another incident of these boyish years of a very different complexion has made a far deeper impression on my memory. it must have been, to the best of my remembrance, about the same time, probably some six months later in the same year, that it was decided that i was to accompany my father and mother in a “long vacation” ramble which had long been projected. my father’s method of travel on this excursion, which was to include parts of sussex, hampshire, wilts, devon, somerset, and monmouth, was to drive my mother and myself in his gig, accompanied by a servant riding another horse, who was provided with a pair of traces to hook on as tandem whenever the nature of the road required such assistance. i think that this tour afforded me some of the happiest days and hours i have ever known. i can never forget the ecstasy of delight with which i looked forward to it, and the preparations i made—suggested probably, some of them, by the experiences of robinson crusoe. the distance and differentiation between me and other boys of my acquaintance which was caused by my destination{82} to this great adventure i felt to be such as that which may be supposed to exist between livingstone and the stay-at-home mortals who read his books.
we started after breakfast one fine morning, “george,” the footman, turned into groom and courier, riding after the gig. i considered this a disappointingly tame proceeding. i had been up myself considerably before daylight, and considered that, looking to the arduous nature of the journey before us (we were to sleep at dorking that night), we ought at least to have been on the road while the less adventurous part of the world were still asleep.
we had not proceeded many miles before an amari aliquid disclosed itself of a very distressing kind. i was seated on a little box placed on the floor of the gig between the knees of my father and mother, and was “as happy as a prince,” or probably much happier than any contemporaneous prince then in christendom, when my father produced from out of the driving seat beneath him a delphin virgil, and intimated to me that our journey must by no means entail an entire interruption of my education; that our travelling was not at all incompatible with a little study; and that he was ready to hear me construe. it may be readily imagined how much such “study” was likely to profit me. every incident of the road, every waggon, every stage coach we met, every village church seen across the fields, every milestone even, was a matter of intense interest to me. had i been argus-eyed every eye{83} would have been busy. i remember that my mother remonstrated, but in vain. and an hour or two of otherwise intense delight was turned into something which it is scarcely an exaggeration to call torture. i think, however, that my mother must have subsequently renewed her pleadings, for on the second day’s journey the virgil was not brought out. it was reserved for the days when we were stationary, but no longer poisoned our absolute travel.
if i never became a distinguished scholar it was assuredly from no want of urgency in season and out of season on the part of my poor father. but not even virgil himself, backed by an eton latin grammar and a small travelling dictionary, could altogether destroy the manifold delights of that journey. i must not inflict on my reader all or a tithe of my topographical reminiscences: but i will relate one little adventure which went near to saving him not only from this volume but from all that half a century, and more, of subsequent pen-work may have inflicted on him. it was at gloucester. my parents and i had gone to the cathedral about a quarter of an hour before the time for service on a sunday morning. the great bell was being rung—an operation which was at that time performed by seven bell-ringers down in the body of the church. one large rope, descending from an aperture in the vault, was, at some dozen or so of feet from the pavement, divided into seven—one for each of the bell-ringers. now it so happened that on that day one of the men was absent from his post, and one rope{84} hung loose and unoccupied. no sooner had i espied this state of things than i rushed forward and seized the vacant rope, intending to add my efforts to those of the six men at work. but it so happened that at the moment when i thus clutched the rope the men had raised the bell, and of course at the end of their pull allowed the ropes to fly upwards through their hands. but i, knowing nothing of bell-ringing, clung tightly to my rope, and was of course swung up from the pavement with terrific speed. fortunately the height of the vault was so great as to allow the full swing of the bell to complete itself without bringing me into contact with the roof. the men cried out to me to hold on tight. i did so, and descended safely—so unharmed that i was very desirous of repeating the experiment, which, as may be supposed, was not allowed. i can pull a bell more knowingly now.
the charming old church at gloucester was not kept and cared for in those days as it is now—a remark which is applicable, as recent visits have shown me, to nearly all the cathedral churches in england. i may observe also, since one object of these pages is to mark the social changes in english life since my young days, that the improvement in the tone and manner of performing the choral service in our cathedrals is as striking as the increased care for the fabrics. it used for the most part to be a careless, perfunctory, and not very reverent or decorous performance when george the third was king. those were the days when one minor canon could{85} be backed to give another to “pontius pilate” in the creed, and beat him! other times, other manners!
i think that the points in that still well-remembered tour, that most of all delighted me, were, first of all, lynton and lynmouth, on the north coast of devon; then the banks of the wye from chepstow to ross; and thirdly, raglan castle. i had already read the mysteries of udolpho, with more enjoyment probably than any other reading has ever afforded me. it was an ecstasy of delight, tempered only by the impossibility of gratifying my intense longing to start forthwith to see the places and countries described. and when i did in long after years see them! oh, mrs. ratcliffe, how could you tell such tales! what! this the lovely provence of my dreams? but i was fresh from the mysteries, and full of faith when i went to raglan, and strove to apply, at least as a matter of possibility, the incidents of the romance to the localities of the delightful ruin.
nor was raglan in those days cared for with the loving care now bestowed on it by the duke of somerset. i have heard people complain of the restrictions, and of the small entrance fee now demanded for admittance to the ruins, and regret the days when the traveller could, as in my time, wander over every part of it at will. all that was very charming, but the place was not as beautiful as it is now. the necessary expense for the due conservation of the ruins must be very considerable.{86} and when one hears, as i did recently at raglan, that steam and bank-holidays have brought as many as fifteen hundred (!) visitors to the spot in one day, it may be easily imagined what the condition of the place would shortly become if careful restrictions were not enforced. of lovely—ever lovely—tintern, the same remarks may be made. certainly there was a charm in wandering there, as i did when a boy, almost justified by the solitude in feeling myself to be the discoverer of the spot. now there is a fine hotel, with waiters in black-tailed coats, and dinners à la carte! and huge vans pouring in “tourists” by the thousand. between four and five thousand persons, i was told, visited tintern in one august day! scott tells those who would “view fair melrose aright” to “visit it by the pale moonlight.” but i fear me that no such precaution could secure solitude, though it might beauty, at tintern in august. but the care bestowed upon it makes the place more beautiful than ever. the guardians by dint of locked gates prevent the lovely sward from being defiled by sandwich papers and empty bottles, as the neighbouring woods are. but he who would view fair tintern aright, had better not visit it on a bank holiday.
a similarly striking change between the england of sixty years since and the england of to-day may be observed at beautiful lynmouth and lynton. the place was a solitude when my parents and i visited it in, i think, 1818. we had a narrow escape in driving down from lynton to the mouth{87} of the little stream. a low wall of unmortared stones alone protected the road from the edge of a very formidable precipice; and just at the worst point the horse my father was driving took fright at something, and becoming unmanageable, dashed at the low wall, and absolutely got his fore-feet over it! “george,” riding the other horse behind, was at an hundred yards or so distance. but my father, with one bound to the horse’s head, caught him by the bridle, and, by the sheer strength of his remarkably powerful frame, forced him back into the road. it was not a mauvais quart d’heure, but a very mauvais quart de minute—for it was, i take it, all over in that time. now the road is excellent, and traversed daily in the summer season by some half dozen huge vans carrying “tourists” from ilfracombe to lynton.
at the latter place, too, there is a large and extremely prettily situated hotel, where, on the occasion of my first visit, i remember that we obtained a modicum of bread and cheese at a lone cottage. even the valley of rocks is not altogether what it was, for the celebrated “castle rock” has now well contrived paths to the top of it. i wrote a few months ago in the book kept at the hotel, ad hoc that i had climbed the castle rock more than sixty years ago, and had now repeated the feat. but in truth, the “climb” was in those days a different affair. i remember my mother had a story of some old friend of hers having been accompanied by her maid during a ramble through the{88} valley of rocks, and having been told, when she asked the maid what she thought of it, that she considered it was kept very untidy! and truly the criticism might be repeated at the present day not altogether unreasonably, for the whole place is defiled by the traces of feeding.
truly england, whether for better or worse, “non è più come era prima!”
that was my first journey! has any one of the very many others which i have undertaken since equalled it in enjoyment? ah! how sad was the return to harrow and lessons and pupil-room! and how i wished that the old gig, with me on the little box between my parents’ knees, could have been bound on an expedition round the world!
a leading feature, perhaps i should say the leading feature, of the social life of harrow in those days consisted in a certain antagonism between the vicar, the rev. mr. cunningham, and the clerical element of the school world, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, the drury element. mr. cunningham was in those days rather a man of mark among the low church party. he was an ally of the venns, of daniel wilson, and that school, and was well known in his day as “velvet-cushion cunningham,” from a little book with that title which he had published. he was of course an “evangelical” of the evangelicals; and among the seven masters of the school there was not the slightest—i must not say taint, but—savour of any{89}thing of the kind. dr. butler probably would have found no difficulty in living in perfect harmony with the vicar; but the latter—he and his ways and his doctrines—were especially abhorrent to the drurys. of course they were not high churchmen in the sense which the term has acquired in these latter days, for nothing of the kind was then known. they were of the old-fashioned sort, which had come to be somewhat depreciatingly spoken of as “high and dry”!—though in truth it is difficult to see with what justice the latter epithet could be applied to many of them.
harry drury, who was perhaps foremost in his feeling of antagonism to the vicar, was a man of decidedly literary tastes, though they shared his devotion with those of a bon vivant. he was a ripe scholar, and undoubtedly the vicar’s superior in talent and intellect. but he was essentially a coarse man, coarse in manner and coarse in feeling. cunningham was the reverse of all this. he was, i believe, the son of a london hatter, but in external manner and appearance he was a more gentlemanlike man than any of the harrow masters of that day, save dr. butler. he had the advantage, too, of a handsome person and good presence. but there was a something too suave and too soft, carrying with it a certain suspicion of insincerity which prevented him from presenting a genuine specimen of the real article. i believe his father purchased the living for him under circumstances which were not altogether free from suspicion of simony. i know{90} nothing, however, of these circumstances, and my impressions on the subject are doubtless derived from the flouts and skits of his avowed enemies the drurys. there was, i remember, a story of his having, soon after coming to harrow, in conversation with some of his new parishioners, attributed with much self-complacency his presentation to the living to his having upon some occasion preached before lord northwick!—a result which no harrow inhabitant, clerk or layman, would have believed in the case of his lordship, then often a resident on his property there, if the preacher had been st. paul. but again, audi alteram partem! which i had no chance of doing, for we, though living on terms of neighbourly intercourse with the vicar, were of the drury faction.
i remember well an incident which may serve to illustrate the condition of “tension” which prevailed during those years in the little harrow world. mark drury had two remarkably pretty daughters. they were in all respects as thoroughly good and charming girls as they were pretty, and were universal favourites in the society. now mark drury’s pew in the parish church, where of course he never appeared himself, for the reason assigned on a former page, was situated immediately below the pulpit. and on one occasion the vicar saw, or thought he saw, the two young ladies in question laughing during his sermon, and so far forgot himself, and was sufficiently ill-judged, indiscreet, wrong-headed, and wrong-hearted to stop in his{91} discourse, and, leaning over the pulpit cushion to say aloud that he would resume it when his hearers could listen to it with decency! the amount of ill-feeling and heart-burning which the incident gave rise to may be imagined. harry drury, the cousin of the young ladies, and, as i have said, cunningham’s principal antagonist, never for a long time afterwards came within speaking distance of the vicar without growling “brawler!” in a perfectly audible voice.
i well remember, though i suppose it must be mainly from subsequent hearing of it, the storm that was raised in the tea-cup of the harrow world by the incident of byron’s natural daughter, allegra, having been sent home to be buried in harrow church. a solemn meeting was held in the vestry, at which the vicar, all the masters (except poor old mark), and sundry of the leading parishioners were present, and at which it was decided that no stone should be placed to commemorate the poor infant’s name or mark the spot where her remains rested, the principal reason assigned being that such a memorial might be injurious to the morals of the harrow schoolboys! amid all this cunningham’s innate and invincible flunkeyism asserted itself, to the immense amusement of the non-evangelical part of the society of the place, by his attempts to send a message to lord byron through harry drury, byron’s old tutor and continued friend, to the effect that he, cunningham, had, on reading cain, which was then scandalising the world, “felt a profound{92} admiration for the genius of the author”! “did you indeed,” said harry drury; “i think it the most blasphemous publication that ever came from the pen.”
the whole circumstances, object, and upshot of this singular vestry meeting were too tempting a subject to escape my mother’s satirical vein. she described the whole affair in some five hundred verses, now before me, in which the curiously contrasted characteristics of the debaters at the meeting were very cleverly hit off. this was afterwards shown to harry drury, who, though he himself was not altogether spared, was so delighted with it, that he rewarded it by the present of a very remarkable autograph of lord byron, now in my possession. it consists of a quarto page, on which is copied the little poem, “weep, daughters of a royal line,” beginning with a stanza which was suppressed in the publication. and all round the edges of the ms. is an inscription stating that the verses were “copied for my friend, the rev. harry drury.”
of course all this did not tend much to harmonise the conflicting partisans of high and low church in the harrow world of that day.
i may add here another “reminiscence” of those days, which is not without significance as an illustration of manners.
among the neighbours at harrow was a mr. —— (well, i won’t print the name, though all the parties in question must long since, i suppose, have joined the majority) who had a family of daughters, the{93} second of whom was exceedingly pretty. one day this girl of some eighteen years or so, came to my mother, who was always a special friend of all the young girls, with a long eulogistic defence of the vicar. she was describing at much length the delight of the assurances of grace which he had given her, when my mother suddenly looking her straight in the eyes, said, “did he kiss you, carrie?”
“yes, mrs. trollope. he did give me the kiss of peace. i am sure there was no harm in that!”
“none at all, carrie! for i am sure you meant none!” returned my mother. “honi soit qui mal y pense! but remember, carrie, that the kiss of peace is apt to change its quality if repeated!”
