Early memories

Front matter

*V

3> c ^

- v

Preface

To begin a book with an apology is never desirable. Where, however, one writes about one's self or ventures to record one's personal recollections, some slight explanation seems almost necessary. Yet for what is contained in these pages I can give no better warrant or excuse than a passage from a very great writer who, it is to be feared, is not so much read now as he ought to be, or as he once was:

"The life of every man/' says our friend Herr Sauerteig, "the life even of the meanest man, it were good to remember, is a Poem; perfect in all manner of Aristotelean requisites; with beginning, middle and end; with perplexities and solutions; with its willstrength (Willenkraft) and warfare against Fate, its elegy and battle-singing, courage marred by crime, everywhere the two tragic elements of Pity and Fear; above all, with supernatural machinery enough, for was not the man born out of Nonentity; did he not die and miraculously vanishing return thither?"

Nothing really is easier than to find words of excellent appearance to explain the compelling motives for writing one's memoirs or reminiscences or autobiography. Whatever we may say, however, whatever ingenious phrases we may employ, the main purpose is to write about one's self, and the efficient reasons may all be summed up in the simple sentence: "I do it because it gives me pleasure." In fact, to the well-regulated mind there is no pleasure equal to that of talking about one's self, and one's satisfaction is not diminished by the inexorable necessity of seeming to talk about other people. My preface is already too long, even by these few words, and I will therefore end it here, trusting blindly for what is to follow in the assertion of Leslie Stephen, that "no autobiography is dull."

Contents

PAGE

Preface v "

CHAPTER

Chapter I Heredity

Every one in giving an account of himself would like, I think, to begin with the words of the Due de Choiseul at the opening of his memoirs: " Je ne vous parlerai pas, Monsieur, de ma naissance. L'on m'a toujours dit que j'etais gentilhomme aussi ancien que qui que ce soit. J'ignore absolument ma genealogie qui est, comme celle de tout le monde, dans les livres qui traitent cette matiere." We may still say, with a gentleman and a scholar who lived many years before the Due de Choiseul: " Honestissimum enim est majorum vestigia sequi, si modo recto itinere prsecesserint," l but it must be admitted that times and manners have greatly changed since the minister of Louis XV wrote, with a fine disdain, in this fashion. The little world where "everybody" could find his genealogy in "the books" has departed. The waves of democracy have submerged the old and narrow lines within which the few sat apart, and definition of a man's birth and ancestry has become more necessary. Moreover, Darwin and Galton have lived and written, Mendel has been discovered and revived, and the modern biologists have supervened, so that a man's origin has become a recognized part of his biographer's task. Therefore, he who writes of himself must follow the practice of those who write the lives of people other than themselves.

My father was John Ellerton Lodge, a merchant of Bos-

ton, an owner of ships engaged in commerce with China. He was the son of Giles Lodge, who was born in London in 1770, the son of Matthew Lodge, a merchant, and Elizabeth Ellerton. The Ellertons were an old family in the north of England, where a priory on the Swale and an abbey on the Derwent commemorate the antiquity of the race and their devotion to the church, both foundations bearing the Ellerton name. The abbey was still in the possession of the family in 1866. At that time a cousin of my father had changed his name to John Lodge Ellerton in order to inherit the property, which, I think, was of slight pecuniary value, and, as he had no children, he asked my mother to let me take the name of Ellerton and remain in England, a proposition wisely declined without previous consultation of the person most concerned, although I should have cheerfully ratified the decision.

According to Burke's "Royal Descents," Matthew Lodge was descended from Francis Lodge, archdeacon of Killaloe at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I find in Dwyer's "History of the Diocese" that the name of the archdeacon was Thomas Lodge, that he was archdeacon from 1624 to 1638, and that he was a graduate of Oxford. There are four of the name in the Oxford lists of about that period, and it was not possible, with such research as I could give, to identify the archdeacon. I should have liked to connect him with Thomas Lodge the poet, but beyond the fact that the arms of my ancestors are identical with those of the poet's father, a rich grocer and Lord Mayor of London in 1563, I could discover no evidence of relationship. My grandfather, Giles Lodge, who, as I have said, was born in London in 1770, was in the West Indies in 1791 on business for his brothers, who were merchants in London and Liverpool. He was caught at Santo Domingo in the rising of the blacks which occurred in

August of that year. Presence of mind and the fact that he spoke French fluently enabled him to escape the massacre and take refuge on an American schooner which brought him to Boston. Coming to Massachusetts by the merest accident, he found a good business opening in Boston, settled there, became a merchant and the correspondent of his brothers, and never returned to England ; in fact, he never left America again. In 1800 he married Mary Langdon, the daughter of John Langdon, who had been a stationer, then a captain in the Continental army during the Revolution, and who finally held a place in the customhouse, to which he was appointed by Washington. John Langdon's cousin, Samuel Langdon, was the president of Harvard College at the time of the Revolution, and prayed for the troops drawn up on Cambridge Common on the evening of June 16, just before they set out for Bunker Hill. The Langdons were descended from John and Philip Langdon, who came to New England in the seventeenth century, sailors and ship-captains, and such their descendants continued to be for a hundred years. John Langdon's wife, the mother of Mrs. Giles Lodge, was Mary Walley, the daughter of Thomas Walley, a prosperous merchant of Boston, grandson on the mother's side of Thomas Brattle, one of a family eminent in Colonial times, and on the father's side grandson of John Walley, lieutenant-general of the Canadian expedition in 1690, and later a judge of the Supreme Court.

My grandfather, Giles Lodge, died in 1852 in the eightythird year of his age. I have been told that he knew me, and was pleased to like me, but of him personally I have, of course, no recollection whatever. His portrait shows that he was fair, and the face which looks out from the picture is handsome, gentle, and refined. The family tradition represents him as a gentleman of somewhat determined character, "whose word was law," and whose laws were promulgated in the most concise form and were subject to no debate. My mother always spoke of him with great affection, and said that he was invariably most kind to her. Apart from his picture, the family tradition, and some business letters, I have nothing which throws any light upon him or his character except his cane and a few books, my father's small portion, I suppose, of the library, which was divided among many children. A cane would not seem to be a very illuminating witness, and yet this particular stick has seemed to me full of meaning. I have never been able to use it; it is not long enough for me — thus showing that its owner was a short man. It is a blackthorn, with a long steel ferrule, and a large irregular piece of ivory fitted tightly down on the top. It is very thick, very formidable as a weapon, very determined in appearance. Altogether, it is a stick with a great deal of sturdy character, like its possessor. It is a cane which might have supported the tottering footsteps of any man, and yet it distinctly suggests, as one grasps it, that its owner never either wavered or tottered in his walk.

The books with my grandfather's name written on the fly-leaves, in his neat, precise hand, tell another story and seem to show another side. Most of them are, as one might expect, eighteenth-century classics: "The Spectator," "The Tatler," "Hume's Essays," and the like. Neat little volumes, good editions, in excellent contemporary binding, they, too, seem characteristic of their possessor. Then there are Pope's translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, also in the "reliure de l'epoque," which is much worn by use rather than by time. But the surprising book is a very pretty and complete edition of Spenser, evidently much read in its day and generation. I have often wondered what the element was in my grandfather's temperament which drew him to the great Elizabethan and made him love and read the "poets' poet," so alien to the taste of the eighteenth century and to the pursuits of a hard-working merchant and man of business.

My father's mother I never even saw. She died before I was born, and, except for the fact that my mother was fond of her, I know nothing about her. There is a hard portrait of her in the possession of the family, painted by Rembrandt Peale. The features are clear and well-cut, but my poor grandmother is so disfigured by the turban she has on that it is difficult to tell whether she was good-looking or not. It was a hideous fashion, that of the turban, so prevalent in those early nineteenth-century days, and when I read of the game of whist in which Mr. Pickwick engaged at Bath I used to wonder, most irreverently, if the Dowager Lady Snuphanuph looked like my grandmother's portrait. Now the wheel of fashion has revolved, and I see indications of the renascence of the turbans of our grandmothers.

My mother was Anna Cabot, the daughter of Henry Cabot and Anna Blake, the daughter of John Welland Blake, descended from William Blake, who was a cousin of Robert Blake, the great admiral of the Commonwealth. William Blake came to Massachusetts in 1630, was for forty years town clerk of Dorchester, and left many descendants. My grandmother Cabot died before I was born, but she was one of the women who make such a deep impression upon those about them that I have always felt as if I had known her. Not only in the family, but from all my grandfather's old friends, I used to hear continually, until the last one who remembered her had passed from the stage, of her beauty and grace, her abiding charm and fascinating qualities. Venerable gentlemen, when I had grown up, used to tell me of her many attractions with such emphasis and insistence that I frequently had an uneasy feeling at the back of my mind that they were thinking how unlike she was to some of her grandchildren. None the less, it was pleasant to hear such things said of her, and her bust by Greenough and her portrait painted by an English artist when she was in Europe in 1837 certainly, so far as they can, bear out the tradition.

My grandfather, Henry Cabot, was the son of George Cabot and Elizabeth Higginson, who were double first cousins. In this way my grandfather was doubly descended from the Reverend Francis Higginson, a graduate of Cambridge, England, and the first minister of the first church of Salem in 1630. My colleague, Senator Hoar, was also a descendant of Francis Higginson, and one day he told me, with great satisfaction, that through Francis Higginson we were both descended from the sister of Chaucer. I received the information with due respect because Mr. Hoar seemed so pleased, but I confess the connection struck me as a trifle remote.

The Cabots came to Salem from the island of Jersey toward the close of the seventeenth centuiy. They were a numerous race in the Channel islands, of pure Norman extraction, as Stowe gives one of that name in his list of those who accompanied William the Conqueror to England. From this Norman island stock came the Chabots and Rohan-Chabots and others of the name in France, as well as the Italian branch, including the navigators, or their immediate ancestors, as is shown by the identity of arms and other evidences. The two brothers who settled in Massachusetts married and had many descendants. My great-grandfather, George Cabot, left college in his sophomore year to go to sea, became a sea-captain and successful merchant, and took a large part in the privateering of the Revolution. He then entered public life, was in the

Provincial Congress, in the State constitutional convention, in the State convention to ratify the Constitution of the United States, and was chosen United States senator in 1791. At the end of five years he resigned and retired from public service, declining the secretaryship of the navy to which he was appointed by John Adams when that department was established. He continued, however, to be the leader of the Hamiltonian Federalists in Massachusetts until his death, and in 1814 was president of the Hartford convention. He was the friend of Washington and a very intimate friend of Hamilton, whose measures he strongly supported when he was in the Senate.

Mr. Samuel E. Morison, who has made a most thorough study of the politics of that period, in his paper upon "The First National Nominating Convention of 1808," describes Mr. Cabot's position at that time in the following words:

"The chief support of the Clinton coalition came from Boston. Otis, whose eloquence, it is said, turned the balance in favor of DeWitt Clinton in the Federalist convention of 1812, was equally strong in favor of George Clinton in 1808. Another powerful advocate of coalition was George Cabot. Cabot since 1804 had occupied in his party a position similar to that of Jefferson in the Republican party after 1808. From Brookline, as from Monticello, the active party leaders received letters that spoke with authority. Easily the intellectual leader of his party since the death of Hamilton, George Cabot in his study at Brookline saw what no other Federalist had the wisdom to see, that a page of democratic evolution had been turned, and the days of Federalist ascendancy had passed never to return."

Soon after my graduation from Harvard I published Mr. Cabot's letters, with an accompanying memoir. I omitted, through ignorance of its existence, the description of him given by William Ellery Channing in his article upon the "Union/' which I ought to have put by the side of Webster's brief eulogy. I now place it here, because it is the best estimate of Mr. Cabot's character and services by a contemporary that I have ever seen. I will give what Mr. Webster said first, and then Channing's more elaborate analysis. In his brief autobiography 1 Mr. Webster wrote: "To my endeavors to maintain a sound currency, I owe the acquaintance and friendship of the late Mr. Cabot, who was kind enough to think me entitled to his regard." In his speech before the New England Society of New York in 1843 he said: "And the mention of the father of my friend, Mr. Goodhue, brings to my mind the memory of his great colleague, the early associate of Hamilton and of Ames, trusted and beloved by Washington, consulted on all occasions connected with the administration of the finances, the establishment of the Treasury Department, the imposition of the first rates of duty, and with everything that belonged to the commercial system of the United States — George Cabot of Massachusetts."

Channing, more elaborate, wrote as follows: "We know not in what manner we can better communicate our views of the Federal party, of its merits and defects, than by referring to that distinguished man, who was so long prominent in its ranks; we mean the late George Cabot. If any man in this region deserved to be called its leader, it was he, and a stronger proof of its political purity cannot be imagined, than is found in the ascendency which this illustrious individual maintained over it. He was the last man to be charged with a criminal ambition. His mind rose far above office. The world had no station which would have tempted him from private life. But in private life, he exerted the sway which is the worthiest prize of a lofty ambition. He was consulted with something of the re-

1 Writings, &c, of Daniel Webster, National Edition, Vol. XVII, p. 26.

spect which was paid to an ancient oracle, and no mind among us contributed so much to the control of public affairs. It is interesting to inquire by what intellectual attributes he gained this influence; and, as his character now belongs to history, perhaps we may render no unacceptable service in delineating its leading features.

"We think, that he was distinguished by nothing so much as by the power of ascending to general principles, and by the reverence and constancy with which he adhered to them. The great truths of history and experience, the immutable laws of human nature, according to which all measures should be framed, shone on his intellectual eye with an unclouded brightness. No impatience of present evils, no eagerness for immediate good, ever tempted him to think, that these might be forsaken with impunity. b To these he referred all questions on which he was called to judge, and accordingly his conversation had a character of comprehensive wisdom, which, joined with his urbanity, secured to him a singular sway over the minds of his hearers. With such a mind, he of course held in contempt the temporary expedients and motley legislation of common-place politicians. He looked with singular aversion on everything factitious, forced, and complicated in policy. We have understood, that by the native strength and simplicity of his mind, he anticipated the lights, which philosophy and experience have recently thrown on the importance of leaving enterprise, industry, and commerce free. He carried into politics the great axiom which the ancient sages carried into morals, 'Follow nature.' In an age of reading, he leaned less than most men on books. A more independent mind our country perhaps has not produced. When we think of his whole character, when with the sagacity of his intellect we combine the integrity of his heart, the dignified grace of his manners, and the charm of his conversation, we hardly know the individual, with the exception of Washington, whom we should have offered more willingly to a foreigner as a specimen of the men whom America can produce.

"Still we think, that his fine qualities were shaded by what to us is a great defect, though to some it may appear a proof of his wisdom. He wanted a just faith in man's capacity of freedom, at least in that degree of it which our institutions suppose. He inclined to dark views of the condition and prospects of his country. He had too much of the wisdom of experience. He wanted what may be called the wisdom of hope. In man's past history he read too much what is to come, and measured our present capacity of political good too much by the unsuccessful experiments of former times. We apprehend, that it is possible to make experience too much our guide; and such was the fault of this distinguished man. There are seasons, in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods, when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when in truth to dare is the highest wisdom. Now, in the distinguished man of whom we speak, there was little or nothing of that enthusiasm, which, we confess, seems to us sometimes the surest light. He lived in the past, when the impulse of the age was towards the future. He was slow to promise himself any great amelioration of human affairs; and whilst singularly successful in discerning the actual good, which results from the great laws of nature and Providence, he gave little hope that this good was to be essentially enlarged. To such a man, the issue of the French Revolution was a confirmation of the saddest lessons of history, and these lessons he applied too faithfully to his own country. His influence in communicating sceptical, disheartening views of human affairs, seems to us to have been so important as to form a part of our history, and it throws much light on what we deem the great political error of the Federalists."

As I conclude this brief outline of my New England ancestry I am struck by the lack of what is usually conspicuous in such pedigrees — the clerical strain. Except for Francis Higginson, eminent indeed among New England divines as the first minister of Salem, and pathetic in his early death, brought on by his devotion to his people and his belief, I find on both sides merchants and sailors, seacaptains and soldiers, men of action and men in business and in public life, but no clergymen. They seem on both sides likewise to have been, as a rule, hardy, active, and successful, taking part in the life of their time, and filling a place in the world, whether large or small, by work and energy.

Chapter II Earliest Memories: 1850-1860

I was born in Boston, as I have been credibly informed, on May 12, one pleasant Sunday morning in the year 1850. The house in which this event occurred belonged to my grandfather, Henry Cabot, for whom I was named. It was a square stone house of smooth granite, large, comfortable, facing south, and open on all sides. Two short streets called, respectively, Otis Place and Winthrop Place, ran out of Summer Street, and, curving to the left and right, met, and thus formed a horseshoe. At the bottom of the horseshoe stood our house, having on one side a small private lane, which was closed by an iron gate. This lane led to our stable and thence turned to the east and meandered in the form of an alley into Franklin Street. It was not much used except by the owners and as an access to our stable, but it offered a short cut to the business quarter of the town, which was not overlooked by those who were familiar with the neighborhood and anxious to save time. One morning somebody encountered Rufus Choate, who lived in Winthrop Place, hurrying down this alley, and expressed surprise at meeting him there. "Yes," said Mr. Choate, "ignominious, but convenient," and passed on.

Back of the house was a garden, an ample garden, which ran out also beside the house to the street. Here stood a weather-worn marble statue of a garden nymph, which, with the assistance of a young friend, Sturgis Bigelow, I pushed over one happy day, and was thereby involved in an

EARLIEST MEMORIES : 1S5O-1S60 15

Iliad of woes, not because of the mischief itself, but because I undertook to lay the responsibility upon my companion, a mean-spirited effort that aroused my father's just anger, which I greatly dreaded, although he never inflicted the slightest physical punishment upon me. The garden was a sunny and sheltered spot, and behind the nymph of bitter memories stood some fine pear-trees, much cherished by my father, and I have still the medals with which their fruit was crowned at various horticultural expositions.

As I recall the old house (it was not really very old, but it was large and solid and spacious, with a fine air of age and permanence) it seems to me that there was an atmosphere about it and its garden, and about the quiet court in front, and the like solid houses surrounding it, which no longer exists in Boston or in any American city. All that quarter of the town indeed was pervaded by the same atmosphere. Hard by was Summer Street, lined with superb horse-chestnut trees, beneath whose heavy shade the sober well-built houses took on in spring and summer an air of cool remoteness. Farther to the east, where Summer and Bedford Streets came together, stood the New South Church, with a broad green in front and trees clustering about it. A little farther still and more to the south of us was Essex Street, which was dignified by great English elms. Two of these elms, a short distance beyond the house where Wendell Phillips lived, lingered on long after trade had taken possession of the whole region. They seemed, in their last days of gaunt survival, like a melancholy protest against the destruction of the old town.

It was long before I reasoned out the underlying meaning of all this, long after our old house and garden had been swept out of existence by the new street which was pushed through into the quiet court to make way for the roaring tides of business, which now ebb and flow over the spot without anything resembling a private house to be seen anywhere in the neighborhood. The fact was that the year 1850 stood on the edge of a new time, but the old time was still visible from it, still indeed prevailed about it. I do not think that it was in itself a very remarkable year, and it has always seemed to me most noteworthy on account of the extreme and disagreeable ease with which one's age could be computed from it, but the year 1850 came nevertheless at a memorable period and had memorable companions. I have often said and written that there was a wider difference between the men who fought at Waterloo and those who fought at Gettysburg or Sedan or Mukden than there was between the followers of Leonidas and the soldiers of Napoleon. This is merely one way of stating that the application of steam and electricity to transportation and communication made a greater change in human environment than had occurred since the earliest period of recorded history. The break between the old and the new came some time in the thirties, and 1850 was well within the new period. Yet at that date this new period was still very new, hardly more than a dozen years old, and the ideas of the earlier time — the habits, the modes of life, although mortally smitten and fast fading — were still felt, still dominant. The men and women of the elder time with the old feelings and habits were, of course, very numerous, and for the most part were quite unconscious that their world was slipping away from them. Hence the atmosphere of our old stone house, with its lane, its pear-trees, and its garden nymph, indeed of Boston itself, was still an eighteenth-century atmosphere, if we accept Sir Walter Besant's statement that the eighteenth century ended in 1837. At all events, it was an atmosphere utterly different from anything to be found to-day.

The year 1850, too, stood well beyond the zenith of the romantic movement, which in outward seeming continued in full control; but which was in reality upon the downward slope, as one can easily see to-day. On the other hand, the unrest, which was apparent in all directions, and the revolt against the reaction of 1815, was just culminating. Two years before, in 1848, the outbreak had come in Europe, and the movement which was to result in the consolidation of the United States and of Germany, in the unification of Italy, the liberation of the slaves, the emancipation of the Russian serfs, and the wide extension of democratic and representative government, was resuming its sweeping and victorious march, which had been checked at Waterloo. It was the day of the human-rights statesmen just rising to power, of the men who believed that in political liberty was to be found the cure for every human ill, and that all the world needed in order to assure human happiness was to give eveiy man a vote and set him free. Thus it happened that the year 1850 came at the dawn of a new time, at the birth of new forces now plainly recognized, but the meaning and scope of which are as yet little understood, and the results of which can only be darkly guessed, because the past has but a dim light to throw upon the untried paths ahead. Yet, none the less, that which was first apparent to the child born in 1850, as he came to consciousness during the next ten years, was the old world which still surrounded him, for a child, happily for himself, sees only what is near to him — his present seems to have existed always and is haunted with no shadow of change.

In 1850 Boston had a population of one hundred and thirty-three thousand, which by 1860 had risen to one hundred and seventy thousand, about one-fourth of the present population of the city proper, if we take the average for the decade. The whole State of Massachusetts had only a million people in 1850, less than one-third of its population to-day, much less even than the population now gathered in Boston and in those suburbs which can be distinguished by no outward sign from the city itself. The tide-waters of the Back Bay still rose and fell to the west of the peninsula, and that large region now filled in and covered with handsome houses had no existence. The best houses of that day were in Summer Street and its neighborhood, then just beginning to yield to the advance of trade, or else were clustered on the slopes of Beacon Hill. Opposite to us in Winthrop Place, for example, were two large stone houses with yards or gardens like our own, one occupied by Joshua Blake, my great-grandfather's brother, the other by Samuel Cabot, and later by George Bancroft, the historian. On one side our neighbors were the Hunnewells and on the other the Bowditches. In Winthrop Place lived Rufus Choate, and close by in Summer Street or its immediate vicinity were the houses of Daniel Webster and Edward Everett, of the Grays, Gardners, Frothinghams, Bigelows, Lees, Jacksons, Higginsons, and Cushings. The list might be indefinitely extended, but I have mentioned names enough to show, especially to Bostonians, the character of that quarter of the town now extinct except for purposes of trade and commerce.