SMALL TALK AT WREYLAND II (continued 2)

When these northern nations were converted, the new religion was grafted on the old; and the grafting was not always neatly done. The Anglo-Saxon kings all claimed descent from Woden, and he was once a god; but when they took up Christianity, they had to fit him in. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (855) knows better than the Pentateuch what happened in Noah’s Ark. That speaks only of Shem and Ham and Japheth; but Noah’s wife had another baby while she was on board—“se wæs geboren in thære earche Noe”—and this was Woden’s ancestor.

That seems incongruous enough, but it is nothing to the incongruity of an Anglo-Saxon coin with its inscription all in Arabic except two lines of Roman letters, “Offa the King,” which come in upside down between three lines of Arabic, “Mohammed the Prophet of God.” It is a gold coin, a mancus, of the same weight as an Arabic dinar; and it is dated in year 157 of the Hegira, or 773 A.D. It was found in Rome, and must be one of those gold mancuses that King Offa undertook to pay Pope Hadrian for Peter’s Pence.

The southernmost part of Italy was known as Bruttium in Latin, but Brettia in Greek, and was said to take its name from Brettos (a son of Hercules) who came over with the first Greek colonists. And this, I suspect, is the only basis for the story that Britain took its name from an imaginary Brutus who brought a colony here. I suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth got the Brettos story at second hand through Stephanos, who quotes it from Antiochos of Syracuse, say 423 B.C. And our Geoffrey either got it wrong, or altered it to suit his theme, and thus created Brute the Trojan.

The story of Brute the Trojan is not wilder than the story of Æneas, and the motive is the same—to connect the Britons (like the Romans) with the Homeric heroes and thus with the Olympian gods. (Brute was a great-grandson of Æneas, so Venus was his great-great-grandmother.) I cannot see why the story makes the Trojans land at Totnes, fifteen miles from here, rather than in any other part of Britain. But at Totnes they show you the very stone on which Brute stepped ashore, just as they show you the stone at Brixham on which Dutch William stepped ashore, and the stone at Newton from which he was proclaimed as King.

Nobody takes Brute the Trojan very seriously now; but I cannot understand the people who scoff at Trojans coming to Britain, and then talk solemnly of Phœnicians coming here. In books and pamphlets and essays and articles and by word of mouth, in Devon and in Cornwall and the Scilly isles, one hears everlastingly of these Phœnicians.

All this talk of the Phœnicians is founded on a blunder. Strabo devotes book iii of his Geographica to what we now call Spain and Portugal. In iii. 5. 11 he says that the Cassiterides islands were off the coast of Spain and Portugal, and that the tin trade with these islands was formerly in the hands of the Phœnicians. In iii. 2. 9 he says that tin was found in Spain and Portugal and in the Cassiterides, and adds parenthetically “and it is brought also from Britain to Marseilles.” Diodoros is more explicit, v. 22, 38, saying that the British tin came from the western part of England, and went to Marseilles overland through France, a journey of thirty days with horses. I suppose people have forgotten Diodoros, and failed to see that Strabo is using a parenthesis; and have then mixed up the whole of what he says in iii. 2. 9 with what he says about the Phœnicians in iii. 5. 11. There is no suggestion in any ancient author that the Phœnicians ever had anything to do with this trade in British tin.

As for the Cassiterides, they must be the Burlings. These are the only noticeable islands on the outer coast of Spain and Portugal; and ancient authors say the Cassiterides were on that coast. Strabo and Diodoros, Mela and Pliny, Ptolemy, Dionysios and Avienus, all agree in putting them there, though they give them various positions from Cape Finisterre and Ferrol down to Cape St Vincent, and call them Hesperides or Œstrymnides as well as Cassiterides.

In the Scillies it is an article of faith that those islands are the Cassiterides, and this heresy of mine aroused the wrath of good Scillonians. (They never say Scilly Islanders themselves: it is too ambiguous.) Those islands seemed very remote, when I visited them first, in the autumn of 1886. The cable was broken, and the mail-boat did not waste her coal on making the passage in an equinoctial gale. But people told me I could get a pilot-cutter to take me off in any weather for £5. If it failed to make Penzance, it was sure of making Cork or Brest.

My going to the Scillies was indirectly the cause of Walter Besant’s going there and writing his novel of Armorel of Lyonesse. I was often talking of the islands after I came back, and he went in the spring of 1889. The novel pleased the islanders, and when I went there next (1896) there seemed to be an Armorel in every house. It was a contrast to Tarascon and Alphonse Daudet’s book. I never saw a Tartarin anywhere there.

Being at Tarascon, I inquired for the Tarasque—the dragon that was led captive by Saint Martha—and I found it locked up in a stable, 18 March 1891. It is not allowed out in processions now, as it has broken too many people’s bones by the waggings of its tail. Getting inside it, I found a tiller that worked the tail as if it were a rudder, and I made it wag.

The dragon at Tarascon is not unlike the dragon in one of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s Kampf mit dem Drachen, where the knight uses a dummy to accustom his horse and hounds to the look of a dragon in real life. He does this in France, and then goes back to Rhodes and kills the dragon there. The story is told of Dieudonné de Gozon; and he must have seen the dummy at Tarascon, as he was at Avignon from 1324 to 1332. But in one version the knight dressed up a bull to personate the dragon. In a version current at Rhodes it is a dervish, not a knight. He loaded forty donkeys with eighty sacks of lime, and drove them past the dragon’s den. The dragon swallowed them, lime and all, and then went down to drink.

The dragon at Rhodes was killed near Phileremos, the citadel of the ancient town of Ialysos; and Phorbas of Ialysos had killed a dragon there about two thousand years before. The old Greek legend was put into a mediæval dress; and another of those legends has been put into a dress that is completely modern. There are elevated beds of sea-shells in various parts of Rhodes, showing that the island has risen from the sea; and the story of its rising from the sea is told by Pindar in his ode in honour of Diagoras of Ialysos, Olympia, vii. 54-71. Either Thomson or Mallet copied this from Pindar into Rule Britannia, and now it is Britain that at Heaven’s command arose from out the azure main.

Many years ago I wrote a couple of volumes on the history of the island of Rhodes: they were published in 1885 and 1887, and now are obsolete. At first I only thought of writing about the Rhodian colonies in Sicily, but the subject led me on to Rhodes itself, and then to the adventures of the Knights after they had quitted Rhodes; but these were not included in the book.

The Knights were the Hospitallers, or Order of Saint John of Jerusalem; and their first home was at Jerusalem. But the Saracens drove them out of Palestine in 1291, the Turks drove them out of Rhodes in 1522, and the French drove them out of Malta in 1798. Malta was taken by the English in 1800; and by the tenth article of the Treaty of Amiens, 1802, England undertook to give up Malta to the Knights within three months. It is ancient history now that England held on to Malta, and thereby made a precedent for dealing with an inconvenient treaty as a scrap of paper.

In 1814 some of the French members of the Order formed a committee at Paris to see what could be done. But there were scamps among them, and these men admitted new members to the Order and made appointments in it—neither of which things had they any right to do—and pocketed the money that they took for entrance-fees, etc. The climax came in 1823 with an attempt of theirs to borrow money in the name of the Order. The office of Grand Master was vacant then, but the Lieutenant of the Mastery sent them a peremptory letter, 27 March 1824, saying that the committee was merely a self-appointed body without authority, and must forthwith be dissolved. The French Minister for Foreign Affairs also wrote a letter, 29 April 1825, saying that the admissions and appointments made by the committee were altogether illegal and could not in any way be recognized. And when the committee proposed to meet again in May 1826, the meeting was stopped by the Prefect of the Police.

France was now too hot for them, but the rogues found dupes in England. They began admitting new members to the Order and making appointments in it over here; and they appointed the Rev. Dr Peat as Prior. That was the foundation of the present Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in England.

All the English and Irish estates of the Order were confiscated by Act of Parliament in 1540, and the incorporation of the Order was dissolved in England and in Ireland, 32 Henry VIII, cap. 24. There was an attempt, 2 April 1557, to circumvent this Act by Letters Patent under a later Act, 4 & 5 Philip & Mary, cap. 1, but this was defeated by another Act next year, 1 Elizabeth, cap. 24. Of course, these proceedings had no effect outside the realm, and therefore did not touch the Order itself, as that was an international body with headquarters then at Malta. But they cut off revenue and practically closed a good recruiting ground; and there were few Englishmen or Irishmen among the Knights in after years. For administrative purposes the Order had been divided into Languages or Nations, one of which was English and included Ireland. But the members of the Order were simply Knights Hospitallers or Knights of Malta or of Rhodes, not Knights of any separate Nation or Language.

In 1834 Peat took an oath of office as “Prior of the Sixth Language of the Sovereign Order of Saint John of Jerusalem in London,” swearing “to keep and obey the ancient statutes of the said Sovereign Order,” and “to govern the said Sixth Language as Prior thereof under the provision of the statute of the 4th and 5th of Philip and Mary in the case made and provided.” By the statutes of the Order (which he promised to keep and obey) he was neither qualified for appointment nor appointed by the proper authority, and there could not be a Prior of a Language—the Languages were governed by Bailiffs, with Priors as their subordinates in the various priories. There is no statute of 4 & 5 Philip & Mary relating to the Order, only Letters Patent; and these make no provision for the government of the Language or the Priory. So he only bound himself to discharge the duties of an impossible office under an imaginary statute.

These people could not even make out mediæval Latin. If a candidate for admission proved his ancestry, he was admitted a knight by right, de justitia. If he could not prove his ancestry, he might be admitted a knight by favour, de gratia. Out of this they have made Knights of Justice and Knights of Grace. The hospitale at Jerusalem was a place of hospitality where pilgrims were entertained. They mistook it for a hospital, and then went in for ambulance-work, first-aid, etc., on the strength of their mistake. No doubt, they have done much useful work, especially in this War. But you can very well do useful work without pretending to be something that you aren’t. And these non-combatants are posing as successors of the greatest clan of warriors in the age of Chivalry.

They were silly enough to apply for a Charter of Incorporation, and this brought them up against some lawyers with no love for false pretences. Instead of getting a charter as a branch of the real Order, or in some way connected with it, they only got a charter (14 May 1888) as a charitable society of fifty years’ standing.

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but I doubt its covering lies as well; and their lies were multitudinous. They had a statement printed—“The English, or Sixth, Language of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem: a brief sketch of its history and present position, compiled by a committee appointed for that purpose by the Chapter of the Language.” It can hardly be surpassed in puerility. It talks of proceedings at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and at Paris in 1816, as if there were no such things as the Acten des Wiener Congresses and the Archives Parlementaires to show that its statements are untrue in all essential points. It cites the Letters Patent of 2 May 1557 as saying one thing, when they say another, as anyone can see by looking at Dugdale’s Monasticon, where the document is printed. (I had Dugdale collated with the Patent Roll, and there is no mistake.) It says Peat’s oath of office was sworn in the King’s Bench, 24 February 1834, and is on the record. It would certainly be on the record, if it was sworn in the King’s Bench, as 9 George IV, cap. 17, was then in force. I had the record searched: it was not there.

Not long after I was called to the Bar, an old Queen’s Counsel said to me as we were coming out of court—“I can’t understand that fellow telling those transparent lies. The whole object of telling a lie is to deceive. If you don’t do that, you don’t attain your object, and you have the bad taste in your mouth the same.”

When the Knights left Malta in 1798, they took their greatest relic with them—the right hand of their patron saint, John Baptist. Having chosen the Czar Paul as Grand Master, they delivered this relic to him at Gatchina on 12 October 1799; and it has remained in Russia ever since. The anniversary is kept, and there is a service for the Translation of the Right Hand in imitation of the old service at Constantinople on the anniversary of its translation there from Antioch. It goes from Petersburg to Gatchina on 11 October and is carried to Saint Paul’s church there on 12 October, returning to Petersburg on 22 October. I saw it in the Winter Palace at Petersburg in 1889, and made some notes about it then—“The Right Hand is sadly dilapidated. The fourth and fifth fingers are gone, so that it can no longer gesticulate in response to inquiries about the harvest. There is a very large hole in the thumb, far too large for the little morsel of the thumb that choked the man-eating dragon at Antioch. And it is all very black indeed. The remaining fingers are long and slender, and the nails are delicately formed. It is the hand of an Egyptian, and a mummy.” It was at Constantinople when Sultan Mohammed took the city in 1453, and Sultan Bajazet gave it to the Knights in 1484.

Rhodes was besieged by Sultan Solyman in 1522, and at the great assault upon the city, 24 September, the garrison believed they saw John Baptist himself standing on the roof of his own church, waving a banner and encouraging them. It really was the prior’s French cook; and when they found this out, they accused him of making signals to the enemy, and nearly murdered him.

At the siege of Rhodes by Mithridates in 88 B.C. the garrison saw the goddess Isis standing on her temple and hurling down a mass of flame on the attacking force. And such apparitions have been common, from Castor and Pollux at Lake Regillus down to Saint George at Mons. Saint George, however, had no business there. He suffered martyrdom at Diospolis, twelve miles from Jaffa, where Perseus delivered Andromeda; and the old legend was transferred to him. It must have been a whale that Perseus killed, according to Pliny’s description of the bones; and, if Saint George had known his business, he would have abandoned Mons and gone out spearing submarines.

There is a treatise by Artemidoros on the interpretation of dreams, Oneirocritica, which (I believe) is not much read now, yet really is worth reading, as it shows what people used to dream about in the second century A.D. We do not dream now of being beheaded or crucified or becoming gladiators or fighting with wild beasts or being sold as slaves. But apparently these people dreamt oftener of such calamities than of the minor ills of life. Judging by what they dreamt, I should say their minds were not so complex as our own.

In interpreting their dreams Artemidoros tried induction, noting down the things they dreamt and what happened to them afterwards. Thus (iv. 31) Stratonicos dreamt he kicked the Roman Emperor: on going out he trod on something, and found it was a gold coin with the Emperor’s image on it. There were two kinds of dreams. If people dreamt of doing anything that they did habitually, it was nothing but a dream and needed no interpreting; but it became a vision, if they dreamt of doing things they seldom did, or could not do. Thus, it was only a dream, when they dreamt of lighting a lamp from the fire on the hearth; but it was a vision, when they dreamt they lit it from the Moon—after dreaming this a man went blind, v. 11, 34. Most people would be content with saying that the thing could not be done, because the Moon was too far off; but Artemidoros goes on to explain that nothing can be lighted from the Moon, as the Moon itself is not alight and shines only by reflexion.

They often dreamt odd things. Thus (i. 4) somebody dreamt he saw a man playing draughts with Charon, and he helped him to win the game: Charon did not like losing it, and went for him: he bolted off, with Charon after him, and got as far as an inn called the Camel; and he slipped into a shed there and closed the door, and thus dodged Charon, who ran past.—It is an uncomfortable sort of dream that might occur to anybody now, only the setting would not be the same. Instead of Charon, it would be the Devil; and instead of draughts, it would very likely be King Arthur and the Devil playing quoits. They played a game of quoits with Haytor Rocks about three miles from here—the Devil missed King Arthur with one rock, and then King Arthur got the Devil with the other, and sent him down below.

In dreams I have imagined myself in Rhodes, walking up the hill at Ialysos and finding Laon cathedral on the top. Laon stands on the same sort of hill: so this came from mixed memories. I have also imagined myself in Paris, driving to the Opéra and finding Milan cathedral there instead. They are both great staring buildings of about three acres each on similar sites: so this came from mixed memories also. But then I found the Louvre and Tuileries turned right round, with the east front of the Louvre looking westward down the Tuileries gardens; and I cannot think what mental twist did that. When I dream of being in those gardens, I usually see the west front of the Tuileries as it was before the war of 1870, not the ruin afterwards nor the vacant space there now.

I dream almost every night that I am travelling, sometimes on a ship but usually by train. In former years I travelled a good deal, and could ascribe the dreams to that; but since 1914 I have not travelled at all, and yet I dream of travelling just the same. As a rule, some little thing goes wrong—a few mornings ago I woke up very cross at finding that the Penzance dining-car did not go through to Brindisi, whereas the time-bill said it did. And these things usually happen at a station that could not possibly exist, being partly a big terminus and partly a junction and partly a wayside station with one signal-post. I can see a great deal of this station with my mind’s eye when I am awake, only there are misty bits just where the wayside station merges in the junction and where the junction merges in the terminus. But I do not see these misty bits in dreams, as my mind is occupied with one thing at a time and jumps from thing to thing like pictures on a film. This station has remained unaltered in my mind for twenty years at least, as I remember talking of it to a man who died in 1899.

As a rule, I see things with my mind’s eye almost as distinctly as if I were looking at the things themselves; and I thought that everyone could do the same till I read Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and found how greatly people varied as to this. I also see some things with my mind’s eye as symbols for other things that cannot be seen at all, e.g. boot-trees for arguments. They are trees for shoes, without handles, and made of polished wood; and they are on a grey felt floor with an open doorway at the further end. When two arguments lead up to a third, the corresponding boot-trees turn their toes in towards the other’s heel; and I have seen as many as eight or ten boot-trees pointing like this to half the number in a line beyond them, these also pointing to others further on, and finally a boot-tree going through the doorway. I find it very convenient—I see more at a single glance than I could put into a page of print.

Galton speaks of numbers being personified, and gives several instances of children doing this. The son of an old friend of mine—an undergraduate now—tells me he did it when a child and sometimes does it still. His views are—“1 and 0 do not count, being inactive. 2, good-natured, always doing its best to please. 3, sometimes kind and condescending, hated by 8 when added, but not when multiplied to make 24: great friend of 9. 4, not very noticeable, but means well: great friend of 8 and 6. 5, much the same as 4, but no special friend except 2: rather meek. 6, inclined to be selfish: no great friend of 3, pals with 4 and 8. 7, unlucky and despised, bad luck in making such numbers as 49 and 63 when multiplied. 8, fat and good-natured, but inclined to be selfish: likes being made up to good round numbers such as 12, 24, 48, &c. 9, friend of 3, disagreeable and a bully, despised for making brutish numbers such as 27, 63, 81, &c.”

I now suspect Pythagoras of having done this as a child and then, instead of putting away childish things, making it a basis for much of his philosophy. Thus, amongst other things, he says that 8 is Justice itself, being isacis isos or bis bina bis—in other words, it is composed of 4 and 4, and each 4 is composed of 2 and 2, so that there is even balance throughout. This reasoning must surely be an afterthought to justify some childish fancy.

Usually, when people think of numbers, they see the Arabic figures with their mind’s eye; and some people can see these figures manœuvring at each stage of a calculation. (I heard this from George Bidder, who was famous as The Calculating Boy a hundred years ago.) Within narrow limits I see this manœuvring myself; but, although they are mere figures, I feel that they are moving like soldiers on parade. And that comes very near personifying them.

I imagine that the people who see things very clearly with their mind’s eye, are the most likely people to see visions when their intellect has lost its balance through hunger or fatigue. In dreams the outward eye is closed, and the mind’s eye must rely on memories that are often mixed. But in visions both sights are at work, though the outward eye is working listlessly for want of physical strength; and I suspect that every vision is based on what the outward eye is seeing at the time.

There is a clump of trees upon the summit of a hill about three miles from here, and it stands out against the sky-line, when one looks up along the valley of the Wrey. It looked like any ordinary clump of trees until the undergrowth was cut a little while ago; but now one sees the sky between the tree-tops and the hill, and the line of tree-tops looks just like a prehistoric monster of the lizard type. I notice that it looks more life-like, when I am tired out; and with want of sleep and food as well, I might have visions of a dragon there.

Some years ago a woman said that she had seen the Devil, when she had only seen the Rural Dean. She lived in a lonely cottage; and, when the Devil went to Widdicombe on 21 October 1638, he called there to inquire the way, and he asked for water—which betrayed him by going off in steam. Now the Rural Dean was dressed in black and mounted on a big black horse; and it was a foggy day, so that he loomed up large. Not knowing the story, he called there to inquire the way to Widdicombe, and asked for water also, but did not get it, as the woman fled. I think she had a vision, merely based on what she saw, and going far beyond that. She said she saw his horns.

People who have seen the Devil, all say he is just like the pictures of him: so I suppose they carry these pictures in their mind, and see them with the mind’s eye, when they are in a fright. Pictures may also be the basis of many of our outlandish dreams. After a long look at a picture of some centaurs, a man here said to me—“Pity there bain’t such critters now: they’d be proper vitty on a farm.” I quite agreed with him, they would. A week afterwards he said to me—“I dreamed as I were one o’ they, and, my word, I did slap in.”

I have not heard of the Devil being seen about here very lately, nor of many witches. Seven or eight years ago two elderly people were complaining that someone had ill-wished them; but their misfortunes could be explained by their own want of foresight, without the intervention of an evil eye. They came from Cornwall. An old friend of mine tells me that his grandmother practised witch-craft there. She could bring down rain or bring in shoals of fish, but would seldom perform the rites until she had been asked repeatedly. In fact, she waited till the weather showed her what was coming.

My grandfather was called an atheist by several people here, because he scoffed at witch-craft, “a thing attested by the Word of God.” If you denied the Witch of Endor, you might as well deny John Baptist or Saint Paul. Witch-craft was as well attested as the miracles. But then they said that miracles had ceased, yet said the Bible showed that there was witch-craft still.

In very early life I felt certain that a woman here must be a witch, because she looked it. She lived in a cottage that had a great big open fireplace, and she sat there cowering over the fire on the hearth, with her walking-stick leant up across her knees. I had no doubts about her flying up the chimney on that stick, and always hoped she would while I was there.

We have substitutes for most things now, even substitutes for witches. My father noted in his diary on 7 April 1844, “Witch-craft a common belief to this day in Lustleigh, and prevalent even among the better-informed classes.” And now I note that alien-espionage has been just as common a belief from 1914 onwards, and especially among those classes. They scent spies and aliens as keenly as the old folk scented witches; but the mania is more expensive now.—Two young men had bought a lonely cottage in a wood, and were living their own life up there. Until the War nobody ever suggested that they were anything but English. Then people said that they were German, and would as readily have said that they were Japanese or Russian, if we had been at war with Russia or Japan. And then a more inventive person said they had a gun-platform of concrete underneath their lawn. In a careless moment the editor of a local paper put that in. It was a costly blunder, and the lawyers profited.

There are people everywhere just now with such a comprehensive hate of Germany that they tell us to abjure all German things for evermore; but I notice that the men who talk like this, are almost always wearing German hats. Instead of saying that the hat is Tyrolese or Homburg or whatever German type it really is, they say it is of English make and call it Trilby or some other name like that. Yet these same men are always preaching that a German is a German always, although he has been naturalized or born here and has assumed an English name.

In speaking of the politicians who governed France in 1871, Bismarck said that some of them had Jewish names but several more had Jewish noses. People here think only of the alien name, forgetting that the alien blood is just as active in descendants in the female line, though the name has lapsed on marriage. There is the progeny of a Dutchman who settled at Exeter in the reign of William the Third. Nobody bothered about the female line; but descendants in male line were hunted out as Germans by a pack of people who knew too little of language or of history to recognize the name as Dutch.

There is probably more alien blood in England than these people think. They say that so-and-so is tainted by having an alien ancestor some generations back. But in nine cases out of ten they cannot give a complete list of their own great-great-grandparents, or even their great-grandparents; and the completest lists may not be quite conclusive. There was a wonderful old lady on a Dartmoor farm, ostensibly of English ancestry, but born about the time when French prisoners-of-war were out on parole there. I have seen her towering form, with eagle eye and outstretched hand, directing geese into their pond; and I have fancied that I saw a Marshal in Napoleon’s army launching a charge of cuirassiers.

I have heard her say Bo to a goose. Few people say it now, and they never say it properly. If it is said in the right way, the goose turns round and waddles off at once, however much it may have hissed before. It is like Ahi with a horse in Italy. When the driver has flogged and progged in vain, as a last resort he says Ahi, and then the brute moves on.

In my early days my grandfather would often talk of the French prisoners-of-war whom he remembered here a century ago; and I never imagined then that I was going to have prisoners-of-war working for me here, and that these prisoners would be German. They were quartered at Newton Abbot in the workhouse, and came out each day to work, returning for the night. I had nineteen here in the summer of 1918, though never more than six at once. There were six from Bavaria, three from Baden, two from Wurtemberg and one from Saxony; and seven were reckoned as Prussians, but two of these were from the Rhineland, two from Hannover, two from Hamburg and the other one from Silesia. They were the same kind of people that I have always met in rural parts of Germany—good-tempered and good-natured countryfolk, exceedingly unlike the Huns depicted by our Propaganda.

However little we may like it, the Germans are our own kith and kin. Sixteen of those nineteen prisoners would certainly have passed as English, if they had been in English clothes and had not cut their hair so short. A person here confounded Hannover with Andover, and thought the Hannoverians were of English birth. Of course, language makes a gulf; and here it was not merely a matter of English and German. The prisoners spoke such different dialects that they could hardly understand each other, and the Yorkshire of the corporal in charge of them was not exactly like our Devonshire here.

Quite early in the War the people here discovered that all Belgians were not angels, and I think they are discovering that all Germans are not devils. But at first the prisoners were not welcome. Looking at them from the road, a man declared he would not stand in the same field with them. A girl who heard him, looked at him, and was unkind enough to say, “No, not in the same battle-field.”

Standing in the wheat field, I was watching two good-looking cheery youths at work there. They were the same sort and evidently liked each other; but one belonged to Lustleigh and the other one to Dueren near Cologne. I felt some doubts about the state of things that had put them into hostile armies, to maim or kill each other if they could.

On an outlying farm the clock went wrong, and struck one at three and two at four and so on. This was a nuisance, as people were unable to remember which was wrong, the striking or the hands. But the farmer settled it by keeping the clock an hour fast; and then, when it pointed to one and struck eleven, everybody knew that it was twelve.

There is much the same confusion now on every farm that has adopted Summer Time. Farm work must be regulated by the sun—some things cannot be done until the dew is off the ground, others cannot be done until the noon-tide heat has passed, and so on with other things all through the day; and the times for doing them have been fixed accordingly. It would be disastrous to do the things an hour earlier: so the times for doing them are all moved on. The clock says five instead of four, but what was timed for five is timed for six.

For many years past the Board of Agriculture has called for a return on 4 June in every year with the acreage of the crops and the quantity of live-stock on each farm, including horses but not including asses. In 1920 the War Office called for a return of horses and asses on 4 June. So (I suppose) asses must be useless in agriculture, but of some use in war. Just at that time the War Office was suspected of planning an expedition into southern Russia; and I wondered if a man of genius had been reading in Herodotos how a Persian army made an expedition there, and frightened the enemy clean away by the braying of the asses in its train.

Although the War Office and the Board of Agriculture were calling for returns on the same day, 4 June, the War Office did not apply for them direct, or through the Board of Agriculture, but through the Board of Trade. And these authorities differed over mules. The War Office had asked for a return of horses and asses, and said that ‘horse’ included ‘mule’; but the Board of Trade changed this into a return of horses, mules and asses. Seeing that the Board of Trade was acting under an Army Council Regulation made under section 114 of the Army Act, I doubted its having any right whatever to distinguish horse and mule.

In this part of Devon we all received a notice in the autumn of 1917, headed “Increased Food Production for 1918,” and informing us—“The area of corn and potatoes allotted to the Southern Division of Devon for 1918 is 86,000 acres. In order to get this quantity it is necessary for all farms to have 30 per cent. of their total acreage into corn and potatoes. This percentage has been adopted by the Executive Committee for the Division, who have power to enforce it. You are expected to have [number inserted] acres into corn and potatoes in 1918.” I suppose the fools imagined that an average of 30 per cent. on all the farms together was the same thing as 30 per cent. on every single farm. But they had the power, and they used it with disastrous results. They ploughed their 30 per cent. on dairy farms, destroying pasture that will not mature again for years; and on other farms with 60 per cent. quite fit for ploughing, they ploughed no more than 30. On some moorland farms they only got their 30 by ploughing such sterile ground that the crop was of less value than the seed that was put in.

There was a story of a successful advocate who was troubled on his death-bed by the thought of having got innocent men convicted, but at last found comfort in the thought of having also got guilty men acquitted, so that, upon the whole, he had got justice done. And this Committee will perhaps find comfort in the thought of having got the specified amount of ploughing done.

In some flat parts of England people might believe that all land was alike and one acre as good as another; but I cannot understand how anyone could think so here, in a district that runs up from sea-level to about 2000 feet above, with all sorts of soils and climates. The fools may say they had no time to make a survey of each farm; but that is no excuse. They had the figures at hand, and did not use them.

Under the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 a map was made of every parish in England, and every field was numbered on the map; and the corresponding number on the Tithe Apportionment gave the acreage of the field and its state of cultivation. It is waste of seed and labour to put corn or potatoes into fields that were not arable then, for they were grown wherever it was possible to grow them, as they were paying crops—Potato Disease did not appear till 1845, and the Corn Laws were not repealed till 1846. The fools could easily have seen what fields were arable then, and based their regulations upon that. They had the figures in every parish, at Exeter for the whole of Devon, and in London for the whole of England, for the apportionments and maps were made in triplicate—one for the parson of the parish, one for the bishop of the diocese, and one for the Tithe Commissioners themselves, which last is at the office of the Board of Agriculture.

In the autumn of 1918 we had a notice that 35 per cent. of every holding must be ploughed, and “substitution of quota (from one holding to another) will not be allowed under any circumstances.” Suppose arrangements had been made for ploughing an acre of productive land on one holding instead of an acre of unproductive land upon another. It was forbidden by these fools, in the name of Food Production.

Farmers often blundered, and have been ridiculed for that; but after all they only blundered here and there and now and then. As things are, they have to blunder on a bigger scale, and may be prosecuted if they fail to blunder as prescribed.

As for the people who prescribe these blunders, it is charitable to think that they are merely fools: they may be something worse. The law assumes that everyone intends the natural consequences of his acts, and might very well assume that they intended doing all they could to damage agriculture, without increasing the supply of food. Such things have been done before. Thus, the London County Council wanted an excuse for running steamers on the Thames, and therefore made it impossible for the steamboat companies to carry on. It then ran steamers at a loss, using money from the rates, and finally came to grief with them.

These public bodies come to grief in the most foolish ways. I am one of the trustees of a property in London, and the County Council scheduled part of it for “betterment.” We could not comprehend how houses in one street would be bettered by the Council’s widening another street that ran parallel with it some hundred yards away. But the Council then decided on making a new street at right angles to the street that it had widened, and demolished these houses to make way for the new street. It wanted now to buy them at their market value, but we made it buy them at their “bettered” value—we could not, as trustees, sell property to the Council for less than the Council’s own valuation of it. So the Council paid us (with the ratepayers’ money) for a “betterment” that never existed except in some cranks’ brains.

Lawyers abbreviate trustees into trēēs, and a careless copyist will sometimes write trustees for trees, if the crossing of the t is rather long. On looking into a deed, I found a power to cut down and sell trustees by public auction or by private treaty, etc., etc., and I was one of the trustees there. In another trust there were two sums of Consols in the joint names of myself and co-trustee. They were entered in the usual way as A and B accounts, and it happened that our B account went on long after our A account was closed. My co-trustee was a knight, belonging to various orders, and ‘B act.’ came next the groups of letters following his name. After a time this was altered into ‘Bart.’—an excusable mistake, as there was no ‘A act.’ and he was ‘Sir.’ Having thus become a baronet here, he was entered as ‘Bart.’ in other stocks standing in his name.

A friend of mine was being shown into a stockbroker’s room just as a shabby old man was coming out; and the old man turned back and said something which showed that he was speculating heavily. My friend remonstrated with the stockbroker for letting the man risk money that he manifestly could not afford to lose. But the answer was—“Don’t make yourself uneasy over him. He’s very fond of speculating, but he always keeps a hundred thousand in Consols, so that he may never be reduced to actual want.”

I doubt if many people understand the happiness of misers. It must be like the happiness of feeling thoroughly fit. There is a joy in knowing you can jump clean over any gate you see; and I think the miser has this joy in knowing he can pay for anything he likes. But he does not go buying things, any more than you go jumping over gates.

The air is often very buoyant here, especially upon the hill tops; and one morning on the top of Easton Down a friend of mine turned round to me and said—“Well, you know, I don’t think the Ascension was very much of a miracle after all.” And certainly one felt there was no saying where one wouldn’t go to, if one just gave a jump.

A man here said to me, “Her went up ’xactly like an angel,” as if he often saw them go, and thought I must have seen them too. (He was speaking of the finish of a play he saw in town.) Another person here was very certain of what angels did or did not do. A stranger came to the back-door one Sunday morning, and asked for a drink of cider to help him on his way. He was denied it by the maid who was in charge there, and thereupon he said to her—“You know not what you do. You might be entertaining angels unawares.” To which she answered—“Get thee’ long. Angels don’t go drinkin’ cider church-times.”

People sometimes ask me for advice on matters of which I am no judge, and a girl once asked me this:—She had been engaged to a young man for several years, but the engagement had just been broken off. She used to suffer dreadfully from toothache; and in the early days of his affection he sent her to the dentist, and paid for putting in a plate of teeth. Was that plate of teeth a present that ought to be returned? Rightly or wrongly, I said that it was not; and I see she has it still.

When teeth are drawn, young people here think nothing of the pain, but often speak with pride of the resistance of their teeth—“he scarce could stir’n,” or “he had a proper job to get’n.” In a letter to my father, 20 January 1860, my grandfather says—“I saw a man spitting out blood, and asked him the matter, when he said he had had a tooth drawn, and the doctor had torn the jaw.... I gave him brandy on lint, which soon stopped the flow of blood.... The old dentists or tooth-drawers used to apply salt and water, which was not bad, though a little brandy would have been better: but the fact is their charge was only sixpence, so they could not afford the brandy. But now, I hear, those new fashioned ones charge as much as five shillings: therefore there is no excuse.”

A man here who was born in 1852, tells me that he had whooping-cough when he was four years old, and that he was treated for it (if not cured of it) by being laid on a sheep’s forme. A forme is the imprint that a sheep makes on the grass by lying in one place all night; and when the sheep gets up in the morning, a sort of vapour rises from the warm ground underneath into the cold morning air. He was taken out into a meadow in the early morning, and was told to lie face-downwards on a forme and breathe this vapour in, not merely through the nostrils but with open mouth. He breathed it in until the ground was cold and there was no more vapour to be breathed (a matter of about five minutes) and then he was taken home to bed.

People now-a-days laugh at cures like that, but they laughed at Jenner when he first said that there was something about a cow that kept small-pox away. There may be something about a sheep that cures the whooping-cough; but there may be people who would rather have the whooping-cough than cure it in this way. I remember about fifty years ago a claret was being advertised as an antidote to gout; and the old three-bottle men who tried it, all said that they would rather have the gout.

I started drinking port when I was less than two years old. An injudicious friend remonstrated with my mother—if I had port when I was well, what could I take if I were ill and needed strengthening? She answered that it would prevent my ever being ill. I never was ill enough to spend a day in bed till I was fifty-five, and might never have been ill at all, if I had gone on drinking port proportionately; but I degenerated with the times and only drank two glasses, not two bottles, as I should. There is an entry in Dyott’s Diary, 10 November 1787—“There were just twenty dined, and we drank sixty-three bottles of wine.” I heard of a man going to a physician because he could not drink three bottles, as his father did before him. The physician said, “Perhaps it was port that your father drank.” Even in my time it has become a different wine. If I can trust my tongue, the vintages of 1900 and 1904 are quite unlike the vintages of 1847 and 1858 at similar ages. Phylloxera attacked the Douro vineyards after 1878, and most of them have been replanted with a stronger sort of vine.

My grandfather was a little disturbed about my starting port so early in my life. He writes to my father on 22 November 1858, “My views are different from yours respecting the treatment of young children: however, I hope all will go right with him,” and again on 30 January 1859, “I hope he gets on well—but not too much port wine, mind.” All went right with me, and I got on as he hoped; and he writes on 25 December 1859 that a neighbour said I had “limbs strong enough for a wrestler.”

Wrestling was formerly as great a sport in Devon as in Cornwall; but it died out in this district about fifty years ago. My brother writes to my father, 2 August 1866—“I went to see the wrestling, but it was a rough and clumsy business.” This was at a festival at Lustleigh in honour of the opening of the railway. My grandfather writes to my father, 28 May 1858—“There was a grand wrestling match at Moreton on Saturday, set on foot by Mr *****, who said he would see one match more before he left the world.” A few years earlier there was wrestling at Moreton every summer. My grandfather notes, 22 June 1841, “Moreton Wrestling today,” 14 June 1842, “Wrestling at Moreton today and tomorrow,” and so on, and usually with a further note that so-and-so or so-and-so had gone off there instead of sticking to work.

Writing to my father on 10 November 1861, my grandfather says, “Football was a game much played in my youth, but cricket was my favourite game.” He was born in 1789; and the cricket and football of a century ago were very different from cricket and football now.

The chimney-pot hat used to be worn in playing cricket; and I have seen it worn in matches on village-greens and even at Lord’s. The distinction between Gentlemen and Players was much sharper then than now; and the Gentlemen wore chimney-pots, while the Players wore caps. Policemen also wore chimney-pots, a London fashion adopted in Milan and retained by policemen there. And the Channel Pilots wore chimney-pots. I remember them on liners starting from the Thames. The pilots were dropped off Dover or the Isle of Wight, and kept their hats on even when going down the ship’s side to the pilot cutter, and came on board in the same style on voyages home.

My father told me how he once got a lesson in the Continental way of taking off your hat to anyone. He met Louis Philippe strolling in the Tuileries gardens, and raised his hat to him as he would have raised it to Prince Albert or anyone like that in England. And in reply the King not merely raised his hat, but swung it right down to the level of his knees and up again.

He notes in his diary on 17 September 1840 that he was at Versailles that afternoon, and “there were no cheers or any sign of respect” when Louis Philippe drove out from the Trianon. He also notes on 15 September that “the Palais de Justice is strongly guarded, as young Bonaparte is imprisoned there.” Some years afterwards he saw ‘young Bonaparte’ in the Tuileries gardens and Louis Philippe at Kew.—Napoleon the Third had landed in France on 6 August 1840, and was sentenced on 6 October to imprisonment for life, not escaping until 1846.

After a visit to the Palais de Justice, 16 October 1839, he notes down in his diary—“An advocate on the right bench was addressing the judges as I entered. He used an immense deal of action and gesture, quite unknown at the English bar. Then the advocate on the other side replied. His action was much more violent, even when reading from documents.” He liked things quietly done. In his diary, 24 March 1838, he speaks of Lord Denman as “a judge more to my liking than any one I ever saw: quite a contrast to some of them, especially in his exclusive attention to the case in hand, instead of officiously meddling with every thing and body in the court.”

Some twenty years ago a very astute old man in Paris got into litigation in the English courts about a group of companies that he controlled; and he asked me confidentially how much I thought he ought to give the judge in order to secure the right decision. I felt it would be waste of time to tell him that we did not do this here: so I told him what huge salaries our judges got, and what big fortunes most of them had made while they were at the Bar. He saw their price would be prohibitive, and gave the notion up. He really had a very strong case that was bound to win upon its merits; but from what he said, I gathered that merits were not always the decisive point in France in litigation or in anything else.

I once saw a trial for brigandage in Sicily. (I think it must have been at Girgenti in 1885, but am not quite sure.) This band of brigands never made mistakes. They never tried to rob a man unless he happened to be carrying a good amount of money: they never held a man to ransom unless he was worth ransoming; and they never fixed his ransom at a higher sum than his people could just manage to pay. They evidently had good information; and there were comparatively few people from whom the various bits of information could have come. And now the police had not only got the band of brigands, but had got the members of the syndicate that ran the band. I saw the prisoners in court—they were all inside a great big iron cage like one of the aviaries at the Zoo—and I have never seen more respectable and pious looking people than some of the members of that syndicate.

There was a story going round Sicily then of some young scamp, who was hard up, and arranged with brigands to capture him and share the ransom that his parents were quite sure to pay. The parents paid up heavily, and the brigands kept their word and gave him half.

I was at Taormina in 1883—it was a quiet place then with only two small inns, not a suburb of hotels, as now—and I was reading in Goethe’s diary of his travels, 7 May 1787, how he sat there in a garden by the sea and planned Nausikaa, a five-act tragedy of which he wrote no more than sixty lines. I am only a Wahrheit man myself, and have no Dichtung in me: yet I have imagined Nausicaa in Corfu, when looking at the stone Phæacian ship there; and I have also imagined Ulysses in Sicily, when looking at the seven great rocks the Cyclops hurled at him at Aci; but Taormina brought me down to 735 B.C., with the first Greek colony in Sicily on the little headland there, and all that this portended for Carthage and for Rome. Being a real poet, Goethe only talks geology about the rocks at Aci, and rather regrets he did not picnic there and hammer off some specimens of zeolite. He says the Taormina scenery will provide him with a setting for his play: he will model Ulysses on himself, his own conversation being quite as entertaining and instructive as anything Ulysses can have said to the Phæacians; and he will model Nausicaa on the ladies he left broken-hearted at each place where he stayed.

A poet ought not to disclose the sources of his inspiration. One day Petrarch was thinking of Laura till his eyes were filled with tears, and he walked into a brook he did not see: hence Del mar Tirreno. And one day Toplady got underneath a rock and kept dry in a storm: hence Rock of Ages. Toplady was here the wiser man, and the better poet too, for he says nothing of the rain, whereas Petrarch talks of his wet feet.

Goethe has disclosed his sources here; and his setting for the play seems just as inappropriate as his heroine and hero. The ancients were convinced that Corfu was Phæacia, and there is a certain austerity about Corfu that exactly suits the theme; whereas Taormina is all riotous luxuriance, befitting a Cyclops or a Satyr, but not Nausicaa. And surely Ulysses and Nausicaa are worlds away from Goethe and the ladies who adored him. Croce has called him ‘gran poeta’ and ‘borghese’ also, that is, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘middle-class’; and I think it hits him off.

Tradition has made Homer old and blind, and knows nothing of his maturity or youth. And from this I gather that he made his reputation late in life; and I suspect he made it with his later work, the Odyssey, or rather with the striking part of it, the travels of Ulysses, v. 1-xiii. 184. I fancy that Ulysses was to Homer what Hajji Baba was to Morier—a character of whom he could narrate all manner of tales collected from all sources; and his tales of Southern Italy and Sicily were just the tales to take the fancy of the Greeks, when they first thought of planting colonies there.

For my own part I believe that he lived on until about 800 B.C.—as Herodotos avers, ii. 53—and that he heard the first explorers’ tales of all the places that Ulysses visits. I do not underrate the difficulties of this, and have read some cubic feet of books about them; but, where the critics trace the handiwork of different poets, I cannot see anything but Homer at different stages of his life. He must have reached a good old age; and an author’s point of view may shift a long way with advancing years. In the Vatican Library they show you Henry the Eighth’s treatise against Martin Luther with the author’s dedication to the Pope.

There is an amusing little volcano near Girgenti, and I once spent the best part of a day there playing with it, 26 March 1885. It is called the Maccaluba, which clearly is the Arabic maklûbah, ‘topsy-turvy,’ so that the name goes back to the days of Arab rule in Sicily. The mound is about 150 feet high, and on it there are little cones that shoot out gas and mud. You throw turf and stones into the mouth of a cone until you stop it up: then it wheezes and gurgles for a while, and finally shoots out the things you have put in; and you retire briskly, as the mud is scorching if it catches you. But the whole volcano was very quiet then, and seemed more bored than angry in the way it shot things out.

Apart from its great cone, Etna has always given me the notion of a big Bath Bun, the little cones being the lollipops. It covers more than four hundred square miles—twice the whole extent of Dartmoor—and it is only two miles high. It looks best at long distances, where the lower part is hidden and the cone stands out: the best view I ever had of it, was from a steamer going from Brindisi to Malta. With little more than a third of the height, Vesuvius made more show. But it is sad to see Vesuvius now, after the eruption of 1906: the cone fell in, and that has deprived the mountain of its former grace. Volcanoes have these ups and downs. I always wish I could have seen the rise of Monte Nuovo on the other side of the bay. It is 450 feet in height, and rose up from level ground in the course of a few hours.

We have an extinct volcano here, only half a mile from this house. One sees geologists going round there now and then with their little bags and hammers and going off with specimens. An eminent geologist came lecturing here in 1906, and he spoke of volcanoes breaking out again after long periods of calm, such outbreaks being usually most violent. One of the listeners was much disturbed at hearing this, and thought it hardly worth his while to go on putting in potatoes near such a dangerous place. So he inquired when that hillock were a-likely to be bustin’ forth. With the spaciousness of a true geologist, the lecturer replied, “In the science of geology a period of thirty thousand years is relatively....” The man went on with his potatoes.

Though living on the edge of a volcano, I do not worry about eruptions, but only about earthquakes. I can remember two earthquakes in England—I felt the shock in 1884 but slept through it in 1868—and I have seen what earthquakes do abroad (especially at Chios in 1881) and I do not want a heavy earthquake here. In these valleys it would be overwhelming. The hillsides are strewn with granite rocks that have weathered away till they have nearly lost their hold upon the ground—some actually are Logans and go seesaw—and a smart shock would send them racing down into the valleys below. Sometimes I see a rabbit start a stone off down a hill; and, when the stone comes bouncing by, I picture what would happen if the stone weighed ten or fifteen tons, and hundreds of such stones were coming like an avalanche.

A year or two ago the End of the World became a common topic of conversation, as a newspaper was exploiting some prediction of it. And a man here cleared the matter up with the remark—“In church it be World Without End.” About fifty years ago my brother and I used to go to the Scotch Church in Crown Court towards the end of December, to hear Dr Cumming announce the End of the World for the ensuing year. But after a few years he grew more wary, and he hedged—“And if the World does not indeed come to an End, something else very remarkable will certainly occur.” (I quote from memory, and may have got the words wrong, but they were to that effect.) About the same date I heard a preacher in a country church declaring that the World, “having now lasted for close upon six thousand years, cannot reasonably be expected to last much longer.”

Coming into Jerusalem by the Damascus gate, 14 March 1882, I noticed two unfamiliar objects standing out above the city walls against the evening sky. Upon inquiry I found that they were ventilating pipes. A family (American, I think) had taken a house there, as they thought the Day of Judgement was at hand, yet wished to have a sanitated home meanwhile. And other families had likewise taken houses at Jerusalem, the notion being that the Last Judgement was going to be held there and residents would get priority.

On a Good Friday morning I found a small girl standing on my door-step here, eating a hot-cross-bun. I asked what she was doing there, and she curtsied and said, “Please, zir, I be fasting.” And generally the seasons of the Christian year were marked by buns, lamb, goose, plum-pudding, pancakes and salt-fish far more than by observances at church. There were no week-day services at Lustleigh except on Christmas Day, Ash Wednesday and Good Friday; and the only recognition of a saint’s-day was the transfer of its collect to the following Sunday. There was Communion four times in the year, each time with a fresh bottle of wine at ten shillings per bottle. It was heralded by the reading of the exhortation on the previous Sunday, and perhaps was held in more esteem for being so uncommon.

A new Rector came to Lustleigh at the end of 1844, and remained there till his death at the end of 1887; and at first the parish did not like his innovations. My grandfather writes to my father on 15 December 1844—“I am informed that the parishioners will not submit to any alteration in the service, and that the churchwardens have gone over the parish to ascertain their opinions, and it is supposed the parson will not attempt anything further to annoy them,” and again on 29 December 1844—“I saw Mr ***** on Thursday: he told me he had left the church for seven weeks until last Sunday, when he determined to go and shew his resentment by leaving the church on the parson going to the communion. He did so, and again on Christmas day, but no one followed him. They are opposed to the surplice and offertory, but have not spirit to resent it. His brother (who is churchwarden) says unless the parson goes back to the accustomed duties of the church, he will leave altogether. His father talks more than he does, but it appears he has stood the whole, offertory and all.”

He writes again, 20 January 1845, about people leaving the church—“What will they do then? I suppose they will dissent and erect more chapels, so we shall by and by have a plenty of ’Isms. I fancy we have quite enough already.” People left the church and went to chapel for very varied reasons. I remember an excellent old lady doing this because a child of hers had caught its death of cold by the parson a-baptizin’ of it without a-puttin’ of a kettleful o’ bilin’ water into that stoney font.

The new Rector was merely following the directions in the Book of Common Prayer. After the Sermon he is to “return to the Lord’s Table and begin the Offertory,” and then, “if there be no Communion,” he is to say a Prayer and Collect, concluding with the Blessing. And he kept his surplice on for finishing the service, instead of putting on a black gown to preach in, as was the custom when the Offertory and Prayer and Collect were omitted and the Blessing was given from the pulpit. He was right enough in what he did; but it was hardly worth doing, if it scared parishioners away.

The bishop was trying to stop all innovations. My grandfather writes to my father, 20 January 1845—“What do you think of the old bishop’s letter? I fancy it is very evasive: he gives them no direct instructions. They are to do as they are now doing: he does not tell them to withdraw any innovations.” It was only in more important matters that the bishop gave direct instructions to his clergy. My grandfather writes to my father, 27 October 1856—“The bishop has caused ***** to shave off his beard: he was like a Crimean soldier.”

Innovations might have been accepted here at any other time; but this was the period of Puseyism, and every innovation was supposed to be the outcome of a plot to Romanize the church. People generally knew nothing of ritual or doctrine, and would not have been so vehement about such things, had there not been another cause behind—they thought the clergy were not altogether honest over this. A few had gone over to Rome, and there was a notion that many others would have done the same, if they could have done it without giving up their livings. And from this point of view Anglicanism was merely a fraudulent device for holding on to livings, while assenting to the doctrines and ritual of Rome; or, as my grandfather puts it, 10 November 1850, “to remain in receipt of the Protestant pay while practising all the eccentricities of Romanism.”

However, there was not much sign of Romanism here, or of its eccentricities. Once a stranger came to church and crossed herself, and no one knew what she was at. It was described to me—“Her were a-spot-in’ and a-stripe-in’ of herself”—as if it were telegraphy by dot and dash.

There was a policeman who used to work here in the garden before he joined the force; and, when he was home on leave, he came round to see the gardener. I found them in the cider-cellar, looking at a dozen empty casks that I had lately bought. These were port-pipes of over a hundred gallons each; and, on seeing them ranged round the cellar, I began to think of Ali Baba and the oil-jars for the Forty Thieves. The policeman did not know the story, and listened very attentively and thoughtfully while I recounted it to him; and then he said in a regretful way, “We ain’t allowed to do that now.” Some years afterwards he had a murderer in his hands, and the murderer died. It was really a very satisfactory ending to the case, as it saved all the time and trouble that is wasted on the trial and execution of a murderer caught red-handed in the act. I presume the murderer died legitimately, but I thought about the Forty Thieves.

I have a planisphere, and a young carpenter noticed it when he was working in the house; and he showed an interest in it that astonished me until I saw what he was at. He learnt the names of the constellations and their places in the sky; and then, when he took damsels for romantic walks, he had a topic of conversation that his rivals could not touch.—An astronomer tells me that he has sometimes given a popular lecture and invited questions at the end, and more than once he has been asked—“You say the spectres [spectra] showed you what the stars be made of, but how did you get at their names?”

Some years ago I transferred a youthful maidservant from my house here to my house in town, and for several evenings after her arrival I heard thunderous noises overhead. At last I made inquiry, and was informed that she took exercise last thing at night by turning somersaults in her room. Another time two youths from here were staying at my house in town, while they were up for an examination; and the ample staircase tempted them to descend it on their heads. Coming downstairs in the twilight, I just saw the soles of their shoes, and could not imagine what those four objects were, hovering in mid-air far down below me. This method of progression is much in vogue at Lustleigh. On a hot day I have seen a dozen boys going along the mill-leet upside down. With sleeves tucked up, the water only wets the arms and scalp; but there is always a chance of overbalancing and going in full-length. That sends the water flying over anyone upon the path alongside; and sometimes, I think, they do it purposely for that. As an exasperated man once said, “they Lustleigh boys be hardly human.” Yet they might learn a little from the boys in Italy. When those boys go stealing fruit, they leave their clothes at home, as they run less risk of recognition, being naked. But the boys here keep their clothes on, and so are recognized at once.

On a Sunday morning I met a Lustleigh damsel on her way to church, wearing a new dress and evidently wishing it to be observed. For want of anything better to say, I said, “You don’t go in for hobble skirts, I see.” She answered, “No, not I: a proper fright I’d look in they.” And I inquired Why. The answer was, “Why, mother says my thighs be like prize marrows at a show.” Three old ladies, on their way to church, just caught the last remark, and passed on with averted eyes in consternation at our talk.

Some summers ago a young lady of about nineteen was lodging at a house near here; and, like many other townsfolk, she found the country more entrancing than the countryfolk find it themselves, “And her were proper mazed a-gettin’ up all hours of the mornin’ and goin’ out for walks. And her waked up everybody in the house a-bath-in’ of herself afore her went. And one of they mornin’s after her’d a-bath’d herself, her went off right across the valley without ever thinkin’ to put any of her clothes on. And Jim *****, he were a-goin’ early to his work, as he had a bit of thatchin’ to do four mile away, and he come sudden on her in that copse. And he saith, ‘Bide thee there ahind that rock, and I’ll tell my missis to bring’e a garment’.”

As a mid-Victorian bachelor, I was perturbed at post-Victorian spinsters coming down to stay with me unchaperoned. The custom is established now; but when it was an innovation, I wrote to one inquiring if she really meant to come alone. And she answered—“Yes, of course. Sans chaperon, sans culottes, sans everything.” Another one assured me that she could not possibly need a chaperon, as she was thirty and had three false teeth.

A man who often came to Lustleigh, was careless of the clothes he wore; and one of the Lustleigh people told him that he was lowering himself in everybody’s estimation by dressing in that untidy way. He was looking down the valley towards a house a long way off, as if he did not hear the other man’s remarks: then, nodding towards the house, he said—“Did you ever hear how old *****’s grandfather made all that money of his?” The other man pricked up his ears, and said he had not heard. The answer was—“Well, I can tell you, then. He always gave his whole attention to his own affairs.”

That was about sixty years ago, before the railway came here bringing fresh interests in. There were a good many people then who might have done much better in the world by giving as much attention to their own affairs as they were giving to other people’s. And in spite of all their curiosity they very often got things wrong. It was all ‘putting two and two together,’ drawing inferences and passing inferences on as facts. I hear echoes of it still. People tell me positively of things that happened in this neighbourhood at such or such a date, and I find diaries and letters and other papers contradicting them. Sometimes they tell me very unexpected things about myself, although they could have ascertained the facts at any time by merely asking me. I used often to go for a long Sunday walk, starting off along the Bovey road; and I was told I went to church at Bovey most Sunday afternoons.

This ‘putting two and two together’ is a ticklish process even for a careful man. I remember my father saying that he saw the Alabama at Calais and the Kearsarge waiting for her outside. Now, the Alabama never was at Calais: she went into Cherbourg, and the Kearsarge caught her coming out from there, 19 June 1864. I thought it was merely a slip of the tongue, Calais for Cherbourg; but his diary shows that he was not at Cherbourg at the time. There is an entry on 23 April 1864, “saw a Federal war-steamer lying off Calais, watching a Confederate vessel within the harbour,” and at that date the Alabama was about latitude 17° S. and longitude 32° W. I think he would have noted the ships’ names, if he had ascertained them at the time; and I suppose that some years afterwards he fancied that they must have been the Alabama and the Kearsarge.

My father was puzzled about a lady who lived at Moreton, where she could not possibly have many interests in life, yet seemed as active-minded and alert as if she mixed in the great world. He spent some time one afternoon in conversation with her, trying to discover where her interests lay; but the only thing that was elicited was this—she always made a point of knowing what everyone in Moreton had for dinner on a Sunday.

Very small things made a great commotion in a little town like that. There is a letter to my father from a friend there, 30 June 1843—“We had Sand’s Horsemen here on Friday last, who managed to take about 100l, which is a larger sum than they took in Exeter in one day or almost any other place. All the Beauty, Rank and Wealth of the neighbourhood for some miles were present—quite grand for Moreton—indeed I never saw so many persons in Moreton before. ***** and his wife came to my house and brought two Miss *****s, and I escorted one of them to the Horsemanship. Next day I was told that people said I was after Miss ***** and the cash—she has about 7000l. I am thoroughly sick of these reports.”

Not many years ago a man at Moreton said something slanderous about another man there. He was threatened with an action, and compromised it by agreeing to publish an apology and devote a sum of money to any public purpose that the injured party chose to name. The public purpose was chosen very astutely—taking the whitewash off the almshouses, a fine old granite building dated 1637. The building is mentioned in the guide-books, and many people go to see it. Finding it improved, they ask about it; and then (as the astute man had foreseen) they hear the story of the other man’s discomfiture.

In another country town a man did something that really was discreditable; but people went on exaggerating it until at last they dropped the real facts out, as these were much too trivial to be worth mentioning in such a lurid tale. And thus he found himself in a position to deny it all on oath. So he denied it, threatening prosecutions, and received a whitewashing that he did not at all deserve, the local papers denouncing “these unjustifiable aspersions on a man of blameless life.”

When people had to see a lawyer, they seldom told him the whole tale, and thus got bad advice, unless he knew enough of their affairs beforehand to enable him to get at all the facts. They would never trust a lawyer if he kept a clerk, and hesitated if he were in partnership, feeling that a clerk was sure to gossip and a partner might. And thus the little country towns were full of lawyers with small practices, each doing his own office work. There is a letter to my father, 12 September 1852, from a lawyer at Moreton, a very able man, who died in early life from no complaint but being bored to death. He says—“I copied 29 sheets draft and engrossed a deed and settled two mortgages and a lease yesterday: hard work that.”

There came a time when lawyers (and others) did not work so hard at Moreton. In his diary on 20 January 1870, two months before his death, my grandfather notes that he had been to Moreton in the morning to see the lawyer and the doctor—“neither at home, one hunting, the other shooting: so lost my labour.”

That lawyer who went hunting, used to tell his clients, when they had a good possessory title, they had much better burn their title-deeds, as these were certain to have some blunder in them that would cause trouble some day. He had drawn a good many of these deeds himself, so I suppose he knew what they were likely to contain.

Writing to my father on 3 December 1844, my grandfather says—“There is a literary society formed in Moreton. I suppose it must be a sort of mechanics’ institute. I fear the intellect of Moreton is too shallow to make much progress for some time. However, that is the way to make it better.”

A friend of my father’s writes to him from Moreton on 23 November 1844, “We have a meeting tomorrow for the purpose of establishing a Reading Room and Library for all classes,” and then on 13 December, “I enclose a copy of the rules of our Society for the promotion of knowledge.... We have £11 to lay out in books at once. We have expended a portion of that sum already in the purchase of selections from the ‘Family Library’ 2/6 per vol, Cabinet and Lardner’s Cyclopedia 3/-, and Chambers very useful elementary books on the sciences etc., all the nos (27) of Knights weekly volume 1/-each (the cheapest and best almost now publishing) and two or three of Murrays cheap edition etc. etc., in all nearly 90 volumes: cost about £7. We are going to take in weekly the ‘Athenæum’, Chambers Journal and Chambers Miscellany, some mechanics magazine and one or two other monthlys. Lectures once a week till April. The object of the Society is to benefit all classes and particularly tradesmen and their apprentices and mechanics etc. who will be much better in the reading room for a couple of hours than in a public house.” The reading room was to be open three times a week, and the librarian was to have £8 a year for the use of the room (it being in his house) including coals and candles and his own services.

There is now a Public Library at Moreton, an ostentatious building which must have cost at least a hundred times as much as the books that it contains. People can read newspapers there and bring away light literature to read at home. But such libraries are seldom of real use. There is not a library in Devon where real work can be done on very many subjects; and the buildings of these libraries might be turned to some account, if each one took a subject and acquired the proper books.

Being a Cambridge man, I can get books from the University Library—Oxford men cannot get books from theirs—and by going to the Reading Room at the British Museum, I can use the books in the immense collection there. That was all I needed when I had a house in town: if I wanted a book down here, I had only to wait till I went up. Now that I am always here, I feel the loss of it, and have to buy extensively. I have about four thousand books, and find I want quite eight or ten. If you have only a single subject, you may perhaps get the necessary books; but you can hardly manage that, if you have several subjects, and do not want mere books-of-reference or text-books, but the books containing the material on which such works are based. These books cannot always be obtained without delay, and therefore must be ordered in advance, as soon as you foresee that you will need them. And then, before a book arrives, you may perceive another way of dealing with the subject, and find you do not need the book at all.

I have tried to arrange my books by subjects, or alphabetically by author’s names—with Roger Ascham next to Daisy Ashcroft—but it always ends in my arranging them by sizes. If a book is higher or wider than the book alongside, it bulges at the edges where the other does not hold it in; and the slightest bulging lets the dust creep in between the leaves. Books are classed as 4to, 8vo, 16mo, &c., according to the folding of the sheets; but the sheets themselves are of all shapes and sizes, crown, royal, demy, and so on. And books come out in dozens of different heights and widths, as if they never were intended to stand in rows on shelves.

In the Pepysian Library at Cambridge the books are all arranged by sizes; and the arrangement is so rigid that the volumes of a work are separated if there is the slightest difference in their size. But then Mr Pepys had a catalogue of them that was “perfectly alphabeticall.” They are in the bookcases that Sympson made for him in 1666, and they number just three thousand. There is a story that he always kept that number, neither more nor less, turning one book out if he brought another in. But his catalogue has only 2474, and the other 526 were added by his nephew: so it must really be a story of his nephew, not of him.

There was a saying of Mark Pattison’s that no man can respect himself unless he has at least a thousand books, and I have heard it argued that no man need have more. But really it must all depend on what editions they are. There are ninety-four volumes in one edition of Voltaire’s works, and another edition is contained in three. I have these three volumes on my shelves: 6,250 pages with two columns to the page and 78 lines to the column, making about ten million words in all. Goethe’s works are only half that length, but they spread out into five-and-fifty volumes on my shelves: 18,000 pages of 29 lines each.

I have two dictionaries here, written by two old friends of mine—I have known one of them for nearly forty years and the other one for some years more. They both come down to stay with me, but I keep their works apart. Side by side upon a shelf, the dictionaries look like Dignity and Impudence in Landseer’s picture of the dogs. The dictionary of Egyptian Hieroglyphics is the mastiff, and the terrier is the dictionary of Colloquial Chinese. The mastiff is seven times the terrier’s weight and size. But the little one has 1038 pages, of which 1030 are vocabulary, with 45 lines of Chinese type per page. The big one has 1510 pages, of which 1065 are vocabulary, with 60 lines of Hieroglyphic type per page in double column of 30 lines apiece. So the little one is nearly three-quarters the length of the big one, measured in vocabularies, only the paper is much thinner and the type is small—in my eyes, much too small, the Chinese being only a third of the height of the Hieroglyphic, though the characters are more complex.

The author of the Chinese dictionary is also the inventor of a Chinese typewriter. The machine was built by Remingtons; but commercially it has not hitherto been much of a success, as there are no effective laws in China for securing an inventor’s rights. As a rule, it takes two taps to make a character complete, the left half coming with the first tap and the right half with the second. By combining each of the left halves with all the right halves in succession, it can produce a great variety of characters. These, however, are not the characters employed in classic Chinese writing, but more like modern characters evolved from them for ordinary use. Chinese is written in upright lines that are read from top to bottom and follow one another from right to left. Thus, instead of having the characters upright, the typewriter has them lying down. When the paper is taken out, the left edge is treated as the top, and the lines and characters then come in proper order, only the right halves are underneath the left halves instead of being beside them. And this defect could not be cured without making the machine much larger and more difficult to work.

The meaning of the characters varies with the tone in which they are pronounced; and there are similar tones in English. At the tea-party the little girl drawls out, “No, thanks”—tone 1: the hostess thereupon exclaims, “What, none”—tone 2: a friend remonstrates, “Oh, really, now”—tone 3; and the little girl then says what she has heard her father say, “Take the damned thing away”—tone 4. The typewriter puts down the number of the tone, and thus requires three taps in all, two for the character itself and one for this.

This led me into planning a Cuneiform typewriter. I did not have one built, but my plan was briefly this: I divided the wedges that are upright or slope down from the wedges that are level or slope up, and then picked out the commonest groups of each; and, instead of always moving on from left to right, I had a catch to check the automatic movement of the paper, so that one group could be printed on another with the level wedges running across the uprights. The compound groups are not exactly like the groups in printed books; but very often there is just as great a difference between these printed groups and their originals on the clay or stone. After studying Cuneiform in printed books, people are annoyed at finding that they cannot read a word of the real thing; and there are other kinds of print with that same fault.

Hebrew was written in letters that were practically the same as the Phœnician letters from which our English capitals have come: yet it is printed in letters that are not like ours nor like its own. In my Cambridge days the Regius Professor of Hebrew (the late Dr Jarrett) was trying hard to get this changed, and he brought out a Hebrew book in what he called a modified Roman alphabet. I think he might have gone a good deal further, and I do not know that anybody else has gone as far; but, really, something should be done. Hebrew type is just about as bad as any type can be, with half the letters so like others that they may be confused. Greek type is not so bad; but it is quite unlike the Greek of the inscriptions or the older manuscripts. And it expresses nothing that Roman or Italic type would not express as well. If anybody says Iota Subscript, I say iota was not subscript in good Greek, but kept its dressing in the line.

We write English in the same style as Italic type, yet print it with the Roman type that represents handwriting of four hundred years ago. If we are going to copy other writing than our own, we might as well adopt the Gothic type that still survives in Germany. Gothic and Italic both look well, but nothing can be uglier than Roman. I consider it clear proof of mania in a bibliomaniac, if he buys books in Roman type for anything but common use. We ought to scrap the ugly thing, and print English (as we write it) in Italic.

We should be merciful to children. There is quite enough for them to learn, without their learning to read English in one lettering and write it in another. And they might be spared some spelling. Why should they have to ‘proceed’ with e and e together, and ‘recede’ with e and e apart? Both words are based upon the Latin ‘cedere.’ Its participle ‘cessus’ is the base of ‘process’ and of ‘recess’ and also of ‘decease’: yet they may not write ‘decess’ to match, though French has ‘décès’ matching ‘procès.’ Italian always treats the Greek ph as f, and they may do the same in ‘fancy’ and in ‘frenzy,’ but may not do it in ‘philosophy.’ We might at least abolish all anomalies, and also downright blunders like the h in anchor. There are difficulties enough about our spelling without increasing them capriciously.

In early life the mind takes facts in and remembers them, but does not judge them critically, whereas it afterwards becomes more critical and less receptive. It would surely be good policy to feed the mind with facts in the years when it retains them, and leave the reasoning for the years when it can reason. But the policy has been to “make boys think”—at least, that was my experience at Harrow—and that policy defeats itself, as one cannot think effectively without a stock of facts to think about.

Looking back on my eight years of Harrow and Cambridge and judging them by results, I find that Classics have supplied me with a mass of interesting and amusing facts to think about, whereas Mathematics only taught me how to think on abstract things. Hardly any Mathematics linger in my mind. Sometimes, when I am going to sleep, I think of Space and wonder whether it is circumnavigated by the curves that go away to Negative Infinity and come back again from Positive Infinity, as if the two Infinities met. Sometimes I snap at people for saying Two and Two make Four as if it were an axiom, instead of being a result attained by rigid proof. And I sometimes lose my temper when they talk of what would happen if there were a Fourth Dimension. I tell them they can get a Fourth Dimension by putting Tetrahedrals for Cartesians, and it makes no more difference than putting Centigrade for Fahrenheit and thereby getting 15° of cold instead of 5° of heat.

Until I went to Harrow, I had a tutor at home, and he taught me to read Virgil as anyone reads Dante, not stopping over every word to consider it as grammar. But this did not assist me there. “Optative Future used where Indicative Future would be required in Direct Oration.” That is my note on Æschylos, Persæ, 360. I remember that my mind was far away at Athens, watching the gusts of passion sweep across the audience when the play recalled the battle they had fought at Salamis seven years before. And my mind came back to Harrow with a jerk at hearing the suave voice of Dr Butler addressing me by name, repeating this, and recommending me to note it down.

In my Cambridge days the Mathematical Tripos and the Classical Tripos were still in their primæval shape. It had gone on for half a century with little change, and lasted until 1882. If you were going in for either of these, you had no examinations (except Little Go) until the middle of your fourth year there, and then came these two Triposes with only four weeks interval between them. The system had worked well, but subjects were enlarged till it became unworkable—Electricity and Magnetism were reckoned as Mathematics, and so on with many other things. Down to 1850 nobody could go into the Classical Tripos unless he had already got honours in the Mathematical: in the next four years, 1851 to 1854, there were about thirty men each year who got honours in both; but in the four years I was there, 1877 to 1880, this average of thirty had fallen to an average of two, and in 1880 I was one of the two. I was a Senior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and got a bad Third in the Classical—a result that always puzzles me, as I had a considerable knowledge of the Classics even then.