Chapter XVII · MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES. SOCIAL.

443When we had settled down, as we did rapidly, into our pretty little house in South Kensington, we began soon to enjoy many social pleasures of a quiet kind. Into Society (with a big S!), we had no pretensions to enter, but we had many friends, very genuine and delightful ones, ere long; and a great many interesting acquaintances. Happily death has spared not a few of these until now, and, of course, of them I shall not write here; but of some of those who have “gone over to the majority” I shall venture to record my recollections, interspersed in some cases with their letters. I may premise that we were much given to dining out, but not to attending late evening parties; and that in our small way we gave little dinners now and then, and occasionally afternoon and evening parties,—the former held sometimes in summer under the lime trees behind our house. I attribute my long retention of good health to my persistence in going to bed before eleven o’clock, and never accepting late invitations.

I hope I shall be acquitted of the presumption of pretending to offer in the scrappy souvenirs I shall now put together any important contribution to the memoirs of the future. At best, a woman’s knowledge of the eminent men whom she only meets at dinner parties, and perhaps in occasional quiet afternoon visits, is not to be compared to that of their associates in their clubs, in Parliament and in all the work of the world. Nevertheless as all of us, human beings, resemble diamonds in having several distinct facets to our characters, and as we always turn one of these to one 444person and another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem. The relation too, which a good and kindly man (and such I am happy to say were most of my acquaintances) bears to a woman who is neither his mother, sister, daughter, wife or potential wife, but merely a reasonably intelligent listener and companion of restful hours, is so different from that which he holds to his masculine fellow-workers,—rivals, allies or enemies as they may be,—that it can rarely happen but that she sees him in quite a different light from theirs. Englishmen are not eaten up with Invidia, like Italians and Frenchmen, such as made D’ Azeglio say to me that it was a positive danger to a statesman to win a battle, or gain a diplomatic triumph, so much envy did it excite among his own party. In our country, men, and still more emphatically, women, glory enthusiastically in the successes of their friends, if not of others. But the masculine mind, so far as I have got to the bottom of it, (as George Eliot says, “it is always so superior—what there is of it!”), is not so quick in gathering impressions of character as ours of the softer (and therefore, I suppose, more waxlike) sex; and when fifty men have said their say on a great man I should always wish to hear also what the women who knew him socially had to add to their testimony. In short, dear Fanny Kemble’s “Old Woman’s Gossip” seems to me admissible on the subject of the character and “little ways” of everybody worthy of record.

It was certainly an advantage to us in London to be, as we were, without any kind of ulterior aim or object in meeting our friends and acquaintances, beyond the pleasure of the hour. We never had anything in view in the way of social ambition; not even daughters to bring out! It was not “de l’Art pour l’Art,” but la Société pour la Société, and nothing beyond the amusement of the particular day and 445the interest of the acquaintanceships we had the good fortune to make. We had no rank or dignity of any kind to keep up. I think hardly any of our friends and habitués even knew who we were, from Burke’s point of view! I was really pleased once, after I had been living for years in London, to find at a large dinner-party, where at least half the company were my acquaintances, that not one present suspected that I had any connection with Ireland at all. Our host (a very prominent M.P. at the time) having by chance elicited from me some information on Irish affairs, asked me, “What do you know about Ireland?” “Simply that the first 36 years of my life were spent there,” was my reply; which drew forth a general expression of surprise. The few who had troubled themselves to think who I was, had taken it for granted that I belonged to a family of the same name, minus the final letter, in Oxfordshire. In a country neighbourhood the one prominent fact about me, known and repeated to everyone, would have been that I was the daughter of Charles Cobbe of Newbridge. I was proud to be accepted and, I hope, liked, on the strength of my own talk and books, not on that of my father’s acres.

We did not (of course) live in London all the year round, but came every summer to Wales to enable my friend to look after her estate; and I went every two or three years to Ireland, and more frequently to the houses of my two brothers in England,—Maulden Rectory, in Bedfordshire, and Easton Lyss, near Petersfield,—where they respectively lived, and where both they and their wives were always ready to welcome me affectionately. I also paid occasional visits at two or three country houses, notably Broadlands and Aston Clinton, where I was most kindly invited by the beloved owners; and twice or three times we let our house for a term, and went to live on one occasion in Cheyne Walk, and 446another time at Byfleet. We always fell back, however, on our dear little house in Hereford Square, till we let it finally to our old friend Mrs. Kemble, and left London for good in the spring of 1884.

I think the first real acquaintances we made in London (whether through Mrs. Somerville or otherwise I cannot recall) were Sir Charles and Lady Lyell, and their brother and sister, Col. and Mrs. Lyell. The house, No. 73, Harley Street—in after years noticeable by its bright blue door, (so painted to catch Sir Charles’ fading eyesight on his return from his daily walks), became very dear to us, and I confess to a pang when it was taken by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone after the death of our dear old friends. Like Lord Shaftesbury’s house in Grosvenor Square, pulled down after his death and replaced by a brand new mansion in the latest Londonesque architecture, there was a “bad-dreaminess” about both transformation scenes. The Lyells regularly attended Mr. Martineau’s chapel in Little Portland Street, as we did; and ere long it became a habit for us to adjourn after the service to Harley Street and spend some of the afternoon with our friends, discussing the large supply of mental food which our pastor never failed to lay before us. Those were never-to-be-forgotten Sundays.

Sir Charles Lyell realised to my mind the Man of Science as he was of old; devout, and yet entirely free-thinking in the true sense; filled with admiring, almost adoring love for Nature, and also (all the more for that enthusiasm), simple and fresh-hearted as a child. When a good story had tickled him he would come and tell it to us with infinite relish. I recollect especially his delight in an American boy (I think somehow connected with our friend Mr. Herman Merivale), who, being directed to say his prayers night and morning, replied that he had no objection to do so at night, but thought that “a boy who is worth anything can take care of 447himself by day.”^[21] Another time we had been discussing Evolution, and some of us had betrayed the impression that the doctrine, (which he had then recently adopted), involved always the survival of the best, as well as of the “fittest.” Sir Charles left the room and went downstairs, but suddenly rushed back into the drawing-room, and said to me all in a breath, standing on the rug: “I’ll explain it to you in one minute! Suppose you had been living in Spain three hundred years ago, and had had a sister who was a perfectly common-place person, and believed everything she was told. Well! your sister would have been happily married and had a numerous progeny, and that would have been the survival of the fittest; but you would have been burnt at an auto-da-fè, and there would have been an end of you. You would have been unsuited to your environment. There! that’s Evolution! Good-bye!” On went his hat, and we heard the hall door close after him before we had done laughing.

Sir Charles’ interest in his own particular science was eager as that of a boy. One day I had a long conversation with him at his brother, Colonel Lyell’s hospitable house, on the subject of the Glacial period. He told me that he was employing regular calculators at Greenwich to make out the results of the ice-cap and how it would affect land and sea; whether it would cause double tides, &c. He said he had pointed out (what no one else had noticed) that the water to form this ice-cap did not come from another planet, but must have been deducted from the rest of the water on 448the globe. Another day I met him at a very imposing private concert in Regent’s Park. The following is my description of our conversation in a letter to my friend, Miss Elliot:—

“Sir Charles sat beside me yesterday at a great musical party at the D.’s, and I asked him, ‘Did he like music?’ He said, ‘Yes! for it allowed him to go on thinking his own thoughts.’ And so he evidently did, while they were singing Mendelssohn and Handel! At every interval he turned to me. ‘Agassiz has made a discovery. I can’t sleep for thinking of it. He finds traces of the Glaciers in tropical America.’ (Here intervened a sacred song.) ‘Well, as I was saying, you know 230,000 years ago the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at one of its maximum periods; and we were 11,000,000 miles further from the sun in winter, and the cold of those winters must have been intense; because heat varies, not according to direct ratio, but the squares of the distances.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘but then the summers were as much hotter?’ (Sacred song.) ‘No, the summers wern’t! They could not have conquered the cold.’ ‘Then you think that the astronomical 230,000 years corresponded with the glacial period? Is that time enough for all the strata since?’ (Handel.) ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we must go back to the still greater period of the eccentricity of the orbit three million years ago. Then we were 14 millions of miles out of the circular path.’ (Mendelssohn.) ‘Good-bye, dear Sir Charles—I must be off.’

“Another day last week, he came and sat with me for two hours. I would not light candles, and we got very deep into talk. I was greatly comforted and instructed by all he said. I asked him how the modern attacks on the argument from Design in Nature, and Darwin’s views, touched him religiously? He replied, ‘Not at all.’ He thought the proofs in Nature of the Divine Goodness quite triumphant; and that he watched with secret pleasure even sceptical men of science whenever they forget their 449theories, instinctively using phrases, all implying designing wisdom.”

I remember on another occasion Sir Charles telling me with much glee of two eminent Agnostic friends of ours who had been discussing some question for a long time, when one said to the other, “You are getting very teleological!” To which the friend responded, “I can’t help it!”

At another of his much prized visits to me (April 19th, 1866) he spoke earnestly of the future life, and made this memorable remark of which I took a note: “The further I advance in science, the less the mere physical difficulties in believing in immortality disturb me. I have learned to think nothing too amazing to be within the order of Nature.”

The great inequalities in the conditions of men and the sufferings of many seemed to be his strongest reasons for believing in another life. He added: “Aristotle says that every creature has its instincts given by its Creator, and each instinct leads to its good. Now the belief in immortality is an instinct tending to good.”

After the death of his beloved wife—the truest “helpmeet” ever man possessed—he became even more absorbed in the problem of a future existence, and very frequently came and talked with me on the subject. The last time I had a real conversation with him was not long before his death, when we met one sweet autumn day by chance in Regent’s Park, not far from the Zoological Gardens. We sat down under a tree and had a long discussion of the validity of religious faith. I think his argument culminated in this position:—

“The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though liable to err, are true in the main, and point to real objects. The religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger; and is, to-day, more developed among the 450highest races than ever it was before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great truth.”

Here is another glimpse of him from a letter:—

“After service I went to Harley Street, Sir Charles, I thought, looking better than for a long time. He thinks the caves of Aurignac can never be used as evidence; the witnesses were all tampered with from the first. He saw a skeleton found at Mentone 15 feet deep, which he thinks of the same age as the Gibraltar caves. The legs were distinctly platycnemic, and there was also a curious process on the front of the shoulder—like the breast of a chicken. The skull was full-sized and good. I asked him how he accounted for the fact that with the best will in the world we could not find the least difference between the most ancient skulls and our own? He said the theory had been suggested that all the first growth went to brain, so that very early men acquired large brains, as was necessary. This is not very Darwinian, is it?”

It is the destiny of all books of Science to be soon superseded and superannuated, while those of Literature may live for all time. I suppose Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology has undergone, or will undergo, this fate ere long; but the magnanimity and candour which made him, in issuing the 10th edition of that book, abjure all his previous arguments against Evolution and candidly own himself Darwin’s convert, was an evidence of genuine loyalty to truth which I trust can never be quite forgotten. He was, as Prof. Huxley called him, the “greatest Geologist of his day,”—the man “who found Geology an infant science feebly contending for a few scattered truths, and left it a giant, grasping all the ages of the past.” But to my memory he will always be something more than an eminent man of Science. He was the type of what such men ought to be; with the simplicity, humility and gentleness which should be 451characteristic of the true student of Nature. Of the priestlike arrogance of some representatives of the modern scientific spirit he had not a taint. In one of his last letters to me, he said:

“I am told that the same philosophy which is opposed to a belief in a future state undertakes to prove that every one of our acts and thoughts are the necessary result of antecedent events, and conditions and that there can be no such thing as Free-will in man. I am quite content that both doctrines should stand on the same foundation; for as I cannot help being convinced that I have the power of exerting Free-will, however great a mystery the possibility of this may be, so the continuance of a spiritual life may be true, however inexplicable or incapable of proof.

“I am told by some that if any of our traditionary beliefs make us happier and lead us to estimate humanity more highly, we ought to be careful not to endeavour to establish any scientific truths which would lessen and lower our estimate of Man’s place in Nature; in short, we should do nothing to disturb any man’s faith, if it be a delusion which increases his happiness.

“But I hope and believe that the discovery and propagation of every truth, and the dispelling of every error tends to improve and better the condition of man, though the act of reforming old opinions causes so much pain and misery.”

It will give me pleasure if these few reminiscences of my honoured friend send fresh readers to his excellent and spirited biography by his sister-in-law Mrs. Lyell, Lady Lyell’s sister, who was also his brother, Colonel Lyell’s wife; the mother of Sir Leonard Lyell, M.P.

I saw a great deal of Dr. Colenso during the years he spent in England; I think about 1864–5. He lived near us in a small house in Sussex Place, Glo’ster Road (not Sussex Place, Onslow Square), where his large family of sons and 452daughters practised the piano below stairs and produced detonations with chemicals above, while visitors called incessantly, interrupting his arduous and anxious studies! He was in all senses an iron-grey man. Iron-grey hair, pale, strong face, fine but somewhat rigid figure, a powerful, strong-willed, resolute man, if ever there were one, and an honest one also, if such there have been on earth. His friend, Sir George W. Cox, who I may venture to call mine also, has, in his admirable biography, printed the three most important letters which the Bishop of Natal wrote to me, and I can add nothing to Sir George’s just estimate of the character of this modern Confessor. I will give here, however, another letter I received from him at the very beginning of our intercourse, when I had only met him once (at Dr. Carpenter’s table); and also a record in a letter to a friend of a tête-à-tête conversation with him, further on. I have always thought that he made a mistake in returning to Natal, and that his true place would have been at the head of a Christian-Theistic Church in London:—

“23, Sussex Place, Kensington,

“Feb. 6th, 1863.

“My Dear Miss Cobbe,

“I thank you sincerely for your letter, and for the volume which you have sent me. I have read the preface with the deepest interest—and heartily respond to every word which you have written in it. A friend at the Cape had lent me a German edition of De Wette, which I had consulted carefully. But, about a fortnight ago, a lady, till then a stranger to me, sent me a copy of Parker’s Edition. I value it most highly for the sake both of the Author’s and Editor’s share in it. But the criticism of the present day goes, if I am not mistaken, considerably beyond even De Wette’s, in clearing up the question of the Age and Authorship of the different parts of the Pentateuch. I shall carefully consider the Tables of Elohistic and Jehovistic portions, as given in 453De Wette; but, in many important respects, my conclusions will be found to differ from his, and, as I think, upon certain grounds. De W. leant too much to the judgment of Stäbelin.

“The above, however, is the only one of Th. Parker’s works, which has yet come into my hands, till the arrival of your book this morning. When I repeat that every word of your Preface went to my very heart—and that many of them drew the tears from my eyes and the prayer from my heart that God would grant me grace to be in any degree a follower of the noble brother whose life you have sketched, and whose feet have already trodden the path, which now lies open before me—you will believe that I shall not leave long the rest of the volume unread. But, whatever I may find there, your Preface will give comfort and support to thousands, if only they can be brought to read it. Would it not be possible to have it printed separate, as a cheap Tract? It would have the effect of recommending the book itself, and Parker’s works, generally, to multitudes, who might otherwise not have them brought under their notice effectively? I think if largely circulated it might help materially the progress of the great work, in which I am now engaged.

“You will allow me, I hope, to have the pleasure of renewing my acquaintance with you, by making a call upon you before long—and may I bring with me Mrs. Colenso, who will be very glad to see you?

“Very truly yours,

“Jo. Natal.

“Please accept a copy of my ‘Romans,’ which Macmillan will send you. The spirit of it will remain, I trust, abiding, though much of the letter must now be changed.”

Writing of Dr. Colenso to a friend in February, 1865, I said:—

“I never felt for him so much as last night. We came to talk on what we felt at standing so much alone; and he 454said that when the extent of his discoveries burst on him he felt as if he had received a paralyzing electric shock. A London clergyman wrote to him the other day to give him solemn warning that he had led one of his parishioners to destruction and drunkenness. Colenso answered him, that ‘it was not he who led men to doubt of God and duty, but those teachers who made them rest their faith on God and Duty on a foundation of falsehood which every new wave of thought was sweeping away.’ The clergyman seems to have been immensely dumbfounded by this reply.”

Another most interesting man whom I met at Dr. Carpenter’s table was Charles Kingsley.

One day, while I was still a miserable cripple, I went to dine in Regent’s Park and came rather late into a drawing-room full of company, supported by what my maid called my “best crutches!” The servant did not know me, and announced “Miss Cobble.” I corrected her loudly enough for the guests to hear, in that moment of pause: “No! Miss Hobble!” There was of course a laugh, and from the little crowd rushed forward to greet me with both hands extended, a tall, slender, stooping figure with that well-known face so full of feeling and tenderness—Charles Kingsley. “At last, Miss Cobbe, at last we meet,” he said, and a moment later gave me his arm to dinner. This greeting touched me, for we had exchanged, as theological opponents, some tolerably sharp blows for years before, but his large, noble nature harboured no spark of resentment. We talked all dinner-time and a good deal in the evening, and then he offered to escort me home to South Kensington—a proposal which I greedily accepted, but, somehow, when he found that I had a brougham, and was not going in miscellaneous vehicles (in my best evening toggery!) from one end of London to the other at night, he retracted, and 455could not be induced to come with me. We met, however, not unfrequently afterwards, and I always felt much attracted to him; as did, I may mention, my friend’s little fox terrier, who, travelling one day with her mistress in the Underground, spied Kingsley entering the carriage, and incontinently leaving her usual safe retreat under the seat made straight to him, and without invitation, leaped on his knee and began gently kissing his face! The dog never did the same or anything like it to any one else in her life before or afterwards. Of course, my friend apologised to Mr. Kingsley, but he only said in his deep voice, “Dogs always do that to me,”—and coaxed the little beast kindly, till they left the train.

The last time I saw Canon Kingsley was one day late in the autumn some months before he died. Somebody who, I thought, he would like to meet was coming to dine with me at short notice, and I went to Westminster in the hope of catching him and persuading him to come without losing time by sending notes. The evening was closing, and it was growing very dark in the cloisters, where I was seeking his door, when I saw a tall man, strangely bent, coming towards me, evidently seeing neither me nor anything else, and absorbed in some most painful thought. His whole attitude and countenance expressed grief amounting to despair. So terrible was it that I felt it an intrusion on a sacred privacy to have seen it; and would fain have hidden myself, but this was impossible where we were standing at the moment. When he saw me he woke out of his reverie with a start, pulled himself together, shook hands, and begged me to come into his house; which of course I did not do. He had an engagement which prevented him from meeting my guest (I think it must have been Keshub Chunder Sen), and I took myself off as quickly as possible. I have often wondered 456what dreadful thought was occupying his mind when I caught sight of him that day in the gloomy old cloisters of Westminster in the autumn twilight.

The quotation made a few pages back of Sir Charles Lyell’s observations on belief in Immortality reminds me that I repeated them soon after he had made them, to another great man whom it was my privilege to know—John Stuart Mill. We were spending an afternoon with him and Miss Helen Taylor at Blackheath; and a quiet conversation between Mr. Mill and myself having reached this subject, I told him of what Sir C. Lyell had said. In a moment the quick blood suffused his cheeks and something very like tears were in his eyes. The question, it was plain, touched his very heart. This wonderful sensitiveness of a man generally supposed to be “dry” and devoted to the driest studies, struck me, I think, more than anything about him. His special characteristic was extreme delicacy of feeling; and this showed itself, singularly enough, for a man advanced in life, in transparency of skin, and changes of colour and expression as rapid as those in a mountain lake when the clouds shift over it. When Watts painted his fine portrait of him, he failed to notice this peculiarity of his thin and delicate skin, and gave him the common thick, muddy complexion of elderly Englishmen. The result is that the èthos of the face is missing—just as in the case of the portrait of Dr. Martineau he is represented with weak, sloping shoulders and narrow chest. The look of power which essentially belongs to him is not to be seen. I remarked when I saw this picture first exhibited: “I should never have ‘sat under’ that Dr. Martineau!” Mill and I, of course, met in deep sympathy on the Woman question; and he did me the honour to present me with a copy of his “Subjection of Women” on its publication. He tried to make me write and speak more on the subject of Women’s Claims, and used jestingly to say that 457my laugh was worth—I forget how much!—to the cause. I insert a letter from him showing the minute care he took about matters hardly worthy of his attention.

“Avignon, Feb. 23rd, 1869.

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“I have lately received communication from the American publisher Putnam, requesting me to write for their Magazine, and I understand that they would be very glad if you would write anything for them, more especially on the Women question, on which the Magazine (a new one) has shown liberal tendencies from the first. The communications I have received have been through Mrs. Hooker, sister of Mrs. Stowe and Dr. Ward Beecher, and herself the author of two excellent articles in the Magazine on the suffrage question, by which we had been much struck before we knew the authorship. I enclose Mrs. Hooker’s last letter to me, and I send by post copies of Mrs. Hooker’s articles and some old numbers of the Magazine, the only ones we have here; and I shall be very happy if I should be the medium of inducing you to write on this question for the American public.

“My daughter desires to be kindly remembered, and I am,

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“Very truly yours,

“J. S. Mill.

“P.S.—May I ask you to be so kind as to forward Mrs. Hooker’s letter to Mrs. P. A. Taylor, as she will see by it that Mrs. Hooker has no objection to put her name to a reprint of her articles.”

There never was a more unassuming philosopher than Mr. Mill, just as there never was a more unassuming poet than Mr. Browning. All the world knows how Mr. Mill strove to give to his wife the chief credit of his works; and, after her death, his attitude towards her daughter, who was indeed a 458daughter also to him, was beautiful to witness, and a fine exemplification of his own theories of the rightful position of women. He was, however, equally unpretentious as regarded men. Talking one day about the difficulty of doing mental work when disturbed by street music, and of poor Mr. Babbage’s frenzy on the subject, Mr. Mill said it did not much interfere with him. I told him how intensely Mr. Spencer objected to disturbance. “Ah yes; of course! writing Spencer’s works one must want quiet!” As if nothing of the kind were needed for such trivial books as his own System of Logic, or Political Economy! He really was quite unconscious of the irony of his remark. I have been told that he would allow his cat to interfere sadly with his literary occupation when she preferred to lie on his table, or sometimes on his neck,—a trait like that of Newton and his “Diamond.” This extreme gentleness is ever, surely a note of the highest order of men.

Here are extracts from letters concerning Mr. Mill, which I wrote to Miss Elliot in August, 1869. I believe I had been to Brighton and met Mr. Mill there.

“We talked of many grave things, and in everything his love of right and his immense underlying faith impressed me more than I can describe. I asked him what he thought of coming changes, and he entirely agreed with me about their danger, but thought that the mischief they will entail must be but temporary. He thought the loss of Reverence unspeakably deplorable, but an inevitable feature of an age of such rapid transition that the son does actually outrun the father. He added that he thought even the most sceptical of men generally had an inner altar to the Unseen Perfection while waiting for the true one to be revealed to them. In a word the ‘dry old philosopher’ showed himself to me as an enthusiast in faith and love. The way in which he seemed to have thought out every great question and to express his own so modestly and simply, and yet in 459such clear-cut outlines, was most impressive. I felt (what one so seldom does!) the delightful sense of being in communication with a mind deeper than one would reach the end of, even after a lifetime of intercourse. I never felt the same, so strongly, except towards Mr. Martineau; and though the forms of his creed and philosophy are, I think, infinitely truer than those of Mill (not to speak of the feelings one has for the man whose prayers one follows), I think it is more in form than in spirit that the two men are distinguished. The one has only an ‘inner,’ the other has an outward ‘altar;’ but both kneel at them.”

A month or two earlier in the same year I wrote to the same friend:—

“Last night I sat beside Mr. Mill at dinner and enjoyed myself exceedingly. He is looking old and worn, and the nervous twitchings of his face are painful to see, but he is so thoroughly genial and gentlemanly, and laughs so heartily at one’s little jokes, and keeps up an argument with so much play and good humour, that I never enjoyed my dinner-neighbourhood more. Mr. Fawcett was objurgating some M.P. for taking office, and said: ‘When I see Tories rejoice, I know it must be an injury to the Liberal Cause.’ ‘Do you never, then, feel a qualm,’ I said, ‘all you Liberal gentlemen, when you see the priests rejoice at what you have just done in Ireland? Do you reflect whether that is likely to be an injury to the Liberal Cause?’ The observation somehow fell like a bomb; (the entire company, as I remember, were Radicals, our host being Mr. P. A. Taylor). For two minutes there was a dead silence. Then Mrs. Taylor said: ‘Ah, Miss Cobbe is a bitter Conservative!’ ‘Not a bitter one,’ said Mr. Mill. ‘Miss Cobbe is a Conservative. I am sorry for it; but Miss Cobbe is never bitter.’”

It has been a constant subject of regret to me that Mr. Mill’s intention (communicated to me by Miss Taylor) of spending the ensuing summer holiday in Wales, on purpose 460to be near us, was frustrated by his illness and death. How much pleasure and instruction I should have derived from his near neighbourhood there is no need to say.

A friend of Mr. Mill for whom I had great regard was Prof. Cairnes. He underwent treatment at Aix-les-Bains at the same time as I; and we used to while away our long hours by interminable discussions, principally concerning ethics, a subject on which Mr. Cairnes took the Utilitarian side, and I, of course, that of the school of Independent Morality (i.e., of Morality based on other grounds than Utility). He was an ardent disciple of Mill, but his extreme candour caused him to admit frankly that the “mystic extension” of the idea of Usefulness into Right, was unaccountable, or at least unaccounted for; and that when we had proved an act to be pre-eminently useful and likely to promote “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” there yet remained the question for each of us, “Why should I perform that useful action, if it cost me a moment’s pain?” To find the answer (he admitted) we must fall back on an inward “Categoric imperative,” “ought;” and having done so, (I argued,) we must thenceforth admit that the basis of Morality rests on something beside Utility. All these controversies are rather bygone now, since we have been confronted with “hereditary sets of the brain.” I think it was in these discussions with Prof. Cairnes that I struck out what several friends (among others Lord Arthur Russell) considered an “unanswerable” argument against the Utilitarian philosophy; it ran thus:

“Mr. Mill has nobly said, that,—if an Almighty Tyrant were to order him to worship him and threaten to send him to hell if he refused, then, sooner than worship that unjust God, ‘to Hell would I go!’ Mr. Mill, of course, desired every man to do what he himself thought right; therefore it is conceivable that, in the given contingency, we might 461behold the apostle of the Utilitarian philosophy conducting the whole human race to eternal perdition, for the sake of,—shall we say the ‘Greatest Happiness of the Greatest number?’”

Prof. Cairnes did great public service both to England and America at the time of the war of Secession by his wise and able writing on the subject. In a small way I tried to help the same cause by joining Mrs. P. A. Taylor’s Committee formed to promote and express English sympathy with the North; and wrote several little pamphlets, “The Red Flag in John Bull’s Eyes”; “Rejoinder to Mrs. Stowe,” &c. This common interest increased, of course, my regard for Mr. Cairnes, and it was with real sorrow I saw him slowly sink under the terrible disease, (a sort of general ossification of the joints) of which he died. I have said he sank under it, but assuredly it was only his piteously stiffened body which did so, for I never saw a grander triumph of mind over matter than was shown by the courage and cheerfulness wherewith he bore as dreadful a fate as that of any old martyr. I shall never forget the impression of the nobility of the human Soul rising over its tenement of clay, which he made upon me, on the occasion of my last visit to him at Blackheath.

Another man, much of the character and calibre of Prof. Cairnes, whom I likewise had the privilege to know well, was Prof. Sheldon Amos. He also, alas! died in the prime of life; to the loss and grief of the friends of every generous movement.

The following is a memorandum of the first occasion on which I met Mr. John Bright:—

“February 28th, 1866. Dined at Mr. S.’s, M.P. Sat between Bright and Mr. Buxton. Bright so exquisitely clean and with such a sweet voice! His hands alone are coarse. Great discussion, in which Mr. B. completely took the lead; the other gentlemen present seeming to hang on 462his words as I never saw Englishmen do on those of one another. Talking of Ireland he said he would, if he ever had the power, force all the English Companies and great English landlords to sell their estates there; the land to be cut up into small farms. I asked, did he believe in small farming in 1866, and in Celtic capitalists ready to purchase farms? He then told us how he picked up much information travelling through Ireland on cars, from the drivers, (as if every Irish car-driver did not recognise him in a moment from Punch’s caricatures!) and how, especially, he visited the only small farm he had heard of where the occupier was a freeholder; and how it was exceedingly prosperous. I asked where this was? He said ‘in a place called the Barony of Forth.’ Of course I explained that Forth and Bargy in Wexford have been for four hundred years isolated English, (or rather Welsh) colonies, and afford no sort of sample of Irish farming. Bright’s way of speaking was dogmatic, but full of genial fun and quiet little bits of wit. He spoke with great feeling of the wrongs and miseries of the poor, but seemed to enjoy in full the delusion that it only depended on rich people being ready to sacrifice themselves, to remove them all to-morrow.

“I ventured to ask him why he laboured so hard to get votes for working carpenters and bricklayers, and never stirred a finger to ask them for women, who possessed already the property qualification? He said: ‘Much was to be said for women,’ but then went on maundering about our proper sphere, and ‘would they go into Parliament?’”

Again another time I sat beside him (I know not at whose hospitable table), and he told me a most affecting story of a poor crippled woman in a miserable cottage near Llandudno, where he usually spent his holidays. He had got into the habit of visiting this poor creature, who could not stir from her bed, but lay there all day long alone, her husband being out at work as a labourer. Sometimes a neighbour would look in and give her food, but unless one 463did so, she was entirely helpless. Her only comforter was her dog, a fine collie, who lay beside her on the floor, ran in and out, licked her poor useless hands, and showed his affection in a hundred ways. Bright grew fond of the dog, and the dog always welcomed him each year with gambols and joy. One summer he came to the cottage, and the hapless cripple lay on her pallet still, but the dog did not come out to him as usual, and his first question to the woman was: “Where is your collie?” The answer was that her husband had drowned the dog to save the expense of feeding it.

Bright’s voice broke when he came to the end of this story, and we said very little more to each other during that dinner.

Another day I was speaking to Mr. Bright of the extraordinary canard which had appeared in the Times the day before announcing (quite falsely) that Lord Russell, then Premier, had resigned. “What on earth,” I asked, “can have induced the Times to publish such intelligence?” (As it happened, it inconvenienced Lord Russell very much.) “I will tell you,” said Bright; “I am sure it is because Delane is angry that Lady Russell has not asked him to dinner. He expected to go to the Russells’ as he did to the Palmerstons’, and get his news at first hand!” A day or two later I met Lord Russell, and told him what Mr. Bright had said was the reason of the mischievous trick Mr. Delane had played him. Lord Russell chuckled a great deal and said, rubbing his hands in his characteristic way: “I believe it is! I do believe it is!”

My beautiful cousin, Laura, one of my father’s wards, had married (from Newbridge in old days) Mr. John Locke, Q.C., who was for a long time M.P. for Southwark. Their house, 63, Eaton Place, was always most cordially opened to me, and beside Mr. Locke, who was generally brimful of political 464news, I met at their table many clever barristers and M.P.’s. Among the latter was Mr. Ayrton, against whom a virulent set was made by the scientific clique, in consequence of his endeavours, on behalf of the public, to open Kew Gardens earlier in the day. He was rather saturnine, but an incorruptible, unbending sort of man, for whom I felt respect. Another habitué was Mr. Warren, author of Ten Thousand a Year. He was a little ugly fellow, but full of fire and fun, retorting right and left against the Liberals present. Sergeant Gazelee, a worn-looking man, with keen eyes, one day answered him fairly. There was an amusing discussion whether the Tories could match in ability the men of the opposite party? Warren brought up an array of clever Conservatives, but then pretended to throw up the sponge, exclaiming in a dolorous voice, “but then you Liberals have got—Whalley!”

Beside my cousin Mrs. Locke and her good and able husband, I had the pleasure for many years of constantly seeing in London her two younger sisters, Sophia and Eliza Cobbe, who were my father’s favourite wards and have been from their childhood, when they were always under my charge in their holidays, till now in our old age, almost like younger sisters to me. They were of course rarely absent from the Eaton Place festivities.

There was a considerable difference between dinner parties in the Sixties and those of thirty years later. They lasted longer at the earlier date; a greater number of dishes were served at each course, and much more wine was taken. I cannot but think that there must be a certain declension in the general vitality of our race of late years for, I think, few of us, young or old, would be inclined to share equally now in those banquets of long ago which always lasted two hours and sometimes three. There were scarcely any teetotalers, men or women, at the time I speak of, in the circles to which 465I belonged; and the butlers, who went round incessantly with half-a-dozen kinds of wine, and (after dinner) liqueurs, were not, as now, continually interrupted in their courses by “No wine, thank you! Have you Appolinaris or Seltzer?” I never saw anyone the worse for the sherry and the milkpunch and the hock or chablis, and champagne and claret; but certainly there was generally a little more gaiety of a well-bred sort towards the end of the long meals. My cousins kept a particularly good cook and good cellar, and their guests—especially some who hailed from the City—certainly enjoyed at their table other “feasts” beside those of reason. And so I must confess did I, in those days of good appetite after a long day’s literary work; and I sincerely pitied Dean Stanley, who had no sense of taste, and scarcely knew the flavour of anything which he put in his mouth. When the company was not quite up to his mark, the tedium of the dinners which he attended must have been dreadful to him; whereas, in my case, I could always,—provided the menu was good,—entertain myself satisfactorily with my plate and knife and fork. The same great surgeon who had treated my sprained ankle so unsuccessfully, told me with solemn warning when we were taking our house in Hereford Square, that, if I lived in South Kensington and went to dinner parties, I should be a regular victim to gout. As it happened I lived in South Kensington for just twenty years, and went out, I should think to some two thousand dinners, great and small, and I never had the gout at all, but, on the contrary, by my own guidance, got rid of the tendency before I left London. There has certainly been a perceptible diminution in the animal spirits of men and women in the last thirty years, if not of their vital powers. Of course there was always, among well-bred people a certain average of spirits in society, neither boisterous nor yet depressed; and the better the company the softer the general “susurro” 466of the conversation. I could have recognized blindfold certain drawing-rooms wherein a mixed congregation assembled, by the strident, high note which pervaded the crowded room. But the ripple of gentle laughter in good company has decidedly fallen some notes since the Sixties.

I am led to these reflections by remembering among my cousin’s guests that admirable man—Mr. Fawcett. He was always, not merely fairly cheerful, but more gay and apparently light-hearted than those around him who were possessed of their eyesight. The last time I met him was at the house of Madame Bodichon in Blandford Square, and we three were all the company. One would have thought a blind statesman alone with two elderly women, would not have been much exhilarated; but he seemed actually bursting with boyish spirits; pouring out fun, and laughing with all his heart. Certainly his devoted wife (in my humble opinion the ablest woman of this day), succeeded in cheering his darkened lot quite perfectly.

Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett were the third couple who in this century have afforded a study for Mr. Francis Galton of “Hereditary Genius.” The first were Shelley and his Mary (who again was the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft). Their son, the late Sir Percy Shelley, was a very kindly and pleasant gentleman, with good taste for private theatricals, but not a genius. The second were Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. They also have left a son, of whose gifts as a painter I do not presume to judge. The third were Mr. Fawcett and Millicent Garrett, who, though not claiming the brilliant genius of the others, were each, as all the world knows, very highly endowed persons. Their daughter, Miss Philippa Garrett Fawcett,—the Senior Wrangler, de jure,—has at all events vindicated Mr. Galton’s theories.

467Many of us, in those days of the Sixties, were deeply interested in the efforts of women to enter the medical profession in spite of the bitter opposition which they encountered. Miss Elizabeth Garrett, Mrs. Fawcett’s sister, occupied a particularly prominent place in our eyes, succeeding as she did in obtaining her medical degree in Paris, and afterwards a seat on the London School Board, which last was quite a new kind of elevation for women. While still occupying the foreground of our ambition for our sex, Miss Garrett resolved to make (what has proved, I believe, to be) a happy and well assorted marriage, which put an end, necessarily, to her further projects of public work. I sent her, with my cordial good wishes, the following verses:—

The Woman’s cause was rising fast

When to the Surgeons’ College past

A maid who bore in fingers nice

A banner with the new device

Excelsior!

“Try not to pass”! the Dons exclaim,

“M.D. shall grace no woman’s name”—

“Bosh!” cried the maid, in accents free,

“To France I’ll go for my degree.”

Excelsior!

The School-Board seat came next in sight,

“Beware the foes of woman’s right!”

“Beware the awful husting’s fight!”

Such was the moan of many a soul—

A voice replied from top of poll—

Excelsior!

In patients’ homes she saw the light

Of household fires beam warm and bright

Lectures on Bones grew wondrous dry,

But still she murmured with a sigh

Excelsior!

468“Oh, stay!”—a lover cried,—“Oh, rest

Thy much-learned head upon this breast;

Give up ambition! Be my bride!”

—Alas! no clarion voice replied

Excelsior!

At end of day, when all is done,

And woman’s battle fought and won,

Honour will aye be paid to one

Who erst called foremost in the van

Excelsior!

But not for her that crown so bright,

Which hers had been, of surest right,

Had she still cried,—serene and blest—

“The Virgin throned by the West,”^[22]

Excelsior!

Some years after this I brought from Rome as a present for my much valued friend and lady-Doctor, Mrs. Hoggan, M.D. (widow of Dr. George Hoggan), a large photograph of the statue in the Vatican of Minerva Medica. Under it I wrote these lines:—

“Minerva Medica! Shocking profanity!

How could these heathens their doctors vex,

Putting the cure of the ills of humanity

Into the hands of the ‘weaker sex?’

O Pallas sublime! Would you come back revealing

Your glory immortal, our doctors should see,—

Instead of proclaiming you Goddess of Healing,

They’d prohibit your practice, refuse your degree!”

The first dinner-party I ever attended in London, before I went to live in town, was at Mr. Bagehot’s house. I sat beside 469Mr. Richard Hutton, who has been ever since my good friend, and opposite us there sat a gentleman who at once attracted my attention. He had a strong dark face, a low forehead and hair parted in the middle, the large loose mouth of an orator and a manner quite unique; as if he were gently looking down on the follies of mortality from the superior altitudes of Olympos, or perhaps of Parnassus. “Do you know who that is sitting opposite to us?” said Mr. Hutton. I looked at him again, and replied: “I never saw him before, and I have never seen his picture, but I feel in my inner consciousness that it can only be Mr. Matthew Arnold;” and Mr. Arnold, of course, it was,—with an air which made me think him (what he was not) an intellectual coxcomb. He wrote, about that time or soon afterwards, some dreadfully derisive things of my Theism; not on account, apparently, of its intrinsic demerits, but because of what he conceived to be its upstart character. We are all familiar with a certain tone of lofty superiority common to Roman Catholics and Anglicans in dealing with Dissenters of all classes; the tone, no doubt, in which the priests of On talked of Moses when he led the Israelitish schism in the wilderness. It comes naturally to everybody who stands serenely on “the old paths,” and watches those who walk below, or strive to fray new ways through the jungle of poor human thoughts. But when Mr. Arnold had himself slipped off the old road so far as to have liquefied the Articles of the Apostles’ Creed into a “Stream of Tendency;” and compared the doctrine of the Trinity to a story of “Three Lord Shaftesburys;” and reduced the Object of Worship to the lowest possible denomination as “a Power not ourselves which makes for righteousness;” he must, I think, have come to feel that it was scarcely his affair to treat other people’s heresies as new-fangled, and lacking in the sanctities of tradition. As one after another of his brilliant essays appeared, and it became 470manifest that his own creed grew continually thinner, more exiguous, and less and less substantial, I was reminded of an old sporting story which my father told of a town-bred gentleman, the “Mr. Briggs” of those days, who for the first time shot a cock-pheasant, and after greatly admiring it laid it down on the grass. A keeper took up the bird and stroked it, pretending to wonder at its size, and presently shifted it aside and substituted a partridge, which he likewise stroked and admired, till he had an opportunity of again changing it for a snipe. At this crisis “Mr. Briggs” broke in furiously, bidding the keeper to stop stroking his bird: “Be hanged to you! If you go on like that, you’ll rub it down to a wren!” The creed of many persons in these days seems to be undergoing the process of being patted and praised, while all the time it is being rubbed down to a wren!

But whatever hard things Mr. Arnold said of me, I liked and admired him, and he was always personally most kind to me. He had of all men I have ever known the truest insight,—the true Poet’s insight,—into the feelings and characters of animals, especially of dogs. His poem, Geist’s Grave, is to me the most affecting description of the death of an animal in the range of literature. Indeed, the subject of Death itself, whether of beasts or of men, viewed from the same standpoint of hopelessness, has never, I think, been more tenderly touched. How deeply true to every heart is the thought expressed in the stanzas, which remind us that in all the vastness of the universe and of endless time there is not, and never will be, another being like the one who is dead! That being (some of us believe) may revive and live for ever, but another who will “restore its little self” will never be.

“... Not the course

Of all the centuries to come,

And not the infinite resource

Of Nature, with her countless sum

471“Of figures, with her fulness vast

Of new creation evermore,

Can ever quite repeat the past,

Or just thy little self restore.

“Stern law of every mortal lot!

Which man, proud man, finds hard to bear

And builds himself, I know not what

Of second life, I know not where.”

We knew dear Geist, I am glad to say. When Miss Lloyd and I came to live at Byfleet Mr. Arnold and his most charming wife,—then living three miles off at Cobham,—kindly permitted us to see a good deal of them, and we were deeply interested in poor Geist’s last illness. He was a black dachshund, not a handsome dog, but possessed of something which in certain dogs and (those dogs only) seems to be the canine analogue of a human soul. As to Mr. Arnold’s poem on his other dog, Kaiser, who is there that enjoys a gleam of humour and dog-love can fail to be enchanted with such a perfect picture of a dog,—not a dog of the sentimental kind, but one—

“Teeming with plans, alert and glad

In work or play,

Like sunshine went and came, and bade

Live out the day!”

Does not every one feel how true is the likeness of a happy loving dog to sunshine in a house?

I met Mr. Arnold one day in William and Norgate’s bookshop, and he inquired after my dog, and when I told him the poor beast had “gone where the good dogs go,” he said, with real feeling, “And you have not replaced her? No! of course you could not.” I asked his leave to give a copy of “Geist’s Grave” for a collection of poems on animals made for the purpose of humane propaganda, and he gave it very cordially. I was, however, deeply disappointed when 472he returned the following reply to my application for his signature to our first Memorial inviting the R.S.P.C.A. to undertake legislation for the restriction of vivisection. I do not clearly understand what he meant by disliking “the English way of employing for public ends private Societies and Memorials to them.” The R.S.P.C.A. is scarcely a “private society;” and, if it were so, I see no harm in “employing it for public ends,” instead of leaving everything to Government to do; or to leave undone.

“Cobham, Surrey,

“January 8th, 1875.

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“Your letter was directed to Oxford, a place with which I have now no connection, and it reaches me too late for signing your Memorial, but I should in any case have declined signing it, strongly as your cause speaks to my feelings; because, first, I greatly dislike the English way of employing, for public ends, private societies and Memorials to them; secondly, the signatures you will profit by, in this case, are not those of literary people, who will at once be disposed of as a set of unpractical sentimentalists. To yourself this objection does not apply, because you are distinguished not in letters only, but also as a lover and student of animals. I hope if you read my paper in the Contemporary, you observe how I apologise for calling them the lower animals, and how thoroughly I admit that they think and love.

“Sincerely yours,

“Matthew Arnold.”

In my first journey to Italy on my way to Palestine I made acquaintance with R. W. Mackay, the author of that enormously learned, but, perhaps, not very well digested book, the Progress of the Intellect. I afterwards renewed acquaintance with him and his nice wife in their house in Hamilton Terrace. Mr. Mackay was somewhat of an invalid and a nervous man, much absorbed in his studies. I have 473heard it said that he was the original of George Elliot’s Mr. Casaubon. At all events Mrs. Lewes had met him, and taken a strong prejudice against him. That prejudice I think was unjust. He was a very honest and real student, and a modest one, not a pretender like Mr. Casaubon. His books contain an amazing mass of knowledge, (presented, perhaps, in rather a crude state) respecting all the great religious doctrines of the world. I had once felt that both his books and talk were hard and steel-cold, and that his religion, though dogmatically the same as mine, was all lodged in his intellect. One day, however, when he called on me and we took a drive and walk in the Park together, I learned to my surprise that he entirely felt with me that the one direct way of reaching truth about religion was Prayer, and all the rest mere corroboration of what may so be learned. To have come round to this seemed to me a great evidence of intellectual sincerity.

I forget now what particular point we had been discussing when he wrote me the following curious bit of erudition:—

“Dear Miss Cobbe,

“Dixit Rabbi Simeon Ben Lakis,—Nomina angelorum et mensium ascenderunt in domum Israelis ex Babylone.”

“This occurs in the treatise Rosh Haschanah, which is part of the Mischna.

“The Mischna (the earliest part of the Talmud) is said to have been completed in the 3rd century, under the auspices of Rabbi Judah the Holy, and his disciples.

“I send the above as promised, The professed aversion of the Jews for foreign customs seems strangely at variance with their practice, as seen, e.g., in their names for the divisions of the heavenly hosts; the words ‘Legion and Sistra (castra) are evidently taken from the Roman army. Four Chief Spirits or Archangels are occasionally mentioned, as in Pirke Eliezer and Henoch, cf. 48, 1. Others make their number seven, as Tobit 12, 5; Revel. 2, 4–3, 1–4, 5. The angelic doings are partly copied from the 474usages of the Jewish Temple, hence the Jerusalem Targum renders Exod. 14, 24. ‘It happened in the morning watch, the hour when the heavenly host sing praises before God’—comp.: Luke 2, 13,—and the same reason is applied by the Targumist for the sudden exit of the angel in Genes. 32, 26. One may perhaps, however, be induced to ask whether (as in the case of Euthyphron in the Platonic dialogue) a better cause for departure might not be found in the inconvenience of remaining!

“Though I have Haug’s version of the Gathas, I am far from able to decipher the grounds of difference between him and Spiegel. Non nostrum est tantas componere lites, a volume entitled Erân by Dr. Spiegel contains, among other Essays, one entitled Avesta and Veda, or the relation of Iran and India, and another Avesta and Genesis, or the relation of Iran to the Semites. Weber’s Morische Skizzen also contains interesting matter on similar subjects. We were speaking about the magical significance of names. See as to this Origen against Celsus, 1–24; Diod. Sicul, 1–22; Iamblicus de Myst, 2, 4, 5.

“Socrates himself appears superstitiously apprehensive about the use of divine names in the Philebus 1, 2 and the Cratylus 400e. The suppression of it among the Jews, (for instance in the Septuagint, where Κυριος is substituted for Jehovah, and Sirach, Ch. 23, 9) express the same feeling.

“We were talking of the original religion of Persia. You, of course, recollect the passage on this subject in the first book of Herodotus, Ch. 131, and Strabo 15, see 13, p. 732 Casaub. The practice of prohibiting selfish prayer mentioned in the next following chapter in Herodotus, is remarkable.

“I hope that in the above rigmarole a grain of useful matter may be found. Mrs. Mackay is, I am glad to say, better to-day.

“I remain, sincerely yours,

“R. W. Mackay.

“20th February, 1865,

“41, Hamilton Terrace, N.W.”

475Another early acquaintance of mine in London was Lady Byron, the widow of the poet. I called on her one day, having received from her a kind note begging me to do so as she was unable to leave her house to come to me. She had been exceedingly kind in procuring for me valuable letters of introduction from Sir Moses Montefiore and others, which had been very useful to me in my long wanderings.

Lady Byron was short in stature and, when I saw her, deadly pale; but with a dignity which some of our friends called “royal,” albeit without the smallest affectation or assumption. She talked to me eagerly about all manner of good works wherein she was interested; notably concerning Miss Carpenter’s Reformatory, to which she had practically subscribed £1,000 by buying Red Lodge and making it over for such use. During the larger part of the time of my visit she stood on the rug with her back to the fire and the power and will revealed in her attitude and conversation were very impressive. I bore in mind all the odious things Byron had said of her:

“There was Miss Mill-pond, smooth as summer sea

That usual paragon, an only daughter,

Who seemed the cream of equanimity

Till skimmed, and then there was some milk and water.”

Also the sneers at her (very genuine) humour:

“Her wit, for she had wit, was Attic-all

Her favourite science was the mathematical” &c., &c.

I thought that for a man to hold up such a woman as this, and that woman his wife, on the prongs of ridicule for public laughter was enough to make him detestable.

A lady whom I met long afterwards told me, (I made a note of it Nov. 13th, 1869) that she had been stopping, at the time of Lady Byron’s separation, at a very small seaside place in Norfolk. Lady Byron came there on a visit to Mrs. Francis 476Cunningham, née Gurney, as more retired than Kirkby Mallory. She had then been separated about six weeks or two months. She was (Mrs. B. said) singularly pleasing and healthful looking, rather than pretty. She was grave and reticent rather than depressed in spirits; and gave her friends to understand that there was something she could not explain to them about her separation. Mrs. B. heard her say that Lord Byron always slept with pistols under his pillow, and on one occasion had threatened to shoot her in the middle of the night. There was much singing of duets going on in the two families, but Lady Byron refused to take any part in it.

Miss Carpenter, who was entirely captivated by her, received from her some charge amounting to literary executorship; but after one or two furtive delvings into the trunks full of papers (since, I believe, stored in Hoare’s bank), she gave up in despair. She told me that the papers were in the most extraordinary confusion; letters both of the most trivial and of the most serious and compromising kind, household accounts, poems, and tradesmen’s bills, were all mixed together in hopeless disorder and dust. As is well known, Byron’s famous verses:

“Fare thee well! and if for ever!”

were written on the back of a butcher’s bill—unpaid like most of the rest. Miss Carpenter vouched for this fact.

Lady Byron was at one time greatly attracted by Fanny Kemble. Among Mrs. Kemble’s papers in my possession are seven letters from Lady Byron to her. Here is one of them worth presenting:

“Dear Mrs. Kemble,

“The note you wrote to me before you left Brighton made me revert to a train of thought which had been for some time in my mind. I alluded once to “your Future.” I submit to be considered a Visionary, yet some of my 477decided visions have come to pass in the course of years let me tell you my Vision about you—That you are to be something to the People; that your strong sympathy with them (though you will not let them touch the hem of your garment) will bring your talents to bear upon their welfare; that the way is open to you, after your personal objects are fulfilled. My mind is so full of this, that though the time has not arrived for putting it in practice, I cannot help telling you of it. I am neither Democratic nor Aristocratic. I do not see those distinctions in looking at Humanity, but I feel most strongly that for every advantage we have received we are bound to offer something to those who do not possess it. Happy they who have gifts to place at the feet of their less favoured fellow-Christians!

“I cannot believe that a relation so truthful as yours and mine will be merely casual. Time will show. I might not have an opportunity of saying this in a visit.

“Yours most truly,

A. Noel Byron.”

“March 19th.

It is an unsolved mystery to me why such a woman did not definitely adopt one of either of two courses. The first (and far the best) would, of course, have been to bury her husband’s misdeeds in absolute silence and oblivion, carefully destroying all papers relating to the tragedy of their joint lives. Or, if she had not strength for this, to write exactly what she thought ought to be known by posterity concerning him, and put her account in safe hands with all the needful pièces justificatives before she died. That she did not adopt either one course or the other must be a source of permanent regret to all who recognized her great merits and honoured them as they deserved.

Among our neighbours in South Kensington, whom we were privileged to know were many delightful people, who 478are still, I am happy to say, living and taking active part in the world. Among them were Mr. Froude, Mr. and Mrs. W. E. H. Lecky, Mr. Leslie Stephen, Mrs. Brookfield, Mrs. Simpson, and Mrs. Richmond Ritchie. But of several others, alas! “the place that knew them knows them no more.” Of these last were Mr. and Mrs. Herman Merivale, Sir Henry Maine, Mrs. Dicey, Lady Monteagle (who had written some of Wordsworth’s poems to his dictation as his amanuensis), and my dear old friend Mrs. de Morgan.

Sir Henry Maine’s interest in the claims of women and his strong statements on the subject, made me regard him with much gratitude. I asked him once a question about St. Paul’s citizenship, to which he was good enough to write so full and interesting a reply that I quote it here in extenso:—

“Athenæum Club, Pall Mall, S.W.,

“April 6th, 1874.

“My dear Miss Cobbe,

“There is no question that for a considerable time before the concession of the Roman citizenship to the whole empire, quite at all events, B.C. 89 or 90,—it could be obtained in various ways by individuals who possessed a lower franchise in virtue of their place of birth or who were even foreigners. The legal writer, Ulpian, mentions several of these modes of acquiring it; and Pliny, more than once solicits the citizenship for protégés of his own. There is no authority for supposing that it could be directly purchased (at least legally), but it could be obtained by various processes which came to the same thing as paying directly, e.g., building a ship of a certain burden to carry corn to Rome.

“I suspect that St. Paul’s ancestor obtained the citizenship by serving in some petty magistracy. The coins of Tarsus are said to show that its citizens in the reign of Augustus, enjoyed one or other of the lower Roman franchises; and this would facilitate the acquisition by individuals of the full Roman citizenship.

479“The Roman citizenship was necessarily hereditary. The children of the person who became a Roman citizen came at once under his Patria Potestas, and each of them acquired the capacity for becoming some day a Roman Paterfamilias.

“St. Paul, as a Roman citizen, lived under the Roman Law of Persons, but he remained under the local Law of Property. His allusions to the Patria Potestas and to the Roman Law of Wills and guardianship (which was like the Patria Potestas), are quite unmistakeable, and more numerous than is commonly supposed. In the obscure passage, for example, about women having power over the head, “Power” and “Head” are technical terms from the Roman Law.

“Believe me, very sincerely yours,

“H. S. Maine.”

George Borrow who, if he were not a gipsy by blood ought to have been one, was, for some years, our near neighbour in Hereford Square. My friend was amused by his quaint stories and his (real or sham) enthusiasm for Wales, and cultivated his acquaintance. I never liked him, thinking him more or less of a hypocrite. His missions, recorded in the “Bible in Spain,” and his translations of the scriptures into the out-of-the-way tongues, for which he had a gift, were by no means consonant with his real opinions concerning the veracity of the said Bible. Dr. Martineau once told me that he and Borrow had been schoolfellows at Norwich some sixty years before. Borrow had persuaded several of his other companions to rob their fathers’ tills, and then the party set forth to join some smugglers on the coast. By degrees the truants all fell out of line and were picked up, tired and hungry along the road, and brought back to Norwich school where condign chastisement awaited them. George Borrow it seems received his large share horsed on James Martineau’s back! The early connection between the two old men as I knew them, was 480irresistibly comic to my mind. Somehow when I asked Mr. Borrow once to come and meet some friends at our house he accepted our invitation as usual, but, on finding that Dr. Martineau was to be of the party, hastily withdrew his acceptance on a transparent excuse; nor did he ever after attend our little assemblies without first ascertaining that Dr. Martineau would not be present!

I take the following from some old letters to my friend referring to him:

“Mr. Borrow says his wife is very ill and anxious to keep the peace with C. (a litigious neighbour). Poor old B. was very sad at first, but I cheered him and sent him off quite brisk last night. He talked all about the Fathers again, arguing that their quotations went to prove that it was not our gospels they had in their hands. I knew most of it before, but it was admirably done. I talked a little theology to him in a serious way (finding him talk of his ‘horrors’) and he abounded in my sense of the non-existence of Hell, and of the presence and action on the soul of a Spirit, rewarding and punishing. He would not say ‘God;’ but repeated over and over that he spoke not from books but from his own personal experience.”

Some time later—after his wife’s death:

“Poor old Borrow is in a sad state. I hope he is starting in a day or two for Scotland. I sent C. with a note begging him to come and eat the Welsh mutton you sent me to-day, and he sent back word, ‘Yes.’ Then, an hour afterwards, he arrived, and in a most agitated manner said he had come to say ‘he would rather not. He would not trouble anyone with his sorrows.’ I made him sit down, and talked as gently to him as possible, saying: ‘It won’t be a trouble Mr. Borrow, it will be a pleasure to me’. But it was all of no use. He was so cross, so rude, I had the greatest difficulty in talking to him. I asked about his servant, and he said I could not help him. I asked him about Bowring, and he said: ‘Don’t speak of it.’ [It was some dispute with Sir John Bowring, who 481was an acquaintance of mine, and with whom I offered to mediate.] ‘I asked him would he look at the photos of the Siamese,’ and he said: ‘Don’t show them to me!’ So, in despair, as he sat silent, I told him I had been at a pleasant dinner-party the night before, and had met Mr. L——, who told me of certain curious books of mediæval history. ‘Did he know them?’ ‘No, and he dare said Mr. L—— did not, either! Who was Mr. L——?’ I described that obscure individual, [one of the foremost writers of the day], and added that he was immensely liked by everybody. Whereupon Borrow repeated at least 12 times, ‘Immensely liked! As if a man could be immensely liked!’ quite insultingly. To make a diversion (I was very patient with him as he was in trouble) ‘I said I had just come home from the Lyell’s and had heard—.’... But there was no time to say what I had heard! Mr. Borrow asked: ‘Is that old Lyle I met here once, the man who stands at the door (of some den or other) and bets?’ I explained who Sir Charles was, (of course he knew very well), but he went on and on, till I said gravely: ‘I don’t think you will meet those sort of people here, Mr. Borrow. We don’t associate with blacklegs, exactly.’”

Here is an extract from another letter:

“Borrow also came, and I said something about the imperfect education of women, and he said it was right they should be ignorant, and that no man could endure a clever wife. I laughed at him openly, and told him some men knew better. What did he think of the Brownings? ‘Oh, he had heard the name; he did not know anything of them. Since Scott, he read no modern writer; Scott was greater than Homer! What he liked were curious, old, erudite books about mediæval and northern things.’ I said I knew little of such literature, and preferred the writers of our own age, but indeed I was no great student at all. Thereupon he evidently wanted to astonish me; and, talking of Ireland, said, ‘Ah, yes; a most curious, mixed race. First there 482were the Firbolgs,—the old enchanters, who raised mists.’... ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Borrow,’ I asked, ‘it was the Tuatha-de-Danaan who did that? Keatinge expressly says that they conquered the Firbolgs by that means.’ (Mr. B., somewhat out of countenance), ‘Oh! Aye! Keatinge is the authority; a most extraordinary writer.’ ‘Well, I should call him the Geoffrey of Monmouth of Ireland.’ (Mr. B., changing the venue), ‘I delight in Norse-stories; they are far grander than the Greek. There is the story of Olaf the Saint of Norway. Can anything be grander? What a noble character!’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘what do you think of his putting all those poor Druids on the Skerry of Shrieks and leaving them to be drowned by the tide?’ (Thereupon Mr. B. looked at me askant out of his gipsy eyes, as if he thought me an example of the evils of female education!) ‘Well! well! I forgot about the Skerry of Shrieks. Then there is the story of Beowulf the Saxon going out to sea in his burning ship to die.’ ‘Oh, Mr. Borrow! that isn’t a Saxon story at all. It is in the Heimskringla! It is told of Hakon of Norway.’ Then, I asked him about the gipsies and their language, and if they were certainly Aryans? He didn’t know (or pretended not to know) what Aryans were; and altogether displayed a miraculous mixture of odd knowledge and more odd ignorance. Whether the latter were real or assumed, I know not!”

With the leading men of Science in the Sixties we had the honour of a good deal of intercourse. Through Dr. W. B. Carpenter (who, as Miss Carpenter’s brother, I had met often) and the two ever hospitable families of Lyell, we came to know many of them. Sir William Grove was also a particular friend of my friend Mrs. Grey. He and Lady Grove and their daughter, Mrs. Hall, (Imogen), were all charming people, and we had many pleasant dinners with them. Professor Tyndall was, of course, one of the principal members of that scientific coterie, and in those days we saw a good deal of him. He was very friendly 483as were also Mr. and Mrs. Francis Galton. Mr. Galton’s speculations seemed always to me exceedingly original and interesting, and I delighted in reviewing them. The beginning of the Anti-vivisection controversy, however, put an end to all these relations, so that since 1876, I have seen few of the circle. It is curious to recall how nearly we joined hands on some theological questions before this gulf of a great ethical difference opened before us. Some readers may recall a curious controversy raised by Prof. Tyndall on the subject of the efficacy of prayer for physical benefits. Having read what he wrote on it, I sent him my own little book, Dawning Lights, which vindicates the efficacy of prayer, for spiritual benefits only. The following was his reply, to which I will append another kindly note referring to a request I had proffered on behalf of Mrs. Somerville.

“Professor Tyndall to F. P. C.

“Royal Institution of Great Britain,

“7th Nov., 1865.

“My dear Miss Cobbe,

“Our minds—that is yours and mine—sound the same note as regards the economy of nature. With clearness and precision you have stated the question. In fact, had I known that you had written upon the subject I might have copied your words and put my name to them.

“I intend to keep your book, but I have desired my publisher to send you a book of mine in exchange—this is fair, is it not?

“Your book so far as I have read it is full of strength. Of course I could not have written it all. Your images are too concrete and your personification of the mystery of mysteries too intense for me. But as long as you are tolerant of others—which you are—the shape into which you mould the power of your soul must be determined by yourself alone.

“Believe me, yours most truly,

“John Tyndall.”

484“Royal Institution of Great Britain,

“21st June.

“My dear Miss Cobbe,

“I would do anything I could for your sake and irrespectively of the interest of your subject.

“Had I Faraday’s own letter, I could decipher at once what he meant, for I was intimately acquainted with his course of thought during the later years of his life. It would however be running a great risk to attempt to supply this hiatus without seeing his letter.

“I should think it refers to the influence of time on magnetic action. About the date referred to he was speculating and trying to prove experimentally whether magnetism required time to pass through space.

“Always yours faithfully,

“John Tyndall.”

In a letter of mine to a friend written after meeting Prof. Tyndall at dinner at Edgbaston during the Congress of the British Association in Birmingham, after mentioning M. Vambéry and some others, I said; “The one I liked best was Prof. Tyndall, with whom I had quite an ‘awful’ talk alone about the bearing of Science on Religion. He said in words like a fine poem, that Knowledge seemed to him ‘like an instrument on which we went up, note after note, and octave after octave; but at last there came a note which our ears could not hear, and which was silent for us. And at the other end of the scale there was another silent note.’”

Many years after this, there appeared an article in the Pall Mall Gazette which I felt sure was by Prof. Tyndall, in which it was calmly stated that the scientific intellect had settled the controversy between Pantheism and Theism, and that the said Scientific Intellect “permitted us to believe in an order of Development,” and would “allow the religious instincts and the language of Religion to gather round that 485idea;” but that the notion of a “Great Director” can by no means be suffered by the same Scientific Intellect.

I wrote a reply, begging to be informed when and where the controversy between Pantheism and Theism had been settled, as the statement, dropped so coolly in a single paragraph, was, to say the least, startling; and I concluded by saying, “We may be driven into the howling wilderness of a Godless world by the fiery swords of these new Cherubim of Knowledge; but at least we will not shrink away into it before their innuendoes!”

I have also lost in quitting this circle, the privilege of often meeting Mr. Herbert Spencer; though he has never (to his honour be it remembered!) pronounced a word in favour of painful experiments on animals.

With the great naturalist who has revolutionized modern science I had rather frequent intercourse till the same sad barrier of a great difference of moral opinion arose between us. Mr. Charles Darwin’s brother-in-law, Mr. Hensleigh Wedgwood, was, for a time tenant here at Hengwrt; and afterwards took a house named Caer-Deon in this neighbourhood, where Mr. and Mrs. Charles Darwin and their boys also spent part of the summer. As it chanced, we also took a cottage that summer close by Caer-deon and naturally saw our neighbours daily. I had known Mr. Darwin previously, in London, and had also met his most amiable brother, Mr. Erasmus Darwin, at the house of my kind old friend Mrs. Reid, the foundress of Bedford Square College. The first thing we heard concerning the illustrious arrivals was the report, that one of the sons had had “a fall off a Philosopher;” word substituted by the ingenious Welsh mind for “velocipede” (as bicycles were then called) under an easily understood confusion between the rider and the machine he rode!

Next,—the Welsh parson of the little church close by, having fondly calculated that Mr. Darwin would 486certainly hasten to attend his services, prepared for him a sermon which should slay this scientific Goliath and spread dismay through the ranks of the sceptical host. He told his congregation that there were in these days persons, puffed up by science, falsely so called, and deluded by the pride of reason, who had actually been so audacious as to question the story of the six days Creation as detailed in Sacred Scripture. But let them note how idle were these sceptical questionings! Did they not see that the events recorded happened before there was any man existing to record them, and that, therefore, Moses must have learned them from God himself, since there was no one else to tell him?

Alas! the philosopher, I fear, never went to be converted (as he surely must have been) by this ingenious Welsh parson, and we were for a long time merry over his logic. Mr. Darwin was never in good health, I believe, after his Beagle experience of sea sickness, and he was glad to use a peaceful and beautiful old pony of my friend’s, yclept Geraint, which she placed at his disposal. His gentleness to this beast and incessant efforts to keep off the flies from his head, and his fondness for his dog Polly (concerning whose cleverness and breeding he indulged in delusions which Matthew Arnold’s better dog-lore would have swiftly dissipated), were very pleasing traits in his character.

In writing at this time to a friend I said:—

“I am glad you like Mill’s book. Mr. Charles Darwin, with whom I am enchanted, is greatly excited about it, but says that Mill could learn some things from physical science; and that it is in the struggle for existence and (especially) for the possession of women that men acquire their vigour and courage. Also he intensely agrees with what I say in my review of Mill about inherited qualities being more important than education, on which alone Mill 487insists. All this the philosopher told me yesterday, standing on a path 60 feet above me and carrying on an animated dialogue from our respective standpoints!”

Mr. Darwin was walking on the footpath down from Caer-Deon among the purple heather which clothes our mountains so royally; and impenetrable brambles lay between him above and me on the road below; so we exchanged our remarks at the top of our voices, being too eager to think of the absurdity of the situation, till my friend coming along the road heard with amazement words flying in the air which assuredly those “valleys and rocks never heard” before, or since! When we drive past that spot, as we often do now, we sigh as we look at the “Philosopher’s Path,” and wish (O, how one wishes!) that he could come back and tell us what he has learned since!

At this time Mr. Darwin was writing his Descent of Man, and he told me that he was going to introduce some new view of the nature of the Moral Sense. I said: “Of course you have studied Kant’s Grundlegung der Sitten?” No; he had not read Kant, and did not care to do so. I ventured to urge him to study him, and observed that one could hardly see one’s way in ethical speculation without some understanding of his philosophy. My own knowledge of it was too imperfect to talk of it to him, but I could lend him a very good translation. He declined my book, but I nevertheless packed it up with the next parcel I sent him.

On returning the volume he wrote to me:—

“It was very good of you to send me nolens volens Kant, together with the other book. I have been extremely glad to look through the former. It has interested me much to see how differently two men may look at the same points. Though I fully feel how presumptuous it sounds to put myself even for a moment in the same bracket with Kant—the one man a great philosopher looking exclusively into 488his own mind, the other a degraded wretch looking from the outside through apes and savages at the moral sense of mankind.”

There was irony, and perhaps not a little pride in his reference to himself as a “degraded wretch looking through apes and savages at the moral sense of mankind”! Between the two great Schools of thinkers,—those who study from the Inside (of human consciousness), and those who study from the Outside,—there has always existed mutual animosity and contempt. For my own part, while fully admitting that the former needed to have their conclusions enlarged and tested by outside experience, I must always hold that they were on a truer line than the (exclusively) physico-scientific philosophers. Man’s consciousness is not only a fact in the world but the greatest of facts; and to overlook it and take our lessons from beasts and insects is to repeat the old jest of Hamlet with Hamlet omitted. A philosophy founded solely on the consciousness of man, may; and, very likely, will, be imperfect; and certainly it will be incomplete. But a philosophy which begins with inorganic matter and the lower animals, and only includes the outward facts of anthropology, regardless of human consciousness,—must be worse than imperfect and incomplete. It resembles a treatise on the Solar System which should omit to notice the Sun.

I mentioned to him in a letter, that we had found some seeds of Tropæolum, very carefully gathered from brilliant and multicoloured varieties, all revert in a single year to plain scarlet. He replied:—“You and Miss Lloyd need not have your faith in inheritance shaken with respect to Tropæolum until you have prevented for six or seven generations any crossing between the varieties in the same garden. I have lately found the very shade of colour is transmitted of a most fluctuating garden variety if the flowers are carefully self-fertilized during six or seven generations.”

489The Descent of Man of which Mr. Darwin was kind enough to give me a copy before publication, inspired me with the deadliest alarm. His new theory therein set forth, respecting the nature and origin of conscience, seemed to me then, and still seems to me, of absolutely fatal import. I wrote the strongest answer to it in my power at once, and published in the Theological Review, April, 1871 (reprinted in my Darwinism in Morals, 1872). Of course I sent my review to Down House. Here is a generous message which I received in reply:—

“Mr. Darwin is reading the Review with the greatest interest and attention and feels so much the kind way you speak of him and the praise you give him, that it will make him bear your severity, when he reaches that part of the review.”

Referring to an article of mine in the Quarterly Review (Oct., 1872) on the Consciousness of Dogs, Mr. Darwin wrote to me, Nov. 28th, 1872:—

“I have been greatly interested by your article in the Quarterly. It seems to me the best analysis of the mind of an animal which I have ever read, and I agree with you on most points. I have been particularly glad to read what you say about the reasoning power of dogs, and about that rather vague matter, their self-consciousness. I dare say however that you would prefer criticism to admiration.

“I regret that you quote J. so often: I made enquiries about one case (which quite broke down) from a man who certainly ought to know Mr. J. well; and I was cautioned that he had not written in a scientific spirit. I regret also that you quote old writers. It may be very illiberal, but their statements go for nothing with me and I suspect with many others. It passes my powers of belief that dogs ever commit suicide. Assuming the statements to be true, I should think it more probable that they were distraught, and did not know what they were doing; nor am I able to credit about fetishes.

490“One of the most interesting subjects in your article seems to me to be about the moral sense. Since publishing the Descent of Man I have got to believe rather more than I did in dogs having what may be called a conscience. When an honourable dog has committed an undiscovered offence he certainly seems ashamed (and this is the term naturally and often used) rather than afraid to meet his master. My dog, the beloved and beautiful Polly, is at such times extremely affectionate towards me; and this leads me to mention a little anecdote. When I was a very little boy, I had committed some offence, so that my conscience troubled me, and when I met my father, I lavished so much affection on him, that he at once asked me what I had done, and told me to confess. I was so utterly confounded at his suspecting anything, that I remember the scene clearly to the present day, and it seems to me that Polly’s frame of mind on such occasions is much the same as was mine, for I was not then at all afraid of my father.”

In a letter to a friend (Nov., 1869) I say:—

“We lunched with Mr. Charles Darwin at Mr. Erasmus D——’s house on Sunday. He told us that a German man of science, (I think Carl Vogt), the other day gave a lecture, in which he treated the Mass as the last relic of that Cannibalism which gradually took to eating only the heart, or eyes of a man to acquire his courage. Whereupon the whole audience rose and cheered the lecturer enthusiastically! Mr. Darwin remarked how much more decency there was in speaking on such subjects in England.”

This pleasant intercourse with an illustrious man was, like many other pleasant things, brought to a close for me in 1875 by the beginning of the Anti-vivisection crusade. Mr. Darwin eventually became the centre of an adoring clique of vivisectors who (as his Biography shows) plied him incessantly with encouragement to uphold their practice, till 491the deplorable spectacle was exhibited of a man who would not allow a fly to bite a pony’s neck, standing forth before all Europe (in his celebrated letter to Prof. Holmgren of Sweden) as the advocate of Vivisection.

We had many interesting foreign visitors in Hereford Square. I have mentioned the two Parsee gentlemen who came to thank me for having made (as they considered) a just estimate of their religion in my article “The Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians.” The elder of them, Mr. Nowrozjee Furdoonjee, was President of the Parsee Society of Bombay; but resided much in England, and had an astonishing knowledge of English and American theological and philosophic literature. He asked me one day to recommend him the best modern books on ethics. My small library contained a good many, but he not only knew every one I possessed, but almost all others which I named as worthy of his attention. We talked very freely on religious matters and with a good deal of sympathy. I pressed him one day with the question, “Do you really believe in Ahriman?” “Of course I do!” “What! In a real personal Evil Being, who is as much a person as Ormusd?” “O no! I did not mean that! I believe in Evil existing in the world;”—and obviously in nothing more!