly house and carried him to her robbers’ fortress in Connaught, whence she only released him in subsequent years on the solemn engagement of the Lords of Howth always to dine with the doors of Howth Castle wide open. I believe it is not more than 50 years, if so much, since this practice was abolished.

I think the only act of “tyranny” with which I was charged when I kept my father’s house, and which provoked violent recalcitration, was when I gave orders that men coming from our mountains to Newbridge on business with “the Master” should be served with largest platefuls of meat and jugs of beer, but should not be left in the servants’ hall en tête-à-tête with whole rounds and sirloins of beef, of which no account could afterwards be obtained!

Of course, the poor labourer in Ireland at that time after the failure of the potatoes, who had no allowances, and had many young children unable to earn anything for themselves, was cruelly tightly placed. I shall copy here a calculation which I took down in a note-book, still in my possession, after sifting enquiries concerning prices at our village shops, in, or about, the year 1845:—

Wheatmeal costs 2s. 3d. per stone of 14 lbs. Oatmeal costs 2s. 4d. per stone of 14 lbs. India meal costs 1s. 8d. per stone of 14 lbs. 14 lbs. of wheatmeal makes 18 lbs. of griddle-bread. 1 lb. of oatmeal makes 3 lbs. of stirabout.

A man will require 4 lbs. food per day 28 lbs. per week. A woman will require 3 lbs. food per day 21 lbs. per week. Each child at least 2 lbs. food per day 14 lbs. per week.

A family of 3 will therefore require 63 lbs. of food per week—e.g.,

s. d. 1 stone wheat— 18 lbs. bread 2 3 1 stone oatmeal— 42 lbs. stirabout 2 4 -- - - 60 lbs. food; cost 4 7

A family of 5 will require—

Man 28 lbs. Wife 21 lbs. 3 children 42 lbs. —— 91 lbs. food.

s. d. Say 30 lbs. bread—23 lbs. wheatmeal 3 10 61 lbs. stirabout—20 lbs. oatmeal 3 4 —— — —— 91 lbs. 7 2

Thus, when a man had five children to support, and no potatoes, his weekly wages scarcely covered bare food.

Before the Famine and the great fever, the population of our part of Ireland was exceedingly dense; more than 200 to the square mile. There were an enormous number of mud cabins consisting of one room only, run up at every corner of the roadside and generally allowed to sink into miserable squat, sottish-looking hovels with no drainage at all; mud floor; broken thatch, two or three rough boards for a door; and the four panes of the sole window stuffed with rags or an old hat. Just 500,000 of these one-roomed cabins, the Registrar-General, Mr. William Donelly, told me, disappeared between the census before, and the census after the Famine! Nothing was easier than to run them up. Thatch was cheap, and mud abundant, everywhere; and as to the beams (they called them “bames”), I remember a man addressing my father coaxingly, “Ah yer Honour will ye plaze spake to the steward to give me a ‘handful of sprigs?’” “A handful of sprigs? What for?” asked my father; “Why for the roof of me new little house, yer Honour, that I’m building fornenst the ould wan!”

I never saw in an Irish cottage any of the fine old oak settles, dressers and armchairs and coffers to be found usually in Welsh ones. A good unpainted deal dresser and table, a wooden bedstead, a couple of wooden chairs, and two or three straw “bosses” (stools) made like beehives, completed the furniture of a well-to-do cabin, with a range of white or willow-pattern plates on the dresser, and two or three frightfully coloured woodcuts pasted on the walls for adornment. Flowers in the gardens or against the walls were never to be seen. Enormous chimney corners, with wooden stools or straw “bosses” under the projecting walls, were the most noticeable feature. Nothing seems to be more absurd and unhistorical than the common idea that the Celt is a beauty-loving creature, æsthetically far above the Saxon. If he be so, it is surprising that his home, his furniture, his dress, his garden never show the smallest token of his taste! When the young girls from the villages, even from very respectable families, were introduced into our houses, it was a severe tax on the housekeepers’ supervision to prevent them from resorting to the most outrageous shifts and misuse of utensils of all sorts. I can recall, for example, one beautiful young creature with the lovely Irish grey eyes and long lashes, and with features so fine that we privately called her “Madonna.” For about two years she acted as housemaid to my second brother, who, as I have mentioned, had taken a place in Donegal, and whose excellent London cook, carefully trained “Madonna” into what were (outwardly) ways of pleasantness for her master. At last, and when apparently perfectly “domesticated”—as English advertisers describe themselves,—Madonna married the cowman; and my brother took pleasure in setting up the young couple in a particularly neat and rather lonely cottage with new deal furniture. After six months they emigrated; and when my brother visited their deserted house he found it in a state of which it will suffice to record one item. The pig had slept all the time under the bedstead; and no attempt had been made to remove the resulting heap of manure!

My father had as strong a sense as any modern sanitary reformer of the importance of good and healthy cottages; and having found his estate covered with mud and thatched cabins, he (and my brother after him) laboured incessantly, year by year, to replace them by mortared stone and slated cottages, among which were five schoolhouses supported by himself. As it was my frequent duty to draw for him the plans and elevations of these cottages, farmhouses and village shops, with calculations of the cost of each, it may be guessed how truly absurd it seems to me to read exclusively, as I do so often now, of “tenants’ improvements” in Ireland. It is true that my father occasionally let, on long leases and without fines, large farms (of the finest wheat-land in Ireland, within ten miles of Dublin market), at the price of £2 per Irish acre, with the express stipulation that the tenant should undertake the re-building of the house or farm-buildings as the case might be. But these were, of course, perfectly just bargains, made with well-to-do farmers, who made excellent profits. I have already narrated in an earlier chapter, how he sold the best pictures among his heirlooms—one by Hobbema now in Dorchester House and one by Gaspar Poussin,—to rebuild some eighty cottages on his mountains. These cottages had each a small farm attached to it, which was generally held at will, but often continued to the tenants’ family for generations. The rent was, in some cases I think, as low as thirty or forty shillings a year; and the tenants contrived to make a fair living with sheep and potatoes; cutting their own turf on the bog, and very often earning a good deal by storing ice in the winter from the river Dodder, and selling it in Dublin in summer. I remember one of them who had been allowed to fall into arrears of rent to the extent of £3, which he loudly protested he could not pay, coming to my father to ask his help as a magistrate to recover forty pounds, which an ill-conditioned member of his family had stolen from him out of the usual Irish private hiding-place “under the thatch.”

But outside my father’s property, when we passed into the next villages on either side, Swords or Rush or Balisk, the state of things was bad enough. I will give a detailed description of the latter village, some of which was written when the memory of the scene and people was less remote, than now. It is the most complete picture of Irish poverty, fifty years ago, which I can offer.

Balisk was certainly not the “loveliest village of the plain.” Situated partly on the edge of an old common, partly on the skirts of the domain of a nobleman who had not visited his estate for thirty years, it enjoyed all the advantages of freedom from restraint upon the architectual genius of its builders. The result was a long crooked, straggling street, with mud cabins turned to it, and from it, in every possible angle of incidence: some face to face, some back to back, some sideways, some a little retired so as to admit of a larger than ordinary heap of manure between the door and the road. Such is the ground-plan of Balisk. The cabins were all of mud, with mud floors and thatched roofs; some containing one room only, others two, and, perhaps, half-a-dozen, three rooms: all, very literally, on the ground; that is on the bare earth. Furniture, of course, was of the usual Irish description: a bed (sometimes having a bedstead, oftener consisting of a heap of straw on the floor), a table, a griddle, a kettle, a stool or two and a boss of straw, with occasionally a grand adjunct of a settle; a window whose normal condition was being stuffed with an old hat; a door, over and under and around which all the winds and rains of heaven found their way; a population consisting of six small children, a bedridden grandmother, a husband and wife, a cock and three hens, a pig, a dog, and a cat. Lastly, a decoration of coloured prints, including the Virgin with seven swords in her heart, St. Joseph, the story of Dives and Lazarus, and a caricature of a man tossed by a bull, and a fat woman getting over a stile.

Of course as Balisk lies in the lowest ground in the neighbourhood and the drains were originally planned to run at “their own sweet will,” the town (as its inhabitants call it) is subject to the inconvenience of being about two feet under water whenever there are any considerable floods of rain. I have known a case of such a flood entering the door and rising into the bed of a poor woman in childbirth, as in Mr. Macdonald’s charming story of Alec Forbes. The woman, whom I knew, however, did not die, but gave to the world that night a very fine little child, whom I subsequently saw scampering along the roads with true Irish hilarity. At other times, when there were no floods, only the usual rains, Balisk presented the spectacle of a filthy green stream slowly oozing down the central street, now and then draining off under the door of any particularly lowly-placed cabin to form a pool in the floor, and finally terminating in a lake of stagnant abomination under the viaduct of a railway. Yes, reader! a railway ran through Balisk, even while the description I have given of it held true in every respect. The only result it seemed to have effected in the village was the formation of the Stygian pool above-mentioned, where, heretofore, the stream had escaped into a ditch.

Let us now consider the people who dwelt amid all this squalor. They were mostly field-labourers, working for the usual wages of seven or eight shillings a week. Many of them held their cabins as freeholds, having built or inherited them from those who had “squatted” unmolested on the common. A few paid rent to the noble landlord before-mentioned. Work was seldom wanting, coals were cheap, excellent schools were open for the children at a penny a week a head. Families which had not more than three or four mouths to fill besides the breadwinners’, were not in absolute want, save when disease, or a heavy snow, or a flood, or some similar calamity arrived. Then, down on the ground, poor souls, literally and metaphorically, they could fall no lower, and a week was enough to bring them to the verge of starvation.

Let me try to recall some of the characters of the inhabitants of Balisk in the Forties.

Here in the first cabin is a comfortable family where there are three sons at work, and mother and three daughters at home. Enter at any hour there is a hearty welcome and bright jest ready. Here is the schoolmaster’s house, a little behind the others, and back to back with them. It has an attempt at a curtain for the window, a knocker for the door. The man is a curious deformed creature, of whom more will be said hereafter. The wife is what is called in Ireland a “Voteen;” a person given to religion, who spends most of her time in the chapel or repeating prayers, and who wears as much semblance of black as her poor means may allow. Balisk, be it said, is altogether Catholic and devout. It is honoured by the possession of what is called “The Holy Griddle.” Perhaps my readers have heard of the Holy Grail, the original sacramental chalice so long sought by the chivalry of the middle ages, and may ask if the Holy Griddle be akin thereto? I cannot trace any likeness. A “griddle,” as all the Irish and Scotch world knows, is a circular iron plate, on which the common unleavened cakes of wheatmeal and oatmeal are baked. The Holy Griddle of Balisk was one of these utensils, which was bequeathed to the village under the following circumstances. Years ago, probably in the last century, a poor, “lone widow” lay on her death-bed. She had none to pray for her after she was gone, for she was childless and altogether desolate; neither had she any money to give to the priest to pray for her soul. Yet the terrors of purgatory were near. How should she escape them? She possessed but one object of any value—a griddle, whereon she was wont to bake the meal of the wheat she gleaned every harvest to help her through the winter. So the widow left her griddle as a legacy to the village for ever, on one condition. It was to pass from hand to hand as each might want it, but every one who used her griddle was to say a prayer for her soul. Years had passed away, but the griddle was still in my time in constant use, as “the best griddle in the town.” The cakes baked on the Holy Griddle were twice as good as any others. May the poor widow who so simply bequeathed it have found long ago “rest for her soul” better than any prayers have asked for her, even the favourite Irish prayer, “May you sit in heaven on a golden chair!”

Here is another house, where an old man lives with his sister. The old woman is the Mrs. Gamp of Balisk. Patrick Russell has a curious story attached to him. Having laboured long and well on my father’s estate, the latter finding him grow rheumatic and helpless, pensioned him with his wages for life, and Paddy retired to the enjoyment of such privacy as Balisk might afford. Growing more and more helpless, he at last for some years hobbled about feebly on crutches, a confirmed cripple. One day, with amazement, I saw him walking without his crutches, and tolerably firmly, up to Newbridge House. My father went to speak to him, and soon returned, saying: “Here is a strange thing. Paddy Russell says he has been to Father Mathew, and Father Mathew has blessed him, and he is cured! He came to tell me he wished to give up his pension, since he returns to work at Smith’s farm next week.” Very naturally, and as might be expected, poor Paddy, three weeks later, was again helpless, and a suppliant for the restoration of his pension, which was of course immediately renewed. But one who had witnessed only the scene of the long-known cripple walking up stoutly to decline his pension (the very best possible proof of his sincere belief in his own recovery) might well be excused for narrating the story as a miracle wrought by a true moral reformer, the Irish “Apostle of Temperance.”

Next door to Paddy Russell’s cabin stood “The Shop,” a cabin a trifle better than the rest, where butter, flour, and dip candles, Ingy-male (Indian meal), and possibly a small quantity of soap, were the chief objects of commerce. Further on came a miserable hovel with the roof broken in, and a pool of filth, en permanence, in the middle of the floor. Here dwelt a miserable good-for-nothing old man and equally good-for-nothing daughter; hopeless recipients of anybody’s bounty. Opposite them, in a tidy little cabin, always as clean as whitewash and sweeping could make its poor mud walls and earthen floor, lived an old woman and her daughter. The daughter was deformed, the mother a beautiful old woman, bedridden, but always perfectly clean, and provided by her daughter’s hard labour in the fields and cockle-gathering on the sea-shore, with all she could need. After years of devotion, when Mary was no longer young, the mother died, and the daughter, left quite alone in the world, was absolutely broken-hearted. Night after night she strayed about the chapel-yard where her mother lay buried, hoping, as she told me, to see her ghost.

“And do you think,” she asked, fixing her eyes on me, “do you think I shall ever see her again? I asked Father M—— would I see her in heaven? and all he said was, ‘I should see her in the glory of God.’ What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means. Will I see her herself—my poor old mother?”

After long years, I found this faithful heart still yearning to be re-united to the “poor old mother,” and patiently labouring on in solitude, waiting till God should call her home out of that little white cabin to one of the “many mansions,” where her mother is waiting for her.

Here is a house where there are many sons and daughters and some sort of prosperity. Here, again, is a house with three rooms and several inmates, and in one room lives a strange, tall old man, with something of dignity in his aspect. He asked me once to come into his room, and showed me the book over which all his spare hours seemed spent; “Thomas à Kempis.”

“Ah, yes, that is a great book; a book full of beautiful things.”

“Do you know it? do Protestants read it?”

“Yes, to be sure; we read all sorts of books.”

“I’m glad of it. It’s a comfort to me to think you read this book.”

Here again is an old woman with hair as white as snow, who deliberately informs me she is ninety-eight years of age, and next time I see her, corrects herself, and “believes it is eighty-nine, but it is all the same, she disremembers numbers.” This poor old soul in some way hurt her foot, and after much suffering was obliged to have half of it amputated. Strange to say, she recovered, but when I congratulated her on the happy event, I shall never forget the outbreak of true feminine sentiment which followed. Stretching out the poor mutilated and blackened limb, and looking at it with woeful compassion, she exclaimed, “Ah, ma’am, but it will never be a purty foot again!” Age, squalor, poverty, and even mutilation, had not sufficed to quench that little spark of vanity which “springs eternal in the (female) breast.”

Here, again, are half-a-dozen cabins, each occupied by widows with one or more daughters; eight of whom form my father’s pet corps of Amazons, always kept working about the shrubberies and pleasure-grounds, or haymaking or any light fieldwork; houses which, though poorest of all, are by no means the most dirty or uncared for. Of course there are dozens of others literally overflowing with children, children in the cradle, children on the floor, children on the threshold, children on the “midden” outside; rosy, bright, merry children, who thrive with the smallest possible share of buttermilk and stirabout, are utterly innocent of shoes and stockings, and learn at school all that is taught to them at least half as fast again as a tribe of little Saxons. Several of them in Balisk are the adopted children of the people who provide for them. First sent down by their parents (generally domestic servants) to be nursed in that salubrious spot, after a year or two it generally happened that the pay ceased, the parent was not heard of, and the foster-mother and father would no more have thought of sending the child to the Poor-house than of sending it to the moon. The Poor-house, indeed, occupied a very small space in the imagination of the people of Balisk. It was beyond Purgatory, and hardly more real. Not that the actual institution was conducted on other than the very mildest principles, but there was a fearful Ordeal by Water—in the shape of a warm bath—to be undergone on entrance; there were large rooms with glaring windows, admitting a most uncomfortable degree of light, and never shaded by any broken hats or petticoats; there were also stated hours and rules thoroughly disgusting to the Celtic mind, and, lastly, for the women, there were caps without borders!

Yes! cruelty had gone so far (masculine guardians, however compassionate, little recking the woe they caused), till at length a wail arose—a clamour—almost a Rebellion! “Would they make them wear caps without borders?” The stern heart of manhood relented, and answered “No!”

But I must return to Balisk. Does any one ask, was nothing done to ameliorate the condition of that wretched place? Certainly; at all events there was much attempted. Mrs. Evans, of Portrane, of whom I shall say more by and by, built and endowed capital schools for both boys and girls, and pensioned some of the poorest of the old people. My father having a wholesome horror of pauperising, tried hard at more complete reforms, by giving regular employment to as many as possible, and aiding all efforts to improve the houses. Not being the landlord of Balisk, however, he could do nothing effectually, nor enforce any kind of sanitary measures; so that while his own villages were neat, trim and healthy, poor Balisk went on year after year deserving the epithet it bore among us, of the Slough of Despond. The failures of endeavours to mend it would form a chapter of themselves. On one occasion my eldest brother undertook the true task for a Hercules; to drain, not the stables of Augeas, but the town of Balisk. The result was that his main drain was found soon afterwards effectually stopped up by the dam of an old beaver bonnet. Again, he attempted to whitewash the entire village, but many inhabitants objected to whitewash. Of course when any flood, or snow, or storm came (and what wintry month did they not come in Ireland?) I went to see the state of affairs at Balisk, and provide what could be provided. And of course when anybody was born, or married, or ill, or dead, or going to America, in or from Balisk, embassies were sent to Newbridge seeking assistance; money for burial or passage; wine, meat, coals, clothes; and (strange to say), in cases of death—always jam! The connection between dying and wanting raspberry jam remained to the last a mystery, but whatever was its nature, it was invariable. “Mary Keogh,” or “Peter Reilly,” as the case might be, “isn’t expected, and would be very thankful for some jam;” was the regular message. Be it remarked that Irish delicacy has suggested the euphuism of “isn’t expected” to signify that a person is likely to die. What it is that he or she “is not expected” to do, is never mentioned. When the supplicant was not supposed to be personally known at Newbridge, or a little extra persuasion was thought needful to cover too frequent demands, it was commonly urged that the petitioner was a “poor orphant,” commonly aged thirty or forty, or else a “desolate widow.” The word desolate, however, being always pronounced “dissolute,” the epithet proved less affecting than it was intended to be. But absurd as their words might sometimes be (and sometimes, on the contrary, they were full of touching pathos and simplicity), the wants of the poor souls were only too real, as we very well knew, and it was not often that a petitioner from Balisk to Newbridge went empty away.

But such help was only of temporary avail. The Famine came and things grew worse. In poor families, that is, families where there was only one man to earn and five or six mouths to feed, the best wages given in the country proved insufficient to buy the barest provision of food; wheatmeal for “griddle” bread, oatmeal for stirabout, turnips to make up for the lost potatoes. Strong men fainted at their work in the fields, having left untasted for their little children the food they needed so sorely. Beggars from the more distressed districts (for Balisk was in one of those which suffered least in Ireland) swarmed through the country, and rarely, at the poorest cabin, asked in vain for bread. Often and often have I seen the master or mistress of some wretched hovel bring out the “griddle cake,” and give half of it to some wanderer, who answered simply with a blessing and passed on. Once I remember passing by the house of a poor widow, who had seven children of her own, and as if that were not enough, had adopted an orphan left by her sister. At her cabin door one day, I saw, propped up against her knees, a miserable “traveller,” a wanderer from what a native of Balisk would call “other nations; a bowzy villiain from other nations,” that is to say, a village eight or ten miles away. The traveller lay senseless, starved to the bone and utterly famine-stricken. The widow tried tenderly to make him swallow a spoonful of bread and water, but he seemed unable to make the exertion. A few drops of whiskey by and by restored him to consciousness. The poor “bowzy” leaned his head on his hands and muttered feebly, “Glory be to God”! The widow looked up, rejoicing, “Glory be to God, he’s saved anyhow.” Of course all the neighbouring gentry joined in extensive soup-kitchens and the like, and by one means or other the hard years of famine were passed over.

Then came the Fever, in many ways a worse scourge than the famine. Of course it fell heavily on such ill-drained places as Balisk. After a little time, as each patient remained ill for many weeks, it often happened that three or four were in the fever in the same cabin, or even all the family at once, huddled in the two or three beds, and with only such attendance as the kindly neighbours, themselves overburdened, could supply. Soon it became universally known that recovery was to be effected only by improved food and wine; not by drugs. Those whose condition was already good, and who caught the fever, invariably died; those who were in a depressed state, if they could be raised, were saved. It became precisely a question of life and death how to supply nourishment to all the sick. As the fever lasted on and on, and re-appeared time after time, the work was difficult, seeing that no stores of any sort could ever be safely intrusted to Irish prudence and frugality.

Then came Smith O’Brien’s rebellion. The country was excited. In every village (Balisk nowise behindhand) certain clubs were formed, popularly called “Cutthroat Clubs,” for the express purpose of purchasing pikes and organising the expected insurrection in combination with leaders in Dublin. Head-Centre of the club of Balisk was the ex-schoolmaster, of whom we have already spoken. How he obtained that honour I know not; possibly because he could write, which most probably was beyond the achievements of any other member of the institution; possibly also because he claimed to be the lawful owner of the adjoining estate of Newbridge. How the schoolmaster’s claim was proved to the satisfaction of himself and his friends is a secret which, if revealed, would probably afford a clue to much of Irish ambition. Nearly every parish in Ireland has thus its lord de facto, who dwells in a handsome house in the midst of a park, and another lord who dwells in a mud-cabin in the village and is fully persuaded he is the lord de jure. In the endless changes of ownership and confiscation to which Irish land has been subjected, there is always some heir of one or other of the dispossessed families, who, if nothing had happened that did happen, and nobody had been born of a score or two of persons who somehow, unfortunately, were actually born, then he or she might, could, would, or should have inherited the estate. In the present case my ancestor had purchased the estate some 150 years before from another English family who had held it for some generations. When and where the poor Celtic schoolmaster’s forefathers had come upon the field none pretended to know. Anxious, however, to calm the minds of his neighbours, my father thought fit to address them in a paternal manifesto, posted about the different villages, entreating them to forbear from entering the “Cutthroat Clubs,” and pointing the moral of the recent death of the Archbishop of Paris at the barricades. The result of this step was that the newspaper, then published in Dublin under the audacious name of The Felon, devoted half a column to exposing my father by name to the hatred of good Clubbists, and pointing him out as “one of the very first for whose benefit the pikes were procured.” Boxes of pikes were accordingly actually sent by the railway before mentioned, and duly delivered to the Club; and still the threat of rebellion rose higher, till even calm people like ourselves began to wonder whether it were a volcano on which we were treading, or the familiar mud of Balisk.

Newbridge, as described in the first chapter of this book, bore some testimony to the troubles of the last century when it was erected. There was a long corridor which had once been all hung with weapons, and there was a certain board in the floor of an inner closet which could be taken up when desirable, and beneath which appeared a large receptacle wherein the aforesaid weapons were stored in times of danger. Stories of ’98 were familiar to us from infancy. There was the story of Le Hunts of Wexford, when the daughter of the family dreamed three times that the guns in her father’s hall were all broken and, on inducing Colonel Le Hunt to examine them, the dream was found to be true and his own butler the traitor. Horrible stories were there, also, of burnings and cardings (i.e., tearing the back with the iron comb used in carding wool); and nursery threats of rebels coming up back stairs on recalcitrant “puckhawns” (naughty children—children of Puck), insomuch that to “play at rebellion” had been our natural resource as children. Born and bred in this atmosphere, it seemed like a bad dream come true that there were actual pikes imported into well-known cabins, and that there were in the world men stupid and wicked enough to wish to apply them to those who laboured constantly for their benefit. Yet the papers teemed with stories of murders of good and just landlords; yet threats each day more loud, came with every post of what Smith O’Brien and his friends would do if they but succeeded in raising the peasantry, alas! all too ready to be raised. Looking over the miserable fiasco of that “cabbage garden” rebellion now, it seems all too ridiculous to have ever excited the least alarm. But at that time, while none could doubt the final triumph of England, it was very possible to doubt whether aid could be given by the English Government before every species of violence might be committed by the besotted peasantry at our gates.

I have been told on good authority that Smith O’Brien made his escape from the police in the “habit” of an Anglican Sisterhood, of which his sister, Hon. Mrs. Monsell, was Superior.

A little incident which occurred at the moment rather confirmed the idea that Balisk was transformed for the nonce into a little Hecla; not under snow, but mud. I was visiting the fever patients, and was detained late of a summer’s evening in the village. So many were ill, there seemed no end of sick to be supplied with food, wine and other things needed. In particular, three together were ill in a house already mentioned, where there were several grown-up sons, and the people were somewhat better off than usual, though by no means sufficiently so to be able to procure meat or similar luxuries. Here I lingered, questioning and prescribing, till at about nine o’clock my visit ended; and I left money to procure some of the things required. Next morning my father addressed me:—

“So you were at Balisk last night?”

“Yes, I was kept there.”

“You stayed in Tyrell’s house till nine o’clock?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“You gave six and sixpence to the mother to get provisions?”

“Yes; how do you know?”

“Well, very simply. The police were watching the door and saw you through it. As soon as you were gone the Club assembled there. They were waiting for your departure; and the money you gave was subscribed to buy pikes; of course to pike me!”

A week later, the bubble burst in the memorable Cabbage garden. The rebel chiefs were leniently dealt with by the Government, and their would-be rebel followers fell back into all the old ways as if nothing had happened. What became of the pikes no one knew. Possibly they exist in Balisk still, waiting for a Home Rule Government to be brought forth. At the end of a few months the poor schoolmaster, claimant of Newbridge, died; and as I stood by his bedside and gave him the little succour possible, the poor fellow lifted his eyes full of meaning, and said, “To think you should come to help me now!” It was the last reference made to the once-dreaded rebellion.

After endless efforts my brother carried his point and drained the whole village—beaver bonnets notwithstanding. Whitewash became popular. “Middens” (as the Scotch call them, the Irish have a simpler phrase) were placed more frequently behind houses than in front of them. Costume underwent some vicissitudes, among which the introduction of shoes and stockings, among even the juvenile population, was the most remarkable feature; a great change truly, since I can remember an old woman, to whom my youngest brother had given a pair, complaining that she had caught cold in consequence of wearing, for the first time in her life, those superfluous garments.

Many were drawn into the stream of the Exodus, and have left the country. How helpless they are in their migrations, poor souls! was proved by one sad story. A steady, good young woman, whose sister had settled comfortably in New York, resolved to go out to join her, and for the purpose took her passage at an Emigration Agency office in Dublin. Coming to make her farewell respects at Newbridge, the following conversation ensued between her and myself:

“So, Bessie, you are going to America?”

“Yes, ma’am, to join Biddy at New York. She wrote for me to come, and sent the passage-money.”

“That is very good of her. Of course you have taken your passage direct to New York?”

“Well, no, ma’am. The agent said there was no ship going to New York, but one to some place close by, New-something-else.”

“New-something-else, near New York; I can’t think where that could be.”

“Yes, ma’am, New—New—I disremember what it was, but he told me I could get from it to New York immadiently.”

“Oh, Bessie, it wasn’t New Orleans?”

“Yes, ma’am, that was it! New Orleans—New Orleans, close to New York, he said.”

“And you have paid your passage-money?”

“Yes, ma’am, I must go there anyhow, now.”

“Oh, Bessie, Bessie, why would you never come to school and learn geography? You are going to a terrible place, far away from your sister. That wicked agent has cheated you horribly.”

The poor girl went to New Orleans, and there died of fever. The birds of passage and fish which pass from sea to sea seem more capable of knowing what they are about than the greater number of the emigrants driven by scarcely less blind an instinct. Out of the three millions who are said to have gone since the famine from Ireland to America, how many must there have been who had no more knowledge than poor Bessie Mahon of the land to which they went!

Before I conclude these reminiscences of Irish peasant life in the Forties, I must mention an important feature of it—the Priests. Most of those whom I saw in our villages were disagreeable-looking men with the coarse mouth and jaw of the Irish peasant undisguised by the beards and whiskers worn by their lay brethren; and often the purple and bloated appearance of their cheeks suggested too abundant diet of bacon and whisky-punch. They worried me dreadfully by clearing out all the Catholic children from my school every now and then on the pretence of withdrawing them from heretical instruction, though nothing was further from the thoughts or wishes of any of us than proselytizing; nor was a single charge ever formulated against our teachers of saying a word to the children against their religion. What the priests really wanted was to obstruct education itself and too close and friendly intercourse with Protestants. For several winters I used to walk down to the school on certain evenings in the week and give the older lads and lassies lessons in Geography (with two huge maps of the world which I made myself, 11 ft. by 9 ft.!) and the first steps in Astronomy and history. Several times, when the class had been well got together and began to be interested, the priest announced that he would give them lessons on the same night, and they were to come to him instead of to me. Of course I told them to do so, and that I was very glad he would take the trouble. A fortnight or so later however I always learnt that the priest’s lessons had dropped and all was to be recommenced.

The poor woman I mentioned above as so devoted to her mother went to service with one of the priests in the neighbourhood in the hope that she would receive religious consolation from him. Meeting her some time after I expressed my hope that she had found it. “Ah, no Ma’am!” she answered sorrowfully, “He never spakes to me unless about the bacon or the like of that. Priests does be dark!” I thought the phrase wonderfully significant.

My father, though a Protestant of the Protestants as the reader has learned, thought it right to send regularly every year a cheque to the priest of Donabate as an aid to his slender resources; and there never was openly, anything but civility between the successive curés and ourselves. We bowed most respectfully to each other on the roads, but I never interchanged a word with any of them save once when I was busy attending a poor woman in Balisk in the cramps of cholera; the disease being at the time raging through the country. With the help of the good souls who in Ireland are always ready for any charitable deed, I was applying mustard poultices, when Father M—— entered the cabin (a revolting looking man he was, whose nose had somehow been frost-bitten), and turned me out. I implored him to defer, or at least hasten his ministrations; and stood outside the door in great impatience for half an hour while I knew the hapless patient was in agony and peril of death, inside. At last the priest came out,—and when I hurried back to the bedside I found he had been gumming some “Prayers to the Holy Virgin” on the wall. Happily we were not too late with our mustard and “sperrits,” and the woman was saved; whether by Father M—— and the Virgin or by me I cannot pretend to say.

I have spoken of our village school and must add that the boys and girls who attended it were exceedingly clever and bright. They caught up ideas, were moved by heroic or pathetic stories and understood jokes to a degree quite unmatched by English children of the same humble class, as I found later when I taught in Miss Carpenter’s Ragged Schools at Bristol. The ingenuity with which, when they came to a difficult word in reading, they substituted another was very diverting. One boy read that St. John had a leathern griddle about his loins; and a young man with a deep manly voice, once startled me by announcing, “He casteth out divils through,—through, through,—Blazes, the chief of the Divils!”

In Drumcar school a child, elaborately instructed by dear, good Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock concerning Pharisees, and then examined:—“What was the sin of the Pharisees?” replied promptly: “Ating camels, my lady!”

Alas, I have reason to fear that the erudition of my little scholars, if quickly obtained, was far from durable. Paying a visit to my old home ten years later I asked my crack scholar, promoted to be second gardener at Newbridge, “Well, Andrew, how much do you remember of all my lessons?”

“Ah, Ma’am, then, never a word!”

“O, Andrew, Andrew! And have you forgotten all about the sun, the moon and stars, the day and night, and the Seasons?”

“O, no, Ma’am! I do remember now, and you set them on the schoolroom table, and Mars was a red gooseberry, and I ate him!”

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VII. IRELAND IN THE FORTIES. THE GENTRY.

I now turn to describe, as my memory may serve, the life of the Irish gentry in the Forties. There never has been much of a middle class, unhappily, in the country, and therefore in speaking of the gentry I shall have in view mostly the landowners and their families. These, with few and always much noted exceptions, were Protestants, of English descent and almost exclusively of Saxon blood; the Anglo-Irish families however long settled in Ireland, naturally intermarrying chiefly with each other. So great was, in my time, the difference in outward looks between the two races, that I have often remarked that I could walk down Sackville Street and point to each passenger “Protestant,” “Catholic,” “Protestant,” “Catholic”; and scarcely be liable to make a mistake.

As I have said, my memory bridges over the gulf between a very typical ancien régime household and the present order of things, and I may be able to mark some changes, not unworthy of registration. But it must be understood that I make no attempt to describe what would be precisely called Irish society, for into this, I never really entered at all. I wearied of the little I had seen of it after a few balls and drawing-rooms in Dublin by the time I was eighteen and thenceforward only shared in home entertainments and dinners among neighbours in our own county, with a few visits to relatives at greater distance. I believe the origin of my great boredom in Dublin balls (for I was very fond of dancing) was the extraordinary inanity of the men whom I met. The larger number were officers of Horse Artillery, then under the command of my uncle, and I used to pity the poor youths, thinking that they danced with me as in duty bound, while their really marvellous silliness and dulness made conversation wearisome in the extreme. Many of these same empty-headed young coxcombs afterwards fought like Trojans through the Crimean War and came back,—transformed into heroes! I remember my dentist telling me, much to the same purpose, that half the officers in the garrison had come to him to have their teeth looked after before they went to the Crimea and had behaved abominably in his chair of torture, groaning and moaning and occasionally vituperating him and kicking his shins. But it was another story when some of those very men charged at Balaklava! We are not, I think, yet advanced far enough to dispense altogether with the stern teaching of war, or the virtues which spring out of the dreadful dust of the battlefield.

Railways were only beginning to be opened in 1840, and were much dreaded by landed proprietors through whose lands they ran. When surveyors came to plan the Dublin and Drogheda Railway my father and our neighbour Mrs. Evans, were up in arms and our farmers ready to throttle the trespassers. I suggested we should erect a Notice-board in Donabate with this inscription:—

“Survey the world from China to Peru; Survey not here,—we’ll shoot you if you do.”

The voyage to England, which most of us undertook at least once or twice a year, was a wretched transit in miserable, ill-smelling vessels. From Dublin to Bristol (our most convenient route) took at least thirty hours. From Holyhead to London was a two days’ journey by coach. On one of these journeys, having to stop at Bristol for two nights, I enjoyed an opportunity (enchanting at sixteen) of being swung in a basket backward and forward across the Avon, where the Suspension Bridge now stands. Preparations for these journeys of ours to England were not quite so serious as those which were necessarily made for our cousins when they went out to India and were obliged for five or six months wholly to dispense with the services of a laundress. Still, our hardships were considerable, and youngsters who were going to school or college were made up like little Micawbers “expecting dirty weather.” Elderly ladies, I remember, usually travelled in mourning and sometimes kept their little corkscrew curls in paper under their bonnet caps for the whole journey; a less distressing proceeding, however, than that of Lady Cahir thirty years earlier, who had her hair dressed, (powdered and on a cushion) by a famous hairdresser in Bath, and came over to exhibit it at St. Patrick’s ball in Dublin Castle, having passed five nights at sea, desperately ill, but heroically refusing to lie down and disarrange the magnificent structure on her aching head.

This lady by the way—of whom it was said that “Lady Cahir cares for no man”—had had a droll adventure in her youth, which my mother, who knew her well and I think was her schoolfellow, recounted to me. Before she married she lived with her mother, a rather extravagant widow, who plunged heavily into debt. One day the long-expected bailiffs came to arrest her and were announced as at the hall door. Quick as lightning Lady Cahir (then, I think, Miss Townsend) made her mother exchange dress and cap with her, to which she added the old lady’s wig and spectacles and then sat in her armchair knitting sedulously, with the blinds drawn down and her back to the window. The mother having vanished, the bailiff was shown up, and, exhibiting his credentials, requested the lady to accompany him to the sponging house. Of course there was a long palaver; but at last the captive consented to obey and merely said, “Well! I will go if you like, but I warn you that you are committing a great mistake in apprehending me.”

“O, O! We all know about that, Ma’am! Please come along! I have a hackney carriage at the door.”

The damsel, well wrapped in cloaks and furbelows and a great bonnet of the period, went quietly to her destination; but when the time came for closing the door on her as a prisoner, she jumped up, threw off wig, spectacles and old woman’s cap, and disclosed the blue eyes, golden hair, and radiant young beauty for which she was long afterwards renowned. Meanwhile, of course, her mother had had abundance of time to clear out of the way of her importunate creditors.

Many details of comforts and habits in those days were very much in arrear of ours, perhaps about equally in Ireland and in England. It is droll to remember, for example, as I do vividly, seeing in my childhood the housemaids striving with infinite pains and great loss of time to obtain a light with steel and flint and a tinder-box, when by some untoward accident all the fires in the house (habitually burning all night) had been extinguished.

The first matchbox I saw was a long upright red one containing a bottle of phosphorus and a few matches which were lighted by insertion in the bottle. After this we had Lucifers which nearly choked us with gas; but in which we gloried as among the greatest discoveries of all time. Seriously I believe few of the vaunted triumphs of science have contributed so much as these easy illuminators of our long dark Northern nights to the comfort and health of mankind.

Again our grandmothers had used exquisite China basins with round long-necked jugs for all their ablutions and we had advanced to the use of large basins and footpans, slipper baths and shower baths, when, as nearly as possible in 1840, the first sponge bath was brought to Ireland. I was paying a visit to my father’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth M‘Clintock, at Drumcar in Co. Louth, when she exhibited with pride to me and her other guests the novel piece of bedroom furniture. When I returned home and described it my mother ordered a supply for our house, and we were wont for a long time to enquire of each other, “how we enjoyed our tubs?” as people are now supposed to ask: “Have you used Pears’ soap?” I believe it was from India these excellent inventions came.

Many other differences might be noted between the habits of those days and of ours. Diners Russes were, of course, not thought of. We dined at six, or six-thirty, at latest; and after the soup and fish, all the first course was placed at once on the table. For a party, for example, of 16 or 18, there would be eight dishes; joints, fowls and entrées. It was a triumph of good cookery, but rarely achieved, to serve them all hot at once. Tea, made with an urn, was a regular meal taken in the drawing-room about nine o’clock; never before dinner. The modern five o’clock tea was altogether unknown in the Forties, and when I ventured sometimes to introduce it in the Fifties, I was so severely reprehended that I used to hold a secret symposium for specially favoured guests in my own room after our return from drives or walks. All old gentlemen pronounced five o’clock tea an atrocious and disgraceful practice.

Another considerable difference in our lives was caused by the scarcity of newspapers and periodicals. I can remember when the Dublin Evening Mail,—then a single sheet, appearing three times a week and received at Newbridge on the day after publication,—was our only source of news. I do not think any one of our neighbours took the Times or any English paper. Of magazines we had Blackwood and the Quarterly, but illustrated ones were unknown. There was a tolerable circulating library in Dublin, to which I subscribed and from whence I obtained a good many French books; but the literary appetites of the Irish gentry generally were frugal in the extreme!

The real differences, however, between Life in 1840 and Life in 1890 were much deeper than any record of these altered manners, or even any references to the great changes caused by steam and the telegraph, can convey. There were certain principles which in those days were almost universally accepted and which profoundly influenced all our works and ways. The first of them was Parental and Marital Authority. Perhaps my particular circumstances as the daughter of a man of immense force of will, caused me to see the matter especially clearly, but I am sure that in the Thirties and Forties (at all events in Ireland) there was very little declension generally from the old Roman Patria Potestas. Fathers believed themselves to possess almost boundless rights over their children in the matter of pursuits, professions, marriages and so on; and the children usually felt that if they resisted any parental command it was on their peril and an act of extreme audacity. My brothers and I habitually spoke of our father, as did the servants and tenants, as “The Master;” and never was title more thoroughly deserved.

Another important difference was in the position of women. Of this I shall have more to say hereafter; suffice it to note that it was the universal opinion, that no gentlewoman could possibly earn money without derogating altogether from her rank (unless, indeed, by card-playing as my grandmother did regularly!); and that housekeeping and needlework (of the most inartistic kinds) were her only fitting pursuits. The one natural ambition of her life was supposed to be a “suitable” marriage; the phrase always referring to settlements, rather than sentiments. Study of any serious sort was disapproved, and “accomplishments” only were cultivated. My father prohibited me when very young from learning Latin from one of my brothers who kindly offered to teach me; but, as I have recounted, he paid largely and generously that I might be taught Music, for which I had no faculties at all. Other Irish girls my contemporaries, were much worse off than I, for my dear mother always did her utmost to help my studies and my liberal allowance permitted me to buy books.

The laws which concerned women at that date were so frightfully unjust that the most kindly disposed men inevitably took their cue from them, and looked on their mothers, wives, and sisters as beings with wholly inferior rights; with no rights, indeed, which should ever stand against theirs. The deconsideration of women (as dear Barbara Bodichon in later years used to say) was at once cause and result of our legal disabilities. Let the happier women of these times reflect on the state of things which existed when a married woman’s inheritance and even her own earnings (if she could make any), were legally robbed from her by her husband, and given, if he pleased, to his mistress! Let them remember that she could make no will, but that her husband might make one which should bequeath the control of her children to a man she abhorred or to a woman of evil life. Let them remember that a husband who had beaten and wronged his wife in every possible way could yet force her by law to live with him and become the mother of his children. Personally and most fortunately (for I know not of what crime I might not have been guilty if so tried!) I never had cause of complaint on the score of injustice or unkindness from any of the men with whom I had to do. But the knowledge, when it came to me, of the legalised oppressions under which other women groaned, lay heavy on my mind. I was not, however, in those early days, interested in politics or large social reforms; and did not covet the political franchise, finding in my manifold duties and studies over-abundant outlets for my energies.

Another difference between the first and latter half of the century is, I think, the far greater simplicity of character of the older generation. No doubt there were, at the time of which I write, many fine and subtle minds at work among the poets, philosophers and statesmen of the day; but ordinary ladies and gentlemen, even clever and well-educated ones, would, I think, if they could revive now, seem to us rather like our boys and girls than our grandparents. Thousands of allusions, ideas, shades of sentiment and reflection which have become common-places to us, were novel and strange to them. What Cowper’s poetry is to Tennyson’s, what the Vicar of Wakefield is to Middlemarch, so were their transparent minds to ours. I remember once (for a trivial example of what I mean) walking with my father in his later days in the old garden one exquisite spring day when the apple trees were covered with blossoms and the birds were singing all round us. As he leaned on my arm, having just recovered from an illness which had threatened to be fatal and was in a mood unusually tender, I was tempted to say, “Don’t you feel, Father, that a day like this is almost too beautiful and delicious, that it softens one’s feelings to the verge of pain?” In these times assuredly such a remark would have seemed to most people too obvious to deserve discussion, but it only brought from my father the reply: “God bless my soul, what nonsense you talk, my dear! I never heard the like. Of course a fine day makes everybody cheerful and a rainy day makes us dull and dismal.” Everyone I knew then, was, more or less, similarly simple; and in some of the ablest whom I met in later years of the same generation, (e.g., Mrs. Somerville) I found the same single-mindedness, the same absence of all experience of the subtler emotions. Conversation, as a natural consequence, was more downright and matter of fact, and rarely if ever was concerned with critical analyses of impressions. In short, (as I have said) our fathers were in many respects, like children compared to ourselves.

Another and a sad change has taken place in the amount of animal spirits generally shared by young and old in the Thirties and Forties and down, I think, to the Crimean War, which brought a great seriousness into all our lives. It was not only the young who laughed in joyous “fits” in those earlier days; the old laughed then more heartily and more often than I fear many young people do now; that blessed laugh of hearty amusement which causes the eyes to water and the sides to ache—a laugh one hardly ever hears now in any class or at any age. An evidence of the high level of ordinary spirits may be found in the readiness with which such genuine laughter responded to the smallest provocation. It did not need the delightful farce of the Keeley’s acting (though I recall the helpless state into which Mr. Keeley’s pride in his red waistcoat reduced half the house), but even an old, well-worn, good story, or family catch-word with some ludicrous association, was enough to provoke jovial mirth. It was part of a young lady’s and young gentleman’s home training to learn how to indulge in the freest enjoyment of fun without boisterousness or shrieks or discordance of any kind. Young people were for ever devising pranks and jests among themselves, and even their seniors occupied themselves in concocting jokes, many of which we should now think childish; the order of the “April Fool,” being the general type. Comic verse making; forging of love letters; disguising and begging as tramps; sending boxes of bogus presents; making “ghosts” with bolsters and burnt cork eyes to be placed in dark corners of passages; these and a score of such monkey-tricks for which nobody now has patience, were common diversions in every household, and were nearly always taken good-humouredly. My father used to tell of one ridiculous deception in which the chief actress and inventor was that very grande dame Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of Moira, daughter of the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Moira, my father and two other young men, by means of advertising and letters, induced some wretched officer to walk up and down a certain part of Sackville Street for an hour with a red geranium in his buttonhole, to show himself off, as he thought, to a young lady with a large fortune who proposed to marry him. The conspirators sat in a window across the street watching their victim and exploding with glee at his peacock behaviour. The sequel was better than the joke. The poor man wrote a letter to his tormentress (whom he had at last detected) so pitiful that her kind heart melted, and she exerted her immense influence effectually on his behalf and provided for him comfortably for life.

Henry, the third Marquis of Waterford, husband of the gifted and beautiful lady whose charming biography Mr. Hare has recently written, was the last example I imagine in Ireland of these redundant spirits. It was told of him, and I remember hearing of it at the time, that a somewhat grave and self-important gentleman had ridden up to Curraghmore on business and left his bay horse at the door. Lord Waterford, seeing the animal, caught up a pot of whitewash in use by some labourer and rapidly whitewashed the horse; after which exploit he went indoors to interview his visitor, and began by observing, “That is a handsome grey horse of yours at the door.” “A bay, my Lord.”

“Not at all. It is a grey horse. I saw you on it.”

Eventually both parties adjourned to the front of the house and found the whitewashed horse walking up and down with a groom. “You see it is grey,” said the Marquis triumphantly.

Certainly no one in those days dreamed of asking the question, “Is Life worth Living?” We were all, young and old, quite sure that life was extremely valuable; a boon for which to be grateful to God. I recall the amazement with which I first read of the Buddhist and Brahmin Doctrine that Existence is per se an evil, and that the reward of the highest virtue will be Absorption, or Nirvana. The pessimism which prevails in this fin de siècle was as unknown in the Forties as the potato disease before the great blight.

I much wish that some strong thinker would undertake the useful task of tracking this mental and moral anæmia of the present generation to its true origin, whether that origin be the ebb of religious hope and faith and the reaction from the extreme and too hasty optimism which culminated in 1851, and has fallen rapidly since 1875, or whether, in truth, our bodily conditions, though tending to prolong life and working power to an amazing degree, are yet less conducive to the development of the sanguine and hilarious temperament common in my youth. I have heard as a defence for the revolution which has taken place in medical treatment—from the depletory and antiphlogistic to the nourishing and stimulating, and for the total abandonment of the practice of bleeding—that it is not the doctors who have altered their minds, but the patients, whose bodies have undergone a profound modification. I can quite recall the time when (as all the novels of the period testify), if anybody had a fall or a fit, or almost any other mishap, it was the first business of the doctor to whip out his lancet, bare the sufferer’s arm, and draw a large quantity of blood, when everybody and the aforesaid novels always remarked; “It was providential that there was a doctor at hand” to do it. I have myself seen this operation performed on one of my brothers in our drawing-room about 1836, and I heard of it every day occurring among our neighbours, rich and poor. My father’s aunt, whom I well remember, Jane Power Trench (sister of the first Lord Clancarty), who lived in Marlborough Buildings in Bath, was habitually bled every year just before Easter, having previously spent the entire winter in her bedroom of which the windows were pasted down and the doors doubled. A few days after the phlebotomy the old lady invariably bought a new bonnet and walked in it up to the top of Beacon Hill. She continued the annual ritual unbroken till she died at 79. Surely these people were made of stronger pâte than we? In corroboration of this theory I may record how much more hardy were the gentlemen of the Forties in all their habits than are those of the Nineties. When my father and his friends went on grouse-shooting expeditions to our mountain-lodge, I used to provide for the large parties only abundance of plain food for dinners, and for luncheons merely sandwiches, bread and cheese, with a keg of ale, and a basket of apples. By degrees it became necessary (to please my brother’s guests) to provide the best of fish, fowl and flesh, champagne and peaches. The whole odious system of battues, rendering sport unmanly as well as cruel, with all its attendant waste and cost and disgusting butchery, has grown up within my recollection by the extension of luxury, laziness and ostentation.

To turn to another subject. There was very little immorality at that time in Ireland either in high or low life, and what there was received no quarter. But there was, certainly, together with the absence of vice, a lack of some of the virtues which have since developed amongst us. It is not easy to realise that in my lifetime men were hanged for forgery and for sheep-stealing; and that no one agitated for the repeal of such Draconian legislation, but everybody placidly repeated the observation (now-a-days so constantly applied to the scientific torture of animals), that it was “NECESSARY.” Cruelties, wrongs and oppressions of all kinds were rife, and there were (in Ireland at all events) none to raise an outcry such as would echo now from one end of England to the other.

The Protestant pulpit was occupied by two distinct classes of men. There were the younger sons of the gentry and nobles, who took the large livings and were booked for bishoprics; and these were educated at Oxford and Cambridge, were more or less cultivated men and associated of course on equal terms with the best in the land. Not seldom they were men of noble lives, and extreme piety; such for example, as the last Protestant Archbishop of Tuam, and a certain Archdeacon Trench, whom I remember regarding with awe and curiosity since I had heard that he had once got up into his own pulpit, and (like Maxwell Gray’s Dean Maitland) made a public confession of all his life’s misdoings. The second class of Irish clergymen in those days were men of a rather lower social grade, educated in Trinity College, often, no doubt, of excellent character and devotion but generally extremely narrow in their views, conducting all controversies by citations of isolated Bible-texts and preaching to their sparse country congregations with Dublin brogues which, not seldom, reduced the sublimity of their subjects to bathos. There was one, for example, who said, as the peroration of his sermon on the Fear of Death:—

“Me brethren the doying Christian lepps into the arrums of Death and makes his hollow jaws ring with eternal hallelujahs!”

I have myself heard another read the concluding chapters of the gospels, substituting with extraordinary effect the words “two Meal-factors,” for the “two malefactors,” who were crucified. There was a chapter in the Acts which we dreaded to hear, so difficult was it to help laughing when we were told of “Perthians and Mades, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia and the parts of Libya about Cyraine, streengers of Roum, Jews and Proselytes, Crates and Arabians.” It was also hard to listen gravely to a vivid description of Jonah’s catastrophe, as I have heard it, thus: “The weves bate against the ship, and the ship bate against the weves;” (and, at last) “The Wheel swallowed Jonah!”

They had a difficult place to hold, these humbler Irish clergymen, properly associating with no class of their parishioners; but to their credit be it said, they were nearly all men of blameless lives, who did their duty as they understood it, fairly well. The disestablishment of the Irish Church which I had regarded beforehand with much prejudice, did (I have since been inclined to think), very little mischief, and certainly awakened in the minds of the Irish squirearchy who had to settle their creed afresh, an interest in theology which was never exhibited in my earlier days. I was absolutely astounded on paying a visit to my old home a few years after disestablishment and while the Convention (commonly called the Contention!) was going on, to hear sundry recondite mysteries discussed at my brother’s table and to find some of my old dancing partners actually greedily listening to what I could tell them of the then recent discovery of Mr. Edmund Ffoulkes,—that the doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Ghost had been invented by King Reccared.

As regards any moral obligation or duty owed by men and women to the lower animals, such ideas were as yet scarcely beginning to be recognised. It was in 1822, the year in which I was born, that brave old Richard Martin carried in Parliament the first Act ever passed by any legislature in the world on behalf of the brutes. Tom Moore had laughed at this early Zoophilist.

“Place me midst O’Rourkes, O’Tooles, The ragged royal blood of Tara! Place me where Dick Martin rules The houseless wilds of Connemara

But in the history of human civilisation, “Martin’s Act” will hereafter assuredly hold a distinct place of honour when many a more pompous political piece of legislation is buried in oblivion. For a long time the new law, and the Society for Prevention of Cruelty which arose to work it, were objects of obloquy and jest even from such a man as Sydney Smith, who did his best in the Edinburgh Review to sneer them down. But by degrees they formed, as Mr. Lecky says every system of legislation must do, a system of moral education. A sense of the Rights of Animals has slowly been awakened, and is becoming, by not imperceptible degrees, a new principle of ethics. In my youth there were plenty of good people who were fond of dogs, cats and horses; but nothing in their behaviour, or in that of any one I knew at that time, testified to the existence of any latent idea that it was morally wrong to maltreat animals to any extent. Pious sportsmen were wont to scourge their dogs with frightful dog-whips, for any disobedience or mistake, with a savage violence which I shudder to remember; and which I do not think the most brutal men would now exhibit openly. Miss Edgeworth’s then recent novel of Ennui had described her hero as riding five horses to death to give himself a sensation, without (as it would appear) forfeiting in the author’s opinion his claims to the sympathies of the reader. I can myself recall only laughing, not crying as I should be more inclined to do now, at the spectacle of miserable half-starved horses made to gallop in Irish cars to win a bribe for the driver, who flogged them over ruts and stones, shouting (as I have heard them) “Never fare! I’ll batther him out of that!” The picture of a “Rosinante,” from Cervantes’ time till a dozen or two years ago, instead of being one of the most pathetic objects in the world,—the living symbol of human cruelty,—was always considered a particularly laughable caricature. Only tender-hearted Bewick in his woodcut, Waiting for Death, tried to move the hearts of his generation to compassion for the starved and worn-out servant of ungrateful man.

The Irish peasantry do not habitually maltreat animals, but the frightful mutilations and tortures which of late years they have practised on cattle belonging to their obnoxious neighbours, is one of the worst proofs of the existence in the Celtic character of that undercurrent of ferocity of which I have spoken elsewhere.

Among Irish ladies and gentlemen in the Forties there was a great deal of interest of course in our domestic pets, and I remember a beautiful and beloved young bride coming to pay us a visit, and asking in a tone of profound conviction: “What would life be without dogs?” Still there was nothing then existing, I think, in the world like the sentiment which inspired Mathew Arnold’s Geist or even his “Kaiser Dead.” The gulf between the canine race and ours was thought to be measureless. Darwin had not yet written the Descent of Man or made us imagine that “God had made of one blood” at least all the mammals “upon earth.” No one dreamed of trying to realise what must be the consciousness of suffering animals; nor did anyone, I think, live under the slightest sense of responsibility for their well-being. Even my dear old friend, Harriet St. Leger, though she was renowned through the county for her attachment to her great black Retrievers, said to me one day, many years after I had left Ireland, “I don’t understand your feelings about animals at all. To me a dog is a dog. To you it seems to be something else!”

Another difference was, that there was very little popularity-hunting in the Forties. The “working man” was seen, but not yet heard of; and, so far as I remember, we thought as little of the public opinion of our villages respecting us as we did of the public opinion of the stables. The wretched religious bigotry which, as we knew, made the Catholics look on us as infallibly condemned of God in this world and the next, was an insuperable barrier to sympathy from them, and we never expected them to understand either our acts or motives. But if we cared little or nothing what they thought of us, I must in justice say that we did care a great deal for their comfort, and were genuinely unhappy in their afflictions and active to relieve their miseries. When the famine came there was scarcely one Irish lady or gentleman, I think, who did not spend time, money and labour like water to supply food to the needy. I remember the horror with which my father listened to a visitor, who was not an Irishwoman but a purse-proud nouveau riche married to a very silly baronet in our neighbourhood, who told him that her husband’s Mayo property had just cost them £70. “That will go some way in supplying Indian meal to your tenants,” said my father, supposing that to such purpose it must be devoted. “O dear, no! We are not sending it for any such use,” said Lady —. “We are spending it on evictions!” “Good God!” shouted my father; “how shocking! At such a time as this!”

It has been people like these who have ever since done the hard things of which so much capital has been made by those whose interest it has been to stir up strife in the “distressful country.”

I happen to be able to recall precisely the day, almost the hour, when the blight fell on the potatoes and caused the great calamity. A party of us were driving to a seven o’clock dinner at the house of our neighbour, Mrs. Evans, of Portrane. As we passed a remarkably fine field of potatoes in blossom, the scent came through the open windows of the carriage and we remarked to each other how splendid was the crop. Three or four hours later, as we returned home in the dark, a dreadful smell came from the same field, and we exclaimed, “Something has happened to those potatoes; they do not smell at all as they did when we passed them on our way out.” Next morning there was a wail from one end of Ireland to the other. Every field was black and every root rendered unfit for human food. And there were nearly eight millions of people depending principally upon these potatoes for existence!

The splendid generosity of the English public to us at that time warmed all our Anglo-Irish hearts and cheered us to strain every nerve to feed the people. But the agitators were afraid it would promote too much good feeling between the nations, which would not have suited their game. I myself heard O’Connell in Conciliation Hall (that ill-named place!) endeavour to belittle English liberality. He spoke (a strange figure in the red robes of his Mayoralty and with a little sandy wig on his head) to the following purpose:—

“They have sent you over money in your distress. But do you think they do it for love of you, or because they feel for you, and are sorry for your trouble? Devil a bit! They are afraid of you!—that is it! They are afraid of you. You are eight millions strong.”

It was as wicked a speech as ever man made, but it was never, that I know of, reported or remarked upon. He spoke continually to similar purpose no doubt, in that Hall, where my cousin—afterwards the wife of John Locke, M.P. for Southwark—and I had gone to hear him out of girlish curiosity.

The part played by Anglo-Irish ladies when the great fever which followed the famine came on us, was the same. It became perfectly well known that if any of the upper classes caught the fever, they almost uniformly died. The working people could generally be cured by a total change of diet and abundant meat and wine, but to the others no difference could be made in that way, and numbers of ladies and gentlemen lost their lives by attending their poor in the disease. It was very infectious, or at least it was easily caught in each locality by those who went into the cabins.

There were few people whom I met in Ireland in those early days whose names would excite any interest in the reader’s mind. One was poor Elliot Warburton, the author of the Crescent and the Cross, who came many times to Newbridge as an acquaintance of my brother. He was very refined and, as we considered, rather effeminate; but how grand, even sublime, was he in his death! On the burning Amazon in mid-Atlantic he refused to take a place in the crowded boats, and was last seen standing alone beside the faithful Captain at the helm as the doomed vessel was wrapped in flames. I have never forgotten his pale, intellectual face and somewhat puny frame, and pictured him thus—a true hero.

His brother, who was commonly known as Hochelaga, from the name of his book on Canada, was a hale and genial young fellow, generally popular. One rainy day he was prompted by a silly young lady-guest of ours to sing a series of comic songs in our drawing-room, the point of the jokes turning on the advances of women to men. My dear mother, then old and feeble, after listening quietly for a time, slowly rose from her sofa, walked painfully across the room, and leaning over the piano said in her gentle way a few strong words of remonstrance. She could not bear, she said, that men should ridicule women. Respect and chivalrous feeling for them, even when they were foolish and ill-advised, were the part, she always thought, of a generous man. She would beg Mr. Warburton to choose some other songs for his fine voice. All this was done so gently and with her sweet, kind smile, that no one could take offence. Mr. Warburton was far from doing so. He was, I could see, touched with tender reverence for his aged monitress, and rising hastily from the piano, made the frankest apologies, which of course were instantly accepted. I have described this trivial incident because I think it illustrates the kind of influence which was exercised by women of the old school of “decorum.”

Another man who sometimes came to our house, was Dr. Longley, then Bishop of Ripon, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a very charming person, without the slightest episcopal morgue or affectation, and with the kindest brown eyes in the world. His wife was niece, and, I believe, eventually heiress, of our neighbour Mrs. Evans; and he and his family spent some summers at Portrane in the Fifties when we had many pleasant parties and picnics. I shall not forget how the Bishop laughed when the young Longleys and I and a few guests of my own, inaugurated some charades, and our party, all in disguise, were announced on our arrival at Portrane, as “Lady Worldly,” “Miss Angelina Worldly,” “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead,” and the “Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims.”

Our word was “Novice.” I, as Lady Worldly, in my great-grandmother’s petticoat and powdered toupee, gave my daughter Angelina a lecture on the desirability of marrying “Sir Bumpkin Blunderhead” who was rich, and of dismissing Captain Algernon who was poor. Sir Bumpkin then made his proposals, to which Angelina emphatically answered “No.” In the second scene I met Sir Bumpkin at the gaming table, and fleeced him utterly; the end of his “VICE” being suicide on the adjacent sofa. Angelina then, in horror took the veil, and became a “No-vice,” duly admitted to her Nunnery by the Cardinal Lord Archbishop of Rheims (my youngest brother in a superb scarlet dressing gown) who pronounced a Sermon on the pleasures of fasting and going barefoot. Angelina retired to her cell, but was soon disturbed by a voice outside the window (Henry Longley’s); and exclaiming “Algernon, beloved Algernon!” a speedy elopement over the back of the sofa concluded the fate of the Novice and the charade.

There was another charade in which we held a debate in Parliament on a Motion to “abolish the sun and moon,” which amused the bishop to the last degree, especially as we made fun of Joseph Hume’s retrenchments; he being a particular friend and frequent guest of our hostess. The abolition of the Sun would, we feared, affect the tax on parasols.

At Ripon, as Dr. Longley told me, the Palace prepared for him (the first bishop of the new see) had, as ornaments of the front of the house, two full-sized stone (or plaster) Angels. One day a visitor asked him: “Pray, my Lord, is it supposed by Divines that Angels wear the order of the Garter?” On inspection it proved that the Ripon Angels had formerly done service as statues of the Queen and Prince Albert, but that wings had been added to fit them for the episcopal residence. Sufficient care, however, had not been taken to efface the insignia of the Most Illustrious Order; and “Honi soit qui mal y pense” might be dimly deciphered on the leg of the male celestial visitant.

A lady nearly related to Mrs. Longley, who had married an English nobleman, adopted the views of the Plymouth Brothers (or as all the Mrs. Malaprops of the period invariably styled them, the “Yarmouth Bloaters”), which had burst into sudden notoriety. When her husband died leaving her a very wealthy woman, she thought it her duty to carry out the ideas of her sect by putting down such superfluities of her establishment as horses and carriages, and a well appointed table. She accordingly wrote to her father and begged him to dispose of all her plate and equipages. Lord C—— made no remonstrance and offered no arguments; and after a year or two he received a letter from his daughter couched in a different strain. She told him that she had now reached the conviction that it was “the will of God that a peeress should live as a peeress,” and she begged him to buy for her new carriages and fresh plate. Lord C——’s answer must have been a little mortifying. “I knew, my dear, that you would come sooner or later to your senses. You will find your carriages at your coachmakers and your plate at your bankers.”

Mrs. Evans, née Sophia Parnell, the aunt of both these ladies, and a great-aunt of Charles Stewart Parnell, was, as I have said, our nearest neighbour and in the later years of my life at Newbridge my very kind old friend. For a long time political differences between my father and her husband,—George Hampden Evans, M.P., who had managed to wrest the county from the Tories,—kept the families apart, but after his death we were pleasantly intimate for many years. She often spoke to me of the Avondale branch of her family, and more than once said: “There is mischief brewing! I am troubled at what is going on at Avondale. My nephew’s wife” (the American lady, Delia Stewart) “has a hatred of England, and is educating my nephew, like a little Hannibal, to hate it too!” How true was her foresight there is no need now to rehearse, nor how near that “little Hannibal” came to our Rome! Charles Parnell was very far from being a representative Irishman. He was of purely English extraction, and even in the female line had no drop of Irish blood. His mother, as all the world knows, was an American; his grandmother was one of the Howards of the family of the Earls of Wicklow, his great-grandmother a Brooke, of a branch of the old Cheshire house; and, beyond this lady again, his grand-dames were Wards and Whitsheds. In short, like other supposed “illustrious Irishmen”—Burke, Grattan, Goldsmith, and Wellington—Mr. Parnell was only one example more of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon intellect in every land of its adoption.

Mrs. Evans had known Madame de Stael, Condorcet and many other interesting French people in her youth, and loved the Condorcets warmly. She described to me a stiff, old-fashioned dinner at which she had been present when Madame de Stael was a guest. After dinner, the ladies, having retired to the drawing-room, sat apart from Madame de Stael in terror, and she looked them over with undisguised contempt. After a while she rose and, without asking the consent of the mistress of the house, rang the bell. When the footman appeared, she delivered the startling order: “Tell the gentlemen to come up!” The sensation among the formal and scandalized ladies upstairs, and the gentlemen just settling down to their usual long potations below, may be well imagined.

When her husband died, Mrs. Evans built in his memory a fine Round Tower on the plan and of the size of the best of the old Irish towers. It stands on high ground on what was her deer-park, and is a useful landmark to sailors all along that dangerous coast, where the dreadful wreck of the Tayleur took place. On the shore below, under the lofty black cliffs, are several very imposing caverns. In the largest of these, which is lighted from above by a shaft, Mrs. Evans, on one occasion, gave a great luncheon party, at which I was present. The company were all in high spirits and thoroughly enjoying the pigeon-pies and champagne, when some one observed that the tide might soon be rising. Mrs. Evans replied that it was all right, there was plenty of time, and the festival proceeded for another half-hour, when somebody rose and strolled to the mouth of the cavern and soon uttered a cry of alarm. The tide had risen, and was already beating at a formidable depth against both sides of the rocks which shut in the cave. Consternation of course reigned among the party. A night spent in the further recesses of that damp hole, even supposing the tide did not reach the end (which was very doubtful), afforded anything but a cheerful prospect. Could anybody get up through the shaft to the upper cliff? Certainly, if they had a long ladder. But there were no ladders lying about the cave; and, finally, everybody stood mournfully watching the rising waters at the mouth of their prison. Mrs. Evans all this time appeared singularly calm, and administered a little encouragement to some of the almost fainting ladies. When the panic was at its climax, Mrs. Evans’ own large boat was seen quietly rounding the projecting rocks and was soon comfortably pushed up to the feet of the imprisoned party, who had nothing to do but to embark in two or three detachments and be safely landed in the bay outside, beyond the reach of the sea. The whole incident, it is to be suspected, had been pre-arranged by the hostess to infuse a little wholesome excitement among her country guests.

Our small village church at Donabate was not often honoured by this lady’s presence, but one Sunday she saw fit to attend service with some visitors; and a big dog unluckily followed her into the pew and lay extended on the floor, which he proceeded to beat with his tail after the manner of impatient dogs under durance. This disturbance was too much for the poor parson, who did not love Mrs. Evans. As he proceeded with the service and the rappings were repeated again and again, his patience gave way, and he read out this extraordinary lesson to his astonished congregation:—“The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself. Turn out that dog, if you please! It’s extremely wrong to bring a dog into church.” During the winter Mrs. Evans was wont to live much alone in her country house, surrounded only by her old servants and multitudes of old books. When at last, in old age, she found herself attacked by mortal disease she went to Paris to profit by the skill of some French physician in whom she had confidence, and there, with unshaken courage she passed away. Her remains, enclosed in a leaden coffin, were brought back to Portrane, and her Irish terrier who adored her, somehow recognised the dreadful chest and exhibited a frenzy of grief; leaping upon it and tearing at the pall with piteous cries. Next morning, strange to say, the poor brute was, with six others about the place, in such a state of excitement as to be supposed to be rabid and it was thought necessary to shoot them all. One of them leaped the gate of the yard and escaping bit two of my father’s cows, which became rabid, and were shot in my presence. Mrs. Evans was buried beside her beloved husband in the little roofless and ruined church of Portrane, close by the shore. On another grave in the same church belonging to the same family, a dog had some years previously died of grief.

A brother of this lady, who walked over often to Newbridge from Portrane to bring my mother some scented broom which she loved, was a very singular and pathetic character. He was a younger brother of that sufficiently astute man of the world, Sir Henry Parnell, afterwards Lord Congleton, but was his antipodes in disposition. Thomas Parnell, “Old Tom Parnell,” as all Dublin knew him for forty years, had a huge ungainly figure like Dr. Johnson’s, and one of the sweetest, softest faces ever worn by mortal man. He had, at some remote and long forgotten period, been seized with a fervent and self-denying religious enthusiasm of the ultra-Protestant type; and this had somehow given birth in his brain to a scheme for arranging texts of the Bible in a mysterious order which, when completed, should afford infallible answers to every question of the human mind! To construct the interminable tables required for this wonderful plan, poor Tom Parnell devoted his life and fortune. For years which must have amounted to many decades, he laboured at the work in a bare, gloomy, dusty room in what was called a “Protestant Office” in Sackville Street. Money went speedily to clerks and printers; and no doubt the good man (who himself lived, as he used to say laughingly, on “a second-hand bone,”) gave money also freely in alms. One way or another Mr. Parnell grew poorer and more poor, his coat looked shabbier, and his beautiful long white hair more obviously in need of a barber. Once or twice every summer he was prevailed on by his sister to tear himself from his work and pay her a few weeks’ visit in the country at Portrane; and to her and all her visitors he preached incessantly his monotonous appeal: “Repent; and cease to eat good dinners, and devote yourselves to compiling texts!” When his sister—who had treated him as a mother would treat a silly boy—died, she left him a small annuity, to be paid to him weekly in dribblets by trustees, lest he should spend it at once and starve if he received it half-yearly. After this epoch he worked on with fewer interruptions than ever at his dreary text-books in that empty, grimy office. Summer’s sun and winter’s snow were alike to the lonely old man. He ploughed on at his hopeless task. There was no probability that he should live to fill up the interminable columns, and no apparent reason to suppose that any human being would use the books if he ever did so and supposing them to be printed. But still he laboured on. Old friends—myself among them—who had known him in their childhood, looked in now and then to shake hands with him, and, noticing how pale and worn and aged he seemed, tried to induce him to come to their homes. But he only exhorted them (like Tolstoi, whom he rather resembled), as usual, to repent and give up good dinners and help him with his texts, and denounced wildly all rich people who lived in handsome parks with mud villages at their gates, as he said, “like a velvet dress with a draggled skirt.” Then, when his visitor had departed, Mr. Parnell returned patiently to his interminable texts. At last one day, late in the autumn twilight, the porter, whose duty it was to shut up the office, entered the room and found the old man sitting quietly in the chair where he had laboured so long—fallen into the last long sleep.

I never saw much of Irish society out of our own county. Once, when I was eighteen, my father and I went a tour of visits to his relations in Connaught, travelling, as was necessary in those days, very slowly with post-horses to our carriage, my maid on the box, and obliged to stop at inns on the way. Some of these inns were wretched places. I remember in one finding a packet of letters addressed to some attorney, under my bolster! At another, this dialogue took place between me and the waiter:—

“What can we have for dinner?”

“Anything you please, Ma’am. Anything you please.”

“Well, but exactly what can we have?”

(Waiter, triumphantly): “You can have a pair of ducks.”

“I am sorry to say Mr. Cobbe cannot eat ducks. What else?”

“They are very fine ducks, Ma’am.”

“I dare say. But what else?”

“You might have the ducks boiled, Ma’am!”

“No, no. Can we have mutton?”

“Well; not mutton, to-day, Ma’am.”

“Some beef?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“Some veal?”

“Not any veal, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then, a fowl?”

“We haven’t got a fowl.”

“What on earth have you got, then?”

“Well, then, Ma’am, I’m afeared if you won’t have the fine pair of ducks, there’s nothing for it but bacon and eggs!”

We went first to Drumcar and next (a two days’ drive) to Moydrum Castle which then belonged to my father’s cousin, old Lady Castlemaine. Another old cousin in the house showed me where, between two towers covered with ivy, she had looked one dark night out of her bedroom window on hearing a wailing noise below, and had seen some white object larger than any bird, floating slowly up and then sinking down into the shadow below again, and yet again. Of course it was the Banshee; and somebody had died afterwards! We also had our Banshee at Newbridge about that time. One stormy and rainy Sunday night in October my father was reading a sermon as usual to the assembled household, and the family, gathered near the fire in what we were wont to call on these evenings “Sinner’s chair” and the “Seat of the Scornful,” were rather somnolent, when the most piercing and unearthly shrieks arose apparently just outside the windows in the pleasure ground, and startled us all wide awake. At the head of the row of servants sat our dear old housekeeper “Joney” then the head-gardener’s wife, who had adopted a child of three years old, and this evening had left him fast asleep in the housekeeper’s room, which was under part of the drawing-room. Naturally she and all of us supposed that “Johnny” had wakened and was screaming on finding himself alone; and though the outcries were not like those of a child, “Joney” rose and hastily passed down the room and went to look after her charge. To reach the housekeeper’s room she necessarily passed the servants’ hall and out of it rushed the coachman—a big, usually red-faced Englishman, whom she declared was on that occasion as pale as death. The next instant one of the housemaids, who had likewise played truant from prayers, came tottering down from a bedroom (so remote that I have always wondered how any noise below the drawing-room could have reached it), and sunk fainting on a chair. The little boy meanwhile was sleeping like a cherub in undisturbed repose in a clothes basket! What that wild noise was,—heard by at least two dozen people,—we never learned and somehow did not care much to investigate.

After our visit at Moydrum my father and I went to yet other cousins at Garbally; his mother’s old home. At that time—I speak of more than half a century ago,—the Clancarty family was much respected in Ireland; and the household at Garbally was conducted on high religious principles and in a very dignified manner. It was in the Forties that the annual Sheep Fair of Ballinasloe was at its best, and something like 200,000 sheep were then commonly herded at night in Garbally Park. The scene of the Fair was described as curious, but (like a stupid young prig, as I must have been) I declined the place offered me in one of the carriages and stopped in the house on the plea of a cold, but really to enjoy a private hunt in the magnificent library of which I had caught a glimpse. When the various parties came back late in the day there was much talk of a droll mishap. The Marquis of Downshire of that time, who was stopping in the house, was a man of colossal strength, and rumour said he had killed two men by accidental blows intended as friendly. However this may be, he was on this occasion overthrown by sheep! He was standing in the gangway between the hurdles in the great fair, when an immense flock of terrified animals rushed through, overset him and trampled him under their feet. When he came home, laughing good humouredly at his disaster, he presented a marvellous spectacle with his rather voyant light costume of the morning in a frightful pickle. Another agreeable man in the house was the Lord Devon of that day, a very able and cultivated man (whom I straightway interrogated concerning Gibbon’s chapter on the Courtenays!); and poor Lord Leitrim, a kindly and good Irish landlord, afterwards most cruelly murdered. There were also the Ernes and Lord Enniskillen and many others whom I have forgotten, and a dear aged lady; the Marchioness of Ormonde. Hearing I had a cold, she kindly proposed to treat me medically and said: “I should advise you to try Brandy and Salt. For my own part I take Morrison’s pills whenever I am ill, if I cannot get hydropathic baths; but I have a very great opinion of Tar-water. Holloway’s ointment and pills, too, are excellent. My son, you know, joined Mr. ——” (I have forgotten the name) “to pay £15,000 to St. John Long for his famous recipe; but it turned out no good when he had it. No! I advise you decidedly to try brandy and salt.”

From Garbally we drove to Parsonstown, where Lady Rosse was good enough to welcome us to indulge my intense longing to see the great telescope, then quite recently erected. Lord Rosse at that time believed that, as he had resolved into separate stars many of the nebulæ which were irresolvable by Herschel’s telescope, there was a presumption that all were resolvable; and consequently that the nebular hypothesis must be abandoned. The later discovery of gaseous nebulæ by the spectroscope re-established the theory. I was very anxious on the subject, having pinned my faith already on the Vestiges of Creation (then a new book), in sequence to Nichol’s Architecture of the Heavens: that prose-poem of science. Lord Rosse was infinitely indulgent to my girlish curiosity, and took me to see the process of polishing the speculum of his second telescope; a most ingenious piece of mechanism invented mainly by himself. He also showed me models which he has made in plaster of lunar craters. I saw the great telescope by day, but, alas, when darkness came and it was to have been ready for me to look through it and I was trembling with anticipation, the butler came to the drawing-room door and announced: “A rainy night, my lord”! It was a life-long disappointment, for we could not stay another day though hospitably pressed to do so; and I never had another chance.

Lord Rosse had guessed already that Robert Chambers was the author of the Vestiges. He explained to me the reason for the enormous mass of masonry on which the seven-foot telescope rested, by the curious fact that even where it stood within his park, the roll of a cart more than two miles away, outside, was enough to make the ground tremble and to disturb the observation.

There was a romantic story then current in Ireland about Lord and Lady Rosse. It was said that, as a young man, he had gone incog. and worked as a handicraftsman in some large foundry in the north of England to learn the secrets of machine making. After a time his employer, considering him a peculiarly promising young artisan, invited him occasionally to a Sunday family dinner when young Lord Parsons, as he then was, speedily fell in love with his host’s daughter. Observing what was going on, the father put a veto on what he thought would be a mésalliance for Miss Green, and the supposed artisan left his employment and the country; but not without receiving from the young lady an assurance that she returned his attachment. Shortly afterwards, having gone home and obtained his father, Lord Rosse’s consent, he re-appeared and now made his proposals to Mr. Green, père, in all due form as the heir of a good estate and an earldom. He was not rejected this time.

I tell this story only as a pretty one current when I saw Lord and Lady Rosse; a very happy and united couple with little children who have since grown to be distinguished men. Very possibly it may be only a myth!

I never saw Archbishop Whately except when he confirmed me in the church of Malahide. He was no doubt a sincerely pious man, but, his rough and irreverent manner (intended, I believe, as a protest against the Pecksniffian tone then common among evangelical dignitaries) was almost repulsive and certainly startling. Outside his palace in Stephen’s Green there was at that time a row of short columns connected from top to top by heavy chains which fell in festoons and guarded the gardens of the square. Nothing would serve his Grace (we were told with horror by the spectators) than to go of a morning after breakfast and sit on these chains smoking his cigar as he swung gently back and forth, kicking the ground to gain impetus.

On the occasion of my confirmation he exhibited one of his whims most unpleasantly for me. This was, that he must actually touch, in his episcopal benediction, the head, not merely the hair, of the kneeling catechumen. Unhappily, my maid had not foreseen this contingency, but had thought she could not have a finer opportunity for displaying her skill in plaiting my redundant locks; and had built up such an edifice with plaits and pins, (on the part of my head which necessarily came under the Archbishop’s hand) that he had much ado to overthrow the same! He did so, however, effectually; and I finally walked back, through the church to my pew with all my chevelure hanging down in disorder, far from “admired” by me or anybody.

Of all the phases of orthodoxy I think that of Whately,—well called the Hard Church,—was the last which I could have adopted at any period of my life. It was obviously his view that a chain of propositions might be constructed by iron logic, beginning with the record of a miracle two thousand years ago and ending with unavoidable conversion to the love of God and Man!

The last person of whom I shall speak as known to me first in Ireland, was that dear and noble woman, Fanny Kemble. She has not mentioned in her delightful Records how our acquaintance, destined to ripen into a life-long friendship, began at Newbridge, but it was in a droll and characteristic way.

Mrs. Kemble’s friend “H.S.”—Harriet St. Leger—lived at Ardgillan Castle, eight Irish miles from Newbridge. Her sister, the wife of Hon. and Rev. Edward Taylor and mother of the late Tory Whip, was my mother’s best-liked neighbour, and at an early age I was taught to look with respect on the somewhat singular figure of Miss St. Leger. In those days any departure from the conventional dress of the time was talked of as if it were altogether the most important fact connected with a woman, no matter what might be the greatness of her character or abilities. Like her contemporaries and fellow countrywomen, the Ladies of Llangollen, (also Irish), Harriet St. Leger early adopted a costume consisting of a riding habit (in her case with a skirt of sensible length) and a black beaver hat. All the empty-headed men and women in the county prated incessantly about these inoffensive garments, insomuch that I arrived early at the conviction that, rational and convenient as such dress would be, the game was not worth the candle. Things are altered so far now that, could dear Harriet reappear, I believe the universal comment on her dress would rather be: “How sensible and befitting”! rather than the silly, “How odd”! Anyway I imagine she must have afforded a somewhat singular contrast to her ever magnificent, not to say gorgeous friend Fanny Kemble, when at the great Exhibition of 1851, they were the observed of observers, sitting for a long time side by side close to the crystal fountain.

Every reader of the charming Records of a Girlhood and Recollections of Later Life, must have felt some curiosity about the personality of the friend to whom those letters of our English Sevigné were addressed. I have before me as I write an excellent reproduction in platinotype from a daguerreotype of herself which dear Harriet gave me some twenty years ago. The pale, kind, sad face is, I think inexpressibly touching; and the woman who wore it deserved all the affection which Fanny Kemble gave her. She was a deep and singularly critical thinker and reader, and had one of the warmest hearts which ever beat under a cold and shy exterior. The iridescent genius of Fanny Kemble in the prime of her splendid womanhood, and my poor young soul, overburdened with thoughts too great and difficult for me, were equally drawn to seek her sympathy.

It happened once, somewhere in the early Fifties, that Mrs. Kemble was paying a visit to Miss St. Leger at Ardgillan, and we arranged that she should bring her over some day to Newbridge to luncheon. I was, of course, prepared to receive my guest very cordially but, to my astonishment, when Mrs. Kemble entered she made me the most formal salutation conceivable and, after being seated, answered all my small politenesses in monosyllables and with obvious annoyance and disinclination to converse with me or with any of my friends whom I presented to her. Something was evidently frightfully amiss, and Harriet perceived it; but what could it be? What could be done? Happily the gong sounded for luncheon, and, my father being absent, my eldest brother offered his arm to Mrs. Kemble and led her, walking with more than her usual stateliness across the two halls to the dining-room, where he placed her, of course, beside himself. I was at the other end of the table but I heard afterwards all that occurred. We were a party of eighteen, and naturally the long table had a good many dishes on it in the old fashion. My brother looked over it and asked: “What will you take, Mrs. Kemble? Roast fowl? or galantine? or a little Mayonnaise, or what else?”

“Thank you,” replied Mrs. Kemble, “If there be a potato!”

Of course there was a potato—nay, several; but a terrible gêne hung over us all till Miss Taylor hurriedly called for her carriage, and the party drove off.

The moment they left the door after our formal farewells, Harriet St. Leger (as she afterwards told me) fell on her friend: “Well, Fanny, never, never will I bring you anywhere again. How could you behave so to Fanny Cobbe?”

“I cannot permit any one,” said Mrs. Kemble, “to invite a number of people to meet me without having asked my consent; I do not choose to be made a gazing-stock to the county. Miss Cobbe had got up a regular party of all those people, and you could see the room was decorated for it.”

“Good Heavens, what are you talking of?” said Harriet, “those ladies and gentlemen are all her relations, stopping in the house. She could not turn them out because you were coming, and her room is always full of flowers.”

“Is that really so?” said Mrs. Kemble, “Then you shall tell Fanny Cobbe that I ask her pardon for my bad behaviour, and if she will forgive me and come to see me in London, I will never behave badly to her again?”

In a letter of hers to Harriet St. Leger given to me after her death, I was touched to read the following reference to this droll incident:—

“Bilton Hotel, “Wed. 9th.

“I am interrupted by a perfect bundle of fragrance and fresh colour sent by Miss Cobbe with a note in which I am sorry to say she gives me very little hope of seeing her at all while I am in Dublin. This, as you know, is a real disappointment to me. I had rather fallen in love with her, and wished very much to have had some opportunity of more intercourse with her. Her face when I came to talk to her seemed to me keen and sweet—a charming combination—and I was so grateful to her for not being repelled by my ungracious demeanour at her house, that I had quite looked forward to the pleasure of seeing her again.

“F. A. K.”

I did go to see her in London; and she kept her word, and was my dear and affectionate friend and bore many things from me with perfect good humour, for forty years; including (horrible to recall!) my falling fast asleep while she was reading Shakespeare to Mary Lloyd and me in our drawing-room here at Hengwrt! Among her many kindnesses was the gift of a mass of her Correspondence from the beginning of her theatrical career in 1821 to her last years. She also successively gave me the MSS. of all her Records, but in each case I induced her to take them back and publish them herself. I have now, as a priceless legacy, a large parcel of her own letters, and five thick volumes of autograph letters addressed to her by half the celebrated men and women of her time. They testify uniformly to the admiration, affection and respect wherewith,—her little foibles notwithstanding,—she was regarded by three generations.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VIII. UPROOTED.

I draw now to the closing years of my life at Newbridge, after I had published my first book and before my father died. They were happy and peaceful years, though gradually overshadowed by the sense that the long tenure of that beloved home must soon end. It is one of the many perversities of woman’s destiny that she is, not only by hereditary instinct a home-making animal, but is encouraged to the uttermost to centre all her interests in her home; every pursuit which would give her anchorage elsewhere, (always excepting marriage) being more or less under general disapproval. Yet when the young woman takes thoroughly to this natural home-making, when she has, like a plant, sent her roots down into the cellars and her tendrils up into the garrets and every room bears the impress of her personality, when she glories in every good picture on the walls or bit of choice china on the tables and blushes for every stain on the carpets, when, in short, her home is, as it should be, her outer garment, her nest, her shell, fitted to her like that of a murex, then, almost invariably comes to her the order to leave it all, tear herself out of it,—and go to make (if she can) some other home elsewhere. Supposing her to have married early, and that she is spared the late uprooting from her father’s house at his death, she has usually to bear a similar transition when she survives her husband; and in this case often with the failing health and spirits of old age. I do not know how these heartbreaks are to be spared to women of the class of the daughters and wives of country gentlemen or clergymen; but they are hard to bear. Perhaps the most fortunate daughters (harsh as it seems to say so) are those whose fathers die while they are themselves still in full vigour and able to begin a new existence with spirit and make new friends; as was my case. Some of my contemporaries, whose fathers lived till they were fifty, or even older, had a bitterer trial in quitting their homes and were never able to start afresh.

In my last few years at Newbridge my father and I were both cheered by the frequent presence of my dear little niece, Helen, on whom he doted, and towards whom flowed out the tenderness which had scarcely been allowed its free course with his own children. L’Art d’être Grandpère is surely the most beautiful of arts! When all personal pleasures have pretty well died away then begins the reflected pleasure in the fresh, innocent delights of the child; a moonlight of happiness perhaps more sweet and tender than the garish joys of the noontide of life. To me, who had never lived in a house with little children, it brought a whole world of revelations to have this babe and afterwards her little sister, in a nursery under my supervision during their mother’s long illnesses. I understood for the first time all that a child may be in a woman’s life, and how their little hands may pull our heart-strings. My nieces were dear, good, little babes then; they are dear and good women now; the comfort of my age, as they were the darlings of my middle life.

Having received sufficient encouragement from the succès d’estime of my Theory of Intuitive Morals, I proceeded now to write the first of the three books on Practical Morals, with which I designed to complete the work. My volume of Religious Duty, then written, has proved, however, the only one of the series ever published. At a later time I wrote some chapters on Personal and on Social Duty, but was dissatisfied with them, and destroyed the MSS.

As Religious Duty (3rd edition) is still to be had (included by Mr. Fisher Unwin in his late re-issue of my principal works), I need not trouble the reader by any such analysis of it as I have given of the former volume. In writing concerning Religious Duty at the time, I find in a letter of mine to Harriet St. Leger (returned to me when she grew blind), that I spoke of it thus:—

“Newbridge, April 25th, 1857.

“You see I have, after all, inserted a little preface. I thought it necessary to explain the object of the book, lest it might seem superfluous where it coincides with orthodox teaching, and offensively daring where it diverges from it. Your cousin’s doubt about my Christianity lasting till she reached the end of Intuitive Morals, made me resolve to forestall in this case any such danger of seeming to fight without showing my colours. You see I have now nailed them mast-high. But though I have done this, I cannot say that it has been in any way to make converts to my own creed that I have written this book. I wanted to show those who are already Theists, actually or approximately, that Theism is something far more than they seem commonly to understand. I wanted, too, to show to those who have had their historical faith shaken, but who still cling to it from the belief that without it no real religion is possible, that they may find all which their hearts can need in a faith purely intuitive. Perhaps I ought rather to say that these objects have been before me in working at my book. I suppose in reality the impulse to such an undertaking comes more simply. We think we have found some truths, and we long to develop and communicate them. We do not sit down and say ‘Such and such sort of people want such and such a book. I will try and write it.’”

The plan of this book is simple. After discussing in the first chapter the Canon of Religious Duty, which I define to be “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and soul and strength,”—I discuss, in the next chapter, Religious Offences against that Law,—Blasphemy, Hypocrisy, Perjury, &c. The third chapter deals with Religious Faults (failures of duty) such as Thanklessness, Irreverence, Worldliness, &c. The fourth, which constitutes the main bulk of the book, consists of what are practically six Sermons on Thanksgiving, Adoration, Prayer, Repentance, Faith, and Self-Consecration.

The book has been very much liked by some readers, especially the chapter on Thanksgiving, which I reprinted later in a tiny volume. It is strange in these days of pessimism to read it again. I am glad I wrote it when my heart was unchilled, my sight undimmed, by the frozen fog which has been hanging over us for the last two decades. An incident connected with this chapter touched me deeply. My father in his last illness permitted it to be read to him. Having never before listened to anything I had written, and having, even then, no idea who wrote the book, he expressed pleasure and sympathy with it, especially with a passage in which I speak of the hope of being, in the future life, “young again in all that makes childhood beautiful and holy.” It was a pledge to me of how near our hearts truly were, under apparently the world-wide differences.

My father was now sinking slowly beneath the weight of years and of frequent returns of the malarial fever of India,—in those days called “Ague,”—which he had caught half a century before in the Mahratta wars. I have said something already of his powerful character, his upright, honourable, fearless nature; his strong sense of Duty. Of the lower sort of faults and vices he was absolutely incapable. No one who knew him could imagine him as saying a false or prevaricating word; of driving a hard bargain; of eating or drinking beyond the strictest rules of temperance; least of all, of faithlessness in thought or deed to his wife or her memory. His mistakes and errors, such as they were, arose solely from a fiery temper and a despotic will, nourished rather than checked by his ideas concerning the rights of parents, and husbands, masters and employers; and from his narrow religious creed. Such as he was, every one honoured, some feared, and many loved him.

Before I pass on to detail more of the incidents of my own life, I shall here narrate all that I can recall of his descriptions of the most important occurrence in his career—the battle of Assaye.

In Mr. George Hooper’s delightful Life of Wellington (English Men of Action Series) there is a spirited account of that battle, whereby British supremacy in India was practically secured. Mr. Hooper speaks enthusiastically of the behaviour, in that memorable fight, of the 19th Light Dragoons, and of its “splendid charge,” which, with the “irresistible sweep” of the 78th, proved the “decisive stroke” of the great day. He describes this charge thus:—

... “The piquets, or leading troops on the right were by mistake led off towards Assaye, uncovering the second line, and falling themselves into a deadly converging fire. The Seventy-Fourth followed the piquets into the cannonade, and a great gap was thus made in the array. The enemy’s horse rode up to charge, and so serious was the peril on the right that the Nineteenth Light Dragoons and a native cavalry regiment were obliged to charge at once. Eager for the fray, they galloped up, cheering as they went, and cheered by the wounded; and, riding home, even to the batteries, saved the remnants of the piquets and of the Seventy-Fourth.” (P. 76.)

My father, then a cornet in the regiment, carried the regimental flag of the Nineteenth through that charge, and for the rest of the day; the non-commissioned officer whose duty it was to bear it having been struck dead at the first onset, and my father saving the flag from falling into the hands of the Mahrattas.

The Nineteenth Light Dragoons of that epoch wore a grey uniform, and heavy steel helmets with large red plumes, which caused the Mahrattas to nickname them “The Red Headed Rascals.” On their shoulders were simple epaulettes made of chains of some common white metal, one of which I retrieved from a heap of rubbish fifty years after Assaye, and still wear as a bracelet. The men could scarcely have deserved the name of Light if many of them weighed, as did my father at 18, no less than 18 stone, inclusive of his saddle and accoutrements! The fashion of long hair, tied in “pig tails,” still prevailed; and my father often laughingly boasted that the mass of his fair hair, duly tied with black ribbon, had descended far enough to reach his saddle and to form an efficient protection from sabre cuts on his back and shoulders. Mr. Hooper estimates the total number of the British army at Assaye at 5,000; my father used to speak of it as about 4,500; while the cavalry alone, of the enemy were some 30,000. The infantry were seemingly innumerable, and altogether covered the plain. There was also a considerable force of artillery on Scindias’ side, and, commanding them, was a French officer whose name my father repeatedly mentioned, but which I have unfortunately forgotten.[12] The handful of English troops had done a full day’s march under an Indian sun before the battle began. When the Nineteenth received orders to charge they had been sitting long on their horses in a position which left them exposed to the ricochet of the shot of the enemy, and the strain on the discipline of the men, as one after another was picked off, had been enormous; not to prevent them from retreating—they had no such idea,—but to stop them from charging without orders. At last the word of command to charge came from Wellesley, and the whole regiment responded with a roar! Then came the fire of death and men and officers fell all around, as it seemed almost every second man. Among the rest, as I have said, the colour-sergeant was struck down, and my father, as was his duty, seized the flag from the poor fellow’s hands as he fell and carried it, waving in front of the regiment up to the guns of the enemy.

In one or other of the repeated charges which the Nineteenth continued to make even after their commanding officer, Colonel Maxwell, had been killed, my father found himself in hand to hand conflict with the French General who was in command of the Mahratta artillery. He wore an ordinary uniform and my father, having struck him with his sabre at the back of his neck, expected to see terrible results from the blow of a hand notorious all his life for its extraordinary strength. But fortunately the General had prudently included a coat of armour under his uniform; and the blow only resulted in a considerable dent in the blade of my father’s sabre; a dent which (in Biblical language) “may be seen unto this day,” where the weapon hangs in the study at Newbridge.

At another period of this awful battle the young Cornet dismounted beside a stream to drink, and to allow his horse to do the same. While so occupied, Colonel Wellesley came up to follow his example, and they conversed for a few minutes while dipping their hands and faces in the brook (or river). As they did so, there slowly oozed down upon them, trickling through the water, a streamlet of blood. Of course they both turned away in horror and remounted to return to the battle.

At last the tremendous struggle was over. An army of 4,500 or 5,000 tired English troops, had routed five times as many horsemen and perhaps twenty times as many infantry of the warlike Mahrattas. The field was clear and the English flag waved over the English Marathon.

After this the poor, wearied soldiers were compelled to ride back ten miles to camp for the night; and when they reached their ground and dismounted, many of them—my father among the rest—fell on the earth and slept where they lay. Next morning they marched back to the field of Assaye and the scene which met their eyes was one which no lapse of years could efface from memory. The pomp and glory and joy of victory were past; the horror of it was before them in mangled corpses of men and horses, over which hung clouds of flies and vultures. Fourteen officers of his own regiment, whose last meal on earth he had shared in convivial merriment, my father saw buried together in one grave. Then the band of the regiment played “The Rose Tree” and the men marched away with set faces. Long years afterwards I happened to play that old air on the piano, but my father stopped me, “Do not play that tune, pray! I cannot bear the memories it brings to me.”

After Assaye my father fought at Argaon (or Argaum), a battle which Mr. Turner describes as “even more decisive than the last”; and on December 14th he joined in the terrific storming of the great fortress of Gawiljarh, with which the war in the Deccan terminated. He received medals for Assaye and Argaum, just fifty years after those battles were fought!

After his return from India, my father remained at his mother’s house in Bath till 1809, when he married my dear mother, then living with her guardians close by, at 29, Royal Crescent; and brought her to Newbridge, where they both lived, as I have described, with few and short interruptions till she died in October, 1847, and he in November, 1857. For all that half century he acted nobly the part to which he was called, of landlord, magistrate and head of a family. There was nothing in him of the ideal Irish, fox-hunting, happy-go-lucky, much indebted Squire. There never was a year in his life in which every one of his bills was not settled. His books, piled on his study table, showed the regular payment, week by week, of all his labourers for fifty years. No quarter day passed without every servant in the house receiving his, or her wages. So far was Newbridge from a Castle Rackrent that though much in it of the furniture and decorations belonged to the previous century, everything was kept in perfect order and repair in the house and in the stables, coach-houses and beautiful old garden. Punctuality reigned under the old soldier’s régime; clocks and bells and gongs sounded regularly for prayers and meals; and dinner was served sharply to the moment. I should indeed be at a loss to say in what respect my father betrayed his Anglo-Irish race, if it were not his high spirit.

At last, and very soon after the photograph which I am inserting in this book was taken, the long, good life drew to its end in peace. I have found a letter which I wrote to Harriet St. Leger a day or two after his death, and I will here transcribe part of it, rather than narrate the event afresh.

“Nov. 14th, 1857.

“Dearest Harriet,

“My poor father’s sufferings are over. He died on Wednesday evening, without the least pain or struggle, having sunk gradually into an unconscious state since Sunday morning. At all events it proved a most merciful close to his long sufferings, for he never seemed even aware of the terrible state into which the poor limbs fell, but became weaker and weaker, and as the mortification advanced, died away as if in the gentlest sleep he had known for many a day. It is all very merciful, I can feel nothing else, though it is very sad to have had no parting words of blessing, such as I am sure he would have given me. All those he loved best were near him. He had Dotie till the last day of his consciousness, and the little thing continually asked afterwards to go to his study, and enquired, ‘Grandpa ‘seep?’ When he had ceased to speak at all comprehensibly, the morning before he died he pointed to her picture, and half smiled when I brought it to him. Poor old father! He is free now from all his miseries—gone home to God after his long, long life of good and honour! Fifty years he has lived as master here. Who but God knows all the kind and generous actions he has done in that half century! To the very last he completed everything, paying his labourers and settling his books on Saturday; and we find all his arrangements made in the most perfect and thoughtful way for everybody. There was a letter left for me. It only contained a £100 note and the words, ‘The last token of the love and affection of a father to his daughter.’... ‘He is now looking so noble and happy, I might say, so handsome; his features seem so glorified by death, that it does one good to go and sit beside him. I never saw Death look so little terrible. Would that the poor form could lie there, ever! The grief will be far worse after to-day, when we shall see it for the last time. Jessie has made an outline of the face as it is now, very like. How wonderful and blessed is this glorifying power of death; taking away the lines of age and weak distension of muscles, and leaving only, as it would seem, the true face of the man as he was beneath all surface weaknesses; the ‘garment by the soul laid by’ smoothed out and folded! My cousins and Jessie and I all feel very much how blessedly this face speaks to us; how it is not him, but a token of what he is now. I grieve that I was not more to him, that I did not better win his love and do more to deserve it; but even this sorrow has its comfort. Perhaps he knows now that with all my heart I did feel the deepest tenderness for his sufferings and respect for his great virtues. At all events the wall of creed has fallen down from between our souls for ever, and I believe that was the one great obstacle which I could never overthrow entirely. Forbearing as he proved himself, it was never forgotten. Now all that divided us is over.... It seems all very dream-like just now, long as we have thought of it, and I know the waking will be a terrible pang when all is over and I have left everything round which my heart roots have twined in five and thirty years. But I don’t fear—how can I, when my utmost hopes could not have pointed to an end so happy as God has given to my poor old father? Everything is merciful about it—even to the time when we were all together here, and when I am neither young enough to need protection, or old enough to feel diminished energies....”

I carried out my long formed resolution, of course, and started on my pilgrimage just three weeks after my father’s death. Leaving Newbridge was the worst wrench of my life. The home of my childhood and youth, of which I had been mistress for nineteen years, for every corner of which I had cared, and wherein there was not a room without its tender associations,—it seemed almost impossible to drag myself away. To strip my pretty bedroom of its pictures and books and ornaments, many of them my mother’s gifts, and my mother’s work; to send off my harp to be sold; and make over to my brother my private possessions of ponies and carriage,—(luckily my dear dog was dead,)—and take leave of all the dear old servants and village people, formed a whole series of pangs. I remember feeling a distinct regret and smiling at myself for doing so, when I locked for the last time the big, old-fashioned tea-chest out of which I had made the family breakfast for twenty years. Then came the last morning and as I drove out of the gates of Newbridge I felt I was leaving behind me all and everything in the world which I had loved and cherished.

I was going also, it must be said, not only from a family circle to entire solitude, but also from comparative wealth to poverty. Considering the interests of my eldest brother as paramount, and the seriousness of his charge of keeping up the house and estate, my father left me but a very small patrimony; amounting, at the rate of interest then obtainable, to a trifle over £200 a year. For a woman who had always had every possible service rendered to her by a regiment of well-trained servants, and had had £130 a year pocket-money since she left school, it must be confessed that this was a narrow provision. My father intended me to continue to live at Newbridge with my brother and sister-in-law; but such a plan was entirely contrary to my view of what my life should thenceforth become, and I accepted my poverty cheerfully enough, with the help of a little ready money wherewith to start on my travels. I cut off half my hair, being totally unable to grapple with the whole without a maid, and faced the future with the advantage of the great calm which follows any immediate concern with Death. While that Shadow hangs over our heads we perceive but dimly the thorns and pebbles on our road.

A week after leaving Ireland I spent one night with Harriet St. Leger in lodgings which she and her friend, Miss Dorothy Wilson, occupied on the Marina at St. Leonard’s.

When I had gone to my room rather late that evening, I opened my window and looked out for the last time before my exile, on an English scene. There was the line of friendly lamps close by, but beyond it the sea, dark as pitch on that December night, was only revealed by the sound of the slow waves breaking sullenly on the beach beneath. It was like a black wall before me; the sea and sky undistinguishable. I thought: “To-morrow I shall go out into that darkness! How like to death is this!”

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