IX. LONG JOURNEY.…

IX. LONG JOURNEY.

The journey which I undertook when my home duties ended at the death of my father, would be considered a very moderate excursion in these latter days, but in 1857 it was still accounted somewhat of an enterprise for a “lone woman.” When I told my friends that I was going to Egypt and Jerusalem, they said: “Ah, you will get as far as Rome and Naples, and that will be very interesting; but you will find too many difficulties in the way of going any further,” “When I say” (I replied) “that I am going to Egypt and Jerusalem, I mean that to Egypt and Jerusalem I shall go.” And so, as it proved, a wilful woman had her way; and I came back after a year with the ever-delightful privilege of observing: “I told you so.”

I shall not dream of dragging the reader again over the well-worn ground at the slow pace of a writer of “Impressions de Voyage.” The best of my reminiscences were given to the world, in Fraser’s Magazine, and reprinted in my Cities of the Past, before there was yet a prospect of a railway to Jerusalem except in Martin’s picture of the “End of the World”; or of a “Service d’omnibus” over the wild solitudes of Lebanon, where I struggled ‘mid snows and torrents which nearly whelmed me and my horse in destruction. I rejoice to think that I saw those holy and wonderful lands of Palestine and Egypt while Cook’s tourists were yet unborn, and Cairo had only one small English hotel and one solitary wheel carriage; and the solemn gaze of the Sphinx encountered no Golf-games on the desert sands.

My proceedings were very much like those of certain birds of the farmyard (associated particularly with Michaelmas), who very rarely are seen to rise on the wing but when they are once incited to do so, are wont to take a very wide circle in their flight before they come back to the barn door!

Paris, Marseilles, Rome, Naples, Messina, Malta, Alexandria, Cairo, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, Dead Sea, Jordan, Beyrout, Lebanon, Baalbec, Cyprus, Rhodes, Smyrna, Athens, Constantinople, Cape Matapan, Corfu, Trieste, Adelsberg, Venice, Florence, Milan, Lucerne, Geneva, Wiesbaden, Antwerp, London—such was my “swoop,” accomplished in 11 months and at a cost of only £400. To say that I brought home a crop of new ideas would be a small way of indicating the whole harvest of them wherewith I returned laden. There were (I think I may summarise), as the results of such a journey, the following great additions to my mental stock.

First. A totally fresh conception of the glory and beauty of Nature. When crossing the Channel I fell into talk with a charming old lady and told her how I was looking forward to seeing the great pictures and buildings of Italy. “Ah,” she said, “but there is Italian Nature to be seen also. Do not miss it, looking only at works of art. I go to Italy to see it much more than the galleries and churches.” I was very much astonished at this remark, but I came home after some months spent in a villa on Bellosguardo entirely converted to her view. Travellers there are who weary their feet and strain their eyes till they can no longer see or receive impressions from the miles of painted canvas, the regiments of statues, and the streets of palaces and churches wherewith Italy abounds; yet have never spent a day riding over the desolate Campagna with the far off Apennines closing the horizon, or enjoyed nights of paradise, sitting amid the cypresses and the garlanded vines, with the stars overhead, the nightingales singing, and the fireflies darting around among the Rose de Maggio. Such travellers may come back to England proud of having verified every line of Murray on the spot, yet they have failed to “see Italy” altogether. Never shall I forget the revelation of loveliness of the Ægean and Ionian seas, of the lower slopes of Lebanon, and of the Acropolis of Athens, seen, as I saw it first, at sunrise. But when my heaviest journeys were done and I paused and rested in Villa Niccolini, with Florence below and the Val d’ Arno before me, I felt as if the beauty of the world, as I then and there saw it, were joy enough for a lifetime. The old lines (I know not whose they are) kept ringing in my ears.—

“And they shall summer high in bliss Upon the hills of God.”

I shall quote here some verses which I wrote at that time, as they described the scene in which I lived and revelled.

THE FESTA OF THE WORLD.

A Princess came to a southern strand, Over a summer sea; And the sky smiled down on the laughing land, For that land was Italy.

The fruit trees bent their laden boughs O’er the fields with harvest gold, And the rich vines wreathed from tree to tree, Like garlands in temples old.

And over all fell the glad sunlight, So warm, so bright, so clear! The earth shone out like an emerald set In the diamond atmosphere.

Then down to greet that lady sweet Came the Duke from his palace hall: “I thank thee, gentle Sire,” she cried, “For thy princely festival.”

“For honoured guests have towns ere now Been decked right royally; But thy whole land is garlanded One bower of bloom for me!”

Then smiled the Duke at the lady’s thought, And the thanks he had lightly won; For Nature’s eternal Festa-day She deemed for her alone!

A Poet stood by the Princess’s side; “O lady raise thine eye, The Giver of this great Festival, He dwelleth in yon blue sky.

“Thy kinsman Prince hath welcomed thee, But God hath His world arrayed Not more for thee than yon beggar old Who sleeps ‘neath the ilex shade.

“His sun doth shine on the peasant’s fields, His rain on his vineyard pour, His flowers bloom by the worn wayside And creep o’er the cottage door.

“For each, for all is a welcome given And spread the world’s great feast; And the King of Kings is the loving Host And each child of man a guest.”[13]

The beauty of Switzerland has at no time touched me as that of Italy has always done. There is something in the sharp, hard atmosphere of Switzerland (and I may add in the sharp, hard characters of the Swiss) which disenchants me in the grandest scenes.

The second thing one learns in a journey like mine is, of course, the wondrous achievements of human Art,—Temples and Churches, fountains and obelisks, pyramids and statues and pictures without end. But on this head I need say nothing. Enough has been said and to spare by those far more competent than I to write of it.

Lastly, there is a thing which I, at all events, learned by knocking about the world. It is the enormous amount of pure human good nature which is to be found almost everywhere. I should weary the reader to tell all the little kindnesses done to me by fellow-passengers in the railways and steamers, and by the Captains of the vessels in which I sailed; and of the trouble which strangers took to help me out of my small difficulties. Of course men do not meet—because they do not want,—such services; and women, who travel with men, or even two or three together, seldom invite them. But for viewing human nature en beau, commend me to a long journey by a woman of middle age, of no beauty, and travelling as cheaply as possible, alone.

I believe the Psychical Society has started a theory that when places where crimes have been committed are ever after “haunted” the apparitions are not exactly good, old-fashioned real ghosts, if I may use such an expression, but some sort of atmospheric photographs (the term is my own) left by the parties concerned, or sent telepathically from their present habitat (wherever that may be) to the scene of their earthly suffering or wickedness. The hypothesis, of course, relieves us from the very unpleasant surmise that the actual soul of the victims of assassination and robbery may have nothing better to do in a future life than to stand guard perpetually at the dark and dank corners, cellars, and bottoms of stone staircases, where they were cruelly done to death fifty or a hundred years before; or to loaf like detectives about the spots where their jewelry and cash-boxes (so useful and important to a disembodied spirit!) lie concealed. But the atmospheric photograph or magic-lantern theory, whatever truth it may hold, exactly answers to a sense which I should think all my readers must have experienced, as I have done, in certain houses and cities; a sense as if the crimes which had been committed therein have left an indescribable miasma, a lurid, impalpable shadow, like that of the ashes of the Polynesian volcano which darkened the sun for a year; or shall we say, like the unrecognised effluvium which probably caused Mrs. Sleeman, in her tent, to dream she was surrounded by naked murdered men, while 14 corpses were actually lying beneath her bed and were next day disinterred?[14] Walking once through Holyrood with Dr. John Brown (who had not visited the place for many years), I was quite overcome by this sense of ancient crime, perpetuated as it seemed, almost like a physical phenomenon in those gloomy chambers; and on describing my sensations, Dr. Brown avowed that he experienced a very similar impression. It would almost seem as if moral facts of a certain intensity, begin to throw a cloudy shadow of Evil, as Romist saints were said to exhale an odour of sanctity.

If there be a city in the world where this sense is most vivid, I think it is Rome. I have felt it also in Paris, but Rome is worst. The air (not of the Campagna with all its fevers, but of the city itself) seems foul with the blood and corruption of a thousand years. On the finest spring day, in the grand open spaces of the Piazza del Popolo, San Pietro, and the Forum, it is the same as in the darkest and narrowest streets. No person sensitive to this impression can be genuinely light-hearted and gay in Rome, as we often are even in our own gloomy London. Perhaps this is sheer fancifulness on my part, but I have been many times in Rome, twice for an entire winter, and the same impression never failed to overcome me. On my last visit I nearly died there and it was not to be described how earnestly I longed to emerge, as if out of one of Dante’s Giri, “anywhere, anywhere out of” this Rome!

On the occasion of my first journey at Christmas, 1857, I stopped only three weeks in the Eternal City and then went on by sea to Naples. I was ill from the fatigues and anxieties of the previous weeks, and after a few half-dazed visits to the Colosseum, the Vatican, and Shelley’s grave, I found myself unable to leave my solitary fourth-floor room in the Europa. A card was brought to me one day while thus imprisoned, bearing names (unknown to me) of “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Apthorp,” and with the singular message: “Was I the Miss Cobbe who had corresponded with Theodore Parker in America?” My first impression was one of alarm. “What! more trouble about my heresies still?” It was, however, quite a different matter. My visitors were a gentleman (a real American gentleman) and his wife, with two ladies who were all among Parker’s intimate friends in America, and to whom he had showed my letters. They came to hold out to me the right hands of fellowship; and friends indeed we became, in such thorough sort that, after seven-and-thirty years I am corresponding with dear Mrs. Apthorp still. She and her sister nursed me through my illness; and thus my solitude in Rome came to an end.

Naples struck me on my first visit, as it has done again and again, as presenting the proof that the Beautiful is not by itself, a root out of which the Good spontaneously grows. If we want to cultivate Purity, Honesty, Veracity, Unselfishness or any other virtue, it is vain to think we shall achieve our end by giving the masses pretty pleasure-grounds and “Palaces of Delight,” or even æsthetic cottages with the best reproductions of Botticelli adorning the walls. Do what we may we can never hope to surround our working men with such beauty as that of the Bay of Naples, nor to show them Art to equal the treasures of the Museo Borbonico. And what has come of all this familiar revelling in Beauty for centuries and millenniums to the people of Naples? Only that they resemble more closely in ignorance, in squalor and in degradation the most wretched Irish who dwell in mud cabins amid the bogs, than any other people in Europe.

I had intended remaining for some time to recuperate at Naples and took a cheery little room in a certain Pension Schiassi (now abolished) on the Chiajia. In this Pension I met a number of kindly and interesting people of various nationalities; the most pleasant and cultivated of all being Finns from Helsingfors. It was a great experience to me to enter into some sort of society again, far removed from all my antecedents; no longer the mistress of a large house and dispenser of its hospitality, but a wandering tourist, known to nobody and dressed as plainly as might be. I find I wrote to my old friend, Miss St. Leger, on the subject under date January 21st, 1858, as follows: “I am really cheerful now. Those days in the country (at Cumæ and Capo di Monte) cheered me very much, and I am beginning altogether to look at the future differently. There is one thing I feel really happy about. I see now my actual position towards people, divested of the social advantages I have hitherto held; and I find it a very pleasant one. I don’t think I deceive myself in imagining that people easily like me, and get interested in my ideas, while I find abundance to like and esteem in a large proportion of those I meet.” (Optimism, once more! the reader will say!)

It was not, however, “all beer and skittles” for me at the Schiassi pension. I had, as I have mentioned, taken a pretty little room looking out on the Villa Reale and the Bay and Vesuvius, and had put up the photographs and miniatures I carried with me and my little knick-knacks on the writing-table, and fondly flattered myself I should sit and write there peacefully. But I reckoned without my neighbours! It was Sunday when I arrived and settled myself so complacently. On Monday morning, soon after day-break, I was rudely awakened by a dreadful four-handed strumming on a piano, apparently in my very room! On rousing myself, I perceived that a locked door close to my bed obviously opened into an adjoining chamber, and being (after the manner of Italian doors) at least two inches short of the uncarpeted floor, I was to all acoustic intents and purposes actually in the room with this atrocious jangling piano and the two thumping performers! The practising went on for two hours, and when it stopped a masculine voice arose to read the Bible aloud in family devotions. Then, after a brief interval for breakfast, burst out again the intolerable strumming. I fled, and remained out of doors for hours, but when I came back they were at it again! I appealed to the mistress of the house, in vain. Sir Andrew——and his daughters (I will call them the Misses Shocking-strum, their real name concerns nobody now) had been there before me and would no doubt stop long after me, and could not be prevented from playing from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day of the week. I took a large card and wrote on it this pathetic appeal:—

“Pity the sorrows of a poor old maid, Whose hapless lot has made her lodge next door, Who fain would wish those morning airs delayed; O practise less! And she will bless you more!”

I thrust this under the ill-fitting door well into the music-room, and waited anxiously for some measure of mercy to be meted to me in consequence. But no! the hateful thumping and crashing went on as before. Then I girded up my loins and went down to the packet office and took a berth in the next steamer for Alexandria.

After landing at Messina (lovely region!) and at Malta, I embarked in a French screw-steamer, which began to roll before we were well under weigh, and which, when a real Levanter came on three days later, played pitch and toss with us passengers, insomuch that we often needed to lie on mattresses on the floor and hold something to prevent our heads from being knocked to pieces. One day, being fortunately a very good sailor, I scrambled up on deck and beheld a glorious scene. Euroclydon was playing with towering waves of lapis-lazulæ all flecked and veined like a horse’s neck with white foam, and the African sun was shining down cloudless over the turmoil.

There were some French Nuns on board going to a convent in Cairo, where they were to be charitably engaged taking care of girls. The monastic mind is always an interesting study. It brings us back to the days of Bede, and times when miracles (if it be not a bull to say so) were the rule and the ordinary course of nature the exception. People are then constantly seen where they are not, and not seen where they are; and the dead are as “prominent citizens” of this world (as an American would say) as the living. Meanwhile the actual geography and history of the modern world and all that is going on in politics, society, art and literature, is as dark to the good Sister or Brother as if she or he had really (as in Hans Andersen’s story) “walked back into the eleventh century.” My nice French nuns were very kind and instructive to me. They told me of the Virgin’s Tree which we should see at Heliopolis (though they knew nothing of the obelisk there), and they informed me that if anyone looked out on Trinity Sunday exactly at sunrise, he would see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité.”

I could not help asking: “Madame les aura vues?”

“Pas précisément, Madame. Madame sait qu’à cette saison le soleil se lêve bien tôt.”

“Mais, Madame, pour voir loutes les trois personnes?”

It was no use. The good soul persisted in believing what she liked to believe and took care never to get up and look out on Trinity Sunday morning,—just as ten thousand Englishmen and women, who think themselves much wiser than the poor Nun, carefully avoid looking straight at facts concerning which they do not wish to be set right. St. Thomas’ kind of faith which dares to look and see, and, if it may be to touch, is a much more real faith after all than that which will not venture to open its eyes.

Landing at Alexandria (after being blown off the Egyptian coast nearly as far as Crete) was an epoch in my life. No book, no gallery of pictures, can ever be more interesting or instructive than the first drive through an Eastern city; even such a hybrid one as Alexandria. But all the world knows this now, and I need not dwell on so familiar a topic. The only matter I care to record here is a visit I paid to a subterranean church which had just been opened, and of which I was fortunate enough to hear at the moment. I have never been able to learn anything further concerning it than appears in the following extract from one of my note-books, and I fear the church must long ago have been destroyed, and the frescoes, of course, effaced:

“In certain excavations now making in one of the hills of the Old City—within a few hundred yards of the Mahmoudié Canal—the workmen have come upon a small subterranean church; for whose very high antiquity many arguments may be adduced. The frescoes with which it is adorned are still in tolerable preservation, and appear to belong to the same period of art as those rescued from Pompeii. Though altogether inferior to the better specimens in the Museo Borbonico, there is yet the same simplicity of attitude and drapery; the same breadth of outline and effect produced by few touches. It is impossible to confound them for a moment with the stiff and meretricious style of Byzantine painting.

“The form of the church is very peculiar, and I conceive antique. If we suppose a shaft to have been cut into the hill, its base may be considered to form the centre of a cross. To the west, in lieu of nave, are two staircases; one ascending, the other descending to various parts of the hillside. To the east is a small chancel, with depressed elliptical arch and recesses at the back and sides, of the same form. The north transept is a mere apse, supported by rather elegant Ionic pilasters, and having a fan-shaped roof. Opposite this, and in the place of a south transept, is the largest apartment of the whole grotto: a chamber, presenting a singular transition between a modern funeral-vault and an ancient columbarium. The walls are pierced on all sides by deep holes, of the size and shape of coffins placed endwise. There are in all thirty-two of these holes; in which, however, I could find no evidence that they had ever been applied to the purpose of interment. In the corner, between this chamber and the chancel-arch, there is a deep stone cistern sunk in the ground; I presume a font. The frescoes at the end of the chancel are small, and much effaced. In the eastern apse there is a group representing the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. In the front walls of the chancel-arch are two life-size figures; one representing an angel, the other having the name of Christ inscribed over it in Greek letters. This last struck me as peculiarly interesting; from the circumstance that the face bears no resemblance whatever to the one conventionally received among us, in modern times. The eyes, in the Alexandrian fresco, are dark and widely opened; the eyebrows straight and strongly marked; the hair nearly black and gathered in short, thick masses over the ears. I was the more attracted by these peculiarities, as my attention had shortly before been arrested very forcibly by the splendid bronze bust from Herculaneum, in the Museo Borbonico. This grand and beautiful head, which Murray calls ‘Speucippus’ and the custodi, ‘Plato in the character of the Indian Bacchus,’ resembles so perfectly the common representations of Christ, that I should be at a loss to define any difference, unless it be that it has, perhaps, more intellectual power than our paintings and sculptures usually convey, and a more massive neck. If this Alexandrian fresco really represent the tradition of the 3rd or 4th century, it becomes a question of some curiosity: whence do we derive our modern idea of Christ’s face?”

Cairo was a great delight to me. I could not afford to stop at Shepheard’s Hotel but took up my abode with some kind Americans I had met in the steamer, in a sort of Pension kept by an Italian named Ronch; in old Cairo, actually on the bank of the Nile; so literally so, that I might have dropped a stone from our balcony into the river, just opposite the Isle of Rhoda. From this place I made two excursions to the Pyramids and had a somewhat appalling experience in the “King’s Chamber” in the vault of Cheops. I had gone rather recklessly to Ghiza without either friend or Dragoman; and allowed the wretched Scheik at the door to send five Arabs into the pyramid with me as guides. They had only two miserable dip candles altogether, and the darkness, dust, heat and noise of the Arabs chanting “Vera goot lady! Backsheeh! Backsheeh! Vera goot lady,” and so on da capo, all in the narrow, steeply-slanting passages, together with the intolerable sense of weight as of a mountain of stone over me, proved trying to my nerves. Then, when we had reached the central vault and I had glanced at the empty sarcophagus, which is all it contains, the five men suddenly stopped their chanting, placed themselves with their backs to the wall in rows, with crossed arms in the attitude of the Osiride pilasters; and one of them in a businesslike tone, demanded: “Backsheesh”! I instantly perceived into what a trap I had fallen, and what a fool I had been to come there alone. The idea that they might march out and leave me alone in that awful place, in the darkness, very nearly made me quail. But I knew it was no time to betray alarm, so I replied that I “Intended to pay them outside, but if they wished it I would do so at once.” I took out my purse and gave them three shillings to be divided between the five. They took the money and then returned to their posture against the wall.

“We want Backsheesh!”

I took my courage à deux mains, and said, “If you give me any more trouble the English Consul shall hear of it, and you will get the stick.”

“We want Backsheesh!”

“I’ll have no more of this,” I cried in a very sharp voice, and, turning to the ringleader, who held a candle, I said, “Here, you fellow! Take that candle on in front and let me out. Go!” He went!—and I blessed my stars, and all the stars, when I emerged out of that endless passage at last, and stood safe under the bright Egyptian sun.

I am glad to remember Ghiza as it was in those days before hotels, or even tents, were visible near it; when the solemn Sphinx,—so strangely and affectingly human! stood gazing over the desert sands, and beside it were only the ancient temple, the rifled tombs, and the three great Pyramids. To me in those days it seemed the most impressive Field of Death in the world.

The old Arab Mosques in Cairo also delighted me greatly both for their beauty and as studies of the original early English architecture. Needless to say I was enchanted with the streets and bazaars, and all the dim, strange, lovely pictures they afforded, and the Eastern odours which pervaded them in that bright, light air, wherein my chest grew sound and strong after having been for years oppressed with bronchial troubles. One day in my plenitude of enjoyment of health and vigour, I walked alone a long way down the splendid Shoubra avenue of Acacia Lebbex trees with the moving crowd of Arab men and women in all their varied costumes, and trains of camels and asses laden with green trefoil, glittering in the alternate sun and shade with never a cart or carriage to disturb the even currents to and fro. At last I came in sight of the Nile, and in the extreme excitement of the view, hastily concluded that the yellow bank which sloped down beyond the grass must be sand, and that I could actually plunge my hands in the River of Egypt. I ran down the slope some little distance from the avenue, and took a few steps on the supposed yellow sand. It proved to be merely mud, like the banks of the Avon at low tide at Clifton, though of different colour, and in a moment I felt myself sinking indefinitely. Already it was nearly up to my knees, and in a few minutes I should have been (quietly and unperceived by anybody) entombed for the investigation of Egyptologers of future generations. It was a ludicrous position, and even in the peril of it I believe I laughed outright. Any way I happily remembered that I had read years before in a bad French novel, how people saved themselves in quicksands in the Landes by throwing themselves down and so dividing their weight over a much larger surface than the soles of the feet. Instantly I turned back towards the bank, and cast myself along forward, and then by dint of enormous efforts withdrew my feet and struggled back to terra firma, much, I should think, after the mode of locomotion of an Ichthyosaurus or other “dragon of the prime.” Arrived at a place of safety I had next to reflect how I was to walk home into the town in the pickle to which I had reduced myself! Luckily the hot sun of Egypt dried the mud on my homely clothes and enabled me to brush it off as dust in an incredibly quick time. Before it had done so, however, a frog of exceptional ugliness mistook me for part of the bank and jumped on my lap. He looked such an ill-made creature that I constructed at once the (non-scientific) hypothesis that he must have been descended from some of the frogs which Pharaoh’s magicians are said to have made in rivalry to Moses; forerunners of those modern pathologists who are just clever enough to give us all sorts of Plagues, but always stop short of curing them.

I was very anxious, of course, to ascend the Nile to Philæ, or at the very least to Thebes; but I was too poor by far to hire a dahabieh for myself alone, and, in those days, excursion steamers were non-existent, or very rare. I did hear of a gentleman who wanted to make up a party and take a boat, but he coolly proposed that I should pay half of the expenses of five people, and I did not view that arrangement in a favourable light. Eventually I turned sorrowfully and disappointed back to Alexandria with a pleasant party of English and American ladies and gentlemen; and after a short passage to Jaffa, we rode up all together in two days to Jerusalem. I had given up riding many years before and taken to driving instead, but there was infinite exhilaration on finding myself again on horseback, on one of the active little, half Arab, Syrian steeds. That wonderful ride through the Jaffa orange groves and the Plain of Sharon with all its flowers, to Lydda and Ramleh, and then, next day, to Jerusalem, was beyond all words interesting. I think no one who has been brought up as we English are, on the double literature of Palestine and England, can visit the Holy Land with other than almost breathless curiosity mingled with a thousand tender associations. What England is to a cultivated American traveller of Washington Irving’s or Lowell’s stamp, that is Palestine to us all. As for me, my religious views made it, I think, rather more than less congenial and interesting to me than to many others. I find I wrote of it to my friend from Jerusalem (March 6th, 1858):

“I feel very happy to be here. The land seems worthy to be that in which from earliest history the human soul has highest and oftenest soared up to God. One wants no miraculous story to make such a country a ‘Holy Land;’ nor can such story make it less holy to me, as it does, I think, to some who equally disbelieve it. It seems to me as if Christians must be, and in fact are, overwhelmed and confounded to find themselves in the scene of such events. To me it is all pleasure. I believe that if Christ can see us now like other departed spirits, it is those who revere him as I do, and not those who give to him his Father’s place, whom he can regard most complacently. If I did not feel this it would pain me to be here.”

When I went first into the church of the Holy Sepulchre it happened, on account of some function going on elsewhere, to be unusually free from the crowds of pilgrims. It seemed to me to be a real parable in stone. All the different churches, Greek, Latin, Armenian Maronite, opened into the central Temple; as if to show that every creed has a Door leading to the true Holy Place.

I loved also the little narrow marble shrine in the midst with its small, low door, and the mere plain altar-tomb, with room to kneel beside it and pray,—if we will,—to him who is believed to have rested there for the mystic three days after his crucifixion; or if we will (and as I did), to “his Father and our Father”; in a spot hallowed by the associations of a hundred worshipping generations, and the memory of the holiest of men.

Another day I was able to walk alone nearly all round outside the walls of Jerusalem, beginning at the Jaffa gate and passing round through what was then a desert, but is now, I am told, a populous suburb. I came successively to Siloam and to the Valley of Hinnom, and of Jehoshaphat; to the Tombs of the Prophets, and at last to Gethsemane. At the time of my visit, this sacred spot, containing the ruins of an “oil press” (whence its supposed identification), was a small walled garden kept by monks who did their best to spoil its associations. Above it I sat for a long time beside the path up to St. Stephen’s Gate, where tradition places the scene of the great first Christian Martyrdom. The ground is all strewed still, with large stones and boulders, making it easy to conjure up the terrific picture of the kneeling saint and savage crowd, and of Saul standing by watching the scene.

Leaving Jerusalem after a week with the same pleasant English and American companions, and with a due provision of guards and tents and baggage mules, I rode to Bethlehem and Hebron, visiting on the way Abraham’s oak at Mamre, which is a magnificent old terebinth, and the vineyard of Esh-kol, then in a very poor condition of culture. We stopped the first night close to Solomon’s Pools, and I was profane enough to bring my sponges at earliest dawn into Jacob’s Well at the head of the waters, and enjoy a delicious bath. Ere we turned in on the previous evening, a clergyman of our party read to us, sitting under the walls of the old Saracenic castle, the pages in Stanley’s Palestine which describe, with all his vivid truthfulness and historic sentiment, the scene which lay before us; the three great ponds, “built by Solomon, repaired by Pontius Pilate,” which have supplied Jerusalem with water for 3,000 years.

I am much surprised that the problem offered by the contents of the vault beneath the Mosque of Hebron has not long ago excited the intensest curiosity among both Jews and Christians. Here, within small and definite limits, must lie evidence of incalculable weight in favour of or against the veracity of the Mosaic record. If the account in Gen. L. be correct, the bones of Jacob were brought out of Egypt and deposited here by Joseph; embalmed in the finest and most durable manner. We are expressly told (Gen. L., 2 and 3) that Joseph ordered the physicians to embalm his father, that “forty days were fulfilled for him, for so are fulfilled the days of those which are embalmed;” and that Joseph went up to Canaan with “all the servants of Pharaoh and the elders of his house, and all the elders of the land of Egypt,” (a rather amazing exodus!) and “chariots and horsemen, a very great company.” They finally buried Jacob (v. 13) “in the Cave of the field of Machpelah which Abraham bought.” It was unquestionably, then, a first-class Mummy, covered with wrappers and inscriptions, and enclosed, of course, in a splendidly-painted Mummy-coffin, which was deposited in that unique cave; and the extraordinary sanctity which has attached to the spot as far as tradition reaches back, affords presumption amounting almost to guarantee that there, if anywhere, below the six cenotaphs in the upper chamber, in the vault under the small hole in the floor where the Prince of Wales and Dean Stanley were privileged to look down into the darkness,—lie the relics which would terminate more controversies, and throw more light on the origin of Judaism than can be done by all the Rabbis and Bishops of Europe and Asia together! Why do not the Rothschilds and Hirschs and Montefiores and Goldschmidts put together a modest little subscription of a million or two and buy up Hebron, and so settle once for all whether the Jewish Ulysses were a myth or a man; and whether there were really an Israel of whom they are the “Children?” I have talked to Dean Stanley on the subject, who (as he tells us in his delightful Jewish Church, I., 500) shared all my curiosity, but when I urged the query: “Did he think that the relics of the Patriarchs would be found, if we could examine the cave?” he put up his hands in a deprecating attitude, which all who knew and loved him will remember, and said, “Ah! that is the question, indeed!”

Is it possible that the millionaire Jews of Germany, France and England are, after all, like my poor friends the Nuns, who would not get up at sunrise on Trinity Sunday to see “toutes les trois personnes de la sainte Trinité,”—and that they prefer to believe that the bones of the three Patriarchs are where they ought to be, but would rather not put that confidence to the test?

One of the sights which affected me most in the course of our pilgrimage through Judæa was beheld after a night spent by the ladies of our party in our tent pitched among the sands (and centipedes!) of the desert of the Mar Saba. (Our gentlemen-friends were privileged to sleep in the vast old monastery whence they brought us next morning the most excellent raki.) As we rode out of the little valley of our encampment and down by the convent of Mar Saba, we obtained a complete view of the whole hermit burrow; for such it may properly be considered. Mar Saba is the very ideal of a desert. It lies amid the wilderness of hills, not grand enough to be sublime but only monotonous and hopelessly barren. So white are these hills that at first they appear to be of chalk, but further inspection shows them to be of whitish rock, with hardly a trace of vegetation growing anywhere over it. On the hills there is sometimes an inch of soil over the rock; in the valleys there are torrents of stones over the inch of soil. Between our mid-day halt at Derbinerbeit (the highest land in Judæa), and the evening rest at Mar Saba, our whole march had been in utter solitude; not a village, a tent, a caravan, a human being in sight. Not a tree or bush. Of living creatures hardly a bird to break the dead silence of the world, only a large and venomous snake crawling beside our track. Thus, far from human haunts, in the heart of the wilderness, lies Mar Saba. Fit approach to such a shrine! Through the arid, burning rocks a profound and sharply-cut chasm suddenly opens and winds, forming a hideous valley, such as may exist in the unpeopled moon, but which probably has not its equal in our world for rugged and blasted desolation. There is no brook or stream in the depths of the ravine. If a torrent may ever rush down it after the thunderstorms with which the country is often visited, no traces of water remain even in early spring. Barren, burning, glaring rocks alone are to be seen on every side. Far up on the cliff, like a fortress, stand the gloomy, windowless walls of the convent; but along the ravine in an almost inaccessible gorge of the hills, are caves and holes half-way down the precipice,—the dwellings of the hermits. Here, in a den fit for a fox or a hyæna, one poor soul had died just before my visit, after five-and-forty years of self-incarceration. Death had released him, but many more remained; and we could see some of them from the distant road as we passed, sitting at the mouth of their caverns, or walking on the little ledges of rock which they had smoothed for terraces. Their food (such as it is) is sent from the convent and let down from the cliffs at needful intervals. Otherwise they live absolutely alone,—alone in this hideous desolation of nature, with the lurid, blasted desert for their sole share in God’s beautiful universe. We are all, I suppose, accustomed to think of a hermit as our poets have painted him, dwelling serene in

“A lodge in some vast wilderness, Some boundless continuity of shade,”

undisturbed by all the ugly and jarring sights and sounds of our grinding civilization; sleeping calmly on his bed of fern, feeding on his pulse and cresses, and drinking the water from the brook.

“He kneels at morn at noon and eve, He hath a cushion plump, It is the moss that wholly hides The rotted old oak stump.”

But the hermits of Mar Saba, how different are they from him who assoiled the Ancient Mariner? No holy cloisters of the woods, and sound of chanting brooks, and hymns of morning birds; only this silent, burning waste, this “desolation deified.” It seemed as if some frightful aberration of the religious sentiment could alone lead men to choose for home, temple, prison, tomb, the one spot of earth where no flower springs to tell of God’s tenderness, no soft dew or sweet sound ever falls to preach faith and love.

There are many such hermits still in the Greek Church. I have seen their eyries perched where only vultures should have their nests, on the cliffs of Caramania, and among the caverns of the Cyclades. Anthony and Stylites have indeed left behind them a track of evil glory, along which many a poor wretch still “crawls to heaven along the devil’s trail.” Are not lives wasted like these to be put into the account when we come to estimate the Gesta Christi? Must we not, looking on these and on the ten thousand, thousand hearts broken in monasteries and nunneries all over Europe, admit that historical Christianity has not only done good work in the world, but bad work also: and that, diverging widely from the Spirit of Christ, it has been far from uniformly beneficent?

It was while riding some hours from Mar Saba through the low hills before coming out on the blighted flats of the Dead Sea, that one of those pictures passed before me which are ever after hung up in the mind’s gallery among the choicest of the spoils of Eastern travel. By some chance I was alone, riding a few hundred yards in front of the caravan, when, turning the corner of a hill, I met a man approaching me, the only one I had seen for several hours since we passed a few black tents eight or ten miles away. He was a noble-looking young shepherd, dressed in the camel’s-hair robe, and with the lithesome, powerful limbs and elastic step of the children of the desert. But the interest which attached to him was the errand on which he had manifestly been engaged on those Dead Sea plains from whence he was returning. Round his neck, and with its little limbs held gently by his hand, lay a lamb he had rescued and was doubtless carrying home. The little creature lay as if perfectly contented and happy, and the man looked pleased as he strode along lightly with his burden; and as I saluted him with the usual gesture of pointing to heart and head and the “salaam alik!”, (Peace be with you), he responded with a smile and a kindly glance at the lamb, to which he saw my eyes were directed. It was actually the beautiful parable of the gospel acted out before my sight. Every particular was true to the story; the shepherd had doubtless left his “ninety-and-nine in the wilderness,” round the black tents we had seen so far away, and had sought for the lost lamb “till he found it,” where it must quickly have perished without his help, among those blighted plains. Literally, too, “when he had found it, he laid it on his shoulders, rejoicing.”

After this beautiful sight which I have longed ever since for a painter’s power to place on canvas (a better subject a thousand-fold than the cruel “Scape-Goat”), we reached the Dead Sea, and I managed to dip into it, after wading out a very long way in the shallow, bitter, biting water which stung my lips and nostrils, and tasted like a horrible mixture of quinine and salt. From the shore, all strewed with the white skeletons of trees washed down by the river, we made our way (mostly galloping) in four hours to the Ford of Jordan; and there I had the privilege of another dip, or rather of seven dips, taken in commemoration of Naaman and to wash off the Dead Sea brine! It is the spot supposed to have witnessed the transit of Joshua and the baptisms of St. John. The following night our tents were pitched among the ruins of Jericho. The wonder is, not that the once flourishing city should be deserted and Herod’s great amphitheatre there a ruinous heap, but that a town was ever built in such an insanitary place. Closed in by the mountains on every side from whence a fresh breeze could blow upon it, and open only to the unwholesome flats of the Dead Sea, the situation is pestilential.

Next day we rode back to Jerusalem through the desolate mountains of the Quarantania, where tradition places the mystic Fast and Temptation of Christ; a dreary, lonely, burning desert. Here, also, is the supposed scene of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the ruins of a great building, which may have been a Half-way House Inn beside the road, bear out the tradition. I have often reflected that orthodox divines miss half the point of that beautiful story when they omit to mark the fact that the Samaritans were, in Christ’s time, boycotted by the Jews as heretics; and that it was precisely one of these heretics who was made by Jesus the type for all time of genuine philanthropy,—in direct and purposeful contrast to the representatives of Judaic orthodoxy, the Priest and Levite.

The sun on my head during the latter hours of the ride became intolerable; not like English heat, however excessive, but roasting my very brains through all the folds of linen on my hat and of a damp handkerchief within. It was like sitting before a kitchen fire with one’s head in the position proper for a leg of mutton! I felt it was a matter of life and death to escape, and galloped on by myself in advance for many miles till suddenly I came, just under Bethany at the base of the Mount of Olives, to a magnificent ancient fountain, with the cool water gushing out, amid the massive old masonry. In a moment I leaped from my equally eager horse, threw off my hat and bared my neck and put my head under the blessed stream. Of course it was a perilous proceeding, but it saved me from a sunstroke.

That evening in Jerusalem I wished good-bye to my pleasant fellow-travellers, who were good enough to pass a vote of thanks to me for my “unvarying pluck and hilarity during the fatigues and dangers of the way!” I started next day for the two days’ ride to Jaffa, accompanied only by a good Italian named Abengo, and a muleteer. There was a small war going on between some of the tribes on the way, and a certain chief named Aboo-Goosh (beneath whose robber’s castle I had been pelted with stones on my way up to Jerusalem) was scouring the country. We passed, in the valley of Ajalon, some wounded men borne home from a battle, but otherwise encountered nothing alarming, and I obtained a great deal of curious information from Abengo, who knew Palestine intimately, and whose wife was a Christian woman of Nazareth. There is no use in repeating now records of a state of things which has been modified, no doubt, essentially in thirty years.

From Jaffa I sailed to Beyrout, and there, with kind help and advice from the Consul, I obtained the services of an old Turk as a Dragoman, and he and I and a muleteer laden with my bed and baggage started to cross Lebanon and make our way to Baalbec and, as I hoped, also to Damascus. The snows were still thick on the higher slopes of Lebanon, and after the excessive heat I had just undergone in Syria, the cold was trying. But the beauty and grandeur of those noble mountains, fringed below with fig and olive, and with their snowy summits rising height beyond height above, was compensation for all hardship. By a curious chance, Lebanon was the first mountain range worthy of the name, which I had ever crossed. It was an introduction, of course, to a whole world of impressions and experiences.

I had a good many escapes in the course of my ride; there being nothing to be called a road over much of the way, and such path as there was being covered with snow or melting torrents. My strong little Syrian horse walked and scrambled and stumbled up beds of streams running down in cataracts over the rocks and boulders; and on one occasion he had to bear me down a very steep descent, where we floundered forward, sometimes up to his girths in the snow, in dread of descending with irresistible impetus to the edge of a precipice which yawned at the bottom. We did reach the verge in rather a shaky condition; but the good beast struggled hard to save himself, and turned at the critical moment safe along the edge.

A sad association belongs to my sojourn among the Maronites at Zachly; a large village on the further side of Lebanon, on the slopes of the Haraun. I slept there on my outward way in my tent pitched in an angle of grass outside one of the first houses, and on my return journey I obtained the use of the principal room of the same house from my kind hosts, as the cold outside was too considerable for tent life in comfort. Zachly was a very humble, simple place. The houses were all of mud, with flat roofs made of branches laid across and covered with more mud. A stem of a living tree usually stood in the middle of the house supporting the whole erection, which was divided into two or three chambers. A recess in the wall held piles of mats, and of the hard cushions made of raw cotton, which form both seats, beds, and pillows. The rough, unplaned door, with wooden lock, the window half stuffed up, the abundant population of cocks and hens, cats and dogs and rosy little boys and girls, strongly reminded me of Balisk! I was welcomed most kindly after a brief negotiation with Hassan; and the simple women and girls clustered round me with soft words and presents of carrots and daffodils. One old woman having kissed my hands as a beginning, proceeded to put her arms round my neck and embrace me in a most motherly way. To amuse the party, I showed them my travelling bag, luncheon and writing and drawing apparatus, and made them taste my biscuits and smell my toilet vinegar. Screams of “Taib, Taib! Katiyeh!” (good, very good) rewarded my small efforts, and then I made them tell me all their names, which I wrote in my note-book. They were very pretty: Helena, Mareen, Yasmeen, Myrrhi, Maroon, Georgi, Malachee, Yussef, and several others, the last being Salieh, the young village priest, a tall, grand-looking young man with high cylindrical black hat, black robe and flowing brown hair. I made him a respectful salutation at which he seemed pleased. On my second visit to Zachly I attended the vesper service in his little chapel as the sun went down over Lebanon. It was a plain quadrangle of mud walls, brown without and whitewashed within; a flat roof of branches and mortar; a post for support in the centre; a confessional at one side; a little lectern; an altar without crucifix and only decorated by two candlesticks; a jar of fresh daffodils; some poor prints; a blue tea-cup for sacramental plate, and a little cottage-window into which the setting sun was shining softly;—such was the chapel of Zachly. A few men knelt to the left, a few women to the right; in front of the altar was a group of children, also kneeling, and waiting to take their part in the service. At the lectern stood the noble figure of young Papas Salieh, leaning on one of the crutches which in all Eastern churches are provided to relieve the fatigue of the attendants, who, like Abraham, “worship, leaning on the top of a staff.” Beside the Papas stood a ragged but intelligent little acolyte, who chanted very well, and on the other side of the lectern an aged peasant, who also took his part. The prayers were, of course, unintelligible to me, being in Arabic; but I recognised in the Gospel the chapter of genealogies in Luke, over whose hard names the priest helped his friend quite unaffectedly. The reading over, Papas Salieh took off his black and red cap, and, kneeling before the altar, commenced another chanted prayer, while the women beside me bowed till they kissed the ground in Eastern prostration, beating their breasts with resounding blows. The group of children made the responses at intervals; and then the priest blessed us, and the simple service was over, having occupied about twenty minutes. While we were departing, the Papas seated himself in the confessional and a man went immediately into the penitents’ place beside him. There was something very affecting to me in this poor little church of clay, with its humble efforts at cleanliness and flowers and music; all built and adorned by the worshippers’ own hands, and served by the young peasant priest, doubtless the son and brother of some of his own flock.

As I have said there are sad associations connected with this visit of mine to Zachly. A very short time afterwards the Druses came down with irresistible force,—massacred the greater number of the unhappy Maronites and burned the village. The spot where I had been so kindly received was left a heap of blackened ruins, and what became of sweet, motherly Helena and her dear little children and good Papas Salieh and the rest, I have never been able to learn.

It took six hours of hard riding in a bitter wind to carry me from Zachly to Baalbec; but anticipation bore me on wings, and to beguile the way I repeated to myself as my good memory permitted, the whole of Moore’s poem of Paradise and the Peri, culminating in the scene which the Peri beheld “When o’er the vale of Baalbec winging.” In vain, however, I cross-questioned Hassan (we talked Italian tant bien que mal) about Peris. He had never heard of such beings. But of Djinns in general he knew only too much; and notably that they had built the vast ruins of Baalbec, which no mortal hands could have raised; and that to the present time they haunt them so constantly and in such terrific shape, that it is very perilous for anybody to go there alone and quite impossible to do so after nightfall. I had reason to bless this belief in the Djinns of Baalbec for it left me the undisturbed solitary enjoyment of the mighty enclosure within the Saracenic walls for the best part of two days, unvexed by the inquisitive presence or observation of the population of the Arab village outside.

To pitch my tent among the ruins, however, was more than I could bring Hassan to do by any cajoling, and I consented finally to sleep in a small cabin consisting of a single chamber of which I could lock the door inside. When I prepared for sleep on the hard cotton cushions laid over a stone bench, and with the two unglazed windows admitting volumes of cold air, I was frightened to find I had every symptom of approaching fever. Into what an awful position,—I reflected,—had I put myself, with no one but that old Turk Hassan, and the Arab from whom I had hired this little house for the night, to take care of me should I have a real bad fever, and be kept there between life and death for weeks! Reflecting what I could possibly do to avert the danger, brought on, of course, by cold and fatigue, I took from my bag the half-bottle of Raki (a very pure spirit made from rice) which my travelling friends had brought from the monastery at Mar Saba and had kindly shared with me; and to a large dose of this I was able to add some hot water from a sort of coffee-pot left, by good luck, in the yet warm brazier of charcoal in the middle of my room. I drank my Raki-toddy to the last drop, and then slept the sleep of the just,—to awaken quite well the next morning! And if any of my teetotal friends think I did wrong to take it, I beg entirely to differ from them on the subject.

The days which I spent in and around Baalbec were more than repayment for the fatigues and perils of the passage of “Sainted Lebanon;” whose famous Cedars, by the way, I was unable to visit; the region where they stand being at that season too deeply covered with snow. Here is a description I gave of Baalbec to Harriet St. Leger just after my visit:—

“I had two wonderful days indeed in Baalbec. The number of the vast solitary ruins exceeded all my anticipations, and their grandeur impresses one as no remains less completely isolated can do. Imagine a space about that of Newbridge garden surrounded by enormous Saracenic walls with a sweet, bright brook running round it, and then left to entire solitude. A few cattle browse on the short grass, and now and then, I suppose, some one enters by one or other of the different gaps in the wall to look after them; but in the Temple of Jupiter, shut in by its great walls, to which the displacement of a single stone makes now the sole entrance, no one ever enters. The fear of Djinns renders the place even doubly alarming! Among the most awful things in Baalbec are stupendous subterranean tunnels running in various directions under the ruined city. I groped through several of them, they opened out with great doorways into others which, having no light, I would not explore, but which seemed abysses of awe! The stones of all these works are enormous. Those 5 or 6 feet and 12 or 15 feet long are among the smallest. In the temple were some which I could not span with five extensions of my arms, i.e., something like 30 feet, but there are still larger elsewhere among the ruins.”

The shafts of the columns of the two Temples,—the six left standing of the great Temple of the Sun which

“Stand sublime Casting their shadows from on high Like Dials which the wizard Time Had raised to count his ages by”—

and those of the hypæthral temple of Zeus of which only a few have fallen, are alike miracles of size and perfection of moulding. The fragments of palaces reveal magnificence unparalleled. All these enormous edifices are wrought with such lavish luxuriance of imagination, such perfection of detail in harmony with the luscious Corinthian style which pervades the whole, that the idea of the Arabs that they are the work not of men but of Genii, seemed quite natural. I recalled what Vitruvius (who wrote about the time in which the best of these temples was erected), says of the methods by which, in his day, the largest stones were moved from quarries and lifted to their places, but I failed to comprehend how the colossal work was achieved here.

Passing out of the great ruined gateway I came to vast square and hexagonal courts with walls forming exedræ, loaded with profusion of ornaments; columns, entablatures, niches and seats overhung with carvings of garlands of flowers and the wings of fanciful creatures. Streets, gateways and palaces, hardly distinguishable in their ruin, follow on beyond the courts and portico. I climbed up a shattered stair to the summit of the Saracenic wall and felt a sort of shock to behold the living world below me; the glittering brook, the almond trees in blossom and Anti-Lebanon beyond. Here I caught sight of the well-known exquisite little circular temple with its colonnade of six Corinthian columns, of which the architraves are recurved inwards from column to column. If I am not mistaken a reproduction of this lovely little building was set up in Kew Gardens in the last century.

Last of all I returned to the Temple of Zeus—or of Baal as it is sometimes called—to spend there in secure solitude (except for Djinns!) the closing hours of that long, rich day. The large walls are almost perfect; the colonnades of enormous pillars are mostly still standing. From the inner portal with its magnificent lintel half fallen from its place, the view is probably the finest of any fane of the ancient world, and was to me impressive beyond description. Even the spot where the statue of the god has stood can easily be traced. A great stone lying overturned on the pavement was doubtless the pedestal. I remained for hours in this temple; sometimes feebly trying to sketch what I saw, sometimes lost in ponderings on the faiths and worships of the past and present. A hawk, which probably had never before found a human visitor at eventide in that weird place, came swooping over me; then gave a wild shriek and flew away. A little later the moon rose over the walls. The calm and silence and beauty of that scene can never be forgotten.

I was unable to pursue my journey to Damascus as I had designed. The muleteer, with all my baggage, contrived to miss us on the road among the hills in Anti-Lebanon; and, eventually, after another visit to the ruins and to the quarries from whence the vast stones were taken, I rode back to Zachly and thence (a two days’ ride) over Lebanon to Beyrout.

I remained a few days at the hotel which then existed a mile from the town, while I waited for the steamer to take me to Athens, and much enjoyed the lovely scene of rich mulberry and almond gardens beside the shell-strewn strand, with snowy Lebanon behind, towering over the fir-woods into the deep blue sky. The Syrian peasant women are sweet, courteous creatures. One day as I sat under a cactus-hedge reading Shelley, a pretty young mother came by, and after interchanging a “Peace be with you,” proceeded unhesitatingly, and without a word of explanation, to deposit her baby,—Mustapha by name,—in my lap. I was very willing to nurse Mustapha, and we made friends at once as easily as his mother had done; and my heart was the better for the encounter!

After I had paid off Hassan and settled my account at the hotel, I found my financial condition exceedingly bad! I had just enough cash remaining to carry me (omitting a few meals) by second-class passage to Athens: which was the nearest place where I had opened a credit from my bankers, or where I had any introductions. There was nothing for it but to take a second-class place on board the Austrian Lloyd’s steamer L’Impératrice; though it was not a pleasant arrangement, seeing that there was no other woman passenger and no stewardess on the ship at all. Nevertheless this was just one of the cases in which knocking about the world brought me favourable experience of human nature. The Captain of the Impératrice, an Italian gentleman, did his utmost, with extreme delicacy and good taste, to make my position comfortable. He ordered his own dinner to be served in the second cabin that he might preside at the table instead of one of his subordinates; and during the day he came often to see that I was well placed and shaded on deck, and to interchange a little pleasant talk, without intrusion.

It is truly one of the silliest of the many silly things in the education of women that we are taught little or nothing about the simplest matters of banking and stock-and-share buying and selling. I, who had always had money in abundance given me straight into my hand, knew absolutely nothing, when my father’s death left me to arrange my affairs, how such business is done, how shares are bought and sold, how credits are open at corresponding bankers; how, even, to draw a cheque! It all seemed to me a most perilous matter, and I feared that I might, in those remote regions, come to grief any day by the refusal of some local banker to honour my cheques or by the neglect of my London bankers to bespeak credit for me. My means were so narrow, and I had so little experience of the expenses of living and travelling, that I was greatly exercised as to my small concerns. I brought with me (generally tied by a string round my neck and concealed) a very valuable diamond ring to sell in case I came to real disaster; but it had been constantly worn by my mother; and I felt at Beyrout that, sooner than sell it, I would live on short commons for much more than a week!

One day of our voyage I spent at Cyprus where I admired the ancient church of San Lazzaro, half mosque, half church, and said to be the final grave of Lazarus. I had visited his, supposed, temporary one in Bethany. Another day I landed at Rhodes and was able to see the ruined street which bears over each house the arms of the Knight to whom it belonged. At the upper end of the way are still visible the arch and shattered relics of their church. Writing to Miss St. Leger March 28th, I described my environment thus:

“Dearest Harriet,

“Behold me seated à la Turque close to a party of Moslem gentlemen who alternately smoke and say their prayers all day long. We are steaming up through the lovely “Isles of Greece,” having left Rhodes this morning and Cos an hour ago. As we pass each wild cape and green shore I take up a certain opera glass with ‘H. S.’ on the top of the box, and wish very much I could see through it the dear, kind eyes that used it once. They would be pleasanter to see than all these scenes, glorious as they are. The sun is going down into the calm blue sea and throwing purple lights already on the countless islands through which the vessel winds its way. White sea-gulls follow us and beautiful little quaint-sailed boats appear every now and then round the islands. The peculiar beauty of this famous passage is derived, however, from the bold and varied outline of the islands and adjoining coast of Asia Minor. From little rocks not larger than the ship itself, up to large provinces with extensive towns like Cos, there is an endless variety and boldness of form. Ireland’s Eye magnified to twice the height, is, I should say, the commonest type. In some almost inaccessible cliffs one sees hermitages; in others convents. I shall post this at Smyrna.”

As the Impératrice stopped two or three days in the magnificent harbour of Smyrna, I had good opportunity to land and make my way to the scene of Polycarp’s Martyrdom amid the colossal cypresses which outdo all those of Italy except the quincentenarians in the Giusti garden in Verona. It was Easter, and a ridiculous incident occurred on the Saturday. I was busy writing in the cabin of the Impératrice at mid-day, when, subito! there were explosions in our vessel and in a hundred other vessels in the harbour, again and again and again, as if a battle of Trafalgar were going on all round! I rushed on deck and found the steward standing calm and cheerful amid the terrific noise and smoke, “For God’s sake what has happened?” I cried breathless. “Nothing, Signora, nothing! It is the Royal Salute all the ships are firing, of 21 guns.”

“In honour of whom?” I asked, somewhat less alarmed.

“Iddio, Signora! Gesù Cristo, sicuro! È il momento della Resurrezione, si sà.”

“O, no!” I said, “Not on Saturday. It was on Sunday, you know!”

“Che, che! Dicono forse cosi i Protestanti! Sappiamo noi altri, che era il Sabato.”

I never got to the bottom of this mystery, but can testify that at Smyrna in 1858 there were many scores of these Royal Salutes (!) on Holy Saturday at noon in honour of the Resurrection.

It was one of the brightest hours of my happy life, that on which I stood on the deck of our ship at sunrise and passed under “Sunium’s marble steep” and knew that I was approaching Athens. As we steamed up the gulf, the red clouds flamed over Parnes and Hymettus and lighted up the hills of Peloponnesus. The bright blue waves were dancing under our prow, and I could see over them far away the “rocky brow which looks o’er sea-born Salamis,” where Xerxes sat on his silver-footed throne on such a morn as this. Above, to our right, over the olive woods with the rising sun behind it, like a crowned hill was the Acropolis of Athens and the Parthenon upon it.

Very soon I had landed at the Piræus and had engaged a carriage (there was no railway then) to take me to Athens. The drive was enchanting, between olive groves and vineyards, and with the Temple of Theseus and the buildings on the Acropolis coming into view as I approached Athens, till I was beside myself with delight and excitement. The first thing to do was to drive to the private house of the banker to whom I was recommended, to arouse the poor old gentleman (nothing loath apparently to do business even at seven o’clock) to draw fifty sovereigns, and then to go to the French Hotel, choose a room with a fine view of the Parthenon, and to say to the master: “Send me the very best déjeuner you can provide and a bottle of Samian wine, and let this letter be taken to Mr. Finlay.” That breakfast, with that view, was a feast of the gods after my many abstinencies, though I nearly “dashed down the cup of Samian wine,” not in patriotic despair for Greece, but because it was so abominably bad that no poetry could have been made out of it by Anacreon himself. Hardly had I finished my meal, when Mr. Finlay appeared at my door, having hurried with infinite kindness to welcome me, and do honour to the introduction of his cousin, my dear sister-in-law. “I put myself,” said he, “at your orders for the day. We will go wherever you please.”

It would be unfair to inflict on the reader a detailed account of all I saw at Athens under the admirable guidance of Mr. Finlay during a week of intensest enjoyment. Mr. Finlay (it can scarcely yet be forgotten) went out to Greece a few weeks or months before Byron and fought with him and after him, through the War of Independence. After this, having married a beautiful Armenian lady, he bought much land in Eubœa, built himself a handsome house in Athens and lived there for the rest of his life, writing his great History (in five volumes) of Greece under Foreign Domination; making a magnificent collection of coins; and acting for many years as the Times correspondent at Athens. He was not only a highly erudite archæologist, but an enthusiast for the land of his adoption and all its triumphs of art; in short, the best of all possible ciceroni. I was fortunately not wholly unprepared to profit by his learned expositions and delicate observation on the architecture of the glorious ruins, for I had made copies of prints of all at Athens and elsewhere in Greece with ground-plans and restorations and notes of everything I could learn about them, many years before when I was wont to amuse myself with drawing, while my mother read to me. I found that I knew beforehand nearly exactly what remained of the Parthenon and the Erechtheum and the Temple of Victory, the Propylæum on the Acropolis and the Theseium below; and it was of intensest interest to me to learn, under Mr. Finlay’s guidance, precisely where the Elgin Marbles had stood, and to note the extraordinary fact, on which he insisted much,—that there is not a single straight line in the whole Parthenon. Everything, down to single stones in the entablatures and friezes, is curved, in some cases, he felt assured, after they had been placed in situ. The extreme entasis of the columns and the great pyramidal inclination of the whole building, were most noticeable when attention was once drawn to them. As we approached the majestic ruins of Adrian’s Temple of Jupiter on the plains below, (that enormous temple which had double rows of columns surrounding it and quadruple rows in front and back, of ten columns each) I exclaimed “Why! there ought to be three columns standing at that far angle!” “Quite true,” said Mr. Finlay, “one of them fell just six weeks ago.”

Since this visit of mine to Athens a vast deal has been done to clear away the remains of the Turkish tower and other barbaric buildings which obstructed and desecrated the summit of the Acropolis; and the fortunate visitor may now see the whole Propylæum and all the spaces open and free, beside examining the very numerous statues and bas reliefs some quaintly archaic, some of the best age and splendidly beautiful, which have been dug out in recent years in Greece.

I envy every visitor to Athens now, but console myself by procuring photographs of all the finds from those excellent artists, Thomaïdes, Brothers.

Mr. Finlay spoke much of Byron in answer to my questions, and described him as a most singular combination of romance and astuteness. The Greeks imagined that a man capable of such enthusiasm as to go to war for their enfranchisement must have a rather soft head as well as warm heart; but they were much mistaken when they tried in their simplicity to exploiter him in matters of finance. There were self-devoted and disinterested patriots, but there were also (as was inevitable), among the insurgents many others who had a sharp eye to their own financial and political schemes Byron saw through these men (Mr. Finlay said), with astounding quickness, and never allowed them to guide or get the better of him in any negotiation. About money matters he considered he was inclined to be “close-fisted.” This was an opinion strongly confirmed to me some months later by Walter Savage Landor, who repeatedly remarked that Byron’s behaviour in several occurrences, while in Italy, was far from liberal and that, luxuriously as he chose to live, he was by no means ready to pay freely for his luxury. Shelley on the contrary, though he lived most simply and was always hard pressed for money by William Godwin (who Fanny Kemble delightfully described to me àpropos of Dowden’s Memoirs, as “one of those greatly gifted and greatly borrowing people!”), was punctilious to the last degree in paying his debts and even those of his friends. There was a story of a boat purchased by both Byron and Shelley which I cannot trust my memory to recall accurately as Mr. Landor told it to me, and which I do not exactly recognise in the Memoirs, but which certainly amounted to this,—that Byron left Shelley to pay for their joint purchase, and that Shelley did so, though at the time he was in extreme straits for money. All the impressions, I may here remark, which I gathered at that time in Greece and Italy (1858), where there were yet a few alive who personally knew both these great poets, was in favour of Shelley and against Byron. Talking over them many years afterwards with Mazzini I was startled by the vehemence with which he pronounced his preference for Byron, as the one who had tried to put his sympathy with a struggling nation into practice, and had died in the noble attempt. This was natural enough on the part of the Italian patriot; but I think the vanity and tendency to “pose,” which formed so large a part of Byron’s character had probably more to do with this last acted Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, than Mazzini, (who had no such foibles) was likely to understand. The following curious glimpse of Byron at Venice before he went to Greece, occurs in an autograph letter in my possession, by Mrs. Hemans to the late Miss Margaret Lloyd. It seems worth quoting here.

“Bronwylfa, 8th April, 1819.

“Your affection of Lord Byron will not be much increased by the description I am going to transcribe for you of his appearance and manners abroad. My sister, who is now at Venice, has sent me the following sketch of the Giaour:—‘We were presented at the Governor’s, after which we went to a conversazione at Madlle. Benzoni’s, where we saw Lord Byron; and now my curiosity is gratified, I have no wish ever to see him again. A more wretched, depraved-looking countenance it is impossible to imagine! His hair streaming almost down to his shoulders and his whole appearance slovenly and even dirty. Still there is a something which impels you to look at his face, although it inspires you with aversion, a something entirely different from any expression on any countenance I ever beheld before. His character, I hear, is worse than ever; dreadful it must be, since everyone says he is the most dissipated person in Italy, exceeding even the Italians themselves.’”

Shortly before my visit to Athens an article, or book, by Mr. Trelawney had been published in England, in which that writer asserted that Byron’s lame leg was a most portentous deformity, like the fleshless leg of a Satyr. I mentioned this to Mr. Finlay, who laughed, and said: “That reminds me of what Byron said of Trelawney; ‘If we could but make Trelawney wash his hands and speak the truth, we might make a gentleman of him!’ Of course,” continued Mr. Finlay, “I saw Byron’s legs scores of times, for we bathed together daily whenever we were near the sea or a river, and there was nothing wrong with the leg, only an ordinary and not very bad, club-foot.”

Among the interesting facts which Mr. Finlay gave me as the results of his historical researches in Greece was that a school of philosophy continued to be held in the Groves of the Academè (through which we were walking at the moment), for 900 years from the time of Plato. A fine collection of gold and silver coins which he had made, afforded, under his guidance, a sort of running commentary on the history of the Byzantine Empire. There were series of three and four reigns during which the coins became visibly worse and worse, till at last there was no silver in them at all, only base metal of some sort; and then, things having come to the worst, there was a revolution, a new dynasty, and a brand new and pure coinage.

The kindness of this very able man and of his charming wife was not limited to playing cicerone to me. Nothing could exceed their hospitality. The first day I dined at their house a party of agreeable and particularly fashionably dressed Greek ladies and gentlemen were assembled. As we waited for dinner the door opened and a magnificent figure appeared, whom I naturally took for, at least, an Albanian Chief, and prepared myself for an interesting presentation. He wore a short green velvet jacket covered with gold embroidery, a crimson sash, an enormous white muslin kilt (I afterwards learned it contained 60 yards of muslin, and that the washing thereof is a function of the highest responsibility), and leggings of green and gold to match the jacket. One moment this splendid vision stood six feet high in the doorway; the next he bowed profoundly and pronounced the consecrated formula:—

“Madame est servie!”

and we went to dinner, where he waited admirably.

Some year or two later, after I had published some records of my travels, and sent them to Mr. Finlay, I received from him the following letter:—

“Athens, 26th May.

“My dear Miss Cobbe,

“Baron von Schmidthals sent me your letter of the 18th April with the Cities of the Past yesterday; his baggage having been detained at Syria. This post brought me Fraser with a ‘Day at Athens’ with due regularity, and now accept my sincere thanks for both. I am ashamed of my neglect in not thanking you sooner for Fraser, but I did not know your address. I felt grateful for it, having been very, very often tired of ‘Days at Athens!’ It was a treat to meet so pleasant a ‘day,’ and have another pleasant day recalled. Others to whom I lent Fraser, told me the ‘Day,’ was delightful. I had heard of your misfortune but I hoped you had entirely recovered, and I regret to hear that you use crutches still. I, too, am weak and can walk little, but my complaint is old age. The Saturday Review has told me that you have poured some valuable thoughts into the river that flows through ages.

‘Rè degli altri; superbo, altero fiume!’

Solomon tried to couch its cataracts in vain. If you lived at Athens you would hardly believe that man can grow wiser by being made to think. It only makes him more wicked here in Greece. But the river of thought must be intended to fertilize the future.

“I wish I could send you some news that would interest or amuse you, but you may recollect that I live like a hermit and come into contact with society chiefly in the matter of politics which I cannot expect to render interesting to you and which is anything but an amusing subject to me; I being one of the Greek landlords on whose head Kings and National Assemblies practise the art of shaving. Our revolution has done some good by clearing away old abuses, but the positive gain has been small. England sent us a boy-king, and Denmark with him a Count Sponneck, whom the Greeks, not inaccurately, call his ‘alter NEMO.’ Still, though we are all very much dissatisfied, I fancy sometimes that fate has served Greece better than England, Denmark, or the National Assembly. The evils of this country were augmented by the devotion of the people to power and pelf, but devotion to nullity or its alter ego is a weak sentiment, and an empty treasury turns the devotion to pelf into useful channels.

“I was rather amused yesterday by learning that loyalty to King George has extended the commercial relations of the Greeks with the Turks. Greece has imported some boatloads of myrtle branches to make triumphal arches at Syra where the King was expected yesterday. Queen Amalia disciplined King Otho’s subjects to welcome him in this way. The idea of Greeks being ‘green’ in anything, though it was only loyalty, amused her in those days. I suppose she knows now that they were not so ‘green’ as their myrtles made them look! It is odd, however, to find that their outrageous loyalty succeeded in exterminating myrtle plants in the islands of the Ægean, and that they must now import their emblems of loyalty from the Sultan’s dominions. If a new Venus rise out of the Grecian sea she will have to swim over to the Turkish coast to hide herself in myrtles. There is a new fact for Lord Strangford’s oriental Chaos!

“My wife desires to be most kindly remembered to you.

“Believe me, my dear Miss Cobbe, “Yours sincerely, “GEORGE FINLAY.”

I left Athens and my kind friends with great regret and embarked at the Piræus for Constantinople, but not before I had managed to secure a luxurious swim in one of the exquisite rocky coves along the coast near the Tomb of Themistocles.

Stamboul was rather a disappointment to me. The weather was cold and cloudy and unfit to display the beauty of the Golden Horn; and I went about with a valet de place in rather a disheartened way to see the Dolma Batchi Palace and a few other things accessible to me. The Scutari Hospital across the Bosphorus where Miss Nightingale had worked only four years before, of course, greatly attracted my interest. How much do all women owe to that brave heart who led them on so far on the road to their public duties, and who has paid for her marvellous achievements by just forty years of invalidism! Those pages of Kinglake’s History in which he pays tribute to her power, and compares her great administrative triumph in bringing order out of chaos with the miserable failures of the male officials who had brought about the disastrous muddle, ought to be quoted again and again by all the friends of women, and never suffered to drop into oblivion.

Of course the reader will assume that I saw St. Sophia. But I did not do so, and to the last, I fear I shall owe a little grudge to the people whose extraordinary behaviour made me lose my sole opportunity of enjoying that most interesting sight. I told my valet de place to learn what parties of foreigners were going to obtain the needful firmaun for visiting the Mosque and to arrange for me in the usual way to join one of them, paying my share of the expense, which at that time amounted to £5. Some days were lost, and then I learned that there was only one party, consisting of American ladies and gentlemen, who were then intending to visit the place, and that for some reason their courier would not consent to my joining them. I thought it was some stupid imbroglio of servants wanting fees, and having the utmost confidence in American kindness and good manners, I called on the family in question at their hotel and begged they would do me the favour to allow me to pay part of the £5, and to enter the doors of St. Sophia with them accordingly; at such time as might suit them. To my amazement the gentleman and ladies looked at each other; and then the gentleman spoke, “O! I leave all that to my courier!” “In that case,” I said, “I wish you good morning.” It was a great bore for me, with my great love for architecture, to fail to see so unique a building, but I could not think of spending £5 on a firmaun myself, and had no choice but to relinquish the hope of entering, and merely walk round the Mosque and peep in where it was possible to do so. I was well cursed in doing this by the old Turks for my presumption!

Nemesis overtook these unmannerly people ere long, for they reached Florence a month after me and found I had naturally told my tale of disappointment to the Brownings, (whom they particularly desired to cultivate), the Somervilles, Trollopes and others who had become my friends; and I believe they heard a good deal of the matter. Mrs. Browning, I know, frankly expressed her astonishment at their behaviour; and Mrs. Somerville would have nothing to say to them. They sent me several messages of conciliation and apology, which of course I ignored. They had done a rude and unkind thing to an unknown and friendless woman. They were ready to make advances to one who had plenty of friends. It was the only case, in all my experience of Americans, in which I have found them wanting in either courtesy or kindness.

I had intended to go from Constantinople viâ the Black Sea and the Danube to Vienna and thence by the railway to Adelsberg and Trieste, but a cold, stormy March morning rendered that excursion far less tempting than a return to the sunny waters of Greece; and, as I had nobody to consult, I simply embarked on a different steamer from the one I had designed to take. At Syra (I think) I changed to the most luxurious and delightful vessel on which I have ever sailed—the Austrian Lloyd’s Neptune, Captain Braun. It was splendidly equipped, even to a camera obscura on deck; and every arrangement for luxurious baths and good food was perfect, and the old Captain’s attention and kindness to everyone extreme. I have still the picture of the Neptune, which he drew in my little sketch book for me. There were several very pleasant passengers on board, among others the Marquis of Headfort (nephew of our old neighbour at Newbridge, Mr. Taylor of Ardgillan) and Lady Headfort, who had gone through awful experiences in India, when married to her first husband, Sir William Macnaghten. It was said that when Sir William was cut to pieces, she offered large rewards for the poor relics and received them all, except his head. Months afterwards when she had returned to Calcutta and was expecting some ordinary box of clothes, or the like, she opened a parcel hastily, and was suddenly confronted with a frightful spectacle of her husband’s half-preserved head!

Whether this story be true I cannot say, but Lady Headfort made herself a most agreeable fellow passenger, and we sat up every night till the small hours telling ghost stories. At Corfu I paid a visit to my father’s cousin, Lady Emily Kozzaris (née Trench) whom I had known at Newbridge and who welcomed me as a bit of Ireland, fallen on her

“Isle under Ionian skies Beautiful as a wreck of paradise.”

I seemed to be en pays de connaissance once more. After two days in Trieste I went up by rail to Adelsberg through the extraordinary district (geologically speaking) of Carniola, where the whole superficial area of the ground is perfectly barren but honey-combed with circular holes of varying depths and size and of the shape of inverted truncated cones; the bottoms of each being highly fertile and cultivated like gardens.

The cavern of Adelsberg was to me one of the most fearsome places in the world. I cannot give any accurate description of it for the sense of awe which always seizes me in the darkness and foul air of caverns and tunnels and pyramids, renders me incapable of listening to details of heights and lengths. I wrote my recollections not long afterwards.

“There were long, long galleries, and chambers, and domes succeeding one another, as it seemed, for ever. Sometimes narrow and low, compelling the visitor to bend and climb; sometimes so wide and lofty that the eye vainly sought to pierce the expanse. And through all the endless labyrinth appeared vaguely in the gloom the forms taken by the stalactites, now white as salt, now yellow and stained as if with age,—representing to the fancy all conceivable objects of earth and sea, piled up in this cave as if in some vast lumberhouse of creation. It was Chaos, when yet all things slept in darkness waiting the fiat of existence. It was the final Ruin when all things shall return to everlasting night, and man and all his works grow into stone and lie buried beside the mammoth and the ichthyosaur. Here were temples and tombs, and vast dim faces, and giant forms lying prone and headless, and huge lions sleeping in dark dens, and white ghosts with phantom raiment flickering in the gloom. And through the caverns, amid all the forms of awe and wonder, rolled a river black as midnight; a deep and rapid river which broke here and there over the rocks as in mockery of the sunny waterfalls of the woods, and gleamed for a moment, white and ghastly, then plunged lower under the black arch into

‘Caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.’

“It is in this deadly river, which never reflects the light of day, that live those strange fleshy lizards without eyes, and seemingly without natural skin, hideous reptiles which have dwelt in darkness from unknown ages, till the organs of sight are effaced.[15]

“Over this dismal Styx the traveller passes on further and further into the cavern, through seemingly endless corridors and vast cathedral aisles and halls without number. One of these large spaces is so enormous that it seemed as if St. Peter’s whole church and dome could lie beneath it. The men who were with us scaled the walls, threw coloured lights around and rockets up to the roof and dimly revealed the stupendous expanse; an underground hall, where Eblis and all his peers might hold the councils of hell. Further, on yet, through more corridors, more chambers and aisles and domes, with the couchant lions and the altar-tombs and the ghosts and the great white faces all around; and then into a cavern, more lately found than the rest, where the white and yellow marble took forms of screens and organ pipes and richest Gothic tracery of windows,—the region where the Genius of the Cavern had made his royal Oratory. It was all a great, dim, uneasy dream. Things were, and were not. As in dreams we picture places and identify them with those of waking life in some strange unreal identity, while in every particular they vary from the actual place; and as also in dreams we think we have beheld the same objects over and over again, while we only dream we see them, and go on wandering further and further, seeking for some unknown thing, and finding, not that which we seek, but every other thing in existence, and pass through all manner of narrow doors and impenetrable screens, and men speak to us and we cannot hear them, and show us open graves holding dead corpses whose features we cannot discern, and all the world is dim and dark and full of doubt and dread—even so is the Cavern of Adelsberg.”

Returning to Trieste I passed on to Venice, the beauty of which I learned (rather slowly perhaps), to feel by degrees as I rowed in my gondola from church to church and from gallery to palace. The Austrians were then masters of the city, and it was no doubt German music which I heard for the first time at the church of the Scalzi, very finely performed. It was not seldom in the usual English style of sacred music; (I dare say it was not strictly sacred music at all, perhaps quite a profane opera!) but, in the mood I was in, it seemed to me to have a great sanctity of its own; to be a Week-day Song of Heaven. This was one of the rare occasions in my life in which music has reached the deeper springs in me, and it affected me very much. I suppose as the daffodils did Wordsworth.

Naturally being again in a town and at a good hotel, I resumed better clothes than I had worn in my rough rides, and they were, of course that year, deep mourning with much crape on them. I imagine it must have been this English mourning apparel which provoked among the colour-loving Venetians a strange display of Heteropathy,—that deep-seated animal instinct of hatred and anger against grief and suffering, the exact reverse of sympathy, which causes brutes and birds to gore and peck and slay their diseased and dying companions and brutal men to trample on their weeping, starving wives. I was walking alone rather sadly, bent down over the shells on the beach of the Lido, comparing them in my mind to the old venuses and pectens and beautiful pholases which I used to collect on my father’s long stretch of sandy shore in Ireland,—when suddenly I found myself assailed with a shower of stones. Looking up, I saw a little crowd of women and boys jeering at me and pelting me with whatever they could pick up. Of course they could not really hurt me, but after an effort or two at remonstrance, I was fain to give up my walk and return to my gondola and to Venice. Years afterwards, speaking of this incident to Gibson, he told me he had seen at Venice a much worse scene, for the victim was a poor helpless dog which had somehow got into a position from whence it could not escape, and the miserable, hooting, laughing crowd deliberately stoned it to death. The dog looked from one to another of its persecutors as if appealing for mercy and saying, “What have I done to deserve this?” But there was no mercy in those hard hearts.

Ever since I sat on the spot where St. Stephen was stoned, I have felt that that particular form of death must have been one of the most morally trying and dreadful to the sufferer, and the most utterly destructive of the finer instincts in those who inflicted it. If Jews be, as alleged, more prone to cruelty than other nations, the fact seems to me almost explained by the “set of the brains” of a race accustomed to account it a duty to join in stoning an offender to death and watching pitilessly his agonies when mangled, blinded, deafened and bleeding he lies crushed on the ground.

From Venice I travelled very pleasantly in a returning vettura which I was fortunate enough to engage, by Padua and Ferrara over the Apennines to Florence. One day I walked a long way in front during my vetturino’s dinner-hour, and made friends with some poor peasants who welcomed me to their house and to a share of their meal of Polenta and wine. The Polenta was much inferior to Irish oatmeal stirabout or Scotch porridge; and the black wine was like the coarsest vinegar. I tried in vain, out of good manners to drink it. The lives of these poor contadini are obviously in all ways cruelly hard.

Spending one night in a desolate “ramshackle” inn on the road high up on the Apennines, I sat up late writing a description of the place (as “creepy” as I could make it!) to amuse my mother’s dear old servant “Joney,” who possessed a volume of Washington Irving’s stories wherein that of the “Inn at Terracina” had served constantly to excite delightful awe in her breast and in my own as a child. I took my letter next day with me to post in Florence, but alas! found there waiting for me one from my brother announcing that our dear old servant was dead. She had never held up her head after I had left Newbridge, and had cease to drop into her cottage for tea.

At Florence I remained many months (or rather on the hill of Bellosguardo above the city) and made some of the most precious friendships of my life; Mrs. Somerville’s first of all, I also had the privilege to know at that time both Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Adolphus Trollope, Walter Savage Landor, Isa Blagden, Miss White (now Madame Villari), and many other very interesting men and women. I shall, however, write a separate chapter combining this and my subsequent visits to Italy.

Late in the summer I travelled with a party through Milan over St. Gothard to Lucerne, and thence to the Pays de Vaud, where I joined a very pleasant couple,—Rev. W. and Mrs. Biedermann,—in taking the Château du Grand Clos, in the Valley of the Rhone; a curious miniature French country house, built some years before by the man who called himself Louis XVII., or Duc de Normandie; and who had collected (as we found) a considerable library of books, all relating to the French Revolution.

From Switzerland I travelled back to England viâ the Rhine with my dear American friends, the Apthorps, who had joined me at Montreux. The perils and fatigues of my eleven months of solitary wanderings were over. I was stronger and more active in body than I had ever been, and so enriched in mind and heart by the things I had seen and the people I had known, that I could afford to smile at the depression and loneliness of my departure.

As we approached the Black Forest I had a fancy to quit my kind companions for a few days; and leaving them to explore Strasburg, and some other places, I went on to Heidelberg and thence made my way into the beautiful woods. The following lines were written there, September 23rd, 1858:—

ALONE IN THE SCHWARZWALD.

Lord of the Forest Sanctuary! Thou By the grey fathers of the world in these Thine own self-fashioned shrines dimly adored, “All-Father Odin,” “Mover” of the spheres; Zeus! Brahm! Ormusd! Lord of Light Divine! GOD, blessed God! the Good One! Best of names, By noblest Saxon race found Thee at last,— O Father! when the slow revolving years Bring forth the day when men shall see Thy face Unveiled from superstition’s web of errors old, Shall they not seek Thee here amid the woods, Rather than in the pillared aisle, or dome By loftiest genius reared?

Six months have rolled Since I stood solitary in the fane Of desolate Baalbec. The huge walls closed Round me sublime as when millenniums past Lost nations worshipped there. I sate beside The altar stone o’erthrown. For hours I sate Until the homeward-winging hawk at even Shrieked when he saw me there, a human form Where human feet tread once perchance a year, Then the moon slowly rose above the walls And then I knelt. It was a glorious fane All, all my own.

But not that grand Baalbec, Nor Parthenon, nor Rome’s stupendous pile, Nor lovelier Milan, nor the Sepulchre So dark and solemn where the Christ was laid, Nor even yet that dreadful field of death At Ghizeh where the eternal Pyramids Have, from a world of graves, pointed to Heav’n For fifty ages past,—not all these shrines Are holy to my soul as are the woods. Lo! how God Himself has planned this place So that all sweet and calm and solemn thoughts Should have their nests amid the shadowy trees! How the rude work-day world is all closed out By the thick curtained foliage, and the sky Alone revealed, a deep zenith heaven, Fitly beheld through clasped and upraised arms Of prayer-like trees. There is no sound more loud Than the low insect hum, the chirp of birds, The rustling murmur of embracing boughs, The gentle dropping of the autumn leaves. The wood’s sweet breath is incense. From the pines And larch and chestnut come rich odours pure; All things are pure and sweet and holy here.

I lie down underneath the firs. The moss Makes richest cushion for my weary limbs! Long I gaze upward while the dark green boughs Moveless project against the azure sky, Fringed with their russet cones. My satiate eyes Sink down at length. I turn my cheek to earth. What may this be, this sense of youth restored, My happy childhood with its sunbright hours, Returning once again as in a dream? ’Tis but the odour of the mossy ground, The “field-smells known in infancy,” when yet, Our childish sports were near to mother Earth, Our child-like hearts near to the God in Heaven.

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X. BRISTOL. REFORMATORIES AND RAGGED SCHOOLS.

After I had spent two or three weeks once again at my old home after my long journey to visit my eldest brother and his wife, and also had seen my two other dear brothers, then married and settled in England with their children; the time came for me to begin my independent life as I had long planned it. I had taken my year’s pilgrimage as a sort of conclusion to my self-education, and also because, at the beginning of it, I was in no state of health or spirits to throw myself into new work of any kind. Now I was well and strong, and full of hope of being of some little use in the world. I was at a very good age for making a fresh start; just 36; and I had my little independence of £200 a year which, though small, was enough to allow me to work how and where I pleased without need to earn anything. I may boast that I never got into debt in my life; never borrowed money from anybody; never even asked my brother for the advance of a week on the interest on my patrimony.

It had been somewhat of a difficulty to me after my home duties ended at my father’s death, to decide where, with my heretical opinions, I could find a field for any kind of usefulness to my fellow-creatures, but I fortunately heard through Harriet St. Leger and Lady Byron, that Miss Carpenter, of Bristol, was seeking for some lady to help in her Reformatory and Ragged School work. Miss Bathurst, who had joined her for the purpose, had died the previous year. The arrangement was, that we paid Miss Carpenter a moderate sum (30s.) a week for board and lodging in her house adjoining Red Lodge, and she provided us all day long with abundant occupation. I had by mere chance read her “Juvenile Delinquents,” and had admired the spirit of the book; but my special attraction to Miss Carpenter was the belief that I should find in her at once a very religious woman, and one so completely outside the pale of orthodoxy that I should be sure to meet from her the sympathy I had never yet been privileged to enjoy; and at all events be able to assist her labours with freedom of conscience.

My first interview with Miss Carpenter (in November, 1858) was in the doorway of my bedroom after my arrival at Red Lodge House; a small house in the same street as Red Lodge. She had been absent from home on business, and hastened upstairs to welcome me. It was rather a critical moment, for I had been asking myself anxiously—“What manner of woman shall I behold?” I knew I should see an able and an excellent person; but it is quite possible for able and excellent women to be far from agreeable companions for a tête-à-tête of years; and nothing short of this had I in contemplation. The first glimpse in that doorway set my fears at rest! The plain and careworn face, the figure which, Dr. Martineau says, had been “columnar” in youth, but which at fifty-two was angular and stooping, were yet all alive with feeling and power. Her large, light blue eyes, with their peculiar trick of showing the white beneath the iris, had an extraordinary faculty of taking possession of the person on whom they were fixed, like those of an amiable Ancient Mariner who only wanted to talk philanthropy, and not to tell stories of weird voyages and murdered albatrosses. There was humour, also, in every line of her face, and a readiness to catch the first gleam of a joke. But the prevailing characteristic of Mary Carpenter, as I came subsequently more perfectly to recognise, was a high and strong Resolution, which made her whole path much like that of a plough in a well-drawn furrow, which goes straight on in its own beneficent way, and gently pushes aside into little ridges all intervening people and things.

Long after this first interview, Miss Elliot showed Miss Carpenter’s photograph to the Master of Balliol, without telling him whom it represented. After looking at it carefully, he remarked, “This is the portrait of a person who lives under high moral excitement.” There could not be a truer summary of her habitual state.

Our days were very much alike, and “Sunday shone no Sabbath-day” for us. Our little household consisted of one honest girl (a certain excellent Marianne, who I often see now in her respectable widowhood and who well deserves commemoration) and two little convicted thieves from the Red Lodge. We assembled for prayers very early in the morning; and breakfast, during the winter months, was got over before daylight; Miss Carpenter always remarking brightly as she sat down, “How cheerful!” was the gas. After this there were classes at the different schools, endless arrangements and organisations, the looking-up of little truants from the Ragged Schools, and a good deal of business in the way of writing reports and so on. Altogether, nearly every hour of the day and week was pretty well mapped out, leaving only space for the brief dinner and tea; and at nine or ten o’clock at night, when we met at last, Miss Carpenter was often so exhausted that I have seen her fall asleep with the spoon half-way between her mouth and the cup of gruel which she ate for supper. Her habits were all of the simplest and most self-denying kind. Both by temperament and on principle she was essentially a Stoic. She had no sympathy at all with Asceticism (which is a very different thing, and implies a vivid sense of the attractiveness of luxury), and she strongly condemned fasting, and all such practices on the Zoroastrian principle, that they involve a culpable weakening of powers which are intrusted to us for good use. But she was an ingrained Stoic, to whom all the minor comforts of life are simply indifferent, and who can scarcely even recognise the fact that other people take heed of them. She once, with great simplicity, made to me the grave observation that at a country house where she had just passed two or three days, “the ladies and gentlemen all came down dressed for dinner, and evidently thought the meal rather a pleasant part of the day!” For herself (as I often told her) she had no idea of any Feast except that of the Passover, and always ate with her loins girded and her umbrella at hand, ready to rush off to the Red Lodge, if not to the Red Sea. In vain I remonstrated on the unwholesomeness of the practice, and entreated on my own behalf to be allowed time to swallow my food, and also some food (in the shape of vegetables) to swallow, as well as the perpetual, too easily ordered, salt beef and ham. Next day after an appeal of this kind (made serious on my part by threats of gout), good Miss Carpenter greeted me with a complacent smile on my entry into our little dining-room. “You see I have not forgotten your wish for a dish of vegetables!” There, surely enough, on a cheeseplate, stood six little round radishes! Her special chair was a horsehair one with wooden arms, and on the seat she had placed a small square cushion, as hard as a board, likewise covered with horsehair. I took this up one day, and taunted her with the Sybaritism it betrayed; but she replied, with infinite simplicity, “Yes, indeed! I am sorry to say that since my illness I have been obliged to have recourse to these indulgencies (!). I used to try, like St. Paul, to ‘endure hardness.’”

Her standard of conscientious rigour was even, it would appear, applicable to animals. I never saw a more ludicrous little scene than when she one day found my poor dog Hajjin, a splendid grey Pomeranian, lying on the broad of her very broad back, luxuriating on the rug before a good fire. After gravely inspecting her for some moments, Miss Carpenter turned solemnly away, observing, in a tone of deep moral disapprobation, “Self-indulgent dog!”

Much of our work lay in a certain Ragged School in a filthy lane named St. James’ Back, now happily swept from the face of the earth. The long line of Lewin’s Mead beyond the chapel was bad enough, especially at nine or ten o’clock of a winter’s night, when half the gas lamps were extinguished, and groups of drunken men and miserable women were to be found shouting, screaming and fighting before the dens of drink and infamy of which the street consisted. Miss Carpenter told me that a short time previously some Bow Street constables had been sent down to this place to ferret out a crime which had been committed there, and that they reported there was not in all London such a nest of wickedness as they had explored. The ordinary Bristol policemen were never to be seen at night in Lewin’s Mead, and it was said they were afraid to show themselves in the place. But St. James’ Back was a shade, I think, lower than Lewin’s Mead; at all events it was further from the upper air of decent life; and in these horrid slums that dauntless woman had bought some tumble-down old buildings and turned them into schools—day-schools for girls and night-schools for boys, all the very sweepings of those wretched streets.

It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently before the large school-gallery in this place, teaching, singing, and praying with the wild street boys, in spite of endless interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles into hats on the table behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out “Amen” in the middle of the prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing, like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes, down from the gallery, round the great schoolroom and down the stairs, out into the street. These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour and, what seemed to me more marvellous still, she heeded, apparently, not at all the indescribable abomination of the odours of a tripe-and-trotter shop next door, wherein operations were frequently carried on which, together with the bouquet du peuple of the poor little unkempt scholars, rendered the school of a hot summer’s evening little better than the ill-smelling giro of Dante’s “Inferno.” These trifles, however, scarcely even attracted Mary Carpenter’s attention, fixed as it was on the possibility of “taking hold” (as she used to say) of one little urchin or another, on whom, for the moment her hopes were fixed.

The droll things which daily occurred in these schools, and the wonderful replies received from the scholars to questions testing their information, amused her intensely, and the more unruly were the young scamps, the more, I think, in her secret heart, she liked them, and gloried in taming them. She used to say, “Only to get them to use the school comb is something!” There was the boy who defined Conscience to me as “a thing a gen’elman hasn’t got, who, when a boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn’t give the boy sixpence.” There was the boy who, sharing in my Sunday evening lecture on “Thankfulness,”—wherein I had pointed out the grass and blossoming trees on the Downs as subjects for praise,—was interrogated as to which pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of the year? replied candidly, “Cock-fightin’, ma’am. There’s a pit up by the ‘Black Boy’ as is worth anythink in Brissel!”

The clergy troubled us little. One day an impressive young curate entered and sat silent, sternly critical to note what heresies were being instilled into the minds of his flock. “I am giving a lesson on Palestine,” I said; “I have just been at Jerusalem.” “In what sense?” said the awful young man, darkly discerning some mysticism (of the Swedenborgian kind, perhaps) beneath the simple statement. The boys who were dismissed from the school for obstreperous behaviour were a great difficulty to us, usually employing themselves in shouting and hammering at the door. One winter’s night when it was raining heavily, as I was passing through Lewin’s Mead, I was greeted by a chorus of voices, “Cob-web, Cob-web!” emanating from the depths of a black archway. Standing still under my umbrella, and looking down the cavern, I remarked, “Don’t you think I must be a little tougher than a cobweb to come out such a night as this to teach such little scamps as you?”

“Indeed you is, Mum; that’s true! And stouter too!”

“Well, don’t you think you would be more comfortable in that nice warm schoolroom than in this dark, cold place?”

“Yes, ’m, we would.”

“You’ll have to promise to be tremendously good, I can tell you, if I bring you in again. Will you promise?”

Vows of everlasting order and obedience were tendered; and, to Miss Carpenter’s intense amusement, I came into St. James’ Back, followed by a whole troop of little outlaws reduced to temporary subjection. At all events they never shouted “Cob-web” again. Indeed, at all times the events of the day’s work, if they bordered on the ludicrous (as was often the case), provoked her laughter till the tears ran down her cheeks. One night she sat grieving over a piece of ingratitude on the part of one of her teachers, and told me she had given him some invitation for the purpose of conciliating him and “heaping coals of fire on his head.” “It will take another scuttle, my dear friend,” I remarked; and thereupon her tears stopped, and she burst into a hearty fit of laughter. Next evening she said to me dolorously, “I tried that other scuttle, but it was no go!”

Of course, like every mortal, Mary Carpenter had les défauts de ses qualités. Her absorption in her work always blinded her to the fact that other people might possibly be bored by hearing of it incessantly.

In India, I have been told that a Governor of Madras observed, after her visit, “It is very astonishing; I listened to all Miss Carpenter had to tell me, but when I began to tell her what I knew of this country, she dropped asleep.” Indeed, the poor wearied and over-worked brain, when it had made its effort, generally collapsed, and in two or three minutes, after “holding you with her eye” through a long philanthropic history, Miss Carpenter might be seen to be, to all intents and purposes, asleep.

On one occasion, that most loveable old man, Samuel J. May, of Syracuse, came to pass two or three days at Red Lodge House, and Miss Carpenter was naturally delighted to take him about and show him her schools and explain everything to him. Mr. May listened with great interest for a time, but at last his attention flagged and two or three times he turned to me; “When can we have our talk, which Theodore Parker promised me?” “Oh, by and by,” Miss Carpenter always interposed; till one day, after we had visited St. James’ Back, we arrived all three at the foot of the tremendous stairs, almost like those of the Trinità, which then existed in Bristol, and were called the Christmas Steps. “Now, Mr. May and Miss Cobbe” (said Mary Carpenter, cheerfully), “you can have your talk.” And so we had—till we got to the top, when she resumed the guidance of the conversation. Good jokes were often made of this little weakness, but it had its pathetic side. Never was there a word of real egotism in her eager talk, or the evidence of the slightest wish to magnify her own doings, or to impress her hearers with her immense share in the public benefits she described. It was her deep conviction that to turn one of these poor sinners from the errors of its ways, to reach to the roots of the misery and corruption of the “perishing and dangerous classes,” was the most important work which could possibly be undertaken; and she, very naturally, in consequence made it the most prominent, indeed, almost the sole, subject of discourse. I was once in her company at Aubrey House in London, when there happened to be present half-a-dozen people, each one devoted to some special political, religious or moral agitation. Miss Carpenter remarked in a pause in the conversation; “It is a thousand pities that everybody will not join and give the whole of their minds to the great cause of the age, because, if they would, we should carry it undoubtedly.” “What is the great cause of the age?” we simultaneously exclaimed. “Parliamentary Reform?” said our host, Mr. Peter Taylor; “the Abolition of Slavery?” said Miss Remond, a Negress, Mrs. Taylor’s companion; “Teetotalism?” said another; “Woman’s Suffrage?” said another; “The conversion of the world to Theism?” said I. In the midst of the clamour, Miss Carpenter looked serenely round, “Why! the Industrial Schools Bill of course!” Nobody enjoyed the joke, when we all began to laugh, more than the reformer herself.

It was, above all, in the Red Lodge Reformatory that Mary Carpenter’s work was at its highest. The spiritual interest she took in the poor little girls was, beyond words, admirable. When one of them whom she had hoped was really reformed fell back into thievish or other evil ways, her grief was a real vicarious repentance for the little sinner; a Christ-like sentiment infinitely sacred. Nor was she at all blind to the children’s defects, or easily deceived by the usual sham reformations of such institutions. In one of her letters to me she wrote these wise words (July 9th, 1859):—

“I have pointed out in one of my reports why I have more trouble than others (e.g., especially, Catholics). A system of steady repression and order would make them sooner good scholars; but then I should not have the least confidence in the real change of their characters. Even with my free system in the Lodge, remember how little we knew of Hill’s and Hawkins’ real characters, until they were in the house? (Her own private house). I do not object to nature being kept under curbs of rule and order for a time, until some principles are sufficiently rooted to be appealed to. But then it must have play, or we cannot possibly tell what amount of reformation has taken place. The Catholics have an enormous artificial help in their religion and priests; but I place no confidence in the slavish obedience they produce and the hypocrisy which I have generally found inseparable from Catholic influence. I would far rather have M. A. M’Intyre coolly say, ‘I know it was wrong’” (a barring and bolting out) “and Anne Crooks in the cell for outrageous conduct, acknowledge the same—‘I know it was wrong, but I am not sorry,’ than any hypocritical and heartless acknowledgments.”

Indeed nobody had a keener eye to detect cant of any kind, or a greater hatred of it. She told me one day of her visit to a celebrated institution, said to be supported semi-miraculously by answers to prayer in the specific shape of cheques. Miss Carpenter said that she asked the matron (or some other official) whether it was supported by voluntary subscriptions? “Oh, dear no! madam,” the woman replied; “Do you not know it is entirely supported by Prayer?” “Oh, indeed,” replied Miss Carpenter. “I dare say, however, when friends have once been moved to send you money, they continue to do so regularly?” “Yes, certainly they do.” “And they mostly send it at the beginning of the year?” “Yes, yes, very regularly.” “Ah, well,” said Miss Carpenter, “when people send me money for Red Lodge under those circumstances, I enter them in my Reports as Annual Subscribers!”

When our poor children at last left the Reformatory, Mary Carpenter always watched their subsequent career with deep interest, gloried in receiving intelligence that they were behaving honestly and steadily, or deplored their backslidings in the contrary event. In short, her interest was truly in the children themselves, in their very souls; and not (as such philanthropy too often becomes) an interest in her Institution. Those who know most of such work will best understand how wide is the distinction.

But Mary Carpenter was not only the guardian and teacher of the poor young waifs and strays of Bristol when she had caught them in her charity-traps. She was also their unwearied advocate with one Government after another, and with every public man and magistrate whom she could reasonably or unreasonably attack on their behalf. Never was there such a case of the Widow and the Unjust Judge; till at last most English statesmen came to recognise her wisdom, and to yield readily to her pressure, and she was a “power in the State.” As she wrote to me about her Industrial School, so was it in everything else:—

“The magistrates have been lapsing into their usual apathy; so I have got a piece of artillery to help me in the shape of Mr. M. D. Hill.... They have found by painful experience that I cannot be made to rest while justice is not done to these poor children.” (July 6th, 1859.)

And again, some years later, when I had told her I had sat at dinner beside a gentleman who had opposed many of her good projects:—

“I am very sorry you did not see through Mr. ——, and annihilate him! Of course, I shall never rest in this world till the children have their birthrights in this so-called Christian country; but my next mode of attack I have not decided on yet!” (February 13th, 1867.)

At last my residence under Mary Carpenter’s roof came to a close. My health had broken down two or three times in succession under a régime for which neither habit nor constitution had fitted me, and my kind friend, Dr. Symonds’, peremptory orders necessitated arrangements of meals which Miss Carpenter thought would occasion too much irregularity in her little household, which (it must be remembered) was also a branch of the Reformatory work. I also sadly perceived that I could be of no real comfort or service as an inmate of her house, though I could still help her, and perhaps more effectually, by attending her schools while living alone in the neighbourhood. Her overwrought and nervous temperament could ill bear the strain of a perpetual companionship, or even the idea that any one in her house might expect companionship from her; and if, while I was yet a stranger, she had found some fresh interest in my society, it doubtless ceased when I had been a twelvemonth under her roof, and knew everything which she could tell me about her work and plans. As I often told her (more in earnest than she supposed), I knew she would have been more interested in me had I been either more of a sinner or more of a saint!

And so, a few weeks later, the separation was made in all friendliness, and I went to live alone at Belgrave House, Durdham Down, where I took lodgings, still working pretty regularly at the Red Lodge and Ragged Schools, but gradually engaging more in Workhouse visiting and looking after friendless girls, so that my intercourse with Miss Carpenter became less and less frequent, though always cordial and pleasant.

Years afterwards when I had ceased to reside in the neighbourhood of Bristol, I enjoyed several times the pleasure of receiving visits from Miss Carpenter at my home in London, and hearing her accounts of her Indian travels and other interests. In 1877, I went to Clifton to attend an Anti-vivisection meeting, and also one for Woman Suffrage; and at the latter of these I found myself with great pleasure on the same platform with Mary Carpenter. (She was also an Anti-vivisectionist and always signed our Memorials.) Her biographer and nephew, Professor Estlin Carpenter, while fully stating her recognition of the rightfulness of the demand for votes for women and also doing us the great service of printing Mr. Mill’s most admirable letter to her on the subject (Life, p. 493) seems unaware that she ever publicly advocated the cause of political rights for women. But on this occasion, as I have said, she took her place on the platform of the West of England Branch of the Association, at its meeting in the Victoria Rooms; and, in my hearing, either proposed or seconded one of the resolutions demanding the franchise, adding a few words of cordial approval.

Before I returned to London on this occasion I called on Miss Carpenter, bringing with me a young niece. I found her at Red Lodge; and she insisted on my going with her over all our old haunts, and noting what changes and improvements she had made. I was tenderly touched by her great kindness to my young companion and to myself; and by the added softness and gentleness which years had brought to her. She expressed herself as very happy in every way; and, in truth, she seemed to me like one who had reached the Land of Beulah, and for whom there would be henceforth only peace within and around.

A few weeks later I was told that her servant had gone into her bedroom one morning and found her weeping for her brother, Philip Carpenter, of whose death she had just heard. The next morning the woman entered again at the same hour, but Mary Carpenter was lying quite still, in the posture in which she had lain in sleep. Her “six days’ work” was done. She had “gone home,” and I doubt not “ta’en her wages.” Here is the last letter she wrote to me:—

“Red Lodge House, Bristol, “March 27th, 1877.

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“There are some things of which the most clear and unanswerable reasoning could not convince me! One of these is, that a wise, all powerful and loving Father can create an immortal spirit for eternal misery. Perhaps you are wiser than I and more accessible to arguments (though I doubt this), and I send you the enclosed, which I do not want back. Gógurth’s answer to such people is the best I ever heard—‘If you are child of Devil—good; but I am child of God!’

“I was very glad to get a glimpse of you; I do not trouble you with my doings, knowing that you have enough of your own. You may like to see an abstract of my experience.

“Yours affectionately, “M. C.”

And here is a Poem which she gave me in MS. the day she wrote it. I do not think it has seen the light.

CHRISTMAS DAY PRAYER. Dec. 25th, 1858.

Onward and upward, Heavenly Father, bear me, Onward and upward bear me to my home;— Onward and upward, be Thou ever near me, While my beloved Father beckons me to come.

With Thy Holy Spirit, O do Thou renew me! Cleanse me from all that turneth me from Thee! Guide me and guard me, lead me and subdue me Till I love not aught that centres not in Thee!

Thou hast filled my soul with brightness and with beauty Thou hast made me feel the sweetness of Thy love. Purify my heart, devote me all to duty, Sanctify me wholly for Thy realms above.

Holy, heavenly Parent of this earthborn spirit, Onward and upward bear it to its home, With Thy Firstborn Son eternal joys to inherit, Where my blessed Father beckons me to come.— December 25th, 1858. M. C.

The teaching work in the Red Lodge and the Ragged Schools, which I continued for a long time after leaving Miss Carpenter’s house, was not, I have thought on calm reflection in after years, very well done by me. I have always lacked imagination enough to realize what are the mental limitations of children of the poorer classes; and in my eagerness to interest them and convey my thoughts, I know I often spoke over their heads, with too rapid utterance and using too many words not included in their small vocabularies. I think my lessons amused and even sometimes delighted them; I was always told they loved them; but they enjoyed them rather I fear like fireworks than instruction! In the Red Lodge there were fifty poor little girls from 10 to 15 years of age who constituted our prisoners. They were regularly committed to the Lodge as to jail, and when Miss Carpenter was absent I had to keep the great door key. They used to sit on their benches in rows opposite to me in the beautiful black oak-panelled room of the Lodge, and read their dreary books, and rejoice (I have no doubt) when I broke in with explanations and illustrations. Their poor faces, often scarred by disease, and ill-shaped heads, were then lifted up with cheerful looks to me, and I ploughed away as best I could, trying to get any ideas into their minds; in accordance with Mary Carpenter’s often repeated assurance that anything whatever which could pass from my thoughts to theirs would be a benefit, as supplying other pabulum than their past familiarity with all things evil. When we had got through one school reading book in this way I begged Miss Carpenter to find me another to afford a few fresh themes for observations, but no; she preferred that I should go over the same again. Some of the children had singular histories. There was one little creature named Kitty, towards whom I confess my heart warmed especially, for her leonine disposition! Whenever there was some mischief discovered and the question asked Who was in fault? invariably Kitty’s hand went up: “I did it, ma’am;” and the penalty, even of incarceration in a certain dreaded “cell,” was heroically endured. Kitty had been duly convicted at Sessions at the mature age of ten. Of what high crime and misdemeanour does the reader suppose? Pilfering, perhaps, a pocket handkerchief, or a penny? Not at all! Of nothing less than Horse-stealing! She and her brother, a mite two years younger than herself, were dispatched by their vagabond parents to journey by one road, while they themselves travelled by another, and on the way the children, who were, of course, directed to pick and steal all they could lay hands on, observed an old grey mare feeding in a field near the road and reflecting that a ride on horseback would be preferable to their pilgrimage on foot, they scrambled on the mare’s back and by some means guided her down the road and went off in triumph. The aggrieved farmer to whom the mare belonged, brought the delinquents to justice, and after being tried with all the solemn forms of British law (their heads scarcely visible over the dock), the children were sent respectively to a Boy’s Reformatory, and to Red Lodge. We kept Kitty, of course, till her full term expired when she was 15, and I am afraid Miss Carpenter strained the law a little in detaining her still longer to allow her to gain more discretion before returning to those dreadful tramps, her parents. She herself, indeed, felt the danger as she grew older, and attached herself much to us both. A teacher whom I had imported from Ireland (one of my own village pupils from Donabate) told me that Kitty spoke of us with tears, and that she had seen her one day, when given a stocking of mine whereupon to practise darning, furtively kissing it when she thought no one was observing her. She once said, “God bless Exeter jail! I should never have been here but for that.” But at last, like George Eliot’s Gipsy, the claims of race over-mastered all her other feelings. Kitty left us to rejoin her mother, who had perpetually called to see her; and a month or two later the poor child died of fever, caught in the wretched haunts of her family.

In a visit which I made to Red Lodge two years ago, I was struck by the improved physical aspect of the poor girls in the charge of our successors. The depressed, almost flattened form of head which the experienced eye of Sir Walter Crofton had caught (as I did), as a terrible “Note” of hereditary crime, was no longer visible; nor was the miserable blear-eyed, scrofulous appearance of the faces of many of my old pupils to be seen any more. Thirty years have, I hope and believe, raised even the very lowest stratum of the population of England.

Miss Carpenter’s work in founding the first Reformatory for girl-criminals with the munificent aid of that generous woman Lady Byron, has beyond question, contributed in no mean degree to thinning the ranks of female crime during the last quarter of a century. Issuing from the Red Lodge at the end of their four or five years’ term of confinement and instruction, the girls rarely returned, like poor Kitty, to their parents, but passed first through a probation as Miss Carpenter’s own servants in her private house, under good Marianne and her successors, and then into that humbler sort of domestic service which is best for girls of their class; I mean that wherein the mistress works and takes her meals with the servant. The pride and joy of these girls when they settled into steady usefulness was often a pleasure to witness. Miss Carpenter used to say, “When I hear one of them talk of ‘My Kitchen,’ I know it is all right!” Of course many of them eventually married respectably. On the whole I do not think that more than five, or at the outside ten per cent. fell into either crime or vice after leaving Red Lodge, and if we suppose that there have been something like 500 girls in the Reformatory since Lady Byron bought the Red Lodge and dedicated it to that benevolent use, we may fairly estimate, that Mary Carpenter deflected towards goodness the lives of at least four hundred and fifty women, who, if she had not stirred in their interest, would almost inevitably have spent their days in crime or vice, and ended them either in jail or in the “Black Ward” of the workhouse.

There is an epitaph on a good clergyman in one of the old churches of Bristol which I have always thought remarkably fine. It runs thus as far as I remember:—

“Marble may moulder, monuments decay, Time sweeps memorials from the earth away; But lasting records are to Brydges given, The date Eternity, the archives Heaven; There living tablets with his worth engraved Stand forth for ever in the souls he saved.”

We do not, in our day (unless we happen to belong to the Salvation Army) talk much about “saving souls” in the old Evangelical sense; and I, at least, hold very strongly, and have even preached to the purpose, that every human soul is “Doomed to be Saved,” destined by irrevocable Divine love and mercy to be sooner or later, in this world or far off worlds to come, brought like the Prodigal to the Father’s feet. But there is a very real sense in which a true philanthropist “saves” his fellow-men from moral evil—the sense in which Plutarch uses the word, and which every theology must accept, and in this sense I unhesitatingly affirm, that Mary Carpenter SAVED four hundred human souls.

It must be borne in mind also that it was not only in her own special Reformatory that her work was carried on. By advocating in her books and by her active public pleading the modification of the laws touching juvenile crime, she practically originated—in concert with Recorder Hill—the immense improvement which has taken place in the whole treatment of young criminals who, before her time, were simply sent to jail, and there too often stamped with the hallmark of crime for life.

As regards the other part of Miss Carpenter’s work which she permitted me to share,—the Ragged Schools and Streetboys’ Sunday School in St. James’s Back,—I laboured, of course, under the same disadvantage as in the Red Lodge of never clearly foreseeing how much would be understood of my words or ideas; and what would be most decidedly “caviar to the general.” A ludicrous example of this occurred on one occasion. I always anxiously desired to instil into the minds of the children admiration for brave and noble deeds, and therefore told them stories of heroism whenever my subject afforded an opening for one. Having to give a lesson on France, and some boy asking a question about the Guillotine, I narrated, as vivaciously and dramatically as I knew how, the beautiful tale of the Nuns who chanted the Te Deum on the scaffold, till one voice after another was silenced for ever, and the brave Abbess still continued to sing the grand old hymn of Ambrose, till her turn came for death. I fondly hoped that some of my own feelings in describing the scene were communicated to my audience. But such hopes were dashed when, a day or two later, Miss Carpenter came home from her lesson at the school, and said: “My dear friend, what in the name of heaven can you have been teaching those boys? They were all excited about some lesson you had given them. They said you described cutting off a lot of heads; and it was ‘chop! and a head fell into the basket; and chop! another head in the basket! They said it was such a nice lesson!’ But whose heads were cut off, or why, none of them remembered,—only chop! and a head fell in the basket!”

I consoled myself, however, for this and many another defeat by the belief that if my lessons did not much instruct their wild pates, their hearts were benefitted in some small measure by being brought under my friendly influence. Miss Carpenter always made the schoolmaster of the Day School attend at our Sunday Night-School, fearing some wild outbreak of the 100 and odd boys and hobbledehoys who formed our congregation. The first Sunday, however, on which the school was given into my charge, I told the schoolmaster he might leave me and go home; and I then stopped alone (we had no assistants) with the little herd. My lessons, I am quite sure, were all the more impressive; and though Miss Carpenter was quite alarmed when she heard what I had done, she consented to my following my own system of confidence, and I never had reason to repent the adoption of it.

In my humble judgment (and I know it was also that of one much better able to judge, Lord Shaftesbury) these elastic and irregular Ragged Schools were far better institutions for the class for whom they were designed than the cast-iron Board Schools of our time. They were specially designed to civilize the children: to tame them enough to induce them, for example, to sit reasonably still on a bench for half-an-hour at a time; to wash their hands and faces; to comb their hair; to forbear from shouting, singing, “turning wheels,” throwing marbles, making faces, or similarly disporting themselves, while in school; after which preliminaries they began to acquire the art of learning lessons. It was not exactly Education in the literary sense, but it was a Training, without which as a substructure the “Three R’s” are of little avail,—if we may believe in William of Wykeham’s axiom that “Manners makyth Manne.”

Another, and, as I think, great merit of the Ragged School system was, that decent and self-respecting parents who strove to keep their children from the contamination of the gutter and were willing to pay their penny a week to send them to school, were not obliged, as now, to suffer their boys and girls to associate in the Board Schools with the very lowest and roughest of children fresh from the streets. Nothing has made me more indignant than a report I read some time ago in one of the newspapers of a poor widow who had “seen better days,” being summoned and fined for engaging a non-certified poor governess to teach her little girl, rather than allow the child to attend the Board School and associate with the girls she would meet there. As if all the learning of a person, if he could pour it into a child’s brain, would counterbalance in a young girl’s mind the foul words and ideas familiar to the hapless children of the “perishing and dangerous classes!”

People talk seriously of the physical infection which may be conveyed where many young children are gathered in close contiguity. They would, if they knew more, much more anxiously deprecate the moral contagion which may be introduced into a school by a single girl who has been initiated into the mysteries of a vicious home. On two separate occasions Miss Carpenter and I were startled by what I can only describe as a portentous wave of evil which passed over the entire community of 50 girls in the Red Lodge. In each case it was undeniably traceable to the arrival of new comers who had been sent by mistake of magistrates to our Reformatory when they ought to have gone to a Penitentiary. It was impossible for us to guess how, with all the watchful guardianship of the teachers, these unhappy girls had any opportunity for corrupting their companions, but that they did so (temporarily only, as they were immediately discovered and banished) I saw with my own eyes beyond possibility of mistake.

It came to me as part of my work with Miss Carpenter to visit the homes of all the children who attended our Ragged Schools—either Day Schools or Night Schools; nominally to see whether they belonged to the class which should properly benefit by gratuitous education, but also to find out whether I could do anything to amend their condition. Many were the lessons I learned respecting the “short” but by no means “simple” annals of the poor, when I made those visits all over the slums of Bristol.

The shoemakers were a very numerous and a very miserable class among the parents of our pupils. When anything interfered with trade they were at once thrown into complete idleness and destitution. Over and over again I tried to get the poor fellows, when they sat listless and lamenting, to turn to any other kind of labour in their own line; to endeavour, e.g., to make slippers for me, no matter how roughly, or to mend my boots; promising similar orders from friends. Not one would, or could, do anything but sew upper or under leathers, as the case might be! The men sat all day long when there was work, sewing in their stuffy rooms with their wives busy washing or attending to the children, and the whole place in a muddle; but they would converse eagerly and intelligently with me about politics or about other towns and countries, whereas the poor over-worked women would never join in our talk. When I addressed them they at once called my attention to Jenny’s torn frock and Tom’s want of a new cap. One of these shoemakers, in whom I felt rather special interest, turned to me one day, looked me straight in the face, and said: “I want to ask you a question. Why does a lady like you come and sit and talk to me?” I thought it a true token of confidence, and was glad I could answer honestly that I had come first to see about his children, but now came because I liked him.

Other cases which came to my knowledge in these rounds were dreadfully sad. In one poor room I found a woman who had been confined only a few days, sitting up in bed doing shopwork, her three or four little children all endeavouring to work likewise for the miserable pay. Her husband was out looking vainly for work. She showed me a sheaf of pawntickets for a large quantity of table and house linen and plated goods. Her husband and she had formerly kept a flourishing inn, but the railway had ruined it, and they had been obliged to give it up and come to live in Bristol, and get such work as they could do—at starvation wages. She was a gentle, delicate, fair woman, who had been lady’s maid in a wealthy family known to me by name. I asked her did she not go out and bring the children to the Downs on a Sunday? “Ah! we tried it once or twice,” she said, “but it was too terrible coming back to this room; we never go now.”

Another case of extreme poverty was less tragic. There was a woman with three children whose husband was a soldier in India, to whom she longingly hoped to be eventually sent out by the military authorities. Meanwhile she was in extreme poverty in Bristol, and so was her friend, a fine young Irish woman. Their sole resource was a neighbour who possessed a pair of good sheets, and was willing to lend them to them by day, provided they were restored for her own use every night! This did not appear a very promising source of income, but the two friends contrived to make it one. They took the sheets of a morning to a pawnbroker who allowed them,—I think it was two shillings, upon them. With this they stocked a basket with oranges, apples, gooseberries, pins and needles, match boxes, lace,—anything which could be had for such a price, according to the season. Then one or other of the friends arrayed herself in the solitary bonnet and shawl which they possessed between them, and sallied out for the day to dispose of her wares, while the other remained in their single room to take care of the children. The evening meal was bought and brought home by the outgoing friend with the proceeds of her day’s sales, and then the sheets were redeemed from pawn at the price of a half-penny each day and gratefully restored to the proprietor. This ingenious mode of filling five mouths went on, with a little help, when I came to know of it, in the way of a fresh-filled basket—for a whole winter. I thought it so curious that I described it to dear Harriet St. Leger one day when she was passing through Bristol and spent some hours with me. She was affected almost to tears and pushed into my hand, at the last moment at the Station, all the silver in her purse, to give to the friends. The money amounted to 7s. 6d., and when Harriet was gone I hastened to give it to the poor souls. It proved to be one of the numerous occasions in life in which I have experienced a sort of fatality, as if the chance of doing a bit of good to somebody were offered to us by Providence to take or leave and, if we postpone taking it, the chance is lost. I was tired, and the room inhabited by the poor women was, as it happened, at the other end of Bristol, and I could not indulge myself with a fly, but I reflected that the money now really belonged to them, and I was bound to take it to them without delay. When I reached their room I found I was in the very nick of time. An order had come for the soldier’s wife to present herself at some military office next day with her children, and with a certain “kit” of clothes and utensils for the voyage, and if all were right she would be sent to join her husband’s regiment in India by a vessel to sail immediately. Without the proper outfit she would not have been taken; and of course the poor soul had no kit and was in an agony of anxiety. Harriet’s gift, with some trifling addition, happily supplied all that was wanted.

I did not see so much of drunkenness in Bristol as the prominence given to the subject by many philanthropists led me to expect. Of course I came across terrible cases of it now and then, as for example a little boy of ten at our Ragged School who begged Miss Carpenter to let him go home at mid-day, and on enquiry, it proved that he wanted to release his mother, whom he had locked in, dead-drunk, at nine in the morning. I also had a frightful experience of the case of the drunken wife of a poor man dying of agonizing cancer. The doctor who attended him told me that a little brandy was the only thing to help him, and I brought small quantities to him frequently, till, when I was leaving home for three weeks, I thought it best to give a whole bottle to his wife under injunctions to administer it by proper degrees. Happening to pass by the door of the wretched couple a day later, before I started, I saw a small crowd, and asked what had happened? “Mrs. Whale had been drinking and had fallen down stairs and broken her neck and was dead.” Horror-struck I mounted the almost perpendicular stair and found it was so; the poor hapless husband was still alive, and my empty brandy bottle was on the table.

The other great form of vice however was thrust much more often on my notice—the ghastly ruin of the wretched girls who fell into it and the nameless damnation of the hags and Jews who traded on their souls and bodies. The cruelty of the fate of some of the young women was often piteous. Thankful I am that the law for assaults has been made since those days far more stringent and is oftener put in force. There were stories which came to my personal knowledge which would draw tears from many eyes were I to tell them, but the more cruel the wrong done, the more difficult it generally proved to induce anybody to undertake to receive the victims into their houses on any terms.

A gentleman whom I met in Italy, who knew Bristol well, told me he had watched a poor young sailor’s destruction under the influence of some of the eighteen hundred miserable women then infesting the city. He had just been paid off and had received £73 for a long service at sea. Mr. Empson first saw him in the fangs of two of the wretched creatures, and next, six weeks later, he found him dying in the Infirmary, having spent every shilling of his money in drink and debauchery. He told Mr. Empson that, after the first week, he had never taken any food at all, but lived only on stimulants.

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XI. BRISTOL. THE SICK IN WORKHOUSES.

My new life on Durdham Down, though solitary, was a very happy one. I had two nice rooms in Belgrave House (then the last house on the road opening on the beautiful Downs from the Redland side), wherein a bright, excellent, pretty widow, Mrs. Stone, kept several suites of lodgings. It is not often, alas! that the relations of lodger and landlady are altogether pleasant, but in my case they were eminently so, and resulted in cordial and permanent mutual regard. My little bedroom opened by a French window on a balcony leading to a small garden, and beyond it I had an immense view of Bristol and the surrounding country, over the smoke of which the rising sun often made Turneresque pictures. My sitting room had a front and a corner view of the delightful Downs as far as “Cook’s Folly” and the Nightingale Valley; and often, over the “Sea Wall,” the setting sun went down in great glory. I walked down every week-day into Bristol (of course I needed more than ever to economise, and even the omnibus fare had to be considered), and went about my various avocations in the schools and workhouse till I could do no more, when I made my way home as cheaply as I could contrive, to dinner. I had my dear dog Hajjin, a lovely mouse-coloured Pomeranian, for companion at all times, and on Sundays we generally treated ourselves to a good ramble over the Downs and beyond them, perhaps as far as Kings’-Weston. The whole district is dear to me still.

The return to fresh air and to something like country life was delightful. It had been, I must avow, an immense strain on my resolution to live in Bristol among all the sordid surroundings of Miss Carpenter’s house; and when once in a way in those days I left them and caught a glimpse of the country, the effort to force myself back was a hard one. One soft spring day, I remember, I had gone across the Downs and sat for half an hour under a certain horse-chestnut tree, which was that day in all the exquisite beauty of its young green leaves. I felt this was all I wanted to be happy—merely to live in the beauty and peace of Nature, as of old at Newbridge; and I reflected that, of course, I could do it, at once, by breaking off with Miss Carpenter and giving up my work in hideous Bristol. But, per contra, I had concluded that this work was wanted to be done and that I could do it; and had seriously given myself to it, believing that so I could best do God’s will. Thus there went on in my mind for a little while a very stiff fight, one of those which leave us either stronger or weaker ever after. Now at last, without any effort on my part, the bond which held me to live in Red Lodge House, was loosened, and I was able both to go on with my work in Bristol and also to breathe the fresh air in the morning and to see the sun rise and set, and often to enjoy a healthful run over those beautiful Downs. By degrees, also, I made several friendships in the neighbourhood, some most dear and faithful ones which have lasted ever since; and many people were very kind to me and helped me in various ways in my work. I shall speak of these friends in another chapter.

One of my superstitions has long been that if any particular task seems to us at the first outlook specially against the grain, it will continually happen that in the order of things it comes knocking at our door and practically saying to our consciences: “Are you going to get up and do what is wanted, or sit still and please yourself with something else?” In this guise of disagreeability, workhouse visiting first presented itself to me. Miss Carpenter frequently mentioned the workhouse as a place which ought to be looked after; and which she believed sadly wanted voluntary inspection; but the very name conveyed to me such an impression of dreary hopelessness that I shrank from the thought. When St. Paul coupled Hope with Faith and Charity he might have said “these three are one,” for without the Hope of achieving some good (or at least of stopping some evil) it is hard to gird ourselves to any practical exertion for our fellow-creatures. To lift up the criminal and perishing classes of the community and cut off the root of crime and vice by training children in morality and religion, this was a soul-inspiring idea. But to bring a small modicum of cheer to the aged and miserable paupers, who may be supposed generally to be undergoing the inevitable penalties of idle or drunken lives, was far from equally uplifting! However, my first chance-visit to St. Peter’s in Bristol with Miss Elliot, showed me so much to be done, so many claims to sympathy and pity, and the sore lack of somebody, unconnected officially with the place, to meet them, that I at once felt that here I must put in my oar.

The condition of the English workhouses generally at that period (1859) was very different from what it is now. I visited many of them in the following year or two in London and the provincial towns, and this is what I saw. The sick lay on wretched beds, fit only for able-bodied tramps, and were nursed mostly by old pauper women of the very lowest class. The infirm wards were very frequently placed in the worst possible positions. I remember one (in London) which resounded all day long with din from an iron-foundry just beneath, so that one could not hear oneself speak; and another, of which the windows could not be opened in the hottest weather, because carpets were taken to be beaten in the court below. The treatment of the pauper children was no less deplorable. They were joyless, spiritless little creatures, without “mothering” (as blessed Mrs. Senior said a few years later), without toys, without the chance of learning anything practical for use in after life, even to the lighting of a fire or cooking a potato. Their poor faces were often scarred by disease and half blinded by ophthalmia. The girls wore the hideous workhouse cotton frocks, not half warm enough to keep them healthy in those bare, draughty wards, and heavy hob-nailed shoes which acted like galley-slaves’ bullets on their feet when they were turned to “play” in a high-walled, sunless yard, which was sometimes, as I have seen, six inches deep in coarse gravel. As to the infants, if they happened to have a good motherly matron it was so far well, though even she (mostly busy elsewhere) could do but little to make the crabbed old pauper nurses kind and patient. But how often, we might ask, were the workhouse matrons of those days really kind-hearted and motherly? Of course they were selected by the gentlemen guardians (there were no ladies then on the Boards) for quite other merits; and as Miss Carpenter once remarked to me from the depth of her experience:—

“There never yet was man so clever but the Matron of an Institution could bamboozle him about every department of her business!”

I have sat in the Infants’ ward when an entire Board of about two dozen gentlemen tramped through it, for what they considered to be “inspection”; and anything more helpless and absurd than those masculine “authorities” appeared as they glanced at the little cots (never daring to open one of them) while the awakened babies screamed at them in chorus, it has seldom been my lot to witness.

On one occasion I visited an enormous workhouse in a provincial town where there were nearly 500 sick and infirm patients. The Matron told me she had but lately been appointed to her post. I said, “It is a tremendously heavy charge for you, especially with only these pauper nurses. No doubt you have gone through a course of Hospital training, and know how to direct everything?”

“O, dear. No! Madam!” replied the lady with a toss of her cap-strings; “I never nursed anybody I can assure you, except my ’usband, before I came here. It was misfortune brought me to this!”

How many other Masters and Matrons throughout the country received their appointments with as little fitness for them and simply as favours from influential or easy-going guardians, who may guess?

I had at this time become acquainted with the friend whose comradeship—cemented in the dreary wards of Bristol Workhouse more than 30 years ago—has been ever since one of the great pleasures of my life. All those who know Miss Elliot, daughter of the late Dean of Bristol, will admit that it would be very superfluous, not to say impertinent, to enlarge on the privileges of friendship with her. Miss Elliot was at that time living at the old Deanery close to Bristol Cathedral, and taking part in every good work which was going on in the city and neighbourhood. Among other things she had been teaching regularly for years in Miss Carpenter’s Reformatory, regardless of the prejudice against her unitarianism; and one day she called at Miss Carpenter’s house to ask her what was to be done with Kitty, who had been very naughty. Miss Carpenter asked her to see the lady who had come to work with her; and we met for the first time. Miss Elliot begged me to return her visit, and though nothing was further from my mind at that time than to enter into anything like society, I was tempted by the great attractions of my brilliant young friend and her sister and of the witty and wide-minded Dean, and before long (especially after I went to live alone) I enjoyed much intercourse with the delightful household.

Miss Elliot had been in the habit of visiting a poor old woman named Mrs. Buckley, who had formerly lived close to the Deanery and had been removed to the workhouse; and one day she asked me to accompany her on her errand. This being over, I wandered off to the various wards where other poor women, and also the old and invalid men, spent their dreary days, and soon perceived how large a field was open for usefulness in the place.

The first matter which occupied us was the condition of the sick and infirm paupers; first of the women only; later of both men and women. The good Master and Matron admitted us quite freely to the wards, and we saw and knew everything which was going on. St. Peter’s was an exceptional workhouse in many respects. The house was evidently at one time (about A.D. 1600, like Red Lodge) the mansion of some merchant prince of Bristol, erected in the midst of the city. The outer walls are still splendid specimens of old English wood and stonework; and, within, the Board-room exhibits still a magnificent chimney-piece. The larger part of the building, however, has been pulled about and fashioned into large wards, with oak-beamed rafters on the upper floor, and intricate stairs and passages in all directions. Able-bodied paupers and casuals were lodged elsewhere (at Stapleton Workhouse) and were not admitted here. There were only the sick, the aged, the infirm, the insane and epileptic patients and lying-in women.

Here are some notes of the inmates of this place by Miss Elliot:—

“1. An old woman of nearly 80, and as I thought beyond power of understanding me. Once however when I was saying ‘good-bye’ before an absence of some months, I was attracted by her feeble efforts to catch my attention. She took my hand and gasped out ‘God bless you; you wont find me when you come back. Thank you for coming.’ I said most truly that I had never been any good to her, and how sorry I was I had never spoken to her. ‘Oh, but I see your face; it is always a great pleasure and seems bright. I was praying for you last night. I don’t sleep much of a night. I thank you for coming.’... 2. A woman between fifty and sixty dying of liver disease. She had been early left a widow, had struggled bravely, and reared her son so well that he became foreman at one of the first printing establishments in the city. His master gave us an excellent character of him. The poor mother unhappily had some illness which long confined her in another hospital, and when she left it her son was dead; dead without her care in his last hours. The worn-out and broken-down mother, too weak and hopeless to work any longer, came to her last place of refuge in the workhouse. There, day by day, we found her sitting on the side of her bed, reading and trying to talk cheerfully, but always breaking down utterly when she came to speak of her son. 3. Opposite to her an old woman of ninety lies, too weak to sit up. One day, not thinking her asleep, I went to her bedside. I shall never forget the start of joy, the eager hand, ‘Oh, Mary, Mary, you are come! Is it you at last?’ ‘Ah, poor dear,’ said the women round her, ‘she most always dreams of Mary. ’Tis her daughter, ladies, in London; she has written to her often, but don’t get any answer.’ The poor old woman made profuse apologies for her mistake, and laid her head wearily on the pillow where she had rested and dreamed, literally for years, of Mary.

“4. Further on is a girl of sixteen, paralyzed hopelessly for life. She had been maid-of-all-work in a family of twelve, and under her fearful drudgery had broken down thus early. ‘Oh, ma’am,’ she said with bursts of agony, ‘I did work; I was always willing to work, if God would let me; I did work while I could, but I shall never get well; Never!’ Alas, she may live as long as the poor cripple who died here last summer, after lying forty-six years in the same bed, gazing on the same blank, white wall. 5. The most cheerful woman in the ward is one who can never rise from her bed; but she is a good needlewoman, and is constantly employed in making shrouds. It would seem as if the dismal work gave her an interest in something outside the ward, and she is quite eager when the demand for her manufacture is especially great!

“In the Surgical Ward are some eight or ten patients; all in painful diseases. One is a young girl dying of consumption, complicated with the most awful wounds on her poor limbs. ‘But they don’t hurt so bad,’ she says, ‘as any one would think who looked at them; and it will soon be all over. I was just thinking it was four years to-day since I was brought into the Penitentiary,’ (it was after an attempt to drown herself after a sad life at Aldershot); ‘and now I have been here three years. God has been very good to me, and brought me safe when I didn’t deserve it.’ Over her head stands a print of the Lost Sheep, and she likes to have that parable read to her. Very soon that sweet, fair young face, as innocent as I have ever seen in the world, will bear no more marks of pain. Life’s whole tragedy will have been ended, and she is only just nineteen!”

[A few weeks later, on Easter Sunday morning when the rising sun was shining into the curtainless ward, the few patients who were awake saw this poor girl, who had not been able to raise herself or sit upright for many weeks, suddenly start forward, sitting straight up in bed with her arms lifted and an expression of ecstacy on her face, and something like a cry of joy on her lips. Then she fell back, and all was over. The incident, which was in every way striking and affecting, helped me to recall the conviction (set forth in my Peak in Darien), that the dying do, sometimes, catch a glimpse of blessed friends waiting for them on the threshold.]

“A little way off lies a woman dying in severest sufferings which have lasted long, and may yet last for weeks. Such part of her poor face as may be seen expresses almost angelic patience and submission, and the little she can say is all of gratitude to God and man. On the box beside her bed there stands usually a cup with a few flowers, or even leaves or weeds—something to which, in the midst of that sickening disease, she can look for beauty. When we bring her flowers her pleasure is almost too affecting to witness. She says she remembers when she used to climb the hedge rows to gather them in the ‘beautiful country.’”

Among the few ways open to us of relieving the miseries of these sick wards and of the parallel ones on the other side occupied by male sufferers, were the following:—The introduction of a few easy chairs with cushions for those who could sit by the fire in winter, and whose thinly-clothed frames could not bear the benches. Also bed-rests,—long knitted ones, fastened to the lower posts of the bed and passed behind the patient’s back, so as to form a kind of sitting hammock,—very great comforts where there is only one small bolster or pillow and the patient wants to sit up in bed. Occasionally we gave little packets of good tea; workhouse tea at that time being almost too nauseous to drink. We also brought pictures to hang on the walls. These we bought coloured and cheaply framed or varnished. Their effect upon the old women, especially pictures of children, was startling. One poor soul who had been lying opposite the same blank wall for twenty years, when I laid one of the coloured engravings on her bed preparatory to hanging it before her, actually kissed the face of the little child in the picture, and burst into tears.

Further, we brought a canary in a cage to hang in the window. This seems an odd gift, but it was so successful that I believe the good visitors who came after us have maintained a series of canaries ever since our time. The common interest excited by the bird brought friendliness and cheerfulness among the poor old souls, some of whom had kept up “a coolness” for years while living next to one another on their beds! The sleepless ones gloried in the summer-morning-song of Dicky, and every poor visitor, daughter or granddaughter, was sure to bring a handful of groundsel to the general rejoicing of Dicky’s friends. Of course, we also brought flowers whenever we could contrive it; or a little summer fruit or winter apples.

Lastly, Books, magazines, and simple papers of various kinds; such as Household Words, Chambers’ Magazine, &c. These were eagerly borrowed and exchanged, especially among the men. Nothing could be more dreary than the lives of those who were not actually suffering from any acute malady but were paralysed or otherwise disabled from work. I remember a ship-steward who had been struck with hemiplegia, and had spent the savings of his life time—no less than £800,—in futile efforts at cure. Another was a once-smart groom whom my friend exhorted to patience and thankfulness. “Yes, Ma’am,” he replied promptly, “I will be very thankful,—when I get out!”

As an example of the kind of way in which every sort of wretchedness drains into a workhouse and of what need there is for someone to watch for it there, I may record how we one day perceived at the far end of a very large ward a figure not at all of the normal workhouse stamp,—an unmistakeable gentleman,—sitting on the side of his bed. With some diffidence we offered him the most recent and least childish of our literature. He accepted the papers graciously, and we learnt from the Master that the poor man had been found on the Downs a few days before with his throat cut; happily not irreparably. He had come from Australia to Europe to dispute some considerable property, and had lost both his lawsuit and the friendship of all his English relatives, and was starving, and totally unable to pay his passage back to his wife and children at the Antipodes. We got up a little subscription, and the good Freemasons, finding him to be a Brother, did the rest, and sent him home across the seas, rejoicing, and with his throat mended!

But the cases of the incurable poor weighed heavily on us, and as we studied it more, we came to see how exceedingly piteous is their destiny. We found that it is not an accidental misfortune, but a regular descent down the well-worn channels of Poverty, Disease and Death, for men and women to go to one or other of the 270 hospitals for curable patients which then existed in England (there must be many more now), and after a longer or shorter sojourn, to be pronounced “incurable,” destined perhaps to linger for a year or several years, but to die inevitably from Consumption, Cancer or some other of the dreadful maladies which afflict human nature. What then becomes of them? Their homes, if they had any before going into the hospital, are almost sure to be too crowded to receive them back, or too poor to supply them with both support and nursing for months of helplessness. There is no resource for them but the workhouse, and there they sink down, hopeless and miserable; the hospital comforts of good beds and furniture and carefully prepared food and skilled nurses all lost, and only the hard workhouse bed to lie, and die upon. The burst of agony with which many a poor creature has told me: “I am sent here because I am incurable,” remains one of the saddest of my memories.

Miss Elliot’s keen and practical mind turned over the problem of how this misery could be in some degree alleviated. There was no use in trying to get sufficient Hospitals for Incurables opened to meet the want. There were only two at that time in England, and they received (as they do now) a rather different class from those with whom we are concerned; namely, the deformed and permanently diseased. At the lowest rate of £30 a year it would have needed £900,000 a year to house the 30,000 patients whom we should have wished to take from the workhouses. The only possible plan was to improve their condition in the workhouses; and this we fondly hoped might be done (without burdening the ratepayers) by our plan, which was as follows:—

That the incurables in workhouses should be avowedly distinguished from other paupers, and separate wards be allowed to them. That into those wards private charity be freely admitted and permitted to introduce, with the sanction of the medical officer, such comforts as would alleviate the sufferings of the inmates, e.g., good spring beds, or air beds; easy-chairs, air-cushions, small refreshments such as good tea and lemons and oranges (often an immense boon to the sick); also snuff, cough lozenges, spectacles, flowers in the window, books and papers; and, above all, kindly visitors.

The plan was approved by a great many experienced men and women; and, as it would not have added a shilling anywhere to the rates, we were very hopeful that it might be generally adopted. Several pamphlets which we wrote, “The Workhouse as a Hospital,” “Destitute Incurables,” and the “Sick in Workhouses,” and “Remarks on Incurables,” were widely circulated. The newspapers were very kind, and leaders or letters giving us a helping hand were inserted in nearly all, except the Saturday Review, which refused even one of its own regular contributors’ requests to introduce the subject. I wrote an article called Workhouse Sketches for Macmillan’s Magazine, dealing with the whole subject, and begged that it might be inserted gratuitously. To my delight the editor, Mr. Masson, wrote to me the following kind letter which I have kept among my pleasant souvenirs:—

“23, Henrietta Street, “Covent Garden, “February 18th, 1861.

“Dear Madam,

“As soon as possible in this part of the month, when there is much to do with the forthcoming number, I have read your paper. Having an almost countless number of MSS. in hand, I greatly feared I might, though very reluctantly, be compelled to return it, but the reading of it has so convinced me of the great importance of arousing interest in the subject, and the paper itself is so touching, that I think I ought, with whatever difficulty, to find a place for it....

“In any case accept my best thanks for the opportunity of reading so admirable and powerful an experience; and allow me to express my regret that I had not the pleasure of meeting you at Mrs. Reid’s.

“I am, dear Madam, “Yours very truly, “DAVID MASSON.

“Miss Frances Power Cobbe.

“Should you object to your name appearing in connexion with this paper? It is our usual practice.”

The paper appeared and soon after, to my equal astonishment and delight, came a cheque for £14. It was the first money I had ever earned and when I had cashed the cheque I held the sovereigns in my hand and tossed them with a sense of pride and satisfaction which the gold of the Indies, if gained by inheritance, would not have given me! Naturally I went down straight to St. Peter’s and gave the poor old souls such a tea as had not been known before in the memory of the “oldest inhabitant.”

We also printed, and ourselves directed and posted circulars to the 666 Unions which then existed in England. We received a great many friendly letters in reply, and promises of help from Guardians in carrying out our plan. A certain number of Unions, I think 15, actually adopted it and set it going. We also induced the Social Science people, then very active and influential, to take it up, and papers on it were read at the Congresses in Glasgow and Dublin; the latter by myself. The Hon. Sec. (then the young poetess Isa Craig) wrote to me as follows:

“National Association “For the Promotion of Social Science, “3, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, “28th December, 1860.

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“The case of the poor ‘incurables’ is truly heartrending. I cried over the proof of your paper—a queer proceeding on the part of the Sub-editor of the Social Science Transactions, but I hope an earnest of the sympathy your noble appeal shall meet with wherever our volume goes, setting in action the roused sense of humanity and justice to remedy such bitter wrong and misery.

“Yours sincerely, “ISA CRAIG.”

A weightier testimony was that of the late Master of Balliol. The following letters from him on the subject are, I think, very characteristic and charming:—

“Coll. de Ball., Oxon. “Hawhead, near Selkirk, “Sept. 24th.

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“I am very much obliged to you for sending me the extract from the newspaper which contains the plan for Destitute Incurables. I entirely agree in the object and greatly like the touching and simple manner in which you have described it.

“The only thing that occurs to me in passing is whether the system of outdoor relief to incurables should not also be extended? Many would still require to be received into the house (I do not wish in any degree to take away from the poor the obligation to support their Incurables outdoors, and it is, perhaps, better to trust to the natural human pity of a cottage than to the better attendance, warmth, &c., of a workhouse). But I daresay you are right in sticking to a simple point.

“All the world seems to be divided into Political Economists, Poor Law Commissioners, Guardians, Policemen, and Philanthropists, Enthusiasts, and Christian Socialists. Is there not a large intermediate ground which anyone who can write might occupy, and who could combine a real knowledge of the problems to be solved with the enthusiasm which impels a person to devote their life to solving them?

“The way would be to hide the philanthropy altogether as a weakness of the flesh; and sensible people would then be willing to listen.

“I entirely like the plan and wish it success....

“I am afraid that I am not likely to have an opportunity of making the scheme known. But if you have any other objects in which I can help you I shall think it a great pleasure to do so.

“Remember me most kindly to the Dean and his daughters. I thought they were not going to banish themselves to Cannes. Wherever they are I cannot easily forget them.

“I hope you enjoy Garibaldi’s success. It is one of the very few public events that seem to make life happier.

“Believe me, with sincere respect, “Yours truly, “B. JOWETT.”

“Coll. de Ball., Oxon.

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“I write a line to thank you for the little pamphlet you have sent me which I read and like very much.

“There is no end of good that you may do by writing in that simple and touching style upon social questions.

“But don’t go to war with Political Economy. 1st. Because the P. E.’s are a powerful and dangerous class. 2nd. Because it is impossible for ladies and gentlemen to fill up the interstices of legislation if they run counter to the common motives of self-interest. 3rd. (You won’t agree to this) Because the P. E.’s have really done more for the labouring classes by their advocacy of free trade, &c., than all the Philanthropists put together.

“I wish that it were possible as a matter of taste to get rid of all philanthropic expressions, ‘missions, &c.,’ which are distasteful to the educated. But I suppose they are necessary for the Collection of Money. And no doubt as a matter of taste there is a good deal that might be corrected in the Political Economists.

“The light of the feelings never teaches the best way of dealing with the world en masse and the dry light never finds its way to the heart either of man or beast.

“You see I want all the humanities combined with Political Economy. Perhaps, it may be replied that such a combination is not possible in human nature.

“Excuse my speculations and believe me in haste,

“Yours very truly, “B. JOWETT.”

About the same time that we began to visit the Bristol work house, Miss Louisa Twining bravely undertook a systematic reform of the whole system throughout the country. It was an enormous task, but she had great energy, and a fund of good sense; and with the support of Lord Mount-Temple (then Hon. William Cowper-Temple), Mrs. Tait, and several other excellent and influential persons, she carried out a grand reformation through the length and breadth of the land. Her Workhouse Visiting Society, and the monthly Journal she edited as its organ, brought by degrees good sense and good feeling quietly and unostentatiously to bear on the Boards of Guardians and their officials all over the country, and one abuse after another was disclosed, discussed, condemned, and finally, in most cases abolished. I went up for a short visit to London at one time on purpose to learn all I could from General Twining (as I used to call her), and then returned to Bristol. I have been gratified to read in her charming Recollections published last year (1893), that in her well-qualified judgment Miss Elliot’s work and mine was really the beginning of much that has subsequently been done for the sick and for workhouse girls. She says:

“In 1861[16] began the consideration of ‘Destitute Incurables,’ which was in its results to bring forth such a complete reform in the care of the sick in Workhouses, or at least I am surely justified in considering it one of the good seeds sown, which brought forth fruit in due season. One of the first to press the claims of these helpless ones on the notice of the public, who were, almost universally, utterly ignorant of their existence and their needs, was Frances Power Cobbe, who was then introduced to me; she lived near Bristol, and with her friend Miss Elliot, also of that place, had long visited the workhouse, and become acquainted with the inmates, helping more especially the school children, and befriending the girls after they went to service. This may be said to be one of the first beginnings of all those efforts now so largely developed by more than one society expressly for this object.

“I accompanied Miss Cobbe to the St. Giles’s Schools and to the Strand, West London, and Holborn Unions, and to the Hospital for Incurables at Putney, in aid of her plans.”—Recollections, p. 170.

While our plan for the Incurables was still in progress, I was obliged to spend a winter in Italy for my health, and on my way I went over the Hotel Dieu and the Salpêtrière in Paris, and several hospitals in Italy, to learn how best to treat this class of sufferers. I did not gain much. There were no arrangements that I noticed as better or more humane than our own, and in many cases they seemed to be worse. In particular the proximity of infectious with other cases in the Hotel Dieu was a great evil. I was examining the bed of a poor victim of rheumatism when, on looking a few feet across the floor, I beheld the most awful case of small-pox which could be conceived. Both in Paris, Florence and the great San-Spirito Hospital in Rome, the nurses, who in those days all were Sisters of Charity, seemed to me very heartless; proud of their tidy cupboards full of lint and bandages, but very indifferent to their patients. Walking a little in advance of one of them in Florence, I came into a ward where a poor woman was lying in a bed behind the door, in the last “agony.” A label at the foot of her bed bore the inscription “Olio Santo,” showing that her condition had been observed—yet there was no friendly breast on which the poor creature’s head could rest, no hand to wipe the deathsweats from her face. I called hastily to the Nun for help, but she replied with great coolness, “Ci vuole del cotone!” and seemed astonished when I used my own handkerchief. In San-Spirito the doctor who conducted me, and who was personally known to me, told me he would rather have our English pauper nurses than the Sisters. This, however, may have been a choice grounded on other reasons beside humanity to the patients. At the terrible hospital “degli Incurabili,” in the via de’ Greci, Rome, I saw fearful cases of disease (cancer, &c.), receiving so little comfort in the way of diet that the wretched creatures rose all down the wards, literally screaming to me for money to buy food, coffee, and so on. I asked the Sister, “Had they no lady visitors?” “O yes: there was the Princess So and so, and the Countess So and so, saintly ladies, who came once a week or once a month.” “Then do they not provide the things these poor souls want?” “No, Signora, they don’t do that.” “Then, in Heaven’s name, what do they come to do for them?” It was some moments before I could be made to understand, “Per pettinarle, Signora!”—To comb their hair! The task was so disgusting that the great ladies came on purpose to perform it as a work of merit; for the good of their own souls!

The saddest sight which I ever beheld, however, I think was not in these Italian hospitals but in the Salpêtrière in Paris. As I was going round the wards with a Sister, I noticed on a bed opposite us a very handsome woman lying with her head a little raised and her marble neck somewhat exposed, while her arms lay rigidly on each side out of the bed-clothes. “What is the matter with that patient?” I asked. Before the Nun could tell me that, (except in her head,) she was completely paralyzed, there came in response to me an unearthly, inarticulate cry like that of an animal in agony; and I understood that the hapless creature was trying to call me. I went and stood over her and her eyes burnt into mine with the hungry eagerness of a woman famishing for sympathy and comfort in her awful affliction. She was a living statue; unable even to speak, much less to move hand or foot; yet still young; not over thirty I should think, and likely to live for years on that bed! The horror of her fate and the piteousness of the appeal in her eyes, and her inarticulate moans and cries, completely broke me down. I poured out all I could think of to say to comfort her, of prayer and patience and eternal hope; and at last was releasing her hand which I had been holding, and on which my tears had been falling fast,—when I felt a thrill run down her poor stiffened arm. It was the uttermost efforts she could make, striving with all her might to return my pressure.

In recent years I have heard of “scientific experiments” conducted by the late Dr. Charcot and a coterie of medical men, upon the patients of the Salpêtrière. When I have read of these, I have thought of that paralyzed woman with dread lest she might be yet alive to suffer; and with indignation against the Science which counts cases like these of uttermost human affliction, “interesting” subjects for investigation!

Some years after this time, hearing of the great Asylum designed by Mr. Holloway, I made an effort to bring influence from many quarters to bear on him to induce him to change its destination at that early stage, and make it the much-needed Home for Incurables. Many ladies and gentlemen whose names I hoped would carry weight with him, were kindly willing to write to him on the subject. Among them was the Hon. Mrs. Monsell, then Lady Superior of Clewer. Her letter to me on the subject was so wise that I have preserved it. Mr. Holloway, however, was inexorable. Would to Heaven that some other millionaire, instead of spending tens of thousands on Palaces of Delight and places of public amusement, would take to heart the case of those most wretched of human beings, the Destitute Incurables, who are still sent every year by thousands to die in the workhouses of England and Ireland with scarcely one of the comforts which their miserable condition demands.

“House of Mercy, “Clewer, “Windsor.

“Madam,

“I have read your letter with much interest, and have at once forwarded it to Mrs. Wellesley, asking her to show it to Princess Christian, and also to speak to Mrs. Gladstone.

“I have no doubt that a large sum of money would be better expended on an Incurable than on a Convalescent Hospital. It would be wiser not to congregate so many Convalescents. For Incurables, under good management and liberal Christian teaching, it would not signify how many were gathered together, provided the space were large enough for the work.

“By ‘liberal Christian teaching’ I mean, that, while I presume Mr. Holloway would make it a Church of England Institution, Roman Catholics ought to have the comfort of free access from their own teachers.

“An Incurable Hospital without the religious element fairly represented, and the blessing which Religion brings to each individually, would be a miserable desolation. But there should be the most entire freedom of conscience allowed to each, in what, if that great sum were expended, must become a National Institution.

“I earnestly hope Mr. Holloway will take the subject of the needs of Incurables into consideration. In our own Hospital, at St. Andrew’s, and St. Raphael’s, Torquay, we shrink from turning out our dying cases, and yet it does not do to let them die in the wards with convalescent patients. Few can estimate the misery of the incurable cases; and the expense connected with the nursing is so great, it is not easy for private benevolence to provide Incurable Hospitals on a small scale. Besides, they need room for classification. The truth is, an Incurable Hospital is a far more difficult machine to work than a Convalescent; and so the work, if well done, would be far nobler.

“Believe me, Madam, “Yours faithfully, “H. MONSELL.

“June 23rd, 1874.”

In concluding these observations generally on the Sick in Workhouses I should like to offer to humane visitors one definite result of my own experience. “Do not imagine that what will best cheer the poor souls will be your conversation, however well designed to entertain or instruct them. That which will really brighten their dreary lives is, to be made to talk themselves, and to enjoy the privilege of a good listener. Draw them out about their old homes in ‘the beautiful country,’ as they always call it; or in whatever town sheltered them in childhood. Ask about their fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, everything connected with their early lives, and tell them if possible any late news about the place and people connected therewith by ever so slight a thread. But before all things make THEM talk; and show yourself interested in what they say.”

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XII. BRISTOL. WORKHOUSE GIRLS.

Beside the poor sick and aged people in the Workhouse, the attention of Miss Elliot and myself was much drawn to the girls who were sent out from thence to service on attaining (about) their sixteenth year. On all hands, and notably from Miss Twining and from some excellent Irish philanthropists, we heard the most deplorable reports of the incompetence of the poor children to perform the simplest duties of domestic life, and their consequent dismissal from one place after another till they ended in ruin. It was stated at the time (1862), on good authority, that, on tracing the subsequent history of 80 girls who had been brought up in a single London Workhouse, every one was found to be on the streets! In short these hapless “children of the State,” as my friend Miss Florence Davenport Hill most properly named them, seemed at that time as if they were being trained on purpose to fall into a life of sin; having nothing to keep them out of it,—no friends, no affections, no homes, no training for any kind of useful labour, no habits of self-control or self-guidance.

It was never realized by the men (who, in those days, alone managed our pauper system) that girls cannot be trained en masse to be general servants, nurses, cooks, or anything else. The strict routine, the vast half-furnished wards, the huge utensils and furnaces of a large workhouse, have too little in common with the ways of family life and the furniture of a common kitchen, to furnish any sort of practising ground for household service. The Report of the Royal Commission on Education, issued about that time, concluded that Workhouse Schools leave the pauper taint on the children, but “that District and separate schools give an education to the children contained in them which effectually tends to emancipate them from pauperism.” Accordingly, the vast District schools, containing each the children from many Unions, was then in full blast, and the girls were taught extremely well to read, write and cipher; but were neither taught to cook for any ordinary household, or to scour, or sweep, or nurse, or serve the humblest table. What was far more deplorable, they were not, and could not be, taught to love or trust any human being, since no one loved or cared for them; or to exercise even so much self-control as should help them to forbear from stealing lumps of sugar out of the first bowl left in their way. “But,” we may be told, “they received excellent religious instruction!” Let any one try to realize the idea of God which any child can possibly reach who has never been loved; and he will then perhaps rightly estimate the value of such “religious instruction” in a dreary pauper school. I have never quite seen the force of the argument “If a man love not his neighbour whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?” But the converse is very clear. “If a man hath not been beloved by his neighbour or his parents, how shall he believe in the Love of the invisible God?” Religion is a plant which grows and flourishes in an atmosphere of a certain degree of warmth and softness, but not in the Frozen Zone of lovelessness, wherein is no sweetness, no beauty, no tenderness.

How to prevent the girls who left Bristol workhouse from falling into the same gulf as the unhappy ones in London, occupied very much the thoughts of Miss Elliot and her sister (afterwards Mrs. Montague Blackett) and myself, in 1851 and 1860–61. Our friend, Miss Sarah Stephen (daughter of Sergeant Stephen, niece of Sir James), then residing in Clifton, had for some time been working successfully a Preventive Mission for the poorer class of girls in Bristol; with a good motherly old woman as her agent to look after them. This naturally helped us to an idea which developed itself into the following plan—

Miss Elliot and her sister, as I have said, resided at that time with their father at the old Bristol Deanery, close to the Cathedral in College Green. This house was known to every one in the city, which was a great advantage at starting. A Sunday afternoon School for workhouse girls only, was opened by the two kind and wise sisters; and soon frequented by a happy little class. The first step in each case (which eventually fell chiefly to my share of the business) was to receive notice from the Workhouse of the address of every girl when sent out to her first service, and thereupon to go at once and call on her new mistress, and ask her permission for the little servant’s attendance at the Deanery Class. As Miss Eliott wrote most truly, in speaking of the need of haste in this preliminary visit—

“There are few times in a girl’s life when kindness is more valued by her, or more necessary to her, than when she is taken from the shelter and routine of school life and plunged suddenly and alone into a new struggling world full of temptations and trials. That this is the turning point in the life of many I feel confident, and I think delay in beginning friendly intercourse most dangerous; they, like other human beings, will seek friends of some kind. We found them very ready to take good ones if the chance were offered, and, as it seemed, grateful for such chance. But good friends failing them, they will most assuredly find bad ones.”—(Workhouse Girls. Notes by M. Elliot, p. 7.)

As a rule the mistresses, who were all of the humbler sort and of course persons of good reputation, seemed to welcome my rather intrusive visit and questions, which were, of course, made with every possible courtesy. A little by-play about the insufficient outfit given by the Workhouse, and an offer of small additional adornments for Sundays, was generally well received; and the happy fact of having such an ostensibly and unmistakeably respectable address for the Sunday school, secured many assents which might otherwise have been denied. The mistresses were generally in a state of chronic vexation at their little servants’ stupidity and incompetence; and on this head I could produce great effect by inveighing against the useless Workhouse education. There was often difficulty in getting leave of absence for the girls on Sunday afternoon, but with the patience and good humour of the teachers (who gave their lessons to as many or as few as came to them), there was always something of a class, and the poor girls themselves were most eager to lose no chance of attending.

A little reading of Pilgrim’s Progress and other good books: more explanations and talk; much hymn singing and repeating of hymns learned during the week; and a penny banking account,—such were some of the devices of the kind teachers to reach the hearts of their little pupils. And very effectually they did so, as the 30 letters which they wrote between them to Miss Elliot when she, or they, left Bristol, amply testified. Here is one of these epistles; surely a model of prudence and candour on the occasion of the approaching marriage of the writer! The back-handed compliment to the looks of her betrothed is specially delightful.

“You pointed out one thing in your kind letter, that to be sure that the young man was steady. I have been with him now two years, and I hope I know his failings; and I can say I have never known any one so steady and trustworthy as he is. I might have bettered myself as regards the outside looks; but, dear Madam, I think of the future, and what my home would be then; and perhaps if I married a gay man, I should always be unhappy. But John has a kind heart, and all he thinks of is to make others happy; and I hope I shall never have a cause to regret my choice, and I will try and do my best to do my duty, so that one day you may see me comfortable. Dear Madam, I cannot thank you enough for your kindness to me.”

The whole experiment was marvellously successful. Nearly all the poor children seemed to have been improved in various ways as well as certainly made happier by their Sundays at the Deanery, and not one of them, I believe, turned out ill afterwards or fell into any serious trouble. Many of them married respectably. In short it proved to be a good plan, which we have had no hesitation in recommending ever since. Eventually it was taken up by humane ladies in London, and there it slowly developed into the now imposing society with the long name (commonly abbreviated into M.A.B.Y.S.) the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants. Two or three years ago when I attended and spoke at the annual meeting of this large body, with the Lord Mayor of London in the chair and a Bishop to address us, it seemed very astonishing and delightful to Miss Elliot and me that our small beginnings of thirty years before should have swelled to such an assembly!

My experience of the wrongs and perils of young servant girls, acquired during my work as Whipper-in to the Deanery class, remains a painful memory, and supplies strong arguments in favour of extending some such protection to such girls generally. Some cases of oppression and injustice on the part of mistresses (themselves, no doubt, poor and over-strained, and not unnaturally exasperated by their poor little slave’s incompetence) were very cruel. I heard of one case which had occurred just before we began our work, wherein the girl had been left in charge of a small shop. A man came in out of the street, and seeing only this helpless child of fifteen behind the counter, laid hands on something (worth sixpence as it proved) and walked off with it without payment. When the mistress returned the girl told her what had happened, whereupon she and her husband stormed and scolded; and eventually turned the girl out of the house! This was at nine o’clock at night, in one of the lowest parts of Bristol, and the unhappy girl had not a shilling in her possession. A murder would scarcely have been more wicked.

Sometimes the mistresses sent their servants away without paying them any wages at all, making up their accounts in a style like this: “I owe you five and sixpence; but you broke my teapot, which was worth three shillings; and you burnt a tablecover worth two, and broke two plates and a saucer, and lost a spoon, and I gave you an old pair of boots, worth at least eighteen-pence, so you owe me half-a-crown; and if you don’t go away quietly I’ll call the police and give you in charge!” The mere name of the police would inevitably terrify the poor little drudge into submission to her oppressor. That the law could ever defend and not punish her would be quite outside her comprehension.

The wretched holes under stairs, or in cellars, or garrets, where these girls were made to sleep, were often most unhealthy; and their exposure to cold, with only the thin workhouse cotton frock, leaving arms and neck bare, was cruel in winter. One day I had an example of this, not easily to be forgotten. I had just received notice that a girl of sixteen had been sent from the workhouse (Bristol or Clifton, I forget which) to a place in St. Philip’s, at the far end of Bristol. It was a snowy day but I walked to the place with the same odd conviction over me of which I have spoken, that I was bound to go at once. When I reached the house, I found it was one a little above the usual class for workhouse-girl servants and had an area. The snow was falling fast, and as I knocked I looked down into the area and saw a girl in her cotton dress standing out at a wash-tub;—head, neck and arms all bare, and the snow falling on them with the bitter wind eddying through the area. Presently the door was opened and there stood the girl, in such a condition of bronchitis as I hardly ever saw in my life. When the mistress appeared I told her civilly that I was very sorry, but that the girl was in mortal danger of inflammation of the lungs and must be put to bed immediately. “O, that was entirely out of the question.” “But it must be done,” I said. Eventually after much angry altercation, the woman consented to my fetching a fly, putting the girl into it, driving with her to the Infirmary (for which I had always tickets) and leaving her there in charge of a friendly doctor. Next day when I called to enquire, he told me she could scarcely have lived after another hour of exposure, and that she could recover only by the most stringent and immediate treatment. It was another instance of the verification of my superstition.

Of course we tried to draw attention generally to the need for some supervision of the poor Workhouse girls throughout the country. I wrote and read at a Social Science Congress a paper on “Friendless Girls and How to Help them,” giving a full account of Miss Stephen’s admirable Preventive Mission; and this I had reason to hope, aroused some interest. Several years later Miss Elliot wrote a charming little book with full details about her girls and their letters; “Workhouse Girls; Notes of an attempt to help them,” published by Nisbet. Also we managed to get numerous articles and letters into newspapers touching on Workhouse abuses and needs generally. Miss Elliot having many influential friends was able to do a great deal in the way of getting our ideas put before the public. I used to write my papers after coming home in the evening and often late into the night. Sometimes, when I was very anxious that something should go off by the early morning mail, I got out of the side window of my sitting-room at two or three o’clock and walked the half-mile to the solitary post-office near the Black Boy (Pillar posts were undreamed of in those days), and then climbed in at the window again, to sleep soundly!

Some years afterwards I wrote in Fraser’s Magazine and later again republished in my Studies: Ethical and Social, a somewhat elaborate article on the Philosophy of the Poor Laws as I had come to understand it after my experience at Bristol. This paper was so fortunate as to fall in the way of an Australian philanthropic gentleman, President of a Royal Commission to enquire into the question of Pauper legislation in New South Wales. He, (Mr. Windeyer,) approved of several of my suggestions and recommended them in the Report of his Commission, and eventually procured their embodiment in the laws of the Colony.

The following is one of several letters which I received from him on the subject.

“Chambers, “Sydney, “June 6th, 1874.

“My Dear Madam,

“Though personally unknown to you I take the liberty as a warm admirer of your writings, to which I owe so much both of intellectual entertainment and profoundest spiritual comfort, to send you herewith a copy of a Report upon the Public Charities of New South Wales, brought up by a Royal Commission of which I was the President. I may add that the document was written by me; and that my brother Commissioners did me the honour of adopting it without any alteration. As the views to which I have endeavoured to give expression have been so eloquently advocated by you, I have ventured to hope that my attempt to give practical expression to them in this Colony may not be without interest to you, as the first effort made in this young country to promulgate sounder and more philosophic views as to the training of pauper children.

“In your large heart the feeling Homo sum will, I think, make room for some kindly sympathy with those who, far off, in a small provincial way, try to rouse the attention and direct the energies of men for the benefit of their kind, and if any good comes of this bit of work, I should like you to know how much I have been sustained amidst much of the opposition which all new ideas encounter, by the convictions which you have so materially aided in building up and confirming. If you care to look further into our inquiry I shall be sending a copy of the evidence to the Misses Hill, whose acquaintance I had the great pleasure of making on their visit to this country, and they doubtless would show it to you if caring to see it, but I have not presumed to bore you with anything further than the Report.

“Believe me, your faithful servant, “WILL. C. WINDEYER.”

I have since learned with great pleasure from an official Report sent from Australia to a Congress held during the World’s Fair of 1893 at Chicago, that the arrangement has been found perfectly successful, and has been permanently adopted in the Colony.

While earnestly advocating some such friendly care and guardianship of these Workhouse Girls as I have described, I would nevertheless enter here my serious protest against the excessive lengths to which one Society in particular—devoted to the welfare of the humbler class of girls generally—has gone of late years in the matter of incessant pleasure-parties for them. I do not think that encouragement to (what is to them) dissipation, conduces to their real welfare or happiness. It is always only too easy for all of us to remove the centre of our interest from the Business of life to its Pleasures. The moment this is done, whether in the case of poor persons or rich, Duty becomes a weariness. Success in our proper work is no longer an object of ambition, and the hours necessarily occupied by it are grudged and curtailed. Amusement usurps the foreground, instead of being kept in the background, of thought. This is the kind of moral dislocation which is even now destroying, in the higher ranks, much of the duty-loving character bequeathed to our Anglo-Saxon race by our Puritan fathers. Ladies and gentlemen do not indeed now “live to eat” like the old epicures, but they live to shoot, to hunt, to play tennis or golf; to give and attend parties of one sort or another; and the result, I think, is to a great degree traceable in the prevailing Pessimism. But bad as excessive Pleasure-seeking and Duty-neglecting is for those who are not compelled to earn their bread, it is absolutely fatal to those who must needs do so. The temptations which lie in the way of a young servant who has acquired a distaste for honest work and a passion for pleasure, require no words of mine to set forth in their terrible colours. Even too much and too exciting reading, and endless letter-writing may render wholesome toil obnoxious. A good maid I once possessed simply observed to me (on hearing that a friend’s servant had read twenty volumes in a fortnight and neglected meanwhile to mend her mistress’s clothes), “I never knew anyone who was so fond of books who did not hate her work!” It is surely no kindness to train people to hate the means by which they can honourably support themselves, and which might, in itself, be interesting and pleasant to them. But incessant tea-parties and concerts and excursions are much more calculated to distract and dissipate the minds of girls than even the most exciting story books, and the good folks who would be shocked to supply them with an unintermittent series of novels, do not see the mischief of encouraging the perpetual entertainments now in vogue all over the country. Let us make the girls, first safe; then as happy as we can. But it is an error to imagine that overindulgence in dissipation,—even in the shape of the most respectable tea-parties and excursions,—is the way to make them either safe or happy.

The following is an account which Miss Florence D. Hill has kindly written for me, of the details of her own work on behalf of pauper children which dovetailed with ours for Workhouse girls:—

“March 27th, 1894.

“I well remember the deep interest with which I learnt from your own lips the simple but effective plan by which you and Miss Elliot and her sister befriended the elder girls from Bristol Workhouse, and heard you read your paper, ‘Friendless Girls, and How to Help Them,’ at the meeting of the British Association in Dublin in 1861. Gradually another benevolent scheme was coming into effect, which not only bestows friends but a home and family affections on the forlorn pauper child, taking it in hand from infancy. The reference in your ‘Philosophy of the Poor Laws’ to Mr. Greig’s Report on Boarding-out as pursued for many years at Edinburgh, caused my cousin, Miss Clark, to make the experiment in South Australia, which has developed into a noble system for dealing under natural conditions with all destitute and erring children in the great Colonies of the South Seas. Meanwhile, at home the evidence of success attained by Mrs. Archer in Wiltshire and her disciples elsewhere, and by other independent workers, in placing orphan and deserted children in the care of foster parents, enabled the late Dr. Goodeve, ex-officio Guardian for Clifton, to obtain the adoption of the plan by his Board; his wife becoming President of one of the very first Committees formed to find suitable homes and supervise the children.

After my efforts above detailed on behalf of the little Girl-thieves, the Ragged street boys, the Incurables and other Sick in Workhouses, and finally for Befriending young Servants, there was another undertaking in which both Miss Elliot and I took great interest for some years after we had ceased to live at Bristol. This was the Housing of the poor in large Cities.

Among the many excellent citizens who then and always have done honour to Bristol, there was a Town Councillor, Mr. T. Territ Taylor, a jeweller, carrying on his business in College Green. At a time when a bad fever seemed to have become endemic in the district of St. Jude’s, this gentleman told us that in his opinion it would never be banished till some fresh legislation were obtained for the compulsory destruction of insanitary dwellings, such as abounded in that quarter. We wondered whether it would be possible to interest some influential M.P.’s among our acquaintances in Mr. Taylor’s views, and after many delays and much consultation with them, I wrote an article in Fraser’s Magazine for February, 1866, in which I was able to print a full sketch by Mr. Taylor of his matured project, and to give the reasons which appeared to us to make such legislation as he advocated exceedingly desirable. I said:—

“The supply of lodgings for the indigent classes in the great towns has long failed to equal the demand. Each year the case becomes worse, as population increases, and no tendency arises for capital to be invested in meeting the want....

“But, it is asked, why does not capital come in here, as everywhere else, and supply a want as soon as it exists? The reason is simple. Property in our poor lodgings is very undesirable for large capitalists. It can be made to pay a high interest only on three conditions:—1st, That the labour of collecting the rents (which is always excessive) shall not be deducted from the returns by agents; 2nd, That very little mercy shall be shown to tenants in distress; 3rd, That small expense be incurred in attempting to keep in repair, paint, or otherwise refresh the houses, which, being inhabited by the roughest of the community, require double outlay to preserve in anything better than a squalid and rack-rent condition.

“Convinced long ago of this fact, philanthropists have for years attempted to mitigate the evil by building, in London and other great towns, model lodging-houses for the Working Classes, and after long remaining a doubtful experiment, a success has been achieved in the case of Mr. Peabody’s, Alderman Waterlow’s, and perhaps some others. But as regards the two great objects we are considering,—the elevation of the Indigent, and the prevention of pestilence,—these schemes only point the way to an enterprise too large for any private funds. All the existing model lodging-houses not only fix their rents above the means of the Indigent class, but actually make it a rule not to admit the persons of whom the class chiefly consists—namely, those who get their living upon the streets. Thus, for the elevation of the Indigent and the purifying of those cesspools of wretchedness, wherein cholera and fever have their source, these model lodging-houses are even professedly unavailing.”—Reprinted in Hours of Work and Play, pp. 46, 47.

Mr. Thomas Hare had, shortly before, set forth in the Times a startlingly magnificent scheme whereby a great Board should raise money, partly from the Rates, to build splendid rows of workmen’s lodging-houses, of which the workmen would eventually, in this ingenious plan become freeholders. Mr. Taylor’s plan was much more modest, and involved in fact only one principal point, the grant of compulsory powers to purchase, indispensable where the refusal of one landlord might invalidate, for sanitary purposes, the purification of a district; and the greed of the class would inevitably render the proposed renovation preposterously costly. Mr. Taylor’s Scheme, as drawn up by himself and placed in our hands, was briefly as follows:—

“An Act of Parliament must be obtained to enable Town Councils and Local Boards of Health (or other Boards, as may hereafter be thought best) to purchase, under compulsory powers, the property in overcrowded and pestilential districts within their jurisdiction, and build thereon suitable dwellings for the labouring classes.

“The usual powers must be given to borrow money of the Government at a low rate of interest, on condition of repayment within a specified time, say from 15 to 20 years, as in the case of the County Lunatic Asylums.”

Miss Elliot and I having shown this sketch to our friends, a Bill was drawn up embodying it with some additions; “For the improvement of the Dwellings of the Working Classes,” and was presented to Parliament by Mr. McCullagh Torrens and my cousin John Locke, in 1867. But though both the Governments of Lord Derby and of Lord Russell the latter of whom Miss Elliot had interested personally in the matter were favourable to the Bill, it was not passed till the following Session; when it became law (with considerable modifications); as 31, 32 Vict., Cap. cxxx., “An Act to provide better dwellings for Artisans and Labourers,” 31st July, 1868.

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